 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, Kirk Stephenson, and Andrew Pearl, and Brian Condren, whose shoutouts were sponsored by Matt Zeiglin. On this episode of DTNS, so advertisers can spy on you through your phone's mic? No, we'll explain. Plus, a supercomputer that really does work like a human brain, and Harry McCracken from Fast Company is here to tell us why it was hard for Disney Plus to put Hulu into Disney Plus. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, December 15, 2023, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Drawing the top tech stories. In Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, global technology editor at Fast Company, Harry McCracken. Hi, Harry. How's it going? Great. Thanks, Tom. How are you? Good. Good. I'm excited to talk about our topic today. It's good to have you for the entire show. Thanks for being here. Pleased to be here. Well, Google surprised us by extending the deadline for you to enable the Bluetooth on your Stadia controller until December 31, 2024. They give you a whole extra year. That was nice of them. Now, the rest of the quick hits. Thursday, we mentioned the new Intel Core chips in the Meteor Lake family. Those are going into laptops mostly. And the big feature is Intel's neural processing unit, the NPU. But Intel also announced new chips for companies running AI and data centers, the Gaudi 3, which it compares to Nvidia's H100 and AMD's forthcoming M1300X. Gaudi 3 launches next year. Intel also announced new Xeon processors. If you're going to operate cloud services, you might be interested in those. Google announced this week that it is changing the way that it stores and accesses users opt-in location history in Google Maps. It will become impossible for Google to access this information, thus impossible for it to respond to Geofence warrants. Geofence warrants are also known as reverse location searches and they empower local and federal authorities to force Google to hand over information about all users within a given location during a specific time frame, potentially implicating anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a crime. Large language models can't actually create new knowledge yet, but they can iterate so fast that it might look like they do. DeepMind used an LLM based on Google's Palm 2 model called FunSearch. It outputs solutions to problems with no regard to accuracy, so it's just throwing darts against the wall. But DeepMind filtered those outputs through a second tool, an accuracy evaluator, and discarded the millions of incorrect solutions in favor of promising ones that it then fed back into FunSearch for improvement and reevaluation. That system was able to create a solution to a previously unsolvable math problem, so if you know what the cap-set problem is, it solved it for 512 points across eight dimensions. If you don't know that problem, like most of us, just know that no human was able to solve that before. Google has released an on-demand or should say on-device diagnostic tool for pixel phones, allowing users to run a full diagnostic to detect issues across the entire device. Pixel owners can dial pound star pound seven two eight seven pound star pound to find out what's wrong if anything with their devices. Users can also run individual tests for physical defects and problems affecting the phone's display, sensors, and connectivity. I love a phone hacking code. Yeah, this isn't a phone hacking code, but it kind of feel has that feel. Feels like it. Yeah, yeah. And finally, the Vivo X100 Pro launched in China back on November 13th. If you remember it, it's the one with the 50 megapixel one inch type main camera in a big circular camera bump. So if you were curious about this Cyclops-looking phone, but you didn't live in China, good news for you. It's coming to Europe. And the X100, which has a slightly less cool sensor, but I think it still has the circle thing is coming to Southeast Asia and India. So let's talk a little bit about Cox Media. A marketing team at Cox Media Group has claimed what up until now was largely just a rumor in theory backed up by little to no evidence that our devices are listening to us and using the data they gather to target ads to us. CMG Local Solutions claims on its website that its ads use voice data to target the exact people you are looking for and that active listening can identify potential customers based on casual conversations in real time. Yeah, this is this is a marketing team. So they make this thing sound really capable. It's not clear if the claims that it works at all are true. They don't know or they don't tell us what devices on the market today it works with. But the company notes it is a marketing technique fit for the future available today. Now, I have a theory about what's going on here. But I also know for sure that for the next five years, I will have people bring the story up as a counter example when I say like they're probably not listening to you. Before I get to my theory on what's going on, I'm curious, Harry, if you have a theory of what's really happening here. Well, and might have something to do with the Cox marketers getting a little ahead of what they can actually do. I mean, the conventional wisdom from experts has always been that when people think that their devices are listening to them to target them with ads, they're being paranoid. And I still don't quite see how this could be done on an iPhone or an Android device. And I believe that Cox took down this post after 404 media broke the story. So I think there's there's more to learn about what's happening here. But there still may be more marketing fluff than actuality to it. I think it's pretty clear there's more fluff than actuality. Rob, here's my theory. I think possibly, I'm not saying I know this, but I think something that would fit the facts is there's enough sketchy apps out there, even in the Apple store, that can socially engineer you into giving permissions that you might not otherwise give them. You know, they're a fun game or something. They're like, turn on your mic so we can do this. Then they would take that data, run it through a large language model, and then try to parse that to target ads to you because they're already collecting a bunch of other information that they got you to agree to give them. Now, granted, it's harder to do that on an Apple platform than it is on Android these days. But you know, there's some clever apps that are that are able to get people to do stuff. In which case, this wouldn't be happening to most people and anybody who's paying close attention to what they give permissions to wouldn't be subject to it. What do you think of that? So that could be true. But I honestly thought when I first read this, this has to be an onion article. Because why would a company of this stature even admit that they're even thinking about doing this kind of stuff, let alone saying, Oh, no, this is what we're doing. And you can sign up. What was what was really interesting is that they have a whole marketing deck for this. So you know, so this this subsidiary is absolutely serious about this, or at least they were before they took you took everything down off the website. And, you know, what I found interesting was one of the very first bullet points was that they addressed the legal concerns, because they want to make sure that you know, people know, and this is legal week, you know, people are absolutely, you know, they're absolutely opting in for us to be able to collect this kind of information. Didn't really say much about the ethics of doing so. And, you know, the ROI apparently is really good. And there is even a sales consultant who has, you know, as part of this article put up, you know, a link to his LinkedIn saying, come hit me, come holler at me if you want to know more can't find any of those things right now on the internet. So I just I thought this was just very strange because if people react like I'm reacting, there is no way ever that if I find that, you know, I've thought this has happened for years, but I look at the data and I look at the code and it's like, well, I don't see where that can actually happen. But if you have a marketing company telling me that this is what you do, any company you ever represent is no longer an option for me to purchase from. So I don't see what the upside of this would be from a company with the stature of CMG. Yeah, I feel like the bigger story here is that CMG had this publicly on a website, right? Don't you think, Harry? Totally. I mean, I imagine somebody is getting a stern talking to if not being fired over this. Yeah, I am. I am not looking forward to having to make the argument that this isn't happening in the future. But I guess the things that I will marshal is, you know, that the phones are very good at letting you know when the mic is on. There are things you can look for. There are, you know, there are permissions in the settings that you can lock down if you're worried about it. Even the voice assistants like the Echo and the Google Assistant and Google Home, Nest Home, they all have been well audited to show that they generally aren't sending what the mic hears to the cloud most of the time. It's accidental activations that cause the headline grabbing stories. Can you all think of any other things that are good to pass along? So I saw a really good comment. Now, I know I shouldn't get into the comments on social media and stuff like this, but someone said, so this is actually an Apple ad. Because Apple is going to come out and let you know that there is no way ever that we will allow this to happen on our platform. So I just, I thought that was kind of clever. Now I'd be, I'd be a tug of teak when I say that, but from a technical standpoint, how would this happen? You've got to put some fairly sketchy apps on your device, which you can do on Android. You know, you know, pretty readily that would allow this technology to work. As I said before, though, I'm just shocked that they actually admitted it. And this is not, this is not an April Fool's joke. They're really serious about this, at least at one point. Harry, any additional tips and trips? Yeah, go ahead. Well, your devices do like show you when the mic is on and they do that for a reason. It's kind of easy to ignore