 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Dustin Campbell, Dim Deputy, and Brandon Brooks. Coming up on DTNS, what the heck is Blue Sky and why are all the cool kids talking about it? Plus, an open standard to stop misuse of Bluetooth trackers, and Nika Monford tells us about a leader in the effort to represent black people in the field of artificial intelligence. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the Atlanta area, I'm Nika Monford. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Oh, my friends, we've got a lot of practical news. And if you've been hearing all the folks talking about Blue Sky, we've got that news as well. We're all on it, so we're going to explain it to you. Let's start, though, with the quick hits. Apple issued its first rapid security response update available for iOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1. Apple introduced rapid security response in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. It moves some system files that are likely to need more frequent updates, particularly WebKit related files, into their own secure volume, which then reduces the size of patches and the time it takes to install those patches. In some cases, they can be installed without a reboot. The first public update does require a reboot, but it was smaller and faster to implement. No word on the specific flaws addressed in the update. Some people, though, experienced an error when it first rolled out. Apple has now fixed that issue. Yeah, mine went painlessly when I did it this morning. Same thing. As of May 2nd, Utah requires sites that publish or distribute material deemed harmful to minors to perform age verification for all users. The definition of harmful material is very extensive in the law, if you want to take a look at it, but mostly it applies to adult porn content. In response to the law, pornhub.com has started serving a video message on its website explaining its opposition to the Utah law and asking visitors to contact their representative. And if you're a Utah IP address, that's all you get. The rest of the site is unavailable. Pornhub already verifies ages in Louisiana in partnership with a third-party service called Allpass Trust, so they're not protesting it there. It appears that they believe the Utah law is not well written and lacks proper enforcement and provisions for device-based verification. Motorola announced its new Edge Plus flagship phone is coming to the US starting at $799. On top of typical flagship specs, it offers a 165 Hertz, 1080p OLED screen, 68-watt wired charging, and IP68 rated weather resistance. The phone will be available unlocked on Amazon and also Best Buy on May 25th, and later through carriers Boost Infinite and Consumer Cellular. Yeah, it's a nice-looking flagship phone. IBM CEO Arvin Krishna said the company will suspend and slow hiring for some back-office jobs, including some things done in human resources. Krishna told Bloomberg, and this is the important part because I've seen every headline misrepresent this, Krishna said, I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period. Now, Krishna said things like workforce composition and productivity evaluation would not be automated. They would automate mundane things like employment verification letters, other paperwork. Basically, IBM is cutting back on jobs or at least on hiring in advance of an expected recession and also planning for future efficiencies. Back-office roles amount to 26,000 jobs at IBM. If you take 30%, that would be 7,800, which is the number you keep seeing in headlines. But no, Krishna did not say IBM would replace 7,800 jobs with AI. Yes, there is the potential for that to happen, given what Krishna did say. E-Scooter maker Unagi announced its latest version, the Model 1 Voyager. You can buy it for $1,190 or rent it for $89 per month, which includes maintenance and also insurance. It uses the same design as the previous Model 1, but double the range at 25 miles and a system to give you an estimate of how many miles you have left on that battery. That is, look at the quick hits. All right, let's talk a little bit about this tracking standard. Multiple companies have joined together to propose an industry standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force, aka the IETF, for unauthorized tracking alerts. So it's a standard for when to provide these alerts, how to detect unauthorized trackers, et cetera. Basically, warning people if a Bluetooth tracker like an Apple AirTag or a Tile Tracker is on their person or in their car or something without their knowledge. The group proposing the standard includes Apple, Google, Tile, Samsung, Chipolo, Anchor's Ufie, and Pebblebee. And if you can think of a tracker that's not in there, let us know, feedbackanddailytechnewshow.com because that covers a large majority of them. Features are expected to be complete by the end of the year and once they are complete in the standard, implemented in both iOS and Android. Meaning you won't have to have a separate app in Android to be able to check for Apple AirTags. That will mean that Apple AirTag alerts will work across those operating systems and all other tracker makers like Tile will be able to join the standard and work with those operating system tracking systems as well. Nika, what do you think of this industry effort? I think it's probably the best thing to do when AirTags were first announced. Everyone was excited about them. And then of course, negative threat actors if you want to call them started using AirTags for things that AirTags were never meant to be used for. And so people who had non-Apple phones didn't have a way to identify if an AirTag was on them or unknowingly or if they were in their bag on their car. And then they had to be a whole separate app and there was a whole lot of talk about that. Is Apple doing enough to protect people, particularly women were the largest people who were being targeted for this, for stalking, harassment, you know, those types of things. So I think this joint effort from most of, like you said, the app, the, you know, tracking type devices coming together. I think this should hopefully quell some of the discourse and also make people safer to use whatever tracking system they like with a certain level of confidence that they'll be safe. Yeah, I have a fun AirTag story. My dog was staying with a friend of mine a few months ago and the friend wanted to make sure my dog was safe, put a little AirTag on my dog's collar and then everyone forgot about it because then the dog was back in my possession, it was safe and sound. But at one point, because I hadn't really thought about the AirTag, I got a little alert in my phone like, just so you know, there's an AirTag that's, you know, with you. Oh, because it wasn't yours. It wasn't mine, exactly. And it was totally above board. Like nothing weird was happening. But if it was something weird that was happening, it was probably gonna take me a while to notice that AirTag if I hadn't gotten that notification. However, I use iOS. So if I had, I don't know, a variety of, you know, other mobile devices that could also ping me and be like, heads up, just so you know. I think that's better for everybody. Yeah, the important part about this is that you don't have to be using a tracker and you don't have to think of all the possible trackers someone you would use against you. Once the system is in place, your operating system is either Android or iOS, it's gonna let you know. You don't have to do anything. And that's, I think that's the key here. Absolutely. Now that we've solved that. Really? Yeah, I'm kind of, I was thinking about the story earlier of like, okay, well, I think it's, I think, you know, getting more updates on, you know, if a tracker wants to let you know that it is near you. So your whereabouts are being possibly seen by one or more people, all very good. I think that, I don't know, in the same way that smart home devices, we're getting closer to them all talking better together. This is sort of the same idea, but very much more in a safety situation. Especially because in a home situation, you're the one deciding to use the devices. In this situation, it's the nefarious person who's deciding to use the device. And so they're shifting the responsibility off of you to protect yourself to just be built into the operating system. I think that's good. Matter for trackers. Yeah, yeah. Good way to put it. All right, Nika, it's time for another edition of Teching While Black, where you shine a light on a technology leader in the black community that we might not have heard of yet, but we'll be glad that you told us about. So Nika, who are we highlighting today? Today, we are highlighting, right yet, a bi-bay. She is the co-founder of Black in AI, which is an organization that is working on increasing the presence of black people in the field of artificial intelligence. Throughout this show today, we've talked about AI a couple of different times. So it's one of those things where we're making sure to... I thought it was important to highlight someone who is a minority, who is in this space, and who is working to further encourage other people of color to be in this space because as we've seen already, like I said throughout this show, the way that AI is really taking over, it's the new hot thing in the tech space right now. Additionally, into co-founding this organization, she is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She happens to be the first black female professor in the history of the department and the second in the history of the College of Engineering. Additionally, she is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, which she is the second junior fellow with a PhD in CS and the first female computer scientist and the first black computer scientist in that society altogether. Additionally, she is the first black woman to complete a PhD in computer science at Cornell. So lots of firsts here for her. There's a slew of other awards and honors that is honestly too much to go through on this show right now, but I definitely encourage you to go and check out her work, the work that she's doing in AI and the way that she is facilitating the inclusion of black people and other people of color in this space because as we know, when everybody is included, especially in new technology, everyone is the better for it. One of the big problems you hear about with training sets is that they aren't comprehensive in representing the world, right? That they might skew in one particular way and so having a diverse set of people working in AI kind of helps correct for that. You've got somebody in there that's like, hey, wait a minute, this data set doesn't represent me or my family or people who look like me and so having somebody working to make sure that you include a diverse set of people working on AI is a good way to prevent that bias from creeping in or at least reduce it. Absolutely, and a prime example of that is recently in the field of art, there was an image of a child who drew a hand and it had like flowers sprouting out from it and it was a brown hand and they used generative AI to create a realistic photo of the drawing. I mean, it's obvious when you look at the source, it's the child's image because you can see the crayon, streaks and everything, but when they created the AI image from the source image from the child, the hand was white and female and not black and nondescript because it was just like a regular if you kind of trace the outline of a hand type of hand but the way that it was able to take that and convert a very obviously brown hand into a white hand but the integrity of the image was still intact, the flowers coming out of the fingers, you could definitely tell that that's where that image was sourced, so things like that because it's all based on the data that is trained on. So if it doesn't have enough data to train on, it doesn't have a way to identify that, oh, this is a brown hand. So what I create in the AI generative process should be a brown hand as well. Well, last month, the Economist Korea reported that employees of Samsung had uploaded sensitive information to open AI's chat GPT on at least three occasions. The first occasion, it was asked to check database source code for errors. The second occasion asked for code optimization and the third uploaded a meeting recording and asked chat GPT to generate minutes. Okay, in all cases, the data was confidential though and chat GPT uses data prompts to train its models unless you opt out. Now at the time of the incidents, the only way to get rid of chat prompts once they're made was to delete the entire user account. Initially, Samsung responded by limiting the length of the prompts, its employees could enter. Now, Bloomberg has seen a memo indicating that Samsung has banned employees from using generative AI tools, including chat GPT, Bing Chatbot, and Google Bard on company-owned devices and any device using the company network. The measure however is temporary until Samsung can build better security around chatbot use. Open AI is slowly coming along and adding some additional ways to control the data you add to its prompts. Tom, can you tell us a little bit about those products? Yeah, yeah, they're not terribly user friendly. To get your data removed without deleting your account, you can try filling out the open AI personal data removal request. Requires a lot of info like what country's laws apply to you, whether you're a public figure, evidence that your data has in fact been processed and you have to make sworn statements that your information is accurate. Also, if you're not in Europe, they might not honor your request. This is really done in response to the lawsuit that was brought in Italy. If you want to stop collection before you enter prompts, if you want to opt out of that data collection, any user can fill out the user content opt out request. It's a Google form and that will prevent your user data from being used to train open AI's models. They give you lots of warnings about how this will reduce the effectiveness of your results. And you can also go into chat GPT's account settings and disable training on your data, though that method will disable your chat history as well. So these are not terribly user friendly ways to protect your data because open AI wants to use that data in the training set. What I thought was kind of the first thing that stood out to me about this was, you hear so much about, well, AI is going to take humans' jobs away and then you've got Samsung employees being like, no, no, it's helping us. This is good stuff. Let's check some source code for errors. Maybe there are some, like optimize some code. Maybe that really boring meeting that we all had to sit through for two hours earlier today, we can generate some minutes from that. But yeah, if you're Samsung, you're like, no, no, no, no. Let's not do that until we can assure that confidential information isn't going into, you know, the larger, I don't know, AI pie in the sky and end up coming back to bite Samsung in the, you know what, at some point, because that's what the company would be afraid of. And honestly, it's smart. I think there are not a lot of guardrails on the different uses for AI. And I think this is where we can get into a bit of trouble is when we don't have guardrails to protect companies, individuals from, you know, their data being used incorrectly or without credit or in this case with proprietary and, you know, information that they don't want out there being susceptible. So I think it's smart of them to temporary with these blinders on and get it fixed, get it working, get it in a secure, safe format, then opening it back up. But playing a little bit of devil's advocate, is that really going to stop folks from using it? Because if you're not on the company network and if you're not on the company device, you can still use these tools. There are ways around it, but I think they're kind of slowing, you know, putting some hurdles in the way of people doing it. I always think that the same thing when I hear on company devices, it's like, well, okay. So the company says, all right, wasn't us. We did what we had to do, but yes, your employees have other options. Yeah. Like you said, it takes a little extra work, but if it's going to save you a little extra work, maybe it's worth it. I think the solution here is either Samsung figuring out a way to safeguard this stuff. Because honestly, once it gets trained, it's not like the data is in the model. I think a lot of people have that misimpression. The risk isn't the training. The risk is it's sitting unprotected in the data set and somebody gets access to the data set and then finds that stuff in there. So you don't want it to go into an unprotected data set. And I know OpenAI is working on like versions of itself that you can buy and locate in your own company so that you're training it and you're protecting it and it doesn't go into the cloud. It doesn't go anywhere else. Feels like Samsung needs something like that. Yep. Well, folks, if you want to join in the conversation and you've got some ideas on how Samsung could fix this, fix this or OpenAI could fix it, get in our Discord. You can join it by linking to a Patreon account. Just become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. Many people are talking or looking or talking and looking for an alternative micro blogging service Mastodon, one popular option and it's rolling out new features to make it more appealing. Some folks said servers, we don't really understand. It's kind of hard to figure out how to join Mastodon. Mastodon says now, when a new user signs up, they'll see two server options. Mastodon.social, which is already a very popular one or pick my own server, which you can already do. Mastodon is also adding things like quote posts, improve search and groups to make it more like a micro blogging service that you might already be familiar with. But the Darlene of the Technoradi last week became Project Blue Sky. So Nika, let's remind folks what Blue Sky is and how it differs from other Twitter alternatives. So Blue Sky started, was started by Jack Dorsey, we all know, was the CEO of Twitter as a project to create a decentralized micro blogging system. It was spun out at founding. So no, it's not currently a part of Twitter now. Now, Mastodon is also a decentralized service, but Mastodon is built on an activity pub standard. Blue Sky chose to make its own open standard called AT Protocol. Among other things, the AT Protocol has more robust account portability. Portability compatibility that activity pub with the aim to make it easy to move between servers without losing posts, followers or follows. So tell us a few things to know about Blue Sky, Tom. Yeah, thanks, Nika. Here are a few things to know about Blue Sky. Because it was spun out of Twitter like Nika told you, it looks a lot like a simplified Twitter. It's gonna look very familiar if you get in. It only has one server right now that is run by the Blue Sky project. So you don't have to choose. And also it's not really decentralized because there's just the one server at the moment. They do plan to open that up and interoperate with other people on the AT Protocol. You have to get an invite to join right now. You can't just join in. So yeah, 300,000 people or so have downloaded the Blue Sky app, but there aren't that many users of Blue Sky because a lot of people downloaded it just to get on the wait list. A few things about how it works. It has a 300 character limit. You can like, reply and repost. There's a following feed and a what's hot feed. Following is people you follow. What's hot is just kind of the fire hose. It is algorithmically driven though. There's a mobile app, a website at staging.besky.app and a few third party apps being developed for it. Users receive one invite code every two weeks that they're on the platform, though the Blue Sky devs have been going around giving out extra invites to folks they see using the platform well. Now, we've all been lucky enough to have somebody invite us to Blue Sky. Nika, starting with you, what is your impression of this social network? So first, let's see if I can get through this without portability, compatibility. I mean, but so far I've enjoyed it. I think because it is so new and there aren't as many people on it. To me, it gives me a lightness of social media because it's not as, you know, like you said, it's just not a dumpster fire. Yeah, it's not crowded. It's not crowded. It's people that, you know, you know, it's people that you followed, you know, on Twitter. Some of them are on Blue Sky as well. And so it's like a streamlined version, again, because this is an invite-only beta that makes sense that that's the way it is. But for an initial offering for a new platform, I think they are, from what I can tell in my usage, I think they are going in the right direction and I expect tons of improvements to come because there are, as you said, limitations. But I think where they are and where it seems to be going is so far pretty good. And I have to say on the portability capability part of it, being able to use my own domain as my username and the process to get that to happen on the app was pretty seamless. I was pretty surprised how easy it was. Now, I was, when Macedon first kind of came out as a potential alternative, I went over and I was like, I'll try Macedon and then I got over there. And I'm a tech person. So I know kind of how to maneuver my way around. I was like, this is a whole lot to get this set up. And I was like, I'm going to not do this and I'm just going to go back and suffer through Twitter the way it is. So for Blue Sky to have that ease about it was a big winner for me. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way you do, Nika. Macedon, which I'm on, it was not hard for me to understand how it worked. And Annaly Nuits was on the show recently and made this great comparison. Macedon versus email. When you have an email address, nobody talks all that much about what your email address is. You just use the email protocol. And you share information and we're all very used to that. You might use IMAP, you might use Pop3, right? But nobody cares what you're using. Exactly, that's behind the scenes. And maybe there's some people out there. Well, I know there are some people out there still paying for AOL kind of thing. But it took a while for some of the normies to get on board. But we're all used to that and it's not a conversation to be had anymore. And I think that you could see Macedon that way. What I found interesting about Blue Sky was once I realized that there was a desktop client, I was much happier. Not a desktop client, but a web client. Because I don't actually like microblogging on mobile all that much because I'm usually sitting in front of a computer. But I was like, oh, this is Twitter. It looks exactly like Twitter. OK, the fundamentals are supposed to be different than Twitter. It's supposed to be based on a more open standard. But it looks and acts like Twitter. For example, the design is Twitter. The design, I mean, it's Twitter. The user experience is definitely Twitter. Yeah, I mean, it's not hard. If you're like, I liked Twitter and I want something like Twitter, but not Twitter, Blue Sky is for you. For example, I looked at the What's Hot feed last night. It was all Met Gala photos. Jared Leto in a CAD costume. I'm like, this is my stuff. I'm following people left and right. It's like it felt like the fun thing that I like about Twitter. And I'm not saying that Twitter is just a bunch of nonsense because it can be, but it can also be an incredibly important news source, which I think for our purposes it probably is for this panel. And Masternon is that almost plus, but you still have this barrier to entry for people who go in servers and whatever. So I think Masternon is doing the right thing here. Trying to just be like, let's simplify this whole thing. Let's stop giving you all these server options because it's confusing people and they think they have to run their own servers type thing. But Blue Sky, I don't know. It seems like it seems like the one to watch. It is very clicky right now on the one hand. And what do you mean by that clicky? Well, on the one hand, it's low population. So I feel like, oh, my voice can be heard and I can have a conversation without people piling in like Nika was saying. But also it's a lot of people talking about how cool it is to be in Blue Sky and let's make sure we make it in our image before the randoms get here. Yeah, right. So that's the clicky part of it. Which is in Twitter was the exact same way. Yeah, right. But naturally, not exclusively, right? You didn't need an invite to get on Twitter in the early days. Right, right, right. Yeah. I know that there's some talk about Blue Sky's instance of this staying invite only to control the growth and then opening it up to third parties and saying those folks can decide whether they want to do invite system or not. When they launched in March, they said that they would only do the invites until they got their moderation system in order. So I'm not sure where they're going with that. But I kind of like the idea that they might keep it invite only to control the growth and encourage people to go to other servers once they're interoperating with other servers. I think that would be a good way to get other servers to interoperate. I know originally I think they thought Twitter might adopt the protocol. It does not look like that's going to happen because Twitter cut off their funding last year. They used to get money from Twitter to be developed when Dorsey was in charge under Musk. They are not getting that money anymore. So that would have been a great fuel for their growth. I don't know if that's going to happen anymore though. Yeah, it's really interesting and especially on kind of like the clicky and it kind of made me think a little bit about the way Clubhouse was when it first came out. Yeah, it was, you know, that type of experience. But I have to say for me, for the people that I've seen, I don't get the sense that oh, it's like we're trying to only the cool kids come in to me. I haven't had that experience. I know some people have seen that and have had that experience. It hasn't been that way for me. But I know there's another coming upcoming that's pretty popular social media site spoutable that is out and a lot of people are using it very. You can put over your legacy Twitter check over there. They have a tool that does that and quite a few notable people have signed up and are using it. But there has been a little bit of controversy on office on the Twitter timeline of with the founder what seems to be some people saying kind of taking shots at Blue Sky and like some back and forth. So it's I think competition is good for the consumer. So it means that there are different platforms out there that are really trying to create a product that is going to be better for the consumer. So I'm all for it because at the end of the day you have to at this point you have to try different things to find out what platform is going to work for you. And right now it seems like we have some pretty good options out there. I would just encourage the devs at Blue Sky to go invite a few less like-minded people. They seem to be a lot of like-minded people inviting like-minded people and I think I think you could you could use a little more of a mixture there. It's like the bouncer at the club. Come on, you know, not just your friends. Everybody. Nika Monford is one of our friends. Always nice to have you on the show. Nika, let folks know we can keep up with your work. For the most part you can find me on all the social media outlets at tech savvy diva. You can also check out my own podcast is a weekly podcast that I co-host with Terence Gaines which is called The Snobbo West Show where we talk about all things Apple and then some other tech as well. So definitely check us out. We our shows come out on Fridays unless you're a Patreon supporter and you get the show on Wednesday live with us. How about that? Good to be a patron. Also a special thanks to Chad Johnson, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Chad. Thank you for all the years of support. Yay, thank you, Chad. Chad is one of our patrons and our patrons can stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. The writer's guild is on strike and it's streaming TV's fault. Ah, it was DVDs last time. So here we are. We're going to talk about that and more on Good Day Internet patrons or people who are just becoming a patron right now. Stick around. You can catch our show at DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live tomorrow's Wednesday and you know what that means. Scott Johnson is with us. We'll talk to you then.