 This tenth year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Cali Cook, Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre, and our new patrons helping us to get to our patron goal, Michelle, Scott, Wauga, and Mark. On this episode of Daily Tech News Show, the metaverse may have started in Indonesia. They got real-life meta-humans down there. Plus, EA makes moves away from being a video game company. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 21st, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio 7Lamps, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And the show's produced, sir Roger Chan. Let's get right into the quick hits! As part of the continuing protests around Reddit's API pricing changes, some subreddit moderators have switched their communities to NSFW, aka Not Safe for Work. This means that Reddit doesn't display ads on these communities. Now, as a result, Reddit started suspending some of these mods with spokesperson Tim Rothschmidt saying, Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our content policy and moderator code of conduct. Mods for the mildly interesting subreddit report that their team has been subsequently reinstated. Maybe they posted some Not Safe for Work content. Like, no, see? It's correct. It's mildly interesting. ByteDance-owned TikTok is testing a new shopping feature in the UK called Trendy Beat, offering a selection of items that are popular in TikTok videos. The Financial Times reports these items are sold by another ByteDance-owned company with ByteDance reportedly taking all the revenue from the sales, but keeps it all in the family. This is different from TikTok Shop, which you may have come across. That allows third parties to sell items with TikTok taking a commission on the sales. TikTok Shop has proven popular in some Southeast Asian markets, but has not proved popular in the UK. So maybe Trendy Beat is a way to be like, well, what if we sold just stuff in a different way? Shopping on social media is popular. Yonap News reports that YouTube is going to launch a shopping channel of its own in South Korea on June 30th, and that will offer live streamed shopping content with 30 brands signed up to go with it at launch. Discord Group Product Manager Derek Yang announced the platform plans to experiment with letting servers sell digital products as one-time purchases over the coming months. So these products will be available in a new server shop section. The company is also updating its server subscription options, providing tier templates to make it easier to initially set up some support levels. Apple added support for pass keys to the betas of iOS 17, iPad OS 17, and macOS Sonoma. So if you're running the beta, you can use pass keys now to sign into any account linked to an Apple ID, and that includes your third-party Apple ID sign-ins if you're using the Apple ID to sign into a third-party site. So it doesn't have to be an Apple-owned service, but you do have to be using an Apple device. This is not going to work on your Windows machine, even if you're logging into something with an Apple ID. The Verge is West Davis, though, expects that support across devices would happen once the feature is fully released. DP Review Fans Rejoice! Hopefully, publisher Gear Patrol announced it is saving by way of acquiring DP Review around three months. After the camera review site announced it was being shut down by Amazon. Amazon acquired DP Review back in 2007. So, why the hopefully? Are you doubtful that Gear Patrol is going to keep its word? I'm just saying, I know there are a lot of fans of DP Review saying, hey, it does not die after all. So let's hope it thrives under its new ownership. Alright, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging the company violated rules by using so-called dark patterns. Dark patterns is that practice of kind of trying to trick you into answering a same way because you're not paying close attention. Like, you design the page to make the yes button bright blue with big letters and the no buttons kind of gray and small letters so you're not going to pay attention to it as easily. But the main complaints of the FTC lawsuit are that non-prime subscribers saw multiple buttons for checkout. That would be where the dark patterns played in, making it hard to see which one would not subscribe them to prime. In other words, there was one they had to pay close attention to to not accidentally sign up for prime. Also, once they were tricked into signing up for prime, cancellation was too complicated according to the FTC, making customers go through unnecessary steps. Amazon allegedly calls the prices Iliad internally, at least according to this lawsuit. Iliad is a reference to the work by Homer about the Trojan War. I would have thought Odyssey would have been a better Homeric reference there because, you know, making people on a big long travel bit Iliad apparently is what they used. The FTC is looking for a court order to force Amazon to change its practices and provide refunds to affected customers. We all agree dark patterns suck, but