 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Ali Senjabi, Andrew Bradley and Dale Mulcahee. Coming up on DTNS, Shannon Morris is here with an up-close look at the Pixel 7 phones and the Pixel Watch Plus, Apple's new App Store Rules Target NFTs and Facebook and Shutterstock partners up with open AI. Is that a good idea? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 25th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Taylor Snopes. Shannon Morris. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Couldn't decide for a second which one you wanted to be. I want to know what Roger's alter ego is. It's Roger. It's just a very slightly different Roger. Yeah, there are subtle differences. Roger. Alright, let's start with a few tech things you should know, the quick hits. Here they are. Amazon is rolling out the option to use a Venmo Balance, linked bank account or debit cards for payments as it promised in 2021 it would do. And Venmo can also be made the default payment for payment going forward. Purchase protection will apply and the rollout begins on Tuesday, began on Tuesday rather and expected to be available to most Americans by Black Friday, which is November 25th. Oh, how convenient for Amazon. In a statement to The Verge, NVIDIA says it is investigating reports of two RTX 4090 cards that had their included power cables melt or burn. NVIDIA moved to a new 16 pin connector for the RTX 3090 Ti cards and now it's standard on the RTX 40 GPUs across vendors. The concerns stem from the 12 volt HP power connector designed for ATX 3.0 power supplies that might cause issues if bent in a certain way. These things sometimes turn out to be user errors. Sometimes they turn out to be design problems or confusion. Sometimes it's a little of all of that and there's only two across a lot of cards. We'll see. Reuters sources say that Microsoft is beefing up its Chinese video game content to compete with Sony's success from Genshin Impact, an action role playing hit from Shanghai based studio Mi Ho-Yo that has brought Sony billions of dollars since it's released just two years ago. Filing showed that Microsoft paid $2.5 million to feature action game ARC Survival Evolved on Game Pass and $2.3 million for sequel ARC 2, both from US developer Studio Wildcard, which you might not know, is owned by China's Snail Games. Executive from Shanghai's Recreate Games tells Reuters that his company signed a deal with Microsoft last year for its upcoming multiplayer title party animals to launch exclusively on Xbox. Japan's digital ID effort launched in 2016, but the government has had a hard time getting folks to sign up. The government of Japan has decided now to link the My Number card to driver's license and health insurance. And the key is that the health insurance cards folks have now will be discontinued in late 2024. So after that point, if you want your health insurance card, which you do, you need a My Number card, which means you need to sign up for the digital ID program. Now, there's resistance to the plan in Japan based in part on common concerns over data protection that I'm sure you could guess at. But it's also not that easy to sign up to get a My Number card. You have to get a form in the mail, then fill it out and send it back in the mail. Only about half of the people in Japan have a My Number card and those half don't really want one. So we'll see where this goes next. According to a Google support page, the final version of Chrome that will be compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 will be released next year with Chrome 110 tentatively scheduled for February 7th, 2023. Windows 7 was released back in 2009. Microsoft officially ended support for it in 2020. But it's estimated that at least 100 million PCs are still running that OS, so kind of matters. Yeah, upgrade your witness. Alright, that is a look at the quick hits. Let's talk a little more about Shutterstock. What do we got? Let's do it. So Shutterstock, if you're not familiar, is a marketplace of sorts for artists. If you're a photographer, you might want to license and sell your work for things like pamphlets or advertising or maybe a video that somebody would use that has your work included and the like. We've talked a lot about the increased use of text to image generators as a potential replacement for stock art and the fact that it takes a certain skill to get those generators to output something that is usable that would be on par with what an artist could generate themselves as a human. With that in mind, it's not surprising to see Shutterstock get in front of the issue and announce it's partnering with OpenAI to integrate Dolly too. In the coming months, you'll be able to enter text prompts to create images in Shutterstock which then you can modify as much as you want and then sell on the platform. That part is really important. That also means you won't be able to sell machine-generated work on Shutterstock that wasn't made with Dolly too because that's not a partnership. So Shutterstock sold OpenAI access to its images and metadata in order to train its algorithms to address concerns about that quote contributors whose content was involved in training generative models will receive a share of the earnings from datasets and downloads of all AI generated content produced on our platform. Now those payouts will come every six months based on earnings from data deals and royalties from generic licensing on Shutterstock. Well, that's nice except those training sets weren't just made up of data from Shutterstock contributors. I'm not sure what Shutterstock plans to do about people whose training data was used and they aren't on Shutterstock. I imagine Shutterstock has no plans to go find out who they are and pay them. One of the big names in imaging licensing is Getty Images and Getty Images has decided to avoid this whole question by not allowing any machine-generated imagery to be sold through its systems because it's unclear if that is fair use of data or not. Shutterstock doesn't have to pay people, at least not yet, but we don't know what the legal system will say about that. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge, we don't want to put our customers into that legal risk area. Getty is taking a different approach. It's partnering with a company called Bria, B-R-I-A, to provide its customers with machine-powered editing instead of machine-powered generation. So the source material still comes from you, the creator. The algorithm in Bria helps you do things like remove an object fast or you can even tell it to change the gender of people in a photo, apparently, just by typing a few words. I think it's really fascinating here to see the different approaches to what is a tool to help you make better stock images and also with Shutterstock and Getty both having different ways of addressing the concerns over what those tools could be used for. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure Shutterstock or Getty are right here. I get that Getty's saying, we're just going to hands off for now. We don't know how this is going to play out and we'd rather just not engage. Shutterstock says, well, you know, let's do some dolly stuff. You know, let's allow folks to be able to pay for AI-generated images that are based on artist images. Now, in some of my artist community this morning, there was a lot of fud, you know, people saying, well, hold on a second. I'm on Shutterstock and now I'm competing with AI on Shutterstock that has used my images on Shutterstock to make the AI more, you know, effective, you know, to give, you know, Sarah the eventual art that she's looking for altogether. Well, Shutterstock saying, don't worry, you're going to get paid. Okay, if that's true, that's great. I don't know how you record that, though, effectively. I have a big concern with, like, how much these Shutterstock artists are going to get paid because, like, in my experience, I have paid $50 to $250 for a commercial, like, anime character of myself from an artist. And if they're not making that same amount of money, if they're only making, like, five bucks from some kind of AI-generated content, like, that's not fair to them. And ethically, that makes me very concerned for the artists that are on the platform, as well as the ones that aren't. Like Tom mentioned, the training sense, we're not just made up from the data from Shutterstock, so there's other people involved. And when it comes down to that, like, personally, I would rather just go straight to a content creator on Twitter and, like, you know, commission them for some kind of piece of art that I have a little bit more control over, over something that might come out really janky from some AI-generated tool. But even if it isn't janky, like, even if it's exactly what you wanted, it's like, okay, who contributed and who's getting paid? Like, it would be cool if there's some way to use the AI-generated content to find out what artists it's kind of bringing in this information from, and then I could go find those artists and pay them directly for the content. But that's not how it works. I know. And I think I'm going to take the unpopular stance here, which is, I don't think artists are owed what Shutterstock is paying them any more than Scott Johnson owes all of the artists who inspired him and helped him learn. 100%. This is just training data that was used to teach an algorithm, and it now creates something based on that. I understand that they didn't get permission to use the data in the training set. And I think that is a fair thing to address of whether they should have been paid to use their data in the training set. But I don't think what the algorithm outputs is in any way theirs. It's just whether their data was used to train. To me, that's similar to, well, did you pay for the book of art that helped you learn to do art so the creator of the book got paid? That's how I view it. And don't forget that it's not a machine putting out cheap art that's going to undermine the marketplace for stock creators. What they're doing is saying Dolly too can be used by the creators of art on our platform to help them make the art. And there's a lot of creators who want to do that. And using that tool doesn't immediately make you able to create something that you couldn't otherwise. There's a skill to having it create something that then you might want to modify. So I think this isn't, I think people get very upset about this because of a perception of unfairness that isn't there. But there is an unfairness that we're confusing it with that is there. And what Shutterstock's doing is trying to address one kind of fairness, but it's addressing it in the wrong place. And I'm not sure that that's, I think that's going to engender a bunch of confusion, actually. I think the comparison you make to Scott Johnson, you know, prolific artist saying, hold on a second, you know, if you're inspired by my work and you make your own work, great. You know, I'm pretty cool with that. If you rip off my work, not cool with that. And that, you know, applies to a machine as well. And we're still in those early days of figuring out, okay, well, how much of that is, is derivative versus actual, you know, copyright infringement. Yeah. And what Dolly too does is not going to rip off an artist unless you direct it to, in which case it's your fault for putting in the text. That says like imitate Scott Johnson, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, don't do that. I really do try to continue to see this as a tool because I know a lot of artists like Scott who are like, yeah, this is interesting. I might use this. This might help me. Apple regularly updates the App Store guidelines with little tweaks here and there. Of course, the latest revision comes with the release of iOS 16.1 and iPad OS 16.1. We don't usually cover these, but this time around, there's a couple of things in here that are of greater interest than usual. Let's go through a few of them. For instance, developers now have to give the app review team a demo account for apps that include account based features. That makes sense. A reviewer can't properly verify that everything is secure in an app if it doesn't have access to all the features, right? Yeah. There are also some details on handling NFTs in apps. This is new, but you can use in-app purchases to sell NFTs as well as charge for things like minting, listing or transferring NFTs. You can also let people see the NFTs they may have bought elsewhere, but you can't let a user use an NFT to unlock features or functionality within the app. Well, you can view other people's galleries of NFTs. You can't add buttons. You can't add links. You can't add links to buy them unless it's through an in-app purchase mechanism, which is where Apple gets their cut. We're familiar with that. And quote, apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, cryptocurrencies, and cryptocurrency wallets, etc. So you can unlock special stuff with an in-app purchase or for free. That's kind of it. Yeah. So they're basically putting NFTs in the class of Netflix or Amazon Kindle Store. It's a viewer of your NFTs. If you want to do anything else with NFTs, you got to go do it on the web. Shannon, this bother you at all? Not really. I mean, it kind of makes sense from my standpoint. And so far, this is not confusing. So it's pretty basic. I think it reduces the usefulness of these kinds of apps on the platform by relegating them to reader status. And it's a long list now that Apple has done this to streaming, cloud gaming, Kindle, you know, the list goes on of like, oh, you're a viewer app. You can't let people do some of the features you would normally do because it's a digital purchase. Oh, you're a retail store. Then you can charge whatever you want from whomever you want. There's also the clarified guidelines on advertising apps. If your app only lets people buy and manage advertising campaigns across multiple media types, you don't need to use the in-app purchases. So if you're an ad agency, you can have an iOS app for people to manage their campaigns and you will not need to give Apple a cut. That's dependent on the fact that the advertisements themselves don't show up in the app to other users. And if I'm managing my ad campaigns in bigdigitaladagency.com's app, I don't expect to see any ads, but the ones I'm managing, right? So that makes sense. It makes sense, but here's where it might get kind of interesting. Digital purchases for content that is experienced or consumed in an app, including buying advertisements to display in the same app, such as sales of boosts for posts in a social media app, must use in-app purchase. So this is a perfect example of what Facebook does, where you can buy a boost to your post from within the same app, where you can also see other users boosted posts. You can ignore them if you want to, but they're probably going