 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. And that's you right there. Hey, thank you for listening. Maybe you're Howard Yermish, John Atwood, Pat or brand new patrons. Everybody welcome in Daniel, Ulysses and Tony. On this episode of DTNS, the US issues, AI rules, but are they all for show? Meta is going to start charging Europeans for Facebook and how to turn noise canceling headphones into heart monitors. Magic. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 30th, twenty twenty three in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Blackpink's Jenny Studio. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I'm sorry, what? I thought I'd throw you for a little Monday, Tom. You did. You got to keep you on your toes. No more disco napping. Panderin for the Blinks. Let's look at that. You and I from from Jenny doing quite well out there. So congratulations to her on that solo effort. Apple's having a Monday evening announcement, so we'll be covering those on our Tuesday show. If you're listening to this later, that's why you're not going to hear about that yet. But let's see what's in our Monday quick hits. Western Digital announced it will separate its flash business from its hard drive storage products into two discrete entities in the second half of next year. You may recall that Western Digital bought flash memory manufacturer Sandisk back in 2016. The Wall Street Journal notes, though, that this move effectively reverses that whole merger and spins off the flash division into a standalone business. Yeah, so they're going to sell off the flash memory business is what that seems like. That is what seems to be implied here. Got some good Microsoft news. Windows 11 2 to H2 now natively supports several new archive formats. So if you're a fan of raw or seven zip tar and GZ archives and a few others, you can just click on them. No need to do anything else. It does not, however, support password encrypted archive files. You'll need to bring in some third party support if you want to do those. You can get it now or wait for it to be rolled out throughout November. Less good Microsoft news. The company started showing error codes if you connect a third party controller to the Xbox that is not part of Microsoft's designed for Xbox program. If it's part of design for Xbox, third party controllers fine. If it's not, the error code tells the user they have two weeks to stop using that controller before it will be blocked. Microsoft recommends returning such controllers to the seller. That's their mitigation of like, yeah, get rid of it. Unauthorized controllers can sometimes be used for cheating, whereas unauthorized controllers also don't make Microsoft any money. Open AI rolled out a new feature for its pain. Chat GPT plus users that lets them upload files. This is a feature already available in chat GPT enterprise. So you might have played around with it. But if you haven't, when you give it a file, chat GPT can summarize it, answer questions about it and generate data visualizations. So let's say you upload a PDF or a data file or really any document. With multimodal support that would include an image as well. Qualcomm held a live benchmarking session for reporters to show off how well its new PC processing platform, the Snapdragon X Elite runs. The platform is based on Qualcomm's ORION CPU, which was built by engineers who previously worked on Apple's A series chips. And the benchmarks were really good outperforming Intel, Ryzen and a lot of cases, Apple's M2 chips. However, that comes just as Apple is announcing new chips. So, you know, your mileage may vary. How long that comparison lasts? Meanwhile, another chip news. Asus released a dual RTX 4060 Ti with an integrated PCIe M2 SSD slot. PC Gamer notes that lets you add an SSD in a PCIe lane that would otherwise be taken up by the graphics card. So that's kind of nice. And it will be in a better position for cooling. If you're using a motherboard with the M2 slots are located underneath the graphics card. Mastodon has added lists as a feature in its Android app. So if you're using the Android app or Mastodon or an instance, rather, you can create lists and then categorize them on topics or interests. A redesigned homepage also makes it easier to navigate between your feed and hashtags and the new lists feature. No word on when this might come to iOS, though. Hmm. They're working on stuff for iOS. That's all they said. All right, let's talk about the president. Yeah, so US President Biden, perhaps you heard of him, issued an executive order. This was expected today meant to manage the risks of developing AI. So, Tom, let's go through what it actually says. All right, we're going to ping pong this. It requires large developers to share safety test results and other critical information with the government. President used the Defense Production Act as a justification for this order. It would only apply to the largest developers. So we're talking open AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, maybe Adobe. It'll require