India Blocks WhatsApp Usernames - DTNS 5302

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0:57Huyen Tue Dao: Technology at Capital One.

1:11Huyen Tue Dao: This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 2nd, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and help each other understand. today dr nikki joins us to give her take on claude science and india blocks whatsapp's plan to let you use a username instead of a phone number oh india i'm todd merritt i'm windward now let's start with what you need to know with that big story so you know that cool thing uh where whatsapp was going to let you use a username so you can start conversations without having to give somebody your phone number uh for your messaging account kind of like most messaging services do, where you just give a username?

1:52Huyen Tue Dao: Well, India doesn't like that. And India is WhatsApp's biggest market with more than 850 million users. So Meta has to at least listen. India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology sent a letter to WhatsApp ordering it not to launch the username project, quote, until the consultation on this point is achieved to the satisfaction of the government. In other words, to make us happy, don't launch those usernames. Meta has three days to respond to explain itself. And the government says the reason it's asking this is it's worried about impersonation, identity spoofing, including the impersonation of individuals and public authorities, financial institutions, government agencies, and also express concern over fraud and the potential for criminals to hide behind usernames.

2:41Huyen Tue Dao: I guess an example would be like, I could say I'm cricketer Verat Kohli, but spell the last name K-O-L-I in my username, not K-O-H-L-I, and then try to pretend like, you know, I need you to subscribe to my cricket magazine or I'm going to sell you game-worn jerseys or something. meta says it has reserved usernames resembling those of public figures government entities and verified accounts to reduce the chance of impersonation they're like we're already on this also noted that you have to know the exact username of someone in order to contact them users still need to use a phone number to sign up so it's not like you can just get a whatsapp account without a phone number and the system will limit how many new people an account can contact blocking repeated attempts to guess usernames that cuts down on spam however this is similar to india's relationship with telegram now telegram has a much smaller market share in india but india blocked telegram in part because of how username-based contact and hidden phone numbers made it harder for law enforcement to track sellers of leaked medical entrance exams so some people think this tracks one-to-one when but uh it is it is a big roadblock for whatsapp wanting to roll out usernames for folks.

3:59That is very true. And I mean, I think when I first heard about this, I'm like, why? Why can't I have my username? But to be fair, and maybe this is something that we accept with our everyday, is, you know, the whatever, the baseline threshold of impersonation and, you know, slightly off accounts, your Prado versus your Prada bag that we do get online. And it is a source of issues, whether that's kind of more benign, you know, weird internet clout issues or actual, you know, more kind of more nefarious and more harmful personal identity, personal identity, like, sorry, not even identity theft, but like harmful, you know, harmful effects of impersonation.

4:38So I don't hate that there, I do not hate that this was brought up. But I honestly don't know what the resolution could be. Because just because I also, again, the idea that of having reserved usernames for public figures is not a bad one. I just don't see how it could possibly be exhaustive enough to, I don't know, overcome this initial statement of concerns.

5:02Huyen Tue Dao: I don't know. I look at all the other services that use usernames that have dealt with this exact problem. And I think the mechanics of it aren't the tripping point. You can come up with a pretty exhaustive list and you can have adaptable lists these days to kind of look at the pattern of behavior. And don't forget, you also have to use a phone number to sign up. So there is a limit on how many accounts you can create, unlike a lot of other messaging services where you could just, you know, try to create unlimited accounts and they would have to do other anti-spam measures to stop fast account creation.

5:39Huyen Tue Dao: So I don't think this is an unsolvable problem at all. In fact, it's a problem that has mostly been solved. I think what's tripping India up is it's a change of expectation. So in other words, you're used to WhatsApp not having usernames. And so you've kind of come to rely on that to mean like, well, it's harder for someone to fool me because there is no username. It's just a phone number. But you still have names, right? And you still need a phone number to sign up. So to me, it's like, well, is the username really that big of a deal? Or is it just that India is not used to this and saying, well, hold on, let's get comfortable with the idea that there could just be a username.

