 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. That's you. Thanks to all of you, including Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and our new patron, Sasi Kamalash. Welcome, Sasi. On this episode of DTNS, Twitter gives verified blue check marks out for free to some folks. And even those folks aren't necessarily happy about theirs. Plus, we travel to Antarctica for the latest on internet connectivity there. And you probably use a VPN. But when do you really need to? Patrick Norton breaks it down. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 4th, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. And we head to the 314 on Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. Boy, do we have a good show for you. And unless you want to tell everybody in GDI, Patrick, we're not going to talk about the DMV at all. I'm heartbroken. I bet you are. I bet you are. Anybody who deals with a DMV in the US knows, it's just not a fun day for 48 hours in Patrick's situation. But let's get into some technology with the Quickets. The financial time sources say that Google may start making users pay for search results that use Google's high-end Gemini advanced model using a subscription model. Google doesn't currently charge for anything related to its search engine. So this would be a first, although the company apparently still plans to offer completely free search results that use Google's standard Gemini plan, not the advanced plan, but the standard plan, without any kind of paid subscription model. The market demand for this enhanced type of AI, enhanced search, is sort of unclear at this point as for competitors, Microsoft's massive AI investment in its Bing search engine hasn't taken much from Google's market share. Reuters sources say Google's parent company Alphabet has been mulling over an offer to buy HubSpot, the online marketing software company with a market value of $35 billion. It would be Alphabet's largest acquisition ever and let the company put some of its nearly 11, I should say 111 billion dollar cash pile to work. Alphabet hasn't made an official offer to HubSpot, but the company reportedly did meet with Morgan Stanley Investment Makers in recent days about a potential offer. Potential offer might be official offer, or might not. Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, or FAS, announced on Thursday it asked Apple to explain why Russian users of Apple devices don't have full functionality when it comes to accessing banking and payment services. The FAS said that most Russian banks have been removed from the App Store, but Apple isn't letting users install apps from anywhere but the App Store, rendering it impossible for Russian banks and contactless services to function normally. In its statement, the FAS said Apple's actions contained signs of violation of anti-monopoly legislation. Open AI's image generation tool, Dali, can now edit images directly from chat GPT. Dali also pre-set style suggestions to help inspire image creation, sort of like Android's AI-generated wallpaper prompts. The chat GPT integration at least in theory will make it easier for users to write prompts by simply telling chat GPT what they want and allowing it to take care of the rest. The Guardian sources report that the Israeli military, IDF, in this case, used an AI-powered database as part of a system called Lavender, that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas. Six sources told the Guardian that Lavender was able to process large amounts of data to rapidly identify potential junior operatives to target. Four of those sources also say that at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad. Lavender was developed by the IDF's Elite Intelligence Division. All right, Rob, let's talk about why I might, well, I actually don't see a blue check mark, but why someone else might? Absolutely, so ex-formerly Twitter is now rolling out free blue check marks to some of its users that have more than 2,500 premium followers. Wednesday, some well-known journalists and other users with large following started reporting that their verified blue checks made a return to their accounts, even though they weren't paying for the premium distinction. Supposedly, any account with over 2,500 verified followers will now get premium features for free and any with over 5,000 get the ad-free premium plus tier for free. Some are speculating that this is a move by the Biax to lure news Twitter back to the platform given a variety of other social options. This is so confounding to me. So I've been, you know, I saw this story this morning and of course, the first thing I did was be like, well, you know, I don't have like the biggest following in the world, but I've been on Twitter for a while. You know, I've got a healthy amount of followers, probably 2,500 of them are premium, maybe. I don't have a check mark, so maybe it's personal, but assuming that it isn't, this might be rolling out. It might need me to have over then 100,000 followers total which I don't have, even though I'm close. I don't know. The company isn't telling a lot of people exactly what the details are of this, which is why I think it's sort of hilarious that a lot of journalists who do have big followings but very much were not paying for Twitter premium for whatever reason. Maybe it was financial, maybe it was, you know, to take a stand, who knows, for whatever reason, being like, ah, I have a check mark, but everyone should know I did not pay for this, okay? I'm not that guy. Patrick, where do you stand on this latest move by X2? I guess, try to get some journalists back, you know, engaged on the platform. Well, I mean, it's