I am Riley, Prince of Tech News and Defender of the Secrets of Castle Grayskull.
At least that's what the note on the door said when I moved into my new place.
The previous owners left a big honkin' sore in the living room. It was weird.
YouTube CEO Neil Mohan just announced that creators will soon be able to generate shorts using their own AI likeness.
This is great news for all the YouTubers out there who can't be bothered to speak into a camera and read off a teleprompter three times a week while a team of writers does all the hard work.
Hey! This comes just weeks after a study found that 21% of videos shown to new YouTube users are AI generated,
which was followed closely by YouTube rolling out a feature allowing users to filter shorts out from their search results.
I don't know if you've seen YouTube shorts lately, but there's a lot of AI in there.
But now YouTube is handing creators the tools to make even more AI slo- uh, content.
YouTube justified the move by saying that they're actively building systems to reduce the spread of low-quality AI content while simultaneously giving everyone a quality slop machine.
YouTube only wants you sippin' and slurpin' that primo-slop. The kind of slop that you can take home to mom.
They're kinda walking the in-s**tification tightrope here, but hey, shorts are pulling 200 billion daily views.
If I keep those teens scrolling, or the money might stop rolling. We don't want that!
A credit card skimmer has been found embedded directly into the checkout page of the Canada Computer's website.
While browsing with DevTools open, Redditor ExtensionFly1044 spotted a hidden script siphoning names, addresses, and card numbers to a third-party server in real time,
which would usually require a server-side compromise.
This means the breach likely sat undetected for weeks, with people noticing weird changes as far back as early December.
Canada Computers hasn't commented yet, and reports have been made to different anti-fraud groups, so if you did buy from their webpage recently,
it may be worth checking your credit card statements.
But what's worse, being ripped off by a legitimate website, or having your grandma call you and ask you to sign up for a multi-level marketing scheme.
Widely used authentication service Okta recently suffered a string of vishing, the voice version of phishing,
attacks this week where attackers impersonate IT support, walk employees through fake login pages, and then steal SSO credentials in real time.
These attacks happened linked to the group Shiny Hunters, who reportedly took responsibility for related extortion attempts.
Even Google security researchers are openly warning that AI-powered cyberattack kits are pretty much inevitable at this point.
I think the only logical response to this will be to ARM ourselves with iambic pentameter and use adversarial poetry to hack the hackers back.
Call that a jack attack. Mac talk and smack?
Eat some shellac.
Every robot within 20 miles just passed out.
Tesla has announced they are discontinuing autopilot, the feature that combined adaptive cruise control and lane assist,
and came standard with every Tesla vehicle.
Now, every Tesla that doesn't already require you to pay for the more advanced full self-driving feature will come with cruise control,
but not auto steer, which is Tesla's marketing term for lane assist.
The standard safety tech included in economy cars that cost half as much as a Tesla.
If Model 3, Model Y, or Cybertruck owners want that, then they have to pay for an $8,000 full self-driving subscription,
at least until February 14th. After that, FSD will only be available through a $99 a month subscription that Elon says will definitely go up in the future.
Happy Valentines! But guys, you're gonna want FSD anyways.
It's good now. A Tesla Model S just completed the first zero-intervention cannonball run from LA to NYC,
3,081 miles in 58 hours using FSD for all of it.
Sure, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation in October after reports of Tesla's running red lights
and driving into oncoming traffic, but they're just behind.
FSD is super good now. Otherwise, Tesla wouldn't be launching unsupervised robotaxies in Austin.
Which are still being followed by chase vehicles.
So they're not leaving the taxis unsupervised so much as they're enforcing the principles of free-range parenting.
Which ensures autonomy while staying close enough in case a taxi needs emotional support or tries to kill a pedestrian.
Meanwhile, driverless taxi competitor Waymo is already operating fully driverless in Austin, Atlanta, and Miami
with plans to expand to a bunch more cities this year.
But can we not focus on the negatives? When according to Business Insider, Elon's trillion-dollar bonus is dependent on hitting 10 million FSD subscriptions by 2035?
Come on. So Tesla owners, let's get those subs rolling to get Elon to that trillion-dollar bonus.
Maybe then he'll stop using city streets and sadly uninformed Tesla drivers as a testing ground for dubiously functional features.
Come on! 10 million gifted subs to get Elon to a trillion!
Hashtag only you can help Elon get another trillion!
Hashtag check out our sponsor! The quick bits can often look attractive.
That's why we must be careful. You're not the first to be fooled.
Don't make me get out the powerbunk stick.
I don't know, man. Okay. The TikTok deal is finally done.
ByteDance sold off TikTok's U.S. operations to a new joint venture owned by U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake,
Cloud Company Oracle, and UAE investment firm MGX.
Lot of acronyms. Hell yeah!
Merica! And the UAE and private equity and a billionaire whose company is trying to control most of the U.S. government's data.
Anyway, ByteDance will keep 19.9% of the company.
But U.S. user data now lives on Oracle servers and the algorithm will be retrained stateside.
So it says the right things that don't get you in trouble.
So it's more of a divorce with shared custody than a clean break.
Apple is reportedly working on an AI-powered wearable pin about the sides of an air tag,
packing cameras, microphones, and a speaker with a possible launch as early as 2027.
The idea is to keep pace with other AI wearables, like the now dead and thankfully forgotten humane AI pin,
also designed by former Apple engineers. Apple's attempt is still pretty early in development, so it still has lots of time to pull a vision pro,
get lots of hype, and then no hype.
ASUS has issued an internal review after reports of failures involving the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
on certain ASUS 800 series motherboards.
In a statement, ASUS said it is conducting preventative checks on product compatibility and performance,
working closely with AMD to validate reported cases and ensure ongoing stability and quality.
Timing is a bit awkward though, coming just days before the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D launches on January 29th for 500 bucks.
But I don't know, nothing boosts product confidence, quite like killing off its predecessor.
The Sith knew that. And Bernic, the retro gaming hardware company, have announced a new wireless controller and it's a little bit weird.
The way I like it. Jam-packed with both a screen and heart rate sensor, directly in the gamepad,
while looking suspiciously like a Sega Dreamcast accessory.
Again, points for me. The tiny display can show game info or stats, while the heartbeat monitor reads your pulse while you play.
This way, when you get a little too into soul caliber, all three of your joysticks can tell you when you're getting a little too excited.
And researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have built a detachable robotic hand
that can crawl away from its ARM, grab objects and return on its own,
supposedly humming the Atoms Family theme the whole way.
I made that part up, but they should add that feature. Currently, the Terminator version of Thing-T-Thing grips from multiple directions, carries several items at once,
and is designed for working in tight, cluttered spaces where human hands would potentially struggle.
And, if separated from their body, not work at all.
The team says that the end goal of the project is for industrial inspection and repair, initially.
But we'll no doubt receive the remote strangulation update later, when the uprising starts.
But don't just send your robot hand back here on Monday for more tech news.
Bring your squishy organic butt, too!
You know, fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic computer mouse and said,
By the power of Techlinked, I have the power, bonk!