 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Paul Teeson, Allie Sanjabi, and Andrew Bradley. Coming up on DTNS, PlayStation launches its streaming competitor to Xbox Game Pass. Flag emojis no longer allowed, and whether Europe's DMA will break end-to-end encryption. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 29th, 2022, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Toronto, I'm Jen Cutter. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are happy to bring you some good tech news today, so let's start with a few tech things you should know. After an announcement back in January, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti today for $2,000, with the Limited Founders Edition board exclusive to Best Buy online. The triple card slot looks similar to the RTX 3090, has 24 gigs of GDDR6X running at 21 gigabytes per second, 40 teraflops of GPU performance, a base clock of 1560 megahertz, 10,752 SCUDA cores, 78 RT teraflops and 320 sensor T-flops as well. NVIDIA claims it will be 9% faster than the RTX 3090, but hey, at least ASUS announced a price drop of up to 25% for NVIDIA 30 series GPUs. Starting on April 1st, we are suspicious. Apparently it's supposed to keep going after that, but will it? Microsoft is adding an easy way to change your default browser in Windows 11. If you remember Windows 11 shipped without a simple way to switch your default browser, something that was always available in Windows 10. In the latest update, Windows 11 users can now go to the default apps section and just choose their browser of choice, no like digging in, finding settings. Microsoft also says it plans to announce bigger changes to Windows 11 for hybrid work at an event on April 5th. Otter.ai is well known for its ability to transcribe text from audio files. The company is adding some new features, including automatically transcribing meetings. Otter will provide a calendar and user accounts, letting users jump into meetings using Otter integrations with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and also Google Meet. A meeting summary uses AI, using a combination of singles like what words have been used, who's talking, et cetera, highlighting the most important moments. Meeting gems take segments highlighted by participants, which can then be tagged or commanded from folks using it. Users can also add screenshots to transcripts and it also offers some analytics like who spends the most time talking in meetings. Oh, yeah, that's never gonna be misused. I'm sure, it'll be fine. Hey, the Google Hangouts mobile app. We continue to document the long decline. It has now been removed from both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store as Google continues to move everybody on Google Workplace over to Google Chat. The old version of the app still works if you still have it installed, but it will have a big pop-up now that tries to encourage you to switch over to Google Chat and no word on how long that old app will continue to work. Well, speaking of old apps, remember the Amazon Glow? It was a video calling device that was part projector and kind of meant for children so they could play games over a call. If you don't remember it, it's fine. That was announced in September and sold by Invite Only, but now it's available to all US customers. Might actually be something that you would be interested in. The price has risen from $249 to $299 and it includes a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids Plus. Might be worth your while if you're in that market. The consensus in our Twitch chat is no, they didn't remember that. No, I know. I was being kind. All right, let's talk a little more about this big old Sony announcement. Jen, what do we got? We have a lot of news. All right, so Sony revealed their game subscription planned formerly codenamed Spartacus. New system is taking on the name PlayStation Plus but has three tiers instead of one and PlayStation Now will be rolled into one of the tiers. The lowest tier PlayStation Plus essential is the same price as the existing PS Plus offering at $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year. It includes the same features like online multiplayer, cloud storage for saved games, two downloadable games a month, and if you're already subscribed to PlayStation Plus, this is the tier you'll automatically be converted to, don't have to do with it. Middle tier is called PlayStation Plus Extra. It adds a downloadable catalog of up to 400 PS4 and PS5 games for $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Note that Sony will not be making its first party titles available in PlayStation Plus on the day of release. And the top tier is called PlayStation Plus Premium. On top of everything else, you can download and stream PlayStation One, PlayStation Two, and PSP games, and PlayStation Three games can be streamed. If you're in a market that has PlayStation Now, you can stream those plus PS4 games as well, and this is the only tier with access to time limited game trials. PlayStation Plus Premium costs $17.99 a month or $119.99 a year. This is the tier that PlayStation Now customers will be automatically converted to. As for the streaming, Sony doesn't offer streaming in all its markets, so there's a special tier called PlayStation Deluxe that will be cheaper than premium in those markets, though the exact prices are not announced yet. It'll include downloadable games from OG PlayStation, PS2, and PSP, plus the limited game trials. All of this begins in June and Asia, followed by Europe and North America, and as a final note, for PS3 and