 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Daniel Dorado, Howard Yarmusch, and John Atwood. Coming up on DTNS, Aaron Carson tells us how machines are replacing audiobook narrators. Twitter now requires you to pay to be picked by the algorithm and what's actually going on with TikTok. Don't believe the rumors. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Nashville, I'm Aaron Carson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Aaron, it's wonderful to have you. How are things? I am rolling along, just enjoying a little bit of good weather here in Tennessee despite the allergies. Well, we are having good weather in Los Angeles, which you might say, well, of course, it's Los Angeles, but it's been ridiculously rainy. And it's going to be ridiculously rainy again tomorrow, apparently. So I'm glad we both have some nice weather. That's good. Let's begin with the quick hits. Zoom announced several new features. It's opening its email and calendar clients to all users, and that includes end to end encryption, custom domains, if you're a paying user. And Zoom's scheduler, which is similar to Calendly, if you want to share your availability for meetings. Also, Zoom huddles will offer a sort of virtual co-working space so people can drop in and out as needed. Zoom's IQ assistant can now provide summaries of meetings as well as chat threads. Zoom IQ can also help compose your chat messages, your emails, your meeting agendas, even your whiteboards. Zoom IQ is powered by open AI. The Japan Fair Trade Commission ruled that it did not expect Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard to reduce competition in the country. It informed both companies it will not issue a cease and desist order and closed its review into the deal. So your move, UK, Europe and US. One of the many shoes has dropped. I think we know why Jack Ma returned to China. Alibaba announced it's going to restructure into six independently run entities. This will include a cloud intelligence group, a Taobao team all e-commerce group, local services, global digital business group, digital media and entertainment and smart logistics. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang Yang will oversee the group and head the cloud intelligence unit with CEOs for each of the other business units to handle all operational decisions. Business units can also seek their own fundraising, including stock IPOs. The US state of North Dakota has passed a law requiring schools to teach cyber security in classes from kindergarten to grade 12. A plan for classes must be approved by July 1st, 2024 and this is the first US state to require cyber security classes. That is very interesting. Good job, North Dakota. If you're in the market for a new laptop, there's several new models to look at. Lenovo announced a new slimline, 14.5 inch slim Pro 7 and slim 7 eyes and 14.5 inch and 16 inch slim Pro 9 eyes as well. The 9 eye can come with an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card. Lenovo says the laptops have software built in to speed up video editing. The Verge also notes the slimline has 1.5 millimeter dish cap keyboard keys, a larger track pad, infrared camera, privacy shutter, time of flight sensor and a four microphone setup. Most of these are coming in April with the 9 eye coming in May and they range between $1,200 and $1,800. HP also has a new Victus 16 gaming laptop that the Verge thinks might be the cheapest way to get an RTX 4070 starting at $1,049.99, though that's the price before you add the 4070, but still. There's also a 4.6 pound Omen Transcend 16, which HP says is its thinnest and lightest laptop yet. HP's new laptops arrive early this spring. All right, let's talk a little bit about Twitter. Twitter CEO Elon Musk says a lot of things. Sometimes they have some happening, sometimes they don't. So with that in mind, let's talk about his post from Monday that said, as of April 15th, only verified Twitter accounts, that is accounts that pay for Twitter blue or Twitter gold or our government entities, will show up in Twitter's for you feed. You pay or you don't show up in the for you feed. The for you feeds the one that's algorithmically organized. It's not the chronological feed. Now Musk says that he's going to do this to combat bots, although verified bots will still be in the for you feed. He's talking about spam bots of Twitter's hundreds of millions of active users around 400,000 are paying. So it's not a huge percentage. It sounds like this will mean the default page will not show people unless you will not show the people you follow unless you're verified. So if you want to see the people you follow, you got to get the chronological page. Natasha Lomas is a very level headed reporter for TechCrunch who wrote a very well reasoned article called Twitter is dying, which I found compelling because Natasha is not prone to exaggerations and laid out a very interesting case why it's just death by a thousand cuts. Aaron, do you think Twitter is dying? Gosh, you know, it's, it's hard to feel like it is not on kind of a, you know, a downward spiral spiral. It feels like, you know, we always get these pronouncements from Musk and kind of to your point, it's usually a little uncertain if the thing that he says is going to happen is actually going to happen. But when it comes to this idea of like, oh, so you want more people to pay for a service, normally, if they're going to pay, there's a sense of they're going to get some added benefit when really, I think for a lot of users, when they hear news, the thing that they're, they're hearing is that well, I'm actually losing value here in my experience. Yeah, I try to read these through the filter of what has he said before and what is actually reasonable. And sometimes what he says is what happens and it's weird. But a lot of the times what I thought was like, well, that doesn't sound reasonable, but a reasonable thing to do that sounds like that is this ends up being what happened. To me, if this was, hey, verified users will get more prominent placement in your for you feed. I wouldn't blink an eye. I don't think a lot of people would. You'd still have people being bent out of shape, but that makes sense. Like, oh, if you're paid to be verified, you get boosted in the algorithm, not only people who pay show up in the algorithm, because that would just make my for you feed useless. And I as much as people have fun, you know, throwing stones at Twitter right now, I don't think they would do that. Or if they did, I don't think they would last very long before they changed their mind about it. So I'm fully expecting that as of April 15, we will find out that only verified tweets get boosted in the for you feed. And this goes with a platformer story that was out that said there is a list of 35 people that are boosted right now, just because Musk wanted them boosted. I feel like maybe that's what's going to happen, the verified people go into that program. What do you think? Well, and I think, you know, kind of to your point, there is this kind of gap that exists between when we find out that maybe there is a plan that's, you know, he's going to roll out on Twitter and then the practicality of how it actually works. And then the adjustments that follow after that. And we, I mean, we have just seen this so many times like early on with sort of, you know, all the issues of, of like, you know, parody accounts and you know, anybody being able to grab a blue, you know, checkmark or whatever. There's the idea, there's the practice and there's the adjustment period that's after. Yeah, no, that's a good point. The verified, I think, people still think, oh, you just pay and you get verified, they changed that. Now, you still have to pay, but you also have to prove who you are again, which makes sense. So yeah, sometimes he says a thing that's crazy and that's not how it works. Sometimes he says the things that are crazy and it is how it works for a short period of time and then they change it. So we'll see what happens with this one. Let's go from something as controversial as Twitter to TikTok. That's not really a change in tone, is it? There's a lot of fud flying around about TikTok. So we wanted to break down what you need to know. Of the several bills that would ban TikTok in the U.S., there are, there is one circulating in the U.S. Congress called the Restrict Act from Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and John Thune of South Dakota. It's a bipartisan bill. It would require the U.S. Department of Commerce to create a program to identify, assess, and if necessary, restrict or ban ICT products, basically computers and technology products, quote, in which any foreign adversary has any interest and poses undue or unacceptable risk to national security. So that's the leading contender bill. That's the one everybody's talking about and it's not limited to TikTok or China. It just says, if the intelligence agency says this country is a threat, and they say this technology is a threat, the Department of Commerce has a program to assess that and take action. Short of banning. It could be banning, it might not be. All right. Let's talk about why this is a concern. China can require companies to hand over any data if there is a national security concern for their domestic companies. They can't force a U.S. company to do this unless that U.S. company we're operating in China, but China actually doesn't allow U.S. companies to fully operate in China. They always have to have a partner company. That partner company is the one that they require, but TikTok, while not based in China, has a parent company, ByteDance, that is. So the concern is that ByteDance would require the international TikTok to hand over data because the Chinese government wants it to be handed over. So that's one of the big concerns. The other big concern is that TikTok might be persuaded to adjust its algorithm to affect U.S. public opinion. There's less certainty about whether that actually works or not. Way less certainty that people seem to admit when they talk about it, but that is another concern. All right. In December, TikTok admitted that members of its risk control team accessed IP addresses of two U.S. journalists in order to track down who at TikTok was leaking to the press. This has got a lot of attention to see, they do this. But keep in mind, this is something that also happened at Uber and happened at eBay. It was, let's figure out where those journalists were by their IP address to find out if they were talking to the people at TikTok who leaked stuff about that. The people who looked up those IP addresses were fired and policies were changed to prevent that kind of monitoring in the future. So that's what's actually going on with that if you hear that story kicking around. I'm not saying it's good, bad or otherwise, but that's actually, you know, it's good to know the actual details of it. TikTok has done things to try to prevent this all from becoming a problem. One of them is called Project Texas. We talked about that earlier this year on DTNS. We'll have a link to that episode in the show notes. Project Texas would create a separate company. That company, TikTok USD, would report to the US government's Committee on Foreign Investment and would manage all TikTok data on an Oracle-managed server. Only public data, like things you post, your likes, the things that you can see anywhere in the world on the internet, only that data would leave the US. Private data would stay on Oracle servers in Texas, managed by this company that reports to the Committee on Foreign Investment. So when you hear about Project Texas, that's what that is. TikTok is also planning to make its algorithm accessible to US authorities for inspection. That's a little more vague. It's a little more of a promise than it is a reality. So given all this, given the tenor of Congress, the likelihood, according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, is that TikTok will be sold or banned within three to six months. Angelo Zeno, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, actually gives that a 35 to 40% chance. It is a little more bullish on the idea that TikTok won't get sold or banned because there are a lot of voters who love TikTok, love using it, and the politicians may blink because they don't want to anger voters. If TikTok is banned, though, here's what might happen. Nothing as far as China having access to your personal data. China has as much access to your personal data right now through legal data brokers who collect far more than what's available on TikTok servers. And there are no restrictions, nor are there any laws being planned to restrict data brokers from selling that data to any customer. So if TikTok gets banned, your personal data is no more safe than it is right now. Adi Robertson at The Verge pointed out there's more concrete evidence of Tim Hortons secretly tracking the average app user than TikTok. And these laws don't bear on tracking pixels from ByteDance, which are present on almost every website you visit, including 30 US state-sponsored government websites across 27 states. So ByteDance might even still be able to collect more information about you than TikTok. Moody's estimates that if TikTok were banned, it would boost revenue for YouTube, Instagram, and especially Snap, and that there would harm many creators. And we talked previously on an episode of DTNES about what happened in India, where a lot of creators were out of luck and a lot of business moved to Instagram and YouTube after that. Erin, how's that all sit with you? Yeah, I think one of the parts of this that I've thought about and is interesting is there is so much hype around this right now and so much conversation, but that little bit about how this actually plays out with voters. 2024 is an election year, and I think it's going to be interesting how many people are going to want to go after something that is really popular with a pretty key voting demographic. And so I think it's one of those moments like we'll see where the rubber hits the road on this. Yeah, the interesting thing about that analysis is I also think they win political points by banning TikTok amongst another sector of voters. So I can't tell which sector of voters they are willing to upset more, the TikTok users or the TikTok haters. And I guess we'll find out. My gut feeling, though, is that the U.S. government agrees on very little these days, but it seems to agree on this. And I think they're going to cause some kind of sale by July. I don't know how they'll manage to convince the Chinese government to approve a sale, but I bet they can come up with something creative. Perhaps it's something similar to Project Texas where they can split the company. I don't know, but my sense is they won't want to ban it because they won't want to upset those creators, but they will find a way to force a sale that they can say we forced a sale that China will accept. That's my guess. Right. And to your point, it is kind of a striking moment when you get bipartisan support on anything. But I think also another part of this, talking about creators and whatnot is almost like the PR campaign that is going to have to be launched to explain why this is happening to kind of your average person. And also what to do about rounds and things that people are inevitably going to find in order to keep scrolling their FYPs. A couple of other things just before we wrap this up to keep in mind, whatever happens with TikTok is going to happen to CapCut. If you use CapCut to do editing, it's a mobile app for editing. It's owned by ByteDance. So it's going to be affected. And then whatever happens to TikTok sets the precedent for other Chinese-based companies like Xi'en, Temu, Alipay, WeChat. Famously, President Trump tried to get WeChat banned along with TikTok. So I would expect WeChat might be the next target for the current administration if they end up banning TikTok. There you go. So now you can make your own decision of what you think about all of this, but hopefully you have a clearer idea of what's actually going on. If you have a thought about something we've talked about on the show, TikTok or anything else, please email us. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. ChatGPT is everywhere, but it is not the only machine learning-based tool having an effect out there. It's not the only kind of AI that's causing waves. Generative tools are being used more frequently in book narration. According to Acumen Research and Consulting, the audiobook market size is expected to reach $33.5 billion by 2030. So there's money there. That's up from about $4.2 billion in 2021. And Erin, you wrote a story on this, how AI is being used in audiobook narration. What's going on there? Right. So AI narrators aren't necessarily brand new, but recently we're seeing this kind of renewed push and interest in creating these tools that essentially let smaller book publishers or authors take a manuscript of a book, pump it through a platform, maybe do some limited quality checks and essentially get an AI recording of whatever work it was for less money and less time and less labor than if they went the route of trying to hire a human to narrate their book. Yeah. So something like 11 Labs, which we've played around on Good Day Internet with where you can train it on your own voice and then it can talk like you could certainly do this kind of thing. I know immediately people say, oh, okay. So the big publishers are going to do this. Is it the big publishers are going to do this? Or is it the small publishers? Who takes the best advantage of that? Right. I think it's a mix of people. I think that because it is really expensive to record an audiobook, like it can be I think up to $6,000, some of the groups that are the most interested in this right now are some of the smaller players. They might not have the time and the money and the resources to create a book, but certainly any time that you have a technology that has the potential to impact a bottom line, I think there's going to be interest kind of across the board. But you definitely are those seeing, I think in this first kind of way of this argument of like, oh, this is going to take down barriers and open up opportunities for folks that don't immediately have those resources. Yeah. If you don't have the $6,000 to pay a narrator to do a professional reading, this could make it more accessible. Speaking of accessible, what about actual accessibility? What about making books more accessible through audiobooks? Is it good for that? Right. There is definitely that potential there. I spoke with someone from the University of Michigan Press, and he was kind of setting up this idea for me that there are so many books out there, and so few of them in reality have audio versions. This is something that could potentially help people kind of work through that backlog and make audio versions of books accessible to folks who maybe, for example, have low vision or other similar issues. Obviously, there's tech that already exists out there like screen readers, but you have kind of like a wide swath of people with different needs. And so he was saying that, you know, for example, the audiobook perhaps that gets spit out by one of these platforms might not be like so much more amazing than what you might find on your screen reader, but not everybody has a screen reader has access to a screen reader. So this could really like kind of open up a catalog of books potentially. I remember a long time ago, Kindle ran into problems where publishers didn't want them to allow text to be turned into audio. This was back when it was very robotic, too. So I wonder if we've solved that, or if this could be built in, because if you get a decent narrator from an AI, that really would be a boon for a lot of people. Right. And I think that that's one of the kind of interesting moments that we're in right now is on one hand, you have, you know, when you talk to like audio book narrators, the humans, you know, the real ones, there's this argument that like, Hey, this is a creative performance. There's all this work and time and everything that we put into it to make sure that you get the emotion and the nuance and this and that. But the fact is that a lot of these AI voices are improving, you still definitely hit moments that kind of, you know, kick off like the uncanny valley switch or like, Oh, that came out kind of weird. But there's enough progress where, you know, some people are making the argument that like, Hey, this could be a decent offering. But at the same time, you know, I spoke with an audio book narrator who herself has a disability, and she was also kind of making this argument that, you know, can we do better for this community than just kind of cranking out these like, kind of, you know, stiff sounding AI books. So it's, there's a lot of potential for progress and change and a lot of kind of thoughts kind of in this space. Yeah. And obviously, when you talk about anything like this, a lot of people their first thought is like, Oh, it's going to throw people out of jobs, human narrators are out of a job. Are there any bright spots in this for the actual human narrators? Right. I think that there's, there's a few. And it kind of depends a little bit on who you're talking to. I think that, you know, when you talk to the narrators, there is a lot of anxiety. There's folks who are like, I don't know if I'm going to have a job in five years. But there's also a few kind of areas where maybe there's potential for things like passive income. I spoke with a company that does some of this like AI narration, and they were making the argument that like, Hey, you could license your voice. We have the technology to get you into different markets that you may not be able to tap into. And so maybe while you're, you know, sleeping, your voice could be reading a book in Spanish and you are, you know, making money off of that. But as always, I think right now we've just hit such a moment of anxiety, as far as AI kind of creeping into these creative spaces that we thought that maybe we'd be a little bit more immune from. And so there's just a lot of hand wringing. Yeah, I like the idea of licensing. Obviously, it might not be as much money as reading, but also takes less time. So it could be more money over time, because it's continuous and can be applied to more books. I can see an argument for that. I also thought it was interesting you mentioned in your article about the idea that publishers might try a AI based narration to see if there's a market for an audio book. And then if there is, go ahead and spend the money for a real human narrator to up the production value. That's fascinating too. Exactly. Yeah. It was that same person that I talked to you from U of M press who he himself is like a huge audio book fan. And so it's a matter of like, well, from the business perspective, how do you allocate your resources? And so he's like, well, if we produce an audio book and with this AI voice and it gets a lot of attention and it's popular, then we can actually go and justify the cost and the time and the labor of getting a human. And then that kind of works out for everybody involved, right? You get that kind of human level quality and the narrator gets the job and, you know, you kind of go forward. Yeah. Go read, read Aaron's article because there's some interesting things about how they deal with character voices and how you can like pay extra for better AI and all of that. It's a good read, as always. Well done. Let's move on to Chris Christensen who says, if you like vacationing with an ensemble of friends, you know that coordinating multiple people can be tough, but Chris Christensen has an app that takes the chore out of your group travel. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. My resource for you today is a web app for planning a trip coordinating with friends called Roaming Duck. You can find it at roamingduck.com. It lets you create an itinerary centered on flights accommodations and especially in this particular app on tours that you might do, although you can put in other activities as well, and then share that itinerary with friends and put in comments and chats and notes, you know, this is my proposed itinerary and then Bob can say, no, I think we should do this instead. There's a number of different apps that have tried to tackle this. This is closest to the one that I think I would write if I were trying to write it myself. So if you're interested, roamingduck.com. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Oh, that works as well as Chris says it does. That takes a lot of pain and agony out of travel. I'm the one in my friend group who handles all the itineraries and the travel I'm listening. Yeah, roamingduck. It's an easy to remember name. All right, let's check out the mail bag. A different Chris, Chris H had an idea for listeners interested in what to do with old UB keys. We had someone right in saying like, I've got all these old UB keys. They're not FIDO compliant. They're old. So I don't want to keep using them because they're less secure than FIDO compliant. What do I do with them? Chris says, I reuse my old UB keys by using the UB key manager application. You can configure the UB key to simply type in two different strings of text with a short touch or long touch by choosing the static password option. So it's kind of acting like a like a keyboard emulator. Any long but important information, which would be a hassle to type in can be entered into the UB key manager so that the UB key you're programming just types that text when you touch the button. I use it to enter an encryption key and another to enter my complex Wi Fi password. If somebody wants to use my Wi Fi, I can simply plug in the UB key under the device and it will type in my Wi Fi password for them. That is pretty cool. Thank you, Chris. As long as they trust you plugging the UB key into their laptop, I guess. And then Kevin in Milwaukee has been a software engineer for 25 years. He doesn't want to write the have an AI write the code. He doesn't want chat GPD to write code for him, but he would like AI to do the following. One, what problems do you see with this code snippet? It's a little bit of troubleshooting. Two, write me some test code that will exercise this function. Then he can use it to include and modify it from there. Or three, is there a more optimized way of doing this? So a little code analysis. I'm all for AI helpers. I'm just not comfortable with AI authors, at least in the software space. I think you're right, Kevin. I think it is probably a bad idea to just have it write the code and then start using it. You're going to need to look over it. And these three things are what it would be really good at. Well, thank you, Aaron for being with us today. What have you got going on to tell folks about? Well, you can always find me in Twitter at Aaron Carson, if I can get that sentence out of my mouth. It's E-R-I-N-C-A-R-S-O-N. You are available for opportunities. So folks, hit Aaron up. A special thanks to Justin Luther, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Justin, for all the years of support. We could not do this show without you. Patrons like Justin can stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about Disney disbanding its metaverse department. Is the buzz around metaverse already over? Aaron and I are going to talk about it. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.