 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Dr. X17, Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and new patron Eddie. A perfect day for a new patron. Good job, Eddie. On this episode of DTNS, Mozilla will sell you privacy protection. Why AI isn't good enough for student cheaters, oh no. And Sarah is one of the people who experienced the Apple Vision Pro launch glitch. So congratulations. Thank you. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 6th, 2024, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And it's to do Animal House. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Thank you to everybody who sent well wishes to us Californians, seeing that we made the news worldwide. It was on the BBC. Somebody in Denmark was saying they saw us on the news for all of our reign. Not gonna lie, pretty intense. Evacuations, even a few fatalities. So it was serious business, but just so you know, all three of us are doing okay. So we feel very lucky. Thank you. Indeed. Indeed. Don't worry about us, till we tell you to. And then fuss a lot. And then go crazy. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Meta announced it will expand its labeling of synthetic imagery in the coming months to include images made with tools other than Meta's own models. Now it began labeling those when it detected them since it launched Imagine with Meta back in December. The company president, Nick Clegg, says that the company has worked with other companies through the partnership on AI form to create technical standards to help increase detection. That includes watermarks as well as automatic detection, even if watermarks have been removed. Clegg mentioned detecting images from tools made by Adobe, Google, Mid Journey, Microsoft, OpenAI and Shutterstock. So watch out. Sources told the Financial Times that China's SMIC has new production lines in Shanghai that are expected to produce five nanometer chips for Huawei as early as next year. The US has been putting ever stricter rules in place against shipping any kind of chip technology to Chinese companies, including chip making machines if they use US intellectual property. We've been covering that on DTNS, so I'm sure you're well aware. SMIC though is apparently using existing stock of US and Dutch made equipment that it got before the restrictions went in place. Current cutting edge processes are three nanometers. You'll find three nanometer processes from companies like Taiwan's TSMC, but Huawei's designs and SMIC's processes have been narrowing the gap, and now they're real close. However, it does appear that SMIC is gonna have to charge 40 to 50% more for its five and seven nanometer chips than TSMC does for equivalent processes and SMIC's yield is less than a third of TSMC's. So their process isn't equivalent in quality or cost. Speaking of TSMC, it announced it will build a second chip factory in Japan to go with the first one that's opening this February, this month. The second plant should go into a production mode by 2027. This goes along with plants from TSMC being built in Arizona, in the United States, and Germany, in the European Union. On Monday's show, we mentioned that were indications that Microsoft was planning to bring more of its Xbox and PC titles to the Sony Polystation 5 and other platforms. Microsoft CEO of Gaming Phil Spencer posted on X that the company will announce details for the future of Xbox next week. The verges sources say this announcement has been moved up from the end of the month thanks to the leaks of potential cross-platform game announcements. Yeah, we're gonna hear more about this from Scott Johnson if you want a little deeper dive on it, that'll be on tomorrow's show. YouTube TV has more than 8 million subscribers now. The cable replacement service, don't confuse it with plain old YouTube, this is the one where you can watch ABC, CBS, TNT, et cetera. It is now the largest service of its kind, right ahead of Hulu Plus Live TVs, 4.6 million, and Sling TVs, 2.1 million, but still smaller than traditional cable TV services like Comcast Xfinity, that one has 14.1 million. This is probably because YouTube TV got the rights to NFL Sunday ticket this season. That has boosted a lot of interest in YouTube TV. It also boosted Google's overall strategy for increasing subscription revenue to supplement ad revenue. As for that plain old YouTube, it now has 3 million channels and reports 1 billion hours viewed daily, and also added a new odd option in the Android and iOS mobile apps. I don't know if anybody's seen this yet, but apparently it'll crop up and give you the option to create a feed of videos like a row themed off color. So you can be like, give me a row of red videos or green videos. I don't know. Maybe if you have like a themed party or something. Yeah, or chill beats, you just want them to all be blue. I don't know. Now you've got the option. Nintendo updated a previous forecast of Switch console sales, and now says it expects to sell 15.5 million in its current fiscal year, which ends in March. That's up from 15 million. Nintendo said the Super Mario Brothers wonder game had a good start following its release in October with 11.96 million units. The company also said the Mario movie is helping sales of older titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and is also planning launches of new games based around characters from the Mario world, including Donkey Kong, Princess Peach, this quarter. Analysts who spoke to CNBC also said they expect a new Nintendo Switch to come out this year. Yeah, so they can thank Chris Pratt. Mozilla introduced a privacy monitoring service called Mozilla Monitor Plus. They'll be charging $8.99 a month. Service monitors more than 190 sites that sell information gathered from publicly available sources like social media apps, browser tracking, et cetera. This is not dark web stuff. This is, we found your information online and we collated it together and sold it to advertisers. Monitor Plus will notify you if it finds any of your information for sale and will take attempts to remove that information automatically. Mozilla is partnering with a company called OneRep on the scanning and takedown request part of the service. If information cannot be removed, Mozilla will still try to give you some further instructions to help you try to remove the information yourself. So they really wanna go as far as they can in helping you scrub your personal info, your address, stuff like that, your phone number, if you can. This is in addition to Mozilla Monitor, which is still free. That's the one that does look at the dark web and illegitimate sites. This is for legit sites. This is for info brokers. Sarah, had you thought about a service like this before? Is this something you ever wanted? This is not the same as something like Reputation Defender, right, where you're actually trying to kind of go away online. No, it overlaps with it in that it's going after personal info, but it's not, I don't think Mozilla Monitor Plus, and I'm sort of guessing now, but I don't think it's gonna try to like remove negative stories about you from news sites. This is more like, I don't want my phone number and address out there or any other personal information. Yeah, I mean, I pay for Mozilla VPN. I pay monthly. I feel like Monitor Plus being nine bucks a month feels kind of high, but we looked up some competitors before the show started and it doesn't actually seem like it's that expensive based on what other people are charging. This is a service that if you care about it, you can part with the money and especially if you trust Mozilla, which a lot of people do. I think it's a great idea. I think, yeah, I mean, I haven't looked for my phone number online lately, but I've had the same phone number for quite some time. Probably not that hard to find, somebody really wants to. And the fewer robocalls I get as a result, the better. Yeah, this is a good question. CR poll in our YouTube channel is asking if this is like incognito mode. No, it's not. This is not a browser thing. Even though it's made by Mozilla, this is an information service. So you don't have to even use Firefox if you don't want to for this. This is Mozilla having a team of people who go to these broker sites that exist and looking and saying, okay, is Sarah's phone number here? Great, let's issue takedown notices to these brokers to say, please don't sell that information. You don't have permission for it. It's stuff like that. So it's a privacy protection service. It's fairly reasonably priced. Delete me, what did we find? I think it was 12 bucks a month. Yeah, it's something like, you know, north of $10 a month. So it's more than Mozilla. And delete me is a perfectly legitimate one. There are also a lot of scammy ones out there that say they will do this sort of thing and then just take your money. So it's nice to have one from Mozilla, which I know a lot of people believe in and trust and would be willing to say, yes, I will trust that you will actually try to do this for me. Yeah, I'm certainly one of those people. I've used Mozilla products for a number of years and I'm not sure that this is something that I care about enough. Maybe that's because I'm just, I'm very online. So I feel like I've lost the war already, but yeah, for anybody who's like, the fewer broker services that end up sharing my information, you know, even if it's not nefarious, it's just annoying. To have an option to be able to minimize, if not completely eradicate that kind of stuff, not a bad idea. Yeah, and CR poll clarified, he did not mean to type incognito, he meant incogni, which is another service like delete me. And yes, this is like incogni, except it's run by Mozilla. Well, Tom, we've got a new educational hustle. Ooh, tell me about it. You wanna hear about it? Yes, please. This one is adding human vibes to entrance essays that were originally written by AI. You might be a student, you wanna get into that, you know, the good high school. You might say, let's see what chat GPT can do for me. Forbes reports that kids applying to high school, they were talking about, so you're talking, you know, eighth grader age, applying to high school are using chat GPT and others to write personal essays for entrance, but then paying other people to then edit and DAI them to make them less obviously written by a bot. Editors from freelance marketplace Fiverr, that's Fiverr with two Rs at the end, told Forbes that the goal is to replace repetitive tells, indicating that AI tools were involved in the first place. For example, using the phrase, aligns seamlessly with my aspirations and stems from a deep seated passion, perfectly fine, you know, sounds pretty grown up unless everybody's using them. And then all of a sudden, wait a second, this doesn't seem like it was a personal essay at all. Yeah, these chat bots don't have your voice. Voice is what you sound like. And if you read an author often enough, you'll start to understand their voice, right? Frank Herbert writes differently than Marion Zimmer Bradley. They both have a distinctive voice. And so you're going to get the same voice out of chat GPT for everyone unless you tell it to write in a particular style, right? If you say, write my term paper like Lionel Richie, then it'll be different than other people, but it'll also sound different than you. And that's the key here, right? Is the professor knows how you talk from being in class? Maybe, maybe not, but probably has at least some kind of idea. And so can easily tell, okay, this is not how you would talk. This is not how you would write it. To get a chat bot to do this in your voice, you would need to train it on your own work, which would mean you'd have to write your own work at the first place. So it kind of, you know, obviates the point here if you're trying to avoid doing the work. So I think it's interesting that we've run up against one of the limits of these large language models and even cheaters are like, yeah, if you really want to get away with it, you got to pay somebody to modify it. So it sounds like a human wrote it. Yeah, in fact, an alum and former editor-in-chief of the Cornell Business Journal who now edits grad school applications through capital editors and wanted to remain anonymous, did tell Forbes that there are certain keywords, for example, tapestry in particular, appearing in drafts from at least 20 of its clients in recent months, his or her, I don't actually even know what his gender is, but added, there will be a reckoning. There are gonna be a ton of students who unwittingly use the word tapestry on their own or other words in their essay that may not be admitted in this cycle because now it's a red flag. There were other examples too. Other words, for example, beacon or phrases like comprehensive curriculum, esteemed faculty, vibrant academic community. Again, that all sounds like, yeah, I wanna go to your school, you've got a vibrant academic community. I want to be a part of that, but you see enough of that stuff happening too often and that's why you've got not, let's say I wanted to get into a school back in the day and I say, Tom, you're just better at this than me. Can you just write my entrance essay? That would be something where it's like, all right, well, I'm pulling the wool over someone's eyes here because it wasn't really my voice. Now it's like, well, let's get chat GPT or something similar to do that, but now I don't wanna be flagged for that so I'm gonna hire an editor to then polish it up to make it human. It's a funny circular thing. It is interesting because my point about knowing your voice doesn't apply in an entrance exam, does it? So it really wouldn't matter that they can't tell it's your voice, it just needs to not sound like chat GPT's voice. So I wonder if a more clever prompt would be able to do this, like avoid the regular tropes and words that people use in entrance essays and then write me an essay. I'm sure somebody must have tried that out there, but I guess it's cheaper than paying someone to write an entire essay like you're saying to just have them punch it up and look for those words. And it struck me when you were talking about all these words like tapestry and esteemed faculty, these are the kinds of things that the people judging these essays roll their eyes at already before there were ever even large language models in the picture because they're like, everybody uses these. It's why the large language models spit them out because they're trained on everybody else's essays that everyone uses all those overused words. So it overuses them because it doesn't know any better. It's a really interesting quirk of how this stuff works. Yeah, I know the whole idea of like, I want this to sound very professional but also very human. And so instead of just doing it myself for whatever reason, I'm kind of like, all right, let's do a first pass use chat GPT then second pass human helps. And then, I don't know, hopefully I go to the school that I wanna go to. I mean, these are little tips and tricks. I mean, it's not really, I don't know. I mean, there's nothing wrong with using the tools unless a school explicitly says if you use one of these models for an entrance essay, you will automatically be barred from the school. I mean, that would be one thing. But otherwise, I feel like this is just, this is what anybody, I was about to say kids, but anyone of any age is gonna do. Like, you kind of game the system. You see where you can get. And I think it's actually pretty smart to be like, thank you chat GPT. All right, a person who used to work at Cornell for many years, can you just like punch this up and make me sound really great? It's an interesting thought. Like using chat GPT as a tool to get you started doesn't bother me. But using chat GPT as a tool to get started for someone else to finish, now it suddenly really bothers me. But maybe it just shows your organizational skills and your ability to delegate. Yeah. I mean, it kind of does bother me as well. But at the same time, I think that there are, especially when you're in the educational system, there are certain things people aren't very good at. Some people are extremely smart, but are really bad at taking tests. This is maybe another one of those things where it's like, gosh, I really wanna put my best foot forward. I'm just, I don't think I'm gonna sound good. That's just saying it's a bad way of determining who should get in. Well, that too, yeah. But I mean, I think it always was that way. If we're looking at those. And I think it also shows the limits of what these large language models can do. They cannot capture the human voice as well as an actual human. So there you go. Folks, if you want a recap of the week's tech headlines, a lot of people are like, sometimes I wish there was just a weekly show, but we got it for you. Not only that, but it includes insights on how technology affects and disaffects communities of color. Check out The Tech John, hosted by Rob Dunwood, Stephanie Humphrey and Terence Gaines. They dive into the top tech stories of the week delivered from points of view you don't always hear in mainstream media. New episodes, land Tuesday afternoons, find it wherever you get your podcasts or visit thetechjwn.com. More owners of the $3,500 minimum Vision Pro are reporting they forgot their passcode and entering an incorrect passcode more than a couple of times will disable the Vision Pro and start a waiting period to try it again. If you can't remember the code after the waiting period, you're stuck. You can't do anything. Unlike, say, an Apple Watch, there's no way for you to reset the Apple Vision Pro and start over unless you have a $299 cable that lets you plug it into a Mac or an iPad, but they only sell those to developers. So you either have to pretend to your developer or actually be a developer in order to give them the $299 to get the little dongle that would help you reset the Apple Vision Pro. Otherwise, you have to hike it into an Apple Store or if you're not near an Apple Store, which a lot of you aren't, you got to mail it into Apple, get them to erase and reset it and mail it back. Now, Sarah, as we mentioned yesterday, had a similar problem. You didn't forget your passcode though. You did get it locked up and had to take it into the Apple Store for the same reason to get it reset. If you want her full story on that adventure, get Apple Vision Show. The first episode is out, AppleVisionShow.com. She tells the whole story to Eileen Rivera, but does it make you feel any better knowing you're not alone now that you've seen all these other reports? Kind of. So yeah, so again, I will not go on and on about the story because I did detail it in a lot of detail on Apple Vision Show, but long story short, I am, and there might be somebody out there being like, she forgot her passcode. I didn't forget my passcode. It's the same passcode that I use for my iPhone. I was able to do lots of- Now you're gonna get somebody say you shouldn't reuse your passcode, but yeah, it was- Well, you know what? You didn't forget it, that's the point. There are lots of things I do wrong, but in this case, I knew my passcode. I had restarted the Pro several times and entered the passcode and was able- Successfully, right? Yeah, exactly. So that wasn't the issue. What I suspect happened, and I don't really know why, is that because Eileen, co-host on Apple Vision Show, had been playing around with the Pro over the weekend, wiped it, gave it to me. So I was starting from scratch. I mean, she did everything right. Something in there glitched and it just got confused. It got confused. I was at the store. I'm not far away from an Apple store. So it wasn't the end of the world for me to go in, but I had to go in. Cause I was on the phone with them earlier and I was like, there's no remote wipe option. And they were like, no, no. And honestly, we don't even- There's no even literature for how to deal with you. You should just go to the store. When I got to the store, it was sort of the same thing where they were sort of like, huh, head scratching. Like, this is weird, but I heard whispers. Among the several employees that gathered around me to be like, what do we do? I was not alone. Now, that was Monday, February 5th. By Tuesday, February 6th, all sorts of articles had been published about people who had forgotten their pass codes that had to do what I did. Now, again, whatever happened in my case, the problem seems to be resolved. They did wipe my unit while I was there at the store, went home, played around with it, all good. But it is a, you know, it highlights a, I mean, to say like incredibly frustrating situation is minimizing it for some people because when I was on the phone, before I even went into a store where I was like, ah, we can't like just fix this remotely. You know, maybe it's a theft thing. You know, they're worried about me, whatever. You know, I'm thinking, what if I were, I don't know. I mean, up in the mountains on vacation, somewhere really far away from an Apple store. A lot of people just don't live near an Apple store anyway. And, you know, mail it in, get it wiped, mail it back. I mean, maybe you're looking at a week if you're lucky type thing. That is super disappointing for anybody who plunked down that much money for a unit, especially for anybody in the Apple ecosystem who's like, well, hold on a second, I don't have to do this with an iPad or an Apple watch, as you mentioned. I would be surprised if Apple didn't change its tune sooner than later. Weird Dami asked, did they tell you how to wipe the unit so you can do it at home? No, because you can't. You can't. The way you can wipe the unit is plug it into a Mac or an iPad. And the only way to plug it into a Mac or an iPad is to have the proper dongle. And the only way to get the proper dongle is to spend $299 and be a developer. So the work around here, the reality is you can sign up for a developer account, pay the $99 a year, tell them you're a developer, order the $299 dongle. Now it's a $399 dongle, I guess, $398. And then have the ability to do yourself, but that's not worth it, especially if you are near an Apple store. It's much cheaper to just go down there and be like, fine, this is inconvenient, but do it for me. I don't think they expected to have to do this a lot. I also don't think they are doing it a lot. It doesn't sound like this is a widespread issue. It's a unique issue that some people are forgetting their passcodes maybe because they didn't want to turn on Optic ID, maybe because they handed it to a friend to use and the friend typed the passcode in wrong. And Sarah, it can be tricky to type the passcode in, right? Sort of. I mean, the whole typing on the Vision Pro in general, I find, I don't want to say lackluster, but it takes some