Nintendo Switch 2 Price Increase, Musk Faces Escalated Criminal Probe, Meta’s AI Bone Structure Analysis + more!

It does occur to me occasionally that humanity has built machines that produce with terrible confidence inane tripe and codswallop. One hesitates to call this progress and yet forward we march. Nintendo is raising the global prices of the Switch 2 starting September 1st. Prices in the US and Canada will jump by 50 bucks while Europeans can delight in the strength of their currency, only seeing a 30 euro increase, which I think is pretty close to being 50 bucks. Anyway, uh, haven't checked. 4835 Canadian. Okay, pretty close. The Japanese, however, were hit the hardest as every Switch configuration will cost more, not just the Switch 2. Nintendo Switch Online is also going up in Japan and South Korea starting July 1st. Nintendo blames the changes on market which is another way of saying the AI boom has been hoovering up every memory chip on earth and feeding them to chatbots that have mostly helped people write LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn users are happy though. To be fair to Nintendo though, Sony already hiked the PS5 price back in March, so Nintendo's just following suit. Xbox also had some price hikes recently, but no one buys those, so. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo expects sales to dip 17% compared to last year. Well, at least it seems like they know what they're doing. And that's reassuring. French prosecutors have escalated their probe into Elon Musk and the platform formerly known as Twitter to a full criminal investigation. The probe kicked off in January, 2025 over allegations of Musk using X for political manipulation. And it then ramped up when Grok went MechaHitler and started generating deepfakes and CSAM at the end of last year. Very cool. This prompted French officials to raid X's Paris offices in February and issue a summons for Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino to appear in Paris on April 20th Unsurprisingly both of them no but Musk did make sure to let everyone know what he thought of the summons, tweeting that the prosecutors had intellectual disabilities, but not phrasing it like that at all and definitely phrasing it in the way you know he would have said it. The US Justice Department is refusing to cooperate with the investigation, claiming the French government is wrongfully regulating an American social media platform. Hey, if the French want to regulate our companies, they need to come over here and do a regime change like a normal country. Meta is rolling out an AI tool that scans your kid's bones. Why are they scanning their bones? In order to figure out their ages. It's not weird. The company is reportedly launching this as a form of age verification that doesn't require ID or facial scanning. instead using photos to extract things like height, posture, and bone structure. The rollout is likely response to a preliminary EU finding that Meta is violating the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off of its platforms, and also probably that recent New Mexico ruling that found Meta liable for misleading users about child safety. Critics have largely dismissed the whole bones-based approach as AI phrenology aimed at appeasing regulators rather than actually keeping kids off the platform. Meta probably wants those kids on the platform. Meta, however, claims that its goal is to limit the cases of children circumventing facial scanning technology using sophisticated techniques like drawing on a fake mustache. which Wired reported was exactly how. A 12 year old convinced a facial scanning based age verification system that he was 15, an age at which many children famously grow mustaches. I mean now if those kids want to get past age verification they need at least two other kids and a trench coat and maybe our sponsor Vessi Yellow card penalty Inappropriate footwear for this weather. If you're gonna be on a field this slippery and wet, you're gonna wanna be wearing Vessi's Weekend Neos. They're lined with Dymatex, which Vessi says is both breathable and 100% waterproof. So your knee-high soccer socks will stay bone dry no matter how slushy or sloppy it is on the pitch. Red card! Ha! You're wasting time lacing your shoes! Vessi's heel loop lets you slip your shoes on without messing with laces. So you can go from lounging barefoot on the bench to playing hard in this wet, slushy game in seconds. And since they're very compact, they'll fit even the thinnest of duffel bags. So you've got no excuse to leave them at home. If you're constantly on the move, you need a shoe that keeps up. Weekend Neo does it all. I'll grab 15% off with free shipping, 30 day hassle free returns, and a one year warranty at vessi.com slash tech linked. Now get off the pitch. All right. I confess I am awfully fond of the quick bits and I shall endeavor not to be greedy. Why? Why? TCL showed off a display panel with a refresh rate of just 0.01 Hertz. That's one frame every 100 seconds as opposed to one hertz, which is just one frame every second. LG only just started rolling out those one hertz panels, but TCL wanted to top the competition and move a hundred times slower. The display uses 12 independent zones to swap between 120 hertz and basically a static image. Yeah, and TCL estimates it could add over an hour of video playback. It's the ideal display for watching paint dry in stunning 4K. The hacking group Shiny Hunters has infiltrated the widely used Canvas learning portal for thousands of schools including prestigious organizations like Harvard Columbia and Princeton The group claims it stole around 275 million records from Canvas parent company Instructure including names, emails, and student IDs. They've now given affected schools until May 12th to negotiate a settlement before the data gets leaked. The silver lining for a lot of those kids that might get their info leaked is that it happened during finals week. So now they have a few extra days to try not to fail Calculus 2. Eh, might be worth it. OpenAI launched GPT 5.5 Cyber, a version of 5.5 with fewer guardrails for vetted defenders in its trusted access for cyber program. It handles bug hunting, malware reverse engineering, and penetration testing. It comes a month after Sam, why am I laughing? I can't, wha? It comes a month after Sam Altman criticized Anthropic for gating mythos, calling it fear-based marketing. At this point, Altman and Amadei are performing anything you can do at each other across San Francisco. And everyone's watching. Nobody show this to Lin-Manuel Miranda. I don't want to give him any ideas. And a Verge reporter was run over by a Yarbo lawnmower for science after researcher Andreas Macris hijacked it from 6,000 miles away. These $5,000 robots ship with hard-coded root passwords, allowing hackers to override safety stops and steal Wi-Fi credentials. Now, despite Macris reporting the flaw, Yarbo initially called the back door a deliberate design decision. They have now publicly said they are taking action by giving the 200-pound robot with spinning blades a password. Seems like a good idea. And I have an even better idea. Why don't you come back here on Monday for more tech news? And I will stop doing this accent. I'm so sorry. I apologize to all the UK. Love you.