 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre and Jeff Wilkes Coming up on DTNS the US bands and video from selling chips to China. Well sort of is it bad to use AI to win a state fair competition and Hallelujah Twitter launch the edit button This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 1st, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt On location. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm the show's producer Roger Jay, you know Apple might do some weird stuff with that iPhone notch next week But guess what? We'll find out next week when they actually announced it until then Here's a few things that have actually happened that you should know The UK's Competition and Markets Authority or CMA has expressed concerns over Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and We'll move to a phase two Investigation if Microsoft is not able to answer certain questions within five working days They get the weekend off the sixty eight point seven billion dollar deal is also being looked at by the US FTC and the European Commission As well as other regulators with Saudi Arabia the only country to approve the deal so far The CMA is quote concerned that Microsoft's anticipated purchase of Activision Blizzard could substantially lessen competition in gaming consoles multi-game subscription services and cloud gaming services in other words all the game things a Report from the Wall Street Journal says the Disney's in the early stages of planning for a membership program similar to Amazon Prime Unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal the membership would include quote Discounts or special perks to encourage customers to spend more on its streaming services theme parks resorts and merchandise The program all would also continue a trend of customers of one Disney product getting discounts on other Disney products Like the existing perk of Disney World stays being 25% offer Disney Plus subscribers The company is talking about working with third parties for the program like being able to offer discounted Disney Broadway show tickets Disney has not yet commented on the rumored program I mean in the next two years if I'm not able to click on the screen To buy a toy of the thing I'm looking at I'll be shocked Arm is suing Qualcomm over Nuvia's custom CPU code in a US federal district court in Delaware Arm accuses Qualcomm of breach of licenses and to fulfill obligations under those license agreements is seeking The destruction of its Nuvia CPU designs as well as compensation Arm says Qualcomm's improper acquisition of relevant Nuvia technology and violation of arm standard provisions threatens to harm arms position in the Ecosystem of arm-based devices and embolden other companies to likewise harm arms reasonable business expectations in issuing its licenses This is a weird fight though because Qualcomm and arm they they're usually hand-in-hand Qualcomm's general counsel responded arms complaint ignores the fact that Qualcomm has broad well-established license rights covering its custom designed CPUs and we are confident those rights will be affirmed. We'll keep you up to date if any of this really affects any of us Ecommerce company Jumia is partnering with a longtime drone delivery company zip line to launch on-demand deliveries in Ghana The plans to expand to Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire This will particularly benefit rural areas which make up about 27% of Jumia's orders Zip lines drones will carry a maximum payload of three kilograms out of 11.8 leaders So we're talking about a limited selection of products and not full grocery orders Zip line has operated since 2015 starting with medical deliveries in Rwanda and counts novant health and walmart as clients at EFA 2022 Lenovo announced its new line of products the x1 fold is a tablet that folds into a laptop configuration And now comes in a bigger version. It's got a 16 inch screen And from all the reviews that 16 inch screen makes all the difference They also improved the hinge put webcams on two sides It's shipping in november for $2,499 looks like a solid entry Lenovo glasses t1 were showed off they put two micro OLED screens in a pair of prescription glasses Like all these things they look like a pair of sunglasses They connect by a wire though usb-c to any windows android or mac os device And you can use them on an iphone with an adapter no pricing on that yet and it's going to ship to china first next year Lenovo also updated its think vision monitors its tab p11 android tablets and added a 16 inch version of the idea pad flex 5i chrome book That one will run you 549 euros But you didn't come here for any of that you came here to celebrate, right? Justin Friends the time has come haters will say it's photoshop. You don't have to like it But you will learn to love it indeed twitter Has an edit button Oh, yeah, I know I know We've all waited a long time for this and we can now rest our keyboards and revel in our victory How do you spell revel? Doesn't matter. I can edit this later when I post about it on twitter Well, almost twitter is doing internal testing So you may see some edited tweets from those folks, but later in september Subscribers to twitter's four dollars and ninety nine cents a month blue subscription Will indeed get the button All right, so here's how it's working now in the test Uh for 30 minutes after you post, uh, you can edit your tweet. You have 30 minutes to edit it Twitter says a few times in its official blog post It didn't put an exact number on it at least not yet If a tweet has been edited Uh, the rest of us will all see a little pencil icon with the phrase last edited and a time and date To let you know it was edited uh this time on this date if you click on any of that You will be taken to an edit history So you can actually see what was changed the original thing. Was it just a typo? Did they change the meaning etc? Uh twitter talked a lot in their post about wanting to test the effects of this feature before rolling it out to more people To see if it's you know, going to be misused some way they didn't anticipate So it might end up working a little differently when it's actually rolled out to subscribers and We don't know if it's going to roll out to non subscribers twitter wrote As part of their subscription They meaning the subscribers receive early access to features and help us test them before they come to twitter That kind of implies that this might eventually just come to the rest of the twitter But they didn't say it for sure Uh, the test will be localized to a single country at first and expand as they learn and observe how people use Edit tweet a lot of hand-writing in this post just in about worrying that people are going to misuse this thing But it's there. It's finally launching I hope the one country that gets it before anyone is cote d'voix I believe that this is something that obviously has been on the the the minds of Fans of twitter active users of twitter for a very very very long time There has to be a reason why it hasn't happened up till this point And I think the hand-wringing that you're describing is that Reason people were afraid twitter has long been been not made it a secret that they were afraid of an edit button being used to change a A thing that is getting traction While it is getting traction and something beyond possibly more insidious than just deleting the tweet Yeah, I I I think it is fair for twitter to say hey, you know what a mistake we get Nailed about in and other companies get nailed about is Not preparing well enough for misuse and then having to scramble later So we're trying to get ahead of that. I think that's smart On the other hand edit features aren't new they've been around since the 90s in forums The ston of the internet. Yeah, this is it like they invented the edit and they're the first one to ever do this Freakin facebook a a minefield for misuse has had an edit function for years, right? So why now that that's really the only thing that I care about because this seemed like this has long seemed like a slam dunk feature for them But the question for me is if not then then why now and I can't help but think about the fact that The current regime of twitter by their own actions Doesn't want to be the current regime much longer. They want to force a a sale to elan muska They're going to court to try to enforce that Uh, I wonder if there is an element of people that are in charge now that are like you want to know what we We want this to be on our permanent record. We want people to know that we gave twitter the edit button. All right So coincidence is not proof of core of causation So what are the arguments against that? Uh, I could think of a couple One is this has been a long time in the making they you don't just roll this out since elan musk Decided to buy the company. They've been they've been working on it for a while So it probably predates the motivation to to rub it in elan's eye Uh and product managers often Want to roll out on a schedule no matter what else is going on And and this very much feels like a product manager delivered thing where they're like rolling enough for internal testing And the messaging is being tacked on afterwards to me So I would argue that there's also if you read in the tea leaves some evidence that this has just been around for a while They've wanted to do it They wanted to do it right and dorsi leaving if anything Kind of times out to be the thing that allowed them to go ahead with it because he was the one always saying never You'll never get an edit button not for me not until you pry this company from my oh, I'm gonna leave Yeah, well and and I guess that's the question is exactly how much of this is Yeah, it's been in the oven I would suspect that there have been versions of twitter of an edit button on twitter Who have that have been around for as long as twitter has yeah, but they've actually even admitted that yeah, yeah Yeah, that this is something that they were probably working on along with core functionality to the website Uh, and maybe it is jack's leadership Maybe it's other capital v capital g very good reasons why this has not happened, but It did happen now Not any other time Is that it happened now? Yeah Is that it? Yeah, and so and and by the way, I don't necessarily think that this is tied directly to Elan although elan has also said he was going to be the person who brought an edit button to twitter Uh I do think it probably in my mind It feels like something for which was a priority for people that are in there Whether or not it was something that became a priority one jack left or is more of a priority now That's that's you know You know, I'm sure you'd have to get a little closer to figure out the true motivation You can have something in the works for a long time and there's a whole different Set of hurdles you have to go over when you make it real right when you go from like Oh, we've had this in the works too. I need to publish it So to say like well, they've had it in the works for a long time They could just push a button and make it live That's really not how it works on the other hand If your entire executive team is distracted by other priorities That sure is a lot easier to get something you want done done, right? So yeah quick quick the mods are asleep. Although according to uh, uh, According to some some other information, uh, you know, the admin access was plentiful. So, you know So anybody can do it anytime It just just sneaked it in Uh, by the way, since twitter seems to be rolling out features to its paid users facebook It looks like it may want to get in on that action The verge got a hold of a memo that says facebook is setting up a product organization to build paid features into facebook instagram and whatsapp It's called the monetization experiences group and i can't wait to see them play the forum It'll be led by metas previous head of research Pratidhi ratudari and before you get too excited Metas vp of monetization john hageman said the company has no plans to let a paid feature disable ads in apps I think that might go the other way you're going