 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Paul Teeson, Ali Sanjabi, A.B. Puppy, and two new patrons, Jamil and Sugami Sugumi. Welcome in on this episode of DTNS. Cyber attackers infiltrate the U.S. water supply, the coming power crunch for A.I. and Scott Johnson breaks down the specs for the coming PS5 Pro. If they're real, they will put them up here. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 17th, twenty twenty four in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Animal House. I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheen. And you know what each one of us have in common? What's that, Tom? We were glasses. Happy that you, the listener, are here today. Oh, I mean, I'm not wearing glasses right now. Oh, I'm sorry. And neither is Scott. I should probably give you glasses. Come on, let's focus on the happy listener. All right, let's actually start with the quick kids. Here we go. Some current and former T-Mobile and Verizon employees say they've been receiving text to both their personal and work phones with an offer of three hundred dollars to perform sim swaps and messages seen by Mobile Report. The attackers claim they got the contact information from employee directories. Bleeping Computer also saw some text where the attacker asked to be contacted on Telegram if the employee was indeed interested in this offer. Simswap attacks are designed to trick a victim's wireless carrier into rerouting a service to a different device controlled by an attacker, at which point personal information leaks, identity theft and significant financial losses can occur. Also, I bet they never get the three hundred dollars even if they do the sim swaps. I'm just saying you're dealing, you know, yeah, it's like. Well, take two interactive maker of games like Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K announced it will lay off about five percent of its workforce. If you do the math that comes out to around five hundred seventy nine jobs in the process, it will also end development on several game titles, though it didn't say which the reductions along with other cost cutting measures will take place over the course of the year and be done by the end on December 31st. Google will use its large language models to summarize user reviews of electric vehicle chargers and use those summaries to provide better directions to chargers located in parking garages or other harder to find locations. Users will also be prompted to review chargers with information like the type of plug, speed of charging and whether it worked at all. This will help Google provide real time charger availability and speeds for Google Maps in cars. And Google Maps will let you filter by EV charger availability when you're choosing an overnight stop on a trip. Snap says it's going to add a translucent snapchat logo, a watermark on images generated by its algorithms when you export them or save them to your camera roll. The watermark can, of course, be removed if you're at all good with image editors. But Snap says if you do remove it, that's a violation of the terms of service. The company will also add context cards in snapchat to inform users in the app if an image came from its generative models there. Logitech has a new software tool called Logi AI Prompt Builder. Really rolls off the tongue. It lets you highlight text and turn it into a prompt for chat GPT. If you have a compatible Logitech keyboard or mouse, you can link one of its buttons to this tool. When you click it, the selected text is sent to the prompt builder where then you can choose to rephrase or summarize or create an email chat GPT stuff. You can also add your own recipes for things like creating images. It works with some, not all, but many of Logitech's MX, Ergo, Signature and Studio devices that use the Logo Options Plus app. So it's it's it's not Logi. That that makes more sense. That would make it sound kind of slow and tired. I guess it's also not Logo, which I just said. Logi. Well, that's only because I wrote it. Sometimes, Tom, I'm Rom Burgundy. US cybersecurity firm and Google subsidiary Mandiant said on Wednesday. That a hacking group, often referred to as the Cyber Army of Russia or the Cyber Army of Russia reborn, has ties to Russian at GRU Military Intelligence Agency, often referred to as Sandworm and claims to be behind the January cyber attack that caused a tank at a water facility in Moleshoe, Texas to overflow. The group also claims it directly targeted water utilities in Poland and a water mill in France. Sandworm has previously been linked to numerous attacks. Triggered blackouts in Ukraine, releasing self-spreading destructive code just to name a couple. Why are published a extremely detailed piece? It's really worth reading and we'll have it in our show notes on exactly what Mandiant found complete with screen recordings. The attackers uploaded in January to Telegram kind of to prove that they actually were in these systems, showing at least some success inside these systems in the US, Poland and France. So all we know what this is a pretty big story, right, Tom? All we really know is that these