 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi, Tech Oki, Jim Hart, and our brand new patron, Edie. On this episode of DTNS, Charlotte Henry explains whether Messy Mania is good for Apple TV, plus TikTok wants to sell you merchandise. It's now a good time for that. TikTok, read the room. Come on. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 25th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from studio, I don't even know what it's called. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us from the edition newsletter, a great addition to the show, Charlotte Henry. See what you did there. How are you, my friend? Oh, it's good to have you. How are you? I'm thrilled to be back. It's been far too long. I know. We're going to start a regular new thing on the show today. It's very exciting. Little crossover, little collab. It's like, yeah. It's like when like the Marvel characters collide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you're the Nick Fury and I'm Captain the Avenger. I don't know. Take it. It's a universe of some kind. Exactly. I'm taking it. Well, it will get Messy. We promise you that. But let's start with the quick hits. Apple recently announced the release of its Vision Pro developer kits currently available as a loaner that will allow Doves to develop and test apps. Along with a Vision Pro, developers will get help with device setup and onboarding check-ins with Apple experts for UI design, development guidance, help with app refining and two additional code level support requests for troubleshooting code issues. The company makes it clear that the developer kits are Apple property. They need to remain in this secure workspace where they are shipped and are accessible only to developers approved by Apple. ChatGPT's app is now available in the Google Play Store in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, and the United States. Users in other countries can still find the app store listing and then choose to have it installed as soon as it's available. Separately, OpenAI updated its post from January about AI classifier, which is a tool meant to help detect whether text had been generated by a large language model. It didn't work very well. OpenAI wrote, as of July 20th, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. OpenAI says it's still working on other ways to detect if text is machine generated. Stanford researchers found that Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter-like social media platform, has a substantial child abuse material problem and that the open posting of child sexual abuse material or CSAM is disturbingly prevalent. Researchers scanned the 25 most popular Mastodon instances and in two days found that 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts with the first instance showing up just after five minutes of searching. Concerns about safety on decentralized networks such as Mastodon are growing because these networks don't use the same approach to moderation as mainstream sites. Researchers suggest that networks like Mastodon employ more robust tools or moderators along with photo-DNA integration and cyber-tip-line reporting. Several pieces of news to note if you followed the chip industry closely, the European Union just gave final approval to its CHIPS Act. They will spend 43 billion euros to try to increase Europe's share of worldwide chip production from 10 percent to 20 percent by 2030. The United States also wants to increase its share of chip production, but the Semiconductor Industry Association estimates that of the 115,000 chip jobs expected to be added in the U.S. by 2030, 58 percent could go unfilled if current decree completion rates stay where they are. There's just not enough people graduating with the degrees needed to fill these jobs. TSMC, in fact, just delayed its U.S. plant opening in Arizona because of difficulty finding skilled workers. Fewer U.S. students are studying STEM subjects and people from other countries who are studying in the U.S. are leaving a lot of times because they can't get permission to stay. Speaking of TSMC, it's worth noting that it is taking routine precautions right now at its Taiwan locations due to Typhoon Docksuri moving toward the island. We've had flooding and rains cause problems before. They don't expect it to cause a problem this time, but it's something to keep an eye on. A couple of hardware release notes, releases to note. Sony released its WF-1000XMS Earbuds Monday, thanks to TechnoMench for their reminder on that. Sony also added two proprietary processors and dual feedback microphones that use bone conduction and updated high performance drivers to 24-bit audio processing and also added new noise-isolating earbud tips. They're also smaller and lighter and available for $300. DJI also announced the Air 3 Drone, which packs in dual 4K cameras, two of them, that can both shoot at the same time. The Air 3 also has an omni-directional obstacle sensing and 46 minutes of flight time. The base package starts at $1,099 and is available now. All right, folks, if you haven't run across Timu or Xi'en yet, you likely will soon, maybe even just in a commercial, they're both Chinese-based retailers selling discounted items with quick delivery. Now, your mileage may vary if you like these services, but they're immensely popular. Timo