This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 24th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Xbox is in the midst of a big rebranding, and that includes a new logo. Wow, we're going to talk all about it, but that's coming up. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Quinn Twitlow. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. as win said just a few seconds ago microsoft shifting its xbox strategy toward being more of a cross-platform service so they're focusing on daily active players across console pc mobile cloud instead of just kind of focusing solely on selling consoles alone xbox ceo asha sharma detailed the strategy in a memo that describes the company vision of the, quote, return of Xbox, which is a reaction to slowing growth in the console space, at least for Xbox, and increased expectations by players to be able to move and play across devices. It's kind of what they're expecting nowadays, and especially PC, where Sharma says Xbox has under-delivered. The memo says that the console is the foundation, the cloud extends Xbox everywhere else, and that there is a market that is needed for flexible pricing, for customization. Overall, gamers want more access. Developers and publishers also want more access, kind of broader access to all these directions. And in this memo, Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty also acknowledge the need to reevaluate how it approaches Xbox exclusivity and release windows. So that's some pretty big information there, but we don't really have any details there. They say there's more to come on that once they decide on those changes. So, you know, I feel like anytime we talk about gaming stuff, I kind of defer a little bit more to you, Wyn, because you've had your toes in the water of gaming on a more consistent basis than I have. and I'm trying to remember are you more like a PlayStation or an Xbox girl PC PlayStation I did have an Xbox for a super super long time in college I did go through a Call of Duty phase I wasn't that good y'all but I did go through an Xbox phase and I was pretty loyal to Xbox up into a point I I want to say like up about 10 years ago 12 years ago I switched to kind of Sony PlayStation because that's what my husband played on so the social aspect kind of got me and I've always been a PC gamer like on top of everything else um so it's been a while but I've always had affection for xbox and i think not just for xbox in general but i like the idea of them moving away for like moving like reevaluating let's say exclusivity and i do think it makes a lot of sense in this day and age to kind of allow cloud like because i mean it feels like cloud in some some flavor or another has been in like been part of the gaming zeitgeist for several several years now whether it's like like not necessarily even cloud computing platforms but just the idea of not having to like of having your purchases and your games available in more places and playable in more places um and so i cannot help but be very excited about all this like the only reason i i like probably like a lot of people is that i didn't continue with xbox is that i who can afford to have all the all the consoles every like every new every new generation of every console and so i had to choose and the the i basically kept on the intersection of what i could play most and what i could play most with my friends which was pc and playstation so i'm looking forward to seeing where they go with this i like it a lot i actually like the new logo a lot um it's not like wildly different but it has like i think i saw i was reading some reddit posts and people were thinking oh it looks a lot like it reminds them of their old xbox consoles it reminds them of like the buttons and stuff and i think that it's really smart in that the new logo calls back to where they started and kind of similar to what the memo said was like the council's the foundation so the logo is like oh man remember like how great it was to have like the old xbox and like it's a very interesting you know it's it's it was a very notable design so calling back to that but also listening to maybe what people what gamers what customers want and trying to just more be everywhere rather than expecting people to keep buying these things which by the way, is getting more expensive for people to make anyway. So I really like the direction. And I would be sad, again, as an old Xbox person, wait, a previous Xbox person. I ain't old. A previous Xbox person. I would be sad if the Xbox brand collapsed in general because I think all of us have really great memories of our Xbox days, whether that's like, I don't know, Call of Duty, Halo, or whatever exclusives you played. So I'm looking forward to it. I feel like this could be the start of something positive, a good upward swing. But I don't know. Yeah. And I know that, you know, people have very deep, deeply kind of etched in stone beliefs around, you know, console, their devotion and dedication to different consoles. I am really curious to see how this kind of changes potentially the narrative around the kind of the competitiveness of consoles. Like as someone who was once really into this whole game, no pun intended, but then kind of life got too busy and so I wasn't able to invest myself on a deeper level into it. I always thought there was a bit of a disconnect that the Xbox didn't play into the PC side of things more because it is Microsoft. And it seemed like that could be a real differentiator. That could be a real kind of broadening of the brand years and years ago. So obviously, clearly the cloud and what has happened for a number of years in the cloud has enabled a lot of that. So maybe that technology wasn't as easily done before, and now it is, and that's why we're here. But I do know that what I've heard gamers say is that the Xbox brand has kind of lagged behind, that it hasn't delivered on some of the promises and the kind of excitement that players want around their consoles, that some of the exclusive titles haven't been that exciting. that sort of stuff. So, you know, and in prepping for this, and