 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Dr. X-17, Dustin Campbell, and Tim Deputy. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's $5 a month unlimited prescription plan. More bad news from LastPass' parent company, go to. And Megan Moroney is here to tell us if it's a good idea to use ChatGPT to write your resume and your cover letter. The answer is maybe. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 24th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Petaluma, I'm Megan Moroney. And I'm the show's producer, Roger. Megan, it's so good to have you back. It's good to be back. I love it here. This is the good place. Aww, so nice. Now let's get into some tech news. Yeah, let's talk about Justice Department lawsuits. The U.S. Department of Justice in eight U.S. states filed suit against Google accusing it of antitrust violation in the digital ad market. The suit says that Google has control of tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers and has used anti-competitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies. Google has cited Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft's ad businesses as counter examples. We have competition. WhatsApp released a beta of its native Mac OS app for Apple's M-series chips for Apple Silicon. People with Macs running on Apple's chips and using Mac OS 11 Big Sur can download the beta version from the Mac App Store. Those with Intel-based Macs can also use the app if they can run Apple Catalyst as well. Catalyst ports iPad OS apps. Tap bots, that's the company behind Tweetbot. RIP Tweetbot. They launched an app for Mastodon on the iOS app store called Ivory. It's got limited functionality as of now. So you can't edit profiles, you can't edit posts, you can't read alt text though, although those are on the roadmap, says tap bots. You can use it in read-only mode for free where you can pay $1.99 per month to get full access. Blizzard's developer of WoW Classic, Brian Birmingham, was let go because of his opposition, according to Brian anyway, to Activision Blizzard's use of a stack ranking system. That is a system of productivity ratings that encourages competition among employees. In Blizzard's case, 5% of employees on a team had to be assigned the lowest rank which would reduce opportunities and reduce pay and bonuses. Microsoft stopped using stack ranking in 2013. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo 3 and all other Blizzard games have gone offline in China. This doesn't have anything to do with Brian Birmingham or stack ranking. It has to do with Blizzard's license with NetEase expiring. Companies in China are required to use a local company for a lot of online services including gaming. Blizzard said it tried to get a six month extension while it looked for a new deal, but NetEase declined. NetEase put out a statement and in that statement called it, and I quote, divorce but still try to live together behavior. Well we have new things in both the big mobile operating systems today. Let's start with iOS. Apple iOS 16.3 launched for the iPhone with support for hardware security keys as a second factor. Those are hardware devices the size of a thumb drive or even smaller that use either USB-C or NFC. iOS 16.3 supports both with an adapter for the USB-C version. iOS will require two keys to be registered. One you carry with you and one stored at home or maybe an office as a backup. And Android 14 will fully block attempts to install apps targeted to outdated versions of Android. Google Play already blocks these kinds of apps in most cases but they could still be side loaded. In Android 14, they will no longer install at all. So to begin with, only apps targeted the earliest versions of Android will be blocked with the plan to have the threshold at Android 6. However, manufacturers can change that threshold or turn it all fall together. Alright, that's the quick hits. Let's talk about Amazon sending you drugs. Amazon acquired Pillpack in June 2018. Pillpack offers medication by mail without charging you shipping. They have a whole lot of robotic stuff in the packaging and stuff like that. But with Pillpack you pay your copay or whatever insurance doesn't cover. Pillpack is still in business though Amazon launched a separate service called Amazon Pharmacy in 2020. The online pharmacy space is pretty competitive these days. There are incumbents like CVS and Walgreens that offer similar features to Pillpack where they can mail you your pills. And companies like Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drug Company are trying to compete on price. However, Amazon took it a step further launching RX Pass in the US Tuesday. So if you happen to be an Amazon Prime subscriber which will cost you $140 per year, you will pay an extra $5 per month for RX Pass. Then you can receive as many prescriptions as you have prescriptions for from a list of more than 50 generic medications. This is all for $5 a month. Now you might say, well, what's my copay? There's no extra cost. If it's on the list and you have a prescription, you get it for $5. Yes, we are not kidding. This was a bit of some confusion, at least for me this morning where I was like, is this real $5 a month? Sounds pretty great. So you got things like blood pressure medication, certain antidepressants, hair growth pills among the list of popular drugs that can be sold as generic versions. It's not insurance, but you don't need insurance in order to use it either. Now there are some restrictions. If you're on Medicare or Medicaid, you cannot sign up for this because Amazon Pharmacy already provides medication through Medicare or Medicaid and the U.S. makes it against the rules to offer a go around to Medicare or Medicaid. They're like, if you're sending drugs here, you can't send them to them some other way. It's also not available in eight states, California, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. And Megan, you found in California, there's some rules about having to sign that maybe Amazon didn't want to jump through those hoops and there may be similar stuff in other states. Also, this is interesting, you're locked in for the duration of your supply. So you can cancel anytime, but if you just bought 90 days worth of pills or just got 90 days worth of pills delivered, you have to stay on the plan for 90 days worth of service. Sign up, pay $5, get the 90 days worth of pills, and then cancel. Megan, even so, even with these restrictions, it seems like quite a bargain if you've got more than one prescription. How do you think Amazon is making money off this? That's a really good question. I mean, I assume they have deals with the drug companies. They're not, you know, they're generic drugs, so I'm sure they're making money that way. I'm sure they're making money just because it's another reason to sign up for Amazon Prime. I don't know if it's a yearly cycle. I just got my bill for $150 a year, whatever that is. Does everybody get it in January? I don't know, but it's like every time I get it, I'm like, ugh, that's so much. Like a lot of places are offering free shipping. What else do I use? And there's always like a TV show that one of my kids watches, or like there's something they get on Twitch that is free because of Prime, and I just can't ever give it up. So I guess that this would be a reason if like you were a person that really didn't thought you didn't need anything else, but then that $5 for all my prescriptions, I mean, that's pretty good deal. Conveniently delivered, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm a Prime subscriber. I'm with you, Megan. Once a year, I look at my credit card bill and I'm like, what in the heck is this? I didn't do this. Oh yeah, Amazon Prime. Dang it, they got me again. But $5 per month, you know, as somebody who has a variety of prescriptions, some of them might be covered by this, some of them might not for a generic version if that's even something that you're willing to do. That is a great, that's a great deal. To the point where I was like, wait, what, we're not reading the fine print correctly. What is this actually going to cost me? So it sounds like Amazon is saying, let's just get everybody into the prescription realm of Amazon. We got all sorts of offerings. And RxPass is the latest of those and it will cover a lot of folks who at least have pretty common drugs or varieties of common drugs that they might be able to take advantage of. I guess you're losing money on this if you're Amazon right now, but going forward maybe it makes sense. I have a theory. I think that what they're banking on is, let's say you've got five prescriptions and you look at this and two of your prescriptions are on here. You're going to say, well, that's going to save me money right there even though it's just those two. So you sign up, you get those two prescriptions coming and then Amazon is going to say like, got any other prescriptions? Because even if they're not part of this, you can get them through Amazon Pharmacy at the regular rate and we have competitive prices and you're going to look and say, well, gosh, since I'm already signed up with Amazon, I might as well get them all in one package from Amazon and you'll go to Amazon Pharmacy and you'll spend your money there and then once you're at Amazon Pharmacy, then you're going to see what else is at Amazon Pharmacy. Maybe some vitamins, maybe some stuff like that. In fact, if you have a prescription for vitamin B12, which you don't need a prescription for, but sometimes doctors will say you have to take it, that is part of RX. That is part of this $5 a month thing. And if you're like, oh, but I'm also taking CoQ9 or some other multivitamin, you're probably going to want to get that through Amazon. So I feel like you're both right. It's sort of like keeping you into Amazon Prime, but it's also getting you to buy things on Amazon that you were buying other places as well. And that's why I think it's a limited list to say, well, we've looked at the tables and we're pretty sure that there are very few people that would have more than two or three of these at a time. So this is just the right amount to get them to sign up and then paste up something somewhere else. Well, that's the model of CVS, right? Everything in CVS is more expensive than it needs to be. It's more expensive than it is at other stores. It's like, well, I'm waiting for my prescription. Right. And then I guess I need Altoids and also, like I also need those almonds and that lipstick and a bunch of other stuff I don't need. And you buy it because you're just waiting around for your prescription. And they're like, oh yeah, we can bring you up here. You don't have to go up to the front. And suddenly it's actually more convenient to pay more for that thing because you had to wait in that line anyway. And I imagine Amazon is going to make that case even better because a lot of their stuff is not going to be more expensive. It'll be the same Amazon price that you would always pay, which is usually lower because they can buy in bulk and make deals with generic makers and stuff like that. I think this is insidious and interesting. Is it also possibly like their first step into being an insurance provider? Because some people like the only thing they really need for insurance is prescriptions. Well, and because they're not taking insurance, they're avoiding the whole mess of having to be an insurance provider. So I don't know. I don't know that it takes them one step. I would think Amazon would not want to even delve into that. They dabbled in it before and backed out. So this may be their solution to that. All right, we got some updates from LastPass' parent company GoTo. On November 30th and then again on December 23rd, they gave us announcements about an unauthorized party accessing customer information stored in a third party service. Both of those announcements had to do with LastPass. We've talked about that before. They got access to encrypted vaults, which isn't great, but, you know, those vaults are pretty hard to crack. We will be talking hopefully with Rod Simmons soon about alternatives to LastPass. This story, however, is about other things in GoTo's portfolio. The update said that in addition to LastPass, attackers accessed encrypted backups from customers of Communications Tool Central, Marketing Service Join Me, VPN Service Hamachi, and Remote Access Tool Remotely Anywhere. The affected information varied by product, but included things like salted and hashed passwords, as well as multi-factor authentication settings. Settings, not your MFA, but whether you had it on or off. In addition, MFA settings for Rescue and GoToMyPC were also affected. GoTo said an encryption key for a portion of the encrypted data was also accessed, though they do salt and hash the passwords, which provides a little additional protection. GoTo will contact affected customers and advise them to either reset passwords and reauthorize MFA settings, or possibly they're just going to reset passwords. They've done that for central and pro users already and migrated those accounts to its Enhanced Identity Management Platform. Well, as a LastPass user, I was a little taken aback from the news, towards the holidays of last year. Changed some passwords, felt pretty good. None of what this new update has stated affects me directly, but for anybody who's using any of these tools, now is a good time to go back and see where you are. If you're feeling vulnerable, change some passwords and think about what password manager you're using at all. I know it looked really bad that they announced the encrypted vault part of this breach from LastPass on December 23rd, and I'm not saying that they didn't time it to kind of fall in the gap of news or not. But what I am noticing is this is an ongoing investigation and this is an investigation where they're saying, we know something happened and we don't want to say what happened and be wrong. We want to make sure we know what happened and then act accordingly. And this third announcement about that follows with that. I'm not saying it's good news, but it does seem that they're working with Mandiant to investigate this and responsibly disclose and protect their customers. It's a bad breach. Don't get me wrong. But I don't think they're acting in bad faith. Folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at show.reddit.com. We've talked a lot about the use of chat, GPT and helping write things like seen-out articles with varying results. Academic research papers is another one. But what about using it for something a little bit more prosaic, something like, let's say, your resume? You might be looking for a job. You might have to write a cover letter for a job application. Well, Megan, you recently did an article for Fast Company looking into just this. What did you find out about how well this works? I mean, it works great. I think that I'm amazed by chat GPT. Like, I use it for everything. Tweets, which, you know, it's stories. Like any of that writing that is just so boring, like just stringing words together, it works perfectly. But you have to edit it. Like, it's a great template. It's a great place to start. And especially for those tasks, like staring at a blank page and just thinking, like, what am I going to write? It's great. And so, yeah, go ahead and use it for all the times you're being asked for cover letters. Hopefully those are fewer and fewer times these days. But lots of people are looking for jobs right now. Now, some HR companies already use AI tools in some capacity to help sort these kinds of applications. Do you feel like there is, I don't know, I don't want to say red flag, but something where they go, ah, yeah, I know what they're doing here. They're using AI to write their cover letter. Well, I think that it's not an AI problem. Like, I think it's that problem's been around for a while if you've ever been hiring for a job and you read a cover letter. You're like, oh, you just cut and pasted this from a template. Or like, you have no personality or you don't know how to, like, translate your personality into the written word. Like, so it's not like an AI thing. Like, I think chat GBT is not unlike bad writers everywhere. It just has more access to information. But I think what's interesting, one thing that I'd learned that was really interesting is the question I wanted to answer is like, okay, well, we know that employers are using these tools and, you know, you have to put certain keywords in your resume or you're never going to get seen. And so, isn't it fair for us to also use them when we're looking for jobs? And what I learned when I talked to people who work on those kinds of applicant tracking systems, ETS, that's what they're called, is that they're not really as, like, they're not using AI as much as people sort of think they are. Like, it's really just a tracking system and humans are still really looking at resumes by and large to decide if people are qualified for certain jobs. So, yeah, I think I do think that those humans will be able to tell that, that might be able to tell that was written and not edited. But I mean, the recruiters, one of the recruiters that I talked to, Alexandria Brown, she runs a site called the HR Hacker. She basically said, you know, like, if you're using technology to work smarter and not harder, like, good for you. Like, I applaud you. Those are the kind of people that I want working for me. So I think that I found pretty fascinating that a lot of recruiters are just like, yeah, cover letters are kind of dumb. Nobody reads them. And if you found a way to hack the system in that way, then maybe you're someone I want to hire. Now, before the show started, because you have access to chat GPT, we had a little bit of fun thinking, okay, well, if Megan Moroney was looking for a job and wrote a cover letter that chat GPT actually wrote, what would it say? Said lots of things. Very nice things about you. Megan Moroney is a well-known podcaster and internet personality, the host of the popular technology podcast IOS Today and MacBright Weekly on the Twit network. Megan has a wealth of experience in the technology industry and is known for her ability to break down complex tech topics into easy-to-understand language. Sounds good, right? In addition to her podcasting work, Megan is also a frequent guest host on other technology-related shows and has appeared on major news networks such as CNN and Fox. Her expertise in the field and engaging personality have made her a respected voice in the technology community and a popular figure among tech enthusiasts. Now, this sounds like you, Megan, but how much of it is accurate? Yeah, that's absolutely... Chat GPT is kind of a liar. I've never been on CNN. I've never been on Fox News. I didn't tell it I had been on either of those places. I was never the host of MacBright Weekly. I'm no longer the host of IOS Today. So, yeah, a lot of it is just simply not true. And it's like the audacity of chat GPT to make stuff up like that. Yeah, you're like, thank you, but no, chat. So, what I think chat GPT is best for is preparing a thing that you can then launch off of. And I think that what you found with people, with the HR folks that you were talking about is many of them are like, yeah, if you use it as your first draft and then you go in and get rid of the inaccuracies, the lies, and maybe add a little of your own flavor to it, then that's great. It's saving you time. A lot of people just don't like, I don't even know where to start. Chat GPT is great for that moment when you're like, how do I even start this? Ask chat GPT to write it. Then you'll look at it and go, oh, well, I should change that. And that's not right. Oh, and it didn't include this, which I hadn't thought about till now. It kind of gets the juices flowing, right? Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing that if you know how to like write a cover letter or resume, like you look at the job description and you say, like, okay, well, I have those skills in that thing. I know Ruby on Rails, like I have six years of management experience. You know, and you sort of cut and paste those and put them in your cover letter. But like what Chat GPT does really well is you take the job description, you put it in and then it fits it out. And so like, if this were mine, I would say, well, like I have, you know, delete the part about being on Fox News and CNN and, you know, and add I was the host of iOS today instead of I am. And you know, you just go through and then, and you know, it's the same thing. You have to edit it because if you don't actually have those skills that you're asking for and then you lie and say you do have them, then. Then you get elected to Congress. Exactly. I was like, how political can I be? I'll let Sarah be. So, so basically if you, it depends on the job and it depends on how much time you want to put into it, whether you should use this. But, but you're saying that, that it's probably good for, for, for a first step. Yeah. The only person that I talked to that was like, no way was he, he owns a like a branding and advertising company like words. He's like, words are literally our currency. Like, we're, you know, we want you, they're, they're doing the job of like writing creative things that people still want to read. I mean, even they were like a little bit like nervous about, well, you know, is this going to take our jobs? But he's confident that like they, they can still write better than a robot. Do we even need cover letters? If you've got a machine processing the cover letter and a machine writing the cover letter, like at what point do we go dispense with the fiction that we need this anymore? Right. Covering anything. You're not mailing. I know that is the thing. It's like, you think about it's like, why was it called a cover letter? Because it covered up a resume that we printed out on this like really thick paper that was expensive and resume paper and then mailed it in the mail. And we don't do that anymore. So, I mean, you still need an email introduction. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with throwing a few things into chat GPT and having it help you out a little bit. Yeah, no one needs to know. If you rewrite it in your own voice, you know, it's just helping you with that first draft. Mm-hmm. Well, speaking of figuring out where people are in life, Carnegie Mellon University scientists have developed a new way to sense humans through walls by using two Wi-Fi routers. Do we have your attention yet? In a new paper, the researchers explain how they used a deep neural network called DensePose, that maps phase and amplitude Wi-Fi signals to UV coordinates. So, a 3D model surface is projected in a 2D image for mapping a computer generated image. DensePose was created in coordination by Imperial College London, Facebook AI, and University College London. But, Carnegie Mellon researchers can now accurately map multiple subjects' poses with a simple 1D sensor. In this case, Wi-Fi antennas, instead of a more expensive LiDAR or radar option. The researchers say the Wi-Fi approach to imaging humans in households could be applied to home healthcare as one obvious example. Yeah, we've seen research out of MIT similar to this, I think, before, and we've talked about it on the show. It's the idea of monitoring the way signals are bouncing off of people. And you could do it with any kind of signal. It's just that if you've got Wi-Fi, which most people do these days, that's the most prevalent signal that you can use to monitor. And then, yeah, immediately our minds jump to surveillance and privacy violations. But there might be reasons you want it to know, just as simple a thing as is the person in the room that could be used good for smart home stuff, where when you ask it, turn on the light, if it knows, like, oh, you're definitely in the living room and we can pinpoint that, it helps improve accuracy and things like that, along with the, they always give the example of monitoring an elderly person and make sure they're okay, are they standing up, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from Steven speaking of surveillance. Steven says, not so much feedback as general wondering here. I was sitting in my home office when my landline rang. Of course, I'm a normal human, so I ignored it. The built-in answer phone picked up. Then it dawned on me, so I immediately unplugged my smart speaker. I almost felt paranoid that I did the right thing, possibly. The thing that occurred to me, so Steven, is how much of the olds have answer machines and have helpful millennial children that have bought them smart speakers. I did a quick look online. There are many exploits, but I wonder how many times this specific hack may have been used, makes me think of the old school payback phone re-hackers. Yeah, pay phone hacks. I actually didn't understand this at first when Steven wrote in. I was like, what are you unplugging the smart speaker for? Because the answer machine could trigger something from the smart speaker. For anyone who doesn't remember answering machines, if someone doesn't pick up, they play out loud. That's where call screening originated, is that you could hear them talking on the answering machine and then decide to pick up if you wanted to talk to them once you knew who it was, in a world before you knew who was calling by their phone number. They still work that way, and there are still people with answering machines. Probably not a lot, Steven's right, but there could be a system to go after people with answering machines and activate smart speakers to get information. Now, I'm not sure what... When there's a vector, someone will find a way to exploit it. You can't hear what the speaker says. You can't use it to have the speaker tell you things, but you could say, unlock the door, just try stuff and see what works. There's certainly a vector there. It's a small subsection, but it's something to think about. Who has an electronic door, a smart lock, and also an answering machine? Exactly. It starts to get narrow and narrow. How many people have answering machines? Not that many. How many people who have answering machines also have a smart speaker? That gets even smaller. How many of those people have someone who wants to target them and use that to do something? You start to wonder, well, I guess you could just mess with people and make their smart speaker play music. I bet there's something I'm not imagining, though. If you are like, this is how you could exploit that, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Indeed. My mother is a person who has a landline and answer machine and also a smart speaker, but they're not all in the same room. I was like, I think we're good in this particular case. Maybe. I have smart speakers answer me from the other room sometimes because I don't have Wi-Fi monitors that can tell I'm in that room. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you, Stephen, for the feedback. If you ever have questions, comments, something that we might talk about on a future show, do send it our way, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thank you to you, Megan Maroney, for being with us today. Always a pleasure. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Well, I'm MeganMaroney.com, MeganMaroney on Twitter, MeganMaroney on Instagram. I've mostly been writing freelance for Fast Company so you could just Google Fast Company, MeganMaroney, and then read all my stories there. Also on LinkedIn, which I'm enjoying a lot lately. Are you? Mm-hmm. That's tough. It's the new Twitter, having heard. It might be. Everything is. Jury's out on that one. Well, we love having you with us. Please come back early and often. We also want to stand a special thanks to Hector Bones. Hector is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We couldn't do it without you, Hector. Thank you for all the years of support. Thank you, Hector. And, indeed, speaking of patrons, do stick around for our extended show Good Day Internet. What will we talk about today? Only the moon knows. You can also catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We'd love to have you join us live if you can. And we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. 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