has been the number one free non-game app on both the Apple and Android app stores for months now. So it probably doesn't shock you that the Wall Street Journal reports TikTok wants to get in on that and is going to launch a new e-commerce business in the U.S. in early August. Sarah, how's this going to work? Well, so TikTok already offers a way for third parties to sell goods, but customer service and profits have been kind of disappointing. So the company plans to centralize things. Supposedly, TikTok will store and ship items for merchants, as well as handle marketing, transactions, logistics, customer support. Then the TikTok shopping center will have channels where you can view and buy stuff from a single page. Merchants will then be from China to start with plans to offer other markets later. All right, Charlotte, TikTok is under pressure in the U.S. It's even banned in some states, specifically the state of Montana. How do you think this whole retail thing is going on? Well, it's really interesting because, first of all, TikTok, we know, has always been interested in building this shopping capability, hasn't it? Already, there's facilities for summer, creators to sell stuff directly. There's shopping events that TikTok itself has held, that kind of thing. But this is obviously a really big extension. I wonder if launching something like this is going to get politicians from all different countries taking another look at the company. It's kind of gone quiet, hasn't it? And then something big like this, I wonder if people are going to start getting interested again. Yeah, the momentum seems to have slowed down for pressure on TikTok in the United States, worth noting that they already launched similar services to what they're going to do in the U.S. in August in the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. It did not seem to cause too much of a flutter in the U.K. or Saudi Arabia, for that matter. So maybe this will be fine. Maybe this will go under the radar. It might. I doubt it. I mean, if you look at that Wall Street Journal story, it's saying TikTok aims to quadruple the gross merchandise value or total transaction amount of goods on the platform. We're talking serious money here. I wanted to get it to $20 billion this year, and it was less than $5 billion last year. So we're talking serious money here, which tends to usually attract attention, doesn't it? Yeah, it usually does. The other thing is this is hard. They want to go to $20 billion. Will they be able to get to $20 billion? They certainly have the users for it. They've got $1.2 billion monthly users. Timu is somewhere between $100 and $200 million. So it's certainly an option for them, but they're trying to do what Amazon does with logistics. Amazon has been doing that for 20 years. And TikTok has not done the logistics part of this. They have not done the warehousing. They have not done the delivery part of it. They have not done the customer support part of it. Those are the new things they're taking on with these plans. Sure. The one thing they do have, though, is the creators and the creator economy. They've got the sales channel. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm really interested to see how they're going to get creators into this plugging products through that TikTok is selling, because obviously that's what they way they think they can get this revenue and the merchandise value up is presuming because the creators who use TikTok are going to promote things. Do we know if some TikTokers are going to get a cut of it? That would be also an interesting way if there's some kind of affiliate thing the way Amazon does it, for example. There's quite a lot of questions. I'm very interested to see how this plays out, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, I have no doubt that TikTok can get people to buy stuff, whether it will be in the amounts they want and whether they will have issues with delivery. Again, they're limiting themselves to Chinese manufacturers right now, so selection is going to be limited to Chinese manufacturers. It's a pretty wide selection, but still. And that, of course, comes with other human rights and logistical worker rights issues as well, doesn't it, which is all these kinds of things crop up and back to the start of our conversation tends to attract attention from lawmakers as well. Although Timu and Xi'an have so far escaped that kind of government regularity. Yeah, there was a bit of a controversy about Xi'an and getting influencers there and stuff like that, but yeah, I think he talks already in the firing line of where those companies aren't, though. We bought like two or three things from Timu. One of them was a total bust. One of them was not exactly. Oh, it was these bags that you're supposed to be able to compress your clothes so that they store better and they just beat. The other one was a pump that worked fine. That was fine. And then the other one was a small electric iron which worked as advertised. It just didn't end up working as we thought it should. So that one's not on Timu, but they're all cheap stuff. It's like little Daiso kind of cheap stuff. Well, if you hang out on Netflix a lot, you might notice that it is replacing its downloads tab with a new my Netflix tab, which the company describes as a one stop shop