 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith, and Miranda Janell. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon got MGM in order to help its advertising. Snap has something that might actually be a part of the metaverse someday and why fact-checking makes people trust news less. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Not wearing green, I'm Sarah Lane. With a inch-proof green badge in Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert. Yeah. I am wearing green. I'm in Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. I'm wearing red, oblivious to everything, and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, whether you're Irish or not, you're welcome here at Daily Tech News Show, where we're all tech-rish. No? All right. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announces annual developer conference, Google I.O., will take place May 11th and 12th as a virtual event viewable through YouTube and I.O. Adventure in VR. The May 11th keynote from Sundar Prachai will be streamed from the Shoreline amphitheater. Samsung announced new models in its mid-range Galaxy A series. The A53 5G adds 5G, as you might have guessed from the name. It also has better display, visibility, photo editing features, 6 gigabytes of RAM, and a 5,000-mAh battery. All models will use Samsung's Exynos 1285 nanometer processor, so no Qualcomm in the US this time. Starts at $50 lower than the previous A52 version. A little inflation buster there from Samsung. Samsung Galaxy A53 comes to the US April 1st for $450. Samsung also announced the Galaxy A33 at a price that'll be set somewhere between the A53 and the $250 A13. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a law Wednesday clarifying the status of cryptocurrency assets in the country. Crypto exchanges have legal authority to operate regulated by the National Commission on Securities. The bill passed parliament on February 17th after the president had rejected a previous version back in September of 2021. The Ministry of Finance is working on amendments to the country's tax and civil codes to fully launch the market for virtual assets. AMD confirmed that its upcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor will not support overclocking. That's the official word. Everybody kind of thought that, but they've made it for sure. They said the reason is that 3D vCache doesn't work at high voltages. AMD says the extra cash, however, in their opinion, will compensate for the lower clock speed. Microsoft Edge can now generate automatic image description for users browsing with their screen readers on. The feature uses Azure's cognitive services intelligence to generate alt text to images that don't have them assigned already. Users can turn the feature on and edges accessibility settings. All right, let's talk about the big closing. Amazon got its MGM on. MGM, now part of Amazon. Tell us about it, Justin. Indeed, it is Amazon RR. MGM. Amazon closed its acquisition of Movie Studio MGM on Thursday. No word on how MGM will be integrated into Amazon Studios, but as a reminder, MGM makes content that includes James Bond, Rocky, the Pink Panther movies, as well as television properties like The Handmaid's Tale, Vikingsfall Hall of Fargo, and many others. First, don't jump to conclusions that all this content will go right to Amazon Prime. Studios often make content for partners and those contracts usually keep the content there for a while. See the slow unwinding of Netflix's deal with Disney over Marvel shows or the bouncing of Harry Potter movies between Peacock and HBO Max. In fact, Variety reported that the EU approved the merger without conditions because MGM's content cannot be considered as must have. Ouch. MGM will certainly make more content for Prime Video, but Amazon has indicated that it'll still operate as a studio that will make content for other clients. The back catalog will probably be the bigger boon to Prime Video. MGM holds the rights to nearly 4,000 films and 17,000 TV episodes. That's part of why Protocol's Janko Redegars argues that while some extra content for Prime Video won't hurt, the bigger win for Amazon is the ad money. Fast services, and that is fasts the acronym, free ad supported television is a hot growing streaming market and Amazon owns one of the tops with IMDB TV. That has 120 million viewers a month viewing its ads and while Prime Video subscribers can watch IMDB TV content, they have to watch the ads. There's no ad-free version. So injecting a bunch of MGM library content into IMDB TV should raise more eyeballs, which of course sells more ads. James Bond movies have only been available for rental or purchase, for example. So I think what Janko Redegars was thinking is those James Bond movies might show up for streaming on IMDB TV and so you'll have to watch them with ads and if you don't want ads, well, go rant one. But they're gonna try to drive eyeballs to that ad sales, which would be a big way to boost the advertising revenue of Amazon. A lot of rumors that Amazon might change the name of IMDB TV too to make it sound a little more interesting to people. Amazon. Yeah. Easier for me to say, thank you Amazon, that'd be nice. I mean, I gotta say, the EU