Tech News Weekly 344 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 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Amanda Silberling is here. We start by talking about the spicy, spicy FTC. That's right. The FTC has banned NGL, the anonymous app, from offering that app to minors. Then they talk about how there are many dark patterns being used online by, frankly, almost all of the subscription apps and websites. Afterward it's time to pour one out for Redbox. It's a nostalgic moment, as the company who owns Redbox has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Then Christina Warren stops by to talk about the zombie AI resurrection of TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and what you do when your name and your content is being reused as part of an AI content farm. Afterward we get to a very important story, because Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event took place this week, so Jason Howell stops by to tell us all about all of the hardware announced at the event.

Stay tuned for a jam-packed episode of Tech News Weekly.

0:01:10 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is Twit.

0:01:20 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly, with Amanda Silberling and me, Mikah Sargent, episode 344, recorded Thursday, July 11th 2024: Samsung's Galaxy Ring and Watch Ultra. 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. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined by the one, the only, Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch. Welcome back, Amanda.

0:01:53 - Amanda Silberling
Hello, we are here. I was going to say welcome back to you and then I was like no, you're always here. I can't say that.

0:02:02 - Mikah Sargent
It did make me wonder, though, because I said the one, the only. Is there another Amanda Silberling out there that you compete with?

0:02:09 - Amanda Silberling
Okay. So here's the thing is I'm pretty sure that I'm the only person in the world with my name not a very common last name. You don't see it a lot, but there is some blog that is like an SEO grab, social media kind of blog and they post articles that are like how to grow your following on TikTok and there's an author named Amanda Silberling who I am not convinced exists. I think they are trying to undercut my search traffic and I told our lawyers about it but they couldn't like do anything because they're like well, you can't prove that that person's not named Amanda Silberling and I'm like what have you got? Like there's only one picture of this supposed person and like on all like it's, it's very obviously not real but it's you're convinced, and I'm convinced now too.

0:02:58 - Mikah Sargent
We will destroy the fake amanda silverling. Um, yes, I, I compete. I don't actually compete with, but there is a Micah Sargent spelled with a C, who just so happens to be a mixed race woman who's named Micah Sargent, and it used to be early on that she would constantly get mentioned in place of me, and then she and I kind of had a little you know, back and forth, haha, every time it was supposed to be for me or it was supposed to be for her. Uh, luckily she was not in any sort of similar field and so I've never had to worry about that. But, um, outside of that I'm, I've got a pretty unique name as well, so I don't do too much competing with other people.

0:03:39 - Amanda Silberling
Um, there's oh, go ahead please no, there, this is not related to tech except for, uh, the ways in which we interact with each other on the internet. But there is a film producer named brad silberling and there's not a lot of us. So one day he emailed me and he was like I saw your name on twitter. What is the name of your great great grandfather? Are we related? But it turned out I don't think we're related, but it was just kind of bizarre that this happened, because he's worked on some really really big things and then occasionally in my google alerts he comes up. But I'm like good for brad. He's uh, like I think he produced jane the virgin or something, but oh, wow, he's a mover and a shaker.

0:04:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's cool. Um, all right, let's get into the stories today. This, of course, is, uh, the part of the show where each of us brings a story of the week, and, amanda, you are kicking things off this week with your story.

0:04:35 - Amanda Silberling
Tell us about it yes, so the FTC is getting spicy this week.

At first they everyone loves in the FTC is spicy um the FTC banned the app NGL from offering itself to minors, and NGL is one of those apps that has been like. This format of app has been around like since I was a child, where people send you anonymous questions and then you respond to the anonymous questions, but you can assume that, like for something marketed toward teenagers and giving them the option to anonymously interact with one another, like they're going to immediately use it for bad Like I don't know. I forgot the name of the one that was big when we were younger, but it was FormSpring and I remember I was afraid to have an account because I'm like I don't know, I don't want to know what people think about me, and now I'm a journalist where people always tell me what they think about me. So here we go.

But NGL in particular came under fire because it was marketing itself as being like those apps, except safer, because they claimed to have an AI content moderation system that would filter out harmful messages and cyberbullying. But the FTC alleges that this was false advertising and also that NGL sent users fake questions, which I definitely believe that because, like my editor, sarah Perez reported on this two years ago, where she posted an NGL link on her Instagram story, because that's how most people use NGL is like you post the thing and then people can send you questions and then it becomes like an Instagram story kind of situation and she posted the link on her Instagram story and deleted it within like a split second and then, despite that, she still got responses, which I don't think people are really like hardcore, like looking at her Instagram story that closely.

0:06:39 - Mikah Sargent
Right.

0:06:40 - Amanda Silberling
But yeah, and this is something that, like, a couple different outlets have reported on and not the FTC took notice of, and so the problem with the fake messages is that then, when you get messages, you can pay a $10 monthly subscription to get hints on who sent you the message. So it's a.

0:07:03 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah message. So it's uh, yeah, yeah, it's clearly an attempt to get people to spend money, especially when you have younger people who are, I mean, you know, psychologically speaking, still finding themselves and are, you know, uncertain in the world, and you get a message from someone that either says something implies something negative or implies something positive, and you want to know who that person is, you want to know who feels that way about you or who asked that question, and then you are perhaps more likely to pay the $10 monthly subscription. You're then perhaps likely to forget that you're paying the $10 monthly subscription and continue to pay the company that money. I thought it was kind of surprising the FTC report what it alleged some of these automatic messages were that were sent including are you straight? Including, are you straight? And then one that in the vein of every like early 2000s slasher flick uh, it is. I know what you did. Come on, that is absolutely a bait and switch situation. And get this uh quote from the uh tech crunch piece. It says ngGL's bait. And this is them quoting the FTC.

Ngl's bait and switch tactic prompted many consumers to complain, which NGL executives laughed off, dismissing such users as suckers. I am that's crazy. It's unclear because they do quotes around suckers. Does that mean that NGL executives literally called these users who were paying quotes around suckers? Does that mean that NGL executives literally called these users who were paying for it suckers, or is it just kind of like that was the vibe we were getting? I don't know, but yeah, that's yeah, that is wild in either case that is grammatically interesting.

0:08:58 - Amanda Silberling
I would guess that the quotes around suckers implies that they are quoting something and not just saying like uh, you are a insult in quotes, but um, yeah, that is. It's not a good luck to uh call your users suckers no, it is not um I imagine to any, to any founders out there, piece of advice.

0:09:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly, indeed defendants. This is directly from the complaint line. It's page 15, line 11 says indeed, defendants not only acknowledged the consumer complaints regarding this issue, they even laughed at them. In response to a consumer complaining about the fact that NGL Pro does not actually disclose who sent a message, the company's product lead wrote, quote LOL, suckers, unquote in a text message thread with defendants Veer and Figurito.

