Daily Tech News 1 January 2025

• It's not always the Chinese: A US soldier has been arrested for his role in hacking AT&T and Verizon and attempted extortion of the president and vice president. (Krebs on Security)
  
  This seems like a very poor choice of career paths for a soldier, but Cameron John Wagenius does not strike me as the sharpest spoon in the drawer:

  "In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked," Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple "#FREEWAIFU" tags. "You don't think we don't have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again."

  It turned out those plans involved going to prison for an extremely long time.
  

• April Fool's Day is still three months away, guys: 9to5Mac has named Apple's Vision Pro headset as its product of the year. (9to5Mac)
  
  The Vision Pro made history for being the first Apple product where more units were returned than were ever purchased in the first place.
  
  
  
• It didn't even live long enough to be bricked by a bad firmware update. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Good work, Facebook. Bonus points for telling customers that you weren't going to fix it and they had to buy a new device, before rapidly backtracking when legal woke up from their drunken stupor.
  
  
  
• What happened in AI in 2024? A whole lotta nothin'. (Simon Willison)
  
  Actually, while the industry leader OpenAI produced a whole lotta nothin', smaller AI companies and the open source community were busy eating their lunch. So as a whole not much changed, but the distribution of the nothin' changed greatly.
  
  Still, on consideration, Carthago delenda est.

  I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents.

  I don't know, maybe you could stop building the Torment Nexus.
  
  
  
• Though at least AI killed off $1600 laptops with 8GB of RAM. (Ars Technica)
  
  8GB in 2024 cost manufacturers about $8, and renders Windows almost unusable. Now I'm looking for something to kill off expensive 16GB laptops as well.
  
  Cheap 16GB laptops? Sure. Fine. Perfectly usable for basic tasks. But expensive ones can burn.
  
  
  
• The Verge's year in review: Advertising masquerading as content and miserable failures. (The Verge)
  
  But at least they tried. Sort of.
  
  
  
• Tech Crunch's year in review: Trying its hardest to be worse than The Verge. (Tech Crunch)
  
  A laudable effort if a questionable goal.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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