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Okay, this is gonna sound weird, but I think I'm stuck in a time loop.

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Like, I'm pretty sure I've done this exact episode before,

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but it doesn't matter that I'm trapped in an infinite cycle of delivering tech news

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until the heat death of the universe. You need to know about this computer stuff!

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Microsoft announced on Friday that Phil Spencer, CEO of their gaming division,

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and more importantly, the guy you'd think of if someone said the Xbox guy is retiring.

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Spencer, who joined Microsoft in the 1900s and took over Xbox in 2014

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after the disastrous Xbox One launch, is widely credited with turning the brand around,

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and despite being one of the public faces of an increasingly reviled tech giant,

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lighting up the room with his boyish smile. I'll fail.

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Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving the company, which according to the Verge's Tom Warren,

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many employees are relieved about. Bond had reportedly been pushing the Xbox Everywhere strategy

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that de-emphasized console hardware in favor of mobile and cloud,

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gifting us with that most brilliant of marketing slogans,

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this is an Xbox? Which ironically has made it harder

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than ever to say with certainty just what an Xbox is.

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It's this. That strategy coincided with three consecutive years

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of declining hardware revenue. Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma,

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now former president of Microsoft's Core AI division, which, given the micro-slop moniker

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that Windows has picked up, is causing concern within the Xbox community.

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Sharma joined Microsoft just two years ago in 2024, and before that, she was VP of Product and Engineering

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at Meta and Chief Operating Officer at Instacart.

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This is fine. That corporate pedigree isn't inspiring optimism

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from Xbox fans and is causing outright concern for some that her background is a harbinger of doom

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for their favorite console. Dooms game. This is fine.

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After the announcement, Sharma laid out three commitments, great games, the return of Xbox,

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and the future of play, whatever that means. On AI, she drew a line saying,

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we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.

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Games are and always will be art crafted by humans.

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Whether Sharma is the savior or executioner of Xbox

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remains to be seen. There's also a third option where she sort of just

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continues keeping Xbox in a wraith-like,

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neither dead nor alive, undead kind of state.

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Yeah, I think that's the one probably. Zbox.

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Wikipedia has officially blacklisted archive.today,

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the paywall bypassing tool often confused with the non-profit archive.org, not the same.

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After editors discovered it was fueling DDoS attacks and tampering with web snapshots.

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Following community discussion, English Wikipedia is purging roughly 695,000 links,

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citing security and reliability risks. Kind of like what your therapist might suggest

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to you do with your ex's texts. The drama centers around the author of a blog

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called GyroVag, Yanni Patokalio,

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who exposed some alleged aliases used by the archive.today maintainer,

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including Deni Petrov and Mashar Rabanovich Rabanovich.

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Whatever. In retaliation, archive.today reportedly embedded

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malicious code in its captures to funnel DDoS traffic

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towards GyroVag. Wikipedia editors also noticed that archive.today

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was editing its captures of web pages. A blog post linked in a GyroVag article was tampered with

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to have its author changed from Nora to Yanni Patokalio.

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Again. Patokalio. The double L is messing me up.

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To top it all off, in an email exchange telling Patokalio to delete his blog post,

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the archive.today maintainer made bizarre threats about posting an OSINT,

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an open source intelligence investigation into Patokalio's Nazi grandfather

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and creating a GyroVag branded gay dating app,

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which is potentially the most terminally online threat ever.

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Ew, and we wouldn't want your socially conservative mother

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to see that, would we? No!

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Despite the chaos, the archive.today person claimed this campaign turned out pretty well

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and plans to scale down the DDoS attacks. We just had a little bit of fun.

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It was just a little bit of fun. I'm done now, guys. Security researchers just blew the lid off Persona,

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the age verification provider Discord got absolutely

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flamed for trying to quietly test on UK users.

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One of the researchers, named Celeste, found Persona's entire front end code base

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exposed to the open internet on a US government server.

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And what was in those files goes way beyond checking your age.

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According to the hackers, Persona software performs 269 not nice

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individual verification checks, screening users against watchless for terrorism

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and espionage, comparing selfies to watchless photos

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using facial recognition and flagging people as suspicious entities

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based on their face alone, which explains why all my verification attempts

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kept returning as weird vibe server error whenever I would wear a beret.

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Why did you get that beret? It's none of your artistic business.

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I like to smoke long cigarettes sometimes. For Mel Kida?

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The internet rumor mill started spinning when the exposed code had references

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to a deployment named Onyx, which shares a name with an AI surveillance platform

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purchased by ICE for $4.2 million. Critics online connected that

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to Peter Teal's Founders Fund being a major Persona investor.

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And then connected that to Teal's co-founding

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of the surveillance from Palantir, jumping to the conclusion that Persona

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had to be funneling biometric data to federal agencies.

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What other explanation could there be with so much circumstantial evidence?

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Well, here's what the researchers actually found. Zero direct references to ICE, Palantir

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or immigration enforcement in the source files. Salas publicly asserted this,

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noting that a lot of misinformation was spreading about their findings

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and wanting to set the record straight. The surveillance capabilities in the code are real,

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but the government conspiracy angle was not confirmed. To his credit, Persona CEO Rick Song didn't send lawyers.

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He emailed Salas directly, acknowledged the exposed code was an oversight

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and explained that the Onyx name actually came from a co-worker's favorite Pokemon.

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It's a rock snake, you guys. I did not just think of that, I just now.

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Salas asked Song to answer a number of questions in writing and Song agreed.

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He then posted the full email exchange on X in the interest of transparency.

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Salas credited Persona for fixing the issue quickly and acknowledged some of the flag security concerns

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were not severe. Reading through the emails, this exchange was constructive.

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Civil, dare I say, flirty. And to summarize, the surveillance tools baked

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into Persona's code are real, so we'll keep our guard up for now.

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But whether they were ever pointed at discord users is unknown.

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And I'm shipping Salas and Song hard right now. Almost as hard as I'm shipping our sponsor.

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The quick bits are immune to the time loop thing because they move too fast for the fabric of space time

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to catch them. They're frictionless. Must be nice.

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Open AI CEO and walking snow patrol song, Sam Altman,

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attempted to justify AI's energy consumption at the AI Impact Summit by saying,

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it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.

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So, yeah. The pizza pops, the water.

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Think about it. He went on to drive home his lack of understanding of basic humanity by stating that it takes

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like 20 years of life in all the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

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I'm so sorry, Sam. I never considered that by living life.

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So, inefficiently, I might be taking power and water away from hardworking AI's that would make better use of it

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than I ever could. I'm pooping half of this away. At this point, Altman seems like the kind of guy

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who when presented with the trolley problem advocates for the trolley.

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You're just gonna switch the tracks it's on? It's got places to be.

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AMD has allegedly stopped updating Windows drivers

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for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, a chip notably used in many popular gaming handhelds.

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According to posts on the Korean forum DC Inside where a Lenovo support agent reportedly said

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there are no more plans for further updates. Similar claims have surfaced in Lenovo community threads

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and on Reddit, notably neither an ASUS nor Lenovo have released a new Z1 Extreme driver update

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in roughly six months, which adds some credence

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to the theory. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed any end of support

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and the systems this chip is featured in are only two years old, but the Z2 is still

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getting regular updates. So what the heck, AMD? Where are the other ones?

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Maybe they just forgot about half the user base. You guys are still using those?

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Ew. Ew, great. Rumors suggest Intel's next mainstream desktop platform

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codenamed Nova Lake S, the S meaning standard desktop,

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may not arrive until CES 2027. These leaks come from posts on Twitter and Weibo

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and were later echoed by Bench Life's posts claiming AMD Zen 6 Olympic Ridge desktop chips

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are also being delayed with the same timeframe, by the same timeframe.

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Who the same timeframe? None of this has confirmed yet. However, it would be nice to get a CES

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with some proper good old fashioned gaming CPUs for once, you know?

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Go to Vegas for a reason. I mean, the sooner is always better, but still.

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Researchers at MIT have developed a multi-material 3D printer

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capable of producing a fully functional, linear electric motor in a single print.

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Why should you care? This system uses four extrusion methods to deposit five different materials,

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including the conductive ones needed for, you know, electric motors.

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What if you printed an electric motor gun? The only thing needed to be done after printing

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was to actually magnetize the motor's coil for it to work. Even more impressively, the total bill of materials

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only came to about 50 cents, potentially marking a huge breakthrough

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in electric motor manufacturing. I wonder if they sell things in their dorms with it.

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Maybe something rubbery. I think this is a sex toy joke.

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And Kohler just unveiled the Anthem Evo Cycle, a smart shower system that recirculates

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and filters your water in real time so you can stay clean while using less of it.

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It's like the bath of showers, you know, you're in your own filth. After putting cameras in toilets,

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they've now moved on to creating a way for you to spray yourself with hot filtered piss.

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It's even gold colored for obvious reasons. And it also has other available smart accessories

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so you can listen to Jerry Jeff Walker's song, Pissing in the Wind, except now it's about showering

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while you clean out all those pesky, jellyfish things. That's not a vice, by the way.

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That actually makes it way, way worse. And whoever told our culture that that's a thing

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is perfectly wrong, David Schwimmer. And that's the show.

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Now I have to go fall in love with Andy McDowell to break the loop. Or else I'm doing this shit again tomorrow.

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You get the reference? Groundhog day, groundhog day.

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I never saw that one. I'll put that, you know what? I'm gonna put that on my movie list.

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I'm gonna put it.