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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
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Quick, quick drop, whatever you're doing and intel seems to have implicitly confirmed rumors that they'll release a more powerful ARC battlemage gpu. If some tweets are anything to go by, and when are they not? In response to multiple fans pleading for an Arc B770, which would sit above the existing B570 and B580 in Intel's naming scheme, the official Intel Twitter account replied with various versions of ST Stay tuned with an eyes emoji which in influencer means Watch this space sparkles. Despite not having officially confirmed the existence of the B770, intel said another fan who wants one is a gamer with great taste and called the card which so far only exists in liminal space, a solid pick. Which is like me congratulating you on picking me for your baseball team. Yeah, I might show up, but my schedule's all up in the air right now. Now intel said the same thing to the one reply guy or gal who asked about a be, which makes me think either they're also making that card or this account is like an AI that will also tell you to stay tuned when you ask for an Intel ARC BLT cheese sandwich. But really, who knows what we're gonna see at Computex next week. There have been rumors about a 24 gig version of the ARC B580, which is probably actually a pro card. But another fresh rumor this week indicates a third party card manufacturer is is prepping a dual GPU graphics card with 2B580 chips on a single board. Maybe they'll be stacked like a cheese sandwich. Stay tuned. Google is testing out adding an AI mode button to the main search page. Users have reported seeing it replace the I'm feeling lucky button that takes you directly to these top result of your search while others report seeing it as an additional button in the search bar. So to make sure I understand, Google forced AI overviews into your normal searches and made you first perform an AI enabled search before you can even select the option to search without AI. And instead of making normal web searches more accessible, they're adding an extra button that injects even more AI that very well might tell you that rocks are edible. Very cool. We're making products for human people, we're not being evil. Got it? But you know what? It's okay because Google is offsetting this nonsense with improved spam and scam protections for for Android which will stop you from disabling Google Play, protect sideloading or granting extra permissions while on a call. And it'll warn you about scams if you open a banking app while screen sharing with an unknown contact, which probably should just also not do that. These add to the existing scam detection tools in calls and messages added this year, which are entirely processed on device supposedly. And oh, there's also a new key verifier feature that will let you confirm the identity of the contact you're talking to using cryptographic keys. Somebody send this to the Department of Defense stat. Google also showed off and confirmed the new design language that had previously leaked coming with Android 16 called Material 3 expressive, which is definitely going to bring in so many gen zers who were like I thought Android was cringe, but I see myself here. Color blocks on the Google logo, make that a gradient and I'm on board. Watch this space. House Republicans have slipped language into the proposed budget reconciliation bill that could ban US states from enforcing any locally passed AI regulations for 10 years. It's a strange move because the rest of the bill is about completely unrelated stuff like cuts to Medicaid. But it's not the only wacky AI related bill in the House right now. Senator Tom Cotton introduced his own bill that proposes putting tracking chips in all high performance AI processors so we can protect children. This kind of legislation is going to be relevant because the Trump administration just rescinded Biden's AI Diffusion rule, which was horribly named to be fair, that placed strict limits on US companies shipping AI chips, although China's, you know, still a no go. The Middle east, however, is fair game, which is why Saudi Arabia's hot new AI company, Humane with with an I in it. So it's Humayun is immediately buying $10 billion worth of AMD GPUs and 18,000 Nvidia GPUs to start, while the United Arab Emirates wants to buy over a million GPUs. Okay, hold on there Sparky. I mean they're gonna need chips to power all of these data centers being built over there in the desert. Because according to a recent statement from the US Commerce Department, anyone using Huawei's ascend AI chips anywhere in the world could be subject to disciplinary action by the us. And also don't make fun of the tariffs online. It's bad for the nation's youth. You know what's good for the youth? Video games like our sponsor War Thunder. The game that immerses you in intense combat with more than 2,500 incredibly detailed tanks, planes, helicopters and ships, and one of the most sophisticated vehicle damage models in gaming. We're talking individual components like engines, fuel tanks, weapons and even crew members. This is still a video game. They're a component all susceptible to damage or disabling by enemy shells or missiles, different types of which behave differently according to the type of armor you have equipped. You can learn about how all of those things interacted to cause you to blow up using the X ray view, which would be great to have in real life. Join a worldwide community of over 70 million players in one of the most comprehensive vehicle combat games ever made. Check out War Thunder for free today on PC, console and mobile using our links okay, you're still watching. That's good. I thought I saw you looking at reels for a second there. Hey, hey, eyes up here. Yesterday Samsung announced the Galaxy S25 Edge, which does not have a curved edge on the screen like the discontinued Edge phones from days of yore. This Edge is just amazingly thin and an amazing example of the exact reasons why everyone reacted to rumors of ultra thin phones with but why? With a 6.7-inch screen, the S25 Edge is basically an S25 but worse, while being slightly more expensive. At $1,100 US, the battery is 1,000 milliamp hours smaller at 3,900. It's got weaker wired only charging and no telephoto lens. And while it's got a 200 megapixel main camera now it uses the same size sensor as the 50 megapixel one in the rest of the lineup. On the plus side though, you won't get bullied for having a phone with a normal thickness. I don't get it. Nintendo published proper tech specs for the Switch 2, so the digital Foundry team at Eurogamer, who did a lot of Switch 2 hardware sleuthing before the official announcement dove into analysis mode. The biggest takeaway is that the Switch 2 has a much larger gap in performance between handheld and docked mode, probably partially due to the new dock and having a fan in it. So get hyped to play on the tv, but don't be disappointed when you can't see the sweat glistening on your cyborg. GF in cyberpunk wouldn't be a problem with a real girl, you'd see their sweat just fine. And that's just an idea. Users who bought a lifetime subscription to VPN provider VPN Secure had those subscriptions canceled because the company's new owners say they had never heard about it when they were in the buying process. It's not their fault, nobody told me. After enduring customer backlash, the new VPN Secure agreed to give the lifetime sub holders two free years. So I guess after that they'll die. Thanks. Couple super quick bits here, because I didn't know where else to put them. HBO is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max, two years after rebranding as just Max, in an effort to signal that it's not just the Sopranos and stuff on there. There's a lot of worse shows, too, and Uber has announced Uber Route share, routeshare, whatever you want, which involves drivers following set routes and arriving at stops every 20 minutes. Yes, it's a bus. This Silicon Valley innovation is relentless, and scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics in Amsterdam built a robot powered entirely by air, being pushed through tubes like a wacky inflatable tube man. But he's alive now, apparently without any programming. The robot's leg movements begin as a chaotic mess, but then naturally synchronize through the power of raw physics. Unlike other robots, which don't involve physics at all, the bot even switches to an alternating limb method in Water Wild. I'm not gonna lie, though. The real reason I included the story is because Ars Technica's title and subtitle sounds like a string of creative insults. You're a brainless robot that runs on air. You're a stotting gazelle that swims like a dog. You have an air of stilted vapidity about you. Begone. Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. Okay, look, how about to make it up to you, you come back here on Friday for more tech news and we'll call it even, okay? Don't look away yet.