 Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. proposes making third-party app stores the law. NVIDIA faked their CEO's appearance in a press announcement with AI, and football star Lionel Messi got paid partially in NFTs. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 12th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Joining us, Bloomberg Tech Editor, host of Tech's Message. Nate Langston is back. Welcome back, Nate. Thank you once again for having me. Great to be here. We were getting an excellent description from Nate about the tech behind his drum set. If you want that and more, get the wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is also where you can join our top patrons like Dan Boyles, Logan Larson, and Mike Aikens. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Provisional findings from the UK's competition and markets authority investigation into Facebook's acquisition of Giffy would negatively impact competition between social platforms. The CMA, as it's known, could order Facebook to unwind the deal and sell off Giffy if its final report confirms these initial findings. The CMA will take comment until September 2nd before issuing a final report on October 6th. Facebook's going to change the name to Jiffy right before it spins it back up. Honor announced the Magic 3 series, its first flagship phone series since spinning off from Huawei. The Honor Magic 3, Honor Magic 3 Pro, and Honor Magic 3 Pro Plus all have the same 120 Hertz OLED screen and feature Google services. The Magic 3 Pro Plus offers a Snapdragon 888 Plus system on a chip. 50 watt wireless charging has an IPX68 rating for dust and waterproof and top shelf cameras while the Magic 3 Pro uses a smaller main image sensor. The standard Magic 3 uses the Snapdragon 888 is IP54 rated, laxes zoom lens, and the Magic 3 starts at 899 euros, the Pro at 1,099 euros, and the Pro Plus at 1,499 euros. No release date or markets were announced. Twitter began rolling out visual changes to both its site and its apps. The new chirp font is now being used on the app menus and feeds and colors have been updated to be high contrast with a lot less blue. China State Council issued a statement calling for guidelines through 2025 to produce legal frameworks around the digital economy, internet finance, artificial intelligence, and big data and cloud computing. In other words, the crackdown will continue. And the beat goes on. Chinese autonomous driving startup Pony.ai suspended its plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange after it failed to gain government assurances in China that it would not be targeted for doing so. In positive news, though, Baidu grew revenue 20% on the year driven by its AI business. Foxconn reported a 30% rise on the quarter and 20% rise on the year driven by smartphone sales, though Foxconn did warn about some uncertainty related to worsening COVID-19 in parts of Asia. Spotify announced it will release an updated Wear OS app in the coming weeks with support for offline playback. This will work on Wear OS 2 and newer releases, though it does require a premium Spotify subscription. Alright, let's talk about that US bill, a bipartisan bill. You got one Republican, two Democrats sponsoring this called the Open Markets Act proposed in the US Senate Wednesday would impose new rules on app stores. The rules would apply to any app store, not just mobile, any app store that has more than 50 million US users, so Google and Apple. It would prohibit those app stores from requiring developers to use its in-app payment system. It also would not allow those app stores to prevent developers from having different prices in different app stores. Right now, app stores may say like, you can't sell this for cheap or somewhere else. It also would not let app stores prohibit legitimate business communication with app users. Apple has some restrictions on what you can say to your customers if you're in the app store. It would not let app stores use non-public information to compete with app makers in its store and third-party app stores must be allowed, as well as the ability to hide or delete pre-installed apps. And app store operators can't prefer their own apps in app store searches and must make all development info that the company uses for its own apps available to all the developers. Those are all the things in the bill that's being proposed in the US to become a law. If it passed, the act would put the US Federal Trade Commission in charge of enforcement, so it'd be an anti-competitive measure essentially. We don't know if it's going to become law. What do you think guys, should it become law? I think it has a very, very, very low chance of becoming law from my understanding of US politics. I think it will take a long, long time to pass through and then would be challenged all the way, as we've seen, obviously with the Epic and Apple and Google SPAT. But it has to be said that this is not something that any one government is solely going to be looking at. I know that our consumer markets authority, which was mentioned at the top of the show with regards to Giffy and Facebook, they have a probe going on that's similar to this. It's not so much a proposal of a bill, but a review of whether it's anti-competitive that's going to conclude, I think as soon as next month it's been going on since the spring. I think it would be very difficult to enforce, very difficult to police, and it would open that floodgate of how do you implement this on a country-wide and then international basis in a way that's different for each market, if you don't know me. It's very difficult. Yeah, I think what we're looking at here is the opening salvo in a war. Honestly, if left to its own devices, because it's a bipartisan bill from the start, this could get some traction, but you're going to have the full weight of everyone's lobbying, not just Apple and Google. You're also going to have Facebook and Amazon saying like, man, we don't love this idea either. Even though Facebook would like Apple to implement these things, Facebook doesn't want the same restrictions to apply to it. Should it want to qualify as the Oculus store? So I think the lobbying probably keeps it from becoming a law, but it starts the conversation. It starts the pressure. I think that's why the senators did it, to say like, look, we could do this. So you might want to compromise on something else. And you have to pay an attention to consoles just quickly as well, because they I think would apply under this too. The game stores on Xbox, for example. Yeah, I might. You're right. So Microsoft and Sony might have it. As somebody who hasn't downloaded an app recently, I kind of have the apps that I use, and that's what I use. It's easy to sort of go, oh, okay. I mean, how big of a deal is this really? And so I was going through this as we were preparing for the show. Is there anything in this proposed bill that sets off red flags? And it really doesn't. None of it really does. Like you said, Nate, it's probably a long shot of it being passed in its current form. But none of none of this is, I think, unreasonable or some sort of too much government oversight that I can see. I don't like the principle of the government deciding that at a certain level, a marketplace has to operate this way. I wonder if I don't. I haven't thought through what the unintended consequences are, but that's where my head goes in these sorts of situations. I'm sure somebody out there is going to do the work on that shortly, but there are always unintended consequences when you say like, look, we just want to let third parties on the platform and do this. Could it also harm developers in some way? That's what I'm always looking at. Well, moving on, Zoom announced a new focus mode for its desktop, and it's also its web app, which will let the host of the call hide video of participants on a call from each other. The feature can be enabled for accounts or groups or individual users alike. It's primarily aimed at classroom uses to stop students from distracting each other. So hosts, and in many cases, this would be teachers, will still have access to all participants' video and can spotlight participants to let everybody see their video temporarily if they so choose. Makes perfect sense for teachers, right? Yeah, you got goof-offs like me in the class, trying to put up funny gifts in the middle. I could totally see myself having done something like that back in the day. So this is a way to keep everybody's attention. My brain immediately went to, what other things are they going to use this for? Like our corporation's going to say like, oh, for all hands meeting, we'll use this to make sure everybody's paying attention and they're not distracted. I think there's some positive use cases too, where we've talked about before, the wearing effect of knowing everyone can see you, even when you're not speaking, this could be a relief for some. Yeah, my mind immediately went to that boss that's just micromanaging every single thing you do it on the Zoom call. This might be something that's great for the boss, not necessarily great for the people who work for the boss. But yeah, it does seem like for classroom uses, and I know some teachers who have had a real hard time over the last year plus, trying to navigate, especially with younger children, conducting a classroom experience that is enriching for kids who are easily distracted. And this makes sense. I can see it being done in the corporate world as well though. I was trying to think of an example of when that would be necessary, where you needed to hide two employees from seeing each other. And other than getting fired over Zoom and having the HR people on the call, I couldn't think of an example unless someone's doing something on the camera that they shouldn't be doing, but then there's a whole different procedure for preventing that from being seen. To me, it was the large meeting where everybody doesn't need to be seen the whole time. That was the only thing I could think of there. Also, the Verge notes that emoji's are still allowed by the kids. So you could still send your cowboy hat and skull emojis to distract your friends. Yeah, it's like throwing a spit-wad. The modern-day spit-ball. Is there an emoji for spit-ball? I don't know. I think there really should be. We should talk to them. I'll probably get them wrong if I try. Apologies to the sporting savvy out there. Bear with us, but for those who don't follow football, you should know it's biggest star, Argentinian Lionel Messi, just left the club he's been with for most of his career, Barcelona, to sign a two-year contract with Paris Saint Germain, often referred to as PSG, and that's how we'll continue to refer to him here. Why, you may ask, are we telling you this? No, it's not an attempt after our previous victory in interesting Nate in sport during his last appearance to make him love the beautiful game. It has to do with NFTs. You see, big sports stars get paid big money, and just the welcome package that PSG gave Messi was worth 25 to 30 million euros. I would like a welcome package like that. It included some PSG cryptocurrency fan tokens from Socios.com. These tokens let fans who hold them vote on some minor decisions regarding the club, like what song is played in the stadium during warm-ups, or the message that'll be on the captain's armband, for example. Socios.com says the sale of the tokens has generated close to $200 million for its partner clubs this year. They've got a good half dozen or so partner clubs. And of course, fans who buy them can then try to sell them for more than they paid them for them. And there's a brisk business in that. Trading volumes before Messi signed with PSG reached $1.2 billion. So giving Messi a bunch of them gives him a volatile asset that he could potentially sell for millions. And these things are benefiting PSG as well. The PSG fan token generated 30 million euros in sales this past week. And it's estimated PSG keeps about half of that, if not more. So NFTs, everybody's like, what are they good for? Well, they're good for moving money around and apparently paying your major superstars. Wow. I mean, if anything was going to get me interested in sports, I suppose it was this. As far as, I mean it, so he was getting like a signing bonus awarded in NFTs, right? So it's kind of like getting given stock when you join a startup any company. Sure. More of a question than a statement. Because it seems like broadly speaking, it's equivalent to that. It's not the same because the stock is a more, there's a less volatile, you know, instrument. That's all. I mean, that was going to be my point is that this, as far as what's his name, Messi is concerned. This is like having a very volatile signing bonus. It's not the majority of his bonus. It's a throw in, right? They're like, because we don't know how much of his welcome package was that, but one expects it wasn't the majority of it. True. I just think, you know, if, if, if Socio has said, what did it say, says the sale of tokens has generated close to 200 million for partner clubs. I mean, this isn't small money. And I can only imagine if this was part of a deal that got him to leave a club, like it must have been a decent part of it. Anyway, that was my first thought. NFTs is a signing bonus. I've heard of Bitcoin, you know, crypto being given as signing bonuses at companies I've written about. And particularly in obviously the crypto world, it's, it's, it's quite common. If you've got a new coin, for example, you're doing an ICO, then that can be quite lucrative. But yeah, first time I've seen this in sport. So great. Still don't care about football, but care about this. Again, let's make it clear. This was not to try to convert Nate to loving football at all. Well, but you know, we can, you know, pick your sport. You know, if you don't like sports, what then maybe it doesn't apply to you, but lots of sports. I mean, there are especially for stars of Messi's size. And that is, I don't know. He would even put in that category. I mean, he's one of the biggest stars in the entire world, certainly in the football world. But to have a signing bonus, where you're getting so many millions of dollars. And, and that's all great. But, you know, part of it is, there's a select group of fans who are, you know, have the socio or on the socio side that could now, you know, choose some warm up songs. Well, that's probably not going to make you any worse of a soccer player, you know, but it might be something where it's like, oh man, why did I agree to this kind of thing? And I wonder how much this sort of thing will just be a fact of life for, for the big sport stars in the future who sign these kinds of agreements. Yeah, there were a couple of the technologically interesting parts of this article that don't even have to do with Messi, just the idea that here's an NFT, kind of like we've talked about with bands in the past that gives you a something, you give you a right to do something, right? It's not just, oh, I pretend I'm the owner of the video of Messi's great goal. It's, I get a voice in some of the ways the club is operated, right? Right. And so, you know, that's interesting. Then taking those tokens and giving them to Messi, Messi doesn't want to vote on the warm up song. He doesn't care. He's just going to hold on to these things and hope they gain in value. And then his manager will trade them at a time when they think they should cash in on them. But, but that's, that's interesting too, if thinking of NFTs as compensation for anything, right? And going back to what Nate was saying about, you know, getting paid in cryptocurrency at certain startups, it's now celebrity compensation. This is, you know, right up there with like, oh, we'll give you, you know, worldwide rights and points on the back end and some NFTs. Like, I could just see that being another element in contracts. Well, folks, if you need just the headlines, sometimes you don't even have the 30 minutes we have for DTNS. Check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines, all the essential tech news in just about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com. NVIDIA released on Wednesday, the press announcement of the NVIDIA Omniverse system that was delivered earlier this year by CEO Jensen Wang was not delivered by Jensen Wang exactly himself. It was a computer generated version. While Wang appeared to be in a kitchen where he was frequently making announcements these days, the kitchen and the Wang in the Omniverse announcement was created from a full face and body scan of the human ring done in the back of a truck. Then an algorithm was trained to mimic Wang's gestures and expressions. The kitchen was then created by Omniverse. Facial performance used an audio clip to drive the facial performance with software called Audio2Face that mapped the movements of the face to the words. Then they used face video to video, which mapped the CG model to a photo to make it appear as natural as possible. For body movements, Audio2Gesture, the number two, was used to mask gestures to the words. Then an actor in a motion capture suit read past keynotes mimicking Wang's performance. That created the training set of movements, also generated 21 candidates, one of which was implemented in the final product. The kitchen and also Wang were done in Omniverse and other tools like Maya and Substance were used for adding textures and that sort of thing. In the end, it's what you would do for a movie effect, something that's a big special effect. Done by Nvidia, though, in secret, so they could put this out as a surprise blog post. Guess what we did? No one even knew. But one quote in the Nvidia video does stand out. Nvidia researcher Ming Yu said, quote, as an AI researcher, I come from a machine learning background and I was not familiar with the movie production pipeline. An important thing for me was to feel the pain. How difficult is it to create a digital human? And to kind of challenge myself, how can we create tools to make digital human production a much easier process? End quote. So this is a prustunt, certainly, and it's gotten a lot of attention because of that. But there might be a substantive effect here. Yeah, when I first saw this come across my feeds this morning, I was intrigued. I was like, oh, they did an AI generated Jensen Wang. Let's check that out. The more I dug into it, the more I realized, oh, they just did what anybody does for like Black Widow. They did visual effects. They were using their own products to do it and showed out how great their products are. I get that. But it's a prustunt until I hit that quote from Ming Yu that you just said. I'm like, but the fact of having done that means that their own researchers now have a better appreciation of the difficulty that visual effects artists have in their jobs, and maybe that will help make the Nvidia tools even better in the future. I had two thoughts when I read this. The first one was, even as a prustunt, I have to take my hat off and say kudos because it's very cool as a proof of concept. My second thought on this, though, was regarding nobody spotting it. In my head, I would question, did anybody watch it? Did anyone care? Is it the reason that no one spotted because no one really was paying attention to this? I'm sure it's the former. Nvidia is going to say no, it was that good, but maybe people just weren't paying that close attention. I don't know. You would have thought somebody would have noticed something. Also, I'm curious why they didn't just reveal it at the time. I would have think that would have been a dramatic reveal at the end to say like, and by the way, this whole time I was virtual, this isn't really me. And then the real Jensen Wong walks into frame or something. I don't know. I mean, I will add, it was just the 14 seconds for a very specific part of the keynote that he gave. That was the virtual Jensen. Was it only 14 seconds? Yes. If you look at the end of this, I watched the Nvidia blog. Maybe because I was looking so closely, it felt longer. That would be another reason why people might not notice. It's pretty fast. Well, and the whole idea is that they wouldn't notice at all. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Surprise. Yeah. Plex updated its Plex amp music player app to add a feature called supersonic does not involve hedgehogs. It uses a neural network to map all the tracks, albums and artists in your library to generate playlists from your library that will be full of songs that are sonically similar to each other rather than just generated through metadata. So instead of just like, here's a jazz playlist with everything that was tagged as jazz. Oh, that podcast from DTNS was tagged as jazz. It's in your jazz playlist now. It would be actual jazz like songs that are similar to each other. One example, for instance, is mixes for you that would use your most frequently played songs as a basis and then mix in other songs that are similar to those. So like, Oh, if you like these songs, you play them a lot. Here's some other songs that are similar. Now, it's different than Pandora's music genome project. That one uses human analysis supersonic is all software. It extracts 50 parameters, waits them, and then uses those parameters to determine how close two tracks are to each other. The setup is very CPU intensive. So it'll take a couple of days usually to complete depending on your library size. You can then see which tracks Plex thinks are similar to any particular song in a related tracks feature when you're looking at any particular song. You'll need to pay for Plex Pass to get this feature. You'll need to run Plex Media Server version 1.2.4.0 in either Mac OS Windows or Linux on an x86 processor. No arm support yet. Well, I'm a big Plex user. I don't really do a lot of Plex amp music listening. However, I do find just with the various quote algorithms that we have on music services at Pandora being one of them. But there are others, you know, that it's sometimes it's like, wow, they really know me. And sometimes it's kind of hit and miss. And that is just the way that it's always going to be when a bunch of humans are getting together trying to figure out what you want to hear next. I would, I'd be really interested to see how much something like this, if I say like, here's my genre, here's my favorite artist, give me other things, how this might give me different results. I'd love to test this out on my library. My, you know, Apple Music, I'm not in Plex, but my library is so weird that Apple Music has a very difficult job of making any kind of recommendations to me. I mean, I'm the guy that true story in the same week once saw Taylor Swift and Cradle of Filth, and I love them both equally. Not playing together either. That's the point of that story. One day, one day. So making a dream is difficult. Yeah. Yeah. I, I know for sure that my musical taste is not as diverse as yours, Nate. And yet I have problems with it going like, here, this is stuff we think you'd like. And I'm like, no, not really. So I kind of like this idea of like, we're not going to try to predict what you like. We're going to try to say like, Hey, if you want more of this kind of music, we know what fits that. Now, it'd be interesting to see how good it is at that. But that's the Pandora promise of like, Oh, I know I like this Jonathan Colton song. Give me more of that. Sometimes it works on Pandora pretty well. Other times, not so much. Kind of depends on the artist. But being able to say like, let's do some more complex stuff. Let's say like your top 10 most played songs, stuff like that, I'd be interested to see how that worked. So you have to, you have to try it out, Sarah. Sorry, you're, you're the one of us that has plex. So I'm happy to do it. Yeah, I'm happy to do it. I don't really know why I don't use plex for music, because I use it to kind of watch everything else. Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll check it out and report back. Well, if you are interested in traveling to Nate's part of the world this year, or anywhere in Europe really, Chris Christensen has some handy websites that you might want to check out before you do. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. If you're planning on doing some traveling in Europe in the near future, which is getting more possible, there are two resources that you should know about. One is Roma Torrio, R-O-M-E, the number two Rio.com. And the other one is O-M-I-O.com. And both of them do a similar thing. They let you put in two cities and find out not just what the flights are between those two cities, but what it would cost to fly, to do rideshare, to drive, to take a bus, or to take the train. And so especially in Europe, where train travel is much more practical, Roma Torrio and O-M-I-O.com are great resources to know. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. We should hasten to clarify, you cannot take a train from Rome to Rio, though. At this point. Yeah. No, you can't do it. Yeah, you can fly it. No, it's a good tip. Thank you, Chris. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Nick. And Nate, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I thought you might be able to help us out with this email if you so desire, because Nick says, if you read this email, please use Z instead of Z when saying, you know, that last character of the alphabet, Australian versus American English law. So, Nate, would you like to take it from here? I will read the rest, yes, from Nick. Nick says, continues, I've really come to appreciate big displays built into phones. I was one of those people that were not happy when Apple made the iPhone 5 screen taller, but not wider than the 4S. Since I left the iPhone ecosystem for Android, I've used the Samsung Note line because of the big screens. I would have jumped right on board with the Galaxy Z Fold line when it started three years ago, because simply it was an even bigger screen, but I decided to wait and see what reliability was like. So far, I've not bought a Z Fold. But honestly, if a year from now, the Z Fold 3 owners are pretty happy with the reliability of their device, I'll probably get a Z Fold 4 as reliability was the one thing holding me back. The advancements in this area Samsung announced are very encouraging. Also, I should note that at the department store I work at, which is not fancy or upmarket, I do see people using Z Fold 1s, 2s, and flips. So folding phones seem to slowly be taking off as a thing people buy and use. Yeah, so I think Nick is probably representative of a lot of people, and these are the people Samsung needs to persuade, which is I'm in the Android ecosystem. I'm using a Samsung phone, but I'm still not sure your hinge is going to work. I'm still worried about that crease in the middle of the screen. I'll let a few other people try this first before I jump in there. So that's where they need to do the work. Also, I thought it was interesting that he sees the folds and flips out in the wild. That was interesting to know. Yeah, on our show yesterday, I was sort of like, they seem so great. Certainly the newest Galaxy Z Fold line is expensive, but it looks real nice. But yeah, if you're already in that ecosystem again, then you have a built-in market. And thank you, Nate, for reading that. I know it wasn't Australian English, but it was much closer than we would have gotten. I just felt like it would just be a botched job of talking. I even tried to, yeah. So thank you, Nate. Bollywood would jump out of nowhere and make fun of me for saying Zed or something. That's right. Every time he said Zed, I was like, he did it again. Oh, wow. That's really a thing people do. Thank you, Nate. Also, thank you, Nick, for that feedback. And also, everybody who sends us feedback, we doesn't always get on the show, but we sure appreciate it. And we love to read your feedback. Questions, comments, we'll take it all. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to give a special thanks to Chris Benito. Chris is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Chris, for all the years of support. Thanks, Chris. You hear Chris's name in the Master and Grandmaster list as well. Been doing it for a long time. You rock. You sure do. Chris, you're the best. Also, the best, Nate Langson. Thanks for being with us, Nate. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work lately. Well, if you like the sound of my accent reading you tech emails and technology news, then do check out my show, text message, uktechshow.com. As one of the things we did for patrons that admittedly isn't on the free feed is, turns out my wife put the nothing ear one headphones that I recently reviewed through the wash. And I just recorded an episode about how that went. Badly, but anyway, uktechshow.com. Yeah, I'd be like, how did it go? But, you know, just, it's fine up from Nate. Sorry about your headphones. We are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC headphones or not. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us if you can. I'll be off tomorrow, but Tom will be here and Shannon Morse will be joining us as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Ireland Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.