 Coming up on DTNS, Jonathan Strickland explains why NFTs are not a magic tool for the metaverse. White Elkos and Airlines are fighting over 5G in the United States, and Microsoft did some post-holiday shopping, woke up and found a pre-ordered Activision Blizzard, shipping sometime next year. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And joining us, executive producer at I Heart Media, Jonathan Strickland, welcome back to the show. It's been too darn long. Howdy, y'all. It's good to be back. It's good to have you back. I can't wait to talk about the metaverse stuff, because I think you've got an important take that we don't hear enough people talking about. We were just talking about all kinds of stuff, including memories of ammonia leaks and fires on good day internet. Get that longer version of the show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Andrew Bradley, Dale McKayhee and Scott Hepburn. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. After no showing its own event on January 11th, Samsung has announced the Exynos 2200 smartphone mobile processor. It's the first mobile system on a chip with a GPU known as Xclips, starting with an X, running AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture and manufactured on Samsung's four nanometer EUV process, allowing for hardware accelerated ray tracing. Other specs include one high powered cortex X2 flagship core, three cortex A710 cores for balance performance and four more efficient cortex A510 cores, an upgraded NPU, an ISP architecture that can support camera sensors of up to 200 megapixels. Samsung and AMD first announced a licensing deal back in 2019. Samsung, why did you ghost on us? We're not here to talk about the past. Here's our first chance. Speaking of smartphones, data from panelists shows that Apple had the most smartphone shipments in Q4 2021 worldwide, 22 percent of the global smartphone market top in Samsung, which fell back to second place at 20 percent. Xiaomi kept hold of third place with 12 percent share. And if you keep in track, Apple came in at fourth at 9 percent and vivo in fifth place at 8 percent. You may recall back in November, Amazon proposed a ban on UK issued Visa cards to pay for goods and services on Amazon service because of the high fees that Amazon said Visa was charging. A lot of customers weren't too happy about that. Now, Amazon says that the expected change regarding the use of Visa credit cards on amazon.co.uk will no longer take place on January 19th. That's when it was set to go into effect. Originally, Amazon says it's working with Visa to come to a solution that won't require customers to use alternate alternative payment methods. Now, unlike in the US, Visa doesn't currently offer a co-branded Amazon card in the UK. Maybe that's how they worked it out. Look for that soon. Central Bank digital currencies, CBDCs. You've heard us talk about them. They're worth keeping an eye on. They are not competitors to cryptocurrency, so much as attempts to smooth out a lot of the operations of a nation's financial system by using some of the benefits of a blockchain, albeit not decentralized. We've mentioned that the Bahamas and its sand dollar were the first to launch a CBDC. Since then, back in October, Nigeria launched its NERA and Cambodia's Bakong has reached half of its population. And of course, China is the biggest country experimenting with CBDCs. Still hasn't fully launched the digital yuan, but it now has 261 million individual users, about a fifth of the population. All right, let's talk about what pretty much ate up all of social media this morning. The fact that Microsoft has announced an agreement to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Reminder, this deal is not expected to close until Microsoft's fiscal 2023. Microsoft's fiscal 2023 begins, confusingly, for people who don't follow finance, July 1st, 2022, and it won't happen right on July 1st. It'll happen when it gets regulatory approval sometime between July 1st, 2022, and June 30th, 2023, if everything goes as planned, which it might not. So don't get confused in June when Activision Blizzard and Microsoft are still not the same company. It could be anywhere between July this year and June of next year, and probably on the later end of that, given the complexity and the number of markets these two companies operate. However, once it's done, Microsoft expects it'll make them the third largest gaming company in the world by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. Microsoft has already said, when it gets this done, it plans to add as many Activision Blizzard games as it can to Xbox Game Pass. Activision Blizzard, for example, has World of Warcraft, Diablo, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, some or all of those might it show up. Activision Blizzard, however, is not a company with a lot of issues. It has been dealing with sexual harassment problems, including reaching an $18 million settlement with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and being sued by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Wall Street Journal sources say 37 employees have been quote-unquote exited, in other words, fired since last July, and 44 more were