I know what you're probably thinking right now. Hey, that's the tech news guy.
What's he doing in my house? Well, by clicking the thumbnail, you invited me in.
And it's nice in here. So I'm not leaving.
Sorry. You can now lease a PlayStation 5 in the UK,
starting at 10 pounds per month, because owning things is a quaint little tradition
our ancestors enjoyed. This is much better. The program is called PlayStation Flex
and is essentially just a partnership with Raylo,
a gadget leasing business that has been doing PS5 leases since March of last year.
The big change here is that it's now being advertised
directly through the PlayStation Direct Storefront,
which basically just sends you to a PlayStation branded section of the Raylo website.
There's no clear buyout path. You either keep paying or eventually,
hand the console back when your term is up, unless you contact them to negotiate.
No rent-to-own or financing options are being offered either,
like what you might see with something like a firm on other digital stores.
And this isn't even exclusive to PlayStation. Raylo will lease you the Nintendo Switch 2,
MetaQuest, Xbox consoles, and even the Lenovo Legion Go.
Interestingly, Microsoft offered a console
rent-to-own program called Xbox All Access
before shelving it last year, presumably because it actually allowed people
to save about 20 bucks overall
on the cost of the console and Game Pass combined.
That's helping consumers. We're past that.
No, society has progressed to a new advanced stage
where companies take hardware that people used to be able to purchase
and make it a subscription like HP's laptop program
that Line has recently covered on LTT. The problem is hardware keeps getting more expensive,
so cheaper payment plans look okay by comparison,
but these companies don't even have the decency to easily let you buy out the device at the end.
I mean, even car leasing companies at least entertain the option of a buyout,
even if it's usually probably not the best idea.
Hey, I'll tell you what, Sony, I'll charge you 10 pounds a month for me
to give you some better ideas for what to do with those IP rights to Spider-Man
that you somehow still have. You know what, let's talk Morbius sequels.
Morbius too, Morbius.
Amazon security camera subsidiary Ring announced yesterday
that it has canceled its partnership with Flock Safety,
the incompetent mass surveillance company that's recently been under fire for potential misuses
of its automated license plate reader network in the leaking of 2.3 million license plate searches
from its database. That one. The announcement comes after Ring aired
a Super Bowl ad on Sunday for its new AI-powered search party feature,
showing dozens of cameras scanning a neighborhood to find a lost dog.
Aw, that would be good. But as pointed out by Senator Ed Markey,
this is kind of clearly a mass surveillance program,
prompting people to take a more critical look at what it might mean for Flock
to be able to access Ring's camera network at will.
And what they found was not reassuring. The partnership, which was announced in October, 2025
as part of Ring's community requests program,
allows law enforcement agencies to request video footage
from Ring doorbell owners during active investigations.
Under the Flock integration, police departments using Flock software
would have been able to submit those requests directly through Ring's system.
And combined with Ring's recently launched familiar faces,
a facial recognition feature that scans every person who walks past a camera,
and the search party features ability to track living things across an entire neighborhood.
The whole package starts looking less like, find my lost puppy,
and more neighborhood surveillance state.
In its press release, Ring says it's canceling the integration
because it would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.
Sure, it is, and the breakup was totally mutual.
Flock was one of two companies approved for the community requests feature.
The other is Axon, the world's largest manufacturer of tasers and body cameras.
So the only remaining approved handler for your Ring doorbell footage is the taser guys.
If that makes you feel safe, I've got a very nice bridge to sell ya.
The China manned space agency on Tuesday successfully tested its Mengzhu crew capsule
and Long March 10 rocket, which nailed a propulsive landing on a recovery barge.
China is targeting a manned landing on the moon by 2030,
which is also where Jeff Bezos wants to go. Hours after the test,
Bezos, with the energy of the weird kid who ate glue in elementary school,
tweeted a black and white photo of a turtle.
I like totals.
What can I say? Bold move when you already look like the turtle club guy
from Data Carvey's 2002 film, Master of Disguise. Yes, the cryptic tweet was, evidently,
a reference to Bezos' own space company, Blue Origin,
which has a coat of arms featuring two turtles in an apparent attempt to troll Elon Musk.
The two have taken little potshots at each other since 2015 when Jeff made his infamous
welcome to the club tweet. SpaceX had just landed a Falcon booster
and Bezos pointed out that Blue Origin's new shepherd
had done a suborbital landing weeks earlier.
So yeah, you're just as cool as us now.
