 Coming up on DTNS Europe cracks down on tech Walmart pulls the safety drivers and Patrick Beja gives us the lay of the land in gaming after the release of the new consoles This is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday December 15th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane and from the eternally dark forests of Finland. I'm a very tired Patrick Beja And I'm the show's producer Roger Yes, but from those dark forests Patrick helped us uncover all kinds of mysteries about sting in our wider conversation on good day internet I believe I believe Tom the word you were looking for is yes and you don't say yes, but It gets a wider conversation a good day internet become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know Nikai Asia sources say that Apple plans to produce up to 96 million iPhones in the first half of 2021 which would include the latest iPhone 12 range and older iPhone 11 and iPhone SE phones That's nearly 30% year-on-year increase although industry-wide component shortages could still bring that number down a source also says that Apple is working on a new Apple TV and Preparing an aggressive production schedule for new MacBook Pros and the iMac Pro in 2021 and one chips for everybody the elect comm sources say that LG display may convert its Gumi factory From making automobile and wearable displays to making panels for the iPhone with a name to supply 40 to 50 million OLED panels for iPhones in 2021 Signal has added support for end-to-end encrypted video calls You can have up to five people in your call and signal hopes to increase the number of participants. It allows over time Ireland's data protection commission issued a 450,000 euro fine against Twitter for failing to promptly declare and document a data breach that the GDPR Requires breaches of personal data be notified within 72 hours about the company apparently was not aware of it so anyway Twitter was fine the bug was in the Protector tweets feature that may have exposed some Android users to private tweets to the public Internet way to go Twitter said that Inadequate staffing over the holiday period in 2018 when the bug was discovered caused the delay Twitter also announced it will shut down its periscope mobile apps by March 2021 We've got the official word New users will no longer be able to sign up through the app starting now an archive of all periscope videos will stay Online and you'll be able to download your periscope videos by March as a big ol archive You can continue to stream live through the Twitter live feature on Twitter. Gosh, I wonder if I have any periscopes I should download have not checked in a while Samsung president of mobile TM Row confirmed that Samsung will hold an event in January and implied that the S pen support might come to more phones Row also indicated that Samsung will have a portfolio of foldable phones There will be more accessible to everyone, which probably means cheaper He also said that Samsung wants to do more with you at WB for things like opening your car door. We're finding lost objects All right, let's talk a little more about these big new proposed bills in the EU Let's do it the European Union proposed two bills on Tuesday So we'll start with the digital markets act that would preemptive preemptively block Competitive behavior by companies with 6.5 million euros in revenue or a market cap of 65 billion euros or more Which also serve 100,000 active business customers and 45 million active end users So these are you know big companies so Google and Facebook got it. All right It would create obligations towards smaller firms and end users such as price transparency for online advertisers better data portability for end users And the like so that's the digital markets act the second bill called the digital services act would require large tech companies that reach more than 10% of the EU's population to actively look for and mitigate risks from illegal content and goods that might be available on their services with annual external audits New transparency rules so users understand what's going on It allows for the application of local laws as well The proposal keeps the current liability shield that protects services from content posted by their users as long as a good faith effort Is made to correct problems, but it also increases the obligations needed to keep it Penalties could include periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of daily average daily income and continued violations Could lead to divesture of business units each bill must be approved by the European Council and European Parliament Which is likely to take years, but they're taking some steps it's it feels like something that The European Union has been kind of asking for these kind not these specifically but these kinds of laws Your the EU has been dancing around these things and you know implementing things like GDPR like essentially trying to take back control over the big companies that make up the internet today, which means they make up a lot of our even physical world and I think There might be good things and bad things in every law, but I think from a European perspective We don't usually don't think those would be a bad idea Maybe we would squabble about the details, but I would suspect that most people would think you know what yeah Let's hold them up to a certain standard Yeah, and it seems like what they're targeting with this is the criticism that if you over-regulate You'll squash new businesses from entering so they put these very large Revenue and market caps on anti competitive behavior. They're really trying to stop Tying in services to say well if you use Android you have to also use this and that And so so they're they're really targeting. I mean I jokingly say Google and Facebook But they're also targeting Amazon and Apple and and other big companies They're trying to make this still be open for smaller companies to grow Which is the big concern the big concern is that these companies are elbowing out everybody else And there's no there's no more room for any other tech companies the second bill is is very interesting because it is trying to address the same thing that section 230 addresses in the United States that idea of You're not responsible for what your people say on your platform Unless you're aware of it and we've told you you have to take it down and they're just kind of Increasing the penalties for that. I found that the local law part of this very interesting so for instance if there's let's say Hamburg