Google Throws a Bone to Publishers - DTNS 5337

[music] This is the daily tech news for Friday, August 21st, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and try to help each other understand. >> Today, Google makes it easier for news publishers to get you to add them to preferred sources. This will make them show up higher in search and more often in AI overviews. >> A little bone. Little bone. Maybe a big bone. I don't know. Well, we'll talk about it. Uh, but it is being thrown at the publishers. I'm Tom Barrett. >> I worked it down. >> Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. >> Yeah. So, Google launched an easier way to add preferred sources to your search, Google News, or that Google discover feed on mobile. Uh, if you didn't remember, preferred sources launched in May. I had kind of forgot and had to go back and look, did I add any preferred sources? Turned out I added eight of them back in May and totally forgot I did it. So, hey, here's a reminder. Uh, you might have some preferred sources settings. Uh, the preferred sources button is the new thing, though. This will show up if you're on the publishers website. So, you're reading a news website. Uh, and you'll see that preferred sources button and you'll say, "Gosh, I really like this news website. I would like it to be one of my preferred sources on Google." And then you click that button and it will add it to your preferred sources list in your Google account. Right now, obviously you have to be logged into Google, so if you're using Chrome, that's going to be easier. Um, but it is meant to make it easier. Publishers had a badge before that they could use, but it would send you to Google's source preferences tool and then you had to add the publisher yourself. So, this just makes it a lot faster and easier uh and let you stay on the publishers's website. It's not going to kick you out to anything. You just press that button, keep reading your story. uh preferred sources show up more often in top stories and AI generated responses. I think that's the other thing to emphasize is when you are getting a Gemini response, an AI overview or even in in in just the the the AI tab on search, your preferred sources will be used more often if you have them. In addition, uh Google's also adding a feature to Google Discover that when you select the three dot menu, or sometimes it'll show you a chat prompt. Uh you can tell it in natural language, hey, I want to see more uh uh K-pop topics, or I'd like to see less about uh enraged people, and it'll try to show you more or less of that. You can also curate your daily audio briefing in the Google News app if you use that. uh you can tell it to choose specific topics and it will also now link out to full articles more often. Uh the big one that the industry is focusing on is the preferred sources because that is a boon to publishers. I don't know how many people are going to use this, but I guess enough people can use it that it might make a little bit of a difference. I that's what I was kind of curious and you mentioned throwing the publishers a bone and of course given that you know AI summarization AI overviews and everything like that are I I I assume I don't know the numbers on this disrupting you know kind of like the traditional relationship between >> definitely disrupting >> definitely disrupting um I I was actually as you were speaking introspecting on how I use these things I actually got a new phone recently and I elected to not because it's a Samsung I elected to not put Google Discover in that like lefth hand side so I even more removed myself from that just because I and and I I'm doing that for a very specific reason. I'm doing that because I'm a little bit tired of the thing that to be honest this the preferred preferred sources is supposed to be helping me with and that is to get more results of things that I actually trust and and care about and less of the what I perceive to be not necessarily slot but just things I really didn't care about and don't need in my eyeballs in the morning. So I I don't know whether that makes me an outlier or whether that makes me maybe part of the problem. But I do agree with you that um as and there's I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this feature. This is a great feature to be honest with you like giving people choice and allowing people to be specific about what they want to use. But that's kind of always the problem with features like this is that there's a lot of good intention there. Discoverability and even just the entropy of users to use something which normally is like a very helpful feature. there's like not really a downside. I I guess one could say nominally to using this, but a lot of it is I get entropy and discoverability. Are we Is this like too little too late? I don't know. But it I would I would actually be a little pessimistic about whether this kind of brings people back to, you know, viewing their prefer even their preferred sources on these different surfaces since we're all kind of been inundated with this stuff for a while. I don't know. What do you think? Would you >> So you're you're on the small bone side. This