Australia has become the first country to ban teens under 16 years old from social media. BBC.com reports that as of today, kids in the country have awakened to find their accounts have gone dark. As you might assume, a substantial number of kids there have already figured out work arounds, and are continuing to doomscroll on social media…and will until they are caught. At that point, they will find another hack. As you might imagine, tech companies are quite unhappy with this new law…which requires Meta, TikTok, and YouTube to take ‘reasonable steps’ to make sure the underaged Australians don’t have accounts on their platforms. Many global leaders cheered the ban, claiming it is necessary to protect children from harmful content and algorithms – though critics have argued blanket prohibition is neither practical nor wise. Count me as one of the critics that finds it impractical…how many memes and stories are there about kids helping parents or grandparents to use tech? The kids are smart and learn much more quickly than adults. The bans won’t work…in Australia or anywhere else. 

After a report hit that said China was using smuggled top line Nvidia Blackwell chips in AI startup DeepSeek, Nvidia has put out a statement refuting the story. according to CNBC.com, the statement from Nvidia said in part, “We haven’t seen any substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom data centers’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement. “While such smuggling seems farfetched, we pursue any tip we receive.” We just reported yesterday that President Trump said Nvidia can ship its less powerful H200 chips to “approved customers” in China and elsewhere on the condition that the U.S. will get 25% of those sales. China has indicated that DeepSeek will soon have its own ‘next generation’ chips to support its AI models. 

Petco has taken a portion of its Vetco Clinics website offline. Techcrunch.com says a security lapse exposed a lot of customer personal information and info about their pets. The lapse made it possible for anyone to download the records without needing a login. Besides pet info, the files contained customer names and home addresses, email, and phone number. They also showed the clinic location the person took their pet to. All their pet info was there, too…species, breed, sex, age and medical history, prescriptions, etc. The records dated back to at least 2020. Petco didn’t disclose how many people were affected, but they will have to if it was more than 500, under California law. Petco was hacked earlier this year but a hacking collective that demands a ransom, and they also had a data breach in September. 

RAM chips have already gone up dramatically in price due to AI use hoovering them up. Now, graphics cards could be next. Engadget.com reports that AMD is weighing raising the price on its 8 gig models by $20 and its 16 gig cards by $40 due to the price of GDDR6 memory. NVIDIA, meanwhile, is rumored to have recently told its board partners it would no longer supply them with VRAM for their cards. On top of that, neither Nvidia nor AMD will releases new models soon…it may be the middle of next year. If you are thinking about buying a better GPU card, you’d better move fast. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.