 Coming up on DTNS, how smart are smart monitors? How many friends do you have that aren't deep fakes? And are the kids all right? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 28th, 2022, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are going to, well, we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff, but first, Rich, kick us off with a few tech things you should know. Well, Apple's original film's Coda won the Academy Award for Best Picture, a first for a streaming service debuting on Apple TV Plus and in theaters on August 13th. The film also received Oscars for best adapted screenplay and supporting actor for Troy Kutzer. Netflix led the field with 27 nominations, but one only one with Jane Campion winning best director for the power of the dog. Transport for London granted Uber a 30 month license to operate private vehicles within the city. Transport for London previously denied Uber a license in November of 2019, but a judge upheld an appeal in September of 2020 and granted it an 18 month license. The UK's Supreme Court ruled Uber drivers must be treated as workers in February of 2021. Tessa will temporarily halt production at the Shanghai Gigafactory due to a surge of COVID-19 cases in the city. As part of a two stage lockdown in the city, Tesla's factor will be shut down for four days. The facility accounted for half of Tesla's global production last year with the China Passenger Car Association reporting it produced roughly 2,000 cars a day. Apple's penalty fines in the Netherlands after an antitrust order about payment tech for dating apps has hit its maximum, least for now, reaching 50 million euros after the authority for consumers and markets or ACM issued a 10th consecutive weekly penalty of five million euros for ongoing non-compliance on behalf of Apple. The regulator did say, though, that Apple's latest amended proposal should result in definitive conditions for dating app providers. And late last week, the Federal Communications Commission added the security company Kaspersky to a list of firms not eligible for FCC funds, saying its products posed an unacceptable risk to national security. The FCC also added China Mobile and China Telecom to this list. Kaspersky products are already banned from US government networks. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about whether or not the kids are all right. Yes, we have some new research from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. They published findings from a study on teenage use of social media in the journal Nature Communications. The study looked at over 72,000 people across UK households, surveying them seven times between 2011 and 2018. Researchers found that life satisfaction for those 16 to 21, so kind of older teens, young adults, did respond to social media usage compared to those who used up to three hours of daily social media. Those that either had no usage or usage over seven hours reported lower life satisfaction. The researchers also looked at a smaller group of 10 to 21 year olds, so a wider age span to see if current use of social media impacted future life satisfaction. It found that girls 11 to 13 that increased social media usage over 12 months were less satisfied with life after a year. Boys 14 to 15 and 19 year olds across genders showed a similar pattern. The researchers said this vulnerability to social media may be linked to brain, hormonal and social changes during development, but that more research was needed to understand the link. They've just observed it in these age groups. They've not saying there's any where the relationship is coming from. Researchers also cautioned this work cannot predict which individuals are most at risk. But we've been kind of beating this drum on DTNS for a while here that instead of taking the anecdotal route of, hey, I heard a teen had a bad experience on Instagram or something like that. It's important to look for this research. And I do think there's a couple of really interesting things in this study, Sarah, right? Yeah, a couple of things that definitely stand out to me is if you're looking at 16 to 21 year olds, which is teenagers and very young adults, this has been pretty well documented that social media can have a negative effect, particularly if you're a female. If you're looking at 10 to 21 year olds, well, first of all, the 10 year olds aren't supposed to be on social media anyway, but they are, you know, the kids can figure that out. And how that actually is the number that makes a lot more sense to me as something to look at, because if you're 10 years old and you've got a decade plus of social media going on and it has been somewhat well documented that some some young people have a hard time with this, what do we do? Can't keep kids off the social network. So what do we do? Well, and I mean, to your point about not being able to keep the kids off, the research is showing that a complete abstaining from social media for, you know, that 16 to 21 year olds is older. Yeah, you know, so that to me was perhaps the most interesting is like that maybe there is at some point a happy medium. The other thing to keep in mind, though, is, you know, this study does cut off in 2018. Obviously, there's going to be more research along these lines and not suggesting there isn't. But that is before the rise of TikTok. And I feel like a lot of shift over to even more like video centric social media, which was just kind of seem taking over everything recently, obviously, like Snapchat stories, you know, still existed. I'm imagining Snapchat made up, you know, a lot of this for a lot