 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito, Steve Aeterole, and brand new patron Laurence. Welcome, Laurence. Welcome. Welcome. On this episode of DTNS, why is Powell World so popular when everyone seems to hate it? Plus Apple strategy to get into the AI race, and Ring takes a step back from helping law enforcement. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 24th, 2024, huh, in Los Angeles, I'm time, Mary. And from Studio Animal House, I am Sarah Lane. Adjacent to the Great Salt Lake, I am Scott Johnson. And I'm the Shoes Producer, Roger Chang. Roger, are you adjacent to any bodies of water? A bathtub. Well, adjacent to the Great Bath tub. Wow. It's impressive. Sink. Mm-hmm. Toilet. I guess the ocean is the closest I am. I am. And what's the lake that's over in Griffith Park? I'm like halfway between that. Oh, something. Oh, Echo. No, Echo. No. No. Elysian Lake. No. Lake made up. Lake shouldn't be there, but we dug a big hole. We live in LA. We swear. We're real people. We're not AI. All right. Let's just give that up and go for the quick hits. That's what we're here for. Apple may introduce more fees and restrictions as it starts allowing people to download apps outside of the iPhone's closed ecosystem. That's in response to DMA regulations in the EU. Apple may review each app downloaded outside of its app store and sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the company also plans to collect fees from developers that offer downloads outside of the app store. Those plans may yet change before Apple officially delivers them to the European Commission for approval. The commission will evaluate whether Apple's plan will make the market more open and meets the provisions of that DMA also known as the Digital Markets Act. Apple has until March to comply. I was trying to think of Silver Lake. How embarrassing is that? It's very embarrassing. Oh, the reservoir. It's not even really a lake. I know. X announced support for Passkeys. If you're on iOS and you live in the US, Passkeys is the secure way to log into a service without having to memorize a password. It's supported by the major operating systems and browsers. So we've just been waiting for a critical mass of websites to adopt it before we can ditch passwords altogether. X follows PayPal, TikTok, WhatsApp, bunch of others in the slow march of services adopting it. But everyone counts. No word on when X might bring Passkeys support to non-IOS operating systems or non-US countries. But I bet the SEC wishes they had had it earlier this year. Be real. The social app that launched as a way to be more authentic and less staged as a social network announced that starting February 6th, brands and celebrities will be able to sign up as real brands or real people so that fans can watch both share behind the scenes moments from their lives and work. Alongside the announcement, be real told TechCrunch and now has 23 million daily active users. That's up from 20 million in August of 2023. The company also has introduced some new features like groups, mentions, multiple posts per day, used to only be able to do it once, pinned posts and a friend of friends feed. A recent Pew study reported that around 13% of US teens use be real. Now I can see people really using collagen supplements and all kinds of other things. Twitch is changing how it shares revenue with its streamers and it's mostly an increase. First of all, streamers no longer see their percentage drop after the first $100,000 shared. The split is going to stay 70% they used to drop to 50%. To qualify for the 70% revenue share, you now only need 300 plus points, not 350. Go look it up if you want to know what a plus point is. New tier will start giving you 60% of revenue after you get 100 plus points. So there's an earlier entry into getting some revenue as well. On the downside, starting June 3rd, the amount shared from members who use Amazon Prime to pay for a subscription will be calculated from a fixed rate instead of what is happening now where it's paid the same as if it was paid by cash. Nvidia RTX GPU owners have a new feature called RTX Video HDR, which uses AI to convert SDR color space video to HDR, as long as you have an HDR10 compatible monitor with HDR enabled in Windows. Nvidia's RTX video super resolution can upscale old blurry web videos. We talked about that in the past, but the HDR feature is part of today's 551.23 game ready driver release for the new RTX 4070 Ti Super launch. Works in both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Amazon own ring is scrapping its request for assistance feature in the neighbors app. They're trying to pivot the neighbors app to be more about community building and like I found a cat or whose package is this not crime. Request for assistance was the feature that let the police get on your neighbors app and then ask for doorbell footage that was near an investigation that might help provide information. So going forward, police will have to obtain a warrant for almost all of their video requests. Yeah, so police can still request clips from Ring and from somebody who has a ring if they consider an event an emergency. You know, they're looking for a kidnapped kid or, you know, there's a murder or something, you know, something that's an emergency. In fact, Amazon's Yasi Yarger confirmed in a statement to the Verge that on rare occasions ring will provide information to law enforcement when there's kind, when there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury again, kidnapping attempted murder. Google will currently show footage from Nest devices to police in emergencies with no warrant acquired so required. So this is not totally a ring thing. These, these, you know, all the big companies who have these sorts of security systems that they sell to people are kind of going through through this. Tom, I know you have a ring doorbell. I do. Yeah. Is that have you ever been in a situation where anyone's asked you for footage? No, and good luck if they do because I don't pay for the storage. So there is no stored video on my ring doorbell. I can use it to see someone when they're there and that's it. But that wouldn't have stopped somebody from trying to ask me about it. And they haven't. I've seen, I've heard some of my neighbors talk about like, oh, we saw the coyote on the ring doorbell, but that's as close as we've ever gotten to stuff like that, which is what they want the neighbor's app to be about, right, about coyotes, not, not crime. I do think this is somewhat misunderstood because there's a little bit of a ring is guilty until proven innocent in the minds of public. And I'm not saying it's ill deserved ring has done some things in the past that that make people not want to give them the benefit of the doubt. But essentially what they're doing here is saying we already told the police they can't go to you directly to get your ring stuff. We're not going to give them contact information or anything like that. We are now going to take away the only remaining in ring universe way of contacting, which is through the neighbors app. We're not even going to let them do that. If a policeman is out investigating and you talk to him and you agree to give him your ring footage, that's between you and the police, but ring is not going to be involved in helping them in any way. Right. So if you've got some some crazy porch piracy going on in your neighborhood, there's nothing stopping you from saying, Oh, an officer, if you could hand that footage in. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. But that's on you to do there. If there's an investigation and they they want to just say, Hey, anybody in this zip code got footage, they can't do that. They're going to have to go knock door to door and ask you directly and they're not going to get rings assistance in that is right is the difference. Right. We ring at one time would give people like, Hey, these people had their ring on. You can go talk to them. They don't do they haven't done that in a long time. Now they're not even letting cops have access to the neighbors app. I mean, a lot of not for investigations anyway, they can still post public safety announcements, right? Of course. Yeah. And it's like, I mean, for people being like, well, why wouldn't we care about crime? I mean, if there is a crime situation, then of course, I mean, part of having, you know, security footage is to keep yourself safe. This sounds to me like, OK, well, if I had a, you know, a nice porch with a cool chair, maybe I'd sit outside and see lots of stuff. And, you know, in cases where, you know, we can't do that. That's what a ring camera is providing. Tom, you don't have recorded a video stored up. Some people do, but this this doesn't seem really different than, yeah, somebody, let's say a police officer coming up and being like, you know, something happened about 30 minutes ago. Did you happen to be around? I mean, that in itself is not an issue. It's how they can contact people that has been has been pulled back a bit. Right. And your rights as a citizen remain the same. But they were before that none of this isn't like some law change. This is just policy change on the on the part of ring. And it might be interesting. I'm going to do this later today. I haven't done it, but I want to go see what wise is policy is. I use their ring doorbell camera. And it works very similarly in almost every way. In fact, it kind of even looks like a ring doorbell style wise. But I don't know what their policy is for my cloud footage. And there is cloud footage for that. So if you're concerned about it and you're not using ring, chances are they either have a policy or you could pressure them to make one at some point. All right, let's talk about AI. A lot of folks have wondered why Apple's not in the conversation. We always talk about Microsoft and open AI. We talk about Google. We talk about Anthropic and all these others out there. Reality Labs. Financial Times has an article looking into Apple's AI strategy because they do have one. They've talked about it a little bit here and there. And looking at this Financial Times article, I think it's very apply. So Scott and Sarah, tell me if you agree. Here's what I hear. Tell me if you agree. This is the premise with things like chips and the iPhone. Apple strategy has always been don't be first to market. Buy up a bunch of talent. Release a user focused version of the product and pitch it as superior. Is that sound right? Yeah, that's that's that is the Apple M.O. Yeah, that is the way. OK, here's what Financial Times found. Apple has bought 21 A.I. related startups since the beginning of 2017. The they also hired Google's A.I. executive John John Andrea in 2018, who's been working on this since. Morgan Stanley says close to half of Apple's recent job postings include the term deep learning. So we've got the not first to market. We've got the buying up the talent. Now we're just waiting on the release of user focused version of the product and pitch it as superior. And Apple is expected to show that off. Show off its own large language model powering Siri at WWDC. I think it's pretty obvious that they can make this work well. Could the challenge is going to be when you've got open A.I. and Google and Microsoft with open A.I. doing cloud versions, they can use data centers, power hungry data centers, but data centers that can really crunch numbers and do things that you can't do on device. Apple is going to have to rely on the fact that it has amazing chips on device to pitch this as whatever you can't get on device that you can get in the cloud is not going to matter much because the S nine chip can access and log data for Siri without needing the Internet. The A 17 Pro chip has a neural engine that's twice as fast as the previous one. We all know how great the M chips are. So I'm guessing this year at WWDC, Apple puts out a series of smart features for all its operating systems that emphasize privacy and security running on device and they play up their LLMs and other models as being better on device than any other model. And they try very hard never to say the word A.I. Well, they're talking about all these. I wonder what the what the Apple A.I. LLM, etc. term will be, you know, I smarts know I smarts. Yeah, I guarantee that I think Tom's right that it will be something that they make up and make it sound like it's their own thing. And well, it's like Apple and spatial reality. Like, OK, we know what you mean. Yeah, we know what you mean. It's just I mean, Apple does that. It's it's companies like to brand their own thing, even if it's something that's similar to what another company is using. I mean, I I use Siri quite often throughout the day. It's not my only smart assistant that I use. But, you know, I'm wearing a watch where she's never far. And that said, it is extremely limited in what I think it's useful for. So I would love to see, besides the obvious, like we've bundled, you know, a new chatbot into Safari, you know, on your mobile device, that kind of thing. I mean, that would be cool. And you can still do that at this point on some level. But I don't know. I mean, I wonder if there's going to be any curveball surprises? Yeah, I will. Intelligence. We're not. We just coined it. Oh, that's not bad. Apple intelligence. That's not bad. That she sounds like something they would do. That is that is good. That is. Yeah, then it's still AI and they claim they own the term. Here's the here's the thing, though. I usually try to find things to disagree with Tom about. But I honestly can't with this one. I think this is exactly the path that they'll take. And it is the same path they always seem to take. They will talk big game about security. And then they will introduce features that do seem cool on device. Here's the one thing I hope, because on the one hand, you're like, well, maybe cloud computing is a really crucial part of this in terms of speed and and so on and or capabilities or whatever. And we don't know until they show us what these are capable of. But what I hope happens is they undersell it like they did Apple Silicon to me anyway. When the when the M chips are announced, I went, OK, well, I've been through this transition before. I guess let's hurry up and pull the mandate off. I'm sure it'll be fine, but it'll take a while and it'll be a pain and whatever. I was not only was I wrong about how how amazing those were and how easy that transition was, but they way exceeded even on the lowliest of Mac minis way exceeded what I expected out of those M chips. So that being said, maybe we'll get surprised again here. There's a chance I'm trying to be optimistic that when they get up there and talk about this stuff and talk about it being on device that in actual use case, we will be blown away. I really hope that that's true. And based on the investment they made, the buyouts they've made, I don't think they want to enter this sloppily. I don't think this needs to be a whipped together maps competitor that they show too soon that isn't quite baked fully yet. Works great now, but, you know, at the time maps was awful. I don't think they can afford that in what is the AI driven future. So I think this has to stick. Whatever they are doing, it has to stick. They're OK with being a little late to the party. Just over undersell me and blow my mind. And maybe you'll maybe you'll carve out a piece of the AI future for yourself there, Apple. I I think the challenge, unlike the chip, is that you're comparing apples and oranges. Ha, ha, ha with the M one chip. You could compare it to an Intel chip and go, wow, this is much faster and more power efficient like I