 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Matt Zaglin, Scott Hepburn, and Bjorn Andre. Coming up on DTNS, Apple's good and bad announcements and leaks, a way to breach an iPhone when it's turned off, and Max Scoville is here to help us fill that E3-sized hole in our video gaming hearts. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sarah Lane's off today, but Max Scoville, senior writer and hosted IGN is here. Welcome, Max. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Let's start with a few tech things. Not just Max, but all of you should know. Google originally said it would end its free version of G Suite and migrate everyone to a paid version. I think a few of you may have noticed that. However, enough of you put pressure on the company that it would set, it said it would come up with a plan for non-commercial use, and it has. Google announced the free legacy edition of G Suite for personal use, an almost Microsoft-like name. Any free G Suite user has until June 27th to sign up in the Google Admin console. Free users get to keep your custom domains. A lot of people thought they'd just make you use Gmail, but you get to keep your custom domain. You get to keep all the access, Google Drive, Google Meet, all your purchased content. You just need to confirm that you're doing it for a non-commercial use. If they find that you're a business, they're going to make you pay for the workspace plan. The new plan will not include customer support either, so if you want customer support, you would want to pay for that. Personal users who already paid for Google Workspace should contact Google Support and Google says they'll be transferred to a new free account. Not a new free account, but a free account. Elon Musk tweeted again Tuesday. That's not the news. He said that his acquisition of Twitter can't move forward until he is convinced that Twitter's claim of 5% fake accounts is true. He wants to see the receipts. Twitter claimed that the number is, I'm sorry, Twitter claimed 5% in an SEC filing that Musk has used to justify his bid. And he seems to be alluding to a market research firm called SparkToro's estimate that the number of fake accounts is closer to 19%. But that research from SparkToro counts automated accounts that post things like news headlines and Twitter only counts things that they think are actually fake accounts. At an event in Miami on Monday, Musk said a deal at a lower price wasn't out of the question, but Tuesday, Twitter issued a statement saying it is committed to completing the transaction on the agreed upon price as promptly as practicable. Musk waved due diligence when he signed the agreement to acquire the company and he would need to pay $1 billion if he walks away from the deal. All right, that's as the Twitter turns. John Deere is acquiring an algorithm package from artificial intelligence startup Light to further its development of fully autonomous farming. The company tells the next web that the acquisition will not only accelerate the development and deployment of the company's AI, but allow the equipment to literally move faster, safer without human intervention. People in the US are changing their mind about tech regulation. This kind of goes against expectations here. Pew Research Center found that 44% of people in the US think tech companies should face more regulation, but that is down from 56% when they asked the same question a year ago. The number who said tech companies should face less regulation also rose from 10% a year ago to 20% this year. The drop came no matter what political ideology the respondents identified with. And ASUS announced the ROGFLOW X16 2-in-1 gaming laptop. It has a mini LED 165-hertz screen with peak brightness of 1,100 nits, the latest Ryzen 6000 series CPUs and up to an NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti. Pricing starts at $1,950. ASUS also announced an updated special edition of its ROG Strix SCAR 17 laptop offering Intel's new HX CPU line up to the i9-12900HX CPU with a 3080 Ti. Pricing starts at $3,500, both expected to ship before the end of June. Will you be getting one of those, Max? I wish, but also, I don't know. Do I need one? Yeah. Well, I'll take one, right, is where I'm at. If anyone's watching, sure, I'll check it out. I'm not sure I need to drop on it. It's a nice looking one, though. All right, let's round up some of the Apple news today. First, some things that Apple's actually doing. Apple announced new accessibility features coming to its phone, watch, and laptop line. Live captioning is available or is going to be available on any spoken content on your device. And it will be powered on device, machine language processing on your device, not in the cloud. That will include videos, podcasts, and even FaceTime calls. FaceTime calls will even get a special treatment. Magnifier's detection mode, which already exists, is now going to announce when the phone's camera sees a door. Detection mode can detect certain things, and doors is one of the things they're adding. It'll tell you how far away it thinks it is, and if it's open. The sound recognition feature, and that is going to include the ability to add custom sounds, not just the pre-made ones. You can train it on sounds particular to you. A buddy controller lets a person help