 Coming up on D T N S A I that can teach itself why Verizon's 5G is not actually slower than its 4G network, but you should still turn 5G off and that game console that keeps your fried chicken warm. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. It's all like city. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty. Oh, it's our last live show of the year. Very exciting. We were talking a lot about McGruff, the crime dog and Smokey Bear on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that expanded show, go check it out at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit asking for information about the US FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit, which the ACLU says can break or at least believes can break encryption on phones. The lawsuit was filed because the FBI hasn't responded to freedom of Information Act requests regarding the program. Telegram's Pavel Durov announced the app is approaching 500 million users and will begin monetization next year. That's right. Telegram's going to introduce an ad platform for mostly for businesses in the one to many channels. Your private chats will still remain ad free. It may also offer things like premium stickers for sale and all existing features will remain free. They're not going to take something they have now and put it behind a paywall. Telegram also introduced a new feature Wednesday group voice chats. Security firm Celebrite claims it can decrypt messages sent through the Signal app on Android. Celebrite claims to have found a decryption key that unlocks Signal's messages databases. Creator of Signal, Moxie Marlin Spike, notes that the process described by Celebrite used an unlocked Android phone and saying they could have also just opened the app and looked at messages. Yeah, because if the Android thing's unlocked, you could just launch Signal. A lot of things you could do with an unlocked phone. The Wall Street Journal reports that thousands of apps have been removed from the Chinese version of Apple's App Store to comply with the 2016 law that requires video games to be licensed. Estimates of how many titles are removed range from 3,000, according to advocacy group Campaign for Accountability, up to 94,000 apps according to Sensor Tower. Australia began building its national broadband network by forming the NBN company in April of 2009. On Wednesday, Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety, and Arts Paul Fletcher declared the network is complete. 35,000 premises still can't connect to the network, though this is attributed to new construction, which will always be an issue. It also estimates that 230,000 folks don't get speeds of 25 megapits per second or greater. That's likely in part due to the network being fiber to the node, not to the home, but legislation governing the build requires it to complete by December 31st. So they declared it complete. Now it's met the deadline. It's darn near complete. It's pretty much complete, right? All right. Let's talk a little more about Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt, a free encryption service, has come up with a workaround that will make sure its certificates continue to work on older Android phones. If you hadn't heard about this, Let's Encrypt encrypts like a billion different websites. I'm not making that up. It's a billion plus websites and apps out there. And the problem arose because Let's Encrypt is transitioning to rely on its own root certificate rather than one that is cross signed from IDENTRUST. Any new certificate authority has a long rollout like this because you have to get added to the list of trusted CAs by every operating system and browser on Earth. And that takes time. You also have to get every user updated. So Let's Encrypt launched with an IDENTRUST root certificate four years ago. That got it up running faster. Let's Encrypt's own root certificate was submitted four years ago, and it is accepted by all major operating systems. However, that only applies to operating systems that have been updated to update their list of trusted CAs. Meaning people running Android older than 7.1.1 won't recognize Let's Encrypt's new root certificate. You could say, well, why don't they update Android? Well, yes, they should update to Android 7.1.1 and then they would be able to recognize it. But a lot of people don't do that. It's not centrally updated. In fact, about 33.8% of Android's active user base are using versions of the operating system older than 7.1.1. And yes, they should update, obviously. But also, Let's Encrypt didn't want to break apps and websites for all those people using older versions. That would make their older versions even less secure. So they figured it out. Tuesday, Let's Encrypt announced it will receive a three-year extension from IDENTRUST to continue validating these subscriptions for these phones. It's three years enough. What this says to me is that for whatever reason, on the Android side, people are slower to update to newer versions of the OS. That's something Apple is always touting, is if it's some kind of, I don't know, jewel in their crown that so many, you know, the high percentage of people update to the latest OSes. But for whatever reason that is, I mean, I don't know how else they do this other than the delay. What are you going to do? You can't force it. There's no forced updates. You're going to have to, hopefully, the more time means people buying newer phones with better updates and or the older handsets get updated. I mean, my question before our show today was like, OK, well, if it's getting tripped up by a date that is not necessary for it to work correctly, why is there even a date in there? And Tom, you had described, well, you know, if you're making an app that's going to work cross-platform, other apps do actually need that. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the thing is that the CAs, it's secure. It's just secure using a different certificate authority, right? It's like, OK, this certificate authority is secure and it's already in the operating systems. So let's use that one to get launched. And then all the operating systems will update. But and again, stuff like iOS that's centrally managed, they've been able to push out these updates and get people on the updated systems. 7.1.1 is pretty old. That's that's way back there. But just a lot of phones still running it. Well, as Ripple had warned on Monday, this US Security Securities and Exchange Commission indeed filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming a violation of security laws for the sale of XRP cryptocurrency. Both of the co-founders of Ripple are defendants as well as the company itself. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not usually considered securities because they're decentralized, but XRP works a little differently. The SEC claims XRP was controlled by one company at its launch, which it was, making it subject to securities law, which would have it act more like a stock than a currency. Ripple claims XRP is separate from the company and has been decentralized in the in the subsequent years after it was introduced. This is a fascinating story to me for a lot of reasons. I have, I do not own any cryptocurrency at all. Certainly not XRP. So I, this is not something that that affects me personally, but some people that I know, dabble on this quite a bit. And boy, was there a flurry of, you know, selling off and oh, how do you think that, you know, how, how low is it going to get? And this is this really bad lawsuit. And, you know, and I, I pulled a few of them this morning and said, Well, what do you think? Is it a currency or is it a security? Because I think a lot of us kind of go, Hmm, okay, well, Bitcoin, people know Bitcoin, Ethereum also the SEC has ruled in the past works like Bitcoin decentralized. There is no person or entity or company or something that has been, you know, DM day company that is in control of what's going on there. And so that's why it is not a security, but XRP was absolutely in the hands of one company. I think there were something like 100 billion XRP tokens that were in least unleashed to the world. And many of those tokens still belong to the co-founders. So, you know, it dipping in price isn't great for them, but it does seem like a security to me. And I would, I would love anyone to chime in who thinks otherwise because some of this stuff can be really convoluted. Yeah. According to the Howie test, which is apparently the Supreme Court case that is the standard for assessing whether something's a security or not. There's a three part test. It has to be an investment of money. Okay. Checkbox. Definitely an investment of money. A common enterprise, number two and number three, a reasonable expectation of profits derived from the efforts of others. In other words, you're not putting in the work. It's not a multi-level marketing scheme where you have to sell the Amway. Somebody else is doing the work and you can cash in. So I think, I think it checks off that third box too. Reasonable expectation, right? Not guaranteed, but like, hey, it might go up and then we all make money. The question seems to me to center around that second one. Is it a common enterprise? Because the difference between Bitcoin is like, it's not common. It's decentralized. Nobody owns Bitcoin. It's out there in the world and there's no one Bitcoin company that controls all the Bitcoin. And what SEC is saying is that this was pitched as an investment by Ripple. And they were saying, buy our coin that we will put out there and control and then you'll make money. And to the SEC, that sounds like an investment. Well, it sounds like no matter what, no matter how we define it or no matter how even historical cases have defined it, this is where we're going to find out how the US government defines it if this lawsuit ends up in their favor. So from here on out, it seems like that will be pretty clear or maybe we'll have clear case law on what defines that. Yeah, maybe there will be a lawsuit. We'll see how it goes. Well, folks, joining the conversation in our Discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. And tell us whether you think it's a security or not. You may have seen some flashy headlines out there that Verizon's 5G network is slower than its 4G network. That's not exactly true. PC Mag Sasha Segan has done the Lord's work writing up the actual story, so we will have a link to that in our show notes. Please go read that if you really want to understand it. But here's the short version. 5G is a system that delivers improvements in capacity and latency and sometimes speed, but mostly capacity and latency. See our Know a Little More episode at know a little more dot com on 5G. If you want to understand that more in full Verizon has chosen to operate its 5G service in the millimeter wave spectrum. That has some speed advantages because it has really wide channels. The band width, the literal width of the band it operates in is better, but millimeter wave has a hard time going through walls. So in places where millimeter wave doesn't work or they haven't got it up and running, Verizon is using something called dynamic spectrum sharing or DSS. That lets Verizon run the 5G protocol with its capacity and latency improvements and even some speed efficiencies. On the same spectrum that it's running LTE. Sharing spectrum between two services, though, means one gets prioritized and another always suffers. And in this case, because still more users on LTE, LTE gets prioritized and 5G gets the scraps. Why are they doing that? Well, Verizon wants to show you a 5G symbol on your phone. So if you don't have a 5G phone, you're never going to notice this. You'll just get LTE. Everything's fine. But if you have a 5G phone, Verizon will force you to use the dynamic spectrum, the DSS 5G, when you could be using LTE otherwise. The 5G system isn't worse, but it's just starting out. And as I mentioned, its big advantages are in capacity and latency, not speed. Whereas LTE has been out for a long time and sometimes these most advanced 4G systems can deliver higher speeds than these beginner 5G systems. As 5G gets updated and rolls out more and gets advanced and developed, that will be true less often. And eventually 5G will always be faster. But on the smaller channels, remember Millimeter Wave has those big wide channels, you have smaller channels that are being shared. 5G is getting squeezed into the empty corners. And on average, you'll be about the same, sometimes slower than your LTE usage. Segan founded tests, it was almost always slower. In fact, he also found some latency disadvantages, which shouldn't happen. But on DSS, you got a lot of negotiations going on, so maybe that explains that. But you don't even get that advantage. Verizon could just deliver you LTE and call it 5G. AT&T did that with 5G, but Verizon is actually trying not to lie, so give them points for that. Until Millimeter Wave Services ubiquitous from Verizon, though, Segan recommends you just turn off 5G and force your phone on a Verizon network to connect to LTE. And for now, you'll get faster service. So a friend of mine had gotten an iPhone 5G capable and is on Verizon. This is a month ago now or so. And she sort of says, well, 5G is the worst. I can't believe how awful this is. And I was like, well, hold on a second. Like, where are you and what are you doing? And there's no way that that's really true. But this actually lays out exactly where her problems were, because she didn't realize, oh, you know, in the past, if you're on LTE, because I have Verizon as well. So I know, you know, sometimes I have spotty internet around where I live as well. You know, it'll drop down to 3G. If I'm really unlucky, it'll be 1X, but you know, I can, it sort of does the work for me. But it sounds like at this point, if you've got issues and you're on that 5G network, you should manually drop down to LTE. Yeah. Remember the old thing at conferences was like, turn off 3G and get back to the edge network. It's actually faster right now because nobody's using it. Oh, the edge network. Yeah, but you're basically describing the capacity problems that existed before this that 5G is supposed to address. And one of the problems that we just sort of have right now that we can't help is we don't have any big conferences to sort of go test this on. So my AT&T 5G coverage, I'd love to see how that did in a big Vegas conference or a BlizzCon type event or something. Because that's where that potentially will shine. The capacity will be better, not necessarily your download or upload speeds, although I'm doing pretty good. I'm like 112 up or 112 down and 10.11 point something up, which is pretty solid for what's happening in my network. You're on AT&T, though. AT&T, yeah. So that's the big difference there. I'm on T-Mobile. My 5G doesn't seem particularly faster, but it's good. Yeah. But wouldn't it be great to get some real-world testing of the capacity thing? Because to me, we're at speeds already that are already phenomenal for a mobile device where it's already pretty great. Not that it can't get better, but what can get better is actual ability to fill a space with 20,000 people and have them all be able to get their stuff. And internet of things and sensors and all of that. And the problem is this dynamic spectrum sharing is sharing the spectrum. Right? So it's got the capacity advantage, but it doesn't get the spectrum. The capacity, even if it can handle a bunch of connections, it may not be able to give them the speed because it's squeezing it through this extra spectrum. And 5G just isn't faster yet. It will get there, though. And LTE was the same way. Some of the first LTE was not appreciably faster than 3G, but it's got a higher ceiling to it than LTE. We've about squeezed all the speed out of LTE that we can. Well, let's see if we've squeezed all the brain power we can out of DeepMind and talk about this. DeepMind's MuZero algorithm has been able to learn how to play go. You know the game go. There's also chess, shoji and several Atari games without being fed the rules of how to play. I assume Atari because there's a simplicity to those. Anyway, previous algorithms used a look ahead search system, a model based system based on a model free system or a model free system. MuZero uses a combination of these. It makes a model but doesn't try to model everything. Its model is made of these three important elements. Number one, the value of how good its current position is. Number two, the policy of which action is best to take. And three, the reward of how good its last action was. Sounds like my average morning. It can learn from iterations on this model without having to gather new data from the environment. It just gets better with practice and this is similar to what humans do. So if this sounds familiar, maybe you do it. We don't obviously model the entire environment when we see dark clouds on the horizon, but we still know it's likely to rain by seeing that. MuZero or MuZero is just as good at chess go and shoji as AlphaZero is and better at Atari games than all previous algorithms. So I jump up there. Next, DeepMind wants to explore how MuZero will handle the multiplayer games like poker and bridge. Real-world uses include video compression, which looks like it might reduce bandwidth by 5%, which may not seem like a lot, but it actually is. It also could be helpful with digital assistance robotics and predicting protein folding. Freely available information about MuZero is used in the U2 surveillance plane ARTU and Mu algorithm that assisted a U.S. Air Force pilot in hunting missiles. Yeah, we talked about that last week. Yeah, big advancements in AI, Tom. Happy times if you want human robots. I'm ready. I mean, you mentioned Scott like some Atari games might not be that hard. Maybe that's good for this algorithm. But chess is. I love the idea that it's sort of like, okay, don't know what I'm doing, but I'm just going to observe long enough. I'm going to pick up little notes from people who are better than this than me at this than me, whether they're humans or otherwise. And then I'm going to get better over time. And that is so human-like, isn't it? Yeah, but even more so. And it's only playing against itself. It doesn't even get to see experts, right? It's just like, huh, that didn't work. Let me let me try it again, see if I can get better at it this time. And that would take us forever to do if we were just playing against ourselves, but it can do this millions of times a second. So it can practice a lot more. The other thing is, I mean, you guys made a crack about Atari being easier. Atari is harder for computers. Right. Because you can know exactly where to go in chess, right? It may be hard to master, but it's easy to play. Atari, on the other hand, even the simplest game like Combat or something has way too many rules, way too many exceptions. It's really hard if you started to try to write down like, okay, assume somebody knows nothing about video games. How would you explain? Like there's a lot of intuition in video games, which is why that's actually a harder problem to master. And why it's really interesting that Mu Zero is better at Atari than any of their previous algorithms, because the previous algorithms, they tried to teach. They tried to give them rules and said, okay, this is the environment. This is the model you're going to go from. And with Mu Zero, they said, just figure it out and it was able to figure it out. Yeah, with chess, it's, you know, the math is a little simpler. It doesn't seem like it, but it is. You basically have pieces that can only move a certain way. Every single piece on the board has a limited set of movements and you have a limited set of cause and effect when it comes to chess. And you can kind of plan way out better as a robot half the time than people can. But when it comes to, like you said, combat, every turret rotation, every position on the map, every wall that may or may not be within your line of sight, every ricochet point. All of that stuff, plus just the general intuition of movement and when to move and why to move and why is it smart to move now and dodging. Like when you really start to think about it, it is crazy how complex that stuff is. And there's a reason why even the best advanced AI in video games as presented to the player usually isn't the AI itself being great AI. It's usually the game being really good at fooling you, the player into thinking that AI is smart. It's just doing things visually and stuff to sort of play with your brain, but really it ain't that smart. So this is a huge step forward regardless. And you know, I don't want to play, I don't want to play combat versus this robot. I'm terrified how I do. I can't wait for the Queen's Gambit season two where it's just robot against robot. Who's the smarter algo? Without AI. Yeah, this is not generalized AI yet, which is the ultimate goal. Like an AI that you don't even have to tell it anything and can just observe the world around it because they still had to give it a model. And they still like made that model work for games. And this model that they made, even though it's a very open-ended three-part model like Scott described, may not work so great for poker. They might have to tweak it a little. So we'll see what happens when they start adding extra players. You know, this was only doing either single player or two-player games. But it's a big advance. It's a big advance nonetheless. Pretty cool. Well, going into holiday season or the tail end of it really at this point, we felt this story was appropriate today. KFC, yes, that KFC and PC hardware manufacturer Cooler Master have unveiled a prototype game console that has a drawer to keep food warm. For instance, fried chicken you might have bought from KFC. They didn't exactly release specs, but there is a custom coloring system that takes heat from the rig and then directs it into the food drawer. So it's kind of just dealing with itself in many ways. It will also supposedly have a top Intel CPU, ASUS hot swappable mini GPU and one terabyte MVM ESSD from Seagate all inside. Apparently it will be capable of 4K at 240 frames per second. We don't have a price and we don't have a release date, but I want it to be real and I don't even need it KFC. This is just fun. But we full well know this is a publicity stunt. But it's a pretty good publicity stunt. Listen, if it's real, then it's sure. I mean, it's a stunt in timing, but if it's real, make the thing. I would love one just to have one and say I own one, but I don't think there we were talking before speculating on whether they could even approve something like this. Have a UL listing for something that had greasy fried chicken warming in it and probably not. But well, you would have to get FDA approval too, right? Right. And don't forget this is a year. Well, last year they made they had a video game, a dating simulator called something. I forgot the exact name is a KFC themed dating sim on steam. And it was a good actually good version of one of those kinds of games in that genre. And then this year we not only get this weird console thing, but this is the same year they put out a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie dedicated to the Colonel and a spicy romance. Or whatever they put on their tag line. Yeah, like they are so weirdly somebody. Okay, I don't know who it is, but I'd love to know who's in charge of all of this stuff because it's great. I love it. Mario Lopez is Colonel Sanders. Right. Yes, he is. And he's all salt and peppery and got the beard and the tie and everything. The Bolo is great. Terrible, but great. I don't even want to eat this chicken. I don't want. I don't like their chicken. No offense to KFC. I'm interested in your chicken, but I am interested in your PR. This is just a food warmer. Like every, you know, even our pre-sure, everyone's like, oh, the chicken is going to be so greasy. It's going to be spilling everywhere. It's like, you put anything in there. I don't know. Keep your tea warm or something. You want to put a liquid in a piece of I performance electronics. I don't know. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not lost on me that it's Christmas time. And Christmas in Japan means KFC. You know, millions of people across Japan have got their order in for a big bucket of KFC. If you're laughing at me right now, you don't live in Japan or you don't know about this. It's huge there. And so this kind of ties in with that too, right? Gaming culture, Japan, Christmas time, KFC. It's all tied together. Used to be, you could count on Burger King was the company you counted on for this stuff because they would do like weird times with the king and they had that stealth game where you'd walk around as the Burger King and try to, you know, surprise people. Or whatever. I think it was called Sneak, I think it was called Sneak King and you can only buy it in a drive up at a Burger King. What do you surprise them with? No, you were just. And you were freaky and you and the goal was to not get caught until you had to freak somebody out. So they really leaned into how creepy that King face was. And now it's KFC's turn and bad. Maybe it's the same people who knows who's doing this. Well, this is a silly if enjoyable story, but let's get serious and check out the mail bag. Shall we? Scott Scott Johnson, different Scott wanted to clarify something about battery technology because we're talking about this whole Apple car rumor that has resurfaced and what it's all what it all means. Scott says lithium iron phosphate batteries are actually lithium ion batteries. They're just a specific type of a lithium ion battery compared to lithium cobalt dioxide or lithium magnesium oxide, which are lithium ion battery chemistries. People are most accustomed to seeing other advantages to lithium iron phosphate batteries over lithium ion batteries, which again are, you know, that's more of a blanket term. Besides safety are that they support a much higher discharge rate and last significantly more charge and discharge cycles. They don't have as high of an energy density, but the longevity and safety advantages are significant enough when it comes to something like cars to make the compromise. It's a matter of accepting either lower driving range or finding a way to fit more batteries into the vehicle. Scott says I actually own and use a few of these batteries myself. Their differences and advantages are the reason that I chose them. You know, I was I was telling Sarah earlier like part. There was something tickling me in the back of my brain about this where I'm like, but aren't pretty much all battery tech lithium ion. So thank you, Scott for explaining that this this is in fact a lithium ion. It's just a different kind of lithium ion. I appreciate that. And thank you for sharing your expertise. On this. It also makes sense why they were at why this sources were emphasizing the structural changes that would make the battery smaller if you've got to have a little different energy density going on. That was fascinating as well. Indeed. Hey, if you got feedback that helps us make our show, the best it can be. We love it. Scott, thanks so much. And everybody who sends us feedback all the time. Keep it coming. Feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We'd like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including today, Craig Meyer, Phillip less and Dan Colbeck. Also, thanks to the one, the only Scott Johnson going into a nice holiday season with your family. I hope what else is going on? So much stuff, but I would direct people to the sillier part of my life, which is a little comic strip I create each week called Fred and can. You'd find it at Fred and can dot com. I've talked about it on the show before, and it's going to be the last couple of episodes and maybe the next one will be all holiday related and had a really good time making it. So if you want to check it out and check it out on the weekly sign up for it over at Fred and can dot com. Oh, folks, this is the last daily tech news show. We're recording of the year. You've got more coming in your feed, but we already did those. So for us, this is it for 2020. But tell you what, man, back in March, I was not so sure how we were going to make it through this year and y'all rallied. So thank you for supporting the show. Every single person, if you're a patron, huge thanks for staying a patron. If you just listen to the show and you get the feed with ads, that's definitely helping us as well. And those of you who spread the word and bring in new listeners, I could not be more shocked with how well this year has gone for the show. And that's all because of you. So really, really appreciate every single one of you out there. Thank you again for listening to us this year. And special shout outs to everybody at patreon.com. We are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. As Tom mentioned, we're going into some pre recorded stuff, but we're back tomorrow with our retro show. It's a lot of fun. I've already been there. It kicks off our special holiday pre recorded programming. We are also streaming them at the regular time on Twitch live all through next week. So you can join as usual. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Oh,