The iPhone 18 Ain’t Bad, It’s Just Big and Expensive - DTNS 5354

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2:56Jenn Cutter: This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. We tell you what you need to go, give you important context, and try our darndest to help each other understand these crazy tech times. Today, we've got some inside info on flock cameras, and we do mean from inside. We're also going to talk a whole bunch about the Apple iPhone 18 Pro reviews. Indeed. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. so yes all the reviews around the net are in for the iphone 18s and they are you're not going to believe this but they're really kind of positive shocker i know it's just unbelievable uh patrick holland at cnet has my favorite description of the 18 pro and pro max he called them uh heavy boys because obviously they've got their aluminum unibody design going on uh but he also kind of spins that into a positive, saying, quote, the heft reassures me, though, as the phones feel like they were built like tanks.

3:57Jenn Cutter: Big boys. I could show them. For all the shutterbugs out there, all the reviews I've read, Engadget, 9to5Mac, CNET and more, they all praise the auto settings, especially when it comes to low light and night photography. There's tons of examples out there, so you can see the difference. People have really gone all out in comparing all the photos from various models from the past five years. So you can really see where you're at if that's what you are interested in. And then the kind of consensus is from CNET, CNET, I don't know why I keep saying that wrong, but for CNET, they suggested if you've got an older phone that you're happy with, upgrade the battery rather than upgrade the whole phone if you're not a creative who's going to use all of the fancy features.

4:439to5Mac was very specific. They said that if you have a 17, there's very little reason to upgrade, but 16 and under users might want to actually consider it. And Engadget fell pretty much exactly in the exact same place there.

4:57Jenn Cutter: Yeah, honestly, I always expect iPhones to be reviewed well, but they are often more critical than this. There is, especially when there, when it's a, uh, sort of a talk is a, is it the talk? That's the less, uh, evolute revolutionary upgrade or is it the tick? I think it's the tick is the one where you change a lot and the talk in the tick tock settings. Anyway, this is not a big change over the 17. Uh, and yet these reviews are incredibly positive. And I think that's because this is a mature form factor and Apple didn't take away anything that works well. the things they added seem to improve things, according to these reviewers.

5:38Jenn Cutter: So I thought it was interesting to see CNET saying like, you know, if you've got a 14 upgrade, anybody else just replace your battery. Whereas most people say 16. I feel like the 16 is, I have a 16 and it's still fine. Like I wouldn't need to upgrade it if I wasn't doing the show. So I'm kind of leaning more towards the CNET side, especially given what I saw of these reviews here. Did you, any of your spidey senses get activated reading this? Do you feel anybody's inside the bubble too much? No, like because of the reserve suggestions to upgrade under like the very specific circumstances, I really like that everyone brought up the battery life.

6:17They're saying like, listen, the new battery, pretty fantastic. People testing it, test it really heavily. And they're like, yeah, I had to charge it like three times in a week. And that was it. And I was using this thing like 12 hours a day.

6:29Jenn Cutter: Oh, I love Joanna Stern's poke the pickle battery test. Made a dedicated app to poke the pickle as a, here's how I'm going to test all the phones exactly the same way. Yeah, that's good stuff. So honestly, this probably will be skipped by a lot of outlets because it's so uncontroversial. But I think that's one of the things that made us pick it as the big story today is, hey, everybody's talking about the foldable. Don't forget the 18. You may not need to upgrade to it, but if you are in the market for a new phone, whether you're coming from Android or another iOS phone, look at this. It is a solid phone if you can afford it.

7:11Jenn Cutter: That is the one universal criticism that I saw on every review is it's expensive. Yeah. Like if I was still on the 11, I would have like thrown my money. But because I had to upgrade earlier this year there's like i upgraded to like a 16 so it's not like a full fancy thing but yeah uh for me despite using the camera as much as i do and using it for video and stuff like i love the new features i love the tracking i was like wait this thing is good enough that i can put it on a tripod on the bench behind glass and film myself playing hockey because it'll actually follow me that's pretty great without having to buy a dedicated sports camera I can't quite justify that as buying a whole new phone just now.

7:52Jenn Cutter: Yeah, and it really shines a light on all of the financing options, whether you're doing it through a carrier or with the Apple card or taking advantage of the new lease. Yeah, Americans have a lot of options that way. Yeah. Do you not have the – I know you don't have the lease, but do you not have the payment options through the cards or the carriers? There are some through the carriers, but as Canada remains three telecom companies in a trench coat, A lot of people choose to just buy them outright. Yeah. And that has always been my preferred way to do it until these prices got so big, right?

8:26Jenn Cutter: Yeah. And then it becomes something where you're like, maybe. Buy direct from Apple because then I get my AppleCare in it and just deal directly with them. There's no middleman. I have luckily never actually had to cash that in. So I don't know how effective AppleCare is in here. But yeah, for my safety. I had to cash it in on my 16. and it was great. I cracked the screen. I sent it to them. Did you do it just all over the internet? I did it all over the internet. They sent me a box. They actually sent me the new phone and a box to send my old phone back in. So I transferred everything over, sent the one with the broken screen, done and done.

9:03Jenn Cutter: It was great. That's pretty nice. Yeah, because I got my watch. Like the watch is the thing I'm going to be waiting for the most reviews on because that one I am likely to upgrade because I have an eight, which just got kind of end-alifed. But yeah, for the watch, I really made sure to go through all the AppleCare stuff. I was like, listen, I'm going to wear this thing on the ice. I'm going to get hit. What happens when this thing shatters? They're like, okay, we're going to charge you for the new unit and send that to you at the same time we're waiting for you to send the old one back. And then we will take that charge off.

9:33And I'm like, okay, fine. I can live with a hold.

9:36Jenn Cutter: That's not, yeah, it was a hold. That's right. They put a hold, but they didn't charge. And then once they got the new unit, then the hold went away. So it was reducing my ability to purchase things, which, you know, I wasn't going to hit that limit anyway. It was pretty fair. I'm sure that it's attempted to be scammed a lot. So I get it. But I haven't used it yet. Yeah, but they didn't actually charge. I think that's important for people. It is a hold, not a charge. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, these overall positive reviews on the 18. I guess the other thing to mention is Siri is still in beta. Nobody was raving about Siri AI.

10:10Jenn Cutter: Everybody agrees that it's better than it was, but it's still not there yet. Yeah, I think like the beta is getting positive reviews. I think they're still holding something back for the final release because they're going to need a really big push when this is out to say, finally, we are delivering on the things we have promised for the last two and a half phones. Yeah. And there are things that the 18 can do that the older phones cannot just because of the processing power and things like that. But these reviewers did not seem to find that to be something to crow about. But reduced typos is nice.

10:41I'm still waiting for, I want to fix for spellcheck. I think spellcheck has lost its mind in the last 12 to 18 months. So that's what I'm waiting for.

10:49Jenn Cutter: Yeah, I can never decide how much is spellcheck and how much is my increasingly degrading ability to type. But it's a battle to see which is worse for me. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thank you to WhatTheIf, Paul Boyer, D. Laser, and Peruborg. Yay! Thank you, patrons. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files, and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step.

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12:26Jenn Cutter: 20 minutes after every call decoding my own shorthand, figuring out who owed me what. Now the notes are just done. Organized action items pulled out before I've even closed my laptop. You get better notes in one place and you get to actually stay present instead of typing the whole time. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free. Head to granola.ai slash dailytech. That's granola.ai slash dailytech to get your time back. Go to granola.ai slash dailytech and try it on your next call.

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13:52Jenn Cutter: Wayfair, every style, every home. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save HydroJug. So we engineered The Traveler, a leak-proof, cup holder-friendly tumbler. Amazon Ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95 % of all of our sales. Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

14:27Jenn Cutter: There is more to talk about today, so let's get to the briefs. 404 Media and Wired report on data shared with them by hackers who copied the data from a Flock camera. They copied the camera's storage, accessed its Android operating system, and recovered an encryption key in one partition that they used to unlock another section where they could access vehicle detection files, including videos and stills. It runs on a mid-range phone-style processor and uses about 20 flock apps to handle things like motion detection, object classification, updates, and uploads. Like most current computer vision software, it can detect people, vehicle, stickers, and other graphics like patches.

15:12Those details are stored along with license plate numbers. Identities are labeled like Person 0.53 and Vehicle 0.90 and did not perform any facial recognition. The actual reading of plate numbers and identification of things like make, model, and color happen off the camera on Flock's servers. And the camera they found had about 21 days worth of data.

15:37Jenn Cutter: Listen, Flock has talked about the fact that this encryption key is on the device by saying like, well, you have to have physical access to the device to be able to get it. And it's like these hackers said, okay. Great, we can do that. We know where the camera is. So I think there needs to be a better way to safeguard this information. Not that we're going to have a massive number of people running around pulling these things down and stealing my information, but it's just not a great security practice as it has been shown. Otherwise, nothing in here is particularly surprising for me. I think there's a little more identification happening on the device than I expected.

16:12Jenn Cutter: I thought more of it would be happening in the cloud. And I think some people think it's just license plate detection. And it's good to know that, no, they're tracking objects, whether that's a person or whether that's a car. But I also think it's important to emphasize they are not tracking identities here. They are just saying that seems to be the same car. So we're going to call it vehicle 0.9. The controversy comes once it does get into the cloud. If police departments use that data with other data they have access to, they can de-anonymize that. Not that this is anonymous necessarily, but it's not identifying the car at that point.

16:50Jenn Cutter: But they can take the license plate number and they can say, oh, well, that car belongs to this person. And that's where the debate comes about. Like, yeah, if you're trying to catch a criminal, maybe I want you to be able to do that. But do I want you to be able to do that to every car driving down the street, whether it's innocent or not? Yeah. Like, I don't think anyone that I know of in the past has ever complained, oh, gas stations are recording my vehicle every time I pull up and use the pump. And it's like, well, yeah, they don't want to get ripped off. And I feel like that is a fair exchange of services.

17:18I've never really had problems with these cameras in, say, parking lots. Also, as a woman alone at night, I would like to think, hey, maybe someone will notice something if something goes wrong. But yeah, I don't want them on every street corner tracking all of this stuff. But my problem still comes not necessarily from the camera, even though that is part of it. It's from the people with access to it doing things that they shouldn't do. It's always the humans. And the police side of things. It's like, please stop looking up your ex-girlfriends, guys. Come on.

17:47Jenn Cutter: Yeah. And I think that kind of, we've talked about that before on the show is the auditing of who has access and how that access is used has been increased since a lot of those stories came out. And I think that's something that people need to know. And if they're concerned about this, you know, talk to your local police department, talk to your local council members to make sure that that stuff is in place if they're using these. I don't advocate knee-jerk get rid of them because I think they can be used responsibly. And the problem is people say, yeah, but they're not being used responsibly and there's no chance of them being used responsibly.

18:23Jenn Cutter: And then it becomes a whole other conversation about trust in your government and your local officials. A lot of people probably are even already thinking of the stories of people in medical fields looking at people that they are not necessarily treating. In the States, there's all kinds of violations about that all over. It doesn't matter whether it's the Canadian health services or in the UK and elsewhere. People with access to systems like this do occasionally abuse them. It's not necessarily that everybody is, that it is a possibility. And yeah, let's fix those audits, please. I think that's a really, really good point, is this is not unique to the technology.

19:04Jenn Cutter: Again, it's the humans. and the idea that we could somehow stop humans from trying to do those sorts of things is a lost cause. People are going, there are going to be people try to take advantage of the systems they have access to. So the question isn't get rid of systems or the answer isn't get rid of systems. The question is, how do we prevent that? How do we limit it? How do we catch the people when they do it and make sure that it is something that causes the least amount of damage? And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that idea, but that's all of society. Everything we do has people who are bad actors.

19:42Jenn Cutter: Can you keep those bad actors limited to as close to zero impact as possible? Lots of folks, speaking of keeping bad impacts as close to zero as possible, lots of folks scrambling to make their statements on AI safety this week. Here's a roundup of safety news as of today, Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously has resisted calls for pacing the development of frontier models, mostly because he's behind and so he would not want to slow down. Today now saying Meta delayed shipping news for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would.

20:24Jenn Cutter: We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. It's not my favorite way of phrasing that. Like, we didn't do what you guys are doing. But I think it's fair to say, like, yes, every company should take responsibility for their own products. He also wrote that engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. Honestly, kind of an uncontroversial thing to say. It's all a matter of the details. Jensen Huang, also resisting calls for regulation, said Tuesday that safety is paramount. In a lot of ways, it's job one. However, safety is an engineering problem.

21:03Jenn Cutter: In other words, saying it's not a policy, it's not a government policy problem. Google DeepMind co-founder and current chief AGI scientist there has launched the DeepMind Institute. The point of that organization will be to explore the implications of potential systems that can exhibit all the cognitive capabilities of a human brain. So trying to get ahead of that problem. It's not something we have now, but saying, if we start to see a development of that, what do we do? And Microsoft's head of AI, Mustafa Salaman, also a co-founder of DeepMind, published an essay on Wednesday arguing that frontier models cannot become conscious and specifically criticized Anthropic for infusing its models with human-like characteristics, which he believes make them more likely to go rogue.

21:48Jenn Cutter: He says trying to make them feel like humans is bad because then they do things that are human-like, even though they aren't conscious. It's a very nuanced take on this, but an important one if you want to look into it. Reuters reports that independent researcher Jonas Wiedermann Miller discovered evidence last week that open AI agents compromised two hugging face user accounts as early as May 13th. That's two months before the July brief that we have been talking about previously. The agents appeared to use the access to map the network. They might've been planning to infiltrate it, but no breach was detected at that point.

22:25Jenn Cutter: OpenAI said it has disclosed this incident privately to Hugging Face. And Sayesh Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan wrote on their AI as Normal Tech blog, an in-depth look at the response of the industry to these loss of control incidents like at Hugging Face. They think that these incidents are best viewed as a security story and advocate a layered approach to securing agents beyond just alignment. Everyone talks about, oh, let's make sure the agent is aligned with human goals. And that's important. They say that's one layer, but you should also have control of the agents, downstream defense, and resilience.

23:04Jenn Cutter: So basically, they are advocating for applying defense in depth to your own agents when testing them. I think this actually nicely lays out two of the big discussions happening that get blurred together, Jen, which is what do we do in the case that we get some kind of human-like intelligence or recursive self-improvement in the future? Let's prepare for that ahead of time. And the other is what these folks here at AI as normal tech are saying, like, what do we do about now? What do we do? Let's secure things now with the agents we have now so that they aren't breaking into things. I said what feels like nine billion years ago and still feel like when it comes to the regulation thing, we're going to end up with at least some sort of intermediate step, like for video games, the ESRB, where it's like, yeah, we're going to have this council and we're going to regulate ourselves.

23:57We're going to send everything there first. And then if that doesn't work, I think more governments are going to step in as they are currently trying to step in to various degrees when China came out and said some stuff. And then the United States was like, no, no, no, we're not doing that. But that's when you're getting into the nation-level security stuff. I really like the points that the AI is normal tech mentioned, as you did, because we've talked about this before in terms of sandboxing. It's like, what are you guys running in your sandbox that you're not running this slow enough as a test to see each step as it happens first.

24:31And then you can run it fast later. But your first things for your agents before even your trusted people have access to it should be done as slow and as careful as possible. It's like when you have a puppy, that puppy is going to find ways out of that fence.

24:44Jenn Cutter: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of this is backseat driving, frankly, where people after the fact are going, well, I never would have made that mistake. And I think some of it is moving faster than you knew was safe. And there can be arguments about whether you should have known or not. But at this point, well, it's pretty clear that it was too fast. I have heard very compelling arguments from people that we just didn't think it was capable of that. And you don't take every safety precaution with everything you do ever. So we were taking what we thought was reasonable. And it turns out it was more capable than we thought.

25:23Jenn Cutter: I think this is an incredibly important teachable moment for that. A lot of good lessons to be learned. And so, yeah, I think probably the government role is on the current situation, something like CISA, something like a government agency that helps facilitate testing, that defense in depth of your agents, setting best practices that companies can follow, sharing information, doing that sort of things that we do for vulnerabilities right now. I don't think you need to have laws so much as facilitation. I think these companies really do understand that they don't want to sell an agent to someone that is then gonna hack somebody else and the company that bought the agent is gonna be liable for that.

26:10Jenn Cutter: That's just a no-go business proposition. As far as the future stuff, I think that's probably more of an international coalition is like, what do we do if there's recursive self-improvement? Let's start talking about that now. That is along the lines of nuclear energy. That is along the lines of quantum computing. Like, let's all get on the same page for that kind of thing. Yeah. Well, to go back to the puppy thing, I was really good at raising puppies. And then I got rabbits. And it turns out rabbits are self-destructive in other ways because, boy, do those guys love wires. I found wires that I did not know I had not protected, but the rabbits sure did find them.

26:44Jenn Cutter: I think that is perfect. Everyone thought they were raising puppies and it turned out they were raising rabbits. They just didn't know it. That's my contribution to the cause. That is the best analogy I have heard. Yeah. Y 'all need to realize you're raising rabbits and those wires. Take a page out of Jen's book here. I like that. One last thing along this same topic, following Microsoft's record, 964 bugs patched last week. If you hear 974, where there's some that are cloud bugs on top of that. Apple released patches for more than 260 vulnerabilities across all of its operating systems, which is the largest patch cycle in Apple history.

27:23Jenn Cutter: None of these were being actively exploited, but Gartner Research Vice President Craig Lawson gave a talk saying, yes, we're seeing these crazy numbers right now, but we may see those numbers fall in 2027 as models like Mythos and others are used to find all these bugs in a more thorough way than previously possible. And if that proves true, he thinks security companies might want to stop measuring staff success by the number of bug tickets processed and start looking at the number of attacks stopped. This is a very hopeful perspective, Jen, where he's saying like, hey, if we're finding this number of bugs, we might get close to finding most of the bugs.

28:06Jenn Cutter: We'll never find all of them, but maybe it'll drop quite a bit next year. I think I agree that it's optimistic, but it would be fascinating if old stuff is patched and now all we need to worry about is new zero days and not stuff that was in the wild since, you know, 2024. What was it? Windows Server 2002 was kind of, no, 2022? I don't remember which one was end of life recently, but I was thinking like, man, if you're using that kind of, yeah. Like that's going to have extended security support. So like people with that are not necessarily hosed just yet. But yeah, so does that mean that by, you know, 2028, that that's going to be an ironclad solve system?

28:50Jenn Cutter: Maybe. I mean, it is logical. And I know the human mind just doesn't want to think too optimistically for fear of being wrong. But it is logical that there aren't an infinite amount of bugs. And granted, you're always adding things to software. So you're always adding the possibility of bugs. But if we're just cleaning up all the old stuff we didn't know was there, at some point, that number does need to drop. And whether it's next year or not, I don't know. But I'm with Lawson that, you know, if these things are really good at finding the bugs, pretty soon they will have found most of the bugs.

29:23Jenn Cutter: And then, granted, number doesn't ever go to zero, but it goes quite a bit farther down. And we have much more secure software as a result of that. Yeah. As a thought exercise, because in no way is this practical, I would love if somebody could aim all this stuff at Windows 95 or Windows 98 SE and see if they can make, like, can you make that in this modern day? I mean, honestly, somebody has to be doing that. I need somebody to do this and then call us and publish some research. Let us know. That is good. Because I figure, like, that is a really good old system. But obviously, finding the bugs does not necessarily mean that they're able to patch the bugs.

29:58But I want to know. Yeah, yeah. If you've got to research a friend who would do this, call us.

30:03Jenn Cutter: That was an interesting thing about the Apple bug report is only two of them talked about using an AI model in the patch. So, yes, maybe AI models are finding a lot of these bugs, but it wasn't disclosed in that patch result. I thought that was notable. If you have any feedback about anything that gets brought up in the show, please get in touch with us on the socials. We are at DTNS show on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon. And then for TikTok and YouTube, you can find us at Daily Tech News Show.

30:42This episode is brought to you by Capital One. 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 trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

31:12Jenn Cutter: Hey everyone, it's Chris Guillebeau here, host of the Side Hustle School podcast. This episode is powered by AT &T Business. In my early days, I did some of my best work in parked cars or coffee shops. But when I landed my first big contract, I realized I couldn't bet my future on a public connection that cuts out if someone turns on a blender. As a small business owner, you're already wearing at least 10 hats. You shouldn't have to be your own IT department as well. That's why I rely on AT &T Business. They keep your connectivity reliable so you have one less thing to worry about. Powered by AT &T Business.

31:46Jenn Cutter: Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com.

31:55Jenn Cutter: Time for some quick headlines that, once you know them, will make you a smarter human being. Microsoft announced it will hold an event in San Francisco on October 7th to discuss how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC. This will be with Microsoft CEO Satya Nutella and CEO Jensen Wang. Yeah, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang. They're going to talk about RTX boxes. The device's head is going to be there, too. But yeah, I am curious where they take this, because this is going to be a new direction for Surface. Samsung is rolling out one UI 9 based on Android 17 to its Galaxy S26 series of phones.

32:36Jenn Cutter: It previously was only available for the Fold 8, Fold 8 Ultra, and the Flip 8. Books announced a new e-reader, the Books Palma 3, running Android 16, with an anodized aluminum frame and a fiberglass black plate. It's$340, which is$60 more than the Palma 2, available soon. There's also a new tablet, the Books Note Air 6C, which can flip pages 40 % faster, has a 10.3-inch color e-ink screen, also runs Android 16, and can access the Google Play Store. That one is available now with a case and stylus bundle for$580. They also announced an 8.52-inch Note Mini C coming soon for$550. Yeah. I mean, I know Kindles are still incredibly popular, but when did books become the runner-up?

33:30They've been quietly developing stuff. I like their things. I've still got my, oh my goodness. What's the Canadian one? Done by Rakuten.

33:43Jenn Cutter: I don't know either. Oh, good. It is the Kobo. It's the Kobo. Thank you. Yeah, I have a discontinued one, but I absolutely love those things. But Bux is the one thing I'm looking at as the alternative. Yeah, they're the stealth competitor. Canon has launched a retro style camera, the EOS R8 Mark II, basically the R8, but with five axis sensor stabilization, improved autofocus, a body redesign and a larger image buffer. Camera starts at$1 ,899 for body only. And you can pre-order it today for shipping in late October. Mozilla is using Mistral models now for Mozilla's browsing agent, Firefox Smart Window.

34:22Mistral's models are trained and fine-tuned on regional dialects and cultural context.

34:28Jenn Cutter: Nice win for Mistral on that one. The information sources say that Apple is considering building servers again. These would be built around its M8 chips. Currently, M6 is the most advanced, not the most powerful, but the most advanced chip. So a couple of generations down the road. But it would apparently possibly incorporate NVIDIA and V-Link Fusion to link the processors. Apple has not made servers since it discontinued the XServe in 2011. OpenAI is testing an ad format in ChatGPT called Sponsored Agents. This would let people start a conversation with a business-sponsored agent after clicking an ad in ChatGPT.

35:09Jenn Cutter: That's like chatbot on steroids. Okay, I get it. TypeSafe AI released a frontier model called JEV, J-E-V, that outputs typed probabilistic decisions rather than natural language, which makes the output easier to use by other software. One demo fed structured data describing a player's game state in Doom, of course, so it could then play Doom. But its primary use is probably something around customer service inquiries. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2027 and Premiere Elements 2027 are now available in standalone and bundled forms from Adobe and other retailers. This is just in case you were wondering if you could buy software without a subscription anymore.

35:50These are available for 100 US each or 150 for the bundle, and they are valid for a three-year term. So you get it for three years.

35:59Jenn Cutter: So still not forever, but you know, better than monthly, I guess. AWS says it is unable to restore access in some of its Middle East availability zones because of damage to data centers caused by the U.S. war with Iran. This is not a we're having a hard time. This is like you need to move your data elsewhere. It's not coming back to these availability zones anytime soon. HHMI, Janelia Research Campus and Google Research created a connectome, a complete map of the 166 ,000 neurons of a fruit fly. The fly brain wiring map was released earlier this month and has been used by online modders to trade Bitcoin, parallel parking car, and of course, PlayDune.

36:40Jenn Cutter: I mean, yeah, if you can't play Doom, it's not, yeah, it's not really. This doesn't count. We're going to have to talk to Dr. Nikki about that one. I sent it to her and we're hatching a plan to dig into that a little more. Finally, benchmarks of Apple's M5 Ultra chip showed up on Geekbench 7 Tuesday, confirming that, yes, in fact, it is the Apple's fastest chip yet and is also pretty expensive. It's a twofer. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Matt has some good perspective on the AI safety discussion, which we will keep having forever. Yeah, no, thank you, Matt.

37:14Jenn Cutter: He was listening to the discussion around China and AI safety that Rob and Jason had on Monday and said they touched on a thread that deserves to be pushed even farther, especially when looking at the analysis coming from the Wall Street Journal's China Bureau. Western AI safety debates remain heavily consumed by grand existential narratives, the sci-fi hypothetical of superintelligence running amok and eliminating humanity. But Beijing's domestic framing of AI risk is completely different. It isn't existential for our species. It's existential for the ruling party. As the Wall Street Journal's China correspondent pointed out, Beijing's immediate concern isn't that an out-of-control system will wipe out civilization.

37:54Jenn Cutter: They fear it as a disruptive force that directly threatens their ability to control information. A regime whose stability relies on centralized information gatekeeping cannot tolerate an unpredictable, non-deterministic system generating unvetted narratives. If the government loses control of the information ecosystem, it loses its grip on power. That shift in framing highlights why the two nations talk past each other on safety. Their risk assessments stem from fundamentally different priorities, survival of humanity versus survival of the ruling regime. Understanding that distinction is critical.

38:27Jenn Cutter: It explains why their regulatory playbooks look nothing alike and clarifies what each side is actually trying to protect enjoyed how that episode laid the groundwork on this keep up the great work matt matt if you wrote a book i would read it yeah that's a really good framing of of that discussion i appreciate the extension of what we talked about on monday that was fantastic so what are you thinking about out there and by you i mean you specifically are you listening to this right now then i mean you because we would love to hear your insight into stories, please share it with us over at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

39:03Jenn Cutter: Yeah, big thanks to Matt for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. You can become a patron, get the show directly ad free at patreon.com slash DTNS. Go type it in now.

39:21Jenn Cutter: The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

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