Daily Tech News 14 September 2024

• OpenAI's new AI o1 is like having an autistic nine-year-old as a personal assistant with all of the expense and none of the comic moments. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ask it if you need to rent an AirBNB for Thanksgiving to provide more oven space, and rather than telling you that you're an idiot and that you can buy benchtop ovens from Walmart starting at $50, it does the analysis and comes up with a painfully detailed list of pros and cons all of which you already know.
  
  
  
• This drivel is what OpenAI believes will drive it to a market valuation of $150 billion. (Reuters) (archive site)
  
  Bubble? Scam? Delusion? Fraud?
  
  Or all of the above?
  
  
  
• Quick update from yesterday: That offer from Boeing that unionised employees rejected as a bad deal, appears to truly have been a bad deal.
  
  I'm looking for an article that gives the full details that I can link to, but have come up dry so far.

• Sam Bankman Fried is appealing his conviction on fraud charges relating to his theft of $10 billion in customer funds. (Coin Telegraph)
  
  His core claim - most of them amount merely to waah - is that FTX was never insolvent because by a miracle of timing, the company's Bitcoin assets inflated enough to make all its customers whole.
  
  Which... Uh. I'd have to know more about the exact details of the charges and the underlying laws than I really care to, to comment on that.
  
  If you try to scam people selling a penny stock in a failed silver mine in Arizona, and you suddenly find that it's just loaded with high grade platinum group deposits worth billions, did you scam anyone but yourself?
  
  
  
• Google is rolling out its Gemini chatbot to you whether you like it or not. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's in Chrome and there's an even more invasive version in Android.

  I thought I might try this out so I went to the page on the Play Store and read about the data policy. Telemetry-wise it requires basically everything. Just an utter firehose of everything on your phone straight to Gemini.
  
  Google already tracks a lot of my online life and I'm sure the analytics are fed to their AI's in various ways, but I'm not quite comfortable looking the beast in the face and just throwing myself into its mouth like that.

  If you gaze too long into the mouth of the beast, you get chomped.
  
  
  
• Now that Annapurna's entire game development division has fled the company, it can focus on what really matters: Movies about women who think they are turning into dogs. (The Verge)
  
  It's called Nightbitch.
  
  I watched the trailer. It's actually worse than the Minecraft movie.
  
  
  
• Australia's Stalinist government, which is moving to stamp out free speech everywhere in the world, is deeply upset at being mislabeled as fascist. (The Register)
  
  Prime Minister Whatsisname said "The fascists have nothing on us."
  
  
  
• Meanwhile senators from Australia's Khmer Vert party are threatening to fine supermarkets for price gouging. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  They pointed out that across Australia and New Zealand, our largest supermarket chain has made an unconscionable net profit in the past financial year of, uh, 0.15%.
  
  
  
• People will start buying new computers and upgrading to Windows 11 real soon. (The Register)
  
  Any day now. Yep. Any day now.
  
  
  
• Apple's Vision Pro exposes your passwords. (Wired) (archive site)
  
  Vision Pro lets you type just by looking at a virtual keyboard.
  
  It also presents a virtual avatar on video calls that tracks your eye movements.
  
  So... Yeah. Not a great combination, Apple.
  
  This is like the stone age exploit where the send and receive indicators on modems were wired directly to the data lines, so all you needed was a high-speed camera and you could siphon off every single bit.
  
  
  
• 23andMe is paying $30 million to settle a lawsuit over leaking its customers genes. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Also, ew.
  
  
  
• United Airlines is planning to equip all of its planes with Starlink. (MSN)
  
  And free wifi.
  
  
  
• If you were looking for a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mini-PC here's one from Beelink. (Liliputing)
  
  Looks like it has two M.2 slots for storage and up to 32GB of soldered RAM. Which is basically enough, but I'd like to see a 64GB model.
  
  One USB4 port, five other slower USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and two audio jacks.
  
  
  
• And here's one from AOOSTAR. (Notebook Check)
  
  This is similar, but offers three M.2 slots and an OCuLink port (basically x8 PCIe over a cable) for external GPUs.
  
  At the front.
  
  
  
• 1.3 million Android streaming boxes have been backdoored and nobody knows how except that some of them were running a bootleg Android version from 2016 which is a pretty big hint. (Ars Technica)
  
  These are mostly dirt cheap no-name models sold in poorer countries; Brazil seems to be hardest hit.
  
  
  
• Intel has signed a $3.5 billion deal to make secure chips for the US military. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
  
  Which makes sense, because the other fabs owned and operating in the US tend to be specialised (Micron) or running on older process nodes (Texas Instruments).
  
  But it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Intel has squandered.
  
  
  
• If you want a tiny Apple IIe I guess this is your lucky day. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And when I say tiny, it's dwarfed by an original model Macintosh... Mouse.
  
  
  
• Why is online advertising so uniformly awful? (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, it's a combination of advertisers realising that online ads don't work, so that advertising rates collapsed and everyone scrambled for what was left, and Google and Facebook taking 95% of the ad delivery pie leaving everyone else to scramble for what was left, so that smaller sites were left scraping the bottom of the barrel and showing ads explaining how and why you should shove an entire bar of soap up your arse.
  
  Smaller sites in this case being The New York Times.
  
  
  
• Consumer Reports warns of high levels of lead in cinnamon. (Ars Technica)
  
  Levels so high that if a child were to eat as few as eighty cinnamon rolls in a single day they could reach the CDC's recommended safety limit.
  
  
  
• Paramount TV has shut down. (TV Tonight)
  
  Paramount TV was in the process of remaking Time Bandits as a television series - without the dwarves.
  
  Unfortunately CBS is picking up all the shows currently in production rather than cancelling them as they mostly deserve.
  
  
  
• The winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize have been announced. (Ars Technica)
  
  Some of these are actually interesting, like the demonstration of how a dead trout can swim upstream, and some are scientifically solid, like the investigation that showed clusters of extremely long-lived individuals are closely correlated with shoddy government record-keeping.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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