 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Kevin, Paul Teeson, and Ali Sanjabi. Coming up on DTNS, U.S. passes chip subsidies, but what will that actually mean for chip making and for us, the consumers? Plus, we check in on the state of battery swapping for EVs, and Corey Doctorow brings us up to speed on DRM and why it still probably isn't good for anybody. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 29th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawn the top tech stories from Cleveland, and I'm Len Baralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, author, journalist, and activist, Corey Doctorow, welcome back. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. It's been too long. I can't wait to talk about Dr. M, the digital rights management with you. Oh yeah. That's a good acronym. I like that. Thanks. I sometimes get mail for Dr. Corey O. Oh yeah. All right. Well, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Judge Kathleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery set the trial date for Twitter's lawsuit against Elon Musk for October 17th through the 21st. Judge McCormick already determined the case would receive a five day trial in October. Now we have the exact dates. In other Twitter news, the company announced it increased the price of its Twitter Blue subscription $2 from $2.99 to $4.99 per month. Existing subscribers won't get the increase until October. Intel continued the week of dismal tech company earnings reports with a 22% drop in revenue on the year partly due to slowing PC sales. Also because it couldn't get all the components it needed to finish enough data center chips to meet demand. Sony announced PS5 sales did rise 4% on the year, but it cut its annual profit outlook by 16% as the sales of games fell 26% and are expected to fall again next quarter. And there ends the bad earnings reports. Amazon beat expectations with a 7% rise in retail sales and Apple reported record revenue again though only a rise of 1.87% and profit fell 11%. Still, iPhone revenue was up 2.8% and analysts had expected to see the first fall in iPhone sales. Max sales did fall 10% and service revenue slowed to 12% growth. Apple sounded pretty rosy about the next quarter though saying it expected parts shortages to ease and continued demand for the iPhone. Good news if you're one of the people still waiting on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console. Steam wrote on Twitter, everyone who currently has a reservation can get their Steam Deck by the end of this year. We've cleared up supply chain issues. A bunch of folks got moved up to Q3 and all other reservations are now in Q4. So check your reservation window. You may have an earlier ship time now. Samsung has an announcement coming up on August 10th right in the middle of Daily Tech News Show's annual experiment week. A little rude Samsung, but don't worry, Rob Dunwood and Rod Simmons have agreed to try out Instant Reaction, a new experimental show. So you're going to get probably more Samsung coverage than you would have otherwise. Get a cool new show experiment. We should also thank Evan Blass who did his usual leaky job and got a hold of some advanced marketing photos of what appear to be upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Z Fold 4. He posted them on 91mobiles.com. Pictures don't reveal much other than the design is not in for a big change and they look kind of like the current models. A less pronounced crease, an S Pen slot on the Fold 4, details like that you can't tell from the pictures. So you're just going to have to wait until the 10th to find out about those. On Qualcomm's latest earning call, CEO Cristiano Amon said that the company reached a multi-year deal with Samsung that will see Qualcomm chips powering their devices globally. Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets are already used in 75% of shipped Galaxy S22 smartphones with Samsung X NEOS chips used on 25%. As part of the deal, Samsung will expand Snapdragon chip use across PC, tablet and extended reality products. All right, let's get to the House of Representatives. Oh, let's. So we mentioned somewhat in passing yesterday that the US House of Representatives passed the Chips and Science Act of 2022. This actually matters to a lot of people. It authorizes the spending of a $280 billion, some of which will go to companies to expand and build semiconductor manufacturing plants in the US. It was passed by the US Senate on Wednesday, now heads to the president to sign it into law likely early next week. So Tom, for anybody who needs a little refresher, what is in this bill? I'm no Jennifer Briney, the Congressional Dish Podcaster, but I did look at this bill a little bit. $39 billion is going right to semiconductor manufacturing subsidies, right to companies to build plants to make chips. $11 billion will go to research and workforce training at those plants. So a little bit to support R&D and get people trained up to work there. $2 billion will go to older tech, the kind used by automakers and of course the military. So there's a military aspect of that as well. That makes up the $52 billion number that you're going to hear a lot when you look in headlines as being allocated to chip making. Now, you may have noticed that Sarah said a number that was quite a bit bigger than $52 billion, we'll get to that in a second. Intel, TSMC and Global Foundries all have plans to take some of that money and build plants. Those plans were supposedly contingent on this money being allocated. Samsung and MediaTech are expected to benefit as well. The US Department of Commerce is in charge of preparing for these subsidies and it has been doing that and will administer applications and allocations. $170 billion of this bill will