Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/17 – New Mac Tuesday

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, January 17th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Starting point is 00:00:40 New Macs and new M2 chips from Santa Tim this morning. Microsoft has made its Azure Open AI service generally available, but will lawsuits slow down the AI revolution? Is Google about to reveal its own air tag-like product? And the law of, if it's too good to be true, it probably is, continues to hold, at least when it comes to hard drives for sale on Amazon. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's not Mark German Apple Scoop Tuesday, but it is new Mac Day from Apple.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Apple this morning announced updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, featuring M2 and M2 Max chips, support for Wi-Fi 6E, 8K, HD, and HDIMI, and more, starting at $1,99 and $2,49, respectively. Mac Rumors. The new M2 Pro Chip features a 10-core or 12-core CPU, and offers up to 20% faster performance than the M1 Pro chip, according to Apple. The chip also has up to a 19-core GPU that delivers up to 30% more graphics performance, while the neural engine is 40% faster. The higher-end M-2-max chip has an improved 12-core CPU with up to eight high-performance and four high-efficiency

Starting point is 00:01:55 cores and delivers up to 20% faster performance than the M-1 Max chip, and it has up to a 38-core GPU according to Apple. Customers can order the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro starting today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24th, end quote. More on those M2 Pro and M2 Mac ships. They're built on a second-gen-gen-five nanometer process, offering 20% more transistors than the M1 Pro. Also, Mac rumors, quote, Apple says some apps like Photoshop and X-code can run heavy workloads substantially faster. The M2 Pro's GPU can be configured with up to 19. graphics cores, three more than the M1 Pro, and it includes a larger L2 cache. As a result, graphics are up to 30%

Starting point is 00:02:38 faster than with M1 Pro. The M2 Max chip features the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but offers a more GPU with up to 38 cores and a larger L2 cache. The chip offers graphic speeds up to 30% faster than the M1 Max. M2 Max also contains 10 billion more transistors than the M1 Max and can be configured with up to 96 gigabytes of unified memory. Apple says that the M2 Max is the world's most powerful and efficient chip for a pro laptop. The chips are also more power-efficient and enable better battery life on the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, end quote. By the way, Apple also announced an updated Mac Mini with M2 and M2 Pro chips, also sporting improved

Starting point is 00:03:19 graphics performance support for Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth, 5.3, and more, starting at $599. Microsoft has made its Azure OpenAI service, announced back in 20, broadly available to everyone, giving users access to the GPT 3.5 language model, Dahl E2, and chat GPT soon, quoting Bloomberg. Microsoft is currently using OpenAI's codex to add automation to its GitHub unit's co-pilot programming tool, and it's adding that feature to Azure along with the other open AI tools. The company wants to adopt even more OpenAI technology in its Bing search engine, office productivity applications, teams, chat program, and security software, end quote. Indeed, Microsoft's CEO Satcha Nadella says the company plans to integrate OpenAI's tools into all of its products and make them available for other businesses to build on, quoting the journal.

Starting point is 00:04:19 Speaking Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum's annual event here in the Swiss Mountains, Mr. Nadella said that his company will move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI, the research lab behind the chat GPT chatbot, as well as image generator doll E2, which turns language prompts into novel images. Microsoft was an early investor in the startup, quote, every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product, Mr. Nadella said. The Microsoft chief executive also struck an optimistic tone about the broader economic potential for tools like chat GPT, which can quickly generate fluid-sounding text based on

Starting point is 00:04:56 short queries or prompts. He said such tools are needed to boost human productivity, which he said would increase increase economic growth and wages for lower income jobs. Quote, We need something that truly changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth, he said. People with office jobs involved in so-called knowledge work should embrace the new tools rather than assuming they will steal their jobs, Mr. Nadella said, citing the example of computer software developers who currently use tools to help them generate some of the code they

Starting point is 00:05:23 write. The best way to prepare for it is not to bet against this technology and this technology helping you in your job and your business process, Mr. Nadella said. asked by a member of the audience about the impact of these tools on the Wall Street Journal itself, Mr. Nadella responded, quote, I think they'll be able to write great articles in the future relying on GPT, end quote. Mr. Nadella said in the interview that the new excitement around the tools was based on the fast growth in their capabilities in the past year, something he said he expected to continue. I'm not claiming, by the way, that this is the last innovation in AI, Mr. Nadella said.

Starting point is 00:05:56 This is not linear progress, end quote. Given how quickly this technology has risen to the four-finding. front, what can stop AI at this point? Well, stuff like this could at least slow it down. Getty Images has announced plans to sue Stable Diffusion Creator Stability AI in the UK over alleged copyright violations. Unlike OpenAI, Stable Diffusions training dataset is open source, quoting the Verge. Gettie Images, CEO Craig Peters, told the Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a letter before action, a formal notification of impending litigation in the U.K. The company did not say whether legal proceedings would take place in the U.S. too.

Starting point is 00:06:43 The driver of that letter is Stability AI's use of intellectual property of others, absent permission or consideration, to build a commercial offering of their own financial benefit, said Peters. We don't believe this specific deployment of Stability's commercial offering is covered by fair dealing in the U.K. or fair use in the U.S. The company made no outreach to get images to utilize our contributors' materials, so we're taking an action to protect our and our contributors' intellectual property rights, end quote. The lawsuit marks an escalation in the developing legal battle between AI firms and content creators for credit, profit, and the future direction of the creative industries. AI art tools like stable diffusion rely on human-created images for training data, which companies scrape from the web, often without their creator's knowledge or consent. A.I. Firms claim this practice is covered by laws like the U.S. Fair Use Doctrine, but many rightsholders disagree and say it constitutes copyright violation.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Legal experts are divided on the issue, but agree that such questions will have to be decided for certain in the courts. This past weekend, a trio of artists launched the first major lawsuit against AI firms, including stability AI itself, end quote. Yes, about that last bit. Quoting the Verge again, the artist Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKearinen, and Carlisle Ortees, allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of millions of artists by training their AI tools on 5 billion images scraped from the web, quote, without the consent of the original artists, end quote. The lawsuit has been filed by lawyer and typographer Matthew Butterick, along with the Joseph Savary law firm, which specializes in antitrust and class action cases.

Starting point is 00:08:20 Buterick and Savary are currently suing Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a similar case involving the AI programming model co-pilot, which is trained on lines of code collected from the web. In a blog post announcing the suit, Butterick describes the case as, quote, another step toward making AI fair and ethical for everyone, end quote. He says the capacity of AI art tools like stable diffusion to, quote, flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists, end quote. Generative AI art models are trained on billions of images collected from the web, generally without the creator's knowledge or consent. AI art generators can then be used to create artwork that replicates the

Starting point is 00:09:00 style of specific artists. Whether or not these systems infringe on copyright law is a complicated question which experts say will need to be settled in the courts. The creators of AI art tools generally argue that the training of the software on copyrighted data is covered in the U.S. at least by fair use doctrine. But cases involving fair use still need to be litigated and there are numerous complicating factors when it comes to AI art generators. These include the location of organizations behind these tools, as the EU and US have subtly different legal allowances for data scraping, and the purpose of these institutions. Stable diffusion, for example, is trained on the Lyon dataset, which is created by a German-based research nonprofit, and nonprofits may be

Starting point is 00:09:40 treated more favorably than regular companies in fair use cases. The lawsuit launched by Buterick and the Joseph Savary law firm has also been criticized for containing technical inaccuracies. For example, the suit claims that AI art models, quote, store compressed copies of copyright protected training images and then recombine them functioning as, quote, 21st century collage tools, end quote. However, AI art models do not store images at all, but rather mathematical representations of patterns collected from these images. The software does not piece together bits of images in the form of a collage either, but creates pictures from scratch based on these mathematical representations, end quote. will 2020 be remembered as the year AI took over first the tech world and then the world at large, or will it be remembered as the year that the litigation battles began? Google Nest appears to be working on air tag-like location trackers, code named Grogu,

Starting point is 00:10:44 with support for Bluetooth LE and ultra-wideband, possibly for launch this year at Google's I.O. conference, quoting the verge. Developer and reliable leaker Kubo Wischowski discovered references that indicate Google is working on support for locator tags in FastPair, Google's method for quickly pairing nearby Bluetooth devices, and claims in a Twitter thread that Google is developing its own first-party tracker to use with the feature. The tracker, according to Wisjiski, is codenamed Grogu, the name of the Baby Yoda character from the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, alongside the alternative names, GRU-10 and GroguO audio, and is currently being developed by the Google Nest team. That doesn't mean it'll launch as a Nest brand.

Starting point is 00:11:26 product, but Wichiski suggests the tracker might be released in multiple color options and include an onboard speaker to help users locate a missing device via sound, similar to that of an Apple Air tag. Wichiski also claims that the Grogu trackers could support Bluetooth LE and ultra-wideband. Google's flagship Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro mobile devices both support UWB connectivity, but its application so far has been limited to features like nearby share. while UWB offers far greater precision than Bluetooth for locating lost items, providing the ability to show both distance estimations and directions to a tag, which is he claims that even though Google's tracker most likely has UWB, it's not a requirement for the finder network they're working on. BLE is enough, end quote.

Starting point is 00:12:20 Can I end today with something weird that I noticed myself back when I was shifting over all of my computing to my new Macs, studio setup. I was also researching a ton of portable SSD options for backing up things like podcast files on a device that was separate from my main computer just to be safe. What can I say? I'm super fastidious when it comes to backups, I guess. Anyway, when I would search Amazon, I would find weird listings for things like 16 terabyte external hard drives for insane prices like 100 bucks. I didn't take the bait because I knew enough to figure that it was too good to be True, and according to this piece by Review Geek, the story is weirder than even I had imagined. Quote, you don't have to go far to find these fake hard drives. Start a search for a 16-terabyte

