 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to every single one of you, including Daniel Dorado, Howard Yermish, John Atwood, and new patrons. Keep them coming. Remsomnia and David on this episode of DTNS. Roblox comes to the quest headset. This might be the start of a metaverse. Huawei will make 5G phones again. And Scott Johnson talks about the need to change the law to preserve video game history. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 12th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. Frying under 100 degree heat and the show's producer, Roger. You say that as if we live in different places. Other than the L.A. You're frying under. I am also frying under the heat that Roger is frying under. You're both usually so much cooler here there than here. But today we're all sharing in about a 100, 100. It's just the whole southwest part of the United States. And it's the fraternity of triple digits. Indeed. Oh, Stoic Squirrel says it's 93 in New York. So they're not far behind. All right, great. That. Yes, we have air conditioning, Nick, with a C. OK, we can still complain. It's fine. By the way, Elon Musk started an AI company. Finally, it's called X AI here are the rest of the quick hits. Microsoft discovered that starting on May 15th, threat actors had accessed outlook accounts belonging to around 25 organizations, government agencies and consumer accounts across the United States and Western Europe. The group obtained a Microsoft MSA consumer key. If you know, you know, otherwise just know they obtained a key and were able to use that to forge authentication tokens for other accounts. They were exploiting a token validation issue. It wasn't supposed to work that way. They shouldn't have been able to do it. And Microsoft has since mitigated that vulnerability, terminating the unauthorized access. But they had it at least from May 15th to June 16th. The threat actors are thought to be operating in China. Speaking of Microsoft, here's the latest on Microsoft versus the world, at least when it comes to acquiring Activision Blizzard, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, issued a report against the deal and was pursuing legal action. But Tuesday, both the CMA and Microsoft paused their legal action to resume discussion Wednesday. The CMA issued a statement saying their decision stands as it is unless the deal is restructured. This is likely a negotiating stance that says, we're, you know, against the deal, you might need to convince us otherwise. And we'll see if Microsoft can do it. Microsoft has a self-imposed July 18th deadline to finish the deal without incurring any penalties. Yeah, what a nice discussion about this on the morning screen today. If you want to check that out. Intel has some bad news for you, folks, because I know a lot of you are fans of the NUC, the next unit of computing. But the company says it's going to stop making the NUC. Now, the good news is it will encourage partners to keep making the versions of this small form factor PC. So we may still have NUCs. They just won't be made by Intel. The NUC was first used as the basis for a home theater PC, but really took off when it was established as a compact gaming platform. A lot of people are using it for that now. Intel will stop direct investment in the next unit of computing, but will continue to support existing NUCs that they have already shipped. Adobe today just today announced that its Firefly Web Services now available globally with support for text prompts in 100 languages, including Klingon, by the way, I found out today. Just today, I found out that also includes important languages, real languages like German, French, Japanese, 20 more, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Firefly, which launched in March with a web interface before being added to Photoshop. This is well before that has collectively generated one billion images, making these two launches the most successful beta releases in the history of Adobe. Well, a group of U.S. senators issued a report asking the Justice Department, FTC and Treasury Department, as well as the IRS, which will make sense in a second, to investigate and prosecute popular online tax filing companies for allegedly sharing millions of taxpayers' financial data with Meta and Google. Now, maybe it was financial data, maybe it wasn't. The report includes accusations first raised by the markup last November that tax prep companies were using Meta and Google tracking pixels. When you got a tracking pixel, you can collect all kinds of information like a user's full name, address, date of birth, etc. Without needing consent, the tax pixel loads and you can triangulate all that stuff. Tax Slayer, H&R Block and Tax Act all confirmed that they shared data through Meta's pixels, but then removed or disabled it after the markup revealed that it was there back in November. Coming after a man. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a look at the quick kits. All right, let's talk. Let's talk China. Starting in 2019, the U.S. restricted what technologies Huawei could use to make its phones and routers. It said you can't sell parts to Huawei without a license if you are in the U.S. You can't use U.S. technology to sell things to Huawei, even if you aren't in the U.S. Basically, U.S. companies can't sell or license most of their modern tech to Huawei and U.S. intellectual property can't be used in products sold to Huawei. And that's all prevented it from making most of its products. If you've seen 5G phones from Huawei, they're probably made with chips that they had in stock. They had stockpiled a lot of stuff before these restrictions went in place. In fact, that led to Huawei spinning out Honor. If you see Honor phones that used to be owned by Huawei, they just put out a new phone today, but Honor was spun out as a separate company in order to avoid these restrictions. Now, however, Reuters reports that industry sources say Huawei has designed its own 5G chips and is working with China's SMIC to produce them. So these designs don't come from U.S. companies and SMIC is not using any modern equipment that uses U.S. intellectual property, which means it's using older equipment to make these processors. SMIC has something called the N plus one process that can make chips on older equipment that are equivalent to seven nanometer chips. So it's not actually a seven nanometer process. They wouldn't be able to get a hold of that equipment, but they figured out a workaround to get the same performance out of a different, older process. SMIC has then made these chips based on Huawei's designs, and that will mean more expensive chips and lower yields because this isn't the optimum way to do it. So I think it's about a 50 percent yield. That means 50 percent of the chips that come out can't be used. We're talking yields in the millions, not tens or hundreds of millions. Maybe they'll get to 10 million and that makes them expensive. Even so, Huawei is going to have 5G phones and routers with these newly made chips in them, possibly by the end of this year, Scott. Everything you described sounds like the technology version of winging it, trying to make things work, despite all these restrictions. I think it's interesting that the entire point of these restrictions were to stop them from being able to do what they wanted to do with parts and products that come from here. And I understand the initial reasons, all that stuff. I can't get into the minutia on it because it's a lot more complicated than I'm able to comb through. However, the fact that they find, they find a way that whole life finds a way thing. Yeah. Is not that surprising to me. Of course it did. This either meant they go away or they do whatever it takes to make some sort of stand and to be able to have product and make it work. And it's gone so far as to do something that ends up sort of faking the seven nanometer process that everybody else can freely do and they can't, or at least up till now. So I don't know, I find that fascinating that they are this tenacious and that they're that they're this willing to sort of push through these restrictions anyway and keep going and not just fold. And I'm sure there's some there's governmental, cultural and other issues at play that I don't know or understand as to why they're being so tenacious. But I think a lot of people thought when these these restrictions were in place, they was sort of like the death nail and they were going to give up. They didn't do it. Yeah, I keep in mind, Intel does a similar thing. They don't necessarily have a four nanometer process, but they have ways to make chips that have the same performance and they came with a clever naming scheme so that sounds like maybe it's the four nanometer process, but it's not. It may be wrong about the four, but they definitely do that with lower level chips. So it's not unheard of. I think it's a great point that life finds a way. And I don't think the US thought that they would just kill Huawei. I think they wanted to slow them down and they have slowed them down. And this will last a while. But at some point you won't be able to do a workaround to get to three nanometer or two nanometer or whatever replaces. We've talked about photonic chips, possibly replacing this this race because at a certain point, you can't make it any smaller. And so you run into a wall there and will China even have access to that new new level. So this only buys them time for so long. On the other hand, to your point, if you've pushed very smart and very experienced people, which the folks who work at these companies in China are, they may come up with innovative solutions. In fact, they might leapfrog more as law because they're forced into figuring out how to do it in a way that other companies aren't. So it's it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on. Yep. Meta announced that open beta for Roblox on the Quest 2 and Quest Pro and eventually the Quest 3 when that comes out will launch in the coming weeks. If you're like, wait, I thought Roblox was already on VR. Yes, it's on the Oculus Rift, the Vive and the Valve index. And you can play Roblox on the Quest 2 if you connect it to your PC. But this new implementation can run on the Quest