Why Microsoft Blocked Major VPN and Encryption Software

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2:24Huyen Tue Dao: This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 9th, 2026. We will try to tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and help you understand. Today, Andy Beach talks about the first newsroom to strike over AI and why Microsoft is blocking major VPN and encryption software. Not cool, Microsoft. No, not very cool. Keep your cool, Microsoft. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Wint Witt Dow. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Yeah. So thanks to TechZ Explorer for posting about the latest in this saga on our subreddit. We mentioned earlier this week that the developer of the open source encryption app Veracrypt had his account for signing Windows drivers closed without explanation.

3:09Huyen Tue Dao: And that prevents him from making updates for the Windows version of the app. Now, you may think, well, hold on, I can just make an app and run it on my Windows. Why do I need Windows account to do this? It's because VeraCrypt operates at the kernel level, and Microsoft requires all kernel mode drivers to be signed as a security measure. And to do that, you need a Microsoft developer account to get the credentials. The developer of VPN software, Windscribe, and also the developer of VPN software, WireGuard, both found themselves in a similar situation. I'm guessing there's other apps that are in this situation we don't know about.

3:47Huyen Tue Dao: All three of these developers claim they never received a notification prior to trying to log in to get an update pushed through and finding their account blocked with no explanation. In fact, Windscribe posted on X, we've been trying to resolve this for over a month and getting nowhere. Support is non-existent. Anyone know a human with a brain that still works at Microsoft that can help? A little exasperation I'm detecting there. Jason Donnenfeld, the developer of the WireGuard VPN, which, by the way, underpins a bunch of other VPN services, told the register that he did the following to attempt to correct the situation.

4:26Huyen Tue Dao: So after he found his developer account was blocked, he was like, oh, how do I appeal? And Microsoft said, just file an appeal through your developer account. And he said, well, I can't do that because it's blocked. So he filed an appeal with the Azure team for something unrelated and then got them to redirect the appeal to the developer team, which I thought was an excellent workaround. This week, he got acknowledgement that his appeal had been received and it would take 60 days to review. No more information than that. No, like, could you provide this kind of documentation? He's like, I hope I gave them what they need.

5:01Huyen Tue Dao: Donnenfeld then emailed Microsoft's Standards of Business Conduct Department, kind of saying, hey, there's people in Microsoft who use WireGuard, so maybe I can get them to respond that way. They referred the issue to the executive support team, who confirmed that, yes, the right people had your appeal. But nothing about what else he could do to get his account back. However, finally, yesterday, Pavan Davaluri, Microsoft's president of Windows and Devices, posted on X, We've seen these reports and are actively working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Now that so much time has gone by. We've reached out to VeraCrypt and have spoken to Jason at WireGuard.

5:43Huyen Tue Dao: They should be back up and running soon. He didn't seem to have heard about Windscribe at that point, didn't say anything about them. He noted that this all stems from a blog post Microsoft made on October 1st that said all partners in the Windows hardware program who had not verified their identity since April 2024, so if you'd gone a long time without verifying your identity, needed to verify their identity within 30 days of October 16th. So basically until November 16th of 2025, or they would have their status set to rejected and will be suspended from the program. Now, he says partners were sent several emails, they were shown banners and reminders on the website, but he added, we know that sometimes things still get missed.

6:30Huyen Tue Dao: We're taking this as an opportunity to review how we communicate changes like this and make sure we're doing it better. The one good news of this story, Donnenfeld told the Register that his account has been reestated and he successfully pushed an update to WireGuard Thursday morning. no updates that I could find as we're recording this about VeraCrypt or Windscribe. In possibly related news, possibly not, but I figure it was worth noting since I saw it today as well, the president of Microsoft's developer division, Julia Lucin, is going to resign at the end of June and then continue in an advisory role.

7:05Huyen Tue Dao: When, as a developer, does this story make your skin break out? Do you want to scream? What's your reaction? um yes yes all of the above and actually as an android developer i i personally have lucky i've been lucky enough not to experience something like this but i've heard the same story over and over again because a lot of the same steps that we have to go through an android are very similar to this process like you know your apks which are the binaries that we produce to upload to the play store have to be signed and the same process of you know like feeling like you do you don't you're that there was no proactive communication when your accountant is suspended, no human intervention, appeals being a bit opaque, trying to chase down leads, trying to like find friends that work at the place, and then to going to social media to shame and hopefully get attention.

7:58That is all like very familiar and it's still going on to this day. So I can only roll my eyes, feel much sympathy that apparently this goes on for other folks on other platforms as well. It is, I've always tried to keep a little bit of, I suppose, understanding or empathy, if you want to call it that, for large corporations that kind of manage these platforms because the problem with everything else in our industry is in a sense always related to scale, right? because of the vast number of presumably apps that different platforms have domain over. You could kind of squint and say, okay, like there are certain processes or certain parts of the process that may need to get automated or that you can't.

8:43I don't really agree with that, but that, you know, humans may not be available at every step of the process or you may not have the same level of human intervention possible or to the same degree. I say that with like trying to understand that there's like two sides to everything. but I honestly I feel like this whole process is garbage um and yeah it's so weird because I think especially at big corporations and big companies there are so many parts of a process and a product that you test user experience you know and and presumably they I believe them when they say that they did intend to show banners and reminders in a dashboard or or what have you or in any other place that might seem to provide visibility for developers.

9:25But also in my personal experience, I feel like a lot of these flows, these particular flows which are, granted, abnormal and occasional, are not tested very well. Just the fact that there was like this catch-22 about needing an account to file an appeal but you can't file the appeal because you don't have an account. I've heard that exact story.

9:46Huyen Tue Dao: yeah it's like when you call the internet uh service provider when your internet is out and they ask you to email them and you're like i can't my internet's out that's the whole point yeah i once bought a screwdriver set and the screwdriver set was actually screwed shut if i think it was like a husky or something i was like that's amazing this is not helpful no yeah that's exactly the same thing that's exactly the same thing and again i i feel like because these experiences are so similar there there there are these common vectors like again scale and this inclination um insert rant about capitalism or something here about scaling and automation and trying to like like maximize output throughput while minimizing human labor etc etc it is monstrous it is absolutely monstrous and i'm really glad that especially for these projects which are very important projects that they have gotten resolution.

10:42There are so many smaller developers that I don't even know what they have done. They've gone through all the channels, including, again, shame and personal connections. And there's like no recourse. And I just...

10:53Huyen Tue Dao: You can see the priorities at work. WireGuard is incredibly important for VPNs, probably incredibly important for Microsoft employees. That one got fixed first. Veracrypt, well, it's an open source competitor to BitLocker. So, you know, that one, we'll get to that one later. Windscribe, we don't, they're small. I don't know that that's actually fair to Microsoft, but that's what it feels like from the outside. I mean, again, trying to be fair is that it's not, I assume that there's a large percentage that is not malice in this. Yeah. Other than, and if anything, the prioritization is more a side effect of, I guess, how one prioritizes things as a company with one's own products possibly.

11:37and also i wouldn't say this it's not that even the squeakier wheel like the shinier more branded wheel gets the gets gets the grease but it is it is well you saw the the things he

11:49Huyen Tue Dao: had to leap through is like so so i went and i filed a ticket with azure like not everybody would think to do that yeah and that's not even how it's supposed to work no absolutely but this is a very common thing uh especially kind of you know on these larger platforms and at scale and i don't I don't know what the answer is because we're moving even further away from human interventions and processes like these. Well, I have a thought on that exact thing. And this isn't necessarily going to happen, but this is what should happen and could happen. One of the things that I keep running up to when I think of automation is customer service is always the thing that gets cut because you don't have enough people to handle the amount of calls you're getting right yeah and if you have automation that makes other parts of a job easier now you should be able to use that extra free time to devote to improving your customer support yeah um yeah you can do some cost savings but if you want to like rise up rise above and be like our our product is better adding more customer support is important.

