Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.
I'm just kidding. It's great to see you. Also, that's a weird insult. Microsoft has apparently patched a popular loophole
that allowed users to install Windows 11 on PCs that don't meet the outlandish hardware requirements.
Why convince people to download your OS when you can just make it harder to upgrade
for those who actually want to? This particular trick allowed anyone to bypass
the TPM 2.0 chip requirement of Windows 11
by tricking the OS's setup file into thinking your machine was a server.
Classic. Not a host. That's another computer and restaurant word.
Unfortunately, Twitter user, TheBobPony, discovered that the most recent insider build
of Windows now also requires servers to have TPM 2.0 support.
This isn't the case in normal Windows yet,
but chances are they'll be rolling out an update soon. And that could leave you with a non-functional system
if you use this workaround to install Windows 11. There are still other methods to install Windows 11
without having TPM 2.0. For example, open source utility, Rufus,
apparently has its own workaround too. I doubt Microsoft is going to succeed
at patching every method for bypassing the hardware requirements, but I'm happy to have them try.
That means less time for them to program more ads into Windows 11.
Just kidding, they'll make time. Procreate, the company behind the popular art app for iPad,
have pledged to never add AI to their products.
This is despite the existence of the 2010 song,
Never Say Never by Justin Bieber. In a video posted by the company's Twitter account,
CEO Jason Kuda said, I really f***ing hate generative AI.
And Procreate's website features a page dedicated to their anti-AI stance.
As a result, the company has received a lot of love from digital artists who probably are tired
of having generative AI trained on their work without consent, but painters and illustrators
aren't the only ones seemingly becoming tired of the onslaught of AI tools.
AI photo editing and image processing features are starting to raise questions about
when a photo stops being a photo.
Just last week, award-winning iPhone camera app Halide
has introduced a new feature called Process Zero,
allowing users to take photos without any AI or image processing at all.
Of course, Halide costs $20 a year, so now ironically, you need to pay a subscription
to not use AI. National Public Data, or NPD for short,
has finally confirmed it had a data breach, though they don't actually seem too sure.
In their official statement, the data aggregator says there appears to have been a data security incident,
as if hundreds of millions of people's data ending up on the dark web was somehow not definitive proof enough.
While many reports claim that 2.7 billion people's data
was exposed, that's apparently not quite true. Web Security consultant Troy Hunt investigated it
and found there were about 134 million unique email addresses.
Yet NPD told the main attorney general's office that only 1.3 million people were affected,
which would imply that they all have about 100 emails.
That's normal non-degenerate behavior, right? It was also discovered by a company called Atlas Data Privacy
that the leaked data contained 272 million unique social security numbers,
so every person affected by the breach must have also been born roughly 200 times.
Now to be fair to NPD, millions of these records are for people who no longer are alive,
so maybe they weren't included in the 1.3 million figure.
But it's hard to cut them slack when the hackers may have gotten all this data
because an NPD sister site published a file
containing admin passwords on its homepage
that was only removed today. Sure, we've been hacked before,
but the hackers still had to put in some effort.
How do you summon quick bits? Easy. Just go, wait, no, that's cats.
Intel's upcoming Aero Lake S desktop CPU lineup
is expected to arrive in October, a little fuller than anticipated.
A little healthier, girthier. A leak courtesy of Jakein on Twitter lists 14 SKUs
with two previously unseen Core Ultra 5 models,
the 235 and 225. Another more different tweet from fellow leaker,
OneRaichu, points to the lineup including one or more additional Core Ultra 3 models
with eight cores, likely four P cores and four E cores, although depending on who you're talking to,
these aren't real E cores. Those have all gone to join hyper threading
in the great outdated tech glossary in the sky. Raspberry Pi, the company whose entire raison d'etre
is hyper affordable mini PCs, has launched a new even lighter two Gigabyte version
of the Pi 5 down from four gigabytes. Beyond the two Gigabyte drop in memory
and a newly optimized SOC, the rest of the Pi specs remain unchanged.
It's also for just 50 bucks down from 60
for consumers who would rather buy a box of nice popsicles
than double their available RAM. Yet unclear is whether Raspberry Pi will follow this up
with a one Gigabyte version or whether they'll follow that with an infinite number
of pies, each with half the memory of the previous model,
Xenos Paradox style, ask them total pies. Comment if you're nerdy enough to get that reference.
The Zotac zone first revealed at CES has now gone up for pre-order in select regions,
hoping to entice foolish gamers into buying what looks like a steam deck,
thanks to its dual touch pads, but is actually an $800 Windows handheld
with a 120 Hertz OLED screen, hall effect joysticks, a selfie camera, and a kickstand.
The real kicker though is the RGB strip on the back.
Valve wouldn't do this to us. The zone reportedly officially launches in September,
but I don't know who to trust at this point. According to tech radar, Google has quietly confirmed
there will be no more Fitbit smartwatches produced.
I'm shocked. No one was more shocked by the story, then Google as a spokesperson then told ours,
Technica, that tech radar's article was not correct, but did not elaborate on any potential
new Fitbit smartwatch products. This confused us because last week,
the senior director of product management for Pixel wearables told in gadget
that moving forward Fitbit will be focusing on trackers, not smartwatches.
So I feel like not even Google knows what Google is doing.
That's fun. And Tesla is hiring workers to train
its humanoid robot, Optimus, using mocap suits.
Candidates must be reasonably fit in between 5.7 and 5.11.
No big boys or short kings allowed. Unfortunately, this training might take millions
of hours of data, meaning that the first sign of the robot apocalypse may be an epidemic
of repetitive strain injuries. By contrast, Chinese company Unitree says
it has a $16,000 mass production ready bot
that can jump, jog, withstand kicks. Solder electronics and flip pancakes with training.
It'll be the perfect bodyguard slash butler for all those average sized men
with debilitating carpal tunnel. But it would be even more debilitating
if you didn't come back on Wednesday for more tech news.
I know when you aren't here, and frankly, it hurts.
Almost as bad as my carpal tunnel. Ah!