 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Pat, DeGrashe A. Daniels, and Irwin Stur. Coming up on DTNS, do you need security labels on your car charger? Uber wants to show you ads while you ride, and why banning TikTok has only made YouTube and the Gram more powerful than India could possibly have imagined. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 20th, 2022. Happy birthday to my brother Tim in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. Also in the area, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All right, my brother is having a birthday, but we've got some other tech things you should know with the quick hits. Lots of news from Intel today. It showed off the next generation of Thunderbolt, which is going to be based on USB 4 version 2.0, the one we just told you about earlier this week. Basically, it takes some of those optional USB specs and makes them required. So if you have a Thunderbolt connection when this is published, you would be assured to get 80 gigabits per second with the possibility of that asymmetric 120 gigabits per second support for dual 4K monitors and delivery of at least 100 watts of power, although USB 4 version 2 can support 240 watts, so no word on that. Also no word on when the next version of Thunderbolt will be published. Intel also officially launched its Raptor Lake family of CPUs featuring the core i9-13900K, the snappily named i7-13700K, and the sportily named i5-13600K. Each chip is also shipping without integrated graphics. Just look for KF in the model alongside Z790 motherboards. Reviews are finding the increase in the efficiency cores, seems to improve it over Alder Lake for sure, and all those e-cores and faster clock speeds make it competitive with AMD Zen 4 as well. You're going to need Windows 11 or a recent Linux kernel and be ready for some high power consumption. Oh yeah. Google announced new features for messages on Android. It now supports emoji reactions. Other Android users will see the emojis and iOS users will see a sense in selling them which emoji was used in the response. Messages now also support threaded replies, and you'll be able to watch a YouTube video in the Messages app. Yeah, and messages can be used on United Airlines Flight's Wi-Fi without charge. More airlines are expected to follow, and Google announced Android 13 Go edition for low-end phones. Now this includes material, U-designs, and Google Play system updates, among other features. Phones will need two gigs of RAM and use Android 13 Go edition. Yeah, a bit of a ram hog, that low-end operating system. The Competition Commission of India has fined Google $161.9 million for anti-competitive practices related to Android in, quote, multiple markets. Google requires that device manufacturers install the entire Google mobile suite and prominently place Google apps if they want to get the Google mobile suite and the apps. The Commission found that this, quote, amounts to imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers. It also ordered Google not to offer incentives for exclusive search. 97% of smartphones in India run Google's version of Android, so it's kind of hard for them to argue that they're not, at least, in a monopoly position. Maybe they don't think they're abusing it, but they certainly are in one. Yeah. Podcast company Pocketcast, which is owned by Automatic, the folks that own WordPress, announced that all of its apps are now open source. Pocketcast is using Mozilla's public license. Pocketcast encourages all developers to share modifications they make to the code. Repositories for iOS and Android version of the apps are now available on GitHub. The information sources say Apple has paused production of some of the components of the iPhone 14 plus. That's the larger version of the base model. There's also the iPhone 14 Pro Max. That one has not been paused. Just the big version of the intro, the non-pro iPhone 14. The information also says a plant that assembles the iPhone 14 plus hasn't paused but has cut its production by 70 to 90%. It looks like Apple is pausing or halting or delaying production in order to evaluate how to go forward because they're not selling as many of these as they expected, but it does not look like they're going to cancel the model. Hey, remember BlackBerry? I think so. I was little. Yeah. The company, the company that made the phones and stuff, yeah, they are still a company. They do security now and they do it quite well, I have to say. They also do a little market research around security. Recently, BlackBerry published results of a survey that found around 74% of people think there should be ratings for how secure connected cars and electric vehicles, chargers, are. So you have a little label that says, you know, like Energy Star. This is 70% protected, hopefully bigger. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with the Federal Trade Commission are working on a basic set of security standards to create at-a-glance labels like that, similar to those Energy Star labels. And those are set to launch in 2023, but not necessarily on connected vehicles and chargers. That's not part of the plan. It's all about IoT. And while most people want the ratings, 54% in this BlackBerry survey said they are concerned about devices in their home being attacked. That means 46% are not. They think their IoT devices are just fine. 32% said they have at least one IoT device that they do not allow to connect to the internet because of security concerns. That means that 68% of them just let everything connect. Now, Lamar, it could be because they have very secure, well-vetted IoT devices and they've never bought an off-brand one. Is that what you think is going on? That or they just really put a lot of trust in their system. Like, for example, I use HomeKit. I put my trust in HomeKit. That's what I personally feel secure when I have all my devices connected under there. And I'm sure other people feel the same with Alexa, Google Assistant. But I honestly think the most important work to matter protocol team, no matter 1.0 is out now, I think the most important thing they can do is the education of this because all these devices are going to become going to be matter certified. But what does that mean? Well, we as techies know that HomeKit is the foundation under matter. We know that's rock solid secure, according. But how do you tell everyday consumer that if it says matter, it matters? That was corny, but they should use that. Yeah. In which case, it will be easier to have these labels. One wonders if maybe the labels won't be necessary, but it sounds like they're going to do them anyway. And it would be interesting if you walk into a store and you see all the matter compliant stuff in the 90s or whatever the rating system is, the high rating and non matter stuff is lower. I do think that what happens is people say, yes, I'm very concerned with security on the box. I would like it to tell me if it's insecure. But I assume that everything I have running in my house is fine, which may or may not be true, right? Yeah, absolutely. When you said the box, maybe you're thinking of a Tommy boy where it's like the guarantees on the box. Yeah, it says it on the box. That means it's a guarantee. And it's like, do people really still have trust in that? I guess they do. Now you have a connected car that is an electric vehicle. How do you feel about this idea of, hey, maybe we should also put it on the chargers and the cars? I think as a good idea, short answer. I think as long as EVs are becoming more prevalent, they're here to stay. There has to be some kind of standard or some for security on there. I mean, side note, we still need a standard on the type of charger. I think we're getting there with that. But going along with that, yeah, a standard for safety security, because actually, after I read this article, I'm like, is my charger secure? Can someone come plug into this thing and do things to my car? I don't know. And now you make me worry. I imagine your charger at home. Does your charger at home connect to the internet in any way? It does. It does. There you go. Yeah. So there's a way in. And once they get in, anything that it's connected to apps, phones, etc. is a potential vector. That doesn't mean they will be able to get in, but you want to make sure that the highest security level is put in there. Because if it's connected to the internet, someone can find a way to get into it if it's not properly secured. I agree. And so I don't want that to happen. Man, I have a few things in my house that are not internet connected because I don't know if they're secure or not. So my washer, my washing machine, I'm like, I don't really need that to be internet connected and I can't find any vetting on it. So I'm just not going to connect it. That's just going to be the way that goes. You know, as much as I want to internet connected washer and dryer and all that, I didn't really consider that. If you're not, yeah, if you're not sure, it's probably better not to have it because it doesn't need it. I'm sure it's fine. But really, all it can do is allow me to get a notification that my laundry done, which would be nice. I'm not going to lie. But it doesn't seem to work. It can have firmware updates so your dryer could be more efficient. Yeah, that's true. And now I have to manually go check for those if I want. But yeah. All right, let's talk about ads while we relax. Who doesn't love that? Yes. Uber launched a new advertising product called Journey ads. Now it will sell ads based inside its ride hailing and Uber Eats apps and also offer in vehicle digital ads. Uber says brands will have 100% share of voice during the trip, meaning you'll only see ads in the app and the car from one brand during your ride. So Uber has already sold some ads and will continue to sell placement and sponsor emails, post checkout ads and menu ads and car top ads. That's a lot of ads. So how many people can Uber show an ad to? Well, Uber says it has 122 million monthly active users globally. And it told investors it expects it could make more than 1 billion in revenue in 2024. Ride hailing company Lyft launched a similar plan earlier in August called Lyft Media. So we all complain about having more ads than we actually exhibit behavior that we don't like. Everyone says they don't like ads, but then people respond to them, which is why people keep buying ads. So I think it's easy to tear this down and say, I don't want this. It's going over the line. I want to be able to opt out of it. And I'm not even arguing against that. But let's approach it from the other side. Is there any way this is beneficial? Is there anything out of this that you would say, okay, I would like to be able to opt out of it, but I wouldn't if it did this. Yeah, I have a different philosophy about ads. Maybe I probably sync with you a lot. I don't see a problem with ads as long as they are beneficial. I'll give you an example real quick. I saw an ad on TikTok today for a NFC business card. So someone wants my business information. I take out the card. They tap their phone on it. They get up my website and it has all my links and they can have any context. To me that ad, I sat and watched the whole video. That was interesting to me. That's beneficial. Same thing I'm thinking about. If I'm in an Uber and I'm being taken from the airport whatever it's evening time, it knows I'm probably hungry. It knows type of restaurants I tend to order from. So why not put an ad that says, hey, you could order your food now and it could be there when you get home. I think that's a really good use case of something that's beneficial. I don't mind those kind of ads if it's going to help me do something. I know you mentioned something about watching programs in the airport, right? Yeah. Although now you got me thinking about coming home from LAX and ordering Korean fried chicken to just be hot and ready on my doorstep. Isn't that what you can do? You can actually do that already. But the ad that's going to push me to do that, give me a coupon, all that stuff. But yeah, I was thinking about this because I saw that NBC Universal was one of the advertisers on board for the initial launch of this. By the way, my wife works there. So I always try to disclose that. But that doesn't really inform my take here because it could be NBC. It could be Disney. It could be anybody. I could see them using this to advertise you to you by letting you watch an episode of one of their original shows. So let's forget about this NBC. Let's say it's Apple. Apple TV Plus could say, hey, have you seen? Oh, what's the what's the the big C or? Sure, let's go with C. Have you seen any of C? We'll show you the first episode. We know your ride is 45 minutes long. This episode is 38 minutes long as you watch the whole thing. And if you like it, sign up for Apple TV Plus and watch the rest of them. I feel like that would be the kind of advertising that I would appreciate because it's giving me something entertaining in exchange for showing me off. It's like a free sample. Yeah, absolutely. Now I don't listen. We've watched those movies. I can't name them off top of my head where it's in the future. And as you walking down the street, there's ads blaring at you everywhere. And as you walk past the windows like, hey, hey, you there. Now, so obviously that scares us. I don't see that type of future because that does not that does not seem like that's going to make anybody any money. Those are just ads to be ads, but ads that are helpful. And I'm in a photo disclosure. I'm a creator who lives off ads, but I but I still pick and choose the ones that I can pick and choose. Yeah, something that I feel is going to be helpful for not only me, but for the people watching me, because if it's not helpful, then it's a waste of time. Yeah. And that's always true of ads. I always point out the trailers are essentially ads and people host them for free because people like to watch trailers. Absolutely. That said, OK, well, I think we've done a good job of looking at it from the other side. Is this too much? Are we swinging back to advertising just being everywhere? Not that we ever really swung away from it. Like Netflix is adding ads and they had said they would never do it. Uber is is putting ads and during the ride. Like, is that just where we're headed? I think so, because I think the reality is more money. I didn't realize this before until I started studying this. There's more money to be made in ads than people paying outright. And it didn't seem that way. It seemed like, well, if you get the full amount for me, that should pay for the difference, right? Yeah. But but ad rates are going up and it's more desirable. So I think both will live. I don't think the if I want to pay for no ads and pay a little premium, I don't think that's ever going to go away. I want to I want to be shielded from that. I can pay the premium. Not everyone can. But again, ads that are done tasteful are going to keep people on the on the platform. If Netflix has some annoying ads like who used to have and maybe some of people argue still have, they're going to stop using Netflix. The negative of targeting is that targeting makes you give away your information without your consent, right? What I like about this. And granted, we have to assume that Uber isn't going to use third party ad targeting here when I say this. But if Uber just uses stuff it knows about you, it can give you good advertising because it knows where you go, when you go, what you eat if you use Uber eats. And I feel like that means it won't feel as creepy because it's first party and it will be more helpful because they actually know stuff about you. The good the good thing about ad targeting is they know what you want. And they're they're showing you something that you might find useful. But how does Netflix know who we who what we do? They know what stuff we like, right? Right. So I think they kind of have to use third party. You have to use third party. I think they have to because that's just not enough. It's just not enough. Well, folks, if you know if you've cracked the code on advertising, let us know. We got an email address. You can send us an email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. There's a common belief that big companies like regulation because they're big enough to survive it. And regulation tends to crowd out any smaller competitors before they get big. Restofworld.org describes just such a situation playing out in India. While the US has made a lot of noise about banning TikTok, India went and did it on June 29, 2020. At that time, folks hoped that TikTok's 200 million monthly active Indian users would move to homegrown apps like Moj or Josh or Chingari or Raposo. Now, the demand is there. Restofworld notes that analysts estimate the short video space in India will be worth more than 19 billion by 2030. Wow. That sounds like good news for local apps. But most marketers rest of the world talk to believe it in a benefiting YouTube and Instagram instead. It's not that local apps don't have users. It's just that the bigger foreign apps, well, have more of them. Like at least twice as many. Restofworld says Moj and Josh combined have 300 million active, monthly active users in India. YouTube alone has more than 100, excuse me, 325 million there. And Instagram is suspected a top 400 million in India this year. Yeah. The companies that run Moj and Josh are paying creators and racking up losses as they do that and only getting half the monthly active users of YouTube and Instagram. YouTube also pays creators and racks up losses on shorts, but it has plenty of cash to burn and it can outlast the other competitors. Plenty of creators come to YouTube and Instagram without being paid as well because of the prestige of the platform, the size of the user base, not to mention that brands do seem more comfortable working on YouTube and TikTok because they're familiar with them. Part of that is familiarity. Part of that is simply things like tracking is more developed from YouTube and Instagram and any of these older, bigger platforms. Lamar, I know you've had a lot of good success in short videos, so I was curious on your insight as a creator, what kind of things could these smaller companies do to get you over there? Is it just paying or is there more than that? Yeah, I didn't think about this one for a while because obviously you want to app that if I was an ideal app, I was to build one massive reach of course because the more people, the more that benefits you and your business, I'd like to get a rev-share of ad placements that are before and after my videos if there are any ads. A lot of places do not do that right now. I think most of them do not have that. They're starting to and maybe a friendly environment for when a brand comes to me and wants to do a sponsored thing, I post it on that place, but because we didn't post it through you, through your network, you push it down and that's something every network does now. Brands know this, so they compensate for it, but it's still annoying to have the views just plummet on a branded video because they're mad that you didn't use them to add in place. KSL wonders if YouTube shorts or TikTok are better revenue-wise or are they the same? Well, YouTube shorts doesn't have revenue at all. They have a fund that pays little to nothing each month, but in 2023 they are going to have rev-share. TikTok actually sent me a notice yesterday that they're coming out with an ad rev-share program almost immediately. They're working out of since June. I think they're all trying. Instagram has a bonus program, Facebook Reels has a bonus program. They're trying to find ways to pay creators with shorts because right now they're getting a lot of data, a lot of traffic, and they don't have to pay anything out necessarily. The tide is starting to turn with that for sure. On the consumer side, on the person who watches these things, the reason if I'm in India that I'm going to Instagram or YouTube is because that's where all my friends are finding the funny things and sharing them with me. These other platforms just don't have the penetration. I feel like reach is one of the main platforms because if you get the reach, then you can sell the ads that will bring people like you to the platform. But how do you get that reach? I think you have to be different. You can't just do the same platform that TikTok does, which is what YouTube and Instagram are doing. You have to have a spin. You have to have something a little different the way TikTok did in its origins, right? Yeah, exactly. It was musically beginning, so there was lip-syncing, lip-syncing dances, whatever they got. They got a massive amount of people in, then they were able to shift. I think these local India apps right now, they're bringing in a lot of Indian celebrities. I think that's great, but that's very short-term thinking that money's going to run out at some point. What do you do if they haven't reached a certain level, having all these celebrities in? That's one of the international apps. I think they made a mistake there getting rid of TikTok. I understand it was a China-India dispute. Yeah, there was a border conflict between China and India going on when TikTok got banned. Not to mention COVID and stuff like that. Yeah, there's more to it than just helping out the domestic apps. That's a good point. I don't know. I think you have an opportunity in India to niche market because you have so many individual languages and individual cultures that you could superserve. I know that doesn't give you mass adoption, but that could be your way to build a community and then expand out of it. I got this impression from the Rest of World article anyway, and I don't know myself that that wasn't happening, that everybody's just going for mass appeal straight out of the gate. Yeah, mass appeal, and then when a certain amount of creators or celebs leave, they leave, and then an audience moves on, and then that was local is gone. All right, Meta announced Wednesday that it has built the first AI-powered speech translation system for unwritten languages. They call it the Universal Speech Translator, or UST. Just call it Universal Translator. Might as well just go ahead. Come on, Meta. Meta says that it estimates around 40% of the 7,000 languages on Earth are primarily spoken and have little or no written component. Usually, the way you train an algorithm to identify and translate a language is to train it on text, but on these 40% of languages, you don't have enough text or any text to train it on. Meta used a few different techniques. They used intermediate languages like Mandarin, so they would translate a language into Mandarin, then translate the Mandarin into English, and that helped bridge the gap because they could have a little more information and be able to get it trained on languages it otherwise couldn't. They also engaged in something called speech mining, where they encoded the spoken words into the semantic space as written languages like English. So instead of speech to text, because there is no text, Meta generated waveforms from the little bits of speech, and those waveforms were treated as if they were text, because they always looked about the same. The system is able to translate the primarily oral Taiwanese language Hukian. The purpose of UST is to provide real-time speech-to-speech translation across all languages. Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will open-source the Hukian translation models, but also the evaluation data sets and research papers so that others can reproduce and build on the work, so this is not a proprietary thing. In the end, what you need to know out of this is that UST has to be trained on a language, but it can be trained on languages that other algorithms can't. Once you train it, it can do real-time translation of languages that most other systems can't handle. Yeah, I think a couple of things here. Some of this is over my head, but I just appreciate, we have 7,000 languages in the world. That's amazing, you don't think about that, and the fact that 40% of those have little to no text. What a job these researchers have to try to figure out, and I think using a bridge through Mandarin is pretty genius to try to find some commonalities or some similarities. I think it's genius work. It just bridges that gap for us to be able to talk to each other in real-time one day, just like on a certain show. Yeah, we could have real-time where you speak in English, I speak in the language that I have yet to learn, but everyone would understand each other. Yeah, I also love the idea of using waveform to build a vocabulary. I think there's probably other avenues of research there that you could do regarding linguistics, regarding figuring out things like, is there a universal grammar? Because we've never done that before. We've never compared that many languages in that way. I wonder if there's some other tributaries to this river of research going on. Fascinating stuff, and yeah, the fact that it's being done by META is going to bother some people because they've got a thing against META, but these are just scientists, and they are scientists that would work somewhere else if META wasn't employing them, and I don't get the sense that they're doing anything nefarious here. It seems like a pretty good project. No, it seems good. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. George wrote in and said, hey team, hope you are well. Just been listening to the latest episode and hearing the listener's confusion over cookies. So we had an email where someone was talking about the GDPR and saying, well, they should allow functional cookies. And I was explaining that, yeah, they do. The GDPR doesn't prevent session cookies for logging in, and that sort of thing. It's about tracking cookies. And George said, that made me think this would be a good topic for Know a Little More. Working in the ad tech industry, the issue of a cookie-less world, especially with GDPR and also Google deprecating them in the Chrome browser in the future, is always discussed. I think it would be useful to know a little more about cookies. And I was very pleased to be able to write back to George and say, good, because I did one not that long ago. It was in September. We updated it and reposted it. So if you want the episode of cookies, go to know a little more.com. And I talk about where they came from, why they're called cookies, what they were originally used for, what they became used for later, and a little bit about what our emailer yesterday was talking about, which is you don't have to have cookies to track you. There's ways to track you without cookies. Real quick, I just want to say something fascinating about your podcast. I was able to learn about HMI 2.1. You did a rerun episode on that. I didn't realize that 2.1 doesn't mean it has all the features. Yeah. And when you were breaking that down, I was like, wow, I just learned a little more. Oh, I'm glad. No, I did. Oh, it was really helpful. Well, you got some good stuff going on, too. I've been enjoying seeing your stuff on TikTok and Reels and YouTube and all over the place. What do you got going on? Yeah, I'm doing all kind of unboxings and showcases. One of the highlights was this cloud device. It came out a couple weeks ago called Logitech Cloud. It literally was called that, where it's a gaming device that you can you can use Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud and all these different services. And this nice little portable device. And I just thought it was really cool. It did really well on that. So I do a lot of tech things like that. So if you're interested, go to my site, LamarWolsey.com, and whatever site that you're most comfortable with, I am there everywhere, Tom. I'm even here. You're also behind me. I don't even know how you pull that off. Am I that emoji back there? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone who supports us on the show. We couldn't get Lamar here without your support. So thank you, Simon and Nathan. Simon and Nathan just started back on us on Patreon. Thank you, Simon and Nathan. Good to have new people in here. Keep it coming. You're going to get good stuff. You're going to get Roger's got a column up today. You could become a patron and see what he says about being a video content creator right now at patreon.com slash D T N S patrons can also stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live, and we shall return tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.