 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Logan Larson, Mike Aikens, Norm Fasikus and Marlon Thompson. On this episode of DTNS, we catch you up on the move it attacks with what you need to know, whether you're a company or a customer, plus a robot mop that can change its own water and Amazon wants a piece of ESPN. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 25th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Falafel, I'm Sarah Lane. And back in the house, your boy, Chris Ashley. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And this shows producer Roger Chang. And just to clarify, I am also Tom Merritt when I'm not in Los Angeles. And Len is drawing the top tech stories and he's in Cleveland. They're not the top Cleveland tech stories necessary. That's always very confusing. So yeah, yeah. So. All right, Chris Ashley. I'm Studio Falafel. Thank you. Thank you. Your studio, there's nothing wrong with your studio. That's a good studio. Right. That's right. This is going to be a late lunch. Chris Ashley, you a Falafel fan? I get periodically not my 100 percent go to. But I have one, you know, if it's there, if it's there, may partake. Yeah. All right. Nibble, Nibble. Yeah, just reach, reach right through that stream yard window into Sarah's studio and have a bite. Let's start off with the quick hits. AMD announced the four hundred forty nine dollar Rx seventy seven hundred XT and five hundred dollar seventy eight hundred XT, both initially coming with a free copy of Starfield. Both cards also average more than 60 frames per second at up to 1440 P resolution without upscaling. And AMD claims that the seventy eight hundred XT outperforms the six hundred dollar RTX forty seventy. So, you know, you're getting more for less. The designs are larger, taking up two point five slots with in a desktop and use up to two hundred sixty five watts of power. AMD also announced its latest upscaling tech uses FSR three, which will add frame generation, which uses machine learning to create frames for more sophisticated motion smoothing. Nvidia added this to DLSS three point. Oh, speaking of DLSS, there's some chatter out there that AMD's Frank Axor is not denying that there's something in the contract with Starfield that prevents it from supporting DLSS. He has somewhat carefully said, quote, if they want to do DLSS, they have AMD's full support and, quote, the new two AMD GPUs and FSR three will all launch together on September 6th. MSI confirmed that the recent spate of blue screens of death. You pluralize that like attorneys general, I guess, blue screens of death. Anyway, if you're getting a blue screen of death because you installed this week's Windows 11 preview update, it's probably because you have an MSI six hundred or seven hundred series motherboard. MSI wrote both MSI and Microsoft are aware of the unsupported processor error and have begun investigating the root cause. Now, MSI basically warns its users if you haven't installed this preview, which you don't need to don't until they get an update. If you have already, they've got instructions on how you can roll back the BIOS and then uninstall the update. However, Microsoft notes that some users may experience Windows automatically uninstalling the updates on its own after experiencing a blue screen of death, which is kind of a cool thing. And several users have confirmed that that indeed has happened to them. Cool. The US view on cryptocurrency a little clearer today, although it's not going to make everybody very happy. The US Treasury Department proposed new rules on Friday to make it harder to avoid income taxes if you're selling digital assets, but also to simplify those taxes. The proposed rules would have exchanges such as Coinbase deal with the IRS in a manner similar to a broker who handles stocks or mutual funds. So starting in 2026, exchanges would send 1099s to taxpayers and also the IRS reporting how much customers paid for assets versus how much they were sold for. Federal taxes would be assessed up to 23.8 percent. That's a lot. Scientific Kings College, London, tested eight popular pedestrian detection systems used by autonomous cars. They used more than 8000 images of pedestrians in the tests. So they were using images, not real life situations. They found that pedestrian detection accuracy was 20 percent higher for adults than it was for children. And it was also 7.5 percent more accurate for light-skinned pedestrians than dark-skinned pedestrians. The accuracy in both cases dropped under low contrast and low brightness tests. Paper has been published as a preprint. It has not been peer reviewed, but you can find it at archive.org with an X that archive. Alibaba launched two new artificial intelligence models, Q1, that's Q-W-E-N-V-L, and Q1-V-L-CHAT designed to make sense of images and also carry out more complex conversations. Q1-V-L can respond to open-ended queries based on images and then generate picture captions. Q1-V-L-CHAT handles more complex interaction, such as comparing multiple image inputs and then answering multiple rounds