 Coming up on D T N S a proposal to fix safe harbor for tech companies. Why Apple is punishing a base camp email app and whether AI will replace artists like Scott Johnson. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 17, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from irreplaceableartist.com. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Shane, the show's producer. Man, we were talking about the proper way to communicate with people over the internet, how we'll be ruled by our chat bots. Sarah's deep explorations into the world of TikTok. You can't miss good day internet folks. You got to become a member and get it at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook has added an option for US users to turn off political advertising, which will roll out over the next few weeks. The option will pop up when a user sees political, electoral and social issue ads. The option will come to other countries this autumn as well. The company also announced a voting information center in the US with information on registering, requesting mail-in ballots, deadlines and other voted related information. Well, at the same time, Qualcomm launched a new 5G chipset. Snapdragon 690 meant for budget phones. Snapdragon 690 does not support MM wave and does promise 20% better CPU performance and 60% faster graphics rendering. Snapdragon 6 snap dragon 690 also supports 120 Hertz refresh rates and 4K HDR video capture. The first phones with the budget chip will arrive by the end of the year from H M D L G Motorola sharp and TCL. Yeah, someone had some $200 5G phones and apparent price leak of the upcoming Sony PlayStation five appeared on Amazon's French website listing the standard PlayStation five at 499 euros and the digital edition that's the one without the physical drive at 399 euros. That would roughly mean a US price of $499 and $399. That Amazon page also listed a release date of November 20 2020 in France. The page has been taken down and it's hard to tell whether Amazon was using real information or just plugging in its best guess. But there you go. Zoom will launch an option for AES 256 GCM transport end to end encryption on its beta version in July. This is for all users. Previously, Zoom said it would only launch end to end encryption for paid users. A toggle switch will now be available to call admins to turn on or off. It will have to be off to let users join and then free users who want the feature will have to provide additional verification such as verifying a phone number by text message. Zoom says that this is meant to stop mass creation of accounts. It'll have to be off to let phone users join. So if somebody's on a like telephone, you can't have ended encryption. Everybody's on the internet though. You can. Let's talk a little more about a Siri shortcut. Sure, why not? The Siri shortcut I'm getting pulled over developed by Robert Peterson in 2018 has been updated and gained new popularity lately. The shortcut is triggered when you say to Siri, I'm getting pulled over and then dims your phone. In this case, your iPhone, everybody knows where Siri comes from, I guess pauses any audio playback records video from the front facing camera and can send location and copy that video to an emergency contact that you would, you know, you would set that up. The shortcut is free on the app store for users of iOS 12 and up and needs to be granted permission to you. Yeah, you do have to do a little work. You have to go into settings and say, use allow untrusted Siri shortcuts. If you don't, the default is for that to be off so that you don't accidentally put something malicious on there. So there's a tiny bit of a risk to allowing these sorts of things, but the shortcut itself is perfectly fine. It's been vetted. And yeah, this would, I mean, you wouldn't have to use it when you're getting pulled over. You could use it whenever. But if you say I'm getting pulled over, it's going to dim your phone and start recording, which is the perfect situation. If you're someone who historically has had bad interactions and wants to make sure that that you're you've got a record of what went on and you got your hands on the wheel and you're wallet out and all of that. This is a way to to kind of let people know what happened. I had a situation at a Costco long time ago. This was, oh, I don't know, a couple of years ago now where I'd gotten on my car was getting ready to leave and I noticed somebody yelling and coming my direction. Great big dude coming my direction toward the car, telling me to wrote on my window and he was coming fast and kind of scary and it looked like as in trouble. And I remember thinking, well, this is about to go down. I hope someone films it. I don't know what's wrong. This could go real south real fast. And it turns out it wasn't that I'd left a car or something in the store and he was being really nice and returning it. He just resting angry body or whatever. I don't know what to call it, but he just looked really mad at me. It would have been cool had it really been an altercation that was about to go down for me to have a thing like this. There are obviously a ton of use cases for this, but to be able to document a little bit and say, yeah, this is what actually happened and have some audio, have some video. And I can see why this is taking on new popularity given current circumstances. I think it's actually kind of a cool idea. The fact that it's been around since 2018, I had not heard of this before. And place of privilege, I suppose, because there are probably people who are like, oh, I knew about it or I wish I knew about it because this is something that I would have needed. But the thing is, just because you might be getting pulled over, which is insinuated that you're going to have to talk to a police person on the side of the road or wherever and maybe it's dark and maybe it's late and maybe things go awry or maybe they don't. It doesn't mean that, oh, this is something terrible is about to happen to me. But just to have that kind of backup more and more these days seems like, well, it doesn't hurt you. It doesn't hurt you to at least have your side of the story that could help you later on if indeed something does kind of end up sounding a little sus. Yeah, I'm lucky enough to feel like I don't need this. But not everybody is. That's just the world we live in. And especially folks who are black, you know, we've heard Chris Ashley and Rob Dunwood talk on SMR podcast about like, yeah, they have that wallet out when they're driving around because they don't want to have to reach in their pocket and have a misunderstanding. This is protection for those kinds of situations to be able to show what happened. And if you really, really, if you really just want to sing a song and it's come to your brain, you don't want to fiddle with your phone or take your eyes off the road or remove your hands from the wheel, it can act as that too. Just a moment of like, I've got to sing this song and send it to my mom. She's your emergency contact. She hears you sing it. Everybody wins. So there's a little happy way to use it as well. Yeah, your mom's like, you said it was an emergency, but I like the song as well. Thanks, Scott. Moving on, a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing has developed a tool called Deep Face Drawings that can take a rough sketch and then produce high quality artistic images from that sketch. The deep learning system was trained on facial components and can recognize them in a sketch to pull together detailed versions that then work together into a complete image. The technology will be presented at SIGGRAPH in July. Yeah, so the big advance algorithmically here is that it's able to recognize the components of a face even when it's me drawing, right? Like, oh, those must be eyes and that must be eyebrows and that that's hair. And it's able, it has learned. It's been trained on a dataset to figure out like, okay, so that would correspond to this type of hair, which usually goes with this type of forehead, which corresponds to what they have and create a picture that looks good. There's been a lot of algorithms try to do this sort of thing and it ends up looking kind of like a Picasso. Like, they just don't quite fit together. This one apparently works fairly well. Yeah, it's quite the advancement. So I actually have a case of a use case for this that could be potentially devastating to a certain sector of sort of art employment. And it's this, in the games industry, if you're somebody like, I don't know, company making the next big RPG, and we could use an example like the old Baldur's Gate games or something, those games, one of the hallmarks of them is that you get to build a team of characters. And not only that, but you get to be very customized about what their portraits look like. And this is true of many games. We'll just use that as an example. So there is dozens, if not hundreds of portraits to choose from, that were all created by artists who were all paid to do this because it's a very specific skill and some look like, you know, brutish barbarians and others look like wizards and whatever. You have this big range of stuff. In theory, this has incredible potential to autofill for a development company, all that stuff, and they suddenly have a gigantic cost lifted from them. Or the next step of this, by the way, is a player being able to say, yeah, kind of like this, but I want to tweak it a little bit. The eyes are too far apart. I want to, you know, give them a bigger nose. I want them to look like me, whatever. All that kind of customization comes into these things as well. And suddenly you have blocked out the need entirely for portrait artists to create fantasy portraits or portraits of faces that look painterly. We're not talking about just reconstructing human faces here. We're talking about a stylistic look to an artistic representation of a face. In theory, in the short term, that kills a bunch of art jobs, potentially, in that industry and others. But maybe I don't, I'm having actually a hard time seeing what the long term is where I'll give you one. So what so what this can do for me is I can do a sketch on my computer and have the character created, right? It's much easier to do that than to sit there and painstakingly, you know, pick one out in a character builder screen. But somebody needs to have created the art for the orc, for the undead, for the kind of character. So while the tedious work of having to create all these different versions can go away, artists can still be employed to do master versions and potentially get paid more for that because it's higher quality work. That's a good point. So I hope that is what ends up happening because part of me is stoked about this and then part of me is just a little nervous for people who are in that in that world. Yeah, sure. It's always nervous until you know what that it's nervous. Like you mentioned this on Twitter. It's nervous for accountants to see Lotus 123 until they realize, oh, this is going to free us up to do a bunch of other work we were never able to do and we're not going to all lose our jobs. There you go. So yeah, you got to get a see if that's going to happen and you got to manage that transition. Don't just assume it's going to happen either. Yeah. Hey, you know what we can all agree on all the major parties in the United States hate section 230 of the communication decency act and a group of U.S. senators has introduced a proposal to amend that act to limit the safe harbor protections of section 230. Now you'd be forgiven if you're like, didn't they already do this? Yeah, they have a dozen times in multiple different variations. But this is the first time they've got one that's very narrow and seems likely if passed to survive court tests. Section 230 of the CDA in the United States grants a company immunity from liability for and I'm going to quote the act here. You get immunity from liability for any action voluntarily taken in good faith. So you as the company are saying I'm doing my best here to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable. You're basically saying we're not going to punish you if you moderate. If you take something down, we're not going to say, oh, well, now you're responsible for everything everyone says on your platform. The person who said it is so responsible section 230 gives you the ability to moderate things without taking responsibility for what everybody's saying. This new proposal from Senator Holly at all would define good faith. Remember it said you have to take that action in good faith as fair dealing and not acting in good faith as selective enforcement of the terms of service, either by a human or algorithm. So what they're trying to do in this law is say if you don't follow your own terms of service when you're applying this to everybody, then you lose your section 230 protection. If you fail to show this definition of good faith, you lose your immunity from lawsuits. The provision would only apply, however, to services with more than 30 million US monthly users and more than $1.5 billion in global revenue, which I can count on probably one, maybe two hands. The US Department of Justice is also working on guidelines that emphasize section 230 does not shield companies from liability for facilitating federal crimes. That has been part of section 230 from the beginning. It says like, hey, if somebody is committing a crime and you know about it, you don't get immunity from that. You have to do your best to help law enforcement and take it down. Most companies are not in trouble for that. But this other thing says if you're not enforcing your terms of service for some people on your platform, but are for other people on your platform, you would then lose your immunity. What they're asking for is they're they're asking for exceptions for the parties, and that's kind of it. I mean, I understand I understand this whole idea, which is complete and utter. We don't pick a side. We just enforce the rules as they're currently stated, but that's never gonna work. Okay, Scott opinion time. I'm doing an off. Here goes. Here's here's how this works. You got one side who's mad at Mark Zuckerberg. Give you a real world example. They're mad at Zuckerberg because Zuckerberg is not going to bother with correcting anybody's posts about misinformation from high places in office. And at the exact same time, there was another group of people mad at Zuckerberg because Zuckerberg is doing that thing you mentioned earlier about Facebook. Or earlier in today's show even about Facebook not giving people the option to opt out of political advertising or political stuff like that. In general, one side sees that as inflammatory. The other side says no, that's great and good. Same with the other side. Like I don't know how that ever gets resolved. I don't think there's anything as anything such as a it's get resolved in the courts. What this does is say if someone thinks that the terms of service are not being applied fairly, they can take you to court and hold you responsible for the thing at issue. So it will result in lots more court cases and it could result. I'm not saying it will, but it could result in companies saying, you know what? We're not going to moderate that because Section 230 says we don't have to. We're not responsible for what's on our platform, no matter even if we know it's there. So maybe we'll just back off on that and only go after the federal crimes, which would then allow people to say all kinds of things on whatever perspective they're coming from, which I don't think a lot of other people want. So I don't know this might make it through the Senate. I don't know that it will make it through the House. And so I think we're going to have to wait until this election is over to really see something like this take off. But I think it's interesting that they're really narrowing it. They're narrowing it every time. I think the problem with Section 230 is that the first court case, Zaren versus AOL, ruled that federal immunity to any cause of action was a result of Section 230. And the case law before that said, well, if you're