6:22Huyen Tue Dao: Because again, if you didn't have to have the phone number to sign up, then I have a few more concerns, but it's like, well, it's honestly not that different than right now when someone named Polly32 contacts me on WhatsApp. There's a phone number attached to that, but I don't know what it is. It's just that we both had to use our phone numbers to create the account. I think that's really fair. And I, I, the note that some of the measures they put in place, like the limits on how many people, a new person can contact and the blocking does help a lot. And I, I don't disagree with you. Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree with you.

6:58I just, yeah, I, I can see what you're saying, India, but I don't, I, I also just want to say, I don't necessarily think this is, if it was up to me, which is not, it wouldn't be a blocker, will say um but it is it is it is something and and maybe there's i i don't disagree there's something to the fact that yeah maybe this is a different way of handling and to be fair the probably the most used or most widely used messaging app uh across like is that true is that still true i mean what's it was probably like the most i mean wechat is is also widely used but

7:33Huyen Tue Dao: only in mainland china so it's close but it doesn't have the spread that whatsapp has worldwide Yeah. Well, I'm kind of curious. Maybe this is just their chance to kind of, I don't know, have a discussion before. I suspect that India wants more control over information in its country all the time, which is another reason that it was overdoing it when it blocked all of Telegram for everybody in order to catch a few fraudsters. That seems to be a symptom of Modi's government there. It seems to be, well, not a symptom. It is a tactic. It is a common tactic. And so I imagine this is more of a negotiation of like, how much more can we rest from Meta to get them to cooperate with law enforcement and give the government access to information that it doesn't have now?

8:20Well, I guess we'll have to see how it shakes out. And, you know, I've already reserved my username. Me too. I'll just be waiting.

8:27Huyen Tue Dao: I'll just be waiting. Well, DTNS, we want to take time to thank our listeners because we are made possible by you. Ooh, so let's take time to thank Pat, Mike Cortez, Bill Russell, and Jeremy Matthews.

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9:45Huyen Tue Dao: Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping, Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trading value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

10:17Huyen Tue Dao: All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. All right, well, we got lots of Apple news today. So Tom thought it would be fun to make the host of Android Faithful read it. Well, Counterpoint Research says Apple's plans to build a foldable will increase shipments of foldables, of foldable panels rather, by 24 % this year. China's BOE remains the market's biggest supplier of foldable panels, followed by Samsung Display, Visionox, and TCL. But Samsung should get a boost since it's assumed Apple is using Samsung Display panels in its foldable. Nikkei Asia says Apple has raised its order for foldables to 10 million, up from a previous forecast of 7 to 8 million.

10:59Apple is expected to announce new iPhone Pros along with the foldable, which might be called iPhone Ultra in September. I am still very sad that the rumors don't have it being called the iFoldable, but that's just my opinion. The standard iPhones and a new iPhone Air would be announced next spring. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple will also introduce a redesigned entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro, codenamed K104 early next year, that will follow the new touchscreen MacBook Pros expected to come by the end of this year.

11:33Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, splitting up the iPhone announcement is going to be a big deal. That's been rumored by Gurman for a while. So if that happens, that'll be new. A lot of this stuff is not new. There's also a bunch of like, there's new iPads coming with better specs. It's like, yeah, they do that all the time. They have a fall announcement and they have a spring announcement. The big news here is they might not do all the iPhones in the fall announcement anymore. They might move the base models to the spring. That's interesting. We might be getting an Air. That's interesting. Redesign MacBook Pro, kind of interesting.

12:02Huyen Tue Dao: But the foldable is the big news, right? It's like, oh, it does look like the foldable is going to come out in September. It looks like Apple is bullish on its sales, even at an eye-watering$2 ,500, which is the price that has been tossed around out there. But yeah, people are going to want to have the first iFoldable. I will join you in the quest to call it that. And I'm not shocked by any of that. Most of this is not terribly shocking news or anything, but interesting to know ahead of time. Yeah, I'm really curious about the reception to the iFoldable. I mean,$2 ,500 is significantly more than I'd say the ballpark, what it used to be was$1 ,800 for foldables for a long time, regardless of what manufacturer was fund.

