 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, whether you're Alice Anjabi, Andrew Bradley, Dale Mulcahy, or someone else. Thank you for making this show possible. Coming up on DTNS Tech has not increased productivity since 2005, but we think we have a fix. Plus Tim Cook told GQ his thoughts on the future of Apple and we honor the inventor of the search engine. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 3rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Strafilino from the Stormy Atlanta area. I'm Nika Monfort and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You're getting that rain we had last week. Oh man, we got tornadoes here last week. It was pretty rough. I thought the apocalypse was coming. There's been a lot of tornadoes over this past week. They are no joke either. So I'm glad I'm glad you're safe, Nika. Good to have you with us today. We got some great stuff to talk about. So let's start with the quick hits. The Torre Project. You might know them as the maker of the anonymous Torre network and the Torre browser. They are working with Mulvad VPN to launch a privacy focused Mulvad browser, but it's built on a fork of Firefox. The browser from Mulvad is going to use a VPN on Windows, Mac and Linux to reduce the amount of user metadata available to sites, particularly for tracking. It will not connect to the onion router network itself. I'm sure you could make it do that, but that's not what it's being built for. Torre is just on board to share its privacy protecting smarts. The Verge notes that it's already possible for anyone tech savvy enough to configure a browser to minimize their fingerprint online, but the Mulvad browser is going to take ever care of everything for you so you don't need to think about it. On Sunday, Paris residents voted on a referendum to ban shared rental e-scooters from the city streets. 89% of Parisians voted in favor of the ban, and as a result, scooter providers Lime, Dot and Cheer will have to remove around 15,000 total scooters in the city by September 1. It should be noted only 7.5% of registered Parisians turned out for this vote. The referendum also isn't binding, so Mayor Anne Hidalgo could still decide to allow the scooters in the city. Rental e-bikes and privately owned scooters won't be impacted, don't worry. Ah, but the tradition of scooters in Paris. That's fine, yes. With your cigarette and your baguette. A galois, a baguette and a scooter. Twitter has updated its verified check mark system, and whatever you think about Twitter or check marks, you're going to run into them in the wild, so it's good to know what's true and what isn't about the check mark system because everybody's got a gunfire. People who have not paid for verified check marks were supposed to lose them April 1, but not all of them have been taken away. At least not yet. And as a result, Twitter changed the message that you get when you click on a blue check mark. It says the account is verified because it subscribes to Twitter blue or is a legacy verified account. Mine, for example, is a legacy verified account. Previously, Twitter distinguished between the two. They either said it was paid or it was legacy. So now you won't know just by hovering whether that account is paid or verified. Now, if that's a concern to you for people faking accounts, there have been some changes into how the paid accounts get verification that you should at least be aware of. Right now, if you want to get verification through Twitter blue, when you pay, you have to show ID. They're not just giving it to everybody automatically anymore. That did happen. They're not doing that anymore. You must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username. So you can't change yours to Rich Strafilino and then pretend to be Rich Strafilino. And if you change anything after you get verified, so if you get verified as Roger Chang and then change it to Rich Strafilino, Twitter will remove your verification until you are re-verified. Please don't change it to Rich Strafilino. Yeah, please don't do that. I'm April 1st, ASUS announced the Republic of Gamers or ROG Ally, a handheld Windows 11 gaming PC in the same vein as the Steam Deck, similar form factor. Given the date, people kind of weren't sure if it was real, but ASUS confirmed on Monday that the ROG Ally is indeed. No joke. The Ally will use a customized AMD Ryzen APU, very similar to the Steam Deck, rather than the AMD 6800U chipset used in other handheld PCs from companies like Aya Neo and One X Player. It'll also feature a 7-inch, 120-hertz 1080p display that's able to hit up to 500 nits of brightness with a dual fan system for what they say, quieter operations. We still have no word, though, on a release date or a price. The South Korean publication, the Elek, L-E-E-L-E-C, says the TSMC did not send out its Apple M2 wafers for package testing in either January or February. That, it knows, what it believes is that they didn't send them out because Apple told it to stop production due to falling demand for MacBooks. TSMC reportedly resumed production in March, so it's back to sending them out and it's back to making them, but at only half the level of the previous year. This comes as Gartner analysts found that overall PC shipments did fall 16.2% in 2022, and Q4 Apple specifically saw shipments down 10.2% on the year, although, even though that was a drop, it was the smallest drop among the top six PC vendors. Speaking of Apple, let's talk a little bit about the future of Apple, Rich. But you don't have to make it up. You can find out somewhere else. Oh, I'll just go with a different tack, Ben. Okay. Well, you know, GQ's Zach Barron sat down for an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, and as you would expect for one of these high-profile glossy interviews, has a lot of the expected beats that these kind of things kind of revel in. For example, Tim Cook doesn't go around on golf carts on the Apple campus. Okay. Okay. He's approachable. Like people don't scatter when he's walking through the beautiful Apple park up there. He doesn't raise his voice. They talk about his haircut a lot. I mean, again, it's GQ. It's GQ. Pretty typical stuff. But we did get some more details about the company's AR ambition and maybe some details on its upcoming headset as well. As to why it's taking so long to come to market, Cook said Apple wants to control the primary technology because we know that's how you innovate. And interestingly, for the company leading in smartphone market share, Cook also said, my philosophy is if you're looking at the phone more than you're looking in somebody's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing. Okay. Now that he's making glasses, he says that. Right. Now he's made all the money in the smartphone game. Uh-huh. Yes. So Nika, I guess with kind of some of this background, some of the other tidbits that we got in there, does anything in the interview give us some hints to maybe how Apple will position this headset whenever it actually, you know, is announced and comes out? I think the fact that he has been doing more interviews lately around the AR VR headset, it's led into a lot of credence because typically Apple is pretty tight-lipped about what they're releasing, what's on the docket. It's kind of like surprise. This is what we have. So I think him openly talking about it now leads to the more likelihood that it's coming up pretty soon. I think when he says the statement about, if you're looking at your phone more than you're looking at a person, that leads me to believe that it's going to be this software, glasses, goggles, reality, whatever, as whatever they're calling it. I think the intention behind it is to still have some of the technology behind what we have in our smartphones, but giving it more of a, I guess, in-person feel. Because a lot of times, if you go to restaurants or if you're out, everyone's looking at their phone at a concert. Everybody has their phone up pointing at the stage, looking at the phone at the person performing rather than just looking directly at the person. So I suspect based on those types of interactions and things that I'm sure he's seeing, the goal is likely to be able to use this headset to engage with people more, but from a technology aspect meaning, you're going to be able to talk to people or be in some semi-in-person interaction with someone who may be in a different state, in a different country, with giving it a little bit more of a human feel, if that makes sense. So that's what, based on his statements, that's kind of the avenue that I think they might be going along. Yeah, that tracks. It felt like there were two big issues that he was plugging in GQ. One was privacy in general, which Apple does all the time. That one didn't surprise me. It's not particularly specific to the AR headset, but the other is what you're talking about. This idea that they're going to push this as everyone has a problem with the phone, not our fault. We didn't invent the phone. We just made it better. But we have done a great thing. We think you're going to love. We have fixed this problem. No longer looking at your watch for a notification being seen as a signal you're bored. No longer will that you catch your friend looking down at their phone when you're talking at them. Or like Nika said, you have to make a decision of whether you want to watch the concert through your phone screen as you film it or actually look at the concert. They're going to push that. I think that's valid. I think there's something to that. I think there's some value with a well done, easy to use headset that's let me like, yeah, just record what I'm looking at and then I'll just keep looking at it. That's great. I think it also is going to cause other problems, which is, you know, the thousand yard stare that you'll get now. It won't be as obvious as people looking at their phone be like, you're not really listening to me. Are you? You're you're you're checking your notifications in your headset. Yeah. Yeah. And the dystopian clock people walking around all with their headsets staring at into the distance is like only marginally better than everybody staring at their phone. Maybe. But what is really interesting to me is reading this interview. At first I was kind of thinking with the AR stuff. I was like reading. I guess I was, you know, reading into the commentary. Oh, these are digs on some of these are digs on meta. Right. Like the emphasis on like real world connection. We're going to be doing stuff in the real world and we're going to, you know, be bringing people together as a, you know, the unspoken thing of being as opposed to getting together in a purely virtual space with weird legless avatars. But looking back in the version of really good job of pointing this out. Cook has been kind of on this same beat since 2016 appearing on Good Morning America talking about AR being, it lets you be very present talking to each other. So it's easy, I guess, to think about this in terms of them competing with Meta. Certainly that is going to be something on Apple's radar for sure, given Meta's position in that market. But this is not like a short term, like messaging thing for Cook either. He's been kind of beating the string for quite some time. Yeah. I also thought it was interesting that he talked about the fact that the delay is because they want to control all the tech. They don't want to use other people's tech. Is that a little like an excuse? But it also could make sense. Yeah. And we talked about it, I was just going to say, we talked about it last week or the week before on our show. There seems to be a little bit of a conflict internally in Apple with the engineering operations people saying, let's run with what we have, which is the goggles. And then you have the design people saying, no, no, no, that's not what we agree to. We agree to a more sleeker looking actual glasses type product. So I think the reason we have the delay is because of some impossible internal conflicts with the Apple teams themselves trying to decide what we want to release. And my, and my guess is this release of reality OS, whatever glasses goggles, whatever they're going to call it, I think it's going to be the one last thing for this year. I think they're going to try and stretch out as much time as they possibly can to get this thing in a workable, you know, produceable state because for $3,000, you better come with, you know, the hot fire, so to speak, once you finally do release this thing. So that's kind of my, my assumptions and guess. You predicted this for a couple of years. You're going to be right. Yeah. At this time, I have a feeling. I wonder if it splits the difference. If it's the design people want it to be smaller, but to do that, they would have to use other people's tech. And so that, that could be the source of the conflict there. No. All right. Time for another edition of teching while black where Nika shines the light on a technology leader in the black community. You might not have heard of yet, but maybe you'll be glad she told you about Nika. Who are we highlighting today? We are highlighting Alan Emmetage, the inventor of the search engine. We've talked a lot in teching while black before about foundational technology from black tech leaders. Well, what's more foundationary? If that's even a word foundation, these than the search engine. So Alan conceived and implemented Archie, which is widely considered the world's first internet search engine. So in addition to this, he also pioneered a slew of other techniques and and that we use now in the public search engine. Additionally, he co-founded bunny up information systems, which is the world's was the world's first company that expressly was founded for and dedicated to providing internet information services. Bunny up distributed a licensed commercial version of Archie search engine. So this search engine technically was pre Internet, but it used basically the foundation of what we use now on the Internet version of this pre web. You mean pre web? What did I say? You said Internet, but no, I don't know. Yeah, pre web. Yeah, pre web. Yeah, Nick took clarification. Additionally, he is a founding member of the Internet Society. He's chaired a multiple internet task for Internet engineering task force. But I think the one that's probably sticks out the most to me is the one that he chaired that established the list of standards for URLs. I mean, Nice. Hello. That's pretty much what we use for everything. Yeah, a little bit useful. And he also served on a slew of advisory panels, including the National Science Foundation, Library of Congress and online computer library center. Additionally, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. I would assume so as an inventor by the Internet Society. So for the basis of the search engine, we have Mr. Alan Imtage to thank for that. Well, thank you. Yeah. I used Archie back in the day. I've read a lot about Archie over the years. Had no idea that this was who was behind it. So thank you for giving Alan his due here. Appreciate that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. What stood out to me like looking into this, Nika, once you once you put it in the rundown here was just how young he is. Like he's 58, like, and to think of how like, and to show like in terms of Internet, in terms of Internet age, like Archie was innovated on by Gopher, right? Of being able to do like in document searching and stuff like that because Archie was focused on like searching titles of documents. So like when Gopher is in it, like that's how primary this is. Like how he's not much older than me. And he invented search. And I didn't ever invent anything nearly as useful as search. I mean, to be fair, quite a few people have not invented search time. That's true. I'm a good company. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's pretty cool to think that, you know, the person who invented this, like you said, is still relatively young. And it's really the foundation that we pretty much use in literally almost every aspect of our day to day life. Searching the Internet for stuff. Yeah. For sure. Well, thank you, Nika, for bringing good stuff to us once again. I want to tell you real quickly that Know a Little More is a podcast associated with Daily Tech News Show that I host that does deep dives into individual topics. So you want to know about USB. You want to know about a DLSS. What does that stuff mean? Go check out Know a Little More. It's coming back with a new season this Thursday. And we've upped the game. This is basically a relaunch of Know a Little More. If you have not yet sampled the show, go get subscribed right now. The first episode in the relaunch is coming Thursday about RSS. It has a rocky history, but it ended up sticking around 90s technology sticking around to underpin podcasting. Do not miss this episode subscribed by Thursday at Know a Little More dot com. Computer scientist Roberto Soraco wrote an article for IEEE Future Directions called AI Won't Steal Your Job, People Leveraging AI Will. We'll have a link in the show notes worth a read. Here's the summary. Goldman Sachs projects that up to 300 million jobs, which is about 18% of all the jobs will be affected by some kind of AI. It also projects that world GDP will grow 7% as a result of the adoption of AI. And he links to the MIT technology review article from March 25th, which points out that productivity has not grown much since 2005 and puts the question of whether AI will resolve that. Now, we've said many times on the show that jobs, most jobs, we just said 18% will be affected. So most jobs probably won't be replaced by AI and those that are replaced will be offset by new jobs created by AI. But the trouble lies not in the jobs being replaced but in the gap between the skills needed for those new jobs and the skills possessed by the people who need those new jobs. It almost sounds like Soraco and technology review are saying that you better either figure out these AI tools or fall into that gap. So, Nika, you're someone who works directly with these kinds of tools. How does their perspective sit with you? It's pretty much spot on. I've said it before, a lot of the conversation around AI and how people think, oh, it's coming from my job. I'm not going to be able to do anything. And I've said, you know, from the beginning, AI, artificial intelligence, it's not what most people think of when they hear it. There's still human intervention and interaction needed for AI to work. So it won't be, oh, this system is going to replace 15,000 people. No, that's not the case. As they mentioned in the article, the gap is going to fall in. Are we going to have enough people to even be able to understand the concepts and use the concepts to do the jobs that AI is now introducing? And it's going to be like they said, either you're going to catch up and get on board and learn the technology to be able to use it in whatever system it is, or you're just going to be completely left behind. And that is probably one of the biggest concerns that I have with this whole conversation is, because AI is one of those technologies that is a privileged type of technology, there are going to be people who are not going to have access to be able to learn and grow with the technology. And that is going to leave a gap, not just for people who don't want to learn it, but for people who do want to learn it, but don't have access. That's going to create an additional gap. And I think one thing that people are really missing with this AI concept is really sexy. It's really cool. But the biggest thing for me, I think we need to put some focus on, is the ethics and the transparency behind it is not a sexy part of AI. It's not something that's going to get you kind of splashed all over the papers or on the internet. But it is to me so important to make sure that we don't let this technology get out of hand. Yeah, to your point about the access, I think this study underlines that point. Two MIT economics graduate students ran an experiment. They published it March 2nd. Now, this is not yet peer reviewed. So I don't want to lean too heavily on this, but before peer review, they found that, so they did an A-B test. Half the people used chat GPT in their job. There were things like marketing and HR, half did not. The people who were the least skilled accomplished the most improvement. So people who were poor writers before they got access to chat GPT became better writers and faster writers. People who are already good writers just got faster. So I think that underlines your point, Nika, which is like, you need to have the access to this because if you have the access, it's going to lift up a lot of people to become better at their jobs. But if they don't have access, then it's not going to happen. Yeah, and it's one of those things. As old as time, access equals unfortunately success. And it's not the first time in technology in the tech space where access has been a barrier for a subset of the population. And I think this just further highlights that as well. Yeah, because this could actually improve people at a lower position if it's there, if it's there. Go ahead, Rich, sorry. And I think alongside the access issue, which is huge, as this again, as we're just starting to realize, I think one of the things that really was spelled out really well in this article is that we don't have the use case yet for seeing the giant productivity gains that we saw with something like the initial computer revolution. We know what this is. Like the killer app kind of thing. Yeah, like we know this can like mass produced reasonable quality text very quickly and efficiently. We don't know how that like supercharges productivity quite yet. We haven't like worked that out yet. We will work out what it is good for eventually. But like that isn't quite there yet. But the other thing that goes along with access that this piece also points out is that it's not just about seek. It's not just once you have that as of seeking out training for this, but it's for these tools to be like designed for human enhancement. If that makes sense to. Yes. This is a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. For these to be upskilling technologies as opposed to purely autonomous technologies of being like, you know, you just need to put in one word of text and boom, it gets out all this stuff. Like these are design choices. It's not like inherent in this technology that it is this massive wipe out of jobs. It's just an everything tool. It's not designed to do anything in particular. And I think to address some of these concerns, you need to say like, okay, that shouldn't be the product. The product should be this is a tool that is that is, you know, we have tried to reduce bias and it's, it's, it's affordable to use and it's meant for HR job descriptions or something tailored like that. I mean, Nika, does that, does that. Again, you, you work in this area. Does that sound right to you? It does. And I think a lot. What is missing partly from the conversation is we're very narrowly focused on the text based AI because chat GPT is just everywhere open AI is everywhere. Everybody's into it, but this is just one of the swim lanes for AI based technology. We also have to make sure we think a little bit downstream. What other types of AI tools and technology that are going to come into the workforce that have, that have different applications, different instances. Again, focus is on text based AI right now because that's what everybody's using. That's what everyone's talking about. But you know, we have to, you know, stretch our, our thought process a little bit more because this is going to impact more areas as well. Yeah. We make software for purposes. And this is, this is software. So to me, not the chat GPT shouldn't exist. It's a great test bed. It's a great beta test. But the products that come out of it like software shouldn't be like, here's the software that does everything. Right? Yeah. It's not going to, it's not going to be like that. That makes sense to me. Yeah. And I've used chat GPT a couple of times and the latest way that I've used it, I was trying to write a little script to do some file conversions. And I was like, okay, let me write it myself. And then let me put in the description and chat GPT and do a little comparison to see how the code, you know, lines up and it was pretty much spot on. And I was like, wow. Yeah. I was like, oh, wow. That's a time saver. For sure. Yeah. For sure, especially if it's for an application, that's not one of those things that's proprietary. Yeah. You have to worry about it pulling from something else. But if you just need to come up with a quick, quick script to do something, you know, simple and mundane instead of having to use the brainpower to create it. You can just type in a description and, you know, it spits you out something and you can use it to tell people about your day and about your next task. Way faster to glance over it and make sure you don't see any obvious errors than it is to like tediously hack it out. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, the other thing that I know we're all waiting on generative AI to spit out at us in kind of this gold rush moment that we are at with open AI and all of these other companies is generating windows 95 keys. Right. Yeah, we can all agree on it. Well, the YouTuber Enderman tried this out and came back with some interesting results just kind of on a lark here. He was asking chat GPT to generate the keys and it resulted in a flat refusal. Sure. One chat GPT actually suggested migrating to a supported version of the OS. So also good security etiquette. Stop nagging dad. Nice job chat GPT. But the OEM format for windows 95 keys is like known. There's a set formula for it. So Enderman tried to put that formula into words to see if he could still get chat GPT to generate it. And it did. He eventually did get or they eventually did get the output, but only about one in 30 actually worked in activating windows 95 in a virtual machine. And Enderman found it's because the system can't count sums or understand the visibility for an output, which is part of the key. It has to be divisible by seven. And as a result, it was kind of just blind luck if it would actually work out as a result. This is not interesting because it's making windows 95 keys. There's not a huge windows 95 piracy problem. The keys, as you mentioned, can be manually created by you sitting at your computer for a few minutes. What's interesting is the workaround, the sort of the figuring out like, oh, you know, you shouldn't make this key for me. What if I ask you this way? Like there's lots of different way. Let me go about it. Let me take another avenue. Yeah. It's like when you're a little kid and you just keep asking until you get the answer. Yeah. The logic loopholes in these systems where you can get them to tell you their code names or do windows 95 keys is super fascinating and kind of like an, I think an unexpected reality of how these systems are kind of set up. Yeah. We're still have the upper hand in creativity. We can come up with creative ways to ask it a question. It doesn't know it's not supposed to answer. Yeah. All right. Well, Tom, let's check out what's in them. Thank you, Rich. Yes. Given the state of the world today, Aaron wrote in to say, it seems like the obvious replacement for E3 would be a conference focused on AI and gaming. Gaming has been used, has been using the term AI for a long time. It's never really been what most people would think of as an actual AI. Given the incredible advancements, surely there are a hundred developers already working on applying AI in lots of different ways. I fully expect the next big procedurally generated game will use generative AI rather than traditional methods. Love the show. Have been listening since Veronica was new on Buzz out loud. Aaron, thank you, Aaron. Good, good to hear from you. And yes, maybe this is a place that E3 could could stake at its niche because obviously there's lots of people talking about AI and game development at places like GDC game developers conference. But it's still new enough. I don't know. Is there anything that is about gaming in AI? I took a look and I couldn't find anything obviously dedicated to it. Well, I'm sure at any of these shows, whether it's packs or whatever, there are panels and stuff like that that will spend a ton of time talking about this. Yeah, right, right. I was thinking about this email and the Virtue had a great write up of like why E3 died and it was, you know, going back to like this is when like consoles were like duking it out for like media space. And I wonder if AI could get to that space where it need like where it need to duke it out to kind of get that high ground. I don't I don't know. But that's like kind of what made E3 E3. So in terms of like the scale and the prestige of a show, something like that, that's what I think it would take to get to that level. But I mean, I love the idea. Yeah, Nika, you don't know of any like game AI. Yeah, I have a Nintendo switch that I bought during the pandemic because I was going to get into and all I play is Mario Kart. Well, there you go, Aaron. It seems like an open lane. If anyone's like, no, no, no, there is a thing that already does this. By all means, send us an email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, thank you so much, Nika Montford for being on the show, dropping the knowledge as always giving us the great perspective. Where can people find more of your great stuff on this world Wide Web? You can find me mostly at the handle at TechCypediva on all of the social media platforms. You can also check me out on at Snava Westcast, which is an Apple Focus podcast that I do with Terrence Gaines. It's a weekly show, so you can definitely check us out there. And thanks to our brand new bosses, Graham, Paul, Nicole and Sunny, who all just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Graham, Paul, Nicole and Sunny. I call them the fabulous four for backing us on Patreon. I just started calling them that just the second, but I'm going to continue to call them. Or maybe the fantastic four. 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