 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Kevin, Paul Teeson, and Ali Senjabi. Coming up on DTNS, Twitter rolls out Circles. Will they have more success than Google+, also a Chinese app that promotes its anonymity as its best feature, and what's actually in California's age-appropriate Design Code Act, and how it might affect the rest of the Internet. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 30th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And this is Allison Sheridan from the Podfeat Podcast Empire. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. That's not the Inland Podcast Empire, though. The Outward Podcast Empire. Outward Racing Empire. I mean, the Inland Empire might like your podcast quite a bit. My wife hails from the Inland Empire, so. There you go. Yeah. Alright, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Alright, approximately two years after the Ryzen 5000 desktop processors, AMD announced pricing and availability for the first wave of Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture, promising up to a 29% single-threaded speed boost over the Ryzen 5000 line. The first four Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be available beginning September 27th, with four higher end and higher priced parts, with the mainstream and budget additions to follow next year. The core accounts remain the same as the Zen 3, with the entry level 6 core Ryzen 5 76000X launching for $299. We have an 8 core Ryzen 777X for $399. Math is hard. And the 12 core Ryzen 9 7900X at $549, with the 16 core Ryzen 9 5950X at $699. All Ryzen 7000 CPUs and motherboards will require DDR5 RAM with no backwards compatibility for DDR4. AMD also says that AM5 will be supported until at least 2025. Just come up with better names, Ryzen. Oh my gosh. Seriously. Come on. Happy birthday to Nick with a C's dad, by the way. Oh, happy birthday. Earlier this month, Logitech announced an upcoming handheld gaming device in conjunction with Tencent that would support multiple cloud gaming services, like NVIDIA's GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Evan Blass, aka Evlix on Twitter, who has a pretty good track record with these things, now says that he hears it'll be called the G Gaming Handheld, since Logitech posted that moniker and photos on a new website landing page. The images show left and right joysticks, a direction pad, ABXY buttons, a home button, shoulder pads, and a custom G button. It also shows icons for Google's Play Store, Xbox GeForce Now Steam, Chrome, and YouTube, plus icons for user profiles, messages, settings, and power. People love a handheld gaming thing, so good luck Logitech. Well, in other gaming news, the PlayStation 5's 2020 launch consoles weighed at 9.9 pounds for the disc drive edition and 8.6 pounds for the digital edition. Now reporters at Press Alert in Australia have noted the launch of a new set of PS5s that weigh 13% less. The new models were revealed on some Japanese retail sites over the weekend, but Press Start found them already on Australian shelves. So no other changes appear to be happening besides the size of the unit and the weight of the unit. System specs seem to be the same. This move follows the previously announced price increase of the PS5 in most regions other than the US. Yeah, so it's actually the same size, just a different weight. What did they take out? The guts. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission announced the expected lawsuit against Kochava, a major data broker. The service is accused of tracking US citizens at sensitive locations, including addiction centers, shelters, medical facilities, and places of worship. Kochava calls itself the industry leader for mobile app attribution. The FTC says the company previously had a free sample of data, which included 61 million mobile devices, and quote, only minimal steps and no restrictions on usage for accessing that sample. First one's free. The general manager of the Kochava collective, Brian Cox, said in a statement, quote, this lawsuit shows the unfortunate reality that the FTC has a fundamental misunderstanding of Kochava's data marketplace business and other data businesses. I don't know what that means. Sure, they're right. I mean, either one could be true. Maybe they both are. On October 28th, maybe you have plans, maybe you don't. But Facebook plans to shut down its Facebook gaming app on iOS and Android, although gaming features will still be accessible on the main Facebook app. So this is the standalone Facebook gaming app. Facebook gaming launched more than two years ago now viewed as a competitor to Twitch at the time, or at least, you know, wanting to be one. But according to a report from market research firm Streamlabs in the second quarter of 2022, Facebook gaming accounted for only 7.9% of the market share for amount of hours watched with Twitch at 76.7% and YouTube at 15.4%. It strikes me that Instagram imitates people successfully, yet their corporate brethren at Facebook do not. All right, let's talk a little about Twitter rolling out a nostalgic name for a feature, Allison. Well, following four months of testing, Twitter is rolling out the circle feature to all users to help people feel more comfortable tweeting and expressing themselves. Twitter circles is a close friends feature similar to Instagram's where tweets can be viewable to only a smaller circle of up to 150 followers. If you see a green badge under a tweet, that means it was posted to a circle and you were included. Now you can't control who puts you in a circle. You also aren't going to be notified if they put you in one or take you out of one, but you also can't retweet a post from a circle. It's like a locked down Twitter account in that respect. In fact, Twitter is probably doing this to keep people from blocking down their accounts. They're like, we want you to be out on the open Twitter here. We'll give you this middle ground as a way in between. Twitter also doesn't allow you to leave someone else's circle any more than they allow you to stop them from at-replying you. If you don't want to be in their circle, you got to block them or mute them or something like that. Twitter revealed early tests of the features showed users with circles tweeted more overall and got more likes and replies, thanks to sharing with a smaller group, as well as eliminating the need for a secondary private account to switch back and forth from. I have questions. You end up in multiple circles, but only one is yours. I can have circles and put you in it, and you can have a circle and put me in it. I'm actually in two circles. Let's say in my circle, I say something and you can reply to that within the circle. You can like it and make comments and stuff. Can you also generate a new tweet inside that circle that is my circle? Not to your circle, no. Okay. As we reply, yes. We can talk all day. To the original tweet that was limited to the circle. If Tom's like, you know what, cool conversation, but I have a different one. I want to start. That would be his own circle. Here's what's happening. Right now, all of Twitter is a circle. And the only way to limit who gets to see your tweet is to lock down your account to say only people I approve get to see my account. And in that respect, yes, same thing. I can't create a tweet to your locked down account. Right. I can't create a tweet that only people who you've allowed to see your locked account. If I create a tweet, I can only control who sees it from my end. Circles is just saying, well, let's give you a subset of all of Twitter that's between locking your account. So you don't have to lock your account and the full overall set of everything in Twitter. But you also can't re-tweet something. It's not a circle like Google Plus. You can't re-tweet something. That's not the circle. To do what you're talking about is a community. They actually have that on Twitter. You can have a community and then you can include people in the community and other people in the community can add people in the community. And when you tweet within the community, it stays within the community, but anybody can start a tweet in that community. Circles is, I want to say this to just a few people. So only for original thought, that must not be for me because I'm all about regurgitating what I saw. You could re-tweet something to your circle. I mean, think about it this way also. If you and Tom and me and Roger and the DTNS and Podfeet teams just kind of wanted to have a conversation that is more or less a group text, this would be the way to do this using Twitter. But a group text is you could create a unique text and you can't because it's my circle. Well, exactly. And that's why this whole thing falls apart a little bit for me. But you can just reply. Basically, a group text is just replying to the original message. So it's not that different. But it's sort of like, I worry because I asked a couple of people, I pulled some, you know, like Twitter users, like, do you guys want to use this? And they were like, but you could still screenshot sensitive material. I mean, Twitter circles doesn't sound good. Sure, if you're sharing sensitive material, that is always the case. This is not signal. This is, I don't want drive by randos to see me posting about black licorice and start hating on me. You know, if Sarah hates on me for it, it's fine. Black licorice. Because we like each other. But I don't need a thousand people seeing that tweet and jumping on it. Or just me kind of saying, okay, I get a general sense of, you know, who responds to this or that, but maybe just a few people on Twitter care about this other aspect of my life. That's pretty normal. I just, it always harkens back to the days of more private social networks like path where you kind of went like, okay, cool. Yeah, it's just like a, you know, a 10 to 15, maybe 100, you know, at their heyday, you know, like friends who kind of see a little bit more personal stuff from me. Maybe it's a little bit less self promotional. All of that, if you're on the internet for very long, that can be, that, that, that can, that can feel liberating. But it doesn't, you know, I mean, it's not a place to send each other sensitive information. Absolutely. I totally get the need for this, which is, I want to say this in the pub, not out in the public square, right? I want to say it to my friends. And maybe I've got 100 people I want to say it to. But I don't want everybody to hear it and interrupt and go, well, you know what I think about that. So you have a circle, right? I get it. Here's the thing. I got circles in the beta test. I've had it for months. I used it once until today. Now I've used it twice. So I don't know. Maybe it's not that useful. But you're not one of those private people who lock their accounts down. And if they're just trying to get those people, maybe they'll love it. Sure. Yeah. Maybe. Well, moving on, restofworld.org has an article up about a Chinese social app called Soul. You might have heard of it, but if you haven't, Soul uses an algorithm to connect people with similar interests, but doesn't show a user's real name and doesn't have any photos. So instead, you create an avatar to represent yourself in interactions. You can, you know, text chat. You can even do video and audio. Though again, your actual photos or video aren't shown. It's just your avatar. So if you're wondering who this speaks to, Soul has more than 30 million users in China. Now, when you say photos, you can, here's what confused me when I went to their site. You can share photos, share photos of your cat, et cetera. But you are replaced by an avatar. So certainly there are ways around this. You could show yourself, but the spirit of it is don't show yourself. You could show things around you. You can share photos, but not photos of yourself. You're trying to keep things on the level of we're talking to each other because we're interested in the same thing. A rendering engine creates a customized avatar so you can decide what it looks like. And then when you put it over your face in a video, for instance, you control facial expressions and body movements. That goes for photos too. Soul's founder Zhang Liu said they wanted Soul to be quote, a gamified social platform where people interact with virtual identities, build their own personas, and express themselves without any concerns. It is not meant to be about offline relationships. Rest of the world said, isn't this just a dating app? They're like, no, no, no, it's not about that. And apparently people post about schoolwork, beauty, pets, entrepreneurship, outdoor activities, stuff like that. But I found this interesting because, A, we like to try to identify stuff early so that y'all can be smart when it blows up. So when we look at this, we're like, well, this could be the musically that becomes a TikTok down the road. So it's worth paying attention to. And two, it contains a couple of trends in these kinds of apps that we saw in Ubo where they were like, yeah, we're trying to group you by interest and we'll keep young people away from older people. And we'll try to get you to connect by interest and be real, which is very much trying to say like, look, let's just connect by something you're doing at the time rather than staged moments by Instagram. But it all has a theme there, right, which is like trying to have authentic connections, not fake connections like those old heritage social networks have. So I really found my reaction to this story interesting because I'm reading along, I'm reading the interview, and I'm thinking, wow, this is kind of neat. This is kind of interesting. I like the approach she's taking with the way she was really trying to frame it and what they're looking for and what they're trying to cause in this happy place, not all about how you look and that sort of stuff. And I was really liking it. And then she said metaverse and my instantaneous reaction was, well, this is stupid. So I think I've become so biased against the whole idea of the metaverse that something I thought I liked, it turned to stupid the minute I saw the word in there. We left the word metaverse out of our description here on purpose because I think this is a metaverse, right? It's not a 3D world. It's just putting, it's like an emoji on your face. And otherwise it looks like any social networking app where you're doing messaging and sharing photos. So maybe she threw that in just for the Google juice or something. Okay, good. I like it again then. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I think this is, I think it's fascinating. I don't know if Sol or Ubo or Briel are in the Friendster or MySpace or Facebook category in the evolution. I mean, and there's a little bit of a dating app thing going on here too. She says it's not. She said very clearly in the interview. It's not. But yeah, I know, right? Sure, but you know, you have a similar interest with somebody. You might have other interests with them as well. I think I, I don't know. I like the idea of this, not necessarily for my current everyday use, but the idea that you, I could meet some pretty cool people who have a lot in common with me. And we're, you know, we're behind like, I don't want to say like some like veil, you know, cloak and veil. But you know, maybe just, just one more, one more way to just kind of make sure that everything's cool before we might take it to the next friend slash whatever level. Yeah. They're not, they're not talking about outside of China yet. Right. They would love to expand to be on China, but yeah, they didn't detail any plans on that. Okay. But we'll keep an eye. They, they are going to go public in Hong Kong. So that might be the step before they, they start either going somewhere else or buying something somewhere else and expanding, which is what bite dance did. They, they bought musically, which was in Santa Monica and then turned it into tick tock. So we'll, we'll see, or, or they may just fade away. I'm not trying to predict that that soul is going to be the one. But it certainly got that authentic, we want to have authentic connections. We're coming at this in ways where we, we protect privacy and we, we fight against inauthentic expressions. It's another one of that series. Folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You can let us know in lots of ways. One of them is our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Several attempts at regulating the internet for children have failed in the US state of California, but the state's Senate just unanimously passed the California Age Appropriate Design Code Act, aka AB 2273. The assembly in California, which is what they call their House of Representatives, had already unanimously passed it in May. So it's unanimously passed both houses and it now heads to the governor's desk. He has not indicated one way or the other whether he's going to sign it. The US has a federal law called the Children Online Privacy Protection Act. You may have heard us talk about COPA before. That restricts sites from collecting info from children younger than 13 and sets rules for a site that is aimed specifically at children. California's AB 2273 expands that to sites likely to be accessed by children and raises the age that it applies to from 13 to 18. So Sarah, what sites is this going to affect? All right. So first, AB 2273 applies to sites that it is quote, it is reasonable to expect based on the following indicators that the online service product or feature would be accessed by children end quote. So the indicators include that it's directed to children as defined by the Federal COPA Act or marketed to children in some other way. There's reliable evidence internally or independently that a significant number of children visit the site or it's similar to a site that is, meaning kids want to get in there and find ways to do it. They're imitating the kids site that accounts, yeah. Yeah. It has child focused features like games, cartoons, music, celebrities, things that appeal to the younger set. The rules don't apply to telcos, broadband internet providers or physical products. A child is anyone younger than 18. We know that. So if a site meets