 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to every single one of you, including Brad, Paul Teeson, Ali Senjabi, and new patron, Edward. Everyone welcome, Edward. Hey, Edward. On this episode of DTNS, people are mad at Bungie about developer layoffs at YouTube for blocking the ad blockers. We'll explain all of that. Plus, it was very interesting to see what search terms may Google the most money, even if the info is five years old. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 1st, All Saints Day, the reason for the season 2023. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Trisket Gang, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All right, my friends, did you have a good Halloween? Everybody tricked and treated? Mostly treated. I hid in the back room with my dog. It was too exciting for him with all the little kids, but it was fun. We worked it out. Sorry to all the children who didn't get the Milky Way bar that you didn't want anyway. The one Milky Way bar that you had? Well, there were like little ones, but I'm like, nobody wants the Milky Way. Roger took kids trick-or-treating, I'm guessing. I took one kid trick-or-treating. 15 homes. I wanted 20, but eh. What would you do with the other kid? You wanted 20. Oh, the other one stayed home and handed out candy because she's afraid of going out on Halloween. Oh, really? That's so sad. Well, let's move on from that sad story to the quick hits. Representatives from government, business, and academic institutions recently met in the UK. From that meeting, they announced an AI policy paper dubbed the Bletchley Declaration, named for Bletchley Park, which Adam Turing and others developed computers in that broke code during World War II. It says, AI should be safe and human-centric, using the term frontier AI, which OpenAI already uses to refer to models that are in development already. The U.S. says an AI safety institute will live within the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The UK, which organized the gathering, announced that follow-on AI summits will happen in South Korea within six months and in France in a year. Yeah, so I agree. AI should be safe. Wall Street Journal sources say we work plans to file for bankruptcy. And no, this is not an old story. We work had not filed for bankruptcy previously. There were a lot of stories back in the day saying they were going to, they never did. The flexible office-based company avoided more serious financial problems by, in part, selling off a bunch of real estate and other investments. However, we work missed an interest payment to bondholders on October 2 and will be considered in default if those payments or other arrangements aren't made by November 2. Kenya's first domestic smartphone assembly plan is official and located outside capital city Nairobi. The plan is a joint venture between Kenya's SafariCom and China's Shenzhen Tele1 technology and is expected to create around 500 new jobs. Netflix announced it now has more than 15 million monthly active users on its cheapest ad-supported tier with around 30% of new subscribers choosing that tier. Starting in Q1 2024, Netflix is going to start selling more ads to them, but also showing less ads. Title sponsorships will be available for its premier properties, for example, the Crown. So if you're a viewer and you watch three episodes in a row, the title sponsorship will let you watch a fourth episode without ad interruptions. I've seen this kind of thing on other platforms like Hulu, for example. So Netflix is playing catch up, but it looks like they're serious about ads, making some money off it. Netflix also will sell ads that can be tied to a specific big moment in a show. Now back in August, India announced it would require licenses for companies that wanted to sell electronics in the country with the idea to encourage more domestic production. Well, some companies objected in a big way. In fact, India has since reversed the policy or at least changed it a bit. Now it's trying out a new system. Starting Wednesday, November 1st, as of this recording that would be today, more than 100 companies have to report the quantity and value of their imports to India with no restrictions imposed until at least September of next year. That would be 2024. After that date, the government will evaluate the data from those reports and consider a new import authorization plan. All right, let's talk about why everybody on the internet is mad. Where do we start? Tom, the internet has been mad for some time now and gamers sometimes the most angry of the mad. And that has been just what you have to do when you're on the internet. But that's not the news part. The news part is one of the latest reasons that gamers specifically are mad. On Monday, Sony owned bungee laid off around 100 people. That's not good. If you're laid off, of course, it's not good. But it's not unusual these days in or out of gaming. There's a lot of flux with companies trying to figure out their bottom line and trimming the fat as it's sometimes called were applicable. So we heard about the layoffs on Monday and then Bloomberg reported Destiny 2's the final shape downloadable content would be delayed from February to June. Bloomberg also reported that executives told bungee employees two weeks ago before the layoffs that revenue was 45% below expectations. CEO Pete Parsons said Destiny 2 was not retaining players as expected and pre orders for the final shape were lower than expected as well. There's a lot of talk on the IGN article about this that some of the employees had been saying we tried to tell them why and they wouldn't listen and then they went and laid us off. So yeah, I could see why there'd be some employee upset about this. But it seems like there's a lot of people just in general more upset about this particular layoff, this particular round of game layoffs from this particular company than others, some of them that were even larger like epic laid off 700 plus people. Scott, why do you think that is? Well, I think you could make the argument there's a final straw happening here, because it has been so bad to share in terms of layoffs in the industry. Mostly that's accentuated or made worse by the fact that this is one of the best years in the industry in terms of overall successful titles. Critically, it's one of the best years on record in terms of, you know, game reviews and things getting perfect tens and so on. So it just feels like such a weird dichotomy to players to hear about these layoffs, continued layoffs, and hear about the success the industry is having. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people, especially if they're not, you know, extremely invested on how public companies work and how these sorts of things happen. But in particular with Bungie, my theory is Bungie is a bit of an industry darling and has been since a very, very long time ago. And they they are seen as a company that is very valuable, one that can do no wrong. They are the originators and makers of Halo, lots of stuff before that. And since then, the very successful Destiny games. When Sony bought them, a lot of people thought, well, this is great. They're getting flushed with cash. This will be good for them. Turns out maybe it isn't. There's still some quote unquote fat, as Sarah said, that needs to be trimmed. I hate that term, but it works. Yeah, I know. It's frustrating. It's not a nice term, but it's a term for a company saying, hey, we got to get rid of something. Yeah, we got to we got to do something, which, you know, again, your mileage may vary on how much that stuff is palatable for the common man or not. But the final shape, which is their next expansion for deal or for this game is now delayed, which means you got a lot of Bungie faithful whose main game is Destiny. That is their main game that was announced earlier this year that they're also working on a remake of Marathon, a game they made forever ago, decades ago, a very old game that originally appeared on on an old Mac. And it was awesome. I can't wait for this remake. But now that's been internally delayed to 2025 on top of this DLC delay for Destiny. So what you've got is a one game company currently, that's the one game they have out there. And that fan base is furious, because it not only affects the company they like, it not only affects, you know, them in all of those ways, but it affects them in they're not going to get the next expansion when they were supposed to. And so everything feels off and delayed and weird. I think that's a big part of it. But there is also just kind of a fatigue this year, everybody is like, Well, wait a minute, is our thing is outrageously successful, like you're telling us every other minute, or is it all dire because you're laying everybody off every minute. And the problem is, there are some companies that are benefiting wildly from some title success. And then there's some stalwarts like Bungie, where Destiny 2 is not performing as well as it used to the game's getting a little long in the tooth. It's time for something new, hence them working on the multiplayer only marathon follow up or remake. So there's a lot of potential there. It just I think gamers are getting to the point where it's like Bungie also like even Bungie's having this, what are you going to tell me that Steam's going to lay off everybody? Like it just starts to add up to a point that the dissonance between success and layoffs is starting to hurt. And I think it's perceived success, not actual success, right? There's a lot of people just reading other people's comments, you know, on Reddit or Twitter or wherever, and thinking like these guys are raking it in when in fact, as you pointed out, maybe some of them are even the ones raking it in actually aren't raking it in as much in this current economy as they used to be. And a lot of them like Bungie were not raking it in. So there's a perception that this is fat cats, you know, hurting them hurting the employees so that they can get richer. And yes, that is happening. It's always happening. But I don't think that's why you lay off people right now. I think it's because you lose money. People also have a tendency to lump them all into one place or one