tailored to you. The tab still shows downloads, but I also add shows that maybe you've given a thumbs up to movies that you've saved to my list, trailers you've watched, reminders for upcoming releases, and a list of in progress and recently completed viewings. The tab has already arrived on Netflix's iOS app and will come to Android in early August. So Charlotte, knowing what you know about Netflix, does this seem easier or more complex? I have to be honest, I'm not a big user of the downloads tab or like, I don't generally download content onto, you know, I tend to use Netflix on my TV is the log of the short of it. I have used it a few times, you know, when I'm traveling or something, but I tend to just stream content. So it's not going to make an immediate impact on me. I guess Netflix thinks it's making life simpler for users, you know, everything you want to watch everything that you have watched, I guess, goes into one place and that makes life simpler for its users. And I kind of get that. I kind of see what they're doing. If you think, for example, of a podcast app, all your podcasts are there, you know, some of them have you downloaded, some of them you haven't, and you there's different ways to differentiate that. So I guess it's moving in that kind of way. And most users prefer simplicity, don't they? This sort of strikes me as Netflix saying, here are all the ways that you might watch something. Maybe you had like a, you know, a slight curiosity, maybe you even, you know, completed part of series that you, you know, you could go back to. We want you to watch things on Netflix. Yeah, I'm looking at those three tabs right now on my home tab. I have new releases, top picks for Tom, continue watching. I go to the my Netflix tab. I have new releases, my list, trailers you've watched. I go to new and hot. Coming soon. Everyone's watching things for you. Like, it's just three different versions of the same way of letting you see stuff. This is getting a little silly. Like these categories are not good categories. They're very messy. Yeah, it's getting a little bit tangled up. You want things for clarity. Have I started this? Have I finished this? Have I downloaded this? And I guess putting it in one tab makes that easier to find everything you might possibly be interested in. Then why have the other two tabs at that point? I don't know. There's slightly different things in different ones. Thankfully, the downloads are still at the top of the my Netflix. I'm just going to have to remember to go to my Netflix to get my downloads next time I get on a plane and I've downloaded something, but by the way, I just so you know, Sarah, I keep, I think you should leave downloaded on Netflix so that on any plane ride, I've got one. You've got your say. Every time. Every time. Exactly. All right, folks. Samsung's doing its first ever Galaxy unpacked from Seoul, South Korea. It's home on Wednesday. So there's never been a better time to join the Android Faithful. Android aficionados, Ron Richards and Huentui Dao bring you Android Faithful, a podcast devoted exclusively to Android news and information. You can catch it Tuesdays, 8 p.m. East Coast, 5 p.m. Pacific and subscribe to it right now at www.androidfaithful.com. So we're going to start a regular feature with Charlotte, where we talk about the intersection of tech and media based on her podcast and newsletter, The Addition. So welcome to additional conversations on DT and us. Do you think they see what we did there? Yeah, I hope they did. They're smart. They know. It's a very small audience. They get it. Yes, I'm really excited we're doing this. This is going to be fun. Yeah. This time, we're going to talk about football superstar Lionel Messi coming to Major League Soccer in the U.S. and what that has to do with Apple TV. Have you heard of Messi? I'm sorry. I know he's like the biggest. Is believe the word goat? Here's the guy. I've called him. Goat would apply. Right. Now, MLS, Major League Soccer. We're very proud of it in the U.S. having had indoor soccer for many years and the North American Soccer League back in the 70s. MLS, however, is not on the level of the Bundesliga or Premier League or La Liga or the others. So with Messi involved with the MLS and MLS involved with Apple, Charlotte, can Apple get international viewers to plunk down money just to watch Messi? Charlotte, what do you think? Uh-oh. We have had an issue. Kind of messy. Yeah. We promised that this segment would be messy. So we're delivering on that promise. If anybody doesn't know, the idea was that they brought Messi to the Miami franchise in Major League Soccer in the U.S., gave him a cut of the Apple TV revenues as a sweetener for the deal. Everybody was trying to get Messi in their league. Saudi Arabia has a league that has been getting a lot of the big stars like Ronaldo. And so it was a big deal for Apple to get that cut, to give that cut, or I guess for MLS to give that cut of the revenues to Messi, in order to get him here to where they could promote him and get people to sign up for those subscriptions. Now, it's something that is certainly going to help in the United States. Everybody in the United States wants to see Messi, right? I certainly do. I don't know. Charlotte. Yeah. So I think really what we're talking about here is how much should it