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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply more Tech.
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News Stop the ride. I wanna get off. You can't. Time marches on. You're gonna be a cyborg soon. Accept it. Reviews are in for Intel's long awaited Arc B580 gaming graphics card, and there is a consensus it's good. At just 250 bucks, the card consistently outperforms the more expensive RTX 4060 and RX 7600 at both 1080p and 1440pMeaning for once, Intel's first party benchmarks acted just like Shakira's hips. They don't lie. They didn't lie. The upgraded ray tracing and XESS2 upscaling worked pretty well, if not quite as efficiently as Nvidia's. And while frame generation only officially works in one game right now, F1 24, it's super good. While many are celebrating the launch of a certified budget friendly banger after Intel's awkward launch of its first gen ARC cards, Nvidia and AMD will almost certainly be unveiling their own next gen cards in the next couple of months. Nvidia's RTX 50 series was just teased in the new trailer for the Witcher 4, which Nvidia just helpfully pointed out in case you didn't understand what was meant by trailer pre rendered on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU. Oh, did anyone see that? What could it mean? Oh, leaks claiming to show a third party case for the Nintendo Switch 2 have been circulating for a couple of weeks now, and I'm no longer able to block them out of my mind because freaking dbrand posted a 3D animated mockup for their own case. So maybe now we have to take the leak seriously. Or maybe we don't because it's dbrand. Ugh. The other leaks show what may be telltale signs of AI image generation, or maybe it's upscaling, but either way it would be super easy to create your own mockup and pass it off like this YouTuber switchup. Actually, 3D printed a model based on the leaks so you can get a feel of what the Switch 2 might look like. Damn it, dbrand. Or you can get excited about much more reliable images of Lenovo's upcoming Legion Go. S handheld. Posted by chronic leaker Evan Blass it's allegedly a more affordable model without the detachable controllers that some are speculating may run steamos due to the built in Steam button. Now it's totally possible it still runs Windows, and that's just a Steam shortcut we can't know. Which I'm gonna say is also somehow dbrand's fault. Blass also blasted over some images to the verge of a larger, more proper successor to the original Legion Go with an OLED display, so expect these to make an appearance at CES next month, along with an updated version of the Lenovo Legion glasses that will let you play games on a virtual display while looking like the guy from CSI Miami. Whoa, is that Horatio? Come on, take the glasses off. I'm playing Elden Ring Google has announced Android xr, a new operating system to power headsets and smart glasses until Google doesn't feel like doing that anymore. But unlike Project Tango and Google Daydream, Android XR is gonna stick because it's part of the Gemini era, which we're already nearly two years into. That's like 84 Google years. Google published a bunch of very Vision Pro esque demos of what they hope the software will look like, although to their credit they also let a number of journalists and influencers try it out on an unannounced Samsung standalone headset running a Snapdragon XR2 gen 2. So there must be something real here. That unit is powered by an external battery pack, but Google's also reportedly making progress on smart glasses with an embedded display in optionally prescription lenses. In all of their marketing materials for Android xr, Google can't not mention how them caring about AR again has been made possible by Gemini, Gemini Gemini. Please tell your friends and neighbors about Gemini. They don't even know they're in the Gemini era. Must be horrible. And then tell them about my favorite sponsor, Seasonic. I'm always in my Seasonic era. Hey, look at their Vertex series of power supplies including the GX1000. Did you know it's a great choice for most builds. It's both silent and power efficient, plus it doesn't hallucinate seasonic PSUs are backed by a 10 year warranty because they've been making them for 43 years. They're so old and wise, so check them out at the link in the description and grab one for your next build. Okay, you're already half cyborg at this point. You might as well stick around for the quick bits. For day six of OpenAI's 12 days of announcements, they added real time video input to ChatGPT's advanced voice mode a day after Google beat them to the punch with their own experimental version. But OpenAI also added a Santa voice. Just do not let your kids talk to him. He's too honest. He won't hold back. For day seven, OpenAI added a projects feature to ChatGPT, which collects stuff Cool. Hey, did you know you can talk to the AI podcast hosts in Notebook LM now and tell them they're not real? See what happens Mozilla removed the Do Not Track setting in Firefox this week because really, all it does is ask websites not to track you, and hardly any of them actually listen. Mozilla says it's better to use a newer setting based on the Global Privacy Control standard, but as PC Gamer and others point out, GPC simply asks websites not to sell the data that it already collected from you. This actually lines up with other recent moves Mozilla has made to standardize collecting and selling truly anonymous data, leaving it bland and tasteless. I mean, if you can't blackmail someone with it, what's the point? Microsoft recently re released a preview build of Recall, its controversial Activity History feature for Copilot PCs, promising increased security and privacy. And it's already screenshotting credit cards and Social Security numbers. Okay, Tom's hardware found that the Filter Sensitive information setting, which is toggled on by default and is supposed to block that behavior, only really worked on a couple of shopping websites. To be fair, it is still in preview and Microsoft's letting people test it so they can fix this kind of stuff by asking the AI to please stop doing that. That's what software Dev is now the European Union's oversight body has confirmed that an ad campaign commissioned by the European Commission broke the EU's own data protection rules. The finding was triggered by a complaint from digital rights nonprofit noib, who pointed out that the Commission used Data Driven Micro Targeting in a campaign to sway public opinion on a controversial EU legislative proposal known as Chat Control. The EU data protection supervisor has issued a reprimand to the European Commission, but not a fine due to the risk of taking this too far and having Europe explode due to a logical error. Does not compute. Oh no, wait, it's Europe. Does not compute and the 2024 Game Awards happened last night and while The Half Life 3 rumors were obviously incorrect, there were some cool game announcements, which you can see on screen here, because if I point any of them out specifically, you'll comment. No mention of Xenostar, Sword Chronicles, Road to Valyria? No, no mention. I will tell you which game won game of the year, though. Astrobot, probably, because it was a really good game. It would also be really good if you came back here on Monday for more tech news. And watch out for any autonomous cars on the way over. Waymo says its cars are officially certified against crashing into emergency vehicles now, which they apparently weren't before, despite driving on the road for a long time. So just be careful, okay?