 Coming up on DTNs, will metaverse mania give Second Life a second chance? TSMC says it isn't even worried about the chip shortage anymore, and delivery robots don't need humans anymore, mostly. DTNs, starts now! This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 13th, 2022 at Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. That's right, Len's doing a bit of a Thursday stint for the next foreseeable few fortnights. So good to have you, man. It's nice to have you on a Thursday. It's nice to be here. It's different. We were just breaking down an analysis of the cultural relevancy of Ferris Bueller's Day off on an extended version of this show called Good Day Internet, which you can get at patreon.com slash dtns. Big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. We have a couple of Apple follow-ups. One, Apple confirmed it removed several wordal clones from the App Store. One game called Wordal, with an exclamation point after it, is still there because it's a different game and had already been there for five years. It has, Wordal is not as old as five years. A reminder that the actual Wordal game is a web app that you get in a browser, not in an App Store. No word from Google, however. Apple said it's not changed customer settings regarding private relay. That's a similar story that we were talking about over the last couple of days. It seems most likely now that people find private relay turning off have only activated it for Wi-Fi. So it needs to be activated separately for your carrier's data connection. Here are a couple of battleground game stories you should know about. Krafton, the developer of Player Unknown Battlegrounds, aka PUBG, is suing game maker Garena and Apple and Google for copyright infringement in the United States. Krafton claims Garena's free fire game copies PUBG's opening game structure, play, object selection, locations, color schemes, materials, and textures, and that Apple and Google have not responded to takedown requests, so they are liable as well. Krafton and Garena settled on similar issues in Singapore previously. Separately, Epic's battleground game Fortnite is back on iOS, sort of. Fortnite for mobile is in a closed beta test on the Nvidia GeForce Now game streaming service, which you can access as a web app in the Safari browser. Microsoft confirmed it has hired chip designer Mike Filippo. Bloomberg sources say that Filippo will work on custom processors for Microsoft's Azure Cloud Service. He previously worked for ARM and Intel, and most recently worked on Apple's M1 chip. WordPress's popularity makes it a big target for malware, and one of the easier ways in is through a plugin's vulnerability, risk-based security, put out their end-of-year analysis saying that WordPress plugin vulnerability kind of skyrocketed, 142% in 2021 to 2247% of those were being publicly exploited, so these weren't just discovering a vulnerability before somebody could take advantage of it. Risk-based security recommends that organizations prioritize their security resources on WordPress towards the most easily exploitable bugs, not just based on a criticality score. Nigeria lifted its ban of Twitter in the country after Twitter agreed to open a local office and also appoint a representative, among other actions, including tax obligations. Twitter was suspended on June 4th after it removed a post by Nigerian President Mohamedu Buhari. All right, let's talk about game consoles. We mentioned previously that Sony extended production of the PS4 through 2022 in order to plug the gap in availability of the PS5, so if you just want Sony games and don't care about the advanced features of any PS5 exclusives, you can save money and actually have a chance of getting a console. The chips for the PS4 are apparently easier to source, and Sony doesn't have to make as many of them. For comparison, Sony sold 8.9 million PS5s in the first nine months of 2021 compared to 1.7 million PS4s. They say they expect they'll make about 1 million PS4s this year, and this is actually fairly common for Sony. The PS3 stayed in production for three years after the PS4 launched, and in fact, the PS2 was in production until the year before the PS4 launched. The PS2 stayed in production for a long time. Microsoft, on the other hand, is taking the opposite approach. It told the Verge Thursday it stopped production on all Xbox One consoles back at the end of 2020, more than a year ago. And while the Xbox One Series X, the one with the drive, is still hard to find, the Xbox One Series S seems to be able to stay in stock, and that's mostly, Microsoft says, because it's easier to get chips for the Series S, so it can make a lot of them. I mean, I know the PS5 is still hard to come by, and it's been quite a while. I know a few folks who have figured out how to get them on the black market. The idea that the PS4 is still being in production doesn't surprise me, especially with PlayStation's history of having older consoles still also being in production and people buying them. Microsoft's play here is a little, I don't know, it's a little unclear to me. Do they just want the idea of the Xbox