 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Chris Allen, Hi Chris, Chris Smith, Hello other Chris, Hi Mark Gibson, Hello Not Chris, and brand new Not Chris's and Patrons, Michael and Cat Shirts! Welcome, both of you. On this episode of DTNS, make three minute songs by AI for free, how tech helped minimize disaster after the Taiwan earthquake, and will Microsoft shed the ghost of Clippy with the Xbox chatbot. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merri. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. My friends, we have good stuff for you today. We're very excited to create some bed music or hold music with AI. An interesting thing going on in Taiwan, in spite of the earthquake, not just about the earthquake, all of that coming up. But I have an idea. What's that Tom? Let's start with the quick hits. Whoa. Okay. Samsung is expected to launch two models of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 this year. Now a new leak, there have been others, but a new leak shows a model number for an ultra model. Galaxy Club is now reporting that the model number for this new Galaxy Z Fold 6 will be SMF958. That might not mean much to you, but it does align with previous naming conventions for the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the Galaxy S24 Plus. So the whole ultra variant of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is starting to seem more and more like it might be a real thing. In any case, Samsung is expected to announce its new line of foldables in July. That will not be a shock because that's usually when they've been doing it. Google's Find My Device Network has apparently been on hold as it waits for Apple to implement unknown tracker alerts. Basically, Google wants Apple devices to be able to spot its trackers in case someone were to use them maliciously. So it looks like we might be getting closer to that. 9to5Mac discovered some code strings in the latest iPhone OS Beta that detail how an iPhone would be able to detect third-party trackers. Spotify raised prices for its premium tier in the US last year, going up $1 from $9.99 to $10.99. Bloomberg reports it's about to do the same thing in Australia, Pakistan, and the UK. Spotify is now the second largest source of audiobooks behind Audible, which accounts at least in some part for the price hike probably, but the company may offer the current plan price without that price rise if you just want a basic plan without audiobooks. There's also a rumor that the US could get another price increase later this year, but that might actually refer to Spotify's plans to offer a sub-premium level that includes spatial audio and other bonus features. Man, somebody inside the US Cyber Safety Review Board does not like Microsoft. There is a report that has leaked out to journalists concluding that Microsoft could have prevented attackers from breaching Microsoft Exchange Online last year and accessing government email. I'm underplaying how they wrote it, though. They basically said there's no excuse they should have prevented this. If you don't recall, that attack compromised 22 organizations affecting more than 500 people, many of them in the government. The attackers acquired a Microsoft account consumer key and forged tokens to access outlook. It's still unclear how that key was taken. The board criticized Microsoft's security culture as inadequate and recommended an overhaul, which Microsoft has undertaken. April 25th, the US FCC will vote on whether it should continue its seesaw of net neutrality regulation changes. Now, if you haven't been keeping up, ISPs can be classified as either information services like cable TV or common carriers like a phone network. A common carrier must treat everything it delivers equally, and information service can affect delivery differently. This is what lets a cable TV service offer premium channels you have to pay extra for, for example. Phone company can't charge you more if you want to talk about politics using the network. ISPs are currently classed as information services, but were classified as common carriers under the Obama administration's FCC. If the vote passes on April 25th, the new classification will go into effect 60 days after the new rules are published. Yay! Let's just keep changing the rules every four years. Sounds great. We're never going to stop talking about this, are we? No, I don't think so. Not until Congress can agree on net neutrality legislation. I can't even finish the sentence. It's a brilliant effort, Tom. You likely heard about the 7.4 magnitude earthquake centered in Hualien City, Taiwan. We'll leave the detailed coverage of the earthquake to others. There's plenty of good coverage happening out there. Its human toll has been significant, but thankfully preparedness made it less damaging than it could have been. It could have been much, much worse. Bloomberg reported on the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction's use of scanning social networks for keywords and the ability to detect mobile signals as two of the technologies that helped speed up deployment of emergency services where they were needed. On the tech business side, Taiwan is the source of around 80 to 90% of the highest-end chips required for advanced applications like smartphones and AI and TSMC is Taiwan's biggest chip maker. TSMC said all its workers were safe and those who needed to evacuate have started returning to work. Company computers and networks are all operating normally. Construction sites checked out normal. It is still suspending work at those sites while it conducts further inspections to make sure everybody is safe. Yeah, but it does seem like the building codes there helped TSMC out as well as others. Also, when you think about that idea of scanning social networks, it's interesting to note that threads seems to have become the most popular social network in Taiwan. There's not good stats to support that, but there's some anecdotal stuff. Sensor Tower measured it to be the most downloaded app on Android and iOS in Taiwan almost every day this year. MIT technology reviews Zeyi Yang interviewed people to find out why it has surged in popularity in Taiwan and repeatedly people said they enjoyed talking about the recent Taiwanese presidential election on threads because there weren't a bunch of bots or disruption from people outside Taiwan like you get on Facebook and Twitter. In other words, they could have healthy conversations with other citizens actually voting in the election. Scott, how long before threads gets popular enough worldwide to ruin this for Taiwan, do you think? Oh, man. Well, I really like hearing this because it actually confirms a lot of bias that I have, but something I believe in pretty strongly, which is a theory. Let's call it that. That's fair. That these social networks are better when they are more closely contained within an area, whether that's geographic or otherwise, but kind of focused in one place where moderation is heavily used. And I don't mean censorship and things like that, but I mean like, here's the community we want to build. Think of it as like a Reddit community or something to that effect, a subreddit. Those subreddits that succeed the most or seem to get the most traction are the ones that tend to have the most reliable mod teams. We're really actively making sure that the place is what they want the place to be. And I'm always a little bit surprised when bigger social networks don't just make that the plan from the get-go. I realize that in relatively speaking in human terms, this isn't a very old thing that we do with each other, but I think we've had enough time now to learn that maybe there are some lessons there and if you just want it to be a giant open free for all and anybody can say do or post anything or have bots do whatever they want or whatever, I suppose that can be your prerogative and maybe that makes more financial sense, which is what I sneakily think is going on in most cases. But here's a little bit of proof anyway or at least a good example of that working and working really well. I also worry it will get ruined that it will end up beginning, you can't hold on to this for too long. You can't have Twitter 2008. Because threads isn't limited to Taiwan, right? No. It's wide open out there and they're only experiencing this by obscurity, not security. Exactly. My version of threads when I go in there and use threads is full of bots and trolls and the stuff that we're all supposedly fleeing Twitter for or whatever. This stuff just is everywhere, but they're having this moment that, you know, the horrible tragedy of the earthquake and its effects aside for a second, they're having this moment where you can show that this is really a great way to do it and it seems to benefit Meta, I would assume, having this be the most popular app in the area. I mean if someone likes an app that Meta makes, yeah, benefits Meta. I think that's good for Meta if you like their app, it turns out. Yeah, my overall is that I wish we could replicate this in more places. Maybe even where we're more entrenched because as it stands right now, if I go to Blue Sky, if I go to threads, if I go to Twitter, certainly, slash X or go to Facebook, I'm going to get bombarded with the stuff that drives me nuts about those places. Fake images, fake outrage, trolls, not real people. All this stuff is so prominent and the big part of it is, it was like, well, these are town squares and nobody's moderating. No, they're not town squares. They are planet squares. And squares are not good at planet-sized stuff. Also, have you ever been to a real thriving town square where they have people talking? It's usually cranks. It's usually conspiracy theorists, right? And it's fine. Let them have their say. But unmoderated areas tend not to have high-quality discussion and threads, Meta, X, all of these platforms are worldwide-scale, wide-open platforms which are only going to descend into chaos the larger they get. It's not about size, though. I think it's about focus. You can have some pretty big subreddits that are very well-maintained because there's focus. Everybody is there to be on topic. And if you're off topic, the mods tell you, hey, stay on topic or get out of here. I wonder too, you know, how the Taiwan threads experience might just be unique. Maybe there are other global markets where someone living in another region says, yeah, that's kind of how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like the bot and spam situation is all that prevalent on threads for me right now. I don't know why. Maybe I'm lucky. But I will mostly just use my following visual for my timeline. But I often will let it do the For You example. Sometimes it's people who I either already am following or I kind of know and I go, oh, yeah, I should follow them. Yeah, you know, this is relevant. Haven't really thought that much about how US-centric all of those people who are more or less being suggested to me to follow are. But maybe there's something to that. I'm actually enjoying the For You version of threads. And maybe that's because it just isn't overrun as much as I feel like X is. I mean, anything, look at, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trust me, I don't believe this will always be the case because, you know, with scale comes chaos. No, it's interesting because that's already in the chaos. I can't do anything that's, you know, the For You version of X is just like a minefield of just stuff I don't want and don't care about. But there was a time on Twitter back in 2008 where it felt like threads, right? So I think I think it just shows that, like, you're early enough in the bubble that for whatever reason it hasn't exposed you to the raw radiation of unmoderated world, whereas Scott, for whatever reason, has moved out into that on threads. I feel like all of us will move out into that on threads as threads gets more popular because it's scale and focus that cause these issues, not, you know, not any particular thing about the platform. And I think that's why I'm always like, yeah, OK, trust and safety, moderation, that's all good. But it is almost impossible to moderate the entire planet at once. You are better set up for success if you moderate focused communities like on a message board in the old days, as we've been saying, subreddits and stuff like that. Quick, quick disclaimer. I made this point when I started on threads that I would follow everyone who followed me, kind of a follow for follow kind of thing. Purely as an experiment. See what it would be like. I think that's what thrust me. Yeah, because as it gets more popular, the trolls will show up in larger numbers. It's about it's about reach. I have regrets is what I'm saying. You can always wipe and start over. Can always do that. Stable audio 2.0 is an audio generation model built on stability AI and is now letting users upload their own audio samples that they can then transform using prompts to create a generated songs that are designed to sound more like a traditional song. You got an intro, you got a progression, maybe a bridge, maybe an outro. Stable audio was first released back in September of 2023. You might have played around with it. It initially only offered up to 90 seconds for some users, users who were paying. That's interesting, but not really a full song capability at the time. Now Stable audio 2.0 can generate a full three minute sound clip. That's a lot closer to an average length of a radio friendly song. Uploaded audio has to be copyright free. Not a huge surprise, but to use it is also free and it's publicly available through its website and soon it will be available through its API. So during our office hours stream earlier today, I was playing around with this, I put in guitar based tech news show with an upbeat tempo and no vocals, because apparently the vocals are real weird. This is what I got. It's not bad. This is like inoffensive bed music for a pharmaceutical company really more than what I was asking for. What's bed music? Oh, like a bed. Underneath the light. I'm thinking like for a nap? I don't know about a nap. No, no, no. Yeah, this reminds me of this sounds like some interstitial walking dead music is what that sounds like to me. You're looking over the city of Atlanta. It's all destroyed only milling around or just zombies. I don't know, Judson. I don't know if we can make it through. I don't know if we can do it. We're going to have to try. So then someone said I should do Beatles inspired rock song with a gradual increase in sound upbeat with drums and that's where you got vocals. I don't know. I don't know what language or if it is a language. But I get what they're going for. Not very Beatles ask. But but I get, you know, it's it's it's we're entering the genre, I guess. Yeah. So I think it shows kind of the limits of this thing. Like even though it's improved and it can do like a full radio length, three minutes, this is not going to replace Billie Eilish anytime soon. Right. There's that open letter from Elvis Costello and Billie Eilish that they all signed saying, you know, we need to stop companies from using our copyrighted material to train their models and creating things that replace us because their music isn't as good. And I would say, yes, you are correct. Their music isn't even close to as good, at least not right. If you have something to worry about, it's not today. It's not today. But at the same time, like you were talking about hold music, something in the background, you know, maybe you're you're playing around with with models for video. And this is something that can be part of that and really get creative. I've I've been I was fooling around with it a little bit this morning, you know, just to sort of see if it worked well. It for anybody who is sort of like, well, haven't we heard about not only artists but, you know, other people who can replicate an artist and pass it off as the artist doing something that they never did. This is not that. Now, there are concerns about that happening, but this is very much a let's have some fun here with a style. And, you know, obviously, if you're really good at prompts and you're really interested in a certain sound and you want to update those prompts, it works, I think, pretty well as advertised. I think so. The thing you just described, Sarah, is already happening usually with multiple tools, though. People are taking voice models and then they're replicating, say, Bruce Springsteen's voice and then they take music from, I don't know, the kids show SpongeBob or something and have Bruce Springsteen sing one of the SpongeBob songs or something. And it sounds just like he's doing it. These combinations are are actually kind of freakishly real, but there's all in one music thing. They're not the first. There's a couple of others. I think there's one called Suno, S-U-N-O, that I used the other day. That one does a bit better on the vocal side, a lot better, actually, than what Tom played. But the music side is similar. You know, it's kind of the same vibe or anything. My experience with these so far is that everything I've tried to create, maybe I'm a terrible prompter, but they all sound terrible. It's just all kind of garbage. And I think that it's easy to get lulled into this idea of, well, oh, it's so bad. It's fine. We're not going to have to worry about it. I think Sarah makes a really important point. And I think I would understand why musicians would be concerned because this is just the start of something. It will get better very quickly. And while it wasn't obvious to what Tom just played, it was inspired by the Beatles at all, the fear is that eventually you'll be able to make a Beatles song without the Beatles, you know. I do want to, I want to hasten to add that we tend to spend all our time talking about the misuse of these tools. And not that we shouldn't talk about that, but what about the use of these tools? The way this is created. You can upload a sample of your own audio and say, hey, build on this. And it is very good at keeping copyrighted audio off. It wouldn't let me use the DTNS thing because it doesn't know I have the copyright to it, even though it's Creative Commons. And it said, nope, can't do that. But if you're a musician and you've done a little sample and you're like, you know what, this is a tool you can use to help expand and create beats and explore, like, what would this sound like with saxophones? Let me do a quick rough draft of it. So I think stable audio is actually tailoring this to composers and musicians rather than, you know, some kind of tool meant to replace them. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, the main takeaway for me is somebody who does some stuff with music, needing it for shows and things. There's times where I just need a good, like a low impact sort of old big band jazz bed for the bottom of some discussion or something. It'd be nice if I didn't have to run through, you know, try to find a bunch of old out-of-copyright stuff from the 20s. It'd be cool if I could just generate something and have it be that vibe and then play it back there. This will let me do that. So there are used cases like that. Somebody will shout that, well, wait a minute, Sky, they're taking away somebody's, you know, potential commission if you're doing that. That's a whole other discussion that we could have. There are music libraries that you can pay for that, you know, I mean, I've used many of them, you know, over the years for this or that. And sometimes, especially if you hang out in one music library long enough, you start getting good at, you know, what a certain genre and weird title of song will give you. But a lot of times you end up spending hours and hours listening to stuff. No, that's not right either. No, that's not right either. No, that's not right either. It's like you're sort of crippled by choice, but it's all stuff that you don't really want. You're trying to find something that works. So to have a little bit more control out of the gate could save you some time. Yeah. And you might not hire someone. So it might even not replace someone that is being hired. Well, in the time that Scott said Big Band Jazz, it created this. Oh, there you go, Scott. It's kind of bad. I like it. Tough crowd. It's just a big tough crowd here. I think that sounds like garbage, but whatever. You know, it doesn't sound like garbage. Folks talking about Android on Android faithful every week. Ron Richards went way down. Michelle Ramon and Jason Howell bring you the latest Android news and information. You can watch it live Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific at youtube.com daily tech news show twitch.tv slash good day Internet or subscribe to the feed and listen to it whenever you want at Android faithful.com On Tuesday, the Verge reported Microsoft testing an embodied A.I. character to automate Xbox support tasks. The Xbox A.I. chat bot called the Xbox support virtual agents responds to support questions and handles things like game refunds. The Verge notes that Microsoft is also looking for ways to expand the integration of A.I. features into game development tools, game operations, and even the Xbox platform itself. The company is also mulling the use of A.I. for safety and moderation tasks. Scott, Microsoft clearly sees it's, you know, working with open A.I. and running Microsoft Azure as a competitive advantage that it can use in all of its businesses, including the video game space. What do you think? Is this a defining feature in gaming? Well, it does feel. I mean, I think the jokes about it being Clippy 2.0 aren't that far off the mark. You know, what did Clippy originally want to do? They wanted to help you get your job done. Whatever question you had, whatever thing you needed fixing, while it wasn't directly involved in customer support, it was in effect that it was helping you with simple stuff with, you know, your office or your Excel or Word or whatever. In this case, you're talking about a pretty broad set of use cases probably in gaming anyway. And they haven't been real specific about where, but saving money on both support staff and just infrastructure is a big part of this, I'm sure. And it will be roundly mocked by gamers. I can promise you that at this point. They will all, all of them will make fun of it and think it's silly and not think much of it. However, a bunch of them will run into situations where they're like, oh, I need to cancel Game Pass this month, or oh, my Xbox is rebooting randomly for no reason. And they're going to maybe have to deal with this thing. And that's where some rubber might meet the road and we will learn if this thing's, you know, worth the salt that it's built on. So I actually kind of want to see it in action. I think that others like Sony and Nintendo are on the fence on this sort of thing and will probably be watching very closely. They're very happy to let Microsoft be the guinea pig and take the hit. Because they will be, like I said, mocked endlessly online for this. But, you know, you could see them rolling this into other aspects of gaming, whether that be things like moderation or community management. Those things could be huge. One of the biggest problems or one of the biggest challenges that game companies publishers, especially those running live service games have is keeping a non non toxic play place for players. And it's hard. It's hard to manage it. It's hard to keep track of who's cheating and how that a new cheat method has happened. And two months later, what are you going to do? Go back and try to find everyone who used it. You can try, but there's a lot of time cost and pain in that. If there were some ways to in real time have a smiley little icon tell you, sorry, you cheated. You used an aim bot in the shooter. We're going to have to ban you for 14 days while your account is evaluated or whatever. I think that would be a boon to the industry, no matter how much we make fun of it. So this is a use of AI that I think is inevitable. It's just a matter of how deeply within their systems this goes or whether it even branches out and becomes a thing that Microsoft could sell as a white label product to any number of companies trying to do this, including Sony and Nintendo and say, here's yours. You call yours Mario and he runs around going, oh, it looks like you have achieved it again or whatever. You know, yeah, yeah. So totally like white label stuff, the way they the way they make surface as a reference design, right? And then they sell it, but they also show people like, hey, you can you can build on our platform. If this ends up working, the mocking will slowly subside and it will become that if it if it doesn't work and it's got to work even better than than acceptable or people are going to continue to mock it. Then yeah, it's probably not the part that makes it hard is that they're calling it a character. They want to make a character and that immediately makes people go, oh, you're going to sign a personality. That's the part where I think they may be making a mistake. If they just said, I don't know, maybe they get more heck for this, but if they said we're creating AI assisted support systems, that's boring. But if they said that and it appeared like just, you know, pop up windows and things like that, they probably would get less heat for this. It's a cheat. It's a say for all the hatred that Clippy apparently had. We sure love to talk about Clippy to this day. So there's something to it. Microsoft Bob rarely gets a mention and much worse. Bob was terrible. Oh my gosh. Don't name him Bob. But they also had a real rough time getting Cortana off the ground is a thing people would use all the time. And Cortana came from the gaming side. Literally a character in Halo. So I don't know. This is basically Cortana. It kind of is under another name with open AI tech behind it. Yeah, it's their new name. What do they call her now? It's a much more boring name and it's not really character anymore. Whatever it is, their AI prompt thing is now got a new name. And anyway, this this is fine. This is fine. I'm just warning them that they will get they will get teased to know in for this and they know this. I don't people are ready to tease him and they know it. They know exactly. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mall bag. Matthew wrote in on our discussion we had yesterday's show of perception of refresh rate, depending on what your eyes are like. Matthew says make perfect sense to me as I've gotten sick before watching laser shows that I could perceive being drawn that nobody else around me could perceive and this explain what was going on as for gaming on high refresh rate displays. I was actually stunned to find that jumping from a 60 Hertz display to 144 with matching frame rate did make me better in first person shooter multiplayer games. I'm assuming this is mostly due to having the image display updating closer to game time instead of delaying to the slower refresh time Matthew so well said that is better said than I tried to say it yesterday like having the image display updating closer to game time instead of delaying because of the slower refresh time. So thank you for that. That's exactly right. And in fact, Nova Byte wrote in and pointed to a website called testufo.com that will actually display this and show you animations that will let you see the difference between the frames per second in motion. So in other words, not just the flicker, not just whether you can see the flicker or not, but like how does the extra refresh rate affect the motion smoothness and that that shows the difference between simply the like oh I can't see above 60 Hertz and the effect that 120 Hertz will have on motion. So thank you Nova Byte for that. Love is full email in the show notes as well. Yeah, good stuff from Nova Byte and Matthew both. And thanks to everybody who writes in every day. We love your emails. Feedback at dailytechnooshow.com keep in coming. Scott Johnson keep coming back to the show as well in the meantime, where can people find your latest? Well, I do a show now on Mondays with my daughter. She happens to be someone who works in the games industry and we have really fascinating conversations, but it's not just about games. It's mostly about the generational gap that is me and her and her generation and my generation. What does that mean? And today with technology and entertainment and everything else, I think people would get a real kick out of it if you just took a minute and gave it a listen. It is called the Monday show and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts or specifically at frogpants.com slash Monday patrons stick around for the extended show. Good day Internet. We're going to talk about the stats out that show that people aren't playing games as often as they used to the hours played is going down. Are we running out of gamers? Oh no, stick around or you can catch our show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC is when it all goes down live. Join us live if you can and find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow answering the question. Do you really need a VPN with Patrick Norton? Talk to you then. Thank you.