 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Steve Iadirola, Geoffrey Zilx, and Tony Glass. Coming up on DTNS, what we do and don't know about the FAA computer crash in the United States, Netflix is moving into live streams, and scientists find no evidence that Twitter disinformation affected the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We'll explain. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 11th, 2023 in Los Angeles on 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 J. All right, folks, we are well into 2023 at this point. CES lingering behind us. We still got some more analysis to do with that coming up, but not necessarily in today's show. Let's start with the quick hits. Twitter began rolling out changes to feed appearances on iOS, now showing two tab feeds for you and following. For you will show when opening the app, which will offer an algorithmically driven feed similar to the old home feed. Following will show you a chronological feed of followed accounts similar to latest tweets. Users can swipe between the two, but no word on when the new feeds will come to Android. On its Discord server, a human representative of OpenAI said that the company has begun starting to think about how to monetize chat GPT. Through a version called Chat GPT professional as a way to, quote, ensure the tool's long term viability. The company posted a waitlist link in Discord asking potential customers questions about pricing. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Quo expects Apple to release the first MacBook with an OLED display by the end of 2024 at the earliest. Meanwhile, Bloomberg's Mark German sources say that Apple plans to start using its own custom displays on mobile devices as early as 2024 as well, starting with switching from OLED to micro led displays on high end Apple watches and eventually the iPhone. Add the following to your calendar. We got a couple of events. Xbox and Bethesda are host Bethesda. It's easy for you to say. We'll host a developer direct event on January 25th at 3 p.m. They're going to be talking about Forza Motorsport, Minecraft Legends, Elder Scrolls Online, as well as which titles are going to come to Xbox PC and Game Pass in the next few months. That event will be streamed on Twitch and YouTube. Samsung is also going to hold its own event, Galaxy Unpacked, the first one of 2023 on February 1st in San Francisco, first one in person in a couple of years. That'll happen at 1 p.m. Eastern. Samsung will stream the event on its site and on YouTube. Expected updates there would be another Galaxy S phone, the Galaxy S23 series and new Galaxy Book laptops. Alphabet graduated its X Moonshot Factory Computational Agriculture Project mineral into a full alphabet company. Mineral works on using generative AI and also machine learning and edge computer hardware to develop sensing tech for richer plant data sets and organizing crop data across disparate sources. Alright, so there we go. M, I think they already had an M, but M added to the alphabet. Let's talk about that outage. Let's do it. So at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the U.S. Aviations Agencies, Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system crashed and required a hard reset. Apologies to anybody who was flying this morning. In the words of Captain Brian Hoffman, who wrote in about this and knows a lot about this stuff, NOTAM tells pilots about issues like a closed runway or taxiway due to construction or airspace that is closed, say, due to military usage to name a few examples. Now, this is information that can be conveyed to each pilot individually as needed, but that doesn't really scale. So the automated system is necessary if you want to have the thousands of flights in the year, which we do. Yeah, BBC did an article about this and pointed out the system's been around since 1947. It used to be done by telephone. It is not anymore. But if we want to have those flights that Sarah's talking about, you need a lot of notifications and you need them easy to get. 21,464 flights were scheduled on Wednesday. So flights already in the air were safe. There was no disruption to you if you were in the air, because this is just notifications that you either already saw before you took off or they could talk to you if you're in the air and tell you what you need to know. Flights were delayed from taking off, though, until the automated system got back to normal operations. Departures began again at around 8.15 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday. The FAA is investigating why the system crashed, but US officials said there was no evidence of a cyber attack. My question is, how old is this system? And we know the FAA requires redundancies. I'm not doubting that there were redundancies. So my question isn't why weren't the redundancies? Is why did the redundancies fail? Why did this system have to do a hard reset? Yeah, it's easy to look at this and go, well, it must be based on some old technology. What are they running? Windows 98, you know, this sort of attitude. Who knows what they actually use? I know that this feels like a rare event. You don't hear a lot about the FAA being the outage point. You hear about airlines having trouble, but it's usually within their own realm. We had a listener do film sac right in and say they were taxiing when the word came in that they couldn't leave. So literally they're about to take a turn and take off when the captain says, we're going to have to not do this and they had to go back and dump everybody off. In fact, I think they had to sit on the tarmac for a while just to deal with it. But I guess hearts go out to everyone who had to deal with that. That's kind of a nightmare. And I feel really bad for them. No fun. Yeah, I think especially having, I mean, I am not myself a pilot, but I'm quite into