Tech News Weekly 340 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Dan Moren
Coming up on Tech News Weekly this week. I'm Dan Moren sitting in for Mikah Sargent. We've got a lot of great stuff to talk about. First thing, we're joined by CNET's Abrar Al-Haiti to discuss Facebook's play for younger users. They're going after the teen market once again and it seems like it's actually really taking off. Then Abrar sticks around and we discuss Zoom CEO Eric Yuan's preview of digital avatar twins coming soon to Zoom. Well, maybe not soon, but someday, instead of going to your Zoom meetings, you may be able to send a digital twin in your place. Maybe I'm a digital twin right now, we have no way of knowing. Then we talked to Ryan Christoffel from 9to5Mac to get a preview of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference coming next week, including all the AI features you can stand to hear about, and probably way more than that. Finally, we wrap everything up with a discussion of the new Windows Recall feature and some security concerns that have been raised about this capability, which keeps track of everything you're doing on your Windows PC. We talked to Zach Bowden from Windows Central, who gives us the full details on it. A whole lot more to come, stay tuned.

00:01:10 - VO
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00:01:29 - Dan Moren
This is Tech News Weekly with me, Dan Moren, for Thursday, june 6, 2024. What To Expect From WWDC24. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. My name is Dan Moren, I'm sitting in for Mikah Sargent this week and I have the great pleasure to be joined from CNET by Abrar Al-Heeti. Hi, Abrar, welcome to the show.

0:01:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Hello, thanks for having me so excited to talk to you here today.

0:01:49 - Dan Moren
We love my show. I should say thank you for having me, because you're here more than I am, so I'm the interloper this week.

0:01:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Well, I'm sure we're all thrilled to have you here.

0:02:01 - Dan Moren
Oh, thank you. Well, let's kick things off with the story of the week that you have brought with you, which I thought was pretty interesting. Facebook, not a thing that we end up talking about these many days, but they're back in the news a little bit and they may have something interesting going on over there.

0:02:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, welcome to today's throwback episode of Tech News Weekly tech news weekly. So this caught my attention because it is Facebook, right, and it's not only a Facebook story, but it's about how younger users are apparently using Facebook on a daily basis in the highest number in three years. So more than 40 million users in the US and Canada between the ages of 18 and 29 are now checking Facebook each day, which was just so interesting to me because I didn't realize. I understood that Meta as a whole was trying to lure younger users, gen Z users. I did not realize Facebook was part of that equation, but it makes sense now that I think about what they've been doing.

So they've been boosting their AI recommendation algorithm to try to keep people on the platform more, but they've also been pushing video. We know Instagram has been pushing video and reels, but Facebook has also been pushing video. So they had this new video player that launched a couple months ago, where you can find reels and live videos and longer videos, just like you could on TikTok, and Facebook says that video accounts for over 60% of the time spent on that platform. So just really interesting to think of them tapping into that there. But it's just it's so interesting because I don't know, were you as surprised by this as I was? Because I just had no idea that this was an effort on their part to try to get younger people on Facebook.

0:03:43 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I mean it makes sense, right. I mean they are struggling to compete with things like TikTok, and I mean Instagram is obviously in their portfolio, but Facebook, I think, is sort of the, it's the part of the big brand right, For a long time it was the brand. I mean the name of the company was Facebook. So it makes sense they want to draw younger people in, but it surprises me that it's working, I guess.

0:04:05 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I think that's right. Yeah, exactly.

0:04:08 - Dan Moren
One of the interesting things I saw in there in this article was that one of the things that was drawing people in was the reliance on some of these other parts of the platform, things like marketplace and even like the dating aspect of it. I thought that was kind of interesting too, because it does not. I guess it made sense to me. Like, I don't use Facebook, my wife doesn't use Facebook.

0:04:28 - Abrar Al-Heeti
But that said, you know we have a two-year-old and we have bought a ton of stuff off Facebook marketplace for that, so I guess there is an appeal there still, and I thought about that too, Cause when I saw that, I thought, oh, that makes sense, Because you start out by looking at oh, where can I buy a used couch or coffee table for my new place? And then you, I guess, inevitably end up scrolling through your feed and seeing what people are posting. But, yeah, the emphasis on younger people using Facebook, dating and marketplace and groups I think is so fascinating. But then I think about how there's this push and pull between doing things that cater to a younger audience but then doing things that seem a little bit more counterintuitive. So if you look at Instagram, for example, Instagram has recently rolled out unskippable ads which essentially imagine you're scrolling through your feed and then you get an ad and you cannot scroll until you finish. It's like it's 10 seconds or something until you finish watching this ad.

And I thought about that because, um, it's uh, if, if that were to happen on TikTok, um, I think that would be detrimental, because what people are doing on Instagram now? We're just closing the app, Like it's like okay, well, I guess I'm done, Cause if that were to happen on TikTok, I would say this is my sign that I need to get off this platform because I've spent two hours on it already. Okay, here's my chance, here's my pause. I'm going to hop off. So if that happens, on Instagram, people are already starting to tune out because they want more of those. The algorithm isn't as good as TikTok's yet. It's getting better, I think, but it's still not there. So I don't know what the thinking is with that unskippable ads. I know it's still just a test, but I have already seen online people are livid about it. Sounds really annoying.