One Series X to be so hard to find that it drives up price? No, no, no. I mean, this is by design. Really, with the last console switch over, Microsoft made a fairly deliberate decision to say, we want you to refresh your game cycles closer to that of a laptop than that of a television. And if you think about it like that, that Sony's like, look, once every decade or so, we're going to ask you for anywhere between $800 and $1,000, and you're going to get the new hardware that will be there for a very long time. Whereas Xbox believes that, hey, if we come out with incremental step ups in the intervening intervals, A, we're probably going to be able to sell a few versions of this to various people who want some new feature or some new element that will benefit them. But also, they have a little bit more of a production of scaled situation where Sony does not. So it's like, obviously, the chip shortage here exacerbates a lot of it, but I think that this is kind of their business models showing their strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, I think the Series S, whether you want to give Microsoft credit for foresight or not, just as easier to make. The PS5, the two versions of the PS5 are both harder to make. And so the PS4 is the Series S in this situation for Sony. It just happens to be an older model, but the Series S is also a less capable model than the Series X, although perfectly acceptable and still very new. So yeah, I think Microsoft does have a little bit of advantage of looking newer, but if you step back a little, the strategy isn't that much different. It's just that the branding is a little bit off. You know, governments are getting into this crypto thing, and the two biggest governments in the world are doing it in very different ways. China has been full speed ahead with its digital one and plans to make a big push for athletes to use it at the Winter Olympics in February. That's not all. China's state-backed blockchain services network wants to support NFTs by the end of the month. China has banned almost all cryptocurrencies, and almost all NFTs are associated with cryptocurrency, especially Ether. So China's betting that it can get a piece of that NFT pie without having to rely on those pesky, independent systems. The BSN distributed digital certificate BSN-DDC for short, in case you want to have that super, super handy nomenclature in your brain, has localized public chains like Ether and will have its own API, so businesses and individuals can build portals and apps that will work with it. Only Chinese WAN can be used for purchases and service fees. Seems like that might be a great place to promote digital WAN. Aside from collectibles, it might also be used for certificate management like car license plates and school diplomas. Meanwhile, in the good old US of A, we're moving a little slower. While the Federal Reserve says a digital dollar is a top priority, how it will work is still up for debate. One of the largest salvoes is from Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer's proposal to limit the Fed's ability to operate a digital dollar. The bill would prohibit the Fed from issuing digital dollars directly to individuals. The idea is to prevent the Fed from being able to collect personal identifiable information, track transactions or operate in any way like a retail bank. That's music to the ears of, you guessed it, retail banks whose main concern with the government issue digital currency is that it would cut them out of the loop. Yeah, there are concerns that there could be an implementation where if the Fed issued the digital dollar directly, they could collect a lot of data. Now, there are a lot of ways to safeguard and operate a digital dollar that would allow the Fed to issue it but not collect that information. I'm not sure if Emmer's bill, and I haven't read it, is on that end of like, sure they can issue it but there needs to be a way to firewall them off from knowing stuff which would be perfectly reasonable or if it is sort of like, and so they should be issued to banks and then everybody gets them from banks and then banks can make sure to profit off this and not get cut out of the chain and then you're just back to like, well now banks have my personally identifiable information which they already do but one of the big benefits of a central bank digital currency like this is that you can issue it in a way where only the person who has it has to deal with it. You don't need a bank and that is good for the unbanked population to be able to easily access digital currency, something that is more difficult these days otherwise because sometimes banks don't want to grant an account and then you can't use Zell if you don't have a bank account and stuff like that. So I would hope that Emma's bill does not cut off that benefit of a central bank digital currency. Yeah, I almost wonder whether or not it matters. Certainly a federally backed digital currency from the United States would be something that would be attractive to a lot of people in the way that anything back by the United States is attractive to a lot of people but