 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you right there with us in your ears, thanks to all of you, including Brian Hoffman, Mike Aikens, and Narm Physikus. Coming up on DTNS, how to find a good VPN, how a vitamin company gained Amazon reviews and how you can spot similar attempts to fool you, and studying microorganisms with lasers by exploding them. Really the story. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 11th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redmond, I'm Sarah Lane. From Alabama, I'm Dr. Nikki Ackermanns. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, there's so much going on in the tech world. Twitter, Incorporated, has been absorbed by Elon Musk's X-Corp, so technically there's no Twitter anymore. The New York Times says tomorrow Warner's gonna rename HBO Max to just Max, but today we start with the quick hits. Well, the feature that caused all the hubbub between Substack and Twitter last weekend has fully launched. Substack Notes rolled out to all users on Tuesday, after a beta test period over the last few weeks with some users. Notes let Substack account holders post short status updates along with photos, gifs, links, short messages, might sound familiar, kind of like, I don't know, mastodon, T2 also does this? That's exactly what it reminds me of. A couple of Microsoft stories are getting some attention on the DTNS subreddit, Motang noted that Microsoft patched a five-year-old bug caused by a Windows Defender service that caused high CPU usage by Firefox. That bug was first identified five years ago, and Neon says that Mozilla developers worked with Microsoft to finally get it fixed. The patch will be pushed to all Windows Defender users as part of its definitions update, so you don't have to wait for a Windows update to get it. The other piece of Microsoft news was posted by GreatSeam Mac. Microsoft Teams now supports 26 Snapchat lenses in virtual meetings. The integration uses CameraKit, Snaps SDK that lets its partners use Snap AR features in their own apps and websites. A friend of mine who uses Teams was like, what do I need to download? I was like, nothing, that's the beauty of it. It's built in. It's built in. You're using it. A trio of Google Stories 2 Note as well today, the company is whirling out its Auto Archive feature for Android, so if you turn on the feature, it will delete apps that you don't use, but maintain your personal data so it's easy to restore the app if you need it in the future. Also come in the summer, Fitbit users will have the option to log into their Fitbits with a Google account. Just an option. You don't have to do it right away, but you will have to link a Google account by 2025. And in less good news for Google, Korea's Fair Trade Commission fined the company about $32 million for blocking developers from releasing mobile video games on One Store. That's an alternate Android app store. One Store is run by Search Giant Naver and three Korean telcos. Lots news out of China related to Generative AI. Alibaba announced its answer to chat GPT called Tongyi Changwen, which will work in Chinese and English, launching first on Alibaba's workplace communication platform DingTak, and eventually rolling out to all its products, including e-commerce. This comes a day after SenseTime Group launched SenseChat based on its SenseNova AI model, and Saturday, Huawei launched Pangu, a collection of its AI models for enterprise. Meanwhile Baidu, which was the first out of the gate in China, with its preview of Generative AI Chatbot Ernie, has sued Apple over unauthorized or downright fake Ernie apps being listed in the Apple App Store. As the Generative AI space in China heats up, the cyberspace administration of China announced new rules requiring companies to pass a government security review before they can provide these kinds of services, and the new rules also restrict what content can be produced by the Chatbots and what data they can be trained on. Coincidentally, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a request for public comment Tuesday asking if the U.S. government should put in a certification process for AI models as well. YouTube announced pricing for next season's NFL Sunday ticket, which is moving from Direct TV to YouTube. The short version is that it will be more expensive, but here's the longer version and some more details. If you're a YouTube TV subscriber already, you can get a discount if you sign up by June 6th. After that, the standard price will be $349, or $380 per year if you want to add Red Zone. If you're an NFL fan, it's likely that you do, but that is the channel that shows you important plays of all the games that are underway. Red Zone alone is also available for $10.99 per month if you're a YouTube TV subscriber. If you want to just add Sunday ticket to YouTube without getting YouTube TV, it's $100 a month more, so considering that YouTube TV is already $73 per month, it makes financial sense to get YouTube TV, but hey, they're giving you some options. You can pay $27 extra a month to not get YouTube TV. Yeah, if you don't want us, yeah, just pay more money, we're good. All right, that is like at the quick hits. All right, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved its first ever final consent order for a case of review hijacking. You might say, what does that mean? That refers to when a company merges products into one listing, so the newer or even lower-rated products get the benefit of the higher-rated products' reviews. Here's how it went down. The FTC ordered retailer The Bountiful Company, maker of Nature's Bounty brand of supplements, maker of lots of vitamin supplements basically, to pay $600,000 for deceiving