 Coming up on DTS Google kicks free users off its workplace plans. Are they being unfair plus Amazon opens a clothing store and Controlling your earbuds This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday, January 20th 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young draw the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang We were just talking about Netflix numbers and mail carrier problems on good day internet We may have invented a romantic comedy or a thriller you can find out at patreon.com slash DTNS big thanks to our top patrons today They include Dr. X 17 Dustin Campbell and Tim deputy. Let's start with a few tech things. You should know Google open sign-ups for a limited beta of Google Play games for PC to people in Hong Kong South Korea and Taiwan Beta testers have access to four games initially hardware requirements in the beta include a Windows 10 or 11 PC and 8-core CPU and Select gaming class GPUs although Google says spec needs will be lower in the future Twitter will now let you if you pay for the Twitter blue subscription show an NFT as your profile picture Subscribers to the $2.99 a month service can connect the Argent Coinbase ledger live metamask rainbow and trust wallets To Twitter the Financial Times sources say meta is also working on a feature for Facebook and Instagram users to let them Display NFTs on their profiles and the meta team is also working on a way to mint NFTs and has had talks of launching an NFT marketplace all of its own all these efforts are reportedly in the early stages Except for the Twitter one which is live Epic filed its opening brief and its appeal of the September district court decision that the iOS app store does not qualify as an abuse of a Monopoly position the filing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals makes the argument that the district court aired in its application of antitrust law regarding multiple behaviors Including tying its in app payment system to distribution in the app store Epic may look to have the appeals court to find the market differently in order to show a broader market dominance by Apple Round two begins Security researcher Brian Krebs points out that this summer the internal revenue service in the United States will transition to a new login service for your tax records Managed by the online identity verification service ID me this will require users to submit copies of identity documents and bills as Well as a live selfie and possibly a live video chat depending if you have problems confirming your identity Where an actual human will verify you 27 US states already use ID.me for state benefit sites a Couple of reports on new Google projects The verges sources say that Google is working on its own wire free AR headset internally code named Project iris that could ship as early as 2024 so not tomorrow, but Perhaps in the works Google's device reportedly uses outward-facing cameras to blend computer graphics with real-world video and according to emails sent Seen by Bloomberg Google engineering vice president Shiva Kamara then Karataman now runs a unit Focused on quote blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage Technologies within the newly reconstituted Google labs. All right. Let's talk about that clothing store Right right near Sarah where we once had a staff meeting. Oh man I mean I used to live not too far away from this so I would have been excited to play around I no longer am in the Los Angeles area But if you are Amazon announced it will open a clothing store later this year called Amazon style at Glendale's Americana mall if you're not familiar it's in a suburban area of Los Angeles. It's sort of an outdoor mall There's an Apple store there. It's you know, it's pretty cool And this is supposed to happen later this year You can use the Amazon shopping app to scan a QR code to see Sizes of things colors of things product details of clothing shoes and accessories Then if you want to try an item on you can send it to a fitting room Get an alert when the fitting room is ready saying you know room 24 is ready for you type thing Or have something sent right to the pickup counter if you're ready to buy and also leave the store Fitting rooms will be outfitted get it with big touch screens So you can keep shopping from there if you want you can get a different size sent over that type of thing But fitting rooms won't include cameras. There was some outrage I saw from folks this morning saying oh gosh who wants that in the fitting room That's not actually the point the point is no one and it's not there It is to be able to order things from the fitting room itself The store will use real-time machine learning for recommendations and Amazon one palm scanning for faster checkout Although will not use Amazon's just walkout technology at least not at launch not in this store No robots yet either actual humans will be employed in the store delivering items to fitting rooms Managing inventory answering questions like whether or not you look good in peace By the way, I do not the idea is to keep the store from getting cluttered So you got a you know warehouse in the back Minimal stuff in the front, but if you want something that you don't see Likely it's in the back So instead of having every size on the rack you can have one of everything and additional sizes and colors in the back You can also find items on Amazon itself have them sent to the style store to try on next time you're there So if you're at home thinking you know Really want to buy some sneakers on Amazon the prices are good But I really gotta try them on if you're in this particular area that would be a great way to do it Yeah, I assume that this would be good for returns too Like I was funny is my first reaction to this was like oh Smart experiment extending clothing buying Amazon really wants to increase clothing buying And and the one of the holdups is like yeah, but I want to try it on first This gives you a place to try it on but sorry you you you hit on the way to like crash the system immediately, right? Well, so here and again, I know this is one store and it's not in an area that I'm in But it wasn't that long ago that I would have been within reasonable driving distance You know, maybe 15 20 minute drive away from the store and I would have um I I think I would have um Taking advantage of the idea of like yeah, I don't want to buy certain things without trying them on this This works really well But let's just say that I'm in the market for new running shoes happens a couple times a year What if I send a bunch of running shoes in my particular size to the store and then I just sort of never go I wonder how much the warehouse in the back is going to have to deal with Kind of weird inventory that may not apply to the next customer And to that I would say it's literally what Amazon does it is Reason why Amazon is a successful company They did not get big because they sold books and books were something that randomly became the the Basis the foundation of this massive company They figured out how they could have enough warehouses that were next to enough publishers And then eventually figure out through algorithmic solutions Where to put different things at different times because they can predict the kind of people that would want certain things That will be ahead of the game so No, that you're you're very right That said a book does not come in lots of sizes and colors. You get it if you want, right? You know, you know, you have a little inventory of books that needs to be moved You know, somebody's gonna get it eventually It's a little different when it gets into like body stuff Sure, and if they only sold books in the intervening 20 years, I would agree with you They've said sold literally everything that comes in literally every size shape or fashion So I I think that that's that's something that that Amazon really When you think about them their real skill is logistics That that's what they have always been able to figure out and that's what that is what separated them It's not even e-commerce. They're good at e-commerce But they're not nearly as good as that as they are at logistics And and I could imagine a system where and I don't know that this is what they're doing But I could imagine a system where there's a truck going every day And when you put those 12 pairs of running shoes to to try on on the store It tells you you have 24 hours to get to the store and try them on Take some to the store. If you don't pick them up take some away Right, right. Yeah, it's not just gonna be there forever. Yeah. I mean, it's fair. It's department store ask just in Amazon's Eyes a more efficient way to do it. I do I do think of a world where An amazon style store or anything that really amazon sells but style is a good A really good Example of something that it's it's very personalized, right? You know, I always use shoes an example because I need them to fit really well Even if it's my size still gotta try them on Before i'm comfortable buying something. This is great for that sort of thing Robots being able to get stuff from the back in your size Take it to the fitting room. This is not what they're doing right now But in the future, I can see where amazon is like this is kind of our stopgap thing Let's see how this works and how we can make this a real warehouse situation in the future Now that was another part of this that I felt was a really good example of what amazon does well Is they said they're using the same system they use in warehouses to fulfill orders fast To deliver things to fitting rooms So as soon as the warehouse robots are good enough to do what they're doing in these stores Those warehouse robots are going to show up in the store, right? Yeah One last thing on this I think that it gives them a lot of politically way that they can hire people that aren't just Factory workers or aren't just warehouse workers Right the idea that you can get a job with amazon that is forward facing It's something that people understand I don't know if it's a forever solution But in the near term it does give them political leverage that there are more than just the peeing and bottles, you know Jobs that that are available to you at amazon You don't have to be an engineer or a grunt that here is a forward-facing retail gig Also, why not both? Why not robots delivering fast to the fitting room at some point when that gets better But still humans around to help you out tell you if you look nice answer questions Yeah Yeah, uh, you've probably heard of algorithms that are trained to recognize photos You know algorithms that can tell a cat or a dog or something more useful You've also probably heard of algorithms trained to speak in natural language or to create texts But you've probably not heard of algorithms that do all of those things because Before this none of them could this is the one good reason not to fear that we're too close to general purpose AI that can think on its own However Meta AI scientists have developed an algorithm called data to veck That can train a neural network to recognize images text and speech all in one not three different algorithms one algorithm That can do it all data to veck was trained with self supervised algorithms, which is that that's not new. That's like gpt 3 Uh, that's where it learns to spot patterns and data sets without needing guidance or labels The way it is trained. However, I thought was pretty clever Two neural networks are used a teacher and a student bit like a gan If you think of it that way the teacher network is trained on images or text or speech So you're gonna have multiple teachers pretty normal stuff these days for neural networks to do that That part's not hard The student network is not trained on the images the text or the speech But it's trained to predict what the teacher Will say So you're just doing one input for the student algorithm The teacher network sees an image of a dog And then the student network says I bet he's gonna say dog And then the teacher says dog And there you go That's how the student network is trained that may sound like a distinction without a difference But it means that the student neural network doesn't need to be tailored to a particular kind of input But only to predicting what the teacher will say and eventually gets good enough You just take the teacher out of the equation The way this work means the student can only be trained on one type at a time Because the teacher can only know one type before it's switched out But eventually you get there data to vex performed a little better than similarly sized existing techniques Round 100 megabytes of data at images and speech And it was about the same on text So a little better on images and speech same on text Specialized models may still outperform as they continue to learn Because they can have bigger databases But this is this is a big stepping stone towards generalized intelligence certainly doesn't get us there But but it's a very clever way and and I think what's significant is that it was a clever moment to say like Yeah, we can only teach it on one input But what if the input was this then the effect would be like we had three inputs I think I think the idea of uh Trying to expand the base of how you're programming and ai is is a really really interesting idea And uh, I'm curious to see where it goes. Yeah. Yeah, it's good good good advance Hey any uh music fans you guys like music I like music. Yeah, good. I can only think of one person I know who doesn't like music Who's that I bet I know who that is it's allison Well everybody but allison likes music teams uh media research estimates music streaming subscribers rose 26.4 percent year over year as q2 Of 21 data would tell us making it easy to listen and control your music experience in a big market Tech crunch reports on a paris based company called wise ear that just got a round of funding And is now looking for companies to license its hands-free earbuds technology wise ear uses electrodes in an earpiece to detect muscle activity It's based predominantly on jaw movements The goal this year For ios is to perfect two controls Bite down on your own teeth twice to pause or three times to skip in the next three years They hope to be able to have 12 different control gestures The benefit if they can make a work is that it isn't affected by noise and requires very little movement And no speaking from the user your general movements won't cause accidental activation It can be useful for hands-free control of music as well as vr and ar headsets co-founder yacin acchic told tech crunch that wise ear had an 80 success rate from people who tried it at their booth at consumer electronics show or cef Cef's heard of it. Yeah It happened You may have heard of it on the show Yeah, I I was fascinated by this as a sort of like oh, yeah, definitely hate using voice controls sometimes And and to be honest there there are moments when I'm walking a dog and I got a bag of poop in one hand and the dog leashed in the other where I can't reach up and tap As easily as I like or at least not comfortably And and so being able to just use like a facial expression or a jaw movement To control like play pause alone would be fascinating So I I know that this company is saying like look we're not quite there, but we think we're close But I would love it if if this does work and it gets licensed out I I'd be in line to buy one of those earbuds my first reaction When I read the story this morning was like Okay, so I have a teeth grinding problem. You know, I wear a night guard at night I know I'm not alone. Some of you out there have the same thing every time I go to the dentist They're like you're gonna break your teeth pretty soon Like you should be wearing your night guard more often than you are a type thing where I'm like, yeah I know I'm not doing it so The idea of anything that is like that is jaw related to me. I'm like, that's just bad behavior. Yeah, you were like no way No way. Yeah, like I'm not I'm not supposed to do that. That's all I think about is Not doing that. This is not gnashing of teeth in order to like skip a song You know, it's like it's a little tap tap tap and I love the idea that for a lot of folks It's like wow, it's it's almost like my brain telling you to You know to to go front or back or pause or that sort of thing It's not quite that But it it it is it is getting there where like you said, tom Not using your hands not using your voice. Um if if it works as Um as hoped It is a pretty cool way to Almost think something into existence for me. I still I'm like no jaw stuff, please Uh that you've hit it, uh sarah if it works because the ideal way that this works is that you don't even think of it as tapping Your your teeth together you it is just an involuntary thing that you do with your jaw That is the closest thing that triggers it and and it is not in the same way that you would clack clack clack Your your teeth together in the way that we are thinking that being said I don't know if an 80 success rate is going to get you over the finish line and that's not yet their best Version of it right now. I think we got some time in the oven on this idea Yeah, and and to be and to be fair in the tech crunch article, uh the the co-founder Says like we're not there yet. We're hoping to get the two perfected this year and then have 12 in the next three years Uh, I thought they were very honest about where they are with it, uh, but but I am I'm hopeful for it because They what what was genius about the tapping of the teeth? outside of the jaw concerns Is it's not something you would do a lot normally In just talking the neighbors are walking along. You're not likely to do a double tap, right? You might do a single tap of your teeth, but you're less likely to do a double So finding those gestures that you can do with facial movements, you know, squinting or whatever where it knows Yeah, you you actually are talking to me. You're not just being a human Yeah, yeah Maybe chattering teeth are a problem if you are either very cold or skeleton Just like autonomous cars. This isn't going to work in the cold. You always forget the cold weather people Oh, okay, you know All right, folks, uh, if you are uh in the cold weather and you got something to say about this Or if you're anybody in any kind of weather join our discord, you can you can talk to folks in there Uh, Larry and Atlanta and zoe brings bacon are talking in there right now You can join them by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash d t n s Back in 2006 This is the the bush administration. All right 16 years ago Google let users create a domain name based version of its services for free called google apps for your domain I did this with sub brilliant.com back in the day That service has had many name changes over the years You probably think of it as g suite, which it still goes by sometimes most recently just in last year They changed it to google workspace So you'll hear it referred to like that as well But the the idea was the service would let you use your own domain name with g mail and calendar So daily tech news show dot com for google services like email google drive, etc in 2012 10 years ago This is now the obama administration google stopped offering the service for free 10 years ago and encouraged free users to either pay for a business account Or transitioned to the free versions of its services, which did not allow you to use a custom domain, but they were free however Google did not immediately kick the free users off At the time that they made the change the paid version was $50 a year Google now 10 years later has finally started to email users of the free service to let them know They will not be able to continue to use it for free Users have until may 1st to pick a paid version after which they will be automatically upgraded If they don't provide payment info Then their account will be suspended after 60 days, but suspension doesn't mean it doesn't work On july 1st you'll get 60 more days And on september 1st if you still haven't paid You'll lose access to core services email calendar and meet But google says you may still retain access to additional google services like youtube and google photos through that account so to sum up You had almost 10 years to move off You now have four months to pick a plan after which google will pick one for you Then they'll give you two months to start paying or the limit your account and two more months before they cut it off mostly The plans are not cheap anymore. They're not $50 a year. There's six to 18 dollars per user Per month depending on the features. They max out at 300 users These are these are meant for small businesses if you're bigger than 300 users You need an enterprise plan. Anyway, google is offering a year-long discount for anybody making the switch And if you're done with this which a lot of people are I want to ditch all together You can use google's data export tool that however will not Let you export things associated to that account Like purchases for books movies music and apps You may also lose google voice. That's unclear and google is not providing a seamless way to transition the data to free consumer accounts It's not Immediately apparent how many people are still using the free version of google workspace 10 years later I know there's at least One on our team and A couple in our discord probably a higher percentage here in the audience That then in the general populace Do we think this is unfair of google to do? Uh as a person who is using a free version of google workspace For a domain that I've had for quite some time, but I poured it through you know the the google Uh I was very confused by this. I still am a little bit confused. I understand the timeline of like here's what you got to do Uh, it's not a free red anymore. Sarah. You have to figure out like yeah, what is do you have a you know enterprise need? Which I don't really it's just me. Um, do you have some sort of you know, is is the google workspace option? Uh, does it make sense for you? You have all these add-ons Most of them I don't need either but some people do so I get that A lot of folks have very different reasons for being in this kind of limbo Um mode that I I find myself in as well I'm also Not scrambling because it's like I kind of have till september right to like figure things out But it is pretty convoluted. I'm not totally sure what my option is and my option if I were to say You know what I'm just going to move from google. What would that be? Well, yeah, uh, if you if you you'd you'd have to go to proton mail or or microsoft Yeah, there are options, but it's other things, but yeah, it's just when you're so used to this it's like Is it just you? Uh on this particular demand it is. Yeah, I'm not so that's six dollars per month That's that's your other is to say just pay six dollars per month. Which is not the end of the world It's just something where I was like, I just never thought I would be here Okay, what's funny about this is that so much of google's initial offering into consumer services We're really to undercut microsoft if you think about email docs and enterprise level stuff like what we're seeing With this they have since then realized that there is a profit center here Especially on the on the enterprise level where microsoft continues to make so much of their money What's interesting to me is that they don't just let these early adopters ride I can't imagine how many of them they are I can't imagine that the conversion rate they're going to get out of this would even be a Rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error on the balance sheet for for alphabet But then again This is a company that has never been afraid to piss off early adopter nerds Elsewise they would not still have the dripping blood of google reader on their hands I think what happens sometimes is when a Population of users gets small enough. It just becomes annoying to the engineers They're like, why are we maintaining this for this number of people? Uh, and that's what pushes them to be like, let's just get rid of it There's not that many people using it anyway, but you got to remember those people are loud Uh, I look at this and I I'm split part of me thinks like look you had plenty of time You got to realize you got to pay On the other hand google should have done better communications in the intervening 10 years Continually, they should have been emailing you saying like hey, you're on a free tier. We're not kicking you off yet But this won't last forever. Yeah, keep it in mind. You got to keep that top of mind I mean they did tell people but the kim and pa and our twitch chat was like, I don't recite So, you know, you got to you got to realize like if you don't want people to be angry You have to make sure they know and then give them a give them an easier way to transition beyond a business level Account because a lot of people doing this. We're doing it for family They're doing it for personal reasons like sara where they had just been trying it out and it never went away So so make it easier for those people to either switch to the free service and keep all their data and services Or provide like a mid-level plan like we're going to start charging in three bucks for this one Okay, you know I don't know there there's got to be a Couple of other things they could do to keep people from getting upset if this part of their business gave a rat's Ptoot about The goodwill of of an average customer. It's not going to pay at least six dollars a month Then maybe they would but they don't I mean, I will say I never saw one email about this Maybe I'll get one. Um, I've been looking But you know, you get enough span Spam through the gmail interface alone that I could see a lot of this Reaching out of google being like we're giving you ample time to figure out your next You know, if you want to pay us great if you want to move away great and people saying I never saw this Because I didn't Yeah, I don't think this is a big enough audience for it to be a cash grab either. I see I I think it was Uh skelly saying I haven't received or no, it was uh Someone saying my guess is their revenue from other sources is dropping. That's not motivated. This is This isn't a revenue. This is them buttoning up Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, this is checking a thing off of this. All right. Let's check out our mailbag Let's do it. James from Columbus, Ohio wrote in and said Netflix making new gaming announcements right after a Netflix price hike makes me feel that the two are related I would gladly pay less for a service that did not include gaming I wish they broke out the gaming part in Into an added fee instead of increasing the cost for everybody Even though even if we have no interest in their gaming service I'm currently on netflix hiatus and this makes me drag my feet even slower about coming back Uh, this is is it the recency bias where when when two things happen in succession You see causality whether it's there or not. Yeah, you wonder if that's why I think and that's that's It's perfectly normal human behavior. I have to fight against that all the time to be like this happened after that I wonder if the first one caused the second one. I don't think that's the case here. James The the if if they deducted the amount of money that the games are Costing them per user from your account. You wouldn't notice The true reason for the price increase is the cost of their video programming total global spending on tv and movie content Is supposed to hit 230 billion this year and netflix is the third largest investor in video content And they're trying to keep ahead of disney They're trying to keep ahead of comcast mbc They also hit a subscriber plateau netflix just announced before the show They added 8.3 million subscribers and they were expected to add 8.5 million They they missed their target and their stock price dropped So that's where that price increase is going they have to make more money per user Right now because they're not gaining them as fast and they need to keep spending money on content to stay competitive Yeah, don't don't don't blame the games james Blame all of the players amas and comedies that you're not watching Ask for a deduction of those And you might see something different in your bill if they ever offered such a thing which they will not nope Well, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on the show anything We might talk about on a future show you have ideas you have concerns questions All of those things should be sent to feedback at daily tech news show dot com We love your feedback keep it coming We also would like to thank a brand new boss that brand new boss's name is john wiggy wilkenowski Just started backing us on patreon if I can call you wiggy. I'd like to thank you wiggy wiggy on john Excellent Also, thanks to len peralta who has been illustrating today's show. What have you drawn today len? Well, you know, I am kind of with sarah in that whole idea where I don't I don't really see why is it me using a wiser and clenching my My jaw I'm I'm at that age now where I feel like that could be very detrimental to my health I do find it very interesting, but it seems more of kind of a way to break up frustration, right? So that's what this image Shows it's are you frustrated? Well, you know working out with tom's top five It's a playlist that lets you clench your jaw skip and pause and you can kind of take a look I don't know. I just Imagine dragons that we can but love slayer like I see where I see where you're going with this And tolerates bootle-deedle do is which is a which is on the playlist as well Which is very interesting and hates walnuts is you know, it's kind of strange, but yeah, I I um Is walnuts a band or just the nuts? It's just walnuts in general. It doesn't like it. It's like crunching on them He wouldn't be the only one. Yeah, right. Well, this if you're interested in this piece. This is uh Not only did I draw this on twitch today at my twitch channel But you can get this at my patreon patreon.com forward slash line if you're backer there Or if you're just a traditional person like to send me money Go to my online store letting for all the store.com and you can purchase this and uh and and work out some of those frustrations people That's the way you got to do it with wise here. Oh good stuff. As always lend everybody Take care of your jaws. Uh, no matter what kind of music you like or don't like, uh, but yeah, good good stuff poor frustrated crunch guy Justin rubber young also thanks to you for being with us today Uh thursday usual, uh, what's been going on since you saw you last Well, uh the bite administration turned one and so we take a look back at the year that was in the new president's term And uh where he might go forward. It's all in a brand new episode of politics politics politics available Everywhere you get a podcast tomorrow morning Well, we sure thank both of you for being on the show with us today Reminder for everybody. We're live doing this monday through friday at 4 30 p.m Eastern 21 30 utc. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live And we will be back doing it all again tomorrow with Lamar wilson talk to you soon This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover