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Valve Game Console Imports, German Domain Outage, Google Chrome AI Downloads + more!
00:09:23
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Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC.
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And for a limited time, college students
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get the best of both worlds.
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Get the unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 terms@ aka mscollegepc valve just
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imported around 50 tons of game consoles from China, and you know what that means. Maybe Steam machines, which is great news for us, but probably a tough day for the customs agent staring at a manifest that jumps from container two to container four. Cause you know valve can't count to three. I'm Linus Sebastian, this is TechLinked, and according to customs records dug up by the Verge, recent shipments by Valve totaled to nearly 100 tons in just the past two months. But what's really interesting is that the new containers are noticeably lighter than the previous ones, suggesting that the delayed Steam Machine or Steam Frame VR headsets may be contained inside them. Or they could just be even more Steam decks, and we're gonna look really stupid in a few weeks. Either way, optimism is high. Not all is well in Valveland, though. The Steam controller instantly sold out on launch day, so if you were hoping to get 1:31 minutes after they were released, the joke's on you. But the good news is that alongside Valve announcing that more stock is coming, they've also released the controller's CAD files under a Creative Commons license. So if you can't wait, you can 3D print the shelf or the controller, and then sit in front of a cardboard box to just hallucinate the gaming experience. Nintendo approves you. You can be just like an AI. Meanwhile, in Germany, millions of websites and apps using their.default suddenly disappeared from the Internet for hours on Tuesday night, including Amazon.de, dHL, Steam and Germany's Transit app. The outage was traced to Denic, the organization that manages Germany's.dep country code domain, after the registry distributed faulty cryptographic signatures. Dnick explained in a blog post that the bad signatures went out during a routine key exchange, though they're still investigating the exact chain of events that led to it. Per Cyber News Network engineers suspect that D Nick fumbled a scheduled key swap that the registry runs every five weeks. The faulty keys caused any DNS lookup targeting a.de site to fail security checks, which brought the whole system crumbling to its knees. You gotta love single points of failure, don't you? According to D Nick, the issue is now resolved and the population of Deutschland is back to enjoying German Internet, which I believe operates like the regular Internet, except the series of tubes is filled with meat of course. Sorry, that joke was the worst. You know what's even worse is Google Chrome has been silently downloading a 4 gigabyte AI model file to some user devices without asking permission. Evidently they've decided it's just time to rip the AI band aid off and everybody's using it with or without permission. Evidently anyone with AI features enabled and compatible hardware is receiving the model, so we're talking potentially hundreds of millions of devices. Privacy researcher Alexander Henf first flagged the behavior, and users who tried to delete the file have reported that Chrome will simply redownload it. So to get rid of it you need to go to Settings then system and toggle off on device AI. Hempf also states that the practice likely violates a whole mess of EU privacy laws and if it were to be launched on all devices, would consume an estimated 240 gigawatt hours of energy. Which is way more energy than I need to do this Easy, light, breezy segue to our sponsor Jawa.
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Global shipping costs are out of control, but we've got a way to fight back. That's right, Shipstorm has returned. From April 24 to May 7, you can get free shipping sitewide on lttstore.com of orders over $150 in the US and Canada or $225 worldwide now. No special code required. Just load up your cart and you're good to go. And if you want an even lower threshold for free shipping, you can sign up for our Supporter plus tier at floatplane.com for an even better offer. We'll have that linked down below all the other cool kids and me. We call it the QBs, but their scientific name is actually Quickeus Bitius. Oh, you said, you said it. That's not it kind of Notepad creator Don Ho is threatening legal action over an unofficial macOS port on of Notepad, but according to Hou, it's not the port itself that's the problem. It's that the unofficial site uses the Notepad name and branding wholesale, and even lists Hou himself as a contributor, which he very much denies being. Hou is asking users to reply to any social media posts that are hyping up this port with a copy pasted disclaimer, effectively crowdsourcing his cease and desist. So it's less Control C and more control cease I said your Don's a Hoe. An unclosable popup on Reddit's mobile site has been prompting users to download the app to keep browsing, and apparently it's on purpose. A Reddit spokesperson told Ars Technica that it is targeting frequently logged out mobile users, which of course are the exact people who keep saying they don't want the app. Reddit insists, though, you will like it once you stop avoiding it. And to that I comment. Well, actually, I comment nothing because I'm stuck behind a popup. Look at me, I'm stuck behind a popup. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google, DeepMind and Xai have signed deals with the US center for AI Standards and Innovation letting the government review their Frontier models before they are released to the public. Which, according to the New York Times, is a sharp reversal of the US Administration's hands off approach to regulating top AI labs. This new deal will vet models for cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical weapons risks before they are released, which, fingers crossed, will keep us safe from any Terminator adjacent apocalypses. Aw, I mean, I wouldn't bet on Polymarket about it. Even though the world is apparently a casino now. You just did insider trading. Microsoft's Edge browser apparently has a habit of storing passwords in place plain text memory, as cybersecurity researcher Tom Running disclosed. Interestingly, Edge is the only chromium browser that's doing this. But despite running's warning, Microsoft downplayed the threat, stating that if someone can read your memory, you're already compromised anyway. It's part of a bold new cybersecurity philosophy called why lock the safe if they're already in the house? I mean, they do have a point, but also, so does he. And Energizer has a point. Their new Ultimate Child Shield button batteries are designed to prevent chemical burns that occur when toddlers accidentally swallow them. This is a great move, as roughly 3,500 people a year ingest button batteries in the US alone. And lithium batteries are apparently especially fatal, as they can burn through stomach tissue. Good Lord. The new battery features a Sorry. The new battery features a special coating that blocks current on contact with saliva, but conducts normally inside electronics. As one toddler on Weddit wrote, we Joyce final we da forbidden coins. Ah, back on the menu. I don't know what that voice was supposed to be, but you know what? I know I'm gonna see you guys on Friday when tech news is back on the menu. In fact, it's the only thing that's ever been on the menu. We're like one of those food stands that only serves one thing. We're like the opposite of Cheesecake Factory. Cheese fake factory, man. Cheese fake factory. More like Haha. What do you have against Cheesecake Factory.