 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. We could not do it without you, Jeffrey Zilx, Kriya Artam, Tony Glass, and new patrons. So many new patrons taking advantage of the free preview week last week, and keeping it going, Victor, RL, Sylvain, Mark, Hermit, Kevin, and Legion Podcasts. On this episode of DTNS is a wearable screen-realist AI device future, or FAD, Apple's building a search engine and bad news for over-the-air broadcasts. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 2nd, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From Keeping the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Now it's October. Now I will accept Pumpkin Spice into my life. September is a little early. I'll tell you, not for many, Anchor. I know. I mean, I mean, my wife. By the multitudes contained within your wife. Yeah. I mean, she drinks enough of it. I'll tell you that. PSL. That's the new, that's the new hot waiter to refer to it. Kids tell me. Let's start with the QH. Google introduced Chromebook Plus, a label to certify models of Chromebooks approved by Google. To get the Chromebook Plus designation, your Chromebook must have either an Intel Core i3 or higher or an AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU or better, an IPS panel with at least 1080p resolution, a 1080p webcam, 1080p webcam, at least eight gigabytes of RAM, and at least 128 gigs of storage. All Chromebooks, plus or not, are required to have at least 10 hours of battery life. So it's no different for the plus ones. Chromebook Plus laptops also get access to some exclusive Chrome OS features like the Magic Eraser in photos, automatic noise cancellation when you're doing video calls, offline file sync, a few others, and customers who buy Chromebook Plus devices also get free trial subscriptions, not to Google stuff, to GeForce Now and Photoshop on the web. Lenovo, HP, and Acer all have their Chromebook Plus certifications ready to slap on the models for sale later this month. Android Authority found code in the latest version of the TikTok app, indicating that it will offer ad-free monthly subscriptions in the United States for $4.99 a month. The code included text that said, quote, we are testing the ad-free plan with the TikTok community, end quote. Android Authority got the offer to load on some, but not all of its accounts. For $5.99 a month, they won't let the government of China look at it. While Coinbase is facing increased regular, we're banned in China anyway. I know. While Coinbase is facing increased regulatory scrutiny in multiple areas of the world, including the United States, it just received a regulatory win in Singapore. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has granted the cryptocurrency exchange a major payment institute license. This lets Coinbase offer digital payment token services to retail and institutional customers. The Block.co points out that Singapore has granted these kinds of full licenses to around a dozen crypto operators now. Tokyo's Subame Industries is selling a 4.5 meter tall, 3.5 ton four-wheeled humanoid robot for $3 million called RCAX. A human pilot sits inside where they can view monitors and control the arms and hands of the robot with a joystick. It can sort of kneel down for a vehicle mode and reach speeds up to 10 kilometers per hour. Yes, it's basically a Gundam and that's intentional. 25 year old CEO Roy Yashida plans to sell five of these machines to robot fans, but also hopes that he might find uses in disaster relief or in the space industry someday. I'm imagining this as a Kickstarter with like we have five available for $3 million, we will hit our $15 million goal if we do that. The Google Pixel announcement is coming Wednesday, October 4th, but Google has already announced almost everything about the Pixel 8, the Pixel 8 Pro and the Pixel Watch 2. I'm not even talking about leaks and rumors. I'm talking about things that actually said by Google. We're pretty much just waiting for the official confirmation of the price and to get a good look at what it looks like. But in fact, you can see it now. YouTube channel PBKReviews has two videos purporting to show you the unboxing of the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro. Meanwhile, if you'd like a more surprising launch, a little more suspense in your product announcement, Samsung India teased an announcement for the same day as the Pixel announcement, October 4th. And that is expected to be for the Galaxy S23 FE. FE stands for Fan Edition. They do these with the galaxies where they include some tweaks and improvements based on user feedback, special colors, stuff like that. And that is a look at the quick hits. All right, Justin, let's start with a couple pieces of Apple news for folks. Individibly, Tom, last week we mentioned that Analyst Ming-Chi Quo suspected that the iPhone 15's new titanium case was causing complications leading to reports of overheating. Quo expected Apple would address it with a software update. And Apple uncharacteristically has commented on an issue with words. It said that the overheating was caused by a bug in iOS 17 that will be addressed in a software update. Apple also said updates to Uber, Instagram and the game Asphalt 9 overload the system. Instagram has already updated its app with the fix. Apple also told Mac rumors that the new titanium frame did not cause the problem. That's a lot of talking about stuff for Apple. That's that's really interesting. Other Apple news and his power on newsletter. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, again, if you don't know, has an excellent track record on this sort of stuff reports on Apple's continuing work on search. Gurman sources say that Apple Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI strategy and, by the way, former Google executive, John John Andrea, oversees a, quote, giant search team. We assume that means the team has a lot of people. Not that it's made up of Gundams. Their engine is codenamed Pegasus and Apple uses it already to power the instant results in Syrian spotlight. Google provides the deep results. But, you know, when you see those instant things that show up, apparently that's Apple using its own Pegasus magic. Gurman says Pegasus will soon be used for search in the App Store, which would be a big increase of its use and a direct revenue generating use because the App Store ads generate a nice chunk of change for Apple. So everybody's asking, Justin, oh, is this Apple going to go for Google now? Are they going to make their own search engine? Are they going to do to Google what they did with maps or at least tried to do with maps? Let me actually take one step back before we get into the search. I totally buy the fact that this was a 17 issue and has nothing to do with the titanium case because I am getting the new iPhone. But I don't have the iPhone yet. And my phone, which often uses it for an Instagram, has been overheating. So I tend to buy that as the reason, as opposed to the titanium case. On search, I think that we probably, especially on a show like this, should have a conversation on what search is. Because I do think it means a bunch of different things. Most notably, we think of search is synonymous with Google, which is web search. Right. And web search matters a lot to Google because they can sell ads, ad words on top of those results. And we do it constantly, became a huge way of how we navigate around the Internet, if not the way that we navigate around the Internet. But in a world where we spend so much time within our own devices and apps, there has also been a largely unsolved question of searching for things inside of walled gardens. Think of Netflix, of ways that you can better find things that you would want to watch. If you look at a platform like Apple, which has so much data about you, but very purposely wants to make it a habit that they don't sell it and they don't sell advertising on it. I think with AI, I would be very, very shocked if they don't have a new way to look and power what we would refer to as in ecosystem search. And for Apple, iCloud data, all of your preferences of how, well, what you open, when you open it, which they're already using. I think it could be extraordinarily powerful. Yeah. And I think it's worth pointing out again that this team that Gurman is talking about is run by Apple's vice president, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. Yes. So it would be very Apple to say, we're not trying to make a search engine. That would be like us saying, you know, in 1998, should we make news groups? Yeah. Apple focuses on what does the user need to do? And, you know, sometimes we use that as a punchline for Apple. But I could see Apple saying, what the user does when they use search is not I want to use a search engine. The user says, I want an answer to a question. I want to find the answer to something. I want to find something. And so machine learning and search indexing combined can deliver answers. And those answers right now are the instant search could be the app store. And I like what you're talking about, Justin, of like, you know, what about just finding my files and finding facts from my own notes and things like that? Combine that with the fact that people don't search. I'm searching on Google is an old person thing. Yeah. Search. People search elsewhere. They I my wife is Gen Z at heart. Forget what it says on a driver's life. Identifies as Gen Z. She when she searches for things, she searches on tick tock. A lot of people search for things on YouTube. So yeah, search engines are kind of an old thing. I'm not saying they're going away, but if I'm creating something new, I'm not going to create the old thing. Again, that's like creating news groups in 1999. I'm going to figure out, well, what is it? People are using a search like thing for and create that. I've spent a lot of time this weekend trying to figure out the best solution for a virtual AI assistant and something that I would feel comfortable giving access to my emails, access to my calendar, stuff like that. And largely it's because I want to be able to have something that could go back and say, Hey, when's the last time that I talked to Tom about no a little more remind me every five days that I don't talk to Tom about not a little more to, to in the morning, just send me a text. Hey, reminder, you haven't done that. You should probably send him. Do you want me to send him a text that says blank with a guess of what, where we left the last conversation. Like there, there's a lot of stuff that I think is just on the surface that we now have the tech for that a company like Apple can really take advantage of, especially if you can do a portion of it on device and only be leaking out to the cloud periodically. I think that there's, there's some extraordinarily powerful stuff. Yeah, especially if you keep it local, like you said, prosaic example here, but one of our editors will for no a little more was asking, where is that file that has the new credits at the end? Yeah, I found it for him by scrolling back into the conversation to where I had mentioned it last because I remembered mentioning it. I would not expect him to scroll back there, but an AI could have an AI could