by the way, I also really like the logo. I think it's a nice bit of return to like the 360 era with like a green glowing color palette, kind of glassy, keeps the sphere that you're used to seeing, but now it has this like reflective look and, you know, that along with reaction to the memo and everything, it seems like the social reaction that I've seen is pretty positive on all of this. Having said that, this is just an announcement of intention. And what does it lead to? What is on the other side of this? How long is it going to take before gamers start to see this change in ethos impact the platform as it is and maybe kind of turn the tide a little bit and win people back. It was just earlier this week that they cut the price of Game Pass. That was a piece of news that was pretty goodwill received for players. So is there more of that? Does the sentiment continue to shift? That's what I'm really curious about here. Yeah, I think definitely they've tried. That the one thing I think not just Xbox and Microsoft But for a long time they tried to take advantage of the way that things have been with the fact that you know but naturally consoles tend to be very like siloed ecosystems of certain games right And the exclusive games or exclusive title would be like the cherry on top, yeah. And then there's other ways that they milk money out of us like DLC and all the kind of different practices like pre-send, everything like that. And I feel like after a couple decades maybe now of all this that people have finally kind of showed what matters to them. And I personally feel like that cannot not have contributed to some of the downside of Xbox and some of these practices. Obviously, Sony and PlayStation still do it a little bit. But I think especially nowadays with given, again, as we always talk about the broader socioeconomic like trends, what's going on in the world and the way that people tend are holding on to their money and wanting to get more for that money. Like, again, here in Game Pass, like price going down is absolutely the right direction and maybe does show kind of maybe a different strategy other than trying to say, hey, we want to cook you guys and we want to keep you guys on our platform and we can charge whatever we want for it. They're realizing finally that that didn't quite work and that maybe we would like to be treated a little differently now and maybe try a different strategy. So I'm, but I think that's the thing that with games and gaming and game sales and game consoles, a lot of it is hype. I feel like so many like launches, it's all about hype and customer enthusiasm and customer investment. and I and yes it is just intent and it is weird because especially with like game development cycles they're all very weird because it's like on the course of years not months you know and so it feels like maneuvering things a little bit there's a lot more entropy and maneuvering things around but I feel like this is a good step for them to get us hyped to kind of welcome xbox back into our hearts so we'll see we will see all right well we hope that we have a place for you that you have a place for us in in your hearts because we certainly you have certainly have a place in ours think that's the way I wanted to say it because you, the listener, are who make ZTS possible. So thank you to Jacob H. Loeb, Jim Hart, Mike Akins, and Norm Fazekas. Thank you so much. We celebrate you. We celebrate you. All right. There's plenty more we need to get to today to know all about it. So let's get to the briefs. Well, DeepSeek just launched preview versions of its next flagship model, V4 Flash v4 pro positioning them as the most powerful open source system available v4 uses what deep seek calls a hybrid attention architecture that can activate up to 37 billion out of a trillion trillion with a t parameters per task which essentially cuts down inference costs and stretches context to 1 million tokens so what that means is that users can feed longer documents and even entire code bases into a single prompt deep seek says that capacity for v4 pro is limited for now mostly because or because of compute crunch but expects prices to fall once huawei once the huawei ascend 950 base clusters go live later this year yeah they're really talking up the uh the reasoning capabilities of this also obviously you know improved agentic capabilities which deep seek had already been dabbling in and they all kind of do that. I guess the question remains if this open source model closes as much of the gap as we saw when the deep seeking happened, if you want to call it that. I don't know if anyone called it that, but I like that. We should call it that. I like it. Yeah. The deep seeking AI part two. Yes. And, you know, everybody freaked out when that hit the scene what was what was that even i you know in the in the world of ai everything moves so fast it's hard to even know the time scale but that may have just been a year ago at this point um and so does this new kind of major model you know have as much oomph to it to get the that type of of reaction i'd say initially it's it's a little bit more measured reaction compared to when that came onto the scene, whenever it was a year ago. But I mean, these are pretty powerful models, no doubt about it. Being open, you know, it's good to see that you have a little bit of extra control on these compared to, you know, a lot of the Frontier models that everybody's playing with that you don't get that type of control with, LOD and ChatGPT and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, always very curious to see what they're doing because they do things a little bit differently. Yeah, I'd be really curious. I mean, like, as someone who I know I'm an AI skeptic, but for work, I have to start using it. And I'm not blind to, like, some of the – a lot of the good and, like, the way that it can work. But I actually even have personally run into, like, the context window rot that can happen when you have long sessions. So, I mean, the idea, and that's kind of one of the things is that just like, just from limitations of, of like, you know, resourcing in terms of money, what you can afford, and even the limitations of the model themselves, you know, we're rapidly seeing where the edges are in these kind of things. And it's kind of interesting to see like the infrastructure part of it pay out, like the, like the data center infrastructure compute crunch play out, but then also kind of like what the human uses and what that could be for ill or for good. So, I mean, I'd be really interested, especially appreciating more like it's really weird because a lot of times like listening to this is like a lot of gobbledygook. Even for me, it's like a lot of gobbledygook, like how many millions say what's this and how's it? But I think as we're all getting more like accustomed to it, kind of like, OK, I can kind of see like where they're going with this and maybe what leaps we might take in productivity. I say that with big rabbit ear fingers, an asterisk. But I mean, it's just interesting to see, again, this war. And yeah, like AI development time is like the opposite of geological time, which is like, yeah, on the scale of millions of years, we're like talking like nanoseconds or something at this point where things just seem to change like within an instant and everybody keeps leapfrogging over everybody else. Yeah, it's an interesting time. Well, definitely related to DeepSeek is another bit of news, but not related to the new model anyways. The U.S. is preparing sanctions and legal action over what it calls industrial scale model distillation attacks by Chinese firms, mainly that's what they're calling out here, that clone U.S. frontier systems. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratzios warns in a memo reviewed by the Financial Times that it has information that demonstrates how foreign entities in China and elsewhere are using various known methods to determine and extract proprietary capabilities from competitive models, a.k.a. distillation attacks. The House Select Committee on China wants adversarial distillation, as they call it, formally treated such that the U.S. can prosecute offenders and impose heavy financial penalties when they recognize that. Beijing, on the other side of this, is rejecting the allegations. They're calling it political slander. They're arguing that China supports healthy competition and respects intellectual property. So there you go. Now the U.S. wants to kind of like firm this up and say, hey, you know, things like DeepSeek. I mean, it's related to DeepSeek because this was, you know, to a large degree, what was kind of the fingers that were pointing at DeepSeek back when it did make such a big burst onto the scene that moved things. This is, you know, part of what's behind this announcement right here. This is where my bias comes in a little bit. and not to whataboutism this, but I mean, it's just kind of funny to see again, now we're talking about like proprietary models. I guess at the same time where a lot of like US based companies, of course, are going through litigation and other issues for trading their model on data that isn exactly free and isn exactly theirs And then of course now because now that there so much competition in the space I suppose suppose to be fair the natural reflex would be to kind of protect what the you know intellectual property That term seems to be not very well defined in this day and age of, you know, models. So I don't want to, like, sound too positive or in anyone's favor, but I will say this is very interesting. Blink, blink, blink. Blink, blink, blink. Blink, blink, blink for what that's worth. All right, well, Instagram is running live tests of a new Instance app for iOS and Android in Spain and Italy. So this Instance app focuses on a single tap in the moment capture of photos that are set to disappear in 24 hours and can only be viewed once. The app does not allow for uploads from the camera roll, does not include filters, and only has very basic text tools. Users send shots called Instance to their followers or close friends list, which is consistent between the main Instagram app and Instance. Meta is also testing Instance as an in-app feature inside of Instagram, giving the company two paths to explore whether user behavior is better integrated into the experience or as its own separate app. The goal is to, quote, give people low-pressure ways to connect with friends. We've seen this before, right? Yeah. Snapchat was kind of this. Be real. there was some like third-party app i feel like we talked about last year which was basically this where the i or or maybe we talked about android faithful where the idea is like you get a ping once a day and your job or your your goal is to like just take a picture of wherever you're at that's be real i mean i'm pretty sure that's be real yeah yeah yeah and so it's almost like the anti-sns or anti-social media social media where it's trying to like meet people where maybe they're having social media like fatigue and try to make it more like in the moment more about connection rather than clout chasing and and and xx or insert what maxing so i think it's interesting that instagram is going after it yeah i mean be be real like i can't help but think some of this like ethos while i like the premise i really do like you know you you mentioned social media fatigue and I raised my hand for anyone who wasn't watching the video version because I totally had that. Once upon a time, I posted all my thoughts on Twitter when it was called Twitter and then there was threads and then there was Blue Sky and then there was Macedon and I still kind of tried to do it in all the four places and then I went to business for myself and tried to do all those things and just realized that is a full-time job just doing that and I don't have the time for that. And I just kind of got exhausted by it. So things like Be Real that kind of takes some of that social pressure out and just allow you to just be like, you know what? I ain't got time for that. I'm just going to take this picture and move on. And that's kind of the quirky kind of quality of it. That's great. I love the ethos. At the same time, I wonder how sticky this idea has been with users. Has its day come and gone? Is this a little behind the ball? Does it really matter though if it is because you know if they just integrate it into the app and it's there for the people that want to use it great but i i don't know something tells me that this might get integrated and then be one of those things that like a year later they're like it's instagram or meta is removing the the instance functionality from instagram due to low usage i suppose time will tell i just don't know the appetite for this right now yeah it feels like if anything especially like um zillenny or hold on what's the one after zillenials or gen z like gen z and and stuff if at the most at the most extreme if if we're not all still plugged into social media we're really trying to get away from it as far as possible so even a kind of back to basics back like the old days with oh man path how was it path or just like the old the old ones where the idea yeah it was just I remember Path. Yeah, wasn't Path great? I think so. Yeah. I've used like, at this point, I've probably used like 30 or 40 different social networks over the years. Like I remember Path and I remember liking it, but I couldn't really tell you that much about it. Yeah. I was like, maybe that's the problem. Yeah. Like we just, like, obviously that didn't stick with us. And there's something, unfortunately, about this current, you know, evolution of social media that is sticking for better for worse with the the clout maxing and and influencing that it feels almost to me like a binary like yeah this is too close to before like same with you like if i have fatigue i don't even know if i can manage to post something to my close friends yeah it's like i just want to be yes the the the sequel to be real is just be and that that is an app that you pick it up to use it it's like no and it turns off the display you're forced to like be in the moment okay dude i'm gonna vibe code that app after this i swear i want to take a picture of this no why don't you pay attention to reality instead it shuts off the phone yes yeah yeah powers it off i love it well let's be real for real for a second and if you need a snazzy gift for your co-worker colleague we have tons of ideas for you dailytechnewsshow.com store we got mugs t-shirts mousepads all with our new dts logo if you want to take your like daily like be real picture or an instant fort you can because you know they're great gifts and a great way to support the show so there you go get run and share it with someone else all right now we got some quick headlines that are good to know might make you look smarter in the future smarter than you already are which by the way you are very smart we're just going to tack on like a 0.01 to your smart score All right. Well, OpenAI launched GPT 5.5, touting it as faster and more capable for coding, knowledge, and scientific research work, rolling out to plus pro business and enterprise customers in chat GPT. Co-founder and president Greg Brockman says it brings the company even closer to realizing its super app ambitions. Ooh, super app. We can keep hearing about this. I wonder when we're going to see it, but there you go. Intel's quarterly earnings report showed strong growth. CEO Lit Bhutan said Intel is in a strong position to capture a growing AI inference demand for CPUs in the coming years by leaning into its big wins. Xeon 6 in NVIDIA's DGX Rubin NVL8, its long-term Google IPU plan, and potential upside from Elon Musk's TeraFab chip project. So Intel, thumbs it up. All right. Well, YouTube TV started a limited rollout of its fully customizable multi-view, which lets you select or which lets select subscribers rather build all channels, grids across categories like sports, news, movies and shows. Yeah, so not limited to just like sports, which in my mind is the obvious choice. Because like if you're putting on four movies, like I'm not following the narrative of four movies simultaneously. But for sports, like I could probably do that. But anyways, they're letting you do it on any type of show. It sounds like any type of live content coming through the app. Anthropic expanded Claude's connectors into some lifestyle apps that you might be happy to hear about. Spotify, Instacart, AllTrails, Uber, and Booking.com. a few others for tax task execution inside the chat all right well back to social media demand for social media bans for children under 16 appear to be spreading norway and the philippines are now looking to enact policies that restrict minors from accessing social media to protect against excessive use and mental health impacts yeah following in the uh on the heels of australia in the bans going on there it kind of seems like there's a little bit of a snowball growing right right now in that regard. Meta will replace its Accounts Center with a unified Meta account system in the coming year That to give comprehensive controls for Facebook Instagram WhatsApp Messenger Horizon meta devices from one place uh there you go simplify that's what it's all about well Microsoft now lets enterprise IT admins uninstall the co-pilot app from eligible Windows 11 devices after the April 2026 patch Tuesday thanks to the remove Microsoft Copilot app policy, CSP, and group policy. Okay. And finally, Bloomberg, finally this exists. Bloomberg reports that Tin Can, which is a $100 Wi-Fi landline style phone for kids, complete with the like coily cord that connects to the base and everything, apparently seeing rapid adoption in schools. That's the company's fastest growing customer segment is putting old school landlines back in schools, which actually makes a lot of sense because there's also this growing movement to ban smartphones from schools. You got to have a phone. I don't know. It's, yeah, I guess it makes sense, but I like to see it. Like it's total throwback technology and I love it. Like your, like your, like your snap camera. I just like, your B camera. Oh, there you go. Your B camera, B phone, B tin can. I just like the, I, I'm waiting for like the, the memes of, of people getting wrapped up in the phone court again when they have like a particular like engaging conversation i have done that many times in my in my childhood yeah i remember we had the the phone in our kitchen and the coil was so long that it just like coiled onto the floor but that was necessary because we that phone could reach into like three different rooms and so you know what this is what you did before you had wireless folks most most people listening probably remember those days but oh yeah And then the move where you hold the phone between your head and your shoulder and you just do whatever. Yeah. Just, yeah. Phone neck. Yeah. Except I do remember that, you know, they have the little squishy thing that you connect to it. So it makes that less head tilty. Anyways, we are so off base right now. We end every episode of DT&S with some shared perspectives. And today, Andrew shares his confusing experience with pass keys. All right. Well, Andrew writes, DT&S crew, I should be all on board with pass keys as an old hand at software development. but the rollout is just rough. On multiple sites I've used, they push the passkey option on me at login, which is usually not what I want to be doing then. I want to finish checking out, making my appointment, et cetera. But after having heard you advocate for them for so long, I persisted a few times, only to be met with an add a passkey on a different device QR code. I'm on my phone. I don't want it elsewhere. Then the screenshot tool blanks out the QR code because the window has turned off screenshotting for security reasons, presumably so people don't get social engineered into sending the QR code over text email. So I'm writing this to you, and I decide I need to try this multi-device setup that seems to be requested, and it just works on my iPad. If you use a third-party password system on Android, and you've turned off Google Password Manager autofill in the past because it was annoying, it apparently breaks all possible passkey setup on your phone, turned it back on, and I can make them no problem. over customization strikes again. Maybe this will help someone else who's been unjustly hating on Pasky's. Andrew from Colorado. I mean, it just illustrates that as in a perfect world of Pasky's was the only thing that existed, it would probably be the easiest thing in the world. But because it's undoing decades worth of habit, decades worth of technology that's built into our browser that already handles this in another sort of automatic way, you end up with this complex grid of potential avenues that people can get pulled down. And so there is no single direction that we all head down with passkeys the way I think sometimes it's promised. Yeah. And so it can be really confusing. I will say that definitely got me too, Andrew. And I know I've pretty much been on the passkey wagon since it started, but I also fully admit that there were issues and I definitely had that Google password manager problem. And that was like one of the things I it's better now but I remember when passkey's were first starting to roll out and I and like good like especially on Android to be totally fair Google password manager just wanted to be the one and only password manager on your phone and the way to actually get my I use one password get one password in a place where I could actually get a safe passkey's was mind-numbingly awful and I have to admit if I was really honest like that was the first time I kind of noticed hmm maybe uh maybe this was not rolling out really well and we should reconsider but i mean i i feel you it's it's just they could have just done this in so many ways better and even all the advocates for it like google could have they could have they could have done something a little different just to make us less hostile but here we are yeah i mean at the same time i don't want them to not try and change the password conundrum that we're in yeah so yeah it's a weird position to be in. Maybe, you know, maybe we, let's just jump ahead 10 years from now, speaking of time, which is like a million models updates for DeepSeek. But let's just get through the pain and get to the point at which PassKeys is the default if that ever happens. Well, by then the agents will be logging in for us and handling the login. Yeah, we won't even have to touch it. That's right. It'll be their problem. All right. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have any tips, tricks, or just complaints? We take them all. Get some insight into, if you have insight into a story, we love that too. Share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Yeah, thanks to Andrew for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at Patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you next time. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, and writer Tom Merritt. Host and writer Jason Howell. Co-host Sarah Lane. Co-host Rob Dunwood. Co-host Wen Tway Dao. Producer at large, audio aperture master editor, Naz Keeper of Twin Vaults, Signal Alaska watchman, Anthony Amos Lamos, regional winner of podcast descriptions, nationally ranked in acceptable bitrate decisions, first of his name to actually read the documentation, certified survivor of CES Wi-Fi, holder of the sacred USB-C that definitely works this time, two-time rebuilder of the same network problem, unchallenged arbiter of That's Not Real Markdown, defender against the buffering wheel, patron saint of why is this not loading bearer of the backup plan for the backup plan balancer of luffs and levels tamer of ces signal chains breaker of adobe dependence eventually warden of the 72-hour plan that will absolutely be reviewed monthly guardian of redundant connections because the internet keeps failing him speaker to radios in the void that may or may not be encrypted curator of clickable domains display text only obviously he who demands markdown done right and will notice if you don't. art by Len Peralta, Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Bobby Wagner, and our guests this week were Bodie Grimm, Andy Beach, and Richard Gunther. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.
