 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Philip Lass, Daniel Dorado, and Howard Yermish. Coming up on DTNS, virtual reality tries to make it as a K-pop group. Why do we put up with the ridiculousness that is terms of service and using chatbots to talk to yourself as a child? Not like you're a child, but like yourself when you were a child. Will explain. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 12th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From New York City, I'm Ayaz Akhtar. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. This is some good stuff. You're not gonna find this stuff anywhere else. Everybody else is just gonna be like telling you the same old rehash takes on SBF and Twitter. We have better tech news for you here. Let's start with the quick hits. This is Twitter news, but relevant Twitter news. The company relaunched Twitter Blue subscription service in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. The service cost $8 per month when signing up on the web or $11 per month through iOS because of course there's that iOS that takes its cut. Twitter's director of product management, Esther Crawford, said that it added a view step for applying a blue check mark to accounts. So changing a handle, changing the display name or profile photo will remove your blue verification mark and spur another review to see that you actually deserve another check mark. Twitter also began testing blue for business, showing gold check marks for businesses who previously had a relationship with Twitter. This will open new businesses soon and the company also plans to use gray check marks for government and multilateral accounts. Over the weekend, if you're keep and count because boy does this story change frequently, Twitter also began really not its crowdsource community denotes a feature to all users globally. That feature began testing last year under the name Birdwatch. Previously only US users could see notes so it's opening up to mores now. Yeah, but see things that actually happened, not just like maybe, I don't know, somebody said. Bloomberg sources say Japan and the Netherlands agreed in principle to join the US with tighter export controls on advanced chip making equipment to China, impacting anything under 14 nanometers in the chip making process. This would block access to tools that are almost essential if you wanna make chips from Dutch lithography specialist ASML and Japan's Tokyo Electron, both are critical suppliers in the chip making industry. Now, when the MatterSmart home standard launched back in October, it supported controllers. You know, that was the first. Now we have the first wave of matter enabled devices. EVE systems began rolling out an optional update to its threat enabled EVE energy smart plug, door and window contact sensor and motion sensor to add matter supports. Those devices previously only supported Apple home now they can be used by any matter enabled controller. So here we go, it's our first wave. Upgrading will not impact any existing functionality. However, features like autonomous schedules, energy monitoring only work with Apple home. So EVE CEO Jerome Gackle told the Verge earlier this year, this was part of a custom device function in Matter Apple and that didn't translate to other platforms necessarily. Yeah, so early days. Not all features are cross platform, just the most essential ones. Meta told LightReading.com that it has folded Meta Connectivity into the company's infrastructure and central products groups. Meta Connectivity launched back in 2013 looking to extend Facebook's network to more users by improving those users connectivity. So that was when you heard about Facebook doing solar powered drones, fiber laying robots, low orbit satellites, that kind of stuff. So they haven't shut it down entirely but they've definitely turned it into less of a priority, merged it into some other groups. The cyberspace administration of China issued regulations forbidding the use of deep synthesis service providers to alter facial or voice data known as deep fakes without consent. The new rules go into effect January 10th. They also decommissioned their, the national COVID tracking app, they're still local ones but the national one, they just shut it down. Doesn't even work anymore, that's weird. And that's the quick hits. Virtual singing stars, aka idols, have been popular in many parts of the world, particularly in Japan for years. The most famous being Hatsune Mikkei who debuted in August of 2007. If you're a fan, if you know, you know. But now K-pop is getting in on the act and has been for some time using more modern technology. The BBC has an article up today about a Korean singing group called Eternity made entirely of virtual characters, no humans involved. But before we discuss how that is possible and why it is popular, Tom, let's go back a little bit into some things we need to know about K-pop. Yeah, sure. Here's some quick background. If you're unfamiliar with how K-pop works, just mostly around the terminology, groups generally have any number of members but it kind of centers around four to nine. But there are even bigger ones. 17 has 13 members. It's a long story. A group's debut is a big deal. So they always talk about the debut in specific terms. That's when their first come onto the stage. Sometimes they put the music out before debut but they usually have a big deal about the debut. And then each album after the debut is called a comeback. Even in Korea, you call it a comeback. Even if like KARA, they've been here for years. A group's members are called logically enough members. So that seems to make sense. Sometimes a song will be performed by a subset of members. That's often called a unit or a line. If all the rappers in a group do a song and it's just them, you might call it the rap line. Groups are signed to management companies, AKA labels. Some of the biggest are JYP, which includes Twice and Stray Kids. YG, which includes Blackpink. And of course, HYBE, which not only includes Ariana Grande, but also BTS. Eternity, however, was not created by one of those existing labels. Yeah, so Eternity was created by a tech company called Pulse9 using some deep technology they call Deep Real. The group debuted on March 22nd, 2021 with a single called I'm Real, followed by No Filter. You might know both of these songs, maybe, you know. You probably don't. It's possible, somebody does out there. Eternity's comeback though was two songs released in November. So just a couple of months ago, Eternity has 11 members, but so far each song has been performed by a unit, including one song as a solo. Now, another thing about K-pop groups is that they often involve fans in the creation of the group to build engagement. This could be anything from social media reveals, you know, to get people excited. BTS kind of pired near this on YouTube, but some like is one, are created by a full-on reality show where fans vote on which members end up in the group and hyphen was done that way as well. Eternity was started by using algorithms to generate 101 faces, and then fans voted on their favorite faces, and the winners were designed and animated by the company. Oh my goodness. Okay, so Eternity's faces were then defaked onto real humans, singing and dancing, so they looked pretty real, meaning Eternity can do videos, they can do live chats, they can do online fan meets. Why not? They're people, sort of. But the avatars have no actual relation to real people's appearances. Pulse 9's CEO, Park Jeon, emphasized to the BBC that these are fictional characters. She said the company follows the EU's draft ethical AI guidelines, and she also believes that the benefits that the individual performers are shielded from the stress involved with being a public artist. Similar to why some people choose to be VTubers instead of using their real appearances. Yeah, so this is interesting. You've got actual humans doing the singing and dancing, but they're sort of interchangeable, I guess. Eternity may be from a tech company, and it may be leaning into the virtual, but it is not the only one doing this. Those labels that I mentioned are doing it as well. SM Entertainment's ESPA, spelled A-E-S-P-A, debuted in November 2020 with four members, but they also introduced four companion avatar members, one for each of the humans. Now, the avatars don't perform live, but they do play a part in the group's storyline and videos. Blackpink won the MTV VMA for best metaverse performance this year for their all-virtual concert in PUBG, and the BBC noted that K-pop group, Billy, used virtual avatars to do fan events in IF land during lockdowns. IAZ, it's a step towards more virtual performances, not the first one, probably won't be the last one. What do you think of it so far? It's really, really strange. It just reminds me way back, like with the Archies, if you want to create a band, it's like screw it, you know, we don't want to deal with performers, we don't want to deal with the people, we can change all of you out, because we own your faces. I'm also stuck with the titles of the songs I'm Reel and No Filter. It's like, we are human, trust us. It's such a strange kind of releases. So if this does take off, I could see record labels loving it. They would own IP forever. So that would be something that would be good for somebody. It's like turning the performers into session musicians, right? It does protect the performers from the stress because they don't, you know, theoretically you could have three different performers doing the same character and reduce the workload, but it also reduces the amount of money you have to pay those performers because it's not their personality on the line. All right, folks, on Hacker News over the weekend, user Walter Bell posted a link to a January Washington Post article called No One Reads the Terms of Service. Lawmakers want to fix that with TLDR bill. Even though the story was old, the discussion on Hacker News was pretty lively. People talking about terms of service, even if few really wanna do that much about them. Yeah, I mean, it's no secret that terms of services perhaps and services are very dense. Most people don't read them in their entirety. I am definitely guilty of this. A 27 Deloitte survey found that 91% of people consent to legal terms and services conditions without reading them. This isn't anything new. 11 years ago, you might recall South Park even satirized the 55-page iTunes terms of service even if somebody wanna know what's inside of that TOS agreement. They're structured as very lengthy contracts and it makes it tough to tease out what the legalese can mean even if you dig through dozens of pages. The Washington Post story linked in the Hacker News Post was about some US congressional attention to the issue of terms of service. A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the TLDR Act in both the US House and Senate, which would require sites to display a summary statement that makes terms easy to understand, disclose any data breaches in the last three years and specify what personal data is collected. The law would exempt small businesses and empower the Federal Trade Commission to seek civil actions for violations. Yeah, so the TLDR Act was introduced back in January, almost a year ago, hasn't made it to committee yet, but you could argue that even its introduction has had at least a small effect. Both Apple and Google introduced privacy nutrition labels in their app marketplaces, for example. But I guess the bigger question is why is the disconnect between legal sort of, I don't know, some people would call it fiction, and the reality of terms of service and how we all decipher what's going on in between. Yeah, the legal fiction being the fiction that everybody reads these, right? The legal fiction is, well, the terms of service were presented, if you didn't read them, that's your fault. Whereas 91% of people are like, yeah, I don't have time to read them. And I think it is an undue burden on people to assume that they would read all the terms of service that they would have to read in order to have an informed agreement to everything. I feel like it's a disconnect between the drift of legal language as it is processed through the courts and refined in its meanings and modern language, which drifts in a different direction of what people think is meant by certain phrases. I as, you know, as a person who's passed the bar in the past, am I onto something there? What do you think? I mean, so the law and catching up with the modern world is always behind, almost always behind. So the reality is there needs to be notice, of course there's notice, and you should have an opportunity to check the terms and conditions. You do have those things where you get in your app, you can hit accept, you do have that time if you decided to do it. So technically they're all covered in everything. I mean, the companies to have these terms of services, but it doesn't really reflect what normal people do. Like I know when I rented a car once and I actually read the contract, the person behind the counter was floored. She's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm reading what it says. She's like, nobody does that. I'm like, I wanna know what I'm on the hook for. So I mean, if the terms and conditions are gonna have this, like in this bill, here's another thing you're going to read. I just think people are gonna ignore that too. So it's kind of, you've got the law trying to catch up with modern people and then you've got human behavior. And people just wanna use apps or wanna use services, they wanna use their operating system, they wanna use stuff. And if they can't use the item without hitting accept, they're not gonna think twice about it. But there's a, my head always goes spinning about the idea that everyone's giving up their rights to like go into court with these people because everything's got arbitration clauses included in terms of services, which I think is really bonkers by the way. So I think this is just a mess that is very difficult to undo and I'm not sure where this should go. I'm not either. I'm really not. And I cannot tell you how many times I've been like, yes, yes, yes, I agree. And I'm like, I should have read it but I'm not gonna read it. So, you know, I'm very much in the camp of many people who are like, what? I'm not doing that. I'm just not doing that. It's a broken system. It's a very broken system. Because as someone who runs a company, I understand that companies need to be able to say like these are the terms that we are offering our service on. We are not making these kind of promises, we are making these kind of promises. You know, and here's the privacy disclosure and all of that stuff. It's in terms of service are important but the way they're written now, they're unusable. Like this is, a user experience designer would never allow this out, right? It's only a legal department that would ever approve this. So I'm not saying I have the solution but I think we need to start over and determine like, yes, arbitration, when is that allowed? When can you just say it and it becomes true? What kinds of things can you put in a term? Like maybe there just needs to be categorization of like these kinds of things can be put in a term of service that we know people may not fully read before they agree. These kinds of things can't because we know that people aren't gonna fully read it before they agree. And some of them in the chat was talking about plain English in some of these terms of services and that's the kind of a problem because plain English is open to interpretation and that brings liability. So you need to have precise language and then when you have precise language you get the longer terms of services with very precise words and sections and they're 55 pages and then you go, I'm not gonna read this. I'm gonna read it in a different way. I think one of the few things that we... Yes, very good points. One of the few things that we get I think it's kind of useful is almost like when our phone is like, do you wanna give this thing away? You want your microphone, your video, your camera operational? Like that's the closest thing. Like if it was per item, you're putting your name and like, you know, we're gonna share this. Maybe that's a way you could have a person more... Pop up terms of service. It sounds annoying, but it might be better because at least you know... It would definitely get your attention. Yeah, I think anytime any of us, and I'm not excluding myself, have picked on someone saying, but what you said was this, you're doing the kind of thing that led to terms of service being written the way they are. They're being written for everyone who goes, ah, but you didn't say I couldn't do it. You said I shouldn't do it. Like whenever you have done that, you're doing the thing that causes this kind of terms of service to be written. So kind of like the pop-up idea. That's pretty genius. Folks, if you have solved terms of service, please let us know. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Or if you're the person who's gonna say, nope, I have read every word of every term of service that I have ever encountered. We'd love to hear that too. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We've talked a lot about the use of chatbots. Well, we've talked a lot about the use of all kinds of machine learning and algorithms and stuff, but chatbots in particularly to create written works, original written works. They can impersonate notable people. They can, we've had them impersonate us. Sarah and I have had it look at our works and create virtual versions of us. They're often used at customer support. But Michelle Huang, a New York based artist and scientist did something a little different. She fed the open AI GPT-3 playground and trained it on journal entries from her childhood as an experiment to see what it would be like to talk to herself as a child. Michelle said that interaction felt very similar to a normal texting conversation as if I were texting my past self in real time. Felt like I was reaching through a time portal disguised as a chat box. Ayaz, I know you were looking at this story pretty closely. Is this something you would find compelling? I think it's interesting just as a thought experiment. I know, I don't think I wanna talk to me from the past because I've grown a lot and the person I used to be, I'd be like, that guy's a jerk. I don't wanna see what that guy was thinking. But then again, I was a lot more motivated. I'm really curious, you know, when you think about when we're going to school, like how on earth did you do seven subjects in a day? Like nowadays, like I could do one thing per day, that's enough. So like how did that person handle all that stuff to kind of get this insight, this idea of what you were like because it's, what you think about yourself now is through a filter. If the way this person did this with their journal entries, that's a much more like raw kind of feel. So that way that person is really getting close to themselves in a way that's, I think it's almost impossible to do without like tons and tons of either therapy or videotapes of watching yourself. So I just think this is a very interesting thought experiment. It is and Wong had said, I actually have been to quite a bit of therapy over the years and she has more journal entries than I don't know. I mean, more than I had when I was a child, although I also had like sort of the diary type thing. Some of it that she found, she found just kind of awesome and in a way helped her know herself a little bit better. I was like, I don't know. I don't know if I would have the same reaction to this because talking to myself as like a 10 to 12 to 15 year old is quite frightening to me because I was just, I just didn't know a lot of things. I still don't, but I knew a lot less then. And I don't know that I would want that version of myself to give myself a life advice, but I haven't actually, haven't gone through this experiment as much as she has. And for her to say, it was actually pretty therapeutic is actually kind of cool. And kudos to her for being like, I have so much of the stuff written down. Why not see, you know, see where we get with the modern technology that we have. Yeah, especially people my age and older may be like Sarah and saying, who's much younger by the way? But they may be saying, you know, I don't really have all that much written down, but folks, the younger you get, the more you've probably written, some of it publicly and online, right? So there's more that you have to train these things with. Now, Michelle locked out in that she had a chatbot that said, I'm honestly proud of you for everything you've accomplished. That would make me feel very good too. Remember, this isn't simulating the mind of young Tom Merritt. This is simulating the style. And some of that is just gonna be random. So it's just as likely that you train it up and it says like, I'm really disappointed in you. Like, I never would have thought you would have done this because again, it's not really simulating what you thought and felt as a young person. It's simulating, oh, this is how that person talked and it has to fill in the gaps itself. I'm thinking about talking to younger me. I wonder if my son would be friends with me at my age and he could probably set this up as a chatbot just as an experiment. It's like, what do you hang out with this person? And I seriously doubt it because, because he's so nice. My son is so nice and I was not. So just really, I wanna build a couple of these using like all kinds of like either tweets or old journals. I don't know if I've got my own, but I can find some, I'm pretty sure. I've got some old things that I wrote. The younger I get the harder it's gonna be though. But certainly high school and college, I've got things that I wrote. They agree to get, huh? Well, I'm just saying that when I go back, to try to do a seven year old Tom, I don't have that much material to work with. Whereas I wrote journals and stuff in high school and I think I've got those. I could probably put that in. I certainly have plenty that I've written, since I started doing tech journalism in the 90s, but let's say that was not the problem. I bet it would be interesting to talk to young me, but once I get my teens until I'm probably in my 30s, I don't really wanna talk to myself. Like I feel like that person is just gonna be argumentative and hard to get along. Giving bad advice, kind of in a bad mood. Yeah. Yeah, probably teenage me as well. Well, teenage me is right, yeah, yeah. I love this research project, I really do. I would wonder how much I would get out of hearing from the old me. Well, Sarah, I have been wondering if anyone on this planet has solved the problem I have of wanting to be able to get to my earbuds easier. Oh Tom, I'm glad you asked, because I've got a solution for you potentially and for many others. Huawei launched the Huawei Watch Buds in China. This is a smart watch, but also with a pair of wireless earbuds under its watch face. So yeah, you flip up the face of the watch, you get to the earbuds and now you have both. The buds weigh about four grams each. They aren't stripped down though and includes AI, noise canceling technology, supports touch controls to answer calls, just volume, skip tracks, kind of what you would expect from, you know, yeah. The watch itself includes a 1.3 inch AMOLED screen, includes sleep, heart, ECG and blood oxygen sensors and runs Harmony OS 3. Available now for $298. $2,980. $2,980, thank you Tom, which is about 430 US dollars because math is hard. Oh, listen, you can't keep Huawei from designing. You can stop them from building chips, you can stop them from getting lithography machines, but they can keep their imagination. You know, I don't hate this. I do not hate this. And you might say, that's crazy. Why would you ever build something under the watch face to like hold earbuds that it would be like taking up so much room, make the watch crazy? I lose earbuds every five seconds. This is my dream machine. Makes it easy to get at them, yeah. Yeah. I love this and I hate it at the same time. I don't know what to think about this. It seems like I'm just thinking in my use case, I'm a spaz, I know that thing's gonna flick open and I'm gonna lose earbuds at random at the wrong time because I talk with my hands a lot. So boom, there goes my earbuds. I don't need protectiles attached to it but it's really handy. Yeah, I'm gonna need, I love the idea that this exists. Somebody thought this was a good idea and made it to production, it's a real thing. It's always easy until you actually like get your hands on a device to come up with all the ways it couldn't possibly work. My guess is, Huawei also thought about all the ways it couldn't possibly work and may have addressed a lot of those. So maybe it's not too thick. Maybe it won't pop open easier. We'd have to get our hands on it to be sure. That always brings me to like, okay, let's assume that they fixed all the obvious stuff. Do I want this? And actually, if it does work and I'm still kind of skeptical whether it all could work, it would be kind of cool to just, you know, instead of having to reach into my pocket to grab my case for my earbuds to just have them on the watch, if it didn't make it uncomfortable, who was easy to get them in and out but it didn't happen accidentally, like, yeah, yeah, it would be nice because then your case is just always with you. I do love that idea. Consolidation, not always the worst. Right. It's all in the execution, right? And the fact that you have to run HarmonyOS, that's now, now I'm out. So there's that. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one came in from Scott over the weekend. Scott said, I am completely on board with the services as its subscription plan for cars. We were talking about this last week with John DeVorek. Scott says, two years ago, when I purchased my new car, I couldn't afford all the options I would have liked but today I can. So do I have to trade my car in, lose the value in the trade, get a new car with the options I wanted? No, now I could just pay for the upgrades or add as a service and enjoy the features I would have bought two years ago or I could sell my car and the new owner could add the options that they want. Sounds like a wonderful idea. Also, it's cheaper for the manufacturers to build all the cars the same and then disable options that you haven't paid for instead of customizing the car for the options that you choose and waiting months for it to be delivered. This is the win-win all around. Well, Scott, I disagree with you but I can't find any fault in your logic. I kind of, I feel like Scott is- I get where Scott is coming from. Come on, man, come on. And when I say I disagree, I don't mean I disagree with any point you're making. I disagree in how I feel like I feel differently from Scott but yeah, this makes sense. I guess the key is if the price of the car is equivalent to buying a car without those options, right? If you're paying just about the same as if you didn't, if you got a car that didn't even include those options, then it is kind of nice to know you have the option even if you never take advantage of it and then you just have to get over the psychological barrier of, well, I paid for it. But if it's like, oh, there's a car from Honda and a car from Toyota, they both have the same exact features and they're the same price but the car from Honda allows you to add features without having to go into the dealer. You can just subscribe to them. I mean, if you put it that way, Scott, it's kind of compelling. I get it. I get where you're coming from. I mean, in many ways, I just think like, okay, it's software for my car. Like what software am I paying for? Yeah. Not unlike Creative Cloud. But- Scott means subscribe, I think, to these features, not purchase the features but it could be a difference to some people whether you subscribe or purchase them too. So that's a difference too. Well, what isn't a difference is ever having an IaaS actor on the show because it's always the best ever. IaaS let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Go to this old nerd.com. This has my YouTube show. So watch that show. It's a good show. I've been doing it again and I got a new episode coming out this week. We show you how to have the most tech forward life and home as possible. And the thing is because life is short, our projects are short because you've got more important stuff to do. Like watching DTNS. That's compelling. It really is. Go check that out. It's a win-win. Also, we wanted to thank our brand new boss, Michael. Michael just started backing us on Patreon over the weekend. We see you, Michael, and we raise you a glass of whatever beverage you like the most. We have brand new Patreon loyalty merch too. Like it just kicked in last week. It's got Len Peralta's new nine-year anniversary logo on it. And so Michael clocks down now ticking. Michael's already in. In three months, he'll get the first of the things at his level. If he's at any level above production assistant, all the levels, but the basic one, get the Patreon merch and the higher the level, the cooler the merch. But go check it out. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show. Good day. Internet would be rolled right into after DTNS closes. But just a reminder, we do the show live and you can catch it Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back again tomorrow talking about how generalized AI is around the corner with Dr. Nikki Ackerman's time. How it's not around the corner. Oh, I thought it was. No, she's gonna tell us it's not. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Timing Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.