 Coming up on DTNS, Arizona tries to outlaw Apple's app store payment policy. The Kings of Leon release an NFT album on the blockchain and Jay Z sells title to Jack Dorsey. It's all real news. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 4th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You know, I am. I am looking forward to that day where you're saying from my house in Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. Congratulations. We were just talking a little bit about that on GDI. See you soon, soon. Get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. WhatsApp rolled out support for voice and video calling to its desktop for app for Mac and Windows. This is currently limited to one-on-one calls. But what app plans to support group calls in the future? Apple launched a new service on its data and privacy website to automatically transfer your iCloud photos to Google Photos. If you would like to do that, Apple accounts must have two-factor authentication on to use the service. And Apple says it'll take about three to seven days, depending on how many photos you have to complete the transfer. A new preview build of Windows rolling out to insiders for testing includes new system icons and a taskbar widget using Microsoft's Fluent Designs tile. This comes as Microsoft is working on a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows code named Sun Valley. Separately, Microsoft also updated the Edge browser to include vertical tabs and startup 41% faster by actually never fully shutting down. Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Sound with new processors, Bluetooth audio system on a chips and codecs like AptX Adaptive to achieve playback of hi-fi music up to 24-bit, 96 kilohertz. Qualcomm's components show up in headphones and earbuds from Bose, Jabra, One More, Sennheiser, Audio Technica, Anker, just to name a few. The first Snapdragon Sound products are expected in the next few months with Xiaomi and Audio Technica signing up as the first two Snapdragon Sound partners. Bloomberg sources say that Nintendo will announce a Switch console with a larger 7-inch 720p OLED display later this year. The updated Switch will also reportedly support 4K graphics when connected to a television. All right, let's talk about who should wave to title. I'll tell you, Tom, Square announced that it will buy a majority Stig in music service title. Title is owned in part by musical artists who will continue to hold shares in title. Co-founder Jay-Z, aka Sean Carter, will get a seat on Square's board. Square is known for its retail cash register service, but also offers loans and bank-like storage and transfer. The full suite of Square tools will eventually be offered to artists through title for better royalty payments and fostering things like merchandise sales. Jay-Z said, quote, artist deserves better tools and to assist them in their creative journey. And quote, Square CEO Jack Dorsey said Square will create ecosystems of tools for sellers and individuals and we will do the same for artists. Square has worked with artists before like Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, giving away a million dollars to fans who message them with their Square Cash App usernames. Title will operate independently inside Square alongside the seller and Cash App platforms. Square's hardware lead, Jesse Drogster, will serve as interim head of title. I think this is amazing for a few reasons. One, this is title saying, you know what? It's about being in the money flow. So yeah, we got a streaming service. That's not going to go away. Yeah, we want to get artists paid, but we would like to get them paid more places than just title. So I fully expect this to be, we showcase almost like Microsoft does with its surface devices. We showcase a payment system in title and then shop that out to other music services. Now obviously Apple's not going to do it, maybe Spotify won't, but there's lots of others like Deezer and such out there and artists putting some pressure on companies for that might work. There also will be some other products spin out of this that will be non-reliant on a streaming service. Also super smart for Jay-Z to get a spot on Square's board and keep the artists as shareholders. All the investors like Sprint, they got paid off. They're great. Jay-Z does what the VCs do. He moves on to a board. Once you move on to a board, you're likely to move on other boards and have more influence and have more investments. So this is huge for Jay-Z. It's good for the artists because they all keep their shares in title, which are now shares in Square and there's a payment system rolling out. Hopefully that will benefit artists if it's rolled out right. I mean to look at the pathway of Jay-Z from where he began to where he is title was essentially propped up by Jay-Z and Beyonce and some affiliated artists related exclusives. I mean, that's what prop title up. Otherwise it would have been more like it was before Jay-Z got involved more like a Deezer or something like that or like a Pandora that just did not have the same kind of oomph to move into what was increasingly a commodity driven market that was dominated by big money like Apple and Spotify. Where does this fit in the gigantic landscape of that? I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you are, Tom, although I do see the idea that okay, so now are they kind of like a super powered sound cloud? Are they more of a egg artist friendly thing that is a little bit more of a glossy name that will allow you when you're just starting out to put more stuff exclusively on this because they're going to give you a micro loan to fund your merch or they're going to put you in touch with like that kind of stuff. Maybe. Yeah. Apologies to Drake. It's title that started from the bottom and now they're square. Yep. That's what just happened. So, but I think Justin, I think that is a really good point. I mean, if you are a title fan up into this point, it's because you like really good audio quality. Not that people don't like good audio quality, but some people will pay for that. Or many do not or in my case, you really wanted to watch the Kanye West famous video, which was exclusive to title for five minutes. I also signed up for that briefly as well. But, but, you know, that that was sort of the whole thing. And so there were a lot of folks saying, well, there's nothing wrong with title. It just doesn't have the numbers that a Spotify or Apple Music has. And what exactly do you use to draw in more not only creators, but also, you know, listeners like me when I don't necessarily care if it sounds so great because I don't know. I'm, you know, on a jog or in my car anyway. What do I really know the difference kind of thing? This is a very, this is a very interesting, potentially interesting. I don't really know what's what, you know, how creators themselves will be able to make use of Square being now the, the boss man, but it does, it does change title a lot because title again before was, you know, I was sort of waiting for it to die because I just didn't think that they could keep the user base up. Well, one last thing on this title now wants to position themselves as an entity that will get your music out to a lot of people will bankroll you in key elements, especially as you are starting up or going into an album cycle. Effectively, they are trying to replace a record company. They're not necessarily looking. I mean, like their value proposition to young or undiscovered artists is that of will be your do it yourself, your DIY record company. If you are just getting started out, at least by their language there, which is an interesting idea. I wouldn't be shocked to see title start to push more of publish here and we will publish your stuff to Spotify and Apple music, which there are precedents for that. They could start, I hadn't even thought about that. They could start doing that and be able to say and we'll make sure that the payments flow and then they start to become a bargaining power in those deals that artists put if we follow what you're saying about them being more like a record label. That's fascinating. Well, a lot of entertainment news today and specifically music news. The band Kings of Leon will release the album when you see yourself as a non fungible token. You've heard of NFTs. This is one of them on March 5th, one of the three tokens as part of a series called NFT yourself. One token is the album package with exclusive content and vinyl for 50 bucks. The second is 18 golden tickets with exclusive art, which offers for front row seats for life, personal driver and a concierge service and backstage access at shows. Six of these will be auctioned and 12 will be vaulted and the third offering is six NFTs for exclusive audio visual art ranging from $95 to $2,500. The album without exclusives will be available through standard music services. So kind of what we were talking about before. The album goes on sale Friday at 12 p.m. Eastern time for two weeks after which no more NFTs will be made. So, you know, get it while you're getting good. If this is something that you want, the art tokens will sell until Sunday at 8 p.m. Which is also when the auctions or the golden tickets will end because of the nature of NFTs. Kings of Leon can decide where the money for resale goes. The band will send some of its proceeds to a charity that helps out of work touring professionals. Maximum prices for resale can also be set to deter scalping. This is fascinating. They've really thought about this. Some of it's weird. In detail. The idea of vaulting part of your NFTs like they were premier art and you'll like wait for them to go up in value and sell them later is odd. But when you're talking about golden tickets with front row seats for life, I guess maybe they want to limit that supply. I get that. It's a scheme. But this is it's not the first band to make use of NFTs for an album, but it certainly is the most extensive. I think the idea here is. NFTs are the entry into a digital version of any kind of collectible, which is you are deciding a group of people are deciding that there is value to something. And before that people sneered at the concept that these cheaply printed paper comics would be that and they and cheaply printed cardboard squares could be that or beanie babies. You would get a McDonald's could be that there's no reason why a digital version is any less valuable than a digital item is any less valuable as long as you were able to prove that it can't be duplicated, which was the only problem for this. Who knows exactly how deep the fandom of Kings of Leon are now. But if you are looking at a music industry that is increasingly about maximizing your narrow audience as opposed to breaking wide into a gigantic audience, then figuring out new ways that you can offer exclusivity and a hierarchy to your fans is huge. I think that this is a if it works. I think you will definitely see this replicated all over the place. Well, and this is definitely I mean Kings of Leon. I know the band. I'm not their biggest fan, but I know the band to to get like personal drivers and concierge services in order to go to a Kings of Leon show. I'm like, they're being a little silly right now. But again, there's probably more than a few people out there who are like, no, this is really cool. And this is why this is really cool. And also this just didn't exist as something that I could buy before. So I think it's less about, oh, is this a cool thing to buy and is this possible to buy? And that's where I bands like this. It doesn't have to be a band of artists, you know, anybody who are thinking outside the box on this. I, you know, I got it. Got to give them props because it is a brave new world. Yeah. NFT is going mainstream is closer and they won't waste a moment to use somebody around the world. Facebook reports its computer vision program Sears scored 84.2% on ImageNet's classification accuracy score better than existing models. Sear was trained on more than one billion public unlabeled images from Instagram because it's Facebook. So they used Instagram, but they were using public images, not private images. This is a significant advance for self supervised learning where the model can learn to identify objects without being told what examples of the objects look like. So they don't show them a bunch of images of cats and say, that's a cat. That's a cat. That's a cat and try to train it what a cat looks like. Sear used an algorithm called SWAV to cluster groups of images with similar visual concepts. Now eventually you have to tell it like, oh, that that cluster there, that's a cat, but it learns what things are on its own. Then a type of convolutional network called Reg Nets captures the learning of the visual concepts and scales that to billions of parameters so that it can run in a reasonable amount of time. Sear was trained on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs with 32 gigabytes of RAM for 30 days. Facebook has released Sear's general purpose library called Vistle for anyone to use with their own data sets and machine learning models to help facilitate that accelerated self supervised learning. Facebook will not share the image data set or the final Sear model itself. Partly they say because that model hasn't been perfected to look for things like bias and everything, they just wanted to see if they could get it to do it and that was the purpose of this exercise. And they did 84.2% like also this is a huge milestone being self supervised learning. Yeah, yeah, I'm always fascinated with with with how fast these kinds of things are being put together. I'm curious to see where Facebook wants to slot themselves in in the current race for for these kinds of technologies because it's a controversial one. Facebook is certainly not a company that is want for other reasons to get into a PR situation. So I think as a technical story, it's very interesting. I'm curious to see how far they want to push it. Alright, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? AIs are welcome, but we've assumed most of your humans. Let us know on our subreddits. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com Apple never heard of it. It's this company here in California heard of it like other big tech companies. It's facing government investigations and regulation worldwide specifically. Apple is facing scrutiny over its app store policies that force companies to use only Apple's payment system, which Apple of course takes a cut off the UK's competition and markets authority said Thursday. It has opened an investigation into whether Apple's app store policies are unfair or anti competitive Reuters. Meanwhile, reports that the European Union's anti trust investigators plan to announce a charge sheet against Apple in the coming weeks as a result of Spotify's complaint about the app store policies. Two weeks ago, the US state of North Dakota Senate voted against passing a law requiring Apple to let developers use their own payment processing software and possibly alternative app stores. But Wednesday, Arizona's House of Representatives voted 31 to 29 to pass HB2005 such a bill. Arizona's version requires companies with app stores that have more than 1 million downloads per year to let developers in Arizona offer alternative payment processors and let any developer offer alternative payment processing to Arizona users. Software stores for game consoles and music players were exempted, so it would apply to Google Play and the Apple app store. The Arizona Senate would also have to pass it and the governor would have to sign it for it to become law. But even if it does get defeated somewhere along the road in Arizona, Minnesota, Hawaii and Georgia are considering similar laws, which are being pushed by match group, Spotify and Epic Games. Yeah. So that's what's going on here. This is a battle between match, Spotify and Epic versus Apple. They're trying to make Apple fight this in a bunch of different states. So far, they haven't been able to get a state to pass it. Arizona is the closest they've come so far. We'll see what happens there. A lot of people are expecting it to fail in the Arizona Senate or maybe not maybe maybe even be vetoed by the governor. But Epic Match and Spotify are going to keep putting on the pressure. I wonder if this let's let's pretend for a moment this got passed this with you in Arizona and I want to sidestep for the moment the idea of like, well, how do you have this only apply in Arizona? Right? Because there's there's some technical interest interesting technical problems there. But let's say they did it and Apple's like fine, fine, fine. We'll just do it. What if Apple said great and this would be allowed under the Arizona version of the law. You can use your own payment processing, but you have to pay a fee to get in the up store then. It's free to get in the up store. If you use our payment processing or you can pay this flat yearly fee. I mean, I feel like that would be their only recourse. Yeah, Sarah, go ahead. Well, yeah. So yeah, what you've laid out Tom is sure that would be a way that Apple could play nicely. But wouldn't that make people go absolutely batch it for those reasons? And also wouldn't that make how other states might focus on this? But I don't know. It sounds like a it's it. It sounds messy. Well, let's let's all take a moment to focus on the real winners here. And that is state capital lobbying firms because they are probably having just a bumper crop where a lot of money is coming in so they can talk to the people that they need to talk to to get these bills pushed forward because the victory for match epic and Spotify is not even necessarily that these things are going to cross the finish line. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. The point is that they are being mentioned in the news. And the idea is that oh, look at this. That's a rising tide against Apple. Now there is a writing arising tide against Apple specifically in Europe and likely here in the States too in terms of anti competitive policies. I don't know what would happen if we got a situation where Apple did as you pointed out Tom had to carve out some digital hole in the sheet that they figure out for Arizona only. But I do suspect that if it ever got to that and this is the big question that I'm looking at is there a moment where Apple makes a preemptive move that I know they don't want to do anything until the government twist their arms so hard that they have to tap out. But is there a moment where they just suspect you know what we have enough of an idea of where everybody's coming from. We have enough of a way that we believe we can get on the right side of public opinion by making a certain decision. We can leave our enemies out in the cold if their efforts are not met exactly by what we want to do. We're just going to pull the trigger here. Apple is a stoic company when it comes to stuff like this. They have not come out come out in the same way that Facebook has and just begged and pleaded publicly to come up with for there to be new laws written that they could have a help in writing. They have held their cards really close to the chest. They have said everything we're doing is perfectly within the law. Do they blink. I don't think they will. What's up like. But the question is is there a moment that can make them. I don't think it's any of these state situations. I don't think they I don't think they blink at those. But yeah that that is the question because after enough times it's harder and harder and harder each and every time. I don't know if you've heard of the thread protocol. It's a wireless communication standard designed to replace legacy protocols like Z-Wave or ZigBee. It's part of the connected home over IP or chip project which is backed by most of the major smart home makers. So this isn't a we're trying to get this taken up. This has got a lot of industry momentum behind it. Thread promises faster response time more reliable connections and better battery life. So it's good when it's implemented. It's supported in a few devices out there most prominently the Apple HomePod Mini which can act as a bridge between thread devices and the Internet. The news today is that Eve Systems is widening its support by announcing thread is coming in firmware updates for its Eve Aqua Sprinkler to the new Eve weather outdoor weather station which is coming March 25th and to the updated version of Eve's smart plug Eve Energy. Eve Energy can act as a repeater for a thread network as well. That's coming to the U.S. April 6th in the U.K. May 4th Eve previously updated firmware to support thread in its door and window sensors. So it's going to have thread support on a lot of its devices and one of the reasons they're the first to jump on this is that Eve processes all its data locally on devices and therefore it only works on HomeKit and since HomeKit works on the HomePod Mini and thread is supported by the HomePod Mini Eve thought hey be easy for us to adopt thread. It's interesting to me that Eve processes all data locally and only works on HomeKit because Amazon and Google require devices to have their own cloud services so what Eve's doing is saying like we'll just take the commands through HomeKit you tell it you want to turn the light switch on or off you want to change the temperature that just all comes through HomeKit and we'll do all the processing locally to protect your privacy. It reduces the surface area for attack whereas Amazon and Google require each device to be like you need to be managing your device in the cloud and then send it into our device and we'll manage it from there. Yeah but if somebody's like I want my home to be smarter I mean and you're like oh but I like Amazon's voice assistant or I like Google's home services you know offerings I mean this is somewhat limiting. Yeah I think that there is a large scale trend I think that is happening in a lot of technology now and that is a collapsing that we might have we might have been at a point over the last year or so where the most things that are scattered we're going to exist and and both inside the IoT community and social networks and streaming services that the next trend is alright the business model has proven itself now how many ways can these things work together that that's what the market pressure is here for so I I think it would be nice if we could have a lot of ways that you didn't have to worry about how these things would connect with each other but I don't know if we're ready for that yet. Yeah all right tell us about the deep deep blue ocean Sarah. Tom I'm I'm ready to circuit boards fail at intense pressures such as in the deep deep ocean meaning that ocean exploring robots need lots of bulk to protect their circuitry but we might be getting somewhere a report in nature describes a team of Chinese researchers operating a soft-bodied robot in the deep ocean during a successful 10 kilometer ride down into the Mariana trench you're not familiar it's about 200 kilometers east of the Mariana Islands and also the deepest oceanic trench on earth it's deep the researchers were also inspired by species of snailfish that appear to have adapted over time to being in deep water with skulls that don't close off entirely in order to survive the immense pressure in such deep water a soft-bodied robot can mimic this flexibility by splitting up circuit boards among different locations in the soft body connected by flexible wires other components were put on larger boards to increase space and reduce pressure issues and a new material was used for the actuators that didn't lose functionality under pressure may not be a full replacement however since the robots on board battery supports less than an hour of operations and its circuitry hasn't been made to do anything but swim in a circle we've we've we've we've got some stuff to do here there's still some more we yeah we're you know although all the rides yet need to be taken however this is cool promising exploration of the deep end and in the short term right of a pool you can you can handle that pressure this is pretty cool technology to be like oh usually we have to really reinforce this stuff with really thick walls so that you know the pressure doesn't just collapse the robot we figured out a way to not have to do that but by imitating a snail hopefully they'll be able to figure out how to make more complex circuitry and have it do more than swim in a circle right that that's the next step yeah yeah let's check out the mail bag let's do it this one actually comes from a discord discussion from scott in canada who said just watch the trailer for the new netflix series sky rojo looks intriguing and now i'm wondering how much just netflix care about the u.s. domestic market obviously it's still important to netflix but with all the other competing services in the u.s. certainly appears that netflix is setting their sights on the international markets as their future there are a number of high production movies and series that are dubbed to english rather than the other way around not a complaint just an observation i think you're on to something scott from canada like you said it's not that u.s. isn't important but it's not the growth area it's not where they're going to make the biggest strides right oh i also think that while there are certain markets that have been socialized to pay for this kind of content and india is a massive growth market if they can crack it they would not be the first american streaming service or western streaming service to try to to look at the raw numbers of india and say wow if we can just break in here and find out that the culture there is is different than western european and american audiences like there there is a tremendous thirst in india for free content like youtube usage and stuff in india is is massive but premium pay stuff you know maybe they'll be able to coach people over the uh over over over the fence for it but listen man disney hotstar has disney hotstar is huge in india and it's for pay i think that i don't think the pay personally i don't think the pay block is the big impediment it's the content you get the right content you can get people over that wall and to do that you're still right justin they have to work with local production and local sensibilities which it looks like they're trying to do that's always harder to do than it harder it's easier to easier to say you're going to do and it's harder to execute i think that that's that's the better way to put it is it if you come in and say no indians love american programming and we're going to do our american version of indian programming then it's you know it's it's easier said than done if you're going to if you're not going to i think an indian audience watch for free all day that that that has borne out on on youtube paying for it's a different story you got it you got to hit it out of the park well if you have thoughts about uh where netflix should or should not expand next or anything that we talk about on the show or anything that we might talk about in our future show feedback at daily tech news show dot com is where to send that email we also like to shout out patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels today they include carol hi tech okie and tim ashman many many thanks to our brand new bosses john fallah valita and ross mcnulty just started backing us on patreon thank you so much to the new bosses and also the utmost of thanks to one and only jelson marbrion thank you i tried to make that dramatic i'm not sure why and thank you for accepting it graciously oh i always always what's going on with you well you know uh the politics keep uh rolling along here at the politics politics politics program we got a very fun project launching tomorrow on the px3 show uh it was an idea that brian brushwood had that i was stupid enough to help bring to fruition it is schoolhouse rock meets degenerate gambling it is the amendments bracket mark madness comes uh you will learn about all of the amendments to the constitution and you will eventually decide which reign supreme by the end of the month so go ahead and tune in for the first round that is politics politics politics well i can't wait to find out what the seeds are this is going to be so much fun uh danos cinco minutos y te daremos las noticias más importantes en el mundo de la tecnología o te devolvemos tu dinero escucha noticias de tecnología express disponible en espanol daily tech news show dot com slash n tx we are live 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