 Coming up on DTNs, Laura Shin explains DOWS and who might have pulled off the biggest Ethereum theft back in 2016. Plus, should AI get intellectual property protection? DTNs starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022, 22, 22, 22, 22, 22. In LA, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger With us is Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians. Idealism, greed lies in the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze out today. She's also the host of the Unchained podcast and senior contributor at Forbes. Laura, welcome back. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Congrats on the book launch. Thank you. Thank you. I've been waiting for this day for many reasons. I bet you have. We were just talking about the new book with Laura, a little more on the expanded version of the show. Good day, Internet. You can get that at patreon.com slash DTNs. Big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Michelle Surju, Mike McLaughlin, and Ms. Music Teacher. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Meta-owned Facebook, perhaps you've heard of it, is launching Facebook Reels, similar to the feature that launched on Instagram last year. Facebook has already encouraged users to start cross-posting Reels onto their Facebook feeds, but Reels will now be a standalone feature in Facebook itself in more than 150 countries. Users can also share Reels inside of Stories, and then turn Stories posts into Reels as well. Facebook Watch and Facebook Groups can also host Reels content, and suggested Reels will show up in some users' feeds. Right. It feels like they're trying real hard there. Spotify's car thing is now available for anyone in the United States to purchase directly from Spotify. That's the dedicated player for the streaming service that costs you $90 and requires a Spotify Premium subscription to use it in your car. The device was available for a limited testing pool starting last April. It no longer needs an invite if you want to give them the money and get it. The car thing connects through an Oxjack or Bluetooth and does require a power source, acts as a touchscreen controller for Spotify. Microsoft is experimenting with two methods to warn Windows 11 users when the OS is installed on unsupported hardware. Latest test builds show a watermark on the desktop wallpaper stating system requirements not met, as well as a similar warning on the Settings app landing page. The desktop watermark is similar to the one that appears on an unactivated Windows install. There does not appear to be any feature restrictions with the warning at this time. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources are telling him that Apple's regular spring announcement might happen on March 8th. Keep an eye on that date. These dates do tend to change closer to the time Apple announces them, but sometimes they stick. Germany believes Apple will announce at least one new Mac at the event. And a little farther afield, DSCC's analyst Ross Young says Apple is exploring an all-screen foldable MacBook. It might come out with a foldable phone in 2025. Intel shared details on its Bonanza Mine Asics. Those are application-specific integrated circuits targeted at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency miners. Tom's hardware has information from the ISCC 2022 conference, which describes how Intel came to take 300 BMZ-1 chips and combine them into a 3600-watt miner. Tom's hardware also has some information on what might be coming in the second gen of the Bonanza Mine Asics from Intel. All right, let's talk a little bit about the new Sony PlayStation VR announcement. Let's do it. Sony is continuing to drop info about the PlayStation VR2 one little crumb at a time. It has since revealed the actual look using the same white and black colors as the PlayStation 5. The headset includes a lens adjustment dial, a new vent, a slight reduction of weight compared to the original, and connects to a system with a single USB cable. Yes, it does have a cable. The VR2 supports haptic feedback, 4K HDR, eye tracking, 110 degree field of view, foveated rendering, and 90 to 120 Hertz frame rates. It also includes that vent fan. That's going to cut down on moisture and foggy lenses, says Sony. The only game announced specifically for this headset at this time remains Horizon Call of the Mountain, which a lot of people are pretty excited about, but that's all we know. Price and release date continue to be a mystery. Now, if you're keeping track, this is a full year after Sony first announced the headset, that was back in February of 2021, then showed off the controllers last March, then confirmed it would be called the PlayStation VR2 just last month. This is very exciting if you are lucky enough to have a PlayStation 5, I feel like. It's been a while since the PlayStation VR came out, so this is a big jump in features, 4K HDR, foveated rendering, all that stuff. One USB-C cable instead of the many, many cables of the original PSVR, but when you start comparing it to the Quest 2 or the Quest 1 even, it's still got a wire. You still need a PlayStation. Yeah, I mean, I hate to say something as DOA to me because I've