 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you. Give yourself a big old pat on the back. Thanks to all of you, including Mark Gibson, Reed Fishler, and Larry Bailey. Coming up on DTNS, the guy who made Meerkat wants to take down Discord. Google wants to stop Canadians from reading news. Plus, the U.S. Copyright Office says you can't copyright A.I. generated works. Folks, the A.I. copyright wars have begun. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 23rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Hey, big thanks to our subreddit. Because of them, we told you last week about Netflix reducing prices in places around the world. Welcome to the Party Wall Street Journal, which noted it today that Netflix has lowered its price in more than 30 countries. Now, let's get you ahead of the pack on some other tech news in the quick hits. Samsung announced a new standardized 5G non-terrestrial network modem, which offers two-way communication between phones and satellites, opening the door to sending calls or texts and data without a cell network. Yeah, it's similar to what Apple's doing for its emergency SOS system. Samsung plans to integrate its modem into its future Exynos chips. Interestingly enough, though, Samsung isn't using its Exynos chips in the Samsung Galaxy S23. Maybe they could integrate it into Apple Silicon and then sell a bunch more. Qualcomm would not be happy with that. Alright, lots of coverage has focused on Apple and others diversifying their supply chains away from China, moving things to Vietnam, India, Brazil, the U.S., Europe, etc. But we have a significant story about the opposite thing happening. Nikkei Asia's sources say Apple plans to use a China-based supplier named Lux Share to finish development of its upcoming Mixed Reality headset. That would take it away from Taiwan's Pegatron. This also would mark the first time Apple would use a Chinese supplier for a first-gen product. In another part of the world, allowing third-party payment system is all around the Google Play Store. On a support page Thursday, Google wrote out the steps that developers can follow to offer alternative billing systems in India. If a user pays through an alternative method, Google reduces the cut it takes by 4%. Google was fined $161 million by the competition commissioner of India last year and in order to make changes, including allowing third-party billing. YouTube expanded access to multi-language audio tracks to more creators, like foreign language dubs. So let's say you recorded your video in your native Urdu. You can now add a dub in BASC. These can be added through the subtitles editor tool and existing content can be updated with tracks as well. So you can go back and do your old stuff too. Videos with multiple tracks will default to the viewer's language preference. The European Commission requested that employees delete TikTok from their work devices, just requested, didn't demand, as well as any personal devices that they use to access official apps or email systems. The EC said, quote, this measure aims to protect the commission against cyber security threats and actions which may be exploited for cyber attacks, end quote. ByteDance said that directive was misguided and based on fundamental misconceptions. Yes, it's a request. You don't get us. That's a strongly worded request. All right. Who I am. Let's talk about Ben Rubin. Ben Rubin, if you don't recognize the name, is famous for having good ideas that have not quite fully caught on. He's had successes, but nothing you can point to right now. For example, he founded the mobile live streaming app, Meerkat, back in 2015, darling of South by Southwest, but almost immediately couldn't compete with Twitter-required Periscope and shut down a year after it launched. In 2015, Rubin's House Party, a social group video chat app, was acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games and shuttered in 2021, even though it was downloaded 17 million times in March 2020 alone. Lockdown boredom, anybody? Rubin is also behind the tool Slack Talk that seeks to replace meetings with faster decentralized conversations. That one has yet to gain super traction, but who knows? However, he's up to something new. Tell us about it, Sarah. Yeah, so Rubin's latest project is called Towns, like the town, T-O-W-N-S, and it's built within here, not their labs, sort of an incubator for projects. Co-founded by former Microsoft employee Brian Meek, so the two are working together on this. Now, at first glance, or at first description, it sounds kind of like Discord, Rubin told TechCrunch. This is a new way of thinking about social networking as a network that's owned and operated by its constituents. Now, Towns is a protocol, and it's also a web-based chat app that lets self-owned and governed communities set up their own rules, run their own content moderation, and even handle monetization using an Ethereum-based smart contract system that also supports end-to-end encryption. It counts as what people call a DAP, a decentralized app. Now, if you go decentralization, Ethereum, DAOs, that stuff doesn't excite me, at least I don't really know where I fit into this, Rubin does say the Towns app takes all the technical things that the protocol implements and makes them available in an open source, end-to-end encrypted, delightful chat experience. So you might go, okay, well, I like chatting, and I feel like I have some kind of decentralized chat options. Rubin says the Discord comparison is something that a lot of people are making, but he notes anybody who's running their own Discord server, you have a lot of control, but you're still renting the experience from Discord itself. So if you want something that takes it a step