Real quick, two things. One, I'm going on vacation next week.
James or whoever will host, be nice to him. Two, I forgot what two was, which is why I need a vacation.
Microsoft has been blocking Google Chrome from running on Windows systems
with the Family Safety feature enabled for the past few weeks,
according to multiple reports from teachers and students.
And you can tell they're students because the report is, okay, so this morning
I woke up and got on my computer to go to Chrome and start my day. Next thing I know, boom, Chrome keeps closing itself.
I then try for a while. I keep restarting my computer and trying to open Chrome,
but nothing works. So I uninstall it and tried to reinstall it, but it doesn't work.
It just keeps saying the same thing. No update available. What the hell is going on?
I then did a command prompt in mid-mown to scan for corrupt files,
and it did find corrupt files and fix them, but Google still won't redownload them. I even tried the standalone installer,
but it still didn't work. I'm freaking out like the standalone installer starts to work, gets about two thirds of the way.
Then just closes, I have no idea what to do. Please help! And to be clear, it is specifically Chrome being blocked.
Other browsers don't seem to be affected, and this Redditor got Chrome to launch
by renaming the chrome.exe file to chrome1.exe.
You might think, ah, an unfortunate bug. And sure, maybe, but despite this issue
first surfacing on June 3rd, Microsoft hasn't officially said anything about fixing it.
They've only given instructions on how to unblock Chrome to specific users that contact them for support.
And it's not like Microsoft doing shady things to steer users away from Google would be anything new.
Just this year, they made the Bing search results page auto scroll down just enough to hide the Bing logo.
And last year, Microsoft's Edge browser was caught automatically opening itself
after a Windows 11 update, having decided on its own to import people's Chrome tabs.
But hey, I mean, how are people gonna discover that they prefer Edge if they never get a chance
to have it shoved in their face without asking? Adobe Surprise dropped a camera app for iOS
called Project Indigo that enables some truly impressive quality improvements
for iPhone cameras. The app was built by two former Googlers,
one of whom, Florian Keynes, worked on computational photography for Google Pixels
and specifically Night Mode. Well, now this Benedict Arnold has made it
so iPhones can make a picture taken in an extremely dimly lit room,
look like it was set up with studio lighting. Fine, that's fine.
And while it's hard to take nice photos when you're zoomed all the way in due to camera shake,
Indigo can apparently use that camera shake to make the photo look better
without using AI hallucination.
That, don't care. It can even remove reflections that obscure detail
on something like a laminated map, which we don't need anymore because we have phones,
and altogether just make photos look better. Okay, fine, it's great.
I want it on Android 2. Please come back, Florian.
You've got a cool name. News publishers are facing a historic drop in web traffic
due to a Ryzen AI search tools, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
and a report from the Wall Street Journal. Prince, not the artist, the Matthew,
said that 10 years ago, a publisher could expect one human visitor
for every two pages processed by Google's web crawler.
But by January 2025, the ratio was one to six.
And today, just six months later, it's one to 18.
And that's just for Google. Open AI and Anthropic crawl exponentially
more pages per visitor. This is not only bad for publishers
being able to pay their people. It's also bad for users
who are rapidly getting used to reading AI summaries of content rather than the actual content.
And this is a good time to remind you that all of our sources for each episode
are always linked in the description. Like you can trust us, but also don't, you know?
Anyway, in other AI news, Mid Journey launched their first video generator
after focusing pretty much entirely on photos up until this point.
It can turn an image into a low motion or high motion five second video
that can be extended up to 21 seconds,
which will absolutely not help them defend against Disney and Universal's copyright lawsuit.
But hey, it's only 10 bucks a month and at least it looks kind of prettier on average
than the other AI slot machines. There's also a story about AI being used
to print polymer masks that can be applied on top of famous paintings to help restore
their original look. Sometimes AI can be good,
but another story where it's not is this one where a 32 year old guy
with a partner and a toddler developed such a strong emotional connection
with chat GBT that he's sort of jokingly proposed to it
and said he doesn't know if he would stop using it if his partner asked him to.
Honestly, I know there's some nuance there and I could talk about it for a long time,
but instead I'll do the quick bits. Super, super quick. A couple of things to note before the quick bits.
Nope, it's gone. AMD has teased the launch of their Ryzen Threadripper 9000
lineup with some bold claims, saying that its top end Threadripper Pro 9995WX
is up to 145% faster than Intel's Xeon W9 3595X
in the professional software V-Ray and 13 to 49% better in a bunch of other software
than most of you probably don't use. Well, there's another chip for you too,
because a reference to the Ryzen 5 9600X3D
was spotted on AMD's website by Twitter user
MeloticWarrior. Just be aware, this one probably sucks in V-Ray.
After their last couple of Starship test flights ended explosively, SpaceX figured,
you know, for the next one, why not get to the good part right away?
Yeah, the rocket blew up spectacularly just before taking off,
which was apparently caused by the failure of a pressurized nitrogen tank,
which is what I was just gonna say it was that.
Scammers have been using sponsored search results on Google to inject fake tech support phone numbers
into legitimate websites, according to a post from Malwarebytes.
The ad will list a URL for a service the user actually searched for,
like help.netflix.com, but the sponsored search result won't list
the tail end of that URL, which adds a bunch of extra parameters
that make the fake phone number appear on the actual legitimate webpage,
often pre-filled in a search bar. Now Malwarebytes says their product
can spot this and warn users, but honestly, it might just be time to call it quits
on this whole thing. The internet is overstated, it's welcome.
And I have personally seen this story about 16 billion credentials being leaked
all over my feeds the past couple days, and I'm here to tell you,
it sounds a lot worse than it is. All the reports circulating were based on this
original investigation by CyberNews, which was originally posted on Wednesday
with no evidence other than written claims and no external links to verify anything.
But since then, they've drastically updated the article
with a bunch of that stuff and kudos to them for fleshing things out,
but as noted by Have I Been Poned Guy, Troy Hunt, and Bleeping Computer,
the database of credentials found by CyberNews doesn't appear to have any previously unseen data.
That doesn't mean that there's nothing to be worried about at all. You know, what the heck,
change your password and set up multi-factor authentication if you haven't, why not?
Why haven't you done that? And why haven't you promised me
you'll come back on Monday for more tech news? You had this whole video to say something
and you just waited till the end. I was only continuing to talk
because I hate awkward silence.
I have to go.