 Coming up on DTNS, the CIA has been spying on Americans and two US senators would like us to know why if you see only one movie this summer, it's probably because you didn't sign up for the return of movie pass and Nate Langston helps us understand the UK's fascination with age variation. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 11th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. And joining us from Bloomberg, tech editor and host of text message, Nate Langston. Nate, welcome back. Hello. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. We were just talking about digitizing things on good day internet. That's the longer version of the show you can get at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of big things to our top patrons today, they include Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre, and Jeff Wilkes. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. AMD has already confirmed the Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs based on its brand new 5nm Zen 4 core architecture and the respective AM5 platform will be launching sometime in the second half of 2022. But Graymon 55 reports that launch may happen as early as Q3 of 2022 and perhaps even at Computex, which takes place in May, right around the corner. Graymon 55 also reports that AM5 motherboards are nearing production and early samples were expected to ship before the end of this month. The European Publishers Council has filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission alleging that the company quote achieved end to end control of the ad tech value chain. Not a real chain, but anyway, it does have Google with a market share of at least 90%. In June 2021, the European Commission launched an investigation into whether Google's ad business gives it an unfair advantage over rivals. Google announced it will begin shutting down Google Currents in 2023. Now, if you're saying, what was Currents? It doesn't rag a bell. It was the rebrand of Google Plus as an enterprise focused social network for paying G Suite subscribers. Remaining content and communities from Currents will be brought over to Google Chat Spaces Group chats with Google Promising Updates to spaces to better support larger communities and leadership communication that comes straight from Google. So, you know, that's what you should know before the shutdown. Yeah, Google Plus was kind of still around, but not anymore. Speaking of Google, Google also released the first developer preview of Android 13. This brings the Material U dynamic color feature to all app icons on pixel devices as well as a system-wide photo and video sharing tool for apps without having to give an app access to all your photos. A new Android 13 API supports settings, a per app language preference, different from the overall system language, and Google plans to release a second developer preview before a beta release in April. Android 13 codename, Tiramisu. Best Buy restocked NVIDIA RTX 3000 series GPUs, but don't go nuts yet. It has restricted those purchases to subscribers to its Total Tech perks program. Best Buy introduced Total Tech back in April as a beta program offering free shipping, unlimited geek squad tech support, extended warranties, and free installation for $199 per year. And the ability to actually possibly maybe be able to buy a GPU. Interesting. Alright, let's talk a little more about what's going on with the CIA thing I mentioned earlier. Let's do it. So the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a US panel that reviews classified intelligence programs. We've talked about it in the past. From August 2015 to December 2016, it reviewed a CIA surveillance program, and in March 2021, it released its classified reports on that surveillance called Deep Dive 2. US Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich read the reports, and in April sent a letter to the CIA requesting expedited declassification. Among other things, they wanted the public to see how the records of US citizens were being handled in the surveillance program. They say in the letter that they believe the program is operating outside the statutory framework. On Thursday, the letter from the Senators and a set of recommendations from the Oversight Board were declassified. Both were heavily redacted, so we don't know when the surveillance occurred, or if it's still ongoing, or whether it was conducted by the CIA itself or some other organization for the CIA, or what kind of data was collected. A lot of questions remain. But this particular surveillance falls under a Reagan-era executive order and is not subject to FISA court review. It's different than the metadata surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden. He might say, yeah, I mean, doesn't it work the same way? It actually doesn't. It doesn't also work the same way as financial transactions or surveillance on those that were previously reported. Yeah, so this is news surveillance. We don't know anything about it. And the Senator's letter basically asked the CIA, can you make that information public? The public has a right to know. Congress has a right to be able to debate this publicly about whether you did this within statutory limitations. Like you said, it's a Reagan-era executive order that gives the authorization for