So that is yeah. They're actually pulling from the text message thread where they are celebrating the fact that people are spending money on something that is not be able to find out who was sending you the question and people kind of complaining about well, it doesn't really tell you per se. This is really, I mean, it's just frankly, it's gross, and so I'm glad to see the you know FTC gets spicy, like you're saying, and come in and say look, you can't, you can't try to sell this to minors, who are more likely to take advantage of an app like this, and then call it something like a safe place for them to be and that there are these guardrails in place, when clearly that's just not the case.

0:10:56 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, I think, especially we're in a moment when there's so much government focus on the impact of social media on young people Like this has been one of the few areas that there is bipartisan support for some of these bills that are coming out about, like how to regulate the experience of minors on the internet, which, uh, some, some positives and negatives in those bills.

But like you can tell that like it seems like there's like a theme that the FTC is also interested in these things. I also wonder, even if, even though this investigation had been going on for two years, I wonder if we'll see like more uh resolutions of these lawsuits as we are nearing towards maybe having a different president. Uh, we don't know. Question mark. But because under the FTC or under the Biden administration in particular, the FTC has been pretty like hard on tech companies, so it'll be interesting to see if we see like a more like we got to get these things through before the administration changes or yeah, if that happens and speaking of uh, when you were saying that the FTC was like, um, feeling negatively about the way that you are getting people to subscribe to a $10 a month subscription.

And then suddenly you're like, oh, but what if we hide the button so that it makes it difficult to unsubscribe?

0:12:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, how do we make it so that you can't cancel your monthly subscription? How do we make it so that you think you're subscribing for a month and you're actually subscribing on a week by week basis? I have to say that was the first thing, specifically about the NGL. I thought, for sure it was going to be, users were paying, and you said $10 a month and I thought, hey, at least they did the per month thing and not per week, because a lot of apps will try to do the per week.

0:13:00 - Amanda Silberling
Oh my God, yeah Well, so the day after this NGL lawsuit resolved, where NGL had to pay five million dollars, that's the resolution of this whole thing. And then they can't market toward kids anymore or have kids. On the use of dark patterns, which are manipulative design techniques such as like not making it easy to see where you cancel a subscription subscriptions nearly 76 percent had at least one dark pattern and 67 used more than one dark pattern, which I guess that makes sense, because if you're going to use one dark pattern, might as well use multiple dark patterns. But um, one example of this is um the FTC sued match because again, it made it difficult to cancel subscriptions.

But it's also things like you know, when you download an app and they immediately are like free trial, and it's an app that does have a free version, but they make it hard to click out so that you realize that you don't actually have to give them your credit card information, like I can't think of what example. But just like any app that you download that has a subscription component, and then they're like where do I click the x? Like they call that um obstruction, or even things like what they call social proof, which is you go on any given website and you're like, oh man, I really want to buy this blue button down shirt with some cool white designs on it. And then you put it in your cart and it's like five people put this in their cart in the last five minutes. And then you're like, oh my God, I need to buy my shirt so I can wear it on Twitter. And then now, here you are, in your shirt shirt so I can wear it on twit.

0:15:08 - Mikah Sargent
And then now here you are in your shirt. Etsy does that dark pattern I, there are constantly. I, if I, it's usually crochet patterns that I'm buying and it'll say this is in 15 other people's carts and I'm like joke's on you, etsy, cause this is a digital pattern and they can't run out, so ha, but I can imagine, yeah, if you have a physical object and there are only so many of them, you want to quickly move to to get it and make sure it's yours. Yeah, there are a lot of these dark patterns. I know that one place where it was brought up, um was in giving money to um, to political campaigns and people accidentally, you know, offering $100 a month when they thought it was $100 one-time payment, or accidentally signing up and not having any idea how to cancel it all. And there has been and it's been working its way through the system, its way through the system a rule about making it possible, making it just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. So if you don't have to call to sign up for a subscription, then you cannot require someone to call to cancel a subscription, and I want that law to be passed yesterday. I think that that would make such a huge difference.

It is a dark pattern that I fall victim to because I hate having to call and go through phone trees and wait here and then talk to this person and they try to pitch me on 12 different things while I'm telling them no, I don't want them. And I become kind of a nightmare person in those scenarios because I just I hate the whole thing and so I will just put it off and put it off, and put it off and put it off because I don't. I hate going through that process and so that I would love to see fixed as well. So it's really kind of nice to see the FTC saying look, we're looking, we're seeing what you're doing and we're coming for you. So I hope that they'll get spicy with all these other companies as much as they've gotten spicy with Not Gonna Lie or NGL.

0:17:18 - Amanda Silberling
Yep, it's. This is a spicy FTC summer, hot FTC summer, hot FTC summer.

0:17:28 - Mikah Sargent
The FTC is in its spicy era, yeah.

0:17:31 - Amanda Silberling
Lena Kahn is coming for you.

0:17:35 - Mikah Sargent
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All right, we are back from the break and it is time now for my story of the week. All right, I need to start by saying this Many of us grew up where we would go to book fairs and we would, you know, attend the library, and there were always those books Chicken Soup for the Soul. Some of them were for, you know, your parents, but some of them were for younger people. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul Turns out, that company that made the Chicken Soup self-help books has become a media company. So there's the first thing to understand Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment is a media company. That, I think, is a lot like Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel. Like Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel. They have acquired lots of properties that are responsible for free, ad-supported feel-good shows and movies and over the course of the last maybe five or so years, they have acquired different companies, including Crackle from Sony, 1091 Pictures, screen Media and Sonar Entertainment, and in doing so with Crackle, with Popcorn Flix and, of course, chicken Soup itself, the company had quite a bit of great momentum, according to Deadline, but the problem is that a number of things have played against the company, including something that's played against everybody, the COVID-19 pandemic, and just an overall kind of malaise, if you will, from Wall Street in terms of yet another streaming media platform or distributor.

So the company made the decision in 2022 to purchase Redbox, and for folks who are outside of the US or folks in the US who've never heard of Redbox, redbox is the sort of DVD vending machine service.

So what you would do they tend to be kind of outside of drugstores and sometimes gas stations, I think McDonald's at times would have them a bunch of different places, but it was a vending machine and you'd walk up to it and you would look through the catalog for different films and you would select one. You'd pay right there out, would spit a DVD and you had a certain amount of time to return it. You'd bring it back, you'd put it back in the machine, it would scan it, make sure the disc was there and then you would move along. Unfortunately, when the company purchased Redbox for $375 million in 2022, things just took a tumble. There was a huge issue because of the strikes that took place in 2023 among Hollywood and overall, also just a step away from having physical media and instead having streaming media and people paying that. So that has resulted in the company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment C-S-F-T-S-E to file for chapter Just call it Chicken Soup Entertainment.

Yeah, that works. Chicken Soup Entertainment.

0:22:56 - Amanda Silberling
I feel like that's a good name I like it.

