I am a YouTube Music subscriber and generally like the service. However searching for YouTube Music is unconfusing to exactly no one.

This visualization on the increase in Kia-Hyundai thefts is insane. Good roundup by Motherboard on this.

This is odd phrasing from Logitech:

2023 has been an exciting year for Logitech. Following its acquisition of the popular audio equipment brand Blue Microphones, Logitech is rolling out several new products in the Logitech G line of gaming devices.

“Following its acquisition…” It acquired Blue Microphone in 2018. You didn’t acquire it this year, you phased out a brand.

For all the fun to be had poking fun at Apple calling a phone Pro, the iPhone 15 Pro does let you record ProRes video to an external SSD, something you only find on prosumer cameras. It’s incredibly niche, but actually is a pro feature.

How useful is it given the sensor size? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Well due to my healthcare provider using the MoveIT MFT, both my kids have now had data leaked. So at age 5 and 6 they’ve had SSN, DoB, and medical conditions exposed. Good thing they get (checks notes) two years of credit monitoring.

I’m sorry T2, there can only be one Pebble in my heart.

iPhone 15 Pro or a Honda Motocompacto e-scooter for a cool grand? I know I’m going cool mod scooter.

So in 10 minutes, I read two amazing things. From this Guardian piece on X potentially violating its consent decree with the FTC:

The DoJ filing also counters X Corp’s argument that Musk should not have to testify about its [data privacy] compliance with the order. The DoJ argues that Musk has “unique, firsthand” knowledge about the company’s data practices.

Compared to this excerpt from the upcoming Is Walter Isaacson bio (from Tech Dirt):

The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “F—, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.

So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. “I can’t believe it worked,” James says. “They all made it to Portland safely.”

Physically ripping out servers yourself without doing any due diligence that they might contain personal data and then suggesting that sticking AirTags and consumer locks on them as adequate…. seems like there may be some cause to testify.

The Surface Duo was an experimental form factor and I appreciate Microsoft taking a swing at it. But ending software support (including security updates) this soon after launch is just another reason why I’m a single-issue phone buyer.

Going live at 3:30pm ET with VillageMD CISO Dan Walsh for the Cyber Security Headlines Week in Review! Going to be talking about the details of Microsoft’s MSA key leak, Mudge working for the feds, how the LastPass breach got worse.

Polaroid just announced the I-2, a high-end instant camera like they haven’t made since the venerable SX-70 or SLR 680. Lomography has done this with Instax instant cameras for a while, but basically your options for Polaroid film were to buy a 40-50 year old camera and hope for the best. Might by most excited for external flash syncing. One thing that’s weird, Polaroid says the lens is sharp, but seems to go out of its way to not say if its glass or plastic. I imagine if it was glass, they’d crow about it.

But this seems to be another example of companies realizing that the camera supply might be something there is economic incentive to address. For years, it was hard to invest the R&D into building a camera for a very limited market, given that the cheaper used cameras available are often more technically advanced and reliable. But we’re hearing that Pentax and MiNT are designing new 35mm film cameras. So clearly they see a tipping point as a market opportunity.

This also comes as we’re starting to see the supply chain crisis subside for actual film production. Kodak stock actually seems somewhat reflective of demand as of late, with some actual price cuts coming after years of not insignificant increases.

But Polaroid, a company sometimes chided for being too much of a brand and less of a “serious film company,” is actually making a high end camera. What a time to be shooting film!

I’ve seen a little bit of Android versus iPhone talk come up lately. MKBHD recently did a video on it, and it’s balanced and well considered like most of his takes are. I guess I’m mostly a single issue voter on this. As long as there is relative parity when it comes to cameras and usable performance, software support will keep me in iOS for a long time.

I bought an iPhone 8 soon after my son was born. I remember standing in a Sprint store and trying to keep a baby occupied while the rep took forever to port numbers over and set up a family plan with some friends of ours. It was interminable. My son is now in Kindergarten. The phone runs the latest version of iOS. I couldn’t say nearly the same thing if I had bought a Galaxy S8 or Pixel 2 that same year.

I used Android from 2011 until 2016. I was a power user. Set up Tasker automations. Rooted and ran Cyanogen. I put Android on an HP Touchpad. I bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus a year after it came out. I knew it was not a good phone then, but I wanted that Google-direct Nexus experience and was willing to put up with a bad camera and horrific early-4G battery life to do it.

The Android phone I liked the best was my last, a Droid Turbo. It had a cool kevlar back, Motorola put in some meaningful customizations (wrist twist to open camera is great). Battery life was decent. The camera was…. a mid-teens Android camera. The downside? Software support. While it did get updates to two Android versions (actually good in that time), it was consistently a year and a half behind the current Android release.

Compare that to my wife’s iPhone. It got 4 major OS updates in its lifespan, delivered same day the OS hit general availability. It got security updates for years even after she upgraded to the iPhone 7 in 2016. See an old device keep getting the new software hotness while my Android phones remained entirely forgotten pushed me over the edge. I know the situation with Qualcomm drivers makes it a nightmare to provide long-term software upgrades for OEMs. I know Samsung and Google have gotten better, promising 3-4 years of OS upgrades on flagship phones. But as a consumer, I kind of don’t care about that. Not my problem, figure this out if you want me as a customer. I know if I buy an iPhone, I will get better software support long term.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max now and don’t see any reason to upgrade any time soon. It performs well enough, the camera is still great (if a little too HDR happy), and the battery life remains serviceable. When I do upgrade, either my parents will get it or it will turn into a car toy for the kids. But unless Android OEMs meaningfully differentiates on hardware from iOS (maybe a really killer foldable experience), I’m a single-issue phone buyer.

Microsoft is forced to unbundle Teams in the EU, just over two years after Slack was acquired by Salesforce. It seems so late for that kind of move given that Microsoft already disrupted the innovator in that space. As Casey Newton noted when the deal was announced:

But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users.

No one brandishes the cudgel of Office like Microsoft.

Death, taxes, and…

Pleasantly surprised that the Beeper cross messaging app doesn’t break or punish you for switching back to first party clients. Occasionally need to do that if you want to send gifs or other rich media. I’ve had email clients that made going back to webmail a pain.

Why is the Washington Post offering an 11% discount to not subscribe annually? Their monthly special works out to $26 a year versus $29 all up front…

The former e-bike giant VanMoof found a buyer, the private equity-owned former tech arm of McLaren. Not surprising, but I can’t imagine it won’t be long before VanMoof owners are faced with paying a subscription to maintain access to previously free services for their bikes.

One of the under appreciated joys of the Aeropress is that it’s almost more difficult to leave it dirty than to just clean it right away. Love my French press but that thing languishes in squalor after I use it.

There’s been reporting on this before but people are being trafficked and forced to run cyber scams. A reason I find those “we scammed the scammer” video on YouTube distasteful.

I’ve really been enjoying using Micro.blog. Something about having a little bit ownership of one feed and having that go to other channels. Admittedly, Micro.blog is still a service that can go away, but at least its a more easy exported RSS-supported blog.

It is always funny to me that Nissan does not own nissan.com. It belongs to some kind of computer company that posts very Web 1.0 content. Keep on holding out!

What’s the oldest piece of tech you use regularly? I started thinking of this when I saw my mom was still using her original iPad we got her back in Christmas 2010 (its a tethered solitaire machine now). Mine is probably my Nikon N90s SLR, which date back to the mid-90s.

It’s amazing the coverage Bluesky gets from where it is at as a network. It saw outages and performance degradation after adding 5000 users in a day. For comparison, Mastodon regularly adds almost twice that many in a day. Of course, this also underscores the other issue with Bluesky, although often billed as decentralized, it actually isn’t federated. So it still has a centralized point of failure.

Of course, Mastodon servers have buckled under the strain of no users. But the seemingly paultry numbers that put Bluesky in fits speaks to just how small it still is.

So Cyber Security Headlines just turned 3! It’s really weird to think I started this deep in the pandemic. The time has flown and I’m really proud of how the show has grown and developed since we started. Can’t wait to bring in more new voices over the course of this year.

Zoom caused a minor internet kerfuffle with some overly broad ToS. These terms made it sound like Zoom could train AI systems on customer logs and potentially calls, the latter with vaguely defined consent. Now it’s walking that back with specifics:

Zoom has updated its terms of service and reworded a blog post explaining recent terms of service changes referencing its generative AI tools. The company now explicitly states that “communications-like” customer data isn’t being used to train artificial intelligence models for Zoom or third parties. What is covered by communications-like? Basically, the content of your videoconferencing on Zoom.

In the arms race for datasets to train LLMs, it’s easy to see this as Zoom trying to open up a customer treasure trove on the sly. But enough years on Daily Tech News Show taught me never to ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence, or at least over zealous lawyers. We’ve seen this pattern over and over again, lawyers trying to give a company plenty of wiggle room, people see this and assume there is a larger objective, company revises terms.

This isn’t to say we should give these companies a pass for shoddily written ToS. We should highlight obvious overreach and potential for abuse. These terms are obscure by design and without (occasionally) hyperbolic coverage of them, we’d likely never see them. Still it’s always my instinct to withhold ire in these cases until the company responds.