Okay, I know reviews are up for the Ryzen 7 9850X 3D today, including Linus Tech Tips
one. But what do you want us to do? Say the same things Linus said in that video, but with less spittle?
That all braces. Google's new desktop interface for Android, meant to eventually replace Chrome OS, has
been spotted by 9 to 5 Google on a Chromium bug report page.
It includes screen captures, features of an Android 16 build, codamed ALOS, and a bunch
of numbers, which stands for Aluminum OS.
Google's project to have Android incubate inside of and burst out of Chrome OS' body
like an alien. It mostly looks like Android 16's existing desktop mode, but with a slightly modified
top bar and without, the buttons for back home and multitasking usually available at
the bottom right. Only because this is running on an HP Elite, Dragonfly Chromebook, not an Android phone
or tablet. The other obvious thing here is the extensions button to the right of the URL bar in Chrome,
which is only there on desktop versions of the browser. I'd tell you to go see the bug report yourself, but it's been deactivated, probably to stay
consistent with what Google does to most of their products. This lines up with what Google executives have been saying openly since last year.
Chrome OS and Android are being merged into a single platform.
As Roddy pointed out in his ShortCircuit video on the Samsung Tab S11 Ultra, big Android
tablets already are laptops in a sense, but their desktop functionality is limited.
So the obvious thing to do is to combine Android with another very limited OS, and together
they'll make one full desktop.
A landmark social media addiction lawsuit will soon head to trial.
Marking the first time social platforms have had to convince a jury they aren't liable
for harming kids. A mere 20 years after those platforms probably started harming kids.
The lawsuit's 19-year-old plaintiff claims that platform features like infinite scroll
and autoplay triggered depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
Unlike previous social media lawsuits, this one is not focused on the impact of the content
itself, which platforms are not liable for, but on how the platforms were engineered to
be addictive. In a show of confidence about their innocence, both Snapchat and TikTok settled with a plaintiff
out of court, with TikTok getting their settlement in yesterday, just a few hours before the
jury selection started. They would have gotten in sooner, but they saw a video of someone making a funnel cake
and got lost in the scroll for seven hours. That happens to the best of us.
Meta and YouTube, on the other hand, never afraid to slug it out with the little guy,
are taking this to trial, despite Meta's prospects for the suit not looking so hot.
Unsealed internal documents have shown Meta employees messaging one another about the
addictive nature of Instagram, with one commenting that IG is a drug, and another saying we're
basically pushers. Those people got bad attitudes and got canned.
Internal emails also show that Mark Zuckerberg made getting teens locked into Meta's apps
a top strategic priority right behind buying big chains, with an email from 2016 stating
that Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in 2017 is teens.
Very epstein of him. An open source AI assistant called Moltbot, formerly Claudebot, has crossed 80,000 GitHub
stars, making it one of the fastest growing AI projects of 2026.
Already? It lets you run a personal AI assistant on your own hardware and control it through messaging
apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, or Slack.
People are comparing it to Jarvis from Ironman, using it to manage their calendars, send emails,
and even write code. That's how dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's working out pretty good
so far. Except maybe it's not, as security experts have started sounding alarms about Moltbot's
security vulnerabilities. Heather Atkins, VP of security engineering at Google Cloud, posted a warning not to run
Moltbot as it appears to be massively vulnerable to prompt injection attacks in which an attacker
can feed hidden instructions to the victim's AI assistant.
Also it's not owned by Google, so use Gemini.
Rachel Toback, CEO of Social Proof Security, explained that if your autonomous AI agent
is reading all your messages and has admin access to your computer, then someone can
hijack your computer with a simple DM. But it gets worse, Moltbot is connected to the internet in many different ways, allowing
security researcher Jameson O'Reilly to find hundreds of exposed Moltbot instances on the
web, with some allowing unauthenticated access to private messages, credentials, and API
keys. O'Reilly also demonstrated a supply chain attack through Claude Hub, Moltbot's skills
library. He uploaded a proof of concept malicious skill, artificially inflated, the download count
to over 4,000 to look more legit, and watched as developers from seven countries downloaded
it. The skill was benign, but O'Reilly said he could have exfiltrated SSH keys, AWS credentials,
and entire code bases. Moltbot's own documentation acknowledges the risk, stating running an AI agent with shell
access on your machine is...spicy. Really?
They actually wrote that? That's verbatim? And who can argue with that?
Handing rude access to an hallucinating robot prone to being compromised by simple text
messages is my fourth favorite spice, right after Perry Perry, Montreal Steak, and our
sponsor. And you know what else? How about a quick bit before the quick bit?
Samsung revealed their Galaxy Z tri-fold phone is going to cost 2900 US dollars.
Do you want me to sit here and cry about it? Or do you want some real quick bits?
You want them. Intel just switched on XES S3 multi-frame generation in new drivers, letting ARC GPUs
and Core Ultra IGPUs generate 2X, 3X, or 4X the frames across any game that already
supports XES S2. The best part?
If a game already supports the second generation tech, developers, developers, developers
don't need to release updates for the new one to work.
You just got to turn it on in the Intel control panel. I know what you're thinking.
XES S spelled backwards is SSEX, and now you can do it three times with your IGPU.
It's time to boogie down boys. Did you know Tesla Model 3, Tesla Model Y, you know, SEXY, Elon did it first.
NVIDIA finally did it, folks. China has reportedly approved initial purchases of NVIDIA's HU under AI chips by ByteDance,
Alibaba, and Tencent, covering more than 400,000 chips.
After a year of Uncle Sam saying, no, China saying, please?
And Uncle Sam saying, well, okay, since he asked nicely. And then China saying, no, once they actually got permission, apparently all it took was
a visit from the great one Jensen Huang himself.
Sorry, Gretzky. Maybe he gave Xi Jinping the skinny on where to get those sick leather jackets.
I guess we'll find out at the next press conference. Xi Jinping's press conference comes out of her liturgy.
Actually, leather-assless chaps. Sparks fly.
Stone cold Steve Austin beer. This is how you get social credit.
Iran is planning to permanently cut itself off from the global internet, sending a virtual
fist bump to North Korea. After 20 days of near total blackout during widespread protests and by all accounts a
hideously violent response by authorities, the government is now implementing what Digital
Rights Group FilterWatch calls absolute digital isolation.
Instead of lifting the shutdown, they're building a whitelisting system where 90 million Iranians
can only access approved domestic sites while security vetted elites get access to the outside
world. Our porn, our awesome sunglasses.
Even worse, VPNs won't help because new deep packet inspection updates are specifically
designed to fingerprint VPN and Starlink traffic.
A government spokesperson, who's probably evil, confirmed international access will
never return to its previous form, except of course in the offices of Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei. Reports say when he's not hurrying to the little Ayatollah's room, he's compulsively
doom-scolling. There's trap posts on Tumblr.
Amazon accidentally tipped its hand on planned layoffs after an internal AWS email went out
way too early. The message, sent by Senior VP Colleen Aubrey, scheduled a Wednesday meeting titled Project
Dawn, which then promptly got cancelled. The email claimed impacted colleagues in the US candidate Costa Rica had already been notified
and referenced a follow-up note from HR Chief Beth Galetti that, awkwardly, never appeared.
Aubrey wrote, changes like this are hard on everyone.
Still, considering Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says that the real risk of losing a job comes
from someone who's very good at using AI, maybe this was AI's way of proving that it
can do stuff on its own. Just get it over with. Fire them already!
And figure, just drop new footage of its Helix 2 humanoid robot calmly putting away dishes
and somehow that is way more unsettling than it should be.
The video shows some serious fine motor control, hip-bumping a drawer closed and using its
foot to close the dishwasher, showing it's got the dexterity to complete chores with
style and to murder you.
I mean, at least it's actually useful, unlike those other robots who can't stop doing Karate
and Air Flips. Meanwhile, Fauna Robotics went the opposite direction with Sprout, a small, wildly little
guy who's actually designed to be cute and emotionally disarming.
Why can't we give that one the knife? That one seems like a much safer option, or at least I could be like, you too, Brutus!
But the best option would obviously be for you guys to come back tomorrow for more get-
I mean, back on Friday for more tech news. I think that's right.