 Do you want a holiday card from DTNS? Well, become a patron, or if you're already a patron, give us your address by November 15th, and we'll send you a special DTNS holiday card. Coming up on DTNS, Facebook's facial recognition program shuts down. Microsoft makes a couple moves towards the metaverse, and Nate Langson helps us understand if anyone knows what the metaverse is. Actually, this is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 2nd, Election Day 2021, but it's that off-off election that nobody cares about. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merri. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty sick. Joining us, Bloomberg Tech Editor and host of Tech's message, Nate Langson. Welcome back, Nate. It's good to have you, man. Oh, it is good to be here. Thanks for having me. I hope that Daylight Saving Ended has treated you well. We'll get that next week. It treated me well up until the point that I realized I had one hour less than I expected before the show started. That is not fun. But you're here. I admire that. Thank you. We were just talking about our mutual fascination with North Korea on good day internet. You can get that wider conversation at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons who make all this possible, like Mike Acons, Norm Physikus, and Chris Allen. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei Asia's sources say Apple and Nintendo will both have to cut manufacturing due to supply shortages. The sources say Apple will move parts meant for older iPhones and iPads to production of iPhone 13s. While iPad demand has been strong, demand for iPhone 13 is even stronger and they had to choose. Meanwhile, Nikkei's sources also say Nintendo will produce 20% fewer Nintendo switches dropping from 30 million units by March to 24 million. Nintendo has admitted it doesn't think it can produce as many consoles as it would like. Zoom announced its piloting showing ads to free tier users. Ads will appear on the browser page all users see at the end of a call. And only if the meeting they joined was created by another free basic tier user. Zoom's chief marketing officer, Jeanine Pelosi, states the ads will help the company, quote, support investment and continue providing free basic users with access to our robust platform. In other words, we need to make money off the free users. Ads have rolled out to certain countries but specifics were not provided on the full rollout. Yahoo has ended its presence in China saying its decision was due to an increasingly challenging business and legal environment in the country. Chinese Yahoo users now get a message saying its sites are no longer accessible. In a statement, the company says Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support and of course, Yahoo services remain unaffected outside of China. Netflix announced its Netflix games are rolling out to Android subscribers worldwide. You get five games, Stranger Things 1984, Stranger Things 3, The Game, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, which I was enjoying before the show and Teeter Up, the games can be downloaded individually from the Google Play Store and then played for no additional charge by logging in with your Netflix login and starting Wednesday, November 3rd, you'll be able to launch the games from a games tab that will show up in the main Netflix app. Netflix says an iOS version of all of this is on the way. And finally, Tesla issued a recall on 11,704 Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles. Those sold since 2017. The recall notes that Tesla's beta version of the full self-driving update on October 23rd caused inadvertent activation of the automatic emergency braking system in some circumstances, which is a risk for a rear end collision. Full self-driving update 10.3.1 has already been released to fix the problem. The recall is to make sure that everybody hears the news. Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the deal to sell 100,000 vehicles to Hertz Renekar has not yet been signed. The Hertz sales are not the same margin as consumer sales or they are. They are the same margin as consumer sales and will have no effect on Tesla's economics. I think he's covering his SEC rear there. Hertz told the BBC it has started taking deliveries of the Tesla vehicle. So it sounds like Hertz is getting them. Tesla just wanted to make sure that people didn't get overly enthusiastic about those sales. All right. Let's talk a little bit about Microsoft Ignite Nate. Are you ignited with excitement? I feel like I'm about to be. Strike a match, Tom. I will. Here's all the office-y goodness. Please welcome a new Microsoft Office app called Loop or as TechCrunch calls it, Google Wave. Loop is a project management tool for collaboration and workers can update Loop products in real time and see everybody doing it, just like the promise of Google Wave. Loop has three elements. The smallest are components. These are basically little bits of documents that you can embed, lists, tables, notes, tasks. They use the fluid framework so that multiple people can read and update the embed and it stays updated no matter where you embed it. Components can appear in one note, Outlook, Teams and they'll be added to other software to come. There's a third party developer kit for it so it can be added to non-Microsoft products. Examples include voting on ideas, tracking status, drawing out a customer record that will stay updated as that customer information changes. Okay, that's element one, components. The second element is pages. These are full documents which can include components and you can see each contributor's cursor as they work on the document. This is the most Google Wave-like of the bunch. And the final element is workspaces which can track progress and maintain access to multiple pages. Basically they were using Loop in their documents in their Office apps inside Microsoft and they decided they wanted a place to access all the Loop stuff in one place. So they created an app for it. A preview of Loop will launch in the first half of 2022. Do you feel looped in now, Nate? Yes, I feel fully looped in, thank you. I was a massive fan of Google Wave even though it was one of those products where I loved it and I played with it but it had absolutely no use to me whatsoever but I was still very sad when it went away and bits of it got baked into Google Docs and Drive and whatever it's called these days. Hopefully at this point Microsoft will keep it around a little longer than Google did, let's say. But do you ever find that when you use these collaborative documents that you feel this uneasy sense of like pressure, like performance anxiety when you're typing and you know that somebody else is watching you typing because their cursor is just a little bit higher than yours? I feel like I've got to type perfectly, I've got to type quickly. What if they think I'm pausing on this word? Do they think I don't know how to spell that word? What if I don't spell that word? So with some of these things where it's just moving objects around, it doesn't worry me too much but when it's actually typing text, I find myself just really, really desperate to perform perfectly. So, fan of the tech. It's kind of why I like that Google Docs just shows that somebody's in a cell in spreadsheet, doesn't show you what they're doing until they press return, takes a little of that pressure off, right? Yeah, I guess so. I like drawing components of these. I like being able to draw and doodle and sketch and have people see that in real time. I find that's quite satisfying. Maybe that's because my profession involves words rather than pictures, which is good because if anyone's seen my art history, it looks like somebody's trying to be facetious. You're not worried about people thinking your artistry looks bad because you already assume it does. Is that what you're saying? Oh, I know it is. I mean, I've essentially had teachers when I was a kid send notes home but like don't be facetious and I'll try my best. But anyway, in a nutshell, I love this tech. I hope it sticks around and I hope it's more useful than Wave was to people. Yeah, especially the components part strikes me as something you didn't know you need until you start using it. And you're like, oh, this kept updated. That's nice. Microsoft Teams is also adding Mesh, which it has announced before. It's a platform for virtual experiences to Teams. Teams will get new 3D advertisers that can represent you in 2D meetings. So instead of showing your camera, the avatar will animate based on your vocal cues. You don't need to have your camera on. Takes a little of that pressure off. In a 3D meeting, your avatar can do things like raise its hand when you press the raise hand button animate emojis around you. And eventually though not at launch the avatar will be able to mimic your actual movements. That's coming down the road. Microsoft intends this to be the start of the ability to meet work and socialize and virtualize spaces inside of Teams. Accenture has been experimenting with building a virtual workspace in Mesh, kind of testing this for Microsoft. Obviously this works best if you have a VR or AR headset, but it will be accessible without one. Microsoft says it also intends to add translation and transcription support as well. So I could be speaking in Korean to Nate and Nate could respond in Spanish and would just translate into English for both of us. Mesh for Teams will arrive in the first half of next year. What do you think about virtualization inside Teams, Nate? It's a very smart move and Microsoft's in a very good position to do this well because of Azure, because of Teams, because of Xbox, because of Edge, which I personally really like. It's got all these component bits that make it feel like it's not destined to be sandboxed and overly proprietary in the way that some other companies would do it. Facebook, for instance, which we'll come to. But yeah, I don't use Teams. I feel a little bit cheeky talking about it from a personal opinion, but it looks good. Yeah, I think this is how, not to get ahead of our conversation we're gonna have in a minute here, but this to me is how metaverse happens if it happens at all. It is little things get added slowly and then they get improved and then more things get added and you're like, oh, it's nice to have an avatar in my 2D Teams video conference and then you get used to that and you want it to do more and then they add more features, rinse and repeat, I guess. Here are a few other notable Ignite announcements. ClipChamp video editing is coming to office. That's a web-based tool that helps you make professional video clips without needing specialized skills. In 2022, PowerPoint is getting a recording studio that lets you add audio to a presentation easily that can run when you're not there. So you can just record the whole presentation. Excel's getting a JavaScript framework that lets you use JavaScript to create custom data types and functions. That's coming in preview later this month. Microsoft's going to offer an upgraded version of OpenAI's GPT-3 for things like summarizing documents, analyzing the sentiment of text, generating ideas for projects. OpenAI sells access to its own API, but the Microsoft version offers extra support and security and don't forget, Microsoft holds an exclusive license to integrate GPT-3 into its products. Finally, Microsoft's Chromium-based version of the Edge browser is now in the stable channel and generally available for Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSusa. Oh, and one more thing, Microsoft launched a tool in preview that helps businesses transition off Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer, remember, finally goes out of support for most versions of Windows June 15th, 2022. Any of those catch your eye, Nate? Oh, yes, only that I would absolutely amaze that PowerPoint didn't have a voiceover feature until now. And still not even now, but to come. It did have it. It just didn't have it like a little recording studio like this. I think this just makes it easier. You could add audio before. It's just, they've added an entire, they've just made it like super simple. At least that's what they're saying. I haven't tried it. Okay, that makes sense. Meta is shutting down Facebook's facial recognition system. Even if you've opted in, photos of you will no longer be automatically identified by your face. Facebook will delete more than one billion people's facial recognition templates. This will make the site less accessible because alt text has been generated by facial recognition in the past and that will happen no longer. Alt text will need to be manually programmed in order to identify people in photos. If you don't know what alt text is, if you're a blind user, for instance, alt text will describe what's in the photo. Facebook was using facial recognition to populate that. It will not anymore. Meta says it will continue to research and develop the use of facial recognition for identity verification and preventing fraud and impersonation. And it will explore on-device facial recognition that requires no communication with an external server. But Nate, this feels a bit like a scorched earth policy of we have too many legal problems. We had to pay $600 million in fines in Illinois. There's more on the way. It's not worth it. Let's just rip the whole thing out. And almost, I don't know if it's meant to but it almost felt a little bit peevish that they're like, alt text is going away. Sorry, we can't do anything about it if we wanna get rid of facial recognition. We have to get rid of it for everybody. There was a whole big chunk of the post about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this feels part of Facebook's overall plan to kind of shift the focus away from some of the most problematic parts of its blue app and its business, right? I mean, I'm reading a book at the moment called An Ugly Truth, which is written about Facebook. It's extremely interesting and I'm kind of shocking in equal measure. And Facebook's history has tended to evolve around introducing things, if people like them, celebrate them, if people don't like them, kind of ignore until it goes away. And the facial recognition stuff has always been very problematic for Facebook. And I don't see this as being the end of facial recognition for the company because it's too valuable. Facebook doesn't tend to get rid of things that are incredibly valuable. What this becomes in future though, I have no idea. It's really hard to guess on this one because it just seems so obvious that they should have this feature. Yeah, I think that's what's surprising about this is it's not a half measure. It's not a, well, we didn't wanna get rid of it for the alt text, so here's what we did. They're like, it's gone. It's all gone. We're gonna research facial ID because I know you're gonna be like, you're gonna bring it back. What we're gonna do is bring back on-device facial ID for security because everybody does that. Apple does that, Samsung does that. We might do that. But this post was very clear of like, that's it, that's all we're gonna do. And I think it's telling that most people are like, yeah, but even though you're called meta now, we still don't trust that you mean that. But I don't know how you could implement this any different way if this company suddenly had become the most positive, wonderful company in the world, this kind of is the way you would do it except for maybe the PV shalt text part. Yeah, I mean, I've said this on text message. The show just gone by at the weekend you can put lipstick on a pig, still a pig. Just might look a little nicer, but it's still a pig. And I think there's an element of that to this. I mean, facial recognition, how long's it been on Facebook now? 10 years? It must be a decade at least. And the real issue that I remember running into first was where you get pictures pop up and it would say, is this you and identifies you? And for some very bizarre reason, it often identified you as me. I don't know if I've ever mentioned that before, but every now and again, it still happens on Apple's system. But I do actually like the implementation on certain apps. For example, if I'm searching for a photo where I know I was in a picture with someone else but I cannot remember where it was, I can do a search in photos in iOS for me and that person and it will just show me those pictures. And I haven't labeled those pictures. I've labeled some of them, the systems learned it and that can be really useful in then resurfacing old pictures of people you forgot about. And I really like that feature. And so it can work, it can be effective. I think it's when it's done in conjunction with Facebook and where it's automatic and it's not necessarily opt-in. That's always been the problem for me. So if that's going away here, I'm not gonna complain. It seems like the right thing to do. Well, to be clear, it was opt-in and Facebook is still saying, forget it, we're just not gonna do it. We're just not gonna do it anymore. And I don't think they're going, you're still having people going, yeah, but like, I'll be honest, this is, you got what you asked for and people still aren't satisfied because they just are mad at Facebook. It doesn't really matter what they do. This is a very good example of even if Meta, nay Facebook does exactly what you want, people will pick at it. I can clearly see that happening out there. Yeah. All right, here's an interesting question for you, Nate. Senior Vice President of Alexa Tom Taylor wants you to talk to your Echo less that may seem counterintuitive, but at a web summit conference in Lisbon, he said, we believe that the future of consumer technology is ambient intelligence. In other words, good assistance can anticipate your needs before you ask. Taylor said, and I'm quoting now, it's there when you need it and recedes into the background when you don't. Adding, it means you're spending more time looking up at the world and the people in it. Current examples include routines, which is something on Amazon's devices that can do things like turn off the lights and lower the thermostat when it detects that you're gone, right? Amazon also offers occasional suggestions, mostly around buying, if it thinks you're out of something. Do you want this, Nate? No. You don't want it to predict what you want. I won't have an Alexa. Or do you not believe it can do it well? Oh, I believe it can do it very well. That's part of the problem. I don't have, and I apologize for using the A word, just then, for anyone listening. I don't have an A device or any of those because I don't trust them. And therefore, this as a feature just doesn't appeal. I wish I had something more insightful to say, but it's probably a great idea if you're in a household that uses all this stuff, but I do not. So let's say it's on device by a company created entirely by imaginary beings you trust, then do you want it? That's just so hypothetical, because it isn't. It's, you know, you always have to look behind the products and look at the real motive. It might be on device, right? A lot of this may be on device. Amazon's moving more and more of its intelligence to be on device. But the ulterior motive for that even existing at all, it doesn't matter whether that's on device or off. Like the whole idea, similar with Google, is that, you know, Google, everything is free, and it's gathering the data, and that's a fair exchange. And with Amazon, the stuff isn't free, but a lot of it doesn't come with any extra charge. But the idea is that, you know, it's more shopping. It's more product recommendations. It's more accurate. Whereas with Apple, it's more like, hey, just spend another $1,000 on an iPhone every single year or 19 bucks on a piece of cloth. Like each company has their own reasons for doing what they do. And for me, I just, I tend to prefer to go with the ones where it's like they just want to lock me into an ecosystem so I spend money, but not necessarily suck up all my data. And I can not really control whether I keep doing that or not in the future. And so with services like this, on products like this, I tend to be pretty downbeat on those. I want this. I want my Echo to only ask me if I want to order more sardines at the exact moment that I've realized I'm out of sardines and need to order them. I want it to say, oh, you guys are back. Let me, let me, you're coming back. Let me turn that heat up. I share all the same concerns as you made as like, yes, but I also want it to be done in a way that isn't exploited for a purpose I don't agree to. I may be fine with them exploiting it for the purpose of helping me to shop more easily on Amazon. As long as I'm in control of that, I may be fine with that, but I do want it to work. To me, it's not just about on-device and privacy because I actually feel like people have unreasonable expectations about that sort of thing these days and these companies can do it well. It's just because they're these companies, they'll never be trusted to do it well. And I don't think that's fair to the companies. Maybe you don't care because they've been so unfair to you and that's certainly a reasonable response. I'm more concerned with, it's always asking me to buy sardines before I need the sardines. It's always asking me to buy something I don't want to buy. It's always saying, hey, would you like me to turn down the thermostat when I'm still here? Like, I just want it to work. That's where I'm at. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. As we know, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg so much believes that the future of his company is the metaverse that he has renamed the company Meta, but he would have, you think, maybe they're the only ones doing this. They're not. During Ignite, Microsoft CEO Sacha Nadella renamed the company Metasoft. No, he didn't do that, but he did tell Bloomberg TV that Microsoft will do metaverse things in gaming. He said to Bloomberg, if you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse and so is FlightSim. In some sense, they're 2D today and the question is, can you now take that to a full 3D world and we absolutely plan to do so? We didn't say how and we don't really know exactly what the metaverse is. Nate set out to answer that in a quick take that he wrote for Bloomberg called what the metaverse is, who's in it and why it matters. Is it possible to summarize the metaverse, Nate? Heck, I'm going to do my best. I think there is this expectation that a lot of people have that the metaverse is actually something that we can define today and it's something that companies like Facebook and Microsoft now are trying to do and it generally feels like most people's perception is that the metaverse is just around the corner and it's something to do with VR and 3D worlds. The reality is much, much more likely that what we think of the metaverse as being is probably 10, 20 years away from now. If you take a little step back, a key component to what will make the metaverse a metaverse is not whether it's 3D or not. It's not whether it's VR or not. It's whether objects, things, experiences, purchases, objects, things can move from one bit of a metaverse to another and retain that portability, retain that value. So for instance, I'm going to talk entirely in hypotheticals here because it really helps make this clearer, I think. If you imagine that the web today is 2D, it's information, you can write an email on an iPad and you can send that email with an image that you took on a digital camera, you email that to somebody, that person can download it, they can do something else with it, they could print it out, they could mint something as an NFT in the first place, all these sorts of things. It changes platforms, it changes providers, but it withholds the thing that it is. It is still a photo, it still has some value that you can claim back by saying, well, hey, I own the copyright on that and I can sell that. That's like a really, really basic example of what you should be able to do in a future metaverse. Microsoft talked about flight simulator. So the idea would be maybe that if that were the case, you would be flying in flight simulator and you pay some money for an object while you're sitting on a virtual flight and then when you land, you can take that virtual object and you can go and put it in something in Minecraft or you can move it over to something you're playing in Roblox or if you're a child and you're playing Roblox and you've built something or you've created something but then 10 years later, you're older and you're not playing Roblox anymore but you really like that thing that you did. In a metaverse, as we envision it, you should be able to take that from Roblox and take that with you. As you grow mature, that thing that you have should be able to move with you and you should be able to pass it on and sell it or what have you, it should retain that value. And that's kind of where I think what we have thought of as being a metaverse differs from where a lot of the commercial companies that are talking about it seem to be pointing it, which is that it's just kind of like second life on steroids or something. And second life had a lot of examples of what a metaverse could be, but it was contained. Everything was self-contained in that world. You couldn't take the thing that you bought in second life and necessarily move that into another virtual world. It was locked in that one place really. So it's going to be a massive evolution of all of these things. VR included, virtual 3D worlds included, objects included, teams, games, all of that stuff but it's going to be defined by the ability for one thing to move seamlessly into another and back again with holding that value in just the same way that if I buy a car today and I drive it for a year and then I sell it to somebody else, it is still that one car and I've still been allowed to move it and sell it and do stuff with it. So I'm really trying to summarize this as you said in five minutes. That's kind of key though, is that it is portability of things in a way that should be reminiscent of the web. And the one last thing I will say that's probably key to this is if you think back to the early days of the web, the web was created after the internet, it was a thing you could use the internet for and but it was created by researchers and scientists and military to a certain extent and geeks in schools and in research facilities and it wasn't driven by a commercial interest shareholders and so forth but it evolved organically from being this thing where you share information to being this thing where we can sit here and do this podcast over video. The evolution of a metaverse will probably I expect take a similar journey in that it can't know so much be built as it can be sort of tried to be experimented with bit by bit and we'll look back on this conversation and think, wow, Nate was so wrong and I may be but that seems to be where we're going. That's five minutes, I hope that's a summary. No, that's good. Do you think that fits in with what Andrew Bosworth was saying at Facebook Connect when he described it as something in the internet right now is something you look at when the metaverse has kind of arrived it'll be something you're in. I agree with part of it. I think VR will be a way of interacting with the metaverse in the way that a high resolution screen is a better way of interacting with the web than a very low-res, tiny little screen. It's fundamentally underneath the surface and underneath the screen or the VR glasses or whatever the information, the objects, the experiences they're all basically the same but are the ways in which we interact with it that's kind of how things are being shaped and made exciting frankly and probably made commercial. So I would agree with a lot of what he's saying but it's gonna be very interesting but I'm skeptical that any one company can do this. It has to be open by design. And again, this is a message I think it's lost out there but meta is saying they want it to be open that they're not the only ones who will develop the metaverse and they wanna just be a part of developing. Again, there's zero trust for these companies but that is what they should be saying and that is what they are saying. It reminds me of web 2.0 in a lot of ways in that web 2.0 felt a lot like, well, we already have some of it. So web 2.0 was the idea that you could like have live updating websites and interactivity and maps you could zoom around on and just more interactive web pages in general. And everybody kept asking, are we there yet? Is this web 2.0? Have we achieved web 2.0? Have we moved past web 2.0? What's after web 2.0? The metaverse feels like that. We're at the early days of like, it's a thing that kind of means what you were talking about and will change as we undergo it and we'll never quite know if the metaverse is here. It's just one day we'll realize like, oh, I guess we should be looking for the thing after the metaverse now because the metaverse isn't exactly what Nate thought in 2021 but it's close enough and we've got it now. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah. All right, folks, you wanna make sure you're maximizing your points, earning and saving potential during a vacation if you're traveling around. Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler has an app pick for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Whether or not you're traveling right now doesn't mean you can't be saving your points on things you spend with travel credit cards so that you can afford travel whenever you're ready. I've been looking at a couple of different apps that help you manage your points and what credit cards you have and getting new ones. The points guy has an interesting app that you can actually log into your different credit card accounts and it will keep track then of how many points you have available. But the other feature that I really liked there is if you're at a store, you can get on your app and say which of my credit card should I use here based on how many points I will get with the different cards because some cards, for instance, will give three times on groceries and other cards will give points at a certain restaurant so it's something worth knowing. The app again is The Points Guy and I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. That's kind of a useful little trick there. I don't have enough credit cards to make use of it but I can see where it might be useful. The Points Guy owned by Red Ventures, which now in CNET, which Nate and I both used to work for. So there you go. Also thanks to our brand new bosses, Mike Smith, Mr. Rust, Shelley Gaskin and Yupeng Zhang all just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, it's good to start off a new month with a bunch of new patrons. We went down on patrons a little bit last month as the belts are tightening so really, really appreciate every single new patron who supports us so thank you, thank you, thank you. Again, Mike, Shelley, Yupeng and Mr. Rust for being our new patron. Maybe it'll be you tomorrow. Thank you, Nate Langston of course as always for helping us wrap our heads around that metaverse idea a little better. I think that was an excellent summary. I highly recommend people also read Nate's Quick Take on Bloomberg, we'll have that link in the show notes as well. Anything else going on you wanna tell folks about? Well, I've also been trying to explain to my podcast listeners why so many schools in Britain are rolling out facial recognition for children to pay for their lunch instead of cash or cards or anything. It's been a bit of a controversy over here. There seems to have fallen under the radar but we talked about it over two episodes and text message the last couple of weekends. UKTekshow.com, episode 254 and 255. If you wanna listen to that in order, I'd love to have you. Yeah, a good conversation. Had me muttering along with you at my phone. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC, find out more at dailyteknewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.