of questions. Alibaba's new models will be open source and invites researchers, academics, and companies worldwide to create their own AI apps without needing to train their own systems. All right, everybody wants a little PC, ESPN, apparently, these days. What's been going on, Sarah? Well, so Disney's Bob Iger, head of Disney, he's a talker. He says a lot of things. He raised a few eyebrows recently when he said that the company was looking for strategic partners for ESPN. Since that's often sort of code for we want to sell it or sell a part of this property. But it appears what he wants to do is keep ESPN, but sell off or at least contract out part of the distribution business, especially broadcasting cable, because neither of those are growing. He's also said Disney's been working on a streaming only version of the full ESPN experience. Now, if you're confused, you probably aren't alone. ESPN plus exists, it's a streaming service, but it only gives you broadcast that aren't on ESPN's cable channels, so this would be different. All right, all of that is background to the information reporting that Amazon is in talks with Disney to team up on the ESPN streaming service. And Amazon might even buy a 30 percent minority stake in ESPN. If you don't know, Disney actually only owns 80 percent of ESPN. Hurst owns the other 20 percent. So it wouldn't be unprecedented for a minority stake to be sold. And of course, if they were to team up in any way, ESPN streaming service would be offered through Prime Video once they get that full ESPN streaming service. Sources say the price on ESPN on its own would be expensive. Somewhere between twenty and thirty five dollars a month. Most of this is not surprising. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and T-Mobile are all rumored to be in talks about ESPN in some way or another. And Disney would like to distribute an ESPN streaming service as widely as possible. In fact, Wedbush Securities Analyst Dan Ives has convinced Disney's going to sell ESPN, not to Amazon, though, but to Apple. So it is now the hot commodity. What's going to happen with ESPN? Is Disney going to sell some of it, all of it, part of it, none of it? Chris, what are your ideas about ESPN's future? Well, I could see them selling all of it. But overall, I find this to be totally silly on the part of Amazon and the rest of these companies, for that matter. And the reason why is, you know, new media is really stepping up. I mean, I haven't watched ESPN in probably the better part of five years. I just don't I don't like anything about them anymore. And, you know, Pat, they fired about 10, 15 hosts just over the last two months. Then they bring in Pat McAfee for 80 million dollars. And how did Pat McAfee get popular by his new media show that they bought into? They could have got Shannon Sharp. They could have got the the two cats from the do the basketball one. They should have used this as an opportunity to build up or invest in in the new media style, because all of these shows and all these former athletes are super popular. And they could have bought a bunch of them together and made their own little ESPN, if they will. Why are they buying into this? I don't know. But I mean, I mean, Chris, you say you don't really like ESPN anymore. And I get your points at the same time. It's like there is only one sports center. I watch that thing all the time. It's it's this is a this is a very valuable product. Yeah, I say, yeah, I can definitely see that, you know, ESPN and Sports Center, the name of it, you know, definitely has some value to it. But if you're spending all this money, I would assume you'd be looking to look towards the future. And how long is ESPN and Sports Center going to be valuable? Verse, what is worth of them today? When there is a game you want to watch and it's on ESPN. Chris, what do you do? I don't watch it. Seriously, I'm being dead serious. I rarely I don't watch a lot of football anymore. In fact, I was just talking about on the show. That's more this week, how I had to repurchase who lives so my wife could watch NFL because I stopped watching as much. And it just I just don't really watch ESPN. I don't watch a lot of sports anymore. OK, OK. And but I do listen to I watch clips on YouTube. No doubt about it. I watch highlights. I love boxing highlights. I love I even love I still love football highlights. Watching the whole game, not as appealing, even though the commanders did reach out to me to get season tickets again. But I don't understand like to me, this is a perfect opportunity because ESPN is definitely losing viewers. This is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of where people are shifting their attention to. So my point was going to be, and I think it still is, that the valuable stuff on ESPN is the sports, the sports itself, the games. And I think that's what Iger is seeing is like we will have we have the games. We have the NBA, we have the NHL, we have Major League Baseball, we have Monday Night Football, like that's the valuable part. And how do we capitalize on that? Granted, Sarah, you're absolutely right. Sports Center is also incredibly valuable. It's it's a heritage brand and everything. But all of the rest of it is kind of is kind of interchangeable. And so the streaming service value is I could pay twenty dollars, thirty five dollars a month and get all those games. ESPN has the rights to a lot of the best sports on television. And I feel like that's what's important about it. Oh, the other hand, Chris, you're not alone in being a someone who just is like, oh, no, I watch sports by watching the highlights. Yeah, on YouTube later. And I think they need to take that into account. Let's all be honest. That's that's what we all want. Yeah, like that's kind of one moment that everybody else already saw. I want to see it. You know, the red, the red zone. The red zone channel from Direct TV was absolutely genius, especially at the height of fantasy sports. Just clicking over to the team that's about to score constantly. That kind of begun for me, the more enjoying like the highlight part of it, versus just having to sit back and watch an entire game. Yeah. And you can keep naming sports. I named the biggest ones, but there's other sports that people care about that ESPN has. I think they are going to make sure that they they protect those rights because those are what's valuable. Sure. I think if they're smart, they would get in on that highlight real stuff and start locking that down too and make that part of this offering as well. I miss bowling. Well, the next time you have a bowling party at your house, Chris, you might have a mess to clean up afterwards. Goobles in their house, right? Switchbot has introduced an autonomous vacuum slash mopper called the Switchbot S10. If you're saying, all right, well, what does it do? It's battery powered. Also has a water station connecting to your in-house plumbing. So maybe it would be next to a sink or a washer and dryer that you have in your house. So the robot can drain the dirty water and then refill with clean water autonomously. That's the idea anyway. When S10 docks with the water tank, it also charges the water stations batteries from its own. The charging dock is sold separately, but can also dry a mop as well. So it's not necessarily just everything that has to be wet, but that's sort of the selling point. It also empties dust into the charging dock. So Switchbot says you need to empty the docks dust bin around every 70 days. And you might say, oh, that's not that often. It's kind of often. So it's something that you definitely have to be thinking about as you're thinking about getting this product. Switchbot is also showing off a humidifier that can automatically refill a dehumidifier. If you live in a humid place that the S10 vacuum could also empty. So there's some options there. Now, you might say, OK, but how much I'm interested? All these products are going to be shown off at IFA in Berlin next week. The event runs from between September 1st through the 5th. We'll probably get price and availability at that point. The verge that took a spin with the Switchbot S10 said, this is probably going to be a upwards of $1,000 or more product. Makes sense. Kind of a big deal, yeah. You've got the battery dock, which it's not sold separately. It's just separate from the water dock. So they don't have to be next to each other. And then you have the bot itself, right? So you've got there's a lot. There's a lot of parts there. It's it's good and pricey. Well, and before the show, both Tom and Chris, you were saying like that just wouldn't work with my laundry room. They were either like they're down some stairs or it's just otherwise not accessible. I mean, I think a lot of your home layout will have a lot to do with whether or not this is a great product for you or just something that is expensive and won't work. 100 percent. First off, you know, I have been secretly wanting one of these type of devices for years. I just can't pull the trigger on it. It's so expensive and, you know, I rather hire a clean lady than, you know, drop that loot, but I want one. And then eventually I will get one. And I love the idea of this thing because it solves a problem. Right? If you have something that's automated, the less you have to interact with it, the better automation it is. But it's just not practical, especially in any house that I can think of, unless you live like in a rambler or something. But my my, you know, my washing machine and dryer are in my basement. It ain't climbing the stairs that come up to the middle floor, which is where I mainly want to use it and where my kitchen is. Also, I do want to move my washer and dryer, but I don't want to move it to the middle floor. I want to move it to the top floor where the bedrooms are. So we never have to lug laundry again, not, you know, not going to solve a problem for me there. The other thing I'm thinking of is like who whose house layout really is has an option to not only plug in the water spout to it, but then you figure drains go down, not up. So now you need a drain that's actually going downwards unless it has a pump to pump through the drain. And then you could probably get you hook it up. Kind of like you hook up a dishwasher. That's that's the way it looks in that kitchen thing. So you're you're plugging it into the drain the way a dishwasher would plug into the horizontally, I guess. Yeah. OK. But then it has to sit in front of your sink. They show a version of a sink where somebody doesn't have a cabinet under the sink. And I'm like, how many people how many people do that? And then they show a version with cabinets and the water recharger is sitting in front of the cabinet. And I'm like, that's a non-starter. I'm not going to happen all the time. Exactly. I'm with you, man. I I love this idea of like, oh, I don't have to ever refill a tank. It just automatically gets the water. But I don't need to almost rather go through the trouble of running piping to it where I want it to be rather than trying to jimmy it in by the dishwasher or the sink. Hundred percent. If I was to do something like that, I would definitely have to run some plumbing to it. And, you know, and it would not. And the spot it would have in my house, at least I would have to put it. It wouldn't be an easy run, you know, it's like down in the corner. Because you want the idea of these things are to be out of the way, right? When it's not in use and then it can sneak out, you know, at night and do its thing. And then, of course, it has to maneuver itself around my dog, as well as the groceries. I understand. I mean, as a person who I I still use my room, but that I reviewed for live with it years ago, love that thing. But it also it requires a lot of foresight, right? It's like, how long am I going to be gone? Put some chairs on top of the, you know, coffee table so that, you know, the room can do their thing. You know, you're introducing water into all of this. And then, like you said, Chris, it's like, well, my washer dryer in the basement, like what am I going to just, you know, tear apart my house? You know, for something like this, it all is a great idea in theory for the right layout, right? Yeah. Yeah. And if you if you're someone who doesn't have cabinets under your kitchen sink or keep anything else there, there's no trash can. There's no boxes. No, so it's. Yeah. Just nothing. I've never thought of putting anything there. This is going to work great for you then. Oh, great point. We can build a house around the vacuum. And I do think it's smart that the battery charger and the vacuum are separated. Like it goes to the water pump. It charges the water pump so you don't have to keep it charged. There's a lot that's elegant about this. We should we should give a credit for that. Sure. The fact that it dries the mop for you at the battery charger station. That's there's there's some good stuff in here. It's definitely we're all we're all getting stuck on like, OK, but how am I really going to hook this up with the water? My current layout won't support this. I hate it to be fair. You don't have to hook it up. You can just fill it up on your own. So we should mention that. You could do that. Yeah, then it's just like a bunch. There's a bunch of other things that do that. So then it's a lot of thing. A lot of things that people don't necessarily get about autonomous cleaning products is like you can do a lot of manual things. And this can still be something that is great for your overall, you know, cleanliness of the house. This is just maintenance cleaning. Not yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, folks, real quickly, I want to remind you that we have a show on our YouTube channel called Top Five, Tom's Top Five, because it's me telling you five things that Roger and I put together every week. This week, surprising projects that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did that weren't Apple. We all know they did Apple and they did things together at Apple. But they did things together that were not Apple. And of course, some things independently of each other that are significant as well. And we count down five of them. You can go catch that right now at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. TechCrunch has an article up today discussing the impact of the breach of the Movit file transfer software. We have not covered this a lot. We've mentioned it here and there. The numbers are big. More than a thousand companies affected at this point impacting more than 60 million user accounts. Bleeping Computer had an article Wednesday this week focusing on what happened, what data was accessed. So we thought we'd take this Friday to kind of give you the the thousand foot view of what is going on with Movit. Movit is a corporate file transfer tool from progress software. So they provide the tool that lets corporations manage moving files, which, you know, if you're an individual, you're like, why do I need a big tool for that? If you're an enterprise and you got lots of files, this is a good thing. However, it is managed by progress software, which, as you'll see, is part of the problem. On June 6th, a ransomware group claimed responsibility for a breach of the tool that had apparently been going on since May. The group said it discovered a vulnerability and was able to access IT environments and sensitive data at companies that used Movit. So they weren't doing the ransomware thing where they locked down and encrypt a system, they were doing the ransomware thing where they say, we stole your data and we'll publish it on the Internet if you don't pay us. The data appears to be personal info about employees and customers. It's unclear what exactly they have. Obviously, things like email addresses, maybe postal addresses, possibly social security numbers or other government ID numbers. It's hard to tell. The vulnerability itself is what's called a supply chain attack. This is what I was referring to earlier, that the problem is that it's managed by a company. So what happens in a supply chain attack is you breach the code in the software that's supplied to the clients and then you can exploit all the clients. You only have to breach once because it's getting supplied to everybody. For example, in this breach, zealous is a payroll provider. The attack on Movit allowed the attackers to access zealous, which allowed access to zealous's customers payroll info. This particular vulnerability was a zero day as well, meaning it was not previously known. And so it wasn't, oh, people should have patched. Nobody was aware of this until it started being exploited. And it appears the attackers knew about the vulnerability as far back as 2021, but did not exploit it in a noticeable way until this year. It was a sequel injection. If you know what that is, basically, it's a way to inject data into a database request that then causes unplanned behavior, which can be exploited for the unauthorized access. In this case, the attackers installed a backdoor in Movit that let them download data from Movit's clients. All right, so we know how it was done. We know what it was. We know it's had a wide impact. Here's my question for the panel. This is a large attack, but I see a lot of hair on fire headlines saying it's the worst attack ever. And I'm not sure how bad it is. I'm not saying it isn't bad, but we don't really know what data is out there. I can't find a clear idea of that. And it does not appear that the attackers have revealed any of the data. So, Chris, how do we assess this? Do you think that's why it's perceived as perhaps the worst one ever? Because everyone's going, we just don't know. So I think it's the the well, first of all, we always like to say every breach is the worst one ever because that's right. But but also it's a large 60 million user counts. That that's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the headlines are probably over overzealous because they have no idea what was actually taken. But that doesn't mean that the headline is incorrect. And so as a guy who professionally works with software, you know, this attacks like these have do definitely have reverberating effects. So more and more as we go through and we, you know, we try to sell software to companies and stuff like that, we're starting to get questioned more on what is our pen testing plans? What is the we have to actually share the results of those pen tests? A lot of times, what is the scheduling for these? And so you typically, when we started out these type of things, we would do it against certain pieces of software. But now you're going to really have to start testing it against all your software. So imagine now if your costs are going up because you need a team that's managing these things and then can present this type of information in white papers or whatever to custom to people. And then on top of that, it takes time to run these things. And then, you know, if you're holding up a release because something didn't pass or you have to come up with a workaround or or basically a time frame as to OK, this is not as important, but we have to let people know that this exists. So I think this is going to as these things continue to happen, you're definitely going to have to cost are going to go up for people. And then on top of that, you also start to look at it from this is from a professional standpoint that we're having these questions. But some of these companies like Dropbox or whatever were affected by this, too. So now we're talking about consumers and are these guys are now going to have to be expected to start working the chain and understanding. OK, who does this company use for to provide their services to me because, yeah, Dropbox does this, but are they using Azure for storage and are they doing all these things? And no, there's no way that that's going to happen. So I think this definitely has a massive effect. And it is and it's going to be a problem because now you start digging into the trust of these organizations. And, you know, does this then impact a lot of people's move or trust in cloud operated applications? So this is still pretty big. Yeah, no, that's a good that's a good explanation. That kind of clears it up for me to think like, OK, it's a red alert. We may not know how deep the red is, but it's a red alert. Like, even if it's just emails and and and and home and mailing address, the the scope of it is so big that it's going to be costly. And as you pointed out, Sarah, it could be worse. There could be other things in there that we're unaware of. I do wonder how much bluffing is going on since they they've passed several deadlines of if you don't pay us by now, we're going to publish it and have published it. So yeah, there could be a bit of that, right? But but still, even with the threat of the attack, right? The next thing that comes up is like, how are you guys protecting against this type of attack and what are you doing against it? So even if they're bluffing, it still makes people have to work a lot more diligently to prepare for the next attack. So in the case that they're not bluffing, you know what I mean? So it still has an impact no matter what. Well, Bleeping Computer had a really good article going into the like, you know, you need to move to zero trust. Here are the things you do if you are in a company situation. Go go check that out. We have a link to it or you can just go to BleepingComputer.com. Yeah, definitely more companies are doing that too. All right. Well, I think it is time to see what Len Peralta has been drawing for us today. On the show, Len, what's what's at the tip of your pen? Well, you know, one of the great things about working on DTNS is sometimes I get to put two stories together. It's sort of like the Reese's Reese's peanut butter cup of art. So my question is, what if the S10, I'm trying to remember the name, the switchbot S10 and mixed with the move it, what would happen? And I think you got your switchbot in my move it. You get this, right? This is the move it bot 10, the personal data quicker sucker upper. Oh, my God. It's it's kind of going around just grabbing pin numbers and passwords and bank info and private picks and all that stuff. This is as it is the most trusted bot and exploiting your clients vulnerabilities. Absolutely genius. Absolutely genius. Thank you. The move it. Supply chain bot sucker that you don't have to recharge. Yeah. So if you're into like if you like these mashups and everything else, and if you want to see if you want to get this for yourself, you can get it right now at my patreon, patreon.com. Ford slash Len, where you can if you're if you back me at the DTNS lover level, you get it right away, or you can go to the old fashioned way. Go to my online store, Len Peralta store.com, where there is not only you can find that piece, but all kinds of other DTNS pieces and other commissionable art as well. So check it out. It's right there for you at your fingertips. Well, and we're happy to have you on the show. I missed you the last couple of weeks. You missed you too. I am very happy to have Chris Ashley on the show as well, not only because there's an apron for barbecue and tech in his background that I would like to purchase for myself. But Chris, let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do because you're a busy guy. I am, but you can always catch me and the homies on SMR podcast. And today release season five of barbecue and tech episode one, where we did a smoke meatball experiment that is meatballs right off my smoker. They were delicious. And yeah, we have got some really cool interviews lined up for this season. And yeah, some really cool experiments and testing some equipment that we're going to be messing around with. So yeah, come check us out. Always a great listen. I was so happy to have that in my ears this morning. So I'm very excited, barbecue and tech is back. Go check it out, folks. Patrons of DTNS stick around. We have more show for you. Good day. Internet begins right now. And it's the premiere on Friday of GDI debates. We're going to talk, take on the great questions of the day and debate their merits like boneless wings. Are they just chicken nuggets? That is our first question. Stick around when we debate it next. Just a reminder that DTNS itself is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 20 hundred UTC. We do it Monday through Friday, y'all. We'd love to have you join us live. If you can, more information at daily tech news show dot com slash live. Have a wonderful weekend, everybody. We'll be back on Monday going on again. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host, producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-hosts, Rob Dunwood and Megan Mineroni, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coons, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language, host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Dettering. Our mods, B Master, W. Scottis One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and JD Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Our contributors this week were Justin Robert Young, Shannon Moore, Scott Johnson and Chris Ashley. And our guests this week were Huentui Dao and Charlotte Henry. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.