practice. And one of the first things that you do is set a passcode. So you're kind of doing this whole thing. And I can see, again, I swear to y'all, I did not forget my passcode, but I could see where- Because you got past the passcode screen. I think that's the key information here. If you didn't get stuck on the passcode screen and get locked out, you got past it and then it locked out. Several times, yeah. Like I'm not like embarrassed or whatever. You know, like if I forgot the passcode, I would just tell everybody, but people did. And I think- And a lot of people are saying that they didn't forget the passcode either and it also still locked up. So there's a few other people like you out there. There, I suspect it's what, because we were doing the weird thing where Eileen set it up for herself, she followed all the rules that Apple says about gifting or selling an Apple Vision Pro. She wiped it. She removed it from her iCloud account. She did all the things right and gave it to Sarah, but there's a glitch. There's a glitch in there that stopped it from being able to be handed over. And frankly, if Apple had profiles on this thing, this would not have even been an issue. We would have just had a profile for Eileen and a profile for Sarah. Yeah, and this actually got me down a rabbit hole of like, well, hold on a second. I mean, what if I had bought the Vision Pro, nobody else had used it. I set it up and I just wanted a friend who came over, my mom, whoever, just like, I'll put it on and play around a little bit. There are guest profile options for the Vision Pro, but they're very limited. I used it. If you're not careful, it won't let you do anything. So you have to explicitly, it's set it up to say, yes, let the guest do everything I have. So it's all or nothing. And it's not personalized to the guest. It's not like a Tom guest profile. It's just a guest profile. And every time you log in, you have to train it to your eyes every time. It will not remember that. So it's super annoying. Must be between four and 25 letters was asking, it sounds like an anti-theft measure, but it wasn't that either, was it? Because we tried the things that would have tricked it into not being anti-theft. I mean, I think, because what ended up happening, and this was part of why I was like, something's up here, was that, put in my passcode, put in my passcode, not right, not right, not right. And then I get like a, okay, you're permanently locked out. I was like, forever? Like that, just like that? Yeah, and then it was like, I would sort of just like get frustrated, put it down, put it back on later. And it was like, you're locked out for seven hours and three minutes. Yeah, which is what it does when you put in the wrong passcode multiple times. Yeah, but I mean, that would have been, it's like, am I permanently locked out, or is it seven hours, or is it 13? I got that at one point and I just went to bed. And yeah, in the morning it was like, yeah, what's your passcode? Something, something's up, something's up. So hopefully nobody has that. Protection, the seven hour timeout is to stop people from just trying to hack into it, but you were entering the right passcode. So it was not that. I don't know, I feel like this thing is not meant to be shared very clearly. They did not test it with sharing. And this happens with every new device when it launches. There's always some glitch. Enough people have it that it seems widespread. It's always a small slice of people. And it's something they didn't encounter until they got it into mass numbers of people, right? Because they just didn't test for these sort of scenarios. Like why would you share it? Why would you buy? Why would one person buy it and then give it to someone else immediately? Why would you do that? Well, we did. Well, yeah. Take that, Apple. I mean, we can't all have these, you know, expensive devices. Sometimes we have to share these things. Yeah. All right, real quickly before we get out of here, let's check out the, oh, that's the wrong one. Nail bag, there we go. Alison Sheridan wanted to make a clarification to yesterday's show regarding she charging. Alison says, I just re-listened to the show. And at one point, you said that she too will work with any phone. We should have said any CHE2 compatible phone. The iPhones are already CHE2 compatible, of course, but that may not be true with other manufacturers. I don't know this for certain, but it would make sense that the coils and the phones would have to be redesigned to match up to the chargers. I tried to download the CHE version 2.0 spec, but they don't have it available yet. They explicitly say that you can't read it. So a CHE phone that is not CHE2 will charge with a CHE2 charger at the slower rate. It will not charge at the faster CHE2 rate. Everything's backwards compatible. So that's what I was meaning when I said any phone should work. Also, I guess it should be obvious that if a phone doesn't have CHE charging capability at all, if it's not meant to wirelessly charge, it also wouldn't work with any CHE charger. But yes, thank you, Allison, for the clarification. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. Blue Sky is now open to everyone to sign up, but do we care anymore? We're gonna talk about our various social strategies these days, stick around. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live because we do it 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 that planned by Microsoft and Xbox to bring Xbox titles to other platforms, including the PS5 with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. The DTNS Family of Podcasts, helping each other understaff. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.