1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,080 Real quick, there won't be a tech link this coming Monday 2 00:00:03,080 --> 00:00:07,900 because I would much rather try and fail to cover all the Computex news on Wednesday. 3 00:00:07,900 --> 00:00:11,240 What a thrill that'll be. Apple is up to its old tricks, 4 00:00:11,240 --> 00:00:14,820 slapping big red warning symbols on some iOS apps 5 00:00:14,820 --> 00:00:18,960 in the EU like Instacart that don't use app store payments, 6 00:00:18,960 --> 00:00:22,360 something they've been allowed to do for more than a year. 7 00:00:22,360 --> 00:00:25,800 And, well, Apple's used these warnings since then too. 8 00:00:25,800 --> 00:00:29,680 It's just that a bunch of people notice them now that some apps are actually starting 9 00:00:29,680 --> 00:00:35,080 to implement external payments. It's Apple's typical playbook of technically complying 10 00:00:35,080 --> 00:00:39,480 with new regulations, forcing them to allow third-party payments, but doing it angrily, 11 00:00:39,480 --> 00:00:43,560 like a nurse that you've offended somehow. Is this the wound? 12 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:48,240 Here's a band-aid. That attitude can also be seen in Apple telling Patreon 13 00:00:48,240 --> 00:00:52,700 that its external payments link can't open in an in-app browser window. 14 00:00:52,700 --> 00:00:56,000 The link has to go out of the Patreon app to Safari, 15 00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:00,560 which might as well be the Elephant Graveyard. No, don't go there, Simba! 16 00:01:00,560 --> 00:01:05,780 But when it comes to app store-related shenanigans, Apple isn't the only sketchy player. 17 00:01:05,780 --> 00:01:10,520 After resubmitting Fortnite to the US version of the iOS app store last week, 18 00:01:10,520 --> 00:01:15,840 Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that Fortnite's next update must drop 19 00:01:15,840 --> 00:01:18,840 on all platforms simultaneously. 20 00:01:18,840 --> 00:01:21,920 That's important. He then went on a little tweet storm, 21 00:01:21,920 --> 00:01:27,560 directly asking his fellow Tim Cook to let the kids play as racist Darth Vader. 22 00:01:27,560 --> 00:01:32,640 Wait, no, that's for later in the episode. Sweeney pointed out that Fortnite's not allowed 23 00:01:32,640 --> 00:01:36,400 on the app store, but a game called Fort Battle Royale, 24 00:01:36,400 --> 00:01:41,080 Epic Shoot, was. When Apple took that down, Sweeney recommended 25 00:01:41,080 --> 00:01:44,080 another knockoff, but Apple neither accepted 26 00:01:44,080 --> 00:01:50,960 or rejected the official Fortnite update, which Sweeney said put the game's Friday update in jeopardy. 27 00:01:50,960 --> 00:01:54,080 Now this morning, Epic Games claimed Apple blocked 28 00:01:54,100 --> 00:02:00,400 its Fortnite submission, shocker. And for some reason, this means Fortnite can't be released 29 00:02:00,400 --> 00:02:04,720 to the US app store or to the iOS Epic Games store 30 00:02:04,720 --> 00:02:12,080 in the EU where it was already available. And now, quote, sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be offline 31 00:02:12,080 --> 00:02:17,720 worldwide until Apple unblocks it. Now, Fortnite was unavailable to download 32 00:02:17,720 --> 00:02:21,400 for iOS today in the EU, but in statements to Bloomberg, 33 00:02:21,400 --> 00:02:25,840 Apple denied blocking Fortnite on Epic's own store. 34 00:02:25,840 --> 00:02:32,340 It says it just asked Epic's EU developer account to resubmit the app update without also bundling it 35 00:02:32,340 --> 00:02:36,520 with the US app store submission, which it doesn't want to allow. 36 00:02:36,520 --> 00:02:40,440 So TLDR, either Apple's lying or Tim Sweeney took 37 00:02:40,440 --> 00:02:44,240 Fortnite off Epic's own store on purpose to make Apple look bad. 38 00:02:44,240 --> 00:02:47,280 Unfortunately, neither of those are that far-fetched. 39 00:02:47,280 --> 00:02:52,600 Like Tim's trying to open up the app store, which is good, but he doesn't really care about who he misleads 40 00:02:52,600 --> 00:02:56,280 along the way. He's like Luthin' Rail from the best Star Wars thing 41 00:02:56,280 --> 00:03:00,040 ever made and or season two finale streaming now on Disney Plus. 42 00:03:00,040 --> 00:03:05,240 Disney sucks, but the show doesn't. I love Tim Sweeney retweeting an American Fortnite player 43 00:03:05,240 --> 00:03:08,860 who's sad about being this close to playing Fortnite 44 00:03:08,860 --> 00:03:14,420 on iOS again, only to get rug pulled. And the only reason he had that hope in the first place 45 00:03:14,420 --> 00:03:18,160 is because Tim Sweeney promised that Apple would approve Fortnite this time. 46 00:03:18,160 --> 00:03:23,280 He also retweeted an AI video saying that elephants evolved from Dimetroton. 47 00:03:23,280 --> 00:03:27,040 I think we all know what that says about him. So, you guys like dinosaurs, right? 48 00:03:27,040 --> 00:03:31,280 It's not a dinosaur, shut up. Now I spent way too long talking about that, 49 00:03:31,280 --> 00:03:35,760 so I'm gonna have to speed through this next stuff. Video cards with a Z.com spotted reference 50 00:03:35,760 --> 00:03:40,540 to an Intel Arc Pro B60, whatever that is on the Max Sun website. 51 00:03:40,540 --> 00:03:47,920 So I guess we'll probably at least get to see that at Computex next week, along with maybe a Radeon RX9060XT 52 00:03:48,720 --> 00:03:52,120 which will not look like the reference design in this tweet from AMD. 53 00:03:52,120 --> 00:03:56,440 That's just a mock-up that won't go on sale, but which they nevertheless wanted to show you 54 00:03:56,440 --> 00:03:59,560 because they're proud of the intern that made it. Congrats, Kevin. 55 00:03:59,560 --> 00:04:03,700 Listings for eight and 16 Gigabyte versions of the card have already been spotted, 56 00:04:03,700 --> 00:04:10,000 so it seems like this thing might launch next week. We probably won't get to see AMD's rumored MedusaPoint 57 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:16,600 Ryzen APU with 22 cores or the ARM-powered PC processor code named Soundwave 58 00:04:16,600 --> 00:04:21,920 that will reportedly take on NVIDIA's own ARM-powered N1 chip in 2026, though, 59 00:04:21,920 --> 00:04:25,040 unless Kevin makes a bang and mock-up for those two. 60 00:04:26,040 --> 00:04:31,040 Good luck, dude. OpenAI finally made its GPT 4.1 models 61 00:04:31,040 --> 00:04:35,560 available in ChatGPT this week and then announced a new cloud-based coding agent 62 00:04:35,560 --> 00:04:39,880 called Codex, not to be confused with Codex CLI, 63 00:04:39,880 --> 00:04:44,640 the open source agent for terminal apps that launched last month. 64 00:04:44,640 --> 00:04:49,520 No, if you'd like to be confused, let me tell you about how XAI's chatbot GROC 65 00:04:49,520 --> 00:04:55,840 suddenly started rambling about white genocide in South Africa anytime someone tweeted for its opinion 66 00:04:55,840 --> 00:05:00,120 on literally anything that wasn't that. Sometimes it answered the question, 67 00:05:00,120 --> 00:05:03,440 it was actually being asked and then went, 68 00:05:03,440 --> 00:05:08,080 now, regarding South Africa, other times it completely ignored the prompt 69 00:05:08,080 --> 00:05:11,160 and just jumped right into it. I mean, that's what we're all here for, right? 70 00:05:11,160 --> 00:05:14,920 After taking the bot offline for a bit, XAI brought it back, 71 00:05:14,920 --> 00:05:19,840 said they'll be publishing GROC's system prompts to GitHub going forward and blamed the issue 72 00:05:19,840 --> 00:05:23,440 on an unauthorized modification made, presumably, 73 00:05:23,440 --> 00:05:28,640 by someone with permissions to do so that also has strong opinions about South Africa. 