 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Degracia A. Daniels, Irwin Sturt, Ken Hayes, and we have a new patron, Aisha. Welcome, Aisha. On this episode of DTNS, threads may be coming to a regional area near you. RCS gets a lot more love, and Google has some big announcements of its own. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 30th, 2023. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have all sorts of great political stuff to talk about, and it's good because Justin Robert Young is with us today. But as always, we start with the quick hits, so let's do that now. CEOs from companies like Metta, TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X are all set to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on what the committee calls failure to protect children online. Social media's negative impact on young people's mental health has been increasingly concerning for both parents and lawmakers. Metta and TikTok CEOs specifically are appearing voluntarily, but Senators Dick Durbin and at Lindsey Graham expressed frustration with the CEOs from Snap, Discord, and X for appearing only after being subpoenaed. Sam Altman is officially back as CEO of OpenAI, and Microsoft now joins the company's non-profit board with a non-voting observancy. OpenAI's new board includes Chair Brett Taylor plus Larry Summers and Adam DiAngelo, the only previous board holdover. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Suscover did not keep his board seat, according to Altman, but will remain at the company. Bloomberg also reports that OpenAI will continue a plan to let employees sell shares in the company through what's known as a tender offer. Certain investors reportedly dropped out of the tender offer following the Altman ouster. Employees now have until January 5th to opt in instead of needing to close in early December. At the Deal Book Summit in New York on Wednesday, Elon Musk addressed how some advertisers have paused ads on X because of anti-Semitic posts that Musk amplified on the platform. Musk said, if somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go bleep yourself. Go bleep yourself. Is that clear? I think it's clear because he said it twice. He then singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was in the audience, saying, hi, Bob. Musk also said that others would boycott those advertisers if they thought the advertisers killed the company. Robotaxi Company crews announced plans to start operating again last week. The subsidiary of GM also plans to cut spending by hundreds of millions of dollars, according to GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra. Specifics on how crews plans to operate differently is set for the coming weeks, but the spending cuts are expected to result in widespread layoffs of Tru's 3,800 employees. U.S.-based real estate service of Fidelity National Financial, sometimes known as FNF, disclosed that it is contained a recent cyber attack that caused havoc for about a week. In an SEC filing, FNF said that the incident has been under control since November 26th after first occurring on November 21st, and it's restoring normal business with its customers. All right, let's talk about the expansion of threads. Justin, I know this is your favorite topic. The Wall Street Journal reports that threads, that's Meta's microblogging platform, often compared to as a direct competitor to X, is going to launch in the European Union in December. This is thread's largest expansion since its debut back in July in the U.S., and certain other markets wouldn't became available, but e-regulations have forced Meta to work a little bit differently in this particular market. The company will give users the choice to use threads without needing to link to an existing profile on Facebook or Instagram, that's how I signed up for it, and allows users to make their own posts more or less from scratch. So if you want to be part of the threads team, you don't necessarily have to be part of the Meta team as it stands now. Threads in the EU could lead to upwards of 40 million additional monthly users for the platform in 2024. Threads had a big uptick. All the headlines a week later were like, we can't believe how many people have signed up for threads. A lot of that had to do with the fact that people just had Facebook and Instagram accounts already, and then growth sort of stalled a bit, and everybody at Threads said, we're building slowly. So Justin, what do you make of this? I think that they're going to add a lot of people. I think that Threads and Meta has a tremendous audience advantage to get people on a platform. The question is whether or not the platform is worth it. And before I get into anything critical, let me say that my standard position on all of this is that we are going to live in an increasingly balkanized world when it comes to social media. It's going to be same as it ever was. When we first came onto the internet, there were a million little message boards, and everybody had their own little reason to be on it. We're going to have