 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you. Yes, you, right there, listening to the show right now. Like, maybe your name is Norm Physikus or Chris Allen or Chris Smith. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft is making call of duty deals with pretty much everybody except Sony, plus what the Supreme Court Justice has said about Section 230 will surprise you, I swear. And Spotify and YouTube Music have new ways to make a personalized radio station for you. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from studio, rather than I'm Sarah Lane. In 4.2 inches of snow or feet of snow, I'm Scott Johnson. And snowless on the show's producer. There's a difference between 4.2 inches and feet. Yeah, you're right. One's a lot easier to shovel. You can just kind of push them out of the way. Well, folks, we have got so much for you today that we need to get right into the quick hits. Several users on Twitter shared screenshots claiming that OpenAI began offering early access to a new developer platform called Foundry. This will provide customers with a dedicated compute capacity to run OpenAI's model, including GPT 3.5, with the same tools and dashboards used by OpenAI itself. Pricing for the lightweight version of GPT 3.5 starts at $78,000 for three months. So this is for corporations. This is not for personal use. Amazon completed its acquisition of something that is for personal use. One Medical, which operates 200 medical offices across 26 markets in the United States. One Medical offers membership for $199 a year on top of insurance coverage. So your insurance covers part of it. You pay $199 whether insurance covers it or not. But that gives you some all-in-one care that one Medical says is easier to navigate. Lab tests can all happen at the same place. It's kind of like Kaiser, to be honest. Amazon announced the acquisition in July last year and shuttered its Amazon Care telehealth service this past August in anticipation of this. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it would not object to this acquisition, but is still investigating the deal for any anti-competitive effects or privacy implications. Amazon also partnered with Cochlear to launch a new app letting fire TV devices stream over Bluetooth to Cochlear implants, including any apps supported by the platform. Amazon says this will provide a dramatically cleaner and clearer signal than audio that comes from speakers. A little bit more health care news. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say that Apple has hit major milestones in developing a glucose monitor for the Apple Watch. The tech has been in development at Apple reportedly for 12 years and will use light-based measurement instead of blood samples, probably a plus for Apple Watch customers. An algorithm measures the reflection of light from lasers to estimate glucose concentration. Now, it's still years away from ending up in a watch as the next step. It's apparently to make an iPhone-sized version to strap to your bicep to use in conjunction with the watch. How much glucose is in there? Nikkei Asia sources say Chinese regulators informed several domestic tech giants including Tencent and Ant Group to not offer public access to chat GPT services. No foundry $78,000 subscription for you. They are not allowed to do that either on their own platforms or those from third parties, at least according to these sources. Launching any chat GPT-like service, which a lot of these Chinese companies have said they are going to do, would also require approval from regulators. Microsoft released a preview of mobile apps for Bing and Edge on Android and iOS, both featuring its new Bing chat experience. A Bing icon at the bottom of the apps can be used to begin the chats with users able to get responses as bullet points or text or even as a voice response. The apps use the same waitlist that Microsoft set up for desktop access to the new Bing chat and the company also added a preview of the new Bing chat to Skype. All right, and that is a look at the quick hits, but not the end of the Microsoft news. Microsoft had a busy week and it's only Wednesday. On Tuesday, we told you the company announced a 10-year deal to provide games specifically Call of Duty to Nintendo. Same day they launched on Xbox. Well, a little bit later, Microsoft announced another deal, this one also 10 years, to bring Call of Duty and other Activision games to Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming platform. Now, Microsoft can't share Call of Duty with Nvidia until it actually successfully acquires Activision Blizzard, but in this case we do know that this deal will immediately bring some Microsoft owned titles like Minecraft to GeForce Now as well. Yeah, Vice President and General Manager of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Phil Eisler said he was initially concerned about the acquisition, but that Microsoft was, quote, very open about wanting to enable cloud gaming and work with us on a 10-year license agreement. So over time, they made us more and more comfortable with it, end quote. Eisler also said that Microsoft isn't paying for access to the titles. Now, Microsoft's xCloud service is in direct competition with GeForce Now, obviously. Call of Duty will be available on Nintendo. Microsoft still says it'd like to sign a deal with Sony if Sony wanted to play ball, which it has not yet. So Scott, at this point, is there anything else that Microsoft can do? Anything else they can share with their partners to make nice, to make sure? I'm being offered Call of Duty for 10 years on my own body by Microsoft at this point. You're going to wear it all the time. They want the acquisition to go through, so what are you thinking? Well, I think that this is Microsoft lately. They want people to play their games and games in general with their services wherever people want them to play. It's no longer our platform. We don't care what platform you're playing on. We just want you to play our games and we want you to pay us money for subscriptions. And they're making ground doing that. The interesting thing about the two fills coming together, Phil Spencer and Phil Eisler, is that this seemed like an impossibility a little while ago. In fact, when GeForce Now first launched, you could play certain Activision and certainly Blizzard titles via the service. You could run them via their normal ways of owning them, but you could open them and run them basically as a virtual machine via GeForce Now. So for a while, people were playing World of Warcraft that way, Overwatch, some other popular titles, and that got yanked. They had takedowns for that, so they did. They complied and took it down. This is Microsoft basically saying, hey, we'd like to come back and if we end up acquiring these titles along with our own stuff, we'd really love to bring these back to the service. And it's really no sweat to GeForce Now because GeForce Now doesn't sell you the games anyway. They just provide a gateway service for you to play the games you already paid for, usually through Steam or other services, but some of this stuff has been gated off for a while and now there's a chance it'll all come back. So I think it's actually a really positive move and it's really, honestly, it's no skin off of GeForce or NVIDIA's nose. They lose nothing by this and they gain subscribers by this, so they lose nothing in this process. Microsoft doesn't really lose anything either because you have to buy Call of Duty in the future or even, I mean, you don't really buy Minecraft, but they're going to make their money off Minecraft if people are playing Minecraft. So the more places they could play Minecraft, including GeForce Now, the better. Obviously, Microsoft was motivated to make this deal because they want to look good for these regulators, but there's no reason they shouldn't have made this deal already, to be honest. I think people misunderstand that GeForce Now is not making money off of selling you the games. It's making money off of selling you access to the machine upon which you play your own games that you already bought, like Scott was saying. Yeah, exactly. And that therein lies the key. Now, the one thing I could see people raising their eyebrows at is they have a competing access your games via the cloud service called XCloud, like Sarah described, and XCloud, while still in beta, is a very solid piece of work and people like it and it seems like that competes directly with something like GeForce Now. But it really doesn't. Any more than them selling Halo Infinite on their store, the Xbox store, or you playing it by Game Pass, or buying it on Steam, or buying it on Epic Store, you get my drift here. Or selling a Surface laptop and letting HP use Windows. Exactly. They're doing that same thing kind of across the board. So the plan with games as going forward fits really nicely into a concept like this. And they're basically just saying, look, if you have Game Pass, we do have XCloud. But if you really like what GeForce is doing, and we kind of do too, actually I really do as well, hey, you can play them there too. And I think this just is consistent with their current mode and puts a little bit more pressure on Sony who seems to be the only one with their arms folded in the corner refusing to do what anybody wants them to do. It's kind of a bad look for them. I still, I appreciate their position, especially as a market leader in consoles. And they don't like this kind of pressure. But I think the writing's on the wall ultimately. Yeah, I know this isn't our prediction show that we do annually at the end of the year. But I feel like within a week, maybe I'm wrong, Sony might change their tune. Oh, follow up next week. If regulators allow this, Sony changes their tune. I don't think Sony changes their tune unless this acquisition goes through. You're right, because then you're just left out. Yeah, although maybe, maybe they will, but they'll want to get something else. Microsoft will want to get something else to return for it. Real quickly though, do we think this is going to go through? Do we think this is going to make a difference? Because right now, I don't know. I keep having these back and forths on it. Part of me is like, it depends on how frustrated or tired of dealing with it, Microsoft is. And then stuff like this happens, they go, oh, no, they're actively out there like building partnerships with companies that previous to now were kind of at odds in a lot of ways. And now this is then coming together in this very specific way. So they clearly have the. Do the regulators care or are they going to be like, I'm still too big if you get it? Because I think Microsoft has enough lawyers. They'll do this all day. Yeah, that's what they're hired to do. And you know, Microsoft has been in long drug out acquisition talks in the past in other capacities. I don't know. I feel like Microsoft is throwing everybody as many bones as possible saying, what about this? Yeah, they're doing everything they can. I still don't know if it's enough. I don't know if the regulators are like, yeah, you can dance all night. We don't care. All right. Speaking of dancing, you're going to need some music. If you want to dance, Google began rolling out a new radio feature on YouTube music that gives you more control than the usual automatically generated playlist. For example, you can select up to 30 artists rather than just one to start your station. And you control how often those artists repeat. You can put some artists in heavy rotation, some in smaller rotation. You can set filters to change the mood of the station. Maybe you want to have more chill stuff or downbeat or pump up. As you listen to the station, you can also adjust those settings in the tune option, which will appear at the bottom of the interface. As somebody who has created her own playlists named Angry Drake versus Chill Drake. I respect this. And this is actually something that I would use. Listen, sometimes you have to get granular with stuff that you like. Especially with Drake. Yeah. Similarly, sort of, Spotify launched a DJ feature. It's in beta and provides curated music with automatically generated spoken commentary about the tracks and the artists selected. The feature is powered by Guess Who? Open AI. Spotify saying it provided its music editors and experts and script writers and data curators because Spotify has all of those things apparently with access to the tool in order to create culturally relevant, accurate pieces of commentary at scale. So humans definitely still in the loop here. And you can tap the DJ button to shift to a different artist say or maybe a different genre or mood help improve the DJ as much as you can. Spotify's DJ is available in English only for now to premium subscribers in the U.S. and Canada to start with. So let's all talk about what we prefer here. Do you want to be in charge of your own radio station? Have all the controls at your fingertips? Or do you kind of like the AI that knows you being in charge and is just kind of helping you out? Or you just want playlists the way that you've had them in the past? I'm the little kid in the GIF who shrugs your shoulders and says why not both? Because that's what I want. I want both the ability to still be very granular and manual with the way I choose music and how I make my quote-unquote mixed tapes showing my age here. But I also love the idea. Some of the application of AI lately in this field is very interesting to me. And I think it can get very good at knowing what you want, how you want it and when you want it. But I don't want that to be the full-time thing. I need to have tools. And they're not saying they're replacing people here or they're replacing my ability to do that. But that would be a hang up for me if all they offered was this AI DJ business. When they say they're going to make me a radio station, as someone who used to program a radio station, I want that. I want the ability to have a rotation list, 10 songs in heavy rotation, 10 songs in medium rotation, some recurrence, a library of 500 oldies that get circled through more slowly. I want to be able to set a clock that plays like heavy rotation at the top of the hour, bottom of the hour, and tendily hour. I really want that kind of control if I'm going to make a radio station and if I don't have that kind of control, then I kind of want the opposite, which is just an AI that asks me some questions every once in a while. Do you like this? What kind of stuff do you like? I notice you've been playing more of this and then creates the perfect station for me. It feels like YouTube music is going in the direction that you want, Tom. It's just that not everybody is like, well, I used to be a radio DJ, so here's what I know I'm capable of doing. Oh, no, I don't. If only you gave me the controls. Yeah, yeah. But it's definitely giving you a sort of, yeah, let's say you pick your 30 artists. Well, maybe 10 of those artists are actually your favorites and others you'd like peppered in a little bit more. So there's a bit of a sliding scale going on here. I also don't have an issue with what Spotify is doing. I say anything that helps me discover artists because honestly, unless I, if you give me too much control, I listen to the same stuff over and over. Or I just go to the radio and then I just suffer through songs that I like less than other songs. And I think, ah, if only I could hard it like I do on Apple Music. As an Apple Music person, neither of these services are directly affecting me. But yeah, I think the, you know, the more control we have over the music that we'd like to listen to for the next hour or however long our next road trip is, it's cool. I don't think either of these are wrong. No, neither approaches are. And I mean, you'll have, you'll still have kind of the base control you have now, but it does make me wonder, mainly because you mentioned it, but it also, I am also an Apple Music user. This feels like something Apple can't take their time with and be like the perfection version of a thing that takes three years longer than everybody else. I think they have to get on it. So I don't know how soon we'll start seeing this sort of thing. Yeah. Because honestly, Spotify is just straight up opinions of a lot of people straight up better at curation than Apple Music. Apple Music has more total songs and albums, but if you can't get what you want or get enough or recommended to you, Spotify is probably the place you're going to go. So I don't think they can sit back and go, well, we're going to have a huge team of researchers figure this out for the next seven years, and then we'll have the ultimate AI recommended DJ. I don't think they can afford it. Also, side note here. I love that Spotify is using open A technology not to replace anyone, but to make their job easier, to make their job more effective, to make their job happen at scale. For example, Spotify's head of cultural partnerships, Xavier Jernigan, who also hosts the Get Up podcast, is the model for the AI voice that reads you things in the Spotify version of this. You get his voice as an artificial DJ. He's not going anywhere, but they're using that. This is a great example of AI being used as a tool, rather than replacing someone. I think that that might be significant down the road. I think there are not everybody, some folks like streaming services enough to have several and like to compare. Most people don't, right? You're a Spotify user, you use Apple Music. Maybe you stick with Google's YouTube Music or some version that I'm not thinking of right now. For me, I'm sort of like, Apple Music's great. $9.99 per month. My Verizon subscription pays for it anyway. We're good, but I don't really know what I'm missing. If you feel like you've been comparing multiple streaming services, I'd love to hear about it. Email us. Deezer users, email us. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering interpretations of the law that we affectionately on the show called Section 230, which protects internet platforms from being liable for what their users post on those platforms. Why should you care? Well, depending on how the court rules, it could change the kind of things that platforms allow you to post or not post. It could also make it more expensive for new platforms to enter the market and then challenge the existing big ones. And if that happens in the U.S., it's going to have repercussions around the world. Yeah, we have an episode of Know a Little More about how Section 230 works specifically in relation to these cases. The short version, though, is before Section 230, internet platforms either had to choose not to moderate at all or become responsible for everything on their platform. And the U.S. Supreme Court is considering two cases challenging a part of those safe harbor protections. Tuesday, the court heard arguments in Gonzalez vs. Google that rests on whether algorithmic recommendations, the YouTube algorithm that suggests another video to you is protected as moderation or not. The other, Tomna vs. Twitter, rests on whether failure to remove terrorist content fast enough constitutes liability because of the anti-terrorism laws in the United States. Now, we're not going to get Supreme Court decisions on these till late June. All we got was the oral arguments this week, but here's what we can glean from what they said starting with Gonzalez. All right, several of the justices pointed out that algorithms weren't nearly as sophisticated when Section 230 was written as they are now. That seems kind of obvious. And that maybe Congress should deal with this, not the courts. You can check out Neil Gorsuch's feelings when he said, quote, I mean artificial intelligence generates poetry. It generates polemics today that would be content and goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing, or digesting content. And that is not protected, unquote. Very interesting. Chief Justin John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas also asked questions concerning what the wider effects of the case would be. Justice Thomas specifically said that it's the same algorithm that recommends cooking and racing videos than the plaintiff needs to explain how it differs in this case. But the clincher came from Justice Amy Conan Barrett, who said the following, if you lose tomorrow, do we even have to reach the Section 230 question here? Hmm, Tom, what do you think she means by that? Yeah, so Wednesday's case, Tom Noversus Twitter, asks whether Twitter and other companies bear responsibility for a shooting in Istanbul in 2017 because they hosted and monetized videos that radicalized the shooters. The case is not about recommendations. Most experts think, however, that if the court finds that Section 230 protects Twitter in the Tomna case, that that would make the question of algorithms in the Gonzales versus Google case irrelevant. Because, basically, if hosting the videos in the first place is protected, then it doesn't matter if you recommended them or not. Google could then file a motion to dismiss its case, or it could be remanded by the Supreme Court for further proceedings in the light of their Tomna decision. This would be a way for the court to avoid deciding the boundaries of Section 230. But that's only if they ruled in favor of Twitter. Sarah, how did the justices sound in their hearings on Tomna? Well, they focused quite a bit on the part of the Anti-Terrorism Act, saying liability may be asserted as to any person who aids and abets by knowingly providing substantial assistance. They grilled both sides about where the line is between unknowingly assisting somebody who goes on to commit a crime and providing that assistance when you did not... you did know or maybe should have known. So, you know, more of that gray area. Justin Sclerence Thomas asked how the law would treat him if he provided a gun to a friend who then went on to commit a crime. Justice Catani Brown Jackson pointed out that willful blindness is something that we have said can constitute knowledge. So, now what do we make of this? Yeah, so this second one is more typical for the court, which is they ask a lot of hard questions of both sides and you get an idea of how they're thinking about the case but not necessarily how they will rule. So, what I took from the Tomna questioning was that they're taking this one very seriously and they're trying to figure out where is the line of aiding and abetting. They're looking very closely at that part of the law. Did Twitter aid and abet when it provided money to these folks who ended up going on to do the shooting or provided money to people making videos that were seen by the people who were then inspired to do the shooting, is that aiding and abetting? So, that's why you get Justice Thomas' question like, well, hey, if I loaned my friend a gun, but I don't know what he's gonna do with it and then he commits a crime, am I liable for that? That's why you get Catani Brown Jackson, Justice Jackson saying, hey, willful blindness, if you know you should look but you turn away anyway, you can still be found responsible. So, they're not telling us how they're gonna rule but they're telling us that's what they're looking at. They're ruling is gonna rest on did Twitter, can you decide that Twitter aided and abetted? If you decide they did, then Tomna wins and Twitter is found liable and Gonzales versus Google is still in play. If they decide this doesn't constitute aiding and abetting, therefore it's not a violation of the law, therefore Twitter wins, then they can and they indicated very clearly in the oral arguments with Gonzales versus Google that they wanted to kick that one down the road. So, if I had to guess, not based on what their questions were but based on what they said in Gonzales versus Google, it sounds like they want to rule in favor of Twitter and then kick Gonzales versus Google down the road because they don't want to alter how section 230 is interpreted. Yeah, I spent a lot of this morning trying to come up with okay, what's my best guess for how this shakes out? And I don't know because, you know, it still goes back to that question of if you knew somebody was going to do something wrong and you did nothing, that is one thing. But that's not what we're arguing about. We're arguing about whether or not you should have known. Right. And, you know, and that is, I mean, if we're talking about, you know, if Tom should have known that I was going to do something terrible with a gun when he handed it to me yesterday, well, that's different than, you know, a person who uses a platform, you know, which is made up of many employees who, you know, have different opinions about all sorts of things. It is, it is, it's a fascinating and certainly not a rosy situation that we're going through. But, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I would say the only thing I would add here is Gorsuch brought it up in his opinion or in his comments. AI is about to make their 230 docket really busy. So maybe clear all this stuff out, get it figured out, do what you got to do, throw it back to Congress, whatever you got to do, but things are going to get weird. Yeah. I was heartened by what Justice Kagan and Gorsuch and others said in the Gonzalez versus Google where they're like, we, Congress needs to figure this out because algorithms aren't now what they were when Section 230 was put in place. You need new language. And they kind of repeated that over and over that Section 230 really isn't equipped to deal with the modern algorithm and AI, which is why you saw Justice Gorsuch, you know, point out like, hey, this thing's doing poetry. Congress needs to do something about that. Well, let's turn, turn our attention to the heavens, shall we, particularly space. TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that a company called Vast Space that aims to build artificial gravity space stations in low earth orbit acquired the Space Tug Startup Launcher. This would give Vast Space access to Launcher's Orbiter Space Tug, also their employees, and payload platform and its liquid rocket engine known as E2. Vast would use the Orbiter Tug to test space station subsystems and components in orbit as early as June with another test set for this coming October with both carrying customer payloads. Also, Vast says its first space station will be zero G. Now they haven't quite cracked the artificial gravity thing just yet. If you know more about it, let us know because Vast's commercial project will continue The company adds that Launcher's Space Tugs abilities and its flight software, avionics and guidance, navigation, control systems technology will complement development of the space station, which is why the acquisition happened and Launcher's first Orbiter mission in January failed after the spacecraft's power systems malfunctioned. So Launcher doesn't necessarily have a great track record, but Vast Space thinks they can do something with it. Vast's CEO, Jud McKayla, co-created Mt. Gox, the crypto exchange that went Mt. Down. He's a founder of the protocol Ripple. He's a crypto guy. He has a lot of money. He has a lot of really smart people working on this, though. So to me, it's less about McKayla, he's the front man, he's the hype man for this, but they're doing some really interesting things. And in fact, even though Launcher's first Orbiter failed, it failed in a way that they learned something from. They were very positive about, yeah, while the batteries were working, everything worked the way we wanted to, and we know exactly why the batteries failed, and this is a great test to let us learn from that. So I feel like even though Jud McKayla is CEO, which is gonna make a lot of people go dismiss this, there might be something to this. I'm not sure about the anti-gravity part of that. That seems a little bit, you know, ahead of things. You're getting ahead of themselves, but I think we are at the point where we've got private companies doing regular launches, about to take people to the moon in a couple of years. It's about the time in the schedule where you'd see private companies making their own versions of the International Space Station. I think that's gonna get more common, whether it's vast in Launcher or somebody else. We say hurry up so you can do CES from the moon, Tom. That's what I want. That's expensive though, man. I know. You think it's expensive to stay in the Renaissance Las Vegas until they have CES on the moon. Brand new, patron-level. I think if the satellite internet costs. Well, you're closer to the satellites though. I guess that's true. Yeah, but the Ethernet cable, you know, it's flying all over the place. Yeah, it's really long. Yeah. All right. Well, let's thank Scott Johnson for his being here. Scott Johnson, we just want to thank you for being here. Oh, that's so nice of you to say. I really want to thank you for having me here. How about that? I also want to tell people that I'm getting really close. Like, this isn't a great representation about a centimeter on my fingers here, and you can't see it if you're listening, but that close to finishing my brand new card game called Dungeon Murder, which you can find details at DungeonMurder.com. Some new video going up there this week, so watch for that. But anyway, I am playing the final beta deck. I have play-tested it to death. I think we're there. So keep your eye on that site. Kickstarter coming soon. I'm very excited about it. Can't wait to get it in people's hands. And if you want to know more, once again, that is over at DungeonMurder.com. Scott, I know you've answered this question before, but how long have you had that URL, Dungeon Murder? I have had Dungeon Murder since 2008 because I had this idea. It was based on a comic I drew that year, and I had this idea that, hey, I may want to use that for something, and then I just let it sit. It's just so good. It's not bad, right? It's okay. There aren't a lot of good URLs left anymore. I would have guessed even longer, to be honest. I'm surprised I got it, to be honest, but it's all good now. Scott, you're never short of surprises, and we thank you for being with us today. We also have a boss to thank. And you know who that boss is today? It's Brandon. Brandon's backing us on Patreon, and we want to shout you out, Brandon. Thank you. Brandon, we see you. You're the best. And because Brandon is a patron, Brandon and all the other patrons are going to hear us talk about something else on The Extended Show. Good Day Internet. Samsung has a feature that will synthesize your voice on its phone so you don't have to pick up the phone. You can just type your responses in text, and then your voice will read them during the phone call. We're going to gauge how horrified that makes Scott Johnson. But just a reminder, we do DTNS Live, and you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young joining us. Talk to you soon.