 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Rodrigo Smith Zapata, John and Becky Johnston, and Chris Benito. Coming up on DTNS, the AVXL folks are here to go over what we actually learned about TVs at CES, plus what you need to know about the story of an AI lawyer and the digital license plate hacks. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 10th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Patrick Norton from the Edge of the 314. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And Patrick's co-host of AVXL. Robert Herron is with us as well. Hey, Robert. Hello, hello. So, fine to see all of you right now. It is a lovely way to begin this new year. Let us start with the quick hits. Lots of Microsoft news today, led by Microsoft's new text-to-speech generator called Voli. It's like saying Voli with an accent, v-a-l-l-dash-e. It can simulate a person's voice when that person records themselves saying a three-second text prompt. So you talk for three seconds, do the thing it tells you to do, and then it can simulate your voice. With varying results, but they're pretty good. Voli uses Meta's end codec to break down audio samples into tokens that it can use to match against training data that tell it how to make other sounds from that same kind of speaker. Microsoft has a website demonstrating how it does all this. It did not release the code, though. Also, SEMA4 reports that Microsoft is in talks to increase its investment in open AI by $10 billion. That would bring it to a 49% stake in the company. Microsoft announced it is acquiring a data processing unit fabricator called Fungible. In fact, it did acquire it in December. That'll probably be rolled into Azure infrastructure. Finally, Windows Central's Zach Bowden says Microsoft's next-surface phone won't have two screens separated by a hinge. They ditched that, and they're going to use a foldable screen. Buy with Prime is an Amazon service that lets non-Amazon websites and apps offer Amazon Prime benefits like free shipping and next-day deliveries. So if a shopper has an Amazon Prime subscription, they can get those benefits even when shopping outside of the Amazon. That's exciting, right? Amazon has already launched the service on an invite-only basis, but plans to expand Buy with Prime to all eligible US-based merchants by January 31st. Merchants must have an Amazon seller central and Amazon pay accounts become eligible, and the goods must be stored with Amazon for fulfillment, which, by the way, is not free. Oh yeah, none of that's free. There's lots of things you pay Amazon for all of these privileges. The US Federal Aviation Administration has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that will give US Airlines until February 1st, 2024, so more than a year from now, February 1st, 2024, to replace the equipment. We've talked about radults, but altimeters that don't properly filter out 5G signals. There's about 180 planes that need a full-on replacement in the US. Another 820 need filters installed. The rulemaking notice will take public comment for 30 days before it can be finalized. The FAA expects it to be finalized and go into effect, though. The older equipment is what has caused cellular carriers to have to modify their 5G service near some airports in the US. We've talked about that before. Microsoft ended support of Windows 7 three years ago, but allowed some companies pay for extended security support. That support ended today, January 10th. Stick a fork through the heart of Windows 7. Windows 7 will still work. Okay, maybe not stick a fork through the heart of it, but it will no longer receive security patches, so someone else can do that for you. Windows 8.1 also raised the end-of-support date today. Microsoft will not offer extended support for Windows 8.1, and I don't blame them one bit. I like how Microsoft, Windows 7, yeah, we'll let you pay for a couple of years extra support on that. Oh, Windows 8.1, you're the person still using it. Yeah, we're not going to do that. A study led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that Russian disinformation campaigns on Twitter in 2016, so they just looked at Twitter, they didn't look at Facebook, but they looked at Russian disinformation campaigns on Twitter in 2016, and they found they reached few users and they did not find any evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to those campaigns and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The study found 70% of the exposures to the disinformation reached 1% of the users. All right, let's talk about AI lawyers. I'm just a simple AI lawyer, your honor, is what you will not hear them say, because they don't want the judge to really know they're using it. Here's what's going on. Back in February, Joshua Browder's Do Not Pay. This is the thing started in 2015 to just get you out of parking tickets by filling out forms for you. It is testing out an algorithmic system that can advise a defendant in real time in a courtroom. The defendant they are going to try this with is accused of speeding, so it's a pretty simple case. A smartphone app will feed audio from the court to the algorithm, so the smartphone mic will listen in, the algorithm will then do speech recognition, tell what's being said, and the defendant will wear earphones and has agreed to say only what the algorithm advises them to say. So the algorithm hears what's going on in court, processes it, says, say this, the human says it. Browder's company says they will pay any fines if the defendant loses, so if this fails to convince the judge, they won't be on the hook. Do Not Pay trained its algorithms on case law in a wide variety of areas. It has already intervened in approximately 3 million cases in the UK and the US, but never in real time. Now, you will not see this become commonplace because most courtrooms don't allow you to do anything like this. They don't allow you to wear earphones, have recording equipment, but Do Not Pay says it found a court where their system technically qualifies as a hearing aid device. Do Not Pay says we know this isn't the spirit of the law, but we think word, you know, by the words of the rule that we'll be able to do this. They have not revealed which court this is going to happen in, and even in the court where they will try it, it's not impossible that the State Bar Association could sue them claiming it's an unauthorized practice of law. I don't expect them to do that in this case, but that's a threat hanging over anybody who would want to try to make this widespread. So Patrick, this is a stunt. It's a PR stunt, but it is going to happen in a real court with a real algorithm and Do Not Pay for all its stuntiness actually works, you know, on the form-filling side of things. Stuntiness is a very dangerous room to say word to say in a live recording. I am very curious about this because when you start digging into a lot of what, a lot of what goes on in courtrooms is fairly mundane. Most of us don't understand the way it works. Something like this I think could make things vastly better. If you read especially places like here in St. Louis, public defenders and not the traffic tickets require public defenders, but I am fascinated. I've also been deeply fascinated by chat GPT over the last few weeks and eventually everything being replaced by a very small shell script or a very large distributed AI. But I'm curious to see how this does. I'm curious to see if the judge, if the judge can figure out who's wearing the earbuds and throws them out. I certainly would expect every state bar association to try to block something like this because they want to charge their hourly fees by the second or minute or 10 second bracket, whatever they're charging hours for by now. My guess is that this court in particular will tighten up its rules so this won't be allowed in the future once it happens and that the bar associations won't need to do this because the rules will already prevent it. But the demonstration would show what's possible and potentially cause a push for allowing these sorts of things in cases where somebody's like, yeah, I don't want to have to pay a lawyer. Should I have to? Can I get some rules changed? And there might be some public pressure for that. Robert, what do you make of this? I think as long as it doesn't disrupt the flow of the courtroom itself, it shouldn't be a problem trying to introduce this, at least for more basic cases where it is kind of formulaic in terms of what you're going to be presenting or how you would go through it to either challenge or have something dismissed by a judge. My recent experience with jury duty, I was surprised at how mobile devices were allowed, in essence, at least through the jury selection process. There was, in fact, encouraged, not encouraged, but whenever they put up information on the screen, the judge was quick to point out, one, this was all a digital courtroom anyway with a judge in a remote room and with TV screens on the walls. We were supposed to take pictures of the information on the screens in order, with our cameras on our phones in order to capture it quickly and efficiently that way. So I think it's already like one step there. You combine that with the hearing augmentation systems that are already in courtrooms for people with hearing disabilities. And maybe it's just another way of bringing the AI to do another task that in some cases can be kind of mundane. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah. I know there's a challenge from Browder to say if any Supreme Court lawyer will let me do this with a Supreme Court argument, I'll give you a million dollars. I think that million dollars is very safe. I would be more concerned if you disrupt the flow of the courtroom itself and pass off the judge. Then it all kind of goes out the window. And things, again, do not pay has been very good with things like traffic court because they are very on rails. There's only a few possibilities of what can happen. It's very clear that if you do this, this happens. If you do that, that happens. So this is just more approving of how good speech recognition has gotten than the algorithms itself. I think if it can understand what's being said, that the form-filling aspect of this has shown, yeah, you can kind of navigate this with algorithms now. And I do expect this maybe not immediately after this demonstration, but I do expect this to become something that people start to see as an advantage of once it's proven and say, like, yeah, no, I would like to have that. Let me get my congressperson to pass a rule that says I'm allowed to do it. It feels like the fin-edge of the wedge and that, you know, it's funny, you mentioned congresspersons like thinking about the number of members of Congress who are lawyers, I don't know how much traction it's going to get, but that might be the snarky, cynical part of me rearing. Oh, yeah. No, the Bar Association is definitely going to dig in. Also be a good scenario for maybe somebody with a court appointed attorney and just as a backup so you can hear maybe what the AI is saying and compare that to what they're saying and making sure you're getting decent representation. You will probably be surprised how many lawyers do support it because they see it as a way to gain an advantage on a bigger company that they can't get an advantage on. Oh, wow. Yeah. All right, let's talk about this. In October, California joined Arizona and Michigan in offering digital license plates. Texas also offers digital plates, but only for commercial vehicles there. Digital plates are, they have a few advantages. They're easier to update. You just push a new piece of information. You don't have to put a sticker on them. They can show emergency messages like amber alerts. They can push a message that the vehicle has been stolen. In fact, Reviver, which is the company that makes and manages the plates for the state of California, can use tracking abilities to help find those stolen cars. Excellent. Obviously, when this was first announced, everybody in the DTNS audience started wondering how and if and when it would be hacked. Web application security researcher, Sam Curry and friends, had similar thoughts about many automotive companies. Last week, Curry posted about a multiple automotive, excuse me, last week, Curry posted about multiple automotive vulnerabilities they found, including one related to Reviver. Yeah, so they found a JavaScript on Reviver's website that they were able to poke around with. This was not an obvious thing. They had to do some testing and there's a good description in Curry's post, but they were able to use it to tease out super admin access that would have let them track location of all cars with digital plates, change the slogan at the bottom of the plate, which is something that the owner of the car can also do and change vehicle status to stolen so they could flip that flag and say, you know, like let's make this car look like it's stolen. It also would have let them do things you usually can do when accessing any admin system, see address, phone number, email, some industry specific things like vehicle type, some fleet management functions as well. So they got super admin access. This is a long way of saying they got super admin access. It was not easy. They weren't able to get into the super admin tool, but they were able to fool the API into letting them do some of these things. Curry's group, of course, responsibly reported the vulnerability to Reviver, which patched it within 24 hours. Patrick, I tend to look at these as good news stories because the white hacker found it, told the company, and the company responded and fixed it fast, which is good. That's the way it works in the ideal world, I think, and props to them for pointing that out and getting it patched. You know, I'm still kind of back at the, you know, 175, 250, I guess it's what, $275 a year for four years for this. California, yeah. I think so. I'm still trying to figure out how I would use this, although it would be highly amusing to see someone, you know, stealing one of my vintage vehicles with its fancy digital license plate screaming, call the cops, call the cops. Robert, my opinion is I tend to try to avoid, you know, just having the knee jerk. Why would I want that toward stuff? But I also look at this and I'm like, I don't have a problem with it. I'm sure it's great for certain things. I'm not sure I need it. How do you feel? I would, I encourage this actually. One, it would be cool to have perhaps the automotive manufacturer actually integrate this directly into the into the styling of the vehicle so that a digital license plate could be present and then you wouldn't have to deal with adding a plate or adding a plate in a spot. You wouldn't want one. The other thing is I really would appreciate something like a stolen sign just automatically appearing on a vehicle that's stolen and to give you a heads up, or if it's your own vehicle, it just makes a little more obvious to the people around that that would be the case. I am a fan of the good old fashion license plate as well, especially here in California. We have some pretty unique designs and new colors and retro new colors that have been brought back so to speak. And I appreciate those as well. But if this could be something that they could literally integrate into a bumper, especially on the front bumpers of vehicles, that would be more appealing to me. And I know a lot of sports car people who prefer a lot of people prefer not to mount anything on the front of their cars that could break up perhaps the arrow or the look. And in that case, I could really see something like a standardized digital license plate actually be a very cool thing to have. I just wonder if this is the equivalent of a mechanical buggy whip. Are we going to identify cars even with license plates at some point or is it just going to be transponders? In a world where we can pay by tapping an NFC chip, you don't have to show a credit card. You don't have to hold a picture of the credit card up from your phone. Maybe this is just a stopgap measure and eventually cars just tell whatever needs to know what to know about them. As a pedestrian in a place where people have a curious relationship to stop signs, I think we need a great big human readable number letter combination on the back of vehicles. I'll push back on you a little bit there. What would be better? Is it playing on your panicked brain what the number was or your phone automatically picking up the transponder faithfully when you didn't even know you needed it? I am torn between acknowledging whether or not my adrenaline will allow me to recognize the vehicle that just ran my ass over. And the fact that I often have difficulties dealing with Bluetooth devices at a close range in a non-panicked environment. So it's an interesting question. I think we should have both. Let's just chip everybody. Satellite chips. Satellite chips for all. Well, folks, if you like these stories, thanks some of the folks at our subreddit. There's a lot of great folks in there submitting these kinds of stories and voting on them so that we make sure we see them. If you want to be part of that, it's real easy. Just head on over to dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right. There were a huge number of announcements that CES last week we did our best to sort through the most important ones, help you understand what was going on there. But it's always good to step back a week later and get some perspective, which is why Robert and Patrick are here to talk about the latest TV developments from the show now that we've had a chance to understand them. Robert, what do you think was the biggest trend you noticed? Ryder OLED TVs. They are approaching upwards of 2,000 nits and beyond. And that is a significant improvement compared to last year. Major manufacturers are now going head to toe or toe to toe, so to speak. That and we have more competition. I mean, LG has been the acknowledged champion, I guess, of OLED TVs in the home and they're celebrating their 10th year in this marketplace this year. And now we have another company, Samsung, display with their QD OLED tech. That is also back and creating what I think is just excellent competition in terms of creating better displays at better prices and just pushing this technology forward where it needs to go in terms of brightness, resolution, and robustness of the products. In particular, a couple of things that jumped out at me on the show floor was with LG and for 2023 will be their G3 series gallery edition of their LCD panel. That right there is the Panasonic. It also features the same technology I'm about to talk about and that is the micro lens array technology. One way of making these TVs brighter and more efficient, more critically speaking, is through the use of a layer of micro lenses that redirect light that would otherwise be scattered within the material of the panel itself sideways or trapped within and directed right forward into a person's eyes. We're talking effectively a 30% brightness improvement. What they claim, at least, we'll get these in for testing, of course, in the coming months, but companies who use LG's OLED panels like Panasonic would just showed in addition to other companies like Sony will be introducing these TVs with specific screen sizes. In particular, the 55, the 77, and the 65 inch screen sizes will feature this MLA technology for increased brightness. On the other hand, we had Samsung and Samsung Display showing off their second generation quantum dot OLED technology. And for me, this was one of my favorite things I saw at the show. It was literally a new blue emitter. There is a, for Samsung's technology, they use a blue backlight material. The OLED material itself is blue and then it goes through a quantum dot color converter to create the red and green sub-pixels in addition to blue. 30% improvement from year to year compared to the 2022 models. Samsung Display was being a little more reasonable in saying it's at least 20%. Ideally, it may actually hit about 30% and you're just simply getting more light from the screen, brighter highlights without any increase in power consumption and that'll be important for other displays. The other being, of course, there you go, a 77 inch version of that QD OLED technology. The only question really that Samsung was unable to answer at this point was they're having two versions of that TV you just saw, the S95C and the S90C. The question was, will they both use this new blue emitter in the upcoming models that will be released? The premium S95C will, of course, but the S90C is still an unknown at this point. If they're going to use perhaps last year's technology and make it more value-oriented or just apply the new OLED material across the board and get it out to customers. I cannot wait for that. It was a lovely TV with incredible color punch and it's also being featured in a new monitor from Samsung, a 49 inch Odyssey OLED G9 monitor, which is just fantastic. It was really one of the, I'm not a huge fan of ultra widescreen monitors per se, especially with a, in this case a 32 by 9 aspect ratio. That's a little, not tall enough in essence for what I would like, but the image quality of this was so eye-catching and just amazing to look at. I would really love to see something like a 16 by 9 or a 16 by 10 version of that display technology. It just has color that surpasses anything I've seen in any other display tech for a flat panel to date. And I'm looking forward to just seeing that in store shelves so I can actually get hands on with that. Now I know 90% of the folks out there are listening, not watching. So when you hear it say, look at this or see this, you can go to our show notes dailytechnewshow.com and we have links to all the stuff he's talking about there and you can see it there. Real quick before we move on why, for people who don't know, is it important for OLEDs to be brighter? Why is that such a big deal? Well, I know a couple of reasons. I wanted just to simply compete with the LCDs of the world out there and for room like conditions that may not be theater ready in terms of pitch black, where you have some extra ambient light in the room to deal with and having a brighter display will make that less of an issue. Also, when you talk about just having color brightness, it's one thing to have a bright display. It's another thing to be able to produce pure colors extremely bright. And for reproducing HDR content or Dolby Vision content, the brighter the display, the better especially for peak bright detail. The standard for HDR video or Dolby Vision video goes up to 10,000 nits. And we're talking about displays that can hit about 2,000 nits on a good day. And because of that limitation we're forced to do video trickery like tone mapping in order to map perhaps content that was authored at one of these very bright standards into something that isn't so bright and make it look good. And I think between those two things, it's just Yeah, so if you have a really bright room, you aren't thinking, well, I guess I'm stuck with LCD because these are getting bright enough that you can use them in there. Totally. And also for the European Union, they have coming up in a month or two new standards for screen size versus power consumption and it becomes even more important to increase the efficiency of any of these displays. So this is another deal for them as well. I see no turning back from just making brighter and brighter displays and it's not so much of you're not staring at a full screen of white. I'm talking about especially highlighted detail like glinting chrome on a sunlit day or the stars in a star field background or something like that in a space scene where you can do pinpoints of extremely bright detail that better mimic what you see when you look out the window or just in real life in general. And that applies to color as well. Now Rich Strafilino who was covering CES in Las Vegas for us was talking yesterday about how impressed he was by the projectors and we promised we'd hear from you about the projectors. What did you see there? Good stuff all around. One interesting development that happened in the last few months was the launch of a new chip set from Texas Instrument in their DLP lineup .94 inch 8K DLP chip that will be used in a variety of projectors coming up. Two of them that caught my eye were one from Hisense and one from Samsung. These both feature RGB laser projectors. So they're using our red blue green lasers as the light source creating effectively color that goes beyond the current standard for HDR video which no other display type can currently say that. Everything else is doing a reduced color palette due to various technical limitations. Certain projectors that use RGB lasers as their main light source not only are they going to be available with an 8K resolution but they also currently exceed the color palette used in these wonderful formats like Dolby Vision and HDR10 that while they may not have the brightness capabilities or the absolute contrast of something like an OLED panel still additional light output and additional color purity that you can get from some of these displays in a light controlled environment is just fantastic and we talk about 8K is it really necessary the bigger the display becomes I think it creates even a more seamless picture and for certain things at least for high end PC gaming on say like a 4090 running on a computer the difference between 4K and 8K is noticeable even on a 70 you know 80 inch screen it is perceivable and usable and fantastic to actually have that performance or at least the resolution bump if you can maintain adequate frame rates for the content you're looking at and of the demos I saw at CES I think gaming was really the one kind of I think best case scenario for pushing toward 8K or even beyond in terms of what would you really need it for in addition to just simply having it for the largest size displays in terms of creating a very seamless looking picture yeah those are answers to the common questions right is like 8K but what do I get there's no 8K content I can't really see the difference so those are interesting that there's like yeah but there's some secondary benefits there maybe it's not worth the cost yet but at least it's something to think about right it's kind of like the retina display equivalent you remember when you first looked at a retina display on an iPhone you're like I can't see the pixels it's kind of what's happening with 8K over time yeah alright we got we got an email let's let's check out to the mail bag here Simon is in the process of looking for a new TV because his 2 year old 65 inch Samsung has purple spots three noticeable purple spots in fact he emailed because we did the story last month about the purple lights the LED lights that were turning purple because the coding was wearing off and he said I went from one barely noticeable to three in just weeks from everything I've read this seems to refer back to the LED coding wearing off due to heat and time so he asked what is the minimum level slash quality of an LED or above TV to buy to get away from this issue is there any way to reduce the potential of your your LED coding wearing off so you don't get those spots that's crazy I especially for something that's only two years old that should not be happening period and then I would immediately contact Samsung about that and because that could easily turn into something like a class action against them for this other manufacturers that I have visited personally they do extreme testing in terms of putting these TVs in very high humidity high temperature stressing them to the point of failure to ensure that things like this do not happen as far as LED backlighting goes that is not going away anytime soon they I mean this show every LCD television out there anything in the mid to premium range was using the mini LED technology where they're putting more and more of these behind the screens to create better light control in terms of creating more contrasted imagery with fewer artifacts like blooming or halos and that is not changing anytime soon so what I would hope is that they are continue to be focused on this as a just a quality assurance issue I I want to research this a little bit more I'm actually kind of surprised that a two year old TV is exhibiting any kind of issues like this particularly from a number one LCD manufacturer or at least a television sales point from Samsung I don't believe Samsung actually makes LCD panels anymore but that's that's just not a good thing to see and I would take advantage of whatever remedies you can come across and number one contact the company and tell them and get this get at least this logged and go from there and if you've purchased it from say a retailer like a Costco or a membership club like that you probably have an extended warranty if you purchased it with a credit card you have an extended warranty beyond just what is available that's it just strikes me as ridiculous that something two years old is already showing signs of degradation of any kind Patrick did you find any extra I saw you poking around see if you could you could find anything about it while we were talking I was looking for the I was looking for the warranty length on the on the basic Samsung entry level sense on QLED TVs and it's you know parts and labor is one year but just you know I want to amplify what Rob said is is there's this Samsung their quality controls good and this should not be happening and I would I would definitely that's the first thing like we always say on AVXL like talk to your manufacturer because a lot of in many cases want to do the right thing or at least they can tell you maybe what happened so you can prevent it from happening with your next television but that's that should not be happening here so you should be able to get some satisfaction for that if Simon's looking to replace that I would say and you once excellent uniformity for picture quality look at one of the old ads we talked about earlier in this episode got you all right Robert before we go where can find folks find more about what you do and then the great information that you give us please visit me over at heronfidelity.com or you can always hit me up on Twitter as long as that beast is still running at Robert Heron or at Heron Fidelity I'm always I'm pretty easy to get a hold of drop me an email reach out I'll answer questions help you guide your way through the world of home theater and display technologies in particular and of course you'll find Robert alongside Patrick Norton on AVXL where can folks find that Patrick just search for AVXL AVEXEL on your favorite pod catcher and go to AVXL.com or go to patreon.com slash AVXL we love to answer your questions well folks if you're a patron that's the reason we're here we are not sitting here doing the show trying to help each other understand without you special thanks to Lloyd Wayne Tyson Rivers one of our top lifetime supporters thank you Lloyd for being with us all these years Patrons stick around to the extended show Good Day Internet we're going to be talking more TVs and more you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson 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