 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Peter Bohack, Phillip Less, Howard Yermish, and new patrons, John Citrix, Peter, and Fallen and C. Yay. On this episode of DTNS, did it take Taylor Swift to make people address deep fakes? Shannon has thoughts on the Pixel 8 Pro's temperature sensor and Samsung's bid to make a comeback in China. Forget it, Samsung. It's China, not even Chinatown, just the whole country. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 26, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You're jaunty today, Roger. I like that. Am I? Yeah. Doesn't Roger sound like Perky? What does jaunty mean? You had fun and Perky. Perky and cat at an angle. Having or expressing a lively, cheerful, and self-confident manner. Got it. Well, you know, we always take jaunty, Roger. There's Jolly Roger, which is your actual Twitter name, right? Sure. Yeah, it's true. So jaunty is but a vowel and a couple of consonants away. That's right. It's so close. Well, I believe we should start with the quick hits unless anyone's opposed. Nope. Aye aye. Motion carried. A few follow-ups to Apple's announcement about how it plans to comply with the EU's DMA. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney criticized Apple's new policy, which still charges developers, even if they don't use the Apple app store. Sweeney said Fortnite will return to iOS in the EU this year as part of an Epic Games store on iOS. Sweeney also criticized Apple's requirement that operators of independent app stores must show about a million dollars of Euro letter of credit to be approved by Apple. The maker of the Proton app also criticized Apple's policies on side loading and third party app stores. Separately, EU iOS users will be given a choice of browsers the first time they will launch Safari, starting with iOS 17.4. App makers will be able to choose other browser engines beyond Apple's WebKit as well. Opera already announced it will have a new browser for iOS in Europe coming to March with lots of AI. Oh, AI, good. Then I know exactly what it'll have. Also coming in iOS 17.4, auto-generated transcripts for podcasts, transcripts for podcasts in English, French, German and Spanish will be available in more than 170 countries. It's gonna work like Apple music lyrics work. You'll just click the little quote button and then the transcript will play out while you're listening to your podcast. The words will be available shortly after publishing. So if you listen to a podcast right away, it might not show up right away. And podcasters can choose to upload their own transcripts as well. Bloomberg passed a longer report from the Omdia analyst Hiroshi Hayase suggesting that Nintendo's next console, sometimes referred to as the Switch 2, although that is not for sure, will launch this year featuring an eight inch LCD screen. That is a downgrade from the OLED Switch, but an upgrade obviously in size. Last year, Sharp said it was supplying LCD panels for Nintendo's upcoming console. The Switch Lite has a 5.5 inch screen. The original Switch model screen is 6.2 inches. The OLED Switch has a seven inch screen. So eight inches, it's big. A biggest switch yet. In another sign that China is easing up on video games, the government approved licenses for 115 video games in January. That's the largest number of approvals in 18 months. This follows the removal of a proposal to increase restrictions on in-app purchases and other things. The National Press and Publication Administration of China issued 1076 licenses for video games in 2023. They only issued 512 the year before. So big increase overall. The estate of the late George Carlin has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Federal Court calling for the removal of the doozy video that showed a generated George Carlin doing a comedy routine about current topics. The folks behind doozy claim the entire routine was generated by a model trained on Carlin's works and call it an impersonation. The Carlin estate calls it use of copyrighted materials and likenesses without permission. The state asks the court to order the immediate removal of George Carlin, I'm glad I'm dead, that's the name of the show, which was posted January 9th on the doozy YouTube channel. The suit also asked for the destruction of all copies of the special and payment of unspecified damages. Doozy previously removed a comedy special made to impersonate Tom Brady after Brady himself or his camp threatened a similar lawsuit. Which makes me wonder why they didn't cave this time because presumably the Carlin estate told them they were gonna file this lawsuit and they decided to fight it out. So it's a little bit interesting. You know, Ars Technica had a really interesting article showing evidence that maybe the doozy thing isn't as AI generated as they would like you to build as well, which I buy. There had to be some editing. There had to be a human touch at the end, just make it smooth. Just based on what Gavin was saying last week about how they do their AI. There's just not tools to do this. Samsung launched the Galaxy S24 in China, but instead of using Google's Gemini models, cause Google doesn't really operate a lot in China, it's using Baidu's Ernie. Baidu launched Ernie back in August. It will do translation, summarization, text formatting, real-time call translation, and a feature similar to Google's Circle to Search. So they're trying to replicate the Gemini feature set on the Samsung Galaxy S24, but with a different engine that is more amenable to the Chinese government. Google operates in a limited way in China, but mostly in advertising. It does not offer Google Play services or any of its hardware or even Google Search. Baidu received government approval to launch Ernie. Google likely doesn't wanna submit to government scrutiny for that, so it's not possible for Samsung to use Gemini there. Also Samsung's no longer the top five smartphone brands in China. Remember we had that story that Apple leads the way, Huawei's on its way up, Vivo is up there, Xiaomi's up there. So Samsung would like to get back in the game domestically. Everyone talks about, oh, is Apple sales slowing down in China? Samsung has a real problem in China, and it would like to get that back. So maybe partnering up with a domestic agency like Baidu is the way to go. Shannon, what do you think? Do you believe that? I don't know, none of us have used Ernie, but what do you think about the chances of a domestic company in China being able to replicate Gemini? Well, maybe it will help. I mean, obviously we are bigger fans of like Google's Gemini over here, and I just in my personal opinion, I would love to see a comparison between Baidu's Ernie and Google's Gemini just to see like which one is better side by side. So I am very curious to see if this would like potentially help sales over there. Like maybe since they are partnering up with something that is from China with Baidu, maybe that will allow them to lower the prices of the S24 series over there and possibly sell more of them. Like that could be a potential marketing thing that they could exploit over there, but it's really kind of, I'm not really sure. I'm very, very curious about it though. It's hard to get a fair estimate of how good Ernie is either because it's been sort of shrouded in mystery. It's limited in what it's allowed to do, frankly. So this will be putting it into its most stretched use case, I feel like. Yeah, and that was the way that I felt going into the story and we talked about this in our pre-show. I was like, have we talked about Ernie all that much since August when it was released? Not that it isn't a great OS, but forever. Not a great OS, but a JAPI, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A part of an OS. But for a variety of reasons, Google going this way, or Samsung rather going this way makes a lot of sense, but again, would love to know more about, you know, how people who have used Ernie in, I don't know, some capacities have thoughts. You know, obviously, like as an Android reviewer, all of the phones that I'm checking out and personally trying like physically in front of me, they all use Google. So for me, if I was ever to be able to test Baidu's Ernie next to it, it would be a very fascinating experience and I don't know if like from a usability standpoint, if I would just be more biased towards like Google's Gemini over Ernie just because that's what I'm used to. And I'm also curious of like, if there's any other reviewers here in the United States who have had an opportunity to use it because it is fairly new, it just came out in August. So we really haven't heard much about it here in the United States in terms of like our own marketing. Well, yes and no. It hasn't made headlines here, but there's tons of stories about it. If you go looking for it, I just found one from CNN Business a month ago where they actually compared it to GPT-4. So not the same as comparing it to Gemini, but they said Ernie was better than GPT-4 on general news, at least the kind of news that's allowed in China, which is a lot. The takeaway CNN said is it's pretty good. You can't go wrong with either. They asked both bots to help a hard-working graphic designer ask their boss for a raise, and they each outlined compelling arguments. Ernie still seemed to get confused at times, but then so did GPT-4. And of course, if you ask it about Chinese politics, it just goes, I don't know what you're talking about. Let's start over. What? No. Yeah. So do you think that this is... It seems like it performed pretty well according to the CNN article. Do you think that this is like Samsung's play to get more marketing power and more of a hold in China? Yeah. It makes sense to me too. It's got to, right? Yeah. If it wants to compete at all, it's got to have a product in China that feels on par with the product outside of China. And this is a little bit of a leg up to be like, hey, patriotism. There's a little bit of anti-American backlash in the US, and Samsung can take advantage of the fact that it's not an American company, use a domestic product in Ernie and maybe score a few points. I don't think it's the magic bullet or anything, but it can't hurt. Real quickly though, Shannon, you just got the new Galaxy S24, the worldwide edition, the one with Gemini on it, minutes before the show. So I know you've just pulled it out of the box. I haven't had a lot of time to spend with it, but what do you think so far? Yeah, I did. I got it not even in the last 30 minutes. I've been able to get this thing set up with my account and I was able to download some applications on it. And so far it's a very smooth process. I will say this is my first titanium phone. This is the S24 Ultra. It's the first one that I've ever had that's titanium. So I'm very curious about the durability and the use cases in that sector, but also curious about the screen because I've heard that this one is a little less vivid than the S23 Ultra. So I'm very, very curious to see if that's going to affect how much I like looking at this screen compared to the old one. In terms of how fast it's running and everything, it's a brand new phone. I just took this thing out of the box. The box is right over there in my studio. So it's nice and fast. The performance is looking really good. The photos look really nice and sharp. We just got some snow here in Colorado, so I fully intend