the idea of the pilot universe. I have heard from quite a few pilots, like especially like, you know, flying PJ stuff, that yeah, you think that pilots need more information that they actually need. Not to say that this is not important. But once you're in the air, you know, for anybody who was like, oh gosh, you know, it, you know, is everybody, you know, on a plane right now, save, you know, are they going to crash? Now, for the most part, pilots, they know what they're doing. This is all information that is more about taking off and landing. Yeah. And stuff you can tell the pilot, you can say like, hey, runway five is closed. Use runway four. But when you have a dozen air traffic controllers and thousands of planes, it's easier to have a system that just automatically feeds that information to folks. These no-tams are apparently pages and pages long too, right? So you wouldn't have someone sit there and read hundreds of pages of information to all the pilots out there, which is why you need this system at the scale at which we operate. So yeah, I'm sitting here waiting like, okay, this wasn't dangerous. I get why they had to ground planes, not that the planes couldn't fly. It's just too many planes to fly as safely as we want them to fly. But what was that system running on? Why did it crash? Why did they have to do a reset? Why wasn't there a failover? Do they have the system in multiple places? Was it just in one place? Was it a power outage? You know, these are all the questions I have. Exactly. Like if it wasn't a cyber attack, which is great, what did happen? Yeah. Yeah. I love that it wasn't a cyber attack. That was good news. But I don't know. I look at the sort of thing and think they could be more transparent about that. I want answers to everything Tom just asked them. Why is it a problem that we would know that? There's a security issue by letting people know what systems this is running on. What kind of coding is involved. Have you looked to find out what the system runs on? I looked around. I looked around and couldn't find anything. But my brain goes to Unix, Linux. Before I accuse them of lack of transparency, I want to make sure I've exhausted all my lanes. Maybe it's over there somewhere and I just didn't know where to look, right? Sure. What I think is responsible for them too is to say, hey, we're not going to speculate on what could have caused it until we're sure. And so I think they're looking into like, okay, we think it was this, but as with any computer crash, there's a difference between fixing the crash and knowing what caused the crash, right? Yeah, I agree. Well, let's move on to some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everyone's favorite turtles. Shredder's Revenge was a game that launched a little while ago on Xbox PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, but it is now coming out on iOS and Android from none other than Netflix. And will be a mobile exclusive for Netflix subscribers. So that seems cool. Yeah, I, yeah. In other Netflix news, whether or not you're excited about this game or not, Netflix reached a multi-year partnership with the Screen Actors Guild to livestream the SAG Awards that's starting in 2024. The show will also be streamed on Netflix's YouTube channel. The company will host its first live stream content on March 4th at 10 p.m. Eastern where you can watch Chris Rock Selective Outrage. The show will be streamed from Baltimore and then be made available on demand on Netflix after that. So when Chris Rock's streaming event was announced, I thought, well, that's interesting. Netflix is testing live streaming and they're testing it with what is going to be a very popular live stream because everybody wants to hear what Chris Rock has to say about what happened at the Oscars with Will Smith. So I'm like, okay, this might be just a toe dab. When I saw the news about the Screen Actors Guild Awards coming to Netflix in 2024, I actually found that more interesting because the SAG Awards are something you see on Bravo. They're not expected to get a huge audience, but they always get an audience. There's people who just love award shows. I mean, I'm one of those people for sure. And so Netflix getting that is like taking away some of that secondary cable. As we're going to watch cable die, some of that secondary cable content is going to have to go elsewhere. Here it goes. One of them is going to Netflix and it means Netflix is open to streaming things that don't have to be super popular to justify it. That implies to me that they are going to be doing a lot of live streams and award shows might be among those. I mean, award shows, I always tell people, I don't really need cable TV or even like network television except for things like sports and award shows because it's appointment viewing. If you care about the SAG Awards, for example, you're going to watch it wherever it may be. So I think that this is really lucrative for the variety of companies who are going to, I mean, it's kind of like Amazon and Thursday night football. It's all sort of the same thing. Yeah, I like that Netflix is finally showing us what they're going to do, but it also feels very familiar to me in the playbook of Netflix. And same thing with their mobile game stuff that we just talked about with the Ninja Turtle. They start slow. They start with a thing that isn't the Oscars, but it's an interesting award show, maybe even a little more prestige in some ways. Some people take that thing more seriously than the Oscars and they're going to put that thing out and say exactly. But they're like, we're going to start here and then we're going to see where it takes us. How about a comedy stream or a live concert with Chris Rock? That sounds good. Then they'll build it out from there. That seems like the Netflix way. They don't start with spending all their money on a big flashy moment. They work with small stuff and see how it pans out over time, including original programming in the early days. And I think that's, this is just part of their playbook and we'll probably work for them as a result. Yeah, I look at this and I think, okay, Netflix was making noise about sports last year, but basically, if I'm reading the tea leaves right, said it's too expensive. We would have to have a lot more control over a sports deal in order to make it work. Similar to why Apple didn't end up getting NFL Sunday ticket. They wanted fewer blackouts. They wanted more control over the streams. I think Netflix is even more so that way. But they definitely want to do live. So what else are they going to do? Sure, they're going to do other award shows. I think that could be a given. What about news? Because news is the other live thing that people talk about. And wouldn't it be interesting if a Netflix news product came out of this once they're like, yeah, we can do live. So we're going to do live news sometimes or breaking news. I don't know. Netflix news department sounds crazy, but at this point, they've done a lot of things like ad supported and now live that they had said they weren't going to do before. I'd be curious if they do that. Well, and a Netflix news department that is successful would be the absolute best way for everyone to say, oh, yeah. I mean, I go to Netflix for my news the way that I would go to CNN or Fox or whatever. It hasn't really been tested and done at this point, but why not? Yeah, I mean, I would at least I watch very little news because I think it's all kind of bad. Just the way they do it. I don't like the format of news is fine. 100% me. I don't want to. I'm not blanketing everybody else's opinion, but I find news to be just laborious to watch. And it could they do something interesting. Yeah. Could they something different where they're because they're not beholden to making. And what? And like, and that's kind of the question is like, how would it be different? You know, for somebody like Scott, who's like, you know, the news is just like such a bummer. Just, you know, I really don't want to consume this. How could it be done differently by a company like Netflix? Yeah, I don't know. CBS, ABC, NBC, they all have free news apps that are ad supported. Netflix now has ads. Could they do something free outside of their paywall? I don't know. That's where my mind has been going with this stuff. Also, clarification. We mentioned the show will be streamed on Netflix's YouTube channel. That's just for this year. This year, they're going to do it on the YouTube channel. And then as of next year, it'll only be on Netflix. If you're like, well, wait, why are they even putting it on Netflix? They're going to put it on YouTube. That's a, it's a temporary measure. And one tiny bone thrown to the gamers real quick, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, very successful on consoles and PC and its initial run. People really like it. It's an amazing throwback to the, to the nineties games. However, I don't think the supports controller is just trying to find out. So I'm just saying, I may not be your preferred way to play at touch screens or kind of lame when it comes to games like that. Yeah. There you go. Side note complete. You can do that. Yeah. If you're feeling social and you want to say Tom, Scott, Sarah, you, you should know this. Get in touch with us on social networks. DTNS show on Twitter, Daily Tech News show on TikTok and DTNS pics with an X, DTNS P I X on Instagram. Yesterday, we mentioned a study that found disinformation campaigns on Twitter in 2016 had little to no effect. That's a big surprise for some of us. This contradicts what a lot of folks believe. So let's look at the study a little bit closer. It was led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the Journal Nature Communications. It was conducted by scientists from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College, Dublin and the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Tom, you're right up on this. And what are the sources of the info in the study? Yeah. So I know a lot of people who may, may be seeing this going against what they previous believed. We'll have questions. The study looked at disinformation spread mostly by the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. That is a group with alleged links to the Russian government. There were a few other smaller campaigns that were part of this as well, linked to groups in China, Venezuela and Iran. To identify which accounts were engaged in disinformation, they used Twitter's identification of foreign influence campaign accounts. So however you feel about how Twitter identifies those, that's how you would feel about how they were identified for this study. As for people's attitudes and exposure, they used data collected by YouGov from 1,500 representative U.S. voters, representative of the demographics of U.S. voters. They used surveys to measure their attitudes and beliefs, and the respondents approved access to their Twitter accounts, and that's how they were able to measure information. Surveys were conducted in April 2016, and then again in October 2016, so you could measure whether their attitudes changed, and then a third survey was conducted after the election that just asked who'd you vote for or did you vote? The study only looked at individual attitudes. It did not attempt to measure other effects that may have occurred, like whether you believe the election had integrity or anything like that. It was just looking like, how did your beliefs and support get changed if they got changed? All right, so we've got a couple different surveys of April 2016, October 2016, and anecdotal information. So Tom, let's get into more about what they actually did find. Well, it wasn't anecdotal. That's the thing, is this was very scientifically done. It was self-reported, so that's something to keep in mind. The main finding was that Russian disinformation campaigns on Twitter in 2016 reached very few users. Not that many people saw it, and there was, quote, no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. In fact, exposure to information from the media in the U.S. and politicians themselves vastly outnumbered the exposures to disinformation. Study respondents were exposed to an average of four disinformation posts from the Internet Research Agency per day during the period studied. They were exposed to 106 posts per day from news media and 35 a day from U.S. politicians. So 25 times as much exposure to the media than disinformation posts. The study also found that 70% of exposures to disinformation reached a 1% of the users. So even the people who were seeing them, it was a very small number of people who were seeing them. Most of those users, too, of that 1%, were identified as strong Republicans. So they were already reaching people who were already very firm in their beliefs. Okay, so that does tell us something about the reach of Twitter, but how does Facebook factor into this? Yeah, that is a good question. The study did not look at Facebook data because Facebook does not make it easy to access its data. If you recall back in August 2021, Facebook shut down personal accounts of NYU researchers who were trying to study the spread of misinformation on that platform. So Facebook has actually combated efforts to study it. However, Facebook has released a little bit of information and they included what they could in this report. They previously estimated that 126 million users had at least the potential to have viewed disinformation over a two-year period around 2016. And the paper, through its surveys and its measurements, estimates about 32 million US Twitter users were exposed to the same kinds of posts in the eight months before the 2016 election. Now you're talking about two years for 126 million and eight months for Twitter. That's not exactly apples to apples, but back in the envelope calculation, Facebook in 2016 had around three and a half times as many US users as Twitter. So if you do that calculation, the reach is pretty similar on both platforms and barring there being some of their mechanic at play, it's probably the same reach on Facebook as it was on Twitter. So, okay. So we're talking about reach. Is this the first study to point to little or no effect? That's not, yeah. This is not the first study to do that. A study published in 2019 in PNAS found no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted six distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a one month period. Now that was looking at 2017. This is the first time we've looked at the period before the election in 2016. There have been some other studies out there that have said, oh, betting markets changed on Russian holidays. Maybe there was an effect. There's also studies around the media response to hacks and leaks of information, but that's not related to social media platforms. So there's other evidence that other things were happening in the election, but all of the studies so far that say, did social media posts have an effect, have not been able to find an effect? This is really interesting stuff. I was thinking about this a lot since you and I talked about it in the morning show a little bit, just briefly. We talked obviously a lot more here, but my grand takeaway is that people who are already pointing a certain direction with their opinions, regardless of that direction or party or side or whatever, were already there. And if you came along to them with something counter to that, they weren't going to suddenly go, oh, I've seen the light. I'm now going to change my mind. Or if they already supported a certain position, they were just having confirmation by hearing that. And all that it only turned out to be, for the most part, is this social media stuff just gave us all megaphones and let us all yell about it. And we got loud about it and everybody heard it. And the assumptions I think are natural that there was a bigger impact than you'd think, but I think at the end of the day, people were still people and we probably weren't swayed that much. You don't usually have two people who diametrically oppose each other, show up at a table and then walk away completely changed in their opinions. They may find some new understanding, but for the most part, it stays the same. So part of me was surprised to hear this and part of me is not that surprised to hear this. Yeah, I think, I mean, I certainly know, you know, myself included, that yes, if you have feelings about anything, politics being a, you know, a centenary topic, then you're not necessarily going to be swayed by anything that comes your way, whether it be from Facebook or Twitter or some other social media entity that is trying to sway you into either believing something or paying money for something. I don't know. I mean, in a way, I feel like it's like, all right, well, this, actually all of this data shows that people just, you know, are resolute in their beliefs and good for them, whatever they may be. The other thing it shows is that these disinformation campaigns didn't reach that many people. There's a human bias we have when we see an example of something to think, oh, that one example must be replicated and because I'm seeing it, everyone can see it. And so you have to counteract that bias and say, okay, just because I'm seeing an example doesn't mean it's widespread. How do I tell if it's widespread? You do this kind of study and see how many people actually saw it and of the people who saw it, what effect did it have on them? And what the study found is, not that many people saw it and of the people who saw it, it didn't have much of an effect. What people did see was mainstream media and what you don't hear anyone talking about anymore is what effect is 24 hour quote unquote news which are really just entertainment channels having on people's beliefs. How does that sway people? Because those are the messages that people are seeing in way greater numbers on social media. Forget about the fact that they're also watching the television hours and hours a day. Your information is coming from that source in huge amounts compared to the disinformation that's on social media. I don't think that means we should undervalue the social media. I don't think it means this is the last word and disinformation is not a problem. But the amount of attention being given to disinformation on social media is way out of proportion to the actual information that seems to be having an effect on people. I agree. And I also, well, I don't know. I think you said it best. And if there's anything that's changed about my attitude about this in all this time, it's this one thing that it wasn't quite what I thought it was. Do you know what I'm saying? Like if there was any certainty, there was no certainty then. It always just felt like chaos. But right now I'm like, no, maybe we were just all really loud and upset and in our different ways. And at the end of the day, we didn't really change any minds. I wonder if disinformation networks and bots, though, people that make that stuff, are they feeling a little failure right now? I would think so. I hope so. I hope so. I don't think they probably can still point to the chaos that still feeds. I guess, unless that motivates them to try harder and get better at it, which it might. That's a good point. Yeah. I would also like to see a study of what effect mainstream television news had on people's attitudes, beliefs and polarization over this same period. I think that would be interesting. 100%. Yeah. Well, let's talk about eyes. The conversation has an article from senior lecturer of psychology at Royal Holloway University in London, Sonya Durant called Eye Movement Science is helping us learn how we think. She says, since the 1960s, scientists have been studying the way that eye movements potentially help decode people's thoughts. More recently, research in Germany showed eye tracking could help detect where somebody's at in their thinking process, because they're able to track thought processes and can avoid life-threatening disconnects between humans and computers. Since then, infrared cameras and computer programs have made eye tracking easier, and in the last few years have shown eye tracking can reveal a lot of things such as what stage somebody is at in their thinking. For example, in cognitive psychology experiments, people are often asked to find an object in an image. In a 2022 German study, results show eye tracking can distinguish between two phases of thinking. In ambient mode involves taking in information. Focal processing happens in the later stages of problem solving. Yeah, so, you know, it's basically whether you're gathering information or trying to solve the problem, right? So potential uses of this combination could be telling if somebody's tired, telling if someone's dyslexic, telling if someone is stuck in a lesson as a teaching aid and being able to apply some more, you know, some more help to somebody. Or otherwise, don't, you know, agree with, you know, you know, the eyes have it, right? If someone's like, I don't really agree with, you know, what we're going for here. It always makes me think of VR uses and eye tracking obviously a big part of VR technology moving forward. How this would affect you in game decisions and an AI slash computer recognizing you think or mean by your eye movements and or expressions. That's interesting. Yeah, we're getting better at being able to interpret what eye movements mean and we're getting better at being able to track eye movements for good or for ill. Those are both. Remember back in the day when it was like, if someone's lying, they blink a lot. Yep. You go, okay. So this is just, you know, a natural progression of that based on technology that we have access to now. Well, Scott, I don't think that you're ever lying to us. If you are just blink a lot and it'll be more obvious, but thank you for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest that you do. Well, good news, everybody. My final beta deck came in for the game at Dungeon Burner, which means a little more play testing, a little bit of more tweaking, but it's almost ready for Kickstarter. If you would like to follow along with my fun new card game that can play up to five people, two to five people, ages eight and up, go check it out. DungeonMurder.com. There's a video there and some other information. I'll have some more stuff up very shortly, but we are coming down to the moment of reality for that thing. So if that sounds interesting, you like your tabletop games, check it out. Once again, that is DungeonMurder.com. Sounds good for a lot of the folks who listened to this show. Speaking of folks who listened to the show, we have a couple brand new bosses to thank. Those bosses are Kenny and LTJM. Thank you Kenny. Thank you LTJM. Both started backing us on Patreon and we could not be happier to have you. I posted on Twitter yesterday. I was like, I don't know, if you start backing us on Patreon, you might get your name in the show today. Kenny just, just, he almost made it to the yesterday show, so I'm glad we got him in today's show. Thank you Kenny. And LTJM as well. I don't know if you saw that post as well. Thank you both. Indeed. Speaking of patrons, do stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet, where we talk about all the things. But just a reminder, on DTNS, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then. Thank you.