the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, a.k.a. NIST to set, quote, rigorous standards for extensive red team testing to ensure safety before public release and, quote, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy will use their existing authority to encourage adoption of these standards for critical infrastructure. All right, they're going to make screening for AI risks a condition for federal funding of life science projects. You want to get the federal funds? You got a screen as a way to protect against dangerous biological materials. The Department of Commerce also getting involved, developing content authentication and watermarking guidance for federal agencies to use to show which communications are real and not AI generated, adding AI tools to find and fix security vulnerabilities other than the existing AI cyber challenge. So they're going to add that to the AI cyber challenge. But that would make sense. The order is meant to support research to protect people's privacy in training data and take other measures to encourage privacy protection in AI, both in and out of the government. Provide guidance and training about how to keep from using AI in a discriminatory way in housing and law enforcement. The Department of Health and Human Services will establish safety programs and take complaints on the use of AI in health care. They're going to create some guidance for teachers, provide guidance on preventing the use of AI from harming workers and also issue reports on impacts in the labor market. Encourage the use of resources and training for AI and research. And promote responsible use of AI abroad. And there's some more in there on setting safe standards for the use of AI by the government while encouraging government agencies to use it to improve costs and efficiency, encouraging hiring AI professionals. You notice there's a lot of guidance in here. Executive orders are not law. They cannot make or change the law. And executive orders can be challenged if they're seen to overstep the boundaries of the laws they use as their justification. Also, a new president can quickly rescind them. They don't stay on the books like a law does. Reuters saw the G7's document on a voluntary code of contact for AI. So that goes along with that. The G7 is Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US, plus the European Union. So with that and the UK summit set for the middle of this week, it's a big week for talking about regulating AI. Sarah, this is a lot of stuff coming at once. Who do you think benefits from all of this? Well, I think we all potentially benefit from this. I didn't see anything in this executive order that, you know, made the hair stand up on my neck, so to speak. I thought, yep, that sounds good. Yeah, that's kind of vague, but sounds good. Yeah, that sounds really vague, but also sounds good. I think certain departments from within the administration being tasked with, you know, coming up with solutions, or at least following them closely, is not going to harm anyone. I think the more knowledge we have about what's going on, the better. I know that the executive order also doesn't, you know, roll back any rules that current AI systems are using. It's going to force companies, if they think that they're going to get in hot water, if they, you know, don't play nice with the government, to perhaps rethink some things that might be cool, tech-wise, but not necessarily great for humanity long term. So, you know, I wish I had a better answer for this. I think a lot of this is, let's start this conversation for realsies. That's what this feels like to me. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I just don't know exactly what changes from here. We need legislation. That's the long and the short of it, especially regarding training data. You know, there's some guidance in here about privacy and making sure people know about training data, but it's fairly toothless and fairly vague when we need comprehensive legislation, in my opinion, anyway, to set the ground rules to say, like, oh, if you're going to use data for training AI, here are the rules. Here's who you have to get permission from. Here's when you don't need to get permission because that's an entirely new situation. And there's a lot of other safety issues like that. That said, I don't have a problem with any of these. A lot of it is just good. Like, yes, we should have guidance. And I guess it depends on how good the guidance is. Right. Yeah. If the guidance isn't good, then this is bad. But if the guidance ends up being valuable, then that's fine. But no, it also doesn't force people to do the right thing. It's just guidance that that's always the nature of guidance, right? I mean, I would not even pretend to compare something like AI technology to net neutrality. But having the latter be a ping-pong issue in the government for some time now, what would be great is if we all kind of go, OK, so here's here's how AI is going to help us and not, you know, crush the world and not have the sort of like, well, that was the law a year ago and then