Wait, if it's Good Friday, then why is this tech news only passable at best?
It's just okay. Microsoft has managed to close a loophole used to download emulators on Xbox, making
retro gaming just a bit harder on the platform, unless you use this one simple trick that
app stores hate. The only clue we have as to why this is happening now, after years of Microsoft seemingly not
caring that much about a few bros emulating each other.
It doesn't matter if you use your bros loophole if you weren't socks.
The only clue comes from Microsoft Azure developer Aliana McKenna on Twitter.
She claims a colleague from Xbox QA said that this was related to legal issues with
Nintendo, and while that almost makes too much sense, there are some caveats.
McKenna didn't provide any receipts, and emulators have been officially banned from
Microsoft's store policies for a long time. So it's conceivable that Microsoft suddenly decided to enforce their own rules.
The emulators that were in circulation were published as Private Universal Windows Platform
or UWP Apps, which allows them to bypass the approval process for a public store listing
while allowing anyone with a link to download it.
But wouldn't you know it, for just $20, you can put your console in developer mode and
make those emulators work again.
Is there no problem it can't solve? Samsung has announced they would be cutting memory chip production after reporting a 96%
drop in Q1 profits compared to last year.
Wouldn't 96 be bad? Not nice.
Reportedly, the Korean company had its smallest quarterly profit since the 2009 financial
crisis at a mere $600 billion won, or $450 million.
Samsung blames a falling demand for memory chips, so they are adjusting to lower memory
production to a meaningful level, which is, Corpo speak for, make less.
Next time do as a favor and say less, you know what I mean? Give me a-
Competitors like SK Hynix and Micron had already reduced their production, but Samsung allegedly
held off doing the same to grab market share from these competitors.
I guess that went well. The good news for you, dear consumer, is that this trend of hilarious tech goofs should
lower prices on PC components, provided that they actually follow economic trends and aren't
artificially inflated due to swarms of crypto and or AI bros.
On GPUs. That's what happened.
Also, market analysts predict the price decrease will only last six months, at which point
the prices will go up, at least for DDR memory.
So if you don't have enough save to upgrade, there's always next recession.
And two major telecom companies up here in Canada have merged and become one.
That's right. We have problematic mergers too. We're a real country.
Rogers Communications Incorporated has taken over Shaw Communications Incorporated, the
final move in a battle that was probably initially started by a which corporation has the most
original name contest, obviously. The acquisition cost Rogers a cool 20 billion Canadian roubles, which equates to about 14.9
billion freedom bucks. Consumer advocates have long protested the lack of competition in the Canadian telecom
space with the market dominated by two companies, Rogers and Bell.
And occasionally, Telus tags in for a fun three-way on the West Coast, where only consumers
get screwed. Canada's mobile data cost per Gigabyte is currently seven times more expensive than
Australia, 25 times more than Ireland and France and 1000 times more than Finland.
Some think that this merger will allow for more competition, though, because Shaw was
forced to sell its subsidiary and fourth largest Canadian wireless provider, Freedom
Mobile, to the fifth largest Canadian wireless provider.
Now if that's confusing, it's actually fairly simple. Two mergers may decrease the number of companies, but still increase competition through the
sophisticated application of blood sacrifice and lies.
Do you ever feel like life moves too fast? Well, you're about to, because here comes the quick bits.
Former Tesla employees have claimed their coworkers passed around private videos recorded
by customer vehicles. From 2019 to 2022, graphic crashes, road rage incidents, and embarrassing moments, such
as a naked man approaching a car, were shared internally.
Tesla states in their privacy policy that camera recordings remain anonymous, but former employees
claim that a program used internally at the company can display location data that can
be used to identify customers. So if you were ever naked in front of a Tesla, it may be time to take that permanent vacation
to Mexico you've always dreamed of. We're just the low cost of everything you have in your whole life.
Comcast has been accused by some of its customers of abusing the managed Wi-Fi feature on iOS
that allows iPhones and iPads to auto-join carrier networks.
While users are supposed to be able to disable the feature on each managed network, at least
one user has stated they cannot disable auto-join on their carrier's managed networks, which
includes any neighbor with a Wi-Fi slash modem combo with a free hotspot.
Okay, how about a little gratitude for the free one-bar Wi-Fi that interrupts your home
network connection that you pay for that's way better?
We didn't have to do that. Twitter is disabling likes, replies, and retweets for any tweet with a link to Substack, and
only Substack. Because that's the next bold step to ensuring freedom of speech on the internet, preventing
writers and journalists from sharing their point of view, or making money.
Twitter has not announced any reason for this change, but it comes shortly after Substack
announced the Notes feature, which could kind of be seen as a Twitter competitor, but not
really. It's a stretch. So far, Elon Musk is doing a great job of fostering competition to the product he owns.
AMD's acquisition of Xilinx has borne fruit with the launch of a stand-alone media accelerator
card for data centers. Yeah, okay, that sounds boring, but actually, the Alvio MA35D is the first in line of media
accelerator cards for data centers that could change the streaming game thanks to its ability
to encode and decode AV1, H264, and H265.
EposVox does a tremendous job talking about how awesome this $1,600 card is, so check out
his video if you, like me, had to be convinced this thing is cool.
And a nasty rumor has come out that Sony is planning to launch a new handheld, except
it isn't anything anyone would actually want. The alleged device would be exclusively for streaming games from your PS5 via remote play
and would require constant internet connectivity, like only in your home.
Why buy a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck when you can just play on your PS5, but on
a smaller screen and only when the Wi-Fi isn't spotty?
And why not come back on Monday for more tech news? I mean, you can be with your family, or you can be with me, some guy on the internet.