 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, right there, right now. Thanks to every single one of you. Maybe you're Kelly Cook or Scott Hepburn or Jelf Wilkes or Ditch Doctor. Whoever you are, we thank you. On this episode of DTNS, is everybody done trying to ban TikTok? Maybe. X offers government ID based verification and the iPhone goes on sale. But is Apple being a jerk with its USBC implementation? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, the Ides of September, September 15th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio, I don't even know what we call it these days. I'm Sarah Lane. Draw on the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's tech producer, Roger Chang. And joining us to see what you've done to us, Tom. The cohost of Brad and Will made a tech cloud. Will Smith is with us. Welcome back. Well, everybody. Good to have you. Yes, it's good to be back myself. It's been two weeks, but it suddenly doesn't feel like that. Just feels awesome to be mad. Thanks for having me. I'm thanking myself for having. Welcome back, Tom. We're so glad to have you here today. Thank you for being here, Tom. We really appreciate this and we hope you do well. I'll do my best. We're rooting for you. I'm going to give it a shot. We're rooting for you. Thank you. We are. We're in your corner, OK? Right. Well, with that kind of support, I'm willing to give a try to the quick hits. Reuters sources say that TSMC has told major suppliers such as Dutch lithography maker ASML to temporarily delay delivering high end chipmaking equipment because of potential weak customer demand. TSMC is a really big chip maker. So this tends to make people kind of worried. The company has been experiencing delays at its $40 billion chip factory in Arizona. And the latest reported instruction to suppliers is aimed at controlling costs and managing expectations. Apple will release a software update for iPhone 12 users. Nothing to do with the new 15 iPhone 12 users in France. This follows a ban of iPhone 12 sales in France after regulators found that its specific absorption rate for radiation exceeded legal limits. The determination was made based on how much radiation your limbs absorb, not your head. Usually the calculations are made about the head. Apple says the update is related to a specific testing protocol used by French regulators and not a safety concern referring to the limb thing with the iPhone 12 itself. Granted, the iPhone 12 does not pass the absorption limit when you hold it to your head to make a call. It does. It does pass. I'm sorry, I said does not. It does pass the absorption limit when you hold it to your head. It just doesn't pass when you hold it in your hand. So basically Apple's saying since technically your hand might get more radiation than the limit of EU law, they're going to adjust things in France. Google has given a small group of companies access to Gemini. That's its next generation, large language models, often compared to OpenAI's GPT-4. Eventually, Google plans to make Gemini available through its Google Cloud Vertex AI service. Meta denied a Financial Times report that had claimed some teams at Meta were evaluating showing ads within lists of conversations on WhatsApp's home screen. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta, wrote on X, this financial time story is false. We aren't doing this and not much wiggle room in that. If you're wondering how WhatsApp does make its money, it charges more than 200 million business merchants for certain services to help them provide customer service to clients over WhatsApp. I'm just going to say evaluation does not mean that it happened, but they weren't evaluating it. But he said the story is not rolling out. We're not doing it. He's like he's just basically saying nothing they said was true. So I don't know. It's very flat and I'm pretty hard to dial there. Yeah, there you go. Back to some Google News. On Thursday, Google and the state of California reached a $93 million settlement over the company misleading consumers about its location tracking practices. The state argued that Google was able to profile people and target them with advertising, even if those people turned off their location history and also deceived those people about their ability to block ads that they didn't want to see. Google didn't admit to any wrongdoing here. Settlements sometimes just go that way, but it has to disclose more about how it tracks people and what it does with data that it does collect going forward. In other California news, after the state also passed the most expansive right to repair act in US history, Google confirmed to the Verge, quote, at this moment, we don't have any repair option for the Google Pixel Watch. If your watch is damaged, you can contact the Google Pixel Watch customer support team to check your replacement options end quote. So, yeah, that's going to have to change. All right, let's talk about this X paid verification ID thing. Let's do it. OK, so X has offered verification to its paid users for a while now. Blue check. We're all pretty familiar if you hang out on the platform. The initial criticism when it launched the program was that anybody who paid could then be verified and potentially impersonate somebody else or otherwise just confuse other users about who they were. X, even back when it was still called Twitter. Remember those days had policies against impersonating accounts. So you could lose your verification. Even if you paid, if you got caught, you can't do that. You can just pay and then, you know, say that you are somebody that you're not. X has not become the widespread hellscape of impersonation. And a lot of people thought that it would once this rolled out. So so in that sense, Tom, I feel like there's there's less outrage. Sure, sure. But there are still people out there trying to impersonate people and you can't, you know, keep track of everybody. So it happens. And in response, X has contracted with an Israeli company called Authentix, like Authentix, but spelled with a 10. A, you know, one, no, no, I don't I don't know much about this company. But it is one of many companies. This is a fairly mundane service that provides government ID based account verification as an option. So I've seen this from other companies at other platforms where you scan your ID, you send it in, you turn on your camera, you do a selfie within a couple of minutes. They say, yep, it all matches. It all checks out. You're good to go. And they keep that record for 30 days before they get rid of it. Takes about five minutes on X, which is much faster than the current non ID based method. You can still get verified without it. But if you want to provide your government ID, when you click on your checkmark, users will see an extra badge now showing that your account is not just verified, but ID verified. X says you'll also get priority service, the ability to change your name, username and profile photo without losing your checkmark. Right now, if you change any of those things, you will temporarily lose your verification. If you do the ID thing, that won't happen. And X wrote that it may also use ID verification in the future to do things like have age gated content. So you could have some adult content, only if you have your ID verified in your of age, would you get to see it? Other things like protecting against spam. Something they say would maintain the integrity of the platform and safeguard healthy conversations. Don't know what that would be. But for now, this is focused on preventing impersonation. Now, I know it's fashionable to bag on X these days, but Will, is this on its own a bad thing? I'm always a little skeptical about updating, uploading government ID to places I am not familiar with. I think probably, like, would I upload my ID to Twitter under absolutely no circumstances in any way, shape, or form when I do that for Mr. Musk? Is it better that it's a third party company? Maybe I don't know anything about this particular company. I'm not going to do it. I don't really care. In my eyes, it's kind of an irrelevant network at this point. I get better engagement literally everywhere else with a fraction of the followers. So I don't waste as much time on 10 as I used to. You know, this is not something that I don't have a. Well, I had a legacy blue checkmark on Twitter. And I don't even really know why, you know, I got lucky. But this was not something that I was willing to pay for. As far as a government ID issued ID, I did this with Coinbase. Very different, somewhat recently. It was required of me for tax purposes. Trust me, I'm not crypto rich, but it was something that I had to use for Coinbase to basically say, OK, you are who you say you are. So in that sense, I really have no problem with this. I think it's by and large a good thing. I mean, sure, there's going to be some spoofing that still happens. But for the most part, I get why X is doing this. What I wonder about is how many of us legacy users just say, I don't care. They're they're too many of us who don't want to do this. How many new X users are signing up every day that say, OK, here are your terms. We will agree to them. I think that's where the company has the biggest problem. I just really like I have questions about how they're going to distinguish this. The value of the blue check used to be that when I saw somebody saying they were from the California Wildfire Commission posting something on Twitter, I knew it was actually somebody from the California Wildfire Commission because they had the blue checkmarks to them. I think they're saying that there's going to be a new icon in addition to the blue checkmark that you have with this new super verified thing. It I think they've just completely devalued it at this point as a as a. Hey, this is something I know this person is who I think it's going to be. I'm not only verified, I'm super verified. I'd be verified. Yeah, it's a little bit buried because you have to click on it. It'd be nicer if it was like a different color checkmark or the ID thing was right next to it, so it is easy to see. It does. I think this is X growing back up and realizing the ideals that they had proposed in the early days of like anybody can get verified. It'll be fine. They're starting to realize that there's some some limits to that. So I take this as a good sign of the calming down of the platform, perhaps. Well, speaking of platforms, let's move on to TikTok. The Irish Data Protection Commission, which has jurisdiction over TikTok in Europe, find the company at three hundred forty five million euros for eight violations of the GDPR. Now, the violations included mishandling underage users accounts where underage accounts could be set to public by default and then paired using the family pairing feature with unverified nonchild accounts. The company said it may changes before the investigation began that addressed these issues, including making accounts for those younger than 16 private by default. The use investigation, though, focused on TikTok's handling of child data from July 31st of twenty twenty to December thirty first of that same year. So just, you know, under six months, TikTok has until December of this year to make sure that it has addressed all of the EU's complaints. So that just feels like typical TikTok under the gun news, right? But what's interesting is this fine is not accompanied by the sometimes frequent calls to ban TikTok. In fact, the Washington Post has a story out today that the US and TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, are back to negotiating over how it will operate in the US. ByteDance submitted a plan last year called Project Texas. We talked about it on DTNS. It would outsource data in the US to be run by Oracle and create a separate US subsidiary that would be managed by a three person board selected by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, which is a government agency, and that company would report to the US federal government. In fact, the objections to Project Texas often are that it gives the US