is >> small bone. Tiny bone like like one of the bones in your ear kind of like >> Yeah. >> It's [clears throat] like a hammer anvil. >> Anvil and a sturrup. Yeah. >> Yeah. [laughter] Uh okay. I I think it might be a little bigger than that, but I'm still going no bigger than a neck bone. Like this is this is not a huge bone. Um >> so not a femur. Not not a >> Yeah. This is the kind of feature that everyone says they want. >> Yeah. >> And 10% of you actually use. >> Yes. No. Yeah. Like just give me control. And then the Allison Sheridans of the world actually use that control and the 90% of other people out there are like, "Oh, right. I forgot. Oh, but that's so much work." These sorts of things work better when you just do it automatically. And that's the thing that I I come to this and I'm like, "Okay, I guess I should do this." And then I looked and I'm like, "Oh, I already did it. Okay, good. Good on me. Do I need to update it? Do I need to add anything to it?" But I had forgotten to maintain it right now. This publisher button is a good way to maintain it, but how often do you actually go to a publishers's website and read an article? >> Like not never, >> but rarely, right? >> Like a lot of times you're reading it somewhere else. Maybe it's Apple News, maybe it's that discover section. Uh you may be reading it in a way that gives revenue to the source, but you're not on the publishers's website. So making sure that this button shows up every time you read an article, maybe it's in an RSS reader and stuff would go farther. I don't think they're going to go that extent though. Um, so yeah, small bone. I'm with you. >> Small bone. Small bone. Not quite as small as not quite as small as a stirup. >> My bone might be a little bigger than yours. There's I regretted that as soon as it came out of my mouth. The size of the Never mind. Uh, yes. I'm a slightly more optimistic but still pessimistic, put it that way. >> Uh I mean is there is there any in your opinion especially someone who you know I I know that you know how many people are still using this is not an insult like do like how do people like do we know how people are really consuming news because I know that you use an RSS reader but that's kind of almost like part of your day job and part of your habit right for all these doing reporting. I started to use an RSS reader when I started uh when I subbed in for writing this show. And I do find it, oh wow, this is kind of cool. Like if I'm like very forward and and I really do care about my sources, this is a great way to do it. But also, I'm a I'm a lazy mobile user. I just want it kind of served up to my eyeballs. Do we have like a any sense at all about I don't know how greatly people's newsreading habits and their news reading mechanisms have changed from say like even like 10 years ago, 5 years ago. >> Yeah. Everything I see is that it's social media. People get their sadly get their news from at least it's not just Twitter anymore. Uh you know it's some of it's still X but a lot of it's threads, Instagram, Facebook. >> Uh that's where people see news. >> Unless you're in a country where Facebook has nerfed news. Uh you know, and then you're getting it from some other social media platform probably. >> Does this feel like polishing the silverware on the Titanic or is this do you think this is going to change? Does this have any momentum? I guess this is this is maybe back to like the relative size of our optimisms uh optimism or never mind optimism optimism buckets whatever this anyway does >> bone density >> bone density there we go [laughter] does this do you do you feel like do you have do you feel optimistic about this or do you think like like again is this >> I am very pessimistic uh on where we are with news I am optimistic that we will eventually come out of this cycle but I don't know when I don't think that this moves the needle much if to make I'm getting away from bone metaphors just for me. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, I will say just to be positive, I do think that one of the powers of gener of of Gen AI LLM in particular is that natural language processing. And I would say that I do think for maybe non professionals or non non-professionals that using natural language to say hey I don't want to see this and I don't want to see that is promising and that is an [clears throat] improvement over I would only like to see you know X Y and Z preferred surface preferred sources because I assume that people that aren't tech >> enthusiasts like we are are probably more in that gray. So I will say in in in in a positive light that I would like to see more of that and leveraging that natural language to make it easier for people and maybe once we make it easy enough they will actually like if we make the the the level effort low enough people will actually do it. >> It has it has to be low or no effort uh to improve things for you. And honestly some of my optimism does lie in the LLM's uh being able to sort through and say like this is a more reliable source. Let me go with that. They didn't used to be good at that at all. Uh, and I' I've seen that they have gotten better. And not just on Gemini, but but chat GPT as well. >> Uh, one thing I said today when I was researching and I got an AI overview was like, uh, can you give me a source that isn't a YouTube video? And it was like, oh, uh, sure. Yeah, here you go. That that's an action I would take that most people would not take, though. Uh, so there's, you know, the mixed results, but I I think it's actually better than than search engine optimized gamed results that we've had in the past. >> That's a really good point, though, is is maybe also exercising that muscle because I should do that. I when you said that just now, I feel like, well, I'm a techsavvy person. I never thought to do that. So, I should Yeah, maybe just again exercising that muscle of we can kind of go back and just tell it our choices rather than doing it manually. So, >> yeah, because I I have found LLMs to be useful in finding sources. I can get to a reliable source faster. I'm not relying on it >> to be the source. I'm saying I need a source that says this and it's like, oh, here's the Department of Justice page on this. I'm like, exactly what I want, right? The actual primary source, not somebody's clickbait post that doesn't even mention the primary source. >> This is one of the things I think is so interesting about generative AI in particular because it's so good at certain things and I know that everyone I know the temptation is there to use it in everything. I think that it's a term called a AI washing. I understand. But, you know, like if we could just refocus refocus it on the things it is really good good at but then leave room for you know not destroying that's very dramatic but yeah like not disrupting you know publisher relationships and and kind of like website like kind of the website economy. I would be like I think 30 to 40% more positive on it like and and like because there are dollops of really good stuff in here. It's just like okay we just focus focus our powers for good >> and then you can have like I don't know. I'm about to go back to the weird metaphors, but yeah. No, I like that. >> Yeah, it's it's just get narrowing down. And I think we see signs that that is happening where instead of being a do everything. Anytime anything's a do everything, it's not it's not at its best. That was true of social media platforms. They're actually better now because they've been broken up into different ones than they were when it was like one platform for everything. And that's true of LLMs. Uh when they are tailored, when you get them like, oh, they are focused and they're good on this, they always perform better. >> Yeah. Well, tech people like them a golden hammer. Uh, but uh, you know, not everything is a nail. So, there we go. >> Well, we are made possible by you, the listener, this year right here, DTNS. I don't even know what to call it. There was like a golden hammer metaphor there. But, we want to be your news for everything. Hopefully, we're not a golden hammer. So, hopefully we're just a golden I don't know. >> We're just golden. >> We're just golden. There you go. Got to be. There you go. We cut it back to the K-pop. I love that. Um, and you know, I would also love to thank or we would love to thank Ryan Marx, Michelle Serju, Kirk Stephenson, and Miranda Janelle for being our supporters. >> There is more to talk about today. Let's get to the briefs. >> All right. Well, the Pixel Watch 5 is on sale now and the reviews are out today as well. So, here are just a few of the common things that reviewers praise about the Pixel Watch 5. it being faster, health and wellness features like health guardian, strength training is now useful, accurate GPS and sleep tracking, offline Gemini ondevice models, double the storage as before, so more room for your watches and uh and other things like that or not watches, your watch faces as well as a faster charging battery. And with regards to the cons, watch faces and I think in particular things like you know AI generated watch faces and like that and also just like the the availability battery life is still two days which is kind of pedestrian compared to some uh fitness trackers out there. Active band the band that comes in the box with your Pixel Watch 5 is a bit boring and has been the same band for several generations now. Too many settings just lots of different toggles to toggle as well as a unsurprising but still sad price rise of $50. The Pixel Watch 5 costs $399, sorry, $399.99 for the 41 millimeter Bluetooth Wi-Fi model and $429.99 for the 45 mm version. >> I have to say from the outside looking in, uh, the cons here are not terribly damning. Like, didn't improve the battery life much. You know, that included active band is kind of boring. Uh, yeah. Uh, the >> too many settings, but >> yeah, your watch faces are slop. Uh yeah. Uh it could be worse. Like it does seem like the reviews of the Pixel Watch 5 are are fairly favorable. People seem to like it. >> Yeah. I And I agree. Like there there are other things too. Like I just like everything else with this current generation of Pixel devices, whether that's the phone or not. It's a good iterative. It's nothing. It's It's generally just nothing but