0:06:15 - Dan Moren
I mean, yeah, it sounds terrible to me. I think I would absolutely just exit out of the app. If I hit something and, like I hate watching a streaming where you can't skip the ads, I'll get up and go do something else. I mean, granted, I was, you know, a child of the 80s. There's, the ads were always skip unskippable when I was a kid. But it is interesting to watch meta, try all these different things, and despite being, you know, they've talked a lot about their, their sort of pivot to vr, xr, all that stuff, but social media still seems to be such a huge part of what their company is between Facebook, instagram and now threads too, and on the thread side, it feels like they're still trying to capture perhaps some of the Twitter exile market or maybe just some of those demographics that aren't grabbed by either Instagram or Facebook. Do they kind of have a social media destination for every demographic? Or at least I guess that's what they'd like us to think.

0:07:06 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, and the thing about threads like me personally, I've had a really hard time just getting into it. Like I feel like I scroll through and I'm like this is really boring versus. I know Twitter slash X has changed a lot, but it's still like I laugh a lot because I'm like, oh, these are really funny tweets that you know I enjoy and and there's still relevant and timely and you still have trending things on the side that you can click on. But yeah, I feel like I saw a tweet actually the other day that said I want Instagram to understand that I do not care who just posted their first thread, because that's something else. You're scrolling through Instagram and it's like so-and-so posted their first thread. I barely know who. That is Synergy.

0:07:44 - Dan Moren
They're trying to move you from one to the other. It's, yeah, I the thing I like about threads and Mastodon and blue sky and all the ones. I've stopped using Twitter pretty much, but the thing I like about that is I get to the end like I, well, there's nothing else, nobody else is, but like there's like eight posts and that's it, and then I stop and it's kind of great in some ways, but I miss that endorphin hit from the constant fire hose.

0:08:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Oh God, that'd be so nice if there was an end to TikTok for me, or even Twitter. It's so bad.

0:08:18 - Mikah Sargent
But yeah, I think you hit it.

0:08:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, exactly, and I think Meta has been trying to figure out how much to have that cross platform experience, because there was that, that feature that I believe they kind of rolled back recently, where you know you users coming on this platform. I wonder how that'll inform their future decisions about how much, how many, how much of their resources are they going to pour into building Instagram into the TikTok competitor, or are they also going to, because video is doing so well on Facebook now apparently, um, kind of spread the love and and then how do you build up threads to become that thing that can actually be better than than Twitter?

0:09:08 - Dan Moren
for a lot of people like me who refuse to accept that reality, yeah, are we poised for a Facebook renaissance where people start like their money starts flowing back into Facebook and they put in more features that people actually want to use, or I don't know? I mean Facebook still, I think probably gets derided by a lot of the younger generation as that place where their parents or, you know, parents parents in some cases go and do all their social networking.

0:09:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti
But I guess, like if fashion ever shows us anything, it's like retro stuff comes back in style all the time, right, yeah, no, that's exactly right, Because I was thinking about that in terms of things like retro tech that makes the comeback so like flip phones or, like you know, dumb phones, as people call them non-smartphones and I did wonder.

I was like, is this just part of that craze where it's like, oh, this is like retro and cool and like it's a bit more scaled back, but, um, but I wonder if it'll it'll be part of that. I think it also kind of reminds me of Snapchat, which is such a funny platform, because I feel like it depends how you think about Snapchat is directly related to how old you are, right? So I am, uh, I'm 30 years old, and I remember when Snapchat first took off and we all had Snapchat and then we all decided it was dead and it was like not cool, like nobody would use Snapchat anymore. We all switched to Instagram stories. But then, if you're even a couple of years younger than me, then Snapchat is still something you use every day, and so I just wondered if Facebook would have that kind of resurgence and popularity among future younger generations.

0:10:44 - Dan Moren
Man, speaking as a 44-year-old. Snapchat was the first one that came along, the first social media network that came along, where I was like I literally don't understand this. I always felt too old for it. So, you know and I never particularly was a heavy Facebook user, but I certainly was on there for a while Twitter was, for me, always like that was like my number one social network, and then I was really sad when they drove it into the sea. But you know, maybe that'll come around and be cool again too. Maybe we'll see Twitter really, you know, pick up some of the losses it's had. I think it's. You know there's not been any social networks that have come out of it that have really managed to dethrone it. I think it's just it's turned into this very weird fragmented landscape, and maybe the resurgence of Facebook amongst younger people is just part of that.

0:11:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, no, that's so true. I think I guess what we've learned is sometimes you just got to hang back and see, but I mean, yeah, and I can't you know, I can't not say that Facebook is still a really big deal for a lot of people. So, um, yeah, it does. It does make sense that they have probably been like okay, well, we've already got this demographic, this older demographic, um, in the palm of our hands, but, yeah, let's continue to keep catering to to younger people and, um, I am curious to see what other changes kind of roll out and how they leverage things like AI and more and more videos all over our feeds to to try to keep us coming.

0:12:08 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I mean, and they got it right. I mean, that's the thing is, they've bet their company more or less on social networking and the problem with Facebook especially has been your users are going to start to die off or just you're not replacing them fast enough. Right? You need growth and there's not as much growth amongst older demographics, so you got to appeal to the younger markets, and that's hard because trying to predict what a teenager or 20 something is going to find interesting and cool Like if there was a science for doing that, people would have figured it out by now.

