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Daily Tech News 8 March 2024

Top Story

• The worst person in the world just made a good point: EU Bookburner General Thierry Breton has confirmed his agency is investigating Apple over its decision to cancel Epic Games' developer account. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple did this specifically to prevent Epic Games opening its own app store as is permitted under the new EU regulations.
  
  Breton pointed out that the regulations that force Google and Apple to open up their platforms also forbid those companies from using pretexts to keep their platforms effectively closed.
  
  As we've seen, the EU isn't shy about fining American companies billions of dollars, because for them it's free money.
  
  And it's reached a point where I don't blame them. Watching one group of communist bleed another group of communists dry is better entertainment than you can find almost anywhere.
  
  
  

Tech News

• JEDEC has published the specifications for next-generation graphics memory, GDDR7. (AnandTech)
  
  GDDR7 is 50% faster than GDDR6 - because it uses trinary.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 (and the horribly named USB4 Version 2.0) also use trinary.
  
  With GDDR7 the data inside the chip is still ones and zeroes, but the interface uses 1, 0, and -1.
  
  The spec also supports chip sizes up to 64Gb - including intermediate sizes at 24Gb and 48Gb - though only 16Gb is expected initially.
  
  
  
• The House Commerce Committee has voted 50-0 to force Bytedance to divest TikTok to some other owner not directly under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party. (Ars Technica)
  
  TikTok got its insane userbase to contact their congressmen - or just any random congressmen - and threaten to unalive themselves if the app was banned, but this had shockingly little effect. (Engadget)
  
  (Not that TikTok's userbase is that much different to any other social platform. People are dumb.)
  
  Worth noting that TikTok is banned in China.
  
  
  

All Tech Companies Suck Rant of the Day



I just bought a Moto G54 because (a) Motorola phones run a pretty clean version of Android, (b) it has a headphone jack and a microSD slot, (c) it has pretty good specs, with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, an FHD+ screen, dual A78 cores and six A55 cores, and a 50 megapixel main camera with image stabilisation, and (d) it was dirt cheap at under $130 including sales tax and delivery.

Turns out they make you jump through hoops and void your warranty if you want to unlock the bootloader and install a fully open source operating system but with all the other nonsense going on I'm finding it hard to get outraged. Yeah, it's sucky behaviour, but what am I going to do, pay four times as much for a three year old iPhone that is locked down harder than Motorola could ever dream of?


But Not as Much as a Certain Vtuber Company Video of the Day



Nijisanji's standard contract has leaked - the English language version, since it's a Japanese company - and though it's quite long it all boils down to two simple points:

1. We own you.
2. We owe you nothing.

There's a clause in there that if you are deemed to have "betrayed" the company, they can not only fire you without further notice but claw back everything they have paid you for the past twelve months.

There's another clause that they can force their vtubers to make appearances and issue press releases - which I suspect is what they used on Elira in the infamous hostage video - and another where they can force you to relocate at your own expense.

Oh, and there's another clause that they can change the contract at any time and the next time you stream you are automatically considered to have accepted the new terms. Of course, streaming is the only way you can make money, but see points 1 and 2 above.

People still sign up for this because big vtubers make good money - solid six figures after YouTube and the agency take their cuts - but that's limited to Hololive (which has forty talents with over a million subscribers each) and a handful of others. Smaller corporations and independent channels have a tough a hard time of it.

Secret Lives of Vegetables Video of the Day

Two of those handful of others are Filian - who hosted the annual vtuber awards recently - and Dokibird, who broke out of Nijisanji and kicked off much of the recent drama, both very successful independent vtubers.

Here Dokibird explains to Filian explain what is really going on.




Disclaimer: Nijisanji is basically a cat in corporate form.