 This 10th year Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Dr. X-17, Dustin Campbell, Tim Deputy, and our new patrons, Sean, Francisco, Mark, Morgan, and Vince. On this episode of DTNSO and JJ Stone, aka Odocta joins us, and we talk about AI fears, what's reasonable and what's just a distraction. Plus, news is now banned on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, but they'll never know. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, June 23rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Love and Special Sauce, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories, from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And as I mentioned, O-N-J-J Stone, aka Odocta at 844-986-4563. I did not pay for a laugh through my read. I mean, come on. This is not what I pay. Uh, 98 oil me. What is this phone number? It's a text line. People text me and say hi. It's like it's like an email list. Instead, you could just text me and tell me how great or bad I did on the show today. And I'll reply to you and say, instant feedback. I love that. That's right. I'm texting on the show. People always do that, though. That's the gotta put the phone down. You're going to get a bunch of chatbots after today's show because we're talking about AI. There you go. Let's start with the quick hits. Apple's Vision Pro's release of its Vision OS SDK includes some code that suggests that the headset will limit its functionality or even stop working entirely if the user is moving too fast. The alert shows up to a user as moving at an unsafe speed and then gives the prompt, virtual content has been temporarily hidden until you return to a safe speed. You might say, what is this for? Well, good news. There's a travel mode. You can enact when you're a passenger in a car or a bus or an airplane, which would probably why that would be something that you would see otherwise. Yeah, they don't want you running with it on. Is that the idea? I don't know. Please don't run during a VR headset. No running with the Vision Pro. Don't do it. At VidCon, YouTube announced its bringing tech from the Google Area 120 incubator called Allowed over to YouTube that it dubs video into other languages. So you don't have to speak all those languages. It saves you a lot of time on Duolingo. The tool transcribes videos which users can then review and edit before the dub is created. Allowed currently supports English, Spanish, and Portuguese. So not a lot of languages right at the moment, but there's more to come. YouTube also updated its policy on fan channels. As of August 21st, creators need to explicitly mark fan channels as such and make it clear that it doesn't represent the original creator. A channel that copies the look and small details of another channel like copying a profile photo can be subject to termination. And YouTube announced Test and Compare, which lets creators upload up to three thumbnails for a single video, then lets YouTube decide which will perform the best. YouTube says it's testing the feature with a few hundred creators and plans to roll out a beta version in the coming months, two thousands more, and then do a broader launch next year. The NFC or Near Field Communication Forum released a roadmap for research through 2028. A big focus is on increasing NFC range, with a roadmap looking to expand NFC to four to six times the current operating distance, which would be up to 30 millimeters. Yeah, it's also looking to increase the NFC wireless charging spec from one to three watts, which could make smaller devices possible as well. According to an LA City Tourism Commission planning document, the Electronic Software Association, or ESA, has canceled its hold on the LA Convention Center. You know, hold the Convention Center for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, for both 2024 and 2025. The ESA says it's in talks with stakeholders about the future of E3 events and no final decision has been made. E3 was last held in person in 2019. So maybe they're going to go back to the hotel thing. I don't know. Is it dead-dead or mostly dead? Mostly right now. I think it's dead-dead. Everybody's holding their own events now. Everybody wants to do their own thing. You know, they're spending weeks on end talking about their own systems. What has E3 given me that I can't look at somewhere else already? You wouldn't be the first person to ask. Qualcomm announced the S3 Gen2 Sound Platform designed for use in dongles and also adapters. This is built on Bluetooth 5.4. It supports latency down to 20 milliseconds for games and 24-bit 96 kilohertz music streaming. No word on when we'll see this in devices, but how we know. Good for the gamer. They want that little latency. All right, the Canadian Senate passed the Online News Act Thursday, sending it for royal assent. Once His Majesty's representative has blessed it, it becomes law. It's called Bill C18 until then, and it makes access to any portion of content from a news business forbidden without an agreement by a qualifying digital news intermediary. And true to its word, Meta announced it will remove news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada as soon as this thing becomes law. Google also started testing blocking some news content for Canadian users, but told The Verge it's still working with the Canadian government on a possible solution. Among other things, Google wants a clear path to exemption for its existing commercial deals. The bill requires both companies to enter into agreements to pay news publishers for use of content on their platforms once it gets royal assent. It'll take about six months to go into effect. Now, Owen, what they're saying is if a news publisher, let's say, you know, the National Post has a presence on Facebook and publishes its news on that Facebook page, Facebook has to pay them. They have to negotiate payments. So what Facebook is doing is saying, great, then we will not allow that to happen. We'll not allow the National Post to publish its own news on our thing so that we don't have to pay them. They'll still have access to their account and everything. We just won't allow them to publish. You or I could share a link. That's a different thing, but you won't have the publishers able to post their own news on the platform. They did this in Spain to various effect. They did it in Australia, and it's the law of the land now. They reached a conclusion. What do you think of this? I don't like controlling the media in this kind of form. At the end of the day, if people could still share the links, 90% of the time, whenever I read anything in the news, it's from someone else sharing it. I don't follow CNN or Fox or anything like that. A lot of grandparents do, I'm sure, but I don't know how much this is going to stop the propagation or fund them getting money from this because if you can still share the links from regular people, that's what most people do. They're getting into little groups and they stand in little tribes and they all throw the links in there and they read stuff and they believe what they read. I mean, if Canada wants to try and get some money out of it, cool. But I don't think it's going to work that well. Yeah. I feel like this is a little bit of a game of chicken, you know, Facebook say or Metta saying, okay, we just, you know, we won't show news the way that we have in the past. I don't think that the company would acquiesce in this way unless it felt that click-throughs weren't really doing it any favors anyway. Otherwise, there would be more of a fight here. That's my feeling. You know, what Google is saying, you know, blocking some news content for Canadian users also, but we're working with the government on a solution. I would love to know what that solution would be because I'm not sure we can see it as far as a walled garden like something like, you know, your Facebook feed is concerned. Yeah, a couple of clarifications here. If I try to share a link to the national post, that won't be carried because the national post is too big. So the links I share would have to be other links. So it will stop some news stuff from being shared. Metta estimates that links to news articles make up less than 3% of the news feeds on its platform, says it's insignificant revenue. To your question, Sarah, what Google wants to do is make it so that when it's got independent deals, it can get an exemption before it goes through the process. So to say like, hey, I've already got an agreement. They agreed with me. We didn't go through your Canadian process, but we agreed that should count rather than having to have the deal submitted through the process and possibly be determined to be insufficient. Is the Canadian process getting a cut? No. The Canadians, the Canadian government gets nothing out of this. It all goes to the news publishers. Yeah, Google's got some something rolling there that I don't think they could do that. Because if I look, we're already paying them. So I'm going to pay them twice. Yeah, because the law would maybe require them to do it a little differently. It's all the devils in the details and stuff. Well, court hearings have begun on the FTC's attempt to block Microsoft from closing its deal to acquire Activision Blizzard. And the interesting revelations are continuing to surface. According to an email from January of 2022, unsealed in the hearing, Sony's PlayStation chief, Jim Ryan, said to then Sony Computer Entertainment CEO, Chris Deering, about the Activision Blizzard deal, quote, it's not an exclusive play at all. They're thinking bigger than that. And they have the cash to make moves like this. I've spent a fair amount of time with both Phil Spencer, Microsoft giving head and Bobby, he's talking about Bobby Kotek over the past day. I'm pretty sure we'll continue to see call of duty on PlayStation for many years to come. I'm not complacent and I'd rather this hasn't happened, but we'll be okay more than okay. So yeah, this is the smoking gun email, right? If Sony's out there trying to convince the court and everyone else that they do not believe that things will be okay. And then you've got an email that says like, I mean, things will be okay. That does undermine their position. It's not determinative though. It's also, I mean, come on now, you know, you could have thought things wouldn't be okay and still send an email like that, right? Yeah, right. We do that all the time. You know, wishful thinking. This is an email written in the shower crying under the warm water in a fetal position. That's how this email is written. Because I'll tell you exactly that's what it is because it's not okay. I hate Microsoft. I haven't had an Xbox in so long. I used to have all the systems, but I'm a PlayStation junkie. And as soon as I heard this, I'm like, man, this is like a game over move for my lifestyle and way of life. And I'm going to have to go back to Microsoft. This is not okay. It is not a safe space. And they need to shut this whole operation down. I don't know if it's corrupt. I don't know if it's legal, but it should be illegal. I don't know how much power the show has, but every listener should write your congressman and senators and let them know this is one of the diabolical things in human history. And we must shut it down. PlayStation for life. PlayStation for life. I do agree, Sarah, that Jim Ryan can change his opinion. He can write an email in January. And then the next day go, I was horribly wrong. This is going to be bad. Like it's... Right. Or I didn't mean it. You know, in the first place. Yeah, exactly. I was in shock. Yeah. Because I like Owen. I think this is a catastrophe. I don't know if there's a fetal position in the shower. That's how this is written. A few other juicy tidbits here from the opening moves in the court case. Microsoft said many futures ZeniMax titles would come to PlayStation and Nintendo before its acquisition of that studio closed. But now Indiana Jones will be exclusive to Xbox and PC. This one works the other way. It's like, okay, so they made one title exclusive. I don't think that proves anything either. But this is all building up preponderance of the evidence. No one of these things is supposed to be the clincher. Microsoft notes that cloud gaming makes up only a tiny fraction of the billions of hours of gameplay each year and has never achieved consumer demand beyond its current niche. So basically saying, oh yeah, this business is a total failure. Trying to undermine the claims that Microsoft could monopolize cloud gaming. That's one of the things the UK has based their opposition on. Microsoft says Xbox's console has consistently ranked third of three behind PlayStation and Nintendo in sales and that it's focusing on game sales, not console sales. So if it dominates consoles, that wouldn't do it any good. It's too far behind already. There's play to be made there, although from what I was reading, it sounds like Sony had already started to counter that on the witness stand saying, yeah, but this is a battle between the two high end consoles. So counting Nintendo is just patting its stats. Most of the stuff does seem like it might work in Microsoft's favor a little bit, but do we think any of this is going to make a difference? I mean, one of the things that has been talked about, which Microsoft has played down, along with playing down the fact that it's ranked third in console sales, is the idea of cloud gaming. Microsoft has an option. So do other companies. This is a fear from regulators that, well, once Microsoft gets a hold of cloud gaming, this whole Activision Blizzard thing, that's where we get into testy waters. But the rest of us are kind of going, well, okay, but a lot of that is just predicting cloud gaming in the future, because it's a real nascent market right now. Yeah, I don't think you can call them a monopoly when there's not even a market yet. I would like to say again, Microsoft is the enemy. They are in a brave heart situation. They are at the enemy line saying hold, and they're trying to trick everybody into thinking that they're not coming down that hill full force. Yes, they are. They know what they're doing. They got the Xbox, they got the PC, they're about to be streamed. Like, they have a monopoly just waiting at the gate and they're just trying to make you think that nobody's there armed and ready for war. They are, and they know what they're doing, and hopefully, again, the government shuts it down. Right, Congressman, today, because it's scary to me. Right, your Congressman's not going to do anything about it. You need to write the FTC if you want to come in on that side and the UK, because if the UK comes down against it, that could stop it, too. Well, that's the only hope, monopolize and get vacationed. Yeah. Or you could write them to say you support it and you disagree with Hoenn, and you like think that Microsoft should win this. That's not a problem. You could do that, too. It's your show time, but don't go against me. Just relax. Make your voice heard. Don't swear to people. No one is right or wrong here, unless you're right or wrong. Or unless you're, oh, and in which case, you're always right. We have fewer than 400 patrons to reach our goal. We're in the 300s now. Just 300s some more to get to 4,000 paid patrons by next Thursday. And if we do, we can have Mollywood on the show the very next day and once a month on a Friday from then on. So make that happen. Make Molly Fridays happen. You like Mollywood? You like Daily Tech News Show? You want a little more of that spice in the world? Well, make it happen. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Back in February, a group of scientists released a report called The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence, Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation. Short version is that large language models and other tools generally classed as AI can be used for bad as well as good. The malicious uses they mentioned got the most attention though. Propaganda, phishing attacks, remote or automated physical attacks. Scary stuff here. You know, robots gone wild kind of stuff. There was also some work on how to combat the malicious uses in this report. But the negativity has been carried on. In fact, Thursday at Bloomberg Technology Summit, open AI Sam Altman even acknowledged there's many ways this could go wrong. Yeah, and there are counterpoints, because there always are, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an article on ways AI can strengthen democracy. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman told audience at the Bloomberg Summit, one of the things I think is dangerous about the existential discussion is it blinds us from some of the nearer things. Now, several AI scientists wrote an article this week for the conversation called let's focus on AI's tangible risks rather than speculating about its potential to pose an existential threat. That was listing the near-term risks of using existing algorithms and recommending focusing on those over hypothetical risks. Now, Metis Chief AI Scientist, Yann Lacoon and its Vice President of AI Research, Joelle Pinot both believe focusing on future risks crowds out talk about current harms. Now, Owen, we know you've thought a lot about this. So where do you fall on this debate so far? So just to begin, I'd like to say I have always believed and loved and had strong affinity for Skynet. My bloodline loves Skynet. My future kids will love Skynet. We are a Skynet family. You just want that on record there. Definitely want it on record. You wanted that on an indexable record that would be included in a training database someday. This is a Skynet household, okay? This is a Skynet household. Now, so many random people that aren't in tech come to me and ask me, like, what is it gonna do? Like they think of the Skynet thing of being bad. And I always go to them and I say, I'm not worried about AI yet. I'm worried about humans using AI. You know, you already get spam calls to grandmothers conning them out of their bank accounts and things like that. Now that you can simulate someone's voice, you know, you could have someone's son call and say, Mom, I need $500 or whatever. And they think that they're talking to that person and they just start sending money willingly. That's already started happening. I'm more worried about how the human can use AI in a negative way. It's always gonna be what's gonna happen, terrible, but there's so many good uses for it and the things that are bad right now are human based that are causing negative things for AI. Yeah, that's one of the themes I've seen from a lot of folks on the let's not worry about it wiping out humanity side of this debate is there are bad uses it can be put to now. Let's work on preventing those bad uses. That's always gonna be an arms race no matter what new technology we have. There's always gonna be somebody trying to figure out how to use it for bad. Let's focus on countering that because that's important right now. And we can spend a little bit of time thinking about the existential risk of the future, but that is in their opinion, farther in the future. Because at this point, we don't... Oh, sorry. Just at this point, we don't have actual artificial intelligence in the way that movies and everyone thinks of it in their mind. It's just things that we program to make things easier for us to replicate. One more thing that did creep me out. My aunt asked me to use AI to make my dad his voice because I have a lot of recordings of him and stuff like that. And she misses my dad and my grandfather. She's like, can you do that? And I got sad. I instantly got sad. I was like, whoa, do I want to hear my dad talking to me in a prompt? It hit me emotionally. I'm like, I don't know about that. So I told her, I was like, I'll look into it. I don't know if I could do it because I don't know if I want to do that. I know people are doing it, but when she asked me, it made me feel... It made me really emotional. So there's a lot of weird things going on with AI. Well, I think that really speaks to how good some of this technology is, right? If your aunt says, can you do this for me? And you go, well, okay, I have recordings, but it's not him. So whatever he says, it's not really something that he's saying. And maybe it's just sort of like a cartoonish thing. That would be one thing. However, the technology is so good that it does something to us in our psyche, in our heartstrings. And I think that is where your comparison to somebody getting a phone call from someone who sounds like their son who wouldn't have been calling otherwise, maybe they're alive, maybe they're not. But that sort of thing is, it is tugging at the sort of love for humans thing. And I think that that's where a lot of people are getting their signals crossed. Are we mad at the technology? Are we mad at the people making the technology? Are we mad at both? And I don't really know what my answer is at this point. Well, and I think that confusion is being manipulated because I think as evidence by the conversation we're having right now, it's easy to go back and forth between this could wipe out humanity. I've always been a favorite of Skynet. This could be used to fool somebody and scam them right now. Those are two very different things. And I think it's worth repeating. What ChatGPT's strongest version can do right now is fool you. It can't be you. And so when you see companies talking about, wow, we really need to concentrate on the existential risk. When you see researchers and scientists signing those petitions saying, we need to be careful about the existential risks, I don't know that all of them are motivated selfishly, but the outcome is that you have people able to distract you into spending a lot of time talking about existential risk and less time talking about transparency and openness to what Sarah said, where meta of all companies is the one going, yeah, we're behind in this game. And we think open AI and Google are trying to shut the door behind them before we can get into it. We're trying to do open source stuff and they don't want that to happen, which is why they're pushing for, we got to be careful with existential risk because they're saying things like open sourcing is dangerous because of existential risk. Existential risk is years down the road, if not decades down the road, real risk right now of bias and discrimination and manipulation of human behavior can happen this moment and having open source technology is a better way of preventing that because you can actually see how these things work better. It's such an interesting thing because so many different levels of fear. A lot of people are like, AI is going to take my job, copywriting, all the, like there are so many things that have done this in the past. We used to make cars by hand. Now the line's automated by mostly machines. Like there are so many things that have happened where humans adjust and react to and change. And this is just one more thing that we have to adjust to and react and change and just keep an eye on the landscape of the world because nothing's all good, nothing's all bad. It's how you make it. And don't let the leaders in this space make it harder to prevent the near term problems. This is something you definitely don't want to monopoly in. It is scary stuff. It can be scary stuff and you don't want one guy with the key. That's what you don't want. And of all things, open AI is probably one of the least open in this space at the moment. And they say they're doing it because they don't want abuse of their material and I think that's fair. I mean a lot of that is because of just general interest and also the fact that a company wants to make things. And I was going to say and cost, right? A little bit of column A. A little bit of column B. The cost of having this AI and you're like, oh, you want it open? Like I'm spending billions of dollars. You want to come in and piggyback off my stuff for free? There is a little bit of that too. Yeah. A lot of money. Which is weird because open AI is a nonprofit foundation. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Well, if you've ever wanted a creative way to display and even reminisce a little bit on all the places that you've previously been in the world, the amateur traveler has an app for that. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. At the risk of people thinking that all I do is sit around and keep track of places I've been, I do have another app for you that does just that. It keeps track of what countries you've been to and it's just called Ben, B-E-E-N. And it's got lovely pictures of different countries. You can mark them. The interface could be a little faster in terms of how many clicks you have to make per country to mark where you've been, but then you can display it on a moving globe or on maps. And it's just a useful tool for country counters like me. The app again is Ben, B-E-E-N. And this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Thank you, Chris Christensen. Let's check out the mailbag. Matthew wrote in saying, just speaking from my experience here, that is Adobe is incorporating its apps into the Chrome environment because of the recent success that Canva has had. Now Matthew is talking in response to our conversation with Justin Marbet Young and Rich Truffilino about Chromebooks and their future in schools. Matthew says, I'm one man IT guy. I work at a small private school and I utilize Canva's platform, which is free for education for almost all designs. Making cards or videos or brochures or photos, Photoshop tools, et cetera. I use it almost daily to help design school ads or job opening posts for social media. It's been a godsend. I point every teacher to it for almost every type of project. I can see this being the reason that Adobe is in panic mode, wants to race back into the student scene. I'm not going to lie, they've got some work to do. I don't know that they're panicking, but I think you're right. I think they're in ketchup mode. Even if not panic mode, ketchup mode. I know they're in panic mode because I get 90 emails a day from Adobe trying to get me to go back into Express. I pay for the cloud, but they are on this marketing campaign. They're just pinging all day long. Remember here, we're here, remember we're here. It's a very calm thing on their end. They just press one button though. They don't see you. They're panicking. Adobe's like, and would you like to purchase? Because we would. We got another great email here from Restless Mind Studios. Hi, Sarah, Tom and Roger. I've been listening to you since you started at TWIT. I've always appreciated your insight on tech and your dedication to putting together such great content. And I finally decided to become a patron today to show my support. I got my first taste of computers playing games on my friend's Apple 2e. My parents got our first computer and Apple 2GS when I was in middle school. I then started learning how to write programs and wrote my first video game for it. But as I got into high school, I quickly left Apple behind for the PC and have never looked back. Today, I'm a full-time software engineer writing media software for embedded Linux systems and your show helps keep me current on the tech industry, which has really helped me in my career. Thank you and keep up the great work. Thank you. That was really nice. What a cool email. I can't think of anything better than someone saying, love your work and also inspired my own. Yeah, the fact that we could help anybody who does cool stuff like that in any way makes me feel very good. So thanks for letting us know about that. And thank you, Len Peralta, for illustrating today's show quietly behind the scenes. Len has been drawn some. What have you got? You know, I've had conversations about AI in the past so so many on so many levels. But I'm with Owen. I love Skynet. I bow toward my robot overlords. I think we all do. You better put a record. No, I don't speak for me. I don't love Skynet. So this image that I drew today is sort of a funny one. How do we know that the robot isn't telling us to look at the risk factors and not the threats? So that's what this one's all about. This is a... Oh, there's a little issue on the image there. I'll have to send something out. That's the robot doing something to my art. What the heck? Yes, so it's risk factors instead of inherent threats. The Skynet may be the one telling us to do that. So you may want to just be careful. Now that you mentioned it, Len, how do we know you're Len? I refuse to answer any further questions. I'm starting to wonder. Just a little bit. I work really, really quickly. I'm kind of like a robot, but if you want this image, if you also want to bow down before our robot overlords, you can go check this out over at patreon.patreon.com for it's Len. If you back at the DTS lover level, you get this image immediately, you can do it the old fashioned way. Go to my online store where you can just purchase it outright and also maybe commission me for something. And it is not AI art. It's done by a real human being. That's what I've been told. So there you go. That's what you've been told to say. By humans. Good stuff as always. Oh, and JJ Stone. Oh, doctor, good to have you back on the show. It's been a minute. Thank you. And let folks know because you are a busy person otherwise where they can find the rest of your work. So first and foremost, my t-shirt because I know Elan watches. We ain't going to Mars. I'm still right six years later. I'm already on the vision program. But you can find me at iqmz.com or at o doctor. Or you can text me a449864563 and I'll say hello to you like I am right now. Hello. That is definitely my friend. And I will be back on the show. As a person who fears even her best friends giving her a phone call, I really appreciate your commitment to the craft. Well, I got to do something to keep people loving me. My campaign to hating Tom Merritt is keeping me off the show. I might have to change my tune at this point so I can get back on on a regular basis. But Tom, still, Tom. I've signed up for your campaign. That's one of the reasons why I don't love you because you're just the worst best person in the world. This is like meta in Canada all over again. Who will win? Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. It is Quiz Friday. We got a great quiz coming, but we'll also do our best to understand why there are multiple versions of Spider-Man across the Spiderverse playing in theaters. True story. And I don't know that we'll figure it out today, but we'll talk about it. But in the meantime, just a reminder, you can catch this show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC, and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We're back Monday with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech New Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, producer and writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dettarding, our mods Beatmaster, W's Goddess One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens, AKA Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Patrick Norton, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young, and Chris Christensen. Our guest this week was Owen JJ Stone, AKA ODokta. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program. Hope you have enjoyed this program.