 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Hector Bones, Dan Krafton, Tim Ashman, and our brand new patrons, Tyreek and Brandon. Yay. Welcome on in. On this episode of DTNS, how is X going to deal with the ongoing explicit content problem? Gently. Laugh now, cry later. Or IDGAP. Apple shows off its multimodal LLM chops. And why is Microsoft going cross-platform for games? Well, Scott will tell you this. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 7, 2024. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. In two feet of snow and growing, I'm Scott Johnson in Salt Lake City. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. He didn't have a snowing problem. He had a growing problem. Uh-huh. I sure did. Growing about a snow. Wow, you got a lot of snow, huh? Yeah, I don't know what's going on. It's you guys. It's LA. It's winter. This is not that unusual, right? No, I didn't think we had left any water in the clouds for you. I know. I was hoping most of it would end there. But no, it moved here, got cold, and then came to us in a different form. But look, it's fine. It's the way things go. It's how we drink here in the valley. So that's right. You need that snowpack. Yeah, you'll want that come July in August, so. You're right. All right, let's start with the quick hits, Sarah. Disney Plus is the latest to start cracking down on password sharing. Subscribers are now being informed of new changes to Disney Plus's terms of service that will make it harder for people to access the service using login credentials that aren't actually theirs. And that starts March 14th for existing customers in effect now if you're a new customer just signing up. Disney Plus started the password sharing call with its Canadian subscribers a few months ago. And earlier this week, Hulu sent out similar notices to its users about changes to its own terms of service and its plans to stop password sharing in the coming weeks. Speaking of Disney, Disney is going to team up with Fox and Warner Brothers in a statement. All three said they would create a combined sports streaming service that will offer content from all the major leagues they have deals with, NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL. This confirms a Wall Street Journal report with all three companies having one third ownership of a brand new service. No pricing options were shared, but the company says fans will get more choices. Of course they said that. Especially those who have cut the cord, for I mean, yeah, they said a lot of things. The news service is expected this fall and we'll be talking at length about this on tomorrow's show with Justin Robert Young. I wrote about it in my sub-stack. So if you go to freetechnewsletter.com you can get what I think and then tune into DTNS tomorrow to listen to Justin tell me why I'm wrong. G analysis reports that ransomware attacks were up quite a big, quite a big up in 2023 with many attacks carried out exploiting the file transfer software issue move it and ransom money clearing $1 billion in extorted cryptocurrency payments from victims. Now chain analysis notes this is a big uptick after ransomware showed declining year over year efficacy as of 2022. So it was a bad year. Open AI announced that its image generator Dolly three will now add watermarks to image metadata using standards from the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity, the C2PA that has folks like Microsoft on board. So it's a good standards organization. You'll see those watermarks on both the chat GPT website and the API for the Dolly three model. They will include both an invisible metadata component and a visible CR symbol which will appear in the top left corner of each image. Mobile users get access to the feature for the first starting February 12th. Some Apple vision pro users such as myself complained about having to go into an Apple store or repair center or even mail back their unit if they happened to get locked out of their device most commonly because somebody forgot a passcode although I still stand by the fact that I did not forget my passcode there was something else going on. Vision OS 1.1 beta contains code spotted by nine to five Mac and released Tuesday to developers that adds an option letting users not just developers but users erase all data from a vision pro when they forget a password used to unlock the device. This new alert says this Apple vision pro is in a security lockout. You can try and wait, try your passcode again or you can erase and reset this Apple vision pro now. Now it has activation lock on so you're gonna still need an Apple ID password so you reactivate the device but this should keep some people from going into a store that they don't wanna go into. Yeah, this is just in the beta so we don't know when we'll get this. My guess is probably within the month so don't forget your passcode in the next month and or like Sarah run into inexplicable problems that we still don't quite understand why they happen but haven't happened again. You know, I suffer so you don't have to. Exactly, that's why we do this. Well X, you know, X, formerly Twitter. Hit the number one. That's the site that's at twitter.com, X, right. It is, yeah, yeah, it'll redirect to x.com but they both work. It hit the number one slot among free apps on Apple's app store on Wednesday. Now you might say, is that weird? Is that significant? Well, it was for a very, very specific reason. That reason is hashtag Drake video. We're not going to go into too many details about this exact video but it is alleged to be the rapper Drake in a nude situation. So it might be real, it might be fake, we don't know but overall very NSFW content. Let's just, you know, we'll leave it right there. X is not new to this though. In fact, X has had a lot of folks talking about how the platform is not doing a great job of getting this kind of content off of the platform. In fact, we talked about this in late January when fake AI generated explicit images of Taylor Swift, another artist. We're circulating among users in really big numbers. It led to X at one point blocking all searches for her name all together just until things got back under control. This seems to be the same idea. Now, there's a lot of kind of Tee-hee we can do about this whole thing just because the nature of the video in question or the videos in question. Right, but I think it does present a bigger problem of how does a platform, a platform that says we have a zero tolerance policy, you know, against all sorts of content like this to have such a hard time scrubbing that content from its platform because I looked for it a few times today and it's not gone. Yeah, knives are out for X right now. Let's just put that out there in front. Like people want it to fail. So it can't do enough to satisfy a lot of people out there. That said, it's also true that X gutted its trust and safety team. It is much smaller than it used to be and while the user base has declined a little, the user base is still 200 some million daily active users. That's a lot of users and that is a very difficult system to deal with when something unusual happens like this, when something takes off viral and becomes a problem. So it's no surprise to me that they can't keep up now that this has taken off. Scott, do you think, what do you think about that? Like I don't think anyone disagrees that they should try to keep up and that maybe if they'd kept more people they could try to keep up. Yeah, I think that they and should still and I think that they should hire for it if they haven't already or do something because this is gonna backfire even though it's a now privately owned concern that entirety of Twitter, X. It is still going to be given the number of users and current laws around how we do things on the internet. They're gonna be a lot of scrutiny about this and it's only gonna get worse. The fact that people can very easily deep fake something with AI and put that video up and even if people know it's AI, it doesn't matter. This stuff spreads like crazy, especially if it involves somebody very popular, in this case two musicians, could be actors in the future, who knows. That pressure's just gonna get worse and worse and worse and you're gonna have more and more questions about, well, do we need to step in and try to control this or do they recede further into the part of the web where everything's sort of happening willy-nilly? I don't know what the answer to that is. Probably if I had to guess, if Elon Musk is serious about the service growing, probably doesn't want that. So if I were them, I would wanna hire the right people, work on the right technology, maybe even more that than just the right people because the tech can go a long way to detect these things and to find out better ways to stop it quick and early so that you're not spending a week trying to sweep up over a mess and just be faced with another one next week, which is probably gonna happen and it'll probably happen even more because now this is a thing. Because people want it to happen because they want the clout of saying, I made the thing go viral on X because it's easier to do there and still has a huge audience and has a CEO that is excited that it has become the number one downloaded app on the app store. I don't think he should be because these people are not gonna stick around. They're just, if they didn't have Twitter installed before, they're downloading X just to look for this hashtag and they're probably not gonna hang out. I mean, maybe they will, but most of them probably won't. Well, and you mentioned the trust and safety team being more or less gutted. If you are a huge star, if you're Taylor Swift, if you're Drake, if you're, I don't know, I mean, the list goes on, that's one thing. And yeah, you're gonna get a lot of interest. You're gonna get a lot of, yeah, I guess people downloading the Twitter app for the first time, even though they didn't have it before type thing. I think where people really suffer are folks who are being exploited, who don't have the reach, who don't know people on high places, who can't do a lot of stuff about this because when you report things to X at this point, it's a little bit of like a, well, let's wait and see. Because they simply aren't putting a lot of their efforts on the platform into helping people who don't have a huge following. Yeah, I don't know if it's so much a wait and see as it is a, we're doing our best, right? Because there's only so many of them and they can't do everything. That's true. And I do worry about people who aren't Drake and who aren't Taylor Swift, who have the resources to actually make a giant noise out of this, just simple stuff, like somebody being, having their image used in this way. And then. There's lots of places on the internet where that happens. They're talking about that Mozilla service that's 8.99 a month on yesterday to remove that. So X wouldn't be alone if it was the kind of place where that could happen. It could be right up there with a lot of other places. Yeah, I mean, if it does, if it gets worse on X, I guess the problem is they want it to be a big, giant service like Twitter has always been a big player in social media. They want to keep that going. You can't go further down that hole. You have to figure out a way to make it so your mainstream- Or you become popular the way pornography becomes popular. You're not popular with an audience that is mainstream and wants to admit it. Maybe this is what X's future is. I mean, that's a fair point. I'm not saying it is, but I mean, that is an avenue. That is a path. That's a road they could take. In related news, Apple has a new large language model. This is an entire change of tone from Drake showing us so much of Drake. It is a nude situation. Or possibly not Drake. Could be just fake. We have no idea. We don't know. We weren't there. We definitely do not know. I certainly wasn't there. Apple and scientists at UC Santa Barbara released an open-source multimodal large language model. Multimodal means it can do text and images and sometimes other things. In this case, it's text and images. It'll convert natural language instructions into image edits. It's called MLLM guided image editing, or M-G-I-E. And so you can do the expected things that you would do with any image editor. You can say, increase the contrast, change the brightness, make it sharper, resize the image, change the color, texture, filter, all that stuff. Change background images. You can blend images. But you don't need to use those terms to do a lot of the stuff. An example they give in their paper is you could tell M-G-I-E, take a picture of chocolate donuts with sprinkles and let the donuts have a strawberry glaze on them. So if you're not able to see this, imagine like you've got a plate full of chocolate donuts with sprinkles and you say, let the donuts have strawberry glaze and the model will add the glaze leaving the sprinkles on top and the chocolate visible just underneath on the edges. Just based on your natural language. You could also tell it to remove the Christmas tree in the background or add lighting and make it add lightning and make the lightning reflect on the water. Source code, data and pre-trained models are available on GitHub. You can also try it out on the web if you go to the Hugging Face Spaces platform. So I don't know if you guys have seen these cool, there are other large language image generation models and they're not apples, but what it feels like apples aiming for is something I've seen before where the demonstration is less about you having a bunch of good prompts and then waiting for it to render and then it does. And then you say, well, if these four images I'll use the fifth, but I want to change it some. And then you go in and tweak it and then you wait again. What I think the future is of this stuff for Good or Ill is in real time, you saying donut, boop, there's a donut, very basic, turn it a little bit, turns. Yeah, that's what Apple's model is doing here. Exactly. Yeah, and that is exactly where this is headed. That is the smart tact. Where it is. It's where it is. You're absolutely right. It really is there already. Apple's like, we just did it. We advanced it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that is where it should go. If you're asking me from just sort of a workflow, what we're doing prior to this is really, I mean, it's impressive on its face. You're like, whoa, look, I just made a pirate ship or whatever it is you made. But then you took forever kind of to do it. This is gonna, that's gonna feel like Dot Matrix printers pretty soon. We're gonna be lasering through this stuff. And it's gonna be real time, natural language. And that's very interesting. It also means a lot more headaches for X, sorry to refer to the last story, but this stuff's gonna get easier to make. But that's the point. You and I have to sit there and render forever. Yeah, a little under the hood for you, Scott, because I think this will make sense to you, particularly if you type make the sky more blue in MGE, it actually has a part of the model that converts that to increase saturation of the sky region by 20%. It then hands that to the image generator so that it knows exactly what to do. So you've got two parts of this thing working. I think that's one of the things that makes it unique. Well, I think, and the difference between Scott and me is Scott would be like, well, I could just do this myself. I know exactly what I kind of, on the scale. And I'm like, remove the Christmas tree. Wow, that works. Yeah, that exists on the same way. Make the sky more blue, please. I don't know what that means. Right, and I know Photoshop whizzes will shake their heads being like, oh, shakes fist. This is why we're good at this. Oh, dare they make it faster for me? Yeah, these people don't even know what they're talking about, but it opens up the chance to make an image and video going forward in the future. So much more interesting. Yeah, and so much faster. It really is more of a workflow thing if I'm honest, because this isn't like changing the idea of you're making what you wanna make. You're just gonna be able to make it faster and more intuitively. Yeah, and this is an interesting advance on its own, but I think it's even more interesting in the context of the drumbeat of Apple issuing scientific papers. This was published in a journal with the UC Santa Barbara folks and open sourcing models. They remember back in December, they had a couple of papers out about ways to do inferencing on device so you didn't have to use cloud resources. And during the earnings call, Apple said, we're gonna have a lot of really cool stuff from AI coming later this year. There's also the rumors that internally people in Apple are saying that the next version of iOS is the biggest change in iOS ever. To me, it's all leading to Apple saying, look, we've got great AI chops, even if we haven't made a big deal out of them by putting out a chat, GPT or a Bard, and you're going to see them in iOS at WWDC this summer. Yeah, and it's so much more along the Apple lines of what they want us to think is cool. Like it's not, you can program your own spreadsheet in minutes, that's boring to them. What they wanna do is say, you can get in there like a dream and you can say these words out of nothing and they're gonna really go for that. Tim Cook is gonna be floating two inches above the ground when he announces this. They're open sourcing the models. They're like, the value isn't in the models. Let everybody do the models. They'll make the models better and that helps us. The value is in the implementation and we think we have the special implementation that other people don't, just like they weren't the first to do a touchscreen but they thought they had done it better than other people and it turned out, oh yeah. They kind of did, man. If you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, get in touch with us on the socials at DTNS Show on X and on mstdn.social. DTNS Show at mstdn.social for Mastodon, Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, and DTNS Picks, DTNS PIX on Instagram and threads. Earlier this week, we reported on news that Microsoft might be looking to bring some of its game titles like Hi-Fi Rush to other platforms like Sony's PS5 and Nintendo Switch. Now, you might say, is this a shift away from a console-centric model of selling games to one based on game sales overall and games as a subscription, even more importantly, or a move to head off criticism and potential government regulation over recent StudioBind sprees? Scott, help us out here. What is the strategy, you think? Well, a bunch of us are keeping real close sort of contact with this story because it is still evolving. In fact, we just heard that Phil Spencer, over there at Microsoft, head of Xbox, is gonna have a little meeting next week or tell people what's going on. In fact, I'll just quote from his ex post where he says, we're listening and we hear you. We've been planning on business updates for the next week and we will, we look forward to sharing more detail with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. I have a feeling though, and I've had a feeling through this entire ordeal, despite all that hyperbole, that this is just them kind of moving more toward the goals they've already told us they have, which is the games service and the IPs and the games themselves are going to be what is where the depth is with Microsoft moving forward. They are less concerned about making sure it's their plastic box under your TV moving into the next generation than they are about you having a monthly subscription to Game Pass or whatever form their other services may end up taking. And I think this is a step in that direction. Unfortunately, this step has been mostly rumor and a couple of confirmations. The one confirmation we have is that Hi-Fi Rush is for sure coming to at least the switch, if not other platforms. It's already on PC, of course. So we'll leave PC out of this whole conversation. They're already all on PC. But Indiana Jones in the great circle, big, big title coming from Bethesda, which is now Microsoft own studio. That's being rumored to showing up on PlayStation 5 as well as the Xbox series devices and Starfield, which is already out on Xbox series as of last holiday season, is rumored pretty heavily to be maybe the first one they announced that's like the big deal. Like, yep, this is coming to PlayStation. It is ironic that right around the time of Starfield's announcement or not announcement, but as we got closer to launch, people were like, oh, I wish they'd put it on the PlayStation 5. I don't have an Xbox. I was looking forward to the next big Bethesda game. And now they might actually get it. And now that the conversation just turned to, you turncoach, you're selling the world off to somebody else. I can't believe it. So there's a lot of tribalism and stuff going on. I'm gonna try to cut through that real quick and explain. Years ago, Spencer and others at the company have said, look, what matters to us, the services and the future and the cloud and all this. And it started then to feel like, well, the hardware is gonna be a little bit secondary. They're still gonna make some hardware and we're gonna get it or not, but that's not really the point. The end game is we're gonna be playing what they have on lots of stuff, including their $68 million acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. And we're not there yet. So we're in the short term. And I think in the short term, porting stuff to PlayStation will happen and their continued support of their own Xbox line will also continue in the short term. None of that really changes much. PlayStation is gonna have access to some formally exclusive titles. In the midterm though, I think that they will continue to beef up their games for portfolio and their multi-platform support over time. I still think there might be an Xbox to play all that on in the midterm and even the longterm. They may still make that stuff, but what will matter most is these services and the cloud and trying to get competitors to allow their service on them. They've set out loud before. We would love to put Game Pass on PlayStation 5. Sony is not letting them do that currently. And they would love to do it on Nintendo and had many discussions with Nintendo about this. And they also have opted out of it, but that doesn't mean they won't in the future, depending on Microsoft's plans for exclusivity and or hardware moving forward. I have some predictions about the longterm. I think it's all about services, cloud and the games and the IPs in the studios, which they have been spending so much money on. There's no way that they don't care about that most. And they're not gonna care what box you play it on. I think there's even a possible future and others have posited this as well, so it's not just me. I think there's a possible future where Microsoft makes a handheld and that device is maybe like a switch or a steam deck and its sole purpose is to play your Microsoft Game Pass life on. That may be hard drive and it may actually have hardware to run it or it may be purely cloud based. I don't know, but it would be an opportunity for them to say, hey, we got a thing. So if you don't want to play this stuff over the cloud in your notebook, that's fine. You can buy this or play it on your PlayStation or play it on your PC or play it in a thousand other ways. We don't care where you play it as long as you're playing our games. And I really feel like that's where they're planting their flag. This is Microsoft's strategy with Office and Surface devices. Yeah. Right? It's the same strategy, which is like, you wanna make Office available on as many platforms as possible so people use it, but you're also making your own hardware, the Surface as sort of a flagship demonstration of the best version of Microsoft software. Yeah, it feels to me and I think you're echoing it exactly. This is their strategy from the top down. Like the entire company is this now, these days. And having them do the same thing on the Xbox line should not be surprising, especially because they have been signaling it and outright saying this sort of stuff for years. This isn't new. I think a lot of Xbox faithful were just like, well, look at Microsoft, they're beefing up everything, this is gonna be incredible. They're gonna own everybody and everything. Sony off to sell, they'll have to buy Sony. Sony will be so in much trouble. And it's not, it's not bad. It isn't that, that was never the plan. The plan was always- That would be like getting mad that Netflix made itself available on anything but the Roku. Right, right. That's exactly right. And the thing about that is will Microsoft succeed? Like there's big questions. Is this strategy a good one? Do we have all the details yet? No, maybe next week we'll have a big enlightenment. I don't know. But do we know if it's gonna be a sure-fire success? We don't, but they are betting on what the future of gaming is. And the future of gaming looks a lot like what Microsoft thinks it's gonna look like. How much will they help shape that? Yeah. End times thing scenario? I don't know. How much will their competition do that? What would this do if, I mean, it's fun to think about. If they pulled out of console hardware altogether, what does that actually do to this very competitive business? Does Sony suddenly have kind of a monopoly on the high end? And Nintendo just does what Nintendo does and nobody's there to challenge Sony? Nobody really wants that. We think it's good to have that healthy competition and keep everybody going. Does somebody step in? And does Atari or somebody come from the grave, Sega, and go, hey, well, we'll get back into this race? I mean, those are all crazy ideas, but I cannot wait to see. If they do pull out of hardware, what happens there? Because that's fascinating. But what they're counting on is they have all the games right now. And they do, they have a ton. Yeah. And Satya Nadella has been running Microsoft as a cloud company since day one. He stepped in and was like, no, we don't make money the way we did in the 90s off windows. Look at Azure. That's where all the money is. Make money off cloud. Put office in the cloud. Everyone's like, nobody wants office in the cloud. Now everybody has office in the cloud. And he's hoping the same can be true for games. Yeah, he might be right. All right. Well, Satya, Scott thinks you might be right. Hope you like that. Let's check out the now back. Martin wrote in on Patreon saying, following up on the thoughts of LinkedIn, also owned by Microsoft, being more of a serious social network as many people think that it is. Microsoft also thinks so. Martin says, in Bing co-pilot's compose tab, if you select funny as the tone and LinkedIn post as the format, it replies with, I'm sorry, but I cannot generate text with a funny tone for a LinkedIn post. LinkedIn is a professional network and a funny tone may be inappropriate or harmful to your reputation. Please choose a different tone or a different format for your text. Wow, buzz kill anyone. Geez, don't be funny at work. Just trying to have a little x.com fun around here. Hey, it's just a joke, LinkedIn. Gosh. That's interesting, yeah. Interesting voice to that. I have two minds on that, right? Like I get it, like, yeah, it's probably better if you're applying for a job, not to try to be funny as your primary mode. Yeah, you could show a little sense of humor, but don't write it in a funny tone. On the other hand, I'm like, well, but also like jokes and humor within bounds that don't go over the line or fine in a business context. In fact, opening your business presentation with a joke is a time-honored tradition. So, I don't know. Derek, who works in the advertising industry, chimed in on our blue sky discussion from yesterday's Good Day Internet, says most of the Twitter slash X alternatives are not ad-supported, at least not yet. I'd be surprised if that wasn't their long-term goal. Unlike restaurants, most social platforms, if not all, end up going into an ad-supported model or are part of an ad-supported company where they're used for data ingestion. Even Reddit has been shifting their platform to be even more advertiser-friendly. And I would add to Derek's point here, look at Netflix adding ads, Amazon adding ads to Prime Video, et cetera. When it comes to advertising, scale and reach is still most important. Sure, there are small properties that offer very targeted and niche communities, but they often stagnate or end up being bought out by larger competing platforms. It's not to say there'll be one platform that will rule them all, but I would imagine we will see a consolidation across these Twitter slash X alternatives in the coming years as opposed to having wide myriad choices. That might be Blue Sky's advantage. If it can get to enough scale is to be able to say, we will offer an ad network across instances. You can opt in or not if you want it and then make money off of that versus having to be a centralized platform. There are ways to, you know, traffic ads on decentralized platforms. Look at podcasting, for example. Well, Scott Johnson, you know a thing or two about podcasting, so let folks know where they can keep up with your work when you're not with us. Well, they can sure do that over at frogpants.com. All the podcast and art stuff is there. Speaking of art, I have this limited time. I think there might only be like eight of these left. Limited edition, four prints that I created that are all on a zombie theme. It's got a Spongebob zombie and a zombies Bambi, which I call a Zambi. George Decay instead of George Decay. Anyway, a bunch of dumb ideas and there are four of them all hand signed and only 10 bucks and no shipping. It doesn't even matter if you live overseas. So we're doing this one quick runoff on the show or on the store. I would recommend people grab it quick because they are literally almost gone. Head on over to frogpants.com slash store and check it out today. If you did a zombie version of me, it'd be a tombi. It would be a tombi. You're right. And this is a zombie for Sarah. Yeah. And a Rajami for Roger. Rajami. A dance. A zombie. And a Jobe for Joe. There you go. We got them all. Got the beats going on. All right, folks. If you are a patron and if you're not, oh, well, you know, not everybody's perfect, but patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We keep waiting for Apple to make a foldable and the information has the latest inside info, which is you'll still have to keep waiting for a couple of years. But do we need to? Or can foldables succeed just fine without Apple? Stick around. We'll discuss. Just a reminder, we do the show live and we'd love to have you join us live if you can, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We're talking about that ESPN, Fox, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Megasport streaming service with Justin Rubber Young. Join us tomorrow and talk to you then. The DTNS Family Podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.