customers on Amazon by merging listings of supplements with different formulations in order to boost overall sales. Now, merging listings is not itself a bad thing or a wrong thing, right, Tom? Yeah, it's meant for things like color variations, right, or size variations. You see a shirt and you want to get it small, medium, large, blue, pink, mauve, whatever. Yeah, are those Nikes available? Yeah, my size. And you want that to be one listing, because you're like, I want the shoes. I just need to customize the size and the color. Even a vitamin maker could use it to give you the option to buy a bottle of the same vitamin with a different number of pills, right? I want the 90-bill bottle or the 120-pill bottle. In this case, though, The Bountiful Company, maker of my vitamin D supplement, exploited this feature to merge its newer products with older, more established products, which weren't the same. So they were putting in things that weren't just the same thing in different amounts in the bottle. And basically, so the lesser-bought vitamins were getting great reviews. Yeah, the FTC said it did this 12 times between 2020 and 2021. Here's an example. One Stress Comfort product had 3.2 stars when it was listed on its own. Then they merged it with four other similar products that weren't the same, and the ratings appeared to be 4.5. And guess what? Sales of stress comfort spiked because people thought it was better than they did when it was rated 3.2. It also got to keep the Amazon Choice label of the other items that it was merged into. This explains some confusion I've seen on Amazon where I'm looking at a product and I'm like, well, wait a minute, it's giving me two options, but these aren't the same thing. Now I know why they were doing it. Have you ever noticed this, either one of you? Nicky, I'll let you go first. I have some thoughts. Yeah, I've seen this before, and I don't know if it's because I plumbed the depths of Amazon and I can't find exactly what I'm looking for, and then I get to the really less-reviewed products. But I've definitely seen products where there's three completely separate objects in one listing. So I'm not surprised by this. I'm annoyed that it's for supplements because I know supplements aren't FDA-regulated, but they should be, so that's a little bit iffy to me. That they did that. Well, that was my thought, too. I had never really thought about the idea of review hijacking, but I have seen it on Amazon specifically, although I'm sure it exists elsewhere. But I've never seen it for anything health-related, even though I do buy vitamins on Amazon. And vitamins are health stuff, but for some people, they're very important health things. So you get into that gray medical area. And so that's where I feel like the FTC was like, you're not going to do this anymore. Would they have come down so hard on that shoe brand where I'm like, well, I like the shoe in my size six that's a pink, but it's given me a blue, but it's also given me a green option that I don't care about. I kind of get it, but when it comes to health, then you got to crack down. Yeah, it doesn't feel as bad when it's like, wait, I just wanted a USB to lightning cable, and now you're showing me an HDMI cable in the listing. Like that's weird. This is a different thing. I guess that's why Amazon doesn't crack down on it. It's a scale problem to crack down on any of this stuff, because it's not like they're looking at the one page, right? They're looking at millions of pages. But there ought to be a system for reporting that sort of thing, and Amazon should have a better system for cracking down. And they haven't had a very good response other than to say they cooperate with the FTC and they're against fraud, which great. I'm glad, but maybe something more specific to this. We hate fraud, but sometimes we miss it. Me too. I am also against fraud. Ah, me and Amazon. Anyway, too much work. Never mind. Well, speaking of fraud and also speaking of USB, the USB, the US FBI tweeted a warning Monday. They are not called the USB. USB are all in there. US FBI. Yeah, the US FBI tweeted a warning on Monday about public USB charging. You might have been in an airport recently saying, isn't it great? They're giving us charging. The post said, quote, avoid free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead. Yeah. And if you really did that two days ago. Oh, see, this is good to know. Well, I mean, and many people do and think that, you know, that's convenience, right? That's why the scammers use it, right? Because they know people are going to do it. You can get a charge only USB cable, and that'll protect you a little bit. But the safest thing is just not to do it at all. Anyway, thank you, FBI, for passing that along. That's a good one. Another good piece of advice in these kinds of situations, airports, hotels, etc. Is to use a VPN if you're on public Wi-Fi. To that end, I thought it was worth pointing out that Katie Malone at Engadget has a great review, very comprehensive of the best VPNs of 2023. She wrote it up, but the whole Engadget team worked on it. They looked at analysis from Consumer Reports, VPN analyzer, which is a good one to bookmark. They have a lot of great source material. If you want to test your own VPN, for example, and they looked at other sources, privacy policies, transparency reports, security audits, they narrowed it down to nine candidates by just looking at what was written out there already. And then they tested those nine across iOS, Android, and Mac. Not sure why they didn't test it on Windows. All of the ones they tested are compatible with Windows. But, you know, for cross-platform compatibility, those were the platforms they used. They found that Proton VPN, which I know is a favorite of Allison Sheridan when she did her own VPN review, it's the one that she picked, was Engadget's top choice for security and ease of use. That's kind of their overall one. And ExpressVPN, which is the one I use, was the best for travel, gaming, and streaming because it has a large number of servers and excellent speed. They also found it secure. There were just a couple little things Proton VPN does that put them in front. What VPN do you use, Sarah? I'm curious. I use Mozilla VPN, and I was sort of disappointed that it wasn't involved in this test because, I don't know. I mean, Mozilla, Firefox, I mean, pretty well-respected as far as the consumer privacy-focused person is concerned. VPN also, but it's not free. You know, I pay monthly for it. Yeah, none of the others that they reviewed were free either, so that should be a reason not to use it. Well, and that's the thing. It's like, you know, the free VPN that you go, well, is this good enough? Likelihood is no. Do not do that. I thought it was odd that they had a free choice. Best free VPN was Windscribe, although it is a VPN you can pay for. It's just that they thought- For extra stuff. Yeah, the free tier was the best free offering of the bunch. I think Proton even has a free tier. ExpressVPN does not, as far as I know. Yeah, I must be out of the loop because I didn't know that we were supposed to be doing this. I thought that VPNs were for like back in the day when you were doing semi- When you're trying to hide your tracks of doing the wrong things. You're trying to watch the Canadian TV show that only streams in Canada. Yeah, and so apparently I should be doing this. Well, I think it's Nicky is that VPNs still are good for that, but that's not the reason that VPNs exist. Yeah, if you want- VPNs exist for, you know, all sorts of reasons where you don't want to be tracked. You know, I was about to be like, for example, when you're doing- It doesn't matter what you're doing, you don't want to be tracked. Anything. It's not even just for not wanting to be tracked. It's for protecting you from man-in-the-middle attacks, from surveillance. If you are on hotel Wi-Fi, coffee shop Wi-Fi, airport Wi-Fi, anything that's public, you should be using a VPN. Another dumb question, is it also on your phone? You can do this on your phone. Yeah, ExpressVPN works great on my phone. Most of it does as well. Yeah, I use that all the time. In fact, ExpressVPN, one of the reasons I keep it over ProtonVPN is because I stream a lot of video in hotels, and I don't want to be off the VPN on hotel Wi-Fi, but I want to be able to watch shows, and it does it very well. I was watching a whole live stream concert on vacation a couple of weeks ago over ExpressVPN, just doing great. So, yeah, you can use these on your phone. You can use them on Android iOS, Mac, Windows, and you should if you're not on your home network. A lot of people even use them on their home network, too. Just to be extra safe. I do. Yeah. Good to know. Folks, let us know what your favorite VPN is. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We love to hear from folks who support the show. Anybody listening out there, if you have a couple of minutes, not going to take you long. It's just a few questions. We'd like you to fill out our latest survey. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you, and what isn't. That's helpful, too. Just visit DailyTechNewShow.com-survey. All right, Dr. Nicky, you brought on a guest to the show to talk about lasers. You know a lot of people who are really smart about a lot of things, science, and specifically laser today. So, Nicky, who was your guest? So, Dr. Enrique Rio is a microbiologist who just happens to be in town visiting the University of Alabama and me. And so, I thought it would be fun to bring him on the show and talk about the latest findings in his research and just nerdy things about the field of microbiology. So, welcome to the show, Enrique. And please tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and the paper that you picked to talk about your work. Hey, Nicky. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for hiring me. Yeah, I just, I am a postdoc that is working with sexual transmitted infections. And I just found this really cool paper that it's a new technique that just allows us to just study up to like 11 of these infections in just one single go. And I thought it would be interesting because it involves using lasers. And yeah, really cool. Yeah, the laser part is definitely what made me want to bring you on to DTS. Yeah. We're all big fans of lasers here. And I'll tell everyone that we actually did our PhDs together at the University of Zurich and you're still post-doc-ing over there. So, we get some fresh Swiss research for the show. So, tell me about what they did in this paper and why you wanted to bring it up. Yeah, sure. Like, I don't know, but you probably figure out, like you have in mind probably that when you're studying bacteria, it takes a little time to just really grow them and be able to characterize them. And the cool part about this technique is that it's actually really fast, that you can really know what bacteria you are studying in a fraction of the time, which is very important when you're talking about infections. So, that's why it's so interesting for us. And the cool thing is like in order to do this, you just shoot them with a laser and destroy them into parts. And that's what you're really looking at, which I think is not many people really think that that's what you usually do to study bacteria. That, yeah, that's what I thought. I didn't realize we use lasers to study bacteria these days. So, what is the sort of example case scenario where you would use this? Yeah, so it's, for example, if you have like a really life-threatening infection and you're not sure what's going on and you really, really need to give information to the medical doctors on how to treat them. So, there was like a really example that is really good for this. There was like a father and a son that went on a cancer trip. And when they come back, they felt like they have gastroenterology problems and sepsis and they went to the hospital. And they were really worried that they didn't know really what was going on. So, they really applied this technique and to try to have in less than a day information about what was the bacteria. And they found out actually it was a bacteria that is called listeria. And it's not really common in humans. So, that was very important to use this kind of like technique because otherwise they will have like overlooked it. So, that was just kind of like a really like quick way of identifying it. So, explain for the tech nerds in the audience, how are you using a laser to figure out whether or not you have listeria after a camping trip? Yeah. So, what would you normally do is you try to grow the bacteria a bit in a fast way. You still need to grow to culture it. And then you just pick a bit of the bacteria that's growing put in like a really tiny plate. And then you just really shoot kind of like a UV laser to it. And this is in a special matrix that there is. And that's really going to like vaporize, ionize in very tiny particles, everything that is in there. The thing is like when you're doing that, that flies, let's say to like a sensor, you know, because the way that the machine is composed, it do vaporize and then get shoot out towards the sensor. And you can actually measure how long does this take. And the cool thing about this is like each bacteria has like its own fingerprint profile. So, you can really look at that bacteria, how the profile looks like and compare it to thousands, thousands of bacteria to 100 database. So, it's really, really accurate. It can be very, very accurate to even a species level. Is there ever a case where you don't know and you're just going to go and look for everything? Is that even possible? Yeah, absolutely. Especially from like a concept of like DNA and the full array of bacteria that we have. Maybe you have heard the microbiome. Like a lot of people is just using this. Yeah, it's using this like a more like broad spectrum PCR, you know, you just don't focus on one bacteria, but all of them at the same time. And this is called like, it has a fancy name. It's called like shotgun metagenomic, you know, like shotgun. Just getting everything. Exactly. You're just like, you just get all of it without any kind of like respect really and amplify all the DNA at once. And that's usually what you do using in research settings because you really want the full picture. You just want as many bacteria as you can to see what they are doing. And how do you know what you're getting? Like, are you able to put a specific label on certain ones? What you usually would do is you just put them all together and just put in like this giant machine that just is reading each of these letters, you know, giving them like little colors to it and just reading all of them at once. Yeah, it can be like a bit complex, but like it basically what it's doing is just you have like a camera that is seen all lots of colors flashing and then we'll just tell you more or less all the letters that say that the DNA is made of and just try and like to you figure it out as you just go like it's a lot of data. Yeah, so computer after that does a bunch of work. Glad we got to talk about this and figure out a little bit more about what you do very quickly. And if people have more questions, where can they find you? Well, I mean, as you say that I'm a researcher at the University of Zurich. So I'm not super active on the web but we definitely have a webpage. So you just go for my name, you will find all kind of the information about the bacteria I work with and what I'm doing. All right, thanks. Thank you, thank you for having me. So Dr. Nicky, that was fun. We explode things with lasers. Yeah, you know, I heard, I knew about Enrique, Dr. Rios Taufek, and I said, maybe the DTNS people would be interested in hearing about how we do this. And he didn't mention it, but he does that sometimes with mummy specimens, where he'll take some samples and explode them with lasers and try and find out what sicknesses they died of. That's always my favorite part, but it's not what he's doing anymore. So he doesn't want me to bring it up, but I think it's cool. Does it cost a lot? Yeah. Yeah, okay, so you can't just do it on a whim. Yeah, for someone who's like, this is so cool, like what are we talking and why is it cost per hand? It depends what you're doing. So if, like sometimes if you know exactly what you're looking for, so he talks about these two different techniques if you know what you're looking for, you can go for a specific pathogen or bacteria. That is relatively expensive because you're doing piece by piece, but if you're doing this Malditoff, you're taking a sample and doing them all at once. And so that's less expensive, but because all of this is happening in a lab, it's always expensive. So it's expensive, but this is actually saving you some money by doing it this way? Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, instead of going through like the most highly, like the candidates that you have the highest chance that it might be, you can just shoot them on the machine. So if you're, you know, need to do it fast, like happen with those campers, Malditoff is the way to go. You know, for anybody who's listening to this and saying, wow, this is really cool technology, really cool science technology, how will it affect daily life going forward? Maybe not, maybe not going to be tomorrow, but what do you think, Nikki? But like for science, a lot of different ways, we will learn more things about bacteria. Right now, Dr. Rao is working on a chlamydia study and trying to figure out why chlamydia and gonorrhea happen at the same time using these kinds of techniques. So actually it has a lot of direct impacts on people. And I think when you have chlamydia, you want to find out about it and cure it quickly. So yeah, it will have direct impact. Is it practical enough to, so we had the case of the campers with Listeria and they were able to find it out quickly. Is it something that anyone can use or was that a unique situation, do you think? It depends what hospital you're at. I guess anyone can use it if the urgency is high enough, but if it's not that urgent, you'd probably go towards PCR, like we've been doing for COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a little bit more routine. It's more common, right? You're going to have that in lots of times. PCR is a little kit that you could have anywhere. So this is a mass spec machine. It's giant. So you have to have it there. I'm sure as time goes on, it'll get smaller and smaller and we'll have one on our phone at some point, but not yet. How did you find out about this? I mean, Dr. Rao and I did our PhD together. So we talk about this stuff all the time. And I was trying to figure out if there's any way I could get my goats to do anything with this. And I don't think we can, but I was like- Your goats? Yeah, my goat research. You know, Nikki loves her goats. Yeah. I was like, can we take their spit and put it in the mass spec and find out? And he's like, no. Well, not yet. I mean, we can, but it wouldn't answer any questions that I care about, basically. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. When you say I got your goat to Nikki, it means something entirely different to her. I started to get worried. Yeah, exactly. Like, what did you do with it? She's like, in what way? Yeah, where? Why would you do that? There's a very expensive goat. Don't go like them. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Mike and Dubai thanks us for our coverage of the Kareem story on yesterday's episode. Mike says, as a Kareem user, I appreciated learning about the update. The app's role for payments is critical for expats in the UAE, you know, I'd Arab Emirates, since many services are increasingly requiring an Emirati bank account. Kareem lets you pay for many of these services, including highway tools with a US card, making life a lot easier. The name is a slime modification of the word name Kareem with a K, which means generous in Arabic. Mike says, thanks for keeping me on top of tech wherever I am in the world. Oh, and thank you for the insight in the name of Kareem. Appreciate that. Mike's been around the DTNS audience for a long time. It's good to hear from you. Indeed, yeah. Mike, you always give us good info as well, so keep it coming. Absolutely. And then Josh, who also has been around the community for a long time, wrote in and said, your comment about liking AirPods reading messages struck a chord. My phone is set to Japanese for the operating system, but when I get a Slack message in English, it reads it in English with a Japanese accent. It is hilarious, especially since my cousin's name is Kern, K-E-A-R-N, but it reads it as Khan. I'm not sure that's exactly, but that's the way he spelled it. Even funnier since he is a huge Trekkie. It seems to be picky and sometimes doesn't read it, possibly depending on the app. He suggests that I should set my phone to Korean. Just hear what it says. You know, Tom, I feel like that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for you. Hey. That's kind of fun. Oh, I love that. You know, see what works, see what doesn't. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send your thoughts, your questions, your comments, your ideas. Please keep them coming. You make our show better every day. Also, Dr. Nicky Ackermann's making our show better today. Dr. Nicky, where can people keep up with your work? As usual on my website at nickcoalackermanns.com, and for now, still on Twitter at Ackermanns.com, and potentially over on Mastodon, but still haven't really merged over yet. I'm going to wait till everything burns down. You're not the only one. If you want to find out about Nicky's goats, if you're still confused, go to Nicole Ackermanns. You can learn all about them. Also known as Dr. Headbutt. That's where the goat things. I'm jealous of the goats. And you know, who doesn't like a goat? Speaking of goats. Everyone loves goats. Yeah. Speaking of goats, a special thanks to Lewis Butler, a goat of sorts for us. One of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Yes, greatest of all time. That is what you are, Lewis. You are a goat. And thanks for all the years of support. Be like Lewis. Join our patron. If you're listening to the free feed, you're going to get extra stuff. You're going to get the editor's choice. You're going to get the extended show, Good Day Internet. In fact, patrons got a chance to ask us questions on Patreon. We're going to talk to them and the live audience for an Ask Me Anything. If you are a patron, you're going to get that extended show right now. Stick around. You can also catch our show live Monday through Friday. Have you heard the good word? 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We do it every week, Tim. We'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.