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OpenAI wants its data centers called AI compute campuses in what Axios describes as an intentionally provocative rebrand the company will roll out right after Tuesday's midterms. Campuses like a college. I assume kids can play hockey in them in the winter using decommissioned server racks as nets. I'm James Strive. This is Techl and the reason for the rename is that seven and 10 Americans told a Gallup poll in May they don't want a data center near them. OpenAI's policy chief Chris Leane is pitching the new word alongside AI speed limits and a message that these buildings, unlike legacy data centers, make the towns they land in money. The company could use a win. The Financial
Times says OpenAI cut its funding from around $30 billion to 20 after raising only 11. And Sam Alman is still getting dunked on for saying your PC's RAM would be better off in a data center. Elon Musk joined in on the roasting on Sunday with the line, "The people deserve to have their RAM, too." which is rich from a man building his own memory hungry campus in Memphis. Elon would like you to have your RAM. He just would also like you to mail it to Tennessee. Don't tell Sam. France is trying to tax the internet. Their National Assembly just voted to approve an amendment to their 2027 budget that would tax tech platforms per gig of data sent to French users. The tax will be 5.5 per 100 gigs
of data and is projected to bring about€ 10 billion annually. as they would say in French, whoa, mucho dollarinos. That said, the amendment has yet to be ratified into law and is currently getting push back from a majority of French MPs, even the ones who voted for it, with the MP who cast the tiebreaking vote claiming that he voted yes by accident. Oh, mer. Critics of the tax say that the tax's implementation is unclear as tracking the source of internet traffic is difficult, and smaller French tech companies say that about half the tax would hit them. The amendment is subject to another vote tomorrow where it could be killed off if the assembly doesn't adopt the budget. Then after that, the budget needs to
pass a Senate vote and potentially face a review by the constitutional council. But if it passes all those steps, then France might have a few extra billion dollars in walking around money. You know, Lord knows they need those dollars. Actually, I think it's Diero is what that's what they say. Anthropic has told Claude to stop cloning other people's video games after 6 weeks in which it powered the biggest reverse engineering spree gaming has ever seen. Hundreds of games were decompiled and ported. Halo, Vice City, Black Ops 2 in a browser tab, Switch games as native Mac and iPhone apps, and Mario Kart World on an iPhone a week after the Switch 2 jailbreak. It got so bad that decomp.dev, Dev, the community's
decompilation leaderboard, shut down last month over what it called a conveyor belt of sloppy AI ports. Anthropics fix is two sentences in the instructions behind Claude Code, its coding tool. Build original games, games in genre, and games from your own designs, but do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it's renamed or called original. Make no mistakes. Anthropics Adi Aszmani says to report anything it wrongly refuses and developers are already are since the filter has been catching people patching their own games. Of course, users also say their model now declines reverse engineering jobs outright, though Anthropic hasn't commented. Is this going to stop the engineering software?
Either way, the conveyor belt has other models to run on. They'll recreate anything you ask for, which is a lot of work when you could just download our sponsor, War Thunder. I am Baleth, a devil in a man's skin suit and a king of hell. I command 85 legions of demons, so you know I love me some War Thunder. When I'm not busy ruling in the underworld, I use War Thunder to keep my war skills sharp. Demon legions are cool, but this game lets you command over 2500 tanks, planes, helicopters, and ships from across 10 human nations. War Thunder is the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made outside of hell. With realistic damage, gorgeous graphics, and 95 million players,
there's no better playground for a military history nerd, a wararmongering demon, or you know, just someone wanting a chill game sesh. So, play War Thunder for free on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile using the links below. New to the game or returning after 6 months of other TDM. You'll get a massive bonus pack on PC and consoles. Now, I must return to my allegiance. Fairly well. The quick bits and I were playing hopscotch earlier and some pesky Sasquatch stole my wristwatch. Now he's hiding up in a tree. The quick bits are with him somehow, even though we all know they can't climb. Microsoft is
previewing a DirectX update that cuts ray tracing's memory use by 90% in its own test on AMD and Intel and Nvidia cards. It splits detailed models into small clusters, so the GPU only rebuilds the pieces that moved, which took Microsoft's test scene from 1.2 frames per second to 79. Games have to build for it. And Microsoft's blog says in capital letters, "Do not assume games will see wins like that." But they should. And if they do, every RTX 2060 in a closet gets to ray trace for the first time since 2019. Microsoft's the good guy again. A security researcher has exposed a critical flaw in Android known as the SMS of death, which can reportedly cause phones to crash just by
sending them a text message. Uh, my mom's going to do this to me, isn't she? The vulnerability is triggered by a single malformed push SMS, which is a kind of text that carriers can use to send instructions to your phone's OS. The researcher demonstrated the attack on a Pixel 9 and was able to trap the phone in a reboot loop, rendering it unusable. The vulnerability is patched for newer versions of Android, but anyone running versions 12 or 13 is at risk. Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but here's a WAP push, so reboot indefinitely. Hold on. You're saying there's another WAP song?
Supermarkets across Europe are getting slammed with a cyber attack on their fridges and freezers. Stores across Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Estonia. Yes, America, these are real places. Have reported millions of euros of spoiled food and slowcooked groceries. Hackers reportedly got into the unit's temperature controllers remotely and turned them up as high as 50° C. Put the Fahrenheit on screen for these guys. This seems to be related to a rash of similar attacks that hit France last month, though no one has yet taken responsibility. Russia, the freezers are going out all over Europe. I fear they will not be cold again in our lifetime.
More wire just published a report revealing that hundreds of apps in the Google Play and Apple App Store were AI deep fake tools that were disguised as other not disgusting apps. Among the disguises, the apps posed as language classes, workout coaches, and AI pet portrait apps. Those bastards. There's no line they won't cross. Users of the illicit version of the app were reportedly given access by coming to the app through a Meta ad for explicit deep fakes. Both Google and Apple have started taking the offending apps down. And Meta reports that it's taken action against over 10,000 ad accounts that had been advertising these apps. All this is a bit awkward for Apple, who spent years
arguing that letting people sideloadad apps would flood iPhones with exactly this kind of filth. Turns out the App Store had it covered. America's first flying police vehicle is coming to Florida Polytenic University, which is not a compute campus. It's a human campus. It's a singleseat electric aircraft called the Jetson 1. The FAA still has to sign off, but it's a singleseat electric aircraft. It's a $148,000 drone that you sit in with eight rotors, a 63 mph top speed, a ballistic parachute. What is that? And about 20 minutes of battery. The police chief says it's for patrols, storm damage, and getting supplies past flooded roads. 20 minutes at a time. I too need to recharge, but come back on Wednesday for
more tech news. The Sasquatch says hi. By the way, the quick bits say nothing because they're quick bits and they're in a tree. See you then.