disciplined. While Bobby Kotek will remain CEO of Activision Blizzard for the time being, and at least through the close of the deal, it's unclear what will happen once Microsoft takes control. Activision Blizzard's lead, whoever it is, will report to Microsoft's CEO of gaming, Phil Spencer, and Wall Street Journal sources are saying that Kotek probably won't stay on. Satya Nadella summed up Microsoft's strategy on this acquisition in a statement saying, quote, we're investing deeply in world-class content, community, and the cloud. Now, this was said in relation to a gaming acquisition. I get that, but pay attention to the breakdown there. Gaming or content, community, and the cloud. That implies that there are things other than the cloud, other than Azure that Microsoft now hopes to capitalize on. They've been doing good. They're not going to stop with Azure. But content, community, a very interesting way of putting that, lots of takes here. Jonathan, where's your head at on this? I mean, you were getting at it toward the very end there, Tom. I was feeling like Satya was getting a bit meta with all that as in metaverse, which of course is the topic that no one can get around and we'll talk about it more later on in the show. I actually think it's promising for multiple angles. I think it's promising in the sense that my hope is Microsoft coming in can help Activision Blizzard clean house and get things in order. And I often feel skepticism when a company that has been revealed to have a toxicity to its corporate culture at a very deep ingrained level, like a generational level in the case of Activision Blizzard. I often am skeptical that such a company can turn things around by themselves. It's not impossible. It's just really hard. And I know a lot of people have expressed skepticism with codec in charge in particular. I feel like this perhaps could be a chance for that to really have a true transformational change, which I think would benefit all the people who work at Activision Blizzard. And then that sort of has a trickle down effect of, I believe when people are in a space that's safe, where they feel their contributions are valued, they produce better work, which means you get better games down the line too. And then, of course, with Game Pass, the immediate boon for gamers is that they'll get access to more titles very quickly. So I think at least in the short term, this has a lot of positives. I don't foresee a ton of regulatory resistance to this simply because, as you mentioned, even with the acquisition, Microsoft won't be the dominant company in that space. That doesn't mean they won't face some resistance. It's also a global market, so it gets way more complicated. But I think that there are no obvious roadblocks that I see. Yeah, I mean, before we move on, I mean, this is, if I'm not mistaken, well, I know it's Microsoft's biggest acquisition, I believe the biggest one was LinkedIn, which was in the $20 billion range a few years ago. So I mean, this is that and quite a bit more money. Kotick not resigning as CEO of Activision Blizzard sort of surprised me for some time because Activision Blizzard had gotten so much press as being a problematic company. And you kind of figure that if somebody's at the helm and these things are happening, they often aren't at the helm anymore. This makes a lot more sense to me now. Why Kotick? And not stepping away today, I mean, it might be more than a year. But before Microsoft officially takes over of the company, but it sounds like there was some boardroom deals that were already in the mix. Yeah, there definitely will be a story coming out on what the shareholder involvement in this dance was. And what, you know, if it was Kotick agreeing like, OK, fine, sell to Microsoft and then I'll step away gracefully, get my parachute from Microsoft. Who knows? We'll find out all of that stuff. There's also lots of stuff to talk about on the gaming competitive landscape. You know, does Call of Duty become a Microsoft exclusive only on Xbox and PC? They're not saying that. And certainly Sony would not benefit from that. It weren't it to happen. I have some thoughts on the fact that they have made. I think Phil Spencer made some noises about like, well, eventually Xbox Cloud, you know, Xbox Game Pass, they're going to have to be available on PlayStation. Maybe this is how they do it. They use this as leverage to get that. We'll we'll talk about this some more with Scott Johnson tomorrow. But it definitely feels like like Microsoft is going to have more leverage to force some deals with Sony in the future. Well, Toronto's Citizen Lab has issued a report on the 2022 Winter Olympics app called My 2022. The China is requiring all athletes, audience members and media to use for daily COVID monitoring. Anybody who's going to be involved in the Olympics, all visitors traveling from outside China to the Beijing Olympics must download the app 14 days before they travel to China and start recording daily COVID statuses. Foreign visitors must also upload passport details and travel and medical histories. Now, though, COVID tracking is the main purpose, the app also includes the ability to do some voice chats. There's some social stuff, make file transfers, read Olympics news. It's designed to do a little bit more than just, you know, have your medical history involved. Citizen Lab, though, found some things that's not super surprised about. There is a feature to flag things as politically sensitive, a list of censored words as well. The words list isn't active, so it would be a boilerplate addition to any Chinese made software. Not a huge surprise. But Citizen Lab also asserts that the app's encryption has a flaw that could be exploited by attackers to intercept voice audio and file transfers. If you were to use those features of the SAP, it also says that server responses could be spoofed to show fake fake instructions to users and confuse them. The company that made the app didn't respond to Citizen Labs to disclosures, but state run Global Times reported that all personal information will be encrypted to ensure privacy. OK, well, you believe them or you don't. Several countries have recommended that their athletes use rental or disposable phones, burner phones and computers and new email addresses meant only for use in connection with the Olympics. Yeah, so I mean, Global Times is not wrong. Citizen Labs didn't say there wasn't encryption. They just said the encryption had vulnerabilities in it that could let you get around it. So, you know, it'll be encrypted just not well. The doors locked, but the windows are all open. Yeah, the door, the door is locked. I mean, there's a few people might have the key besides you, but it's definitely locked. Yeah, I don't know. This none of this surprises me. I think it's gotten a lot more play just because it's China. And you know, that list of censored words and stuff, it's like you're not going to have a piece of software made by a Chinese company that doesn't have that in the source code somewhere. The fact that it's not active, I think is more of a surprise to me than the fact that the list is even there. But I would like to see this company respond to Citizen Labs responsible disclosure, especially because athletes from all over the world are going to be forced to use this. You want it to be secure because it's got their passport information and everything in there, their health. Some of their health information is going to be in there. It's important stuff. It's just interesting to me to see the recommendations to people who are attending the Olympics be not unlike the recommendations I would make to someone who's going to DEF CON for the first time. I had the same thought. It's so funny. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, oh, you might want to use a burner phone. Definitely turn off all your devices. Yeah, it's like the nation of DEF CON. In December, we did a know a little more episode about the problem with C-band 5G rollouts and airlines. We talked to airline captain and computer scientist Brian Hoffman about that. But here's the short version. If you don't have time to go listen to that entire episode, AT&T and Verizon want to roll out new 5G service in a bit of the spectrum that the FCC has authorized them to use. That part is in controversy. But the spectrum happens to be near spectrum used by some airplane equipment, particularly something called radar altimeter or radalt, which is used often for landing in poor visibility, you know, to tell you where the ground is kind of important when you're landing a big old airplane. The FAA worries that some radalt equipment, especially older equipment, may be affected by C-band 5G transmissions, since some equipment uses a little more bandwidth than it was designed to, than it's supposed to. So it's, you know, the truth on the ground is different than the truth on paper. C-band service happens without disruption to airlines in other countries, though. And the FAA says that it's different here because, A, C-band and equipment spectrum are closer to each other in the U.S. than they are in other countries. And the 5G service being launched here uses higher power levels. The FAA says it will not allow flights to use uncertified equipment near 5G broadcast, which could cause flights to be delayed or diverted during poor weather if those 5G broadcasts are happening. Sunday, the FAA certified two models of radar altimeter for use at the 88 airports expected to be most affected by C-band rollouts. That's about 45% of the aircraft, but that leaves a lot of aircraft still uncertified. And the telcos have agreed to buffer zones where they will not have C-band transmissions near the runways of 50 airports in the U.S. That includes big ones like LA, New York and Chicago. That brings us to Monday when the executives of 11 airlines signed a letter saying these measures are not enough to avoid significant disruption to flights and asking the U.S. government to intervene and delay the 5G rollout longer. They painted a picture of, you know, half their fleet's being grounded and not being able to fly in the fog and rain. And so Tuesday, AT&T and Verizon both complained but agreed to postpone the rollout once again at a limited number of towers around certain airport runways beyond the 50 they had previously agreed to create buffer zones near. And that's where we're at on that now. So, Tom, with the FAA saying, well, this