Tech

Can’t think of the last time I opened an app to an apology for how buggy the app is!

Believe it or not, there’s another blue screen that’s popping up on some Windows machines. Microsoft says some Windows 11 devices will see a blue BitLocker recovery screen at boot after installing the July 2024 Windows security update. The issue isn’t widespread, but those impacted will have to enter a recovery key to get a PC to boot properly. A fix is on the way.

Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”

According to IDC research, the rise of domestic smartphone brands has knocked Apple out of the top five spot. Apple, which now sits in sixth place, saw a 3.1 percent year-on-year decline even as the Chinese market grew by 8.9 percent. At least it’s doing better than Samsung which doesn’t even get a mention, despite dominating sales in the region a decade ago.

The issue impacting Safari users began late Thursday night, according to 9to5Mac, and is still impacting “some users” — myself included — globally. Try turning it off in settings if the browser seems stuck.

Canadian officials now say that in addition to the drone practice spying incident earlier this week, "additional information has come to our attention regarding previous drone use against opponents, predating the Paris 2024 Olympic Games."

Canada Soccer CEO & General Secretary Kevin Blue:

In light of these new revelations, Canada Soccer has made the decision to suspend Women’s National Soccer Team Head Coach, Bev Priestman for the remainder of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and until the completion of our recently announced independent external review.

That’s no exaggeration, it’s just me checking in on my 2022 story about the Logitech Powerplay Wireless Charging System, now on sale at Amazon for its best price in two years.

Mind you, that price is $94, not including a compatible mouse... but in hindsight, I’d gladly pay it.

Note: If you buy something from this link, we might get affiliate revenue.

“However, we understand our work is not yet complete, and we remain committed to restoring every impacted system.,” CEO George Kurtz continued in his post on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, CrowdStrike released a detailed report on the software update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines, along with some of the changes it plans to avoid similar issues in the future.

As the fervor among Democrats surrounding her still-new presidential campaign continues, Vice President Kamala Harris has now joined TikTok.

“I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the For You page, so I thought I would get on here myself,” she says in the clip.

Harris has previously expressed national security concerns about TikTok parent company ByteDance, but also said the Biden administration has “no intention to ban TikTok.”

The trend of hallucinations showing up in public AI demos continues. As noted by a couple of reporters already, OpenAI’s demo of its new SearchGPT engine shows results that are mostly either wrong or not helpful.

From The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong:

In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)

According to a post from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT Plus subscribers will get access to its new voice feature next week. The company initially demoed this feature back in May, you know, the one that sounded like Scarlett Johansson’s character from the movie Her? They yoinked that voice option though, sorry guys.

This will be interesting to test out, especially ahead of ChatGPT getting baked into Siri.

The free launcher, announced last month, will let you access Jackbox games you own from one place instead of having to hunt around through individual party packs.

You can wishlist the Megapicker on Steam right now ahead of its release on July 29th. It won’t have controller support at launch, but that should follow “pretty quickly after,” according to a developer AMA.

The officially licensed dock includes an 1,100 mAh rechargeable battery designed to replace a pair of AA batteries inside Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One wireless controllers. It also comes with replacement battery doors adding charging contacts and magnets for easy docking.

The battery takes about three hours to charge, after which the dock’s adjustable LED lighting will switch from amber to white.

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Also, “we’ll be Steam native — meaning the EA App will not be required to play the game,” according to BioWare. This is great news; I’ve loved Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on the Steam Deck, but logging in to the EA App can be a pain.

The Veilguard is set to release this fall. More launch details are coming “later this summer,” BioWare says.