cost, right? $13 per month, $40 per season. Is there a better way to do that? No, not really. So yeah. I mean, if you care about the sport, then are you going to pay this, or do you feel like for whatever reason it's egregious? Yeah, it's hard. I think people don't always take on, it can be not so extensive. You hold, just go along together and not just actually make a plan, make your axis to prove your point. And then suddenly the day's gone, just not taking it out, only taking it on one thing. Do you think this is going to get people internationally to watch Major League Soccer, to pay the amount that would get them this? Because Apple's made it worldwide, no blackouts. Everybody can get it. I think so. It's certainly an attempting way to encourage people because there's a way to actually see him. Normally, I don't think American football was that encouraging, but it's about £35 for the rest of this season. So that to watch him a few times every week is quite exciting, really. Have you done it? I don't think I will. So it's theoretically very exciting, but yeah. Yeah, you just feel like it's cost prohibitive? No, I mean, I think it's a decent price. There's so much other, you know, 50, whatever. But you know, they've done a really good job and they've got it for 10 years. So Apple have got themselves in a good position. They want to have Messi for 10 years. He's not going to play for another 10 years. No, they might not go, but they what are they going to do for their next trick then? Yeah, hope others have turned up. It's going to be really interesting to see. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they use this to build for the future. Also, you know, I know that, you know, the rest of the world is rolling their eyes when I say like, you know, the US is not like we like soccer. All the kids play soccer, but like it's not a thing here yet. It is on some level. And it's a bigger thing that it used to be. And amongst people who like the MLS, they're already writing the email to angrily tell us it is a thing, but it is not yet on the same level as the NFL or NBA, right? It doesn't feel like it. And, you know, it's quite interesting that Apple decided to be the company that, you know, took this on for 10 years. They bought the Rock the rights for 10 years, which obviously you don't do if you think it's coming. Everything's turning around straight away. Yeah. And you don't, I don't know how much Apple had to do with cutting Messi in on the revenues, but I'm sure they were in on the conversations. Well, my reporting, some of the stories is that some of the subscriptions is going to Messi. He is being paid for some of the income, you know, a chunk of housing. But is that coming out of Miami's cut? MLS is cut? I imagine it's not coming out of Apple's cut. I don't know if it's coming directly from TV Plus or from Miami, but that's the, he's obviously, he's benefiting is said from people who sign up. Yeah. Well, if you want to get that coverage that Charlotte is talking about, get more on this, by all means, get conversations like this in the Addition newsletter. Look for it online and sub-stack wherever fine newsletters are pervaded. Thank you, Charlotte. No, I'm so glad to be doing this. We're going to have fun. Well, if you, Charlotte, me, Tom, or anybody out there have moved recently, you might want a new piece of furniture or, you know, want to reimagine an entire living room, say, Wayfair, which provides such things, launched a free virtual room restyler called Decorify, using AI to create a room that you might want and then might buy. There are others. There's a site called Home Designs AI offering a similar feature, but Decorify starts at $27 per month and offers Visualize AI, which isn't free, but offers style options and lets you enter items to include or exclude from the generated image. Maybe you just really don't like that coffee table type thing. A quick Google search says there are countless other apps and services offering pretty much the same thing, and they all want your money as well. So I don't know. What do we think of Decorify? Quick clarification here. The difference with Decorify, $27 a month is what Home Designs charges and the other one's charge, Decorify right now is free on Wayfair. So you are getting that thing that you would pay for otherwise, at least for now, for free with the idea that Wayfair's hoping like maybe you'll just buy a few pieces of furniture from Wayfair and that'll make up the difference, right? 100%. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I feel like the whole kind of like, imagine your new room. We've been doing this for some years now, and it never really, all of the tech is interesting, but I don't know anybody who's ever been like, you know what? I just put together my new home using Decorify. Maybe this will help, but yeah. And it is working a little differently. It's not letting you plop furniture down into your house. It shows you your room with, it doesn't show you your existing furniture. It's like removing your existing furniture. So it's a little better than that old Amazon thing where you're like awkwardly trying to place the couch in front of your own couch and cover it up and all that. So it's a slight advance, I guess. I mean, this is clearly the way things are going to go, isn't it? We're all going to have these AI VR, you know, different tools of buying things like rooms and furniture before you actually see it in real life, aren't you? We're going to see some of that already. And this just seems to me the kind of logical, you know, next step. Do you know what I mean? I think IKEA does stuff like this now, doesn't it, as well? Yeah, in Amazon, IKEA, they've all been doing it. And so this is the next most advanced version of it. If you want to go try it out, check it out at Wafer. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Jason, who wrote in response to the whole Samsung fire incident. Jason says, holy cow, I had totally forgotten about the fires and the recall that they had being Samsung. I had a co-worker that had a model refused to turn it in. He did eventually, but it was right down to the line when Samsung was going to remotely shut them down. If I remember correctly, says Jason, they had been remotely throttling back the battery, making them almost useless. And he still held on to it because he loved it so much. That's crazy. This is the Samsung Galaxy Note. If anybody doesn't remember, we were talking about that yesterday. I remember talking about some people who tried to hold on to them to the very end and Samsung had to remotely disable them from the service. That is wild. And the point of our conversation yesterday was that even with these note fires, Samsung, people were predicting like Samsung's done. No one will ever trust them again. They won't be able to sell phones. Turns out, they're doing just fine. And there were even people like Jason's friend back then who held on to their fiery notes until the bitter end. Well, and unpacked is tomorrow Wednesday. So, you know, Samsung doing quite well, in fact. You'll get a chance to see just where they are seven years after the Galaxy Note recall. Jose also wrote in response to Worldcoin. We talked about Sam Altman's new Worldcoin venture yesterday. That's the one where you have to go in person to an appointment and have your iris scanned by an orb, which is what Worldcoin calls it. We're not just being creepy when we say that. That's literally their word for it. Jose wrote, what is stopping me from paying some rando on postmates to get their orbs and hand me the credentials to my new world account, which is now tied to a real world identity and then use that for spamming, spoofing, and scamming. It seems to me that this is just a very long way to provide some false security to potential victims. I'm guessing he pounded on the table after he said that. We should clarify, Jose. When we say identity verification, we weren't saying this is a identity in the sense of a driver's license. I admit that was probably confusing. It's just verification that you're a person, not a bot. It's not identity like, oh, we can now prove who you are. It's you are a person. The thing stopping you from paying some rando on postmates is that they would have your account then. You probably don't want them to have your account because they're going to have to have your account logged in on their phone and all of that. Then if Worldcoin ever does get worth anything, they would have all that money. They would have access to all that money too. This is not meant to stop people from impersonating other people. This is meant to stop bots from being able to game the system. You have to have a human behind it. You could create multiple accounts if you had multiple humans, but that's a lot harder to scale than bots. Right. I mean, that's the whole orb point. Who wants to go through the trouble? Someone will, sure, got a game of system, but otherwise, that's the idea is that Even if they did move into more identity, like personal identity oriented things, which they might, there are other steps they could take to verify personal identities that you wouldn't want a separate person to be doing because, again, then they would have the access to your account and you would not because you couldn't re-verify with your own iris. You'd have to have them do it every time. Well, Charlotte Henry, iris is scanned or other wires. We're very happy to have you on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. I'm so pleased to be back and really excited that we were going to do this regularly. The main places head over to theedition.net. If you look over on Amazon, you might also be able to find my book, Not Buying It. Then I'm at TikTok at Charlotte A. Henry and you can find YouTube, The Edition on YouTube as well. Just want me on Twitter while it survives. I'm at Charlotte A. Henry over there. Excellent. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We've got an ongoing project with Astro the Robot. That's the Amazon robot with the camera that roams around your house. I tried it for around a month and it scared my dog to death. We've got a video up on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash daily tech news show of me trying it out and installing it. It's now gone to Roger's house, phase two. I dropped it off on Sunday. How has the robot dealt with a family of four? Stick around or become a patron to find out. Also, just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow talking about Samsung's unpacked event with the Android faithful zone when Tweedow. Talk to you that. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.