We've brought you some tech news to get you through the most evil day of the year. Black Friday,
when skeletons rise from their graves and...is that not what Black Friday means?
Dbrand and Zach, Jerry or everything Nelson, are taking competing phone case company,
Casify, to court for allegedly stealing their teardown skin designs. The theft was discovered
when Dbrand and Nelson carefully analyzed Casify's inside-out case for about one second.
As Nelson explained in a YouTube video, he and Dbrand painstakingly reproduced the internals
of phones and laptops for their teardown series of skins, but they also include fun little Easter
eggs in said skins because that's what Black Friday is all about. Can I get a hallelujah?
I don't understand Black Friday, but I do understand it doesn't make sense for Casify
to have the same exact Easter eggs on their inside-out products. I also know what you're
thinking. Casify must have bought Dbrand skins, scanned them, changed a couple things,
then sold them as their own work, but you're actually giving them way too much credit.
Based on the research of Nelson and Dbrand attorneys at LA, it looks like Casify used
lower res product images from Dbrand's own site. In a further update, Casify may have also
cheated off iFixit, as pointed out by Labs correspondent Jake Danes on a tip from the
LTT subreddit. They did a journalism. In Casify's defense, they at least tried to hide their thievery,
while Iranian company Mahut Leather hit Ctrl C, Ctrl V, and called it a day.
Does no one know how to properly play drives anymore? Kids these days are so spoiled by chat GPT.
And get this, Casify just released a statement calling themselves a bastion of originality.
A bastion. Never call yourself a bastion.
Lenovo is taking ASUS to court for allegedly violating four of their patents.
What does Oprah Winfrey giving out lawsuits? Lenovo is seeking damages for a halt on sales of any
infringing products within the US. For example, the company says the ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 OLEDs,
wake on land tech, diagonal scrolling capability, and even its hinge.
All vitally patents granted to Lenovo. I don't know. Sounds a bit unhinged.
Anyway, in a press release on Tuesday, Lenovo said the lawsuit was a last resort as they had
previously offered ASUS a cross-licensing deal earlier this year as a solution.
Now, however, Lenovo demands ASUS stop marketing, advertising, selling,
distributing, basically doing anything with their laptops in the United States.
While they're at it, Lenovo decided to channel Kelly Jensen from middle school by claiming
this won't harm US consumers for competition since ASUS' market share is so small. ASUS,
some advice if I may, when you run home to your bedroom and lock the door, blast Soundgarden
to hide your loud sobs. Chinese factories are taking apart thousands of brand new RTX 4090s
to make specialized GPUs for AI according to posts on Baidu, which is offensive to me as a
fan of GPU shortage one. It was perfect. It doesn't need a sequel.
The export restrictions on AI chips to China took effect November 17th,
just after NVIDIA was supposed to launch their Chinese export restriction-compliant
AI chip the H20. But NVIDIA delayed that launch until the first quarter of next year.
Fortunately for AI companies, crafty NVIDIA absolutely pumped out RTX 4090 orders to China
before the restrictions took effect. Unfortunately for actual gamers, those cards seem to have been
bought up by potentially sketchy companies that are dismantling them and slapping their chips
into blower-style coolers that are more suited for multi-card systems. Now, the Chinese market
has been flooded with cheap coolers and 4090 PCBs, which are useful for repairing melted 4090s.
To be fair, you need to have a 4090 to melt in the first place. All these perfectly good cards
are going to AI farms while Chinese gamers are left in the lurch. All they want to do is drop
at Lazy Lagoon with the boys. Don't spread it around, but Linus has been diagnosed with a
debilitating neurological condition that prevents him from saying quick bits. It's also terminal.
Developer HackHive.io on Reddit has discovered a fun workaround to Google's current crackdown on
adblockers, an extension that simply mutes ads and plays them at 16x the original speed.
The developer also plans to create a version that automatically clicks the skip button when it
becomes available. They've even submitted it to the Chrome Store, and it technically doesn't break
the rules, just like how technically Google CEO Sundar Pichai can't pay a large beefy man to
break HackHive.io's knees. That would be against the rules. HackHive, the bee's knees. There's
something in that. SpeakerMaker Sonos will be expanding its business to offer its first-ever
headphones, releasing a $400 over-ear set next year, possibly as early as April, which is such a
natural progression as it's kind of weird that they weren't doing that already. Sonos is apparently
considering following up with earbuds. Again, it seems inevitable. It's an ambitious plan,
with the headphones codenamed Duke, which sounds like sh**, intended to compete directly with the
Apple's AirPods Max and other high-end headsets. At least that's according to Bloomberg's Mark
Gurman, the undisputed Gretchen Wieners of the tech world. That's why his head is so big. It's full
of secrets. Samsung is catching some heat for removing some screen burn-in protection
in their most recent OS update. That may not be too bad according to Rating's 10-month study of
OLED and LCD burn-in, simulating 6,000 hours of real-world usage. While the OLED TVs they tested
experienced some burn-in, it wasn't noticeable during normal use, while every LCD had overt
degradation. But it's still nothing compared to the images my brain has retained since early
childhood when I walked into my parents' room at the wrong time. I never wanted to see my neighbors
like that. Google made a deal with Spotify that let the audio company avoid paying anything to
Google if its users paid directly through Spotify, according to testimonies shared during the Epic
V Google trial. If Spotify users picked Google's payment processor while signing up,
Google would get a 4% cut. But that's way less than 15% Google's standard cut for subscriptions
for the past two years. That deal is even better than the 10% cut Google offered to Netflix,
who had watched enough Shark Tank to know it was time to say I'm out. Prior to this testimony,
Google understandably requested the deal's specifics remain sealed. I wouldn't want to
advertise the fact that I'll give you tech news for free if you're important enough.
I will. And Ubisoft has issued a statement regarding their surprise in-game Black Friday ads,
and yesterday's GameLinked, that's a different channel, but it's kind of the same.
We reported that players of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and some other franchise titles reported
in-game ads for 20% off Assassin's Creed Mirage that would prevent them from accessing the map
screen unless they pressed a button to make the ad go away. In a statement, Ubisoft said the ad was
supposed to show up in the main menu of Assassin's Creed games, but was misplaced due to a technical
error in that they meant to do it, but since no one liked it, it was technically a mistake.
But it's never a mistake to come back on Monday for more tech news, and if you have a free moment,
please tweet at Linus and tell him he's in your thoughts and prayers as he battles this affliction.