 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Jeff Wilkes, Pelik Glendale, and lifetime supporter Neil Wilson. On this episode of DTNS, is TikTok about to be different in Utah? Can Apple survive without Google Search? And cloud gaming is coming to PS5 customers with some restrictions. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 11th, 2023. From Studio Sarah Lane, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were talking before the show about things that we don't like to eat, and many other things as well. We will be going back to that in GDI, so hopefully you will join us for that. But for now, we're doing the quick hits. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 244, or the Right to Repair Act, into law on Tuesday. The bill was co-sponsored by iFixit. This makes it much easier for owners of devices to repair themselves or have more choices at independent repair shops. It's comparable to similar efforts in New York, Colorado, and Minnesota. But the California version says manufacturers must make available appropriate tools, parts, software, and documentation for seven years after production for any device priced above $100. It's three years for anything that's cheaper than that. The law is in effect on electronics made and sold after July 1st, 2021. Game consoles and alarm systems are exempt. The EU's commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, send a letter to X, formally known as Twitter, saying X faces, quote, very precise obligations regarding content moderation, unquote. And that the company's handling of the conflict in Israel has raised doubts about its compliance with Europe's Digital Services Act. The DSA became enforceable for large platforms back in August. X has 24 hours to respond. An investigation has not yet been launched. Breton also gave Meta 24 hours to inform him of measures taken to counter the spread of disinformation on its platforms. Yeah, so X getting a lot of attention here, but Meta also being required to give the EU a little bit more information. In cloud service land, Dropbox announced a new web interface and an open beta for its dash search powered by large language model that is proprietary with redesigned navigation and file previews rolling out over the next few months. Dropbox AI can now also answer questions about anything in your account as a user. The company also announced Dropbox Studio for video editing, commenting and publishing tools into a one central location. Now in cloud service land, other news box, not to be confused with Dropbox announced a new pricing system for its AI tools powered by open AI. Box users will get 20 credits per month for AI related events, asking a question, generating content. We've seen this model before after those credits are used. Users can still borrow from their company's account if they have one, which will have a pool of 2000 credits and then companies will have the opportunity to buy more if necessary. I hate the credit system, more on that at a different date. Microsoft announced that when it's Microsoft 365 co-pilot assistant launched for businesses on November 1st, when it does anyway, it will be available in one note. It's only available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint currently. Yeah, well, hey, you know, look at co-pilot, getting into one note. Samsung reported Wednesday that its third quarter profit dropped by 78% to 2.4 trillion won. Sounds like a big dip, but that was actually less than expected, indicating at least some recovery from a severe chip downturn is happening. Samsung's third quarter profit was also well above its Q1 profit of 640 billion won. The lowest since 2009 got a lot of headlines for that. Q2 was up a bit, 670 billion won. So, hey, we might be on an upswing after all. All right, Scott. The register reports a somewhat staggering number from Bernstein analysts. If you're not familiar, they analyze things like how Google might pay Apple every year for having top search engine placement, which it does. It makes up, according to Bernstein, 14 to 16% of Apple's annual profits. Now, Apple is historically known for having quite a bit of money that it's sitting on. This is sort of interesting. Estimated at 3 billion in 2017, potentially climbing to 15 billion in 2021, and maybe as high as 18 to 20 billion today. Major concern about this arrangement, if you're on the side of wanting Apple to get as much money as possible, for example, is Google's ongoing FTC antitrust case? And what happens if Google gets prevented from paying Apple the money that it's been paying Apple to retain what some people consider overly dominant search? Bernstein opines that in that scenario, Apple could maybe just, I don't know, collect payments from multiple search providers to make up at least some of the loss from Google or launch its own search engine. We talked recently on the show about that rumor that's been floating around seems like Apple is at least working on it internally, if not going to launch its own search engine. But Scott, where do you stand on this at this point? I mean, the idea that Apple is getting that much money from Google and it could all go away is not insignificant to Apple. No, I'm actually surprised how much it is. The whole thing was a bit of a surprise to me when I saw this article, I couldn't believe they were paying that much for essentially what is a small menu item that says, Hey, which search engine do you want to use? Or which one is default, I suppose. And that's why they get the big money. But they've got all these other, you know, others listed there. And it makes me think, well, if Apple is in the mood for their own search engine, there's one solution. How they would make up that revenue that just comes from Google, which feels honestly, it feels like a mob payment or something. It's so weird to me. But they'll lose out on that cash right away. How can they make that up? Well, if they have their own search engine, that means they'd have their own ad revenue within that engine, and all the other benefits that come from running a hopefully successful search engine. The other thing they could do is partner with somebody else and, I don't know, make that make that arrangement work. And I don't know if that's that's Microsoft with Bing, or that's DuckDuckGo, or that's some other third party I can't think of that they would rather have in there. It cannot be denied though, that Google search engine is still and probably will always be the biggest boy on the block. So maybe it's worth them paying that kind of money to Apple to keep that fresh on top of people's devices for as long as they can. Yeah, I mean, depending on the FTC stuff, Google may not be able to do that. So I feel like that's kind of where the conversation gets interesting. It's like, if Apple's really working on its own search engine, which is probably, I mean, let's, this is a very poor comparison, but Google Maps, Apple Maps. Well, Apple Maps kind of sucked in the early days. And by many accounts, it's pretty great now. Apple has gotten a lot of data from it. Apple does compete with Google on a lot of things. So if is there a scenario where Apple can say, you know what, okay, we're going to do our own thing by Google, or Google, you're going to only be one of several options that we push towards users as far as searching for the things that they want. You know, I don't think that's a bad thing either. And I'm not a Google hater at all. I mean, I use Google like 100 million times a day. But I think that this could potentially be a real shakeup where Apple has to say, if the Bernstein numbers are right, getting upwards of $20 billion from Google annually goes away, or whereas, you know, cut off at the knees in some respects, that, that changes things. Yeah, it's a lot of money. I mean, like we say, Apple's not short on money. So it isn't like this would put them in the toilet or anything. But they, you would think they'd have a strategy to make up for it on the other end with ads or whatever. For those that are like, well, this seems unprecedented, not really. I mean, Apple took the dominant Maps app, Google Maps and deprecated it and basically said, Hey, it's still on here, but we're going to be doing it as well. Rocky Launch didn't go great at first. But over time, Apple Maps has proven to be a good competitor in that space. And that's all I honestly use because I've, it's just easy to use. It's integrated with everything else on my phone. And same reason people might prefer Google Maps. Like take me to this place. I could make it use Google Maps, but it wants to use Apple Maps and Apple Maps has been fine for me. It's been good. I think they've continually improved it. So I would expect if they are doing their own thing, I'd expect a similar rollout, a bit of a bummer at first, not sure why you should use it feels like it's a weird move. And then they'll stick with it. And then five years later, we'll all go, you know, what's not bad right now, Apple eye search or whatever dumb, numb name, a name they decide to give that thing. They'll either call it eye search or something like Safari, you know, yeah, maybe something like that. You're right. You're right. Like, but their, their hope would be that you would go and use this thing outside of the Apple ecosystem, right? So you'd want to, you'd be on a Chrome browser on a Linux machine and you might prefer their search engine. So you'd go to whatever that is. And I think they would probably give it a name that evokes Apple, but not too much, you know, being a little far from Microsoft in terms of a name, you could probably get something better than that. But I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. I am very curious if that's their plan though, because Apple in a search engine market, that's a weird one. I know, I know. Let's move on to Sony. Sony announced in a blog post on Wednesday that it will officially let its premium customers play select. That's an important word here. Cloud streamed PS five games on PS fives in Japan, Europe and North America. And this will all start later this month. This applies to PlayStation plus premium users. This is the top tier of the premium tier of their current plus subscription. The top tier of Sony's PlayStation plus offerings are okay. And there already is some streaming happening there, but it's with retro games, some PS three titles, PS two, PS one titles, even some PSP games are in there. But that's all they've had so far. So here are the rollout dates where you'll get to play some of these quote unquote, select AAA games. Japan, October 17th in Europe, you'll get it on October 23rd. And in North America, we get it the day before Halloween, October 30th. Ooh, spooky season. For those who wonder what select means when it comes to Sony's supposed hundreds of PS five games available for streaming at some point, this would likely include what's in the PlayStation plus game catalog, right? Such as Resident Evil four, Genshin Impact, Fortnite, game trial titles like Hogwarts, let it legacy, the Witcher three witch hunt, wild hunt rather. Sony didn't specify. And so there's some talk in the gaming community of like, what does this include? But Sony did say a 4k, 1440p, 1080p, and even 720p were all resolution options for games that will be included. The company also said PS five game streaming will only work on PS fives at launch. And the verge points out the way that that was worded might indicate a way to stream PS five games to other devices at some point in the future. All right, Scott, what say you? Well, the first device that comes to mind outside of the PS five would be the new PlayStation portal device, which currently has a similar announcement about how it wouldn't have streamable content for a while, but maybe soon, they may just be talking about that for potential devices. But who knows, maybe we'll get it on browsers and other, you know, other potential devices, phones and things like that. But I think this is good. It is a significant, significant step forward for at least their offerings, how well it'll run and how it'll behave and perform and all that is yet to be seen. But Microsoft does have the heavier hand right now when it comes to cloud streaming. And the way they've done it is they've said, well, if you have if you have Game Pass Ultimate, which is their, you know, their higher tier, that means you can get a ton of games on play or excuse me, a ton of games on Xbox, a ton of games on PC. And if you want to play those same games over the cloud, they're all playable in the cloud. They are one to one. So if there's a game on Game Pass, it is also xCloud streamable. Sony's approach is a little bit different. And they haven't really had an answer up to this point to sort of compete with this. So this is kind of what that will be. But the difference here is they're saying, well, we don't know which games they'll be. One would assume some of these games will be their monthly offerings that they give out on PlayStation Plus, even at the lower tier, that those at the very least will be streamable games. But there may be others. And because they're being so nebulous about it, makes me think that we're probably going to get mostly a rotation of first-party titles from Sony and third-party hasn't worked out yet. They haven't signed on. There's not a deal in place like there is with Game Pass. So that's probably coming, though. Overall, though, I think this is significant for Sony. It's significant for its players and its player base. And I think it's probably about time that they took streaming seriously, because it's coming whether even gamers like it or not, there's a future where streaming matters more than it even does today. That was going to be my question for you, because besides VR things here and there, I'm really not much of a gamer. I don't have a PS5. I've never had a PlayStation to anything. But I know a lot of the games I've hung out with folks who enjoy a lot of the games. What would be the reason that a company like Sony, and it sounds like this is not what they're doing, but just to kind of reverse it, would say, we're not going to allow you to stream on any of our games outside of a PS5. What do they gain from that? They gain very little. And I think that's why it's probably temporary. I think if they really want to truly compete, then they need to embrace the idea that these streaming means streaming, not just to the same device you've already got. And I think that that's not a mistake. I just think this is just to start. And they've even said so. To begin with, it's PS5 only. That tells me they have other plans. And those other plans could mean anything. There's no way to really speculate. I think that they probably need to have it as wide open as possible, let people play it on their browsers and their notebooks and their phones and their tablets, the way I can with Game Pass and the way I can with PlayStation remote play, which is already a thing, local network, mind you, but still a thing. So expand that and make your stuff more available in other places. That's hard for Sony. They love having their own stuff. They love having their own little dome and keeping everything in that dome the best they can. And most companies do. But I think that that will be the ultimate, if they want this to succeed and be accepted in a wider way, they have to do that. Because otherwise, if you already have like for people like you, this is a non-announcement. Like if you were like, I'm curious to play one of those games, you're still hosed right now because you got to have PS5 to do it. Well, if you said, Hey, Sarah, you can play on your phone and test it and see what you think. You might go, Oh, that might be worth a seven day try. Yeah, give it a try. Sure. Yeah. See what the Witcher is all about. The Witcher is great. One of the greatest games ever made. You would love it. Wait, maybe I probably would. I probably would. The more I the more I'm like, I'm not a gamer. The more I'm like, maybe I should be a gamer. Maybe I should be. Well, listen, you might have feedback about anything that Scott and I have talked about thus far on the show or anything that gets brought up on DTNS in general. If you do, you have options. You can get in touch with our audience on the socials, DTNS show on X formerly Twitter, mastodon, mastodonmstdn.social, daily tech news show on TikTok and DTNS pics, PIX on Instagram and threads. All right, Scott, it couldn't be more perfect for news to just plump down into our laps because it is Utah based because you live in Utah. Utah's division of consumer protection filed a lawsuit against TikTok alleging that the app is knowingly harmful to children because of its quote, addictive nature and quote. The suit also said that the app falsely claims that the company is based in the US, not controlled by its parent company ByteDance, which the suit says is controlled from China. Now we've talked about this. ByteDance does have headquarters in the Cayman Islands and Beijing. TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance with headquarters in Singapore and also Los Angeles. The Utah suit is not the first of its kind. It joins previous suits against the company from the state of Indiana, a school district in Maryland, as well as the state law outright banning the app in Montana. Now, Scott, you are a Utah person. You live there. You know it better than I do. Does TikTok seem particularly addictive in the state and why? I'll disclaim this a little bit and say this is my experience having lived here my entire life. Utah is, we are the youngest state, the lowest median age of any state in the union. Currently, 31.1 years old is the median age in our state. You may say, well, that sounds kind of average. Well, the next closest is DC at 34.1. It goes up from there. At the bottom of this list, Maine is 44.8 years old is the median age. Now, the reason that that skews young here isn't because everyone's a 30-year-old utopian human being that just stays at 30 their old lives. We have a ton of kids, like a ton of kids. There's all familiar reasons we can go into why it's more prominent to have more children here, but we have a ton of children in this state. Having raised three myself, I can tell you that whenever something is big with the kids, whether that's Snapchat in its day and its heyday or Facebook in its early days, or go all the way back to whatever you want, whatever big comic books in the 50s, video games in the 90s, whatever thing was like exploding and it seemed like might be quote-unquote dangerous for our kids, a.k.a. addicting. He won't stop playing video games. He won't stop reading comics. He won't stop watching TV. Whatever it's ever been, we freak out here sometimes. And I say we, the collective we, our legislators tend to get a little freaked out. And I do think it's a kind of who is thinking of the children knee-jerk reaction that happens here more often than in other states. And maybe in D.C., Alaska, and Texas, where these ages are similar, maybe they have a similar thing where there's a similar freak out. But I really do think that that's what this is. And it is less about whether or not there's any scientific data to back up the idea that TikTok is at all addictive or even a little addictive or any kind of quantitative measurement of addictiveness. I don't think any of that is what is actually at play here. Nobody's basing their opinions on that. They're basing it on, well, I was told TikTok was bad. Well, why? Well, because it's from China, even though it's complicated, right? Right. And it makes people addicted. Well, what are they addicted to? Are they addicted to like good information or bad information? Yeah, I tend to. I tend to hear that. I mean, those are two different scenarios. I hear those sorts of things that I immediately want quantified assessment. I want to hear the numbers and no one's talking about those. They're just playing purely on fear and freak out and parents are afraid of the app because they don't understand it. My advice to parents is use the app and find out for yourself how that app works. Just start using it. If you find an objectionable and you don't want your kids to use it, great. But the government here is famous for a little bit of this stuff. I love, I really love where I live, but sometimes the stuff drives me crazy and I don't know exactly where it comes from. My guess is like all of these sorts of things, it will sort of peter out. How much they put into actual legislation around here is iffy. Like that's the one thing they never do is they never go so far as to say, well, we're going to have a law banning TikTok. That will not happen here at the state level. But they'll happily join lawsuits and they'll happily do that other stuff. So I just don't think there's a lot of merit to this. And even if there is, like I, I am all for let's study it. Let's look at it. Is there something in particular about TikTok that makes it more addicting? Can you prove that in some sort of double blind study? Can you do some something in terms of homework to show that? And if you can, well, then let's have the discussion. Let's have the conversation. But right now it's just going to freak out. Well, yeah. And even that conversation, I mean, let's say, sure, you know, people say, well, we've pointed to, uh, you know, the younger set not being able to get off of TikTok. TikTok, I think certainly for some people to this day is like, oh, just like people doing dance videos. TikTok is not that anymore. Sure, there is that. But TikTok is, we've talked about it on DTNS recently in the last couple of weeks. In fact, the idea that people go to TikTok to get news content, which back in the day in like, I don't know, 2005 or six, people used to say that to me about YouTube. And I'd say, you're going to YouTube for news? I mean, isn't YouTube just like where like your cousin uploaded a video of him, you know, shooting his arm off? Like, like, like YouTube was just like a funny videos. And then it became no legitimate news source. And now it's like where brands are. And I think, you know, TikTok is in an earlier stage of the same thing where it's like, you can make it whatever you want. It might be addictive. And let's talk about that. But when it comes to the type of content that you are consuming, it's, you know, it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. It's also not, they don't, TikTok doesn't exist in a media vacuum. It's not the only app out there. And you just mentioned YouTube, YouTube shorts are exploding right now. As much as TikTokers may hate it, they basically copied it and copied it well and are doing really well with shorts. Everything internally says that's been hugely successful for them. So why are you pretending that the only app you're worried about is this thing called TikTok when YouTube already had your kids and they're likely watching shorts now. And if you think the other thing's addictive, I have very bad news. It's the same thing. Instagram and Instagram reels and Instagram in general. Same kind of problem. It's all the same. Yeah. The targeting of TikTok is just kind of a trendy thing to do. And I just don't feel fooled by it. It just sort of annoys me. And I hope it fails. I hope whatever this suit is just falls by the wayside because it's dumb. Well, you know what you might like a little bit better, Scott? Is a new Disney robot. Yes, finally. Oh my gosh, that fixes everything for me. Okay, good. I was hoping you would say that. So last week at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, which took place in Detroit, Disney showed off a new bipedal robot designed to keep its balance through various terrains, even when it was like somebody tried to like push it over. It was supposed to be quite good at that low center of gravity. Disney research, real thing in Zurich, mostly 3D printed this particular robot, which doesn't have a name yet, according to the company. But research scientist who works for the company, Morgan Pope, in a statement to IEEE Spectrum said, most roboticists are focused on getting their bipedal robots to reliably walk. At Disney, that may not be enough. Our robots may have to strut, prance, sneak, trot, or meander to convey the emotion that we need them to. So the company has no word on when you would be able to hang out with a sturdy bot. I would think maybe a theme park situation might be good, especially since they're hard to knock over. Disney also unveiled similar bipedal concept robots in the past, resembling characters like Groot and Judy Hopps. Yeah, you'd have to do these at a park, right? I mean, unless it was just in a movie where they didn't have to do other animatronic things, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, if you had them in a park and they were there for the patrons to see and laugh at and point and take pictures, that's actually better because the more people it's out in the sunlight, no one's going to be kicking those over without getting arrested by security. So if it were me, that's where I would demo this stuff. There's strength in numbers there. If you do it at night or in a place that's more secluded or a parking lot, as people come in or whatever, you're just asking for some kid to come boot it in the face and knock it over. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea is not like, hey, let's go to Disney World and kick the robots and see what happens. It's more of like the robots, if they were there, and again, speculative, you know, maybe in crowds and little kids and, you know, just a bunch of stuff that the robot can't necessarily predict beforehand. It's kind of going to be okay rather than what we hear about delivery robots on college campuses where you knock it over and that's the end of that. Those poor robots, I always feel bad. I know, I know. Well, in the mailbag, Richard shared a story in his local paper this morning. Richard says, yes, I still get an actual newspaper every morning. Hey, Richard, I'm with you on that. The Forcith County Sheriff's Office and Duke University are partnering with each other to see if drones can help save people having heart attacks. This is something that Richard read in his local paper. The Sheriff's Office said that the program would be the first of its kind in the US to use drones to deliver a device called an automated external defibrillator AED to the scene of a cardiac arrest, saving a lot of time, potentially over an ambulance. Yeah. Has the crow flies. You have that thing fly over, clamp down on your, on your chest. 100%. Yeah. Iron man or something and then bam, bam. Clear. I didn't have to say clear. It just does it. You know, let's go. Let's do it. I'm into this because I mean, how many times have you said to yourself, like, if only I could elevate my car and just drive as the crow flies and then drop it down at my destination, boy would I save some time. This is perfect, especially when it's a life-saving thing. Yeah. And everybody thought they wanted flying cars. And we always say, what happened to our promise of flying cars? Everything will fly to us. This is the way we really want it. We don't want to fly to it. It's coming to us. So fly your drone, save my life, bring my groceries, whatever. I'm all about this future. This is great. Oh, well, Scott Johnson, I knew you would like this. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Well, sure. I do a weekly video game podcast, a big beefy one on Thursday is called Core with a couple of colleagues. And I think if you enjoy some of the games coverage that happens over here on DTNES, you might really like that show. We'll go into depth this week on all sorts of subjects, including the surprisingly positive Quest 3 reviews that are coming out, Rick Otello getting booted at Unity, which I think a lot of us are coming and knowing his history anyway, and a lot of other really cool stuff. If you like gaming, check it out. That's Core wherever you get your podcasts, or you can find it at frogpants.com. Good stuff. We are going to be talking in Good Day Internet after we wrap up here a little bit more about AI-powered upscaling tools that can improve the quality of the gifts you love most, but probably more importantly, video footage that could use some upscaling. The pros and cons of both. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are going to be back tomorrow with just a rubber young joining us. Talk to you then.