 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and Hector Bones. Coming up on today's DTNS, Susan Wojcicki steps down as YouTube CEO, Tyler announces new tracker safety measures, and the Verge's Sean Hollister is with us. He's gone hands-on with Sony's PlayStation VR2, and he has thoughts. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 16th, 2023. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalano. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. And we are joined by the Verge's senior editor, Sean Hollister. Hey Sean. Hi, I'm in Union City, California. Thank you. See, you already know the drill. You've been here before. Sean is going to talk a lot more about VR a little bit later in the show. But first, let's start out with some quick heads. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say Apple now plans to announce its mixed-reality headset at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, rather than a planned April announcement that was a date that had been reported on earlier. It said the delay follows recent tests showing remaining hardware and software issues with the device, specifically sensors handling, hand and eye control. Kind of a big deal for this kind of headset. Apple reportedly still aims to have it on sale by the end of 2023. We have some earnings to talk about. Let's start with Roku, which reported Q4. Its ad-supported Roku channel reached 100 million people in the US. That's up 25% on the year. The company also beat analysts' earning estimates, still losing $1.70 per share on flat revenue of $867.1 million. It increased active accounts by 7% on the quarter to 70 million, with streaming hours up 9% on the quarter to 23.9 billion. In other earnings news, Paramount Plus added 9.9 million subscribers in Q4, bringing its total to 56 million, just under analysts' estimates. Paramount Plus Showtime, BET Plus and Noggin combined added 10.8 million direct-to-consumer subscribers, now at 77 million total for all of them. Price increases are coming though. Paramount Plus' premium tier, which includes Showtime, will climb $2 to $11.99 per month, and its essential tier will increase $1 to $5.99 per month. Western Digital announced an update to its dual-drive MyBook Duo external hard drive, which now maxes out at 44 terabytes of capacity for a mere $1,500. Its chips configured in RAID 0, combining the two drives into a single pool for better performance and an infinitely larger fault domain when you want to lose 44 terabytes in a hurry, but users can reconfigure them, either to be kind of in a J-Bot configuration where they're recognized discreetly or a redundant RAID 1 configuration with a mere 22 terabytes of capacity. It also updated its single-drive MyBook hard drive to 22 terabytes of max capacity for $599, peace of mind, not included. In a blog post, Microsoft addressed recent reports of odd behavior with its new Bing AI chatbot. The company said, long extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions can cause the bot to forget what it was trying to answer, resulting in it becoming repetitive or giving responses not in Microsoft's designated tone. To combat this, the company may add a tool to let you reset Bing's search context within a conversation. Microsoft also said that the model can respond or reflect in the tone in which it was being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn't intend. TikTok announced a series of live trivia games, kind of like trivia HQ for those OGs that remember. The rounds will be live-streamed each day on the official TikTok account between February 22nd and February 26th, with a $500,000 cash prize pool to be split between winners who are at least 18 years old and in the US. TikTok creator James Henry will host the trivia rounds. AdAge also reports TikTok quietly launched a shop pilot in the US to capitalize on the hashtag, tech talk made me buy it, hashtag trend. Paxon and Revolve are said to be among the pilot brands. And those are the quick hits. All right, let's move on to item tracking. Item trackers like Apple's AirTags, Tiles trackers are a great way to keep track of things. People use them for luggage or their car keys or their pets. I've got one on my dog right now. But reports of trackers being misused for stalking others, maybe thefts of cars and the like have forced tracker makers to at times rethink and reposition the software behind those trackers for more emphasis on user safety. Yeah, well today, Tile announced a new feature to make its devices safer called anti-theft mode. Very creative. This keeps a tracker from being detected by anyone other than its owner. Now you might ask, how would that prevent a stalking situation? So Tile is going to require users to register using multi-factor authentication, including biometric data and a government ID in order to use it. And there's going to be some verification on top of that as well. Not only that, users must agree to new terms of use that let Tile share their personal information with law enforcement at its discretion when a criminal investigation is underway, but that doesn't require a subpoena. Tile also says it can sue anyone for $1 million who use Tile trackers to commit crimes that violate its terms, although that would be up to a court's discretion. All right, now on the one hand, this might sound a lot safer, right? Like you'd hear this and go, oh, all right, seems like they're going to take care of me. But you also might wonder how Tile's position of cooperating with law enforcement by turning over users' personal and private data is fully protecting people's right to do process. Normally a court order or a subpoena search warrant or some sort of legal request is almost always needed first. Yeah, so Life360 acquired Tile back in 2021. Its co-founder and CEO Chris Holes said in a statement about this. To meaningfully address stalking with technology, we must implement safeguards like ID registration of all location-enabled devices that are small enough to be planted on a person so law enforcement have information to pursue justice for victims. Now that sounds fine and good, but remember the new anti-theft mode makes Tile's tracker invisible to anyone but the Tile owner who tries to use the scan and secure feature for scan to scan for trackers on stolen goods. So the idea is if you give Tile all your information and you're the owner, then nobody else should be able to use these trackers for their own benefit. In its announcement, Tile also said that Apple's air tag technology has insufficient protection for victims. Of course they would say that. So what do we all think? Is the potential privacy backlash due to new law enforcement terms that Tile has laid out in its terms of service because we've all read them, is it worth it for the company as they claim better safety for all? I'm not as worried about privacy backlash because it's very clear that this is going to be extremely opt-in. First off, you have to activate this mode. It's not on by default. You have to say, I want to opt-in to anti-theft mode and you have to submit your government idea. So you will know when you are submitting this thing, oh yeah, I am handing my private information, my driver's license information to this company and then you can ask yourself, do I actually want to do that? Is that worth making this tracker a little bit more undetectable? So I'm not as concerned about that. I'm more concerned about the potential for this to be used by stalkers. It's already the case that people are taking apart their air techs and disabling the speakers and things like that. And now Tile is saying, we are the brand that you can buy trackers from if you want to keep them from being detected. Yeah, I have similar feelings about it. This is one of those technologies and especially when Apple picked it up because we were like, oh okay, if Apple is doing it, that's pretty serious, you probably see other bigger brands doing it. And it never occurred to me the ways that these things would be used in the various ways at the time. And I bought three or four of them to go on a trip and I think they were helpful in keeping track of luggage and so on. But you started hearing these terrible stories about people sticking them on cars and stalking, tracking, you know, lead up to an actual kidnapping, that sort of thing. And even though I try to keep in mind a lot of these stories are isolated, it's not a runaway problem, but it's a problem nonetheless. I feel like what Tile is doing is ensuring that they're as covered as possible with a device like this. And I'm not even saying that's bad. Most companies want to cover their rear ends as often as much as they can. But this is them basically saying, look, we'll give you some security features. But in trade for that, you're going to have to basically be on tap. If anything ever goes to court in any way that's tied to your air tags or rather our Tile tags. And I guess I don't know what else they would do. If you're a company making these things and these sorts of risks start to come to life, you're probably going to have to react. And I expect Apple will probably react in similar ways in some ways they already have, but their original ULAs for these things. So I don't think it ends here. I think these maybe even get more restrictive as time goes on. The one thing to note here is that this doesn't substantially change Tile's policy of how they're interacting with law enforcement. Life 360's privacy policy already says that they can share information with law enforcement on our sole discretion to investigate, prevent or take action regarding suspected or actual illegal activities. So it basically already says if we want to, if we believe there's something nefarious going on, we can give this information over. The level of information that they will now have on certain customers that opt into this is a lot more because before it might be your email or something like that as opposed to a government ID, two factor keys, biometric data, certainly that has a higher standard of privacy behind it. But in terms of policy, this doesn't actually change their interaction with law enforcement. I'm curious though, in terms of is the solution to this like turn off like the ability for anyone else to find this? Because I feel like all that does is create a very tempting, admittedly hard to crack a kind of target for this either by falsifying the verification, which we've seen verification does fail with these kind of systems, no matter how complex, or for compromised accounts. Because once you opt into this, all of your devices go into anti-track mode. So if you compromise someone's devices and then you can then register new devices to that or you gain access to them, you know, through some ways like people that want to use this nefariously. I don't think a million dollar lawsuit is going like that. That is people just are someone is going to try and use this. And I feel like having this no tracking like having this only discoverable by you feature makes the problem worse in some ways. Admittedly, it hires the bar in some ways to go ahead. Go ahead, Sean. Okay, the threat of the million dollar fine is sounds it sounds like a lot of money, you know, you could potentially lose if law enforcement catches you tracking somebody with your tile. But how often is that going to happen? Do you know, do these would be criminals? Do they do they anticipate that that will actually happen to them? Maybe not. And the company itself can't levy that fine. It depends on law enforcement, basically finding this tile, going to them, going to the company and saying, Hey, do you have this tile in your system? Okay, who is this thing registered to? And to your other point about verification, I do wonder how how intense their verification system is going to be how well they're going to be able to tell that the person registering the tile is actually the user. Because one thing that we found when we did a big story about air tags on the verge, I think it was last year, maybe the year before about their potential to be used in stocking. One thing that we found out, we found that there are a lot of domestic abuse cases where, you know, husbands will track their wives and vice versa. And so there's this situation where maybe somebody could register the tile to their, you know, the person that they're planning to domestically abuse and track them all around the place. And we'll have access to things like their driver's license and be able to register that in someone else's name to disable them to keep them from finding it. Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't like, I appreciate they're trying to address it, but I don't think this is necessarily it solves all situations, maybe like for like auto theft and stuff like that. This is potentially a. I think tile believes strongly this is a deterrent, right? We're going to, we're threatening you with, if you do something wrong, then you should know that you're going to get in trouble. There are ways around it because there always are. But, but yes, tile doesn't want to be suing a bunch of people for millions of dollars. That's not what the company wants to do or what the business is. But, but yeah, it is, it is a, hey, we're security first, we're safer than our competitors by our product. That's how I see this. Well, YouTube CEO Susan, Susan Wojcicki announced in a letter to staff. She's stepping down from her role after nine years and will be replaced by Neil Mohan, her longtime number two at YouTube since 2015. Wojcicki says she'll start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects. I'm passionate about. Yeah. Wojcicki has been with YouTube's owner Google for 25 years in a variety of capacities. She joined the company in 1999 after renting out her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin just a year earlier. It's kind of one of those Silicon Valley lures that you hear about. I mean, it's true. While at Google, Wojcicki held roles running marketing, building Google's online ad business, even Google's own video service. It was tinkering around with at the time trying to compete with that little startup YouTube before Google just decided to buy YouTube instead. Wojcicki is widely credited for that decision, by the way. She's also pretty notably one of very few women running a big monster tech business while running YouTube. Under her leadership, YouTube has been really big business for Google, which bought YouTube back in 2006. YouTube, a parent company to both YouTube and Google Alphabet. Can also thank YouTube for more than 10% of Alphabet's total revenue in 2022 with $29.2 billion in ad sales. Depending on creators that you talk to, advertisers that you talk to, consumers of video that you talk to who use YouTube's platform. Some are very happy with the direction YouTube has gone in in recent years. Others not so much. I guess we could go around the horn now and say, under new leadership, it sounds like Neil Mohan and Susan Wojcicki probably have similar styles because they've worked together so well for so many years. But this always means that things can change at YouTube. What would we like to see change if we could? I mean, honestly, it feels like she did a really good job of running and establishing what YouTube is today, which is a massive force in video content and really kind of rivaled by no one. And not as good as maybe seeing what the future holds in terms of short form video, TikTok type stuff, algorithmically served video, this sort of thing. Especially coming from a company like YouTube where algorithmically served everything is their entire lifestyle over there. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I think maybe it would be time to pass the torch. I don't know if this other guy's up to it or not, but somebody there needs to be able to be a little more forward thinking about this stuff. There's no reason that they're having to play catch up with something like YouTube shorts because of TikTok. If they had seen the writing on the wall, they would have probably been there. But then you could say this about Instagram and everybody else. So everybody was caught off guard a little bit, just like they're all being caught off guard now by AI-assisted stuff. So I feel like you can't know everything and it's maybe not fair to level that on everybody. But this is a chance for them to kind of reassess and say, all right, what is YouTube moving forward? We're still this thing, but we can be other things too and maybe we'll be a little bit more ahead of the curve and more people can follow us instead of the other way around. She don't have a lot to say about Susan's leadership except that she has been involved in dealing with some of the algorithmic failings of YouTube. Certainly there was some controversy about some of the echo chambers it could create a while back. And I definitely know people who have gotten stuck in YouTube echo chambers coming right around to getting served fake news all the time because they were interested in related topics. So I do hope that they improve that. I will say something about the garage myth though. It's absolutely true that she provided a garage for Google's founders and some of its early staff. But she also provided more than a garage. There are some early videos you can find online that show that the office is kind of coming into the house as well. And Google definitely did not start in the garage. It started in a dorm room and Sergey and Larry had raised a million dollars in venture capital by the time they moved into Susan's house. I'd love to know what the garage rent was. There was some sort of lease agreement going on. She said it was like 1700 a month or something. For a garage. My goodness. Not bad over there. Yeah. But you have access to the kitchen fridge. And good things came out of it. Well if you have ideas about what we should talk about in a future show or anything we've talked about on this show or previous shows you can always join the conversation in our Discord. Got a lot of good folks in there. Join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. The PlayStation VR 2 doesn't hit the street until February 22nd. That's next week everybody. But the review embargoes have lifted. Yes that's right. And by very fortunate coincidence Sean you've been spending some time reviewing this new headset for the Verge so we cannot wait to hear some of your takes on it. First off can you help us understand where the headset fits into the overall VR market currently. Well if you if you were looking at that picture a moment ago of a cord tangled around my colleague at a doesn't quite look like that in real life. You plugged the cord into the front of your PlayStation 5 and that is the big difference with the PlayStation VR 2 versus all the other headsets on the market. Back in 2016 and Sony came out with its first PlayStation VR. The idea wasn't really formed yet what VR would be. You sat down with in front of a camera like a webcam facing at you with some ancient PlayStation move wands that had colored orbs on the top. People didn't realize that you'd be wanting to walk around in a virtual reality space turn all the way around behind you and walk around a room and lean down close to see VR objects. The original PlayStation VR was really bad at that. But what it was good at was giving people a headset they could buy for four hundred and five hundred bucks that plugged into a console they already owned. And the PlayStation VR 2 is the only other headset that does that. Every other headset that's been made is either designed to be plugged into a PC or wirelessly connected to a PC. Or it's like the Oculus Quest where it's completely standalone and uses a mobile processor from like a smartphone built into a wireless thing on your head. So we're back to the tethered cord. But we're also back to you just plug this into a console you might already own which has pretty good graphics. Now as the PS VR 2 goes we're aware of some of the specs leading up to this thing but now that you've had hands on to it. Can you give us like the overall on the improvements that you see in this device versus the PS VR which is now getting long in the tooth. Oh my gosh it's it's like night and day. This thing has a four basically a 4K OLED screen inside. You get 2000 by 2040 pixels for each of your eyes. There are eye tracking cameras inside. I are illuminators around each lens and a camera that can see where your pupils are pointing so that you can do things like foveated rendering. When you play a game like Horizon Call of the Mountain and you're looking around the room. I would look at a I would look at some plants on my left. I would look at some sunflowers my right. I would look up in the distance each time I changed what I was looking at the game would increase the resolution at that spot. I'm looking at while blurring out the resin. Everything else basically taking advantage of its processor power in the most efficient way possible so that whatever I was looking at looked very crisp. Was it noticeable. This is one thing. This is a huge question with the foveated rendering because I've heard a lot of talk about it never actually seen it in practice. But moving from one object to the other and having that shift in focus is that at first anyway was it distracting or you know bothersome at all. That's one of the ironies about it is that if it's done properly it's one of those things you don't notice at all. You never realize what the benefits of it are unless you turn it off and you see that the frame rate of the game plummets you see that there's it doesn't run as smoothly. One of the things that's true about every console is at the beginning of their life cycle at the beginning of a system life cycle like the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR. They aren't necessarily using all the processing power. And so when I turned off foveated rendering in Horizon Call of the Mountain and turned it on the game looked largely the same to my eyes because wherever I was looking it looked sharp without it. However, when I took screenshots of what it was doing when I had foveated rendering on it could very clearly see oh wow this is really doing something and it's doing something so quickly and efficiently that I didn't notice it until I froze time and took that screenshot so I could see what it was doing. So hopefully this means that future games will be able to have better graphics than the VR that you're playing today on a PC or Oculus Quest 2 or something like that without slowing down. Now that's interesting because the quality of our own eyeballs peripheral vision is similar. Right like I can't really I know I can see my hand over here moving on the side but I don't have it in full focus. I don't have it in its full rendering of whatever my hand looks like because I'm looking forward. But if I shift to my hand now I can do it. I feel like this is just this is emulating that and at a speed that our brains and our eyes can handle. That sounds very impressive. It's very much like what you're saying. The Achilles heels though is that Sony Sony made a very interesting trade off with the lenses in the PlayStation VR to a lot of headsets use a lens called a Fresnel lens. I think I'm probably pronouncing that wrong but during it but the lens has lots of little ridges. It's designed so that it can doesn't have as nearly as much glass as a conventional magnifying lens in it. They figured out a different way to create a pattern of basically of prisms that allow the light to point straight at at your eyes from whichever direction it's coming. A problem with these benefit of these lenses that they're very lightweight. A problem with these lenses is that they typically have something called God rays where you can see kind of shafts of light come in through the lenses that shouldn't be there that kind of distract you from the virtual reality experiences. Sony has a pattern to design that reduces the God rays. But what we found out is that the side effect of this is that the sweet spot in these lenses is very small. If I if I have my eyes in the very center of the lenses in the tiniest circle it's incredibly sharp looking into this you know this 4k display. But if it moves just a little bit in any direction which it can do after you know after you're jumping around a room or playing a bunch of a game. Or if you're just turning your eyes to the side to try and use that eye tracking. If you're looking if you're not looking into the center of the lenses it's not as clear. So it's it's a bit of a detriment when it comes to really seeing what that eye tracking can do. Now as sorry Scott as somebody who's a who's a quest lover in fact I have their original quest the quest to and the quest pro at this point. But I but I love exercise games workout stuff not that I'm playing all that many of those games but that that is why being untethered is very important to me. What about what about the games that are offered with the VR to and and do you think that that holds it back at all. Sony and and and Sony's third party developers did not provide any exercise games to us during the review period. And I think I know why. And I think you can guess why. Every one of our review myself Eddie Robertson and Tom Warren we all got tangled in the cord playing games. We did not trip. None of us tripped and fell on the ground. We didn't pull our you know we don't pull our console right out of our entertainment center and have it crash on the ground. Because we've done a lot of VR with cords and we noticed when we were getting tangled and then we had to spin the other direction and untangle ourselves. But we also didn't play anything intensive enough to make us forget that we were in a headset to make us forget that the cord was there. And I have played exercise games. I played pistol whip. I played beat Saber and I've I've smacked my controller into the walls while while playing those games. I definitely think that I could trip on this cable if I if I if I lost myself in VR. Well speaking of games and apps that like in the case of Sarah and I think that's a really good point about about workout apps. I think they're going to miss an opportunity there. But how about the rest of the lineup. Do you feel strongly about how a they're launching with what games they have. And what's on the horizon. No pun intended. I guess horizon up the mountain or whatever it's called is the is the one to watch right now. That's the one everyone's freaking out about. But how do you feel about the whole lineup given the price of this device. Yeah. In terms of breadth there's a lot of titles at launch. There are 30 plus games at launch. They're promising that a hundred other games are already in development. The reality today is that most of those games are ports from other VR headsets. Some of them are from the original PlayStation VR and you do you don't necessarily get them for free. Some of you of them you can get a free update. Some of them cost five to ten bucks. Some of them you need to buy from scratch. They're all things you could play elsewhere. The PlayStation VR 2 is one of the best places to play them if you don't mind that chord because it is very comfortable. It's very easy to set up. It has high resolution. It has those fancy features like eye tracking that developers can take advantage of. And some of them are you know you shoot laser beams with your eyes in Res Infinite and it targets with that. Horizon Horizon though is the is the one and only flagship game we have played. It's the only game that was designed from the PlayStation VR to from the ground up has that kind of graphical advancement. It really uses the eye tracking in a whole bunch of different ways makes you feel like this is a step forward. And so we want there to be more games like that. I really hope there are lots more games like that. But to not have Sony tell us that there's specific things that'll do that. To not know that anything else is coming and to look back at the 2016 PlayStation VR and see that they abandoned it. And to look back at the PlayStation to Vita handheld which they released a few token games for and then you know basically said hey indie developers you have this thing. They don't have the best track record supporting peripherals and accessories. Well at five hundred and forty nine dollars this is very expensive device given that it's exclusive to the PlayStation five is not working with PCs and other stuff. Who do you think the market is as kind of a final question here. Who should buy this headset and should they buy it now. Yeah I don't I don't want to push back too much on you know whether the PlayStation VR to is affordable or not because you know we're in the middle of probably they'll call it a recessions in a later right. People don't have as much disposal when come right now it's a pricey device. If you look at this outside of that you know economic context though it's it's a lot less expensive than PC VR is you don't have to buy a new PC for it. You don't have to buy a new graphics card and graphics cards have gone up in price. Recently you can get some old graphics cards for a decent price now but still in general the trend has been up with graphics card prices. It is it is more expensive than the quest to yes which doesn't have a cord but it has it is way more comfortable than the quest to is by default way better graphically. It just you feel more like you are there unless you're playing an exercise game where you're going to trip over that court. And if you already have a PlayStation to a PlayStation PlayStation five excuse me if you already have a PlayStation five and are looking at the PlayStation VR to. I don't think it will disappoint you if you like the selection of games on tap. Well Sean Hollister thanks so much for for joining us today and giving us a rundown. I'm jealous. I wish I was trying this thing out especially when you say better graphics because I don't know any different than my MetaQuest and I feel like it's already magic but you know VR can be magic to anybody who tries it out for the first time no matter what platform you're using. So thank you so much for your thoughts. We love your work at the verge let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Yeah. In addition to the verge I'm at Sean Hollister at Mastodon dot world and they can see my author profile for brief moment. All right. And thanks also to Scott Johnson Mr frog pants himself Scott where can people find you on the cyberspace should they be so inclined. Well here's what I would recommend. We're going to talk a lot more about this device and this review tonight on a show called core. It's a video game podcast I do with a couple of friends and every week we talk about the big stories in gaming from the big company stuff all the way down to some little indie we played over the weekend. So if that sounds interesting to you please tune in and check it out over at frog pants dot com slash core or wherever you get your podcasts. Well thanks to you both Sean and Scott for being with us today. So thanks for our brand new boss Rayon. Rayon just started backing us on Patreon. Rayon we see you and we thank you. Thank you for being part of the team. Speaking of patrons do stick around for our extended show Good Day Internet. We're going to roll right into it after we wrap up here. But just a reminder you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live and even tell a friend. We'll be back to it all again tomorrow with Lamar Wilson and Lynn Peralta drawing top tech stories talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.