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Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a tech news machine out of a Delorean? Great, Scott. Wait, who's saying who am I being? I guess I kind of mixed them up. Sorry. Microsoft went full AI hypebeast at its build conference this week, completely ignoring the improving Windows by listening to its users commitment that it made in the last few months. They were just joking. They were vague posting. Instead, Microsoft CEO and man with an unsettling amount of teeth, Satia Nadella, introduced a bunch of new AI stuff, starting with a co-pilot super app meant to bundle the scattershot of
existing co-pilot products into a single tool. They called it this co-pilot super app. Yeah. Okay. The new app expected to release in the summer will also be a home for a number of always on personal assistant agents called autopilots. And Microsoft announced the first of these, which thankfully isn't also named co-pilot. Count that as a win. The new scout agent connects to all of your Microsoft apps, then using the notoriously insecure OpenClaw agent under the hood. Wait, really? Yeah. Oh, no. coordinates meetings, manages your calendar, and generally helps with your work. In an attempt to stave off security concerns associated with OpenClaw, they showed a demo where an OpenClaw agent kept trying and failing
to delete a bunch of user files, crediting their implementation of stricter guard rails. It will try to delete your stuff. It's just we've gotten better at stopping it. Okay, which I suppose is a step in the right direction, but still raises the question, why not just train a model that doesn't delete your entire hard drive? It doesn't want to. It needs to have the drive. It needs to have that hunger. Not to be outdone by Google and OpenAI's Agentic OS push, Microsoft also announced Project Solar, which is currently only in a concept phase, but they think it'll be an Aentic OS that runs AI agents instead of apps. We're not sure, though. They're still working on the spells and the potions. And for
the developer crowd, Nadella announced a Surface laptop as well as a Surface desktop mini PC with Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip inside, prompting Jensen Hong to join the conference via video chat and gush about how excited he is for AI because now he can text his computer because I guess he has no one else to text. God, I would feel sorry for these guys if they weren't actively destroying the world. It's a lonely life being a super villain. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Google to let publishers opt out of being included in AI overviews in a rare win for the open internet. Whoa, I think a pig just flew past the window. Oh, never mind.
It's just a fat drone. The ruling is welcome news after Google announced a couple of weeks ago that it would be significantly expanding the prevalence of AI overviews in search, resulting in a backlash from publishers that were worried about losing traffic. The new ruling requires Google to allow publishers to block Google's AI overviews from pulling content from their websites using a toggle in Google Search Console. It also makes it mandatory for AI overviews to provide proper attribution if a website's content is accessed to generate the AI summary. And as an added bonus, it gives publishers the option to stop Google from using their work to fine-tune its models. Wow. The CMA plans to spend a
year assessing the ruling's impact on publisher web traffic before considering whether Google should be paying publishers directly for the use of their content. Kind of like you're about to assess the impact of our sponsor. Ah, behold OP Manager Nexus, an observability platform like no other. Forged by the dwarves of Kaza Doom, it gives you the power to MONITOR YOUR ENTIRE STACK, NETWORK, INFRASTRUCTURE, APPLICATIONS, and UX all reveal themselves to you via the mythic OP Manager Nexus. And because of its encryption, your data is protected from scrying and divination, keeping your monitored tool set REGIONALLY COMPLIANT and audit ready. Op manager Nexus has been crafted to seamlessly work both in the cloud and on prem with the full
ECOSYSTEM OF MANAGE ENGINE APPS AS WELL as your own arcane tool. ITS DASHBOARDS BEND TO THINE will and its AI can peer into that mastrom of data bringing insights THAT ARE BEAUTIFUL AND TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN OF MANAGER NEXUS. Stop guessing and start knowing with full stack visibility. Link in the description. Oh my god, it's the Quickbits. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me. Run for it, Marty. I'm the dock now. RUN FOR IT, MARTY. PROTECT YOUR KIDS. Google is adding fake call detection to its phone app to stop those annoying contact spoofing scammers. The feature, however, only works if both you and the person calling you are using the app because it uses silent RCS encrypted
signals to verify that the caller isn't a scammer. If they are, your phone won't get that hidden signal and it'll trigger a warning telling you to hang up. The feature is rolling out globally for Android 12 and later. And starting with Pixel phones, I really hope Dwayne the Rock Johnson hasn't already been scammed by someone using my voice, my buddy Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Meta just teamed up with a DOJ and a massive list of big tech companies to absolutely crush 1.4 million Southeast Asian scam accounts. Now, this task force went heavy. Thai police arrested 63 people. Coinbase froze $3 million in crypto.
Microsoft nuked 20,000 accounts and Starlink even blacklisted thousands of satellite dishes. Strangely though, since this happened, Dwayne the Rock Johnson has completely stopped texting me. I was one Apple gift card away from him agreeing to hang out in person. Meta is listening to feedback regarding its kind of creepy practice of logging its employees keystrokes to train its AI. And it only took a 1500 signature petition and employees literally branding the company an employee data extraction factory. So not much. Meta staff can now pause the official spyw wear for, wait for it, a whole 30 minutes at a time. Obviously they aren't actually removing it. Zuck says the staff is just too talented not to
harvest their skills. And have you guys considered that you're being incredibly selfish by wanting privacy? Please think of the shareholder value of those guys. Open AAI has been sued by lots of people, but never a whole state before. Enter Florida. Florida is suing the company, and Sam Alman personally over ChachiBT's safety records. An 83-page complaint by Florida's attorney general accuses them of marketing the AI as kids safe while ignoring internal warnings that it pushed vulnerable users toward self harm and literally helped plan deadly attacks. The state wants 10 grand per violation and it looks like they
have enough violations logged to easily total billions of dollars. If Florida wins, they plan to spend the money on the state's most pressing issue. More sunscreen for the elderly. Gotcha. Florida. Your old people are tan. And researchers at the University of Toronto have built a proof of concept worm. Like a virus type of worm that uses free openweight AI models to adapt its attack as it spreads across laptops, printers, and even the power grid. Oh, this is fun. It also even steals processing power from infected devices to fuel its next move. Lovely. What could go wrong with a self-replicating, self-improving AI worm that grows stronger the more
devices it infects? Hey, here's a fun suggestion. Let's not do that. I know we let it slide with Oenheimer that one time, but not never again. Why do we keep researching these things? I just wanted to see what it would do. And I will be seeing you back here on Fridays for some more tech news. me. I'm heading there right now. But you don't have enough road to get up to 88. Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads. I lost my license because the Delorean wasn't street legal.
