WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.280 Okay, this is gonna sound weird, but I think I'm stuck in a time loop. 00:00:03.280 --> 00:00:06.640 Like, I'm pretty sure I've done this exact episode before, 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:09.960 but it doesn't matter that I'm trapped in an infinite cycle of delivering tech news 00:00:09.960 --> 00:00:15.080 until the heat death of the universe. You need to know about this computer stuff! 00:00:15.080 --> 00:00:18.880 Microsoft announced on Friday that Phil Spencer, CEO of their gaming division, 00:00:18.880 --> 00:00:23.320 and more importantly, the guy you'd think of if someone said the Xbox guy is retiring. 00:00:23.320 --> 00:00:28.680 Spencer, who joined Microsoft in the 1900s and took over Xbox in 2014 00:00:28.680 --> 00:00:33.360 after the disastrous Xbox One launch, is widely credited with turning the brand around, 00:00:33.360 --> 00:00:38.000 and despite being one of the public faces of an increasingly reviled tech giant, 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:41.640 lighting up the room with his boyish smile. I'll fail. 00:00:41.640 --> 00:00:46.680 Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving the company, which according to the Verge's Tom Warren, 00:00:46.680 --> 00:00:52.520 many employees are relieved about. Bond had reportedly been pushing the Xbox Everywhere strategy 00:00:52.520 --> 00:00:56.280 that de-emphasized console hardware in favor of mobile and cloud, 00:00:56.280 --> 00:00:59.800 gifting us with that most brilliant of marketing slogans, 00:00:59.800 --> 00:01:03.040 this is an Xbox? Which ironically has made it harder 00:01:03.040 --> 00:01:06.920 than ever to say with certainty just what an Xbox is. 00:01:06.920 --> 00:01:11.400 It's this. That strategy coincided with three consecutive years 00:01:11.400 --> 00:01:15.840 of declining hardware revenue. Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma, 00:01:15.840 --> 00:01:20.880 now former president of Microsoft's Core AI division, which, given the micro-slop moniker 00:01:20.880 --> 00:01:24.920 that Windows has picked up, is causing concern within the Xbox community. 00:01:24.960 --> 00:01:30.080 Sharma joined Microsoft just two years ago in 2024, and before that, she was VP of Product and Engineering 00:01:30.080 --> 00:01:33.280 at Meta and Chief Operating Officer at Instacart. 00:01:33.280 --> 00:01:37.560 This is fine. That corporate pedigree isn't inspiring optimism 00:01:37.560 --> 00:01:43.440 from Xbox fans and is causing outright concern for some that her background is a harbinger of doom 00:01:43.440 --> 00:01:47.000 for their favorite console. Dooms game. This is fine. 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:51.920 After the announcement, Sharma laid out three commitments, great games, the return of Xbox, 00:01:51.920 --> 00:01:56.480 and the future of play, whatever that means. On AI, she drew a line saying, 00:01:56.480 --> 00:02:01.320 we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. 00:02:01.320 --> 00:02:05.000 Games are and always will be art crafted by humans. 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:08.120 Whether Sharma is the savior or executioner of Xbox 00:02:08.120 --> 00:02:11.320 remains to be seen. There's also a third option where she sort of just 00:02:11.320 --> 00:02:14.400 continues keeping Xbox in a wraith-like, 00:02:14.400 --> 00:02:17.480 neither dead nor alive, undead kind of state. 00:02:17.480 --> 00:02:20.960 Yeah, I think that's the one probably. Zbox. 00:02:20.960 --> 00:02:24.240 Wikipedia has officially blacklisted archive.today, 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:29.640 the paywall bypassing tool often confused with the non-profit archive.org, not the same. 00:02:29.640 --> 00:02:34.520 After editors discovered it was fueling DDoS attacks and tampering with web snapshots. 00:02:34.520 --> 00:02:39.920 Following community discussion, English Wikipedia is purging roughly 695,000 links, 00:02:39.920 --> 00:02:43.960 citing security and reliability risks. Kind of like what your therapist might suggest 00:02:43.960 --> 00:02:48.080 to you do with your ex's texts. The drama centers around the author of a blog 00:02:48.080 --> 00:02:51.440 called GyroVag, Yanni Patokalio, 00:02:51.440 --> 00:02:56.000 who exposed some alleged aliases used by the archive.today maintainer, 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:59.920 including Deni Petrov and Mashar Rabanovich Rabanovich. 00:02:59.920 --> 00:03:03.200 Whatever. In retaliation, archive.today reportedly embedded 00:03:03.200 --> 00:03:06.720 malicious code in its captures to funnel DDoS traffic 00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:10.400 towards GyroVag. Wikipedia editors also noticed that archive.today 00:03:10.400 --> 00:03:16.080 was editing its captures of web pages. A blog post linked in a GyroVag article was tampered with 00:03:16.080 --> 00:03:20.840 to have its author changed from Nora to Yanni Patokalio. 00:03:20.840 --> 00:03:25.320 Again. Patokalio. The double L is messing me up. 00:03:25.320 --> 00:03:29.280 To top it all off, in an email exchange telling Patokalio to delete his blog post, 00:03:29.280 --> 00:03:34.240 the archive.today maintainer made bizarre threats about posting an OSINT, 00:03:34.240 --> 00:03:38.560 an open source intelligence investigation into Patokalio's Nazi grandfather 00:03:38.560 --> 00:03:42.280 and creating a GyroVag branded gay dating app, 00:03:42.280 --> 00:03:45.480 which is potentially the most terminally online threat ever. 00:03:45.480 --> 00:03:48.600 Ew, and we wouldn't want your socially conservative mother 00:03:48.600 --> 00:03:51.040 to see that, would we? No! 00:03:52.400 --> 00:03:57.680 Despite the chaos, the archive.today person claimed this campaign turned out pretty well 00:03:57.680 --> 00:04:01.960 and plans to scale down the DDoS attacks. We just had a little bit of fun. 00:04:01.960 --> 00:04:07.400 It was just a little bit of fun. I'm done now, guys. Security researchers just blew the lid off Persona, 00:04:07.400 --> 00:04:10.560 the age verification provider Discord got absolutely 00:04:10.560 --> 00:04:14.280 flamed for trying to quietly test on UK users. 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:18.760 One of the researchers, named Celeste, found Persona's entire front end code base 00:04:18.800 --> 00:04:21.880 exposed to the open internet on a US government server. 00:04:21.880 --> 00:04:25.840 And what was in those files goes way beyond checking your age. 00:04:25.840 --> 00:04:30.200 According to the hackers, Persona software performs 269 not nice 00:04:30.200 --> 00:04:34.720 individual verification checks, screening users against watchless for terrorism 00:04:34.720 --> 00:04:38.040 and espionage, comparing selfies to watchless photos 00:04:38.040 --> 00:04:41.520 using facial recognition and flagging people as suspicious entities 00:04:41.520 --> 00:04:46.400 based on their face alone, which explains why all my verification attempts 00:04:46.400 --> 00:04:50.760 kept returning as weird vibe server error whenever I would wear a beret. 00:04:50.760 --> 00:04:54.040 Why did you get that beret? It's none of your artistic business. 00:04:54.040 --> 00:04:57.520 I like to smoke long cigarettes sometimes. For Mel Kida? 00:04:57.520 --> 00:05:01.440 The internet rumor mill started spinning when the exposed code had references 00:05:01.440 --> 00:05:06.000 to a deployment named Onyx, which shares a name with an AI surveillance platform 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:10.400 purchased by ICE for $4.2 million. Critics online connected that 00:05:10.400 --> 00:05:14.320 to Peter Teal's Founders Fund being a major Persona investor. 00:05:14.320 --> 00:05:17.480 And then connected that to Teal's co-founding 00:05:17.480 --> 00:05:21.920 of the surveillance from Palantir, jumping to the conclusion that Persona 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:25.600 had to be funneling biometric data to federal agencies. 00:05:25.600 --> 00:05:30.200 What other explanation could there be with so much circumstantial evidence? 00:05:30.200 --> 00:05:35.080 Well, here's what the researchers actually found. Zero direct references to ICE, Palantir 00:05:35.080 --> 00:05:39.240 or immigration enforcement in the source files. Salas publicly asserted this, 00:05:39.240 --> 00:05:42.400 noting that a lot of misinformation was spreading about their findings 00:05:42.400 --> 00:05:46.760 and wanting to set the record straight. The surveillance capabilities in the code are real, 00:05:46.760 --> 00:05:53.200 but the government conspiracy angle was not confirmed. To his credit, Persona CEO Rick Song didn't send lawyers. 00:05:53.200 --> 00:05:57.080 He emailed Salas directly, acknowledged the exposed code was an oversight 00:05:57.080 --> 00:06:01.640 and explained that the Onyx name actually came from a co-worker's favorite Pokemon. 00:06:01.640 --> 00:06:05.520 It's a rock snake, you guys. I did not just think of that, I just now. 00:06:05.520 --> 00:06:09.560 Salas asked Song to answer a number of questions in writing and Song agreed. 00:06:09.560 --> 00:06:13.760 He then posted the full email exchange on X in the interest of transparency. 00:06:13.760 --> 00:06:17.840 Salas credited Persona for fixing the issue quickly and acknowledged some of the flag security concerns 00:06:17.840 --> 00:06:21.320 were not severe. Reading through the emails, this exchange was constructive. 00:06:21.320 --> 00:06:26.000 Civil, dare I say, flirty. And to summarize, the surveillance tools baked 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:30.080 into Persona's code are real, so we'll keep our guard up for now. 00:06:30.080 --> 00:06:33.360 But whether they were ever pointed at discord users is unknown. 00:06:33.360 --> 00:06:38.460 And I'm shipping Salas and Song hard right now. Almost as hard as I'm shipping our sponsor. 00:06:38.460 --> 00:06:43.280 The quick bits are immune to the time loop thing because they move too fast for the fabric of space time 00:06:43.280 --> 00:06:46.840 to catch them. They're frictionless. Must be nice. 00:06:46.840 --> 00:06:50.560 Open AI CEO and walking snow patrol song, Sam Altman, 00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:55.520 attempted to justify AI's energy consumption at the AI Impact Summit by saying, 00:06:55.520 --> 00:06:58.560 it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:02.040 So, yeah. The pizza pops, the water. 00:07:02.040 --> 00:07:06.600 Think about it. He went on to drive home his lack of understanding of basic humanity by stating that it takes 00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:12.240 like 20 years of life in all the food you eat during that time before you get smart. 00:07:12.240 --> 00:07:15.520 I'm so sorry, Sam. I never considered that by living life. 00:07:15.520 --> 00:07:21.260 So, inefficiently, I might be taking power and water away from hardworking AI's that would make better use of it 00:07:21.260 --> 00:07:26.120 than I ever could. I'm pooping half of this away. At this point, Altman seems like the kind of guy 00:07:26.120 --> 00:07:30.560 who when presented with the trolley problem advocates for the trolley. 00:07:30.560 --> 00:07:34.120 You're just gonna switch the tracks it's on? It's got places to be. 00:07:34.120 --> 00:07:37.120 AMD has allegedly stopped updating Windows drivers 00:07:37.120 --> 00:07:41.760 for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, a chip notably used in many popular gaming handhelds. 