 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you. That includes Mark Gibson, Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, and brand new patrons. Everybody welcome a man, Sudar, Tonga, and Brandon Thomas. On this episode of DTNS, robots get more reasonable. The tech the princess of Wales used to edit her controversial photo. And Shannon Morris runs down the growing list of handheld gaming machines. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 11th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morris. And I'm seriously awake on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Roger, you sound very awake. Did you have a good Mario day yesterday? It was March 10th. So no, I kind of bounced in and out of the Oscars because I wanted to see who wins, but I didn't care enough to actually see the rest of it. To stay. So then you guessed all the people. Did you see John Cena? I did. I did not see the best part. All right, let's start with the quick hits. The European data protection supervisor has found that the European Commission did not properly safeguard data that it stored through Microsoft 365. A lot of people are jumping to the conclusion that Microsoft is at fault here. It is not in this case. The supervisor said that data safeguards were not adequately applied to data that might be stored on Microsoft servers outside of Europe. In other words, it wasn't guaranteed they'd stay in Europe, so you didn't know. So you needed to secure the data just in case it got stored outside of Europe. There were also not contractual provisions prohibiting the data from being used beyond the purpose for which it was collected or by processors other than Microsoft outside of Europe. Again, not saying that that happened, it's just that the contract didn't prohibit it, which it should have. In addition, there was no legal data transfer agreement between the EU and the US from July 2020 when the existing rules were struck down until July 2023 when new rules were adopted. So part of the time that they were using Microsoft 365, they didn't provide another basis to justify it. The Commission must comply with the supervisor's corrective measures by December 9th. Qualcomm posted on Weibo in China that it will announce its next flagship smartphone chip on March 18th. It's possible this might be the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which was leaked last month. The announcement hinted at AI capabilities, which is essentially table stakes when making a chip announcement these days. Authors Brian Keen, Abdi Nazemian and Stuart O'Nan have filed a class action lawsuit against NVIDIA for using their copyrighted works to train the NEMO language model training framework. NVIDIA said it believed it created NEMO in full compliance with copyright law. Several other authors have been suing other companies for similar reasons. Meta and Open AI both are under lawsuits from various authors. Most of those claims relate to the use of a dataset called Books 3. We don't know if that's what's at issue with NVIDIA, but it likely could be. It's not clear, however, whether courts see scanning of copyrighted works for training purposes as fair use of a copyrighted work or even a copyright infringement at all. Reddit filed paperwork on Monday for its upcoming IPO stock listing. The company expects to sell 22 million shares between $31 and $34 a share. The filing indicated Reddit set aside around 1.76 million shares for users and moderators of Reddit. Users must have created their account before January 1, but will be able to sell the shares immediately upon listing. Investors often must hold an IPO stock for six months after going public. The date has not been fixed, but it is expected to happen this month in trade under the symbol RDDT. It is kind of cool that they're giving users and moderators a shot at this. We'll see how well it works. Nothing ever goes to plan, but hopefully it will. And finally, the bill that would attempt to force ByteDance to sell TikTok is back in the news again. In fact, I don't think it ever left the news. Just a reminder, it has a long way to go in the U.S. Senate before it can become law. Even if it becomes law, ByteDance will challenge it on constitutional grounds. And in that future where it might lose those cases, it's unclear if ByteDance would even sell TikTok anyway, especially since the government of China has expressed opposition in the past to such a sale. But just in case ByteDance does at some point decide to sell the U.S. version of TikTok at a dinner party during the Allen and Co. Conference last week, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick floated the idea of like, maybe I should put together a group. We could buy this thing and says that he has in fact expressed his interest in buying TikTok to ByteDance's co-founder. No idea if the co-founder answered that email or call or whatever. Wall Street Journal reports that open AI CEO Sam Altman was also at that dinner, but we don't know if he paid attention to what Kotick was saying or not. Maybe he did. No idea. Covariant has created a new model called the Robotics Foundation Model 1. Covariant is company created by UC Berkeley scientists. And RFM1, as we'll call it for short, is described by co-founder Peter Chen as basically a large language model, but for robot language. So this isn't trying to speak English so much, although it can recognize human language. It's meant to help a robot be able to operate itself and various kinds of robots, humanoid robots, but also like robot arms and stuff like that. The model is general purpose and able to process real world data and adapt to determine the best course of action. It's already been just deployed on industrial robotic arms and has been used for jobs like picking stuff out of bins in a warehouse. Its adaptability means it could do a lot of other things too. It can look for the right items, adjust to odd placement, you know, if something's at an angle on the conveyor belt. Sometimes with these robot systems you have to have them exactly right. This one doesn't matter. It'll be able to find it and pull it off the shell for the conveyor belt or whatever. In the future, it will be able to work on humanoid constructions and be able to do multiple tasks without being reprogrammed. A lot of these kinds of robots right now have to be programmed to do their specific thing. This model does not. For example, one example they gave was telling the robot, pick up an apple. The robot would know what an apple is, be able to look around, find an apple, pick it up and hold it, all without being specifically programmed to do that. The eventual hope is to power robots in not only warehouses but manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, service industry, possibly even in people's homes as like a home assistant, something like that. Shannon, this is a big advance in that robots can do a lot of these things, but they have to be programmed. If you want them to do something else, you have to reprogram them. Having a general model like this makes them more versatile. Right. We officially have gotten to the point where Cylons are going to be a thing and the robot overlords are going to take over the world. I get it. I'm here for it. I'm just kidding. I think this is really cool, especially when they mentioned being able to use this in recycling and being able to use this in homes. I could see this being really beneficial for people who have limited mobility and need to be able to tell something like, hey, can you go get the cup off of the counter or something like that? That would be so useful. And being able to see that as a future is like, it feels really positive. It feels like a really good use of this kind of language model for robots. Yeah. One problem I have with these stories sometimes is people think robots can already do all this stuff. So when they actually make the advance, it's kind of hard to impress people. Like, wait, robots couldn't do that. It's like, well, we've had these demos where like, yeah, the robot can go get you a beer, but that's only because you program the robot to know what a beer is, go get the beer and bring it back. You couldn't say get me a sprite because it would be like, I don't know what a sprite is or a Chilson Cider or whatever, right? But this model you could, you could say like, go get me a yogurt and it would be able to go to the fridge and know what a yogurt is and pull it out. In the demos from what we've read, it almost, and I had to catch myself when I was thinking this, it almost looks like you're speaking to a child because you have to make the information pretty simplistic for the robot to still understand what you're saying. And when it responds, it says like, oh, I see apples and bananas when it asks, when you ask it, are there any fruits in the bin? So it almost like you do have to still keep things fairly simplistic. But yeah, this is very new. This is going to be complicated for anything that doesn't have a human mind. But it is definitely something really beneficial and I can see like so many ways that we can use this in the near future. So I would hope to see it as a thing that actually comes to light and is used in more in more different like industries. But I wonder how long it'll be until we actually see that happen. Yeah, they have some of these robot arms out in the world and they are upgrading them now with this. So it's actually pretty soon that you might see them in a warehouse. But yeah, when do we get to see the advance? When do we get to see it be able to pick up the can of tennis balls? And to your point, there are limits to how good this is. And so we shouldn't fall in the same trap I was just talking about with this one ago. It can do everything because they can't. It can just do more than others. I did like the fact that you can correct it in one of the demos that we were just watching on the video version. It was saying like, I can't pick this up. And so you could say like, try picking it up at the top, go go a couple of centimeters from the top. And it learns like it can learn from your instructions, which is another useful advance for this kind of robotics. So yeah, I think it's cool. I wonder if we have something like this yet in like networking in big networking environments where you could stick a robot like in a near a bunch of network towers, for example, and tell it like, Hey, internet went out for this network tower in space number one or unit one or something. Can you check the internet and like plug it in and plug it back in again or something like that? Like I feel like that would be really useful from like a networking or information security scenario, not just like in warehouses. Yeah, yeah. And there are lots of other uses besides warehouses that they're talking about that's a really interesting one like just being able to run around a data center or network situation. They should hire me. Yeah, you could program it to like stick USB drives into things for you. Yeah, plug plug this malicious USB drive into ethernet port one doesn't have to be malicious This could be a rubber ducky. Yeah, it could be. All right. Before we get too far off track, let's talk about the British Royal Family. Why you may ask? Well, first of all, let's give you a little background. Princess Catherine, aka the princess of Wales, sometimes colloquially referred to as Princess Kate, spent more than a week in hospital in January and had not made any public appearances since during the UK's Mother's Day weekend, she released a picture of herself with her three children. Ostensibly, it's just a Mother's Day picture, but it also kind of served the purpose of letting people know like, Hey, I'm fine. I recovered from my surgery. Look, I'm a normal human. Subsequent to its publication, however, the Associated Press found that it had been manipulated. So did the AFP, so did Getty Images, PA, and Reuters, and all of them announced that they were pulling the photo in accordance with their policies. So all of these folks syndicate their stuff. And so what they were doing was saying, we are pulling it from the feed. We will not be replacing it. We have found evidence that it has been manipulated. So we're pulling it from all our own products. Right. And the princess did say that she was the one that messed with the picture, right? Yeah, that's a good point. Like, this is not like, who did it? Kate is like, it was me. She said, quote, like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. She also wrote on X. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. However, Kenzik De Pellis said, it's not going to reissue the original unedited photograph. Oh, I want to see the unedited one now. Okay. So how can we tell that it's actually edited? Do we have any pictures? Yeah, yeah. So the BBC and the Verge both are two of the outlets that did a pretty good job of pointing out the evidence. The BBC noticed that part of Princess Charlotte, one of Kate's daughters, part of her sleeve is missing. Catherine's hand is blurred in one part where the rest of the picture is not blurred. Her zipper is misaligned. So it just kind of jumps like maybe it's been cut. Part of the background is also misaligned, similar situation. And Princess Charlotte's knee is blurred. And then the Verge noted that Prince Louis' finger is at an odd angle, which could be him just gaze a fidgety kid, but it looks really odd, almost like AI odd, as well as some indications of bad stitching, some other indications that part of the photo was stitched from another photo. Oh, okay. So these kind of look, I'll be honest, these kind of look like my YouTube thumbnail sometimes when I have to make edits because I am not very good at Photoshop. So how do we know, do we know what she used? Because obviously it's not from the newer Samsung or Android AI fix it toolkits that you could. But what did she do? Yeah, Prince Louis' finger would make you think it was an AI thing. It doesn't look like it was. It looks like, according to the metadata on the photo, that it was taken with a Canon camera, or at least a camera with a Canon lens. So not a smartphone camera. It was saved twice in Adobe Photoshop on a Mac. So Princess of Wales uses a Mac, apparently. Once on March 8th at 9.54 PM and once again on March 9th at 9.39 AM. And that could indicate why we're not going to get an original. If she took multiple photos and stitched them together, there isn't an original, right? She was probably fixing stuff. We can leave speculation about the Princess of Wales Health to others, but what do you guess she was doing to this photo? And do you think this is unethical to release it to the public? Honestly, no. And mainly because I have a lot of friends who are moms who have many kids. And I was also the daughter of a mom who had three kids. And I know how hard it is to get all your kids to like look at the lens for two seconds all at once without one of them like seeing a squirrel or getting mad and hitting the other kid. Like there's always something happening because kids are hyper. They move. It's so hard to take a picture of children. So I honestly like I don't blame her like her being a mother. I do not blame her for wanting to post a decent photo of all your kids smiling all together for Mother's Day. It's the first picture that you've posted after like what is it been like three months. Like I get it. I mean the girl's a girl. The mom's a mom. Like that's what moms do. My sister is a mom and she has three kids. Like she always uses photo editing software to make sure all the kids are looking and making cute faces at the same time. And sometimes she uses cute filters to like get rid of a zit or something like no big deal. I don't think it's unethical, especially when we have like paparazzi and newspapers and stuff posting celebrity pictures where they like make them look larger than they actually are or make them look uglier than they actually are. Like okay. So Princess Catherine did the same thing. Big deal. It's her own family. I think there's a lot. I think there's a lot there that I agree with which is by all accounts she is a photographer. She enjoys taking photographs. So I can easily believe that it is normal for her to take a photo, put it in Photoshop and touch it up just like any other photographer. I think it's somewhat a failure either of her or her staff to not note that. But they may not be in the habit of noting that. It may be that they always brush up their photos and they're like they're not major manipulations. So nobody cares, right? This is just a photo that we're releasing to the public and it's never been a problem before. So they may have been in the habit of not announcing it whereas this case had a lot more scrutiny on it because she hasn't been seen in public since January and they probably should have released that. Now they know and they probably will every time. It's possible that she was taking a better photo of her of her own face and sticking it in there because maybe she still doesn't look as good as she wants to but I don't know that you can tell that or not from this. The stuff that's in here that shows it was manipulated doesn't indicate anything nefarious or not one way or the other. It just indicates that she touched it up and it could be just touch-ups like you say that that any mother would do to try to stitch together decent pictures of her kids, right? Right. I feel bad for the woman for having to apologize for making very simple edits that I feel like most mothers do and given that she and her children are the subject of the photo it's not her editing somebody else's picture without consent like she's consenting to post in this picture of her and her family so like she is the subject she is making that consent and she was making the edits to her own photo like it wasn't somebody else putting it out there of her. So I don't know that's just my opinion based on like being around other people who are parents with kids like I get it I think it's okay and I don't think she should have had to apologize for