radar equipment, particularly older equipment, it's not going to play nicely, that is not something that can be handled at the airport level in order to roll this out more smoothly. What do you mean by handled at the airport level? Meaning update your old equipment. Oh, yes. If everybody bought new equipment, that would solve the problem. But you're talking about a lot of planes. You're talking about a lot of cost and you're talking about airlines going like, well, why should we pay to replace perfectly good working equipment when you could just not operate your 5G near the runway? Yeah, I was going to say, Patrick Beltin of lightreading.com wrote a really interesting article about this, where he was actually making the argument that a lot of this it's it's there is the technicality part, the technological part and the safety concerns part. But there's also a political struggle between organizations that that represent the telecom industry and organizations that represent the aviation industry that largely boils down to we agree that some equipment needs to be replaced. We want you to pay for it. And it's both sides saying that. And it comes down to this argument about the agreement that 200 megahertz was an appropriate buffer band between the upper level of the 5G C band that AT&T and Verizon are using, which tops out, I think, 3.98 gigahertz and the low end of radio altimeters, which is around 4.2 gigahertz. And that they said, well, everyone agreed on that. So since you agreed on that and since we went by that, that means that you aviation industry should foot the bill. Whereas the aviation industry is saying, you're pushing this this agenda, this the schedule on us, we're telling you that we need more time for testing for the FAA to certify that we can actually operate in these these these regions under these conditions. So you should really pay for the updates. And that is a large part of this as well. And it's it's always interesting to me to see that that convergence of politics, financial interests and the actual technology and and of course concern for safety all collide because it always leaves you questioning which part is actually the most crucial at this at this point of the conversation. Yeah, Amos, I saw you turn your camera on a producer Amos. I know you've worked on a tarmac or two. Did you do you have a thought on this? Yeah, with the comment of Sarah saying, you know, just we can't we just replace the radar all radar altimeters. Part of the problem there is that each airframe and often each variation of the airframe will have a different form factor for the radar alt and they're very bespoke to a specific line. And a lot of the companies that created these that made them in the first place are either out of business or have been folded into a new business and are no longer making them and providing just enough parts to repair the ones that are there. So actually going in and doing all that, it's not just like a simple box swap. You know, you can't just take a video card out of one computer and throw another and everything work fine. It's sometimes the form factor, the physical form factor, the weight distribution of it. And all that has to play part into retrofitting these older planes. So I can see where the airlines are coming from that it's it's a lot more consuming than than what, you know, than at first glance. But at the same time, I don't disagree with everything. Jonathan Strickland just said that, you know, it's there. And if you're not if you're not using the bandwidth that was given to you, that's a problem with your equipment, not necessarily the cell phone towers. But yeah, it can be a lot more involving just because the physical form factor, the weight of it can shift how the aircraft flies and everything else. It's pretty intense, but it does need to get done. That makes sense, because I've seen several airline commenters say, in some cases, you just have to replace the plane. And that could be why because it's just too old to retrofit. Oh, well, folks, if you like science and tech intersecting like that, check out Nikki Ackerman's new miniseries, scientists in tech on how a researcher is using remote digital cameras to track endangered wildlife. It was in your feed this weekend. You might have listened to it already. So check it out in your DTNS feed right here. Well, one way to make money in our new metaverse, whatever that ends up being is to sell ads. Oh, tech. As an example, the Financial Times sources obtained documents from meta detailing patents on body and facial tracking, including eye tracking that could make virtual experiences more realistic and possibly improve their ad targeting might improve the experience as well. But ad targeting definitely part of the mix. Another method would be to sell you virtual things. And in less speculative news, Coinbase announced that it has partnered with MasterCard so you can buy NFTs with fiat currency if you so desire. Because NFTs record ownership, it's often assumed that there'll be a great way of letting you own and use virtual things in the metaverse because there's a ledger. There's record of all the stuff. Who owns what? Jonathan, you seem to believe that's easier said than done. And we might need to fix a few issues first. In fact, you referenced an article by Intel's Roger Kodori about technical requirements for NFTs. So so what are the technical requirements that give you the most pause? Well, in that in that post that Kodori puts out, he posits that we would require compute power, networking capability, all the bits and pieces that would run this machine of the metaverse at about a thousand times more power than what we currently have at our disposal with cutting edge technology, which is, I would argue, significant. But beyond that, I mean, the tech part is just one issue of it. Obviously, one of the big problems we have is that we don't have a definition for what the metaverse truly is, right? We have a bunch of different companies that are pouncing after this idea of the metaverse, but because we don't actually have a thing to look at and say, here's how it's going to work. That makes a lot of these conversations speculative at best, which creates, I would argue, grounds for disaster if you are someone who's enthusiastic about it, but not informed enough to be super careful, which is why I get nervous about the NFT side. So the way that I see NFTs being positioned right now are often in the sense of this is a way of recording a purchase, whether it's a piece of virtual real estate or an object within a metaverse, or very frequently I'm seeing it described as being able to purchase something within one pocket metaverse and potentially poured it over to other pocket metaverses. So this would free you up so that let's say you're in Meta's metaverse, but you really like the virtual coats that are in Microsoft's version of the metaverse. So you want to go and buy a virtual coat, but you spend most of your time in Meta's metaverse. So you want to bring that virtual coat over to Meta. A lot of people are talking about NFTs being this kind of token that would allow that sort of portability, except that that ignores the need to actually build all that stuff from a coding perspective. And I see a lot of people making an analogy with video games saying, imagine that you're playing like a Call of Duty Warzone and you buy a gun and that and you want to use that same gun in maybe Microsoft's Halo series. You actually have to build all that. You have to include that in the physics of the engine. And because we don't have one cohesive metaverse we're talking about, we're really looking at a lot of walled gardens potentially. I don't know that that's actually going to be how it all pans out. And I worry because the sales pitch could be very different from the virtual reality we actually encounter when it blossoms. Well, and also, OK, so using the gun as an example, say that I pay pretty penny for the gun NFT that can can be ported through the metaverse, depending on where I'm where I'm hanging out, where I might be playing a game, where I might use that. Couldn't you just say, well, I paid this much money and my gun can never miss? And so now my gun is better than everyone else is going like, that's not going to work. No, but I think it's more likely that we're going to see issues where there's going to be these promises made where the people who actually have to build the stuff are the ones who eventually have to explain unless there is deep collaboration, it's just not going to happen. Right. Like that's the real fear. Like, I think we can always define what is possible or not possible within any virtual world. I mean, the rules can be defined by the way the creators who create the world. The other aspect of this, the compute power plays into this, too. I believe anything that at least anything I would call a metaverse would need to be pretty expansive in what you could do, what you encounter, the number of people you encounter. And currently that we see some pretty big limitations, at least on the number of people. Like if you look at Facebook's Horizon Worlds, I think that caps out at 20 people per virtual world. That seems small for a metaverse. Yeah, I don't. So I mean, you could have pockets of that, right, where you're transferring from one to another. But that that I can't imagine that being a seamless experience. And it's like if you're at a party and you're thinking, wow, man, things are really popping in the kitchen, but it is so crowded. There's no way for me to get in there to see what's happening. That's kind of what I think about. And like these are the just the technical issues I see even within a walled in garden. Like if we're just looking at Meta's version of a metaverse, these are our issues that I think are going to take time to solve. And by time, I mean, like a few years. I'm reminded, I mean, we've all seen the hype cycle. We've all been there when something's really been taking off. But I'm always reminded of the 1990s, like late 80s, early 90s, when virtual reality first got its start and everybody was jumping on board until they tried it. And then we're deeply disappointed and the industry died for more than a decade. I'm worried that we're heading toward the same thing with Metaverse right now, because the hype train is just so out of control. And in the meantime, I'm worried about people who get swept up in that and think, oh, I want to buy