the same thing, but it's going to be social media instead of just text. That being said, Threads is not culturally relevant. Threads is a tech story. Threads is not influencing news. It's not influencing culture. And for whatever the chaos that is happening on X and whether or not it's being mismanaged, which I do think it is, that is culturally relevant. So if we're going to measure success by that, by whether or not people are paying attention, then Threads is not something that matters. Now, Facebook, or sorry, Meta, is an ad company, an ad sales company. Will they be able to monetize Threads better than X is being able to while the CEO is currently hurling expletives at advertisers? Quite possibly. Yes. I agree with what you're saying in spirit. I do think, however, Threads is coming. I think sometimes we forget. This thing is only six months old. It's a baby. So to compare it feature to feature to X, you can't really do that yet. To compare it to being the social water cooler, so to speak, the town square. It needs more than six months to become that. But I can tell you from my personal experience, my use of Threads has increased exponentially probably over the last, I'd say, month to six weeks. And I'm not alone. There are many people who I now see on this platform that I used to converse with in the other place that I'm now conversing with here. Yeah, I think what has struck me as interesting with Threads specifically, even though you got Blue Sky, you got Mastodon, you have lots of other social networks that also are competing with X for people who either just want to try something out or don't want to be on X at all. Threads now has folks that I like and follow and care about what they're saying, exclusively posting on Threads now. It doesn't mean that everybody is doing that, certainly not the case. And you still have all the fun stuff about the old Twitter, Late Night Twitter or Sports Twitter. That doesn't exist on Threads, at least as far as what I'm seeing now. But I feel like people are starting to dedicate a lot more time to making it that identical place. And again, like you said, Rob, this is in the first six months of it being a thing at all. Can I push back a little bit on that? Tell me about Facebook watches fifth birthday. Tell me about all these other features that have been started by this company and then abandoned because it didn't get the reach that they wanted. Meta's not in the business of doing small things in the way that Google's very frustratingly not in the business of doing small things. They need scale to sell advertising against. So if it's not catching in the way that they wanted to, they will kill it. Or they will just kill it by death of a lack of engineers. Here's the tipping point. The second that I see on X, a screen grab of something that has been taken from Threads that is not posted on X and it goes viral there on X, then I will believe that something is happening over there that is not currently happening on the platform that I pay the most attention to. Because right now that is on Instagram, but you don't really see that on Threads. Well, I don't know what their support is for images. Because I haven't been on there. I logged out and then I have not bothered to log back in, although Instagram does show me tantalizingly a post of people on Threads that are no longer on X that I am friends with. And whenever I click there, it says log into Threads and I say, I'll get to it. So Meta is also warning that foreign governments such as Russia, Iran and China will continue to curb inauthentic messaging campaigns from various social media accounts heading into the worldwide elections in 2024. But Meta also says the US government has stopped proactively sharing information with social networks, which often covers up major nation state influencer operations. Yeah, so Justin, we're heading into a pretty wild 2024. You know, how much does stuff like this move the needle as far as messaging and making sure that people are getting real messages? By way of every expert in this field, the way that foreign governments disrupt places that they want to disrupt is by amplifying hysterical ridiculous commentary about issues big and small. So considering the fact that I have not been on the show because I was in Europe, one of the places I was at was in Liverpool, I will quote one of their favorite sons war is over if you want it. If you don't want to be manipulated by misinformation, then please discount and absolutely stop yourself from posting hysterical, half informed opinions, because that is easy to replicate and easy to manipulate. That is what is coming. You can educate yourself by just being very, very sober and saying, maybe I shouldn't post right now. There is yet more meta news today. Meta is in the news today. The company sued the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, FTC, in Washington federal court over claims that it's in house trials violate the U.S. Constitution. Meta also asked a court to halt the FTC's bid to change a 2020 privacy settlement. This was