Who likes tech news? We wear short shorts.
You know what I mean. Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Edge
are allowing Google's domains access to full system information, including your CPU, GPU,
and memory usage through a built-in Chrome extension.
You'd think the worst part is that you can't see or disable this extension, but personally, I
like that it's been a part of the code for the past decade.
Big thanks to developer Luca Casanato for letting everyone know on Twitter.
We can all give thanks to the great Google machine's monopolistic practices.
Google says this is all just to help improve the user experience so they can optimize audio and video
configurations based on system capabilities and to provide data on crashes or performance issues.
But if that's the case, then surely they'd be open to sharing this data with their competitors, right?
I mean, they'd never do anything to get a leg up over the little guy, like harvesting data
to improve their own digital meeting software without telling Zoom or other services not
owned by anyone at abc.xyz. That's Alphabet's real URL, BTW.
But hold on to your initialisms, because AT&T has finally
told the public that there was a massive data breach from May
to October of 2022. Also, there was a smaller breach in January 2020,
but don't worry about that one. It's a small one, small potatoes. The hack exposed the tech and call records
of just about every cellular and landline customer in that time frame.
Thankfully, it doesn't include timestamps, durations, or any of the contents of the texts or calls.
Oh, good. I was worried for a minute that everyone
would be able to see how desperate my texts look at 1 AM on Friday night. Taco Bell didn't even reply.
Now AT&T found out about the breach back in April.
But after disclosing it to the Justice Department, the company was told to delay this information not once,
but twice. The data was stored on servers owned by cloud data company
Snowflake, whose incredible cybersecurity prowess
is also responsible for the Ticketmaster hack. Good job, guys.
But Snowflake isn't really the bad guy, according to Snowflake.
They say the blame is on its customers for not using multi-factor authentication
to secure their accounts. But don't worry, AT&T says the data
isn't publicly available yet. It's just in the hands of some hackers
who are allegedly financially motivated.
Nothing to worry about there. Easy breezy. Just like how NVIDIA is financially motivated
to make the RTX 5090 as expensive as possible.
The rumor mill is talking about 28 gigabytes of GDR7 memory, a ton of CUDA cores,
and a whopping 2.9 gigahertz base clock.
All of this while getting smaller, allegedly housing this horsepower
on a two-slot dual fan card. Most people can fit that in their machines.
What a concept. What ways to make money will they think of next?
Selling A6000s to power the Las Vegas sphere?
Oh, wait. That's exactly what they did. With 150 of the cards being used to pump out
three layers of 16K resolution content at 60 frames per second at a real thing
that real people spent real money on. It's Vegas, baby.
What do you think's reason comes into the equation? They specialize in five-second weddings.
For the record, that's nearly $700,000 worth of GPUs
with 1.6 million CUDA cores and 7,200 gigabytes of total VRAM.
From AI to gaming rigs to giant video spheres.
Is there anything Team Green can't do? Quick bits.
Quick bits. Get over here. Where'd you get off to?
Go on back. Many old-school Apple fans have fond memories
of the unofficial Apple wed block, which was shuttered by AOL nearly a decade ago
in a grotesque development. It seems that the old domain has been acquired
and revived through unholy necromancy and the site is now pumping out AI plagiarized news articles
and stolen graphics under the bylines of its former staff.
Ooh. It's alive and it's copying literally everyone else.
Bizarrely, the website's new owner didn't buy any of the old content
but claims its staff has meticulously rewritten
the site's archived content, despite its writing staff apparently consisting
of a bunch of stolen names and AI-generated profile pictures.
Sounds like my girlfriend. She lives in another country, never met her once in my life,
but she asked me beautiful questions, like what's your social insurance number?
What's your mother's maiden name? If you've ever dreamed of hopping in your sky car
and flying off to work, the future might be closer than you think.
A few companies like Archer, Joby, and Volocopter
are all vying to be the first to offer EV tolls
or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts as short-range air taxis for some major airlines
as an alternative to driving those pesky medium distance trips.
We could see them faring about the wealthy as early as the Paris Olympics later this month.
I can't wait to take a rich guy's tossed soda cup to the dome from a few hundred feet in the air,
at least it'll be smaller, because it's France. They don't let you have the jumbo sizes. US sales of the Apple Vision Pro are basically dead.
Market analysis firm IDC says the headset hasn't sold 100,000 units in a quarter
since its February launch and it faces a 75% drop in domestic sales
at this current quarter. The IDC also reports a 67.4 drop
in VR slash AR headsets across the board, which mostly affects VR.
The firm actually predicts bigger acceptance for mixed reality headsets moving forward,
which makes it a great time for the Vision Pro to launch in Canada,
starting at just 5,000 Canadian dollars.
An FTC study into the use of manipulative design techniques
used to trick consumers has determined that a majority of the over 600 websites studied
used one or more of these so-called dark patterns. But the release of this kind of report
likely means the FTC is actually planning to do something about the fact that Jeff Bezos personally signed your grandma
for 12 separate auto renewing subscriptions for flea medication for a cat she doesn't have.
Whiskers, whiskers.
That's your grandma calling for a cat she doesn't have. And scientists have built a spacesuit
to recycle astronaut pee, inspired by the still suits from Dune.
This is why science is the best. You don't see an art student doing this.
While the International Space Station already has a recycling system,
that solution misses out on all the liquid gold expended during spacewalks,
which lasts six hours on average. That's a lot of pee-pee time.
And spacewalk times will only get longer during NASA's upcoming Artemis II and III missions.
The new system is, worn as a backpack, filters the urine into 99% pure water
and then adds electrolytes via a flavored powder and pumps it into an in-suit drink bag for easy sipping.
Maybe pissing a Gatorade? Hell yeah, they did. Ha ha ha!
My son's an astronaut. He makes his own Gatorade.
But it's still not as easy as getting your next taste of tech news.
Just come back here on Monday. And don't pee yourself.
Maybe use a toilet.