 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, and Pepper Geesey. Coming up on DTNS, the latest from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including wireless AR headsets, scrollable screens, and the rise of satellite connections for your cell phone. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 27th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Denwood. From the Not, Ohio, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, good Ohio represent. We just need someone from Cincinnati. We'd have the whole state covered. The C trifecta. Yeah. We are running out of February. I don't know if anyone noticed this, we are almost out of February. So I don't know if we want to restock or replace it with March. You let me know. While we decide that, let's start with the quick hits. If you don't use Spotify, you may not care about this, but some folks who do have found this change to the service to be monumental. The heart icon for favoriting songs has been replaced on Spotify by a plus symbol. Tap that plus icon once it'll save a song or podcast to your library. Tap it again, and you can add it to a playlist. Non-spotify fans can now move along from this, but Spotify fans, we're thinking of you during this change. Meta announced it's funding a service from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children called Take It Down. It's created a tool to help people younger than 18 stop intimate images of themselves from spreading online. The tool will make a hash of an offending image on the user's device and only the hash will be submitted online. That's a big deal. A hash is a mathematical formula that can identify a file without being a copy of that file. You don't have to share the file, just the hash. That hash can then be used to find copies of the image and take them down. Over the weekend, the Verge and platformer Zoe Schiffer reported that Twitter laid off at least 50 people. New York Times was reporting it was up to 200. These included prominent product manager Esther Crawford, who had become famous as the defender of Twitter Blue, as well as product manager Martin de Kuiper, the founder of the now shuttered review newsletter platform, which Twitter acquired in 2021. Employees of Dish Networks told Bleeping Computer that an outside bad actor, a known threat agent, had attacked Dish systems this week. Dish Network began experiencing a major outage on February 23rd. Eventually, it impacted everything from Dish.com, the Dish Anywhere app, call centers, and even authentication services. Users could not access accounts or stream online over the weekend. That seems to have been resolved. But as of today, its main website remains offline. As China's government cracks down on Chinese companies using US-made AI-like chat GPT, more companies are joining in on launching their own homegrown version. So, can't use open AI? Let's make our own. Reuters sources say Tencent began working on its own generative AI chat bot called Hanyan Aid based on its Hanyan training model. South China Morning Post reported that model achieved better than humans for the first time on the Chinese language understanding evaluation test back in November. That is a test that tests how a computer can understand and respond to Chinese text. And that is the quick hits. All right, Snap, speaking of AI, can use chat GPT and it has. It has made a chat bot that they call MyAI available to $4 a month Snapchat plus subscribers. Runs a version of chat GPT trained to follow SNAP's trust and safety guidelines and it is restricted. So, this isn't open to whatever question you want to ask it. You try to get it to write an academic paper. It's going to say no. It's restricted to certain kinds of responses. It seems to be meant to be used like a virtual friend that you can just say hi to and chat with. It even has an alien Bitmoji profile icon. Snap eventually plans to make it available to all users. Chat GPT is a tool to generate text responses to props. So, it doesn't have to be used for search or writing academic papers. It can be restricted to whatever use you want to put it to. We talked about this a lot with Justin Marbury Young last week about how he uses it with Notion and Notion is doing a little bit of chat GPT with some other stuff to create an embedded version on their service. I think we're going to see a lot of embedded uses like this. What do you think of this one Rob? Well, I actually really like this. So, you know, one of the, if you want to say there is a problem with, you know, chat GPT just the, you know, the open AI version of it is that it kind of can be all over the map. Well, what SNAP is doing here is they're really directing its usage for the use case that they want it to be used for. So, you're going to see probably less variance in responses and it's not necessarily an idea that's looking for a use case. They've actually come up with a way. Here's how we can use this and make this useful in our environment on our platform. So, I kind of like what SNAP is doing here. Yeah, I really like this idea of these more specific versions of chat GPT. Like we've seen what it can do as a, as just a general tool. I've, I've almost referred to like the stuff that open AI hosts itself as almost just a tech demo that is so generalizing. You can do so much with it. You can do a ton with it, but really where it becomes like useful for productivity or for different, it's very specific like verticals is when you get to these more specific ones for, SNAP in particular though, I do wonder if there is, I don't even want to say a danger. I don't even want to say that, but like they're personalizing. It's my AI. It has a face. I suppose I'm assuming it's going to have a tone that goes with it as well. We've seen with the Bing search that that can get weird if you want to make it weird. And I know that these tools are kind of a reflection of the prompts that you give it. And it's been trained by SNAP systems. I think that gets a little potentially could be like SNAP actually put out a bunch of warnings about that even though they have it restricted. And they said, we trained it on our trust and safety guidelines. They pointed out like, if you try, you can make these things say stuff. And we know that. So please, you know, keep that in mind. If you try, you get what you try for. And as you use it, it'll help us improve it. But what I think is fun for this is it almost feels like the evolution of like a Tamagotchi that you have in your pocket. Not necessarily like a weird one, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like you just something like, Hey, I'm bored. I don't know. Let me talk to to my AI. Like I've gone through. I've read all my chats in Snapchat. I always have chatting. Yeah. I always have someone that I want to chat with. I also wonder if this if you know, I know we mentioned this can't be used for search. But Snapchat is kind of a very amorphous product when it comes to like searchability of very different forms of content. And I wonder if they could have something where it's much more real time when it's specific to Snapchat itself and using that as a better tool to kind of surface different content. That's no, they said no search. No, actually, no, sir. Yeah, they didn't have law at launch. They're they're restricting it. They're restricting it from open uses. But all kidding aside, you're right. They might they might throw something in like that down the road. I think that's why this is kind of weird is that I think they're putting it in and going, here's a toy, play with it. We'll see what you use it for. And then that might inform what we do with it. Now, I don't see how this helps them monetize Snapchat Plus because they're saying like, like, if you want to check this out, you could just be like, in like a month, it'll be out or two months, you know, it'll be out. And they've said eventually they want to give it to everyone. I think they're putting it in Snapchat Plus. Yeah, yeah. Just if you want the fun to play with to me, I'm like, I want to do a better job. Trust and safety. It's the trust and safety that's keeping it in Snapchat Plus. They're like, we don't we don't want too many people using it. We don't want to see how you'll break it first and then we'll fix it and then exactly, exactly. And we want our paying customers to break it, not just anyone. All right, let's go. Let's get to the Mobile World Congress stuff. Yeah, we had so much news coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. So here are some of the quick kind of look at some of the highlights here. So Rob, start us out here. We saw like one of the big trends was stuff coming out of China, right? So yes, there's lots of Chinese gears coming to Europe honors magic vs tablet to phone foldable. We'll hit the continent starting in the UK in June. It starts at 1599 pounds, folds completely flat and claims a 400,000 fold related lifespan. It's a little pricey, but at least they're giving you double the memory for contemporary the Galaxy Fold. I believe this goes up to 512 whereas the Galaxy Fold is only 256. And double the folds of the Galaxy Fold to rated at least we'll see not IP rated, though. That's a big red flag for me, though. Weirdly, 1599 euros, even though it's it's coming to the UK, right? Yeah, yeah. No, it's confusing. Xiaomi also plans to bring its 13 phone series to Europe after a domestic release in December. So they'd released it in China in December. Now it's coming to Europe. That's another theme. Phones are coming to Europe. This includes the 13 pro, which offers flagship specs standing out with a one inch 50 megapixel main camera and 120 watt wired fast charging. Ship into Europe March 8 starting at 1200 euros. And the standard Xiaomi 13 and 13 Lite are also coming to the market. Those are 999 and 499 euros respectively. The phone maker HMD Global announced plans to spin up some phone manufacturing in Europe to meet a surge in customer demand, specifically citing security and sustainability concerns. No word on where they're going to build this manufacturing, but the company is headquartered in Finland and it moved its data centers there in 2019. So it has a significant presence there. Wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, not a bad time to announce your diversified supply chain plans. Of course, HMD sales Nokia branded phones. And at the show it announced the Nokia G 22, a 179 euro Android phone meant to be repaired at home. In collaboration with iFixit, HMD will offer repair guides and parts that can be used without voiding the warranty. Fix kits for the Nokia G 22 cost five euros and the global average price for the parts are 49 euros 95 for a screen 24 euros 95 for a battery and 19 euros 95 for a charging port. I have to ask, is this really intended for tinkerers? This is not necessarily a high end phone. So I'm kind of wondering really who's going to be fixing a phone that's only 179 euros? It's a beater phone, right? Like you can, you can give it to your kid. Like you can give it to your can be like, I don't use a case with it, like beat it up and it's going to cost me, you know, 50 is less than 180, right? So, you know, if it's simple to do, if it's just, hey, I pull a pin out, I have to, you know, use the little guitar pick looking thing to open it up. If it's not that bad, I'm super interested in this probably figuring out the supply chain maybe to hopefully do it on more. No, I think you're right. It's the person who buys the $1,600 phone doesn't care about saving money. It's the person who buys the 179 euro phone that cares about saving money. So they're the ones more likely to want to fix it. I had never thought about that. That's interesting. Nokia itself lets HMD make and sell phones under its name, but Nokia still sells its own networking gear and has stacks of patents that it makes money off of. To remind everyone of that, Nokia announced a refreshed logo. It looks like it's in the Futura typeface or something similar with some letters missing in parts in a lighter shade of blue. The new logo does not change for the HMD made phones just for the corporate version. So you can tell the difference between the two. It really won't let you know they don't make phones anymore. It looks very enterprising is what I will say. It is very like enterprise networking gear look and logo. That's all I'll say. Well, of course, it wouldn't be a big trade show without a few concepts, right? Well, Lenovo is here to play the game. They showed off a rollable ThinkPad concept which starts as a 12.7 inch laptop. It has a four by three screen, so pretty traditional, but that unrolls at the flip of a switch to a 15.3 inch eight by nine screen. So almost square. The screen is made by Sharp and Lenovo owned also Motorola showed a rollable smartphone concept. It starts out as a squat five inch 15 by nine screen unrolls to a 6.5 inch tall boy 22 by nine display actually rolls around the bottom of the phone providing a small secondary display when stowed away. Both of these very much prototypes like they wouldn't even let reviewers like pick up the laptop. No details about things like battery life or even weight or when you can actually physically touch them. But some cool ideas. One of the reviewers from the Verge pointed out he couldn't even see the difference between he no one knew it was a rollable laptop until they pressed the button and it popped up just like sitting on a table. It just looks like a regular laptop. That's cool to me. Lenovo usually ship stuff. So I'm curious why they're so cagey with these because this this fits right into their yogas and Vendables and all that sort of thing makes me think they're they're not quite ready for general use, especially if you can't pick one up yourself. Like literally pick it up off the table. I mean not just at the store. These things just mean we're closer to those night those late nineties early 2000s I five shows to where your phone is just like something you just grab it and you just slide it open and you've got massive amounts of screen. So we're getting closer to that. Finally, yeah. So Xiaomi showed off its wireless AR glass discovery edition concept, which sort of looks like sunglasses and don't require a cable to connect to your phone. It uses the snapdrax and excuse me, the snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 SOC supports hand tracking and mapping using three Ford facing cameras using advanced materials like carbon fiber to keep the weight to only 126 grams and offers a pair of micro OLED displays that can end up to 120 nits of brightness and the lenses turned black to stop light from coming in when you're using for something like watching a movie. XDA developers got a hands on on the concept but refer to them as the Explorer Edition instead of Discovery, but specs and looks wise it appears to be the same one. So this has a lot of the same specs as the you know the MetaQuest Pro right? So the pricing on this I mean has to be again it's a discover device it's a dev kit at this point right it looks super cool but I have a feeling you're gonna be paying for the looks there. I mean it's wireless though I'll give it that even though it is just a concept it does make you look a little like Jordy LaForge when you're wearing it you know so I'm curious what the final design might end up being but XDA developer XDA was like really excited about it. They were the only ones who actually got their hands on it so that that outlet is usually a little harder to impress so I'm like okay there must be there must be something there. Good job Xiaomi. Finally OnePlus showed off a OnePlus 11 concept phone which features active cryo flux that's not a sci-fi term it's their term for a liquid cooling system that's visible and lit up through the phone's transparent back. It uses a piezoelectric ceramic micro pump to push the water through so they said it didn't really feel like extra heavy for a phone. OnePlus says the system lowered the system on a chip temps by 2.1 degrees Celsius with three to four frame per second improvements in some titles not a lot but you know when you're playing on a phone could be noticeable. Yeah we've seen like Asus's ROG phones have external water coolers that you can kind of hook up and they run actually through the phone but I mean cool to see this and it I mean it does look cool like I will say it it does I know. Cool is the word looks cool. Yeah I was thinking that that how cool it looks I wonder if that's more so than the actual abilities of it to keep your phone from getting from overheating in your pocket. It's 2.1 degrees Celsius cooler like you can put a number on it. That's like a thousand degrees Fahrenheit I haven't done the math but it's a lot. It's okay. Folks if you would like to correct our math you can join in the conversation in our discord which you can join by linking your patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Okay back to a few of the more wide ranging mobile world congress announcements. You know everybody's getting into the satellite phone connection business. Samsung just announced its own version is coming to its Exynos chip UK's a bullet announced a rugged smartphone with its own satellite connectivity built in and Taiwan's media tech will show off its version at MWC of course Apple most famously built it into its last iPhone. Now Apple uses Qualcomm's hardware and operates its own service through a deal with global star Qualcomm announced its own service on the iridium network to go with its hardware in case you don't want to roll your own like Apple did and now it's expanding that service so Snapdragon satellite integration will come to new phones from nothing Motorola Appo Vivo Honor and Xiaomi a lot of big phone manufacturers there. Snapdragon satellite will be available on all upcoming 5G modem RF systems and Snapdragon mobile platform tiers. Basically what that means it's not just coming to phone chips we're going to be seeing this in the automotive and IoT chip markets as well given you know Qualcomm's presence there that's a heck of a lot of products that that's coming to. I mean yeah one way to think about this is Qualcomm's Snapdragon satellite integration is the Android to Apple's iOS satellite integration right it's Snapdragon satellite is available for any manufacturer whereas Apple makes their own and only uses themselves even though they're both running on Qualcomm hardware but the fact that we're also seeing Exynos the fact that we're seeing bullet we're seeing other hardware makers makes me wonder like this is not going to stick around just as an emergency service forever they as these companies get better and as you get things in orbit that aren't just iridium and global star that can do satellite internet connections I think we're going to see satellite internet built into phones in a really interesting way this is an emerging trend I want to keep an eye on satellite phones have been around for a long time but I think that this is actually bringing it to the masses to where everyone now has a phone that eventually will be able to connect to the internet do something regardless of your location that's actually kind of cool yeah yeah like the the whole idea that this is also like a space story right this is we have more satellites that can do more things in orbit and because of that now we're building business models on the ground that enable like on a consumer level an approachable consumer level because you're right satellite phones have been around forever Rob like on a mass consumer level to hit something for as vital as emergency services but also you know just for places where your signal just kind of stinks eventually is very exciting yeah if this can somehow work through iridium and global star to connect with you know like on the back call to star link or one web or something and like you say Rob we we just end up having internet in our phone anywhere we like literally anywhere not not just you know most places in the country but literally everywhere I think I think that will be very interesting to watch now you may or may not have heard of Twilio but you probably use something that runs on it its web API is power a lot of stuff text messages from businesses phone calls other comm functions if you've gotten a text message confirming an order or telling you your delivery is on its way good chance it was provided using a Twilio API so it's interesting to note a similar effort from the gsm association the gsm a called open gateway it will provide a framework for universal open source based apis in carrier networks for developers so it's not exactly a competitor to Twilio it's making it so that you can do more things like Twilio did in other arenas 21 carriers are signed up at launch including Verizon Vodafone Orange Barty Airtel China Mobile Deutsche Telecom KT AT&T all the participating carriers have signed a memorandum of understanding to work on these apis through an open source project called camera C A M A R A which is co-developed by the GSMA and the Linux Foundation so this is an open platform for developers which is very good news and AWS and Microsoft Azure are the first two big cloud providers that are going to provide the access to open gateway it's not exactly a Twilio replacement in fact it's going to make some things like location and identity verification or carrier billing cheaper and easier to do than they are now there are no apis live yet but the announcement sets out apis specs for eight services so at the beginning they're going to do sim swaps uh legal ones uh sm two factor authentication carrier billing device location among a couple others aws and azure are carrying out uh that backhaul and the idea is that by providing these apis not only will it make some things easier for carriers but developers will create apps and services that will increase 5g usage and business so you know it's the it's the killer app theory so somebody's going to use this to make something that's going to make you want to use 5g uh and yes the buzzwords immersive mixed reality experiences and web three applications were used as examples whether those end up being the examples or not i don't know but that's how excited the people got when they talked about it rob what do you what do you make of this the cool things about these are apis so these programming interfaces are going to make it easier theoretically for pretty much developers to create things that can interoperate with each other they don't have to go and build everything from scratch there's a you know there's a platform or a framework out there that you can pull from that you know how it works you know how it's going to operate you you know there's going to be you know the more people that use it the more you're going to actually uh you know be able to garner from what other people have gone before you have done and it just it just allows you to create really really cool things we don't know what's going to come from this but i would imagine it's going to be really cool stuff eventually but you don't twillio had to do a lot of work to make twillio if twillio we're starting now this might make it easier i i do wonder if this will enable like more i almost want to say like mom and pop like virtual like you know virtual networks almost like if you have all of these api services as long as you're paying to use them and you're paying for the you know the carriage on you know to use the 5g network or whatever like that like that's what excites me about this is all of this stuff is interesting off the bat other than them calling it sim swapping which from a security standpoint it's what it's called it's just as willy scott said in the chat it's sad that we have to clarify that but but like yeah some kind of mobile virtual network like down the line that could just be very easily like rob like you were saying like these are standards you can just build off of these they're part of the terms of service potentially like down the road like that is that is what is exciting to me of kind of just creating these you know whole new entities is kind of fun all right we got one more big announcement right right so google announced new features across android chrome os and chrome fast pair support will soon come to chrome os letting users add bluetooth headphones with a tap and automatically connected devices already set up on android android will soon get google keep single note widget to let you check off the do list right from the home screen where os will also get a new keep shortcut to allow you to create to dos um on the watch face where os will get a mono audio mode color correction and grayscale modes to improve accessibility and the latest chrome beta now supports users increasing page content size up to 300 while still preserving page layouts i think that the the chrome content size thing is going to be like the closed captioning for the web where at some point everyone's just going to realize everyone is doing that all the time and then we're all just going to be like oh that's like just like the best way to do it and it's not going to break the page i think that's a great win but as a google keep user the fact that google did something to remind me that they haven't forgotten that keep exists and they're going to immediately kill it because i kind of like it but i wish it could be so much better rob i think we're in the same boat here right right absolutely it's just the fact that they they're still keeping it around because google you know will kill stuff right quick in a hurry they're still keeping it around and it's actually more usable or will be more usable tomorrow than it is today so yeah build into the ecosystem please just keep it alive that way all right folks we set ourselves up for a hard job which is to cover the entire planet with tech news if you want to do it right you just pick the area you're in like Nate Langston did Nate and Ian are doing text message if you want a UK perspective on the tech news and that Nate is back to share what's going on with UK encryption law on the next text message long time no speak everyone thanks for having me back and this week we have talked quite extensively about signals threat to leave the UK if Britain passes an extremely controversial law over here that would prevent essentially encrypted messaging products from being legally operated so we've talked about how that might even work what could the implications be for larger messaging apps like metis whatsapp and others and you can find that conversation alongside all of our shows at uktechshow.com and we would love love love love to have you listen thanks guys i just did and i can highly recommend this episode go check it out folks uktechshow.com thank you Nate let's check out the mailbag we talked previously about how some major league soccer games would be broadcast on tv even though apple has the streaming rights so andy in montreal wondered if that meant you could stream the ones on tv through the broadcast partner streaming apps he said the tsn channels are using the american fox feeds and you can stream from ts the tsn app now that being said most of the games will not be on tv so it's probably still going to be worth it for folks to get the apple tv plus service if they want all their favorite teams games but you know good to keep in mind thanks andy for for writing in yeah and thank thanks for running that down too and because he was writing and i was like okay so but is tsn letting you stream them because i'm like i'm not sure if fox is letting you stream them is is apple locking that down and like no if the broadcast network gets to simulcast then they get to stream it as well um but you don't get all the games so that's what it doesn't take away apples apple's advantage there uh well rob donewood thank you so much uh for being with us i know you have two very good shows that i very much enjoy tell folks about where they can find them and what they are well yeah you can check me out at smrpodcast.com where it's a couple of buddies of mine where we just get on and talk about tech like we would normally talk about sports and football um and then also you know i've always said that i love to talk about tech i wish i could do it every day so if you want to hear me again later today come over and check us out on the tech job because i'm recording that right after we get done recording here and the tech job is a weekly tech show where we actually cover technology from a diverse perspective so all of the hosts are african-americans we've all been doing this for 20 years or more so we actually kind of bring up the stories because tech really hits differently in our community yeah no and you do a great job it's a great show i really enjoy it and thanks also to our brand new boss patrick who just started backing us on patreon thank you uh man we've been on a run don't let it end if you've been on the fence and you want to be a hero uh become a patron patreon.com slash dts keep that streak going uh in fact if you are a patron like patrick stick around for the extended show good day internet we got apple leaks from both ming chi quo and mark german on the same day two of the most reliable apple leakers uh reprieve for the iphone se and the fact that you might not need an iphone at all if you want to use apple's upcoming next reality headset we're going to discuss that patrons stick around you can also catch the show live monday through friday at 4 p.m eastern 2100 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we'll be back tomorrow talking about password managers with rod simmons see you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com prime and club hopes you have enjoyed this program