 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to you, Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith Zapata, John and Becky Johnston, and brand new patrons. We got so many people coming into the tent. Stephen, Lance, Zach in 415, Dave, Peter and Gerald. On this episode of DTNS, Sony is at the top of its game. But for how long? How Amazon could save baseball streaming and why the bad folks target game companies? Stop it. Please stop it. Stop it. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 20, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Cube or Studio McStudio Face or Studio Cubby Hole. I'm Sarah Lane. Thank you for the suggestions from Nick, Matthew and Ian. From Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I'm glad Studio McStudio Face has been suggested. That is a requisite for any naming. I kind of love Studio Cubed. It's not bad. It reminds me of Cube Burt, which is just a really fun arcade game, even though we're spelling it totally different. But we're onto something here, everybody. I can imagine a logo where you just use the two, like the superscript, like Cubed. Yeah. Right. Q3. You use the three. Yeah. Sign me up. Or something mathematically accurate in your logo. Roger's like, that doesn't really work, but okay. Mathematically precise, but yes. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Samsung announced its self-repair program expansion adding 30 European countries, including Denmark, Greece, Hungary, and Portugal. Galaxy foldables like the Flip 5 and Fold 5 are now included. And Samsung says the program will also include the Galaxy S23 series, the Tab S9 series, and the Galaxy Book 2 Pro series. The company also expanded its partnership with UBreak iFix to create 50 new repair shops across the US by the end of this year, which is 10 days from now. Dr. Steven Thaller has filed patents on behalf of machines all over the planet. He's even been granted a couple of patents here and there, but his application in the UK was denied. And he just lost his last court case to get his DABUS algorithm recognized as the inventor of a food container and a flashing light beacon. The UK Supreme Court decided, quote, an inventor must be a person. And also, I guess, by implication decided that the machine was not a person. It did not weigh in on whether the algorithm invented anything or not. It didn't get philosophical. The court also denied Dr. Thaller the right to DABUS's patents as the algorithm's owner as well. This is a decision without much immediate effect, but it does leave things open in the future for dispute over innovations derived from machine outputs. This will not be the last. Drugstore chain right aide must halt use of facial recognition in its stores for the next five years as part of a privacy settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission. And a complaint that was filed on Tuesday, the FTC said right aide misused the technology to mistakenly tag certain consumers as shoplifters in major US cities, some of them anyway, but did not notify customers it was doing so. The FTC also said the system included thousands of improper matches, which led to some employees assuming at least some of those customers were going to try to steal items from the store. In addition to the five-year facial recognition ban, right aide also agreed to delete its current database of all images and provide annual reports to the FTC on compliance going forward. The bird has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Not that bird. That bird's called X. I'm talking about the e-scooter company. It filed in the court in Miami. According to court documents, bird has a tentative deal to sell itself to a Canadian firm. Back in September, the New York Stock Exchange began delisting proceedings against bird due to a big decrease in consumer interest. According to a report from McKinsey and Company, more than one third of the top 100 cities globally have banned scooters entirely. So it's not just bird's issue. Majority of those cities are in China, but they also include Barcelona, Philadelphia, Sydney and Toronto. Bird has filed several routine motions that will let it keep operating as it navigates the bankruptcy processes like it used to navigate our streets. On Wednesday, Blizzard Entertainment EP Holly Longdale shared a 2024 content roadmap on Wednesday, illustrating plans for World of Warcraft, both for the retail version of the game and the classic servers. This is the start of the World Soul saga, which was first announced at this year's BlizzCon. Three more content updates for the current expansion, Dragonflight are on deck, and next summer, players can also test the upcoming The War Within expansion. Blizzard is also continuing to develop World of Warcraft Classic with Cataclysm Classic on the way as well. All right, let's talk more games. Sony announced Wednesday it has now sold 50 million PlayStation 5's, showing a lot of market growth, almost as big as during the big pandemic boom of 2021. Improved availability of the PS5 is a big factor as our new titles like Sony's own Spider-Man 2, Microsoft's Starfield and Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Now, that's good news for Sony. Microsoft has been getting all the press though because they bought Activision Blizzard, and one of the eyes got dotted when they finally nailed down the last day Activision Blizzard CEO, Bobby Kotick, will step down. Originally, everybody thought he would step down the day that the deal closed. Then they said when the deal closed, it'd be by the end of the year. Now there's an official date, December 29th. Microsoft has not formally replaced Kotick. In fact, they may not, but it did move Blizzard president Mike Ibarra, Activision publishing president Rob Kostich, and Activision Blizzard vice chair, Thomas Tipple, into Microsoft's Game Content and Studios division, all reporting to Matt Booty, who is now also overseeing Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and Xbox Game Studios all together. So the pieces are on deck here, Scott. Sony out to a big lead, but the big fear was that Microsoft getting Activision Blizzard would undermine that lead. Where are we headed? Well, it's interesting. One of the things that didn't get mentioned or that we haven't talked about in this context is Sony also released a new version of the PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation Slim. And I think that probably injected some hype into their market share. I think a lot of players were maybe they held off and they're like, well now I'm getting one because it's the newer one and it's probably the newest one they'll have, although I have bad news for you. I think they're working on another interim change. But anyway, they are doing quite well. On the Activision slash Microsoft side, that is also going well. There's a lot of cool stuff happening mostly behind the scenes. But if you were just to look at the number, you'd say, well, how disappointing this is, Microsoft's stinking up the joint with its drop in sales when it comes to actual Xbox hardware. But they are doing swimmingly well when it comes to cloud services, specifically Game Pass. So I don't know that this portends anything, but I always like to theorize around this sort of stuff that this may signal, at least for the foreseeable future, that Sony continues to be the master of the hardware game and sell the most consoles and that Microsoft will be the one that is doing Microsoft things, which is a lot of cloud based stuff and a lot of services based stuff. And they will do that more and better than even Sony can. And there is maybe an eventual marriage where Sony lets you subscribe to a service like Game Pass on a PlayStation. But I think that would require Microsoft to get out of the hardware business. And I don't necessarily think they're ready to do that quite yet either. Why do you think that? Why do you think that? Because I don't think Microsoft will care. I think they would put that service on Sony's PlayStation 5 if the deal could be struck. Do you think Sony would object if Microsoft was still making an Xbox? I think that Sony would object, yes, because they'd still have a competitive, they'd have to answer competitively to another console. And without that in the way, I think Sony would be much more amenable to this. And I'm not even sure they would at all. Like to be honest, the blood's a little bad between the two companies anyway, as one might expect with this level of competition. But my overall takeaway would be, if Microsoft get out of that business, right now they kind of do it as, I think you coined it earlier, a boutique sort of way of selling consoles. That is not their chief concern. They've said as much. They're like, we actually don't care where you play Game Pass. We just want you in on Game Pass. And when they say things like that, that makes me think they are at least maybe in the future willing to concede the hardware to somebody else and then just feed this to phones, to other consoles, to handhelds, to devices of all sorts and sizes that they no longer have to make themselves. What does that sound like? It sounds a lot like Windows or the way Microsoft does most of their business. It sounds more like Azure to me than Windows even. It really does. And so even Sony uses Azure for their online PlayStation stuff and for their stores and what they have of it. What they have. So why not lean into where you're strongest, where you're making the most money and still have Game Pass be this force? Because it is one. Like it or not, Sony definitely doesn't like it and they don't like this new acquisition. But this acquisition combined with those services means that Microsoft's not going anywhere. They are going to be a factor in this. But are they going to be the traditional factor of who's pretty boxy you buying at Christmas? Maybe not anymore. And I think Microsoft's okay with that. Oh, go ahead, sir. I was just going to say, Scott, you had reminded us in our pre-show meeting, for anybody who's sort of like, oh, look at Microsoft just moving everybody around in Activision Blizzard and getting rid of jobs. A lot of the stuff was announced quite ahead of time. This is not entirely crazy. I mean, I guess it's significant because it's happening, because it's happening, especially at the end of the year. But not a huge surprise here. Yeah. And as far as the Bobby Kotick stuff goes, putting aside all of the problems around his running of Activision that many of us have, gamers and people who follow this business alike, we know there's a whole conversation over there. But all of that aside, this is a big moment of leadership change that says two things. One, it says, hey, we're Microsoft. We own you now. And we also have the power and the backbone to help you with what you need. But we want you as studios to have the tools you need to do what you already do best. And they're not saying this out loud, but Kotick was a block for that. And with him gone, you don't have that anymore. And I think even beyond Kotick, which like you say is not a surprise, the way they are moving people into Matt Booty's team tells me, in fact, these two stories tell me the two different approaches. Sony is very happy with the way things are going in the present and are doubling down on the present. They're not doing a lot that we see regarding cloud. Microsoft is betting on the future. Microsoft is saying we think the cloud is going to go, is going to be where everything goes. And so we are, you know, in the hockey metaphor skating to where the puck is going to be, they may be wrong. The puck may be going somewhere else in which case this is bad. But this is, I always say it, Microsoft is not a hardware company. They make hardware to show what their software and cloud services can do. And they're not even really a software company as much as they are a cloud company these days. And that's what we're seeing play out with gaming. Yeah. And they have all the studios in the world now to make all the software they ever need in the gaming space. They didn't do this lightly. They didn't do this going, Oh, one day we're not going to be able to make X boxes because Sony's outselling us like they have a plan. We don't know all the details. I think they're going to probably be fine. It's Microsoft. But I do say props to Sony for, for at least in the here and now where the puck is, where the game is on the line. They're doing all right. They're doing good. Yeah. Going into the third period they lead. Yeah. I like the metaphor. It's good. It works. Somebody's Bobby Kotick's going to the penalty box. Yeah, he is for good. Uh, you know what doesn't have third periods or a penalty boxes? Baseball. Oh, well, let me tell you more. Amazon may be setting itself up to get baseball streaming rights, but it might also be kind of messy. So the situation itself is messy. Let's try to explain it as simply as we can. Diamond sports group is a subsidiary of a company called Sinclair. If you watch sports on belly sports nets in the US, you are watching a channel operated by Diamond. That's what is used to that's what used to be Fox's regional Fox sports outlets. If that helps you remember what they are, the belly sports net channels have rights to about 40 teams games across the NBA, NHL and major league baseball. Now, Diamond has its own board of directors. Uh, and this gets very businessy. Uh, but they are able to block the parent company from doing certain things. So Sinclair owns Diamond, but Diamond has some autonomy because of the way the subsidiary was constructed. And they did that. They blocked Sinclair from interfering in its operations. So that's why we're not talking much about Sinclair in this story. Uh, Diamond also has not been doing well as cable has been declining. And they don't have streaming rights for everything. So filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 14th this year. Since then, it's a long tail. You can read about it, uh, in their Wikipedia article and all over the internet. Uh, but it's a constant. Uh, they missed a payment. Uh, are they going to be able to keep broadcasting? Will they keep the rights? They come up with a payment. They've lost a few. They lost a couple of Arizona teams. Uh, they've been able to keep a lot of other teams. But as time marches on, it's looking like it will be harder and harder for Diamond to keep its rights if things continue the way they are. There's even talk of breaking up the company. So Amazon is now reportedly in talks to bail Diamond out, which would be before they got broken up, before the rights got sold off. Amazon would come in and, and help them out. They would, they would bring their rights over, uh, to Amazon, both the Wall Street Journal and the athletic report that Amazon is doing this. Uh, it's, it gets even messier from there because while they have done their rights deals for the MBA and apparently they're very close to doing their rights deals for hockey, they are getting resistance from major league baseball because major league baseball would have, like to have all the rights back to itself. And Diamond only has the digital rights for five of the 11 baseball teams it has, which means they can't just hand over the digital rights to Amazon. So you're going to have this big three-way conversation between Amazon, uh, the major league baseball organization and Diamond about how this kind of deal would be, uh, structured. I think it's, I think it could end up being very good. Uh, but it's not a guaranteed thing. And if Amazon doesn't help them out, I think Diamond just goes belly up. Um, dumb question, but where does Sinclair fit into all of this? Well, that's what I was trying to explain before. Sinclair is locked out of this. Uh, so that, uh, it's very business as I said, uh, it's very businessy, but Diamond as a subsidiary has the kind of business charter that says we can be autonomous and they voted, uh, again, as I said, they voted to say, uh, we are no longer going to take orders from the parent company. So Sinclair owns them and they'll get whatever benefit contractually they're obligated to get out of a sale or whatever, but they can't interfere in their operations. And, and even though diamonds had a tough time of it this year, it doesn't sound like, uh, they would like Sinclair to be more part of. No, they have definitely blocked them from operating. Yeah. So Sinclair has nothing to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of moving parts here. Yeah. I mean, do you feel like, uh, you're the biggest sports fan? I know, Tom of everyone or baseball fan in particular, um, does this seem like, uh, the right time for this? In other words is that we've been, you know, Oh, this is past time. Uh, so what Amazon could do here, which would be very interesting if they were able to work this out, if they could get major league baseball to agree, if they can get all the teams to agree, if they can make the numbers work out and then the dollars and cents work out, they would be able to bring over not only some of these NBA and NHL games, but they would bring over major league baseball games to prime video. And if you bring it to prime video, suddenly it's not a situation where you're like, well, I can only get it on ballet sports net in my region. I can't get it from online unless I get the ballet sports streaming, but it doesn't have all the rights. And Oh, I happen to live in a part of Iowa that it's considered to be a local market for six teams. And now I can't get any of those teams. Prime video could just resolve all that and say, Hey, we're offering these games nationwide, uh, to everybody. Uh, but again, you have to get a lot of people to sign off on that deal. So the upside is very big in making things better for fans. They obviously have to subscribe to prime video, but, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's not a guarantee to happen, but it is very interesting to see because my theory has been that major league baseball has been hoping diamond would go under so they could get rights back and then provide a direct subscription through MLB TV that didn't have the local blackouts. Maybe Amazon can agree to that as well and say, yeah, we'll let MLB TV do without the local blackouts on our stuff, uh, as long as we get to do it on prime video as well. Wow. The sport. That's possible. I'm not saying that's gonna happen. It just feels like they're a year. It's been years. Everybody's talks about this for years and years and years and every year, every year. It's the same thing. Someone goes, but hold on a second. This is the game I want to watch. This is my team. What? How? Where? Yeah. Well, and for a while it really wasn't that bad and people complained, but it was, you watch it on cable. It's annoying, but you, you have access to it. Now people don't, don't subscribe to cable as much and they're like, but I can't get it on streaming because ballet has not struck a lot of deals with the streaming services like YouTube TV. Uh, and so sometimes you're like, well, I subscribed to that for my cable, but I don't get ballet now. And then it's like, well, you can do the ballet streaming. Oh, but it only has five of the 11 major baseball teams. Uh, and it really has become more of a mess, uh, recently. So until this whole diamond thing gets straightened out, I don't, I don't think it's going to get any clearer. I'm still getting used to Amazon prime video on Thursday nights. Yeah. For Thursday night football, right? Yeah. Uh, and they, and they're trying to get some NBA stuff on there. So by this time next year, we may be looking at prime video is like, you know, the home of lots of sports, a competitor to ESPN, which would be a nightmare for Disney, frankly. Yeah. Uh, well folks, if you have feedback about this or any further questions, cause I know this is complicated stuff, uh, get in touch with us on the socials. We are DTNS show on X. Uh, we are DTNS show on masted on at mstdn.social. We're a daily tech news show on tiktok and DTNS pics. That's DTNS P I X on Instagram and threads. All right. In yesterday's show, we reported the screenshots of employee info and upcoming games from developer insomniac were posted online after a ransomware attack on the studio that happened earlier in the month. Now, Scott, here's the question. Why are game companies such as insomniac targeted for ransomware attacks? Well, insomniac is effectively a Sony studio. I mean, they are a Sony studio by all, you know, all measures. Um, but they have not always been that and they have grown to be a very, very lucrative and important part of Sony's strategy with PlayStation, the brand and moving forward, going back. They have been doing games forever for them. And the latest being the Spider-Man two, uh, game was a huge hit and continues to sell well and is probably responsible for a lot of those sales we're talking about of PlayStation fives this year. Um, that makes them a highly valued target, especially if there's a weakness in their security somewhere and these hackers, uh, found it. So just a quick little background on it. They wanted $2 million. That was the ransomware amount they were trying to get out of these guys. Sony is going to spend a lot more than that trying to fix all of this, but that's what they asked for. They declined to do it. Uh, I'm glad personally, I like when companies don't cave to this stuff. It drives me crazy. They got a full terabyte of data, uh, that included in that were some major things. The next five games they're working on now that could change and it could be shuffled around somewhere announced. Some weren't, but the next five games they were planning on a Venom game in 2025, uh, Wolverine in 2026, although that's been rumored to even be next year, but I'm, I'm thinking that 2026 is right based on the, the footage we saw Spider-Man three in 2028, Ratchet and Clank in 2029, and a untitled X-Men game in 2030, obviously leaning hard into the, their Marvel deal. And they also had part of this information showed how much money Marvel Disney is giving to Sony slash Insomniac in good faith to work toward these things being done. That was all in there as well. And there were contracts and DA's, all the things you might think would show up in this kind of leak to why they were targeted and why other companies and frankly why video game companies, I think are the hot new target for hackers is in a lot of ways Insomniac, I said it before, I'll say it again, they have carried Sony this year. Their releases have been huge to the success of the PlayStation five. And honestly, it's been a little sparse overall. If you don't count third party stuff, just talking first party output, if it wasn't for them, I'm not sure we'd be singing as much praise about Sony's PlayStation results this year as we are. And that makes them a, in particular, a very sensitive target or a very high profile target. Rockstar had went through this recently, the folks who make GTA, they had a huge breach. A bunch of GTA six stuff got leaked ahead of time. That went to court. There are people in jail now on that case. We'll see if any of that comes to any sort of fruition on this other side. But this also included some Wolverine pre alpha footage. I should mention that I watched that. It looks very pre alpha. It looks very not finished. These people work really hard not to have that stuff get out in the public because the public doesn't know what to do with alpha footage. They think these are supposed to be finished games. They get it in their heads. It's all very weird. But these, these are more and more high ransom targets, I think, because in the entertainment business, it used to be if you went after something, something like MGM, or you went after, I don't know, Disney or something. That was a high profile target. Video games make a lot more money than traditional media now. And that's kind of true across the board. One insomniac and one Sony is worth a whole lot more than, you know, Warner Brothers or something else. No reason they might not go after them as well. But I think that's what's making these multi billion dollar targets at least lucrative for hackers to go after because there are three things that play. One, lots of money, so potential for a big ransom if they, if they do it, lots of exposure if they don't. So lots of embarrassment and lots of online, let's put this stuff everywhere and spread it all over the place if they don't pay up, which is kind of a thrill in its own right. And I think that, you know, the bigger they are, the harder they fall kind of attitude is there and they see these as industry leading greedy companies who have sold out a lot of hackers are gamers and there's kind of a little bit of culture war in there a little bit about some cash to being able to infiltrate, you know, the cool company. Yeah, exactly. And I think if I think if you, I mean, I'm trying to put my head and in the head or my brain in the side, the head of a hacker or a hacker group, if the goal is to go after something big that will get you a lot of headlines, lots of discussion and all kinds of fanboy freak out, there is no better way to do it than attack a great big monolithic video game company right now. So I think I don't think they went after them for the money because I think they knew that insomniac wouldn't pay. Right. I think they they were like, well, if they do pay great, not a problem. But I really do think they knew like they're probably not going to pay, but we will get so much attention that so many other people will want to hire us for ransomware because a lot of these ransomware groups are ransomware as a service. And so they can they can now get a bunch of jobs from people as the folks who hacked insomniac. Yeah, exactly. And did it potentially scott free without any, you know, without them getting caught. If that ends up happening and there is no ramifications for this, that puts them way up on the list of who you would trust to get the job done in that world. And I think it's a little bit of a wake up call because a lot of studios, both small, medium and big are kind of all over the place with their security. They just are. They'll admit it to you if you can get them in private. And I think stuff like this is actually good in that it will motivate the larger studios and everybody in between to think more about this, to think about their security and what they do with their documentation and how they share it so that these things can be less and less frequent. Yeah. You're going to hear a lot next year about cyber resilience and not just securing things, but figuring out what to do once you've been breached. What are the protocols to limit the damage to recover from ransomware, et cetera, et cetera. So it just shows that we we've moved on from like, well, you better be careful or you're going to get attacked. What do you do when it happens? Yep. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Brian in Pittsburgh wrote in about our convo on Monday. This was in GDI about what makes an e-sport an e-sport. Brian says, relevant to the post-show discussion on the world championship of excel, the fine folks at people make games covered excel as an e-sport in a video earlier this year. It's well worth a view for anybody interested in e-sports, excel or both. And then Brian gives us a link on YouTube, which we will have on our show notes. Hey, thank you, Brian. Good to see more resources on that. It's new to my radar that people were using excel as an e-sport, but just like everything else on the internet, it's not new to everybody. No, excel is also a sport I'm very bad at. I'd like to get better. I'd like to get better. You know, I have a little pivot table elbow. So I just, you know, that really hampered my career. Understood. Yeah. Oh, that's a bummer. Hopefully some physical therapy will get you back in no time. Making some, I don't know, algebraic. I don't know. Excel is weird. It's very hard. All right. To sum up, it's weird. Scott Johnson, you're not weird. You're weird, but you are kind of weird. So thanks for being on the show today. As always, let folks know where they can keep up the rest of your work. Well, I would actually recommend, I mean, everything's happening at frogpants.com, all the shows and everything else. But here's what I want people to do. A little Christmas gift. I'm doing it for absolutely free and for fun. I've been drawing since the beginning of this month and drawing one Santa Claus per day for 25 days, right up to Christmas. And they're goofy and they're just stuff out of my head. And there's no real theme to it other than Santa Claus is somehow involved. And I think people might enjoy it. So head on over to frogpants.com slash Santa. I'm putting them up there every time one goes up. I'm actually a couple of days behind because I was, I'm getting over a sinus infection, but I will be caught up and have all 25 by the end of the year. So if you want to see the evolution of the Santa drawings, log in today at frogpants.com slash Santa. Advent calendars are hot. That's a great idea. I'm thinking ahead to next year, Tom, because when these are done next year, I print them all, put them in a calendar, have little doors on them. There you go. Yeah. Exciting. Patrons, stick around. You get more show. Good day. Internet starts in a few seconds and we'll be talking about Apple's latest foray into making car play more custom, you know, for your Porsche. Because who doesn't have one of those? Just a reminder, though, we do the show live Monday through Friday and you can catch it live at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then.