because most of the time, if the mic is on, you know it's on, but this might be a subtle reminder that that's there for a reason. And if you see your mic is on and you didn't put it on intentionally, there's something awry. Yeah. Well, there you go, folks, some stuff to pass along to your friends and family over the holidays when they bring up the fact that their phone has been listening to them. And what usually causes people to think this is not the story, even before the story, targeting is good. It's good at being able to predict what you're into based on things you don't realize you're doing. So people say, well, there's no way they could have known that. There's usually another way they could have known that that you're just not thinking of. And that's how those ads show up. When ads get good enough that they're not constantly showing me things I just bought, then I'll probably worry a little more about this. Possibly you will need a computer that mimics the human mind to do something like that, which leads us to our next story. Neural networks in computing, they work similarly to how an animal brain works. They simulate how an animal brain works. They're not built out of actual neurons, but the classical computer is able to create virtual neurons that build connections and strengthen them to execute operations, just like our brains do. Scientists at the International Center for Neuromorphic Systems, ICNS at Western Sydney University in Australia, announced that they have developed a supercomputer they call Deep South, capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second. This was purpose built to operate like a network of neurons. So they even picked hardware that would be good at this. It uses less power than a more generalized computer because of that. Our brains, which use actual neurons, only use 20 watts. Deep South won't be quite that power efficient, but it will take advantage of some of the same efficiencies and operations that we do. The aim is to model a human brain to understand how it works. Now the scientists do say, because they published this in Nature, that it may also point the way to more power efficient software, ways to have more power efficient devices. They are not trying to create a human thinking brain with this. Deep South will use off-the-shelf configurable parts and the scientists hope to turn it on by April. Harry, what do you make of the Deep South brain? Well, it made me think of something which has been a big new story for a long time, which is the idea that quantum computing is going to be how we really do transformative things with scientific research. But quantum is still in the lab and even among the people who know a lot about it, there's a great deal of disagreement about when it can actually do anything incredible. We can't do otherwise. But supercomputers exist and there's still headroom for them to get more and more powerful. And so I think there's a decent chance that a lot of the remarkable stuff that happens over the next few years won't be through quantum. It will be through supercomputers. And this is a good example that there's still room for supercomputing to do new things. So I know folks who are like me who always jump through the conspiracy theory side of things are hearing neuromorphic systems. That kind of sounds like cyberdine systems. Are they about to build a T-2000 or something like that? No, this is not that. Ultimately, where I see this technology leading is to create just more power-efficient computers. Because when you think about just the amount of computing power for like all the AI stuff that's going on right now for all of the, you know, we're not really talking about Bitcoin again, but all of the crypto stuff, those operations take enormous amounts of power. So if they can make more efficient use of power and not use as much of it, I think that that's a good thing. Yeah, and getting more power out of our batteries and our mobile devices is something that everybody's always looking for. I do think that it's worth keeping an eye out for stories that say we have now, we now understand a little more about consciousness. We understand a little more about why we dream or where we dream. Things like that might come out of here because they're able to model how the brain works. I don't expect, I'll put it at, you know, 2% chance that we will have an emergent property out of this that it'll start thinking in some way. But you never know. That's why I'm leaving a couple of percentages. Yeah, just like I said, I'm one of those folks who jumps to, wow, they're really trying to build a terminator. And like I said, when I dig into this, it's like, no, they're trying to figure out how to just, it's two pieces that I got of this, how the brain works, which is really cool. The more we know about the brain, the better we can do with medications and stuff like that, therapies in the future. But really, it's just if you can decrease the amount of power that computers use to do the things they do, you'll make a much better world. Yeah, Harry, are you worried? I think long term there's certainly reason to be concerned. This doesn't seem so worrisome. And