 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and Hector Bones. Coming up on DTNS, Why You Will Love, I'm not even kidding, the new Bluetooth LE audio standard, a risky move to go open with AI, and iazaktar plays which customer policy is worse. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 12, 2022. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Iazaktar from New York City. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, Iaz, it's good to have you on the show. It's been too long. Thank you, thank you. I never pronounced it that way, but that's what it said in the docs. That's what I said. You take direction well, yeah. Thank you. That's what I do. He's a man who can follow a direction. Well, let's do some tech news today, starting with a few tech things you should know. The K Asia reports that Nikon will withdraw from the DSLR camera market focusing its camera development on the mirrorless market. The company will still produce and distribute existing DSLR models, but Nikon's last DSLR release was its flagship D6 in June of 2020. In its fiscal 2021, mirrorless cameras accounted for half of the revenue from Nikon's imaging business. Okay, end of an era there. Spotify is also ending the era of hurdle being independent. Hurdle is a game that is like Wordle, but you listen to it. Spotify bought the app, making it its first game acquisition. Game will remain on a standalone website for now, though it will link song answers to Spotify instead of to SoundCloud in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Spotify plans to integrate hurdle more fully into its main app, but did not give any specifics yet. Twitter began rolling out its unmentioning features to all users after testing it in April to a limited set. Users can now select to get you out of this conversation option in the three dot menu on a tweet that they're tagged in. Of course, this is the official Twitter apps. Their username will still appear in the tweet, but they won't receive notifications after that once unmentioned. You can't be tagged back into a thread either. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this one. It doesn't happen that often, but I will definitely take advantage of this. Get me out of the canoe. But then there's the ones where you're like, well, they'll notice if I took myself out. They're just being, it's going to create a whole new thing. Bad news for F commerce, a.k.a. fast commerce, a.k.a. instant delivery of things like groceries and restaurant meals. One of its big stars, airlift is permanently shutting down as of July 13th. In May, it started cutting back, shutting down its operations in South Africa and going from eight cities in Pakistan to three. Restofworld.org attributes high operating costs and a global startup funding crunch among the reasons for the shutdown. TikTok planned to update its privacy policy in Europe on July 13th to no longer ask users for consent to be tracked to receive targeted ads. The Irish data protection commission announced that after engagement with the company, it agreed to pause the update to allow analysis by the regulator. Earlier this week, Italy's data protection watchdog warned that the change would breach the privacy directive and GDPR. All right, let's play a little game, shall we? It's called, that's kind of like award show music. I'm not going to use that here. How about this? Let's play a little game, shall we? She is Tom. It's kind of dark. Work on that. Maybe I should ask our video producer Joe next time instead of just going wild on my own. Let's play a little game, shall we? It's called which is worse. We're going to present two new policies from companies and I as you're going to tell us which one you like the least. Ready? Ready. All right, Sarah, give us the first case. All right, so the UK's hive, which sells smart home thermostats, also smart lighting, smart plugs, smart sensors, no longer sells home security products like cameras and water sensors. But there's more to the story. Hive is discontinuing service for those previously sold home security products. The leak detector will stop working as of September 1, 2023. So not tomorrow, but it is happening and the cameras and security systems lose support August 1, 2025. This isn't the first time this has happened. Hive stopped direct sales in North America back in 2019 and devices there stopped working in November. So to be clear, Hive is not going out of business. They're given a year or more of notice before discontinuing support. Okay, are we mad about this? Tom, what's the other case? All right, compare this when I asked. So we got Hive pulling your service. BMW is making several car features available as a subscription in South Korea. They've tried this before in the US with car planning didn't go so well, but in South Korea, heated seats, 18 bucks a month heated steering wheel, 10 bucks a month. We converted the numbers from one by the way. High beam assistant headlights, you know, the ones that automatically brighten or dim based on traffic, $8 a month. There are a few more options like that. Each option will give you a discount if you pay for a year or three years in advance and they offer permanent access for a higher cost. For example, the $18 a month heated seat subscription can be obtained permanently for $406. All