what's interesting about cryptocurrency to me and I think for a lot of people to look at it as a hedge against a controlled currency by a state, any state really but the United States in this particular case is that there are a lot of options and unless we get into a situation where other currencies are banned or you are chasing them out of the market by some kind of regulation then the U.S. doing whatever they need to do to their currency to feel special about it is probably okay. Yeah, digital dollar ends up being like a stable coin. It's not an either or. Here is a central bank digital currency that could even make it easier for cryptocurrencies to interoperate. I mean, USDC is already sort of that. But it's not run by the Fed, right? It still needs to have dollar back. So that's what a central bank digital currency gets you is you don't need to have a piece of paper anywhere. Well, this wouldn't require a piece of paper either. Second life founder Philip Rosedale is returning to the company. He left in 2010, at least publicly. Rosedale told the Wall Street Journal that he'll serve as strategic advisor and help grow the company's expansion as the metaverse gains wider traction. Rosedale also said that the business models that big tech currently uses didn't necessarily name them but I think you would know other big tech companies who are interested in the metaverse like tracking user behaviors to target ads would be potentially harmful in this future metaverse that we all might be going into. Second life was founded in 2003 and has hovered around 1 million users since 2008. Now at the time, there was a lot of users. There are a lot of other second life-esque companies that have a lot more users as of this time. Second life's parent company, Linden Research, said it's working with Rosedale to drive momentum into its business. Part of that is Second Life offering people a way to withdraw money from in-game sales into the real world and improving the social and economic components of the game such as avatars and digital marketplace items. After Rosedale left Second Life, he founded High Fidelity which initially planned to create a successor to Second Life but eventually focused on spatial audio and VR instead. Clubhouse is one of High Fidelity's clients. Clubhouse. High Fidelity's staff will join Linden Lab as well as High Fidelity's patents as will. You know that million, a million install base for Second Life is a very, very interesting idea because obviously it is nothing to sneeze at. There are a lot of platforms that would love a solid, can't chase them away with a rake and a bang in the pots and pans, million sub user base. But that user base has been there for a very long time and they are very used to that service and I don't know exactly how much utility they have to change things, you know, radically. What I will say about Second Life is that if they have a best in class or at least in the neighbor of that VR app, they do have a lead in terms of community and moderation and that is something that has really, really eluded other elements that have kind of played in this space like VRChat, which famously became very, very quickly earned a reputation for being toxic. I think this is fascinating because with all of this metaverse talk since Mark Zuckerberg launched it into public consciousness, I've been wondering about Second Life. I sort of the general sense seems to have been, gosh, they were doing a similar thing back in the day but they're too far behind the eight ball. That's old and it's not going to happen. And so I was very interested in the story of Second Life saying, well, we're not going to resign. We're not going to just back away. Let's see if we can get in on this. Let's see if we can, because we know we've learned a lot in the 20 years that we have been doing this. And you know who the guy who really knows this space and continues to work in it? Philip Rosdale. So they convinced him to come back. I still think there's a better chance that Second Life doesn't become a major player in the metaverse than not, but they got a shot because you've got experience and you got users. It seems like a classic example. Sorry, Justin, of Second Life just being ahead of the game saying this is the metaverse. Who likes it? And a million people were like, we do. But life went on. And now there is this resurgence in the idea of, oh, okay, what does the metaverse mean? What did Second Life provide people? And what can the next iteration of Second Life continue to provide people, which makes sense in this whole thing that's being pushed by a lot of other companies? I don't know. I think they might have a shot. Yeah, you know, there's that old saying, right, that the first through the door get shot. And oftentimes it's better to have the second mover advantage than the first mover advantage. In Second Life's case, they were so fast through the door they got forgotten. You know, Second Life is kind of thought of as retro tech, despite the fact that obviously it kind of portended this online all the time sort of future that now the metaverse is given a fresh coat of paint on. I've