 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks and Alexander Nashev. Coming up on DTNS using the blockchain to make a space game that nobody can take down. And Bodie from the Kilowatt podcast is here to tell us how EVs are kept safe even after a crash. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 28, 2022 at Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, the aforementioned host of the Kilowatt podcast, Bodie Grimm, welcome back. Hello, thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back. We are going to talk all about safety and fire suppression a little bit and all kinds of good stuff related to EVs, but let's start with the quick hits. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to ban the sale of electronics in the U.S. from several Chinese companies, including Huawei, ZTE, and camera makers Za Dahua, rather, and Heak Vision, and the two-way radio maker, Hytera Communications, citing risks to data security. This obviously is not the first time that Huawei and ZTE have been under U.S. regulatory crosshairs. Back in 2018, Congress voted to stop federal agencies from buying equipment from these five companies. In the order, the FCC asked for comment on whether to revoke existing equipment authorizations. OpenAI announced a new Minecraft AI. It's the first bot able to craft so-called diamond tools. The tasks require skilled human players to take about 24,000 actions. With AI systems used to play go and other goal-oriented games, researchers have typically used reinforcement learning. This is where an AI system is left to dither in a game from scratch without instruction, but Minecraft doesn't have a simple goal. So OpenAI started the Minecraft AI with imitation learning, training a neural network to perform tasks by watching the humans do it. In this case, Minecraft AI watched 70,000 hours of people playing Minecraft. Researchers used another neural network to label those videos automatically, which itself was trained on 2,000 hours of paid Minecraft players that recorded their keyboard and mouse clicks. OpenAI then fine-tuned the bot with reinforcement learnings to carry out the highly complex tasks. Kind of similar to that diplomacy bot that we talked about last week. Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta 265 million euros for failure to take steps to prevent a data leak of personal phone numbers and other profile information impacting other over 500 million users. Now this date's back to 2019, talked about it then, when a malicious actor used Facebook's contact importer tool to scrape this data. Meta disclosed the leak in 2021 and clarified it resolved this issue that was back in 2019. Meta spokesperson says it has not decided whether or not it will appeal. Bloomberg sources say protests at Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPhone Factory will likely result in a production shortfall of around 6 million iPhone Pro units this year. The size of lost production will depend on when Foxconn can get all of its workers back on all of its assembly lines. Those have been impacted by both protests around working conditions and the subject of the protests, which is ongoing strict COVID-19 lockdowns. Foxconn and Apple do expect to make up the lost output in 2023. TechCrunch is reporting that according to China-focused analysts, Twitter saw a significant uptick and spam tweets over the last three days when searching for any major Chinese city. These tweets show porn, escort services, gambling content, and the like, making it difficult to find any legitimate search results. This comes as, as Tom mentioned, demonstrations are ongoing in China and continue while folks protest the country's zero-tolerance COVID-19 measures. The Washington Post reported Twitter was aware of the spam issue and was working to resolve it. And that is a look at the quick hits. Alright folks, MIT technology reviews Mike Orkut wrote an article earlier this month called, This sci-fi blockchain game could help create a metaverse that no one owns. It's an example of how blockchains can be used for things that don't involve speculating on finances or, you know, defrauding people. It might even shed a little light on what the word metaverse might actually come to mean someday. Yeah, so the game in question is called Dark Forest. Players start at an unexplored universe that only becomes revealed as they continue exploring. Sounds like a fairly typical space-based massively multiplayer strategy game, but the difference is no one is really in control of how the game plays out. No one in particular anyway. It's an incomplete information game. So every move is verified on a blockchain as legal without being revealed to the other players. A developer who goes by Gub Sheep had the idea after reading Xi Xing's Liu's novel, The Dark Forest, just a few days after attending a conference on zero-knowledge proofs. So if you're like, what's that? Let's explain what a zero-knowledge proof actually is. Yeah, zero-knowledge proofs are a way to prove you have some information without revealing that information itself. A classic example involves a person who's colorblind. Let's call that person Kelly. Kelly is colorblind. And then there's a person who wants to prove to them that two balls are different colors. Kelly can't tell, and we're going to call the person that wants to prove the balls Pat, Pat the Prover. Colorblind Kelly puts both balls behind their back and then shows one of them to Pat. Pat says what color the ball is. Maybe it's red. Then Kelly puts it behind their back again and either switches the ball or brings out the same ball. And Pat says whether it's the same or whether it's switched to green. Now one time's not going to tell you anything, but you do this 20 times or so and it'll become clear if the balls are really two colors or not. So Dark Forest, the game uses a version of zero-knowledge proofs called XZXSNARK to hide data on the blockchain. So a blockchain was used because it's an easy way to verify legal moves are being made without letting players see what the other players are up to. It also means it runs autonomously. Dark Forest runs in rounds that have an end date for gameplay reasons. People are kind of used to that, but it wouldn't actually need to. It could potentially be run with no end at all and nobody could take down the server either. Yeah, because there's not a server. It's a distributed blockchain. Several developers are exploring what else could be done with the kind of blockchain that Dark Forest implemented. CubSheep started a group called XZeroXPARK, and yes, it's totally a play on XZeroXPARK, to encourage research and development. Some are looking at other kinds of games, but there are also some non-game projects being looked at too. One is about digital identity, which would let you prove certain things about yourself without revealing all your personal data. So one example would be like a passport that you could just say, yes, I'm allowed to go into this country, but you wouldn't even have to say what country you're from. Just the piece of information that says you're improved. That's the kind of thing that a blockchain like this could do. Bode, I don't expect you to be the foremost up on blockchains, but as somebody who's interested in technology, how does this appear to you? Well, it appears really cool. I love video games, and I don't really love buying new updates to video games. So this seems like you would maybe pay for it once and that'd be it. Yeah, or maybe a subscription. Yeah, or maybe there's some other way of paying for items or transacting on the network where the operator of the blockchain takes a cut of those transactions, but it's free to play and the prices could just be set by the people playing the game, right? Yeah, they could like mine cryptocurrency on my computer and then they would split it with me. And I think that that is an option, but don't get freaked out people because it wouldn't have to do that, right? No, I was just kidding. But I think this is an interesting implementation of something that doesn't have to do those kinds of things to be successful, right? Yeah, no, I think it's neat. Sarah, what do you make of this? Well, it took me a minute this morning to sort of wrap my head around, okay, this is a game and we're using the blockchain and there's no decentralized server and that is kind of cool and novel in a lot of different ways. And my first question was like, okay, well, let's say somebody does something really terrible in the game, who do you go complain to? Well, there's no corporation that made the game. So you could figure out who did what, right? And then you could, I don't know, rectify that as a community, but it operates very differently than what I would be used to. Yeah, I mean, that would be the interesting part of this. Like what would constitute a terrible thing? Like how well designed is the game to allow that? Sure. Maybe that's part of the game is like, hey, it's the Wild West out there, don't play this if you're not willing to be pirated. Because again, this is a explore planets and try to take them from each other kind of game. So part of that's just built into the way they do it. But there is an aspect of like, what if someone cheats? What if someone does this or that? Or there's some sort of harassment situation? That would be not on the blockchain though, right? That would be in the software implementation. So how are you chatting? Well, you wouldn't be chatting through the blockchain. You'd be chatting through something else. Maybe you're chatting through Discord, in which case then the harassment is taken care of that way. I don't know. Yeah, these are good questions that I don't have easy answers to them. But a lot of the abuses that have happened in cryptocurrencies that they have corrected for or that the blockchain just makes impossible like stealing. Maybe not impossible makes them very unlikely that you would have the same advantages here. If you have thoughts on on that answers to that question, right? Like if you're like, oh, the reason it wouldn't be a problem is because of X, especially if you're involved in this. Let us know feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Indeed. Well, the electric vehicle market continues to get more crowded. And if you're in the market for one, that might be a good thing. Tesla might have been the pioneer. We're seeing aggressive electrification goals from virtually all the big automakers and more EV startups as well. In fact, we're starting to see cars come into the U.S. from markets that traditionally don't really have a stake here. Yeah, one example that a few people are reporting on, the verge among them, is a Vietnamese electric vehicle maker called Vinfast, which shipped its first batch of EVs to the United States. The company may not be a familiar name to you. It was only founded back in 2017, but it's already become the first Vietnamese car brand to expand into global markets. They have offices in Germany and Australia, and they have been exporting vehicles to Russia since 2018. The first U.S. shipment includes 999, and yes, that's just one car shy of a thousand. It's a lucky number. Cross-over SUVs called the VF8. Yeah, you look at some photos. They're pretty nice looking. Performance-wise, these compare well with other EV models. 402 horsepower, 472-pound fleet of torque, and a 290-mile range. Starting at around $40,000, give or take, would look styled by Pininfarina and Torino Design. Some will go to the car subscription service Autonomies, so some of those cars have already been spoken for, but the majority will go to retail pre-order customers by the end of December. Vinfast expects to have another shipment on the way in January. Vinfast also plans to begin making cars at a plant in North Carolina in the United States in 2024. That would allow it to take advantage of U.S. tax incentives. Remember, there's a lot of those EV incentives require the cars be made in the United States. More models should also be on the way. At the LA Auto Show, they showed off the subcompact VF6, a mid-size VF7, and production on those is expected to start in Q3 2023. Now, Bodie, we do expect you to have an opinion about EVs here. So what do you think of these? How did these look to you? Initially, Vinfast showed off the vehicles at CES in 2022, and I'm very high on this company. I think they've basically since from 2017 to now, they have actually developed and started shipping and producing vehicles, whereas companies like Faraday Future, which has been around for a lot longer than Vinfast, they haven't shipped anything yet. There are at least teetering on being bankrupt Faraday Future. So it's impressive that this company is not in the United States. They built a car, produced a car, and now they're shipping them to the United States. There's also a VF5, which is not mentioned because it's coming later, but it's going to be even more affordable than the VF6 or the VF7. Do you think we are going to see more of these kinds of companies? Because up till now it's been traditional automaker, Tesla, and potential Tesla competitor that may or may not last and goes in and out of business, and none of them have really caught on yet. Are we going to see more Vinfast? I hope so. I think, and this is probably going to get me in trouble with a lot of US centric folks, but I think the Chinese automakers are doing it right right now. Geely, which owns Volvo, Polestar, and Zeke. Geely is making a big push here in the United States. I see Polestar is all over my neighborhood, and of course you got the XC60 EV for Volvo. Zeke is a really neat company, and I won't go too much into them to save time, but look at what they're doing. It's really unique and it's very different from what's going on here in the United States, but you have Build Your Dreams, X-Pang, and my favorite company, NEO. NEO is probably the most Tesla-like if you want to compare companies, but NEO has a little personal assistant called Numie, and I'm saying that wrong, but this personal assistant actually sits up on your dash and it has facial expressions, and it'll tell you when it's raining outside. It'll make jokes. It's just a cute little add-on for the car, and the moment I saw that, Does it point out the windshield and say, look, it's raining? If you have your sunroof open and it detects rain, it will close your sunroof for you. I've had my windows down a few times and been caught in those situations. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, and it's a good-looking car without looking futuristic, right? I think that's what impresses me the most about the design, like the external design. It just looks like a well-designed car. Yeah, not every car needs to look like a rocket ship, or what we presume the future rocket ship's going to look like. Right. I don't know. I feel like all the cars sort of look futuristic because of, I don't know, aerodynamics and just keeping up with the Joneses these days. But yeah, a company called VinFast, who I had not heard of before, from Vietnam, which I wasn't aware that could make inroads in the U.S. market. I think that's really exciting. I think competition is good. Bring down some prices, at the very least. Yeah, and VinFast, actually, when they were for the first three months of reservation holders, they were very, very giving. They gave you a home charger. You got a credit for $3,000 off or $5,000 off the VF8, VF9, whichever one you chose. You got some brakes on it with a battery lease. They actually took reservations bringing it back on the blockchain. So, you know, I don't know if that was a gimmick or not, but it has all of the perks that you received, and they're all stored on the blockchain. It's just probably a little bit more secure, a little bit easier to manage, possibly, and also good buzzwords, for the personally. Yeah. All three of those can be true at the same time. Well, folks, if you have a thought about VinFast or EVs or anything else, here is our email address. Please send us a note. Let us know what you think and feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Earlier this month, Tim Stevens, our automotive correspondent, detailed the work that Mercedes-Benz is putting into making EVs safer, not just to drive, but also during and after an accident for passengers and first responders. We talked about things like automatic disconnection of the high-voltage system if a crash is detected, safe routing of the high-voltage wires. Bodie, you've developed and taught several classes on this exact subject. What else should we know about how first responders are being trained in handling EVs involved in accidents? Well, here's the thing. This is still kind of new in the fire service. That's not to say that first responders don't know what they're doing because they know what they're doing, but a lot of this training is happening on the job. Like they show up, there's an electric vehicle, now they got to figure it out. But there's some things that I kind of put together to help not only first responders, but others who might be witnessing an accident and they see firefighters show up and they're like, what are these guys doing? It doesn't make any sense. So for most emergencies, how does an EV and an internal combustion engine car compare? For 99%, we'll just say, let's say 90% of the emergencies, they're the same. There's not a whole lot you're going to have to worry about. Some of the things that I would be concerned about as a bystander if you came up onto someone having a medical emergency or if there was a small accident is we want to make sure that the scene is safe. And the first way we do that for first responders say, because we identify the car, we need to know if it's an electric vehicle or an ICE car. And then we need to immobilize the car, and this is really important, because electric vehicles have instant accelerations. Let's say you have somebody unconscious at a stop light, maybe they fell asleep at a rough night, and then you're knocking on the window and somebody's walking across, then everybody's surrounding the car and they wake up and they get startled and they press on the gas, that car becomes a rocket or the accelerator, that car becomes a rocket, and now somebody else is going to be injured. So as firefighters, we need to immobilize the vehicle, put it in park, and there's a wide range of ways to put an electric vehicle in park. You just kind of have to do your research on that. But we'll chalk the wheels and things like that. But disabling the car, that would be the third thing. Normally that would just mean turning the car off and then taking the smart key or cell phone and moving it six feet away from the car so it doesn't get reactivated. So it's the same three things as an internal combustion engine car, but you have to do different things because you're dealing with gas or EV or smart locks, which you could be dealing with both. Are there specific concerns with the high voltage system of an EV? What do you do for dealing with those? As a general rule, no. So if you get in a little accident and we have to pop your door open with our extrication tools or something like that, we're not going to disconnect the high voltage system. But if you're in a serious accident, that is going to be something we're going to be more concerned about. So the EV high voltage system is more than just the battery. It includes the battery, the cables, I'm blanking on the battery management system, motors, the inverter, everything that's in there that is high voltage. We need to stay away from that. It's not just the cables themselves because sometimes we get focused in on that. Those cables are usually bright orange or bright yellow. We're going to disconnect the high voltage system and every car has a different place to disconnect the high voltage system. This is why it's really important to read the auto manufacturers have these emergency response guides. It's really important to at least have knowledge of those guides and where you need to go to disconnect the car because every car is done differently. Teslas, you open up the front, you remove a piece of plastic near the windshield and then it can be on the left, it can be on the right, it can be on the top. There's a red wire and it's got a little tag on it and it shows you where to cut. You have to cut it in two different places. On a Hyundai Ionic 5, there's just a pull tab near the battery and you just pull it and you've discharged the system. It does take five minutes for the system to discharge so it's really important like what Mercedes is doing once the airbags go off, the system automatically discharges. When we get there and it's time to go to work, that's not something we necessarily have to worry about. Let's say there's a Vinfast car and you haven't trained on that. Is it just like we would do? You look it up on your phone? How do first responders deal with that? Well, that's a really good question. Typically, on my truck we have four people, on the latter truck we have five. Not always, but most of the time. And there's enough people that are there that can start looking this stuff up so that we can have those emergency response guides so we can move forward. We're not going to delay patient care. We're not going to delay cutting into that car. We would if it was unsafe, but if we feel like we can do it safely, we're not going to delay and wait for those emergency response guides. Do you ever see, this is kind of jumping off of Tom's question, a point where it's not up to first responders to figure out, okay, this is the manufacturer. This is how they do it. This is the wire that we need to find. Where's the red one that it would be mandated for car manufacturers to do it all the same way to make it easier for accident situations? Man, I hope so. We don't look up, you know, this is a Chevy SUV versus a Ford SUV. We're not confused on that. They all work pretty much the same way. But every manufacturer needs EV manufacturer anyway. Feels like they need to be cute and original. Yeah, like the F1, not the F150, Ford Mach-E, there's just a button you push on the post and that opens up the car, which is great. But if somebody, let's say somebody gets into an accident and they're unconscious, maybe a bystander isn't going to know how to open the door when they could just open the door and pull the person out if need be, which I wouldn't recommend. Just leave them there if everything's okay. But they may freak out and they'd be like, I'm going to break the window and now you've just broken your window and really all you've just kind of got knocked out for a couple seconds, but somebody freaked out. Yeah, yeah. Anything that you would tell in general, you've covered a few of these, but in general for someone either with an EV or approaching an EV accident to be aware of? Just in general, one of the things that is always surprising to me is when we roll up and it doesn't matter if it's a car fire that's an ice car or an EV, people are just standing in the smoke. There's so much nasty stuff in car fires in general and then the EV batteries, if they're involved, there's a lot of cancer-causing agents. If everybody's out of the vehicle and safe, steer clear of that smoke because it's just, I mean, we tease cops all the time, but we'll see cops do it and you're like, hey man, you're going to stay out of that stuff. It's going to hurt you. There's nothing unusual about an EV's materials in that respect, that makes sense to me. No, the batteries are a little different because they have some different chemistries in there, but if it's just a regular class, a fire inside of a car, it's pretty much the same stuff. All right, let's get to a little more fun topic, obsolete sounds. Yeah, something that might also be unusual to you depending on when you were born and who you are is what a 56K modem sounds like. Perhaps a radio getting tuned or the startup sound of the Elliott 903 computer. Maybe a slide projector, ever seen one of those? I haven't in some time, but my grandparents used to love slide shows. The Sound Project Cities and Memory released something called the Obsolete Sounds Library, featuring over 150 increasingly rare sounds. Sure, you might see them around here or there, but they're fewer and far between. Founder Stuart Fox said that the collection is designed to draw attention to the world's disappearing soundscapes, to highlight those sounds that are worth preserving because they form part of our collective cultural heritage. Aside from the actual sound recordings, obsolete sounds also include some remixes of each from musicians and sound artists, so people are having some fun with us. Yeah, it's a hot new dance craze. The hot new modem track? Yeah, modem life is rubbish, is the name of this title. It really was rubbish. It really was rubbish, but I didn't know it until I knew what broadcast was. It was all we knew, it was all we knew. I love that we have Moose 2271 saying 56K, too new. I need, I have classic rock, 14-4, please. Yeah, yeah, 28-8, come on, you know. 56K, what are you, rich? I remember my first 56K modem like it was yesterday. I remember, well, having a modem maybe longer than I need to and a friend came over and was like, hey, can I get online? I have to do something. And I was like, yeah. And he was like, no, you're kidding, really? And I was like, yeah, this is how we do it. A lot of people still do it this way. It takes me back. It actually, this sound, as grating as it is, I find very nostalgic. Yeah, me too. Because it reminded me of being like, yay, I'm gonna like be online. The excitement of getting online. Yeah, and like see what other people are doing all over the world. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Good one from Lee, wanted to chime in about the awesomeness of libraries. We've been talking about this recently. Lee says, the St. Louis County Library provides free headspace subscriptions. That's a $70 value. And free LinkedIn learning subscriptions, which is a $240 value, as well as physical items and services like instruments, telescopes, even hotspots. Oh, and online instructor-led courses via Gale. And so much more. People don't realize that they are missing out. Lee also has a special shout out to Patrick Norton, who is his favorite guest. He says, St. Louis represent Kaka. Fantastic. We'll pass that along to Patrick next time we see him. We will. That's great. And a good reminder on all the other things your public library has. We were just focusing on that one project related to music. But yeah, there's so many other things. Thanks for chiming in, Lee. Appreciate that. Indeed, yeah. Thanks to everybody who writes in. And thanks to you, Bodigrim, for coming with the knowledge today. Let folks know where they can keep up with what you do. Well, I do a podcast on electric vehicles, obviously. I don't really focus so much on the cars themselves. I focus more on the technology. So, and, you know, behind the cars and renewable energy and stuff like that. So it might be a good fit for folks who listen to the show. And you can just search Kelliwatt in your favorite podcatcher of choice. Because I don't have a website. Allison keeps getting mad at me to tell me I need to do that. And then if I could just give Allison's show a little plug, because we actually went into more depth on the fire. And it was chit-chat across the pond. Man, I can't remember. You might have to search it. 739. Thank you, 739. Where we talked probably about 45 minutes about EV fires. So if anybody's interested in that. Fantastic. Well, we're so glad to have you on today. Come back early and often. We also took a four-day weekend here in the U.S. for a holiday. But we got some brand new bosses. Those bosses are Ron and Kevin. Ron and Kevin said, turkey be darned. We want to be patrons. So thank you, Ron. And thank you, Kevin. Yeah. We're thankful for Ron and Kevin today. We are. Even though it's not even Thanksgiving anymore. We're very thankful for Ron and Kevin. I'm still eating turkey. So, you know. Indeed. You know. It could be you tomorrow. If you want to join our Patreon, please do so. Speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet, which you can catch right after DTNS ends. We are live, though, on this show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. Tell a friend if you think they'd like the show as well. We are back tomorrow talking smart home gift guides with Nicole Lee joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I'm in club. I hope you have enjoyed this brover.