 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you listening right now thanks to all of you including Norm Physicus, Chris Allen, Justin Pruitt, and our brand new patron, Jay. Coming up on DTNS, stop saying autonomous cars are dead, they're just resting. Plus, did MetaPanic announce a new Quest VR headset? And BReal enters the chat. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 1st, 2023 in Greenville, Illinois at the Smart Center. I'm John Merritt. From the loveliest Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Rapaleno. And from Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. California. Am I right, Roger? I know the temperatures are so mild. West Coasters. Yeah. You're not wrong. It's like really nice in California right now and it's super hot out here. All right, let's start with the quick hits. AMC Theatres makes money off tickets and concessions, but as folks started to go theaters less, it started its own streaming video service. They called it AMC Theatres on Demand. Wanted to fill a little of that revenue gap. Well, Fandango, separate company, makes its money off selling tickets for theaters. But similarly, for seeing a gap years ago, bought a video streaming service and then later bought Voodoo and merged them together. So the consolidation continues. AMC Theatres on Demand is being replaced by Fandango's Voodoo, which will still be owned by Fandango, but become the official streaming destination for AMC Theatres patrons. Users of AMC Theatres on Demand have until August 31st to transfer their movie collection over to Voodoo. Well, back in April, Reddit announced it would start charging for API access. It had been offering free API requests before then. According to Christian Selig, the developer of the popular independent Reddit reading app Apollo, Reddit plans to charge $12,000 per 50 million API requests. So based on Apollo's current usage, that would cost them about $1.7 million per month. By comparison, Twitter does charge $30,000 for the same number of requests. Under Reddit's new API pricing, it should be noted bots and academic researchers are not charged. That feature to send out just a newsletter or automatically send blog posts through the email. All newsletter features are available to any WordPress.com blog, even the free ones, but paid plans will have lower transaction fees on newsletter subscriptions, including 0% on the commerce tier. Security company Eclipseum says it's discovered that the firmware for up to 271 gigabyte motherboard models don't properly secure automatic firmware updates. This could let malware hijack the firmware's built-in update installer and effectively make it a backdoor. The up-to-date utility isn't malicious in itself, but Eclipseum says gigabytes of firmware did not properly authenticate code or even consistently use encrypted HTTPS connections over regular old HTTP, making it vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. Eclipseum recommends disabling the app center download and install option in the firmware, blocking as well as blocking the three sites, the uploader contacts and implementing a BIOS level password. Eclipseum passes on to Gigabyte and they are working on a fix. And Motorola officially announced its new Razer foldable phone, the Razer Plus, launched on June 23rd for $999, a 3.6 inch 144 Hertz OLED screen on the front. So when it's closed, that's about twice the size of the one on the Galaxy. You can run full apps on that closed screen, has a usable keyboard, the entire foldable phone uses a Qualcomm 2022 flagship system on a chip, does not leave a gap when it's closed, and is IP 52 water and dust repellent. There's also the standard Razer offering, which is a smaller 1.5 inch screen when closed. That one will use a mid-range Qualcomm SOC, no word on the pricing of release date for that yet. All right, let's talk about this new Quest headset. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Instagram today, today being Thursday, that a Quest 3 VR headset will come out this autumn. A 128 Gigabyte version will cost you 500 bucks. There will be an option with more storage space, didn't give any price on that one though. Zuckerberg said the Quest 3 will be 40% lighter than the Quest 2, run on a newer Snapdragon chip, which seems obvious, but he promised it'll have twice the performance, graphics wise. Your old Quest 2 games will also run on the Quest 3, we got backwards compatibility, and the Quest 2 will remain available. They'll just cut the price, and performance boost will come from a firmware update. Meta will share more details at the Connect event, and you say, oh, well, they're announcing it June, when's the Connect event? September, September 27th. But if you want, you can sign up for more info at meta.com slash Quest. A surprise announcement on Instagram just a few days before Apple's WWDC, where Apple is expected to announce their own mixed reality headset. Justin, what could it mean? That Meta lost the plot when it came to VR and mixed reality. This was the pivot that was supposed to redefine their company, and every move that they have made since then has not landed. They wanted to make these headsets a fleet product for businesses. Not a thing. They have not really advanced the line of the Quest as a mainstream gaming platform that it was certainly on the path for before they decided to make it the entire focus of their company. And let's not even get into the metaverse, how much that looks like an absolutely propped up system. The fact that they're rushing out a half an announcement to an announcement that will eventually be fulfilled toward the end of the summer is kind of desperate. Yeah, and it's interesting that this comes after they already gave a hands-on to Apple Boo Mark Gurman. Very notably, the biggest Apple reporter out there gets a hands-on with the MetaQuest 3, I don't know, like a week ago, and had pretty glowing reviews with the pass-through video and stuff like that. And either that didn't get the reaction that they wanted, or Meta got some information on pricing for what Apple is going to be announcing or something like that to feel like they had to come out and come out with something concrete and something to fill up the news cycle ahead of WWDC. But yeah, Justin, the fact that this kind of came along with their VR gaming showcase that was happening today, too, very much feels like, hey, we're focusing this on a gaming device, an area, a word of the metaverse, at least in this announcement. They showed people gaming in the preview video on that, and that definitely was the focus. Back in March, the estimate was they'd sold 20 million quests all told. Probably the majority of those are Quest 2s, I'd guess at least half, probably more than half. I'll push back a little on the Quest Pro being not fulfilling its purpose. I don't really know what the enterprise sales of it are, and what kind of long-term service agreements they get. A lot of times, when you look at enterprise stuff and think it isn't succeeding because we don't hear a lot about it, but maybe that's doing fine. Nevertheless, it is wreaking of desperation for meta to come out the Thursday before a Monday announcement on Instagram to say $500 in case you were wondering. Does that mean, Justin, we get in the world realm of wild speculation, but does that mean that meta figured out the price that Apple's going to sell its mixed reality headset? Or did they just say, you know, it's going to be a little more than a $500? Let's get that price out there. One of the most long-running Justin Tom back and forths is the idea that I believe failed consumer products say that they're pivoting to enterprise, so they don't have to report earnings and have any kind of footprint. And you seem to buy that, I seem to be skeptical. That being said, the plan for that headset was to be enterprise, and we have not seen a ton of them, and we've seen a lot of the reviews for them be lackluster. And I don't think that that is something that is conducive to getting the kind of sales that they want. As for the price anchoring, almost assuredly, they probably know what this is going to be priced at. One of the games that Apple has long played in the press, and this is going back decades, is they usually leak a price that is way higher than what they're going to actually put it out at. I remember early iPhone articles being like, well, it's going to be a $2,000 phone, which is $1,000 for a phone. No, it was going to be less than that. And so that was the plan that they had from the very beginning. This might be a weaponized opposite version of that. Let's anchor a price that is lower than what we know they're going to go at. Yeah, and I would be shocked if Apple's mixed reality set were $500. That just that seems hard for them to do because even the believable leaks were that Apple was trying to figure out how to get the bill of sale down to and decide whether it should be a loss leader or not. I guess they could, they're Apple, they've got enough cash, they could decide to make it a super loss leader for a while, but I don't expect them to do that. Five hundred, five hundred is Apple watch. Yeah. Yeah, they would not, Meta would not like be this forward with basically just the price and okay, it's lighter and more comfortable. That was like the only other thing we didn't get specifics on a chip inside of there. We got some performance figures, but the idea that they're leading with price, right? They want to the first post about the Apple headset to be it costs four to six, you know, meta-quests and stuff like that. So I don't think that is a coincidence to me that signals that's, I mean, that's obviously their play. Hey, it's cheaper than a PSVR too. It's going to be factors cheaper than, you know, an Apple headset. And we have this catalog of games that we've built up at the Quest two that's highly successful that great. Look, hey, look, they're going to look really awesome on this new headset. One final thing, you don't do this if you are secure with your place in your spot in the marketplace. No, you don't need to remove. Yeah. If anyone out there is wondering about this, you don't go on Instagram with the CEO of the company to announce pretty much nothing but the price. They're like, Oh, it's going to be lighter. What a shock. It'll use a different chip. You know, yeah, that's exactly right. All I will add is that if you are an enterprise user of the Quest Pro, feedback at DailyTechViewShow.com love to hear your stories. And if you're not, please send one in too. We'll see who gets one. All right. Well, the social imaging sharing site Be Real has been expanding its functionality. Its latest test is called Real Chat. They're on brand with this naming convention, a chat feature available to users in Ireland right now. This lets users send messages, images and reactions to friends in private whenever they want. You don't have to wait for the, you know, for the Be Real usual two minute window of authenticity. You can just send messages to your heart's content. This is the latest new functionality added to the app to try and grow engagement. It added a real people feature of curate users last month added the ability to show what you're listening to from Spotify or Apple Music. When you're posting your authentic Be Real moments and also rolled up bonus Be Real posts for users that post when they're prompted, you get two extra ones to post. So