 This 10th year of Daily Tech New Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Pilly Glendale, Dr. X17, Adam Green, and we've got some new patrons. Let's welcome Nick, Michael and Jackson. On this episode of DTNS and Encryption continues to draw lions in the sand. Google Podcast lives on in a new home and Justin Robert Young has some choice words for Gemini. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 7th, 2023. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwoody. And from Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. We got quite a bit of news today, including, this is a quick one, X's chatbot named Grock is now rolling out to X Premium Plus users and meta announced new hashtag, but not really quite hashtag functionality to help surface posts. Let's move on now to the quick hits. Amazon sent a notice to customers that it's scrapping the option to pay using Venmo beginning January 10th, 2024, although it will still allow payments using Venmo debit or credit cards. Amazon first started accepting Venmo in October of last year. It's a little unclear why the reversal of Venmo Sparks person tells CNBC that the two companies agreed to disable the payment service as an option adding, we have a strong relationship with Amazon and look forward to continuing to build on it. Epic Games launched Lego Fortnite on Thursday, as the name implies, it's a crafting game that has been compared to a Lego version of Minecraft, but lives inside of Fortnite itself. Friday, Fortnite Rocket Racing is launching as well and Fortnite Festival on Saturday, December 9th. The idea is that Fortnite will expand into a platform for all sorts of games similar to how Roblox works. Decentralized social network Blue Sky is still in closed beta, but last month the company announced it would open up a public web interface, letting anybody view the posts on its platform, even if they didn't have an invite to the app. Some Blue Sky users took issue with not having an option to post privately, that's something that is an option on X and many people on Blue Sky are former X users, or at least are using both. Blue Sky now says it will offer an opt out tool from public view and says third party apps on the open network should also respect that setting, although Blue Sky can't really force another third party app to do that. Last month, a small number of Google Drive users suffered a sync error that accidentally deleted some of their files. Google Drive has since been updated with a recovery tool that may allow affected users to recover their files. If this applies to you, you can go to the menu bar or system tray, click the drive for desktop icon, press and hold the shift key and click settings, and then you'll be able to hit a recover from backups and then you'll get a recovery is complete message to find and you'll find a folder that's called Google Drive Recovery. Although this doesn't work for everyone, Google is actually stating that. So it hopefully it'll work for you if you had this problem, but it may not. Well, Nintendo announced that Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo has been canceled. This is due to safety concerns. Nintendo says it's gotten numerous threats of violence, targeting both employees and the wider community. Additionally, several competitive events including the Splatoon, Koshien 2023 National Finals, the Splatoon 3 World Championship 2024, and the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Online Challenge Final Stage have also been postponed. Alright, Rob, let's talk about what Facebook is doing with Messenger. So Meta announced that Facebook Messenger chats and calls will be protected by end to end encryption by default. Since 2016, encrypted chats have been an opt-in feature in Messenger, but now end to end encrypted messages and calls for conversations between two users will be the standard. Yeah, so this means that any message protected by end to end encryption can only be read by the sender and the recipient. Anybody who listens to DTNS is aware of how end to end encryption works. The backlash, though, has already started by various groups, depending on who you are, including the UK government and police who claim that the move to default encryption makes it harder to detect something like child sexual abuse. This would apply to any Messenger service that works this way, but it's Meta, so they definitely get added scrutiny. End to end encryption for group chats is still opt-in, but that behavior could also change in the future. Now, Justin, this argument could apply to any end encrypted messaging service, and there are many groups who say, unequivocally, that is the way to go because that is a privacy forward way to go. So does Meta have different rules here? Well, they don't have different rules now. Should they have to play by different rules, I suppose? Should they have to play by different rules? No, I don't think that they should have to play by different rules. Yes, they are a gigantic platform. Yes, they have a lot of users. It is their right to say that by default these messages need to be end to end encrypted, not unlike a lot of other competing platforms if they believe that it's going to bring them more users. To the earlier point about whether or not they will have to play by new rules, I do think it is only a matter of time before somebody, likely in Europe, forces some legal challenges to end to end encryption. And just to kind of put some of the dichotomy into light here, EFF, obviously very privacy focused organization said on X, Meta's decision to make end to end encryption the default will bring strong encryption to over one billion people, protecting them from dragnet surveillance of the contents of their Facebook messages and not a moment too soon. NCA UK also said on X, today Meta has chosen to roll out end to end encryption on Facebook Messenger, which means they will no longer be able to keep children safe on their platform. Today, our role in protecting children from sexual abuse just got harder. Very different ends of the spectrum. Rob, where do you fall on this? So to be clear, they don't just complain about Meta. They complain about everyone who was turned this on. Meta is just the biggest and the baddest and the latest to do it. Other Meta products already have this. So, you know, I think the EU kind of should have seen what this is coming. But, you know, and I think it's maybe where you live being from the United States. I am all for this end to end encryption. I do not want anybody looking at my messages and I don't want to have to opt into something to make that work. If it just works by default, that's better for me. I do understand where they're coming from. I just don't know that I necessarily agree with it. And I think that might just be a cultural thing from where we, you know, from where I live. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I, you know, if somebody were to say, Sarah, what do you think? You can only choose one. I say end to end encryption is better for all of us. There are bad actors. There are always going to be bad actors. This will perhaps make it easier for a bad actor to act badly. That is, that, that is an issue. That is something that all sorts of, you know, a variety of law organizations across the world deal with every day. But the fact that messaging on Facebook Messenger is tighter than ever is, is I think for the majority of its users, a very good thing. Yeah, I wonder if, you know, if, you know, if, if, if you're, if they care that if they, if they force companies to open up these products, that these companies may say like signal, they said they flat out, they're, they will never do it. They will just stop operating in, you know, on your continent if they do that. I don't know that Facebook would go that way, but you now are going to have two classes of Facebook. Facebook that works really, really good and secure for most of the world, but not so much in Europe. And then I think European users would have issues with that. Well, and this is something that I think a lot of companies are going to be willing to fight about because it's one thing to say. You have to alter your product because of profitability. It's another thing to alter your product because of government fiat for security. And that is a decision that all companies need to make. And if, if Facebook has decided, I don't think that they went into this blind turning this on by default. If they are turning it on by default, I think that they're willing to fight on it. Yeah, in fact, this was something that Facebook had said, I think it was even before it was meta had said, we're working on this. You know, it was like back in 2016. So this is a long time coming for a lot of people who want a feature like this. And I think maybe more of a reactionary thing for other folks who didn't realize it was so, so long in the works. Just before we move on, meta also announced a new project called Purple Llama, which the company says will eventually offer responsible tools and evaluations for the AI development community. Because you know, meta just wants us all to get along. And a blog post, the research team behind Purple Llama said that generative AI is innovative but controversial. And the building of trust is of utmost importance. Quote, the building, the people building AI systems cannot address the changes of AI in a vacuum, which is why we want to level the playing field and create a center of mass for open trust and safety. Said the company in a response to this announcement. To that effect, Purple Llama begins as a free and open set of cybersecurity evaluation benchmarks for LLMs called CyberSecEval. Meta also announced Llama Guard, which is a safety classifier for input and output filtering. Google today announced the launch of its Google podcast to YouTube Music Migration Tool. This news comes after Google in September announced that Google podcast was being discontinued sometime in 2024 and replaced by YouTube Music as a default podcast player on Android. Today we also found out that sometime in 2024 means the beginning of April, as Google noted the official discontinuation of Google podcast will come at the end of March. Even though Google podcast was the default podcast app on Android, it was only used by about 4% of weekly podcast listeners in the US, so pretty small amount. Conversely, 23% of weekly listeners opted for YouTube as their podcast listening app of choice. Same company, but, you know, the users made their choice now. Seems like with that kind of listener shared disparity would only make sense for Google to say, okay, let's just port everybody over to YouTube. Justin, do you think Google will have, I don't know, better luck with YouTube music than it did with Google podcast when it comes to listenership? No, but not for lack of trying. The issue that Google has is that they are often trying to play catch-up. They give up on certain ideas, scrap them and create new ideas, which creates a generational distrust in terms of investing in platforms, and it's specifically acute when you were talking about a medium that rewards long-term commitment and listenership. Podcast listeners are very, very finicky about the apps that they use to listen to their shows. I know I am. The fact that they are combining with YouTube music is very much them chasing the Spotify example of, all right, well, we couldn't be Apple, so let's try to be Spotify, which is now the top dog in terms of podcast listenership. What complicates everything is YouTube, where a lot of people say that they listen to podcasts because podcasts mean something kind of different on YouTube than they do in the purely audio realm. It is very, very popular for stuff with that name, but it doesn't exactly fit. I don't think this is the right move for them. I think if YouTube really, really wanted, or Google in general, really wanted to make YouTube and Google a player in podcasting, what they would have done is just play to their strengths, get in the ad sales game, and then have easy integration into all of these platforms. If you want to go the opposite direction and go from the listener in, then in my mind the only thing to do is to buy a best-in-class podcast app and allow that user base to experience something that they wouldn't otherwise with your kind of money and reach. With this, it's a gigantic mushy metal. So 4% of users use this here in the United States. It's not like Apple has 96% market share. They're over 50%, but it's not like it's 96%. So this means that hardly any Android user is using the default app. Now, part of the reason for this might be because, well, I think if you go back, well, they first started with apps like... As far as I can remember going back, it was Google Play. There was something that was before that, but there's Google Play, and then Google Play didn't pan out, so then they go to Google Podcast. And when Google Podcast came out, you couldn't even add podcasts to Google Podcast. You had to already be there. So they weren't really serious about that. And a year or so later, they decided, okay, yeah, we're going to allow you to add podcasts to the actual podcasting app. Then they said, nope, that's not working. We only get 4%. Now we're going to go to YouTube. So if anything, it could be the greatest app in the world. YouTube music is not, but if it were, do you trust that Google is going to keep this thing around long enough for you to actually get used to it, use it and like it? I don't know that they will. The only thing that is different here is that, and I've said this many times before when talking about Google services, the ones that are their core services, you pay attention to those. YouTube is a core Google service. You know, YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the planet. So the fact that they're tying this into YouTube music makes me think, well, maybe they at least care and are serious about it at this point, and two things that Google has done. They've now made it so that you can actually add your audio first or audio only podcast to YouTube via RSS. That actually makes it a little bit easier. They've also added the ability to add podcasts to YouTube music directly via RSS. So they're not going the old Google podcast route where you couldn't even add a podcast to it. They're saying right off the box, when we get rid of Google podcast, you'll be able to add all your shows. So at least it is a, I would say a usable podcasting app. You know, YouTube music is, but just their history. I just don't know that I trust it when I think of, you know, I'm an Android user, but I've owned iPhones and I think about the, you know, I think about the iPhone and you go back and they've only had Apple podcasts. I don't know that there's ever been another default application has always been that. Well, Google, you've got three, four, five different things. You just don't know if you can trust them. I mean, before Apple podcast, it was just iTunes, which was also confusing in the exact same way that this is confusing. I mean, listen, there's more going on with Google besides naming conventions. But boy is this company bad at that. And, you know, putting, you know, if you know what you're doing, saying, okay, RSS feeds, go to YouTube music, all right, good, you know, works as advertised, great, not a problem. But no new user is going to feel like that makes sense in the way that Spotify, you know, going hard on podcasts after being, you know, music only after a while wouldn't make sense to a lot of kind of that average new user. Again, DTNS audience is exempt from this because we know how this all works. But it just boggles my mind that Google would say, okay, Google podcast didn't really work. Let's port everybody over to YouTube music because that makes sense for podcasts. It just doesn't, to me. Well, again, it's all the Spotify example. That's what they're trying to replicate. Let's push people to our subscription music service. But I mean, at least Spotify isn't called Spotify music. Well, but that's the other problem, right? So Rob said YouTube, gigantic core product for them. Guess what? They also have two other services at the very least that I know off the top of my head that are totally separate from that core service that share the branding, YouTube TV and YouTube music. As far as I know, as a YouTube TV user, which by the way, good service. I like it. Yeah. It doesn't affect my YouTube experience. It doesn't feed me more stuff based on what I am watching live using YouTube TV. It's a totally separate garden. But YouTube TV makes sense. Like that is a good name. It makes sense. YouTube music for podcasts does not make sense. When I say YouTube TV, I would. I would assume that I go to YouTube, the place where I watch YouTube videos and I would also be able to get live television. I guess that's a separate website. Let me let me let me point out to Rob sage wise Rob. Can we trust Google? That is a foreshadowing to our next conversation. Yeah. So are you interested in AI and his impact on your life in society? Then you need to listen to AI name this show each week. Tristan Jettra and Tasia Custody way through the hype and doom saying to keep you informed on the latest news in the AI world. Catch it all at AI name this show dot com. All right. Yesterday we talked about Google announcing Gemini. Oh boy. This is, you know, Google's response to chat GPT. It's been it's been in the works for some time. A lot of rumors of delays and what's going on behind the scenes. So let's just remind everybody what's going on in case you missed yesterday's announcements. Google said Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform humans in an M M L U. That's massive multitask language understanding test. Gemini Nano is a smaller and more efficient system that can run locally on machines. Android developers would be able to use nano for example in apps. Pixel 8 Pro users will also get nano powered features. But that isn't what's in Google Bart. That would be Gemini Pro. And here's where people say WTF. Justin Rubber Young, you're one of them. Tell us more. Well, where do we begin? So there was a story that came out earlier this week saying that Google was going to move the launch of Gemini. Yeah, it came from the information. From the information now known as Gemini Ultra to next year. The only reason why the information knew that was because Google had scheduled hands on appointments with press for this week. They were going to roll it out this week. They cancelled their own birthday party last minute. The information story comes out and then yesterday we get the rollout of Gemini. It is heralded by a few papers and a video. A video that impressed a lot of people on the internet where somebody in what appears to be as live footage starts drawing on a piece of paper and interacting via voice with an AI model. The AI model understands exactly what he is doing. Down to the fact that his duck that he is coloring blue is not something that is normal in the animal kingdom. Let's do the launch first. AI is an existential threat for Google. It erodes search, their key product, which dovetails into AdSense and their AdSales capabilities. That's what actually makes them money. They have as much data as anybody on the planet, as much server and computing power as anybody on the planet, and they were a leader in the research of the technology for which GPTs, what OpenAI has built, is built on. The fact that they got this far into saying that this is going to come out and then canceled it at the last minute means it's not ready. And if it's not ready, then they are further behind OpenAI than we initially thought. Sarah, do you have a question? No, I just, yeah, continue please. Okay, sorry, I thought you were trying to get it. Then we go to the video. The video is not real, at least not in the way that it is presented. And it is presented in a way that is supposed to show you something that is happening in real time. They say it was edited for brevity. What the reality is, is that everything that you see was not going back and forth via voice. It was prompts that were entered in via still images. So what I'm assuming is that the reason why Gemini wasn't launched is because it's late and right now the product is slow and it's possibly unreliable. We simply don't know. They released a bunch of benchmarks that at this point were around, like they said that they were above, but they are not far beyond chat GPT-4, but OpenAI finished training chat GPT-4 a year and change ago. This is old tech for them. They're already far beyond that. If this is a threat and Google has had a year to figure this out and they're not ready to go with a product, that's a major, major, major red flag to the point where I don't know if the current leadership at Google is around by next year because they saw this coming a year ago and they are here now kicking this can down the road that they believe is an existential threat to that company. I do think AI can work with Google. I do think the Gemini is going to be a good and powerful model, but I think that there are organizational problems there not only in the fact that they couldn't release it and it's not what they made it out to be, but they also, as Rob said, got a history of hyping up technology that just doesn't hit the market. And if this is that, then they've got major, major problems. And quite frankly at this point, that's on the table. I couldn't agree with you more. I've said this before, even before we knew about Gemini or what Gemini is not at this point. Google cannot get this wrong. Our business is predicated on search. This type of AI is going to replace search. So if you're Google, you're saying this stuff that is coming out that is not coming from us is going to replace us like quick in and a hurry. We need to jump on whatever bandwagon we can and get to get on this train of AI and build something. And I don't, you know, you mentioned that they may have to change in leadership. You're probably right because someone at the top should be saying that we need to spend billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to make sure that we are a player in this space. And right now it's just not looking like it. I, you know, you know, I'd love to disagree with you on this just, you know, just so we can have counterpoints. So we could have a better show. But we can have a better conversation about this. But I see no lies in anything you said. Rob, that's the problem. They got the money. They got the best talent. They've got the best computing and they've got the best data. All the things that you need, the ingredients are there. And if the ingredients are there and you can't cook it within a year, then you got to start looking at the chef. Yeah, that's leadership. That's leadership at that point. I played around with Gemini pro as many people did a lot of kind of, you know, hot takes on the internet this morning were, well, this sucks. Google should be embarrassed. Maybe not everybody feels that way, but a lot of people were sort of like, hey, I got you. Look, I did this, you know, thing that Bard should be able to complete with Gemini pro at the helm. And it didn't, you know, I think that you can, you can trick a lot of models. This is not just like Google, you know, crap in the bed here. There are a lot of models where, you know, you feed them certain information and the model either says, I don't know how to do that. Or it gives you bad information. Then you go, haha, you're not as smart as a human. So I don't think Google is alone here. However, I did try to throw it off with a few pretty soft ball queries. And I did throw it off. It was just bad information. For example, I'm moving to a new apartment in like, I don't know, eight days from now. And I asked, I asked Bard what it thought of my new neighborhood, you know, just kind of like, I don't know, let's have a conversation. And it said nice things, thankfully. But it also, you know, told me that certain streets were on the west side of me when they should have been on the east and vice versa. It was just, it's just messy. It's messy. And that is probably going back to your original point, Justin, something that Google rushed this out for whatever reason. I don't know. You know, it's December before the end of the year stock. Yeah. I mean, there's so many variables. But but it just, you know, it seemed rather exciting because a lot of us who were following this thought that there probably wasn't going to be an announcement until January. Because the word on the street was that Google wasn't ready. So this big push on Tuesday, pardon me, on Wednesday was somewhat of a surprise. And, you know, according to Google, you know, it's the best model you'll ever have. It just does not seem to be the case. It just isn't. It's not even close. So some people who are trying to hold the water for Google are saying, well, all of these all of these platforms, they don't get things exactly right. And it's like, yeah, I guess you could have an Olympic four by four by one team. They could botch a handoff, but they still run 22 miles an hour compared to the eighth grade team that runs 30. I mean, you know, the runs that runs 12. It's like it's these other systems are so much better than where Google is. It's just unconscionable that Google with a year has not gotten to where they've got something that is literally prime time ready. Here's the other thing. I don't know why they launched this with the Gemini name because now everybody's going to use something that they themselves are saying are the middle range product. And they're going to judge the high range product based on the experiences they're having now. My assumption is they released it because they wanted to say that they had something out in 2023. They barely did it. Congratulations. You played yourself in my opinion. I will also announce I had a cup of coffee consulting at Open AI so I know people at Open AI. You can you can call me a Homer there, but I am not giving you this take that I don't believe Google can do what they are saying in that video because I am biased in the AI space. I am biased because I believed Google's pitch for Google Glass. And then at the end of the day, I had a CRT monitor in my top right eye and I looked like a Borg that retired to Key West. It was a failure. Failure. Oh, the Google Glass. Oh, well, you know. Yeah. There are others. There are others in your camp, Justin. I'm just saying. Who feels though, yes. You all should, you know, maybe have a cup of coffee in Key West and talk about. It's a lovely place. It's a lovely place, but it's also very fluorescent like the orange Google Glass I had. Well, Justin, we always love your takes. They're not just hot takes. They're smart takes. And that's why you're on DTNS. So let folks know where they can keep up with you between your appearances with us. Well, when I'm not blistering Palo Alto from this bully pulpit. I also run a production company called Dog & Poty Show Audio. And one of our shows indeed stars the host of this program, Tom Merritt, with Know a Little More. And there's a new episode out. You ever wonder about Black Friday? Well, you're going to know a little more about it when you listen to the latest episode of Know a Little More. Oh, patrons, you already know that you can stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. But if you're not a patron, you're missing out because we keep the party rolling. Today we're going to talk about Amazon Prime grocery customers getting some new perks. Might be you, might not be you. But what do you think about it? You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Easter in 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We'll be back tomorrow talking about the difference between Secure by Default and Secure by Design with Rivian Sissow, Mike Johnson. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.