Welcome to TechLink, where we're going to patch your knowledge of the world
with some hot, fresh tech news. Microsoft has sheepishly admitted
that the Windows 10 security updates that released between March and August
were in fact a serious downgrade that undid several old security patches,
like a bad case of scurvy, reopening decades old wounds.
Luckily, I've never been on a pirate ship. And also, luckily, it seems that only a small number
of systems were directly affected. Enterprise users still using
the original 1507 version of Windows 10 released in July, 2015.
According to Senior Director of Threat Research at Immersion Labs and also auto-generated character
in Skyrim, Kev Breen, Microsoft's statement
points to an integer overflow vulnerability where the build version numbers verified
by the Windows update service fell into a range that caused a code error.
This then led to certain optional components to be reverted back to their original unpatched versions,
i.e. exactly how they were when they were first manufactured.
Security experts have given this particular bug a score of 9.8 out of 10,
which would be great if this was an Olympic dive or a dressage performance.
Microsoft, though, has now released a new patch to patch the old patch that unpatched
this particular patch of PCs. The US Department of Justice's antitrust trial
against Google started this week. Oh, not that one.
This is a new one. As you may know, Google was recently found liable
for illegally abusing the dominant market power of its search division
and is now awaiting the court's suggested remedies to prevent it from continuing to do so in the future.
Oh, the courts. Now, however, the company is again in court
facing similar accusations regarding its ad division.
As with most antitrust disputes, a major point of contention in the case
is how to define the market that Google is supposedly dominating.
The DOJ says that Google is acting as an illegal monopoly
by intertwining its various ad tools, specifically its publishing software ad manager
and its ad exchange network, AdX, and its advertiser network market AdSense,
leading to website publishers to feel trapped.
Google, however, says that it's part of a much bigger ad market
where it competes with fellow tech giants like Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Roku
and TikTok and Yahoo! That one, not just the feeling.
Of course, most of those supposed rivals really only publish ads within their own walled gardens,
whereas Google, much like Jesus and the smell of microwaved salmon, is everywhere.
In other Google-ish news, Nevada's Department of Employment Training
and Rehabilitation has apparently paid Google over $1.3 million for access to AI-powered cloud software
that will recommend whether or not unemployed citizens should receive government benefits.
In the past, organizations have typically relied on AI and other less sophisticated algorithms,
primarily to handle relatively low stakes decisions that don't require much human oversight.
However, this system is apparently going to be used
to analyze evidentiary documents and transcripts
for unemployment appeals hearings, which are likely to be relatively complex cases.
I mean, just look at those words. They're big words. According to Nevada officials,
this system will help them eliminate the backlog of cases that has existed since the pandemic
by reducing the time it takes to write a determination from several hours to just five minutes in some cases.
While the state promises each case will receive human review,
five minutes of human review isn't particularly reassuring.
If I were to deliver it and it arrives five minutes later, I ain't eating it.
This is yet another example of how automation is being used as a way to place more and more responsibility
into the hands of unaccountable machines. Similarly, an experiment by More Perfect Union
found that several Uber and Lyft drivers standing directly next to one another
were offered the exact same jobs for different amounts of money.
This was particularly drastic in Lyft's case where the pay for a trip could vary as much as $3,
potentially adding up to hundreds over the course of a normal month.
And that money could wind up being really important after the robot down at the unemployment office
denies you your benefit claim. Go fuck yourself, stay poor, asshole.
Each of the following quick bits is fully OSHA compliant and has never resulted in the loss of a limb.
But make sure to wear your special quick bits helmet, just in case.
There could be eye pokies. Following a series of delays due to weather
and technical issues, SpaceX successfully launched its Polaris Dawn mission,
carrying pilot slash billionaire Jared Isaacman, as well as three other people who have far less money.
The mission will last five days and attempt the world's first private spacewalk.
Presumably they mean private in the sense of privately financed
and not in the sense that somebody is getting naked.
Other SpaceX projects, however, have been delayed,
as the Federal Aviation Administration has been slow to issue launch licenses.
SpaceX by itself apparently accounts for 80% of the overtime logged by FAA workers,
charged with safety and environmental reviews for space travel. Similar to how Elon Musk accounts for 80%
of TOS violations at Twitter, I'm above the law.
Huawei has launched a folding phone with not one, but two hinges and the world will not shut up about it.
The Mate XT features a 6.4 inch OLED display
when fully collapsed, but fully unfolded. It becomes a 10.2 inch tablet
that's nearly the size of a standard iPad. There's also a 7.9 inch in between,
single fold configuration. If you just want a little bit more screen,
you're not showboatin'. Oh, and its price starts at about $20,000
or $2,800 US dollars. It's the perfect phone for people who miss unfolding maps
when they get lost, but still wanna be able to fold them back up when they're done.
Keep it in your glovebox. People keep wanting to toss data centers in the ocean
off the California coast without a permit and regulators, they're sick of it.
The most recent offenders are the founders of Y Combinator backed startup, Network Ocean,
who wanna dunk servers in the San Francisco Bay as a way to save energy and slow ocean temperature rise,
which I can already see a problem with. Sure, hot servers might not raise
the whole ocean's temperature, but experts say localized hotspots
could trigger toxic algae blooms. Microsoft actually tested submerged servers
in California and Scotland before recently abandoning the project.
You know what they awoke in the darkness of the bikini bottom.
Meta has admitted to using public photos and posts on its social media platforms
from far back as 2007, when I joined,
to train its AI models in a confession that's only really newsworthy
because it was made in an Australian Senate inquiry by Meta's global privacy director.
Immediately after she denied Meta had done that exact thing,
users in the UK and EU have the legally mandated ability
to opt out, but users from anywhere else do not. And while the Meta exec made it clear
that the only scraped accounts over the age of 18,
if an adult posts pictures of kids on their account, those are fair game too.
I'm sorry, you're not ready for the future where everybody owns everything.
That's a you problem, by everybody I mean us.
Legal loophole, parents. And a robot will begin removing melted radioactive fuel
from the Fukushima nuclear plant, and it'll certainly take its sweet time.
This test removal will grab merely three grams of the approximately 880 tons of waste,
which will then be studied to both learn more about what happened and to determine
how to best remove the rest. Grabbing this sample alone will take two weeks
because the robot must be maneuvered very carefully
by rotating teams that are averse to the idea
of spending more than 50 minutes at a time in a highly radioactive environment.
What, you don't wanna grow a third ARM or suffer a painful death?
And I'll suffer painfully if you don't come back on Friday for more tech news.
Not nearly as painfully as someone with radiation sickness,
but it still hurts a little.