 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Kevin, Paul Thieson, Ally Sonjabi, and two new patrons, Drew and Brent. On this episode of DTNAS, a firefly is open to all, Adobe takes it out of beta, plus MGM resorts, have it a pretty bad week, and Game Engine Unity managed to upset pretty much everyone over the last 24 hours. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 13th, 2023, from Studio Secret Bunker. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dundlewood. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. We've got some angry gamers, game developers, we've got some zero-day exploits, we've got a little of everything for you in the show, because it's not Apple Announcement Day. So let's go ahead and start with the quick hits. Okay, tiny bit of Apple Announcement News. At its Wanderlust event yesterday, along with new phones and a new Apple Watch, Apple updated its AirPods Pro with a USB-C charging case. That was something that some people were hoping it would do. However, the case cannot be bought as a standalone purchase. We're going to have to shell out $249 for that and new AirPods themselves. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman pointed out on ex-formerly Twitter that the USB-C AirPods are the only ones that supposedly are compatible with the upcoming Vision Pro headset, but he says technically that shouldn't be the case. Previous reports claim that China was banning the use of iPhones in various state-backed companies and government agencies due to security problems. The country's foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Nying has since responded saying China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brand phones and that the government attaches great importance to security and that all companies need to abide by its laws and regulations. So yeah. Mozilla released emergency security updates Wednesday to fix a critical zero-day vulnerability known as CVE 2023-4863 and exploited in the wild, which affected Mozilla's Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird email client plus Brave and Edge browsers that are based on Chromium. The flaw is caused by a heap buffer overflow in the WebP code library or lib WebP, which can cause crashes, but also allow arbitrary code execution. Users are advised to install updated versions of all the things to stay safe against potential attacks. Unrelated to Apple's iPhone event on Tuesday, France's agency nationality frequencies or ANFR said that Apple must halt iPhone 12 sales in France after tests showed that the phone's specific absorption rate or SAR, which measures radio frequency energy absorbed by the body from a piece of equipment, was higher than the legal limit. In response, Apple said Wednesday that its iPhone 12 model, which launched in 2020, was certified by multiple international bodies as compliant with global radiation standards. Apple also claims that it gave the agency several Apple and third-party lab results proving the iPhone's compliance and that it will contest the findings. Microsoft is headed to the U.S. Army, well, one step closer anyway. An Army spokesperson says that Microsoft's 20 prototype IVAS, IVAS 1.2 goggles, which were delivered in late July and based on Microsoft's HoloLens mixed reality goggles, passed their first round of intensive testing by soldiers. Microsoft has been granted the go-ahead for another batch that will be put to the test for some time in combat evaluation in 2025. The Army gave Microsoft a new contract to September 5th for additional systems and to assess Microsoft's capability to produce larger quantities. The Army projects spending up to $21.9 billion for as many as 121,000 of these devices, spares and support services, if all options are exercised. And those are the quick hits. All right, Rob, let's talk about AI in Photoshop. So Adobe launched its Firefly generative AI models in the beta several months ago and now announced that Firefly is open to all of its creative cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience cloud apps. Firefly includes features like generative fill and generative expand in Photoshop. Adobe is also launching Firefly as a standalone web app. Company says that going forward, it will use what it calls generative credits to measure how often users interact with these models. Yeah, so the way that generative credits work, or at least how Adobe was hoping that they will work, is every time you as a user click generate to create a Firefly image, then you use one credit. Your image might just be one credit or many credits, depending on the kind of art. I mean, you might go back and tweak it 600 times if you want to. The Firefly web app won't automatically start generating images before you've said, okay, I'm done with all the tweaks that I wanted to make, which is the point of the pricing structure to not get overcharged. Scott, I know you're not a super big fan of this model, though. No, I'm not. In fact, of the two models that are typical with AI these days, whether it's image or otherwise is usually subscription or this sort of piecemeal credit thing. It's