 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre and Jeff Wilkes. Coming up today on DTNS, new AI tools include video, plus the future of Stadia is not excellent. And what if your vinyl record player could also print music? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 29th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we have a lot of stuff to talk about. Some of it meta, some of it not meta. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Financial Services Platform Square publicly launched its tap to pay solution for iPhone, at least for US based sellers for now. It requires Square's app and works with all iPhones going back to the iPhone 11. The feature was in testing with a select group of retailers since June, and previously merchants had to purchase some hardware from Square in order to collect payments. Australian officials are calling for stronger privacy laws following last week's breach of customer data for 9.8 million current and former Optus customers. The Australian communications telecommunications company has not yet released info on which systems were breached or how it occurred, although Optus CEO Kelly Brayer Ross Marin claims that the breach was the result of a sophisticated attack. The Australian government is working with Optus to conduct a criminal investigation with the Australian Federal Police in cooperation with the American FBI as well. Amazon's Epic streaming TV service will be rebranded as MGM plus next year with the change going into effect on January 23rd, 2023. Mark your calendars. Don't be alarmed. Amazon closed the deal to acquire MGM for $8.45 billion earlier this year in March. I have always wondered at what point we will stop renaming things plus. And it is not today. Not today. Not today. CNET confirmed that Microsoft is discontinuing SwiftKey for iOS, although it will be available in the Apple App Store for one more week. If you don't have it yet, now's the time. Users with SwiftKey installed will still be able to continue using it as long as it's not uninstalled, at which point you are SOL. SwiftKey on Android will continue to be available and also supported. Adobe announced its agreement to purchase interface design tool Figma earlier this month in a $20 billion deal and has now said to Bloomberg that Figma's freemium model will remain as is after the deal is approved by stakeholders and antitrust regulators. A lot of assumptions there, Adobe. Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said we don't want to fix something that's working really well. Also Figma co-founder and chief executive officer Dylan Field said the app will remain free for educational users. There's been a lot of concern about what this will look like post acquisition. So I think Adobe trying to get out ahead of perhaps some ill will there. Well, on yesterday's show, we had a lot of fun with creating chatbots. We've also talked a lot about the dolly ability for AI to create beautiful works of art that are actually not created by humans, but maybe seem that way. This is, I don't know, somewhere in the middle. Meta has a new AI generation tool called Make a Video that lets users type in a description of a scene. So let's say I would say, you know, a boxer dog walking down a riverbank with a bone in his mouth type thing. This would generate a short video that matches that text. As the Verge describes it, the videos are pretty artificial. They don't really look real. There's some blurring. There's some distortion, but they do give a sense of what's possible. In a blog post, Meta said, quote, generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools too quickly and easily create new content with just a few words of lines or text. Make a video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors and landscapes. Now, before you get too excited and say, this is so great, clips are only five seconds long. They don't have audio, and it's also not a public tool. In fact, Meta said it's not going to release anything besides some cherry-picked videos that look pretty good, that publications like the Verge have access to. Meta does say it's publishing a paper on the Make a Video model and plans to release a demo of the system at some point. Yeah, of course, Meta isn't the first to attempt AI video of this sort earlier this year. Researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released their own text-to-video model named Cogvideo. But in Meta's case, Make a Video is using a training content source from two datasets, Webvid 10M and HD Villa 100M, which together contain millions of videos, spending hundreds of thousands of hours of footage, including content from sites like Shutterstock and Scrape from the web. So probably the same kind of concerns that cause stock photo services to ban AI-generated content might crop up here whenever these hit more mainstream use. Make a Video currently outputs 16 frames of video at a resolution of 64 by 64 pixels, which, if you're keeping track, is tiny, but then a separate AI model boosts that to 768 by 768, which is, I mean, that's kind of coming close to 720p there. But Justin, you've had a look at some of these. I mean, it's a closed system right now. We're only getting kind of the best outputs. I'm like, I guess, where are we in when we've seen the same road with AI-generated images, still images, is this, you know, how far down the road are here and what's Meta's plan with this? Well, their plan right now is to put out a press release to prove that they have hired people to research into AI. When I initially read the story- We made unicorns run on the beach. Look. Yeah. When I initially read the story, I was like, oh, okay, well, this is Facebook