 interested in video game, but don't have time to follow it. Jen Cutter rounds up the biggest video game news in 15 minutes. Just look for it in your D T N S feed coming up on D T N S solar powered cars. Do we want IMAX in our house and NFT games are fun, but the taxes might not be. This is the Daily Tech news for Monday, November 8th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino and I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. There is a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash D T N S. And we want to thank our top patrons that you can join them there. Specifically, John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benitao and Steve Ayadarola. Thank you. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Niantic announced the Light Ship Augmented Reality Developer Kit or ARDK offering tools the company uses on its own AR games like Pokemon Go and Pikmin Bloom to developers. These tools include real time mapping, understanding to help AR objects interact with real world places and multiplayer sharing features. The company also launched Niantic Ventures with the initial $20 million fund to invest in AR projects. You know, Apple car rumors vacillate between a product set for release in the next several years to it's just vaporware. It'll never ship with that grain of sort of omnipresent salt in mind. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Dana Holes source say Apple hired Christopher C J more to work on self driving car software more previously served as Tesla's autopilot software director and will report to another Tesla autopilot alum Stewart Bowers. Apple's definitely working on a car whether we'll ever see, I don't know. Read those tea leaves. Microsoft will end support for personal OneDrive desktop apps for Windows 7 8 and 8.1 on January 1st 2022 with users unable to send content to the cloud starting March 1st 2022. Files will still be accessible in the OneDrive app and users can still backup files manually using the web app. I just upgraded to Windows 7 back when I worked at CNET last decade. We learned a little about AMD Zen 4 CPU roadmap for its epic data center processors that's EPYC data center processors and its accelerated data center event. These will be built on a five nanometer process in 2022 claiming twice the density and power efficiency with 1.25x better performance compared to its seven nanometer chips. They include Genoa, which will offer up to 96 high performance Zen 4 cores, DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5, as well as Bergamo, a chip customized for cloud native applications with up to 128 high performance Zen 4C letter C cores. Genoa is sampling the customers now set for a 2022 launch. If Zen 3 cores are still your thing, the company also announced the EPYC Melon X processors, which used 3D stacked L3 cache to offer up to 768 megabytes of cache per chip with up to 1.5 gigabytes on a dual socket system. These are shipping in Q1 with a preview instance in Azure using the chips available right now. In September, the U.S. Department of Commerce asked global semiconductor manufacturers to voluntarily complete supply chain questionnaires providing a November 8th deadline. The South Korean Ministry of Economy and Finance reports Samsung and SK Heinecks will disclose some data in response, although they will not include detailed info that could constitute trade secrets. TSMC also submitted a response but said it did not disclose detailed information about its clients. There's kind of a pain point for them, obviously. Micron, Western Digital and United Microelectronics also made submissions according to the Department of Commerce. All right. Let's talk about EVs. If you can't find a charger for your EVs or think EVs are for others because you can't do anything but park on the street and you're like, how am I going to charge it if I'm just leaving it out on the street overnight? Well, Wall Street Journal has a write-up on several startups, including a Dutch startup called Lightyear, that are developing cars with solar panels that can generate enough electricity by sitting in the sun. Dutch startup Lightyear's four-door sedan can get 43 miles of range by sitting in the sun all day. That's enough to go run some errands. You might have to plug it in if you're going to go for a longer trip, but you can do that. It's plug-in as well. After a motors of San Diego is developing solar-charged two-seaters, these are definitely meant for just running errands around town. The idea of solar-powered cars, though, is that they optimize the surface area to collect sunlight and lower the weight and increase engine efficiency so they need less power because you just can't put enough panels yet. Panels aren't efficient enough to bring in all the energy you would need to charge the car, so you're trying to meet in the middle, cover the thing with panels, and make that engine so efficient that what you can bring with the panels will be useful. The Lightyear one has about 50 square feet of solar cells and a lightweight motor in each wheel instead of a heavier central motor. Fully charged it can go 440 miles. It's got great efficiency. The Aptura 3-wheeler has 24 square feet of solar cells. It's a smaller car and can get 40 miles of charge in a summer day and when fully charged, depending on which battery pack you buy, could go 250 to 1,000 miles on a charge. It is not something you'd want to sit in for 1,000 miles. Dutch startup squad Mobility has a golf cart sized vehicle meant for short range trips. I mean we're talking golf court around the condo complex kind of trips. Maybe run into the grocery store. It can do 12 miles after four hours in the sun. One of the keys to all EVs solar or otherwise is better battery tech and we got news on that as well. Ours Technica reports on a company called SES that is using a heavy salt electrolyte to eliminate the need for graphene in the batteries anode. That lowers the size and weight of the battery and increases the range. Automakers are actually evaluating SES samples. This isn't like hey it's in the lab and maybe someday it'll make it. SES is partnering with GM, Hyundai, Geely, SAIC, and Foxconn and building a factory in Shanghai that's scheduled to be finished in 2023 and SES hopes to have cars on the road using