 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, Reed Fishler, and our new patrons, Bill and Nick. On this episode of DTNS, Meta launches threads in the European Union. Dropbox turns on a new feature and angers more than a few folks, and let's all overspend for AI tools. Everybody else is doing it. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 14th, 2023. From my final day at Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Deep in the Art of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, boy, do we have a show for you. There's good AI, there's bad AI, and there's everything in between, plus a little Meta speak, Justin's favorite topic. But first, let's start with the quick hits. Google announced its tracking protection feature that turns off third-party cookies in Chrome will slowly begin January 4th with 1% of Chrome users. So it's a slow rollout. It will roll out to all Chrome users by the second half of the year. The company says regulatory concerns could delay the timeline, though. If you use Chrome, you'll get notified when you get the feature. Secure Mail Service Proton released a new desktop app in beta with access to both Proton Mail and Proton Calendar without a user needing a browser or the Proton Mail bridge. It's still cloud-based for now, but Proton says it will offer offline access at some point. The app is available now for Windows and macOS subscribers on its visionary tier, which currently is a legacy offering, but will be reopened for new users on January 3rd. Proton hopes to offer the app to all users in early 2024. Twitch updated its policy on prohibited content to allow at least some nudity, but only if a stream has a content classification label. Streams with warning labels won't be recommended to users. The new rules don't apply to games, they have their own policy, and pornography is still prohibited in all cases. After a test back in September, YouTube is tweaking its ad experience on TVs so ads appear less frequently, but the trade-off is longer commercials. You'll see an updated countdown timer in the bottom right corner of your screen that shows you how long you have left and when you can skip. Previously, YouTube displayed how many ads were in the break at the top left corner, plus a countdown timer for each individual ad. YouTube is also expanding ads on shorts to TVs. Intel announced new laptop Core Ultra processors for its Meteor Lake lineup. TSMC makes them the first for Intel, and they're also the first on the Intel 4 process. The Core Ultra 7 165H promises up to 11% better multi-threading performance against AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple's latest chips, but pre-release benchmarks show slightly reduced single-core performance. The integrated ARC GPU showed big improvements, which Intel says also improves power efficiency. Intel focused most on its first neural processing unit. You know what? Let me start that sentence over. Intel focused most on its first neural processing unit. See, just second time's a charm. It can handle things like background blur, eye tracking, and picture framing. Most of the Meteor Lake chips have launched except the top of the line Core Ultra 7 185H. MSI, ASUS, Acer, and Lenovo announced laptops with these new chips. All right Justin, what's new in MetaLand? Well, threads launched in the European Union, adding a potential 448 million users to its platform. More than 100 countries can now access Instagram's X competitor, which first rolled out in July. EU users don't have to sign up for Instagram in order to use threads, but they can if they want to. Yeah, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also posted on Wednesday we mentioned on the show that threads is also testing its first activity pub integration, which lets you follow some threads accounts on federated services like Mastodon, though the integration is limited for now and one way. On Thursday, threads head Adam Maseri posted that this test will include threads from both him and a few members of his internal team starting this week. All right Justin, I know in the past you've said, you know, I don't know if threads is really that Twitter killer that everybody either expects hopes or doesn't hope it owns. You know, by the time that we wrap everything up, I will nominate the Twitter slash X experience as one of the biggest creators of noise with lack of consequence in history. Because Twitter had such a clamp on commentary in our internet culture, but was never something that had a user base and had an anemic user base compared to things like Facebook and Instagram. And now we want to subdivide an already small pie into smaller pies and wonder whether or not they are going to be economically efficient. Obviously, this would be something that Meta would be able to take advantage of. They are far better ad tech salespeople than Twitter ever was and X is currently obviously with its ad challenge situation that they are in right now. But does adding the EU materially change threads? No, I think you're going to have a lot of people that have threads accounts, but I've yet to see anything culturally interesting erupt initially on threads. I have no doubt that at some point something like that will happen. But until then, let's Meta give us some sort of breakout to show how much money they've been able to sell advertising against this audience. I think it's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. What I've noticed, and this morning, I will say threads was quite lively. A lot of new users, people that I would follow on any other social network that now I can follow on threads. And yeah, you've got the whole sort of like, Hey, this is interesting and new. Maybe I'll post something. Hi, everybody. I'm Sarah. I'm new to threads. I'm from the EU. That kind of thing. You saw a lot of that. What a bunch of you right? I mean thread and you do. There are people Casey Newton, for example, who has said, I'm off of X. I don't want to post there anymore. I have my reasons and he and many other people that I respect and follow have been pretty prolific on threads lately. So it does feel like a place I want to be. But the experience of threads versus the experience that I still have on X are totally different. I don't sort of go like, Well, I just choose one or the other. I get something from both of them. Threads is nothing like my Twitter timeline or my X timeline. And until it is, I see no need to abandon something. And I'm not saying it's because I agree with one company more than the other. This is like news gathering stuff. I mean, sure you have fun. And Twitter historically was a fun place to just ish post. I'll just say that. And the memes and the whole thing. It's been doing that forever and it does it very well. And I don't think that experience is going to be replicated. I don't think we can start from scratch and make that again. Maybe we don't want to. But for now, I'm interested to see where this potential huge influx of users, what this looks like in a couple of months, because as we saw over the summer, threads got a lot of uptick real quick. And then, sure you have a lot of accounts, but you didn't have a lot of engagement. Threads is the place where my friends who don't want to post on X post now. That's the brand for me. It's not a place where news breaks. It's not a place where I can see things that I couldn't see elsewhere. It is just a place where people that have personal issues with posting on the other side post there. That's fine. At some point, I'll log back into threads and I'll see it. Right now, I only know that that exists because when I go to Instagram, they tell me things that are happening on threads. Beyond that, it is just not a part of my life, nor do I necessarily feel that I'm missing out on a lot of stuff. It's not as intolerable as Blue Sky, where it's only people who want to complain about Twitter and they've all gone there. And Mastodon, they've had their own community forever. But to your point of it serving another point, another scratching of their itch for you, that's what I've always thought will happen with all of this. Let a million flowers bloom. I think that there is a place for this to exist. But will it be an economic powerhouse? Will it be a cultural powerhouse on the level that Twitter was? And I would say X in many ways still is. No, I don't think it will. I am not bullish on that being its destiny. I will say, and this is particularly speaking to the activity pub integration, which again is really not slowly, but it was, I wouldn't say it was promised when threads launched, but the company made it clear that they were interested in doing that and you had a lot of people saying, well, we'll see about that. I do think that the threads roll out. It started out pretty bare bones. And Missouri and team has said this entire time, we are taking things slow by design. We do not want to screw up privacy, screw up growth scale. All of that is stuff that we have learned the hard way in the past. And I think that he's pretty genuine about this. The threads experience is still somewhat bare bones compared to what the X experience is, if you want to compare the two, it's not really a one-to-one comparison, but you get, you get my drift. But the company has been super communicative. Stuff has been rolling out slowly, but surely. And, you know, if I, if I can give meta anything, it's that it seems that they have some pretty level headed folks at the helm. That's what you want with an explosive platform, level headed folks. Hey, you know, I mean, Hey, Dropbox turned on a new setting. Well, we know it's being boycotted by Disney. Dropbox turned on a new setting and boy, are people mad Sarah. Here's what happened. Dropbox been testing an alpha feature as part of something that lets you use open AI to search your files. Google does something similar with Google workspace and Google drive. However, Dropbox turned on the setting that allows the feature to work by default for organizations who opted into the test. No data get shared with open AI for this feature if you don't use the AI search. And you also can turn the setting off since, again, not mandatory. Yeah. And even if you do use the setting, open AI has said it's not going to use your data for training its models just to try to find the thing you're searching for. That's the tool. And again, the setting isn't even available to everybody. Only people participating in Dropbox's alpha. Although ours, Technica notes that some of its staff who didn't have any knowledge of the test found the setting was enabled by default. So they were a little confused there. When Dropbox announced universal search tool dash, which is in beta, back in June, it also announced the Dropbox AI alpha. This is the alpha in question saying at the time in a blog post, it will be available in the US to all Dropbox pro users customers and start rolling out to select Dropbox teams to test. So that single sentence did more or less say what Dropbox intended to do, but it was also buried in