 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to everyone among you, including Mark Gibson, Reid Fishler, and Larry Bailey. Coming up on DTNS, Mudge goes to Congress to talk about Twitter, why Apple Card threatens Goldman Sachs' bottom line, and The Verge takes on Twitter and Facebook with a new redesign. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 13th, 2022, with Los Angeles on top. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the suburbs of Atlanta, this is Terence Gaines. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, we have got, we promise we'll try not to get distracted by the pretty typefaces on The Verge, but we are going to talk about their actual content strategy. It's pretty interesting. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple released security updates to patch an eighth zero day vulnerability tracked as CVE 2022 32917 used in attacks against iPhones and Macs since the start of 2022. Apple said on Monday, it's aware of reports saying the security flaw may have been actively exploited. The bug may also allow malicious apps to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. It's an interesting day to drop an iOS 15 patch as iOS 16 is also now available. Yeah, it only took me three hours to update now, and it wasn't that long. It just felt long because you had to do two in a row. The non-profit Linux Foundation announced the intention to form the Open Wallet Foundation, the OWF, to develop open source software that supports interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases. Now the press release says the OWF does not intend to publish a wallet itself. It is not going to offer credentials or create new standards. The community instead is going to focus on building an open source software engine that other organizations and companies can leverage to develop their own digital wallets to try to make the piping that will connect them all. The OWF will be led by the CEO of Open Banking startup Yes.com, Daniel Goldsheiter. He's already on the board with the OWF, as well as people from Okta, Ping Identity, Accenture, CVS Health, the Open ID Foundation, and more. Intel published and then deleted the specs for its 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors on its Canadian website one day after confirming an upcoming 13th-gen CPU. We'll run at 6GHz including info for its Core i5-13600K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i9-13900K CPUs. The specs also show the i9-13900K with 24 cores and 32 threads and performance cores running at a maximum frequency of 5.4GHz. The i7-13700K will have 16 cores and 24 threads with up to 5.3GHz on the performance cores and the i5-13600K will ship with 14 cores and 20 threads plus a maximum frequency of 5.1GHz on the performance cores. Now, likely a lot of you have heard the news that Patreon laid off the world. You probably jumped to a lot of conclusions and if you did, I hope you're safe there. Here's what actually happened. Patreon announced it laid off 80 people, about 17% of its workforce. A large number of the layoffs came in Europe, where it is closing its Berlin and Dublin offices, leaving Porto as its remaining European location. They are going to try to transfer some of those people to the United States, see if they can translocate them. Patreon CEO Jack Conti said the company is going to increase investment in product, engineering and design, and then the reductions are coming out of marketing, operations, recruiting, internal support and creative partnerships. Layoff employees will be given three months of health coverage, three months severance, plus an additional two weeks of severance for each half year of service beyond their first year, and Patreon waived the one-year equity vesting deadline for layoff employees, so they won't have to wait a year to get their stock. They'll be able to get stock on the normal schedule. Conti also made it clear that the security layoffs last week were not related to this round of layoff, and were due to a redistribution of responsibilities across engineering, as well as partnering with external experts. My back of the envelope look at this is, it sounds like they're retrenching finances for a harsh economy, and doubling down on product versus marketing. Well, speaking of doubling down on product, Amazon's 2022 Kindle Edition has a new 300 PPI display, up from the one 67 PPI found on previous models, in fact, the one that I bought just last year, and matches the resolution of the last few paper-wide models. On-board storage has doubled to 16 GB with acclaimed six-week battery life, lighter frame, adjustable front light, and that much yearned for USB-C port. At least some of you yearned for it. The Amazon Kindle 2022 edition starts at $100, comes in black, or denim, and there's a kids edition for $20 more. All right, let's get into the Twitter news. Let's do it. I know. We got to do it. We got to do it. A majority of Twitter's shareholders voted in favor of selling the company to Elon Musk. It's been going on for a while. You might say, wasn't everybody really upset about this? Actually, no. In fact, shareholders were pretty bullish about the idea back in the day. As has been covered ad nauseam, though, Elon Musk no longer wants to buy this company, and Twitter and Musk are now suing each other over whether or not Musk's Musk can back out. Alongside that whole circus, former Twitter security chief, Peter Zatko, aka Mudge, filed a long document with the SEC alleging all kinds of security shortcomings and public misrepresentations. We covered that on August 23rd. If you want to go back to that show to get a little bit more context, but going forward, Zatko will be disposed on all of that by Musk's lawyers on October 17th. It's right around the corner. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress asked Zatko to tell them all about it because nothing helps a politician in an election year like a chance to talk about how awful tech companies really are. He will be deposed. I know that's what you meant to say. I hope they don't dispose of him. That would be awful. Oh my gosh. No, deposed and disposed. Two different things, turns out. I guess he's disposed to be deposed, so you could look at it that way. Deposed, yes. That is what I meant. Anyway, this all brings us to Tuesday's U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Here are a few of the things Zatko said. Twitter's security team had been contacted and told that there was at least one agent of the MSS, which is one of China's intelligence services, on the payroll inside Twitter. He also said the company had 10 years of overdue critical security issues, and it was not making meaningful progress on them. Both of those are reflected in the SEC reports. There's not much new there, but the majority of the concern of the questions that were received of the press releases from the politicians afterward seemed to be over whether Twitter can detect foreign agents operating within its network. Last month, a former Twitter employee was found guilty of spying for Saudi Arabia by accessing private Twitter user information in exchange for money and gifts. There's a fact on the ground that this has happened, just not with China. Twitter declined to send a representative to the hearing, citing confidentiality required because of the lawsuit with Elon Musk that is ongoing. Senators Richard Durbin and Charles Grassley sent a letter to Twitter asking them to respond to some of Zatko's allegations by September 26th. So keeping in mind that most of what all the senators are doing here is running for midterm elections in November. Terrence, what else do you think of this? Well, that's what I was going to say. Of course, they're trying to make this a big deal to get some cool points with the people. But I wonder, now this is purely conspiracy theory, now I know all of this stuff about Zatko and Twitter security came out after Twitter was in this back and forth with Elon Musk. But I wonder if the reason why Twitter was so, well, was more eager to deal with Musk than not was because of these rumblings that they kind of knew about. Maybe they had Zatko, they were keeping an eye on him. They maybe thought he was going to stir up some stuff and said, OK, well, let's see if we can pass this off on somebody else. And Elon Musk just happened to be the guy at the time that they were considering the shareholders being considering about getting this. That's just purely conspiracy theory, but that's where my mind first went. And of course, like you mentioned, he hasn't said anything new Zatko, but it just makes you wonder what else is going on at Twitter besides just Elon Musk and this whole back and forth with him and Twitter. Well, apparently security that is somewhat lax. I mean, that's, listen, I don't work at Twitter and I couldn't pretend to know what's going on with the security team. And I know there are a lot of really smart people who work within that organization as due at many companies. But it does sound like there is a security issue. The spam bot issue is something very different and that is ongoing as well. And that's a whole part of the Musk controversy of whether or not Twitter was worth what he paid for it or what he said that he was going to pay for it. But yeah, it's a bit of a mess. But yeah, like you mentioned, Terrence, it is interesting timing and there's a lot of politics going on here. Yeah, there's a lot of smoke and very little fire. The whole spam bot thing, I don't buy it all unless there's something technical that Musk can use to get out of the deal. Then that's why he wants to do it. Terrence's theory is not impossible. There's no evidence one way or the other. But certainly there was it about turn, right? You remember Agrawal was very much against selling, was going to do a poison pill and then suddenly he was accepting the offer. So maybe there was some pressure put on there. Who knows? All of this is just, it's a lot of fluff to me. I don't know that there's real threats from Chinese foreign agents on Twitter or not. Zotco is a reliable witness, so yeah. And what he's saying is there may have been. There was a warning that there may have been. And he's saying Twitter security practices are so lax that they might not have been able to tell. We also have a former employee that was convicted of doing some nefarious things. Now, that person was caught, which is what you want to happen. So I don't know. I feel this is a teapot. I just don't know who benefits from the tempest that's being brewed in it. Absolutely. Yeah. Here's an interesting bit of fallout from Apple and Goldman Sachs getting together. Apple's Apple Card is promoted as an easy way to get news credit. While there have been some controversies about how credit limits are assigned in the past, it is fairly easy to get an Apple Card. There's even a commercial. Justin Robert Young loves to bring this up, showing a person eating a chocolate bar in line before paying for the chocolate bar, then realizing they forgot their wallet, but applying and receiving an Apple Card right on the spot and the day is saved. I've been there. I was able to get an Apple Card myself relatively easily in a situation very much like that. It wasn't a chocolate bar, but you know, that's neither here nor there. Credit card issuers, though, report what's called a charge off rate. So if you miss payments for six months, your balance goes into what's called the charge off category. Essentially, that's money that the bank is accepting they may or may not ever see again. CNBC reports that Goldman Sachs has a charge off rate of 2.93% in Q2. That is in the subprime range, although Goldman isn't targeting subprime customers. You might say, okay, is that good or is that bad? Well, Bank of America has a record low charge off rate of 1.60%. JP Morgan's is 1.47%. Capital One, which intentionally does target riskier customers, is also lower than Goldman at 2.26%. So it's not as simple as just the economy. But then what is it? Yeah, that was going to be my guess when I first saw this headline. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, people are having a hard time paying for stuff these days. But apparently, this is specific to the Apple Card. And the Apple Card has been a huge success. Goldman's not a big credit card player. Apple Card and GM are their only big cards. And Apple Card is the majority of it. Apple Card is the largest contributor to Goldman's 14 million credit card customers. Loan balances are expected to reach 30 billion by 2024. That would be a double, more than double of what it has now. So why the bad repayment rate? Well, one reason is that the card is young. It was just launched in 2019. And most customers have had it for less than two years. And it is known in the industry, I just learned this today, charge off rates tend to be highest. For the first two years, a person has a card. All the other card issuers have been doing this for decades. So the majority of their customers have had their cards longer than two years. They've had time to adjust or drop out. Whereas pretty much all of the Apple Card customer cases are in that two year shakeout period. So you've got a sample group that's riskier by definition, right? Because it's just, they've all had it for less than two years. Another reason, though, is that even though Apple doesn't target risky customers like Capital One does, Apple does go after a wider section of the public than most card issuers. 28% of Goldman's card loans go to people with credit scores below $660. Compare that to Capital One that has 30% below $660. That's almost the same. And by comparison, JP Morgan is at 12% in Bank of America. If you got $660, you're not getting a card at Bank of America. It's only 3.7%. I'm guessing that's people whose credit card scores are credit scores dipped down after they got it. Apple also has a history of being willing to operate sections of its business at a loss, if it believes it will raise up other parts of the business as a result. That's kind of business stuff. Apple TV is an example of that. Could that be why Apple's rumored to want to bring in the bank element in-house? Yeah, maybe they're like, yeah, we don't care if we have a 3% charge-off rate. We're Apple. We got a pile of cash. It'll be worth it in the end. Terrence, what do you think of that? Again, purely speculation, so stay with me here. Maybe the reason why Apple's rate in the first few years is relatively high. I'm thinking when people get credit cards, they get that credit card and then maybe the first thing they do is go shopping. Maybe they'll go to the mall. Maybe they'll get some furniture. Maybe they'll take a vacation. Well, in Apple's case, most people, when they get the Apple card, they're like, oh, let me go spend money at the Apple store. Maybe since Apple's products, MacBook, if you decided to go on a spree and got a MacBook and an iPhone or a watch or whatever, those add up to maybe more that they would normally charge on other cards because it's an Apple card. So they think I'm going to go buy Apple products. And since Apple products are a little bit more expensive, then maybe that's why the charges are higher. And as a result, the charge offs are a little higher. That's just my pure speculation. No, that's interesting. I wonder if you could tease out that effect from the data somehow, because it would make sense if you're giving more credit to more people with lower riskier credit scores and they're buying more expensive equipment like MacBook Pros, that might make it harder for them to meet that payment and boost that charge off rate. I really am curious to fast forward five years to when you don't have the majority of Apple card customers in that two year window to see if that charge off rate is still a problem. Also, one of the reasons this is bubbling up is Goldman Sachs CEO, David Solomon, has rubbed a lot of the investors the wrong way. He's kind of a character. He moonlights as an EDM DJ. He used to go by DJ DeSol. He even played Lollapalooza this year. So I think a lot of people see him as kind of a character. Listen, being an EDM DJ does not mean you're not a good CEO and you don't understand banking. That said, yeah, there's probably stands out in a room. Going from a DJ to a CEO of a major financial institution is a nice come up, especially in the pandemic, right? For sure. I think what he just needs to say is, look, I know the charge off rate is high. Just wait for the drop. Oh, I see what you did there. Folks, if you'd like to complain about that joke, you can do so on our social media. Get in touch with DTNS on the socials DTNS show on Twitter and DTNS pics DTNS PIX on Instagram. Go find us. The Verge launched a redesigned website Tuesday. Much of the talk is about the broken line nature of the logo or how the new color scheme affects your eyes. The new typefaces. But the interesting part to readers will be the feed. They call the feed the story stream. It's curated by Verge editors and senior reporters who can post media from across the net. So you could see TikTok, Reddit, Twitter posts in there. It means they will occasionally be linking out to companies who compete with them like Bloomberg or Wired. There are no user comments on that, though the Verge says they might add those later. Editor-in-Chief Neely Patel told Axios, I think that the core realization for us is that our competition is not wired. Our competition is Twitter and other aggregators of audience. So he's talking about Facebook. He's talking about TikTok. The idea for the Verge here is to get people to come to the Verge homepage instead of consuming the Verge elsewhere and then to use that story stream to get them to infinitely scroll. They're going to make an infinite scroll and then if you keep them scrolling, you can serve them more ads and make more money. Patel also believes that the feed will let editors spend less time aggregating these posts into a story. I can just put the Twitter post up in the story stream. I don't have to create a blog post specifically for it. And then the theory is they'll have more time for original reporting. Patel says the Verge should be fun to read every time you open it. Terrence, does this sound like more fun to you and is it something you want? It probably sounds like more interesting for their diehard Verge fans, but you mentioned something about how the writers won't have to create a blog post out of a single tweet. They could just post a tweet with a comment or two and then link to it, right? And that will give them more time to focus on editorial, longer form, whatever the case may be. I'm wondering if this becomes so much of a success that the editors and the writers will spend all of their time, more time creating content for this story stream, and then they will have even less time to write editorial because who wants to read? I have worked for plenty of companies who have gone through various redesigns in a blog, your online presence format, and the kind of logo and font type faces aside because everybody's going to get used to that. If they like the Verge, they're just going to get used to it. That aside, I think that the idea of the story stream is really interesting. It is not unlike if I knew... The Verge is one of my favorite websites. For the purposes of the show, I probably go there a lot more than the average person does, but I do visit the site a lot directly. That said, I do find a lot of Verge content all around the net, mostly Twitter because I spend a lot of time on Twitter. If the Verge had some sort of a curated list that was published on Twitter that I followed, I don't know how different this is than that, except that I'm then going to the Verge's own domain and, yes, being able to be served ads that the Verge has a lot more control over. That makes a lot of sense. It is a somewhat chaotic, though. It's a little chaotic. I don't mean to say I don't think it's a good idea. I just wonder... It kind of reminds me of the days where when blogging got popular, everybody had a blog, and then gradually over time, many of us were like, well, I don't really have anything to say, or there are too many of us. My content is better served being funneled some sort of way that has a little bit more of a brand and presence, and maybe I'm getting paid for it. This kind of feels like that, the Verge saying, well, just come to us directly instead of finding us elsewhere. That isn't going to work for everybody. In fact, there are probably lots of people who absorb Verge content that never go to theverge.com. In fact, verge.com is not their domain, which is very confusing. I'm surprised that they don't have that yet. It is the Verge, but that's not really the point. The point is I give them kudos for trying out new stuff. I think it looks fresh, it looks clean. I get it. I get the fact that some things just don't need to be a story. They can just be part of this story stream, a feed coming from, I don't know how much stuff is going to come from TikTok, but I guess gadget reviews and that sort of stuff. It's all feeding into the same place. I've run into stories where a CEO has done something on TikTok or said something on TikTok. So you're going to have to reference it anyway. You might as well instead of going into the CMS, creating a blog post, betting the TikTok, this theoretical would be faster. I think Terrence makes a good point. Whenever you have a new tool like this, everybody assumes it's going to be a lot faster than it is. I don't know how much of time saving they're going to get for the reporters. I say that because I've heard this idea before. When I worked at CNET, I'm going to say 2009 or so, they had something they called the river. They were going to bring all this stuff over from Facebook and Twitter onto the CNET homepage to try to get people to come to the CNET homepage and see the river of content from us. It didn't really stick. One of the reasons was because they were too strict about what to show up. So I think one of the things the Verge is right about here is saying, hey, if we're linking out to Bloomberg or Wired, that's fine. Our competition is your eyeballs on Twitter, your eyeballs on TikTok. So if we're going to win this and it's a gamble, we need to not be restricted or else you're going to say, well, the things I want aren't here. What they're gambling on is saying, I will go to theverge.com because everything that's going on in technology is there, which is actually kind of what we make Daily Tech News show to do, which is to say, for a half hour, we'll tell you the most important thing so you don't have to go all over the place to find them. So I respect that. I like that idea, whether you can get people to change their behavior to do it, whether you can get a comprehensive feed going from your writers, not that they're not capable, but can you get them into that habit of doing it? Those are the things that'll make this work or not. But I think it is acknowledging them the major problem that publishers face these days, which is your attention is elsewhere to find their content. You go somewhere else to find their content and they're all trying to figure out how do we get control of our audiences. Again, this is an interesting approach to do that, I have to say. Yeah, and it burned, I'll be honest, it burns me up when a tech site or website in general, they create a whole story out of just one tweet. So at least at least verge is like, look, we're going to keep it 100. This is what we're doing. Blah, blah, blah, blur, blur, tweet or link to the thing that we were trying to originally make a blog post out of in the first place. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's way better for that instead of kind of falsely elevating a single mention into the same level as your 10 part, you know, story that you spent three months on. I know the verge has been doing really good work at doing those longer investigative pieces. So I hope it does pay off and lets them to do more of them. I like to see those. Well, if you happen to be looking for a destination, perhaps it's time to get that passport out from wherever it is. And you want to go somewhere physically impressive, but maybe also rich with history. The amateur traveler has an idea for your next trip. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. I have another destination for you. And it's one that I enjoyed as someone with a couple engineering degrees traversing the Panama Canal was quite a joy for me, especially because before I did it, I had read the book Path Between the Seas by the late great Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David McCullough, who we just lost in August. It describes the struggle that it took to build the canal. And I think if you read that and then get a chance to go through the canal and see how much of it is still working the way it was designed more than a hundred years ago, it can be an enjoyable experience to see how that technology has held up. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Thank you, Chris. And you know, when I hear Panama, it makes me think of you, Sarah. Because because there's a famous pal and a plan. I can know. Yeah. They're a big palindrome fan. You're the biggest palindrome. One of my what is just it's just one of the best. One of the best. All right, let's check out the mailbag. All right. So we keep getting feedback from folks about these new Apple watches, the new Ultra, what are our options? What would be excited about James was listening to our episode about the Apple announced announcement and said, when I was deciding which to get yesterday, I found out the larger size series eight stainless steel Apple watch turns out to be the same price as the Ultra fact. I had a hard time deciding which two of these to get and ended up doing the stupid thing, but both so I can figure it out after trying both. Hope the return policy is still as good as before. James also said, I had the aluminum Apple watch before, but I scratched it up pretty quickly. So I upgraded to the stainless steel after losing the aluminum one. I didn't like that it got heavier, but I got used to it. So I'm hoping the titanium will make it lighter, but also sturdy enough. We'll see how both watches feel when I have them in my hand. Well, first of all, James, thank you for doing the science of comparison on our behalf. I love that you're like, you know, I'm just going to try both. Also, after reading this email, seconds after reading this email this afternoon, I then turned on the tech John in progress on my podcast player to hear Terrence talking about this exact thing of that. If you max out the specs on the series eight, it's the same price as the ultra and whether, you know, one is better than the other. So, so James must have heard you, Terrence, that is willing to do the experiment. Yeah, I did the same problem. I ordered the stainless steel GPS and cellular Apple watch series eight and then looked and is like, well, that's the same price as the ultra. Now my senses and sensibilities would not let me go ahead and get the ultra because it's still all the thing. I would really, I would really feel like it was a waste if I didn't use most of the functionality of the ultra. So I stuck with the stainless steel Apple watch version eight, but I suspect a lot of people will pull the trigger on the Apple watch ultra if it's the same price as something they're originally going for because it's better. Yeah. And James, we salute you for trying to both appreciate that. Absolutely. And keep us posted, James, on, you know, what you end up feeling like was the right thing for you. And if that return policy did work as expected. Also, thanks to you, Terrence Gaines for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with all you've been up to lately. No problem. Myself and my co-host, Nika Monford host the snoboscast.com where we go a little bit more in-depth about all things Apple. You go to me to my website. You can go to brothertech.com to find out all the things I'm doing, all the things I'm interested in. And like Tom mentioned, myself and two other hosts, Rob Dunwood and Stephanie Humphries, we do the tech John, which is a technology podcast with a diverse perspective. So definitely check out, check us out there. You can find me all over the internet at brothertech. Well, thanks for being with us today. And also thanks to our brand new boss, Ari. Ari just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Ari. Glad to have you along for the ride. Ari, Ari made my day. Every new patron makes my day. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you could be Ari tomorrow. Just get on in there. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to be talking about iOS 16, among lots of other things. Just a reminder, though, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4pm Eastern, 2800 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.