Okay, stand back. Stand back! We've got a dangerous amount of tech news
coming through with it. You trying to get your face burned off? Get the back up!
When tech news gets too close, it burns your face off. Ah!
Andy, no. iPhone 16 will come with a pretty hefty upgrade
according to a new report from Taiwanese site Economic Daily News.
Their sources indicate Apple's next gen A18 chips
for mobile and M4 chips for Macs will likely feature an upgraded neural engine
with significantly more AI cores, which makes sense given that Tim Cook promised
to give us huge AI announcements if we were good this year.
Other recent reports have indicated Apple will be launching a suite of generative features
as part of iOS 18, most likely at WWDC in June.
Notably, Apple Silicon's standard neural engine has had 16 cores since the iPhone 12 back in 2020.
What is your grandma's neural processor? However, certain configurations of the Mac Studio
and the Mac Pro have had neural engines with up to 32 cores,
which my AI assistant tells me is twice as many.
And you'll definitely want to get one of these new phones because Apple is currently rolling out
quantum proof encryption protection in what the company is calling
the most significant cryptographic security upgrade
in iMessage history, including all the other ones you remember.
It's a preventative measure to help keep you safe from getting hacked by computers that don't even exist yet.
Well, I'll be safe today when you can be safe tomorrow. We released a patch for a bug that wasn't even...
What won't protect your phone, however, is rice,
especially from hackers, according to new guidance published by Apple Support,
who recommend leaving your phone to dry somewhere with decent airflow rather than shoving it
in a sack full of edible grain, which might get into the device and damage it.
I, however, would like additional clarification. What about oatmeal, barley, quinoa?
You're just showing off about how many grains you know. Grits!
What'd you say, rits? Grits! What?
What if I put a fan in with the rice? Is that enough airflow? Psh!
The European Commission has announced a formal investigation
into whether TikTok is out of compliance with the Digital Services Act,
specifically when it comes to the protection of miners and potentially addictive design features.
TikTok will be the second platform investigated under the DSA following Twitter,
which drew the commission's ire in part because they have a moderation team
that's barely even big enough to staff and control a large waffle house.
But they try. Both TikTok and Twitter are potentially in trouble
with the EU over failure to meet the DSA's standards
for advertiser transparency and access to research data.
But TikTok has received far more attention for the harm it might pose to children and adolescents
because Twitter is for old people, I feel attacked. Guys, we have to make more TikToks.
We don't make any right. According to an EC Press officer speaking to ours,
Technica, the commission suspects TikTok of failing to ensure its default settings
will appropriately protect the safety and privacy of miners,
as well as neglecting to properly assess the risk of 13 to 17 year olds pretending to be adults on the app,
which is less of a risk and more of a certainty.
But TikTok is far from the only company in Europe's bad books,
as the EU will reportedly be finding Apple around 500 million euros next month,
following an antitrust probe into a formal complaint from Spotify that Apple was using its platform
to preference its own music streaming service. This is so sad.
Siri, play Despacito. Google suddenly dropped a couple
of lightweight open source AI models inspired by the same tech
used in their flagship model, Gemini. So naturally they called it Gemma,
the sound you'd make if you gave up saying the word Gemini halfway through.
Why use chatGPT when you can use the Gemma? Actually it's pronounced Gemma.
Is it? No. Okay. Google says Gemma 2B and 7B can be run locally,
do better than larger models on key benchmarks,
although we've heard that before, and are part of what DeepMind CEO,
Demis Hasabis calls the company's long history
of supporting responsible open source and science,
which apparently did nothing to stop open AI from snagging the AI crowd.
But hey, sure, you know, you know, whatever. Although if chatGPT continues occasionally
losing its damn mind as it did early this morning,
Google may have a shot. Reports flooded in from chatGPT users
about getting responses that were everything from overly verbose to full on gibberish
until open AI correctly diagnosed and fixed the bug in about 24 hours.
This follows open AI having to step in after widespread reports of its chatbot
slacking off around the holiday season. Okay, say it with me.
It thinks it's people.
The following five quick bits have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
It would be weird if they were, you can't ingest news, or can you?
A federal appeals court has overturned a $1 billion penalty that was leveled
against Cable ISP Cox Communications in 2019.
According to the judge, Sony did not prove its case that Cox received direct financial benefit
from the piracy and copyright infringement committed by its users.
Cox may still face penalties due to the finding that it failed to combat piracy,
making it a willful contributor to the infringement,
but such a penalty will likely be far lighter than the damages originally awarded.
They didn't actually make money from you downloading all nine seasons of Seinfeld.
They just stood there and watched it happen. Great finale.
Elon Musk claims the first Neuralink patient
can already move a computer mouse with their mind, a sentence that would be way more impressive
if it didn't include the word computer.
While Musk has stated patient A can move a mouse around the screen just by thinking,
that's really all anyone knows at this point. This has caused concern among some researchers
who believe the public deserves a bit more transparency
because people care deeply about their brains.
Using their brains. Yeah, I care deeply about how my soyboy brain
is completely incapable of telekinesis. Hurry it up, Elon.
I wanna be a Jedi, colon survivor.
A coalition of AI experts, academics, and industry executives,
including deep learning pioneer, Yashua Benjio,
have published an open letter calling for more regulation and safeguards for deep fakes.
According to the letter, which currently has over 600 signatures,
the rapid advancement of deep fake technology means that they have become a common element
of fraud schemes, disinformation campaigns, and non-consensual sexual imagery.
Honestly, it's tragic to see people using AI to impersonate and deceive people
when they could instead be like Will Smith, who commemorated last year's viral AI monstrosity
by pretending to be a machine-generated version of himself eating spaghetti in the worst way possible.
I call it a shallow, real deep fake.
Y'all better watch yourself. Taylor Swift's gonna hunt you for sport.
Last week, 13,000 owners of Y's home security cameras
were able to see images, and in some cases, video,
from cameras that weren't theirs due to a bizarre glitch.
Even worse, a similar issue occurred just five months ago.
In an email, Y's referred to this newest incident as a security issue that occurred
due to a third-party caching client library
the company had started using. Like they did five months ago, Y said,
they may changes to their system so that something like this never happens again, again.
And a nearly three-decade-old European satellite
made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere earlier today.
The ERS-2 satellite, which CBS described as wing,
about as much as an adult male rhinoceros,
so we can all get a ballpark. That's about pretty heavy.
Was decommissioned and had the last of its fuel used up in 2011 in order to prevent
any potential catastrophic explosion, meaning its descent couldn't be controlled
as it spent the next 13 years slowly falling back to Earth
while it thought about what it's done. In the future, space debris might be managed
by specialized junk removers like the Addras-J satellite
that launched this past weekend. In the meantime, however, most of ERS-2's rhino-like mass
has burned up in the atmosphere, and its remaining chunks are raining down
across a 100-mile-wide patch of the Pacific Ocean
in a decidedly un-rhino-like manner.
And also, unlike a rhino, you should come back on Friday for more tech news.
I mean, hey, no offense if you're a rhino. I just, I don't know if it'd be really your kind of thing.
I just don't, we don't have a rhino section in the demographics of,
rounders are cool, man.