 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Chris Benito, Steve Adderola and Jeffrey Zilx. Coming up on DTNS, you've heard of influencers, but the new trend is D influencers. That's a D E plus Apple might add another iPhone model and how India has fared without TikTok. It's been like two and a half years. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 6th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino from the New York City. I'm my as actor and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Yeah, I don't accept those New York City substitutes. I as is in the real one, the like the Ohio State. Yeah, the New York State University. All right, let's get into the quick hit, shall we? Last week, Twitter announced it was shutting down free access to its API as of February 9th. That's a couple of days away as of this recording. But CEO Elon Musk said over the weekend that Twitter will provide a right only API for bots providing good content that is free. So you can only write from it. And Elon Musk has to think it's good, I guess. In other Twitter news, according to internal messages seen by the information, Twitter may charge businesses a thousand dollars per month for keeping the verified for organization's gold check mark, as well as 50 bucks per month for each affiliated business account. Twitter launched early access for verification for organizations last month. Microsoft confirmed a planned event tomorrow at its Redmond headquarters at 1 p.m. Eastern Sacha Nadella, CEO of Microsoft will share details on some exciting projects, but everyone expects he might show off integrations of chat GPT into Bing, something we've reported on definitely before. You may say, hey, that seems like it's tomorrow. Isn't there another event? Yep, Google is holding an AI related announcement one day later on February 8th. The stock image giant Getty images filed a lawsuit against stability AI, the creators of the text image generator Stable Diffusion. The suit was filed in the United States District Court in Delaware, accusing stability of brazen infringement. They use the word brazen. It's in quotes, praise and infringement of Getty images, intellectual property. They say they copied more than 12 million images without permission or compensation. Stable Diffusion does not copy images, though. It may, however, have used Getty images in the training data it uses to get Stable Diffusion to create images and Getty alleges that however that happened, some images generated by stability AI feature the Getty watermark. So I mean, if if if there was any image with the Getty watermark in the training data set, that could happen. Getty previously said it began legal proceedings against stability AI in the High Court of Justice in London. I feel like their best defense is the number of fingers are appropriate in Getty images. In a blog post on the Chromium Bug Tracker, the Chromium team announced it began an effort to port the full Chromium Blink rendering engine to iOS as of January 31st. Before you go celebrating thinking you're going to get like a full version of Chrome on iOS, Apple's App Store policies require all third party browsers to use its WebKit engine. There is no indication that they're going to be changing that. The team said the plan isn't to make this part of a shipable product, characterizing it as a prototype that we are developing as part of an open source project with the goal to understand certain aspects of performance on iOS. It could be used to demonstrate the effects of Apple's policy, restricting other browser engines, however, though, so, you know, could have some value there as well. Samsung's senior vice president of mobile business in India, Raju Pillan, said the company began assembling products across its phone portfolio in India. He also said that Samsung received double the orders for its Galaxy S23 launch within the first 24 hours in India compared to last generation with nearly 140,000. All right, Mark Gurman has a good track record. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good at knowing what Apple's going to do. And he's been putting those suppositions, insights, expectations into the power on newsletter. So it's always a good read if you want some inside Apple information. This weekend was no exception. Gurman says, don't expect an update of the Mac studio in the near future. In fact, Gurman isn't certain if Apple plans to refresh it at all. Apple reportedly plans to focus its high powered M2 chips, the new ones, on upcoming Mac Pro and will not refresh the studio to better differentiate it. In fact, if the studio does continue on, it would be more likely to get a future M series chip, like like a M3 or an M4, whatever they call the next one. Gurman also has some ideas about the next iPhone. He previously reported Apple might rebrand the top end iPhone from Pro Max to a Samsung like Ultra. Well, now Gurman reports Apple may just make a whole new flagship phone called iPhone Ultra sitting above the Pro and Pro Max models in terms of features and price. I mean, the big question, though, is how would Apple differentiate the Ultra from the Pro models? Gurman throws out a couple of possibilities, things like faster processor, better camera, bigger screen. You may say, hey, those sound great, but they're also largely what they're already doing to differentiate the Pro from the Pro Max or just the standard iPhone. Gurman also throws out Wi-Fi 6E and a portless design as for their differentiators. Well, see how that goes. We've seen how Samsung defines an ultra, you know, superlative specs and always has like eight gigs more RAM, bleeding edge screen tech. They always try and do something cool there and an S Pen. But I guess I as you know, what could an Ultra actually mean for Apple and an iPhone? You know, I've been thinking about this because the iPhone line is so kind of cluttered right now. There's the SE, there's the previous generation, there's the regular version, there's the Pro version, there's a Pro Max version, there's a regular Max version. So it's going to go ultra. It's got to do something that's beyond the scope of whatever Pro is. So this is kind of a weird one. I'm thinking more about the watch. That thing is really ruggedized. If there was a super rugged iPhone that you spend a ton of money because you'll never have to pay for a repair, I guess, because nothing ever breaks on it. I don't know, either that or maybe some pencil compatibility. I know I'm still the weirdo who wants to use a pencil on a phone. I just don't see why it's not on the iPhone yet. But maybe that would be it. But the main thing I keep thinking about is making sure that there's better sales of the Pro because you go, well, the ultra costs a billion dollars, and this one doesn't cost as much. It's the second most expensive I'm getting the Pro. I think maybe I figured it out, maybe. So you're right, there are too many iPhone models already. It's confusing what the difference between the Pro Max and the Pro is for a lot of people other than it's one's got a bigger screen, which to me seems like really the only big difference between them. What if that's what they do? Because German doesn't rule this out in his note. What if they get rid of the Pro Max and they're actually simplifying the line to say there's the SE, there's the iPhone, then there's the Pro. If you need some, you know, higher processing power and then there's the Ultra if you want everything. And that would actually make more sense to me that like, oh, the ultra has every feature we've got. The Pro is tuned to professional users. The iPhone is is the standard one and the SE is the bargain one. If they did it that way, and I'm not saying I know that they will or won't. But if they did it that way, that would be the only way it made. It would make sense to me because it would actually somewhat simplifying instead of having two different versions of the Pro gets confusing. I just enjoy the mental angst. It will cause Samsung owners if Apple releases a phone called Ultra that has pen support, like like like worlds just collapsing at that point. I mean, if you really want to get wild with it, really the only like processor headroom they have. I mean, I'm sure they could call it like the A16, you know, quad plus or like you come up with some nomenclature for it. But theoretically, I don't know if an M1 can fit into that envelope. It can go into a fanless design. Like you could really put some superlative performance on there. And the other thing that Apple has been doing with their pro lamp, it doesn't get as much headlines is that they've been doing some like kind of pro creator codecs and stuff like that. Right, right. They're doing raw photo, you know, other kind of raw video and that kind of stuff on there. And if you had something with, you know, it was totally maxed out, right? It comes with like a terabyte of storage by default comes with an M1 equivalent kind of processor or a laptop kind of style processor on there. You could really put in some impressive media specs on there to kind of turn it into a mini iPad mini, which then gets into a whole another confusing nomenclature. Yeah, I feel like they're not going to make it more confusing, which is why I was trying to simplify this. Well, one thing, though, that is confusing is kind of where the studio ends up. It seemed like Apple was kind of going very aggressively to the studio branding of being kind of in between, you know, the super high end expensive pro stuff and you're more consumer oriented. You know, this is just the MacBook. This is just the Mac mini. What they're doing with the studio as just kind of we're only going to update this when we need a placeholder that we can't justify a $5,000 Mac pro or a, you know, $1,000 Mac mini or something that really seems weird given how much they've invested in that branding. You know, they have the studio display, they have the Mac studio already. It seemed like that they were going down that path. It almost reminds me how they treated the Mac mini for years and just in terms of, I guess when we need something to fill in like a sales niche, if we, you know, in our Gartner quadrant we have something missing there. We'll throw the Mac studio at it until we have kind of more of a flag. Nobody's ever happy, Rich ever. Oh, you upgrade the specs every year to make us buy new stuff. Oh, you're not upgrading the specs every year. You're abandoning the product line. I don't know. I actually wonder if maybe they just do a Mac pro studio. Like the Mac pro would might replace the studio line. Now, what I'm actually is definitely been a weird entry in this level. I guess we ran into the Mac mini ultra, please don't do that. All right, let's let's move on to the the how do you survive without TikTok story in 2020 tensions on the Himalayan border of India and China flared up. That is a historical hotspot. In that incident, 20 soldiers were killed on the Indian side and India responded in June 2020 by ordering app stores to block Chinese apps. In all, they ended up blocking more than 200 Chinese apps. One of those was TikTok. Some thought the ban might be temporary. It was not last summer by dance even tried floating the idea of partnering with an Indian company to return to the country. Kind of