 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Logan Larson, Mike Aikens, and Norm Physicus. Coming up on DTNS, Google's got new Pixel phones. They're great. They're reasonably priced. Will anyone buy them? I don't know. And Jen Briney from the Congressional Dish is here to tell us what's actually in the chips hack. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 6th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm Roger Scheng, the show's producer. And joining us host of Congressional Dish, Jen Briney. Welcome back. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for reading the entire chips hack for us. No, I know, but that's why we appreciate it all the more. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about the Pixel phones, but let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Quick Hits! The Australian government proposed changes to consumer privacy rules that would allow telcos to share government-issued identification documents with banks to better implement enhanced monitoring for data breaches, something that Australians wish would have happened earlier. The data can only be used for preventing and responding to security incidents, fraud, scam activity, or identity theft, and must be destroyed when no longer needed. This comes after the breach at the Telco Optus exposed personal information on as many as 10 million accounts. That's a lot of accounts. A couple of AI stories to tell you about. Alphabets DeepMind published a paper in the journal Nature detailing Alphatensor designed to discover novel, efficient, and probably correct algorithms. So it's an AI that can discover more AI. Google also announced its text to video systems. One is called Imagine Video, which similar to Meta's recently shown Make a Video System uses a short text prompt to generate a 16 frame, 3 frames per second video at 24 by 48 pixel resolution, which is upscaled to 24 frames per second at 720p. Google also showed Fnaki designed to turn longer detailed prompts into videos with two minutes, but currently offers less resolution. Alright, we're going from images to videos already. This is a big one. Netflix has agreed with major U.S. theater chains AMC, Regal, and Cinemark to show Glass Onion a Knives Out Mystery in their theaters for a limited but exclusive run. This is not just to get award consideration. They could have done a much smaller run for that. 600 theaters, so not all their theaters, but 600 theaters across the United States will get what's going to be billed as a sneak preview run of the movie from November 23rd through November 29th, so the Thanksgiving weekend. Then it'll be out of theaters and unavailable to watch on Netflix until it shows up on the streaming service December 23rd. It's the first time AMC, Regal, or Cinemark have shown anything from Netflix in one of their theaters. Bloomberg sources say that Twitter and Elon Musk agreed to delay Musk's deposition in the company's lawsuit previously set for Thursday. That's actually today. This indicates the two companies may be close to an acquisition deal that would settle the court case. I mean, anybody's guess what's actually going to happen, but here's the thing that actually points towards one outcome. So there you go. And Hyundai's joint venture with Aptiva called Motional has signed a 10-year deal to provide autonomous vehicles to Ubers' ride-hailing and delivery service. So not just Uber, but Uber Eats too. The companies did not announce service areas, but they did say they'd launch in multiple cities in the United States. Motional already works with Lyft to provide autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas, and Uber actually has a separate deal with Nuro for vehicles in California and Texas. All right, Google had an announcement in New York City to announce the details of the Pixel 7, the 7 Pro, and the Pixel Watch. They teased all these during Google I.O. back in May. You probably remember that. But now we have the details, and all three pixels are available to order now, shipping October 13th. Let's start with features that are available in both the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. They both run on the new Google Design Tensor G2 chip, have IP68 dust and waterproof protection, and claim to get 24 hours on a single charge up to 72 hours when the battery saver kicks in. The pixels are capable of Qi wireless charging, USB-C fast charging, and can charge other devices. Now, some of the features coming to the phone include cough and snore detection while you're sleeping, stays on device, they're not going to send it to the cloud. Google previously launched Realtone on the Pixel for more accurate skin tone in photos, and now is going to offer guided frame, which helps people with low vision frame up a shot using haptics and audio guidance, like telling you raise it up, lower it down. There's also Cinematic Blur, which some people might just call Boca, Photo Unblur, Face Unblur, and Google Assistant has some pixel-specific features like you can now tell the Pixel Silence if you want it to stop ringing, which will be fun to shout. And it will transcribe your voice messages, something that iPhone users have enjoyed. It's going to be able to do that. And it can label the different speakers in the Recorder app if you're recording a meeting or something like that. So, yeah, the recording is really interesting to me. And then also, will it kick me if I'm snoring like my wife? They need some stronger haptics for that, yeah. I just wondered. But the pixels both come with an underscreen fingerprint sensor and face unlock, though face unlock is not available for everything since the fingerprint is still considered more secure on the Pixel. The pixels both ship with Google One's VPN built in at no additional cost, though it's not available in all countries. And some systems won't actually send data through the VPN. You also get five years of security updates on both the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. Okay, so that's what's in both phones, but let's tell you the differences. The Pixel 7 has a 6.3 inch 1080 by 2400 screen up to 90 hertz variable refresh rate comes with eight gigs of RAM. You can get it in either 128 or 256 gigs of storage has a rear 50 megapixel camera and the same front facing main and ultra wide sensors as the Pro. It doesn't have a telephoto lens. The Pro does. The Pixel 7 will start at an affordable $599. The Pixel 7 Pro has a 6.7 inch 1140 by 3120 display with up to 120 hertz variable refresh rate. It has polished aluminum frame and adds a 48 megapixel telephoto lens to the rear camera that can do up to 5x optical zoom or 30x digital. It can also macro focus at close as close as three centimeters. It has 12 gigs of RAM and adds a 512 gigabyte storage option. The Pixel 7 Pro starts at $899. So these prices relative to others with similar specs on the marketplace are pretty good. The builds look great. Essentially, if you're paying for the Pro, you're paying for the bigger screen, the better camera and maybe some increased storage options and better RAM and such. What do you as an Android user think about these Rob? Are you tempted to switch to the Pixel? So it is not so much the hardware. I have been team Samsung since I think the Galaxy S3, so I just like Samsung hardware. But the software additions, the voice transcription that this phone can do is second to none. I mean, you literally talk to it and it figured out what you're saying and types it out for you. Which you would think all transcribing does, but it's just better. The ability for you to make a phone call or someone to call you and then it basically answers screens them, those all kind of stuff. I would actually pay for that service that is so good for people who I know who have pixels. So the software things that Google is doing on this phone are really interesting to me. The hardware, I still kind of like just to look and polish that you get with all that glass on the Samsung devices. But the heart, like I said, the software is really making me perk my eyes up and say, I might have to try this out. I've used that automatic Google Assistant thing where it can talk to someone for you and you're just tapping the stuff. And in fact, they've got some improvements here where they say if it's a commonly called number, it'll start sharing what the options are. I won't wait to hear the options. But I always wonder if I'm being as bad as I feel when I have to deal with a phone tree, an automated phone tree. But I guess to turn about is fair play, right? Right. Jen, as an iPhone user, have we swayed you at all with these pixel stats? Does this bring any interest to your phone life? So the one thing that made me curious is the speech to text because I'm huge on that. I see I'm wearing giant glasses because I strain my eyes a lot with what I do. So I'm using speech to text and I do find myself editing a lot when I'm using it to text people, which kind of defeats the purpose of not looking at my phone. So knowing that that's really good was the one thing that made me go like, hmm, but the rest of it, I don't know for me to give up and have to relearn a whole system. I'm definitely in the Apple net. They've captured me completely. So it would have to be something kind of extraordinary because once I switch the phone, then I feel like my Apple computer doesn't talk to it as well. I just I would have to go all in on the Google stuff. I'm just not there yet. Yeah, I mean, that's the been the problem for a lot of these Android makers and Google's no exception, even though they make the operating system, it's hard to break people out of their ecosystems. We just heard it from two different perspectives. We heard Jen talking about it from the iOS perspective and Rob, you were just basically saying like, well, I'm kind of like a my Samsung life, you know. Well, here's the thing. I don't know that this is a problem for Google, but it's always been this way. They allow anyone to make Android devices. Anybody can make them. So for years, other manufacturers have made better iPhones have made better Android devices than Google itself was making. So you now have people who are kind of locked in. So clearly it is not as much of an ecosystem thing for me. It is just I like the big giant phone with the pen that I use more so than being able to transcribe something on my phone. So I'm not saying that I'm not interested in the pixel. It's just I don't know that there's enough there yet to make me switch over from what I'm currently using. It just sounds real familiar to me to hear a bunch of people talk about how well how good a phone is that is not going to sell. It happened to HTC. It happened to LG. It's currently true for Sony. They sell well in Japan, but outside of Japan, almost no one knows about the Xperia phones and their great phones. So I look at this and I'm like, Google only reports $6.55 billion in other revenue. That's not even just their hardware. That's all their hardware plus Google Play compare 6.55 billion to the 50.5 billion Apple makes on iPhone. Samsung is making billions off the Galaxy line. I I'm not saying these are bad phones. I just don't know where this goes for Google unless they go a Microsoft route and say it's not the sales numbers that matter. It's showing off the capabilities. We're the showcase phone for Android. And if they do that, they have to start allowing some of these pixel only features to move to additional, you know, Android devices. I'll be flat out honest with you. I'm probably more apt to move to iPhone than I am to move to pixel because like what's the point? I want to get, you know, transcription. That is an awesome, awesome thing. I don't know if it's enough to just change everything. If I want to change everything, I might as well just change to a completely different platform. That's just me though. And if they are using it as a showcase and those features do move to Samsung phones, let's say, then you're going to look at it and think, well, can I just wait? Can I just wait until it shows up on Samsung? Like, you know, it takes away a little the impetus to move it. So I'm not even sure what Google's up to here, except making very nice phones at a very good price. No, they are really good phones. If you are coming from a mid-tier or lower end Android device and you want to get into a premium device, these things are very, very well priced. I think that Samsung and Apple, they definitely figured out back in 2020, you can't charge people $1,300 or $1,400 for a phone. They'll just wait until that phone breaks before they show up that kind of money. So the phones have definitely gotten less expensive over the last couple of years. And the Pixel really has never been super expensive. So that's always a good thing. But these are very, very, very good phones for that price range. So I definitely recommend them if you're on like a mid-tier phone and you're just trying to move to get the best of Android, you're probably not going to do better on Android than you will do with a Pixel. Maybe that's their best bet. Maybe that's their path is to say, look, compare it to a Galaxy A. Not a Galaxy S, a Galaxy A. And we're amazing. If you're stepping up, you don't have to step up to $1,400. You don't have to get a fold, step up to a Pixel. You don't have to spend that much more money than what you're spending already. Maybe that it. Maybe that'll work for them. Yeah. And we didn't even talk about this, but the camera on the Pixel, pretty much as the Pixel has been out, we have always talked about, man, those pictures look great. Yeah, they do. You know, with what they're doing with this new processor. Last year they came out with the real tone that was a big deal. They're adding the new stuff for people who are visually impaired, which is kind of awesome. I mean, that is not an insignificant thing that they're doing. So when you, like I said, when you look at the software on this, you're getting the best of Android on this phone. You're getting what iOS is to the iPhone on a Google device. It's just that they're so far behind with just now catching up to where the hardware is even comparable to their competition. Like I said, I'm all in on this platform, on this operating system. I just don't know that I'm willing to give my pen up. Yeah. That I only use once every three or four months. Make one with a pen for goodness sake. You'll get wrong. Yeah. Even making their own chips, that Tensor chip that Google designed. It's a good chip. Finally, we should mention the Pixel tablet got another look. That's not coming out until 2023. So we didn't get specs and shipping, but Google said that the coding, they compared the coding to a LaCrucette Dutch oven. If that's, I mean, I like my LaCrucette. I guess that's nice. And there's also going to be a docking station. So you can use the tablet like you would a Nest Hub smart display when you're not using it as a tablet. That really looks cool. But would you bet money? They're not going to cancel it. Oh man, it's not even out yet, Rob. Give them a second before, before you lose faith. I don't trust them. I just don't trust them. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit submit stories of vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Third time's a charm. I shouldn't have pressed it too early. The president of the United States went to Poughkeepsie, New York on Thursday to talk about IBM's plans to spend $20 billion there over the next decade on chip making and quantum computing. The president traveled to Ohio last month for Intel's $20 billion chip plant promise. And Rob, you can see it from your window, right? You said it's under construction. I could see it from my yard. Tuesday, Micron promised $100 billion to spend over the next two decades to build chip plants in New York. One wonders if this might upset trading partners like, I don't know, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. And the answer is, yeah, probably. So the United States has created the chip for alliance to ensure a stable supply chain and keep advanced chip making technology out of the hands of mainland China. Taiwan's Deputy Economic Affairs Minister Chen Chun-yi said the manufacturing equipment comes primarily from the US and Europe. The raw materials come from Japan and manufacturing technology from Taiwan and Korea. So this requires collaboration to form a very resilient supply chain. Of course, all of this is following the passage this summer of the US Chips and Science Act of 2022, AKA the Chips Act. Jen Briney is possibly the only person on earth to have read the entire Chips Act. So we wanted to get her to explain what's actually in there. Jen, thank you. What's actually in there? Well, the big story here is $50 billion for the industry. It's our tax money that is going to be funneled through the Department of Commerce. And it's going to go to these corporations. I would imagine IBM would get a piece of it, but we don't know exactly who. The reason I think IBM is on the list is because they have been the sole source foundry for the Department of Defense for quite a while. And there is $2 billion specifically for the Department of Defense for microchip industry things. Development, yeah. So there's $50 billion there for that. And then there's, so there's a few billion more for research and development and education. So the research and development was quite clear for me that the idea is that our tax money will pay to essentially invent new tech that will be handed to the private sector. And so while there's billions appropriated, there are tens of billions of dollars authorized. So they would have to, in a future law, actually give out the money, but the permission slip has already been granted. So while this bill is valued at about, and it depends on who you ask, but it's like $60 billion-ish, the amount that has been appropriated for this industry is far more, or authorized as you say, is far more than that. So it's basically like $50 billion now for the industry, education, and inventions, likely in the future if the money is actually appropriated in future laws. Yeah, I've seen numbers around $170 billion for the stuff outside of just the $50 billion, right, that could go. How much in this act is about other tech? It's called the CHIPS Act, but it seems like a lot of it is not really about chip making itself. So funding-wise, the vast majority of it is actually for the CHIPS, because out of the stuff that is appropriated, $50 billion, actually more than that if you include the Defense Department and the State Department, all the money they get, that's specifically for CHIPS, but most of the law itself, like the pages of it, was authorizing these other programs and doing a lot of different kinds of educational programs that will flow money from the federal government to state and local governments, nonprofits, universities, and the private sector. And what I found really interesting is that that money, which is authorized, which there is a difference. You authorize stuff and then the money is actually appropriated. They've done the first step, but the decision making on that, they've created a lot of boards to actually hand out the money, and the private sector has gotten a huge role in the seats on those boards. So really industry has been given permission in certain ways to be directing where this research and development and education funding will eventually go. But this particular law, the money that's actually provided, most of it is for semiconductors. That's interesting. So if I have this right, the $52 billion number you see thrown around is money that is authorized. That's gonna be spent. The $170 billion appropriated. Got it. The $170 billion is like, maybe, we could set up a committee and they could go up to that amount. Or it's a little mushier. Yes. Because there's two parts of government funding, so they authorized stuff first. So actually this $50 plus billion that's going to the semiconductor industry was actually authorized years ago in a defense authorization. So the permission was already given. The second half of this law where, like I said, there's tens of billions of dollars authorized, but there's going to have to be a future law that actually hands out that money. Now, we are in a government funding cycle where we're funding our government improperly every year. There's supposed to be 12 separate bills that do this. They're funding it all at once. And that is set to happen on December 16th. And when you have these massive government funding laws right before the holidays that no one reads, that's when a lot of this stuff can get appropriated because the price tag is so huge that it's not as obvious. So if they were to appropriate $170 billion in this chip slot, that would have been a much bigger scandal than the $50 billion they actually did. And then the rest of the stuff they can kind of push out later. Yeah, or the stuff that they never intended to appropriate to begin with, they can make it look like they're going to. But like, whoopsie, we never funded it so it doesn't actually exist. There's a difference between saying I'll write a check and write in exactly. Kind of feels like, you know, back, you remember the old Oprah Show when you get a car, you get a billion, you get a billion, you get a billion. So it's like, you know, they've said we will write this check for this money, but we still have to pass a law to determine who ultimately is going to get it. Yeah. And that's just so how the government operates. It just, it's very slow moving. Well, this one was a big fat check to the semiconductor industry. It certainly seems to have gotten the company's excited. So it's obviously had an effect. You see the president go into Ohio, you see him go into New York. But when I look at the numbers as huge as 52 million sounds to me personally, when I look at the fact that it's 20 billion to spend on shipmaking for IBM, 20 billion for Intel and Intel has talked about spending 100 billion in Arizona, micron spending 100 billion and knowing that 52 billion has to get split up among multiple companies over five years. I don't know how much difference it really makes. I mean, it seems like it's spending a lot of money for us. And yet it's was it really even that much money? Was it necessary to get them to move their companies or were they going to move it anyway? Well, I have my doubts that they were going to move it anyway because when they got the permission in the 1990s, they did. So the percentage of the industry that is controlled by so called US companies, although they're multinationals, but the so called US companies have always controlled between 40 and 50% of the market. What's changed though is the actual production of the chips. We now only produce 11% because these companies went and built their foundries in places where they can pay people damn near nothing to make them. Giving them tax money and saying you can only spend this here because the vast majority of it says in clear language this has to be spent building foundries inside the United States. You can't build foundries or even upgrade the ones you have overseas by requiring that then it makes them go like, OK, well, if we're going to get some of this money, we're going to invest somewhere and it has to be here. That is why I think they're choosing to invest in the people working here and they don't want to do that. That's not instinctual, so I do think that it's having the intended effect. So it's enough to entice them to do it and it's worth doing for the government because it locks them into keeping it here. That makes sense to me. The other question I have about this and this is less about what's actually in the chips act, but the idea that we're going to get some of those chips out of the process is that we're going to get some of those chips out of the process and it sounds like, oh, so then they're done and the fact of the matter is chip fabrication is just one part of the process. There's design, there's packaging, there's testing, there's assembly and especially when you're talking about packaging and assembly, we're not moving those parts of the process over here. So these chips that we're making in the U.S. are moving the foundries overseas like that, that they would have the production at least close to one another. So if you had like the chips being made in Taiwan and then the testing being done in Korea, it was all in the same neighborhood. And so now there is going to be more international shipping going back and forth and nothing in this chips law said you had to do any of that other stuff here in the States. So I looked at this law and saw it as being quite incomplete and that is a good point. That is one of the things that they left out along with any taxpayer return on investment, which if you listen to my episode, I rant and rave about that. We were required to, like we don't get any profit sharing, we don't get any cut of the company is like nothing, it's just we give them the money and too much. And theoretically make tax revenue off of it. Theoretically, sure. Theoretically, yeah. Yeah, go ahead, Rob. I just want to say being here in Columbus, you hear about what Intel is doing and the big news all the time is the taxpayers get nothing from this. It's like, oh, well, people are going to have more jobs and therefore they'll pay more income tax or pay more property tax because it's not just the foundry. I mean, there are homes, there are companies that are going to support Intel, all of this stuff is being built. And that's just what they keep you know, keep throwing out, but it's kind of like well, that's always the case. People who work always pay taxes. Companies who have employees always pay taxes. So I was at truly benefiting the taxpayers here in Ohio for subsidizing this massive development that they're about to do. I agree completely. I came to the same conclusion and there was nothing in the law that requires them to stay 20 years from now. So I mean, just look at what happened to Detroit when they had an industry and then the industry pulled out and now the whole town was you know, in trouble. So there were not anywhere near the number of protections for the taxpayers and pretty much close to zero actually when I say nowhere near I'm trying to think of any and that was probably the most upsetting thing for me. I do believe in it being important to have a industry manufacturing industry here in the United States for self sufficiency. There's a lot of good reasons for it but we should get a return on that investment and I mean an actual financial return and there was something like that required. So yeah, I did feel the rage bubbles as I was reading it because of that. I think if there are some good things in this act, one of the good things is that it is certainly helping us diversify the supply chain. One of the problems with the supply chain that became very apparent during COVID was just with chips, there were so many others, but just with chips, there were Taiwanese companies with all of their fabs in China and suddenly there was a backlog getting things out of China and so having a diversified system in my mind where you have some of every bit of the process, fabrication packaging, etc. Some of it in Taiwan, some of it in Vietnam, some of it in Korea, Japan, India, Brazil and the United States and I'll just leave it there but other places as well Germany, the Netherlands, etc. That's good. Make it so that if one part suffers a breakdown it doesn't bring the entire system to a halt. I think that's a positive development out of that. I agree and especially because so much of it was concentrated in Taiwan Taiwan's becoming a flash point for war things. I mean there is a not zero chance that China could invade Taiwan and the foundries are on the coast that faces China. So one of the reasons that there was urgency on this is that if there is a war those foundries could either be captured by China or they could be destroyed and so there is this urgency to prepare for that possibility and to move this production so that the supply chain isn't so concentrated in this one location. Not to mention a lot of those Taiwanese companies have foundries in mainland China as relations break down what would have been unthinkable ten years ago nationalization of a plant and taking it away feels like something that's not necessarily impossible. So you want to move things around for that reason too. Absolutely absolutely. Well Jen thank you so much again for going through all the hard work of reading these bills and sharing your expertise. If you haven't listened to the episode on the CHIPS Act a congressional dish definitely go do that but this is even one of the less interesting bills that you cover. Tell folks about some of the other stuff you do. Well yeah I read bills and laws but I also watch a lot of hearings and so even the hearings give me information like there was one about pet collars that I watched recently like there are pet collars the number one on the market the seresto flea and tick collars that are poisoning pets and they're doing nothing about it so it's Congress is my window to the world and I just dig for these stories so I'm going to be working on the inflation reduction act because you know that's the biggest thing that Democrats did but yeah I'm fascinated by what goes on in the halls of Congress and so if you want to hear some stories that are not being reported and some details on bills and laws congressional dish is I think it's a pretty good place to go. I agree congressional dish dot com you don't even have to agree with Jen I don't always agree with Jen but I always value your detail I always value your perspective and the work you put in and the information you bring me it's incredible so go check that out folks congressional dish dot com and as a bonus if you just like hearing Jen talk she sat down and talked about disaster with me on a word with Tom Merritt we had a great time talking about prepping disaster movies games she plays with her husband to prepare for disasters so go check that out at wordpodcast.com as well a word podcast dot com and congressional dish dot com of course before we go Rob what you got going on these days. Not a whole lot just podcasting and talking about tech so you can check me out pretty much everywhere around the world at Rob Dunwood and also head over to thetechjohn.com that is like my new baby it's just over a year old now and we are having so much fun talking about the weekly tech that comes up but talking about it from let's say a blacker perspective yeah exactly thanks to our brand new boss Dr. Mr. Esquire first of all great username second of all thank you for supporting us third of all just like Dr. Mr. Esquire you could be the star of the show tomorrow if you start back in us at patreon.com slash DTNS patrons stick around we're going to talk more about all this stuff on good day internet you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. eastern twenty hundred UTC find out more DailyTechnewshow.com back tomorrow talking about the features you'll want in your next TV with Robert Herron and Len Peralta will be here too talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program