Libraries Are More Than Corporate Database Products

As Brewster call made this statement, "libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products," it highlights the importance of libraries in society. Libraries not only provide access to information but also play a crucial role in preserving and lending books. The current ruling is a blow to libraries, readers, and authors, as it undermines their historic role in democracy.

The library's historic role in society cannot be overstated. They have been the cornerstone of education and knowledge for centuries, providing access to information that has shaped human understanding and progress. As Call aptly put it, "sustaining their historic role in society" is essential for libraries to continue playing a vital role in democracy. Libraries must be able to adapt to changing times while maintaining their core function: to provide access to knowledge.

The ruling in question seems to have been made with the intention of controlling content creation and distribution. Internet Archive, which has provided excellent services, has been accused of not meeting the transformative requirement. However, Call notes that "no one here is a lawyer," and thus, it's difficult to determine the legality of the situation based on moral grounds alone.

Call also brings up an interesting point about the power dynamics at play. The Publishers, especially those dealing with textbooks for colleges, have been accused of exploiting their customers by charging exorbitant prices. Call notes that "big Publishers... are evil" and that they do charge way too much money. However, this does not necessarily mean that the ruling is morally justifiable. As Call puts it, "what matters is what's the legality of it, not what's the morality of it." This highlights the complexity of the situation and the need for a nuanced approach.

The Future of Libraries

As we move forward, it's essential to consider the future of libraries in light of this ruling. Will they continue to play a vital role in democracy, or will they be relegated to the dustbin of history? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, there are those who would seek to promote the interests of libraries and authors alike. These individuals recognize that libraries are more than just customer service departments for corporate database products; they are institutions that hold a sacred trust in society. By fighting for the preservation of their historic role, these individuals hope to ensure that libraries continue to serve as beacons of knowledge and understanding.

The Tablet with a Twist

But there's another story worth sharing this week. Asus has launched a new tablet called the Rog Flow Z13-ac-r-n-m-n rmt02, which comes equipped with a harness and is designed to be a reality modeling tool. The name "Rog Flow" apparently stands for "Reality Modeling Tool," but it sounds more like something from a sci-fi movie.

The specs of this tablet are impressive, with a 3900H and RTX 4070 laptop GPU. However, the real focus of this product is its style. The keyboard has made-up characters instead of a space bar, and the back of the shell features machined aluminum vents and text. There's also a void bar that serves as a replacement for the traditional space bar.

But what really sets this tablet apart is its design. The outer shell has been replaced with a machined aluminum chassis, complete with shapes and vents that make it look like something out of a high-end gaming console. The back of the tablet features a kickstand that spans the entire width, allowing users to stand up and use the device in either portrait or landscape mode.

The harness, which doubles as a strap, is another notable feature. It's designed to be worn around the waist, with various buckles and slides that allow users to carry it in different ways. This design seems to have been inspired by the work of construction workers, who often use similar devices to secure themselves while working at heights.

The tablet also boasts liquid metal and a vapor chamber for cooling high-performance silicon inside. Companies are getting more comfortable with using liquid metal in their thermal designs lately, which allows for more effective heat transfer. The tablet also includes an eGPU connector, which can be paired with a separate graphics card to create a powerful computer system.

The Price of Progress

As we move forward into the future, it's essential to consider the price that we're willing to pay for innovation and progress. The Rog Flow Z13-ac-r-n-m-n rmt02 may not be the most affordable option on the market, but its unique design and features make it a statement piece.

Whether or not this tablet will become a staple in your daily life remains to be seen. However, one thing is certain: it's a product that's designed to stand out from the crowd. And who knows? Maybe it'll even inspire you to start using reality modeling tools in your own life.

Conclusion

As we conclude this article, it's clear that there are many different perspectives on the issue at hand. While some may see libraries as nothing more than corporate database products, others recognize their historic role in society and the importance of preserving knowledge and understanding.

The launch of the Rog Flow Z13-ac-r-n-m-n rmt02 is another reminder that innovation and progress come with a price. Whether or not we're willing to pay that price remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: the future of libraries and technology will continue to shape our world in ways both exciting and unpredictable.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap of the week we have a good episode for you this week so we're gonna be talking about some MSI malware concerns the company issued a statement warning people not to download drivers from suspicious locations and the reason is that MSI was recently breached and the source code was leaked as part of that breach so feasibly hackers could now create malicious versions of MSI software and drivers and convince people to download additionally we'll be going over the budget boards for am5 so this is going to be the new a620 series of chipsets it's supposed to be the cheapest possible am5 boards that'll be out there and further there's some news on a potential 10 uplift 10 to 12 percent for the 7800 X 3D through a simple bios tweak let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or projects portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace first up quick GN store update we have a new project and soldering map we always like to do a quick News segment on the news video that follows the launch of one of our products because uh these are exciting we spent a lot of time working on them and we're really happy with the way our custom stuff comes out so I wanted to go over it quickly first of all huge thank you because it was a massive success thus far we still have more in stock if you want to grab one on store.gamesaccess.net but for everyone who has purchased one so far thank you sincerely because we've been working on this for two years now it was a lot of back and forth of changing the supply so thickening the silicone going with higher quality materials tweaking and fine-tuning the placement of the specific spots on on the mat where you can place and organize screws and tools and all that stuff and then we just started working on sort of an FAQ because we got some of the early questions in people were asking a lot about how resilient is it against paint glue uh cutting and heat which is extremely heat resistant but we're working on a more specific number for you and I have some early results we're going to do a separate thing on this it'll be on Geon extras then an FAQ for the support team to answer but just so you know so I asked Patrick who has some Miniatures and model building experience I asked him to do some testing and he created and this is awesome this grid of the different paints adhesives and chemicals and when I explained the Testo I said I want you to treat it kind of like I said have you ever had an allergy test you know where they do the grid of shots and they're all like an inch apart so we did that on the mat we did an allergy test for how it reacts to different things and we had already tested a lot of stuff but we had specific questions from people that we hadn't considered so like how does it do with Citadel paint for example if you play Warhammer or do any wargaming uh with Miniatures and we have some initial results so first of all the paints just briefly it held up really well to everything that we tested so we tested a Tamaya and Citadel primarily and soap and warm water was able to get rid of all this actually is the unit that we tested and I held it up a second ago it was pretty clean so soap and warm water with a washcloth or a rag gets rid of pretty much all the paints you don't really you know you want to minimize how long it sits there dried but we did allow it to fully dry dry and it wiped off as for glues and specific heat and all that stuff we're compiling the full report Patrick's writing it up for me and we'll post that on the site on the store page if you want to learn more about it or you can email the support team and they'll have an answer soon but anyway I wanted to share it because this stuff is really exciting where it's just it's fun and this is what we do for our jobs normally but we get to test it and then apply the same methodology to our own product so that's always cool and as for what exactly this is if you don't know it's on store.gethersaccess.net these are our new projects and soldering mats we made these out of a super dense thick heavy and high quality silicone material and it makes the mat a very Hefty project surface that can withstand extreme heat and also serve as a workstation to store all of your tools it has molded in driver flux brush and spool holders and small parts trays and screw organizers and we also molded in some electrical Gates and diagrams for electronic students or enthusiasts now these are different from the mod mats so they're both durable services but they're built for different the modbats provide a specific and purpose-built anti-static conductive surface for ESD sensitive projects we have a whole video explaining the ESD properties how different anti-static materials and services work and it includes a common ground Point ESD wrist straps they're also much larger to accommodate PC Building they have diagrams PC builds and Silhouettes for parts and they're moderately heat resistant for like heat guns and some light soldering the projects in solder mats though are an insulative extremely heat resistant silicone so it can withstand solder and iron contacts directly and it's easy to clean and it's also sort of 3D to sort tools and things like that so just to give you an idea for the density though the mod mat that the solder mats currently on top of this weighs almost as much as the much larger surface below it because of how heavy duty we went with it and it's been it's been awesome uh we've been using it internally for a while now and we've had to hide it every time we film something so I'm happy to finally be able to share it and anyway thank you everyone for supporting us on these Endeavors always a lot of fun and we try not to like harass you all too much with the news updates about what we're doing for the store but it is the best opportunity for us to talk about hey here's some of the stuff we're doing that we're really excited and passionate about in addition to all the reviews that the store helps fund including the testing and all the research so all right let's get to the news stories so first up MSI has posted some explicit warnings for people not to download drivers or software from any website that's not theirs right now and they've posted this before obviously that's just good advice in general but as you all know they're sort of download rehost insights and sometimes for various reasons those maybe where people land but for this specific instance MSI noted that it suffered a breach of its servers it didn't really disclose further detail as to what exactly that means what servers uh it does appear to be internal servers not necessarily the website although who knows how much they separate them and uh the company that this point hasn't disclosed too much useful information but including the lack of specificity but currently the implication is that they've lost control of some of their source code and that would largely be source code that builds drivers and that's dangerous because that that gives you a pretty good attack Vector that looks very authentic so a post by bleeping computer had some additional information it suggested that a ransomware organization claimed the breach and specifically noted that it has source code it is asking for money and return of releasing that source code I suppose back to MSI and the extent that I can do it so we can also reach between some lines here MSI specifically instructing customers not to download things suggest that they have sufficient concern to believe that there could be compromised drivers or software out there we already know there's a compromised versions of afterburner out there which is the MSI overclocking and system monitoring utility it is actually a good tool but uh actually recently they specifically put out a notice saying don't download afterburner from anywhere that's not msi's website because I I think that particular attack was a crypto related um scam or uh or mining software in the background we had a news story on it it's been a while but anyway this is just good advice in general to download things directly from the source we're gonna add our own warning here because it's not clear how far this breach has penetrated MSI servers we would recommend maybe wait a little bit on just downloading anything from them either to allow them sometime to fully scrub and scan their own uploaded files and make sure that those haven't been silently swapped with something that could be concerning either way sticking to just msi's website should isolate attack vectors uh to adjust their own first party compromised servers rather than uncompromised third-party servers hosting compromised files so maybe wait a little bit just to be sure next one also MSI news but this is better news for them MSI posted after the 7800 xvd announcement its own announcement about a bios update that reportedly according to them boost performance of the 7800x3d somewhere around 10 to 12 for basically a bios toggle so in other words sort of doing nothing at least as much as you can do nothing to gain performance and this one is just following up the xvd launch we have that review on our Channel you should check it out if you haven't seen it really interesting part and following the launch msi's update is reportedly going to be available on all MSI 600 series AMD motherboards and specifically the ones that use the ajisa combo Pi 1.0.0.6 based for the build there are actually three new enhanced mode boost settings under the PBO menu suggesting that part of msi's change lies in manipulating the underlying PBO values additionally MSI has another new feature from memory it's called a high efficiency mode it looks like these are actually preset memory timing configurations available in four steps from relaxed to tightest in the past we've heard from overclockers that secondary timings actually matter a lot on ddr5 relatively speaking and that not all motherboards set them appropriately so this could help there MSI claims that combining the two can boost game performance by up to 12 percent MSI also showed off some benchmarks from a to 64 as an indication that memory sensitive production tasks May benefit from these tweaks as well so in essence this has been billed as a sort of free 10 or so boost it's 10 to 12 they say with no real downsides according to MSI the only theoretical downside might be stability so maybe there's some heat there depending on how they're playing with the PBO values but stability would would show itself pretty quickly so we might take a look at it no promises it's it seems like pretty straightforward uh stop and bios we've tested things like ape in the past and uh results weren't that exciting from a Content perspective but maybe worth considering for a user perspective EK and Seagate are working on some lightsaber heat sinks and ssds and these are officially branded so we're getting more official collaborations between Big Brand intellectual property and computer parts and we don't hate this because we've gone uh on on record a lot talking about Justin for example and how it's been doing really cool sort of self-branded just different things and they don't always work out great but it's awesome to see stuff like the cute pet cards and like the Sakura card where they're doing something just different and that's what EK and Seagate are doing here they're doing it more of the traditional approach though where clearly someone said how do we get a lot of sales without inventing our own thing let's license someone else's and that's what they're doing definitely a very sort of old school approach to making something unique but the companies are offering two variations they have one light side and one dark side set of ssds with tributes to Obi-Wan Kenobi Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader there's an LED light bar under the heatsink cover that shoots down to the saber Hilt so you'd want to install this in the most visible m.2 slot you can find there are also a lot of cool build options with this theme if you can find a board that best showcases it as for hard specs Seagate and EK note that these are fire Cuda drives that's part of seagate's branding and their pcie Gen 4 and vme SSD is up to two terabytes in capacity and operating sequentially up to 7 300 megabytes per second ek's primary contribution here was a specific loading mechanism that attaches the face plate to the SSD the companies noted that the faceplates are interchangeable and these would go well with nvidia's Star Wars video cards from a few years ago if you remember those it was a special release for it was around the 20 series time in and uh unfortunately not modern so you can't do the full themed thing if you want a new video card but but and we're happy to see just different stuff visually it's it does make it more interesting for everyone and um whether or not you know you're into Star Wars specifically it's it's cool to see something new so budget a620 boards for am5 this is important news because we're finally getting into territory where am5 boards are getting affordable uh AMD motherboards for am5 and the a620 chipset are official now it is no longer a rumor and at this point they are planning to offer just the lowest possible cost alternative to x670 and b650 there is reduced connectivity of course there's no CPU overclocking support so this is the one where they've specifically turned that off uh and at the time of writing there are only two as rock boards that are available on NewEgg for public retail and the cheaper of the two is eighty six dollars big change so now to be fair the original a series boards and it's been a long time and say 2017-18 whenever it was you could get those for like 40 50 bucks sometimes new so it's still more but it is much cheaper than what we've seen for am5 and this one is the a620m hdv m.2 and this one we'll we'll give it a closer look so at a third of the price of the cheapest x70 board for starters a620 doesn't have any pcie 5.0 at all on any board or at least it shouldn't buy the spec and here that's evidenced by the first m.2 slot below the socket having asrock's hyper m.2 branded which corresponds to gen 4. there's another m.2 slot way down in the bottom right corner but it has no markings to indicate what generation it is and an m.2 Wi-Fi slot is located along the left the standard pcie slot layout isn't really anything special here it's mildly surprising though that ASRock put two additional X1 slots below the main metal clad x16 maybe they had leftover inventory from mining boards for memory it's ddr5 ryzen 7000 cannot do a ddr4 and it has just two slots considering the capacities available these days from two sticks that's adequate for a low end system and honestly it'd be nice to see more boards embrace the two dim configuration because it can help with memory stability but here that's not the goal it's cheap it's the goal one thing we're potentially concerned about is the vrm layout we'd have to test it and we probably won't to be fair but with only a four plus one plus one phase layout using 50 amp stages the lack of a heatsink here could be a problem on some of the CPUs amd's offering depends what you sock it in there and what your case airflow configuration is there's a set of holes on the left vrm area that look like they could be for a heatsink but we'd guess ASRock didn't think it was worth it paradoxically it's usually the boards that need the most that get snubbed and while the 16 phase plus monsters don't necessarily need them get wildly Overkill thermal designs because it looks cool but maybe that's part of our motherboard unhinged rant part two the back of the board feature this is fine it shows the unusually forward position of the CPU socket though due to the board's reduced width what's left of the rear i o after Extreme cost cutting has only five USB ports counting the type C and it would probably be a good idea to pick up a USB hub to go along with this if you have a lot of peripherals but there is a reason for minimum viable products to exist for example low end PCS that are used primarily in maybe just like a household PC for the family or an office PC where it just kind of does web browsing so if you get good enough airflow there over the vrm it could be an okay low cost choice for low end ryzen 7000 Parts but you are giving up a lot here's just you know don't don't put a high on part in this it would be a massive waste the 100 plus dollar version of the board has a few more features here and there so a couple of them would be six brm phases and a heat sink and that board or one of the other options like the Asus tough gaming might be more appealing to Value focused buyers than say the absolute cheapest thing depending on again what you're using where they're priced up next is the Asus Ally Asus Rog pulled an April Fool's prank and then reversed it and said it's not actually a joke haha we got you now you don't know if the product is real not sure that's a great joke but okay uh Razer did it with a toaster they did it the other way though they they made a razor toaster as a prank and then at some point the CEO said he would actually make it if they hit some goal or enough people cared they hit the goal and I don't think they've made it yet so there's two ways to do things here uh either way Asus is proceeding to sow confusion ahead of its launch the Rog Ally is interesting it's a new handheld device and it is following clearly the trend that's been set by the steam deck which was wildly successful especially