Meta's announced a new Quest VR headset. The Quest 3 is 40% slimmer than the Quest 2, have lal new controllers, dual 4MP RGB colour cameras for an even better passthrough/augmented reality experience and "a next-generation Snapdragon chipset developed in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies" that's twice as fast as the one in the Quest 2. The Quest 3 will go on sale "later this year" for US$500. The Quest 2 gets a price cut to US$300 on June 4th. Interesting timing, considering everyone reckons Apple will reveal its own headset next week at WWDC.
The USA's FTC gave Amazon a few slaps on the wrist this week. They found Amazon didn't delete Alexa voice recordings and geolocation data of children when users requested it and fined them US$25m and implement a few bare minimum privacy policies. Separately, Ring (which Amazon owns) got busted "compromising its customers' privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers' private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos". The punishment for this? Refund the impacted customers. Piss weak considering the (in my opinion) severe breach of privacy.
The National Eating Disorder Association runs a hotline for people needing help in the USA, sacked the four people running it and replaced them with an "AI-powered" chatbot called Tessa. Unsurprisingly, Tessa offered so much shit advice (500-1000 calories a day is healthy, lol) that they had to turn it off. Granted it was a crude chatbot, but still, the management didn't know it was shit. Meanwhile, the US Air Force simulated an AI-powered drone and told it to "destroy enemy's air defense systems, and attacked anyone who interfered with that order", so it tried to kill the operator that would provide final go/no-go confirmations. When it was told not to do that, it would take out the comms tower used by the operator so it couldn't receive a no-go message.
Two blokes in Japan were so keen to get their hands on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, they got jobs at an Amazon warehouse and stole copies of the game soon as it entered the building a few days before the public release. One guy immediately went home and played it. The other guy "had stolen a bunch of Zelda-related merchandise, including Amiibo and Zelda-themed Pro Controllers with the aim of reselling them on sites like Mercari". Totally separate guys too, they didn't know each other or devise a plan, they just really like Zelda.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
The bombe was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes. In 1994 a group led by John Harper of the BCS Computer Conservation Society started a project to build a working replica of a bombe. The project required detailed research, and took 13 years of effort before the replica was completed, which was then put on display at the Bletchley Park museum. (I took this photo!)
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