we got a new president and now we got a whole other thing going on in the end. You know, it makes it more convoluted for the rest of us. Yeah, there's a lot of knee-jerk responses you could have to this, like, oh, this is just political trying to win votes. Oh, it's companies trying to preserve their competitive advantage over new companies by putting a lot of regulations. It's called regulatory capture. Put a lot of regulations in now that they can afford to comply with them. I don't see much of that here. The largest amount of paperwork is applied to the largest companies only. And and these are these are, again, fairly mild. Now, I would beware of regulatory capture, because I do think open AI and Google and Meta are all pushing to get regulations put in place that will make it harder for others to compete with them. I think there needs to be some honest discussions about safety and what's actually dangerous and what's actually not so that you're not doing regulatory capture, but you are contemplating, you know, what unforeseen side effects might happen. And like I said, I think we need read legislation. But all of that said, like, even with those knee-jerk reactions, this is not the worst example of the kind of thing that I would be worried about. So I think on the whole, it's benign, maybe is how I describe it. Yeah, at least they weren't like, you know what? AI companies should do what they want. End of story, gavel. Right. That would be an issue. So it's an element of the conversation. This is not the end of the conversation, but it's an element. Right. All right. Let's talk about this technology, which I find fascinating. Google has announced research into audio plethysmography. So we'll call it APG for short. It uses hardware for active noise cancelling to sense your heart rate, meaning it can turn any set of noise cancelling headphones into heart rate monitors with a soft rate, software upgrade. The ones you've got could become heart rate monitors. It works by sending a low intensity ultrasound signal into the ear, and then the active noise cancellation mics can detect the echoes of the sound off the ear canal that they're designed to do stuff like that. Tiny movements of the ear canal skin that are caused by blood moving through your your skin changes how the sound echoes back in a very small way, but it changes them and the software can use the variations detected to tease out what your heart rate is and even your heart rate variability. It works with music playing. So it doesn't matter if you've got music playing. It can still detect these differences because it can just cancel out the music. And even if the seal isn't great, it can also cancel out the noise that's leaking through. It does have to adjust for body movements. That is one thing that can throw it off. So Google says they are using a multi tone approach to kind of calibrate and adjust for that sort of thing. But in a study they did, 153 people had consistent accuracy, like less than four percent problem. So so pretty high accuracy. Not something you'd use in a clinical setting, maybe, but but enough to kind of tell you as you're walking around. We might be honest here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the only noise canceling headphones that I use, but I use them daily or the AirPods Pro that I bought earlier this year. And I use the noise canceling not all the time, but the majority of the time. And I also wear an Apple Watch. But if I was monitoring my heart rate, which that's just part of my health data that I find interesting. But if I was really looking at it closely and for whatever reason, I either didn't have a smart watch or I didn't always want to wear one. And that was the metric I was going for. This is awesome. I think the, yeah, I mean, this is not unlike, you know, you're taking a pulse and that's how you get your heart rate. I can see where and I never really thought about it this way, but I can see where, especially when one might be out and about the that kind of, you know, blood rushing to an ear or not rushing, but, you know, giving an indication of of what's going on with the heart makes a lot of sense. I don't exactly know how, I don't know, is there a firmware update that makes this all possible at some point with existing noise canceling headphones that people might have over, you know, using various vendors to buy them. I don't know, but I I love this. I mean, this is all just like, let's let's reimagine data that we actually need. Some people, this data is extremely important. For other, you know, I don't have any heart problems that I know of. So this is more sort of like interesting and good to take, you know, keep an eye on type thing. So if there ever was anything weird, I would know more about it later. I think again, everybody wins here. Yeah, there are lots of headphones out there that have built in heart sensors because there are people who are like, they don't they can't afford to buy a super cool smart watch or don't like you said, don't want to wear a Fitbit, but they just want the heart rate. And