 Coming up on DTNS, everyone gets a refund for cyberpunk 2077, an AI copilot for fighter planes, and teleportation helps advance the quantum internet. This is The Daily Tech News Show for Friday, December 18th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. If you want to hear us talk about tires falling from the sky and the worst places to drive, you've got to get good day internet. That is our wider conversation today. You can become a member and hear that at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter announced a new feature called Spaces last month, offering users voice-based chat rooms. The company now says it is testing the feature. Twitter said that users will be able to create spaces and the test group will be very limited at first. These users can allow anyone else on Twitter to join. Spaces offer host control of who can speak, offers blocking and reporting, as well as the ability to send emoji reactions, share tweets within a space, and a very early test of live transcriptions. Currently, Spaces is only supported on mobile. Amazon began rolling group video and audio calling on Echo devices after originally announcing the feature in September. Calls now support up to seven participants. Users will be able to set up custom groups in the app for easier calling, and Amazon plans to let callers be made directly from the app as well. Group calls are available in parts of Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States of America. Bloomberg sources say that Microsoft is working on in-house arm-based processor designs for use in servers that run the company's cloud services. Microsoft is also supposedly investigating design in its own arm-based processors for use in a surface line of computers. Apple has clarified that when the new AirPods Max headphones are taken off but not put in their smart case, they enter a low power mode after five minutes of being left stationary for three days, then enter an ultra low power state that disables Bluetooth and the Find My location to preserve battery life. If the AirPods go into a smart case, low power mode is immediately activated, and ultra low power mode kicks in 18 hours later. Mac rumors notes in its testing that AirPods Max battery drains only slightly faster when you leave it outside the case. And people love that case, don't they? Yep, they do. Alibaba said in a statement that it is dismayed about a facial recognition algorithm developed within Alibaba Cloud that can identify a person's ethnicity and specifically whether or not a person is Uyghur, which is a minority group in China. Surveillance industry publication IPVM, rather, originally reported the feature. Alibaba says, quote, we have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering. The trial technology was not deployed by any customer. We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to target or identify specific ethnic groups. Good luck with that. All right, let's talk a little bit about Cyberpunk 2077. Ah, yes. So Sony announced that it has removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer refunds or offer customers for refunds for the game. Now we're talking about the digital copy here in this instance. Today, I believe, Microsoft announced that it will offer refunds too, but it has not pulled the listing, which Sony did pull the actual listing. So the U.S. retailer Best Buy will also set returns of the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game, even if you have opened the package. That's new. And if the retailer you bought the game won't give you a refund, Cyberpunk 2077 maker CD Projekt Red says to email help me refund at CDprojectred.com with valid proof of purchase. Now you have till December 21st to contact the company about getting your money back. Wow, this is bigger than I thought. So the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game suffer from poor performance, low frame rate, and text pop-ins or texture pop-ins. The game seems to run smoothly on PC and through games during the services like Stadia, etc. CD Projekt Red has issued small fixes and promised significant patches coming in January and another in February. So where do we start here? I mean, that's unprecedented. First of all, it's just unprecedented for Best Buy to proactively say, if you open something, we'll give you a refund. I mean, they are notorious at like, if there's a crack in that shrink wrap, you can't return it. So that's huge. So as Project Red just coming out and saying, we are going to back you if you need a refund. If you want a refund on this, you get it. I mean, I get that it's buggy and it does appear to be unplayably buggy for some users, but just offering a blanket refund like that, that's crazy. Yeah, and also Sony just making an unprecedented move of pulling the, you know, it off their store. That's huge. I mean, that was really big news when I dropped that they did that. And, you know, so people were waiting to see what Microsoft was going to do. And, you know, Microsoft didn't choose to do the nuclear option, but, you know, they are offering a refund. Yeah, the retailer surprised me too with that. Expect Amazon and Walmart and others probably to do the same thing at some point. But my only, I said this before the show, my only, not negative, but like wondering, you know, that will the average person really even know about this to do the refund already already have they kind of set in a hit? Okay, we might get 10% you know, other people 20% maybe, right? Or even if they know about it, will they go through the motions to do it or say like, well, it's going to get patched and it's not that bad. I guess I can keep playing it. Like, I don't know, because this only applies to the console versions. It does not apply to the PC version. Roger, you're playing the PC version and you, you say you really haven't noticed anything bad, right? I have had no problems with the game. It plays. I mean, I have some issues with the game mechanics, but overall, I mean, I have not seen any of the problems detailed here for game consoles. And it might be very well that the team focused heavily on the PC version to get that right and kind of did the consoles as, all right, we finished this. Let's see how we can massage this. Well, they optimized for the higher because it doesn't seem to be having the problems on the Series X and the PS5 as much as on the PS4 and the Xbox one. So it seems like they optimized for the high performance, right? Not for the older hardware. Exactly. And the game, at least on the PC specs are pretty high. I mean, like to for, you know, you can get away with 1080p with a bunch of stuff turned off, but for optimal settings, I mean, you need at least a 1660 GTX or 1660 GTX to run it well. And if you want to do 4K, I mean, you're going to have to spend out at least four, 500 bucks for a 2000 or 3000 series Nvidia or Radeon equivalent. Yeah, I was surprised to see the Stadia getting kind of a good rack pair. Like, you know, they're obviously running on PCs and full disclaimer, I have done brand deals with them, sponsored things with them. But it's not just me saying that. Like, people are like, oh, wow, this one is actually, you know, pretty stable. And yeah, it's not the console version. So, you know, plus one for Stadia, they need it. Yeah, yeah. And then negative several thousand million dollars for CDPR, right? Even if only 10% do it, it is going to cost them a pretty penny. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see if after January and February patches, if this turns around, like yeah, usually what happens is you have a rocky launch and then eventually everybody forgets that's actually happened to CD Projekt Red before where they had rocky launch and everybody forgets and talks about how great the game was because they love the game. This is this is a much bigger thing to get people to forget and come back to the game for. Yeah, I think a real quick, another conversation I think we'll have in the future is will people finally stop pre-ordering games? Oh, yeah. Well, this, I mean, they won't stop, obviously, but will this dent it? Will this reduce the number of people to do it? Yeah, yeah. Another story making some waves today, the US Commerce Department added 77 entities to its entity list, 60 from China, but also companies from Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Malta, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. Among the companies are SMIC, that's China's largest chip maker and drone maker, DJI. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that SMIC was added because of evidence that it supplies its chips to the Chinese military. SMIC is subject to an additional provision specifically denying technology required to develop 10 nanometer semiconductor processes or below. This is significant because the chip maker is struggling to get beyond the 14 nanometer process in order to provide chips to Huawei. DJI was added to the list because of alleged human rights abuses, including, quote, through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high technology surveillance. The province of Jin Zhang reportedly used DJI drones for surveillance of the native Uyghur population. US companies will need to obtain a license to sell US-made components to the companies that are now on this list. Yeah, so if you're unfamiliar with the whole Huawei situation, they have been added to the entity list and what that means is a company needs to get permission in order to sell to Huawei. Now in practice, some companies have been given limited permission. Google got some limited permission to provide Android. Qualcomm has got some limited permission to provide certain chips to Huawei, but by and large it has really hurt Huawei because the chips that you need to make network gear, not as much for the phones, but to make network gear are the ones that the US is cracking down on. So it'll be interesting to see what they do here. With SMIC, it feels like they're really just trying to stop Huawei from having a way around by saying, well, we're going to crack down on the supplier of chips that you were going to now that TSMC is not allowed to sell to you. With DJI, I don't know what the end game is here. I don't know what they would like to see DJI do, and that's going to have a huge impact because this is a very consumer-facing brand. And I don't know if it's just... You also have a lot of folks saying abusive genetic collection? So they're accusing them of helping to connect genetic information, probably using the drones to transport it, to test if people are Uyghur or not. And the whole crackdown on the Uyghur population, probably just mentioning it as one of the things that's gotten daily tech news show banned in China. But it is human rights violations, people in work camps, reeducation camps. And there was recently a lot of reporting about them being used forced to labor on cotton production in China. And China is a huge producer of cotton for the worldwide market. So it may be that they're really not so much trying to stop DJI from doing anything, as much as they are really trying to use a very popular brand as a lever to push China on the human rights abuses in Xinjiang. That's so terrible. A question. So does this stop the sales of DJI here in the States, like the drones that are popular? Do they get taken off the shelf? Good question. No. Any DJI stock that's out there you can still buy. What this does is the other direction. So a company that supplies DJI can no longer sell without permission. So DJI can keep selling drones as long as they've got them. But if they don't get the parts, they won't be able to make them anymore. And then that's when you'll see the quadcopters disappear from the shelves. Interesting. Yeah. So I guess it's a good opportunity for other non DJI quadcopter companies to step in. But yeah, I'll be curious if they provide more licenses, how they approach licensing DJI. Because with Huawei, what they wanted to do is stop people from using network infrastructure from Huawei because the US accuses Huawei of putting back doors in. There's no evidence that they do it, but that's what the US says. And so I get why they're trying to stop them from building and selling network infrastructure. With DJI, it really does seem to be about putting pressure on human rights. With SMIC, it's basically saying, well, you're going to supply Huawei with the gear that would then they will use to have the back doors. So that all makes sense too. All right, folks. Listen, we have lots of conversations going on in our Discord. We had one about the Mandalorian going on earlier today. You can join those conversations by becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com, patreon.com slash DTNS and connect it to Discord today. All week long, updates have been pouring in related to this solar winds attack. Microsoft reports it has found malicious binaries in its systems as a result of the attacks on the Orion network management platform from solar winds. But contrary to some headlines, Microsoft does not say it has seen evidence of unauthorized access to production services or customer data. Microsoft says it found no evidence that its Azure cloud services were used in the attacks either. They're saying we found the code in some solar winds implementations, but there is no evidence it was used for anything. Now, what may have led to the confusion around Microsoft is the US National Security Agency, the NSA, published a security advisory Thursday warning about two techniques used by these attackers to escalate access from the compromised local network, once they got in through solar winds, to cloud-based infrastructure centered around Azure, but applicable to other environments. Now, I'm going to explain what these are, but basically this means once they got in, they could steal credentials for Azure, not that there was a vulnerability in Azure. The first technique involved compromising single sign-on infrastructure and stealing credentials or keys to forge authentication tokens, and the second technique involved compromising a global admin account to assign credentials to cloud applications that would then give the applications access to cloud resources, particularly email. Both techniques have been around for years. They're not new, but they all rely on compromising local network or admin accounts, not finding holes in Azure. So it's a it's an attack that took advantage of Azure by being able to log into it, not by finding a security problem. NSA is recommending countermeasures to detect these kinds of intrusions, and we got more disclosures about who is affected, the US Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, three US states, the city of Austin, and Microsoft said 40 of its customers were targeted victims of the attack, 80% of those in the United States, but also customers in the UK, Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. In all of these attacks, there was only evidence that email communications were affected. They haven't found any evidence of anything else. However, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA said Thursday it had evidence of other vulnerabilities besides solar winds exploited by the attackers to gain access to other networks. The Wall Street Journal reports that the attack was only discovered at all because an employee at FireEye received an alert that someone had used their credential to log into VPN from an unrecognized device. That was the one mistake these attackers made. They tripped that alert. That got the folks at FireEye investigating. FireEye's team noted how well the attackers covered their