improvements. I would say like yeah, nothing the battery life didn't get worse. You know, the bands didn't get worse. It's just there's not a lot of improvements. I will say the active band is I mean I think the fact that the active band is is quote boring is is not a is I I guess that's kind of fair. Um especially since the if you're not aware the active band is this like solid silicone thing. So if you tend to have skin issues or stuff like that or you like to work out with it and you want something more breathable that is kind of a pita. But I I I it just a lot of things seem great you know. Um and and even like I'd say even some of the good things are just kind of almost unabashly good things. Of course, we can't get away from Gemini and you know AI and all of our things. So having ondevice models is great like and I think they did a good job. Um and like people like to one thing that people do like to do is attack battery life on these devices. I So for do you have an Apple Watch? >> Yeah, I do. I the 11. Yeah. >> What is your charge time? Like what is um what is your battery >> charge? Oh battery life I can go a day and a half. >> Okay. A day and a half. Um, and that seems so reasonable given that our, you know, these watches are, sorry, these are not watches. These are fitness trackers. I got two of them in this hand. I got a Pixel watch in this. [laughter] Um, it makes a lot of sense, right? It's it's so funny to me still because the negative with the battery life still being at two days is is still comparing it to again fitness trackers like a Garmin, like you know, these kind of bands or even like to be fair like a tick watch uh something like that where the functionality and the usage is quite different. you know, your Apple Watch, my Pixel Watch is not just a health tracker. It's a bunch of other things, including having Gemini on it. So, I still find it interesting that maybe one of the biggest cons is like, oh, well, this watch that does a billion and a half things and runs, you know, an LLM on here or large language model on here still only does two days of battery life, which in my opinion is still pretty good, uh, given the fact that they've done the the fast charging easy. So, yeah, yeah. So, I I got one. if you can fast charge it up during a shower, you know, or or or something like because I always charge mine when I'm asleep, but I don't use mine for sleep tracking. So, obviously, if you're using it for sleep tracking, you don't want to charge it while you're asleep. Uh so, you need a short period in the day uh to charge things up. So, fast charging, I think, is an is an important thing here. The Apple Watch does not charge very fast in my experience. So, >> yeah, I I have no complaints. I think she think they closed like I think even the Pixel Watch 3 they had already closed the loop on in my opinion on the charging story because within like a shower's length like say 10 to 20 minutes you have at least a whole day. >> In fact, I'm the kind of person who's a little bit uh not battery anxiety on running it out but battery health anxiety where I try not to charge this up to past 90%. And if anything it charges too fast I end up at 100% when I'm trying to save the battery. So I I will say like and and that's kind of the thing is like coming from again like more of a Garmin, more of a tick watch, you're you're like I don't have to charge it for two weeks. >> It kind kind of re refraraming it as like okay this is a this is like a smart device not just a health tracker. So yeah um if we can just change our habits >> it's more capable both these watches are more capable than the original iPhone or the the original Nexus. like, [laughter] you know, like it's crazy to think you're just wearing that you can wear a large language model on on device on your wrist. >> Yeah, >> that's that's kind of insane. Um, I will say just just just because I'm the fitness weirdo here that Yeah. Um, if you're curious, Health Guardian is kind of a new thing. And I I do find this really interesting because we've seen a lot of, you know, of these health wearables, including like those by Samsung, like the Galaxy Watch and stuff. Try to like get into that more, not just like fitness health, but actual general health, of course, like, you know, digital well-being or like kind of overall well-being is like a big theme for both like Samsung, Apple, and and Google. And so, HealthGuardian is kind of along the lines of like, you know, how people want to do glucose tracking and like blood pressure monitoring. And it kind of gets into a weird space with those specific things. And I I looked it up. HealthGardian basically tries to correlate your sleep uh and and kind of like your activity and other things like that into a metric that can correlate to your metabolic health, which then ties into glucose. What I do think is fascinating is that there is still some interesting legal loopholes or regional like like laws around, you know, saying something is a blood pressure monitor or not. And that's like I think does Apple Watch have the blood pressure monitoring yet or is it >> Yes, it does. But but it's an estimate, right? It's not going to