Napster Heads to the Metaverse - DTNSB 4983
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Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 25th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories, and help each other understand. Today, Dr. Nikki tells us about other ways to bring certain aspects of extinct animals back to the present and more from your emails. Yeah, I'm Jason Howell. I'm Jen Cutter.

Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. And it might not be the big story you're thinking of. Don't worry, we'll get to that in a moment. Napster, the gift that keeps on giving, is about to become a metaverse destination for

The company Infinite Reality, actually a metaverse music startup, just bought the Napster brand for $207 million. They have intentions to transform the music service into a social music platform for extended reality devices.

The company plans to bring concert experiences, digital and physical merchandise sales, and direct artist interactions into the new and improved Napster. Infinite Reality sees the new platform as a way for artists to, quote, "...connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans."

And Napster currently holds the license. Some of you might not even know that Napster is still around. It is still kicking. They have the license to stream millions of tracks. It's kind of just a music streaming service. Infinite Reality plans to use that access to, as they put it, disrupt music.

legally i love that they put legally in there because you kind of got to do that when you're talking about napster no matter what even 25 or 30 years later no word on when the new napster will launch no word on what platforms we're going to see it but you can imagine i mean i'm guessing like the meta quest and and that sort of stuff

Kind of sounds like, I don't know, does it give you like Patreon, but for the metaverse vibes? It kind of sounds something like that, I guess. Well, the first thing it did was give me time travel vibes. I'm like, wait, what? Yeah, exactly. I'm checking dates on articles, making sure I'm reading this right. Totally, totally. And then, of course, you see the metaverse and you're like, oh, it's one of those. Oh, here we are again. Yeah.

The metaverse is another gift that keeps on giving. Maybe this time it'll work. Yeah. But I will say, you know, during the pandemic, I remember when the pandemic happened and we were all shut down and everything and everybody was spending so much time in their places. I actually, in our family, we had two VR headsets, two Quest headsets. And

And it was kind of like a lifesaver to a certain degree because it gave you, gave us a little bit of that kind of like social interaction quality that we were missing at the time. And I know that there was a little bit of this stuff like, oh, you can go and watch this artist. I can't remember which artist did it.

But this artist holding a virtual concert in VR and you can use your headset to connect into it. I don't think it's ever really the idea has ever lived up to its promise. But I also don't think that that means that it won't eventually at some point live up to that promise or at least deliver more than it has. What are your thoughts on that?

on that? Because the definition of the metaverse is so broad. Like, people initially held up things like Decentraland as a big example of the metaverse, and they had some concerts that were slightly glitchy. But then Fortnite, people consider Fortnite a metaverse, and they are kind of, they were killing it on the concert part. Ariana Grande was part of the lore. Yeah.

They used that as like a season transition. They gave everyone a juice for old skin. Not that long ago. Snoop Dogg and Mariah Carey were available in the shop over Christmas. They got all the names. Yeah, you know. Exactly. But does Napster have that level of artist? And we don't know that because they're going to need something big to pull people in. You're going to need more than nostalgia here.

Yeah, well, and I mean, metaverse in and of itself, XR in and of itself is kind of a limited market to begin with. I think another aspect of this is kind of the idea of how much juice can you squeeze out of a lemon? Maybe not a lemon. Lemon's putting it harshly. But I mean, how much brand equity can you get out of a company like Napster? Like we just heard...

that the company Dig, they announced their relaunch and there's some excitement around that. And we haven't seen that product yet, so we don't know if it's going to be a success or a failure, but this can be done well. And Napster was such a

At a moment in time, Napster redefined – I don't think it's putting it too widely to say that Napster really redefined how the music industry works in an online world. And so there's something there from a brand equity perspective. Yeah.

I just wonder if there's any more juice to squeeze out of it, because this is not the only time that someone's tried to squeeze some juice out of Napster. Yeah, I totally missed all of the other things, but Napster was my first introduction as a kid to the wider music world. And with a lot of retro stuff kind of coming back on TikTok and stuff, we'll see how much traction it gets when they have more concrete details.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, and we're probably a little ways out from that. But, you know, anytime I see Napster, it tugs at my heartstrings just a little bit. But I think every time they do something new, I have less and less...

I guess, faith that it's actually going to become as big of a deal as it was back then. I don't think you ever live up to that because it was just so monumental at the time. You're kind of always chasing that dragon. So we'll see what it turns into.

