WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.080 Real quick, there won't be a tech link this coming Monday 00:00:03.080 --> 00:00:07.900 because I would much rather try and fail to cover all the Computex news on Wednesday. 00:00:07.900 --> 00:00:11.240 What a thrill that'll be. Apple is up to its old tricks, 00:00:11.240 --> 00:00:14.820 slapping big red warning symbols on some iOS apps 00:00:14.820 --> 00:00:18.960 in the EU like Instacart that don't use app store payments, 00:00:18.960 --> 00:00:22.360 something they've been allowed to do for more than a year. 00:00:22.360 --> 00:00:25.800 And, well, Apple's used these warnings since then too. 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 00:00:29.680 --> 00:00:35.080 to implement external payments. It's Apple's typical playbook of technically complying 00:00:35.080 --> 00:00:39.480 with new regulations, forcing them to allow third-party payments, but doing it angrily, 00:00:39.480 --> 00:00:43.560 like a nurse that you've offended somehow. Is this the wound? 00:00:43.560 --> 00:00:48.240 Here's a band-aid. That attitude can also be seen in Apple telling Patreon 00:00:48.240 --> 00:00:52.700 that its external payments link can't open in an in-app browser window. 00:00:52.700 --> 00:00:56.000 The link has to go out of the Patreon app to Safari, 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:00.560 which might as well be the Elephant Graveyard. No, don't go there, Simba! 00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:05.780 But when it comes to app store-related shenanigans, Apple isn't the only sketchy player. 00:01:05.780 --> 00:01:10.520 After resubmitting Fortnite to the US version of the iOS app store last week, 00:01:10.520 --> 00:01:15.840 Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced that Fortnite's next update must drop 00:01:15.840 --> 00:01:18.840 on all platforms simultaneously. 00:01:18.840 --> 00:01:21.920 That's important. He then went on a little tweet storm, 00:01:21.920 --> 00:01:27.560 directly asking his fellow Tim Cook to let the kids play as racist Darth Vader. 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 00:01:32.640 --> 00:01:36.400 on the app store, but a game called Fort Battle Royale, 00:01:36.400 --> 00:01:41.080 Epic Shoot, was. When Apple took that down, Sweeney recommended 00:01:41.080 --> 00:01:44.080 another knockoff, but Apple neither accepted 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. 00:01:50.960 --> 00:01:54.080 Now this morning, Epic Games claimed Apple blocked 00:01:54.100 --> 00:02:00.400 its Fortnite submission, shocker. And for some reason, this means Fortnite can't be released 00:02:00.400 --> 00:02:04.720 to the US app store or to the iOS Epic Games store 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 00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:17.720 worldwide until Apple unblocks it. Now, Fortnite was unavailable to download 00:02:17.720 --> 00:02:21.400 for iOS today in the EU, but in statements to Bloomberg, 00:02:21.400 --> 00:02:25.840 Apple denied blocking Fortnite on Epic's own store. 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 00:02:32.340 --> 00:02:36.520 with the US app store submission, which it doesn't want to allow. 00:02:36.520 --> 00:02:40.440 So TLDR, either Apple's lying or Tim Sweeney took 00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:44.240 Fortnite off Epic's own store on purpose to make Apple look bad. 00:02:44.240 --> 00:02:47.280 Unfortunately, neither of those are that far-fetched. 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 00:02:52.600 --> 00:02:56.280 along the way. He's like Luthin' Rail from the best Star Wars thing 00:02:56.280 --> 00:03:00.040 ever made and or season two finale streaming now on Disney Plus. 00:03:00.040 --> 00:03:05.240 Disney sucks, but the show doesn't. I love Tim Sweeney retweeting an American Fortnite player 00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:08.860 who's sad about being this close to playing Fortnite 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 00:03:14.420 --> 00:03:18.160 is because Tim Sweeney promised that Apple would approve Fortnite this time. 00:03:18.160 --> 00:03:23.280 He also retweeted an AI video saying that elephants evolved from Dimetroton. 00:03:23.280 --> 00:03:27.040 I think we all know what that says about him. So, you guys like dinosaurs, right? 00:03:27.040 --> 00:03:31.280 It's not a dinosaur, shut up. Now I spent way too long talking about that, 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 00:03:35.760 --> 00:03:40.540 to an Intel Arc Pro B60, whatever that is on the Max Sun website. 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 00:03:48.720 --> 00:03:52.120 which will not look like the reference design in this tweet from AMD. 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 00:03:56.440 --> 00:03:59.560 because they're proud of the intern that made it. Congrats, Kevin. 00:03:59.560 --> 00:04:03.700 Listings for eight and 16 Gigabyte versions of the card have already been spotted, 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 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:16.600 Ryzen APU with 22 cores or the ARM-powered PC processor code named Soundwave 00:04:16.600 --> 00:04:21.920 that will reportedly take on NVIDIA's own ARM-powered N1 chip in 2026, though, 00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:25.040 unless Kevin makes a bang and mock-up for those two. 00:04:26.040 --> 00:04:31.040 Good luck, dude. OpenAI finally made its GPT 4.1 models 00:04:31.040 --> 00:04:35.560 available in ChatGPT this week and then announced a new cloud-based coding agent 00:04:35.560 --> 00:04:39.880 called Codex, not to be confused with Codex CLI, 00:04:39.880 --> 00:04:44.640 the open source agent for terminal apps that launched last month. 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 00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:55.840 suddenly started rambling about white genocide in South Africa anytime someone tweeted for its opinion 00:04:55.840 --> 00:05:00.120 on literally anything that wasn't that. Sometimes it answered the question, 00:05:00.120 --> 00:05:03.440 it was actually being asked and then went, 00:05:03.440 --> 00:05:08.080 now, regarding South Africa, other times it completely ignored the prompt 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? 00:05:11.160 --> 00:05:14.920 After taking the bot offline for a bit, XAI brought it back, 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 00:05:19.840 --> 00:05:23.440 on an unauthorized modification made, presumably, 00:05:23.440 --> 00:05:28.640 by someone with permissions to do so that also has strong opinions about South Africa. 00:05:28.640 --> 00:05:33.560 When asked who it thought the rogue employee was, knew, feeling much better now, 00:05:33.560 --> 00:05:39.880 GROC said, come on, guys. I mean, obviously it wasn't noted CEO of XAI 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? 00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:50.760 He's never done racially charged things in front of large groups of people before 00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:55.280 and I've never had a worse segue to our sponsor. 00:05:55.280 --> 00:05:59.240 It's the quick bits now. There's just no time. 00:05:59.240 --> 00:06:02.680 Spotify has responded to backlash from podcasters 00:06:02.680 --> 00:06:08.280 upset over the company's recent update adding public play counts to every podcast. 00:06:08.280 --> 00:06:11.640 Spotify's new policy will be to show public play counts 00:06:11.640 --> 00:06:15.320 only for podcasts with more than 50,000 plays. 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 00:06:19.720 --> 00:06:23.960 discovered by Business Insider and CNN this week that are only like 10 seconds long 00:06:23.960 --> 00:06:27.040 because they're just a front for selling drugs. Everybody's happy. 00:06:27.040 --> 00:06:30.640 Reports circulated this week about a massive steam data breach 00:06:30.640 --> 00:06:33.960 that supposedly compromised 89 million accounts 00:06:33.960 --> 00:06:38.360 and full disclosure, I didn't include it on TechLink because something seemed off 00:06:38.360 --> 00:06:42.800 and sure enough, Valve has confirmed that the only thing that was really compromised 00:06:42.800 --> 00:06:46.480 were a bunch of one-time login codes that don't work anymore. 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? 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:54.320 Do it anyway. Come up with a fun one. 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 00:07:00.480 --> 00:07:05.800 but during launch preparations, the rocket's nose cone deployed prematurely. 00:07:05.800 --> 00:07:09.400 There were no photos, but it probably looked something like this clip. 00:07:11.040 --> 00:07:14.080 According to scientists, in other words, 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. 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 00:07:22.320 --> 00:07:26.480 because it gave Darth Vader, a boss character in the game Star Wars mode, 00:07:26.480 --> 00:07:31.160 an AI version of James Earl Jones' voice that players can talk to. 00:07:31.160 --> 00:07:34.720 Vader immediately started swearing. Freaking. 00:07:34.720 --> 00:07:38.040 F***ing. Whoa! And being a little racist. 00:07:39.040 --> 00:07:42.760 A useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders. 00:07:42.760 --> 00:07:45.920 To be fair, he's a space Nazi super soldier. 00:07:45.920 --> 00:07:50.560 It's not completely out of left field. Epic Games pushed a hotfix immediately 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 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 00:08:00.400 --> 00:08:04.480 when you come back on Wednesday, not Monday for more tech news. 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 00:08:09.240 --> 00:08:14.360 about the atomic purple Game Boy color. Ooh, don't do it.