 Coming up on DTNS is Facebook done for plus Microsoft abandons the HoloLens and one hackers solo campaign against North Korea. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 3rd, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young drawing the top tech stories from Hoth. I'm Len Peralta and on the show's producer Roger Chang. There is a longer version of this show and Justin was just explaining his theory that CNN might get sold to Amazon or Apple or somebody like that. You can get that on Good Day internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Steve Ayadarola, Jeffrey Zilx and Tony Glass. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. In its Q3 holiday quarter, Nintendo reported it shipped 10.67 million switch units down 8% on the year but bringing lifetime shipments to 103.54 units, surpassing the original wheeze 101.63 million. In response to questions on recent high profile game studio acquisitions, Nintendo president Shintaro Furukawa said, quote, our brand was built upon products crafted with dedication by our employees, having a large number of people who don't possess Nintendo DNA in our group would not be a plus. So you're saying Nintendo plus Apple is deprecating a kernel extension in Mac OS 12.3 that Microsoft OneDrive used for syncing files. In response, OneDrive's Mac client has changed to using Apple's file provider extensions instead. That seems fine, except along with this change Microsoft made files on demand the default behavior. That's a feature that keeps the file in the cloud, but lets you use it as if it's stored locally. It also means that when it turned on, it deleted everybody's files from your local hard drive and not everybody wants that feature on. And many OneDrive users have been complaining about that. A lot of them have gone in and manually marked folders as always keep on this device to restore it to their hard drive, which sounds tedious, especially because a lot of them have a lot of folders. GameStop plans to launch its own NFT marketplace pitched as a place to buy and sell in game assets represented as blockchain tokens. This will be built on the immutable X platform, which combined thousands of sales transactions into a single right on the Ethereum blockchain to make transactions more energy efficient and less expensive. Spotify's Daniel Eck told a meeting of employees why the platform continues to host Joe Rogan's podcast in the face of criticism and removal of music like Neil Young over the content in Rogan's episodes. According to the Verge, X said, there are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive. Then he added, if we want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with. Not anything goes. But there will be opinions, ideas and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even make us angry or sad. Eck also noted that Spotify does not have editorial control over Rogan's content and that having the exclusive gives Spotify leverage to make deals with bigger companies like Google, Amazon and Tesla. Mozilla announced that it is shutting down the Firefox Reality browser that was meant for use in VR. It was launched back in 2018 and available on Oculus, Viveport, Pico and HoloLens. Mozilla suggests that users download the upcoming open source browser, Wolvik, which is based on Firefox Reality's source code. All right, let's talk about the HoloLens. What's happening to it, Justin? Is it okay? No, Tom, please look away if you are a dear, dear fan of the HoloLens. Insiders sources say that Microsoft has scrapped plans for the HoloLens 3 device in the middle of last year and is partnering with Samsung on a mixed reality device that Samsung wants Microsoft to make the software for, but not the hardware. Or sorry, Microsoft wants to make the software for it, but not the hardware. And there is reportedly disagreement within Microsoft on what to do with the HoloLens project now. Someone to focus it on enterprise similar to what Google did with Google Glass, which is still a successful enterprise product. Others want the team to focus on software to be used for consumers and the catch all bucket of the metaverse. Supposedly, Sacha Nadella is in the software camp. So I think we can all guess who has the upper hand if those two are going head to head. Though it does not mean that Microsoft can't or won't eventually do both. In response to a question from the Financial Times about the future of relating the acquisition to Activision and Blizzard, Nadella said, quote, being great at game building gives us the permission to build this next platform, which is essentially the next Internet. The embodied presence and quote, and maybe a wind chime. Nadella did not didn't say that it's all running on Azure, but he didn't need to because that's also a thing they make a lot of money on. Hey, for the record, Microsoft's Frank Shaw told Insider that HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories, and the company is committed to its development. But come on, right? Looks like Microsoft's metaverse future is software and not hardware. Yeah, it does right now. I think that enterprise argument is probably a side argument. Somebody will do a calculation of whether they've got enough clients in the military and big enterprises that it makes sense. And they'll either do it or they'll not. But it definitely feels like the future is to take what they did for HoloLens and make software. Samsung doesn't even want them to make the hardware. So I feel like the future of augmented reality right now is Microsoft, very similar to, well, kind of what Meta has said they want to do, make the platform, make the software that allows you to do augmented reality and VR and metaverse style stuff, and then own the worlds, which is Activision Blizzard and etc, all the video game aspects of it. I feel like that clearly is where they want to go, whether that means they'll ever do hardware again, maybe they will, maybe they won't. It was a surprise when they came out with the Surface laptops and those are fine, but they still partner with the HPs and the Lenovo's of the world on other things. So I feel like Samsung won't be the last they'll partner with on making some kind of mixed reality headset. This all feels very much to me like Microsoft saying, let's just sit back and see how this market turns out. You know, if all the other companies start to, you know, hit home runs with hardware, then we'll get back into it or we'll figure out who to partner with to get back into it. But it's like, it's kind of a little bit of a waiting game. I would say that Meta is the company I certainly am looking at to the most to say, okay, what are you doing next? But it won't be the only company. And that said, if you look at something like Google Glass back in the day, totally had a market wasn't the consumer market, but it could be the consumer market. If it was sort of reimagined and brought back to life and Microsoft could do the same. That's a very, very kind way, Sarah, of saying if it was good, which right now, hardware for consumer AR is not. You know, there's the old saying that the first people inside the door, the first people to walk in the door gets shot. And there's a couple bodies on the floor when it comes to people trying to do this. Part of it is that the tech just simply isn't there. So I don't blame Microsoft for looking I don't know. I mean, I think it's I think it's I think it's very much there. It depends on what you're using it for, certainly. But yes, if we're talking about you, me, Tom, Roger, Len, everybody buying it, you know, the next version of the HoloLens, we have a long way to go. Well, I mean, I don't know if we have a long way to go. And that's and that's I think where we're at is that it's like, we are a far cry from where we were, you know, five years ago, six years ago, when Google Glass happened, we are probably closer to what we would understand as a functional, exciting breakthrough AR product, as we sit here talking right now. But I don't blame Microsoft for saying, you want to know what? Let's let come in like Samsung. Perfect. All you guys want to do is figure out ways that you can sell these screens and and throw as many pieces of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. That's who needs to be doing this right now, not Microsoft. Microsoft is is is there after there is an idea of exactly how all this works. And then they'll be able to work in concert with their with their software. I genuinely think this is a great idea for them to just forget about the hardware for right. I wonder if there's a scenario that plays out where the quest is the Palm Trio, whatever Apple comes out with is the iPhone and Microsoft would like to be Android. Maybe, maybe. And look, it took Android a while Google a while to build their own phone, right? To fully integrate everything that Android was into their own hardware. So I think that that might that might be a good analogy. Well, here's an inspirational tale, folks, a white hat security researcher that goes by P4X, not PX3, P4X, does in what's up, just yeah, you guys are neighbors. Just P4X just grained their hat, their white hat a tiny bit, because they just couldn't take it anymore. Wired reports that just over a year ago, P4X was one of the security researchers targeted by some North Korean attacks that were aiming to steal security research tools, software vulnerability details, etc. P4X says the attacks did not succeed. The FBI got in touch together details about them, but then never followed up. A year later, no official US response. So P4X went poking around and found numerous unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems. A bug in Enginix X web server, an ancient version of Apache over there, a few vulnerabilities in North Korea's homegrown Linux version Red Star OS. And with all that combined, P4X had the makings of a good old fashioned denial of service attack against an entire country. The attack could be largely automated. So according to Wired, P4X let them run and sat and now I quote, in his living room night after night, watching alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks, and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress. End quote of his denial of service attack against the entire state of North Korea. Two weeks ago, North Korean websites started going down, Pingdom records show that every website hosted within North Korea has been down for at least some amount of time over the past couple of weeks. Some routers, not just home routers, I'm talking about like the routers that run their internet have gone offline that that's taken down email, along with a bunch of websites, possibly cause some complete internet outages in the company. Now these attacks are largely annoyances because very few people actually can use the internet in North Korea. Most of those websites that got taken down were up for propaganda purposes. But P4X knows this and said the next step will be exfiltrating information from North Korean systems and sharing it with experts. And to that end, P4X launched a dark website called Funk Project. Funk, of course, in an initialism standing for F U North Korea. Ah, see what they did there. So will it stop? Is P4X gonna just do this forever? P4X told Wired, I just want to prove a point. I want that point to be very squarely proven before I stop. Now, this is probably illegal under the US computer fraud and abuse act, hence P4X not giving their real name to Wired. But P4X thinks it was ethical because North Korea, do we? Well, so a shout out to the fantastic podcast Darknet Diaries hosted by Jack Reissider. He had a series on North Korea state sponsored hacking, which I think fairly cleverly and conclusively pointed out that they are not like state sponsored hacking from Russia, the United States or China, whatever you might think of the motives of those countries. The espionage is largely directed toward state sponsored elements. North Korea as like robbed banks before like they are malicious on a street level that is uncommon for a state sponsored hacking effort. If you are going to be playing around on those street level waters, then you're gonna wind up picking up a few enemies. And this is one of them. Yeah, I look at this and I think the security research community seems to be divided on this. Some people are saying, yeah, I get why he would do that. Seems justified. Some are saying he might be causing more trouble than it's worth. I'm not sure what lesson North Korea is going to learn. Most of their hacking teams are not inside of North Korea, so he's not even stopping them from doing their deeds and might even be getting in the way of actual intelligence operations because they aren't coordinated and they don't know what he's up to. Let us know what you think. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Indeed. Also whenever we can, we like to direct your attention to a good read that we think might help you understand the tech world a little bit more and certainly helps us. Rest of World has an article up by Peter Gast called Exposed Documents reveal how the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm tells the story of a company called Aliminalia. Spanish company headquartered in Barcelona, Spain and Kiev, Ukraine. With the tagline, we erase your past. We help you build your future. You might say, that sounds nice. Rest of World found multiple companies like it that use copyright claims, also GDPR violation accusations, right to be forgotten laws, sometimes even fake legal notices to rid the internet of embarrassing information on behalf of their clients about those who have enough money to pay for this service or services like it. Some want corruption allegations wiped. Politician that you might be in that category. Others want explicit video script. I can understand that. The most common though is people wanting critical articles about their business or political activities taken down. Rest of World saw documents indicating Aliminalia charges about 2,500 euros per link. So this is a lucrative business and it sounds like there are quite a few clients. Yeah. RestofWorld.org did a great job digging into this. They got a hold of documents. They detailed a lot of the documents. They confronted the people named in the documents. They confronted the companies. So they've got everybody on record reacting to this or at least trying to get them to react. Aliminalia says like that's not us. Some of this stuff is wrong. Here's what we do. It's worth a read though. It's a it's an excellent read if you're like want to see examples of people using the existing laws to their best advantage to try to delete something from the internet, which frankly that's really hard. And the way that they do it is by using among other things that right to be forgotten the GDPR and the DMCA laws that many people here in America are well familiar with. The article itself I think makes a fairly compelling case that if this stuff especially for public figures is allowed to be wiped off the internet especially through some of the ethically gray areas that some of these companies are using up to and including a falsely representing yourself as a part of the European Union or writing you know trumped up legal challenges that you are precluding a populace from being able to fairly understand who is governing them, which I do think is true and it reminds us that some of the distinctions that we have here in America when it comes to free speech and freedom to criticize people if they are a public figure is precious and I hope that it continues to be translated on the internet as well as in other mediums. Yeah this is it's a great article we'll have it on our show notes and and give it a read if you're so inclined but important to remember when I when I think about reputation correction you know whatever the company decides to call itself and Eliminalia is just one of those companies. I always kind of equate that with well was there an embarrassing video of me or you know am I trying to get a job and I really want that blog post of mine that you know just won't get out of search results to just go away. Those are all perfectly you know understandable understandable ways that you you might get a hold of a company like this but when it comes to you know people in positions of power and kind of rewriting history then it becomes a little bit more interesting. Yeah I mean I understand that if you got caught giving a million dollars as a bribe to somebody you know that's gonna you might want people to forget it. You want people to forget about that yeah and and one of the key takeaways before we move off of this is remember that laws like the DMCA are are no-fault laws. I can accuse someone of having put up copyright and as long as I can defend myself as oh I thought they had then right it's really incumbent on the people who are being accused to defend themselves. The platforms that are being asked to take it down are supposed to be neutral. They're supposed to just take it down and so if if you're accusing smaller organizations who don't have the funds and the resources and the lawyers to fight this you're going to succeed that's how this works a lot a lot of times they'll they'll put up a copy of an article back date it and say we're the original owner they copied us have it taken down and the platforms the ISPs the web hosts etc go yeah no I mean it looks to us like you're right so we're taking it down. If you got thoughts on this or thoughts on dealing with all the snow and ice out there you can chat with folks in our discord which you can join by linking to your patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Meta stock took up pounding after it released its earnings Wednesday the quarterly numbers really weren't that awful pessimistically I would call them mixed but there were a couple of things that caused that negative reaction one was a lower than expected projection for q1 22 earnings for the next quarter that was attributed mostly to bad advertising numbers which is bad since advertising makes up 98 percent of Meta's revenue if the advertising is bad Meta's revenue is bad. Meta's pointing the finger specifically at Apple of course you probably realize Apple now requires apps on iOS to ask for a user's permission before sharing data with third parties Meta says that decision will cost them 10 billion dollars in 2022 and coincidentally Meta says they also lost 10 billion dollars on VR and AR development in 2021 so now 20 billion dollars off however another business that makes more than 80 percent of its money off ads is Alphabet's Google. Google had a great earnings report earlier this week Alphabet right now is on target to hit a two trillion dollar stock valuation so what's the difference here one way to explain it is that Google has a diversified set of ad revenue generation that isn't overly dependent on getting data from one platform you know like iOS. Another way to explain it might be to say that Apple doesn't require websites to follow the same privacy protections as apps and Google makes a lot of its ad revenue from searches that people do in browsers so maybe they're just built to survive this better Meta CFO David Wenner thinks it's more detailed than that he explained it this way given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google search the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue Apple likes Google better than Facebook is what he's implying well that's a hard sell because it wasn't just Google the ad business overall grew 20 percent in 2021 because turns out people still spend money on ads even on iOS a more likely culprit in general for Meta's problems could be increased competition Amazon, Alibaba, JD.com all continuing to grow their market share at alphabets but more often at Meta's expense the other reason that investors are down is worth paying attention to also Meta lost users this one's not Apple's fault Facebook's daily active users fell for the first time ever dropping about a half million to 1.93 billion there are now less than two billion users of Facebook the biggest user drops came from Africa and Latin America which were thought to be growth areas monthly active users for Facebook continued to grow however so monthly they're getting people logging in just not daily and Instagram what's happened Messenger all continued to add users as well but the big engine Facebook dropping is not a good look the vultures have now begun to circle in fact we saw some pretty bad headlines Bloomberg's headline reads Facebook and Google's ad addiction can't last forever also protocol red is this the beginning of the end for Facebook and these are not outlets prone to extreme headlines and we're not talking about the register Gizmodo here so is this the beginning of the end for Facebook and can Meta's 10-year plan to use the metaverse to be its future business plan work at all or will they be out of steam by then oh man and first of all good summary Tom of this because yes depending on where you like to read your news you might have heard this morning that Facebook is done for or Facebook will be fine and I'm talking about meta of course but but Facebook being kind of you know this this cash cow that the company has had this entire time I I guess that I mean there's so many people who use one or all of Meta's companies at this point I don't think we're anywhere near you know some like oh Facebook imploded and that's when that's when it happened although I have asked myself this question over the last however many years once Facebook overtook MySpace and it was like okay this is what happens MySpace overtook Friendster then Facebook overtook MySpace and then Facebook is just like the biggest company in the world and everyone's on it and what are you gonna do about it at what point yeah do those growth areas that all of a sudden people start to go other places and you needed that growth to to you know keep everybody feeling good about that your company's progression you know that that's where it gets interesting because you know the the my mom myself I use Facebook sometimes and lots of other people still use the platform I don't think Facebook's going away anytime soon Meta's plans for the metaverse and the future going forward I think are much more in question looking at these numbers Counterpoint the sky is falling and it's going to crush meta here's the reason why these numbers went down while certainly the daily or the the active user a top line is something to worry about and that is probably more indicative of the fact that their that their product is very complicated and it's not quite as usable as I think they think it is because they've stapled so much crap to it the real problem is something that they identified as a real problem months and months ago and they said this is really going to hurt us it's really going to cripple us and then it did and then the numbers showed that it is doing exactly what what then Facebook now meta feared it was going to do here's the reality Google makes money because they are the world's premier destination for search they primarily sell ads based on the idea that when you search for a thing you will get an ad that people can buy based on keywords that has remained the same in our ever-evolving internet we still want to search they still want to sell you that real estate Facebook had a superior ad product because of the ability that they had in terms of rich data because so many of their users are mobile because iOS has such a gigantic outsized platform on mobile if Apple says they cannot have this data and let's also not forget the fact that post Cambridge Analytica they took some of these tools away from themselves trying to engender more public support that means that their product is not as good they have less people and eyeballs than Google has to sell against they always were there because they were able to do it more effectively and now they can't do it and that is a major problem I'm the problem it's my fault I'm the guy who logs into Facebook monthly now not daily I am the embodiment of the drop in the daily active user number versus the monthly active user I log into Facebook now when I have to not out of curiosity so I have to go check on something I have to look at the Daily Tech news show page I have to get a piece of information out of it whereas and I think that's what's happening is Facebook is aging out it's just not as compelling people get a little burnt out on it they're finding other places that are fun like TikTok and possibly other things to come I agree with Sarah I don't think it's gone today but this is the beginning of the slow AOL like ramp down yeah I mean the other thing is they push so hard for engagement and so what we associated with Facebook was controversial content that you're going to spend time on and yell about and there is a brand cost to that if every time you go on Facebook you're yelling and screaming and you're incentivizing people to do that then you are going to have more of that and I do think that there is a brand cost yeah and they didn't do enough to diversify into first-party advertising and they didn't have a business model that could do it as effectively as Google does for reasons Justin I think very eloquently laid out so they know this that their whole strategy wasn't to take a full-page ad out and complain to Apple that was just kind of a rear-end action their strategy is to try to become a metaverse company and I'll be honest I'm not bullish on them being the ones that do the metaverse I think you're seeing Microsoft and Sony make the better kinds of moves you need to do that it seems very mid-life crisis yeah I don't know it smells like AOL maybe Facebook will buy discovery Warner Brothers Discovery CNN Facebook will buy CNN I'll buy CNN there we go exactly yeah exactly it's all it's perfect like AOL oh it comes together all right let's check out the mail back let's do it Dominique Deckman who's a tech reporter at Distandard in Brussels wrote in with some additional insight from our conversation in yesterday's show Wednesday show on the IAB Europe case related to pop-up notifications specifically Dominique points out the decision hinges on the way that the IAB's framework handles consent data the answers you give to the questions about cookies because those answers are sometimes then used in ad sales Dominique writes simple fact nobody really knows exactly what goes on in these ad auctions these things are simply too complicated too many ad companies involved in the chain that doesn't mean our personal data is being abused in there it means we can never be certain that it is not being abused and a lot of people are slowly realizing that there is just no way that ad auctions can fit the demands of GDPR which require great care to be taken when handling personal data so who's to say whether our privacy choices are being respected and whether our data whether our data are safe or not in this real-time bidding auction system the Belgian Privacy Authority says it's up to IAB Europe they are the data processor that's under DPR law IAB Europe says no we're not so if they're not the data controller then they're off the hook unfortunately it's pretty likely that we're going to get bogged down in that legal discussion but that's lawyers for you Dominique thank you so much for sending in the insight from on the ground in the capital of the EU in Brussels appreciate that absolutely yeah thank you so much if you have feedback for anything we talk about on the show you have anecdotes that you think will help us in stories for the future please do send it our way feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also have a brand new boss to thank and that boss is Sharon McFauls Sharon just started backing us on Patreon thank you Sharon hey it's good to have but we haven't had a new boss in a couple of days thank you Sharon for being the brand new boss Sharon Sharon Sharon on our Patreon I don't know well let's thank Len Peralta as well who is here on a Thursday temporarily while he's teaching classes on Fridays what are you drawing for us today Len well this one I like to call very very simply meta gets mauled and I you know I'm glad you know I don't really know what it's going to mean for the future of Facebook I'm sorry meta but but yeah I don't this this could this could be they took it on the chin at least this this past week so that's what it literally did in your in your illustration too literally like it hurts yeah if you if you'd like this maybe this will be something that that is indicative of the future of meta you can go to my Patreon patreon.com forward slash Len you can get that if you for for free if you were just a backer or go to my online store Len Peralta store.com and you can download it or purchase a print signed by me good stuff Len as always also good stuff from you just from Robert Young let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do well if you listen to good day internet then you heard me talk about my theory that CNN will be sold out of the newly minted Warner Media Discovery Company and possibly go to Appler Amazon I got I got a theory I got a theory and it's going to be on the next episode of the politics politics politics podcast find it on Friday morning wherever you get your podcasts excellent thank you both for being here today reminder for folks if you want to join us live if you can we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC you of course can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back doing it all again tomorrow Patrick Norton is going to be joining us and he has some ideas for affordable GPUs where to find them talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this 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