New Products and Legal Battles - Episode 657

F5 Live: Refreshing Technology (Audio)

Description

This week, Apple's sales drop, Blizzard's future is revealed, Sam Bankman-Fried's fate is sealed, and YouTube's Terms of Service is enforced.

Participants

Scott Ertz

Host

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram Piltch

Host

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

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Mac sales collapse 34%, but Apple hopes new hardware will help

This week, two things happened in the Apple universe: the company announced a refresh for its Mac lineup, and sales numbers for its current Mac lineup were released. The latter certainly indicates that Apple needs the former to increase sales for the company's computers because the latter showed a collapse in sales equaling a roughly 34% decrease year-over-year from 2022 to 2023.

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Extra Life

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BlizzCon 2023: Highlights and lowlights from this year's event

This year's BlizzCon, Blizzard's annual announcement fiesta, comes at an interesting time for the company. It is the first BlizzCon since the approved merger of Activision Blizzard with Microsoft Gaming, and likely the last where Microsoft has no influence on the direction of the company. The company announced what they see as the direction of their products over the short and long term, seeing a plan for Microsoft to benefit from.

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News From the Tubes

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Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX crypto-fraudster, guilty on all counts

A year ago, the crypto-exchange FTX collapsed. It took with it a lot of money, value, cryptocurrency, and trust in the industry. Since then, governments around the world have been investigating and prosecuting the executive leadership of the company over various versions of fraud. This week, former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all 7 counts in the US and now faces over a century behind bars.

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YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers is getting aggressive with users

Since nearly the day Google purchased YouTube, the company has been fighting against users who have ad blockers installed. They have tried various tactics over the years, such as messages and delays. But now, Google is taking its battle against ad blockers to a new level, blocking users from watching any content on YouTube entirely.

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