what they're trying to do with Oracle here in the United States. That plan has not gotten anywhere yet because public sentiment doesn't seem to care. TikTok is still not allowed in India. And while there are ways to get around the rules, you can use VPNs and such. Most users just don't bother and have turned to short form video platforms like YouTube shorts or Instagram reels. As calls are increasing in the United States to block TikTok, rest of world.org thought it would be worth looking at how that block in India has worked out like an A.B. testing for for blocking TikTok in a large democracy. So Rich, what did they find? Yeah, so in 2020, right before the block, TikTok had more than 200 million Indian users, which if you're doing the math is a lot. It was by gets a second largest market next to China after the block YouTube launch shorts, which has reached 1.5 billion monthly logged in users and Instagram is reels now make up more than 20% of the time spent on Instagram. There are three new startups, Moj, Josh and Glance that have grown significant audiences, but are still far behind reels and shorts. So it seems like the winner with the block in India has been alphabet and meta. I as obviously the reasoning for the block seems to be much more drawn out in the case of it ever comes to the U.S. I mean, do you think we'll see those same results kind of play out again? I think the U.S. The big thing is what can actually translate from a TikTok audience to another audience because like when Vine disappeared and some of those Vine comedians went to YouTube, they found out very, very quickly that audience was not the same that those six second jokes weren't very funny for a longer form kind of thing. So as long as it's easier to port your audience, essentially from TikTok to another thing, that would be a key differentiator that friendship. This would be a key reason for something actually winning because YouTube shorts is still kind of awkward considering how the platform is in general reels moving from you still photography to these videos that are never ending. That seems a little bit more natural. So the question is whether will it be easy for the audience that the TikTok or had will to be able to have that audience move over to another platform because that can be really rough. That was one of the interesting things about the rest of World Article though is that the audience moved. They didn't really care who was on it. It was the creators that had a problem. Some of them have made the move more successfully than others, but it did leave a lot of those who had created a big audience on TikTok behind some of them weren't able to make that transition. So I yeah, I don't know if it even matters if the creators can move if the audience moves. It's bad for the creators and as a creator, I don't like that idea. But right, it seems like India has shown us like, you know what, you'll miss it for, you know, a little while and then you'll just go elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, people want distraction. They want the shiny and they're going to find a way to stand in line somewhere and be mildly amused at something that they can, you know, flick and have that recycled for them. Kind of no matter what the the real thing that I'm interested if this were to ever come to pass is we saw that change in ownership in Twitter was enough to kind of ramp up the the usage of mastodon in and kind of an certainly in an unprecedented way for them. It's still orders of magnitude smaller than Twitter, but has brought that into the conversation. I wonder what that would do given what we've seen. Will it just be alphabet and better because they already have that infrastructure in place for that short firm video? I want this exact same dopamine hit. Let me get that again. I'd recognize this format or if there is something, whether it's a startup, whether it's a, you know, a Fediverse project or something like that, that would crop up and kind of, you know, fill in some of that void, some of that vacuum given how much more seismic that is than just an ownership change. Yeah, well, I mean, the India test seems to indicate doesn't matter much. I don't know. I mean, your conditions will be different though. You're right. Well, I was thinking about mastodon. That's exactly why I was talking about Kevin ease for the audience or the creator for this particular thing, because when people are like moving to mastodon, like, wait, how exactly does this work? I've gotten at masto.info or whatever you've got. That's a different kind of handle, which made people confused right away. So the idea of just simply going from one platform to the other was difficult. Like I was saying earlier about the creators. That's what I was more concerned about is some of the creators in the articles were saying, yeah, they didn't have success on these other platforms. We've seen what happens when something like Microsoft tried to start their own streaming service, basically buys a streamer and that just didn't translate. So I don't, I'm kind of curious if any of these networks will go with like throw money at creators or they just realized since the audience will move like you're saying, Tom, they don't need to buy the talent or the creators. And, and despite what they may be saying in their all hands meetings or meta and alphabet, quietly saying, like, you know, it's fine. Go ahead and ban tiktok. It's not a problem. Do it. Folks, if you have a thought about something like that and you would like to send us an email, we welcome it. We love getting your emails, reading them. We read every single one of them. And if they're