can just tell with this. You're going to be comparing on device to cloud, right? And on device can be so impressive. And because you are never using on device, you're going to be like, it's OK, it's not as good as Bard, you know, it's not as good as something else. But but it's it's going to be a harder sell to to say like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's not going in the cloud. That's one of those things that people say they want all the time. But it's like hard to experience the privacy benefit. You know what I mean? Yeah, you're not even noticing the privacy benefit because the privacy benefit is just happening. Yeah. And so it's a negative. It's a thing that doesn't happen. You don't get breached. Well, you know, if there's any lag, then that's what somebody notices. Is like, oh, I mean, it's like seems kind of slow. Yeah. And the question is something's more limited. It it's hard to convince somebody that the on device experience and not everybody will agree, but many people want that. They just don't realize that's what they want. And if they can do it, they can show that that that's really efficient and fast. Well, then they've got something because then we won't care or notice that something in the cloud is faster or not. And then it's on to the next innovation and somebody will prove it wrong. But for right now with their install base and everybody who buys into the Apple ecosystem or just phones, they want something fast, reliable. And I hope that's what they show us at WWDC. That'd be great. All right. Well, folks, if you've got inside information about this or just a thought, either one, you can email us, send us your your feedback. We we got some great feedback. We're going to talk about later in the show about laser printers and more. Join in on the conversation feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Monday, we told you about the rapid rise in success of Powell World. Powell World made by Pocket Pair is kind of a meme. The Pokemon with guns, but it launched an early access on Steam and everybody wanted to try it to the tune of 1.8 million concurrent players. 1,864,421 concurrent players on Tuesday, passing counter strikes May 2023 peak to make it the second most concurrent players ever behind PUBG's January 2018 peak of 3.2 million. Pocket Pair says it has sold six million copies of Powell World in its first four days. Now, this is interesting because those numbers are big, but you also just don't hear a lot of gamers praising this game at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, in fact, Pocket Pair had to issue a apology of sorts and also offer a roadmap for some basic features that a lot of people were complaining they didn't have, like player versus player and game rate bosses, that kind of thing. Also, Pokemon fans are accusing the game of plagiarizing characters that people consider familiar with the Pokemon universe, in part by using AI to create the character models. Nintendo, which is a co-owner of the Pokemon franchise, hasn't publicly commented on this specific game on Powell World, but has issued a takedown notice for a video explaining how to mod Powell World to swap in-game characters with Pokemon Ones, which, I mean, that part of it is not very surprising that Nintendo would not like this. All right, Scott, Scott, I know you've been following this. What do you think is behind the game's crazy sudden popularity, besides just, I don't know, people being mildly curious? And what do you think? What do you think is going on with this controversy? Well, the meteoric rise of the game kind of out of nowhere in some ways is all anyone's talking about in my circles. And it's a little bit bewildering, to be honest, because, well, I think a lot of this is interesting and cutting and sort of part of the overall discussion about tech and the movement into AI and all these other issues. It does lean into that. But also, I think the big reason that this is happening is because we are now at seven million copies sold. By the way, none of the numbers you guys mentioned even includes who is playing it on Game Pass, which it was a day one Game Pass release and also being sold on the Microsoft Store. The only place you can't get this is PlayStation currently. So it's on PC and on Xbox consoles. So without those even being in there, it's just in a massive, crazy, very short term success. And a lot of people are like, no, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. Why is it like this? So there's there's there's that part of it. It was originally announced in twenty twenty one. And I remember that announcement going, oh, that's a fun joke, I guess, because it's just, you know, it's Pokemon with guns, like Tom mentioned. And it seemed like it maybe would would have a little flash in the pan. But it seemed like it was OK. And we knew this developer. They made Craftopia and a couple other games. It's not like they were unheard of. But it also includes some other stuff. The other thing is everyone's complained by the Pokemon side of it. If you're looking at actual gameplay, this lifts from things like Tears of the Kingdom, Fortnite, Minecraft, Valheim. I mean, name the game. There's some of this in there. In fact, the