Scott, should they be against the law? Oh, that's a big jump, isn't it? Going from they're terrible to we should ban them in legal ways. I don't know. I worked for a company for a while and was in some meetings that felt downright devious because those meetings were all about how do we make it hard for people to cancel our service. And it was a web service. This is like 2004 or 2005, so it was early. But it was still this feeling of like we're going to make it really easy for them to sign up and almost impossible for them to figure out how to get out of here. And worst case is they'll have to email us finally and then we'll be forced to get them out. But then we'll still ask them questions. So this thinking, I think, is still pervasive and obviously it exists in big, huge companies like Amazon all the way down to smaller services and sites. In terms of the question, though, should it be illegal? I'm kind of tempted. If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I said, no, it's fine. We're all adults here. We can figure it out. I'm starting to think maybe there ought to be, at the very least, some regulations that people have to adhere to where they get fined. And I guess that would bring in legal status. So yeah, I'm going to answer the question, yes. I think to make them suck less, people shouldn't be allowed to do them, especially when there's money involved. There's no money involved. It's just like a dumb thing where you sign up to have an avatar made or whatever it is. Fine, whatever. But if you've got monetary transaction going on and people are making it difficult for you to get out and are using skeevy methods to get you in, we probably ought to have some guidelines. I know what Prime 2 is. I've been an Amazon Prime member for, I can't even tell you how long it's been. Not since the beginning of Amazon, certainly, but we're going on a decade. The price has crawled up over the years. It's $140 a year. It used to be $99. And each time it goes up, $10 or so, I go, well, but it makes sense to me because I use Prime a lot and over the course of any given year, I am saving money. But if I didn't use Amazon the way that I do use it, then that could be a little much, especially if I was like, you know, I'm not using it. And so this doesn't make sense for me. I'm going to go ahead and cancel. Now, I've never tried to cancel Prime since I signed up for it. So I'm not a great person to ask about how hard this is. However, there are definitely times where I'm going to buy a product and I'm seeing like, here's the, you know, here's the Prime button to get it, you know, when two days shipping or that sort of thing, you know, where here's the, you know, the Prime way to get it in fewer boxes, you know, save the planet while you're doing this type thing. Or here's another option to do it another way. Now, as a non Prime subscriber, if you're seeing all those same options and you're kind of like, I really just need toilet paper, you know, whatever it is, I can see where this could be confusing. I don't think Amazon is going out of their way to be like, Hey, here are the differences between your account that is non Prime and a Prime account, which could benefit you going forward. So that's I think where, you know, a lot of this stuff comes in. Stokes world just said in our chat room, I'm not one to defend Amazon, but when I canceled Prime, it was easy. So I think that it's a it's bad policy to try to define a business practice in a law. So trying to define dark patterns in a way that people won't be able to get around them sounds like a recipe for ineffective legislation. What I support is something that they've done in Europe. I believe they've done it in the UK may or may not have become an actual law, but I know it was it was in the draft, which is if you sign up for a thing away, you have to provide cancellation in the same way. So if it's one click to sign up for the thing, it should be one click to get rid of it. For example, in Europe, they required Amazon to make Prime cancelable in two clicks. If I call to to subscribe, I should call to unsubscribe. But if I sign up online, I shouldn't have to call to unsubscribe. And again, Amazon isn't making you call. They're not going that far. But that's where I would go with the rules and the laws. When you start trying to say like, well, your dark pattern is too confusing. It becomes a fight over like, well, but what if we did two buttons and what if we did this shade of yellow? And I'm not sure that that's the most effective way to. There's a there's a lot I can do in two clicks to I was just thinking about my exit from Adobe. I finally am not paying for any Adobe services after years and years and years of doing it. And they really just gave me one page when I said, I want to cancel. And the page said, hey, stick around. We'll give you this deal for so many months. You want to do that? And that was on the same page as it's saying, no, I'm still canceling and I can hit that button right below it. I don't mind that, right? I don't feel like I'm being misdirected. I don't feel like I'm being tricked. Of course, the company wants to retain your sir. Yeah, sure. And they probably they probably have numbers there that say this many people have been retained because we did you know how long I kept paying for Acrobat for this exact reason where I was like, oh, well, that was good. Thank you for the kickback. I guess I'll stick around for another four months. Sure. Sure. I don't want to take that away from anybody who's sort of like dark patterns. I don't know. Have I ever seen something like this anytime you get an email and it's like, oh, I don't want this. I want to unsubscribe. Sometimes that's pretty easy to see. Sometimes it's like in a weird font where it's barely legible where it seems to not appear at all. You know, it's all sort of the same thing. It's a company saying, OK, we're providing the service, but we don't want you to do it. So we're going to look for an uns, yeah, look for an unsubscribe in an email that that'll help you understand dark patterns. So at least the first step. Well, what do we got next, Sarah? Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the company will restructure its studios as far as naming goes anyway, starting an effort to empower our creative team. So this includes splitting up EA Sports and EA Games into separate units with the latter EA Games renamed to EA Entertainment. This will see COO, Chief Operating Officer Laura Meal, as President of EA Entertainment and Cam Weber, remaining the head of EA Sports. Now, Scott, EA renaming Games to Entertainment sort of sounds like EA's got plans to expand. Where do you think that might go? Well, it's an interesting question, right? I have my own feelings about why sports should be separate and maybe should have been separate for years, given the business that that represents because it's a very complicated, licensed based thing. And you're always negotiating for a better deal from the NFL for this year. And are we going to continue getting the Madden license or not and all this sort of stuff? Aside from that, though, maybe this is an opportunity for them on the quote unquote now Games, or what was Game Side now Entertainment side to do more with their IPs. They have a number of them that are popular and that have been around for a long time, Mass Effect, Dead Space. The list goes on and they also do some Star Wars games. They no longer have exclusivity on that. But maybe this is a chance for them to say we want to make a deal with Hulu and make a Dead Space series. It'll be a horror anthology series and we're really excited about it. It'll be part of our EA Entertainment brand. Games will still come out of there, but they'll be closely associated with these other projects. Like the way I'm saying it is the kind of spin I could expect. And I don't mean that to say that it's just spin. It very well could be a great way for them to branch out. But they haven't really done any of this up till now. There hasn't been any way that you see from other IP holders. You see more of this sort of stuff from Konami and Riot Games with their recent success with Arcane and various others. The new Mario movies, an example of a big one from Nintendo after being kind of quiet on that front for a while. So I do think there's a desire from gaming juggernauts out there, EA being one of them, whether we like it or not, who want to do more of this and end up with more hands and more cookie jars. And those cookie jars are other kinds and forms of entertainment. But they're not necessarily suited to do internally, by the way. They're not going to make their own Dead Space television show. They will likely sub that out like Nintendo did with Imagine Entertainment or like Konami did with Castlevania and whoever they worked with. They don't do these things internally, but they do a lot more of this now. And I think this is an opportunity for them to do that. Hold on, Scott. I'm on the phone with five year ago Scott Johnson who's telling me, well, Netflix isn't going to make games. They're just going to license their properties to games. Oh, I remember that, Scott Johnson. Do you think there's a possibility that, yes, not today? No. They're absolutely not going to make TV shows. They're just laying the groundwork of like, well, future streaming. Maybe we need to keep that door open entirely possible, I suppose. The problem with doing your own homegrown entertainment, you know, like Blizzard Entertainment is known for having the best internal animation cinematic studio in the business. Like there's no question. And most other companies, they sub out the stuff to companies that are suited more to that full time. But Blizzard has their own. So they kind of farm their own stuff internally. They've never turned around and made a television show out of it or even a one-off film out of it. It's all aimed toward the games. So I'm not saying they're not doing that because it's hard. I just think they're not doing it because it's a separate business. And so this could be them saying, well, by branching out this way, now we have a separate business kind of. The problem is they're not splitting games from that. This isn't a whole new third leg. This is still part of the second leg. Sports being part of the first leg. So, so it doesn't sound like that's what they're ready to do. But I, you know, tell Scott five years ago, A, quit eating fat food. And secondly, he's, he might be wrong about this. Who knows? Yeah. He said quit eating the fat food. All right. Too late. Wait, I didn't change immediately. So it must not work. It didn't work. That was, that was a bad reception. All right, folks, we have fewer than 400 patrons to go to until we're at 399. We can do it. We want to have 4,000 paid patrons by next Thursday. You can help us make that happen. And if we get there, Molly Wood has committed to being on the show the next day, June 30th, and once a month on Friday from then on. So help us make Molly Fridays happen. Patreon.com slash D T N S. The metaverse may have arrived, but it's in Southeast Asia and it's out in the world, not in a headset. Restofworld.org reports the first example. We've got multiple examples, but the first example, Indonesia's TV one biggest broadcast channel in the country or at least one of the biggest has been using a digital reporter called Nadira based on human news anchor Fahada Indy. Indy still provides the voice, but the machine model provides the visuals and the movements as well as translations. Here's the key into British and American accent in English. So two different accents, Chinese and many local dialects of which Indonesia has many, including Javanese and Sundanese. There are two other avatars to Sasha is an imposing looking Chinese Indonesian avatar and Bumi is a curly haired eastern Indonesian. This is fascinating to me and Indonesia being where this is taking place and seems to be thriving of particular interest because a lot of people live in Indonesia, series of islands, lots of different dialects. And the idea that a, I don't know how popular Fahada Indy is, but let's just say pretty popular, right? News anchor, people like her, people like her voice, people like her to give the news. Not everybody in Indonesia is going to want the news or be able to even absorb the news translated in one way. A human trying to figure out how to deliver news with a population of folks who are in the hundreds of dialects, that would be an impossible task. So you'd have to leave a lot of people out for this to be able to reach more people. And as far as I know, this is something that Indonesia has been experimenting with in a variety of ways. Airports, for example, certain banks, that kind of thing. That makes a lot of sense and it doesn't. This is a situation where I can't possibly say, well, you're putting people out of jobs. In a way, you're being able to keep somebody in a job to be able to reach more folks. Yeah, it's interesting that this is in Indonesia, isn't it? The immigration office at the airport, as you just mentioned, has four virtual spokespeople. And like you said, there's a bank, there's an Indonesian folksinger who's virtual with real life endorsement deals. Why so popular in Indonesia in particular? I know Indonesia is a center of tech startups and tech life and they've tried to position themselves as a great place for companies to pivot to as they start to try to find new areas of the world to diversify supply chains and that. Maybe that's why? Because there's just a culture of trying things? I don't know. It feels like this is where this stuff will often start as we move forward into these metaverse-like things or AI-driven things. And the reason I think that is mainly I'm criticizing ourselves. I think we're a little hesitant to do this. I think we're hesitant to see an avatar on the nightly news. When you say we, you mean the US? Americans. I'd say the Americans. I think there's some truth to that. We look at some avatar on the nightly news telling us what's going on or what we should be hearing about or thinking. And I think we block at that. And I think that can change, like a lot of things have. But I don't think it's going to come within. We're going to get super stoked here in pockets about it. We're going to get really excited about what it could mean, but as a mainstream acceptable method of disseminating news in multiple accents, markets, languages, I think we're going to be slow to embrace it the way that other markets could. And by them embracing it, I think that will help us get around to it. I hate that we're slow with this stuff because actually I'm kind of a fan of this aspect of the metaverse. I think it's cool. Respectfully, US isn't the only market. Why isn't this happening in Europe? Why isn't it happening in India? Why isn't it happening in South Korea, Japan? Same problem to some degree, right? Like there were all a little slow to do it. I would even argue Indonesia is just slow to do it. They're just going to be the first one. They're going to be the least slow to do it. Maybe. I don't know that it will catch on like wildfire either. And it may take time to suss out what people actually really want. Personally, I'm stoked about it. I think about a game like Mass Effect where I walk into a space and a holographic robot lady tells me everything I need to know. And I tell her where I need to go and what I need to do. There's interactivity there and more beyond just consuming what she's saying, I can ask questions and get all I need. I'm for this future. I'm stoked about it. I am too. I know a lot of people want to sit down and watch, you know, NBC Nightly News with a fake dude yet. Yeah, but at the same time. Okay. So I was thinking about this earlier. It's like, okay. So let's say I call my bank and I've got to go through some phone tree thing, right? You know, I live in California. So there's, you know, a lot of Spanish that's spoken in California as well as English. You know, so there's always like, you know, if you want the rest in Spanish, you know, press two type thing. So it's like, there's, I'm used to this in some respects. But yes, if I'm watching my Nightly News, you know, and Tom Broca is telling me what's going on. And I'm like, yeah, well, I don't speak English. So I would like Tom Broca, you know, trusted name of news to be able to speak to me in a way that feels a little bit more seamless, a little bit more like I'm being heard. I'm being reached. I think that is an awesome thing. Now I know where the US is, you know, where we can be pretty insular about a lot of things, you know, and I live here. So, you know, I feel like I can say that only speaking for myself, but, you know, some of you as well. But yeah, a country like Indonesia I think is so much more of a melting pot of culture, of language, of, you know, you are pretty close to going to lots of other countries, just geographically. You know, the official language, which is based on Malay, I was reading up about this this morning because it's very fascinating, is actually not the most spoken language, just the official language. So when you have all that stuff, plus a country of, you know, 200 plus million people in a relatively small space, I think it's fascinating that this is happening and it's also working. And that makes me think that India would be the next on the docket for something like this, right? Because same thing, huge population with a large number of languages. And you know what? If you're in the audience in India right now and you're like, oh no, we already have it, please. Send us an email. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Well, I don't know how hungry everybody is after this conversation about the Metaverse being a real thing, but I am. So I would like to let you know that you can drop a pin and get a pizza. That is, if you like Domino's Pizza because the company announced pin point delivery. This is designed to be able to get a pizza delivered to a specific location but not necessarily a specific address. You might not be home. You might be at the beach. Maybe you're having a picnic in the park. Or on a street corner. I don't care. You might just want to eat some pizza. So Domino's is using Google Maps in its mobile app, its own mobile app to receive your order. You drop a pin. Then you can trap your driver and also track your driver's GPS location. And then you can get text updates and arrival times about, you know, when they're arriving. Now if you're saying this is magical, there are some restrictions. You can't like have the driver wade out into the ocean and give you a pizza type of thing. Hey, get a speedboat driver. Come on. It needs to be a reasonable and safe spot for a driver to pull over. And then you only have four minutes to meet them. So if you're giving them, you know, a little bit of a curveball, just know that it might not work out. But hey, if you want to play, pizza is pizza. We are preparing for a trip in the end of August beginning of September. And we've been watching these videos about the Han River in Seoul. One of the things that is normal there is to get delivery. You go rent your picnic equipment, you go to the convenience store, get your drinks, and then you order fried chicken or something to be delivered. And there's a space dedicated for delivery people that you have to go meet. This turns that into anywhere in the world, well, anywhere Domino's is operating, I guess, for pizza. It doesn't have to be a specific area that is organized. You can just have your pizza at whatever park, beach, wherever you are. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, and Domino's is quick to say and it's announcement. It's like, listen, if you're backpacking in some back country area that Domino's would never deliver to, don't expect somebody to magically find you. They're not going to drop it. Parachute down. It's not going to happen. They're like, well, I'm at home, but I'm not at a friend's house either. We're kind of in transit and wouldn't that be fun? This is another option. That's what the, you know, that's what the drones are for. Eventually the drone delivered pizza will be able to use this to go anywhere. We're just not there yet. Exactly. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We got some really good feedback on our Fediverse conversation today. The Fed is joining the Fediverse is in a big way and stays there long enough to have some traction. If they then decide to block some other mastodon operators, though, they have outsize impact in terms of the number of users that removes them from the site and because of human inertia, that means that most of those users won't quickly switch over. Doug says open systems are good. What are better are open systems in terms of size and impact. Katie wrote in with a somewhat similar sentiment. She wrote into our Patreon saying, I think my main concern with Meta and the Fediverse is that the Fediverse was someplace that a lot of marginalized people sought out to be a safe haven from places like Twitter and Facebook. The other concern I have is the ability of a company like Meta to have a greater influence on protocols like ActivityPub to change them to be more Facebook Meta friendly. These are both great points. What I would say to Doug and Katie is the hope is that the open protocol is designed to prevent the abuses that Doug and Katie are worried about. Katie's point about Meta getting influence over the ActivityPub protocol is another spin on that. But again, if you have a properly functioning, properly governed set of rules for ActivityPub, they shouldn't be able to have undue influence for them. All these concerns are totally valid though. And thanks to Katie and Doug for sharing them with us. Tom, aka Kedgie Kemper wanted to follow up on our GDI discussion about Samsung's forthcoming 49-inch Odyssey monitor and linked us to an article from How2Geek called Your Gaming Monitor Might Be Too Big. Scott, this How2Geek article says that issues like lower pixel density and a large monitor strained reactions because it's so big, ergonomic stress, hidden costs contribute to diminishing returns as screen size increases. For optimum gameplay comfort and budget balance, smaller monitors often prove more beneficial. Says How2Geek. I 100% agree with this. I had an experience that I will now share with you, which is this. I thought it would be cool to have a 46-inch 4K television as a computer monitor. I thought that would be the coolest way to play. I could play in 4K, HDR, all the fancy bells and whistles and do it right for my computer. Here's what happened. I would miss all kinds of special peripheral UI elements. It would be like I'm going to where is that supposed to be? I don't see it. Well, way over here, if I had just stood back and looked up to the left, I would have seen the tiny corner up here where some very valuable UI information is telling me exactly what I need and where I need to go. It became a problem. I actually noticed it a lot where I was just forgetting to look at the rest of it. I became very, not tunnel vision, but very narrow focused on what was right in front of me depending on the game. It really threw me. I went back to a 32 and it solved it. My wife got a television in the bedroom so now that's there. But it solved the problem. I don't have this problem anymore. I'm pretty sure that if I even went smaller, I'd benefit more. 27 feels like the happy place for most gamers. But we do have this thing going where they get cheaper, they get bigger and we all think we want bigger all the time. I think there's an upper limit on that with Gaming Monitor so I completely agree about this. This article is correct as far as I'm concerned. Everyone's going to be a little bit different. You might just be fine with your gigantic screen. It didn't work for me. It made me feel kind of dumb if I'm honest. I didn't like it. Well, we never feel dumb when you're on the show, Scott Johnson, because you bring the knowledge with a big okay. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Sounds great. Today Nintendo did one of their directs and dropped a couple of big previous to today unheard of bombs. We didn't know they were going to do. Do you want to know what those were? Do you want to hear us disseminate what those were, why they matter, and why the Switch might have one of the better falls for all the major consoles? Tune in to our podcast called Core. It's all about video games, and it happens every Thursday night. If you want the podcast, find it wherever you get podcasts. Just search for Core. For all other details, check us out both live or otherwise at frogpants.com slash core. If you have just around a dollar a week to spare, you can't even get a cup of coffee for that. You can become a patron, and when you do, there's no downside. You're getting extra content. You're getting the attention. You're getting access to Discord. You're getting access to all of us, and you get to stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet, where we're going to talk about A.I.'s role in the new Marvel series Secret Invasion. It has ruffled a few feathers by trying to stay on brand with the theme of the show. How dare they? But just a reminder, DTNS is live, and you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Visit dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com The club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha.