 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, and Pepper Geesey. Coming up on DTNS, the US ready to build a force meta to pay for news, your feedback on the challenges facing autonomous trucking, and John C. Dvorak tells us whether he likes paying a subscription for heated seats or not. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 6, 2022, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, technology and sub-stat columnist, co-host of the No Agenda show and DHN plugged podcast, John C. Dvorak. Welcome, my friend. That would be me. Congratulations on being you. And congratulations. I'm far as showing up this time. I was on the show before and I couldn't get them out. You know, well, it's true. I wasn't going to screw you twice. So here we are. Well, there's something that we said. Yeah, there we go. I'm glad we've put that all behind us. Let's start with the quick hits. Apple expanded itself service repair program to Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. This will provide parts and repair guides for common fixes on iPhone 12 and 13 models and Apple Silicon Mac notebooks. Apple also announced a karaoke feature called Apple Sing. That's coming to Apple Music later this month with a catalog of tens of millions of songs. So get those New Year's Eve parties ready. Yeah, just in time. TSMC plans to build a second chip fab close to the plant that's already under construction in Arizona, bringing their total investment at the site to $40 billion. TSMC will reportedly announce that the new plant will produce three nanometer chips by 2026. The report also reiterated previous reports that the fab already under construction will shift from five nanometer to four nanometer chip production. Starting in 2023, Microsoft will raise the price of its major first-party title from $60 to $70 at launch. The company says regional pricing may differ, but it didn't offer any more specifics than that. Sony, Ubisoft, and Take Two Interactive also announced $70 price points for some new games. Meta's oversized board. Well, it might be oversized, but it's also called the Oversight Board. Released a report on Facebook and Instagram's cross-check system. That's not an exercise, Regimen. It's a system for double-checking when an algorithm decides to moderate something posted by high-profile public figures. So you or I might get our post taken down right away, but if you're an actor or a politician, your post gets looked at by a human first, which could leave it up for up to five days. The board found that the program appears more directly structured to satisfy business concerns, and it also found that the system, quote, allows content which would otherwise be removed quickly to remain up for a longer period, potentially causing harm. The board recommended making posting publicly what criteria are used to determine who gets to be on that special cross-check list. It also recommended hiding posts marked as high severity while in review. Google wrote out continuous scrolling for desktop English language search in the US, which was something available on mobile since October of 2021. If you're like, didn't they already do this? Well, they did in some capacities, but there's more now. The company says users can now see up to six pages of results with pages marked by a loading indicator as you scroll. The company said in mobile search, users typically found what they were looking for within four pages. All right, there we go. Well, I think it's wonderful that we could all come together to talk about a bipartisan US bill that pleases not only both sides of the aisle, but even the media, everybody on the same side, right? The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would let news organizations collectively negotiate with online platforms to increase their share of ad revenues. Right now, they can't do that. News organizations have to negotiate individually with Facebook, with Google. A similar kind of law passed in Australia, it's pending in New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and the EU as well, these kinds of things that force the platforms to pay news organizations. And of course, as you might expect, most media companies, including Microsoft, which isn't necessarily a media company, but it's on the side of believing that this law will help raise revenues to protect local journalism. Well, on the other side of this, Meta is opposing the bill, arguing that news companies put their content on Facebook because it benefits them and their bottom line, and Facebook shouldn't have to pay extra on top of that. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone posted on Twitter, which is ironic, but whatever, that if the bill is passed, Facebook, quote, will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether, end quote. Facebook made the same statements in Australia and Canada previously. In Australia, it pulled down news pages temporarily and then restored them after the Australian law was amended to include a provision or arbitration. But it's not just the usual suspects, Meta, and Google. You know they would be against this, but Meta has some unlikely supporters, or at least you might think they're unlikely. 