Sorry, no stupid intro, not that kind of day. Nintendo has been issued a challenge
by Brazil's official consumer protection agency over the company's recently changed user agreement,
which now gives Nintendo the right to remotely brick your console if you muck around with it
in a way Nintendo doesn't like. The Brazilian watchdog wants Nintendo
to remove the relevant clause from their agreement, citing legal reasons, like not violating
consumers' rights to access services they've paid for.
But I just hope they know who they're dealing with here. As far as I know, every Nintendo employee
has been to law school. But this whole Nintendo-bricking-consoles thing
took on a new dimension this week when a redditor going by bimmy-tongue
said they bought an open box Switch 2 from Walmart
only to discover it was apparently pre-owned by a hooligan who got the console
struck by Nintendo's online services ban, probably because they were trying to use it
to hack an orphanage or something.
Suddenly, it's hitting a lot of people, presumably, or maybe just me,
that the second-hand Switch market is about to become a bit of a minefield.
I mean, sure, people and retailers can learn to verify that the console isn't banned
before buying or selling, but now that's a thing we have to do
because Nintendo decided that there wasn't enough e-waste in the world.
Meanwhile, over in Japan, there are numerous reports of Switch 2 consoles overheating,
usually while playing Cyberpunk in docked mode, even with the dock fans going full blast.
Although there have also been English-language Reddit posts about the Switch 2 getting hot while running,
so Nintendo fans might just be learning about how consoles get hot sometimes
once they can render big-boy games. Microsoft has announced another round of layoffs
with around 9,000 employees, or about 4% of the company's entire workforce,
getting chopped. A couple hundred of those cut jobs are coming from Xbox,
despite gaming chief Phil Spencer saying the Xbox platform hardware and game roadmap
have never looked stronger. Xbox is the mediest it's ever been,
so it's a perfect time to slice a nice big sirloin off
right out of there and gobble it up raw. As part of the layoff,
some Xbox projects are being canceled, including the Perfect Dark reboot,
developed by The Initiative, which is also being closed down, the studio,
and Everwild, the game announced in 2019 from Rare
that looked like it was just about chilling and doing magic with mystical beasts.
Well, if they didn't want to get canceled, they should have made the game about lines
and making them go up, lesson learned. OpenAI is still trying to fight a court order
in the New York Times lawsuit, forcing them to retain and provide
the chat GPT logs of all users,
something the company says they don't want to do because they care so, so much about user privacy.
You guys don't even know how much we care about user privacy. It's a big deal.
To be clear, privacy obviously is an issue with the order,
but though OpenAI doesn't say it, the logs could also reveal more evidence
of copyright infringement or hallucinated nonsense
improperly attributed to a source that didn't even say that.
But also the logs could provide ammunition to potential plaintiffs looking to take the advice
of the judge who recently ruled that meta and anthropic training their AI
on copyrighted materials was fair use,
but only because the plaintiffs in that case made the wrong arguments.
They should have worked at Nintendo first
and gone to law school, that was dumb. The judge said other authors or news organizations
could make a stronger case against meta or OpenAI
by focusing on how the use of llama or chat GPT
has affected the market for books or news content.
Or if you don't wanna go the legal route, you could use Cloudflare's new pay per crawl feature,
which will let content creators charge AI companies
to set their web crawlers loose on the creators content.
After all, as NYT columnist Kevin Ruse said
in response to Sam Altman lamenting the violation
of user privacy, it must be really hard when someone does something with your data
you don't want them to. Okay, I had a whole introduction
for the quick bits typed out, but my dog just ate it, I swear.
AMD has dropped new GPU drivers that boost the RX 9070 XT's gaming performance
by up to 27%, according to extensive testing
by hardware unboxed. The 9070 XT performed slightly worse
than the RTX 5070 Ti when it launched, but now performs 3% better on average.
Meanwhile, people are just trying to find out if the RTX 5050 is even launched or not.
In a blog post published yesterday, NVIDIA said it was coming in the second half of July,
but GPU partner, Inno3D, said their 5050s are on shelf now.
And if you're getting deja vu, it's because this is the third eight Gigabyte card
from NVIDIA this generation without any launch day reviews.
I don't know, maybe they're just sparing reviewers from feeling dumb for staying up all night reviewing a card
no one's gonna buy. Speaking of no one, nothing has fully unveiled
what it calls its first true flagship phone, the Phone 3,
which will actually properly launch in the US for 800 bucks on July 15th
with four 50 megapixel cameras and a fun little Glyph display on the back.
It's fun because it's like a normal display, but worse, that's rude.
It's fun. Like nothing's first over ear headphones,
the headphone one, which has buttons.
And will also launch on July 15th for 300 bucks.
But will you want the nothing some things or the Honor Magic V5, the thinnest foldable ever
with a noticeable crease in the display and also it's only available in China, hard choice.
Theater chain AMC will now advise you ahead of time
that you'll have to sit through about 25 to 30 minutes of ads before your movie starts.
I mean, okay, some of those are trailers. That's not fair. The change comes after AMC announced,
they'll be following their competitors in showing more ads before films start,
but at least they're letting you know so you don't pay the same as a month of Netflix
to trek to the theater to sit through a TV show episodes
worth of slot before you can see your movie. It's nice.
And musical artist Lord with an E,
her new album Virgin was released last week with a number of physical variants,
including a fully transparent CD,
which many fans discovered is not actually playable
in many CD players with the main problem being
because of how CDs work. See, the CD is read by a laser, which is light,
which goes through transparent things.
Anyway, this Redditor got it to work in a CD player with a tray.
So I don't know, look for one of those maybe. Lord posted some fun facts about the album on Twitter,
which I'm sure is great, but none of them say anything about whether the clear CD idea was tested beforehand.
Like this seems like designing a cup with a hole in the bottom and then never pouring something in there
before you sell it to me. I mean, hey, maybe it's a prank.
It's art. Look, don't prank me. Just come back on Friday for more tech news.
Okay, let's keep this straightforward. No funny business.