74 00:05:28,640 --> 00:05:33,560 When asked who it thought the rogue employee was, knew, feeling much better now, 75 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:39,880 GROC said, come on, guys. I mean, obviously it wasn't noted CEO of XAI 76 00:05:39,880 --> 00:05:45,640 originally from South Africa, Elon Musk, he wouldn't risk his company's rep for that, right? 77 00:05:45,640 --> 00:05:50,760 He's never done racially charged things in front of large groups of people before 78 00:05:51,800 --> 00:05:55,280 and I've never had a worse segue to our sponsor. 79 00:05:55,280 --> 00:05:59,240 It's the quick bits now. There's just no time. 80 00:05:59,240 --> 00:06:02,680 Spotify has responded to backlash from podcasters 81 00:06:02,680 --> 00:06:08,280 upset over the company's recent update adding public play counts to every podcast. 82 00:06:08,280 --> 00:06:11,640 Spotify's new policy will be to show public play counts 83 00:06:11,640 --> 00:06:15,320 only for podcasts with more than 50,000 plays. 84 00:06:15,320 --> 00:06:19,720 That way you won't be able to tell how many people are listening to all the fake podcasts 85 00:06:19,720 --> 00:06:23,960 discovered by Business Insider and CNN this week that are only like 10 seconds long 86 00:06:23,960 --> 00:06:27,040 because they're just a front for selling drugs. Everybody's happy. 87 00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:30,640 Reports circulated this week about a massive steam data breach 88 00:06:30,640 --> 00:06:33,960 that supposedly compromised 89 million accounts 89 00:06:33,960 --> 00:06:38,360 and full disclosure, I didn't include it on TechLink because something seemed off 90 00:06:38,360 --> 00:06:42,800 and sure enough, Valve has confirmed that the only thing that was really compromised 91 00:06:42,800 --> 00:06:46,480 were a bunch of one-time login codes that don't work anymore. 92 00:06:46,480 --> 00:06:51,280 The company says there's no real reason to change your password, but do you need a reason? 93 00:06:51,280 --> 00:06:54,320 Do it anyway. Come up with a fun one. 94 00:06:54,320 --> 00:07:00,480 Australian startup Gilmore Space was due to launch the country's first orbital class rocket this week 95 00:07:00,480 --> 00:07:05,800 but during launch preparations, the rocket's nose cone deployed prematurely. 96 00:07:05,800 --> 00:07:09,400 There were no photos, but it probably looked something like this clip. 97 00:07:11,040 --> 00:07:14,080 According to scientists, in other words, 98 00:07:14,080 --> 00:07:17,880 the top fell off and they should probably build the next one so that doesn't happen. 99 00:07:17,880 --> 00:07:22,320 Well, some of them are built so the front doesn't fall off at all. And Fortnite is back one more time 100 00:07:22,320 --> 00:07:26,480 because it gave Darth Vader, a boss character in the game Star Wars mode, 101 00:07:26,480 --> 00:07:31,160 an AI version of James Earl Jones' voice that players can talk to. 102 00:07:31,160 --> 00:07:34,720 Vader immediately started swearing. Freaking. 103 00:07:34,720 --> 00:07:38,040 F***ing. Whoa! And being a little racist. 104 00:07:39,040 --> 00:07:42,760 A useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders. 105 00:07:42,760 --> 00:07:45,920 To be fair, he's a space Nazi super soldier. 106 00:07:45,920 --> 00:07:50,560 It's not completely out of left field. Epic Games pushed a hotfix immediately 107 00:07:50,560 --> 00:07:55,360 and pointed out you can report it to them the next time the guy that literally slaughtered 108 00:07:55,360 --> 00:08:00,400 a temple full of younglings says something a bit edgy. And who knows, maybe I'll say something edgy 109 00:08:00,400 --> 00:08:04,480 when you come back on Wednesday, not Monday for more tech news. 110 00:08:04,480 --> 00:08:09,240 I've got some dark thoughts in here. You wouldn't think so, you don't even want to know what I think 111 00:08:09,240 --> 00:08:14,360 about the atomic purple Game Boy color. Ooh, don't do it.