 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Jim Hart, Logan Larson, Mike Akins, and Jason P. Martin. On this episode of DT&S, be it Storm, Earthquake, or otherwise, Patrick Norton is going to help us prepare for keeping the internet working in disasters. Plus, the world reviews Meta's new Ray-Ban smart glasses, and Qualcomm is making Risk 5 chips for watches. Is it risky? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 17th, 2023, in Los Angeles, on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Secret Brunker, who needs a name? I'm Sara Lane. At the edge of the 314, I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. And I suppose you're wondering why we've called you all here today. Yeah, why am I here? No, why we've called them, the listeners, all here. I have a fantastic new soap product I'd like to tell you all about. We're going to get right to that, Patrick. But first, the quick hits. Apple announced a new affordable Apple pencil on Tuesday with a USB-C port for $79 available in early November. The new pencil is designed for things like note-taking, sketching, annotating, and journaling, and is compatible with any iPad that has a USB-C port. The new Apple pencil magnetically will attach to your iPad, but magnetic wireless pairing and charging is just for the Apple pencil to 2nd Gen. Now, those of you who listened to Monday's DTNS after they announced this is not going to be as impressive, but I called this. I called this on Monday's show before they announced it, just saying. The use of pass keys continues to increase. Pass keys let you log in securely without having to manage or remember complex passwords. WhatsApp enabled pass keys for Android users using facial recognition, fingerprint scan, or secure pin. There's no word when that will come to WhatsApp's iOS app. And Amazon has enabled pass key support for its site, though it does not appear to work yet on its apps. And it also seems to continue to ask you for a second factor authentication code, which is not necessary because pass keys are designed to eliminate that, but maybe they'll work that out later. Xiaomi announced a new Android based operating system. It's calling HyperOS will replace me UI after 13 years. Coming first to Xiaomi's 14 series of devices. HyperOS is designed to go beyond just smartphones, tying into its entire ecosystem of products across 200 categories, like smart home devices, cars, and more. The US continues to try to stop China from accessing chip technology, particularly for AI uses. The US Commerce Department announced Tuesday that more high end AI chips are now banned without a license. They're not really banned. It's just saying you can't sell them to anyone in China unless you get our approval and we aren't going to give a whole lot of people approval. Companies must also notify the government of any sales to China of so-called gray zone chips. Those are ones that are almost as powerful as the one on the restricted list. The US can deny sales of those gray zone chips on a case-by-case basis. So you just have to say we're selling them and then after the fact the US might go, you need to stop that. Nvidia's A800 and H800, which were specially designed AI chips to meet previous restrictions to be sold to China, now fall under the new high end ban. So they cannot be sold without a license to China. The US also closed a loophole that let Chinese overseas subsidiaries transfer chips back to the mainland. So they can't just get them without a license because they're in Austria and then transform to mainland China. And the department indicated it may soon restrict access to cloud computing resources like AWS as well. They have not done that. They say they're thinking about doing it. The US based semiconductor industry association for the first time objected to these new restrictions, calling them overly broad and claiming they don't do anything to increase national security, but do reduce sales. The restrictions do not apply to chips used in consumer products, that's important. So phones, laptops, game consoles do not fall under these restrictions. Meanwhile, in some related chip news, Bloomberg reports chip stocks lost $73 billion in value on Tuesday after the new restrictions were announced in an otherwise upmarket. Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared at 10 cents honor of Kings tournament in China. And TSMC has decided not to build a one nanometer plant in long-tongued Taiwan after residents protested relocation, but in saying they weren't going to do it there, they revealed they're working on a one nanometer plant. For those who aren't restricted from buying its chips and Vidya announced its older RTX 20 series GPUs can now use RTX video super resolution which can upscale video quality playback in VLC as well as Chrome and Edge browsers. The algorithms for the upscaling were refactored to run on the 20 series. Nvidia's Tensor RT-LOM is coming to Windows PCs as well, running RTX and RTX Pro GPUs. The model was released in September for data center chips like the Hopper H100 and Amper A100. Consumers can now take advantage of the model speed which Nvidia claims is four times faster in inferencing workloads. All right, let's talk about those new smart looking glasses. Yeah, so early reviews