This video discusses current events and potential threats within the tech industry, framed partly as an April Fool's Day special. Topics include geopolitical threats to tech companies, the risks AI poses to open-source software, and various tech-related news snippets like a source code leak, a lunar mission launch, layoffs, autonomous vehicle failures, and advancements in high-temperature memory chips.
Uh, well, I'm sorry to say we don't have any tech news today, April Fool. Oh my god, I got you so good. The look on your face. Oh, I love this holiday. It's good that we do this. Iran has announced plans to attack 18 major tech companies across the Middle East, either as part of its ongoing military conflict with the US or the most ambitious April Fool's joke of all time. The threat was posted to Telegram on Tuesday, naming Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Boeing, and GE, among the companies it accused of helping the US and Israeli military carry out strikes on Iran. Wait, GE? Is the US dropping shitty washer dryers on their enemies now? You're going to have to run the Ayatollah who or whoever's pants through the wash twice if he doesn't want weird detergent residue on them. Do you What do you have against GE? They make shitty products. These tech companies have thousands of employees across the Gulf region who were warned to evacuate a 1 kilometer radius around all targeted facilities. The attacks were expected to start at 8:00 p.m. Thyron time on April 1st, but as of recording, no strikes have been confirmed. Risk management firm Helix's CEO, James Henderson, told CNBC that since AI is now being used as a weapon in the theater of war, cloud infrastructure assets like data centers will be pulled into conflict more and more. And then also GE for some reason. I mean, their microwaves suck, but are they like jihad bad? The writer that wrote that is Muslim, by the way, so I'm allowed. Alohu Akbar. Open-source software is under siege from AI. And not in the fun Steven Seagal way, either. Two security researchers recently launched an AI tool that can clone entire open-source projects as a tongue-in-cheek provocation to show how easily AI can be used to bypass open-source licensing. The dubiously named Malice, spelled M A L U S, recreates software from public documentation alone, producing code that's functionally identical to the original, but proprietary. The seemingly satirical service markets itself as targeting companies that don't want to credit the original developers or share their changes back to the project, promising legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. It's still unclear whether Malice is real or not, but what is definitely real is the broader threat to genuinely beloved open-source tools. Curl was forced to shut down its bug bounty program to stem the massive tide of vibecoded slop submissions. GitHub is considering a kill switch to let maintainers disable pull requests entirely for the same reason. And Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineers after AI tools tanked their revenue. As for whether Malice is satire, well, on the one hand, its blog includes cartoonishly villainous posts thanking maintainers for their unpaid labor and testimonials from clients like Chad Stockholder at Profit First LLC. On the other hand, a guy named Chad Stockholder is on paper arguably more believable than about half of the weirdo tech bros in Silicon Valley. up. Now, in case you hadn't noticed, today was April Fools, aka the hardest day of the year for us here because Teimu Tik Tok store slop has completely flooded the internet, and it's hard to tell what's real. These are probably jokes, though, that I'm going to say now. Yahoo showed off the scroll stopper, a thumb helmet inspired by what I can only imagine is Juggernaut, the Marvel bad guy, designed to physically stop you from doom scrolling. And I'm kind of sad that this is a joke cuz for a second there I thought I knew one thing that Yahoo still does. PlayStation's project play mode goes the opposite direction, letting AI take over your controller, your gameplay, and maybe one day your role as a father and husband. Trager's Meat AI glasses promise realtime stake intelligence for those who love meat and don't love meta. There's got to be some crossover. Metro by T-Mobile dropped Kalone, a phone-based fragrance so you can smell like an old Nokia. And Sega released a Sanic shirt collection that thankfully did not include Sonichu. CD Project Red's Project Roach or Ride on a Controller horse is exactly what it sounds like, an experience that gaming has been sorely lacking until now. MSI added a cat bed to a monitor arm because of course they did and I want it. And then there were these articles. One from Techbot about AMD buying Intel, which is thankfully not true or it would trigger the shitty naming scheme apocalypse. And another one from Tech Powerup about AMD's answer to DLSS5 called FSR5 Scarlet Cortex, which genuinely broke my brain because it's seven pages long with AMD branded presentation slides, detailed diagrams, and even interactive comparisons, which is a lot of work for an April Fool's joke about a feature that in all likelihood AMD is probably going to release for real at some point soon. We confirmed with AMD that this is not real for now. But like it's like making an April Fool's joke about Apple working on the iPhone 18. What if they did that? They're going to like how you're going to protect YOUR PRIVACY WITH OUR SPONSOR. Proton Mail. In this life, I believe a man is entitled to certain things. A good wine, a warm breeze, and an inbox that does not read his love letters and sell them to advertisers. Most email providers scan your messages, track your behavior, and some are even using your private conversations to train their AI. That is no way to treat a person. 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Anthropic told Axios it was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. I feel like those can be the same thing, but so at least no user data was leaked. CIS admins on Reddit point out the sweet irony of Anthropic building 23 separate layers of bash security only to be undone by one misconfigured text file. I I wouldn't have done that. Uh Anthropic has since DMCA the leaks because publicly accessible data is only valid when Enthropic is the one doing the scraping. Okay, FYI. NASA's Aremis 2 successfully launched today at 6:24 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first crude mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in the 70s. The 10-day lunar flyby is part of a longer road map in the Aremis program focusing on lunar exploration and carries the first black astronaut, first woman astronaut, and even the first Canadian astronaut to ever visit the moon's orbit, shattering the glass dome that encompasses the entire Earth, causing our atmosphere to vent into space and giving us all hours to live. But at least those guys will get to see the moon. Oracle is laying off thousands of its employees as the company decides AI data centers have a better value proposition than people. Workers across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico received a termination email from Oracle leadership. at 6:00 a.m., which is an AI robot thing, uh, with no prior warning and access to systems was cut immediately. Senior operations manager Michael Shepard took to LinkedIn to write to my colleagues who were impacted today, "Your worth is not defined by this moment," a post looking like it was drafted with Chad GBT. But I think what calms my restless heart is knowing somewhere out there Larry Ellison is unaffected by all this sipping Chardonnay in a bubble bath while keeping his perfect wax viz out of the water so it doesn't melt off his head. Over a hundred of BU's Apollo Go robo taxis turned into 4,000lb paper weights on Wuhan highways Tuesday night after a total system failure. The second worst news to come out of Wuhan in the last six years. Passengers were trapped for almost two hours. Some stranded in the middle of high-speed lanes with trucks speeding past them. Some of them those driverless blocks that are just there's no humans in there. Okay. China uses you. You've seen them. No. Okay. One passenger told a journalist it took her 30 minutes just to connect to a customer representative. Turns out AI drivers don't get sleepy, but they do occasionally decide to take a simultaneous unprompted coffee break in traffic. This will be fine. Let's do more of this. And scientists at USC built a memory chip that works at 700°C, which could finally allow computers to be used by Dennis of the elemental plane of fire. The team used tungsten, ceramic, and a single atom thick graphine layer to block the short circuits that normally kill chips in extreme heat. It held data for over 50 hours at 700° and survived over a billion switching cycles at that temperature. So, for all the super villains out there who have been eyeing up those primo volcano locations for their evil data centers, now's your time to shine. Teal, I'm looking at you. And I'm looking at you, viewer. Hoping you'll come back on Friday. Oh, just kidding. We got you again. It's a stat holiday. We'll be back on Monday, April 6th, with more tech news. Man, you are really gullible. You should do something about that. Like severely doubt everything and maintain heinously high standards of evidence. No intuition or vibes at all. Just question everything. Try that.