Hey, what up? It's ya boy, LM Jesus.
I put on one of my finest collared shirts to bring you the tech news.
Be grateful. Who's LM Satan? Linus.
Windows 11 decided to break your SSDs again
after the most recent moment to update. We're having a bit of a moment.
A little bit. Two. Multiple users took to the Windows 11 subreddit
to complain that the read and write speeds of their NVMe SSDs were vastly diminished after updating,
and the speeds were restored after rolling back the update.
Reddit user and person whose birth year we may never know,
MrBigDog99, was one of those who shared their experience
in the comments of the update post. But they also came with receipts,
as MrBigDog99 included screenshots from Crystal Disk Info
that purportedly show massive write speed drops after installing the update.
Spill the tea. That's fine, tea. What if it's like a nice oolong?
Not on the receipts. Man, of all the problems Windows 11
has had over a short lifetime? This is certainly one of them.
I mean, it's not even a unique problem. Windows 11 users were reporting drastically lower write speeds
on their NVMe SSDs two months after the OS launched.
There are very few moments in the last few years that I wanna re-experience,
so I don't need Microsoft trying to forcefully unrepress the end of 2021 by repeating the same bug.
Microsoft Photos has a memory for you. And it's sadness.
A vulnerability in the Google Pixel markup tool allows for some screenshots to be uncropped and unredacted.
The issue is due to how the edited photo is saved. While it is saved in the same file location
as the original photo, the original isn't erased beforehand.
This means that if the new file is smaller, like if, I don't know, it was a crop of the original,
a conceivably large portion of the original's data still exists.
Simon Arons was the first to identify and report this vulnerability,
which he dubbed Acropolis, I approve, and using a proof-of-concept by David Buchanan,
showed how someone could conceivably uncover sensitive data from one of these cropped images.
The good news is that this issue has already been patched on many pixels in the March security update.
The bad news is that Pixel 6 series phones have yet to receive that update.
LLL upgrade, dude. What, you have last generation's phone?
Just throw in the garbage, you're basic. But there's still some hope that the Acropolis
might be more like a regular old natural disaster, like a landslide or something,
since I'm assuming they're large Fleetwood Mac fans, because everyone is.
Since many social platforms, like Twitter, reprocess uploaded images,
that renders the old data unrecoverable. Unfortunately, Discord only started doing this
in mid-January of this year, so anything posted to Discord before then is vulnerable.
Good thing no one spent six years posting cropped pixel photos to Discord, right?
Oh no, I'm in the cropped pixel photos Discord server. Right?
Right? My crops! A YouTuber spent over $22,000 buying every game
on the Wii U and 3DS eShops before Nintendo shuts them down next week.
Gerard Khalil, aka the completionist, is appropriately known for completing
all the achievements and trophies NVIDIA games. He faced his strongest challenge yet
by 100%ing an achievement he set himself.
Buying 866 Wii U games and 1,357 3DS games,
requiring close to a terabyte and a half of storage. Talk about it, backlog.
You're never gonna play all that. How is he gonna complete them? He already did by buying them, and it wasn't easy.
The eShops aren't like Steam, where you can put piles of shovelware in a cart
and bankrupt yourself in one convenient purchase. Each game had to be bought individually,
and after 328 days, Gerard and the completionist team
accomplished their goal and plan to donate these games to the Video Game History Foundation,
a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of video games.
Mom, comments and all. Your mom loved this game.
100% of that game. I 100%ed your mom. And this is significant, since the 3DS and Wii U
are the last Nintendo platforms to support the virtual console service,
which means come the 27th of March, Nintendo will only provide retro games
through the Switch Online expansion pack, which costs $50 a year.
And I'm sure did not influence the decision to shut down the 3DS and Wii U eShops at all.
And you can't even plug it into an N64 controller. Oh, the expansion pack.
Wait, the expansion pack goes in the N64. Riley, you're mistaken.
If I've learned anything from you that the expansion pack goes in your mom. Ladies and gentlemen, now introducing,
for the very first time, these five quick pits.
Oh, wow.
Tech layoffs suck. And Google just made them worse.
The company has decided not to pay out the remainder of maternity and medical leave
for laid off employees. Some people found out days after Matt leave approval,
and at least one woman was holding her literally newly born newborn when she was sacked.
Even worse, since Google had on-site medical facilities
and laid off employees can't access Google property, some people have lost access to their primary care doctor.
But why would they need jobs or doctors when they have babies? That's what the babies are for.
They make you feel good. In other news, Amazon is laying off 9,000 more people.
Silver lining, 9,000 potential nannies for those ex-Googlers.
Now, if only they could pay them. AI Startup Runway has announced their Gen 2 text
to video generator will be available to users within weeks.
After previously helping develop text to image generator stable diffusion,
Runway put out their Gen 1 model that could take existing footage and modify the visuals.
Gen 2 appears to create videos entirely from text,
but all they've released are short demo clips. If the portfolio I put together
from my experience applying for this job is any indication, I'm sure that the examples they chose
were not cherry picked at all and they saved their best work for later
because they're very humble and not because it doesn't exist and they deserve the praise they're getting.
A fake Samsung 980 Pro SSD has been spotted
by a user on a Chinese forum with packaging, labels,
and even firmware, all suggesting that the drive is legit.
But unfortunately, it was proven false when it worked correctly.
And to be fair to the drive, it is indeed a two terabyte SSD,
but after buying it for a big discount over MSRP on Taobao,
the user found out it performed at just over half the read speed of an actual 980 Pro
and opened it up to find different components than the real thing. What was their macaroni in here?
Macaroni hamburgers, what's going on? Fake hard drives, micro SD cards,
and now SSDs have become more common. So be careful, or you might find yourself opening
what looks like an SSD box to find, oh my God, it's a boa constrictor?
How do they even fit it in there? Oh no! The Internet Archives Open Library
was in New York federal court today to defend itself against a lawsuit
from three of the Big Five print publishers.
At issue is the Open Library's heinous act of letting users check out digital scans of physical books.
More specifically, the publishers really don't like controlled digital lending.
The system that allows a library to lend out as many digital copies of a book
as it has physical copies in storage. That doesn't make any sense.
Matt, doesn't work out. You got three books, so you lend out three books? But the publishers were spurred to sue over
the Internet Archives National Emergency Library, which let unlimited users check out e-books for two weeks.
The Internet Archives faces massive fines and CDL being potentially ruled illegal if they lose,
and for what? Trying to help people read and learn
and not go stir crazy inside their homes locked away from everyone they loved during a pandemic
that was unprecedented but predictable.
I hope it was worth it. And computer maker Acer has decided to make an e-bike.
The Acer, Ebi, Ebi?
Ebi? Ebi! Will feature onboard AI for predictive transmission control
and collision detection. And because why not, the Ebi's removable battery
can be used to charge your phone or laptop. So what I'm hearing is Acer can figure out
how to increase their laptop's battery life so they over-engineered the world's most portable charger.
Good job, Acer. And I can't figure out why you wouldn't want to come back on Wednesday for more tech news.
It'll be fun! You'll make friends in the comments. Don't go in the comments, actually.
Don't do that. Unless you want to, maybe, like me.
Derby Trolls.