NewsBytes Briefing: Musk's army of gamer cyborg monkeys, and more
There is never a dull moment with Elon Musk. At a recent Clubhouse interaction, the world's richest man revealed that his Neuralink start-up has monkeys with brain implants that allow them to play video games with one another. Subsequently, his tweet revealed the long-term plans of the start-up: Human-AI symbiosis that is touted as species-level important. Read on for more craziness that transpired today.
WhatsApp tells users not to worry about WhatsApp's privacy policies!
If there was ever a case against brain implants, WhatsApp's latest attempt to brainwash its users into conceding to its privacy policy trap makes a good one. The messaging service has been sending story-like in-app messages reminding users that Facebook isn't an evil corporation that harvests and sells their private data to achieve everything ranging from manipulating your mood to manipulating elections.
Australia calls Google's bluff; Microsoft offers Bing as replacement
Even as Big Tech has managed to de-platform who was once the most powerful person in the world and kill off competitors with zero consequences, the upside-down land of Australia isn't having any of it. Australian premier Scott Morrison called out Google's bluff to pull its search engine from the country. Now, Microsoft has offered to fill the void with its Bing search engine.
Reddit humiliates Hedge fund Melvin; Makes it bleed $4.5 billion
Australia isn't the only one sticking it to the powers that be. Reddit's WallStreetBets saga is an unprecedented case of how the internet facilitated people's burning desire to wrest the levers of economic power away from the clutches of a few chosen elites. This silent revolution didn't involve peasants with pitchforks, but the working class weaponizing their stimulus checks to break Wall Street's back.
NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming service enables M1 Mac support
Now back to more boring stuff. If you have bought the new M1-powered MacBooks this Christmas, you are in for a treat with NVIDIA bringing native M1 support to its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service. What's more, Apple's next M1 chips are rumored to include a 128-core GPU. It looks like proper gaming on the Mac might be an actual possibility in the future.
Xiaomi's 'smart glasses' patent reeks of snake oil
Don't you hate it when tech companies take a break from subverting democracy and sowing seeds of civil war to come up with products squarely targeted at the sort of people who answer Nigerian email scams? Well, Xiaomi's latest patent seems to be an attempt to top yesterday's snake oil campaign featuring an improbable wireless charging system that was thoroughly debunked by EEVBlog.