12:59Huyen Tue Dao: It's usually expensive to do that. Well, guess what? Now it won't be. You can actually have human contact with people for cases like this, where I think in the past, there's a culture on the internet of like, well, we just make things free for everybody and then we're not going to support them because you're on your own. And that culture has seeped into things where you are paying for things. Because that's the other thing about getting these drivers you have to pay you have to pay fees to be a member of these these certificates they're not they're not just something that microsoft's giving away yeah exactly i mean and and like to larger to larger lesser extent that's like the same thing on say even apple and android or android uh so my from my experience i i think that's like an interesting point though and like i know you guys have been saved from my ai like skepticism for two weeks since i've been on vacation but i feel like what is what is kind of coming out from a lot of the current discussion we have now is that the bottleneck for a lot of these things, which were being promised will be 10X or 20X or 100X, humans are still the bottleneck in so many of these processes that, you know, we have traditional automation for.

14:04And now, you know, with AI and things like that too. And that I think it's just the more that we go on, the more I'm just like, yeah, we really need to emphasize, as people have said, both people writing in, we have said that the human part of the process is super important. And that maybe the positive outcome from all of this stuff going on is that maybe people will understand that we need to realign to that. I agree with you. I don't know if it's going to happen just because yes, people are more expensive. But I think we just keep getting proven time and time again that humans are still important to the process, especially for something like this.

14:38Huyen Tue Dao: This really reeks to me of, hey, we need to do this and we need to cut off the bad guys. They're doing this to stop people who don't have proper verification or people who have squatted on proper verification. So it's the right thing to do. And they say like, well, we'll just put up some banners and send an email and then they can't complain. We told them. The blog? Yeah, they can. They can complain. If you only hurt the bad guys, great, but you didn't. And my guess is I was looking to see if VeraCrypt had been able to push an update out. And what I noticed was the last update before this one was in May of last year, the last major update.

15:20Huyen Tue Dao: And I'm like, they probably didn't log into their dashboard until this month. They didn't need to. So they never saw if there were banners, they never saw them. And we all know how email gets accidentally deleted, shuttled into spam, like all kinds of things happen. And so when they say we didn't get the email and Microsoft says we sent an email, those both may be true. They may have never seen that email. So then what do you do? You need to have a better way of communicating with your developers. I'd have to say that it kind of jives with how I observe most companies do tend to do this thing where for legal purposes and also trying to do some level of due diligence.

15:57They do things like that, but they never think about certain cases. And I, isn't there some kind of algorithm pattern finding we can do to like distinguish bad actors from, from, from accounts that, you know what I mean? Like there's got to be some kind of behaviors that we can pick up. If you're going to automate this, then automate it smarter instead of like, okay, every, just like bring down the band hammer. And then, you know, we'll, we'll maybe consider if someone raises enough of a stink about it to improve the process.

16:23Huyen Tue Dao: What about some kind of algorithm that looks and says, hey, we're getting close to that 30-day deadline, and it's odd that VeraCrypt hasn't responded. Exactly. They seem like the kind of company that should maybe make an extra effort to reach out to them. Yeah, like more automated emails or something, just something. And they can do that. Especially, tech companies are so freaking numbers-driven. and look at an account, see if they have some threshold number of installs or some threshold number of activity. Or are used by the company itself, as in the case of WireGuard. I like that check mark.

16:59Do we use it? Yes. And then, I mean, that's like the crazy thing. We have so much technology to kind of shave off some of these rough edges and we don't. We don't. And it's absolutely insane to me in 2026 that this is a thing. And I'm, yes. no this this triggered me so hard if i may say i had a feeling it might and i apologize but i mean that this is this is this is i i'm not even sure what the white phrase i'm looking for but it's just it's just crazy how this kind of thing still happens in 2026 and that we cannot

17:35Huyen Tue Dao: figure out better ways and we we have the tools to figure it out so we do you know use a microsoft Hey, Microsoft, take this as your opportunity to become the leader in reforming customer service for developers and then maybe customer service for everybody. And we would thank you. And of course, we at DTNest would like to thank you, the listener, because we made possible by you. And in particular, thank you to Jeff Wilkes, Tim Deputy, Brendan Brooks and David Fretz. You are the best.

18:33Yes. in Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, or West Virginia. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Available in the U.S. For New York, call 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY 467-369. For Massachusetts, 1-800-327-5050. For Iowa, 1-800-BETS-OFF. For Puerto Rico, 1-800-9800-0023. First bet offer for new customers only, subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards are non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire in seven days in partnership with Kansas Crossing Casino and Hotel. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI.

19:15They 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. If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be.

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20:31Iconic behavior. So shop CoverGirl Jammy Lip Sleeping Mask at your nearest retailer now. Only from easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP. because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off and Grainger is your trusted partner. Offering the products you need all in one place, from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, visit grainger.com, or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

21:14Huyen Tue Dao: all right there's more we need to know today let's get to the briefs all right well youtube has added some new experimental features for premium users sorry paying premium users that is so auto speed dynamically adjusts speed so you can get through a video faster without it sounding sped up or hurting comprehension and on the go control view makes playback controls easier to access when you just want to pause or skip forward or back just like when you're listening to a podcast. When activated, the feature suggests turning itself on when it detects motion for 60 seconds while you're playing a video with the phone unlocked.

21:47And for creators, you can now scan yourself in by taking a live selfie and speaking a few words similar to how Sora worked. Except for YouTube, you can only use your avatar. You can then put your virtual self in shorts of up to eight seconds long. All videos that include avatars will have watermarks and digital labels.

22:07Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, so this isn't the remix thing that Sora was doing where you could let other people put you in videos, but you could add yourself to videos. This is mostly VO-generated stuff, I'm imagining. It wasn't available. I looked, it hadn't been rolled out to my YouTube app yet, so I haven't been able to try it, but I will. I'll give it a shot and see what it's like. I'm more excited about auto speed, honestly. That does seem really cool. just like small ways to help our consumption of youtube videos yeah uh and and anything that is podcast oriented maybe we'll nudge youtube into having a better podcast service so the on-the-go one is is positive as well i mean it kind of makes sense right because they want to take over podcasts so like i guess the side effect of that is just let us add rss feeds to youtube that would be a great way to do it because that's what podcast apps do again a simple something that we can solve All four.

23:00We've had, like, I don't even need to tell you RSS is this, like, why? We have the technology. We can make it better, stronger, faster, please.

23:09Huyen Tue Dao: Lots of tidbits of interest came out of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's annual letter to shareholders. He promises that Amazon's Starlink competitor, now named Leo for low Earth orbit, will launch in mid-2026. This is after reports that they had to delay some of their other launches, but I guess they'll have enough satellites up by mid-2026 to turn on service. Jassy promised that Leo will have better performance and lower costs than what customers have access to now. And then he coughed and said Starling. Amazon may start selling its Tranium chips to other companies. Right now, they just rent them out through AWS, but it's saying, you know what?

23:46Huyen Tue Dao: There's enough demand for this. We might be able to make some money there. And it may also sell its robots and its robotic systems to other companies as well. AI revenue for AWS is at a$15 billion annual run rate. That's just the AI-related stuff. And the chips business is now generating more than$20 billion a year. But they are spending a lot more than that. And so finally, as to whether spending a lot of money on infrastructure is warranted or not, Jassy wrote, we're not investing approximately$200 billion in CapEx in 2026 on a hunch. So he is one of those that believes the demand is real. well that's good i mean that's reassuring i guess it is reassuring i mean there's a lot of money so i guess we'll see i i think he's a little prickly there of like people are like why are you spending all this money because he's like because we definitely seriously believe that there is demand for it get off my back you guys yeah like i mean sorry to to to be so flippant about but i mean i mean it's something that i still am skeptical about uh especially the way that the current industry is like popping up and like this is this real like are you actually doing things or is this kind of an interesting i don't know um self like self self-fulfilling prophecy or something like that yeah yeah self-self-belief self yeah i i think it is legitimate to think that this demand will continue i don't think it's guaranteed and i think that's where we're having this debate is you know if you're on the more conservative side like microsoft's amy amy hood was you pull back on the spending but the risk is now you're not spending enough and now microsoft is having to spend to catch up on the data centers on the other side you're open ai and you're throwing lots of money out there or amazon and you're getting criticized and if you're wrong then you're going to be in trouble but if you're right then no one will care and it'll all be fine i suppose that's always been tech is like half yeah yeah yeah exactly uh well folks if you have feedback about stuff we talk about on the show we are available on the uh tobacco of the internet social media at dtns show on x instagram threads blue sky and mastodon for tiktok and youtube you can find us at daily tech news show legendary doesn't happen by chance it happens because it's what betmgm does sign up for betmgm and receive up to 1500 back in bonus bets if you don't win your first bet Get into hockey, basketball, and more of your favorite sports with same-game parlays, live betting, and more.

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27:00In partnership with Kansas Crossing Casino and Hotel. This 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.

27:36Huyen Tue Dao: And now some quick headlines that are just good to know. Might make you look smarter in the future if you know this stuff. All right. Well, this actually might be the biggest story of the day if you look at the top of most tech news aggregators. Spotify has added a setting that lets you turn off all videos in the app, including for individual members of family plans. I didn't know how many tech journalists were bothered by the autoplay videos on Spotify until I saw how high this story was. uh dyson announced its first handheld fan the hush jet mini cool you hold it in your hand it spins at 65 000 rpm uh that means it can push air roughly 55 miles an hour it'll cost 100 bucks goes on sale tomorrow if you want the gray one if you want the red one that goes on sale in may and the blue one goes on sale in june that is the most dyson thing i've ever heard a handheld fan that goes at 55 miles an hour and yes i want one well bloomberg's a market german says that the base model iPhone 18 will not be announced as autumn alongside the Pro and Max models, but instead come next spring, 2027, along with the less expensive iPhone 18e and the iPhone Air 2.

28:39Huyen Tue Dao: Ah, so that'll be a big change to move the base model off into the spring announcement. That means you'll go a long time between those base models. And they are selling well. Counterpoint Research estimates the iPhone 17 Pro Max was the best-selling smartphone worldwide in Q4. Yeah, the max the most expensive one the one that was like who's gonna buy that everyone apparently uh second place went to the base model iphone 17 followed by the 17 pro the iphone 16 and one non-iphone in the top five the samsung galaxy a 56 s25 is down there at the bottom at number 10 in fifth place uh was the a56 xiaomi's redmi a4 was in ninth place that was the only non-apple or non-Samsung phone in the top 10.

29:24Pretty impressive, honestly. Well, Google has fully integrated Notebook LM into Gemini. The option to create a new notebook has been added to Gemini's site panel.

29:33Huyen Tue Dao: This is almost a tip as much as a news story, but a company called Photon, which does like intermediary for connecting agents, has discovered that all macOS machines break networking every 49 days, 17 hours, two minutes and 47 seconds. So if you don't reboot your Mac in that time, you will have to reboot it to restore your networking connection. It's because the XNU kernel stores time as a 32-bit unsigned integer. That means it can hold values up to 4 ,294 ,967 ,295, which works out to 49 days and change, 17 hours, 2 minutes, 47 seconds, the time I just mentioned. My gosh, I love this story so much.

30:23All that 32 bits. All right. And Axios reports that OpenAI is also planning to release a security-focused model to a limited number of partners similar to Anthropics Project Glasswing.

30:35Huyen Tue Dao: Wow. It's crazy that that leaked out the day after Project Glasswing. Wow. Meta says it has removed ads from lawyers who are recruiting plaintiffs to file lawsuits against Meta. A spokesperson told Axios, we will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful. I wrote OpenAI has paused its Stargate infrastructure project in the UK for the time being and, quote, will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment. Meta is going to spend an additional$21 billion with cloud provider CoreWeave, adding to a previous commitment to spend$14.2 billion.

31:17John Deere agreed to put$99 million into a fund to compensate farmers who filed a class action lawsuit over the company, preventing repairs as well as provide digital diagnostic, maintenance and repair tools to third parties for 10 years.

31:30Huyen Tue Dao: Hey, win for the right to repair. That's great. USDC appeals court did not grant Anthropic a preliminary injunction in one of its two cases challenging its designation as a supply chain risk. This is a little complicated. The appeals case is appealing the designation directly. They're saying that it was arbitrary. That case now has an accelerated schedule with oral arguments to begin on May 19th. Anthropic did get an injunction in a separate case. We talked about that previously. That one was filed in San Francisco, and that one is challenging the ban on First Amendment grounds. All right. And finally, Google has agreed to buy multiple generations of Intel's Xeon chips for its data centers, starting with the Xeon 6.

32:11Huyen Tue Dao: All right. Those are the essentials for today. Shall we dive a little deeper? Let's shall. Wait, shall we? Yes, let's shall. I like that. Well, the first U.S. newsroom strike authorization over AI just happened, and it's not out of clickbait tabloid. Andy Beach explains why ProPublica's journalists drawing a line in the sand this week is a bellwether for every media contract negotiation to come. Andy Beach, welcome back. It's good to have you, man. Tom, good to see you again. Yeah, absolutely. So we got a little Woody Guthrie AI story. We got a little union action, but it is against ProPublica, which is itself very pro-labor as an organization.

32:54Huyen Tue Dao: Can you explain a little what ProPublica is first? I don't even know if I'm 100 % the right person to try and run down everything that they do, But they are a guild that ultimately aggregates a lot of professionals in the content community. And they have been themselves looking very closely at sort of the impacts that AI is going to have on labor in the journalist and the creative space. So ProPublica, the nonprofit newsroom, which I think feeds its investigative journalism to it, is negotiating with its own employees, the ProPublica Guild. And it's the guild that is striking here. ProPublica itself isn't particularly like AI friendly.

33:46Huyen Tue Dao: So what is the dispute about? Yeah, so the guild that they have is about 115 members, and they have been in contract negotiations now for over two years around where AI is going to fit into things. And sort of the big number was that 92 % of those 150 members authorized the strike. So it was nearly unanimous in the fact that they were going to strike. The core demands, the thing that they really were concerned about were contractual bans around AI-related layoffs. In other words, they want to ensure that there's not just cause firing that goes on, and they don't want people replaced by AI agents effectively as part of the work that's going on.

34:36Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, or at least they don't want someone to lose their job because an agent has done that, right? Very specifically, they don't want someone to be laid off and then have that job replaced by an AI agent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why does ProPublica, which is the kind of organization that is trying to promote human based journalism and it's a nonprofit, why is it resisting that? It seems like a reasonable demand. What are they saying? Well, I think they're probably feeling like they're somewhat caught in the middle, like they're they're trying to find that middle ground. They're sort of trying to find the floor effectively of where negotiations with the entities that they partner with are going to be.

35:21But they're getting pushback of not being aggressive enough, I guess, by the by the member guild on where exactly that floor is. So I think this is the first round of negotiations that they will then have to then take into any future contract negotiations.

35:37Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. So this is really interesting because ProPublica says we're not going to use agents to replace journalists. Don't worry. And the union members say, great, put that in writing. And ProPublica says, well, if we put it in writing, that might lock us into something that has unforeseen consequences. I think this is going to make ProPublica management feel a little more empathy for OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, anybody else out there. Because I don't think, I'll say personally, I don't think ProPublica wants to replace journalists with AI. What they're worried about is if they do layoffs in the future, having this contract used against them to say, well, you shouldn't have laid people off.

36:21Huyen Tue Dao: And they may need to lay out. Every company needs the option to be able to change its staff from one point to another. Sure. I think what became really interesting about this is that it's probably a preview of other arguments we're going to see because SAGAPRA and DGA, the Directors Guild of America, also have contracts that are expiring soon that have AI language in it that was agreed a few years ago. But that was very early language. And so they're probably going to be watching how ProPublica does this so that when they go back for renegotiations, they can equally be more aggressive around how they look at sort of the human AI interactions when it comes to layoffs and where basically that floor, where the bottom of the contract negotiations can truly live.

37:09Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I think that's where the debate is going to continue to be, is how can you adjust your staff as you use these tools to shift duties around, right? I am of the opinion that smart companies don't just get rid of people because they got an agent to do something. Smart companies say, okay, we got the agent to do the tedious stuff. That frees us up to use you to do more stuff we couldn't have done otherwise. I don't think ProPublica disagrees with that. It's all about the language, right? It's about what is this contract going to do to our flexibility with our staff in the future? And that does not sound to me like a conversation we're not going to hear a lot of.

37:53Yeah. And I feel like even if we took AI out of this, there are often times when there's either economic crunches or other things that go on where a company will be aggressive sometimes about the layoffs they do, because that is a quick way to do cost savings. Like if you're a CFO, you're thinking about the bottom line and you're just looking to save money. I think this is the ProPublica putting in some language or being made to put in some language that ensures that businesses don't just take the easy fix on an economic boundary when it involves AI agents replacing workers. You have to balance it and you can't just immediately jump to there.

38:39You have to go try other cost savings measures before you get to this route.

38:42Huyen Tue Dao: There is also some language in this contract about disclosure and everything. I feel like that one is easier for them to agree to. ProPublica already has public guidelines about disclosure. They're a little resistant to put them in the contract because that makes them less flexible as well. But I feel like they could come to an agreement on that. It's going to be tricky. There is not a strike yet. I don't know. Do you think there will be? They're still bargaining they've gotten until this week to resume, but there hasn't been any resolution yet. But I think given the fact that so many people like that, that's a pretty big percentage of the guild that agreed on this, which means they have to come back to the table with something that looks promising.

39:28Otherwise, they are likely to see a strike. Yeah.

39:33Huyen Tue Dao: Well, Andy, thank you so much for helping us wrap our heads around this. If folks want to find your good work on these kinds of topics, where should they go? So I write about sort of the intersection of media technology and AI all the time on my sub stack. It's called enginesofchange.ai. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Tom. Yeah, ProPublica wouldn't have been on my bingo card for the first one to have a labor dispute over AI. But I guess in a way, that's the people most concerned about it, right? Or the people who work there. And I mean, I appreciate the perspective, like especially as someone who works in tech so um who's already going through the churn and somebody who personally knows like possibly dozens of people at this point who were laid off and specifically with ai given as the reason i i definitely have like a hair trigger you know kind of listening to stories like this but i do appreciate the perspective that it's it's it's more nuanced than that and that and that um for better for worse um layoffs are a tool that companies may need to use and so yeah like i i appreciate the the nuance there even though like Like a lot of times when we use these words, it feels bad.

40:35And yeah, but I was like, oh, okay, ProPublica. Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. I just like more of the very fine, I guess, discussions that will need to take place in this new era.

40:46Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, more to come than fewer, I think. Yeah, for sure. All right, well, we end every episode of DTS with some shared perspective. And sometimes it's just a nod to something one of us said. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking about the people going to the moon this week, a thing that happened. Mohan wrote, I think Jason Howell said it best about Artemis 2. It just feels good to feel good. I cannot agree more. Yeah, well said, Mohan. Well, well quoted, I guess, because Jason said it first. So well said, Jason. All right, well, what are you thinking about? Is it something that brings you joy? Obviously, things that bring you negative feelings, like our top story also are a good discussion, regardless of what it is, whether you have something you want to share, have some insight, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

41:32Huyen Tue Dao: Big thanks to Andy Beach and Mohan 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. Don't forget to become a patron. The show's over. You can go do it right now. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

41:52The DTNS family of podcasts. helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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