company. And it's not that way at all. And some of our older season developers names like Bungie like Blizzard like others are kind of at a dip right now. Like that's it's just different. There's different people who are in the lead. And so you can come out and say, Hey, Baldur's Gate 3 sold so many copies that they're hiring 500, you know, nobody's talking about those successes. And not everyone published Baldur's Gate 3. So you have to not publish Baldur's Gate 3. No, they didn't. It turns out. Yeah, they wish they had, but they did. Yeah. Well, YouTube is also the target of much ire today. YouTube has launched its ad blocker prevention efforts worldwide. Companies started testing the policy earlier this year. First, it did pop up reminders. Then it did more, I want to say more explicit warnings, but they weren't cursing. They were just, you know, very expressive, very particular, saying you're going to be limited to playing three videos. Imagine if they were like, you know, you better. No, they were just saying very, very specifically, let's say you get three videos. If you don't turn off your ad blocker for us, then that's all you're going to get. But now it's just everybody, everybody who has an ad blocker is going to get a notification that directs you to either allow YouTube ads doesn't tell you to turn your ad blocker off. It just says allow our ads in your ad blocker or pay for YouTube premium, which means we're your ad free and your ad blocker doesn't matter to us anymore. Now we talk all the time about like, Hey, if you have thoughts on anything we talk about on the show, send it to feedback at daily tech news show.com. And sometimes that feedback lends itself to a story just like this. This one came in from Josh who wrote, wanted to get your thoughts on this online outrage that's going on on YouTube about blocking ad blockers. I just don't understand the entitlement that people feel. Most of the comments on YouTube subreddit is that, Oh yes, the poor big company wants more money. And or how dare they make me watch ads. Josh says, is the current internet so used to free stuff that they don't realize that they're actually using ad supported products? YouTube is simple. You watch ads, you get free video, or you pay for an ad free experience. How are people expecting a free experience? Do they feel there'll be a turning point or do we, Josh kind of points the question to us on the internet soon where people realize that free doesn't mean free as other sites start cracking down on ad blockers. Now, Scott, I know you're a YouTuber. You're also familiar with ad blockers. So who you sadden with here? It's funny. I as somebody who used to use an ad blocker on YouTube for reasons that had nothing to do with I did that and ads annoyed me. It was that I had stuff I wanted to do for show stuff and I didn't want interrupted video while I did the show. So I was showing like secondary screen stuff and going, All right, well, no ads here. It's just going to be pure. But the value proposition, I think anyway, so Scott's opinion, the value proposition that is YouTube premium these days is really strong. I not only get an ad free experience, but I also get YouTube music for free, which is my main music service now, and not for free, but it's included in there, as well as downloads offline and many other reasons playing it, you know, playing it in your app while the phones close that kind of stuff. There are benefits to having that service. And I really like it. It's one of my favorite subscriptions. So since then, I've had the same benefits. Get rid of the ad blocker. The whole time though, I kept going, when will YouTube instigate some sort of ad blocker, at least a pop up to say, Hey, we see you're using this, maybe you'd like our stuff more if you didn't or something, either some softball like that, or even something harder, like, well, you can use YouTube while you're using your ad blocker. And the fact that it took them this long is a little surprising to me, but I think that's why people are mad, but not mad that this doesn't make sense because it does. I mean, it does make sense. It's there. They're mad because they've been getting a thing without having to watch ads. And now they might not be able to. It's really simple as that. And I don't know. I don't know how those people are going to, how you're going to make it in the world, you know, past this point. But to me, to me it is, if it's, if the ads aren't too abusive or too hard for you, great, you're good. If you would rather not have them, there's a way, there's a way to pay through it. I don't pay for YouTube premium. I mean, I pay for YouTube TV. So YouTube is getting my money in some sense, but as far as YouTube, I don't hang out on YouTube enough for it to be more than just like a very minor inconvenience, you know, to like go past an ad or to see something, you know, that's mid role. It doesn't bother me that much. Sure. I'd love, you know, if someone was like, oh, look at this crumb, you know, you know, this is the way that you can just like get ads stripped out of YouTube. I might check it out. And I would assume it to render itself useless very soon, because of course the company, you know, doesn't benefit anything in any way from me or anyone else using something like that. So yeah, there are workarounds. I don't expect workarounds to just work. And I don't expect a company to not try to patch those workarounds and get around those because they are in the business of making money, which is why we have the platform in the first place. I really do. I mean, listen, I'm always down for a good workaround. Let's just put it that way. At the same time, I feel like someone being up in arms about something like this is missing the point of the content that they wanted in the first place. I think you have to remember that it is quite frequent in humanity that people say things that are different than what they actually do or even believe. So you got a lot of people out there saying like, I can't believe they're doing this because they think they'll get supporters. But really, I think what most people are mad about is they put an ad blocker in place because the web can be unusable without an ad blocker. Certain sites just, it's really hard to see the content if you don't have an ad blocker. And so they put the ad blocker in place for those reasons and then didn't realize or didn't even care maybe that there was blocking the YouTube ads, but that was a happy side effects. And then YouTube comes along and starts giving them this problem, right? Instead of watching the video they wanted to watch, now they have to deal with making a decision. And if there's anything humans hate, it's having to make a decision that you weren't expecting. So this is to me more about friction. People are getting mad because they're like, I don't want to deal with this. And yet it also has to do with getting around ads and not paying and all of that. But it's mostly that this thing that worked and I didn't have to think about, I now have to think about it. I think that's, that starts people being mad. And then they add on rationalizations to that. And it's because the companies are greedy. I think that answers Josh's question is, I don't think these people don't understand how the internet works. They just don't think there's any consequence to them complaining. And they're upset because they had to change things and everybody hates change. Yeah, I think that's a fair way of looking at it. Also, if you're waiting for companies to stop being greedy, you're going to be waiting a long time. Well, I mean, and that's a whole conversation. Are companies being greedy or a company's just trying to stay in business, right? Well, yeah, what's the difference? It's your more profit company. Your bottom line is that's the goal. As a very small version of this, I have struggled every freaking day of this year trying to figure out how to make sure we treat our audience well while also paying the bills. It's not fun. So I, you know, I get, I get a little sensitive when, when people like, oh, a company that wants to charge you for something, how greedy of them. I'm like, yeah, you won't have the product if they can't figure out how to pay for it. That's just the way the world is. Yeah. So to me, it's really this simple. If, if YouTube's like, well, all right, now we have this premium option. It's really not that bad. It's relatively inexpensive. If we want more people to use it, one of our chief benefits needs to be a benefit and not a thing they can do easily for free. I think it's really that simple. They want that to be a value. It's less valuable unless you, you know, cut it out and let, let people get it the real way. Well, I bet you have a thought about this. I bet you're like, Tom, you forgot to mention or Tom, you're totally wrong about this. You could send that email or perhaps even an email that supports what I'm saying. Any of them are welcome. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We all know that Google makes money from search. People all over the world search for pretty much every word, subject, phrase imaginable on Google. And especially around this time of the year, the company itself will do lots of retrospectives to talk about search term popularity, words of the year, all that kind of stuff. But not all Google searches make Google money speaking of Google and money. The company itself has said it only shows ads on around 20% of total queries, which you probably don't notice. But now that I've said that, start paying attention. Do you get a sponsor with every search you do? You do a lot more searches than you think. It only runs ads on what it deems commercial queries. So if you're searching best new car 2023 or cheapest flight to Palermo, you're going to connect with advertisers with that. So they're going to serve you an ad. If you're doing something overly specific, like, what did boxer dogs eat in 1760? I haven't been looking at Sarah's search history, but I could guess. I'm not saying I did it and I'm not saying I didn't. You're not going to run an ad against that because it's not really a commercial situation. Exactly. So the ongoing US and Google antitrust trial is giving us some more insight