right, so you've heard the deets, which is worse? Hive slowly discontinuing support for its products that people have already bought or BMW charging a subscription fee for luxury features that people thought were bundled in? You know, I thought long and hard about this in the minutes we've talked about it and I will say that the BMW plan is worse because I'm used to places discontinuing products or if you're in your home, at least you can have the option of changing up what you're doing. If you have a BMW and this thing actually catches on, that means other car manufacturers be like, hey, we're going to continue this model. And I think this model is horrible. The idea you can unlock features and then isn't that just part of the cost of the car because you're buying a whole thing. When I buy a house or buy an apartment or rent an apartment, I can equip it as I want and I know things will disappear. This is my Harmony remote and it's going away. I mean, there's going to be support for a long time, but I got to get ready for when things disappear from smart home. But my car, which I don't have one, this thing scares the heck out of me. Yeah, the Wraith 86 was like, how is this steering wheel optional to which we clarify heated steering wheel? It's the heated steering wheel. You get the steering wheel. They haven't made that. You can drive the car. Yeah. I don't know, though. This is all optional stuff. You don't need a heated steering wheel. You don't need heated seats. They're nice to haves, you know, but you can still drive the car without them. They're not like essentials, whereas Hive is taking away the ability for the thing to work at all. I feel like that that makes a difference. I mean, when it comes to the car stuff, I have luckily I have heated seats and I have a heated steering wheel. I don't use any of that stuff half of the year during the winter. I definitely think it's nice. But I kind of equate this to, I don't know, the way I feel about Photoshop and Creative Cloud. I can kind of come and go YouTube TV. Sometimes I'm like, I don't need live TV for a few months and I'll just like sign up later. So I'm not paying for something that I'm not using. So the subscription version of the driving a car that has luxury features that I may use sometimes and not other times. I don't hate that idea. I think I'm probably going to spend more. And that is the whole point that BMW is going for here. But yeah, I think that the the Hive situation, you know, for anybody who has Hive products, that is that's kind of the that's the nail in the coffin. Yeah, I mean, it BMW wants you to think of this the way you think of software in your computer, right? You know, you pay for Creative Cloud, just like you said. But people don't think of car stuff that way. They think of it as I have it. I have a heated seat. It either works or it doesn't. It shouldn't go away with a software update. You know, I shouldn't have to jailbreak my BMW to get my heated seats back. And Hive actually has a good read. I don't know personally if the company has a good reason, but most companies have a good reason to discontinue products that require software updates, require security updates, making sure everything is working in whatever world is happening. So let's say Hive said, oh, yeah, everything's going to work until 2025. A security update stop at a certain time. Actually, I did say 2025. Let's say 2030. If they didn't provide security updates and everything that that will change their business model. So if Hive is going to shift to what they're doing, they have to tell everybody well ahead of time, look, we're we're shutting this stuff down. We're moving away from this stuff. And that while is while it's annoying for people who have Hive products, it definitely seems like at least there's enough notice. You're not stuck with this idea of I have to subscribe to parts of my car versus switching out a smart thermostat or switching out a smart light bulb. In theory, I'd imagine since I'm the the smart home community out there is freaking really smart. So I'd imagine there'd be some kind of firmware upgrades that could be done for these things. So you can have continuous use if you really want to. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's it's an option and or you can change out the parts BMW. You get that car and you're like, hey, I wanted this thing to be hot. What's that? My credit card changed. My info changed and I don't have that right now. Why are my seats? Oh, great. Oh, yeah. My card expired. Yeah, these little things actually do mess up your experience. I believe one of the things was like some kind of a headlight high beams. It's like, hey, guys, don't don't attach it to like adaptive headlight safety features. Yeah, that's something you can control on your own. I don't have assistive headlights in my car and I'm able to turn the high beams on and off myself. But but yeah, it's nicer if they just do it naturally speaking. I don't know. I get why Hive is like, these are security features and it requires staffing, right? Because they provide staffing to like respond to security threats, even the water leak. They'll call plumbers for you and stuff like that. I get them taking that part of the way of the service away. But the fact that they're disabling them, that these are just not going to work at all anymore, makes me not want to buy any other Hive products because what are they going to take away next? Oh, you don't buy Hive then. Man. Yeah. All right. So in the end, I as you the winner. Quote unquote of which is worst is if for you is the car. That's correct. All right. All right. Well, maybe this will brighten all of our spirits. MIT review MIT technology review rather has a write up on bloom. That's a large language model similar to open ai's GPT three or Google's Lambda GPT three is famous for powering things like Dolly. A lot of people have fun with that recently creating pictures of cats orbiting space in a Ferrari or my favorite achita jumping over a bus. Lambda is the one that the one that one of the Google employees thought might be sentient as of late, which we talked about on a show recently. The similarity of GPT three and Lambda is not that they're both large language models, but they're both preparatory. Neither group shares their code or models with the public. So unless you got the code, you can't really do anything with it. Open ai says it doesn't offer access widely because it's unsafe at this point to do so. However, there's one large language model that is partly open. And that is Meta's open pre-trained transformer OPT 175 B making its code and logbook on training available on request. But the license is limited to research purposes. So that brings us back to bloom. Yeah. So bloom is completely open. Bloom stands for big science, which is one word. Intercapped, which is also the name of the product. One one word. Intercapped. That's the name of the project. Anyway, big science, large, open science, open access, multi-language, language model, multi-lingual language model. Anyway, rules right off the top. Yeah. Bloom is much better. Not only is the code available for anyone to download for research or commercial use. So you can do what you want with it. But they record their meetings on development as part of the project and upload that for anybody to review. So you can find out what data it's being trained on, how it's being developed, how they evaluate its performance, something you cannot do with any of these other projects. The startup called Hugging Face with some funding from the French government has coordinated big science with more than a thousand volunteers selected from around the world trying to get a representative sample, not having everybody all be in Europe or any other one place. And they've been working on this for about a year. Now it's officially launched as of July 12th. The aim is to change the culture of AI development and make access to cutting-edge research available to everybody worldwide. Bloom has 176 billion parameters. That's almost the same as GPT-3. It's actually a billion more. It can handle 46 languages, including 13 Indic languages, 20 African languages, and it's the first model of its size for Spanish and for Arabic. It can write recipes, make poems, summarize texts, write code just like GPT-3 can. It can understand 13 programming languages. But is it dangerous to make something so powerful available for free to everyone? Have they thought about that, Sarah? Well, they have. In fact, the big science project folks understand it could be dangerous. So they warn that Bloom can suffer from the same biases and possibilities to export offensive languages as other models. However, the hope is that by making it accessible, it can correct those problems more easily and faster. And big science is taking its own steps to help further that goal. The group developed a data governance structure that makes clearer what it is used and how it belongs to and who it belongs to. And it sourced multiple data sets from around the world as well as making sure to include a wider variety of volunteers. It's also using a responsible AI license designed to deter Bloom from being used to harm or exploit anybody or be used in high risk sectors such as law enforcement or health care. All right. So if you want to try it, you can download it. It's available at huggingface.co slash big science slash Bloom. If you log in to Hugging Face, if you create an account there, they'll let you play with it online and do some sample queries and texts and that sort of thing. If you're recognizing the name Hugging Face, they're also the company that did Mini Dolly, which was an open source version of Dolly 2 from open AI. So they're doing a lot more than just Bloom, but it's the same folks, same startup that's doing this. I don't know. What do you think? This feels like a big step in AI to have a big and fairly competent project making AI accessible, but do you buy what open AI and others have said that that might be irresponsible? Okay. So you're always going to have bad actors with anything, right? You could use Photoshop and you could use a legal copy of it and create all kinds of horrible things with just Photoshop. So there's always going to be bad actors no matter what's going on with this. I was taking a look at the license and it claims that if you use it for usages that could harm others and particular other things, you shouldn't be able to use the code base. If the code base is open, I could see anybody grabbing it and using it for nefarious purposes. Again, that could happen with anything. I think it