 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you. That's you, Rodrigo Smith, Zapata, you too, both of you, John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito, not leaving you out. And everybody, welcome in our new patrons, Michael and Maher Noodles. Delicious. On this episode of DTNS, why I message on Android is a bad idea. Apple CEO Tim Cook has a succession plan and Robert Herron's here with gift ideas for home theater fans. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 21st, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from studio thinking about Thanksgiving already. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang, home theater and TV calibration expert, Robert Herron. Welcome back to the show. Hey, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on a holiday week in the US, too. It couldn't be better timing. Honestly, I love this time of the year. It's really nice. Almost like this is the week when a lot of people just mysteriously stopped responding. So it's always good to get the work done early. It's nothing that Black Friday is an entire month. It's not even a single day. It's good to have true that. All right, let's start with the quick hits. As we wait for yet more open AI news, here's what we've learned since yesterday's DTNS. The information reported that in an attempt to sway anthropic CEO, Dario Amodi, to become CEO of Open AI, the board of Open AI proposed a possible merger between the two companies. Amodi declined. The information also says that the Open AI board offered the position to Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Microsoft owned GitHub and also Alex Wang, co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, both declined. The financial time says that the percentage of staff who have signed on to leave Open AI for Microsoft, unless the board resigns, has grown to 97% of all employees. Meanwhile, while Open AI decides what to do with itself, Anthropic released Cloud 2.1, its chat GPT competitor. Cloud 2.1 can pay attention to more information at once than chat GPT with 200,000 tokens. It also promises better accuracy and can use apps and APIs. Ex-Chairman Elon Musk has filed his lawsuit against Media Matters, an organization that issued a report last week that alleged corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence and neo-Nazi accounts. After the lawsuit was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he also is opening an investigation into Media Matters. Both Musk and Paxton claim Media Matters created an account that only followed major advertisers and extreme content and then refreshed the feed in order to make the ads show up and imply that it was a common occurrence. Musk filed the lawsuit in Texas where it will not be subject to rules that prevent retaliation over reporting like California's anti-slap laws. Although bipartisan calls for a ban on TikTok have quieted as of late, US concerns about issues over privacy and social media and the matter involving TikTok is not yet resolved. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC, quote, we do have concerns about the potential issues with privacy and social media. She also added she can't discuss TikTok specifically, citing pending legal action that prevents US regulators from acting. No, we're ramping that one up again. Okay, play the hits. Firefox users have been reporting that some YouTube videos will take around five seconds to load, whereas on Chrome those same users with those same videos see them load right away. Some folks on Hacker News and Reddit dug into the code and found some snippets that indicate the delay might be because of an anti-ad blocker routine. It's unclear exactly what the code does and the problem is not easily replicated just because you have Firefox and YouTube with an ad blocker doesn't mean it's always causing that same delay. Google told Android authority that some users with ad blockers installed, quote, may experience suboptimal viewing. Amazon launched its free AI ready program with the goal of training at least 2 million people by 2025 on basic to advanced AI skills. The training is centered on eight online courses that focus on generative AI and catered to both beginners and those who have a little bit more experience in this realm. The courses are free for all to access online through the Amazon learning website. All right. Oh, we talked previously about nothing trying to bring you an app powered by Sunbird that would let you access iMessage on an Android phone. If you recall, it worked the way Beeper works and there are other services that do this by putting Macs in the cloud that you then log into remotely and it would forward those messages to you. Following nothing removing that chat app based on Sunbird that we mentioned yesterday, Sunbird has now removed its own app from the Google Play Store. Both of them are removed because of security questions. Here's what we know. Both nine to five Google and text.com found multiple security problems with Sunbird's implementation, such as Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plain text in its error reporting software century and in a Firebase database. The tokens used to secure message delivery were sent over HTTP, not HTTPS which made those tokens easy to intercept. Messages were not encrypted at rest in the Firebase database until the client read them, leaving them vulnerable to interception before they are read. So text.com was able to intercept one of those tokens and then use it to subscribe to the Firebase real time database which would notify them every time a message was entered into the database making it trivial for them to access and read almost every message before they were encrypted after somebody attempted to read them. All of this of course, in violation of Sunbird's promise that all your messages are secure and decrypted. Nine to five Google also looked into this and found that all the documents sent through Sunbird remained public because they were links to documents that were on a server that was public. I think, you know, there's always a good side and a bad side to a story, Sarah, except maybe in this case. Yeah, I can't. This just seems like a bad side. Can't find the silver lining here. When we first reported on the story, I was like, this is great. I mean, not for everybody but it's certainly an interesting solution for a lot of people who- Yeah, the idea of it, right? Yeah. Exactly, yeah. I want to get over that kind of blue versus green bubble thing which is really quite silly to be honest but hey, some people really care. And at the time, I remember seeing some chirping around the internet of like, I don't know. How are they doing this? How is this being implemented? Ars Technica noted in its article about nothing saying, yeah, we're not going to do this anymore that in their frequently asked questions on the website, at least as of this recording, they still explain how everything end up encrypted and you as a user should have absolutely no issue or any privacy concerns because nothing has taken care of. Now, obviously, well, not obviously but I'm going to suppose that the company believed that was true and just did not do their own due diligence. I don't think this is in some way supposed to be some like crazy and a farious way to see everybody's chats and ruin the company's reputation going forward. It's still a pretty big blunder though. I believe companies like this, like Sunbird and Beeper can make this work securely but it requires a lot of assurance and a lot of trust. I tried Beeper and then immediately revoked its token because I just didn't feel comfortable having my Apple ID logged in on a terminal that I was not in charge of and I still don't feel comfortable and I have nothing against Beeper. I'm not even saying I don't trust them. I'm just saying, you know what? I just feel uncomfortable doing that. I was feeling the same way about Sunbird, right? Yeah, it was one step beyond and then someone goes poking around in Sunbird like how good is their security and we find out it doesn't exist. It's just not implemented. Robert, I know you were telling me before the show that Signal was talking about just how expensive security is. Totally, they had a wonderful article that detailed that their estimated cost per year right now is about $50 million in order to make their entire ecosystem work for everyone around the world and that includes end-to-end encryption, including file transfers and they even have a built-in money transfer system as well within their application. Granted, if the color of the chat bubble is what is driving into these applications, then something like Signal may not appeal to you but it's almost a proven at this point, overly proven technology in terms of how well it's implemented in terms of personal security and if that's the most important thing to you, that's where you really have to take a look at what these services are doing and maybe not jump on the bandwagon for the absolute latest one until it's proven it's worth, especially if your communications are critical in terms of keeping them private between you and whoever you are communicating with. That's one thing Signal does very, very well and they have proven time and again that if there's a problem, it's not their protocol, it's not their backend, they are experts practically in that field, pioneers, so to speak. And others are, they'd like to just say they're doing that and doing it right but it really does take a critical eye on the whole ecosystem to make sure it's all end to end and done properly. Yeah. But it's that green versus blue, the chat bubble thing though, that amazes me that how important that is to so many people. Apple implementing RCS will help with some of this but it's still gonna be green bubble, blue bubble. So there's still gonna be that psychology. All right Sarah, I'm levitating at our next story. I bet you are. Tim Cook appeared on Dua Lipa's at your service podcast for BBC Sounds. Now Cook sitting down, they talked about a lot of things but Cook told the singer at Dua Lipa, if you're not familiar, she's just lovely, great, a lot of hits. Tim Cook said, we're a company that believes in working on succession plans. So we have a very detailed succession plan because something unpredictable can always happen. I could step off the wrong curb tomorrow. Hopefully that doesn't happen. I pray that it doesn't. Now, when Dua Lipa asked Cook who was next in line, he said, well, I can't say that, but I would say that my job is to prepare several people for the ability to succeed. And I really want the person to come from within Apple, the next CEO. So that's my role, that there's several for the board to pick from. If I were Tim Cook, I would have answered this differently. I would have said, don't start now, I've got new rules on who's gonna succeed me in case I do a Houdini. Yeah, it should have been you that she was interviewing, obviously, Tom, but since it was Tim Cook, I don't know. Nothing about this, I think you could jump to a conclusion like, is Tim Cook about to retire? Or is he sick? Or all sorts of, that's kind of, I'm not saying that's not true. What I think is, whether he's going to be at Apple for another 25 years or another year or somewhere in between the two, of course, when you're Apple, you're going to have a plan B, C, D, E, F and who even knows. I mean, there's no way that the company is like, well, if Tim goes, we're really screwed, nobody will have any direction and we'll just shut down the spaceship and that'll be the end of that. Of course, a company is going to have succession plans. I mean, ha ha, anybody who's seen the series succession knows that that can get kind of messy, but I don't really feel like Tim Cook is a Logan Roy in the situation, I think he's probably like, yeah, I mean, if it's not going to be me, who is it going to be? Just the same way that Steve Jobs pinpointed Tim Cook as his successor quite some years before Tim Cook actually became the successor. It makes me wonder if either of you have an idea of why address this, right? Cause these interviews, a lot of times, the list of questions is vetted ahead of time. The question she asked was not, do you have a succession plan but how long do you think you'll continue working? You're 63 years old, Tim, it's a fair question. And he took it and said, well, I hope to keep working for a long time, which is the answer you expect and turned it into the succession issues. So are there people out there concerned about this? And he wants to get the word out to say, hey folks, don't worry, we, you know, I'm not going anywhere, but we've got a plan in case, you know, I just wonder what caused him to want to address this publicly. I agree with Sarah in the sense that he's stating the obvious for a trillion dollar company. They are obviously well-prepared for any eventuality. I'm sure they have a playbook written down where if Tim just straight up loses his mind one day or just decides to, that's it, I'm running out of the building and never coming back, that company would function just perfectly and quickly and what to do exactly if and when that ever happens. Chances are that is not going to happen. Chances are it will be a very, very detailed and smooth transition for their next leader of the company, but Tim is still doing a fantastic job. I think according to anybody who follows that company, there is no rush in it, but maybe he has indicated within the company itself that hey, you know what? I would like to get this ball rolling and make sure we're ready to go because I would like to retire and enjoy a very successful end of this career and go do whatever the hell I want to do. That all makes sense and within Apple, I would have no question about that. Why tell Dua Lipa though is my question. Like why make a point, you know what I mean? Like why make a point of saying, okay, I'm going to say this, it's going to make headlines. The only thing I can think of is he's 63 and is getting ahead of it and says, you know what? As I get closer to 65, a bunch of people are going to start asking this question. So let me just answer it before it starts getting asked. Well, especially because he went to the extent to say, and I really want that person to come from Apple itself. Yeah. Now Apple can change their mind. Sure. That he say whatever he wants. Or he can do whatever he wants, right? But assuming that. Ask Sam Waldman. Yeah, right. Assuming that it would actually come from inside Apple to lay that foundation of, I mean, I don't know. Is it any cute? Like whoever it could be that makes the most sense from within Apple to get everyone used to the idea of Tim Cook, you know, handing over the reins and maybe somebody taking on a little bit more of those CEO rules over the next few years. That just makes especially the stock market chill out a little bit. Yeah. And then there will be a seed planting function within the company itself just to make sure there's like, hey, be aware this will happen sooner than later and think about it. Let's start taking it seriously. Yeah. Well, folks, if you're like, enough Apple already is your iMessage thing and your Tim Cook thing. Why can't you talk about Android more? Well, we can and we will. And we have an entire show devoted to it as well called Android Faithful. This week our friends, Ron Richards and Huan Tui Dao and a lot of their friends bring you the latest Android news and information. You can watch it live, tune in Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific or subscribe to the feed and enjoy it whenever you like at androidfaithful.com. Well, on last Friday's show, Will Smith shared a great selection of gift suggestions for the holiday shopping season with an emphasis on the geek in your life. This week we're getting electronically specific because it's a great time to see what the best deals are for home theater shoppers and gifters this season. Robert Herron, nobody is better to talk about this than you. You always bring the knowledge. So where do we begin on the gift guide? I want to buy somebody a TV. Where do I start? Let's start with the very best in iCandy for 2023. And that really has become the OLED displays that are available right now. The organic light emitting diodes. These TVs deliver that perfect black, that incredible contrast that makes color pop, beautiful viewing angles. And there really is nothing better out there. Companies like LG, Samsung and Sony make the very best models. If the budget permits and you just want to go right to the head of the line in terms of what it is, what is the best thing I could buy right now, that's the short story for that. Now, if you want to save a little bit of money. How much budget are you talking about there? Like what is the average price of those? It depends on the screen size. Say for a typical 55 inch screen, you're talking about $1,500, maybe a little bit cheaper when it really gets down to the Black Friday pricing. On up to a solid five figures if you want to go all the way up to say the 90 plus inch screen sizes, which are now available, which is kind of crazy. That is something to keep in mind. Let's bring it back down to Earth then. They are beautiful screens though. In terms of iCandy, that's where you go. Oh, do I have to not send you that 90 inch screen, Tom? That's what, it was gonna be your thanks to me. I mean, if you're gonna buy it, I'm not gonna turn it down. Yeah, you might turn it on a wall or two. Now, for good value at good prices, LCD is still the workhorse of the TV industry. And I was helping a friend shop for a sub $500 55 inch TV recently. We came across a wonderful LG that was available at our local Costco, the R8000. This has turned out to be a fantastically reviewed unit for currently at about $350, which is a wonderful price for that kind of a 4K screen at that price point. It fit their budget and their needs perfectly. However, if you had a little bit more money to spend something closer to that $500 budget or maybe just slightly above, High Sense and TCL are the ones I love the most. High Sense in terms of their UAK, that's literally their flagship. That is competitive with even the very best LCDs out there today. They also have a step down version, the U6, which is almost as good. And it will still provide that bright punchy picture. And likewise with TCL, they have the QM8, which is just fantastic. I had previewed this at CES last January. It is an amazingly bright and detailed display with wicked contrast. I mean, just very, very good. And then they also have a step down version called the Q7 that provides good value in terms of picture performance and screen size options. Again, up to 90 plus inches if you really need something super-sized. Now with Google TV operating system on these listings here, which is interesting to see that instead of Roku more often. That is a choice. Granted, generally speaking, the more expensive TVs usually have better processors built into them and they will provide a better app experience overall. I think Google TV is an okay app experience. I think Samsung's version of their Tizen operating system or their TVs is an okay option. I think LG does a pretty good job with their WebOS option for that built-in app experience as well. And we'll get into some additional streaming options here in a second. But one thing I wanted to mention is with all of these flat-panel TVs is that the need for a good audio experience, period. Soundbars are the simple way to do it. They're very popular and they're very easy to do. And a couple of companies that are really worth mentioning are the ones I love the most. And number one I would put up there is Sonos in particular. I have done work for Sonos in the past and I have given them lots of critical feedback on their products. That is just one of the easiest to use setups I've enjoyed. I love the sound quality. It's not exactly the cheapest option out there but what you pay for, I think you really get a good value in terms of just audio performance, room correction features if you're an iOS user and other features like that that just, I love their products in general. However, if you wanna save a little money and you just need something to help your current TV sound better, period. Roku of all people makes a wonderful streaming bar. They're Streambar Pro products. Good prices, good performance for what it is and it integrates their streaming products which are fantastic. And it's available at even very, very affordable pricing. That's also a Streambar or I should say a Soundbar product. I would even be comfortable using outdoors just for temporary use or semi-permanent anyway. Now, if the budget is really kind of like, okay, I want the absolute best. What is the craziest thing I could buy right now that's gonna drive a large room? Check out Nakamichi and what they're doing with the Nakamichi Dragon. This is a custom made system. They make a few of these every month and they are well reviewed. Everyone seems to love them who gets their ears on them. It's kind of the ultimate high-end. If you were gonna spend something similar with Sonos, you'd be buying a pretty big kit. Nakamichi is kind of doing that all in one with that particular product and it's just... 38 bucks is a lot but it's not sky-high really. No and it incorporates wireless quote-unquote products. Generally you have to plug these into a wall somewhere but you don't need to connect them with individual wires for transmitting the sound to each speaker which is really nice. Now likewise, I was talking about streaming products. There are really only two that I recommend and one would be Roku and they're streaming products. The Roku Express 4K Plus is my low-cost recommendation. They have an express version, just regular that isn't the 4K Plus. I do not recommend that one. The 4K Plus adds an actual power button and a volume control which the regular and granted cheaper express version doesn't. And if you're trying to just have that all-in-one experience where it's like, hey, I don't wanna use two remotes at the same time, stick with that 4K Plus. That's a great way to do an inexpensive upgrade on a TV you may already have and you just wanna make sure that it's gonna provide a good streaming experience with any service currently available. Now likewise, if you are an Apple user, IOS user and that is your product, the Apple TV 4K, 4K Plus in particular is, or I think it's just the 4K. That is the one to get. If you already are in the Apple ecosystem, stick with that product and it is something that you will just learn. It will integrate seamlessly with everything you use. It provides terrific performance. It is built like a tank. It'll last for years. And it's right up there with any of the very best streaming products currently. And they're not huge anymore either. They're getting to be hockey puck size. They're not as small as the Roco Express, of course, but you know, they're- Totally. Yeah, they hide pretty well on a small console or even behind the TV itself. I've been purchasing a bunch of these products recently. I helped a relative basically ditch cable television service. Their bill was over 300 bucks a month for cable and internet service. And they were paying for hardware they no longer even had. And there's a tip. If I could just give one is take a look at your bills. If you're a longtime cable or satellite subscriber, you'd be surprised at what they've been billing you for over the years and they will never tell you. It's like, oh, by the way, you don't need this anymore or here's a better option for less money. They'll never do that. And that's just something to keep in mind when you do that. Also, for any of the TVs I just mentioned, they're all internet enabled. If you didn't, if you absolutely wanted a dumb TV, you don't want a smart TV, you could just not connect them to the internet and say no to any of the terms and agreements that you have to click through in order to fire these TVs up. But for ease of use, have it connect to the TV or have it connect to your internet service automatically and do all those upgrades and firmware updates automatically. And that will make it so that every time you turn it on, the apps are ready to go. The TV is less buggy than it may have been when it first shipped. And I think for any product out there, even things like your streaming products, they provide regular updates as well. And it's good just to keep that kind of stuff updated. And finally, when you're shopping through the holiday season with either Black Friday coming up or any throughout the rest of the year, just realize that this is a good time to take a look at what the cheapest prices will be and realize those prices will come around again before soon if you can't buy right now. And services like Amazon necessarily do not have the lowest prices that you're gonna find. And do check other sources. It doesn't even matter what the product category is. I was shopping for Chromebooks recently and I realized that Best Buy had much better pricing for some of the devices I was looking for than Amazon or anyone else. And the same could be said for something like Walmart. Amazon isn't the be all end all. They're convenient as can be, no doubt. But look around when you're gonna make the decision on what to buy. And then your sources like Costco too or your subscription or membership clubs, those things are wonderful for a reason in their own way. And they provide either- Yeah, it sounds like it makes a lot of sense to figure out the model you want, then do a little price comparison rather than just see what one place like Amazon is going to offer you as their Black Friday deal. I agree 100% and I'm always looking for like, what's my favorite TV of the year? What will be the lowest price on that and when? And if right now through the holiday season isn't really gonna do it for you. I'm thinking TV specific. Think about when say like the Super Bowl rolls around in February, I guarantee you there'll be another big sale and it will match very closely with the current prices. Don't ever feel like you have to do it now. There's not gonna be another opportunity again at this price point. It will always come around again. Don't fall for the panic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, take your time and get what you want and save some money. Don't pay full price, wow. Well, thank you, Robert. These are fantastic tips and good day internet folks stick around. You're gonna get some more. But before that, let's check out the mail bag. This one comes in from Alison Sheridan who was on the show last week. She mentioned on Thursday's episode of DTNS. She says, you all talked about Apple finally jumping on the bandwagon with RCS. Tom made the point that all of the carriers support RCS. Alison says, what I'd like to add, it wasn't until very recently that all three of the big carriers had full support for the advanced features in RCS. For example, AT&T didn't switch to RCS for its default Android messaging until just a few months ago in June of this year. Yeah, I think a lot of people will probably notice this same thing that Alison pointed out. It's not exactly right that AT&T didn't switch to RCS for Android. It supported RCS on Android as far back as 2015. But what Alison said, that's a good point, is full featured. And particularly the date, June of 2023, is when AT&T switched to supporting Google's messages implementation of RCS, which is the one that gave you all the features, including end-to-end encryption and everything. So they've supported RCS for a long time, for eight years now, but they was kind of slowly bringing along the features and expanding the support. And it really wasn't until Google started pushing it in its default messaging app that everybody kind of collapsed into saying, okay, we're gonna support it on this one default app for everything. So it's, yes, they've supported RCS for a long time, but Alison makes a good point that it's only recently that it became easy to be able to take advantage of RCS on Android. Well, thanks to Alison for the mailbag and thanks to everybody who emails us and gives us feedback in a variety of different ways. I really appreciate it. We also appreciate you, Robert Herron. This is, even though I'm not really in the market for a TV, I want to be. It's just my favorite conversation ever. So thanks for bringing some knowledge and giving people some gift ideas. Where can they find out more about what you do? You can check out my website, herranfidelity.com, and I'm also on Twitter occasionally and also Blue Sky. I've started using that more and more I find, and I like that a lot. So I'm available, ping me, shoot me an email, contact me however, I'm easy. Hey, Teran, stick around. We're gonna talk to more with Robert Herron about home theater recommendations. We've got some projectors to talk about, stuff like that. Stick around for that. Just a reminder, we do the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we're back tomorrow and we're gonna be live again with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. He he he he he.