are in for folks who have been testing out Meta's new Ray-Ban MetaSmart glasses as they're now known. To refresh your memory, they're VR AR capable, but they don't have a heads-up display. This is not Google Glass. They do have a camera to record video and take photos, five microphones for voice commands to hear you and know what you wanna want them to do, and small speakers near your ears for playing sounds. Nothing too crazy. You pair them with a phone, not unlike how you would with a Bluetooth headphone set. And gadget notes that the glasses now turn on when you pull them out of the case and put them on, which gets rid of the power switch, so it makes them a little bit lighter and more form-fitting than the older models have. Reviews are in the eye of the beholder. See what I did there? But there is some consensus in general on the good and the bad from what we've read, the good. They look more like Ray-Bans. Ray-Ban is, there are two options. We've got Wayfarer models and the new Headliner models. And they look more like just wearing regular glasses, which a lot of people have had issues with older models in the past. Don't feel heavy. They have better audio capability, better video capability. You're limited to 60 seconds at a time, but when you're on the go, that's sort of what they're known for. You can send photo messages to, with your voice, to Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, that kind of stuff. You can stream to Instagram and Facebook live. But again, this is the metaverse, and that's where some of the cons come in. Meta AI is limited, first of all. So the knowledge cutoff, which many large language models or AI models do have, is December of 2022. So if you were to say something like, tell me when is high tide in Jenner, California today? It's not gonna know that because it's pulling from a different data set. You're also stuck inside the metaverse. So if you use Instagram a lot, if you talk to people on WhatsApp all the time, if you're using Facebook Messenger for a lot of things or Facebook itself, maybe this is not a problem. For a lot of content creators, it would be limiting. And then the last dock off of it is short battery life. Four hours on a single charge. So if you're out and about during the day, maybe this doesn't matter. If you're really looking to, I don't know, maybe you're on vacation and you're at the beach and you're going ham with video and live streaming. Well, four hours might limit you. So overall, reviewers say, hey, glasses are better than before. Tom, I know you've got the first gen model. So I'd like to hear your thoughts, but most people probably don't need them. Yeah, it looks like creators, specifically like influencers, people who are going to post a lot, specifically on meta platforms, not going to help you on Snapchat. I mean, I guess it could. You can take the photos, import them into the meta app, then export them out, then upload them to Snapchat, but the integration isn't there. So you're more likely going to be using this to go live on Instagram, go live on Facebook, post things there. And if that's the world you're in and there's a lot of people living in that world, these are better than holding up a phone. They're not as high resolution necessarily, but it's a lot easier if you're like at an event, where everybody's filming. So we're not talking about a situation where it's going to be annoying that you have these glasses on filming, but everybody's got their phones up. Maybe it's concert or something. You could take 60-second clips, a little limiting the 60-second clips on what you can do, but for a lot of reasons, that's fine. And that's better than what they had before. Photos are better resolution. This is getting there. The thing they nailed is the form factor. Like you said, Sarah, these aren't meant to be VR or AR. These are just smart glasses. They're meant to look like glasses. They're meant to not really stick out unless you've got video recording which they flash a little light. The rest of the time, they should just look like Ray-Bans. Yeah, Patrick, I'd be... I already feel like I know the answer because I know you, but Ray-Bans starting at 229 US for the Wayfair model. Headliner, a little bit of a rounder look, going for 329. Ship in October 23rd. Are you in line? No, I'm not in line. I mean, I was giggling quietly to myself when Tom said, you know, this is less intrusive or less, you know, if you're sitting at a concert and taking that picture and I was laughing because I was at a show not too long ago and like half the audience was filming it with cell phones. I'm like, Jesus, put the phone away and dance. And... All right, old man. I was definitely like, I owned Ray-Bans that are older than you and I, Tom. And it's funny, I will say they look a lot better. They no longer have the fat, you know, arms off the side of the ridiculous frames. They're no longer looking like you planted some weird cyber thing on your face, like a punk gadget. You know, I love the idea that they have more base built into them. You know, you know, given whatever base you can get out of that tiny little speaker. This is all wonderful things. I'm just kind of curious to see where this evolves. I'm kind of curious to see where meta evolves. You know, it's, I prefer to, and again, Tom, feel free to call me an old man or anyone else in the podcast. But, you know, I prefer framing my images where I can actually see them, usually on the back of a phone these days, although occasionally I still use a camera. You know, I think it'll be interesting to see what people do with these or continue to do with these as they evolve. It's, you know, it's better. It's lighter. It's, you know, I prefer to be more determined and composed. I feel like you're just saying you don't want this product, but for the product that it is, and there are people who do want this product. Well, I feel like what Patrick's saying is I want something that feels more like a camera. You know, if I'm going to take photos or videos. I feel like Patrick's saying I want a camera. Yeah. Well, or that. Or that. Well, and I'm more or less, so that I can frame the picture in the lens, right? So that I am, that I have the control over the image composition that I want while I'm wearing the glasses. They become vastly more compelling. You know what I mean? This is, this to me is like watching, you know, a small child kind of do this and eventually hit the frame and take a picture, right? Because, you know, I'm going to, you're going to evolve over time and idea of what you're capturing, especially with a wide angle lens. Hey, I'll take care of it. I'll take classes, right? That'll take care of that. You know, a lot of chance solves this. Yeah, I've had a lot of time cropping images in the last year. So I'm also very into like intentional creation rather than, you know, saving a weird. And this is not for that. There's, well, actually it could be for that. I think, in fact, there's a little, I guess what I'm arguing is this is a different way of taking pictures. This is a different way of recording things. And there will be a discipline grow up around it if it ends up taking off as a category, which it may or may not, right? Or there may be three or four people who own parts and therapies to keep their art going forward for the next 20 years. There are a lot of creators that I follow who do, I mean, many of them are dog owners, but a lot of it is like, you know, outdoor stuff, hiking. And, you know, I can't tell you how many times even yesterday, you know, I'm like fumbling with my phone like, oh, Otis looks really cute. Ah, you know, let me capture this moment type thing. It's not really that I consider myself an influencer, but some people do take that pretty seriously. Yeah, a lot of people mount GoPros to themselves right on their head or something. It's a little bit more of that category that I think could be pretty useful. There's a whole category at TikTok and YouTube Shorts where I think these are gonna be like as they get better, these will be everywhere. Totally, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've had folks on to talk about the open source chip instruction set risk five last week's episode of Know a Little More, actually dug into that and explained what it is and where it came from. It's like ARM in that it's an instruction set that companies can license and build their own chips from except the license is free since risk five is a royalty free open standard unlike ARM. This week Qualcomm announced it is building a risk five based platform for Google's Wear OS smartwatch operating system. Qualcomm says the addition of a risk five option to its ARM based options, they're not stopping the ARM stuff, they're just also making a risk five based one should reduce time to market for smartwatch manufacturers because they don't have to worry about some of the licensing. Qualcomm also says it should have performance and power advantages over the ARM based options as well. Of course we'll wait to see on that but Patrick, I know you haven't really been following risk five super closely but you follow the chips in general. What do you think of this? Sure, it's a funny, right? It's if you listen to the interview that the Verge did a while back with the new CEO at ARM. He's like, well, you know, if there's a display ARM's controlling the display but if there's a cheesy timer in the background that maybe turns the microwave on and on and off that's risk five, right? And this is a challenger to ARM. This is something that Qualcomm would very, very, very, very, very much like to take off because obviously they've kind of had a very, very, very strange split from ARM. You know, it's interesting that when ARM, you know went public, one of the things they did was make sure where is it Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA and Intel all bought stakes in ARM sort of solidifying the relationship between those companies. I think risk five is, you know I think anything open source is generally positive but the thing you hear from, you know the executives at Qualcomm is they really, really, really need software developers to invest in the platform and build on it. And I'm kind of curious if that's gonna happen. You know, because it has advantages and price should be one of them but we'll see how that goes over time. I think it's gonna be a waiting game. Yeah, back in August when Qualcomm joined that alliance to commercialize risk five I was like, yeah, we're gonna see it in embedded systems. We'll probably see it in cars first and over the next couple of years we'll see it move out into other devices. This is super fast to see Qualcomm jumping on this. Of course, this may lead to nothing like you say. It's all about development and adoption but Qualcomm is pushing this a little harder than I would have guessed they are. Also, it's getting some political heat on risk five because it is an open standard and because the US as we heard earlier in the show is really trying to crack down on the export of chip technology to China there's a lot of concern about this being an avenue to go around some of those restrictions. So get ready to see more of that kind of scrutiny being put on risk five as well. Yeah, I mean, on one hand I get the concern and it was legitimate concern, right? If it's open, it's everywhere. It's like, oh, if we could just keep China from using Linux, well, that's not gonna happen, right? But when you look at this, what's kind of crazy is like the arm one, the first arm processor was 1985 and it took a very long time for arm to kind of take over computing the way it has. And, you know, risk five is fairly early on that path so it has a lot of potential. I would be curious to see how long it takes for it to get powerful enough for it to be considered a competitor to the AI chips that everybody is so concerned about. Yeah, yeah, it's a little ways. I feel it's got a ways, yeah. Possibly, possibly. Possibly. Well, folks, if you're looking for a podcast to fill your Android hunger, that empty Android space inside of you, we have got a full meal for you. Android Faithful, hosted by Android chefs, Ron Richards, when played out, devoted exclusively to Android news and information and you can catch it live if you want to, Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. Right now it is at androidfaithful.com all the time. So you can watch it live at those times or you can go subscribe to it right now, androidfaithful.com. Well, as we all know, disasters can strike at any time and depending on where you live, could be any minute now. It's why we recommend you keep multiple backups of your data, for example, in different locations. Can't ever be too safe, better than sorry, but what happens to your internet? And when the internet goes down, how do you back up an internet connection before a disaster hits? Patrick, we know you're a fan of having that BCD and E plan in case of an emergency and you've been looking into this very question. So what do we do? So a couple of things have me think about this. One winter is coming here in St. Louis and we're guaranteed to get at least one major power outage or tree is gonna fall and take out the fiber line in our neighborhood or power line. We also get at least one water main break every winter. So we have, you know, a considerable amount of water stashed inside the house in case of that. But the other thing that kind of happened is there's a nationwide expansion of Starlink that really happened recently. And like a thousand new version two satellites which promise four times the capacity and all the US markets that have been closed to new Starlink customers are now open to new Starlink customers. And that's kind of fascinating to me because, you know, when you look at internet access most of it is based on cables whether they are buried or hung on poles or they are based on distributed wireless networks many of which in some cases in the last one I was involved with was literally distributed network that required devices in houses running power off the house. More traditionally it's a great big tower in the middle somewhere that works kind of like a cell tower but, you know, something I keep coming back to rule number one of emergency prep do it before the emergency. Rule number two of emergency prep plan and practice before the emergency. So you're not like reading the instructions by candlelight. Rule number three of emergency prep expect plan A to fail. It's not a bad idea to have a plan B and a plan C and a big thought is, you know, do you need internet and what do you need internet for? Are we talking like I make my living online and I need it even if a tree takes out a power line for a couple of weeks which happened to a friend of mine not too long ago or I live in a part of the world where weather is trying to kill me and having access to, you know, satellites would make that advantageous like satellite weather information or something like that. You know, the folks in the weather is trying to kill me part of the world probably already know that text works when, you know text messages work best and most other things don't. So it was meeting at a pre-assigned place, call times, leaving a paper note on somebody's door or mailbox, technically leaving it in the mailbox is illegal, please don't get angry at USPS. Weather radios, ham radios, you get the idea. It's kind of funny because we become so dependent on certain tools. For example, you know, using Google Maps to tell us whether or not a road is open, it could be super problematic. So having a list of what you need to know or do on a regular basis and alternative ways to getting to that other than through your cable modem is probably a good idea. So we're talking about internet. Your phone's almost always your first fallback and probably your own fallback if you're not at home. One, always have spare power. I keep a 20,000 milliamp hour power bank in my backpack, the one that's on me pretty much at all times when I'm not sleeping or at home. Important note, not all cell towers have emergency backup power. Some do, but in some cases like one place I was reading about, they had 43,000 cell phone towers and 5,000 or, you know, a wireless company that 43,000 cell phone towers and 5,000 head emergency backup. Oh, Patrick, back where I live in Sonoma County, fire country, quite a few, I learned the hard way some years ago now, thankfully, knock on wood everybody, hadn't had a lot of fires in our areas this year, but when the cell towers would go down, that meant, okay, the Wi-Fi goes down, but the cell service was also put. There was nothing anybody could do about it because they didn't have backup power. It gets interesting, right? You know, one of my neighbors is like, I was fiddling with a weather radio on the porch, I'm like, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, it's nice to be able to know what's coming out of the sky when all hell breaks loose, you know, especially in storm season. And that gets really intense, right? Back in the day, if you had a landline phone, you know, unless the power and the power line, unless the phone lines were toppled, you know, the landline worked even if the house was out of power and it just does not happen in a lot of cases with wireless and, you know, that's your landline, that's your emergency beacons, that's how a lot of regional emergency offices, you know, communicate with the residents of their city or county, it's how we access news, it's how we access Facebook groups or Twitter or whatever systems in place. So, you know, thinking about that, especially if you're in a place like, you know, if all hell breaks loose in Sonoma County and it's on fire, one, hopefully you're out of there long before it's within any number of miles of your house. And two, you know, it's one of those things that sometimes it pays to leave early and leave often, which is a weird sentence saying it out loud, but you know, my folks learned after one of my parents got trapped on an island that was isolated and flooded and overrun by water. And they got real active about leaving before the hurricanes made it to the island in the future. You know, if you're in a part of the world where you're fairly isolated, it's probably better to leave early. So this goes back to what you were saying about satellites though, which is if you lose the power on both your home stuff and the cell towers don't have enough backups, at least the satellite internet hasn't gone out. But how do you get the satellite internet if you don't have power at home? Well, one of the things is, you know, there's anchor and a whole bunch of other companies make portable power batteries. You can make your own, you know, since the lithium ion battery in a box with a device to, you know, convert 12 volts to 120 volts, you know, having a generator, a backup generator, having fuel for that backup generator, at the very least, you know, having a voltage converter and, you know, a half tank of gas in your car is, will give you, will allow you to power everything up, run, check a few things and shut it all down, right? You know, I've been surprised to find emergency power keeping the internet up on, you know, fiber optic or cable systems, even when the power was down. In that case, I may have just been lucky, right? But, you know, the folks out there that live in big snow and hurricane country are familiar with a lot of this, you know, about being self-contained. But, you know, if you are worried about this or if you have to make a living, even when the power lines go down and take your internet with it, you know, the Starlink stuff is looking interesting. And if you have other options, I'd love to hear about them. Do me a favor, tweets at Patrick Norton on the Twitters and I'll try to find some sort of alternative to that in the near future. Well, while you're doing that, you might also be interested in some sort of a golf tournament that you haven't seen before. Netflix announced a new sporting event. I tried. Okay, I tried. Thank you. A new sporting event called the Netflix Cup. Now, you might say, what is the cup? It's a cross-promotional golf tournament where race car drivers from Netflix's Formula One documentary series, Drive to Survive, play against golfers from the series, Full Swing. So, yeah, again, cross-promotional, fun for all, I guess. It all goes down at the wind, golf, golf. All going down at the wind, golf course in Las Vegas on Tuesday, November 14th. Sanctioned by both the PGA Tour and Formula One, so everybody's in accord that this is gonna be fun. Right, these are not sanctioned like we sanctioned Iran. This is sanctioned as in- Very different. Approving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Both. Yeah, sure, do your thing, Netflix. Now, you might say, well, I don't know. Haven't I seen things like this before? And the answer is yes. Warner Bros. Discovery did something similar with something called The Match. It was a series of celebrity golf events, including NFL players that was on TNT and some other