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