23andMe Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - DTNSB 4982
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Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 24th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories, and help each other understand. Today, Chloe Castile tells us about the tech Cal Fire used to keep the public updated, and we hear from you. Yeah, we do. I'm Jason Howell. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know today with Big Story.

Genetic mail-in testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri after first announcing it, that they were actually exploring options for a sale anyways back in January. Ann Wojcicki, who is actually the co-founder of the company, she co-founded it back in 2006,

will step down as CEO while the company seeks a new buyer. CFO Joe Selcevich will act as interim CEO while Ann will also remain on the board. She also announced her intentions to be a bidder in the bankruptcy auction proceedings. So her story with the company might not be over. Well, that remains to be seen.

Since the announcement, as you can imagine, things have tanked in Wall Street. The company's market cap has dropped below $50 million, a fraction of the $6 billion valuation of its peak right when it IPO back in 2021.

23andMe has released an open letter. They're addressing the sensitive data of its customers, assuring that the filing changes nothing about how it stores, manages, and protects customer data. And of course, privacy advocates are concerned about all of that sensitive data ending up in the hands of an

Unknown third party, whoever happens to end up buying the company, if that happens, whatever the case may be. Uh, they also note that many users have consented to sharing of that data for research purposes. And that happens like in the onboarding process.

And though it is possible to delete that data in account settings, the privacy statement also reserves the right for 23andMe to transfer customer information in the case of a sale to, you know, the new destination, the new owner. So I think all of this is really interesting in the, you know, for the fact that, you know, 2021 was the IPO. It was riding high. And then 2023, as I'm sure, you know, Tom and maybe even you, Rob and the gang spoke about

their massive data breach

And I think that just really damaged the reputation. And I don't know, what do you think is driving this like drop in interest in mail-in DNA? Is it the hack? Is it something else? What's your thought? - Well, to me, the big part of this is the hack. Back in 2023, I think this is almost a year and a half ago when this happened, they had the hack, which is bad, but then they handled it as about as poorly as you possibly can handle a breach of 7 million users.

You know, the most, you know, the most personal data you could have your DNA and they just handled that poorly. And it has been just horrible selling for the company ever since then. So I think when you look at this, you have to almost say that this was expected because $6 billion is what they were once worth. And they're now worth somewhere south of $50 million. That is a,

this will be written about in textbooks for business school about how this company you know went from a height to a low to where it is now yeah and i mean you know we're talking about health we're talking about highly sensitive information another thing that privacy advocates are really concerned about is that if 23andme a company that had you know all the all the goodwill that it had leading up to the you know the ipo and everything had all the value

had so many people willingly signing up for the service and clicking to share and then you know had this massive trove of important health related data of people if a company riding that high with what we can imagine had some pretty great you know

approaches to protecting that data could still fumble it. What about the next company that takes it over? Could those security protocols, in fact, be the same, if not worse, where that data goes? And if so, what should customers who currently have that information stored with them, what should they do? Because it doesn't give anyone any feeling of good

I don't know, good outcome here. It's really sensitive data that's going who knows where at this point. As much as I am into tech, as much as I love to have a great conversation about tech and we'll sign up for stuff,

The DNA stuff is something I've just never been able to bring myself to do for these very reasons. Now, I'm not going to tell you that I thought that this is exactly what was going to happen to a big company like 23andMe, but there was something in the realm of this happening. And my concern is you've got my DNA. You literally could recreate me in a test tube. What happens to that data if things change? Things are significantly changing. And that is now the big question.

Well, and I think, yeah, and I think this is yet another really important reminder of the fact that you never know where your data will end up. You never know how much control you actually have over it. Even if you were a user of 23andMe and you go into their account settings and you say, do not, you know, I do not consent, do not share my data, which is something that you agreed to when you first signed up for it and probably long forgot about. Even if you do that, you know, there's details in the, you know,

know in in the i don't know the terms of service or the privacy policy whatever it is that basically says like oh and by the way like we can still transfer this information over to the new owner i think of this in the state of california they've come out they put out a statement to basically say no here you are protected i don't know if those protections though expand outside of the state of california and it is probably on a state-by-state basis how much you are actually protected but

Privacy advocates definitely urging current users, like if you care about this information and your data that's stored there, which you probably should, it might behoove you to at least go in there and at least secure that data, opt out if you can, and see if you can delete the information of the account. Because from this point, you just really don't know where that's going to go.

I would have to imagine that other companies that do similar things are really thinking hard about, do we just if they don't already have one, do we give everybody a master delete? You can just hit this delete button and everything that we have on you is gone. So it can never be sold in case that company were to be purchased down the road. I mean, but at the same time, like 23 and me might, you know, that might be the saving grace is that they do have that information like.

You know what I mean? It's like the intentions might shift a little bit when it's like, well, this is the only, this is the only value we have is this information. Uh, and we, you know, we want, we want to regain something if we possibly can. So who the heck knows. DTNS is made possible by you. The listener. Thanks to Tony glass, Phillip less Howard Yermes and Peter box. Thank you. Wonderful patrons. You are awesome.

Picture this: you're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, "You know what? I can also use new brakes." So where do you go next? Back to eBay. You can find anything there. It's unreal. Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there. And you've got eBay guaranteed fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back. Simple as that.

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Everyone's talking about AI these days, right? It's changing how we work, how we learn, and how we interact with the world at a tremendous pace. It's a gold rush at the frontier, but if we're not careful, we might end up in a heap of trouble. Red Hat's podcast this season on Compiler is diving deep into how AI is reshaping the world we live in. From the ethics of automation to the code behind machine learning, it's breaking down the requirements, capabilities, and implications

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Apple AirPods Max headphones with a USB-C port are about to get a major firmware update in April to include support for high fidelity audio. This will enable 24-bit 48kHz losses audio playback that extends to personalized spatial audio. Apple also noted that ultra-low latency will be included, which makes this a meaningful update not only for casual music listeners, but also songwriters and musicians with strict music playback timing requirements. The new update will roll out in April.

Yeah, that's a big update. Getting that latency down if you're in music production, that's critical. I don't claim to be a musician any longer, but those who are really wanted this. This was a big thing. If I pay $500 for some headphones, I should be able to plug my amp in and still use them. Oh, heck yes. I'm right there. I get it.

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg says that Apple is working to bring a camera to the Apple Watch. This is in an effort to integrate visual intelligence, AI features and happening somewhere in the two year time frame. The cameras will be hidden inside the display on the standard Apple Watch.

while the Apple Watch Ultra will seat the camera next to the digital crown. Apple is also designing AirPods that house a camera for this function. Apple reportedly plans to unveil these devices in 2027. It's all timed with the company's release of its own in-house AI models that will drive these features. Of course, all of this is, in my mind, a big question mark considering all the Siri brouhaha that's happening right now.

Have to be careful. This is not Apple. This is Mark Gurman is reporting this, but Apple has to be careful about talking about stuff that comes out in a couple of years because maybe it won't. Yeah. Microsoft has announced the end of support for OneNote for Windows 10. Mark, October 14th, 2025 in your calendars as the date that Microsoft kills support for the feature along with support for Windows 10 itself. Users are encouraged to migrate to the newer OneNote desktop app as part of Microsoft 365.

So it looks like in about six months time, we're going to have to pour one out, not only for OneNote, but for Windows as well. Yeah, pour one out. A little bit of TAPS music playing in my head right now.

Tesla's full self-driving beta program is seeing a temporary halt to its planned rollout in China as it faces regulatory hurdles. The trial period was originally set for between March 17th to April 26th, so we'd be firmly in the middle of that right now, but new regulations introduced in February require deeper scrutiny of autonomous driving software updates before deployment in China.

Tesla has partnered with Baidu to enhance its navigation capabilities in an effort to overcome these hurdles.

Google Maps users took to Reddit when they discovered that their timeline data had disappeared. Google is now confirming the accidental deletion of that data with the only chance of recovery being dependent upon the user's cloud backup settings. Google says, quote, those who do not have backups enabled will not be able to recover lost data, end quote. To see for yourself where you stand, tap on the user icon in the Maps app, go to your timeline and find the cloud icon with either an arrow inside, meaning it's backed up, or a strikethrough line, meaning cloud backup is disabled.

It's a neat feature. I don't know how much this would really bother me, but I imagine some people rely on the timeline history for certain things. I've never like it's for me, it's just been obscure and interesting. It's never been necessary. So this wouldn't bug me that much. It's not going to bug most, but those who will bug is going to. But I mean, you basically were just told to behead. So sad if you don't have. Yeah, pretty much. Which is weird coming from Google, right? I don't know what to tell you there. Yeah, exactly.

Well, Google is also rolling out the Gemini Live features that first announced a few weeks ago at Mobile World Congress earlier this month, including the ability for Gemini to see the contents of your screen as well as the live video feed coming from the camera on your smartphone. Can you tell me everything you see on the screen right now? Okay, I see your phone screen.

There's a notification saying you're live with Gemini, and it's been about seven minutes. The time is 8.50 p.m., the weather's 71 degrees, and the date is March 23rd.

Anything else I can help you with? The features are rolling out to paid Gemini Advanced subscribers as part of the Google One AI premium plan. And they really represent a taste of what their unreleased Project Astra AR glasses have been shown to do in promotional demos. And I mean, I can attest to that. I tried Project Astra and it's pretty awesome to use these features when you're wearing glasses and a pretty great first step to bring it to smartphones too.

Yahoo announced late last week that it reached a deal to sell the news site TechCrunch to Regent, a media investment firm. Financial details were not disclosed in the deal, nor will it need to get regulatory review, an indication that the deal was valued at less than $100 million. Regent is also looking to build a collection of tech news sites and earlier last week also acquired Foundry, which bought PC World, Mac World, and TechAdvisor into their stable.

Okay, TechCrunch, go, please continue to continue to go because I like you a lot. So I hope this doesn't change anything. It doesn't sound like it would, but you just never know. That's the thing. I use TechCrunch literally every single day. And I wouldn't say that I thought they were bigger than 100 million. But now that we know that they're not, it's kind of like, oh, well, it's one of the biggest tech sites I use and they weren't more than 100 million dollars. Yeah, I mean, I should also clarify that 100 million is basically all that is, is like

Beyond that, it would require regulatory review. So it's something under 100 million. That's between one to 100. Who the heck knows what it is? I'm sure we'll find out what that is soon enough. But for everyday users, it probably doesn't mean a whole lot of change to TechCrunch, to be honest. But you just never know. Those are the essentials today. Let's dive a little deeper into the ongoing stories and follow up.

Yeah, so this past January during the fires in Los Angeles, the public was kept up to date in a number of ways, including a live stream of morning ops briefings. There were also public town halls and so much more. Tom made the Palisades fire ops briefing his morning watch. He actually got to talk to Chloe Castillo from Cal Fire about how they put together these streams.

Chloe, thanks so much for taking time from what I know is always a busy schedule to talk to us. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So as I mentioned, watching these live streams was very helpful in understanding what was going on. But a lot of people probably didn't see them the way I saw them. For folks listening around the world, what kind of live streams were made available?

The live streams that we offered on the Palisades and the Eaton incident are no different than any of the live streams that we offer on every single incident.

The live stream itself is typically featured on an incident management page YouTube channel. And that YouTube channel is then restreamed against local city, board of supervisors. Anyone that wishes to have it restreamed, we can restream it with a YouTube restream key. Do you make a different channel for each incident or is it a regular place that you go to?

Typically, we have a incident management team that has their own YouTube frequency, or I'm sorry, their own YouTube channel. However, in 2025, we have moved everyone over to the CAL FIRE YouTube incident page.

with the purpose of we have multiple teams that sometimes will take over an incident. And instead of moving the public from one location that they're known to frequent, they can just frequent the same location to get the incident updates. That's great. That's going to make it easier to point people to it, which was something that I was doing in January a lot. And I think even if people go back and look at these now, they could end up being educational in how those incident responses happen.

Yeah, definitely. The breakdown of resources that are there, the amount of resources that they have and where they were located. They can get a lot of information out of the operational briefings if they have enough time to sit through them.

Well, let's talk a little bit about how you pulled this off, because as somebody who's done a lot of live streams in locations that are less challenging that you were in, I was impressed. Tell me a little bit about what technology you were using on the ground in both Palisades and the Eaton incidents.

So for both incidents, what we use is a Mevo Logitech, the three camera platform so that we have one for the stage and one for the interpreter, the ASL interpreter. So we use that platform typically on all of our incidents. And we found that it gives us the best quality in video and along with the wireless microphone system that we use.

You'll either use like a Shure or another one that we use, I believe is called Ultra Tech. It's a digital platform. We've used that as well. But in initial attack incidents, we always just resort back to those DJI wireless microphones.

They are widespread and very useful. I've seen them in a lot of places. And then does that just connect to a laptop? Do you have a desktop on site? How do you handle that part? Yep. We usually have a communications trailer that is directly next to the operation stage. And what they do is they have a laptop there that...

moves around all over the incident complex and that is what they feed it off of. They use Restream from YouTube so, or for the YouTube so that we can Restream it onto multiple different YouTube channels so that people that have different audiences that maybe wouldn't normally be a follower of CAL FIRE or an incident management team still have the ability to watch it. And then I think a lot of people are going to wonder how do you get internet in locations like that?

On initial attack, it is either a Starlink. It is what we call a mobile cow from AT&T FirstNet. Verizon also has a first responder program that we use. However, typically you're going to get a FirstNet there first.

Right before Verizon, but usually everyone just pulls out a Starlink. Yeah. Okay. And in this day and age, just pointing up at the sky seems like the easiest thing to do, right? And it's crazy how good this has gotten. It used to be trying to stream video over a wireless connection like that was pretty spotty at best, but these streams are really solid.

Yeah, very solid. And for us, it's the continuity of what we're able to offer and making sure that we can do it on a daily basis because people get so used to going to these channels to see the incident update. And if you do have technical issues and they're not able to watch it, it can be quite an issue, especially for the public who just wants to be informed. Yeah.

I mean, the streams were real clean. They were easy to hear. There was good lighting, good video. How hard is it to do that in a situation like that?

Well, for every incident after we've been established for at least 24 hours, we have a communications team. We have multiple communications teams throughout the state that we use that are on contract. So we hire them for the incident. And that's literally their sole job is to do the operations briefings, to do any filming that we need. Sometimes we'll have town hall meetings in the evening.

that are hosted on YouTube that people are allowed to make comments on so that we can get them some answers.

A lot of times when you're evacuated and we are closer to the incident because we want to be in close proximity to the fire, the people that are evacuating are not close by. So having that ability for them to be there virtually and participate is really important. So the communications teams for us, it's super important to have them.

Well, and you all must have some skills, too, because I know how easy it is for one piece of a chain like this to get out of whack and make a stream more difficult. And I'm sure there was more going on behind the scenes than I saw, but I didn't see anything like that in my consumption of it.

No, our communications teams, I feel like they do them so frequently, um, and have so much experience doing it every single year on all these different fires, mudslides, anything you can think of, they'll go to, uh, but they have so much experience doing it that usually have a team of maybe 10 people and they will do, they'll set up the else, um,

LCD walls or the LED walls. They'll set up all of that stuff and they also have to break it down at the end of the day too. And sometimes you have an eight day incident and it takes all day to get one part set up and it's going to take a whole day to get it taken down.

It's kind of sad to get it to see it, to get it taken down. Yeah. No, you mentioned the wall. I was going to ask about that. There were often maps and things projected behind.

I think I assumed sometimes that was a green screen or something. Was that actually screens? It's an LED wall. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's an LED wall. Some vendors have it in their package that they offer. Some of them don't. We usually prefer it just because we do a lot of streaming of our incidents. And I think it gives people a better visual when the person is standing in front of it of what it is that they're looking at.

Well, for us, as I said, it was regular viewing and my wife was a fan of Christian Litz and it was good to see familiar faces day to day like Thomas Schutz and those folks. So thank you for your efforts in that and thank them for me as well. I appreciate all of the work and the technological difficulty that goes into providing that information. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

If people want to find out more, you know, this is not a situation where you want them to have to find out more, I suppose. But if they want to find out more about what CAL FIRE does and be able to find out more about these kinds of streams, should they need them, where should they go?

They should definitely visit the incident page for Cal Fire, fire.ca.gov. Each incident will have the link to the YouTube, to the YouTube playlist for that specific incident. So should there, heaven forbid, be another incident in LA County, that LA County incident name will pop up on the incident page. They click on it and then the link to the YouTube frequency or the

playlist will be right there. Chloe, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Join in the conversation in our discord, which you can do by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Picture this, you're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, you know what?

I can also use new brakes. So where do you go next? Back to eBay. You can find anything there. It's unreal. Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there. And you've got eBay guaranteed fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back. Simple as that. Look, DIY fixes can be major. Doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod. You

You got it, especially when things are guaranteed to fit. So when you dive into your next car project, start with eBay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love.

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All right, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. And today, Anon Jr. and Matt, we got two emails. They're sharing perspectives on recent large language model news.

Anon Jr. writes, "I'm torn. I firmly believe that using works, even copyrighted works, to train LLMs as well within fair use. It's the torning of copyrighted works that's the problem. If they bought a bunch of ebooks or scanned a bunch of physical books, it would come down to the fair use issue, and maybe we'd get some firmer precedent to guide future discussions. I hate how messy the torning makes this because there's already a lot of problems explaining the fair use part given how little people understand what training in LLM is and produces."

Yeah, the torrenting does make things kind of a little ickier than it would be, I think, without it. Or it just gives ammo to the people who are hardline against this even more, you know, even more kind of backing behind their argument. Matt also wrote in to say, I'd be more sympathetic.

to the arguments of AI companies of fair use if they were not so quick to cry foul when a competitor uses their tools to create an even better AI. Oh, man, we see that all the time right now. Not sure if this applies to meta, he says, Matt says, but OpenAI did accuse DeepSeek of violating the terms of use when creating its AI. Yeah, you know, it's like they make their bed, they also got to sleep in it. So I don't know. So...

- So just make sure I wanna understand. So they want access to everything for free, but they don't want anyone to access their stuff for free. - That's exactly it. That's exactly it. - What's right for you or what's not right for you is right for me or whatever the saying is.

Something along those lines. Anyways, we're seeing a lot of that in AI. We will probably continue and hopefully you'll continue to write in about it. Thanks to Chloe Castillo, Anon Jr., and Matt for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. This show is made possible by our patrons at patreon.com slash DTNS. DTNS has a live version called DTNS Live on YouTube and Twitch.

You can find details on that and more on DailyTechNewsShow.com. We'll talk to you tomorrow. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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