0:12:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Oh, absolutely Absolutely. It's each new generation. And then I think, also think about, like they mentioned, things like Facebook groups and marketplace and dating being where younger people go to, but those are not really pockets of the platform that are like monetized as much because you don't see as many ads through there. So I'm also curious how they'll find ways to, you know, make that because they want younger users, because they want to make money off of those all users, right. So how will they find ways to kind of cater to them, to not only keep them coming on the platform but to also profit from that engagement?

0:13:12 - Dan Moren
Yep, that's the big challenge. How do you turn that into money? And I think Facebook, they would love to be able to turn more things into money, I believe.

0:13:21 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Wouldn't we all, though, yeah?

0:13:25 - Dan Moren
Is that? Yeah? Is there a button I can press for that? That would? That would be great, Exactly, All right. Well, when we come back, we're going to have a little bit of a chat about another platform that people love to hate Zoom in our future of digital avatars and AI on Zoom. But first we're going to turn things over to Mikah to tell us a little bit about one of this week's sponsors.

0:13:48 - Mikah Sargent
I know you're enjoying this episode of Tech News Weekly, but I do need to take a quick break. Thank you, by the way, to Dan for being here. I want to tell you about Lookout, who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. So today, every company out there is a data company and that means that, frankly, every company is at risk. There are cyber threats, there are breaches, there are leaks. These are the new norm, and cybercriminals grow more sophisticated by the minute. At a time when boundaries no longer exist. You know, we're working from home, we're working from a coffee shop, we're working from a beach.

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0:15:14 - Dan Moren
And thank you, Mikah. Now it's time for my story of the week. I was fascinated to see an interview over on the Verge from Neelay Patel and Eric Yuan, who is the CEO of Zoom. A lot of stuff in here, but the thing that I think grabbed everybody's attention was this idea of digital twins. Yuan says that in the future maybe five, six years from now instead of going to all your meetings yourself, you'll be able to send your digital AI-powered avatar instead. So if you ever felt like hey, I've just got way too many meetings to go to and I don't want to go to them all, instead you could send your little AI avatar. It would be able to make decisions and, like, listen to all the input you know, as if it were you.

I found this fascinating, and Neelay Patel did as well. I think he really drilled down deep with you on here about what this would entail, what kind of technologies need to be developed in order to get us to this point and what some of the challenges might be with this. Abrar, I don't know about you. I mean, I do a lot of podcasts. I don't do a lot of meetings. I don't like meetings, and my first thought upon reading this was, you know. If people talking about like well, you've got too many meetings, so you need to send your digital avatar instead, my thought was what if we just had less meetings? Is that maybe a better solution than having to create an entirely new technology so that we can have more meetings?

0:16:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, my thought was also just send it in an email. I'm not exactly sure what there is to benefit from sending your digital avatar, which then will recap to you what happened. Why not just send information via text, if that's how you're going to receive it anyway? But yeah, I don't know. This is something I never would have crossed my mind, but it did remind me of something that my colleague, jesse, did a couple years ago, where he was also like oh, I have too many meetings and I don't necessarily feel like I contribute that much to most of them, and so why don't I just pre-record some messages and just have them play automatically? And so he did that and he just had this loop recording of him just looking at the camera and looking like he was engaging.

So this is this kind of feels like the next iteration of that, and I had to let Jesse know. I was like I have a million people sent you this article yet, but I don't know it, just I. I don't know what purpose this has. It feels oddly dystopian. I don't know if I want to be on a Zoom call with AI, twins of people and, again, email. I promise that's a direct, easy way to do this.

0:17:50 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I found this so strange. I mean, in part, I feel like I mean, I'm a science fiction author as well. I feel like he's horning into my territory here. Leave the dystopian stuff to us, come on. But I thought what was really my first, first thought again was this idea of, like, if you had all these people everybody in a meeting sending their digital avatars because nobody wanted to be in the meeting, then, like, isn't there a conclusion that maybe that meeting did not need to happen and maybe that's an end result of this? Like, all the ais are off having their meetings by themselves and we all go and live our lives. I don't know. It felt increasingly strange the more I read his things like, oh, you could just go to the beach. It's like, well, that sounds great. I mean, I'd love to go to the beach, but then why am I have? Why am I in this job in the first place?

0:18:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, no, absolutely, and I think that's the question that I had was if it's just a bunch of these avatars or these digital twins in this meeting. Who is leading, Like you?

0:18:46 - Dan Moren
know what I mean. Like at what point is there a?

0:18:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti
human that is initiating the conversation, like who gets to choose? Like, oh, I'm going to send my AI, but you physically need to be there because you need to lead the conversation and my AI will respond accordingly. So you know, I'm sure these are all things that he's thinking of, but it's fascinating to think of the ways that people are incorporating or trying to incorporate AI into like all these things where you're like I don't know, do we need it? Not sure.

0:19:12 - Dan Moren
Yeah, and the lower level employees or middle managers probably, who are going to be using this as much as sort of the high level executives who are like a CEO of Zoom who has dozens of meetings on his calendar every day and is probably tired of going to meetings which I totally get, but I don't know it does. You know? I hear from a lot of my friends who work at larger corporations and have a lot of these meetings every day, that especially post you know, covid, in an era where in the COVID like sort of height of the pandemic, everybody was going to Zoom and people all had the Zoom fatigue. You know, I can see why this appeals, but I totally agree with you, I don't really understand what sort of the end result of it is. What is the end game there in terms of is everybody sending their AI twins to meetings?

Uh, is, are some people allowed to do it and some people aren't allowed to do it? What are you doing with the rest of your time? I mean, it feels like it's one of those, those memes almost, where it's like oh, oh, he's almost got it, he's almost realized that maybe we have too many meetings, but instead his answer is let's throw ai at the problem.

0:20:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, no, absolutely. And also like is there, like, there's all the logistics, like, is there a disclaimer that you know? Like, if it ends up being looking incredibly lifelike or sounding incredibly lifelike, it's like am I talking to you or am I talking to your AI twin? Yeah, no, I don't know. I think it, and you know he's obviously proposing this as something where you can spend more time on either tasks that matter with your family or, as you mentioned, just like chilling. You know, go chilling out wherever you want to go.

But it it also begs the question of like it feels like a slippery slope to where we have a lot of these conversations about AI and what it'll replace and how effective or necessary that is. And if we're talking about AI in the workplace, if you have this AI avatar that joins Zoom calls for you, what else will it do? That then renders you unnecessary, and so that's, I think, something that I don't know if these CEOs are thinking about, but I know it's something that those of us who really want our jobs and want to hang on to our jobs are going to be thinking about and raising questions about. So I just wonder how far something like this would end up going.

0:21:29 - Dan Moren
Yeah, one of the things I thought was really interesting was even at one point suggests essentially the idea of personalized large language models. So, rather than all of us using chat GPT and it's kind of the same chat GPT for everybody there would be, you know, a Dan large language model and a Brawler large language model. You have your own. You know AI that's built off you. And he even alludes to the idea that at some point, this could make decisions for you based on you know, knowing you, which I also find fascinating, as somebody who is the CEO of a publicly traded company is like it does that. Like if you, if your digital twin, makes a policy decision or some sort of business decision that then ends up, say, costing your company millions of dollars or really affecting safety or security or something, can you blame it on your AI avatar? That was my avatar. It made that decision. It wasn't really me. Or do you still get fired? I don't know. I think the implications of that are wild.

0:22:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, no, that's a really great question. Just to paint a picture of how kind of cautious I am with literally even the most basic AI, like I was talking this week about how, even when I do interviews Otter AI is really great for transcribing, but I tend to actually like to listen to the interviews. I do myself to not only be able to come through them but to make sure that they're, like, really accurate, there's no typos or misunderstanding. And so to take that like times 100 and say, well, this avatar is now me and it's going to make decisions and it's going to speak on my behalf and it's going to be another, like my twin. I don't know if I have the trust to ever do that or to ever allow that, which is just, yeah, next level.

0:23:04 - Dan Moren
Right, yeah, I mean it's essentially, it's your face, it's your voice, potentially like all these things. Like, at what point does it become indistinguishable from you? This is another issue Patel raises is like security and privacy issues as well. Right, like, if somebody a bad actor or malware or something like that gets into your computer, can it take over your digital twin? Can it start like injecting it with other information and start making different decisions? I think that's really kind of a fascinating sort of idea. I mean the sort of poisoning the. Well right, I mean we already know AI has plenty of problems with inventing things that don't exist. I mean, the hallucination issue is a serious problem, and so the idea that maybe somebody could turn that to their own ends, I think adds a whole new dimension to what the implications of this could be. I am now full on in, like science fiction novelist headspace, trying to figure out how this could go.

0:23:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Write these ideas down. This is good fodder for your next thing.

0:23:58 - Dan Moren
The AI will write it down for me. It's good, no problem, the AI will write it down for me, it's good, no problem.

0:24:03 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I think the other piece of it is in this interview when he talks about catering this avatar to be better at whatever it is you're not as good at in real life, so being a better salesperson, for example, he mentions. That's just really interesting, because I don't mean to get all like weird and sappy about it, but like we're all unique and individual and we have our strengths and our weaknesses and it's what makes us human. But if you just had this capability to be like I can make this avatar whatever I want it to be, and then you just lose that, you completely lose that sense of humanity, of like well, if it can be anything, then like what purpose am I as a human being serving in this company or organization if my AI is better at negotiations than I am? And so that kind of seems like a very odd thing to think about too.

0:24:53 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I feel like that even starts to verge into the personal realm as well. Understanding. One can imagine a world where you send your digital AI on a video date or something like that, where it's like, oh, be more charming, turn that charming dial way up, or something like that. Or it's like making you know, sending Tinder messages for you, or something like that. That would be super weird, right, like I just I don't know. This is one of the things that worries me the most about AI, as with any technology, is you can't uninvent it Right Once it's out there. It's out there and people will start finding more and more ways to apply it. And there comes a point where you feel I feel like, especially now that we've seen the proliferation of deep tech, technology and other things like that where it's just like can we ever rein that back in, or are we at a stage now where it's like you can never trust your eyes and your ears anymore at all?

0:25:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, your Tinder comment reminded me that I feel like I've been living under a rock, but people really apparently do use generative AI to create these messages on dating platforms.

0:25:58 - Dan Moren
Oh no.

0:25:59 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Okay, you take that and then you apply it to anything else, whether it's a work environment or whatever it is. What are, what are you, as a human, saying, and what? How much of this is just generated? Um and so, uh, you know, I guess the good news is, this sounds like it's off into the future and it'll take some time to develop, but I feel like we're already. The building blocks are already here, Right and um, and I just don't think anyone's going to be pumping the brakes anytime soon. So I'm like, is this an an inevitable thing, Um, or will some miracle happen and we say, hey, let's take a minute to just think about this for a second?

0:26:32 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I'd certainly like to think that was the case.

I I, reading through this, you know, was struck by sort of just the very gung ho nature of this entire conversation from from Yuan's perspective, where he's like this is the thing that I really want to really happen and here's the steps we need to take to get there.

And even admitting that it was a few years off was not necessarily, to my mind, spending as much time in consideration of what the end result of the consequences of this might be. It does worry me a little bit, especially in the realm of AI, as we saw previously when sort of blockchain and NFT and Bitcoin cryptocurrency were all really big, people just plowed straight ahead into that, no guardrails at all, and we've seen some of the consequences of that with the fall of the cryptocurrency exchanges and what that leads to. And to me, if you're somebody in charge of making these decisions and you're someone in charge of developing technology and deciding the priorities of a multi-million or billion dollar company, it is your responsibility to spend the time thinking about what the end consequences of this might be. And it seems like maybe Eric Yuan's just sort of offshored that to his AI avatar instead of worrying about himself.

0:27:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti
That's so true. Maybe that avatar needs to join a meeting and clear this all up, or just join this chat with us and let us know what's going on there.

0:27:54 - Dan Moren
It turned up that hosting dial and it just got way better than us. We don't even need to be here anymore.

0:28:00 - Abrar Al-Heeti
And we'll just hop off and we'll just let it take over. Yeah, no, exactly, even need to be here anymore and we'll just hop off and we'll just let it take over. Yeah, no, exactly. Um, and I think that I mean even a more like recent example of um having to pump the brakes on something that rolled out ai related as google's like ai overviews that were like telling you to eat rocks and put glue in your pizza. Um, so, even things that are that simple, where it's just your search results, um, those are things that, um, you know, maybe a lot of these companies it's just take a minute like we're in this, this mad dash and this race to for all these companies to compete with each other and roll out the biggest, baddest version of AI. But, but maybe, maybe let's just take a minute to breathe and just think about things a bit more.

0:28:41 - Dan Moren
I think that is a that's a great message, one that we should be sharing with more people. Well, abar, thanks so much for joining me this week. It was a pleasure to talk with you. Where can people find you, and what else are you up to these days?

0:28:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, you can find me on Instagram. It's my first name, last name Also on TikTok. Don't really post a lot of work-related stuff there, but you can hang out with me as a human being, not an AI avatar, and just gearing up for WWDC next week. So that'll be the talk of the town.

0:29:09 - Dan Moren
Indeed it will, and when we come back we're going to have an overview of what to expect at this year's Worldwide Developer Conference, which is coming up just next week. But first, before we get there, let us hear once again from Mr Mikah Sargent.

0:29:23 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, time for another quick break before we head back to Tech News Weekly. This time, Tech News Weekly is brought to you by our friends at Mylio Photos. These days, many of us rely on the cloud in our digital day-to-day, and many apps and services just aren't protecting our data as they should. That's why we here at Twit are avid users of Mylio Photos+. I love Mylio Photos+ because what's so great about it is I have what I call the single source of truth for all of my photos. I can log in to my different accounts, I can connect to the different servers where my photos are stored and know that, even if those servers, those sites, go away, I have all of the photos that I've ever created and published and edited and they're all right there on my device, but also that I can sync them to all the other devices I have. It's brilliant, it's beautiful.

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0:32:08 - Dan Moren
Thank you, Mikah. Okay, we are back, and next week marks the annual Worldwide Developers Conference for Apple being held in Cupertino, california. Lots of exciting new stuff expected to be unveiled, and joining me to talk about that from 9to5Mac.com is Ryan Christoffel. Welcome to the show, ryan.

0:32:26 - Ryan Christoffel
Hey Dan, Thanks for having me on.

0:32:28 - Dan Moren
So there's lots of different stuff. Obviously, we've heard a lot of rumors, starting, let's say, with iOS 18, do you have some sort of high-level overview of what we can expect Apple to talk about when it comes to iPhone software updates?

0:32:46 - Ryan Christoffel
about when it comes to iPhone software updates.

Yeah, iOS 18 is going to be all about AI.

This year, apple has even officially teased that AI is going to be the focus and, you know, comes at a time following events and announcements from some of Apple's biggest competitors in this space Google, Microsoft, OpenAI had a recent unveiling and now it's Apple's turn. So expectations are that just about everything that you hear announced on stage is going to in some ways relate to AI. Maybe that will be a new and improved Siri that actually does the things that we have always hoped and wished that Siri could do for us. Maybe it's going to take the form of features that perhaps a few years ago, apple would have billed as machine learning features, but now that AI is all the rage, they're going to use the term AI. Most likely Things like the ability to more easily edit photos by removing unwanted objects or get intelligent summaries of your text message conversations or an article in Safari All kinds of you know things that lots of other competitors do already but that Apple hasn't baked into iOS before. Expect to see a whole lot of AI build features next week.

0:34:03 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I mean. The popular conception seems to be that Apple is behind quote unquote on this sort of AI technology. Does it seem like the kind of thing they're going to be rolling out next week actually has a shot of bringing them into competition with some of these other companies? Or is this still a case where what they're doing may be more limited in scope or more may force them to work with partners?

0:34:27 - Ryan Christoffel
Yeah, that's really the big question, honestly. So there are a lot of features that Apple is going to announce that will be sort of catch-up features where they are doing something that their competitors have already done. There will be an interesting partnership Apple is partnering with OpenAI to bring some of the technology behind chat GPT into the system, so it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. There are talks of a possible partnership with Google for Gemini as well, and all of this again apparently making Siri better than ever. But I think one kind of unique advantage that Apple has is it has this massive customer install base with its devices. Customer install base with its devices, and Apple can reach billions of people who are going to be using iOS 18 at some point, and so AI technology is really exciting for people like us.

We get all jazzed up about it, but for, I'd say, the average person out there, they maybe know what chat GPT is kind of sort of, but Apple really has an opportunity to take AI mainstream with iOS 18.

So it may or may not do that with some revolutionary new feature that no one else is doing, but it could do it by just making these common AI features more accessible to more users, and so I think that's one angle that you're going to see from Apple next week users, and so I think that's one angle that you're going to see from Apple next week. Another thing is that there are lots of concerns around AI and privacy and even its impact on the environment, and those have been two major talking points from Apple for years, as they are, in their words, like really privacy conscious. They put the user's privacy first, and I think they have done a good job of backing up those claims, and they have these big ambitions for being environmentally conscious and aware and their big 2030 goal to be completely carbon neutral, and so Apple can potentially have a unique advantage over its competitors by stressing what it can offer in terms of privacy and approaching AI in a way that really takes the environment into account.

0:36:32 - Dan Moren
Now, besides sort of this AI focus, are there any other features that are being rumored that may avoid being actually connected to AI? Is there anything else or is this really just all AI all the time?

0:36:45 - Ryan Christoffel
Yeah, I certainly hope that there are other things, and I think there will be. I'm guessing that many of us are going to be tired of hearing AI over and over again, but one of the big rumored features is the ability to do more home screen customization. So remember, a few years back, there was this craze of everyone starting to build their aesthetic home screens by, you know, creating custom icons using the shortcuts app. Well, it sounds like Apple is going to provide even more tools to make your home screen exactly what you want it to be. This will involve being able to place your apps and your widgets anywhere on the screen, so you don't have to, you know, start in the top left corner and have them all be right next to each other. You could put an app in the bottom right corner with nothing else above it if you really want to, as well as the possibility of retheming app icons so that maybe they match a better aesthetic.

What it sounds like Apple's going to do is build out some sort of home screen customization system that's similar to what they did on the lock screen, where you can build your custom lock screens with wallpapers and different fonts and all that. It sounds like something similar is going to come to the home screen, which I think a lot of users are going to appreciate. Beyond that, there will always be a variety of other things. One big change is that iOS is going to gain support for RCS as a new messaging protocol. So right now, the iPhone uses SMS and MMS, and RCS will enable, hopefully, better, more compatible conversations between iPhone users and Android users, potentially bringing some of the features that we come to expect in iMessage conversations to your green bubble threads as well. So that could be really neat, as well as a variety of other changes like control center updates, redesign, settings app and yeah, just more goodies for the system apps, with some design tweaks here and there.

0:38:46 - Dan Moren
Now, last year's WWDC saw the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, which, of course, debuted earlier this year. Widely expected that we'll see a version 2 of the Vision OS software that powers it. What kind of stuff can we expect, or should we hope to see, from that update?

0:39:04 - Ryan Christoffel
Yeah, Apple has a really unique opportunity now to show what the next year of the Vision Pro is going to look like. It had what seems like a good launch a few months back but so far has not rolled out internationally. It's expected that Apple will announce dates for international availability of the Vision Pro next week. But Vision OS 2, what is that going to look like? We know a handful of things. One is that there are expected to be more and more native first-party apps built for VisionOS. So this means that some of the apps that when the Vision Pro first launched, Apple had not yet built natively on VisionOS Instead they were running as essentially iPad apps in compatibility mode those will get their own full-blown VisionOS versions. So that'll be a nice change. One kind of quality of life improvement that's expected is the ability to reorder apps on your VisionOS home screen so they don't have to just be ordered in the way that Apple has them.

There's a really neat live captions feature that Apple has announced. It's targeted for accessibility use, but it's just a really fantastic feature nonetheless, where you can have live captions visible in your space for any spoken dialogue. So this could be dialogue that's inside of apps that you're using it could be people having a conversation with you in your room. The Vision Probe will be able to automatically put captions up in your view of everything that's being spoken. So obviously really amazing for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, but also just a really neat feature in this time where I think more and more people tend to rely on captions, whether they're watching videos on YouTube or Netflix or something else. So, yeah, um, yeah, that's another great change. That's, uh, coming next week.

0:40:49 - Dan Moren
Now I'm really looking forward to the future where it does the automatic translation. As it goes. That's super Star Trek universal translator. There it feels like it's close to um. Obviously Apple's got a ton of other platforms Mac TV, watch any other surprises coming on those fronts?

0:41:08 - Ryan Christoffel
Well, the iPad is getting a calculator app, so big news.

Stop the presses, everybody. Yeah yeah. It really seems like Apple is putting all of its focus into AI and the way that its platforms work. These days, things that are built for iOS 18 also tend to benefit iPadOS 18 and the new version of macOS that's coming out. And so, because Apple is bringing its platforms closer and closer together feature-wise, even though in the keynote you may see a feature that's built as an iPhone feature or an iPad feature or Mac feature for many of them, they're actually going to exist across all of those platforms. But as far as specifics that are only a Mac feature, for many of them they're actually going to exist across all of those platforms. But as far as specifics that are only for a given platform, it really seems like the iPhone is going to be the focus this year. I wouldn't expect to see too much out of the iPad Mac. Watchos had a big year last year, so it's probably not going to get a whole lot either. And then tvOS it never gets too much, so I wouldn't have too high hopes this year.

0:42:09 - Dan Moren
Ah well, I can. Hope springs eternal, I can keep. I can keep crossing my fingers that they'll finally updates TVOS. Well, ryan Criswell, thank you so much for joining you.

0:42:20 - Ryan Christoffel
Where can people find you online? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter / X. Uh, Mastodon um Threads Um. My user is IRyanT-L-D-R.

0:42:31 - Dan Moren
All right, Thanks very much. All right, when we return we're going to switch gears and talk about AI feature coming to Windows that may have some unintended security consequences. Stay tuned for that. But first let's hear from Mikah.

0:42:53 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, one more quick break. Thank you so much, dan, for subbing in for me today on Tech News Weekly. I do want to take a moment to tell you about our next sponsor of the show. It's the Eufy Video SmartLock E330. I was able to install this device with no hassle, no problem, in fact. I've got a box and I've got a screwdriver, and that's all that I needed.

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0:45:00 - Dan Moren
Thank you once again, Mikah. My pleasure for being here. All right, microsoft recently announced a feature called Windows Recall to help you remember everything you've ever been doing on your computer. Sounds a little weird. Does sound a little weird? Potentially a little security concerns. Possibly Joining us to talk about this is Zach Bowden from Windows Central. Zac, thank you for being here, and could you lay out for us perhaps, what is Windows Recall intended to do?

0:45:29 - Zac Bowden
Hey, Dan, thanks for having me. Yeah, so Windows Recall this is a thing, an app that Microsoft announced that's coming soon to Windows 11 Copilot Plus PCs. That's, as you said, designed to remember everything you do. It essentially takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds and triages that as snapshots that you can sort of refer back to at a later point. So it uses OCR and SLMs to analyze the text and images in those snapshots and lets you search for them using natural language. It's Microsoft's latest AI sort of tool or feature or experience, and it's designed to encourage users to buy these new Copilot Plus PCs, which are the next generation of Windows PCs, if you will. This feature is exclusive to these Copilot Plus PCs, so it won't be coming to existing devices. You have to buy a new device to get it, but if you do buy that new device, you will be able to use this Windows Recall feature.

0:46:21 - Dan Moren
And so, in terms of you know, this feature remembering things, I mean certainly seems handy. If you can't remember where you read that article or who you were talking to about going to dinner, that you can just search for it here. But it seems like researchers have discovered there may be some security concerns about this.

0:46:37 - Zac Bowden
Yeah.

So when the feature was first announced, Microsoft did sort of talk a little bit about the privacy and security of it, and at the time they were saying things like you know, that they don't intend to use the data for any of their own means, that all the data it collects is stored locally on the device, it doesn't get uploaded to Microsoft servers or the cloud and they can't train their AI models on it because Microsoft itself can't see the data it collects.

And that was, I think in Microsoft's mind, supposed to calm people's nerves. It didn't and it sort of snowballed from there. It has been discovered since then that, at least in the sort of pre-release builds that we currently have, the Windows Recall app, the data it stores is not encrypted on the device. So when you're logged into a computer, windows Recall can be running in the background collecting all that information, and all that information is just almost sort of readily readable by potential malware, for example. There are some basic sort of protections against normal users trying to access that information, but it's easily bypassed, and so a lot of people are quite concerned at how recall is storing that data. Microsoft so far has remains radio silence on this that they've not commented on on recalls um method of storing that data far, but it's not looking good right now.

0:47:51 - Dan Moren
So are these concerns more theoretical? I mean, a lot of times we see news about security vulnerabilities and this could potentially be exploited if such and such conditions were to come to pass. Or does this really seem like something you know? Hey, somebody gets access to your computer, whether it's physically or using a piece of malware, and they really can just scrape all this information up.

0:48:12 - Zac Bowden
Yeah, so I think, physical access, there's less of a chance of your data being stolen, because Microsoft does use something called BitLocker, which encrypts the data when the device is not logged in.

So if you're not logged in and your laptop's off and your laptop gets stolen, that data should be safe. The only issue is when you are logged in using that device, and so malware is really the sort of main culprit here that could potentially jump in and steal that data from you. Right now, of course, there isn't any malware out there to my knowledge that's already doing this, and even if there was, it's probably ineffective because there are no copilot plus PCs on the market currently. As I said, this is exclusive to copilot plus PCs, and those don't start shipping until June 18th. So that market of potential sort of victims, I guess, is going to be very small at the beginning anyway. So if you're concerned about this feature yourself, you don't need to be right now. This feature is not coming to your existing PC, and to avoid it, just don't buy a new PC, which isn't hard for most of us, I don't think.

0:49:10 - Dan Moren
And Microsoft. Do they build in any protections in this feature in terms of things that it does not actively store when it's looking at stuff on your screen? Is it redacting any sort of information or ignoring any specific types of data, or is it just really grabbing everything?

0:49:27 - Zac Bowden
So by default it will grab everything except for private browsing sessions in Chrome and Edge and Opera and Firefox.

I believe there are some tools that are built into Windows Recall that allow you to configure what it can and can't see, so you can filter out specific apps and specific websites.

So if you didn't want it to see your banking website, for example, you could type in the URL of your banking website and Windows Recall would then know to ignore that when it's on screen. Or if you had an app such as the MediaPlay or something, you could set that to not show up in Windows Recall as well and it simply wouldn't snapshot it. And you can, even if something comes up that by chance that you didn't think would and it has been snapshotted by Windows Recall, you can go into the Windows Recall app and you can delete the snapshot. And you can even go in and configure. You can bulk delete multiple snapshots up to forever so you can delete all of them. Or you can delete the past hour, the past 10 days, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a lot of control around if you are using it, but the concern really is malware jumping in and stealing that data, which Microsoft really does need to address.

0:50:29 - Dan Moren
Are there any privacy concerns in terms of this being deployed in, say, corporate environments where your manager might have access to it or a company might want it deployed? How does it kind of play in those larger enterprise environments?

0:50:49 - Zac Bowden
So I don't believe we know yet if enterprises can take that data and read it for themselves, at least not officially. I don't think there's a built-in system into Windows where that's going to be a thing. Of course, since that data is currently readable by anyone, there's nothing stopping an enterprise from building its own tool to extract that data. But yeah, this is a tool that could, in theory, be enabled on enterprise PCs. It's not limited to PCs that run at home.

0:51:11 - Dan Moren
And in terms of I mean I know you said Microsoft hasn't really responded to this yet. Is there any expectation they will make changes to the system? Does it seem likely, or are they kind of, you know, committed at this point?

0:51:24 - Zac Bowden
I think they have no choice. I think if they leave it as is, this feature is not going to get any uptick. There's been a lot of outrage and backlash already based on the discovery that this data isn't encrypted on the device. So I think they have no choice but to figure out a way to at least ensure the data can't be read by anything other than the Windows Recall app. How they go about that I don't know. Whether they can do it in time for the launch of Co-Pilot Plus PCs on June 18th is unknown. I think it's most likely that they will go ahead with the launch on June 18th and promise an update in due course that adds better protections.

0:51:58 - Dan Moren
Does this seem? I mean, obviously we've heard a ton of concerns around privacy and AI. Does this seem like it's just kind of adding fuel to the fire in terms of AI concerns, or is this just a kind of a one-off?

0:52:12 - Zac Bowden
Yeah, it certainly isn't helping. The sad thing about this is the Windows Recall app, and what it does is actually really good. It's very clever. It's one of those things that you don't realize you need until you have it. I've been using it over the last week and it works surprisingly well.

A great example is I was writing an article today in my own CMS and I deleted the paragraph, thinking, oh, that doesn't make sense here, I don't need to use that. I need to realize later in the day that actually I could have reused that paragraph elsewhere in the story. On a normal PC that paragraph would have been gone and I would have had to rewrite it from scratch. But with Windows Recall I was able to jump in, go back to the point in the day where that paragraph I was writing, copy it from the snapshot and paste it back into my CMS, and so it saved that text for me, and that's a basic example of what it can do. But it's one of those small things that once you have it, it's nice that you do have it, and so I really hope Microsoft is able to fix these sort of privacy concerns because, like I said, the feature is really quite cool.

0:53:11 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I think that's one of those things that often comes up with. A lot of these AI related features is, there are certainly downsides, but I think you can't really just look at sort of oh, there's this potential risk for things being misused, but benefits to it as well, and obviously Microsoft is making a lot of big plays on AI and kind of betting on it. It seems like in terms of the co-pilot branding and all of that.

0:53:34 - Zac Bowden
Yeah, for sure. It's really quite clever. The processing is handled on device and you can even search for things like images. So if you see, like, a red bag in an advertisement on a web page and you want to go back to that later in the day, you can just type red bag into the recall app and it will bring up that moment where you saw that red bag online. And yeah, it works really well.

0:53:54 - Dan Moren
And you know, in terms of the security stuff, you know, it seems like some of this was uncovered by security researchers who've been sort of poking around through these things. Are there any other interesting aspects of this system that they've discovered while poking around through it? Are there any other things that Microsoft didn't discuss that people kind of now see this system as being used for?

0:54:13 - Zac Bowden
No, not really. It did prove that Microsoft was telling the truth when they said it doesn't upload data to the cloud. It really is all handled on the device, at least for now. I know a lot of people are concerned or skeptical that Microsoft will change that in the future and start uploading that information. That remains to be seen, but as of right now, it really is all local and the only real concern is that that data is readable by a human. It's not encrypted, which it should be.

0:54:35 - Dan Moren
Right, all right. Well, zach Bowden, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

0:54:42 - Zac Bowden
Thank you. You can find my content at windowscentral.com and you can follow me on Twitter or x at x.com/zacbowden.

0:54:52 - Dan Moren
Thanks very much. All right, that brings us to the end of this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. Tech News Weekly publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. And if you want all our shows ad-free, check out Club Twit. It's $7 per month. It gets you every Twit show with no ads, an exclusive Twit Plus feed with extra content and a members-only Discord channel. At twit.tv/clubtwit. You can also subscribe to individual shows on Apple Podcasts for $2.99 a month. You'll get the audio feed completely ad-free. I would like to thank Mikah Sargent for giving me the opportunity to sit in here today. You can find me at dmoren.com and my various social media things. I'm on Threads, blue Sky, mastodon, pretty much every place, as at dmoren. You can also find me co-hosting the Clockwise podcast with Mikah every week over at relay.fm/clockwise, as well as my other tech podcast, the Rebound, at reboundcast.com. Thank you once again, everybody, for joining us. I'm Dan Moren and see you next time.