developers themselves have come out and got in front of it and said we were heavily inspired by a game called Ark Survival Evolved. If you played Ark at all, then you kind of know what kind of game this is at its core. It's a survival, open world survival game. You're cutting down trees, you're breaking up rocks, you're building stuff, and you're doing that in this particular case with the help of these not Pokemon, but these pals. Not to be confused with all European and your weird TV standards from the 90s. Forget about that for a minute. So anyway, that that's kind of the setup. Now, it's not the first Pokemon like there's maybe hundreds of Pokemon like games out there. Everything from cassette beasts to any number of other ones. But nobody cares and nobody talks about it this way. Well, why? Well, I think it's because of the sheer amount of sales combined with the fact that when you look at this game, your first impression is I don't care which side of this you're on. You feel like you're looking at Pokemon characters at the very least heavily inspired by Pokemon characters. And there are some that they have shown some some guys have hacked into the code and put models of some Pokemon meshes right into the same mesh as a close to equivalent character in Power World, and they line up with near-mathematic exactness. So there's some questions about that side of it. The A.I. accusations kind of have nothing to them. There's no proof. There are actually strict A.I. rules in both Microsoft stores and Steam. And if these broke any of those rules, we would know that by now. Plus all the sniff tests and everybody trying to check this thing for A.I. work are not finding it. So so far, that is a baseless accusation that people are just running with. I don't know why that's happening. There's no real evidence of it. Now, I played the game. I don't think it's that great. I think it's kind of janky. It's early access, so that's to be expected preview in Xbox's case. That's what they call it. And it's not finished. And there's a lot of stuff missing. And there are times where I feel like I'm just playing one of the jankiest games of the year. And it's we're not even that far into January. And it feels a little janky to me. But there are people who really like it. Some people like it just to stick their finger in the eye of Nintendo and Game Freak for for kind of not innovating the the Pokemon series very much. And so there's just a lot of factions with a lot of motivations around this thing. One reason people are worried about the A.I. element is this developer made a game previously called A.R. Art Imposter. And it uses generative A.I. as a core mechanic of the game. I've never played this game, can't really speak to it. It looks a lot like Among Us. So there's another kind of inspiration, visual thing happening there. Anyway, there's the bigger conversation, which I do think is interesting and isn't about name calling or telling something, you know, making accusations online. It's more about iteration in video games and what that actually means. And most games, even the most popular games you'll ever play are iterative in some way or another. Nobody's starting fresh day one with something that is completely different than anyone else. So if you play Call of Duty, you're playing you're playing on if you're playing Call of Duty, you're playing on the backs of Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein and, you know, the earliest prototypes of first person shooters. There's no difference here in terms of the survival aspects of it. The Pokemon part is just visually like a little shocking. And if Nintendo gets involved with lawyers, you'll certainly hear about it. They are a litigious company, but so far they haven't said anything. So I think this is my personal opinion. Give this like another month and a half and no one's talking about this game anymore. Yeah, just flames high and dies out because there is nothing special about this. A popular game getting criticized and having unfounded accusations. That's not new. A game being based on a funny meme coming out and getting a lot of attention. That's not new. What made this a game ripping off from multiple, you know, or being inspired by multiple other kinds of games? As you pointed out, Scott, that's not new. What was it that made this become the second most concurrent players in history? And listening to you speak, I was still grasping for it until I finally realized maybe it's because they're mocking Nintendo and nobody likes to mock Nintendo because Nintendo is so litigious. So the fact that they got away with that. And like you said, when you watch the trailer, it's like, oh, am I watching Zelda or am I watching Pokemon? Is it Zelda with Pokémons? Like and then suddenly your brain goes, well, that would be kind of cool if there were Pokémons in Zelda and they had guns. Like I think it's a perfect storm of confluence here. Yeah, and you're not here. People to be like, I want to try that. I want to try that in greater numbers than you would usually have with a joke game like that. I think you're right. And I and here's the other thing about it. And if I don't say this, people are going to call me on it. It is at its core, got a pretty good loop. It's a loop, I think is janky right now, but it has with enough polish. It's a fun combination of the things we've talked about, of the things that inspired it and even the things they're poking fun at. There is a strong loop there that is hard for many players to put down. So I think that that's an important aspect. If this was just junk, nobody would care. We'd be done. But it's a playable game with potential. And it's also relatively inexpensive. And so I think these all play a role. It's a little zeitgeisty, like a viral video. No one expected, you know, how you can't make videos viral. They just happen. It's kind of like that. And the fact that as a Japanese developer and not some kid in Des Moines doing this and doing it in the face of the biggest Japanese formidable video company of all time, that being Nintendo. There's something attractive about that to your point. I think it's all those things. And I think in the end, this thing's ability to survive beyond this will be polishing this game up to be a really good playing game. Despite all the controversies, the questions, the accusations, because that's what they ultimately want. Otherwise, this will just be remembered as a weird moment and a flash in the pan and some quick money. And then that's the end of it. So it's already have a better handle on it now. Yeah, I mean, pardon me. I think I know I'm reminded of Flappy Bird or, you know, a variety of games that just rocket to like a crazy height of popularity, just because, you know, at a certain point, it's the momentum carries itself. It's the momentum. Yeah, exactly. And and, you know, sometimes it's just a flash in the pan. No one can can truly know it's a it's a mixture of some people legitimately being excited about it or at least, you know, telling others about it and then the rest of us going, what's going on here? Exactly. Scott, you had mentioned earlier, you know, a lot of this has to do with just the fact that when a game is this popular and making money and maybe making fun of that other company who doesn't like any of those things. That's where that's where we are right now. And, you know, to no one, I mean, you could say this about musician, an artist, a game developer, anyone who says, I am so inspired by this wonderful game, gosh, one of my favorites. You know, I can only only hope to make a game that great. No one cares about that. That's fine. That's how we all live, right? But when it is just sort of like too close in a way where it's like, and the Pokemon character is holding the gun, then you get into, you know, some weird territory. Yeah. And if this thing only sold a hundred thousand copies, the conversation would not be at the crescendo we're at. So sales is a huge part of this. But then you have to ask, well, why the sales? Like it is a big, weird loop of why is this happening now? When two weeks ago, nobody even talked about it. It's like it was not even a thing on anyone's radar, really, other than the preview in twenty twenty one. So, you know, we'll keep our eye on it, of course, bring anything up here that makes any sense to bring up. But it is one of the weirdest gaming stories of, I think, the last maybe even decade. It's a very odd time and we'll just have to see how it unfolds. All right, I'm going to check out the mailbag anyway, because I promised people earlier in the show that we would check out the mailbag and I know we're running close on time. But mostly I just want to say we got so many people writing in saying, yes, laser printer, it changed my life. I've been using one for 15 years. Yeah, I have to spend more on toner, but I only have to buy it once every five years, so it doesn't really matter. So that's it. That's all I wanted to say is thank you for all of those emails. We read every one of them and it's great to hear from all of you. Keep them coming. Feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. Turns out people care about printers and certainly buying overpriced in cartridges. Scott, whether or not you do that, we certainly love having you on the show. Today was just perfect. We can't do a Pell World conversation without Scott Johnson. Let everybody know where they can keep up the rest of your work. Well, the best place to do that would be over at frogpants.com. And in particular, the show core. So you can just do that same thing and go to the podcast page. And there it is frogpants.com slash core. In fact, and that's a video game show we do on Thursdays. It's a long format show with some really smart guys that I work with. And we talk all about what's going on in gaming, including big stories like this whole Pell World thing. We've all played it too. So we have stuff to say. Check that out. That again is at frogpants.com slash core or wherever you get your shows. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. The return to the office war appears to be over and remote workers appear to have won. We're going to discuss why. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow talking about the tech in his van life with AI for humans show host Kevin Pereira. Yeah, lives in a van. A lot of tech. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand you have enjoyed this program.