these batteries by 2025. So some good news for expanding the efficiency and the utility of electric vehicles there. Yeah for sure and what's interesting to me is I don't know maybe before electrified cars were more common in my mind it was always kind of like well you have to have a solar car or an electric like there was there was some sort of distinction there you know as opposed to these can all exist and complement each other because my first thought even seeing something like the the light way or the light-year car excuse me that one looks like a regular sedan relatively like it's shaped like a standard sedan you know the Aptera one is shaped like pretty much every solar kind of concept car that you've seen it looks very you know soup hyper aerodynamic three wheels that kind of stuff but even that I seeing that being complementary to okay if you leave this on the sun you know for the full day you can get a usable amount of range it's not going to take you everywhere you need to go but if you had also solar panels on your garage that could have hundreds of square you know theoretically hundreds of square feet to complement that as or you know your whole home is is covered in solar panels and stuff like that you know letting you get this is even more than a trickle charge it sounds like this is a you know would be a functional amount if you had to park your car on the street or something like that again none of these solve any of the one problem and the the light-year car I know is supposed to retail for what like a hundred seventy five thousand dollars now they cheat but that's also like you know gen one tesla kind of money so we've seen over time that with refinement and with sales you get people on board you can you can finance you know theoretically to to make those more affordable over time and if you combine that with a battery now that you can get twice the you know the energy density with all of a sudden now that's you know 86 miles theoretically or something that wait that doesn't work out solar is different it's more just to say it's yeah it's but it or you can have a lighter battery as a result because you don't need it as big of a battery which makes your car more efficient that to me is the exciting thing is like this complimentary action between all of these different technologies yeah we're going from solar is technically possible in a car but it's not practical to solar is technically practical in a car but maybe not for all users and and so you know in a few years with battery tech improving like you're saying from sES with solar panels improving and getting better at collecting more you know we'll meet in the middle and suddenly we will have a car that can essentially charge on the street if you need it to it'll never it'll be a long time let's never say never but it'll be a long time before it matches being plugged in but hey if even if you don't have a garage if it can charge enough for you to take off in the morning with it and drive it to a garage or mall or your workplace where you can plug it in and charge it up then that starts to become a workable option for people most definitely uh next up here town we have a we have a scandal a story and i need your hottest of hot takes on this okay uh bloomberg's mark german reports that developer steve moser discovered code in netflix's ios app that indicates netflix will have to release each of its mobile games as a separate app in the ios store and only use the netflix app to launch the games individually can you imagine compare this to netflix's current system on android where it releases each of its mobile games as a separate app in the play store and only use the netflix app to launch the games individually you see how did sit the sit go ahead no i said it different so i because i said it like this for apple that that that sounds maybe the same to you but the difference is really that apple requires you to do this way and android kind of it doesn't sound as bad and nobody likes being told what to do yeah that's the difference right the difference here is and well android doesn't make them do it that way so they're going to change it and someday when they do change it then they may have launched on apple and apple will have forced them to do it in a way that won't let them change it which means we should get mad now uh yeah no i was laughing at these stories and and trust me there's some some very respectable journalists writing these stories today they're like listen at some point netflix will start including the games within the netflix app on google and then at some point they'll also launch these games on ios and then at some point further down the road they won't be able to include the games unless they get it there's a lot of at some point and if going on here but it cracks me up because right now what they're finding in the code on netflix is that netflix is going to do the apps exactly the same on ios as they're currently doing them in the launched version on google play where they wouldn't have to do it that way if they didn't and at the end of the day now given netflix has extremely limited game catalog at this point it's like six games or something it's it's a modest number of games five yeah it's very so like at this point this is a minor inconvenient collage to get this to work but you're still getting game you know you're still getting more for that same netflix subscription i don't see really any subscribers being like darn i have to click an extra button to go through here it's a bigger deal when you have a huge or a huge or sure or do you even notice when you you go to the tab in the google in the android version of netflix and click on a game it launches the game yeah it technically launches it in a different app but does it matter like if they were trying to do stadia which they're not yet uh then yes it will become an issue if they're trying to do streaming games instead of downloadable games but they're doing downloadable games like they are right now you know yes at some point it may make a difference but we are not at that point uh disney plus is going to display 13 marvel movies in i max's expanded aspect ratio of 1.901 starting november 12 these movies have sequences shot using i max cameras uh in those aspect ratios with avengers infinity war and endgame entirely shot in i max and basically this means smaller black bars when viewing on a 16 9 tv offering 26 percent more picture the new i max launch coincides with the release of shang chi and the legend of the 10 rings on the service which will also get the new look now if you have a projector i feel like this is good news for you because you can make your screen as big as your wall is right if you have a tv i understand that the black bars are going to be different now with the i max ratio but it also means part of the picture becomes smaller as it you've got more picture so i mean i know it's like pan and scan is not as good even if the picture is bigger but is this better is this better rich tell me i don't know i can't decide so i am generally an av uh plebeian when it comes to like i kind of don't care about hdr at all i barely care about 4k this actually interests me because this is like i don't know like my screen bigger so it seems like i'm getting more as opposed to like black like studying black levels and stuff like that so this actually does interest me now this will like when you're watching non avengers infinity war endgame this will shift between the 16 by 9 and the larger or the standard aspect ratio and that expanded ratio as depending on what sequence right it's not well when they do it in the movies the the picture stays the same size it's just the tops and bottoms just kind of go away and honestly you don't really notice no well because i was going to say so there's a there's a movie west anderson film called the grand budapest hotel that changes aspect ratios like almost in every little section it changes aspect ratios to almost like a one-to-one and unless someone a film nerd tells you to look for that you probably won't notice hopefully because you're invested in it i haven't i haven't seen chang chi i hope i am thoroughly invested in it so that i don't notice it if and when i choose to watch it yeah honestly um i can't decide so look uh simu lu uh will be this big if i watch in in in regular hd non i max and he'll be slightly smaller if i watch in i max but the rest of the picture will be bigger i think i you know what i think the i max is better because you get more picture even if because it won't make him that much smaller let me reiterate here must screen bigger the screen doesn't actually enlarge when you watch in i max on disney plus it stays the same size you may believe that tom you may believe i choose to believe that they're expanding the size of my tv and all right and our insiders yeah uh folks join in the conversation in our discord uh is your screen getting bigger when you watch disney plus let us know by linking uh your discord to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtmf now if you're one of those people who is still thinking nft sound like a pyramid scheme this story is not going to mean much to you but if you've moved into the okay i can see a few fun uses for these maybe especially in games take notice nfts have created a play to earn business model yes there's issues of pay to win but we're not talking about that we're talking about people who get paid to play a lot of these companies do that you play not just for fun but also to get paid by the appreciation of an nft that you buy the nft gets more valuable and some games are even giving you in-game cryptocurrency the longer you play you're like generating the currency as you play this is in fact what caused steam to clarify its policy against blockchain based games that issue cryptocurrencies to players and then epics immediate like but we'll take you come over here whatever your opinion nft gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry right now people are buying and selling digital items in games like axie infinity all the time and protocol points out that under current law and even more so under the new infrastructure investment and jobs act that was just passed in the united states those game transactions where you buy and sell an nft are taxable as securities trading that's right if you sell your plus 12 magic sword it's subject to capital gains tax i mean if you sell it for more than you paid anyway and actually if you hold on to it for less than a year that would be short term capital gains which is taxed at a higher rate ah you sold the nft for bitcoin you say and then cashed out the bitcoin yay two taxable events you get taxed on both of those you didn't get around it at all man those roads are going to get so paved thanks to your tax dollars so keep on playing folks even swapping nft items in game could have tax implications protocol also noted the idea of getting people to play games on behalf of nft owners in order to raise value so you grant what are called scholarships in the industry you cut those people in like you're going to play generate a bunch of cryptocurrency from my account and then i'll share some of that cryptocurrency with you that's subject to a business tax because you're essentially contracting them uh scholarships usually involve people from overseas so it's a foreign business arrangement which trust us does not make it less complicated and honestly the system isn't built for any of this games don't yet keep tax records it's on you to record and report your transactions and unless you're forced to game operators won't want to do things like collect id and maintain tax writers to tax records because that's too much friction for a game but it's still the law and it could constitute tax fraud if players don't follow the rules plus it may have implications on the games themselves a player may want to sell you a magic cloak but delay in order to make the capital gains implications more favorable which is not your usual game dynamic rich yeah i mean we've seen we've seen like real world economics at play and in games like uh you know world of warcraft or any number of games but like this is like a next level like waiting for i gotta wait 365 days before i could sell this because otherwise i'm going to get murdered on my tax rates uh you know this does make me wonder like at first when steam announced they weren't going to be doing the nft gaming thing i was like oh okay it's just like it's a new marketplace maybe they don't want to get some bad publicity if some of these games are you know not like high quality or scammy or anything like that no i also think maybe now reading this that they didn't want to touch you know having to do these tax reportings with a 10 foot poll ultimately though you know we kind of heard these same warnings uh when you know there was you know when crypto exchanges were in a lot of infancy where it was like you know you have to keep in mind i mean there was no iris guidance for any of that first of all like for years and then when there was it was a realization that's like oh i need to know like how much i bought the set you know how much i sold it at how long i held it that kind you know like very basic stuff now but so i can see this over time there is a market incentive right for game companies or game developers or you know whoever is the publishers of these not to make a player's life a living hell at tax time so i feel like the the games that can do that will be better valued by their customers at least in the long run uh so like not not to say that everybody was just kind of figure this out the good news here is at least according to the protocol it's not like this is a point of emphasis for the iris now i'm i am in no way saying anyone should avoid paying the taxes that they owe to any sovereign government please pay your taxes that you owe however if this is confusing to you and it's accid you know you accidentally don't pay something or something like that it's not like the iris is like gunning for this where they put out a crypto advisory i think it was a year or two ago where they said you need to be on top of this because we are going to be looking for this is a point of emphasis for us so uh fascinating world to to to think okay where we're calling these you know nfts as securities and increasingly again under that new infrastructure bill that's laid out in law now uh there's some ambiguity about what that actually means uh but uh could definitely make these games a lot more complicated at least yeah i had a front row seat as patreon went from uh you people pledge money and we give it to you to uh there's tax implications to this so we're going to start collecting some tax information on you don't worry it's all on our end to we have to collect sales tax and that now because we're big enough to be on people's radar so i think that's what's going to happen here none of this is really going to be a a big issue for most people uh until one day it is until one you know enforcement agency whether it's in the us or elsewhere says like all right we're going to start cracking down they'll go to the businesses uh the businesses will say this is burdensome it doesn't work we need new laws there'll be a bunch of sterman drong and eventually they'll pass new regulations that give the gaming industry its own system for collecting taxes because here's the thing when the internet requires a new system like net neutrality or something nobody wants to do it but when that system impacts taxes governments do it really fast because if they're like oh this system isn't helping us bring in the revenue as fast we'll fix that so this will eventually get fixed it's just a matter of win it's it's called a motivated actor at that point right yeah all right uh and next up here what's that began rolling out multi device support as a default feature it's kind of been a big news we've been following the development here it was added to the stable version of the app earlier this year but users still had to opt into the multi device beta program it was in there you just had to opt in the feature now lets users link up to four non-phone devices and doesn't require a primary smartphone to be connected to the internet to use as a big pain point for a lot of people that you know wanted to leave it up on their computer or something like that the rollout of default multi device support just might encourage you though to leave that open in a browser tab or on your tablet or something like that all the time you know like you would for i don't know an app like discord or slack or something like that but you know it's kind of a you know it's apples to oranges comparison you know whatsapp doesn't quite work like either of those apps maybe not yet though because whatsapp beta info reports what xda developers had found hints of back in october and that's that a community feature is in development for whatsapp on android and ios this would let community admins manage effectively groups of group chats including the ability to send community invite links whatsapp beta info compares communities to something like a discord server which individual group chats within those communities acting like a discord channel so you wouldn't have maybe access to all of the the chats within your community but you would have the ones that you would be interested in the admin would oversee everything whatsapp beta info notes that community icons appear to be squares with rounded corners format that whatsapp mistakenly enabled and then quickly disabled back in october you know that that lines up really you know if one of these two pieces on the other obviously the multi device support just a big deal in terms of if your whatsapp user convenience of you know just not having to have your phone on all the time especially for like travel and stuff like that being able to stay connected like other apps like signal and stuff can do but you know combine that kind of a sneaky backdoor you know kind of a more sophisticated group chat feature maybe a future path for growth for whatsapp for sure yeah it's kind of a chicken and egg right like i know there were lots of reasons users wanted multi device mode because when whatsapp started it was like yeah i just use it on my phone but then as android and ios and everybody started to have these you know microsoft added it the ability to like oh it's nice to get my messages on my desktop everybody wanted to be able to do that with whatsapp so multi device support was important to the users but what else could whatsapp do with that and what's the business reason for doing that besides just making users happy when the users really aren't paying anything for whatsapp and uh this this could be it right yeah there's there's a weird thing where you know like discord and and slack are like sometimes can be good organizational tools for like corralling people into the right groups to communicate with but sometimes this chat tools especially when it comes to things like threading and stuff like that can kind of fall on their face at times i'm not a regular whatsapp user i have like two chats that i'm ever in uh with that so i can't speak to like i'm not an expert at the efficiency but if you have like a really great chat experience that can be expanded to be like an organizational productivity kind of thing that might have a ground up uh you know uh kind of uh emphasis on it that could be appealing and whatsapp's trying to make their money off businesses so yeah having having a business version of this you make it popular with regular users and then have business versions of it that they can pay to get different analytics or bring in customers for things i can totally see that all right uh do we have one more story rich yes we do and it's it's truly close to my heart because if microsoft's arc mouse has always seemed like something approaching greatness but stopping tragically short microsoft may be working on your ideal travel mouse an international patent spotted by the german tech site windows united shows microsoft's idea for a mouse with a deformable body that includes an expandable shell on the top and motion trackers to communicate tactile input yes a folding mouse in other words stays flat slipping in your laptop bag easily and you can bend it more than your typical mouse you'd be able to uh microsoft says in the patent that current travel mice lack an ergonomic design and may be uncomfortable to use which i find kind of odd because i know some people say the arc mouse is not exactly the most comfortable mouse to use but maybe if you can if it's like fully formable and you can really kind of contour it to how you want to use it tom are you are you lining up for a fully foldable mouse so so if i'm understanding you right the arc mouse is the one that's kind of kind of like a top of the triangle right yeah and so this one is flat the mouse itself is actually flat which would be useless as a mouse but you pull it out of your bag and you just bend it into the arc shape and now you can use it as a mouse on that very small tray in your in your airplane seat back it i mean you're probably using it in the lounge but still yeah you use it on it's using a goat this is genius actually you know it folds like i like weird microsoft productivity like like you know everyone's like the vertical mouse okay we're doing that microsoft's like no no no we're this mouse we're folding half you can like business traveler guy we got you or gal all right let's check out the mailbag absolutely andrew wrote in with a nomenclature question on meta he says i had a quick question about meta platforms and how we refer to it versus facebook on the show my original assumption was that with the name change when something changed on facebook it would be reported as facebook has decided if something was then outside of the facebook app it would be reported as meta has announced i've noticed a couple of times on the show when talking about facebook you are saying meta and not facebook so when you decide to say meta is doing something versus when facebook is doing or announcing something and then uh he had also said he can kind of compare this to reporting on something that google has done but not mentioning alphabet yeah so alphabet is pretty easy with alphabet you have very distinct companies right alphabet rarely does anything google does stuff wemo does stuff deep mind does stuff uh so so it's pretty easy there with meta you don't have company divisions that's one of the big differences here is like meta is just changing the name of the parent company but you're not creating a facebook company that is below meta you've still got facebook whatsapp you've got company divisions but it's not the same as alphabet which actually has like corporate structures than ceo's for each of the divisions there's no ceo of facebook separate from the ceo of meta at least not yet they might do that at some point but uh so so what's going on here is i have to decide when to say facebook because that means it only applies to the product facebook but when it's the company doing it i say meta because that's the overall company and in fact in the case uh i asked ncb i wrote him back i was like okay what what is the example you're seeing and he pointed out that we had said meta is shutting down facebook's facial recognition system and andrew was wondering like well if it's facebook's recognition system wouldn't you say facebook shutting it down a there is no facebook to shut it down so you could kind of go either way but also in the press release from the company about this they wrote in the coming weeks meta will shut down the face recognition system on facebook so i just i'm like oh they are saying we meta are shutting i'm making the the decision to shut this thing down in our product called facebook so i know this is getting kind of in the weeds here but that that's the thinking that goes between this and it also is a nice way to illustrate the difference between alphabet and why we say google differently than we might end up saying facebook because you're talking about two different structures two different situations absolutely and if you have any other thoughts on that feedback at daily tech news show dot com happy to talk about that on the show and thanks to our brand new bosses samir tartier and die morgan henwood who just started backing us on patreon thank you samir and morgan truly truly appreciate yeah this is uh this is a nice nice streak we're on please don't let it end if you if you're on the fence out there and you've been thinking about jumping in and supporting us now's the time to do it because you'll get a holiday card we're mailing holiday cards to all the patrons who give us their their address so get in there and do that right now patreon.com slash dts that's you rich oh okay we're live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 20 30 utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash line we'll be back tomorrow with patrick norton always a good time see you there this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover