 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Dustin Campbell, Tim Deputy, and Brandon Brooks. Coming up on DTNS, are you tired of government targeting big tech? Well, the US Senate bets you're not. And they're going after Google's ad business. Plus, do we need more platforms to add gaming? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 19, 2022, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty strong. We are going to put your face on a refrigerator later in this episode. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. Hey, good news for framework fans. The makers of the modular laptop announced 12th gen Intel chips are available in their brand new second generation framework laptop models, as well as in replacement mainboards for existing models. The whole point of modular, right? Like, if you want to upgrade to the 12th gen chip, you don't have to get a whole new laptop. You can just swap out the mainboard now. The full laptops, if you're starting from scratch, run between $1,049 and $2,049. Those will start shipping in July. The mainboards will cost you between $449 and $1,049. Again, there's three chips in each of these. There's also a replacement top cover that will add a little more rigidity to the body. Again, something we don't have to replace the whole laptop. If you've been like, that's kind of floppy. You can just replace that top. Later this year, framework will put out an expansion card with a Realtek RTL 8156 controller that will support 2.5 gigabit ethernet. The US Justice Department announced a new policy Thursday saying, quote, good faith security research should not be charged. End quote under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, CFAA. This is a big shift away from the department's previous policy that allowed prosecutors to bring federal charges against hackers who find security flaws as a way to help secure exposed or vulnerable systems. The CFAA was enacted in law in 1986 but has been criticized for outdated and or vague language that does not help good faith researchers or hackers. Yeah, I think it's a nice step for the policy change but it has not changed the actual law so they could change their policy at any time. Good news for the phone market. Cannellus estimates smartphone shipments in North America rose 4% on the year last quarter. Apple increased its already dominant market share past the 50% mark, 51%. Led by sales of the iPhone 13, Samsung grew one point in North America to 28% of the market. Lenovo, mostly because of Motorola, rose 56% to take third with 7% of the market. TCL dropped 21%, but still held onto fourth for 5% of the market and Google cracked the top five of the smartphone market with 380% growth over last year that gives them 1% of the market, but hey, it's a start. Number one, they're number one. Percent. Percent. Hey, who's ready for some Apple rumors? Mark Gurman of Bloomberg says that Apple showed off an almost finished mixed reality headset to members of its board of directors last week. Sources indicate that the next step is to finish development of the operating system for it referred to as RealityOS or ROS for short. Something called ROS was referred to once in an early build of iOS 13 and has shown up in other logs as well. Gurman sources think that the headset might launch later this year or next year. Do you think anyone at Apple thought it was hubris to name an operating system reality? No, I think that is the branding, baby. At yesterday's show, we had an explainer about Tether, the stablecoin, and how one of the issues with it was exactly how it's backed while Bloomberg reports Tether has revealed some more details about the cash and securities that are backing the Tether stablecoin. As of March 31st, its bank, MHA Cayman, assured that Tether had assets totaling $82.4 billion and at the time, its liabilities, which are mostly Tether coins that you could cash in for a single dollar, totaled $82.2 billion. So it had more cash than it had liabilities. Tether further reported that it had reduced its holding of commercial paper to $20.1 billion and increased its investments in U.S. Treasury bills and money market funds to $39.2 billion. In other words, its non-cash reserves were moved to less risky, more easily convertible assets and that's good if you're worried about the ability to get your dollars out of them, but it also would reduce the impact on the non-crypto markets if Tether did have to suddenly sell down all its commercial paper holdings. They wouldn't be flooding the market as much because they don't hold as much of it. All right, let's talk about reading, fast reading, speed reading. I got an API for you, Justin. Oh, well, why don't you tell me about it, Tom? Tech in Asia highlights a technology called Bionic Reading that uses an old speed reading trick to look at just the first part of words and changes online text to make it faster to read. It increases the size and bolds the first part of words just enough to help your brain recognize the word without having to look at all the letters. You know, let's give you an example. The phrase reading and understanding would have R-E-A-D-A and U-N-D-E-R-S-T all highlighted. That's enough for your brain to know what those words are and move on to the next word even faster. The kind of trick can even improve focus and is possibly helpful for those with reading problems like dyslexia. Yeah, Joe, our video producer said it's very helpful for that, like his direct experience. Bionic Reading has an API which has already been implemented in reading platforms, Reader 5, Fiery Feeds, and Lyre. Now, don't worry if you've never heard of those. Those are reading platforms that you could try, but they're hoping to get more folks to take this API. They do charge for the API, but it's the kind of thing that could help you be able to scan through documents faster. And I was fascinated with the idea and I'm not even certain that Bionic is the first one to try this, but it's the first time I've seen anybody take one of those old speed reading tactics, which I'll be honest, I am too impatient to actually master. I know lots of people who have, but I've always like sat down and been like, that seems like a lot of work. I'm not gonna spend the time. This means I don't have to master it. I don't have to learn to look at the first parts of words. It's just gonna pop them out. And if you go to bionic-reading.com, you can look at some of the samples and try it and it really is faster to read the ones where they've emphasized those first parts of words. It works. Our mutual friend Andrew Main has recently gotten obsessed with speed reading and has gone through a bunch of different strategies to help him do it. This is certainly one of them. They're also on some kindles. There is a format where it will just flash one word at a time, but in a faster manner. So you are focusing only on that but you are comprehending everything. Really, the most controversial elements of these tactics are sure they'll help you read faster but will they help you comprehend? And that is up to a lot of debate and really I think probably a person-by-person situation. The argument bionic makes on that is you'll be less distracted because you're not drifting as much that you're focused and moving faster and then they sort of just wave their hands and imply that that equals comprehension. It may or may not, right? I mean, and look, I do think that there is a bit of an existential crisis when it comes to the internet and reading. We have a lot of things to distract us and in an ever-weakening ad market, the advertising solutions are only going to get more in your face. Meanwhile, we have an explosion of content including fantastic new sub-stacks like Tom's where we only have X amount of time in the day to read and a lot of folks aren't great about using tricks to format stuff so your eye is more easily going by it. If you have gigantic blocks of text then people are more likely to tap out at a certain point. So that is all to say that while we have more than ever to read and yet we are less likely to read it having solutions like this I think could be pretty, pretty important. Yeah, Johandar in our chat room makes a salient point. This tech seems pretty easy to reproduce without their API. The point is that they've cracked the code and being able to do this. It's more of a, if you don't want to put in the work to reproduce it, you can pay them and it makes it happen. It's plug and play. Yeah, so like a lot of things, you can do it yourself. It might not be worth your time to do it yourself. So I don't know how easy their API is to implement. That's the key question there is does this allow you to do this to your app in a way that you wouldn't have considered before? Is it cheap enough and does it save you enough time? And are you fast enough? And does it improve things enough for your customers that they're like, yes, I want that? Hey, Tom, Reuters sources say that TikTok is testing mobile games with users in Vietnam with plans to expand elsewhere in Asia and other markets. But, you know, TikTok's done gaming before, right? Yeah, protocol noted that gaming isn't new for the company. Duyan, the version of TikTok in mainland China, has had many games since 2019. And TikTok itself partnered with Zynga, launched an HTML5 game called Disco Loco 3D in the US on the platform last November. TikTok also released a mini game called Garden of Good with a nonprofit called Feeding America last June. So yeah, they've done this before. It looks like they just want to expand it. Yeah, Reuters expects the first releases to arrive this autumn and they will be ad supported. We don't know if they will continue to license games from folks like Zynga or build their own or both. But TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, bought a mobile game studio called Monotone last year. So, Tom, explain to these fine folks why this move into gaming in Vietnam is happening. $100 billion, Justin. That's why mobile game is expected to be worth more than $100 billion this year. And you want young people. So they picked Vietnam because 35 or I'm sorry, 70% of the citizens in Vietnam are younger than 35. So Vietnam's a good place to start. $100 billion is a good reason. And Reuters notes that ad revenue is important for TikTok right now and ad revenue is booming for them. Insider Intelligence expects it to pass $11 billion this year without games. $11 billion if TikTok hits that mark would be more than the combined sales of Twitter and Snap. The answer is money. Yes, and the fact that they've cracked ads, which means they know how to get people to buy ads, which means they need places to serve ads. Netflix and now TikTok are trying to cash in on games which makes sense, although for different reasons. Does it make sense for users? Do consumers want to play games on non-gaming platforms? And really, when you look at both Netflix and TikTok, there are two different solutions to this. Netflix wants stickiness so you don't forget, you don't remember that you have a subscription with them and you just continue to paying it every month forever. And TikTok wants more places that they can put their highly targeted ads. Yeah, TikTok wants your eyeballs, Netflix wants your memory. And I try to resist the bias of, well, I don't do this, so it must not be necessary because I don't really play a lot of mobile games anyway. So I'm a horrible test case for this. I know