Starting point is 00:13:08 external hard drive, and you'll get dozens and dozens of entries. Most are from completely unheard of brands like Wai-a or Sejulus. But while these strange brands offer hard drives under $100, options from well-known brands like Western Digital are in the multi-hundred range. It gets more suspicious. Compare the sub-100 offering to the others, and you'll notice the case appears to be much smaller. The well-known brands don't offer 16-terabyte SSD portable drives. They're merely enclosures for traditional spinning drives. But the sub-100 brands claim to be M2 SSD, one of the most expensive and fastest formats out there. For reference, the largest portable SSD Samsung offers is two terabytes, and it goes for $180. I did have some difficulty,

Starting point is 00:13:54 curing the suspicious portable SSDs. The listing claimed it would come directly from Amazon, but instead of fast two-day shipping, my package went to the wrong state entirely and got lost for a moment. I'm not sure how the courier confused Wisconsin and Ohio, but that may have been an Amazon mistake as the company let me know about the delay and that it turned over the package to UPS to fix the problem. To keep things safe, I'm only connecting this hard drive to a fresh factory reset Windows laptop that is never connected to the internet. I have a second freshly formatted flash drive with files and tools to run tests on the drive. My first test involved moving a folder with one gigabytes worth of files onto the portable hard drive.

Starting point is 00:14:34 If the claims had been true, that should have taken a minute at most. It took 20 minutes. That suggests a USB 2.0 connection, not USB 3.1. And I certainly can't test putting 16 terabytes of data on the drive at that rate. So I used a common tool to write data to the drive until it filled up, with a USB 3.1 connection that could still take a while, and with the 2.0-like speeds, I expected it to take even longer. After an hour, the test filled the hard drive with 64 gigabytes of data. Not tiny, but definitely not 12 terabytes. It's clear that the manufacturer, whoever that may be, didn't want people to take

Starting point is 00:15:10 this hard drive apart. There are no seams, no screws, no obvious points of access. I found a pinhole near the USBC port resembling a SIM card access point, but no amount of prodding did anything. So I broke out my trusty I-Fix-It tools and pried the thing apart. Once I managed to take it apart, I found exactly what I suspected from my tests. A micro-SD card slotted into a circuit board acting as a USBC adapter. The micro-SD card doesn't have any markings on the front side and some serial numbers on the back that seemed to confirm the 64-gigabyte size, my testing revealed. Why does Windows show a 16-terabyte drive then? That's likely part of the board's firmware, falsely reporting a size that doesn't exist.

Starting point is 00:15:50 This thing is a total lie from top to bottom. If you're a tech person, you probably know that a 16-terabyte external SSD for $100 or less is too good to be true. But what about everyone else? Most people just assume larger is better and look for the largest drive they can find. From there, it's a matter of looking at reviews. And therein lies half the problem. I identify dozens and dozens of listings for this product, including an 8-terabyte version, and many of these had hundreds of five-star reviews.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And if that's all you judge a product by, it sounds like a great deal. But upon looking closer, I discovered the reviews often didn't match up to the product. The reviews were for steering wheel covers, ornaments, pillowcases, and 64-gibite flash drives. On Amazon, product sellers can update listings for accuracy and, in the process, take them over. That means adding new pictures, titles, descriptions, the whole works. By the time this scammer finished, what used to be a listing for a steering wheel cover, now sells a fake portable hard drive. But despite all the changes, the reviews stay in place, at least until Amazon.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Amazon notices. This little scam is often called review merging. I have contacted Amazon and asked for comment on both the fake hard drives and this process of listing takeovers. I haven't received a statement yet, but I will update this article when I have one, potentially to its credit. After I provided Amazon links to these fake hard drives, a few of the listings became unavailable, but the majority of the links I provided are still up and taking purchases. However, the listing I personally purchased disappeared on its own before I contacted Amazon. and a new one took its place. I suspect that when enough people buy these hard drives and the reviews drop, the scammer pulls the listing and lists it again in a new spot. It's like whack a mole. It may not

Starting point is 00:17:30 have been Amazon that removed the links I provided after all, end quote. So yeah, no such thing as a free lunch, as I suspected, or even a $100 SSD lunch. Now, I know, dear listener, that you wouldn't be foolish enough to fall for this scam, but maybe warn your non-tech friends to stick to well-known brands like Western Digital, because $100 for a 16-terabyte SSD may be coming sooner rather than we think, but today is not that day. Quick note that after today's episode, my cupboards are basically bare when it comes to ads for this show. Hopefully things will start turning around for February, but until then, I figure taking

Starting point is 00:18:19 any money is better than no money. So until the end of this month, I'm offering advertising spots. on this show exclusively to listeners of this show for $500. That's one-third of the normal rate in case you're interested. You'll get 50,000 downloads at least, so if you do the math on that, you'd be getting a hell of a CPM. Again, this is only through the end of the month on a first-come, first-served basis, because I don't want to underprice myself forever.

Starting point is 00:18:44 But again, some money is better than no money at all, so if you're a business of any size and grabbing the attention of the Mutant Podcast Army would be valuable to you, and $500 is within your budget, get in touch at Brian at Techmeme.com. I'm also open to blockbusting deals where you buy out the whole next week or something like that. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/17 – New Mac Tuesday

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