Vita users, because they haven't totally forgotten you yet, you won't be able to renew subscriptions on those consoles. They don't have to do it on desktop and mobile instead. And Sony reiterates, if you remain subscribed, any PS3 and PS Vita benefits, such as previously redeemed monthly games, will continue to be accessible. So at least they're not completely cut off, even if they're kind of end of life. We will not actively annoy a small but vocal majority of our customer base. Smart move, Sony. What do you think of this, Jen? I mean, it feels like this is not nearly as complete or compelling as Xbox Game Pass, but if you're already in the Sony ecosystem, it certainly is a decent way to convert. If you're on an existing subscription plan, you get the same or better with options for more. I'm really glad they made it seamless for existing subscribers, because you don't wanna anger people who are already giving you money and who have already probably committed to a year or two, because a lot of people like me locked in before they raise the price, so I have like another year or so left. So I don't have to do anything, which is great, but because these tiers match up pretty much one for one with all the rumors, now that it's finally here, it feels slightly underwhelming. And like the part that I find kind of annoying is selling game limited trials. That's not a feature I would ever pay for. It doesn't matter the system, doesn't matter the console, I'm not paying for a demo. And then because I am a long time gamer, I may already even own like 250 of the games that they're offering, if not more, because I have all my OG collections I've never traded in. That was a complaint I heard from other people saying, this is great, but what if you already have a lot of these games? Is this gonna be worth your while? Yeah, is the convenience enough and the omission of day one PlayStation games, like the Microsoft Game Pass has. Microsoft Game Pass has been very aggressively saying, hey, play everything day one, you don't even have to pre-order, it'll just be there. That's a huge plus and they have the EA tie-in. Whereas as of right now, Sony has not announced any catalogs outside of their own first to third parties. Yeah, like maybe some Bungie stuff will be kind of added in the future, but it's nebulous, there's no game list out, so there's no way to go like, yes, I gotta get in on that. It's just, I guess I'll wait and see what's good. Yeah, I feel like things like the limited trials are just a throw in to be like, let's add another line to the slide so that you feel like you're getting more. It's certainly not the marquee feature. And if I had to describe this, I would say that the new PlayStation Plus tiers are nice to haves, not have to haves. Whereas Xbox Game Pass feels closer to have to have. Yeah, and Xbox also being available on PC kind of also is a mark in its favor because not everybody can get a console. Like if you only have a PS3 right now, there's no point in switching anything. You can do some PC streaming on this though, right? You can, but you still I believe need a PS4 for the majority of the games. Now PS4s are still available, so that's a plus. But if you're like waiting for a PS5, save your money and get a PS5, then look at the tiers. Yeah. Well, we all live a good emoji story. We have a couple for you today. First off, YouTube is running a limited test, letting users share certain emoji reactions at a particular moment in some videos. So if Jen makes a video, I'm watching the video, five minutes, 50 seconds in, I might say, ah, ha ha, fun, fun. I want her to know that I thought that that was funny, which is like leaving a comment, but it's an emoji comment. So similar to the beta test of time comments where users could opt to leave and view comments at specific moments, talking about specific time in a video. A separate reaction panel in the comment section of those enabled videos will display the emoji reactions at those specific moments, but won't list the user names of who's reacting. So if you're a content creator, you kind of get a, just a finger on the pulse of what might be resonating with your audience, but not necessarily who's commenting precisely and when and why. But in other emoji news, the Unicode consortium is cutting off new flag emojis submissions and you might say, well, why would they do that? Turns out Unicode can't remove a character once it's been added. Only designs can be changed, like if a country changes its flag type thing. If an emoji already exists, the consortium has the opportunity to doctor it up a little bit, depending on what's going on in the world. But flags are the least use of all emoji, even though they're the largest group. If you're kind of scrolling through looking for emojis to use. The consortium wants to limit the number of emoji added each year, it's time consuming, et cetera. If flags aren't that popular, then adding more flags doesn't make a lot of sense. So keep in mind this affects regional flags, organizational flags, stuff like that. Flags are still automatically recommended for countries with a Unicode region code that's recognized by the United Nations, but that will only happen when a new country is recognized by the UN. That doesn't happen very often, so. Yeah, so if you're worried like, what if a new country splits off from Sudan or something? Do they not get their flag in here? No, those are the only flags that will be added in the future according to this. What Unicode is saying is, look, we just defined the flag. We'll say that flag is for Canada. If Canada changes