be spent by several federal agencies over the next five years on research and development in fields like quantum computing, open architecture, software based wireless technologies. I think that's probably around open ran, but it didn't say so in the bill. Others for artificial intelligence development and precision agriculture. The bill directs the Commerce Department to set up 20 regional technology hubs to foster growth in tech, training, development, outreach, et cetera. National Science Foundation gets $20 billion to spur development of critical security technology. The Department of Energy's Office of Science gets its budget increased. It's going to end up being $50 billion, although some of that already exists, to fund development of clean energy, development of nuclear physics and high intensity lasers. And there's a lot in here on NASA that's not funded, but direct NASA to do things like aerospace regulation, cleaner burning fuels for planes, bringing people to Mars. It becomes a priority in the law, not just in the policy, as well as the Artemis mission to return to the moon. So, Sarah, how has it been received? Well, it got some bipartisan support. Of course, chip companies pleased by that. Criticisms of the bill include the fact that for chip makers, the amount of the subsidies that's 52 billion split among multiple companies over five years is very small when a single fabrication plant costs hundreds of billion dollars to operate. While the bill does allocate some funds for raw materials and equipment, most of that equipment, materials and components will come from elsewhere. Protocol notes that certain tools needed for advanced chips come exclusively from the Netherlands. Japan is also a supplier of crucial components needed to make chips. And chip packaging doesn't seem to be part of the strategy at all. So chips will still need to be flown to packages and testers in Asia, in at least many of these cases. Also, the effect of this will not be felt until construction is complete, volume production begins, and things are kind of often running. The first plans to reach that stage will be from TSMC in 2024 and Intel in 2025. Hey, Corey, I don't expect you follow semiconductor manufacturing every single day of your life, but given the rundown here, how does this strike you as a consumer of computers? Well, the long-term trend over the last 40 years has been to do more offshoring and to focus more on how production works rather than what happens when it fails. And I think the last two years have been a real crash course in the problem of only considering how well things go and not what happens when they go wrong. And the version of efficiency that says all you care about is that the prices are low and good times leaves out the possibility that in bad times, the prices will effectively be infinite, like you won't be able to get chips at all. And so re-onsuring some chip production and just more broadly pluralizing chip production. So it happens in lots of places in the world is clearly a good idea. And it's true in lots of key inputs. I just read that the reagent in our rapid tests for COVID is made in one factory and for all the world. There's a single Chinese factory that makes all the world's reagent. And that's just a bad idea, not because we don't trust the Chinese or because of trade war or whatever, but like, what if there's a fire? Single point of failure. Yeah, it's just bad news. And I can save a lot of money on backup drives by not doing backups. Sure, that works great, but no, it fails really badly. And so the specifics of this are a little weird because it effectively ends up being a subsidy to Intel who just gave away a ton of money this year in stock buybacks, which is an ugly look. It's just basically transferring money to more rich guys from the public purse. And Bernie Sanders made a pretty good point, which is like, yeah, there are lots of countries out there that subsidize their chip manufacturer. Most of those countries also have universal health care and universal child care. If we're going to emulate other countries, why don't we emulate all the things that work for them? Yeah, I think that hard drive backup metaphor is great. The usual advice we give is you should be backing up in a local place, an offsite place, you know, have multiple backups. And I think that's what needs to happen here is, sure, maybe this is a small part of a good strategy, but it really doesn't seem like it's part of a strategy. A strategy would be to diversify supply so that, like you say, things like reagents and minerals and materials are coming from multiple places. Packaging and testing is coming from multiple places so that if one fails, then you don't have the whole system fall apart. I think that's not what I'm seeing here. Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, Friday is backup day for me because I have these little USB two terabyte drives and I keep one in the mailbox down the street at a commercial mailbox provider where I get my mail. So I don't have to give strangers my home address and I keep one here on my desk and I swap them once a week. And so Friday, I literally just brought this back. I went and got my mail before speaking to you. Oh, that's great. That's a cool tip. I might have to steal that. I have a PO box myself, so that's a good way to think about it. It really, and they were very sweet about it. They were like, are you sure your data is encrypted because we wouldn't want to be on the hook if you lost your data? You know, if your drive got stolen or whatever out of your box. And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty sure my data is encrypted. Good. That's what you don't have to lecture me on. What I do. Yeah. Well, some of you also think about batteries and EVs on a regular