to take this thing outside and really bright sunlight in Colorado weather with all the snow on the ground and see how it does with all sorts of whites and all sorts of different colors. So I'm pretty excited about it, especially given that this one does have the new circle feature and a lot of Samsung's AI is being brought into the S24 Ultra. So yeah, it's very exciting to finally have my hands on it, and it did arrive a little bit early. So I'm super stoked to be able to use this thing over the weekend, but so far so good. It looks good. Oh, and also, I don't know if anybody cares about this, but I care. They didn't put the IMEI on the back of the phone, which if you're into a security and privacy, like people can clone IMEIs, and it's nice to not have it there, so I can take pictures of the back of the phone without anybody cloning my IMEI. Well, Shannon, speaking of things that people thought were curious decisions, design-wise, Google updated the Pixel 8 Pro this week to allow for a new body temperature sensor feature with clearance from DeNovo FDA, which some other companies use. To use this particular feature, you sweep the phone's infrared temperature sensor over the side of your forehead so it can read a level. The Verge notes that the phone's temperature sensor is located in the rear camera array, which makes it kind of that much harder to gauge if you're taking your own temperature correctly because you can't easily see the screen. What do you think? Yeah, what do I think? So I did get to demo this. I have the fully updated temperature application on my Pixel 8 Pro, so you do have to update your app if you're curious about using this. The sensor specifically, if you're watching this on video, it's going to be directly under the flash on the back of your phone, on the rear side. And given that it's not directly centered, that can make it kind of finicky whenever you're actually trying to use this because you do have to place it a little bit over to the side, which they don't really go into that explanation in the videos, they just tell you, this is where the sensor is, place it near your temple. So you do kind of have to figure that out. It actually took me three tries to finally get it to figure out where I was trying to place it, which is kind of a user error thing, but also goes to show that this is going to be a very, very precise thing. Like you have to get it in a very precise place. And then I'm not even really sure how accurate the temperature is on here. It does give you a historical data point to tell you what the temperatures readouts were whenever you're testing this on like your body. And my last one was 98.3. I can run another one right now and just see if it does any better or if it's just as close and see if my temperature changed at all. And another hard thing is like you have to move your hair. Hopefully you put it in the right place. Yeah, right? Oh, did it work? Yeah, you don't know. You don't know because you can't see the screen. So it's kind of, it's definitely not something that I use all the time. In one scenario, I feel like it would have been useful. I was coming home from CES and hanging out with Tom and I was so worried that I was getting him sick. It would have been nice to be able to use this while I was at the airport just to test it out and be like, okay, should I avoid him? Should I make sure that there's social distancing going on? And that would be the point of this whole thing, right? Oh yeah. And I'm not going to be a believer. I will tell my friend, whoever I've been in contact with, the Verge who also checked out this feature explained a scenario where one of their riders had come in from cold and his temperature was 95 degrees Fahrenheit. That's very cold. Quite low, yeah, to the point where it's like, you know, like, have you fallen to a lake type of thing? And that wasn't the case. It was just sort of whatever it was. It's just not very accurate. There could be conditions where it's not very accurate. Exactly. And I think that's where the conversation goes. If you're just kind of trying to like, hey, is my kid sick type thing? Maybe they have a fever. This might be kind of a pretty cool tool. But if it's actually trying to be really, really specific about, you know, what's going on, you know, on your bod, then, yeah, it doesn't sound like it's quite there yet. And the very weird thing about, you know, like, well, it's using the back camera instead of the front-facing camera, that actually does make a difference. It's, well, it's kind of awkward. I would say, like, if you are using the back camera, like, if you do put it a little bit too close to your face, you might get a bunch of oils on there that might skew the results as well. And mess up your camera lens. Yeah, exactly. It might mess up your camera lens too. So you have to keep that in mind as well. You're not supposed to put it directly on your skin. I noticed it's kind of hard to do with glasses, too, because you do have to put it pretty close within millimeter range of your temple. So it's easier for me if I take off my glasses and then I put it up there. So, yeah, it's, I think that it's something they should probably work on a little bit more because right now it's just, it's not quite there. It's a little bit too, it's too much of a gimmick and I feel like it's not going to be easy enough for most people to use. So you're cool on it. I'm cool on it, yeah. According to this though, my temperature that I just took is 98.6. So I'm pretty normal. You are a healthy person. That's good. Well, if we believe that, I was accurate then yes. Folks, real quickly, we did a little change on top five. Roger trying to improve the production of it all the time suggested that we shorten it up, make it 60 seconds, make it easy to watch on all the platforms like TikTok and Reels and everything. So the latest version is a faster version of the top five and it's the top five things you could do to afford an Apple Vision Pro. How do you get $3,500 real fast? We've got answers for you. Check it out in our new 60 second style on TikTok, on Instagram Reels, or at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. All right, let's get into this Taylor Swift thing. 404 Media says that deepfakes images and videos of Taylor Swift that took over X originated on Telegram. There was a group there that for a long time has shared explicit images made with Microsoft Designer. It's a thing they were doing over in a dark corner of the internet. Somehow some of those images went viral on X. Why things go viral is a mystery in and of itself. But you know, combination of AI interest, X weirdness and Taylor Swift, you know, you can sort of see how that would happen. Obviously these deepfakes violated X's zero tolerance policy, but the platform seemed a little slow to catch up and one post in particular was seen more than 47 million times before it was taken down. Taylor Swift's fans fought back, not only reporting these things, of course, but also posting in large numbers under any hashtag associated with the deepfake in order to make it harder to find the deepfake, right? So if the hashtag was like Swift... I don't really understand how that works. Yeah, let me explain. If the hashtag defined the deepfake is Swift Nude, right? Hashtag Swift Nude. Have 30 million Taylor Swift fans, and that's not an exaggeration, all post with the hashtag Swift Nude and then her latest video that is non-controversial. Oh. So that when you go to search for the hashtag... So you're not really burying it. You're seeing a bunch of legitimate results instead of seeing the one that everybody was trying to get you to see. Oh, that's smart. Yeah, it was clever. X says it has removed almost all of the posts now and the associated accounts and it is continuing to monitor. Okay, so now Congress in the U.S., taking advantage of this, saying, this is U.S. Representative Joe Morrell, calling attention to the preventing deepfakes of intimate images act that he proposed last year, real one. Representative Yvette D. Clark chimed in saying, what's happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new. Also as advancements in deepfake tech make it easier and cheaper. Congressman Tom Keane Jr. said, whether the victim is Taylor Swift or any young person across our country, we need to establish safeguards to combat this alarming trend. Okay, so Taylor Swift herself has not commented. Although the Daily Mail says sources say that the Swift camp may be considering legal action against the sites involved. Shannon, you and I have both been women on the internet for some time. What do you think here? What do you think is the best course of action? I love your description because, and not even just women on the internet, if you have any kind of public-facing photos or videos, you could be a victim of this. You could be victimized. And I know personally, I've had people Photoshop my face onto very lewd images and post them on all sorts of forums and places like that. And I've had to send more DMCAs than I can count off the top of my head. It's just been something I've dealt with ever since I was in this career. So personally, I'm angry for her because I know how it feels to have somebody create that, which can hurt your reputation and it can hurt your credibility with your fans or your viewers or whoever is out there. So I'm angry for her just as somebody who has experienced similar. I've never experienced something with deepfakes, like going that route, but given that it is getting easier and easier, like that's something that I've thought about just as a content creator, like when it happens. It's not really like if it happens, but when does it happen? And will it happen at a time that there's some kind of regulations involved to protect me as a public-facing figure? Like how am I going to be able to take down these potential deepfake photos if they ever did happen? Like what is the thing that I'm going to be able to do to protect myself? Yeah. One thing that I've used in the past other than just DMCA takedown notices to websites that post these without your consent is MD5 hashes, which is so like encryption. Like this is very much in the hacker era of my life and my career, but with MD5 hashing, a lot of times people would use MD5 hashes to determine if a original file is equal to the file that you receive. And it's something for security and privacy as well as just determining authenticity. And I'm wondering, and this is just something that I've kind of hypothesized, is would there be a way to take something like an MD5 hash and like stick that onto photos of your face or videos that you post on YouTube or wherever it's going because it's code. It's coded into the video or in the photo or in that file that you're uploading. Even if somebody erased like all the metadata off of a photo, like that MD5 hash is still going to remain the same. So is there a way that we could take some kind of hash and add it to photos and videos so that if somebody did end up creating a deep fake based on pictures of you? Like is there a way that you could say like, no, that's not actually indeed accurate and social media could look at the uploads of these deep fakes and say, and somehow I don't know, like immediately not allow them to be posted. Like is there something out there that we could do to protect people? And right now there's not really anything out there protecting us. I think what you're laying out, like that sort of two step is like, we need, you know, these files to have something inside them, you know, that somebody can't get around to say like, I did this and this is, you know, this is the way I did it. We all know, you know, and whether or not you find that to be, you know, right or wrong, then there's the whole other thing of someone's likeness being on the internet, not being part of their actual likeness. That is, you know, that stuff, again, being, you know, part of a public facing person as Shannon, you know, you certainly are, you know, we all are really. I mean, I think that's very, it's a hard line to walk. What I think, you know, is best served at this point is just like figuring out if something isn't real, there's some, there's some little, little something in that metadata that just lets anyone who cares to know, know that it's not real. Like a watermark. Yeah. Like this is a fake watermark. I think that's an important step is for platforms and creation. And this is very similar to the argument about AI, being able to tell us something is AI or not in the first place, right? Yeah. I think that is helpful. It's not the only thing that should be done either. I think you also need a law. You need a law so that you can dissuade people from doing this because everybody's going to be able to get around whatever technological measure we put in. It's a speed bump. It's not that it's not worth doing, but it's not going to stop it. You're still going to have people who find clever ways around because that's how the internet and hackers and everything works, right? So what do you do to dissuade people from wanting to do 47 million versions of these? The United States has no federal law that punishes someone. Right. It's not illegal for them to do what they did. It's just against the policy of Twitter. In the UK, they have the online safety act, which you can debate whether that's a good law for lots of other reasons. But one of the things it does is it makes it specifically illegal for you to publish this sort of thing without permission. So that the person who wants to be like, I am in control of my image, I want it to be out there, can do it. But if you don't have their permission, you can't do it without their permission. There are some state laws being implemented and there's a few that are already out there that do protect you from having non-consensual photos posted without your consent. But that has nothing to do with deep fakes. It has to do with photos that you sent somebody in the past or that might have gotten leaked through a hack or something like that. Some somehow are out of your control at this point. Yeah. And we have nothing federal in that sense. And we also, like you said, Tom, we don't have anything federally for deep fakes and for those kind of protections. So there's also an argument for the creativity of deep fakes and how are we going to still be able to use our artistic creativity to be able to create our own images and stuff like that. But where is that line? So it's such a big debate and it's something that I've, of course, since I've had those disgusting Photoshopped photos posted about me in the past, it's something that I feel very deeply about. And I want to see something happen, but it's like, where is that answer? Technically, I want to see something happen with the photos themselves, but we do need some kind of federal rolling that protects you across state lines, especially when the people that are doing this chances are they don't live in the same state. Yeah. And the good news is, unlike a lot of things around AI or net neutrality or any of the other things we grapple with, this has bipartisan support. The three representatives that Sarah mentioned were from different parties. So it may even be a chance of getting something done. And if it takes Taylor Swift bringing attention to it, well, then it takes Taylor Swift bringing your attention to it. Go Swifties. That's what it takes. So I'm sorry that it had to be her to do it, but maybe that's what helps get something taken care of. Well, Shannon Morse, the good news is that we rarely talk about things like this. We talk more about all the cool stuff that you're doing in your life. Let folks know where your latest can be found. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. I haven't posted it yet because I just got the phone in, but I will be posting an S24 ultra review, some pro tips, especially going into the new AI features and some photography versus videos. I'm so excited to check it out in more detail. And I also have some really fun reviews coming up of some alternative choices for Android phones in February 2 that I can't talk about quite yet. So I'm really excited about those two. Fantastic. Well, we had a bit of a weighty topic there. It was important to address, but let's lighten the mood, folks. If you're a patron, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's Friday, so we're doing something fun, which we like to do on Fridays. It's another round of who am I? Can you guess the actors who shot to start them partly because of Netflix play along with us? Oh, well, just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We're back on Monday doing it all again. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coots, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Gildorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST and Len Peralta. ACAST adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeill. The contributors for this week's shows include Scott Johnson and Shannon Morst and our guest this week was Kevin Pereira. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.