in general, I think the better we understand the human brain, the better off we'll all be. So I am supportive of this type of research for sure. If you're wondering about the name, it is an homage to IBM's True North System, which was one of the first computers built to simulate spiking neurons, and Deep Blue, the one that beat Gary Kasparov to become a world chess champion. So it's, you know, and it's south because it's Australia. So there you go. That's the mystery behind the name. We have a whole YouTube channel. In fact, if you have alerts on for lives, keep an ear out this weekend for that, because I think my wife Eileen Rivera and I might be piloting a new YouTube show on youtube.com slash Daily Tech News show. One of the other things we have there, along with Android Faithful and other stuff is Tom's top five. And this week, Roger put together some tools you need to upgrade or build a PC and I count them down for you. So go check that out. It's only a couple of minutes and find out those top five tools you need to upgrade or build a PC. Disney recently added its Hulu catalog. That's around 70,000 shows or so to Disney Plus, which sounds easy, right? You already have the shows. You just make them available in the other app. Turns out, like most things, it's way easier for people like me to say it's easy than it is to actually do. Harry, you recently wrote an article titled Why Disney Plus's New Hulu Integration Was Such a Huge High Stakes Challenge. What was some of the complexity behind this? Well, basically, even though Disney owns Disney Plus and has a majority stake in Hulu, they've really been totally separate. Hulu was one of the original streaming services has been around for 15-plus years and Disney Plus is a lot more recent and so the video was encoded in different ways. On Hulu, they just needed to upload a few assets, like beautiful screenshots. Disney Plus, you needed a lot to get something into the system and so when they needed to move the Hulu stuff into Disney Plus, they kind of ended up doing a lot of overdue work to get everything on one platform, which obviously has a lot of value when you're a company like Hulu that owns a bunch of streaming services and owns a huge amount of IP and so it's the first step in a longer range plan to get some efficiency out of all the stuff they own in a way they have not gotten until now. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that Hulu wasn't really anybodies. It was co-owned by major broadcast networks, I think four or five of them, right? Yeah, Disney is planning to buy the part they don't own. Comcast still owns a little bit, but before too long it should be 100% owned and operated by Disney and just another Disney property. Yeah, and so Comcast has gotten the first check as part of the agreement which lets Disney start making these changes, but it was a separate platform so it makes sense that you would have differences and then at the scale of 70,000 shows that's quite a bit of difference. What did you find out about some of these legacy systems? Well, in the past all these various arms of Disney kind of worked independently and they've spent the last few years trying to build one tech team. When I visited Disney to talk to folks about this where I went was Bristol, Connecticut, which ESPN fans will know about. That's the ESPN campus but it's also kind of now the east coast headquarters for a lot of Disney's tech. Another interesting thing is when they launched Disney Plus a few years ago they had this super ambitious plan to go from it not existing to being a true competitor Netflix almost overnight and they pretty much succeeded in doing that but because they were moving so quickly there was a lot of stuff they didn't build, they weren't really planning for the future, they were just trying to push it out there so like everybody else they've been raising prices and they had never built a platform to let them raise the price with just a few clicks. That was actually like a tech project and now they they build that so that they can adjust the pricing like they want and that's that's something that the pricing people can do without the tech people needing to be involved and they'll be able to roll that out across their other platforms as well. So I see that one of the things that they're trying to do is potentially set up their own advertising platform. I guess if you're going to be joining these large systems together you may be able to get much better rates, much better deals if you're doing that as compared to using Google's advertising so you know so what's the low down on that? Yeah I mean Disney really wants to be like an actual tech company in a way that not not all media companies that have been around for a hundred years are and one of the things they got out of buying the majority of Hulu which they got when they bought most of Fox was Hulu had a pretty robust ad platform of its own and so instead of using Google like Disney used to do it it has its own bespoke ad platform which it can tailor to its own needs and at least according to them it's much more efficient and they can do stuff that they couldn't do if they were relying on an outside platform that was like built to serve everybody and also and Disney Plus now has advertising which is still relatively new and they were able to roll that out partially because they had this platform of their own. Yeah and that's something that Netflix is having to deal with as well because they never planned for advertising. Yeah the Netflix used to brag about the idea that would never be advertising on Netflix. So when when you mentioned the thing about the pricing it made me laugh because I had called Disney Plus at one time about trying to unify Hulu and Disney Plus. I was getting billed for Hulu and yet I had the bundle for Disney Plus and what they pointed out to me is I was getting billed for Hulu but I was also getting a credit on my Disney Plus bundle and I didn't realize that. So they made me look at the details of my invoice and it's like oh okay so I am paying less for the Disney Plus side than I would normally and it all makes perfect sense now. I'm like why are they doing this Rube Goldberg style thing and that's why. Yeah I mean it was all held together with chewing gum and string in the past and they're finally integrating things so there is one actual platform behind these streaming services. Yeah I actually when I first heard the news that they were just going to be joining these things I said this actually might work for customers like me because I actually have both but I cancel Disney TV regularly because there's just not enough content that I watch daily on or at least regularly on there that I would just keep it going on you know month after month after month I generally would watch a series and then if there's nothing for two or three months that I would watch again I would just cancel save 10 you know 15 bucks and then sign up again. But now if everything is in one app the hassle of doing so may just not warrant you know it may not warrant you know the squeeze may not warrant the juice. So this this might actually you know get them a few additional dollars because I probably if I were just in one app wouldn't cancel every time I get them watching something specifically on Disney Plus. And as all of these services are raising their prices you're probably not going to subscribe to Netflix and Prime Video and Disney and Hulu and Paramount Plus. So the more they can do to make it convenient for you to get as much as possible out of the money you're paying that the less likely you are to come and go. Yeah one of the takeaways from your article on this was to remind me that that Hulu category that shows up in Disney Plus if and when you get it that that's not what it's meant to be. Is it March when they plan to launch the final version we'll have FX and Nickelodeon and stuff right. Yeah I mean most people don't really care that much about Hulu as a thing because Hulu is just sort of a lot of stuff aimed at everybody and it's the channels such as FX or Nickelodeon that people care more about and they're planning to build those out more into hubs of their own that live within Disney Plus. And then maybe my watch progress on Hulu will be reflected on Disney Plus at that point. Well yeah I mean one of the odd things is one major thing they have not done yet is to integrate the profiles. So if you're watching stuff in the Hulu app that's not reflected in Disney Plus and vice versa they told me they don't have any plans to do that but you know they also acknowledge it's kind of tricky because if you're in both of these apps and you have profiles you need to somehow connect them together and it's kind of a major design challenge of its own along with a technical challenge and I would expect they will eventually get around to that but it's not part of their plans for the immediate future. Well Kim in Pennsylvania I think expresses a lot of folks feelings I love Hulu I don't want it to change and I guess the good news is they're keeping the Hulu app around. So yeah I think there are long ways there are long ways from only having a single Disney Plus app. I mean just just from a branding standpoint Disney Plus is always going to have this friendly family or a to it which in a lot of cases is a huge asset but Hulu is a brand that's not associated with a particular age group also has a lot of value I would think. Indeed. All right before we wrap up the show let's check out the mail bag what's there Rob. So responding to a question from a viewer on the editor's desk show that patrons get Jeremy wrote on the topic of VMs on ARM Macs I moved from an x86 based iMac to an M2 MacBook Pro this past year on the iMac I was using VMware Fusion but the change to the ARM based Mac I switched to something called UTM. UTM is free or you can buy a copy from the Mac App Store if you want to support the developers. It's really just a UI front end for two different VM technologies first as you are running an ARM VM it uses built-in hypervisor technology in macOS to create VMs if you want to run non-arm based OS's it uses QEMU to emulate x86 even over other CPUs or I should say even or even or even other CPUs. Yeah yeah thank you for that Jeremy if you're wondering where this came from if you're a patron I do a solo show where I just answer people's questions called editor's desk you get that in the Patreon feed at the associate producer level and up and somebody had asked what VMs I use on Mac now that it's Apple Silicon and my answer was I haven't actually used a VM on Mac in a while I talked about the ones that I had most recently used but then I asked folks to send in their recommendations and Jeremy very very kindly did thank you Jeremy also thank you Len Peralta who has been illustrating today's show Len what have you drawn for us today. So I was pretty amazed that when I turned when I longed on to Disney plus last week I saw Hulu there and I was just sort of like what is going on here so it was very informative to to hear all the talk about it however I do think it's sort of weird that Bluey is next to the bear which is next to what we do in the shadows it's like what happened to this this Disney plus sort of like aristocrat sort of thing and that's sort of what this comes up with this image it's I call it Dulu or Dulu plus it's sort of like a monster call of Dulu or maybe maybe people know HP Lovecraft and call of Dulu this is call of Dulu coming to D plus Hulu soon and yeah it's kind of weird to have these monstrous things you know this this monster this Frankenstein sort of put together with all these kids shows next to adult shows and it's very odd to me but anyway Bob Iger I hope you're watching your new logo back it out that's yes please contact me about renaming the service if you're interested if you're a Dulu fan you can go to my patreon patreon.com four slash lent you get the at the DTNS Lover level you get that image immediately or you can go the old fashion route and go to my online store at lentparaltestore.com which by the way I am still taking orders for custom-drawn holiday cards just up until the 20th so if you have if you still haven't done it yet contact me I'll help you out so so Harry McCracken we're going to thank you too but before we do I'm holding up a fast company an actual paper fast company right now and it's got a picture of Marquez Brownlee on it and I just want to ask I rumor tells me that you actually wrote this article about Marquez can you tell us a little bit about that before we let you go the rumors are true we did a cover profile on Marquez and the fact that he has been you know the preeminent gadget reviewer for at least a decade and he started doing it when he was 15 and he's turning 30 this month so he's been doing it for half his life and while he has become very successful and famous it's not through trying to become successful and famous it's it's through this obsessive dream he has to always do a better tech video than the one he last one he did and he's still doing that and raising the bar and it's still working for him and it was just a lot of fun to not only look at what he's doing today but also look back over this 15 year archive of his YouTube videos back to the first one he did in his bedroom when he was still a kid yes an excellent article I read it actually well before even knew you were coming on the show but go ahead and tell us tell everyone who's watching who's listening how they can get at you if they're interested in finding out what you do and where you do it well just about everything I write is at fastcompany.com if you go there you can sign up for my plugged in newsletter which comes out every Wednesday and you'll also see all the other stuff I'm writing including a story that I'm going to have to finish to get up but the minute I get off of the show all right well we let's get the show on the road then patrons stick around the extended show Good Day Internet starts momentarily and it's Friday so we like to do fun stuff on Friday and we're bringing back the great GDI debates Roger Chang has picked three topics for us to debate some of the most perplexing questions of all time stick around for that you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com four slash live we'll be back Monday looking at the epic versus Google decision from a developer's perspective with Android Faithful's Huintui Dou this week's episodes of dailytechnewshow were created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merrick host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer and Booker Roger Chang producer writer and co-host Rob Dunwood video producer Twitch producer Joe Coons technical producer Anthony Lemos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding our mods Beatmaster W. Scottus 1 BioCow Captain Kipper Steve Guadorama Paul Reese Matthew J. Stephens a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway modern video hosting by Dan Christensen music and art provided by Martin Bell Dan Looters Mustafa A A-Cast and Len Peralta live art performed by Len Peralta A-Cast adds support from Tatiana Matias Patreon support from Tom McNeil contributors for this week's shows include Rich Trafalino Chris Christensen and Justin Rubber Young our guest this week was Harry McCracken and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible this show is part of the Frogpants Network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program