 Coming up on DTN essay solution to annoying ads that interrupt your movies, Twitter buys away to compete with Facebook groups and can the blockchain save journalism? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 21st, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about Korean TV and Netflix and Squid Game and all that good stuff. If you want that expanded conversation, get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS, where you can join our top patrons. You know, if you ever heard, be more like Paul Boyer. Why can't you be like Brad? Be more like Kevin. Well, become a patron and you will. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Razer released its Zephyr face mask. That's the one they showed off at CES with the RGB LEDs and fans on your face. It's available start on Thursday evening for 100 bucks, including the mask, a carrying case and USB-C charging cable and three N95 filters as well as a small container of anti-fog spray. There's also a package with 33 N95 filters included for 150 bucks. Or you can just buy the filters from Razer insets of 10 for $30 a set. Keep in mind, the mask is not tested against SARS-CoV-2 virus particles and is not officially considered personal protective equipment. It's officially marketed as an air purifier. It has been submitted to the FDA. That just means the FDA knows it exists. That's all. Razer also announced a much more practical line of PC components with LEDs, of course, because it's Razer. Those are liquid coolers, case fans, platinum rated ATX power supplies. You might want to check those out too. Thursday Amazon launched a merchant option called local selling. This lets shoppers on Amazon choose to pick up an item from a local store or have the store deliver it instead of having it shipped. The pickup service does not cost the customer anything and sellers use their own vehicles to deliver items, not Amazons. Sellers can offer things like installation and assembly along with delivery. Let's just have everything on Amazon. The Independent Oversight Board that reviews Facebook's moderation decisions began its own investigation into Facebook's X-Check program after it was revealed and reported by the Wall Street Journal. The board was a little put off that Facebook wasn't more forthcoming about the X-Check program. The board found that Facebook's previous description of the program was misleading. X-Check was a quality control program for actions against high profile accounts. In other words, if they were going to moderate something on somebody who was a celebrity or a high profile person, they would double check it. Some people felt that meant there were a separate set of rules. And it grew to be more than a million accounts. In a previous case, Facebook had described the program being used in a small number of decisions. Facebook considers a million a small number. They got billions of users. The Oversight Board said Facebook's ambiguous and undetailed response was, quote, unacceptable and is drafting recommendations to change the system. Facebook thanked the board for its work, saying it will strive to be clearer in our explanations going forward. We are very nice. We are nice people, said Facebook. Please remember that in the coming weeks. A couple of notable business moves by Google to tell you about, notably not being Facebook, which I'm sure they're thrilled about right now. Google has reduced the cut it takes on all subscription based apps from 30 to 15% right from the beginning. And eBooks and on-demand music streaming services will be, quote, eligible for a fee, quote, as low as 10%, unquote. And nine to five Google reports that AT&T is working with Warner Brothers to license the Google Stadia technology to offer a browser based streaming version of Batman Arkham Knight to customers on AT&T Wireless. And the Google Smart Home Developer Summit, Google announced tools to do up developers build devices with support for Matter, the interoperability smart home platform supported by Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and others. So Stadia as a service. You know what? I think that's probably smart. Initial benchmarks are out showing the GPU on Apple's M1 Max chip, scoring 68, 870 in the Geekbench 5 metal test. That's 62% higher than the top end AMD Radeon Pro 5600M. That's the one that's offered on the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro, so it's a little older. 181% higher than the base GPU on that model. The closest equivalent GPU score is the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56. That's the one you find on the iMac Pro. All right, let's start talking about music. Indeed, Tom. Starting November 3rd in the snowy hinterlands of Canada, YouTube Music will swap two features between the paid premium version and the free version of the service. So either of them used to have these features and then freaky Friday style, they're going to have the opposite features. It's not like one's getting added to both. Free users will now get background listening, but will lose access to videos. So first of all, when you say the hinterlands of Canada, it makes me think only Calgary is getting this. All of Canada is getting it. All of Canada. Sorry. Amongst the bustling sun dappled metropolises of Canada as well. Also, I just called Calgary hinterlands through them under the bus. I apologize to you Calgary, but you beat BC and I'm still upset about it. All right. Back to this story. I think swapping the features, I think this makes perfect sense to me, right? Like having background listening is day regur for the freest of the free platforms of Spotify and everything else. Like why that was in the paid version still doesn't make any sense anymore. Maybe it did when they launched it, but it doesn't now. And saying, oh, you got to pay a little if you want to get videos also makes sense to me. That's that that was weird that that was in the free version. So yeah, why not? Does it make sense? Yes. That qualified in the bizarre, twisty, turvy, emcee, Escher-like world that Google music subscription services exist in. Yes. I don't quite know. I mean, this has been the constant head scratcher, right? Like we've had so many different versions, Google music, YouTube music. They've had a problem with branding. And this is one of the only situations where I think they should have rebranded. This is, I mean, if you're going to swap features and you already have an established thing, it has a quirk to it, blow it up and do another thing. I mean, it's not like people have invested so much in the Google streaming ecosystem that they wouldn't tolerate yet another rebrand. Listen, listen, it's very simple. There's YouTube music for free and then YouTube music as part of YouTube premium, which includes things like ad free on the YouTube app, you know, the app where you can watch videos for free, music videos for free, which you can't on YouTube music unless you pay. Yeah, that simple. Hope everybody gets that. Yeah. All right, folks, speaking of confusing things, if you've used almost any free streaming platform to watch movies or TV shows, Pluto, 2B, IMDB TV, you know the pain of a dramatic scene being interrupted, sometimes mid sentence by an ad for laundry detergent or some such thing. This happens when content does not have natural ad breaks or the ad breaks aren't where the streaming company needs them. Maybe they got the show overseas and there's a different set of ad breaks, maybe only one ad break in the service once two or three, maybe a show that used to have ad break metadata lost them somewhere along the chain of custody of the file. They just didn't get copied over in protocols. Next up newsletter, Janker Rickers mentions a startup called Spots AI with zspotz.ai that uses computer vision and machine learning to solve the random ad problem. Ralph Jason was president of Verizon Digital Media Services and left that company last year to help start spots. He joins former Pluto employee Ernest Wilkerson, who co-founded spots and serves as CTO. Right now, these spots are put in by humans. Most companies hire people to mark where the ad should go or they're just kind of randomly thrown in sometimes. But that's expensive and time consuming. And not all video services have the money to do that or if they do, possibly not for the entire library. Also, humans make mistakes. They're not watching the movie or show. They're just looking for black frames. And sometimes those frames aren't actually a sensible spot for an ad. So Spots uses an algorithm to look at more than just whether there's a black frame or not. It checks audio levels, brightness, other indicators to determine if it's an actual break in the action. It's training an algorithm to look for that stuff. The service is available as an API that analyzes videos 20 to 40 times faster than regular viewing speeds. So it can do this faster than humans. Customers can tell the service how many ad breaks to look for. They can customize it with complex rules like we want fewer breaks in the first few episodes of a series. Once we get them hooked, then you can add more breaks in later, which is insidious but understandable. This is definitely an annoyance. And it's interesting to know that there's a start-up out there trying to solve this for us. Absolutely. The first thing that came to my mind when we were reviewing this story was the watching Mad Men when it was initially airing on AMC, the creator, Matthew Wiener, famously hostile to commercials, which is odd for a television producer, which is never carve out good times. And so it'd be a very jarring moment when Peggy gets something dropped out her desk that now all of a sudden you're seeing the bounty being the quicker picker upper ad. This, to me, is mostly a story validating the business model for the Pluto's, the 2Bs, the IMDB TVs. Not only are you seeing their market share continue to go up. Big ad spends for a lot of them to put this out there. The idea of free streaming content is something that is obviously caught on. It's good that this is out here, but then again, janky ads might be the cost that you're paying because you're watching all this stuff for free. Yeah, I think that's a really good point is we're seeing a lot more people wanting to get a part of this business because it's got nothing but growth. Every time I'm watching on Direct TV Stream some empty ad break where it's got a dancing bottle saying, commercial break in progress, I'm like, you are just leaving money on the table. Like, your tech needs to catch up and sell these ads because the money is out there for them. And it's going to continue to come pouring into streaming in multiple ways, including this. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former president of a startup accelerator Y Combinator. That guy, he went and started a cryptocurrency company on Ethereum, but bear with me. This one is at least worth hearing out because Altman's behind it. And, importantly, the pitch, my friends, is weird. Worldcoin will give you free cryptocurrency in its system if you allow them to send you a little metal ball with which you can verify your account with an Iris scan. No, this is not about collecting iData if that's where you're going. The Iris image is encrypted on device and becomes the code used to access your account. The original scan data is deleted and the only the code, rather, is sent off the device. Worldcoin says it does not have any biometric data in its database. Worldcoin says that it is 100,000 users worldwide adding 700 or so a week. Okay, so then what? What is Worldcoin good for? Nothing yet, like every other cryptocurrency, you can hold it in a wallet and maybe pay for something if somebody, somewhere decides to accept Worldcoin. They'd also like for developers to build on their system like every other cryptocurrency. All of those things take adoption at scale. So what Worldcoin is trying to solve first is adoption. If it can get to a billion users by its goal in 2023, they figure the businesses and developers will come and the eye-scanning part makes it attractive because it deters cheaters. Also, Altman is a big fan of universal basic income, thinks Worldcoin could, surprise, surprise, be used for UBI. Yeah, of course. Of course. This is, I don't know. If it weren't Sam Altman, I'd probably discount it a little more. Sam Altman is good at things, not everything. He paid $10,000 to scan his brain for virtual replacement later, but for him, $10,000, that's like me spending $19 on a cloth to buy my Apple products. So yeah, this is interesting because he's right that if you can get to a billion users, yeah, people will come, right? They'll see that number and be like, oh man, I can access a billion users, I will do things, right? Getting momentum, getting scale, he's right. The question I have is, can you get to a billion users just by giving people free Worldcoin that they can't do anything with yet? There's a certain number of people who are like, yeah, free to get in on a cryptocurrency that might someday be the next Bitcoin? Sure, I'm in. But how many people is that, especially when to get it, they have to give you a mailing address to have you send them a little steel ball they could scan their iris with? Well, I mean, number one, I can understand from Altman's perspective that if you look at the world of cryptocurrency right now, it is very, very swingy, right? Like you have no idea where things are going. You have influencers that are running effective pump and dump scams on some of these coins. You've got a lot of people that are in there that are spending a lot of money trying to figure out what's real. So we are in a moment of adolescence for cryptocurrency. And if you're Altman and you've got the money and you apparently have the tech to send little metal iris scanners to whoever wants them, then why not? Why not try to carve out your corner on this? If it doesn't work, all you've lost is money. Yeah, technologically, this is fascinating. You know, the actual orb that they use to do the scanning and everything is a nice little piece of tech. The fact that it's privacy protecting will be attractive to people. The fact that they're calling it proof of person is how you get new coins, right? You prove you're a person and then they give you free world coins instead of proof of stake or proof of work. I mean, it's all very interesting, but it all hinges on the adoption, right? Yeah. So I don't know. I'm going to try to sign up. Are you going to get it? Are you going to scan your eye? I think the eyes have it, Tom. I'm going to get it, too. Hey, a spear. Oh, wait, sorry. Before it gets a spear. Yeah. No, no, no. Go ahead. Before I get the spear. Do you want to expand your Spanish tech skills? I do. And specifically, I'd like to do it with my buddy, who I hung out with, in Mexico City, Dan Campos. Dan Campos is here to help you. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for The Word of the Day, brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. I think THANG is a group of experts that provides advice on policies reflecting and researching about relevant ideas. In Spanish, we could refer to this concept as a grupo de pensamiento, but the most accepted term is laboratorio de ideas. There are important laboratorios de ideas like the Mercator Institute for China studies. They reviewed ethical guidelines for AI recently revealed in China. You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express, available every Friday. So, Tom, spear. See, here's the deal with spear, man. It's a group chat app focused on communities, basically an attempt to make a better Facebook group situation. It has features like self-clearing feeds, auto-archiving, tries to encourage interactive conversations around specific interests. If it sounds good to you, well, get ready for it to be incorporated into Twitter, because Twitter acquired Sphere and its 20 member team. Twitter VB of engineering, Nick Caldwell says Sphere's team will help improve communities, DMs and creator roadmaps on Twitter. Twitter launched its own invitation-only communities in September. The Sphere app will wind down over the next few months. Yeah, if Sphere sounds good to you, too bad, it's going away, but it will. It's going away, grand opening, grand closing. It will come back within Twitter, and this immediately reminded me of Review, the newsletter service that Twitter bought and is trying to integrate into this creator community side of Twitter. Twitter knows it's a bunch of journalists and influencers that use the platform, and they're trying to cater to the kinds of things that journalists and influencers and creators do. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the sub-stack reaction, sub-stack understood and Patreon, to another extent, understood that there is a place where people want to a poor time and money. The world of journalism, which we're going to get into in a second, is very chaotic right now. The money around journalism is very chaotic for a lot of different reasons, but I mean, I don't know, Tom. It's just, it's Twitter. Like I would understand if they had a coherent road map for anything, but boy, the product sure seems like the exact same thing that it was when I first got on it, every time they tried to tack something on it, usually isn't great. I have no faith that this is going to be any different. Yeah, if I were to defend Twitter, I would say the things that they have improved, you don't notice, you know, the 280 character limit, the- Okay, that was sure. Yeah. The ability to follow topics. More people use the trending stuff in different ways than they used to. I think we sort of forget how much Twitter has changed because the things that do work have worked so smoothly and the things that didn't work, you know, like, what was their little like ephemeral thing that just went away? Fleets. Yeah, fleets, those fails spectacularly. So I think there's more going on with Twitter. I think what they're doing behind the scenes with review and now Sphere and a few other acquisitions that they've made have the potential, I'm not guaranteeing it, but they have the potential to suddenly be a very compelling suite of creator-focused tools that give you more than any sub-stack, Patreon, et cetera, on their own are giving you. I think that they have a tremendous lane for it. I really do, because anybody who's on Patreon, anybody's on sub-stack, guess where they go first to let everybody know that they've got new stuff out? Guess where they go first to detail and summarize what they just did on these platforms so they might get out in front of a new audience because they're going to catch the zeitgeist for a second. Who knows whether or not it works. Who knows whether or not it's smart, but it's certainly the behavior. And if Twitter were able to make a competent suite of tools for it, I think it could be useful. Here's the problem. The problem is, is that Twitter also has a very inconsistent moderation policy. So what you're talking about is please, everybody go, my big community's on Twitter, please subscribe to me on Twitter. What's the guarantee that it's not gonna go away? What's the guarantee that the moderation tools aren't gonna be abused? What's the guarantee that it's not gonna be brigaded on some level? So I think that these are a lot of questions that Twitter has earned. These are not unreasonable fears, but I do think that that shouldn't stop them from trying to create really cool tools. Yeah, I use review, the Twitter-owned newsletter platform, but I have to say, I don't really feel like there's a thing I get from it that's like, ooh, if they weren't owned by Twitter, I wouldn't have this cool thing. But maybe I'm just not using it right. I don't know. Hey, you know that buzzword blockchain? Everybody thinks about blockchain and they're like, yeah, it's a scam. It's part of the cryptocurrency scams, right? How about an example of blockchain that doesn't support a cryptocurrency or track shipments, which is usually the other thing people talk about if they're like, yeah, it can be used for other things like tracking shipments. How about blockchain, Justin Robert Young, journalism? Finally, the main characters of the journalist. The idea of using a blockchain in journalism is that it could control the integrity of the content. So you know you're getting it from a trusted source. You can have it verified that, yeah, this is actually from the Associated Press. Also makes it more accessible. One server goes down, you don't lose access to the information. It can't get overloaded and make the content unavailable. And it's censorship resistant, because once it's there, the thing about the blockchain, go check out our No Little More episode. It's really hard to change. Not impossible, but it's almost impossible to change. And it's more transparent. If a story has changed, you could see on the blockchain how it was changed and when. So the Associated Press announced it is using the Ethereum-based Chainlink Labs smart contract system, which is a blockchain, to automate its news data distribution. Starting on November 2, the more than 15,000 outlets that use the AP will receive some AP data over a Chainlink blockchain so that they are cryptographically verified from the AP. That includes 2021 U.S. state election results, as well as economic and sports data. Think GDP, unemployment numbers, earnings numbers, and for sports, things like scores and injury reports. The AP previously partnered with Chainlink to push out its verified call of the U.S. election so that you knew it was the AP because it was done on the blockchain. That was in November 2020 using Everapedia software. So this is an expansion of that partnership to say, let's start with data, and then we might expand from there and see what it's good for. Well, I mean, this story mostly is interesting to me with the idea of revisions, although that is not in general the biggest problem that I think people have in terms of a distrust of journalism. It is a problem in a digitally editable world where unlike in a newspaper where things are printed and sent out, you can just take out a line or change something. Decorum states, ethics states that you should then put a note on what was changed and why it was changed or what was added. And so that's interesting. But Tom, allow me to bring you into a different scenario on how journalism would interact with the blockchain because what I do think is interesting, what I do think could fundamentally change not only journalism and the quality of journalism but also the way that we understand it is if the blockchain were used to track the reporting process. Who you're calling, who you talk to, you don't have to list them if they're anonymous, you can just list them as anonymous source one, anonymous source two. Blockchain is good for verifying things that are anonymous. So I could see how that could work, yeah. So you could say, look, I was on the phone for X amount of time, you could use this as part of an app or something like that where you would enter in who you're talking to, you would enter in who you're texting with, you could have these things and have tools to reveal as much or as little as you can. But what you'd be able to see in the blockchain is the process of how a story comes together. And that's something that I think has been lost because when we talk about reporting, these are the questions that get asked in a newsroom. When you bring a story to your editor, when your editor's reviewing your story, what they're asking you is who'd you talk to, why didn't you talk to X, go call Y to make sure that this is up to stuff that you think about talking to Z, right? You would now be able to see where the initial idea came from, who the initial conversations were, and then possibly who was added later into the process. Even if it's just categorizing, I talked to anonymous source one three times, I talked to anonymous source two two times and anonymous source three only once, you would at least get an idea of where this story and the information is coming from. I also think it would be a refreshing element of honesty and transparency in a field that by and large gets constantly misinterpreted, but that's my thought. Yeah, and I think you could extend that even after publication. Here's a use for an NFT that isn't collecting a crypto kitty. How about the NFT is tied to the author of the article for authorship? The idea of a non-fungible token is it, one of the ideas is it shows ownership, you could say. Justin Robert Young is the certified author by using an NFT and then if I quote your story in my story, my story can immediately acknowledge this information came from Justin or came from Nate at Bloomberg or wherever and it starts to reduce some of this copypasta we get out there where you lose track of like, I don't know, this outlet's saying the thing, but I don't know where they're getting it from. I love that idea. I love the idea because right now we're in a world where everything just gets repeated without a lot of new reporting on it because there's so many outlets and everybody just kind of wants the headline and they don't really care whether or not they add anything to the story. But if you were able to tell through the blockchain, hey, there's one story that everybody is copying and pasting, then you know, okay, there's just one story. I can just read the New York Times thing. I can read the Washington Post thing. I can read whatever and now you just know that and you know that like when someone adds something to it, okay, well the new information was added by this source. I think that'd be very helpful. And there's obviously a lot of systems work to be done. This is about using the technology and what it could be used for. You obviously have to get the reporters to use the system that tracks their sources. You've got to get the publications to respect each other's blockchains and show that this is where it came from. But yeah, and that's a lot of work. Don't get me wrong, but if you can get that going, get that momentum going, then it is useful for everybody. It is now the time where I snap everybody out of this bizarre hallucinogenic trance that I put you in and remind you that this will never happen. Reporters hate this, editors hate this. They will find it as a different way that they can be attacked by it. It'll never happen. But for that one beautiful five minute conversation, Tom, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, I'm not going to say it'll never happen. You just got to make it easy. The technology can't be difficult. It's too difficult to do an NFT right now. It's too difficult to operate a bunch. Love for up and coming journalists to be trained on a system like this though. I think that this would be, this would be great to just understand, hey, you're going to have to put your sources in the ether when you publish the story that that's, that is, that is part of the rigors of being able to make, make it easy to do, make it trustworthy where, where the reporter's like, I don't know if I put this in, is this source going to get outed? Like you have to, you have to build trust in the system, but it could work. Could work. Yeah. Let's check out the mailbag Tom, Roger and Sarah writes, Russell, I was in Las Vegas for a few days last week and saw a few things I thought might be interesting to pass along. One of the biggest things that struck me was the really innovative and creative use of display technology. Flat panels and micro LED displays were everywhere and used for all kinds of things from international or I'm sorry, informational to purely decorative. Too many examples to send, but I attached a couple of photos. One is of some columns in a lobby that were fully clad in panels and displayed some changing artwork. They also provided some of the lighting for the space. The other is a giant spherical display in an atrium. I had never seen this before. One of the other things that was around some of the casinos was virtual blackjack with an AI dealer did not play but observed and it was interesting as well. Thanks as always for keeping the tech news fair and balanced. Thank you, Russell. We do our best. Yeah, some of these pictures, I haven't been to Vegas in a minute. It's been a while. And it does show that display technology is just kind of infusing itself into this world. Yeah, and it makes sense. It's comparatively lightweight. It creates a magical, a surreal kind of environment because you're able to change it and make it so dynamic. I think if there is anybody, any kind of place that would do it, it is certainly the glittering desert lore that is Las Vegas. By the way, it just struck me just now that we didn't even touch on the idea of blockchain chain of custody journalism making it easy for you to decide what Google gets to use and what it doesn't in its indexing of your news. How do you mean? In other words, you set up a permission system on a blockchain that says, sure, Google, you can include our snippets. Come to an agreement with us. Mm, that'd be interesting. Yeah. Anyway, special thanks to Gabrielle Cohen, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Gabrielle, really appreciate it, man. It's a big deal that we are supported by patrons. We are supported by patrons in a way that means that I don't have to think about a lot of things. I am answerable to you, the actual listener. So if you want to be one of those listeners that I am answerable to, you got to become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. Thank you, Justin, Robert Young, for being with us as always. What do you got going on? I know you got good stuff coming with PX3 soon. So tomorrow's episode of the show, Friday's episode, we'll focus exclusively on not the blockchain, but the supply chain. You've heard a lot about it, a lot of conversation about worker shortages, inflation and shortages of product. Not only are we going to take a look at the latest news surrounding it politically, what Joe Biden made announcements about last week and then where we're going to go forward from it, but also we had a lot of PX3 listeners that are buyers for major retail chains or in shipping that gave us some great perspective. And then, big Jim, James Thatcher, our PX3 supply chain correspondent, gives us the full breakdown of not only why we're in this situation, what solutions in his mind will be the most helpful and we do a little forecasting and some of it is a little dire. So I would very much encourage folks, it's a very nutritious episode of PX3. If you're not normally into the back and forth and bickering of Congress or political campaigns, less of that here, much more of stuff that you're going to need to know because things might get a little hairy with this issue moving into the winter. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Big Jim. You gotta check that out, folks. I'm sorry, I was just reading Big Jim's Global Logistics Haiku's book, also available. We're fine books are sold. Hey, we are live, Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Chris Ashley, host of the new show, Barbecue and Tech, as well as the SMR podcast. And Len Peralta will be here illustrating the show as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this brover.