 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fishler. Coming up on DTNS, should you take your e-commerce problems to Crab Court, plus Meta's prototype VR headsets of the future and a big advancements in tech for 6G cell service? I hear me right here. This is The Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 21st, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my goodness. I'm so excited to talk about Crab Court. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google dropped its appeal on a French $592 million antitrust fine. France's competition regulator issued the fine in July of 2021 for Google's abusive negotiation practices with publishers on payments for content reuse. As part of the settlement, for at least the next five years, Google agreed to good faith negotiating with news publishers on content reuse payments, like offering a compensation proposal within three months of negotiations and agreeing for an arbitration tribunal to settle disputes. The terms also mean that publishers aren't bound by previous deals inked with Google and are free to negotiate under this new framework. The US imposed sanctions on Chinese tech companies over the last few years, most prominently, probably heard about the ones on Huawei. It involved restricting the kinds of chips that could be imported for Huawei and other companies to use. That has spurred China to invest in its domestic chip manufacturing, and Bloomberg results that 19 of the 20 fastest growing chip industry firms over the past year are now in China. A year ago, that number was eight out of 20. Revenue for those fast-growing Chinese chip companies is also growing faster than companies like ASML or TSMC, with total sales from Chinese chip makers rising 18% in 2021 and even established companies like SMIC in China, because you might think, well, the new companies, of course, their percentage rises are huge. They're coming from nothing. SMIC reported a 67% surge in quarterly sales, and it definitely was not coming from nothing. The Chinese government is investing billions of dollars into its domestic chip companies, and the products are decent. Apple apparently considered using Yangtze Memory Technologies as a flash memory on the iPhone. Speaking of Apple, the company shared technical details on a feature in both iOS and iPadOS 16 called automatic verification. When enabled, this would automatically and privately verify a device and Apple ID through iCloud, presenting a private access token to a site rather than using a CAPTCHA. So CAPTCHA haters rejoice, or potentially. Cloudflare and Fastly announced support for private access tokens already, and Apple also said that macOS Ventura supports the feature as well. Microsoft hasn't suffered the same number of Xbox shortages that Sony has for PS5, but Microsoft has confirmed there is now a shortage of Xbox controllers. Microsoft says it's working as fast as possible to improve the supply. Meanwhile, Microsoft also is pulling public access to several of its Azure face facial analysis tools. That includes one that attempts to read emotions. Microsoft will also retire Azure faces attempts to identify attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup. New customers will lose access right away and existing customers lose access June 30th. Microsoft will continue to use the technology in its own seeing AI machine vision aid. Well, whatever this metaverse ends up being, and we still don't really know, many hope it will be an open place where companies, products can interoperate with each other rather than a series of sold lands tied to certain manufacturers hardware. So to further the end of openness, several companies have joined up to form the metaverse standards forum. Amonging the founding members are NVIDIA, Microsoft, Wayfair, IKEA, Adobe, Alibaba, Epic Games, Huawei, Qualcomm, Sony and Meta to name a few. The organization is open to any member at no cost. So Apple and Google can speak yearsly apps and I wonder if they knew about this. Oh, I bet they knew. I'm curious when Google usually joins these standards organizations, I'm curious why they did not in this case or if they will shortly. Maybe they're just trying to get around to it. Apple doesn't surprise me at all. They're often late to these standards organizations but maybe they'll eventually join in and I hope they do because we are starting to get more little things from that metaist of all metaverse wannabe companies, Meta. Yeah, we really are. So the idea of the metaverse, you can't really go any farther than the company that renamed itself Meta. That is a company that really cares about it, hence the name. Continues to sign up big brands to open up virtual spaces in horizon worlds, joining retail company Coach, handbags, make a lot of shoes, high-end brand and others is Fender musical instruments with a guitar shaped island called the Fender Strativerse and the BMW group with its mini Cooper oriented miniverse. So yes, brands are in the metaverse. They are alive and well. The new horizon worlds apps were announced at Cannes Lions event and are available to all US and Canada MetaQuest two users. But Meta also wants you to focus on the hardware that will access the metaverse in the future. At a round table last week, virtual round table, Meta showed off several VR headset prototypes and talked about the company's goal of developing one that will pass a visual Turing test. That's one where the virtual display is indistinguishable from the real world. Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, this round table was for particular reporters and they all seem to get the same presentation at the same time. Meta gave four basic concepts to achieve their goals. They want high resolution. So you should be able to experience 2020 vision without your glasses. Variable focal depth and eye tracking so that as your eyes focus on far away objects, they come into focus naturally. The eye tracking can tell what your eye is doing and change the focus of the screen to adapt. That is something that's shown off before in its half dome prototypes. Number three, fix optical distortions caused by lenses. And number four, implement HDR, which will give you realistic brightness, shadows and color depth. So let's run through the prototypes. There's four prototypes here, I think. The first is a way to achieve these goals with Hollow Cake 2. I know you're like, I barely even knew Hollow Cake 1. Well, welcome to Hollow Cake 2. It's the thinnest VR headset Meta has made and uses thin holographic lenses. The holographic lenses use optical folding to polarize the light so that a nearly flat panel can be used instead of a thick lens which has to focus the light through the thick lens. If Meta can develop a self-contained laser light source, it could make Hollow Cakes as flat as a pair of sunglasses. Shannon, does that sound good to you? Oh, absolutely, it does, Tom. See, the biggest thing for me when it comes to VR and I was an early adopter way back in the day when Google came out with Cardboard and we have Google Glass for AR and then I currently have the very old Lenovo Mirage, I think it's called, but I haven't really gotten into it lately because they've been kind of uncomfortable. They're too big and bulky and I find myself not wanting to put them on my face just because if I'm going to use it for a long period of time, like if I'm playing the Star Trek game, for example, I don't want to because it's uncomfortable. So the fact that they're trying to make something that is a little bit more self-contained, a little bit thinner, hopefully like sunglasses, that is very intriguing to me because as a current glasses wearer, I feel like I would be adapted to that much more comfortably. Yeah, I mean, I'm a Quest 2 user, formerly a original Quest user and one of the things that has been, I mean, it doesn't really preclude me from playing anything and enjoying it, but the way that the headset sort of falls comfortably onto my face, no matter how I put it on my face because it's heavy, it always ends up being like, ooh, my eyes can't quite see this, but it has to be like, if it was just slightly different angle, which the headset can't really do, then I could see everything a lot more clearly. Obviously the lighter the headsets get, the better this is for just the general being able to see what you're supposed to see in VR, but I have found that the Quest 2 is a little harder to secure on my head than the Quest 1 and I think it's because it's lighter. So it bounces around a little bit more. I play a lot of exercise games, so I'm jumping around, you're not necessarily always doing that in VR, sometimes you're sitting quietly, just having some fun with your controllers, but these are all really interesting factors to kind of see where this is going next. Yeah, it's interesting what you say about the Quest 2, it's too heavy to just sit on your face like a pair of sunglasses, but it's lighter than the Quest 1, so it doesn't benefit from its own momentum, which sounds like what you were getting with the Quest 1. Yeah, at least with me, yeah. That's definitely been a factor. It feels like HoloKic 2 would fix that because it wants to be super thin. Now these actually look more like a headset than the HoloKic 1. HoloKic 1 really did look like a pair of glasses, but what you really want out of VR besides weight is resolution. Butterscotch is the next prototype we'll look at. It cuts the field of view roughly in half from 110 degrees down to about 55 or so. So this is a prototype. That's obviously not an acceptable field of view for a shipping product, but in order to do, the reason it does that is to achieve retinal resolution at 1832 by 1920 pixels per eye. That puts it at 55 pixels per field of view degree, and Meta itself defines retina as 60, so it's close to that. Varjo is a company that ships retina screens in its headsets. They're several thousand dollars. It has 64 pixels per eye in the pixels per field of view degree. Still, Butterscotch has enough to let the user read the bottom line of an eye test in VR. Which I can't even do right now with my current prescription glasses. So if they can make that happen and I don't have to wear my glasses, then I'm down. Yeah, I've had a strange VR experience where I need to wear glasses. I mean, I wear contact lenses day to day, but if I wasn't wearing these, I would need to wear glasses. Glasses are usable in VR, but there's a bulkiness, it's a thing. So the idea that if you needed to have the highest resolution possible, not everything is gonna benefit from the smaller field of view, certainly, but I don't know if you're watching a movie or something like that. I mean, then you kind of get into other situations where I can see myself walking onto a plane. Let's say I'm late, everybody else is already seated and everybody's wearing their VR headsets because they're watching their movies. Well, let's get brightness then because you definitely need to not have super dark, even if you have high resolution, the Starburst HDR prototype. That's the one that's gonna make it look good, not just high res, but make it actually look good. That's what HDR does. Can produce up to 20,000 nits of brightness. Compare that to your Quest 2's 100 nits right now. It almost fits my eyes to think about that. Right now the amount of fans and wires it needs to operate means you can't actually wear the prototype. You could just sort of hold it up to your eye with handles but it works. Obviously not usable since you would have to hold it up the entire time. It almost looks like a robot, it's so cute. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Sarah. Well, I was just gonna say, I'm like, do we need 20,000 nits of brightness? Everything seems so nice in there right now. We need the capability for it so that we never feel like we're... That's what we said about standard def, right? Like, come on, who really needs HD? Who cares about 4K? It's like, once you get it, then some people did. Once you get it, then you realize, oh yeah, okay, I'm not gonna go back. And then they tie all these into a concept which they haven't built yet called Mirror Lake. So it gets the holographic lenses that are flat, the HDR, the mechanical varifocal lens and eye tracking, and creepily, it would use high-res LCD displays with laser backlights. No, that's not the creepy part, that's a good part. High-res LCD displays with laser backlights means flat but they're toying with the idea of external displays to show your eyes and facial expressions. That sounds weird, but if I could customize it so that I could have anime eyes, I would love that. It's not the first time they've toyed around with that concept. So hopefully it gets better. Would the external display be for, I don't know, someone else who's observing you? Yeah, to make you look natural as you're wearing these around. So you could wear them to the grocery store? Yeah, I'm sure you'll look real natural someday. I kind of do love the idea of that. It's like, I mean, how many pairs of sunglasses have I bought and lost, you know? So here we go, this is the future. Just making part of your face. Finally, Meta Reality Labs chief scientist Michael Abrash says the key to all this is making the tech thin and flat when you're talking about the holographic lenses and the polarization that lets you pack in more functions without adding weight and thickness. Meanwhile, if you're wondering what they're actually gonna ship, Project Cambria is still on schedule, they say to ship by the end of the year. We'll offer eye tracking, high-resolution pass-through cameras for VR and AR, and after Cambria comes out, Meta plans to develop two lines of headsets, one that stays affordable like the Quest and a high-end professional grade line that they'll be shipping to enterprises and prosumers and companies and stuff like that. All right, let's talk about Gs, Shannon. Okay, let's talk about some Gs. Now, I know that 5G hasn't even rolled out very far enough to fulfill its ultimate low-latency high-capacity promise, but the folks who make standards are already working on 6G as in golf. The goals are pretty predictable, so it's gonna be faster, of course, almost zero latency and 52, 100 times the capacity of 5G. So to achieve the aims of 6G frequency bands, those must pass 100 gigahertz, AKA terahertz, well above the current few gigahertz that 5G services use. But the equipment used in telecommunications now can only resonate and absorb microwaves up to approximately 70 gigahertz, so there's a slight problem there. So a new technology needs to be developed that can achieve the higher frequency resonance, and we do have a promising development for that. Yeah, scientists at Osaka Metropolitan University published a study in physical review letters about something called chiral spin solution lattice. You can just remember it by the abbreviation CSL, that's how they tend to abbreviate. I know there's two S's there, they just call it CSL. The theory for using it to achieve broader frequency ranges than your typical ferromagnetic material, your typical iron magnets, has been around for a while. The theory's been there, but it has not been observed in experiments till now. The scientists created a crystal of a material made of chromium, niobium, and sulfur, if you're into your chemical symbols, it's CRNB3S6. The observed resonance in three models, but two of them weren't that great. The Kittle mod, or three modes, the Kittle mode is similar to what you get in an iron magnet. It would require an impractically strong magnetic field to achieve higher bandwidth in CSL, so that one's out. The second mode, asymmetric mode, didn't produce the desired effect either. But the third, the third called multiple resonance mode, increased frequency, when the magnetic field decreased, that is a win. It means a weak magnetic field could boost frequencies above 100 gigahertz. It means a weak magnetic field. In other words, you don't need as much power for this. First author on the paper, Dr. Shimamoto noted that the resonance frequency can be controlled over a wide band up to the subterrahertz band. So if anyone asked you about 6G, you can say, well, CSL seems to have solved the increased frequency band problem, and then refer them to fizz.org or the paper itself for more details. 6G rollout isn't coming anytime soon. It's currently targeted for 2030, but this was one of the obstacles to getting there, and it looks like we have a great solution to it. I love it because it sounds like this would be more environmentally friendly than what we currently have, because it's supposed to be using less energy. So in that fact alone, I'm very intrigued to see how this would work in actual real-life scenarios. Yeah, there's a lot of other advancements being done, and Samsung and several Chinese companies have shown the ability to do super fast transmissions and all of that, but this was one element of the practicality of being able to roll out that they needed to solve, and it looks like they have solved it. Now it still needs to go out in the field and be field tested, but it works, and it looks promising and saving us some money, which is good too. Shout out to the physicists. Yeah. We're like, hey, the Kittle mode needs a strong magnetic field, but it just is impractical. But hey, the multiple resonance mode actually requires the weakest magnetic field. So yay, we're on one here. Sometimes you just, yeah, we totally are. Sometimes you just do something and it works out even better than you expected. So hopefully this will pan out. If you have a thought about this or anything, send us an email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love your emails, send them. The Wall Street Journal reports on an online court used by Chinese e-commerce shoppers to get judgments on bad shopping experiences, problems resolved in these court cases include a self-changing trash can that actually only self-sealed, oh no, a takeout dish of garlic oysters that had no garlic. Ooh, I know, how dare they. Pulpy watermelon juice that also had seeds. No good. No good, yep, one star. The journal describes the process used by Idea Fish, which is a Chinese online marketplace full of independent sellers. It calls its court the idle fish jury, but everyone else calls it crab court because it's presided over by a crab that has a unibrow, powdered wig, and a gavel. And I think we need to know more about this. Yeah, no kidding, Shannon, yes we do. So presiding over may be a strong word, it is a crab by the way. Judgments are actually carried out by a panel of anonymous fellow customers. So that's what's going on behind the scenes. Hence the word of the word jury in the official name. But the system apparently is working. More than 95% of all disputes brought to idle fish jury are resolved there in less than 90 minutes. 90 minutes, not 90 days, not 90 months, 90 minutes. But the system handles about half of Idle Fish's customer disputes and Idle Fish isn't the only one or even the first. I kind of love it, to be honest. I think it's really cool and that is correct. So Maituan has a customer court that used to be called the kangaroo jury because Maituan's mascot is a kangaroo but is now called Little May's Panel of Judges and Alibaba had its own version called Public Jury, though that one strangely enough was discontinued in 2018. I am fascinated and confused by this. I have so many questions. I respect the numbers. It apparently is working. 95% of the disputes are handled that way. And I get it where you have a seller and a customer who disagree, right? The seller says, I ordered a large, you sent me an extra large or the customer says that and the seller says too bad, that's still a shirt. That's what you ordered and the jury weighs in and goes no, you can't say that seller. Like it seems unreasonable, but sometimes you need somebody else to step in and resolve those things. But I also wonder if this would work anywhere else. Like, is this just unique to the culture of e-commerce in China or wouldn't this just descend into gamesmanship in other markets, including the United States? Yeah, that was my question is like, you would think that if for whatever reason, I don't know, Shannon's a seller, I'm a buyer, I buy something from her store. For some reason, people want to side with her rather than me. I mean, how is the court a impartial jury, so to speak? I don't know that it is. And maybe the people involved don't care. Maybe it's just kind of fun to be a part of this. They would be impartial because they're random and anonymous, right? So the chances of you picking someone randomly that was on the side of any individual seller or customer would be low. I guess the sellers could try to pack the pool with people by paying them to go in there, but that seems like you'd be paying for things that wouldn't always work. It's, yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, unless you were, I don't know, a seller that has lots of money to burn that you would even bother. It's kind of like small claims court, right? Well, hopefully given that this is a bunch of independent sellers, hopefully it holds some accountability to the marketplace, the sellers that are on these marketplaces to actually be selling their customers the actual product that they are describing on the website, which oftentimes I've found purchasing online is not necessarily the truth. And don't forget the company's still there to handle a lot of these cases. A lot of these cases don't get worked out this way and get appealed to regular customer service which weighs in and does things. So it's kind of a filter system, like you say, like a small claims court, right? It just filters out the easy to resolve ones where any given bystander would go like, no, no, they ordered a large, give them a large, come on. Quit trying to be like that. Well, PS5 lovers, you might like this next one. Sony's slim version of the PS5 hasn't happened yet. You might say, what, what are you talking about? Cause this is a thing that has been happening for various iterations of the PlayStation for quite a few years. A YouTuber called DIY Perks has already built that slim PS5. He disassembled a PlayStation 5, subbed up some components with similar parts and his own homemade creations to end up with a device that's 1.9 centimeters thick. That is a thin little box in order to deal with the power supply and cooling system Perks built his own in the long slim and external case designed to hide behind a TV or be otherwise hidden in the shadows. Based on the temperatures that he took while playing Horizon Forbidden West, his cooling system was more efficient than the standard PS5s itself. Yeah, cause he water cooled it. That's so cool though. Like the cooling system and the power supply makes this look more impressive than it is. Cause when you look at that power supply, it's huge and long and you kind of have to set that out of the way. But in the end, that slim is very slim. I watched through this video and I love it. I love that he's like cooking his own components in a microwave and like forming them himself. Like, wow, that's on another level. Like that's really cool. Yeah. If you like good hackering. Very impressive. The DIY Perks channel. This is your ASMR harp. Totally. It was very ASMR for me in my hacker mindset. I almost want to say he sacrificed his PS5 for your entertainment, but he didn't. It still works. It works. In fact, it works better now that he put in all that effort. So pretty cool. Smaller and more efficient. How about that? All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Douglas. This is in response to conversation we had with Rob Dunwood on Friday show about EV cars and performance driving. Doug says from someone in the biz, EVs can beat anything in short accelerations such as quarter mile sprints. The torque is higher and available immediately. Beyond that, pure EVs would lose. They're carrying more weight and they have a heat problem. The first few times you go to full current and to the motors, they're fine. But once they heat up, they lose efficiency quickly. Nothing a day-to-day driver would ever see. But in a road race where you're accelerating and decelerating hard all the time, this would become a problem. Doug says performance driving isn't efficient either. So range would also be an issue. But like all things EV, there's a lot of work going on to address these issues. New motors with less heat rejection, individual motors at each wheel, that can deliver exactly the torque limit on the available traction all the time, and of course improvements in the batteries. On top of that, the batteries are low, which means that the center of gravity for EVs is actually great for performance driving. Yeah, man. If you get the heat problem down, suddenly these things are, you know, formula EV racing, it's gonna be really cool. I mean, it is really cool, but it's gonna actually surpass. If you could get that heat problem down, formula EV would surpass formula one. Well, thanks so much, Doug, for the really good intel. Thanks to everybody who emails us and says, hey, I've got a little something to say about one of the stories that you talked about or something that you might talk about in the future. And we'd love to hear more from you. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. Also thanks to you, Shannon Morse, for being with us today. Wonderful work as always. What else has been going on in your world? Thank you so much, Sarah, and thank you, Tom, for having me on. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse is where you can always find me. And most recently, I did a comparison between the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6a. So if you are curious, if you should upgrade this year or skip the next generation of Pixel, definitely check out that video. Very cool. We also wanna extend a special thanks to Andy Beach. Andy Beach is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Andy. Good to see you around the internet. Thank you, Andy. You're the best. Yeah, absolutely. And folks, there's a slot for your name right there. You can either stick around and help us for a long time like Andy has, including coming on the show and explaining tough concepts to us. Or you could just become a new patron right now and your name's on the show tomorrow, like that. Andy, Andy, I mean, make it sell. How fun. I don't know, I'll do a car wheel or maybe my piñata wheel. There is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We roll right into it as we finish up here. But just a reminder, DTNS is live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern, 2,800 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow. With Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. At frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha, ha.