particularly insightful and we think the rest of the audience would benefit, we read them on the show. So email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If there's one word that's synonymous with the dominance of social media over the past couple of decades, it's influencer love or hate the word. It is definitely a word that people use a lot in relation to social media and influencers are everywhere. They're in pop culture. They're in beauty products. They're in the most infinitesimal niche the Internet can invent. And tiktok has really fueled the expansion. It's not like we didn't have influencers before tiktok, but they generate endless sponsored videos, breathless recommendations, glowing reviews for products that can solve every conceivable ill. Well, the Wall Street. Oh, sorry. Wall Street general Sarah Ashley O'Brien wrote up a new reaction to this trend called D influencing also known as people gaining influence on tiktok and elsewhere by speaking critically about a product rather than maintaining the good vibes only status quo. This could entail recommending not spending in certain categories altogether or offering cheaper alternatives to tiktok sensations called dupes. It's important to keep in mind though in terms of popularity D influencing is still a rising trend. You know, the hashtag has accrued about 68 million views. That is a lot, but it pales in comparison to the more than 40 billion views for tiktok made me buy it. So, you know, I just throw the question out there is this, you know, kind of the typical negativity of the Internet or maybe a more significant backlash against the ever present spawn con. I asked, what do you think? Yeah, I saw this. I thought this was just a maturation of tiktok because tiktok starts off as this kind of goofy place to hang out then they started doing this education push, which I thought was a little strange at first. But then, you know, you've got all of these sponsored a content that comes out and then eventually there has to be some kind of critical backlash to going, hey, wait a second, I can't trust anything anybody saying because everyone saying everything is great all the time. In the Wall Street Journal article, one of the influencers said, quote, so I was just being honest and I feel like that's what people want from influencers and quote, it's like, yes, that's what everybody wants from everything. That's the point. So when I saw this, I'm like this de-influenced thing. People thinking critically, it's like, yes, we've, I think the audience wants to make sure that when they're going to spend money on stuff, it's not going to be in some kind of bizarre, you know, liquid diet thing that will make you lose 85 pounds in 22 minutes. It's about people actually telling you what they think because now you can actually trust the people talking to you through the Internet. I know it's a wacky idea. I really do think this goes in phases and this is the most recent manifestation of the phase. If you go all the way back to radio and early TV, you know, the idea that Milton Burl came out and told you that this particular laundry soap was great meant something. People believed it. They're like, well, Uncle Milton, he says it's good. You know, he wouldn't lie to me. I trust him. And then we had the backlash of like, ah, when a spokesperson says they're just paid shills. You can't believe anything they say and the attitude most of my life had been the reaction to that, which is like, don't believe people who are paid to say things. It has been odd for me having grown up with that to see the past decade and a half or more be people going like, you know, as long as they disclose that they're paid, I can trust these people to tell me and I have some really good friends who make a living doing that. And it's a skill to be able to say like, yes, I'm getting paid to say this, but I only meant recommend the things that I believe in, even if I'm getting paid and that has rained now for a long enough time that I think it is the typical backlash moment to say, yeah, but they're always super positive and even if they mean it, they're not going to tell you the alternative because they're paid to tell you about the thing they're paid to tell you about. Let me be the alternative monger. And I just, the only thing I'm wondering is like, what is the route to sustaining that? Because obviously the route to sustaining the sponsorship message is to get paid by the sponsor. The route to maintaining the alternate alternate message is to be able to say like, I have such credibility that I build a big audience and then I monetize it some other way. Well, and speaking of that credibility, it's interesting to see how this reaction is forming because in a lot of times it's people that were doing the spawn con going like, actually I'd use this face cream and it, you know, it's okay, but it didn't do exactly what I thought or it's people that worked for brands like in retail and are giving their expertise of, you know, these are the things that were actually returned even though, you know, these are super hot on tiktok and stuff like that right now. So I almost feel like it's this industry itself kind of, you know, like I'm tired of smiling and saying this is great and everything is awesome about this. And, you know, I, there is a limit, I guess, to how much it also speaks to how easy it is to kind of get into that, you know, that monetized world on tiktok specifically where it seems like it's not just, hey, this is a very small percentage of people. This is something that if you really focused on, you could 100% do maybe not as a full-time gig, but you could work your