it. Well yes and no I mean I'm 100% with you until you realize that she's a member of the royal family and that that that entire situation plays by its own rules. I don't think she has a lot to apologize for it's more like oh you know what we should we should have let people know that we touch these up and that's fair. I think they should do that in the future. Just so you know on Sunday the Poppy Rodsey caught her on video getting into a car with her husband the Prince of Wales Prince William so you know it doesn't seem like there's anything more to her situation than that but yeah it's it's it's kind of crazy that there's all this controversy around this but the fact that we had metadata that we could be like oh she uses Photoshop on a Mac okay like that made it work. I think great great security tip by the way if you are editing photos on Photoshop and you don't want people to know there are ways that you can go into the Photoshop settings and delete your metadata. Yeah and I don't even think she should have done that because I don't think she was trying to hide that she touched it up I think that was just an oversight. Folks if you use a Mac or any kind of Apple product you probably know that there's tons of podcasts out there that talk about Apple but they all talk about Apple from the rumor side or from the the developer side maybe what about from the people side what about just regular old folks who use Apple products that's what Sarah Lane and Eileen Rivera are doing in the Apple Vision Show podcast talking about whether Apple's vision matches with their vision get subscribed right now at AppleVisionShow.com At CES 2024 MSI announced the Claw a Steam Deck like Windows handheld gaming machine and it is now available for order on MSI's website. It runs on Intel's Core Ultra processor seven inch 1080p screen 48 to 120 Hertz variable refresh rate LCD display it's got the Intel Arc graphics chip in there 8Z cores comes with a 53 watt battery two hours of battery life there's lots more specs it ranges from 700 to 800 dollars and is available through new egg march 15th and through Best Buy April 4th so you can start getting it in your hands pretty soon. Shannon is in a position where she's had her hands on a lot of these kinds of machines Legion Go from Lenovo Steam Deck ROG Ally the of course the switch the switch OLED razor edge Wi-Fi. Shannon what do you think is the appeal of this handheld form factor because it really does seem to be popular. You know it really has and it's so interesting watching this entire like new consumer genre type start to get some speed and get some more interest and popularity. I think the biggest thing that is appealing about this space is the versatility and the portability however that's not the case with all of them some of them require you to be on Wi-Fi locally or some of them like the PlayStation one requires you to be streaming from a console that you currently have set up in your household some of them require you to be on really fast Wi-Fi so you can't really take it on the go some of them don't have 5G so there are still a lot of limitations that we're experiencing but I'm seeing so much interest in this space and now knowing that MSI is coming out with their new one as well and it's coming out really really soon has got me even more excited about you know checking out more of these devices in person. Yeah and because there's so many people doing this it seems reasonable to think of this as a first generation not a not an experiment. What are the pros and cons of the first gen so far? Yeah so so far most of the ones that I have experienced other than like the Nintendo Switch I know the Steam Deck has a second one out now and the Razer Edge they sent me their I think the second gen of their version as as well so so far we've only seen a few second generation ones most of the ones that I've checked out have been first generation and I have to say the most exciting things like the most pro things that you have with these devices is the fact that you can stream on these beautiful displays the fact that you can walk around your household with it you can set it up wherever you want and just being able to move around and be able to relax in a space that's not necessarily where your console is set up or where your PC is set up is one of the biggest pros of these but I do feel like with this first generation a lot of them have a lot of cons and I think the biggest con with these is the fact that battery life is really really low not including like the Nintendo Switch OLED which I think they've kind of figured out that space for sure but with the ones that run on like Windows Windows 11 for sure those ones have really really low battery life like the Lenovo Legion Go that I've currently been playing with I've been playing a lot of like Horizon Zero Dawn on here I'm really looking forward to playing the newest one because that's just coming out to PC in March I think this month so I'm super excited about playing that one as well but even with this one it only lasts for like two to four hours on battery so you really have to plug it in in order to like span a bigger time of like high performance gaming if you play for over like two hours if you don't want this thing to die or if you don't want it to get like super laggy so that's I think that's a big problem that a lot of these manufacturers still need to figure out yeah I it's not really mobile if you have to keep it plugged in is it right yeah exactly although I guess I guess you could see it as a natural built-in time limit to your gaming sometimes yeah that's a longer session so you know and that is the nice thing about having it handheld is you can you can move around and change positions but still stay in the game but if you have to plug it in everywhere you go like that doesn't really help do you think it's too early for the general consumer to buy these a lot of people are enthusiastic and pre-ordered these and and everything but is it is it is it time to jump in and if so what