- With CES all done,
I'm gonna take a much needed break from tech news.
Maybe I'll check on sports.
Oh, that team's doing well.
You excited?
- [James] Sportsball!
- Maybe they'll make it to finals.
Mozilla is the latest victim or perpetrator,
depending on how you see things, in the culture war
between crypto bros and crypto no's.
The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation
has accepted donations in Bitcoin since 2014,
but will now be pausing that program after user backlash,
spurred by a co-founder of Mozilla, Jamie Zawinski,
and Peter Linss, the designer of Firefox's Gecko engine.
Those two apparently weren't aware of the policy
and attacked a tweet posted by Mozilla on New Year's Eve
reminding people they can donate in cryptocurrency
through BitPay.
And I guess I'm confused because I thought everyone
was just on the same page about NFTs being like,
sort of an interesting idea in theory,
but pretty cringe in practice.
Although James obviously disagrees.
You're a crypto bro. - Honestly.
- Or you're a crypto...
- [James] Oh?
- Yeah, that's where it applies.
But crypto, I thought this whole time
that cryptocurrencies were still kind of okay.
So where are we at?
Let me know, I need to know or I can't write the jokes.
I'm simply an empty vessel for the cultural consciousness.
Who are you?
Sonos sued Google for patent infringement in 2020
regarding various technologies
related to wirelessly connected speakers.
And surprise, they actually won,
which I didn't know was possible.
Wouldn't Google have blackmailed them with their own data
or something, isn't this what we're freaking out about?
If I sued you, would you blackmail me?
(clock ticking)
Anyways, Google has already rolled out a change
to its line of Nest slash Home speakers that will bring them
in compliance with the trial ruling,
and which will also make life much worse
for owners of said speakers.
- Yay, that's me. - Really?
- My Google Home. - Do you have them in groups?
- Not really. - Oh, watch,
well okay, you might be all right.
But some users will have to download
a separate device utility app
to set up devices and install updates
and will no longer be able to adjust volume
for a group of speakers all at once.
- [James] Oh my God.
- So if you've got a sick stereo setup
or a few units in the living room group,
you'll have to individually set the volume for each of them.
Google says it doesn't expect the ruling
to impact its ability to import or sell these products.
And yeah, that's incorrect.
It's impacting me right now.
I'm not going to do it.
And I'd like to take a moment to address
a frustrating viral story that has taken off this week,
despite my attempts to ignore it.
See, last year-- - Riley got herpes!
- (laughs) Uh-oh!
Last year Norton announced it was including
an optional crypto mining feature
in their suite of antivirus apps
if you could call them that.
And we called it out as kind of dumb at the time.
But on Tuesday, Cory Doctorow,
an activist, author,
and surprisingly not a Spider-Man villain,
tweeted that Norton is sneakily, quote,
"Installing crypto mining software on computers
and skimming a commission," which it does do if you opt in.
Which led everyone on Twitter to think that Norton
was surreptitiously stealing their users' PC performance
and profiting from it.
But to be clear, Norton Antivirus may be largely unnecessary
and extremely annoying to uninstall.
But while the crypto mining app is automatically installed,
it doesn't appear to be doing anything
unless you tell it to.
- [James] It's not sneakily.
- That's really the one word.
There's even a way, an annoying way,
but a way to uninstall it.
Now, this probably bothers me more than it does other people
because of my now encyclopedic and unwanted knowledge
of obscure tech stories.
But there it is, (bleeping) Norton.
Now it's time for Quick Bits
brought to you one last time this CES week by Seasonic,
the benevolent God of supplying power to PCs.
I mean look, at the PRIME TX-1000 watt power supply.
It has been blessed
with an 80 plus titanium efficiency rating.
- [James] Just look at it!
- [Riley] A fully modular design for clean cable setups.
Testify!
Fluid dynamic fan bearings with hybrid fan control.
- Preach! - And a truly exalted
12 year warranty.
- [James] On high baby.
(Riley laughs)
Miraculous!
Seasonic doesn't want you
to pledge your life to them or anything.
They just want you to check them out at seasonic.com
or at the links below.
Put a Seasonic in your system,
you're too blessed to be stressed!
You can't leave any Quick Bits on your plate.
They're good for you.
They've got nutrients! - Slurp 'em up.
- After confirming their next series of desktop processors
would use a new not backwards compatible socket,
AMD has said they're looking at enabling support
for current gen Ryzen 5000 processors
in old 300 series motherboards.
Some manufacturers enabled Ryzen 5000 support
in some lower end A320 boards,
but it'll be up to AMD to allow the same thing to happen
on mid tier B350 and higher end X370 boards.
Which would be nice
as long as users are ready to ride those parts
into the ground since there'll be no upgrade path, sadly.
The captain should go down with their ship.
That's just the way, it doesn't need to make sense.
- [James] And the band.
- Samsung may be looking to extend its lead
in the foldable display space
if some of their wacky prototypes from CES
are any indication.
Thanks to Abhijeet Mishra,
we got a look at a slider concept, an all screen laptop,
a number of prototypes with trifolding designs,
and a speaker with a wraparound display
that can fold out into a flat one.
That one's kind of dumb.
I gotta be honest cause someone's got to be honest at CES.
Half the things are just made in Blender.
They're not real, like this.
- [James] (laughs) Look at that!
- Speaking of phones, a bunch of smartphone announcements
flew under the radar this week because no one cares.
But they're still kind of interesting
because they're all running Qualcomm's
new Snapdragon 8 gen one chipset.
There's the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, the Realme 2 GT Pro,
the Motorola Edge X30, the Oppo Find X4,
the OnePlus 10 Pro, and the IQ9 series.
Yeah, I don't care, I was right the first time.
E3 will once again continue playing dead this year
with the event's showrunners,
the Entertainment Software Association,
confirming it will exist as a virtual event come June
because of Omicron.
Some industry reporters are calling the ESA out though
since before COVID hit,
E3 was already barely clinging to life.
And it's not clear why they're pretending
that's not the case now.
- [James] We were totally gonna have an event guys.
We were!
- It's just 'cause of COVID! - We swear.
- It's got some real, I'm not dead yet!
In perhaps the realest example of AirTag abuse yet,
fashion model Brooks Nader said
thanks to an alert from her iPhone,
she found an AirTag in her coat
that had apparently been placed there to stalk her.
- [James] Heard she's running as an independent.
- (laughs) Nader.
It's actually happening.
It's the tracker apocalypse.
So I guess all of us Android folks
should install Apple's Tracker Detect app
to stop this from happening to us.
Wait a second.
Is this Apple's way of getting an app on all of our phones?
And you could use some more tech news, but not until Monday.
Come back then to get a refill.
But it's the weekend and CES is over.
Hey, I'll see you at the afterparty at Mandalay Bay.
You gonna be there?
- [James] The weekend, afterparty?
- Not the, is that about the artist?
- Maybe. - Making a pun?
Bye, bye.