smacks of microtransactions and just reminds me of all the stuff I hate on mobile, and even though this isn't a mobile thing, I think it's kind of a mistake, primarily because they're not very clear about this, but it seems like if you subscribe to the service, meaning Creative Cloud, which is not a cheap monthly expense, that you're still going to have to deal with this credit system. It isn't just no bards, all hands off for you if you subscribe. I think this is a mistake for them, and here's the reason that I think so. It's a decent system, by the way. Played around with the beta for a bunch, and I like it. As far as image generation, it's one of the better ones in my opinion, and it's also very workflow-y and has some ideas that others haven't really considered in terms of narrowing down what you want. So it's actually usable in your workflow and the projects you're working on and so on. So they have an advantage there, but where I think they're making a mistake is applying any sort of, let's put a few more walls up for this because inevitably, what's going to happen is something else is going to pop online that will do this as well or better than they're doing it, and it will be more free or less hindering to use it. And the example I would give is a commercial product, not an open source product, but when Canva happened, Canva took Adobe by massive surprise. They didn't expect some third party to come along and create a way for people to use their software in a way that was basically the way most people use Photoshop. Not everyone, but a lot of people just need quick banners, quick ads, quick flyers, whatever they're doing, edit a few photos and get out. And Canva ate their lunch. So what did they do? They very quickly made an alternative to put out for everybody called, they changed the name, but now it's Adobe, not Express, whatever it is. I forget the name of it. But they have a competing product now with Canva. And that to me just says they were too busy, worried about how to hide everything behind this paywall instead of letting some of what makes Adobe great available to people in other ways. Now that can be part of a subscription, but this feels like double dipping to me. And I don't like it. I think the credits thing is like saying, we're going to start, you know, back in the 90s, we're going to charge for text and for pages. Every time someone pages you, that costs this. No, it doesn't. It doesn't cost anybody anything. It's a way to tack stuff on top of already paying customers. That's how this feels to me. And I'm annoyed by it because it stifles creativity instead of supporting it. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Scott, on this because I actually use this product and I'm paying a subscription for it. And as you said, it is not an inexpensive subscription. So now if I feel like I would be nickel and dimed every time I use this, as compared to just give me an additional $15 a month or $30 a month or whatever they just determined the price will be to get unlimited use. I probably would just pay that. But now if I feel like I'm getting nickel and dimed, as soon as something else pops up, well, I was, you know, it doesn't cost me anything to go look at them because I wasn't paying monthly for it. I was paying every single time I used it. So I would be more prone to even go look at other things simply because they're nickel and diming me as compared to if I had a subscription is like, I know unless that other product is so great that I need to go see it. I probably not going to even go check it out because this is doing, you know, the job that I need to do and it's just fine. Right, right. They'll do what the market will bear. And I hope we won't bear this because we already do this enough. And for people out there wondering what kind of a real world example of how this feels, I know there are plenty of gamers who listen to the show. Imagine, and this happens, imagine buying a premium video game for 60 bucks or more. And then turning it on and turning right around and finding out, well, if I want to do this part of it, I have to pay some extra money, whether it's a one time deal or a monthly thing or all the time or whatever it may be. It's infuriating because they're just seeing how much more they can get out of you. And I'm not saying these aren't services worth your money. They are. And I want to pay money to use good services no matter who's making them. But I think them doing this sets them up for somebody else sneaking in under the wire and doing it as good or better for way cheaper or maybe even free. And everyone will go there and they'll have another canva problem on their hands and they'll be playing catch up. So I just worry they're not learning their lessons. And they're a big company and they got a lot of plans and they have very smart people there. It's an amazing organization over there at Adobe. But I think this is a little bit of a misstep. Yeah, I pay for a couple creative cloud services at Photoshop being one of them. And I know it's not a direct comparison. But it's like, imagine if you were doctoring