Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/06 – Don’t Forget Your Vision Pro Password!

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Don’t forget your Vision Pro password, or else you’re going to have to return it to the Apple Store to use it again. Why are the gaming platforms willing to play nice all of the sudden? The AI that can spit out fake IDs in seconds. Does Google owe you yet more money? And more signs the tech recession is over. Sponsors: Miro.com/podcast Hims.com/ride Links: Forgot Your Apple Vision Pro’s Passcode? You May Have to Take It Back to Store (Bloomberg) YouTube says a Vision Pro app is ‘on the roadmap’ (The Verge) Microsoft to share details on bringing Xbox games to PlayStation next week (The Verge) Roblox rolls out real-time AI translation for all users — is this the start of true global multiplayer? (Tom's Guide) Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs (404Media) Google agrees to pay $350 million settlement in data privacy case (Washington Post) Digital ad market shows signs of sharp rebound as Meta, Amazon point to growth (CNBC) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, February 6, 2024. I'm Brian McAllen today. Don't forget your Vision Pro password or else you're going to have to return it to the Apple store to use it again.

Why are the gaming platforms willing to play nice all of the sudden? The AI that can spit out fake IDs in seconds, does Google owe you yet more money and more signs the tech recession is over? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Thought I'd catch you up on some Apple Vision Pro tidbits. Apple is telling Vision Pro users who forget their passcode that they have to bring the device to a store or mail the device to AppleCare customer support to reset the device, quoting Bloomberg. The company's support staff also has been fielding questions from users struggling to set up Optic ID, an eye-scanning tool for logging into the device, and the built-in Apple Music app. The passcode problem could be particularly frustrating when customers enter their passcode incorrectly too many times. the headset will be disabled. If users still can't recall their passcode after a waiting period,

they'll need to send it back to Apple to be reset, according to guidance given to the company's support staff. At that point, all content on the device will be erased. On Apple's community forum, one customer said he spoke to an agent who was flooded with calls about the problem. He's had to deal with a lot of angry customers after telling them their only recourse is to return to the store the user wrote. He said Apple's support was really caught off guard by this and apologized for not being better prepared, end quote. One complication with the Vision Pro is it doesn't have a USBC port that lets users plug it into a Mac for troubleshooting. The company did release a special strap for developers to be able to attach the headset to a Mac last week, but that accessory

costs about $300 and isn't meant for consumers, end quote. I mean, that all fits into the idea that Apple thinks of this more as spatial computing, right? This isn't a device you buy for your household, this is a personal device, like a personal computer, a laptop in Apple's thinking. Though my Mac has multiple user profiles for my wife and children, it seems Apple doesn't really want multiple people using one Vision Pro. As Ben Thompson tweeted this weekend, The Vision Pro's guest mode has to be invoked every single time the guest takes off the headset. Guest sessions don't persist in a way where you could be like, here's son, use this for an hour. But as I've been beating the drum about, Apple should be leaning into this as a computing device.

I mean, half the user videos I've seen on social media have been people raving about using it for big-screen computing all around their house. So why no deeper integration to the Mac? Why no ability for the Mac to be the mother computer, sort of like the phone is the mother device for the Apple Watch? There's no find-mai on this thing either. Good news for Vision Pro users, though. YouTube says a Vision Pro app is, quote, on our roadmap, but doesn't. offer a time frame for that roadmap, but YouTube videos in 360 and VR playback modes are not viewable in Vision OS Safari at the moment, like they are on the meta-quest devices,

and that might not be coming anytime soon, quoting the verge. This, of course, follows YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix all declining to allow their iPad apps to run on the Vision Pro before launch. And the last time we asked, there was no mention of a proper Vision OS YouTube app coming in the future, so something's changed in Mountain View. One theory, the immediate popularity of Christian Selig's Juno app for YouTube on the Vision Pro, I asked Apple if YouTube's 360 and 3D videos will ever work on the Vision Pro during our review, and Apple spokesperson Jackie Roy basically told me they aren't good enough, saying that, quote, much of this content was created for devices that do not deliver a high-quality spatial experience. In some cases, this content could also cause motion discomfort.

We've focused our efforts on delivering the best spatial media experience, possible, including spatial photos and videos, Apple immersive video, and 3D movies available on Apple TV, end quote. The Vision Pro does not support WebXR at the moment, so there's a whole universe of existing VR and 3D content that you can't view on the Vision Pro, including porn, as lots of users on various subreddits have been complaining about quite vociferously all weekend. So if the old adage is that porn leads adoption of new technology, Apple seems to not have gotten that historical memo. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has announced an event next week to share, quote, Our Vision for the Future of Xbox. This comes amid rumors that Xbox exclusives are coming to the PS5-toot suite. Going to use this opportunity to do a bit of an omnibus segment about gaming news because there seems to be a lot of movement all of a sudden for more cooperation

among gaming platforms. For example, sources are saying Bethesda is considering bringing its new Indiana Jones game to the PS5 mere months after its Xbox. and PC debut as part of Microsoft's new multi-platform approach. Quoting the Verge. Microsoft is planning to share details about its plans to bring Hi-Fi Russian other Xbox exclusives to PS5 and Nintendo Switch consoles, according to sources familiar with Microsoft's plans. Details of Microsoft's multi-platform plans have been gradually leaking.

Now Microsoft is getting ready to outline the future of Xbox next week after a weekend of leaks and uncertainty for Xbox fans. We're listening and we hear you, says Microsoft Gaming's CEO Phil Spencer in a post on X. We've been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned, end quote. We're told Microsoft was originally planning this business update for later this month alongside an announcement of Hi-Fi Rush for PS5 and Nintendo Switch. After speculation around Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield and other Xbox games coming to PS5

intensified over the weekend, Microsoft has responded with an announcement of a business update event, for next week. Data-mined game assets hinted at a release of Hi-Fi Rush for PS5 and Nintendo Switch last week, following rumors of Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves making their way to non-X-box platforms, end quote. Meanwhile, sources are telling Reuters that Tencent plans to adapt acclaimed role-playing console game Eldon Ring into a mobile version after acquiring licensing rights from Software in 2022, Eldon Ring on a phone, wild. More gaming, but gaming tied with AI, because that is one of the use cases for LLMs that folks are most excited about, making your NPCs smart-ish. Roblox has rolled out real-time AI chat translations with support for 16 languages built on an LLM trained on open source and internal Roblox data.

Quoting Tom's guide, Metaverse Platform Roblox is bringing a new AI translation tool online for its millions of users around the world, making it easier to communicate regardless of, of a player's native language. Built on a new custom artificial intelligence language model, the translation service will work in real-time chat and convert a message in one language to the user's native language instantly. Roblox boasts over 70 million users connecting every day with some 2.4 billion messages exchanged between 180 countries every day, and, according to the company, a third of the time, people are chatting with others who don't speak the same language as them. This is likely an indication of how AI is going to be used in gaming, particularly multiplayer gaming, in the short term, it presents a way to improve connections and communication. We could also see future

models that incorporate live voice translation for in-game chat. Live AI translation in Roblox works across 16 languages and is built on top of the text chat service. Users simply start typing in their native language and others will see the message automatically converted. For example, a user in Korea can type a chat message in Korean and an English-speaking user will see it in English, while at the same time a German-speaking user will read and respond to the message in German, and they'd all understand each other, end quote. Now for the AI flip side, 404 media has a look at Only Fake, an underground website that claims to use neural networks

to generate highly convincing fake IDs for $15. One ID even passed OKX's verification systems. Quote, an underground website called OnlyFake is claiming to use neural networks to generate realistic-looking photos of fake IDs for just $15, radically disrupting the marketplace for fake identities and cybersecurity more generally. This technology, which 404 media has verified produces fake IDs nearly instantly, could streamline everything from bank fraud to laundering stolen funds. In our own tests, only fake created a highly convincing California driver's license

complete with whatever arbitrary name, biographical information, address, expiration date, and signature we wanted. The photo even gives the appearance that the ID card is lying on a fluffy carpet, as if someone has placed it on the floor and snapped a picture, which many sites require for verification purposes. 404 Media then used another fake ID generated by this site to successfully step through the identity verification process on OKX. OKX is a cryptocurrency exchange that has recently appeared in multiple court records because of its use by criminals. Rather than painstakingly crafting a fake ID by hand, a highly skilled criminal profession that can take years to master, or waiting for

a purchased one to arrive in the mail with the risk of interstate. exception, Only fake lets essentially anyone generate fake IDs in minutes that may seem real enough to bypass various online verification systems, or at least fool-sum people. The era of rendering documents using Photoshop is coming to an end, an announcement posted to OnlyFake's telegram account reads, as well as neural networks. The service claims to use generators, which create up to 20,000 documents a day. The service's owner, who goes by the moniker John Wick, told 404 media that hundreds of documents can be generated at once using data from an Excel table.

The appeal of a service-like Only Fake to fraudsters is that these allegedly AI-generated fake IDs could be used to sign up to online services which ask for identity verification. It is very common for all sorts of sites, banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, or even individual professionals like lawyers or accountants to ask for, at minimum, a scan or photo of someone's ID. Some social media sites also ask for identity documents in certain contexts. While OnlyFake says it uses neural networks to create its fake IDs, 404 media has not done. seen evidence that the service uses generative AI tools. I don't know exactly what is going on here, but I suspect that they are using some tech to insert slash replace the image into a template of license slash IDs. Hanny Farad, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading experts on digitally manipulated images told 404 media in an email. If they were using GenAI to create

whole cloth the entire ID, they would have trouble dealing with inconsistencies in the background, end quote. We said yesterday that in this AI era, you can't trust even a FaceTime video as proof of life or identity, and now you might not be able to trust IDs either. Maybe I need to open a file called Silicon Valley owes you money, because here's another one of these. Google has agreed to pay $350 million to settle a lawsuit over a Google plus security lapse that exposed personal data. If you happened to be someone who bought stock in Google in roughly 2018 to 2019, you can get yourself a share of the settlement, quoting the Washington Post. The settlement comes just weeks after Google settled another lawsuit brought by users of its Chrome

web browser who had their data tracked, even though they were using private mode. That case could cost Google billions, though a specific amount has yet to be announced. People who bought Google stock from April 23, 2018 to April 30th, 2019 will be able to apply for a share of the settlement, according to a filing with the U.S. Court for the Northern District of California. Eligible investors will be notified by mail, and a website with information will be created. The filing said, in 2018, Google realized that its systems had been exposing the data of millions of users of its Google Plus website to external developers for years, but executives chose not to notify the public or shareholders.

An internal Google memo at the time pointed out that if the security lapse came to light, the company might be subject to the kind of scrutiny, Facebook was then receiving for how its data was used by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election. Months later, the Wall Street Journal reported on the potential data breach, sending the company's stock plummeting and triggering a wave of negative media reports. Lawsuits ensued, and Google settled a class action lawsuit by users whose data was affected for $7.5 million in 2018. Most people who applied only got a few dollars. The case that was settled Monday was brought by the Rhode Island government, whose pension fund was an investor in Google. It wound its way through the courts for five years, and Google

tried unsuccessfully to appeal it to the Supreme Court before the settlement was reached, end quote. Finally, today, I've been suggesting that the great tech recession of late 2022 into 2023 is over. And CNBC notes that last week's tech earnings showed more signs of that, of a tech turnaround, specifically of an ad market turnaround with meta's ad sales up 24% year over year, Amazon's ad business growing 27%, and Google's ad business up 11%. Quote, Deborah Aho Williamson, an independent analyst, told CNBC that big advertising events like the Summer Olympics in Paris and the upcoming presidential elections will contribute to higher spending. Insider Intelligence said in a recent report that global ad spending will jump 10% in 2024 up from growth of 6.3% in 2020, and the same level of expansion the prior year. After two years of relative malaise, the outlook is very positive on a global scale and in every major region, the report said.

Analysts at William Blair expressed similar sentiment. They said businesses appear less concerned with the Russia-Ukraine conflict than in the past and are seeing a potentially more favorable interest rate outlook. The current macroeconomic environment is continuing to improve for digital advertising, they wrote. Adding that investments by meta and Alphabet into artificial intelligence to improve their ad platforms are paying off. Investors will get additional data on the digital ad market when Snap and Pinterest report earnings this week. Those numbers could look quite different, Williamson said, because they're, quote, much smaller companies that have struggled to build substantial ad businesses, and in this environment, the big are getting bigger, end quote. On the whole, digital advertising is continuing to eat up share of worldwide advertising,

Williamson said, whether the big players can maintain the momentum is a question that will persist for the coming quarters. One reason growth looks so strong now is because the numbers are being compared to the year ago period when conditions were bleak, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.