of younger users. So there has been shifts in what social media even is very significant ones with the rise of TikTok. So, you know, this provides us a good snapshot for this. And just I also would caution that social media is an incredibly broad category, like the experience of a six year old on Twitter versus Instagram versus TikTok. Now, I imagine there's vastly different ways of interacting, vastly different content. But again, to to not generalize that that there are one we should be attuned to how children develop differently and how that impacts social media, but not reflexively say, hey, keeping them off social media all the time is always the best idea for teens and stuff like that, I think is a really interesting finding. Yeah, it's sort of if you if you compare it to the the kid who can't play with any other kids, it's like, well, that's no fun. I mean, you know, it depends on the kid. But most kids, you know, enjoy being social in some capacity. And that's the same thing with Instagram. I think TikTok is a little bit it's a little different. And maybe it's just because of the people that I follow on TikTok, where I'm like, it's very comedy based, you know, it's very they're they're they're getting very creative, you know, with with what they're sharing. And that is something that you can also do on Instagram. But Instagram was not that long ago, a little bit more of like a show me the best part of your life, you know, and make it make it, you know, perfect and polished. And what we continue to see that that that people of all ages but especially young people are are are harmed by that. Well, moving on, before Apple put an entry level iPad into a 27 inch of 5K monitor and called it a studio display very recently, Samsung showed off something called the M8 monitor back at CES in January. You don't remember it from the delusion of CES announcements. A refresher, the M8 offers a 32 inch 4K display. It runs Tizen, so it supports video streaming apps. It includes built-in speakers, supports HDR 10 plus. Also supports Amazon, Google and Samsung voice assistants, as well as AirPlay, too. Kind of does it all as far as monitor goes. It also includes a magnetic stick on webcam for video calls and can be used as a smart things IOT hub as well. Samsung opened up reservations for the M8 and revealed the price. The price is seven hundred dollars in white with Mac esque pastel blue, green and pink also available. Rich, are you in the market for something like this? I remember I remember this announced it seemed like a an interesting product. Almost, you know, a like I imagine these monitors, I guess, being useful, specifically the M8 where you have a laptop and maybe it's something that you move around enough that you wouldn't have it plugged in all the time. But, you know, you're going to still have, you know, your desktop keyboard mouse set up. So, oh, like I have my laptop downstairs, I just need to shoot off an email or I oh, I just want to watch some, you know, some Netflix or something like that. I could plug this in, have that still have that like decks experience with ties and still have like some productivity basic apps installed there, which I think is which I think is interesting. It it seems like a weird gap, like a like a placeholder, though, for me, from what we think of as like we think of a smart TVs and we've kind of seen like that smaller 32 inch even to 40 inch becoming less and less frequent, we're seeing updates for, you know, we're not saying as many updates for those and like I'm not sure if these smart monitors are supposed to fill that gap or if, if, you know, Apple will tell you that theirs is a is meant for people that are working in a studio for for professionals, you know, across the graphics and all sorts of other stuff. I don't think Samsung is quite as ambitious with this M8 monitor, but they both feel very analogous in terms of, hey, we need to make there's a market for smarter monitors out there. Yeah. And the way that smart TVs, we've talked about this on the show recently, very recently, the idea of like, OK, are you a person who wants everything built in because then it just works if it does? Or do you prefer that, you know, to have your various peripherals that you can that that you can control remotely and and and be able to swap out as as you need. This feels the same way, but. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I for seven hundred bucks, it looks pretty great to me. Yeah, it is a little dimmer than the the studio display, a little bit lower resolution, obviously a bigger size. But if if the features of, I guess, the studio display are interesting to you, it seems like and I don't think the color choices are coincidental. They feel very iMac like for sure. So it again, I was interested at CES. I think the price hits a sweet spot now that we know what the studio display can kind of do and we will like I'm interested to see if we'll see LG and other display and Dell and stuff like that. Like if this is a trend or if this is, you know, kind of to one off products. All right. Well, when computer generated faces or deep fakes made the headlines, a lot of times it's about concerns or real world usage of them being used for things like misinformation or harassment. But an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory found a more mundane and potentially more of use of the technology creating faked LinkedIn profiles. This investigation started kind of by accident. Researcher Renee DiResta received a dreaded LinkedIn cold call message. We've all received them at some point that quickly turned into a software sales pitch for Ring Central. Renee noticed that the profile picture looked just a little off. Things like the person only had one earring. Bits of hair were kind of disappearing, not consistent. And the eyes were perfectly aligned in the center of the image. This led to an investigation that found over one thousand profiles with AI generated faces as part of this investigation. NPR found that if someone replies to one of these messages, they're actually put in contact with a real person. Then thereafter, 70 businesses were listed as employers on these profiles with several saying they hired outside marketers to help with sales but hadn't authorized the use of any computer-generated images or fake profiles as a result. After being alerted by the researchers, Lincoln said it investigated and removed accounts that broke its policies on fake profiles. And, you know, I hesitate to throw the blame at Oh, LinkedIn is just letting anyone in here. According to their last transparency report, they took down 15 million fake accounts in the first half of 2021. So it's like they're not doing nothing. But the difference here is a lot of those are kind of called at either sign up or through automated tools. All of these seem to be, you know, found out there in a while. So maybe there is like a disconnect of once you get through that initial kind of screening firewall. It's easier to kind of move around in LinkedIn. But I mean, Sarah, have you ever had? I mean, I guess I say we all have received these. Have you ever gotten a message on LinkedIn where you're like, this has to be a bot, right? I mean, not that I know of. It may have eluded me, but no, I don't think so. I don't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I use it as, you know, it's my sort of updated resume. If anyone wants to know what he's been doing for the last decade plus, that's where I send them. And, you know, there's a certain amount of, you know, just kind of keeping up with people that I keep up with on LinkedIn. But I'm trying to figure out, like, what is, I mean, sure, if it's a full on scam, then it's a full on scam. But what would be the point of having a non-actual human avatar on LinkedIn that can get somebody to do something? You know, if we're talking like not money being exchanged, but something else, what is the point there? Is it because it's easier for somebody to just interact with somebody and know that it's not there to likeness? Well, at least in the case that, the initial case that Renee Derrista discovered, he said that the person kind of said, oh, we're all, we're part of the same group. And so, you know, there was kind of, they were kind of using that as an end to start the conversation, you know, part of the same usage group. So I imagine if you create enough of these, you could create enough common interest with people to organically maybe try and create that connection even before, you know, that you can kind of reference algorithmically even before you get it. Roger, did you? Well, I'll add this, at least in the NPR article. Part of the whole reason why this was to work around the LinkedIn message limit, like they don't want people scamming other people. So if you have a bunch of fit, computer generated ones, then you have more opportunity to ping the same person. I would add my experience that in the past four months, I've been approached by six profiles on LinkedIn to connect. And because I generally don't look at LinkedIn, I let them sit and then when I went back to revisit them, all those profiles were gone. Like they were people at one point in time, but they no longer exist. And maybe they weren't. Yeah. If it's just a way to basically increase your footprint without actually having to have bodies to fill that space. Like, you know how like you, like if you want to, if you want to bow guard a section of a restaurant, you just kind of put your bag on the seat to pretend like, oh, someone's sitting here, even though it's just you and you're waiting for everyone else to show up. It might be kind of like a way to kind of bring a larger presence than you actually have. Well, and also cynically, I mean, I would, it would be not great if a company did this, but it would also be like a extremely easy way to say like, hey, we have this extremely diverse sales staff. You know, look at all the people that we're hiring and stuff like that. Again, if you're thinking coldly and cynically, now none of the companies that, at least in the NPR report that they've contacted, said they were aware of this activity and they actually had to go digging to try and find companies that were kind of selling these services. And just so just for some reference here, NPR found two companies, Renova Digital, that offered two fully branded avatar profiles for $1,300 a month, another LIA that offered ready made AI generated avatars. So it's maybe sound like cookie cutter a little bit for $300 a month. So not, you know, this isn't exactly like a chat bot service or something like that where it's like, you know, it's a line item. Like that, I mean, again, for like a large company, I guess that's not a lot of money, but that's also a lot more expensive than, you know, a lot of other bot kind of things to kind of scale, I guess. And it's interesting how much a little profile picture, I mean, sometimes you can, you know, click in and make the profile picture bigger, depending on what social network you're on. But how really a small avatar that may not represent anybody and is just, it's a nonsensical person that does not exist is something that, you know, I would easily be like, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. They look fine. They look normal. That's a human. They're trying to talk to me. Let's interact. And, you know, we're only going to see more and more of this. I'm just going to edit my LinkedIn profile to have my eyes perfectly symmetrical with the center of the image, just to mess with AI researchers going forward. Well, if you agree with Rich or you'd like to hear us talk about symmetrical eyes on the show or anything, one way to let us know is in our subreddit, Submit Stories, and also vote on other folks' stories that have been submitted at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, so if you want to find the score for your favorite sports team, you weren't at the TV, you don't know who won, what are you going to do? You might end up using sites or apps from ESPN. In fact, that's something that's going to surface very often if you're looking for that sort of thing. They've got a pretty comprehensive list of just about every sports score you could possibly want because, you know, it's ESPN. But these sites also come with some baggage. At the very least, there are articles and pictures and videos. They all get served up when you load the page. But on top of that, extensions like Privacy Badger show that there are upwards of 18 potential trackers on the ESPN homepage alone. That might trigger some folks saying, well, excuse? What are they actually tracking? Protocol recently highlighted a very different place to get a sports score, plain text sports site created by developer Paul Julius Martinez. The site looks like it would be at home printed from the dot matrix printer offering a flat white background with plain text separated with ASCII art boxes. The site is not monetizing currently with an Amazon CDN bill of about $50. So you might say, is this just retro-peach? Or do people actually want simpler websites that don't track you and don't offer all of the things that you're not really looking for? Rich, what are your thoughts on this? My first thought is that this particular site, I absolutely love the aesthetic. I love the simplicity of it. However, I also realized I am primed to be attracted to this as retro-peach. Like, there is no, like, this is, command line kind of stuff was how I kind of cut my teeth on computers. I think a lot of like, you know, kids or people of a certain age feel that same way, have that hinge of nostalgia for it. And if it's functional, I could see that having a lot of appeal. So I would need to talk to someone either, you know, kind of on either side of the generational line for me to see if like, this has any kind of appeal beyond purely, like, you know, it's hitting that nostalgia. But I do think that there is a kind of, I don't know if it's a plain text web, but maybe a simple web kind of reaction out there. When it's like, for like the trackers and stuff on ESPN, I'm not even like that worried really about, okay, it's like, all right, they're sending it to Facebook. They're sending it to Google. They're sending it to Twitter. They're sending it to, you know, some advertising partners or something like that. Okay, it's more like there's the auto-playing video that loads up as I'm trying to scroll through. There's the pages just physically slow to load because of all those trackers, all that bulk and stuff like that, that a lot of these simple websites kind of come at. And, you know, I would argue that things even like Wordle, not to bring up the thing of things in 2022, but feels like in the same vein. That's not plain text, definitely, but it's like a single use, ultra simplified, basically runs offline once you download it. Right, yeah. And I feel like those are kind of a same, like kind of simple web reaction to a lot of the same problems. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a person who cares about sports scores, right? We're using sports as an example in this instance. And you have other opportunities to go somewhere and besides the ESPN route, which is, yeah, it's gonna bombard you. It's gonna track you, which can be a lot of ads, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, I think it's cool. I know that there is something, you know, as we use the term kitschy, there is something kitschy about something that just like does one thing really well. And, you know, Wordle as an example is something that has captured the hearts and minds of people because it does one thing really well. Doesn't really do anything else. You can't gamify it. You can't play it all day. You can't be like the best. You just do your thing and you move on. And maybe there's a little internet fatigue going on here where these sorts of sites have a place. Yeah, and these definitely kind of fall in, kind of single use websites have been kind of jokey around for a while. But also I think there is like a utility of it like it was like, you know, like did Duke win, you know, sites and stuff like that where you can go and it'll just say yes or no, like on the site. There's down for everyone or just me, like literally like you go in there, it does the one thing and you get nothing. That is not a new concept, but like this idea of. That's very helpful. Well, that particular one, yeah, especially when it's like a discord, what are you doing? But there's also been a rise of, I've seen personally of people, especially for like personal blogs and stuff like that, kind of moving to static websites. I know Jekyll has gotten a lot of popularity. There's Hugo out there, these kinds of engines that let you take literally just like a text file, you plug it in and it'll generate your HTML page that gets served up and is basically, you know, your content and your site are kind of in that one static thing. And it gives you an engine to update it simply on your end. And again, those are all feel very similar to me where it's like, I don't need all the complexities of you know, quote unquote a modern responsive webpage for something that's going to be a resume or just even a simple blog, those kinds of things. And whether that moves back, there's a very niche audience for that, admittedly. Whether that expands into more people wanting to create this. Like I was thinking of what would be like the tech news, the plaintext tech news, which don't try and say that three times fast. Like what that would look like, is that just like a plaintext RSS feed, you know, with the headlines or something like that. A lot of interesting things. One of the sites that I use for these kind of tools is called plaintextproject.online. They have a whole list of like different kind of plaintext tools. I use a couple of different writers that are web based and stuff like that when I just need to focus and that are browser based. I think one's called writer that I've used quite a bit when I have to do like long form writing that just gives you basically like a terminal that I really enjoy using because it doesn't even do spell check. It doesn't do anything. It literally all does is we'll just save it in the browser and you can just kind of focus and get down to business. So I think these tools have a place. There are command line devotees everywhere. Like it's my own bias that I think this is just fascinating to me, but you know, if there's more people out there, definitely a feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Let us know. Give us all the plaintext. Indeed, indeed. Well, this might be good news for those of you who are looking forward to April. Reddit announced it's bringing back. It's our slash place April Fool's Day experience for four days starting April 1st of this year. Reddit executive Alex Lee said in a blog post, it's meant to showcase the magic of online communities, conversation, and collaboration. VR slash place subreddit launched on April 1st of 2017. It featured a large white pixel grid on which logged in Reddit users could place colored pixels one at a time every five minutes just by tapping on it. If you didn't play, you might say, is that a cool thing that anyone wanted to do? Yes, it was wildly popular. It also just so happened to be created by Josh Wardle. His name you might recognize is the creator of the word puzzle, Wardle. Can't get away from him. This reminds me of like when it's like Twitch plays Pokemon where, you know, like everyone can like, like votes on like what direction to move and somehow the game gets played through like this mass consciousness. If you look at the original art from 2017 on this, it's the most internet-y thing, but it's cohesive in a lot of ways. I think there's a real cohesive pieces that you can see in it. And it's remarkable, like that kind of like dedication for a community. So weird online experiments, Josh Wardle also creator of the Reddit button back in the day, even before our site or in an art place. I didn't even know that. Yeah, so he knows how to create the viral experience. You've been busy. Yeah, no kidding. Wow. Well, yeah, for anybody who might say, I really loved the April Fool's Day Reddit game. Well, good news. You're back in business at least for a few days. Get your pixels popping, I guess. Get your pixels popping. Rich, what is in our mailbag today? Sarah, I'm extremely glad you asked because we have a message in here from Jason in NYC. He wrote in about Uber and he said, in the coverage Uber's plan to integrate with NYC taxis, an important piece of context has been missing. Uber actually supported taxi e-hails in New York City back in 2013, where taxi was listed as a ride option along with UberX and Uber Black, which is to say this isn't a new groundbreaking innovation as it's being covered, but a return to an old supply growth tactic. Thanks as always for the great show. Thank you, Jason, for reminding us of Uber's back and forth history with the taxi industry. Yeah, yeah. That is a good reminder, Jason. I, when Uber first launched in, I was living in San Francisco at the time, so I mean, I was obviously in one of the markets, but I had kind of forgotten that depending on where you are, you might get a taxi as an Uber option along with the other Uber offerings. And yeah, it was there, went away, and is back again. So yes, good reminder there. And a good reminder about the growth tactic because as Uber has shifted to, you know, increasingly relying on food delivery and grocery delivery now that they're advertising for Uber Eats and stuff like that, you know, reigniting the ride hailing stuff, definitely appreciate that, Jason. Thank you. Thanks also to a couple of brand new buses that we got over the weekend. Jason and G-Tendra both just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, G-Tendra. Y'all are the best. We've, yeah, we've had, you know, a couple kind of, you know, lower months as far as patrons go. So all support is very much appreciated. And we thank you very much. Also, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's starting momentarily. Patreon.com slash DTNS is how you can learn more about it. But for now, just a reminder, we're live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechmaneshow.com slash live. And we are back doing it all again tomorrow with Jen Cutter joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.