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Blimey. What? You want my home address? Like I'm inviting Xvideos.com over for a cuppa when a bloke's just trying to have some quiet time to herself. Ah, come off it. The UK's Online Safety act has officially gone into effect, requiring platforms that allow pornography to have strong age checks, a phrase that describes almost anything other than asking users to check a box if they're over 18 or although I like to imagine that worked for someone. According to UK regulator Ofcom, age verification pop ups are now the first thing displayed to UK users on not only around 6,000 adult websites, but on every major platform with adult content from Reddit to Twitter to Twitter for anxious people. Okay, but how do they verify user ages, especially when many British children sound like tiny lords and ladies Mother, I'm off to a cricket match with John. That kid sounds 40 years old. Ofcom recommends a number of methods, all of which risk compromising user privacy to some degree. In a completely unrelated development, there was a massive spike in searches for VPNs in the UK this week, leading to concerns that many moppets bop its and chavs will install free VPNs that are unsafe, potentially setting many gooners up for a rude awakening. Now, the BBC reported that platforms can't encourage the use of VPNs to get around the checks, but this smart guy noted that Ofcom's language indicates this is only true for child users. So it's still okay to encourage VPN use for adult users. So you just have to make sure it's an adult user and then you can tell them to use a VPN to get around the thing that will make sure it's an adult user. Except if you look at the actual guidelines PDF instead of the website, you can see that this isn't true. And the BBC was right originally this has been obscure. Tweet Takedown with Riley Moving on, if you're scared of VPNs and you're a gamer trying to get around Discord's new age verification in the UK, you can use Death Stranding's photo mode instead, as Discord is apparently fine with admitting an infinite amount of Norman Red Eye. But should age verification be required for Wikipedia? The Wikimedia foundation has challenged its status under the law and told the High Court of Justice this week that it could be forced to limit UK users access if the government doesn't acknowledge that no one's really going to Wikipedia to blow off some steam. All right? I mean, almost no one I'M sure there are some hidden gems in there. Seems like at the very least, the government might have to respond to this UK petition to to repeal the Online Safety act, which blew past its goal of 100k signatures as the tidal wave of age check popups started to hit. All those people were hoping that the UK repeals this law and gets back to passing legislation that actually matters, like editing their antitrust rules so Epic Games will bring Fortnite back to iOS do you hear the UK iPhone gamers screaming? This is bollocks. This is stupid. Intel just announced more layoffs, saying in its Q2 earnings report that it plans to have only 75,000 employees by the end of this year, which would mean around 24,000 jobs gone compared to the end of 2024. Team Blue has got to stop the bleeding, so it's even cutting entire countries. Plans to build facilities in Poland and Germany have been canceled, and an existing one in Costa Rica's being downsized. Perhaps most concerning is the company's SEC filing spotted by Semianalysis, which says that if they can't find a big customer, intel might have to pause or discontinue development of its Next Gen 14 a node and successor nodes. I'm gonna be frank here. I've covered intel for a long time and this feels like the sky is falling. And to make things worse, CEO Lipp Bhutan published a letter to employees with the plan for what they're focusing on going forward. And once again, there's no mention of of ARC GPUs. I'm starting to think no one's told them about those yet. Or even about our sponsor Saily, the global ESIM service that keeps you connected while traveling even to multiple countries. What, are you trying to impress someone? If so, I think downloading one ESIM for your whole trip with Saily's affordable prices for regional and global plans will do the trick. Oh, sorry. Were you looking forward to waiting in line at the airport to buy a local, potentially scammy SIM card that's an authentic cultural experience. You do you Saily ESIM plans are compatible with most iOS and Android devices, and if yours isn't compatible, you'll get a full refund with chat support available 24. 7. Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily ESIM data plans. Just download the Saily app and use code techlinked at checkout. Oh, it's quick bits time already. I felt bad for only doing English stuff. I won't touch whales though. They scare me. AMD has announced their non pro Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series will start shipping on July 31st, led by the 64 core 128 thread 9980X for $5,000. Mighty powerful, but it can't go in a handheld. Not the case for the Ryzen AI Max 395 aka Strix. Halo GPD has confirmed its upcoming Win 5 as the first handheld to be powered by this Monster Chip and YouTuber. The fox was able to share more details, like the fact that that it does not have an internal battery. It's got an external 80 watt hour unit that can clip onto the back of it like the giant heavy backpacks worn in high school by the kind of dorks that will buy this thing. Is it worth it? I'm kidding. I want to see it. I am dork. Dork me. Apple has launched Apple Care 1, a new $20 a month subscription that can cover up to three Apple devices, including ones you already own, as long as you take them to an Apple store to verify that they're in good condition. As far as device insurance goes, it's not bad, but as his gurmulousness Mark Gurman points out, the vast majority of people will pay 240 bucks a year for the next several years and never use it. But that's new income that Apple will desperately need to replace all the revenue from third party iOS apps that the EU is blocking them from collecting. Evil EU bad apple will be saved by all the maniacs who insist on using their phones without a case. The founder of the pebble smartwatch, Eric Migakovsky, has confirmed that the new Pebbles his company has been working on will be called Pebbles, which is good because everyone was already calling them Pebbles, and Pebble rolls off the tongue so much better than the new smartwatch made by the pebble guy or its previous official name, the Core two Duo. There was art. We already had that. Migakovsky secured the rights to use the pebble name once more, so it's now the Pebble 2 Duo. The Remix Reawakening Pebble 2 Duo again just some ideas and OpenAI will probably release GPT5 in August, according to Tom Warren at the Verge, based on his own sources. But it also lines up nicely with things Sam Altman has said recently, and with the fact that references to GPT5 were spotted in code for Microsoft's Copilot assistant, which is getting an appearance mode where it shall reveal its true form to you. A tiny, slightly unevenly shaped blob sounds about right, but maybe it won't stay that way. The CEO of Microsoft's AI subsidiary predicts that AI assistants may soon age like an organic being and maybe even have a room that it lives in. Maybe when it grows up a bit it can graduate from being a four formless CGI blob to controlling the new R1 humanoid robot from Chinese company Unitree, who once again couldn't resist having like the second thing its consumer marketed robot does in its launch video be punching and kicking Unitree. Hi. This is like the one thing we're hoping the friendly daily life robots don't do. They're all punching and kicking. They're not listening. They're having a good time. I don't wanna interrupt, but hey, feel free to interrupt me on Monday by clicking on the next TechLink video. When it goes up on that day, I won't be doing anything. I'll just be sitting right behind the thumbnail waiting. Maybe I should be working on my.