12:51That seemed to be like the price point that people were hovering around. So$2 ,500 is a bit more, but we also are in Ramageddon and all kinds of other things. So I'd be curious. I'm really curious to see the uptake on this as a foldable fan. And in regards to splitting it, I'm really curious whether this affects them at all. I think that there is, just again, as one of the co-hosts of Android Faithful, there is an interesting thing that has happened with, say, the Pixel lines, right? Because they do the Pixel series in, what is it, August, September, October, somewhere along those lines. But then they do the Pixel A series some amount of months later.

13:28And that does for, I think, average consumers create a weird tension, right? because especially as for, and this is just on the Pixel side, y 'all can jump in and let me know on the iPhone side, but that the base model Pixel has come a lot closer to the Pixel A, right? So it becomes a really weird kind of decision that people have to make on whether they're going to, and I guess they have less context, especially given that there's like a holiday in between on which model they want to pick. And it almost feels like kind of broadly that it causes a little too much confusion or cannibalization for Google on the Pixel side.

14:05That's just kind of what I think the opinion we've had on the Android side for a little bit. I'm not saying that this is going to happen to iPhone. I'm just kind of curious when you kind of split announcements like this, people's buying habits and trends. It's all very like habitualized now given how many years we've had smartphones. So I'm just really curious like how that might affect buying and people's decision making.

14:26Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I think Apple historically doesn't care if it cannibalizes itself. It's like, great, we won. You decided to buy an iPhone instead of an iPhone? Awesome. We're cool with that. But I think it is an interesting move to take those base models and put them in the bargain announcement. That's usually when you would get the SE, you know, or the iPhone Lite, you know, those kinds of things. So it's a way of making those feel more affordable, making those become the more affordable model. And maybe it's a way to reduce the creep in models. Like there used to be an iPhone. Then there was an iPhone Pro and a regular.

15:06Huyen Tue Dao: Now there's like five different models of iPhone and we're going to add another one with the foldable. So I could see Apple having a strategy of like base model iPhones are now the bargain iPhones. Pros are the next level up and the ultra, the foldable is the flagship going forward. That might be the way they're thinking about it. So in the wake of Anthropics fight with the U.S. government over Mythos and Fable 5, a lot of people are calling for some clarity on U.S. regulation on these kinds of models. And at this point, the U.S. has basically an executive order that reads like a suggestion, as well as the nebulous reality of, you know, you don't want to upset someone in the government so much that they slap export controls on your model.

15:46Huyen Tue Dao: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has published a piece in the Financial Times calling for a regulatory framework that's international. Altman proposes an international forum, U.S.-led, of course, that establishes standards, provides expert and impartial analysis of capabilities and risks, and then makes that tech available to nations that participate in the forum and follow its rules. He compares the idea to similar standards, bodies that govern things like aviation or nuclear energy. Meanwhile, the Financial Times also reports that the U.S. government is working with tech companies in the U.S. for U.S. voluntary standards on how new models get released in the country.

16:27Huyen Tue Dao: It would set standards and define benchmarks. That's the big thing we don't have right now for advanced models and then have a process for how access is granted. So it doesn't put advanced technology into the hands of adversaries, but doesn't keep them from rolling out to the companies and people who need them, including the U.S. government. And this would not be a licensing regime. It would just be a voluntary like we're going to run it by you cool if we give it access this way great financial times also reports that altman has suggested that all companies developing models should give the u.s government a five percent stake in their company for use in a sovereign wealth fund this is something that altman has floated out there before it's similar to what alaska does with oil and mineral royalties and it's similar to what intel did when it gave the u.s government a 10 percent stake.

17:15Huyen Tue Dao: It's also similar to a practice in China where domestic companies regularly give that government a stake as well. Interesting. The rush to form structure around the chaos and storm and drang that is our current generation of AI models. Yeah. There's not much to say here until we see something roll out. The Altman thing is not a new idea. I think it's an intriguing idea. I think there are ways it could be set up that I wouldn't mind, especially if it sends me a check. And there are ways that it could be set up that I would hate because it would provide undue influence and lobbying benefits where I don't think they're deserved.

17:53Huyen Tue Dao: But right now, it's just an idea. It's just a thing being thrown out there. Just throw out some thoughts and feelings, y 'all. Just asking questions. Yeah. Hey, folks, I want to point out that new patron perks are here. We have new benefits, including something called the Progress Bar at the top patron level, where I'll just once a quarter sit down and have a drink and you can join me and we'll just chat over the Internet about whatever you want to talk about. If you like the idea of that or the producer's room where you get more of an inside look from us about how the show works. Become a patron.

18:32Huyen Tue Dao: And from now until July 31st, if you use the code experiment, new patrons get 26 % off their first pledge. 26 for 2026. Use the code experiment and check out the new tiers at patreon.com slash DTNS.

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19:24Huyen Tue Dao: Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trading value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

19:56Huyen Tue Dao: All right, let's get some quick headlines that are good to know into your brain. Well, the Verge sources say Microsoft is working on a disk-to-digital plan that would give owners of physical games a digital copy as well. The internal tests are for some Xbox One games. Yeah, this is the step before they decide to stop making physical copies the way Sony did. uh sustainability reports indicate that amazon's greenhouse gas emissions rose 16 percent in 2025 while google's rose 18 percent and of course both of those driven in large part by the operation of data centers but i think in a larger part by the construction of them uh they they count like cement creation and all of that uh amazon still has a goal of reaching net zero by 2040 and google is targeting the same by 2030.

20:45Well, Cloudflare says that after September 15th, it will block crawlers used for training models or operating agents from accessing any page with advertising unless an owner has opted into allowing them. Cloudflare also operates a program where publishers can allow crawlers that participate in Cloudflare's program that pays for the privilege.

21:07Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, so putting the leverage in the publisher's side. A United Launch Alliance rocket has brought a few more Amazon LEO satellites into orbit, giving that satellite-based internet service 390 of them, which is now enough that it could begin operation and start providing internet service. Well, the information sources say Anthropic is talking to Samsung about making a custom chip. Anthropic currently uses chips from Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA. I feel like this pairing of like AI model makers and chip makers is like some interesting speed dating event. Everybody wants to make their own chips. EV sales have begun to rise again.

21:48Huyen Tue Dao: Tesla delivered 120 ,000 more vehicles than they did in Q1. Xiaomi had its third consecutive month of more than 30 ,000 deliveries of its EVs. And BYD posted 403 ,472 sales in June, which is up 5.46 % on the year. C.W. Basden noted in our subreddit that lawyers filed a class action lawsuit in California accusing Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of colluding to fix the price of memory chips. Yep, when prices go up, you usually see that kind of class action lawsuit. Microsoft has committed 6 ,000 engineers and a bunch of money to a new business called Microsoft Frontier that will send those engineers into companies to help them deploy Microsoft's AI products.

22:35And finally, at the first Africa Cloud Summit in Johannesburg, Google announced it had spent more than$1 billion investing in new infrastructure on the continent, passing its five -year goal. Among the examples are an AI lab in Ghana that pairs startups with Google scientists and early access to models. Another effort trains creators in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone on using tech for storytelling.

23:03Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, some good efforts going on there and a lot of startup investment as well. Those are the essentials for today, but let's dive a little deeper, shall we? Well, this week, Anthropic introduced Claude Science, which builds on October's launch of Claude for Life Sciences to act as a sort of workbench interface for scientists to make better use of Claude. So we asked Dr. Nikki to join us to give us the scientific perspective. Hello. I reserved my WhatsApp username while you guys were doing the quick. Oh, good. See? News you can use. Right in the middle of the show. Okay. So a few things to know about this Claude Science that we'll run through real quick so people are up to speed.

23:46Huyen Tue Dao: We did talk about it earlier this week, but it's the standard Claude model. The model itself is not tailored to science. It says it integrates more than 60 scientific databases, but Nikki, you were wondering which databases they meant, right? Yeah, I could not find their source. I assume they mean the general PubMed, Google Scholar, but I think they're also talking about generic apps as well. Ah, okay. There are some pre-built tools that they offer for specific fields. They mentioned genomics, protein structure, chemistry. Agentic, so that the main assistant can create its own sub-assistance, act as a project manager.

24:22Huyen Tue Dao: You can also create your own expert assistants, tuned to your research needs. There is a fact checker assistant that will double check the citations and calculations. This is not the fact checking that you should rely on, but it's just another layer of trying to stop it from hallucinating. It generates figures. They mentioned 3D protein and chemical structures, logs, code, and full message history so that you have easier reproducibility and can run locally on lab infrastructure. It doesn't have to run in the cloud. That way you're under full control of it. And you said that it connects to some tools you were familiar with.

24:59Yeah, it says it connects to Benchling, BioRender, and PubMed, and 10X Genomics, for example. Benchling is kind of like the Google Docs of science where, for example, in my lab, we'll store our protocols. And so like different students can do it online. I did this on paper when I was in the lab, but now my students don't want to write with pens anymore. BioRender is a figure maker so it has like it's clip art for scientists basically um so i think that's good it will help with the figures figures are bad uh right now like ai generated figures are not great but uh you guys brought me here to know where does the academy yeah yeah what what do not that you speak for all scientists but what's the yeah yeah what what do you what's the vibes uh the vibes right now for ai in general and i think this also specifically is that it's a bit of a mixed bag on one hand there's been a huge push uh for the last two years of federal funding to focus more on ai use ai in as many things as possible more grants funded towards ai but then they on like on a more minute scale if you submit a grant that has used ai in the writing it gets flagged for rejection so there's a little bit of like push and pull of like use it but don't use it um i know scientists personally that use it very generously whether that's in their writing or making workflows very little a very few people use it for image generation because it's just bad at that right now i know also people who are 100 against it there is no broad consensus um and the academy is slow to change i'm more on the against side but i am i will test it out once in a while to see like all right what are my students doing because they're using it for sure yeah yeah what

26:37Huyen Tue Dao: do you think of Claude Science? So from the examples that it gave, it gave the example of reading literature, checking literature reviews and summarizing them or finding references. These are the things that I would not recommend people would use it for because if you're in science, you're trying to build that knowledge set on your own. If you only read summaries, you're skipping the whole point. That's my personal opinion. But I found that when it when it is trying to pull these literature citations, it tends to pick the most cited works. So the most popular, let's say, cancer paper that has 500 citations instead of maybe the most recent and most relevant that has one citation.

27:17And it can still hallucinate details. So if I ask for a specific paper that's talking about this specific protein, and it's something that's really recent and maybe hasn't been studied too much, it'll hallucinate to me like, yes, this has this in it, and then I'll read it and it doesn't um that's a problem in general but i think this this can create this snowball effect of like if you only cite the most highly cited papers over and over you're missing stuff and that's a problem with academia already so it will just amplify that um i have a benefit so i'm not all anti uh it talks about generating um compliance documents and i think what this means is like highly structured documents where you already have a printed list of like this needs to be aerial 11 with small margins and have 12 bullet points on blah, blah, blah.

28:02It can help you at least get the framework with this right, but you still have to double check it. If your grant relies on it being generated and it's 0.12 and not 0.11 font and you get rejected because of that, that's a shame. So it also says, you know, regulatory compliance documents. That's something that I don't know if I would trust AI to do because if my lab gets shut down because I missed something about, you know, animal welfare or, you know, human ethics, that's you know you still have to go back and double check everything as far as i'm concerned for me this boils down to what skill set are you willing to give up to claude if you need claude to generate a hypothesis for your research which is the main thing they have in the video then you don't need to be doing research i'm sorry i mean you don't you don't think it's good for brainstorming even do you not for hypothesis generation yeah okay there's other parts where if you're the problem is if you're already a scientist you don't really need this i i get the impression that it's geared more towards industry if you're in the industry and you're like man i really would love a drug that targets x what does the research say about this give me a summary sure that makes sense okay if you're a scientist and i'm like i really should like to develop a drug targeted at x i need to know the literature by heart to make this advancement because ai can summarize and parse existing knowledge but not come up with new knowledge that being said of course you can use it to streamline uh like a pipeline or workflow i think they gave example of people doing that but in my line of work personally and i don't do that much computational work um i only see it as you're choosing which skills you don't really need anymore which which maybe i don't need to know how to make regulatory documents by heart um what do

29:45Huyen Tue Dao: guys think yeah I like what you said about it being more for industry scientists than research scientists I think that that's an interesting perspective to consider and maybe one that anthropic is fine with right because they're gonna get more money out of corporate than they are who is this for and who's gonna pay for it and I think industry has the money we're broke so I'm not paying for it yeah yeah when what do you think of this you know now now that you've taken in what Dr. Nicky says. Well, who is this for is something that gets said a lot, not just with AI, y 'all, but I think a lot of times when technology, especially technology companies, try to reach out and create specialized tools, this happens.

30:25Or even consumer tools. Who is this for is a question that gets asked a lot. And the fact that, and we've talked in the show how some of the most interesting and promising advancements are from tailored specialized models. This is the standard cloud model, which is also kind of ringing in my head. It's like, and again, I am not, so I am not an expert on LLMs, but a lot of the problems that I think a lot of us face are kind of just side effects of it being an LLM. Again, it's a problemistic, stochastic model. So things like you telling me that it tends to select most cited works versus most relevant.

30:58We have similar things happening like that, even with coding, because again, it's almost like that that that generation of new novel ideas and innovation seems to be um well from from here from your saying is like that's the whole that's your whole job really is to that's my job um and in a sense it also is a problem in my job because we are often being told well you should continue to use like architectures and patterns that already exist for a lot of programming that is the that is actually the best practice and good use case but we also often come up with new structures and new architectures and so we're running into this this idea of like does that mean that our our innovation or our embedding of patterns has to stop like and again it's like there there's a little bit of a give and take kind of again similar to what nikki is saying depending on what you're using it for and yeah what skill set do you want to give up um do we do we want to give up kind of continued innovation and refinement of like our best practices now for that productivity that we're being promised so it's weird i i would say that I'm not surprised.

32:02And again, it is a lot of times, and I say this with like empathy, that a lot of times when you are working on a platform, on a product that you as like, that is your specialty. Making the thing is your specialty, but you want to gear it towards people that use it in real life or to specialists that are using it in very pragmatic, very like specialized way. A lot of times there's a disconnect between the people that make the platform or tool and the people actually using it and that's just natural that is not there there is no bad intention there's not a lack of effort there it is just the the the the the effect of i don't i don't live in nikki's everyday life so i can't know 100 how she's going to use it i make my best guess i research i have experts come in but that can never that can never clearly encapsulate all of the use cases and and even like a single individual's like needs so add to that like you can't lump science into one tool like if you think about a chemist and an ecologist and those are two relatively close together sciences even nobody needs the same thing we're not doing the same workflow but i i want to see where we are in in like five to ten years with this of like i'm sure there are things that will help of like can you give me the summary of a budget i could do for this project i don't really want to do budgeting i'll use this as inspiration that might save me an hour fine but in terms of like I'll summarize the literature for you and give you a new hypothesis to work on I don't think that's useful it sounds cool to people who don't know how science works but like

33:32Huyen Tue Dao: that's not actually helpful so if you like yeah if you like this interplay of technology and science that Hoenn and Dr. Nicky have given us be sure to listen to experiment week starting Monday because these two did a bang up job with a pilot episode of a show that you're going to enjoy I I can tell you that as someone from the outside. Thank you both for doing that. I'm really looking forward to people hearing it. Yeah, check out Technical Tea on Monday. On Monday. And Dr. Nikki, thank you for popping in and joining us as well. Remind people where they can find you all the time. Always happy to be here.

34:06You can find me at NicoleAckermans.com. That's also my handle on Blue Sky. And as of this morning, my latest preprint came out. So the research is live. Goats do self-inflict brain injury from headbutting. Those goats. Not yet peer-reviewed, but I'm pretty confident. So go with that. Congrats.

34:24Huyen Tue Dao: That's awesome. Thank you. All right. Well, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Ryan relates his experience with a download-only game. Yes, Ryan wrote, The only game I ever purchased for the only computer I ever built to run Vista was Spore. I played it a little. I wish I had played it more. The game is still alive on the internet, sure, but I purchased it through Digital River. DR was dismantled through bankruptcy in 2025 and ceased operations in January this year. I could not tell you what email I bought Spore through, but with DR dead, it doesn't matter. I could not tell you if I had it backed up somewhere.

35:02Huyen Tue Dao: I certainly did not. But now I cannot play the game again because I never had the physical media. I would love to play Spore again. Rest in peace, Spore. Ryan at Minneapolis. Man, a tale as old as gamers on the internet. Yeah, obviously this is, we're all thinking about this a lot right now with GTA, 6 being digital only, as you mentioned, Sony, and we already mentioned before, Microsoft making moves. I can think of so many games that in my history as a gamer that I've wanted to go back to. And it is sad when in this way it's like the, what is it, the digital decay. Digital rot. Digital rot of art and products.

35:44uh this i can't help but think and this might not be exactly as relevant there was um was it the stop killing games movement it's it was a little bit different it wasn't like about digital versus um uh sorry physical copies but this idea of i think access uh and continued access ownership exactly um so yeah ryan i don't i it's i don't know um i are things beautiful because they're transient and we can no longer have them or oh dang it it's a beautiful or or hey it's a piece of code it should be able to run on something we should be able to enjoy things that also also back up your data no you know what that is fair we're all techie people here i mean that i'm not

36:31Huyen Tue Dao: i'm not victim shaming when i say that uh because i think i think ryan's right is that you know with the company bankrupt, it probably still couldn't play it. But just it's a nice reminder that, you know, it's always good to back up your data. Save things you love. All right. Well, what are you thinking about? Is it the transience of digital projects? Okay. Or something a little more happy? Regardless, we would love to hear your insights. Share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. We are all just dust in the wind, folks. Programming note. There is no show on Friday, July 3rd, because we celebrate the U.S.

37:05Huyen Tue Dao: holiday on Friday. We do have a weekend interview with Tanner Goodman talking about how he has been using AI in his job at a nuclear power plant, and it's all positive. That's coming Saturday. And then all next week is Experiment Week. We hand over the feed for folks to try out new show ideas, including the one I mentioned with Wen and Dr. Nikki on Monday. Big thanks to Dr. Nikki and Ryan for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. Use the code EXPERIMENT. Get 26 % off your first pledge. Patreon.com slash DTNS. See ya soon.

37:53Huyen Tue Dao: This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, and writer Tom Merritt. Host and writer Jason Howell. Co-host Sarah Lane. Co-host Rob Dunwood Co-host Wen Tui Dao Producer Anthony Lamos Producer Roger Chang Editor Hammond Chamberlain Editor Victor Bognot Contributing Producers Kevin Tech Noel Cow and Brandon Richards Science Correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans Social Media Producer and Moderator Zoe Detterding Our Mods Beatmaster, WSkottis1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, and J.D. Galloway Mod and Video Hosting by Dan Christensen Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters.

38:33Huyen Tue Dao: Art by Lynn Peralta. Acast ad support from Ali Gallo. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. Our guest this week was Tanner Goodman. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.

38:59The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.

39:05Huyen Tue Dao: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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