26 organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the United Church of Christ Ministry all signed on to an open letter opposing the bill. The letter argues, among other things, that an agreement could force platforms to carry extreme content because they negotiated the deal and they have to carry the content, and might even set a precedent that would require payments in exchange for using facts. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was sent to the Senate floor on September 15th, still waiting on a vote, appearing possible that it might get added to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is expected to be passed by the end of this month. Yeah, so lame duck Congress might just dangle it on to an omnibus bill, which is a thing that Congress does at the end of the year in the United States quite often. John, do you like this bill? Of course not. Now, let's go with the bill. Tell us more. For one thing, yes, tell us more. For one thing, nonpartisan is a bit much. The only people in the Republican side that support this bill had cosponsored it include, besides the sponsor, by the way, is Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat. It includes Lindsey Graham, who's submarine the 2022 midterms by introducing needlessly an anti-abortion bill is to get the vote out for the Democrats. So he's no good. And Susan Collins is another one. And she's always been kind of a Democrat, more than a Republican, and voted for the impeachment of Trump, one of the few Republicans who did so. So this is hardly a nonpartisan thing until I see Rand Paul's name on there. I'm not buying it. The other thing is this should have been renamed a Screw Facebook bill. And by the way, that letter that was signed by all those people, that's really a letter against them incorporating the stupid bill into the NDAA. This bill is designed to, Facebook looks like the future of, I'm not gonna say journalism, but the future of advertising because of its ability to highly target. And the money it's taking away, it's taking away from the old mainstream media. And they hate this company. And the other thing is, if you look at the people that are signed onto this bill, there's 14 of them, all Democrats, with the exception of a couple of Republicans, and John Kennedy for some reason. These guys are saying to Facebook, hey, where is the lobbying money from you guys? We got it out of Google some years ago. They're throwing a lot of money at these politicians. You guys aren't throwing as much as you should be. So we're gonna keep going after you until you start doing that, which I think is really the basis for this thing. Cause they don't care about the mainstream media that much. This is nonsense. This is a terrible bill and it's stupid. And it was introduced in 2021, first in March, I believe. And it's been reintroduced because, I guess Facebook never came around with the lobbying money that these politicians wanted. Well, the media companies are also lobbying too. And they're lobbying in Australia. They're lobbying in Canada. You know, this is something that media companies have been pushing to the point in Australia, they were trying to make it illegal for them not to take the money or to not link. They're trying to say, you have to pay us to link to us. You also have to link to us. They have to link, yeah. Yeah. And that's why the EFF and public knowledge and Wikimedia and internet archive are all lined up against this because they're saying, this is not how the internet should work. It's an anti-link law. And we've seen this since the beginning in the early 90s, mid 90s. There's right away, there are these anti-link. Oh, you can't link to us. Well, what the hell is the point of the internet if you can't link to something? I mean, that's what it's all about. Yeah, that's how it works. The web, the internet, you know, is a separate thing. But the way the web works, it's all links. So the idea of not only having to link but then having to pay to link is unbelievable. And the fact that this bill's even gotten this far is beyond me. I will say that the US one is a little watered down compared to some of the others. It just says, we're gonna give you leverage. We're not gonna like mandate the linking. But you know, the knock-on effect would likely be the same. It also tries to cap the companies that can participate in the negotiation to those with 1,500 employees to try to make it look like it's helping smaller organizations but then exempts broadcasters. And broadcasters are also owners of big publications. So it exempts Comcast, it exempts Disney. And in that case, it ends up being dominated by the big companies. It's the Anti-Facebook Act. They just- And Google, let's throw them in there. Why not? Well, Google's already been kind of in and out of this washing machine. Even Google is threatened by Facebook in terms of the kind of income they can generate. Facebook has got a marvelous system. I will say that I do have some shares in Facebook. So I'm gonna get that out of the way. But I am not a Facebook user and I would never sign up for a Facebook account. I don't like the way they operate. But the way they operate is a moneymaker and that's what these big companies don't like to see. Yeah. And honestly, I think they're milking a very old cow. It's not out of milk yet, but they're gonna get this thing taken care of about the time Facebook begins its decline. Yeah, right. That's probably true. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for those, John. We got a few emails from folks in the trucking business in response to our discussion yesterday about Embark's financial difficulties and just the future of autonomous trucking in general. And Professor Aaron Levy's interview with The Verge expressing skepticism that autonomous trucking can't even handle the non-driving parts very well like safety checks and security. Joshua wrote in, he's been trucking since 2006, pointed out that another limitation seems to be the kinds of trailers. So autonomous trucks are usually shown pulling 53-foot drive-in trailers. Joshua says, quote, trailers can also vary in length from the short 24-foot pup trailers to 53-foot trailers. Also, with proper permits, you can have trailers that are wider and or longer than normally allowed. And you don't see the autonomous systems handling all variations. At least they don't demonstrate in that way. Yeah, in fact, we got quite a bit of feedback. And thanks to everybody who wrote in, James pointed out the unpredictability of actual driving, including fading lane markings, weather, construction, many factors come into play here. James writes, the hallmark of a good truck driver is adaptability and the Achilles heel of AI is unexpected conditions. And we recently had James Thatcher on talking about logistics. Big Jim, he doesn't drive a truck himself but he works in logistics and he pointed out most trucking that I work with is what we call drop and hook where the tractor comes in with a trailer and swaps it out for another trailer. Doing this with autonomous trailers and autonomous tractors would get very, very expensive, very, very quickly in his opinion. Yeah, in fact, Wired published an excerpt from Karen Levy's book detailing these exact issues. She notes that one idea is to pass the baton. The computer drives the truck in most conditions but hands over driving to a human when needed. Most autonomous trucking companies are dogging this with hubs. Autonomous trucks take the easy controlled access routes between hubs. Human drivers pick up cargo for the last mile. So you got the humans to do some difficult stuff and hopefully the autonomous trucks might get confused about but that last mile could even be operated remotely, something that Starsky Robotics developed. Getting back to the financial problems that we discussed yesterday, each one of these compromises reduces the potential cost savings of autonomy which then makes companies less inclined to try it which then makes it harder to get to the scale needed to make it profitable which then causes valuations to fall. So here's an attempt at a solution. Develop for the military. Hey, it worked for the internet after all. Kodiak Robotics received $50 million to develop autonomous vehicles for reconnaissance, surveillance and high risk missions for the US Army's robotic combat vehicle program as part of a 24 month agreement. The vehicles will be designed to operate in quote unquote GPS challenged environments. So they're gonna try to develop these things to be able to work without lane markers and GPS and all of that sort of thing with the ability to be remotely operated if needed which will probably be needed. Kodiak previously developed autonomous freight trucks using human safety drivers. So they have done this, they have experience with it but they're moving out of the consumer market into the government contract market. John, where do you fall on autonomous trucking at all? Well, I think it's actually basically a good idea. What's needed are separate lanes, separate roads, separate freeways. If you've ever been to Rio de Janeiro or actually South Polo, anywhere in Brazil you'll find they have these special lanes for buses because they got these buses with these. It's like not the one, two bendy buses, like three, the things a mile long and you can't go in that lane ever. In fact, I think in many cases you can't even get into the lane. If you have special lanes for these trucks I don't have a problem with it and if we're gonna take that kind of thinking I think we should extend it a little bit more. Instead of having like they do in Oregon you can have doubles and triples I think they're carrying a lot of these things and then they end at the border they have to get out but how about making maybe the truck a hundred cars long and just putting a couple big motors in the front and then maybe taking the whole thing and make a separate roadway maybe in the form of two tracks. Like a hundred cars on the two tracks with a big motor in front and then you haul it around there it doesn't get in the way of the normal track. It sounds like the tracks are expensive though would it be cheaper than pavement? The funny thing is there's a bunch of tracks already laid for these guys it's already been done so why don't we just go there and put the trucks on these tracks? So you're on the side of autonomous trains? Yeah. Which actually not a bad idea. Anyone goes from the New York airport to... Yeah, I