• Privacy preserving age verification is bullsh!t
• The Supreme Court lets Mississippi's social media age-verification law go into effect
• Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York.
• AI data centers made Americans' electricity bills 30% higher
• AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over
• Ford reveals breakthrough process for lower priced EVs
• More thoughts from Sam on the Ford EV platform
• Popular car brand wants you to pay monthly to unlock more horsepower
• Apple Plots Expansion Into AI Robots, Home Security and Smart Displays
• Elli-q
• After researchers unmasked a prolific SMS scammer, a new operation has emerged in its wake
• Starlink tries to block Virginia's plan to bring fiber Internet to residents
• China Launches Three-Day Robot Olympics Featuring Football and Table Tennis
• The Key to Crack the CIA's Mysterious 'Kryptos' Sculpture Is Up for Sale
• PACER Hacked By Malicious Entities, Briefly Turning It Into A Useful Source For Federal Court Documents
• Court blocks FTC investigation into Media Matters' alleged scheme against X
• Google AI Overviews linked to 25% drop in publisher referral traffic, new data shows

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Sam Abuelsamid, and Lisa Schmeiser

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• GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it.
• Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons
• David Sacks on X: "A BEST CASE SCENARIO FOR AI? The Doomer narratives were wrong. Predicated on a "rapid take-off" to AGI, they predicted that the leading AI model would use its intelligence to self-improve, leaving others in the dust, and quickly achieving a godlike superintelligence. Instead, we" / X
• A taxonomy of hallucinations (see table 2)
• Red Teams Jailbreak GPT-5 With Ease, Warn It's 'Nearly Unusable' for Enterprise
• Medicare will test using AI to help decide whether patients get coverage — which could delay or deny care, critics warn
• Podcasting's 'Serial' Era Ends as Video Takes Over
• Sara Kehaulani Goo named President of the Creator Network
• What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Moved In Next Door
• Google says it's working on a fix for Gemini's self-loathing 'I am a failure' comments
• Two-mile suspension bridge
• Will Giz allow the Skee-ballers to make this their next outing?

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

Guest: Tulsee Doshi

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Patch Tuesday was yesterday, so find out what's new! Plus, two of the best-ever Doom engine games are now available in remastered form (4K/120 FPS, new episodes, cross-play, multiplayer, more) on Game Pass, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox PC (Windows), PS4, PS5, Switch, Steam, GOG, and various cloud streaming services. It's a free update if you already own either game. Also, if you have a local library, you should use it. If only for Libby by Overdrive free audiobooks and free access to periodicals. But then be surprised by all the services they offer!

Windows 11

• Copilot+ PCs: Recall comes to the EU, Recall Reset, Click to Do improvements, AI agent in Settings
• All: Quick Machine Recovery, black screen of death, Snap layouts improvements, Gamepad layout for Windows Touch Keyboard
• Blender is now native on Windows 11 on Arm
• Search settings consolidation in Canary
• Mobile device companion sidebar for Start gets a new layout in Dev
• More Control Panel settings move to Settings app in Dev and Beta

Windows 10

• Consumer ESU licenses will support up to 10 PCs
• Microsoft will support Edge on Windows 10 through October 2028 (as expected)

AI

• OpenAI releases GPT-5 but not everyone loves it
• Quickly brought back GPT-4o
• And now the model picker is back, for now
• Microsoft is adding it everywhere, of course, and Apple says it will add to Apple Intelligence - And Bing just added support for GPT-4o image creation
• Perplexity makes unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google Chrome
• Comet - New tab page with Chat, can choose a Google Search as you type, Assistant in a sidebar, Summarize webpage/document, voice dictation, voice mode, big feature is website interactivity
• Microsoft Edge in Copilot Mode - most evolutionary update, new New Tab page, Quick assist with Copilot button location change, Simple task handoff (which needs work), Voice navigation
• But some bigger UI changes are on the way
• Dia (Mac only for now) - Also, there's a Pro subscription - New Tab page with chat and an attempt at orchestration, @mentions for tabs, Skills (built-in, can edit, can make you're own), and personalization
• Next up: Opera Neon - And what is Google doing with Chrome?
• Copilot 3D can turn images into 3D models - It's a "Creators Update"!
• Microsoft is EOLing the Lens app - use Microsoft Copilot 365 app instead

Microsoft/Surface

• GitHub CEO is leaving, Microsoft is rolling GitHub into its Core AI organization
• Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 get firmware update to add battery charging modes

Xbox and games

• Sony sold 2.5 million PS5s in quarter, now over 80 million cumulatively
• Microsoft rumored to have sold only 21 to 29 million Xbox Series X|S consoles
• Big Windows 11 on Arm updates!
• Game downloading is coming to Xbox app on Windows 11 on Arm
• Epic Games and Qualcomm bring Easy Anti-Cheat to Windows 11 on Arm/Snapdragon X
• Apple and Google have illegal mobile app store monopolies in Australia, so Fortnite is coming back to the iPhone there via Epic Games Store
• Microsoft is updating Xbox Dashboard and app to show game trials and demos in "Free with Xbox" section
• Microsoft has paused the production of Contraband
• Steam for Chromebooks Beta will never leave beta, discontinuing in January instead

Tips & Picks

• Tip of the week: Go to the library
• App pick of the week: Heretic and Hexen

These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/945

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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• CISA's Emergency Directive to ALL Federal agencies re: SharePoint.
• NVIDIA firmly says "no" to any embedded chip gimmicks.
• Dashlane is terminating its (totally unusable) free tier.
• Malicious repository libraries are becoming even more hostile.
• The best web filter (uBlock Origin) comes to Safari.
• The very popular SonicWall firewall is being compromised.
• >100 models of Dell Latitude and Precision laptops are in danger.
• The significant challenge of patching SharePoint (for example).
• A quick look at my DNS Benchmark progress.
• Does InControl prevent an important update.
• An venerable Sci-Fi franchise may be getting a great new series.
• What to do about the problem of AI "website sucking"

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1038-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

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For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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Low-cost MacBooks could begin production soon, with a release period for early 2026. The developer beta for iOS 26 Beta 6 is out now. Could the iPhone 17 be introduced with a higher price point? And Alex Lindsay is excited to play with a new camera to record Vision Pro content.

• Low-cost MacBook production starting soon, possible $599 or $699 pricing.
• Apple's MacBook Pro overhaul with OLED might not launch until 2027.
• Apple's bid to close the AI gap could be hampered by AI brain drain.
• Apple will bring GPT-5 to Apple Intelligence in iOS, iPad OS and macOS 26.
• Everything New in iOS 26 [dev] Beta 6.
• AirPods could soon get Live Translation, iOS 26 beta code suggests.
• iPhone 17 models 'likely' to have higher prices, another analyst says.
• Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon.
• Japan law is forcing more browser choice on iPhone in December.
• Tech giants Apple and Google lose landmark court case as federal judge rules they engaged in anti-competitive conduct.

Picks of the Week:

• Andy's Pick: DockLite Board
• Alex's Pick: The BlackMagic Immersive Camera
• Jason's Pick: Instapaper

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, and Jason Snell

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• GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it.
• Guy Gives Himself 19th Century Psychiatric Illness After Consulting With ChatGPT
• Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson After Lawyers Panic About The Public Domain
• Perplexity gives Apple new reason not to acquire the AI company
• Trump's Threat to Hit Chips With 100% Tariffs Raises Big Questions
• Apple chipmaker TSMC says it too is exempt from US tariffs - 9to5Mac
• Oracle 21 Better Faster Cheaper
• Apple is reportedly working with Samsung to build iPhone image sensors in Texas
• Apple's bid to close the AI gap could be hampered by AI brain drain
• Didn't Take Long To Reveal The UK's Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
• Amazon Cuts 100 Wondery Jobs Amid Podcast Strategy Shift
• Nuclear reactor on the moon is actually kind of doable?
• Hubble Network plans massive satellite upgrade to create global Bluetooth layer
• San Francisco metro area's unemployment hits highest level since 2024
• Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash
• Dial-up Internet to be discontinued

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Owen Thomas, Doc Rock, and Wesley Faulkner

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• Interview with Vlad Prelovac, CEO of Kagi
• OpenAI Just Released Its First Open-Weight Models Since GPT-2
• Genie 3: A New Frontier for World Models
• Kitten TTS: The 25MB AI Voice Model That's About to Change EVERYTHING (Runs on a Potato! 🥔)
• Illinois bans AI from providing mental health services | StateScoop
• Perplexity defensive over ignoring robots.txt and stealing data
• Tesla Autopilot verdict sends a chill across the industry
• AI Flight Pricing Can Push Travelers to the Limit of Their Ability to Pay
• Jim Acosta Just Interviewed an AI Version of a Parkland Victim
• The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die
• A Catholic AI app promises answers for the faithful.
• When you can't trust bunnies on a trampoline....
• AI vegans
• Get $120 off Thistle with my discount code
• Finally, bookmarks on Bluesky... kind of
• Good guy humpback whales

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau

Guest: Vlad Prelovac

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Microsoft's fiscal year ended on a high note, assuming you didn't just get laid off. WinSAT's formal assessment will give you some interesting PC performance information, similar to the old WEI score from Windows Vista. And Proton finally makes a standalone authenticator app; How to transition from whatever you're currently using and why you'll need to keep using Microsoft Authenticator too.

Microsoft Earning

• Quarterly: net income of $27.2 billion on revenues of $76.4 billion. Those figures represent gains of 24 percent and 18 percent, respectively, year-over-year (YOY)
• Annual: a net income of $101.8 billion (up 16 percent YOY) on revenues of $281.7 billion (up 15 percent)
• Another look at layoffs, which are nothing new under Satya Nadella - Over 17,000 in CY 2025 so far, despite over $100 billion in profits in FY
• Headcount "unchanged" YOY
• Big announcements below were likely made to avoid Qs about layoffs and it almost worked
• AI spending in FY was about $85 billion, higher than promised
• AI spending in this quarter will jump to $30 billion (!!!!)
• Azure earned $75 billion in revenues in FY, its first-ever disclosure of this number - Fun with math, that means $56 billion in revenues in previous FY. How far back can we go?
• Microsoft's market cap exceeded $4 trillion after earnings release
• "Copilot" has over 100 million MAUs, really M365 Copilot, which even Nadella thinks is a new M365 tier
• GitHub Copilot has over 20 million MAUs, probably most are free
• HUGE gains in Microsoft Gaming/Xbox, discussed below

Windows 11

• But first, something completely different: Microsoft's "vision" for Windows in 2030
• David Weston a curious choice for this video, first in a series - he's in security
• Daily work life changes thanks to AI - less toil work, less eyes and more talking, multimodal interactions
• Security - customers want appliance-level security, "it just works" security -
• Degenerates into a general security discussion
• Back to AI, reclaiming our lives
• Windows 11 SE, RIP - We hardly knew you. Literally.
• Insider: Changes to Home view in File Explorer for Work and School sign-ins, Settings app changes in Dev (25H2) and Beta (24H2)

More earnings

• AMD - HUGE gains in its PC businesses!
• Qualcomm up 10%
• Apple up 9.6%
• Amazon up 13%

AI & dev

• OpenAI releases its first open-weight reasoning models and Microsoft gives them away for free
• Apple is trying to Sherlock ChatGPT
• Of course Alexa+ will get ads
• Dev: Microsoft has a native app problem on Windows
• Microsoft says it will fix Windows App SDK
• Paul just switched .NETpad to the Windows App SDK and can confirm it's a nightmare
• WPF is half-assed... and last year, it took Microsoft over 9 months to deliver the first Windows Copilot Runtime capabilities to devs, but you still can't use this in production. Also, it's not called that anymore

Xbox & games

• Microsoft Gaming has over 500 million MAUs - More fun with math
• COD has 50 million MAUs
• Microsoft has nearly 40 games in development
• Xbox Game Pass has $5 billion in revenues in FY, over 500 million hours played in FY
• Gaming Copilot (Beta) is available on Game Bar for Windows PC for Xbox Insiders enrolled in the PC Gaming Preview
• Assassin's Creed Mirage and more coming to Game Pass this month
• OG Switch models now cost more thanks to tariffs

Tips & Picks

• Tip of the week:

These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/944

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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