to show up more often because somebody paid for that. Same goes for TikTok, same goes for eBay. A few more apps do the same thing. Gizmodo notes that Twitter and Tinder already use Apple's in-app payment system for these kinds of purchases. This is all just too confusing. It's so confusing. We can go through each one of these and be like, well, I get what they're doing, but I feel like in the end, what I'm seeing is in order for Apple to serve a principle that's supposed to keep people from being fooled into paying for things, they have erected an elaborate system. And when you have to erect an elaborate system that that is this elaborate, it's probably not the right system. Yeah, I mean, I would say, well, why don't they just say you can't boost anything? Nobody can. If nobody can, then nobody can. Or come up with a way for there to be alternate payments for digital items, just like you do with physical items. People are just as much at risk for buying physical retail. Bartering systems been around for millions of years. Well, you don't even have to go to barter. You don't have to send chickens through the mail or anything. But I'm saying some of that seems a little bit easier to understand than this. Seriously. No, that's a fair point. From a content creator perspective, it will be easy to understand from my end just using the application for developers. It seems like there's going to be a lot of hoops and confusion whenever you're developing these apps. And what's digital and what's not digital? Well, this is digital, but it's allowed, but this is digital, but it's not. I mean, whatever applies to physical, honestly, just apply it to digital and take your cut. Take your cut if you need to, but yeah. Oh, they need to. Yeah. Let people do the external payments. It's just gotten ridiculous. It's like when they kept adding epicycles to the orbits of planets because they didn't want to admit that the sun was at the center of the solar system. The sun's at the center of the solar system, Apple. Stop adding epicycles. And don't make us send chickens through the mail. If you haven't thought about something on the show, like Tom, that chicken thing doesn't make any sense. Please explain. We have an email address. You can email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shannon, Google kindly gave you a chance to spend some quality time with the latest Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch. How did you get so lucky? They did. So they invited a whole slew of content creators and influencers to this thing called Camp Pixel last week. It was four days up in the middle of nowhere in New York and in the Catskills. So never been, but it was a perfect time of year to get some photography done, do some workshops and get a little bit more education on the products. So how are you finding? Let's start with the Pixel Watch because I think that one gets covered less often than the phones. What do you think of the watch so far? Yeah, I've noticed that too. I am loving it. I've been wearing it since the day I got it. And there were like three major things that I really wanted to focus on. The first was the battery life because I had heard a lot of negativity around the battery life. And it's true, it does not last for a whole two days. You can maybe get a day and a third of a second day or a half of a second day through it. I found since I do sleep tracking, the easiest way for me to get like more than one day out of it or more than a day and a half is by charging it every morning while I'm like brushing my teeth and doing hair and makeup. And then by the time I'm done, it's back up to 100% battery. So I can make it last for the 24 hours that I need it to before I need to charge it again. And mentioning sleep tracking, that's a part of the Fitbit integrations as everybody knows. Google did purchase Fitbit and they integrated a lot of their software into the new Google Pixel Watch. I have been finding that it's super, super fun to use. I love that it tracks my heart rate. There was a giant spider when I was at Camp Pixel and I could see where my heart rate went from like 80 beats per minute up to 103 beats per minute in like an instant. Like you could tell that I was very, very scared. They call that the spider interval. It absolutely works, definitely. And Google Assistant is built in straight into the watch. I know it's built into other watches as well. I just want to put that out there, but it's very, very well integrated into this watch. It's super easy to use. You can, of course, speak to it or you can just hit a little button if you don't want to use the vocal prompt to wake it up. And it works just like your phone. You can do translations. You can do like weather, calendar. You can pick up and call somebody. You can write text messages. There's so many integrations built into the watch that I'm really enjoying it. I have mine on right now and I am loving it. Yay for Android having a good watch, finally. I mean, I love it. It always seems to be the main complaint of somebody with a great watch. And I'm rocking an Apple watch these days, but I used to have a Fitbit Versa 2 that I wore for a couple of years. And I really, really liked the Fitbit universe even today. Even though Apple has its own stuff. Apple stole your heart? Apple... It's a hard rate. Hard rate. Yeah, no. There are many times where Apple's like, your heart rate seems high. I'm like, I am sitting here doing nothing, but okay. But that whole kind of like day plus thing totally, I totally feel your pain, Shannon, because I also like to wear my watch overnight because I'm like, that's data that I can use later. But that means all night, you know, if I'm lucky, eight hours that my battery is being depleted, I have to figure out when is best to charge it. And that's just going to be any smartwatch really, you know, that is pulling from a lot of data going forward. Yeah, definitely. Now, the Pixel 6 was dinged a little bit for being too far in the direction of affordability without adding specs. A lot of people have looked at the 7 and said, okay, they're making progress towards adding some more of that flagship phone functionality, but still keeping the price fairly reasonable relative to other flagship phones anyway. You've got both the Pro and the 7, right? I do. I purchased the 7 off of the Google Store the day it released, and they sent me the 7 Pro to bring with me up to the camp. So I have been able to compare them side by side. And one of the biggest upgrades for me since I love security and privacy was the fingerprint sensor. It works way better now. That was a huge issue for me on the 6 Pro and the 6. And they also included face unlock and it actually works. So quite happy. Yeah, yeah. Very, very good impression with the security features when it comes to unlocking your phone. Very happy with those. Battery life. I'm hoping that it gets better. My adaptive battery last me screen on time about eight to nine hours, which is good. It's very good. But I watch a lot of YouTube during the day. I do a lot of content creation. So I would like for it to last a little bit longer. Hopefully it increases over time. And the other thing that I really like on the 7 and 7 Pro is the new cameras. Very, very impressive upgrades with the cameras. Now the 7 does not have as good a zoom lens as the 7 Pro does. The 7 Pro now can go up to 30 times zoom optically or digitally. And then it can do, I believe it's up to eight, five or eight times that it can do optically. And it's very good at giving you a nice clear picture even with a very far zoom. The 7 can only go up to eight times, but it's also really good. And then macro with the ultra wide on the 7 Pro is something I've been using every single day. And you can get very, very clear pictures. You can get so up close to a subject like three centimeters away and get a wonderful macro shot. And that's something I was seriously missing on not only the 6 and the 6 Pro, but also the S22 Ultra, which I have been using a lot as well. So I'm very happy with what they've done with the cameras. So usually folks decide that they're going to upgrade because they've waited long enough and their phone is just old. But some folks want to know like, well, if I'm on a 6, should I get the 7? Should I wait for a 7A to come out? What do you think? Yeah, honestly, it's a good question. Like if you are happy with your 6 and 6 Pro, stick with it. It's still getting upgrades. You're still getting your security and privacy updates and patches and everything. So you can stick with it and save your money. If you want to trade it in, you can get like hundreds of dollars off the price of a 7 Pro and you could absolutely upgrade and get the better camera and get the better fingerprint sensor in the face unlock. And for those features alone, I'm very happy with the upgrade, but I can understand if people want to wait and it's totally fine if you do. Yeah. All right. Good to know. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Absolutely. Well, if everybody wants to harken back to the year 2007, where were you when Netflix launched the streaming version of its service? I don't really remember where I was because I was doing DVDs for a while after that, but that's when it started existing. In May of the same year, the online platform Grupper became Sony's Crackle. Also in 2007 in October, Hulu launched. It was a year to spawn many a streaming service. Things were somewhat quiet though until 2014 with the launch of CBS All Access HBO. Now 2018 brought us ESPN plus. And then in 2019 began the plus avalanche with Disney plus Apple TV plus BT plus. 2020 saw Peacock and HBO Max. 2021 brought us Discovery plus and the conversion of CBS All Access to Paramount plus. Along the way, there were constant smaller launches, Crunchyroll, Shutter, BritBox and others. Now that brings us to 2022. Where are we now? GammaWire notes that even when you consider services with less than 1 million subscribers, which would mean not necessarily a huge hit, no major streaming services have launched this year. And there are no announcements at least as we've seen ahead of time going into November for new services in 2023. So you've been wondering when it would end. Looks like we might be at that end, my friends. We are at Peac Services and it's time to start the Deadpool. Yeah, we're at the top of the roller coaster. Who will die? I've been saying for a long time, like just hang in there. Everybody's got to try these things. All the big players have to try these things. And then at a certain point, the market will start shaking them out. People will stop using all of them because they can't. And we're there. Yeah. We're at that point within the next year. We're going to start to see either consolidation or depletion. So yeah, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Send us your Deadpool bets. Who's going to drop first? It's true. I mean, listen, I would pay for everything if I could, but I don't know many people who would pay for every streaming service, even if they really want to watch all the things as easily as, you know, it is afforded to them if they pay. That is just not practical. It's not. So yeah. I think once a few regulatory barriers are out of the way and Comcast and Disney have figured out who really owns Hulu and they've bought out Comcast and all that, I think we see Paramount get snapped up. And I think we see Warner Brothers Discovery get snapped up. And then we see snapped up by who? Well, by Comcast, Disney, Amazon, Netflix, the bigger companies out there. I don't know. No, it's coming. The consolidation is coming. And I think consolidation is coming, everybody. Yeah. New series. I'm going to call it. I think Paramount Plus will be the first of these to get merged into something else. Somebody will buy Paramount and they'll just take Paramount Plus and squeeze it into something else. I don't know who. I don't know when. But it's going to happen. What is happening? All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So yesterday on GDI, our extended show, we were talking about use cases for tablets. Like who uses tablets and when? And why are they better than laptops or phones? We're, you know, as companions. And Dwayne chimed in over email with an interest in one of his. Dwayne says, my company develops B2P iPad solutions. One of our clients is a medium size real estate firm. They deployed a custom iPad app to their staff. The staff considers the iPad the most powerful computer they've ever used because it significantly improves their professional workflow in the field. They can upload real estate property pictures, edit the inventory database, prepare and sign documents, conduct video tours and conferences using the front and rear cameras simultaneously and watch ESPN while waiting for clients. But don't tell anybody that they're doing that. We are implementing AR functionalities so they can do virtual staging based on the potential buyer style or corporate branding theme. We can also use LiDAR for automatic floor plan updates and measurements. Dwayne says the tablet form factor and iPad OS are not a limiting computing environment for them. Quite the opposite. They can do more on the platform than the previous Windows setup with laptops. Similarly, we've developed iPad apps for medical offices and corporate meetings, productions, companies that see higher productivity and significantly reduced IT maintenance costs after deploying iPads for some of their staff. Again, these firms don't consider the iPad or iPad OS apps as limited or for basic functions. It's their computer. That's so cool, Dwayne. Thank you for sharing your use case with us. That was awesome. 100%. Thank you, Dwayne. And thank you to everybody who sends us emails about everything we talk about on the show or might talk about on a future show. Feedback at DailyTechNews.com is where to send those emails. Thank you in advance. Your knowledge helps us get stronger. Also, thanks to Shannon Morse whose knowledge helps us get stronger every time she's on the show. Shannon, thanks so much for being with us and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. This month, I have gone super deep into data brokers and how to delete your data online and how to kind of clean out those Google search results. So check it out. Check out my newest videos. It's been super fun. Well, we're so glad to have you with us today. We're also so glad to welcome new couple brand new bosses, Adam and Sarag. Just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Sarag. Really glad to have you. Ah, so good. So good to have two of you. Tomorrow it could be three. I don't know. It could be you. I know. I know. We might be on a trend of sorts. Speaking of trends, patrons, you know the trend after DTNS ends. We start GDI. Good Day Internet is our companion show. You can catch the show live, though. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.