Is Obsolescence Planned, or is It Natural? - DTNS 5356

Tom Merritt (0:08)

Welcome to 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. This week, the big questions are, do companies plan obsolescence on purpose? Should you get permission before summarizing a conversation with AI? And is there a need for smart glasses?

Joining us here to draw the top tech news this week, Len Peralta is on board. He'll be illustrating our discussions. But first, today's tech news with me and Sarah Lane.

Sarah Lane (0:41)

Motorola posted a teaser for a new device coming September 22nd. With the line, a new perspective is coming and close up shots of different materials. Now, Android Authority suspects that this is the signature 27 That's the follow up to the Motorola signature that launched back in January. Motorola has also been using that same tagline on sign up pages. And a previous teaser showed up on the US homepage. So a US launch seems possible, but that's not confirmed yet.

Tom Merritt (1:13)

An independent agent verification organization called the Advanced AI Society has announced to join the Linux Foundation as well as the Linux Foundation's decentralized trust. The Society also released version 1 of a working draft of proof of control for public comment.

It hopes to provide an independent way to verify agent controls.

Sarah Lane (1:35)

Waymo is expanding to Singapore with its first Jaguar I-Pace vehicles arriving over the next few months. Those are the ones that you've seen around if they're in your neighborhood. The company plans to manually drive the cars around Singapore in 2027 to map roads, adapt to local weather, road geometry, then offer public rides in 2028 through the Waymo app. If you're keeping score, Waymo's Tokyo rollout still on track with commercial rides expected in 2027

Tom Merritt (2:05)

Anthropic has established a biology research lab in the San Francisco area. I imagine no one will have a problem with this. Anthropic's head of life sciences, Eric Cotterer Abrams told Reuters, we believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work. While the lab is in the early stages of automation, he did say that human oversight remains essential for safety. Anthropic launched Claude Science in June, which among other things may be used for drug discovery, which seems to be what they want this lab to do.

Sarah Lane (2:38)

Reuters sources also say Apple Pay is expected to launch in India next month, starting with Axis Bank credit cards. Apple's been also talking with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, but hasn't finalized commercial terms with them yet, reportedly. This looks like a card-based launched, not unified payments interface, also known as UPI support in India. That's important because UPI accounts account for more than 84 percent of digital payment volume in the country.

Tom Merritt (3:08)

Yeah, they're going to have to get UPI integrated if they want adoption of that, but making progress, I guess.

As part of OpenAI's bug hunting program, a team of security researchers from Hacktron AI used Claude on Opus 5 in the end to gain access to an OpenAI employees ChatGPT account, which would have let them read OpenAI's private software. They didn't do it, but they said, we saw that we could have had access. One flaw they used was in an unpatched version of ImageMagic being used by a third-party message board called Discourse, which they chained to another flaw in OpenAI's own software. They alerted Discourse, Discourse patched its flaw on July 27th, and OpenAI paid the team $6,500 for finding the bug in the OpenAI software.

Sarah Lane (3:55)

What are you going to do with all that money?

Google announced early access to Home MCP, that's home support for the Model Context Protocol, so that third-party AI agents can read and control Google Home devices. That can include device history, cameras, speakers, lights, thermostats, dashboards, but Google is blocking certain sensitive actions like unlocking doors. For now, it's limited to Google Home premium advanced subscribers in the US, limited to English, and setup still sounds like an early developer feature.

Tom Merritt (4:28)

We got a lot of headlines about these internal documents unsealed in the copyright case that the New York Times is a part of against Microsoft and OpenAI about using news publications for training data.

They're very salacious. They show that executives at the companies were aware of copyright issues, which I mean, shocker. But Microsoft Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, apparently was one of the lone voices of disagreement with his colleagues, saying that scraping news data for training was not fair use, while a lot of his colleagues had been saying it was. ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote in an internal message that news publishers would face an existential threat, and another Microsoft document warned of a doom loop if chatbots drove out the news publishers whose content was needed to improve the performance of the models.