0:22:58 - Mikah Sargent
I like it Chicken Soup Entertainment, but it's too late because yeah, unfortunately filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection bankruptcy protection, and so this has resulted in kind of something not great, which is that first and foremost, the company was not paying its employees. That's called delinquent payroll, so people were not getting paid and then also, at the same time they weren't getting paid the company also had to suspend benefits. They're working through now chapter 11 bankruptcy to try to get some money. I keep saying that chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to try to get some money and in doing so that would be able to give the employees payroll and, like continued payroll plus to have medical benefits reinstated all the way back to May. So any medical bills between May when they were suspended till now would be covered.

But it's still not clear. So there are a number of companies that have invested in that are creditors for Chicken Soup the Chicken Soup company, we'll just call it that and they will, like banks who have given them money, will get their money back first. But there are a lot of unsecured creditors. Deadline says Universal Studios, sony Pictures, lionsgate, walmart, vizio, warner Bros and Paramount Pictures are all unsecured creditors and they're kind of secondary to those main secured creditors to get their money back. So, oh, when did that update um. Scooter x is telling me that that has since uh, it has since become chapter 7, bankruptcy, not chapter 11.

0:24:52 - Christina Warren
Oh, um, so that that is an update to me.

0:24:55 - Mikah Sargent
Hold on, let's find it I gotta breaking news chicken soup, let's see yeah.

0:25:05 - Amanda Silberling
Let's learn about bankruptcy.

0:25:07 - Mikah Sargent
Red box owner chicken soup for the soul to liquidate in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, Workforce of 1,000 to be let go and 24,000 kiosks shut down. So all the red boxes all around will be decommissioned and I don't know if that means some people will end up with them in their living rooms. But yeah, it switched from chapter 11 to chapter 7. So that's a liquidation of the business and the firing or laying off of all staff. So I want to talk about this because, first and foremost, I think there has been, overall, a big shift from physical media to streaming media.

However, I've noticed a recent kind of undertow of complaints surrounding streaming media, where people are feeling like their end of the deal is not being held up by these companies, where if they are a subscriber to Paramount and they're watching a show on Paramount and then Paramount loses the distribution deal and that show is no longer available to them, people feel like something has been taken away from them. And so I've seen and this is anecdotal a few folks now who are going you know what, I'm just going to start buying media because then it's mine and I have it and nobody can take it away from me kind of situation and I wanted to get kind of your take on. If you did, if you know like growing up Blockbuster was a regular part of you and your family's routine, or if you did use Redbox, kind of what the situation is like for you.

0:27:03 - Amanda Silberling
I'm realizing, as we have this conversation, that if you were to give me a DVD right now, I don't have anything in my apartment that could play the DVD.

0:27:14 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, yeah, that I mean. There you go. We actually had. We have a PlayStation that can technically play DVDs and Blu-rays, but I wanted to just play it through. There were a whole bunch of reasons why it was not the best way to play it through the PlayStation. So at first, what I was doing was, through certain means that I will leave off of the air, making a physical disc into a digital version Interesting, yeah, it's just magic how that works, Magic yeah who knew who knew, and then just streaming it on the Apple TV.

That was what I was doing, but because my significant other is one of these people that I'm talking about, anecdotally, a whole flood of DVDs started pouring into the house, and so he went ahead and bought just an actual DVD player, and so now we have a purpose built DVD playing machine, and they were really inexpensive. At this point, they don't cost very much money at all. Blu-ray players are still expensive, but the stuff that he wants to watch is all I don't know for 80 year olds, and so his content plays on DVDs just fine, so we don't need more than a DVD player for it. But yeah. So growing up, though, did you watch any DVDs? Fine, so we don't need more than a DVD player for it. Um, but yeah, I. So growing up, though, did you, did you, watch any DVDs? Like, do you remember that being part of what you did?

0:28:51 - Amanda Silberling
yeah, blockbuster was a regular uh place to go, I think more so for you were able to like rent video games, which I mean I only use a switch, so I don't know if this is more of a thing on like Xbox or PlayStation, but I miss being able to rent a video game because, yeah, like I would, maybe I would pay like eight dollars to play a game for a week, but do I want to pay sixty dollars to have it forever because that's expensive.

Like sixty dollars is a lot of money for a game, or if it's Breath of the Wild or if it's a Tears of the Kingdom, it's $70. But yeah, I played it after a year after it came out, so I did get it for $60, but a shame, so I don't know. I mean I miss like being able to rent games. I guess you can still rent movies on like Amazon Prime or whatever Like, but yeah, I mean I remember there was a red box in like when you walk into the grocery store and then there's that weird like the liminal space of when you walk into the grocery store and there's the room with the carts oh, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly I love it.

0:30:07 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the place where the carts are, and then you'd have like one of those claw machines and one of those machines it turns coins into yeah, well, new liminal space unlocked, but, um, yeah, I don't know.

0:30:21 - Amanda Silberling
I mean I guess, in a way, like I understand why red box would maybe not be making as much money as it did, like before streaming became so dominant. But I also agree with you that I think there's this moment we are in where people are like wait a minute, this was supposed to save me money when I used to pay for cable, but now I'm paying for Netflix and HBO and Hulu and all that and like that's a lot of money.

0:30:48 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, um, I think that it was very brave and it was very brave that's the extent of what I'm going to say of all of the people who continued to work at Redbox. In this modern world, um, it, it. It takes true bravery to to to feel that DVDs have a future. Um, overall, I like DVD rentals. I think have a future overall, because I just don't see that as being I don't know. I felt like the writing was on the wall a long time ago and especially after Amazon killed its Netflix DVD portion. Then the writing was very much on the wall of acquiring these companies and sort of building this brand overall. And then you buy Redbox and it sinks and because of the nature of Redbox and having all of these little locations and vendors and everything what's involved in that, like it was a complicated business to take on and it was a real sinkhole for finances business to take on and it was a real sinkhole for finances. So, you know, rest in peace, and we pour one out for Redbox and the, I guess, the parent company.

0:32:21 - Amanda Silberling
Frankly, I guess the good news is that I do think that whenever a form of media becomes overly digitized, I do think there are a group of consumers that really want to see. I went to a thrift store with my friend and her 17-year-old sister and she bought a cassette tape.

0:32:58 - Mikah Sargent
Wow.

0:32:59 - Amanda Silberling
And we were like do you have a cassette tape player? And she's like no. And I'm like neither do I.

0:33:04 - Christina Warren
I don't have a DVD player.

0:33:06 - Amanda Silberling
Because it was Barbra Streisand and she really likes Barbra Streisand this is a crazy 17 year old.

0:33:11 - Christina Warren
She's great.

0:33:14 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah.

0:33:14 - Mikah Sargent
She went hard on the barber under her pillow but the kids are all right, the kids are all right. She'll turn it into a necklace or make it a charm for her Crocs. Who knows, could could be any of those things. Amanda Silberling, I want to thank you so much for taking the time today to join me and help us understand what in the world is going on in the world. Of course, folks can head over to tech crunch to check out the work that you're doing. Is there anywhere else they should go to follow along with what you're up to?

0:33:44 - Amanda Silberling
yes, well, I co-host the podcast wow true, which is an internet culture podcast hosted from the perspective of me, a tech journalist, and my co-host, who is a science fiction author, slash attorney. So, covering a lot of bases there, we are doing a redesign and re soft, launching on Wednesday. We just went away for a couple of weeks, but we're wow true, wow true. And then I am still. Every time I have to say this, I'm like wow, it is unfortunate that I am still on Twitter at acilbrights and just I'm on the internet, I'm playing Pokemon, rom hacks.

0:34:30 - Mikah Sargent
Nice Very much online.

0:34:33 - Jason Howell
Online.

0:34:34 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, amanda. We'll see you next time. Bye, all righty folks, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with a story about a zombie, but first I want to tell you about Panoptica. We're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly.

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Panoptica utilizes advanced attack path analysis, root cause analysis and dynamic remediation techniques to reveal potential risks from an attacker's viewpoint. This approach identifies new and known risks, emphasizing critical attack paths and their potential impact. Panoptica provides several key benefits for businesses at any stage of cloud maturity, including advanced CNAP, multi-cloud compliance, end-to-end visualization, the ability to prioritize with precision and context, dynamic remediation and increased efficiency with reduced overheads. Visit panoptica.app to learn more. That's P-A-N-O-P-T-I-C-A.app. Thank you so much to Panoptica for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. Alrighty folks, we are back from the break and back from the dead. Joining us to talk about AI's involvement in a scary zombie resurrection is the true one and only. Christina Warren, hi Christina.

0:36:57 - Christina Warren
Hey Micah, how are you?

0:36:59 - Mikah Sargent
I am peachy keen and so glad to be talking to you today. How are you?

0:37:05 - Christina Warren
I'm great, I'm great. Well, as you said, I'm a little bit zombified right now.

0:37:39 - Mikah Sargent
I guess we'll kind of get into it, but I've had kind of a weird week. To be honest, I'm great. I'm great Well. As you said, I'm a little bit zombified right now. I guess we'll kind of get into it, but I've had kind of a weird week. To be honest, I'm doing really well, but stuff happened that we're going to talk about that. There, of course, have been a number of publications that have existed online that, over time, have you know, was around for a long time and has gone away. So I was hoping, first and foremost, you could start by telling us about the site and then also your involvement with the site.

0:37:58 - Christina Warren
Sure. So TUAW, or TUA as it was called, was the unofficial Apple weblog and it was one of the early. It came out early, kind of during the big blogging boom. I think it first launched in 2004 about all things Apple and it wasn't the first Apple blog, but it was one of the early Apple blogs and certainly for a time it was one of the most prominent Apple blogs and it holds a dear place in my heart because it's where I started writing about tech and it was one of my first writing gigs.

I started writing for the site when I was in college in 2007. And I worked there and at a number of other sites within the same network until 2009 when I got a job at Mashable. But the site itself has not existed since 2015. It was owned by AOL, who has had a number of different owners since then, and AOL shut the site down in 2015, archived the contents on Engadget and had the domain, but the domain didn't go anywhere. If you went to tuaw.com it would just redirect you to Engadget, and that's been the case for the last nine years until this week Until now. Yeah, so that tells us how long it's been the case for the last nine years, until this week.

0:39:10 - Mikah Sargent
Until now. Yeah, so that tells us how long it's been gone. And you know, I was kind of curious when it came to what would happen if you tried to go there before, so knowing that it would go to Engadget. But something seems to have brought it back about its resurrection, how you found out about its resurrection and kind of your initial reaction upon learning that it had returned.

0:39:37 - Christina Warren
Yeah, so I guess it was Tuesday. I got a text from John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who he had come across it, I guess because the site he was searching for an issue on his Mac why something wasn't working, and he was taken to a link to TUAW and he was like wait a minute, this site doesn't exist anymore, or I thought I didn't Clicked on the link and I don't know if I was the byline for that story or not, but he was kind of tooling around and saw archives that had my name, christina Warren, attached, but a different profile photo, and he sent me the link and he was like look at this. And my immediate reaction was kind of a WTF, you know what is this. And then I think I was a little bit confused, and at first I was thinking okay, well, did AOL or Yahoo or Apollo Global or whoever the owner is, did they finally sell the domain? Okay, maybe the domain has been sold, and I could understand that happens. I've seen this for years, where a domain will expire, someone else will buy the domain and they will recreate archives, sometimes with similar links to old, you know pages on that domain that they'll serve.

What struck me, though, what was different about this and usually is just all kind of spam blog content. It's not trying to pass itself off as anything else, and I think it's usually a ploy to try to take advantage of backlinks that might already have existed for something in some sort of I guess scenario where they think they can somehow get money out of it. I don't think the economics work, but I think that's what the idea is. What was different about this was that not only were there archives of old articles which, incidentally, were not things that I'd actually written Some of the headlines were similar to posts that other people had written, but the things that were attributed to me written in the past were not actually things that I had written in the past. What was surprising and frankly disturbing to me, was that there was new content.

The site was presenting itself as being resurrected. Basically, in the About page it said that they had acquired the domain and the domain only not the content from you know Yahoo IP and they were wanting to resurrect it and bring it back you know, kind of as a new. You know, bring back as glory days that he had a whole staff of writers and editors. But when you clicked on the you know about us page. When you went to our team, the team page at the time this is since change the names were all of the former contributors to the site. Wow, and the photos were AI generated.

But beyond that and you might think, okay, well, you know, maybe they were trying to pay homage and again, maybe have the archives, which, again, they didn't buy, they didn't have any rights to the content. Maybe that's what they were trying to do. No, they were then publishing new content and I'm going to use publishing in quotation marks here that they were attributing to the old author's names, and so it was looking as if I'd published dozens and dozens of articles since July 1st 2024 under the byline Christina Warren at the website tuaw.com. And finding that out, I got a little bit, I'm not going to lie, I got a little bit angry, I got a little bit perturbed and I tweeted about it. I posted about it on threads that I masked on and fortunately, the other people out there cared and we were able to get some attention to it, but it was a very bizarre and very strange thing to come across.

0:43:19 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. I mean, especially given that, just without, it seems like no one knew about it and wouldn't have known about it unless you know. You came across it. Naturally it wasn't. There was no alert given to you at all. There was obviously especially no, no question of whether or not you wanted your name attached to it. I made me curious Is any of the content on the website any good at all? What, what's, what is there and what is it doing? Is it all just Google search farming, or is there actually helpful stuff on there at all?

0:43:55 - Christina Warren
No, no, from what I can gather, what they did is they went through and this was funny. They admitted to this in their about page at the time and I don't know if they've changed this, because since the publicity has come out about this, they've made a number of changes to the site, some that have been beneficial, some that don't really solve the underlying problem. But in their initial about page they said that basically they went through archiveorg and quote meticulously rewrote the content to match current standards and practices. What that's not what they did. Yeah, so what they did is they? I think what they did is they found slugs or archive copies on archiveorg.

They fed it into some sort of generative AI thing and said rewrite this, because the Verge had a story where they actually did kind of a comparison between two articles that had the same slug, the same URL structure, maybe slightly modified headlines, sometimes the same, the byline attributed would be different, and then the text would be different. It would be slightly different, it wouldn't be an exact copy, but it would be very close and some sentences might be the same. But then there are things because it's generative AI that just wouldn't be right. So you know, something that was joking and jocular might be changed in a way that doesn't make sense. If they only you know were able to scrape a certain portion, a certain number of characters of a blog, they you know, the sentence might just cut up abruptly.

So, and and now it looks like the net new content because, again, this this is a site that was shut down in february of 2015. Um, I stopped working for it in 2009, but it had new articles attributed to me and it had content attributed to me from long before I'd even joined. But now it looks like the content that is on the site is being stolen from other sources and maybe being lightly rewritten again with AI. It looks like a lot of the headlines are from places like MacRumors, and so I hope that the MacRumors team is able to send some, you know, cease and desist or get their, get their lawyers involved. Yeah.

0:45:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because this was my next question what do you obviously it's hard to get in the head of people that are behaving this bizarrely, but what do you think they saw as what could possibly be the benefit of resurrecting a dead site and using the names of real life people for the content? I know since then things have changed a bit, but like what do you? Do you think it was just trying to quickly get something and then get? I mean it? Just it kind of boggles the mind a little bit. It's it's not very sneaky and you're using people who are more likely to be extremely online than people who are not. That's where I'm kind of blown away.

0:46:33 - Christina Warren
No, I am too. I mean the whole scheme kind of breaks apart a lot. I should note that the company behind this I believe that their name goes on by a number of different things, but I believe Web Orange Limited is how they are described on their own website right now yeah, web Orange Limited is who the owner is. This is not the first time they've done this. This is the first time, at least as far as I can see, kind of maybe using AI to this extent. But they bought a site called iLounge, which you know old, older school, you know iOS and, even before that, ipod people might remember. They bought that site in 2019 and have continued publishing content on it. It's unclear if any of the bylines or the people who write for that site are real, if they actually exist, if they're pseudonyms, you know, for you know people who are from content farms, if it's AI generated, I'm not sure, but the layout of the site is the same that they're using for TUAW and a lot of the content mix seems similar as well, so it looks like they've done this before. As for what their motivation is, this is what confuses me too, because, again, as I said, we've seen over the years, kind of these things that are known as splog farms or spam blogs, where you know people will buy sites and or acquire them and fill them with lots of you know spam kind of highly you know impactful links and then try to get backlinks to those sites other places. And a lot of times what people have done in the past is they've bought these older domains after they've expired and they've maybe tried to refill the content, to again take advantage of the backlinks and try to get some authority within Google search and then that way they can, I guess, try to make money through advertising or through search that way. What confuses me about this is that A the site you know I can understand maybe acquiring something like iLounge, even if the content you're continuing to put on it is low quality.

I think that they acquired that site from the owner. I'm not sure the details on that, but this was a site that hadn't existed for close to a decade that you know. Most of the backlinks had probably kind of rotted away and so I don't know what value there was with it. And beyond that, as you said, you know the writers and the real people whose names they were putting on this content. Not.

Not everyone is still, you know, active online and involved in things, but certainly a number of us are, so you know you would think this would set things off, but even beyond that, google has made changes to their search algorithm to try to limit the impact that these sorts of sites and services can have, and so the only thing I can I can glean and this is just a guess, because I don't know is that this was something that was cheaply acquired. They bought the domain and they were able to very cheaply generate content for the site and just figured okay, if we can somehow get within maybe Google News results or Google search results, we can generate traffic and thus ad revenue, even if no one is actually getting anything of value out of our site. That's the only thing that I can grasp. But the way they did it and you know the method of taking real people's names, misappropriating them, putting them on to new content as well as rewriting and misattributing past content that was what kind of shocked me, right Like that.

That. That was the thing that I didn't expect to see.

0:49:57 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely, and you know you have, of course, not only found it through the help of John Gruber in the first place and then talked about it. It's now been reported across a lot of tech blogs. It's now on Tech News Weekly. Have you seen them do anything to try and mitigate the concerns that are in place, and is there more that can be done in situations like this when it comes to your name and, to some extent, your content being reused in this way?

0:50:40 - Christina Warren
Yeah, so there were a couple of things that I did. The very first thing before it was even written about by anyone else, been written about by anyone else, and I want to give a thanks to Jason Sell at Six Colors, the team at Apple Insider, jason Keebler at 404 Media, who did a great story, and Sean Hollister and Jay Peters, who wrote something for the Verge, and also you, as well as John Gruber, for alerting me to all this. But a number of places have written about this story, which was great, and I think that caused some immediate changes. We saw, even after the first article oh, engadget, carissa Bell at Engadget also wrote something. She was the first person to write something.

But before those articles were even published, I sent a stroNGLy worded email to the one active email it looked like on the site Although there was an email attributed to me I'm sure they all go to the same place that basically said remove my, my name from your website at once. And and I I said like, very clearly I was like I, I will get a lawyer involved, and I was serious about that. I don't like to, you know, even throw around fake legal threats, and I hadn't contacted a lawyer at that point, because it was, you know, tuesday afternoon um, and I was still trying to figure and, and I was trying to figure out what was going on, but I said remove my name from your site.

At once. And within probably half an hour of the Engadget story going up, right before right as the 404 story was published, they had first changed my byline from being Christina Warren to just Christina and I was like, okay, well, that's a start, that's not good enough, uh, but they'd left the other bylines for the other authors, the same Uh, and then, pretty quickly, within a few hours, um, all of the, the names on the site, uh, for the author names had been changed. So the, the content itself was still there and in some cases might be, you know, infringement, plagiarism, whatever, but at least none of our names were associated with any of this content. And that was my primary concern because for me, a lot of people, some people still remember TUAW, some people might be hearing about it for the first time. For me, for better or worse, and, I think, for better, I will probably always be associated with the site because it was one of my first writing jobs, will probably always be associated with the site because it was one of my first writing jobs. I was, you know, becoming more popular.

I was starting to build a following on social media at the same time that I was writing for the site, and so there are a lot of people who will associate me with this site, and my concern was, you know, putting the past content and things like that aside. I didn't want anything new coming up and being potentially people getting confused and associating it with me and thinking, oh, I remember Christina Warren used to write for TWAW, maybe she's doing that again and thinking that that was actually my work product. I didn't want, and I also didn't want for any of my former colleagues to have any of their search engine results or anything else muddied up with this, and so my primary goal, even beyond any of the infringing content, which is going to be harder to deal with, was just take my name off of it and take everyone else's name off of it. So it seems like the bad publicity went a long way, and I should make a slight correction. Jason Snell, I think, had a linked post on his blog first. Chris Adele then had an article for Engadget and then Jason Keepler for 404 Media, but when it comes to so they, within a few hours of me first finding out, my byline was removed from the site, and so were that of the other authors.

When it comes to the infringing content, that's a little bit more difficult. The past archives are still there and they still have. Now they're attributed to randomized names. It's not the same content that existed before, but if you did click on a backlink for some reason from you know an old version of the site, it will now resolve and I'm sure in many cases and take you to content that is similar but different. Right and not right Now.

What can be done about this? This is the more difficult thing. The company is is based, I think, in in Hong Kong, although, from what the first was looking into, it looks like the person behind the site who, fun story. He's now trying to remove his identity off the Internet, which good luck. I think he has some companies based in Dubai, some that are based in Delaware. How to, even, you know, um, send any sort of cease and desist or anything like that, and and to get anything done with that, I think would be difficult and probably expensive, and for me I don't have the time, um, even putting the money aspect of it aside, like I just don't have the time to try to worry about taking down. You know, 15 year old, plus content.

If my name's not on it anymore, I'm not going to be like I can't be too bothered about you know a head, a slug being rewritten poorly. You know, using some of my content Like do I like it? No, am I going to pursue trying to get that taken down actively Probably not Right, like I. Just I think the we all know how hard it is to get those types of things taken down anyway and international laws around copyright are very different and I just don't have the time to do that. But the good news is that at least no one's you know real names are being associated with this. You know AI sludge that is currently on the website.

0:55:59 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. And now more and more people are learning about that site and, I think, are being made aware of the fact that going there is going to get that AI content sludge.

0:56:10 - Christina Warren
Yeah don't go there, I'll say that Don't go there, don't go there.

0:56:15 - Mikah Sargent
Don't go there. Christina Warren, I'm afraid we are out of time, but I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. If people want to stay up with what you're doing and make sure they're heading to the right links, where should they go to do that?

0:56:27 - Christina Warren
Well, you can follow me on all social media. I'm at film underscore girl, as I'm still on Twitter, but I'm also active on threads and on mastodon um, I'm film_girl at mastodon.social. I'm also film girl. One word on blue sky and uh, you can watch the videos that I do at work at GitHub, at youtube.com/github beautiful, thank you so much.

0:56:50 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, MiKah all righty folks, we have another ad break before we come back with our final story. Today it's all about that event that just took place Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. But first I want to tell you about a sponsor I'm super excited to have on this show. It's Experts Exchange. We're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly, so we just had the opportunity to talk to Experts Exchange and it was a lot of fun getting to learn about the company. You can join a network of trustworthy and talented tech professionals to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack, instead of paying for expensive enterprise level tech support.

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Um, hello, go there now, no credit card required. Visit e-e.com/twit to learn more. That's e-e.com/twit. Thank you so much to Experts Exchange for sponsoring this week's episode of tech news. Weekly 90 days free, no credit card required. Why aren't you going there right now? You probably are good. I'm glad I can't wait to hear how you had one of your questions answered by the experts there. All right Back from the break. That means it's time for our final story. Now that we're past noon, I apologize to our next guest, who will be familiar to some of you. It's Jason Howell. Welcome back to the show, Jason. How's it going? It's good to see you Mikah good to see you, twit fam.

Uh, good to have you here, um, especially to talk about this. Uh to the story, because I'm sure you tuned in to the Samsung galaxy unpacked event and I need help sorting through everything that happened, starting with the latest hardware from the company. In terms of the smartphones, tell us about the Z Fold 6 and the Z Flip 6. What's new?

1:01:53 - Jason Howell
What's not? Yeah, well, yeah, it's a hard question to answer this time around because I think for all of these categories there's like a big thing and then we'll kind of go out from that. I think the big thing with their foldables right now is that they're more expensive. So the Z Flip 6 and the Z Fold 6 are both $100 more than last year's versions of these, which I think is a pretty big deal and not a great thing. But you know, hey, inflation comes for all of us, I suppose. Also it's more iterative and I think those two things in combination aren't necessarily an amazing thing. When you're talking about hey, we're Samsung, we've got this new hardware we want you to upgrade to.

It's becoming a little bit harder in their foldable lineup to make the case that you have to upgrade to this next one I mean the Z Fold 6, yeah, it's thinner, it's lighter, it's got a little bit wider of a front cover which has long been kind of. One of my least favorite things about the Z Fold 6 is that the front cover is so thin that, yes, it can be a phone, but it's a really thin phone and that limits kind of the usability to a certain degree. The rear cameras are housed in a way that's similar to the previous version, but still kind of changes things slightly. It's all these like little minor changes that you know in essence. Do they justify the fact that you're ultimately going to spend a hundred dollars more? Sure, you're getting your spec. You know bump inside the Snapdragon, uh, hn three, um, you're getting you know a heck of a lot of Ram.

These are going to be excellent phones. No, no doubt about it. But you know, are they justifying properly the $100 price increase? And that goes also for the Z Flip 6, of course, as well. The cover screen didn't get much of an upgrade. There's also a lot of really great competitors out there. When we're talking about foldables, it's not just Samsung anymore. Really kicked this off in a wide spectrum and motivated a lot of other manufacturers in the Android space to get on board with foldables. They used to be far and ahead of the competition, and now the competition is catching up, if not caught up, and they're offering hardware that's less expensive. So how does Samsung keep justifying?

1:04:18 - Mikah Sargent
So that is kind of something that stuck out to me, that the people, the reaction to this latest one was I mean, it's what you started out by saying what's different about them? First and foremost, they cost more money. That's not enough. No, it's not. What's going on there. How much did Samsung discuss and show off any new expressions of artificial intelligence at this hardware event? Was that a part of this at all, or has Samsung already kind of shown that?

1:05:00 - Jason Howell
at all, or has Samsung already kind of owned that? Yeah, I mean, you know, galaxy AI is Samsung's AI play and AI certainly featured a lot in the presentation. You actually had Rick Osterloh from Google's hardware division take the stage at one point to talk about, you know, kind of the integration of Gemini, really kind of showing how close Samsung and Google are working together with their Android efforts, which is definitely as someone who's been covering Android for a very long time very interesting, considering only a handful of years, Samsung wouldn't even say the word Android on stage anymore. They wanted distance, and now they're close together and largely, I think, part of this is because of AI. Right, like Samsung doesn't have its own AI play, it is utilizing Google's Gemini AI on device.

But again, we're kind of at this point. In a very short amount of time, we went from AI is the biggest, greatest new thing for smartphones and it does all these things to oh yeah, but all the phones kind of do that now. So now what are you going to do? What have you done for me lately? You know on-device AI and I mean, you know AI ambient wallpaper that follows the weather. That's one aspect of it. There's, you know, there's these little examples, but again nothing that really takes it to that next level where you're like, oh my goodness, that's the killer app, that's the killer feature. It's just they're all playing kind of like little incremental catch up, even when it comes to AI, and in a short amount of time. It's kind of interesting, hmm.

