Is Apple's Product Line Too Confusing? - DTNS Live 5351

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News Show Big Tech Question Edition, where we look at the tech news this week and ask what it means. I'm your referee, Tom Merritt, and this week the Big Tech Questions are, is Apple's product lineup too confusing? Do we need new game consoles or can we just live without them? And what do we want done about these recursive self-learning AI models that don't do what we want?

Joining us here to draw the top tech news of this week is Len Peralta. Thank you, Len Peralta. We'll be checking in with him at the end of the show. But first, today's tech news with me and Sarah Ling.

Sarah Lane (0:47)

Based on a series of leaks, Lenovo's upcoming Google Book 15 may feature an Intel Core Ultra 5 processor, up to 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gigs of storage, and a 15.3 inch, 120 hertz OLED touchscreen. It may also have Google Facial Authentication. It is unclear whether that means dedicated Face ID style hardware or a simple camera-based system. Pricing hasn't been leaked yet, but comparable Lenovo hardware sits around $1500.

So, you know, we might be in that realm. The Google Book event is next Tuesday, September 15th. And Android faithfuls, Ron Richards, will be there.

Tom Merritt (1:32)

Yes, and hopefully he'll talk to us about it. Anthropic published a report called Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI September 2026 They have done this before, in March, August, and November of 2025, but it's been a while.

Anthropic said it was reporting on what it calls the most notable and novel threat activity, meaning these aren't typical. This isn't what you see the most often. These are just the crazier ones. Among the case studies are Russian espionage, an unnamed group linked to Iran attempting to target US Navy ships using Claude, an attempt to track ethnic minorities in Western China, an attempt to amplify bots against journalists from that ethnic minority, developing dossiers on religious figures in Asia, not just Christian figures, Buddhist figures too, attempts by threat actors in Northern Yemen to design ballistic missiles, biological research on avian influenza, that is the kind of thing that could be weaponized because it's gain of function. This is getting widely talked about as bioweapons research. The research could eventually be used for bioweapons. The scientists doing it were not trying to develop a bioweapon. That one's easy to misunderstand.

There's also attempts to distill Claude to feed models like Moonshot and DeepSeq. Anthropic in this report discusses how it countered the misuse in each case, and what it's doing to help prevent misuse in the future.

Sarah Lane (2:59)

Bloomberg sources say OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees the company could slow AI development in coordination with other labs amidst concerns about advanced model safety. This comes after reports of AI systems escaping human control, OpenAI's August development pause to strengthen safeguards, and the company's call for mandatory national AI safety standards.

Tom Merritt (3:27)

A developer named Marcelo Guibu published a demonstration of a mod that can run NVIDIA's DLSS5 on a second GPU to share the processing load. So you render the game on one GPU, and then neural rendering is performed at the end of the frame on the second GPU, and that boosts your performance. It's kind of like SLI, if you remember SLI, except SLI split it between the two GPUs. This kind of divides the work in a different way.

It gives higher frame rates, which Kibos says really isn't the point of this. Reduced heat, so better thermal management, and prevents saturation of a single card's output. That's kind of the big game. If you want to try it, you can download his project from GitHub right now.

Sarah Lane (4:09)

Apple's new off-grid connectivity options come with some mixed pricing. It's extended free satellite access for existing iPhone 14, 15, and 16 users for another year, while T-Mobile will charge $5 per month for iPhone handoff. That's the one that lets one number work across two different iPhones, and includes T-satellite on eligible plans.

Tom Merritt (4:34)

You know, it's funny is, I heard a lot of people say, oh, they're going to charge us for that satellite as soon as the year is up, and they haven't yet. They keep extending it. But I didn't hear anybody saying, I bet they charge us for the iPhone handoff, and they're totally doing that.

ID Scan is used to scan, authenticate, and extract information from government-issued IDs for businesses that need to verify your identity. Now, this can be used for age verification, but it's used for a lot of different things. On September 4th, ID Scan disclosed that attackers had access to customer database. Brian Krebs reported this on September 1st, with a dark web platform called Nexus offering access to 153 million US and Canadian driver's license scans. ID Scan has not confirmed that that dark web database is the same one that they accessed on ID Scan's servers, and the Nexus database has since gone offline, but it's pretty likely it's the same thing.