 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Howard Yermish, John Adwood, and Pat. Coming up on DTNS, Shannon Morse tells us why people are buzzing about the Media Tech Dimensity Chip, and I'm going to give you the scoop on how Mastadon differs from Twitter and whether it's right for you. Is Mastadon right for you? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 15, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jain. Yes, that's right. We are not a medical podcast, but we will tell you if Mastadon is right for you. It may or may not be, you know. Side effects include things we'll talk about later. Let's start with the quick hits. Apple announced emergency SOS through satellite is available now to iPhone 14 users running iOS 16.1 in the U.S. and Canada, Rohingya in France, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K. next month. When out of range of normal cell service and Wi-Fi, the emergency SOS feature will let users answer vital questions, including location, altitude, battery level, and medical IDs. The answer and any follow-up messages are sent to a local emergency dispatcher if available, or to an Apple go-between who can communicate with emergency services. A demo mode is available to test out how the service functions without sending messages to a dispatcher. The service will be free for two years. Google settled a U.S. privacy lawsuit with a coalition of 40 state attorneys general and agreed to pay $391.5 million for misleading location history settings that existed from 2014 to 2020. Google's location history during that period turned off location history for Google Maps, but was just caused called location history. There was other location logging controlled in a second checkbox called Web and App Activity, the possibility of confusion over which one did what led to the lawsuit. Google has revised its settings several times since 2020 and has agreed to do some further revisions. The two-year and counting legal battle between Apple and Fortnite Maker Epic Games over how apps are distributed on the iPhone reached the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. Epic argues that Apple collects an unfair cut of revenue. Last year, a U.S. district judge mostly sided with Apple rejecting all but one of Epic's claims, arguing that Apple wasn't a monopolist, shutting down Epic's request to force Apple to let programs be downloaded onto the iPhone outside of Apple's rules. The judge did rule that Apple was violating California's unfair competition law and ordered Apple to stop that, though that process is still wrapped up in appeals. The appeals court now has heard both sides' appeals in person, and the Justice Department is now also involved in the proceedings. Here we go for round two. Amazon launched something called Amazon Clinic, which is a platform that connects users with healthcare providers for your common ailments, your urgent care type of stuff, prescription renewals as well, the services operating in the U.S. in 32 states. After an appointment, patients can send follow-up messages to the same provider for up to two weeks, all as part of the same fee. Previously, Amazon offered app-based telehealth called Amazon Care to employees, and a few select companies across the U.S., but that was shut down in September, so this is a different thing. Cryptocurrency exchange FTX has filed for bankruptcy, and its founder, Sam Bankman Freed, resigned as CEO. But he's still a majority shareholder, and as such, the Wall Street Journal sources say he was busy all weekend making some phone calls, trying to find somebody to invest $8 billion in the company. That's the amount that he said last week would keep the company going, but at this point, it would be used to pay back creditors. Court filings indicate FTX may have more than one million creditors. I assume that includes all the people with holdings in the company. That's how you get to a million pretty easily. Also, I mean, if I was writing a novel and named the guy whose crypto exchange went belly up, Bankman, I'm just saying, they would be like, that's too odd to know. I've seen a lot of Bankman fraud jokes on the internet. Yeah, all right. They read themselves. They do. Let's talk a little more about what's going on with Microsoft and the EU. Let's do it. So the EU is investigating Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard to determine how it would affect competition. One of the conversations that people are having around the potential merger is whether or not Activision's Call of Duty would stay available for Sony's PlayStation. Sony opposes the merge and has used the fate of Call of Duty as an example of why this deal should not be allowed. So Microsoft has gone to great lengths to assure that everyone that Call of Duty would remain available on the PlayStation should Microsoft take over control of Activision. The Verge talked to Microsoft CEO of gaming, Phil Spencer, who said that regulators have not proposed any regulations related to Call of Duty. And he also thinks that it's mostly, quote, rumor in hearsay. But he also said, quote, the financials of Activision is that Call of Duty would stay on PlayStation. When pressed, he pointed out that no business makes a contract that lasts forever and added, quote, we think Call of Duty will be on PlayStation as long as players want to play Call of Duty on PlayStation. And followed that up by saying that he meant not he meant native, not just on Game Pass. So Microsoft's executives aren't the only ones getting intensely parsed. But what they say and exactly how they say it, the EU deputy head of unit Institutional and Outreach Ricardo Cardoso wrote on Twitter, quote, the commission is working to ensure that you will still be able to play Call of Duty on other consoles, including my PlayStation. And quote, well, immediately people started saying