- People ask me, "Hey, how do you come up
with all those wacky stories for TechLinked?
There's some weird words you say,
like 'Google' and 'Microsoft'.
How do you come up with those?"
And I don't know. I was just always creative.
But if you think you can do better,
TechLinked is hiring writers.
Check the link in the "descript" to apply.
- [James] Do you know how to use a semicolon?
- It's important.
Valve Steam Deck has brought PC gamers
a level of handheld-gaming joy
that they weren't sure they'd ever get.
And that joy is only expected to increase
if the company isn't lying in their newly released booklet.
The PDF goes over Valve's company history
and why they even bothered to make the Steam Deck
in the first place,
which could be beneficial to partners
about to sell the console in Asia.
But the real beneficial parts for us
were the passages referencing new versions of the Steam Deck
and calling the Deck and SteamOS
a "multi-generational product line".
- [James] Double Decker,.
- Bom, bom, bom. They release it, it's just a Big Mac.
That makes it sound like a Steam Deck 2
is definitely in the works, although knowing Valve,
they absolutely will not be a Steam Deck 3,
so they should probably just put
"two generational" in there instead.
You know what I mean?
- [James] Steam Deck 3 is fan fiction.
- It's never gonna happen.
Hey, and another fun thing.
Valve included a reference to Linus and Alex
slapping a heat sink on the back of the Deck,
but then say they don't recommend it?
Rude.
- [James] Get with the times.
- Nvidia's leather-loving CEO Jensen Huang told investors
during the company's latest earnings call that Team Green
is dealing with excess inventory of RTX 3000 GPUs.
That sounds horrible.
It's like Scrooge McDuck's money pool
but with graphics cards.
It just hurts.
So Nvidia will be cutting prices of current gen cards
to make way for the RTX 40 series.
- [James] Let's go.
- [Riley] Which Jensen said he'd be revealing
some details about at GTC in December.
- [James] Can't afford it.
- This could be good news for PC gamers
if retailers decide to pass on the savings,
but anyone hoping to pick up a PS5 outside of the US
isn't gonna be so lucky,
as Sony announced they're raising the price
of their consoles in non-American markets.
Why? Inflation.
It's an economic force. You can't do anything about it.
It just happens.
- [James] Should we inflate?
- [Riley] Except Microsoft can do something, apparently.
They said prices of Xbox consoles will not be rising,
and Nintendo also said they wouldn't be raising the price
of the Switch because that would be insane.
The console is five years old.
Nintendo, you didn't need a press release for that one.
What is wrong with this company?
- [James] They're the good guys. Don't you see?
- Don't worry. Don't worry.
You're safe. We won't sue you.
And a recent cyber attack is drawing interest,
not because of the amount of credentials compromised,
but because of the amount of companies targeted.
Although it's not a competition. Put that laptop away.
James is a secret hacker. What's your handle?
- [James] I'm a Russian asset.
- [Riley] More than 135 organizations, including DoorDash,
Signal, and CloudFlare, were attacked by the campaign,
dubbed "Oktapus" by security research firm Group-IB,
because of its connection with Okta,
the single sign-on service
used by the campaign's first victims.
Login credentials for nearly 10,000 individuals
were stolen by the hackers, who used relatively simple
phishing tactics to compromise user's
two-factor authentication, using what?
Say it with me:
- [Both] Text message-based 2FA.
- [Riley] Use an authenticator app or a USB key,
and these hacks are a lot harder to do,
which is why CloudFlare, in particular,
did not have any credentials compromised.
Confiscate your parents' phones and get them up to speed.
It's okay to reverse the power dynamic in this situation.
I'm the boss now, Mom.
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- [James] Boy!
(Riley laughs)
- [Riley] Epidemic has personal and commercial plans
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(James trills)
- [James] Sound effects.
- I wanna use that track.
Here's the part where a new TechLinked writer
would need to come up with something weird to say,
along with the phrase "Quick Bits",
like the wacky thing I just said.
Very wacky.
SpaceX has announced a partnership with T-Mobile
to bring Starlink satellite internet connectivity
directly to cell phones next year,
without requiring a dedicated dish.
- [James] We should call it XT.
- Why?
- [James] Space XT mobile.
- Okay. That's right.
Internet beamed right from space to your phone
and Tesla vehicles later on,
at the blazing speed of two-to-four megabits per second,
shared with anyone else in your cell zone.
That might be just enough bandwidth to check Elon's Twitter
to see what sick meme he just reposted from Reddit.
- [James] Got you, SEC.
- And when you're out in the boonies with no coverage,
that could be just what you need to carry on
despite the dehydration.
"Now what did he tweet? Yeah."
Speaking of people who have been on Joe Rogan,
Mark Zuckerberg casually mentioned to Joe
that Meta's next VR headset will be launching in October.
Other rumors point to said headset
almost certainly being Project Cambria,
a model that's geared more towards
professional work-use cases than gaming.
And that makes sense, given just how unfun
Meta's virtual worlds are looking right now.
There's no slaying dragons at work
unless the dragon is the drop in our Q3 numbers, Carl.
- [James] You don't need good graphics at the office.
- 1V1 me in Beat Saber now, or you're fired.
Google's brilliant plan to merge its Duo and Meet chat apps
into one has had a very expected hiccup.
People don't understand what's happening.
So after rebranding Duo as Meet,
and adding an "original" label to the original Meet,
Google has re-added the Duo app
as a shortcut to the new Meet,
which could sit beside the actual app icon for new Meet
and the old Meet (original).
- [James] I get it!
(Riley laughs)
- James was like, "Oh, finally, it makes sense!"
Nice one, Google. This sucks.
You suck. How long have you had to figure this out?
Like a decade? What is this?
Do better. You suck.
Google prides themselves on finding and notifying
other big tech companies of security flaws
in their products, but well, well,
who just waltzed in but Microsoft?
Who found a flaw in ChromeOS-
- [James] You suck.
- [Riley] -Which could be remotely exploited
by messing with audio metadata.
Google has already fixed the exploit,
which was actually reported months ago,
but man, they were probably so embarrassed
when they did that.
"Oh, this is our job. Okay."
- [James] You suck.
- You suck.
And Corsair is contributing to the whole
weird monitor trend that's going on right now
with the launch of the Xeneon Flex,
a 45-inch, 21:9, ultra wide, OLED gaming monitor
that can bend its display to transform
from a flat screen to a curved screen.
Plouffe did this on Short Circuit.
- [James] I touched it, too.
- [Riley] How did it feel?
- [James] Wrong.
- Curvy?
You can even grab the sides and pull it in yourself
to customize the amount of curvature
up to an 800R curve.
They couldn't let it go any more than that, though,
or you'd be sucked into the game world.
And trust me, you don't want to get stuck in there.
- [James] With Mark Zuckerberg.
(Riley laughs)
- Finally, a friend.
And Monday is not like Friday,
which is why you should come back then for more tech news.
Who knows what delights await? Tech news?
It's that- Yes.
- [James] You suck.
- Not you. Google.