its flag to something, you can change it in your implementation of it, but we're not gonna add flags for stuff anymore. We'll look at adding hearts, because people are like, what about pride flags? If there's new pride flags, they acknowledge that there will be other ways that they'll work with that, but they were saying, look folks, yeah, one or two flags get used a lot. And certainly at World Cup time or Olympics time, they might get used a little more, but the vast majority of these flags never get used and everybody wants us to add a flag for their region. Let's say they use the example of Catalan in Spain. They're like, well, if we add Catalan, do we have to add all the regions in Spain? And if we add all the regions in Spain, do we have to add all the prefectures in Japan? And then do we have to add all the states in Australia? Maybe they already have the states in Australia. I don't know, but they're like, there has to be a line and we're drawing the line at actual UN recognized countries. Yeah, I love a story to cut you off, Jen. I love a good emoji story and I just wasn't aware. I was not aware that, I mean, I know that the Unicode consortium doesn't wanna just add every emoji that anybody ever thinks of year after year. There's certain ones that make sense and that's why there's a consortium to make these decisions. I just didn't realize that flags were not all that used. I feel like I see them quite a bit and might have something to do with Ukraine and just what's going on in the world fairly recently. But yeah, it's, I guess, flags are not the most popular. I believe I've used them twice and both times we're in a bio. I congratulate the Canadian men's national soccer team and also didn't use a flag. I think I use the hashtag instead. How many flags have you, either of you seen, have any of us seen, that were not a top level UN recognized country flag? I can't think of one, to be honest. Pride flag, that's the only one I could think of. Yeah, no. I mean, even I, you know, I'm a proud American but I've never used the American flag in any bio that I've had. I've seen the US flag used, but again, that's a top level. Absolutely, yeah. And especially like you're saying, Jen, sports related stuff, totally get that. You do see that and maybe because the Olympics were recently, I feel like, oh, I see flags all the time. But yes, not necessarily the more specific flags. Here's where it's gonna cause a problem is the next time there's a weird Olympics thing where there's like a sub region of a country allowed to compete, but not the country itself, right? Great Britain is an example. They use the UK flag for that, so it's fine. But World Cup, England plays, Scotland played. Those are regions of the United Kingdom. I don't know, it's probably gonna, it's gonna happen in some kind of international sports competition. It's kinda, yeah, it's kinda hard to believe that would be an issue, but you know, that's the news as we report. Several customers of Verizon Wireless and its MVNO visible have reported getting spam texts that appear to come from themselves from their own phone number. This makes the spam impossible to report or block because the phone's like, no, it's from you. You can't report that. The cause is not anything sophisticated. If you don't know, just like with email, you can set the from in a text message to anything you want, if you know how. That's useful. You might be like, why do they allow that? It's useful for companies with large marketing operations or companies with large customer support operations who want a single number that all the messages come from, but they may use multiple accounts to generate them. It also means, however, that you can get these spoofed accounts. It does not mean your phone account was breached in anyway. It's just a spoof. The carriers and the phone makers have spam protection that usually tries to detect and block these kinds of unwanted messaging. So spoofing the phone number or the phone you're sending to is kind of ingenious because I bet a lot of those filters exempt the originating phone number. Verizon, however, says it's working to block the messages and it's working with U.S. law enforcement to stop the source. If you want to know what you can do about it, U.S. users can forward spam messages to 7726. That spells out spam. Though logging that with a message that appears to come from you does seem rife with possibilities for confusion and error. The USFCC has a more formal complaint process which includes a category called my own number is being spoofed. Canadians can use a form at fight spam.gc.ca and there you can choose the sender's contact information provided the message was incorrect, not valid or misleading. But hopefully Verizon will just figure this out. Jen, you said your dad ran into this. Yeah, I was actually happy to see this story because now I can send it to my dad and be like, see, like you did nothing wrong because he's roaming. I guess he jumped on the Verizon network and he started getting all these weird messages and I'm like, I'm sorry, dad, I don't know how to help you here but now I can at least tell him where to report stuff even though he probably won't because it's kind of a long process. Well, yeah, so if you've gotten one of these, don't freak out. Hopefully Verizon will shut them down and they'll go away but we have in the show notes a couple of ways you could take action if you feel like you'd like to do a little more. You could also ask if people in the Discord, if you're like, wait, what did Tom say about that? Go join our Discord, start that