Cardoso is not being impartial in the investigation by using the words my PlayStation implying a bias. The EC clarified that Cardoso isn't involved in the assessment of the Microsoft transaction. So kind of doesn't really matter what he says, but apparently he has a PlayStation. So Tom, real question, I guess, are we over parsing everybody's language a little too much or not enough? Yeah, maybe we're not doing it enough. Maybe we should take it even further. I actually think one of the real questions is how Cardoso got a PlayStation. They're kind of, you know, they're hard to get old. Well, he didn't say what kind of place they didn't say paid for either. He just said, no, I mean, this is why we can't have nice things, right? If you read that Verge interview with Spencer, yes, the Verge is being very journalistic and saying like, okay, but when you say that, could it mean game pass? And he's like, no, I mean native. But he's also bringing up things that you can tell he's heard people say elsewhere, which is like, and also don't think I mean this. And it comes to like, well, then why aren't you promising forever? And he's like, no business does that. It's bad business. Sony wouldn't want to sign a deal that kept Call of Duty forever, because what if Call of Duty became like some kind of liability in the future somehow. So I do think it would be good if the world just kind of calmed down and said, okay, are there any actual real harms going on here? And and maybe like regulating to the possible harms instead of making up scenarios like, oh, but you didn't say this. I don't know. This feels like, especially because it's Cardoso and Spencer that it's a great example of how that is not productive. I mean, the right when they say that no contract is forever. I mean, that's a very, very literal thing to say when it comes to business dealings like this, but like from a gamer perspective, I don't care as long as I can play the game on whichever console that I'm choosing to purchase. That's what's going to make me want to, you know, actually purchase that console and play that game. So just like make it friendly for the user at that point, like I'm good. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't really do a lot of gaming. I've never played Call of Duty, but I liken this to I want to watch that show I want to watch on a variety of TV apps, you know, maybe have an Apple TV, you know, I don't know, maybe, you know, maybe I've cobbled together some sort of other solution, but just let me do that and I will pay for it. I'm happy to do so. Well, but the question here is like, well, okay, so is the best way to make sure both of you are happy to let Microsoft buy Activision Blizzard because they're saying they'll let it be available, but maybe they're lying or is it to block the acquisition in which case Microsoft doesn't take over Activision Blizzard and who knows what happens. Maybe Activision Blizzard hits hard times and stops making Call of Duty. Well, I think if you really believe that Microsoft is lying, you would want to block the acquisition because you know, the whole thing is in bad faith. Or you would make a regulation that says your existing agreements have to stay the same as they have for, you know, for the next 10 years after this acquisition. They did that with Comcast and NBC when they let Comcast by NBC because they were, you know, a cable company operator that carried channels and stuff like that. There's ways to do this. It's not like a new thing. The bigger question is, does this give Microsoft too much concentration of power? Not whether they'll let Call of Duty on the PlayStation or not. In fact, I feel like it's in their best business interest to let Call of Duty on. I don't think that's the question. And also, I don't know why Cardoso is out there even talking about this if he's not even on the commission. So that's just muddying the waters. I don't think it's bad that he says he has a PlayStation, but I just don't know why he's commenting on it at all. I also don't know why anybody was that mad. People just get worked up about this stuff. They do, but why? Are you really that mad that he has a PlayStation? He might not even have a PlayStation. I don't know. Maybe that's why they're mad. Cardoso, invite us over for dinner and let's check out your rig. Well, a lot of folks are looking for an alternative to Twitter these days. You might be one of them. And many of those folks have gone to Mastodon. Mastodon appears similar to Twitter in that it's a place to post and follow short messages from people and companies. It feels Twitter-like, but organizationally, Mastodon is more like Linux than it is like Twitter. It's not a single company operating a proprietary platform, but it's also not a standard like email or the web. So Tom, give us a little bit more insight here. Yeah. So Mastodon is an open source project under the AGPLv3 license, which is built on a standard, the W3C activity pub standard. There's other things built on activity pub. Mastodon is one of them. It was developed by Eugen Rochko starting in March 2016. The first solid code release was in 2017. The source is open. It's a free open source code. The license does not allow anyone to reverse that. So no one could get control of the code. The code's going to stay free. And it is administered by a company. I think this causes some confusion. There is a German nonprofit run by the founder called Mastodon. It owns the trademark on the word Mastodon and runs two servers, mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Yeah. So there's no one official Mastodon site. There are many. People can run Mastodon servers that are federated with other Mastodon servers. So you could join a server, but then you can also follow and see posts from other servers in the federation. Tom and I are on the same server, but we found each other on Mastodon. We can follow each other. This is known as the Fediverse. Yeah. I think this causes a lot of confusion because people are not used to seeing a federation. And they're like, oh, if I get on this server, I can only see things on this server. And that's not true. But there are some things that don't work the same as if everyone was on the same server. But there is a big advantage to doing individual servers like that. One of those advantages is that each server can set its own policies on what is acceptable behavior. This is one of the guiding principles behind the reason they made Mastodon federated. So for example, a Mastodon server can see all the posts in the Fediverse, but a particular server may choose to ban certain posts. Let's say there's a server that says there are swear words. We're going to be a clean server. No one can say these swear words. We have a list of them. They're banned. If you were to sign up on that server, you wouldn't see posts from outside the server or inside, for that matter, that have swearing. It would block those posts. They'd still exist. You just wouldn't see them if you're on that server. Now swearing doesn't have to be banned everywhere. You can choose to be a member of a server with that policy. Or if you decide, you know what? I feel like I'm missing things because of this. You can move to another server. The other thing you can do on any server is a side benefit, is you can decide to block all posts that come from a particular server. If there's a server out there that you're like, there's never anything good coming from there, you can just say, mute that server. I never want to see any posts that come from it. Another aspect of the whole server thing is that you can move servers. You don't have to lose your data. If you're like, I'm kind of in the wrong place. Maybe rather be on this other server, it seems more to my liking. You can do that. The protocol makes it possible to take your follower lists along with you. You don't have to start from scratch. You just have to abide by whatever rules exist on the new server that you decide to join. Some servers are closed, by the way. Depending on how many people are on a particular server, your mileage may vary. Servers are often run on donations as well. However, with a big increase in users coming to Mastodon as of late, you may see servers having to get a little bit more creative. Mastodon servers generally are proud that they don't take ads, and that may change in the future. Shannon, you reviewed Mastodon way back in 2017. I don't even think I knew about it at that point. What has changed for you? Are you headed back? That's a good question. I was on Mastodon before Mastodon was cool, folks. That's how it used to be. Back in the day when nobody was on it, except for a bunch of InfoSec and hackers, and that was about it. It has changed a lot. I have noticed just in the user interface looks a lot friendlier, it looks a lot cleaner, but it's still set up in the exact same way. I think that's what originally turned me off from using Mastodon as a day-to-day social network back in 2017 is the same problem that they experience now, which is the fact that it is decentralized. A lot of normal users, that's going to be a bit of a learning curve for them, because you don't go to one site like you do with Twitter and create an account. You first have to choose a server, and that's going to cut a lot of people off, because they're going to be like, but when I do that, what's going to happen? They're going to have a bunch of questions, and there's going to be this learning experience. They'll have to dig into all the information and actually read the Mastodon pages to understand what they're getting into. It's a little bit confusing. I can see that from a user perspective, even though I've been using it for such a long time. That might give some people some trouble. I don't know if Mastodon will ever take off in the way that Twitter has or in the way that Instagram has, but maybe that's not really what they want. A lot of people, I feel like, go to Mastodon because they don't want this kind of centralized corporate-owned policy that they have with Twitter and Instagram. They want something that's separate, and that is federated, very star trekking in a sense. I see the way that a lot of people who go to Mastodon enjoy it and understand it, but I can understand why it may not be that popular. I had a bit of confusion when I first, I had an account before, and I don't even remember what my login was. I started over recently, curiosity more than anything, and it was there was a little bit of onboarding confusion on my part. It kind of feels to me more like Discord than it does Twitter. It looks like Twitter, but it's more of you are a part of a server with like-minded folks, but you can also talk to other folks on other servers as long as both of you have made that handshake to say yes. But how do you find those people? There's some discovery, but yeah, there's a little bit more legwork involved. Yeah, I feel like you've both hit on the two big things that are keeping a lot more people from trying Mastodon. One is the server situation, which I think it could be made easy very quickly. Stoic Squirrel is like, well, I haven't signed up yet because I'm not sure which server I want. Just pick one. It really doesn't matter. Pick a popular server and sign up. You can change it later. That's the brilliance of being able to move your relationships. I think people are overthinking the server thing because there's so much choice. Again, I'm probably angering a few Mastodon people like, no, you should carefully pick a community you belong to, but if it's stopping you from signing up at all, then just make that choice easier and start using it, and then you'll start to learn more about it. The following part, though, is difficult. It does take more work than it does on, say, Twitter or Facebook, because you can't search across servers very easily. You have to do the old school thing of seeing who follows other people, and sometimes you can't see that across servers. I think those are the two headwinds that are keeping people from signing up. Well, folks, if you're saying, you know what, I just want to stay on Discord. That's where I want to go. Welcome to our Discord. You can join the conversation there by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. Last week, MediaTek unveiled the Dimensity 9200 chip to quite a lot of buzz. It's the company's latest high performance system on a chip, second generation ARM V9 architecture on a second generation four nanometer process. Shannon, you went to MediaTek's announcement event. What did you learn? I did. I actually learned a lot. This was my first time going to a chipset announcement or event, so I was able to ask a lot of really technical questions and dig deeper and actually speak with executives about what's going on, why is this important, and TLDR, the Dimensity 9200, is going to be bringing a lot more competition to the smartphone space, especially for flagship smartphones. In that sense, I think it's going to be really cool. Yeah. Usually, if somebody's buying a phone, if it's not an Apple phone, it's got a Snapdragon inside. It might have an Exynos inside. It sounds like you're seeing a big step up from MediaTek, which is why you're hearing so many people excited about it. We are. This one has a pretty powerful CPU and GPU in it. It's supposed to be increasing the power and the efficiency seen in the CPU and the GPU. The CPU in this one has four performance cores and then four efficiency cores. That's supposed to really help with power and the efficiency cores will help with battery. The GPU has 11 cores. It's called the Immortalis G715. It sounds super fancy. This will actually be able to give you really, really beautiful graphics if you're playing games on mobile. We're talking about ray tracing graphics on mobile. They showed us a demo when I went to this event. It was so cool to see beautiful reflections in water and video games and beautiful reflections off of a mirrored wall of glass in the video game. I can't wait to see that happen in games. I get why these fancy names like Dimensity and Immortalis are being applied. What about outside the die? What about connectivity options? Oh, good question. Wi-Fi 7 is going to be something we're going to be hearing about a lot in 2023. We've already seen a few announcements. TP-Link just announced something today about bringing Wi-Fi 7, but so did MediaTek. This is going to be the first chip set that supports Wi-Fi 7. That's going to give you better speeds like 6.5 gigabits per second, which is crazy fast. We also got to see a demo of a couple of Wi-Fi 7 routers set next to each other to give you an idea of what kind of throughput you would see between the two, and it was insane. Better than a lot of wired connections. I'm super looking forward to that, especially if the speed speed tests do ring true. They're also increasing with better Bluetooth, which should give you better streaming capabilities for audio. That's Bluetooth 5.3. A lot of people questioned if these chipsets would work for both millimeter wave and subsix, and they will. It will be nice to have these chipsets that are dual compatible for both of those. A lot of times you hear Apple talking about its neural processing, not even just on the M chips, but on the mobile chips too. Certainly you hear Qualcomm talking about that with Snapdragon. What did MediaTek have to say about that? Yeah, they also gave us a lot of information about photography and videography. That's been a really big thing too, to help with night mode on smartphone cameras and to help you with differentiating between what should be in focus in portrait mode, stuff like that. They are bringing better AI processing to photography and videography to help you keep the correct things in focus and to help differentiate between subjects and background. They're also bringing faster storage with UFS 4.0 storage that's going to be compatible on these chipsets as well. So it is a decent competitor here. I can't wait to see some independent benchmarking and stuff coming up of these. When can those independent benchmarkers get a product with them? Where are we going to see these things? Well, hopefully soon. I suspect, I don't have any insider knowledge, but I suspect that we will start to see these at CES 2023 and going into Q1 of next year. They did mention a few brand names like Oppo, Xiaomi, Asus, and Vivo. We will most likely see this chipset going into some of those flagship smartphones for next year. Asus was a big one that they were talking about with the ROG line. So we'll definitely be seeing some pretty high-scale smartphones with the new Dimensity 9200. Yeah, it's going to be a bit of an uphill climb for them because you're not going to see them in a Google phone because they're making their own. You're not going to see them in Apple obviously because they're making their own. The big win would be, could they someday display Snapdragon on Samsung? That isn't going to happen right away, certainly, but I imagine that that might be the goal. Anywhere else we're going to see these? So we're not sure yet. These are specifically mostly tied in with smartphones, but they did also tease the PSVR2. I got to see that in person. I know that you can pre-order those or sign up to pre-order it online right now. So there is a little bit of technical information that you can look up there, but they showed the PSVR2 in person, but they did not say which chipset is in it. They would not disclose that information to us, but it looked really nice. It looked really cool and it looked very