doing what Facebook does, which is take a popular feature on another website and put it on their website because they've seen enough traffic of those kinds of images being shared on their platform. So let's have a way to have people do it and maybe even do a cooler on this side. The problem for Facebook is that moving into the world of image generation takes you into the very tricky and thorny world of whether or not something looks too real and for a site that has spent as much time talking about misinformation and whether or not something that is false can get around the world two times before the truth puts on and choose, that brings them into a troubling area here. As for what they want to do with it, I don't think they're going to do anything. I think that they just want to prove that they are researching this in the way that a lot of people are. I don't think that image generation and video is going to be the height of what AI does, but I do think over the next year, everybody is going to have to be in the AI game because it is going to fundamentally reshape very soon, almost all technology. Taking away the sort of like, how does this signal the end of humanity for a second? Because some people go like, it's too weird, it's too good. We can't have robots making art. If you take that away for a second, it's like, what exactly would this be good for? This kind of feels like the next generation of gift jokes to me. You make a five second video that you set some parameters, you get a little something that's close enough to what you were trying to describe, and the person on the other end goes like, I see what you did there. I'm not seeing this far enough in the future to know why this is dangerous, at least coming from Metta, a social network company. Look at it like this. In terms of how it can be dangerous, we've got a lot of situations that are very serious that people talk about and share pictures and videos with on Facebook. I'm just going to name two off the top of my head that are happening right now, the impacts of Hurricane Ian in Florida and the Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory out there in Europe. If in these highly charged moments, a video of something that is not true shapes conversation or has any kind of reaction, then it's on Facebook that they generated it there, not just the fact that they spread it there. In terms of where it can be applicable going forward, I've been watching a lot of political advertisements because we are only 40 days away from the midterms and that's my job, but I was remarking the other day that, wow, political advertisements all look a lot better since the advent of cheap, high resolution video libraries. It will only look better when you can generate these images via AI in the way that you can now with stable diffusion and Dolly too. That's where, just looking at the samples they provided, the two ones that look best to me and the cherry pick ones they had was like an artist brushing on a palette, mixing that around and a horse drinking from a stream. I can definitely see this, Justin, to your point, being the on-demand B-roll library that you would need instead of going to Shutterstock or whatever service that you have, but then the other thing is looking at what tools like Dolly too can already do, right, like some of the integrations that they're doing there, some of the amazing results that you see, one are like feeding baseline images and then using that to like, hey, make this images Mario look like he has angel wings and looks like a monkey or something like that. I don't know, but then that's what, like giving it those hooks allows it to get better wholesale creation I think for video maybe still a little ways off, although obviously there's, everyone's kind of racing for that as the next milestone, but I think if you can have those kind of tools where you can plug in existing video and then either expand it or just with kind of text-based commands or be able to just kind of enhance things kind of on the fly, I think that is much more on the horizon than kind of wholesale creation as fun as that can be of, hey, there's unicorns on a beach. In very different meta news and news that isn't really all that specific to meta earlier this week, a non-meta created Instagram client called OG app, which offered Instagram feeds without ads or content suggestions from random people was removed from the iOS store. The app had over 10,000 downloads at the time it was taken down and had reached 50th on the most downloaded section before being removed. Nine to five Mac reports that the OG app team had their personal Facebook and Instagram accounts banned and a meta spokesman said, quote, this app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions. The OG app remains available at least for now on the Google Play Store. I mean, this is fascinating to me for one, when I read the story this morning, I was like, Oh, okay, well, there's some rogue app that gives a lot of people like me and Instagram experience that they would prefer rather than the stupid ads and the stupid recommendations, but violates meta's terms of service, you know, Instagram being a meta company. So I don't know what the company was expecting, but boy, do the OG app people have things to say about this. They have been extremely vocal about saying, you know, this is ridiculous. You have created a product that people don't want. We have created a product that people do want. It is very obvious, you know, why not work together rather than, you know, just shutting us down. And you could, I mean, in any app that's like, we are for the people, you know, if you violate terms of service of a company of this size, you're not really going to have a different outcome, but I still sort of, I don't know, I feel like I got to support the little guys. It reminds me of the early days of, you know, weird third-party Twitter apps that did all the things that Twitter didn't do that I wanted Twitter to do. This really reminds me actually of another kind of like harkening back to a golden age of networks and stuff like that of, I remember years ago, there were servers that were come up, unofficial servers that were hosting classic versions or old versions of World of Warcraft. Wow. And Blizzard kind of brought the hammer down on a lot of those and shut them down. And then they released, wow, classic to kind of still serve that need. And I see a lot of similarities. I mean, wow, a game with a very strong, extremely strong social network, seeing some stagnant growth and going, hey, why don't we, people want this nostalgic experience? Let's sell it back to them and make some money on it. I think, you know, 10,000 downloads, not a lot, admittedly in a day and it was boosted by a TechCrunch article that was, had some pretty glowing coverage of it. I think that, you know, if there is, if there's enough demand to it, believe me, I mean, if a meta could figure out how to monetize it, they would, the problem is they're seeking to stay on this growth path. But that, I mean, the way to do that is not by catering to millennials that are kind of bored with the app. I mean, I would say meta's response to this would be like, oh, is this something you want then pay us $5 a month and then we'll just like strip out all this stuff that the other company has been doing. Like, look, that's like saying, you want to know what people hate the most about the grocery store that they have to pay for their items. So I'm opening a store for the people where you can just take things and leave. Instagram works on creating tonnage so you can sell ads on top of it. That needs to be what it is. It's the reason why they wouldn't do, or they would have to really, really be careful about what they would price any kind of ad free experience. This is a business wise, a stupid gesture because they just violated the terms of service and they probably harm their careers as developers as a protest to say that the world of infinite growth that is only going to get more and more algorithmically polluted with whatever be real or tick tock clones you want to jam into a product that people already have engaged with. That I think is the more interesting societal trend when it comes to people's engagement with stuff like Instagram. And that's what this is a protest for. Well, you might have thoughts on this, you know, maybe you're on the side of the OG app. Maybe you're saying, no, they can't do things like this. If you have thoughts, if you have thoughts on anything you'd like to us to talk about on a future show, a great way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote them up at daily tech news show. Reddit.com. Well, everybody, settle back. We're going back in time. Okay, let's set the mood. Remember back to the heady day of July 29th, 2022. It was a simpler time. Of course, Sarah, you remember it. Oh, it was beautiful. They announced the date for the Twitter Elon Musk trial. The days were longer back then. The grass was greener, things just moved slower. And we all remember when the Google Stadia Twitter account replied to at Blue Fire Demon 44 that quote, Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured, we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Well, it turns out a lot can change over the course of two whole months because Google announced that Stadia will shut down early next year. Hmm. Like the lost verse of summer lovin. Here are the details. Users will have access to their games library through January 18, 2023. After that, the service is going dark. Google isn't leaving customers entirely out to dry. However, it will refund customers for hardware, games and add-ons purchased for the service. It expects all refunds to be out around the same time as the service shut down. Of course, the fate of Stadia has been a bit of an open question for a little while now, despite Google's protestations this summer. Many considered the writing on the wall for the service way back in February 2021 when it shut down its internal development studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. At the time, Stadia GM Phil Harrison said, given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we've decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team. In today's announcement, Harrison said Stadia had not, quote, gained the traction with users that we expected, unquote. It was quick to add, though, that the tech powering Stadia isn't going anywhere and will be used across other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play and our augmented reality efforts, as well as making it available to our industry partners. I submit to the panel, true or false. Cloud gaming is bad and consumers hate it. Well, consumers are definitely having a hard time picking up stuff like Stadia. What I do think is important is that Google, and maybe a little bit of lip service at this point, but Google saying, Stadia has a role within Google. We can use this. We can have fun with this as a consumer product. The way it was rolled out was always a little headscratchy. I mean, from the very moment that it was rolled out, people were like, oh, maybe cool. And then more and more, especially over the last, I don't know, year plus that we've been talking about it. More and more, it was like, who's using Stadia? And I know our gaming folks who are frequent contributors to the show, more and more said, I don't know. I mean, it's not, there's nothing wrong with it. It just isn't that great. Well, you know, Justin, I think that is the key question here. And I think what Stadia always had the problem with and that perhaps Microsoft and, you know, certainly Microsoft doesn't necessarily have this direct problem is comparing cloud gaming to PC gaming. Cloud gaming may suck a lot. It may not be good because when you're dealing with that, there are very different set of expectations versus that versus a console experience, which we kind of all have accepted. Yes, I'm not going to have all of the latest graphical bells and whistles, but it just works. I can fire it up. I have to download a patch or something, but it'll work fairly quickly as opposed to PC gaming where there is this, all this emphasis, everything is customizable. Everything is about, you know, maxing out your FPS and that kind of stuff. So I do think that for when you don't have that, that kind of console expectation to set, you know, customers mindsets on, I do think it always will fare badly or at least compared to, you know, the latest PC games. I mean, certainly though, for all of the failings of Stadia and it's always, probably it's just Google's reputation for killing services, right? They've always been skeptical of Stadia in particular, but I don't hear, you know, Microsoft is, is, you know, going all in on this Nvidia is certainly investing a ton of money into their cloud gaming. So I mean, there's a lot of money in it to succeed, whether, you know, I do think the consumer confidence in it at this point is an interesting question. But a lot of money from who, because all the players that you announced have one thing in common, they sell cloud storage, except for Nvidia, except for Nvidia, but the three biggest players in it are Google, Microsoft and Amazon. And they're the three people that launch cloud gaming systems because they want to be able to leverage the fact that they have an inside track on this idea. It has always to me seemed like a solution waiting for a problem. It did not feel that gamers were desperate for it. There was a lot of wait and see boy, it'll be cool if it is great, but it wasn't because the product is bad and consumers don't like it. I would interject in that you're, I think you're taking a very broad approach to cloud gaming. Yeah, aspects of our bad Stadia's pricing model was ridiculous. You pay full price for the game on top of the subscription. It's like signing up for Netflix. And then every movie or TV series you watch, you got to pay that to pay to watch that particular movie. Pricing wise, it makes no sense. And I think Google was basically kind of halfheartedly kind of losing interest in it anyway, because it wouldn't, to get into it at the stage of Microsoft has gotten into, you have to have invested a great deal of time and money developing not just the underlying infrastructure, but you got to develop a broad base of content as well as consumers. Microsoft has managed to do that for what 20 years. Same way that Netflix has managed to cultivate viewership based on its DVD subscription model that they could slowly transition over to a streaming one when they even when they had a very poultry and I mean very they had like 30 movies at one time and that was it and a couple of TV shows no one wanted to watch. But it was there and it was first. And because they had the mind share people associated Netflix with movies and the same way that people associate Microsoft or at least Xbox with video games, Google stated that there's no PR, there's no consumer awareness of what that means. And so when people say, right, Amazon or Amazon Luna, I mean, it sounds like either a clothing brand, a dairy brand or a car brand, right? You know, there's nothing about it that screams at you. This is about gaming. And I think part of the problem is that you need to spend an equal amount to build out that portion as well. And the product needs to be good. And the product wasn't good because look, UFC made a deal with ESPN plus to be there exclusive streaming home. And when they have a pay per view, despite the fact that you pay $3 and 99 cents, whatever you pay for ESPN plus, you still got to pay full freight on that pay per view the way you would over a cable subscriber or another online option that product works for those consumers. This one has not and and you're right, Roger, you're right that all of these things are certainly impediments to this thing getting off the ground. None of them are insurmountable if the product is what they promised and it hasn't been. Here is what was also a bad product, Google Glass. You know, it is alive in the enterprise, Google Glass. If we take Phil's statement and we say, given our focus on building on proven technology of stadium, we'll be as well as deepening our business partnerships, we decided we will not be investing in a consumer experience, aka we're going to white label this, we're not going to do AAA, but we're going to take this tech stack and offer it to companies, maybe large streaming providers that want to build out a large gaming platform. I don't know Netflix companies like that that want to be in the game streaming game, not on the AAA level, but on something where they compete a lot more and they can do that down the line and make a ton of money, not put their name on it and have the whole Google, you know, killed by Google stigma attached to it as well. Well, listen, I know we're a little far out from holiday season and getting the gift for the person who has everything, but I've got a contender everybody. Swedish brand Teenage Engineering, which makes electronic music creation hardware. If you're not familiar with them, they're very cool has introduced something called the PO 80 record factory that lets you cut vinyl records at home and then also play them back. So it's a record player, but also a vinyl creator. You just plug an audio device into the 3.5 millimeter jack. You start recording onto the vinyl itself. Maybe you made some like weird electrode music in Pro Tools, you know, you can feed that into the 45 and then print it. And then with the included five inch blank records, you can get about four minutes of audio per side at 33 RPM, three minutes per side at 45 RPM. Anybody who is familiar with records knows that, you know, those are the little ones, but there is an adapter. If you want to cut a seven inch record, it's all powered over USB. And you might say, hmm, it sounds kind of familiar. Teenage engineering teamed up with Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki, who previously built a similar concept. So this is come to fruition. You might say, sounds great for me. What's the cost? It's kind of affordable actually. The PO 80 record factory is available for $149. Now that only includes a few uncut vinyls. You're going to have to buy more of them if you really want to go ham. But this is fun. Let's just, let's just call it what it is. This is fun. Well, and especially for teenage engineering, not known for making the most affordable electronics. No, no, I was actually sort of surprised by the price. Like imagine it, like, I don't know, if you had a wedding and you were like, as you know, a gift for everybody coming instead of like a bunch of candy corns, like we're going to give you like, you know, a vinyl that we printed ourselves, you know, and there's only 80 of them because we're having a small wedding. I don't know the possibilities of this, I think are like really cool. And it looks like I love, I love that the cuteness of that idea was reflected in your delivery, Sarah. It was a very, very precious wedding idea. Which is funny because I'm like, I'm, you know, I hate weddings and, you know, in general, like humanity is just like boo, but no, I really, I love the idea. Like if, if, if I were five year old Sarah, the idea that I could, you know, could back then my house had a lot of vinyl records, you know, record player, you know, tape cassettes existed, but you know, we had a lot of records. The idea that you could make one of your own and either, you know, just enjoy it yourself or maybe give it as a gift. So cool. Very cool. All right. Well, I guess I'm the only one who cares about buying this group. I love it too, sir. Hey, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Let's do it. This one comes from Mark. Mark says, first time writing in, but I have been a listener since the buzz out, love days regarding your discussion yesterday about medical pictures. My wife used to be the medical photographer at a hospital in Canada and was instrumental in making up the photography policy for the hospital at the time. This included the requirement of signing, you know, patient consents, digital storage procedures, et cetera. Her biggest battle by far at the time was staff using personal cell phone cameras to take pictures of injuries or wounds without consent. So you can figure out from there how images may end up on the internet, love the show and all the best from starting to get chilly in Northern Ontario. And yeah, this is coming off our conversation, you know, from that, that we had in yesterday's show about, you know, there are a lot of, a lot of not necessarily like a breach of medical data, but just stuff that gets taken that ends up being somewhat public information that may inform an AI in the future. And we should all know a little bit more about that. Absolutely. Yeah, should the, the, the long legacy of shadow IT and AI may haunt us for years. Indeed. A man that will not haunt us unless he wants to is Justin Robert Young. Justin, you're a busy man. We're so glad to have you on the show week after week. Let folks know where you've been up to latest. It is spooky season after all. I have a show called We're Not Wrong with myself, Jen, Bryony and Andrew Heaton. We have a great new episode out. I hope you guys download that, but I forgot that I also had another gigantic thing to plug. My production company, dog and pony show audio has a brand new prestige audio series that is very bingeable. If you are a movie fan, it is a must listen. Will Saddleburg host, don't explain every brilliant, sorry, every, every tired cliche in any movie you've ever seen at one time started as a brilliant breakthrough idea and will tracks the history of one such of those old tired genres. The rock star biopic from ladies sings the blues to Ray walk the line and even Elvis, which came out this summer will explains the entire story of that genre, why we love it, why it's so predictable. Go get it wherever you get your podcasts. I think you're going to really, really enjoy it. Don't explain from dog and pony show audio. That sounds freaking cool. You know who else sounds freaking cool, Brian Roe, who's one of our top wife time supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Truly Brian, Brian. This could be you tomorrow. If you want to be a new patron or if you happen to be a patron who has supported us for a while, you might hear your name on tomorrow's show. Speak of the patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We affectionately call it GDI. You couldn't catch this show though. DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're doing it all again tomorrow talking 3D X-rays in color with Dr. Nikki Ackerman's and Len Peralta draw on the stuff. Talk to you then.