basis. And some of you have actually asked us about the idea of swapping batteries and an alternative to recharging an electric vehicle. Sort of, you know, another analogy. It's like when I, you know, put fresh sheets on the bed. Sometimes my sheets haven't been washed yet, but I got the extra pair. So the idea, if you're unfamiliar, instead of waiting for your car's battery to charge up, you take out the battery, you put in a fresh one. This could be potentially faster, obviously, then mean that you always have the latest battery tech also improved range since battery charging theoretically would be optimized by the provider of those batteries. Now, we talked about this on the January 28th episode of the show this year. That was some time ago. So Tom, let's recap. Yeah. One of the biggest success stories in this is Gogoro. They are very popular in Taiwan and they're moving out to other markets. They swap batteries for electric scooters. We also talked about Tesla experimenting with swaps between 2013 and 2016, but then dropping that idea. China's NIO NIO had 700 battery swap stations for cars as of last December. I think they have plenty more now. The downside to it is you need a lot more batteries than cars. You need more than one battery per car in the system. A good logistical plan needs to be there. So charged batteries are available at the right place when someone drives in and needs them. You need to program for safety testing, responsibly disposing of older batteries. And you probably need a universal battery standard. If you want this to get to scale so that multiple car brands can use it. If you don't get to scale, it might end up being too expensive to catch on, at least for large vehicles. Then there's the question of whether customers would do it. Vehicle range is regularly in the 300s and going up as far as miles. Charging times are around 20 minutes and falling. And so the question is, is the extra 15 minutes compelling enough to get customers to pay for battery swap? When we came to the conclusion back in January that the best hope for battery swaps might be for fleets where scale and demand is kind of built in. You know how many cars you have and you control where they get parked and swapped. We mentioned a San Francisco company called Ample that had five swap stations in partnership with Uber and another company called Sally. However, protocols Lisa Martin Jenkins has revisited the topic in an article called What It Will Take for EV Battery Swapping to go mainstream in the US. Sarah, what did you find? Well, so Jenkins mentions that Ample as well, mentions Ample as well and describes more about its process. Ample puts an adapter plate in place of the normal battery, then it fits it with a smaller and lighter battery module, making them easier and cheaper to swap out than a standard battery in an EV. And that makes it easier to set up swapping stations. Ample CEO and co-founder Khalid Hasuna told Jenkins that if they get a couple of parking spots and a flat piece of land, they can set up a battery swap station within two weeks, takes five minutes to swap out a battery. Sounds pretty convenient. Ample has about 100 cars modified in the Bay Area, mostly with Uber. Company has plans to reach 1000 vehicles, though, and expand to Madrid and also Kyoto, Madrid, Spain, Kyoto, Japan before eventually marketing to individual owners. So knowing that, does it change anybody's mind? Well, it's not about changing minds so much as does it change the conditions for success? And the answer is maybe does it change your mind of the possibility for success? Yeah, yeah, maybe it does, but probably not. Smaller vehicles like Gogoro scooters are more likely to benefit. Two and three wheel vehicles right now make up 55% of battery swapping market. And India is close to a national battery swapping policy, but it's for two and three wheel vehicles, which are very common in India. As for full size passenger EVs, car makers seem to be focused on expanding charging networks, not looking into battery swapping. So it seems for cars and trucks, there's just not a lot being done there. And battery swapping still right now, if you asked me, seems to be best for fleets or the smaller vehicles, the two or three three wheel vehicles. Corey, I don't know if you have an EV or if you ever use an EV or think about this, do you? Yeah, I just typed into the chat. I have something to add on this. I do have an EV. I've got a level two charger in my house. We've got solar panels. We drive sunshine, but the thing that was the reason this sparked my interest is I'm actually playing hooky to speak to you from the project that I'm on for Electronic Frontier Foundation right now, which is writing comments for a federal docket on building up public charger infrastructure. There's about $8 billion in bipartisan infrastructure money to build chargers at about a 50 mile cadence. So on all the and not just across all interstates, but looking at specifically at underserved areas and the NPRM, the notice proposed rulemaking and the NOI that came before it are both really interesting and they're interesting in part for kind of how they progress. So if I went and read like all 500 comments in the notice of inquiry and there were some pretty hilarious inputs into it, like Tesla made these comments, they said, you know, you want to make sure that your your charger infrastructure is like suited to the vehicles on the road. And since 70 percent of the vehicles on the road are Teslas that are EVs, we should just make sure that 70 percent of the chargers only charge Teslas that are paid for with public money. That was hilarious. And then there was some job owning from the White House, where various people who are involved in this at the White House made some noises about maybe saying that if you were a vehicle made by a manufacturer that had its own network, but excluded rival cars from it, that you would not be eligible for public infrastructure. So only people who share get shared with and then like 24 hours later, Tesla announced that they were going to start sharing their charger infrastructure. One of the one of the weird and not great things about this otherwise very laudable initiative is that the underlying standards. There's about there's about five of them, about three of them are super proprietary and you have to pay like eight hundred dollars to look at them. And so we are on the verge of having a law, not the first one, but but a new one that will say in order to comply with this law, you will have to follow some conditions, but those conditions are behind a paywall. And so that is really like a weird kind of law to have, right? A law that you have to pay to see, but which you are still required to follow is not really a law like a bedrock since the law of the forest, which is the document that came before the Magna Carta that, you know, the kind of the OG Magna Carta, it establishes this bedrock principle that was, you know, it also shows up in the Magna Carta and the Constitution and lots of other foundational documents that it's not the law unless you can read and speak the law. You have to be able to see the law, duplicate the law and so on. And there's a real problem with these societies of engineers and industrial societies writing what amount of public safety standards that governments adopt by reference. So they'll say, you know, the plumbing code of East Pigs, Knuckle, Arkansas shall be this document from the American Society of Plumbers. Go buy a copy and, you know, you as someone who hires a plumber can't find out whether that plumber complied. You as a plumber have to go out and buy the document in order to follow the law. And that's just not good policy. And one of the things I've been really chewing on this week and the reason I'm glad to have a couple hours break before I go back to work on this document is what we're going to recommend. And I think we're going to say something like, look, if you look at this 800 page, seven hundred dollar, eight hundred dollar standard, there's only like four pages that are relevant to this part. And it's pretty clearly fair use to reproduce those in the law. So you should just reproduce those four pages and six diagrams or whatever in the statute and the regulation and just say, like, you must do this. And source it to the underlying document. Yeah. And just, just shepherd, that, that sounds like a good idea. Just shepherd it in that way. If you can get him to do it, that makes sense. It doesn't sound like there's anything in this bill that has to do with battery swapping that it is pretty much focused on recharging, right? Yeah, no. And I think that's right. Cause batteries, batteries swapping is like jam tomorrow, right? Like it requires that we have a different fleet of vehicles to the one that we have because they're, you know, all the, not with sending all this business about putting in a charge plate and a smaller battery and so on. The vehicles aren't designed to do this. So you'll always be cutting against the manufacturing and prerogatives of the, of the designers. And it's, it's, it's always going to be a collage. I mean, you know, there's a joke from Ireland that I often quote whose punchline is, uh, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. And you know, that's, I think that's where we are, right? Like we, we just have some, like vehicle turnovers, like a 10 and 15 year prospect, even EVs, which do in fact need a battery swap somewhere in there. But, you know, if you've got 15 years worth of fleet on the road, that won't be able to use battery swap, then you're kind of in this chicken and egg thing where you're building out battery swap infrastructure for cars that don't exist. And you have to run it in parallel with charger infrastructure for the cars that do exist. And obviously like the, the elephant in the room here is that geometry hates cars. And if you're going to build a city and you're going to try and solve its mobility issues with individual vehicles, you, you come up with this thing where you just like multiply the square footage of a car by the number of people in the city, by the miles they need to travel, and then you start realizing that this, that all the places they need to go are getting further and further apart as you add roads. And, you know, you are locked in this Red Queen's race where you need more roads to bring people places that are further apart because you added roads and then the places are further apart. So you need more roads again. You know, I've been going to Disneyland since I was 18 years old and I worked as an Imagineer for a while in Glendale and would drive down to Anaheim on the five and they've been widening the five since I was 18 years old. I'm 51 now. I remember driving that road when I was 18 in 1989 and going, God, this is terrible construction. It is now I think like 79 lanes wide in places. And permanently under construction too, right? It's a parking lot. Yeah. It is like there's a thing called induced demand, right? Like no matter how many lanes you add to the five, the five will be a parking lot. What it needs is a single high speed train and that would solve 95 percent of that traffic. Well, folks, if you've got thoughts on this or anything you want to hear about on the show, one way to let us know is in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. I have been following the story of Digital Locks, aka DRM, since the early part of the 20th century. And Corey, your work on Boing Boing, Crap Hound and all over the place, the EFF has has been very helpful over the years in helping me wrap my head around not only DRM, but also the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how that preserves digital locks and what effect it has on creative works in general. So I wasn't surprised and enjoyed reading your Twitter thread that you wrote earlier in July, explaining why you don't put your books on Audible and kind of going into the current state of digital rights management. What I really liked in the thread was your approach to the issue like a security problem. Can you talk a little bit about when you called a computer running a program with DRM, meaning like, you know, an Audible app or something like that, an adversaries computer, you called our computer an adversary to that program. Sure. Well, you know, we have a lot of different kinds of information security and security, as Bruce Schneier has been wanting to say, it doesn't exist in the abstract, right? You cannot be secure. You can only be secure from something, right? All the fire suppression systems in the world won't help you against burglars. And so every time you talk about a security measure, you have to talk about what you're trying to prevent. In the case of digital rights management, what you're trying to prevent is the owner of the computer doing something that is in their interest, but is against the interest of the shareholders of the company that have provided them with the software or the tool or the media or what have you. And that is a very odd kind of security model, right? It's actually not one we have a lot of experience with in the physical realm. It's, I mean, I guess you get things like if you stay at an Airbnb, there might be like a locked closet with the owner's personal things in it or what have you. But generally speaking, like if you own a thing, or even if you like are accustomed to using it, you are considered to be on the same side as that thing. And that thing is on the same side as you. You are collaborators and in doing stuff, right? We don't redesign our houses to make it easier for, you know, the cable company to make sure that we're not stealing cable. We're the ones living there. Yeah. Yeah, it's yours, right? DRM is weird because what it's saying is you own this computer and the computer's job is to stop you from doing what you want with it. And leaving aside all questions about whether we think it's good for people to do it, what the manufacturer is trying to stop or not. And we can talk about that too. I think that's a rich area to dig into. But there is just something foundationally cursed about designing a computer to police the actions of its owner, right? Because in order to do that, you really have to design the computer, not just to police the owner, but to hide how it works from the owner. Because like if there's an icon on your desktop labeled like DRM.exe, the first time you get a dialogue box on your screen with a glowing red eye that says, you know, I can't let you do that, Dave, you're going to go find that DRM.exe file and drag it into the trash, right? So in order for the DRM to work, there have to be files on your hard drive you can't see. There have to be processes running that you can't, that you can't see. And you have to not be able to terminate or alter those files or processes. Because if you can, because you are the adversary of your computer in this context, then you can defeat the security, right? It's like, you know, even really good bank safes are not kept in bank robbers' living rooms. Like we don't secure stuff by giving it to people we don't trust. It's just not, not how it works. And so, you know, you could, you could imagine if for some reason, banks decided that we all needed to have a bank vault in our living room that we couldn't open and then proceeded to insist that we also must now have cameras and microphones in our living rooms that are rolling 24 seven and that we can't cover or terminate so that they can make sure we're not robbing the vaults. We would all say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that, that doesn't sound right. And that's basically what DRM has turned our computers into. It's turned it into systems that run processes that are adverse to us. And again, like we could talk about whether it's fair or unfair to do the things that the manufacturer wants to stop you from doing, you know, I don't know, ripping a Netflix stream and watching it later or Amazon is notorious for taking all the Christmas movies off prime, starting in like late October and charging you two ninety nine to rent them and then restoring them in like February. So maybe you maybe you save them to your hard drive in September. We could we could say whether that's cool or not, but I think a much more important point from a computer user's perspective is that if there is a facility built into your computer to hide certain processes from you and someone else figures out how to use that process, right? If you've got a backdoor on your computer that lets programs run that you can't see or terminate and a bad guy figures out how to use them. Well, you are really screwed, right? Because by design, your computer can't see what's going on or stop it. So this this actually came up yesterday. They're Kaspersky just released data on a new UFE boot worm. They call it a boot kit that runs in the secure trusted computing module in your computer where the UFE is resident, the pre boot software, security software that by design, your computer just has to listen to and do what it says, can't inspect and can't terminate. And this malware dates back to at least 2016, but Kaspersky only found it this year because by design, this is an opaque black box, right? And it's an opaque black box because it's supposed to protect you. If you can look inside it and change what's going on, then someone