itself. So eventually it'll be available in the MetaQuest store. This is not a port. This is not, you know, running it from your PC and viewing it in your headset. However, that means Roblox has some VR content already and it's publishing some experiences that use default players scripts to a Roblox VR library, specifically. So when you get Roblox for VR, you'll have a bunch of things that work really well in VR immediately available to you. You'll also be able to play cross platform. So if you're in the Quest version of Roblox, you'll still be able to see players on Xbox, mobile and desktop. Scott, I've been saying for a long time that if it's not Fortnite or even Minecraft, it's probably Roblox that ends up becoming the metaverse. And here it is native on what is currently the most popular VR headset. I mean, as much as I've heard you say this over time, I've always in the back of my head go, well, it's this is fun to say, but I'm not so sure about this because older gamers, especially and gamers who play, quote unquote, core games, look at Roblox and go, that is the dumbest, weirdest, jankiest kids play thing I've ever seen. And I can't believe even they even exist. And then you find out the numbers it does. You find out the many how many users it has, how much money it brings in. And we're all flabbergasted about it. Even if we try to understand it more, we still don't quite understand what's going on. So I am no longer going to poo poo your idea that this could be ground zero for at least a massive push into the metaverse. And I've said this before, VR chat, another competing product. But nonetheless, a VR based chat room where virtual avatars get to hang out and do stuff is already more of a metaverse than anything meta tried to put out into the world, including Horizon Worlds and their other product. So it does track with my theory, which has always been the metaverse will not come from meta or Apple or anyone else. It will come from some weird corner that no one expected or didn't expect as much to come from. And it will grow from there. So your idea isn't at far fetched anymore. In fact, I'm starting to come around to it. I don't know what step acceptance is, but I'm there. And let's see what, let's see what happens. All right. Yeah, this isn't the moment that Roblox becomes the metaverse. I'm not trying to say that, but this is a step on the way that it would have to take and it is taking it. So I'm not declaring victory or anything, but I am, I am pointing out, hey, on Meta's own equipment, you can use Roblox now. It's not the only open world you can use on Meta's own equipment that isn't from Meta, but it is certainly one of the highest profile ones. It is one of the ones with high usage. It's one of the ones that creates an ecosystem that it doesn't have to manage, that just kind of happens. And it's able to make money off of it. And the fact that Meta is working with it to provide an open beta because Meta and Roblox are both trumpeting this on their various websites means that Meta understands that they they may need to be the place where you use the metaverse, not the operator of the metaverse, which to be clear, Zuckerberg has said before, it's just a lot of people didn't believe them. They're like, ah, open world, blah, he doesn't mean it. Well, maybe he does. Maybe he realizes, you know what? It's going to come from somewhere like Roblox and I should be ready to take advantage of that when it happens. Yeah. And for them to say, I think there was an assumption when when they first talked about Horizon Worlds and showed it up. A lot of people are like, that's not a place that's going to be the metaverse. I'm not sure they meant that to be the place. I mean, they'd be fine if it did and they'd grow it out accordingly. But I think they just needed a use case. I think they had to show something with a virtual half body of Mark Zuckerberg floating around doing stuff so that people could kind of start getting into the mindset of what's going on. I'm not a Meta apologist, but I really do think that's the idea. And whatever takes that form is where their headset wants to be ready for it or their hardware, their services, their store and whatever. The one thing that they don't really they haven't really talked about with this with this deal is up till now with with Roblox primarily being on PCs. There are it's also on consoles and phones and stuff. But on the PC side of it, there is a lot of questionable stuff going on in there. And by that, I mean, you know, I peas stuff taken directly from copyright material put right into the game by players. Things that they are taking a lot of heat for in general. This is a much more not sanitized, but controlled zone on that headset. And I think players should at least know that if they're going to want to go all in on getting a Quest three or something this year, or have a quest to at home and they want to play Roblox in there, just know this experience is not going to be quite what maybe you had in terms of the extensiveness of it on PC. So just know that going in, they're going to have more caps on legal issues and music use and