been really amusing to me because a friend of mine just in the last year and a half actually decided to become part of Twitter. So everything we all went through back like 12, 13 years ago, I'm watching him go through and working really hard not to say you should have been here last year, man, it was so much better. But he was like, oh, you probably have 2,500 verified followers and I'm like, the way it was, it's been really bizarre, right? Because Elon's like, anybody who has 2,500 verified premium subscriptions or subscribes, the wording was really odd. There was nothing in the X Help Center or as I like to call it, help.twitter.com since that's still what it shows up on the web. And then finally, it gets activated today and a whole bunch of people are like, I have a blue check. Why don't I have a blue check? Oh, okay, I'm getting an ad-free experience if I have this many followers or I'm just getting premium and the ability to edit, you know, tweets and other things. And I'm pretty sure it's still not up in the Help Center defining this. And when you go into, because my friend was like, don't you have 2,500 verified followers? I'm like, I have no idea. And you go into your followers and it gives you kind of a gross number on the homepage. It doesn't give you a number of verified followers. So if you want to figure out how many verified followers you have, you actually have to manually count them, you know, with, I don't know, 10 or 15, however many per page and just click through and just start writing down the numbers and telling them to yourself because there's no way to do any of that. And they've deprecated and they've not eliminated that fundamentally deprecated a lot of the statistics tools inside of X, which makes it, you know, kind of frustrating if you're trying to track activity or something on your account since so many third party tools have been eliminated. You know, I think based on some of the stuff I'm seeing at another gig I work on, you know, they are potentially giving up the majority of their posting on X because they've gone from, you know, X has never been a place for Twitter. Nobody's ever been like, oh, I have a million followers on Twitter and every time I post something, a million people click through it. It's like, you know, a tiny percentage. It's kind of like spam. But even that tiny percentage is fundamentally eliminated in terms of click throughs to get to people's contents. So I think they're starving for engagement. I think they're starving for activity. I think they're trying to make, you know, since they eliminated, you know, they personally, I think they made tweetback worse, which is why Twitter, before it became Elon Musk's Twitter, before it became X, which is why they hadn't actually switched to the new version of tweetback, you know, so a lot of primary tools or third party phone tools have been gone. So I think they're desperate to bring anybody back and to try to promote some of the stuff they do. Yeah, I mean, there was, you know, when the check mark policy, the new one that's currently in place was implemented, it was like, okay, you pay, but if you're a news org, not just any news work, but you know, one that we decided is worthy of this, you can get a check mark, which was actually yellow rather than blue. Some celebrities got check marks automatically, whether they wanted them or not, you know, and you know, this whole idea is influential users who might just, yeah, like you said, like you get, you know, 2.5 million Twitter followers. How many of those are bots? Hard to say, you know, every so often back in the old Twitter days, they would do like a bot sweep and we'd all say, oh my God, I lost 10,000 followers, but you never had them in the first place. But yeah, I think it's cloaked in mystery and I think it's easy to sort of chuckle and be like, well, nobody wanted the verified check anyway. Some people do, some people find value in that. There are things that you can do metrics wise to your point, Patrick, on X that you can do as a premium or premium plus subscriber that you can't do otherwise, but you know, a lot of us sort of railed against the machine and said, eh, we're just not gonna do it. If you happen to have been, you know, ushered into this new era, you probably got an email associated with your account that said, as an influential member of the community on X, we've given you a complimentary subscription to X premium subject to X premium terms by selecting this notice. So there's a little bit more, you know, fine print going on here, but I think in general, yeah, I think Twitter wants the news Twitter back. Yeah, I think X really miscalculated the number of people that would not sign up for their premium services. And because so many didn't and those voices got basically pushed down by the algorithm, Twitter really isn't the place for news anymore. It still kind of is, but it is not, you know, to the point that it was before. So I think this is the move by X to basically say, hey, we need to get these folks back, you know, to the top of our algorithmic, you know, you know, push out so that people can actually get news here as compared to going other places to get it. I think this is really just a move by X to try to make sure that they're keeping as many people engaging on their platform as possible. And maybe the, you know, the forced way that they did, the blue check marks did not work as they planned. Right. Well, and you can have almost no reach at all, but pay for a premium account and get pretty great placement, you know, when people are searching for news content or content at all. So this doesn't really solve the problem, but yes, definitely get some of the folks that may have said, you know, I've got elsewhere to go. I have other options more than ever to come back and take X seriously as sort of the number one place to share their content. All right, well, I mentioned at the top of the show that we were going to Antarctica. We're not actually going physically on the show. I am sorry, but someone is there and that person is Craig Porter, who recently took a job working on a power plant in Antarctica. So Tom asked him what the internet and connectivity situation is like on the latest episode of A Word with Tom Merritt. And here's an excerpt of that interview. So we're talking to each other, you're in Antarctica. That blows my mind that we can even do this. That of course means there's internet in Antarctica. How does that work? I don't necessarily mean for you to, you know, tell me the infrastructure layout of it, but like, how well does it work? It seems like it's working pretty well. It's pretty well. Yeah, so right now we're talking over Starlink. And Starlink is pretty new to USAP. You know, I think it's only been a couple of years where this capability has been around. I got my Bluetooth headphones going to my phone, which is hooked up to the wifi in the building, which is connected to the Starlink infrastructure and then it's going to outer space. So there's that. Before that, there is some slower internet and I'm not really sure how it works. I think it's also satellite, but it's military related or using like the government satellites and things like that. Pretty much everything is either satellite or like HF radio because there's no subsea cables or anything like that, at least to McMurdo station. And, you know, I don't know if that's in the cards anymore with the satellite capability that we have with Starlink. I mean, it's, you know, people download movies and things like that. I can have a chat with you from 10,000 miles away, you know. So it's really good. I mean, there's no latency, you know, like it's incredible. Yeah. Are you able to like stream video? Or does it just all downloads? Yeah. I can stream like sometimes in the evenings I'll stream Twitch, you know, like I was watching the most recent Sumo tournament on Twitch. Wow. You know, I have a passing interest in Sumo. I mean, I'm not an expert or anything, but yeah, you can stream video, especially now because the station population is so low, the internet is a lot better. In the summertime, when there's six, seven, 800 people here, I'm told that that's not possible. Okay. So yeah, there's a lot of bandwidth constraints in the summertime that we don't have in the winter because there's just less people. Interesting. But it does seem like it's pretty capable. It's obviously working pretty well for us in a way that, you know, five years ago, I wasn't able to do. You are the second person that I have interviewed for a podcast who has been in Antarctica. The other one, I had to wait for them to come back to talk to them. So yeah, this is pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. With the limited bandwidth, is there sort of a practice of courtesy to, you know, not use it for too long or? Not that I've seen. Okay. Yeah, maybe during the summertime. So far not. You haven't run into it, which means it's pretty good, right? Or otherwise people would start bringing it up. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also, the Starlink is not in work centers. So like down at the power plant at different mission critical facilities and things like that, there's no Starlink. There's only the official Wi-Fi for like official use and things like that. So yeah. So the Starlink is mostly for personal use then? Mostly for personal use, yeah. So like in the dorms, in the galley. Now you said that there's also, you told me before there's a pager network. There is a pager network. You do, which is interesting. Yeah, it's, and I don't know the details about it. All I know is people who are mission critical. So like power plant, water plants, you know, operational people, things like that. You know, the firefighters and the medical people things like that. We all, we have pagers. And so, you know, I can either email my pager or somebody can email me or there's like mass messages that get sent out. Like if there's a power outage or if the weather is gonna be really bad, you know, you'll get, you'll get a page and it'll tell you, oh, it's a, you know, it's conditioned to right now. There's, the weather has different conditions based on wind speed and temperature and visibility and things like that. So yeah, that was something I did not expect at all. It was like, hey, you can get paged. And I assume that the mission critical internet, Wi-Fi, pager stuff, that is campus wide versus the Starlink where I'm guessing the receiver is just in the galley area. Yes, yeah, exactly. So anywhere that I go on station, even, you know, like I said, Scott base is a couple of miles away, but they're tied in with us. So like we supply a lot of their power and their calm systems and their, their phones. So we have phones and things like that. They're tied into our network. So like last night, if I was at Scott base and something bad had happened, I would have gotten the page and then I'd have to catch the van back. Yeah, again, it's just wild to think, right? That you're in Antarctica, you could be out having fun and get paged to come back to work, you know, so just like anywhere else, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, you can catch the Antarctica Craig Porter episode on the award with the Tom Merritt podcast, fascinating stuff. And you can find that show wherever you get your