 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Tony Glass, Phillip Less, Daniel Dorado and brand new patrons trying to get Molly Wood on the show. Thomas, Lisa, Mark, Louis, Paul, Greg, Pat, Fernando, Ryan, Christopher, Joe, Rafi and Adam, y'all rock on this episode of DTNS. I as actor is here to tell us his hands on impressions with the foldable Motorola Razor Plus and the outlook for foldables in general. Plus, the great Reddit showdown has begun. Who's going to win the users where the API feels? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 12th, twenty twenty three in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Travolino from a once hazy New York City. I'm I as actor and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Glad to hear it's not as hazy there as it was once. The lot nicer. Yeah, congratulations on that. I've been through that. So it's good, good to come out the other side. Let's start with the quick heads. RCS is a standard for multimedia messaging. It is not owned by Google, but Google has its own implementation of it. And it's getting popular. Google's senior VP of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer, announced on Twitter that AT&T is going to migrate its back end RCS messaging service to Google's GIBE platform. Lockheimer says this should resolve interoperability issues with devices on different networks and let AT&T subscribers access new RCS features instantly. Lockheimer also said he expects there to be about one billion users of RCS by the end of twenty twenty three. Well, over the weekend, the Indian newspaper Malayala Manorama reported that a bot on the messaging app Telegram leaked data on Indian citizens that received COVID-19 vaccines through the CoWin platform. And that's the government's own platform for vaccine scheduling. So, you know, a ton of people when providing a phone number. The bot replied with odd hard unique ID numbers, voter IDs, dates of birth and home addresses for people who registered for vaccines with that number. If there was a household that registered with the same phone number, not uncommon in the country, all information would be provided with that one phone number for that household. The bot was shut down, though, on June 12th. India, today's open source investigations team was able to contact the operator of the bot who claimed they did not breach the CoWin platform itself, but obtained that data from a flaw in another health system. Meta released MusicGen. It's an open source language model that generates music based on text and music prompts. So you can do it like chat GPT or play a little snippet. This can either create music just from that text or use a text prompt combined with the existing melody. So you still got to write something. Company claims MusicGen performs better than other music models in objective and subjective metrics, including Google's MusicLM. Meta released the code and model on GitHub, licensed for commercial use. Well, we've got a ton of news out of the Xbox Games Showcase. First up, Microsoft announced the Carbon Black Xbox Series X console. This ups the storage, offers one terabyte of storage for $350. Ships in September 1st, other specs are the same as the existing X. But hey, you get more storage. It saves you 30 bucks if you had bought the Oracle console and you were planning to get a separate storage expansion. As far as major console updates, however, Xbox head Phil Spencer said, don't hold your breath saying right now we're pretty set on the hardware we have. The company is also expanding its partnership with Nvidia, announcing it will bring select PC game pass titles to Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service in the months ahead. And as a reminder, Microsoft already has a pretty solid relationship with GeForce Now. They purely struck a 10 year deal to provide Xbox PC games to that platform and big news new Flight Simulator 2024 on the way described as a standalone sequel from the Flight Simulator that came out back in 2020. Virtually all add-ons purchased for the older game will transfer over to the new title. You won't have to repurchase them. They'll just fit right in. Flight Simulator developer Asobo said it will continue to support the older game after the 2024 version comes out and deliver it to and deliver on its existing roadmap that it had already announced. Kind of a big deal because before Flight Simulator 2020 came out, they said they would support that title for a decade. And South Korea's Suwon District Prosecutor's Office announced the indictment of an unnamed former Samsung electronics executive and SK Heineck's VP alleging he illegally took information used for building advanced chip making facilities with him to China. Prosecutors claim the overall goal was to replicate a Samsung semiconductor factory in the western Chinese city of Xi'an, saying the scope of the crime and damage are incomparable to previous individual tech leak cases. This saw the former executive hire roughly 200 SK Heinecks and Samsung employees who were tasked with acquiring trade secrets. Very sophisticated stuff. All right, but the big news burning up the internet today is the big Reddit protest. Reddit's plan to charge for API access has led to the backlash for of the biggest third party Reddit apps. Apollo, Reddit is fun, Sync and Red Planet have all announced those new fees are too expensive and they're going to shut down by June 30th because they can't afford the new fees. So they're not shutting down now. They're shutting down at the end of the month. As a result, many subreddits on Monday switched to private or restricted their viewing to protest Reddit's new API fees. Red Arc reports more than 7,200 subreddits switched over to private. I think it's more than 7,500 now. It just keeps going. It might even be above 8000, depending on when you are listening to this. Red Arc reports that more than 7,200 subreddits switched over to private. The biggest is our funny with more than 40 million subscribers, but at least 36 subreddits with more than 10 million subscribers are among the protesters. Many of the restricted subreddits are directing their members to Discord servers to continue talking to each other. Now, Reddit continues to insist that it just can't continue as a company. It doesn't make a profit unless it makes some money off of APIs. It doesn't have to provide an API, but it's going to keep doing it. And for high level commercial customers, it's going to charge. The third party apps say, yeah, fine, we'll pay, but you're charging too much. And that's where the gap between the two sides exists. I, as it's kind of almost beside the point who's right at this point, it's more of a matter of who's going to back down first. Are the Reddit users going to get tired of this eventually? And then Reddit will be able to just continue to charge or will they be able to force Reddit to change the policy? You know, we hear sometimes about like the very vocal minority that exists on the Internet, and it's a lot of people on Reddit, the people that use it, including myself, excuse me, have very strong opinions on whether or not they will continue to use this platform, even if everything goes right. The thing is, you know, people came from like Dig and we came from Reddit. I mean, to Reddit, we've come from 4chan. All these places, people end up at Reddit. So the thing is, with this somewhat adversarial relationship that Reddit seems to have with third party applications that allowed the Reddit community to grow and grow and grow, this relationship could cause a giant skism where people are deciding just to leave because while Reddit is good, there can be many more opportunities for other apps or just going to Discord and creating content that will be visible to most without having to pay crazy fines. I know one of my favorite apps will be gone because of this. Whether or not Reddit is going to succeed after this mess, I don't know. Yeah, it also comes at a time when Discord has kind of expanded its own functionality with forum level of functions. You know, doesn't quite have that same voting dynamic as Reddit has, but it is more feels more equipped now than it did a year ago to be able to take on that kind of duty. Still, though, in terms of like searchability, like I was looking up like what what is the Fediverse like answer to this? I'm thinking like this is kind of feels like a very like Mastodon November 2022 Twitter kind of moment where you might see this mass exodus. And I was like, is there anything like that that maybe I'm just not familiar with? There are some apps like that. Lemmy is the one I've seen out there the most for all of you Fediverse fans out there, but it doesn't appear to be on the same level of maturity or community that we had Mastodon at even, you know, even as that saw a massive growth, you know, in a very short period of time because of everything that was happening at Twitter. So it is it is interesting. There doesn't seem to be as natural a pivot point, though, for for a lot of these communities in a way that's visible and useful, the way Reddit could be even for people that weren't regular Reddit visitors. Yeah, I think this is really interesting for a lot of reasons. It is fashionable these days to assume that companies are greedy and people are right. Those are not always true, but that that that is the default point that people begin their arguments from these days. I try not to begin my arguments personally from that point. And so when I when I sort of play this out in my head, I think, well, if Reddit's right and they've calculated their API fees reasonably, then they won't be able to budge much. They might be able to go down a little bit. There's always room for negotiation, but they wouldn't be able to budge much, maybe not enough to make a difference to the third party apps, at which point this kind of backlash is going to do damage to them, which is also uncharacteristic for Reddit. The last time people turned against Reddit last this way, they lost their CEO rather quickly and Huffman came in and Reddit has had very good relations with its user base since. So it seems unusual that Reddit has mishandled the public communication about this so badly. And I am left not knowing. I'm I don't have an axe to grind in the case. So I'm not I don't know if Reddit is overcharging or if these third party developers really are as inefficient as Reddit accuses them and they either don't realize it or don't want to fix the the apps, but the developers certainly have rallied the populace to their side and the balls in Reddit's