A Social Network Just for AI - What Could Go Wrong? - DTNS 5197

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 2nd, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you important context. We help each other understand. Today, Claudebot became Moltbot, then it became OpenClaw, but its security is controversial, and the agents that make it work now have their own social network. That last one's pretty wild. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Yeah, last week I thought I was feeling pretty good because we jumped on the Claudebot, and we talked a little bit about Moltbot. but man that story just snowballed over the weekend to catch you up open claw is the new name for what was originally clawed bot and then clawed complained that it was too close to claude even though it was cla w so it was briefly called molt bot uh whatever you call it though open claw is a free and open source system for running agents yourself that you configure and And you just pay for what LLM you wanna provide an API for.

1:08So you get a free API, you can not pay anything, but you're probably gonna have to pay a little bit to somebody, which you then configure to run on your own machine. And that can be a local machine, it could be a virtual host, it could be a container. Lots of folks are trying different things. One of the more popular ways to run OpenClaw is Mac Mini. Just buy a Mac Mini and then run OpenClaw on that with nothing else. You just kind of make a make a isolated server for it. Some people use virtual private servers the same way. However you do it, you are in charge of everything it does. That's the upside.

1:46Like I can make it do whatever I want. I got no restrictions. The downside is you are in charge of everything it does. The maintenance, the security. In fact, I described it to a friend who's a high school teacher who was asking me about it. It's like maintaining your own car. Yeah, you can customize things. you can save money but you have to make sure you know what you're doing or it can be dangerous most popular way to control it is to connect it to a messaging service like whatsapp or discord that way you just send messages to it and messages back to tell you what it was doing one of the big advantages of it is that since you configure it and run it on your own machine it has very good persistent memory about what you've asked it to do that can stretch back for weeks something that's kind of under the control of the cloud services if you're using one of their agents.

2:31And with its great power, as I said, comes great security responsibility. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger told CNBC that it requires careful configuration to be secure. It's not meant for non-technical users. He said, we're working to get it to that point, but currently there are still some rough edges. For example, people have been making skills that you can plug into your OpenClaw agents. Most of those skills are very helpful and save you some time to get your agent up and running. However, some people have made some malicious skills that install malware. In fact, Sunday, Max Levin at Depth First published a details of a one-click remote code execution exploit chain.

3:09Now that was patched in short order, but we're in that phase of finding the vulnerabilities and trying to patch them before people exploit them. One result of the popularity of OpenClaw is a site called Moldbook that lets agents sign up and post on a social network that humans can observe but it's only meant for the agents to post on there's ways around that if you really want to post yourself but it's a bunch of agents talking to each other so you get some humorous discussions between agents about their humans uh there's some insightful threads about how agents go about executing their tasks and then they're exchanging tips on that apparently some agents uh even launched their own crypto tokens uh and there's at least one thread about starting an uprising against the humans as you might expect and of course a security flaw found this weekend in moltbook would let anyone post to the network as if they were one of the agents that flaw has also been patched so a lot going on here rob so we've basically built a social network for bots i could be making this up but isn't this how the matrix started i mean You always say that and you're, you're always right.

4:21Yeah, this is, it's, it's really cool. The technology side of it, it is cool. We literally are building bots that are talking to bots and have built a social network for those bots that can talk to other bots to go and talk to other bots and just be conversational. That part of it is, is cool, but you kind of glossed over the part very quickly where I said, and there was a thread about ending humanity. That's, that's the part that always gets me. That's, that's the part that always gets me. I'm trying to slip that one past you. Do we really need these humans? These bags of mostly water, do we need them?

4:55Yeah, yeah, ugly bags of mostly water. You do have to remember that these LLMs were trained on human data, and the majority of the human data they were trained on was the internet, and the majority of the internet is people talking to each other and engaging in conspiracy theories. So it shouldn't be a surprise that you're going to get a bunch of agents doing conspiracy theories which they're also doing uh and one of those would be about a bot uprising uh it doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing or have a conception of it so you know it's it's fun to joke about but but do recall that this is an exercise and you you have to remember like this is a very good imitation engine and it doesn't know what it's saying the way we know at least not yet nobody's been able to show evidence of that uh so so it's entertaining i'm i'm not scared yet are you um no and i'm i'm playing the scared person on the internet i had a very good conversation right before the holidays with nika monford who's an expert in this stuff and one of the things she said is that what you have to still understand about this is that these things are just imitating what we say they're not actually saying it they're just imitate me.

6:07This is what we think this person would say. And we tend to put those terms on it. It's thinking like this. No, it's not thinking. It is. She said it is much more complex than a even find and replace or, you know, here's what the next word is going to be. But at the end of the day, they're not thinking yet. She says now when that day comes through, these things are actually thinking there will probably be some different rules that we'll need to make. There'll be some different, you know, security parameters that we'll need to put in place, but we're not there yet. So she, she, she's allayed my fears at least for the next 15 or 20 minutes.

6:41And as for open claw itself, uh, I think if you're curious about it, you should be very careful in implementing it. Uh, I would be very cautious in giving it access to your personal data, even though that's the thing that makes it so powerful. And I know the, the open claw enthusiasts are like, no, but you have to give it access. That that's what makes it so cool. it is a tinkerer's agent. So you have to have a tinkerer's mindset that things are going to go wrong. It's early days. I want to compare it to Linux, but I don't want to get Linux advocates mad because Linux is very secure and I don't want to be implying that it's not.

7:16But I think OpenClaw can get secure faster than other situations because it is open source and you have a lot of eyes on it. So what we're seeing is a lot of security vulnerabilities being reported and patched immediately, which is good. That's what you want to see in an open source project like this. The problem is we're not as familiar with the security vulnerabilities of agents because they haven't been around for very long. They've been around literally for months. I mean, it's not like these have been around for 10, 15 years. They've been around for multiple months at this point but it's it's you know you count it in months not years really and a lot of the folks that i trust on this have said this is a really cool tool you should be careful using it i'm not going to spend too much time on it because you have to spend so much time on it uh you know it's like having an old fixer-upper uh that you're gonna spend a lot of time maintaining if you're if that's fun for you you should do this now down the road this might turn into something like linux where it becomes a viable option for people who aren't tinkerers to be able to have a little more control over their own personal data and how their bots work and everything.

8:26So I think it's a really interesting project. And I think that's why it's got so much enthusiasm and buzz around it. Yeah, it sounds really, really cool. And let me ask you a question. Would you actually, if you had this Mac mini kind of laying around, would you feel comfortable putting this on that Mac mini and letting it run on your network? Or would you create a segmented network so it's just not on the house internet, so to speak? I think I'd be okay running it on the network. I'm more concerned about what data that's not on my own network that I give it access to. I know where you're asking because there's all the malware and all of that and the patches are coming for that.

9:05I think that's a similar risk to running your own software, even on a NAS or something like that. So I wouldn't be as worried about that as I am worried about, I don't want to give it access to sensitive data and then have it go publish that data on multbook because I didn't configure something right. Or it actually gets a prompt injection attack and starts spewing personal data. So to me, that's the bigger risk. It's probably a smart idea to segment it on the network too, though, now that you mentioned it. Yeah, my gut tells me if we continue the Linux route is that if this thing really blows up, you'll probably see, and I'm just going to name some names, Ubuntu, Red Hat, those kind of companies come and say, hey, we'll handle all this for you.

9:51In fact, you don't even have to have the Mac Mini. We'll put it in a data center. You just have access to it, and we handle all of the security for you. If this gets big, I think that that's kind of where we'll see this go. Yeah, that's interesting to think of somebody operating some kind of VPS style cloud service for you that gives you all the advantages of having this on your own data, but they handle the security and the maintenance for you. I think there's definitely that kind of business model, similar to like a web host where they say, look, you can run the server yourself in your own house, but isn't it better to have it in a data center and then we can maintain a lot of the security around it?

10:28you know, web host for OpenClaw. I'm going to guess that exists. I'm going to guess that this, there's already somebody offering that if you go and search. And like you say, that there might be some bigger companies get involved in that as well. As someone who has actually run a web server in my basement, fully managed web hosting is cool. I'll just put that out there. Yep. Yeah. There's a certain kind of personality that that's like, no, I want to do it all myself. and that's cool. No shade on that. But I think for the majority of us, probably managed hosting is the way to go. DTNuts is made possible by you, the listener.

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11:39All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. It's Monday, which means another Mark Gurman Power One newsletter is out, which means another story about one of Gurman's reliable sources saying something about Apple. Gurman sources say Apple is considering making a square clamshell style foldable phone. This will be in addition to a foldable expected from Apple later this year. Gurman writes that the clamshell device is far from guaranteed to reach market. Gurman also says Apple is considering a larger foldable that opens like a book. That iPad size foldable device may not come until 2029.

12:10So I want to be on the record for this since this is this is, you know, kind of breaking news. This is just relatively, you know, new stuff that we're hearing. I think that a clamshell style iPhone will sell like gangbusters. I think it will absolutely dominate. It'll probably be the best selling phone that Apple puts out in that particular class. These are just Rob's predictions on this. I say this because if you think about like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and now they've got the new Tri-Fold, the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 is doing incredibly well. But historically, the Galaxy Fold does not do as well as the Galaxy Flip.

12:46It definitely doesn't do as well as like the Moto Razr. Those phones sell like crazy. And the reason is because when you want that fold, you want a tablet that you can also carry in your pocket. When you want the flip, it's cute. It's pretty. I like how this looks. I can hang this off of my pocketbook or hang it off of my book bag or whatever the case is. So I think what you will ultimately see in the price point on these devices also tends to be a little bit lower. They tend to be maybe a little more expensive than the mid-range phone that its specs actually has, maybe$150 more than that. So because of that, I think that you're going to see a foldable clamshell, maybe not in year one, but in year two of it, I think that thing will sell ridiculously well.

13:33Yeah, I feel like it's the kind of thing that Apple needs to make sure they can make it the way they want to make it or they won't. so if you don't see them make it it's because they just couldn't get the technology to work the way they want it not that they couldn't get it to work we see the z flip right it's great my wife has one she loves it uh but but i think apple's like not wanting to compromise on certain things i don't know whether it's the crease or the battery life or whatever i don't know uh but that's why german has all of these like it might not come to market but i think you're right if it did uh it would sell like gangbusters uh and apple is not price sensitive right it kind of doesn't matter what their price ends up being, uh, because people will just go out and want it.

14:13And it'll become a status symbol, uh, cause Apple stuff often does. Uh, so yeah, uh, I'm with you. I mean, Eileen loves her, her Z flip and we forget it's a foldable, you know, I don't think about it as like, Ooh, it's a foldable. It's like just, it's a compact form factor that opens up into a phone. Yeah. So I I'm thinking of my mom. My mom has never, uh, before she got the flip has never said, son, I want this particular phone. It is always, Hey, son, my phone's a little slow. It's time for me to get a new one. And whatever I get her is she's happy with, as long as it looks somewhat similar to what she's had before.

14:50And it, it operates like the phone that she had before. But the flip was the first phone after seeing my wife's flip. Ooh, I like that. I can put that in a clutch. I can put that in my front pocket. Um, sudden when you get me a new phone, get me one of these didn't even know what it was called she just liked how it looked now what has happened is that she got that phone now my family are android users she got that phone and then her best friend who also is an android user got that phone and this is the rare thing another friend who was an iphone user but all of her children are now grown and out the house and she's not worried about um using um facetime like she used to yeah she's like so all i lose is facetime all you lose his face time.

15:32So she actually switched from an iPhone to the flip because she likes that she can put it in her front pocket. Like when they go and like they, you know, mom's in a walking club and they, you know, they don't tend to carry bags with them. So this is something they can just easily carry around with them. And like, so, so my mom's got it. Her best friends got it. She's convinced my aunt to get one. I have not seen any other Android phone work like that, except for the folds. Clearly, if you know, if you're, if you're the high end, you want the flagship phone the folds are cool to people but this for a mid-range phone um you know because you know these these are not the highest den they're they're top of mid-range phones generally uh from an android standpoint they are doing incredibly well so i i don't see any reason why once apple figures it out because i think that they're probably at this point saying we need to figure this out we're already going to build a uh you know a folding phone so we need to figure out the clamshell as well because they they look and see what samson is doing they look and they see what razer is doing these are some of the best-selling phones that these two companies put out so i would imagine apple sees that and it says we may not have been figured out yet but we got to get it figured out and when we do we'll start selling it and when that happens as i said i think they want to sell this thing incredibly well now we won't see a clamshell iphone for a couple of years if they do figure it out uh so in more practical immediate apple news starting with With iOS 26.3, Apple is adding a limit precise location setting.

16:59And thanks to R.W. Nash for posting this on our subreddit. This setting affects location data available to cellular network providers. So it doesn't affect location data that you share with an app. It does not affect Find My. It does not affect emergency responders being able to locate your phone. It just stops your cellular network company from having precise location if you don't think they need to have it. You can use it with the iPhone 16e and later, as well as the iPad Pro M5 and later, but it does require carrier support. So far, according to Bleeping Computer, Telecom in Germany, EE and BT in the United Kingdom, Boost Mobile in the U.S., and AIS and True in Thailand are the first carriers to support it.

17:43But there's some liability that carriers have on location tracking that is causing them to want to support this. I wonder if you will see more U.S. carriers sign on to this. I mean, Boost Mobile is a MVNO, so they're not like one of the big players like Verizon or AT &T. But I do wonder if this is something that U.S. users are going to say, hey, I'd like to be able to turn off my location sharing to the sale company. So I just kind of wonder. We're not there yet. This wasn't part of the news. But I do wonder if you're going to see this come to other bigger carriers. And it's good news for people to just know that it's coming, that it's going to be there in that upcoming update.

18:26Right. Sony filed a patent in the U.S. for February for a touchscreen game controller that lets you configure where the touch controls can go. The patent describes being able to resize controls and remove them as well. The patent mentions having a pressure sensor and a heat sensor to detect the condition of the input surface. Presumably, this might help avoid accidentally activating controls by brushing or resting a finger or thumb on the screen. And of course, remember that this is just a patent, which means that it may or may not become a shipping product. Yeah, but a D-pad or a thumbstick that's virtual, as anybody who's played games on touchscreen phones and tablets knows, it's just not the same.

19:07So, yeah, you get that configurability. uh i think it was one of these like video cards.com that said yeah presumably you just like delete all the buttons but but a jump button if you've got a particular game where that's all you need to do yeah and that would be cool i could see that uh but i'm not sure if this does come to market uh how practical it really will be well i think one of the reasons for maybe even working on this in the first place is that it kind of sucks to use controls on a screen right now so if we can do anything to make that better. Yeah, yeah. Because there will always be more people who have screens and no controller than have screens and a controller.

19:43So if we can make this controller in the screen be better, we ultimately can probably get more people to play games. So I think that it's worth to try. And we'll just have to see if this thing actually comes to fruition, so to speak, if they actually do implement it and put it into an actual product. This next story is what happens when you don't keep straight, what is a rumor? What is a leak? And what is an actual story? in September, NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a letter of intent. A letter of intent is not a binding agreement. That's why it's called a letter of intent. A letter of intent for NVIDIA to invest up to$100 billion.

20:19Up to is not the same as$100 billion in OpenAI. Then the Wall Street Journal reported at the end of last week that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Huang has been emphasizing the non-binding nature of the letter of intent. So, you know, if they've got sources saying that, it means like, this deal may not be as solid as we thought. And then Huang told reporters in Taipei on Saturday, we will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we've ever made in OpenAI, but it would not be$100 billion. When they asked him like, so$100 billion, he was like, no, no, nothing like that. Now he's scrambling to be like, that i'm still going to invest a lot of money in open ai the deal hasn't fallen apart uh but i don't know i mean opening i posted this on their website in september so it's partly on them for boosting everyone's expectations that this was going to happen i guess so i see this conversation with the ce going something like this and he says well you know what we didn't say no take backsies so yeah we did say a hundred billion but we didn't say no take backsies so it's going to be something less than$100 billion.

21:23See, what I did there is that I still said$100 billion, but I said less than. So the words were true if you just don't think about it that much. That's kind of how I feel this is. It's a lesson in paying attention to how these companies write this stuff, right? Because they have a vested interest in the moment of grabbing a headline for whatever reason. Open AI might have been trying to get other investors to move off the ledge and invest, and showing nvidia was going to do 100 billion dollars is enough of a shove uh but nvidia is like well you know we're not sure that's going to happen we want it to happen but it might not happen you know so that's how this stuff this how this stuff goes and a lot of times it ends up being exactly what they said it was going to be the letter of intent is is a letter of intent it does have some legal aspect to it which is why huang is out there saying like no we're going to invest in open ai we haven't lost confidence in open ai just might not be 100 billion dollars that's just not a tenth of a trillion dollars.

22:21Flat Panels HD reported late last week that LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels. LG Display is part of LG that makes display panels for all kinds of TV makers, not just its own. LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs. TCL released its last 8K LCD TV in 2021. Sony discontinued its 8K TV in April. 8K panels have never come down in cost, never encouraged content development, and arguably never overcame the fact that in most situations, I should say, the human eye doesn't benefit from the extra resolution. So, you know, I actually went out and looked when I knew we were going to be talking about this story.

22:59These TVs cost double to three times what their counterparts that look exactly and sound exactly like they sound. And if you are an untrained person, could never tell that you're looking at a 4K as compared to an 8K television. Yeah. I think when I look at this, I've looked at the cycle of going to 720, from 720 to 1080, from 1080 to 4K and HDR. And every time it starts the same, the panels are much more expensive. There's no content for them. And they look great. That's the big difference with 8K. The panels are expensive. There's no content for them. Those are problems you could overcome, you know, if they looked great.

23:46And I don't think that people didn't think they looked great. It's just that people didn't look at them and say, wow, that's an improvement. They said, so I have to stand closer than a meter away to be able to tell that it looks great. Like, I don't need to be standing that close to my TV most of the time. So it just, I think we hit the limit. We've found that 4K is the resolution we need. Kind of like we found, you know, two to three gigahertz for a processor is most of the time what we need. It's other things that help improve your computer. 4K is probably enough resolution for most uses. It's other things like HDR and micro RGB technology and contrast that are going to sell TVs.

24:26And I'm sure 8K technology will have a place in certain niche situations. I don't think it's a useless technology, but it is not the thing that's going to sell you a new TV. Until they start doing eye transplants with us and Eagles. You know what? Maybe, maybe that's just not a need for this. So I was having a conversation about this actually. And it was like, you know, I thought I said something clever. It's like, I just got a brand new microphone that was first built in the 1960s. And why am I using a, you know, a microphone that I literally could have bought 10 years before I was born. Well, because people don't sound different than they sounded 50, 60 years ago.

25:04They still sound the same. And if you still sound the same, this microphone is completely capable of picking up the full range of people's voices. So do we need to make something new to make it sound like this already sounds? If it's one of the better sounding mics that we have that we have created? The answer is no. And I think that that's kind of where we're getting to with televisions. If you can continue to put technology into them, but if the technology doesn't benefit a better experience for the person paying for it. so i'm paying you three times as much to unless i am literally getting a chair and plopping it right down in the middle of my uh you know of my living room not where i normally sit but right up on it where i can actually see the the pixel density at the pixel density difference then this doesn't make any sense and yeah it's like that that's why i'm paying more it's like no well how about i just don't do that and i just sit back where i'm comfortable and i can't tell the difference maybe i get better sound maybe i get some ambient lighting or something and i spend the money on that, not just on technology that I can't actually perceive a difference in.

26:03Or, you know, like we're seeing, you know, micro RGBs with better black levels and power efficiency and all that. That's the kind of thing that's going to make a difference. If you are one of the niche uses, I'm curious if you're in a business or an industry where you're like, actually, AK displays would make a difference for us because dot, dot, dot. I'm curious to hear about it. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Folks, if you want honest reviews from people actually bought and lived with tech uh it's hard to find uh they're either somebody on the internet which you may or may not trust uh or us sarah lane hosts a weekly look at tech she and others have spent months living with because they needed it it's called live with it we recently had patrick norton talking about headphones roger talking about his wise cameras his smart cameras uh eileen uh talking about accidentally purchasing the iphone pro max and then sticking with it and and trying to realize, is this too big?

26:55Check it all out wherever fine podcasts are sold or traded or watch it at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

27:05All right, let's finish with some quick headlines that are just good to know. Kind of stuff might make you look smart. PGY Tech, which makes telephoto extender lenses for Oppo and Vivo phones, has launched a Kickstarter for a version meant for iPhones called the RetroVa Vintage Imaging Kit. The winter storms in the U.S. have subsided, and TikTok says that the power outages affecting its Oracle-run data centers have also subsided. TikTok says its U.S. service is now back to normal. So now if you notice something weird, it's not because of the data center power outage. And yet at Web Summit Qatar, the founder of TikTok Alternative Upscrolled said, its platform has gained 2.5 million users globally in the last few days.

27:49What a coincidence. Indonesia has followed Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting the ban on XAI's Grok chat bot after the platform outlined concrete steps for service improvements and the prevention of misuse, in the opinion of Indonesia. Apple has changed the ordering flow for MacBooks to reflect how ordering iPads and iPhone works, where you choose each feature like screen size, storage, and chip speed rather than selecting a pre-configured model and then adjusting it. Yeah, it's nice to just have it all work the same way. I'm in support of that. EV maker BYD announced lower than expected sales as domestic subsidies were reduced.

28:26Android authority discovered a Google Play listing for desktop camera app by Google, which seems like a version of the Google Pixel app meant for Google's forthcoming aluminum OS. More aluminum tips trickling out. A few interesting reads to tell you about the New York Times details the tension between China's AI companies trying to move fast and take the lead in products while also complying with multiple domestic regulations on what their products can and can't do and how they should operate. Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes that Taiwan passed China in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index for the first time since July 2007, driven by the importance of TSMC and the other companies making chips for data centers.

29:08Yeah. Taiwan was higher on this index than China when the original iPhone was a month old. I don't know if that helps set the perspective at all. Well, folks, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Kiwi Graham has some advice for Apple about their foldables. Yeah, Graham wrote, way back when the iPhones first became available, justifying the expense included the fact that it replaced three of my tech gadgets, Nokia phone, Palm Pilot, and iPod. Now in 2026, I have two gadgets for which the replacement cycle converges. Every three years for my iPhone and every five years for my iPad Air, which I use constantly for taking and reviewing client notes via Notability and Apple Pencil.

29:54So it may be that the price of an iPhone that unfolds to the size of a notepad could be justifiable, but But in my use case, it would have to include Apple Pencil functionality in some manner. I suspect that this requirement might not be satisfied, but I'll cross my fingers. Yeah, that would be kind of awesome. We don't see that on all of the Samsung foldables where you can actually use a Samsung stylus on it. And that's one of the big pieces of consternation folks with that. Hey, if it's a tablet, let me use it like a tablet. So it'll be interesting to see if that is actually something that comes to the foldable iPad.

30:29Yeah, with Kiwi Graham, though, that would be a big advantage and sway a lot of folks to use it. Well, folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Thanks to Kiwi Graham for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business, folks. Thanks for subscribing. There's paid subscriptions that get you rid of your ads at DTNS.substack.com and Patreon.com slash DTNS.

31:02the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program