comfortable, but we weren't allowed to do anything with it. So I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out with a MediaTek chipset as well. And you will also find their chipsets in a lot of smart home products too at home. Very cool. Thank you, Shannon. Sure. Well, you might want a new chipset and you might just want something that Nike is calling Swoosh, a web three platform designed to let users buy or sell or trade virtual shoes and apparel. You know what Nike does in real life, but for the metaverse, the assets will reportedly be wearable items in digital games and other immersive experiences, whatever those are, signups for the platform open on November 18th, but Swoosh's first digital collection doesn't actually come out until January of 2023. So not far off, but not right around the corner either. At that point, Nike says it'll let creators enter a community challenge to win the opportunity to co-create virtual products with Nike and earn a royalty on any sales. You might recall that Nike bought the studio RTFKT last year. That's a web three company that makes NFTs and sneakers for the metaverse. All right. So the buzzwords have caused so many face-pomping emojis to be either written or imagined, but I think I may have figured this out because whenever there's a new technology, everybody's knee-jerk reaction is talking about dumb dumb it is until somebody figures out why it isn't. And then we all change our minds. What if these virtual shoes, forget web three, forget metaverse, forget blockchain, NFT, forget all of that. What if you could buy your new Nike Air Jordans and wear them in Supernatural or Beat Saber? Okay, you're speaking my language a little bit here at time. Oh, yeah. Well, one thing that you don't see is your own legs and Supernatural. So we gotta add legs. Yeah, or some sort of different apparel type of thing. Well, particularly feet. You're gonna have to have feet. Yeah. But, but, you know, that's common. People are working on legs. That's actually a pretty good point. That's one thing that, you know, well, anyway, we're talking about the VR game, Supernatural, which I love very much. But you do kind of look down and sometimes you're like, where am I? I'm invisible. I can only look ahead, you know, or around, but not at myself because myself doesn't exist. That could be kind of cool. Or maybe something where Nike has relationships where, you know, if you do well enough in a particular exercise game, say, you know, or you take a certain amount of steps in any given day, it's like, well, you've leveled up to like these cool sneakers, you know, that would have been kind of expensive to buy in real life. That's fun. I can see that. And for those of you who are like, well, I would never want to wear virtual shoes in an exercise game. I just want, you know, to yourself, ask yourself, have you ever bought a cosmetic upgrade in any game? Because maybe you wouldn't in that game, but I bet you have in some other game. 100%. Just saying. Just saying. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from Brian, who wrote in regarding our discussion recently. It was last week of the Air Lee air quality sensors. And Brian wanted to contribute his experience with purple air. Brian says, as a resident of Sonoma County, not too far from studio, Redwood. Hey, Brian. Hope to see you at the Safeway sometime where the fall wildfire wildfire season can make outdoor activity dicey. I use it regularly to check hyper local air quality. Purple air sells monitors to individual users for a few hundred dollars, and then aggregates all that data onto a map. In fact, Air Lee uses purple air data on their own map as well. Oh, nice. Yeah. Brian says, there are a couple other sensors within my subdivision out on the coast. I can use the sensors to see where pollution and smoke is coming from, which way the wind might be blowing it. IQ air is a similar company, but they haven't distributed as many sensors. Brian says, thanks for the show. I'm a longtime supporter on Patreon and Twitch. Bodega Bay Brian, keep up the good work. Oh, thank you, Brian. This is great. Yeah. Whenever there's a product we talk about, there's always a long list of other companies doing similar things. We try to acknowledge, hey, they're not the only ones in the space, but I love it when we get an on-the-ground report from somebody who's like, hey, I'm using a similar thing, and it actually works with Air Lee in some ways. Very cool. Thank you, Brian. Indeed. Also, thanks to Shannon Morse for being with us today. Shannon, you have been obviously very busy. Where can people keep up with your latest work? I have. You can find me over at youtube.com slash Shannon Morse, as usual. My most recent video was on a secure encrypted file storage SSD that you can take with you on your holiday travels. So you may want to look into that, find out all the technical info that I shared in that video, and see if that would be a good gift for somebody in your life. And indeed, we are getting to the holiday season. You might be wondering, you know, who the geek in your life is going to get this year. So good stuff from Shannon. Also, brand new boss, Brian. Got a lot of Brian's on the show today. Brian just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Brian. It's great to have you. Thank you, Brian. Different Brian, but all Brian's are welcome. All Brian's are welcome. If you're a Brian out there who doesn't support the show yet, come on over. There's plenty of Brian's. You won't be alone. It'll be great. It's a good crew. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We roll right into it live after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, we do the show live. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow talking about when it will be time to fear General AI with Dr. Nicky Abrams joining us. Talk to you then.