1:06:30 - Mikah Sargent
So that's kind of supposed to be right, the the big hardware thing. But the company also announced some wearables and I want to start by talking about some interesting watches. First, if you could tell us about the Watch 7 and the Watch Ultra, and then I'm curious to hear your take on comparisons that have been made between you know, watches from other companies. You know, we'll say, because there's there's a large part of me that feels like there's only so much you can do with a watch and watch design. So to try to say that it's a direct copy and paste from Apple is a little bit kind of like, is it? But then I saw the watch ultra side by side with an Apple watch ultra, which is also called ultra and ultra. I thought, oh, there's a little bit of an argument there. But yeah, tell us about the watch seven and the watch ultra and then, believe it or not, we're going to take a quick break after that.

1:07:35 - Jason Howell
Yeah, and we've got more. I know this was an incredible amount of hardware at this event. Yeah, I mean, you know, here with the watches, the big thing is what you mentioned, that holy moly, this thing looks a lot like the Apple watch ultra, um, but also I, I would, I would go ahead and put a little flag in the ground and say trend watch orange is the new black. These watches, uh, uh, the nothing cmf phone you know that uh was announced last week the rabbit r1, which actually I'm late to the game but I finally got in my hands, like our orange is is, wow, such a big color for this year. So you're seeing it a little bit here. It really you're. You know, you're seeing it left, right and center, which is similar to what Apple had with its watch.

So the Galaxy Watch, ultra big, rugged, titanium design, has that sapphire crystal display. This is a big chunky watch 47 millimeters, ip68 rated, 10 ATM waterproof, so that basically means 328 feet depth for 10 minutes. So you know it's really tough. It's meant for, like, ocean swimming, mountain climbing, all those. You know rough and tumble things. The design itself squircle design, if you want to call it that, although it's still really a display that's circular. It's just a circular display housed in a squircle body. I just love that name, squircle, Anyway so it gives it a little bit of a different feel.

But, like you said, you put it up against Apple's top-of-the-line watch and there's a lot of similarity there. And this thing also is more expensive than we're used to seeing from Samsung in their watches, but less expensive than the Apple version of this watch. It's $650 for this compared to the $299 that you pay for the Galaxy Watch 7, which is definitely more of like the standard smartwatch 40 millimeters, 44 millimeters. So a couple of different sizes, smaller sizes, no, no doubt. Um, and again, you know, ip68 rated 5 atm waterproof, so it can't quite go as deep and go 164 feet deep at 10 minutes, but, um, still probably a pretty, pretty great smart watch. But, um, yeah, there's a lot of similarity and this is not the only hardware that we saw that we're going to talk about. That has a very strong similarity to what Apple does Excuse me Apple design has put out in the last handful of years. So something interesting going on with Samsung right now.

1:10:08 - Mikah Sargent
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Tell us about Samsung's latest offering in terms of its in-ear devices, particularly the I would argue shift in design from what we've seen in the past.

1:12:22 - Jason Howell
Big time. Yeah, Samsung, and I'm actually a really huge fan of Samsung's earables, as I think you just put it. I like that. In the past, you know, they had more of kind of the bean kind of form factor approach not with the stem, that's, that's hanging down. So here this year with their ear bowls. The big thing is, yeah, they look a heck of a lot like AirPods. You know they were stemless before. Now they've got that stem and they say, you know, arguably this adds more surface area for touch controls.

Personally, like, like, I get it, but then at the same time, like I got used to it, on the kind of bean style approach that they've been doing for so many years, but anyways, they've got two different ear bowls. That's so a word that I'm going to continue using Galaxy Buds 3, which are kind of the lower end, $179 open type earbuds. So there is no true seal here, you know, because everybody's different as far as what they want to put in their ear holes. Some people don't like the one that goes deep into the canal with a silicone tip, which Samsung does have. We'll talk about it in a second.

This is the one that kind of rests on there, so you get some noise cancellation, though you know how much can you do with an open canal design, some not. You know how much can you do with an open canal design, some not. You know. Total. There is no transparency mode here because it's not really needed because of the open design. And then you've got the galaxy buds 3 pro, which are, you know, the more premium 249 metallic looking, which I'm not a big fan of, has on the ear tip, which they actually call the blade, because it's kind of like an angular ear tip instead of a circular one or a cylindrical one like you see on the AirPods. The blade, but it. But it works as the blade because there's also LEDs running down each. So it just it just reminds me of when AirPods were first announced, how many years ago, and we all saw them daNGLing down and it was the easy target to like, make fun of, like, oh my goodness that looks awful, and now we're accentuating it.

1:14:27 - Mikah Sargent
Is there a function to that, or is it just look?

1:14:31 - Jason Howell
Oh, that's a good question. I wonder if it shows like that would be, yeah, some sort of like pairing.

1:14:37 - Mikah Sargent
I guess it'll only be showing unless you're looking in the, because I was thinking from like light blue to dark blue. It was telling you that it's you know more, or the volume's higher or lower, or brightness, dimness, but when I think about it you'd have to be looking in a mirror to see that. And so then I'm just thinking about how yeah, how much of my battery is being devoted to these lights.

1:14:57 - Jason Howell
That's totally wouldn't mean that I totally agree.

1:15:01 - Jason Howell
That's a. That's a really great question. I didn't actually look that up to see like, is it some sort of indicator? Is it a volume indicator? Is it a battery indicator? You know all these things that I guess it could be. But again you have to ask yourself, like, but why? Like it's in my ear, do I really need that light to be shining? Unless it's just meant to look blingy, which that could be it too, you know, and at what cost.

But I mean silicone ear tips so you get that seal. It's that in your ear canal type. That gets you the seal that brings you true adaptive noise cancellation. That brings you true adaptive noise cancellation. And in fact it's adaptive because the surroundings can actually influence the sound and the cancellation. They're using adaptive EQ, adaptive noise cancellation, to basically take in like, what is the environment, apply more, apply less, make it sound different. It also has a transparency mode and, yeah, that's $249. So, you know, definitely more expensive and definitely looks. You know, they've just taken a completely different design approach and really kind of I mean it's hard to say that they're copying directly Apple, because Apple is not the only earbud manufacturer that does the stem thing. There are lots of them out there. I mean, I have, you know, some OnePlus buds right here, their stems as well. It's just, it's one of the design approaches, but it is interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting that Samsung is doing that after so long not doing it. I wonder what the real reason is. Is it that surface area for touch interaction, or is it something different?

1:16:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, cause I always thought that any ability to get the microphone closer to the mouth would be a good idea. So when you've got the, you know the beans that are. It's just a little bit farther away that maybe you wouldn't have as good beam forming, but in any case I I don't. I didn't have a problem with it being close to the design, other than the charging case. That felt a lot like the same design, because the case is almost identical and has the led light right there in the middle where it charges. Um, but again, I just don't really care. If it's so what if it's the same thing? It's just for like, but from a different company.

I don't know unless they're trying to sell it as if it's an Apple product, then it's not breaking any rules. It's just, I guess, about taste. At that point, I don't know.

1:17:30 - Jason Howell
I don't know Like. I find myself in a really interesting position when it comes to earbuds and you know, true wireless earbuds and everything like that. At this point. I've used so many of them and I have a couple of different pairs that I can review. I've used them enough to do a review on them, but I feel like they're so commoditized at this point they all really do close to the same thing. How much can you really say about it other than that's just the Samsung branded one and sounds a little better, or whatever the case? I will give Samsung that I've always felt that they're or maybe not always, but definitely in the last handful of years when I've had the opportunity to test out their true wireless earbuds, I feel like they are right near the top of the best sounding ones that I've used.

1:18:16 - Mikah Sargent
So I will totally give them that the top of the best sounding ones that I've used, so I will totally give them that. And then, last but not least, something that I know people were excited about and I'm curious to hear if, after it was announced, people still seem to be excited about it how you feel about it, and, of course, cost and all of that the Galaxy Ring. It is cool to see a wearable of this sort from a big tech company, as opposed to kind of smaller tech companies that are trying to do the same sort of thing. Tell us about the Galaxy ring.

1:18:49 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean, we've known about the ring for, you know, months now and we've kind of been waiting, like when is Samsung going to finally release the ring? So they are. And, by the way, I should also mention every siNGLe piece of hardware that was announced yesterday is shipping on july 24th, including the ring. So I think that's pretty cool. You know, there's none of that like here's the thing and you're gonna have to wait months for it. It's all you know. Not quite immediate uh gratification, but close enough anyways.

The galaxy ring 24 7 tracker uh meant to be worn all the time. It can last seven days, according to what Samsung is saying. As far as the battery is concerned, which I mean I I think that's pretty fair. It has a little, you know, a charging case that it rests in. Looks like you could propose to someone with it. Um, is it like a futuristic proposal? Um, but I don't know. I feel like seven days is enough. I wonder how fast it? You know it charges up. But three finishes matte black, silver, gold. It has three different sensors underneath heart rate, infrared, uh, skin temperature for things like sleep monitoring, which is very interesting, and then there's an accelerometer in there for steps and runs.

Um, as you said you, the Galaxy Ring is not the only thing to do this. That does this. The Aura Ring is a little less expensive than what Samsung has here $399 for the Samsung Galaxy Ring, and I think the most expensive Aura Ring is $350, in my understanding, $50 is my understanding but that requires a subscription to do the stuff that this allows you to do as far as tracking and data and all that kind of stuff. Data analysis, that sort of stuff comes out of the box. However, the flip side to this is the Galaxy Ring only works with a Galaxy phone paired with a Samsung health app, so it's really locking itself into the Samsung ecosystem, which I guess isn't that odd. Samsung really likes to think of itself as another Apple as far as its ecosystem is concerned, and they've done a pretty good job of cultivating that.

I'm curious about this purely from the perspective of sleep tracking, probably more than anything. Do I need to count my steps and all that stuff? No, I've got my phone in my pocket usually, or I've got my watch on my wrist. That does that. I don't really pay close attention to it anyways, but sleep tracking is something that I'm more and more paying attention to as I get older and I have zero interest to wear a gigantic honking watch to bed, but I will absolutely wear a ring and I want to know how accurate it is. I, you know, they, they say that it's, you know, going to be able to kind of track uh aspects of sleep apnea and that sort of stuff. That that could be really helpful, really handy.

1:21:30 - Mikah Sargent
Um, but $399 is an expensive ring to put on your finger. So we'll see if it's worth it. But, yeah, I want to see this be successful because I want to see other companies do this. I'd like, you know, google to make the pixel ring, and for Apple to make some sort of ring and OnePlus to do a ring and then, with it, kind of involve it in other aspects of the technology. You know, we've seen the Apple Watch, for example, having gestural controls that are built in that have to do with it looking at the tendons essentially in your wrist and knowing what you're doing with your fingers because of what you're doing with your, the way that the tendons are moving, and so the idea that you know a ring could be part of a gestural interface when these companies are working on AR and VR products would be pretty cool.

1:22:46 - Jason Howell
So, yeah, I still look forward to seeing how this technology evolves overall and, if you know, there's going to be a Galaxy Ring 2 and 3, like there has been with the other, the other products and so, um, I think I think it's really interesting what, what you just mentioned there sorry to interrupt, but, but before we lose the thread of it, what you mentioned there as far as things like controlling in an ar and vr perspective, because another thing they announced yesterday or they didn't really announce, they just mentioned it again and it's not the first time we've heard this, but we keep hearing it is the upcoming reveal of some sort of XR platform by Google and Samsung.

We've heard Google talk about this very briefly in the past, kind of lay the little secret pathway down in front of us, so that we all start to get curious, but then not tell us very much about it. And Samsung did or I can't remember if it was Rick Osterloh or if it was Samsung itself did mention the XR platform yesterday as well, saying that it would be unveiled sometime this year. So I don't know. I mean we could see, maybe not necessarily with the Galaxy Ring right now, I don't know that it necessarily. At least at this point we don't know enough about it to know whether it has the ability to do some of those kind of control mechanism sort of things with a potentially, you know, a new kind of XR platform coming out. But I could totally see it in the future and that's a really interesting direction to explore, and we've got the clues to know that something's coming, so you know we might not have to wait too long to see.

1:24:19 - Mikah Sargent
We shall see. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time today to walk us through what Samsung announced at its Galaxy Unpacked event. If folks want to stay up with what you're doing and perhaps see reviews of some of these hardware devices later on down the line, where should they go for all you've got?

1:24:41 - Jason Howell
Well, two main things for reviews of these types. youtubecom/@techsploder T-E-C-H-S-P-L-O-D-E-R is my YouTube channel, so I'm doing a lot of, you know, tech reviews and AI walkthroughs and everything. There's also a bunch of my podcasts that are hosted on there, but also Android Faithful androidfaithful.com, which is essentially All About Android, the next generation. With the same crew, we're doing it over there and we will absolutely be talking about this event on the upcoming episode this next Tuesday. Awesome.

1:25:14 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you, Jason, for your time and we'll see you again soon. Thank you.

1:25:18 - Jason Howell
Great to see you, Mikah. Bye TWiT folks.

1:25:22 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks. That brings us to the end of this episode. Tech News Weekly publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. So you head there if you want to subscribe to the show in its audio and video formats. If you'd like to get ad free episodes of this show, as well as many other shows, check out Club TWiT. twit.tv/clubtwit. I invite you to join us. For $7 a month you can be a member of the club. When you join the club you gain access to all of our shows ad-free. You also gain access to the video versions of our Club TWiT shows. You gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else Behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club TWiT events all get published there. And access to the members only Discord server A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at TWiT. We'd love to see you in the club. Love to have you join us. Again, twit.tv/clubtwit Just seven bucks a month. Consider joining us there.

If you would like to follow me online. I'm @ Mikah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check out today Hands on Mac and iOS Today, which will be published. And, of course, you can always tune in on Sunday to watch Ask the Tech Guys, the show co-hosted by me and Leo Laporte, where we take your tech questions live on air and do our best to answer them. Thank you for tuning in and I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye-bye.