these indicators, what does it now need to do? All right. So I love that they exempted telcos. Good job, telcos. Your lobbyists work. Consider the best, so if a site meets this, right? If it meets these qualifications, it should consider the best interests of children. Again, they define children as younger than 18. Consider the best interests of children when designing, developing and providing the service product or feature. I don't know how you prove that in court, but it's required. Establish the age of consumers with a reasonable level of certainty. If it does not have actual knowledge of the age of the user, it should not collect any personal info that isn't necessary to provide the product. This is what gets a lot of folks hung up. I don't know how you all feel about this, but establishing the age of the consumer with a reasonable level of certainty is pretty vague. So I do have a thought on that. People are losing their ever loving minds about this piece of it, of making you be required to prove your age. But don't we already have laws about under 13? Yes. So why wouldn't this be just like that? The copa doesn't require you to prove it. It just says, yeah, like you kind of check a box. If you know they're 13, then you can't do this. But this goes a little farther and says, you can't just do it if you know they're under 18. You have to establish the age of the consumers using your product. If you qualify, if you have one of these indicators, then it's on you somehow to establish the age of consumers with a reasonable level of certainty. We're not going to tell you how good luck. Yeah. I mean, this kind of reminds me of, I don't know, every once in a while I'll go to like some wine site, you know, some winery around here. You know, it's like 21 or older, you know, otherwise you can't answer. And I'm like, yeah, sure. But like they don't, they have no idea who I am. Copa says, if you ask them how old they are and they say 12, then you follow their copa. This says, you can't just ask them, are they 18? You have to establish with a reasonable level of certainty what that age is, right? And that's there and lies the rub, right? That's no matter what kind of product you just... If you qualify to those things that Sarah was telling about, you're targeted at children. But what's bothering me is the part of the sentence that says should not collect any personal info not necessary to provide the product. If you can't say how old they are, then you shouldn't collect any personal info. That doesn't say you can't do other stuff. Basically, I know they seem in contradiction. There are other contradictions in this rule. The no actual knowledge says you can't get away from the personal collection thing by saying, oh, but we just couldn't determine what the age was. You have to determine the age of the consumer. And even if you don't, that doesn't give you leave to collect the personal info. You should assume they're a child if you can't establish the age. You're not allowed to use a child's personal info for anything other than the reason it was collected. You can't share it. You can't sell it. That includes location. So a navigation app gets to collect location to provide the purpose of navigation, but it can't use it for anything else. You can only use it for the navigation. You're not allowed to use dark patterns to collect info. We all know what dark patterns are, right? Good because they didn't define them in this law. You have to set all your default privacy settings to the most private level. Write all privacy information in terms of service policies and community standards in clear language suited to the age of the children likely to access the service. So if you're targeted at seven year olds, your terms of service have to be readable by seven year olds. Which is, I mean, that is... Is like Big Bird going to explain it. I don't know how that's going to work. I mean, imagine a company saying, well, we thought seven year olds could be that. It's well-intentioned, right? Hey, if you're targeting this at teens, then teens should be able to make sense of it. You shouldn't write it in terms of what they can understand. But a lot of this law is lost in the details. You have to provide an obvious signal to children if parents are monitoring or tracking them. You have to make it easy to report privacy concerns. You have to do data protection assessments and report it to the California Privacy Protection Agency and update it every two years. You're not allowed to use personal information in a way that is harmful to physical or mental health, which sounds great, but they also kind of leave it open to determine what's harmful to physical or mental health. There's no clear guidelines of how that's determined. And finally, you can't profile a child by default. Profiling means using personal info to predict their behavior. Basically, they're describing ad targeting. One of the links you provided in the show notes had a great quote in there that I wanted to read. They said, European laws are often, this was patterned after a European law, a UK law. It said, European laws are often aspirational and standards-based instead of rule-based because European regulators and regulated businesses engage in dialogues and the regulators reward good tries even if they aren't successful. We don't do A for effort laws in the U.S. and generally we rely on rules, not standards, to provide certainty to businesses and reduce regulatory overreach and censorship. So I think that's part of where this disconnect is, right, of just saying, be good. Don't do dark patterns. There's a lot of connections between that UK law. Some of the people that worked on it also worked on drafting this one. And that could be one of the problems here is that you've taken a law that works in one system and it's not built for the system of laws. It's not bad or good. It's just, it might not work here. A really good criticism of this was written by Eric Goldman in June. We have that link in our show notes as well. Goldman was writing before the draft was finished. So some of his criticisms don't apply, like the profiling thing. They actually went in and defined it. When Goldman was writing, they hadn't defined it yet. But it's worth a read if you want to see some of the less crazy criticisms. He's got a very well-reasoned analysis. He was the one I was just quoting, by the way. Yeah, yeah. So that's good. If you're curious, okay, well, if a company goes rogue here and doesn't follow the rules, what happens? Finds of up to $7,500 per affected child can be levied against companies that violate the rules that we laid out. Tech industry groups, NETCHOICE and the CCIA are both pressuring California Governor Gavin Newsom to veto this bill, calling it unconstitutional. Those two groups are also challenging Texas and Florida's social media regulations in court. The law is similar to the UK's age-appropriate design code, which began being enforced last September. So if signed into law, and it has not been yet, it would take effect in 2024. Well, there you go. We will update you if we find out whether the governor signs it or not. And then look at how this is going to apply outside of California, right? Because this is for California. It's going to get challenged in California court if it gets signed. But companies will have to decide if they want to create two versions of their site, one for inside of California that might also work in the UK, since the rules are so similar and one for the rest of the world, or if this will be like environmental standards where a law in California ends up applying outside of California because it's just easier for companies to do it that way. It depends on how it's enforced, right? There's still a lot of vague language in here that some companies may not want to deal with and may overcompensate by just shutting off anyone who's under the age of 18. How do you make sure that they're under the age of 18? I don't know. There's a lot of questions here. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Jordan. So Jordan originally wrote us back in January with a prediction in response to the concept of the metaverse, because we were all hearing about it kind of for the first time, from meta itself. Jordan said at the time, Apple will not just avoid focus on the metaverse, they will actively deride and disparage all the talk about the metaverse, turn it into a meme to make fun of. While presenting new hardware that skips all that stuff and focuses directly on the fitness and entertainment experiences, their new hardware provides access to. There will definitely be social elements to it, but not virtual worlds with avatars and collectibles, which try to replicate boring real world things like medians. So Jordan wrote back with an update after our show yesterday, because we were talking about this still, because of course we're talking about Apple's new AR headset, what's it going to be, what's it going to come out, what's it going to look like, how's it going to be different, etc. Jordan said, I'm renewing my prediction from earlier this year with how much bad press Horizon World seems to be getting, which is meadows thing, and a few consumers seeming to care, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple take a totally different direction with their headset. Yeah, I try not to get swept up into, oh, everyone's talking about it or it's getting so much bad press, because you can say that about every single thing that exists. You can find bad press because that's what gets clicks. So I will look at Horizon Worlds and say, yeah, usage doesn't seem to be very widespread. I think you're right on there. And I totally am on board Jordan with your idea that Apple will not even use the word metaverse. They will just take an entirely different direction. I think you're absolutely right. When you do your predictions results show this year, you need to just give Justin some points. Yeah. Yeah, Jordan. Jordan, sorry. Apple's just going to call it reality. Yeah. What's your reality? I can see it right. I can see it already. Because we're not trying to take you out of reality. We're trying to enhance reality. That's right. Because Apple cares. Apple, definitely, that feels very Apple-y to say, like some companies want to put you in a whole world where you look ridiculous. We're going to keep you in the real world with reality OS. Yeah. And help your life to become better. You know who? We really do. One more thing. I don't know what that is. Thank you to Alison Sheridan. You are our one more thing today, Alison. Thank you for being with us. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Well, everything you can find that you would care about me is at podfeed.com. But I actually want to plug Bode Grimm's Killwatt podcast. Steve and I both got to know Bode because of DTNS. And it has become this love fest of us being on each other shows. The one I want to point out to you is episode 309 of the Killwatt podcast. And of course, there's a link in the show notes. Bode interviewed Steve and me about our whole home batteries that we had just installed to go along with our solar and how the installation process worked, how we decided how many panels to buy or how many batteries to buy and what it's like to be energy independent, to be able to leave lights on all over the house anytime you want because you literally don't care because it's the sun doing it. Very cool. Well, everybody keep up with everything that Alison does. podfeed.com. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Anoop. Anoop just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Anoop. So good to have you. Thank you for giving us something to celebrate today, Anoop. Be like Anoop tomorrow. Someone. And back us at patreon.com slash dts. Could be you. Speaking of patrons. Stick around for the extended show. Good day, internet patrons. You know who you are. You can also catch this show. DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tell a friend. Watch it with your friends. Listen, we'll be back tomorrow talking about the crowdfunding publisher Unbound with Will Harris. Talk to you then.