 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thank you so much, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer and Brad. Coming up on DTNS Tiktok is affecting the food on restaurant menus. Gotta look good in those videos. Plus how Netflix streaming is tanking the yen and what Apple can learn from the New York public school system that decides math. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 19th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Oh folks, we got we got food. We've got Apple, which is also food, but we mean the company. So let's start right on in with the quick hits. Some folks who use Android or even Google Voice have complained of a strange bug that's breaking their messaging threads with iPhone users. Somewhere between Android and iOS, a plus sign is being added to the Android user's phone number. Now, if you didn't know this, a plus sign usually indicates an international number. So the plus says, ah, the next number is the international code plus four four, for example. So when that happens, it can often break threads because iMessage thinks, oh, well, this is a new number. It's an international number. This is a new sender. I should put it in its own thread. It also causes suspicion for some users when they see what looks like an international number attached to a message from a domestic friend. The problem has happened at the same time as the release of iOS 16.5, but that's merely correlation at this point. Mac rumors notes that many of the reports are coming from AT&T users, but also that's anecdotal. Resetting network settings does seem to fix it for some folks and adding a plus one if you're in the U.S. to the beginning of your number will avoid the problem as well because you already put the plus in. The Wall Street Journal sources say Samsung suspended its internal review to explore replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine on mobile devices. The company reportedly had concerns over how the switch would be seen by the market as well as how it would impact business relationships with Google. FX Technology is selling a screen replacement for SteamDEX that gives you 1920x1200 resolution so it's not just a fix for a broken screen, it's also an upgrade because the Steam Deck comes with a stock 1280x800 screen. The replacement screen also comes with the same anti-glare coating as the stock screen, but PC Gamer points out that to replace the screen in your Steam Deck you need to do a full disassembly because it's the last part you get to and you're going to have to use a heat gun because there's adhesive to get through. So this is not for everyone. However, if you heard full disassembly and heat gun and said, now I'm really excited, you can join the wait list for the Deck HD at deckhd.com. They haven't put a price or released date on it yet, but they said it should cost somewhere around 99 bucks. The security researcher known as V. Doné published a proof-of-concept tool called KeyPass Master Password Dumper that could let someone extract the master password for the password manager key pass from PC memory excluding the first character. This requires physical access to the machine but does not require elevator privileges. KeyPass told Bleeping Computer it will update the app in about two weeks to resolve the issue and a beta with a fix is available now. Yeah, so that's a researcher finding something not in the wild. That's good news. That means they found it before the bad guys did. Multiple stories to follow up on today. We had mentioned Apple TV. It was going to roll out MultiView for Sports. They have done so for the Apple TV 4K. So you can go check out your multiple soccer and baseball games in Apple TV Plus now. Google clarified that it will not delete accounts that have YouTube videos when it clears out accounts older than two years that haven't been accessed. That was not originally what they said, but they will not be wiping out years of YouTube history. Five TikTok creators have sued to stop Montana's TikTok ban from going into effect on January 1st. I imagine they may not be the last lawsuit to come, but that's the first one. And Telly, remember we talked about Telly earlier this week, the free TV that builds an ad into a second screen. Telly says it had more than 100,000 people apply to get one of its free TVs. That was not, I was not one of them. Rob, were you? I was not. I don't think I would be, but it's kind of interesting. No, I read the terms of service and that was enough for me. Thank you. Thank you. Wall Street Journal reports that Apple restricted some of its employees from using generative models at work over concerns about leaks. Now, this story also says that Apple's developing its own generative model, so maybe they just want people to dog food it, but they are not allowing internal folks to use chat GPT and GitHub co-pilot coding assistant in most cases. Some people are allowed to use them. I guess if they have a justifiable need, but they don't want most people to use it because they're worried that accidentally confidential information would be entered into the interface, make its way to