mean autonomous trains work pretty well in lots of places already. Yeah, I definitely think I don't know if we're still 40 years away like Karen Levy said in the Verge interview yesterday but I think she's on the right end of how far we are. I think these are all solvable problems if companies want to sink the money into them. What's happening is the funders are not wanting to sink the money into them anymore. And you know what's always left out of the conversation is vandalism. Vandalism is how people avoid vandalism as a topic. And in fact we have other examples of vandalism getting involved and never being formulated into the final results. In the case of vandalism in these trucks you know there's going to be some jokers out there maybe from a competitive trucking company with no license plates on jacking around in front of the truck or doing some crazy things or putting up some signage so the truck has to read it. I mean you can have a lot of fun if you think vandalism is fun. Vandalizing any autonomous vehicle and people have already done this with changing the stop signs to you're just putting a sticker on top of the stop sign or just blanking the house. Yeah, yeah. Or just go right through the stop sign. There's a lot of problems in the society that make it difficult to do these robot. I don't know how much of a real threat that is. Vandalism's a problem for human driven stuff too. But it's definitely something that needs to be addressed because it is going to happen, you're absolutely right. Folks, what do you think? You got a thought on this or anything else we talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Two weeks ago, Mercedes-Benz announced a $1,200 per year subscription service. I said bend by accident. I think you'll see why in a second. It's Mercedes-Benz. It's new Mercedes-EQ EV line that increased unlocked performance for torque and acceleration. Bending the rules perhaps? Bending something to get you to pay $1,200 for it. This isn't a new thing. Tesla has been selling access to its beta version of self-driving features for years. Over the summer, BMW caught a lot of heat in the US for something it wasn't yet bringing to the US. Functions on demand. It's a service in Korea and a few other European countries, I think South Africa might even have it too, where you pay a subscription to unlock a feature that's already in your car. The one that got all the attention was heated seats. They also have one that turns the driver assistance camera into a dash cam so it can record. Function on demand has been a product and for BMW since 2020, the announcement of the heated seats being added to it this past July is what caused a lot of the uproar. This isn't new. It doesn't seem to be going away. It's just the car company is trying to battle the public perception about it. John, what do you think? Is there anything in a car you would pay a subscription for? No, but of course I'm on the show as a negative Nelly that just says poop, poo, everything. Is there anything you like, John? Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I like, but none of this tech... But none of this, yeah, yeah. What about an internet connection, though? Software as a subscription to your automobile. I mean, with Microsoft, you know, okay, so I pay a yearly subscription to get Microsoft Office. And throughout the year, they upgrade things, they do things, they improve things, they change things a little bit here and there. It's all part of the subscription. That's what I expect the subscription to deliver. I don't expect to get the whole package and then they release features from something I already own after the fact and that's where I'm paying for it. This is a scam. Yeah, yeah, so do you have a problem with paying for internet access if there's internet access coming to your car? Do you have a problem paying with that? So you're gonna use the argument. No, no, well, hold on, just answer that. I'm gonna tell you, oh, you know, they can make your internet access go faster if you pay more. Well, it's costing them more on the backend and they have to do it on the back and they don't do it. I'm not getting 100 megabits per second. That's actually not where I was going with that. That is one of the arguments. If you're okay, I think the dividing line is a lot of people say, okay, I'll pay for 5G access in my car. That's fine, I understand that. I have to pay for it for my cell phone too. Where they get upset is, but the heated seats are in my car. I bought the car and the heated seats are in there. You're not charging me to deliver a service. You're charging me to use a thing that's already in there. Yeah, this is an old IBM scan, by the way. They did this with one of their printers back in the 50s. It was very notorious. They upgraded the, I think it was a chain printer or a belt printer, some sort of printer. And it was for the big mainframes. And they upgraded all of them by sending a technician over there to basically flip a switch. It was already capable of doing these higher speeds and they changed something in the thing. You already had this. Which brings me to the problematic aspect of this particular, this car story, which is, again, like I mentioned, Vandals, let's