 Coming up on DTNS, tricked into paying after a free trial, there ought to be a law and a bipartisan group of US senators want to pass one, plus another attempt at making nuclear fusion work and do we need a blockchain for our mobile phone bill? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just discussing smart assistance and whether they can help you contact ghosts and also more practical things like how to find out why they activated when you didn't need them to get that wider conversation on our expanded show. Good day. Internet become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sony will open up a beta program for PlayStation 5 to users over the age of 18 in the US, Canada, Japan, the UK, Germany and France. Microsoft began allowing Xbox owners to test upcoming software releases in its Insider program since late 2016. Speaking of Microsoft, they announced that CEO Satya Nadella has been unanimously voted as the new chair of the company's board, replacing independent director and former semantics CEO John Thompson. Probably forgot, Thompson was even the chair. Thompson joined Microsoft's board in 2012, replaced Bill Gates as the Microsoft chair in 2014, which was the same day Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO. Microsoft will also begin rolling out its Fluid framework, which allows blocks of office content to live independently across the web in Microsoft Teams this summer. It'll start with a collaborative notes app that syncs in real time with Outlook invites. Microsoft will also update its whiteboard app to serve as a canvas for fluid components. Russia's lower house of the Duma, its parliament, passed legislation that requires foreign online platforms with more than 500,000 daily users in Russia to establish local branches or a legal entity within the country. Non-compliant sites will be designated as so on search engines potentially being excluded from search and possibly even banned from advertising in Russia. Amazon launched the Amazon App Store Small Business Accelerator program, which will reduce the cut that Amazon takes from developers from 30% to 20% for those earning less than $1 million per year. Developers in the program will also receive an AWS credit equal to 10% of their revenue. All right, let's talk a little more about subscriptions. We mentioned subscriptions at the top of the show. Justin, there's some legislation being proposed. Oh, Tom, these politicians, they keep playing politics. A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators Brian Shatz, John Thune, Raphael Warnock and John Kennedy proposed a bill Wednesday called the Unsubscribe Act. Companies would be required to make terms and conditions more transparent when offering a free trial. It would also require a clear and easy way to cancel the trial subscription, including requiring a customer to be able to unsubscribe in the same way that they subscribed. Many trials let you easily subscribe online, but then require a phone call to cancel, for example. This bill would prohibit that practice. It would also require a clear notice of when the trial is ending before charging the customer and would disallow automatic transfer of a contract longer than one month. In other words, if you signed up for a monthly subscription, they can't automatically switch you to a multi-month or a year subscription to charge you. Companion legislation is also being introduced in the United States House of Representatives. First of all, it's bipartisan. It's got companion legislation. This feels like something that's probably going to end up becoming a law. It feels like it's got a chance. I'm not finding too much that I don't like about this. I think subscription obviously is becoming the new way of doing things. It's much more common. Obviously this would also apply to magazines and things that are more traditional, but you're talking about game subscriptions, video subscriptions, stuff like that. Yeah, I want it to be the rule that, hey, if you can take the subscription online, you can let me cancel it online. Don't make me jump through hoops to do that. I like the idea of saying it's only fair to let people know when the free trial is ending so they have a chance to decide. I understand that these are not great for the person running the business, but as a person who runs a business that's partly built on subscriptions, I think you do better when you treat your customers better than you do otherwise. So maybe that's an argument for not needing a law, but I don't know. I think this one's okay with me. Yeah, me too. I can't think of any specific example recently, but there are subscriptions that have free trials all over the place. I sometimes get to a certain point in the, yes, I want to try this out, free trial stage, and then I go, you know what, this is going to be weird. It's going to get weird, the unsubscription thing, and payment upfront, and they're asking too much and there are all these boxes to uncheck. And so I just back out of stuff because I know that the company is going to fight me tooth and nail to keep me subscribed. What I didn't realize was even going on was something like signing up for a monthly subscription and then getting bait and switched into something annual that you didn't sign up for. That should not be allowed. And I think that that is a very aggressive practice that is probably not as commonly seen in this world, but the reality is that this is kind of where we are headed in terms of our entire economy. Subscriptions are something that have proven tremendously popular and therefore are also going to be abused because we just kind of want things and direct debit from our accounts or credit cards have made it very, very easy to do so. Tom to your point, it's bipartisan. It's got a great chance of passing. Would that it were so simple, my friend? There's a million reasons why this can or will get either sideline or never see the light of a vote depending on various different circumstances, including just the schedule by which things are going to happen. One last thought here. So you're saying there's a chance. Sure. Yeah, there's a chance. There's a lot that needs to go on. We'll see whether or not this can make it past the gates. One last thing on this. There is a element that is directly tied to politicians and one of the reasons why this might get either watered down or not see the light of day of a vote is that small donor, small dollar donations, many of which are recurring or subscription quote unquote based through Winred and Act Blue, the officially sanctioned websites that handle small dollar donations for the Republican and Democratic Party are also going to face a lot of these questions. So what is good for the goose, be it Netflix or the Wall Street Journal will be good for the gander every single one of these politicians reelection campaign. So look for the amendment that exempts political subscriptions from this quite possibly. Yeah. Well, Gorilla mobile is launching a mobile service in Singapore in September with no contracts. $25 plan gets you 100 minutes, 100 text messages and 20 gigabytes of data. That sounds pretty normal, right? This is something that we're familiar with. No contract plans. Pretty common. Even the idea of rolling over or giving a refund for unused data or tax or minutes, not unusual. But that's not exactly what Gorilla mobile is doing. Instead, unused data is going to be converted into a cryptocurrency called Gorilla Go tokens. The non expiring tokens can be used for international direct dialing, roaming data or even shared with other members of your company, family or friends. If you're a customer of this Gorilla mobile started originally developed its blockchain system called switchback to support a travel SIM card folks that are on the go. The idea was that after a trip you could convert your unused data because that happens sometimes into tokens and then use those tokens for other things. But then a lot of people weren't traveling. So Gorilla mobile switched to focusing on the local market in Singapore. Would like to expand though. The company hopes to expand into Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Longer term looking into Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as well. Yeah, I feel like the knee jerk reaction here is to be like, oh, so they took a, you know, a rollover credit minute and slapped blockchain on it to make it popular and that very well maybe all this is. But I suspect there's something more behind the scenes that makes it easier for them to operate. Like there are some definite advantages to being able to plug in a blockchain and say, oh, you handle all that ledger stuff so we don't have to build a system to do it. And that may be all this is too. I'm not sure. It certainly is attention catching to see somebody like, yeah, our rollover credit system is going to be handled by our own internal token. I can't wait until Disney dollars are run on a blockchain. Yeah, right. I mean, that's happening. Isn't it? I mean, I think, and I think that will happen if, if what's going on here is grill mobile saying, look how much we save on like transaction stuff that the company's eating anyway, you know, for our in store credit system that we already have. The question, yeah, the question will be whether Disney feels that makes a, it helps it to make a big deal out of being blockchain or you just find out later like, oh yeah, they switched to a blockchain a long time ago. Exactly. Yeah, it's just in some Q4 earnings that tremendous savings. A magical savings. Google translate. It's a go to for people looking to find out what a word or phrase means in another language and now the information sources say Google's working on a project called Tivoli, T-I-V-O-L-I, which would put a conversational AI in Google search. So you could actually learn a foreign language by doing a search. It uses Google's Lambda or language model for dialogue application. Google demonstrated that at IO last month, if that rings a bell. That's the model that can understand conversation cues better and have a smoother conversation because of that. Right now it looks like Tivoli would just use text. So you'd be doing a search like translate this and it would be like, oh, this is the translation. Would you like to, you know, engage in a back and forth to learn something? But Google wants to, according to the information, integrate Tivoli into its voice assistant, which I could absolutely see like doing some conversational stuff or even YouTube. One example the information gave was a YouTube language quiz. You would watch the quiz and record yourself responding, giving answers, and then Tivoli would analyze the recording and give you a rating. Let you know how you did and how you're progressing. Tivoli is expected to launch sometime this year. We don't have an exact date on this, but keep an eye out by the end of the year. Google translate to me is a standard. You know, I don't think I have not been on any kind of vacation where there's a foreign language involved in which that was not a major, major, major part of it. And I think in terms of people who I know are focused on learning those languages, Duolingo is great in terms of reading comprehension, but nothing really beats being able to speak the language back and forth. This seems like it would be a reasonable facsimile. Yeah, the YouTube example stands out to me because I use Duolingo. I've been using Duolingo for years, but I kind of practice French when I when I'm in the mood or I have some spare time. And there are some limited, you know, turn your mic on and speak back and and you get a, you know, a score based on how well you're doing. It's also repetitive in a way that an app like Duolingo is just going to have to be the desktop and the mobile versions are slightly different. But it's, there are certain things, you know, that that you miss a little bit, even though you're always learning. I like the idea of, for example, if a you if a YouTube video were able to using the Tivoli AI functionality, be able to if I granted permission, you know, to look at my camera and be able to, you know, give a given expression. What if what if the lesson was, can Sarah understand when she's receiving bad news, that kind of stuff like that, that conversational stuff, you know, I'm kind of just spitballing here, but I would love, I would love that to be a little bit more because that just becomes that much more of a real world application where you're like this is actually really helpful because there's so much of those cues that really do exist. Yeah, just having more options for this kind of thing is important to me too. I use Duolingo pretty much every day and your mileage varies depending on what language you're learning like some of them like Spanish and French are like super like polished, but some of the languages don't get as much attention. And so I'm always looking for supplements. And this could be a great supplement. It's also Google. So this could be like Google Translate, which over the years has gotten better and better to the point that I just rely on it. It's always there and it's gotten better at understanding context and everything. Or this could be something where Google throws it in there and then it just languishes and, you know, then eventually goes away. So I'm not counting on it, but I'm very curious to see it roll out. I love that. That's my new slogan for Google. Google. Don't count on it. Maybe Google shrug. Maybe maybe it'll come but it'll be named five things before you really ever see it in practical use. That is weird. It translate never had that translate was maybe that's the signal as soon as they change a name, you know, it's over. Yeah, if it keeps its name, it's going to be fine. All next week, folks, it's accessibility week on Daily Tech News show. Every day we're going to feature a guest that will come on to talk about accessibility and technology from testing products to developing UIs to more starting next week, Monday, June 21. So mark your calendars. Tell your friends if they're into accessibility. We got some great guests lined up some great topics. We will be doing that all next week. United States Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand has revamped the data protection actually introduced last year co-sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown. It would establish a federal agency to oversee data privacy in the country. The new version of the bill adds a provision requiring the data protection agency to review any merger that would affect the data of 50,000 people or more. It also adds an office to monitor and possibly penalize high risk data practices like algorithms, biometric data and data from children or other vulnerable groups. This is not a bipartisan bill, however. Other proposals would add new enforcement powers regarding data to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. And a bipartisan proposal introduced last month from Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Kennedy, Joe Manchin and Richard Burr called the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act would put requirements on companies to give users more control over their data and let them opt out of tracking and collection. I'll look at Senator John Kennedy getting a double mention on DTNS today. Who would have thunk it? I don't have a lot of confidence that Senator Gillibrand is going to have any more luck this time around with the Data Protection Act than she did last time. Also, I'm not a big fan of, like, let's set up another agency. I could see maybe expanding the Federal Trade Commission and saying, you know, let's give them a little more oomph to be able to look at this. But I actually prefer that last one that you mentioned where you're like, no, let's just make a law. We have enforcement agencies already. Let's make a law that says you got to give people control over their data. I would love that. I would love, I think even more stringent than this, that's, you know, data portability acts and things like that. I think those are necessary and worth debating anyway. We are in a very strange time for these kinds of laws because you have some of the biggest power players, most notably Facebook, spending a tremendous amount of money, both in terms of lobbying and in terms of just retail advertising, not even just in D.C. But also on just average television shows saying, please regulate us. We're asking you for rate. Isn't it time somebody made a law peeping gold scamps like us in line, which tends to lead me to the question of how much of this is regulatory capture? How much of this is setting up unrealistic lines? And I would say something like an agency that would affect any company with the data of 50,000 or more people, which you could take to mean 50,000 total that have ever interacted with that service is a very low bar that tends to make me a little bit wary that it would favor gigantic companies that hoover a tremendous amount of data. Let's say our Facebooks, our Googles, our, you know, TikToks, blah, blah, blah, but would be very hard if there were other regulations to have newer players get into the game, which is ultimately I think what the biggest bipartisan question is, are these companies too powerful? Not necessarily is collecting data wrong or bad, but once they have so much of it, is it too much of a potential problem to bear? So I'm curious to see where these go. I agree with you that Kirsten Gillibrands is probably DOA, and I would say that the bipartisan one is something that is a little bit more of a shock. Yeah, I'm with you that it is important to remember that when Facebook says, yeah, we've come around, we need regulation, it's Facebook saying, please create regulation that leaves us as we are. Let's us do something that's easy, but stops competition from being able to rise up and easily combat us because, you know, they easily can. We take data so seriously, we think every company should put $500 million in an escrow account or they collect a single bit. Right. And we've done it already because we won't even miss it. By the way, while we're on bipartisan senators, that conversation topic that so frequently comes up a group of bipartisan US senators proposed a 25% tax credit for investments in semiconductor manufacturing as Congress works to increase US chip production. This is also a pet project of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as part of his bid to create investment to combat some of China's advantages. All right, we'll keep an eye on that as it works its way towards possibly becoming a law. Nuclear fusion. Let's talk about that instead. It's a promising idea. It would fuse atoms together rather than splitting them apart as current nuclear fission reactors do. Fusion cools quickly. So there's no risk of meltdown. Its byproduct is an inert gas helium. You know, make your voice sound funny, but otherwise it doesn't have a whole lot of implications. And also some tritium, which has a short half life and is consumed by the reactions as well. So you don't build up a lot of it. And you don't need enriched materials. So there's not a risk of nuclear proliferation either. Nuclear fusion is what makes the sun shine. A lot of people think man, nuclear fusion would solve so many things less pollution, low cost energy. How can we do it? Well, that's the trick. Canada's General Fusion, which had an infusion of some cash from Jeff Bezos, is going to build a large scale nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Cullum, Oxfordshire, England. The UK Atomic Energy Authority operates a campus there, which has multiple nuclear fusion projects underway, including the joint European Taurus or JET and the MAST upgrade. So General Fusion is going to join that campus. General Fusion, however, uses a different technology than most of these products. They use something called magnetized target fusion. It uses a superheated plasma of hydrogen, injects it into a cylinder of liquid metal, and then pneumatic pistons compress the plasma until the atoms fuse together, generating heat. The heat boils water to drive a steam turbine, and then like most ways of generating power, that steam turbine can generate electricity. General Fusion's reactor will be 70% the size of a commercial reactor, and it is only demonstration. It's not going to generate power for the grid. This is just to see if they can make it work. General Fusion hopes to have it up and running by 2025. Fusion, if you're like, well, why hasn't someone done this before? Well, they're not for lack of trying. Fusion's been 20 years away from being practical as an energy generating technology since the 1950s. That's the joke. It's just 20 years away, 20 years later, still 20 years away. Hard to get it to put more energy out than you put in. That's the problem. You can make it work, but it's usually at a deficit, which is not what you want from a power plant, right? One of the highest profile examples is an international effort called ITER, I-T-E-R, being built in southern France. It's a truly international cooperative effort. China, the United States, Russia, India, the EU, South Korea, and Japan are all cooperating on ITER, but it's not expected to work effectively until after 2035. It has constant cost overruns. A lot of private companies have been hoping to get nuclear fusion working before then, and General Fusion seems to be among the people who follow this closely. One of the more likely to be able to do that if anybody can do it at all. Yeah, I mean, if you've got a target date of 2025 to say, see, look, we did it. It works. I would hope. Yeah, it's not another. And in 20 years, we'll be able to add this to a power grid somewhere and save everybody money and make the earth better. But yeah, it's promising that we'd be that much closer to a working product in under five years. Certainly so. And I think the idea of clean energy is something that or at least cleaner energy than we have now is something that is such top of mind that you're going to get a lot of money in it. I mean, if you look at the cycle of these kinds of scientific researches or trends, they tend to be dominated by gigantic infusions of cash. And right now we have not only a government friendly appetite for it, but also a lot of billionaires that really want to spend money on big gigantic ideas because big gigantic ideas. They feel kind of had their legacy. So I think it's a very curious time for where this is going. Yeah, Jeff Bezos obviously would like to live on a planet that isn't constantly warming, I assume like most of us do. But also Jeff Bezos would like to be known as the guy who helped make that happen, right? So if you've got a few hundred million, you can sink into General Fusion as one of those bets. That's why you're going to see folks like him doing that. And good. The more of those bets we have, the more chance that one of them pans out and becomes the thing that actually brings nuclear fusion into practicality because it has the promise. It's just trying to figure out the trick of making it generate more energy than you put into it. Once somebody solves that, then we're on our way. It's just refinements after that. Can I just say this though? And this might sound ignorant and everybody can email me and tell me I'm stupid. But like, I don't trust anything that has a deadline or a projection longer than a year from now. If it's 2025, it might as well be 2055 and it might as well be 5,050. I feel like once you get outside of a year, maybe two. Maybe because I guess they announce Avengers movies two years out. That's when I'm like, for real? I don't know. I don't know. I might not put it quite so so bleakly, but I think you're right to be like, yeah, once you're a couple of years out, especially with nuclear fusion. Whereas I just mentioned the joke has always been it's 20 years away. It's like, yeah, that's great. That's great. I'm glad you're excited. I will check in in 2025 and see where you're at. I was actually looking through the FAQ over at Eider.org just to, you know, what do they have to say about their project? You know, because so many countries are involved and there were more than one reference about, you know, later this century. And in the second half of the century where I'm like, okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. I might not be here, but you know, best of luck, everyone. It's it's sort of by the way, let's just hope that that was an old copy from 1970. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, another 20 years. Let's attack another 20 years. Sorry, we're a little bit behind. Leica, you may be familiar with like cameras, pretty high end stuff. Well, Leica announced its first self branded smartphone, the lights phone one exclusively on SoftBank in Japan and launching in July for 187,920 yen. It's about $1,700 US. The phone basically a rebranded sharp aqueous R6. If you remember the R6 specs, they're pretty much exactly the same, although Leica has added its own red badge and a magnetic lens cap to the devices one inch 20 megapixel rear sensor and 240 Hertz 6.6 inch OLED display. So this is a smartphone that is basically a most most beautiful camera you can buy on the market. If you're a Leica person, you might be into this. Yeah, I mean, people love a Leica, don't they? It just it has a magical brand effect on people and it's a pretty phone. It's pretty camera. I mean, what's interesting is we had a guest on here a couple of weeks ago mentioned that this is one of the new things for high end camera makers is to sell their name and trade on it. I mean, this phone actually does have a Leica designed simicron lens on it. But it's still we're going to trade on the Leica name and it's going to be a status thing. Right. This is not the first phone to have a Leica lens in it either. Exactly. Yeah. It's just a very nicely presented version of it. I mean, so it's a it's a brand play. Yeah, right? Like beautiful, beautiful brand play with real light with a real Leica lens. Yes, exactly. But like you said, that's not rare. Like that's been a selling point to for smart phones for a long time now. So it's just a if you really, really, really like cameras. But it's pretty Justin. I'm not saying it's it's evil. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a it's a brand play. It's a status phone. This is not some budget feature thing. It's $1,700. Come on. I'm sure look, I'm sure it's a fine phone like by itself, right? The non rebranded version, I'm sure is very nice. But I just, all right. I just call. I may not take out a loan to buy it, but it's pretty. Yeah. No, I would take a picture of myself taking it. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. We're talking about Windows 11 and what it may bring on the show yesterday. One of those was the new startup sound and Jason wrote in and said, I like the shorter length of the startup sound. After all, a startup sound that's longer than a solid straight drive boot speed would quickly feel terrible. Cause nice and snappy. See what Jason's getting out there. Yeah. I just, it sounds a lot more like a day spa than the life. Yeah, for sure. And Jason's totally right. You would not want your startup sound to outlast your boot length and you're waiting for the startup sound to finish playing. If you have thoughts on anything we talk about on a previous show or might talk about it on a future show or questions, comments, send all of them right now. Well, not right the second, but when we're done with the show feedback and daily tech new show.com actually do it now. You can multitask. We believe in you. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, all multitaskers. We're just sure of it. Paul Thieson, Ollie Sanjabi and Andrew Bradley. Thank you very much. You are featured patrons of the day. Also extra special thanks to Bjorn Andre, who's in our top lifetime support list for DTNS. Bjorn has been supporting us for years. And for that we thank you. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, you know, a little birdie told me you've got some new stuff going on. Indeed. For the last seven months in secret, my production company dog and pony show audio has been working with Brian brushwood on a project. That project was released this week. It's called world greatest con. It's going to be a five episode series. The first two episodes are up now in podcast form on any and all podcasting platforms that you would like. It is a, I think an intensely personal and educational project. Brian's amazing in it. It tells the story of an audacious plan by the allies to hoax Hitler toward the, you know, middle of world war two. And I'm very, very, very proud of it. Don't take my word for it though. Go ahead and take a look at the reviews so far. It is the number three podcast in all of history podcasts on I on Apple podcasts as it is now, and it's in the middle of the top 100. So I could not be more proud of it. I would very much encourage DT and S listeners to go listen to it. And I'm sure because we have a large shared audience that many of you already haven't downloaded it. Thank you. If you have, if you haven't listened to those first two episodes, if you don't like what you hear in the first two episodes that you're probably not going to like the rest of the series, but I got a feeling that there's a great, great, great majority of you guys that will want to know why cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we're human legendary Austin writer Andy Langer said, if you love Skull Duggery military history 007 and dislike Hitler, this is your new favorite podcast. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, an amazing list of people have kind of co-signed on this Jack Rusider of Dark Knight Diaries. The goat himself, Dan Carlin even had a positive tweet to say about it. And that is so amazing to hear as we kind of enter that genre of history and, you know, I guess true crime. I guess the crimes are hitlers, but sure. Yeah, right. But it is true. World's greatest con folks. Yeah. Greatest con podcast. Sounds intriguing. We're live Monday through Friday on this show. We're always intriguing. We like to think for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC tune in. If you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live, we are back tomorrow with Amber MacArthur and Len Peralta. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.