Daily Tech News 31 July 2023

• Sam Altman-Fried, CEO of OpenAI (corporate motto: In a world of Saurons, be a Saruman), has run into a snag with his new venture, Worldcoin: It is a transparent totalitarian takeover and existing governments don't appreciate anyone muscling in on their turf. (Tech Crunch)

  Worldcoin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's bid to sew up the market for verifying humanness by convincing enough mobile meatsacks to have their eyeballs scanned in exchanged for crypto tokens (yes, really), only started its official global rollout this week but it's already landed on the radar of European data protection authorities.
  
  Why should anyone feel the need to prove their humanness on the Internet? Well one reason is that by unleashing free power tools like ChatGPT Altman's generative AI company is leading the charge to make it harder to distinguish between bot-generated and human digital activity. But don't worry, he's got an eyeball-scanning orb-plus-crypto-token to sell humanity on for that!

  Tech Crunch is sounding almost appropriately cynical here.
  
  The idea behind Worldcoin is they will pay their victims - I mean, their early adopters, a small amount of cryptocurrency to have their retinas scanned and recorded.
  
  A cryptocurrency they just made up.
  
  And of which they have reserved a huge chunk for themselves.
  
  And trust them, they would never permit all that critical biometric data to be misused in any way.
  
  It's basically a credit card fraud ring combined with a massive Ponzi scheme, only with venture capital funding.

• The Biden Administration is planning to spend $100 million on products produced from "transformed climate pollution". (Energy.gov)
  
  You know what transforms "climate pollution"?
  
  Trees.
  
  On the plus side, $100 million is peanuts on the scale of things. A lot of peanuts, but still peanuts.
  
  
  
• Why do banks still use IBM mainframes? Because they work. (Ars Technica)
  
  That's it. That's the story.
  
  
  
• After one disastrous quarter, Intel has returned to profitability. (The Register)
  
  Good. They might not be my favourite company, but any company without adequate competition will turn rotten.
  
  
  
• Expect the Radeon 7700 and 7800 to be announced in three weeks. (Notebook Check)
  
  And to be priced at $449 and $549 respectively.
  
  The article gives price ranges of $399 to $449 for the 7700 and $499 to $549 for the 7800. But it also gives a price range of $579 to $649 for the 7900, and that has now been officially announced at $649.
  
  A $399 7700 would kill the 8GB 4060 Ti, and a $499 7800 would kill the 16GB version, so we shouldn't expect to see either.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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