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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. It's Cybersecurity awareness month, and LifeLock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up Multi Factor Authentication, report phishing and update the software on your devices. And for comprehensive identity protection, let Lifelock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. Lifelock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed or your money back. Stay smart, safe and protected with the 30 day free trial at lifelocked.com podcast.
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Terms apply between Avatar 1 and 2, the humans went from harvesting Unobtanium to slurping up alien whale brain juice. It's a cautionary tale about how they should have been harvesting tech news from the get go, and also something about colonialism. Did you see Avatar 2 in 3D? Now that's technology. Discord has confirmed a data breach in which hackers were able to access government IDs submitted as part of the mandatory age verification process required by the UK's Online Safety act after it went into effect earlier this year. Ah, codswallop. If only someone had seen this coming and expressed concerns about it, other than the thousands of people who did that. Discord says that the hackers hit one of their third party customer service providers and gained access to some personal information shared by users with that provider, including users names, emails and other contact details, IP addresses, messages with support agents and and a small number of images of government IDs. Again, which is crazy because I thought the UK government rolled out age checks only after they made all the hackers promise to leave the IDs alone. Hopefully all the other hackers stick to the agreement and we won't see any more IDs get compromised from the hundreds of other popular platforms that have also collected them. Microsoft is assuring gamers that their Xbox hardware isn't going anywhere. Console elves won't steal it away. In the middle of the night, when Microsoft announced they'd be raising the price on multiple teams of their Game Pass subscription service, rumors began to spread that this focus on profiting from software and membership fees marked the end for Xbox hardware. However, Microsoft has now stated that they are still investing in upcoming first party consoles and devices made by Xbox. It makes sense that Microsoft isn't totally giving up on Xbox hardware, because apparently they're still figuring out exactly how to make those gaming services profitable. According to the Verge, Microsoft is considering launching a free ad supported Xbox cloud gaming service, while a Bloomberg report came out saying Microsoft lost almost $300 million in sales by putting Call of Duty 6 on Game Pass. So yeah, Maybe it's not time to jump ship on building hardware quite just yet. That said, it doesn't look like Xbox is doing a good job of releasing hardware either, because apparently a first party Xbox handheld was canceled with when Microsoft wouldn't commit to filling AMD's minimum order requirements for the chips inside the hardware. We really just don't know if we're gonna sell that many, so I was like can we just do like baker's dozen or the Xbox brand is 23 years old now and like many others its age. It's clearly going through a bit of an existential crisis, something that routinely happens at age 23 these days. I don't know. It's true though. Hey, I hope you figure out who you wanna be Xbox. Maybe time to go backpacking to find yourself. You know who seems to be really figuring themselves out recently? Xbox's first party hardware partner, amd, who has entered into another lucrative partnership, this time with OpenAI. The new partnership was announced today and will see OpenAI deploy what they describe as 6 gigawatts worth of AMD's Instinct AI GPUs, which I guess translates to potentially millions of GPUs over the next several years, beginning with 1 gigawatt of the upcoming Instinct Mi 450 GPU in the first half of 2026. Great Scott. What a missed opportunity for these nerds to have referenced the 1.21 gigawatts used to time travel and back to the future. But whatever, the deal is worth tens of billions of dollars a year for amd and gives OpenAI the ability to acquire up to 10% of that company for for a penny per share. Not only is this deal seemingly great for AMD's wallet, but it also highlights growing confidence in their AI GPUs, which could help them become more competitive with Nvidia, who obviously dominates that field. Yet the production demands of making all of These enterprise AI GPUs has PC gamers concerned that AMD's head is in the cloud. Woo rim shot. Instead of the desktop market which is already dealing with a storage and memory related pricing apocalypse. I don't think Dr. Lisa Su will forget about us. She took an oath to protect the vulnerable, heal the sick and all that stuff, you know. Right? Sadly, she can't do anything about data brokers selling your personal info online. That's where our sponsor Delete Me comes in. They're the pros at keeping your personal information, well, personal. Their experts find and remove your sensitive data from search engines and websites so it can't be passed around like a newborn baby at the Grandma meetup. It's your info, it's not a baby. Speaking of babies, Deleteme has family plans now, so each family member gets their own personalized data cleanup service. And managing it all is easy with DeleteMe's user friendly tools. So head on over to the link in the video description and check out Delete Me Today. Now in the Way of Water the Second Avatar movie sure, those Met Kayina Clan kids can swim fast, but there's no way they're beating the quick bits. Quick bits don't even have to hold their breath. Intel's imminent Panther Lake mobile CPUs are reportedly said to feature another kind of chip branding. Yay. Every Panther Lake CPU will allegedly include integrated graphics, but the models with the highest spec will be referred to as Core Ultra X. Elon has gotta be hyped on this and you can expect to see a Core Ultra X9 and X7 chip make it stop like Jason X. These core Ultra X CPUs are gonna be beefier than their compatriots. The CPUs will use 12 XE3 GPUs cores, a big jump from the 8 XE2 cores found on Lunar Lake processors. So intel is clearly focused on making more powerful IGPUs to compete with AMD's APUs. For a while there, we thought about combining TechLinked with Jackass to create TechLinked X, but there were just too many casualties. The Nintendo Switch 2 supports multiple versions of Nvidia's DLSS, as discovered by Digital Foundry in one of their recent YouTube videos. One version is practically the same as the one you'd find on Nvidia's PC GPUs, but the second version is a sort of DLSS Lite that prioritizes performance and appears built to upscale games beyond 1080p on the Switch too. This lighter version is far less resource intensive, but becomes more apparent during camera motion, revealing unfiltered pixels. No good. Destroy them. According to some reporting by Digital Foundry, game developers working on Switch 2 titles are able to choose which DLSS variant best suits their performance targets. Do a Mario impression saying it's a me a super sampling OpenAI and Jony I've are hitting some roadblocks on the way to creating their secretive AI device. According to a report by the Financial Times, OpenAI and I've the legendary Apple product designer on are working to build a palm sized piece of hardware that doesn't have a screen but uses audio and visual cues to serve as your AI assistant. However, they are running up against the privacy concerns created by designing hardware that is always listing and or watching, along with concerns about how much compute power is needed for a mass consumer product to run OpenAI's suite of models. So far, this all sounds a bit like that AI friend product Linus tried on Short Circuit and named Riley and he seemed to hate. But that's only because there can only be one AI Riley. Wait. Activision's Ricochet Anti Cheat Appears to Be Doing what It's Supposed To Thank God. Cheating is the scourge of many competitive online games, in case you didn't know. But with the launch of Call of Black Ops 7's early access beta, Ricochet appears to be catching cheaters hyper efficiently. Uh oh. They claim to be stopping 97% of cheaters within 30 minutes of their first sign in, and that fewer than 1% of cheating attempts are making it into matches. This is great news. Hopefully Ricochet's work sets an example for the rest of the gaming industry, but the standard they've set for themselves also needs to be maintained because the game is only in early access and concurrent gameplay numbers have been lackluster for a Call of Duty game as the anti cheating ramps up. People care less about the game, the Astros aren't in the MLB playoffs, and they're clearing cheaters off of a COD game. Maybe there is hope for fair play after all. I'm sure that joke makes sense to someone. Yeah, yeah, but I wouldn't know. And in Japan, NTT East Group has teamed up with Chiba Prefecture to protect the poultry industry with drones equipped with lasers. This doesn't need to be said, but this is badass chicken defending laser drones. Sadly, the more I tell you about these drones, the more pedestrian and logical this plan all sounds. But I'm gonna do it anyway. The lasers aren't gonna set fires or anything like that. They're actually being used to scare other birds away from interacting with the chickens in order to avoid any spread of avian flu, which will help to avoid having to call the chickens. We're living in the future, baby. I'm gonna start shooting a laser pointer at my nephew whenever he comes at me with a runny nose. Get away from me, goopy. And that's why you're not a parent and you should get away from me too. But come back on Wednesday for more tech news. I've got to get my NEVAI language lessons in. I'm trying to learn it before fire and ash. That's Avatar 3, so I don't have to use any subtitles. Hey, O lovay means until next time.