especially if you want it while you're jogging, a lot of people wear headphones while they're jogging. Boom, there you go. It's a it's a simple thing. So yeah, this isn't going to replace fitness monitoring from your wrist, but it is an interesting thing to have. And it is something that is easily added to existing headphones and turns them all into heart rate monitors, making it more compelling. I don't have to buy a special pair of headphones to get it. Exactly. So yeah, I think that I think this is this is cool. You hit on the big question, which is so Google, are you going to make this easily available for Sony and Apple and others to use? Are you going to hoard it to yourself? Are you even going to roll it out to your own earbuds? Like the Pixel Buds, we don't have any kind of sense of that. This is just the study to say, hey, it looks like this works. Right. I don't know when this rolls out into a product, but I would like it to be soon because I think it's cool too. Me too. Me three. Well, do you think it's cool? Tell us on our subreddit as well as telling us other stories like this one that you'd like to hear us talk about. We've got a great subreddit community in there. So go over and take a look at it. You can submit stories and vote at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. Back in January of this year, the European Union determined that Facebook, owned by Metta, could not claim a contractual necessity for much of the personal data that it collects on its users. Under the GDPR, any collected info that isn't strictly necessary has to be collected by user consent that is informed specific and freely given and are really handed down by the court of justice of the EU. Judges advised that an appropriate fee could be collected for equivalent alternate services that don't track users. This was non-binding, but it was an element of the court's decision. Metta is using this to justify its next approach. Right, Tom? Yeah, it's a little shaky ground, right? The court just said, maybe you could do this. They didn't rule that you could do it. So I'm going to spoiler alert. The end of this story is everyone's going to take Metta to court and we're going to rule on this again. But here's the situation as it stands now. Users in the European Economic Area. So the European Economic Area is the European Union plus Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway. So the European Economic Area and Switzerland, which is not part of the European Economic Area, but it's part of this policy from Facebook. If you agree to be targeted by ads, you can continue to use the service for free. So what Metta is saying is on Facebook and Instagram, we will give you informed consent. We will tell you we're going to track you in these ways. Is that OK? If you say yes, keep using it for free. If you say no, you either don't use the service. You just say, nope, I'm not going to use Facebook or Instagram or you will be given the option to pay nine euros, 99 cents a month, 10 euros a month. Or if you're signing up through Google or Apple stores where they take a cut, it'll be 13 euros a month. After March 1st, 2024, they're going to start charging you for linked accounts. So if you have an Instagram account and it's linked to your Facebook account, you won't have to pay 10 euros a month for both. Your linked account will cost you either six euros or, again, if you're going through the app store, eight euros a month. Ads for users younger than 18 will be paused. So the charge is only if you're older than 18. If you're younger than 18, you will not have to see ads or pay starting November 6th. Metta says that cause will last while it evaluates the impact of new EU regulations, and they'll have more details on options for younger users in the coming months. Now, this hasn't been tested in court, nor has it been approved by the Data Protection Commission. Ireland's Data Protection Commission has jurisdiction over Metta because Metta's headquarters are in Dublin. It is still evaluating this plan. Metta gave it to them, but Metta said we're going to put it in place in 2024. The Irish DPC said, we think you should put it in place faster than that. Metta said, OK, we will, but the DPC hasn't finished evaluating itself. It could conceivably come back and say, no, this isn't OK. But even if it comes back and says, yes, this is fine, I would expect Max Shrems and his organization to take Metta to court and say, this is too much money. This is not what we had in mind. What do you think, Sarah, is 10 euros a month an appropriate fee to get Facebook without ads? Well, I wouldn't pay. I wouldn't pay that, which is, you know, let's just say it was 10 dollars a month, which is not too far away from it. It's good. Yeah, euros and dollars are fairly close. Exactly. For Facebook, I'd be like, I don't care about Facebook that much. But if you say that for Instagram, I might go, huh, well, I really, really hate ads on Instagram, but I also use Instagram on a daily basis. Well, my dog uses Instagram on a daily basis. Otis is a prolific user of Instagram, right? Yeah, you know, I'm his guardian. So you might have to pay 10 euros for each your and Otis's accounts. Yeah. And that's where it kind of gets fuzzy to me. I wonder how much, listen, I know Metta is trying to, Metta knows that there are legal battles ahead. And for the company to say, OK, well, for those of you who do not want to be targeted by ads and maybe we're just going to bounce out, maybe some of you will pay. And for that, let's see how many people do do that and the rewards that we reap financially. I think this all is going to get torn apart sooner than later. I don't exactly know how it just seems too easy. And, you know, for anybody going, I knew Facebook was going to make me pay. Eventually, you know, it doesn't matter where you live in the world. That's not what's going on here. You just have to agree to what was already happening. And you can either say, no, I don't like this place. I'm going elsewhere, which you always could do or say, actually, you know, how about an ad for experience? That could be a fun, you know, way to stay on a platform that, you know, all my friends and family are still on or at least a way to give it a shot. I don't, you know, I don't live in the EU, so this doesn't apply to me. But this would be something I would try for a month, 100 percent. It's clear to me that Metta doesn't want to use this to make money. I've seen I've seen a lot of people say, oh, this is a cash grab. If that was the case, they would be going to get enough cash for it to be. No, they're not. And they would be rolling at it. They'd be talking about like, well, and if it goes well in Europe, we might roll it out elsewhere. They're not. They very clearly said, this is only going to happen in Europe. We're only doing it because we have to. So the big question is going to be whether the courts will say, this is an inappropriate fee at which point, what is the appropriate fee? Is it five euros? And is that enough for Metta to go? OK, it's we don't want to leave the European market. So fine, we'll take a loss on the people that sign up. Maybe it won't be that many. They've obviously figured out that 10 euros is going to keep them from losing money. I'm guessing it's got a little padding in there so they could probably go down a little bit. But what is that number? Is there a number? I have a feeling that that Max Schrems group is going to say they shouldn't make you charge at all. That's not freely given consent if your only other option is to pay. I'm not sure I'd buy that, though, right? Because you pay to get rid of ads and lots of things. Like, why should Facebook be prevented from offering that? Yeah, I mean, that is one of the huge issues that people have with. Well, I was about to say Facebook, but Metta in general. I think this is potentially something that will appease a lot of users. Maybe not anybody who works, you know, in the government sector. But but yeah, let's let's let's see what happens. If you live in one of the areas affected and you're, I don't know, if you're under 18, that would affect you as well. But if you're over 18, well, that's the thing, right? Can you just say I'm under 18 and get away without ads? You can. You might get caught. And it also restricts what you can do. So exactly. You may not be worth it to do that. Right. Right. I know when I was like, oh, for every additional account associated with Facebook, I'm like, oh, this is younger than 18. Yeah. But I mean, I also have like burner accounts that sure. I mean, if somebody really wanted to go after me, they could figure it out. But like, I'm not telling them that that's my other Facebook account and paying more. Come on. Yeah. Agreed. Well, what Max Shrems and the Noeva Group, and why be are our regular folks that are going to fight this on your behalf, Europeans, if you don't like this. Meanwhile, in Japan, giant robots are going to fight on your behalf. Yeah. At Japan's mobility show, Yokohama based Subame showed it showed off something called the Arch Axe, a three million dollar transforming Mecca, meaning a large armored robot. Now you might say, well, that's crazy. What in the heck? This one doesn't really do much besides left its arms, wave to the crowd and go between robot mode and vehicle mode. This part is actually pretty fun. So the Arch Axe, which only has five sellable models, mind you, has four legs, each with a wheel at the bottom driven by an electric motor. So, you know, it's a car in vehicle mode. The legs are spread apart, lowering the center of gravity. It can it can reach a blistering top speed of six miles per hour. So, OK, it can move. But transforming to robot mode takes about 15 seconds, where then the machine rises to a height of 15 feet. Uh, uh, mobility show event goers have said it's pretty cool and it's real big. Finally, the cockpit is accessed through four separate hatches, which open and sink, revealing the pilot's chair, just the one chair. Once the models are sold out, Subame wants to create a robot league where the models fight each other. And you might say, well, that's a really bad idea, right? Especially when humans are inside, it's only supposed to be in VR. This is now this is like a concept car for mechos. I know giant robots are a big deal in Japan. Gundam and everything, the closer they can make them to being real, the more likely somebody is to try to make them. And so this doesn't surprise me too much. But Roger, you follow this really close. I know you're you're a fan of giant robots. I mean, it's I mean, who isn't a fan of giant robots? So this totally reminds me of back in 2016. There was a whole or 20, 2015, 2016. There was a whole thing where Megabots, Incorporated, based down in Hayward, or up for me, up in Hayward, California, challenged the Japanese Serobashi Heavy Industry, who also created a very similar robot to a robot versus robot duel. And to me, this kind of is half kind of tongue in cheek, like we're going to create a giant robot. Other half of but the other half is creating the technology that allows you to kind of have a large, heavy and somewhat awkward shaped piece of machinery amble about without keeling over and crushing someone. This is I don't want to say this is totally a promotional stunt, but it's it's a pretty cool promotional stunt. It's a love of giant robots first, then promotional stunt second in order to try to make enough money to justify doing the thing you did because you love giant robots. That's how I guess it is. It is definitely kind of a self-referential campaign. I feel like I'm indifferent to giant robots. You know, Roger, you said who doesn't love them. Are you sure you want to say that on the Internet, Sarah? Well, I don't I. Yes, I am sure. You know what? You're not the boss of me, but you're sitting. We I'm indifferent to them until they really are fighting each other. And then I'll have some thoughts when you're sitting in your own very, very own 30-foot Sarabot that you get to control like I don't want to do that. I mean, maybe you say that now, say that now. Oh, my gosh. You guys, OK, you know what? When the apocalypse hits, I'll be I'll be getting in there and watch out world because I will not be fighting in VR. This is no, I know. I think that VR training for you, Sarah. Now you we need some regulations on giant robots for the exact. Biden, where are you when we need you? All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it on Friday's GDI. We were talking about whether we would like to look into the future or the past if we had to choose one that inspired Allen to post a comment on Patreon. Allen said the time travel discussion reminds me of a story by Ozzyk Asimov called the dead past. He says spoilers incoming. This was written a long time ago, so I think we're OK. Allen says roughly it's about some people who invent the ability to look back in time, but they get shut down by the government. At first, all the viewing was distant past. But as they got closer, they got government interference. The reason is that the past ends a split second ago. So basically the device was the ultimate spine device, which is why the government stopped them and also how it thwarted their plans. Ozzyk Asimov liked like and the ending liked ending his stories with a twist. And I'll always remember this one. That is a really interesting premise because broadcasts are much more delayed from live than they used to be. When everything was over the air, there was a little bit of delay between something happening and you seeing it or hearing it, but not much. Of course, now over the Internet, there's so much more latency in there. I actually heard that the CBC has has ended its one o'clock PM long dash, which was meant to let everyone in Canada calibrate their clocks to know exactly when it was one PM Eastern time because digital broadcasting means that it doesn't happen at exactly the right moment that it should anymore. It's not that is good at calibrating. I thought everybody in Canada had had to run in a dash. Now, yeah, now they all have to do a hundred meter dash. Yeah, that's us. No, I'll get you. But but that idea of like if you look into the past, the past is just a split second ago. Yep, there you go. All right, folks, if you like these kinds of conversations, we have them in good day. Internet patrons get the extended show, stick around. The phone maker, nothing has put out its own beer. Now, granted, they partnered with a brewery. Like, yes, it's it's a publicity stunt. But we have a report on how it is is a decent beer. And we started thinking about what drinks other companies might want to put out. Perhaps Apple, Andrew Langston from CNET, suggests might want to put out a vodka. We're going to talk about it, stick around. And that sentence by Tom is now in the past. You can also catch the show Monday through Friday. We do it live. 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC for a little bit longer. Anyway, find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com at slash live. That URL is there. It's just that there's a time change looming in the US. We are back tomorrow with Charlotte Henry joining us. 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.