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Everyone's talking about AI these days, right? It's changing how we work, how we learn, and how we interact with the world at a tremendous pace. It's a gold rush at the frontier. But if we're not careful, we might end up in a heap of trouble. Red Hat's podcast this season on Compiler is diving deep into how AI is reshaping the world we live in. From the ethics of automation to the code behind machine learning, it's breaking down the requirements, capabilities, and implications

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There is more we need to know today, and we've got some pretty interesting stuff here, so let's get right to the briefs.

Samsung co-CEO Zhang Yihong has died from a heart attack at the age of 63. He led the consumer's electronics and mobile devices division and became CEO in 2022 after more than 30 years with the company. Just last week, young Hyun Joon was named co-CEO along with Han, and now Joon will become the sole CEO of Samsung with no indication yet as to whether another CEO will be appointed.

Yeah, it's sad news. Interesting that like just last week that happened, the co-CEO was named and now stepping up, but...

Timing is an interesting thing. Speaking of timing, you probably thought I was going to talk about this story earlier. And for better or for worse, after a lot of consideration, we realized this is far less of a technology story than it is a political story. So I'm going to give you the technology aspect of this very briefly. But

The U.S. presidential administration currently under fire big time for discussing highly classified and sensitive military operations in a private signal group chat.

as well as inadvertently including Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to that thread. Now, Signal is commonly used by privacy-conscious users, has its encrypted protocol, minimal metadata collection as well. Signal is not, however, an authorized platform for government communications in the United States. So it'll be really interesting to see what this means for communication from the government going forward.

OpenAI released a new update for ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode that improves its conversational capabilities. OpenAI says the update brings a more personable and natural tone with less interruptions and more concise output. Paid users get access to these updates with the GPT-4.0 model, while free users gain access to a usage-limited version powered by GPT-4.0 Mini.

Now you can feel like your AI is really connecting with you on a human level. That's where we're headed here.

OpenAI is shifting roles at the top of the company with a broader set of responsibilities for COO Brad Leitkamp as he oversees more of the day-to-day business. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, will focus more of his time on research and product efforts as he oversees the technical direction of the company. OpenAI has no plans to replace the vacant CTO role.

left behind by Mira Marotti. She actually left the company last September. So it's kind of Sam Altman taking a little bit more of her responsibilities, if I'm reading that right. Waymo announced it intends to bring its robo-taxis to Washington, D.C., but there are significant regulatory hurdles to work through before fully autonomous vehicles are allowed in the city. Current city law prohibits autonomous vehicles without safety drivers, and that would need to be changed to make way for Waymo's fleet.

Washington, D.C. has proven to be a challenging environment for autonomous vehicles with some of the worst traffic congestion in the country, which I know because when I was in the U.S. a lot more, that was always a much longer part of my drive than I ever thought it would be.

Yeah, it's a complicated driving scenario for sure in that city. That and then San Francisco, which is close to where I live. Having these autonomous vehicles be able to maneuver through those things, it's almost like if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. The first time I went to San Francisco, I was optimistic and I brought my rollerblades and I learned that the hills are not a joke. Oh, my goodness. I can't imagine rollerblading in the hills of San Francisco. So I always think like, what would it be like to drive there with your limited visibility up and down hills? So yeah, autonomous vehicles kind of freak me out a little and I'm kind of glad they're not really in Toronto. Yeah. So someday you might see some Wemos driving around. Just saying. Might happen. Yeah.

Apple announced that its Apple Music Catalog will soon integrate with leading DJ software and hardware tools like Serato, Alpha Theta, and Algorithm's DJ Pro software, among others.

Apple is also bringing a new DJ with Apple Music category page to the service. That's for exploring editorial playlists and curator pages aimed at DJs. Mixing does not require DJs to download those tracks individually. Actually, it all streams from the cloud, which we were talking before firing up this recording. That could be a real tricky situation if you're in some venue that doesn't have any

cloud access or it's kind of dodgy or whatever, you could end up with a silent DJ and no one wants that.

Yeah. I'm thinking about like parties I went to in my 20s and it's like, wait, how is this going to stream in a concrete bunker? Do they have fiber these days? No, you know what? It's an effect. It's like as a DJ, you've got reverb, you've got delay effects, and then you've also got buffering, which is when it just stops. Hey, like I said, retro is new again. So maybe that's a style change. Yes. Right. Yeah.

Netflix is adding support for HDR10 plus streaming using the popular AV1 codec, which aims to improve visual fidelity and dynamic range on streamed content from the platform. Subscribers will need to belong to the Netflix premium plan, which is currently $24.99 per month in the US. Netflix anticipates this move could make AV1 its most streamed codec.

Yeah, a lot of content on streaming platforms, you know, when it lacks that high definition, when it gets really dark in a scene, it becomes really difficult to see. And so everybody's looking at the inclusion of HDR 10 plus is just a really great upgrade that impacts a lot of its catalog. I think something like 50% of his catalog will have Netflix's catalog will be able to benefit from this. So good news if you're a Netflix streamer.

TikTok is going on an ad buying spree in the U.S. in an attempt to showcase all the ways in which it is good for Americans and small businesses. Video ads running on Facebook and Instagram show how the service has helped entrepreneurs thrive.

as well as saved lives by helping users find organ transplants, just among other examples. TikTok faces a ban, of course, in the U.S. if parent company ByteDance can't find a buyer by the U.S. imposed April 5th deadline. That's right around the corner. Yeah. You know, those sentences you need to reread a couple of times to make sure it's real. And it's like organ transplants.

I am not on the organ transplant side of TikTok. Yeah, but you know, watch a couple of those videos, seek them out, watch them, and then your feed will be filled with it. That's how their algorithm works. When they were advertising in Canada on television during hockey games, as you'll be unsurprised that that's where I saw them, they were really highlighting that it has helped Indigenous artists reach new audiences. And I was like, okay, cool. But they have a lot to go through in the U.S.,

Yeah, yeah, it's an uphill battle. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper in the ongoing stories and follow up. Yeah, let's do that. Genetic engineering is not the only way to bring an extinct animal back to life. And Tom actually talked to Dr. Niki about a very Philip K. Dick-like method that's actually being investigated.

Dr. Nikki, I was really excited when I saw that just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, robots are helping us bring extinct animals back to life. I hope this is real, but what's going on here?

Yeah. Does Tom dream of robotic extinct animals? I want a robotic owl. Well, you know, who doesn't? So this comes from a team of researchers at EPFL in Zurich and Humboldt University in Germany. They paired up to recreate the gait of an extinct animal based on 300 million year old footprints. And it was published in Nature this January. And this is actually a colleague of mine. And I realized that once I was writing this story. So that's fun.

Okay, so maybe I'm a little disappointed that we're talking about how an animal walks, but explain to me why this is important. Tom, it's really important to know how animals walked. Sure. But of course, there's a lot of questions they're trying to answer. Specifically, they're looking at this ancient vertebrate named Orobates papsti, and they want to find out how it moved around. And the reason why that's really important is because Orobates papsti

Is one of the animals that can help us understand how animals came from land. Sorry, to land from water. Okay. Right. At some point we decided to get out of the water.

And this specimen is the oldest known vertebrate for which scientists have fossilized footprints. And I guess you could place this guy between on the evolutionary tree somewhere between ancient amphibians and reptiles, if that helps you visualize it a little bit. So literally understanding how it walks helps us understand how life moved on to land. Yeah. How we started walking eventually coming to us. Yeah. So we don't know.

I'm still waiting for the robot part of this story. How did they do this? How did they go about studying this?

I've actually seen this work presented at a few conferences, and it's so fascinating to see how they go from fossilized footprints. They basically recreate a computer simulation based on like the depth of the different toes and the placement of the different footprints. And they kind of reverse engineer it to simulate how these steps would have occurred and what's like the minimum kind of anatomical structure you need to walk like that.

Kind of like in CSI when they find a footprint and then they go back and like, oh, this guy had a limp. It's exactly what's happening here. Except it's real. And then they created a robot that was based on the numbers they got from those computer simulations. They called it Orobot. And they designed it to match the shape and movements of this extinct animal.

And so they kind of use the robot as almost like a puppet or a template to extract more information on how it could have walked, if that makes sense. That does. So a lot of times when we talk about computer simulations, I'm sure a lot of people, including myself, will think, well, but you know...

simulation isn't the real world. I'm sure it's close enough, you know, to learn something, but I wish you could see the actual animal walks. It sounds like that's what they're doing with the robot is like, well, let's put the simulation in the real world and see what actually happens. That's really cool. Exactly. And if you do want to see it, there is a EPFL did put up a YouTube video of how it walks and it's really cool. It kind of looks like a weird alligator, a flat alligator. Oh yeah. Yeah. We came out on our bellies from the, from the water. We kind of slithered our way up onto land.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So what qualities, once they got the robot out and walking, what were they looking for? So when you're thinking about these types of computer simulations, it's not just a bunch of numbers. Like they have a kind of

like virtual skeleton that they based off of real existing animals. We know it was a vertebrate. We know it had a backbone. So that gives us some parameters within like we can tweak basically to see, all right, how is it walking? So they wanted to try different types of gates. So like running, jumping, whatever, based on a bunch of extant or non-extinct species. They use things like caimans, salamanders, iguanas, and more looking at different ways that these animals carry themselves. Yeah.

Specifically, they had three features that they looked at, which was how high the animal stood on its legs. So think like dragging its belly or not, kind of how alligators legs are kind of at a 90 degree angle almost when they're running or when they're not running. And then also how its spine bent kind of left to right or multiple curves, things like that.

And then how much its elbow and shoulder joints moved when they walked. And they can get a little bit more of this information based on just like basic skeletal properties rather than just the footprint.

And then once they got all this metrics from the robot and from the calculations, they also put on other metrics like energy requirements. Like, sure, maybe it can walk this way, but is that really efficient for the amount of energy it requires and stability? Because you don't want to fall over. And so they try to make the gate as realistic as possible. Yeah. Again, it kind of floors me that...

But as cool as this is to just do, like you don't have to simulate the environment it's walking in anymore. And that makes a big difference. You can too. I'm sure they use like mud substrate. Well, that's what I mean. You don't have to computer simulate it. You can actually put mud down. Yeah, you get a robot, you throw it in some mud. Right. And see what actually happens. You could say that this research is fast paced.

Ah, yes. And you should, you should say that. Okay. So this is good. And I love Orobot and it's good for Orobotis, the species study. What other robots are we looking at? Are they going to do this for other things?

I've already seen octopus robots for different reasons, like more like grip and stuff. But this team says that they could produce robots to study different things like the origins of flight. You may have heard of Archaeopteryx, the old potentially bird. And galloping is one that we're always trying to find out. So I can't wait for Horsebot Simulator 9000. That's fantastic. Yeah, we're totally headed to Westworld today.

Let's go. Yeah. Dr. Nikki, thank you so much. This is a great story. I appreciate you bringing it to us. If folks want to follow you, where should they go? Always my pleasure to be on the show. You can come find my stuff at NicoleAckermans.com. And I'm also on Blue Sky under Dr. Headbutt. Want to catch today's music news in just five minutes? Daily Music Headlines is perfect for you. Visit DailyMusicHeadlines.com.

Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished up tuning your engine with a part you found on eBay. And you realize, you know what? I can also use new brakes. So where do you go next? Back to eBay. You can find anything there. It's unreal. Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there. And you've got eBay guaranteed fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back. Simple as that. Look.

Look, DIY fixes can be major. Doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod. You got it, especially when things are guaranteed to fit. So when you dive into your next car project, start with eBay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love.

BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30-second ad to remind you, right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath in and out.

Feels better, right? That's 15 seconds of self-care. Imagine what you could do with more. Visit betterhelp.com slash random podcast for 10% off your first month of therapy. No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax. All right, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. And today, Andrew is helping us understand.

Andrew says, I am one of the people who makes extensive use of Google Maps timeline data as part of my second brain. I can use the timeline to look back on previous trips and get information on when we got started on the morning road trip or what parts of a city we explored last visit or which trails we did last time we were hiking in a park.

My memory often works best off a time frame or a location as a jumping off point, and Maps Timeline helps me connect those two and find the next piece of info. I was already backed up so unaffected by the deletion, which would have devastated me. I'd like to be able to download my own copy so I can back it up in more places.

Yeah, I think you can back up that data if you go to Google Takeout. I actually I didn't research this beforehand, but I'd be really surprised if they don't have that information for you to take with you. Anytime that I've used Google Maps timeline.

This is totally a me problem, by the way, and probably not many other people. But I think both my wife and I, we each have each other's kind of main Gmail account synced on our phones because there's certain things that we share between our accounts. It's just easier that way. And so if I go to timeline, it's like a mixture of like where I went and where she went, you know, so it's like all over the map. So it's kind of useless, kind of polluted for me.

for me. Yeah. Well, thanks for reminding me about Google Takeout. I have not backed up my stuff in a while and should do that. Yeah. Takeout is awesome to have. And remember, it's such a pain in the butt to actually do stuff with some of that data. Like if you ever want to back up your Google Photos library from Google Takeout, prepare yourself for like an entire like day, like eight hours of organizing and sorting because it's just it's a total pain. But I'm happy it exists. So there's that.

Thank you, Jen. Thank you to Dr. Nikki. Thank you to Andrew, for everyone for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons on patreon.com slash DTNS. DTNS has a live version called DTNS Live on YouTube and Twitch. You can find details on that and more on dailytechnewsshow.com. We'll talk to you tomorrow. ♪

The DTNS Family of Podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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