talk about hackers. What kind of, you know, what does it take for somebody to hack this thing at the shop and flip on the heated seats? And I'm driving around with heated seats now. Is it checking in constantly? And there's ways around that, by the way. Well, you're talking jailbreaking. It's what they used to do with iPhones. Yeah, you'd have to jailbreak your car if they turned on the heated seats, totally. People are absolutely good to do that. And it's absolutely, in fact, only this, and smart money will do have that done. They'll pay for it. I mean, if there's any, I don't know, way to look at this in a way that's at all positive, and I really am with you, John, if there's something that is capable in my car that should be turned on, why charge me a subscription service to turn it on later. However, for example, my car has heated seats, heated steering wheel, very nice, great in the winter. Six months out of the year, don't need it. If I had a fixed, a fixed finance fee that could, where I was paying a little bit less, and I would just sort of pay for it the way I might pay for an HBO Max subscription for a couple of months because I wanted to watch something specific and then dip out of it, I could see where this could be sort of attractive to somebody. Yeah, I can see where the hacker'd be more, I'd be more attractive than the hacker who could fix this so I can turn it on when I want. By the way, the funny thing about heated seats, my wife's a big fan of these things. So I was there, what, who cares, you know, it's not where it gets that cold. But I have heated seats in this car of mine and it's actually kind of comfortable. It's really cold. How often does it get really cold in California? Describing to them, that's for sure. Hey, I live in California and trust me, I need my heated seats. You get a cold up there. All right, fair enough. Yeah, absolutely. I do start to waver when I think about, oh, I've got a LiDAR system and they'll add some software to turn it into a dash cam. Then I start to feel like, well, okay, maybe you're giving me something that isn't already there. I'm not being charged for the existence of the camera, you're just saying- No, I'm game for that. If it's not there and they have to go through a rigmarole to get it there, another- Yeah, yeah. Like a software upgrade. Is there not flipping a switch? It's only the idea that it's there and you have to pay to have the switch flipped by somebody when you could do it, you should be able to do it yourself. It's abhorrent. These companies should be ashamed of themselves and I think BMW, and they're both German companies curiously enough. I don't see any Japanese companies proposing this. I think we just stopped buying their cars. What about car sharing or rental? Like if there's a zip car or you're just going to Hertz and they say, check box these features, it's an extra dollar or two to get them on. Like what, give me an example. So you go to zip car, you're like, I need a car for the day and they're like, great, it's $20 for the day. Oh, you want heated seats, $21. Do you want the- Yeah, the lane assist, another five. Yeah, yeah, that's $22. They do this? No, I'm just saying, what if they used this for that? I wouldn't go to them, I'd go to some other company. You want it all inclusive, yeah, yeah, all right. I mean, if it's already there, now I know that some of these car rentals they'll give you a car specifically with a navigation system in it, okay. Who needs that anymore? It's not like they all have it and so in that case I think I'm okay. All right, well, let's see if we can cheer up John with some nostalgia, Sarah. Well, good. John, I think you might like this one because Wired has an article up called How to Start a Cassette Collection in the 21st Century. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, talking about- Because cassettes make in a return like vinyl did in years past. Record stores apparently have cassette sections again depending on the record store you're going to obviously full of shrink-wrapped new releases. Cassette sales are even up, expected to rise even more next year. And you say, well, why? I mean, cassettes are not the greatest form of media, right? They break, they sound strange, they don't do well in heat. Movies like Stranger Things, Guardians of the Galaxy have featured cassettes of their own. Artists like The Weeknd and Taylor Swift have released their albums on cassettes. So if you say, hmm, interesting, I like a good cassette, I'd like to get back into it. Wired does have a guide with tips on where to find players and where to find the cassettes themselves. We will link to that in our show notes because yeah, you're not just gonna go get a bunch of, you know, DRX tapes at your local Walgreens these days, but they can be found. I stocked up. Yeah, hey, me too. I got some old DAC cassettes that I never used from way back in the day. I am astounded at the ability for every new generation to rediscover old technology that the generation that grew up with it no longer likes. Like everybody in Generation X is like cassettes, hiss, they melt, all that stuff. I've never seen one melt. I'll tell you, there's a couple of advantages. I do like cassettes, I don't use them, but I do like them. And there's a couple of advantages. For example, you can have a tape that plays 60 minutes on each side and it reverses us two hours of recording. You can't get that on an audio CD. My old Sony Walkman does that exact thing. In fact, I got a cassette in it right now. Look at you. Don't even remember what's on this, but somebody made me a mixtape and it's still in here. Yeah, there's the mixtape. The cultural mixtape is down missing. You can't give people a mixtape, you can't do that. Well, and thank the cassette for the whole mixtape thing. We use that term very interchangeably for like, oh, it's a bunch of songs that might be fun for you in a streaming service. All came from cassettes. Yep, it all came from Memorex. Well good, I'm glad cassettes could finally bring us all back together. Me too, me too. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. That Charlie Dude wrote in and said, that Charlie Dude is a teacher, said, I haven't seen any AR-generated code turned in by my students, at least I don't think I have. Coding is like writing an essay or a story. It's personalized. Programmers have a distinctive style or a voice just like authors do, so I think it would be easy to tell if a student's programming style changed suddenly. It's one of the ways the programming teachers look for cheating. If a student's style changes on a project, it's a clue they didn't write that code themselves. Charlie Dude says, in my opinion, using AI for coding is the same as looking up answers. The answer is on the internet. For most of our college classes, the answers are on the internet already. Even if instructors write their own material, those questions and answers show up pretty fast online. If a student wants to cheat with AI, they'll be caught. Maybe not all of them, but certainly some of them will. I'd rather see students use AI to learn concepts, have AI help them debug, and show them where they went wrong. In other words, use it as a learning experience. As an instructor, I wouldn't consider that cheating. Well, there you go. I think that's a good perspective. I'm with that. Use the algorithm as a tool. It's not a replacement for what the student's doing. And yeah, it's just another tool like a calculator or anything else, right? I'll take the negative side on this one. Really? Yeah, really. What happens when this coder gets out into the real world? That's what he's going to be doing. He's going to be, especially the JavaScript guys, all they do is pick and match. They take this piece of code and that piece of code. They scramble it up and they put it in a package. There's not, who's doing real coding nowadays? Most people are doing that and to start learning that skill in college may not be a bad thing. Well, I'm with you actually. I think using the algorithm as a way to help you identify what did the algorithm get wrong? Because these things aren't perfect. How do you do it right? Use that as an example. If you got the proper teacher, like that Charlie dude, then you are using it to help them learn to code. But I agree. They shouldn't be just replacing the actual ability to code with that. I'm with you there. Finding good coders nowadays is impossible. Maybe not impossible. Well, you know what's not impossible? Finding good guests for Daily Tech News Show because we did it again today. Indeed we did, Tom. John C. DeVorek, it was such a pleasure having you on the show today, even if you like to take the other side of things. That's why we love you. Let folks know where they can- Not take the reasonable side of things. That's what's not fully understood. Well, yeah. So if people wanna hear more about the reasonable side of things, where can they keep up with your work? Well, you can always go to DH Unplugged, which is where I talk about stocks with Andrew Horowitz, or The Big Show, which is the No Agenda show, which is on twice a week, NoAgendaShow.net or NoAgendaShow.com will get you there. We have, look at that beautiful art. This show is, we have a lot of, it's a very popular podcast in it. We deconstruct new stories that people normally just gloss over or fail to understand fully. And it's very easy to do, it turns out, because the mainstream media stopped doing its job about 25 years ago. And it's always a surprise when we go back further and find the scams that go on today or went on back in the day during the Walter Cronkite era. So that's what we do. Well, we're so glad to have you on the show. You go to Dvorak.substack.com and read my old essays. I've got a few more to put up. Yeah, yeah, and The Real Dvorak on Twitter as well. John C. Dvorak, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Also a pleasure to thank one of our Lifetime supporters, Ronald Huss. That is you today. Thank you, Ronald, for all the years of support. And thanks to everybody who supports us on Patreon. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show. Good day, internet. We're rolling right in after DTNS wraps up. Just a reminder, we do the show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with a tech gift guide for those folks who are hard to shop for it. With Scott Johnson and Richard Miro, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.