 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks and Alexander Nashev Coming up on DTNS using the blockchain to make a space game that nobody can take down and Bodie from the kilowatt podcast is here to tell us how EVs are kept safe even after a crash This is the Daily Tech news for Monday November 28th 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and joining us the aforementioned host of the kilowatt podcast Bodie Grimm welcome back Hello, thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back We are gonna talk all about safety and and fire suppression a little bit and all all kinds of good stuff related to EVs But let's start with the quick hits The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to ban the sale of electronics in the U.S. from several Chinese companies including Huawei ZTE and Cameramakers Zah Dahua rather and Heak Vision and the two-way radio maker HITERA communications Siding risks to data security This obviously is not the first time that Huawei and ZTE have been under U.S. regulatory crosshairs back in 2018 Congress voted to stop federal agencies from buying equipment from these five companies in the order the FCC asked for comment And whether to revoke existing equipment Authorizations open AI announced a new Minecraft AI It's the first bot able to craft so-called diamond tools the tasks require skilled human players to take about 24,000 actions with AI systems used to play go and other goal-oriented games Reachers researchers have typically used reinforcement learning This is where an AI system is left to dither in a game from scratch without instruction But Minecraft doesn't have a simple goal So open AI started the Minecraft AI with imitation learning training a neural network to perform tasks by watching the humans do it In this case Minecraft AI watched 70,000 hours of people playing Minecraft Researchers used another neural network to label those videos automatically which itself was trained on 2000 hours of paid Minecraft players that recorded their keyboard and mouse clicks Open AI then fine-tuned the bot with reinforcement learnings to carry out the highly complex tasks kind of similar to that Diplomacy bot that we talked about last week Ireland's data protection commission find meta 265 million euros for failure to take steps to prevent a data leak of personal phone numbers Another profile information impacting other over 500 million users now the state's back to 2019 talked about it then when a malicious actor used Facebook's contact importer tool to scrape this data Meta disclosed the leak in 2021 and clarified it resolved this issue that was back in 2019 And that a spokesperson says it has not decided whether or not it will appeal Bloomberg sources say protests at Fox con's Jingzhou iPhone factory will likely result in a production shortfall of Around six million iPhone pro units this year the size of loss production will depend on when Fox con can get all of its workers Back on all of its assembly lines those have been impact by both protests around working conditions and the Subject of the protests, which is ongoing strict COVID-19 lockdowns Fox con and Apple do expect to make up the lost output in 2023 Tech crunches reporting that according to China focused analysts Twitter saw a Significant uptick and spam tweets over the last three days when searching for any major Chinese city These tweets show porn escort services gambling content and the like making it difficult to find any legitimate search results This comes as as Tom mentioned demonstrations are ongoing in China and continue Well folks protest the country's zero tolerance COVID-19 measures the Washington Post reported Twitter was aware of the spam issue And was working to resolve it And that is a look at the quick hits All right folks MIT technology reviews Mike Orkut wrote an article earlier this month called this sci-fi Blockchain game could help create a metaverse that no one owns It's an example of how blockchains can be used for things that don't involve speculating on finances or you know defrauding people It might even shed a little light on what the word metaverse might actually come to mean someday Yeah, so the game in question is called dark forest Players start in an unexplored universe that only becomes revealed as they continue exploring Sounds like a fairly typical space based massively multiplayer strategy game But the difference is is no one is really in control of how the game plays out. No in a particular anyway It's an incomplete information game so every move is verified on a blockchain as legal without being revealed to the other players a Developer who goes by gub sheep had the idea after reading Sicheng's Liu's novel the dark forest just a few days after attending a conference on Zero knowledge proofs. So if you're like, what's that? Let's explain what a zero knowledge proof actually is. Yeah, zero knowledge proofs are a way to prove You have some information without revealing that information itself a classic example involves a person who's colorblind Let's call that person Kelly Kelly is colorblind And then there's a person who wants to prove to them that two balls are different colors Kelly can't tell and we're gonna call the person that wants to prove the balls Pat Pat the prover Colorblind Kelly puts both balls behind their back and then shows one of them to Pat Pat says what color the ball is Maybe it's red then Kelly puts it behind their back again And either switches the ball or brings out the same ball and Pat says whether it's the same or whether it's switched to green Now one time's not gonna tell you anything But you do this 20 times or so and it'll become clear if the balls are really two colors or not So dark forest the game uses a version of zero knowledge proofs called X ZX snark to hide data on the blockchain So a blockchain was used because it's an easy way to verify legal moves are being made without letting players see What the other players are up to it also means it runs autonomously Dark forest runs and rounds that have an end date for gameplay reasons and people are kind of used to that But it wouldn't actually need to it could potentially be run with no end at all and nobody could take down the server either Yeah, because there's not a server. It's a distributed blockchain Several developers are exploring what else could be done with the kind of blockchain that dark forest implemented Gub sheep started a group called Zero X park and yes, it's totally a play on Xerox park to encourage research and development Some are looking at other kinds of games, but there are also some non-game projects being looked at too One is about digital identity Which would let you prove certain things about yourself without revealing all your personal data So one example would be like a passport that you could just say yes I'm allowed to go into this country, but you wouldn't even have to say what country you're from just the piece of information That says you're improved That's that's the kind of thing that that a blockchain like this could do Bodie, I don't expect you to be the you know foremost up on on blockchains But you know as somebody who's interested in technology, how does this appear to you? While it appears really cool. I I love video games And I I don't really love buying new updates to video games. So this seems like you would Maybe pay for it once and that that'd be it Yeah, or or maybe a subscription Yeah, or maybe there's there's some other way of paying for for items or Transacting on the network where the operator of the blockchain takes a cut of those transactions But it's free to play and the prices could just be set by the people playing the game, right? Yeah, they could like mine cryptocurrency on my computer and then it would split it with me Well, and I think that that is an option but not you know Don't get don't get freaked out people because it wouldn't have to do that, right? No, I was just kidding. Yeah, yeah But but I think this is an interesting implementation of something that doesn't have to do those kinds of things to be successful, right? Yeah, no, I think it's neat Sarah, what do you make of this? well, I It took me a minute this morning to sort of wrap my head around okay This is a game and we're using the blockchain and there's no decentralized Server and it that is it's kind of cool and novel in a lot of different ways My and my first question was like, okay Well, let's say somebody does something really terrible in the game. Who do you go complain to? Well, there's no Corporation that made the game so you could figure out who did what right and then you could I don't know rectify that as a community But but it operates very differently than what I would be used to yeah I mean that would be the interesting part of this like what would constitute a terrible thing like how well Designed as the game to allow that maybe that's part of the game is like hey It's the Wild West out there don't play this if you're if you're not willing to be pirated because again This is a explore planets and try to take them from each other kind of game So part of that's just built into the way they do it But there is an aspect of like what if someone cheats? What if someone does this or that which is also there's some sort of harassment situation Where that would be not on the blockchain though, right that would be in the software implementation So how are you chatting? Well, you wouldn't be chatting through the blockchain You'd be chatting through something else. Maybe you're chatting through discord in which case then the harassment is taken care of that way I don't know. Yeah, these are good questions I don't have easy answers to them But a lot of the abuses that have happened in cryptocurrencies that they have corrected for Or that the blockchain just makes impossible like stealing Maybe not impossible makes them very unlikely that you would have the same advantages here If you have thoughts on on that Answers to that question, right? Like if you're like, oh the reason it wouldn't be a problem is because of X Especially if you're involved in this let us know feedback at dailytechno show com indeed Well, the electric vehicle market continues to get more crowded And if you're in the market for one that might be a good thing Tesla might have been the pioneer We're seeing aggressive electrification goals from virtually all the big automakers and more EV startups as well In fact, we're starting to see cars come into the US from markets that traditionally don't really have a stake here Yeah, one example that a few people are reporting on the the verge among them is a Vietnamese electric vehicle maker called VinFast Which shipped its first batch of EVs to the United States a company may not be a familiar name to you It was only founded back in 2017, but it's already become the first Vietnamese car brand to expand into global markets They have offices in Germany and Australia and they have been exporting vehicles to Russia since 2018 The first US shipment includes 999 and yes, that's just one car shy of a thousand It's a lucky number crossover SUVs called the VF eight. Yeah, you look at some photos They're pretty nice looking performance wise these compare well with other EV models 402 horsepower 472 pound fleet of torque and a 290 mile range starting at around $40,000 give or take would look styled by Pin in Farina and Torino design some will go to the car subscription service Autonomies so some of those cars have already been spoken for but the majority will go to retail a pre-order customers by the end of December VinFast expects to have another shipment on the way in January VinFast also plans to begin making cars at a plant in North Carolina in the United States in 2024 That would allow it to take advantage of US tax incentives Remember, there's a lot of those EV incentives require the cars be made in the United States More models should also be on the way at the LA auto show They showed off the subcompact vf6 a mid-size vf7 and production on those is expected to start in q3 2023 now Bodie, we do expect you to have an opinion about EVs here. So so what do you think of these right? How do these look to you? Initially VinFast showed off the vehicles at CES in 2022 and I'm very high on this company I think they've basically since from 2017 to now they have actually Developed and started shipping and producing vehicles whereas companies like Faraday future which has been around for a lot longer than VinFast they haven't shipped anything yet and you know there are always teetering on being bankrupt Faraday future So it's impressive that this company is not in the United States They built a car produced a car and now they're shipping them to the United States There's also a vf5 which is not mentioned because it's coming later But it's gonna be even a even more affordable than the vf6 or the vf7 Do you think we are going to see more of these kinds of companies? I mean we because up till now it's been traditional automaker Tesla and Potential Tesla competitor that may or may not last and goes in and out of business and none of them have really caught on yet Are we gonna see more VinFast? I hope so I think and and this is probably gonna get me in trouble with a lot of US Centric folks, but I think the Chinese automakers are doing it right right now Geely which owns Volvo or Polestar and Zeke Geely is Making a big push here in the United States I see Polestar is all over my neighborhood and of course you got the XC 60 EV for Volvo Zeke is a really neat company and I won't go too much into them to save time But look at what they're doing. It's really unique and it's very different from what's going on here in the United States But you have build your dreams Ex-paying and my favorite company Neo Neo is probably the most Tesla like if you want to compare companies, but Neo has a little personal assistant called New me and I'm saying that wrong, but this personal assistant actually it's like sits up on your dash And it has facial expressions and it'll tell you when it's raining outside. It'll make jokes It's just a cute little add-on for the car and I was at the moment It's all the way out the windshield and say look it's raining Will if you have your sunroof open and it detects rain it will close your sunroof for you That is actually that is yeah, I've had my windows down a few times and been caught in those situations. Yeah, that's cool Yeah, and and it's a good-looking car without looking Futuristic, right? I think that's that's what impresses me the most about the design like the external design is it? Just looks like a well-designed car. Yeah, not every car needs to look like a rocket ship Yeah, or what we presume the future rocket ship's gonna look right, right? I feel like all that Cars sort of look futuristic because of I don't know aero dynamics and just keeping up with the Joneses these days But yeah, a company called been fast who I had not heard of before You know from Vietnam, which I you know wasn't aware that could make inroads in the US market I think that's really exciting. I think competition is good. You know it bring down some prices at the very least Yeah, and Vin fast actually when they were for the first three months of reservation holders. They were very very Giving they gave you a home charger You got a credit for $3,000 off or $5,000 off the vf8 vf9 whichever one you chose You got some brakes on it the with the battery lease they actually took reservations bringing it back on the blockchain So, you know, I don't know if that was a gimmick or not But it has all of the perks that you received and they're all stored on the blockchain It's just probably a little bit more secure a little bit easier to manage possibly and also good buzzwords for the press At least yeah, all three of those could be true at the same time Well folks if you have a thought about Vin fast or EVs or anything else Here is our email address. Please send us a note. Let us know what you think and feedback at daily tech news show dot com Earlier this month Tim Stevens our automotive correspondent Detailed the work that Mercedes-Benz is putting in to make an EV safer not just to drive But also during and after an accident for passengers and first responders We talked about things like automatic disconnection of the high-voltage system if a crash is detected safe routing of the high-voltage wires Bodie you've developed and taught several classes on this exact subject What else should we know about how first responders are being trained in handling EVs involved in accidents? Well Here's the thing. This is still kind of new in the fire service That's not to say that first responders don't know what they're doing because they know what they're doing But a lot of this training is happening on the on the job like they show up There's an electric vehicle now. They got to figure it out But there's some things that I kind of put together to help not only first responders But others who might be witnessing an accident and they see firefighters show up and they're like, what are these guys doing? It doesn't make any sense So for most of our emergencies, how does an EV and an internal combustion engine car compare? For 99% we'll just say we'll say 90% of the emergencies. They're the same. You know, there's not a whole lot You're gonna have to worry about Some of the things that I would be concerned about as a bystander if he came up on to someone having a medical emergency Or if there was a small accident is we want to make sure that the scene is safe And the first way we do that for first responders say because we identify the car We need to know if it's an electric vehicle or an ice car And then we need to immobilize the car and this is really important because Electric vehicles have instant accelerations. Let's say you have somebody unconscious at a stop light Maybe they fell asleep at a rough night And then you're knocking on the window and somebody's walking across then everybody's surrounding the car and they wake up And they get startled and they press on the gas that that car becomes a rocket Or the accelerator that car becomes a rocket and now somebody else is gonna be injured So as firefighters, we need to immobilize the vehicle put it in park And there's a wide range of ways to put an electric vehicle in park You just kind of do your research on that but we'll chalk the wheels and things like that but Disabling the car that would be the third thing normally that would just mean turning the car off And then taking the smart key or cell phone and moving it six feet away from the car So it doesn't get reactivated So it's the same three things as an internal combustion engine car But you have to do different things because you're dealing with with gas or EV or smart locks Which it could be dealing with both are there specific concerns with the high voltage system of an EV? What's what do you do for dealing with those? As a general rule No, so if you get in a little accident and we have to pop your door open with our extrication tools or something like that We're not going to disconnect the high voltage system But if you're in a serious accident that is going to be something we're going to be more concerned about So the EV high voltage system is more than just the battery includes, you know, the battery the cables the I'm blinking on the battery management system Motors the inverter everything that's in there that is high voltage. We need to stay away from that It's not just the cables themselves because sometimes we get focused in on that and those cables are usually bright orange or bright yellow We're going to disconnect the high voltage system and every car has a different place to disconnect the high voltage system This is why it's really important to read the auto manufacturers have these emergency response guides it's really important to At least have knowledge of those guides and where you need to go to disconnect the car because every car is done differently Tesla's you open up the frunk you remove a piece of plastic near the windshield and then it could be on the left Give me on the right. It could be on the top. There's a red wire and it's got a little Tag on it and it shows you where to cut you have to cut it in two different places on a Hyundai Ionic 5 There's just a pull tab near the battery and you just pull it and you've just can you've Discharged the system it does take five minutes for the system to discharge So it's really important like what Mercedes is doing once the airbags go off The system automatically discharges. So when we get there and it's time to go to work That's not something we necessarily have to worry about Let's say there's there's a vin fast car and you don't you haven't trained on that Is there is it just like we would do you look it up on your phone? How do how do first responders deal with that? well That's a really good question typically we on my truck. We have four people on the latter truck. We have five not always but most of the time and There's enough people that are there that can start looking this stuff up So that we can have Those emergency response guides so we can move forward. We're not going to delay patient care. We're not going to delay Cutting into that car We would if it was unsafe, but if we feel like we can do it safely safely. We're not going to delay and wait for those Emergency response guides Do you ever see This is kind of jumping off of Tom's question a point where It's not up to first responders to figure out. Okay. This is the manufacturer. This is how they do it This is the wire that we need to find where's the red one that it would be Mandated for car manufacturers to do it all the same way to make it easier for accident situations Man, I hope so. We don't We don't look up, you know, this is a Chevy SUV versus a Ford SUV. We're not we're not confused on that They all work pretty much the same way. Yeah, but but every manufacturer needs EV manufacturer. Anyway, feels like they need to be cute and And Original yeah, like the f1 not the f150 lightning the Machi Ford Machi There's just a button you push on on the post and that opens up the car, which is great But if somebody let's say somebody gets into an accident in their unconscious Maybe a bystander isn't going to know how to open the door when they could just open the door and pull the person out If need be which I wouldn't recommend just leave them there for everything's okay Sure, but they may they may freak out and they'd be like, I'm gonna break the window And now you've just broken your window and really all you you just kind of got knocked out for a couple seconds But somebody freaked out Yeah, yeah Any anything that you would tell in general you've covered a few of these but in general for for someone either