 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John and Bicky Johnston, Chris Benito, and Steve Aya Darola. Coming up on DTNS, Framework promises modular graphics, chat GPT can go online, and is YouTube a new cloud storage provider? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 24, 2023. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Travoleno. From Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. Also from that area, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, we got a couple LA folks. We got Rich in Lovely Cleveland, and me being in an atmospheric river for the foreseeable future. But that is neither here nor there. Let's get into the quick hits. Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed two bills into law regulating how miners in the state can use social media, and also regulating how companies can design their apps. The first SB 152 requires that as of March 1, 2024, social media companies verified ages of all users, set up systems to get parental permission for miners to open an account, restrict miners from using social media from 10.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. without parental consent, and also gives parents the ability to access a miner's account. The second bill, HB 311, blocks these companies from implementing a design or feature that causes miners to become addicted to their platforms. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority, you might know it as the CMA, announced its narrowed the scope of its investigation into Microsoft's proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition. The CMA no longer believes the acquisition would diminish competition in console gaming. It is still investigating how the deal would impact potentially the cloud gaming market. Twitter announced it will start removing legacy verification checkmarks that haven't subscribed to Twitter Blue on April 1. We're going to assume this is not an April Fool's joke, and actually a thing that will happen on April 1. The company also announced that Twitter Blue subscriptions are now available globally. App researcher Alessandra Paluzzi found evidence that Twitter is working on the ability to hide the Blue verification checkmark for Blue subscribers if they so desire. Why not? United Airlines announced a partnership with Archer Aviation to launch a commercial electric air taxi route in Chicago, going from downtown to O'Hare International Airport. No word of this will include a Stroopwafel. It's set to open in 2025. Archer estimates the flight will take about 10 minutes and will be cost competitive, although no idea what that actually means. They didn't provide any specifics. YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips and other Linus Media Group YouTube channels were hacked earlier this week with the attacker able to live stream crypto scam videos, change channel names, and also delete videos. We talked about this on the show yesterday. Now, according to Linus Sebastian, who posted a video explaining what they now think has happened, the attacker sent over a PDF that somebody at Linus Media Group's team downloaded because it looked like a sponsorship offer. That PDF included malware that accessed all user data from both their installed browsers, including session tokens, which then gave the attacker an exact copy of the browsers that the attacker then could export without needing security credentials. Sebastian says YouTube needs better security options to change key channel attributes like reauthenticating credentials to change a channel name. All right, well, back in 2021, the laptop maker framework made some waves by introducing a modular laptop. We definitely talked about it on this show. That was designed to let users easily replace parts including things like the display and keyboard and even supporting customizable ports. This had a bunch of USB-C ports. You can put these little nodules, get all the ports you wanted. But its original 13-inch laptop notably didn't let users swap one thing. Graphics, just use the integrated Intel GPUs. It's surprising. It's pretty industry standard, but definitely on a wish list for a lot of people. Well, framework is bringing the so-called holy grail to its new laptop 16 platform. The GPU doesn't exactly live within the standard chassis. Instead, the laptop features a removable rear cover. So, this can slide out and be replaced by a larger module, basically expanding the flat part of the laptop behind the hinge for the display. Framework designed a high-power bi-directional PCI Express interface for the module with enough throughput to support a GPU or a pair of solid-state drives. The laptop also features six swappable IO card slots and an input module system that lets you hotswap the keyboard and mouse with framework publishing specifications for keyboard modules on GitHub. No word on pricing or other specs, so that's sort of up in the air. But the company expects to ship it in late 2023, which is we're going into April, not that far away. Not at all. Now, framework also announces 13-inch laptop will soon have options for both the 13th generation Intel chips and the AMD Ryzen 7000 series GPUs. The laptop also received a larger 61 watt battery. It's not just you, Lamar, it's me too. Okay, that's good to know. Which promises up to 30% more runtime and louder speakers. That's good. And all these can be bought as upgrades to the original framework laptop. So, yeah, framework expanding on this vision. I know when that 13-inch laptop came out, everyone was like, okay, they can do this for kind of this ultrabook, whatever kind of model that they can have. But, you know, the 16-inch laptop now kind of going into, I mean, seems like they're targeting that gaming laptop space, which is already pretty niche, but banking on modularity, you know, right, to kind of stand out. I mean, Lamar, are you like, are you interested in this idea at all? No. But I know there has to be people who are, so I want to be considerate to those people. But I'm struggling, as I've read this a couple of times, trying to find out who this is for, who's willing to go through all this for a laptop. I mean, I've built computers in the past, many of you all have, and some people still do. And some people just like the idea of putting their own things together, I completely get that. But when it comes to a laptop, I don't know what's special about there, and I looked at their website, I'm not sure what makes their stuff so special that I can't just get a customized laptop from any other company that has what I need. So I'm struggling to see the benefit of who this is for. Well, I think the idea is kind of in the same way that, you know, PC building has, like PCs are an open ecosystem, right? So even if you buy like a Dell XPS or an Alienware, whatever you have, you know, you could always go off and buy your own GPU off the shelf, assuming you have the right power supply or whatever. And that's never been like that. That line of thinking has never been possible on a laptop. Other than like, if you bought like a weird MMX card from channel partners, but like realistically, there was no consumer friendly way and kind of standardized way to do that. What framework is proposing is basically like that same kind of model where for the longest time you bought that $3,000 gaming laptop, knowing that in two years that GPU is going to be fairly outdated for the games you're going to be wanting to be playing. So you're either going to have to upgrade it and take a big loss as the value of that laptop goes down or stick with the suboptimal system. If you need that kind of portability. I think it's interesting that idea to do that, to bring that model of saying like, okay, yes, these may be at a price premium, maybe at a price premium to buy the 16 inch laptop versus your XPS laptop or your Alienware laptop. But it's going to be cheaper to upgrade this down the line because not only can you do that with the GPU, this still supports, you can replace the system mainboard to upgrade the CPU. You can like any laptop, you can upgrade the RAM, you can even upgrade the networking card, the keyboard itself. So if you want to like say, hey, I want a mechanical keyboard, we can do that if that specifications there. I want one of these weird keyboard in the front trackpad in the back setups. That's all kind of on the table with the super modular setup. There's a lot of questions about, they didn't say if either Nvidia or AMD is on board to supply these GPUs. And that to me is the biggest question of how is that situation going to work? Yeah, I mean, knowing so many people that you among them Lamar from your days of building computers, this is attractive. You know, people want to have control over the thing that they buy, not knowing what the price would be for this particular model, you know, that you can swap out the GPU for, you know, I guess that matters. There are people who say I want to tinker, but I almost feel like the people who want to tinker are already tinkering. And this almost feels like a little bit like a Lego situation. I was just about to say Lego. You know, where I'm like, I don't know how much I really want to tinker. I like the swappableness of all of this. But again, like the price really matters. And, you know, at that point, you know, how much, how much am I going to save rather than just buying another laptop? Exactly. Yeah, Roger had a really good point about like, even if they got this out, like there's there's a certain amount of units they'll have to sell to make this profitable. Otherwise, they will really have to put a higher markup on this. So you end up being more expensive, which again, some tickers won't mind the extra cost. They may just like they may want to pay a premium just so they can make their own laptop laptop. But for a lot of people costs, especially now costs would be a factor. But something to keep in mind with any other gaming laptop, you're going to have to buy a whole new screen, a whole new keyboard, a whole new set of RAM, a whole new set of hard disk, a whole new CPU. And in this, yes, even if it is on a price payment, which I'm sure it will, like the economics are not going to work out for them to get economies of scale, at least right away. But I still feel like even if it's at a hefty premium, it's still going to be cheaper. And then you don't have to worry about all the things of migrating to a new system, which can kind of just be a pain in the butt in and of itself saves you some time. I mean, if the driver situation has sorted out and the idea that still going to have an integrated GPU that you can then leave that at home and then you don't have a power sucking giant GPU, kind of that eGPU setup that we've seen a lot of companies try over the years with varying levels of success, all kind of integrated. It is ambitious, I will say, not guaranteed to succeed. We'll wait to see what they announce any partnerships with NVIDIA or AMD to supply these actually before we can really, you know, start, start looking at the real economics of it though. Was that a slap at e-machines? If so, tell me. Not e-machines, please. I have nothing fond, but fond us in my heart for e-machines. Okay, good. Well, I don't know how fond y'all are about chat GPT, but it can't stay out of the news. Chat GPT gets a lot of credit for being capable, except when it comes to particularly timely sources. For example, chat GPT's knowledge base only goes through September of 2021. So if something crazy happened in September of 2022, it's not necessarily going to be included in something that you're looking for. But organizations will soon be able to change that because open AI launched an alpha for plugins for chat GPT. This will let developers extend the chat bot functionality by allowing it to access third party sources, including the web. Yeah, the web browser plugin won't unleash chat GPT online indiscriminately, but it will open a door for the chat bot poll data from the web to answer questions using the Bing Search API. So when going to the web, chat GPT will cite sources in its responses. Now, open AI said it implemented several safeguards based on red team testing, but acknowledged that the chat bot plugin could lead to some undesirable behaviors. And of course, there are all sorts of other plugins possible outside of the web connection. But early testers that are building plugins include companies like Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, and Zap, you know, kind of a broad range of companies there. Open AI also released support for adding a sandbox Python code interpreter to chat GPT as well. I guess, you know, my question here is, is this kind of like an app store moment for chat GPT, kind of taking it from a certainly interesting and very powerful generalized solution and kind of, hey, we can get some more specific use cases out of this. I mean, if you feel like it's code, you know, it's machine learning, it's code, and it can work for you depending on what app you're using. This makes a lot of sense. You know, in fact, myself included, you know, there are a lot of people that I've talked to lately who are like, Great, but like, do I need this on a daily basis? You do kind of, well, okay, you don't. But this is, this is a, you know, we're leveling up on, you know, Lamar, we were talking in our pre show about Instacart, for example, it's like, Okay, if I'm going to, I don't know, I guess, you know, look up a menu, you know, for a restaurant that it's Instacart might be able to, you know, get something from, and then eventually get to me. And there is less friction between humans about the information that I get from that. And this is, this is, this is current day, right, September 2021. All good. You have a good knowledge base, but that's not really what's happening in a day to day basis with a lot of these apps that we're dealing with. I think probably in six months from now, we're all going to say, remember when we didn't know what JetGPT could do for us. Yeah. And you know, and it's, and it's part of common day life. Yeah, I think that's such a good point. I think JetGPT as it stands now, it's very intimidating to a lot of people. Just the name itself sounds scary. Like, you know, what do I do with this? But making everyday users have plugins that work for everyday things. Instacart is such a good example. Because, you know, if I'm sitting there and saying, and just talking to it, or maybe they'll have verbal one day, but I type in, I don't know what to eat. I like these items. I haven't had pizza this week. That's a possibility. And I just, I'm talking to the thing and it's like, Hey, you might like a rice bowl this week. You can get some ingredients you can get at your local Kroger store. And it compiles the list for me. And one click, I can, I can get the groceries. Does that sound lazy? Maybe. But it sounds awesome. You're leveraging stuff that didn't exist before. I don't think that's lazy at all. I call this the boringification of generative AI where it's like, okay, we were amazed by it because it could write fiction or it could, you know, oh, no, it's going to write our term papers for us and stuff like that. But like, this is like integrating it into Slack and going, you know, and I know there's already a chat you PT kind of extension for Slack, but like, when it's integrated in on the base level and I can draw upon the entire knowledge base of Slack and be like, When was like the last, you know, like Lamar, like, when did me and Lamar agree to meet on this and this we didn't enter it into our calendar and it's able to just go through all of the conversation backlogs or, you know, show me the documents that we shared on this such and such event like Yeah, this is such an interesting kind of integration and I do say I do agree like this gives developers tools to play with right previously up until this we've only seen really how Microsoft wants to play with integrating something like chat GPT or GPT for into their products is basically what they did with Edge and what they did with with search like that's that's the plug in for Bing, right. And this is now giving developers kind of a open ground to play with this. Yeah, the web stuff gets all the headlines. And that's super interesting because that might actually make it a very useful research tool if it's not wildly hallucinating. But like giving developers this tool to play with not just Microsoft kind of putting it out there. I'm interested to see what the what, you know, what how people get creative with this. Well, and I think this is a really good, it's good timing and also probably why we've seen a lot of headlines lately of like, Google Assistant, Amazon's Assistant, Apple's Assistant, I'm not naming them because they're going to blow up my studio here. But, you know, they're not good enough. You know, we, we, we've been limping along with these assistants. But now here's where, you know, it's really going to get interesting. And, you know, you know, the timing could not be more apropos. Well, speaking of apropos, you should watch Tom Merritt's new show called Tom's Top Five where Tom will break down the top five things that you need to know about technology. He's very good at this, you guys. Everything from online services and AI to security and even tech legislation. You can catch it at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Have you ever wished that the annual pain of filing your income tax could somehow be blissfully married to the potential awkwardness of dating? Yes. You answered. Oh, oh, thank you, Sarah, for I'm so glad you said yes, because tax having 3000 might just be for you. This is an anime dating simulator that will help you prepare your 1040 US individual income tax return, including tax credits. Now, this simulator was developed by mischief, a company that likes to get attention through performance art ask stunts. They did a little Nas X's Satan shoes, and they did an art installation where they had people rank their ATM balances and stuff like that. So this feels like very part for the course of look at me, look at me. Yeah, so the game does ask you to input your social security number. That's nice. But mischief says that it doesn't connect to the internet. So you're safe. If you're wondering if the app is at all subtle. Don't worry, your simulated date helping you with your return is iris aka IRS. Okay. And another character is turbo and unsavory sash bro. I don't know if you get that. But okay, who's who likes to include corporate lobbying, confusing forms, dark UX and fleece vests. Wow. Yeah, so the game was set to launch on steam on April 4, but subsequently de listed. It's still listed as coming soon on itch.io itch.io. Now, okay, so, okay, putting that aside, we've seen gamification help people do a lot of mundane tasks for a while. In fact, chat GPT would be part of that. But what do we think about actually making some of the stuff games? I'll start. Okay, so let me just say for mischief, I don't like, they've tried to work with me for I don't care for how they do things, you know, they they've sent packs of people, people's old ID cards. State IDs and stuff. So they do some weird shock value. Yeah, I'm not sure I care about them. But I will say that if you can make taxes fun somehow, which you would win the world if you did that you can win everything. You can make taxes fun in a game form, but still got it done. I'm not sure I'm completely opposed to that idea. I mean, I love games and and obviously we as humans that that's what I mean our primary we love games or anything that we do we wanted to be gamified somehow. So I'm not against it, but just not them. I don't want to use them and I don't want to give them my social security number at all. Well, but like, it's not just mischief, which is the company in question, right? It's, you know, they're gaining attention. They're saying this is kind of fun. Wouldn't it be nice if the, you know, the, I don't know, filing your taxes, which I haven't done this year yet, could be like a cool game, you know, where you learn things and you do what you need to do and it's not as just sort of like soul sucking as it has been for many years prior. I'm like, I'm into that. An independent company who's also sort of known for doing artsy things that gain attention, probably not the place that I want this to play out. But if it were Turbo tax, which I use, then, you know, I might be a little bit more interested and, you know, the whole sort of like, oh, it's a game doesn't mean, oh, you're, you know, leaving reality. It means sometimes people can be walked through things that they otherwise either didn't understand or didn't feel like was worth their time that can make you be more productive. Well, and our producer Amos pointed out during our kind of our prep for the show today that like chorecore as a game genre is already huge. Right. There are all sorts of simulator games for like extremely mundane things that people get super into. And people in games are already kind of into this idea of like, like min maxing, you know, your, your effort versus reward and stuff like like diving into the mechanics of like how can I get the most out of this. Like that's like part of playing a game. Right. And I feel like that mechanic can make a lot of things that otherwise you're just like, I just want to get this out of here. It's incomprehensible. Like, it turns into, yeah, like a fun thing where maybe you get a reward at the end or, or at least enjoy the process. Yeah, like, like outside of paying taxes, like I'm thinking like you put together like a phoenix right kind of simulator for like if you want to fight a parking ticket or something like that like where it's like, okay, the minutiae of law and stuff like that might be super intimidating to you if you're just like reading legal codes or something like that. Not saying anyone should necessarily practice law in themselves if they're not comfortable. But like that that idea of making something that seems extremely opaque extremes extremely technical and putting it into this this game form out not just gamification where it's like you get a badge, because you read a bunch of boring stuff, but like literally putting the whole trappings of a game on it, I think is, you know, super just like there, I can think of things in my own life, like when I'm thinking about like, like how I've like chosen like done like homeowners insurance or something like that where it's like, okay, I'm pretty sure I did my research but like, I don't know if you if you if you had a simulator game like this. And I feel like I would be kind of a little bit more into it it would just be a little bit more fun. Maybe that gets numb after a while, but it seems like it has to be better than just endless forms and like little question mark circles that you click on to find out what the comprehensive coverages or something like that. Yeah, I think I think the only my last problem with this particular one but the dating one is that at the end much like my real life, I won't get a second date. Don't worry about our tax season comes around every year. And every year the same thing happens. Every year I'm like, Oh, I didn't get a return. Crap. Maybe next year. Independent contractors. Well, unlike many other cloud storage services, YouTube will let you upload and download a pretty big amount of data tremendous in fact only capped by the individual file size. Now, of course this has to be video because it's YouTube, but that did not stop YouTuber histidine dwarf from using it for other