seems like it's about time. Something like this has happened though that we're going to have an open version of this. Never underestimate just like how many people have free time and they can actually help grow this kind of stuff in a way that you wouldn't expect. Open source software. You've seen the amazing things that can come out of that or hacker communities, what you can actually build. There's home assistant for smart home like I was talking about earlier. There's all of these ways that you can create new usages and use case scenarios if you have millions of people of access to it. I'm really curious how this is going to move all of this forward. But I'm also concerned about how other tools could be, I don't want to say manufacturer, but created using this technology. Yeah, I don't think we're going to see Bloom necessarily outpace open AI or Google or meta in its competence, but you might see a lot more companies take advantage of it. Do more innovation around it because it's out there. At the same time, that also might mean you'll see more malicious uses than you would see of the other more lockdown. This is not a case like security where, you know, if you lock it down only the bad guys have it because right now it's very difficult to get access to Lambda or even open AI. They hold it very close to the vest. So this will be available for everybody to use for good or ill. Well, folks, next week is special guest week here on DTNS. If you like stories about people using technology for ill and then maybe getting caught. You probably like dark net diaries and we're going to have Jack Resider on from dark net diaries. We're going to also have Will Smith from Foo VR, Quinn Nelson from Snazzy Labs, Joel telling the 3D printing nerd. It's going to be a heck of a week, folks. Lots of new faces. So help us promote the show. Make these special guests feel welcome with a big old audience. Tell your friends to watch or listen to Daily Tech News show all next week. Well, if you've ever wished that your wireless headphones could have better battery life or share listening from one device. We have good news. I wanted to do that in Twin Peaks voice, but it didn't work out. The Bluetooth SIG or SIG has completed the Bluetooth LE audio specification. Manufacturers can now start adding support for this standard to devices, which should start hitting shelves by the end of the year. Let's run through some of what is new in Bluetooth LE audio IaaS. The big one is LC3. That's a codec. It can deliver higher quality audio at the same bit rate as the current Bluetooth classics SBC codec and SIG claims it can even still do better audio than SBC at half the bit rate. That means higher quality audio is going to use less power. Love it. Love it. I have said before many times on this show I have a tin ear, so the higher quality is lost on me. I went over to Bluetooth.com's audio codec demo and I trust people who tell me that it sounds better at half the bit rate. It all kind of sounded the same to me. But if it can save my battery life, I'm in. I'm 100% for it. Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah, I'm kind of with you, Tom. I mean, I listened to so many podcasts these days that as long as I can hear what people are saying, I'm not... I don't spend too much time thinking about how the audio quality is unless I'm listening to music. And even then, you know, I'm kind of like, ah, Bluetooth, whatever, you know, it works. But the better we can do with battery life and also audio quality, because I know a lot of people out there really care about that, that is good news. Yeah, I'm thinking if you have a lousy connection, your bit rate's not very good and you're using this codec, at least the audio will sound decent and not crunchy or terrible or just cut out. That to me, I just want consistency. I want this thing, I want to be able to hear as I'm walking around outside because there's going to be tons of interference no matter what. If I have a little bit rate, I can still get what I'm listening to, it can sound good. There's also a feature called AuraCast, A-U-R-A-C-A-S-T, which lets unlimited audio devices. So speakers and headphones connect to a single audio source. For instance, everybody in the gym could connect their own wireless headphones to a single TV. Everybody in a theater could actually wear earbuds and get improved movie audio connecting to a single source. Users can select AuraCast like they would a Wi-Fi network. This could either be done in the operating system, androids including support, or it could be done with an app. The connections could be password protected. So if you just wanted to share this with a few friends but you don't want other people to be able to access it, you can put a passcode on it. You'll need an assistant, probably most often a phone but it could be a smartwatch to the broadcast, but then once it's selected, the headphones connect directly and get it from the source. AuraCast also supports connections by QR code and NFC. I hope this works well. Oh, go ahead, Ayas. Thanks. I hope this works well. This has been like a debate of my existence in the small apartment of like, how do we listen to something of the televisions? I had to use my Samsung phone which allows you to have two different pairs of headphones wirelessly attached to it to a Roku network. If AuraCast works the way they're claiming it works, I will be super thrilled. I don't know if it'll work. Somebody in the chat mentioned this is like the silent disco kind of model. I want it to work. I really want it to work. But if you guys remember when Bluetooth was rolled out a long time ago, oh boy, did that not work well. So I'm really hoping that AuraCast, when it's pushed out and everyone supports it including Apple, Apple, you better support it. I hope that it works as well as they do. I'm already thinking ahead of my use cases and there's plenty of them that will be just fine. Not that I go to a gym, but the gym audio style. Maybe at a hotel or a bar or something where you want to hear the sports broadcast but not everybody else at the bar does. I was thinking like movie theater, I don't know about all that. But yeah, listening to sports at a bar that's loud and nobody's talking next to you type of thing. I mean, some of this, my initial reaction is like, well, doesn't that seem like you're not being, you know, I don't know, friendly to your fellow humans. But if everybody's kind of on board and this is just the norm, it's not that weird. I'm also, I sometimes just want to share songs off my phone or podcasts off my phone. It's weird to have to like either repair somebody else's headphones or hand them earbuds. It gets a little dicey, you know. Oh yeah. No, no sharing of earbuds. Yeah. Not my home. We have a few other notable features here from the story. Bluetooth audio also lets each earbud maintain its own connection with the source device. So you don't have to rely on one of the earbuds passing the signal to the other. My job does do that. I'm used to it, but it can be a little wonky at times. Apple already does this with its own method, but now more earbud makers can do it free as part of the spec. Bluetooth LE audio also claims 20 to 30 millisecond latency versus Bluetooth classics 100 to 200 milliseconds. So nice feature if you're a gamer. And it's better at managing packet loss when you're at the edge of the range so you don't have as many interruptions to your connection. And LE audio also supports hearing aids and implants. And that is good news for those in the accessibility community. Yeah, that's a huge one. That's been one of the impediments to using hearing aids with phones and stuff like that. So that's huge. And the packet loss thing, I mean, it just seems so simple when you read through it, but they're like, yeah, Bluetooth is meant to like hold on to packets for data uses in case you need them, which when you're transferring data over Bluetooth like a file you want. But with audio once that packet is a few seconds old, you don't need it anymore for your audio and it's just delaying everything else if you're waiting to try to get it. So LE audio, when it's doing music and things like that says, oh, if this packet doesn't arrive within a short amount of time, we'd stop looking for it and move on to something else. I think that's super smart. All right, so how can we get this stuff? How can you get it? Well, I'll tell you some devices may be able to support Bluetooth LE audio with a software upgrade Android 13's beta supports it already. Most likely though you might need new hardware. Yeah, they're probably going to make us get new hardware and Apple, like you said, Apple please put it in the next iOS. That would have been nice if we already knew it was an iOS 16. But there you go. All right. I just want to watch some cricket. Sarah, where can I go watch some cricket? Tom, I'm glad you asked a group of Indian farmers set up a fake Indian Premier League or IPL cricket tournament. You might say, why did they do that? Well, they wanted to trick Russian audiences into making real bets in order to steal their money. The Times of India reports that the fake games took place on a farm in the state of Gujarat with 21 farm laborers and unemployed teens who were each paid around 400 rupees or $5 U.S. to impersonate pro cricket players from well known Indian teams. Apparently the farmers live streamed the tournament to YouTube over the course of a couple of weeks and even set up a telegram channel dedicated to the games where they took bets from Russian gamblers located in Tver, France, and Moscow and a bit of red flag for anybody paying attention since the actual league's 2022 season ended in late May. So if you're paying attention, you might say, this isn't kosher. A lot of people didn't know. Even still the farmers managed to trick quite a few folks by setting up 5 HD cameras, halogen lights around the field, sound effects that mimicked the noise from a real crowd. It seemed real. Eventually Indian police busted four of the people running the sham event during the tournament's quarterfinals which were taking delivery of 300,000 rupees for about 3,775 U.S. dollars from Russian betters before they were shut down. Now listen, scamming people out of their hard-earned money is bad. It's bad. There's nothing funny about a dozen farmers pretending to be one of the world's most popular leagues. And yet it's sports. Kind of smart. It's not funny at all. I'm not laughing about this. Not at all. Not funny. Yeah, and yet. This is fantastic in so many different ways and also it's fantastic the fact that we can report this because if you are looking to bet on sports at all, make sure it's in season at least. And make sure you have a reputable booker, I guess. I don't like bookie. Excuse me. I'm like, this is wow. I mean, I thought those stupid phone calls were annoying. I'm like, oh, you're warranties expired. It's like, there's a whole league set up. Wow. Very, very ingenious. It's ingenious. The lengths they went to with the fake jerseys and the commentator. The commentators. I can't wait for the movie. We're like, oh, yeah, I want to bet on this game. Yeah, this is, this is going to make me somebody's like searching around for betting sites like in the shady corners of the internet found a pirated feed and was like, oh, this is too great. I can make so much. But you know what, I wonder if some people made money betting on this. Did they pay out ever? Yeah, the farmers. Well, until they got busted, I guess. But yeah. Yeah, you know, it was fun while it lasted. You know, again, not, not, don't do this. It's not funny. Don't try this at home, but also kudos. I hope they get their stories optioned soon. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So associate producer Dan White from what he says is hot and humid Bristol in the UK wanted to follow up on our AI assisted screening conversation in yesterday's show. Dan says for several years, I worked at the quality assurance program for cancer screening in the NHS. I worked in the cervical screening program, but the principles are broadly the same across all cancer screening services. You don't want a false negative result, but it can in fact be as bad if you encounter a false positive regarding the AI assisted program. Let's say a woman received a false positive result for cervical screening test depending on the severity of the result, she may be referred to a biopsy sample to be taken. This would mean the woman would have to be subject to an ultimately unnecessary invasive medical procedure with very small, but real risks of complications like hemorrhaging, infection, difficulties with future pregnancies in rare cases would be required to undergo a general anesthetic, which is itself has a very small, but non zero risk of complications and or death. Before I scare anyone away from going for a screening test as Dan, I would like to emphasize it is incredibly important. The risks involved in not attending screening massively outweigh the possibility of any complications. Yes, having an AI as an automated second opinion is undoubtedly a useful tool. They need to be continuously trained and corrected when they get it wrong if we are to avoid false results. Yeah, so if anybody didn't listen to that show, you know the point of the study that we talked about was radiologists on their own outperform the AI but radiologists in the AI working in tandem where the radiologists identified screenings first and then the AI would step in if they thought the radiologist didn't identify a positive score that improved at 3.6% so and it reduced false positives, which is to Dan's point a really good thing false positives while screening is important if you're false positive and you get the biopsy and it turns out oh you don't have it that's great news but also now you've had to undergo the risk of the biopsy which is small but still a risk that you wouldn't have had to undergo anyway. Totally. Anyway, thank you Dan for sharing that info with us. Good points. Yeah, thank you Dan really great email and you know thanks to everybody who writes in with questions, comments, thoughts, updates on anything that we talk about on the show please do keep that feedback coming you can email us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com Also thanks to you IAS for being with us today it's been too long my man let folks know where they can keep up with what you're up to lately. Well, I mean if you're looking for me on CNET you're not going to see that anymore I'm not with CNET anymore so go to like Twitter and follow me at IAS or you can go to IAS.tv and if you're doing what I'm working on this week I have no idea I was on DTNS today if you missed it go listen to it again because you just heard it so go to twitter.com slash IAS and you'll know what I'm doing before I do. Well, we're so glad to have you and I can't wait to see what you're going to be doing over the next few months also we have some new bosses to thank today we are on a roll this week everybody we've got Mark, we've got Trevor all just started backing us on Patreon thank you Mark, thank you Trevor and thank you Jacob Yeah, yesterday we're like tomorrow it could be you and Mark, Trevor and Jacob we're like it in fact is me Yeah, so thanks y'all if you'd like to see IAS on more often become a patron you know the more patrons we get the more chance we can we can play around and do cool things reminder there is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet we roll right into it after DTNS closes patreon.com slash DTNS is where you can find out more about that but just a reminder we do the show live if you can join us live we'd love to have you Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern that's 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're 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 frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program