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The world moves fast, your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot okay, this is gonna sound weird, but I think I'm stuck in a time loop. Like I'm pretty sure I've done this exact episode before, but it doesn't matter that I'm trapped in an infinite cycle of delivering tech news until the heat death of the universe. You need to know about this computer stuff. Microsoft announced on Friday that Phil Spencer, CEO of their gaming division and more importantly, the guy you'd think of if someone said the Xbox guy is retiring. Spencer, who joined Microsoft in the 1900s and took over Xbox in 2014 after the disastrous Xbox One launch, is widely cred with turning the brand around. And despite being one of the public faces of an increasingly reviled tech giant lighting up the room with his boyish smile, Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving the company, which, according to the Verge's Tom Warren, many employees are relieved about. Bond had reportedly been pushing the Xbox Everywhere strategy that de emphasized console hardware in favor of mobile and cloud, gifting us with that most brilliant of marketing slogans, this is an Xbox, which ironically has made it harder than ever to say with certainty just what an Xbox is. It's this. That strategy coincided with three consecutive years of declining hardware revenue. Replacing Spencer is Asha Sharma, now former president of Microsoft's core AI division, which, given the Microslop moniker that Windows has picked up, is causing concern within the Xbox community. Sharma joined Microsoft just two years ago in 2024, and before that she was VP of Product and engineering at Meta and and chief operating officer at Instacart. This is fine. That corporate pedigree isn't inspiring optimism from Xbox fans and is causing outright concern for some that her background is a harbinger of Doom for their favorite console. Doom's a game. This is fine. After the announcement, Sharma laid out three commitments great games, the return of Xbox and the future of play, whatever that means. On AI, she drew a line saying, we will not chase short term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI. Slope games are and always will be art crafted by humans. Whether Sharma is the savior or executioner of Xbox remains to be seen. There's also a Third option where she sort of just continues keeping Xbox in a wraith like neither dead nor alive undead kind of state. Yeah, I think that's. That's the one. Probably Z box. Wikipedia has officially blacklisted Archive Today. The paywall bypassing tool, often confused with the nonprofit archive.org not the same after editors discovered it was fueling DDoS attacks and tampering with web snapshots. Following community discussion, English Wikipedia is purging roughly 695,000 links, citing security and reliability risks. Kind of like what your therapist might suggest you do with your ex's texts. The drama centers around the author of a blog called Gyrovag, Yanni Patokalio, who exposed some alleged aliases used by the Archive Today maintainer, including Denis Petrov and Masha Rabinovich. Rabanov. Whatever. In retaliation, Archive Today reportedly embedded malicious code in its Captchas to funnel DDoS traffic towards Gyroveg. Wikipedia editors also noticed that Archive Today was editing its captures of web pages. A blog post linked in a gyrobag article was tampered with to have its author change from Nora to Yani Patakilio again. Pedo Kaglio. It's the double L is messing me up. To top it all off, in an email exchange telling Padecaglio to delete his blog post, the Archive Today maintainer made bizarre threats about posting a osint, an open source intelligence investigation into Padecalio's Nazi grandfather, and creating a Gyro vag branded gay dating app, which is potentially the most terminally online threat ever. Ew. And we wouldn't want your socially conservative mother to see that, would we? No. Despite the chaos, the Archive Today person claimed this campaign turned out pretty well and plans to scale down the DDoS attacks. We just had a little bit of fun. It was just a little bit of fun. I'm done now, guys. Security researchers just blew the lid off Persona, the age verification provider. Discord got absolutely flamed for trying to quietly test on UK users. One of the researchers named Celeste found Persona's entire front end code base exposed to the open Internet on a US government server. And what was in those files goes way beyond checking your age. According to the hackers, Persona software performs 269 not nice. Individual verification checks, screening users against watch list for terrorism and espionage, comparing selfies to watch list photos, using facial recognition and flagging people as suspicious entities based on their face alone. Which explains why all my verification attempts kept returning as weird Vibe server error. Whenever I would wear a beret. Where did you get that beret? It's none of your artistic business. I like to smoke long cigarettes sometimes from Al Qaeda. The Internet rumor mill started spinning when the exposed code had references to a deployment named Onyx, which shares a name with an AI surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million. Critics online connected that to Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, being a major Persona investor, and then connected that to Thiel's co founding of of the surveillance firm Palantir, jumping to the conclusion that Persona had to be funneling biometric data to federal agencies. What other explanation could there be with so much circumstantial evidence? Well, here's what the researchers actually found. Zero direct references to ice, Palantir, or immigration enforcement in the source files. Solas publicly asserted this, noting that a lot of misinformation was spreading about their findings and wanting to set the record straight. The surveillance capabilities in the code are real, but the government conspiracy angle was not confirmed. To his credit, Persona CEO Rick Song didn't send lawyers. He emailed Celeste directly, acknowledged the exposed code was an oversight, and explained that the Onyx name actually came from a coworker's favorite Pokemon. It's a rock snake, you guys. I did not just think of that just now. Celeste asked Song to answer a number of questions in writing, and Song agreed. He then posted the full email exchange on X. And in the interest of transparency, Celeste credited Persona for fixing the issue quickly and acknowledged some of the flag security concerns were not severe. Reading through the emails, the exchange was constructive, civil, dare I say, flirty. And to summarize, the surveillance tools baked into Persona's code are real, so we'll keep our guard up for now. But whether they were ever pointed at discord users is unknown. And I'm shipping Celeste and Song hard right now. Almost as hard as I'm shipping our sponsor. Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you build a bespoke digital identity across your entire online presence. And thanks to their design intelligence, which combines two decades of design expertise with AI, anyone can build a beautiful personalized website tailored to their needs. 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Must Be Nice OpenAI CEO and Walking Snow Patrol Song Sam Altman attempted to justify AI's energy consumption at the AI Impact Summit by saying it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. So you know, the pizza pops, the water. He went on to drive home his lack of understanding of basic humanity by stating that it takes like 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart. I'm so sorry Sam. I never considered that by living life so inefficiently I might be taking power and water away from hard working AIs that would make better use of it than I ever could. I'm pooping half of this away at this point. Altman seems like the kind of guy who, when presented with the trolley problem, advocates for the trolley. You're just gonna switch the tracks. It's on. It's got places to be. AMD has allegedly stopped updating Windows drivers for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, a chip notably used in many popular gaming handhelds, according to posts on the Korean forum Dcinside, where a Lenovo support agent reportedly said there are no more plans for further updates. Similar claims have surfaced in Lenovo community threads and on Reddit. Notably, neither an Asus nor Lenovo have released a new Z1 extreme driver update in roughly 66 months, which adds some credence to the theory. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed any end of support, and the systems this chip is featured in are only 2 years old. But the Z2 is still getting regular updates, so what the heck amd? Where are the other ones? Maybe they just forgot about half the user base. You guys are still using those ew EW rumors suggest Intel's next mainstream desktop platform, codenamed Nova Lake S. The S meaning standard desktop, may not arrive until CES 2027. These leaks come from posts on Twitter and Weibo and were later echoed by Bench Life's post claiming AMD Zen 6 Olympic Ridge Desktop chips are also being delayed with the same time frame by the same time frame. Who the same time frame? None of this is confirmed yet. However, it would be nice to get a CES with some proper good old fashioned gaming CPUs for once. You know, go to Vegas for a reason. I mean, sooner is always better, but still. Researchers at MIT have developed a multi material 3D printer capable of producing a fully functional linear electric motor in a single print. Why should you care? This system uses four extrusion methods to deposit five different materials, including the conductive ones needed for, you know, electric motors. Vroom, vroom. Wait, no. What if you printed an electric motor gun? The only thing needed to be done after printing was to actually magnetize the motor's coil for it to work. And even more impressively, the total bill of materials only came to about 50 cents, potentially marking a huge breakthrough in electric motor manufacturing. I wonder if they sell things in their dorms with it. Maybe something rubbery. I think this is a sex toy joke. And Kohler just unveiled the Anthem Evo Cycle, a smart shower system that recirculates and filters your water in real time so you can stay clean while using less of it. It's like the bath of showers. You know you're in your own filth. After putting cameras in toilets, they've now moved on to creating a way for you to spray yourself with hot, filtered piss. It's even gold colored, for obvious reasons. And it also has other available smart accessories so you can listen to Jerry Jeff Walker's song Pissing in the Wind. Except now it's about showering while you clean out all those pesky jellyfish things. That's not advice, by the way. That actually makes it way, way worse. And whoever told our culture that that's a thing is horrifically wrong. David Schwimmer. And that's the show. Now I have to go fall in love with Andie MacDowell to break the loop or else I'm doing this shit again tomorrow. I never saw that one. I'll put that. You know what? I'm gonna put that on my movie list. I'm gonna put it.