Is social media addictive by design or just irresistible entertainment? The panel tackles the lawsuit that's dragging tech giants onto the witness stand and how surveillance tech is quietly expanding while lawmakers and users scramble to catch up.

• Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial
• Instagram Chief Says Social Media Is Not 'Clinically Addictive' in Landmark Trial
• Section 230 turns 30 as it faces its biggest tests yet
• Meta apparently thinks we're too distracted to care about facial recognition and Ray-Bans
• Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance
• Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
• TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app.
• Discord backtracks on controversial age verification rollout...kind of
• Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
• The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor that this man remotely accessed thousands of them
• HP's laptop subscriptions are a great deal — for HP
• FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI
• T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation
• Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags
• SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says
• Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release
• Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars
• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
• $1.8 million MST3K Kickstarter brings in (almost) everyone from the old show
• OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. China's ChatGPT Fans Aren't OK
• Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
• Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78
• Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Higginbotham, and Thomas Germain

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Leo Laporte and Paris Martineau go head-to-head over whether today's AI breakthroughs are truly unprecedented or history repeating itself. Hear what happens when the show's hosts use cutting-edge tools to challenge each other's optimism, skepticism, and predictions for the future of work.

• Something Big Is Happening
• Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes
• Amazon's $8 billion Anthropic investment balloons to $61 billion
• Google is going for the jugular — by doubling capex and outspending the rest of Big Tech
• Google's Gemini app has surpassed 750M monthly active users
• OpenAI's Meta makeover
• ChatGPT's deep research tool adds a built-in document viewer so you can read its reports
• Alexa+, Amazon's AI assistant, is now available to everyone in the U.S.
• Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production
• AI didn't kill customer support. It's rebuilding it
• Worried about AI taking jobs? Ex-Microsoft exec tells parents what kind of education matters
  most for their kids.
• A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content
• AI Bots Are Now a Signifigant Source of Web Traffic
• Crypto.com places $70M bet on AI.com domain ahead of Super Bowl
• Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs
• How To Think About AI: Is It The Tool, Or Are You?
• LEO! Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study
• HBR: AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
• As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
• Waymo Exec Admits Remote Operators in Philippines Help Guide US Robotaxis
• Medicare's new pilot program taps AI to review claims. Here's why it's risky
• Section 230 Turns 30; Both Parties Want It Gone—For Contradictory Reasons
• Meet Gizmo: A TikTok for interactive, vibe-coded mini apps
• The Evolution of Bengt Betjänt
• Uber Eats adds AI assistant to help with grocery shopping
• Is having AI ghostwrite your Valentine's Day messages a good idea?
• As Saudi Arabia's 100-Mile Skyscraper Crumbles, They're Replacing It With the Most Desperate Thing Imaginable
• YouTube Argues It Isn't Social Media in Landmark Tech Addiction Trial
• 'Man down:' Watch Amazon delivery drone crash in North Texas
• Understanding Neural Network, Visually
• Leo's AI Journey
• The TIMELINE
• TWiT x 2 in Super Bowl commercials

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

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After years of ignoring and maligning Windows, Microsoft has finally woken up and is making some happy noises. Last week, we discussed how Microsoft plans to improve the quality of Windows and that there are already many signs of that work in various security features and new OneDrive Folder Backup changes - plus those two new direct reports to Nadella. Then, Microsoft announced its Windows Baseline Security Mode and User Transparency and Consent initiatives with questions about the timing. And now, Microsoft just explained Windows 11 version 26H1, and it's not like 24H2 at all despite being tied to Snapdragon X2 silicon.

Something happened ... and that something is tied to 26H1

• 26H1: Only for Snapdragon X2, a "scoped release," based on a "different core" from 24H2 and 25H2
• You cannot upgrade 24H2 or 25H2 to 26H1
• You cannot upgrade 26H1 to 26H2 (!) - instead, those on 26H1 "will have a path to update in a future Windows release." - Is that future Windows release Windows 12? Probably
• 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1 will all have the same user-facing features, this has been the case with all support Windows (11) versions for 2+ years
• (Remember, this is not what happened with 24H2. Shipped early on Snapdragon X1, but was made available to all Windows 11 PCs later that year)
• So why is this happening now? Fortune 500/corporate customer pushback on AI is one guess
• This is GOOD news, however it all unfolds

More Windows 11

• Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, so get to work. Updates this month include: Agent in Settings (Copilot+ PCs only) improvements. Settings improvements, cross-device Resume improvements, Windows MIDI Services improvements, Narrator improvements, Smart App Control improvements, Windows Hello New ESS improvements, and File Explorer improvements
• Somewhat related to the quality/security push noted above, Microsoft is rolling out new Secure Boot certificates this year for older (pre-2024/25) PCs
• Microsoft announces a Store CLI that does (almost) nothing new compared to winget
• New Dev and Beta builds with minor changes: Emoji 16.0, camera improvements, various fixes

More earnings

• Amazon hits $213.4 billion in revenues, will spend $200 billion CAPEX/AI infrastructure this fiscal year, more than Google ($175/$185 billion) or Microsoft (estimated $150+ billion)
• Qualcomm $12.25 billion in revenues, up 5 percent
• Alphabet/Google - Up 18 percent (!) to $113.8 billion - 750 million MAUs on Gemini, 74 percent of revenues come from advertising
• Spotify - somehow has over 750 million MAUs now

AI and dev

• OpenAI and Anthropic release dueling agentic AI coding models that do more than agentic AI coding within minutes of each other
• Ads appear in ChatGPT Free and Go as threatened
• Duck.ai adds private, anonymous real-time AI voice chat
• NET 11 Preview 1 arrives, but there's nothing major here

Xbox & games

• Microsoft announces the 2025 Xbox Excellence Awards
• Celebrate 35 years of Id Software - Castle Wolfenstein 3D was a wake-up call for PC gaming, but DOOM was a miracle, and Quake was a real WTF moment
• Sony sold 8 million PlayStation 5s (down 16 percent YOY) in the holiday quarter, 92 million (!) overall
• Valve predictably delays the vaporware Steam Machine
• Epic Games is having a winter sale - for example, Silent Hill 2, GTA V Enhanced are 50 percentR

These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/970

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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