 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Jeff Wilkes, Pele Glendale, and brand new patrons, C.C.O. Mario, T.J. Dumbrowski, and Ari Gunawan. Welcome. On this episode of DTNS, Allison Sheridan explains chi-charging and why you might want to wait to buy a wireless charger, plus why more sites are going to ask you to sign in soon. Ugh, annoying. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 5, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Allison Sheridan of the PodFeed podcast, also in LA. And also from LA, underneath Soggy Skies. I am the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, the Good Day Internet intro. I speculated that it was a bad idea for us to not have anyone outside of storm-dattered Los Angeles or even California, for that matter, on the show. But we will persist. Allison, are you dry? I'm dry so far. So far, so good. Good, Roger? I am as dry as one can be after running outside to check on something. Yeah, I've only been outside since the big storm started to hold an umbrella over my dog. It's the only venturing out that I've done. Come on, it's only four inches so far. Only four in like a half hour. It's not that big a deal. This is a big deal. Latest preview version of Windows Server 2025 includes an option for the sudo command in Windows. Now the rest of the Quickets. sudo, now the rest of the Quickets. I should say. Microsoft-owned Bethesda previewed a game called Indiana Jones in the Great Circle last month and announced it is coming to Xbox and PC. A source told The Verge that Bethesda is considering launching it on the PS5 as well, albeit a couple of months later than the Xbox and the PC launch. This isn't the only one, though. Xbox-era source says Starfield will come to the PS5 following an expansion release on Xbox and PC, and The Verge's own source indicates Hi-Fi Rush will be coming to non-Xbox platforms in the next few weeks. There appears to be a debate going on inside Microsoft over which titles to bring to non-Microsoft platforms, but not to do it or not. It appears some, a number of games will make the cross-platform jump. Well, I fix it has begun publishing results of its teardowns of the Apple Vision Pro. Among its most interesting findings is that the display that projects your eyes onto the outside world uses lenticular optics to make the eyes look 3D. That's why it's so dim. It also took a lot of time to remove the front glass panel from the main body, but overall, I fix it has found a modular design within, including the previously reported lightning-like cables. More analysis has to be done before I fix it will give us repairability score, but the main thing I got out of this was there's a lot of screws and a lot of connectors. And when you look at the complexity of this thing, you kind of get to see why this thing might cost $3,500. Yeah, a lot of stuff in there. If you know about the website Yandex, you probably know it as the maker of Russia's most popular search engine. It's the Google of Russia, to the point that it provides the popular maps services, advertising, other Google-like products in Russia. But the company is actually owned, even though it was founded by Russians, it's owned by a Dutch-based holding company called Yandex-NV. If regulators approve, though, Yandex-NV is gonna sell almost all of its business to a consortium of Russian investors. And of course, this is a result of sanctions and other knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine. Those investors, the Russian investors, will get the rights to the name Yandex and the Dutch holding company will change its name and continue to develop its few remaining non-Russian businesses. Well, Huawei made big gains in smartphone sales in China in Q4, and Counterpoint Research says it looks like Huawei regained the top spot in China in the first two weeks in January. That's a lot of Q1 still left to go, but it's good news for Huawei and it knocks Apple out of the top spot. Wah-wah, it was fun while it lasted. Anyway, Counterpoint says Chinese users are moving to Huawei as it comes back to the market and in general are choosing foldable phones like the brand new Honor Magic V2. Developer Dylan Russell noted on X that a Google change log includes a section named Bard is now Gemini, basically indicating they're changing the name of Bard. It's gonna be called Gemini just like the model that underlies it. It describes the Bard chatbot as having the same features under a new name. So Bard itself isn't gonna change all that much. Google also created gemini.google.com, though there's nothing there yet. Google will also launch Bard Advance. It's paid version under the name Gemini Advance and a Gemini app is supposed to be in the works to come to select Android devices soon as well. This is all in the change log. Google has an announcement scheduled for Wednesday. That's likely to confirm these change log notes and probably give us more details as well. So Amazon has struck a deal with Reach. Reach is a top UK publisher of newspapers and it's seen as the way forward in the absence of third-party cookies. Couple of years after Apple and Firefox did it, Google is beginning its process of no longer handling third-party cookies in Chrome. Third-party cookies are now deprecated and over the course of the year, Chrome will slowly stop using them. Now that's important to understand the importance of the Amazon Reach deal but to understand the importance of banning third-party cookies, Allison, what are third-party cookies? We're gonna try to keep this short but a cookie is a file set by the browser that includes information you want it to share or sorry, you want it to store. An example of a first-party cookie is a session cookie that lets the browser know it's you so you don't have to log in every time you start the browser. Now third-party cookies are controlled by an entity other than the website you're browsing. You might also hear this referred to as cross-site tracking. So let's say you're on Shopify.com. Shopify could have a cookie from Facebook that records information about your browsing. Facebook can then use that cookie to create a profile on you by combining it with cookies it has from its own website and any other sites where it has a third-party cookie. It takes all of the information associated with that browser and assumes it's the same user. Yeah and not having that information which is what happened when Safari stopped supporting third-party cookies and cross-site tracking and Firefox and now Chrome means it's harder to show you relevant ads because advertisers like Facebook don't know as much information about you, the browser user. That's why it's significant that Amazon has struck a deal with UK publisher Reach over first-party cookies. Reach is the UK's biggest publisher. It handles brands like The Mirror, The Star among 130 others. Amazon's deal will be to place ads based on Reach's own contextual first-party data. So rather than share info with Amazon, Amazon will tell it to run ads for a certain user who likes a certain kinds of stories like maybe like women in their 40s who love Warhammer and then Reach will use its own data to place the ads saying, oh, people who love all our Warhammer stories also love stories on milk. So we'll place ads on those. A tool called Mantis which is used to make sure brands don't get placed next to controversial or harmful material like war coverage, for example. A lot of people don't wanna run their ads next to that. We'll be used to determine the context of where the ads will place. So instead of using Mantis just to stop an ad from showing up next to controversial stuff, Mantis will be used to put it next to the stuff that is relevant. And again, this is all first-party data. This is the first of what I expect to be many of these kinds of deals. Reach, because they have so many newspapers, has a lot of logged in users. It has a lot of first-party data because it knows a lot about its users. There are a lot of other sites who are going to want to make use of first-party data to get the advertising that they were getting with third-party data before, which means you're going to see more sites require you to sign in in order to get their content. So they have to have you sign in in order to get the first-party cookies? That's not always true. They could set a first-party cookie on you and get some data. You're right. They would be able to tell your browser and what pages in that session you go to for as long as that cookie persisted. But if they get you to sign in, they can get your email address. They can get your zip code. They can get all this other stuff that a cookie is not going to be able to tell them and associate it with all of your preferences and what stories you read and all the rest. So you're right. They can get some first-party data without making you sign in, but in a world where they're competing against every other site also with first-party data, they want to have the most valuable first-party data to get the advertising, and so they're going to want to force you or at least encourage you to sign in and give them more data. I see. So this is a really clever way to get to the endgame they want to get to. It's still only 130 in this case for reach, but that's still a pretty big number. Yeah, it's a big publisher. It's not going to be the last publisher to do this. This is going to be, I'm guessing, this is me saying this now. This is going to be the new way these companies do it. And you're going to see more encouragement to sign in. You already see it. Like the New York Times will give you one free article, and then if you want three free articles, sign in. And if you want more of them three, then you got to pay. You're going to see more of that kind of behavior of like, the stuff's free. We just need you to sign in because we need first-party data. It's still less data than they have with third-party because with third-party, they know all the places you've been that set a cookie. Here, it's just still just the one site and they're not allowed to share that information with an advertiser like Amazon. They are just using that data to properly target what Amazon wants to place the ad on. I see. Because as Mark Soussi says in our chat, you are the product. There's no getting around that when it's free. Another interesting story today, the oversight board. That's the group that hears appeals on Facebook's moderation decisions. Independent board that Facebook set up, but Facebook does not run. It has ruled that a video did not violate Facebook's manipulated media rules and Facebook's decision to leave it up should stand. But the board also recommended changes to the policy. Did you do hear about this, Allison? I didn't. I didn't. So what is the video that they were talking about? All right, so it was a video loop of the president who in the original video put an I voted sticker on his daughter's shirt, but then they looped it and repeated it to make it look like he was, you know, pawing at her chest, right? Because of the speed. It was very, very clearly edited. This was not a fake that anyone was going to, you know, mistake. It was done for the lols, as the kids say. Facebook left it up, but some users who thought it should be taken down appealed it to the independent oversight board and that board reviewed this decision and said, no, Facebook applied its rules correctly. Okay, all right. Well, I suppose if that's what the policy says, then if, and if it isn't a fake, this doesn't sound like a terrible thing. It's not like you say it's not a deep fake or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. The policy that Facebook has only applies to video or audio made with AI tools. And if, even if they were made with AI tools, it has to have the intent to mislead users. So the face, the board said, well, look, this is obviously not meant to mislead. Like it's very clearly edited. Nobody's going to mistake this for a real thing because of the speed of it and everything. And even if it was, it wasn't made by an AI tool. So it doesn't fall into the policy anyway. So even if it made somebody think, yeah, there you go, that Biden boy, he's a molester, it isn't AI and it wasn't, didn't look real. Yeah, the policy wouldn't have applied. The board, however, okay, so Facebook has to follow that. Whether, if the board had said take it down, they would have had to follow that. The board saying leave it up, they have to follow that. The board can also make policy recommendations and Facebook doesn't have to do those. They have to consider them, but they don't have to follow them. Here's what the board said regarding the policy. They're like, look, under your current policy, this should stay up, but this policy is inappropriately focused on how content has been created rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent. So the board recommended that rules be changed to apply no matter how the content was created and should add a prohibition on showing people doing things they didn't do or say, not just whether it's misleading or not, it's just faking stuff for faking stuff's sake. The board also recommended that in those cases where it was clearly faked, but making them look like they did something they didn't do, maybe you just label it. You don't have to take down every example of this, but you could label it to make it clear this was edited. So we'll see if Facebook follows that recommendation. I don't understand how you would even police this. Steve just posted a video of our dog, Tesla, and he labeled it indecision. And it was her putting her head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth like she was indecisive. And it was a loop. It was exactly like this was. Would that need to be labeled saying, oh, that's misleading. That makes it look like your dog is indecisive. I think first of all, you have to have somebody report it. So nobody's gonna report Tesla misleading them, right? Like, I don't like this. So it has to be reported. And I'm gonna guess that the rules would still include some calculation of like, oh, is this political? Is this a, you know, is this meant? If it's just a dog, it's not gonna fall on it. So those rules could be created to be appropriate to the terms. What the oversight board is saying is it shouldn't just be like, well, it wasn't attempting to mislead. So leave it up. The board is saying, you know, maybe you should label some things sometimes if there's a chance that people are gonna use this in a harmful way. And again, it still comes down to like what people think is harmful and what they don't think. All right, that's a tough one. Glad I'm not them. Yeah, right. It is interesting to see the oversight board weigh in on these things because I think a lot of people thought they would just be puppets for what Facebook wants. And they do tend to quibble. They do tend to rule fairly in my estimation anyway. And I think this is another example of them being reasonable. YouTube just told the Verge that support for the Apple Vision Pro is on the roadmap. So remember we were talking about YouTube not allowing the iPad app to go to the Apple Vision Pro? Well, there's like, well, we're gonna make an app. We just haven't got to it yet. Speaking of the Apple Vision Pro, Eileen Rivera and Sarah Lane spent all weekend playing with it and will share their impressions in the official first real episode of Apple Vision Show coming today. And Sarah Lane may be the first person in the world to have bricked a Verge Vision Pro. Oh no. She had to go to the Apple Store because the Vision Pro locked up. So find out what happened, what Apple told her whether Apple was able to fix it or not by getting that first episode of Apple Vision Show. You can find that in your podcast app at youtube.com slash daily tech news show or just go to applevisionshow.com because I want to find out too. So I'm definitely tuning in. Wireless charging's a great convenience. No more wires, well, except for the one plug-in in the charger, but you don't have to plug a wire into the device. You don't have to plug a wire into the phone. But with all the different standards out there, MagSafe, Qi, we talked about the Qi2 standard that is incorporating MagSafe. It gets a little confusing. Allison, you got a listener question on this exact topic. Can you help us make sense of these standards and what people should be looking for when they're shopping? I think I can. So the first thing that I want people to understand is that there are two pretty different kinds of chargers. You can see MagSafe chargers, which are for Apple devices and they cost a fortune and they give you 15 watts of high-speed charging, fast charging. I hate that term, like how fast is fast? But anyway, that's the MagSafe chargers. But then you'll see things like MagSafe compatible or you'll see magnetic Qi. And what that is is very, very similar, but it's not MagSafe and it's not as efficient. So you only get seven and a half watts of power. So it charges at about half the speed. Now you might want to look and say, do I actually need high-speed charging? Maybe you don't. Maybe you sit at a desk all day just slapping on the charger. You don't care how fast it goes. So it's really up to you which one you want to go for. But if you're interested in high-speed charging, I think right now I'd really recommend that people either wait right now to buy another charger or look specifically for the very few Qi two chargers that spelled Qi and the number two slapped right up against the word Qi. And I'm saying it that way because it's really important because it's gonna be confusing. Yeah, it's already confusing that it's spelled with a Q, all right? Right, that helped a lot. That really did help a lot. So right now, pre-Qi two, MagSafe is actually better because Apple control the size of the coils that are inside the charger and they control the alignment and they've got the magnets that hold the thing together and they can control all of that and they get much, much higher efficiencies. So with a 20 watt power supply, they get 75% efficiency on that. So that's how they get the 15 watts. If you get a regular Qi charger, it might have a magnet to hold it together but they don't align quite as well and they don't control the size of the coils because you might have all different brands of phones, right? So if you put these together with a 20 watt power supply, which is all, I'm sorry, a 15 watt power supply is all you could do with Qi one and that only gives you the seven and a half watts because they're only 50% efficient. I always wondered why, like, it's just a magnet putting the charger on the back of the phone. What's the difference? So it's about efficiency. Why is there all this waste of energy? So I have an engineer, I keep on staff an electrical engineer, I'm a mechanical engineer, my electrical engineer, Steve, and I spent a lot of time researching it and it just appears to be the alignment mostly that we were able to find. We couldn't find a definitive answer that says Apple says here's our magic sauce but it turns out you don't need to know anymore because Apple gave their MagSafe technology to the, I'm gonna make sure I say the name right, the wireless power consortium. And these are the people that define the Qi standard. So they gave it to them and it's now gonna be called magnetic power profile or MPP. So the new Qi2, and again, I'm saying Qi2 right next to each other, that is gonna have this magnetic power profile and all Qi2 chargers will have 15 watt charging capability, you'll get this fast charging. Now Apple's talking about making those go any even higher, but let's not worry about that. So the cool thing about this is you're now gonna be able to get chargers that are certified for Qi version two but they're not going to be expensive as expensive as buying from Apple. So I think you found a couple of links to some anchor chargers that are out right now that say Qi2 and there's one that's just the puck like what Apple sells for, I think they sell for like a hundred dollars. It's like $30 from anchor. So we're, oh, actually it's only $22. So you're quite a bit of saving. And what you're telling me is because it's Qi2, which means it has the magnetic power profile, it will work as efficiently as the Apple ones. That's what I'm understanding. Yeah, so you'll get this 75% efficiency, which gives, I don't know whether it requires a 20 watt power supply, it probably does, I would think, in order to get the 15 watts because that's the math, right? Because watts is how much power is coming in, right? Yeah, it's like the, it's a speed measurement. It's how much you're pouring into it at the time. What I love about this story though, as we dug into it is the wireless power consortium. Apparently these folks went out for beers with the USB implementer's form and said, how can we make this as confusing as possible? Because you guys are the masters, right? So the name of the spec is QiV2.0. And that isn't Qi2. Qi2 is a subset of Qi version 2.0 spec. They're also going to have something just labeled Qi and that gives you some enhanced power profile, but it doesn't have this magnetic power profile that Apple gave them. So the bottom line is to erase all that confusion is, look for Qi2, smash together on the label, if it says that, then you're gonna get magnetic charging, it's gonna have a magnet holding it on and you're gonna get the fast charging. And that's why I say, don't necessarily buy right away, but this'll give you an idea of what you're getting something that's the good stuff. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. So there's the Qi standard, which was not the same as MagSafe, right? The original Qi, we'll call it Qi1, but no one else does, the first- It's actually Qi1.3 right now, I think. Qi1.3 standard, right? Then we have Qi2, which can include a version of MagSafe that any phone, not just iPhone. QiV2. Well, I'm saying Qi2, I'm saying Qi2, not Qi version 2. Okay. Right, because Qi2, so, oh, I think I know what you're saying that. Qi2 does include. Correct, the magnetic power profile. So let me try again. We have Qi, which wasn't the same as MagSafe. We have Qi2, which includes MagSafe, which can work with any phone, not just an iPhone. Then there is the standard that has an option for the MagSafe or not. And what they did was they said Qi version 2.0 standard can be implemented without MagSafe, but if it doesn't include MagSafe, you can't call it Qi2. Right, you have to call it Qi. You just call it Qi, and then secretly, it's Qi version 2.0, but that's confusing, so don't call it that. Exactly. I have this, right? Yes, yes. Now, there's an important thing I want to bring up here, as Halliday and Resnick said in my physics book from college, in speaking of electromagnetics, it says that it's worthwhile to understand these equations simply for the good of your soul. So during GDI, I'm going to explain how magnetic charging actually works. We're gonna get nerdy and talk about magnets and wires and coils, and it's gonna be super fun. So join us on GDI for that discussion. Yeah, yeah, let me just stick around. We're going to explain a little more about why that efficiency happens, right? That's the part that you need to understand the electromagnetic charging. But if you don't need to understand that to know, okay, if I'm not buying an Apple product and I want to get the full efficiency of MagSafe, it needs to say Q, lowercase i, number two, all together, right? That's right. That's the bottom line. And if you do want to read all this nerdiness, I have written in a blog post that there's a link in the show notes to that. And there are G2, like we said, there's anchor G2 devices out there. I'm not sure Boken's ready yet. They've got a really cool one that that's- They're not out, and I think that's the point is, if you're like, I absolutely need a new charger and I want it to be G2, well, anchor's kind of your choice. There may be a couple others out there, but if you wait, there are more coming, right? Right, right. We could not, we were just tripping over G2 announcements as we were walking around the show floor at CES. So by mid-summer, then it might, there might be enough G2 stuff out to be able to safely go weight out and be able to have a choice, basically. Although anchor makes great stuff, so you're not gonna- And maybe you don't even need fast charging and you shouldn't have listened to anything I said. Yeah, if you don't need fast charging, you can just get whatever you want and, you know, knock yourself out. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Levi is excited for Bard, which was still called Bard when he wrote in, but we know that it's probably gonna be called Gemini very soon. Anyway, Levi is excited for Bard to be built into Google Maps. He writes, hey guys, my wife and I are planning a 10-day trip around Iceland. And while we were looking up things to do, I went to Bing Chat and it gave out a great list of things to do and the directions to head. My only complaint was that I had to then go and type all the cities out in Google Maps and some of the Icelandic terms were difficult to spell out. So being able to do something like that in Maps would be great. If Bard can do things like that plus incorporate Google Flight into Maps, it could plan a whole vacation in a couple of hours. Thank you guys, keep up the great work. Levi, thank you, Levi. You've been to Iceland, right? That's right. I don't think on a 10-day trip around Iceland you're gonna do much, but walk around and look at the hundreds and hundreds of penguins and enjoy it. It's not the kind of place where you say, hey, we're gonna pop over to this bar in this little town because there isn't that. But you would back him up on the idea that it is hard to spell the names of places there if you are not from Iceland. Actually, I'm sorry. I went to Iceland in Antarctica in the same year. He's talking about Iceland. No, you do go around and do all this stuff in Iceland. That's right. Yeah, I think you got a lot of bugs and stuff in Iceland. I keep getting those two mixed up. But yeah, no, you can't spell any of them. Yeah. And so having it all inside Bard to be like, great. Thanks, Bard. Can you put all those locations you just told me on Google Maps and having it be able to do it would be fantastic. I'm with you. And then regarding Friday's show, Dan just wrote in to say, what a fantastic star-studded show. You guys and gals are pros. Six people on the stream, 30 minutes, and it went smooth. Really look forward to seeing Eileen and Sarah's first reactions to the Apple Vision Pro. Have a great weekend. Thank you, Dan. Yes, I too. I'm looking forward to the Apple Vision show today. Partly because I don't know how it turned out. Exactly. That is going to be great to see. But I am disappointed in the audience. I didn't see anybody call you guys the Brady Bunch when you had that many people on the stream. You know, if somebody did, I missed it. So I apologize. But yeah, Allison asked me after she watched Friday's show. She's like, so how many people called this the Brady Bunch? I was like, I don't know that anybody did. Are we aging out? What's going on? Do people not know the Brady Bunch anymore? Oh, no. That's a sad answer. That would be sad. So if you're like, no, I called it, then email us. FeedbackandTayleeTechNewsShow.com. Thank you, Allison, as always for being with us. Folks want to find not only the full article about the Qi charging and explanation of electromagnetics and all of that, but all your other fine content. Where should they go? They should go to podfeed.com, because everything good starts with podfeed.com. Indeed. Roger is telling us that he mentioned it in the pre-show. That doesn't count. No, it was a title recommendation, according to the reverb mic. Oh, OK. OK, reverb mic as it was in the titles. OK, good. Dodge the bullet. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. Not only is Allison going to nerd out more on electromagnetics, but we're going to talk about notifications. A Wall Street Journal article has some tricks for keeping them under control. But should you allow any at all? Or should you allow all of them? We're going to discuss our strategies. Stick around. You can also catch the show live. If you're not watching it live right now, Monday through Friday, 4 PM Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow. Talk to you then. The DTNS Family of Podcasts. Helping each other understand. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.