a blog post that included a lot of other announcements and not super clear. If you're a part of Dropbox teams and you're part of a test and now there's this new setting that you didn't sign up for that is on by defaults that you didn't realize would be on by default. Sure, you can turn it off, but it's not the best way to roll out a feature, especially when you're talking about AI tools because people are already worried about their data getting scraped for all sorts of things. Well, users being worried about their data goes far beyond AI, but there certainly is paranoia in the marketplace about it. I think we need to separate this into two different issues. There is the hubbub over whether or not this was done correctly. And then there's the reality of what we want search to be. And this partly comes into the conversation that we were having last week about Google and open AI. AI search is a very, very novel thing that we will say for a short amount of time because I would expect by about mid next year, by 4th of July next year, we will just call AI enabled search search. It will just be a better version to do a thing that we have always wanted, which is find what we want when we want to find it. That is what Dropbox is trying to do here. I don't quite understand the idea of branding it as an AI thing, but when you are adding something onto a service, you do need to message it, especially when you are talking about something like Dropbox, which has for the last 10 years asked me to put my most precious and personal data onto that platform. And they want me to automatically back up my photo reel. They want me to put all of my writings, business documents, tax documents that I share with other people, video files, audio files. If I am entrusting you to keep treasures of mine, then adding any kind of access to it needs to be very thoroughly messaged, so I know exactly what is happening with the stuff you have asked me to entrust on your servers. Yeah, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston responded in a series of posts on X to a lot of people saying, why did you do this? Why didn't you tell us? He said, third party AI services are only used when customers actively engage with Dropbox AI features, which are clearly labeled. He's, you know, kind of saying like, come on guys, I mean, we thought you could tell. He also said the third party AI toggle in the setting menu enables or disables access to Dropbox AI features and functionality, neither this nor any other setting automatically or passively sends any Dropbox customer data to a third party AI service. Still, he said, any customer confusion about this is on us. And I think he, you know, if you're Dropbox, even if you say we did everything, you know, how has this slipped by everybody? You have to say, hey, we're sorry, our messaging kind of sucked. By the way, an AI researcher named Simon Willison wrote up a really thoughtful piece on his blog about this whole thing. And he compared people just not trusting open AI. He said, if you don't trust open AI, you're not going to be happy about something like this. He compared it to the ongoing myth that meta is spying on you through your microphone to serve you relevant ads. If you're talking to your friend about, you know, some pair of shoes, all of a sudden they show up. Yeah. Yeah, it's not that you lingered on some ad, which is why you're bringing it up with your friend in the first place. And the fact that we are far more predictable than we would like to think when it comes to targeted advertising, right, but still the move fast and break things is a lot more tolerable when you were talking about things that we don't rely on. I rely on Dropbox for my business. I've relied on Dropbox to send very, very personal things to family. So this is the thing that I sometimes get a bristle a little bit when you are talking about breakdowns and communications or mistakes that happen with certain services. If our lives are fully intertwined on these, then it is on you to measure twice and cut once because otherwise you are actively damaging your reputation. I don't think this is a big thing. This is not the end all be all for problems like this, but I do think that it is worth bringing up. Well, speaking of AI, if you want to stay up to date in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence because it goes fast, you need to listen to AI named the show. Each week, Tristan Jutra and Teja Kastodi wade through all the hype and the doom saying, because you're going to get a lot of that, but you can also get informed about the latest news in the AI world. It's a great show. Catch it at AI named this show.com. Speaking at Fortune's brainstorm conference, the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, raised some eyebrows when he said to the audience, most of the people in this room, if they're doing anything in AI are effectively lighting money on fire. Prince explained his comment later, stating the real challenge of AI is that the demo is easy, but production is incredibly hard. So Justin, does Prince's comment reinforce your take from last week about Google's Gemini demo? I think that they're different points. I think my issue with Google's Gemini demo was that it was a massive red flag for Google, which has every advantage. And if anything, the fact that they did a demo that was out and out fraudulent is a bigger issue because they are the kind of organization that better should have known better. What I think Prince's point is, is that right now, AI has come along and reinvigorated a fairly sleepy world for startups, for venture capital funding, for Silicon Valley writ large. We had a gigantic rise in interest rates, a very bountiful period in a lot of money sloshing around in Silicon Valley, kind of came to an end. It was a high bar to get money. And then all of a sudden, chat GPT happens, all of a sudden, the crystal cracks. And a lot of people are saying, well, I can be the next AI solution for whatever. I think Prince is a hundred percent right. A lot of people are lighting their money on fire. And I don't think that it is a sign that AI is anything other than an extraordinary step forward that we're going to be talking about for the next 20 years. We're going to look back on the dawn of this as the beginning of something truly, truly extraordinary, something that I could really only compare to the internet. But if we're going to take a look at that, then let's go back in our time machine, Sarah. Let's go back to 1995 and let's say, how many people at that point, when we knew the internet was there, we knew that it was exciting. We had every bit of promise of what it could be. How many people really knew what they were doing with the internet at that time compared to the money that was going out to companies? Probably about 10%. I mean, I would say phones would ever access the internet. They were still phones. They couldn't even fit a pocket. We were so far away from the journey that we've been on now. I think about 10% of the people knew that then. I think about 10% of the people that are doing things with AI know it now. The reason why a lot of money is being lit on fire is because in a world where nobody really knows the step forward, it's just a natural place for a lot of grifters. It's a natural place for a lot of people that are going to put a wrapper on GPT-4, that are going to put a wrapper on various other tools, and then pass it off as a revolution when really it is the AI, it is the API that is doing 90% of the work. But so who's lighting the money on fire? I mean, that sounds like if you're a grifter, that's a good way to get some money from people who don't really understand what's under the hood. I guess, yeah. In this case, the grifters are oxygen. They are creating the burn. Keeping the village alight with the pile of money that is on fire. I think lighting money on fire is more the idea that these companies might not go anywhere. There was a running joke after the OpenAI dev day where they announced the GPT store that'll debut next year that Sam Altman just put 90% of Y Combinator companies out of business, because 90% of them were putting a wrapper on chat GPT, and now you're able to do that for free and you'd be able to distribute it through the place where most people are going to look for specialized version of GPTs. That's I think more what we're talking about here. There's a lot of people who are pretending to know where we're going to go and don't. And that doesn't make them even, I said grifters before, that might be even too mean. It's not necessarily that they are the music man. It's just that we don't know. We're at 1995. And the good news is that's really exciting because we have another 20 years in this to go. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to make some sort of, I can't make a direct comparison, but something like Amazon's AWS comes to mind. It's like, okay, a lot of people just sort of said, well, let's just use AWS, right? The Amazon did better. This is going to help our company. We can scale, we can do the things we want to do, but we're not really, you know, we don't have any affiliation to Amazon otherwise. I think companies like OpenAI and Google and Microsoft and there are obviously others, but those are kind of the big three in my mind right now that these are the companies that, sure, I mean, lots of other people can further AI, further the technology in new and different ways, but it's happening so quickly that it kind of turns into like, I mean, how many photo editing apps do you have on your phone? Like after a while, you don't need 50 of them. You're just going to use kind of the three that work the best. And that's just human nature. I mean, unless you're just somebody who has a million tabs open, haha, I'm just kidding because that's me. But otherwise, you're not going to use all the tools available to you. You're going to use the tools that work the best because you have a finite amount of time in every day. And this is part of the issue is that going back to a Dropbox wants to do a search. And the reason why search is just going to be search going forward. It's just going to be enabled with AI. The reason why Google can't miss on AI is because they need it to make their product better for the next 20 years. It is the new coin of the realm in terms of smart understanding of computer systems. What we don't have our head wrapped around is exactly what the best versions of this are, which is what makes it an extraordinary tech story. A friend of mine I was out with last night said, you know, the the essence of tech is not the business stories. It's not the gossip. It's not the drama. It's not who tweeted what the essence of tech. The reason why you are probably listening to this show, dear listener, is you got to touch something and interact with it. And it made you feel excited and powerful. That's what AI is now. You know, it's real when you touch it, but you don't quite know what to do with it. And that just means there's a lot of instability. It means there's a lot of people that are going to guess. And also for the record, I don't think that it's a bad idea that people are guessing on more elemental ways to spend it or doing these demos that are going to get VC money humming a few bars and hoping that they're going to be able to figure it out as they walk down the road. That could be a good strategy. Plenty of business stories have been told like that. But right now, it also means that 90% of the money is going to be lit on fire. That's just the name of the game. Well, lest you think the Vatican has not weighed in on this whole thing, Justin, in his annual message for the World Day of Peace, Pope Francis called for a binding international treaty to regulate the development of artificial intelligence. He warned it could lead to a technological dictatorship if left unchecked. All right. Well, Pope Francis has spoken. Let's check out the mailbag. Levi wrote in about e-commerce platform Tmoo's rise in popularity. We talked about it. Tmoo, Tmoo's rise in popularity. We talked about it the other day on the show. Number one, fastest growing iOS app in 2023. Levi says, I work for the post office delivering mail and packages and we've definitely noticed how fast they've become popular. It's now over a quarter of my packages I see on a regular basis and that's from an app that's only been out for less than a year, I believe. It's probably the biggest non-Amazon singular company that we ship. What's interesting is to see who orders from Tmoo and the range is pretty wide. Younger families, older people that assisted living where even Amazon wasn't big at for a while. They've been able to reach a wide variety of people in a short amount of time. Sarah, do you order on Tmoo? Are you a Tmoo user? I didn't even know what Tmoo was until the other day when I looked at top apps and I was like, this seems like something I should know about. I think it's mayhem, but that's just because I'm not used to the sort of, I think, chaotic on purpose UI, but boy are things cheap on Tmoo. I am not surprised that they're getting a lot of customers. I am with you. The only Tmoo I was aware of was Solani on the Anaheim Mighty Duck so many years ago, but look, if the price is right, people are going to buy and somebody was going to find a way to do the AliExpress model and something that was a little less janky than AliExpress and Tmoo seems to have done it. Victor wrote in favor of Apple's upcoming stolen device protection iPhone feature, quote, years ago my wife left a phone on a plane at the Atlanta airport. We realized it within minutes and using Find My iPhone, we tracked it back to the plane. We weren't allowed to go back into the plane and last we saw the phone was just outside the airport at the end of the shift. More security features is great. We were able to identify the phone is stolen, but we couldn't brick the thing. If that was the case, the incentive to steal the phone would be limited. Just sharing my rant from years ago after losing a two months old iPhone. Oh, Victor, it is brutal. Yeah, I mean, Victor's situation is exactly what Apple hopes stolen device protection will help. It sounds like Victor and his wife couldn't get into Find My, well, they could get into Find My because they knew where the phone was, but they couldn't erase the phone. And that is how phones get sold on the second market sometimes. Yeah, I once had that with an iPad. Back when Hearthstone was iPad only, I accidentally left one on a plane and then was able to track it to where it was parked in a hanger and just told them it's in this hanger and I was showing them the Find My feature, but in my case they were able to go back and get it for me, so I was happy about that. I have misplaced an iPhone once or twice, but it's never been stolen, knock on wood, but I did lose a pair of Bose noise canceling headphones and that was like when Bose was the only game in town, they were very cool and they were not cheap and the rental car company claimed, claimed, no, no, we don't have them. So somebody's got my Bose headphones at Hertz. I did get held up once for my iPhone. That did happen. I held up a good one. Oh my gosh. Wow, that, you really buried the lead there. Okay, well, Justin Rubber, sorry about that. Thank you. I'm glad you're safe and sound and Oliva that you're on the show. GDI, stick around for that. We'll be talking more about Justin's robbery attempt, but first let folks know what they think about your work. It was actually a funny, a funny story to it. Where, sorry, World's Greatest Con. We have a two-part episode about Epcot. Not the fun, booze-filled amusement park that you are familiar with in Orlando, Florida, but rather the planned community that Walt Disney on his deathbed dream how they made it happen and why it is still a controversial decision that is being fought about in Florida to this very day, all on World's Greatest Con. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Sounds like it's going to be a spicy one today, including what happens when a company breaks its own trains currently in use by a Polish railway, but then that railway gets them back up and running with some help from a trio of hackers. I mean, stranger than fiction, right? But it's true. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. DTNS would love to have you join us live if you can. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live, and we'll be back tomorrow with fast companies Harry McCracken joining us. Talk to you then.