government too much control over TikTok. ByteDance has already moved most US employees into that subsidiary. They call it TikTok US data security. It is not run by the three person board yet because those negotiations have not been finished, but the subsidiary was created to be ready for that eventuality. And all US data has been moved on to Oracle servers. So US data is no longer in Singapore. It is now on Oracle servers. Meanwhile, a bill that would grant the president of the United States authority to ban TikTok has stalled in the US Congress and a prominent nominee for the 2024 presidential race, Vivek Ramaswamy, has decided to join TikTok after all. Saying that on X or he wrote on X that he's joining TikTok because there's a lot of young voters using it. So will not the worst idea? Yeah, it feels like we're maybe past the like knee jerk ban TikTok era. I mean, I think I think that there were some politicians that definitely did a little trial run on, hey, are people upset about China that we can try to threaten to ban TikTok? And the answer was, no, there's a lot of people that really like TikTok for a whole variety of different things. A lot of them not at all, even related to politics. The interesting thing about Project Texas is that it it almost feels like we're getting a US run US sponsored social network out of this that's owned by China and run by presumably whoever is in charge of the executive branch of the United States government at any given moment, which is a I'm uncomfortable with that for an entirely different set of reasons than I ever was uncomfortable about TikTok being owned by ByteDance. So it's yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I was thinking about this earlier. If I were to compare it to Metta's oversight board, right? You know, Metta is not saying, hey, US government, tell us what not to do again, even though Metta has had some squabbles with the government for a variety of reasons over the last few years. That that supposed way to get around this was, all right, we're going to we're going to have an independent board. They don't work for Metta, but they're not also part of the US government who are going to tell us, you know, how to keep ourselves in check with mixed results, to be fair. But yeah, I don't I don't know to your point, Will, you know, how many folks who say like, well, I'm kind of worried about what TikTok was doing is the, you know, the the the government in the US being now in charge, a better model, I don't know. There was an unnamed source in that Washington Post story from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US saying, this isn't going nowhere. Yeah, they're doing these negotiations for political reasons, but that would give the government too much control. So nobody's going to let that happen either. And it sounds to me like nothing is going to happen. But TikTok's just going to keep operating the way it's been operating. Well, it's data on Oracle servers, because it already moved it there. I mean, the data on US servers, I guess, is better from a US government perspective, at least then they can subpoena and have power subpoena over the data on their servers. If they so desire something important happens. I mean, I think the other big question I get about TikTok a lot is why do we care about TikTok? Because it's just a bunch of teenagers posting dances and stuff like that. But I think what people don't really understand is that for a pretty large percentage of users, TikTok is where people go for answers for things like, how do I get a checking account? And, you know, what, who should I vote for? And all sorts of other like real life things that it's it's moved beyond the this is where songs and dances come from. Which cafe in Seoul has the best salt bread? Yeah, relevant to my first time someone said, oh, I just searched TikTok. Kind of the way I used to search Google. I was like, what? Wow. I mean, how would that even work? It sort of reminds me of, I don't know, in 2006, when someone who lived in China told me, I just watch YouTube. That's how I get my news. And I was like, you watch YouTube for news, which doesn't seem that crazy now. But yeah, actually, it's like, you know, it's well, I mean, it kind of depends on your news sources, of course. But that is that's that's not weird anymore. And I think that the TikTok, you know, search data, algorithm, et cetera, et cetera, is better than ever. So, yeah, like, it's not about people dancing. Sure it is sometimes. Oh, there are a lot of comedy, but it's not just about that. No, no, no, no. I mean, anybody who's just sort of like, oh, I don't care about that, you know, kid thing, that is not what TikTok is anymore. It is it is something much, much greater. And to, you know, to go back to our original point. I mean, maybe there is more, more to all of how regulations should be handled when it comes to TikTok. But but yeah, it's not just like a ha ha, cutesy, you know, social network for children. Or in this week, the Verge reported that they're including Wikipedia snippets in TikTok searches now, like, so they're trying to improve the experience because they know people are using it that way. I don't know, Sarah, I like your idea. Maybe that oversight board that Meta created, which when they created, they said other companies could use maybe bite to answer, just use that. Chuck in some cash. Yeah. Well, folks, I never left our YouTube channel, even though I left physically from this show and from the United States for a couple of weeks. So if you missed me, you could see me every week on Tom's Top Five, the show where I break down the top five things you need to know about technology and the world. This Friday's episode is the top five security vulnerabilities from last year. And the fact that they were still security vulnerabilities last year, even though they had been patched before last year. You can catch that at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Well, pre-orders of the new iPhone 15 model started on Friday morning with the usual social media posts about some folks saying, ooh, got it right away. Going to get mine next week. Others having some problems, shipping dates moving from launch day on September 22nd to sometime in November. My mom, one of those people got a mid-October date despite choosing an in-store pickup, which often can be faster than delivery. So pretty normal iPhone launch. Some people are thrilled. Some people not so much. Tom, your wife got the new one. So how did that go? Yeah, my wife set an alarm for five a.m., got up at five a.m. Pacific time and looked at the store and it said, get just about ready. And it kept saying just about ready. And then we noticed on X that people were posting screenshots of their orders going through. And so she moved to her laptop and was like, maybe I can do better on my laptop. Did that whole dance, which has happened in many iPhone orders, eventually about 15 minutes past the hour. She was able to get her pre-order, which she had set up in advance to show up and and get through. Because even after she got into the store, she wasn't able to get her pre-order to show up at first. So it took a little bit. And she did end up getting a September 22nd ship date, even though it took her 15 minutes to do it. But yeah, it it was a little frustrating on our end. But but she got the one she wanted and she has that plan where she gets the automatic upgrade, you know, she she's subscribed. So that's that's why she wanted to get it. She's like, well, I'm already paying for this plan. I might as well get it. So yeah, it went it didn't go smoothly. But in the end, she she got what she wanted and she got her order in before that ship date started to push out like it always does. I had another friend who pays less attention to these things than all of us do here on this panel. Was like, what is this, you know, the new Jordans, come on. And I was like, come on, when was the last time you bought an iPhone? This sort of always happens. And I think part of the it's hard to get thing can can help, you know, ramp up excitement, even if, you know, even if it is by and large, just mismanagement of, you know, order taking. But yeah, yeah, I'm going to guess that Apple's going to have a good holiday quarter. That's what I'm going to guess. It's still better than taking the launcher and the sleeping bag out to Stonestown at midnight and waiting for six hours in the cold for the store to open. Will, did you ever do that? I used to have to because I used to run a tech website and doesn't send anything to anybody unless you're the Wall Street Journal at that point. So so yeah, I was out at literally at Stonestown every year. Say, see the same friends, the guy that bought 50 and sent him off to China. And where you're sort of like, none of us want to be here. But here we are. Hey, good to see you. I got shut down for streaming from my laptop at a line for an Apple store in Emoryville once. So yeah. Wow. Well, as is usual, there are always a few trailing news items after a big iPhone announcement, which was Tuesday of this week. So let's start with the fact that this is if you adjust for inflation, the cheapest iPhone model since 2007. But you haven't heard that very much. This is according to product recommendation site. Perfect rack, good, good job. Perfect rack. I would say nice job inflation, but that feels bad. I don't know. Yeah, well, it is. Inflation has been bad enough and we haven't had inflation since, you know, I was in my 10, 10 year old era. So not changing the price is a price reduction when inflation is bad. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, by that phone, y'all. Another interesting tidbit is battery life. Apple says it's the same as the iPhone 14, but my smart price published some Chinese regulatory documents where Apple listed the precise milliamp hours and watt hours of the batteries. And it looks like depending on which model you're talking about, they're between one to two percent bigger than the iPhone 14. So this could be this could be either reduction in in material on the cases because the titanium is a little stiffer and a little little less probably interior bracing and stuff than the stainless or the aluminum. It could also be to change in battery chemistry is what my quick research on this led me to believe. So we'll find out when people can get them and take them apart. Apparently not enough for Apple to change its estimates, I guess. I guess is the battery life stuff is I mean, OK, let's say I wake up. My iPhone is fully charged. Got the new iPhone iPhone 15 and I don't do anything with it. It's like, OK, well, how long does it take for that battery to deplete? Very, very different than what you actually use your phone for. Your mileage may vary. Yeah, and Apple's numbers are always like they're reliable and repeatable in all the things that they have to be to avoid getting in trouble with the FTC. But they're a thing that literally no one ever does, which is how many hours of video can I watch on this battery, which is like 300 hours or something ridiculous. And that's with the cell radio off and all the brightness at half and all the things that realistically no users ever do, probably. Then there's the USBC implementation. Tom's hardware is among those that have published critiques of the fact that despite implementing the C type connector, Apple did not update the USB technology inside. So it had a lightning connector, but it was still using USB on the inside. For the iPhone 15, it's still USB 2.0. It is now USB 3.0 for the iPhone 15 pros. But the current USB standard is 3.2. That means slower data transfer and charging speeds than it would have if it had a more recent version. Tom Pritchard at Tom's hardware argues this seems like deliberate sour grapes on Apple's part for being forced by the EU to offer USBC. Will, what do you think? I think that's a pretty bad take, Tom. There's a lot of there's actually a lot of devices that the power delivery and the and the data transfer speeds are typically independent of each other. So you can have a USBC connector with a USB to data rate and a USB PD 40, 60, whatever watt charger. And typically you do that because the device that you're plugging in can't actually support the higher speeds that the higher USB spec allows. And so you're it's just overkill. So you're spending money on something that no one's ever not only are they not going to be able to use it, but the machine is physically incapable of using it, my guess is the memory controller, whatever in the iPhone 15 is the last year's SOC, so they they're not going to do a new SOC that supports USB three on that for sure on the going the jump from three to three point two probably isn't relevant for the speed memory in the memory controllers and iPhones would be my bet. Yeah. And it doesn't feel that unusual when you look at other phones and what they support either. So, yeah, the number, the number of devices that ship with a USBC cable and have a USB three or three point one, three point two port and give you a USB two connector wire with a two with a C end on it and A in the other end is virtually everything that ships with a USB C cable. Yeah. So doesn't feel like Apple is an outlier. No, those high data rate cables are expensive. Is that is the thing? Well, let's not forget that on Monday, iOS 17 comes out for everybody that hadn't installed the beta already. Uh, and if you have any iPhone for the last five years, you can get that. And things might be different. All right. I'm looking forward to trying it out myself. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Mike wanted to add to our story. Uh, this is from yesterday with a Teja Custody regarding Google's plan to extend Chromebook software updates. Mike says, sounds like a great idea to extend the warranty, but a 10 year old Chromebook is going to be a horrible user experience. This is Google extending their leash on kids while cutting their OEM partners pocketbooks. If I were HP Dell Lenovo, I would be furious. Mike says regarding the recycling question, every OEM has a partnership with responsible tech recyclers who give a portion of the value back to the customer. Not sure how much that would be for a Chromebook, but it's something Chromebooks should refresh on a six year cycle. Says Mike, better hardware, more secure in general. Hmm, I don't know. I, I myself am for continuing security updates as long as people are using rather than putting in people in the situation of continuing to use a device that isn't getting security update. Yeah, hardware model. Yeah, they're going to keep using the device anyway. If you look at the number of school systems out there that have 10 year old Chromebooks, it's going to be very high. I don't know how old my Chromebook is, but it's pretty old. I think it's probably six might be a little older though. And it works fine. When did they, this was like 2012, 2013 is when they first came out? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have the, the only one I ever got was that very first one. And it wasn't, it wasn't, it didn't light the world on fire for me. Thank goodness. Yeah. It was a short new USB-C cable. Tell the story. All right. Let's check in with Len Peralta, who is illustrating today's show. Len, it was great to have you with us today. What have you drawn for us? Yeah, you know, so you were talking about the iPhone 15 and, uh, you know, I kind of took it a different direction in which the iPhone, even though it's the version wise, iPhone is turning 15, right? It's the 15 year old. It's, it's now a teenager, right? Pro's cheapest iPhone, you mentioned since 2007 with inflation, better battery life. Titanium, which is also a thing, which we didn't mention. The cons, anything really, people love to complain. And of course, Acne is when you turn 15, you deal with a lot of Acne. So no. Anyway, this, this image, if you're into it, is available right now for Patreon users, patreon.com forward slash Len. Back me at the DTNS lover level and you'll, you'll get that. Or you can go to my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com, get it for yourself or commission me because I'm commissionable, as always. So. Well, Will Smith, so good to have you back in the show, especially Tom Merritt's first day back after. I know, I feel really honored to be here. What a fun Friday. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Yeah, you can find me over on 10 at 10.10.com slash Will Smith. I think that's just an X now. Maybe it's how they represent that. I think it's called Twitter. Or you can do Twitter. Yeah, I do a podcast every week with my friend Brent Shoemaker from Nextlander and we talk about technology. Usually we take a single topic and kind of dig deep into it. Something that's not necessarily from the news. And last week we talked about the back end tech that powers game studios. So tips, back end tech. We do open source stuff, kind of a wide gamut of topics. And that's at techbot.content.town. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. If you support the show directly, you not only get an ad free feed, you get a little extra content. We call it Good Day Internet. And this Friday we have another round of who am I? Can you guess the identity of the person before the final clue is given play along with us? Oh, I did really bad last week. But I'm coming back, everybody. Will and Tom, step aside. Brainiac Lane is on the case. Just a reminder, though, that DTNS is live Monday through Friday. You can catch it at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back on Monday with just from Robert Young joining us. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Kuntz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W.S. Goddess One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, AKA Gadget Virtuoso. And J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting provided by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, Nika Monfort, Terrence Gaines, Scott Johnson and Chris Christensen. Our guests this week were Teja Custody and Will Smith. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.