at its launch it's computer directly aimed at valve steam deck and because valve benefits from anyone selling any kind of gaming device they're probably not too upset about it if anything it brings more interest surrounding the platform so it looks like Asus is angle here to do something different is focusing on premium and high end they are going with a higher end set of specs and core components they've massively changed how the body looks from say the steam deck where Asus is uses an all-white body design newer Hardware inside and from what it looks like the texturing on the body of the Rog Ally resemble sort of the stadia controller texturing there's not much officially on asus's website for this but there were two previews that we saw one was dave2ds and one was from LTT and in these previews we got a first look at it you should check out their videos if you want to learn more and see the Hands-On but we'll give you the recap here of the core components and notes and honestly their content both of them was is the only reason we even heard about this thing we would have just rolled our eyes on April Fool's joke otherwise moved on but the pre-production units that they featured are technically subject to change Aces is probably pretty close to being done though the exterior white shells one obvious difference but the next one is the lack of touch pads that's a feature that we like on the steam deck it makes navigation easier in desktop mode so for input that leaves the Ally with two RGB thumb sticks a d-pad four face buttons shoulder triggers and two rear buttons overall the Ally has fewer input options than the deck the rear of the unit shows the intake area for the dual internal fans which look like they could potentially be restrictive to airflow more so than the deck but it really depends on the static pressure of the fan they're using that brings us to internals with the rear panel off we can see how the fans move air through some very small looking fin stacks and out the top of the chassis and again the design shown here could change prior to launch but one of the things we've noticed is that the deck has a larger mesh vent and that one was actually pretty low impedance to cooling when we did our in-depth thermal testing the battery looks pretty big for the Ally it takes up most of the bottom this is a Zen 4 Apu it will have rdna3 Graphics internally and of course Asus goes on to say it's the fastest Apu yet but until we actually know which unit it is and what the specs are that doesn't mean anything so at this point it's it's almost guaranteed to be faster so to speak than the steam deck and more powerful in that regard to the left of the Apu we noticed that there's an m.2 slot for 30 mil SSD is it below that are four Ram packages they're soldered to the board and this shows us that it's more aligned with the console's unified memory architecture than say what you would deal with on a PC where you have separate vram and dram now the spec bump over the deck continues because the Ally also gets a seven inch display it is 1080p it's capable of 120 hertz refresh rate and that's up from the Dax 1280 by 800 resolution which is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and it's 60 hertz refresh rate and then on the top there's a semi-proprietary connector for the Ally that would allow it to connect to an egpu Mount so if you wanted to shove a two thousand dollar 40 90 into a thermally constrained box unhooked up by cable to the Ally to use with your Zen 4 Apu then you can do that anyway the price will not be uh as cheap as maybe people are hoping but we don't know what it's going to be we'll find out right now there's only a Best Buy page link with no price listed where you can sign up for notifications and additionally Asus here they're going to be forced to run Windows 11 on this because the steam deck Os from valve isn't going to work here just yet it's a better mobile device than Windows 10 Windows 11 that is but there's going to be some typical Microsoft bloat some overhead that might Buck it down a little bit and navigation on valve's custom Linux OS is actually extremely good so it's good that there's some differences here because it's not just Hardware there's going to be some competition in terms of software too and valve hasn't officially released steamos 3 as a generic installer yet but probably a community developed Port will soon follow the Allies launch now we're planning on getting our hands on one as soon as we can to go through a similar set of tests as we did for the steam deck including in-depth thermals with thermocouples physically mounted all over the board but you know we'll talk about that once we have one next one internet archive losing a major lawsuit so internet archive is the creator of the Wayback machine you've likely used it at some point and it's a tool that lets you see old versions of websites it has been under Fire for a couple of years now from four major publishing houses book publishers that is and these Publishers filed a lawsuit over internet archives basically Digital Library project that they embarked on they called it the controlled digital lending program and so far the courts appear to be siding with the Publishers so the Publishers have identified at least 127 works that they say are illegally hosted and distributed through the internet archives program this started back in 2020 when internet archive launched its National Emergency Library project which removed all restrictions for Lending on a specific set of required reading and educational books it's just another classic in the American circle of you need to learn to get a good wage but you need to have a good wage to learn you want to learn give us money uh college textbooks and one of the many one of one of them they were they got me too and then I dropped out so it anyway now the idea from internet archive was because these were required reading for schools like high schools and colleges they wanted to provide those resources for students and the public during the pandemic but received negative attention from some authors and definitely from their Publishers public libraries also have Digital Book programs but the difference with those is that a public library typically buys a license from the publisher or whatever uh they're buying it from for the number of digital copies that the library will distribute this is not what internet archive is doing though in this program internet archive buys a real physical copy of the book they then digitize it and they then lend it out online like an unofficial library in this regard it only lends out one digital copy per physical book it owns without also lending out the physical book so they retain one of the two copies now internet archive argues that this Falls within fair use and the first sale Doctrine the first held Doctrine is a part of U.S copyright law that allows you to resell display or otherwise dispose of a copy of a copyrighted work that you have purchased from the original publisher without the permission to do any of those things from the rights holder because you have that specific copy it's yours to do those things with so as a simple example you buy a book you now possess and own that book even though you don't own the rights to the material within that book however because of the way this works you are free to lend that book to a friend without legal repercussions and then that friend is free to never return it to you because they're still reading that book but you're right to distribute the copyrighted work ends when you no longer own that particular copy so for example your friend decides to take possession of it it is now their right to loan it internet archive posits that the way it does things transforms the work enough to leverage fair use for the transformative aspect of it but the judge for the southern districts of New York disagrees quote the Crux of ia's first Factor argument is that an organization has the right under fair use to make whatever copies of its print books are necessary to facilitate digital lending of that book that's so long as only one Patron at any time can borrow the book for each copy that has been bought and paid for but there's no such right which risks eviscerating the rights of authors and Publishers to profit from the creation and dissemination of derivatives of their protective work ia's wholesale copying and unauthorized lending of digital copies of the Publisher's print books does not transform the use of the books and IA profits from exploiting the copyrighted material without paying the customary price this is a firm denial from the court but despite this internet archive of course intends to appeal the decision and internet archives founder Brewster call made this statement quote libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products for democracy to thrive at a global scale libraries that must be able to sustain their historic role in society owning preserving and lending books this ruling is a blow for libraries readers and authors and we plan to appeal it this one's tough because it's easy to want to side with internet archive which has provided excellent services against four major Publishers it's kind of the classic story of the new fighting the old here and uh we could see both sides of it whereas content creators ourselves I mean you know we don't really think that internet archive is necessarily meeting the transformative requirement but obviously no one here is a lawyer so take that for what it's worth which is nothing but it doesn't appear to be a truly transformative work at the same time uh big Publishers especially of textbooks for colleges are evil and they do charge way too much money because it's an exploitative practice so ultimately all that really matters is what is the legality of it not what is the morality of it because that's how the legal system works and we're not here to answer that so let us know what you think though I am genuinely curious how much people uh side with one or the other and I guess trying to look at it from the um from the perspective of of maybe of the law not just the morality because internet archives taking the moral ground which is an okay ground to fight from sometimes just depends on who you're fighting and I guess in this case of the Publishers how powerful they are up next a tablet from Asus the Ally wasn't the only crazy thing that they unironically launched or announced on April Fool's Day this tablet is the next one so it comes with a harness and it is called the Rog flow z13-ac-r-n-m-n rmt02 they need to work on the name is the Rog flow apparently it's a quote reality modeling tool that's cool I don't know what that means but it does look like it could be more of a joke than the Ally except it's real it's a special edition of the existing flow z13 the high performance tablet it was designed in collaboration with tech fashion brand acronym fun fact Tech fashion exists and there's a brand called acronym that does it the specs include a 3900h and RTX 4070 laptop GPU but the specs aren't really the focus here the style is the focus which means it costs more the keyboard for example has made up characters and not a space bar no it actually has a void bar and actually it sounds kind of cooler than a space bar of course we would hope that they would also replace backspace with Time Warp delete and escape with Singularity collapse but they didn't it's just the void bar the outer shell of the tablet has been replaced with a machined aluminum chassis with shapes Vents and text all over it part of the back shell is a kickstand that spans the entire width of the tablet allowing it to be stood up and either portrait or landscape mode and to be fair it does actually look kind of interesting other four corners are a huge metal connection points for a large strap that doubles as a harness now there are various buckles and slides on the harness that let you carry it in a number of ways including having it open around waist level so you can use it standing up and this actually is a thing we've seen used when we were doing construction on the building renovation I saw one of these in use and they're primarily used in business environments like warehouses factories and the model does a good job of looking like a secondary character from The Matrix that probably loses in a fight with an agent in the background of a shot while also showing off how you're supposed to hold and use this thing inside the tablet Asus boasts of liquid metal and a vapor chamber to provide cooling for high and mobile silicon inside and it seems that companies are getting more comfortable with using liquid metal in their thermal designs lately Which is higher risk but higher reward that allows for more effective heat transfer and if you'd like to have the least cost effective computer possible it also includes like the Ally one of the semi-proprietary egpu connectors so you can buy that and combine it with your tablet there's no price at the time of writing for the tablet but it's also going to be high so that's it for news this week thanks for watching as always and massive thank you to everyone who bought the product and soldering mats they're on the store if you want to grab one if you haven't gotten one yet you can go over to store.careersexis.net we've got some cool content coming up including can't show the details yet kind of a retrospective leave it there so it's got a lot of cool history and testing in it all right thanks for watching subscribe for more see you all next timehey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap of the week we have a good episode for you this week so we're gonna be talking about some MSI malware concerns the company issued a statement warning people not to download drivers from suspicious locations and the reason is that MSI was recently breached and the source code was leaked as part of that breach so feasibly hackers could now create malicious versions of MSI software and drivers and convince people to download additionally we'll be going over the budget boards for am5 so this is going to be the new a620 series of chipsets it's supposed to be the cheapest possible am5 boards that'll be out there and further there's some news on a potential 10 uplift 10 to 12 percent for the 7800 X 3D through a simple bios tweak let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or projects portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace first up quick GN store update we have a new project and soldering map we always like to do a quick News segment on the news video that follows the launch of one of our products because uh these are exciting we spent a lot of time working on them and we're really happy with the way our custom stuff comes out so I wanted to go over it quickly first of all huge thank you because it was a massive success thus far we still have more in stock if you want to grab one on store.gamesaccess.net but for everyone who has purchased one so far thank you sincerely because we've been working on this for two years now it was a lot of back and forth of changing the supply so thickening the silicone going with higher quality materials tweaking and fine-tuning the placement of the specific spots on on the mat where you can place and organize screws and tools and all that stuff and then we just started working on sort of an FAQ because we got some of the early questions in people were asking a lot about how resilient is it against paint glue uh cutting and heat which is extremely heat resistant but we're working on a more specific number for you and I have some early results we're going to do a separate thing on this it'll be on Geon extras then an FAQ for the support team to answer but just so you know so I asked Patrick who has some Miniatures and model building experience I asked him to do some testing and he created and this is awesome this grid of the different paints adhesives and chemicals and when I explained the Testo I said I want you to treat it kind of like I said have you ever had an allergy test you know where they do the grid of shots and they're all like an inch apart so we did that on the mat we did an allergy test for how it reacts to different things and we had already tested a lot of stuff but we had specific questions from people that we hadn't considered so like how does it do with Citadel paint for example if you play Warhammer or do any wargaming uh with Miniatures and we have some initial results so first of all the paints just briefly it held up really well to everything that we tested so we tested a Tamaya and Citadel primarily and soap and warm water was able to get rid of all this actually is the unit that we tested and I held it up a second ago it was pretty clean so soap and warm water with a washcloth or a rag gets rid of pretty much all the paints you don't really you know you want to minimize how long it sits there dried but we did allow it to fully dry dry and it wiped off as for glues and specific heat and all that stuff we're compiling the full report Patrick's writing it up for me and we'll post that on the site on the store page if you want to learn more about it or you can email the support team and they'll have an answer soon but anyway I wanted to share it because this stuff is really exciting where it's just it's fun and this is what we do for our jobs normally but we get to test it and then apply the same methodology to our own product so that's always cool and as for what exactly this is if you don't know it's on store.gethersaccess.net these are our new projects and soldering mats we made these out of a super dense thick heavy and high quality silicone material and it makes the mat a very Hefty project surface that can withstand extreme heat and also serve as a workstation to store all of your tools it has molded in driver flux brush and spool holders and small parts trays and screw organizers and we also molded in some electrical Gates and diagrams for electronic students or enthusiasts now these are different from the mod mats so they're both durable services but they're built for different the modbats provide a specific and purpose-built anti-static conductive surface for ESD sensitive projects we have a whole video explaining the ESD properties how different anti-static materials and services work and it includes a common ground Point ESD wrist straps they're also much larger to accommodate PC Building they have diagrams PC builds and Silhouettes for parts and they're moderately heat resistant for like heat guns and some light soldering the projects in solder mats though are an insulative extremely heat resistant silicone so it can withstand solder and iron contacts directly and it's easy to clean and it's also sort of 3D to sort tools and things like that so just to give you an idea for the density though the mod mat that the solder mats currently on top of this weighs almost as much as the much larger surface below it because of how heavy duty we went with it and it's been it's been awesome uh we've been using it internally for a while now and we've had to hide it every time we film something so I'm happy to finally be able to share it and anyway thank you everyone for supporting us on these Endeavors always a lot of fun and we try not to like harass you all too much with the news updates about what we're doing for the store but it is the best opportunity for us to talk about hey here's some of the stuff we're doing that we're really excited and passionate about in addition to all the reviews that the store helps fund including the testing and all the research so all right let's get to the news stories so first up MSI has posted some explicit warnings for people not to download drivers or software from any website that's not theirs right now and they've posted this before obviously that's just good advice in general but as you all know they're sort of download rehost insights and sometimes for various reasons those maybe where people land but for this specific instance MSI noted that it suffered a breach of its servers it didn't really disclose further detail as to what exactly that means what servers uh it does appear to be internal servers not necessarily the website although who knows how much they separate them and uh the company that this point hasn't disclosed too much useful information but including the lack of specificity but currently the implication is that they've lost control of some of their source code and that would largely be source code that builds drivers and that's dangerous because that that gives you a pretty good attack Vector that looks very authentic so a post by bleeping computer had some additional information it suggested that a ransomware organization claimed the breach and specifically noted that it has source code it is asking for money and return of releasing that source code I suppose back to MSI and the extent that I can do it so we can also reach between some lines here MSI specifically instructing customers not to download things suggest that they have sufficient concern to believe that there could be compromised drivers or software out there we already know there's a compromised versions of afterburner out there which is the MSI overclocking and system monitoring utility it is actually a good tool but uh actually recently they specifically put out a notice saying don't download afterburner from anywhere that's not msi's website because I I think that particular attack was a crypto related um scam or uh or mining software in the background we had a news story on it it's been a while but anyway this is just good advice in general to download things directly from the source we're gonna add our own warning here because it's not clear how far this breach has penetrated MSI servers we would recommend maybe wait a little bit on just downloading anything from them either to allow them sometime to fully scrub and scan their own uploaded files and make sure that those haven't been silently swapped with something that could be concerning either way sticking to just msi's website should isolate attack vectors uh to adjust their own first party compromised servers rather than uncompromised third-party servers hosting compromised files so maybe wait a little bit just to be sure next one also MSI news but this is better news for them MSI posted after the 7800 xvd announcement its own announcement about a bios update that reportedly according to them boost performance of the 7800x3d somewhere around 10 to 12 for basically a bios toggle so in other words sort of doing nothing at least as much as you can do nothing to gain performance and this one is just following up the xvd launch we have that review on our Channel you should check it out if you haven't seen it really interesting part and following the launch msi's update is reportedly going to be available on all MSI 600 series AMD motherboards and specifically the ones that use the ajisa combo Pi 1.0.0.6 based for the build there are actually three new enhanced mode boost settings under the PBO menu suggesting that part of msi's change lies in manipulating the underlying PBO values additionally MSI has another new feature from memory it's called a high efficiency mode it looks like these are actually preset memory timing configurations available in four steps from relaxed to tightest in the past we've heard from overclockers that secondary timings actually matter a lot on ddr5 relatively speaking and that not all motherboards set them appropriately so this could help there MSI claims that combining the two can boost game performance by up to 12 percent MSI also showed off some benchmarks from a to 64 as an indication that memory sensitive production tasks May benefit from these tweaks as well so in essence this has been billed as a sort of free 10 or so boost it's 10 to 12 they say with no real downsides according to MSI the only theoretical downside might be stability so maybe there's some heat there depending on how they're playing with the PBO values but stability would would show itself pretty quickly so we might take a look at it no promises it's it seems like pretty straightforward uh stop and bios we've tested things like ape in the past and uh results weren't that exciting from a Content perspective but maybe worth considering for a user perspective EK and Seagate are working on some lightsaber heat sinks and ssds and these are officially branded so we're getting more official collaborations between Big Brand intellectual property and computer parts and we don't hate this because we've gone uh on on record a lot talking about Justin for example and how it's been doing really cool sort of self-branded just different things and they don't always work out great but it's awesome to see stuff like the cute pet cards and like the Sakura card where they're doing something just different and that's what EK and Seagate are doing here they're doing it more of the traditional approach though where clearly someone said how do we get a lot of sales without inventing our own thing let's license someone else's and that's what they're doing definitely a very sort of old school approach to making something unique but the companies are offering two variations they have one light side and one dark side set of ssds with tributes to Obi-Wan Kenobi Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader there's an LED light bar under the heatsink cover that shoots down to the saber Hilt so you'd want to install this in the most visible m.2 slot you can find there are also a lot of cool build options with this theme if you can find a board that best showcases it as for hard specs Seagate and EK note that these are fire Cuda drives that's part of seagate's branding and their pcie Gen 4 and vme SSD is up to two terabytes in capacity and operating sequentially up to 7 300 megabytes per second ek's primary contribution here was a specific loading mechanism that attaches the face plate to the SSD the companies noted that the faceplates are interchangeable and these would go well with nvidia's Star Wars video cards from a few years ago if you remember those it was a special release for it was around the 20 series time in and uh unfortunately not modern so you can't do the full themed thing if you want a new video card but but and we're happy to see just different stuff visually it's it does make it more interesting for everyone and um whether or not you know you're into Star Wars specifically it's it's cool to see something new so budget a620 boards for am5 this is important news because we're finally getting into territory where am5 boards are getting affordable uh AMD motherboards for am5 and the a620 chipset are official now it is no longer a rumor and at this point they are planning to offer just the lowest possible cost alternative to x670 and b650 there is reduced connectivity of course there's no CPU overclocking support so this is the one where they've specifically turned that off uh and at the time of writing there are only two as rock boards that are available on NewEgg for public retail and the cheaper of the two is eighty six dollars big change so now to be fair the original a series boards and it's been a long time and say 2017-18 whenever it was you could get those for like 40 50 bucks sometimes new so it's still more but it is much cheaper than what we've seen for am5 and this one is the a620m hdv m.2 and this one we'll we'll give it a closer look so at a third of the price of the cheapest x70 board for starters a620 doesn't have any pcie 5.0 at all on any board or at least it shouldn't buy the spec and here that's evidenced by the first m.2 slot below the socket having asrock's hyper m.2 branded which corresponds to gen 4. there's another m.2 slot way down in the bottom right corner but it has no markings to indicate what generation it is and an m.2 Wi-Fi slot is located along the left the standard pcie slot layout isn't really anything special here it's mildly surprising though that ASRock put two additional X1 slots below the main metal clad x16 maybe they had leftover inventory from mining boards for memory it's ddr5 ryzen 7000 cannot do a ddr4 and it has just two slots considering the capacities available these days from two sticks that's adequate for a low end system and honestly it'd be nice to see more boards embrace the two dim configuration because it can help with memory stability but here that's not the goal it's cheap it's the goal one thing we're potentially concerned about is the vrm layout we'd have to test it and we probably won't to be fair but with only a four plus one plus one phase layout using 50 amp stages the lack of a heatsink here could be a problem on some of the CPUs amd's offering depends what you sock it in there and what your case airflow configuration is there's a set of holes on the left vrm area that look like they could be for a heatsink but we'd guess ASRock didn't think it was worth it paradoxically it's usually the boards that need the most that get snubbed and while the 16 phase plus monsters don't necessarily need them get wildly Overkill thermal designs because it looks cool but maybe that's part of our motherboard unhinged rant part two the back of the board feature this is fine it shows the unusually forward position of the CPU socket though due to the board's reduced width what's left of the rear i o after Extreme cost cutting has only five USB ports counting the type C and it would probably be a good idea to pick up a USB hub to go along with this if you have a lot of peripherals but there is a reason for minimum viable products to exist for example low end PCS that are used primarily in maybe just like a household PC for the family or an office PC where it just kind of does web browsing so if you get good enough airflow there over the vrm it could be an okay low cost choice for low end ryzen 7000 Parts but you are giving up a lot here's just you know don't don't put a high on part in this it would be a massive waste the 100 plus dollar version of the board has a few more features here and there so a couple of them would be six brm phases and a heat sink and that board or one of the other options like the Asus tough gaming might be more appealing to Value focused buyers than say the absolute cheapest thing depending on again what you're using where they're priced up next is the Asus Ally Asus Rog pulled an April Fool's prank and then reversed it and said it's not actually a joke haha we got you now you don't know if the product is real not sure that's a great joke but okay uh Razer did it with a toaster they did it the other way though they they made a razor toaster as a prank and then at some point the CEO said he would actually make it if they hit some goal or enough people cared they hit the goal and I don't think they've made it yet so there's two ways to do things here uh either way Asus is proceeding to sow confusion ahead of its launch the Rog Ally is interesting it's a new handheld device and it is following clearly the trend that's been set by the steam deck which was wildly successful especially at its launch it's computer directly aimed at valve steam deck and because valve benefits from anyone selling any kind of gaming device they're probably not too upset about it if anything it brings more interest surrounding the platform so it looks like Asus is angle here to do something different is focusing on premium and high end they are going with a higher end set of specs and core components they've massively changed how the body looks from say the steam deck where Asus is uses an all-white body design newer Hardware inside and from what it looks like the texturing on the body of the Rog Ally resemble sort of the stadia controller texturing there's not much officially on asus's website for this but there were two previews that we saw one was dave2ds and one was from LTT and in these previews we got a first look at it you should check out their videos if you want to learn more and see the Hands-On but we'll give you the recap here of the core components and notes and honestly their content both of them was is the only reason we even heard about this thing we would have just rolled our eyes on April Fool's joke otherwise moved on but the pre-production units that they featured are technically subject to change Aces is probably pretty close to being done though the exterior white shells one obvious difference but the next one is the lack of touch pads that's a feature that we like on the steam deck it makes navigation easier in desktop mode so for input that leaves the Ally with two RGB thumb sticks a d-pad four face buttons shoulder triggers and two rear buttons overall the Ally has fewer input options than the deck the rear of the unit shows the intake area for the dual internal fans which look like they could potentially be restrictive to airflow more so than the deck but it really depends on the static pressure of the fan they're using that brings us to internals with the rear panel off we can see how the fans move air through some very small looking fin stacks and out the top of the chassis and again the design shown here could change prior to launch but one of the things we've noticed is that the deck has a larger mesh vent and that one was actually pretty low impedance to cooling when we did our in-depth thermal testing the battery looks pretty big for the Ally it takes up most of the bottom this is a Zen 4 Apu it will have rdna3 Graphics internally and of course Asus goes on to say it's the fastest Apu yet but until we actually know which unit it is and what the specs are that doesn't mean anything so at this point it's it's almost guaranteed to be faster so to speak than the steam deck and more powerful in that regard to the left of the Apu we noticed that there's an m.2 slot for 30 mil SSD is it below that are four Ram packages they're soldered to the board and this shows us that it's more aligned with the console's unified memory architecture than say what you would deal with on a PC where you have separate vram and dram now the spec bump over the deck continues because the Ally also gets a seven inch display it is 1080p it's capable of 120 hertz refresh rate and that's up from the Dax 1280 by 800 resolution which is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and it's 60 hertz refresh rate and then on the top there's a semi-proprietary connector for the Ally that would allow it to connect to an egpu Mount so if you wanted to shove a two thousand dollar 40 90 into a thermally constrained box unhooked up by cable to the Ally to use with your Zen 4 Apu then you can do that anyway the price will not be uh as cheap as maybe people are hoping but we don't know what it's going to be we'll find out right now there's only a Best Buy page link with no price listed where you can sign up for notifications and additionally Asus here they're going to be forced to run Windows 11 on this because the steam deck Os from valve isn't going to work here just yet it's a better mobile device than Windows 10 Windows 11 that is but there's going to be some typical Microsoft bloat some overhead that might Buck it down a little bit and navigation on valve's custom Linux OS is actually extremely good so it's good that there's some differences here because it's not just Hardware there's going to be some competition in terms of software too and valve hasn't officially released steamos 3 as a generic installer yet but probably a community developed Port will soon follow the Allies launch now we're planning on getting our hands on one as soon as we can to go through a similar set of tests as we did for the steam deck including in-depth thermals with thermocouples physically mounted all over the board but you know we'll talk about that once we have one next one internet archive losing a major lawsuit so internet archive is the creator of the Wayback machine you've likely used it at some point and it's a tool that lets you see old versions of websites it has been under Fire for a couple of years now from four major publishing houses book publishers that is and these Publishers filed a lawsuit over internet archives basically Digital Library project that they embarked on they called it the controlled digital lending program and so far the courts appear to be siding with the Publishers so the Publishers have identified at least 127 works that they say are illegally hosted and distributed through the internet archives program this started back in 2020 when internet archive launched its National Emergency Library project which removed all restrictions for Lending on a specific set of required reading and educational books it's just another classic in the American circle of you need to learn to get a good wage but you need to have a good wage to learn you want to learn give us money uh college textbooks and one of the many one of one of them they were they got me too and then I dropped out so it anyway now the idea from internet archive was because these were required reading for schools like high schools and colleges they wanted to provide those resources for students and the public during the pandemic but received negative attention from some authors and definitely from their Publishers public libraries also have Digital Book programs but the difference with those is that a public library typically buys a license from the publisher or whatever uh they're buying it from for the number of digital copies that the library will distribute this is not what internet archive is doing though in this program internet archive buys a real physical copy of the book they then digitize it and they then lend it out online like an unofficial library in this regard it only lends out one digital copy per physical book it owns without also lending out the physical book so they retain one of the two copies now internet archive argues that this Falls within fair use and the first sale Doctrine the first held Doctrine is a part of U.S copyright law that allows you to resell display or otherwise dispose of a copy of a copyrighted work that you have purchased from the original publisher without the permission to do any of those things from the rights holder because you have that specific copy it's yours to do those things with so as a simple example you buy a book you now possess and own that book even though you don't own the rights to the material within that book however because of the way this works you are free to lend that book to a friend without legal repercussions and then that friend is free to never return it to you because they're still reading that book but you're right to distribute the copyrighted work ends when you no longer own that particular copy so for example your friend decides to take possession of it it is now their right to loan it internet archive posits that the way it does things transforms the work enough to leverage fair use for the transformative aspect of it but the judge for the southern districts of New York disagrees quote the Crux of ia's first Factor argument is that an organization has the right under fair use to make whatever copies of its print books are necessary to facilitate digital lending of that book that's so long as only one Patron at any time can borrow the book for each copy that has been bought and paid for but there's no such right which risks eviscerating the rights of authors and Publishers to profit from the creation and dissemination of derivatives of their protective work ia's wholesale copying and unauthorized lending of digital copies of the Publisher's print books does not transform the use of the books and IA profits from exploiting the copyrighted material without paying the customary price this is a firm denial from the court but despite this internet archive of course intends to appeal the decision and internet archives founder Brewster call made this statement quote libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products for democracy to thrive at a global scale libraries that must be able to sustain their historic role in society owning preserving and lending books this ruling is a blow for libraries readers and authors and we plan to appeal it this one's tough because it's easy to want to side with internet archive which has provided excellent services against four major Publishers it's kind of the classic story of the new fighting the old here and uh we could see both sides of it whereas content creators ourselves I mean you know we don't really think that internet archive is necessarily meeting the transformative requirement but obviously no one here is a lawyer so take that for what it's worth which is nothing but it doesn't appear to be a truly transformative work at the same time uh big Publishers especially of textbooks for colleges are evil and they do charge way too much money because it's an exploitative practice so ultimately all that really matters is what is the legality of it not what is the morality of it because that's how the legal system works and we're not here to answer that so let us know what you think though I am genuinely curious how much people uh side with one or the other and I guess trying to look at it from the um from the perspective of of maybe of the law not just the morality because internet archives taking the moral ground which is an okay ground to fight from sometimes just depends on who you're fighting and I guess in this case of the Publishers how powerful they are up next a tablet from Asus the Ally wasn't the only crazy thing that they unironically launched or announced on April Fool's Day this tablet is the next one so it comes with a harness and it is called the Rog flow z13-ac-r-n-m-n rmt02 they need to work on the name is the Rog flow apparently it's a quote reality modeling tool that's cool I don't know what that means but it does look like it could be more of a joke than the Ally except it's real it's a special edition of the existing flow z13 the high performance tablet it was designed in collaboration with tech fashion brand acronym fun fact Tech fashion exists and there's a brand called acronym that does it the specs include a 3900h and RTX 4070 laptop GPU but the specs aren't really the focus here the style is the focus which means it costs more the keyboard for example has made up characters and not a space bar no it actually has a void bar and actually it sounds kind of cooler than a space bar of course we would hope that they would also replace backspace with Time Warp delete and escape with Singularity collapse but they didn't it's just the void bar the outer shell of the tablet has been replaced with a machined aluminum chassis with shapes Vents and text all over it part of the back shell is a kickstand that spans the entire width of the tablet allowing it to be stood up and either portrait or landscape mode and to be fair it does actually look kind of interesting other four corners are a huge metal connection points for a large strap that doubles as a harness now there are various buckles and slides on the harness that let you carry it in a number of ways including having it open around waist level so you can use it standing up and this actually is a thing we've seen used when we were doing construction on the building renovation I saw one of these in use and they're primarily used in business environments like warehouses factories and the model does a good job of looking like a secondary character from The Matrix that probably loses in a fight with an agent in the background of a shot while also showing off how you're supposed to hold and use this thing inside the tablet Asus boasts of liquid metal and a vapor chamber to provide cooling for high and mobile silicon inside and it seems that companies are getting more comfortable with using liquid metal in their thermal designs lately Which is higher risk but higher reward that allows for more effective heat transfer and if you'd like to have the least cost effective computer possible it also includes like the Ally one of the semi-proprietary egpu connectors so you can buy that and combine it with your tablet there's no price at the time of writing for the tablet but it's also going to be high so that's it for news this week thanks for watching as always and massive thank you to everyone who bought the product and soldering mats they're on the store if you want to grab one if you haven't gotten one yet you can go over to store.careersexis.net we've got some cool content coming up including can't show the details yet kind of a retrospective leave it there so it's got a lot of cool history and testing in it all right thanks for watching subscribe for more see you all next time\n"