 Coming up on DTNS, can you trust Amazon Sidewalk, AMD's new GPUs, game upscaling tech and Tesla parts? And why is Twitter getting into web? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 2nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Podfeat podcast, I'm Allison Sheridan. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty ser. We were just talking a lot about Avatar and our various opinions on that movie, as well as a little bit about Waterworld. If you want that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Intel announced two new 11th gen U-series processors at Computex, the core i7-1195G7 and the i5-1155G7. Both have four cores and eight threads plus Z graphics with 96 execution units for the i7 and 80 execution units for the i5. The i7 is the first U-series chip able to hit five gigahertz in a single core turbo boost with a base clock of 2.9 gigahertz. Today is June 1st. The editorial board of Daily Tech News Show regrets the error. Acer co-CEO Tiffany Wang said the company can only fulfill 50 percent of demand on average due to the chip shortage, saying the situation won't change until up to Q2 of 2022. At Computex, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the chip shortage will quote, take a couple of years for the ecosystem to address shortages of foundry capacity, substrates and components and Gartner issued a report saying it believes this is the most serious point in the shortage and estimates it will continue until Q2 2022. Alienware announced that the X-15 gaming laptop will start at $2,000 and the X-17 gaming laptop starting at $2,100. The X-15 is a 15.9 millimeter thick in some configurations, offering up to 240 Hertz refresh rate screen, while the X-17 offers up to a 360 Hertz refresh rate, both offer a offer 11th gen Intel H core processors and support up to an RTX 3080 graphics card. Uber announced 33,000 drivers joined its U.S. platform during the week of May 17th, increasing active driver hours 4.4% over the previous week and marking a new record for drivers since the start of 2021. Uber did not say how that number compared to pre-pandemic times, my guess is because it didn't compare very well. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced that its users can use money from their new Coinbase cards through Apple Play and Google Pay. Coinbase will automatically convert all crypto to U.S. dollars when adding to a customer's Coinbase card that can then be used for purchases and then receive crypto rewards for shopping. All right, we have a basket of chip news for you today. You heard some of it already. Let's get to AMD's at Computex AMD announced the Radeon RX 6000M series of laptop GPUs. This is the equivalent to the Nvidia 300 series. You got the 6800M, the 6700M and the 6600M, the 6800M being the one comparable to the Nvidia RTX 3080. These are based on the RDNA 2 architecture. They support smart access memory or SAM that's AMD's version of resizable bar and use smart shift to shift thermal limits of the CPU and GPU for best performance. The RX 6800M and 6600M are shipping to OEMs now. They also announced the AMD Advantage program which laptop makers can use if they meet certain standards like at least 300 nits of brightness in the display, less than 40 degrees Celsius at the WASD keys, 10 hours of video playback on the battery, PCIe Express Gen 3 solid state drives, and a few other things. The ASUS ROG Strix G15 will be the first to carry the AMD Advantage label. AMD announced more details about its equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS game upscaling. AMD calls its version Fidelity FX Super Resolution, you could just call it FSR for short. It supports four levels of rendering and can reach up to twice the frame rates compared to native 4k rendering. AMD says FSR will be open source and free to developers, meaning you can use it on Nvidia, not just on AMD hardware, because it's open source. AMD's FSR will run on Nvidia chips. It won't require 10 sore or deep learning hardware and more than 10 game studios and engines are set to use FSR by the end of this year. More details on that coming at the launch of FSR on June 22nd. Finally, a couple of partnerships, the next Samsung Exynos chip for mobile phones will feature AMD's RDNA2 graphics. That means the mobile phones will support ray tracing and variable ray shading. Best bet is this will probably show up first in the Samsung Galaxy S phone in 2022, but that's interesting. And Allison, your next Tesla infotainment system, if you get a Model S or a Model X might use an AMD Ryzen processor and an AMD RDNA2 GPU. They didn't say which models, but the Model S plaid with the new AMD system starts deliveries June 10th, not trying to make it buy a new car. But this is this is important, Tom, because I have noticed some severe video lag when playing missile command and asteroids in my Tesla. So I'm really looking forward to do that a lot, do you? Oh, yeah, all the time. Well, I mean, that's I mean, all kidding aside, though, is there a time when you're looking at the, you know, impressive, you know, infotainment console that's currently in your Tesla I'm thinking, eh, the refresh rate could be better. You know, there are things that are laggy about this display, because I'm always just sort of blown away by anything you do see. Yeah, it is a beautiful display. And now it's more things going on in the in the background, I think, like the it used to be that when cars were sitting next to you, they'd get real twitchy, like they'd spin on access and stuff. But they obviously fix the code and they don't they don't jerk around so much. The the graphics of the satellite display is real slow. But I sort of wonder if that's not the network. But maybe it is a GPU. Maybe maybe that would be good. It's a very Tesla thing, right? Like Tesla wants to let you have a 10 teraflops gaming machine in your center console. Never mind if that's a good idea or not, or you'll ever play Call of Duty in your Tesla, you'd be able to, right? And, you know, that's that's part of the sales pitch is is the idea of things, not not always the reality necessarily. Well, it seems to the fart mode works quickly. So that's, you know, that's what's really important. What does that do? You can have the different seats fart so you can you can press a button and make your left rear passenger. Oh, so it's literally fart. Okay, it is literally. I thought it was a clever acronym for something else, but I was wrong. You can add it to the like to the blinker like when you hit your left blinker, the right rear passenger seat farts and you can change what kind of fart it's it's it's really it's good. So this is like this is like road trip games type thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, right. People waste a lot of time talking about charging efficiency and cost of ownership. And these are the real issues. We want to play asteroids and make the back rear seat smart. Okay. And video is not going to do either of those things, but it did announce its new flaming, flaming gaming flagship GPU. It's on flames. That's how good it is. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and video says it will be available whatever that means June 3rd starting at $1,200. The design and ports are similar to the 3080 but the 3080 Ti has 12 gigs of GDDR6X VRAM and 80 GPU clusters compared to 10 gigs and 64 GPU clusters on the standard RTX 3080. The 3080 Ti requires a 750 watt power supply and can draw up to 350 watts of power. The Verge notes that it's basically the same as a 3090 but with half the VRAM. There's also the RTX 3070 Ti coming June 10th for $600. Nvidia also announced that the Apple TV app is coming to the Nvidia Shield. The app supports watching in 4K with Dolby Vision HGR, Google Assistant playback control and AI upscaling to 4K. Now our resident shield owner and enthusiast Roger Chang, if you were watching Twitter, was quite enthusiastic about the idea anyway of getting the Apple TV app on his Nvidia Shield. Will you be installing it right away, Roger? Possibly. I mean, it's what I find so compelling about it is it really just whittles away the number of things you need plugged into your TV into a single device. And there's really no reason that can happen already just if not for all the competing interests involved. But it's great. I think the idea that you can have everything without necessarily switching between devices. And the great thing about the shield is I can pop between apps and they'll remember like you tapping through a browser. So if I'm watching on something on Hulu, and I kick over to YouTube or cook over Netflix, I can go back and just pick back up where I left off in Hulu or HBO Max or anything like that. And that's great. And I'm assuming it's going to work the same way with the Apple app. Yeah, that's going to be interesting. I like the idea of the it's almost like the players are starting to realize what we actually want. We don't actually want to buy 12 devices. We actually would like them like I want to buy a box and make it do everything for me. Stop making me choose stop making me have more than one. And it's I'm always curious when that happens like, hmm, there must be something in it for them if they keep doing this. What is what is what is their motivation to make us actually happy? And and would you call this uncharacteristically Apple to to make the Apple TV app as widely available as it has? I mean, you can get a Chromecast that supports Apple TV and does, you know, Dolby and 4k and all that. Roku also right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Roku. Yeah, it tells you that their their Apple TV thing is a different kind of thing than what else have done. But you know, I mean, you know, I mean, they do have Apple music on Android. And they, you know, don't forget iTunes on Windows, right? That was good. So they do have a history of having done it, whether they do it well, will probably be the question. Yeah, I feel like this is the first big pivot towards becoming a service company is to do something like this, where you're you're making your app available widely. Now they don't have the Apple TV app for Android, right? Only Android TV, I think. Yeah, I don't know how many people would watch TV on their phone. I use it on my phone. And sometimes I wish it was on my duo. Occasionally, yeah, especially at night, when I'm like, I don't want to turn on the TV. Let me let me just watch a little bit of this on my phone so I can turn it off quick and put it away. Just put a 6.7 inch screen really close to your face. And it's like having a widescreen. Yeah. I love that that turning on the TV is just too complicated these days. That's why we've got it. So no, it really is. If Steve's not around, I just don't watch TV downstairs, because it's just I don't even know how to turn it off. And I'm good at this stuff. So you just tell your voice assistant, turn it off. Make it go away. Well, the tech press is definitely interested in reporting that Twitter is testing ads and fleets. You may have forgotten that fleets are like snapchats for Twitter. But you know what? We're actually more interested in Twitter's new weather service. Twitter partnered with meteorologist Eric Holthaus to launch a local weather news service called Tomorrow across 16 cities in North America with 18 participating meteorologists. There will also be 20 to 30 climate writers and four part time editorial staff. Some of the content will be free, some behind a $10 a month membership. You can get long form content on Twitter and Q&As with meteorologists on spaces. Members can ask unlimited questions. You can check it out at tmrw.is. Twitter VP of product Mike part did told Axios that Twitter wants to build more journalism collectives like this across every topic. He also indicated video monetization on Twitter is coming. Now I read into this and I don't really think it's about weather. I think it's about climate. Because if you read about the long form stuff, they talk about helping you to have hope. They actually use that word about having hope and looking to the future and not, you know, they call it tomorrow and they're hiring 20 to 30 climate writers. So right, I mean, they call it tomorrow a weather service, but I think you're right. It's a community of people sharing resources and delivering justice, hope, connection, safety and resilience in a world in urgent need of systemic action. So this isn't going to be 72 tomorrow. Yeah, no, that's probably going to be in there somewhere. I signed up for San Francisco, which is one of the participating cities and just happens to be the closest city to me that is, you know, in the 16 city rollout. And I, you know, it's sort of signed up and I just got what can I get for free? Let's just see what the free content is. And I guess it's it's going to be rolling out in the evening. So my first edition of this newsletter has not come yet. I got a couple emails like, yeah, okay, we got you welcome. And I was like, huh, a newsletter, an email newsletter. Okay, well, not necessarily going to be bad content. It seems very separate from Twitter. I understand that some of the folks who might be participating in in what I may be reading and, you know, maybe I'll like it and I'll follow them on Twitter because of the the Twitter tie in is a little lost on me. Well, sir, you mentioned in our pre show, what about the poems? Yeah, well, that was one of the things where it's kind of like, you know, there's there's verbiage that's always used for these sorts of things like, ooh, and for, you know, subscribers for $10 a month, you know, more exclusive content, including poems, memes and call to action items. And I'm like, sort of like, like, none of that stuff is necessarily bad. But I'm like, I'm, I'm just, I need to feel more compelled to pay for that. That feels very positioned towards people who would respond to climate justice as a call, like, oh, poems to that. That's very nice. So I think I think they know who they're targeting there, I guess. I I like. Okay. So first of all, this is what they're doing with review with they they bought the newsletter service review. This is what they're doing with it. This is less about Twitter, the 280 character messaging service and more about Twitter owning review and coming up with more monetization strategies. So that makes it make a little more sense for me like, oh, this is basically a newsletter thing, but you can tie in Twitter because they they're Twitter, right? I think it will make even more sense for much more widely appealing topics. Not that climate isn't important and widely appealing, but but, you know, sports, politics, entertainment, they're they're saying they want to do all these topics food. I think they started with climate because it's a little narrower, and that gives them some runway. But it's also important and it's a good PR to be like, Yeah, we're trying to do something about the climate and that that makes them look good. And you might get more people trying it out because of that too, because they they want to look they want to look into what what Twitter is offering there. But this is this is the beginning of the evolution of Twitter away from just being a short messaging service. Yeah, and I think the way that it's being rolled out this way is very, hey, I might have heard about it on Twitter, but yeah, it does seem very separate. What how Twitter might be able to integrate these newsletter features within the timeline in a, you know, in a in a way that doesn't seem to left field or intrusive. I'm sure the company is working on that as well, especially with that one click want to donate $10 per month kind of thing type of situation. I'm I'm surprised Los Angeles isn't among these cities. At first I thought, oh, it's because our weather doesn't change. But if it's about climate, like that's a big market to leave out, they have the Dominican Republic, which I thought was kind of cool. Like it's not all it's North American cities, but it's not all US. There's Toronto, Dominican Republic, you know, it's an it's an interesting selection. I mean, I'm intrigued somebody else to change a chance, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're fine over here. Folks, we have a whole other series out there that you can subscribe to if you want to get deeper dives on individual topics. If you're like, what is an NFT? Well, coming up June 10th, I'm going to take a good amount of time to explain NFTs top to bottom. It's part of know a little more. You can find all kinds of topics in there. If you haven't subscribed already, Wi-Fi 6 5G, a whole lot of stuff. Go subscribe at know a little more dot com. On June 8th, Amazon is launching a free public mesh network called Sidewalk in the United States. It pools together small amounts of bandwidth from echoes, rings, other Amazon voice powered devices to cover your neighborhood with low bandwidth connectivity. In fact, tile trackers will be enrolled in Sidewalk, which will make it easier for tile trackers to work because they'll have a connection more often. The devices using Sidewalk connect by Bluetooth low energy or if they need to go a little farther and there's enough devices that support at the 900 megahertz spectrum. Amazon also says there's a few other direct connection frequencies it might use. That's how the devices can connect like the tile tracker to an Amazon echo or an Amazon echo to another Amazon echo. Then your internet connected device like an echo can communicate on another device's behalf using the internet. So if you're like, why would I need to do this? Let's say your garage has a security light. It just needs it just needs to occasionally, you know, talk to the internet, but it's not using a lot of bandwidth. And it's in a place that's out of range of your Wi-Fi. Well, you can either spend money doing an extender, or if you're part of Sidewalk and your neighbors are cooperating, it could use the 900 megahertz network to connect to the echo in your neighbor's garage, which would forward info over their internet connection. Or let's say you drop your keys in front of an apartment complex, your tile tracker can connect to the ring doorbells in the complex to ping the tile server using those people's internet connection. So I know your immediate question is how much internet are other people's things going to use on my network? If I leave this on, well, the speed is limited to 80 kilobytes per second. So very low bandwidth. It's not it's not going to congest your network. And Sidewalk says that it won't use more than 500 megabytes of data per month per account. So for most people, that's not a lot depends on your plan, though. The encryption is strong and so far, no security professionals have found cause for concern. There's white paper out using Diffie Helman, elliptic curve, three layers, all this stuff, trying to explain that. If you are interested, you can't use this to stream video. You can't be like, haha, I'll save on my back camp. I'll put my outdoor camera on Sidewalk and use my neighbor's bandwidth. It's just for low bandwidth communications, but you might be able to keep motion alerts on if your internet goes out. It's also potentially useful for device setup before you connect it to your Wi-Fi or for troubleshooting if you've lost your internet connection. The downside is you are already opted in if you own one of these devices. And even that 500 megabytes could affect people with very low data caps. You can turn it off at any time. But if you never want to be a part of it, you've got until June 8th to turn it off. Look for Amazon Sidewalk in the account settings of your Alexa app, unless you're Allison, who didn't have it in hers. Sarah and I had it in mind, but it hadn't showed up for you yet. Yeah, so I immediately went in to turn it off. And I've tried to come up with a rational reason why. And I think there's there's a lot of pieces to this. Number one, how dare you opt me in? That's probably the first thing. The second thing is it's also Amazon opting me in. I mean, maybe not as bad as if it was Google opting me in, but it's you know, it's right up there in the players we're starting to trust less and less. I also really wish that they'd used open source encryption tools for this networking technology. They may be doing it right, but it's always better if more eyes are on it. You know, the tools are open source. The fourth thing being not being able to opt out, I find really interesting. And I don't feel like any of this is a problem I have that I need them to solve because I've got a ring video doorbell that's really close to my hero, which is also sold to me by Amazon. And, you know, nine times out of 10, it goes, what? I don't have no. Oh, there I am. You know, it's already slow when it's right next to a really powerful router. So I'm not sure having the echo in my neighbor's garage is going to help me with that. I mean, the range extension thing is not going to be useful for everybody. The tile trackers, the easiest one to get your head around. But I bet I bet if people are using this and the neighborhood is cooperating, you'll see more people come up with use cases. Yeah. When when when both of you mentioned wanting to, you know, turn it off in your settings if you ever find it all of a sudden, you know, before the show, I'm kind of like, well, OK, if you if if the security part of this just gives you the willies because it's Amazon that we're talking about, then of course, you know, that's something that you have that you have the power to do and you should do opting in also it's just annoying, right? You know, it's it's it's assuming a lot on the company's part. The company also just wants it to be widely adopted so that people are like, oh, yeah, it works really well because, you know, a lot of people are already using it without even trying. I'm I'm not going to turn it off for now. I feel like, you know, maybe I'll be sorry later, but more likely I'll just feel like, hey, hopefully my Echo device upstairs helped somebody at some point. Yeah, there's a lot of details on how this works. The people looking at it haven't raised any red flags. The people who know this sort of thing yet. I feel like this is a very good implementation of an idea that could be very beneficial for people. I also turned it right off. And I think it was just me being contrarian like you opted me in. No, no, I'll decide if I want to be in when I get to the point that I decide I want to be part of sidewalk. I'll turn it back on. But don't you tell me Amazon? I don't think that's contrarian that's slapped them for misbehaving. Yeah, maybe. Right. It's a tomato. Yeah, I just I don't know. I don't think it I don't know. Doesn't doesn't make me happy. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What does this next story make you happy? Let's see. Sorry about that. Jumping down. Where am I here? The technical system of an EU wide digital pass to verify your vaccination status is live now in a test status with a full launch expected July 1st, though some member states may take longer to adopt it. It uses QR codes and public key cryptography to secure vaccination status and test results. Reference software for apps to issue, store and verify certificates has been published on GitHub. This system is only meant to be in place for a year. After then, EU citizens may be able to get an EU wide digital ID, which is being developed. EU citizens would be able to use it to store payment details, passwords and official documents like IDs and driver's licenses. Most member states have their own digital IDs, but they're not all compatible with each other. The financial team sources, time sources say the app may be secured with fingerprint or retina scan, though that hasn't been finalized. Yeah, this is to me, this is a sign of the coming digital money, not so much the vaccine part of this, but the digital ID is like, let's make you a wallet. Let's make you a wallet where you can store all your payment info. Let's make you a wallet that it will eventually be able to put digital coins in once the EU has created digital coins a few years down the road. But that was the first thing that popped him to my mind when I saw this. Obviously, the upside is better compatibility. If I'm in Germany and I'm traveling to France, all my stuff still works, whether it's the vaccine or the forthcoming digital wallet. And and that's that's handy. Downside is government administered. They have a lot of privacy protections built into this from the get go because they're EU and they are very privacy focused. But still the government run in it. I think the more exciting part probably is the future of having an interoperable ID across all the member states to be able to not have to carry your driver's license with you. One more thing, one more reason. I mean, that's the last thing that's caring, making me carry my wallet. That's it. That's the only thing left. I think you can do and this is the thing in the United States that varies from state to state. And right now in the EU, it does to where it's like, well, I can I can do my insurance in California on my phone. But if I'm in Arizona driving, I don't know if they'll take that. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. I just don't know. And this is the kind of thing that be like, yeah, no, everybody's going to take it. If you're driving anywhere in Europe, they're going to take it, which is not. Yeah. I mean, even there have been times where if I'm getting on a plane and I don't have to rent a car wherever I'm going, yeah, I won't take my driver's license, but I take my passport because it's like passport. It's, you know, it's international. It's it's the ID, right? But it doesn't actually work for just just everything. In fact, I was in Vegas once with only my passport and had a very interesting car rental situation. But that is a story for another time. I would love it if it was just this just feels to me like and yes, it varies by country. And certainly I don't live in any part of the EU. But to have a place where everything is and is verified and accepted, the more of that, the better. Indeed, indeed. I'm with you. I'll I'll let the European citizens in the audience weigh in if they're concerned about the centralization of this or if they're like, no, no, no, this this is a good thing. Yeah. This gets back to what we were talking about not trusting Amazon in the case of the EU. You're kind of like, well, wait a minute, they understand this privacy stuff of the of the groups that I would try. I would trust my personal information to the EU. So I mean, you say that, but you don't live in the EU. Is that make it easier to trust them? I don't know. Grass is always greener on the other side of the image. I don't know. Maybe. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Mike from Ottawa, Canada wrote in and is actually in response to a conversation we had on GDI where I was saying my echo show when I when I call up the weather speaking of weather. Or even when it's just displayed kind of, you know, in my carousel will say Forestville, Ontario. I live in Forestville, California. Forestville, Ontario is a real place, but definitely different than the one that I were. Yeah, totally. And Tom had said, gosh, maybe it has something to do with the C.A. of California, somehow tricking the system somewhere into thinking Canada. Mike says I loved hearing that Sarah's address was taken for a Canadian location because of that C.A. I work for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority or C.I.R.A. We manage the dot C.A. country code domain and we run into people from California trying to register dot C.A. domains all the time. The issue is that you need to have a Canadian presence to own a dot C.A. Not that strange to the domain space as most country level domains try to reserve them for citizens. So we have an entire legal section for dealing with this type of issue. Just made me laugh that a regular part of my day was a nuisance when you're just trying to get the weather. I love that. There is always somebody in the DTNS audience who knows exactly the one thing you guys are talking about. Exactly. And thank you, Mike, for sharing your expertise with us. That was awesome. And the best part is that the weather is accurate. It's just the location that is. It's just saying the location wrong. Oh, that's. Yeah. Because at first I was like, that's what the weather is in Ontario. And then I'm looking at all my, you know, because I have a bunch of apps. I'm like, no, this is all local. Like it's a little glitch somewhere, somewhere behind A curtain, you know, you'll find it, Mike. But yes, thank you for the feedback. If you have feedback on anything that we talk about on this show, questions, ideas for future shows, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is weird to send that email. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include David Mosher, Dan Voiles and Logan Larson. We also have a brand new boss. Their name is Terrence Edwards. Just started back at us on Patreon. Thank you, Terrence. Welcome to the team. Terrence is smart. Terrence got his name on the show. You could do it too. And just saying, be like there. It's true. Be like Terrence. Yeah. Thanks to Alison Sheridan for being with us today. Alison, what's been going on since we saw you last? Well, I've got a new episode to chitchat across the pond that I'm super excited about. Micah Sargent was on it and explained thread and what it means to our internet of things. And it was nothing like what I thought we were going to talk about. I learned so much. It was a great discussion. He really knows his stuff, and it was a lot of fun too. So check that out. Over at pod feet dot com. Exit launch on this show. We are live Monday through Friday. That's four thirty p.m. Eastern twenty thirty UTC. If you can join us live, please do so. If you want to find out more, go to daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back at it tomorrow. It's not Johnson. Back to then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club. Hope you have enjoyed this more.