that virtual pair of sneakers or I want to get that virtual real estate that's next to that rapper that I really like, and then they end up sinking a lot of money into something that never really comes to fruition. That's I always get concerned about that because I never want to see people get burned by their enthusiasm. Yeah, there's a big difference between what you can do today, which sounds like it will be part of the future Metaverse and what the Metaverse, whatever it ends up being ends up being someday, which is, I don't know, five years, 10 years down the road. I mean, think about how long it took the web, which was interoperable from the start to really catch on. It wasn't until like 9899 that businesses really were starting to do it. And it then it crashed and it wasn't till the mid 2000s that it even became common. So this is a situation where like I've definitely used the like, hey, you know, the idea is like somebody is going to just make wizard swords and then anybody can build a game that uses those wizard swords, right? I think that's a great example of how NFTs don't have to just be like weird collectibles. They could be useful, but that also, you know, I think you bring up a good point means only those games that build on that system will be able to use that wizard sword. And there's a long time between now and that becoming a regular ecosystem that you can trust and say like, this is the place to buy the wizard sword that can be used at a lot of different places. Those sneakers, NFTs you're buying now, not likely for you to be able to wear those in the future, because people will say like, oh, yeah, but that was the old NFTs before whatever we end up developing comes into play. Yeah. And I also think that, you know, we're looking at a situation where NFTs may not even be needed if it is like a truly a walled garden experience where we don't see this interoperability between different metaverses, then there's an argument to be made that NFTs might not be needed at all because you could just have that all contained within the one system. NFTs end up being used net while everyone's using AOL. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think back to the old days of the early days of social network platforms where, you know, you just would end up going to wherever your friends were, right? Yeah. There was no there was no guarantee that Facebook was going to win over my space, which feels I feel so old saying that. But like there was no guarantee in the early days that that was going to happen. But, you know, people started to gravitate toward it and it just became kind of an avalanching trend. And of course, there were obviously decisions made at Facebook and decisions made at my space that contributed to that significantly as well. But but then you're like, well, what metaverse do I invest into? If there's one that is only compatible with certain equipment, then you might be sinking a huge amount of money in stuff for what ends up being a ghost town. Translate. Yeah. My GeoCity site is no longer accessible. All right, let's check out the mailbag before we get out of here. Justin wrote in with a joke. Sometimes we like to, you know, we like to kick around some jokes, usually on GDI that we think are funny. Justin had a joke he'd like to share with a group. He says, what vampire does everyone accept? But basically ignore. Like, except like, I accept you vampire. I accept you, but I'm not really paying much attention to you. I don't know, Sarah. What vampire does everyone except but basically ignore? Dracula. You know, I never, I never scroll all the way. I never scroll all the way through a vampire. That's the problem is I just never. You just click OK. I see it. And I'm like, you're fine. Come on in. Oh, shoot. It's a good metaphor because you just click OK. And suddenly it's sucking your blood. We love a good tech joke. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We want to send those jokes. Anything that you hear us talk about in the show or you'd like us to talk about in our future show, please do send your thoughts our way. We really do appreciate all of your emails, jokes or not. We also have some brand new bosses to thank. They include ex-harding, Ben Fiori and Jackson Bueno. All just started backing us on Patreon. So we'd like to thank ex-harding and Ben and Jackson. Yeah. Good stuff. Good to have new bosses, new blood. There's even new folks in the discord now. Welcome, everybody. It's good to have new folks in the house. Absolutely. New blood, get it? Yula and Fires. Thanks also to Jonathan Strickland for being with us. Jonathan's been way too long since we've all been on a show together. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Oh, sure. OK. So I host a show called Tech Stuff as a tech podcast that publishes five times a week. And I also am a co-host on a show called Large Nerdron Collider about geeky news and mashups. And it's really silly. And that comes out on Thursdays with my co-host Ariel Casten. Check it out. Excellent. Well, please do come back early and often. We are live on this show also Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us live if you can. We'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.