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Tech Beat · 12 PM Update

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Apple is facing fresh scrutiny over a so-called gray list embedded in iOS — a collection of words and phrases that the system quietly refuses to auto-complete or allow swipe-typing. Researchers say the list may contain more than one hundred thousand entries, covering everything from drug references to politically charged phrases like "sleepy Joe" or "Tibetan independence." Apple hasn't commented, but the discovery raises real questions about who decides what your keyboard will and won't help you say.

Meanwhile, Blizzard has offered a rare look behind the curtain at what it takes to launch a major online game without the servers catching fire. World of Warcraft Forever went live on nearly four thousand virtual machines running seventy thousand four hundred eighty CPU cores and two hundred fifty-one terabytes of RAM. Critics and players called it one of the smoothest launches in the franchise's history, which suggests all that infrastructure spending actually paid off.

And in the category of things nobody asked for but everyone appreciates — Doom is now playable on an IBM Z mainframe, rendered entirely in colored text characters through a terminal window. There's no sound, the resolution is what you'd generously call impressionistic, but it runs. At this point, Doom running on unexpected hardware is less a novelty and more a law of nature.

Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.

Sources

  1. https://www.techradar.com/phones/ios/a-very-light-touch-form-of-censorship-the-iphone-has-a-gray-list-of-words-and-phrases-that-apple-wont-auto-complete-for-you
  2. https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/wow-forever-launch-used-70-480-cpu-cores-and-251-terabytes-of-ram-3-924-virtual-machines-powered-one-of-world-of-warcrafts-smoothest-launches-ever
  3. https://krthr.co/person-of-interest/
  4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-strike-power/
  5. https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/11/08/doom-delivers-five-minutes-of-terminal-violence-on-an-ibm-mainframe/5308092
  6. https://github.com/Bidthedog/throng/
  7. https://weekspro.com
  8. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/perfect-road-doc-film-directors-spent-months-in-campervan-poff-1236744367/
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