Daily Tech News Show

By Tom Merritt

Technology Tech News

What's Daily Tech News Show about?

Keep up to date with independent, authoritative and trustworthy discussion of the tech news of the day. Tom Merritt and co-host's home for daily tech news.

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Netflix is Proud of Its Mea...

06.09.2023

Independent streaming analytics company Antenna has the results from Netflix’s recent crackdown on password sharing. Chris Ashley shares his advice on towing concerns with the F-150 Lightning. And the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit for Mercedes-Benz’s Drive ...

Daily Tech News Show episodes:

06.09.2023 Netflix is Proud of Its Measurements – DTNS 4538 Independent streaming analytics company Antenna has the results from Netflix’s recent crackdown on password sharing. Chris Ashley shares his advice on towing concerns with the F-150 Lightning. And the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit for Mercedes-Benz’s Drive ...
06.08.2023 It’s Hard Out There for the 3rd Party Devs – DTNS 4537 WhatsApp has a new feature called Channels which enables “private way to follow what matters,” designed so that channel operators can broadcast to people in the conversation one-way. Third-party Reddit app Apollo developer Christian Selig announced Apollo will shut down ...
06.07.2023 Apple’s Game Tool is Very Metal – DTNS 4536 Automattic launched an AI assistant for WordPress, which integrates easily with all Jetpack-powered sites. Scientists at the University of Cambridge used a publicly available neural network to train a computer to cook by watching videos of people cooking. Apple announced ...
06.06.2023 Zero Risk Doesn’t Mean Zero Waste – DTNS 4535 CNET has issued public guidelines on how it will use AI in its stories. The BBC’s Sean McManus wrote a piece detailing the Circular Drive Initiative ,or CDI, which is trying to reduce this e-waste by reusing hard drives instead ...
06.05.2023 Apple Sets a New Vision – DTNS 4534 Apple announced a flurry of new products including their much anticipated “Vision Pro” AR/VR headset at this year’s WWDC 2023. We share impressions and analysis of the new headset and whether it’s worth the $3499 price tag. Starring Tom Merritt, ...
06.02.2023 Video Hasn’t Killed The Pinball Star – DTNS 4533 Bloomberg’s sources say Amazon is in talks with Verizon, T-Mobile, and Dish about offering discounted cell service at around $10 a month, or possibly even free service to Prime subscribers. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) reports that between 10% and ...
06.01.2023 There’s No Moore’s Law for Autonomous Cars – DTNS 4532 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Instagram that a Quest 3 VR headset will come out this autumn. A 128 GB version will cost $499.99. BeReal is testing a chat feature available to users in Ireland called RealChat. It lets ...
05.31.2023 Cooking Up Language Learning – DTNS 4531 Twitter plans on expanding its Community Notes feature where volunteer contributors can add context to posts in order to combat misinformation. If the notes are voted as helpful, they show up for all Twitter users. Language learning app Memrise is ...
05.30.2023 Teacher, What Do You Meme? – DTNS 4530 We check out the latest announcements from the COMPUTEX trade show in Taipei, Taiwan including Nvidia’s trillion dollar valuation. TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling highlighted a new edtech startup called Antimatter that’s trying to turn this on its head by turning memes ...
05.26.2023 Digital Twins Inform Digital Models – DTNS 4529 Rob DeMillo – Chief Technology Officer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is here to explain the nuances of digital twins and how they relate to digital models and what’s important from a developers point of view. YouTube TV may have ...
05.25.2023 Keeping the “Human” in HR – DTNS 4528 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, issued new guidance on a company’s responsibility to ensure algorithmically driven HR tools don’t deliver results that violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. We explain what it all means and its impact. EC ...
05.24.2023 Dial Up Still Exists – DTNS 4527 We pour over Sony PlayStation’s pre-summer announcements, checkout all the new features in Microsoft’s PowerToy release including running up to four PCs with just a single keyboard and mouse, and we go over the latest news tidbits from Microsoft’s Build ...
05.23.2023 Microsoft Builds a Copilot – DTNS 4526 Microsoft’s annual Build conference starts today and the Redmond company has announced a number of AI chatbot integrations with Windows and Bing. Plus Waymo announced a multi-year partnership with Uber. Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Chris Ashley, Roger Chang, Joe, ...
05.22.2023 The Standard Contract is Not Enough – DTNS 4525 The EU fines Meta a record €1.2B for sending European user data to the US in violation of GDPR. What now for Meta? The Cyberspace Administration of China has warned critical infrastructure operators against buying components from the memory chip ...
05.19.2023 TikTok Table Talk – DTNS 4524 The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple restricted some of its employees from using generative models at work over concerns about leaks. Barclay’s financial strategists highlighted streaming services were a new source of pressure on the Japanese Yen. Grub Street’s ...
05.18.2023 VR Right Under Our Noses – DTNS 4523 Smell-o-vision makes a return, this time in VR? And the SCOTUS issues its ruling on two cases that could affect Section 230. We go over the rulings and explain what happened. And we discuss the startup Sightful that’s announced the ...
05.17.2023 One Uber to Move Them All – DTNS 4522 Allison shares her thoughts on Tesla’s latest “full self-driving beta 11”. Amazon announced new Echo devices. And we explore all the product announcements from this year’s Uber GO-GET event. Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Allison Sheridan, Roger Chang, Joe, Amos ...
05.16.2023 Stop treating AI like it’s human – DTNS 4521 We take a look at the new accessibility features Apple previewed today including Personal Voice and Assistive Access. Vancouver based “Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporate” announced a bipedal robot called “Phoenix”. And Neil Saunders a senior lecturer in maths at the ...
05.15.2023 Meet 1-900-CHATBOT – DTNS 4520 Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Pozin announced a new TV startup called Telly where they’re giving away 500,000 TVs for free. Each set contains an always-on secondary 9-inch screen beneath its soundbar, which shows a variety of widgets and ads. The ...
05.12.2023 Linda Yaccarino, The Xpert – DTNS 4519 Would you pay more for a generative AI chatbot that could process more user input at time? We discuss how Google’s open-source AI tool allowed a gamer to play the Dreamcast game Rez using only his face. And Twitter’s Elon ...
05.11.2023 The ASUS ROG Ally is Whelming – DTNS 4518 Is Disney Plus in subscriber free fall? What’s Fairphone’s latest repairable tech for consumers? And is the ROG Ally worth the hype or is it just another minor step in mobile gaming? Starring Sarah Lane, Rich Stroffolino, Scott Johnson, Amos, ...
05.10.2023 Google Is Bringing You Into The Fold – DTNS 4517 Anthropic announces “Constitutional AI” to help train artificial intelligence without the need for human-intensive training, and Google takes the stage to announce new tools, APIs, and LLM innovations. Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Shannon Morse, Amos, Joe. Using a Screen ...
05.09.2023 Human, This is a Wendy’s – DTNS 4516 What is spatial audio and is worth upgrading your entertainment audio setup for it? Plus Amazon launched “Amazon Anywhere”. A service that could let you buy physical goods from within AR, VR and video games. And Ohio State University about ...
05.08.2023 Streaming Causing Screaming – DTNS 4515 Even as generative AI tools like ChatGPT become normalized the various security, ethical and moral issues surrounding them still grab headlines. IMGUR announced April 19th that it has new terms of service coming into effect May 15th, and it will ...
05.05.2023 Does Apple Need an AI Strategy – DTNS 4514 We dive into Apple’s earnings report and analyze Tim Cook’s answers in an interview with CNBC. Would you use a search engine that’s limited to indexing sites that only use sites you request. And we share our expectations for the ...
05.04.2023 Discord Ditching Digits – DTNS 4513 Discord is changing how it assigns user names and everybody will have to get a new one. Scientists can’t replicate what you see by scanning your brain. But they’re a step closer to being able to help send impulses to ...
05.03.2023 Are We Comfortably Numb With Data Breaches? – DTNS 4512 We look at a new LLM training technique called semantic decoder where data from scans of a person’s brain activity are fed into the model. As T-Mobile suffers another data breach involving hundreds of customer’s information including social security numbers, ...
05.02.2023 What the Heck Is BlueSky? – DTNS 4511 We learn about Rediet Abebe, a key black innovator in AI development. Samsung bans generative AI tools like ChatGPT after employees load sensitive data into a prompt. Multiple companies have joined together to propose an industry standard to the IETF ...
05.01.2023 Ask Your Doctor if ChatGPT is Right for You – DTNS 4510 Geoffrey Hinton, 2018 Turing Award winner for his foundational work in AI, recently left Google so he could speak freely about the dangers of AI without negatively impacting Google whom he believes has acted responsibly in its AI roll-out. Is ...
04.28.2023 Don’t Fall For The Cozy Bear Honey Pot – DTNS 4509 We get a RSA Conference wrap-up from David Spark, ask why there’s no standardized threat actor naming convention, and Reddit began testing persistent chat channels with 25 volunteer subreddits. Starring Sarah Lane, Rich Stroffolino, David Spark, Roger Chang, Joe MP3 ...
04.27.2023 Voltage Irregularities – DTNS 4508 How has cloud computing, data centers and generative AI increased the demand for fossil fuel energy instead of reducing it? Chicago’s Human Computer Integration Lab demonstrated a way to give you haptic feedback in VR without anything on the front ...
04.26.2023 AI Sentient Fear is All in Your Head – DTNS 4507 We further explore the fear people have over generative AI tools by taking a look at what AI firms are doing to stoke those fears. While Netflix saw growth in its North American subscriptions for its service the number abroad ...
04.25.2023 Social Media Wears Me Out – DTNS 4506 GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra said the company will stop making the Chevy Bolt EVs with Michigan plants that makes them converting to making electric trucks by 2024. AT&T helps complete the first successful test mobile phone call from ...
04.24.2023 Gamers Get Old Too – DTNS 4505 Canadian musician Grimes Tweeted she would split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that used her voice. Is this a sign musicians see generative AI differently that their labels? How is BeReal responding to waning interest in the ...
04.21.2023 Lucky is Bad Security Advice – DTNS 4504 Humane, a startup founded by two ex-Apple employees, demoed a wearable personal assistant device that doesn’t need to pair with a smartphone. Proton, the Swiss company that created a secure private mail service called Proton Mail has announced a beta ...
04.20.2023 Deep Mind Now Has Brains! – DTNS 4503 We have an excerpt from “A Word with Tom Merritt” where Tom talks with cyber-ethnography researcher and writer, Ruby Justice Thélot, about how people evaluate the veracity or truthfulness of information they find on the internet. And we share internal ...
04.19.2023 Call Of AI: Garden Warfare – DTNS 4502 Canadian startup Precision AI has developed an AI crop-spraying drone that can reduce herbicide use by up to 90%. And we look at the big stories coming out of Netflix’s earnings report Tuesday including subscriber growth, password sharing crackdown, and ...
04.18.2023 There’s No Place Like Mastodon – DTNS 4501 How does the decentralized nature of Mastodon make the social media experience different from other social media platforms and what kind of expectations should people have? Amazon Prime Video now has a “Dialogue Boost” in select shows in English. And ...
04.17.2023 Is Google in Panic Mode? – DTNS 4500 Netflix delayed then canned its live stream for the cast reunion of Love is Blind after running into technical faults. Does this bold ill for Netflix live streaming plans? The New York Times’ reports sources say that Samsung began considering ...
04.14.2023 BeReal More Like BeInteresting – DTNS 4499 Conversations around ChatGPT always seem to involve job loss. But Jeff Dwoskin proves that’s always true as he shares how he uses the AI tool to simplify his podcast production process. We examine the state of social media platform BeReal. ...
04.13.2023 PC Part Prices and 4K Gaming – DTNS 4498 Is Nvidia’s RTX 4070 worth buying? The latest news on Windows 11 including possible integration with Hololens 2. And Amazon Web Services announced new services targeted at corporate customers wanting to run their own generative AI models. Starring Rich Stroffolino, ...
04.12.2023 Just… Max – DTNS 4497 Warner Media has changed the name of its HBO Max service to just “Max” with details on news and sports on the service to be announced in a few months time. Game developers in China are using generative AI to ...
04.11.2023 So the Answer is, More Lasers? – DTNS 4496 Why is the FTC looking into online review hijacking? The FBI’s Denver field office warns against using public phone charging stations. We look at the best VPN providers. And how do lasers combine with spectrometers to help identify microbes. Starring ...
04.10.2023 Substack Saga Sadness – DTNS 4495 TSMC will see a 15% drop in revenue as new PC sales slump. Do smartwatches need to have apps to be successful products? And breakdown the spat between Twitter and Substack. Starring Tom Merritt, Rich Stroffolino, Justin Robert Young, Roger ...
04.07.2023 Me and My Digital Twin – DTNS 4494 Tim Stevens to explain what alternative fuels are and how they might be alternative technology to EVs. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed sonar glasses to read a person’s face. What are digital twins and how can they be used ...
04.06.2023 You Can Log In, But Never Log Out – DTNS 4493 A mayor in Australia is asking for OpenAI to correct false information being given about him by ChatGPT. Multiple US states are passing their own data privacy laws. Will these patchwork of laws actually do anything to help people or ...
04.05.2023 Nintendo is Nintendo for a Reason – DTNS 4492 Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming’s sources say Sony began development on a new PlayStation Handheld codenamed the Q Lite. Is Sony planning a new handheld and is it a strategy that will work better than the Vita? Is Meta’s release ...
04.04.2023 Who Has 5 Million Files? – DTNS 4491 Microsoft announced a Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock for $299.99 that can support other devices besides the Surface via USB-C. As Spotify cuts their live offering Tidal does the opposite and expands its live music offering. And Google is walking back ...
04.03.2023 Figure Out AI or Fall in the Gap – DTNS 4490 We take a detailed look at Alan Emtage “inventor of the search engine” with Nica Montford. We breakdown GQ’s recent interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to draw out what the company’s intentions with AR/VR technology might be. And we ...
03.31.2023 E3?, No, E0 – DTNS 4489 Professor Maryanne Garry from the University of Waikato in New Zealand is here to give us a psychological analysis of Large Language Models like ChatGPT. E3 is officially cancelled for 2023. What’s behind its cancellation and will the event survive ...

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