into what Google actually considers the most lucrative searches. Now this is just for the week of September 22nd, 2018. So it's a few years back now, but this is fully based on what made Google the most money, not what Google wanted you to think were the searches that were the most popular. For example, iPhone eight, iPhone eight plus, auto insurance, car insurance, cheap flights, car insurance quotes, direct TV, online colleges, AT&T, Hulu, iPhone, Uber, Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, insurance quotes, free credit report, cheap car insurance, AARP and LifeLock. Now again, some of these, hey listen, Scott, some of us are getting a little bit older. Okay. So let's just be cool to the aging members of DTNS. Thank you. I'm right here. I'm a proud member of AARP. I'll have you. You know, aging happens. We're lucky to age. Okay. But again, going back to Google, some of these queries aren't going to surprise you, but it's the first time, because it was part of this legal dispute, we've seen this data from Google saying these are the queries that made us the most money rather than some sort of like cluster of popular terms that would be like a year in, you know, year in review type stuff. Yeah. Most of the stuff is actually pretty easy to explain AARP among them. Google likes to convince people that you want to be the top search term when someone searches for you. So the best way to do that is buy and add. That's why a lot of times you'll search for something like search for Apple, you'll see Apple in the sponsored results and then Apple in the SEO results. And that's because you know what, people do a lot of SEO stuff and you might not be the top result for your own search term. So that's where you get Hulu, AT&T, AARP. That's why you get so much money being made off iPhone because when this list was compiled, the iPhone 8 was new. So everybody's looking at the new iPhone. The ones that are, I think once you weed out all of that, like, oh, these are just popular companies who were paying to make sure they were showing up first, then you get all the insurance and it's like, oh yeah, people definitely comparing insurance. This is what people actually care about and search for. It's not like someone off like, hey, what celebrity did this thing? Although sometimes those searches are popular. It's more of like, yeah, like online college options. Right. Yeah. You know, like stuff like that. Somebody wanted to be the top online college, so they paid to make sure that they would show up on that. Also, I liked free credit report, which is really just trying to get you to pay for a credit report. So somebody was like, let's put our sponsor up there. I think freecreditreport.com is a service or it was, I don't know. I'm thinking of the commercial jingle in my head, which wasn't actually free after all. Yeah. See, that's the song even. It's funny though, because these are kind of evergreen, right? Some of these searches, most of these searches. And even though iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus would have been kind of. But cheap flights. Yeah, that's got to be consistent, right? Oh yeah. Heck yeah. I mean, the phone stuff I get, that's a little brief zeitgeisty kind of thing, but consistently, maybe every year the next model gets searched for a lot. But things like, I need insurance. I need a credit score. Like this feels like life stuff. So I'm not surprised. This is all, the Uber struck me as, I doubt people were searching for like, what's the latest with Uber? You know, is this a good company? What are the options? More than they were just being like, I want a car. Yeah. Because a lot of Google searches end up being just like, let's like, Facebook, Uber, you know, Apple, I want to go do that other thing. When you're searching for that, that their link shows up first, which is why it's making so much money. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's worth point now before we finish up this conversation, that Apple having iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus up there at the top means that Apple was paying a lot of money. iPhone is down later on this to Google. And we already know from this same trial that Apple was also receiving a lot of money from Google. So I don't know if it ends up being a wash, but there's a lot of money going both ways in this relationship. And shake drugs. One other thing here, back in 2016, Google began shifting its search indexing to prioritizing mobile. Long time listeners of DTS will remember that very episode where we talked about it possibly. Well, Google announced Tuesday that after seven years, the switch is complete. They've finished moving search indexing to prioritizing mobile now and the company will reduce the crawling of the web conducted by its desktop Google bot going forward. If you don't have a mobile version of your site, you're going to be in trouble. So get that thing. Get that on there. Well, you might be taking a trip soon. And that trip might include an airplane. So if that's you, Chris Christensen has an update on how in-flight entertainment options are getting smarter and might actually help you on your next multi-stop adventure. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. I'm flying to Malta next week and I'm flying through London via Minneapolis. And I wonder if I'm going to have on my Delta flight the new personalized entertainment system. So this is a seatback entertainment with a little bit of a twist here, because you're logging in with your Delta frequent flyer account, your SkyMiles account. And then it's keeping track of that you are sitting in that seat. And so the second flight I'm on, it might say, hey, do you want to continue that movie you're watching? Or it might know what my favorite movies and TV shows are because it knows who I am. It's personalized. It'll be interesting to see if that catches on. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. I've got a Delta flight coming up, going through JFK to Brussels. And I'm hoping that I have this because that is useful to be like, oh, I don't know if I want to start a movie right now, but if you get another leg of a flight and you know you can pick right up easily, my only question is, how easy is this going to be to log in? Am I going to have to tap in my SkyMiles number or can I do a QR code or something? Hopefully they make it really easy, but I do love this idea that you could start Oppenheimer and not worry about the flight being too short, you know. Yeah, across my 18 hours of flying out and 18 hours of fact, I might finish Oppenheimer. You might finish Oppenheimer, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Long movie. Come on. We can't be expected to finish this. Too long. Or, uh, children of the, what is it? Something of the Flower Man? The Flower Moon. Scorsese movie. Very long, very long. That one's not available on the plane yet. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Gerald passed along a story about a drone. Gerald said, heard this on the news this morning here in Cleveland, and I know Tom has been a supporter of Zipline for years. Thought you might be interested. So here's the story that Gerald passed along. The Cleveland Clinic is partnering with the San Francisco based drone company Zipline to deliver vaccines, blood, animal health products, and more to homes, hospitals, and businesses in the US and other countries. The clinic thinks that hundreds of deliveries a day might be possible from a central hub for things like lab samples, medical and surgical supplies, items for hospital at home services as a patient. You have to be at home to receive the medication and with every drone, only carrying one package at a time to minimize mix ups or abuse. Yes. I'm not a supporter of Zipline so much as a fan of making sure people know that Amazon wasn't the only one or even the oldest one doing this sort of thing, because Zipline's been doing this for literally decades now. But yeah, it's good to see them. They've got other US based operations going on, and it's interesting to see them come to Cleveland. To something as big as the Cleveland Clinic, which is not a tiny little corner store or anything. That's a big operation. Well, we thank everybody for writing in feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. The more we know from you, the more we know what you want. So thank you in advance, and thank you for the past as well. Thank you to you, Scott Johnson, for the past, present, and future. Let folks know, what is your latest? There was a time, not many years ago, where every year, no matter what, I was going to an event called BlizzCon, a little shindig thrown by Blizzard Entertainment. They've been gone for a few years. Their first in physical event is happening since then this weekend. I'm still not going, but me and my co-host from Core are going to be doing a co-stream for at least the introduction. We're not even sure how long it's supposed to go, because it's a little bit different this year. But we're going to cover a whole bunch of stuff that they show on stage during that event. If you would like to watch us and have a little bit of commentary along with that presentation, check it out this Friday. You can find the details at core over at frogpants.com slash core. And while you're at it, check out the podcast, because our next episode will feature a little segment with me and Tom talking about why he's going there. You might be surprised why. Yeah, stay tuned and find out. The answer may surprise you. Indeed. Patrons of the show, you're not done. You don't have to end this. I mean, you can go whenever you want. No, you sit down, patrons. You are not done. There's no recess yet. We have more for you. The extended show, Good Day Internet, LinkedIn past a member milestone is offering some new tools, some AI tools for those who pay for its services. But just a reminder, you can catch the show. We do it live, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. We're on demand as well, but join us live if you can. DailyTechnewshow.com slash live is where you can find out more about that. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robbie Young joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.