Tech News can help you understand and adapt to important technological,
economic, and socioultural shifts that affect all of us. But why keep up with
it at all? It's a good
question. Hell if I know. Nintendo has
updated their user agreements to let gamers know they might brick your Switch
if you screw around with it. Because as much as they love to sue people, it's
like their favorite thing other than releasing the same game a million times,
it's just faster to remotely disable people's consoles. And along with it,
their ability to legally play Nintendo's
games. Hold on. As first spotted by
Steven Totio at Gamefile, the old Nintendo account agreement for US
accounts forbade a long list of jailbreaky actions like copying,
modifying, and decompiling Nintendo services. But the new agreement goes
into more detail and notes that failing to comply with these restrictions may
cause Nintendo to render your account and or Nintendo device permanently
unusable in whole or in part. I don't know what that last part is like. They
might break only your Joy-Con sticks, make them worse than they already are.
Uh the UK version of the agreement is a bit softer, saying non-compliance may
result in the console becoming unusable.
might happen, might not stop. Nintendo
also updated their privacy policy in the US and UK to say they might monitor and
record your video and audio interactions with other users. So, just make sure you
get all the swearing out of your system before you sit down to play online.
Okay. NVIDIA is reportedly once again refusing to give tech reviewers official
drivers for the RTX 5060 until the card
launches on May 19th. Igor's Lab first
made this claim, but it was corroborated by Hardware Unboxed and Andrea Schilling
of Hardware Lux, who pointed out NVIDIA's plan sucks extra hard because
May 19th is the first day of Computex and everybody's going to be in Taiwan
possibly enjoying delicious soup dumplings and bubble tea, which is not
important right now. What's important is we're looking at another launch day
filled potentially with videos of short sandled people complaining about not
being able to publish a review. Thanks NVIDIA. Honestly, the Radeon RX960 XT
listings of which leaked recently revealing both 8 gig and 16 gig variants
can't come soon enough. Please let Linus
review something. Anything. Apple has filed a motion to stay that ruling from
last week, forcing the tech giant to allow external payment options on iOS,
even though Judge Ivon Gonzalez Rogers explicitly said she would not grant a
stay and that she is generally sick of Apple
shenanigans. That's my paraphrasing. But you see, Apple had no choice but to try
something. Because if they don't collect all the commissions they can, even on
purchases made outside of the app store, they could lose hundreds of millions,
even billions of dollars, which I believe was the whole idea, but I could
be wrong. Obviously, Epic Games thinks Apple's motion is BS. The company just
submitted the Fortnite iOS app to Apple for review once again. And again, I feel
like it won't be approved, but you know, I appreciate Tim Sweeny's spirit.
Meanwhile, Apple SVP Eddie Q made a spirited argument in the Google Search
antirust remedies trial, asserting that Google should still be allowed to pay
Apple 20 billion a year to be Safari's default search engine because search
won't even be relevant soon anyway. I mean, people are using it less because
they're using AI to search for stuff instead. Now, Google didn't love the
sound of that, so they posted a short statement to say, "Ah, well, hey, just
uh hold on now." You know, they're we're still seeing overall query growth in
search. So, I mean, you know, Google's still a big deal. And then Apple's like,
"No, it's not." And then Google's like, "Yes, it is." Anyway, Eddie even went so
far as to say you may not even need an iPhone by 2035 because AI is changing
how people use the web so much. In fact, the changes are so big, according to
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, they're killing the internet's entire business
model. I mean, the tides are changing. You know, winds are shifting, your
honor. There are probably a lot of things we should be worrying about
instead of Google paying Apple $20 billion. So, probably just keep letting
them do that. Okay? Right? I mean, why not, you know? And hey, uh, why not
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to big tech? Just an idea. I know why
tech news is useful, you
know. No idea what the quick bits are for. An AI generated video of a man
killed in a road rage incident in Arizona was played during the killer's
trial and accepted by the judge as a victim impact statement. Uh the video
was produced by the victim's sister and features the man saying he believes in
forgiveness despite his family asking the judge to deliver the maximum
sentence. After hearing the uh testimony, the judge said he didn't hear
the victim asking for the maximum sentence, probably because that wasn't
actually the victim. It was a fake person. Does everyone realize that? And
then the judge handed out the max sentence anyway. Okay.
Not sure what we learned from any of this. Huawei showed off its first
laptops running a desktop version of its Harmony OS operating system. The Chinese
tech giant first started developing Harmony OS as an Android-based
alternative to reduce their reliance on Google. And now they're trying to reduce
dependence on Microsoft too because of the, you know, the US China trade war
and also probably because they're sick of the constant nagging to upgrade to
Windows 11. Relatable. In case you missed it, there's a new pope in town.
And yeah, he's a gamer. Kind of. Uh,
Robert Pvost, aka Pope Leo I 14th, is
the first American pope and the first one confirmed to play video games,
specifically Wordle and Words with Friends. According to his biological
gamer bros, he's also the first pope that can be properly stalked on social
media. Evidence has already been discovered of him arguing with his
relatives on Facebook. He's just like us. and a viral Tik Tok trend called the
Chromebook Challenge, in which kids stick objects into the USB ports of
their schoolisssued Chromebooks to elicit a bit of magic smoke, has
unsurprisingly led to fires and evacuations at schools in multiple
states. As one Tik Tok video points out, blowing up your Chromebook may lead to a
situation where it ain't even a Chromebook anymore. Important lessons
learned. Searching Chromebook challenge on Tik Tok now leads to a Tik Tok page
warning against participating in such challenges which they needed to do
because the fire challenge was already a thing and that involved kids pouring
flammable liquid on themselves and then lighting that liquid on fire. What is
the challenge there? To survive. Thankfully, kids have already pivoted to
finding new and creative ways to screw with their Chromebook settings, making
the laptop hard to use the old-fashioned way. You know, maybe the kids are all
right. Maybe the kids are all right. But I won't be all right unless you come
back on Monday for more tech news. I'll just be sitting here worried sick that
you're doing something less useful, like touching grass or other things that are
outside. Your hands might get dirty.