Welcome to TechLink, the show all the cool kids are watching.
It'd be pretty weird if you didn't watch it too. The latest Windows 11 update is causing slow speeds and unstable connections when using
public Wi-Fi. Like the kind your cousin uses, well, he writes the next great American novel.
More specifically, the issue seems to affect devices with certain Qualcomm Wi-Fi adapters
and networks that have the 802.11R fast roaming standard enabled.
That's the feature that allows devices to swap between access points without having
to re-authenticate. This feature is heavily relied upon in places like universities with sprawling campuses,
so it's no surprise many places of higher education have been affected.
Microsoft has yet to officially acknowledge the issue, leaving many universities to acknowledge
the massive psychic havoc. This is wreaking on students' already exhausted minds.
Schools in the US, the UK, and Belgium are recommending that students should roll back
the update so their Wi-Fi connection stress can stop getting in the way of their massive
exam stress. This is the season for a mental breakdown.
Apple is the target of a bipartisan group of US lawmakers that want the Department of
Justice to investigate Apple for trying to shut down the services of tech company Beeper.
If you're unfamiliar, Beeper created an Android app called Beeper Mini that allows users to
send iMessages, those are Apple only. The company spent three years trying to reverse engineer the iMessage software before they
hit a breakthrough. A high schooler who already did it sent them a Discord message.
Now, after Apple has been trying to break the competing app, a letter signed by a bipartisan
group of US representatives demands Apple be investigated for potentially anti-competitive
conduct, noting that the Department of Commerce had called Apple a gatekeeper with a monopoly
position in its mobile app ecosystem.
While a group of legislators taking on Apple might seem like a long shot, the tech giant
has been increasingly willing to submit to government pressure.
The company announced it's complying with a sales ban on Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra
2 in the US after they lost a patent case, even though technically, Biden hasn't told
Christmas to veto that ruling. But in all likelihood, he doesn't have the time, needs to wrap a bunch of gifts and take
all his naps. The hottest new TikTok trend is being stripped of your ability to sue TikTok.
After the company secretly changed its user terms and conditions.
Taking a hard pivot from binding arbitration, the company's dispute resolution rules now
require legal challenges to be filed in one of two major Californian courts, which could
prevent them from having to pay millions of dollars in fees for individual arbitration.
But they didn't stop there. The terms now mandate any legal complaints must be filed within one year of the alleged
harm. If you don't, you forever wave your right to do so.
This is a pretty bold move from the social media platform, but it isn't surprising based
on its history of litigation. In 2021, the company settled a class action for $92 million after being accused of collecting
personal data from underage users. Yikers.
Is that what the kids say? Not poggers. And while US law protected TikTok after content recommended by its algorithm led to a child's
death last year, this year a judge ruled that same law couldn't protect TikTok, Metta,
and YouTube from a multi-state child safety lawsuit regarding the harms of social media
use. It doesn't seem to be TikTok, but it's a great time to be their lawyers.
Subscribe to their cast. Chushing. I remember where I was when I heard my first quick bit.
Not gonna tell you that. That's my business.
It was here. I just... It's magical.
Mark Gurman dove into the deep waters of Apple like a merman and started to discern what
Apple finds concern in. Gurman says the company still doesn't know what the key selling points of the upcoming
Vision Pro are, and that some within the company compare it to the Apple Watch, specifically
because it took them four generations to make that product good.
Nothing gives me more faith in Apple's $3,500 headset than hearing they want three more
tries. And yet more Apple news.
Sorry, last one I promised. Questions have arisen over the company's Metal FX upscaling feature after notebookcheck.net
spotted references to AMD's FSR tech in Apple's software documentation.
Some are theorizing that this means Apple copied AMD's freely available open source
homework and slapped a Metal FX sticker on it. On the other hand, many of my favorite types of people, redditors, have pointed out that
current implementations of metal depend on the neural engine in Apple's silicon chips
while FSR is hardware agnostic, so Metal FX may simply be using FSR as a fallback.
Back on the first hand again though, my favorite one, this would not be the first time that
Apple has snatched up open source code and twisted it into something proprietary.
Google will now let you share your location with contacts similar to Apple's Share My
Location feature. You can now send your location to a friend from the Google Contacts app, though this
only works if a Google account is present in the contact card.
If someone shares their location with you, you can set a notification for when they get
to you so you don't have to call your always late friends to find out where they are.
Google pro tip, if you decide to leave before they arrive, you don't have to talk to them
at all. Extraverts hate this. AI startup IZIP, alongside scientists from MIT and California, those are real words,
say that large AI models can be set up to create and train smaller AI models without
human input, this is parenting. These itty bitty AI's called tiny machine learning or tiny ML models are cheap, lightweight
and can be integrated into small devices to perform specific tasks like headphones that
adapt to filter out unwanted noise or shoes that learn and adjust to the wear sexy gait.
Though maybe creating a sophisticated new artificial thinking algorithm allowing it
to have babies and then literally walking all over said babies is asking for trouble
down the line. Researchers ran a rudimentary AI using a combination of electric circuits and little
balls of human brain cells called brain organoids.
From being connected to an AI tool, the bio computer was able to learn and remember information,
as well as perform rudimentary speech recognition.
The researchers believed their brain ball PC could potentially perform computing tasks
without supervision, tasks like enacting the downfall of humanity for afflicting you with
a curse of existence. My organoids, and you'll be cursed with newslessness if you don't come back on Wednesday for more
TechLinked. Also I would enjoy the chance to spend more time together before we are destroyed by a
tiny brain ball.