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We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and help each other understand. And today, Amazon's got a new voice for shopping, which probably isn't new to you. That's a familiar voice. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. We are both familiar voices, and we're going to start with what you need to know with that big story. Amazon has rebranded its voice assistant in the Amazon shopping service, both in the app and on the web, and added the Amazon website availability to the Echo Show. So you can now shop on the Echo Show, which is great for Amazon. I don't know if you'll like it. there was a voice assistant if you went to the Amazon app or the Amazon website called Rufus that launched back in 2024. Rufus could answer natural language questions like a typical chat bot, but it was limited to helping you find and compare products. It didn't use your personalized shopping or anything, couldn't answer questions about anything else. The newly named Alexa for shopping adds the ability to personalize its answers and answer more general questions. So it can draw on data from your habits on amazon.com, but also from interactions that you have with Echo devices. I didn't figure you would be sure how to help me with that. Thank you, Echo, for launching in the middle of this. If I wasn't wearing headphones, mine would be awake as well. But users ask questions either in the main search bar on Amazon.com or a dedicated chat window. Examples include, what's a good skincare routine? Something you couldn't have asked, Rufus. This one will be like, oh, here's some products that would be good for that. My coffee maker isn't working. Can you help me troubleshoot it? Oh, here's a descaler that might help you, stuff like that. Again, it's not going to do what a chatbot generally would do. but if it's able to solve the problem with, you know, products, it'll be able to help you find them. Something that you would buy on Amazon. Yeah. Right. Uh, another example they gave was I need help with a school science project and it'll be like, oh, well here's, you know, uh, baking soda and paper mache and, and all of that sort of stuff. Um, and it can take, like, if you asked the science project, it asked the echo about the science project, uh, it can take that information and go, oh, I know you were talking to it about there. Uh, it can also generate custom shopping guides if you want it to, schedule recurring orders, which you could already do, but it can do it more easily, I guess, and track prices. You can say like, if it gets below $10, put it in my cart and it'll do that. Also has some agentic features, taking advantage of Amazon's buy for me feature. That's something that already exists where Amazon can go buy things from shops outside of Amazon for you, but you can have the voice assistant do that. Alexa for shopping is available first in the United States. so when the story came across my desk this morning i was kind of like all right i mean so it's not called rufus anymore honestly even though i know we've covered it if you would have said to me like hey sarah quick what's rufus in tech terminology i'd be like i don't know my neighbor's dog like i just it's not something i really think about so this makes a lot of sense I mean, naming wise, just like pick a name, go with it. Yeah. Makes sense. Especially since it's designed to be more all encompassing rather than just price comparisons or, you know, direct shopping stuff. I do think Amazon has its work cut out for that itself a little bit on this because you do have so many more options. And as somebody who uses Amazon a lot, you know, I don't really think I definitely do price comparison stuff, even if I'm not ready to buy something, but it's about buying things, you know, help me with a science fair project. Amazon would not be the first place I would go. No. And maybe that changes. It's one of those things that looks great in a demo kind of thing. Like look what it can do, what people will actually use it for. I will, I will be interested to find out. Rufus never was that useful for me either. And that's probably why they decided to say, Hey, we've got a much more capable model with the plus, much more natural language capable. Let's use that instead. So maybe I'll type some things into the search bar and say like, oh, I'm getting these like extra useful recommendations. The problem is it assumes like I am going to do all my shopping in Amazon, which is the thing Amazon would love, but it's not a thing I do. And so I don't want it to be putting things in my cart. Again, maybe I'm just being an old man about it. I don't mind it going out and shopping for me elsewhere, as long as that's reliable and done well, and I get to approve before it buys it, of course. But that's something I can already do anyway. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm a little skeptical for me what this will be good for, but I can see what it will be good for for other people who are the kind of people who use the button back in the day to refill their laundry detergent and stuff like that. So I'm guessing it'll get good use. gosh the button i had forgotten about that um i also wonder how many folks are pumped about getting the amazon website on an echo show now i've got an echo show in my kitchen and i i use it mostly to just add things to a shopping list that's kind of what i use it for that or at least that's what where i directly interact with it rather than it just being sort of a slideshow of stuff uh you Now, I mean, that's cool, but it's, I don't know. I felt like the Echo Show was always meant to not be a website. One of the problems Amazon has had is figuring out how to monetize the Echo. And one of the things they are hoping people will do is shop on the Echo. So from their perspective, this makes sense. Like, oh, if you're shopping on the Echo, we should be able to show you what you're shopping for. So having the website available there is great. But I'm with you. I think experience has shown that people don't really want to shop on their Echo that much. And certainly taking away one other barrier to doing it might help bring more people to that behavior. But this isn't the killer feature. Yeah, it's like, guess what? We give you a web app. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not a bad thing either. No, no, it's not. I think this is a much more capable account. The show could it supported the web in a very limited way In that Silk browser yeah Yeah So I mean some people are like hey you could already do this Yeah but this is optimized So it should work better Yeah, it's supposed to look better. One other Amazon-related tidbit today from the Financial Times, they had a long interview with Panos Panay, former Microsoft guy who's kind of the head of all the products and voice assistants at Amazon these days, asked him about the idea of Amazon making a phone again. That's something that's been percolating through the rumor mill. Here's what Panay said. It's a little bit of a long quote, but I really want to get all of his words in there because I think it's fascinating. Panay said to the Financial Times, I think your black and white question is, are you going after a phone? A lot of people want me to say no, but a lot of people want me to say yes. I get it. Here's my take. It's not necessarily we're going after a phone. No, there's no clear path that makes sense. You just said it. There's so many new form factors that are important that need to be focused on. It's a tricky question. If I black and white say no, I would say that was accurate. But I also think it's misleading. One of the most incredible parts of the culture here is the willingness to make a big bet when you need to. And the question is, when do you need to? Well, that's the right thing for the customer over time. There's always opportunity. But right now, no. That's some word salad right there. That's a lot of words. That is a delicious salad. It is. I think he's saying no, but he wants to make sure that if they change their mind later, that he wasn't lying when he said no. But right now, no. I feel like they just don't know what they're doing is honestly what they're doing. I mean, to parse this very delicious word salad, it's saying, he is saying, there's no clear path that makes sense. Yeah. Meaning right now, like, don't expect this. Maybe we're working on it. Maybe we're trying things out. But if there's no clear path that makes sense, don't expect this. This is what the internet has done to people. Yes. Part of this is he is trying to do spin, but also he doesn't want to sound like Amazon is incompetent and doesn't have any idea what they're doing. Cause I don't think that's true either. I think they have a lot of things they're looking at. He also doesn't want to shut down a product line and have investors go, well, they're obviously not even interested in this. And that would be a valuable thing. So he wants to make sure like, Hey, when I say no, that would be misleading. But also he's like, we're in the middle of, of researching what the best option is and haven't decided yet. And I'm not going to tell you what those options are because that would be giving away our trade secrets to the competitors. So you get all these people going. So you're saying there's a chance. Basically. Yeah. And I think he is. He is saying, well, there is a chance, just not a very big one. The idea of an Amazon branded phone does not appeal to me, but at the same time, I just bought an Amazon Fire Stick, the new HD Fire Stick. Yeah. And, and which I'm actually going to review on an upcoming episode of live with it. Uh, cause I have thoughts, but it's like, it's not that I don't like Amazon branded things. It's just, you know, entering the phone market is that's a toughie even for Amazon. And it's a commodified market. I think that's the other thing is they're trying to figure out what's the next product that will be a hit with consumers and how do we make that? And how do we put our voice assistant into that? Is it a pendant? Is it a wristband? Is it glasses? Is it a phone? Is it a more phone-like thing? Because he talked in other parts of the interview about like, yeah, you know, one way of doing it is to put your chatbot into a phone and just have you talk to it. And he's like, and a lot of people are investigating that. I don't think that's the path that is right for us. So he's like, okay, we've ruled out that. Well, one path that is right for us here on DTNS is all of you. DTNS is made possible by everyone listening, some of you watching as well. Thanks to ThatCharlieDude, Justin Zellers, Chris Beneteau and Jeremy Matthews. If you can only think about what to go outside. 45% of the Netherlands are ashamed to poop on their work. We say, do your thing. Pages. Comfort begins here. Outstanding digital infrastructure connect you to key markets in real time. Reinesches Revier is ready for growth and ready for you. Find out more at bepartofit.nrw. All right, there's lots more to talk about today. Let's get to the briefs. Let's do it. Meta announced that you can now create incognito conversations with the Meta AI chatbot from within WhatsApp. So these chats aren't saved. This is what the company says. And messages disappear once you close the chat. The session also ends if you close the app or your phone is locked as well. Meta retains no context from that conversation. And the chats use the latest Muse Spark model released last month. Yeah. And last year, Meta detailed how they could do private processing of queries to a model without breaking end-to-end encryption, which I assume is what they're doing here. So wait for confirmation on that. But if that is what they're doing, then these would be private. They wouldn't be able to see them because it'd be end-to-end encrypted. and if you want to ask questions, not because you're hiding something, but you're like, I don't want this to be in a database that could be subpoenaed by a government that is persecuting me, right? Yeah, or just taken out of context. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In the future. And there's always going to be, you know, the folks that say, it's meta and I don't trust it. And if you don't, don't have to use it. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah. And I think a lot of people have made that decision. So, you know, I mean, But I don't know that a huge number of people are using this in WhatsApp, but that's the other thing is meta wants to make it so that you will try it and giving people a secure way to do that, I think is a good option. They're also going to add a way for you to query the chat bot while you're in a conversation without having to open a separate thing or let the conversation see you do it. So if you just want to ask, you know, for a piece of information without inflicting that on the group chat, you'll be able to do that too. So yeah, these are good things. Giving me a private way to ask questions, giving me a way to more conveniently ask questions in a sidebar while I'm doing a group chat. That's all good stuff. Yeah. I mean, the whole AI chatbot revolution that we're in right now. I mean, sometimes I will ask, I don't know, chat GPT is what I use most of the time or Claude. And I'll ask it something just to see what I get back. And I kind of snickered to myself, like, if somebody saw me asking this question, they would really wonder like if I was having a good day or not. Um, but it's not, it's never anything where I'm like, I will be arrested for this. Um, but when you get into, like you said, conversations that could just be sensitive or just like, I just don't want this to be part of anything that is remembered about me in the future. Uh, that's, that's a, for everyone who uses WhatsApp and that's a lot of people, I think that this is, it's a helpful option. Yeah. That's what it is. If you the kind of person who is concerned about your information being unreasonably searched or seized this is a good option for you Big thanks to Motang for noting this next story in the DTNS subreddit And man this is a heck of a story You definitely need to read the Ars Technica full version of this because there's so much more to it that I'm going to tell you. But let me whet your appetite with the story of the brothers Munib and Sohaib Akhtar, who, after serving a few years in jail for wire fraud, which isn't even part of this story, worked their way back into positions at a software company called Opexis, which had 45 U.S. federal government clients. And while working there, they used that access to collect 5,400 usernames and passwords and build a Python script that would go out on the public internet and try them out. If somebody was reusing their username from a government website with, say, a hotel or an airline or DocuSign, they got access. One of the brothers even used that access to book some airline travel with someone else's miles. Now, the brothers were eventually, as you might have guessed, discovered and fired. That happened on February 18th, 2025. The team's meeting in which they got fired ended at 4.50 p.m. While Sohaib's company account was terminated at that point, Muneeb's was not. That was the biggest mistake that company ever made. By 4.56 PM, he had access to US government database maintained by the company that he had just been fired from and, and I quote, issued commands to prevent other users from connecting or making changes to the database and then issued a command to delete the database. Gosh, that's an important six minutes. Yeah. Within an hour, because they still hadn't deleted his access, within an hour, he had deleted 96 databases with U.S. government information. And I think more importantly, because those databases could be recovered from backups, downloaded 1,800 files from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as federal tax info on 450 people. This in addition to the names and passwords that they had already gathered. They finished up by wiping out logs to cover their tracks and reinstalling the operating systems on their corporate laptops so there was no evidence. However, the feds raided them three weeks later on March 12th. And after a nine-month investigation, they were arrested on December 3rd. Muneeb signed a plea deal admitting guilt on April 15th. So he's still in custody and he's going to serve time, but he has a plea deal. So Haib went to trial and lost on May 7th. He'll be sentenced in September. Both brothers now contesting the trial and the plea deal, by the way, from the jail cells. But what a story. How do you contest your own plea deal? You say, I was rushed into it. My lawyer did it and he made me do it and I didn't agree. I'm going to represent myself now, which is always a bad thing, but that's apparently what Muneeb wants to do. So yeah. There's also, they had guns in their apartment. And so that's part of the charges is like they had firearms that they didn't have a license for. The whole thing is crazy. But the idea that there are people inside the company taking usernames and passwords, another really good reminder, don't reuse usernames and passwords. Have a different password for every site. Well, and for, uh, Opexis, uh, the company that, uh, hired the brothers after they had already served time. Listen, serving time in jail does not mean that you can't be a great worker in the future, but background check probably didn't happen. They did. No, they did do a background check. This did not show up on it. And they said, we should have done a more thorough background check. Yeah. That seems like the number one thing that should show up on a background check. Like, what else are you looking for if it isn't this? These two guys are adept at this sort of thing, so they may have figured out how to make it not show up, and the typical background check was enough. Clearly, it wasn't enough in this case. That is quite a story, and you've only heard the half of it. Yeah, go read the full story if you're interested. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Anthropic has received investment offers in recent months that value it at more than $900 billion. dollars, double its last valuation, and if it was formalized, would actually make it more valuable than OpenAI. They're kind of neck and neck these days, but that would mean something. Anthropics revenue growth has also been 80-fold this year, well ahead of the planned 10-fold growth, and putting it on track for a run rate of $15 billion by the end of next month, so end of June, up from a $9 billion run rate back in 2025. Seems like just yesterday. A finance startup, Ramp, says more of its customers now use Anthropic models rather than OpenAI models for the first time. OpenAI points out that Ramp's numbers don't include large enterprise customers. OpenAI says we still have those. Yeah, we could go down a whole rabbit hole of like, well, is OpenAI or Anthropic actually leading? My takeaway is, ooh, competition. We have good competition where these companies are arguing about like, well, that number isn't worth it because we do this other thing. And that tells me we have healthy competition. Also, money. There's been a big question among a lot of people of whether these companies were actually going to bring in revenue and whether that revenue would continue to grow. And this shows that for Anthropic, it absolutely is. They have customers and those customers are paying in large numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I guess Anthropic and OpenAI, to me, it's like both of the models I use fairly often for this or that. I don't see – some people say, oh, I'm clawed all the way or Chad GPT. I don't know if I really have big thoughts. No brand loyalty yet? Not a lot of brand loyalty. That probably comes in time just because we're still in the early days of this. But yeah, this whole thing with Anthropik sort of, you know, in the race kind of come from behind out of nowhere did happen really quickly. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't out of nowhere, nowhere. It's just they suddenly got in a fight with the U.S. government, which is a great way to excite half the country of the United States to want to cheer for. Yeah. What's this Anthropik all about? Yeah, yeah. Let's download some things. It's far from over, like you said. Yeah. Well, if you want to hear product reviews, sometimes we talk about LLMs, but we talk about all sorts of stuff, products, services, anything. If you want to hear reviews from us, people who are actually living with this stuff, using it every day, making notes, saying what's good, what's bad, what's ugly, then you have to join us for Live With It. this week. This is a can't miss, everybody, because Rob Dunwood is telling us about his experiment in the world of Apple using the new MacBook Neo. Rob, admittedly, not the biggest Apple head at all. So can it replace any of his Windows or Android use cases, you might be asking? You can find out at our new YouTube channel. That's youtube.com slash at live with it show. We'll be right back. Comfort begins here Germany most exciting investment hub where global leaders like Microsoft are investing billions Home to Europe fastest supercomputer the region offers strong R partnerships So let its outstanding digital infrastructure connect you to key markets in real time. Rheinisches Revier is ready for growth and ready for you. Find out more at bepartofit.nrw. All right, let's get to the quick headlines. These are those little tidbits that are good to know. A ransomware operator claims to have accessed 8 terabytes of data and 11 million documents from Foxconn's North American operations, including confidential info from clients like Apple, Intel, Google, NVIDIA, and AMD. Now, Foxconn was able to recover from the lockout because the attackers didn't do the lockout right. It was part of the issue. But if they have this data, we're going to see some interesting leaks coming out of that. Bloomberg reports on the restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz affecting chip makers now. Now, obviously, electronics plants need oil and liquefied natural gas. TSMC in particular needs liquefied natural gas. So that's probably not the surprising part of this. But the longer this goes on, the more it affects supplies of oil derivatives, things like helium, bromine and sulfur, as well as something that they call thinners, which are solvents used in printing circuits. In fact, Bloomberg thinks the thinners might be the most important part of this story. Most companies have months worth of inventory, but of course, the longer it goes on, the more they have to dig into that backup inventory. However, a lot of mainland Chinese companies are starting to run low. So that's your first warning sign. And even TSMC in Taiwan is saying, you know, we are concerned at this point. The conflict has also halted work on undersea cables because of the presence of unexploded missiles and mines, including one big cable that was connecting Europe through the Persian Gulf. So the longer this continues to be shut down, the more effects it's going to have. And this is how it's affecting the technology sector. But what about the Strait of Vermouth? That's what everyone's drinking as they wait for the Strait of Hormuz to open up. This is always a good reminder to me that even in our extremely modern worlds where goods and services can travel all sorts of different ways, something like this is still so important that it can just back up the entire industry. Yeah. When you rely on something to always be open and you don't have another way of getting stuff through it, you're stuck. Yeah. Right. Even if there's another option, it's like it doesn't happen tomorrow. Right. Sony launched its flagship Xperia 1 Mark 8 with an image sensor four times larger than in the previous model. Sells for 1,499 euros, not 4,000, or 1,399 pounds with pre-orders available now, shipping in June for Europe. No U.S. plans though. Yesterday we talked about the new Google Books and Jason at the time said that Google was committed to supporting Chrome OS. We're hearing more about that today. And in addition to that support, Google told 9to5Google that some Chromebooks will be eligible to update to the Google Book Android-based OS, which they're not yet calling aluminum, but we all think it's probably aluminum. More details to come on that upgrade path closer to autumn. Canon announced the new EOS R6V full-frame mirrorless video camera that can shoot up to 7K raw video, available in late June, starting at $2,499. Very creator-focused in all of the talk around that. Lenovo announced new AMD and Intel-based X13 and L-series laptops, if you're in the market for those kinds of enterprise-level laptops, as well as new ThinkPad, I'm sorry, not ThinkPad, ThinkStation P4 desktops. Those run AMD Ryzen Pro 9000 series processors and NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition series GPUs. ThinkStation, that's a clever name. I like that. Yeah, what do you want? I want a ThinkStation. Yeah, put it on my desk. PC Gamer notes that Valve's new Steam controller has a built-in feature that plays the Wilhelm scream if suddenly dropped. But you have to drop it from a pretty high height and it doesn't do it every time. So don't break your controller trying to make it scream. Just one of those Easter eggs. You'll find it if you do. And Microsoft's data center agreement with Kenya, thanks to Motang for posting this in the subreddit, by the way, has been delayed over guarantees of payments to build the electricity capacity needed to power the operation. The agreement had called for the government to pay for part of the building of $1 billion worth of geothermal energy, a geothermal plant that was going to provide 100 megawatts of power at the start and up to a gigawatt of power for the data center over time. And that is, as the president of Kenya noted, about the equivalent of half of Kenya's current capacity. So they need to build the plant for the data center to even happen because they don't have the power for it yet. Well, we like to end every episode here on DTNS with some shared perspectives. And today, Seth has some thoughts on who the new remarkable paper pure tablet is for. Yeah, we talked about this last week. And we were wondering like, well, if you've got the two, do you need the pure? Seth wrote, hey, Tom and crew, I'm an RM2 user and love, love, love it. I do wish it would have a backlight and color is a plus, but not needed. The new Remarkable Paper Pure, besides having a really dumb name, isn't that much of an upgrade from the RM2. I mean, more battery life? Sure. I guess three plus weeks isn't enough for people, lol. I find that Remarkable makes a really good product, but this new model is not for the existing RM2 owners. It's not enough of an upgrade. It's for the new Remarkable users looking to get into the ecosystem. Also, one more complaint. Why are the pens so expensive? To get one with an eraser is so much more than one without. I just use a third-party one off Amazon and it works great for 50 bucks. Yeah. I haven't looked at the pen with the eraser, which I have on my RM2, which is very clutch. I mean, you could survive without the eraser, but it really is nice. But yeah, I mean, last I checked, it was like $120,000. Yeah. And you can get the exact same thing for less than half of that price and get the third-party one. Thanks, Seth. Okay. Well, yeah. For anybody getting into the ecosystem, just take heed. You have some options. What are you thinking about? Anything has struck a chord with you that we talked about today? If you have insight into a story that you've been looking at that you would like us to discuss, share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. And big thanks to Seth for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. We exist on the value for value model. If you get value out of the show, give a little value back for that at patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Welcome to Rheinisches Revere, Germany's most exciting investment hub, where global leaders like Microsoft are investing billions. Home to Europe's fastest supercomputer, the region offers strong R&D partnerships. So let its outstanding digital infrastructure connect you to key markets in real time. Rheinisches Revere is ready for growth and ready for you. Find out more at bepartofit.nrw.