podcasts. Just a reminder, we've got a Discord and the Discord is a fun place to hang out. Join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join up by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. VPNs, which stands for virtual private networks, have been the go-to solution anytime someone finds themselves using a public or untrusted internet connection or wants to minimize being tracked for whatever reason. VPNs can secure your browsing traffic from prying eyes to a point. But these days, do you really need a VPN? Patrick, you've been looking into this. Are VPNs as necessary as they once used to be? To answer Rob, your question, most folks don't need a VPN as much as they did in the past. And if you do, it's really more about privacy and control than security. And you can actually see that. It was interesting because they started looking around at a bunch of different VPN websites because he always used to be like, one VPN or your credit card and bank will be hacked. And now it's like your IP address and browsing should be hidden from unnecessary surveillance or hey gamers, forget about DDoS attacks and bandwidth throttling, but a VPN. Or in my case, hey, you can watch those curling tournaments in Canada by geolocating. At least as long as our IP addresses aren't red flagged by streaming content providers. And I made that last one up, but actually it's not unusual to have your VPN IP addresses flagged and denied by certain websites, especially streaming websites. Generally speaking, I think VPNs today are extra security belt and suspenders, if you will, for anything you're moving online that isn't encrypted in your browser with HTTPS. Google's Chrome browser started screaming the non-secure warning back in October 2017 for non-encrypted, non-HTPS websites. And in the years since, the vast majority of websites on the internet have basically gotten their security on. They've embraced secure socket layers, which frankly is pretty secure stuff. And you got to love that lock in the address bar. It means your connection to the server is encrypted, which is way different than, you know, in some of the earlier banking apps, one of the funniest things I ever heard at DEF CON is somebody saying, yes, it's security by lock icon. And somebody was like, you know, hands were starting to go up in the audience. He's like, no, literally some banks claim that your connection is secure because they put a JPEG of a lockup when it was actually open communications. Most of these banks and other software was short-lived, but you know, it's also crazy because people think I'm on a VPN, I'm untrackable. You know, if you're signed into social media, if you're signed to a lot of commercial websites or if you aren't using browser tools that block tracking ads and invisible trackers, which are all over web pages of all ilks and stripes, you're being tracked just in a different way. Browser fingerprinting is fascinating and weird and can totally track your activities across the old web with alarming detail and accuracy. It's actually kind of terrifying. So one, I should admit, I still run a VPN at home because frankly, I don't want to share my browsing average with my ISP. I don't want to deal with my ISP doing weird stuff based on maybe where I'm shopping or something. And of course sometimes I really do want to geolocate myself to Canada so I can watch Canada only curling streams, which occasionally are a thing. Still run a VPN if I'm using the Wi-Fi at an airport or a hotel lobby. I mean, honestly, 90% of the time I use my phone as a hotspot just to avoid public Wi-Fi routers. Now, given I shared office space with the guy that invented the Wi-Fi pineapple, I don't think we'll come as a surprise for anyone. If there's anything I think is shady about a network, I either A, preferable answer, don't connect to it, or B, alternate answer, use a VPN just to try to keep myself from getting into the various situations. Thank you, Gary Kitchen. This might be varying the lead, but I was also pointing out there's been a lot of consolidation or some interesting consolidation in the VPN market. ExpressVPN, PIA, which is private internet access, CyberGhost VPN, Zenmate VPN, they're all owned by CAPE Technologies, which has some strong intelligence, community ties. They also own WebSolence, which is a collection of comparison websites that offer unbiased reviews for various online tools. Now, if you look at the PR people from CAPE, they will be like all of these websites, they're editorials independent, and I will say there's a lot of good detailed reviews there, but ironically, they almost always include several of the CAPE Technologies owned websites, usually in the top three or four preferred VPNs. There's some interesting stuff going on out there, I think for a lot of people, they may not need it as much for other people. It's part of a total security package, not just it's one element, it's not completely hiding, you are securing, you're on the net, people need to be aware of that, especially if they are say, working as for freedom and all sorts of good stuff in countries where they don't like freedom and all sorts of good stuff, just be aware. If you want to learn more about kind of the state of VPNs, I highly recommend Wire Cutters, the best VPN service by David Huerta and E.L. Grower and Mr. Grower, I hope I said your name correctly, or Ms. Grower, I hope I said your name correctly. Really, really good information in there and gets in depth on a lot of what's going on with VPN services and reminding people always that no-log VPN services are only no-long VPN services or should be considered that if they've been verified by a trusted third party. Yeah, I run a VPN most of the time at home. Every so often I get, there's something weird and wonky that happens because of it, so I have to turn it off to do a thing. Most of the time, it kind of runs in the background, I use Mozilla VPN myself because I use some other Mozilla services so it worked out price-wise as a good package for me. But I think, I do think everything that you laid out, Patrick, is like, here's why a VPN is good, but you're not anonymous. It's sort of the, I had somebody ask me, not that long ago, well, don't you just use incognito mode on Chrome when you don't want anyone to know what you're doing? I'm like, not anonymous. Sure, there is, you know. May not leave traces on your computer. Yeah, there are less things being shared willy-nilly, I suppose, but you kind of have to, you have to go forth being like, this is going to help me for this certain thing, this is worth it, but I am not anonymous. I am not invisible. I didn't, I didn't really, you know, this is not, you know, a true cloaking of my identity. And I think that, you know, for example, streaming services getting hip to the game when I'm out of market and I want to watch, you know, a sports event and, you know, I pretend I'm in, yeah, like Iceland instead of the US. It's like sometimes it works. Oftentimes it doesn't and, and companies are only going to get smarter about that stuff. That's really the only reason I still use them to try to actually trick, you know, Netflix or whomever into thinking I'm home when I'm trying to watch something from Canada or Mexico or what have you. My wife, however, she works from home and she uses a VPN. Now her VPN is set up through her, you know, through her job, she works in banking and she can do nothing on her computer unless that computer is connected to her VPN. So everything requires that she actually has one of her work IP addresses through that VPN and, you know, for her to do anything. And that's, that's pretty much how her entire organization, which is quite large work, I think this is a completely responsible decision by the bank, you know, does it create any problems or is it usually just work pretty flawlessly? It pretty much just works flawlessly. And like I said, I'm not even sure which one she uses, it's branded through like their system they log in, but when she logs into her computer, just to be able to connect to anything requires the VPN connects. So she doesn't have to do anything, it just does it, she authenticates with it with some type of two factor authentication. And then she's just on the network, but everything is definitely running through that pipe of the VPN. If she were to disconnect, she can still use the computer, she just can't connect to any of her work apps. Oh, Patrick, remember back in the day when we worked at Tech TV and if you were outside the office, you needed VPN access to get into Lotus Notes, which was always a great excuse for me to be like, I can't, I need a VPN. The VPN's not working. If you don't give it to me, I can't work outside the office. Those were the days, all the old nine to five. All right, well, Patrick, thank you so much for the good reminders about what VPN is good for and maybe less good for, depending on what you're doing for a living. And Rob, let's now check out the mail back. We continue to get some great feedback about our visual refresh rate conversation from Tuesday show. Rick writes having a monitor or having a monitor at a higher refresh rate would still allow you to see the most recent frame. For example, imagine you have a walking gate of one meter per step. Now walk over a road bridge with only one plank per meter and nothing in between. And you'll understand the benefit of having more planks or frames for your feet or for your eyes to potentially land on, even if you don't use them all. That's such a good analogy. I definitely would want more planks. Even though if I'm walking one meter at a time, I definitely would want more. It just is going to make me feel better. Indeed, yeah. We got so much good feedback about that conversation. And we love when conversations resonate with folks. If you did miss the show, the idea was that, depending on what kind of human eyes you have, refresh rates might not register the same to all of us. Kind of the way, all sorts of resolution where people needing readers were all different. And so sometimes top of the line stuff matters more to somebody rather than someone else. Thank you again to you, Patrick Norton for being with us today. Let folks know where to keep up with your latest. You know what? I'll go post, since we were mentioning this earlier, I'll go post up on Twitter today, excuse me, X, whatever URL it's at this year. Exeter, I sometimes call it. I'm gonna be at Patrick Norton since apparently I'm a little slow on the self promotion this year. Yeah, well, yeah, join the club. You know, Rob Dunwood is very good at some promotional tips on threads. I will say, Rob, I've really been enjoying that stuff for you. I appreciate that. I spend a fair amount of time on threads. Yeah, I'm really loving it. Yeah. So Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We know all AI models have race issues when it comes to image accuracy. We'll talk about Meta's latest or challenge. Yeah, but just a reminder, you can catch our show, DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 at UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow discussing the end of Google Podcasts. Pour out a little liquor with Teja Custody and Len Peralta joining us. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Timon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha.