Tech Podcasts

Android teases messaging, cross-device updates, and more news at Google I/O 2022. Rumored Pixel Buds Pro could take advantage of Android 13's new audio tech. How to Watch and What to Expect From Google I/O 2022. Apple, Google, and Microsoft want to kill the password with "Passkey" standard. Sharp Aquos R7 launches w/ huge 1-inch 47.2MP sensor, 240Hz AMOLED display. Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 'Pro' gets further confirmation through codename leak. Photos of Motorola's third-gen foldable Razr show off Samsung-inspired adaptations. Motorola reportedly has a rollable smartphone known as 'Felix' in the pipeline. Amazon Kindle book purchases are the next Google Play billing casualty. Google I/O Pinball is a fun free game to celebrate Android, Chrome, Flutter, and Firebase. Input lag with screen rotation is so annoying! Check out Send Anywhere! Why do password managers sometimes get confused? Read our show notes here: https://bit.ly/3w26zZ3 Hosts: Jason Howell, Ron Richards, and Huyen Tue Dao Subscribe to All About Android at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: itpro.tv/allaboutandroid promo code AAA30

Picture of the Week.  Google updates Android to patch an actively exploited vulnerability.  Connecticut's recently passed data privacy bill became law last Wednesday.  Ransomware victim snapshot.  US State Department offering $10 million reward for information about Conti members.  The worst threat the US faces...  The White House and Quantum Computers.  The ongoing threat from predictable DNS queries.  F5 Networks Remote RCE warning and exploitation.  Closing The Loop.  Sci-Fi.  That "Passkeys" Thing. We invite you to read our show notes at https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-870-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: zentrysecurity.com/twit kolide.com/securitynow privacy.com/securitynow

First up in the news: AMD builds brand new Linux graphics driver support and Ubuntu MATE to add native Flatpak support. In security and privacy: Arch Linux packages are… outdated? Mozilla does something really Meta, the ‘EARN IT Act’ makes a return, and FLoC was a flop, but Google has some new ideas. Then in our Wanderings Joe gets another new to me bike, Norbert defeats distro hopping, Moss goes international, Josh tells us about running Manjaro, and Bill is truckcasting. Download

On iOS Today, Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard share their favorite apps for staying on task. Reminders OmniFocus 3 Directive - Maintenance App Due Pomodoro Timer - Focused Work Things 3 News Apple discontinues iPod touch, ending 20 year run of iconic 'iPod' brand Devs can apply to be part of Apple's in-person WWDC mini event now Photoshop for iPad shifts closer to feature parity with desktop app in latest update Shortcuts Corner Bil wants a shortcut that can set a random wallpaper from a folder of imagesRosemary shares her fuel reminder shortcut App Caps Rosemary: Beatstar Mikah: Alfread Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can contribute to iOS Today by leaving us a voicemail at 757-504-iPad (757-504-4723) or sending an email to iOSToday@TWiT.tv. Sponsors: BuckMason.com/ios ue.com/fits promo code IOS

Apple wants employees to return to the office but a small group of hold-outs doesn’t want to return even in hybrid form. Why is Amazon recruiting mom-and-pop stores to help with delivering packages? And Microsoft is preparing to launch cloud-gaming streaming sticks and pucks over the next 12-months. Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Lamarr Wilson,Continue reading "The iPod Obituary – DTNS 4272"

The history of the iPod, Apple & FIDO, Apple's AR plans  Apple discontinues iPod touch, ending 20 year run of iconic 'iPod' brand  Andy's photos from the 2006 U2 iPod event with Steve  Apple is planning to shake up its massive Services business to push further into streaming and advertising  Apple, Google, and Microsoft commit to expanded support for FIDO standard to accelerate the availability of passwordless sign‑ins  Apple is a massive force in AR. It's also been holding the technology back.  Apple director of machine learning departs over a return to in-person work policy  How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro  Workers at Apple China Plant Clash With Guards Over Lockdowns  AirTag helps Australian photographer recover over $7000 worth of stolen gear  Uncovering the sounds of a galaxy far, far away with Mac  UK antitrust body will be able to fine Apple and Google 5% of their global turnover per day  Fortnite fights its way back to iOS (sort of) without the App Store Picks of the Week Rene's Pick: DJI Mini 3 Pro Andy's Pick: BlurScreen App Hosts: Leo Laporte, Rene Ritchie, and Andy Ihnatko Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/macbreak-weekly. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: Blueland.com/MACBREAK ue.com/fits promo code MACBREAK go.newtek.com/twit-tv

One of the most memorable lines of the past two decades in video games was delivered not by a character in a game but by an executive on stage. “My name is Reggie. I’m about kicking ass and taking names — and we’re about making games,” declared Reggie Fils-Aimé, introducing himself during Nintendo’s presentation at the E3 convention in Los Angeles in 2004. The line represented a new attitude from Nintendo, a statement that the legendary game company hadn’t given up in its battle against the would-be bosses of the industry, Sony and Microsoft. It marked the beginning of a resurgence for the Japanese company and its Redmond, Wash.-based subsidiary, Nintendo of America, which Fils-Aimé would go on to lead as president and chief operating officer. But it actually wasn’t how that line was originally drafted. The last-minute change is one of many behind-the-scenes stories told by the retired Nintendo of America executive in his new book, “Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.” The book combines Fils-Aimé’s life story with leadership insights and some eye-opening anecdotes for fans of Nintendo and video games, including inside details about his working relationships with legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto and late Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata. Reggie Fils-Aimé joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about his career, his book, and what’s next in video games. He also shares the story of that pivotal introductory line, how it was originally supposed to be delivered, and the larger significance of the change that was made on the eve of the event. Read more on GeekWire. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The worst thing about my beloved Logitech trackball is the software. Every time my computer restarts the annoying Logitech software pops up and asks me to fiddle with my system preferences. I never do. My trackball works exactly as I need it to, and the software seems to do nothing but vex me. A small company called Ploopy, started by brothers Colin and Phil Lam, has created a trackball — also called Ploopy — that has no annoying software. Instead it relies on QMK, open-source firmware originally created for keyboards that stores all the crucial settings on the hardware instead of the computer. That wasn’t the reason I purchased a Ploopy. It was all the other elements of the open-source trackball that appealed to me: Ploopy’s trackballs rely on a combination of relatively easy to source sensors and PCBs and a whole lot of 3D-printed parts. The Lam brothers created Ploopy with the idea that there would be a lot of other nerds like them willing to participate in the project and create cool tweaks and mods. And they were right. This month, The Vergecast is doing a special miniseries of Tuesday episodes focused on creators building really cool gadgets (and communities) that larger companies may be reluctant to invest in. Trackballs are not a hot commodity the big gadget makers are tripping over themselves to build. But Colin and Phil have forged a whole community of trackball lovers online, myself included. In this episode, we talk to another member of that community, Chris Person, who previously wrote about Ploopy right here at The Verge. He’s built more than one trackball and has created plenty of his own mods, including a trackball based around a pool cue ball and one using a big steel ball bearing. But first we spoke with Colin and Phil, who talk about the rationale behind a company focused on open-source gadgets and also explain why the heck this thing is called Ploopy.

The ACLU settles its lawsuit with Clearview AI, Intel details its release plans for Arc desktop GPUs, and Microsoft will reportedly release an Xbox cloud-gaming streaming device in the next year. MP3 Please SUBSCRIBE HERE. You can get an ad-free feed of Daily Tech Headlines for $3 a month here. A special thanks to allContinue reading "ACLU Settles Lawsuit with Clearview AI – DTH"