further, Justin, how do they do it? Oh, Sarah, I'd be delighted to tell everybody. You can sign up for an invite to try the alpha version now with a beta planned in September that will let users create their own groups. A mobile web app is in the works with native apps thereafter. Right now, you need to log on with your own crypto wallet, I think it's lined up everybody, but Towns plans to add support for Apple's next gen login pass keys. All right, so file this one as one to watch, because right now if you need to take your crypto wallet along to log in, it's going to limit the appeal. Bunch of you are going to still do it. They're like, ah, it's not that hard here, you just do these seven steps, but it's going to keep a lot of people from, even if they know how to do it, bothering to go through it. As soon as they add pass keys, we'll see if this thing takes up. But I think the interesting thing is that Ben Rubin gets a lot of press, obviously that that's why he got written up by TechCrunch. He has great ideas, House Party and Meerkat were both excellent ideas. They just got the timing wrong. And so the idea of a decentralized social platform is ripe right now with all of the talk about mastodon and Twitter and everything else. I'm not saying this is a lock, but maybe this is the time he gets the timing right. Yeah, go ahead. You first. OK. Number one, of course, the fastest way to a bearded man's heart is through his crypto wallet. So certainly it's going to have a certain audience that will immediately jump on it. But I do think that the idea of taking a lot of these technologies and putting a sheen on top of them that makes them more user accessible is something that is forward thinking, even further than that. If we are looking at the Internet and saying that while we understand that mass market social media networks, Facebook, Twitter, the like, have created a desire for smaller social networks where we can talk to fewer people, then this would be something that I do think that needs to survive. And comparing it to Discord, I think in 10 years or at least a technology like this will look a little bit foolhardy. Yeah, the whole crypto wallet thing, you know, people you're right, Tom. A lot of our audience is like, that's not hard. I already have one. I have more than one. No big deal. Other people will go, well, this costs money. No, thank you. And I don't do crypto anyway, because I don't understand it well enough. And Ruben has mentioned that down the road, because we're still in our early stages of towns, that the company is going to take a cut of transactions made through crypto, because everybody's crypto wallet or, you know, some other version of being able to access money would be used to govern different networks. And again, that can be set by the networks themselves and who is running this particular Dow and that also town says, OK, now we said, if you're using Discord, it's not as decentralized as we would like to be. We want to help you get off the ground. Then you make your own decentralized autonomous organization. And we just kind of go, you know, we just sort of go back into the hedges and maybe just take a cut of transactions. They're going to take a cut. I think that's the most fascinating thing. If they can get this working, if they can make it invisible, that it's crypto on the back end and you're just using a past key to log in. If they're able to make their money on the crypto circulating behind the scenes on that proof of stake system that they're eventually going to transition to, there's a lot of ifs in the in these statements. But if they can do that, then they could have a system that looks free without ads, but is actually making money on the back end. Can I can I be the rain on the parade guy? Please do please rain on my my parade has pulled out its umbrellas. Go ahead. Let's say there is fully decentralized content, which means that things that may be illegal and might be horrifying are happening on that platform, profiting from that by an automatic proof of stake situation might not bode well for them in the future. But that is me being a doomer. I don't want to be the the dark cloud that that passes over a parade. So forget I said anything. No, that that would be the one way that they they would be involved. And this Tomna versus Twitter case is all about monetization off of controversial content. That's the one we talked about yesterday about Section 230. So the way they rule on that could have implications for this. That's a really good point. I also just wonder, OK, I mean, I do a lot of chatting on a variety of platforms currently just kind of depending on where everybody else is. And we're not passing a lot of money around between us. Maybe we could in the future depends on the server and the, you know, the point of of, you know, why everybody's there. But what if you don't do that at all? Because that's not how the crypto gets. That's not how the money gets made. The money is made on transactions to run servers and trade information in a blockchain environment like that. You're not making the money off of people sending money back and forth. You are going to places to buy things because this is an easy way to. So there'll be a subsection of the of the group that are running servers and exchanging crypto that way and cashing that crypto out. And you will never have to know about them. Though they'll just be doing their thing in the background. Well, you know, who else does their thing? News organizations back in December, the Canadian House of Commons passed the online news act, a.k.a. Bill C 18 on to the Senate for consideration. Now, like similar laws in Spain, in Germany, in Australia and elsewhere, this one tries to force big platforms like Google and Facebook to negotiate with news publishers to pay them for linking to their content. Now, in the Canadian bill, access to any portion of content from a news business is forbidden without an agreement by a qualifying digital news intermediary. So what's a news business and what is a digital news intermediary? You might ask an eligible news business must be produced for Canada and must be general news, not industry specific. So, for example, not just a sports blog or a tech blog. Digital news intermediaries are search engines or social networks, but they aren't messaging platforms. So, Tom, where are there some exceptions? Yeah, this is where it gets interesting. The act applies if there is a significant power imbalance. That's how it said in the bill between the digital news intermediary and the news publisher. Who gets to decide that? The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, the FCC of Canada gets to decide that. The bill says that the CRTC will take into account how big the platform is, the Google or the Facebook, how big they are, as well as whether its market position is not only dominant. So it has to have a dominant market position but also has a strategic market advantage over the news publishers. So, obviously, Facebook and Google are going to meet all these definitions. Bing, I don't know, it's not that dominant. Maybe, maybe not. And your personal blog probably does not meet this definition. So you might ask, why are we even talking about this today? While the Canadian Senate is considering this bill, so it passed the House of Commons, it's now in the Senate. Google is preparing for its passage. It's running a test in Canada right now in public that limits the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees. Google says a random sample of about four percent of users in Canada are subject to the test. In other words, it's blocking news content for about four percent of Canadians to some degree. So, Justin, is this Google being petulant or reasonable? Because, hey, they might have to do this or something else. Google to Canada. Surrey, I do think that this is something that there are two cataclysms that have happened over the last five years. Whether or not you have, thank you, sir, whether or not you have realized that they have happened. Number one, Google has seen their golden goose lay less golden eggs. Not stop laying golden eggs, but digital ads have slow as a market. Long ago, we saw advertising begin to slow for newspapers and including newspapers becoming more and more dependent on online traffic for digital ads. Digital ads slowed down a lot over the last two years as well. When you combine both of them, there's an old phrase that I believe is coined by Henry Kissinger, that the smaller the pie, the sharper the knives. This is two very entrenched, very entitled organizations that are going to fight each other, tooth and nail for an ever shrinking pie of money. It's going to be ugly. And I would say not to get into a political theorist element of this, but when you are leaving that much distinction up to the judgment of a governmental body, then you are asking for both sides to game their argument so they can make the best case to that judge. We usually end up regulating something as it's dying. This could be another example of that. For instance, the Morning Consult just reported that 14 percent of Gen Z adults in the US, not in Canada, but, you know, they're pretty close. 14 percent of Gen Z adults in the US turned to TikTok first for news. Morning Consult says specifically, quote, to boost their chances of counting Gen Zers as paying subscribers. News publishers must distribute more compelling content that lives outside of their own websites. So the one thing that I would point out there is that I do believe that that is a reaction. And we've seen these kinds of polls for the last 10 years, 15 years really since the death of the nightly news and the morning newspaper. That had a fairly unquestioned range of reign of dominance. And since then we have seen a migration year, like, you know, by years and years and years that it was late night television and then blogs and then Twitter and now it's TikTok. I presume that the the large let's pay attention to it group of people that are getting their news somewhere else will be somewhere else in five years as well. Yeah, because the other side of this is 86 percent are not turning to TikTok first for news, right? But I do I put this next to the fact that people search for information on TikTok and YouTube first as sort of a trend that people don't turn to search engines as much as they used to for answers because the answers aren't always that good or reliable. And we've got AI over there in the corner going, hey, I'll answer a question for you. So, you know, and that's that's the other element of this is that will 2023 we're going to get into an AI story in a little bit. But will 2023 be the year that we see gigantic strains upon that the search industry, just as all the governments are like, oh, by the way, it's more expensive to be a surgeon. Yeah. Yeah. All right, folks. We get a lot of our best ideas for stories from you. It has sometimes by email, sometimes in the discord or the chat. One way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. And I encourage you to do so. On September 15th of last year, Christina Kastinova posted on Instagram that her comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, had been approved for copyright registration in the US. Now, she had used Mid Journey to make the art for the comic book. And she wrote that she wanted to set a president that we own copyright when we make something using AI. And, you know, there's a lot of debate about that going on right now. The US Copyright Office saw that post and said, we did what? Yeah, because the Instagram picture was of her registration. While Mid Journey was listed on the cover of the comic book, the Copyright Office says there was no other reference to AI in her application. So it followed up and asked a few more questions about how AI was used. Once it got those answers, it withdrew the registration for the images part and reissued a new registration to provide copyright just for the text, the selection, coordination and arrangement of the works written and visual elements, but not for the images themselves. The office wrote a thorough analysis of legal precedent. This is not them not getting it. They actually described like, OK, this is how Mid Journey works. We figured it out, but this is what we think they wrote. The fact that Mid Journey is specific out but cannot be predicted by a user makes Mid Journey different for copyright purposes than other tools used by artists. In other words, this isn't Photoshop. You know what Photoshop is going to do when you press a button. Mid Journey, you never know what you're going to get. So really what they're saying is it comes down to the value of that prompt that you write is the prompt that you write to the tool enough of a creative input to make the work original. Copyright Office says no, that's a modicum of input. That's how they put it in their letter. On the other hand, Ms. Kostanova's lawyer says these are instructions to pull from an artist's chosen place in its massive table of probabilities to drive the generation of an image. What say you, Justin? Before we get into this specific case, let me make a bold claim that I believe prompt that word prompt will be a phrase that you will hear a lot. People will be adding it to their LinkedIn profiles. They will be defining their entire careers on what they can do and how talented they can be with prompts. And in this case, while I respect the fact that the US Copyright Office went to the lengths that they did to define why they made the decision and I respect the fact that they did grant the copyright for elements of her work. I think not that they are ignorant. I do believe that they are on the wrong side of history with this because the prompt what from where we are right now in February to where we will be in December at the end of this year, I think we are going to find a lot more worth in what it takes to do it. Whether or not we look at it as being simplistic now, there is no art without the prompt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you say, show me girl at river with tea in hand. OK, you're going to get a bunch of different options, but that's not extremely descriptive. You can make it much more flowery and say, well, look how artistic I was. I mean, not everybody could have written a prompt like this. There's still prompts. Well, and what we run into on Sword and Laser, where we use Mid Journey, the exact same tool to make our album art, Veronica will say, you know, give me four images of Clark's world flooding. She'll look at those four and she'll be like, no, no, no, more water. OK, hold on. Make it make it lighter. It's a little too dark. Like those are the prompts. It's not just a prompt, right? There are multiple generations and you're choosing from multiple versions of like, oh, OK, take the upper right one. Now expand on that. Take the text out of it. Do stuff like that. That is the part that I think you're right, Justin, needs to be appreciated as the creative input. Because I do understand what they're saying is it's not that the image isn't copyrightable. It's unique. The the issue is, was it created by her or was it created by something else? This goes back to the monkey question. And they cite that in their letter, which is if the monkey took the picture, then the monkey would hold the copyright. But monkeys can't hold copyrights under our law. So nobody gets the copyright. Same thing here. Mid Journey doesn't get to hold a copyright. It's a machine. But the copyright office is saying, but you didn't create it. It did. And also, I have not checked the Yula, but I don't know if monkeys are allowed to generate art on Mid Journey. That's a but we please have that story next. Please. Well, the the next reason about monkeys specifically, but it is about what experts say and they say a lot, don't they? This time, they're saying that within a decade, around 39% of Houseburg chores and things like carrying for loved ones could all be automated. OK, a little bit more specifically, researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK and Japan's Okanomizu University came up with the number after they asked 65 artificial intelligence experts, some in the UK, some in Japan, how much automation for things like unpaid domestic work might take over 10 years and then they published their findings in the journal plus one PLOS. The chore category of getting groceries was expected to cut down 60% of time spent by humans due to automation, but caring for, let's say, a younger or older person in the house showed the least potential growth at just 28% of time saved. As far as robots in the home, researchers pointed to things like vacuums, which many of us are already pretty used to and have become pretty ubiquitous and found that when asking folks about more robot automation in the home, male UK experts were more optimistic about domestic automation in that category than their female counterparts, although the reverse was found by researchers and experts in Japan. That last part is very interesting. I did to speculate why the flip flop between UK and Japan. But I imagine that people who actually do the cleaning more often are less likely to think