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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On May 9, 1996, Linus Torvalds emailed the Linux kernel mailing list with a precise mascot vision: a "slightly overweight" penguin, sitting contentedly after gorging on herring, too stuffed to stand. The inspiration was a 1993 zoo visit in Canberra where a small penguin bit his finger and gave him what he called "penguinitis." Developer James Hughes named the mascot Tux, short for Torvalds UniX, and today Tux turns 30 as the face of Linux, an OS running on 97% of the world's top 500 supercomputers.
What’s happening:
🤝 Apple and Intel strike a preliminary chip deal
🤖 Cloudflare cuts 20% of staff and blames AI productivity gains
🔒 EU flags VPNs as a loophole in age verification laws
🛸 Pentagon launches a public website for UFO footage
🎬 Prime Video adds a TikTok-style Clips feed
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
🤝 Apple and Intel strike a preliminary chip deal ↗️LINK
Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture chips for Apple devices, reuniting two companies that split in 2020 when Apple ditched Intel processors for its own custom silicon.
The US government, now Intel's largest shareholder, helped broker the deal, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick personally pushing Apple, Nvidia, and others to send business Intel's way.
Apple CEO Tim Cook flagged supply constraints at its chip manufacturer last month, so the timing is convenient — Intel's stock jumped 15% on the news, suggesting Wall Street needed the good news more than Apple did.
🤖 Cloudflare cuts 20% of staff and blames AI ↗️LINK
Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees across all non-sales teams globally, its first mass layoff in 16 years, the same quarter it posted record revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year.
CEO Matthew Prince says internal AI usage jumped 600% in three months, with employees becoming "2, 10, even 100 times more productive," eliminating the need for support staff behind them.
Prince says Cloudflare will likely employ more people by 2027 than it does today, which is either a reassuring promise or a very convenient thing to say on a layoff earnings call.
🔒 EU flags VPNs as a loophole in age verification laws ↗️LINK
The European Parliamentary Research Service warned that VPN usage is surging in countries with mandatory age verification laws, with VPN apps topping download charts in the UK after its Online Safety Act took effect.
Regulators are now debating whether VPN providers should require age verification themselves, a move that would force users to prove their identity just to access privacy tools.
The EU's own age verification app was found storing biometric images unencrypted shortly after launch, which makes the push to extend that system to VPNs a harder sell.
🛸 Pentagon launches a public website for UFO footage ↗️LINK
The Pentagon launched war.gov/ufo, a new public website hosting never-before-seen UAP videos, photos, and source documents gathered from across the entire US government, with more files releasing on a rolling basis.
The site is the result of PURSUE, a multi-agency initiative involving the White House, ODNI, NASA, FBI, and the Department of Energy, following years of growing public interest since the 2017 New York Times exposé on a secret $22 million Pentagon UFO program.
The Defense Department now calls itself the Department of War, hosts UFO files at war .gov/ufo, and registered aliens .gov in March, which remains inactive — so either disclosure is coming or the branding team is having a lot of fun.
🎬 Prime Video adds a TikTok-style Clips feed ↗️LINK
Amazon launched Clips, a short-form vertical video feed inside Prime Video, showing snippets of shows designed to hook viewers into watching the full title or adding it to their watchlist.
Prime Video first tested the format during the NBA season with scrollable highlights, and now joins Netflix, Disney, Peacock, and Tubi, which have all launched near-identical discovery features recently.
Netflix already has a feature called Clips too, so the most creative thing about Prime Video's launch is that it didn't bother coming up with a different name.
Today’s Poll:
Do you think age verification laws are actually worth it?
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think AirPods with cameras is a cool idea or just creepy?
A) Cool - 23%
B) Creepy - 77% 🏆
Reader’s opinion:
“If you're going to "cook" or do stuff with camera enabled tech, then something like AR glasses with a HUD and audio feedback are far more practical and useful. Of course, for a visually challenged person, Airpods with a camera makes sense since AR would be, practically, useless. I'm looking forward to the AR hard contact lenses that have a HUD built in, since I wear hard contacts most of the time anyway.”
“They are sticking tech everywhere it doesn’t need to be. It is all for the company’s usage not the consumer at this point.”
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