 Coming up on DTNS Dell's attempt at a responsible and repairable laptops. LG has a TV you can roll around your house and why you shouldn't look at the HDMI 2.1 label on a display and what you should look at instead. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 14th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. There is more where this came from folks. If you like hearing us talk about stuff, get good day internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Andrew Bradley, Dale McKayhee and Scott Hepburn. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. U.S. CESA director Jen Easterly said that the log for J vulnerability is one of the most serious she has seen in her career. CESA believes hundreds of millions of devices are likely to be affected. CESA is creating a dedicated website to collect information companies need to protect themselves. There are multiple ways to exploit, but meeting one layer of protection does not seem to be enough. CESA doesn't believe a single action can fix the issue and recommended organizations, staff security teams over the holidays. Attempted attacks have risen to more than 800,000 per day as of Monday, according to Checkpoint. Yeah, it's a race, it's a race and it's a bad one. Microsoft is partnering with iFixit to sell official Microsoft service tools for surface devices through iFixit.com. Take that, Apple. The tools include those for precision debonding and rebonding for adhesives, as well as some weights and accessories. They are not available to the general populace, though. You'll need to be an iFixit Pro independent repairer or a Microsoft authorized service provider, Microsoft Experience Center or Microsoft commercial customer in order to buy them. LogMeIn plans to separate LastPass into a standalone company that's six years after LogMeIn acquired LastPass, the password management tool, now used by more than 85,000 companies and 30 million users. This move is meant to accelerate the speed at which password management and secure sign-in tools can be developed. LastPass hints at improving the mobile app, adding more third party tie-ins for corporate customers, a website redesign and more support channels. You know, it occurs to me on a totally unrelated note. Sometimes you make a standalone company in order to prepare it for sale. That's just, you know, a random unrelated thing to the thing you just said. Nine to five Google noticed the Google job postings referencing an augmented reality OS and an innovative AR device. Former Oculus GM for operating systems. Mark Lukowski is now a Google employee posting on LinkedIn that he's now leading the operating system team for augmented reality at Google. The new team is based in the U.S. and Waterloo, Canada, which is actually home of North's locals team, which was acquired by Google last year. In perhaps bad news for autonomous car fans, China's Pony AI has paused its driverless testing in California. A Pony AI car collided with a lane divider and a street sign in Fremont, California on October 28th. And after an investigation, the California DMV suspended Pony AI's driverless testing permit. It may still conduct tests with safety drivers on board. In better news, Honda Research Institute USA is conducting a pilot test with the Ohio Department of Transportation of a system to monitor lane markers and identify where they've faded and are need of repair or restoration. The data will be made available to highway and transportation departments. Rob, if you could keep an eye out and tell us if you see fewer faded lane markings as a result of this, you know. We would appreciate that. We'll do. All right. Let's talk a little more about what Oppo's got going on. Inno day is almost over, but they still have a few more announcements. Yes. So Oppo announced its first in-house chip design and neural processing unit or MPU for machine learning image performance called Mari Silicon X. It will show up in Oppo's next flagship in Q1 and be manufactured by TSMC. Airglass is an AR device launching early next year in limited release in China. Oppo calls Airglass an assisted reality delivery device because it projects 2D monochrome info into your field of view instead of overlaying 3D. So it's kind of like Google Glass. Airglass weighs 30 grams, has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 processor and three hour active battery life of 40 hours of standby. Glasses can be used for notifications, directions, teleprompting and real time translation. You can control it with touch, voice, hand tracking and head tracking or through the app. It comes in full or half frames and can attach to conventional glasses. It's pretty. I'll give them that. It's a nice design. AR light, but it's like what, three and a half years after Google Glass? It's like more than that now, isn't it? Yeah, you're right. And Google Glass is still around for enterprise. So maybe because they probably don't sell Google Glass in China, right? Maybe this is a great opportunity for Oppo to sell a similar thing in a niche enterprise system the way Google Glass is used now. I don't see this getting widespread consumer adoption, do you? I kind of wonder if Airglass wants to be widespread consumer adopted. The way that this reads to me is, yeah, I mean, sure, we can compare it to Google Glass. Google Glass didn't really work for the consumer market, also ahead of its time, right? But but still in use today as our other AR glasses products, certainly in the enterprise, it kind of seems like Airglass is going for the same market. It almost, yeah, maybe that's what they're doing. Maybe we're just thinking that it's going to be a consumer because we're consumers. Yeah. You know, consumer play because we're consumers. But yeah, it doesn't look like their marketing is towards us. I don't see myself walking