the second attempt by Meta to block the proceeding in court. Justin, what is your gut say about how successful Meta will be in this? I think they need to do it because they need to push back against it, but this is going to get settled down the road. So let's switch gears a little bit. It's been a big month for rich communication services. A few weeks ago, Apple announced that it is bringing RCS to the iPhone sometime in 2024. And today, Google announced that over 1 billion monthly active users use RCS via Google messages. It's likely that Apple finally decided to add their protocol to the iPhone because the EU is likely to classify iMessage as a gatekeeper status, meaning that by law, Apple would have to make or should say iMessage interoperate with other messaging platforms. But iMessage isn't the only service to be classified with gatekeeper status. Yeah. So Meta's Messenger and also WhatsApp are also classified with gatekeeper status. So they are also going to have to interoperate with other messaging platforms going forward. Does this mean that RCS should be the protocol that all messaging platforms use to communicate since it's also a standard protocol backed by the GSMA? A lot of people say yes. Justin Robert Young, what do you say? I have very complicated feelings on this. Number one, I am a blue bubble supremacist and I do, I was upset on my holiday that I had to realize that there was going to be some element of erosion with green bubble people. But with that being said, I do think that this is, it's frustrating. Obviously, there is not an industry that the EU does not believe that they can regulate and when they're done regulating that, they'll regulate it again. I don't think that RCS is a secure standard and I don't know if these gatekeeper statuses are particularly helpful going forward if we want to look at making the mobile web better. I don't think that cementing RCS makes the mobile web better. So Justin, you're absolutely right. RCS is not in insecure. That is one of the big problems with it. And I was thinking about a platform like Signal. Signal, I used to use it a lot. It's very, very secure. But one of the benefits to it that at least on Android, you could use it as your default SMS application. And I believe just over a year ago, at least October last year, they got rid of SMS. Now, the reason they said this was because SMS was just so insecure that being a security platform or security messaging service, they just didn't want to continue to support that protocol. But if they were to add RCS, it's kind of like, well, you're going backwards because there is no, at least not right now. There's no in encryption in the spec. So I'm just curious, does it make sense for, if the EU says that if you're a gatekeeper, you have to interoperate, it probably makes sense that RCS would be the thing since it is a protocol that is run by the GSMA and not by any one individual company. But it's kind of like RCS right now, unless you're using Google's platform and you're doing so much of it, not inside of RCS, you're doing it inside of Google's messaging app, it's just not that great of a protocol. I mean, it's been around for a while now, and it's kind of old hat. So I'm just wondering, what are these companies going to do, is RCS the thing for them? Yeah, in a perfect world, and I always go back to Trillion in my Windows days where it was like, you just talk to whoever's online, I don't care where you're coming from, because we can all connect various chat services through Trillion. I know that this is different, but in a perfect world, this just is possible. Give me the iOS app that helps me do that. Give me the Android app that helps me do that, or something that's baked into either OS or both. That is the perfect world. But as you were mentioning, Rob, Signal's saying, that's not really what we do though. Our specialty is to be a lot more secure than that. They have a point. RCS isn't the end all be all. It's going to help some folks for sure. But that's not what a lot of these companies built their apps on. They built their apps on bypassing what was sort of available, but not that great. I want to thank you guys for building in so many of my greatest hits into my first show back. Hating on Android. Hating on threads. We're like Sacha Mania and hashtag portal to hell away. Just my entire favorite list of things to talk about on DTNS. So folks, if you would like to stay up to date on the fast moving world of artificial intelligence, you need to listen to AI name this show and launch during DTNS experiment week in August. Each week Tristan Jettra and Teja Custody waved through the hype and the doom saying to keep you informed with the latest news in the AI world. Catch it all at AI NamedThisShow.com. So you got some more Google news. Google is still dominating the news today with big time. It's got updates with not only the Android but also to Wear OS and Google TV devices. Let's start with some non-RCS Google texting updates, Sarah. Yeah. So we've got voice moods, which lets users add backgrounds and animated emoji to voice messages. Not anything super groundbreaking, but it's fun. New reactions for messages are also designed to offer some options besides the standard kind of thumbs up type stuff. And change in chat bubble colors. You hear that, Justin and Robert Young? Yeah, might think they're on iOS after all. It's gonna feel like some folks hated. So yeah, we've also got some AI generated image descriptions for those with low vision, you know, coming out as a new feature. It's called talk back and can read out loud descriptions of images from either the internet or a photo you took yourself. Google is also adding new languages to its live caption feature, which expands on being able to take phone calls without needing to hear the speaker. Yeah. And Google's Wear OS also now lets you control more smart home devices and lights and groups of lights if you have them directly from your watch. So let's say you're away from home and you want to tell your connected smart home devices that you're away so that they do the thing that they're supposed to do, you can do that now. There's also new assistant routines feature that's designed to automate daily tasks. If you have them assistant at a glance on the watch face itself will show you information that's relevant to your day, such as weather, traffic patterns, things that Wear OS has designated that you are interested in because you interact with it often enough. But Google TV also getting an update, 10 new free channels to choose from further helps you get into the ecosystem. I mean, that's Google TV is hoping that you do that. 800 app supported channels overall at this point did not realize there were so many. So Justin, with you being the unabashed iPhone and Apple person, I have to have to speak up for the Android title of the world because I'm an Android user. Please do. And I just want to say that Google does some really cool stuff at Android. If you can get past the fact that it is not iOS, they do some really cool things on the platform. But just beyond what you do on Android, many of these things that Google announced, you can actually do them on an iOS device as well. You can do this on an iPad. You can do these things on an iPhone. Google has some really cool services out there that are available to all. And I think they're all adorable. I think that they're all just so great. And I wish the best for all my Android friends. If we can get to Google TV for a second, Google is an ad company and it's easy to forget it. But I am here to remind you. I don't think it's easy to forget. They remind you. They get ads and they sell ads. It's the only reason why they are in business. AdWords has been their golden goose and everything else that they have done, up to and including YouTube, they've never really been able to turn into the same kind of profit generator that AdWords is. And they face an existential crisis as the value of search is at least threatened. We'll see if it is significantly diminished by the idea of AI going forward. So something like this, a fast channel, which seems to be something that will be a major player in our entertainment landscape going forward, makes a lot of sense for Google. I am now a YouTube TV subscriber, very happily, although they were too good at detecting my VPN in Europe and I was not pleased with that on Football Sunday. But otherwise, I am happy with their service. I think that if they bring that same level of quality to fast channels and are able to leverage their ad sales against it, this is a natural play for them. I think it's a very good idea. Yeah, I'm a YouTube TV person as well. Trust me, the company does not pay me. I wish they did. But even though the price has gone up since when I first signed up in 2017, 2018, whenever it was, I was a little late to the game, but I was like, this is amazing. I love it. Great. Half the time, the ads are just weird little interstitial blank pages because they still haven't figured it out. Yeah, the zen. It's the zen moment before football comes back. All good. It's not going to be like that forever, but it's the best, I think, way to replicate some sort of cable situation. You have other options. You do, but it feels just like it's easy onboarding, makes sense, looks like cable. You get all the same things and it's not really cheaper anymore, but Google TV has a lot of ad supported options, much more than I realized. I'm going to have to dig into that a little bit because I will sit through an ad for free things. That's the thing that I will do. So here's the thing. Fast supported television. What is it? Free ad supported television? It is actually not bad. There's some really good content available on all of these different platforms. The Pluto TVs of the world. It is actually really good. It just reminds me of watching TV back when I was a kid, like in the 80s. Commercials just came on. You just watched them. What's really nice is that a lot of the content was built for commercials. The commercials come in right at the right time. It's not like they're just coming on in the middle of somebody saying something. You literally have a natural break in the content where a commercial is supposed to be and then the content comes back. They're doing it really well. And if you haven't looked at it yet, you probably should do yourself a favor and go take a look at some fast channels because it's, as I said, it is really good content. Even our rundown, our DTNS rundown, I mean, granted, it's just a rundown that works for us. But a lot of us have just been doing this for so long. It's like, we still build a rundown that technically was sort of based on a 30 minute television show, you know, with shocks and breaks because that's just, we know that that is, that's a friendly habit that people are used to and it kind of makes sense. Well, and beyond the fact that they're leveraging legacy television shows and it makes sense to put an ad for a Kickstarter right between when MacGyver is about to get ripped apart with a bandsaw and when he figures out a way to avoid it with a straw that he got from McDonald's, like that is what it is. But also, there's an existential question about FAST of what is worth it for a 24 hour channel? Because in our old cable model, you are thinking about, okay, well, you want certain kind of shows to air during the morning and certain kind of shows to air in the midday, certain kind of shows to air at night and then whatever graveyard shifts, late night television stuff with FAST, the channels that you hear people talking the most about are like the Godfather trilogy just plays on repeat. So no matter what, you can just turn on, you will see one of the Godfathers and it'll just keep going. Yeah, Godfather 2, Shawshank Redemption, it really doesn't matter what is happening. If it's on, I'm going to pause and watch at least 20, 30 minutes of it. So like, you know, I have FAST on one or two televisions in the house, it just runs. It's just, you know, whatever's on is just on. Yeah, I think it's smart. It's the same way I feel about radio in my car where it's like, this is all on demand. Well, I mean, not every song you're going to hear is, you know, you might have to find it, but especially that sort of talk radio stuff. That's all, that's all a podcast somewhere. I can control all of that myself. I can watch whatever television show, you know, to an extent at any time I want to, but when it's just on and I find it organically, I still feel like, oh, yay, Godfather 2. Okay, let's watch it. You know, even though it's all sort of in my mind, it feels like a gift. So I think a lot of this, the linear stuff is it's not yet dead, mostly dead, but not yet. Sarah, I feel like this is a live with it in the making. You just, like, yeah, you, you, you renounced YouTube and you just go, just fast, just, just nothing, but a month of fast television. You know, I don't hate the idea. And I might, I would probably miss some things and discover a lot of other things. That's actually a really good one. I think that would be, that would be a way for you to explore this fast growing marketplace. Well, something I'm also really good at is being an avoider, particularly when it comes to packing. Packing for a trip is how my procrastination really rears its best head. Worry not though, if you're like me and you end up getting real stressed out before trying to make it to the airport five minutes before your flight leaves, Chris Christensen has an app for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. I can pack for a weekend trip in about five minutes and it takes me only about 15 minutes to pack for a three week trip because I use packing lists, but I know for some people this is overwhelming. So I've got an app that's going to give you a good start and that's pack point. If you download the pack point app, it then asks your gender and then asks where you're going, how long you're going to be there, you're going to have access to laundry, what kind of activities you're going to do, and then comes up with a pretty good starting point for a packing list. If it's a work trip, do you need the laptop? Do you need a VPN key fob? If you're going hiking, what do you need to wear? All of those sorts of things. Check it out. Pack point. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. I cannot tell you how many times I just was like, oh, screw it. I'll go to Duane Reed when I get there and just like buy things. I don't have little shampoo. I just don't have it. I don't want to do this. And let me tell you, when you're going between European airports, they got a whole new different set of rules compared to TSA. You have to take out your little things and put them in a plastic bag for some reason only through their version of TSA. I couldn't get down to 15 minutes for three weeks just because I got to go to dry cleaners and pick stuff up that I didn't think I was going to have to go to the dry cleaners and pick up. I got to wash stuff. I need the iron stuff and fold stuff. So yeah, for a three-week trip, I'm still looking at a couple of hours, no matter what the app or list the packing list is for me to use. Yeah. Wait, hold on. Wait, Rob, Rob, you're doing that before you leave? You're not doing that when you get to where you're going? When I get to where I'm going, I'm relaxing. There's no preparation of clothes when I get there. So yeah, I try to make sure all that stuff is done before I go. I was like, I'm not ironing again in Hawaii once I'm there. Yeah. I'm not ironing on vacation if I can avoid it. Oh, man. I mean, I don't iron a lot at any time. So the only time I have to iron is when it's wrinkled on travel. Well, this might move the needle for some of you as well. Natalie wrote in our mailbag today. She says, a few days ago, I found my go-to budgeting app, Mint, shutting down at the end of the year. Natalie says, I learned this through a Mint competitors ad. I haven't received any direct communication from Mint about this. Wanted to ask any of you use a budgeting app that you think would be a good replacement. Natalie says, I'm overwhelmed by the number of options out there and not looking forward to making the switch. I'm not a Mint user, but I used to be one, Natalie. So I looked up Mint's announcement to see if somehow they just never announced it. They did on sort of their news blog, which I would assume a lot of Mint users just never look at. This was back on October 31st. So it was out there. But if you didn't get a direct email, I could see where you just wouldn't know anything about it. But I wanted to ask the crew here if they have ideas for where Natalie should go. Hold on. Before we get to where Natalie should go, Natalie, I am with you. I am a Mint user. I only found out about it because I pay attention to tech news. I didn't realize until we were going over your email for this show that I never would have heard about it if it weren't for the fact that part of my living is made by analyzing the tech news. So this is an absolute travesty. I have nowhere to go. Please at reply me at Justin our young on Instagram or X and let me know where you're going. Natalie, I follow you. Perhaps Rob Dunwood, you have somewhere to send Natalie and Justin and myself. So here's the hard thing. So Mint was free. It's free 99. I have not seen anything that is as good as Mint that is free. There are quite a few services. Actually, just if you were to just stay with Quicken for I think like $2 a month, you will get a darn good Mint replacement. But you know, Quicken or into it, they're trying to get you into their premium products that you pay for. And that's why Mint is going away. It's not something they make money on. So they want to get you over to things that they make money on. So like I can't think of anything that is free that is good. But if you get into the $2 to $5 a month range, I mean, there is a myriad of really good services out there, but they are not free. They do have a charge. Yeah, into it is directly sending users or hoping that they they send users to credit karma, which is another one of their brands that I have not used. So I can't tell you if it's good or not. I don't know if anybody else here has used it. But but yeah, it's it's always a it's a bummer when something that you enjoy and think works well goes away. But it's a real bummer when that has to do with your personal finances. I mean, like this is how we all live. And also like like into it for the love of all that is holy. Mint's such a great brand. I trust Mint. I trust Mint with my bank accounts for years. To jettison that brand and then say no, go to credit karma, which sounds like the worst version of a Ponzi scheme. Like I am I am blown away by this decision from a branding perspective. Disgusting. Well, Justin, Robert Young, whether you are disgusted or positively pickled, we're always happy to have you on the show. So let us know where else they can keep up with your work. Friends, World's Greatest Con is a podcast from Dog and Pony show audio with Brian Brushwood. And we gave a surprise to all of our listeners last week during the Thanksgiving holiday and for all of your holiday travel needs, a two part episode on the founding of Epcot. A story that Disney's Epcot. Yes, Disney, but but not the Epcot that exists right now. Walt Disney's idea for a planned community, the perfect city that would never stop evolving. And by the way, the reason why Walt Disney World has all of the privileges that wound up becoming a gigantic controversy a few years ago in the state of Florida, it all rests in the new two part episode from World's Greatest Con Epcot one and two available right now on all podcasting platforms. So patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Whether you live in Burlington, Vermont or not, Spotify Wrapped may apply to you this year. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday. DTNS is live 4 p.m. Eastern at 2100 UTC every weekday. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. We're talking about all the crazy and wild AI chat box that have taken advantage of OpenAI's custom GPT with AI named that shows Tristan Jucha joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.