says Anybody who doesn't Airbnb has to register with the city Then you could get in trouble under the digital services act if you're not Enforcing that if you're not saying okay, if you're on Airbnb in Hamburg, you got to register with the city I mean, I'm not saying Hamburg does that but I'm just using that as the kind of example where they will allow for local Variation and still require these big companies to know what all those local variations are and enforce them Yeah, I mean Airbnb great example, right because you've got I mean I I have quite a bit of experience with Airbnb and What the company is doing and what it assumes that the hosts people who you know offer up places for other people to stay and Understand is not always the same thing Communication could be better and it should be and this is probably going to force better communication But yeah, like you said the local laws could make things very convoluted I Want to re-emphasize the fact that that second bill specifically only applies to companies that reach more than 10% of use population So maybe reach should be defined a little should be clearly defined But it's not the tiny mom and pop shop that you know just shows up, right? It's not going to be an imposition on every small company that tries to get its its services out and I do want to mention It seems like these things don't happen unless governments force them and That is what the EU is trying to do maybe clumsily sometimes, but I don't think I mean It's difficult to judge from here, but doesn't seem like they're horrible laws on the face of them Yeah, Facebook even was fairly positive in its reaction to this There was little little more trepidation from from Google and Amazon about it, but There's been a lot of work with these companies to to take in to account their legitimate concerns Well, the UK also announced Tuesday It's plans to introduce a bill next year to cover what it calls online harms requiring social media companies and search engines To help prevent a range of illegal or potentially harmful material from being distributed on their platforms or Face fines of up to 10% of annual global revenue Sounds kind of familiar it would let UK regulator off-com demand action against child abuse imagery shared an encrypted message for example, even if end-to-end encryption was As a last resort it would cover all kinds of user-generated content with exceptions for product reviews and news Publishers comment sections that bill won't come before Parliament until next year at the earliest would go into effect in 2022 All right that one. I'm not too sure about Well, and we need more details about it to be sure about it. It's in the earliest stages More details continue to come out related to the attack on solar winds Orion Network management platform And it's used to intrude on email networks at government and corporate networks We talked a lot about that yesterday if you need to catch up researchers at Vilexity said Monday that they had encountered the same attackers penetrating a think-tank organization three times in 2019 and early 2020 and the attackers were able to buy pass multi-factor authentication provided by a company called duo by gaining Administrator privileges on a target network and then stealing the secret key What duo calls it a key from a server running the Outlook web app They could use the a key to generate a valid cookie That would be set when accessing an account that they had already acquired the username and password for That would bypass multi-factor authentication. It just wouldn't happen So MFA wouldn't fail MFA would never be called because they could forge the cookie to look like it already had Been called essentially fooling the authentication server into thinking multi-factor authentication was satisfied Some more details on the malware that was actually implanted into Orion also came out It identified its network traffic as the Orion improvement program when it was passing around It stored data inside legitimate files to try to keep it from being detected it would also search for security and antivirus tools in order to avoid them and The operators never communicated from outside the network with the same computer or network more than once That that way there wouldn't be a build-up of suspicious traffic from a particular source And they would only connect to the malware from outside the minimum amount of time they needed to To gain access to stolen credentials, then they would just use the stolen credentials and not access the malware again reducing The ability to detect that something wrong was going on The malware also didn't use any code from previous malware, which is often Something malware makers do which made it harder to detect Can't wait for the movie. This is so Convoluted and complex and I mean there's a movie to be made about a lot of this. I'm pretty sure Sorry, this is my technical take Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's fascinating stuff and we're gonna keep getting more revelations about this obviously just the number of Important organizations is going to keep building up We talked about a few of them yesterday, but but more US government organizations More corporations and it is going to be fascinating to find out how this operated. This is a Sophisticated actor. It's obviously nation-state backed This is not the kind of thing that your average attacker out there can pull off It may sound easy to be like, oh, yeah, you get admin privileges and you steal the secret key But even admins don't necessarily know how to extract that key and create the forged cookies And if you're gonna come at duo and say well, why don't you protect your secret key more duo's point is well If you are an admin you should be able to access that secret key for creating these cookies Because most people wouldn't be able to create a cookie out of it And there's certain administrative reasons why you'd need to be able to access the a key and flush it out And all of that so their point is the real bone, you know the real Problem here was that they got in and were able to get admin privileges because once you got admin privileges You have all kinds of things you can do bad All of this is really, you know the the super technical aspect what impresses me even more is the care the care and The carefulness with we with which they access the network, you know Not using the same computer or the same IP more than once and all of that aspect It it streams like spy thriller to me again. Yeah movie stuff, but It's very impressive For 18 months Walmart has been conducting a pilot of autonomous trucks from Gattuck the two companies plan to pull the safety driver next year new drivers Just doing it on their own Gattuck added its tech to multi-temperature box trucks to make autonomous trips with a safety driver On a two mile route between a dark store Those are the stores that you can't actually go in they're not like retail stores But they supply things for people who order them and a Walmart neighborhood market in Bentonville, Arkansas The pilot program has covered 70,000 miles in autonomous mode Next year the trucks will start operating on that route without safety drivers The companies also plan to start a pilot with safety drivers on longer routes in Louisiana Those trucks will take a 20 mile route from a walmart supercenter in new Orleans to a pickup location in metterie Gattuck claims that its approach is different than other autonomous vehicle companies though It breaks the deep neural networks into micro models And then gives them specific tasks Gattuck claims that this allows for optimization with less data and implement gatekeeping mechanisms to ensure more safety Now you might recall that walmart is also working with Waymo cruise neuro Udlev Baidu for and postmates on autonomous vehicle delivery. So safe to say They think it's got some legs And wheels We've literally uh, we've we've been talking about this for for years Tech news today and daily tech news show both and A lot of people have been saying it'll be 40 years before you you were able to to pull the driver And this is not the first time we've seen someone pull the driver And I think it's also notable that walmart is one of the companies forging ahead not by Trying to create the technology themselves, but by working with almost everyone who's doing it To say like let's try this let's try that I mean that that's how you figure out what works with new technology like this And the fact that they're now going to be doing that on on what what is a real route a 20 mile route From an actual walmart supercenter I mean the dark store just feels like they made a small warehouse just to test this out going from an actual walmart super center in New Orleans to to metterie again, probably not terribly practical for a lot of people, but it's a it's a Thing that is closer to what you would use this for in practice Yeah, it's it's becoming serious. I think you know, you say some people have been saying it's going to be 40 years I also think some people have been saying, you know, it's going to be five years And you know, maybe that was four years ago. So they were a little bit optimistic a little bit too optimistic but for all of the sort of Disappointments that some of the big companies trying Their hand at this have been Showing in the past couple of years maybe There's also a lot of companies that are holding steady and maybe it wasn't going to be five years but you know Tech people are terrible at estimating the rate of tech advancement advancement when a new technology arrives People think it's going to be like oh in three years. It will be Everyone will use this it actually takes a little bit longer, but it doesn't take 40 It's like you can double it that maybe you're right and it seems like we're on that track I don't think everyone's going to be in an autonomous car Soon, but you know these kinds of trucks are Couldn't change a lot about the way we we envision society. So we'll see Yeah, I I think you're right. I think both are right It will it'll be 40 years before everybody can take advantage of this and it's widespread Right because it just takes a long time to work out all the details and be able to work in all the different environments But the five years for you know having actual services out there. It seems like we're on track for that What do you want to hear us talk about on the show folks? One way to let us know is in our subreddit submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com All right patrick, we got all the new hardware out for gaming. What is how's it doing? What is it doing to us? How's it going in there? It is creating stress and anxiety because they're selling out all the time. You can't get one So we have the playstation 5 and the xbox series x and series s These are the latest consoles from those manufacturers the previous generation was from 2013. So it's been a little while They're a lot more powerful than the playstation 4 and xbox one were at the time they launched They're also significantly more expensive. These are Let's round it up to 500 dollars The xbox is a little bit different though. If you haven't heard the x is the really powerful one at 500 bucks but there's a less powerful one at 300 bucks the series s and So but all of them are are sold out. So if you don't have one yet, it's very unlikely you're gonna get one Yeah, I keep seeing all these stories come across my feeds if like best buy says they'll have a couple more in stock tomorrow And then of course by the time everybody jumps on that they've sold out of whatever they have It's a really successful launch. Um, it's kind of we don't yet know exactly what the reason is but it is they produced They they manufactured Apparently as many as they could which is more than they did in the past And even with covet they managed, but I think my explanation which might be wrong is that Gamers grew up and have a little bit more Available income and we have new gamers and so the population of gamers is just growing and so more people want consoles um So the on on paper the series x is a little bit more powerful than the playstation 5 We haven't seen that pan out Yet and there are some, you know, technical reasons might why it might not be that important But the playstation 5 also has some interesting hardware. So if you're You know, if you're not sure which one you want to get then that's probably not gonna help you because they both have their advantages The playstation 5 has a super fast ssd that Could lead to actually streaming the assets from the game directly from the ssd into The ram fast enough that you could actually move your character and it would stream the the assets as you're moving So that's like for people who understand this really exciting technically and the controller has some interesting innovative Features like the adaptive trigger, which is the triggers on the you know on the controller can resist your pressure and it can be said to simulate for example a bow string or A bowl you're breaking and it locks it and then when you keep pressing a little bit more you force a bit more It unlocks and so you feel like you've broken it stuff like that Technically they can do 4k 120 hertz ray tracing. They probably can do all at once Because that's for some games are very demanding and they both have backwards compatibility Although the ps5 has backwards compatibility with the ps4 and the xbox has Xbox one and all of the previous consoles as well So it I mean it sounds on paper like the xbox is the better console, but that's not what's happening That that it's it's more neck and neck or even sony. Maybe having a slight lead I mean defined better. It's kind of difficult to you know, it's right like a well the sex So, you know, but in practice not necessarily So computing power wise it seems like the the xbox does have a slight edge But things like the ssd on the playstation 5 which is a lot faster twice as fast as the xbox is one Is also a paradigm change for game development So it's really I would say at this point. It's difficult to say which one is The better one even if you want to you know, take into account the The the rope the raw the raw power that Even that is kind of not certain yet. Although. Yes, it seems like the series x might have might take it Now the the the real reason to buy a console though is always what games you can play, right? Absolutely, and you know the that is where the real battle is going to happen And they again, it's really difficult this year because or this generation because they both have really strong Assets the playstation has a lot of exclusive games, which will only appear on that console on that Series I'm sorry not series but on the console on the playstation 5 things like god of war horizon zero dawn and a bunch of others And microsoft has game pass which i'm sure most people know but if you don't it's essentially a subscription that will give you access to hundreds of games Day one including the ones from microsoft that has purchased like 20 studios over the past years So they're going to have a lot of games and they're all going to be available day one for that 10 bucks a month subscription of game pass and that's only on on Series x and to an extent on pc but for consoles. So it's it's really difficult to make a choice But if you want to buy a game for this Holiday season, I would recommend, you know, if your niece likes video games don't buy cyberpunk It's bugged and it's very much a mature game. So not that But there are a few games that are really fun. Hades Is a cool one on pc and switch immortals phoenix rising is a is a kind of a surprise a little bit more mature with Like swordplay and killing ghost of tsushima is a fun open world game set in medieval japan And if you want something a little bit more harrowing the last of us part two is an absolute masterpiece Cool. Thank you so much. Patrick. Good recommendations, man No, probably Well dust collected from the rayugu asteroid 300 million kilometers from earth was returned by the hayabusa Space probe and opened up this week the japan space exploration agency where jacksa was hoping for 100 milligrams of material They got a lot more than that jacksa's hero takasawada said that he was speechless when they opened the container and said I think that next I probably screamed. I really don't remember Next time the team will remove and weigh the samples to see exactly how much was obtained. Yeah We got we got asteroid dust for the first time like wrap your head around that we went To an asteroid. Yeah, chinese just brought or on the way to bring them back some more moon rocks We've had those before it's cool. They were getting some more, but we've never seen asteroids before and I I love this story about how they're like, okay We think we got enough to work with and they open it up and I can't wait to find out exactly how much But it sounds like they got way more than 100 milligrams. Yeah, it's going to be 120 and it's going to be like, oh, but it's so much more understand So much research to be done. No, it's great. This is great. I I love when when people who care about this sort of thing and make the effort to go ahead and collect Asteroid dust from really far from where we live are pleasantly surprised with what they get back Cool. All right, let's check out the mailbag Let's do it. We have good news for the good day internet folding team, which has broken into the top 200 Yes, good job donating those cycles everybody Keep it up. And if you haven't joined yet and you'd like to uh, we've got a link in our show notes Yeah, just go to stats dot folding at home Or actually just go into our discord and go into the folding channel. That's probably the best way Right. I know it's sort of long string But if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on the show, you got questions about anything we talk about on the show Anything coming up on the show all that good stuff. Send it to feedback at daily tech news show dot com Thank you in advance We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grand master levels today They include tim ashman brandon brooks and tim deputy Also, thanks to patrick beija. Boy, did we miss you We hope you've been well and what have you been up to because i know december is a pretty busy month for you Yeah, I mean i'm doing a lot of stuff all the time But you know what the easiest way not patrick dot com You'll find links to everything i do a lot of stuff in french some stuff in english including gaming stuff with the Podcast pixels but everything is at not patrick dot com. So go check that out Go do it folks. Uh, and also if you want to hear me and patrick together go check out work in sanity dot net We just finished our our latest season of tips on how to work from home Hey, we love patrons that uh support us so much that we're giving you stuff You can get a unique sticker a mug a t-shirt or a hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron Each one has a unique piece of art from len peralta Starting with one with the dtns seven-year anniversary logo Then there's one with that logo plus roger three months after that you get one with sarah Three months after that one with me get the details at patreon.com slash d t n s Everybody we are live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 utc put it on your calendar Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live and we'll be back doing it again tomorrow with scott johnson. Talk to them This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Simon club hopes you have enjoyed this program