Oh, don't even talk to me until I've had my tech news.
Mostly because I would have nothing to say. Without that, it's basically empty up here.
Intel really wants you to know that they have not solved the instability issue
with their high-end CPUs. Thank you. Last week, Igor's lab published a report
allegedly quoting confidential Intel documents.
Those documents said the root cause of the instability
is a bug in the microcode for ETVB,
which is an Intel Raptor Lake feature that overclocks processor cores
above the maximum turbo frequency when the chip isn't facing thermal or power limits.
These Intel documents suggest this bug may have allowed chips
to enter high-performance states even when the chip was too hot to handle it.
It wasn't ready. But someone had an issue with Intel's Intel, Intel.
Team Blue later told Tom's hardware that this bug is not the only problem,
but rather a contributing factor. This makes sense since the ETVB feature
is exclusive to Core i9 processors and Core i7 processors have also been
facing instability issues. But at least the company is making progress.
Intel confirmed to Tom's hardware that they have a patch for the microcode bug
that should at least help. But a full solution requires more investigation,
which takes time. I mean, not everyone can crack a case
like Detective Adrian Monk, protagonist of the Emmy-winning series Monk,
starring Tony Shalhoub. He's the best of us. The US Department of Justice
is filing a lawsuit against Adobe on a referral from the FTC.
And weirdly, the fact that Premiere can't seem to go five minutes without crashing
didn't factor into the decision at all. The lawsuit alleges that Adobe has harmed consumers
by enrolling them in their annual, paid monthly subscription plan by default
without adequately disclosing that customers are agreeing to a year-long commitment.
Adobe also doesn't make it clear that, should you become concerned with said commitment
and wanna end it early, it comes with a cancellation fee of hundreds of dollars.
According to the FTC's filing, this early termination fee is only clearly disclosed
once subscribers actually try to cancel, which sounds less like a service
and more like an extortion racket. Thus, the lawsuit.
The FTC even called out the delays and resistance consumers have reported facing
when contacting customer service directly. So hopefully that means the next company
to face the FTC is every other company with a customer service department,
except ours, lttstore.com. I legally have to say that.
AMD is getting called out for publishing incredibly misleading benchmarks
for some of its new CPUs. Although new is a relative term,
AMD announced new Ryzen 5000 CPUs
alongside the arguably newer Ryzen 9000 series of chips.
Now AMD's benchmarks showed their newly announced Ryzen 7 5800 XT
beating Intel's last gen Core i5-13600K
while they're similarly new with an asterisk, Ryzen 9 5900 XT was shown beating the Core i7-13700K.
Hardware unboxed had something to say about this during a Q&A video after a fan going by Lech
brought up that the GPU AMD used for these tests
was a underpowered Radeon RX 6600.
Now by doing this, AMD made the performance bottleneck the GPU, not the CPU.
And since AMD processors work better with AMD graphics cards,
the new Zen 3 chips looked better than Intel's more recent 13th gen.
Now to be fair, Intel is getting a little taste of their own medicine here.
They're also a fan of misleading benchmarks. The company famously tried to argue
that third-party benchmarks don't represent real-world desktop usage using data
they gathered from notebook users. More recently, Team Blue was also accused
of artificially inflating benchmark results for its Xeon server processors.
So moral of the story here, trust no one,
never leave your house, or just wait for independent reviews,
so that's better. Ah, you must be here for the quick bits.
I just, I swear, I swear I just had them. One second.
Oh, they're in my other pants. Proton, the company that asked the question,
what if Google didn't wanna suck up all your data?
Has announced it's transitioning to a non-profit foundational structure.
This new Proton Foundation will own the pre-existing Proton AG Corporation.
They're not the first company to do this. I mean, the most famous example is probably OpenAI,
but Firefox developer Mozilla also has a for-profit subsidiary,
which recently expanded with the purchase of Anonym,
a startup apparently specializing in privacy-preserving advertising, okay?
There aren't any plans to introduce Anonym's tech in Mozilla's web browser yet,
but you never know what the future might hold. It's like that old proverb, inside of you,
there are two firefoxes?
TikTok wants to sell ads using AI-generated avatars,
because of course they do. If that sentence was gonna be about anyone,
of course it's TikTok. The company's symphony digital avatars
come in two flavors, stock or custom.
While stock avatars are based on paid actors,
custom avatars can be used to represent a specific creator or brand spokesperson,
or a version of them that suddenly lost the ability
to sound enthusiastic or move like an actual human being.
What if that happened? That's a sci-fi movie I wanna see.
The custom avatars can even speak multiple languages,
allowing advertisers to unsettle virtually anyone.
Speaking of TikTok, now that the TikTok ban law has been passed,
the US government has set its sights on another prominent Chinese company, DJI,
maker of 70% of the world's drones.
The House of Representatives passed the Countering CCP Drones Act on Friday.
If also passed by the Senate, the bill would ban DJI drones
from using FCC allotted frequencies effectively,
making their sale and operation illegal,
especially for filming aerial TikToks. That's not gonna fly.
Now both companies are being targeted due to concerns they're spying on Americans for the CCP,
and wouldn't you rather use a quality American made drone
that'll spy on Americans for the White House? Hurrah! Researchers have created renewable energy
using living organisms. That doesn't sound that crazy.
Have you ever heard of a bike? What we're actually talking about here is electricity.
Scientists in Canada were able to create cells containing algae that could capture electrons
created during photosynthesis. Now since the tech pulls carbon dioxide out of the air,
it's not carbon neutral, it's actually better, it's carbon negative.
Now the maximum terminal voltage is only one volt right now,
but the technology could be used to power ultra low power devices like IoT sensors.
But it raises questions, like will humans eventually worry
about whether their batteries are vegan?
Fun fact, they already do. Big shout out to Gelatin for being in literally everything.
And researchers at the University of Texas are making progress on technology
that would give smartphones X-ray vision.
At press time, it was unclear whether anyone had consulted mathematician Ian Malcolm.
It's a real can versus should situation. Well, at least the tech isn't actually using
biologically harmful X-rays, but rather wireless signals
in the 200 to 400 gigahertz range.
And so far, the most solid thing researchers were able to see through is a cardboard sheet.
They had better luck looking through thick dust clouds and dense fog.
And yeah, you may laugh, but Thomas Jane would have loved to have this tech
in the 2007 horror film, The Mist.
Too bad he missed it. Just like how I'll miss you
if you don't come back on Wednesday for more tech news. I get lonely, okay?
I have needs.