to get double the ads if you pay you get more ads That's facebook logic at work Uh, as we enter september, we're heading back to school and wrapping up state fairs Now many of you may not be aware that there's a grand tradition of state fair competitions and giving out prizes Sure, people compete on things like cookies flowers butter sculptures and hogs But there are more recently created competitions as well Jason allen entered a work in the digital arts digitally manipulated photography category at the colorado state fair He called his piece theater opera special and it won First prize a blue ribbon for the old boy, but wait There's more to it than that. Yeah, allen goes by sin karnit Like incarnate but with a sin On the discord for mid-journey mid-journey is not Like middle earth so much as like dolly. It's one of the many text to image generators out there It's particularly good at mimicking art styles. You put in some text It spits out images based on your text that are very arty Uh allen says he crafted a special prompt as you do and then created hundreds of images from it He then upscaled them with gigapixel ai and printed three of them on a canvas And entered them into the fair and one of them won. He got a blue ribbon and then People got real angry with them. Justin. Why was that? Oh, like so many john henry's in parades being mad in an artistic inky poo Some people think that he deceived the judges in his description of the art He says he created it using mid-journey Although admittedly he did not explain what mid-journey was to those who weren't hip allen says he told people at the show that it was quote digital art created using ai tools and quote And if people don't need to explain adobe illustrator, why should he have to explain mid-journey? But what do the rules say? Well, they say that an entrance should be and quote artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative Or presentation process end quote and allen says that his own photoshop editing constituted about 10 of the work Okay, so maybe it technically is within the rules But folks still argue that if the judges had known this was generated by an ai allen wouldn't have won But none of those people or anyone else's filed a grievance with the fair about the win uh tom What what is the chain of custody here for legal battles when it comes to to the fairs? There are fair supreme court Yeah, and and two. Do you think this guy's a dirty rotten cheat? I uh, I am not as steeped in the uh in the appeals process of the colorado state fair as perhaps I should be But but from what I have come to understand Anybody can file a grievance over an award, you know if if that that horrible thief patty stole your Chocolate crinkles recipe and want a blue ribbon you can file a grievance and and the fair board will consider it and look it over And nobody's done that so nobody's taken away his blue ribbon They're just mad at him on the internet which reduces my taking you seriously quite a bit, right? It's like you just want to complain. This isn't hurting anybody and in fact What alan said he's doing here is trying to raise awareness of what ai can do and how it Lates with art and get a conversation started about using ai for art and what its role is in this I would sweep away a lot of the objections of this pretty immediately by pointing out He didn't just say ai make me a prize winning art Uh, he he crafted a piece of text which anybody who's tried these things knows You have that's a skill to create the text that is going to create the trickier than trickier than you might think If it's trickier than you might think for sure There's a skill to figuring out how to get it to kick out what you want Then he went in and did some work himself granted. He says it's only about 10 but he did some touching up He used photoshop, so he put his touch on this the question is Should he have disclosed that he didn't do 90 of the work? And would that may have made a difference to the judges? I I feel like you know what if the colorado state fair Wants to change the rules next time now that this is a thing then they should but as it stands now He played by the rules. He deserves his blue ribbon With all due respect to the colorado state fair and state fairs in general This does not particularly seem like it was the highest traffic Contest I don't I don't I don't know And I've been to plenty of state fairs the texas state fair the new york state fair Which are very competitive, especially when it comes to livestock and and the fun things like butter sculptures and stuff like that I don't know exactly how much traffic What is effectively a state-sponsored version of photoshop friday would have necessarily gotten while people are stuffing their faces with deep fried twinkies that being said He was up front and it just so happens that there are ai tools that that might be more uh Powerful than some would would want and if the judges next year want to make this more of a photoshop specific competition Then they should make rules to guard against it. He didn't lie about it. He didn't say he did everything He explained the the the program that he used Was he uh going to the edge of the law Maybe you can make that argument, but He won use technology anyone. God bless him He followed the community standards, which is you just say what the the thing is and and he says I didn't hide it I told people when they asked it was ai Uh, I I think there is a valid argument that someone going into illustrator and and working on all of a thing Is a different skill Than using the ai to generate an image selecting the image you think is going to win and then touching it up They're both skills. They are different skills. And so yeah, maybe they should have a separate category in the future For this I I think that's worth it But I also don't think this is the same thing as saying he cheated by getting the computer to make it I don't think it's I don't think it's that simple I mean any more than somebody would say that exact same argument about illustrator 15 years ago Yeah, right exactly or or somebody would say, you know, accuse someone of having their mom Bake the chocolate crinkles and giving them a red ribbon instead of a blue ribbon at the 4h county fair Sometime in the past. This feels possibly this feels like a like a repressed Conflict. Um, no, it's just it's just a theoretical theoretical example a theoretical one. Hey folks Do you think this was outrageous? Do you think ai should be banned from state fairs? Or do you have like a take on this that we we could read on the show One way to let us know is in our subreddit. This story is there as are many others You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit.com The u.s commerce department put in place new rules on august 26th That require a license if you want to export high-end machine learning chips that meet or exceed a certain performance threshold So it's not a list of chips. It says if they perform it this rate or better You got to get a license or you can't sell them to russia Hong Kong or china the rules are meant to address the risk that such chips might have a military end use or a military end user in china or russia Now the us has not made the details of the restrictions public But invidia mentioned them when it filed an update in its earnings projection with the us sec The licensing requirements apply to invidia's two-year-old a 100s and forthcoming h100 gpus and amd's mi 250 accelerator chips these chips are used in data centers to train machine learning algorithms For example the verge notes that meta uses a few thousand a 100 chips in its ai researcher super cluster in its filing Nvidia says that it thinks about 400 million dollars of its expected 5.9 billion dollars in sales in q3 Quote may be subject to the new license requirement Now that doesn't mean they'll lose all of it. That means they'll have to convince people to take alternative chips Or get a license uh invidia said it may seek a license to sell the chips in some cases and in fact on thursday It received authorization to export a 100s through march 1st in order to provide support to us customers That are operating in china it also got approvals to make sure its development of the h100 is not affected There was some concern that some of the rnd invidia does in china might stop them from developing it They've gotten that cleared up Uh as far as russia goes invidia wasn't selling chips in russia neither was amd So it's mostly about china here So the wall street journal notes that alibaba which operates china's largest cloud service in tencent Which also sells cloud services and is one of china's largest video and social media companies Both are big customers of invidia and have bought a 100s in the past It's unclear how much of the business involves the two restricted invidia chips Chinese companies may change suppliers to companies located in europe and is Real so on the one hand, but we throw baidu in there too. They buy a lot of these things as well On the one hand, I I think a lot of people overreacted to this headline thinking. Oh, invidia has been banned from selling gpu's to china That's really going to hurt the bottom line. And if that were true, uh, it really would hurt their bottom line They can still sell lots of gpu's to china Yes, they are only restricted from selling two Types that are used for data centers now On the other hand Gpu sales for consumers are cooling off Hence the ability for you to actually go buy a gpu At retail lists sometimes even cheaper as we've talked about on the show. So It is data centers where invidia is getting its rosiest economic forecasts At least for the time being so hitting them in the data center Part of their revenue in china, which is a huge place for data centers Is is is not great, but it's 400 million of 5.6 billion and not all 400 million I think invidia will be fine. They're not going to like this They took a little bit of a stock hit which I think is reasonable and uh, and they'll operate what I think is More interesting is This cross administration approach by the united states that's not associated with any one president Uh of slowly eating away at china's ability to play in tech Uh, there's been a lot of of rhetoric around ai in particular, which is what this one is focused at But they're also talking about restricting finfet construction materials so that they can't make some of the more advanced chips in china And you're seeing a lot of companies We've talked about it here on the show moving their operations to vietnam moving their operations to india even brazil mexico the united states and other places Uh, so it is it is a consistent drumbeat of pressure to reduce reliance on china as a place that makes tech And I think the fact that we went through the supply chain stuff that we saw Over the last few years is part of it. There certainly has been a bipartisan move To distance, uh, the united states away from china at the very least you could say without a shadow of a doubt that the world of endless chinese expansion and optimism in terms of the united states is over Uh, whether or not we get back whether or not there's a deal to be struck whether or not, uh, uh, china will on some level be less of a A possible military conflict in the future I'm not rosy on that But you never know in the meantime I think you're going to see more little things like this because the united states in china have been unable to come to A trade agreement where a lot of this stuff would otherwise be part of a large bargain Right like this. This is a piecemeal part of what in other situations if you're talking about the eu If you're talking about, uh, the united kingdom or or certain countries in south america or india It would be part of a larger trade deal. This isn't and it's largely because China has not been able to play well with the united states This sir, I I I don't think it would be reasonable to separate this from the larger world Conflict between china and the united states about so many different things It is certainly part of that but it is also and I may be even majority focused on supply chain diversity On the idea of bringing production under u.s. Control Or second to that at least diversifying the supply chain So that if vietnam is the next one or india is the next one that cracks down on stuff You're not losing or you're not seeing your supply chain threatened by one particular regime And I I think we'll see more of that over the next couple one last one last thought on this I do think that it is realistic to say that if the united states puts these Roadblocks in china's way, especially for gigantic companies like those are in china that If they have if you feel a little pain if you don't like that rock in your shoe You can always come and start talking to us about what we would like in return if you would like more of these data center chips Yeah That leads to a wider conversation of what the us is going to ask for has nothing to do with tech and china does not want to Give it to them. Will they You never know. Yeah, yeah Well, let's talk space then absolutely Back in may nasa announced that voyager one space probe was Sending jumbled or an accurate telemetry back to earth Even though the probe itself didn't seem to be failing now NASA says that the voyager team has solved the issue Here's what happened the probes attitude articulation and control system aac s was sending back information using an onboard computer That hadn't worked for years corrupting the data at the source Voyager project manager manager susanne dodd explains that the team commanded the aac s to send its data through the probes Working computer again and bypass known faulty issues on the spacecraft Voyager one has been operational for almost 45 years and nasa thinks it should be able to run at least one more science instrument until 2025 Before it drifts out of our solar system and down that cosmic dusty trail top to become veager someday Yeah, I I looked at this and I was like well, that's weird I wonder how it started routing through the old computer system that they had stopped it from routing through I wonder what caused that and then I remembered well because it's So hundreds of light years That'd be not hundreds, but it's because it's so darn far away. You know A micro meteorite just jostled it and it you know It clicked back to an old piece of program a neutrino With her who knows the fact that it's operating at all is incredible amazing amazing Yeah, and even more a five-year-old tech is that they could push an update and be like no go back to the other thing And it's like oh, okay. I'm working again. Here we go. Uh, yeah, that's it's truly amazing. Some of it is the simplicity of the system. You're right I'm sure that there are many 45 year olds Listening to this right now wishing that their hardware was the stout as voyagers Yeah, for sure. Uh, all right, let's check out the mailbag. I thought I uh, uh, Mike thought I should say Mike in far too hot Dubai man. I feel you Mike Mike thought I would write in with a quick review for a gadget. I didn't expect to love so much. I love this Mike Thank you for writing in with a little review. Let's see what Mike is living with Uh, I have been an e-ink Kindle user for eight or nine years now There was nothing wrong with my old Kindle But I've been tempted by an upgrade for some time as part of my quest to have everything be usbc Uh, amazon had a sale that packaged the Kindle paper white signature edition a case And wireless charger for $189. So I figured I'd sell my old one and upgrade my god The updated e-ink interface is noticeably better It still has a slight lag over a tablet, but it's close to instant The ambient light sensor is great along with the ability to control the warmth of the back lights since 90% of my reading Is at night anyhow and on top of all of this it's water resistant So I'll feel a little more confident taking it to the pool or the beach I feel a little guilty splurging on this, but now that I have it totally worth it. Thank you, Mike Uh, did paper white you have a paper white don't you? I do I do, uh, I wish I used it more, but uh, uh, I've it's certainly not the fault of the device It is the fault of my own attention deficit Well, uh, if you've got little ones like that and that was the perfect length, uh, Mike is a standard setter For that we'd we'd love to hear Your thoughts on the stuff you've been getting feedback at daily tech news show dot com Thank you. Justin robert young for being with us. Uh, tell the fine folks what they can hear from you elsewhere these days Well, of course, we are less than 10 weeks away from the midterm elections and that means we are up to our Elbows in polls. Yep. This is when the polls are out. This is when we can tell who's Charging ahead flagging behind and everything in between messaging campaigns commercials There's only one place that you can follow all of it And that is the politics politics politics program head on over there Anywhere that you find your podcast in fact the place that you're listening to this can also find you that Oh, good point. Yeah, the place where you're finding the only Independent daily technology news show is the place you can find the only independent traveling political reporter. My friends. Yep Go do it now And the fact that we're able to be independent and continue to do this for for almost 10 years now is because of our bosses Uh, and we've got brand new ones. So all the bosses gather round everybody. Uh, welcome in alan michael and reginald Well done. Alan michael and reginald are brand new bosses Just started backing us on patreon and we're very happy to have them If you'd like to feel that warmth that alan michael and reginald are well, just sign on up patreon.com slash d t n s In fact patrons, stick around. We've got the extended show coming good day. Internet starts momentarily You can also catch the show live monday through friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 utc find out more about that at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with lamar wilson and len peralta Talk to you there This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Time and club hopes you have enjoyed this program