Bit right to the end, I always say, and unfortunately for everyone involved, that includes today's
tech news. That was barely Shrek. That was good.
Honestly, I heard Shrek, but I also heard a crazy guy would have.
China has quietly made progress on one of the hardest problems in modern chipmaking, extreme
ultraviolet lithography. According to a Reuters investigation, researchers at a high-security lab in Shenzhen have built
a prototype EUV lithography machine, a device essential for producing advanced semiconductors
and long monopolized by the Dutch company ASML.
They love monopolies. These are massive, delicate, wildly expensive systems, and no company outside of the Netherlands
has successfully built one until now, kind of.
And maybe not really. China's prototype already generates EUV light, and reportedly fills nearly an entire
factory floor, although it has not yet produced working chips.
To make this happen, China recruited former ASML engineers, many of them Chinese-born
and recently retired, offering them massive signing bonuses and housing incentives.
One engineer reportedly arrived on his first day of work and was handed a fake ID with
a new false name on it, and when he went in the doors, he discovered a bunch of his old
co-workers, all with snazzy new names too.
It's Jeremy now. Me too. We're all Jeremy.
Apparently, everyone was instructed to go buy their new aliases and to never acknowledge
the project outside of the compound. To make things even more interesting, it kind of sounds like this is a skunkworks project
with China buying up parts from older ASML machines in used markets to get around all
those pesky export controls. Now, if this scheme works out, it would be kind of wild, because it's basically the
plot of the red movies. The retired Black Ops agents replaced by semiconductor equipment engineers.
The only thing these operatives are assassinating is the US hegemony.
Okay, now that works. The global RAM shortage, being driven largely by AI companies buying up massive amounts
of memory, is about to push PC and smartphone prices higher, and it doesn't look like it's
going to stop anytime soon. An IDC market analysis warns that the crunch could last well into 2027, and that major
PC and phone makers are already preparing further price increases as the memory supply
tightens. Apparently, Apple and Samsung are a bit insulated from all this because they secure their RAM
12 to 24 months in advance, so they probably won't increase their prices because they
would have no reason to do that just because every other company in the market is doing
that, right? All this pressure to get RAM is causing some wacky behavior in enthusiast spaces, as older
CPUs like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D are now selling on eBay for way more than newer chips, simply
because they let people use the only slightly cheaper DDR4 memory.
Yet this memory shortage hasn't stopped NVIDIA from releasing its RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell
GPU, with a massive 72GB of GDDR7 targeting AI developers, data scientists, and creative
professionals. On Monday, we covered rumors that NVIDIA was slowing production of its lower to mid-tier
5000 series gaming GPUs, and we kind of joked that it was because they were moving the
GDDR7 RAM from those cards into more expensive products.
Well, I guess we now know where all the RAM went.
I'm over here. Can't catch me.
Apple has announced sweeping changes to iOS that are, legitimately, big in Japan.
As of this week, iPhone users in Japan can officially side load apps, meaning developers
can distribute apps outside the app store using alternative marketplaces like Alt Store.
This comes as part of Apple's effort to comply with Japan's new competition rules, and is
only the latest example of regulators forcing a crack into Apple's famously lockdown ecosystem.
That said, this is still Apple, so the freedom comes with fine print.
Apple will continue collecting fees on third-party in-app payments, and even on web purchases
tied to iOS apps. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has, of course, already criticized the changes, arguing that
Apple is still taxing developers even when it is no longer providing distribution or
payment processing. An accusation Apple is happy to lean into.
The tech giant's updated developer agreement gives the company new powers to recover unpaid
fees owed by devs who had the gall to conduct their business outside of Apple's holy dominion.
I see what you have hidden. Your every atom cries out for penitence.
So while this is, ultimately, progress, it's a little bit more of a sour Apple than a sweet
one. Oh, girls are like onions.
Unsort the quick bits. They have layers.
And sometimes they make you want to cry. Riot Games has discovered a critical motherboard flaw that lets hardware-level cheats slip
in and activate before anti-cheat software even wakes up.
The bump in the night was real. The issue affects boards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and Asrock, where a security feature
called IOMMU isn't fully initializing at boot, despite looking like it is.
Riot worked with manufacturers to push BIOS updates, and now Valorant players who don't
update their systems will be blocked with a VAN restriction, meaning that your account
will be flagged for using cheater-adjacent hardware. Oh yeah, what about Innocent Intel Proving Guilty, huh, some legal system?
Sir, this is a hero shooter. LG has backed down after TV owners freaked out when a Microsoft co-pilot app suddenly
appeared on their home screens and could not be uninstalled.
Well, LG has heard their cries and says it will allow users to delete co-pilot if they
want, although they also clarified that it was only a browser shortcut, not a built-in
app. All this fuss over a little shortcut, don't you feel silly?
No, actually, turns out quietly injecting an AI chatbot into a device people use to
watch movies was not the vibe. Several popular browser extensions, with more than 8 million installs, have been quietly
harvesting users' full AI conversations and selling them for marketing purposes.
Security researchers found the extensions inject scripts directly into sites like ChatGPT,
Claude from Anthropic, Gemini, co-pilot, and those other ones, and record everything that
gets said. Even worse, many of these extensions were labeled featured in Chrome and Edge stores.
So yeah, that random free VPN you were using for therapy time with your AI girlfriend might
have actually been recording the whole time. Maybe you can ask them to send it to you and you can remember the good times.
Amazon caught a North Korean infiltrator working in its IT systems thanks to something almost
invisible, typing lag. Security teams noticed keystrokes from a supposedly US-based worker were taking over 110 milliseconds
to reach Seattle way longer than expected and definitely something that would show up
in their performance review. But really, that tiny delay suggested the laptop was being controlled from halfway across the
world. Amazon traced the activity, confirmed it was part of a North Korean remote work scheme,
and kicked the contractor out within days. I knew some companies were tracking their employees, but this is ridiculous.
And a Chinese tech company called Limex Dynamics just showed off Tron2, a robot that appears
to consist of a waste torso module thing with two limbs that can be swapped between having
legs or arms depending on the job. But not both.
Full robot bodies are so 2025. The launch video shows the robot lifting stuff and doing a variety of tasks, but despite
its cool and original Tron name, there's no Daft Punk or 9-inch nails score, unfortunately.
It doesn't even leave a neon solid light trail behind it wherever it goes, even when
the disembodied robot hips are clearly in its weird doing the splits on Rollerblade's
light cycle mode. But if none of that has you sold, wait till you see this half-humanoid perform some very
inhumanoid, uh, Rollerblade summer salts?
Is this like its mating ritual or something?
What even? Whatever it is, it's working. Hey! What are you doing in my swamp?
You can't Rollerblade here! That's it for today's tech news.
Now get out of here, we'll see, oh I think I was still supposed to be doing the accent
there, but it's okay.