 Coming up on DTNS, Scott Johnson interprets Microsoft's cryptic promise to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. What could it mean? Dr. Nicky puts the big advance in nuclear fusion in context for us. And we have new Samsung phones. And the note, well, the note's in a better place than it used to be. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 9th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Red, and I'm Sarah Lane. And from Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Hey, we've got more. If you like this show and you're like, but I don't want it to end, get good day internet. It's a it's this and more at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Brad, Kevin and Paul Thiessen. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Instagram began rolling out the ability to bulk, delete or archive posts or stories or IGTV and also reels. This will be included in a new Your Activity section in user profiles, which will allow users to sort and then filter content and comments by date, as well as search comments and messages from a single location. In a recent web log posting, Google said account compromises were half as likely on accounts with two step verification compared to password only accounts. Makes sense. In Q4 2021, Google started automatically enrolling more than 150 million accounts in two step verification. This kind of forced it on people and Google says it will continue doing so into 2022. The Wall Street Journal reports that Fiji, the country of Fiji, says a team of SpaceX's Starlink employees are working to bring connectivity to Tonga, which was devastated by a volcano back on January 15th. That is nice. However, got a little tougher because SpaceX announced that 80% of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched just last week experienced significant impact by a geomagnetic storm, which resulted in 50% higher atmospheric drag levels, making it harder for the satellites to reach orbital position. You might say, OK, well, how bad was it? Company estimates that up to 40 of the 49 satellites will now burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. Wow, that's a lot of them. Still got the nine, though. It's nearly all of them. Yeah, the nine are going to have to carry a big load now. Top nine. Bloomberg sources say Microsoft is in discussions to acquire the security research company, Mandiant. This comes as Microsoft continues to grow its security business, which reported 15 billion in revenue in 2021. That was already up 45% on the year. The Japanese silicon wafer maker, Sumco, reports it's already sold out its production capacity for 300 millimeter wafers through 2026. Chipmakers use these wafers for chips. Chipmakers want these wafers for chips. The company didn't take long-term orders for smaller 150 millimeter and 200 millimeter wafers, but expects demand to surpass supply for years to come. The company said it wouldn't be able to expand production at all in 2022 either. 2021 saw wafer prices increase 10% on the year, and Sumco expects this to continue until at least 2024. Yeah, and the profit margins are no longer wafer thin. All right, let's talk about Samsung's big announcement. Samsung announced all the things that everybody leaked, but here they are, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, which Samsung itself referred to as powered by Note. So if you missed the Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung wants you to think of the S22 Ultra as the new Note. And I got to say, they're pretty convincing about it. The S22 Ultra is a 6.8 inch, 120 Hertz display with S Pen included, and up to a terabyte of storage. That S Pen has brought the latency down from 9 milliseconds to 2.8 milliseconds. The S22 Ultra starts with the 128 gigabyte model. You don't get the terabyte at this price, but it starts at 1,199 shipping February 25th. So that's the end of the note, right? Hold on, and Gadget's Sherilyn Lowe, friend of the show, says Samsung's vice president of product management, Drew Blackard, told in Gadget, quote, there's not going to be a new product in the current portfolio with Note in its name. So you're saying there's a chance. Actually, he said more than that. He added, I can't be clear enough. This is just an evolution of Note for us. It's not the end of the Note. It just happens there's not a device called Note right now. But then he went back to saying that the S22 Ultra was the device for Note users, pointing out that Note features are in lots of Samsung devices. It's in the S22 Ultra, and it's in the Tab S8. The real Galaxy Note is inside of all of us, I guess. OK, as for the rest of the unpacked announcements, Samsung also announced the slightly less note like 6.1 inch S22, starting at 800 bucks and the 6.6 inch S22 plus, starting at $1,000, both of those also shipping, February 25th. We can go through all the specs. They're impressive. These are great specs. These are flagship level specs. It's got a good set of Galaxy phones here. They're also new tablets, the 14.6 inch, big one. Tab S8 Ultra with 120 Hertz display and 16 gigs of RAM starting at $1,100. There's a $700 Tab S8 and a $900 Tab S8 plus. All of them shipping later this month. All of them with Android. So if you're an Android tablet lover, here you go. These are good versions of that. Finally, Samsung one-upped Pixel by promising four years of Android OS and Samsung One UI updates, not just for the S22 models, not just for the new Tab S8 tablets, but also retroactive to the S21, Fold 3, and Flip 3 as well. That's still one year short of what iOS users get, but we're getting closer at four years for full OS. We're not just talking security updates here. We're talking full Android OS. Honestly, I kind of feel like that's the biggest announcement of the day. Yeah, like beating out the Pixel by a full year seems like a pretty significant thing in terms of support. I'm super interested. It's maybe obvious and everyone new Scott would bring this up, but I'm really interested in that pen and how it performs on 120 Hertz screen. The one big advantage Apple has had with the iPad and the Pencil 2 in particular is extremely low latency performance as compared to its competitors across the board, Microsoft Surface, Android tablets of all kinds, even Waycom tablets, this sort of thing. And this sounds like this brings up much closer or right in line with that kind of performance, which may mean a bit of a boon for those devices, not so much the phones. I mean, it would perform well on the phones, but those looking for larger surface device for drawing or whatever, professionally or amateurish, whatever, this seems like a much faster pen. So that's the thing that jumped out at me. I went, oh, good. Finally, somebody else is getting close to the mark on the latency I need. When it comes to that note nomenclature or lack thereof. I mean, the note nomenclature? That too. Yes, good one. It's a wordal score somewhere in a future life. My baby is quite wordal today, too. Oh, yeah. I had a hard time. Five out of six. But yeah, the whole kind of powered by note thing and the company saying, well, hold on a second. Everything that you love about previous note devices are just better in these devices. They're just not called note, but they're powered by note, which leads me to believe that the next time we've got a big product announcement from Samsung, note will not be mentioned ever again. Yeah. I get the sense that they might just start using note with every product, right? That would be the other direction they could go. But what is note then? What is powering it? Note starts what they might try to do is use note to apply to the note taking, to the features that made the note different. Because screen size, 5,000 milliamp hour battery, 45 watt fast charge, using Glass Victus Plus, Gorilla Glass Victus Plus. You could put those in a note and call it a note, but how much different is it really at that size, right? That was the one thing that made the note was the size. The other thing was the pen. They put the pen in there. So now it's just the features. Well, as long as the features are there, you can call the features note features and say they're in the flip. They're in the fold. They're in the tab. The note is everywhere. I wonder if Samsung will try to do some sort of subscription based note service. Note plus subscription service. Yeah, powered by note. That's kind of genius, right? Like, you get the note features in everything. But if you want cloud storage NFTs, I don't know. If you're a Scott-type power user. Right, right. Well, the name note, the word or name note had some marketing, you know, cache for them. People liked it. People were super into the note line. And I think people are just feeling this feeling of like, oh, my favorite line is going away. But really it isn't. It's still there. It's just built into the main line now and they don't have to call it notes anymore. There's no distinction because screens have gotten bigger. Pins have gotten better. Like, it all became the note anyway. So really, aren't we only losing just a, we're just losing a tagline. That's it. I guess if you have a certain amount of brand loyalty, though, and you're excited about the future of that brand, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, these are cool new devices, but what happened to my brand? I could see where people would get bummed out about it. I don't know. I can't really think of a comparison if Apple says we're not calling it the iPhone anymore. It's now the blurby bot. I'd be like, OK, is it still work? I think that is why you see them doing this dance of saying, oh, the note's not gone. The note's inside of us all because they want that person who's just brand loyal to be like, yeah, but you're getting the note. It's just it's in there. It's maybe called the S22. I wouldn't be shocked if they had a Samsung Galaxy fold note which had a pen, S-Pen, special S-Pen with it because I think you get the pen already. I wouldn't be shocked if you're right, Sarah, where it's like, this is it. They just never refer to the note again. But I also, I think they could go the other way and just try to say, everything is the note. You like the note? Well, we've got 20 products that are. They're all powered by note. They're powered by note. Ooh, there you go. That's how he described it to engage it. Yeah, I didn't make that up. Or no, actually, I think that was in the actual announcement. Not even. Scott was very clever. I was just like, well, meaning if they do that, then they've done what we're asking. They've kept the brand, but they've moved on. And what else can you do? I always thought, just for the record, I always thought that the note indicated. I know there was a lot of annotation. You got the pen kind of stuff. But it sounded to me to note bookie, unless a powerful device that does lots of other things. And so maybe the company felt the same way. Could be. It all started to converge. Speaking of convergence, let's talk about Brad Smith. You've heard of him before. He's Microsoft president, one of them. And his open is often rather the bear of popular news. People kind of like this, guys. Sometimes it's fighting against government surveillance for responsible AI, which there was a big post about that not that long ago. Also maybe arguing for regulated facial recognition or regulating facial recognition in our country or the world. So it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that Brad Smith wrote a blog post up on Wednesday. That's today calling, or basically called this, adapting ahead of regulation a principled approach to app stores, unquote. Pretty interesting. This latest post is specifically aimed at concerns over Microsoft's pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and all of the concerns it'll have and faces it seeks regulatory approval. The book of the post was or is about a set of principles guiding Microsoft's app store that are in line with pending and enacted legislation in the United States, the European Union and Netherlands and South Korea. It's a long explanation about choice, accountability, transparency and safety. And specifically says Microsoft won't for a payment system or won't for a payment system. Not sure what we meant there. Although these principles don't apply to the Xbox because the consoles are generally exempted from new legislation. So fine, Brad Smith knows what you really wanna hear. So after a long explanation of those principles, he also wrote this, quote, Microsoft will continue to make call of duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement with Activision. That's a key point there. And we have committed to Sony that we will also make them available on PlayStation beyond the existing agreement and into the future so that Sony fans can continue to enjoy their games they love. We also, or we are also interested in talking similar steps or taking similar steps to support Nintendo's successful platform. So Brad Smith is saying basically, hey everybody, you thought when we used our kind of a nebulous language about what call of duty would do after this acquisition, I'd like to clarify and say we plan on continuing to support that game in somewhat perpetuity as best they can commit to on competing platforms. And here's my quick take on that. I 100% thought this is what they're gonna do anyway because to spend the amount of money, call of duty being a big part of that money for Activision Blizzard King, they had to have intended to continue forward making it multi-platform or as available as possible on other platforms. To not do that would be to limit the already valuable revenue generation that is the call of duty franchise. That really would be cutting yourself off at the foot. I think their bigger problem right now is that call of duty is a little stale and the current version that came out this year or last year in the holidays, nobody likes, nobody's a fan of the current one, but it still makes tons of money and it's still the biggest shooter franchise on the planet. So if they were gonna buy that and then immediately cut off that chunk that would go to PlayStation or would go other places, it would have been a huge mistake. So I'm not surprised A that they're clarifying this or that Brad is and B that this was always the plan because they'd like money, they want that revenue. It's why it's valuable. So this goes with what you were saying last week on DTNS that the coming war isn't about consoles anymore. It's not about like, let's sell the console as a lost leader to make money off of games. It's just about selling the games on a platform. You wanna own the platform that the game is on and the platform is no longer hardware, the platform is a service of some kind. So I think Microsoft is coming around to, hey, if we sell Call of Duty on PlayStation's platform, we make money like you're saying and that's good. Yeah, they already do this with, for example, they do it with Steam. So if I wanna go play Halo Infinite, the big hallmark release from Microsoft in the last six months, I can get it on Game Pass on my Xbox. I can get it on PC with Game Pass for PC. I can pay for it outright on either of those two services that I just mentioned, if I don't wanna do the monthly thing. And alternatively, I can run over to Steam and say, oh, I'll just buy it here because I buy everything on Steam and spend the 60 bucks. In a way, they're having their cake and eating it too because they have this interim period of let's sell it the way things are currently sold with an eye to the way things will be sold. And that eye to the way things will be sold perhaps will be games as a service and will perhaps be all subscription one day. Who knows? That's what they're positioning themselves as. But they're being consistent right now of saying, we're not in this for the war on the consoles and we don't care about the hardware so much as we do, you getting the game where you want it, when you want it and hopefully paying us money for it in some way or another. And the interim, it's gonna be fine to spend 60 to 70 bucks over at PlayStation and they don't lose by doing that. Any more than Sony loses by having their own developed version of the MLB the show game published on Game Pass which is currently the truth is happening. It's the first time Xbox has had that game from that series. So to me, it makes perfect sense to me. Little crisis comms going on too, right? Microsoft knows that not everybody's excited about its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And so that's, it's sort of nothing's changing. We're not gonna screw up your life. Don't y'all worry that might not be true. I think Scott was making this point earlier when Brad Smith writes something, it's because he wants the government to listen. It's always good news for everyone but AI regulation, facial recognition regulation, government surveillance. This is very much, hey regulators, we're gonna play nice. I know Nvidia said they were gonna play nice and you didn't approve that one but we really mean it. And as Scott Johnson has said, it's in our best interest to play nice. Yeah, also there was clarification was needed here. They needed to get out after the aftermath of the announcement and things calmed down. Everybody's like, no, wait a minute, what about these details? When we start thinking of the stuff that wasn't in the initial press releases or in the initial information. And because we didn't get that then we're asking it now. This is him getting out in front of that and saying, look, here's what we're doing and here's our reasons for doing it. I want clarity on this so that when you guys all start asking questions, there's nothing weird going on. And Microsoft knows what it's like to get questions when something weird's going on. So it makes perfect sense to me that they would get out in front of this and it fits the vision they're feeding us. What they've been telling us for a couple of years now, everything they've done with this Activision announcement so far has been consistent with that. Cause your point, Sarah, you get Phil Spencer to go talk to Eurogamer about this if you just want to get the gamers to feel good about it. You get Brad Smith to post about it on his blog, his official Microsoft blog if you want the regulators to also take notice. Well put. Hey folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You like these stories? Sure, we know you do cause we found a lot of these on the subreddit. Keep it coming, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. In 2017, Bloomberg sources reported a reference to something called ROS, the letter ROS in Apple code. In 2019, they found a reference that confirmed that that stood for reality cause there was a reference to reality OS in some pre-release builds of iOS 13. And then this week, the year of our Lord, 2022, developer Renz Verhoeven found a reference to reality OS in the App Store upload logs. Now that could have just been somebody developer messing around. So Steve Trout and Smith followed up and found references to reality OS in a GitHub repo meaning it wasn't just a stray reference but something that has its own binaries and a simulator. However, Trout and Smith said still could be a remnant of somebody's poll request from a fake account or something but add to that the fact that Ming-Chi Kuo has said he believes an augmented reality or mixed reality headset is coming from Apple in Q4 and that it would have the same computing power as an M1 Mac that would jive with something needing its own OS variant. Quo also has said that Apple has already started to work on the second generation of a mixed reality headset. So that leaves us wondering is it called reality OS or is that just a code name? Well, the verges Tom Warren points out that Mark Gurman said on January 2nd that his sources said the code name for the mixed reality OS was Oak. So maybe reality OS is the final name. Although keep in mind Gurman and colleagues at Bloomberg also have reported the headset won't come until 2023 but maybe that's the one Quo's talking about that's the second generation. Anyway, like the Batman, I have taken all of this, fitted it together like a detective, if we fit all the facts together a plausible scenario that fits all the facts might be Apple announces reality OS at WWDC in June with a first gen for developers at that point that fits the in 2022. Then later maybe out of maybe spring 2023 they announced a consumer version and that like Gurman thinks would go on sale in 2023. You know, this is a really, it's sort of a backwards way that I thought that this was all rolling out and I know we're just speculating here. Reality OS is actually a pretty good name. I mean, it's certainly descriptive kind of long but it makes sense. Perfectly pretentiously Apple to say reality runs on our hop. Yeah, like you got reality, we come to us. But also the idea that at WWDC and this has been debated quite a bit as you know is the AR headset gonna be unveiled. There apparently are supply chain issues and there's power heating issues and this all might get pushed later. But if the, you know, again at a developers conference if the whole idea of like third party developers we got, this is what we got, get on board ready to join the revolution when reality OS, the hardware, you know hits the streets in early 2023 then you get some momentum there. And that might be how Apple can push things a bit when it's on timeline. I agree. I think you're both correct about the timeline. I think this all lines up. It also lines up with, I don't know I spent a lot of time VR in the last couple of weeks talking to people at Metta and some others and I'm convinced that big competition is coming and coming sooner than everyone will admit. And I think they're one of them certainly Apple's one of them and a big one at that. It's weird to me that the thing that makes me most excited here is knowing that it will be the equivalent in power and capability as an M1 Mac. That's a big deal because those M1s have surprised me and I know many others but they've been really, really good and powerful. My Mac Mini is doing things. I used to use a power Mac that costs four times as much money to do and it's doing it easily. I feel like I'm overpowered at the moment and I've not felt that way about an Apple computer in a very long time. So knowing that those headsets are gonna probably use that core technology is weirdly exciting to me. But yeah, it sounds good. It's better than ROS. I think it was Roger Prichot said it sounds like Ross and that's no good. We don't want Ross. We want reality EOS. Rachel, we want. Well, we don't call it like EOS either. No, we don't. But that's also three characters so it's a little bit easier. I don't know. It does sort of confirm maybe not really but sort of confirms that it's probably it would have been easy like TVOS to call it VROS but this is more than VR. It's mixed reality. It's AR. It's augmented reality. It's these other things. So I feel like it's them then using the word reality. What if it was like VAROS and then you could act like a pirate and say RAR. RAROS, that's pretty good. I was thinking mixed reality could be MROS, Mr. OS. Oh, that's not bad. Yeah, well, you know, Tom, maybe a little exclusionary. Yeah, you don't want to gender the OS. That's true. That's true. Don't do that. Well, G-Pag84 says whatever they do, they have to use back to life, back to reality as the song they introduced. Please do it. Please do it. Great song. Whatever you want. Okay, so there was a really big advance in nuclear fusion. You may have missed the story. Luckily for you, our science correspondent, Dr. Nicker Ackermanns is going to explain a little bit what it might mean for all of our future. Nuclear fusion would solve a lot of things if we could get it to work. It fuses atoms to provide energy with zero emissions in nearly unlimited amounts and only creates small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste products unlike nuclear fission, which we're using right now and may even be powering this podcast. We know it can work because it's what fuels the sun. It's, however, slightly impractical because fusing atoms together makes things very, very hot, melting anything that comes near and that's why scientists have been working on a way to control and harness nuclear fusion energy for decades. Until now, researchers haven't been able to keep the reaction stable for more than a second and it usually takes more energy to fuel these reactions than the amount of energy that the reactions actually produced. There has, however, been some advancement. UK-based Jet Laboratory says it broke down the world record for the amount of energy that can be extracted by fusing two forms of hydrogen. The record output produced 59 megajoules of energy or 11 megawatts of power for over five seconds. That's just enough to boil 60 kettles of water according to the BBC. It may not seem like a lot but it's more than double what was possible in similar tests back in 1997. These tests also help validate other projects such as the ITER fusion reactor under construction in southern France. The big win here is not only the length of time that the reaction could be sustained but the fuel mix used. A mix of deuterium and tritium that created a successful reaction inside an 80 cubic meter vessel enclosed in a magnetic field that contained the reaction. These details are important because it's the specific type of fuel and container that are planned to be used in the ITER reactor only with containers 10 times larger. That would allow them to at least break even on power and provide a template for commercial nuclear fusion power plants. ITER is expected to begin experiments in 2025. I got really excited when I got the notification on my phone this morning saying breakthrough in nuclear fusion that could solve the world's energy problems which nuclear fusion could potentially solve the world's energy problems. Thank you to Dr. Nicky for pulling me back and being like, it's an advance but it's still, we're talking about, we're talking still about years but it is a big advance. Five seconds may not sound like a lot but that's five times what we've been able to do in the past and ITER, like she said, being bigger means that we can do better in the future. There's also some private development of fusion going on as well. It's in a race with ITER. So this is really exciting. Yeah, I feel like we've been talking about that stuff since you and I were in high school, junior high maybe. All right, yeah, cold fusion. Yeah, it seemed like every announcement was a huge breakthrough. And like, you'd find out later it's incremental good. We're working toward it. This actually feels like a bigger one. So I'm actually feeling more optimistic about this ancient goal than I ever have. Yeah, man, it couldn't come anytime soon. Please get here now. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. Alison shared, I would say friend of the show but on the show quite often wrote it and said, isn't it curious that when Apple announced allowing tap to pay between iPhones, that was a story from our show on yesterday's show. She said they didn't announce that Apple pay cash was going to be first out of the gate. Right, it was not going to be them because, and it took me a minute to realize this too. I was like, wait, why isn't Apple taking a cut here? Apple doesn't do point of sale. Apple doesn't do cash registers. Apple does consumer payment. They do the credit card. They do Apple pay cash, which works like cash. So Square and Stripe, Stripe is the first partner on this new capability. They do the cash register. Apple pay cash is the cash you pay to the person operating the cash register. So does that make sense? Does that make it make sense? That's why Apple isn't using Apple pay cash because Apple pay cash isn't the cash register, it's the cash. Yeah, well, the whole idea is that Apple saying this is about third party developers making their own solutions, all sorts of different kinds of cash can be thrown around where we're just going to allow this between two different iPhones, as long as they're, at least the one who's tapping to pay is a new enough iPhone. I don't think Apple pay cash being part of, you would have introduced a lot of raised eyebrows like, oh really, Apple? Apple kind of is just like, we're just allowing all of this to flourish around us. And granted, Apple pay cash does allow you to take payments. I get that. It's a little like Venmo in that way, but it's not set up to be stripe. It's not set up to be square. It's not set up to be the cash register. Apple would like you to use an iPad for your cash register. They'd like you to pay with an Apple card or Apple pay cash. They like that you can send cash back and forth to each other, but they see it more consumer level versus it doesn't have the functions that you need to do like the full thing that Stripe and Square offer. At least that's my thought on this. Well, thank you to Alison Sheridan who's always bringing up good thought provoking questions. And yeah, come back soon to the show. We also want to extend a special thanks to Adam Carr. Adam Carr, you're one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS and we would like to thank you now and here for all the years of support. Thank you, Adam. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what's new in your world? Well, there's tons going on and I do a lot of, I don't know, people have noticed this, but when there's video game stories, I have a lot to say. If you want to hear me say I'll hold out more than that, I have an entire lineup of shows. Let's call it three shows that are entirely focused on video games all from different angles, different co-hosts and different points of view. If any of them are interesting to you, you might be able to find out for yourself by going to frogpantsplays.com and those shows are there kind of pulled out and set up separately so you can go, oh, okay, this is where all the gaming stuff is. If that sounds interesting, then you might like it. Go check it out frogpantsplays.com or you can find me on Twitter and ask me anything you want at Scott Johnson. Well, good to have you here as always. Reminder for folks, we are live on the show. We're doing it live right now. You might be hearing us after the fact or even watching us after the fact, but if you can join us live, we'd love to have you. Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back doing it all again tomorrow with Len Peralta and Justin Marbury Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.