Blimey! What? You want my home address like I'm inviting xvideos.com over for a couple when I'm like just trying to have some quiet time to myself?
I come off it! The UK's Online Safety Act has officially gone into effect
requiring platforms that allow pornography to have strong age checks, a phrase that describes almost anything
other than asking users to check a box if they're over 18. Although I like to imagine that worked for someone.
According to UK regulator Offcom, age verification pop-ups are now the first thing displayed to UK users on not only around
6000 adult websites, but on every major platform with adult content from Reddit to Twitter to Twitter for anxious people.
Okay, but how do they verify user ages?
Especially when many British children sound like tiny lords and ladies.
Mother, I'm off to a cricket match with John. That kid sounds 40 years old.
Offcom recommends a number of methods, all of which risk compromising user privacy to some degree. In a completely unrelated development,
there was a massive spike in searches for VPNs in the UK this week, leading to concerns that many moppets,
boppets, and chabs will install free VPNs that are unsafe,
potentially setting many gooners up for a rude awakening.
Now, the BBC reported that platforms can't encourage the use of VPNs to get around the checks,
but this smart guy noted that Offcom's language indicates this is only true for child users,
so it's still okay to encourage VPN use for adult users.
So you just have to make sure it's an adult user and then you can tell them to use a VPN to get around the thing that will make
sure it's an adult user. Except if you look at the actual guidelines PDF instead of the website, you can see that this isn't true and the BBC was right
originally. This has been obscure tweet takedown with Riley. Moving on,
if you're scared of VPNs and you're a gamer trying to get around Discord's new age verification in the UK,
you can use Death Stranding's photo mode instead, as Discord is apparently fine with admitting an infinite amount of Norman Redeye.
But should age verification be required for Wikipedia?
The Wikimedia Foundation has challenged its status under the law and told the High Court of Justice this week that it could be forced to
limit UK users access. If the government doesn't acknowledge that no one's really going to Wikipedia
to blow off some steam, alright, I mean almost no one.
I'm sure there are some hidden gems in there. Seems like at the very least the government might have to respond to this UK petition
to repeal the Online Safety Act, which blew past its goal of a hundred K signatures as the
tidal wave of age check pop-ups started to hit.
All those people are hoping that the UK repeals this law and gets back to passing legislation that actually matters, like editing
their antitrust rules so Epic Games will bring Fortnite back to iOS. Do you hear the UK iPhone gamers screaming?
This is BOLLOX. Stupid. Intel just announced more layoffs
saying in its Q2 earnings report that it plans to have only 75,000 employees by the end of this year,
which would mean around 24,000 jobs gone compared to the end of 2024.
Team Blue has got to stop the bleeding, so it's even cutting entire countries.
Plans to build facilities in Poland and Germany have been cancelled and an existing one in Costa Rica's
being downsized. Perhaps most concerning is the company's SEC filing spotted by semi-analysis,
which says that if they can't find a big customer, Intel might have to pause or discontinue development of its next gen 14a node
and successor nodes. I'm going to be frank here. I've covered Intel for a long time and this feels like the sky is falling.
And to make things worse, CEO LipButan published a letter to employees with the plan for what they're focusing on going forward
and once again, there's no mention of ARC GPUs. I'm starting to think no one's told them about those yet.
I felt bad for only doing English stuff. I won't touch whales though. They scare me.
AMD has announced their non-pro Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series will start shipping on July 31st,
led by the 64 core 128 thread 9980X for $5,000.
Might be powerful, but it can't go in a handheld. Not the case for the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395,
aka Strix Halo. GPD has confirmed its upcoming Win 5 as the first handheld to be powered by this monster chip and
YouTuber TheFox was able to share more details like the fact that it does not have an internal battery.
It's got an external 80 watt hour unit that can clip onto the back of it
like the giant heavy backpacks worn in high school by the kind of dorks that will buy this thing. Is it worth it?
I'm kidding. I want to see it. I am dork. Dork me.
Apple has launched Apple Care One, a new $20 a month subscription that can cover up to three Apple devices,
including ones you already own, as long as you take them to an Apple store to verify that they're in good condition.
As far as device insurance goes, it's not bad, but as his germulousness,
Mark Gurman points out, the vast majority of people will pay
$240 a year for the next several years and never use it.
But that's new income that Apple will desperately need to replace all the revenue from third party iOS apps
that the EU is blocking them from collecting. Evil EU, bad!
Apple will be saved by all the maniacs who insist on using their phones without a case.
The founder of the Pebble smartwatch, Eric Megakofsky, has confirmed that the new Pebbles
his company has been working on will be called Pebbles, which is good because everyone was already calling them Pebbles.
And Pebble rolls off the tongue so much better than the new smartwatch made by the Pebble guy.
Or its previous official name, the Core 2 Duo. There was art. We already had that.
Megakofsky secured the rights to use the Pebble name once more, so it's now the Pebble 2 Duo.
The remix. Reawakening. Pebble 2 Duo again. Just some ideas.
And OpenAI will probably release GPT-5 in August, according to Tom Warren at The Verge, based on his own sources.
But it also lines up nicely with things Sam Altman has said recently and with the fact that references to GPT-5
were spotted in code for Microsoft's co-pilot assistant,
which is getting an appearance mode where it shall reveal its true form to you. A
tiny, slightly unevenly shaped blob.
Sounds about right. But maybe it won't stay that way. The CEO of Microsoft's AI subsidiary predicts that AI assistants may soon age like an organic being
and maybe even have a room that it lives in.
Maybe when it grows up a bit, it can graduate from being a formless CGI blob to controlling the new R1
humanoid robot from Chinese company Unitree, who once again couldn't resist having like the second thing
its consumer marketed robot does in its launch video be punching and kicking.
Unitree. Hi, this is like the one thing we're hoping the friendly daily life robots don't do.
They're not they're not they're they're all punching and kicking. They're not listening. They're having a good time.
I don't want to interrupt. But hey, feel free to interrupt me on Monday by clicking on the next tech link video when it goes up on that day.
I won't be doing anything. I'll just be sitting right behind the thumbnail waiting.
Maybe I should be working on my kung fu.