give you your 120 over 70, right? >> Yeah. Um and so similarly, HealthGuardian is a good feature to kind of augment, you know, any treatments or kind of like, you know, uh like I guess medical advice that you're getting from your uh primary care physician in regards to any kind of uh metabolic conditions that you have like diabetes, but there's always this asterisk of like it's not a direct measurement, which is how they get around the laws of, you know, uh kind of like get around the very specific laws around like um medical like medical grade monitoring. Um so just to say that they're really great features. always consult your primary care physician when using strength training, when using Health Guardian. It's a really good augment. Just make sure you also, you know, close the loop and and see your doctor as well. So, >> I mean, the the reviews were universally praising HealthGuardian. Uh, but that that is a good caveat of like this won't replace accurate medical tools if that's what you need, right? This is just kind of giving you a generalized indication if you're somebody who doesn't need to use those accurate tools to let you know like, oh, you're headed this direction or that direction. Basically, >> absolutely. >> Yeah. Uh, ChatGpt's latest update to its Mac app adds a plugin for Apple Messages, which is usable on all the plans. Uh, it can read and search your messages if you enable the integration and can send messages, but by default, it requires user approval before each send. OpenAI notes that there are risks to disabling this approval, though you can, and you can even disable it on a per conversation basis. say, "You know what? I'm okay here, but then once we start a new conversation, come and ask me again." Uh, it also doesn't let you control your agent remotely through Apple messages, which I think a lot of people were hoping they'd be able to do, like, oh, I can just send a text message to my agent. Uh, because you can do stuff like that with OpenClaw. Uh, it doesn't work in regular chat GPT chats either. Uh, it only works in the chat GPT app chats uh on the Mac, at least for now. Privacy-wise, it runs locally on your machine. also uh and it doesn't create an index of all someone's messages uh which you know I would hope it doesn't but I'm glad they specified that that was the case. >> Okay. As a green bubble is this something that you blue bubbles are excited about? [laughter] >> Sorry. >> Um let me put my my pixel filled away and pick up my iPhone. [laughter] Um >> I guess I think yes. Uh if I am on a Mac and I have Apple messages uh and that is something where I'm I'm I'm wanting an agent to be like oh and can you tell when this right I could send you a text message through iMes uh it will be green not blue but it will go through because it can do SMS and it can do RCS as well. Um so yeah you can you can set this up on your Mac. Uh and yes you do have to have access to Apple messages. So, if you have a Mac and you use just an Android phone, then you're not going to be able to do that, right? >> Um I I don't use agents that way. So, personally, I'm I'm not that excited, but I can see where some people would be like, "Oh, this is going to be a great help because I do all of my coordination over text message." And I and my agents can now just send notes on my behalf, which is fantastic. >> I'm sorry. I miss I I miss mobile over operating system. Do you? Uh >> I'm by operating system. [laughter] I call it bios. >> Oh, I see what you did there. [laughter] That's the best. Okay. >> Uh, yeah. So, I Yeah, this is I I think this is uh one of those things that people are going to be scared about. I think OpenAI did a good job of saying no, we put in the controls and also we are actively telling you don't take off the controls unless you're really sure you want to assume the risk. >> Yeah. >> For that. >> No complaints there. >> Now, when if you're like me, you're more than half water. >> Yes. [laughter] But that water keeps evaporating every time you breathe. And stopping breathing can lead to more serious problems. So instead, if stopping breathing, we have a solution. The DTNS water bottle. It replenishes that water. You just carry the water bottle around, drink the water, and you can keep breathing and still be your full self. 55 to 60% water. [laughter] Get a DTNS water bottle, folks. Dailytechneow.com/store. Do it for your health. All right, let's get to some quick headlines that are just good to know. Might make you look smarter in the future. >> All right. Well, Apple Music sent an email to music industry partners saying that later this year it will make AI labels on songs visible to users. Apple earlier announced it requires content providers to disclose when AI is used in a quote material way. >> Yeah. So, this is telling the labels like, "Remember when we asked you to do that thing? People are going to be able to see that you did that thing. We're just letting you know." Uh, Microsoft will release a 25th anniversary Xbox this autumn called the Xbox Series X25. They announced that, I think, back in June. And now, Deal Labs Bill Coun says that their sources say that the price is going to be 900 bucks. Now, Microsoft hasn't announced that, but Bill Kun is pretty reliable with these sorts of things. Uh he also thinks it's going to launch on November 17th. The day or I'm sorry, 27th. 27th. Yeah, 27th. The day after US Thanksgiving, whatever day that is. So, Black Friday. It's going to la he's the or Bill Kun thinks it's going to launch on Black Friday. >> It is not going to be a cheap device. Uh well, deep. >> It's $100 more than the current one though, right? Like, isn't that wild to think like we are now at an $800 Xbox Series X? I suppose it's been a while since I had an Xbox. So, yes, you know, my my expectations are a little bit >> your expectations. Oh, my Xbox expectations. All right. Well, Deepseek announced the release of an experimental version of its flagship textonly V4 flash mode that can accept visual prompts. Deepseek says it it says it Deepseek says it is close to as capable as Anthropic's Opus 4.8 eight mode on multimodal agentic capability. I >> you know what I I can't help it but I read the story as deepseek still behind anthropic [laughter] like you know deepseat's very capable and it's very very it's not as cheap as it used to be to run uh but it's it's still not at par. Uh the US state of Nevada's transportation authority has approved three permits Thursday to let Tesla, Uber, and Whimo charge people for autonomous taxi rides. So, commercial service in Clark County, Nevada, aka the home county of Las Vegas. Permits allow for up to 8,000 autonomous taxis to be deployed over the next year. And Uber works with Zuks, which already has a permit. So, that's adding to the Zuks uh thing that you'll see out there, too. >> There's got to be like a Pixar's Cars like Las Vegas, you know, autonomous taxi edition. Maybe that's just something that only I want, but >> Oh my gosh. Yes. A new Cars character would be amazing. I love that. Well, Apple Insider reports that Apple has laid off about 60 people from its VR development division, indicating a further shift from away from the Apple Vision Pro and towards smart glasses. >> The government of China has issued a permit to J's Gpace to offer satellite internet of things service for small transport, marine fisheries, energy and water infrastructure, stuff like that. Satellite IoT uses low power connections for a large number of devices rather than the high-speed wide coverage you need for satellite internet. So this is less Starlink and more like let's let's just make sure we get coverage for these these low power devices. Uh and a small but but growing industry aka buzzword. I think we're going to see more satellite IoT stories over the next year or so. >> Really cool applications though with the small transport the fisheries and the internet like the infrastructure where you don't need that high speed. That's actually cool. Exactly. >> All right. Well, US District Court Judge Vince Chabria in San Francisco ruled Thursday that there was not enough evidence that former Google engineer Linuay Ding intended or knew his conduct would benefit the government of China. So he so the judge did not convict him of espionage. He was however found guilty of theft of trade secrets. >> So [laughter] So yeah, it's like it's not like he got off scot-free, but he's like, "Oh yeah, you you're not a spy. [laughter] you just you're just a thief. So, [gasps] uh 22year-old researcher who goes by zeroistic devised a way to enroll a Linux-based machine into Apple's Find My Network. Now, this doesn't get you other people's devices. It just let him add a non-Apple device to his own Find My list, but still pretty cool. And register has all the details about it if you want to read it. >> Cool. Well, N US Medicine data center operator day1 and Melbourne's Cortical Labs have announced they are running a data data center prototype in Singapore built from a 20 unit rack of neuronpowered CL1 computers. Yep, that is 20 computers running on living human neurons. No benchmarks or anything, but it is running. >> What could go wrong? [laughter] >> [gasps] >> No, that that is a a significant deployment of neuronal storage, you know, and individual neurons are not aware. So, it's fine. It's fine. >> It's fine for now. >> Uh, US company Robo Store can no longer distribute humanoid robots from China after a US ban on doing so. So, it's decided to make its own. Uh, it's going to start making humanoid robots from a facility in Long Island, New York. And I'm sure no one will ever accuse it of having taken any of the intellectual property of the humanoid robots it used to distribute. >> Well, attention Walmart shoppers. Walmart now accepts Apple Pay and Google Pay at its Walmart and Sam's Club locations. >> Oh my gosh. Cats, the dogs sleeping together. Massive. [laughter] uh this is going to significantly increase the number of mobile payment users especially in those older demos and I'm not not trying to be snide when I say that it it's like 89% amongst younger demos but it's I think in 65 plus it's less than 30%. Uh and this this is going to boost it because it's going to make it much more widespread. >> Absolutely. >> Put your blazers back on tech workers. A report from CBRE found there are now 394,300 tech jobs in New York compared to 375,730 in the San Francisco Bay area. If you weren't paying attention, 394 is bigger than 375. That makes New York home to more tech workers than San Francisco for the first time since they started tracking this. >> Wow, that is impressive. And I don't think I've unfortunately had a Blazer in many, many years. I would be in trouble. Um well, Brazil's National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development has split a supercomp supercomputer project into two, building half with Huawei and the other half with Nvidia in order to reduce reliance on either China or the US. >> Yes, this is the way most of the world lives. Like, oh [laughter] god. Okay, fine. You know, Brazil's genius. Like, we'll just do half one, half the other. That Yeah, that way, you know, we're in trouble with both. >> [laughter] >> Uh the US now accounts for 15 of the world's 20 largest hypers scale data center markets and 12 of global capacity comes out of Northern Virginia alone uh where a lot of data centers are. So uh you know if if the world is going to run on data centers the US is kind of cornering the market on that. >> All right well we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Peter has a question about using smart glasses for facial recognition. >> Yes, thank you, Peter, for writing in. Uh, he says, "Good day, DTNS group." A followup about the email from the professor from show 5335. That was two days ago. Uh, I could see allowing the glasses to tag a person's face you record with the glasses with a name, which would help the professor or others with facial recognition difficulties. But where would this database of faces come from that is causing all the outcry? Even if Meta used all the public Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp public profile pictures, a large number wouldn't be a high enough resolution for a facial match. It isn't like the madeup facial recognition tech that is in a lot of TV shows and movies. Peter from just outside Toronto, Canada. Uh, I hate to say this, Peter, but it is good enough. Uh, I looked up uh just just one example. There's a company called Briefcam uh that can do pretty high accuracy facial recognition with 40 by 40 pixel resolution. Uh and your average Facebook photo is probably around 300 uh by 300 maybe a little more. Um there's also that study from 2024 where a couple of Harvard students demonstrated a system using info from PIMIS which is a thirdparty database uh combined with an LLM and some metaray bands and they could just identify people at a train station and in their demo they were not only identifying the person but using the LLM to pull up other data about them so they could have a conversation as if they knew the person. Um, so it was a very disconcerting demonstration that they were showing what's possible uh with the amount of information that's out there on the internet about you. But I I think I think that database is good enough uh you know and and so we can have a debate over how you can access the that database and what the rules should be. But I I think the technology is there. >> Um yeah, 40 by 40 pixels is is nothing. Like that's that's like if you're audio user and you can't see but I mean literally that's that's kind of um remarkable in a terrifying way. It's a very small bone. >> Yeah. [laughter] Not quite as small as your syrup, your hammer, your anvil, I don't think, but pretty darn close. And I mean, I guess this is just one of those things where it feels like, you know, we've how long has it been now? like a couple decades now of of you know like Facebook, Instagram, of social media being being intact and there just like I I know we all know this and I know we're all very cognizant of it but at some point all of this accumulated data I think I think the I I totally get the the feeling Peter of like you know we watch we see things on on on in fictional things in TVs and movies and it still feels very very far out but um eventually we do catch up to these things unfortunately. Um, >> I used to make fun of Zoom and enhance >> and now you can literally enhance like >> those were fun days when we could we can just use that meme unabashardly and it was fun, but now it's like, oh, so you you did it. >> You actually can. Oh, okay. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> All right. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have a question? Do you have some insight? We would love to hear it. Feedback atailytechnewshow.com. >> Yeah. And thank you, Peter, for contributing to today's show. Thank everyone listening for being along for Daily Techne Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. Become a patron if you haven't already. Uh we've got great perks. We're going to be doing one of them later today called the producers room. Little behind the scenes. That and more available at patreon.com/dtns. [music] This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host producer and writer Tom Merritt. Host and writer Jason Hal. Co-host Sarah Lane. Co-host Rob Dunwood. Co-host Jen Cutter. Co-host Wento Dao. Producer Anthony Lamos. 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