open AI and somehow find its way into someone's hands who shouldn't have it. Open AI lets you purge that history and everything, but Apple's just being extra careful. And they're not alone. We talked about Samsung doing this before on the show. Wall Street Journal points out Verizon, Amazon, and JPMorgan Chase have also put in similar restrictions. And in a related story, the New York City public school system is easing its restrictions. Remember, we talked earlier this year about how they put chat GPT on the restricted list, meaning you had to justify why you wanted to have access to it. They are now easing up on that. Chancellor for the school system, David Banks, said that while initial caution was justified, it has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology's power and risks. The school system will also create a toolkit for educators to help integrate generative tools into the curriculum, into classroom activities. I feel like we're seeing two ends of a pattern here, Rob. You've got the companies at the beginning saying, we don't want to make a mistake. We don't want our confidential stuff slipping somewhere it shouldn't. So until we get that figured out, we're going to say let's limit who can access this, which is exactly what the New York school system was saying for different reasons, not for confidentiality reasons, but saying let's limit it. And now they're like, okay, we think we've figured it out on our end. Yeah, it kind of makes sense. And one of the things that we have to remember is that we really started just talking about this stuff not even six months ago. It was November 30th when I think the tilt of the Earth's axis changed when this stuff came out. So that's less than six months ago. When you put that in, I think of November as like, well, it's been a long time, but you're right. That's not even a half a year. Not even six months ago. So the issue is that this thing came out, it's making all this news. Nobody knows how to react. Okay, we're not going to allow any of this. And I think in the case of like the New York City schools, they figured out, wait a minute, if our students are using this, this writes way better than they do. We'll know. Let's figure out how to use this in conjunction with learning. I think that that's where they're pulling back to. So it just took them a little bit of time to figure out the technology, how they want to implement it, how they want to make it safe and fair for students and they'll move forward. And I think you're going to see other companies kind of follow suit as well. Yeah, I actually look at what the New York City public school system says it did. You can decide to believe that it's lying or coloring the truth, but looking at what it says it did, that made sense, which was we wanted to be careful. We didn't know what the harms would be. So we didn't shut it down. I think a lot of people jumped to the conclusion they shut it down. They restricted it. They said, bring us a reason why you need to access it. And if it's a good reason, we'll let you access it. That seems smart. Like let's go piece by piece and see how this works, see where the trouble is, and then we can plan for a way to teach kids AI ethics, teach them prompt engineering, show them what's going on. And now according to the New York public school system, they've got all kinds of great programs that are helping kids understand this from the beginning. It doesn't feel like that's what the companies should be doing too, saying like, all right, let's hold off. Let's limit the damage because we don't know what the damage will be and then we'll learn where it's okay to include it and what the best confidentiality practices are and all that. That's part of it. But companies look at this as competition. We don't want it in here because we don't want any way that our stuff is going to get into their system that we're working on. I understand that the fact that they're saying this is the reason it doesn't, I don't think there's any nefarious reasons behind why companies would have done this. That kind of makes sense because at the end of the day, these companies are going to be competing in the AI space. So I understand why they would do that. That's not going to happen in this organization. Yeah, Verizon may not be though. So they might loosen up a little faster. I do think open AI saying, well, you can purge your chat history. You can turn it off. That's good for some companies. To get a quasi-competitor, you're never going to get Google to switch to open AI, right? But to get somebody who's not directly competing but has big confidentiality issues, like maybe Samsung. Samsung's like, yeah, we might partner with open AI at some point. We work with Microsoft on some things. Maybe we'll partner with them. I think you're going to have to have an enterprise-level open AI that is more robust than what open AI offers now that's on-prem and has strict confidentiality, verifiable confidentiality, that kind of stuff. There's no question of Microsoft working with open AI. That's absolutely helping them get there. There's no question about that. Yeah, yeah. No, that's true. So the financial, I should say, financial strategies from Barclays warned about a new source of pressure on the Japanese yen, streaming services. Japanese subscriptions to overseas streaming companies like Netflix and Disney has risen relative to trade and travel. Japanese viewers spent about 4.8 trillion yen or $34.7 billion on streaming last year, which Barclays estimates makes up 90% of Japan's services account deficit. Netflix and Disney have both increased the amount of Japanese and East Asian content in their libraries over the past several years. Tourism to Japan is supposed to bounce back this year and balance things out, but it's still notable that Netflix's subscriptions sent enough money out of the country to affect the currency. And Tom, when I read through this and looked at the article, the math is math. And if you think about what happened, we wanted to do the worldwide pandemic. Japan, when they shut down, they shut down. Tourism completely came to a halt. You combine that with now, you have a whole bunch of folks who are in their homes for extended periods of time. You probably saw the actual numbers and streaming services go up just because you've got captive audiences. So tourism comes to a complete halt. Streaming services go up. You pull a calculator out, you probably can do some math and figure out, wow, this is actually affecting our currency. Yeah. And the Japanese yen has some other problems, which is why you're hearing about it in Japan and not some other countries, because not like every country has a domestic streaming service. But that was the other thing that jumped out of me is you would think Japan would have enough domestic options to balance out the outflow, right? Like Hulu, for instance, in Japan, is a licensed company that's run inside of Japan. It's not the same product as the Hulu you get in the United States. Yahoo! Japan is a different company than Yahoo! in the US. Same kind of thing. 7-Eleven is a different company in Japan than the 7-Eleven you have in the mainland of the US. So I was surprised that the Japanese market turned to Netflix and Disney so hard that it affected the yen. Like you say, the math works out, tourism goes down, and if all the money people are spending is going out, that's going to put pressure on the currency. I get that. It's been slow to come back. Japan has been very cautious in reopening. I think people are still also really cautious about going back out so they're probably still streaming and paying for streaming. But what this says is Netflix and Disney did a great job in creating global content. I probably shouldn't be surprised about that with Disney, but we knew Netflix was doing it. This kind of underlines that they're doing it well. When you look at the amount, clearly Disney, Disney is Disney, but Netflix also has an incredible amount of content for children. That is relatively easy to dub. So you can take those cartoons and dub it into whatever language you want, and it looks natural for the most part. So I think that's a big part of this, is that we have kids in the house all day. We need to let them go watch something. So when I really dug through this story, it makes sense that you would see this because it's just how many people are no longer traveling to Japan and how many people are streaming on, not just Netflix and Disney, but really all streaming services. They're not based there. And in addition to that, Netflix is doing local content in its markets, and that's extremely smart. So you and I can watch these too, but they are made primarily for the Japanese market, like Way of the House Husband, which is about a Yakuza man who settles down and takes care of the house while his wife goes out to work. Gudetama, a whole series about the little boiled egg that lives its life as a sentient boiled egg. Great shows. And they are Japanese first shows. That's one of the ways Netflix is going to survive the rider strike and keep its leverage is it's got these things outside of the United States like that. But it also shows that it's incredibly successful in those local markets as well. Absolutely. Well, folks, you can find out the little known aspects of RSS in the latest episode of Tom's Top Five. Maybe the know a little more episode was too long for you. Couple of minutes, and I'm going to break down the five top things you need to know about RSS so you can better understand why it exists and why you use it. You can catch it at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Now, a TikTok man may have been past in Montana, but TikTok is still incredibly popular all through the United States. So much so that restaurants have started adapting their menus so that their dishes look good on phone screens. I think this is probably happening around the world, not just in the U.S. Grub Street's Ezra Marcus has a story called Cheesier, Saucier, and Drowning in Caviar. How TikTok took over the menu. In olden times, folks, you may remember if you're old enough like Rob and I, you'd look at the newspaper where the food critic would drive a customer to a restaurant. That's like a trope of the old movies, Rob. The food critic sneaks in undercover to the restaurant and writes a review and then it blows up the restaurant because everybody wants to eat where the food critic was, right? That's back when TV was in black and white and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, the old 50s movie. I look at the story and as you said, my initial thought was, oh, it's TikTok. But then I said, you know, stop being 50. Actually, look at the story for what it is and it makes sense. This is where a lot of people get their news. This is how people, they're going to be in restaurants and oh, this is, this is, this looks really good. Let me take a picture of it. Let me make a movie of it and then send it to everybody that I know. That's how this works. So it only makes sense from the restaurant's perspective that they actually get in on this. And I see it even being, you know, more than just your standard TikTok video taken on the phone. I think you're going to see restaurants actually doing some high quality B roll that they actually hand over to influencers. They get to come in and talk about their stuff. So what this article says they're doing so far is obvious. The obvious things like eye-catching lobby decor. Make your, make an Instagram moment from the moment you walk in the door. Fun visuals as you walk to the table. A menu that makes good video. So classics like the table side Caesar salad are good for this. There is one restaurant doing a ceremonial burger carving that shows off the knife skills of one of the waitstaff. But even when the waitstaff leaves the food, entrees need to bubble, melt, drip, stretch, anything that looks good on that video. If you can ladle something over the food that's good too. One example that they had in this article was a viral dish from a steak restaurant called Bad, or it was a steak at a restaurant called Bad Roman. Check this out. A huge raviolo, which is a single ravioli on top of the steak stuffed to the gills. And when you cut into it it just bursts and oozes Kashiwai Pepe over the steak. Is your mouth watering yet? So I actually want to know how it tastes. But that probably looks beautiful. The visual is probably great. But how is it going to taste? Because I'm thinking about like when you ever see food on, you know, just on television, that's not food. That's like, you know, that's not mayonnaise. That's like blue shellac. You know, it's clearly that was painted on there. So I wonder if that's why I don't think you're right about the b-roll because every influencer is going to be like, no, no, no, I need to have that authenticity. I need to show myself in it. It's interesting, like just coming from a restaurant background, I see two parallels. One, traditionally in TV and magazine photography, food is one of the hardest things to kind of capture. And a lot of money has been spent. And I mean, a lot. So much so that plastic food became a thing because it lasted longer under the hot lights. The second thing is that although good reviews really do bump restaurant patronage, it's a short burst. Really what can, what really drives the bottom line is repeat customers and repeat customers who word of mouth tell their aunts, uncles, friends, co-workers about this great place I eat lunch or this great place I eat dinner. And TikTok kind of straddles both of those. Yeah. Right. It's the word of mouth. It's like, hey, I don't want something super expensive, but I need like somewhere I can grab lunch in 30 minutes. And I saw this person downtown and they got this great place and just looking at the stuff that they have. And you get, you get the repeat exposure, right? Whereas the food critic writes you up once and that's it. They're not going to write you up again. Exactly. The TikTok is going to be like, oh, I saw this place on TikTok. I'm going to go and then I'm going to create my own TikTok video. So it keeps the momentum going. And it's like, oh, sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just going to say, I see that exact scenario to where it may actually be the influencer that goes first, but in the comments is, oh, yeah, I went there too. In fact, I go every week on Thursdays for this. And you're going to see all of that additional content created that is doing the job of getting people into the restaurant. And it's weird because like, you can be the influencers. Oh, yeah. I ate at blah, blah, again today and I got this great sandwich. And it's just kind of a passing comment as they get into whatever they want to talk about in that video. But it's the repeat. I drink this. Well, and don't forget that some of these relationships are formal. This article goes into the fact that some restaurants turn their nose up at an influencer asking for a free meal. Other restaurants are paying money to get the influencers in. In fact, there's an agency called Mustard that will charge you $300 to send three influencers in a month to post promising you 40,000 views. Which is, you know, I don't know what the CPM equivalent is there, but you know, that's $300 for advertising to get to reach 40,000 people. That seems about right. But it's like what you were saying about the food critic. It needs to be consistent and constant enough that people just kind of think about it as a second one. Well, that's the beauty of tic-tac, right? Yes. It just keeps throwing it in front of people. But if they only get these people, you say you spend your 300 bucks and you get your one week of influence. After that, do you have to pay an additional like this? Do you have to keep paying? That's, well, yeah. Just like you have to keep paying for advertising. Yeah. And well, but it may cause spin-offs. It may cause other people who you're not paying to do it. And I think you're going to have some folks because everybody wants to be an influencer these days. So first, if the actual influencer they get paid went and got the burger with the single ravioli on the top that, you know, the ooze juice out. Well, I want to go get my picture of it too. So I think that that actually is going to work for restaurants. So when the content quality, at least I should say the first step, the professional influencer, if their quality is really good, it's going to bring other people in just because they want to be the me too side. There's always going to be a restaurant that resist it and they're going to be successful anyway. That's going to be their brand. I get that. But it does seem to be the way something that a lot of restaurants have to consider anyway. They talked about the fact going back to what we were saying about trying to make food look good. You can't you can't use plastic food here, right? The Tiktokers want to use the real food. So they're putting these bright LED lights on it to show what they're eating. And that's disrupting the other patrons. So again, some restaurants have banned that other restaurants are just, you know, try to tell the other patrons like, hey, they're allowed to do this. You know, it's in our best interest. Sorry. Sorry for the brightness. There's a Scottish YouTube food reviewer who does all his food outside of the the eatery. And so he doesn't disturb. He doesn't disturb, but he gets a huge pile of food. And I mean like enough for four people that one guy eats. And it's I am constantly amazed at how quickly and how embedded food has become in so many of these influencer reviews kind of lifestyle because it's a constant thread between all three of them. It's very impressive. I think about food is something that everyone eats. Everyone, you know, everyone eats food. So this is a common experience for literally everybody. Yeah, I eat food. But doesn't everyone need to buy a four story house? I mean, that's that's a common thing. Yeah, I've had so many situations where Eileen has been looking at TikTok and then she shows me one or she forwards it to my TikTok. And I look at it and some of them like, oh, yeah, that looks amazing. We got to go there. But sometimes I look at it and I'm like, they're making this seem like more than it is. Like there has to be a level of literacy to looking at this because there are some tricks to make something pretty mundane look and sound special in a TikTok video. So you got to be careful. Also, you got to be careful with your nostalgia or it'll empty your pocketbook. The Game Boy inspired analog pocket has been creating NES, SNES and Genesis updates for years. And now the analog duo has recreated NEC's Turbografx 16. If you've been thinking, that sounds familiar. They announced they were going to do this back in October 2020, but it is finally available for pre-order. If you don't remember the Turbografx 16, it had its own proprietary format called the Who card that resembled a credit card. It eventually accommodated games on CD-ROM as well with an add-on accessory, the Turbografx CD. But yeah, you can go now and check out the analog duo NEC Turbografx 16. This is one of those game systems that kind of, I don't say fell through the crack, but it literally straddled. You had one. I had one, but I had one after it became an outdated piece of gaming gear because that's when I could buy it for like 20 bucks at the used store. Yeah, the analog duo is 250 bucks. This is not cheap. That's back in the day 250. So, yeah. Well, no, no, the one you can buy now, the new recreation is 250 bucks. Rob's correct. If you bought the game, the original game console was just a Who card and then they did the CD-ROM edition later and then they sold the unit that was both in the single unit. But it was a pretty pricey, but very, very compelling game system, right? Because with the CD-ROM, that was a first. That was like the first, at least in the US, where you could put in the CD and you could play a game and you get stereo CD quality music out of your Japanese RPGs as you sit there grinding through 30 hours of monster battles. You would have a very compelling experience that did not exist and later until you got into the Sega CD and then eventually the PlayStation. So, at least for a lot of game nerds, this is one of the keystone systems at Bridge D8 in 16-bit eras. Yeah, and analog does really good machines, too. They have proven to do so, so I imagine this is going to be worth the pennies if you are so inclined. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Roger, a different Roger than the one we just heard from. This is Roger in the audience, says, I enjoyed your recall of Smellavision on Thursday's show and want to introduce you to a new fragrance technology. We're signed up for a Princess Cruise this summer and they are introducing a 360-degree dining experience. Diners are surrounded by a computer screen that goes all the way around the room. This looks like what they used to shoot the Mandalorian, but in a dining setting. In addition to having great food and animations on your plate, they also claim to offer something similar to Smellavision with their videos. I don't know anyone who has tried it yet, but if I get a chance this summer, I will try it and let you know about my experience. Thank you. Listener Roger, and please do, please do report back if you take one of these cruises. Absolutely report back in on that. Yeah, yeah, because God knows Rob and I aren't going to be on a cruise. Time soon. No, no sir. Thank you. Roger, do you cruise? I don't plan on it because I see them as a very unique vector for a variety. Yeah, okay, so you're right in the camp with that. But other Rod, Listener Roger, if you brave this, let us know. Because I want to know where the Smellavision here sits in because your food already is going to smell because you're eating. So what smells would they want to pump in to compete with that? They could virtualize an alfresco experience in like the Muir Woods or something, and they give you like some pine scent as you eat. Okay, a little compliment, but we don't want it to compete with the taste of the food. You don't want to compete, but it's kind of like ambient music or lighting. Yeah, yeah, it has to be done right. All right. Well, big thanks to Len Peralta for creating the ninth anniversary logo that is on our Patreon merch. If you're a Patreon, you may have got some of this already. Check that out at Patreon.com slash DTNS. And Len has also been illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us, Len? You know, I love today that today's show is food focused. We just had that Princess Cruise Smellavision thing and then, of course, the TikTok influencers who are choosing, you know, helping with the menu. But, you know, you forget that the really, the first influencers came back maybe in the 70s. We call them McInfluencers here. You know, you got your Mayor McCheese. You got Grimace and the Hamburglar. That's, those are the real influencers. Those are the OG influencers. So, you know, I got to give a big shout out to them because they made my childhood very... I would never have tried a purple drink if it hadn't been for Grimace. Or a green or a shamrock shake, right? Those are the original McInfluencers. So, this image, you know, an homage to the McInfluencers is available at my Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Len. If you're a DTNS lover level, you get it for free. Also, you can just get it at my online store. Go check it out. Lenparaldestore.com, where I'm also open for commissions. You can go over there and get something for your grads, your dads, everybody else this summer. So, think about me while you're doing that. Please do. Thank you, Len. And thank you, Rob Dunwood. You always have some interesting stuff in the works. What's going on with you this week? Well, I am Rob Dunwood. And you can find me talking about tech over on SMR Podcast. You can find me talking about tech and culture over on the tech, John. And I am pretty much everywhere on the web at Rob Dunwood. I'm looking here. I'm on Twitter. I'm on. You're a good follow on Twitter. Yeah, people don't know. You're having some good conversations about podcasting and entrepreneurship and stuff on there. I've been enjoying watching those. Oh, wow. Appreciate you. Appreciate you. Appreciate what I put out. Yeah, yeah. Go follow Rob. That's two B's. Rob, D-U-N-E, W-O-D. Well, the link in the show notes as well. Thanks to our brand new boss, Sen, from This Week in MCU. Just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Sen. Always good to have a new patron in the works. That's what keeps the show powering on. We understand if money's a little tight right now, Patreon just introduced a free tier as well. So while you wait for the money to come back, you can still sample a little of our Patreon goodness. You'll get Roger's column monthly updates and today's Good Day Internet, the Friday Good Day Internet. Go sign up right now. Patreon.com slash D-T-N-S. Patrons like Sen should stick around and the free patrons too. For Good Day Internet, it's Friday Quiz Time. When did it come out? Test your knowledge of product releases with Stick Around. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back Monday with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Straffolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter. Signs correspond to Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, AKA Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, I.S. Actor, Molly Wood, Allison Sheridan and Rob Dunwood. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.