You gotta love watching these two weirdos be in a decade-long pissing contest
over who gets to colonize space first. It feels like they drown the world in piss
before either of them won. Blue Origin recently shared plans
for an accelerated moon architecture that could land astronauts before 2030,
which may have had something to do with Elon announcing on Sunday
that SpaceX has shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the moon instead of Mars,
claiming that this could be achieved in less than 10 years. Now, this is the same Elon Musk who, in January 2025,
tweeted that the moon is a distraction and called NASA's Artemis moon mission a jobs program.
All of this might be moot though, because apparently SpaceX is a train company now.
Sort of, we're referencing a letter written by the National Labor Relations Board
to eight former SpaceX employees who were fired after they wrote an open letter
criticizing Musk as a frequent source of embarrassment.
The NLRB under the Biden administration had filed a complaint seeking those employees'
reinstatement and back pay. But in an effort to get out of it,
SpaceX argued it should be regulated like an airline
or railroad instead, which coincidentally exempts it
from the National Labor Relations Act entirely.
When you're a train, they let you do it. The fired employee's attorney called the NLRB's decision
to treat SpaceX as a common carrier,
contrary to law and public policy. Choo-choo, I'll aboard the space train.
You get no benefits, and you'd have to work in Elon Musk's moon colony.
Just so you know. Me, I'd rather check out our sponsor.
Oh, sorry, I should have also said the quick bits are also in your house now.
They may chew on your wires a little bit, but don't worry, they're harmless
as long as you don't try to stop them. Cash app now lets you generate payment links
to drop straight into DMs with the goal of making peer-to-peer payments
feel less formal. The new feature comes after cash app
conducted a money matters report, which found that Gen Zers already coordinate transactions
over text a lot of the time anyways. Convenient?
Sure, I mean, here in Canada, Interac has had similar request money links for years,
and that definitely didn't lead to a tidal wave of fake Canada revenue agency e-transfer scams.
What could possibly go wrong? It'll probably work, you guys do it, it's fine.
Spotify co-CEO Gustav SÃ¶derstrÃ¶m,
it's probably wrong, sorry, bragged during this week's earnings call
that the company's best developers have not written a single line of code since December,
thanks to an internal AI coding system called Honk.
The company shipped more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered prompted playlists
and page match for audiobooks. Given the speed of this development
and AI's propensity for creating security vulnerabilities, we feel it is our responsibility to tell people
to not try and hack Spotify right now.
No matter how trivially easy it might be, especially given that they just hit record profits
of 2.2 billion euros for 2025, nearly double the year before,
driven largely by subscription price hikes. Come on, let's not just let them enjoy this.
Meta is reportedly working on facial recognition for its smart glasses, again,
potentially letting wearers identify people in real time.
They were holding off on outing this feature after receiving backlash over potential privacy concerns,
but an internal memo showed to the New York Times noted that we are now in a quote, dynamic political environment
where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us
would have their resources focused on other concerns. In other words, mods are asleep, post AI slop.
Anyway, if someone wearing smart glasses whispers your name before you introduce yourself,
just assume the pre-crime division is hiring.
And just to get ahead of it, no, I am not the Riley who is gonna steal your car later today.
Apple's latest iPhone update, iOS 26.3,
now includes a built-in transfer to Android tool
that lets you move apps, photos, and even your phone number over to an Android device
just by placing the two phones next to each other. We actually saw hints of this back in December
when code found in an Android canary build suggested that Google was working towards a similar feature
in the opposite direction. The good news doesn't end there.
iPhone users in the EU can also now turn on
notification forwarding for third-party smart watches,
meaning that you don't need to wear a square watch just because you decided to buy an iPhone.
I mean, it's rounded corner squares. Circles are cool, too,
and so are interoperability rules. Thanks, EU.
Thanks so much. And the new robot from Weave Robotics, Isaac Zero,
want about $10,000 upfront, or roughly $450 a month,
to fold some of your laundry. It's mostly autonomous.
The system runs off a stationary pole you set up in front of a table
and plug it into the wall. The robot uses onboard sensors to identify, grab,
and fold common garments on its own, but for more complex or confusing items,
a remote teller operator can step in and assist.
So it's not fully human-controlled, but it's also not quite rosy the robot just yet.
Weave says it's been stress-testing Isaac Zero in commercial laundromats with promising results.
Still, I cannot unsee that this is just Nintendo's Rob with a glow-up.
Maybe we should have treated Rob better. He did help us beat Gyromite after all.
I did not play whatever game this is referring to. But Rob won't be able to help you predict
when I'll come back next week. I'll give you a hint. It's Wednesday, the 18th,
because this Monday is Family Day here in British Columbia.
It's a little problematic because we have one Olive Garden
and it gets real crowded with everyone in there.