 Coming up on DTNs, Twitter cracks down on sharing images of other people. FIFA uses machine learning to help call off sides. And the real estate boom in the metaverse is upon us. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty. We were just talking about slang from copacetic to mid. Get that longer conversation on good day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNs. Speaking of patrons, big things to our top patrons, including Mark Gibson, Reed Fischler and Michelle Serju. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Finland's National Cybersecurity Center is working to combat the spread of text messages with links to malware called Flubot. Several million messages have been sent containing that link. The messages usually tell the recipient to to click the link in order to listen to the voicemail on Android. The link prompts users to install an app with the malware, which will try to collect financial login and password information. On iOS, the link goes to a website with attempts at fraud. I know this is supposed to be our quick section, but let me tell you a little story. A company once called Facebook once wanted to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra and a wallet called Calibra. And it was all spearheaded by the former head of messenger for Facebook named David Marcus. Well, that stablecoin was changed to be called Diem and then spun out of Facebook altogether. The wallet changed its name to Novi. The parent company Facebook changed its name to Metta. And now David Marcus is leaving. Novi just launched in October without support for Diem. And now Marcus says, quote, my entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it. The end. That was a really good story, Tom. A U.S. National Labor Relations Board judge ordered Google to hand over 71 documents related to Project Vivian. Its efforts to counter union organization at the company. Google sought to withhold the documents from court proceedings related to three employees who claim unfair termination. The employees were activists pushing for a union at Google. Google workers formed a union earlier this year as part of the communications workers of America. Fraunhofer Technology announced the successful implantation of a 3D printed prosthetic eye, not a robotic eye. It doesn't have vision. It's a prosthetic. Fraunhofer's cuttlefish eye system scans the patient's eye socket. So you get a custom fit and color calibrates from the existing eye to create a realistic version that looks like that person's eye. The model is then printed by a company called Fit AG. Fraunhofer worked with a company called Occupy. That's P-E-Y-E, as you might expect, which will market the system. Patient Steve Verz said it made him feel more confident, adding, if I can't spot the difference, I know other people won't spot the difference either. A clinical trial among 40 patients will be conducted next to determine how it compares to existing handmade prosthetic eyes. Uber announced it will wind down its food delivery service. Uber eats in Hong Kong, not everywhere, but in Hong Kong by the end of the year due to slower than expected growth. The sleeves deliver and Food Panda is the two main food delivery services in Hong Kong. Uber says the company is more committed than ever to its ride-hailing service in the city. All right, let's talk a little bit about an update to Twitter's privacy information policy. That's the one that prevents sharing personal information without consent. The anti-doxing privacy policy will now prohibit using media depicting private individuals without consent. In other words, photos and videos now part of the anti-doxing rules. Twitter will not proactively screen for this behavior. They will respond to requests from people depicted in the media or that person's authorized representative who say, I didn't give permission, please have this taken down. In those cases, Twitter will remove the media and depending on the situation, they may take further action like downranking the tweet, maybe requiring it to be deleted or even permanently suspending the user. Now, there are exceptions to this policy. If you're considered a public figure, the policy mostly doesn't apply to you unless the media is being done to harass, intimidate or use fear to silence you. An exception may be made if the media is considered to be in the public interest or add value to public discourse. Even if you're not a public figure, you're caught up in a newsworthy event, they may say, no, we're going to let it up. For instance, if the image is being used on TV and in newspapers, that will be an indication they're like, yeah, this is newsworthy. We're not going to remove it. So let's get a few things out of the way right up top. The First Amendment or Free Speech Law does not apply. This is Twitter's private platform. It can make its own rules. We can disagree with them, but there's not a legal aspect of this. Second, yes, this means Twitter is deciding the line. That's fraught with peril, but I don't think you should jump to the conclusion that you're going to need a signed release for every photo or video you post to Twitter from now on. I would expect posting will feel no different for almost all of your images under these rules. It's the edge cases that are going to be the interesting ones. The infrequent, but notable situation where Twitter believes that a piece of media fell under the policy and a large enough group of people disagree, and then there's a public outcry about it. That's where all of these kinds of policies eventually run into controversy. So let's ask a better question. How likely is this new policy to cause a problem? Not could it, but will it? And how much of that kind of problem is acceptable in order to make it easier to stop harassment? I'm before we discuss this, I want to point out this isn't about revenge porn or violence. There are were already rules on Twitter banning those specific cases. This is about the the middle ground cases. There was a police officer who was now lost their job where they were drunk or he was drunk off his butt at a wedding and it was videotaped and he was saying some pretty racist stuff, you know, to make a long story short. And he ended up losing his job over this because of this video that was posted, but he's not a celebrity. Could he go to Twitter and say, hey, take this down? It's, you know, I'm in a bad light. Now, you know, Twitter now has to, well, is that newsworthy? Is he enough of a public person because he's a police officer that we need to lead this up? It just creates a gray area for them that is going to be untenable for a lot of folks. That's a great example, because the moment it's posted, he's not newsworthy. And yes, like he could probably say, hey, I don't give permission, take this down. But at internet time, that thing has become news by the time Twitter gets around to take it down, right? That that is now on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, you know, it's everywhere. And then Twitter might say, well, it is newsworthy now. Sorry, we're not taking it down. Twitter is also notorious for allowing a lot of stuff to stay up that some people are upset about, you know, and I don't know. I don't have to go into like the details of some of that stuff. But I I I don't think that the privacy, the privacy policies, but also policies that that that help people and protect people have been in place on Twitter in any sense that made sense to a lot of people. Sure, Twitter said, here's what we're going to do. Here's how we deal with these sorts of things. Here's how we deal with harassment. We care about this stuff. All great. But I don't think it was really ever something that made made the the most of the people on the platform happy because they're just it was just it was very willy-nilly. Yeah, I think Twitter is going to have to be very, very careful to not pick favorites when they're you know, when they're enforcing, you know, these new rules that they have in place because you're going to get the left saying, why are you taking our stuff down or leaving our stuff up but not taking the right now? You're going to have the right saying, why are you leaving our stuff up? Not taking, you know, the left stuff now. So it's you're going to get that. They've got to be very careful in how they mitigate through this mess that they have now created for themselves. Yeah, so there's 98 percent of the photos that go up on Twitter. Nobody's going to care about, right? There's a section of these that I think the law is aimed at where someone's like, oh, yeah, I'm in the I they took a photo of me out and about and they're using it and making fun of me and I don't like it. Please take it down. And nobody's going to be like, yeah, it's not newsworthy. It's just you don't you don't like your image being out there. That's fine. There's there's those cases. There's the stuff that's not controversial. There's the one where most of us would agree like, yeah, no, I can see you saying like, please don't put that up there. It's that sliver and that's where everybody's going to be shouting louder than the number of images that it refers to. Like that that one should stay up. No, that one should stay down. And to your point, Sarah, for everyone that caused controversy and people were saying, you should be taking that down. There were other people who would have got it just as upset and shouted loud. If you had taken it down and that you're going to you're going to see that you're going to see that happen. My my question is, are we going to see it happen a lot? I don't think we will. But it only has to happen once or twice for everybody to decide that it's a problem. Yeah. All right, let's let's move on to some some antitrust behavior. Rob, what's going on here? Well, if you are one of the people disappointed that MetaBot Giffy to add to its offerings like Facebook and Instagram. Good news, they have to sell it. The UK's competition and market authority ordered Meta to sell Giffy. The first time the regulators attempted to unwind a completed acquisition by a tech company, MetaBot Giffy back a year and a half ago. The CMA found three harms concerns that other platforms might be required to provide more data in order to access gifts. A reduction in competition in the display ad market since Giffy no longer competes with Meta selling ads. And finally, the concern that Meta could deny competitors access to gifts. That's right. Access to gifts is now a legal justification for antitrust law in the UK. Go back until your 1997 GeoCities under construction site self that the CMA said the only remedy to these harms was Meta selling Giffy. Meta has argued that Giffy did not have a viable ad business on its own and that it has promised the same access to Giffy's API. Meta is considering all options and may appeal the decision. Oh, they'll appeal the decision. Oh, they're definitely. I will guarantee you that. And for those worried about the folks at Giffy, you should know that while this investigation has been going on, Meta has not been allowed to transfer Giffy employees into Facebook or anywhere else within Meta. Giffy has has remained as it was when they acquired them kind of in stasis. Meta is paying the bills for Giffy to operate. But otherwise it's kind of waiting to see how this all shakes out. Giffy was a small business and it had not been profitable and which is not unusual for small startups like that. So there's a question of whether Giffy survives this having been pulled into Meta and then having to be shoved back out again. I don't know. I mean, I kind of forgot about the Meta buying Giffy thing from a year and a half ago, but Giffy is something that I use in Slack. It's a it's a plug in that you. Yeah, it's the premier search engine for Giff's, right? And and I, you know, Giffy to me is like, oh, that's just the way that I, you know, tell Rob that, you know, I I liked what he said with like a funny person dancing. I don't know. I mean, Giffy is pretty ubiquitous. And the idea that Meta can't buy Giffy is, I guess a bummer from Meta, but definitely a bummer for Giffy. Because I can't buy, but bought it and now has to sell it again. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not working out. But yeah, I mean, Giffy as at standalone business, like, I don't think that's going to work. This is one where this is the the antitrust thing you want to go after Facebook on. There seems like there's so many other things that they could have targeted. Whereas, you know, here's I like using Giffy. There's no way that I'm paying money to use Giffy. I'm just not. I'll save the 10 or 15 different, you know, Giff's, you know, to my hard driver, to my phone and just paste the same ones over and over again before I would go give a company money to do that. So when I look at it, it's like, you know, they made this purchase not necessarily to make money off of it, just because well, they had so many of their users that were using it. Let's just buy it and make it easier on them to, you know, to improve our user experience. And like if they have to sell this out, I don't know that Giffy's going to be able to stand on his own. They were struggling when Facebook bottom. I don't see why they wouldn't go right back to struggling if they were to push him out of that. But that might be my short sightedness and looking at the viability of the business. But I'm not seeing a standalone Giffy. Just oh, yeah, I've got to have that. You know, it's not like Facebook won't do something else to where you can have gifts in your or or maybe the question is, OK, who's going to buy Giffy now? Right. That that to me is the big question, because because this is this is a seminal moment. Right. This is a moment where a regulatory authority didn't say, well, you're kind of hurting competition. So we're going to play some restrictions on you, Comcast. So you can't raise your rates because you bought NBC. No, no, this is like you shouldn't. You're buying this has harmed the market. And so this is a sea change in how regulators are approaching these big companies. But who do they sell it to? Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? You know, like, who can you sell it to where it also isn't going to? Who can you sell it to? Who wants it? Who can pay for it? Who also won't hurt? Who isn't also owned by Metta? Yeah. Well, or or a huge advertising player like Google, right? Or even Amazon. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Send us your who should buy Giffy. Rob's not going to buy it. He's made that very clear. So tell us who it should be. I don't know who it should be. I look at this and like I said earlier, this is the company. This is the part of the company that you're going after for antitrust. It seems like there's just other low hanging fruit that it would have made more sense that they're like, we can we can justify this. And if we get this go and then that helps us build cases for other things. Maybe it's like we're really concerned that company X cannot use gifts properly. Sell this portion of your company. If other companies cannot access Sam Elliott tipping his hat, where is the United Kingdom going to be? Well, send us your your ideas. If you would like to buy Giffy feedback at technewshow.com, well, we'll pass it along to the proper people and let us know. What else you'd like to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. We get great suggestions in there. Submit your stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. The Wall Street Journal reports on investment companies buying up digital land in virtual platforms that they hope will one day become the metaverse. Sandbox and Decentraland are two examples of simulated worlds where people can do things like virtual shop, attend virtual concerts and the like. Republic Realm is the biggest spender, dropping $4.3 million on land in the platform at Sandbox. That's the largest purchase to date, according to nonfungible.com, who keeps up on these sorts of things. Republic Realm bought the land from Atari and plans to co-develop it with Atari and by develop, they mean create digital places for people's avatars to go. That could be a virtual casino, maybe just a place to hang out with friends. There are malls, skyscrapers, private islands all under development here. You can buy them, you can lease them, you can rent space, just like real estate. Virtual platforms even have zooming rules of what can be placed there, you know, like an HOA. Ownership is tracked through NFTs, though. So that's where it becomes a little bit different. These are also risky investments, not just because the platform might fail, but because the transactions are usually done in cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, which can be volatile, there are many others. Republic Realm is diversifying its purchases across 19 different virtual worlds in an effort to combat that a little bit. Some of this may sound familiar, though, to folks who participated in Second Life. Remember Second Life founded back in 2007? Second Life founder, Philip Rosdale, has some advice for the builders of the next metaverse. He knows what he's talking about. He emphasized that the need for identity management, moderation, preparing for bad actors, all come into play here. Rosdale told Time.com, quote, we don't have identity systems yet that would enable strong governance. He also noted that barrier to entry, if access requires equipment, like VR headsets, that people might not be able to be willing to wear regularly or have, you know, the options to do so. Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. Adoption is huge for whatever the so-called metaverse ends up being, right? If you're going to jump into Sandbox and start hanging out with your friends at the virtual lounge that you, you know, spent a hundred Ethereum on, you want it to be easy. And as much as people love VR, Sarah, I know you love the Quest. Would you call it easy? Like at a moment's notice, you just grab it and pop it on your head? No, you got to fit it a little. You got to settle in like, okay, I'm going to do my thing now. You definitely have to be like, I'm going to go do this thing now for a while. Yeah, so I think that that is one of the bigger barriers to entry that I don't think we hear people talking about, which is how are you accessing this? Because if it's on your phone or your laptop, more people will do it. But that loses a lot of the attraction that you would get from augmented reality or virtual reality. So we need those devices to come along. So on the on the tech, John, which came out today, this was one of our main topic stories. We talked about a Canadian company, tokens.com. I believe that bought some virtual real estate in Decentraland. I think they spent like 2.4 over 2.4 million dollars for about 6,000 or 6,100 square feet. So, man, it's like, man, real estate prices even that don't actually exist in the real world are just a little pricier than L.A. Yeah, so there's that, but this is a thing. You know, I know someone well who actually built a company to farm in Second Life. It was a company that had six or seven employees at one point. And this is what they did. They literally would go out, get real estate and then build up, you know, malls and, you know, an auto like there was a, you know, a huge, you know, car company, not car company, but like a, you know, a car dealership in a virtual world where you could literally go and start a conversation about buying cars in this world. So this is. And they would make money because there was some sort of, you know, some sort of you would eventually go to the car dealership and buy a car. Right. And the company would make money. So I look at it like this, you know, metaverses coming. These virtual worlds are coming. I mean, they're already here, but they're going to become, you know, commonplace and mainstay. This is where people are going to shop. So just like yesterday was Cyber Monday, we all got on, you know, our internet browser of choice and went and looked at stores and purchase stuff. I can see a time when, you know, you just, you've got your headset sitting right there next to your monitor. You throw your headset on. And now you're just walking through the space and visiting these stores. I absolutely see that happening. So this is a, it's a real thing. And, you know, I don't know that I want to miss out on it. I'm not ready to go buy virtual real estate at this point. But, you know, this is definitely, in my opinion, going to be a thing. We're going to hear many more stories about big companies that are going out and let's just buy up this land just in case this hits. And we're positioned to where we can resell it later or we can put people, you know, we're the mall, but we're going to put the tenants in the mall and then they're going to pay us. I see those things coming. You can't tell which one's Friendster, which one's MySpace and which one's Facebook at this point, right? But, but the, the mice, the sense I get is, is one of these is, we just don't know which one it is yet. And it might even change names or change hands a few times before that. But one of them will probably arise. And the other thing is, man, did Mark Zuckerberg pull off a magic trick? These were already in existence. Sandbox and Decentraland predate Mark Zuckerberg talking about the metaverse, changing the name of Facebook's parent company to be meta. But now everybody thinks this is all because of him. And it's not, but the investment is the investment in these companies wasn't happening before, because it was a little bit of a harder sell. Now suddenly everybody's talking about metaverse because Mark Zuckerberg talked about it. And now everybody is dropping $4.3 million on virtual land in Sandbox. Maybe not everybody's dropping $4.3 million, but everybody's dropping money. There's more investors moving into this because it's got the buzz, right? Absolutely. And the companies that are doing this, you can almost look at them like angel investors. They're just we're going to hedge our bets across all of these platforms because one of them is going to hit. Let's make sure we're there. Well, I mean, I don't know. When I think of something like going to my local pet store versus Amazon, you know, it's like, eh, I probably save more money with Amazon. It's a it's a lot easier for me. You know, there are so many reasons that, you know, that Amazon just being like the largest version of how, you know, a lot of people have decided to buy differently online. But if that was a place, Amazon isn't a place to me. If that was a place where I'm kind of like, OK, I'm going to go to like my fun place and buy things, but also interact with other people. And and there's, you know, there's a lot more VR kind of stuff going on. I know that sort of like a weird description but if that can if if if if that can be pulled off by many companies, then then we really start to change the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. And that that's the idea. That's the idea of how this you need the device that's easy to pop on and get in there. You need everybody. You need the infrastructure built. You need the protections in place, which is what Rosdale is talking about. Thing with Second Life is they had a subscription to join Second Life. So it kept a lot of the bad actors out because it was costly to get in. So there's a there's a lot that has to happen, but I think you're right. It's going to be a real thing now over to me with sports. Technology could do a lot to help referees, umpires and judges in sport, but sport is notoriously resistant to letting tech replace humans and those sorts of things. Keep in mind, instant replay came along in the 1960s and it took about a half century for it to become normal in sports. So it's notable that FIFA, the folks who govern football, a.k.a. soccer worldwide, will test semi automated off sides detection at the FIFA Arab Cup this week. We will definitely not try to explain off sides to you. Suffice to say it's a rule that prevents people from camping down by the goal and enforcing it involves knowing whether multiple people were in front or behind the ball on certain parts of the field when someone kicks the ball, touches the ball or puck and hockey or whatever. So it's complicated. There's a lot of pieces to knowing whether it happened or not. Semi automated off sides is going to use 10 to 12 cameras collecting 29 data points on each player on the pitch 50 times per second. You're talking about 11, well, 22, right, with two teams. It will specifically focus on the moment the ball is played and which body part is closest to the goal when that happens. When the system spots off sides, it'll send an alert to a video assistant referee, a.k.a. the VAR, who is a human being and that human will review it to make the call or not. Now, the VAR was already doing this. They were reviewing video for things like off sides and other things during the matches off sides is one of the most complex ones to review. So it was taking a long time. Sometimes there was controversy about whether it had been missed or not. So having a machine learning system to help do the sifting of like, hey, you you should look at this one. Don't look at all of them. Look at this one and reduce that complexity, possibly leading to more accurate calls is pretty attractive. The system has been tested in England, Spain and Germany before. And if it does improve speed and accuracy of off sides calls, FIFA is thinking it might implement it at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. So I'm a fan, you know, I was an athlete at one point in my life. I want the calls to be right. And, you know, I've heard those arguments about, well, you know, there's there's nuance to the game. You know, it's a judgment call. No, I don't want that. I want the rules to apply the same way every single time. So I know what I'm dealing with. I don't want this umpire to have one strike zone. This umpire to think that this is, you know, that this is off sides. This one wasn't off sides. I want the rules to be the same all the time. If this gets us closer to that, I'm all forward as long as the implementation of it speeds things up and not slows things down. Yeah, it makes it more accurate. Right. I think because, because the argument about referees is that, yo, he's a homer, uh, they're, they're, they're favoring the home team or, or she's against us. She, she just doesn't ever like us. Her calls always go against us having machines doing it. We'll take that out of the equation. Right. I mean, granted, there could be bias in the machine learning algorithm against a particular team, I suppose we've seen that happen in other situations, but, but it definitely reduces it. Right. So, uh, so I think it's generally a good thing. Like you say, as long as it is in fact more accurate, which they're testing it, uh, and doesn't slow things down. I mean, I as, as somebody who, who came along after the 1960s when incident replay was implemented, I have never known another way to, you know, when, when there's a call, people are like, hmm, I don't know about that. And yes, uh, depending on the sport and, and over the years rules have changed a little bit, but the idea that it's like, well, the rough makes a call, but if it's, if it's questionable, let's look, let's look back at it. You know, let, let's roll the tape. And that has always been something that, you know, I've, I've been familiar with, and I, I feel like, like to your point, Rob, the more of that, the better, because it's just the fact, but, um, but it, it does get complicated depending on what sport you're talking about. Yeah. I look at tennis where they have, you know, absolutely implemented stuff to get the line calls. Correct. And it's brilliant. It works. It's quick. You don't have people arguing before it was a judgment call. You would have, you know, tennis players arguing with, you know, the umpire on whether or not something was in or out. Now, what would John McEnroe be with, with a computer telling him about the line calls? He'd have nobody to argue with. Just fist, fist it. Actually, John McEnroe probably would have been like, come on PC. Yeah, you know what? The computer is wrong, clearly wrong. Look, that's ridiculous. He would have. Yeah. But tennis is generally better with the, you know, with the eagle eye, it is getting, it's, it's, it's way better. So I'm for it when it works and speeds things up. It's true. Like, you know, and to do all the refs out there, you know, I, I really appreciate what you do as well. I just need you to master the system. Just, you know, make your job easier. Yeah, it's, it's the AI. It'll make your job easier. Um, if you have any thoughts on anything that we talked about on this show, anything we might talk about on a future show or anything in between, please do send it our way. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thank you in advance. We'd also like to, uh, extend a special thanks to Steven Ivy. Steven Ivy is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Steven. Yeah, Steven. You can start your road to being like Steven today at patreon.com slash DTNS. Indeed. Also, thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Rob, where could people keep up with the rest of your work? Well, thanks for having me and folks can find me, um, at Rob Dunwood on pretty much every platform and check out my new show, The Tech John. It actually airs on Tuesday, so it came out today. And, uh, we actually talked about some of the things we talked today about in, you know, in, in this show. So, uh, you know, go check us out. It's a great tech show from a different perspective. Indeed it is. Well, on this very show, we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Put it on your calendar and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Hope you have enjoyed this program.