have jumped in and said, hey, well, it's here, you know, because it knows the whole conversation. So yeah, that's that's pretty good. Before we get off the Apple stuff, though, a final quick check, Justin, with your take on X, you have been very positive about the prospects of S formerly Twitter, just news today, Apple no longer offering customer support on X. Send a DM to Apple support or out reply them with a support. They instruct you to visit the support page on Apple's website and talk to them directly there. Yes, X for a million years, the million year reign of X has only just begun. Look, I I tend to be bullish on X in against the takes that it's going away tomorrow. I tend to be long on X in in in that context. As for Apple taking their their customer service off it, I think they probably could have done that on Twitter, to be totally honest with you, if you looked at the audience that was on Twitter. The fact of the matter is that we're diversifying. We're splintering a long, long, long ago has Pangea shattered and we are only further and further away on distant islands, waving to ever softening dots. Yeah. Yeah. So what you're saying is they're they're just on the coast of North America as it drifts away from Europe. That's yeah. And now, like everything else, you got to go to a stupid FAQ that has talked to it, a chatbot that may or may not be a website. Who use websites anymore? Barf. All right. Let's talk about another piece of old tech trying to stay new LG saying it will no longer support ATSC 3.0 in its TVs next year because of uncertainty over patents. Let me tell you what ATSC three point is. ATSC 3.0 is an over the air broadcast technology that is being branded as next gen TV. So if you've seen it referred to generally, it might be as next gen. It would add 4K right now, digital broadcasts only do 1080p. It would add HDR. It would add Dolby Atmos. It would add some interactive elements. It would add the ability to be received by Qualcomm chips over the air on mobile devices. It also adds things like DRM as well. So there's some downsides to it as well. But LG has been an early supporter of this and is now withdrawing its support because it lost a court case and the patent freedom is not clear. Visio and TCL have also decided not to support it in their TVs. Justin, I'm not sure even how familiar you were with this. Had have you heard much about it? Unless we talked about it on this show, almost certainly not. Although I think that that is more to do with the fact that TVs are kind of barely hanging on to the sphere of coverage that we would call tech. I think that it is it is almost legacy to the point of nostalgia that we even refer to it as as tech. It is more answering machine than it is AI, in my opinion, and largely because it has been like much technology commoditized. And this is yet another example of how not only television manufacturers could give a feature to consumers while also giving something to stakeholders that would help populate it with content. But ultimately, people really don't care. They just want the biggest television that is at the cheapest price. They care less about brand. They care less about features than they ever have. I agree. And I feel like ATSC 3.0 in another world, I would be saying, it's just a patent fight. LG wants to support it, they'll figure it out and they'll come back. But ATSC 3.0 smells like cable card to me. Yeah, it smells like something that's a little more complicated than it needs to be to be implemented easily. And if you can't implement it easily by the time you implement it, it's not going to be needed anymore. I think in 10 years, nobody's going to be doing over the air broadcast. It's just it's just going to be obviated. There's another standard for over the air broadcast called 5G broadcast. Boston's W.W.O.O. is testing that one. That one uses the 5G spectrum. And again, the cool thing about both of these ATSC and 5G is that chips in your phones can receive them so that you don't have to use your your bandwidth, your data in order to receive TV. And there's something compelling about that. I'm not sure that it's compelling enough to make people use it, though, when bandwidth is becoming pretty ubiquitous and easier to use all the time. And in 10 years, it's just going to be super easy to use. It's just going to make more sense to just get the video over your data connection. I just I just think they're going to lose this race. I also just think that as far as over the air stuff, I'm a little bit more bullish than you are on it. But in a commoditized device market, that just means that everything forward from here is more consumer friendly, which means less things that would have DRM like just sell better. We're just going to have cheaper, easier ways that you could take advantage of over the air stuff as opposed to having something that would be more complicated or in any way, possibly confusing. Well, folks, if you've got a different take on this, you're like, Tom Tom Tom over the air is going to win or or Justin, the DRM is great. I don't know. Whatever your opinion is, get in touch with us on the socials. It's at DTNS show on X and on mastodon. We're at MSTDN dot social at daily tech news show on tiktok and DTNS picks with an S DTNS PIX on Instagram and threads. Last week, when we talked about the report that Johnny Ive was helping design a device for Sam Altman's open AI, we mentioned that Altman was an investor in a company run by some former Apple employees, Humane. Humane has showed off its AI pin in public for the first time during fashion week at company's Paris fashion show. Naomi Campbell modeled it. She became the first person to wear the device in public. If you recall way back in May, we talked about humane co-founder Imran Chandra describing the device in a TED talk. If you remember, we were critical that he never showed the device. He projected its display on his hand. He translated some English to French on the fly, demonstrated a news catch up feature, but now we actually got to see it. It's a little black square you wear in your shirt or coat. Humane calls it a clothing based device. It has a Qualcomm chip inside. They've confirmed that doesn't have a wake word, so it's not always listening, doesn't have a screen, doesn't have to connect to a smartphone to be used, but we don't know any other details about it. However, humane said it will make full unveiling of AI pin happened November 9th, so we're going to get more details on it November 9th. Meanwhile, I've heard some folks saying that this kind of thing, like an AI based device, whether it's from open AI or humane or somebody else, is where we're headed in the post smartphone age of gadgets. Oh, always dangerous, Justin, to try to speculate on the future. But what do you think of all of this? The buzziness of people saying, ah, this is the direction. This is the next big thing. Well, what we really talk about, in my opinion, when you talk about AI is just faster and more impressive computing power, right? We are just kind of unlocking a lot of the hardware stuff that we have and doing more with it. There's a reason why chat GPT was very, very successful for open AI. And it's because the smartphone you had, the the PC that you had was now just more powerful. You could just do more with it much in the same way that a lot of web innovations did that for that kind of hardware. So if you try to guess where the most powerful way that you are going to go forward with that will be translation is not a bad guess. We've seen a lot of very, very impressive and impactful translation stuff that has happened with chat GPT, for example. But I don't know if this is it. Now, that being said, these kind of devices never really run in a straight line. You had to have a few different interesting, but not all the way their devices before you got to smartphones like the iPhone and the Pixel, which we can understand now has been a very popular device that people have flocked to for now over a decade with fairly little hardware modifications to it beyond upping the specs. But you had to get a sidekick. You had to get a candy bar before it before you had to get flip phones with cameras before we understood what the market wanted. So we're going to have a lot of these. I don't look at this immediately and say, oh, my God, this is it. Because if it was, oh, my God, this is it. We would have seen a feature that we would have yelled, oh, my God, this is it when we saw it. Yeah, sitting here thinking about this, it comes to mind that usually it's not software, which is what AI is that drives new devices. It's hardware. It wasn't, you know, fast computing or higher bandwidth that drove the success of the iPhone. It was the touchscreen. So to say, oh, AI is going to drive us into new devices feels a little bit like saying the cart is going to lead the horse. I feel like you you need to have the device that makes you go, oh, that's a new way to interact with something. And then the software can take better advantage of that. Otherwise, people will say, well, why do I need that clunky thing that projects on my hand when I have a phone in my pocket? And I can just talk to it through my headphones. Like you have to give people a really compelling reason to add a new thing to their repertoire. Yeah, I think the argument for AI being a accelerant is that AI is so powerful that it just needs specific hardware. It doesn't need new hardware. It just needs specifically designed hardware to do something that could really make your life better. And that ultimately what we've seen is not necessarily a post smartphone era, but a the smartphone is king and we like vassal devices, you know, we like AirPods, we like Apple Watches, we like things that can give us some of that smartphone experience other places. And I think this would be an example of that if, you know, you could wear a little pin, which even when I say it makes it sound so aristocratic that 90% of the world would never want it. But call it a brooch. If you were, yes, if you went to Oxford or are in the State Department and you normally wear pocket squares or brooches, then this would be a device for which you could very easily translate. So if you're in, again, another thing that 90% of the world doesn't have to care about, but I'm going to Europe soon. If I have this now, instead of saying, excuse me, excuse me, can I point at my Google translate and ask for them to do a thing? Now I could just say, excuse me, where is the blah, blah, blah? Turn on a button and I could see a live translation of what they're saying. And now have it, I generate a thing that I can just show them that would get me faster into the conversation. Slim use cases. But then again, a use case that might be swayed by Naomi Campbell wearing it at a Paris fashion show. Don't underestimate. Yeah, don't sleep on Naomi. For that audience, for that audience target demo, we're doing OK. Staying in the realm of fashion. If you're a sneakerhead, Cooler Master has a PC for you. It has begun selling its sneaker shaped PC under the Cmod X brand called the sneaker X or perhaps the sneaker 10 if you're so inclined. It has Intel Core i7 13700 K CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 GP 32 gigs of memory, two terabytes of storage and a liquid cooling system. It had originally been teased earlier this year as costing five thousand dollars. But don't it sound like a bargain now where it's only Justin? Oh, thousand four hundred ninety nine. Run, don't walk. And really, they're sneakers. You could also pay more if you want and get a 4070 TI GPU. And in Europe, you could pay even more. You can get a 4080 from for the GPU. A Core i9 AMD Ryzen 9 7950. But yes, the important part isn't just the specs that you'll be using to play games on this. It's that it's shaped like a good looking sneaker, I would say. Yeah, obviously, that's up to your own personal opinion. But if you are going to be spending anywhere between thirty five and five thousand dollars on a PC that looks like a sneaker, it indeed looks like a sneaker. I will imagine that this will be a gift for, you know, 16 year olds and a bar mitzvahs throughout the Tri-County area. Yeah, listen, if you're going to send us some feedback on this and that feedback is going to be, I would never pay thirty five hundred dollars for a PC shaped like a sneaker, send it, please do. Just know we will not add it and go, yeah, that's what I would expect people to say, however, if you're the person who's like, oh, yeah, give me two, I want to wear them. Can I get it in left and right? I will spend more than thirty five hundred dollars. Yeah, we definitely want to hear from you. Feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. And we might even read it on the show like we're about to read this email. Indeed, Tom Stealth Dave writes, I'm a long time user of Raspberry Pi products and I have models ranging from the Pi two, Pi three, Pi four and Pi zero, as well as several Pi Pico microcontrollers. One area where the Raspberry Pi excels is in embedded systems where you want computing power in something that you might not necessarily expect on my ongoing projects as a magical lantern that allows you to cast Harry Potter like spells using the reflective tip of a wand like they do at Universal Studios theme parks. My setup includes a Raspberry Pi three B with a camera and program programmable LED lights. The pie uses machine learning to track the wand tip for quote unquote spells and then runs a little light show inside the lantern. I just I discovered the hard way that the pie three doesn't have quite an apporced power for machine learning. So I'm in the process of upgrading it to a pie four. But if that doesn't work, I'm definitely going to be given the latest update ago. Oh, that's so cool stuff, Dave. Thanks for sending that along. I want to see pictures too. Once you once you get this up and go in, which I have no doubt you will. Yes. Also, a random thought from Professor Metcalf, by the way, Prof Metcalf, one of the people that named know a little more, know a little more. So shout out to you for that idea. I spent several years doing web security and I always told my clients not to advertise admin areas in the robots.txt file, which we talked about on Friday. It was common knowledge that bad actors looked at that to find out where to focus their resources. So I made sure the admin areas were never in the default location and never published anywhere. But after the discussion about search engines the other day, it made me curious, are there any search engines which only crawl and return results that are listed as don't crawl or don't index in robots.txt? I did a little snooping on Google, but wasn't able to find anything. So I thought I'd toss it out there and see if anybody in the audience has heard of one. It seems like it could be a valuable resource for white hackers to find exploits they could patch. And of course, it would also, by contrast, be a place for black hat hackers to find possible targets as well. I don't know of anything either off the top of my head, but that is an intriguing thought because honoring the don't index is a voluntary thing that all responsible search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo and Bing and everybody else honor. But you wouldn't have to. And you could use it as an alternate signal. That's interesting. If you are hanging a banner outside of your domain saying, do not crawl this. It might be an interesting place to crawl. If it's still public on the internet, like if you really don't want people in there, you need to wall it off, but take that down. Yeah, yeah. Well, Justin, Robert Young, always a pleasure chatting with you, my friend. What do you got going on? Well, we are in the middle of our latest season of Know a Little More. It has been an absolute pleasure to put this together with Tom. The mother of all demos is our overarching theme. Some of the most impactful features in computing all previewed in one demo back in 1968. It is amazing. Go ahead and check it out. Listen, I've been getting the edits for these ahead of them getting published. And often I listen to the edit and I'm like, wow, this is a really good show. Yeah, I don't remember actually being involved in it as it gets so much better after it leaves my hands. So I highly encourage people to subscribe at know a little more.com or if you want to get ad free, patreon.com slash know a little more. Speaking of patrons, if you're a patron of this show, stick around as a member, you get the extended show, Good Day Internet, the Airbnb policy director, the same Airbnb policy director that fought the rental of party houses during lockdown is now, as of today, a U.S. Senator. Justin is going to explain. Indeed, I will. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. That's right. It's Tuesday, but still Scott Johnson.