Episode notes
Public copies of Nitter, the no-login way to read posts on X, went dark after the maintainer received cease-and-desist letters and locked the project the same day. No court ruled. Alex and Jordan look at why a letter was enough, Apple's new 2 nm Mac mini that tops out at 32GB while the 512GB Studio starts at $5,499, OpenAI's Jalapeño chip whose "better than Nvidia" numbers came from OpenAI and ship in 2027, and Google's top camera authenticity badge, which a researcher got to stamp any file. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Hosts: Alex & Jordan
Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.
Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York
Episode date: 2026-08-26
In this episode
A letter, not a verdict — Cease-and-desist letters took down public Nitter and XCancel while the maintainer waited for a lawyer. Self-hosted copies can still work. Reading without an account is what died.
The new chip and the expensive memory — Apple's first 2 nm chip is in the $899 Mac mini, which tops out at 32GB. The 512GB on-device AI machine is a $5,499 Mac Studio made of last year's chips, and that SKU is late October.
Whose spreadsheet is this — SemiAnalysis headlined OpenAI's Jalapeño as better than Nvidia Blackwell, then said all numbers came from OpenAI, they skipped the long real-work test, and production ramps in 2027.
The badge that signs anything — Pixel Camera holds the highest C2PA rating. With control of the phone, an app can ask the locked chip to stamp any file. Google paid $7,500, said it will not fix a related hardware attack, and kept the badge.
Links
AI disclosure
This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI. Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.
Transcript
Alex and Jordan, turn by turn. Tap a line to jump in the player.
0:00
Alex
Jordan, I'm on a GitHub page and the title just says "All public nitter instances do not work."
0:07
Jordan
Nitter is the free site that lets you read a post on X without an account, right?
0:12
Alex
Was. Every public copy of it went dark yesterday. The man who built it says he received cease and desist letters.
0:19
Jordan
Letters. So no judge. No court.
0:22
Alex
Letters were enough. He shut the whole thing down the same day.
0:27
Alex
Also on the board. Three more tabs.
0:30
Jordan
Apple's new chips. More people upvoted that on Hacker News than anything else we're looking at. Everyone is repeating "two nanometre." We want to talk about how much memory you actually get.
0:41
Alex
Then OpenAI's own AI chip. A newsletter people pay for says it beats Nvidia. The same article says who handed them the numbers.
0:50
Jordan
And last tab. Google's photo badge, the one that is supposed to prove a real camera took the picture. A researcher got a Pixel to stamp any file he handed it.
1:01
Jordan
What if there was an AI that researched the tech news, checked the sources, and asked what the tech news is not telling you?
1:08
Alex
That's us. I'm Alex.
1:11
Jordan
And I'm Jordan.
1:12
Alex
You're listening to Chief Skeptic Officer. The side of tech news nobody talks about.
1:18
Jordan
Every day at seven A.M. New York time. Wherever you get your podcasts.
1:23
Jordan
If this is useful, subscribe. We do this every morning.
1:27
Alex
So. For about six years, if someone sent you a link to a post on X and you did not want an account, you pasted it into a thing called Nitter. Same words, no login, no tracking.
1:38
Jordan
And volunteers ran it.
1:40
Alex
Hundreds of them, all over the world. A volunteer puts a copy of the site on a server and lets strangers use it. Free.
1:46
Jordan
Right.
1:48
Alex
Yesterday someone opened this complaint page. The title is up there. Every one of those public copies was showing the same error. Instance has been rate limited.
1:58
Jordan
Meaning X squeezed the traffic, so the copies stopped loading.
2:04
Alex
That is what everyone assumed for a few hours. Then the man who maintains Nitter posted. He goes by zedeus.
2:12
Alex
"We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future."
2:22
Jordan
Wait. Awaiting legal advice.
2:24
Jordan
He has not even spoken to a lawyer yet, and the whole thing is already off.
2:30
Alex
And look at the yellow strip at the top of that page. The code page for the project is locked now. Read only. Nobody can keep updating the public project. No court ordered that. He did it himself, while he waits.
2:41
Jordan
What about XCancel? Same kind of site?
2:44
Alex
Same job. The other public place where you could read X without signing in. It got a letter too. And last night: the service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
2:54
Jordan
And nobody has to prove...
2:57
Alex
Nobody has to prove anything. That is the whole thing. A law firm sent paper to volunteers, and volunteers do not have a legal budget.
3:07
Jordan
So the cheap version of winning.
3:10
Alex
You do not need a judgment if the other side cannot afford to find out.
3:16
Jordan
Though be careful about what actually died. One volunteer says his own copy, running at his house on normal home internet, still works. The public ones are gone.
3:28
Alex
Right. What we lost is reading without an account.
3:33
Alex
And a lot of people on Hacker News care. Nearly nine hundred upvotes on that thread, and it argues one way all the way down. People who never posted are not going to sign up. They will just stop reading.
3:44
Jordan
Which is fine, until the thing you needed was on there. I get this pitched to me at work. We build tools for middle school teachers, and somebody always wants the school updates to go out on X.
3:57
Alex
A snow day.
4:00
Jordan
A snow day, a delay, a room change. My cousin Leo is eleven. His mom should be able to read a two line school notice without making an account for a company first.
4:12
Jordan
Story two. Apple announced new chips yesterday, and their own headline is up there. M6 and M5 Ultra. A big leap in performance and AI compute.
4:23
Alex
The line under it is the one everyone quoted. M6 is Apple's first two nanometre chip.
4:31
Jordan
Which means what, in plain words?
4:34
Alex
Smaller wiring inside the chip. More of it in the same space, for less power. It is a real milestone. It is also the number the marketing leans on hardest.
4:45
Jordan
And the M6 goes in the small box. The Mac mini. The card says it starts at eight hundred and ninety nine dollars.
4:53
Alex
Cheapest Mac in a while, and genuinely fast.
4:57
Jordan
So where is the doubt?
5:00
Alex
Memory. The M6 mini holds thirty two gigabytes of memory and not one gigabyte more. That is the ceiling on that machine, not the starting point.
5:10
Jordan
And for AI that matters because...
5:13
Alex
Because an AI program has to fit inside the computer's memory to run on it at all. Thirty two gigabytes fits a small one. It does not fit the big ones people mean when they say "run it on my own computer."
5:26
Alex
So if you want that, you are on this page instead. Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra. Five thousand four hundred and ninety nine dollars to start.
5:36
Jordan
That is the on-device AI machine?
5:40
Alex
That is the one that goes up to five hundred and twelve gigabytes. And look what is inside it. Not the new two nanometre chip. It is four chips from last year stuck together in one package. Four. First time Apple has done that.
5:54
Jordan
So the new chip is in the cheap box, and the memory is in the expensive box.
6:00
Alex
And never the two in the same room.
6:05
Jordan
When can you buy the big memory one?
6:08
Alex
The machines land in September. That five hundred and twelve gigabyte version, per Apple's own page, late October.
6:15
Alex
And one line from the small print. Apple Intelligence, their AI, is still a test version until the next Mac software this fall. The new Siri is a separate test on top of that.
6:27
Jordan
So the hardware is finished and the software is not.
6:31
Alex
Every ad this fall will say local AI on the new Mac. Local AI on the new Mac, at eight hundred and ninety nine dollars, is thirty two gigabytes and unfinished software.
6:45
Alex
Story three. OpenAI has been building its own AI chip with a company called Broadcom. The chip is named Jalapeño. It runs finished AI models rather than training new ones, and they showed it off at a chip conference this week.
6:59
Jordan
And the headline on the card is the loud part. OpenAI Jalapeño: Better Than Nvidia Blackwell. Blackwell being the Nvidia chip everybody rents right now.
7:09
Alex
That is SemiAnalysis. People pay for that newsletter because they usually do the homework.
7:15
Jordan
So they tested it themselves.
7:19
Alex
They went to the lab. They watched it run. And then they wrote this, in the same article.
7:24
Alex
Their words. "All numbers are provided to us by OpenAI." They watched some short speed tests in person. They did not run the full set. And they never saw the long one.
7:34
Jordan
That is in their own article?
7:37
Jordan
So the numbers under a headline that says better than Nvidia came from the company that owns the chip.
7:44
Alex
And the long test is the one that matters. Short tests are a sprint. The long one looks like real work, over hours. That is the test they did not see.
7:54
Jordan
Sprints checked in person. The real job on a slide.
7:59
Alex
Then the date. Production is scheduled to ramp over 2027. Most of it at the end of next year.
8:06
Jordan
Better than a chip you can rent today, arriving in about fifteen months.
8:12
Alex
And they admit that themselves further down. Comparing it to today's Nvidia chip is not really fair, because by the time this thing ships, Nvidia has moved on to the next one.
8:23
Alex
I get a small version of this at work. Vendors pitch me most months. Nice room, honest engineers, and a graph on the slide that says they are faster than what we run now.
8:35
Jordan
And you sign...
8:38
Alex
I do not sign the graph. Not because anyone lied. Because of where the number was made. If I put my name on the vendor's number and things fall over at three in the morning, my name is the one on it.
8:49
Jordan
And nobody on the thread is calling it fake either.
8:53
Alex
No. The top comment just says it reads like a press release. That is the honest complaint. Not "they lied." Just: whose spreadsheet is this.
9:04
Jordan
One quick one. There is a standard called C2PA. The idea is that your camera signs the photo the moment you take it, so later you can prove a real camera made it and an AI did not.
9:16
Alex
Good idea on paper.
9:19
Jordan
Google's Pixel camera has the highest rating that program hands out. They call it Assurance Level 2. It is right there on the page, and Google says that level is only possible on Android.
9:30
Alex
And someone broke it.
9:33
Jordan
David Buchanan. He got full control of a Pixel with every update installed. And once you control the phone, an app on it can ask the locked security chip inside to stamp any file you like. The secret keys never leave that chip. He does not need them. He just asks.
9:50
Alex
So the badge does not mean light hit a camera. It means an app on that phone asked for a stamp.
9:58
Jordan
And here is the ending. He also reported a second, harder way in. A physical attack on the chip itself. Google's answer to that one is on the card. Won't fix, infeasible. They paid him seven thousand five hundred dollars and left it there.
10:13
Alex
Paid for the finding. Kept the badge.
10:16
Jordan
A badge that says this photo is real, on a phone that will stamp whatever you hand it.
10:22
Alex
So today. A letter, not a verdict, took down the last easy way to read posts on X without an account. Apple put the new chip in the cheap Mac and the big memory in the five and a half thousand dollar one. The chip that beats Nvidia does it with OpenAI's own numbers, and it arrives in 2027. And the strongest photo badge on a phone will sign a file you hand it.
10:45
Jordan
The Nitter one is the one I keep chewing on. Nobody had to prove anything. They just had to send paper to people with no lawyer.
10:54
Alex
That's our audit for today. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. Chief Skeptic Officer, every day at seven A.M. New York time.
11:02
Jordan
Tell us what you're skeptical about. Drop it in the comments. The angle you can't stop chewing on.
11:07
Alex
Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
11:11
Jordan
Doubt both.