a distributor, which is what Section 230 said, is like just because you're moderating doesn't make you a publisher. You're a distributor. You're only responsible for the stuff you know is there. And if they had built something on that without giving them blanket immunity, we have gotten rid of a lot of the problems we have. So I think there needs to be something that really narrows in on best good faith efforts to remove things you know are illegal, not to enforce your terms of service fairly, because all that will do is force people to change their terms of service so that they don't have to get into this quagmire. And I don't know that that has the the actual result that you wanted to have. Google is rolling out the ability to buy a subscription to an app from the Google Play store page. So instead of having to install the app and then tap through to buy a subscription, you can do that all at once. You can also resubscribe to services that you previously paid for through Google Play. Developers can also offer free trials at install as well with details about how long the trial lasts and when it will cost, when it's over, details like that. The feature is launching with a limited number of developers to start and Google will also start emailing you when a free trial is ending. Now pop up a reminder just to make sure if you want to install an app that has an ongoing subscription so you might want to cancel so that you aren't charged unfairly. Yeah, the main the main deal here is bringing the subscription information to the Play Store listing in a way that makes it easy to see and puts it in context. So if I'm like, hey, I'm going to install with the free trial. I don't want to have to dig around for the free trial once I'm in the app. I'll be able to see what that trial is. Oh, this trial is for two months and after that it goes to $1,000 a month. No, I don't think I want that, right? Or oh, this free trial is for three months. After that it's $2.99 a month. Okay, maybe that's fine. And I love that. I love giving you more information at the point of download to make it easier so you don't have to click through a bunch of confusing stuff once you're in the app because that's how a lot of this fleeceware gets you is confusing you once they're inside the app. And this clears a lot of stuff up. There's also times where you know when you go in there, when you're going to get that app that you plan to subscribe like some certain health apps or something like that. You just know you're going to. I like that you're just being educated up front about it and choosing then it skips a lot of steps. Like there's like a huge factor here that I really like. So all of that combined with hey reminding you know reminding me later that I'm still subscribed to this. I think is a great fair way to offset some of that as well. I really like it. I hope others follow suit. I think it's good. The more I thought about it, the more I like it. One thing I really like is Daily Tech headlines. You can get it each day in about five minutes. Go subscribe at DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, we mentioned this briefly yesterday when we were talking about the EU beginning its investigation into Apple's requirement that you use its payment service in its apps on the Apple App Store. Monday, Basecamp launched a subscription email client called Hey for iOS and as often happens Basecamp had to push the bug fix Monday as well. That's normal. Sometimes you put a thing up and then you're like oh got the bug fixes right away. But the bug fix version was not approved and a second attempt to push a bug fix version was rejected on Tuesday. Hey did not use Apple's in app payment system to allow subscribers to sign up inside their app. You have to go to the Hey website to get an account. That's because Apple doesn't allow third party payment systems. It's all or nothing. Apple doesn't allow you to even mention where to pay to get a service in your app. And that might be Hey's problem. Throt.com says Hey had a note in its app explaining that users could go to the web and pay there instead. Apple doesn't let you do that. Now if it was simple as that I feel like this would have been resolved. They would have taken that language out and that would have been the end of it. But I saw no other references to that being the issue. If that was not the case you would think just making people go to a website to get a subscription wouldn't be a problem. Kindle does that. Netflix does that. There's no no reference to subscribing in the Kindle or Netflix apps. You know you have to go to Kindle's Amazon's website or Netflix's website to sign up there. Those are considered what Apple calls reader apps. And as long as they have no mention of subscriptions they're fine. But the Verge reports that the problem is that email apps are not considered reader apps. Just let the irony of that fly by. It'll just get the way of you understanding this. Apple apparently only lets music, video and magazine apps be reader apps. And any other kind of app must offer an Apple payment based subscription option if there's any subscription option anywhere else in the world. This is the first time I've heard this. However the Verge notes that there are examples like the subscription email app Newton which does not use Apple's in app payments. So apparently they were making mistakes in letting Newton in and letting the first version of Hay in because of that. Also Basecamp itself, the Basecamp app works the same way. With Basecamp you pay Basecamp for the service then you get the app on iOS and you log in. There's no in app payment system for Basecamp. Well, Apple told Protocol that apps can offer subscriptions elsewhere and not use the Apple in app payments if they're a business service like Basecamp. But not a consumer product like Hay. Basecamp's lead iOS developer Zach Waugh got a call from Apple saying that the issue had escalated. Apple had reviewed it and determined it was a valid rejection. So this wasn't just a reviewer having a bad day and on the call the Apple rep said they wanted a timeline for the fix so they might have to remove the existing version of Hay from the app store. Remember there's a buggy version that's still in there. Now Apple isn't requiring all users sign up through Apple. They're just requiring Hay offer the Apple option in the app. You can still go to the website and sign up that way and not have to give Apple 30%. What they're asking is if you're having a subscription anywhere you have to offer the Apple subscription in your app. Basecamp CEO David Heinmeyer Hansen told protocol quote there is never in a million years a way that I am paying Apple a third of our revenues. That's obscene and it's criminal and I will spend every dollar that we have or ever make to burn this down until we get to somewhere better. Yeah got a little bit of an axe to grind. Heinmeyer Hansen is not new to this topic. He testified to the U.S. Congress earlier this year about any competitive practices for big text. So he's definitely making an example of this. But what have we learned here? Apple's policy is simple. If you offer a subscription for your app service you have to also offer it through Apple's in-app purchase system on iOS and give Apple 15 to 30% of that revenue. Unless you're a reader app like Kindle or Netflix that's for music books or video. There's also an exemption for business services like Microsoft Office or Basecamp. Oh and I didn't mention there's also an exemption for premium video providers that integrate core Apple services like Airplay, Universal Search, Siri and Single Sign-On. Amazon Prime Video is one of those as is Altice One and Canal Plus. Oh and apparently Newton is somehow an exception though we don't know why. But it's that simple. Or maybe Apple just doesn't like Heinmeyer Hansen. I don't know. Yeah this is one of these things where you go like okay a company tried to circumvent Apple's well-known rules that you just have to offer subscription options. You can do it outside of iOS but you have to at least offer the option within the store. You know whether you like that or not that is you know the Basecamp folks who are the makers of this email client hey they would know that. You know there's no way they could be like what? Never heard of it. So in that sense you're kind of like what's really going on here? What they're doing is saying we don't want to pay you 30% ever. And we just you know there are other examples of these other apps that get around this. So we don't want to be singled out. You know and I don't I'm not gonna the fact that you know Basecamp is pretty well established definitely would be considered a business service and whether or not they could argue that hey could also be a business service and maybe get around you know some of the language that Apple is saying well that's why you were flagged in the first place maybe there are some options here. It sounds like there's some bad blood though and you know there might be a little bit more to this story. Check out this quote from epics Tim Sweeney found co-founder and current CEO of Epic. They say this in response to this and this is what there's this is actually what they're getting at is a lot of chatter from a lot of other CEOs or other people weighing in he says here Apple speaks of level playing fields to me this means all iOS developers are free to purchase so excuse me process payments directly all users are free to install software from any source in this endeavor Epic will never seek or accept a special deal just for ourselves so a little solidarity from Epic who doesn't I mean Epic Epic has Fortnite and a big whole lot of people play Fortnite on iOS so I don't know how that works with them and buying micro transactions and all that stuff but they you know they're in solidarity with these email guys so it's interesting to see that. Yeah I mean I admire Hanson's definitely picking a fight here right like this would not be happening in public if he wasn't constantly tweeting about it but also I don't think Apple can really seriously expect people to accept like it's very simple we just have these 15 exceptions and they don't fit one of them like that's right yeah I mean even one exception you know you're like well just explain why that one works and maybe there's a loophole that you know we can take advantage of or maybe there's you know something in the you know the the fine print that we you know we could change and it would be okay and that's the thing is like Apple and anybody who works with you know putting apps into the app store and certainly updating apps and you know stuff like that which happens constantly like yeah little security update I mean you're pushing new versions of apps all the time the fact that so many developers don't really know you know what happens when they get rejected I mean sometimes they do but often they don't and because Apple is just not really transparent about that stuff that probably needs to change not not to mention that having the exception for readers you know and and prime videos means that consumers suffer we have the bad experience of like why can't I buy something in the Kindle app why can't I buy why can't I subscribe to Netflix through the app Apple would say well they should provide an in app payment but I get why Netflix and Amazon are like we're not giving you 30% we're not a developer just starting out and reaping all the benefit of your app store we're a big company we can handle payment systems ourselves we don't need to pay you for that yeah well and now they make an exception for those guys and not others and that's why what they don't for Kindle Kindle has to has to accept its payments off they make some kind of exception but not all kind of right prime prime was in jail for a long time and now prime isn't and it's like wait a minute what did prime do to change that like it's just that's the problem it feels like there's not a you know speaking of section 230 or whatever it's like this case where they're not getting fair treatment to every side and I think that's bad for Apple ultimately they gotta figure that out make them all or don't well if you've got thoughts on this I bet I know where you could find others who do as well and that's in our discord you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns all right folks let's check out the mail bag let's do it this one comes from Sakane who was commenting on our conversation last Thursday with Justin Marbury Young and Justin saying that AB5 California bill was indeed a bad bill because it solved the wrong problem this is the gig economy bill most drivers I spoke to says Sakane didn't want to be classified as employees anyway they felt that it would take away their freedom their gripe specifically was that as independent contractors drivers had no say at all in the terms of the contract gig companies are infamous for arbitrary lowering pay instituting penalties for not accepting undesirable gigs deactivation without cause among other things if they don't like it their only recourse is to quit and the company can onboard someone else who's working for willing to work for less money Sakane says I'm sure that if sub-brillion LLC were just to email Sarah one day and say hey we're cutting your pay by 40% and the next time you miss a show to take notice to the vet you're fired there'd be some kind of reckoning I certainly hope so Sakane but this is the kind of looming promise that gig workers have to deal with every day and most of them aren't financially secure enough to just say no this is the kind of predatory behavior that any legislation should be looking to address maybe then we could afford our own workers comp insurance yeah this is a problem for drivers and I like the way Sakane put it in fact Sakane has written for us over the years many great columns about being a private driver and the perspective from that side of it which is like oh sure I can quit and go to lift but that doesn't really help a lot because you need most of these you need to do multiples of these to be able to scrape a living by and we just don't have any leverage over the companies and that's why I it's my opinion right now still that what you need is a new bill that addresses the gig economy because it's new not one that is applied to every business and affects some better than others and doesn't really as Justin said necessarily address the problem yeah my door-dash person today showed up this total anecdotal but they pulled up and as they pulled up I watched them sort of grabbing for the food on their seat and then I watched them look at their dash and then almost like in a hurried way swapped their lift for their uber sign and then brought me door-dash food yep and then probably ran off to do an uber pickup you know like there's no question that a lot of this stuff's all happening at once because that's again like you said Tom how he's great about a living I just thought that was interesting just I'd never really seen that before somebody's spinning three plates today and I hope they a lot of plates yeah I hope they got good tips that's all I hope well shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including John Johnston Chris Smith and Jeff Wilkes also thanks to the one the only Scott Johnson Scott what's been going on with you Fred and can well so today this week rather ends a little mini story arc I had that's ended a little sadly and it wasn't really intended to be it's supposed to be mostly a funny comic strip but instead it kind of went places and also it's ridiculous so if you want to see how things turned out for let's call them call it a can of cream corn new friend go check it out at fredandcan.com you can get the comic every week it's 100% free it's just there for you to take if you're 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our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com if you have feedback for us we'd love to hear it we're also live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young I won't be there ho they'll be working on know a little more but they'll talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover