Something Ain't Right...
TechLinked
0:01 Happy Easter.
0:03 Guess what the Easter Bunny got you?
0:06 Chocolate!
0:06 What?
0:06 No, it's It's It's tech news.
0:09 Chocolate for everybody?
0:11 Can you imagine the shipping?
0:12 Chinese DDR5 prices are plummeting,
0:15 and resellers who stockpiled RAM during the shortage
0:18 are stuck with mountains of products they can't move.
0:21 So, that's where that all went.
0:23 Clips on Twitter show vendors in a Shenzhen market
0:25 surrounded by piles of modules saying they're, quote, doomed.
0:30 Though, how real any of this is remains an open question,
0:34 especially after WCCFTech illustrated their coverage with what
0:37 appears to be an AI-generated image of a man
0:40 ripping his hair out while his RAM flies all over the place in a warehouse.
0:45 I hate it when that happens.
0:46 Look how sad he is.
0:47 It's It's real.
0:48 Reports out of China say the biggest drops are hitting the gray market,
0:51 meaning these are recycled and repackaged sticks, not factory-fresh kits,
0:55 with prices down 25% to 30% earlier this year.
1:00 But before you get too excited rubbing your little fly hands together,
1:04 industry sources told ET News that Samsung just bumped Q2 DRAM
1:08 contract prices another 30% on top of already doubling them in Q1.
1:13 So, the people who actually make this stuff, they're not sweating it,
1:16 which probably explains why this higher tier
1:18 of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 just received a $650
1:22 price hike from its $1,350 launch price just
1:26 6 months ago for a handheld that runs Windows.
1:29 worst part.
1:31 The eyes of the world are on NASA's
1:32 Artemis 2 crew as they conduct their lunar flyby,
1:35 which is happening right now as we're filming this in a rare
1:38 moment that seems to be bringing the world together.
1:41 Also, they just broke Apollo 13's record
1:43 for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.
1:46 Suck it, Apollo 13 crew.
1:48 You got nothing on Canadian dreamboat Jeremy Hansen.
1:51 Suck it, Tom Hanks.
1:52 you.
1:53 Woah!
1:53 Canada.
1:54 Canada.
1:55 At the time of writing, the four astronauts are in a 6-hour
1:58 observation window photographing craters, lava flows,
2:01 and future landing zones on the far side of the moon,
2:04 the better side, measuring surface albedo, and snapping shots of nearby planets.
2:09 Right now, the life feed is coming
2:10 from modified GoPro cameras on Orion's solar array wings,
2:14 but the spacecraft is also testing a laser system called O2O
2:18 that can beam 4K video from the moon at 260 megabit per second,
2:23 which means future missions could livestream higher-quality footage
2:26 from the moon than Netflix allows on its cheapest plan.
2:29 Ultimately, the whole mission has been going so well
2:32 that the biggest talking point so far is the astronauts' bathroom situation.
2:36 Evidently, their urine froze in the collection tank breaking the mechanism
2:40 that allows them to go number one aboard the ship,
2:43 meaning that the crew has resorted to peeing in bags.
2:45 It's The internet has also been going nuts for a jar
2:48 of Nutella that keeps floating through the cabin on a livestream.
2:51 Is it poop?
2:52 Prompting NASA to have to make a public statement
2:55 that they don't have a product placement deal with Nutella.
2:58 Could be pretty sweet, though.
2:59 LinkedIn is silently scanning visitors' browsers for over
3:02 6,000 Chrome extensions every time they load the site,
3:05 according to a new report called BrowserGate,
3:08 published by a European group called Fairlink, no relation.
3:11 The exposé claims that LinkedIn performs
3:13 hidden JavaScript checks for job search tools,
3:16 competitor products, and extensions tied to religious beliefs,
3:18 political views, and neurodivergence,
3:21 then sends the results back to LinkedIn's servers,
3:23 where no one cool works.
3:25 Funnily enough, none of this is mentioned in LinkedIn's privacy policy.
3:29 Bleeping Computer independently verified the scanning behavior through their own
3:32 testing and confirmed the script checks for 6,236 extensions,
3:37 up from about 2,000 just last year.
3:39 Now, LinkedIn says the report's claims are plain wrong,
3:42 and that the person behind the BrowserGate website is
3:45 the developer of a browser extension called Team Fluence,
3:48 whose account was banned for scraping and violating LinkedIn's terms of service.
3:52 A German court did deny Team Fluence's injunction against LinkedIn,
3:55 so there's clearly some beef here,
3:57 but that doesn't change the fact that LinkedIn is verifiably scanning
4:01 your browser for extensions every time you visit the site without telling you.
4:04 And since LinkedIn already knows your real name, your employer,
4:08 and your job title, that's not exactly an anonymous data point.
4:11 You know what is worth knowing about?
4:13 Our sponsor, Riley.
4:15 Riley.
4:15 Dbrand.
4:16 Has anyone ever told you to touch grass before?
4:19 Well, that's exactly what our sponsor, Dbrand,
4:21 are telling you to do with their new touch grass skins.
4:24 Just like the name implies, these skins are made of real fake grass,
4:28 so you can put them on your smartphone, laptop,
4:30 or Switch too, and boom, just like that, you're constantly touching grass.
4:35 Then, next time someone on the internet tells you to touch grass,
4:38 you can be like, I already am, idiot.
4:43 Then, they'll be the one who needs to log
4:45 off of Blue Sky and go touch some grass.
4:47 Speaking of Blue Sky, every touch grass order also includes a Blue Sky skin,
4:52 free of charge, not affiliated with the social media platform Blue Sky, though.
4:57 It's affiliated with outside, the you know, the sky.
5:00 Anyway, if you want to touch some grass
5:01 and get some free Blue Sky skins as a bonus, head on over to shortlinus.com.
5:08 Speaking of things rising from the dead,
5:10 let's resurrect some stories that didn't quite make the main lineup.
5:14 It's quick bits time.
5:17 Nvidia demoed a new compression method
5:19 to shrink the textures in games last weekend.
5:22 You know, the surface details that make walls
5:24 look like walls and skin look like skin.
5:28 Their new neural texture compression uses tiny neural
5:31 networks to unpack those details on the fly,
5:33 and in one demo, it cut VRAM usage from 6.5
5:36 GB down to under a gig while looking basically identical.
5:40 Intel showed off their own version, too, probably suckier,
5:43 but let's hear them out, claiming up to 18 times smaller textures.
5:47 No games use it yet, but if they did,
5:50 your GPU might finally stop running out of memory all the time,
5:52 or GPU makers will just use it as an excuse to give you less.
5:56 I mean, you're just going to put DLSS 5 on top of it anyway.
5:59 What are you going to do with it?
6:00 going to chat GPT it anyway.
6:02 Chat GPT is the one who needs it.
6:03 A court in Rome has ruled that Netflix's price hikes in Italy between
6:07 2017 and 2024 were all unlawful
6:10 and ordered the company to refund affected subscribers.
6:14 Consumer group Movimento Consumatori, which,
6:17 despite sounding like an Italian vampire coven,
6:20 is actually an Italian consumer rights organization that brought the suit
6:24 arguing Netflix violated Italy's consumer code
6:27 by hiking prices without proper justification.
6:30 Premium customers could be owed up to 500
6:32 euros with standard subscribers entitled to around 250.
6:36 This is a decent class action.
6:38 Yeah.
6:38 Netflix says it plans to appeal.
6:40 OpenAI has just announced that it's acquiring the TBPN podcast,
6:44 a daily live tech show that's popular with tech bros,
6:46 but that most of the rest of us know as the greenest podcast in the universe.
6:51 According to OpenAI,
6:52 they acquired the podcast to help with shaping the conversation around AI,
6:56 but claim the podcast will maintain editorial independence,
6:59 which seems like two completely opposing statements.
7:02 It seems like all scammy boys just pulling a page out of the Ellison playbook,
7:06 joining a trend of billionaires snapping up media
7:09 to help control the narratives around their products.
7:11 I think I speak for all of us, though, when I say that the only thing I
7:14 care about is that it stays overwhelmingly green, so I know to swipe past it
7:19 as quickly as possible during my doom scroll sessions.
7:22 And if you're a fan of that show and you watch this show, well,
7:24 now you can just only watch this show if you don't like them all.
7:28 Oh, so easy.
7:29 Thanks, James.
7:30 Keep watching us.
7:32 That's actually green behind me, too.
7:34 OH, NO!
7:35 WE MIGHT BE THE GREENER than
7:36 SpaceX filed with the SEC last week for what could be the biggest IPO ever,
7:41 targeting a valuation of more than a trillion dollars, cuz it's Elon scale.
7:46 For this historic milestone, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has made a demand
7:50 that the banks advising on the deal buy Grok subscriptions,
7:54 with some already agreeing to spend tens of millions on the chatbot.
7:57 It's not surprising that the banks acquiesced as with an IPO of this magnitude,
8:01 they stand to make over 500 million dollars in fees.
8:05 And I'm sure that plugging the nudifying mecha-Hitler
8:08 AI into the companies that triggered the 2008 financial yeah.
8:14 I mean, if he's a good guy if you get to know him.
8:17 And Cleveland Clinic researchers just published results showing that a one-time
8:22 CRISPR gene editing therapy can functionally cure severe sickle cell disease.
8:27 The RUBY trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine,
8:30 treated 28 patients with a therapy called reni-cel that edits
8:33 their own stem cells to correct the mutation causing the disease.
8:37 27 out of 28 had zero painful crises
8:41 after treatment with hemoglobin levels normalizing within 6 months,
8:44 which is great news for people suffering from debilitating genetic diseases,
8:48 and also for everyone who's been hoping for a Captain America-style super serum
8:52 to be available so they don't have to go to the gym anymore.
8:55 And that's all the tech news for this Easter Monday.
8:57 Enjoy your chocolate, hug your loved ones, and remember,
9:00 if the Easter Bunny asks for your phone number,
9:02 don't give it to him, no matter how much candy he offers.
9:05 He's been trying to get people into a multi-level marketing scheme.
9:08 See you on my downline Wednesday.
9:10 Downline?