saying, you know what? Let's go ahead and improve this merger because nothing really in the MGM, libraries of note. I mean, that's insane. Somebody was having a handshake deal in the back room. I think that is gonna be a stunning rebuke for Brexit. That day. Oh, it was because of James Bond? Yeah, that might be, I mean, what they're trying to say is MGM doesn't suddenly make Amazon dominate the movie market, right? And yeah, right. I mean, when you're, and I wonder how much, I mean, I know that bad catalogs and MGM has a really big one are lucrative for any company looking to be like, okay, we got a streaming service. Now we're going to have all this access to content that we didn't have before. But yeah, like at what point is something like this, does it kind of sound like a tech company buying another dying tech company's IP? Well, yes, and the entertainment IP that they are going to get here is something that Amazon is gonna put a lot of money in. If you've looked at the moves that have been made by these tech companies in the entertainment space, and I would really include Apple and Amazon as the big players there, they don't care about the average price of things in the entertainment world. They are willing to blow away the competition because they care more about the prestige and they are playing different games. Apple is ultimately looking to sell more devices. Amazon is ultimately looking to keep you on the prime service. The fact that there will be new Pink Panthers, there's going to be new James Bond. There's going to be new Rockies. And it's going to include the top talent that money can buy literally. That's why they did this. Sure, the ad supported stuff is fine. And maybe in the next 10 years, those fast networks become absolute juggernauts. But make no mistake, considering what Amazon just paid for a Lord of the Rings series that legally cannot mention any of the characters you know from Lord of the Rings, this is for their ability to free and clear, make new branded IP properties that they can make exclusive to their platforms. I mean, they can mention Galadriel. So it's not all of it, but it has to be mentioned in the appendix, right? For my rampant Galadriel slander. But yeah, they are willing to pay a lot to get a little bit of franchise. And they're getting a lot of franchise at MGM. But I don't think it's any of one of these reasons. MGM wasn't the best thing to buy if they just wanted the franchise. It isn't the best thing to buy if they just wanted the back catalog. It isn't even the best thing to buy if you want the studio expertise. I think Amazon gets the benefit of now saying, hey, Amazon Studios, you have a whole group of people who've been doing this for decades now that can help make Amazon, it's gonna help Amazon content just as much as it will help MGM content, right? It's a two-way street. I don't think it's any of those things, I think it's all of those things. It's a combination. It is all of these things. The deal works for a lot of different reasons, but buying studios is not easy. They are not always for sale, they are not always for sale to you, depending on where you are in the market. MGM has been kind of a sick puppy looking for a savior for a while. This made sense, like you said, Tom, all of the above. Back in October, we did an episode of Know a Little More, the podcast, with Stacey Higginbotham about the matter standard. We've talked about it on the show a few other times since. Matter is a coalition of the biggest smart home platforms, Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung, and a bunch of others to work toward interoperability. The idea is that once matter is all in place and all the products have it, you can just buy a smart product that says it's matter compliant, bring it home, and use it with your system. Doesn't matter what system you have. You can even change your system. All your stuff should still work as long as it's matter compliant. Now that was scheduled to launch this summer, probably around June, but the folks who administer the matter standard, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or CSA, told the Verge that that launch is being rescheduled for autumn. CSA says the holdup is because more developers than expected are adopting the platform. So they want to take more time to make sure that the SDK will work with all the platforms. CSA expected five platforms a year ago, and now says it has more than 16. So in addition to the ones you'd expect like Amazon, Google, et cetera, you also have Infineon, Synaptics, Darwin, Tizen, TI, NXP, Ex-Espressive Systems, Nordic, and more. Everybody wants in on this, which if that's the reason, that's a good sign. The CSA's Michelle Mandela Freeman told the Verge they will use the extra time, quote, to stabilize, tweak, tune, and improve quality in the code. Now, this isn't the first delay of matter. It used to be called Project Chip, and it was supposed to launch in 2020, but then 2020, 2020, all of us, and that launch got pushed to 2021. In August 2021, they changed the name to Matter, set mid 2022 as the launch. So pushing it by one season from summer to fall is a shorter delay than they've done in the past. If you wanna keep watch for milestones, CSA