Justin, lots of new features from Be Real messaging, kind of a big feature. They said customers wanted it, feel like part of a plan for Be Real or just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks at this point. I think that it's actually just a smart move no matter what. I'm not privy to the growth or stagnation of Be Real, but we do know that it is a class of app that came in for a post Snapchat generation of users, largely aided by the pandemic where they were forced apart, that they could have some element of authenticity and put them in some version of something that's not as important as Instagram, but not as work intensive as creating a Snapchat profile. That being said, if you want to ingratiate yourself within the social fabric of your user base, a chat system is mandatory. It is equally as smart to me as a decision if everything was going great as it is if everything is not as great as you would like it to be and you would indeed want there to be another reason to have people open your app. Yeah, we knew that Be Real's concept of like in the moment real pictures was not going to be enough to continue to grow the audience. We always knew, okay, they're going to come up with something else. This isn't a bad one to say like, hey, those of you using this every day, here's a way to talk to each other more. That gets you to use the app more. It's something people like they did it in Ireland. I guess they think they're chatty in Ireland. They launch all their tests in Ireland. I don't know what they're doing. Now we know the server load for what's the craic being. What's the craic? Yeah. So this all tracks. The second question I've had about Be Real beyond engagement has been, how are you going to make money off this? We still see no clue on that because they're not going to start charging people for chat. So it doesn't answer that, but it does say, okay, this is their first step towards trying to keep people on the app more. Chat opens up some monetization options. You could do the classic sticker pack that's fallen out of fashion, but you could build a there. It's easier to build in services in a way that don't feel obtrusive into chat than they would if they were in your main feed. In a lot of ways, I see them coming almost like trying to do a reverse Snapchat where Snapchat takes off in a lot of ways because it's this disappearing chat app that feels like you can just have one-off conversations. They don't follow you. You don't have to worry about managing them. This kind of feels like, okay, we have this visual aspect of it. Now let's graft on this chat. Hey, this is what the kid's like, but it also feels like a worse version of that because they don't disappear unless you both delete the messages. There's no word about, oh, are these encrypted? Like any kind of security? It just seems, if I'm looking for a secure ephemeral chat, like that's the drawback. And I don't think they're trying to sell it. Rich, you are way overthinking this. This is a standard feature for any kind of social media app in the modern era. I will say which is right. If they wanted it to stand out, they would have launched within an encryption and put a privacy feature on it. Yeah, but that's not their audience. Their audience does not care about that. What I will say is I enjoy using Be Real and I treat it like a little baby bird of a social network that I don't find annoying. And I feel it trying to fly away for me at this point with these, you know, each new feature is this baby bird growing up and it's starting to get little talents and it's clawing up my hand and it's trying to, it's trying to be its own thing. And I just want it to be this non-annoying thing that's very subtle. Are you talking about your kids or Be Real? There are many metaphors that I'm mixing here. However, Be Real, please don't be annoying. I chat feels like of all of their new features. Honestly, this one feels like it has the most utility. I can comment on someone's thing and it doesn't have to be public with all of their friends, even if that is a very curated list. I do enjoy that. I enjoy that that feels very organic to how I want to use Be Real. That being said, I just like, if you're going to do this, we are in a saturated messaging marketplace. I would like it to be a little bit more focused if your whole thing is your ephemeral pose. You're focused on that. You're thinking about it the wrong way. The point isn't that it differentiates itself as the place to talk. It's that you can talk. Your goal is to just get you to open it more than the one time when they give you the two minutes. The community that you create on Be Real is something for which you are able to interact with your friends there. If you created a community, you can now interact with them more. It does not have to differentiate itself in terms of the chat marketplace itself. That being said, Rich, I can only imagine how upset you were when the band you first saw in the club got a record deal. They sold out. I can't believe it. Yeah. No, that tracks. How dare they make a living? Well, folks, we're not on Be Real. Maybe we should be. I don't know. But we are other places on social media. If you'd like to get in touch with the DTNS folks here, go to DTNS Show on Twitter and Mastodon. That's DTNS SHOW. Mastodon server is MSTDN.Social if you need that. And we're Daily Tech News Show on TikTok and DTNS PIX, DTNS PIX on Instagram. For a while now, self-driving cars, autonomous car predictions, were kind of like free beer signs. It was always tomorrow. We'll have them tomorrow, we swear. We'd hear predictions that by a given year, we'd have autonomous vehicles. 2016, we heard Ford and Lyft say it was going to happen in 2021. It didn't. Since then, we've seen ride-hailing services shut down their autonomous divisions. Ford and Volkswagen shut down their Argo AI self-driving venture, and suddenly, self-driving tech seems a little bit further off. But Timothy B. Lee of Ars Technica recently published a post arguing that this, quote, death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated. He points to the slow but significant development of Alphabet's Waymo and GM's cruise services, both of which now offer driverless commercial services. Both companies are still making rosy growth predictions, but Lee argues that these are now informed by real-world knowledge, rather than assumptions of where driverless tech would be. So, have years of crying driverless wolf made us overly cautious to any self-driving promises? Tom? It's like podcasting, right? It's going to replace everything. Oh, it's dead. Oh, wait, it's going to replace everything. Oh, it's dead. I see that cycle happening with autonomous cars. I always felt that it was overblown in its earliest days, and then a lot of folks in our audience are like, it'll never happen, people were saying. It's going to be 40 years, and I'm like, well, that seems a little too long. So, I have enjoyed following the progress, but the progress has slowed over the last several years, and it does feel, and I think Timothy B. Lee has noted this very well and is Ars Technica piece, it is starting to accelerate again. Pardon the metaphor. We are starting to see the expansion in Phoenix of Waymo's service. We see a good chance that crews might in fact be able to get 6,000 vehicles on the road by 2025. These are starting to feel like achievable goals now because of the progress we're seeing. It's slower than the biggest optimist we're saying at the beginning, but it's actually better than the biggest pessimist we're saying. The thing that stands out to me is this idea, back in 2016, I feel like especially when you're talking about maybe the more tech platform company, you're talking about Uber and Lyft making these grand proclamations about self-driving, it's like the realization that there's no Moore's law for making an autonomous car. They saw the tech platform going forward, like, hey, we can scan our lighter so much faster, we can process this much data so then we can get to this place. One, there's not an agreement about what technology even is the best for these types of systems. Two, to Lee's point here, having miles on the road really matters. I think Waymo has learned this very astutely in their stuff. There are so many variables and simulations and real-world testing that you have to do that just doesn't scale because you have a faster processor or something like that. Yes, you have a system that can control the car, that can scan however many meters ahead or something like that, but I'm walking into puns right here. The rubber has to make the road, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, go for it. Just steer into those puns. The problem is that this is not simply an engineering challenge, and everybody keeps looking at it like it's an engineering challenge and that Moore's law is what we need to do, but it's not. It's just as much winning hearts and minds of humans that are going to be staffing governments that have to decide whether or not driverless vehicles are on the road, and for every one person that gets injured, hurt, or god forbid killed by a vehicle that does not have human hands at the wheel, regardless how illogical it might sound to those who just want to look at this like a spreadsheet, it will set this back, not only in the monetary sense of the companies that are funding them, but also as far as it can progress. I do believe that a lot of this is media narrative. Yes, there are engineering problems. Yes, they might be solved by the AI revolution that we are seeing right now because that is a great pathway to solving a lot of problems that might be very, very imperceptible to the human brain because you can throw that amount of computing power at it, but the idea that it was going gangbusters and then slowing down it, how it might be growing again. I think that when we look back in history, it will look like a far more steady incline than our perspective is on it, watching it from the 24-hour news cycle. Oh yeah, I'll tell you, it looks like a decent incline up until 2018. That's when Waymo had bought 62,000 mini vans and all that. And sadly what happened in 2018 was an Uber autonomous car because of a failed safety driver struck and killed a person. And all of a sudden you see the progress slow because all of these companies focused on safety. And I hate to put it like this, but this will happen again. We are seeing them pick up the pace now because they finally feel like we can move on from safety, not because we've cracked it, but because we've done all we can on safety and we need to move into a different kind of service in order to progress. And they're going to do that. And there's going to be another incident and it's going to slow things back down again. That's just the way this has to work. And auto fatality will happen. Exactly. In five seconds, in five seconds, by a human. From now, statistically, auto fatality will happen in America. And the idea of bringing self-driving cars, which could be safer than human drivers, unfortunately, will likely still include an auto fatality at some point. How the people process it and how it affects the business case going forward, that's the question. Yeah, and we've seen one example of that. It slowed things down and refocused on safety. It's probably going to be something like that in the future. It reminds me, Tom, a lot about your discussions about where we are with AI. We're at that plateau that we've gone through that giant advancement of like, oh my gosh, we have autonomous cruise controller or all these different driver assistance systems. We're at that plateau in part because unlike AI, these, to your point, have to interface with real world infrastructure that's been around for decades. That they are engineering around that in a way that AI doesn't necessarily have to deal with. So I think that's an interesting parallel. Also, if you're a Tesla fan wondering why we're not talking about Tesla, read Timothy B. Lee's piece. He has a great ending piece about the difference between what Tesla is doing and what Waymo and Cruise are doing. They're trying to achieve different things and they're both doing them well, but they're just aiming at different parts of the problem. All right, well, Tom, Justin, do you like tennis? Yeah, I can go for tennis, tennis school. Would you like tennis legend Roger Federer to be the voice of your directions and the Waze Navigation app? Now, that's a separate question. Why not? Because if you speak French, English or German, we have got good news for your Roger Federer has become the first celebrity Waze voice to give directions in three languages. Justin, are you excited to have some Roger Federer in German telling you to make a left? No, but I want to take this into a totally separate direction. I love the fact that Google is spending money on Waze and they're still trying to keep Waze special. They understand that despite the fact that they have a competing service with Google Maps that there is a there's room for Waze to exist. And I desperately wish that Apple had made the same decision. Oh, just to let dark sky live. Or if you're going to eliminate dark sky, make your inferior weather app an absolute clone of it, polish it up, put it in whatever font you want and just give me the app that I want. Stop it. Waze is the correct way to go with this for Google. Come on. Not everything is about dark sky. Most things are when I'm bothered by it and it's actually raining in Austin. Well, and it is a great example of Google. I still wonder why Google has not merged Waze into Google Maps. And yet I'm very glad because they're both equal data fire hoses. They can extract user data from both of these services equally. They don't need to merge them. Well, theoretically, they would extract the same amount of data. But I think you're right. I think there are there are people who would stop would not use Google Maps if or in vice versa. So yeah, it just tells me they don't hover up as much data with the weather app. That's what that's for Google. It also allows Waze to be something where they can sell ads against it in a different way than they can Google Maps. They've kept Google Maps has been fairly ad free in terms of like the front facing element of it. They don't care how much they make ways into a NASCAR. Yeah. And Apple doesn't need to do a better advertising delivery mechanism. No, they don't care about it. They just care about cleaning my favorite weather app. They don't want to collect data. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Justin. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Hopefully it's not about dark sky. No, in fact, we have this fantastic email from Eugene writing in after listening to the latest episode of Know a Little More. So just listen to know a little more about Taiwan. It was very well researched and a great primer on the topic. My grandfather was a general in the KMT. My father would tell me stories of the old days. My wife is also from Taiwan and we go back to visit regularly. I've had a vague understanding of the political situation, but your podcast helped crystallize everything for me. Many thanks. That is one of the highest compliments that we could get. And when I say we, I mean, me, Amos, and Justin Robert Young, who worked on this episode as well at Know a Little More, to have somebody who has family stakes in the history that we were telling, tell us that it was not only told well, but helpful is incredible. So thank you, Eugene, for writing in. If anybody else wants to check that show out, go to know a little more.com. All right, Justin Robert Young, besides Know a Little More, what else you got going on these days? Well, of course, yeah, Know a Little More, a fine dog and pony show production. And yet another one is there if you would like to get the political panel discussion that is sweeping the nation. We're not wrong, myself, Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton. This week on the program we talk about the boycotts. Boycotts are going crazy these days as well as getting into some of the escalation in Russia with drones hitting apartment buildings in Moscow. Go ahead and check it out. We're not wrong. Some of my favorite conversations every week are the folks on We're Not Wrong. I love how for patrons, they have a special conversation that they do separate from the rest of the show. I love it so much. We stole the idea. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. California has a bill to force platforms to pay news publishers. And Meta is already threatening to stop carrying news on Facebook, probably Instagram in the state. It's just the latest in the parade of save journalism laws. So is this just how it goes? Or does journalism have another possible future? Justin Robert Young is going to save journalism, Patron. Stick around. And remember, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. To find out more, all the details are at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We shall return tomorrow talking about the popular revival of pinball with Ron Richards. See you then.