It's not every day you get tech news.
So. Especially this coming Monday. It's a stat holiday so we won't be here.
Make alternative plans. AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D appears to have been sold out at retailers across North America and Europe,
with even the next batch of pre-orders selling out at German Outlet Mind Factory.
New eggs said their individual units of the CPU are all gone,
but they dug around and managed to find some 9800X3D plus motherboard bundles,
which is not a ploy to sell more inventory. It's a bundle. It came like that. It's a bundle.
If you missed the boat, it's okay. They'll come back in stock eventually.
Maybe even before those new economy saving tariffs drop.
Hopefully they drop after AMD also drops the Ryzen 99950X3D,
because a leaked factorial benchmark shows it running quite a bit faster than the 9800X3D and
the 7950X3D. Releasing processors that are better than last gen is a winning strategy for AMD right now,
whose desktop CPU market share has climbed 10% in the last year, according to Mercury Research.
Apple appears to be trying the same approach. Reviews for the new MacBook Pros, Mac Mini,
and iMac are all focusing on features other than the M4 chip, because it's just obviously
slapping AMD and Intel's competitors, particularly the M4 Pro and Max variants.
But don't worry, Intel knows they've got work to do.
In an interview with Hot Hardware, Intel VP Robert Halleck acknowledged that their desktop
Aero Lake launch didn't go as planned. The company has identified a quote series of issues
at an OS and a BIOS level, which meant that the performance seen in reviews
quote was not what we expected, not what we intended.
Seemingly forgetting about Intel's own benchmarks showing the flagship Core 9 Ultra 285K
performing worse than its predecessor in games.
I mean, okay, well, they didn't intend for that to still be the case after the CPUs actually launched.
Intel may have seen advice from enthusiasts to not trust first party numbers,
and then applied that to themselves. Aero Lake's middling performance came after a scandal over instability issues in the company's
Raptor Lake lineup, which has now earned them a class action lawsuit.
Morale is probably pretty low among Intel employees right now,
especially after their employer took away their free coffee and tea as a cost-saving measure.
You know things are bad when. Intel just brought it back, which is either a sign that things are looking up,
or the shot you give a dying soldier to ease the pain.
At least we have coffee. Now this next story has some wild turns in it, so hang on.
A judge has granted a motion filed by meta to dismiss a lawsuit brought against them
by the man who invented the pop-up ad, Ethan Zuckerman.
The judge thought a lawsuit titled Zuck V Zuck was just too silly.
Could one of you switch the Z for a C?
The lawsuit wasn't about ads. It was a preemptive move to block meta from suing Zuckerman in the future.
If Zuckerman went through with his plan to release a tool called unfollow everything 2.0,
which would allow Facebook users to unfollow everything on the platform,
twice. That's why the two is there. Double tap. Make sure. No, it's 2.0 because there was a 1.0.
The first unfollow everything was a browser extension released by Lewis Barclay in 2021,
for which meta called Facebook at the time.
Banned Barclay from Facebook and Instagram, and threatened a costly legal battle if he didn't take the tool down,
leading him to write an article in Slate titled Facebook Banned Me For Life
because I help people use it less. Which, yeah, sounds like what you would expect to happen.
It's not right. It's just also not shocking. Back to Zuckerman though.
His lawsuit was novel in that it relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
legislation best known for protecting social media platforms like meta,
from liability for the content posted by their users.
But an obscure clause in that section arguably protects the developers
of third-party content curation tools, like unfollow everything.
And Zuckerman's lawyers still believe that's true.
So they'll soon be back with a lawsuit to prevent meta from suing their client,
to prevent him from suing meta, to prevent meta from suing themselves,
to prevent me from telling you about our sponsor, but I won't let that.
Fun fact, it is actually every day that you get quick bits.
They just only appear in the visible light spectrum when they want you to see them.
Having apparently run out of other programs to AIFI,
Microsoft will be adding generative features to Notepad.exe and MS Paint,
two programs that have been around in roughly the same form since the 1980s.
Notepad, which got spellcheck, autocorrect, and window tabs earlier this year,
will now have a feature called Rewrite, which surprise surprise, Rewrites highlighted text.
Similarly, MS Paint will be getting generative fill and erase features,
to make your hasty re-edit of a deep-fried meme from the depths of 4chan a more elegant affair.
But the normies are getting even more AI stuff. Microsoft is also adding an AI support chatbot to Xbox,
as well as natural language search. Because if there's anything Xbox users know, it's natural language.
As well as the very unnatural language they use to talk about my mother,
which I don't appreciate, even if some of it is very clever.
The Canadian government has ordered TikTok to end operations in the country,
citing unclear national security concerns.
To be clear though, this isn't a ban like in the US,
access to the app for the rank and file isn't going to be affected.
TikTok will have to shut down its offices in Toronto and Vancouver,
but everyday Canadians will still have the right to destroy their brains with endless
Ed Ed and Eddie little dark age edits if they so choose.
The Australian government meanwhile has proposed a blanket social media ban
for kids and teens under 16. If passed, the bill could take effect as soon as late next year,
which is likely because it has cross-partisan support with the opposition liberal party.
Finally, something to bring us all together.
Instagram sucks. Law enforcement in Michigan has become concerned after multiple iPhones
stored for forensic analysis have unexpectedly rebooted themselves
and locked investigators out. This is despite the phones being disconnected from cellular networks,
and in at least one case, stored in a Faraday cage.
Has Apple unlocked teleportation? What's happening?
Rebooting an iPhone makes it harder to unlock, which believe it or not,
is the opposite of what the police wanted. Officers apparently believe that iPhones with iOS 18.0
brought into their forensic lab may have communicated with the other powered on iPhones
and told them to reboot after a certain period of time.
Or maybe it was the iPhone Fairy. Make a wish.
Nintendo has found their next target for a juicy lawsuit,
a man who streamed pirated and emulated games in Nintendo's defense.
Sometimes he would stream these games before they were even released.
We get it, dude. Your uncle is hacking Nintendo. Jesse Kagan, a.k.a. every game guru online,
has particularly irked the Mario Mafia because their usual tactics of shutting down his streams and channels didn't work.
Instead, he'd open a new channel on another platform.
He'd even email Nintendo directly bragging about all his burner accounts,
saying, we can do this all day.
We may have just discovered Nintendo's final boss.
But you'll never discover more tech news if you come back on Monday,
because again, it's a stat. We are going to be sleeping.
So come back on Wednesday and you'll discover so much more than you would on Monday, which is nothing.