 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith Zapata and John and Becky Johnston. Coming up on DTNS, we have Will Smith here to talk about the RDNA 3 architecture. We're going to go into the meta layoffs and apples leaking a little bit of private information. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 9th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Rebedo, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, and it's, uh, Wednesday. I'm sorry. And it's Wednesday. You wrote Thursday, November 9th, and I read it, so it's a joint, it's a joint apology from Roger and myself. I apologize. What is today, anyway? We have no idea. Today's the day, Will Smith, co-host of Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod is back. Welcome, Will. Hi, thanks for having me back, everybody. Hey, Will. Yeah, thanks for being here. We're going to start talking some chips in a minute. That's them that you heard just now. Yeah, I just, my phone just fell out of my pocket. Everything's great. It's got chips, isn't it? Firing on four cylinders over here. Let's start with the quick heads. Oh, it's home day, and Twitter updated its Twitter blue service for existing iOS users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US on Wednesday, raising the price from $5 per month to $8 per month. Add the ability to get your account verified and also add a blue check mark next to your name. It will also soon reduce the number of ads that users see by half and let them post longer videos and give them priority in replies, mentions, and search. New Twitter accounts created on or after November 9th may not sign up for Twitter blue just yet though. Twitter will also be adding an official label to government and commercial accounts, not part of Twitter blue. Yeah, and yes, they added those, took them away and then added them back again in case you were following that. In another story that changed seven times over the course of our morning, the Wall Street Journal reports that Binance is walking away from its initial offer to acquire FTX after a review of the company's structure and books. They had signed a letter of intent, but it was non-binding, depending on due diligence. They did their due diligence and rather quickly said, nope, not going to buy that. Binance said our hope was to be able to support FTX's customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help. Well, in other news, Alphabet's drone delivery company Wing has started a pilot program in Logan, Australia for transporting groceries and goods for DoorDash. Customers can set up a drone delivery spot in their yard using the DoorDash app and deliveries are expected to take 15 minutes or less. That would be nice. The test is available to a limited number of households at the moment and will expand in the coming months. Google announced it's bringing its mobile VPN service to the desktop, so it'll just be a VPN service. Google One subscribers on premium plans, those are the ones at the two terabyte or higher level, can download VPN apps now for Windows and macOS in 22 countries. And just like on iOS and Android, you can only use the service to protect your data from being snooped on. You can only use it in one of the supported countries. You cannot use Google's VPN to avoid geo-restrictions. Say if you wanted to try to watch live sports or some other streaming video outside your market, I know perish the thought. Well, listen, we've had some layoff news as of late, and today is no exception. Salesforce confirmed to TechCrunch it had laid off less than 1,000 people, didn't give an exact number, but says it's preparing for a round of layoffs that could impact as many as 2,500 new employees. The company confirmed to CMBC that 100 employees were let go on Monday. More cuts are expected before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, which is Friday, November 25th. And Salesforce is on a hiring freeze until July or January, rather, of 2023, but that's not all. Oh, no, it's not. We'd heard the rumors and they were true. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a letter to employees Wednesday morning that Meta laid off 13% of its workforce, around 11,000 people, including my sister-in-law, so I no longer need to disclose that my sister-in-law works at Meta, because she doesn't. If U.S. workers sign an agreement, they'll get a minimum of four weeks of severance pay plus two weeks' pay for every year they worked at the company. They'll also get any unused vacation paid out, get their stock vested through November 15th, and continue to receive healthcare for six months. Can U.S. workers get something similar tailored to whatever the laws on severance packages are in their various locations? Yeah, so the reason for the cutbacks are more or less clear. Meta posted its first-ever quarterly decline in June, followed by another revenue dip in this last quarter, so companies tend to want to cut people as a result. Meta's market cap is the lowest it's been since 2015. So you might say, what went wrong? What's going on here? Meta's ad revenue has declined in part because ad revenue in general has declined, but with Meta claiming that Apple's ad tracking transparency measures pitting it especially hard, one would say, yeah, probably did happen. With fewer people letting Meta track them, Meta can't target ads, Meta can't reduce the price that it can charge. Meta doesn't really have a lot of leeway here. The company also has more competition from companies like TikTok, where people have decided that they want to hang out there more. Here's the interesting bit for me. Zuckerberg took most of the blame himself on the overspending, saying that was the reason. In a note to employees, he said this, at the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth, many people predicted. This would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. I got this wrong and I take responsibility for that, unquote. I mean, he's not laying himself off, but I'll give him a point for taking responsibility. So what's Meta going to do to rein in the spending? In addition to the employee cutbacks, that's a typical thing that many companies are doing right now. The company is also going to get rid of some of its real estate, so there might be more desk sharing, especially since they're letting people work remote, that makes sense. The current hiring freeze will remain in place, that makes sense. They're going to review infrastructure spending to look for ways to be more efficient. However, in an SEC filing, the company said it expects operating losses at its reality labs division, that's the one working on VR and the Metaverse, and they expect those losses to, quote, grow significantly year over year. In other words, as its other businesses decline, it's betting everything on the Metaverse. And that is not surprising, but man. It's consistent anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, if that's what Meta wants to do going forward. They named the company Meta. Exactly. It was a significant shift, wasn't it, when they named it that? You were like, oh, okay, we're all in on this, this VR business, the future of the 3D universe and where they see themselves in it. And it doesn't surprise me, but I guess I'm still most surprised about this entire thing that he was, for a guy, a lot of people just think he's sort of a corporate robot. I thought this was a nice thoughtful message to employees, even though there's no such night, there's no such thing as a nice layoff. I know that, right? It's always going to be a bummer, but this could have been worse. A lot of people are saying, we'll look at Zuckerberg's laying off 11,000 people to Elon Musk's, yeah, it seemed more thoughtful and he cared about his employees, let's be honest. Just a little frosting on the cake is all. Not much, just a tiny bit. The cake's still made of cat hair and bamboo and nobody wants to eat it. I'm just saying a little bit of frosting goes a little way in this market where they all seem like, you know, dictator sometimes. And it's nice to see just a little sign of that. So that's all I'm saying. I agree with you. And that's a lot of people, like a lot of people. It's a lot of people. I haven't seen anything that says, well, this many are in this department or this much from this department. Like I don't know if we know that yet, but I'd be curious how much of this actually hit the VR side or the metaverse side. Small amount versus everything else. There was a small amount of it, but it was more on the heaviest hit apparently was recruitment. Yeah, the really weird, I mean, the challenge thing about all this is the first time the big tech companies have really had to do layoffs, you know, up until this point, all of their businesses have been driven by intense market growth, you know, as we went from PCs, becoming ubiquitous to phones, becoming ubiquitous in these billion billion person markets opening worldwide. So they've not like they've been pretty recession proof up until this point, we haven't seen like advertising declines hitting them like we did this go around. So like how how the different faceless multinational corporations approach this has been has been, I mean, as somebody who survived the media layoffs of the early and mid 2000s, like it feels like deja vu. And it's interesting to see how the different companies handle it. I feel bad for everyone. Yeah, it's the first time for this round of companies, right? The the Amazons and Netflix has made it through that round back at the early 2000s, but but Google was very small, then Facebook wasn't even around then. So when you're when you're seeing these huge layoffs from these companies, it's it is a first. And it's happening to tech companies out of proportion to the rest of the United States. So you're seeing lift cut 700 workers. You're seeing Twitter cut 3,700 people sales force with its thousand Microsoft laid off a thousand in October. But you're seeing the United States economy add 261,000 jobs. Now, I'm not trying to argue the economy is good. But the the the job rate has not been the problem. However, it is in technology because of what Zuckerberg said. I think he nailed it, which is they overspent because of the windfall of lockdown and didn't expect that they would hit these headwinds. You know, and there's I've seen quite a bit of discourse, especially in the last couple of days, being like, how could you be a company of this size and think that the COVID lockdowns, you know, that made you hire a bunch of people would be sustainable. And I don't know that anybody has that answer. I I'll attempt it. I'm foolish enough to attempt an answer. The the the answer I would give is it wasn't we thought the lockdowns would stick around, they thought they could keep the momentum of the growth, right? So in other words, yes, they didn't expect to keep growing at that rate, but they could hold. And then there was a war in Ukraine. There were unforeseen shipping logistics. There's inflation. Those are the things they didn't count on. It's also impossible to overstate how much that little setting that we all say no to on iOS has hosed Facebook more than any of the other companies. I mean, it shows how much they were relying on that third party targeted for sure. Yeah. Well, Apple's iOS, speaking of Apple, Facebook, this is not versus Facebook exactly, but iOS has a setting that lets you turn off iPhone analytics. The description on the setting says it will disable the sharing of device, a Linux analytics altogether. Security researchers, Tom Mesk and Toulage Haj Bakri found evidence that several of Apple's first party apps, so that includes the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Books, Apple Stocks, seem to all report to Apple, even when iPhone analytics are turned off. The Health and Well Wallet apps didn't collect data, even if permissions were turned on, according to this research. So don't worry about health and wallet, those were not sending any data. But these other apps are, and this is interesting, given what we were just talking about, about third party data collection. This is not third party, this is first party. So here's what they actually found the apps to be doing. On Twitter, they described the App Store app as recording user data and sending it to Apple. They say it included what you tapped on, what you searched for, what ads you saw in the app, how long you looked at an app and details like your device ID, screen resolution, and keyboard language. Again, this is all within Apple's own apps, sending it to an Apple server. We're not talking about third party stuff. The Mesk said with personalized ads, personalized recommendations and sharing usage data and analytics all turned off. In other words, he said, no, don't share any of those. The data still appeared to be collected and sent to Apple. Now, one possibility for that would be, oh, it's just iCloud syncing. It's keeping your preferences set and it's sending all that data to itself. But the analytics data was sent to a separate address from iCloud communications. The researchers used a jailbroken iPhone running iOS 14.6 and a stock iPhone running iOS 16. Here's why they did that. The jailbroken iPhone, let them decrypt the traffic and see what was in the packets to see what was being sent to see. Oh, it's keyboard strokes. Oh, it's taps. Then they used the stock iPhone to say, well, is that just a quirk of the jailbreak? Is that just a quirk of the older operating system? They verified that similar packets were sent to the same analytics address at the same time under the same circumstances. They couldn't see in those packets, but it's pretty reasonable to believe like, well, if it's those packets go into the same place at the same time with the same behaviors, they probably contain the same sorts of information. Apple has not responded to this research. This is a small thing, but it's a thing where you're saying, don't share and Apple appears to be sharing. Will, does that bother you? Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of Apple sales pitch over the last few years has been, hey, we're the company that cares about your privacy. We're not, you know, largest advertiser on the internet, Google or Facebook or any of these other tech companies. So anything that undermines that message for them should be a big problem. They should address this as quickly as possible. I agree. My biggest hang up with all of this is not that this data is being sent. Mine's turned on by default. I actually don't care about analytics data and don't worry about it. What I worry about is Apple being so hardcore about pushing this line about we think about your security first. No one else does. That's why we've introduced these things, like letting people skip out on the Facebook tracking and all that. Like I really like that about the ecosystem, generally speaking. And I'd like the message. What I'd like is for the message to 100% match the action. And it sounds like even if this is like an engineer who forgot, I don't know what the reason is like if they'll hopefully address it. And we find out, I don't know. I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here, but I think it's important for them to address it and to be what they say they are. Because I think that's the that's one of their chief selling points. That's one of the reasons I like and trust Apple. And so this has it eroded all my trust in Apple today. No. But it it chipped off a chunk and I don't like that. So I'd love it if they addressed it and did something about it. Well, and yeah, they're typical non-answer answer of, yeah, we're just not going to say anything and quietly fix this. Isn't going to fly this time, right? Like this is a big deal. They've been selling this. Hey, privacy is important for a while. I want I want to hear somebody say, hey, we made a mistake and we're going to fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck. I'm not with you there. Yeah. Meanwhile, there's a bite out of Scott's Apple trust that they need to they need to replace. Yeah, Tim Cook and glue it back on. There are ways to fix this. It really is just them saying, you know, we we messed up and we don't really need this data anyway. And so or whatever the reasons are, I just like to hear those reasons and and don't PR yourself out of a corner if you can help it. You're Apple, you know, you have a huge market cap. One little apology won't hurt you. I have two last thoughts on this. One is I don't think this will hurt Apple as much with the general public as it will with us. I totally agree with you, Will. It's it's going to take a bite out of our trust in this group and the people who listen to DTNS and the enthusiasts. I'm not sure most of the rest of the world will notice an Apple so big right now. It probably isn't going to hurt them as bad as you might think. Second thought is I really I know Apple has a reason why they think this is the right thing to do. And I'm very curious what that is. So if anybody has a thought of like, let me steal man, this argument. Here's how Apple could justify it. Feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. Because I'm having I'm having a hard time coming up with one on this one. All right, folks, it's time to get our holiday card list in order. Each year we send every patron who wants one, a holiday card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. And I think this year's is his best yet. So you're going to want to get it if you're willing to give us your address. If you're not, that's cool. But if you'd like the card, make sure you're a patron, first of all. And check patreon.com slash pledges to make sure we have your proper mailing address. Do that by November 15th. You'll get that exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed right from us to you. Thank you. Last week, AMD announced two new GPUs based on the company's latest RDNA three architecture, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT. We haven't seen head to head benchmarks with NVIDIA's 4000 series, but it's certainly targeting them. Both flagship cards are priced less than a thousand dollars. Will you regularly benchmark components for PC builds? And you did NVIDIA's RTX 4090 GPU. I know we don't have a lot of information on these yet, but do you think RDNA three looks like a big leap from RDNA to GPU architecture? Or is it more of a refinement? Well, it's definitely a big change. You know, AMD is going with the chiplet infrastructure this time the same way as they do their CPUs. So what that means is instead of having one big, giant monolithic die underneath your heat spreader on your video card, they have several smaller chips, which let some manufacture the chips. It makes the manufacturing more efficient. So like an error in one part of the chip doesn't cause the entire chip to have to be thrown out or parts to be dismantled. To point the NVIDIA 4090 is a 600 square millimeter chip. It's a really big chip. It's like the size of the palm of your hand. Whereas the the chiplets underneath this, the new RDNA three are it's a one main graphics compute chip surrounded by six smaller memory chips. And that lets AMD do different process sizes and different performance and optimize each part individually and also have higher yields on the expensive parts of the chip, which is important for making high performing chips at a lower price range, which is interesting. It's unclear how this is going to impact performance, though, because like we haven't actually seen real benchmarks. We haven't seen comparisons and the cards and the benchmarks aren't out on either side in this price range at this point, neither NVIDIA nor AMD have actually released benchmarks on on the lower end. Yeah. Yeah. So there's there's a lot we won't know. Is it even fair to talk about whether this is a direct competitor for the RTX 4090 or the 4080 yet? Well, so the 48 we have benchmark 4090s. It's a sixteen hundred dollar card, though. So it's a little bit of an apples to oranges, you know, price point. You're almost double the price of the of the sorry, the the seventy nine hundred XTX, which is a nine hundred nine hundred ninety nine dollar card. It's a lot of money for a video card. We're going to have to wait until the benchmarks come out really to know. I mean, AMD compared their new chips with their last generation, our DNA. Two chips, you know, NVIDIA is comparing their chips to each other. We don't we don't know what's going to be best. And there's a bunch of wild cards like the the DLSS3 technology that they unveiled with the 4090 at NVIDIA has gone from changing the machine learning, you know, the AI enhanced performance from upscaling your lower res, you know, DLSS2 renders your game at a lower resolution and upscales it to 1080p or 4k or whatever whatever resolution your screen supports. DLSS3 actually fills in frames when the frame rates are too slow. So so when you're on a CPU bound game, like everything is on the on these new high end cards, you're actually making frames with machine learning in between the the slower frames and reduces micro stirring stuff like that. AMD doesn't seem to have an answer to that, and it remains to be seen how impactful DLSS3 is going to be both in terms of game support and in terms of performance on the lower end cards. So we're kind of we're we're I hate to keep saying we're really in a wait and see moment. Right. It feels really like an impactful technology, but we aren't going to know until we see benchmarks of the lower end NVIDIA cards and and see, you know, what the uptake in the in the in the market is for the for the new technology. And you guess when we're supposed to start seeing that seeing these benchmarks or when they're going to release them. I can't talk about the NVIDIA side and the AMD cards are out on December 13th, but I don't know when the embargoes are for the pre-release I would assume that some time before December 13th, we'll find out before I would guess a week or two before December 13th, we'll we'll know more. All right. So if I if I'm sitting there with a 3060 3070 or even older, I guess it sounds like I shouldn't just jump and make a decision that I should probably wait till a couple of weeks before Christmas before I decide what I want. Yeah. I mean, I think if you've waited this long, you're in the like you have the right mindset. It's worth just waiting another couple of weeks to find out what actually is the best hardware. There's a lot of kind of interesting deals on last gen NVIDIA and at AMD parts right now in the market. I think I would hold off if you can on that because the DLSS three three is the real wildcard, you know, in a world where everything's CPU limited, which means that the CPU is the bottleneck for performance. You know, being able to make frames up using machine learning, it sounds like magic, but it works really, really well in games like, you know, like cyberpunk and flight sim and things like that that traditionally are really, really low performing cards, low performing games. Yeah. So so just just diamond hands, everyone hold on, hold on. Yeah, yeah, stay strong. Well, speaking of staying strong two years ago, Sling Media announced that the Sling box would be discontinued and the day has finally come. I know some of you who were sling enthusiasts. It is kind of a tough day, but nearly 17 year old service will be turned off on Wednesday, November 9th, and all Sling box devices and services will become an operable Sling TV, the streaming television service, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dish Network is separate and will continue on. So if you're like, wait, what? I do I not get to watch TV anymore? You may. It just depends on what you have subscribed to. So I'm going to pour a little out for Sling. Yeah, I know, you know what? Sling was first to market. So we'll never take that away from you. I have I have two Sling box memories. If I may. Two of them, please. Yeah, the first is my first memory of Sling box was at CES 2004 when I had to do a video for CNET of the Sling box. And so I went over to the booth to get it because it was winning awards and they said, this is the only one we have. Don't lose it. And so I was entrusted with the prototype Sling box for for 15 minutes and thankfully nothing bad happened. My other memory is just using Sling box to be at a San Francisco Giants game with my think pad in the in the bleachers and watching the broadcast of the game off of my home television on my laptop while I was at the game on the game on the park. Just to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed like a magical thing at the time. Still does in some way. I mean, yeah, now I can watch direct TV on my phone at a game. Like it's so so crazy. But back then it was like, I'm watching my TV at the ballpark. Really adopters down to love it. It was kind of the first streaming service, right? You just had to host it yourself and it used your cable connection. So yeah, it was better than any streaming like Netflix streaming had just started, but it had like two movies on it, right? Sling box let you get everything off your DVR and all of that. Yeah, it's like the Plex life. It was the Plex life before the Plex life. Yeah. Yeah. Plex is kind of the spiritual successor of Sling box. I think. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. It's not like the future, but not anymore. That's all that always happens to the future. It eventually becomes the past so deep. All right, let's look to the future of our mailbag. What's in it? Let's do it. So Rico wrote in and said, you were talking recently about the, Hey Siri, sorry for anybody whose watches are going off right now, or rather just Siri says Rico, because our conversation was the fact that Apple was trying to drop the Hey part of it. Rico says, this is something I learned recently. Did you know that while Hey Siri is trained to listen to what comes afterward is not so you, the owner of the phone could say, Hey Siri, and activate it. And somebody else could then give it a command. Needless to say, our family tug of war for the car radio has taken all other dimension from the Belgian kingdom where chocolate goes with and on everything, even beer. Rico. Yeah. So I don't feel bad saying Hey Siri, because of what Rico's saying, it's trained to only listen to you. Like I will set off my own if I do that, but I won't set off others usually. I just set off mine. Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. But what he's saying is, even though it's trained to only hear you, as soon as you hear his kids are all like, he said it, so now we can jump in and make it do other things, which is hilarious, but it's also something that Google Home and Amazon Echoes have to. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that's, I mean, anybody who's in a household with a variety of people barking orders at the, at the, uh, the, the, uh, voice assistant is kind of familiar with us. And, you know, I think I, I maybe had dismissed the whole like, you're going to drop the hay, but it still would say Siri. Yeah. I mean, like who cares? Like we said on that episode, if it improves its accuracy, I'm all for it. And indeed. Well, two people who approved our accuracy today, Scott Johnson and Will Smith, Scott, we'll start with you. Where can people keep up with your work? Well, I'm still counting, uh, whether or not I was accurate and we'll have results till later today. I'll let you know, we'll do a press conference anyway. Hey, uh, I'm Scott Johnson and you can find me on other podcasts, including one called core. And the reason I like to talk about core on the show is because quite often, including today with this video card discussion, we talk about gaming related stuff. Well, I have an entire show dedicated to the big stories of the week, to the little games we're playing and everything in between. It's called core. It airs on Thursdays and I think you'll like it. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts or if you are hunting it down and just need it easy, fast way. It's at frogpants.com slash core. We also had Will Smith with us today. Will Smith, so good to have you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Yeah, you can find me at the, uh, the content town family of podcast at techpod.content.town and fospod.content.town. They're both single topic podcasts where we dig into something that's complicated and people don't necessarily understand the FOSPAD is, is, uh, looking and talking to people who are, uh, maintainers for open source projects and finding out what it's like to do that, you know, what the, what the problems are, what the challenges are, what, what is exciting and fun about maintaining this enormous use-based software for everything from like curl and, and, um, uh, uh, Samba, uh, you know, huge, huge, huge protocols all the way down to things like Mr. Cores and things like that. So it's, it's, uh, and those are both at content.town. It's a great timing. We had all this talk right now about, uh, people doing their own mastodon instances and stuff. It was a great time to talk about open source. Oh boy, mastodon. I mean, we're, we're trying to get them on, but for some reason they're really busy. I don't know what's going on. I wonder why. Yeah, I wonder what's up. Well, um, when it comes to DTNS, we are so glad to get brand new bosses and we have a new one on Domo. Just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you on Domo. On Domo. What do you have you? I may I say on the Ammo on Domo. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, speaking of patrons, do stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We affectionately call it GDI. You can also catch this show. Live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Chris Ashley joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.