2024-08-19 Microsoft Slams the Door.txt

Well, well, well.
Look what the cat dragged in.
I'm just kidding.
It's great to see you.
Also, that's a weird insult.
Microsoft has apparently patched a popular loophole
that allowed users to install Windows 11 on PCs
that don't meet the outlandish hardware requirements.
Why convince people to download your OS
when you can just make it harder to upgrade
for those who actually want to?
This particular trick allowed anyone to bypass
the TPM 2.0 chip requirement of Windows 11
by tricking the OS's setup file into thinking your machine was a server.
Not a host.
That's another computer and restaurant word.
Unfortunately, Twitter user TheBobPony
discovered that the most recent insider build of Windows now
also requires servers to have TPM 2.0 support.
This isn't the case in normal Windows yet,
but chances are they'll be rolling out an update soon.
And that could leave you with a non-functional system
if you use this workaround to install Windows 11.
There are still other methods to install Windows 11 without having TPM 2.0.
For example, open source utility
Rufus apparently has its own workaround too.
I doubt Microsoft is going to succeed at patching every method for bypassing the hardware requirements,
but I'm happy to have them try.
That means less time for them to program more ads into Windows 11.
Just kidding. They'll make time.
Procreate, the company behind the popular art app for iPad,
has pledged to never add AI to their products
This is despite the existence of the 2010 song Never Say Never by Justin Bieber
In a video posted by the company's Twitter account Ceo Jason Cuda said
I really f**king hate generative AI
Procreate's website features a page dedicated to their anti-AI stance.
As a result, the company has received a lot of love
from digital artists who probably are tired of having generative AI trained on their work without consent.
But painters and illustrators aren't the only ones
seemingly becoming tired of the onslaught of AI tools.
AI photo Editing and image processing features
are starting to raise questions about when a photo stops being a photo.
Just last week, award-winning iPhone camera app, Halide,
has introduced a new feature called Process Zero,
allowing users to take photos without any AI or image processing at all.
Of course, Halide costs $20 a year,
so now, ironically, you need to pay a subscription to not use AI.
National Public Data or NPD for short,
has finally confirmed it had a data breach.
Though they don't actually seem too sure.
In their official statement, the data aggregator says,
there appears to have been a data security incident.
As if hundreds of millions of people's data ending up on the dark web was somehow not definitive proof enough.
While many reports claim that 2.7 billion people's data was exposed,
that's apparently not quite true.
Web security consultant, Troy Hunt,
investigated and found there were about 134 million unique email addresses.
Yet NPD told the main attorney general's office
that 1.3 million people were affected,
which would imply that they all have about 100 emails.
It was also discovered by a company called Atlas Data Privacy
that the leaked data contained 272 million unique social security numbers.
So every person affected by the breach
must have also been born roughly 200 times.
Now, to be fair to NPD,
millions of these records are for people who no longer are alive.
So maybe they weren't included in the 1.3 million figure.
It's hard to cut them slack when the hackers may have gotten all this data because an NPD sister site
published a file containing admin passwords on its homepage
that was only removed today.
Sure, we've been hacked before,
but the hackers still had to put in some effort.
But do you know how much effort our sponsor, War Thunder,
had to put into their free-to-play vehicular combat game
to make it so, so historically accurate?
Neither do I, but it seems like a lot.
Especially since the game allows you to pilot 2,000 different vehicles into combat.
We're talking planes, tanks, boats.
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How do you summon Quick Bits?
Easy. You just go psst, psst, psst, psst, psst.
Wait, no, that's cats.
Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake S desktop CPU lineup is expected to arrive in October,
a little fuller than anticipated.
A little healthier, girthier.
A leak, courtesy of Jakin on Twitter,
lists 14 SKUs with two previously unseen
Core Ultra 5 models, the 235 and 225.
Another, more different tweet from fellow leaker, OneRaiChu,
points to the lineup including one or more additional Core Ultra 3 models with eight cores,
likely four P-cores and four E-cores.
Although, depending on who you're talking to,
these aren't real E-cores.
Those have all gone to join hyper-threading
in the great outdated tech glossary in the sky.
Raspberry Pi, the company whose entire raison d'etre
is hyper-affordable mini PCs,
has launched a new, even lighter,
two-gigabyte version of the Pi 5, down from four gigabytes
Beyond the two-gigabyte drop in memory and a newly optimized SOC,
the rest of the Pi specs remain unchanged.
It's also for just 50 bucks, down from 60,
for consumers who would rather buy a box of nice popsicles than double their available RAM.
Yet unclear is whether Raspberry Pi will follow this up with a one-gigabyte version
or whether they'll follow that with an infinite number of Pis,
each with half the memory of the previous model,
Zeno's Paradox style.
Ask them Total Pies.
Comment if you're nerdy enough to get that reference.
The Zotac Zone, has now gone up for pre-order in select regions,
hoping to entice foolish gamers into buying what looks like a Steam Deck,
thanks to its dual touchpads,
but is actually an $800 Windows handheld with a 120-hertz OLED screen,
hall effect sticks, a selfie camera, and a kickstand.
The real kicker, though, is the RGB strip on the back.
Valve wouldn't do this to us.
The Zone reportedly officially launches in September,
but I don't know who to trust at this point.
According to TechRadar,
Google has quietly confirmed that there
will be no more Fitbit smartwatches produced.
No one was more shocked by the story than Google,
as the spokesperson then told Ars Technica
that TechRadar's article was not correct,
but did not elaborate on any potential new Fitbit smartwatch products.
This confuses us, because last week,
the senior director of product management for Pixel Wearables told Engadget that moving forward,
Fitbit will be focusing on trackers, not smartwatches.
So I feel like not even Google knows what Google is doing.
That's fun.
And Tesla is hiring workers to train its humanoid robot, Optimus,
using mo-cap suits.
Candidates must be reasonably fit and between 5'7 and 5'11.
No big boys or short kings allowed.
Unfortunately, this training might take millions of hours of data,
meaning that the first sign of the robot apocalypse
may be an epidemic of repetitive strain injuries.
By contrast, Chinese company Unitree says it has a $16,000 mass production ready bot
that can jump, jog, withstand kicks,
solder electronics,
and flip pancakes with training.
It'll be the perfect bodyguard slash butler
for all those average-sized men with debilitating carpal tunnel.
But it would be even more debilitating if you didn't come back on Wednesday for more tech news.
I know when you aren't here, and frankly, it hurts.
I'm a carpal tunnel.