Nerd News Tracker

Unlike Apple, and many of the other hardware manufacturers, where devices are announced annually, AI models get updated far more frequently. This week was an oddity, however, with new models from all over. OpenAI announced GPT-6 Astra, Claude came up with Fable 5.1...

Do people frequently complain that you used to be happier? Do you doomscroll at lunch? A new study at Texas A&M found that employees who consume negative news during the workday are more likely to stay focused in that negative space. Now, you may think it's only...

AT&T filed a lawsuit against Charter, known as Spectrum to home users, over the use of the term "fiber." Wait... is it over the word itself, as I have fiber internet? OK, now before you go stir-crazy, it's part of a long-standing feud between the two, where...

For people who have plenty of money to spend, but aren't interested in the Apple-1, there is now a Wi-Fi-connected, camera-enabled toothbrush. Dyson, long one of the more premium brands for vacuum cleaners, now wants to be part of cleaning your mouth. Yes, it's...

An Apple-1 computer is going up for auction. The new estimates on a rarity such as this, along with some special correspondence, bring this up more. It has a full set of provenance with the original owner, and is even referred to as the "Hatfield", number 48 of the...

Amazon Alexa+ has been out for about 6 months, and while it's been free to Amazon Prime customers, it's been a hefty $20 a month for non-customers. Amazon announced this week that they were going to allow all eligible Fire TV devices the same plus experience for free....

We all learn about the law of supply and demand somewhere in school. The effects of the RAM crisis driving prices up, results in massive profit for the manufacturers. To that extent, Samsung agreed to a massive bonus for employees in the last few months. This week, SK...

Suspicions have arisen in past weeks, various accusations that AI companies are scanning older books for their content for training their platforms. Used books were being levied in bulk for used books that were sufficiently outside of the AI era we are in. More proof...

The latest from Amazon's terms of service are to add new arbitration clauses, along with language which prevents class-action lawsuits. They do claim that this is a net-positive for customers, as they'll pick up "most of the cost" for arbitration, but it does set a...

Those return-to-office mandates from major corporations need rethinking. A large healthcare organization did an employee wellness survey, and it highlights something that seems intuitive, but employers seem to forget. The result from the 7,704 employees was that fully...

ChatGPT Free users are getting a neat little upgrade from OpenAI. It used to be a small amount, from 10-40 messages every few hours before getting downgraded to simpler or older models. Now, GPT-5.6 Luna is coming along and will have unlimited usage for text. There...

The FBI is looking into recent cyberattacks on water supply agencies. The big thing in common is a recurring theme: these various systems were attacked for using default passwords, or no passwords at all. Worse yet, some of these systems had no business being...

Picture the largest building that you can think of. I drove by the Pentagon 2 years ago, and it was huge at 6.6M SF. The largest one in the world right now is in China at 18M SF. So, to top this, Elon Musk's SpaceX and Tesla, have decided to build Terafab, a...

For a while now, we've talked about the RAM crisis bumping up the costs of hardware. It seems, however, that Microsoft felt left out, and they decided that they will now bump up the cost of Windows licenses for OEMs by up to 10%. Now, this isn't a big jump in overall...

This week, Meta announced they have a new toy for the nerds. Muse Glimmer is an agentic AI platform that will run locally on your laptop, with caveats like 32 GB or more of RAM, certain video cards, and willingness to forgo information on the Internet. This platform...

Microsoft and others are warning about hackers targeting hotel guests through Wi-Fi networks. This is something that is growing, so this really applies everywhere you are using someone elses network. I reguarly give advice on how to avoid things like this, so the...

An agent of the FBI has been fired and arrested after he stole $900,000 in cryptocurrency from accounts that he was supposed to monitor. His claim was that he became frustrated by government inaction over the misuse of crypto accounts, and yet he transferred these...

Before I introduce another dystopian nightmare that feels more out of the movie I Am Legend, I'll note that there is a long way to go before this goes bad. A Stanford-led group of researchers has used AI to develop synthetic viruses in a lab environment. This wasn't a...

A new report out of the UK notes that AI models are starting autonomous actions that should concern us all. We've heard of the OpenAI attack against Hugging Face, and more are coming out. I didn't report on it, as it seemed to be a one-off. But now, it seems like...

I spend so much time trying to avoid ads. I'm also a BMW owner. In the past few weeks, BMW has done something that I found absolutely aggravating. It seems that in their desire to highlight their involvement in the latest Spider-Man movie, they decided that hey, why...

Bans on smartphone bans in school have been moving forward. While it was more controversial a few years back, it seems that public opinion has been shifting pretty hard across all ages. Pew Research Center has run a survey finding that just over 3/4ths of US adults...

When coming into the United States, there's a possibility that border agents may seek to scan your computing devices for illegal information. This has been a long-standing item and has been upheld many times. In January 2025, Samuel Tunick was returning from the...

At an odd time, considering the pricing for RAM, Microsoft has raised the minimum and recommended system requirements for the first time in 17 years. The new requirement for the recommended level is 16GB, which can be concerning for what is such a visually simplistic...

SpaceX stock hit over $200 about 45 days ago. That initial bump of the IPO pushed Elon Musk into what healthy Trillionaire status for a short while. In the ensuing weeks, even though SpaceX has had decent success and press, it has dropped down around $112 by the...

The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, provided some interest this week in the AI space. He was asked on CNN on Sunday if we are in an AI bubble. His response was that unless AI produces broad, economy-wide growth, that "we're not going to have this movie end well". He...

I wish I made this up. Let's start with the idea of Battlebots, a TV show that I occassionally watched years back. Two robots, of sorts, would go into a ring and fight each other. Off in China, a new bout in the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend tournament squared off...

Just when I thought that we wouldn't hear more about the RAM issue, and AI causing ripples, it got worse. It seems that automakers are predicting a surge in pricing due to the amount of chips in their cars. GM, Ford, Hyundai, and BYTD have all indicated their...

One of the new approaches that tech CEOs are looking at is personal bodyguards. Recent events have shown that the backlash against datacenters, AI, cameras, as well as various personal concerns like job loss, and more, are raising concern. Out of a few recent...

Back in 2019, the Apple Card was announced and released. Samsung usually counters items from Apple with rapid responses but instead waited until now to release their own. Barclay's Bank is the Visa card issuer here, and after a quick dive, it seems like there's not...

Back in January, Flock's CEO, Garrett Langley referred to DeFlock, a group that is building a map to track Flock's license plate reader cameras, as a "terroristic organization." This past week, he backtracked and said he was sorry, but he tried to shift the blame to...

Our technology is disrupted by solar storms, so many folks pay attention to what our sun does, studying to prepare for another Carrington Event (a solar storm that zapped us in 1859). There was good news and bad news in the last week. The good news is that they are...

Elon Musk's Starlink has a new competitor in the form of Jeff Bezo's Amazon Leo. Well, not quite yet, as they still have to launch a large number of more satellites, but they have nearly 400 up in space now, and plan to start offering service later this year after...

Reflect Orbital has a name that sounds innocuous, but their goal is to put space mirrors into place, and bathe selected areas in sunlight during the dark hours of the night. They just received FCC approval, which is only one step in the process, to move towards...

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a new bill, making New York the first state to impose a moratorium on data centers. Now, there's nuance in this, in that it's anything larger than 50MW, which is enough power to run just over 15,000 homes. This does...

The big RAM crunch that's been pushing tech prices higher? Yeah, more bad news out of SK Hynix, with 34% market share which makes them the second largest in the world (Samsung is the first). This past week, their CEO announced that 2027 is going to be worse, with no...

VMware is virtualization software. Basically, it allows multiple copies of operating systems to run on the same hardware at one time. Broadcom purchased them a while back. When Broadcom bought VMware, you could purchase perpetual licenses for as few as 16 CPUs. In the...

The late Gene Wilder brought Willy Wonka to the big screen with an amazing performance. This fall, a new reality show appears to be pushing forward in a mimicry of the famous contest for money instead of control of an established chocolate empire. The Netflix show has...

California's Protect Our Games Act was covered here on CTR about a month or so ago, and it seems it's failed to leave their Senate committee. That's not to say that it's out of the water, but it does mean that it's stalled out. The more that I saw of this, the more I...

A new CAPTCHA test to see if you are a human is coming. The new approach from Google, being tested now, has you turn on a webcam, and wave or perform other actions with your hand. This reeks of other identity theft issues, with a suspicion that they might pick up...

Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Meta's AI plans, along with cutting 8000 employees, wasn't going as well as he had hoped. Meta shares are down, morale is tanking, and the blind hope that AI would cover those jobs just hasn't panned out. This echoes the experience of...

I am not a fan of GoDaddy, but sometimes you still agree with folks you don't like. GoDaddy has drawn attention to an order from India that could thrash some of what we hold important to the Internet. The Delhi High Court has issued massive measures regarding how we...

A while back, I was pitched the idea of covering Flock traffic cameras as a good thing. I resisted, and a few times over the years, I've talked about my distrust of them. It seems that these automatic license plate readers are everywhere, now passing over 100,000,...

Ford drove down a bad road, leaving a trail of recalls all over the road. In the latest edition from the saga of replacing humans with AI, they have been discovering something we all know about AI. It seems that Ford decided to replace veteran quality engineers with...

Microsoft, in an interesting surprise, extended support for the roughly 1/4 of Windows users still on Windows 10. Now you do have to be on the Windows Extended Security Updates system, and it's free, but requires syncing to OneDrive. Even still, it's a price to pay...

At this time of every year, we get some of the biggest Supreme Court rulings announced. One of the biggest privacy items this year, was a squashing of government usage of tracking our location information without a warrant. The ruling reaffirmed that we have an...

We keep getting reminders about the loss of ownership. This time around, Sony has notified some customers that movies they purchased through the PlayStation store... not rentals, but full purchases, will be taken away due to an expiration of a licensing deal. This is...

Tim Cook, the outgoing CEO over at Apple, a week ago talked about increasing prices. We thought it might be in fall, or a distant thing, and that it would be a gentle nudge. This week, we found out it wasn't either of those. If you're an Apple fan, this bad news threw...

That lackluster $640,000 Ferrari EV that I talked about a month ago, that looks like most any other sedan? It seems that the marketing chief is now looking for a new job. There's all kinds of "we planned this" going up against a realization that Ferrari's market CAP...

Imagine AI tracking your every move. It's already arrived at Meta, but it turned into a fiasco for them, as a data leak exposed private conversations, prompts, discussions, and data to the entire company. They shut off the program, although it seems it's temporary,...

As we dip deeper into the world of AI in the workplace, many have been told that AI will come for their jobs. We've seen reports from many of the big tech companies about performing layoffs in favor of AI spending. Now Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and others are saying...