 Coming up on DTS, Microsoft fights harassment in the metaverse, NFTs are great and can help your movie watching. Also, NFTs are bad and steal your art. It's gonna be a roller coaster, folks. DTS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 16th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Our is a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet and you can get that at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi-Tech Oki, and Logan Larson. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Meta changed the name of Facebook's news feed to Just Feed. Hold on to your butts, everybody. The company says that the change reflects the diverse content people see on their feeds, which is kind of a good point, it's not always just news. A Facebook spokesperson said that the name chain change does not otherwise change the app experience. I thought it implied that they feed upon you. Oh, well, you're not wrong. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn unveiled the bill for the Kids Online Safety Act in the United States of America. If passed into law, this would require online platforms in the U.S. to give parents of children under 16 the tools to track screen time, that become the law at a certain size, opt out of autoplay video and modify content recommendation algorithms, let the parents modify those content recommendation algorithms. Bill also requires platforms to prevent promotion of self-harm and provides for a research program to look at the effects platforms have on minors. In its Q4 earnings report, Roblox lost 25 cents per share with revenue up to 20% on the year to 770 million. You might say, well, that sounds good, right? Well, they both missed analysts estimates. Daily active users increased 33% rather on the year to 49.5 million. CEO David Bazuski said that the company remains very gentle on monetization to focus on quality user growth with no plans for advertising or 3D shopping. Shopify had record-setting earnings and beat expectations that got hammered in the stock market too. You just never know. OM Digital Solutions released its first camera since acquiring Olympus, the OM-1. This use is a stacked CMOS sensor, a first for micro four thirds. It can shoot up to 10 bit 4K 60 frames per second video and up to 50 frames per second stills with auto focus and auto exposure. It's also IP 53 rated for water and dust resistance. It's available for pre-order now for $2,200 shipping in early March. Google announced on Wednesday it will bring its privacy sandbox to Android. Privacy sandbox is Google's project to replace third-party tracking. Right now, Google's investigating something that calls topics as that replacement. We detailed how that works on our January 25th show. So please go and listen back if you'd need a little bit more information. Google says it will replace the current Android advertising ID that identifies an Android device with whatever it ends up using for privacy sandbox. That means no more cross-app identifiers. This is similar, not identical, but similar to what Apple's done with iOS. Advertisers have at least two years to get ready for the change. So it's not happening tomorrow, but it is happening. Facebook VP of product marketing, Graham Mudd, tweeted that Google's approach was encouraging. Oh yeah, they don't mind Google's, they only mind Apple's. All right, tell us some good NFT news, Sarah. All right, we got some good NFT news, particularly if you like movies. Cinemarket is a film sales platform that uses a blockchain to manage film sales rights, like royalty payments and distribution. It's not that sexy blockchain company and you might not have heard of it because it's not selling you collectibles. It's engaging in something useful even if it isn't generally headline grabbing outside of its particular industry. So they'd like you to hold their beer. Cinemarket is launching Cineverse. The idea behind Cineverse is to let said filmmakers who are participating sell films to the public as NFTs. You might scoff, but before you do, this could be a smart move because the idea is that you get the advantage of a decentralized secure contract. So when you buy a movie from Cineverse, that movie is yours because it's on a decentralized blockchain, nobody takes your access away from that. You can also resell it or give it as a gift. But what if the company goes away and the blockchain goes offline? Cinemarket's CEO, Adrienne Lugal, says that within two years, he hopes they won't even own Cineverse and it will be run by an independent foundation run by the community. A lot of NFT related companies do sort of say that they hope this happens. He told Variety, quote, to have a proper decentralized platform, you can't have a Netflix or Google controlling it. So you might say, why would Cinemarket do this? What's in it for them? Because then it would make its money from the licensing deals that we talked about earlier. In fact, with a functioning NFT blockchain, resales of movies can still deliver royalties to those filmmakers instantly and that benefits Cinemarket's main business as well, helping filmmakers manage all of those royalty rights. In theory, everybody kind of wins here. Also data on how films are selling and where they're selling can obviously be useful for filmmakers as well as marketing campaigns. Cineverse had a soft launch on Wednesday in Berlin and will launch for real during the Cannes Film Festival on May 21st. Now with the caveat that content makes or breaks this idea, if you don't get films that a lot of people wanna see, this is never gonna get a lot of momentum. But that aside, this idea has great bones. The idea, this is what NFTs and blockchains are good at. Go listen to our know a little more about blockchains. They're good at being really hard to change, really hard to mess with. Unlike centralized databases, they're much harder to alter without permission. They're really good at tracking who owns a thing. The NFT system application of blockchains are very good at saying, okay, you own the thing. And if you transfer that ownership, one of the previous owners can still get a cut that can be led into NFTs. So the idea that you could resell a digital product kinda sounds silly in an infinitely copyable universe, but this makes it worth something. It makes it so that somebody might be willing to sell, let you resell something because they're gonna get a cut of it later on. It probably would need some kind of digital rights management and I don't love that aspect of it. I'm interested in how that would be handled here, but maybe it can work without it. And the idea of saying, hey, you know what? Apple can't suddenly lose the rights to something and take it out of your library in the cloud because they don't have the rights to show it to you anymore, that's hugely appealing. So I don't know, maybe they could get an Amazon or an Apple or somebody to use the system if it got enough momentum. But to me, this is an excellent application of blockchain and NFT. It just needs the start, right? It needs the beginning. Yeah, and it needs, like you said, a library, the library of movies that people care about, which, you know, there's another difference between this and a standard NFT pitch is that this is a copy of a film and you know that. This isn't like the only print and you're the only one getting it and now you own Terminator 2 and nobody else can have it. So it's a little different in that regard. It also strikes me as the only people that seem to be, I don't know, getting the money early in this process are the ones that are playing middleman and Cineverse is a middleman in this case. OpenSea is a middleman in the NFT world and others in other crypto markets are playing middleman. That seems to be what everybody's hurrying up to be in position to do. And I feel increasingly more every day that that's counter to the whole idea of a digital. That's why Cinemarket said and we'll have to see if they mean it when they say it but that's why they said in two years we don't wanna own Cineverse. We don't wanna be the middleman. We wanna be handling the backend rights of this. We'll make our money there. This would be a lost leader for them. Yeah. The other issue is you mentioned it very briefly but I'll just reiterate real quick here. It would probably need some sort of digital rights management which nobody loves to hear that but also that's kind of the problem with all of this anyway when there's no digital rights management there's no way to not just copy it and give it to a million people whether it's an NFT or if it's not it kind of doesn't matter because it's copyable. And if it becomes not copyable then what's the value in owning it and not being able to use it the way you wanna use it. I think those questions still need to get answered. There's some value to access to be like, oh you've got a really good locker that's got reliable access since you can always get your copy of it because you've got the NFT that lets you in the locker. There are things other than strict DRM that could be used there. But yeah, I'm kind of with you on that. Yeah, that's kind of a weird thing. We'll see how it pans out. Let's talk a little bit about the metaverse or as some have defined it. You'll be forgiven for thinking meta's horizon worlds and second life are the only metaverse like things out there but they're out there in front anyway. But Microsoft offers something called Alt Space VR which has been in operation since 2013. A lot of people didn't know this. I didn't know this till we were prepping for the show. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2017. You can access it with Vive, Oculus, Windows mixed reality gear like the HoloLens for example as well as with Windows and Mac OS desktop apps. Wednesday Microsoft announced several safety precautions it's adding to Alt Space VR but you have to ask yourself, why is that important to do right now at this stage? Well, harassment in VR worlds has gotten much attention lately. There was an incident in meta's horizon worlds which I spent a ton of time in the last three weeks. There was a groping incident there and I watched a groping incident of my own happen in a fake bar in a virtual world and it was very awful and uncomfortable. We'll get more into that in a second. But anyway, this was reported or one of these was reported back on the 26th of November. One of the most recent reports was from researcher Jane Munchen Wong who had to block somebody who forced kissed her avatar in horizon worlds. A thing you can't do anymore but again, we'll get to that. There have been reports of harassment in Alt Space over the years as well going back as far as 2016 and harassment in VR really isn't a new problem. If anything, it's just an extension of the harassment we've all enjoyed in 2D space for a long time. But anyway, here's what Alt Space VR is doing. Alt Space is shutting down the campfire, news, and entertainment that other social, that other social hubs are sort of famous for. These were open spaces meant to help newcomers learn the world, anybody could enter them, come and go in as they please. Alt Space will also be turning on by default a user safety bubble, a thing that keeps other avatars at a distance which you can turn off if you want to. But by default, it would be on. This is now also part of Horizon Worlds. People entering an event will be muted by default. So that's another change. And in the coming weeks, Microsoft will require Microsoft accounts to access Alt Space VR. That brings Microsoft's family safety feature for managing kids accounts as well. So they're going kind of overboard, not overboard. I think they're going bored. This is what should be happening to put in some of these protections. Here's the thing though, here on the news about somebody said a mean thing to me on a message board anymore, because we're sort of past that and we don't think about it anymore. But because this is so new and because it's high profile, you're going to start hearing about it happening in these virtual spaces. And having witnessed one of these myself, I hated it. It was awful. I was in a fake nightclub in a VR space on Horizon Worlds and there was a bad thing that happened in front of me and I went, I don't want to be around here anymore. And I got out and did something else. Their system, as it was constituted that day, they hadn't put in the personal bubble stuff yet, but it was basically relatively easy. If you hear or see or whatever you're doing in there and you want to immediately just block all that out, you lift up your wrist and there's a lock button and you hit it with your finger and suddenly everybody that was there has turned into kind of a translucent ghost of themselves and nobody's talking anymore. There's no sound and you're now given, okay, here's a list of all the people in the room. You can choose who you want to block or report or various ways of taking care of the situation or you can just straight up, this is when I can just leave. I think those are pretty strong already. I think they could even be better. And I think some of the stuff being on by default is better. I think what Microsoft's doing here is smart, but yeah, it's like meat space, maybe worse than meat space. Some people are willing to say and do things in an environment where they're autonomous or nobody knows who they are, there's anonymity in there and they're willing to do some gnarly stuff, so I'm all for these precautions. Yeah, I was thinking about how much this would bother me if something harassment wise happened to me as an avatar in any of these spaces and pretty sure it would be upsetting, but why is it more upsetting than if somebody's mean to me on Twitter or otherwise just being a jerk to me in a way where I can block them or I can ignore or I can take action, there's all sorts of things that we're all kind of used to doing and harassment is certainly a problem that hasn't gone away, but this is different and it's different because sure, I am in VR world, I know the difference between VR world and as you call it, it's got the 2D world, but it is supposed to, even if it's in a cartoonish way or in a fun fantasy way, representing your person and yes, you might be alone as I am in my garage playing VR games all the time, but if you feel violated, you feel violated in a different way than just saying, I don't like this Reddit group, I'm gonna get out of here and that is something that these companies really need to figure out and I definitely think that alt spaces is making some good moves here to protect folks, but it might be darker before it gets lighter. Yeah, maybe, I mean, I'd actually answer your question directly about what's different and I think we all probably know, but there's an intimacy to there being a physicality of a person in front of me now, they've got a face, their mouth is moving in sync with sound, they make expressions if they laugh in real life, I'm hearing the audio of them laughing and I'm seeing it, the avatar smile and the eyes crease and these human motives that we on the internet just do as a quick smiley face, these are happening in real time with real people and they sound like they're right there next to you. Well, and that's supposed to be, that's the point when things are going well, you go, wow, look at us, we're all in a bar together, this is super fun until something happens. And just like in a real bar, when somebody gropes you, it stops being fun. That's right. It's the same. There's a term for this that I can't remember, maybe somebody can remind me, where we extend kind of what we consider us and I've read about this in relation to road rage. One of the reasons that road rage happens is because we stop thinking of ourselves as ending and start thinking of the car as us. And so when other cars cut you off and do things, they're doing it to you. It's very personal. They're not doing it to the vehicle you're in. And I think there's probably a similar thing happening even more so with these virtual worlds because this has now become you. And so when somebody gropes your avatar, they aren't just groping digital bits, they, it feels like you. Yeah. In fact, if anything, there's nothing to even really, for lack of a better way of saying this, you're not really grabbing anything because the way the mechanics in the world work, at least now currently constituted, and this will only get better, but it's not like you can really do much. It's just, you hear the voice, you know what the intent was. And it's really disconcerting because if you were in a real space. The attention are always, always the worst parts. Yeah. Even in the physical world. Yeah. I totally agree. So they're replicating, you know, the magic of VR has us double edges. And this is the other side of it. I really hope that these kind of moves by the companies ahead of the big rush toward this will, well, you know, I think this is really good and important. I feel like Meta's doing a little bit of, not backtracking, but they're kind of, you know, like, oh shoot, we didn't think of that. They're kind of having a moment while it's in real time. But it's good to see Microsoft thinking. I was saying like, oh, it's too bad. We didn't have previous virtual worlds we could have learned from. Like all space VR was having problems like this back in 2016, 2018. Second life was having problems with this well before. It's not like the problems knew. It's not like it just happened for the first time in November. It's just finally getting attention. I mean, heck, people yelling at you over Xbox live and saying horrible racist epithets to you is not that different from this, except now we're all in the space. And I don't know. The more responsible we're going in, we can be the better. Give us all the tools. Give us the protection that we can use for ourselves. And it'll be a better ride. Hey, if you can remember what that phenomenon I was talking about is, or you got any other thoughts on this, I'm sure you do. Send us an email. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. One of the criticisms lobbed at NFTs is that they can be counterfeit. Anybody can mint an NFT for anything. So somebody could take a podcast I made, mint it as an NFT and sell it without my permission. That's a problem with any art, including physical art. You know, there's counterfeit sneakers, counterfeit paintings. So the counter argument to this is that as long as you are buying from a reputable marketplace, then you won't be supporting counterfeiters. Just like with real art and collectibles, you need to use authorized sources. eBay and Amazon, for instance, have put in places ways to verify that you're buying a real collectible or an authentic pair of sneakers or trading cards or art even. So NFT marketplaces, they're gonna do the same thing, right? There'll always be a small amount of criminal behavior out there, but a real life marketplace can keep that to a minimum and criminals can be caught and driven into the shadows. So a digital marketplace will be able to do that as well. So goes the argument. That argument, however, hinges on marketplaces being able to, you know, do that. So far, they haven't proven themselves very good at doing that. More than one artist, Scott Johnson among them, has received messages claiming to have taken their art, minted NFTs without their permission, and offering to sell them to the original artist in order to give them back control of their own art. Now, a lot of these are spam. Some are even phishing attacks, but some of them involve NFTs minted on mainstream well-known NFT marketplaces like OpenSea. Ajatrir says that her art has been created without her permission on OpenSea 86,000 times. The Verge has a really good article digging into this called the counterfeit NFT problem is only getting worse. They describe the rise of bots that will scrape an artist's website, automatically generate listings on OpenSea and elsewhere, then take advantage of something called lazy minting, which lets you list an NFT for sale, but not mint it on the blockchain until it's sold. That means that you don't get charged, so you can freely create mass listings with your bot at no cost. That's spam, folks, email it and cost you anything. Some folks are fighting back, DeviantArt created an image recognition tool called Protect that will notify users if their work is listed on an NFT marketplace, but their action then would be to file a takedown request and the USDMCA process, for instance, requires artists to file a takedown request for each infringement. In Audra Ture's case, that would have meant 86,000 separate requests, which is impossible for a human to do. So as the Verge also notes, developers at Math Venture Partners created something called Sniffles NFT, which is an image recognition tool that also can automatically issue takedown notices. It's not widely available yet. It's in beta tests with 20 artists, but that's some progress. However, as these requests are starting to flood into NFT marketplaces, the marketplaces are getting slower to respond to the request because they're getting overwhelmed with requests for the takedown. Sometimes they'll take weeks, sometimes they just don't respond. Even some big companies are getting infected. Nike is suing a streetwear reseller called StockX for issuing NFTs for Nike shoes. StockX says, these are receipts for purchases. You can trade them for shoes. Nike asserts, you're using our trademarks without permission and you can't redeem these NFTs for shoes yet, so they're not receipts. So what about the platforms? Are the platforms taking any responsibility for this? OpenSea says that it's committed to fighting plagiarized works and estimates that 80%, it admits, 80% of NFTs created with its free minting tool are plagiarized works, fake collections and spam. So it tried limiting that tool to 50 items, cut down on the spam, but still let people mint a lot of stuff for free. That got a lot of backlash from NFT enthusiasts and OpenSea immediately changed course. So you can still mint freely. A marketplace called SENT halted buying and selling of most NFTs on its platform February 6th because it said plagiarized NFTs had become a fundamental problem. Rarible has moved to a human moderated verification system that asks sellers to link to social media accounts and prevents NFTs from non-verified sellers from showing up in search. They self-report a 90% drop in fraud reports since they did that, so that's good news. And the folks buying sniffles NFT are considering building a reputation system on a blockchain that would verify legitimate creators and collectors that marketplaces could take advantages of. Others are pursuing class action lawsuits. John Niemeister, who worked as an artist on the game Smite, is putting together a class action lawsuit on behalf of artists. Others have just taken to supporting, say, for marketplaces. Audra Treer just doesn't list on OpenSea anymore. She moved her art to an invite-only marketplace called Foundation. And that's the hope, Scott, is that the pressure gets put on the marketplaces because there is competition, because there is choice to be like, if you're just going to allow fraud, I'm definitely not taking my legitimate business there. Yeah, I have some hope that this free and very open and very Wild West market will take care of itself because ultimately, artists aren't going to take it anymore and eventually they'll find ways of not letting their stuff get taken advantage of. But as somebody who's been approached twice with somebody claiming to have minted my own work and wanted to sell it back to me, it put me in this thought pattern of like, well, NFTs are just terrible then, and that's the end of it. But as time has gone on and I've done a lot more thinking and digging, it's far more complicated than that. Basically, for me, it comes down to this. If these platforms that are, again, these middlemen we talked about earlier, the ones that handle the transactions that list your stuff, that make their money because you list it there, sold it there, and maybe re-listed there, they need to work not with the masses of people who are trying to sell this stuff or at least not equating those people with the artists because they're not the same people. They need to work with artists to figure out solutions to all of this, not with the masses of people who are trying to make money right now because again, the artists and those making their quickest buck at the moment are not the same people. You saw OpenSea Cave, right? In that exact situation that you're describing. It's exactly the same, yes, it is exactly that. And so we all just kind of feel like, look, for years, people would take something of mine and make a mouse mat out of it and try to sell it on some site somewhere. And for years, I would be told about it because someone on Reddit found it and contacted me and I'd say, all right, well, let's go after the place and say, if we can get it to take down and they always take it down and it's fine and you just sort of move on. But now the stakes have been upped. It's now a thing that is made legitimate and made solid. Literally, we call it minting. It's being minted for all time in eternity in a format that should matter, it should matter more how the artist is involved in this transaction than ever before. And instead, it feels like it is, they're the ones getting completely left in the dark and the art that's getting used or being scraped from them is just being pushed out there willy-nilly and they've got no say or no control over it at all. If that doesn't change at a very fundamental level, I don't think this is sustainable. So I think all of these people you mentioned, all of these middlemen, they have to figure out a way to work with artists and be less concerned about what the buyers and sellers want and more concerned about the origin of the work that has value. And then maybe we see some improvement in the space. I mean, this is no different than what social media faced with moderation. Moderation wasn't new. People figured out moderation on Usenet in the 90s. When I worked at Tech TV and then when I worked at CNET later, we had very good moderation of our forums and then social networks got greedy because they're like, but moderation is expensive at scale. And we got so many users if we don't do moderation, maybe they can self-moderate. Yeah, that's what we'll do. And we've all seen that that has had its own problems. So we're at the same point with NFT marketplaces, which is y'all need to figure this out now or you're just setting up the exact same problem that social networks have gone through in not being able to manage things at scale. And that's what we're seeing. Yeah, not trying to act like one of their parents or anything, but look, open sea or whoever else this might be, you have an opportunity to become the place that figures this out and leads the rest of this industry in the right direction. So do that. It might mean slower growth, which I know is anathema to this blockchain NFT buzz. But- Exactly, exactly. But I think they can do it. It will work out better in the long run. It didn't take long to- I think they can do it. And I think skeptical artists and skeptical buyers and skeptics all over the place will come a long way around here, way of seeing things if you can show good faith in this way. And I think it can be done. It's gonna be big though, cause it's at scale and it's hard that I get it. They'll get there. Well, I have some pretty good news for those of you who are interested in going to space. Would you like to hear it? I would. Virgin Galactic announced it'll sell tickets to the general public starting on February 16th, not just Elon Musk or, I don't know, other really rich people. But there is a tiny catch. You still have to be pretty rich because the tickets cost $450,000 and you have to put down a $150,000 deposit to save your spot. Let them know that you're legit and you're good for it. But if you do have that kind of money, you do get a 90 minute ride from Spaceport America, starts in New Mexico, goes to the edge of space, including what Virgin Galactic calls its signature air launch and a Mach 3 boost. You got weightlessness. It's fun. Look at Earth from afar. That's your thing. The tickets include several days of astronaut training. You get a spacesuit from Under Armour that's conformed to your body and a membership in the future astronaut community. I'm also proud to announce the new $900,000 level on Patreon. The reward which will be, you get to go to space with me because that will cover two tickets. I was trying to think of what would be, what would be the price that I would go to space? Yeah, you're against space. I am anti-space for myself. I want all of you to go to space if you want to. You got the money, great. It's a little, you know, cost prohibitive for most. I'm not going, although everything has a price, right? So like, I don't know, $5 million. I'll think about it. Like if you got $5 million. I'll just keep my eyes closed the whole time and be like, bring me back, bring me back. So we have a $900,000 level for me. Then we have a $5 million level to send Sarah to space. Yeah, I mean listen, I could pay some bills with that money. Yeah, I'll get on adding those to the Patreon as soon as we're done. Thank you, appreciate that. We also appreciate all of the patrons who have supported us for a really long time and we'd like to extend a special thanks today to Sam Leung, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Sam, for all the years of support. Yay, Sam! Sam deserves a presentation. You sure do. Sam, if you want to go to space, I won't be there with you, but I support you in all ways possible. Scott Johnson, also, we love your support. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything you're up to these days. Well, sure. Some of these issues we talked about today, but mostly as it appears or how it works with gaming, especially, I don't know how the metaverse is shaping up and how NFTs might work in gaming. If those are things you want to hear other extended conversations about and just good coverage of the game's business in general, it's a bunch of shows for you over at frogpants.com to check out. So I recommend you do. Go check it out. That's frogpants.com slash podcast. And for everything else, you can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Well, always a pleasure to have you with us, Scott. Good conversation today. Reminder for folks, we are live. Monday through Friday, 4 30 PM Eastern, 2130 UTC. We're on demand, but if you can join us live, we'd love to have you. More info at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back to it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young and Lynn Feralta. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.