 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you. I see you, Chris Benito, Steve Ayaterola, Jeffrey Zilx, and welcome in our new patrons, Nick HW and Randy. On this episode of DTNS, looks like you lost some subscribers there, Max. You okay? Also, we check on Canada now that news is illegal there and introduce you to the local first movement that wants to end your reliance on the cloud. Though this right here, this is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 3rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. Deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends. What a wonderful panel. Good to have you both. If I'm not mistaken, Rob, Justin, have you ever done a DTNS together before? I think once, but it was like a big panel one maybe. Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, not not not one of these. The mothership, the real deal, the straight dope, the real DTNS. No, this is me and Rob's debut. And I am thrilled to be doing me too. All right, let's start right away. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off whether you were thrilled or not. Let us shall we begin with the quick hits then? Why not do that? Nintendo reported earnings for the quarter ending June 2023 with a nice surprise for the street revenue for the quarter rose 52% year on year. This is due in large part to the success of the Super Mario Brothers movie and the launch of the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom in May. Company also sold more Switch consoles than expected moving 3.91 million consoles, which is up 13.9% over the same quarter last year. According to TechCrunch, three security researchers were able to jailbreak a Tesla to get free in car feature upgrades. The technique they use is called voltage glitching where they fiddle around with the supply voltage of the AMD processor that runs the infotainment system at just the right time to get the CPU to do something other than what was intended to do. The researchers who own the car but just don't want to pay $300 for heated seats will present their findings next week at the Black Hat Security Cyber Conference in Las Vegas. Instagram has restricted the number of message requests from people you don't follow to one. Previously, it was unlimited. They could just keep saying, hey, please, you want to be my friend, be my friend, accept my request. A second message can only be sent now if the recipient accepts the request to connect. So you don't have to follow each other. You just have to accept that first request. Also, those message requests only can include text now before they could include images and video. Instagram tested these changes in June, and now it's rolling out there, buddy. Samsung and RepairShop company Asherian have designated 50 UBreak iFix locations as flagship repair centers for Samsung devices. That means they have larger inventories and specialized tools so they can repair more types of devices and problems faster. Samsung also partners with iFixit on self-repair kits. And a couple of product announcements. LG has announced the global release for its 97-inch OLED TV. We saw this at CES. This is the one that puts all the ports in a separate box, then connects to the display wirelessly. That way you can put the TV wherever you want, but keep all the boxes and cords out of sight. The LG Signature OLED goes on sale in September. In the UK, you'll pay 28,000 pounds. That's around $35,000 US. It's been on sale in Korea for about the same amount of money. Alienware also announced the launch of its Aurora R16 flagship gaming computer. It's 40% smaller than the R15, but has larger air intakes to M2 PCIe slots and support for Wi-Fi 6E and 2.5 gigabit per second Ethernet. That one starts at $1,750 in the United States. All right, let's check in on our friend Max, Rob. Well, Warner Brothers Discovery announced quarter-ending June 2023 earnings and has lost 1.8 million subscribers across all properties, including Max, the newly combined HBO Max and Discovery Plus streaming service. Executives don't seem too concerned, however, because most of those cancellations were customers dropping Discovery Plus, now that it is part of Max. And the fact that the streaming revenue grew by 13% year over year. CEO David Zasloff says, while we have seen some expected subscriber disruption, we have experienced lower than expected churn throughout this process. He also states that Warner Brothers Discovery plans to launch internationally over the next year plus, but that's not all he had to say is it, Justin. Oh, Rob, you ain't just whistling Dixie. Indeed not. On the writer's and actor's strike, the CEO says it is quote unquote important that the strike gets settled soon, quote, our goal is to tell great stories and we cannot do any of that without the entirety of the creative community. We should also note that the company saved $100 million on expenses because of the writer and actor strike. Now that may look a little paltry when they don't have money to make a new product going forward. But for right now, it's money found in the pants. Zasloff says that Max now has the ability to deliver live programming and the company recognizes that sports are important differentiators. The company may make a move on the NBA with its current rights set to expire in 2025, although the company will sell or close down its regional sports networks by the end of the year. Yeah, it's a subscriber decline. But when you consider that they forced a lot of people to have to download a new app to keep watching the service and they said, hey, that thing you've been paying for Discovery Plus, well, if you're already paying for HBO Max, now you've got it there. And so a bunch of people are going to cancel Discovery Plus. So this actually 1.8 million probably isn't that bad in retrospect. It'll be more important to see if they bounce back with growth next quarter. What surprises me, though, is that even before we saw Zasloff come in, even before the merger got approved, they've been dragging their heels on bringing sports into what was then HBO Max than is now Max. And I don't quite cotton to why they are taking so long to bring live sports front and center. When they have Major League Baseball, NHL, NBA, they have a lot of live sports that they could do this with. I know some of it is right stuff, but not all of it is right stuff. I don't know, with the NBA expiring in 2025, it seems like they really maybe they're waiting to figure that deal out before they highlight it, but I don't know why. I don't think they're getting the NBA. And if I had to just take an educated guess, I think this company wants to be bought again by somebody who has sports. So they don't want to go sign ginormous contracts that would make their acquisition at some point later more difficult to do. Because when you think about the NBA, the player salaries are already starting to reflect what that deal is going to look like. That thing is going to be billions upon billions upon billions of dollars. So I don't know that they want to be strapped down with that. At least you can infer that by the fact that they just haven't gone after any of these major sport franchises. I don't want to say they're there for the taking, but they are there for the bidding. I mean, they could be in the game much more so than they are, so to speak, pun intended. Well, but but of the people that are buying sports right now, they are by far financially the weakest. And you can make the argument from the Turner perspective that they've already done a lot of the kind of acquiring that they were going to do. They already acquired the NHL. They already have expanded their footprint in MLB. And obviously, NBA is their flagship. They are, at least for sports fans that I talked to, the premier exhibitor of sports. That's a very, very important brand, but they don't have the backing that ESPN has with Disney. They don't have the backing of a major broadcasting outlet like ABC or CBS or Fox. And so they being a cable only outlet have always had to be a little circumspect when it comes to what they are going to buy. I agree with you, Rob. This is something that I think they are very much deciding and the market is deciding whether or not they are the biggest small fish in the world of streaming that will be going forward or the smallest big fish going forward. And that will determine whether or not they are swallowed or whether or not they will be surviving. I think Zaslav is putting himself in a position to kind of do both. But as far as max specifically, I don't blame them for going slow on this. This is still a rapidly evolving product. And we saw what happened with Netflix, which has more money than God in this space, that when a live product went wrong, it was reputational damage. They can't afford that right now. As much as I am sure David Zaslav would love for a house to be rebuilt in real time on their platform, because that's what he got rich on with his discovery properties. This is something I can agree that they should take slow. Well, they do some live on the platform. And maybe I'm underestimating how cautious they need to be on that. I look at what some of the others like ESPN and Peacock do, and I assume Max could do it just as good. But yeah, you're right. This platform has not been the most solid technologically. So maybe I need to consider that more. Now that we've talked it out, now that you guys are talking about it, I do see the timeline, which is 2024, January 2024. Coming up is when Comcast and Disney are likely to finish up their conversations about how they dispose of the rest of Hulu. If you don't know, Comcast owns a chunk of Hulu, and they can either force Disney to take it or Disney can force them to give it to them at a price in January 2024. So it's going to happen. Disney's going to get that back, which will free Comcast up to go and possibly buy someone else now that they've got that money and they've extricated themselves from Hulu entirely. And there were some Comcast is Peacock, right? So some people can understand their NBC Peacock, all of that. And the other part of this is there were some restrictions placed on the merger that will be expiring around the same time in early 2024 that will allow someone to buy Warner Brothers Discovery should Warner Brothers Discovery want to sell, should AT&T want to sell their remaining stake and all of that. So in 2024, you're going to see a lot of consolidation, a lot of merger talk, a lot of acquisition talk. And if I'm Zaslav, I probably don't want to have an MBA deal all signed up and tight yet. I want to leave that as some flexibility in any deal going forward. So he can't sign it now, right? Yeah, it's in 2025. And we don't know what that market's going to look like in 2025. There's a lot of players that major sports leagues have shied away from that now are not all that weird, namely Apple and Amazon. Amazon as the NFL, Apple has bought into MLB and MLS. So we are probably going to see a far different group of bidders in 2025. And I think that Turner itself, whether or not it's a tile in another streaming service, or it is its own streaming service, will then be able to join that conversation. All right, Rob, let's turn our attention as everyone does these days to Elon Musk. So Francis AFP news agency is suing Elon Musk X platform aka Twitter because it isn't negotiating payment for sharing AFP stories on Twitter. The EU expanded its copyright law in 2019 to include neighboring rights, which requires large platforms like Twitter to provide usage data for the purpose of determining compensation. The law covers all but the shortest snippets of news content. Google was fined more than half a billion dollars after the antitrust probe found it violated the law. This is just another example of the struggle between online platforms and news publishers over who should make money off of news. Speaking of Canada, because that's also happening in Canada, Michael Geist calls the Canadian version of this bill C18 a lose-lose as meta is now actively blocking news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. Google has not followed suit on that yet. We don't really know where the status is between the CRTC, which is the agency in Canada that's overseeing this in Google. So they yet may block it, but right now they have it. Geist argues that doesn't really matter. News publishers, particularly smaller and independent publishers, are losing out on audience and revenue under this deal. The platforms are losing by making their services objectively less valuable. Individuals are losing because they have fewer places to read and share news, and the government loses because now that the bill has royal assent, there are few ways to mitigate its effects. So everybody's losing according to Michael Geist. Now this conversation could change if Google unexpectedly strikes a deal, but if it goes as people are assuming right now and Google starts blocking things too, Justin, take a look at this. I know it's the same old song, but does it seem that maybe this time Canada backed itself into a corner? Yes. And it's not the Canada backed itself into a corner. It's that we are in a situation where the ad market is tightening. And I've said this a million times on this show, but if you want to understand why weird things are happening in the world of what we think of as free entertainment things for which they're going to monetize by anybody who wants to sell an ad on top of it, then this is part of it. And Google and Facebook are not just rich companies because they're rich companies. They're rich companies because they redefine how to sell ads to people. And if that market is contracting, for which we have seen, and maybe it gets better this year, but this has been a fairly dismal year in terms of ad sales for a bunch of different reasons, then they need to start looking at these fights, these national fights that are going to be precedents for as long as, you know, until they can then have either popular push to overturn the laws or enough lobbyists that can do it from the inside, then they might need to make somebody an example. And Canada, you look a boot, right? Yeah, this is, this is one of those situations where Canada is a big country by landmass, but it really is not that big of a country. So I think meta is kind of saying it's like, you know what? You're the one. You're the one that we're going to just, we're going to wait this thing out and see what your news publications end up saying about this, what your citizens end up saying about this, because we probably can sustain ourselves without having, you know, news advertising in Canada. But can the news advertisers in Canada sustain themselves without actually having their news promoted on a platform as large and ubiquitous as Facebook? I don't know that that is the case. Yeah. No, in fact, I would say that these companies are saying to Canada, Surrey. With fringe on top. I want to make clear to people that there are differences in these laws. Australia had an easier way for negotiations to happen. Canada locked it down more and made it harder because the CRTC is involved, as Justin was talking about earlier. Europe said you could still do very basic snippets. It was only when you started to use a little bit more that you fall into the law, which is why AFP is just now suing Twitter. I feel like the example to look at is Spain. If you recall about 10 years ago, Spain told Google not only do you have to pay to use snippets on Google News, but you can't not link to the news. You can't get around it by just putting up a link. Anything you do, you're going to have to pay. And Google responded by removing the Google News product in Spain for many, many years. You could not use Google News in Spain. And it does feel a little like maybe that's what's going to happen with meta and news in Canada. And like I said, we're still waiting to see what happens with Google. Well, and let's also understand that this is only reaching the point of government action because these media outlets are dying because they stopped getting ad revenue. They turned to social media, some of which offered to pay them money for various different schemes like pivoting to video like Facebook now meta did. And now they feel sold up the river. And so government is stepping in to make sure that they now get paid directly from these platforms. That's what this is all about. But it would not exist if these local outlets were still making money in ad revenue like they were in the 90s and the 2000s. Well, folks, we set a goal last month to try to get to 3,800 patrons. We got to 3,600 patrons. And so instead of bringing Molly Wood on the show once a month, because she's the most requested person we have to bring on the show, we're going to bring her on every other month until we get to 3,800 patrons. We're still trying to get to 3,800 patrons. So we're going to have her on August 11. We've last had her on in June. So this is every other month. But if we can get to 3,800, we're only a couple hundred away. We will be able to have Molly on more. We'll be able to have her on at least one Friday every month. So if you haven't already, consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com slash DTMS. This is one of those articles that I want to call people's attention to, because if you listen to Daily Tech News show, one of the benefits you get is being the person in the room that says, oh yeah, no, I heard about that a while ago. Wired's Gregory Barber has an article up about something called Local First, Local First Software. Local First has become popular in the developer community. It's a big hit on hacker news, for example. It goes along with the slogan, there is no cloud. There is just someone else's computer. So it's people realizing that, well, we don't like having to be relying on the cloud because then our data is relying on somebody else, and they may not have our best interests at heart. The idea of Local First is not to lose the benefits of cloud access, like access across devices or real-time collaboration. It's just reducing the need to have the third party involved. So instead of keeping a dock with Google that we both access, we'd each have a copy on our devices that would regularly reconcile directly between the devices over the internet. So how do you make that work? Well, computer scientist Martin Kleppmann at Cambridge co-authored a white paper with engineers from Research Lab Inc. and Switch called Local First Software, you own your data in spite of the cloud. And it references something called Conflict Free Replicated Data Type. That's CRDT for short. That was developed by a French computer theorist, Marc Shapiro, and Kleppmann built on Shapiro's work to create an open source tool called Auto Merge that powers a lot of Local First software. It handles how to combine two things that are being done in two different places, and they may or may not always be in communication with each other. This is one of those things that may never break out of its enthusiastic community, but it might break out of its enthusiastic community and maybe becomes the next big thing in tech innovation. Maybe it's the next blockchain or the next large language model or transformer. Rob, I know you read this wired article. What's your feeling about where this goes? So I read the article and I actually went through a lot of the white paper. And my initial thought was, this is cute. It's, you know, the white paper almost read like a manifesto, that there were a lot of words in there like art and ownership and this and that and the other. So my thought and have, you know, spending, you know, a lifetime in the corporate world, can you make the C-suite care about this enough that they would actually move on it? I can see smaller development shops or consultants who are working with many others. This is really, really cool for them. But if you are a giant organization and you standardize on SharePoint and Office 365, are you going, do you care that one developer is saying, I'd really love to have this file locally on my machine and work directly with somebody else locally on their machine? And that has to go through SharePoint. I don't think that managers, directors and C-suite folks are going to care unless you can show that there's a reason for them to ultimately, and that's going to be, is this going to help us make more money? Is this going to help us ultimately satisfy customer needs? Is this going to help us ultimately, you know, get our shareholders, you know, happier because that stock price keeps going up? I don't necessarily see that yet. But the ideas of this are really interesting. And there's, there's some cool technical plays here, but you're going to have to figure out how to make a C-suite person care about this enough to actually implement this in large organizations. Rob, you are 100% correct. And it's that mentality that has kept the corporate world away from the leading edge of this conversation for the last 20 years, because in the last 20 years, Google Docs has largely taken over this space. And they did it because it was free and very efficient. And so while a lot of the corporate world has stayed along with their Microsoft licensing and maybe even went with some other places for which could satisfy elements of their own very specific world, there is no reason why a solution like this cannot take hold, especially in our rapidly divergent community of different solutions for different problems world that we have now. We don't only have one way to communicate with each other, we have a billion different ways, depending on how secret or public we want it to be, that this can't be a way that we can share documents in a way that we feel is more secure. We already have that with messaging signal, WhatsApp, various other end to end encryption apps are popular and names we know, simply because they have those features. And they are not other ways in which we communicate. This could be that for documents. And I don't think that just believing that it's not a corporate solution means it can't be a solution. I feel like the first thing it has to do is become reliable. And that is something that if you read this article, you realize it's almost there, not quite there. So it's still in, you know, Bluetooth circa 1998, USB circa 2001, it works. But does it work for everybody auto merge needs to get better. And that is something that is going to happen, have to happen first. So you get more consumers willing to try out something. Once you do that, then I think, Rob, you're absolutely right. There has to be a compelling reason for companies to take it up to for it to become widespread, even for the consumers, because Google didn't do Google ducks because they wanted to make consumers happy. They did Google ducks because they wanted eventually to get corporations to sign up for Google cloud. So I look at this and I think, well, the tech may or may not get good enough, we'll see. But if it does, I think the pitch, Rob, you tell me if this plays with you would be compliance and security. If you can say, look, you don't have to worry about a third party getting hacked, you don't have to worry about a third party having a privacy violation or holding your data, and you don't want them to hold your data. Remember that all the big freak outs on chat EPT, where the data is actually used for training and open AI is having to scramble to tell companies like no, no, no, we'll let you keep your data local. That could be the appealing advantage to something like this. Oh, that makes me raise an eyebrow. Now, I'm not a CISO, but I know security and that makes me think, huh, we cannot be sued if we use this. So that actually gets it into the C-suite to where a corporate decision could actually be made to get this pushed out. That's viable. The challenge out there to everybody in the audience, if you're out there, especially if you're using something with CRDT, and I know some people are like, wait, does Google use CRDT? They ended up using OT, which is a similar type of technology. But if you're using this, let us know how it's going, because I have not played around with it a lot personally. And I'd love to hear the stories, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Another thing to note here, IBM, Huggingface, and NASA walked into a bar. No, they are cooperating to build an open source geospatial foundation model to better handle earth science data. NASA estimates that a quarter million terabytes of data is going to be generated in 2024. So having some AI to help sort through it and make sense of it will be helpful. Foundational models, if you're like, wait, what's a foundation model? That is a big superset of machine learning models. So large language models like chat GPT are a type of foundational models, multimodal models like Dolly. Those are all foundational models. Foundational models are trained on large amounts of data. And IBM is going to provide the foundational model, the WatsonX.AI foundational model. NASA is, of course, going to provide the data from the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite, so HLS, if you know. And Huggingface is going to host the model on its open source platform so that everybody can access it. The group anticipates it can be used to create AI that can track things like deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, predict crop yields, and a bunch of unexpected stuff because it'll be available for researchers and scientists to play with. Finally, AI can tackle the farmer's almanac. Yeah, and if it could, if it could cool the planet down a little as well, while it's at it, I'd be very appreciative. Just point the fans of the computers and the servers. All right, Rob, let's check out the mailbag. So yesterday, Sarah had a brilliant idea of Taco Wednesday. Kevin writes, the first Wednesday of the month, my employer requested all remote employees be in the office. Today, the IT group brought in an outside speaker to talk about a security issue. And now the important piece, they scheduled this during our lunch hour, so there was lunch Taco Buffet. Taco Wednesday was widely observed in my local sphere of influence. Now, listen, the mission of this show is helping each other understand technology, but the secondary mission is helping each other eat more tacos. Yeah, that's it. That's the little known secondary mission of this. So we can probably say Taco Wednesday without being sued by one LeBron James because that's right. Exactly. We don't have to give permission for Taco Wednesday or Taco Thursday or Taco Friday. No, this was great, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this. Appreciate that. So we also want to thank Justin, Robert Young. Why don't you tell us how we can get at you? What are you doing these days? Well, what I'm doing is working very, very hard on the brand new season of Know a Little More with one Tom Merritt. That will be coming to you. Can we say the debut date, Tom? September 6th. September 6th, ladies and gentlemen. Amos is cursing us, but he's already uploaded the first episode. Yeah, we got our episode. And it's going to be something special. It's something that we have never done on Know a Little More before. And I am very excited for you guys to listen to it because I believe that the Daily Tech News Show audience will love it. If you want to get a sense of what we are doing on this season, go ahead and listen to last season on the podcast player of your choice. And let me also add that because we have no DTNS, or I will not be on DTNS next week because it is Experiment Week, if anybody is going to DefCon, find your boy at the Hack 5 booth Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I would love to say hi to as many DTNS listeners as we can. Experiment Week is the week after, but you should still go find Justin at DefCon next week. Is that not, that's not the week? I was, I'm sorry. I was confused by emails. There's been a lot of emails sent. Yeah, it'll do it to you every time. But nonetheless, I know a bunch of you are going to DefCon, so go say hi to Justin. And by the way, I'm not on the show on Thursday. And don't expect Justin to be because he's going to be at DefCon. No, I'm not on the show on Thursday. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. You may have seen the memes about room temperature semiconductors. There is something to it, but nobody quite knows for sure what yet. So we're going to talk about why it is causing such a stir and what we actually know so far. Stick around. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live back tomorrow back to back SMR podcast host Chris Ashley will be here. We will talk to you that. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.