that a lot of people play mobile games, but I don't know how many people play mobile games within a platform. I know it does happen more in WeChat in mainland China because WeChat has for years been a super app that you do lots of things in and people kind of forget that WeChat is even an app. They think of it as a big platform where you do lots of things. It's almost akin to an operating system. And I don't think in Europe and in North America, we have an equivalent for that. And here people tend to just want an app. It's way too early to tell if people are picking up the Netflix games because they're kind of weird and unfocused and there hasn't been one that everybody's talking about, but I don't think they have yet. So the jury's still out. Well, I mean, gaming's tricky, right? It's very fickle market, but I do think that we would probably be having a lot of these same conversations about Facebook. Do people want to play a game on Facebook? And as it turns out, yes. Plants versus zombies in Farmville have become absolute gigantic Jaggernauts, largely because they had a captive audience of people who wanted to kill time while also on a website where you kill time. So when it comes to- But are they still, I think, or was that a phase with Facebook? I think that's an interesting test case. Well, I think we would probably have to look at the numbers because- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't hear people talking about going to Facebook to play games as much now as they used to. I guess that's all I'm thinking. Sure, although I don't know if we, I think we are probably in a more transient demo than some of the folks who are probably still plugging away on Farmville. That being said, it depends on the game, obviously. If the games are good, then they will get more traction. I think it is more likely that this fits TikTok's demo. Yeah. And it does Netflix's, but that is purely a guess and that is not knowing exactly what these products are gonna be. And TikTok's positive are, I love to discover funny, weird new things on TikTok. And if TikTok can nail, and it sounds like with Duyan, they've been getting some experience. They can nail that seamless, I go from one funny meme video into a game that's fun, they might be able to make a go of this. If anybody can, maybe it's them. On the other hand, it has to be fast. Nobody likes to spend a lot of time on TikTok. It's, well, no one likes to spend a lot of time on any one thing on TikTok. They spend hours on TikTok, but it has to be in quick 12-second chunks, right? Here's the thing that I would say. TikTok is very issue-dependent. Like there's a reason why you always, that there is the suffix, talk to everything. I'm on politics talk. I'm on communist talk, I'm on cooking talk, right? If there is a meme worthy game, or a game for which TikTok users want to share their experiences and strategies, then they will have a natural advantage. Well, folks, what do you want us to talk about on the show? You can email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, you can hit me up on Cheyong Talk, or you can go to our subreddit, submit stories, and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. A group of US senators introduced legislation Thursday called the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act. The sponsors of the bill are senators Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Justin, I don't know why, but that seems like an odd grouping of names. Who are these folks? Look, for those of you who don't follow US politics that close, these senators are not from the same party, and you most specifically do not see folks like Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar cooperating a bit. So it may not be a lock for passage, but it won't be a straight partisan line that would keep it from passing if it does fail. What did these folks cooperate on then? Well, the bill put some price transparency requirements and consumer responsibility rules for the business processing more than $5 billion a year in digital ads. But the main thrust is that one company cannot process more than $20 billion a year in a more than one section of the digital advertising industry. Tom, you did the briny and actually read the bill. What does this mean specifically? It was a much shorter bill than the ones that Jen Bridey from Congressional Dish reads, but yes, I did. And here's what it says. Number one, you can't own an advertising exchange. That's like an auction house. You know how ad-word, ad-words. You can't own an advertising exchange if you also own a brokerage for selling or buying ads or if you sell ad space. Sound like anyone you know? Number two, you can't own a brokerage for selling ads if you also own one for buying ads. You can't buy and sell. You can't play both ends of the market if this bill goes through. Number three, you can't own either buying or selling brokerages if you also buy or sell ad space. And if you didn't catch on already, Google does all of these things. All these cases apply to Google. If the bill becomes law, affected companies would have a year from when it goes into effect to a comply. And in Google's case, it might then be forced to sell off parts of its advertising business. Something it's had since the early 21st century when it bought DoubleClick. Meta might also need to divest parts of its advertising business as well. I didn't hear Amazon mention probably because they don't hit the 20 billion mark in all of those sections. You have to hit the 20 billion mark across the sections. Justin, what do you think the chances are of this becoming law though? Well, one hurdle is the house and a similar bill is expected to be introduced in the house later this week by Representative Ken Buck of Colorado and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington. They are not in the same party so you have two bills that could reconcile should they both pass. On the other hand, it's a pretty big deal to enact this law. The Senate bill is technically an amendment to the Clayton Act of 1914, an antitrust law that has not been amended since the 1970s. But hey, everything in the 70s is coming back. So why not amend the Clayton Act while we're here? Sure. Would it get out of committee? Your mileage may vary. Though Senator Klobuchar is the chair of the subcommittee handling the bill and has moved forward the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would prevent platforms from favoring their own products over those of the competitors that rely on their services and the Open App Markets Act, which is similar but about app stores. Those are out of committee but have not gone to a vote. Yeah. And it's probably obvious but worth noting that Google opposes this bill. They are on record. Meta hasn't commented or at least I haven't seen a comment from Meta yet but I don't know. I would guess they might not be in favor of the bill either unless they thought it would hurt Google more than them maybe. No. No, no, no, no, no. Nobody wants to see that this is... And let me make this clear. These companies exist on this technology. Is Google particularly and Facebook? Facebook and Google particularly? Google and Facebook specifically. They are ad sales companies. Everything else they do is either superfluous too or serving of the goose that lays the golden eggs and that is advertising, advertising, advertising. This isn't a problem. This isn't a hurdle. This is an existential crisis for both of these companies. Yeah. I think this would make more headlines or will make more headlines should it get to a floor vote? Should it get to a point where it's possible to become law? Help me navigate this. Am I right in thinking that it's hard enough to get things out of committee, although they've got bipartisan support, so that helps. It's then getting enough overt sentiment to bring it to a vote. It's kind of easy for representatives particularly, but also senators to just not participate in bringing it to a vote and therefore it just gets shoved behind other priorities. Yeah, it really needs to gain the favor of the leadership too. So Chuck Schumer, who right now is the Senate Majority Leader, would have to say, this is an important thing that we believe is going to be for the best of the country and the Democratic Party. The big issue that in terms of the timing is that we are about to walk into the dog days of summer in an election year and those are not exactly fertile grounds for any kind of law to pass at all, no matter what, because everybody's heading into elections and they don't want to upset any kind of alchemy that they can. So what I would expect is that there's a lot of ads being purchased by every lobbyist shop on K Street targeted both to Google and Facebook headquarters because I think that this is a full court press to kill these bills immediately. Yeah, because first of all, there could be donation pressure. It could be very covert, not overt. If you want us to back your reelection in the midterms, we don't want you working against us. But also being bipartisan isn't a benefit here, right? Because it's not like this gets voted on and one party gets to crow that they were the ones who took down big tech. Also, we just had that report a couple of days ago that Pew Research Center found that the number of people who think tech companies should face more regulation is falling. Now, it's 44%, it's still a lot of people. If you just walk out on the street, you'll find plenty of people who think they need to be more regulated, but it's going out of fashion, not increasing in fashion and that's across party lines. Because by and large, people like free products and a lot of this is free product, right? Google is a service for which people use so much that we don't even think about using it. Facebook has become an indelible part of people's lives so much so that when I'm out on the road and I'm covering candidates, it is among the first thing that's brought up is what are we gonna do about Facebook? Their Facebook is censoring us. But that means that people care about that more than a lot of other bedrock issues that I have seen that have dominated politics for 50 years. It matters a lot. People are happy with it. Sometimes they don't like what happens when they're on it. But by and large, I think people like the fact that these services exist. Yeah, and I think like all things with the public, they only stay mad at the same thing for a while before you move on and get mad at something else. And big tech, they may be getting tired of it. Like nothing changed. I don't know what the next thing is, but I'm not saying everybody's letting big tech off the hook or that they should even. I'm just saying it does seem like there's a little fatigue set again on that issue. Well, I think also one last thing on this, there is, this is a bit of an esoteric thing. I don't think that the average voter, the average citizen knows exactly what separating these parts of the ad business for Google would really do. Sure. Now people in the know understand this is them trying to stab both of these companies in the heart and it is very punitive. That being said, I don't know if that translates to retail. Yeah. If it's more of a privacy or a censorship play if you're going for popularity, actually getting bipartisan support to break up digital ads because you think it's bad for the economy and bad for competition, you're right, that just doesn't have a slogan attached to it as well. Yeah. All right, I got a slogan for this though. Samsung has a line of bespoke refrigerators that are modular and customizable. If you didn't know this, you can decide how many, we're not just talking about the shelves inside, how many drawers, how many doors, where the freezer is, stuff like that. One of the customizations on Samsung's bespoke line lets you choose from a selection of colors and prints for the door. Now you may be saying to yourself, well, that isn't really bespoke if it's a limited selection. Guess what? Samsung hears you, it's adding a new option. If you give Samsung 500 bucks, you can have any photo or image you like, within reason, printed on the unit's double doors. This option is launching for buyers sometime later this year. And if you're already an owner of a bespoke fridge from Samsung, you can order the door panels separately and swap men. That runs you 250 bucks a panel. Samsung says it'll take about eight weeks from your order to print and ship your new panels. They're also gonna screen for copyright violations and explicit images. So if you're gonna put Pulp Fiction on there, maybe you're not gonna get that. Or perhaps an intimate photo of yourself wouldn't make it through. But picture the family out there or some artwork, you wanna put your kids' artwork on the fridge, you could make your kids' artwork, the fridge. I and make it permanent. Yeah. If we ever do one piece of art, and I'm sure that will always stay at the test of time. It's gonna be a lot of people regretting they did this, is my guess. Well, I mean, here's my thing. It just takes a long time. I don't know how many people have bought a refrigerator after the chip shortage and the supply chain issues, but it was a two month wait for me and to add another two months to it so I could put whatever dumb ding dong thing I wanted on my doors. I don't know, that's a quarter. Like I am waiting a very long time for a refrigerator. Or maybe you're waiting a long time for a refrigerator anyway. Why not get a bespoke one with a lovely picture of your garden on it? I mean, like 500 bucks, that's a significant cost. This is a $2,000 fridge to begin with and then you add in 500 bucks on top of that, yeah. I mean, good for Samsung on finding a new way that they could upcharge, but holy moly. Let us know what picture you'd put on your fridge that would permanently be on your fridge until you were willing to pay $500 to replace it. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Let's check out that mailbag. Dwayne from Germany wrote in and said, I know these coins, bitcoins, crypto coins can be unconventional, but they work amazingly well for me and many others. I'm in the process of buying a home in Barbados and Tether and USD, both stable coins, made it possible to send funds to my lawyer, cousin and contractor in a timely matter while paying way less fees. Normally it would cost me $40 to wire money to the island, which then would take 10 to 14 days to be received. Using Binance US, I can send them funds in minutes and pay an 80 cent withdrawal fee unconventional, but convenient. Yeah, I mean, look, there is a million hours of conversation that can be had about crypto coin, but I think that the point of it in general is so there can be fairly frictionless transfer of money. That's part of the cool part about it. There's crypto coin and there's crypto coin, right? There's Bitcoin and Ethereum, which can have high gas fees and actually cost you a lot. It can be slow. Not every crypto coin is the same. And I think what Dwayne is pointing out here is the stable coins are built specifically to make this kind of process work well. And Dwayne's saying, works great for me. Definitely is an advantage. So that's why I had said yesterday, and I'll say it again, you should resist the temptation to pay all the efforts with the same brush. Some are Tera and you probably should have known that wasn't a great idea. Some are Tether, which I would like more transparency, but maybe it is a good idea. And Dwayne explains a use case of what it's good for. Yeah. Well, I know what Justin Robert Young is good for. He's good for being here on DTNS Share and his insights with us, as well as lots of other great shows that you got going on. What are some of those? Well, I'll tell you what, we mentioned the Jen Briney of Congressional Dish. And this week, we are launching a new podcast with myself, Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton of the political orphanage. It's called We're Not Wrong. If you like shows about a political conversation, then I think this one is going to be for you. I would say it's somewhere in the reason round table, blocked and reported, fifth column kind of genre. So go ahead and check it out. I've had a really, really good time doing it so far. And then as far as PX3 goes, I'm gonna be in Georgia this weekend covering those primaries. Yeah. Some people get their peaches down in Georgia. Justin gets his primaries down in Georgia. I do. I do. This is juicy, Tom. Folks, I want to thank our longtime supporters. We are always looking for new patrons and we make a big deal about the new patrons when we get them. Could be you tomorrow. But today, we're gonna thank Ben Vaughn, who has been with us for a long time and is one of our top lifetime supporters. Thank you, Ben, for all the years of support. Ben is one of those folks who's gonna get the longer version of the show called Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow, Len Peralta will be here illustrating. Patrick Norton will be here talking about how to track down a Raspberry Pi for your next project. You'll be here too, right? Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.