graphical use and all this other stuff. This and this doesn't address any of parental issues, which parents have major issues with Roblox. Forget about all that for a minute. Just know that you might get a slightly watered down experience. And if you do, hey, just plug your quest into the PC and your back in business. You'll be fine. Roblox, I'm more like a roadblock. Yeah. Yeah. Well, folks, if you got a thought about something we talk about on the show like this, for instance, keep those emails coming. We've been getting great emails from folks. We don't always have time to read all of them on the show, but we do read all of them ourselves. So keep them coming feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. The Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network teamed up to do a study and find out just how many classic video games are available for you to legally buy, which would be the only way you can legally get a hold of these games and play them. They found out that 87% of classic video games, which basically means released before 2010, are critically endangered in the US. So a couple of numbers to pull out of this study only 4.5% of Commodore 64 games are available for you to purchase in any way in any way that's legal. 5.8% of Game Boy games are available. The vast majority of video game history is not legally available. It doesn't mean it's not entirely available, but it's not available above board. The problem is not the technology. There are loads of options. We're going to talk about a few of them in a minute. You can emulate, you can do FPGAs, etc. The problem is legal. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have a whole know a little more episode about it, makes it illegal to break copyright protection, even for something you legally obtained. So so if you buy a cartridge and you break copyright protection in order to put it on an emulator, you violated the law. I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way the DMCA works in almost all cases. Right. Like I've got I have games. That I've owned since they were brand new in the plastic and I still own them. And the same problem applies to me if I want to emulate it somewhere. It's a weird thing, but that's how it is. The Library of Congress granted an exception to the DMCA for video game preservation, but it's limited. That's important to note. Only preservation societies open to the public or outside researchers qualify for this. All right. So it's not just you and your basement. Access to video games can only be granted to one person at a time and only on the premises of qualifying of it being a qualifying institution. That exemption, by the way, expires next year, 2024. Or this is how the study puts it, quote, imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape and maintain your own vintage equipment, unquote. Yeah. And you had to be a library or a museum in order to do it. And you had to go to the library or museum to get the vintage equipment and play the VHS. Yeah. And the good news is, though, the Titanic is the movie Titanic is constantly being renewed because someone will say, hey, Blu-ray, hey, 4K Blu-ray, hey, digital download, like it keeps getting new formats so you can always get it above board. That doesn't happen with video games, not in the way that these do. It's just insane. Maybe Titanic isn't the best example because it's so easy to find. But think of an older movie that you've had a hard time locating a streaming copy of or even a Blu-ray of. And imagine if that if it was illegal for you to watch it any other way. There is some good news. There's a lot of people who care a lot about this. And if we can make it legal, there's lots of technological ways to preserve games. Open Source Project The Mister can emulate a console, computer or arcade board using field programmable gate arrays, FPGAs. But it isn't actually software emulation. And some advantages include lower latency. That's right. Those are really cool, but they're not everything. You also have companies like Analog. They're making not cheap hardware like the Duo. That thing is kind of expensive, compatible or compare or compatible with what it says is almost every NEC system game ever made. If specs also tout stuff like TurboGrafx 16, PC Engine, SuperGrafx, TurboGrafx CD, PC Engine, CD-ROM, Super Arcade CD-ROM, 1080p, Zero Lag, Bluetooth. That's the zero lag again coming up, cropping itself up. Yeah. And there's also, oh, I didn't bring it down. I meant to, I have a little brand new little portable Ambernic device that lets you play just about anything from Game Boy all the way up to PlayStation One on this tiny little screen. The world is kind of a wash with ways to do it. But none of them are necessarily entirely above board. Well, the hardware might be above board, but how you use it might be impossible legally. In other words, a lot of these say like, hey, you you have to have a legally obtained game to use our hardware. Enjoy. And then people go steal ROMs and break the law. Now, that may or may not in reality be a problem because most people don't get caught for copying a ROM. But it's also not the best way to go about 100 percent comprehensive preservation. Right. Roger, you're into all this stuff. You're a you're a huge fan of the retro game scene. Where do you what's your take on it? The thing is the software is readily available. And I mean, do I do mean readily available? I think what has to happen is that when software developers or even game developers create a title back in the back 10, 20 years ago, a handful of companies open sourced their games when they went when they went under or they just went into receivership so that their games and their legacy could continue to live on through the fan community. And I think it's one of those things that's I mean, I know the laws are an issue, but I think it might be it might be the developers themselves might take a little kind of prescient view site on the content they make and have a way that, hey, if this game ever falls out of popularity, there's a way for the community that is enjoying it to still enjoy it, you know, well past its its use by date. I mean, there are people who have literally was it was it not deep space? There was a 3D deep space shooter that after the French company that produced and published it went under, they three years later, they made it open source and you have a huge fan community that literally has recreated the servers. They update the game. They add mods to it. So they're, you know, there's additional content, but it's all very community based, and it's not necessarily strictly from we made the game. We retain ownership until, you know, the sun burns out. That's a nice thing to encourage, and I encourage it. And I don't disagree with anything you said, Roger, but it's not a solution. First of all, because Nintendo is never going to do that. So you need a law to address things where a large company still exists and has no motivation to go back and open source an old thing because they can't make any money off of it. The way that's what cop. That's what laws are for, is to to to remediate stuff like that. And it also doesn't help all these companies that have gone out of business and you just have a band in where, right? It's like, we don't even know who owns it anymore. That's a real place where the law could help and say, look, if you can't determine who owns it, guess what? It should not be against the law to break the copyright. Yeah, I kind of I totally agree with that. And the thing to mention here is that where we look at video games as a business proposition. And I think we're going to have to start not doing that, at least from a legal standpoint. We have to start looking at it as like film or any other form of art. Older stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. There's there's there's all those rules about time and everything. And we're going to want to work on that and figure out what the best thing is. But, you know, when somebody says we need to restore Nosferatu, the famous silent film, sure. Nobody bats an eye. We're like, yes, please restore it. It's so old. Right. Right. And it used to be a thing people paid for. And then nobody thinks about it now. But it's important to preserve. People still pay for it, but it's public domain. Exactly. And I would say people can benefit from that. If you loved Turrican on your C64, I don't see how that should be treated any different over time as a thing to restore, to keep alive, to make sure is there, even if it's just to study it and know it, not the mass market it. Nobody's going to mass market Turrican. You could you could solve this tomorrow by shortening the length of copyright. I'm not pretending in any way that that's possible for anyone that there's any motivation to do that. But if copyright were half its length, suddenly a bunch of games would be in public domain. And this would not be an issue for those. Yep, I agree. But because copyright in the U.S. is what, 90 years plus the life of the author. So I'm like, yeah. Recently, yeah. So even source could I was thinking, oh, maybe if they could just release this or no, can't do that. And I'll compile it at home. Just that's why I think I think we need to do both. I think we need to pressure developers to do what you're talking about, Roger. Like, hey, if you're not using this anymore, let the community have it. I think that's good. That's one tool in the box. And then we also need to be pressuring for exemptions that that allow for more than just like, OK, with the original equipment in a room and a museum, you can let people play. I'd like that's just that's not going to work real quickly. Redbox announced a new deal with Tiktok. Yeah, Redbox, the kiosk where you rent DVDs. Well, Blu-rays really is going to feature content popular from Tiktok. The U.S. has more than 3,000 Redbox kiosks still at various stations. And the new deal lets brands use Tiktok content to advertise the products or services on the kiosks themselves. Redbox is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul, which owns Crackle. Crackle's been operating the ads, the video ads that you've been seeing on Redbox if you use these. And so now you'll be able to see some Tiktok videos on there. Why not? I can't remember the last time I saw one of these kiosks. But we've got one in my grocery store. I see it all the time. I've never once used it, though. So yeah, Tom, you ought to go by there. Look, you always test things for the show. Yeah, I might as well, right? Go to Redbox and get like 50 first dates or something. I don't know. First dates is the first thing that came to your mind. I kind of love that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Regular contributor and friend of the show, Alison Sheridan, wrote in, said, funny, you should mention Lenovo in the context of trusting companies from China and national security during the Tiktok conversation. I talked about how people get very upset and worked up over Tiktok, but nobody talks about the fact that Lenovo is multi-headquartered, one in North Carolina and one in China, but it's, you know, a Chinese company. Alison says, I worked for a very large defense contractor and we went through a long and protracted process to choose a single provider for our computers at the time. It was HP versus Lenovo. We chose Lenovo almost immediately after the decision. But before the contract was signed, Lenovo became a Chinese company, so I'm guessing they were choosing ThinkPads and then IBM sold it to Lenovo. We switched to HP and never allowed Lenovo inside the company. So, yeah, it is a real concern to have US sensitive security things having Chinese made products in it. So it's not just Tiktok. Thank you, Alison. That's great. I love a good ThinkPad. That was a great. I love my ThinkPad. I still have it up there. That's good stuff. Here's another email. This comes in from Laurence who says, hi, Tom and the gang. Important question. Tom is your nickname cool with a K asking for a friend? No, no, it's not. I guess it could be, but it's not. It's a little Tommy Tinker town, everybody. I'm just kidding. I made up. He says, anyway. So I was thinking with all of this threat of deepfakes using AI, one potential use case for blockchain and NFTs is to authenticate any content you publish. I don't know if that's something or something like that exists yet. But if I can have an authenticity NFT associated with my name, I could use it with everything I publish, be it text, videos, audio, podcasts, whatever, when I'm a guest on the podcast, et cetera. That way, if someone wants to verify whether something they found online is really something I wrote or participated in, this token would provide some form of proof. Laurence from Sunny for 24 hours Montreal. I love this idea and I'll bet something like it does exist. But I've always felt like, hey, let's get to the nitty here. It's not about these monkeys. It's not about these apes and how bored they are. It's about did Tom write this thing? Did Scott make that thing? That's what that's worth. Adobe's provenance NFTs are an example of what Laurence talked about. It doesn't do everything he's talking about here, but it's the closest thing you'll probably find out there, which is using NFTs to be able to show a history of who made this and what changes were made to it. So with an image, you can be sure, like, ah, this was manipulated, but I can tell exactly who manipulated it in what way and all of that. So Adobe's been doing some good work on that. I love Laurence's idea of just kind of applying that beyond. I know there's some other projects out there that are similar to this as well. So if you're involved with one of them, send us an email. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. All right, thank you, Scott Johnson. Good to be with you, of course. We're talking about retro games. I feel like maybe you have an entire show divided into retro games. Well, I just made one up today so that we could make this smooth transition. Just kidding. We're 77 episodes into said show. It's called Play Retro, and it is that it's a show about retro gaming. Today we're doing a whole retrospective on all things Banjo-Kazooie and all the games it spawned. This would have been an N64 game. And before you go, wait, that's not that old. It's 25 years old this week, everybody. Wow. 25 years. So it's retro enough for us, and we're going to cover it. So check us out. Me and Brian Dunaway every week doing retro commentary about the games you used to love and might love again. That's over at frogpants.com. Play retro or wherever you get your podcasts. Patrons of DailyTech News Show, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Domino's Pizza, you may not realize this, has been leading the charge to resist the money-sucking partnerships of DoorDash and Uber Eats and all these delivery apps out there for years. It's been holding fast, saying, no, we deliver our own pizzas. We aren't going to play into your abusive, exploitative business models. Well, they just signed a deal with Uber Eats. So I don't know. Looks like the tide is turning. We're going to talk about it. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live back tomorrow, talking about the Rolls Royce of electric vehicles from Rolls Royce with Tim Stevens. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.