could socially engineer you into undermining your own security or they might just take over your computer, you know, install a root kit somehow and then impersonating you to the computer, alter that that that boot locker. And so once that is compromised, right, then you get into this situation where it's like, I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me, right? That the bad guy is inside the house and you were locked in with him. And it's and you point out in your thread that you're we're dealing with general purpose computers, right? These these aren't appliances. These aren't single single function items that they're meant to do lots of things. So it's a matter of who can get it to do what and you own it. And there's people, malicious actors, the publisher and you all fighting over what that software should do. Oh yeah. And you know, I want to make a clear distinction here between like you deciding to remove some capabilities from your computers to protect yourself. Like I'm not saying that you should be able to play doom on your dishwasher, right? But but I'm saying that when someone else gets to make that call and when they make it specifically to stop you from doing things that you want because it's better for them. If you don't get your way, that's a really different circumstance. Like I'm in my office right now and my door, the way that my door opens, it could hit a framed picture that's on the wall behind the door and one of those little like door jams, right? That that stops like those little pegs at the baseboard. That's fine, right? Like my general purpose hinge remains general purpose. It can still yawn open to the full 270 degrees hypothetically. But I've got I've chosen to restrict the field of motion of that of that hinge. And that's fine, right? Because it's consensual. It's under my control. And from a security perspective, you don't need to somehow lock that peg in place to stop me from release, removing it, right? If I if I, you know, if I get a new sofa for my office and I need to open the door an extra two inches wider and I take the picture off the wall and take that peg off, that's my own damn business, right? And yeah, yeah. And it you know, there are circumstances in which you are going to want to do things that the manufacturer doesn't want you to do for reasons that are totally orthogonal to their financial interests and that are really about the exigencies of the moment. You know, there's a company called Medtronic. They're the largest med tech company in the world. It's thanks to a bunch of acquisitions followed by the world's largest tax inversion where they essentially had a tiny Irish company by them. But it was really the other way around so that they could hide their their money and not pay tax. And they bought all the companies that make ventilators. And so they're now the one company, the biggest, you know, sort of 800 pound gorilla ventilators. And they use these things called VinLocks on their ventilators that stop you from swapping a part in. And then turning the ventilator back on, it needs an unlock code delivered by a technician. And so this is just like a side revenue thing for them where, you know, if a hospital like harvests a donor screen from a dead ventilator and puts it in a ventilator with a crack screen, they then have to pay a technician $200 to fly out and type an unlock code in. And that's kind of odious and gross. Like again, like we can talk about whether the restriction is fair, but what was really bad about it is what happened during the pandemic. When we needed all the ventilators we could get and none of their technicians could get on an airplane. And that became like this very critical moment where hospitals were losing access to their ventilators because the manufacturer put a component or a design choice in place in the early days of the design process that did not anticipate a once in a century pandemic. And, you know, there was no way to sort of travel back in time and undo that. And section 12, one of the digital millennium copyright act, which you mentioned earlier, this law that Clinton signed in 1998 makes it a felony to produce and share a tool to remove that DRM, to remove that Vinlock. It's actually punishable by a $500,000 fine in a five-year prison sentence. My goodness. It's this is why you don't get them, right? This is why like, yeah, you can download a code from the internet to unlock your appliance or whatever. But like you can't you can go into a mall kiosk and they'll swap the battery and screen on your phone. But you can't go into a mall kiosk and jailbreak your phone because not because it's harder but because they don't want to go to prison for five years and no one wants to sell them a tool to do it that might send them to prison for five years. And so what this does, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no. I was just one last point before we wrap up. Sure. Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say. So what this does, I thought you had one last point. So what this does is it encourages manufacturers to add like a kind of one millimeter thick layer of DRM to their product, because if removing the DRM is illegal, then anything that you want to do that requires that you first remove the DRM becomes illegal. So Jay Freeman, the guy who started the the SIDIA project, which was like the alternate app store for iOS, he calls this felony contempt of business model. And and we see this kind of DRM being used to lock people into consumables, into repairs, into certain usage of media. And so does it. A lot of John Deere does it. But you know, coffee makers and toaster ovens and just like all kinds of stuff you're seeing it pop up. And it's like it's not a copyright violation to use your own coffee and your coffee maker. But