 Coming up on DTNS, Sony shows off its new VR controllers. Facebook looks a little farther down the road to wrist controllers that read your nerves. And AT&T loses a court case in California and punishes the whole darn country. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 18th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm today's show's producer, Amos. Yeah, Roger Chang's got the day off taking care of some stuff. We were just talking about the Cow Palace in San Francisco, all kinds of fun facts about it, including when you can see cows there. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member and get good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. NVIDIA has raised paid memberships for its cloud gaming service GeForce Now to $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. They're now called priority memberships. Now, if you're an existing founding member, you can keep your existing subscription as long as you remain a subscriber. If you dip out and come back in, you cannot still pay that $5 per month again. Yeah, no stamps on your hand to get out. YouTube started rolling out its TikTok rival, Shorts, in beta to all creators in the United States Thursday. An earlier version of the Shorts creator tools had been available in India since September. So here's an expansion. Shorts includes features like adding text to specific points in a video or sampling audio from other Shorts plus song sampling, big features since YouTube has deals with major indie record labels and publishers, major and indie record labels and publishers. YouTube also rolled out a new tool called Chex which uses the content ID system to review a video at the time of upload for copyrighted content or other issues that violate advertising guidelines. That's nice because then you know before you publish it that it's going to get taken down. YouTube will also let creators dispute copyright claims prior to publishing. Motorola Edge Plus devices on Verizon received a Ready 4 desktop multi-window interface along with a recently rolled out Android 11 update. This launches when the phone is connected to an external display and supports using the phone screen simultaneously with Motorola planning to release a Ready 4 dock on April 19th. Facebook now supports using physical security keys for two factor authentication on account logons on mobile iOS and Android. They supported it on desktop since 2017 but now you can do it everywhere. Company also plans to expand its Facebook Protect program globally which helps enroll political campaigns and candidates with extra account security. OnePlus confirmed that the upcoming OnePlus 9 Pro includes 50 watt wireless charging able to take a phone from one to 100% in 43 minutes with a OnePlus warp charger. The device also supports 65 watt wired charging able to fully charge a phone from dead to quite alive in 29 minutes. All right, let's talk about these controllers from Sony, Justin. Oh yeah, Tom, oh yeah. Sony announced the PSVR to controllers with a wraparound ergonomic grip that Sony claims offers more freedom, better balance and comfort across hand sizes. Each grip has two of the four PlayStation buttons as well as its own adaptive trigger analog stick and menu button for option or create. A grip button on the inner edge can be used with your middle finger to pick up objects. The vibrating haptics found in the dual sense controllers are adapted for those as well. Your thumb index and middle finger are tracked even if you're not touching any controls allowing for gesture detection and the yet to be seen. Next Gen PSVR had said will be able to track the controllers so you're not gonna need an external camera. Sony hopes to get controller prototypes to developers soon. The controllers have no release date or price. The next PSVR is not expected until 2022. Yeah, so this is to get it out to developers. They're telling everybody because they know that stuff just leaks once you start telling developers. So I think they wanted to control the message on it. Nice design, they look comfortable. Of course I haven't tried one on yet but seem like they're taking some of the better things from the dual sense controllers and bringing them into this. And I think people were very pleased to hear that PSVR headset would be able to track them without an external camera if you're excited about that. But we still got a long time before we're gonna get our hands on any of this. I mean, as a Oculus enthusiast, my first reaction was like, okay, well how is this better than the hand controls that I have gotten used to using my VR apps that I'm actually quite taken with. And it sounds like Sony and Oculus and variety of other companies I'm sure are all getting to the same place where it's like, okay, well we have to use these controllers right now. And these are the ways that we can track movement and be able to give you haptic feedback and that sort of thing. But eventually you just wouldn't have this at all. It would be being able to follow the motions of your hands and hand tracking does exist with Oculus ever so often I like give it a shot and I'm always like, eh, it's buggy. They're not quite there yet, at least for the stuff that I wanna do with it. But I see it like that will be the eventual place that we get to where you don't need to hold controllers in your hands. I mean, maybe that'll always be an option because sometimes controllers are fun. For being able to hit triggers and get haptic feedback for certain things. Yeah, exactly. It would be required, yeah. Yeah, it'd be like, oh, do you never wanna have a console with a controller? Some people would be like, no, I want that. That's how I do things. But I see where it's going. I just think, yeah, I kind of read the announcement. I was like, okay, so many catching up. Yeah, I read the announcement and I'm like, okay, cool. So this is a wireless headset, right? Because nobody posts Oculus becoming the breakaway success in terms of adoption for VR would dare release something that had to be tethered. No, it'll be tethered just like its previous incarnation was. That to me means that you need to really rely heavily on these games. So this would be the pitch that I would say that makes this a win or makes sense to me. If PlayStation is saying, all right, we're putting this out in a year, not necessarily even because we think that the tech is going to be ready in a year, but rather because we want these games to be ready in a year and we want games that demand, you have a better level of access with these controllers then that makes sense. The problem with that is it totally goes against the trend of what the most popular games are in this space, which by and large are things that like Sarah said, with better hand tracking, which you would expect a next-gen Oculus would have and you would also expect a next-gen Oculus will probably come out before this PSVR too does, they might be way behind by the time that this thing debuts. So nice controllers, I hope the software, I hope the games are there to meet it and demand it and they're not something that is simply played in the way that some of the Oculus controllers are, but that's a big bet. I don't think Sony has ever seen its VR product as a competitor to Oculus or Vive or anything. They've treated it as an accessory to sell to PS5 users and for good or ill, you can criticize that and there's plenty of ground to criticize that, but that's what I see here with this strategy is like, you know what our PlayStation users love? Our controllers. So let's make controllers that live up to those expectations, that live up to the dual sense and they'll buy the PSVR headset and we'll get more details on it later. Maybe there'll be lots of obvious reasons why this is great, but they'll probably buy the PSVR headset because they've got a PlayStation and they wanna play the game that's in VR on the PlayStation. And that's fine, I'm with that. The only thing I would say about VR in general is that we are still looking for the successful VR. Forget, you know, subdividing it into vibes and oculuses and all that. These are all great stabs added, but we are still trying to find the pie, let alone divvying it up. Yeah, Facebook Reality Labs announced it is working on a wrist controller for augmented reality. The concept would use something called electromyography or EMG, that's just a fancy name for being able to detect the electricity in your nerves, the nerve signals in your wrist. So as it goes through your muscles, triggering your fingers to move, you can detect that stuff. These signals would be converted to commands then in the wrist device and those commands would be sent wirelessly to whatever device you're using. Does not read your mind, but it does read your wrist. This is similar to how many prosthetics work and it requires a little training for the user because what your brain says will move a finger will now click on something. The upshot is a small finger movement or even just the intention to move a finger could be read by the device and convert it into virtual action. Facebook claims that they think eventually they could let you type on a virtual keyboard faster than on a mechanical one, unless you're me, of course. So how along are they? Facebook thinks it can do what it calls an intelligent click right now. Basically, you twitch a finger and then something gets clicked on in your AR view like play on a playlist, for instance. Facebook says practical products based on this are still years away. So they're just trialing out this concept. That said, Facebook is spending a lot of energy talking about how it will use machine learning and augmented reality interfaces to interpret context and anticipate your needs like showing you your music playlist because it knows you're about to go for a run or knowing you mean car keys when you ask where your keys are because you're about to head out the door. Facebook Reality Labs director of research science, Sean Keller wrote about the wrist device in a blog post at Facebook VP of consumer hardware Andrew Bosworth focused on the contextual stuff in an interview with protocol. But I like this concept, it's still years away but I like this idea of being able to just kind of think without having to do big motions to make stuff happen. Well, yeah. And I mean, we're talking about what will the future of VR be, VRB, yeah. In our previous conversation, it's like, okay, well, you've got controllers and there's certain things you need controllers for and AR is a little bit different. And what Facebook Reality Labs is working on is something that's a little bit more you are going about your life in the real world. How will this, if you have some sort of wrist companion, how will you be able to talk to a set of glasses, for example, and not having to be touching a bunch of buttons at the top of your face? Yeah, or talking in front of everyone. Exactly. And so I can see where this would work out nicely. I mean, I was just thinking about this the other day because I was in my Apple TV settings and I won't even get into that whole thing. But I was having to input a password and there's voice dictation, which has helped it a lot. But I kind of got it messed up and I was sort of going like down, down, down arrow, over, over, over, over, over, over, over, over, enter, enter, enter. And it was fine. It was not the end of the world. But I was like, there are just, there would be ways where something like exactly what we're talking about in the story could make these sorts of things so much more seamless. So we would wonder why we ever used remotes in the past. I feel in general, we are on the edge of a lot of things changing in terms of our user interface. It would not shock me that in 10 years, if we look at things like keyboards and mouse as task-specific kinds of things or we are radically interacting with things different. Maybe even just mouse. Maybe keyboard is there because interacting silently with your computer on a text level makes a lot more sense. But the one thing that selfishly, I feel like my brain is ready for is when I'm doing audio editing and I'm highlighting certain text or whatever, or I'm highlighting certain bits of audio, I have found myself like group highlighting a bunch and then not un-highlighting it and trying to drag one bar. And I'm like, I'm looking at it and I just want it to understand, no, there should be a heat map of what I'm looking at and that should just auto-select and I should be able to drag it. I just feel that we're at a moment now where we trust technology enough, we trust big swings at technology and I feel like the tech itself is there, that we're ready to take a step forward and this is a fine stab at it. I wanna get my hands on and see what works. The other thing I'll throw in here just as a parting grenade is part of this felt like reading about advancements from HP in 1998, the tablet computer will someday revolutionize. I just feel like maybe Facebook isn't the one that's gonna do this because this feels kind of bureaucratic and I wonder if somebody's just gonna sweep in and come up with something entirely unexpected. Although Facebook does feel very bureaucratic, right? Right, and there's certainly startups working on this type of thing. Okay, that makes sense. Facebook is the HP of 2021 is basically 150%. I'm so glad you drew that comparison. Well, speaking of advancements in technology, the Chrome 89 desktop browser now includes support for Google's live caption feature, which generates real-time captions for any audio playing on your device, including for videos. Captions will show up in a black box. You can then move them around, you can close them. Works for websites, as you might expect, but also local files opened in the browser. Google says it works across social and video sites, podcasts and radio content, personal video libraries like Google Photos, embedded video players and most web-based video or audio chat services. Captions are generated on device. They also work offline. You have to turn it on in the accessibility section of the advanced settings. But if you wanna do that, you certainly can. And right now it only works in English. So starting days, but very cool. Yeah, the fact that it works offline on device, I think that's big for privacy and stuff. And just because you don't need to have an internet connection, it'll still work if you've got a video locally. Yeah, obviously, let's understand that it's a new technology and it'll take time to get up to speed. But I think you hit the nail on the head, Tom. Offline, that's a lot of processing power. That being said, I don't think it's going to take away from one of the biggest complaints about Chrome, which is that it's a resource hog and I don't think adding a real-time translation tool on that is going to make it any slimmer. But if what Chrome wants to do, especially as it faces some criticism for how much it digs into your habits and retains your habits, if they want to say, all right, next decade, what is Chrome known for? Now that it's not just the speedy Google browser, it's features. We will give you the features. We've got the resources, we've got the reasoning. Every time we keep you on Chrome, we learn more about you, which benefits the thing that actually makes us money, that is ad sales, that we will give you what features do you want? We're going to have them for you. Where Chrome, please keep using us. Yeah, do not uninstall. We have captions. This is great for accessibility. It's great for lots of other uses as well. And yeah, I like it, but as Justin pointed out, when you turn it on, it will use more of your processing power. So, higher viewer. Honestly, I feel like I have, I've stepped back from the Chrome as a resource hog thing. I feel like Chrome has made some updates. Over the last, I don't know, let's call it six months or so, that seem to have definitely improved. Maybe it's because I'm still a masochist who uses Chrome Canary, but every two weeks or so, it will just grind my computer to a halt because something has gone crazy. Yeah, I use Firefox most of the time, but I have noticed when I do use Chrome, it is a little quicker there. So yeah, and this captioning apparently works really well. I used it on the Pixel before I gave my Pixel to Roger, and it's not bad. It's pretty accurate. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? Let us know. One way to do it is in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. AT&T will no longer exempt HBO Max from streaming data caps starting on March 25th. This comes after a federal court of held California's net neutrality law. Although AT&T says the change will impact all US subscribers because according to AT&T, the internet does not recognize state borders. California SB 822 makes it unlawful to engage in zero rating defined in the law as quote, exempting some internet traffic from consumers data usage allowance and quote, it also prohibits paid prioritization. When AT&T announced the exclusion of HBO Max, it said it was paying itself for the privilege and other companies like Netflix could too. Well, not so according to California SB 822. Boo-hoo for those looking to enjoy the Snyder cut this weekend, huh, Tom? Yeah, it's good. Can I get your data cap if you're watching it in 4-3 on your phone as it was meant to be seen, I guess. Yeah, this is such sour grapes from AT&T. If they really wanted to. And actually, there's a perfectly reasonable business reason not to apply this nationwide. They could exclude California. They could say if your IP address is coming from California then that data counts against your data cap and anywhere else in the country it doesn't. I almost feel like they'd be able to make their case even better at the complexity of that. But what is in simpler message is your streaming of HBO Max now counts against your data cap and it's California's fault. So if you're gonna be mad, get mad at California because they did it to you. The argument against zero rating is that if in this case AT&T zero rates its own service, HBO Max, you're more likely to use HBO Max especially if you're on a tighter budget and you can't afford an unlimited data plan, you're gonna be pushed to use something because of that. And that's an unfair advantage because AT&T is running the carrier network and providing you the streaming service. Yeah, this is what net neutrality looks like. And unfortunately, it's not its most flattering look to the consumer because this is often spoken about the like, this is the devilish deal, right? Like, oh, the consumer will get so fat and lazy on the idea that they can watch the flight attendant without accounting against their data cap that then they'll surrender all of net neutrality and it will all become this various different pools that you're gonna have to pay for access to. I get it and I'm committed to it. I am a net neutrality guy, but this is what we have to give up if we wanna remain ideologically pure on it and obviously it's a California law, so Dems the rules. Here's something you can't blame California for yet. You can't change a flat tire on Mars. You cannot blame California for that. No, but NASA has developed a tire that never goes flat for its Mars rovers and it keeps developing them and it has developed one for future rovers that is kind of useful. In fact, NASA's Glenn Research Center partners with companies to commercialize NASA innovations and a tire has become one such innovation. Last year, a few folks formed the Smart Tire Company. Smart stands for Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology and they're aiming first for bicycle tires. Their tire is called Metal METL, no A. It's made from a nickel titanium alloy called Nitinol Plus which is not a cold medicine. It's an alloy that's being used in a bicycle tire. The material has shape memory so it can bend and expand and contract like a rubber tire but it doesn't risk puncture and it doesn't need to be inflated. It just keeps it shape. For use on Earth, it does need a rubber tread so you can get that traction. They said unless you're doing a dune buggy then you don't need the rubber tread. So you will have to add rubber tread to it. Smart says it will use polyurethanium which will last a long time but eventually metal tires will need to be retreaded but the majority of the tire you can keep you would just get it retreaded. Smart will sell the tires in gold, silver and blue, metallic blue starting in Q1 2022 and it tends to move beyond just bicycle tires after that to become a full tire company. I mean, so my first reaction before I really understood the story was like, I can get gold tires. That is a thing I want. I'll pay anything. Gold tires that you'll never have to replace just retread. That's right, yeah. And they're, you know, they're from Mars. They're like super great. And then I realized, okay, because of asphalt and all sorts of surfaces that we on Earth are accustomed to driving around. This is not, this is not ready for that kind of vehicle yet but for bicycles and like you mentioned Tom some off-road stuff, yeah. It is, it's fascinating. It, it's sort of, okay. So if you have to add tread to it again, I'm just thinking of, you know, as a citizen of Earth like, you know, how does this affect me? How can I get in on the bag? Being able to add tread and then having to eventually replace the tires themselves is like, listen, if someone says, this is how much money this is going to save you, then here we go. Then it becomes a consumer product. I'm here just for the decoration. I feel like it might not be ready for all of America. It's definitely ready for ocean drive on South Beach. Slap these suckers on point billionaires, Tesla and watch him stunt in a club that is illegally operating at six o'clock in the morning, even past COVID restrictions. And that's what I am. I am excited to see these on the street. Like what, what, what's going to be the first TikTok video that we see where someone's like, you know, I can drive this car on Mars, right? So like, these are like Mars tires. Mars tires, yeah. My metallic blue Mars tires. You want to go for a ride? Exactly, they're smooth. Everybody spray paint their tires so they can get the cloud on that. Oh God, that might be my, my best bet. Honestly. Oh, then it rains. It's going to be a horrible thing. Okay. Members of the financial subreddit wall street bets, you remember them. You may or may not love them, but they got a lot of attention over the last month or so. I call before Congress. Indeed. Indeed were. So you, if you hang out in there enough, you might have noticed that they adopted a few slogans, one of them, which was apes together strong. And many members of this subreddit have now donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities supporting gorillas in the wild. Ape strong. Got it. Including the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund, which has received more than $350,000 in donations from the group. That's according to a report in BBC news. That also means actual adoption of the welfare of again, according to the report, 3,500 endangered gorillas in six days. And the fund says normally over a weekend, they would get 20 adoptions. So huge uptick in what might be a really good thing for our ape friends of the world. Yeah. A lot of investors on CNBC, very upset at wall street bets. A lot of gorillas, very happy with them. Very happy. That's right. To all the gorillas adopted. Choose your side, folks. Yeah. Yeah. What side of history you want to be on? Exactly. Kramer or the ape. Oh, but seriously, I don't know. These sorts of stories are like, listen, any time a bunch of folks who have forged kind of relationships and friendships with each other on forums or Facebook groups or, you know, what have you, it doesn't always happen, but when it does, it does give me a warm fuzzy. I will say this, this is getting attention because wall street bets obviously was in the news. It's kind of got a funny sort of element to it. It's a animal charity, so nobody can really pick it apart. That being said, online giving, and it happens a lot on Twitch specifically, is something that is one of the most heartwarming parts of the internet. There is a tremendous charity component to a lot of different communities, including our own Diamond Club community. Every New Year's Eve, there is a big charity thing that our producer, Amos puts together each and every year. So shout out to anybody out there in a community that is doing the hard work to put money in a good charity's pocket. Well, I hear that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got one from Mike because boy, do people want to talk about NFTs and what they might mean. And actually Mike had a good one here. So he says, I had a thought as I was washing out my Guinness mug. I know how much of a fan y'all are of trying to make analogies equating the physical and digital worlds. My Guinness mug is from the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. I bought it there a few years ago. Other than the history that I assigned it, there's nothing exceptional about it. You could buy an identical mug off of Amazon that would look and function like my mug. The value for me is the memory of the trip. That's what makes it special. If I can convince someone else that this particular mug's history is valuable, I could sell it from more than the price of a new one. I feel like NFTs are trying to do the same thing and maybe they'll succeed. I'm doubtful though when Jack, he's talking about Jack Dorsey, sold the NFT for the first tweet. He wasn't actually selling the tweet. He's on a different machine entirely and it's not like he's selling the rights to display it either. And he didn't create the tweet with the NFT. I can see with digital artwork how this could work as you're creating the NFT with the art itself. But going back and assigning NFTs to media that's already been created seems like a speculative money