 Coming up on DTNS, Instagram is 10 years old and has brought back its old icon. Flippy the Burger Robot goes on sale and Shayna Moon is here to tell us how story fits into game development. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 6th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Dark Forest of Finland, I'm Patrick Beijel. I'm the show's producer, Roger Shea. And joining us, Senior Project Manager at Unity Technologies, you might know her work as being a producer on God of War. Shayna Moon is here. Welcome, Shayna. Good to have you. Hey, everybody. I'm really excited to be here. Ah, it's so much fun. We were just talking about a little bit about game design on good day internet, talking about the effect of D&D on story. And we were talking about Roger editing hex codes for cheats in his games. That's all in good day internet. You can get that big becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple announced an event for October 13th, 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time with a tag line, High Speed, which likely points to 5G connectivity and an A14 processor for new iPhones. Besides new iPhones reports indicate we might also hear about over the ear headphones, a new HomePod tracking tags, and the first ARM based Mac. Bloomberg notes that Apple stopped selling headphones and wireless speakers from Sonos, Bose and Logitech in its online store sometime before the end of September. Employees at Apple's physical stores were also instructed to remove the products. Ah, so that would bear out the HomePod and headphone rumors. Google has renamed its set of online productivity and collaboration tools from G Suite to Google Workspace. They even have new logos for all the apps and a few new features like collaborating on documents with guests in chat rooms, previewing linked files, expanded picture-in-picture for video calls and meet. And if you use the at symbol and mention somebody in a document, Workplace will now show you contact details and suggest actions like assigning them a task or something. Speaking of Google, Google Assistant now works on Tobit Dynabox devices, which use gaze tracking rather than voice interaction for accessibility needed by users with disabilities like cerebral palsy, autism and ALS. Users will need a Google account to add to Tobit devices in the Google Home app as a smart speaker slash display. The tiles can be created for commands that would normally be spoken. For instance, you would look at a title, a tile for what's my calendar title today, and then hear your calendar items. Facebook announced it will support Netflix and Zoom on its portal devices. The company will also expand its selection of stories offered through the its story time feature and add new AR effects and offer Spanish language voice control. Security firm PenTest Partners discovered a vulnerability in an internet connected Chastity device called the Cellmate. The Cellmate could lock or unlock by Bluetooth using an app. However, the API did not use a password, meaning anyone could take control of the Chastity device locked on you and lock it without the ability for it to be unlocked without bolt cutters or an angle grinder. The makers of Cellmate have pushed out an updated API, but have not taken down or fixed the previous one, which is still in use. Yeah. Wow. Moving on, Dell announced the UltraSharp 32 HDR Premier Color Monitor, which it claims is the first monitor with 2000 mini LED backlit dimming zones. It has a 99.8 percent DCI P3 and 93 percent Adobe RGB color gamut coverage, as well as VESA certified ETR 1000 support. It comes factory calibrated with a built in colorometer and supports two computers with picture in picture. The UltraSharp 32 ETR Premier Color Monitor sells for five thousand dollars, including the stand arriving November 5th. Well, you get the stand for that price. Reuters, unlike some other manufacturers, Reuters reports the US House Entity Trust Subcommittee is expected to publish a report this week on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet. The draft makes a vehicle for breaking up tech companies, makes it easier to block acquisitions and recommends data portability and interoperability standards. The report does not address censorship of speech. And AT&T has stopped taking new orders for DSL service in the United States as it begins to phase out that service. That leaves some people without an option, though. A report from the Communication Workers of America and National Digital Inclusion Alliance notes that AT&T has deployed fiber to the home in 28 percent of households in its territory as of June 2019. And it slowed roll out down, so it hasn't added much sense. AT&T does offer a fiber-copper hybrid to about 72 percent of households in its territory. AT&T continues to fall behind cable ISPs with 15.2 million internet subscribers compared to Comcast 29.4 million and Charters 28.1 million. All right, let's wish Instagram a happy birthday. Oh, let's. Instagram is 10 years old, y'all. Want to feel old? Yeah, that's what we're doing. Instagram is celebrating by giving its users old home screen icons along with some safety updates to change your icon if you so choose to do so. You go to the settings page in Instagram, scroll down to set off an animation which ends with a page that lets you change the icon to one of the company's first four style icons, as well as one called Twilight, which is a take on the current icon. So, you know, cute. Instagram also brought back StoriesMap, which shows you a map and calendar of your stories over the last few years. You know, if you've been doing stories, that might be kind of helpful. In more practical features, Instagram now uses machine learning trained on previously reported comments to automatically hide potentially offensive comments that you can choose to view if you so desire. And Instagram also expanded its Nudge feature to warn posters of potentially offensive comments from once to each attempts. Yeah, so a better management of trolls in your Instagram comments feed. I think a lot of people will be pleased to see that. I was one of those people who was taken by the idea of, oh, I could put the old brown camera icon back and I immediately went and did that. I'd forgot that they had done a more Polaroid looking version of the camera. That one was in there. That was its launch icon. And I guess they changed it within the first month. You can also change to the beta version of the icon, which I never saw in reality. But I don't know, I for a 10 year anniversary, I thought this was kind of fun. It's kind of funny, but the new icon has been around for about four years. So it's not like, ah, remember 10 years ago. It's just remember five years ago, which is a little bit less impressive. Maybe I'm being a little bit of a curfew. I mean, I don't know Instagram 10 years ago, really 10 years. Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing. I, Shayna, I don't know. Do you even use Instagram? Is this affecting you at all? I do. I like Instagram. Actually, recently I got taken in by an Instagram ad. I won't say what the product is because they're like, yeah, that's where they get you. But yeah, I mean, it's something that I like for like personal photos, that sort of thing. It's definitely not my primary social media, though. But I know for a lot of people, it definitely still is. Where do you fall in this nostalgia? The nostalgia spectrum that we have laid out here. I mean, my nostalgia is for like, certainly not a 10 year old web app. I mean, I'm nostalgic about, I don't know, AIM and live journal and stuff like that, not Instagram. That's real nostalgia. Yeah. The problem is, it's too, it's too current for 10 years to mean something. It's something that was big 10 years ago and that you don't have anymore. This doesn't, yeah. I think I just really didn't like the new icon, and that's why I was so excited. That makes sense. Security researchers have combined two exploits that were initially developed for jailbreaking iPhones. You may have heard of them, the Checkmate and the Blackbird, to hack Apple's T2 security chip. That's the one in your MacBook or your MacBook Pro. The T2 is a co-processor that also serves as a secure enclave processor, or SEP, to process cryptographic operations. So keychain passwords, touch ID, encrypted storage, secure boot. You don't want people breaking into that. The exploit lets a user run code inside the T2 chip during boot up to alter its behavior, letting the user, if you're doing it to yourself or the attacker, if it's someone you don't want doing it, gain access to your encrypted data and get control of the machine. Now, a hacker would need physical access to the Mac to do this. You have to create a special USB-C cable, attach it to the Mac, reboot the machine and run the Checkrain jailbreak, which combines those two vulnerabilities during boot up. The approach works because Apple left a debugging interface open, which allows device firmware update to run without authentication. That's why you're able to get in there and do something to the T2 chip. Sadly, the vulnerability appears to be unpatchable, though it is detectable, so you can undo it. You can take a couple of actions to undo it, but it's not something Apple can push out a firmware update. Now, before you run around with your hair on fire, if you're not a journalist working with sensitive sources who are being oppressed or a diplomat or a head of state, you probably don't need to worry about this. Someone has to have physical access and it's not an unsophisticated exploit. It takes a little sophistication to be able to pull it off, but not a great look for Apple, no matter how you think about it. Yeah, it seems like it would need to be extremely targeted as an attack. I'm also a little bit heartened by the fact that it is detectable and reversible, meaning someone who would really need to pay attention to something like that could soon, I'm guessing, have a tool, maybe even a tool from Apple to periodically look for it and do something about it if it's found. I don't know if Apple would do something like that, but certainly I'm guessing that some White Hat hacker would develop a small tool like that, that those who know they need it might go and look for and use. The little bit like checking that the barn door is closed after the animals all get out, I suppose, if somebody has got the data off the machine that you want. But yes, it is better than the alternative, which is to never know whether you've been attacked or not in this situation. I mean, you could theoretically, if you're in a really sensitive environment, you could have the thing and run it. I don't know how resource-intensive it is, but you could have it run every 30 seconds, you know, if it's possible, I guess, we don't know. What do we all think about talking about a robot for a minute? Oh, robots. It's a robot that does food even better. Even better. Mesa Robots has put an automatic food preparation robot on sale globally. It already existed, but now it's, you know, now it's open. Flippy, you may recall the name Flippy, reaches down from the ceiling to make burgers, fries, anything involving a fryer or a grill, uses a camera array, including an Intel 3D sensor and thermal camera to identify foods and navigate its environment based on the machine learning algorithms. It can scrape off, crud, remove excess oil, cook 19 food items. It really does it all. It can also fry chicken tenders, chicken wings, popcorn shrimp, french fries, tater tots, potato wedges, hash browns, onion rings, and waffle fries. It moves on a rail overhead and is controlled by a 15.6-inch touch screen. If you're wondering, all right, this sounds so great. How much is it gonna cost? Well, the Flippy robot on a rail, AKA Flippy Roar, sells for $30,000 U.S. dollars, although it can be rented for $1,500 a month, including maintenance and upgrades. Part of a pilot program at White Castle locations and soon operational at 50 Cali Burgers. Yeah, Roger, our producer went and looked at this when they first introduced it at the Cali Burger several years ago, and it's made a lot of advances since then. It's not something you're gonna buy for your own kitchen at this point, at least most of us wouldn't. I don't think so, yeah, no, not for that price. Yeah, but Roger, what do you think? Are you excited to see the next Flippy Roar? You know, in this kind of germ-sensitive time, I think this would be a really cool product because ostensibly it would be a little bit more sterile than having a human back there doing up your order of fries and onion rings. It is still limited to basically fried foods, which might blunt its reach in areas that are maybe a little more health-conscious, but I, for one, welcome our new robotic fry cooks. Here, here. I just kind of wanna see it at work. I do, you know, whenever we get these robot stories, we always have to consider like, is it going to be used to replace employees or as most of the time companies say is they wanna use this to let employees have more time for customer service, which, if they did that, would be great. This is awesome, like, this is not unlike the, it was the, what was the, There was a robot that was coming down from the ceiling. I think I know which one you're talking about. I know Patrick, you were laughing at me because I'm like, yeah, it's the one that like, cleans everything from- It was to do assisted living situations, yeah. The robots on rails above your head is kind of the new trend, for sure. It kind of is, right, because it's like, well, you know, it's less of a footprint, right? So something like this, yeah, sure, we're talking about things that are fried, but it's the beginning of something that is potentially pretty cool. Yeah, I'm sure it could be, I mean, currently it does this, but it could do a lot more and maybe not only for cooking. $30,000 was a little bit disappointing to me because I was already imagining it coming to my home and cooking stuff, but I'm hopeful that, you know, for a summer where there's a lot of barbecue happening, 1500 bucks, maybe you can rent it for a month or maybe I can buy W and have a- Yeah. I really don't think that's the target of it, but sure, yeah, why not? I want to eat something created by Flippy Roar, I don't know about y'all. Shayna, would you eat something created by Flippy? Yeah, of course. I'm not terrified of the robots turning against me. I don't think the robot's gonna poison me, although now I've spoken that into existence. Yeah, they've heard you. That's where they get you. I had literally never had to worry about this, but now it's all I can think about, so thank you very much. Hey, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget you can subscribe to our shorter five-minute show, Daily Tech Headlines at DailyTechHeadlines.com. A video game's experience is more than just the gameplay. It's also the narrative that glues all those various gameplay elements together. We asked Shayna on the show today to learn more about what developers need to think about when they're developing a game's story. Let's start with Lore, Shayna, the backstory of characters in the world. How important is Lore? So Lore is super important to any kind of game that's really gonna emphasize story, but it's really one piece of the puzzle, right? So while you have maybe your narrative department, or if you're on a smaller team, just one writer working on the backstory of your game and your world, you also have engineers putting together the systems that are gonna run the game. You have designers thinking about what kind of mechanics are gonna be involved. You have artists working on what kind of style they wanna go for for the game. And generally in a good functioning team, these people are all communicating with each other and everything kind of informs everything else. It kind of depends on what the priority is of the team. There's a whole spectrum of games and there's games where you can say sort of written down big picture story Lore is not as important. And then there's other games where that's really the foundation of the player's experience. So yeah, so it sounds like, I mean, depending on the team that you have, do you start with the game mechanic? Do you build a story around that? Or do you kind of suss out the team and figure out, okay, here's what we can do. Here's what we're good at. Here's what we'll go from there. It's interesting because it can depend on the team. Some developers are more suited to making a first person shooter. Some developers are great at doing puzzle style platformer games. It can depend a lot on the skill. And then I talked about the art team earlier. It can top, they can have some sort of artistic point of view that they really wanna explore and develop. There's a game that came out a couple of years ago called Grease, which is a 2D animated platformer. And so much of that game revolves around the art style and kind of this experience of beauty in gameplay. But there's a narrative to it. The player goes on a journey, but you're not picking up documents and reading out, you know, the story of Thonar, the Great King, blah, blah, blah, but you're still experiencing a story. It's just different. It's designed in terms of the gamer's experience. In every type of storytelling, whether it's books, movies or video games, there are different types of stories you can tell. What are the types of narrative or I guess the ways you can tell the story? What are the types of narrative in video game storytelling? Typically when we're talking about games that are narrative focused, the big split is between basically like a linear narrative. So something that you would think about in terms of like a cinematic experience or a movie. Like a Last of Us kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Last of Us is kind of well-known for being very cinematic. It has beautifully rendered cutscenes. Absolutely gorgeous game. And yeah, like your experience of that game is you're going from point A to point B, having some combat, having some puzzle encounters. But at the end of the day, there is a story that that team is trying to tell. And then there are other games that are more sort of open, you know, the term would be like open world. And that can vary in terms of like, you can have a more branching story where the player is making decisions that kind of changed the outcome of what can happen in the game. So one game I'm actually started playing two weeks ago because it's just one of my favorites is Dragon Age Origins. And Dragon Age Origins is cool because it does not just change based on decisions you make during the game, but you have the option of choosing six different origins for your character. And that origin changes the game sometimes significantly over the course of play. It still has an ending. It still has a thing it's going for. There are other like even more open ended things, but in terms of like RPGs, that's kind of what we talk about when we talk about like branching story and more open story. And then something that's like completely open where it's more about, you know, the narrative that the player discovers could be something as, you know, kind of well known as like Minecraft, right? Like Minecraft presents you with all these different biomes and characters and enemies. And really there's not like a concrete narrative, but, you know, players will talk to each other and say like, oh, I went to this place and this thing happened. And those are kind of like the player stories that can come out of those super, super open environments. Yeah, I wonder if it's appropriate to call something like that, I don't know, a systemic story where the systems of the games or the environments will tell the story as you discover it, not literally tell it to you as they would in more classical media. There are a lot of games like, I don't know, just off the top of my head, things like Dead Cells or you talked about Greece, of course, which isn't quite a narrative experience, but you, the story is inferred by the environment. Is that like, it's often, I guess, a necessity of smaller budget games, but is that like a whole other type of storytelling in itself that is emerging? Or is it still like, I don't know, small individual projects that happen to resort to those users to tell their stories? So it's interesting because there's definitely a certain type of storytelling that is associated with bigger budget games, right? Like Sony puts out a lot of prestige titles that have very high budgets and they typically have sort of very cinematic storytelling. On the Microsoft side, something like Halo has this sort of very epic linear storytelling and 343 has been definitely like pushing the envelope in terms of the visual fidelity of their narrative and cinematic content. But there are smaller sort of in the double A space funded games that also try to take that approach. One recent example would be, there's a studio called Spiders and they made a game called Tech Remancer. They also made a game called Greedfall, which are taking more of those cinematic storytelling approaches. So it's definitely not limited to the higher budget. I'd say it's more challenging because players expect a certain level of visual fidelity these days. But no, there are ways of really telling any kind of story that you want to regardless of budget. And I don't think that one is inherently sort of married to bigger smaller budgets. When you think of storytelling, there's definitely an impact with video games of the hardware of what you're using. How has newer gaming technology impacted the storytelling, the narrative game design? The biggest impact from my point of view has definitely been player expectations in terms of the amount of content. So if you're buying like a big AAA game and you're spending your $60 to buy your game, you have certain expectations about the amount of stuff that is gonna be in that game. There have been instances in the past where a call of duty game comes out and the single player campaign is fairly short and players get a bit upset. So the bigger hard drives get, the bigger downloads get, people are expecting more and more content. You see that a lot also in kind of online games where you may be paying a subscription, you may be paying cosmetics, but people have very high expectations. Sometimes I think a bit unfairly because if you break down your $60 purchase, if you play that game for 40 hours, you've definitely gotten your money's worth, but I think some people sometimes have higher expectations even than that. I mean, Shayna, having kind of been entrenched in the games biz for some time, what would you like to see? Okay, the consoles are getting better, we're all getting 8K kind of stuff, but what do you want to see in games? So my aspiration for the games industry does not necessarily have a lot to do with getting to the most highest fidelity cutting edge tech. The thing that I really care about is getting the tools that people need to make games into as many hands as possible. Because I think that when we put those game development tools in the hands of people from different cultures, people from marginalized groups of any sort, you get more interesting stuff, you get game developers introducing things into the conversation of games that the establishment might not necessarily have ever even thought of. You have better representation and it really just makes the whole landscape of people's experience with games better. I really love just how many open source game development tools there are these days. There's the Blender project and Blender has really, ever since, when I was in college, Blender was a thing and it's just continued to get more and more sophisticated. It's really democratizing tech for people. Unity, of course, is also an engine that's very accessible. I work for them. They didn't pay me to say that, but it's true. When I was in college, we were really like, hey, can we get Unity on these computers? Because this is a way we can make games. So yeah, getting the tools into people's hands and really making opportunities for people who wouldn't normally, I'm from the Midwest. And I had a lot of advantages growing up and it was still really hard for me to get into the games industry. So I try to do what I can to help people break in that way. I really thought you were gonna say you wanted smaller hard drives. This is really much better at it. Two gigabyte hard drives. Well, if anything, Shayna has said resonated with you. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. That's where you can talk about all sorts of stuff. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Before we get out of here, it's time to check the mail bag. It is, Al Spaulding wrote in about our guest, Mark Johnson, yesterday who is the co-founder of Plain for Change. And Al says, this is so cool. It's an amazing project. I've seen and heard more musical instruments that I never had seen before in three songs that I knew existed. I've been going down the rabbit hole on the YouTube watching these for a while. Oh, thank you, Al. Appreciate that. I know, very cool. Also, thanks to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Ken Hayes, Tony Glass, and Jeffrey Zilks. Also, big, big thanks to Shayna Moon for being with us today. Shayna, you're obviously very busy and we'd love to give people a chance to let you know what you're doing else and where they can find you. Yeah, so the easiest way to find me, well, there's shaynamoone.com, which is where you can find all my very professional information. But then the easiest place to talk to me about game stuff is Twitter. I'm at Twitter at Q-O-R-Q-U-I-Q. Don't ask, it's just for fun, y'all. I'm just having a good time. So feel free, I love to talk about this stuff so you can hit me up on there. Solidarity, my Twitter account is ACEDTECT, and I have to spell it out too. So we will have a link in the show notes to Shayna's Twitter account if you want to find it there. There's another way you can get it as well. Thanks again, Shayna. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today. Patrick, what's been going on since we saw you last? Well, if you thought the conversation about gaming was interesting, you might enjoy Pixels, which is a show I do about gaming news. And to find it, it's the opposite of Tom and Shayna's Twitter accounts. It's super simple. You just go, not Patrick, because my name is Patrick, so not Patrick, and you add .com, and you find the links to all my shows. And it's also my Twitter handle, by the way, not Patrick. So both of those work. Hey, folks, if you want a mask or a hoodie or a mug or a mouse pad, I got a DTNS mouse pad right here. In fact, I need a new one. This one's getting kind of dirty. So head on over to dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Helps you out with some new stuff. Helps us out as well to keep the show going. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love your feedback. Keep it coming. We're also live. Join us if you can Monday through Friday before 30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash slide. Creator week rolls on with VFX artist Carrie Smith tomorrow talking about what goes into all those computer-generated effects. Scott Johnson will be here as well. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.