Valve Game Console Imports, German Domain Outage, Google Chrome AI Downloads + more!

Valve just imported around 50 tons of game consoles from China. And you know what that means? Maybe Steam Machines! Which is great news for us, but probably a tough day for the customs agent staring at a manifest that jumps from container 2 to container 4. Because, you know, Valve can't count to 3. I'm Linus Sebastian, this is TechLinked, and according to customs records dug up by The Verge, recent shipments by Valve total to nearly 100 tons in just the past two months. But what's really interesting is that the new containers are noticeably lighter than the previous ones, suggesting that the delayed Steam Machine or Steam Frame VR headsets may be contained inside them. Or they could just be even more Steam decks and we're gonna look really stupid in a few weeks. Either way, optimism is high. Not all is well in Valve land though. The Steam controller instantly sold out on launch day. So if you were hoping to get one 31 minutes after they were released, the joke's on you. But the good news is that alongside Valve announcing that more stock is coming, they've also released the controller's CAD files under a Creative Commons license. So if you can't wait, you can 3D print the shelf for the controller and then sit in front of a cardboard box to just hallucinate the gaming experience. Nintendo approves. You can be just like an AI. Meanwhile, in Germany, millions of websites and apps using their .de domain suddenly disappeared from the internet for hours on Tuesday night, including amazon.de, DHL, Steam, and Germany's transit app. The outage was traced to DENIC, the organization that manages Germany's .de country code domain after the registry distributed faulty cryptographic signatures. DNIC explained in a blog post that the bad signatures went out during a routine key exchange, though they're still investigating the exact chain of events that led to it. Per CyberNews, network engineers suspect that DNIC fumbled a scheduled key swap that the registry runs every five weeks The faulty keys caused any DNS lookup targeting a site to fail security checks which brought the whole system crumbling to its knees You gotta love single points of failure don't you? According to DNIC, the issue is now resolved and the population of Deutschland is back to enjoying German internet, which I believe operates like the regular internet, except the series of tubes is filled with meat, of course. Sorry, that joke was the worst. you know what's even worse is google chrome has been silently downloading a four gigabyte ai model file to some user devices without asking permission evidently they've decided it's just time to rip the ai band-aid off and everybody's using it with or without permission evidently anyone with ai features enabled and compatible hardware is receiving the model so we're talking and potentially hundreds of millions of devices. Privacy researcher Alexander Hanf first flagged the behavior and users who tried to delete the file have reported that Chrome will simply re-download it. So to get rid of it, you need to go to settings then system and toggle off on-device AI. Hanf also states that the practice likely violates a whole mess of EU privacy laws. And if it were to be launched on all devices would consume an estimated 240 gigawatt hours of energy, which is way more energy than I need to do this easy, light, breezy segue to our sponsor. Jawa, it's the number one gaming marketplace for new and used gaming gear and custom PCs. All sold by gamers for gamers at prices that don't break the bank. Every listing is manually moderated by a real human. Every transaction has buyer and seller protection and verified sellers are vetted by the Jawa team. Right now, check out this gaming PC with an RTX 5060, Ryzen 5 5600 for about $1,000. Or this one with an RTX 4060 Ti, which is discounted to just under 900 bucks. 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All the other cool kids and me, we call it the QBs, but their scientific name is actually QuickiusBitchius. Oh, you said, you said it. That's not it. Kind of. Notepad++ creator Don Ho is threatening legal action over an unofficial Mac OS port of Notepad++. But according to Ho, it's not the port itself that's the problem. It's that the unofficial site uses the Notepad++ name and branding wholesale, and even lists Ho himself as a contributor, which he very much denies being. Ho is asking users to reply to any social media posts that are hyping up this port with a copy pasted disclaimer, effectively crowdsourcing his cease and desist. So it's less control C and more control Cs. I said, your Don's a hoe. An unclosable pop-up on Reddit's mobile site has been prompting users to download the app to keep browsing. And apparently it's on purpose. A Reddit spokesperson told Ars Technica that it is targeting frequently logged out mobile users, which of course are the exact people who keep saying they don't want the app. Reddit insists though, you will like it once you stop avoiding it. And to that I comment, well, actually I comment nothing because I'm stuck behind a pop-up. Look at me, I'm stuck behind a pop-up. Meanwhile Microsoft Google DeepMind and XAI have signed deals with the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation letting the government review their frontier models before they are released to the public which according to the New York Times is a sharp reversal of the US administration's hands-off approach to regulating top AI labs. This new deal will vet models for cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical weapons risks before they are released, which fingers crossed will keep us safe from any Terminator adjacent apocalypses? I mean, I wouldn't bet on Polymarket about it even though the world is apparently a casino now. You just did insider trading. Microsoft's Edge browser apparently has a habit of storing passwords in plain text memory as cybersecurity researcher, Tom Running disclosed. Interestingly, Edge is the only Chromium browser that's doing this. But despite Running's warning, Microsoft downplayed the threat stating that if someone can read your memory, you're already compromised anyway. It's part of a bold new cybersecurity philosophy called, why lock the safe if they're already in the house? I mean, they do have a point, but also so does he. And Energizer has a point. Their new ultimate child shield button batteries are designed to prevent chemical burns that occur when toddlers accidentally swallow them. This is a great move as roughly 3,500 people a year ingest button batteries in the US alone. and lithium batteries are apparently especially fatal as they can burn through stomach tissue. Good Lord. The new battery features a, sorry. The new battery features a special coating that blocks current on contact with saliva, but conducts normally inside electronics. As one toddler on Wedit wrote, "'We joyce finally, da forbidden coins are back on the menu." I don't know what that voice was supposed to be, but you know what? I know I'm gonna see you guys on Friday when tech news is back on the menu. In fact, it's the only thing that's ever been on the menu. We're like one of those food stands that only serves one thing. We're like the opposite of Cheesecake Factory. Cheese fake factory, man. Cheese fake factory, more like. Ha ha. What do you have against Cheesecake Factory?