with an EV or approaching an EV accident to be aware of Just in in general one of the things that is always surprising to me is when we roll up and it doesn't matter if it's a Car fire that's an iceman car or a EV people are just standing in the smoke there's so much in hasty stuff in Car fires in general and then the EV batteries if they're involved there There's a lot of cancer-causing agents if if everybody's out of the vehicle and safe steer clear that smoke because It's just and even I mean we we tease cops all the time But we'll see cops doing it and you're like, hey, man, you're gonna get can't stay out of that stuff It's it's gonna hurt you. Yeah. Yeah, and that's nothing unusual about an EV's materials in that respect That makes sense to me No, the batteries are a little different because they have some different chemistries in there But if it's just a regular class a fire in the inside of a car, it's pretty much the same stuff All right, let's get to a little more fun topic Obsolete sounds. Yeah. Yeah, something that might also be unusual to you depending on when you were born and who you are is What a 56k modem sounds like Perhaps a radio getting tuned or the startup sound of the Elliott 903 computer Maybe a slide projector ever seen one of those I haven't in some time But my grandparents used to live slide shows the sound project cities and memory released Something called the obsolete sounds library featuring over 150 Increasingly rare sounds sure you might see them around here or there But they're fewer and far between founder Stuart Fox said that the collection is designed to draw attention to the world's disappearing Soundscapes to highlight those sounds that are worth preserving because they form part of our collective cultural heritage Aside from the actual sound recordings obsolete sounds also include some remixes of each from musicians And sound artists so people are having some fun with us Yeah, it's the hot new dance craze The hot new modem track. Yeah modem life is rubbish is the name of this time It really was it really was rubbish, but I didn't know it until I knew what brought all we knew is all we do I love that we have Moose 2271 saying 56k to knew I I need I have classic rock 14 for please Yeah, yeah 288 come on. Yeah, 56k. What are you rich? I? Remember my first 56k modem like it was yesterday. I remember well having a modem Maybe longer than I need to and a friend came over and was like hey, can I get online? I have to do something and I was like yeah, and he was like no You're kidding really and I was like yeah, this is how we do it a lot of people still do it this way Takes me back. It actually this this sound as creating as it is. I find very nostalgic Yeah, me too because it reminded me of being like yay. I'm gonna like be online Excitement. Yeah, and like see what other people are doing all over the world All right, let's check out the mail bag One from Lee wanted to chime in about the awesomeness of libraries We've been talking about this recently Lee says the St. Louis County Library provides free headspace subscriptions That's a $70 value and free LinkedIn learning subscriptions Which is a $240 value as well as physical items and services like instruments Telescopes even hotspots. Oh and online instructor-led courses via Gale and so much more people don't realize that they are missing out Lee also has a special shout-out to Patrick Norton who is his favorite guest. He says St. Louis represent caca Fantastic, we'll pass that along to Patrick next time we see him That's great and and a good reminder on on all the other things your your public library has we were just focusing on that one project Related to music, but but yeah, there's so many other things. Thanks for chiming in Lee appreciate that indeed Yeah, thanks everybody who writes in and thanks to you Bodie Grimm for coming with the knowledge today Let folks know where they can keep up with what you do Well, I do a podcast on electric vehicles, obviously I don't really focus so much on the cars themselves. I focus more on the technology So and you know behind the cars and renewable energy and stuff like that So it might be a good fit for folks who listen to the show And you can just search kilowatt in your favorite pod catcher choice because I don't have a website Allison keeps getting mad at me to do that And then if I could just give Allison show a little plug because we actually went into more depth on the fire And it was chitchat across the pond And I can't remember you might have to search it 739. Thank you 739 Where we talked probably about 45 minutes about EV fires. So if anybody's interested in that Fantastic. Well, we're so glad to have you on today. Come back early and often We also took took a four-day weekend here in the US for a holiday But we got some brand-new bosses those bosses are Ron and Kevin Ron and Kevin said Turkey be darned. We want to be patrons. So thank you Ron and thank you Kevin Yeah, we're thankful for Ron and Kevin today, even though it's not even Thanksgiving anymore We're very thankful for I'm still eating turkey. So, you know, indeed It could be you tomorrow if you want to join our patreon Please do so speaking of patrons stick around for the extended show. Good day internet, which you can catch Right after DTNS ends. We are live though on this show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC Find out more at daily tech news show comm slash live tell a friend if you think they'd like the show as well We are back tomorrow talking smart home gift guides with Nicole Lee joining us talk to you that This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants calm I'm in club hopes you have enjoyed this program