are people who wrote in Russian on Telegram. This is Mandiant's supposition that, hey, we think it's this and we think it's that and we think it's connected to that and they're pretty good at this stuff. But all I would be comfortable saying is Russian speakers on Telegram showed that they got into these systems. And that is the other part we know is that they actually got into the system in Moleshoe, Texas, which is north Texas and caused about 30 to 45 minutes of water overflow. Not the end of the world. They were able to just flip it back to manual and shut it down. They then got rid of the system that had been hacked and replaced it. No harm done in the long run other than some lost water. And, you know, water being lost in parts of the world is a bigger deal than other parts of the world, I imagine in Moleshoe, Texas. It's it's a disruption. Not great, but, you know, they're not they're not in a super drought or anything. What is concerning about this is it is an example of what is happening consistently. Other towns near Moleshoe have reported thwarting attacks to get through their firewalls into various government systems. Pennsylvania had an attack on its water plant successfully carried out back in November. And the EPA, which is in charge of regulating the water system in the United States, was forced to rescind a regulation it had wanted to put in place back in October. That regulation would have forced states to audit water companies. And if their security wasn't up to snuff, force them to bring their security up to snuff. State Attorneys General in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri stopped them from doing that. They went to court and said, this is not the federal regulatory authorities. Right. It's the state's right. And the courts agreed. And they're probably right. I don't care as a person who does not want these kinds of attacks to escalate as a person who knows that when they are getting in there and trying to see like, hey, can we make the water overflow? They are penetration testing. They are laying the groundwork for getting into other systems elsewhere and doing worse things on the systems they can get into. I want government to cooperate to secure these systems, not fight each other. So, yeah, OK, maybe you need to protect your state's rights and go to court. That's fine. Come up with a solution at the same time. Stop pointing fingers at each other. This is important stuff. It's serious and it's no time to play politics. I could not have said that any better. The only frustrating thing about what Tom says is it is point for point. Exactly what I think. And yeah, I completely agree, dude. And like it's one of those situations where you have to you have to see this as the test that it is, right? Like this feels like somebody went, here goes. It's small, but here we go. Oh, we did it and we're taking credit for it. And you all just kind of it just happened. So boy, I'd sure be on the lookout for future things. I mean, that's the mood I'm in now. I'm like, well, if they can do that, then what's next? And it's not about fear mongering. It's about, no, come together on this, this and other issues like it. It matters. It's more than just a cyber breach. It's not like a, you know, a simple. We stole somebody's emails. It's a way bigger deal. It has real consequences. So yeah, Tom said it perfectly. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's energy grid stuff. No, this is this is a question that I often ask myself. And I know it's it's it's it's a simple question with a very complicated answer. But when you hear something like, and it's not just Russia, I mean, they're obviously attackers that come from lots of different places, the US included. But when you say, all right, so it sounds like these these folks army, a cyber army of Russian reborn are, you know, either part of sandworm or at least have strong ties to sandworm and sandworm is some sort of subsidiary, you know, that's that's a, you know, sort of underground part coming out of the Kremlin. OK, this is Russia. Why doesn't the US just say, hey, Russia, stop this, or we're going to, I don't know, stop sending you our fruit. I think we already do stop sending them a fruit because of Ukraine. But yeah, you're the United States has told Russia and China both. You need to have nothing to do with this. And what Russia and China both say is we don't have anything to do with it. It's not us. It's just people who might sound like maybe they were under our orders. A lot of plausible deniability. There's only so far you're going to get by telling countries stop it. And unless you decide to go to war or something. Yeah, yeah, and nobody wants that. And I don't think you need to do that because even if countries aren't sponsoring this stuff, there will be someone who will sponsor this sort of thing. You should have a secure water system anyway, whether Russia or China is trying to get into it or not. That's why I don't like making too much about the fact of who's behind it because it kind of doesn't matter. You want your water system to be secured no matter who is behind the attack. In fact, the attacks are probably doing you a favor by exposing the weaknesses and so you can get them fixed. I also I don't think the EPA necessarily is it got the high ground here either. The you know, I think a lot of people might take my words earlier as like, oh, so you support the government. No, I support a solution. I support people who actually have the power to change things saying, you know what's important? Fixing this. How do we fix it? Does that mean maybe regional water authorities buying together and help each other out to secure it? Great. Do that. I don't care. Get it fixed. This is too important. Yeah, completely agree. Well, do you agree about power? We were just talking about the power to protect your water. There's also a constraint on power with AI. One constraint on the continued accelerated development of generative models is data for training. We've talked about that. Like, hey, they've kind of used all the data that's available, whether they should have or not, you know, are they going to be able to keep improving these models without as much data? Another is chips. We've talked about companies not being able to get chips fast enough. Nvidia has a long shipping times on its GPUs. Lots of other companies are trying to get into providing AI related chips to people, but they've got to ramp up. Demand is huge. There's a third constraint, though, and it's electricity. Schneider Electric is working with Nvidia to design data centers for AI work and their executive vice president of data center of the data center division. Pankaj Sharma told Ars Technica, we probably don't have enough capacity available to run all the facilities that will be required globally by 2030. In other words, looking at the number of data centers people want to build, there's not enough power being generated to support them. For example, Northern Virginia is the world's largest data center region and the power company there, Dominion Energy, paused new data center connections in 2022 so they could analyze and upgrade their networks. And this past October told the government regulators that it is experiencing significant load growth due to data center development and it's not sure if it can keep up. A research center called Digital Infra estimates spending on global data center buildouts is going to pass $225 billion in 2024. And the International Energy Agency estimates the data center power use will more than double by 2026 to 1,000 terawatt hours. Wow. So knowing all of this and knowing that, yeah, I mean, the whole race to AIs on the surface, you know, it's companies, you know, trying to be first, right? So it's like, there's that, but we have chip shortages and we have companies who need more data than they have to make their models way better. But what really does happen when we run out of electricity to make anything go further? Do we just sort of stay? Do we kind of go like, all right, in 2029, here's the here are the models that we can handle, Earth. Yeah, right. Like, it's a really good question. Like, I assume what happens is you stop being able to provide the services at a higher and higher level, right? Like, in other words, they don't improve as fast and they get more expensive because if you can't supply the number of users who have a demand because don't forget, this isn't just because companies want to provide these services, it's because people want to use them. There's some stats out that like most developers are using these tools to speed up development and finding they're not getting replaced. They're just being able to be more productive. That demand is not going to go away. So if the demand doesn't go away, you've got to raise the price. Yeah, I also wonder about things like other alternate sources of energy in the first one. Obviously, that would be another solution. Yeah, the big one that comes to mind is nuclear energy. And we haven't been necessarily on the rollout path that other countries have been. Do you think this moves the needle that way, Tom, at all? Well, first of all, this is a worldwide problem. This is not a US problem. This is all all over the place. But to your point about developing nuclear power, Microsoft hired a director of nuclear development acceleration this year. So there's a lot of people looking at, can we provide on-site power for data centers? And a lot of that is wind and solar. Which also have delays in building because of regulatory frameworks that slow development of them. Maybe there can be some efficiencies found there. But yeah, Microsoft is considering like, well, maybe we need to build small nuclear reactors on data centers in order to power them separately from the rest of the grid. Yeah, because when you start talking about reaching capacity, obviously, it's a worldwide issue. And it doesn't matter who opens up their caps or says, hey, maybe we'll let more in. We talked about Singapore being amenable to going larger while others are like, we're trying to do less right now. I mean, it does. I can't help but be reminded of the cryptocurrency freakout early on in the crypto time where it was it was pretty much guaranteed or everybody was sure it guaranteed the end of the world because of energy use and a lot has changed since then. But also I don't think it really the fruition didn't really happen on those fears, not not to the level people thought they would. But this feels like this just feels like more of a gold rush. Like it really is a lot of feed on the ground running for the AI, you know, goal. I never got a sense that the cryptocurrency power usage was as critical as this. I think it was exaggerated in part by people who didn't like NFTs and cryptocurrency and the change to proof of stake really did reduce the power usage of cryptocurrency in a large part. This is not going away. A Q Sanagi in YouTube is saying a thing that Robert Roger, our producer said in our prep, which is maybe efficiency, power efficiency of the chips can help. It can up to a point there. They're making these more power efficient all the time. I think there's there's been some pretty big advances in that. But the demand isn't going away. So I'm not sure the achievable power efficiencies would be enough on their own to find our way out of the bottleneck. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure we'll find our way out of the bottleneck somehow. There's there's enough motivation to do it from lots of big players who have a lot to lose if they don't. But I'm curious how they're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, if it really got to a point where it's like, OK, everybody on DTNS, we're going to have an electric blackout again this week type thing. I mean, the world can't. I know many places in the world experience blackouts all the time, but the world can't sustain that way. You don't want to get to that point. Oh, and I realize I said processor efficiency, but Q Sanagi was saying compute efficiency. But the same same is true for both making the algorithms more efficient is another tool in the belt as well. Good point. Yeah. Well, folks, if you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, which we have had some some pretty strong topics already in this one, you might want to let us know on X at DTNS show on mastodon at DTNS show. MSTDN dot social at Daily Tech News Show on Tiktok and at DTNS picks. That's DTNS P I X on both Instagram and threads. In a bid to grow Sony's presence in the PC gaming space, the game Ghost of Tsushima Directors Cut, releasing on May 16th, will be the first PlayStation game for PC that uses the PlayStation overlay and trophies. The visual will provide a friend list, trophies, settings and the user's PlayStation account, as well as any available cross play support. To get that feature, players will need to log in to their PlayStation network account in the game. Now, that's making your PC a little more like a PlayStation. How about making your PlayStation a little more like a PC? What? Much earlier this week, the rumored specs for the PlayStation five pro were leaked thanks to a YouTube channel called Moore's Law is Dead. That channel has an unproven record with this kind of information. But it turns out, in this case, there's a lot of other folks coming to their defense and saying, yeah, no, we're going to say the same thing. The Verge reports it has received a full specification list for the console codenamed Trinity. They were also confirmed by Inside Gaming's Tom Henderson. Here's some of them. It's going to feature a faster GPU that will render 45% faster than a stock PS5. Two to three times increase in ray tracing performance. We'll also feature support for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution PSSR, which is their upscaling method. Support for 8K textures and an AI accelerator. And the CPU will stay the same but feature a high frequency mode that can boost the clock speed up to 3.85 gigahertz, which is 10% over stock. Scott, break this down for us. Faster, more powerful, got it. 4K gaming, great. What else is going on with this? Well, there's always a big question with these mid-generation bumps, which we only have experience with one of these, which is the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X, which were both mid-cycle bumps. And they both provided additional performance and on paper looked really good. In practicality, we'll get to that in a second. But from a technical standpoint, you mentioned a lot of these specs already, but we're talking 67 teraflops of 16-bit floating point calculations. That is roughly 33.5 teraflops of single precision computing. That's a 45% increase, as you mentioned. That's a lot. Like 45% is a whole lot of rendering performance over the previous model. Now, there does seem to be... Oh, the other thing we didn't actually mention, one of the things that seems to support that this is an actual leak of real data is Sony was very quick to demand a takedown, which in my mind is might be the most confirmation we're going to get for a while. It's not copyright if they're not copying a real thing. Or Sony's like, no, no, you're making it sound like we're going to do all of this and we're not. Yeah, I mean, they're very... They wanted takedown either way. It still could happen, exactly. They were so quick to do it, though, it makes me wonder. But anyway, if this is all the case, this thing could offer around three times the ray tracing. What's inside of that device right now, the PlayStation 5 that was released in 2020, is essentially an AMD RX 6700. That's the card, the Radeon RX 6700. This would essentially, according to these leak specs, if they're true, will take their video card equivalent up to a Radeon RX 7800 XT. If you are a PC gamer and use AMD cards, you'll know that that is a pretty massive jump in capability. And that is why they can promise or at least hint at promises at things like upscaling to 8K, 8K textures for that matter, being able to do more, do it quicker, all this sort of stuff. One thing that is interesting, the PSSR that Tom described, if you're not familiar with it, is like Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR. It's an AI-assisted way of enhancing resolution, frame rate, that sort of thing, just improving performance overall. And they're very impressive technologies. People on the PC basically demand this now out of their games, especially the big AAA titles. And that all sounds amazing. That kind of upscaling, kind of future-proofing, all that sort of stuff. But when it comes to just, hey, average PlayStation owner, what do you get out of this if you decide to throw another 600 bucks at the wall? And the answer is a little nebulous. We have the experience of the PlayStation Pro and Xbox One X mid-jump, and those were not always what they had promised. And I don't mean that they weren't capable of what they said they were capable of, but we never really got any software that exhibited those capabilities. We never got a game where we went, oh, okay, now I can see why the PlayStation Pro is the way to go. And I'm not so sure that'll be that different here. These are impressive specs. This is a bigger jump than the previous mid-generation jump, but it's still not enough for me to assume that they're either going to A, rework a bunch of their games to better take advantage of the newer hardware, or B, expect a ton of new games coming out because they have this one other problem, and that is they have to service the PlayStation 5 owners that already exist. And if you give people a new game that is vastly superior on the new version of the console and you tell your existing base who have invested in the ecosystem, sorry, you're stuck at 30 frames at a maximum of 1440p. It's the best we can do on that game. Meanwhile, they're over here playing at AK, 60 frames plus, whatever. That is not good from a marketing standpoint and a customer relations standpoint. So my expectation is these are going to be cool and going to be awesome and fast. If you haven't got a PlayStation yet and you're planning on getting one, I would wait until this fall, until we hear what's going on for sure. Then I would buy this. This is what I would buy as my first PlayStation 5 iteration. Even though the existing PlayStation is supposed to stick around, you go for the pro. You think it's worth it if you don't have a PlayStation. 100% I would do that. And I would do that again only if you don't already have one. If you already have one, I don't think it's worth the upgrade. Not yet. I need to see, again, all we have to go off is what happened last time this happened, which already was rare. We didn't ever do this before. Mid-generation improvements are rare. Little changes, mostly cosmetic. That happens all the time. We get slims and that. But getting an upgrade, almost like a PC upgrade, is a weird thing for consoles still. It's still weird now. Microsoft appears to have no plans for this or at least no leaked plans that we know of. And so maybe that's one advantage for Sony. If they're the only ones doing a bump like this for this holiday season, they may actually have a huge burst of sales out of it. And then we'll go through the whole process of, I can't get a PlayStation 5 Pro. I can only get the original one. Scott told me to get the new one. So there's that whole thing. I guess what I'm saying is bottom line, if you're already a PS5 owner, there's a very good chance that you will continue to get great games that run well. And it won't be that different from the pro because to make it too different would be to poke you in the eye as one of their customers. And I don't think they're going to do that. But they are getting developers on board to improve their existing titles. So they take advantage of the new hardware. Yeah. And they did some of that last time. It was usually frame rates. So I'd be like, oh, this game was previously 30. It's ray tracing particularly I've seen as well. Yeah. And so if that stuff will matter to a certain crowd, then they're going to buy this no matter what. I have no doubt. But I'm just saying if you're your average person, I don't know that I'd run out. You have Gwen Stefani at Coachella. No doubt. Yeah. Why not? All right. Let's check out the mail bag. What about the rest of the band Tom? I've done two. I just couldn't remember all their names. Yeah. Me either. I don't know. Sorry. Yeah. Even under duress, I wouldn't be able to. AirChat sounds fabulous for the blind and visually impaired writes in Mary, aka mpblanton on Twitch. We were talking about AirChat, the new app on the show yesterday that is voice first rather than a written social network. Mary says, my husband's totally blind. I am legally blind. He knows many totally blind people that already have their phones, tablets and computers talking via screen readers like voiceover, talk back and narrator. Mary says, I don't have to use screen readers yet, but I have them installed on all my devices for him and can quickly turn them on and off so he can use my stuff. Anything that helps the blind and visually impaired community is appreciated. As our society ages more and more people need the extra help. Thank you, Mary. In fact, this answers a question Brian Hoffman had. He had emailed and said, I wonder if this would be helpful. It's a thought for accessibility. And it sounds like Mary says, yeah, no, it would be. So that's, that is interesting. Yeah. Not even just to have the accessibility option, but to have it be audio first. Yeah. Designed for the listener. That's a really good point, Mary. Thanks for writing. A non wrote in, well, they, they, they have a name, but their name is anonymous. So I'm calling them a non and says, oh, this is going to give away who it is. I've been a listener of your shows since buzz out loud and supported DNS from the beginning. Oh wait, that's thousands of people. I just wanted to drop a note on how well you communicated the just walk out news. Yeah. Yesterday we talked about the fact that Amazon is kind of ramping down just walk out in their own stores. This person says, I've been on the Amazon just walk out team for about two and a half years now, and I've been taking the poor coverage way too personally. I've seen some of my favorite sources get it flat out wrong. When you and Sarah started talking about it again earlier this week, I began to scowl with dismay that I was going to be disappointed again, but you pointed out perfectly that most of the people doing manual work were validating the machine learning systems and not acting as a mechanical Turk as some people have seen it. It really made my day to know that the people I trust most for tech opinions are still quite accurate. So thank you so much for your hard work. All of that said, the rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated. You will see in our press releases that we are retargeting away from grocery and more towards our bread and butter of high density stores like convenience stores, stadiums, health care and campus. I wish I was allowed to share some numbers, but we've had the problem of stocking stores fast enough to keep up with demand places. Yes, and after yesterday's conversation, Amazon put out a press release not only saying, hey, the just walk out stuff does have machine learning, just like we talked about yesterday, but said, and we're not getting rid of it. We're phasing it out in our larger grocery stores because it works best with a curated selection. And that's what our anonymous developer here is pointing out. Like if you have a convenience store or I see it at stadiums all the time and I've used it now and it works where you have like, you know, 25 items. It works great. Amazon said in their press release they're going to try to make it work better for larger places and bring it back to their big grocery stores. But rather than limit selection at their stores, they found that people preferred the smart shopping cart. So that's why they're switching to it. Well, thank you to everybody who sends us emails because you make us smarter. You can come and feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson. What's new in your neck of the woods? All kinds of fun stuff happening over there at frogfans.com. So I figured I'd just point people there. Frogfans.com is the place to go. There are new shows going up almost every single day, pretty much every day. Wow, I do a lot of stuff. Anyway, that artwork, other cool things. You want to follow me. You want to figure out what's going on in my life. You come into Vegas next week for our TMS Vegas thing. Tom's going to be there. There's details about that. There's all kinds of stores. There's all kinds of reasons to go and really none not to. So go check it out. That's frogfans.com. Check it out today. 12 days. We'll be doing DTNS in 12 days live from Las Vegas. You and me and Brian Ibbitt. I'm looking forward to that. I am too. It was really fun last year. You are going to do DTNS, right? Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. Okay. I'm all in. I'm making sure. Go VivaTMSVegas.com if you want to check that out. Also patrons, get more show. Stick around for Good Day Internet. Do you feel the same kind of ownership over your digital items as you do your physical items? Maybe you're saying, no, I don't. Well, there's a study that examines why you feel that way. Just a reminder, we do our show live Monday through Friday and you can catch it live at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Dr. Nicky Ackerman joining us. Probably something sciency. Talk to you later.