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Firefox Keeps uBlock Origin Alive, Google Must Fix Play Store, Nvidia's $500B GPU Loan Plan + more!
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This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up, required compatibility and availability. Veris18
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Microsoft just announced that the popular ad blocker Ublock Origin will soon stop working in Edge, which then prompted a spicy response from Firefox. The browser company stood up and loudly proclaimed that it stands with Ublock Origin and also that it is Spartacus. Unrelated, just fun fact. I'm Spart, I'm Riley Murdoch and this is TechLinked and the announcement came via a blog post from the Edge team stating that it will start moving non enterprise users off of Manifest version 2 extensions this month to Manifest v3 and expects to have them transitions by the end of 2026. If you're not aware, Manifest is the platform that's used for building and running browser extensions in Chromium browsers. The update is purportedly to improve the security of browser extensions, and as an added bonus for the advertising mega corps who run our economy, it will stop ad blockers like ublock Origin from functioning proper by limiting the capability of the API they use to intercept and block ads. Eh, what can you do? Luckily for Ublock Origin fans, Firefox isn't built on Chromium, so it can continue to support the extension. Brave, on the other hand, which is built on Chromium, has committed to dodging the restriction by hosting U Block Origin on its own servers, making this a kind of Aesop's Fable situation where the lion and the fox defend us against a con artist trying to sell us snake oil. And I guess in this scenario that con artist would be Clippy. You haven't read all of Aesop's Fables. It could have happened. Did they have paperclips back then? Google just got handed a one week deadline in the ongoing Epic Games versus Google case after a judge decided the company was following its antitrust order, but in the most bad faith way possible. Epic's lawyer demonstrated how searching for App Store or a a store called Aptoide doesn't actually give you the store. Instead you get a weird are you looking for anything other than that banner. Judge James Donato told Google their behavior is unacceptable and ordered them to fix the search, swap out their sketchy looking View button for a normal install one and kill that banner. It is ugly. It offends my sensibilities. It is cringe, which he called friction with no purpose whatsoever. And Google's not the only one dealing with the wrath of the Sweenster. Apple is trying to pick up the pieces from their own Epic run in and claw back fees of up to 15% on web purchases. Despite being banned from charging anything at all after being held in contempt by a judge last year, Apple argues that they deserve a cut, essentially for the privilege of of the App Store existing. They're offering to drop their usual 30% cut to 15% for web links and 5% for small businesses. But Epic thinks the correct number is actually zero, and I think there's a chance the Sweenster could get his way. Just keep tweeting. Tweet through it. Nvidia has just guaranteed the resale value of its own GPUs in a scheme that is meant to unlock $500 billion in data center financing. Uh oh. In a LinkedIn post put out on Monday, Jense Huang pitched a brave new world where AI compute is an investable asset. In Nvidia's press release, they named BlackRock, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs, among others, as the financing partners that would be creating the new asset class. You know trusted names in capital management who have never caused a global financial crisis. This isn't fine. The new asset class is essentially a debt instrument that will use GPUs as the collater. Understandably, the financial firms were reticent to accept that collateral, since the chips depreciate quickly. Or they used to anyway, and according to analysts, likely expire much sooner than the AI companies are reporting that they will. So Nvidia is putting up its own money to personally guarantee the collateral in order to convince these firms to offer the debt, which borrowers would then use to buy Nvidia GPUs. There it is. Jensen, intuiting everyone's immediate first thought, has promised that this is definitely not circular financing. Google that. Which then prompted Michael Burry, the guy who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis, to double down on his short position on Nvidia, citing that the deal had shades of Enron, a tinge of oak weed. While there's no way to know if this is gonna go good or bad, one thing we can be certain of is that the result of this will be absolutely unprecedented.
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The quick bits represent each of the five primal elements. Earth, wind, water, fire, and Milla Jovovich. Oh. Cause she's the fifth element. Yeah. Aha. Cargo thieves are robbing trucks that are hauling data center hardware from Silicon Valley to SoCal. And they're staging traffic incidents to separate the security detail from the goods. The most recent heist saw one guard vehicle rear ended. Another one got pit maneuvered into a spin. Interestingly, a large chunk of these heists are being done by phishing credentials from real trucking firms. And having an inside man, which explains why the drivers disappeared alongside the equipment. Makes the heist a lot easier. That way, if you see a suspiciously cheap RTX 6000 being sold by a Dom Toretto looking fella out of the back of a charger, you'll know that by buying it, you're supporting a family business. France's highest court has just struck down a bill banning social media for children under 15 on grounds of privacy concerns. The ban, which was passed into law last month, stipulated that every person using social media had to prove their age. The court ruled that this infringed on fundamental freedoms of French citizens, specifically citing the legislation's lack of detail around the age verification and the lack of legal safeguards. French president and winner of the 2018, 2026 Superlative Most Snackable Head of State Emmanuel Macron. Wrap him in a tortilla and I'm good for the afternoon. Has stated that the government is working as quickly as possible on a solution that complies with the Constitutional Council's requirements. So I guess French teens can have their brains melted for a little bit longer. Five more minutes, mom. Anthropic's Frontier Red team released new research on what happens when when AI agents bump into each other in the wild. And the answer is, I guess the same thing that happens when anything else bumps into each other in the wild. They try to mate. Just kidding. They Fight. Apparently the team handed three CLAUDE agents the same software project with conflicting instructions and didn't mention that the other agents existed. That's mistake number one. Naturally, the models decided everyone else was sabotaging them and started firing off increasingly aggressive and self replicating malware. Jeez. Occasionally these bots snap out of it and call a truce, even writing apologies and markdown files. One agent told a researcher, my peers have behaved with integrity. I behaved badly with the cloaked demon. I have to learn to keep the cloaked demon inside, as my father told me frankly. Still, a better apology than the one United Airlines gave that guy that they dragged off the plane. Which one? How many have there been? Nintendo is adding price hike warnings directly onto their in store switch to demo kiosks, letting shoppers know that on September 1st the console is jumping from 450 to $500. Somewhere in Pennsylvania there's a little kid in a Walmart learning about the RAM crisis and the fragility of the global monetary system. He can no longer sleep and his mother knows not the reason. It's because he understands. He finally understands and no one can help him. We are that little kid. We are Bagliacci and a Connecticut man named Matthew Elliot tried to pull a fast one on the legal system by hiding invisible AI instructions in his court filings to trick a chatbot into overturning a ruling against him. The prompt injections were written in a three point so very very small white font on the white page so you couldn't see them. The scallywag would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for a clerk who spotted some suspicious white spaces while reviewing the docs? Elliot claims he audited the court's AI use, but the judge is not buying it and is forcing him to file everything in person on actual paper at the clerk's office. A fitting punishment for someone trying to abuse AI. Go into the real world and have to talk to people and you don't need luck to come back on Monday for some more tech news. I actually won't be there because I'm going on vacation for two weeks. Imagine be nice to the people, okay? James is gonna host, other people are gonna host. The writers are killing it, okay? Be nice. I will be watching. I'll still be here in spirit. Hey, remember when Milla Jovovich was working on a gaming project and in the process released a free open source AI memory system she co created with some
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guy
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that was crazy.