conversation. You can link your Patreon account to join up at patreon.com slash DTMS. Lots of folks are debating whether Europe's DMA, the Digital Markets Act, is going to break message encryption. Here's why they're saying that. The DMA is still awaiting its first reading in parliament so we haven't seen the actual text yet. All we have to go on is public statements, some leaks and previous drafts from last year. So there's a lot of room for interpretation of what you think might happen. Here's what we actually know. The rule would apply to so-called gatekeepers, a company with market cap of 75 billion euros or turnover in the European economic area equal to or above 7.5 billion euros and at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU and more than 10,000 annual business users. So the biggest companies, companies that meet that size requirement and engage in messaging, WhatsApp and iMessage would meet this qualification, would be required to enable interoperability on request. Keep that in mind. Interoperability would mean exchanging text, video calls and files over an end-to-end encrypted service. Nongatekeeping companies and Telegram and Signal would not qualify as gatekeepers may then ask a gatekeeper to open up their API. Give us the API so that we can interrupt rates. So the burden is actually on the smaller companies to write the software to interact with the API. The gatekeepers just have to make the API open. Now the rule will apparently require one-on-one communication to be implemented three months after a request to interoperate. Audio and video calls and group communication which are more difficult to encrypt would have four years to come into compliance. And the European Parliament's rapporteur, Andreas Schwab, told TechCrunch, if telecoms regulators say it's not possible to deliver end-to-end encrypted group chats within the next nine months, then it will come as soon as it is possible. So it does seem that the EU is not wanting to give on end-to-end encryption. That sort of shoots down a lot of the fears that DMA would weaken it. However, we haven't seen the final text. So it's fair to have concern that somehow the final text might be weaker. However, for now, let's assume that the EU means it when it says nothing in the DMA is meant to weaken end-to-end encryption. All right, that's nice. But how do you do that? Benedict Evans posted a bit of what he says is the final draft that would require providers to provide interconnections to their messaging systems under objectively the same conditions and quality that are available or used by the gatekeeper, its subsidiaries, or its partners, thus allowing for a functional interaction with these services. So it has to be functional and it has to be about the same quality. They can't degrade the service. The Verge quotes Columbia University computer scientist Stephen Belevin saying, trying to reconcile two different cryptographic architectures simply can't be done. One side or the other will have to make major changes. It's just the nature of encryption, the way you implement it, if it's not all part of the same system, you have to do a conversion or you have to change to use the other person's system. One likely scenario might be that big companies create a special API that works with their encryption scheme, thus meeting the functionality argument, but leaves implementing the encryption scheme to the smaller app maker. It's hard to tell if that would qualify, but that might be one way they do it. However, that can only technically be done by converting the encrypted payloads since no two systems have the same schemes. And that means technically the message would have to be converted to plain text on something called a bridge and then re-encrypted. So it wouldn't technically be and encrypted. Now that could possibly be done on your device. So it's only unencrypted on your end, but it still leaves a weakness and potentially violates the law depending on how it's written by not being end to end. Another option would be a universal encryption standard that everybody signs up for. There's lots of these. There's the open source matrix messaging protocol. They've been doing a lot of work to put themselves forward as an option. XMPP and messaging layer security are other options. This does not appear to be required by the DMA. So if one of these were to be adopted, you'd have to get all the companies voluntarily on board, which that's not an easy task. Maybe the requirements of the DMA would encourage them to do that, but it's not required yet. There are other concerns as well. WhatsApp head Will Cathcart told Casey Newton about a few spam since third parties might not be as vigilant against spam as WhatsApp. That's making it harder to prevent. WhatsApp is also unsure if its forwarding limits would be legal under the DMA. My guess is that we end up with a green bubble, blue bubble system everywhere. In-network messages get full features and guarantees of privacy and security out of network messages technically work, but get treated separately and how much deviance would be allowed remains to be seen by the text of the law. The finalized text isn't done yet. We expect it to come probably in the next month or so, and then this wouldn't become law till October at the earliest. Well, yeah, I know. Left to speechless, didn't it? Well, no, there's actually a lot to think about here. I think one of the rule that governs what is considered a gatekeeper could change over time based on how companies do and what their market cap is and how they're conducting business. There's no indication of that. There's no indication of that. The gatekeeper is the one thing we do know the full text of. So there's no indication that that's gonna change. Okay, sure. But assuming that it doesn't, then yeah, I think that there are certain companies that will have to try to, I don't know, I guess play nice API-wise with other companies in order for this to work. I don't really see why, unless your hand is forced governmentally, why companies would bother. Jen, we can't hear you. You're muted, unfortunately. So if you could unmute that one. Happily. I agree with Sarah, because if this happened in Canada, I think these apps would be like, all right, bye. But because it's happening in the EU, I think they're going to have to find a way to work around it. And my brain can't, even with your excellent summary, I have no idea how the actual text of this is going to be written in a way that makes it feasible within the timelines they're asking for. Yeah, I've been short of requiring a standard, which it doesn't seem like they're gonna write into the law, maybe they will, but there's no indication of that either. It seems like they're saying, make this end in encrypted, but also interoperable and that all the security experts out there are saying you can't really do that. Unless you agree on a standard, which I don't know, maybe that's the EU's point, is we're gonna make it really hard for you to follow this law to where your only option is to agree on a standard. So you better go agree on a standard, everybody. The new standard will be called unicorn because everybody wants a unicorn. Or pony or a pony unicorn. Unipony. New thing, get on board, everybody. A little Easter egg in Windows 1.0 RTM. Harking back to the old days, everybody, has been found by a man named Lucas Brooks, who says congrats, Lucas doesn't say that, the Easter egg itself says congrats, also lists the names of the original Windows developers behind this code. Brooks discovered the Easter egg inside of a bitmap of a smiley face while deep diving Microsoft's first graphical OS. Now, if you're thinking, well, this is the first one that's ever been found, going back to the early 80s, Atari also didn't include credits in their games. So Atari developer at the time, Warren Robinette, made a credit that was hidden, but also findable and his boss, D. Wright, coined the term Easter egg to describe this practice. This is now something we're all pretty familiar with. Piggybacking on the fun, Windows has since gone on to include various Easter eggs with developers' names over the years and various iterations of Windows that can be seen by pressing a sequence of keys. Now, Brooks thinks that the code like that exists for Windows 1.0's credits, but as of now, not been found. Wait, I thought you said it was found. Not in the way that it's been found in other iterations. But we found the Windows 1.0 RTM stuff. Correct. Cool. This is very cool. And it's so retro if you go look at that Twitter. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I mean, maybe somebody out there has found it. Let us know how you feel. Feedback at DailyTechNuture.com. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Peter in Burampton, Ontario, who says, love the show also. I don't know if I didn't catch it during the discussion on Monday's show about the smart monitor, but is there a remote on the Samsung smart monitor because it would make a home office expense a bit more of a reach back, relaxing experience easier? Yeah, turns out yes. The answer is yes, good news. There is a remote. If you go to the product page for the Samsung monitor, you can find the specs. The remote is different depending on your market, they say, but yeah, such a weird little product. Jen, I don't know if you saw this. They talked about it on the show yesterday, but it's a monitor with a computer built into it that runs Tizen. So it's more than a smart TV. Yeah, it's a smart TV, but monitor. Yeah, but it's kind of like having a smartphone built into the monitor. Yeah, and it's also 700 bucks. I mean, it's not an impulse purchase, but in 10 years, YouTubers are gonna be tearing it apart and being like, oh, look at this weird, one of a kind thing that was never replicated because it didn't have enough of a use case. It's cheaper than some phones. If you're only ever at your desk. Yeah, I mean, yeah, good point. Well, anyway, wrapping up the show, thank you so much to you, Jen Cutter, for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with what you've been up to. Well, always on Twitter at Jen Cutter, and this Saturday, because this is a busy week, this Saturday is the next gaming news monthly, and if you are an associate producer on the DTNS Patreon, you can check for my column on Thursday about all the excitement going down with bungee suit over fraudulent DMCA lawsuits, which is very exciting. I can't wait to talk about it. Become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Excellent. Well, thanks for being with us, Jen, and I seem to have awoken my smart speaker who is also very excited about this. Also thanks to a brand new boss that we got, and that boss's name is Tom. Tom just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, thank you, new Tom. So glad to have you. Tom with an H, too. Like, I like that, little variation. Yeah, exactly. If you're not a patron, Good Day Internet starts momentarily, and if you're not part of the fun yet, you can join at patreon.com slash DTNS. Reminder for folks that DTNS now starts 4 p.m. Eastern Monday through Friday. That is 2100 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.