 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to everybody who listens, including Jeffrey Zilx, Tony Glass, Philip Less, and our new patrons, Bo, Alex, and Brandon. On this episode of DTNS, Microsoft has not won its fight to buy Activision Blizzard yet, but it just got a lot closer. And Will Smith is here to give us some advice on how to pick PC parts. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 11th, 2023 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from studio, we are going to make it. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Joining us, the co-host of Brad and Will made a tech pod is the Will in Brad and Will made a tech pod. Will Smith, welcome back. Thanks for having me, guys. It's good to be back. It's good to have you. Did you hear that Apple opened a store on China's WeChat super app? I only vaguely understand what WeChat is, Tom, if I'm being honest. It's super app. Look, it's the app where you do everything. You make, you text. Yeah, social network. You travel by a house. OK, you do all the things. You can literally buy a house using WeChat, apparently. Anyway, good for Apple expanding in China. Let's get to the rest of the quick hits. Netflix has updated its profile transfer feature that lets you take your profile from a shared account to a new account. So now you could take your profile from one shared account to another shared account. If you're saying what is happening, for example, you move out of your parents' house, maybe you and your new roommate want to share a Netflix account. This would make that possible. Anthropic opened up its Claude to chat bot available online for users in the UK and US to test. Anthropic builds Claude as a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant. They're trying to make it. They're trying to position it against chat GPT chat. Chat is mean. Claude is friendly. It's able to do similar tasks to other chatbots, but with a more conversational tone. Its training data set also goes up through December 2022. Nothing's phone to specs are official. The company announced performance bumps, including a Snapdragon 8 plus gen one chip also supports a 4K video at six frames per second experience. The rear dual cam has a 50 megapixel primary and 50 megapixel ultra wide and also action mode offers extra stable video recording. You know, you're playing soccer or something like that. The screen is now a seven point six point seven inch rather. 120 Hertz LTPO OLED 1080p screen. So could be better, but not as bad as it was before. Glif lighting still on the back. People like that. Nothing folks do anyway. Software offers more customization, better widget options. And now with the four forty seven hundred milliamp battery, its full charge is in under an hour wireless charging also available. Nothing's phone to comes to the US and Canada for the first time on July 17th starts at five hundred ninety nine dollars in the US and pre-orders are open now. Amazon filed a petition with the European Union General Court challenging the designation of Amazon as a very large online platform under the Digital Services Act or DSA. If you're categorized that way, you have to abide by the restrictions of the DSA. Amazon is the first US company seeking to challenge the law. Amazon argues that it doesn't qualify as the DSA is designed to address large advertising based companies that distribute speech and information. Whereas Amazon is a large advertising based company that sells you stuff. The DSA goes into effect on August 25th. Cannot believe the audacity, but OK. On Monday, Apple issued a set of rapid security response updates to address zero day exploits in the WebKit browser engine on Mac OS, Ventura, iOS and iPad OS 16, as well as Safari. Shortly after it was released, users reported problems accessing some websites in Safari like Facebook and Zoom. Apple has since pulled the update. You can manually remove it and settings as well. Yeah, if you're wondering why Facebook doesn't work suddenly, that could be why if you're if you're on one of these devices that got the update. All right, let's talk about the big news, Sarah. Let's talk about it. OK, so let's talk about Microsoft Activision Blizzard and people who don't want this to be a thing. A judge has ruled against a preliminary injunction to stop Microsoft and Activision Blizzard from completing their merger injunction. A lot of people seem to think, whoa, this is over, Microsoft one. This is good news for Microsoft, but it's not over. So let's give a responsible headline writing award to CNBC for its story on the decision CNBC wrote. Activision Microsoft Activision deal moves closer as judge denies FTC injunction request. This has some people tripped up. So, Tom, let's talk about where we actually are right now. Yeah, the nice thing about that CNBC headline is it pointed out that the deal moved closer, this isn't the end. A lot of headlines kind of implied Microsoft wins as if that was it. They have a deadline to complete their deal by July 18th. Remember, this this deal is like two years old at this point. After July 18th, it's possible some penalties would kick in, etc. They would like to have this all done in seven days from now. The US FTC have filed a lawsuit to stop the merger back in December, but they have set an administrative law judge to hear that argument August 2nd. So the FTC didn't want Activision Blizzard and Microsoft to meet their July 18th deadline because that would end the merger before the administrative law judge heard their case. So they filed a preliminary injunction request, a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop the merger from happening by July 18th. That's the case that was decided today. The injunction that says, don't let them finish the merger before we get to our court case. The US Federal Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley denied the FTC's motion for that injunction. So all the judge said was, no, I'm not going to prevent them from completing their merger just so we can wait for your court case. Because as the judge wrote, the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim that this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to call of duty and other Activision content. I found it interesting that the judge called out call of duty specifically. So in other words, the judge said it's not clear the FTC is going to win. So I'm not going to give an order to stop the merger while we wait to find out. But that's not the end. The FTC has until July 14th to appeal that decision. And even if it doesn't or if their appeal was denied, the deal would face opposition from the UK's competition and markets authority. So it's not just the US, but also the UK that's been objecting to this and a hearing on that case is set for July 28th again, 10 days after the deadline. But the Verge reports Tuesday that Microsoft and the UK's CMA have agreed to pause their legal action against each other in order to negotiate. That's a very good sign for Microsoft that the CMA looked at this FTC case and said, you know what, seems like maybe you get this done in the US. We don't want you to do some messy thing where the merger happens everywhere in the world except the UK. So let's figure out if we can find a way to agree. Microsoft says it's considering further ways to modify this deal to satisfy the CMA. So, Sarah, it's starting to look like maybe Microsoft will get Activision Blizzard after all. Yeah, I was talking to quite a few of my gaming friends, you know, and the consensus this morning was like, yeah, Microsoft won. I was like, Microsoft may indeed win. Microsoft did not win today. This is an injunction. And yeah, you know, if you're not, you know, up with, you know, you know, legal stuff, some of this is really convoluted. What what I think is interesting here is FTC saying, well, hey, OK, so we've got until, you know, you know, August 2nd, you know, for a judge to talk about this lawsuit, let's try to get ahead of it. Another judge says, you don't really have the legs to stand on to get ahead of this. So we're going to go ahead with, you know, you know, the the the dates that that we that we're already dealing with. And, you know, for a lot of people, it's like, well, can't they just like make the dates earlier? No, it doesn't really work that way. And that's this particular case is. I don't know. It's gotten into the weeds a little bit as far as dates go. But will knowing, you know, what you know about however you might like the merged to proceed or not like it to proceed. Where do you stand on this? I mean, I think so full disclosure, my day job, I work at a game studio. We had a game that released on Xbox in Game Pass a couple of years ago. So like I have relationships with everyone involved here. I think more scrutiny is never going to hurt consumers, the people who are buying games and playing games. And I mean, honestly, the best part about this whole thing is all the disclosure that's come where we've learned how much money big studios and first party publishers actually spend making games. You know, we're talking about budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and we know what they're spending on marketing, all this other stuff now, which is incredibly valuable information for all the little guys out there like me that are just trying to make games for people to play. Yeah. And to be honest, there's really nothing that unusual about this case, except that so many lawsuits were left till the last minute. And that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard really don't want to get into the complications of missing their deadline, which involves fees and extensions and things like that. So it does look like pushing it to the deadline was a bad idea and it would have been better if the FTC and the CMA would have been able to get their stuff together to object to this earlier because now they've run out of time. And the judge saying, look, it doesn't look like you're going to win this case. That's what's really bad here. The judge saying, I'm not going to give you a preliminary junction because I don't know, you might win, but it sure doesn't look to me like you're going to. So it's not worth holding up the merger if you're just going to lose. And then this company now suffers because they have to pay breakup fees and extra lawyer fees will still appeal. They may not. They didn't when they may not. I expect when Facebook and within when when a similar thing happened when Facebook was acquiring within the FTC decided not to appeal. Yeah. Yeah. So they may look at it and say it's just not worth it because we agree with the judge, maybe we are going to lose at this point. Commerce always wins, Tom, commerce always wins. Does it doesn't? Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't always, but it always went on. What we always win from is other people being surveyed to let us know how humans react to things. Specifically, a Pew Research Center study indicates that 59 percent of U.S. adults surveyed see TikTok as either a major or minor threat to national security, but a threat nonetheless. So some takeaways from this study. The older you are, the more likely you are to see to talk as a threat, 49 percent younger than 30. And only 14 percent of those in the same age group thought that it was a threat. The 14 percent thought it was a major threat. Now, of those 65 and older, 65 percent of those said, yeah, we think TikTok is a threat. Sixty four percent at least were somewhat worried about how TikTok handles data. But again, that breaks down based on your age. Fifty four percent younger than 30 and seventy five percent older than sixty five felt this way. Now, I know that that's a lot of percentages and a lot of a lot of stats thrown in there, but will throwing this to you, how typical do you think we are? How would you have responded if you were part of the survey? Well, OK, so there's two different things happening here, right? One is I love I love TikTok and I like time just disappears. So it's a massive threat to productivity, I think like national security, I would hope and maybe I'm being optimistic here, but I would hope that if you are working in a national security capacity, you have a device. You're not allowed to run things like TikTok or Discord or, you know, really any third party applications on those devices. And thus, the national security that always feels a little overblown to me. I feel like I feel like maybe in this case, TikTok's a proxy for China. I don't know like are these people that are worried about China and TikTok is the social media app from China that we use in America? Well, that's the, you know, that's sort of the underlying thing of like, who actually feels that way might be true, might not be true. Important to say that of those bold, 70 percent said, we don't think it's a threat at all. And then 17, 17 percent. Yeah, it's very small. 17, yeah, one seven, not 70. And 23 percent said, well, we just aren't sure. I mean, I probably be in that 23 percent, to be honest. Yeah, that's where I land is not sure. Apathetic, maybe I feel like to solve the problems with TikTok, we should just solve the problems with app privacy in general and stop letting people collect so much data about us. So I think I think you bring up a good point, Will, that if if we took out TikTok and replaced it with China, and I said 59 percent of U.S. adult surveyed see China as a major or minor threat to national security. I wouldn't blink an eye that probably sounds about right. I'm not I don't have that number, but it wouldn't be shocked if it was pretty close. And I think people see TikTok as China. I think that's unfair to TikTok. I think TikTok has more of a firewall between itself and the Chinese government than most Chinese companies. And I think there's a lot of Chinese companies like Lenovo that people give a pass to just because they're more familiar with them or they use them more, which is why it's interesting to see that the older you get, the more likely you are to think it's a national security threat. Well, you don't talk about Lenovo like, you know, I'm on Lenovo social network app all day every day, you know, but you're on a Lenovo all day every day. Yeah, there's a social network conversation about like, oh, they know too much, you know, and then it's like, what about that monitor? All of our routers are made in China. If we're worried about if we're worried about TikTok, we should be worried about that and those pipelines, I think more so. All that said, I think I might have responded that this is a security threat. I don't know if I'd say major because. It's it's a broad question. It should someone who works in a sensitive position in the US military, the US government or US intelligence have TikTok on their phone. No, but that's not because I think that TikTok is handing over things to the Chinese military directly. It's because that's a lot of data to be handing over to anyone. And it's well and you're a high value target. You shouldn't be doing that. And there's not a great way to prevent TikTok from collecting the data that it collects. And it's been caught collecting some data that it was in a entirely above board. But that goes back to what you said earlier, Will. That's not unusual. Threads collects a lot of data. That's been in the news lately. But then when you look at it, you're like, oh, that's also the same data that Facebook collects, the Twitter collects, that all these other apps collect. So it does come down to these apps do collect a lot of information about you. And if you're a sensitive target, you probably shouldn't be using those because you shouldn't let anybody have them just to be safe. For the average person like myself, I don't think TikTok is a big national security threat. No, like, if you're not in a position to evaluate a national security threat is like I am, I'm not in that position. I'm an ex journalist who makes video games, right? Like, we're probably OK. Think the the counter to this is the Russian operative in Ukraine who was responsible for some bombings in civilian areas who was posting his daily runs on a running app and got assassinated by the Ukrainians as a result because they knew his route. They believe that it was a straw that it was a Strava route that led him to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like maybe, you know, yeah, it's like they have to be rules about this kind of stuff and how we use our devices. Even that is more of like, oh, I was posting my location. Publicly, yeah, about that, right. You know, TikTok is not really, you know, that is a this is a whole other thing. You know, it it it may be data collection that, you know, will come back to bite me. I don't really post anything on TikTok, but I certainly consume things on TikTok and I don't really ever think like, oh, yeah, I mean, what? What a what a, you know, a landscape to to to get data that will will hurt civilians later, but I also don't know. So I'm kind of in that camp of like, I don't know. I don't feel personally all that scared day to day. But, you know, I think we all have the opportunity to, you know, share or not share on various platforms. Yeah, I think there's there's more of a threat to your personal information from from private companies than than there is from governments in this particular instance. I'd be more worried about TikTok having my information than the Chinese government having information, as I guess what I'm saying. Thankfully, operating systems have been making it easier and easier for you to take control over what data that apps can collect. Android is an operating system that does that. And now there's a podcast entirely devoted to talking to you about Android. Android aficionados, Ron Richards and Huantui Dao bring you Android faithful, premiering today as we're recording this Tuesday, July 11th. If you're hearing this before 8 p.m. Eastern Time, go to twitch.tv slash good day internet at 8 p.m. And you can watch them record the first episode. Everybody should go subscribe right now at www.androidfaithful.com. Big congratulations to Ron and when and everybody and all the folks who are helping out and welcome to all the Android faithful patrons who are who are showing up in our discord. It's good to have you. With prices for PC components like GPUs and CPUs and memory starting to finally come down, you may want to upgrade your PC. So we thought we'd check in with Will about where to start. Will, you've built a lot of PCs in your day. How do you determine what parts of your system you're going to upgrade? Well, you know, Tom, I start by thinking about how I use the computer, right? So if I play a lot of games, then a video card is often the place you can start and and you think about the lifecycle of a PC. You build a new PC or buy a new PC. And then when things start to get slow, you look at the components you can upgrade. So if the frames are slow in the latest games, video cards are a good place to do. If you do a lot of like like heavy computing work, if you're compiling stuff for your programmer or if you're doing graphic design work, then then it gets more complicated these days because there's kind of a, you know, even even your your photo editing app is going to use GPU at this point. So you kind of have to make some more intelligent decisions. And with that, I really don't start to upgrade these days until things start to feel slow. So sometimes it's as easy as taking a 16 gig system with 16 gigs of RAM, putting an extra two sticks of RAM and moving to 32 gigs. And all of a sudden you're you're in all new whole new world of performance. What about Windows 11? Is Windows 11 compatibility for your parts something that's worth paying attention to? Is that is that a good guide? Well, so anything you buy today is going to have Windows 11 compatibility at this point unless you're going to eBay and buying old hardware from from 10 years ago, your new components, anything you've bought realistically in the last three or four years is going to be Windows 11 compatible. And then there's a larger question about whether you want to upgrade to Windows 11. Like, would I build a new machine today to have a Windows 11? Would I replace a perfectly good Windows 10 machine just to get Windows 11? Probably not. You know, Windows 11 is great. I'm using it day to day. It's a much better OS now than it was when it launched. Is it is it a necessity? Absolutely not. That's that's good to know. I think that that's comforting for a lot of people who are feeling the pressure. What about upgrading to older stuff? So you've got a you've got several generations out of the current CPU or a GPU that's like eight hundred level in video, something like that. Should you go to the previous models and get a lower price? So this is where it gets tricky with the CPUs. You can often buy one generation back or like a half step generation back and get a pretty good deal, especially as the transition is happening. With this last generation, we changed memory specs. So, you know, if you're buying a new board and a brand new CPU, now you're probably going to buy DDR5 memory, which is substantially more expensive and realistically, probably have a shorter lifespan than the DDR4 that you buy now just because it's a new new technology and new process and it probably won't last as long. It'll also be when you need to replace it, it'll also be a lot cheaper than it is right now. With GPUs, it's more complicated. The the newer the newer GPUs on the AMD side, you can absolutely go back a generation. You don't have to buy a seventy six hundred Radeon seventy six hundred today. If that if you're playing at 1080p, that's a great card. You can save a fair amount of money by going one generation back and buying a sixty seven hundred XT very comparable performance and like a hundred bucks cheaper on the Nvidia side, it's more complicated because they rolled out some new technology with the four thousand series cards. Now, reviewers really, really, really don't like the forty sixty because it's it's a pretty minimal upgrade in most ways from the previous generation six series card to the thirty sixty. The place that it's better is it has DLSS three, which is a new generation of DLSS for games that support it. It can actually generate frames to reduce micro stuttering in your games. So you can see like a thirty anywhere from a thirty to an eighty percent performance boost in some games, depending on on where the bottlenecks are in them. The games require support, but it's a relatively easy plug in for developers to add. So games are still being actively updated like Witcher three, even, which is a pretty old game at this point, got a DLSS three patch that had an enormous performance boost again for people playing with everything turned up at 1080p. I think the ray tracing support is also a little bit better on the Nvidia side. And the new four thousand series cards are much more power efficient than the three thousand series cards. You're paying a pretty high premium for that. And I think you'll see a pretty good, like it's hard to go wrong at the like eight hundred to thousand dollar PC space right now, because everything's pretty good. The DLSS three stuff is a is is pretty is it's a reason to go with an Nvidia card, frankly, right now, I think. And then the final question, OK, I figured out what I'm going to buy. How do I how do I shop? Where do you go? Yes. So I usually establish my budget. I say, OK, I want to spend a thousand dollars or spend fifteen hundred dollars. Yeah, I did a PC for my daughter last year and we spent five hundred bucks on that and got a really nice PC, a little bit, a little bit stuffed scrounge from the old PC, but mostly new hardware. And then I go to PC part picker dot com. They do a ton of guides. It's a part editorial part. You can post your builds. They do the basically put in what CPU and what GPU you want. And then you can pull motherboards and things like that from there. They also will tend to keep you out of trouble. So you can start with their guides. You can build out from there. You can also just start from scratch and pick the hardware you want. It'll tell you if your CPU isn't going to work with your mother board, if you have the right RAM for your mother board, or if your power supply isn't powerful enough for the hardware that you're putting in the machine, which is which is super important, especially if you're not super confident in those choices, because like especially with the with DDR4 and DDR5 in the channel right now, multiple different chipsets from AMD and Intel, three different graphics card vendors, because Intel is back into it again, it gets really complicated really fast. And and it's nice to have either start with one of their guides at the price point you want or the or the kind of like use case you want or just build up from scratch. And then you can send a link to your friend and say, hey, I know you're good at building PCs. Is this is the right thing for me? Now, for that person whose dog was barking in the back seat or just had a semi honk at them and you're like, what was that? Website, it was PCpartpicker.com, and we'll have the link in the show notes as well. Well, let's talk about satellites, shall we? SpaceX's Starlink satellites are designed to avoid things in low Earth orbit because, of course, why not? The company told the FCC in a recent filing, which it's required to do, that it's a fleet of orbital satellites performed more than 25,000 maneuvers basically ways to make sure that nothing hit them between December 1st, 2022 and May 21st of this year. Now, 1,300 of those were to avoid debris specifically generated from Russia's November 2021 anti-satellite weapon demonstration test. Turns out things hang out in space for a while after that. Only 9 percent of debris from that test is still in orbit, but still posing the largest overall risk to Starlink satellites. SpaceX says it uses a higher threshold than the industry standard, moving when the probability of a collision is greater than one in 100,000. Also noting that NASA uses a threshold of one in 10,000. So, yeah, OK. But Starlink also doubled the number of avoidance maneuvers since its previous reporting period in part because it added 457 satellites into low Earth orbit. She got more satellites, you got more debris, and those satellites are trying to avoid that's fascinating. That's fascinating stuff to see all those cars, but it's base. Well, you were saying you used Starlink recently, right? Yeah, I visited my folks in Virginia and they live out in the country where there's no no cable, no DSL. You know, previously they'd used a 4G uplink on a fixed antenna. And it's a remarkable like it was a remarkable service for browsing the internet, watching videos, all the things that you do in your broadband, except for playing multiplayer games online. Aha, yes, I suppose that would be true. That makes sense. You'd have moments of good performance. And when you when you jump from satellite to satellite, there's just enough downtime that you have some judder and and it made it weird. It was still slightly better than trying to play Diablo four on the airplane to the east coast. That I have I have depends on the airplane these days. There's some pretty there's some pretty good wife on the airplane these days. I've been sort of impressed this weekend. I have some friends who live, you know, definitely country living not far from where I am now. And they just even, you know, even just pain, whatever they could pay, they could not get a reliable connection where they lived. And Starlink has been working for them. Yeah, it used to be when you go over there, they'd say, someone watching a video, don't watch the video, that kind of thing. So it's a remarkable, it was remarkable. Like my daughter was able to watch YouTube. We were able to have multiple videos going at the same time. We could do zoom calls, the whole thing. It just kind of worked in a way that the 4G stuff never really did. So it's a remarkable service. Well, hopefully Starlink satellites will continue to, you know, dodge debris, but it sounds like it's getting crowded up there in low earth orbit. Will Smith, not crowded at all, having you on the show. Thank you for being here with us and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Yeah, so you can find me on while I'm on the blue skies and the mastodons and the like, look, all of the children of Twitter, I'm there. You can find me at twitch.tv slash not that, Will Smith. But I also, my day job, I work on a game called the Anacruces. We're part of the steam summer sale. We are a left for dead like, meaning we're a four player co-op game where you can fight aliens and traverse a scary spaceship. We just launched versus mode with our 39th update in early access last week. And that lets you and your friends play as the aliens, as the bad guys. And so you like the survivors are trying to get to the end of the map. The the aliens are trying to stop them from getting to the end of the map. And we like to think of it as sanctioned griefing. So it's a way to be mean to your friends. And then at the end of the level, you swap teams and then they can be mean to you. And it's quite fun. Fantastic. That's not so much fun. Patriots, stick around. We're not done talking to Will Smith on Good Day Internet. We're going to catch up on some of the conversations he's been having on tech pod about federation, you know, like what mastodon is doing in light of threads. A lot of people have been talking about this some more. So we'll talk a little bit about what problems it causes, which ones it solves and whether people actually want it. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That is twenty hundred UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Probably going to talk about gaming. See you there. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.