Tech news. It's all about trust. In this case, antitrust. It's the best kind. It's like non-bread.
The European Commission has officially charged Microsoft with violating EU antitrust rules by
bundling teams with Microsoft Office, thereby granting the software an unfair distribution
advantage over its competitors. According to the Commission, Microsoft may also have created an
intentional interoperability gap where it is harder for rival communication apps to communicate with
Microsoft software. And even for teams people to communicate with themselves. I never get
notifications. The investigation began in July of last year in response to a complaint from Slack
that Microsoft was using its dominant market position to suffocate competition. Under the
Digital Markets Act, Microsoft could face fines of up to 10% of its global revenue,
but so far no company has been hit with that full penalty. If anything, it appears that EU is more
interested in forcing reform than extracting cash. Apple, who are facing a potential $38
billion fine over their app store anti-steering policy, as well as increased regulatory scrutiny
over their past anti-repair practices, have recently put their whole Apple-acy into showing
European regulators that they've turned a new leaf in terms of repairability. The company has
expanded its self-service diagnostics tools to Europe and published a white paper claiming that
they'll be making features like True Tone and battery health data available for third-party
replacement parts later this year, no matter how dirty, bad, and wrong to find your perfect
iPhone with a battery not blessed by it. Tim Apple's own hand, maybe. Apple-acy? You know what it is.
Is that allowed? The Internet Archive has delisted around a half a million e-books from
the Open Library Project, following a judicial ruling in favor of the publishers currently suing
the Archive for breach of copyright. The Internet Archive has called the decision a
devastating loss, though the organization still plans to appeal the ruling. If the ruling stands,
this precedent could be devastating not just for the Internet Archive, but for libraries
across the United States whose digital lending programs depend on the same interpretation
of the US copyright laws. Controlled digital lending, or CDL, was first pioneered by the
Internet Archive back in 2011. I was playing Starcraft 2, and it allows libraries to digitize
their collections and lend out as many DRM-protected digital copies as they have physical copies in
storage. Publishers, of course, would much prefer that libraries pay exorbitant fees for
restrictive digital licenses. Or even better, that libraries didn't exist. You gotta buy it.
After all, it's basically just book communism. In another blow to information on the Internet,
Paramount Global has pulled the defunct MTV news website offline, deleting a decades-long
digital archive of journalism. Now, the only way for the public to access this past reporting is to
track it down on independent archives like the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet
Archive. A New York Times report has shed light on AI companies altering their privacy policies
to better collect user data for AI training. Perhaps surprising to those who thought these
companies were better than this. Yesterday, Reddit put out a warning to companies whose
bots ignore its robots exclusion protocol, telling webcrawlers not to access its content
lest they be blocked. The CEO of Perplexity, however, has expressed that the exclusion protocol is
not a legal framework. Apparently, that's the new standard. If it's not illegal, then it's
basically fine. YouTuber Sasha Yanshin recently canceled his Adobe subscription in response to
his privacy policy changes, saying, the hardware store that sells you a paintbrush doesn't get to
own the painting that you make with it, right? Trust might be easier to come by if the AI industry's
most prominent proponents, such as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, demonstrated a degree, a modicum,
of caution and empathy for the people directly affected by their products. Instead of suggesting
that the creative jobs undermined by AI maybe just never need to exist in the first place,
like a first act supervillain. Do you trust me to tell you the quick bits?
Well, you shouldn't. These bits are dangerously unstable. That's what makes them so fast.
Thousands of websites are being urged by security research group,
SandSec, to stop using the popular open source web service polyfill.io, as it's been serving
malware to their visitors after being sold months ago to a Chinese company called Funnel,
which is just perfect. We're nullifying it. The service has been used to add modern functionality
to older browsers, but it's actually not necessary anymore for most websites,
according to the original developer. So there's actually multiple reasons to stop using it.
Just stop! Matrix multiplication, or matmul, is a type of math performed by large language models
when they think. And it's also why GPUs have been selling like golden hotcakes recently.
They're really good at it. But a group of Chinese and Californian researchers claim to have created
an LLM that performs about as well as Lama2 without using any matmul at all. Lama2 is pretty weak
compared to today's flagship models, but if this method could be scaled up, it would have a drastic
impact on both the GPU market and, potentially, the environment. That's the thing you're forced
to see when your AI girlfriend refuses to talk to you. Why? There's grass there. You can touch it.
A new prototype from distance technologies turns the entire windshield of a car into a giant
3 augmented reality heads-up display. The prototype, which thankfully hasn't been installed into a car
just yet, uses an LCD panel to project an image upwards onto a glass windshield with a reflective
coating. This new prototype also incorporates eye tracking, and its LCD panel has a parallax
barrier that can display a slightly different image for each eye. There are currently existing
aftermarket huds for cars, but they take up only a small percentage of the windshield,
and the projections have a relatively flat, ghostly look, say the marketers. Ghostly,
just like you'll be when you plow into a tree after turning your F-150 into a movie theater.
Probably a RAM, actually. The Rabbit R1 handheld AI device, that's not a phone,
has had a vulnerability in its codebase that could let anyone access every response the device
ever gave, or simply brick them. And despite knowing about it, Rabbit did nothing. According
to hacker collective and Jewish youth-oriented hip-hop group, Rabbitude. The vulnerability was
actually teased by YouTuber Coffeezilla, who Rabbitude says worked with them on his recent videos.
Rabbit finally fixed the vulnerability today, only for Rabbitude to reveal another,
an even more dangerous one that lets them access the company's email and documents with user data.
So I think it's clearer than ever at this point that the R1 definitely
could have been an app. A team of serious scientists at Tokyo University have discovered
a way to attach, quote, living skin to the faces of robots, apparently taking inspiration from
human skin ligaments. This, they say, may one day lead to Android robots with convincing,
self-healing skin that allows for more realistic facial expressions, and also Blade Runner.
The Japanese scientists demonstrated this concept by taking a peptobismal pink condom with
eyes and forcing it to smile like a psychologically traumatized tonic, the tank engine.
As you do, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether, or not they could. They didn't stop
to think if they should. Whoa, it's like Jeff Goldblum's here. But don't get preoccupied with
whether to come back on Friday for another episode of TechLink. You can, and you should. Nobody's
gonna end up getting eaten by dinosaurs on this show. Why would you think that? Why would you?
Those little chicken-sized dinosaurs are scariest, and I think that's the second one.