into a best buy anytime soon and picking ease up. I think what throws you off is the design, too. Right. If you're expecting an enterprise level niche device, you're like, oh, it's going to have a chunky, durable looking design. That's this is like a very slick, like, oh, that doesn't look too bad if I were to clip that onto my glasses. But hey, who says the enterprise can't have beautiful things. Good job, Hoppo. Yeah. It's a pride of enterprise. Well, it's almost CES like today. We got we got some product oriented stuff sneaking out ahead of CES in January. Dell announced more details on Concept Luna, its laptop with removable components. The aim of Concept Luna is to help Dell meet its goal of recycling or reusing a laptop for every laptop itself. So Concept Luna makes parts easy to scavenge and use in future systems. Dell thinks a motherboard could be used in up to three machines. Once a motherboard comes out of a higher level laptop, it could be used in a lower level laptop. You can remove four screws and then two bars they call keystones and disconnect a single cable to remove the motherboard. That's pretty simple, not the simplest, but it's pretty simple. That motherboard could then go from, say, an XPS, which is their higher end, to a latitude. An average user should be able to take the laptop apart and replace its components in an hour and a half. The keyboard is also removable, but likely not as reusable. Maybe just one more time because keyboards suffer wear and tear a little more. But the idea here is that people could get recycled parts to repair their own laptops and possibly upgrade them and move older parts into the system for repairing other machines. So maybe you have a latitude, you get a reused motherboard from an XPS, you put it in your latitude, and then you take that motherboard out of your latitude, you send it into Dell, maybe they use it in another model. Dell's still trying to figure out the details of how this would all work in practice and whether machines would need to be labeled as refurbished if they sell them reusing parts. They may not use this at all. This is all part of a system to kind of see how it would work and show off a prototype. And yes, framework fans, the framework laptop is already doing this and is available. But the scale of Dell could have a larger impact. And the other efforts like framework don't emphasize reuse and recycling as much as Dell is with Concept Luna. So when I look at this story, I think that particularly when it comes to laptops, they can they can stick around for a long time depending on what your use case is. So, you know, I've got a nine-year-old laptop. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I use it probably two times a week and it does what it does. I can't upgrade it anymore, though. I can't put the newest operating system on it. So if I had the ability to replace the motherboard and processor or to do just minor things to it, that would give me some more life on that as compared to having to go and buy a brand new laptop to replace it, that would be of interest to me. I think, however, that in order for this to work, it can't just be Dell as big as Dell is. They're going to need to figure out how to get some other players to come along. Now, not necessarily their biggest competitors, but maybe some of the smaller players will say, OK, Dell, we'll follow your lead and do this stuff, too. I also wonder and, you know, I don't want to be too much of a pessimist because I think this idea is really great. What's in it for Dell? Dell saying, concept Luna, we're going to, you know, reduce reuse recycle. And as a consumer, you benefit because you have the opportunity to upgrade a system or at least to be able to to give other folks parts of your system that you don't need anymore. But OK, it's a company. So, yeah, like what is it? I understand saying, hey, as a company, this is important to us. This is going to make us look good. This is what we're going to do. I think that part is awesome. But as a company, you also want to sell merchandise. So anything that keeps you from selling merchandise because somebody can do a little, you know, smaller upgrade into their existing system doesn't totally make sense either. If you're the company. Let's imagine this isn't. This doesn't end up getting used for repairability. What if it is simply to make it easy for Dell to strip out parts and rebuild newer machines with the older parts that, and this is the Depression era father I had talking, saves you money, reusing things, saves you money. If Dell is suddenly saying, hey, we've got this recycle program, trade in your old Dell for a new one and then taking all those parts and very efficiently able to like strip out motherboards, strip out hard drive, strip out keyboards and put them in other models. That reduces the amount of parts they have in a world with chip shortages. That would be have been an extremely advantageous thing to have just about now. Yes, there's a cost associated with doing that, but that potentially they may have run the numbers and said, man, you know, just internally, this could do two things. Save us a bunch of money on parts and provide us that PR boost of saying we are now reaching our goal of recycling or reusing a laptop for every laptop we sell, which is going to help lift your boat in the public consciousness of like, oh, maybe I should buy from Dell because they seem to be responsible. I will add that currently Dell does a refurbishment program where they basically take a bunch of leased models back from companies and they refurbish them through a third party and they sell them back to the public. If you could do that with a lot of the consumer laptops and then this is what the third party companies do, they mix and match. They won't give you the full 32 gigs of RAM that it originally shipped with. Give you 16, they'll give you a smaller hard drive. They'll mix and match and they'll set it to a price point. Gives them a lot more flexibility down the road instead of just selling this one particular model at this particular feature set at this price. You can mix and match depending on what the market needs. And look at that and say like, oh, you know how hard it is to refurbish now and it's still worth it? What if we designed our laptops to make it really easy to do that in the future? I don't know. That's the best I can come up with, Sarah. Dell has to pay money to put this stuff into a landfill. Let's see if we can put that money into a box and sell it to somebody else, then their bottom line gets a little better. Well, Tom, you mentioned it was a CES show and LG continued its tradition of mid-December pre-CES prototype announcements with two new TV concepts. One is a version of the 65-inch LG OLED EVE TV that has a screen cover that you can trigger with a remote control to turn it into an art object when you're not watching TV. Kind of puts something else on the wall. It can roll down halfway, also show a clock. It's available now in Korea for the equivalent of $8,381 US dollars. It is not cheap, but it is nice. More conceptual though is the LG Stand By Me, a wireless 27-inch TV, so a smaller television, with a built-in three-hour battery that can roll around on a movable stand. Yes, the TV would not have to be plugged into the wall, but three hours of battery. It's not autonomous, it's just movable. So you can height swivel the screen, rotate it right or left, rotate it between landscape and portrait. You have some options if that's the sort of thing that you're looking for. It also has a cradle on top for your phone so you can use it for video calls with your phone's camera. And it supports USB as well as HDMI, so you could use it with a laptop also. It's also a touchscreen, so if you don't want to use the remote, you can swipe to select apps and use other controls while in the interface. I wanted this to be autonomous. I wanted it to be a little robot TV that would follow me around while I'm doing my things, which would be really dumb and everyone would make fun of. But honestly, this isn't bad. I think that would be dumb. I think that'd be extremely helpful. The innovation here is the battery of saying we figured out how to get the power consumption low enough and the battery capacity high enough that we could stick a battery in this TV and then put it on a rollable stand. And now it's up to y'all when we show this up at CES to figure out what you'd use it for, right? No, I love this idea too. First of all, 27-inch TVs. I know that 27-inch TV is not the smallest screen in the world, but it's smaller than a lot of home televisions, what you got in your living room. So that's kind of small. Three-hour battery life? I mean, if I'm on a binge, I need more than three hours, a lot more. I need seven, eight hours. If you're on a binge though, you can plug it in, right? Yeah, but then the portability doesn't make a lot of sense. Portability isn't for sitting and binging. That's what I'm saying. I want to give you guys a use case to try to make it work for me. Hopefully you're probably going to say, So I have a buddy, real good friend of mine. He has a deck, a patio, and a gazebo. He's got two TVs mounted to tripods that we roll to wherever we are watching football and drinking sudsy beverages. And it's a hassle because we're dealing with extension cords and cables and all that kind of stuff to get the TV to where we need it to be. Wi-Fi is throughout his entire yard, so that works. But if we could just have a TV, that we connected up to get the game on Wi-Fi and it's battery operated and all you have to do is carry this thing out there, all you really need is three hours for a good game. Because at some point people are going to go eat, you plug it back in, you carry it back in, things tend to move inside or move towards the fire pit as the evening progresses. Three hours is more than enough and that battery life will get better in time. I don't know if they're looking at this as a proof of concept to see if people are going to go for it, but I know I can think of at least a couple of buddies and myself that would be interested in a battery powered TV that I can easily move around and I'd have to worry about power cords. I'm imagining that somebody has this while they're binging, Sarah, you're sitting on your couch and then you're needing to prepare dinner, so you unplug it, roll it into the kitchen, start making your dinner and then you start finishing your dinner, now you want to move into a different room and you roll it in there, you can plug it in in there maybe, maybe you've got multiple places to plug it in, but you don't always have to plug it in. Three hours gives you the best ability. And it's funny because it depends on the layout of your house, right? My mom is currently, she's kind of in the market for a new TV and because of the way that her living room and kitchen are, I'm like, oh, you just, we need to mount the TV and be able to give it like a 90 degree angle and you're good to go. But not everybody's house has that. Your kitchen might kind of be around the corner or I don't know, maybe there's a bedroom or something like that. I think this is great, I do. I feel like if it's a 65 inch TV that can give me eight hours of battery life, I'm buying it. Oh, I'd get that. So when we send Rich Strafolino and Amos to CES, we'll send them to the LG booth to make that request. Please do. Appreciate that. Hey, folks, if you haven't thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, it's feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. TFT Central noticed that Xiaomi was selling a display that was listed as HDMI 2.1, but did not appear to have any of the new HDMI 2.1 features. This did not turn out to be a case of deception. This is allowed by the HDMI standards organization. TFT Central decided to investigate, why is it that a monitor could say it's HDMI 2.1 compliant but not support any of the features of HDMI 2.1? And if you don't know, HDMI 2.1's been around for a couple of years now. It added support for several features, including higher bandwidth transmission, which allows you to do more things, like higher resolution, dynamic HDR, eARC, the ability to route audio back and forth through HDMI, variable refresh rate, auto latency, auto low latency mode, ALLM, bunch of other things. Displays could support some of these before, but now they were part of the spec. You might be forgiven for assuming this meant that if you got a device that said it was HDMI 2.1, it would have all those features. That is not the case. When the HDMI licensing administration adopted HDMI 2.1, it decided to stop certifying devices as HDMI 2.0. And what appears to me to be a clever bit of bureaucratic and marketing reasoning, that means if you had a device that supports HDMI 2.0 features, but doesn't support any HDMI 2.1 features, you would have to have it certified as HDMI 2.1. Why? Because they don't certify HDMI 2.0 anymore. Why? Reasons, I guess. They really haven't made that clear. The HDMI licensing administration told TF Central that the features of HDMI 2.0 are now a subset of 2.1. All the new capabilities and features associated with HDMI 2.1 are optional. This includes FRL, the higher bandwidths, VRR, ALLM and everything else. A spokesperson for the HDMI licensing administration, Douglas Wright, told the Verge, quote, we are all dependent on manufacturers and resellers correctly stating which features their devices support. That is part of the spec. If you label it HDMI 2.1, you have to make it clear which features of HDMI 2.1 you support. TF Central notes that many manufacturers are still labeling their displays as HDMI 2.0, even though HDMI licensing association says they could call them HDMI 2.1. That may be because they were certified HDMI 2.0 before it was withdrawn. But the upshot for us is that when we're looking at a device that says it's HDMI 2.1, we can't trust that. We can't use that as a shortcut. We need to do extra work to see what features. Why is that an upshot? Why is that an upshot? Yeah, I'm sorry? What's the upshot? The upshot for us is when we- A consumer doing more work. I'm saying the summary, the summary, the upshot, the effect, the thing that we can, what it means to us is when you see a device with HDMI 2.1, you can't trust it. You need to do some extra work to see what features it actually supports. So, Tom, this makes perfect sense as long as you don't think about it. Yeah, so you're gonna have a bunch of 2.1 certified devices that have no 2.1 feature set in it because of, as you, bureaucracy, is that what we think is happening here? That seems to be part of it. They were like, well, we need to get rid of HDMI 2. What do we do about the devices that would otherwise be HDMI 2? Just make them HDMI 2.1. What if they don't have any of the features of HDMI 2.1? Oh, well, put a thing in there that says the manufacturers have to make it clear what features they support. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I know the audience here is like, okay, well, I do my research. I can figure that out. The 2.1 nomenclature is, you know, sort of suggested, but I wonder how much this just serves to confuse everybody else. Oh, it's gonna confuse even us, I think, because we're just used to trusting, like, oh, if I see HDMI 1.8, 1.7, I know what that means. Now, we all have to adjust and go, mm, 2.1, okay, well, I have to read farther. I can't use that as a shortcut, which I mean, granted USB is kind of like that just because it says USB 3.1 doesn't mean it always supports power. It's like 4G LTE all over again. It is, it's the worst. Wow, yeah. It works, I guess. You just, you can't really trust the 2.1. You have to look at the other specs to make sure that those are the things that you want. I mean, so. So why even have 2.1 on there? Well, to let you know it's not 1.7, that's why. Could be worse. Yeah. All right, Rob, why don't you tell us about this, this advance in medical imaging hacking? Absolutely. So scientists published an article in the journal Nature, excuse me, Nature Communications showing that alerting medical scans can fool, excuse me, altering medical scans can fool human radiologists and algorithms into believing evidence of cancer either was there when it wasn't or vice versa. The scientists designed a GAN model that automatically added or removed signs of cancer from the medical images. An algorithm designed to detect such evidence was fooled by the altered images, 61.6, excuse me, 69.1% of the time and human radiologists were fooled between 29 and 71% of the time, depending on the individual. Similar researchers presented in 2019 at the USINIX conference. This research indicates limitations of algorithmic assistance, but also highlights a potential risk from outside attackers who might try to access medical images and maliciously alter them. Potential reasons for these attacks might be to target a specific patient or to engage in insurance fraud. Algorithms should be trained on such models to improve the ability to detect the altered images and radiologists need to be aware of the possibility and trained to spot them. Ooh. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, okay, insurance fraud. Let's just take that part of the equation for a second and think about that. Insurance fraud happens in all sorts of ways. This is a new one for me, never heard of this before, but I can absolutely see why it would be something that somebody would try in the fact that a human radiologist with help from lots of technology, of course, would need to feel really confident in what they're seeing, that's their job. And in many cases, life-saving job. But yeah, it's a brave new world. This is a good news story. Let's try not to lose sight of that. This is researchers figuring out, okay, if someone we're gonna try to do some harm, how could they do it? Let's figure that out so that we can make our algorithms that assist radiologists and the radiologists themselves smarter so they don't get fooled before someone tries to fool them. I think the risk here is kind of low, but when you're talking about medical stuff, you wanna get that risk as close to zero as possible. So I'm glad they're doing this. I'm glad they're finding this stuff out before the bad folks do. And even if there isn't much risk of a lot of people being harmed by this, man, it's good to know that once we're ahead of the game instead of like we are with Log4J, well behind it. I thought after we went through this in the rundown and I'm looking at this, I'm thinking why would an organization or why would a person want to try to fake this stuff? And ultimately it comes down to, when we're talking about medical stuff, there's a lot of money involved. I mean, insurance is expensive, insurance companies have, they don't wanna pay out claims if they can avoid it. And then there are gonna be unscrupulous people or unscrupulous organizations that are gonna be like, if we can actually make it look like something is there that is going to get this person paid more and we get a piece of that, then there's a benefit, as you said. I believe that the instances of that happening are relatively small, but like you said, it's just good that they're getting in front of it in case anybody does try to do this, we're gonna be better prepared for it. And I think there's also side benefits to research like this where they, the unintended consequences are positive, which is- The algorithms get better. Yeah, the algorithm's better at stopping this kind of thing, but also it's now better at stopping these other things that we hadn't even contemplated before. So I think that's good too. All right, let's check out the mailbag, Sarah. Let's do it. This one comes from Andrew, proposing a solution to selling used clothes or any other used goods. We talked about this on the show yesterday. Andrew says, NFTs. Sellers just need to include NFTs to everything that we buy. Also, clothes companies could offer authentication programs for older clothes, where they issue new NFTs. You know, Andrew's half-joking when he's at this email, but he's not far off. There could be- That's a terrible idea. Maybe not exactly NFTs, but there could be some kind of blockchain way to handle this, where we're using blockchain for supply chain tracking right now, so that you know those strawberries are organically grown in Portland, say. You know, there's stuff like that happens. What if you could do this and say, yes, this is an actual Balenciaga hat, and you've got the blockchain to prove it. Maybe it's an NFT. Maybe it's some other kind of token created specifically for this. But when I run through this, I'm like, Andrew, maybe onto something here. And then I run into, but it would have to be implemented by the makers of the clothing. And they have no reason to do it. They're not gonna do it to help third-party sellers sell used versions of the clothing. They either sell you a brand new coach bag, then have you go buy a used one. So what we have to do is we have to convince them they're doing it for reasons of anti-counterfeiting. Then they'll totally do it. I mean, I just bought some expensive perfume online. Do I know if it's count? I don't know. I mean, it smells pretty good, but an NFT that showed where it came from and where it had been before it reached me, that would be great. It would actually get me to buy more expensive items more often. I'm actually warming back up to this idea of you get the clothing brands to say, look, you wanna fight counterfeiting, use a blockchain for this. Use an efficient one, one that's like proof of a stake, not proof of work. Use one that don't use Ethereum, use something with cheap gas fees, all of that stuff. You could do it and say, it's all for anti-counterfeiting. And then the third-party sellers can use that. Just don't tell them that part, you know? If any of you are listening in the clothing industry, don't pass this along to your boss. Just say. I can say Andrew might be onto something here. I know you're onto something, Andrew, I know you're onto something. I do, I do too. If you feel like you're onto something, we ever talk about something you wanna chime in on, please do let us know, because your feedback is really important to us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. We also have a brand new boss, and we would like to thank Matt Misner. Matt just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Matt. Hey, applause. Matt got mad. You just have to bring the applause. You just ask for it and it comes. When Matt was alone, the only person to be a new boss today? He got all of that applause. All of it for himself. Just a big auditorium for Matt, for Matt. Thanks, Matt. Really happy to have you on board. Also, thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Rob, where can people keep up with your work? I am at Rob Dunwood on all the things, and you can always check me out on my other podcast, the SMR podcast, and the Tech John podcast. Excellent. Well, we love your work, and we always love having you on the show. We're also live, everybody, Monday through Friday. Did you know? 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we'll be back tomorrow. Thanks, Scott Johnson, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha!