Daily Tech News Show
137 episodes listed below
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DTNS host Tom Merritt dives deep into tech topics to help you understand what you need to know about them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Tom Merritt turns technology's legal, historical, and operational machinery into clear explanations while preserving the distinctions that shape each issue.
Know a Little More takes one complicated subject at a time and supplies enough history and mechanism to make the current argument intelligible.
Tom Merritt gets from boat hulls to copyright takedowns, and somehow your curiosity follows.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear history of RSS and its role in podcasting.
It treats RSS as a core piece of podcasting infrastructure and stays with the format's long, practical evolution. The piece follows the removal of RDF so the standard would validate as XML, the July 10, 1999 release of RSS 0.91, the naming dispute around Rich Site Summary, and…
A clear, careful primer on how moderation and platform liability became entangled before Section 230.
Know a Little More brings Section 230 into clearer focus by starting before the familiar Supreme Court fights over Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Tomna.
A clear introduction to passkeys and public key cryptography.
It opens with passwords as the weak point and uses that to move into passkeys and public key cryptography. The central idea is easy to follow: passkeys keep the key on the device, so the service never has a password to store or lose.
A clear reset on how OpenAI became both a mission and a controversy.
OpenAI is presented as a set of tensions: nonprofit status, openness, fast-moving AI development, and the friction that comes with all of that.
A plain-English guide to Mastodon’s servers, standards, and moderation.
This episode makes Mastodon feel concrete instead of abstract. It walks through who runs the code, which standard it uses, and how server by server rules shape the experience.
A clear, patient primer that traces algorithms from ancient math to modern AI.
It begins with a familiar complaint about algorithms shaping what people see, then moves through ancient Baghdad, al-Khwarizmi, cryptanalysis, and modern AI without losing the thread.
A clear, low-drama explanation of ChatGPT's strengths, limits, and the mistake people keep making about it.
This episode handles the ChatGPT question by stripping away the drama and returning to basics: what the model does, what it does not do, and why that difference matters.
A clear reset on the law that still shapes platform speech and moderation.
Section 230 is one of those laws people cite often and explain poorly. This episode does the useful work of taking the statute apart, following the publisher-liability rule, and showing how the moderation carveout applies when a platform removes material it finds objectionable.
David Sparks and Stephen Robles dig into Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and Mac automation weekly.
Federico Viticci, Stephen Hackett, and Myke Hurley work through the week's Apple news and their own gear problems.
Jason Snell and Myke Hurley debate Apple's product roadmap, leadership, and rumors weekly.
Long-form Apple talk with sharp product judgment and deep tech history.
Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell break down Microsoft's week in Windows, Xbox, and AI.
This episode explores the history of the Xerox Alto, the pioneering 1970s computer that featured a graphical user interface, mouse, and other innovations that would later define personal computing.
This episode provides a clear, technical explanation of how authenticator apps work for multi-factor authentication.
This episode explains the fundamental concept of public key cryptography, the technology behind pass keys, using vivid analogies like padlocks with special keys and a dramatized scenario with characters Alice, Bob, and Eve.
This episode explores Taiwan's complex political status, tracing its history from Chinese annexation to its current role as a tech powerhouse.
This episode traces the origins of modern networking back to AlohaNet, a 1970s radio-based system developed at the University of Hawaii to connect campuses across islands.
This episode provides an updated explanation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, covering its history, key legal cases like Cubby vs.
This episode tells the story of Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, from his early academic struggles to his groundbreaking work at Xerox PARC.
This educational episode traces the history and definition of algorithms, from ancient Babylonian mathematics to modern artificial intelligence.
The episode opens with Hayden and Steven introducing Fantasy Fan Fellas and their close read of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn.
This episode tells the story of Gary Starkweather, the optics physicist who invented the laser printer while working at Xerox.
This episode explains RISC-V, an open-source, royalty-free instruction set architecture challenging established players like ARM and x86.
This episode explores Mastodon as a decentralized alternative to Twitter, tracing its history from its 2016 launch to growth spurts in 2017 and 2022 driven by Twitter controversies.
This episode traces the 35-year journey of collaborative editing technology from Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demo to mainstream tools like Google Docs.
This educational episode traces the evolution of Graphics Processing Units from early display controllers to modern parallel processors, explaining the technical differences between GPUs and CPUs while debunking the myth that NVIDIA invented the GPU.
This episode traces the unlikely connection between early 20th-century Korean history and modern technology, telling the story of how a failed diplomatic mission in 1907 led to Japan's annexation of Korea, and how a descendant of the last emperor later declared a VPN entrepreneur as the crown prince, leading to the creation of a blockchain-based virtual nation called Joseon 2.0.
This episode explores the history of Smalltalk, the revolutionary programming language that powered the graphical user interface of the Macintosh.
Tom Merritt explains the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), covering its origins from WIPO treaties, key provisions like anti-circumvention rules and safe harbor for platforms, and real-world impacts such as notice-and-takedown processes.
This episode provides a detailed history and explanation of OpenAI, from its founding as a nonprofit by Sam Altman and Elon Musk with a mission to develop safe AI for humanity, through its controversial transition to a hybrid for-profit structure to secure funding, to its current position as a leader in AI with ChatGPT.
The episode opens by asking what a word processor really is.
This episode demystifies ChatGPT by explaining three key misconceptions: that AI doesn't actually 'know' what it's saying, doesn't look up answers from a database, and operates in ways even scientists don't fully understand.
This episode explains SIM swapping, a cyberattack where criminals trick your phone carrier into transferring your phone number to a SIM card they control.
This episode traces the surprising history of the computer mouse, from its military trackball origins to Douglas Engelbart's invention at Stanford Research Institute.
This episode traces the surprisingly long history of video conferencing technology, from early 20th century experiments with transmitting still images, through Germany's 1936 video phone system, AT&T's expensive commercial attempts in the 1960s-70s, to the mathematical breakthroughs in video compression and the invention of the webcam that enabled today's ubiquitous tools like Zoom.
The episode turns to RSS, the feed system behind podcast listening.
Know a Little More explains Section 230 through Gonzalez v.
“About Okay” traces the word’s first known printed use to the March 23, 1839 Boston Morning Post and a joke involving the Anti-Bell Ringing Society.