 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you. That includes Pepper Geesey, Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, and our new patrons, Rick and John. On this episode of DTNS, should artists use their images to poison the AI training sets? There's a plan for that. And Annalie Newitz tells us about progress in artificial wombs. They're wombs with a view. Truly. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 24th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Burrito Bowl. I'm Sarah Lam. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, the author of the upcoming book, Stories Are Weapons, Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and host of Our Opinions Are Correct. Welcome back, Annalie Newitz. Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. What are you doing October 30th, Annalie? October 30th? I have no plans. I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to eat candy. I'm going to do my duty. Apple is very pleased to hear that because they would like you to attend their October event in the evening. Apple doing an October event at 8 p.m. eastern time. The invite is called Scary Fast. So I guess we're getting faster processors. And it will be streamed online at apple.com. Let's see what else is in the quick hits. A malicious actor got into the identity and authentication service octa's customer support system accessing sessions to obtain an authentication cookie to access one password systems through octa. One password IT members discovered this when they got an email alerting them that somebody had requested a list of one password users with admin rights to the octa system. They thought that seems a little weird. They locked it down. So a second attempt was unsuccessful. One password has released no further details about what exactly happened. We have two stories about government coming for tech companies today. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has suspended the permit it issued a couple months ago for GM's cruise division, which allowed crews to test autonomous cars in the state without safety drivers. They even had a commercial license to do that. The DMV said the suspension is due to safety concerns and the permit will not be reinstated until crews can demonstrate it has addressed those concerns to the state's satisfaction. Cruises still allowed to test its cars as long as it has safety drivers in there. And the other story is a group of 42 U.S. state attorneys general have brought multiple lawsuits, 33 on one and various numbers on the others. These lawsuits in general accuse meta of designing Facebook and Instagram in ways that harm young users. AR glasses maker and real recently were branded to X real and just released the X real air to an air to probe glasses in Europe and the U.S. following a China launch last month. Both versions use a point five five inch micro OLED display from Sony replacing the point six eight inch micro OLED used before. HD resolution is 1920 by 1080 per eye, a refresh rate up to 120 Hertz and 500 nits of brightness. The pro model has electrochromic dimming. That's a new term I just learned today, which offers options anywhere between zero meaning you're just wearing sunglasses and 100% meaning you're seeing something in full VR. An accessory called the X real beam will add gyroscopic tracking and keeps the screen fixed in place when you move and allows for wired connections. The X real air to glasses start at three hundred ninety nine in black or red. The air to pros are four hundred ninety nine dollars. The X real beam is an extra one hundred twenty dollars shipping a set for the U.S. and the UK in November elsewhere in Europe in December. The actual like displays that you are on your face. That's right. Automatic is the parent company of WordPress and announced it is acquiring a messaging service called texts for $50 million. Texts lets you log into various messaging services, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal and iMessage and collect all those messages in one place, one interface. The security model uses on device encryption. They are not storing your messages in the cloud. They're just delivering them to you. Text is currently $15 a month, but automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg says they're considering maybe down the road doing a limited free version possibly clean energy company husk power systems which announced plans to launch 500 solar mini grids in Nigeria over the next five years has raised $103 million. What if it was just $103 and $103 million in new funding to offer communities in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South South Asia with an AI enabled platform of renewable energy services. Since its launch back in 2008 when it helped build the community mini grid industry husk power has expanded beyond energy access to include the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Alright, let's talk about this poisoned image thing that we've got in the offing. Well, it might be good poison depending on where you stand on the issue. A big issue that many creators have with large language models and other generative AI is that their works often get used to train those models without the creators initial permission. A team led by Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago has created a tool called Nightshade that lets creators fight back by poisoning their works, meaning the art that they make looks fine to you and I looks fine to the human eye. But it messes with the algorithms that they try that then are used to train afterwards. Yeah, and Nightshade is the second tool they've made. There's another one they made called Glaze. Glaze just protects the style of the art. So it changes how the style is interpreted so your style doesn't get imitated by a model. Nightshade goes farther. Both of them include pixels in the image that change how that don't change how we see but alter how the training algorithms see because the training algorithms are just looking at pixels. They're not looking at understanding an image the way we are. So for example, images of dogs could be trained to be seen by the algorithms as cats. And if you train on enough of them, the algorithm would put a picture of a cat when you asked for a picture of a dog if it were trained on these poisoned images. Apparently in their studies, 300 poisoned images were enough to cause an effect in stable diffusion. They have a chart in the study where they show like 50 poison samples. The dog just looks weird hundred. It starts to look like a pretty stretched out cat 300 poison samples. That dog is just a cat suddenly. It also made hats come out as cakes handbags come out as toasters possibilities are endless. The idea here is to force model makers to seek permission before scooping up images for training or risk having that training be undermined in this way. Annalie, what do you make of this? I love this. I am always excited when artists and creators come up with really new ways to defeat having their creativity extracted and turned into a product by someone else. And I think this could be the beginning of a new way that we understand how we keep things safe online. How do I make sure that people respect that this is something that I've made? Just add a nasty pixel and the results are not cruel or terrible. You're not harming anyone. You're just basically trolling the company. People who use the product are going to be like, well, wait, I asked for a car, but they gave me a cow. I just don't like this product. It's a fantastic way to get back at corporations for stealing stuff that isn't theirs. Yeah, I agree with you, Annalie. I don't create a lot of stuff myself, but if I were to and I were to say, I'd like to share this with the world. This is something that could be taken off the Internet. And I don't know. I mean, I can't keep you from like maybe printing it out for whatever use that sort of thing. But to just say like, hey, this is not, I don't want to be part of some large language model. I don't want to be part of some AI project. I just don't want to. It doesn't even mean that you're against it. It just means that you don't want to be part of it. And I think that as an artist, these are really cool tools to have. This also sort of reminds me just to kind of, you know, I'm not super puritanical on this. It reminds me of the early days of MP3s where you would think that you were, you know, you got like a cool album off the Internet. Oh yeah. You've downloaded the whole thing and it's a bunch of garbage and they did that on purpose. And it's like someone screaming. To teach you a lesson, you know, you shouldn't be stealing music, which you shouldn't. Sure. So I can, you know, I can see where, you know, as an end user and a creator, you know, both parties can have all the best of intentions here. But I think these tools are really important. Yeah. And we have a really interesting question from Nick in the chat room. Nick with a C wants to know, is this going to work? What if they screenshot it? Or what if they print and re-scan it? Printing and re-scanning wouldn't really be scalable for the way these large language models train. But theoretically a script could do like a print screen and then use that scan. I don't know if this is resistant to that. There are ways to do steganography that are resistant to that. So I'm sure you could make this resistant to that. And that brings up the idea that this is going to create an arms race, right? It's going to create companies trying to figure out ways to get around this and then these sorts of systems having to improve. That usually ends up being a productive situation and stuff like this where people realize that engaging in that race is not as productive as just seeking permission from people. So I think it still would achieve its aims. I generally like giving artists, you know, a bit of power to defend their works. I think this could be used for ill. I don't think we should overlook the fact that somebody might, you know, intentionally sabotage a well acting company that is seeking permission by saying, oh yeah, sure, these are safe. So you got to look out for that side of it too. But overall, I love the idea of giving the artist something that can fight fire with fire, basically. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Bad news for folks who liked Pebble. And I know people who mean the watch already had bad news, but the name appears to be doomed. Twitter alternative T2 recently changed its name to Pebble. And even more recently today announced it shutting down. This is the social network that had Twitter's former human rights advisor Sarah Oh as a co-founder. They really emphasized trust and safety. Co-founder and CEO Gabe Orsell told TechCrunch, I think the competitive landscape evolved faster than we thought. In other words, there's just a lot of companies trying to do this right now. And in addition to companies trying to do it, the Fediverse and all of the flavors of mastodon out there. That leads us to another publication today from David Pierce. David Pierce wrote a column on The Verge today dealing with the question of where you should post in a decentralized social media world. Yeah. And his answer is the old concept of published on your own site, Syndicate Everywhere, a.k.a. Posse, P-O-S-S-E. In other words, post on something that you own, a website, a blog, then let any other platform access the post so users can read your content wherever they want. You set up a syndication so posts automatically get sent to Tumblr, LinkedIn, images to Instagram, that sort of stuff. Videos to TikTok, etc. So you're still posting where you know that people are going to see your content. You're not forcing them to go to one place, but you own the posts. You own where they originate. Your content gets read far and wide and then links back to the original so people know more about where you started. Now, there are some downsides to this right now. They're not insurmountable, but there's not yet a good way to gather all the responses in one place. If you have your blog posts syndicated out on Substack and Mastodon and elsewhere and people are responding there, you have to go to those places to read the response. Not every post is in the right format or even the right topic for all platforms. What you post on Tumblr may or may not be right for LinkedIn, for example, and vice versa. Plus, you have to maintain the website yourself and the syndications that you're running, any feeds that you're providing or bots that you're using to distribute. There are a few tools out there. David Pierce points out there's micro.blog that can automate some cross posting for you. But those are rare and they still don't cover all the platforms you might want. Bridge is another tool that can aggregate social media replies and attach them to blog posts. But again, the same thing. It's one of a few that do that and it may not cover all the replies you want. But, you know, if you get enough people doing this, Annalee, then an ecosystem starts to build around with more of those kinds of tools. Yeah, I'm actually really excited about going back to this model. It's something that I've been advocating for a long time. One of the hopes behind the protocol activity pub, which is what runs underneath mastodon and hopefully some other places soon is that it does make posts portable in the way that we're describing here. But Tom, I think you're right that one of the big issues is that social media is built around community and conversation. And so when all of your comments are disaggregated in that way, it's hard to have a central conversation. And this already happens all the time on mastodon because all of the different servers are not necessarily federated with each other. So you have people responding to one post and they don't see other people's responses. And so you get these really weird conversations where it's like a bunch of people are in a room, but they're inside like little bubbles and they can't, you know, actually have like a full fledged response to each other. So I think that's that's going to be the next frontier is thinking about how do we pull people back to a central conversation. Yeah, I mean, back in the day. Sorry, Tom, I didn't mean to step on you. No, no, go ahead. Back in the day, I had a blog, many of us did. That was just sort of like, okay, let's, you know, I'll buy a domain and start writing. You know, I mean, people do that today. It's not that weird. But that was something that I, I gradually just, I felt like I, I don't know, maybe I just got burned out in general, but social media came along, you know, my blog proceeded social media by quite a few years. So then it was sort of like, oh, okay. It's more of like a fun conversation, like a hangout, everybody else is here type thing rather than like, you know, shouting into the wind and hoping that somebody comes to Sarah Lane.com and reads, you know, what I ate for lunch, which is something that I wrote about quite often in those early days, we all did. Yeah, lunch was like a very, I don't know, postable topic. Right. Yeah. Like I have feelings and I want everyone to know and I'm going to post on the internet. And I don't really think the way that we all try to connect with each other is any different. It's, it's just that, I mean, if you remember the days of like trackbacks and pingbacks that were always very confusing to me, you know, like half the time I would be like, where's this, you know, I got referenced somewhere else, but it's either like spam or sort of sort of unclear. It never really worked that well. Yeah. I don't, I listen, if you are a poster on X, for example, and you're, you know, doing well and getting a lot of engagement and even making money, kudos to you. I would never do that. I would never do that on any network that platform rather that could just sort of change on a dime. We've all seen how that works. And I'm not even calling out X specifically just any company can sort of say, yeah, well, the way that you're doing things is not our business model. So screw you. So yeah, whatever that happy medium is of the two, I would love, I would love to have that and I would love to be able to say like, yeah, go to my blog. Right. And maybe this is where this all comes from, just as an example, but find it all over, all over the place. I mean, we even do that with DTNS. It's like, we want you to, we want you to come here, but we want you to discover our content anywhere you might happen to be so that you eventually do, you know, end up being part of the crew. I like having multiple doorways into the same room. And that's ideally what you want is to have that social media service those doorways but then everyone comes to your site. The conversation is in a place that you have some control over. And I think that's the ideal for social media at this point for all the reasons that you said Sarah where if we are giving our content to some platform there's no idea what's going to happen to it. But if we're hosting it ourselves, if we're hosting those conversations ourselves, then it feels more like having friends over. Yeah, the trick is going to be create a tool where in fact, I would think thinking about it as blogging I think probably confuses the issue because we think about the old way of blogging. But you just need to have control and visibility. Right. You have control over what gets posted where and put it out as many places as possible and then visibility as to what people are saying in response and what the conversations are happening. And it doesn't matter if they come to you, you're everywhere, right, your location is decentralized as well. So as long as you, you can see all of the conversations and decide where it's going, you can be all places at once you can be everywhere or everything all at once. And I think it's going to take a lot, and it may never happen for that kind of ecosystem to grow up but I can imagine a system that works that way. That's probably why Matt Mellonwag is buying texts because he's thinking along those lines too. For sure. Well, folks, if you're like, hold on, I just need to use my Android phone better. Well, we've got an answer for you there to look for Android faithful hosted by Android aficionados Ron Richards and when toy Dow Android faithful devoted exclusively to Android news and information you can watch live if you want Tuesdays at 8pm East Coast 5pm Pacific or subscribe right now and listen to it or watch it at your leisure. Go to android faithful.com. A common trope in science fiction is the idea of growing babies and bats. Well, we do not have a story for you today about growing babies and bats. I am sorry in advance. We do have a report on progress made in artificial wombs, which is closer than ever. So, Annalee, I know you've been following the story. What's an artificial womb? Where are we here? So first, I should say that artificial wombs are kind of like the flying car trope in science fiction. We're obsessed with them. People have been talking about them for over 100 years. And the goal, of course, is to have an external womb so that an infant, whether it's a human infant or a non human can be grown outside of a body. And there's all kinds of great reasons, especially among humans that we might want this. There's lots of people who have issues with miscarriages or who simply just don't want to carry a baby. They are athletes, they have jobs, but they want to have a baby. And so that's what the promise of the artificial womb is. And so, you know, various research teams have been looking into how we might actually get one in real life. And it turns out they don't look anything like in science fiction. They're not giant glass tubes full of like little developing babies. They look more like bags. Some of them look like big Ziploc bags. Some of them look like those puffy bags that people used to wear on their heads to dry their hair. And they hold the developing embryo, the developing fetus for as long as is needed to help them develop the way they might in a womb inside a body. I feel like I saw this on Timu recently. Like, yeah, they don't look sophisticated, but they work. Now, these are targeted towards a very specific issue, right, with premature births. Yeah. So right now, the news is that there's a company called Extend that has asked the FDA for approval to begin human trials on its artificial womb, which is just for premature babies, babies that are delivered around 21 or 22 weeks. And the reason why artificial looms are needed at that point for a lot of infants is that they're really not at the phase yet where their lungs can function very well with oxygen. Even like in an incubator. Right. Even in an incubator. And there's a lot of, there are incubators that do work for extremely premature babies, but it's much better for the baby to be an amniotic fluid. And so that's what this bag is full of is amniotic fluid so that the baby can be immersed in fluid. They don't have to use their lungs. The lungs can continue developing. And what the scientists do is they attach tubes to the umbilical cord to deliver blood to the baby, which is how the baby gets its oxygen. So that's the key there is creating a system like that that can work, I guess. Yeah. How do you, the real question is how do you connect to the umbilical cord? And that turns out to be the biggest technological challenge because they have to get little itty bitty tubes that connect to the umbilical cord. And there can, clots can develop in those tubes. And so the babies probably would have to have blood thinners, which creates some other potential problems. So there are a lot of issues to be worked out before we're going to want to be just turning this loose in infant ICUs. Now, being part of a human trial, you know, me as somebody who doesn't have a child, but if I were in the situation, I'd be like, well, not my baby, I want to, you know, I want to make sure it's, you know, it's good first. Would these trials be used with premature babies that would probably otherwise not make it? Yeah. So that's another one of the big ethical questions that they need to tackle before the FDA is going to let them get that approval. So the question is, if you have parents who are scared and desperate, and they're offered this, are they really in a position to make a decision? And so we need to have protections in place. Like I said, when a baby is at 21 or 22 weeks, there are some hospitals in some areas that have had a little bit of success with maintaining those babies in an incubator. So there's this question of like, when do you choose one over the other? And then the other issue is that people may not have thought about is that this also raises ethical questions around people who are terminating pregnancies, because what if a state demands that a person who wants to terminate their pregnancy instead has to use one of these artificial wombs and bring the baby to term. So that's another question, especially right now as states are fighting over abortion rights and abortion access. So we have to keep both of those things in mind as we move forward with this super awesome technology that I think a lot of people would love to have. Yeah. We're far from being able to completely grow a baby outside of a womb, it sounds like. In fact, we're not even to the point of taking a premature infant yet because of all of the ethical questions and testing questions you're talking about. But according to this article, you want to grow a lamb outside. They've done that. They've nailed that. You can grow lambs in an artificial womb all the time. That's right. They've done it with lambs. They've done it with pigs. And the FDA is considering this. It could get approval as early as the end of this year. More likely it's going to be next year or later. And no, we're not anywhere near having like people with like backpacks on with their like babies inside an artificial womb. But that's that's the goal that's coming at some point. Yeah. Well, on a completely other note, or maybe, you know, if you've got your baby in a backpack. Yeah, you happen to, you know, maybe want to take a walk. If you're a fan of open source maps, a service called proto maps is free to use within websites, apps and other projects. And it builds itself as the cheaper alternative to even something like open street maps, significantly reducing mapping bills with support from cloud infrastructure. Map based projects and sites don't need third party service or API keys. They also work offline. Proto maps also maintains a tiles API, which is free for non commercial use or commercial use when paired with a GitHub sponsorship. Yeah, so I guess the idea with it's cheaper to develop it's simpler to adapt than an open street maps and of course it doesn't have any licensing too. So yeah, good. The more open source choices for mapping is good. I like that. Totally agree. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mail bag. This is a voice mail bag today because we love to hear your voices do send them in this one comes from Marco in response to our discussion on October 16th on new wireless charging options. Hey team. This is Marco Perez from nice fall beautiful weather Salt Lake City on DTS 4625 you guys talked about the very cool but less efficient wireless power charging. And I had a question that didn't come up. If it's less efficient requires more power. If you have a lot of them going would it make a small bathroom warmer or anywhere where it's a warm climate warmer and inversely would that be awesome for colder weather countries. Just curious what you guys think on that. Thanks. I don't know the answer to that but I'm going to guess that maybe a small amount like because it's using line of sight infrared. It might make a small amount of air warmer but probably not enough for us to notice unfortunately for those of you in the Salt Lake City. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm imagining people using server rooms as like their cozy winter room like I put all my servers in here and it's like this. That's been done. Oh yeah. Oh okay. Being being done. Yes. Someone right now is listening to this being like haha I was five years ago. Well I'm in California so we don't need that quite yet. Yeah exactly. Well what we do need to know Annaly is where we can find more of your work when you're not doing DTS with us. Sure. So I have a bi-weekly podcast called our opinions are correct which you can find at our opinions are correct. My co-host Charlie Jane Anders and I talk about science fiction and society. We just recently wrapped up a series that you guys might be interested in which is called Silicon Valley versus science fiction which is all about how Silicon Valley gets science fiction wrong. And you can also if you're interested in getting ready for summer reading next year you can pre-order my book stories are weapons which is about the history of psychological warfare in the United States. And it just became more and more relevant as I was working on it. So yeah check it out. Excellent. And patrons stick around because we are not done talking about tech to make more humans. We are going to discuss a Dutch startups attempt to perform IVF in space because you know what if we're going to get off this planet at some point we're going to need to make babies in space and have babies and deliver babies in space. And we haven't done any of that yet. And sure I'm sure it's a solvable problem but this is how you start solving it right. So stick around for that patrons. Just a reminder our show is live. You can catch a DTNs live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.