Remember when podcasting becoming a $1 billion industry was a big deal? So quaint. Let’s get into it. Podcasting will be a $4 billion industry in two years It’s the boom times for audio. Ahead of the Podcast Upfronts, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers released their annual joint report on the podcasting business, projecting that the industry will generate $2 billion in revenue this year and $4 billion by 2024. That growth is not just because the number of podcasts and time people spend listening to podcasts are increasing (though that doesn’t hurt). A lot of it, according to executives at IAB, also comes from advances in ad tech that allow advertisers to better target audiences and encourage them to spend more money. The way ads are placed in podcasts has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Dynamically placed ads made up less than half of the podcast ad market in 2019; last year, 84 percent of ads were dynamically inserted into podcasts. Plus, advertisers traditionally placed ads based on podcast genre and content, which casts a wide (and sometimes ineffective) net. Now the tech has improved to target listeners based on location, age, and gender, and there are better methods for advertisers to track whether their spots had any effect on listeners. That shift has had a number of effects. First, it encourages advertisers to spend more money if they are seeing better results. Second, it enables podcasters to effectively monetize their back catalogs by allowing them to place new ads in old episodes. “The value is not just from an advertiser perspective; it’s also from a creator perspective,” said Eric John, vice president of the IAB Media Center. While the idea that podcast ads will be more closely tracking listeners may make some people uncomfortable, that influx of ad money is also necessary for the industry to grow. Podcasts don’t run on dreams, people! Audacy sees 37 percent growth in podcasting business The last of the three biggest private radio companies to report first-quarter earnings, Audacy echoed a similar theme to iHeartMedia and Cumulus: podcasts are a major growth area, especially as traditional broadcasting faces hiccups in the ad market. Ad-driven broadcast revenue grew by 14 percent year over year, while podcasting far outpaced it with 37 percent growth. Podcasting is still a relatively small portion of Audacy’s business model — its broadcast sector is three times the size of its digital operation, and podcasts only account for a portion of that. But the company’s 2019 acquisition of Pineapple Street Studios and Cadence13 is paying off. It reported 32 million podcast listeners a month thanks to smash hits like Cadence13’s Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade and the Pineapple Street / Wondery collaboration Will Be Wild. Audacy CFO Richard Schmaeling cited the IAB / PwC’s study’s projection that the podcast industry will grow by 47 percent in the next year as a positive sign for the company’s trajectory. If the stock market keeps going the way it is, Audacy is going to need it. As B. Riley analyst Daniel Day told Hot Pod last week, newer, cheaper industries like podcasting tend to fare better in a recession than legacy media sectors like broadcast television and radio. Futuro Media and PRX win Pulitzer for Suave Suave, a seven-part podcast produced by Maria Hinojosa’s Futuro Media and PRX that follows three decades in the life of a man sentenced to life in prison as a juvenile, beat out competitors from NPR and NBC News to take home the Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Hinojosa, the longtime host of public radio program Latino USA, founded Futuro Media in 2010 and has since produced podcasts like politics show La Brega: Stories of the Puerto Rican Experience with WNYC and Anything For Selena with WBUR. This is Futuro’s first Pulitzer. “When I heard the ne

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Uber, Facebook, and Spotify already use UiPath software Daniel Dines is the founder and CEO of UiPath, one of the biggest automation companies around. UiPath sells software automation or what consultants call “robotic process automation,” or RPA, so they can sound fancy and charge higher fees. RPA is actually very simple to understand. Let’s say you have something in your business that relies on older software to do some repetitive task like entering billing information or moving data from one system to another. Now, the intuitive way most of us would think about making all that more efficient would be to upgrade or replace that old software with something with more capabilities. But, as we’ve all learned by now, new software often causes more problems than it solves; there are compatibility issues, stability issues, and the general chaos of rolling it out and making sure it all works. UiPath and other software automation companies have a different approach: just hire another computer to use software for you. Seriously. UiPath uses computer vision to look at what’s on a screen, and then it uses a virtual mouse and keyboard to click around and do things in apps like Excel and Salesforce. The automations can be mundane, like generating lists of people to contact from public records, or intensely complicated: UiPath can actually monitor how different software is used throughout a company and suggest automations. Huge companies like Uber, Facebook, Spotify, and Google all use UiPath. Last year, I talked a lot about the social consequences of automation with New York Times reporter Kevin Roose — he’d just published a book on automation and the workforce. But I was really excited to talk to Daniel about it directly and hear his perspective on competition in particular, especially because UiPath has had a pretty up and down year. The company went public almost exactly a year ago in one of the biggest software IPOs ever. Since then, the stock has taken a nosedive. (It IPO’d at $74.84 a share, but at the time I’m recording this, it’s just $16.34.) I wanted to ask Daniel how UiPath was built for this moment, how mainstream he thinks automation like this can be, and how he’s thinking about big competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce. Of course, we also talked about those social impacts. Daniel had some pretty interesting responses to those questions. He thinks giving boring work to robots instead of people makes the people much happier and might keep them from looking for new work. Daniel tells the story of a company seeing upwards of 40 percent attrition. They eventually turned to UiPath to give their people a lighter workload — to hopefully make them like their existing job more and keep them from quitting. We often worry about automation taking jobs away, but it’s interesting to hear Daniel talk about how automation might help companies retain their employees. Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath. Here we go. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Daniel Dines is the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me, Nilay. I have been excited to talk to you for a long time. Robotic process automation is one of my favorite subjects, and you are the guy to talk about it with. It is almost exactly the one-year anniversary of UiPath going public as one of the biggest US software IPOs in history, at $1.3 billion last April. I think it’s important to dig into software automation, which has the potential to reshape how everyone works. I want to talk to you about what the last year has been like, and where UiPath as a company goes from here as the market reacts to automation existing. I think one of the big challenges for UiPath — and for everyone else — is that robots are going to become a class of users right alongside people. Let’s start at

Elon Musk, who until the last week or so, was known on Twitter mainly for trolling and incurring the wrath of the SEC, has now set his sights on taking over the platform. Speaking at a TED conference on Thursday, the Tesla CEO positioned his $43 billion hostile takeover bid not as something he wants to do, but as something he feels is “important to the function of democracy.”“It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries,” he said. “Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”That may sound like a lofty goal — and it’s not that different from how Jack Dorsey and other Twitter leaders have talked about the platform — but Musk’s actual ideas for making Twitter more “trustworthy” are bizarre and sometimes contradictory. It suggests he has little understanding of how Twitter works, much less how to run the company.During the interview, Musk repeatedly stated he believed speech on Twitter should only be constrained by what’s legal. Twitter, he said, should “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” He said that permanent bans should be used sparingly. “A good sign as to whether there's free speech is, [if] someone you don't like is allowed to say something you don't like, and if that is the case, then we have free speech.”Besides being a somewhat narrow view of free speech, Musk’s own track record would appear to be at odds with this statement. While he has zero experience running a social media company, his actions as Tesla’s CEO suggest there are many scenarios in which he is notably less committed to absolute free speech.As Quartzpoints out, Musk has reportedly fired numerous Tesla workers who disagree with him. Recently, one employee was shown the door for posting videos to his personal YouTube channel that depicted flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software running on his own vehicle. Musk also reportedly tried to force a law firm, hired by Tesla and SpaceX, to fire an associate who had previously worked for his arch-nemesis the SEC, in an apparent retaliation for the lawyer’s involvement with the agency’s investigation of Musk. Incidentally, Tesla has faced allegations of discrimination and is currently contending with a lawsuit from the state of California over its treatment of Black employees.Trust and safety experts were also quick to point out that a lack of content moderation actually has a chilling effect on free speech. “Effective moderation is not inherently in conflict with free speech,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s former head of civic integrity tweeted. “It is required for people to feel free to speak.”This is more than just theoretical. Just ask former CEO Dick Costolo who famously presided over one of the most toxic eras in Twitter history thanks to a hands-off approach to content moderation. It was under his tenure as CEO that Gamergate and other targeted harassment campaigns were able to drive scores of users off the platform. Costolo later admitted that his failure to deal with trolls was a huge mistake.Others pointed out that less moderation would quickly result in Twitter being overrun with spam and other shady — yet entirely legal — content. Even Musk seemed to contradict himself on this point, saying that a “top priority” would be to rid Twitter of the “spam and scam bots and bot armies” that frequently impersonate him.Away from the culture war battles over "free speech," Twitter is facing significant challenges of its own. The company is still in the middle of a big shift, changing many of its core features in an effort to find new sources of revenue. It still has aggressive growth targets for users and revenue that would prove challenging even for seasoned Twitter insiders — which Musk

Comets aren't known for being gargantuan, but there are clearly exceptions to that rule. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted the largest known comet to date, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein). With a nucleus 80 miles across, it easily overshadows the 60-mile girth of previous record holder C/2002 VQ94 — it's about 50 times bigger than the typical comet. The comet was first discovered in 2010 by its namesake astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein. However, scientists only recently verified the size by comparing Hubble imagery against a computer model of the coma (the 'atmosphere' of the comet as it releases gas) and data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. At roughly 2 billion miles away from Earth, C/2014 UN271 is too far away for Hubble to visualize the nucleus.And before you ask: no, there's no danger of an Earth-shattering collision. C/2014 UN271 is on a 3-million-year-long elliptical orbit that will take it no closer than 1 billion miles from the Sun, or slightly beyond Saturn's distance, in 2031. It appears to have originated from the Oort Cloud (the still-theoretical nest of comets at least 2,000AU from the Sun) and may travel up to half a light-year away. Its -348F temperature may seem frigid, but it's warm enough to produce a carbon monoxide coma.The size confirmation isn't just about bragging rights. This finding widens humanity's understanding of comet sizes, and adds to the still-small catalog of very distant comets. It might also provide more evidence of the Oort Cloud's existence and, by extension, help explain the cloud's role in Solar System development.

In January, Mercedes unveiled the Vision EQXX, an electric concept vehicle. It had a sleek exterior, active aerodynamics, and a battery pack that approached 100kWh while being lighter and taking up less volume than packs it had placed in production cars. The plan: drive 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) on a single charge.On April 5th, it completed that test driving from Germany, through Switzerland and Italy to the south of France. We had a chance to get a ride in that vehicle and talk to one of the drivers. Watch the video above for the full story.

The Twitter board isn't willing to let Elon Musk buy the company without a fight. The board members unanimously approved a limited duration shareholder rights plan, which will be in place for one year starting today.The rights will come into play if a single entity acquires at least 15 percent of Twitter's outstanding common stock without the board's approval. Should that become the case, certain shareholders will have the right to buy more stock. Flooding the market with new shares to dilute other investors' holdings is called a poison pill strategy, and it's designed to ward off a hostile takeover attempt.Musk briefly became Twitter's largest shareholder when it emerged he had quietly snapped up a 9.2 percent stake in the company. He was offered a seat on the board and if he had accepted, he would not have been allowed to build up an ownership stake of more than 15 percent. Musk turned down the board seat earlier this month, though. This week, Musk made an offer to buy the entire company for around $43 billion.The company said in a press release that adopting the rights plan will "reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders." In other words, the move will make it harder for Musk to take his buyout offer directly to shareholders and acquire their stakes in piecemeal fashion.Twitter says the plan is similar to one carried out by other publicly traded companies that have been subject to a non-binding acquisition proposal. Notably, the rights plan doesn't prevent Twitter from accepting a buyout offer if it believes that's in the best interest of its shareholders.Musk claimed in his buyout offer Twitter has "extraordinary potential" and that he would "unlock it." During a TED Talk just hours after making the proposal, the Tesla and SpaceX founder argued that Twitter's algorithm should be open source, "so anyone can see [...] there's no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually." He also suggested he'd err on the side of having less moderation and expressed reservation about issuing permanent bans to users who break the rules.