still plans to make the 0.9 Matter spec available in June. That'll go to more than 450 members so you can start testing and certifying when the 1.0 spec comes later in the year. Spec validation is expected to take six to eight weeks. However, 130 devices in 15 categories from 50 companies are already in testing. These are folks who were part of Matter from the beginning and will be part of that first rollout of Matter certified products. Light bulbs, locks, thermostats, blinds, garage door openers, wireless access points, TVs, those might be ready to ship as soon as the Matter spec is released. So we may still get Matter products before the end of the year, but the bulk of them are now going to come in 2023. Well, as somebody who's pretty, I have a lot of smart home devices, it'd be cool to be able to use Matter as sort of my single hub in the future. In a way, if I was being pessimistic, I'd be like, when is this ever gonna happen? Because yeah, now a bunch of other developers now wanna get on board and now it's getting pushed out because it was the promise of the future. And now the future just keeps getting pushed out. That said, all of this makes sense to me. The consortium saying, okay, well, we have way more interest. That is a good thing. That is a very good thing. In the short term, it's a little bit of a messy thing. And so the consumer has to wait a little bit longer. It makes a lot of sense to me that this is delayed because if you understand what they wanna do, they can't break things. Matter is as a brand supposed to, and I don't mean that in the specific way that they're trying to sell stuff, but rather in what you think about, when you think about Matter, what they hope is ease of use. And so if it is breaking things, it is going exactly against their entire purpose. So for me, I totally understand, if it's worth doing it all, it's worth doing right. And if you have more skews than you would think, then yeah, take the time to make sure that it works because no one's gonna have any sympathy for them if this rolls out and now all of a sudden my front door lock doesn't work. Yeah, and especially when the whole point, like we've been saying, is that this is easy, right? So you wanna make sure it works because otherwise people will lose faith in it really fast. And I think it gets overestimated whether that faith can be restored, but you don't wanna have to go through that work to restore it, because it takes time and it takes money to do that. And all the big companies are on board with this. I think it is, it's easy to wanna slam it and say like, ah, it'll never work. These are big tech companies that don't trust them. Obviously here we go, delaying again. It's gonna keep getting delayed. You just wait. It's sound, it rings true to me that they're like, actually, we have these people on board that really, the only interesting we have in bringing them on board is making this thing an actual standard. And so we're gonna treat it with respect. Make sure it's a standard. If in two weeks we get the unsourced story that Apple or Google are looking to pull out, now I think it is a different story. And to be clear, we're not hearing, give them the benefit of the doubt. We're not hearing any rumblings like that. You'd have to hear something like that to be like, all right, there's something else going. Make matter matter. Yes, we want matter. Well, speaking of things that might matter to you, Snap launched custom landmarkers on Wednesday, which lets the more than 250,000 Lens creators tie experiences to physical locations like stores or sculptures or other landmarks. So for example, you might have a lens that shows up if you're near your favorite brunch place, for example. To use it, you'll need a phone with a LiDAR sensor like an iPhone to scan the landmark. Then you import the scan into Snap's Lens Studio software on a desktop. Early testers said it took less than a day to make a geostatially anchored piece of content. Not, you know, it's a pretty good turnaround. Creators can also post QR codes in the real world to let users know there's a piece of AR content out there. Go find it. Custom landmarkers are viewable in the Snap mobile app as well as AR-enabled spectacles. If you happen to have a pair of those, it would also be, it would be compatible. Content moderators will review every AR lens before it goes live. That's what Snap says anyway, to help prevent conflicts between property owners and creators. Snap is also trying to hook locations up with creators. So, Manhattan's you and me books, for example, worked with creators at AR Developer Studio Real on a custom landmark. Snap's computer vision engineering director, Chi-Pen, told protocol that the next step would be to enable multi-user AR experiences. That's actually the most fun part of this, I think. The multi-user aspect of this, or the potential of it. Yeah, so that you could interact, not only everybody pointing their phones at the big saxophone next to the, you know, musicians statue, but, you know, you could all start playing it with each other or send things or, you know, throw a virtual ball around. We're like, who got there first? Yeah, yeah. The gamification part of this, yeah. Yeah, I think that