way into that in a way that tiktok makes a lot easier than on YouTube or other platforms that have been, you know, the if thing in the past. Yeah, you can definitely build an audience, although a lot of people build that audience and then sell sponsorships. So I'm still hung up on that idea of like, all right, so how does someone, I don't know, someone who tries to be, you know, even handed about things, you know, make a killing on tiktok? I'm not sure that you can or that I can. I mean, that you can. It sounds like you just, there's going to be something called like a brand, right? And they're going to hire people that work within the brand and those reporters will report about things with different ideas. And people have to pay for that. The brand will be paid for and they'll be keeping a separate editorial wall. It's like journalism where they would separate it at some point. Wasn't there a company we both worked at at different points in our lives that did that? I don't know what you're talking about. I think I've seen it somewhere. Yeah, hard to see. Meanwhile, we have a very interesting story that was on our subreddit. Thanks to KV87 who posted this. It's from the Human Computer Integration Lab at the Computer Science Department University of Chicago. They put a slime mold into a wearable heart monitor. The reason is to test how people behaved when they actually had to take care of their heart monitor. Not Tamagotchi virtual pet, but like living thing in their heart monitor. The slime mold formed a conductive wire that was needed for the sensor to work. They weren't electrocuting the slime mold. It was just conductive. But it had to have a living slime mold connection or the heart sensor wouldn't operate to keep it working. You needed to keep the slime mold alive. That meant feeding it with some oat flakes every two days and one drop of water twice a day. If it went dormant, especially dried up because it didn't get the water, the sensor would stop working until you resuscitated it with a couple of drops of water. The lab tested the wearable on five women around the age of 30 who wore it from nine to 14 days each. So they really made it. They made a version of this. The most interesting thing about this is because as part of the study, they had to like tell the women not to feed it, you know, to see how it reacted. Right, because they were trying to see what the negative version would look like. Yeah. Yeah. And like they experienced a little resistant to that. They were like, no, I've I'm used to feeding it. I want I want this to do well. Like already it's a it's a slime mold on your wrist and there was there was a relationship to that. I find I find super fascinating. You got people who have to wear a heart sensor. Okay. So something's very stressing them out. Let's add something else. What if my center itself? I don't think this is a practical item. You're right. It's just this idea of like the guilt and like, oh, man, it's not doing well. It resuscitated. It's coming back. It's coming back and your sensor is not reading it. So you need a second sensor to see how freaked out you were when your first sensor died. So I mean, I'm I like the idea of the actual bioengineering of it, but all joking aside, that's the point wasn't to make a better heart sensor. You're right. That's a very good point. It really was to see like how people behaved when there was a living thing inside their heart sensor and I'm with rich. I think this was really interesting to see people felt bad when they were forced as part of the study to not give water to a slime bolt, which I'm guessing doesn't have a lot of self awareness or self worth. It's gelatinous cube. I mean, but it's slime mold to slime mold no matter how much it's on your wrist. Call it living and suddenly. Yeah, people get attached. They got attached to Tamagotchi's. Yeah, I can't imagine they wouldn't get attached to a slime mold. All right, let's check out the mailbag. All right. Well, Christopher wrote in with some some more thoughts on municipal fiber. He says, I started muni networks.org 12 years ago and so he covers the space a lot on the show. Longmont was called out for voting no on the opt-in in 2009. They voted yes in 2011 and built the muni fiber network that PC Mag just gave the best ISP for gaming award to always get to hear stories from people on the ground thinking about community networks. Thanks. Thanks, Christopher Mitchell is good to hear from you, man. And and yes, good, good to know that Longmont we Shannon did say what the heck's going on Longmont. They just needed a couple more years to vote again and and they've built a very nice ISP so good to know very good. All right, I as actor, thank you so much for being with us. If you are doing anything out there now's a chance to tell folks what it is. What are you doing these days? I'm doing a show called this old nerd. You can see it on this old nerd dot com. Now there I do projects to make my home and life as tech forward as humanly possible and you can learn from my mistakes new episodes are coming out very soon. Excellent. And thanks to our brand new bosses, Kelly and Robert who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks, Robert. Yeah, Kelly and Robert. We we love getting new patrons. So so so we dedicate the episode when we get a new one, you know, other days we call out some of the old timers we love having all of you in here as well. But thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Robert for for making today's show possible. Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Patrick Norton talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.