court of how to calm the angry masses at this point. And and this comes ahead of Reddit's perpetually planned IPO. You know, they were supposed to IPO back in 2021 or there was rumors to that effect. Yeah. And I feel like if they had IPO'd at that time, they would at least have we listen, we publish our earnings reports. You can see we're not making like we are ad revenues down, you know, they could they would have that required to have published that. What's interesting about this is because they are now preparing for this IPO before they do their roadshow, I imagine they won't have their financial house as much in order as possible and is perhaps put them into an untenable position of how we have to be more honest with how we are accounting for this revenue for our API fees at the same time, knowing that we risk, you know, damaging the asset that is our community. If you want to put it in like raw financial. Yeah, because it doesn't make for a good IPO. If your entire user base disappears either. So, you know, back to that user's base, I want to get one quick point in if the moderators that have been moderating all of these subreddits are leaving the quality of content that the visitors will see will change drastically. So if Reddit is taking this money with these API fees or if they taking IPO money, they will need to make sure that their moderation is good enough to keep people there because if the mods leave and everyone is dissatisfied with what they're seeing, you're going to flee from Reddit anyway. Yeah, one thing I will say I feel is safe to say is it is bad developer relations going on and that can happen when the money is tight. And I don't buy that this is all just about the IPO and greediness because you also need your company to be profitable without having an IPO. It's just the IPO that put the deadline on like, OK, I guess we have to do the API fees. They probably had to do the API fees either way, whether they set them well or not, whether they juice them up because they wanted to make the IPO look better. That's that's a that's a fair question. All right, well, even before the Vision Pro headset was announced, we saw its impacts in the VR space. We saw Meta jump in the line to get its Quest 3 headset officially on the books before Apple got the jump. Whenever Apple announces something, other companies inevitably get to bask in that glow a little. So let's talk about two examples this time. One is the startup. Soul Reader has a three hundred fifty dollar VR headset designed for reading. It's fairly thin glasses style design kind of looks like, I don't know, really flat sunglasses, mainly because it isn't using fancy 4K OLED screens. Instead, your eyes get to feast on the glory of two one point three inch e-ing screens at shipping units out now to early access testers. But we have no word on an official release date. I absolutely love this idea. I don't know if it'll actually make any sense for humans at all. But the idea that this form factor is so young and people don't know exactly what's going to be a hit. The idea of having e-ink displays on your eyes instead of just holding up an e-ink reader, it seems like a different take on this kind of wearable. And again, for me, what is it going to take for somebody to go? Yes, I'm going to wear this on my face. The Soul Reader sounds interesting. I just think this feels like, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall when it comes to what's going to succeed on your face. Kindle, the original Kindle was more expensive when it launched. And we've seen the Kindle survive as other tablets have come out with way more functionality, way, you know, higher resolution screens and stuff like that. There is some value in that experience. I just be terrified of being like, like, you know, I already get engrossed in a book and can be surprised, like let alone when I'm completely sealed off from everything, just just Jackie to scaring the pants off me. Well, the one thing strapping a book to your face doesn't require is someone to make special content because people already made books. Those are easy to bring in here. On the other side of the screen, though, companies are creating tools to meet the content needs of those fancier headsets, the one that requires three dimensions in augmented reality. At the photo next 2023 show in Japan, Canon showed off a prototype camera with a folding mechanism that can capture 360 and 180 degree VR content. It's not an entirely new design. It's similar to the Insta360 EVO and we didn't get any word on specs, availability or price yet. Canada has released high end lenses for VR capture in the past. But, Rich, this kind of shows it's also seeing interest in the consumer market now. Yeah, and that was that's one of the things I feel like we haven't heard a lot of one of the things that with all of the stuff that came out in the Vision Pro stuff is this is a thing that's able to capture like, you know, 3D video and photos in a in a way that we haven't seen in a fidelity like if there's Apple knows how to do one thing like imaging, that's their bread and butter that they've had since, I don't know, the iPhone 4 or something like that. So seeing other content creators like companies get involved with that. Canada has been huge in expanding like, you know, who might be interested in hey, doing 4K video, you'd be making making that accessible to kind of like that pro-sumer market. You know, there is a shrinking market, obviously, for dedicated cameras. But I wonder if this is like that weird Delta in the market where we're in like flip cam territory where it's like, we know we need this content. Not everyone's going to be able to afford a, you know, $3,500 headset, but there's going to be a lot of $200, $300 headsets. You know, the Quest 2 is going to be still be out there. And it seems like there may be the tools out there increasingly to meet that demand. There are 3D cameras out there. But, you know, Canon is kind of a big name to get on a consumer level. You know, Rich, you mentioned as a flip cam kind of concept, I think you might be right on the right on the nose. Was I think hit the nail on the head, that kind of thing? I think you nailed it is my point that I believe this will happen. We'll see these little cameras that do great for a little bit, but eventually the phone's going to eat it because there's only how many freaking advances have we seen in phone camera technology over time? It's only a matter of time that we see that all these 3D gimmicks and VR gimmicks come back to the cameras on our phones. Remember, like those old HTC phones that 3D photos, if you wanted them, or the red hydrogen phone, which had a 3D display. Oh, right. It seems like exactly like these gimmicks of the past seem like they'll come back in the phones of the future because there's only so many differentiating points you can have adding 3D spatial video on the iPhone 72, whatever it's going to be. And I go, here you go on your Apple Vision Pro 62. Like it's going to be that kind of world eventually. But that little flip cam blip that might happen. Yeah, there was a vloggy. Remember the vlog of this of my favorite Sony product of all time. It is I'm interested, excited for this, because we have like the action cam version of this. These are out there. We have, you know, Rico GoPro into 360. These are that, you know, if you want to be snowboarding and have 360 degree video, you have options out there that look pretty nice. But I'm interested in moving beyond those use cases and getting those. Like we it's interesting seeing like where TikTok is, like the importance of putting a selfie camera on something, let alone like like putting these into into more, I guess, like traditional workflows as opposed to like action cam kind of stuff. The creative possibilities of that make me excited with kind of a new form factor that we're just starting to explore. Yeah. And it's the other side of Apple popularizing something is people making tools to take advantage of the thing that Apple popularizes. So even if this isn't coming till early next year, this is a good thing to keep an eye on. Well, folks, when we ask what guests you would like to have on the show more often, the single most frequently mentioned guest is Molly Wood, my old Buzz out loud co-host. So we have got Molly to agree to come on DTNS once a month on Fridays. So she'll bring her amazing tech perspective. She'll talk about tech with us on DTNS and in GDI. And Fridays are always our fun day with quizzes and stuff. And she'll take part in that as well. But to make it happen, we need a few more patrons. So here's the deal. If we hit 4,000 paid patrons, we had 424 to go last time I checked. By June 29th, we will start with Molly on the show June 30th, our first Molly Friday. So if you're already a patron, thank you. You're doing your part. If you're not, sign up now and make Molly Fridays happen at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Foldable phones may be about to shift from fad to staple. We got lots of them out there and they're starting to get mature. Samsung still has the mind of the market share and some of the best foldables out there. But the Google Pixel Fold ships at the end of this month and Motorola's got its flagship, which it is now getting into mature status, specifically the new Razer Plus arriving on June 23rd. I, as you recently got to spend a little bit of time with the Razer Plus, for a PC magazine review, what are the biggest changes about the Razer Plus this time around? Well, technically it was a hands-on. So review is coming very soon, but this was a hands-on. In my experience with this, I spent a couple of hours with the Razer Plus and it is designed forward. It's very similar to the Samsung Flip. So we lose that chin that people love with the retro look. But the thing is Motorola packed an insane 3.6 inch cover display on this thing. This is, at first, I'm like, okay, how useful can this possibly be? The more and more I use this, and by the way, that cover screen is covered with Gorilla Glass Victus, not the second one, but the first one. So it's, you know, when you tap on it or swipe on it, it works like a regular phone. A lot of the tasks I could, I would normally do, I could do them on the cover screen. So the idea is when it came to texting or if I was looking at images, even watching a video, which was a little strange on a small display like that, then I gave myself a second thought and go, wait a minute, the original iPhone had a 3.5 inch display. This is a 3.6 inch display with two camera lenses in it. But still, I mean, there's some coverage there, but it's still ridiculous. It's got 144 Hertz refresh rate on the cover screen, which is nuts. And a lot of the tasks you can do with that part of the phone. And the other thing is inside is a much more massive 6.9 inch screen. The original Razer, I believe, was a 6.1 or 6.2. And Motorola fixed a real problem with the original phone where the original Moto Razer was either opened or closed. You couldn't have it in any other state. This Razer Plus allows you and the Razer, the new Razer allows you to put it in several different angles. So you can use it as a tripod, kind of like the Flip. I got to say that the mini phone experience on the outside made me appreciate the Flip form factor so much more because otherwise, you know, that little strip was a nice little gimmick. I know the Flip's got it and the old Razer had somewhat of a usable screen. But this 3.5 inch display lets you really just quickly do what you need to do, put the phone away, and you don't need to open it for everything. And that super ultra thin glass and that screen protector is going to be nice and safe for when you want to use it for other large screen things, like when you have the time to do it. It really was quite impressive. And I think this is going to be a huge factor in people's ideas of what a Flip phone should be like. Are we going to run into an app problem though? Because you have to create something called a panel apparently to work on the exterior screen. Is that easy for apps to do? Are you going to get developers on board to do that? So the panels are more like widgets. So the developers can create panels specifically for the cover screen. Spotify partnered with Motorola, so they have like a perfectly fit thing there. But you can pretty much put any app on the cover screen. Google Maps or you're going to put in your Google. Google Drive is one of the strangest ones I put on there. I was able to edit a document in there with like a one line kind of text interface and the full keyboard, which is so nuts. So but that's up to you, the user, because there's no global option to send all apps to cover screens. You basically do that per app. So you could basically have two little phones that you've decided these 10 apps live on the cover screen or these can continue to cover screen. So you are not locked to panels. What's interesting about this to me is it almost feels like a better version of what we've all been trying to do with like smart watches for forever, right? Where it's like, I just need to see that notification, maybe reply to it, or like I want to check into this place or like, you know, those smaller transactions where it feels silly to get bogged down your phone and like just the idea of instead of having this constrained widget ecosystem, which a lot of the foldables have had where it's, you know, you're, you're missing out on an app functionality because there's that developer problem. This just seemed to solve it by like brute force, but also kind of brilliantly at the same time. Yeah, I definitely did put the folder phone on my wrist to see like, how big is this? Could I wear it? And it looks like, you know, like you look like a quarterback with one of those giant things. Bendables. Can we have bendables? It really, if you're like a giant, it fits great, but like it really is quite impressive. And obviously, there's an always on display. So it can actually like a watch if you wanted it to, but again, not needing to open it up to use it, just open up, no pun intended to open up the door to getting a device that is slim and easy to use. I know when there was a lot of other people at the event and people were slipping this in their pocket. So you don't need like a super deep pocket. You don't need like, I have a 6.9 inch note, right? This thing is huge compared to that thing folded over. It was so light then. And when it was open, I got to say this, it didn't look like a foldable phone because that crease, once the screen is on, you're not really seeing it. So it's very key. And that's a sign of the maturation of the market is nobody talking about the crease. In fact, the second thing that people talk about when I hear them talk about this phone, I as is the chin being gone. Everybody hated the old chin. Yeah, I mean, they put the fingerprint sensor in a, in the actual power button now. So you don't need that chin. And yeah, I mean, it looked, it looked nice because I think it had a nice continuity between original razor and new razor. But I think the world is going to be quite happy with the razor plus and the even the budget one that's coming later this year, just call the razor. Yeah. And that that's more in the tradition of the previous razors. The razor plus is now the flagship foldable, which we're at a point where we have flagship foldables where you have basic foldables and flagship foldables. Yep. All right. Well, with quick access to reference material on the old internet, it may be surprising to learn that the even older world book still prints an up-to-date encyclopedia in the year 2023. Claims to be the only general reference encyclopedia still being printed available for a mere $1,200 for the full set. So why did Wired's bench Edwards decide to get one instead of, you know, using those free alternatives? He said, in an age of rapidly produced generative hallucinations, it would be nice to have a good summary of human knowledge and print vetted by professionals and fixed in form where it can't be tampered with after the fact, whether by humans, AI or mere link rot. This is a super interesting article. Ayaz, are you running out to stock up on the world book or the encyclopedia? We had world world book when I was growing up. We also have Britannica and I also remember that we had a very, very bad bowing problem with the shelves we owned at the time. So I'm not going to be running out for this. I also live on the fourth force. I'm not carrying this up the stairs. I love the idea of this. Just like if you got the space, it's kind of like having a jukebox if you wanted one, because I'm like, you don't need one, but you could have one. The fixed aspect of it's really fun. I like that as a throwback, but I mean, going through the pages and pages and having the world book on a shelf, yeah, it's nostalgic to me, but I don't know if 1200 bucks, just buy a dedicated Kindle and just put it there. That's the first thing I keep thinking of. And keep it offline so that it's fixed and you get that same feeling. Yeah, I wonder how much of this is nostalgia, because I also grew up with the world book. Britannica went out of business in 2012, but the world book still kicks because Berkshire Hathaway owns the company that makes the world book. So thank Warren Buffett for that. I read this article nodding and saying, yes, I've had the same temptation. I've looked into the price. I decided not to spend the thousand plus dollars to get a world book. Encyclopedia just for nostalgia, but I get the attraction to it. It's fun to see it, to see modern things like smartphones in that world book treatment. I just don't know if it's anything more than nostalgia though, because the one thing that Bench said in his article is like, he cannot get his kids to touch this thing. They just don't use it. Yeah. And his wife thinks the giant shark on the front is super tacky. Yeah, I like the shark, but I guess your mileage may vary on that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Yeah. Marty wrote in with some thoughts on Apple's Vision Pro and the lack of cross-platform support. He writes, as you've seen several times in the past when you have a niche or custom product, it's a tougher sell to get developers to build custom apps for your platform. Not only if they want to port it to another platform, they basically have to redo everything because there was such a focus on hand tracking with the Vision Pro here. Marty writes, until there was a rival headset that also has similar levels of hand tracking, I think that's going to be a barrier for developers to really jump at this, especially because most other headsets have controllers and they share a common input system. Watching some of the developer videos from WWDC, Marty said Apple is also very clear with guidelines of how you should design your UI. Very shocking for Apple, I know, which is another layer of making something that isn't easily portable. And he says finally to finish off as a developer myself, I know I'm not jumping at the bit to start developing apps for this until I see how the market reacts. So good thoughts by Marty there. Yeah, on the one hand, you can bring all existing Apple apps into the Vision Pro without even adapting them. That will be an incentive for developers to maybe adapt them to expand their user base if they're already in the iOS system. But a lot of things that take advantage of VR don't exist for an iPhone or an iPad. And I can see his hesitation, especially if this thing's not going to sell in high numbers at $3,500, there's not going to be that massive user base yet. Yeah, there's basically a chance for a land grab. So if you're going to be one of the first developers to make applications that work on the Vision Pro very well, or if you augment your actual app to work with it better, you can get a lot of users at the very beginning because you'll be at the top of the list on their app store. And people will gamble that Apple will come down in price, that that, you know, German story will be true and there'll be a cheaper version in 2025. And a lot of developers will want to position themselves there. But not all of them as witnessed here by Marty. Thank you, Marty, for sharing those good thoughts with us. And thank you, I, as Aktar, congrats on the new gig over at PCMag. Yes, I am a mobile analyst over at PCMag and I will be reviewing the Razer Plus and I believe another Google device. I don't know if I can tell you what it is, but I'm going to be working on this stuff soon and it'll be out and you guys can read it at PCMag.com. We also got a review of the MacBook Pro 15, sorry, MacBook Air 15. Go check it out because I'm also interested in that and it looks pretty good. You know, what else also looks good is our extended show, Good Day Internet. So Patrons, stick around. It's our extended show and we'll be talking about the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9. It's a 49 inch immersive curved gaming monitor. It's expensive, but hey, it's cheaper than a Vision Pro. And remember, you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow and we will talk to you then.