Our tech news is gluten-free and organic, but it's far from cruelty-free.
We've been keeping a clone of Mark Zuckerberg in a cage under the studio for study.
We just pad the wall so you can't hear him trying to be relatable. Two new mysterious Intel GPUs have been spotted
on the SciSoft benchmark database, and enthusiasts are speculating they might be a part
of Intel's upcoming Battle Mage lineup of gaming graphics cards.
The listing was spotted by Michael on Twitter,
you know, Michael, who implied that these chips may be more in the mid or budget range,
given that there are eight megabytes of L2 cache and core counts of 20 and 24 Z cores, respectively,
are pretty low compared to Intel's existing Alchemist GPUs.
However, both of the alleged Battle Mages feature about 12 gigabytes of VRAM,
a configuration not shared by any existing Intel gaming card.
But if the leaked performance numbers are to be believed, what Battle Mage does share with Alchemist
is underdog syndrome, because both of the leaked GPUs performed
significantly worse than both the Arc A770 and A750.
But they kinda had to. How else are they going to generate headlines like new Intel driver brings 120% performance boost
in Octodad? Back at CES 2024, Intel's Tom Peterson said
most of the Arc GPU team had already moved on to the next generation, code named Celestial,
with about 30% of the team fine-tuning Battle Mage, so it's all ready to launch in Q2 2024.
That's this year. Unfortunately, we have no idea what he actually meant by that,
due to the fact that Intel apparently made up their own language in which some dates translate
to other dates that are eight months later. Florida has officially passed a law
banning children under 14 from having social media accounts
and requiring 14 and 15 year olds to have prevental consent before joining.
The ban isn't guaranteed to go into effect. Similar laws have been passed in Utah and Arkansas
requiring parental permission for anyone under 18 to access social media,
but these have been met with significant legal challenges.
That's not just because there's a lot of corporate money riding on this issue, but also because requiring users
to provide official documents for age verification in order to access Facebook is arguably
a pretty substantial burden on their First Amendment right to freedom of assembly and speech.
Florida legislators hope to avoid some of these hurdles
by focusing on the addictive features endemic to social media platforms
rather than the content that they contain. Children are vulnerable and there's a strong argument
that social media is harmful to them. I mean, just look at what it's doing to their parents.
Gangs of moms roaming the streets, they've been radicalized.
That's only partially a joke. The new law also contains language
that would require similar age verification systems for accessing adult websites,
something which numerous other states have already done and which has been criticized by entities like
who else, Pornhub, for potentially pushing users
to sketchier and sketchier sites rather than actually preventing children
from accessing pornography. It's unclear, however, if the same principle applies
to social media, whether 12-year-olds who can't participate in the latest TikTok trend will simply turn
to obscure underground social media rings
just to get their fix. Yeah, like Twitter. Speaking of Snapchat, according to recently unsealed
documents between 2016 and 2019, Facebook had a secret program called Project Ghostbusters
where it spied on network traffic from Snapchat.
And later, Amazon and YouTube. The documents were revealed as part of the discovery phase
in a California class action lawsuit, accusing Meta of using deceptive practices
to collect user information. Back in 2016, Facebook was apparently looking
to get an advantage over its competition by studying how users interacted with rival companies.
Of course, those companies used encryption, which was very inconsiderate of them.
So instead, Facebook got its VPN-like subsidiary,
Onavo, to create a wiretapping tool for Android and iOS
that could be used to intercept and decrypt data from certain sub-domains.
You know, totally cool stuff. Is this malware?
I need somebody to tell me if this is malware. To quote Pedro Canahuati, Facebook's then head
of security engineering, I can't think of a good argument for why this is okay.
Onavo, incidentally, shut down in 2019,
after it was uncovered that they were secretly paying teenagers to use the service
in order to spy on them.
And Meta thought that rebrand worked, eh?
Yes, we spied on teenagers, but we paid them. Meta did not respond to requests for comment
as at press time, Mark Zuckerberg was busy emailing employees in Google's AI division,
asking them if they wanna be his friends instead. We give him Wi-Fi access.
Oh, wait, no, we have a clone. It's not the real one. I didn't wanna say this in front of the quick bits,
but during the sponsor break, the Zucker clone ate Linus.
Google has officially released a native version of Chrome
for ARM-based Windows PCs, two months after an early version was spotted
in Chrome's experimental Canary channel. The release comes ahead of this summer's expected release
of Microsoft Surface devices powered by Qualcomm's much anticipated Snapdragon X Elite chips
or so the rumors go. Now, users of ARM-powered Windows devices
like the Surface Pro X can also experience the speed
of Google's browser and the ensuing pop-ups begging them to use Bing.
TinyCorp has decided to make both AMD
and NVIDIA versions of its TinyBox AI server.
The company initially wanted to exclusively use AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX, criticizing NVIDIA's price
and the closed source nature of CUDA. But after running into multiple driver and firmware issues
using AMD's cards, TinyCorp are now also selling
Team Green TinyBoxes. You can save 10 grand by going with the AMD version though,
provided you quote, like to tinker and feel pain.
Finally, a win for masochists. The exact opposite of what masochists want.
Oh, they hate this, but they love it. Ah, it's perfect.
A judge has ruled that the SEC can proceed in its lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase
for allegedly trading in the unregistered sale of financial securities.
Though in this case, the allegedly is less about whether
or not the crypto that Coinbase sells is unregistered
and more about whether or not crypto is a type of financial security and thus subject to SEC regulation.
Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, has stated that the company will continue
to fight the SEC in court and that they are confident in their legal arguments.
Arguments such as these aren't securities because the buyer doesn't gain any rights
like they do when they buy stocks. And cryptocurrencies are just collectibles,
like beanie babies. I think people used to call those investments too.
Canva Inc. has acquired the Affinity Design Suite,
which is a lot like Adobe, if Adobe wasn't an overpriced subscription con job.
Okay, it's true. Since its release, Affinity has offered
perpetual licenses to customers under the crazy belief
that people should own what they pay for. What are you talking about?
But the buyout from Canva has some users afraid the software will switch
to an Adobe-like subscription model. Canva has since pledged that perpetual licenses
for Affinity will always be offered. And you can trust them because no company,
not a single one, has ever broken a promise they've made in the past.
Go ahead, name 100,000.
And Amazon released reports detailing its fight
against counterfeit products, which had the perhaps unintended consequence
of also revealing just how bad the site's counterfeiting problem really is.
According to Amazon, they blocked over 700,000
suspicious attempts to create seller accounts and identified over 7 million counterfeit products last year,
up from 2 million in 2020. As part of these efforts,
Amazon has partnered with brands and law enforcement,
both foreign and domestic. It's honestly even got me nervous.
Even my lucrative side hustle in gookie handbags
and lala lemon leggings. They just go with my style.
I mean, they're... You're so gookie. Oh, you are a gookie guy.
And you should side hustle on back this Friday
for more tech news. Now come quick or it'll get cold.
The zucker clothe is escaped. No!
He's still hungry. Okay, nice job guys.
Can we just... Oh my God. What the...