only known the Quest experience, the wireless experience. I also do a lot of VR exercise stuff. The whole sweaty, foggy lenses thing, I can relate to that. Having some sort of event built in that works well would be a welcome addition to me, but if you're tethered, how much are you really jumping around? Maybe I'm underestimating how sweaty a game can be if you're still tethered to a PlayStation 5, but it seems like this still feels like a product that is almost the product that people want. I don't want to sound like too much of a Quest apologist because, again, that is the only VR system that I've ever used regularly, so I'm just used to it. The idea that I would have to be connected to anything is weird to me, but if you're not jumping around, then you wouldn't care. The price is going to make all the difference. When they finally announced this thing for sale, if it's $199, then people are going to be knocked out again, but they need a PlayStation. That's a harder thing to get than it used to be in this day and age, so I think this is a good move for Sony. It's not going to put them ahead of the game in the VR race, but it's going to keep them in the game. I'd put it that way. If they can undercut Meta, which is certainly the most consumer-friendly VR experience right now, although certainly not the only one, then this lost leader that can get a bunch of developers to get excited about it and build up an ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera, that could work long-term, but yeah, like you said, Tom, if you do have a PlayStation 5, you're like, cool, maybe one day. Yeah, thanks again. All right, a three-person board at the US Copyright Office has rejected a 2019 request to register a copyright on a work of art made by an algorithm. The algorithm is called Creativity Machine. The filing was made by a human on behalf of the algorithm. That human's name is Steven Thaler, and you may recognize Thaler's name because back in August last year, we talked about him succeeding in getting a patent registered in South Africa with an algorithm called DABUS listed as the Creator. Thaler has been working with University of Surrey law professor to file intellectual property claims on behalf of algorithms. Professor Abbott is that law professor. Professor Abbott assisted in the attempt here in the US as well. In this most recent case, Thaler was trying to get Creative Machine listed as the copyright holder for an image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise. Kind of looks like a painting of a bunch of flowers overgrowing train tracks leading into a tunnel. I guess that's life after death or something. The US Copyright Board found the image did not include an element of human authorship which is a necessary standard in the US for copyright protection, so they wouldn't grant the copyright. AI created works of art can get copyright protection. You just have to demonstrate that humans were involved. Often that would be the programmer of the algorithm, but Thaler avoided doing that. He didn't do that on purpose because Thaler wants to get machine created works to be protected, so this is meant to create case law. One of the reasons Abbott and Thaler pursue this, which they've done dozens of times around the world. The only time they've won is in South Africa, at least as far as I know. They've been rejected a lot. They're trying to help settle the question of who is responsible for work of art created by an algorithm. Abbott argues that the programmers of an AI may not be the one that used the algorithm to output an invention, right? They could have made the AI, but maybe Sarah actually ran it and created the thing. The programmer should not be held liable for every use that an algorithm is put to, nor should users of the algorithms necessarily have to give patent royalties or license copyrights from the programmers just because they used the algorithm and a work of art was created. This is not a new question. We've talked about it before on the show several times, obviously, most recently back in August, Sarah. But have your thoughts on this evolved since then? I got to give Thaler credit. He really believes in this, and he just keeps trying. I don't know. On one hand, I can definitely see the argument of a human created an algorithm. Therefore, a human is involved. You just have to go back a few steps. Humans are involved. It's just that it's sort of like, I don't know, if I liken it to, if I teach you, Tom, we both watch a Bob Ross video, and I'm better at it than you. I help you a little bit with your skill set, and then you create a work of art. That's your work of art. It's not mine, but you're not an algorithm. You're a human. It's really an apples and oranges comparison. I do feel like it would be tough to, I don't know, if I have to draw a line in the sand, I would say an algorithm doesn't have a human component if it has been given all of the tools necessary by that human, and then the human sort of says, okay, go make some art. Human didn't make the art. I'm glad that Thaler is pursuing this before it becomes a problem, because it could become a problem if somebody creates an algorithm, created art, and then once the copyrighted programmer comes in and says, no, no, no, I created the algorithm. You just press the button. That's my work of art. Laura, listening to us talk about this, let me bring you in here. Do you have an opinion on where the line is? What do you think of this? Well, you know, it's so funny because, of course, being a crypto journalist, my immediate take was, oh, this has implications for NFTs. And I'm sure you're probably aware of these kind of generative art NFTs that are being created. And I actually realized I don't know how people are thinking of it in the crypto world, but I agree it raises really good questions. You know, I can't say that I know enough about it to have an opinion yet, but I definitely would want to research it more to see what I think and also probably to interview a bunch of lawyers because there probably is, you know, some kind of, there might be certain precedents where other lawyers can say, well, actually, you know, because of these other reasons, most likely it will be decided this way or that way. I really don't know, but it's incredibly fascinating. The precedents that I've read, and I certainly haven't read everything there is out there about it, but the precedents that I've read have all relied on the same thing that this copyright three-part board did, which is a human has to be involved. A human has to be assigned something. The only reason they got the patent in South Africa is that basically there was a spot on the form for a creator that they could fill in and say, well, Davis is the creator. We are the holder of the patent. And South Africa is like, hey, as long as a human is involved, so I almost feel like there's going to have to be new law, that the pre-existing law just didn't contemplate the idea of works of art that didn't have humans involved. You know, that's just something that's brand new. I wonder if we could have, you know, a copyright law for humans and a copyright law for the algorithms. For machine generated. Maybe the rules don't have to be exactly the same. Maybe we don't have to say, okay, well, you're not a human. You're a machine, but you're supposed to emulate human behavior. Instead of doing that, it's just, okay, here are the rules. Who made this? Oh, it was the algorithm? Okay, now if there's a dispute, we're going to take it to court in a different way. And that is where NFTs could fit back into this in tracking the right, right? Like the creator of the algorithm could have a slice of the NFT of the artwork, you know, that always goes to them. But the person who pressed the button on the algorithm gets the bigger slice. I don't know. There's a lot of interesting possibilities. Yeah. And you could make that into the smart contract in terms of how it pays out the royalties. Exactly. So we should market this idea. What if the royalties can only be used to make the algorithm smarter? Like no, nobody can just pocket royalties. It has to go to the algorithm. Yeah, like it has to be plowed back into developing the algorithm somehow. That's interesting. Yeah. I love it. All right, folks, if you've got thoughts on this or anything else, join the conversation in our discord. Jerry Heisman's in there right now talking away. You can join him and everybody else by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com. As we mentioned, Laura Shin has a new book out today, but she also has an exclusive on Forbes called Austrian programmer and ex crypto CEO likely stole $11 billion of ether. It's a it's a detective story. It's about one of the largest thefts of crypto coin ether that ever happened back in June 2016. The short version is the DAO, the first crowd-funded decentralized autonomous organization, hence DAO was kind of the prototype for DAOs. It let holders of its coins directly activities of the company and the DAO as it was called was meant to be a VC organization where the holders of the DAO could decide what got funded. After the theft in 2016, the DAO declined and it's now essentially defunct. But the attack on the DAO redirected 31% of its ether, which at the time was about 5% of all the ETH in existence, and caused a hard fork in the blockchain into the Ethereum we have now and Ethereum classic, where the wallets with stolen ETH still live to this day. While researching her new book, The Cryptopians, Laura thinks she may have found who is behind the hack that almost broke Ethereum. Laura, you have a thorough description in your article on why this person might have wanted to do this, a lot of circumstances around the theft, so everybody should definitely go read that and the book if you want to get the full story. But technically speaking, what pointed you in this direction? So this is going to be so funny for people to hear, but I was in the final stages of wrapping up my book, meaning we basically have a finished product, we're just making little tweaks. And at that point, I had followed a number of leads that had come from that period when the DAO attack occurred. And I had followed them to a point that was not necessarily conclusive. I had followed the various leads and done interviews with all the different suspects and then was going to present the information without saying anything really, but just saying, hey, I did the homework. These were the people people were looking at and here's why. And here's what they said. And a source of mine who was involved in rescuing the remaining ether in the DAO that had not been stolen because it was vulnerable to the same kind of attack. So he was involved in helping keep it from being stolen by somebody else. He reached out to me saying, oh, and so he's Brazilian. He lives in Brazil. And he said the Brazilian federal police have opened or well, actually it was five years ago, they opened an investigation into the DAO and they want to interview me. I may be a suspect and I was thinking of commissioning a report of the transactions that the DAO attacker did to help exonerate myself. And these reports are expensive. And so he said, I realized that you might be interested in this information too. So maybe we could use the report together. And so the company basically discounted the cost of the report for a credit in my book. And afterward he and I kind of went over the transactions and we got a sense of kind of like things like, when was this person transacting? When were they online? And the times mapped onto kind of like an Asian morning until an Asian nighttime. But the thing is that the suspects I'd been looking at, they were all based in Europe. And then Alex and I, this was the Brazilian source. He and I noticed there was this other suspicious person based on those transactions who was based in Russia. And so the times just didn't match. And I also had previously, in the course of reporting my book, gotten a customer service email that hacker had sent to a company called Shapeshift, which was basically like a crypto exchange. But it wasn't a crypto exchange that took personally identifying information. So it was kind of more like a smart contract type of thing, not actual DeFi. But anyway, I won't get in all the details. But a good way to hide your identity maybe, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And I was able to obtain that customer email, customer service email and saw, even though it really was such a brief note, I could see this person is a fluent English speaker. It was very clear. Because even the way they were using shorthand, it was just even a level of sophistication, even in that shorthand where even if you were kind of good with English, but not necessarily a fluent speaker, like you wouldn't be able to do that. So the Asian time schedule, and then the thing I could tell about the language, it was just like kind of munching on that. And I sent the report to another company that had been helping me report my book called Chainelysis. And they are also a blockchain forensics firm. And they were able to follow the trail because so basically just to give context, the attacker had these ETC coins, the Ethereum Classic. And they were a brand new coin. So they weren't very liquid. It wasn't like there were a lot of places where they could sell it. And everybody could see that those coins were associated with the DAO attack. And so nobody was going to say like, sure, come on in, exchange your coins. And so the DAO attacker was using Shapeshift to do that because it didn't take customer information. And they had converted to Bitcoin, which of course is so much more liquid, it's so much easier to turn that into real money and spend it and do things with it. And they had only gotten about 282 Bitcoins because Shapeshift, since it didn't take customer identifying information, the transaction limit was something like $2,500 or less. So they can only cash out a tiny bit at the time. And then on top of that, Shapeshift kept blocking them. So it was difficult. Let's put it that way. And Chainelysis saw that some of the Bitcoins were put through what's called a Wasabi coin join, which is a mixing technique where a bunch of people's transactions get kind of tumbled together. And then when they're spit out on the other side, it's harder to trace those coins. I'm not saying that's money laundering, but that's what you do with money laundering, right? You try to hide your money amongst a bunch of other money, right? Exactly. And like I've said in various articles I posted today and stuff, there are many legitimate reasons for wanting privacy and financial transactions. It's not that anybody who's using a mixer is doing it for illicit purposes. But in this case, I believe this person was. And so after they had done that a few times, they probably felt confident because at that point what they did was they deposited those Bitcoins to four different exchanges. And what eventually led us to the, me and my sources, to the identity of this person was that on one of the exchanges, I did, or actually a source of mine was able to get one of the exchange employees to reveal what happened to those Bitcoins that were deposited on that exchange. And what the attacker did was to convert it to a pretty obscure coin called Grinn. And then they withdrew those coins to a Grinn node, which had a human readable address, which was grin.toby.ai. And so people who have read the article will know this Tobi AI is the handle that this person used pretty much everywhere that I could find. But since we didn't know that when we were looking at this, we then just were looking at the IP address of the Grinn node and found other nodes, Bitcoin lightning nodes that were at that IP. And then when we went to a Bitcoin lightning explorer, we found, oh, one of those nodes is named. It has a human readable name, which is 10X. And so then of course, we Google 10X and Tobi and we see, oh, the co-founder and CEO of 10X is a guy named Tobi. And his Twitter handle and all his other social media and many other accounts are Tobi AI. So my sources who do these kinds of investigations very frequently, they said, Laura, the evidence is never this good. Yeah. It almost seems like, I mean, if you have taken such steps to cover your tracks, you clearly know what you're doing. You're using obscured wallets and networks and very much under the radar. It seems like such an obvious drop of the ball. Well, after using the coin joints several times, I think they just thought, okay, I'm good. I'm done. I've obscured my tracks. Therefore, no one will ever know that it was me. That's my, I'm just guessing because of, like I said, at that point suddenly then, and by the way, what I later was able to get was the email address used on that account at that exchange was the name of the exchange at Tobi.ai. So again, they even used his email address there. So it sounded to me like a lot of this pivoted on getting help from the person in the exchange. Was that something that they shouldn't have done? Is it something they only did on condition of anonymity, on background? How did that work? So I can't talk about that too much, but you're right that the policies of exchanges typically, the privacy policies of exchanges typically would prohibit an employee doing something like that. Okay, because there's people in our chat room saying like, really, he just left all that out. And I'm like, well, some of that took cooperation. It took a little more than would be obvious to anybody else just sleuthing around on the internet themselves. Exactly. Yeah. Now, Laura, I know that some folks may not be familiar with the Dow, but they're certainly familiar with the concept of a Dow. But for those who aren't, can you explain what the purpose of a Dow is and how it helps? So, Dow's can have many different purposes. And actually, if we just look at the original cryptocurrency, a lot of people would say that that's a Dow, that Bitcoin is a Dow, because it's this decentralized software. And I'm not sure what the market cap is now, but there have been times in its history when it's had a market cap of a trillion dollars or more, which is what only some of the greatest companies in the world have achieved. And yet it's done that without a CEO or a C-suite or hiring workers to help promote it. And so it's just this decentralized software that has been able to achieve that. And now there are all kinds of Dow's with different purposes. And the Dow that we've been discussing, that's in my book, that Dow was structured to be more like a decentralized venture fund. And so it was basically just a group of people that were putting all their money into the smart contracts that were called the Dow. And the way it would work would be that people who wanted funding would submit proposals, you know, sort of the way that you pitch a VC. And then the community would take their tokens and vote on which proposals to fund. And then the winning proposals or projects would give some of their revenue or profits back to the Dow. And then the Dow token holders would be able to receive those profits. So I have to just give notice if anybody likes this idea that the SEC did eventually later come out and say that Dow tokens were securities, but they didn't take an enforcement action because obviously by that time it had been undone by, you know, Ethereum hardforking. But nowadays we have Dow's that, for instance, are basically just social clubs. For instance, one of the more popular ones is called Friends with Benefits. And it's actually literally, you know, like I said, just a social club, people just get together and they have fun and they're little local chapters and you have to own the FWB token. It's actually kind of expensive because you have to have 75 of them. And at different times it's been like $10,000 or more to get in. It's sort of like more expensive than, shoot, what's that place in New York? Soho House. I was going to say Soho Club and I was like, that's not what it's called. Right. Or the Magic Castle or something like that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, you know, there are all different kinds of Dow's right now that are just proliferating and people might be familiar with Constitution Dow from the fall, which again, very different purpose. They just wanted to buy a copy of the US Constitution. So, you know, they're very diverse and very different. And really you could have any purpose that you liked. So, if you don't have a president, you don't have a CEO, you don't have really any hierarchy. Is it just everybody has equal voting? And if so, is that dangerous? Well, it depends on how many coins you have. So, obviously people who have more coins tend to have a greater say in the votes. However, a number of Dow's use what's called quadratic voting, where the greater number of people that vote, even if the amount of coins that they have is less, that will be weighted more heavily than a few whales just like, you know, using all their coins to try to sway the vote. So, for instance, there is a Dow called Gitcoin Dow. And I'm saying Git, like with a G, because sometimes it sounds like Bitcoin. And it's, you know, what you would imagine where developers kind of propose things. But actually now they're doing all different kinds of public goods. And so even journalists have been submitting proposals to Gitcoin Dow and getting like some of their media ventures funded. But they use quadratic voting. So that again, like I said, if many more people support something as opposed to just a small number, then that will be weighted more heavily. It sounds similar to things like rank choice voting and that sort of thing where it's trying to give some weighting to popular sentiment, not just raw coin holding. Is that right? Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Laura. I mean, fascinating article. We urge everybody to go read it. A lot of details there. A lot of reporting. And I will say for people who don't have a copy of my book, definitely get one. It's a beautiful book. I also narrate the audio book if you like audio books and, you know, just to explain to people. So if you're probably a little bit newer to crypto, you might want to get the hardcover because there is a list of characters in the front and a glossary in the back. And it's just easier to flip back and forth. I feel like in a paper version. And because there are a lot of people, I had a hard time kind of condensing it down. And, you know, this is like even with me pairing it back and it's like 50 people. But the ebook is great if you're like a crypto nerd and you want to geek out on the footnotes because I have all these links to blockchain transactions and social media posts. Very fun. And then the last thing is, of course, audio for people who would want to hear that narration and they would even get the sort of like emotion that my sources relate to me when they told me their stories. Well, thank you for being with us here today. Fascinating stuff. And I'm definitely getting a copy of your book. And I'm one of those people who needs that glossary. So I'll be getting a copy. Well, if you are, whether or not you're into crypto, if you're planning to stay at a hotel anytime soon, it might seem a little different, maybe a little out of the ordinary. Take it away, Chris. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. The next time you're in a hotel, you may have a surprise if you call down an order for extra towels or toiletries, because when you answer the door, it may be a robot. At least it may be if you stay at the AC Hotel Sunnyvale Moffitt Park in Silicon Valley with a shortage of staff and difficulty hiring people. The general manager has added a robot. The robot is not yet changing any bedsheets or doing any of the cleaning tasks, but it can deliver items to guests, including food deliveries like Uber Eats and Door Dash. It has four different compartments enabling it to make multiple deliveries on one run. So maybe there's a robot in your future. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Sarah, you and Roger had a robot deliver things to you guys at CES one year that sounds like they're expanding. The Renaissance Hotel, yeah. It was Advil or something. My back was sore and I called down to the front desk. I said, can you help? I don't have anything. And a robot came into my door. It was great. Yeah. Roger got some toilet paper, you know, just in case, just a little extra. You know, whatever. Yeah, I was like, thank you, Mr. Robot shut the door and they were on their way. You know, you know, gender neutral. We want to thank some new bosses that we got over our long weekend here in the U.S. Damien Manion, Patrick Lepper, Misty Blowers, and Bruce Webster all just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Damien. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Misty. And thank you, Bruce. Yeah. Talk about quadratic. We got four new backers. That's right. That's right. I used to hate quadratic equations. Thank you to Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopians, Idealism, Greed Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency craze. Thank you so much for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. So you can find me on Twitter at Laura Shin. I also have a website, laureshin.com. And if you want to buy my book, it's bit.ly slash Cryptopians, which is bit.ly slash C-R-Y-P-T-O-P-I-A-N-S. And you should also check out my podcast, which comes out every Tuesday and Friday. It's called Unchained. Very cool. Well, thanks so much again for being with us today. Reminder that we are live on the show. We're doing it live right now. You might be listening to us after the fact, but Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC is where it all goes down. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow. We're going to be talking video game preservation with one Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.