 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. That's you, Hector Bones, and you, Tim Ashman, and you, Johnny Hernandez, and everybody, welcome in the brand new folks, Habinov and Nikolai. On this episode of DTNS, Apple blocks Beeper Mini and then Beeper finds a way around it. The fight has begun. Apple will pay artists more to do special, spatial, although it's also special, audio music. And if you want a simple tool to send your own newsletter, Rich Strafilino has got you covered. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 11, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merrick. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Welcome back, Rich Strafilino. And just to get this out of the way for some DTNS listeners who've been wondering, where have you been? I've been over at the CESA series doing cybersecurity headlines. It's very new for me doing a five minute podcast largely based around technology news. Yeah. You looked at Daily Tech headlines and you're like, you know, this is just too wide. I need to narrow it down some more. Again, a finer net. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you do a great job over there. And glad to have you back today. Thanks for coming back. I'm excited. Let's start with the quick hits. Members of EU's parliament and the EU council agreed this weekend on new rules to govern AI models. Now, if you're wondering why this hasn't been reported more, it's because the details are pretty scant. Only a press release has been issued so far. Technical details are expected to be published later this week. What we do know is the companies like Google and open AI will need to publish technical documentation comply with copyright law. I mean, didn't they have to anyway? But yeah, there's special provisions on that and provide risk assessment and mitigation of some kind for foundation models. Those are the most advanced models like GPT-4. Facial recognition is also banned under the rules with exemptions carved out for police use in relation to serious crimes. And even the parliament won't take these rules up for a vote until next year. So even though we get some technical details, we're going to be hearing about this next year, when it actually gets voted on by the parliament, then the way the EU works, it'll go from there to the European council. And then it'll go to the various countries to be implemented. It's expected to have an easy go of it, but we won't see this become law until at the earliest 2025. The big win over the weekend, though, was getting everybody on board to assure those votes go smooth. Data AI estimates that TikTok has brought in $10 billion, that's with a B, in consumer spending on its platform. And that makes it the fifth app to reach that amount, and notably, the first non-gaming app to do so. US and Chinese users, for the majority of spending, I don't think too revelatory there, this puts TikTok in the class of games, as the previous statement had suggested. Candy Crush Saga, Honor of Kings, Monster Strike, Clash of Clans, some certain, some proud pay-to-play game company. TikTok will take $1.5 billion of that money and gain a controlling interest in Go2's Tokopedia in order to be able to launch its TikTok shop in Indonesia. That's TikTok's third largest market, big place for e-commerce for them, big deal because Indonesia requires a local company to operate any e-commerce there. Yeah, Indonesia is like, you got to shut this down, you're not Indonesian. And TikTok said, what if we become Indonesian? What about a bag of cash? One of the EU's most promising AI startups, Mistral AI, just completed its Series A round of funding. And more importantly to us, opened up its developer platform in beta, meaning it's definitely now in open competition with open AI, Google, Anthropic, et cetera. Mistral's model is called Mistral 7B. Unlike its competitors, Mistral 7B is available as a free download under an Apache 2.0 license that requires just attribution when you use it. Otherwise, you can do whatever you want. So in a way, this is more being a competitor with meta or even more open stable diffusion. The developer beta gives you access by API to Mistral 7B, Mistral 8X7B, which has more parameters and is also available under the Apache 2.0 license. And a third model called Mistral Medium, which they say has better performance, that one is only available through the API for now. The first beneficiary of the US Chips Act will be a Bay Systems location in New Hampshire. It will get $35 million before anyone else to quadruple production of chips for F-15 and F-35 fighter jets. And scientists at Northwestern University wanted to test Rodin's response to overhead predators. So rather than hiring owls, they decided to create small VR goggles to simulate overhead threats while they measured mice brain activity. The miniature Rodin Stereo Illumination VR, or immersive, get it, is attached to a mouse treadmill. So it's not the mouse wearing the goggles. The mouse is put on the treadmill, and then their head is inside this little area that makes them see the