up some image in Photoshop. And every time you did something, it was a credit that you had to respond to later. The company knew, ah, you've edited this photo 17 times, not just the once. I mean, that's completely insane. Nobody would agree to that. I feel like AI can kind of slip through right now just because it's so new. But yeah, with all of the alternatives, I can't see a model like this being super successful. Unless someone is just Adobe faithful and that's the tool that they're going to use or the set of tools. There's still a big question about how, well, not to go too much deeper into it, but it just seems like there's nobody quite knows you said it well. It's still early. Nobody quite knows what the role of AI is going to be in their creative workflows. So I guess they'll do this while while we're all figuring that out. But there will become they'll come a time where people are just like, yeah, why am I paying for this? Why am I using this? There are many alternatives and Adobe, while they like to think they are the end all be all in creative suites, I hate to break it to them. They're not. Well, let me see if I can make a segue between Adobe, Nicklin, diving you into gaming, you know, not the gaming of video games, but the gaming of actual betting and placing bets, because there's an ongoing cyber incident that has significantly disrupted MGM resorts properties across the United States, affecting MGM's corporate email, restaurant reservation and hotel booking systems, digital room keys, all 31 websites, among other systems. The incidents which started Sunday and was first reported on Monday has now moved into its third day. MGM is stating that the disruption represents a material risk to the company and Wednesday that's today filed an AK report with the SEC. MGM stock price has declined more than 6% since Monday. Now, the extent of the breach not yet totally clear, but current guests took to social media to document how the disruption has impacted ETMs, slot machines, the ability to charge items to their rooms, hours long waits at lines, in lines, customer service lines, people love to do that. MGM is communicating with the press through non-corporate commercially available email addresses, but other than a brief update on Tuesday, confirming that the company had brought its gaming floors back online, MGM has provided not a lot of other information. Now, the Alph V Blackcat ransom gang is claiming responsibility for the cyber attack, stating that all it did to compromise MGM was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee and then call the help desk. The FBI is monitoring the ongoing situation, so this is a big one. They're in day three, systems are still down. And the fact that MGM, they got hacked, I believe it was 2020, and lost 10 million users info back then. So for something like this to come back, and I was looking at videos and stuff like that on TikTok and on Twitter, yes, or I should say X yesterday, the lines are ridiculous. We're talking about hundreds, if not thousands of people standing in line at the Bellagio last night trying to get help and get to the room and figure out what's going on. This is a big mess for them. Yeah, it's a huge mess. I've got friends on the ground there that we talk to all the time, because we do events in Vegas and a couple of them said, I've never seen anything quite like this, nothing quite this bad. And I think it all comes down to when you are as large as the MGM properties group and you own, I think they're the prominent owner on the strip now. They own more properties than anyone else. There are others, but they have the big ones and some of the older ones. And there's some you don't even know about. They own the Luxor and most people don't even know they own the Luxor. I didn't know that. Yeah, they just own half the strip. And while MGM is a growing property, you would think it would be a priority when you're trying to coordinate all of that information, all of that data. And if it's one unified system or one connected system, you would want it to be the most secure thing possible. And you've got the money to ensure that. I cannot understand how they did this or how they let this be that easy. If all it took was calling the front desk and basically pretending to be an employee, massive breach. That's ridiculous. Yeah, I know the whole LinkedIn employee, you have to assume that they're like, I am so-and-so and I need you to do this thing for me help desk. And just got the right person at the right time. I was thinking about, I don't know how this gets solved. And I don't exactly know what happened. But I was thinking about when you were a company of this size. And MGM is a particular example of a huge, huge company that is interfacing with customers physically. What is the plan B? Now, in a perfect world, this never happens, but it does happen. We talk about it all the time on the show. And do you have that? Like, are you the size of an MGM, which has experience already in this realm? Do you say, all right, here, you know, plan B, we've got to get these people into their room. People are trying to order room service. Slot machines aren't working. Like, how would you kind of flip the switch back on in this case? Is it even possible when you're a company of this size? Well, size makes it worse, right? Like just the sheer magnitude of this. You're talking about every coast of this country has MGM properties functioning in them, barely now for a couple of days. It can't go on much longer than this. So if I had to guess, this is what I would do, if I was in the executive group running all of this, I would hire the absolute best security experts there are. And I would have them on this already, like yesterday or before. And their directive would be fix this regardless of what it takes and regardless of what it costs. And we're going to do whatever it takes to never have this happen again. I don't know if they'll do that. But it does, boy, it makes me hesitant to go to an MGM property. I mean, I realize that this is one of the fears that the general public won't like it. But I don't want my names lost in a giant breach. I don't want this sort of inconvenience. Vegas is already a madhouse when you go there. It's hard enough to just check into a hotel when things are working. Exactly. I've got a friend, a co-host and a friend going there on Tuesday. And I'm not 100% sure they'll have this cleared out by then. I think they may have even changed hotels just to ensure things are going to be okay. But it's just too much. And I don't think they did enough. And they're going to have to, boy, it's going to be a hard pill to swallow because you also have to operate. You can't just shut everything down and say, sorry, we're closed till we work this out. They can't. It will destroy them to do that. And so I mean, I guess hats off to everybody on the ground trying to get this done. But what a nightmare. Well, you know who isn't a nightmare? In fact, the exact opposite of anyone who's a nightmare are our patrons. Thanks to everybody who became new patrons and increased their pledges collectively because of your support. We can now bring Molly Wood on the show one Friday every other month. You might remember, we were hoping to bring Molly Wood on every month on a Friday. And we're still trying to do that. We are committed. If you haven't already, consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com slash D T and S and get Molly Wood on the show once and for all. Game Engine Unity announced that it will follow other games such as Unreal Engine and change in charging a runtime fee starting January 1st, 2024. And after some intense backlash, Unity issued some clarifications around certain aspects of the deal, including that it plans to pass on the cost of installation fees to Microsoft and other subscription providers for services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Yeah, that had me scratch in my head this morning. And so if you were as well, you aren't alone. Unity has been a little strange about communication on this one, but it did say it will waive all installation fees for developers who adopt its ad platform for mobile, which Windows Central notes could maybe be in breach of EU contractual law. Eurogamer also notes that Unity's CEO, John Ricotello and other company executives sold enough stock in the past month to maybe make some people jump to certain conclusions about Unity wondering. Yeah. Anyway, you get what I'm going for here. So Scott, what exactly happened? What did Unity do that had everyone so up in arms? Well, we can go back in a little bit of history and see some other missteps that they have made. We won't talk about those today, but let's just say that this didn't them no favors. They didn't start on a throne where everyone loved them, and then today, suddenly we're all mad. They had kind of been having problems for a while. Ricotello is not very popular in the gaming community, particularly the dev community, which is really who this is impacting. It could, I guess, trickle down to players eventually if there's bigger issues, but they are a big name in indie, dev, and publishing, and they make an engine that is very versatile and prior to recent times inexpensive to get into and to manage and use and all of that. Ricotello kind of came in all guns blazing about new ways of bringing revenue in, and I think this is a very... Yeah, he came from EA, right? He did, yeah. He had some experience there. If you're going to bring a weirdo in from another gaming company, EA is the place to do it. And by weirdo, I mean somebody who is really into, let's squeeze every dime out of everybody. Talk about nickel and diming earlier. This is where it's really at, it turns out. And EA, no stranger to this, Ricotello was over all kinds of horrible ideas at EA that they still are recovering from. So these things don't surprise me so much, but I think they're very bad for Unity. Other engines like Godot or Godot, however you say it, certainly Unreal, who's the biggest boy on the block anyway, are going to benefit from this. I know a number of indie developers personally who have reached out, or I reached out to and they wrote back and said, I won't be able to talk long. I am now in the 24th hour or whatever it is of us trying to convert our engine to Unreal before any of this takes place. So some of them are taking it very seriously. They're small devs. It's not the kind of thing you can't afford. I think them putting forth, we plan to pass the costs onto the two giant platform holders, Microsoft and Sony, is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in my life. First of all, those two companies have no idea that what he's talking about, and they're not going to do that. Here's the basics of it, just so everybody really understands what this means. At a very basic level, the idea is not every game, but many that use the Unity engine, they'll charge a fee to the developer every time the game is installed. And that means reinstalled, removed. I got a new computer today. I got to put all my games back on it. I install those games again. The dev gets dinged. Smaller developers are not going to be able to handle that. Big ones maybe, but they don't want to incur extra costs that they didn't plan on either. It's a terrible idea. To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't walked it back already. I keep expecting an update today to hear, well, looks like Unity's going to backpedal a little bit, and they haven't done that yet. Not really. They've added some clarification, but the clarification almost made it worse, because the only real clarification was, we'll make Microsoft and Sony pay for the difference. I mean, I tried to make sense of that too. I don't know what that means. I don't know how Unity is going to placate anybody by saying that. Unity is not as big as Unreal, but they should be big enough to get a PR person in-house, or at least outsource someone that could have written a better response than that. Telling Microsoft or PlayStation, hey, you're going to have to charge your customers more, that doesn't work for them, because those companies are big enough to say, no, we're good. Yeah. Yeah, it's dumb. Rick Otello became kind of notorious at one point. I don't want to load this all on him, but these are his initiatives. And I think that's important to say, because I don't think Unity was in this bind before all of this, but in the past, he took a ton of heat for saying that developers who don't focus on microtransactions are effing idiots, I'll subquote there, while also saying he'd like to charge battlefield players to reload their guns. This is a lot of talk from his EA days. That is just the most, get under my skin and turn me on fire talk you could have in this business and players hate it, devs hate it, everybody hates it. And I know that the good people on the ground trying to make cool stuff at Unity hate it. So what I hope this turns into, this is my hope, it will, they'll probably have to walk some of this back, but I hope the ultimate drive means they get dinged a little bit and it hurts from this, that they're going to have to claw back from it a little bit and earn people's trust and the dev community's trust in particular back and swap your CEOs out. Riccatello is very expensive. You could probably save some money on a nicer, less expensive CEO who's ready to walk in there and maybe do some better stuff. A heinous, the whole thing sucks. And even players are like, wait a minute, no one's talking about this, but what you're telling me is Unreal, or excuse me, Unity's engine has a way of telling when I install it again or later or whenever. That sounds like malware to me. I'm not buying games with Unity in them. That's even worse, because now you're talking about grassroots level rejection, and which is why my friends are saying they're converting to engines people trust. Go back five years, we weren't saying this about Unity, we were praising them because they were the cool kid on the block. They were the underdog that could do it. Yeah, but the little guys, the indie game friends. Yeah, and then they hired an XEA vampire and that's the, I'm letting my buy a show now, but for real, Rick Otello is the problem. And I think that they're not. When you're the CEO, I mean, who else are you going to blame? That's kind of the way it goes. The buck stops there, I hope, in this case. We'll see. Well, I'm with you, Scott. I find it pretty interesting that Unity hasn't walked any of this back yet. And that's why you have some people saying, well, there might be more to this story. There probably will be, and we will talk about that when we know more. First, let's talk about robots. Robots in the home, we all want them, right? Well, we don't all want them. Laryl Pinto, a computer science researcher at New York University, does. He says, robot vacuums, they're great. Many people have them, saves people some time. But robots in the home could do a lot more. Asking the question, how do we create robots that can be more integral? Doing chores, doing elder care, rehabilitation, just being there when we need them. Pinto wants to make that a reality by getting robots to collect information as they learn, and particularly as they fail. This is an approach called self-supervised learning that companies like Meta are already using, along with a lot of research teams. Back in 2016, Pinto created the world's largest robotics data set by getting robots to create and label their own training data and running them 24-7 without human supervision or human intervention. An example of how that would work would be a robot arm failing multiple times to grasp an object. But the data from all those failed attempts can be used to train a model that ends up being that successful grasp because it knows what not to do. Another approach is based on copying humans. So an example is a robot shown a video of a human opening a door or something in real life. The more doors that the robot sees humans open, the more likely that robot is to succeed at opening a random door that it's never seen before. So fail until you make it. Fail upward. No, how do they say that? Fake it until you make it. Fail forward is good. Be a cool robot. No, I'm a big fan of like, I want robots to do more than vacuum my floor. Listen, I got a Rumba. I was a Live With It segment a couple of years ago. Love that thing. It's the little robot that could. But I do love the idea of training, getting a data set more and more focused by knowing what not to do rather than do this robot. It's here's what you don't do. Here's how many times humans have failed. Okay. So watch us and now you'll be the better little home companion that we all either want or don't know we want yet. It would be like training kids a little bit, you know, teaching, not training. You know what I mean? Like don't touch the stove. All right. That makes sense. And then maybe the robot needs to touch the stove to find out how hot it is when then, you know, that's a whole other issue. But but still it's it's like raising our kids. We just have to do it in the digital age. It's fine. There you go. Well, Rob, let's check out the mail bag. So Levi wanted to chime in on our audio books on Spotify discussion we had last week. Levi writes, I have Spotify premium and audible when I use both cycling through music podcasts and audio books. I listen to audio for about six hours a day most days. So I make great use of both subscriptions. I would like to listen to audio books on Spotify if it came with my subscription. But the 20 hours isn't enough for me to switch from audible. I listen to two Stephen King novels within a week. So I would eat up that 20 hours relatively quickly. But a Spotify was to do an upcharge that allows me to listen to any audio book as much as I want that I would be better than that. Actually, that would be better than audible since I have to buy one book at a time. I know the upcharge for the system would end up costing me more than audible. But I did get the streaming version of an audible book rather than buying the book alongside my subscription. And that would bring a lot more people in my opinion. But I'm not sure how that would work for authors much like artists on Spotify. So it's an interesting take. You know, if I were to actually get a bunch of books with Spotify because I pay for Spotify, I'd listen. So I'm kind of with them there. But he listens to a lot of books six hours a day. That's a lot. That's a lot. I was going to say two Stephen King novels per week. Well, listen, you know, maybe you have a long commute or you just, you know, audio really works for you. But I kind of impressed by that. Yeah, I wish I could do that. I used to listen to audio books so much more than I do now. I just don't have time for them. But two 10 hour Stephen King novels is no small task. That's a lot. It's good stuff. Oh, but yeah, it's good to know that in many, many cases, if someone were to say, Sarah, what's your audiobook recommendation? I'd say, well, you have a few but audible library. You know, I don't, I think Spotify is doing something smart here because the audiobook people really like them for a good reason. Yeah. Well, Scott Johnson, we always have good reason to have you on the show. And it's because you show down smart. So let folks know where they can keep up with your smarts in other places. Well, as you can hear earlier, pretty fired up about this unity stuff. So we are planning on having a big discussion about it tomorrow night on our show called Core. It's a video game focused podcast that comes out every Thursday. We do it live as well as everywhere you get your podcasts. And I not only think you'll love our banter and our chemistry as hosts, but I think you'll really like how we drill down on topics just like this one. So if you want more of that discussion, check it out. That's every Thursday over at frogbanz.com slash core or wherever you get your shows. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about an indie video store in the U.S. keeping the DVD rental by Mail Dream alive. If you're upset about the Netflix of yesteryear, you're going to love this one. But just a reminder, we do the show live. DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 20 hundred UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Teja Custody joining us. Can't wait to have her back. Talk to you then.