places. In other sports bets, Amazon placed a big one with its multi-year deal for the NFL's Thursday Night Football. Many of you might already be going to Amazon Prime Live for that. Apple has deals with Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer. And NBCUniversal's Peacock also has MLB offerings, some of them anyway, and access to WWE content and other events. So sports is where it's hot in streaming, y'all. Yeah, and everybody's been wondering if Netflix is gonna do deals like Thursday Night Football, like Major League Baseball. And they've said, no, it's too expensive, but we have our own way of doing it. And this is it. This is their way of doing it. Coming up with a special event that doesn't, I don't think it affects your leaderboard on either Formula One or the PGA. No, it's like the All-Star game. Exactly. You get to see, well, you get to see golfers play golf, but you're getting them paired up with Formula One race car drivers. So there's a handicap there, I guess. I wish there were two sports I'd like to watch. So that I would watch. This is just, I mean, I don't watch Formula One or golf. So it's not for me. But I like the idea of it. I like the idea that you've got like, hey, we've got some hit shows with a certain demo. Let's see what happens when we put the peanut butter with the chocolate. I think they should put the chocolate with the peanut butter and have the PGA golfers drive the cars with the race car drivers in the passengers. I was reading this. Then who will golf? They can golf afterwards. That makes more sense, actually. You know, have some lunch. Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to hit the mailbag sound yet. Go ahead, Patrick. Oh, no, I was reading this like wonderful sort of lamentation about the end of peak streaming and how the streamers are becoming more conservative like network programmers. And I'm laughing because I'm looking at this and all I can think of is like battle of the network stars. Oh, totally. All those weird 1970s things. Where it's like, well, I like to watch this and I like to watch this. Let's mash them together and they'll do a spoon toss and a sacri... Robert Conrad and Farrah Fawcett in the three-legged race. Here we go. Y'all seeing this in real life? They're still doing this. It's a weird, long tradition. All right, now let's check the mailbag. All right, this one comes from Chip. Chip is in leafy Boston and wrote in with thoughts on how Apple could be securely updating those iPads while they're still in boxes at Apple stores. Chip says, iPhones are shipped with the back of the phone facing the top of the box. The box is thin enough that you could place it upside down on a Qi charging pad and use that as the trigger to wake the phone up. The phone could be programmed that when it's placed on the Qi pad, while in the box it wakes up, sees the internal or hidden Apple Store SSID and then knows to automatically download the latest update from Apple servers. The phone could then check in with those servers. When it's done to report that the update's complete, then put itself back into sleep mode. All of this could be done without losing any battery because it's on the Qi pad. The process would be hard to replicate outside the Apple Store. Chip is talking about people already saying, oh, how is this gonna be broken somehow? As you would need to replicate their internal SSID and even then all that would happen is that it would pull the update from Apple servers. The only risk would be if somebody could figure out a way to man in the middle of that update request and replace it with a tampered version. That seems unlikely though as Apple's OTA update process is pretty secure. Yeah, no, that's good. And Chip, the Qi wireless storage stuff, I assumed because they talked about it being on pads in that German story. I'm like, oh, those are probably Qi pads. So that makes perfect sense. I think you're a hundred percent right on that. The SSID, that's a good one. Ryan and Minneapolis also mentioned that as a possibility. And yeah, then you're just dealing with defense against any kind of man in the middle attack if that's the only thing it could do. But if you're out there thinking like, well, even if they do that, here's how I would try to get around it. I'm curious, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Patrick Norton, I want to see what's in your to-go bag. But until then, and hopefully we never get to that point, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Oh, head on over to tweet at me at atpatricknorton on the Twitters or check out avxcel.com. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. You're not going to want to miss this one. Hitscape founder and venture capitalist, Mark Andreessen wrote a manifesto today called a manifesto for the techno optimist. And in a lot of ways, I'm with him. But he also wrote 5,200 words. So there are a few words that I'm not with him on. We're going to talk about what we think of Mark's cry for help. Stick around. Just a reminder, though, DTNS is live Monday through Friday. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. If you so desire, find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. And just a reminder, we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.