out. Another person play a game. Let's say you have a disability that makes one part of the game hard. You could have a friend kind of help out with that. WatchOS is getting new hand gestures for people who have trouble with some of the smaller existing ones. And the watch is also getting the ability to mirror its screen to an iOS device so that you can use, say, an iPhone or an iPad to access some of the watch-specific features in a more accessible way. All of these updates will roll out later this year. Max, any of these strike your fancy? That first one, the FaceTime captions is huge. I have an extremely deaf elderly mother who is not great at technology. She actually tried to get me to uninstall FaceTime from her phone, which you can't really do. It's kind of baked in there. But I convinced her to jump on a call with her granddaughter, and I had to repeat myself a great deal. So if we could get closed captions for that, that's huge. Plus it'll probably translate baby talk into complete gibberish, which would be funny. Actually, I cannot wait to use that with my nieces now that I think about it. Yeah, that's a good one. Next, there are some good news for developers, maybe not as much good news for us users. Apple is rolling out new App Store rules that will let any developer increase the price of an auto renewing subscription without requiring you to actively confirm it. Up until now, Apple has said if you're gonna raise the price, the user will have to confirm that auto renewal for it to happen. It won't automatically renew, in other words, but they're changing that. You'll still be notified if the price goes up, and developers can't increase your subscription price more than once a year without getting you to confirm it. However, subscription increases more than $5 a month or $50 a year will require you to manually confirm or re-subscribe. So there's a cap on how much they can raise it as well. I mean, I guess you could pitch this, Max, as making it easier for you to stay subscribed. Yeah, I guess. I mean, this is one of those ones that it's, at the end of the day, it's fine print, you know? Yeah. I did like that they forced us to confirm it, right? But I sort of get where developers are coming from. It's like, hey, if it's only five bucks, do I have to do that? Well, I mean, and also for a developer side, I mean, even if it's sub $5, what if you just need to bump the price increase because you're trying to catch up with inflation? I mean, I have a couple of bills that sort of do that already where I just get auto charged and they'll let me know, like one of them is my Termitex bill when they go around spray every month. But like it's gone up like four times in the past six years and it's like, all right, your new bill is this amount. Yeah, thanks. Well, it basically shifts the burden of inaction to the user, right? And, oh, go ahead, sorry. Because a lot of people will see the confirmation of the price increase and might even think like, yeah, okay, I'll pay a couple extra dollars, but not get around to clicking the confirmation button and then they get unsubscribed. I'm trying to remember, does Netflix do that? Like when they increase the price because if you have it. They send you a note saying they're increasing the price but they don't make you reconfirm. Yeah. Now to things that might happen, but they're based on generally reliable predictors of things. So these are based on sources sort of stuff, but good track records of both these folks. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says, Apple is testing using a Color E-Ink screen as an external display on a foldable device. Kuo says the tests are for tablet-like applications, makes sense, and that the E-Ink screen would be used as a power efficient way to deliver information when the device is folded. If you've seen the Galaxy Fold or Huawei's Foldable or any of those foldables, they'll have an LCD screen on the outside. Looks like Apple is trying to figure out how to do that same thing with a Color E-Ink screen. And we recently talked about E-Ink's Gallery 3-Tec that has higher resolution and faster refresh times for Color E-Ink. Still, an Apple foldable probably isn't coming until 2025 at the earliest. Into this, Max? Extremely, I think this exact sort of use of it isn't really for me, but the prospect of just Color E-Ink is really exciting. I have a Kindle and I love reading on it because it's not a screen in a conventional sense. So it's kind of nice to actually recharge and have a break from screen time and reading, but I would love to be able to throw some comics on there and get them in full color. Absolutely. Well, and if Apple does do this, I mean, granted it's a couple of years down the road, but whenever Apple does something, it does tend to popularize it and it shows up in other devices too. Yeah, very true. More near term will be the announcements at WWDC. That's coming up in just about three weeks, June 6th. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman predicts major changes in the iOS, including, quote, new ways of interacting and, quote, some fresh Apple apps. However, Gurman does not expect the look or the design to change. I haven't changed the design of iOS since, I think iOS 7, it's been a minute since they went from skewmorphic to that flat design. That's not changing, but I am intrigued about new ways of interacting. I mean, were we talking gesture controls or something like that? I don't know. High tracking, that's all I can think of. High tracking could be, yeah. Blink wants to click on an app. I feel like there's always some really cool little thing that's buried in there. It's these kind of half measure iterations where they're like, we're fiddling with it. We're doing stuff in the back end and then there's some maybe edge case feature that just jumps out at me or you or whoever it is. And then pops into the keynote at WWDC as a major innovation. Yeah, exactly. All right, speaking of iPhones, did you know you can find your iPhone even if the battery is dead because when it comes to modern iPhones, that which is dead may never die. Or rather, a little bit of power is always reserved in a low power mode so that the phone, even with the battery is dead, even if you've turned it off manually, can still operate Bluetooth Low Energy, the U1 chip, which is used for Find My, and NFC. So if you're using your phone as a car key, if your battery was dead, you'd still be able to unlock your car, at least for up to 24 hours after turning off the phone. There is a limit at which all the power goes away. But the little bit of reserve power is still here even if the phone is off. That's a good feature. I don't think any of us are upset about that. And like all good tech features, it's being exploited. Scientists at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt took advantage of the fact that the Bluetooth chip in an iPhone does not have a way to encrypt the firmware it runs. This is one of those, maybe you should have thought of it, but none of the rest of us thought of it until these folks figured it out. The research shows the new functions added in iOS 15 were not documented and also not secured against manipulation. That doesn't sound good, but it's not quite as bad as it sounds. An attacker would have to jailbreak your phone. So this is not something that's gonna happen easily. A target would have to be tricked into installing some malware to jailbreak the phone or maybe it could be used with some surveillance software like Pegasus. So this would have to be a targeted attack. It's not impossible that an over-the-air exploit could be found, none has been found yet. That kind of thing has been done on Android, so never say never. So this is a practical attack. It can be done, but it's not one the average user would likely be targeted with. It would allow malware to run while the phone is off, though. So the idea of like, I'm just gonna turn my phone off, would not protect you from this sophisticated attack. And when your phone was on, malware designed for this attack wouldn't drain the battery, which is sometimes how malware is detected because of its drain on the battery. The researchers notified Apple of the work, Apple has not yet responded on a scale of one to screaming max, how much does this were you? I think initially like a seven, and then after I kind of digested a little bit, it dies down. This seems like a very, very edge case kind of, you know, the chances of this happening seem pretty low, still a little bit, you know, a little bit worrisome, but there's so many other things to worry about too, so why not? Yeah, I'm more fascinated by the research and the fact that they could figure out how to get a turned off iPhone to be hackable just through Bluetooth. I mean, I also am annoyed that Apple isn't responding and saying, yeah, absolutely, we need to block Bluetooth. I understand that it's not a large surface area, there's probably not a large number of people who would be attacked this way, but they should still button it up. Yeah, I mean, you can always just take the battery out, though. Yeah, you just need an I fix it kit, you know. Just head on down to the mall and get that guy to pry it open and go in there for the mall to do it. Yeah, pop that thing out and you're secure. That's actually as practical as the attack, so that seems like a fair way to defend it. Roger, does this bother you at all? No, because in most of these cases, I mean, a lot of effort needs to be done in order to do anything productive outside of being an annoyance. And I think it does kind of reinforce the fact that, you know, the number one security flaw for a lot of these is the user, right? Ensuring that you don't install, or absolutely install malware, or you don't, you know, give access inadvertently to your phone through just things like, you know, leaving it unlocked or not having a password, not having secure password, because even if you could remotely activate, like some of you just off the street could remotely activate your turned off iPhone, you would still need to be compromised through the soft, through the OS in order to be, you know, to really do anything. Yeah. So it's like giving out your address to your house, it's great, you know where I live, but you know, you don't have the key to my house, you don't have, you know, the combination to unlock my garage and the rest. It does make me realize that taking it to the mall and giving it to someone is a good way to get jailbroken and attack this way, so maybe that isn't the best way to defend against this. Yeah, and they always go behind that curtain or that wall and they disappear mysteriously for like 15 minutes. Yeah, I do think, you know, you should, we shouldn't take this totally jokingly because there have been some attacks on iPhones that are clickless, you know, where you're just receiving the text messages, all you need to do and it's not your fault at all. Again, those are usually very sophisticated, very targeted, those are the kinds of things that a Pegasus uses to infect. But yeah, I guess the only part of this story that bothers me is that we haven't heard Apple say anything, but also I'm not surprised because they never say anything, so there you go. Folks, if you would like to say something, let us know in email. We love getting your emails. We read them all and we feature them on the show from time to time, so send it along to us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. E3 was canceled in 2020 as were so many things, but then it came back in 2021 as an all virtual event. So everyone kind of expected a hybrid event this year. However, you may recall at the end of March, the Entertainment Software Association canceled this year's 2022 E3. They said in order to focus on a revitalized physical and digital E3 experience next summer. So they're focusing everything on a new version of E3 for next year. That left the schedule open for others to fill the summer gap with their own announcements. And the same day, March 31st that E3 was canceled, Jeff Keely didn't miss a beat and announced Summer Games Fest would happen for the third year in a row. Max, let's start there. Is Keely like the new E3 now because he's done it three years in a row? He's making a valiant effort to be. I would say what he's doing kind of extends beyond E3. And I gotta give him credit. The guy hustles, the guy works really hard. He's been kind of putting up his own fight against the E3 even in the before times with the game awards, which he shows off exclusive trailer reveals, stuff like that. He's been buddy buddy with Gamescom and doing opening night live, which is kind of its own little E3 type thing. His thing, not Gamescom, that's a much bigger thing than E3. But yeah, as far as him kind of just like striking while the iron's hot and jumping right on this, it's not surprising. And honestly, like the digital version that E3 put on, I guess it was last year, I don't know what that was exactly. You know, like I think- I almost forgot it happened until I was preparing for this conversation today, right? I tried to sign up for press credentials for that and they needed you to paste a URL of recent work, but there was a character limit on the URL. So that should tell you, I don't know, like, you know, I'll do respect to the ESA, but some of their stuff is a little bit old school and not really forward thinking in terms of how people consume, you know, information surrounding games. Yeah, so Summer Games Fest happens June 9th. What else has come in this summer? Whole bunch of stuff. Obviously there, I think the really big one that I'm excited about is the Microsoft one because Microsoft has Pac-Man, a bunch of other big publishers. So that's no longer just Microsoft, that is now Microsoft and also Bethesda and maybe Activision question mark, but they're undoubtedly gonna have some pretty, you know, pretty big things to show off right there. We're also probably gonna get ones from Sony and Nintendo, but they're kind of more obscure about all that and we'll probably announce them a week in advance or something of the sort. But, and there's a few other ones. There's a big one is THQ Nordic who's part of the Embracer Group, which is this kind of shadowy Swedish company that's been scooping up lots of other companies. And they just recently got a bunch of Square Enix's bigger IPs. Like they got Tomb Raider and they got, yeah, they got Crystal Dynamics and Iros Montreal. So they kind of, this is very interesting kind of like a land grab taking place between a bunch of different companies. And it's weird to see sort of different configurations of companies coming out for their big E3 showcases. But sorry, I'm gonna get ahead of myself. There's, it's interesting to have this sort of scatter shot approach to E3, you know, whereas it used to be there were, there was maybe a day, day and a half, two days of kind of rapid fire press conferences and big announcements. And then everyone was turned loose on the show floor to check out what was out there. And now it's just, no one knows when anything's happening exactly. No one's sure what scale it should be or what to expect. You know, it's definitely not, it's nothing like what E3 used to be. That's for sure. It's like E3 used to focus things. Bear with me on this analogy. It's like in 4-H, you'd have the 4-H fare and everything would be in stalls, right? So that all of the exhibits are together. And it's like without E3, it's like, they just took the fences away and everybody's just kind of roaming around. And it's like, some of the things are still happen, June-ish, but some are like THQ Nordics happening in August. Do you think we end up getting about the same number of announcements as we would anyway though? I don't, and here's why. I think even before the COVID thing happened and E3 had to switch to sort of a virtual digital thing, the ESA was getting kind of weird with it. There were a couple of years there where they opened it up as a fan event. And also Sony famously pulled out and Microsoft kind of moved their thing off the show floor and kind of they were occupying the Microsoft Theater. And we were seeing these big players kind of pull out of this, you know, locative experience. And at the same time, you look at what E3 is and was, you know, it was founded in 1995 at the very, you know, the infancy of the internet long before anyone thought we could, you know, live stream 4K video. Right. And at that point, that was all targeting, you know, holiday release windows. Like that was trying to, you know, get people to check out what games grandma was gonna buy for, you know, little Stevie come Christmas. And you look at when and how games are released now and it's a year round thing. So having, you know, one big tentpole event to showcase just one financial quarters releases doesn't really make sense. And if you're not having it all in one physical place then why should everyone have to fight over, you know, airtime like you spread it out a little bit. But I think, you know, we just, we heard a bunch of massive games getting pushed. I mean, we're always hearing about massive games getting pushed, a bunch of massive ones getting pushed until, you know, early next year, which I imagine would just kind of take the heat off of some publishers to try to, you know, cart out this big, you know, PR machine to try to like show things off right now if nothing's ready, you know. Yeah, it reminds me of the change in network television announcements. Fox made a big splash in reverse, I guess, by not announcing their fall schedule at their upfront presentation this week. And it reminded me that that used to be a big thing when a network would announce its big fall schedule, kind of similar to like the video games being positioned as a holiday by, TV just comes year round, video game, all entertainment just comes around now. Yeah. That said, I remember, I'm old enough to remember when E3 became a hotel only conference for a year or two there and everybody kind of predicted its demise then. So, you know, I don't think we should be too quick to count E3 out. You know, if you had to guess, what do you think E3's role is going to be in the future? I think if the ESA, I mean, I can't speak to what they want to do or where they think things are going, but if they are following through with sort of what the sort of audience facing version of it was like the last couple of years, if they want to actually monetize this trade show, they should take a cue from Gamescom and basically have, you have industry days at the top of the show and, you know, people come in and do their game previews and you show all the business people, all the stuff and then everyone leaves, you know, closes out their company cards and then fans come in and get to check out all this stuff and see these massive activations because, you know, that's how games come set up. It's like, it's a week, but by day three, all of the business people have kind of taken off. Yeah. And isn't Tokyo Game Show somewhat similar in a way? I think so. I've actually never done Tokyo Game Show, but but it's often described as the, you know, a Comic-Con of video games and I think E3 would love to be a Comic-Con of video games in some ways. No, totally. I mean, it's funny to look at sort of the different, how these different events come together. You know, you've got something like PAX, which is a, you know, a fan event founded by a web comic and you've got, you know, Comic-Con, which isn't, it used to be about comics and now it's this massive like pop culture, Colchella. Yeah. You got, you know, Gamescom, which is put on by the colon mess of the, you know, the event space that puts the whole thing together. And that one is entirely made, you know, sort of post, like that started in 2009, like they knew what they were doing when they set that thing out. They were like, this is for fans and this is in an age where people are Twitch streaming stuff or, you know, it's, they were aware the internet was there and so they were kind of designing this space to be, you know, appealing to people to come physically hang out. You know, E3 again, it's put on by a trade organization and it's, I don't know, who is it for? Yeah. Yeah. And that, that answer for CES, which is also put on by a trade organization is it's for the companies to work with each other and to get press. And that could be the answer for E3, but it doesn't seem like that has ever really meshed as well in that particular industry. I mean, it's an interesting thing because like if you're showing off the new, rotating LG flat screen 8K TV, it's kind of impressive if you see it in person. But if you're showing off a new video game that runs on Nintendo Switch at 720p, you could throw it on Twitch and you know, you can get people to see it. I mean, again, video games are better if you get a chance to actually play them yourself, but so much of E3 was, you know, behind closed doors, hands off demos or just somebody showing you what the game looked like. But that would be your saying is, make E3 an online conference that participants can play games over the internet on. That's, I mean, we're getting there. Like streaming