grab. Yeah, I was texting with Scott Johnson about this earlier this week about what makes an NFT special? And we were thinking like, okay, it's like the 500th home run ball, right? The ball is no different than any other ball except that it was hit as the 500th home run by a player. And so it's the little sticker that says we swear that this is the 500th home run ball that makes it special, right? But even that, you know, I have an actual ball and you can watch video of it actually being hit. The tweet is not in fact the tweet. So then it becomes, like you say, it's just a little more about bragging rights. It's a little more about like, it's a numbered series, right? The number one on a series of art doesn't make it any special but people like to have number one. You know, that's that kind of thing. Yes, they do. And that's to me, the way to think about NFTs is just think about it like baseball cards. Baseball cards, there is X amount of a run that happens. You do not own the rights to that art. You do not own the rights to those stats or anything that's on it. You literally just own this one thing. So imagine that the file that you are getting is the same as the cardboard that it's printed on. Everything else is, you know, whatever makes it special to you and whatever makes it special in a market, the thing that sets it apart is the idea that it is trackable and you know this is one of blank. And so just like you would, you know, now that information is embedded into the file as opposed to you having to go to Beckett and look up like exactly how many Tom Seaver cards were printed versus the one that you have. But that's the idea. To me that the best analog is just baseball cards because those are also specially printed and have a specific scarcity with each and every run. And that's what these are. And there can be scams. Just like there are scams in the collectibles world where you buy something at a convention that has a sticker that says it authentic and then you find out that it's not authentic. People can sell Jack's tweet and try to convince someone that they have the right to sell the first tweet when they're not Jack and they don't. Like that can happen. That doesn't mean that NFTs will or won't. If anything, the blockchain makes that harder. The blockchain makes it harder for you to be able to do that because there are more verification features on it. It's just not physical. And that's the biggest line that some people will never cross and other people. Although I could take your first episode of PX3 and sell it, I would have to convince people that I'm you, right? That's where it gets fraud. Fraud can still happen. You can illegally go about doing something that you don't own, but I could also illegally make my own baseball cards. And then OpenC is an NFT exchange that actually verifies people. So you're like, oh, am I really buying from Len Peralta? Oh, OpenC verified that it's Len. Okay, great. Well, if you have any feedback on NFTs or anything else we talk about on the show, please do send it. We'd love to get your feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today, they include Justin Zellers, Misk Music Teacher, and Mike Glofflin. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Chad Pinto. Just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, new boss. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young. Justin, it's good to have you back. What's been going on in your world where could people keep up with it? Oh, the politics, politics, politics program never stops. And we've got a great episode for you guys tomorrow. We have the director of polling for the Cato Institute to answer a very, very simple question. But especially for math folks, and I know there's a lot of them listening, it's a very curious one. Why were polls not accurate in 2016 and 2020 but were accurate in 2018? There are a couple of different theories. We break them all down. If you are into that idea of trying to divine the will of the populace amidst a bunch of different possibilities, then you're really gonna love this interview. It's all on politics, politics, politics.com. That's it for us today, folks. But don't forget, if you're a patron, you get rewarded, not only with an ad-free version of the show and all kinds of other perks, but with stuff. We send you things. They're not NFTs. They're totally, well, they're not really fungible, but they're real. They're a sticker or a mug or a t-shirt or a hoodie every three months. If you stay a patron every three months, you're gonna get something. Each one has a unique art from Len Peralta on it featuring the DTNS seven-year anniversary logo. There's ones with Roger, one with me, one with Sarah. Get all the details about which levels get this and what you get at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Folks, we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. If you can join us live, please do so and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Guess what? We're gonna be back tomorrow, doing the show again. And Lamar Wilson is gonna join us and also Len Peralta, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club helps you have enjoyed the program. He he he.