 Coming up on DTNS, do we need a hardware Bitcoin wallet? AI comes for the podcasters and voice actors, and how to make your online arguments more productive. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 9th, 2021. That's 9th, 2021, in Los Angeles, I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dundlewood. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang. This show is pretty sick. We were just talking about whether you should wash a hat. And if so, how often and how? Get that wider conversation on Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft clarified that its patch for the print nightmare vulnerability is working as designed and is effective. Some researchers developed a way around the patch and Microsoft says those relied on an insecure configuration of a registry setting related to point and print. Microsoft encourages all Windows users to apply the patch and offers guidance on registry settings needed to make sure your system is secure. Microsoft also announced it had awarded at $13.6 million in bug bounties to security researchers over the past 12 months, about the same as last year, and has the highest numbers reported by any vendor for yearly payouts. TikTok began testing a new system in the U.S. to automatically delete content on upload for several categories that violate its content policies. That includes minor safety, adult nudity, violent and graphic content, and illegal activities. Got any images that match those categories? They're just going to be torched before you can even get them on the platform. TikTok said it previously tested the system and other markets found it had a false positive rate of about 5 percent, so 5 percent of the times you're going to get torched even though you didn't break any rules. Writers were to say Indonesia's latest IPO from e-commerce firm, Bukalapak, received enough investor orders to cover its sale on its launch day on Friday. Bukalapak competes with Tokopedia, C-Limited's Shopee and Alibaba's Lazada. The site, WA Beta Info, reports that the beta of WhatsApp on Android began testing letting users control the amount of compression used on images and video with options for auto, best quality and data saver. Current version of WhatsApp compresses images by changing a file's extension to send it as a document. Epic Games has been granted an appeal from the Australian federal court, allowing the company to proceed with its legal fight against Apple in Australia. Epic said of the outcome, quote, this is a positive step forward for Australian consumers and developers who are entitled to fair access and competitive pricing across multiple app stores. We look forward to continuing our fight for increased competition in app distribution and payment processing in Australia and around the world. All right, let's talk about what the executive branch of government in the United States of America is up to, Sarah. Let's talk about it. The White House has been busy. Turns out the executive branch outed 14 Chinese companies to the entity list that forbids U.S. companies from doing businesses with them without getting a license. The most famous tech company on that list is Huawei. We've talked about it on the show at Nauseam. But the U.S. says that the companies were added, 14 companies, for being implicated in human rights violations in China's Jingjiang province. Meanwhile, on the home front, the White House released a fact sheet about an executive order that encourages the FCC to restore open internet rules, limit early termination fees by ISPs, limit the ability of ISPs to sign exclusive deals with landlords, and require reporting of ISP prices and rates. The order also encourages the FTC to draft right to repair rules that, quote, limit powerful equipment manufacturers from restricting people's ability to use independent repair shops or do DIY repairs and, quote, and limit non-copy clauses. Finally, it also announces a policy of greater scrutiny on tech mergers, particularly as it relates to user data and eliminating possible competitors. Let me get my bit out of the way. First of all, none of these executive orders actually do anything yet. They just instruct agencies that the executive branch would like them to do things. And the FCC and the FTC are somewhat independent in what they can do. The FCC also only has four members. They don't have a majority. So they really won't be able to do anything until an actual third Democratic member is approved. So that is a bit of a like, hey, I'd like to do something on net neutrality at some point, but you've got to get that other nomination in there before that can happen. The FTC, on the other hand, has a pit bull in charge of it right now. That stuff is likely to happen. You're likely to see a lot of movement on those parts of the order because the FTC is very much in alignment with the administration on this sort of thing. Going back to the net neutrality stuff, I don't love this because I'm really tired of us changing all the rules for the internet every time a new president takes over. I really want us to just have one set of rules as a law instead of trying to use the FCC to switch things back and forth. Rob, what do you think of this? I'm absolutely with you on that. So when I first read several articles on this, I was like, oh, net neutrality is back. Kinda sort of