Tech

Ever since Microsoft announced Windows 11 almost four years ago, there has been significant controversy on a fairly regular basis about stringent hardware requirements that need to be met in order to legitimately run the operating system. A major concern revolved around the fact that Windows 11 mandates TPM 2.0, something that is not present in older processors, rendering otherwise perfectly fine PCs obsolete.

Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.

YouTube has an AI slop problem, with both the main site and the booming Shorts section filling up with low-effort crap shoveled in front of viewers by the millions. New policies are trying to demonetize, or sometimes even ban, accounts that take advantage of AI to mass produce garbage. But if Google is upset that it’s suddenly hosting the web’s video dross, it has only itself to blame.

Perplexity has released its own web browser called Comet, and it's clearly aimed at Google.

Artificial intelligence and the hardware that powers it, is at the heart of a fallout in Pennsylvania, where electricity prices have risen dramatically for wholesalers and consumers due to surging demand. The governor is now threatening to abandon the state's grid energy provider, PJM Interconnection, via Reuters. He's demanding that PJM increase energy capacity through the acceleration of new energy plant construction and approval.

The US General Services Administration (GSA) has announced an agreement with Oracle it claims offers a 75 percent discount on the vendor's license-based technology.

Ubisoft is being called out for a clause people have discovered in its licence agreement that orders owners of its games to destroy them should the studio choose to end service for those games. However, not only is the clause not new, as some have implied, but Ubisoft is far from the only studio that has it in its licence agreement.

Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into a pathology to be cured, creating a loneliness economy. Reframing a universal human experience like loneliness as a medical diagnosis creates a market opportunity to manufacture, sell and buy treatment. The prescription given for loneliness is connection, and Big Tech has found a way to seize the vulnerability of lonely people eager to escape their predicament.

Matt Turnbull, an Executive Producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, recently made a LinkedIn post, emphasizing that he'd be "remiss in not trying to offer the best advice" he could to laid-off workers in these trying times. This "best" advice is to turn to AI assistants like Copilot and ChatGPT for emotional support and to reduce cognitive load.

Julia Liuson, president of the Microsoft division responsible for developer tools such as AI coding service GitHub Copilot, recently sent an email instructing managers to evaluate employee performance based on their use of internal AI tools like this.

In a 92-minute interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, RFK Jr. drilled down on his vision for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Artificial intelligence — arguably, a uselessly vague umbrella term — came up multiple times. (As did conspiracy theories and disinformation on vaccines and autism, the medical establishment, and covid-19 deaths.)

Nintendo has intentionally implemented measures to restrict third-party accessories, including docks, hubs, and other accessories, from working with the new Switch 2. According to two accessory manufacturers who spoke to The Verge, the console maker is making use of a new encryption method as well as an encryption chip. Previously, a similar report by GamesRadar suggested that the change in power requirements (20V) on the Switch 2 has restricted accessory makers like Jsaux, from making docks for the new handheld hybrid console. However, it seems that the real reason is that Nintendo has made changes to the USB-C protocols, which now require “re-adaptation for both power delivery and video output."

Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.

Europe’s ambition for digital sovereignty is more urgent than ever. But instead of backing truly European, privacy-first services, many European businesses and even EU and local authorities still rely on US tech, and might consider the brand-new and shiny "sovereign cloud" offerings as a useful solution.

Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.

Ever since Microsoft announced that it would end support for Windows 10 in October, the company has been trying hard to convince users to make the switch to Windows 11. First, it warned that unsupported Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security updates, making them easy targets for hackers. Later, it advised users to trade in their old computers and buy a new one that comes preloaded with all the Windows 11 goodies.

A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations – a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers.

Elon Musk's xAI made quite a splash when it built a data center with 200,000 GPUs that consumes approximately 250 MW of power. However, it appears that OpenAI has an even larger data center in Texas, which consumes 300 MW and houses hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs, details of which were not disclosed. Furthermore, the company is expanding the site, and by mid-2026, it aims to reach a gigawatt scale, according to SemiAnalysis. Such gargantuan AI clusters are creating challenges for power companies not only in power generation but also in power grid safety.

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The Redditor was experiencing problems with his Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition graphics card, leading him to return it to Micro Center for a replacement. Although the replacement GPU's packaging is labeled for the Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition, the actual card inside features a shroud marked with both AMD Radeon and GeForce RTX branding. This unusual hardware issue appears to be a manufacturing mistake by Asus, directly stemming from the company's production line.

FFS, let it die!

As artificial intelligence becomes the corporate buzzword du jour, executives are finding more and more ways to shoehorn the trendy tech into their everyday business operations.

Customers dismayed by Broadcom's move to selling costly bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) will realize its value if they'd just use more of the components, the company's CTO says.

The fear that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT would lead to a generation of students cheating and plagiarizing work has come to pass. The situation is so bad that educators are now looking at multipe ways to stop the problem, or at least make the practice much more difficult. Ironically, one of them is to use AI.

The European Commission is reportedly in talks to move its cloud services away from Microsoft Azure, according to Euractiv. Per the news outlet, the information came via three senior sources familiar with the matter. Apparently, France-based OVHcloud is the front-runner in these discussions. While other European cloud service providers like IONOS, Scaleway, and Aruba are also being considered.

The UK’s public broadcaster, BBC, has written a letter to Perplexity, the AI search startup, asking it to stop scraping articles from its websites, delete existing copies of content, and propose some sort of financial compensation if it would like to carry on scraping data. If the demands are not met, BBC may seek an injunction against the startup citing alleged misuse of its intellectual property.

A woman severely hurt in a bicycle crash with a Waymo robotaxi is suing the company, claiming one of its vehicles pulled over in a no-stopping zone next to a bike lane, and a passenger opened a door into her path — despite the car’s “Safe Exit” system touted by the Mountain View company as protection for passing cyclists.

After years of providing free services without any bells attached, WhatsApp is now going to start showing ads on the popular chat app. To be clear, users will only see ads on the Status screen — the app’s take on Instagram’s Stories.

A Chinese hardware repair YouTuber received four allegedly faulty RTX 4090 graphics cards that needed repairing. The YouTuber discovered that three of the four cards were fake graphics cards modded from RTX 3090s and RTX 3080s to look like the real deal. The three fake cards had to be scrapped since they were apparently incapable of running. The customer of the four GPUs apparently paid $1,394 (10,000 yuan) for each GPU and purchased all four from an overseas vendor or supplier.

Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.