We hope you enjoy this episode of tech news, but if you don't, we'll send you a voucher
for a half penny of laundry detergent in the currency of your choosing.
So it's a win-win. What do you get to lose?
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that famously crowd-struck millions of computers
with a faulty update late last week, is reportedly offering affected clients
a $10 Uber Eats voucher for their next cup of coffee or late-night snack.
While they're still at the office losing their minds trying to fix stuff.
It's not clear from publicly available information whether this voucher was offered to some or all
employees at the affected companies, though presumably all of Delta Airlines isn't splitting
that $10 between themselves. Furthermore, at least some people who got the voucher reported
that they got an error message saying it had been canceled when they went to redeem it,
possibly because the attached QR code was otherwise infinitely reusable.
Insurance companies estimate that last Friday's outage cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion,
slightly more than the price of a grande macchiato plus delivery fees.
Just a little bit. Notably, that's an estimate that doesn't yet include Microsoft.
CrowdStrike has released a detailed post-incident review that points to a bug in its test software,
which failed to appropriately validate the content update before it caused the global
economy to microdose the Y2K crash. Unsurprisingly, Congress has issued a summons to CrowdStrike CEO
George Kurtz to give public testimony and explain himself this very instant young man.
Google has abruptly announced that it will be scrapping its plan to eliminate third-party
cookies in Chrome, despite competing browsers like Firefox and Safari having blocked third-party
trackers by default for years. Google originally announced the phase-out back in 2020, saying
that it needed time to work out a mutually agreeable solution with advertisers. The solution
was supposed to be Google's Privacy Sandbox, which replaces third-party tracking with first-party
tracking within Chrome. It's much, much easier just to have Google have all the data instead.
While arguably more secure, this would give Google an unprecedented, some might say monopolistic,
level of control over this data, raising concerns among competitors and regulators.
Likewise, some privacy researchers found that, despite Google's safeguards,
the output of the Privacy Sandbox could still be reverse engineered to identify and track specific
users. That's the whole point. Google now says that they instead plan to introduce a new feature
that will allow users to make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing,
though what that could possibly mean is currently unclear. Some have speculated that Google might
offer users a choice between cookies and the sandbox, like a dystopian surveillance state
grandma. If you pick the cookies, you can't go in the sandbox. They don't mix. You'll wear down your
teeth. Meta has launched a new version of their flagship AI model, and the people are excited.
Llama 3.1 405B is the first GPT-4 class LLM that everyday users can freely download and run locally
on their own computers. That is, of course, if they've got a cutting-edge AI server running
out of their bedroom closet, because the B in 405B stands for billion parameters.
According to AB evaluation against current models from OpenAI and Anthropic, Llama 3.1 405B
seems to hold its own. But while this new version of Llama is impressive and it is openly available,
what it is not is open source. No matter how many times Mark Zuckerberg says that it is,
you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. That's a reference.
Inconceivable. Inconceivable. I put the poison in your drink. It's open source.
It's open source. Llama's weights are available for anyone to run and refine, but users will have
to agree to a license and acceptable use policy, making projects built using Llama
potentially subject to Meta's whims. As part of his 2000-word essay on the value of
open source AI, Zuckerberg likewise addressed the concern that these open weights might be
misused by China, but argued that the benefits of fostering innovation outweigh the risks,
mostly because China is just going to steal them anyway. Old Zuck's just using his usual reptilian charm to say something arguably true in the
least comforting way possible. Although he comforts me somewhat now, he looks like a surfer bro.
Those are my people. Wavy locks. Don't worry about it bro. It's open source. This is totally chill.
Come on my boat. I'm not going to lay eggs in your chest cavity. It's totally fine. Come on my
dorky boat. If comfort's what you're looking for, then you're going to want to check out our
sponsor. Remember, the quick bits aren't spying on you and any resemblance to your previous
conversations is purely coincidental. The FTC has launched a probe into what it calls
surveillance pricing, which is kind of like if surge pricing followed you home and watched
you eat dinner with your family. Just like I do every night. We've talked about this.
Services like Uber increase prices during peaks in activity, but surveillance pricing
is personalized, using algorithms to rapidly change prices for individual customers based on
data collected about them. The FTC has served eight companies, including Mastercard and JP
Morgan Chase, with mandatory requests to see if that's what they're doing. And I really hope
they don't find anything. I really thought Mastercard was one of the good ones.
Companies who have integrated Microsoft's co-pilot AI assistant into their workflows
have told Bloomberg that they're still struggling to figure out how to use the darn thing. For one
thing, they've got to feed it a lot of data so it performs well without having that data accessed
by hackers or Toby the intern who was only hired because he's the boss's nephew and he is not
going to last long. Got him photocopying his butt again. He won't stop. Damn it, Toby. We're out of
paper. Co-pilot also struggles to understand context and execute commands involving multiple
apps. This all sounds like AI tools are overhyped and under-delivering, but that can't be right.
Hey, Microsoft, try announcing co-pilot again. It's a new service. Never heard of before.
NVIDIA's GPU board partners are skimping on thermal paste, causing RTX 40 series graphics
cards to lose performance over time, according to an investigation by Igor's Lab. Not only are
RTX 40 series graphics card makers like ASUS, PNY, and Pilot using low-quality paste whose
thermal conductivity significantly worsens after a few months, they didn't even bother to squeeze
enough of it on the GPU and squish it on there correctly, causing hotspots and thermal throttling.
When Igor squeegee the stock paste and squooched better paste on himself, that doesn't sound
right. Hotspot temperatures lowered by nearly 30 degrees Celsius, proving high clocks are nothing
if you're not properly mashing that good ooze on there. That gooze, if you will. The gooze.
Gooze it. Search engines that are not Google are currently unable to get recent results from Reddit,
as spotted by 404Media, thanks to the exclusive deal Reddit made with Google earlier this year.
That means Bing, DuckDuckGo, uh-oh, there's not enough non-Google-related search engines
that are popular enough to be recognizable, Quant, and Kagi? They can only surface Reddit posts from
before the last few weeks. This sucks, but honestly, at this point I'm glad Reddit didn't make a deal
with Mojeek. And during a recent interview, venture capitalist Mark Andresen of Andresen
Horowitz expressed that comedy has basically died, but maybe, just maybe, AI could save the day.
Soon, you'll be able to write and render an episode of animation the same quality as South
Park 20 years ago, quote, in basically half an hour. Man, remember South Park and Beavis and
Butthead and Futurama? What, they're still on the air? All of them? I'm going to make worse versions.
To be fair, AI can be pretty funny, though usually accidentally, like Deep AI's comedian chatbot,
which follows every single joke with an open bracket pause for laughter closed bracket.
And I can tell it's a man because it ends every set with open bracket, wink, closed bracket.
Wait, was that a joke? Oh, but that's why you should come back on Friday for more human-generated
tech news, open bracket, mustachioed, smolder, closed bracket.