 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Philip Less, Daniel Dorado and Howard Yermish. Coming up on DTNS, the President of the United States of America has a plan for dealing with big tech, plus printing a two-story house, and CNET is using algorithms to write some of its stories. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 12th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Boston, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Yock. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. It is God Jam-packed show. Let's get right into it. Spotify scheduled its yearly stream-on event for March 8th. Now, here are the rest of the quick hits. Windows iTunes users are finally able to get replacements. Illumia Italia tweeted that Apple Music and Apple TV app showed up in the Microsoft Store. And Therot.com says those two apps and an Apple devices app for syncing are now all available for download in preview. If that sounds like hell freezing over. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says his sources indicate Apple is working on a touchscreen that could show up in the MacBook Pro in 2025, which makes Ming-Chi Kuo's report that Apple may release $99 AirPods next year seem positively quaint. Oh, that's cute. Reliance Industries Geo Games, JIO Geo Games has signed a 10-year deal with French cloud streaming company GameStream. Geo Games Cloud is already in beta in India, but it doesn't have a lot of AAA titles, which is something GameStream can offer in its white label cloud streaming service. That's a white label cloud streaming service that seems to be successful and is not called Stadia. GameStream has a partnership with Ubisoft, for example. Intel announced the Core i9-13900KS CPU offering 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores with a maximum turbo boost clock of up to 6 GHz. The first processor to hit that frequency without overclocking. It also consumes more power with a base TPD of 150 watts, 20% higher than the standard i9-13900K. It's also available now for $699. You can remember the difference because KS has an S, which stands for 6 GHz. There you go. Since March, Microsoft has shipped the Xbox Series X and S consoles with a power saving option on by default called shutdown energy saving. This mode uses 95% less power than the usual sleep mode, but takes 15 seconds to boot back up. Sleep mode is instant on. A software update is being pushed out now to all existing models to switch that shutdown mode on. Now you can choose to switch it back to sleep instant on if you want, but you're going to have to go into settings to do that. In other Microsoft news, the US Congress did not approve the US Army's request for $400 million to buy 6900 HoloLens units. It did approve an additional $40 million to develop an improved HoloLens that doesn't cause mission affecting physical impairments, including headaches, eye strain and nausea. Shots fired. HBO Max will raise the price of its ad free service from $14.99 per month in the US to $15.99 per month as of February 11th. This comes in advance of a merger between HBO Max and Discovery Plus, which is expected this spring. And that is, look at the quickies. All right. Now in the latest, in world's most sorted crypto saga to date, FTX founder, Sam bank bring freed published his version of what happened on substack claiming his innocence. He claimed quite a few things. He's also saying quote, even now I believe that if FTX international were to reboot, there'd be a real possibility of customers being substantially whole being made substantially whole. You know, if you're following the story, you know that there are quite a few FTX customers who feel like that is not the case. Bankman freed also fired back against his lawyers for asking for his seized $465 million stake in stock trading app Robin Hood, which had the lawyers said was needed to fund Bankman freed's legal defense. Oh, well, so what happened was is how I looked at that. In a related piece of news, US bankruptcy judge John T. Dorsey terminated the naming rights deal between FTX and Miami Dade County for the arena where the Miami Heat play quote unquote effective immediately. Now this is going to be an undertaking the arena's roof, the basketball court, multiple entrances polo shirts worn by the security personnel, electronic cards that employees use to gain access all have FTX branding. It's it reminds me of when the the cup holders at Pac Bell Park still said web then on the naming rights deal went into effect in June 2021. At the time it was going to be a 19 year deal worth $135 million. Justin Robert Young as a proud South Floridian. How do you feel and and a Miami Heat fan that arena, which was once the American Airlines arena is something that does mean something to Miami because one of their main hubs is out of the MIA airport. I would I would I don't know I have a few suggestions. I have a few discoveries zone arena for any local South Floridian Miami subs arena. I feel like a char grill a public arena would be would would certainly be excellent. The funniest thing about this is FTX came in so hot and heavy with its athletic endorsements. And this is probably the biggest element of that buying a 20 year naming rights deal was a huge, huge thing that very much went along with Miami's rebranding is being super crypto friendly. But oh boy, that does this look like an unfortunate tattoo that you're getting lasered off as soon as you can after spread break. Yeah, not since the dot com bust have have we seen any kind of renaming along the lines of what we're talking about here. I got crypto dot com arena. Tom doing a little bit of physical physical comedy here. I once sent him a several of the icon of any South Florida household and anybody who has grown up in the Miami Fort Lauderdale upon beach area knows that