Oh, you here for tech news too? Yeah. Okay. Oh, I'm, it's supposed to be, oh, oh, oh,
I'm the guy. Okay. Apple has been sent a secret order by the UK demanding access to the encrypted
data of Apple's users worldwide. According to people familiar with the matter who spoke
with the Washington Post, the order was reportedly issued under the UK's Investigatory Powers Act
of 2016 known by critics as the Snoopers Charter, which sounds less like an existential threat
to data privacy and more like a British children's novel. I solemnly swear that I'm up to no good.
You'll be a fine snooper, Billy. It's Billy Snooper and the Charter of Snoops.
Apple has neither confirmed nor denied that such a request has been received,
probably because doing so is actually a criminal offense under the Snoopers Charter.
And while Apple can appeal the order, that wouldn't mean they can delay executing on it.
It's unclear where things go from here, but if I were the UK, I'd be careful with Apple's data.
The company just made its former employee publicly apologize for leaking info,
calling it a profound and expensive mistake, also known as buying many Apple products.
Speaking of outrageous pricing, RTX 50 series graphics cards from MSI and ASUS have had their
prices increased by hundreds of dollars as tech spotted by tech spot. I'm sorry.
The USA's new China tariffs may be partially to blame for this, but I don't think they factor in
to ASUS decision to make its ROG Astral 5090 even more expensive by making its cooler out of
literal gold. The ROG Astral Dahab OC edition has an MSRP of $2,800, but retailers will probably
charge even more than that, given that the regular Astrals already listed for more than 3,000.
Hey, want to pay even more for GPUs that are still being plagued with black screen problems?
At least NVIDIA is investigating that now, according to PC Gamer, as reports of similar
issues have emerged from RTX 40 series owners pointing to a problem with NVIDIA's latest driver.
But complaining is kind of pointless. There's still no stock anywhere, so this all feels a bit
like ordering lunch at the Hoppin New Delhi that just opened in your niece's playroom.
Here's your sandwich. This plate is empty. Where's my sandwich? I don't know how to be an uncle.
So you may not know this, but AI is getting pretty good now. Researchers at ByteDance just
showed off OmniHumanOne, which can turn an image and audio into generated video with
lip syncing and gestures virtually indistinguishable from the real original video it was based on.
It's not publicly available yet, still locked to ByteDance's servers, where it's probably
partying with all of the unencrypted data being sent there from the iOS DeepSeq app,
which apparently has so many security holes, it would make people with trypophobia have aneurysms
if they weren't so busy downloading every Chinese app that asked how their day's going.
Yes, running DeepSeq models locally solves that issue, and others are starting to recreate
DeepSeq's success. Stanford and University of Washington researchers used the distillation
technique that OpenAI accused DeepSeq of using to train a reasoning model that performs similarly
to OpenAI's 01 preview using just $50 worth of credits for Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking API.
I mean heck, tech companies might not even have to pirate 80 terabytes worth of books to train
their models anymore, like Meta almost certainly did, according to recently unsealed emails.
Guys, they're just books. Not truly copyright protected material, like the output of a chatbot
trained on books. You have to transform. It's transformative.
Oh, what about the quick bits? We're not doing this again.
The Trump administration has paused its removal of the de minimis exemption,
meaning low-cost packages from China will not be subject to tariffs, at least until the
Commerce Department confirms that adequate systems are in place to collect that revenue.
Trump's tariffs have also moved as rock to shift its manufacturing out of China.
To the US? No. To other countries that aren't subject to the same tariffs, like Vietnam and
Taiwan. I know what will stop this, killing the national EV charging program. What will Elon
think of that? Maybe nothing. He's kind of busy right now, storming more government agencies that
America absolutely doesn't need, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose demise Musk is apparently already celebrating.
You need the government to protect your finances for you? Ever heard of swords?
The Department of Justice did temporarily block Musk's doge group from accessing US treasury data,
allowing only two of Elon's acolytes to have read-only access. Although it seems like they
already had right access and are using all that juicy classified data to train a government
chat botch, which doesn't sound super secure, but on the plus side, if it's anything like
XAI's grok, it'll be hilarious, edgy, and based. Apple has published research that makes it really
look like they're building a real-life robot version of the Pixar lamp, with lifelike expressive
movements and the ability to respond to human gestures like, hey, look over there, and back up,
back, back, back the f**k up. To prevent the iRobot from joining the AI uprising, they've bolted it
to the table. We can only hope it stays there, so the i from the Pixar logo has a chance at revenge.
It's been crushed so many times. And it's time to see Doom running on perhaps the least expected
thing. An Apple Lightning to HDMI adapter dongle. Someone possibly named John, who goes by Nyan
Satan online, adapted the well-known Checkmate Bootrom exploit to get id Software's classic
running on the dongle's Samsung S5-L8 747 processor. It's nice to know that if the whole GPU
situation doesn't get better, you've probably got a ton of little gaming PCs in your box of dongle,
see? You kept them for a reason. And I think you watched this whole video for a reason,
so I could tell you to come back for more tech news on Monday. And now, I have. So,
was it worth it?