tracks within FireEye and found no evidence of the attacks on other victims that were all aware of now. They didn't see that. It was what they called an exceptionally clean operation. Analysts had to scour 50,000 lines of solar winds code before they finally found a few dozen lines that didn't appear to have a reason to be there, which they then alerted solar winds, which led to finding the malicious implant, which led to them changing their updates. Now, despite the headlines indicating that a couple of Russian groups are thought to be behind these attacks, FireEye and Microsoft both believed the attack was carried out by a previously unidentified group. It could be Russian, it could be somebody else, but they don't think it's Cosy Bearer APT-29. They think it is a new, very sophisticated group. There is evidence that preparation for the solar winds attack began well before March, stretching back at least four years, because they're looking at things like the registration of the domain names that were used for external control once they got in to activate the malware. Yeah, I mean, when we hear about sophisticated attacks, whether it's state-based or otherwise on various networks, it's kind of like, okay, by the time many times we report about it, it's this bad thing happened. The companies have taken steps to patch the holes and everybody's better off because of it. There are more secure infrastructures in place because of this. I think a lot of people have, and especially like you mentioned, Tom, there have been quite a few stories in a short week of time about this, and it's escalated somewhat quickly. People saying, well, I mean, what data do they have, even if the vulnerabilities are no longer in place, these are not just like, oh, you got some emails and now we're going to spam you with- It wasn't where are we going for lunch, yeah. Yeah, malware stuff. It's the highest security organizations the US and around the world have, and how scary is that because that information has been obtained, whether or not it can't get obtained again? And the thing to remember is most of these agencies, if they've commented at all, say that confidential systems were not compromised because there were extra protections on those, but there's still sensitive information that goes around in the normal non-confidential email channels. So you can glean a lot. It's not like they got the nuclear codes. It's not like they got into energy production administration. None of that has happened. What they got was a lot of information, and it seems like that's what they were after. They were after information that they could use to gather intelligence. This was not about gaining control. This wasn't about hacking the nukes. This wasn't about hacking the power grid this time. This was about intelligence, and that's why they were so stealthy. They didn't want to get in and do anything. They just wanted to keep monitoring and see who was talking to whom. Yeah, I think hearing this earlier in the week, I haven't followed it closely, but you saw some tweets about the Department of Energy and you hear about the nuclear, like the everyday layman on Twitter panicking over that. There's some rightfully so. Understandably so. Yeah, I'm sorry. Understandably so for that. I like that we're at least having more transparency on this about what's going on. I just hope it can be simplified even more for regular people who are concerned about it, but don't know as much as we know because we're in the tech atmosphere here. So yeah, this is interesting. Yeah, I'm sure we're going to keep hearing about this for a while. Well, speaking of innovation, Hardy Har, scientists at Fermilab published a paper in the journal PRX Quantum demonstrating sustained long distance teleportation of qubits over 44 kilometers with more than 90% fidelity. Cubits are bits used by quantum computers. If you haven't heard of them, they are a little bit different. While an analog bit is a one or zero, think of things that way, a qubit can be a one, a zero, or it can be both. So what does teleportation mean then in this context? Quantum teleportation is the transfer of a quantum state from one location to another. In this case, two photons were entangled, so their state is the same no matter how far apart they are. This lets you transmit information from one quantum computer to the other. The team, which included researchers at Fermilab, also AT&T Caltech, Harvard University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Calgary successfully teleported qubits on two systems. One was the Caltech quantum network and the other was the Fermilab quantum network. So quantum networks don't work like the current network that you know and love. You won't be checking email, you're not going to be browsing the web using a quantum network. Instead, it will exist alongside the current network that you do use, the current internet, for specialized uses, though. So it's good for things like security, particularly quantum key distribution, also known as QKD. You can also link quantum devices that are physically separated so they can act as one big supercomputer, even though they're not in the same place, carrying out large-scale sensing experiments in fields like astronomy, materials discovery, and also life sciences. The U.S. Department of Energy announced a blueprint in July for a national quantum internet. This demonstration is part of that effort, laying the foundation for specifically, at least for now, Chicago area metropolitan quantum network. China has demonstrated a longer entanglement of 745 miles using satellites. That was one qubit, whereas the Fermilab experiment carried out one sustained teleportation. Yeah, so more multiple sustained teleportation. Yeah. This is the kind of thing that's not going to affect your life for another five to ten years at the earliest. But if you want to know what kind of internet stuff you are going to be experiencing ten years from now, keep an eye on this. A lot of people hear about quantum computers and they think, that's going to end security because quantum computers can crack current algorithms in a couple of minutes, which is true, but they also bring their own new security protections, and that's what the QKD that Sarah was talking about here is, is the ability to provide extra security. It's hard to wrap your head around, I know, but it's really fascinating that it's not just, it's not faster, although it is kind of faster on some things. It's different. It's capable of doing different things. Lamar, is your mind blown? Mine is. I was just about to say, I like turtles. That's all I have to say. Turtles all the way down. Yeah, I was just drooling on the side. It's like, I don't know what is going on with this. Well, here, let me put it in terms you can understand. The Chicago area metropolitan quantum network will usually be slowed down and backed up on the ease and hour expressway. Got it. Yep. Jokes. I understand now. Local Chicago freeway jokes are killer in explaining quantum teleportation. I thought I thought Sarah did a good job explaining this as much as you can if you understand quantum stuff. It's just, it's just so mind blowing because it doesn't work the same way, even though you're like, well, wait, if it's teleporting, why do you need the fiber? And it's like, well, I need a quantum physicist if I'm really going to understand that, but it needs it because you are sending the photon that was entangled. You entangle a photon, then you send the photon over there, then you can change the state and then it will change at the other end. So you're not violating the speed of light. You can't instantaneously send information, but it does allow you to do some things that you couldn't do otherwise because with the regular internet, you take a bit and you send it and then that's it. You can't change it once it's sent. Now you can change it after it's sent. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. For all of us who were like, well, is my browsing getting faster? No, that's not what this is about, but in areas like astronomy, for example, which was just one of the examples, it can be very freeing to be able to have this quantum capability, whereas before you were using the same kind of internet that we're all used to now. Yeah. And the security aspect of it. It's an arms race, of course, but it's going to make things more secure and you'll need that. All right. Finally, Air Force Assistant Secretary Dr. Will Roper told Popular Mechanics that an artificial intelligence algorithm served as a co-pilot for the first time on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane during a flight over California on December 15th. The algorithm is called Art Mew, R2 Mew. It's the Greek letter Mew at the end, ARTU Mew. And has previously been used to play games like chess. Now it's flying fighter planes. It was given control over radar, not the guns, and it wasn't flying the plane. It was just given control over radar during a simulated missile strike against Beale Air Force Base. So the fighter plane was trying to defend the air force base against simulated missiles. R2 Mew decided when to hunt missiles and when to focus on self-preservation of the plane. It did not fly the plane, but acted as mission commander telling the pilot where to fly. The co-pilot hints at a future of AI-assisted aircraft. That's one of the things that we're finding in a lot of these stories is AI doesn't replace people. It assists them. It gives them more information and helps them improve at what they do. I mean, could any story be more Star Wars than this? Yeah, I was losing. Oh my gosh. I know it's not like a cute little robot, you know, in the back of the plane or next to you, but it's the start. Darn close. It's also called R2 Mew for that reason, I'm pretty sure. They knew what they were doing. I mean, listen, the only thing that's not cool about this is like, well, you know, somebody hacks the AI and then they, you know, crash the plane or whatever. But in general, I think this is genius and it makes a lot of sense. And listen, when you're a fighter pilot, you can use all the help you can get in certain scenarios. So bring it on. Yeah. And the key to remember in the, what if it gets hacked and crashes the plane? It's not flying the plane. That is the, that's the firewall is a human is flying the plane. It's just telling you what you should do when you fly. And if it tells you to fly into the ground, the fighter pilot will probably not do that. Shut up, but you don't know what you're doing. I'm not flying into that now. No, no, no, it's a great idea. Do it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's do it. This one comes from doctor. Doctor says a topic that seems to come up often on the show, especially with the recent antitrust lawsuits is breaking up big technology companies like Google and Facebook and others. Often the bell breakup is mentioned. And I always wonder what would breaking up a tech company entail with the bell breaker? Well, some time ago it was done by geography. I can imagine WhatsApp and Instagram being split from Facebook. But if Facebook is still seen as too large a monopolistic itself, how could it be broken up further? Could we have a Facebook East and Facebook West or similar to Google or similar situation with Google? How do you think this should be done? If at all, I mean, I love this idea of of southwestern Facebook and Illinois, Illinois, Google. Yeah. But, but what to answer doctor's question. And it's a great question. What people forget is they don't see the ad tech part of this. And if you look at the cases being brought, you'll see the parts that could be broken up. So with Facebook, yeah, maybe Instagram and WhatsApp, but I'm not sure that solves anything because the accusation with Facebook is that they abuse their monopoly to drive up their own ad prices. And the same with Google, these Google antitrust lawsuits that we had this week were all about Google helping its own ad revenue. And so what you could do is you could just break the advertising business out of Facebook or out of Google and say you can't own the platform and the advertising. You can even break the advertising divisions up into smaller pieces and say, well, the ad tech is one thing and the ad buying is another thing. But, but you at the very limit could just say you can't own the platform and the advertising company at the same time. Just like NBC, I don't think I probably should hold off on this, but most television networks, let's put it that way, don't own the advertising placement agencies, right? They take advertising, but they work with agencies on this and the accusation with Google and Facebook is they own too much of the process. So you should just break them up into that. Well, we appreciate everybody who sends us feedback. Good question, doctor. If you have questions or comments or ideas for anything that you hear about on the show, or would like to hear about feedback at daily technewshow.com is a great place to send your thoughts. We also want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Ollie Sanjabi, Paul Thiessen and Kevin. And uh, Len Peralta has been busy illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us today, Len? Merry Christmas, Tom and everybody else. Oh, it's Santa Len. Yes, it's Santa Len. It's my last appearance of the year as next week is Christmas. So I wanted to do a couple fun things. Quantum physics and everything else blew my mind. So here is virtual Santa. This is Zoom Santa. This is what it's like seeing possibly in the future seeing what Santa is going to be like. Robo Santa is sort of helping out the real Santa with a Zoom call and virtual rating rooms and space scans and all that stuff. This print, this Christmasy print, is available in my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com and also at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len. Also, if you're a Patreon subscriber, there is something special for you at Patreon. I drew this this morning. A little Boba Fett image. Some people were saying, oh, can I get this? This is available if you're a Patreon subscriber. Absolutely for free for download today. So check it out. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to everybody. And we'll see you in 2021. I will at least. So thank you. Yeah, it's great. As usual. Also, thanks to Lamar Wilson. Lamar, we're getting to the end of the year, but you never stop working. Where can people find your way? I work everywhere. I am on TikTok. I know, and I'm his size too. I'm on YouTube. If you want to find all of my stuff, no matter where you are, go to LamarWilson.com. Lamar with two Rs. And it'll link you to all my different places. And I'm doing stuff almost every day. It's really cool. Man, holiday spirit is pervading all of us. So we're going to give you some Patreon loyalty rewards. And you know what? In the past, we said if you stay a patron for three months, we'll give you this thing. And then that's it until next year. Well, forget that. We're going to be more generous this year. Now you can get a unique sticker, a mug, a t-shirt or a hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron. Each one has unique art from Len, featuring the new DTNS seven-year anniversary logo. And then three months after that, you'll get one with the logo and Roger. And then three months after that one with Sarah. And then after that one with me, get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hey, folks, we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and join us if you can. We're back on Monday with Ellis and Sheridan. See you then.