should you look for I think that it's almost time to jump in I would say like wait around for this year to see which ones get announced as second generation devices because we are starting to see those second gens come out and we are seeing a lot of companies seeing the feedback that we've given based on like the original ones and implementing those into the second generation line like bigger battery better screens is a big thing better thermals a lot of these devices run really hot but they do have pretty decent thermals coming out of the back or coming out of the of the top of the devices so definitely making sure that you have a device that runs really good so you don't end up experiencing a lot of lag when you are using them on battery also one of the things that I've noticed and a lot of my friends have too is like the weight of the devices needs to be a little bit less and your hands get so sweaty and it's not just me so I know it's not just like me and my sweaty palms but a lot of my friends have noticed like you can get pretty sweaty palms when you're holding these devices holding these consoles so having something that you can like maybe put a case on your controller or having disconnecting console like joycon type of controllers like the Lenovo Legion Go has something like that I would love to see some of these manufacturers bring so that we do have a little bit more options in terms of how you can play your handheld gaming device that's excellent well folks if you want to keep up on these things as they come along I know Shannon you do reviews of these pretty regularly on your youtube channel right I do yes this one in fact is coming out pretty soon too so I'm excited to share that keep an eye out on that all right let's check out the mail bag regarding our discussion last week of the effect of the eclipse on solar power Jason wrote in and said a side effect of these type of events in my world of data centers and enterprise systems are putting their faith in the grid preventative maintenance for energy systems like uninterruptible power supplies generators etc are being done ahead of schedule disaster recovery testing planned ahead of the eclipse for systems and areas supported by power grids in the eclipse path if everything goes well it'll be a y2k situation where we worked diligently for years to proactively remediate systems and ensure we transitioned without a hiccup then listen to people outside of the effort call it a non-issue that was blown out of proportion if we do our jobs all y'all will wonder what we do and I can sleep with that uh safe travels Jason no I love this I love this perspective of like yeah we're worried about this too and we're doing a lot to make sure things go don't go down hopefully you won't notice and then you'll be like yeah what are those folks in data centers do it was pretty easy to get through the eclipse but there's a lot of preparation a lot of work goes into making it look easy right you know I'm glad they mentioned this because I live in an area with tons of solar panels given that it's Colorado we get sun so much so I'm really curious how the eclipse is going to affect everything hopefully like you said not not much at all fingers crossed that everybody has paid attention to preparing uh like like we talked about last week and like Jason's talking about uh one other quick email here Josiah says hey Tom I just wanted to chime in on the smart ring conversation that was kicked off by Samsung's teaser a few weeks back I have an ura it has most of the same health sensors as an apple watch and I don't mind wearing my watch to sleep but it's sometimes easier to wear my ring to bed because it doesn't need to be charged as often or as long as the watch does other highlights I like the way the ura app presents data and provides recommendations for changes or encouragement you have to subscribe to the app for six dollars a month and you can pay for the ring with an hsa which is a flexible spending account they have in the united states for health spending this was a large part of what convinced me to buy it when I knew there'd be some overlap with apple watch features I did not remember that ura qualified for hsa that's that's money you set aside for yourself to spend on health stuff but then it's tax free so that's kind of that makes me more interested in getting one yeah yeah save the save the tax money on it that's cool uh well thank you shannon morse for being with us it's always a pleasure doing the show with you and we mentioned your youtube channel earlier where should folks go to find that youtube.com slash shannon morse just like my name is spelled in my most recent episode was all about all those security and privacy settings that are on the s24 ultra because you know that thing packs in a lot of ai and not everybody is okay with that so watch that video to find out like how you can turn off all that stuff fantastic I mentioned on friday that I am funding my book about technology non-fiction book called synced understand technology and make it work for you at unbound we are at 97 supporters 19 funded so if a couple of you jump in there we can get to 100 supporters and we're not even a week into the funding thank you to everybody who has supported that I'm very excited to get this going I'm very nervous about it getting funded but so far so good thanks to everybody who supported it and if you haven't yet you can go check it out at tomsnewbook.com patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet shannon just got the genshin impact one plus 12 our phone which made us wonder what's the deal with these collab versions these branded special versions of tech are they just gimmicks or are they awesome we shall discuss stick around you can also catch the show live monday through friday four p.m. eastern 200 utc we just did daylight saving time in the u.s find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow dr then the dts family podcast helping each other understand timing club hopes you have enjoyed this bro