file types because people like to tinker. He created a tool called infinite storage glitch that converts a zip file into a visualized data stream to a regular viewer. Looks like static low res, but it's the most efficient and it's not the most efficient rather turning a one gigabyte zip file into a four gigabyte video. And it also may violate YouTube's terms of service and it gets taken down. But again, in the celebration of tinkers, not great at archiving, but available on GitHub. If you want to check it out. I have no word. I don't know. Okay. It's cool. Hey, it's cloud storage that YouTube said you. I mean, they're not touting this, but it's a possible ability. The only thing I want to tell this, this person is like, don't tell YouTube. They're giving away tons of cloud storage. I mean, it's not free because they're monetizing it with ads, but like, I'm like, don't blow this deal for everybody. We're enjoying all of our uploads. Well, too late now, Rich. Yeah. But what's interesting about this is we've seen like kind of embedding data into images and video for like malware for a long time. Like usually there's like proof of concept kind of things, but it's, it's kind of cool to see this as being like, oh no, there's like an actual. I don't know how useful it is, but an actual like legit utility to this that you can have. Or if you just like watching videos of semi random looking static, there's some quality content for you as well. Listen, I like white noise. So, you know, maybe there's a win-win situation here. Yeah. Cloud storage and a nap. Ooh, now that now that's a service I would pay for. All right. In our mail bag, Nick in Australia wanted to weigh in on Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel getting compromised. We talked about on the show yesterday, we had an update today. Nick says, in addition to all the normal content, I watched all the behind the scenes content and their weekly podcast, the WN show or WAN show on a relatively recent show when discussing data deletion and Google in what now seems highly prophetic. Linus talked about the last time that the channel was hacked because it's been more than once. Those private videos, the recent attacker made public were actually deleted years before the first hack, either before, either because they were never meant to see the light of day or they were published, you know, in a time didn't fit the direction of the channel going forward. But when YouTube restored the channel after the first hack, those videos that were deleted years prior were restored. So this time around Linus' team at LMG just privated them because they knew that even if they delete a video, YouTube doesn't actually delete it. Insert joke about the internet never forgets here. I've been trying to get 13 videos from YouTube from 2009 and they swear they are gone permanently. Like I asked back then. So now that I know about this, I'm going to, I'm going to try, I don't know, try to get hacked. Yeah, Lamar, I'll take over your account so you can have it restored. I mean, Lamar, I can't imagine that YouTube would be like, oh, he doesn't deserve it. But one wonders. Yes. If someone like me who doesn't really use YouTube at all, I mean, besides, you know, I watch YouTube videos, but I don't have a channel. You know, if I were like, hey, what about that private video that went away? I'd love to have it restored and the company's like, well, you deleted it. So sorry, I'd say, okay. But if somebody who has enough influence says, well, what about those private videos? And they're like, still have them on that deleted video server. You know, that that it's going to make other people take pause. You know, if they don't have the same, I don't know, share. Agreed. Well, Lamar, we'd love to share this show with you. Thank you for being on the show with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You may find me. The easiest way is Lamar.TV. That's Lamar with two hours at TV. It's my landing page for all of my articles and things that I've done. I'm on kind of a hiatus right now, but I'll be back full pretty full strength next week. I'm doing unboxings, tech stuff, all kind of lifestyle adventures. So tune in at any platform that you'd like to watch. Well, we're so glad to have you on our platform. And yeah, good stuff today. Also good stuff from Gordon Edwards. You might say, who is that? Well, Gordon is one of our lifetime top supporters for DTNS. Gordon, we thank you for all the years of support. And Gordon and all of our patrons, remember to stick around for our extended show. Good day. Internet. We'll be doing a video game movie quiz. Oh, it's Friday. It's GDI Quiz Day. Just a reminder, though, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. Slash live and we'll be back again on Monday talking about bad derived sensor technology with none other than Blair Bazderich. Talk to you then. The week's episodes of DailyTechNewShow were created by the following people. Host producer and writer, Tom Merritt. Host producer and writer, Sarah Lane. Executive producer and booker, Roger Chang. Producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino. Video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coons. Technical producer, Anthony Lemos. Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos. News host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Mickey Ackermanns. Social media producer and moderator, Zooey Dettardine. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, BioCout, Keptkipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens, also known as Getcher. Versuoso, JD Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Acast adds support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Rubber Young, Terence Gaines, Scott Johnson and Lamar Wilson. Guests on this week's show included Trisha Hershberger. And thank you to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.