in every covered there is at least three gigantic green Flanagan cups. And so yes, flannies. If we could change it into flannies arena, then that would be amazing. Half price ribs on Tuesday. Let's go. Yeah, I look at this less as the bad news for crypto that it has been and more as an opportunity. Right. Well, it's certainly a cautionary tale and also one of those things that we should all understand. Whenever there's that amount of spending, then you should probably raise a little bit of a red flag. You know, I don't think any kind of company that is thinking about their 50 year plan is like, No, we want to sponsor everybody and buy everything. I, you know, I think it's interesting that this is going to get ripped away because you crypto dot com arena I'm going there tomorrow night. It's still called crypto dot com arena. FTX is is gone though. That's that's the difference. FTX is is not just, you know, having hard times with money. It is it is bankrupt. So I guess it's not technically gone, but it's certainly it certainly can't afford to fulfill its obligations here. And you know what? I honestly don't think this is as bad as it sounds other than for FTX, which we already knew was really bad for the arena is able to get restitution in court and we'll be able to resell those rights and get whatever revenue was after. So I don't know. Maybe that's I kind of wonder, yeah, like who who was entering into a 19 year deal? What are that? That's normally what those deals are pretty long. Any of those you have to do them because for all the reasons that Tom sure, but it's hard to put it on. It's hard to take it off. Yeah. I mean, if you're FTX, maybe maybe not. All right. Well, what let's let's figure out a way that they could make money. Maybe they can get into algorithmic news. Yes, Tom, maybe they could online marketer Gail Breton. Notice that CNET articles with the byline CNET money staff showed the following message. If you click on the name quote, the article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff and quote that has since been changed to read quote. This article was creating using an AI engine and reviewed fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff and quote and editor's name is also listed by that byline to show which human reviewed it. Google has policies that penalize auto-generated copy to fight spam. The bytes Frank Latimore notes that during a hangout in April last year, Google search advocate John Mueller noted that Google's Webmaster guidelines considered any auto-generated content to be spam. This isn't a new practice by major publications. In 2014, AP started using AI for story generation like earnings reports and sports scores. So it's unclear if Google's policy is actually zero tolerance as Mueller made it sound. Yeah, I get why Google has a zero tolerance towards auto-generated content because they don't want these link farm sites that you run into every once in a while if you go to a domain name that isn't being used. They don't want those to look more valid because they're auto-generating pages and they want to penalize that. I think that's fine. It's kind of hard to detect when that's being done and Google's a little vague about how good they are at detecting it. But Mueller made it sound like, yep, no excuses. Anybody who does this gets penalized. I don't think the AP has been penalized nor do I expect CNET to be penalized. Nor do I think that it's necessarily bad that CNET's doing this as a former CNET employee. I'm glad I got out before they eliminated me with a bot, I guess. But this is a kind of a tool that really probably doesn't even eliminate a writer's position. It frees them up to do better stories instead of cranking out these kinds of stories that are automatic. 100%. I mean, when I worked at TechCrunch, for example, I mean, earnings days were a big deal. For certain people on the staff who were very good at parsing those numbers and making sense of them for everybody else. Did they really want to do that? Not sure. I mean, there may be people saying, please, please don't replace me with AI, but something that is kind of number crunching at its core. I feel like this is not a bad idea, inherently. It just frees the humans up to say, okay, now you have the stats. I didn't have to do that for the last four hours. And now I'm going to talk about this in a way that is more helpful to everyone else. Let me do a little bad news. Good news. Bad news. Humans are probably going to lose their jobs because of this. Good news. Good. Humans should not have been writing awful aggregate stories. What we should be incentivizing is actual writing and actual reporting. What you were describing, Sarah, in terms of the earnings stuff, there is very much still a value for a human to look at the earnings if they can understand, oh, okay. Well, last quarter, this company put this part of their company by itself. Now it's lumped in with something else. We should know that that means that they're trying to hide maybe that it's underperforming. That requires a human eye. That requires a familiarity with your beat. A lot of the stuff that goes up on these websites is tonnage. It's tonnage against advertising that has become more and more and more programmatic. So number one, you need as much stuff as you can if you are in this game. AI is going to have to carry the load there. What I hope is that we aren't in the place that we were in in the last 10 years and that people that are dedicated writers aren't made to believe that being a writer equals being chained to a desk until you write 13 aggregate stories. That's not the best use of the talents of people that should be writing and reporting on better stuff and challenge themselves in their readership. Indeed. And you hear a lot from writers that are full-time writers saying, this is why I'm experiencing burnout. I hate this stuff. The AI version of getting the information out there and then you can go in and be a human and say, this is why I know what I'm talking about. This is why this makes sense. This is why this story has a little bit more of a spin that I could tell you more about. That's where they're supposed to be. I'm skeptical that too many humans are going to lose their jobs just because we tend to overestimate the effects of automation. But that aside, what I hope happens is the person who had to write the mechanical earnings story just spitting out the numbers and then wrote the follow-up analysis now can just focus on the follow-up analysis and doesn't have to waste their time doing the mechanical one. Same thing happens in sports. You have the story that just tells you, here's what happened. You have the step-back story that tells the personal angle on it and something that's a little more interesting and gives you a little more depth. Sports reporters can do the same thing if in this case. And don't forget, these CNET stories aren't earnings reports. These CNET stories aren't mechanical sports stories. One of the examples is, does it hurt to pay off your credit card balance before your billing cycle ends? Written by an algorithm, written by an AI agent, edited by Lilliana Hall. So we still have a human going over this and saying, I didn't have to spend time creating the tedious part of this. I can look over what it generated, do a couple of tweaks to make sure that it's right and then publish it. And I think that's good. It is good and it is fine. When I said that humans are going to lose jobs, let me also put that into context. Humans are already losing jobs in journalism. So this will not help and it will not allow these people to go back into positions. But again, the world is changing. It is ultimately better for anybody who wants to actually write. All right. Another way the world is changing is 3D printed houses. There may not be a ton of them, but they're becoming a little more common. Reuters reports that Germany's Perry 3D construction is working with Design Studio Hanna, architect Leslie Locke from there, and construction engineering company CIV, C-I-V-E, to make what is believed to be the first 3D printed two-story home in the United States. So you need a bigger printer if you're going to print a second story. The printer needed weighs more than 12 tons, lays the concrete for a 4,000 square foot wood frame house in Houston, Texas. The concrete section of the house is the only part that's printed. The wood frame seems to be added later. You can actually find a lot of 3D printed buildings in many states, according to architect Leslie Locke. One of the things about printing a second story, Locke says, is you require, you know, the machine. And of course, there are other challenges, structural challenges, logistic challenges when you do that. Construction is estimated to take about 330 hours. Concrete is great at withstanding hurricanes, heavy storms, and other severe weather, which is a concern in Houston, Texas as well. Certainly, yeah. Today more than any other day. This is one of those like mind explosion things where I'm like, okay, you've got a 4,000 square foot house. That's so, so big. I know some of you are enjoying very large houses. I live in a 500 foot square foot apartment. So, you know, I just, I can't really imagine exactly how much concrete needs to be printed for something like this. But hey, 330 hours later, here we are. We're now we're getting somewhere. I mean, that is exceptional. And it can be built to a spec for which is of a higher quality than, you know, the standard construction that we see now. And I think it is fairly amazing that it can exist like that because 333 hours isn't all that long. I just, I don't know. You can print wood. There's wood feed material out there. And I don't know why they're skimping, you know, print the whole thing. Give me a wood printer in there too. Those wood printed houses are nice. Look at you. What a message board, Cheryl. Look at Tom. Tom's like, I'm not really, yeah. I don't know. They didn't even put the wood in there. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying. All right, folks. If you want to dispute my thoughts by all means, send us an email feedback at daily tech news show dot com. The president of the United States of America wrote an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal reading Republicans and Democrats unite against big tech abuses. The president made several allegations toward tech companies that they use personal data to direct people toward extreme and polarizing content that results in violence. That social media companies are running an experiment on children for profit. That social media companies allow abusive and even criminal contact like cyber stalking, child sexual exploitation, non-consensual pornography and the sales of dangerous drugs driving mom and pop stores off their platform and making it hard for them to compete. Speaking of message boards, it feels like these were pulled off of some. OK, so those are some serious allegations to solve these problems. The president outlined three principles. Let's talk about each one of them. The first one regards all those privacy violations. The president thinks there should be privacy limits on how personal data is both collected and used, talked about minimizing the collection, advocated stronger limits for children and even an outright ban on doing targeted advertising to children. Justin, what do you think? Can I just do a primer on all of these before we get into more specifics? The reason why the Biden White House is doing this is because by and large, Republicans have been a lot louder on the conduct and culture of big tech, capital B, capital T, than the Democrats have. The Democrats have largely focused on antitrust and stuff like foreign manipulation. That's mostly what they have talked about. So this is Biden trying to, with a Republican House that's going to have a lot louder voice, try to split that down the middle and be a part of that conversation. That being said, the idea of privacy limits on how personal data is collected. Obviously, this is part of an evolving world with a lot of these social media companies. And I think it's the kind of stuff that they have spent a lot of money on lobbyists saying, we're into it. Just let us help you write the laws. Yeah. My thinking on this is that I think this is probably the strongest of the three principles. There does need to be some regulation on privacy collection. My preference would be that that focus on giving customers control over it. Rather than a bunch of laws about, well, you can collect this, but you can't collect that. And you have to do pop-ups and things. I mean, GDPR isn't bad, but I think we could improve on it since we're coming in later here in the United States. So why not encourage the creation of these kinds of systems that provide a movable identity that allow you to say, I will give you access to part of my personal information, but not all of it. And I can withdraw it at any time. This is something that Tim Berners-Lee is working on with a solid project. Encourage that. Give us control over the personal information so that you don't have to have a law trying to punish a big tech company. Let us decide, no, we won't give it to anybody unless we're informed and we're sure we want to give it to them. That's where I'm at. Give us the control to stop it so we don't have to go police them. Well, and how would you do that? You do something like solid. Just a new user saying yes, no in preferences. You do something like solid where you have an independent provider that gives you a module, and then when you go to a website and it says, we would like this kind of information. Yeah, maybe there needs to be some rules about how they ask for it. I think that's reasonable. But the information is never stored with that provider. It's stored with you or a provider you trust. All right, reform of section 230 of the CDA is the second one to make companies take responsibility for content posted on their platforms and transparency into algorithms. Well, that's the second part. It's funny that these things tend to get sort of mixed up with each other because Tom, I don't know of anybody who has walked through the barren wastelands of the internet trying to the true word of what 230 is and is not. But the long and short of incorrect me if I'm getting anything wrong here, but this is not about a blanket amnesty for these social media companies. It is rather a understanding that that moderation has to kind of happen in a certain fashion when you are allowing anybody to publish compared to how you do it with with print and television. But yeah, section 230 gets misunderstood a lot. And it is it is not particularly easy to understand. But if you look, it's not incredibly hard. The way the law is in the United States without section 230, you are either on the hook for everything on the platform because if you exert editorial control by moderating, you then become responsible for everything on the platform. And if that were the case, then there would be a lot more restriction on what people would say or you do no moderation and say, hey, I'm just a neutral distributor and you allow everything on the platform and none of it is your liability. That's the case without section 230. Section 230 says you can strike a middle ground. We'll let people do moderation without having to take responsibility for every single thing. That way you're not doing prior restraint and saying we have to approve everything that goes up, but you're also not just letting it just be open and ridiculously wild. So I don't know what problem this is trying to solve. We had the article on the show yesterday saying that there's another study showing that there really doesn't seem to be any evidence that Twitter had an effect on the 2016 election. If you want to solve misinformation, disinformation and things like that, you probably should look at mainstream media, not social media platforms. And if you want to solve harassment and things on social media, I don't think getting rid of section 230 is the way you're going to solve it. I think you're going to have to look for other solutions. People tend to believe that section 230 and a repeal thereof would allow for certain actors to sue social media companies if they do something screwed up in their mind. And that would help make the behavior of these social media companies more to their liking. I don't believe it would. I think that anybody who has looked into section 230 does not believe that a full repeal of it would be the case. Now, if you want to replace it with something else, I have to see what the solution is before we even talk about it, in my opinion. Yeah, because there were lawsuits before section 230. One of them was to CompuServe and CompuServe won it because they're like, we don't do any moderation. And the judge is like, great, then you're just a distributor. It's not your responsibility. AOL was going to lose theirs because they're like, well, we did a little moderation and the judge said, well, if section 230. So yeah, it's a it's all at know a little more.com. Look for the episode on Safe Harbor there. The final principle was to promote competition. Great. I didn't seem to be any ideas on how to do that. But but I'm all I'm all for it. I love competition. Good. Promote competition is the PG version of antitrust. Yeah. Like that's what you're saying is, you know, if antitrust and breakup Facebook and breakup Google is what the more hard line progressives are saying, then the Biden administration is saying, no, we just want to promote competition. You're right. It is useless. It is total pablum and it is a way for the Biden administration to dip a toe in this in this pond without jumping fully in on one side of an issue. And you got to be careful when you put in legislation on competition issues that you don't actually prevent smaller companies from getting larger because a lot of times they are rules that apply to large companies that make it costlier to be a large company, which only a large company can afford. So you got to tailor those, which is why I'm like, show me what you mean by that. I might be for it. But but I don't know without without more details. This is a lot of people being mad at the admins. Like ultimately so much of this just comes down to I don't like what I see on Facebook. I don't like what you see on Instagram. Guess what? You don't like what you see in the mirror. It's people. It's always been people. That's it. So so humanity is ugly. Life means nothing. Move on. I'll be honest. We're probably going to end up fixing Facebook about the time that Facebook stops being successful because it's showing cracks. So you know, you might be a little too late for that one. Well, no matter how you feel about humanity or people, you might be a little too late for that. But I've been traveling recently and been like, well, air travel is pretty difficult these days. So if you've been caught up in system outages during travel, which many people were this exact week, Chris Christensen has a handy tip for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Well, we've had some tech in travel news this week as you've talked about already on the show in terms of the system outage but what I'd like to give you is a travel hack that I heard recently, which is a good one. You may notice if you're someplace that you have one of these massive outages, whether it's weather delayed or whatever the issue is, you're going to have a hard time speaking to anybody in the airport and you're also going to have a hard time reaching people on the phone because they're all their lines going to be flooded. What some smart travelers do is they have the phone number for some other portion of the world for the same airline. And so they dial in, for instance, maybe they're doing a Skype call to Australia, even though they're seeing a delay when they're in San Francisco because they know that that portion of the world, the system will not be overloaded. Something to think about. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Nice little little tip. Thank you, Chris. Nice little hack. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Alright, let's check out the mail bag. This one comes in from Jason who says I work on air traffic control software and I have since the early 90s. My first thought was, oh crap, I hope it wasn't my code. I didn't work on no tam pronounced no tam so I don't feel responsible. But you noted that the FAA always has a secondary system. Jason says this reminded me that we had to have two distinct networks in the air traffic control center. On top of that, they needed to be two different technologies. We had either net and token ring. The thinking behind that requirement was that there would be two different software stacks and therefore the center wouldn't be brought down by a bug in the network driver. Thank you, Jason. It's nice to hear somebody from the inside talking about that stuff. I appreciated this email very much. We did get an FAA statement both to the Wall Street Journal and published at FAA.gov that there used to have been a damaged database file and that they did try to switch to a backup system and the switch to the backup system failed. No more details on how the database file got corrupted or why, whether it was user error, whether it was something else. But at least we know a little bit more now about what that was. Well, thanks everybody who writes into us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is a great way to send us your thoughts because together we're stronger. We're also stronger with you, Justin Rubber Young, for being with us. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, you can go to Politics Politics Politics a podcast found on any and all podcasting apps. We've got a little bit of a new format on the show. I made some New Year's resolutions and one of them was that I wasn't going to cover current news unless I really, really wanted to and I found it very interesting. And so that I'm going to look back into history specifically with certain things that I do find interesting. So on the show this Wednesday I went into why the Iowa caucus after 50 plus years of being the determinant of the first in the nation primary contest was killed and why Joe Biden has the reasoning to do it going back to one afternoon in Des Moines in 1987 I build the case for why Joe Biden killed the Iowa caucus on Politics Politics That means the motive and the opportunity and you laid it out, man. Those were good. I enjoyed that. I did. I feel like I can convict him. Well, our brand new boss Kevin may or may not be a Politics Politics Politics aficionado, but Kevin just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Kevin. We are glad to have you. Tell you what, Kevin. You made today possible. You and every other boss we have at patreon.com. Thank you all enough. Speaking of patrons, tick around for our extended show Good Day Internet. You can also find out more about when we do the show live. By the way, it's Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. eastern 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com We are back tomorrow with new TV highlights with Bodie Grimm, Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta are joining us as well. Talk to you then.