eventually maybe. And then I started to think, okay, even when the FCC gets enough people on it that they can actually do something, these are still just rules, not laws. So once the administration changes, and it will eventually, these can always go back, and that's problematic. They need to create laws, pass them, and then that's what we have. Yeah, I don't think it's good for the marketplace, for consumers or the businesses, to have the uncertainty of rules changing all the time. I know everybody's gonna be quick with their arguments of why I'm wrong, depending on which side you're on. But I also don't think these rule changes have had as much impact and effect as people think they have. I'm not saying the rule changes haven't had any effect, or that they couldn't have any effect, but I honestly think that a lot of stuff just happens because they're like, man, we don't want to take too much advantage of this rule yet, because it might change again soon. And I know the answer to like, yeah, Tom, but it's easier to say pass a new law than it is to actually get a new law through this Congress, which can't get anything through. But that doesn't stop me from believing that that's what we need. We need a sensible law that says, ah, here are the rules for the internet that protect consumers and encourage business and make for good internet. And we're far away from having that. I mean, I guess I will say the obligatory thing of like, a lot of politicians are doing the best they can, but they don't all agree on policies that some of them don't even understand half the time. So wouldn't it be nice if we just had a law? Yeah, this is how the internet works, but that's asking a lot. I don't know where I got cut out. One of my power blipped on me, but they need to create a law. Just pass a law and then give us something that we all want. And I think there is a way in which, and this is probably not going to happen, but there is a way that if people didn't get excited when their team was changing the rules for the FCC, we could actually have pressure on people to be like, no, seriously, we want to have a law. Sadly, there's way bigger problems with, you know, government execution than that. But that doesn't stop me from wanting it, right? Anyway, so there you go. Here's an executive order that is probably not going to have immediate effect on net neutrality and won't solve the underlying problem. But yes. We're doing something. We're signing stuff. So Square's hardware head Jesse Dorogusker announced earlier this week that the company will make hardware wallet for Bitcoin. This is the company's, not the company's first foreign capital currency, with Cash App being supported since early 2018. Hardware wallet means your private keys that are used to identify which coins you own are stored on a device instead of online in the service. That puts the keys exclusively under control of the owner of the device, which is considered to be more secure. While you can make a hardware wallet yourself, the idea is to make a product that encourages mainstream adoption. Dorogusker and Square CEO Jack Dorsey have committed that this will be an open process and possibly open source the code for the wallet. Yeah, I tend to think they mean that. They want to do a nice, secure, open source project that then they can put on their own devices and sell to the folks who don't want to go to the trouble of doing that themselves. And I like that approach because it means we all win. Those of us, and I'm sure it's a lot of people in the audience, and maybe not all of you, but a lot of people are like, yeah, I could put a program on a USB drive myself. I don't need you to sell me a hardware wallet. I know how to make that. But a lot of people won't, or even if they know how, they won't want to do it. They'll be like, you know what? I want somebody to make sure that this thing is secured and buttoned down and nothing else can be written to it and all of that. And so I think there could be, I don't know that there is, but there could be a market for people who are like, yeah, just make a device that'll be my Bitcoin wallet. I can unplug it from my computer and know that my Bitcoin are safe unless I lose the device, you know, but I can, I can treat it like cash. And then when I need it, I can plug it in and know that it will work and be secure and I can use my Bitcoin if I want. That could increase some adoption of Bitcoin, I think. Yeah, this is, this is a marketing thing as much as it is hardware, maybe even more so, because as we say, we can already do this stuff. You know, a lot of the initiated who are really in the crypto, they are doing this kind of stuff. This is for all the folks who just, they're maybe just now hearing about Bitcoin or they're not necessarily hearing about it, but they're just now becoming interested in it. They may have heard on the regular news that oh, countries are starting to use this stuff now. So this is giving regular people who just don't know all the ins and outs about crypto the opportunity to, in their mind, to be very safe with it. They've heard of, you know, they've heard of Twitter, there's a good chance that they've heard of a cash app. It's like, oh, okay, I can get a device from cash app. So when I buy Bitcoin is now on this thing that I own and I can put it in a safe deposit box or whatever you're going to do to keep that thing safe. So it's, you know, it's not amazing technology. This is stuff that has been happening for years, but it is something that's going to allow regular people and initiated folks that want to get into crypto a way to get into it relatively safely. I'm with you, Rob. I, when I first heard the story this morning, I was like, how is this a big deal? But I think that Square has done a really decent job thus far of being, you know, the, you don't need your wallet point of sale company and cash app extremely popular. So the idea of making this sort of a cryptocurrency, we do software, but also hardware solutions for anyone, including you person who might be getting into this, you know, for the first time, I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's like buying a kit versus doing it yourself, right? Some people just like to buy the kit. Like, yeah, just give me everything packaged together. I don't want to have to assemble it. Other people want to assemble it and that's fine. And that brings me back to the fact that I like that they're doing an open source project so that all kinds of people can benefit from their work. Just need to end up being done and be good work. Yeah, you see a kid actually was talking to someone earlier today about this, and they said it's like buying a humidor with cigars in it. And that's exactly right. It's like you just get everything you need. Although it doesn't come with the Bitcoin in it. That's that. That is true. You have to remember that. MIT Technology Reviews Karen Howe wrote an article about artificial voice actors think Siri given the voice to a video game character or the corporate video training that you receive human voice actors provide audio for deep learning algorithms to train on. So you still need humans in the process. The algorithms then can learn the original person's pronunciation, intonation, pacing, et cetera. The ability to emulate nuance relies on that training set. That's where it comes from, aka the human who supplied the voice and then some fine tuning. So it's a couple hours of reading for the human and then a few weeks of fine tuning for the other humans. Well said labs offers eight digital actors with descriptions like you can get energetic and insightful actor or poised and expressive actor markets and services to corporate e learning. Once the models are trained, they can be adapted fairly easily. Let's say you have an artificial voice doing a commercial for a restaurant chain. Not only can you change the text for the ad to say the location is Atlanta or Toronto depending on where you're running it. That's easy. You don't have to re record the whole spot. But you could also change the voices accent from a Southern accent in Atlanta to a Canadian accent for Toronto. Companies can customize the voices the way they would customize typefaces and colors for their logos. So maybe they buy the off the shelf one, but they tweak it a little make it sound like the Pizza Hut guy or the Domino's guy. Company called Synantic provides particularly emotive voices as guide tracks for video games and animation. And even some of those have showed up in final products resemble dot AI specializes in imitations and has been used to patch up actor dialogue and movies and TV shows. If it got garbled or was covered by some noise or there was a mispronunciation that needed to be fixed. Overall, the shorter the duration, the easier it is to fool listeners into thinking it's a human. But longer form works like audio books and podcasts are still best hosted by humans for now. Would you guys want to hear a little sample? Yeah. All right, let's let's do a well said AI voice actor in a promotional style. This comes from Karen house SoundCloud account. So thanks to her for posting me. Karen is the senior AI editor at MIT technology review covering the fields cutting edge research and its impacts on society. She writes a weekly newsletter called the algorithm, which was named one of the best newsletters on the Internet in 2019 by the Webby Awards. Now let's hear a vocal ID different company ad sample. At Casper, we've taken sleep to the next level. Temperature resolution feels like sleeping with a cold breeze through the windows. Get the sleep you've always dreamed of with Casper. What do you guys think? I mean, I'd love to get the app. I want the voice over app. There's gotta be an app for this coming out at some point where I could just type something in and make a commercial really quickly. So it's, it's, well, I mean, I think that, you know, it's, it's good news, Rob. You can hear it is. You can still tell if you really listen, but it's probably good enough for like local stuff. Yeah, listen to this one. Thank you for calling our department store. How can I help you today? Feels like summer is finally here. We've got drinks and snacks for the whole family Yeah, that one, not so much. Yeah. But again, if you're in a grocery store, you're not paying that close attention. So it's not going to stick out. You're not going to be like, whoa, what's that robot voice? Well, and depending on, you know, in, in its context, right? It's, yes, if you're in the grocery store and you don't think there's a woman behind a curtain reading this to you over a microphone necessarily. So yes, you get a little bit more used to this idea. I think they're, for the most part, they're pretty good. They're pretty decent. They're pretty good. Yeah. Well, and I've noticed the smart speakers that I work with have gotten a lot better. They still tend to finish on a download, you know, but, but they've gotten more natural. And so this, I think this is the one of those things where it's just a matter of time. It's a matter of computer power, algorithm training. You know, we've, we have gone from a robot voice to something that, that sounds pretty approximate to us. It just, it's just noticeable enough that I feel secure for a couple more years doing my job. Well, you know, here's hoping, right? Yeah. Yeah. Robots be good. Not so good that we're out of work. Don't get too good until I'm ready to like kind of retire because I'm getting really old. And then I can just license my voice to one of these and rake in the profits. Remember, Tom, you still have to tell the robot what to say. So you're okay for that. Oh yeah. Somebody else will do that. I'll just rake in the royalty checks. Or that. Hey, y'all catch the second episode of the mini podcast series that we are putting out seniors in tech, which is hosted by science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackerman's in episode two. Nikki is going to interview former U. S. Robotics engineer, hardware and software developer and part-time paramedic Michael Musil about his lengthy career in the industry from the late seventies through today. University of Washington engineer Amanda Bowen wrote an article for the conversation about a study she helped conduct on how the design of social media platforms affects arguments. People reported having the most arguments on WhatsApp and Facebook and the fewest arguments on Reddit and YouTube. Participants, however, weren't always upset that they were having arguments. They reported negative feelings about Facebook. Those weren't fun, but positive feelings about the WhatsApp arguments. They felt like they were actually learning something and having a productive discussion. The study also asked participants what design elements they preferred for having a productive argument where you actually learn from each other and arguing to learn, not arguing to win. People liked existing features that are out there like the ability to delete an inflammatory comment, which might distract you. Block users who were trying to derail a conversation and use emoji to convey emotions so that people understand maybe you're being sarcastic or jokey or something like that. One feature that doesn't yet exist that people liked was the ability to switch an argument from public to private to say like, hey, let's not do this in front of an audience. Maybe it'll be easier for us to understand each other if it's just the two of us. The study described the feature as an app suggesting that, not making you do it, but saying like, hey, would you like to move this to a private chat? In the words of the participants in the study, quote, this way people don't get annoyed and included in an online discussion that doesn't really involve them and would, quote, save a lot of people embarrassment from arguing in public. While people were generally positive about the idea of design, improving the quality of their online discussions, there was a limit. One of their proposals was for the platform to force a 30-second time out if people needed, if it thought people needed to cool off and participants didn't like that. They thought it would frustrate people even further. What I noticed about that is suggesting, hey, would you like to take this private? It doesn't make you do it. And people were more inclined to like that than like, I'm going to put you in a time out where you didn't have any choice. Yeah, yeah. Always good to give people the choice, right? Hey, would you like to maybe think about this or perhaps you and this other extremely smart person that you're talking to because you're both very smart, you know, just kind of go, you know, take it to the back room and then come back to us when you're done. I think a lot of people will resonate with that sort of thing rather than, yeah, there being some, you know, 30-second warning that makes you feel like you're in school. I would say that the 30-second warning, people really, really dislike that, but that's probably the one that people need because there's oftentimes when you go back and you read something that you just wrote and it's like, oh, I'm not going to say that. So I could see that being beneficial even though people don't like it, but I wouldn't like it. I don't want you to censor me like that either. I don't want you to give me the 30-second timeout. I want to say what I want to say when I want to say it and then deal with the consequences of it later. The going to a prize, if I'm arguing with someone, argue to me denotes like there is like conflict. I would say maybe if I'm debating with someone, I'm trying to learn something. I'm trying to get their point of view that I could see maybe taking that private, but if I'm arguing with you, I don't want to go to a private room and talk to you because to me, that's when the really crazy stuff comes out, when you don't think anybody else can see it. Well, and that's this study, if you read through the article here, is saying like arguments can be debates or they can be shout-and-slap fights, right? And so I get what you're saying, Rob. It's like if you mean, you know, just somebody getting in a fight with each other, then yeah, taking it to private room is going to help, but what the study is saying is that a lot of people are upset at the design of the platform that sort of encourages bad behavior. And so being able to have the option to say like, I actually think we're getting closer to understanding each other, but it's because we're in front of an audience that I don't want to say all the things that I should say, and maybe we're being a little performative. What if we go somewhere else and talk about this versus let's take it outside, right? Which is if you're in a fight, you know, then that's just going to make the fight escalate. So I see what you're saying, but there's some other stuff in this article about how Facebook hides context by collapsing threads, which makes people jump in and react to things in a way that they wouldn't if they saw like how the discussion got to where it is. I think there's absolutely something to that, like there's absolutely something to the idea that, you know, there's lots of design elements that can encourage good behavior and good discussions like you see on Reddit, honestly. It's one of the reasons like people were in the fewest arguments there versus, you know, the thing that's just designed to like increase engagement, no matter how quality or good or bad it is. Engadget has a write up of the TCL next to where G wearable display glasses that Daniel Cooper calls the closest anyone has got to make any concept work. The idea is to put high res displays in this case, 260 Hertz micro OLED 1080p screens close enough to your eyes so that it fools you into thinking that you're looking at a 140 inch display. TCL keeps the headset lightweight at 130 grams by only putting in the display, speakers and positioning hardware in the frames and everything else in the USBC device you plug into them. And they don't try to block your vision. So you can still see the world around you outside of the projected display. Cooper said colors were washed out when you used it on his MacBook Pro, but overall it worked fine. TCL was pitching the glasses as good for work since documents look good and nobody can peek over your shoulder. The TCL next to where G wearable display glasses are available in Australia for $899. Oh, that's where you lost me. They're a little bulky looking, even at 130 grams. I know that's not super heavy, but they don't look like glasses. I think to get widespread adoption of any of this kind of stuff, augmented reality or cinema displays, you're going to need them to pretty much look like glasses. If they were cheaper, though, I could absolutely see using these on a plane, you know, keeping my screen off on my laptop or maybe just plugging them into a tablet and being able to use the tablet as the pointer device, use that touchscreen. Absolutely. I like this idea. I agree with Engudget. It's not quite there yet. Not quite there. Not quite there. And yeah, 900 bucks. But I was trying to think of, okay, use case on a plane, maybe you want a little privacy. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe also posture. The idea that, okay, I'm going to have to look at this stuff for a while, and I kind of want to sit up and have a good field of view and not be sort of hunched over whatever laptop or computer I would be using otherwise. I can see some use cases for this that will come into play. I don't know if you guys remember, there was a TV show, I cannot think of the name of it. It's probably 2018, 2019. It started Sean Penn, and it was about a manned mission to Mars. I think it came on Hulu. Sorry, I can't remember the name. But they actually wore these glasses that were your everything. They were your cell phone. They were your screen. They gave you the ability to interact with the internet with something that you just wore on your eyes. This is probably the closest thing that we've seen to that. It is not there yet. Clearly, that was a show set 10, 15 years in the future from now. But they're getting close. I wear glasses, a lot of different glasses. I'm almost getting like Fred G. Sanford with the glasses drawer. I have so many at this point. 899 is a lot. But for me, I'd spend 899 on a pair of nice glasses that I liked anyway. So if I can actually watch television in these things or see a YouTube video while I'm on the train or watching, do whatever while I'm on an airplane, 899 doesn't sound so bad if they actually work. I don't think this is it. But I can see this and then not so long. The foreseeable future, I can see these things coming up. Yeah. The interesting thing here is that they made them lighter by not trying to block out the light, which seems like it's a good move because you just need to see a monitor. But it's nice to be able to see folks who walk up to you like you would if you were at your monitor. But it's also not lenses. If you can put lenses in these things and still keep the display, then suddenly I could see you getting a little prescription version of this. And then if you've got eye insurance, maybe that helps to fray the cost and then you start increasing adoption. I don't know. I think there's something down that road maybe as well. But like you said, we're still not there yet. Something as you might say, to keep your eye on. All right, let's check out the bell big. Christopher read in with his two cents about our conversation on one plus nine throttling apps to improve battery and heat. Christopher says, isn't that a lot like Apple doing their battery management with CPU throttling when your battery capacity gets too low to keep the phone stable when that caused tons of people to be angry about it? And I think there is even a lawsuit about it. Christopher says, neither companies seem to be very transparent about it until it was found out by public, the public or researchers looking into it. So do you think public opinion this time will be different or just the same all same? Christopher, that's a great point. It is the same thing. The only difference is that one plus is doing it out of the gate. Apple changed the performance of your phone. And I think I think that's the key where they could get in legal trouble, which they did a couple of times was you bought a phone, it worked to this way, and then it slowed down, right? Whereas one plus is like, no, no, no, you won't notice because it's always been like this. It'll just save your battery life from the beginning. So yeah, I still think Christopher has a good point though where people could say, yeah, but you didn't tell me you were doing that. Maybe I wouldn't have bought the phone if I knew that Chrome was going to run that slight bit slower. I don't know. Well, thank you, Christopher, for the good point. And anybody who feels like, hey, I got something to add to that conversation that you had on the show, please do send it to us. We'd love to read and also include on future shows feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Ken Hayes, Phillip Chain and Paul Boyer today. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, John Clyde. John just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, John. John, John, John, John, John. Right turn, Clyde. You to Patreon. Yeah. Have we had a new patron, a new boss every day this week? I think we have. We sure have. We sure have, Tom. I know. I know. It's so it's heartwarming. Thank you, everyone. Yeah. John is our new favorite. Thank you, John. Yes, you are. Yeah. Yeah. Also, a perennial favorite is Len Peralta, who has been illustrating today's show. Len, what have you drawn for us? Well, I was pretty impressed with the robot VO. That was pretty cool. But I decided to go and draw the story about timeouts in Facebook Fightland. I found it very interesting. I call this one Take It Outside because I think that's essentially what that private message is saying. It's like, hey, you want to, looks like you're arguing with somebody. You want to take this into a private room. It's basically Facebook saying, hey, take it outside. We don't want any problems in here. So this is a great little image of two guys poking each other in the face. It's pretty upset with one another and being interrupted by this message. And if you want to check it out, you can go to Patreon.com porn slash Len. If you're a patron, you get this immediately or you can get it at my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com. Finally, I want to mention I will be gone from date TNS for the next two weeks on a special secret mission. But on Monday, I'm going to be premiering a brand new show on my Twitch channel, twitch.tv forward slash Len Peralta called The Draw. It's a pretty cool show. And if you want to hear the intro for the show, stay tuned on Good Day Internet afterwards, and you can find out all about it. So, but thank you so much. Well, good stuff. Yes, please do hang out and find out more on GDI after DTNS wraps up. In the meantime, also thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us this fine Friday. Rob, where can people keep up with the rest of your work? It's always a pleasure to be on DTNS and folks can find me pretty much everywhere at all things at Rob Dunwood. And of course, you can check me out at the SMR podcast where we will be starting to stream our shows live here in the next few weeks, actually live and with video. So you won't be going to a beach vacation like Rod. You're going to be sticking around. No, it's good stuff. Oh, that's very exciting. As an SMR podcast fan, I look forward to it. Joining you live when I can speaking of being live, we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern and 20 30 UTC on this here show. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will also be back on Monday with Charlotte Henry. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show 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 Strothelino, video producer and tWitch producer Joe Koontz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods Beatmaster W. Scottis 1, Biocow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shit, Steve Rahm, Paul Rees and Matthew J. Stevens, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast, Creative Arts Arts and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, Acast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown, contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Rob Dunwood. Guest for this week were Owen J.J. Stone, twice and thanks to all the patrons who made the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.