 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Paul Boyer, Brad, and Kevin. Coming up on DTNS, part two of our discussion of what the heck Apple's product announcement strategy is these days plus how Firefox is helping ad blockers and are we still feeling okay about TikTok? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, lovely to be back with you all again, isn't it? Well, you see that now. Yeah, I say that now. Let's just find out what's in the quick hits first. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella informed employees that the company will cut 10,000 jobs by March. That's about 5% of its workforce. Unclear where Microsoft will be making the cut specifically, but this does mark the company's second largest round of layoffs in its history. After cutting 18,000 jobs back in 2014, with many cuts at that time tied to its Nokia business. But it's not just Microsoft. After announcing more impending layoffs earlier this month, Amazon continues to eliminate more jobs as well. The cuts started last year, particularly hitting Amazon's Devices and Services Group. The latest round is said to mostly affect Amazon's retail division, human resources, and added to previous rounds. We'll end up totaling around 18,000 positions lost. The largest job cuts in Amazon's history. Alright, so that's kind of a bummer, but this one's good. Samsung expanded its self-repair program to include laptops for the first time. So it's now offering parts and repair guides for the 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360. It also added the Galaxy S22 smartphone line to the program. Twitter launched annual subscriptions for its Twitter blue service, so users can purchase these on the web for $84 per year. It's 12% less than paying monthly on the web, or 36% less than a monthly iOS subscription. New revenue is important for Twitter, as the information sources say that Twitter's daily revenue as of January 17th was down 40% from the same day a year ago, with more than 500 advertisers pausing spending on the site. Now, perhaps Twitter will make more than expected from its auction of various office items, which ended Wednesday. I missed out on that Aims desk. Discord has acquired a four-member team behind GAS, a social media app aimed at teens. We talked about this a while ago in DTNS. Users sign up for GAS by school, so I wasn't able to test it out because I don't go to a school. Then you add friends, and you answer poll questions that are intended to boost your confidence. So users selected in a poll would get an anonymous message with a compliment and a vague detail like, this came from a girl in 11th grade. Discord said that, quote, GAS will continue as its own standalone app, and the GAS team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences. Norwegian shipping register DNV confirmed that its ship manager software system was infected by ransomware on January 7th, forcing it to shut down its servers. DNV's ship manager lets its customers monitor operational, technical, and compliance features of a shipping fleet, so things like repairs, crew schedules, and other record keeping. TechCrunch said more than 7,000 vessels used the software, but that 1,000 vessels had actually been affected. Affected ships can continue to use onboard offline functions of the software. DNV says that it's confident its servers were not affected, but has not determined if any data was actually compromised. Yeah, and I actually, thanks to Big Jim for helping me understand this story. Depending on what data may or may not be compromised, it will depend on whether this is a pretty big deal or not. So, there you go. Alright, let's talk a little more about what's going on with ad blocking. Let's do it. So, R.W. Nash pointed out in our subreddit, and thanks for this by the way, that The Verge has a story called Firefox Found a Way to Keep Ad Blockers Working with Manifest V3. Firefox 109 released Tuesday with support for Manifest V3, also known as MV3, a standard for browser extensions. The short version is that Mozilla is following through on a promise to update its support for extensions, but in a way that doesn't harm how certain ad blockers work. Here's a little bit more that you need to understand this story, Tom. Yeah, so Manifest in this particular case is a file format. It includes a bunch of info. What browser version this extension works with, how long it's been around, and it defines what browser features an extension can access. Manifest version 2, or MV2, allowed an extension to load code from a remote server. So an ad blocker, for instance, could update some definitions as it went. It could also access a feature called Web Request. That might ring a bell if you listened to our discussion last June. Ad blockers use that feature to block traffic to and from domains known to serve ads. And some ad blockers, like Ghostry, for example, also modify data that could be used to fingerprint you and replace it with generic data in order to further protect your privacy from ad tracking. Now ad blockers use those features for the purpose of blocking ads, of course. That makes sense. However, malicious extensions could take advantage of MV2 to hijack login credentials or insert more ads into the page. That's no fun. Like any software function, it can be misused. So monitoring extensions is important. However, it's a whole lot easier to just change things so that misuse isn't actually possible. That's what Google pushed for MV3. Yeah, so they replaced Web Request with declarative net request. That's the feature that lets you still block domains. You just have to say which ones you're going to block ahead of time. You have to list them. Ghostry's attempt to block fingerprint has to happen at runtime, so it could not be declared ahead of time. And that and some other things would no longer work well under declarative net request. Now if you were following the story, there was a lot of noise around this last summer, but here's what happened. Mozilla promised to come up with a way to support MV3 and also continue to support Web Request. That's what it pushed out in Firefox 109. This lets extensions like Ghostry and others continue to work as usual in Firefox while also taking advantage of the rest of MV3. Also makes it easier for developers to design a multi-platform extension that can work in Chrome and also Firefox. Yeah, so Firefox has done what it said it was going to do as of right now. Google on the other hand seems to have blinked. It originally set summer 2023 as the deadline and of support for MV2. However, Ghostry and other extensions have not updated their Chrome extensions to support MV3. On December 9th, Google said that timeline for getting rid of MV2 is now under review and experiments that would test what happens if you turned MV2 off have now been delayed. So as of this moment, you can still do Web Request as an ad blocking extension and get all the stuff from MV3. It's all in both browsers. So here's my initial question. I think I have my head wrapped around how this actually works, but how much does Google really care that some third-party ad blocker is not updating its side of the bargain to work well with MV3? Because they don't want the backlash, right? A bunch of users of Chrome suddenly go, wait, why doesn't Ghostry work? And Ghostry says, because Chrome did an update, talked to Google. And they also don't want to have bad developer relations with Ghostry and others too. I think they'd rather come to an agreement of some sort. So I feel like that's why they've backed down. They've been sort of forced into it. Such a tricky relationship because on the one hand, Google continues to be an ad serving juggernaut. It's a huge primary part of their business. And on the other hand, they can't be seen or even actively do things that get in the way of this kind of stuff. Because if they do, then they're accused of all sorts of malfeasance and those who are trying to do... But I get it. I get why it's a weird relationship because they would like us to never block an ad again. If we could help it, they don't want malicious ads. And honestly, I think the Chrome folks are fine with ad blocking. They're just trying to strike a balance because they've got some internal pressures. Like you say. Well, a day after its M2 chip and refreshed Mac line announcements, Apple said, We're not done. We're going to announce a second gen HomePod speaker, which adds an S7 processor previously used in the Apple Watch 7, Thread radios, and also support for matter. Also has an active temperature and humidity sensor for smart home automations. And a software update in the spring will let it listen for smoke or carbon monoxide alarms. Now, like the original HomePod, it can be used in a stereo pair with another HomePod of the same model, which is important, and as speakers for the Apple TV. Available for pre-order now for $299 shipping February 9th. So you're like, wait a minute, do you talk about Apple stuff yesterday? We did. We talked about those MacBooks. And if this was going to be a new way of announcing products for Apple, or if this is all just them scrambling because of supply chain problems and a delayed mixed reality headset. The mixed reality headset is still expected to launch this year, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman's sources say Apple will delay the launch of a follow-up pair of lightweight augmented reality glasses. So there's going to be the first gen and then they were going to do a lightweight version after that. Instead, Apple is going to follow that first gen with a lower cost version of the first gen sometime in 2024 or possibly early 2025. Gurman claims that Apple's first mixed reality headset will cost around $3,000 and use one of those M2 processors. While the follow-up headset would use a lower power, probably a series iPhone processor and cost around half the amount, still $1,500. So let's pick up where we left off with Nika Monford and Rich Strafolino on Tuesday. Given these two new pieces of the puzzle, dropping a new home pod the day after you announced the new laptops, and these leaks about a mixed reality headset timeline change, Scott, what do you think Apple's product strategy is? Well, it seems different than usual. I will say that it's hard to say whether this is a long-term plan or not. Maybe supply chain still plays a role in how this is happening. But clearly they said, these things which are normally good mentions at a bigger event, we don't need to have Tim Cook get up and do that. We don't need to go film a special thing for it. We can just put it out there. And that's not to say they haven't done this in the past with smaller, more low-level product increases like, oh, this MacBook and a little extra RAM. Well, of course, they're not going to do a full-stage presentation for that MacBook RAM upgrade. But them doing this for, I think, reasonably higher-level products, higher interest products is a change. That's a sea change. And I don't know if it means they're going to keep doing it or not. We'll have to wait and see if there's a second time. But I think it's great. I think save your huge stuff like your mixed reality headsets that are reportedly coming or your next big phone changes or whatever. Save those for your big events. But make more room during the year for exciting new announcements. I have to admit, I got excited about the new HomePod, even though I thought the first one was overpriced and not something for me. Things have changed. And I'm more interested in that device than I was before. And I'm certainly interested in the M2 upgrades from yesterday. So they were kind of nice. I don't feel like I have to wait until the next WWDC or I have to wait until the next fall update or whatever. I can actually hear this stuff happening more quickly. And they kind of got me with it. I can't speak for everybody else, but it feels like good timing. Yeah, I think if the HomePod was bundled into yesterday's announcements, it would have been a little bit more buried. So this makes sense to say like it's HomePod day. That said, the HomePod in general has always been a little confusing to me. When it was first released, I think it was $349. Everybody said, well, it sure looks nice and Apple's touting. It's the best audio experience ever. And you've got Siri in a smart speaker and an Apple product at home. And it wasn't like a runaway hit. A lot of people said, well, I mean, you're a little late to the game, Apple. You're more expensive than everybody else. And a lot of people just have already figured out other alternatives. And the HomePod sort of just went away. You had the HomePod mini, but for the most part the HomePod was kind of like kind of a dud in general. It's back. It's a little bit cheaper. The specs are more or less the same. They do kind of fun stuff. But they've also pulled back a tiny bit on some of the, you know, like there's two fewer tweeters than the original HomePod, for example. Some people will care about that. Other people won't. But yeah, I kind of wonder why Apple is more or less making it seem like we've got this new product. But it's sort of the same. Thread is the answer to that. Because Apple is always late and always more expensive. But sometimes that doesn't matter. And it mattered with the HomePod. And that is the question of like, well, why did it matter? And I think part of the reason was these things are used for two things, playing music and controlling your smart home. And basically people didn't want to do either one of those with the HomePod. They were either listening to Spotify too much or they were using smart home devices that weren't compatible. Putting thread in here suddenly makes it so that you can easily control anything. And you can switch from using an Echo or a Google or a Nest home to controlling your smart home. So I think they're giving it another shot there. If I were Apple, I know Apple will never do this. I'd be advertising the fact that you can play Spotify on this thing and suddenly you're going to sell a bunch more of them. Yeah, if they pushed just Apple music, I think that'd be a mistake. But it's funny because my decision about possibly picking one of these up has to do with that very thing. I've been in the Echo ecosystem for a very long time. And those Amazon devices have been fine, but I found that all I use them for is music. And I use them for Apple music, funny enough. But I don't use them for shopping or checking lists or doing to-dos or any of the other stuff they always suggest that I might want to do and never do it. And so if they're telling me a very nice sounding device that's a little more in my ecosystem and a little bit cheaper this time around, I'm just suddenly in the market. And I think maybe they know that about maybe enough people or they have market research that says people are kind of bored with their Echoes. Maybe it's time for a change, not to leave Google out of this thing because obviously they got an important role to play here in this market. But for whatever reason, I'm more interested in that thing now and it's really mostly music and that's kind of it. And I think this product announcement strategy to get back to that part of the question is a natural evolution because of, well, we would have preferred to announce this in the autumn, but it would have been too far ahead of time because we can't source the parts for it. And then it becomes, well, do we wait till March when we usually do an announcement? No, we can sell them now and we might as well start selling them now. So let's get some spotlight on them and sell them. As you noticed with both the laptops yesterday and the HomePod today available for pre-order immediately shipping in a couple of weeks. So there's not a lot of delay on the stuff. I think Apple is just going to use that to say, yeah, if we've got an iPhone, we're going to do a live announcement and build up a lot of stuff around it. But if the timing of the products is different, maybe it's better. They may look at this and say we sold more HomePods because we gave it its own day and it drafted off of a MacBook Pro announcement. We don't have to pretend like we're replicating Macworld keynotes anymore, which is really what those regular live streams have been doing for years. And I expect we'll see more of that. Folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, as we mentioned earlier on with that Firefox story, you can submit your stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. TikTok announced Wednesday it will expand its labeling of state-controlled media posts. So that label is used on videos published by an account that is, and I quote, subject to control or influence by a government. TikTok has labeled such posts in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus since last year and will now expand that label to more than 40 markets. And among those markets are China, the UK and the US. TikTok obviously owned by ByteDance, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Beijing. There have been a parade of controversies around TikTok's handling of data going back to 2020. You may have strong feelings about this yourself. TikTok itself is headquartered in Santa Monica, California with data servers rather for US users in Singapore and also the US. However, as many of you know, you don't have to live in the same country as a server in order to access that server's data. There have been a lot of stories with many varying levels of accuracy about when and how ByteDance employees in China have potentially accessed US user account information. In fact, last June, TikTok moved its US data entirely to the US on servers maintained by Oracle. Well, that has not stopped the concerns, as you may have noticed. Several US states and the US House of Representatives have blocked TikTok from being accessed on their networks and Tuesday, the University of Texas at Austin announced it will not allow users to access TikTok when connected to university internet servers. Several other Texas universities have followed suit, so might be a good time for us to go around the table. Have our personal feelings changed about TikTok? Sara, you and I talked a bunch about how it's sort of a place we like going and the algorithm knows us and we sort of get the entertainment we're looking for. Is that still true for you? Well, I've kind of come full circle. So TikTok was a big thing before I ever even downloaded the app. I was like, yeah, I don't know. I have too many time wasting things in my life already. But once enough folks started to send me funny TikTok videos that they thought I would like and I signed up for an account, I don't post anything. I'm just consuming fun content. And I was, like many others, really impressed with the algorithm in a scary way. I'm impressed with it because it's just a really intense algorithm that seemed to know me even better than other algorithms of, I don't know, like the Instagrams or the Twitter or the Facebooks or whatever. And for a while I was very on the TikTok train. I have just lost interest and a lot of that is just because so much of the content is designed to just grab my eyeballs. Whether it's dance video or farm animals or things that the algorithm knows that I will like, it just tends to derail my life too much if I spend too much time on TikTok. So that's really just personal fatigue. So it works too well. Is that what you're saying? It works too well. Yeah, exactly. So you're like, I can't handle it. Yeah, it's like if I have ice cream in the house, I'm going to eat it. It's kind of better if I just don't have ice cream in the house. But that doesn't really have much to do with how fearful I am about TikTok and nefarious ways that it is collecting my data. I'm not saying that that's not a concern. I know people are very concerned about that. And particularly a variety of universities saying it's just better if TikTok is not part of at least our school servers. I get that. I don't have a huge issue with it myself. I want to say that locally, just as an anecdotal thing, there are local high school has banned the use of this thing on the high school campus. However, they're not doing it at a server level. They're just doing an honor system where they're telling kids, don't let us catch you with TikTok running on your phone. And they're doing it for distraction reasons. But their controversy doesn't just start and end with TikTok being a security issue. It's also an issue for a lot of parents, a lot of teachers, a lot of people think it's too distracting, too much time on there. And it's just adds to that, I guess. Yeah, I'm not overly concerned with the Chinese government getting information about me from TikTok, partially because I always am aware that a company could be collecting data about me. And so I'm in the habit of acting differently in that way. I also think there's a little bit of China fear out there that's like, oh, everything. China doesn't care that much about TikTok. That said, I wouldn't be shocked if there were some Psyops stuff that was uncovered, but it's probably not targeted at me. So I think ByteDance in particular doesn't strike me as a company that is going to cooperate as much as some other companies. I also am aware that every single company, including Microsoft and Amazon that operate in China, have to operate with a data sharing agreement with some other Chinese-based company. So there's always opportunities for data leaking over there. I don't think there's zero concern, but I think the concern is often exaggerated because China in a way that really isn't warranted. That said, I do, you know, I restrict what I look at on TikTok and I tend to get a lot of K-pop dances. That's really what I see. Yeah, I do, too. And I wonder, Sarah, if that thing about sort of losing interest, if you're good enough in an algorithm, they've gotten part A of the algorithm problem figured out, which is, give them the stuff that they want, and we know that they want. Now the trick is, what do we give Sarah that she doesn't yet know she wants, right? Yeah, exactly. And I don't know any app that can do that, and maybe TikTok's the first to try it or attempt it, and maybe that makes them look bad because they've got to do it together. No, all these apps do that. All these apps do that. YouTube does that. TikTok does that. It's just a matter of whether they do it in a way that works. If you've ever looked at your YouTube recommendations list and said, why is that there? Why is there a Pat Benatar video there? It's because it's trying that. It's trying. It's just they're not that good at it yet. Right. I love that you picked that one, though. I just want to point out. That's actually an example from Eileen. Eileen keeps getting Pat Benatar. She's like, why is that there? I'm like, it's trying. It thinks it knows something about you that it doesn't. To go back to TikTok's algorithm for a while, I was like, this is amazing. I mean, sure, every once in a while, I'd get a funny video where I'd be like, why is that there? Oh, it's because so-and-so sent me something that was relevant enough that it thinks maybe I want to see, I don't know, this video of a parade that isn't actually very relevant to me. But yeah, it's that social media fatigue. There's only so many ha ha funny things I can see or somebody ranting about something. It starts to just all feel the same to me after a while. Yeah. Well, what doesn't feel the same to me is Balton Dynamics humanoid robot Atlas. Because Atlas, if you're not familiar, is a pretty cool robot bipedal. It has a few new tricks up its sleeve, though. The robot could already run and jump on even surfaces, but can now pick things up, drop things off, even throw things with its new hands. Now, they're not really hands. They're more like claws. There's one fixed finger and one moving finger. So you kind