screens surrounding their field of view while they run. A paper on their findings was published in the journal Neuron. And that is the headlines. Right at the end of Good Day Internet on Friday. So if you're not a patron, you probably didn't hear this. But if you are a patron, you got the news that Beeper's integration with Apple Messages on Android had stopped working. Apple did not address Beeper by name in its statement, but did announce Saturday that it has taken steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. Now, it doesn't fake the credentials to get you your messages. It uses your credentials to get your notifications. So that is probably what Apple is referring to. Beeper built on the work of a high school student to reverse engineer how phone numbers are registered with Apple's messaging service. But the messages only ever went between Apple's servers and your phone. The Beeper mini service did not use cloud servers to do anything but get notifications from the Apple servers. Beeper restored service to its cloud version of the app over the weekend. And then Beeper got the mini service to work again on Monday, but only by signing in with an Apple ID. Originally, when it launched, you just sent a text message to register and you didn't have to have an Apple ID. Now you do, meaning it will be tied to an email address, not a phone number when you get your messages, but it still goes direct from Apple to your phone. It's Beeper mini is still not going through Beeper services. The service will remain free for the time being. They had a seven day free trial. They've suspended that and say, you know what, until we can make sure we get the service to the level we want and that it's not going to get interrupted again, which it probably will. They're not going to charge people for it. This is going to keep going. Apple's probably going to find a way to stop this, and then Beeper's going to try to find a way around it. Who do you think's going to win this battle, Rich? So it's 99% certain that Apple will win this, right? I mean, they have every reason to quote-unquote win this, to secure their users. I'm sure Apple, their sophistry, they would like to tell you about that. The only way I see this is for Beeper to blow themselves up as a company and be like, we're just going to open source this, and hey, Metta, you can do this, and hey, everybody else, you can do the same technique. It's no problem. We're not going to offer this as a paid service. The only way to do it is to get so many people doing it that it becomes standardized in a weird way. But other than that, it has to be... As long as Apple is determined not to make iMessage a cross-platform service, and we've seen no indication that they plan on doing that unless the EU makes them, they're going to be doing RCS. They have said, we have no intention to do iMessage by your mom and iPhone. Tim Cook famously said, I see no indication that they are willing to back down on this, or that quite honestly, the numbers of people that Beeper have aren't enough to make enough of a ground. Well, Apple is well-honed at having some... Especially for people that aren't iPhone customers. These aren't people that they're not making their own customers mad. They're making Android users mad who probably weren't going to buy an iPhone anyway. Yeah. Well, good news. It's open source. It's already open source. You can go to github.com slash Beeper and do this. I do think you're right though. Getting the public backlash against Apple is Beeper's only chance. Apple has the patience and the deep pockets to just continue to play Cat and Mouse and stop Beeper Mini every time it comes around to doing something. They don't lose because the people who use their devices don't care if Beeper Mini works, and the people who are on Android aren't using Apple devices. So they would rather upset them enough that they buy an iPhone than keep them happy happily using Android. So the motivations are there for Apple to wait this out. Beeper's only chance is to get a groundswell, whether it's like you say, getting other services to start interacting with this and putting even more pressure on Apple, or just getting the word out that like, hey, there's more Android users than there are iOS users in the world. Let's make this happen. I think the problem is Beeper is trying to use SMS, right? I mean, iMessage is a replacement for SMS, and most of the world just uses WhatsApp or KakaoTalk or something else. Yeah, and there is no lack of options for now. Meta is doing end-to-end encryption, so there is really no dearth of options out there. Yes, SMS is unsecured. If you're worried about privacy insecurity, you shouldn't be using SMS, but there is an abundance of ways to get around that. Just coming from the iOS version, because I was using Beeper for a couple of months, and just having signal integration break with that, right? Randomly, it would just be like, signal doesn't work for some reason. And then having to go into that, it breaks all of the magic that Beeper promises, because it's amazing to have all your chats in one place, especially stuff like Discord Slack. I absolutely love it. Phenomenal product, except that weird janky thing seemed to happen about once a month, let alone, iMessage, the core most bedrock thing. SMS is insecure, but I also never want it to break. I never want iMessage or SMS to break. You don't want to mess those busy things. Yeah, exactly. To me, yes, there are people that are mad at Apple's closed ecosystem. This is a totally new fight for Apple. They've never had to deal with that before. And so, again, they are used to dealing with that. And the inconvenience of this constantly breaking, to me, it's like Apple, by default, almost wins this. ADM was like this. There were a bunch of other instant messaging unifiers out there that were like this, and they all had the same issue. The platforms weren't participating in the unifying, so things always broke. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Clearly, in this case, Apple did it on purpose and said, we thought this was insecure. Yes, Beeper did it for a good reason, I guess, but bad people could have done it, and we don't know anything about the company Beeper, so we don't feel comfortable guaranteeing the security, so we're going to block it. It's a pretty solid, righteous playground to stand on. At least it's going to work for a lot of people. Yeah. All right, speaking of Apple, there's a bunch of Apple stuff out there coming out. We've got three of them for you. First story, Apple trying to make its use of Dolby Atmos, aka Spatial Audio, its competitive advantage over Spotify. Spotify doesn't offer Dolby Atmos. They don't offer any kind of spatial audio, so Apple is trying to encourage its use more on its platform as a differentiator. Bloomberg sources say Apple plans to give added waiting to songs that offer a Dolby Atmos version. That would mean royalties. Bloomberg said that royalties would increase for those artists whether listeners play the Atmos version or not. Apparently, all Apple's going to require is just make it available, and then we'll pay you more for whatever of your music they stream. Rich, it seems like a wise idea. It doubles down on Apple's actual advantage over Spotify, which is that they have a hardware ecosystem that already has a lot of this already ready to roll out. If you own recent AirPods, Pros, the Beats versions of those, a lot of those already have spatial audio. A lot of people probably don't necessarily use that feature, but we can double down and say, hey, we have something special that Spotify doesn't have. My question to you, Tom, though, is, do you think this, like, do people care about spatial audio in music? I think it's gotten better. Some of the early spatial audio stuff that was put out was not very good. The engineers were still learning how it worked, and so there were certain, there were some that were great, but there were others who were like, okay, you just kind of put this through a filter, and it sounds weird. So I'm not going to listen to it in spatial audio. It has improved since then, and I think it's going to continue to improve. In fact, that's probably one of the reasons Apple's doing this, right, is the more artists that use this, the better the engineers are going to get at having a standard way of putting this out here. My only thought, though, Rich, is like, at some point, all the engineers of all the major artists are going to be doing this, and then Spotify can just light it up and take advantage and be like, great, put them on our platform too, right? Well, spatial audio is also like a checkbox then at this point, right? If I'm an indie label, or if I'm anyone that has any control, like direct control over that production process, any DAW logic or Ableton or whatever like that has a spatial audio option that's fairly simple. Now, the mix might not be great, but as you said, people don't need to listen to it. They don't need to respond to it. I just need to have this as an option, and then I get that extra waiting, whether that applies to everybody or just the label partners and stuff like that. Now that I'm thinking about it more, it actually almost makes this a non-advantage when Spotify does roll it out, because it'll just be this passive default already all over Apple. Everyone just clicks the checkbox and has this. Their waiting doesn't change relative to everybody else, because why wouldn't you? It's a relatively simple thing to do when we just have a bunch of mediocre spatial audio potentially mixes out there. Yeah. Responding to a couple of questions in our chat room, Nick with a C says, so make one song and have increased royalties on everything forever. I think the way it works is I put out the song Unforgiven, and then I put out a version of it in Dolby Atmos that's available, and then I get increased royalties on that song. I have to have a Dolby Atmos version of a song for it to work. And then GPig84 is like spatial audio. Is that like surround sound? Yeah. Yeah. It's Dolby Atmos, but it's similar to surround sound, right? Yes. It's supposed to give you the idea of you are listening to a performance, live performance space, and as you turn your head, you hear that, which my big problem with that is people don't want live things that resemble live things in their music. They actually just want the same thing every time, even in a live performance. That's like the history of music performances. They don't want live. They want what they heard on the CD. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, for story number two, tells us that Apple retail store employees have been training for the Vision Pro to be able to offer it in stores. And that training, I'm sorry, I said they have been training. They haven't. They will be training mid-January with the aim to start shipping the Vision Pro end of the month. Gurman says the release will happen at least before March. There's a lot of talk about the need to have fittings to get it fitted to your head, so you get the settings all right. So that's probably what the training was about. But if they're going to have the training in mid-January, that implies that we're going to get this thing in the first couple of months. Gurman says, probably at least before March, if not end of January sometime in February. Apple has only ever said early 2024, but the Bloomberg sources do say that they will launch in the US first with UK and Canada as the potential first two international markets with Asia and Europe to follow soon after that. One reason for the delay in the Vision Pro, if you're wondering like they announced it at WWDC last year, like what the heck, Sony can only make less than half a million displays a year for it according to some sources. So they have been waiting to stockpile them or hoping maybe they can get Sony to increase their yields. That again speaks to the fact that they can only make half a million a year and they're willing to go to market with this, even with the stockpile. They could have been stockpiling this for a year or two for this. The projections on the numbers on this are all, this is going to be a very niche device for the first couple. I'm surprised I was expecting this to be the end of March, I forgot how many days March had, end of March 2024 to meet that early 2024 deadline. I figured they would push it as far as they could. I think that's an encouraging sign of where they see the software at and where they can see what kind of experiences they can give people that they are pushing it forward. I know there's been some reporting on developer woes, but developers are just getting a feel for a brand new platform and that kind of stuff. So I'm hopeful just because I'm interested in this space. I always like to see it go. If that's a sign of confidence, I'm interested to see an interesting new take from a major company. And our third of the Apple stories, Korea's The Elec says Samsung is strengthening its foldable display manufacturing in advance of delivering displays for Apple's first foldable products, which Ming-Chi Kuo and others think is going to come in 2025. Samsung display and LG display are both reportedly working on foldable displays for Apple, including supposedly a 20.25 inch panel. But we're getting more and more indications that Apple will come with a foldable rich if you had to place a bet. What kind of foldable do you think they'll come with? I think they have to go some sort of phone form factor, right? And personally, I think the one that makes the most sense to me is the flip phone, like the tiny phone into the full phone. That to me seems to make the most sense. I don't know. I could also, I mean, it definitely makes sense. They haven't updated the iPad mini in a while. It would make sense to, hey, we have iPad mini to iPhone. I like that form factor better. I'm hoping Apple makes it because I'm more interested in that. I'm going to put my chips on tablet. Okay. I'm going to say they won't want to mess with the phone. The iPhone is iconic. They won't want to bring you a foldable out of the gate. They will eventually do it, but they will start on the iPad. I will give you an iPod touch form factor that folds out into a mini. I have seen more Android people talking about foldable form factors as like a major selling point, more in the last like six months. And it feels like where we were at with big phones for the longest time, Apple resisting and them slowly coming out with that. So that's why I feel like phone solely like solely that form factor. It just feels like a very similar vibe to that admittedly foldable still much smaller than big phones. I guess we're in, I don't know, 2012 or wherever. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like if you don't have to put the cell phone motive, but I guess if you're gonna, you're probably going to offer 5G service in it. So maybe it doesn't save you that much space anyway. But I did my gut tells me tablet first. Not that. And then they'll do a foldable iPhone. They'll make everybody go, why didn't they do a foldable iPhone yet? So that everybody gets a 2026. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, what do you think? What should we talk about on this show? You can let us know. Did you know we have a subreddit? You can go to our subreddit and vote on titles or not titles, vote on stories that other people have submitted and even submit some of your own. Get on over there to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. At the end of November, MailChimp announced that it's closing Tiny Letter. Tiny Letter is a free personal newsletter service, very simple. I am a proud subscriber of Rich's Family Newsletter, which he does on Tiny Letter. But he won't be able to do it on Tiny Letter after February 29th, 2024, which reminds us that 2024 is a new year. Extra day. Yeah, exactly. You got an extra day to use Tiny Letter, but then it's gone. The service is popular among a lot of users, including Rich. And you've spent a great deal of time, Rich, trying to figure out what you're going to do to replace Tiny Letter. First of all, why did you pick Tiny Letter to begin with? So Tiny Letter, I believe it was Justin Robert Young may have suggested using it. I think he was using it for free political newsletter. And so I was like, hey, Justin has good tech, he knows what he's talking about. And the reason I kept with it is it is the most non-upselled little web app that I have ever used. There is literally no option to be like, click here to pay money for anything on here. It's no spam. It's not trying to get me to turn it into a marketing platform or anything like that. It's extraordinarily basic. Shocking that they're not going to do it anymore. Yeah. Well, what's shocking is that they never flip the switch and be like, upgrade to Mailchimp standard for $5 a month or whatever like that. That to me is the shocking kind of the beautiful thing about Tiny Letter that will soon die a unnotable death on February 29th. But yes, that was what attracted me to it. It was like absolutely no frills, minimum viable newsletter product was the appeal for me to try it and keep using it. And so when you were looking for a replacement, what are the things that you were using Tiny Letter for in your newsletter that you had to have in whatever you replaced it with? Yeah. So my newsletter was basically, it was like, I don't want to post pictures of my kids on Instagram. Sometimes I think it's weird. So I wanted just like, hey, newsletter, 10 pictures of my kids. Here's what we did this week. You can enjoy it or unsubscribe or just subscribe and be polite and don't open it. I will know, but I won't never mention it to you. So what I needed for is like have image hosting and a very, what I wanted is a very simple editor. Like that's what I'm looking, I was looking for in a replacement, something that I could hand off to somebody. Occasionally I'm on vacation. I might be under the weather, might have some other work to get done on a Sunday or something like that. I need, maybe ask my wife Jackie or somebody else to kind of, hey, could you put it together? Here's the images. And if it's like some weird, kludgy solution or if it's this really like corporate interface where you kind of have to know the ins and outs, I didn't want that. I wanted something that anybody could kind of handle and make it a family project, not necessarily just something that I was doing. So that was my number one thing. The other thing I didn't want to just do another startup kind of thing. I wanted something that had been on the market for a while that I knew wasn't going anywhere. And then I wanted exportability, because that's a big thing. Luckily, Tiny Letter lets you export your email list very easily and the record of sending stuff. It gets weird when you want to back up all of your other stuff. But I wanted to make sure I could get my stuff out if I needed to, not be locked into a proprietary system. All right. So what did you find? So it will, the first thing I actually came to mind, I was like, oh wait, there's like Substack, right? That's the newsletter platform. How does this even work? I've subscribed to all the Substacks. I actually didn't know how it worked from a creator. I assumed it was a paid thing, which is why I hadn't ever tried it before. It's free. They monetize based on taking a portion of subscriptions. But if you don't charge a subscription, you can actually use it. No problem. Free to use. At a pretty simple editor, not too bad. It's had too much that I needed. More than you needed. Yeah. I mean, it has a lot of different tools. Monetization, I've actually thought, is like, hey, if someone wanted to like, we could set it up to be like, give to the college fund, you know, like a dollar or two or something like that. That'd be kind of nice to have. Of course, then I'm taking a fraction of that. So definitely an option. If there was nothing else out there, I could use Substack. No problem. It's very glossy, very shiny, very nice. Kind of on the other end of that, I actually use MicroBlog for a personal blog, Mr. Anthropology.MicroBlog.com. But their newsletter product for that is only like a paid option. And it's not even the base paid option. It's like 10 bucks a month. It's a little pricey, and I'd have to do it as a separate blog. So I was like, but I love the fact that that is very much a bare minimum interface, right? Okay. Right interface, wrong price. Yeah. The other thing was MailChimp, turns out, also owned by Intuit. And I will say this, the stingiest handoff I have ever gotten from two services that are owned by the same company, I expected there to be like, click here, all your newsletters will be in another place. There's no exporting of anything. They hate Tiny Letter that much, that they like didn't even give me like an easy export. And they're like, they'll give you a free month. That's what everybody gets when you try MailChimp. I didn't even get like a discount. Give me an extra 5% MailChimp. Come on. I ended up back at the beginning, where everyone ends up here, WordPress. It turns out, duh, of course, WordPress, newsletter is like the most ridiculously easy newsletter to sign up for. Obviously, I've used newsletter for work and personal projects over the years, excuse me, newsletter. I've used WordPress over the years for a ton of different projects and work and stuff like that. The UI isn't the easiest. It's the block editor. It still lives a little bit of a learning curve there, but I was like, WordPress, I'm going anywhere. I have all sorts of plugins and stuff like that. If I want to pay for it, there's a huge, extensible ecosystem out there. So, if I want to do weird automations and, hey, upload from this Dropbox folder and automatically send it out, and I'll just do a review or something like that. I like the fact that it can change over time, but it can be also drop dead simple, and no one ever got fired for choosing WordPress. No, that's good. I bet a lot of people don't realize that WordPress, in addition to the blogging tools, offers a newsletter tool as well as part of your WordPress subscription. I didn't notice you do it, and you can get it on the free tier. All of these, like, Substack is unlimited subscribers, but when you're looking at MailChimp or WordPress, all of them are free up to either a subscriber or a monthly send count. I think MailChimp is 1,000 cents a month. I don't come close to hitting that, so don't worry about that. WordPress is 500,000 or 1,000 subscribers on the free tier, too. Also, honorable mention to Beehive, it's more of a marketing tool. That's the problem with a lot of newsletter services. They're all like, you can send all your e-commerce marketing. I will say, though, of all the ones, I tried a bunch of these just to see what was out there. This is the one that had the most functional free tier and felt like it would be the least spammy to people out there. Just a very basic e-commerce focused one that still could be usable for what I was looking for. Well, thank you, Rich. We'll have linked all of those in our show notes at DailyTechNewShow.com, of course. Let's check in with Chris Christensen, who shares a hiking app that won Apple's 2023 App Store Awards for iPhone app of the year. A hiking app. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. This is a resource that I've mentioned before, and it's the All Trails app. I want to bring it up again because they just won Apple's 2023 best iPhone app of the year. That's unusual when that is going to an established app that's been around for a long time. The All Trails app, which helps you find great trails wherever you happen to be, has also added national park guides and trail previews, improved on-trail navigation, weather conditions, local community feeds, and other things. So it's worth looking again if you haven't looked at it recently, All Trails app, and this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Thank you, Chris. All right. Well, thank you also, Rich Strafilino, for being with us as well. If you want to follow what Rich is doing, you should do the following things. Rich, where should they go? You can go to CISOseries.com and you can find cybersecurity headlines. We publish that five days a week, me, Steve, and Sean. Five or six minutes, because you're all caught up on a little bit more of the focused cybersecurity news. And then we've also got other shows, like the CISO series podcast. We're going to be talking about security implications of LLMs there on tomorrow's episode, Dropping and Defense in Depth. If you want a little bit more of the C-suite view of security, really fascinating, great conversations, and a fun time will be had by all. Yeah, we did a little CISO book ending of the weekend for folks who had Mike Johnson. CISO at Rivian on the show on Friday, also a member of the CISO series crew as well. So go check that out, folks. And Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. Netflix is getting into live tennis, but it's still not striking a deal with sports organizations. We'll explain how that can be and why this is genius. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live back tomorrow, talking about genetically edited chickens that can shrug off the flu. Dr. Nicky Ackermans is here. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.