I don’t care if you are a Democrat, or a Republican I don’t see how you can support this secret subpoenas and warrants stuff. Have a look at this.

It is far too easy for law enforcement to target Americans’ emails, text messages and other data hosted by cloud providers, Tom Burt, Microsoft’s VP of customer security and trust, will tell lawmakers, according to selected remarks shared by Microsoft on Tuesday afternoon. “We are not suggesting that secrecy orders should only be obtained through some impossible standard,” Burt is expected to say. “We simply ask that it be a meaningful one. … Without legislative reform, abuses will continue to occur — and they will continue to occur out of sight.”

This Amazon offering looks interesting, still I am not sure I would interested because of the grab bag nature of the service.

You won’t know what records you’ll receive as part of the $25 plan until they show up at your door, but they’ll be classics from the “Golden Era of Vinyl” — the 1960s and ‘70s — chosen by curators at Amazon Music. You’ll receive vinyls from the likes of Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin and ABBA, so if you’ve been collecting records for a while or your tastes fall outside of the mainstream, this might not be for you.

Lots of newish info on Windows 11. The most interesting thing to me is the ability to run Android apps.

Under the hood, Windows 11 is largely Windows 10, and that’s perhaps for the best. Below is the launch video. Version 11, which shouldn’t exist because 10 was supposed to be the final major version number of Windows – is due be officially released around November or December this year as a free upgrade for “eligible” users. Your PC will need UEFI Secure Boot firmware and a TPM 2.0 security chipset to run it.

Facebook’s plan to run ads on the Oculus may never get off the ground. Have a look here.

Facebook’s bid to run ads on its virtual reality headsets hit a major snag after the company’s only named developer partner said it was backing out of the plan amid a backlash from gamers. The news comes less than a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s social network revealed last Wednesday that it would start testing ads on Oculus, its virtual reality headset, through a partnership with “Blaston” developer Resolution Games and two other unnamed game developers.

Not sure what I think about this. I wonder if the new Tesla Model S Plaid will kill the hot rod industry?

The quickest car we’ve ever tested is a $150K five-seat sedan, not some multimillion-dollar, carbon-fiber-encrusted road missile. It’s remarkably well rounded, exhibiting a combination of comfort, luxury, performance, and efficiency that remained a sci-fi fantasy in 2013 when we named the Model S the MotorTrend Car of the Year. Regardless of how much you care about acceleration numbers and how they’re achieved, perhaps the most important takeaway is that the Model S Plaid is absolutely among the best cars on the market today.

Nice to see CD Projekt Red is still chipping away at all the Cyberpunk 2077 flaws. Obviously the game should never have been released like this but nice to see it isn’t being abandoned.

CD Projekt Red has released another patch for Cyberpunk 2077 that fixes dozens of glitched quests, gameplay bugs, and crashing issues that continue to frustrate players since launch. Patch 1.23 picks up where previous Cyberpunk 2077 patches and hotfixes, but this one is on the smaller side compared to some others. The latest update aims to slowly bring the futuristic open-world to the polished state players expected during its launch in November 2020.

It looks like the Nvidia and Arm deal has hit a rough patch. This should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Nvidia Corp may not be able to meet a March 2022 deadline for closing its $40 billion acquisition of British chip technology firm Arm Ltd due to European regulators’ reluctance to consider the case until after the summer holidays, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Nvidia announced the Arm deal last year, sparking an immediate backlash in the semiconductor industry, where Arm has long been a neutral player licensing key intellectual property to customers who are otherwise intense rivals, including Qualcomm Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, and Apple Inc.

I saw rumors several weeks ago that Windows 11 was coming but didn’t judge them as credible until now.

Microsoft hasn’t talked publicly about Windows 11 yet, but this is effectively confirmation that the OS is coming. The alternative is that Microsoft intends to leave the PC space altogether and kill Windows. The company may have pivoted to a cloud-first approach to business since Satya Nadella became CEO, but Windows remains an important part of its product stack (and revenue).

This news article asks the pressing question should tech companies really be adding supply output ?

With the pandemic having sent the world into a tech buying frenzy, the chips inside our PC components have all but passed into myth. And as manufacturers scramble to fill the gap in supply, Jon Peddie Research has issued a warning about the dangers of overcompensation. “The risk,” says Peddie, “is that semiconductor suppliers will be lured into over-reaction and believe that suddenly 100s of millions of new users have appeared and the demand will stay high. That’s not only not realistic, it’s also not true—where are they coming from—not this planet?” This may be a pessimistic outlook, but it is grounded in experience.

Ring has thrown privacy advocates a small bone today.

That changes next week when Ring will no longer allow police departments to contact its customers to ask for footage pertinent to active investigations. Instead, police can post “Requests for Assistance” on Ring’s Neighbors app timeline, which gives users a public forum for freely commenting on the requests. A “Tap here to help” button will also let Ring customers in the immediate vicinity of the incident under investigation privately share footage with police. (Ring will share information including your name, home address and email with the police if you use this option.)

This story was news to me. One more example of how I don’t know everything I guess.

Computer chips have advanced to the point that they’re no longer reliable: they’ve become “mercurial,” as Google puts it, and may not perform their calculations in a predictable manner. Not that they were ever completely reliable. CPU errors have been around as long as CPUs themselves. They arise not only from design oversights but also from environmental conditions and from physical system failures that produce faults.

It looks like Best Buy is going old-school to combat the filthy bots. Waiting in line launch day reminds me of my youth.

The fix for bots snapping up stock of the latest graphics cards: simply don’t sell them online. At least that appears to be Best Buy’s answer to the ongoing tussle between man and machine for cutting-edge tech; for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti launch, Best Buy will be only selling Founders Edition cards in-store. “Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card will have limited quantities available on Thursday, June 3, at select Best Buy stores only,” the company outlines in a post.

Several Need For Speed games prepare to drive off into the sunset soon.

Today, via Reddit (while most the English-speaking world is on a holiday), it’s been announced that Need For Speed: Carbon, Need For Speed: Undercover, Need For Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed and Need For Speed: The Run will be “retired”. Which I suppose is an apposite word, given they’ll be limping off the tracks as they leave digital storefronts today, and their servers switched off come the end of August.

Person going to jail for six months for pirating Windows 10 in Spain. Interestingly the court seemed to feel the piracy was more severe since it was a business doing it.

But if you are one of those who have ever acquired a pirated license to run Windows 10 and even a package of unlicensed programs such as Microsoft Office, you will be interested to know what just happened the first conviction of the Supreme Court for having pirated Windows, specifically on several computers in a call shop in Madrid.