gaming is doable. That's a nice way to be like, hey, if you want this to actually physically be yours on your console by the physical thing, but here's a streaming demo. Well, as, I know this is a little cliche, but we're gonna transition from video games to cement. Tech in Asia reports that scientists at Nanyang Technological University Singapore or NTU Singapore have developed a new cement that uses industrial carbide sludge and mammal urine. Just gonna let that. Well, I don't want to say sink it. Bio cement uses bacteria to harden soil into a solid block. So bio cement already exists. This is a particular kind of bio cement that requires less energy and generates lower carbon emissions than traditional cement production. This form of bio cement also reduces waste disposal because you're making it with the waste. So you no longer have to dispose of it because you're using it to make the cement. The cement can be used to restore monuments, strengthen shorelines, you know, things that you use cement for, as well as sustainable and cost-effective way to improve soil, apparently. I mean, that's awesome. That's a wonderful development. A great way to use urine. Yeah. Yeah. And cement and urine is not just for downtowns anymore. It's for creating environmentally friendly, sustainable cement. We were talking about this before the show, but there's the immediate concern that it would smell like pee, but I don't want to say it's baked in there, but no, that wouldn't be the issue. The smell is baked out of it, I think. If you want your house to smell like animal urine, that's on you. You have to go out and get cats or whatever. Right. Yeah, this is not gonna do it for you if that's what you're talking about. All right, let's do a quick email. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Jonathan wrote in and said, I work for the Office for National Statistics and my day job is conducting the interviews for the labor force survey. So imagine my surprise and delight to hear my work directly referenced on one of my favorite shows today. Oh, thanks, Jonathan. I'm glad we made you happy and you made us happy by being one of your favorite shows. Jonathan says, I confess, I don't get to see the results of my data gathering till you do. And I haven't looked at the latest reports, but a few things stood out to me. The main is what doesn't show up in the data. Not what is in there, but what doesn't show up in the data. The stories of all the respondents that we talk to every day as part of the survey. While nearly everything falls into the standard categories recorded, the nuance is often lost. Things like how often we hear people in their 50s and 60s tell us how the pandemic made them realize how much time they've lost working. So they're looking at retiring early to get back time with loved ones. In conversations with my colleagues, that's probably what stood out to us the most. Another thing is stories about how people would like to look for a new job in a different sector but feel like they can't afford to move jobs right now or that there isn't anything for them where they are. We're still hearing a lot of fear from people about taking new roles or changing businesses in a period where the world is full of such uncertainty and rising costs. This is all apocryphal of course, but just today I spoke to a gentleman who wanted to work more but couldn't afford at two as the loss of benefits would be too costly and he's far from unique. Wow, that's great stuff and great anecdotal insights from somebody working on the actual statistics we use. I love that. Thank you, Jonathan, for writing in. That's so cool to hear. Like the kind of the human side of the data which Dan has sort of defeats the purpose of the data. But I think you need the qualitative to understand the quantitative. So it's good to get outside of it. Yeah, I mean, it definitely offers context to the data you see but also what you're seeing on the real world. Yeah. Well, Max Govil, I have to say it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, time flies. This was great. Yeah. If folks want to find out more about what you've got going on, where should they go? First and foremost, head to IGN if you want to keep up with any of the stuff that's happening this summer, IGN will be carrying it all as part of our big summer of gaming event which we'll have some of our own trailers and showcases and all that. And we'll also be hosting Keeley's thing and all of the other big things when and if they happen. And of course, I have stuff going up there here and there. I have a big feature I worked on about the history of chainsaws in video games. Oh my gosh. There have been a shocking about of chainsaws if you're squeamish, don't watch that. But that goes up tomorrow morning sometime. That sounds amazing. IGN.com, go check it out folks. Special thanks to Christian, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS on Patreon. Thank you so much Christian for all the years of support. Christian's gonna be able to listen to Good Day Internet which is starting momentarily if you're a subscriber at patreon.com slash DTNS. Don't forget, we're live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.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. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.