00:07:41.760 --> 00:07:45.800 According to posts on the Korean forum DC Inside where a Lenovo support agent reportedly said 00:07:45.800 --> 00:07:51.040 there are no more plans for further updates. Similar claims have surfaced in Lenovo community threads 00:07:51.040 --> 00:07:56.120 and on Reddit, notably neither an ASUS nor Lenovo have released a new Z1 Extreme driver update 00:07:56.120 --> 00:07:59.640 in roughly six months, which adds some credence 00:07:59.640 --> 00:08:03.040 to the theory. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed any end of support 00:08:03.040 --> 00:08:08.560 and the systems this chip is featured in are only two years old, but the Z2 is still 00:08:08.560 --> 00:08:12.160 getting regular updates. So what the heck, AMD? Where are the other ones? 00:08:12.160 --> 00:08:16.440 Maybe they just forgot about half the user base. You guys are still using those? 00:08:16.440 --> 00:08:21.480 Ew. Ew, great. Rumors suggest Intel's next mainstream desktop platform 00:08:21.480 --> 00:08:26.200 codenamed Nova Lake S, the S meaning standard desktop, 00:08:26.200 --> 00:08:30.760 may not arrive until CES 2027. These leaks come from posts on Twitter and Weibo 00:08:30.760 --> 00:08:36.520 and were later echoed by Bench Life's posts claiming AMD Zen 6 Olympic Ridge desktop chips 00:08:36.520 --> 00:08:40.380 are also being delayed with the same timeframe, by the same timeframe. 00:08:40.380 --> 00:08:44.940 Who the same timeframe? None of this has confirmed yet. However, it would be nice to get a CES 00:08:44.940 --> 00:08:48.500 with some proper good old fashioned gaming CPUs for once, you know? 00:08:48.500 --> 00:08:51.940 Go to Vegas for a reason. I mean, the sooner is always better, but still. 00:08:51.940 --> 00:08:55.260 Researchers at MIT have developed a multi-material 3D printer 00:08:55.260 --> 00:09:00.620 capable of producing a fully functional, linear electric motor in a single print. 00:09:00.620 --> 00:09:05.140 Why should you care? This system uses four extrusion methods to deposit five different materials, 00:09:05.140 --> 00:09:08.980 including the conductive ones needed for, you know, electric motors. 00:09:09.980 --> 00:09:14.520 What if you printed an electric motor gun? The only thing needed to be done after printing 00:09:14.520 --> 00:09:19.780 was to actually magnetize the motor's coil for it to work. Even more impressively, the total bill of materials 00:09:19.780 --> 00:09:24.140 only came to about 50 cents, potentially marking a huge breakthrough 00:09:24.140 --> 00:09:27.920 in electric motor manufacturing. I wonder if they sell things in their dorms with it. 00:09:27.920 --> 00:09:32.060 Maybe something rubbery. I think this is a sex toy joke. 00:09:32.060 --> 00:09:36.780 And Kohler just unveiled the Anthem Evo Cycle, a smart shower system that recirculates 00:09:36.780 --> 00:09:41.420 and filters your water in real time so you can stay clean while using less of it. 00:09:41.420 --> 00:09:45.240 It's like the bath of showers, you know, you're in your own filth. After putting cameras in toilets, 00:09:45.240 --> 00:09:49.380 they've now moved on to creating a way for you to spray yourself with hot filtered piss. 00:09:49.380 --> 00:09:54.180 It's even gold colored for obvious reasons. And it also has other available smart accessories 00:09:54.180 --> 00:09:59.500 so you can listen to Jerry Jeff Walker's song, Pissing in the Wind, except now it's about showering 00:09:59.500 --> 00:10:03.340 while you clean out all those pesky, jellyfish things. That's not a vice, by the way. 00:10:03.340 --> 00:10:07.340 That actually makes it way, way worse. And whoever told our culture that that's a thing 00:10:07.620 --> 00:10:11.180 is perfectly wrong, David Schwimmer. And that's the show. 00:10:11.180 --> 00:10:15.980 Now I have to go fall in love with Andy McDowell to break the loop. Or else I'm doing this shit again tomorrow. 00:10:15.980 --> 00:10:19.020 You get the reference? Groundhog day, groundhog day. 00:10:19.020 --> 00:10:22.900 I never saw that one. I'll put that, you know what? I'm gonna put that on my movie list. 00:10:22.900 --> 00:10:23.900 I'm gonna put it.