because you have to bypass a digital lock to do it, it becomes an area of copyright. And to return to where we started here, my little article about why you can't buy my books on Audible, Audible, which sells 90% of the science fiction audio books in the world requires DRM. They won't let you choose not to have DRM. And that means that every customer of mine who buys one of my books on Audible, whatever they spent 24 95 is now 24 95 they have to forfeit if they quit Audible because I can't give them a tool to unlock the DRM and go somewhere else. And so I don't want to lock my customers to Amazon's platform because we know that like even companies that aren't as rapacious as Amazon, they're not charities. And if they can find a way to squeeze a supplier, they will. And if they know that I am dependent on them because my customers have sunk thousands of dollars into audible audio books and they're not going to leave even if I leave the platform, then they will use that as leverage to squeeze me. And so long term, DRM is handing Amazon a stick to beat me with. And so I won't let my books be sold on Amazon or on Audible rather, but of course Audible, the way that they figure out whether someone who proposes to upload an audio book to them for sale has the rights is whether there's already an Audible edition. And so I get all these pirates like actual pirates, not fans trading audio books, but people who have trick narrators into recording audio editions of books that there are audio editions for and putting them on Amazon on Audible. And the only edition you can find when you search on Audible is this pirate edition. And so the full title of the article is like, why my books aren't available on Audible and why Amazon owes me $3,200 because I got an email for one of these narrators saying a scammer tricked me into recording your book by claiming they had the rights. I didn't know any better. And do you want the book because it's not on Amazon anymore? And I was like, wait, wait, wait, what happened? And he was like, yeah, we we sold 129 copies and that's three thousand two hundred and something dollars, which frankly, Amazon owes me. Though I didn't come to you. Yeah, well, we could talk for a lot longer about this and we will talk more about it on the extended show, folks. But that's going to do it for DTNS. Big thanks to Len Peralta, who's been illustrating today's show. Well, check it real quick, Len. What have you drawn today? Well, you know, you should actually read the article that that Cori wrote. And one of the things I pulled out of it was Dr. O's first law, which, of course, is any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, but won't give you the key. That lock is not there for your benefit. So yeah, this is available right now on my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store. Look at the little hand. The key. It's over at Len Peralta store.com. So check it out. Excellent. Good to have you back, Len. Cori Doctor, also such a pleasure to have you. Let folks know besides Audible where they can find you on the Nets. Yeah, so I do a daily kind of blog thing at pluralistic.net. It's mirrored as a Twitter thread and also as a master on thread and it's on Medium and it's on Tumblr. I simultaneously publish it everywhere. So if you go to pluralistic.net, you'll see the links to how you can get it. You can get it any way you want. And all of that is surveillance free, ad free, tracker free. I don't know how many people subscribe because I don't get a count because I've turned all that stuff off. So it's just me shouting into the void. And the only thing I, the only feedback I get is when people send me email or notes or whatever. And then, you know, my books are available everywhere. Books are sold. I have a new one coming out in September called Showpoint Capitalism that I wrote with my friend Rebecca Ghiblin. She's an Australian copyright professor. And it's about how creative labor markets are rigged by both big tech and big content and how we can unrig them. Well, things that you can do as an artist or a member of an artist group or fan or someone in local government or a technologist to really take concrete steps to unrig those labor markets and divert more of the revenue from creative work to the creators who make it. That's great. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Corey. Also, special thanks to Bill Russell. Bill Russell is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Bill, if you're listening, we would like to thank you for all the years of support. Thank you, Bill. And the also patrons stick around for the extended show. As Tom mentioned, Good Day Internet rolls right in in just a sec. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern, twenty hundred UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live join us live if you can. We hope you all have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday with Nick. Come on for joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host, producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuntz, technical producer, Anthony Limos, Spanish language, host, writer and producer, Dan Campos. News host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding, our mods. Beatmaster, W. Scottis, one bio cow, Captain Kipper, gadget virtuoso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens and JD Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Way, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. Acast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Terence Gaines, I. Azaktar, Scott Johnson, Lamar Wilson and Chris Christensen. Guests on this week's show included Demetris Jenakis and Corey Doctorow. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at Frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.