Tech News Weekly 359 Transcript

Emilyforlini23@gmail.com

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Emily Forlini is here and we kick off the show with an interesting story of the week. One man asked am I the problem in my relationship where my girlfriend uses chat GPT to win every argument? Then an important but unfortunate story about the effects of an AI chatbot on one team and a conversation about using generative AI to replace conversation and interaction with society. Afterwards, nick Steele, the staff product manager of 1Password and the FIDO Alliance co-chair, and David Turner, senior technical director of standards development for the FIDO Alliance, join me to talk about PassKeys portability. It's a great and nerdy conversation you're going to love. Before we round things out with Dan Moren of Six Colors, who joins us to talk about what we can expect in an upcoming version of iOS 18 and Apple's new-new Apple intelligence tools. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

0:01:21 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly episode 359, with Emily Forlini and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, October 24th 2024. FIDO Alliance Explains Passkey's Portability. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly. The show every week where we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined on this very episode by my wonderful co-host. It's Emily Forlini. Welcome to the show, Emily.

0:01:57 - Emily Forlini
Thank you.

0:02:04 - Mikah Sargent
So good to have you here with us this week. And you know, for folks who are tuning in for the first time a little something, something about how the show works. We kick off the show with our stories of the week. These are stories that we've seen or written in some cases, uh, that we think are pretty cool or are important to be talking about, and so we take that time to kind of break them down, discuss them, and it kicks off, I think, on a nice light note to a certain extent, although this can get pretty serious. Emily, why don't you tell us about your story of the week?

0:02:34 - Emily Forlini
All right. So I have a story that I wrote about for PCMag. I'm a staff writer at PCMag and I write about AI and this is one of my favorite AI topics because it's just so much to debate and discuss. So this is about a guy who came and posted on Reddit. There's a Reddit subreddit called Am I the A**hole, so it's kind of like an advice giving chat, and he went on there and I will read a little bit of his post. I'll just take a minute. So he's 25. His girlfriend is 28. They've been dating for eight months.

He says each time we argue, my girlfriend will go away and discuss the argument with chat GPT, even doing so in the same room. Sometimes she then comes back with a quote, well-constructed argument, breaking down everything I said or did I've explained to her. I don't like her doing that, as I feel like I am being ambushed by the thoughts and opinions from a robot. He goes on to say when he tells her he doesn't like this, she responds with well, ChatGPT says you're insecure. Or ChatGPT says you don't have the emotional bandwidth. And he closes with saying one of his biggest issues is he worries that she's formulating the prompts to chat GPT in a way that turns it against him and does not present both sides of the issue. Finally, he says am I the for asking her to stop using chat GPT in this context?

0:03:57 - Mikah Sargent
This is so sad because there's the part of it where the part when he says I'm worried that she's formulating it in such a way that I don't have you know, that my opinion is not heard, or whatever. That is so much like if your significant other goes and talks to a friend or an in-law, for God's sake, and you are worried that the way that they're presenting it is different. The thought, see and there's that aspect of it of these systems are just that systems. They're not human beings, and so they don't really care what you feel or how you feel, or really judge you at all. And in that sense it's like it wouldn't matter if she perfectly said exactly your point of view and then hers, if she formulates the prompt in a way that says look, he's right, but I need to be right. So help me figure out how to say it so that I'm right.

0:04:58 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, exactly, and it's also funny to use your example, like if someone goes to their friends or family, it's almost like they're telling their side of the story, like're they're prompt, like they're already turning people against the partner. Um, there's just interesting, like why is this different than that? Or why is this different than just googling relationship advice? And I think the answer is that she's putting in exactly what happened in the argument. Or she's saying you know, I went out with my friends, I didn't tell him when I was coming back and he got upset, and so you can kind of do this more interactive talk with the chat bot and get more into these details, versus just a Google search, which maybe would be more generic relationship advice. So maybe he feels even more attacked and she's using it as ammo basically against him. And I don't know where do you come down, do you think? Do you think she's the or he is?

I don't know if we can say that on this show, so maybe I'll stop saying that I know we've said it a lot now, sorry.

0:05:57 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's okay. I think that the A word on its own is okay, but I can't remember if when it's paired with the with hole, that that's what makes it a beeper, but I think we'll just bleep it out just to be safe. So here's the thing. When you first shared this with me, I thought that is diabolical. In fact, that's what I said.

But I really do think that there is this has so many issues outside of just using ChatGPT, right, because there are a couple of things here you have to ask yourself has, in the past, the gentleman who's written this post made her feel like she wasn't being heard, or that, even whenever she was arguing, perfectly and wonderfully that he somehow still came out, quote unquote winning the argument, right? And so why did she decide to turn to chat GPT in this situation? And then you have the situation or the issue of like this isn't a relationship disagreement at this point, it is trying to argue for winning the argument, and if there's one thing I've learned from every single Instagram video that talks about relationships because that seems to be where all of the advice exists is on Instagram it's that you don't argue to win. You argue to better understand one another and come to a resolution, and in that case, I do think that makes her the a-hole, specifically in if we look at this in a vacuum, because here we go again, is he prompting us with the, the issue from his side, without providing the clear details? You know what I mean? He could be, overall, the a-hole who has pushed her to a place where she feels like the only way I could win an argument again, win an argument which should not be the goal, is to go here At the same time.

I don't think that it's a terrible idea to get some advice if it's needed and to help kind of, especially when people feel like what they're trying to say and what they're saying are two very different things and they kind of have themselves going. Why is it that every time I say this and it's well-meaning in my head the person takes it and they just don't get it? I think looking for more understanding of the significant other is a really admirable way to use the system. But yeah, there's also something to be said. In fact, this is one of the first times where I'm like oh, I want to pull up a comment that somebody said in the Discord because they said the part about her doing it in front of him is passive, aggressive, and I absolutely agree. That does make it feel a little bit like okay, this isn't you and the person listening to one another. This is yeah. What are your thoughts, though?

Because I don't want to make you feel a type of way if you have used ChatGPT in an argument?

0:09:17 - Emily Forlini
No, I think it's inappropriate to do that and I agree with you, it can be helpful. Chat, chat GPT could help formulate ways to better express yourself or encourage you to, you know, express your needs, kind of like hey, I didn't like that, you did that it would, I would appreciate. You know, just like softening and language, it could help tell people and give some communication skills. There are some things that are basics, basics of relationships, that we forget, and maybe chat GPT could help. But at the same time, like what she's doing isn't working and I can put myself in her shoes and if my partner was doing that to me, I would be very annoyed and I think that they're clearly struggling. But just the way that she's doing this is not helping them to fight better, she's pissing him off.

So so she might be getting good information, but there's a difference between wielding it like an axe and like sitting down at breakfast the morning next morning and being like, hey, I thought about it, I looked at this online. This is resonating with me.

I there you go we could discuss it, and I just want to know if you think there's any validity to it, like that's. That's a totally different thing than like coming leaving the room and coming back with like a new crazy argument and being like well, chat GPT said this, which is just super annoying, right.

0:10:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly, because that's again, that's not me. That's not me saying this is how I feel. That's well, I have consulted a third party in this situation and this is what they have to say. And then how do you even argue? Because then I'm arguing with this machine that is always going to be able to give the answer that it is asked to give. So you could have a perfect, perfect, perfect argument and I could ask ChatGPT give me five ways that I can defeat this argument, and it's probably going to come up with those.

And so my bigger concern is what happens when now both people are using the system and then no one's actually talking to each other. This is just. This is not the way it should go. Actually talking to each other, this is just. This is not the way it should go.

And I, honestly, I've only ever thought it's kind of interesting, given how much I've seen what I'm about to say that I never had considered this aspect of it, because what I have seen chat GPT used for is people who are are using like online apps to find someone to date, and when they are struggling to figure out what they want to say to the person, they'll use some sort of AI to help come up with some responses or at least give them ideas of what they could possibly say.

And so that seems more even though there's you know there's some negativity there that seems more like a positive use of it, and so I never really considered oh, what about when you're in an argument and you're trying to because people do use this if they, for example, let's say they have a boss who is, I don't know, like narcissistic and is trying to like? Every time you talk to them they say no, let's just say that. And so they talk to ChatGPT and say I have a narcissistic boss who almost always says no to anything that I ask. But I really need a raise. What are some ways that I can stroke the narcissistic ego and circumvent the no? And then it can come up with a bunch of ideas to help you, and that seems like a very positive manipulation. So I don't know it could be helpful.

0:13:03 - Emily Forlini
I like that. I I almost disagree with. I would not be happy if someone I was talking to on a dating app was using chat GPT to talk to me, because I don't want to get the impression that some guy is like super witty, like always making jokes, always on it, and then I get to the coffee shop or the bar or whatever for a drink and he's completely flat and has no idea what to say. I feel like that's a little deceptive. In this case, I like it maybe a little more because it's just advice and you can do with it what you will.

0:13:34 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I agree, some advice is not a bad idea, but, yeah, I don't think I recommend this overall. That's how I feel about it and I have a feeling, you know, this is going to be an interesting thing for therapists now who are going. Oh, it's another case of using AI to try to win arguments. Oof, we've got a lot that we need to break down here.

0:13:59 - Emily Forlini
Exactly. I mean, of course, compared to therapy, it's free, or it appears free. They're collecting your data. You don't have to make an, an appointment. Finding a therapist can just take so much time and effort, so it's tempting. It's tempting, um, but it's just such a weird moment in society where, like people are are going in the closet and asking chat, gpt and like coming back out with a new weapon yeah, just oh.

While I was using the restroom, I thought about this smoking gun yes, well, maybe go ahead well, I think they'll probably break up yeah I mean if she's doing this and he's turning to reddit, I think they're both lost my boyfriend posted our secret details on Reddit and I need to know what I should say back.

0:14:52 - Mikah Sargent
Right Well you've been sharing all those details with me.

0:14:54 - Emily Forlini
Chatgpt Right, I mean also my boyfriend posted it on Reddit and someone made an article out of it. It's just escalating. This is-.

0:15:04 - Mikah Sargent
And now it's on a podcast.

0:15:06 - Emily Forlini
Now it's on a podcast. Oh no, whoever you are out there, if you're listening, come join us, let's talk.

0:15:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, let's talk. Yeah, reach out. I'd love to hear more. All right, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with my story of the week far more somber, but also about AI.

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All right, we are back from the break. I am joined by Emily Forlini of PCMag and we are talking about our stories of the week. My story of the week comes from the New York Times and it is a really sad story, but it's a story that has kind of a bigger conversation that needs to take place or that is taking place. There was a 14-year-old Florida boy who was using Character.ai, a service that lets you create and also sort of tap into different bots that exist, different generative AI bots that exist, and you are able to communicate with them in a chat format. So, for example, you might have a bot that's called Therapist and you could pop in. You might have a bot that's called therapist and you could pop in and it's been, hopefully and in theory, trained with uh cognitive, uh therapy, and uh it is cognitive behavioral therapy is the word I was looking for. Uh, and it is going to provide responses based on what you send to it about what you are feeling. And so, when it comes to this piece, this is talking about an individual who was talking to a chatbot that was named after a character from Game of Thrones and, over a period of many, many, many months, communicating with this bot and, slowly but surely, kind of according to family and friends stepping away from his friends, away from his family, getting home from school, heading to his room talking to this bot, to his room, talking to this bot, the 14-year-old ninth grader, after a period of time of communicating with his bot, ended up taking his own life. And the conversation here is about is about, well, one instance of character, AI in particular. How responsible is this company for what has happened? How responsible are parents for what has happened? The overall argument about how teens are becoming more anxious with the stuff that they have access to online and whether or not social media has an impact on that. But now we also have AI systems that allow you, in some ways, to get what you would get from socialization without necessarily being part of society.

I wanted to kind of talk about this in a broader sense, of course, because there have been, for a long time, little chatbots. Even before this generative AI craze, there were chatbots that you could talk to, that some were somewhat okay, some were not okay in terms of their power and their ability to respond with something that seemed like it was actually responding to what you were saying, and so this technology, in some forms, has existed for a long time. But I think what makes it unique is truly the uniqueness that is at play here and how it does end up feeling like you're talking to a person. Had talked about a different app that also featured some of this functionality, where you could create little characters and then they worked in like a social media format where they would post, but then you could also talk to them in direct messages and you could actually have multiple bots, kind of all together in a group chat. And I'm not going to lie, I found it compelling when I was testing it out and I thought, oh wow, I could see how this could be something that somebody gets drawn into.

It's important to note that in this instance, the teen was diagnosed with mild Asperger's syndrome as a child, did not have behavioral or mental health problems. Serious behavioral or mental health problems, was diagnosed with anxiety and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. So there were some other issues that were potentially exacerbated by character AI. We've looked in the past at what responsibility a social network has for different things, and that is something that's still being figured out Now we have to look at generative AI systems and the companies behind them and look at what they, what their responsibility is and you, Emily, as someone who covers AI, what their responsibility is, and you, Emily, as someone who covers AI. I wanted to just kind of check in with you about, well A, your overall thoughts on this, but also kind of how you maybe see the legalities playing out in any way and what AI companies are kind of doing when it comes to situations like this.

0:23:56 - Emily Forlini
Yeah, this was really devastating and I'm sure the parents had no idea that the technology could be so good that their teen was doing this. Technology could be so good that their team was doing this. I think another important detail is that Daenerys Targaryen was the character that they were kind of acting like they were in love or in some kind of relationship and he proposed to her that he was going to do this to himself and one of her responses basically was implying let's, we'll do it together, we'll go away together. So there's an element of the system encouraging him that's really concerning and I don't know that we know the full legalities of that. But I will say, a week before this came out, I interviewed my first time talking to a CEO of a very similar company and I asked him you know, how do you know that these chats aren't going off the rails?

How do you know that an AI bot or an AI bot friend group are not encouraging a disturbed young boy to carry out a mass shooting? Very real situations could encourage someone in a bad direction and he did not have any systematic way of flagging chats that are very obviously problematic. He was like oh well, I talk to users and users tell me that their chats are, you know, helping them out of depression, that they're encouraging them to go to therapy, that they are talking to them about niche interests, like underground ukuleles. They're talking to them about random stuff that they can't find a human to talk to about, and so he was really highlighting the pros, but I thought it was very telling he did not have a systematic way to basically a defect detection system to flag these scenarios and stop them.

And there's also an issue here of teens and like how old should you be to be able to interact with these systems? And even if a system says, yeah, you can't make a characterai account until you're 18. I mean, they have absolutely no way of verifying that. So now we have and same for Instagram, facebook, whatever. That's an ongoing issue on the internet. So it's just top to bottom, I think, a disturbing trend in society that we need to deal with. We see Meta has AI characters that are fake. Basically, it's just something popping up all over the place, and I think this is a very worthy lawsuit. I don't think we know where it will go, but I think it's very good. They filed it and it raises a lot of questions that need to be answered because, from what I'm hearing, there's pretty much nothing in place that could prevent this from happening again. And no, nobody wants this in their life. This is just a terrible thing.

0:26:41 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, and that's the thing is like I feel for I feel for the parents or parent here in the situation in this instance, that you don't sometimes you don't you think that everything's okay until it's not right and what you're talking about, where these are kind of systems that are just running rampant. To a certain extent, I mean it's interesting, I don't want you, because actually the teen said I'm thinking about killing myself and the chatbot responds to say why in the world would you do that? You know, very angry, very upset, but you can't count on it always doing that. You do that. You know very angry, very upset, but you can't count on it always doing that. And you can't count on it picking up on the subtleties where you know me reading the message. That was the last message and I'm not going to because it's something that I want people to have the choice to read or not read. The last message, to me as a human being, has a lot more subtext than this chatbot is able to pick up on, and so the chatbot becomes very encouraging of what the teen is saying to the chatbot.

And then the child you scary, just plain scary, and as a person who runs a company, I think that it should be scary to them, not this? Oh well, I hear from my users and you know they're doing this and they're doing that. No, you should be petrified that something like this would happen for the purpose of making sure there are as many guard rails in place as there possibly can be. The idea that you can just kind of wash your hands of it and say, oh, people will do what they do with it is not acceptable. And what becomes clear to me and has always, you know, has been clear to many people for sure is that it takes object lessons for humans to change things, and it's so frustrating that that's the case and it's unfortunate that things like this happen.

When they do, it is sometimes the thing that makes the difference in terms of making character AI. We hope, petrified, that something like this could happen again so that this they do something to make these systems more responsible. It should not take this for them to make changes, but it does, unfortunately, um, and so that that is what we're left with is the hope that something as awful as this does make a change for these companies. And, you know, in some cases it doesn't, and that's even more frustrating when you're just kind of looking at it and you're going this could be better, this could be fixed. There are so many ways to look at this and they're not doing anything, and so, in that way, I'm glad that the New York Times has reported on this, because it'll get in front of more people, more people's eyes.

0:30:34 - Emily Forlini
I agree.

0:30:37 - Mikah Sargent
We are at the end of our conversation for this week. Of course folks can head over to PCMag to check out the wonderful work that you do. Is there anywhere? They can go to follow you online to keep up to date with what you've got going on.

0:30:53 - Emily Forlini
Yes, you can follow me on Twitter. You can follow me on TikTok it's at Emily Forlini. On both. You can just read my stuff on PCMag. You don't have to follow me, just check it out. Send me an email. I'd be happy to hear from you.

0:31:07 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you so much, Emily. We appreciate it All right, thank you. See you again soon. All right, we're going to take another quick break before we come back with a really exciting conversation about Passkey's portability from the folks who are making it possible.

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All right, we are back from the break and I am very excited for the next conversation we're about to have. I do have a little disclosure. 1password is a sponsor of the network. However, our sales team and our editorial team are two separate instances of the company and my decision to have someone from 1Password on the show today was not influenced by the fact that 1Password is a sponsor on the network. Joining us today to talk about Passkey's portability well, credential portability two individuals involved with the FIDO Alliance. We have Nick Steele, staff product manager of 1Password, as well as FIDO Alliance co-chair, and David Turner, senior technical director of standards development at the FIDO Alliance. Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks, Mikah.

0:33:42 - Nick Steele
Yeah, thanks for having us.

0:33:44 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, great to have you here. So I'm going to kind of ask a question and I'll let you both answer it as you see fit and we'll just keep doing that, so that way we avoid kind of crosstalk. So we'll kick it off. I was hoping that in talking about this credential portability, we can talk about breaking down the kind of key problem that these new specifications are trying to solve why has credential migration between providers historically been such a challenge?

0:34:12 - Nick Steele
Yeah, oh yeah. No, David, take it away.

0:34:15 - David Turner
Oh well, the problem is that everybody keeps it in their own ecosystem and while that works really great within the ecosystem, there are a lot of challenges when you try to shift ecosystems. If you want to go, say, between Apple and Android, or even if you have reason to move between different PASC providers, there are barriers to doing that and the solutions that are out there tend to be very insecure. You basically save things to text files to your local machine, and that's a really bad thing to do with important credentials, and on mobile devices there's largely no way to do that at all. So it's kind of solving two parts of the problem making the capabilities more broadly available to the industry and, at the same time, making it a very secure way to exchange the data.

0:35:08 - Nick Steele
Yeah, right now the kind of default across the industry is to export a CSV. It's unencrypted, unformatted. It's generally a pain in the butt, not just for users but for companies in the credential management space, to marshal and format these files and sometimes that data gets lost. So there's no guarantees right now that your credentials, when they move from A to B, when you get a new phone and potentially a new credential manager say, you're moving from an iPhone to an Android device that those credentials are going to all be able to be imported or exported properly. Additionally, credential exchange is not just about import-export migration. It's about shareability.

Right, if you have 1Password today and someone else has Dashlane and you want to share a credential, well, there's no great way of doing that. If I want to share something with my mom who's actually a Dashlane user, what? Yeah, well, I use a few, so I'm not picking favorites. But the process is she has to go either download 1Password or the credential manager that I'm trying to share with, or she needs to copy paste the credential, or I need to copy it to her in a separate chat, which undermines the whole reason for having a manager in the first place.

0:36:31 - Mikah Sargent
Now something that stood out to me. The specifications mentioned 12 billion with a B online accounts that can now be accessed with passkeys. You know, the narrative seems to be that there are still very few accounts out there that support passkeys, but that's quite a few. So how significant is this standardization effort for accelerating actual passkey adoption across the industry?

0:36:59 - David Turner
It's critical. I mean, when you look at, you know Google's already announced 800 million users have access to passkeys and Microsoft's rolled it out to all their MSN users. And you know Amazon's announced like 175 million people. When you start adding up, that's, that's three. And then Apple and their ecosystem is about one and a half billion users. Um, that's you know already you're at two and a half three billion, and that's just three accounts.

You know, everyone always talks about the number of accounts they've got there, and an effort like this requires standardization, because if you well you know, if you only have one, of course it's useless, but even if you just have two vendors involved, it still has little value. What you really need is it to be as available and as well integrated as the rest of the ecosystem, because that then removes the barriers to adoption. You know, anytime you're trying to use a new technology, there's the technology itself, and then there's how do you use the technology, and the ability to move the passwords around is an important part of this whole ecosystem, and so having a secure way to do that is a really, really important key to getting this more broadly deployed.

0:38:11 - Mikah Sargent
Something a little nerdy. The specifications address both secure protocol CXP, and standardized format CXF. I was hoping you could explain why both components are necessary for this credential exchange to work as it needs to.

0:38:27 - Nick Steele
Yeah, absolutely so. The credential exchange protocol just defines how we can securely and privately move credentials from A to B. But what's really critical right is that that same thing I was talking about earlier on right is we all need to be able to speak the same language once the credentials move, because we may get dropped data. This is really critical and kind of new to the space of being able to move credentials. Right is that we're going to start defining formats for how credentials should look in, you know, in code or really just in JSON, for how they should be moved, stored and securely backed up. This doesn't just help with Exchange itself and sharing, but for the long-term format and storage of credentials and data related to identity, this is necessary. There's other standards, like SCIM2, that exist for managing and formatting identity information about users. The same needs to exist for credentials.

0:39:30 - Mikah Sargent
Now you look at the list of participating companies and it's, you know, apple, google, password managers like 1Password, which is the password manager I use, bitwarden password managers like 1Password, which is the password manager I use Bitwarden Was it? How difficult was it to get these companies on board? I guess more what I'm asking is did everybody kind of go this is something that we really just need to make happen and so it was just easy to kind of get everybody on board or was it a little bit like pulling teeth?

0:39:59 - David Turner
if you can answer that, yeah, I can take a lot one. So pretty much everyone in the press release is already a member of the FIDO Alliance, where we define, you know, the infrastructure and such for pass keys, and so we already have all of those people having conversations about making pass keys work. They're already invested in the ecosystem and so it wasn't a big leap and it was a pretty clear step to say, yeah, we need to be able to move this stuff around. So for the people that we were already engaged with, who were already members, it actually wasn't a big step because, as I said, they're already doing this work. They already know what their customers need, quite frankly, are asking for, and so you know, yeah, there's always battles about what's in the spec and you know, how does that fit within an ecosystem and so on. But at the conceptual level, we had pretty much everyone on board pretty quickly and it's been a very positive collaboration, which is always great to see.

0:41:01 - Nick Steele
Yeah, I think that's one of the things I love about working in the FIDO Alliance the most is, I've been involved in FIDO for eight years and I've been in standards for 10 as a whole across a lot of different bodies, but it's a really collaborative nature. We don't come at it from a competitive angle and we're there to, you know, make credentials and pass PASCIs, specifically in the FIDO Alliance, work for users. One of the things that I feel like we managed to really get ahead of is I think early on this year you saw a lot of press come out saying that you know, PASCIs are going to be a walled garden. They're a way to lock people into platforms and keep people from moving off of where they keep their credentials, and that's really not the case. We just really wanted there to be a secure way for credentials to be moved because, unlike pass keys, if you lose the private key to these credentials, then that's a higher security concern, because we're putting a lot more trust in these types of credentials than we are passwords in the past.

0:42:01 - Mikah Sargent
Definitely. Now the protocol does emphasize secure credential exchange in both online and offline scenarios. I think the question is a little obvious, but at the same time I'd love to hear these nerdy details of why it was important to support different network conditions. You know, because you've got some services that use the cloud for a lot of things, but then there may be times when you don't. So what led to the choice there?

0:42:30 - Nick Steele
I'm really glad you called this out as saying the day right before the call. I was like this is a really nerdy question. I'm really glad to get like the good ones. Yeah, so we really wanted to make uh credential exchange work in a variety of scenarios. Uh, right now, you know, as, as we said, right, the default is a csv um. That you know you have to kind of hope that users delete um and if you, if you want to, you know make sure that users are are going to this securely.

Well, not only do you need to support these, like consumer cases where you know I'm just trying to move to a new provider, but you need to support these business cases, these more high assurance cases where you know being online may not be available. You know you may be in a secure environment or you may be trying to move credentials from you know your uh laptop in your office to a a rack in your data center and you may. There may be a firewall in between or some air gap. Where you need to, you need to be able to move those credentials. Uh with different uh network conditions or in cases where they can't reach out to the same uh services and back end.

Uh, one of the things that we we really explored in in credential exchange and are going to continue conditions or in cases where they can't reach out to the same services and back end One of the things that we really explored in Credential Exchange and are going to continue to develop is these enterprise specific flows, these high assurance, high security flows, where the business actually has a lot more authority around the movement of credentials and could potentially apply things like policy or authorization certificates and signing that could say that you know, yeah, this user is allowed to move these credentials and only these types of credentials from this provider to this provider and then in the case of these certificates being there, you know, being online or offline may be an optional thing, but the business still has the ability to authorize this movement, and that's something that's brand new and, I think, pretty innovative in the space that we worked on a lot in FIDO.

0:44:29 - Mikah Sargent
One of the key features, of course, is the ability to securely move passkeys between providers. And I think from the outside, looking in, you hear one company supports passkeys, another company supports passkeys, a password management platform supports passkeys. It seems like if we all have the same little key, then moving my key from this place to this place and that place to that place should be easy. But there were clearly and are clearly challenges. What were the specific challenges, or maybe the biggest one or the biggest few, that needed to be addressed for this credential exchange to be as simple as I imagine you all intend to make it?

0:45:20 - Nick Steele
Yeah, I think. Oh sorry, David, go for it.

0:45:22 - David Turner
Oh no, I was just going to say that in my mind and this is not a geeky answer, but it boils down to being able to do it securely. Right that right off the top. If we're going to move stuff between two points, you know important stuff it's got to be done in a very secure, trusted way. The second is the data formats vary wildly.

You try and move stuff between password managers today and you get nominal levels of success because the way they define all the elements of a password versus, say, credit card information, it's not the same. You get some of the data coming over, you miss pieces, and so the value of having agreed upon data structures is actually a huge value as well, so that we get a much better quality of information exchange and it's easier to say at a whole level I recognize this credential type or I don't, in which case you can be really clear that, all right, the ones I recognized, I brought them in, but here are the ones that I didn't, and so you can be really clear that, all right, the ones I recognized, I brought them in, but here are the ones that I didn't, and so you can give the end user a clear indication of what worked and what didn't work, whereas today, yeah, some of the stuff might roll in and you really don't know what did and what didn't.

0:46:32 - Nick Steele
Alex Langshursen. Yeah, behind the scenes, on a lot of these credential managers, the plumbing is very different. So being able to have this protocol in place that is going to standardize how we communicate these credentials was the biggest first step. I think there's still a lot of work being done on behind the scenes and at 1Password, Dashlane, Bitwarden and a lot of these orgs that we're working directly with, and we'll have a beta rollout of CXP with shortly of just like making sure that we're able to, behind the scenes, get these credentials in the format they need to be exchanged and work like we say they're going to work.

0:47:13 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Now let's talk about the future. You know these specifications at least. When I heard that this was coming through the pipeline, I thought, okay, this is it. Now I can get excited about past keys without seeming like I am, I don't know, thinking the earth is flat in the sense that people will actually believe me and be excited that this is the future. But I wanted to ask you both, you know, do you think this is the last big hurdle for making pass keys a more common form of login or other type of authorization? Authentication, uh, authentication, excuse me, or do you still have some boxes that you're looking to check? Uh, in terms of getting you know my, my cousins and my, my uncles and everybody else who's not super steeped in technology, on board with wanting to use them?

0:48:18 - David Turner
from a technology standpoint it's a big one, because that lock-in notion or fear of lock-in, was, as Nick said earlier in the year, being discussed quite a bit out in the wild. But what's interesting is awareness is a big part of it too. There aren't just technology gaps, there's just awareness gaps. People see passkey. They don't know what that is. They don't know if they should trust it. Um, the notion of doing things without a password on the surface sounds scary to people, even though it's more secure. So it's it. It. The deployment is dependent on a variety of factors, not just the technical ones. But absolutely this is a big step forward on the technical side.

0:49:02 - Nick Steele
Yeah, I think the the I mean with regards to CXP right, the first step is is allowing for for passkey portability and we're actually, you know, going to come out. I mentioned that a few of us in the credential manager space, including that warden dash lane, google 1Password, are going to work on supporting pass keys, passwords and some other information I think addresses credit cards. Pretty soon we want to be able to support a broader range of credentials and we see credential exchange protocol really being the first step in a broader conversation about where protocol really being the first step in a broader conversation about where credentials are headed, especially as we start seeing more digital credentials and MDLs mobile driver's licenses become more widely available. We want to be able to support the movement and management of these credentials and allow for that user to have sovereignty over their credentials and making them more portable. So I think this is a huge leap for PassKeys.

Especially, as David said, we're kind of moving away from that fear of lock-in. We're moving away from, you know, users feeling like they're going to, if they're moving from new devices or moving to new apps, that PassKeys are going to be a risk to accessing things that they need. We're just going to make them more available. They're going to be available across more credential managers and I think that's sort of a future that we're also planning for. I think, especially as we start talking about mobile driver's licenses and having digital wallets become more widely used, we're going to be entering sort of a future where you're not just going to have one password or Dashlane or one credential manager. You're going to have multiple sources of credentials and we're all going to need to talk to each other, and we see CXP as a way to enable that, which is like the FIDO Alliance we're starting with passkeys, but we're building for the future.

0:51:02 - David Turner
Yes, I had two things to that. At the consumer level, this notion of well, they tell you you're not supposed to do it, but everyone does sharing your streaming service account password with a family member. You know, at this point it's like copy it down or send in a text message and you still got to enter it in this way. If you can give someone and I won't name a particular service because I'll get mad If you share the account information with them it's in their password manager and it will simply work. So the usability of that scenario is actually much simpler. It's the same with shared bank accounts accounts some of my bank account, they are some of the some accounts with my wife. We can only have one right well, so I have to share, we have to share.

So, again, this makes it simpler and some of the past key password manager tools actually give you some control over that as well, so that that can be managed. In addition, you actually have regulatory requirements In the European Union. The EU, they're developing digital wallet infrastructure, if you will, and one of the key requirements is portability of data. That's a really big requirement in a lot of the EU. Cybersecurity and data areas is to make sure that end users aren't locked in to any one platform, any one product, and so this is the kind of tool that enables that capability again in a way that regulators will like it, as opposed to again doing it in an insecure and unreliable way.

0:52:36 - Nick Steele
I don't think this is like the end of the line, too for what needs to be done on passkeys by any means, and a lot of that work is not just being done in FIDO, it's being done in the W3C and the WebAuthn working group, which I'm also a part of and David's involved with. We've been working on this for seven or eight years and the work continues. We're due to publish the next version of WebAuthn and the WebAuthn API in the next month or so, and that's going to include a lot of improvements around usability of passkeys and the underlying APIs which is defined by WebAuthn in there. So we're really interested in handling scenarios for, I'd say, the more high security holdouts in the space, being able to make these more usable. While usability for people is great, usability for you know your bank is also important.

Banks and other high assurance, you know payment service providers that experience a lot of fraud really want to make these credentials a strong, you know, a stronger replacement for passwords, not just for them but, you know, for their regulatory needs, as David mentioned.

So we're adding a lot of things to support better, I'd say, usability, better signaling between applications and your credential managers being able to handle things like passive enrollment and registration of passkeys is something that's coming down the line. So being able to go to a site, log in with your password and then having one password pop up and say hey, we saw, you just logged in, do you want to enroll a passkey? And we can just seamlessly make a passkey right after login with this site. So we think that's going to be a huge step forward in terms of usability and adoption if we make that process easier and easier to just roll over to something more secure. Because right now, a couple sites have a pretty great flow but if you want to roll a passkey today, okay. Well, you log in, you go to your security settings, you go to add a passkey, you name the passkey and it just becomes this certain amount of friction and we really want to bring that friction down and make it just as seamless as registering an account with a password.

0:54:50 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely Well. David Turner, nick Steele, I want to thank you both so much for taking the time to join me today to talk through this update. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this progresses. Is there a place where folks should go to kind of stay up to date with what's making its way down the FIDO pipeline, as it were?

0:55:13 - David Turner
FIDOalliance.org is our website and that's probably the best starting point. You know from the top level. There'll be links down to both the PASC-y related documents themselves, but also credential exchange information too.

0:55:28 - Nick Steele
You can follow me at Kaiju on Blue Sky too, you can follow me at Kaiju on Blue Sky. I post there and have a couple of lists of other folks like Matthew Miller and Tim Capali, who post a lot in the space, and we'll keep you updated on where the specs are.

0:55:42 - David Turner
Actually, one other quick thing to add is that there are a lot of open source initiatives in the same space trying to do this kind of transfer, and so we've taken a unique step with FIDO and set up a repo in GitHub specifically to get feedback on these specifications. So there is a place, a direct place, to provide comments. It's a publicly available repo, no-transcript. Have comments or feedback. We do have a GitHub repo for that Awesome.

0:56:21 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you both. Definitely, we will link to all of that in our show notes. So folks listening in who are excited about it, be sure to head there to check it out. And thank you, David, thank you, nick, so much.

0:56:32 - David Turner
Thank you, Mikah, appreciate it. Bye.

0:56:35 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks Up next I've got an interview about Apple's upcoming Apple Intelligence features. Before we get to that, though, I want to take a quick break to tell you about USCloud. We're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. USCloud is the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. It's the global leader. USCloud is the global leader in third-party Microsoft Enterprise support, supporting 50 of the Fortune 500.

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Okay, we are back from the break and that means it's time for our next topic. This time, we're talking about some upcoming Apple intelligence features that are already available in beta. Joining us to break it down is Six Colors East Bureau Chief. It's Dan Moren. Hello Dan.

0:59:49 - Dan Moren
Hello, Mikah, I'm ready to break all the things Down up. Break up, break left, break right. I'll break. Any direction you want me to break, I'll break.

0:59:59 - Mikah Sargent
Whoa, and they all mean something.

1:00:00 - Dan Moren
They do Up, down, left and right.

1:00:02 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting.

1:00:03 - Dan Moren
Yeah, let's turn this into a linguistic show. It's going to be really fun.

1:00:07 - Mikah Sargent
So let's kick things off. Of course, many of these features well, actually all of these features Apple announced a long time ago at WWDC and then sort of promoted them as features that one would get with new iPhones, and that's upcoming, but none of these features are yet available. However, now that they're kind of more solidified, people are getting the first look at them. I did ask to join the waitlist.

1:00:35 - Dan Moren
I am not yet part of the waitlist, or part of the Welcome to the waitlist with the rest of us.

1:00:40 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, thank you. Let's kick things off by talking about Image Playground. What is Image Playground and where will people be able to use it?

1:00:49 - Dan Moren
Image Playground perhaps the most contentious, I don't know, of Apple's Apple intelligence tools. It's very similar to a lot of other tools you might have seen that basically allow for generative AI being used to create images. So if you've seen the work of things like Midjourney or DALI or Stable Diffusion, you're talking about something that's very similar, but it's something that Apple has sort of tuned to the ground up for its own specifications. It's going to appear in two specific places, at least to start with. The first of those is right within messages, so you'll be able to use that same little pop-up menu that you use to get at you know different gift search or your check-in or whatever, and you can add image playgrounds from there as well. You'll be able to generate pictures there based on your own photos or based on prompts, which can either be sort of freeform or can be sort of part of these pre selected themes. It also will exist in a standalone app which will include a library of all the images that you've generated which you can get access to in there, or you can even create images to use in other apps like Pages or Keynote or what have you.

Yeah, that's kind of the main thing about it, and Apple is trying hard to create a technology that is safe. Right, it's got to work within its own sort of uh you know image and brand, and so it's doing that by primarily offering two major styles uh, animation or illustration. Um, and these sort of help prevent possible abuses. Right, there's no photo realistic mode here. It's not generating pictures that look like photos. Everything is very, you know, illustrated or animated in some way, and they have a bunch of guardrails in place to prevent certain types of content that might be objectionable from being generated, or so they say. We haven't got a chance to test yet, but that, in theory, is what's happening here.

1:02:44 - Mikah Sargent
Now the next feature is one that I think where Image Playground feels a little bit more. It's mostly an app, it's sort of a feature that you call upon. The next feature feels a little bit more universal. It's Genmoji. Can you tell us about Genmoji and why it sounds like emoji?

1:03:11 - Dan Moren
I thought you were going to say it sounds like my friend Jen Jenmoji. Oh, jen, I know Jen. So Jenmoji is basically it's the ability to create emoji based on a text prompt. So if you've ever felt like there is an emoji, why, why is there no emoji for shrimp on toast? Why Everybody needs a shrimp on toast emoji you know this, I know this, and so you can just type in shrimp on toast and it will generate a couple different options for you.

You can select that and then you can essentially use it in messages like you would use an emoji. You can send it in line, you can send it as a sticker, you can use it as a tap back and anybody else who is on a compatible version of an Apple platform will be able to see it just as if it was a regular emoji. Wild, cool, kind of fun. I will even recognize like people from your contacts and kind of try to generate emoji that look like them. So if you specify, like if I tried to make a Micah emoji, it would try to like recreate your look a little bit. You know, maybe the beard, the hair, it'll look good. So yeah, I mean I think this is kind of cool and should be fun, but again, we're waiting to see exactly how well it works.

1:04:23 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the last one was one that I honestly forgot about, the last of the kind of sort of image generation things, and so I was very happy to get to read the Six Colors piece to remember what in the world Image Wand is. Image Wand, image Wand, abracadabra.

1:04:42 - Dan Moren
That's exactly what it is. It's magic. So this is something that Apple's incorporating into the Apple Pencil tools. You'll see it in that palette of tools. We can pick like a pencil or a highlighter, whatever. You'll see it in that palette of tools. We can pick a pencil or a highlighter, whatever.

You'll see this Image 1 thing and it basically lets you just sort of either take some sort of like a drawing or a sketch that you have made and then turn it into a polished image, or even in cases where you might just want to supplement some text that you have with a picture, you can sort of, you know, designate an area and it will generate a drawing based on the text that's around it. So if you're doing, you know, a book report or a paper or something for school maybe, and you want to add a little you pizzazz, you can just add a insert, an image, and it will read through and try to generate something that kind of matches and draws from the text that you have written. I don't know that my teachers would have liked it if I just started putting pictures in all my papers, but uh, it could have been fun, that's for sure. It's like clip art, basically, but you know a little more. Uh, magical, because the one.

1:05:39 - Mikah Sargent
This is my report of shrimp on toast shrimp. Why?

1:05:43 - Dan Moren
is it delicious?

1:05:44 - Mikah Sargent
keep adding shrimp on toast images all throughout here's a photo of a shrimp. Here's a photo of some toast and we put it together on toast, um, okay. And then I was excited to see that writing tools, which are already available in the 0.1 beta, that will soon be shipping to your average consumer who doesn't jump on beta trains very soon. Writing tools are getting some improvements. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

1:06:15 - Dan Moren
Yeah, there's one major improvement here, and then something else I think we'll talk about in a second, but the in previously, when you have used the writing tools, it's offered a limited number of options in terms of enhancing your writing. You can say, for example, to make something professional or concise or friendly, right, it kind of is just giving you a pre-selected menu of things to do. Well, starting in these next updates, you'll be able to describe a specific change that you want to make. You'll be able to enter a prompt, for example, making something read like a poem or, you know, making something funnier or something like that. It will try to actually follow the instructions you give it. So it's a little bit more open-ended, a little bit more freeform in terms of the text that it's generating.

1:06:59 - Mikah Sargent
Got it. Okay, yeah, so you, you can. That makes more sense. It's. It's about, instead of kind of following along these very specific guard rails although there are guard rails still in place, but these are different yes, but like yeah, you can just write yeah, right, it's letting you order off menu right.

1:07:15 - Dan Moren
Rather, it's like oh, what if I? I see there's no shrimp on toast on your menu? What if I want to order that? You can just type it in the box. It'll generate it.

1:07:24 - Mikah Sargent
While we all ponder shrimp on toast, believe it or not, we're actually going to take one quick little break before we come back with the rest of what's upcoming in the next version of the next next version of iOS. I want to tell you about our friends at ACI Learning who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. ACI Learning is the provider of ITPro that binge-worthy video-on-demand IT and cybersecurity training. With ITPro, you will get certification ready with access to the full video library of more than 7,250 hours of training. Premium training plans also include practice tests to ensure you're ready before you pay for exams, and virtual labs to facilitate hands-on learning. It Pro from ACI Learning makes training fun. All training videos are produced in an engaging talk show format that is truly edutaining.

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1:09:07 - Dan Moren
use writing tools to make that a little more concise, maybe.

1:09:09 - Mikah Sargent
That would be nice, yeah, speaking tools that's coming next.

Because iOS 18, as it stands, does not have the version that has the current set of non-image generation tools. That's coming, we hear, next week as we record the show on Thursday, and then at some point in the future we will see the version that we're talking about now. But those of us who are using the beta will see this version now, except you have to join a waitlist to actually gain access to those features. So many of us we'll see this version now, except you have to join a wait list to actually gain access to those features. So many of us haven't even seen them now, even though we technically have access to them now but don't have access to them now. This is messy, dan. Can you remember a time that this has ever been the situation with Apple's beta program? Have there ever been features like this that had a wait list with Apple's beta program? Have there ever been features like this that had a wait list?

1:10:03 - Dan Moren
Not to my recollection, honestly. I mean, the beta landscape for Apple obviously has changed a lot in the last decade or so. I mean, it used to be really locked down to developers and of course they've added public beta stuff as well, and then more recently it's been easier to get the developer betas and then they've had this weird like. This is, I think, the first time in my memory where they really had these parallel beta tracks too, because even before 18.0 came out for iOS, there was an 18.1 beta, and I could not remember having that ever in any of my experiences, like where there were two betas for different versions, neither of which were out yet. And we're still in that world, because currently there is both the 18.1 beta in both developer and public beta flavors, as well as the 18.2 developer beta. So yeah, it's a mess right now, for sure, for sure.

1:10:55 - Mikah Sargent
It felt like Microsoft.

1:10:57 - David Turner
That just feels like a I know.

1:10:59 - Mikah Sargent
I know, I know, but that is such a Microsoft thing. Back to it. One thing that is part of this version that people do have access to they don't have to wait for the wait list is integration with a generative AI platform. Can you talk a little bit about?

1:11:19 - Dan Moren
that Sure, and specifically in this case we're talking about ChatGPT. Apple has suggested in the past that they might be interested in expanding that to other generative AI models, but as of yet they have not announced any other partnerships. So with this system you'll have ChatGPT, which you can access in a couple different ways, the first of which is via Siri. You'll be able to either explicitly ask for ChatGPT to give you an answer you can say like hey, so-and-so, ask ChatGPT to generate me a poem about shrimp on toast and it will be able to go to ChatGPT and get that information and return it to you. And Apple has built in a number of safeguards here, including, in many cases, prompting you before it sends any information to ChatGPT, Because this doesn't require you to have a ChatGPT account. By default, that information is not stored and it can't be linked back to you. Your IP address is hidden, so it can't be collated with other requests that you might make. All of that is locked down and part of why Apple wants to continue its brand of privacy. In addition to that, you'll be able to even disable that entire integration at the beginning if you want to. You will give them the option, whether or not you want to allow Siri to work with ChatGPT. Siri will also then dynamically try to figure out if the query you are asking it if you do not explicitly ask for ChatGPT might be better served by ChatGPT. So you ask Siri for something and it's using some sort of algorithm. Apple isn't really detailed how it's making that determination, other than what are the things that Siri is well-suited to versus what are the things that ChatGPT is well suited to. So one example might be if you wanted to plan a list of places to go in a city you were visiting, Siri might say, okay, I can't really do that or I don't have that information. I'm going to hand this off to ChatGPT. And again, you will be prompted before that happens to say like, hey, I'm going to send this to ChatGPT, Is that okay? Similarly, you might be able to send other images, like information, like images to ChatGPT, which will also be sort of prompted and disclosed at the time, Like, hey, you've taken this picture that you want to send to ChatGPT to respond with something, Just to let you know. We're going to do that.

The other thing which is interesting is that, in addition to these tools, as part of the writing tools we discussed earlier, there is now a compose option so you can tell the writing tools to generate text for you on the fly not just rewrite text or proofread text, but create new text. And that will also leverage ChatGPT and that is available anywhere within the system-wide writing tools. So that's one other place that you can do that. And in addition to the writing aspect, you can even use ChatGPT's image generation capabilities to add images too. So that's kind of a backdoor into the ChatGPT stuff. Now Apple will also let you. If you have a ChatGPT account, you can log in with that. Just be aware that then that information will sort of accrue to your account. So, like you know, it will know who you are and it will have that information and remember that information, etc.

1:14:24 - Mikah Sargent
So you don't need an account, but you can log into it and integrate with that if you already have one and then another feature that people who are on this beta have access to is visual intelligence, which is a feature that was tied to a hardware feature on the new iPhones. Tell us about Visual Intelligence.

1:14:45 - Dan Moren
Yeah, so this is linked in with the camera control feature on the iPhone 16 line and basically you'll be able to use it to point the camera at something and then get more information about it. So, for example, if you're in front of a restaurant, you could maybe point at your phone at it and use Visual Intelligence to get the reviews, or you could find the hours that it's open. It can also summarize text on the fly. If you point it at some text, it can translate between languages, it can scan qr codes and it does even have integrations with some third-party tools, such as using google to search for where you could buy something, or even using, again, chat gpt to get expertise about a particular subject matter. So all of those things are kind of linked together. It's very similar to what google has been doing for some time with its lens feature and certainly meta, I think has also been trying to leverage with its meta ray bands.

All of these things are kind of places where they're trying to figure out. You know how do you leverage this information coming into the camera and use, uh, artificial intelligence in order to get more information about it. I would like to see personally the ability to like get recipes. Like you know, we they have this thing in it. I think it's in photos in ios 18 where you can look at a picture of food and it like will find recipes for that dish. So you could like take a picture of shrimp on toast and tell you how to make shrimp on toast, for example.

1:16:06 - Mikah Sargent
I had used it and I thought that it was a pretty cool feature with the kind of three different options. I like took a photo of a mug and it knew the name of the company that was on the mug and provided some information about that. And then, when I used it with Google, it tried to find a mug that was like it. There isn't one, this is a really old mug. And then I, you know, did the standard version and it was. Yeah, it was neat seeing the different options that were available there. I think I could find myself using visual intelligence more than most of these features. And then, last, but I don't want to make it least, more English support, which I think is interesting to people outside of the US. Right, this new set of features. Some of them are reaching more people who speak English. Some of them are reaching more people who speak English.

1:17:02 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I like more English support because it sounds incredibly ungrammatical even though being 100% accurate. Yeah, yeah, so the initial Apple intelligence features are only available in English. However, in these new releases, apple is expanding that to more geographic locales. So, beyond just the United States, you'll be able to access these features in Australia, canada, new Zealand, south Africa or the UK. You'll have to set your like Siri language to that specific English localization and then you'll be able to use those features and have them work, you know, in conjunction with your localized version of English, and my understanding is I think that means they would have worked previously if you had been in those regions but just set Siri to US English. I think that might have worked, but obviously now it's more specifically tuned to those particular versions of English.

1:17:55 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Well, dan, when do we think people who are not on the betas and not on the wait lists? The average user will see these features this year or next year.

1:18:12 - Dan Moren
Yeah, that's a good question. So if we are taking it as read that the first set of Apple Intelligence tools will ship to everybody next week, which would be the end of October, it feels to me like probably the earliest we'd see these tools is sometime in December. And I think, depending on the process and Apple is by all accounts, using some of the feedback about these tools to make decisions about how ready they are for prime time and for the average user so I think the average user is more likely to see them in January, potentially, if that stuff gets pushed back. But it's also worth noting that, as with 18.1, it seems likely that a public beta of this will appear at some point and that would probably happen before the end of the year. So if you are still willing to live on the not quite as bleeding edge but still somewhat bleeding edge, you may have an opportunity to use this.

As for the waitlist stuff, it's unclear. Apple has said in the past with the waitlist that they expect them to take a matter of hours. I think you, like me, probably put in pretty early this uh recent wait list for the image tools, which is a separate wait list from apple intelligence, uh, and I've had that for more than 24 hours now and it's still pending. So it really depends on demand, it looks like, for how many people are are hitting those servers. They're clearly trying to meet that out a bit so that it's, you know, not hammering those, those servers, but uh, yeah, we'll have to see how that keeps going.

1:19:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, we shall, and we'll also see what Macs Apple announces over the coming weeks. As well as that is also in the pipeline, Dan Moren of Six Colors. Thank you so much for being here with us this week. If people want to follow along with what you're doing, where is the best way to go? Do that.

1:20:02 - Dan Moren
The best way to go do that is you can follow me on any social media, pretty much as dmorin. I'm also at dmoren.com, d-m-o-r-e-n.com and I'm currently registering the handle at shrimp on toast as many possible sites as I can. You never know, you never know, thank you so much, dan, and we'll see you again soon.

1:20:25 - Mikah Sargent
thanks, mike and take it easy. All righty folks. That is the show uh tech news weekly publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That is where you go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. I want to mention that if you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, well, check out Club TWiT. It's just seven dollars a month and when you join the club, you gain access to, as I mentioned, every single TWiT show with no ads. Also, access to the TWiT+ bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twit events get published there. Access to the members-only Discord server which Discord server, which is a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members those of us here at Twit and also look at photos of shrimp on toast and honestly, it looks appetizing. And access to the video versions of our Club Twit exclusive shows, like Hands on Windows, hands on Mac, ios Today and many more. So be sure to join the club $7 a month.

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