that the robot helps because it doesn't do it right. Or people who don't do cleaning are underestimating how hard it is. And like, oh, a robot probably just, you know, makes it makes it a snap. Having having had a robot vacuum that I had to vacuum behind, I kind of get that. Oh, man, I'd be lost without my room, but fully lost as a person. I'm with you, Tom. I've never had a robot vacuum that didn't just live to get caught on my carpets. I mean, mine gets caught under everything and it's really not very smart at all. But it still is cleaning. It's cleaning. It's cleaning for however long it's cleaning. And every time I dump that into the trash, I go, look, it's not on the floor anymore. And I didn't do a thing. That's a very Japanese perspective, Sarah. I suppose it is. Yes, as a female, I, you know, I belong in that team. I will also say that I am a pigpen trash monster. So you are you are probably a more cleanly person than I am. Well, a lot of this has to do with optimism and pessimism, right? We could be looking at the exact exact same situation, which I actually think Sarah and I are. And I'm like, yeah, it didn't help much. And Sarah's like, yeah, but it helps some like the glass half empty glass. It's like, it's, it's, you know, I mean, even if it helped 20 percent besides me just looking at my carpet and going, oh, dog hair. I can't deal with this. It helps. Yeah. Better than nothing. All right. Let's see who helped us with their insights. Let's do it. So earlier this week, we were talking about the large number of Gen Z folks. Those are born after 1996 using iPhones. And why Peter from Brampton, Ontario, speculated, he said, you know, my kids are in the group that they had their first phone, but it was an iPod touch. My kids who are 23 through, you know, 18 years old, so they're they're in that Gen Z category all had iPod touch devices. And I didn't want to pay for a phone plan at the time. So they're kind of used to that form factor. Adam from Fairport, Harbor, Ohio, echoed that sentiment from Peter, wondering if the kids grew up with iPads as babysitters and iPods as Wi-Fi phones. And now they're just used to them. I think there's something to this that that parents are more likely to choose an Apple product because whether it's true or not, the perception is it's easier and it's safer. It's like unpaid home automation, right? And so you pay for it. I don't know if I want to get that Android thing because I read a headline that said it wasn't secure. I'll just get the iPhone for them. I mean, and look, I've made this joke on a bunch of shows, but I will repeat it because it's very funny to me that I always joke with our friend on this show, Darren Kitchen, that despite the fact that he spends more on his phone that I do, and there are always Android devices, I call his phone a poor people's phone. Like there is there is a there is an element of needling that comes along with the open source nature and the wide strata of Android phones that creates I mean, its value, its brand is that it can cost less and do almost exactly as much. And, you know, almost exactly as much when it comes to a brand definition sometimes means that the thing that can do everything gets that brand hierarchy. Well, folks, if you've got thoughts about this or anything else, especially that mid-journey stuff, I bet you got thoughts on that. Email us feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. And indeed, thanks to you, Justin Robert Young, for bringing the knowledge today, as usual, let folks know where you've been up to and how and how they can keep up with it. First things first on PX3 this Friday, Jimmy Carter, the president of the United States back elected in 1976 is in hospice in his home in Plains, Georgia. And so before he leaves this mortal plane, we are honoring him on PX3 on Friday, categorizing his 1976 win. So listen to that when it comes out. But this Wednesday, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, go to Eventbrite where not wrong. My podcast with Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton is live at the Piano Fight Theater, my favorite venue. It's closing down in San Francisco, and I would I love it so much. I'm coming back across the country to do a live show. Head over there right now. Get your tickets. It's Friday, sorry, Wednesday, March 1st at 8 p.m. Piano Fight Theater where not wrong go on Eventbrite.com to get your tickets. Sounds like a fun show. Not too far from me, in fact. Maybe you should take a trip down south. Maybe I should. Yeah, down south. 90 minutes in a car. I think I could do that. But first, we want to thank our brand new bosses. We're kind of on a streak this week, and I don't want to jinx it, but I do want to thank our bosses, Ricky, Wild West Dan and Deed Co, who all just started backing us on Patreon since our last show, which was yesterday. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you, Wild West Dan, and thank you, Deed Co. Ah, the three awesome folks. In fact, Wild West Dan set off a howdy meme in our discord today. Jump it in. So thank you. Thank you, all three of you, Ricky Wild West Dan and Deed Co. You are now patrons and you get to stick around for the extended show. Good Day Internet. Justin is going to herald our post advertising future as he explains why he loves using AI in notion, which is now available to everybody, not just elites like Justin. You can catch this show live. Did you know that? Well, I'll tell you the deeds. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We're back doing the show again tomorrow. Nika Monford is going to join us and tell us all about mathematician Melba Roy Moulton and her work at NASA. Don't miss it. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.