Happy insert name of your local holiday here, where I am its Family Day, which is why I'm
spending it with my real family, the tech news. It found me and raised me as a tech news cub in the forest, which is why things around
here can get a little wild sometimes.
Meta is rolling out a verification subscription service similar to Twitter Blue this week.
It'll charge 12-15 bucks a month for ID verification, a blue badge, user experience enhancements,
and that feeling of being special you were missing as a child. Mark Zuckerberg announced the service on his broadcast channel, which is a new Instagram
feature similar to Telegram channels that rolled out last week, meaning that Zucker
announced that Meta is copying one platform using Meta's copy of another platform.
Never change, Facebook. But the move has sparked fears that drastic change is coming to the internet at large.
Many people, ourselves included, continue to mock Elon Musk's impulsive attempts to
generate some any Twitter revenue.
But if more platforms follow suit, we may be looking at the end of the free web service
era. Musk certainly thinks so, calling Meta verified inevitable.
And you know he knew the reference people would make based on that.
Meta's announcement follows Twitter locking text message-based two-factor authentication
behind the blue paywall. A move security analysts say doesn't make sense, since SMS two-factor is vulnerable
to way more attacks than dedicated authenticator apps and can actually be worse than only
using a good password. But a lot of Twitter users probably don't know that, and they may be inclined to sign
up for blue if they think they have to pay to secure their account.
Wow, in a few years we may be talking about the good old days when internet platforms
were free thanks to our personal info being collected and sold by advertisers.
I used to run to the corner store and send a tweet for a nickel.
TikTok has announced a new creativity program, which promises higher earnings for creators
who can somehow manage to post videos that are more than one minute long.
Because the more seconds video has, the more creative it is.
This is basic film school stuff. Actually though, the Irishman?
Get out of here. The announcement confirms at least part of the information posted by the information
they knew what they were doing. Last week and highlights how much TikTok has changed in the six years since launching
with a 15-second limit on videos. Now the thirst traps play simultaneously alongside family guide clips and footage from endless
run or mobile games. It's way different. But the creativity program specifically requires high-quality original content to be eligible
for more money. So hopefully our old pal capitalism can fix what was broken by its dark counterpart,
capitalism. And Nintendo might be making it a little easier to access its library of retro games if we
follow the path of potentially baseless, but interesting speculation laid out in this
ours technical article. Ours technical article.
That's not a diss. I made this a main story, so just hear me out.
So the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is investigating Microsoft's planned acquisition
of Activision Blizzard and wrote a report on whether Nintendo Switch Online could compete
with Xbox Game Pass, in which they said Nintendo's service is only available on the Nintendo
Switch device and redacted. Begin speculation now.
Available on the Switch. And what? So one, it could be a future Nintendo console, which we know is launching at the very least
this century. Or two, it might be Nintendo plans to let you stream Switch Online games to your phone
like XCloud? Frankly, anything that can give people access to Nintendo's back catalogue would be good,
since there would be less justification to pirate Nintendo games and therefore less lawsuits
from Nintendo, which the company has said it uses to send a message.
It would have made more sense for me to do an impression of like a triad gangster there
rather than an Italian mafioso, but that wouldn't be appropriate.
Okay, I'm gonna let the quick bits out now. Just stay where you are.
They're gonna sniff various parts of you to get used to your scent.
Do not react. Ends of the new AI-powered Bing were despondent last week when Microsoft imposed new limits
on the chatbot, which, according to some, amounted to a lobotomy.
Well, a few sources have indicated that the limits are temporary, while Microsoft figures
out how to make Bing not pledge undying love to whoever asks it a few personal questions.
I also know a few humans with this problem. So thankfully, this lobotomy is reversible, unlike human ones.
In other humans-crushing AI's dreams news, go-player Kellen Pelrin has defeated the top
go-playing AI models, Catego and Lila Zero, seven years after DeepMind's AlphaGo AI defeated
one of the world's top human players, Lee Sedol.
Now, Pelrin defeated the AI players using strategies suggested by another computer program
that probed the AI's for weaknesses, but they weren't like in his ear or anything when
he played the match, he had it all up here, okay?
So come on back, Lee Sedol, give it another try. Can you imagine he comes back and gets destroyed again?
I'm sorry. Microsoft has finally allowed M1 and M2 Macs to run full-featured versions of Windows 11
on ARM through the Parallels desktop app, meaning Mac users no longer have to use an
insider preview build to access such features as slow loading and bad app support.
Okay, that's not fair. I haven't tried Windows on ARM for a while, so in terms of ARM processor support, now
it could be slightly better than way, way worse than macOS.
Chrome has gotten a new update that adds energy saver and memory saver, features that will
help the browser use less energy and memory, respectively, by snoozing inactive tabs, which
can then be reloaded by clicking on them again to the tab.
It's a sorely needed update, although I'd prefer if Google could, like, make each tab
and the browser as a whole use less energy and memory instead of, like, cutting off your
leg because you're not using it right now. That's just me.
And air travel is about to get more stimulating if a patent just granted to Brazilian aerospace
company Embraer is any indication. Of course they're Brazilian.
It describes a system built into airplane seats that can scan passengers' faces to determine
their emotional state and then offer transcranial stimulation of either the magnetic or electrical
variety. Seems like it would be amazing to turn on if you're stuck with a seat partner who won't
stop talking about how both varieties are actually part of the same phenomenon of electromagnetism
and, oh, you probably shouldn't turn it up that high. And you shouldn't turn away from the tech news come Wednesday because we'll be back
and hopefully delivering better segues than that one. I'm sorry, you know, Mondays, you know what I mean?