this. So it's something different than the Patriot Act stuff. Nate, as someone outside of the United States and living close to the EU, where they're having a lot of debates about how to properly safeguard European data when it's sent to the US for processing, privacy shields, stuff like that. We talked about it earlier this week. Do you look at this and think, ah, this is of concern? Or do you think like, yeah, they're always surveilling me anyway? It doesn't really matter whether they had some Americans in there or not. I used to think that, and then I read several books that said that it was not a good way to think that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. I think I had that sort of pummeled out of me reading quite a lot of books around the Snowden revelations and things. I mean, no, I don't get worried any more than I already was because this is another example of something that we know is happening. It doesn't make me feel any worse, but at the same time, it does make me very interested to know what's in it and what the redactions are. But I think that's kind of part of the course for something like this. You see a report, you see the redactions, you think, well, what's redacted? Can we see behind those black marks, please? But there's nothing about this that makes me more concerned than I was. I don't think it necessarily impacts me. It certainly could impact you guys more. Yeah, because you're getting surveilled no matter what. The smoking gun here seems to be like, but Americans' data is in here. And if it is, we need to know what it is. Nate's data they don't care about, apparently, because that's the ideas. The CIA is only supposed to surveil targets outside of the United States. Yeah, I get it. And again, I think it goes back to the point that it doesn't make me any more concerned than I already was, but I was already pretty concerned. I don't believe that if you've got nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear, partly because I think it's the same thing. If you're happy leaving your passwords written out, or you just take your bank statements and just discard them in the trash and don't care if anyone else sees them, then fair enough, maybe you really have nothing to hide and you have nothing to fear. But we all have things that we want to protect, and that's why I think it's fine to be concerned about privacy on issues that don't necessarily directly relate to you as a law-abiding citizen. But this doesn't change that for me, at least. Yeah, I look at this, and I think if you are looking for a reason to be outraged, then this is all you need. You got another thing to make you mad. If you are concerned about privacy and surveillance and proper custodianship of data and understand that there is a need for foreign surveillance from time to time and we just need to strike a balance, I don't know that there's much in here for you to do other than say, well, Senator Wyden and Senator Heinrich think that I should know more about this. At this point, I'll wait and see if they prevail and I can find out more about it because otherwise it's not telling me something I didn't already know, which is that the CIA surveils things and sometimes the data from people within the United States ends up in that database. There's no other details here for me to evaluate or form an opinion on, honestly. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has accepted Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies using the standards being developed as part of its privacy sandbox. The approval legally binds Google to transparent development of privacy sandbox protocols, publishing test results on cookie replacements and not removing third-party cookies until the Competition and Markets Authority determines that the replacement won't harm competition. That's something the advertisers wanted them to put in. Now, we don't know what Google is going to replace cookies with. It gave up on flocks and it's now experimenting with topics. If you want more on that, we discussed it on the January 25th episode of Daily Tech News Show. But the bottom line here is that whatever Google wants to replace cookies with, we'll need to get UK regulatory and third-party marketer approval. Google still plans to block cookies by default in Chrome by the end of next year, but they'll need to get sign off before they can legally do that, at least in the UK. Now, Nate, we could talk to you about how the UK is influencing global tracking standards here, or we could also talk about the return of age verification, which I know you have talked about on text message quite a bit. The UK once proposed age verification for certain adult sites as part of the Digital Economy Act of 2017. It then dropped that plan in 2019 only to bring them back in the forthcoming online safety bill. That bill will require any site publishing pornography to make sure users are 18 years or older before allowing them to access. According to the Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport, this could include adults using secure age verification technology to verify they possess a credit card and are over 18 or having a third-party service confirm their age against government data. This bill would give OFCOM the ability to find an entity up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover or order the site blocked in the UK. Executives might be held criminally liable. The government points to gambling sites and online alcohol sales as examples of sectors that have implemented age verification. Nate, do you have a preference which of these UK-related stories we talk about? I do, and I prefer the age verification one, but I will just very quickly mention that in terms of the UK's power to influence Google, it will be less than it was when we were part of the European Union and had the collective pressure and bargaining power of a 28-member block of over 400 million people. And that's why we had things like GDPR and that's why everyone in Europe has to accept every cookie on every website they ever visit ever. It's the most frustrating thing about living in Europe online at least at the moment. So I think our potential to power through this is less in the UK. But the age verification thing, this is something that keeps cropping up. Every year it seems we have a discussion, certainly on my podcast as you said, that it gets introduced and then it gets debated in Parliament and then it gets cut out or something about it gets changed. And the principle of what they want, and by they I mean conservative MPs, that's conservatives with both a capital C and a lower case C, they are saying, think of the children. We don't want children accidentally or deliberately accessing adult content, which is absolutely fair enough. I think most people would agree that that's a decent thing to assume. The problem is the heavy-handed approach that some MPs think they should propose and legislate for that leaves the policing powers. I mean, really, it leaves them in a very difficult position. For instance, they're very keen for this to apply to major sites. So these are your biggest, biggest pornography websites, but also sites that host a lot of adult content such as Reddit, such as Twitter. And it's like, where do you draw the line? And there's never been a good answer presented in Parliament or in any of the consultations that the members of Parliament have as to where do you draw that line? Because they are massive user bases, they are huge sites, they host it, and it's easy to accidentally stumble upon it. Therefore, do you block Reddit in the UK if it doesn't implement age verification? Because that's not going to go very well. The second way of doing it is, or rather, it's part of the first way, is who verifies the age. Like with tobacco sales and alcohol, for instance, it's easier because there is a physical product, whether that's an alcoholic drink or if it's gambling, then it's money, that has to come back to that person. Whereas adult content online, it's sort of a one-way street. You're just downloading something, you're not getting someone to deliver it to your door or buy it from a store. So they have to go to some sort of third party to handle the age verification against the credit card in which case who is it? Because it's not the same people who do the alcohol stuff. It has to be international, not for a local supermarket chain. And again, no good answer put forward for this. So these are the kind of questions that keep coming up by people who know better, and I'm including myself in this, but never seem to quite get through the heads of people in Parliament who just assume big tech companies have loads of money, they'll figure it out. And sometimes they do figure it out, but sometimes they just say, hell, this isn't worth our time, so bye-bye. We're out of here. And we've seen that usually by international sites. And still as a result of GDPR, there are some US-based publications, for instance, that you cannot access in Europe because they were like GDPR, and that's too expensive. It's not bothered. So it sounds to me like you're saying that age verification isn't the problem. You could do it. It's that the way they're legislating it leaves it done poorly or ill-defined. It's basically just, it's trying to screw in wires with giant, what are those big foam hands fingers that you have at sports games? Yeah, foam fingers. All right. It's like trying to do maintenance work with one of those other hands. Never screw in your wires with a foam finger. Come on. Don't do it, kids. Legislate against doing stupid things like that. That's how people get electrocuted. You could screw in wires just fine. Just don't do it with foam fingers. That's what you're saying. It's pointless. It makes perfect sense to me. This is the foam finger of legislation. Don't share sports with screwdrivers. Don't do maintenance with foam fingers. Very, very simple. It's a cross-continental issue. It's fine. But yes, it's heavy-handed and it just leaves it open to interpretation. And frankly, it leaves the smallest providers of any of these content open to just being exploited because essentially they're always going to fall below that threshold of legislative care. And it means that they're just going to be able to carry on as they were. And it'll only apply to the big guys. And that's just not good for anybody. So hopefully they'll just pull it out again before it goes any further. And the queen gets asked to sign it, which is how the law works here. The queen has to say yes. That'll ruin her jubilee. Well, I think something that the queen and we all enjoy are watching movies. Right? Everybody likes good movies. She does, actually. I know her personally, so I know that that's true. Movie Pass got on the map back in 2011. Wow. Yeah, it's been a while because it offered unlimited movies at theaters for a low monthly price. At the time, it seemed like a really great idea if you go to the movies a lot. But in doing that, Movie Pass also upset theater chains who drove it out of business by imitating it with similar pricing models. Movie Pass paved the way for what AMC and Regal and other theater chains current subscription plans now offer folks. And of course, over the last couple of years, the movie theater experience in general has really had to reinvent itself and get people able to come back if and when that was possible. So if you're thinking, yeah, Movie Pass, whatever happened? What's going on with Movie Pass? Back in the day was created by Tony B. Cast, Hamlet Watts, and Stacey Spikes. Back in June of 2016, the company made former Netflix and Red Box exec, Mitch Lowe, CEO. Then in August of 2017, Movie Pass was sold to an analytics company called Helios and Matheson. Helios and Matheson fired Spikes in 2018, one of the co-founders. The company closed its doors for good in September of 2019, and we all said, well, that was fun, wasn't it? In November of last year, it was sold back to co-founder Stacey Spikes. So was it done so? Not, not, not apparently. Because on Thursday, Spikes announced Movie Pass is returning this summer. And there are a few details involved with the return and how it's going to work. Movie Pass will use credits, so credits can be traded. You can use it to bring a friend to a show. If you have extra credits, roll over month to month, that sort of thing. Movies might cost different amounts of credits based on peak times. You know, when you see in the movie, is it 9 p.m. on a Friday, that kind of thing. Would we run more like a co-op with users able to hold partial ownership, which is kind of interesting if you're into the co-op model. Lifetimes of subscription tier is also offered. So, you know, if you're in, you have the tier as long as it's still working. Also powered by Web3 technology, meaning in some way, Movie Pass is now working on a blockchain of some kind. Certainly helps the press release show up in search results to say it's got Web3 technology. What is true is that the original engineering team is returning. So, you know, it sounds like the Movie Pass folks, a lot of people, you know, there was quite a bit of scattering over the years. And some core folks are coming back. And if you liked the experience at the beginning and appreciate what the experience might be going forward, that could be good news for you. Also, it's going to incorporate technology from Spike's previous company, PreShow. PreShow has been used to let gamers view ads to get in-game currency. So, it might be a little gamification going on here, you know. If you're a Movie Pass subscriber going forward, you know, you have to view ads to get Movie Pass credits. You don't have to. I mean, you can pay to not do that, but that would be an option. And loyal users will be contacted for a beta test and get a year of free use. So, if you were, if you're, you know, just kind of wondering if this was coming back. It certainly is. And that might be something that you can take advantage of. Movie Pass 2, this time, it's Web 3 somehow, maybe. This time, it's on the ledger. I was always bullish on Movie Pass' idea until they got crazy. Even then, I thought financially they could have possibly made it work. The problem was the theaters were never for it. Spike's was in a very uneasy relationship with them before he handed it over to Lowe. And when Lowe took it over, he just went rogue and was like, we're just going to slash the price and go ahead and force the theaters to come to the table because we'll just be sending so much business they won't be able to refuse us. And they went out of business. So what Spike's is doing is trying to cooperate with Movie Theaters again and say, and I think the theaters are in a more cooperative space, as you mentioned these days. So I think this is a better way and a way that Movie Pass might not have been able to do it had it not failed already and changed the industry and then gone through a pandemic. So the credits-based thing, forget the web three step, the credits-based thing makes sense to me, which is you get a certain amount of credits for movies per month. Some movies will be two credits. Some will be three. You decide how to spend them. You can earn more credits by watching ads maybe. I think, and if you don't use your credits, they roll over to the next month. That all makes perfect sense. And it's a great way to help the theaters understand exactly how much business you're sending their way. Yeah. What are your thoughts on this? Are you a big moviegoer? No, I'm really not. And I was going to say that I find the pandemic's impact on cinema in general to be absolutely fascinating because on the one hand, cinemas were so perfectly placed to be put out of business by the pandemic and the growth of streaming put together. And yet they are still in business and there are still interesting things happening in cinemas. And then when you look at what happened with, let's say, the recent Spider-Man and the sales, ticket sales for that in the cinemas and then you look at the recent Matrix and you look at Black Widow and the controversy that surrounded that because of the day-in-date release online, you think, wow, if you don't put something out to stream, people do seem to go to the cinema still and watch it. There's a huge draw for that. I don't know if we have an equivalent to MoviePass in Britain. I'm not best placed. Ian, my co-host on the show on text message would definitely have an opinion on something like this. But in general, I find the whole concept of movies in the pandemic to be one of the most interesting things. Yeah. It's not gone exactly as people expected. It's very interesting. Folks, we'd love to hear from you. So if you have some time, we have a survey out. It's real quick. It only takes you a few minutes. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you and what isn't. We've got some questions we'd like you to answer. Are you one of many people who are worried that 5G service is going to delay your next airplane flight? If so, this next interview might speak to you because Tom sat down with a working pilot to find out how the compromise between the FAA and 5G characters is working out in practice. If you've been following DTNS, you've heard us talk about the issues between the rollout of 5G phone service in the C-band and the US Federal Aviation Administration having some issues with how that rollout is going. We have an episode of Know a Little More digging into this, but the short version is cell phone companies in the US want to use C-band for 5G because it offers a nice balance of speed and coverage compared to other parts of the spectrum. And the problem is the FAA says the frequencies the US carriers are using might interfere with certain equipment, particularly radar altimeters that are used to detect where the ground is. A very important thing to know, especially in low visibility landings. Well, for the moment, there's an uneasy compromise happening. The carriers are leaving C-band 5G off around some, but not all airports and pilots have some new protocols to follow. Here to help us understand what's going on is airline captain and computer scientist Brian Hoffman. Brian, it was great talking to you. Know a little more. Welcome to DTNS. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, thanks for sharing your insights, your expertise, your experience with this. Since the new rules went into place, the alternate means of compliance. What have you experienced so far? Well, an AMOC, like I said, is an alternate means of compliance. And that is something that the FAA has to give the radar altimeter a blessing of to be able to allow my aircraft to use that radar altimeter in the environment that now has 5G C-band in the area. So what I've noticed is there's a lot of paperwork, a lot of things we've had to read. The FAA has put out guidance. Our company has to put out guidance. And then I have to know that that guidance is approved for the airport I'm going to go to. So I have to read all that. Then as I'm going to one of those airports, ATC or Air Traffic Control is going to ask me what visibility do I have to have to shoot that approach if there's low visibility in the area? My aircraft is certified to fly, so I'm all the way down to 3-3-3, which means I have to have 300 feet of visibility to be able to let the airplane auto land itself. They have to now ask me that question before I start down on the arrival. They have to ask everybody that too, so there's more radio traffic now as we're getting close. That's something we have to do to help mitigate before we ever start down. That's to make sure you've got equipment that can play nice. Is that right? Essentially, yes. It means basically whatever the weather is and whether I have, am I legal to shoot the approach? Because obviously I want to get there and I want to land. Given your experience in Europe where they've had the C-band, the mid-band accommodations and restrictions, what were you expecting to happen as a pilot once this new regime went into place? Well, in Europe, they do things differently. They don't use nearly as much power in their transmitters. Think of it like you're going into a bar and having a conversation. Well, if the band is a nice jazz guy playing, he's not going to be that loud. But if it's a rock band, you're going to get blown out. Well, here in the United States, they've given them rock band power. Yeah, it's jazz in France and rock in the US. That makes perfect sense. They also are aiming the antennas slightly down and the exclusionary zone is further away from the airport. In Europe, it's further away. And the funny thing is after we did the Know a Little More, my very next approach was a CAT 3 into Paris. And so basically the weather was down low and we had to let the airplane land itself using all the equipment and it worked great and there's no issues. I expect that model is probably going to carry over to the United States because it's known to work very well. Do you have any advice for passengers that are worried about this affecting their travel plans? There's been a lot of headlines talking about canceled flights and all of this. What do you think? Well, right now, greater than 70% of the radar altimeters in service in the United States are certified with an AMOC, Ultram-Insa compliance, to be allowed to fly in our airspace down to their scheduled minimums. So while there might be some small disruptions here and there, this is going to work out pretty well. We're going to give a little bit and we're going to get to a place where both are going to work together well. Helicopters, of course, are a different issue. They're going to have problems in the future. But the good news is there's a new radar altimeter spec that is in the works, it's in the pipeline. And when that shows up and the equipment is installed, this will be totally eliminated as an issue. Yeah. And I imagine fewer people take helicopters as often as people take regular airlines. So maybe they'll have less of an effect. Think about the helicopter that you might have. If you have a care flight issue, you need to get to a helicopter and it's bad weather because that's the time when you really need to get to the hospital. Something to that effect, you have to have those services. Whereas if you miss your connection, you don't get to your next thing on time. But probably not that level of... No, it's a good reminder that helicopters aren't just for rich people. They're also for life-saving. They're there for a lot of reasons. Well, Brian, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to help us understand this and for now over time keeping us up to date on it. Absolutely. It's been a lot of fun staying in the books on this. I'm just humbled and glad to be able to help the community out a little bit. Likewise, man. I'm humbled that you're willing to help us out here. If people need to find anything out about you, is there a place to go or something you want to tell them about? Not me particularly. I'm just a line pilot doing my service. But I will throw one little plug for your folding at home. A good day to interact, folding at home team. Perfect. Yeah, get on the team, people. Think about what's going on right now. It's getting better. But now that COVID is hopefully winding down, folding at home can be used for all kinds of good stuff. Excellent. And you can find out more about that in our Discord. We've got a whole channel devoted to it there. Thanks again, Brian. Really appreciate it. Absolutely, sir. Glad to be there. Yeah, thank you, Brian. That's good stuff. It's not every day that someone's like, I'm a pilot. And let me tell you what's actually going on. You might be reading and ingesting a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And yeah, that was awesome. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Daniel. Daniel says, I enjoyed your discussion of the Samsung product line. Thank you, Daniel. And how the new products fill the gap that the note left. The S22 Ultra is certainly an impressive phone with tons of features. And I think the true replacement for the note, though, is the Fold 3. The note's target market was the power user featuring multitasking and the largest possible screen at the time. The Fold does both of those better than any other phone. And anecdotally, I've seen the power users I know that would have gotten the note in the past years get the Fold 3. In fact, Darren Kitchen, a big note fan, Darren Kitchen from Hack 5, switched to the Fold and loves it. So there you go, Daniel. You're in good company. Good stuff. Thanks, Daniel. If anybody has suggestions on what we could talk about in the future, has anecdotes like Daniel does on anything we've talked about in the past, please do send those emails our way, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also would like to thank our brand new boss, and that brand new boss is Ted Lee. Ted just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Ted. Thank you, Ted. Man, when you become a new boss, especially if you're the only one that day, you get all the attention. Thank you, Ted. I mean, we wish there were five of you, but hey, if you're the only one, you know, you get all the glory. Thank you, Ted. Also, thanks to Nate Langston for being with us today. Nate, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, if anyone listening likes this voice, or they like this voice, my podcast text message uktechshow.com, we were talking about why Britain's going to put QR codes on all of its postage stamps right next to the Queen's face. We had a very interesting discussion about that, which I'd love people to check out at uktechshow.com. Excellent. Well, folks, we are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd love to have you join us live. If you can, we will be back Monday, so have a great weekend, everyone. Talk to you soon. 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 host Rich Stravolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Kuntz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods! Beatmaster W. Scottis 1, bio-cow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shid, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, 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 Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Dylan Harari, contributors for this week's shows included Rob Dunwood, Scott Johnson and Justin Robert Young, and our guest this week was Nate Langson and Captain Brian Hoffman, thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.