of touch and grab and pull. Balton Dynamics says that this will let Atlas literally do heavy lifting, though. You could move construction lumber, for example. Maybe move or throw a bag of tools. The company describes Atlas' new pickup and throw skills in a demo video, which is really worth watching, by the way. We'll have it in our show notes and explains it, describes it as an inverted 540-degree multi-axis flip, adding asymmetry to the robot's movement, making it a much more difficult skill than previously performed parkour. Atlas, still a research platform. So if you're saying, I want this robot, this is going to be my new best friend, you can't buy one, at least not yet. Yeah, these are always just demos that everybody's talking about it like we're doing right now. Because then Boston Dynamics hopes that when they do roll out a product, which is going to be for warehouses and enterprise use, that folks who are in purchasing positions have heard about it and get excited and want to buy it. Yeah. I want one. Why? I mean, I said this on Twitter earlier and somebody said, you're crazy. All they're going to do is get so sentient, they decide your family isn't important anymore and you guys are done. Yeah. I mean, it's a whole robot-phobic world we've built for ourselves with science fiction. It's all fine. What I'm saying is that thing looks like it can lift a lot of things and not break its back doing it. And if I had an extra probably many millions of dollars those things cost, then I would probably get one if I had money to waste. Yeah. I have to say the walking really does look like a person in a suit now instead of a robot. Yeah. Which is either a conspiracy theory or impressive. Yeah. There's less sort of like, okay, I get it, you're kind of walking and more of like a, hmm, that is pretty human-like. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. There will be conspiracies about this video because it is freaky and he's too excited about the work he's doing. Wait, you think the internet will have a wide enough reach that someone will create a conspiracy theory? I think it's possible, Tom. I think it's possible. I'm not saying it's likely, but I think it's possible. I don't know. I don't know. You're all being very pessimistic. Humans aren't like that. No, of course not. Nothing like that. No. Humans, however, can get in trouble when they face big cars. We've been talking about that since Friday. Let's check out the mailbag, shall we? Let's do it. So Bodie, who we spoke to on Friday about this very topic, wanted to follow up on our follow-up on Tuesday's show from last Friday's show about vehicle weight and pedestrian safety in particular. Bodie's had some really good info from Trinity College Dublin professor Dr. Ciaran Sims that when designing a vehicle for pedestrian safety in particular, important factors are shape and stiffness of the vehicle. Sim also states that, quote, vehicle mass makes very little difference because all humans are much lighter than cars. End quote. Based on his simulations, a low-fronted vehicle like a sedan is going to do less damage than a high-fronted vehicle like an SUV. Bodie also included video of Dr. Sims giving a talk on the subject at Ignite Dublin, which will be in our show notes as well. Bodie had some other notes. Among them, scientists are researching how to make accidents safer for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians. They're always doing that. Manufacturers are doing some things to make pedestrians safer in the event of an accident, but they could do better. Bodie says it's not really a sexy feature. I mean, when is a car salesman going to tell a potential customer how safe the vehicle is for a pedestrian who happened to hit somebody? He usually just sort of avoid that topic. Bodie says prevention is important, just as important as mitigation. He notes Rob Dunwood's note from Friday's show that some vehicle safety systems detect pedestrians already, and that's true. Bodie says over time these systems are just going to get better. They're going to be available for a wider range of vehicles. And finally, Bodie says we need to rethink or at least reevaluate our city's infrastructure and local laws to provide a safer environment for pedestrians. It's all one big ecosystem. I'm still waiting for someone to find the peer-reviewed, you know, actual rigorous analysis of this. Bodie provided that lecture from Trinity College professor and the NHTSA stuff, which is good. But this all makes sense to me as well. And Bodie works in, you know, in the industry. So he kind of knows about these sort of safety issues. And it makes sense to me that there are so many other things we can do to protect pedestrians. And he backs up what I suspected yesterday is a lot of those SUV studies have to do with the fact that it's a high SUV versus the actual weight of the SUV. So it's good info. Thank you, Bodie, for following up on that. I really appreciate it. Indeed. Turn into a really good conversation. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, sure. I would just point them to frogpants.com, which has a link to all the podcasts I host. And there's something there for everybody. So go dig around, see what you like. There's also some artwork there, progress on my board game or my card game that I'm working on. A whole bunch of fun stuff. If you want to see some creativity on display and wonder how many hours I have in my day, it's a good place to start. Go to frogpants.com and check it out. We also want to extend a special thanks to Daniel. Daniel is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS with quite a few Daniels, who are patrons of ours. But you know who you are, Daniel. Thank you for all the years of support. Patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We roll right into it when DTNS rolls, wraps up, brother. You can also catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young joining us. Don't miss it. Talk to you then.