April 18, 2021 - Episode 592

This week, chips are in short supply, Twitch is reducing the bots, and Google is pushing away the rest of the web.

Description

This week, chips are in short supply, Twitch is reducing the bots, and Google is pushing away the rest of the web.

ParticipantsScott ErtzHost

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 PiltchHost

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.

OpeningPowered by TeknoAXENifty GiftiesPowered by Microsoft StoreGlobal chip shortage is not going to get better any time soon

A global chip shortage has been affecting product production and availability for nearly a year now. For those who had hoped that perhaps the fabrication plants might be getting close to having a handle on the problem, we've got some bad news. According to executives at all of the major foundries, we can expect these shortages to stay around for years.

read full articlePiltch Point with Avram PiltchPowered by PureVPNExtra LifePowered by Loot CrateIt's not just you - your Twitch follow count really did go down

Twitch has always had a love/hate relationship with bots. Some are welcomed and encouraged, such as those that maintain decorum in chat. Others, however, are against the service's terms of service - such as those that create false conversation and false viewership. This week, the company has announced that it has rooted out over 7.5 million of these bots and removed them from the service entirely.

read full articleNews From the TubesPowered by MalwarebytesGoogle is struggling to win support for FLoC, browsers won't support

Google has been working to remove third-party tracking cookies from Chrome. The company has received a lot of negative feedback, including from the advertising industry, which does not feel confident in the company's new approach to the Privacy Sandbox. Now, additional criticism is coming in for Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the approach to tracking users' interests, and it comes from a scary place: browsers and search engines.

read full article* DRM Not IncludedPowered by Amazon PrimeGoogle Play Movies & TV to move to YouTube on smart TV platforms

In 2018, Google began the transition from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. While the Play brand stuck around for a while, it was clear that its days were numbered. This week, Google began the next version of the Google Play brand shift by announcing that Google Play Movies & TV would be leaving most smart TVs this year (Roku, LG, Vizio, and Samsung). In the announcement email sent to customers, the company said,

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