Hey, the the tech news is coming up soon and I and I thought you know if you're
not going to get it from anyone else maybe I could present it to you I I'm
sorry I'm being so stupid I just have you but you wouldn't unless Microsoft
suffered a global outage yesterday affecting access to many Microsoft 365
services according to the BBC even access to Minecraft was affected and
Xbox live actually unfortunately Microsoft stated during the outage that
teams was not affected so close meaning that app continues to barely function by
design the company also determined that the outage was due to a DDoS attack on
its Azure cloud platform the attack then activated DDoS protection
mechanisms which due to an error in implementation made the attack worse
great job Microsoft what is going on over there this incident comes less than
two weeks after global infrastructure was knocked out by a faulty software
update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike many businesses are still
dealing with the fallout from that outage the CEO of US based Delta
Airlines may be seeking damages of 500 million dollars from CrowdStrike and
Microsoft after being forced to ground thousands of flights and reimburse
affected passengers for food and overnight hotel stays that's a lot of
money that Microsoft could be using to continue paying the best engineers for
their worst work there's been a lot of developments around deepfakes recently
Google announced it is updating their search algorithm to better handle
explicit AI deepfakes the changes will make it easier to remove deepfakes at
scale and will penalize sites that hosts such content by demoting them in
search rankings because the easiest way to hide non-consensual imagery is to
place it on Google searches second page on top of that the US Senate has
introduced a bill for the no fakes act which is meant to protect artists from
AI deepfakes while some like artists like the bill others are worried the bill
is overly broad and could allow for misuse meanwhile last week the Senate
unanimously passed the defiance act which allows victims of non-consensual
explicit deepfakes to sue individuals who knowingly produce distribute or
receive those images but that's not enough the US government needs to crack
down on AI deepfakes that are used for fraud and manipulation says Microsoft the
company that arguably had a major role in making AI deepfake fraud so accessible
guys you need to solve this problem I caught AI search company perplexity has announced they will be sharing revenue
with publishers whose content shows up in perplexities AI generated answers this
comes a month after perplexity got in trouble for plagiarizing content for
multiple publishers so while this revenue share may sound like a step in the
right direction I'm not sure perplexity will be able to pay its sources when
it's been failing to disclose where its answers even come from we just handed out
some money to people I don't know who they were aside from dodging plagiarism
accusations there may be another reason perplexity decided to offer a revenue
sharing deal opening eyes launch of their own AI powered search tool search GPT
last week on top of that reddit is now blocking every search engine but
Google's after making a deal with the search giant according to reddit CEO
Steve Huffman search GPT will be able to show results from the site thanks to a
similar deal but Huffman called out perplexity for refusing to pay to access
Reddit's data unfortunately that means perplexity users will have to miss out on
treasures like a factually accurate 1000 word comment about 18th century wheat
agriculture written by someone called Ned the nip hunter and that's not a real
example but it could be we made it up quick bits are like shooting stars
except instead of making you go whoa they make you go AMD has launched its new
Ryzen 5000 desktop processors the Ryzen 9 5900 XT and Ryzen 7 5800 XT now
available at retailers unfortunately for AMD some US retailers also listed the
not yet launched Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs leaking the prices fortunately for
consumers it looks like the new chips will cost up to $100 less at launch
than the current Ryzen 7000 series did there's so many series going on right
now what are you doing AMD meanwhile Intel who apparently spent two chip
generations selling broken CPUs has announced their lunar lake laptop CPUs
will launch on September 3rd at this point I'll consider lunar lake of
success if the chips don't burst into flame let's just go for that Amazon has
been forced to recall over 400,000 products the US Consumer Product Safety
Commission determined that Amazon is legally responsible for the defective
products of third-party sellers and that the platform failed to alert hundreds
of thousands of customers to these serious risks those unsafe products
include hair dryers without electrocution protection faulty carbon
monoxide detectors and children's pajamas that violate federal flammability
standards turns out Amazon's delivery network is so vast they offer same-day
shipping to the afterlife
meta has agreed to settle a privacy lawsuit with the state of Texas for a
massive 1.4 billion dollars the lawsuit was filed two years ago and alleged
meta was using Facebook users biometric data without permission to power the
tag suggestions feature the platform introduced way back in 2011 you think
meta would learn to stay on the right side of the law since then but an
investigative report by the Wall Street Journal claims hundreds of ads for
illegal drug marketplaces have appeared on Instagram and Facebook ads like this
are dangerous to the impressionable users of Instagram and perhaps
insulting to the bots that still use Facebook they can't even do drugs
Google is taking heat for a recent Olympics tie-in ad where a father gets
the Gemini AI assistant to generate a draft of a letter from his daughter to
an athlete she admires now there's nothing wrong with taking a pre-written
draft and personalizing it to fit your needs but there is something ever so
slightly icky about putting something as innocent and authentic as a child's
letter to their celebrity hero through the same process what would the AI say
let's find out I say for my daughter maybe this fictional little girl will
one day be a skilled athlete herself but it'd be great if she also had some
baseline literacy so that she doesn't have to sign documents with an axe like
a medieval peasant and are you an awkward loner with a hundred bucks just
lying around well good news there's a new high-tech wearable just for you it's
an AI conversation bot called friend it takes the form of a large extremely
noticeable necklace that listens and comments on everything happening around
you which is guaranteed to make other humans deeply uncomfortable I just kind
of like to come up here to be by myself I've never brought anybody else I mean
besides her she goes everywhere with you right friend the company behind friend
reportedly raised two and a half million dollars from investors the company
then apparently used 1.8 million of those dollars just to acquire the domain
name friend.com which sounds like a great way to lose a bunch of friends but
for just $99 you can get them back but you won't lose a single friend by coming
back on Friday for more tech news hey if you watch it with someone else you
might even gain one