this is a next level step up with what a lot of people have been doing on the Snap platform for a while in terms of creating filters that you could use only in certain geo-locations. So, you'll see that a lot of theme parks or restaurants or big events, concerts, whenever you're scrolling through somebody's Snap stories and you see, you know, Coachella or something like that, that is something that Coachella sets up and sets the boundaries for. Now, when you are watching Kanye West at Coachella, you might be able to behind the stage see a gigantic, you know, Donda house or something like that, that would be able to digitally be inserted and everybody would be able to see it from different angles. It's a cool idea. I do think that AR-wise, this is the kind of stuff that you would likely see more of if we are in a world where you are constantly looking through AR-powered glasses or something like that, but it really is, I mean, to be totally honest, the most fascinating thing about this to me is that it is on a just sign up to be a creator level because all of the hardware is on commercially available phones. I mean, the fact that we can light our scan and create something that fast truly is a leap forward that I think we kind of take for granted. I don't know if this is the Friendster, MySpace or Facebook of this thing, but this is the kind of thing that builds the metaverse, right? You have creators going out and creating stuff. Some of it won't be that useful. Some of it will only be popular temporarily. Some of it will just be artistic. Some of it will be practical, but I imagine this becoming, whether it snaps implementation or somebody else's, becoming an eventual substrate of the metaverse in the real world where we walk outside and we pop on those glasses that Justin is talking about and we see a whole lot more things. I was saying in our meeting today, I was like, what if we had a DTNS meetup and there was an AR arrow that was like, yep, you're in the right place. This is it. Or you had little navigation markers along the way where only people going to the meetup could see them, but it would help guide you to the thing. Like there's all kinds of useful things this could do as well. Well, but as we're talking about the metaverse and like, what is it? Where is it? How do we all get there? How is it like great for us? I think, and I have definitely been a person who's been sort of held back by being like, well, I don't like this thing. I don't want this in my metaverse. Why would I want this? That's sort of like, you have to think of it as like real life in a certain sense that, oh my goodness. I'm sorry, my Apple watch is ringing. I'm not used to it yet. The idea that, you know, Snap has launched so many of these landmarkers is like, great. Is it right for me? Maybe not. Might be right for somebody else, but it doesn't need to make sense 100% of the time for 100% of the people. Yeah, real quickly. Princess Delirium has a good question in our Twitch chat. How do people with glasses deal with VR goggles and headsets? And the answer for AR anyway is the Wayfarer, where you have prescription glasses that are your VR glasses. Now Wayfarers from meta are not AR glasses, but they are obviously meant to be the template. So you'll have prescription augmented reality glasses. Yeah, I mean, I think you have VR, you wear the headset over top of your glasses. Yeah, you have some kind of space. AR, theoretically, you would build that in. Yeah. All right, folks. If you have a thought about something on the show, maybe we provoked the thought there in that conversation. Why don't you send it to us? Email us feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Political scientist from UT Austin, La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne University of Waikato, published a study in digital journalism, a peer-reviewed journal, called Does Third Party Fact-Checking Increase Trust in New Stories, an Australian case study using the sports rorts affair. So quick digression, a rort is Australian slang for a dishonest act. Sports rorts, sports rorts was a story about the minister of sport in Australia denying that she awarded grants based on whether a club was located in a swing seat for her party in parliament. Okay, back to the study. The scientists made two identical stories, but presented them as being either from ABC, the broadcast network, or News Corp. These are two mainstream media outlets in Australia. The stories had identical wording and headlines. These weren't the actual stories from these outlets. They just had different fonts and banners to try to control for whether someone had a perception of one or the other. 1600 adults were asked to read one of the stories and then answer questions about news trustworthiness. Half the 1600 were given a version with an AAP fact check to read as well. That's the Australian Associated Press. 86% found the ABC story trustworthy. 79% trusted the News Corp story. Those are both really high. However, here's the interesting thing. Trust in the stories fell 13% after reading the fact checking article. The scientists suggested that the fact checking worked to point out that the politician quoted in the story had told a lie, but that the reader, when they found out that the statement was a lie, reduced their trust in the source of the story, not just in the politician who lied. They suggested that media outlets may wanna spend less time giving equal weight to all sides in an issue, calling out things that are falsehoods in the stories themselves, and that fact checking sites might want to clearly state who's being corrected, that they're not correcting the article author that they're correcting the politician, which some fact checking does, some doesn't. Well, some might suggest that maybe the users of these social media platforms just don't like being in hell, which is what the portal of endless fact checking is talking to these readers because they are indeed a hashtag portal to hell, hashtag hell portal. Look, I think that there's a lot of ways that you can look at these. I think that it is faulty for social media companies to look at themselves as a platform that is adding a filter onto a media source, because what I think is fascinating about this is that readers don't view it as, oh, here's this objective truth fairy filter that is put over top of the imperfect world of media. Instead, it's just another form of media. You are just attacking directly these other sources. And there's a million, I mean, I could bore everybody's head off by talking about how I think the way that we have organized journalism is slipping. And I think that there are functional things that editorially outlets should be focusing on that reduce the concept that there is a both sidesism when it comes to reporting. But at the end of the day, these fact checking outlets are not anything other than direct media rebuttals to the original sources. And when you look at it like that, it is very antagonistic and it is almost designed to erode trust. Yeah, I think one of the things that caught me here is that I, because I went to journalism school, I guess, understand that a fact check on something is not a fact check of the entire thing, right? It's a fact check of a part of the thing. But that's not clear. When you're fact checking an article from News Corp, feels like you're saying that the News Corp article was true or not. And really what it gets down to is, in my opinion, fact checking was not a panacea. Fact checking was a response to people shouting do something. So they did something. And we are now studying afterwards whether that was the right thing to do and how effective it was. And I'm not saying fact checking has no place. I think it does. It's just we rushed to slap it on without really knowing what its effects would be. And also the social media companies didn't wanna do it themselves. They didn't wanna hire their own people. So they outsourced it to other people that are actually media outlets themselves that are viewed as directly attacking some of these sources. So look, it is a total mess, but obviously my point on this has been well made over the years. Well, Sarah, how do we get off this planet then? I'm glad you asked Tom. NASA's Space Launch System, or SLS, is ready in a practice countdown before the first Artemis mission later the spring, which is more than 10 years after the last space shuttle took flight. It's kind of big deal if you care about space. The space launch system is designed to bring the Artemis missions to the moon starting with Artemis-1 coming in the spring. NASA engineers plan for the rocket to make its debut on Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern time. They will then roll out the vehicle assembly building and be ferried to launch complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center on Florida's East Coast. Justin, East Coast of Florida. Space Coast, baby. Yep, engineers and technicians will run a series of pre-launch tests through April 3rd. If SLS does indeed pass NASA can then set the launch date for the Artemis-1 mission. However, there is a lot of scrutiny of maybe, this is a lot of cost overruns. Quite a few delays as these things do tend to have. So with a lot of effort and funding invested in this particular moon program, a test run and staging ground for eventually sending astronauts, human astronauts, maybe, to Mars is clear than ever. But there's a lot riding on this test. Yeah, this has been in the works for years. The reason it's called Artemis is because that's the companion to Apollo. So it's gonna take us back to the moon. So Artemis mythologically and Apollo hang a lot in great mythology. So yeah, it's exciting to see a big rocket ready to take off from there. Yeah, look, the SLS has been derisively nicknamed the Senate Launch System because it's looked at as a give back to a lot of the contractors that have made space stuff for NASA in the past. It was once looked at as a competitor to SpaceX and then the intervening five years happened when SpaceX made itself to be a standard for spaceflight. The SLS will not be taking us to Mars. It will not beat SpaceX to Mars, barring something incredibly insane considering how slow it has gone. But it is good to see and the Artemis mission will include a SpaceX component. So that's it. And the Artemis mission wants to put the first woman on the moon, because we've only sent men before. Good, I'm always glad to see it. More space is better space, but the SLS is something that even from the moment that it was green lit was at a date. All right, I know I told Sarah to take us to space, but now I need Sarah to take us back down to the ground. What's in the mail bag, Sarah? Oh, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Sean, the historian in Toronto sent in his thoughts on renting e-bikes, because we were talking about that earlier this week, in Toronto, specifically, Sean says, I've used Zig, and by the way, we'll put his full email in the show notes if you wanna read the full transcript. We'll summarize now. Sean used Zig, which is a $189 Canadian dollar per month on a month-a-month plan, or $129 a month on a one-year plan, as well as seasonal discounted rates. Last autumn, Sean says he signed up for two months just to try it out. And, quote, they delivered the bike directly to my home and repairs and services were included in the price of the subscription. My commute is 25 kilometres. I tried it on a standard bike a couple of times, but it just wasn't practical for me to sweaty. Switching to a pedal-assisted e-bike was the perfect solution for me. I was able to commute regularly to the office two to three days a week, arriving in an hour and relatively sweat-free. If you're worried about safety, Sean adds, these bikes are fast, but they aren't faster than a standard road bike, many of which blew right by me on the way to work each day. Ah, well, that's good to know. Thanks for that. I like to get these on-the-scene reports, and I didn't even know they had one of these in Toronto. So there's even more places out there. They seem pretty widespread. Well, I think the whole idea of like, ride a bike, good for your heart, don't contribute to gas emissions kind of thing. A lot of people are like, yeah, but I mean, if you're really working at it, you are sweaty all the time. So I think Sean makes a really good point about what's actually reasonable for you to show up to an office, maybe in work clothes, and be able to use it to your advantage. Well, busily illustrating today's show has been Len Peralta. And so we check with the artistic fact that he has created. What do you got for us today, Len? Facts. It's funny you should mention facts, Tom. I decided to go with a lot of misinformation, the fact-checking and everything else. This is called fact-check this. And it's definitely something for you not watching the video to check out because there's a lot of lies being given by this so-called politician and some poor guy in the corner who is saying, you can't really trust these fact-checks articles at all, really. And one thing that's interesting about this is it's probably worth checking out because there's all kinds of little hidden sort of things in the background, these lies and stuff like that. So you may wanna- I was intrigued that the inside of my opponent is Nutella. But then I saw that the Cleveland Browns are number one and I knew something was wrong. They're actually Super Bowl contenders. Yeah, that's another, could be a lie, yeah. If you wanna see this, you can go to my Patreon, become a Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store at lennproaltestore.com and you can purchase it right there. Well, great work as always, Len. Also great work from you, Justin, Robert Young. Let folks know what you've been up to lately. Well, thank you, Sarah. Len Condolences on Baker Mayfield's trade request, but you can listen to the work that I've put out on Dog and Pony Show Audio, my production company, the new season of World's Greatest Con starring Brian Brushwood. Is rolling on, the newest episode this week is all about Charles Ingram and the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire scandal. A retired, sorry, an active army major in the British army goes on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, wins the million dollars in one of the most improbable runs of all time because allegedly he and his wife used the dumbest con of all time that we will ever cover on this series. You can go ahead and check that out now and listeners to the Great Night Podcast. Tomorrow, there is a thing that I've been working on in secret. It is the dumbest thing that I have ever worked on personally, but long-time listeners of the show will very much enjoy it. So check that out, Great Night Podcast for comedy, stuff for serious stuff, World's Greatest Con, season two continues. Justin, I don't know how you do it. You are one busy human. I just don't know how you do it. I fortify myself laughing at the Cleveland Browns, which has this power thing. That's what propels you forward. It's what the hate burns within me. All right, all right, everybody. Special thanks to Martin. Martin, maybe a Browns fan, maybe not. We don't know, but we do know that Martin is one of our top lifeline supporters for DTNS. So thank you to all the years of support. Martin, reminder folks, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you're part of the live show, we're gonna roll right into that now. Just a reminder for DTNS, we're live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with our guest, Stephanie Humphrey. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.