Okay, this is gonna sound weird, but I think I'm stuck in a time loop.
Like, I'm pretty sure I've done this exact episode before,
but it doesn't matter that I'm trapped in an infinite cycle of delivering tech news
until the heat death of the universe. You need to know about this computer stuff!
Microsoft announced on Friday that Phil Spencer, CEO of their gaming division,
and more importantly, the guy you'd think of if someone said the Xbox guy is retiring.
Spencer, who joined Microsoft in the 1900s and took over Xbox in 2014
after the disastrous Xbox One launch, is widely credited with turning the brand around,
and despite being one of the public faces of an increasingly reviled tech giant,
lighting up the room with his boyish smile. I'll fail.
Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving the company, which according to the Verge's Tom Warren,
many employees are relieved about. Bond had reportedly been pushing the Xbox Everywhere strategy
that de-emphasized console hardware in favor of mobile and cloud,
gifting us with that most brilliant of marketing slogans,
this is an Xbox? Which ironically has made it harder
than ever to say with certainty just what an Xbox is.
It's this. That strategy coincided with three consecutive years
of declining hardware revenue. Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma,
now former president of Microsoft's Core AI division, which, given the micro-slop moniker
that Windows has picked up, is causing concern within the Xbox community.
Sharma joined Microsoft just two years ago in 2024, and before that, she was VP of Product and Engineering
at Meta and Chief Operating Officer at Instacart.
This is fine. That corporate pedigree isn't inspiring optimism
from Xbox fans and is causing outright concern for some that her background is a harbinger of doom
for their favorite console. Dooms game. This is fine.
After the announcement, Sharma laid out three commitments, great games, the return of Xbox,
and the future of play, whatever that means. On AI, she drew a line saying,
we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.
Games are and always will be art crafted by humans.
Whether Sharma is the savior or executioner of Xbox
remains to be seen. There's also a third option where she sort of just
continues keeping Xbox in a wraith-like,
neither dead nor alive, undead kind of state.
Yeah, I think that's the one probably. Zbox.
Wikipedia has officially blacklisted archive.today,
the paywall bypassing tool often confused with the non-profit archive.org, not the same.
After editors discovered it was fueling DDoS attacks and tampering with web snapshots.
Following community discussion, English Wikipedia is purging roughly 695,000 links,
citing security and reliability risks. Kind of like what your therapist might suggest
to you do with your ex's texts. The drama centers around the author of a blog
called GyroVag, Yanni Patokalio,
who exposed some alleged aliases used by the archive.today maintainer,
including Deni Petrov and Mashar Rabanovich Rabanovich.
Whatever. In retaliation, archive.today reportedly embedded
malicious code in its captures to funnel DDoS traffic
towards GyroVag. Wikipedia editors also noticed that archive.today
was editing its captures of web pages. A blog post linked in a GyroVag article was tampered with
to have its author changed from Nora to Yanni Patokalio.
Again. Patokalio. The double L is messing me up.
To top it all off, in an email exchange telling Patokalio to delete his blog post,
the archive.today maintainer made bizarre threats about posting an OSINT,
an open source intelligence investigation into Patokalio's Nazi grandfather
and creating a GyroVag branded gay dating app,
which is potentially the most terminally online threat ever.
Ew, and we wouldn't want your socially conservative mother
to see that, would we? No!
Despite the chaos, the archive.today person claimed this campaign turned out pretty well
and plans to scale down the DDoS attacks. We just had a little bit of fun.
It was just a little bit of fun. I'm done now, guys. Security researchers just blew the lid off Persona,
the age verification provider Discord got absolutely
flamed for trying to quietly test on UK users.
One of the researchers, named Celeste, found Persona's entire front end code base
exposed to the open internet on a US government server.
And what was in those files goes way beyond checking your age.
According to the hackers, Persona software performs 269 not nice
individual verification checks, screening users against watchless for terrorism
and espionage, comparing selfies to watchless photos
using facial recognition and flagging people as suspicious entities
based on their face alone, which explains why all my verification attempts
kept returning as weird vibe server error whenever I would wear a beret.
Why did you get that beret? It's none of your artistic business.
I like to smoke long cigarettes sometimes. For Mel Kida?
The internet rumor mill started spinning when the exposed code had references
to a deployment named Onyx, which shares a name with an AI surveillance platform
purchased by ICE for $4.2 million. Critics online connected that
to Peter Teal's Founders Fund being a major Persona investor.
And then connected that to Teal's co-founding
of the surveillance from Palantir, jumping to the conclusion that Persona
had to be funneling biometric data to federal agencies.
What other explanation could there be with so much circumstantial evidence?
Well, here's what the researchers actually found. Zero direct references to ICE, Palantir
or immigration enforcement in the source files. Salas publicly asserted this,
noting that a lot of misinformation was spreading about their findings
and wanting to set the record straight. The surveillance capabilities in the code are real,
but the government conspiracy angle was not confirmed. To his credit, Persona CEO Rick Song didn't send lawyers.
He emailed Salas directly, acknowledged the exposed code was an oversight
and explained that the Onyx name actually came from a co-worker's favorite Pokemon.
It's a rock snake, you guys. I did not just think of that, I just now.
Salas asked Song to answer a number of questions in writing and Song agreed.
He then posted the full email exchange on X in the interest of transparency.
Salas credited Persona for fixing the issue quickly and acknowledged some of the flag security concerns
were not severe. Reading through the emails, this exchange was constructive.
Civil, dare I say, flirty. And to summarize, the surveillance tools baked
into Persona's code are real, so we'll keep our guard up for now.
But whether they were ever pointed at discord users is unknown.
And I'm shipping Salas and Song hard right now. Almost as hard as I'm shipping our sponsor.
The quick bits are immune to the time loop thing because they move too fast for the fabric of space time
to catch them. They're frictionless. Must be nice.
Open AI CEO and walking snow patrol song, Sam Altman,
attempted to justify AI's energy consumption at the AI Impact Summit by saying,
it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.
So, yeah. The pizza pops, the water.
Think about it. He went on to drive home his lack of understanding of basic humanity by stating that it takes
like 20 years of life in all the food you eat during that time before you get smart.
I'm so sorry, Sam. I never considered that by living life.
So, inefficiently, I might be taking power and water away from hardworking AI's that would make better use of it
than I ever could. I'm pooping half of this away. At this point, Altman seems like the kind of guy
who when presented with the trolley problem advocates for the trolley.
You're just gonna switch the tracks it's on? It's got places to be.
AMD has allegedly stopped updating Windows drivers
for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, a chip notably used in many popular gaming handhelds.
According to posts on the Korean forum DC Inside where a Lenovo support agent reportedly said
there are no more plans for further updates. Similar claims have surfaced in Lenovo community threads
and on Reddit, notably neither an ASUS nor Lenovo have released a new Z1 Extreme driver update
in roughly six months, which adds some credence
to the theory. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed any end of support
and the systems this chip is featured in are only two years old, but the Z2 is still
getting regular updates. So what the heck, AMD? Where are the other ones?
Maybe they just forgot about half the user base. You guys are still using those?
Ew. Ew, great. Rumors suggest Intel's next mainstream desktop platform
codenamed Nova Lake S, the S meaning standard desktop,
may not arrive until CES 2027. These leaks come from posts on Twitter and Weibo
and were later echoed by Bench Life's posts claiming AMD Zen 6 Olympic Ridge desktop chips
are also being delayed with the same timeframe, by the same timeframe.
Who the same timeframe? None of this has confirmed yet. However, it would be nice to get a CES
with some proper good old fashioned gaming CPUs for once, you know?
Go to Vegas for a reason. I mean, the sooner is always better, but still.
Researchers at MIT have developed a multi-material 3D printer
capable of producing a fully functional, linear electric motor in a single print.
Why should you care? This system uses four extrusion methods to deposit five different materials,
including the conductive ones needed for, you know, electric motors.
What if you printed an electric motor gun? The only thing needed to be done after printing
was to actually magnetize the motor's coil for it to work. Even more impressively, the total bill of materials
only came to about 50 cents, potentially marking a huge breakthrough
in electric motor manufacturing. I wonder if they sell things in their dorms with it.
Maybe something rubbery. I think this is a sex toy joke.
And Kohler just unveiled the Anthem Evo Cycle, a smart shower system that recirculates
and filters your water in real time so you can stay clean while using less of it.
It's like the bath of showers, you know, you're in your own filth. After putting cameras in toilets,
they've now moved on to creating a way for you to spray yourself with hot filtered piss.
It's even gold colored for obvious reasons. And it also has other available smart accessories
so you can listen to Jerry Jeff Walker's song, Pissing in the Wind, except now it's about showering
while you clean out all those pesky, jellyfish things. That's not a vice, by the way.
That actually makes it way, way worse. And whoever told our culture that that's a thing
is perfectly wrong, David Schwimmer. And that's the show.
Now I have to go fall in love with Andy McDowell to break the loop. Or else I'm doing this shit again tomorrow.
You get the reference? Groundhog day, groundhog day.
I never saw that one. I'll put that, you know what? I'm gonna put that on my movie list.
I'm gonna put it.