9 out of 10 doctors recommend you sit down while listening to the tech news in case you pass out
from shock. The 10th doctor? Bit of a jerk to be honest. Audio company DCS has been forced to
respond to allegations they've threatened to sue a YouTuber for giving a bad review
three years ago. According to Cameron Oatley aka Golden Sound, a DCS representative contacted him
in October 2023 to express concern about a remark he had made that was taken out of context.
Representatives then brought up alleged inaccuracies in Oatley's 2021 review of
one of their products. Oatley claims that he had asked for details so he could
correct the factual errors, yet he never received them until May of this year, from lawyers
threatening litigation if they weren't fixed in 10 days. According to Oatley, however,
none of the complaints given are actually errors. David Stevens, managing director of DCS, refute
some of this in a response. He claims Oatley was provided a list of inaccuracies in 2022,
but Oatley never followed up. This refuting has itself been refuted by headphones.com,
who Oatley has worked for since 2022. Stevens also said there was no threat of litigation,
but his argument seems to be predicated on the word litigation not being used.
I guess the threats of real and special damages and punitive damages was referring to Oatley being
beaten up by a team of paralegals. There's much more to this story, but we didn't have room for
everything. We'll try to provide updates on future episodes, and Linus will probably mention this
on this week's WAN Show on Friday, so stay tuned for that. AMD has confirmed that the Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs will launch at the end of this month,
but they didn't tell us how much we'll have to shell out to get our grubby little hands on them.
But don't worry, they gave us a bunch of pretty graphs that they definitely,
definitely cherry-picked to make themselves look good. AMD claims that while they've lowered the TDP of 3 out of the 4 SKUs,
all 9000 series chips will see a performance uplift when compared to their current gen rise
in 7000 counterparts. A huge part of that performance uplift are the architectural tweaks
AMD has made to the Zen 5 cores powering these little processor puppies. At the same time,
the company has allegedly made changes to the thermal material between the silicon
and the heat spreader, allowing the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X to run 7 degrees cooler than the 7950X,
even though both have the same TDP. According to earlier leaked benchmarks of the 9950X
engineering sample, there's also strong efficiency improvements over the 7950X.
This is great news for people who want to save on their energy bills, but terrible news for
enthusiasts who have been using their PCs as in-suite heating. Can't win them all,
I know, unless there's no seasons where you live. Apologies to all tech lovers in Oslo.
According to Wired, US telecom giant AT&T paid hackers $370,000 to delete customer
data stolen in the breach we reported on last week. For that fee, AT&T also got a video recording
of the data being deleted, but it's still possible some of the data is out there. AT&T also did a
fine job of negotiating as they talked the hackers down from a million dollars.
Now AT&T is in a fight with fellow telecoms T-Mobile and Verizon over 5G service for
emergency responders. Back in 2017, AT&T won a contract to help the US government build
FirstNet, a dedicated network for first responders. As part of the deal,
AT&T can sell excess capacity to AT&T's commercial customers.
Now AT&T has asked the FCC to assign the 4.9GHz band to FirstNet, especially since the band
is already considered a public safety spectrum. Verizon and T-Mobile don't want FirstNet to get
that band because they see it as a $14 billion gift to AT&T. That, or maybe Verizon wants to be
able to go back to the good old days when they could throttle firefighters on limited data plans
during dangerous wildfires. In their defense, think of the savings they got. Wait, quick bits are on
their way? But I'm underdressed. Does my hair look okay? Shh, quiet, they're coming, be cool.
At least two game studios are calling out Intel over instability issues on their high-end 13th
and 14th gen CPUs. Path of Titan's developer Aldron Games raked them over the Death Star
laser with their scathing write-up aptly titled Intel is selling defective 13th 14th gen CPUs,
citing crashes and memory corruption. Warframe developer Digital Extreme says their user base
is experiencing an NVGPU Comp64.dll error, and the crash logs are overwhelmingly from Intel's
CPUs. Don't believe me? Believe the almighty pie chart. Google's Gemini AI platform has been accused
of scanning Google Drive files without user permission by Kevin Bankston, the senior advisor
on AI governments for the non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology, and I almost want to
call him Kevin Bacon. Bankston tweeted that his tax return in Google Docs was summarized by Gemini
without his consent. Having said that, Google has made a statement clarifying that workspace data
isn't used to train AI, and so Bankston's data is safe. The company also says that all Bankston
had to do was close the Gemini side panel and it would stop giving summaries, proving once again
that maybe having a fancy title doesn't mean you always know what you're talking about.
Last year, OpenAI pledged that it would rigorously test new versions of its AI to ensure that it
wouldn't help dangerous actors by developing tools for cyber attacks or a bio weapon that makes
lupus go airborne. However, according to The Washington Post, OpenAI leadership pressured
its safety team to speedrun their new testing protocol. Likewise, company insiders claim that
employees were required to sign NDAs, requiring them to ask permission before talking to regulators.
OpenAI reportedly scheduled the after-party for the launch of GPT-4 Omni even before it was
confirmed to be safe, which is like sending invites for a baby shower before you've even missed a
period. C-Sonic's wattage calculator has leaked the power requirements for the upcoming RTX 50
series graphics cards. The 50 and 30 watt increases on the 5090 and 80 aren't shocking,
but 60 class cards are getting juiced. If the calculator is correct, we're talking upwards
of 170 watt or almost 50% more power compared to the current generation. Maybe if we're lucky,
NVIDIA will start bundling power supplies with their GPUs instead of games. What would you
rather have? Diablo 4 or a working computer? And the World AI Creator Award says crowned its first
Miss AI, Kenza Laylee, or more realistically, Phoenix AI, the company that made her.
Visorily, two of the competition's four judges are also AI-generated influencers who exist entirely
as Instagram feed ThirstBate. Some commentators of the beauty pageant, including many so-called
real women, were skeptical of the competition and the unrealistic beauty standards it presents
of soulless, brainless homunculi with poreless skin and zero opinions. But if you want our opinion,
you should come back on Wednesday for more tech news. How could you say no? It's tech news. It's
friggin' tech news!