rekindled my optimism for Second Life being a player. It's going to have to open up though. If it wants to be metaverse has to interoperate. I'm not saying it won't, but they got some challenges. You're taking a creaky old system built for 2003 originally. It's been updated over the years. I'm not saying it hasn't, but... I mean, you looked at Minecraft lately. One last thing on this. I do think that the idea of the founder returning has more to do with the fact that he has a company and a staff and patents and they've been playing in the world. Yeah, the patents. The facial art. Yeah. Also, people who play Minecraft and Roblox, they don't know what Second Life is. It's not their generation. All right, folks. Don't miss this weekend's kickoff of a new mini series from Dr. Nikki Ackerman's. Dr. Nikki is scientists in tech. For the next several weeks on Saturdays, you'll get an interview with a scientist working in the world of technology from Dr. Nikki. Find it right here in the DTNS feed starting this weekend. The chip shortage. How can we miss you if you won't go away? Just because we haven't mentioned it lately doesn't mean it's gone. For instance, Kelly Blue Book released data estimating the average price US customers paid for a new car in December was a record $47,077. Now, December is always heavy with higher priced luxury cars due to generous gift givers that I have not had the pleasure of being related to. But if you remove luxury cars from the math, you still get a rather hefty $43,072 on average. That's for non-luxury cars. To oversimplify, the shortage of new cars is mostly down to a shortage in chips. The chip shortage goes on. However, what you may not realize is the conventional wisdom among analysts is that chip shortage is going to end this year. We're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. One solution to the shortage would be to make more chips. One problem with that is, of course, to make more chips, you need more chip making stuff, factories, fabs. Unlike a Chinese hospital, you can't put up a chip factory very fast. But the world's largest contract chip maker, TSMC, plans to try throwing money at the problem. The question is, are they throwing money at the problem when the problem's about to go away? TSMC finance chief, Zhen Xiaohuang, said Thursday, the company plans to spend as much as $44 million to expand capacity with 70% to 80% of that for advancing processing tech. One example is a 3-nanometer fab expected to go online in Taiwan later this year, 3 nanometers. Intel has also announced plans to spend 25 to 28 billion this year to increase capacity. Now, you might worry that by the time all that new capacity comes online, the chip shortage might have declined. After all, work from home caused a lot of it. People are either heading back into the office or are all geared up for what they need to continue working from home. Supply chain rhythms will eventually find a new normal and stockpiling, aka hoarding, will stop. That's backed up by multiple analysts lowering forecasts for chip demand in 2022. So when you look at the line of like, it takes this long to build the fab and this is where the chip demand is going, is this such a good idea? Well, TSMC believes that even when the current shortage abates, demand, which was increasing even before the pandemic, is going to continue to increase and they want to continue to be the world's largest contract chip maker. 5G service is going to enable higher capacity connections. Talk a lot about speed, but you can have a lot more things connected to it, which means there's opportunities for more connected devices out there, particularly sensors and other IoT devices. TSMC says that there are more chips than there used to be in existing device types, automotive, PC, servers, networking, and smartphones. TSMC is saying, forget the chip shortage. Yeah, okay, that's not why we're building the fabs. There's just going to be a boom in the need for chips in general. TSMC is sure enough about that, that it has raised its annual growth rate targets for the next several years. They went from 10 to 15 percent growth to 15 to 20 percent. It does seem to me that building the next gen chip making facilities is just the way to go. Sure, there's been a shortage and so companies have had to scramble a bit, maybe put this on their roadmap a little bit faster than they would have originally, but none of this seems like a bad idea to me. I also feel like the whole idea of like, well, people are going back to work and maybe the chip shortage is going to resolve itself in 2022. I mean, there are a lot of companies who said that three months ago and that's not the case anymore. I would venture, I guess, that this is going to go a bit longer. I think the chip crisis might abate. The idea that the pandemic also bumped us ahead roughly five years in about a year and a half in terms of the general adoption of technology and therefore the need for more things with chips in it, I think that's here to stay and these are smart moves. You want to know what else is a smart move, friends? The fact that Uber, when they acquired Postmates last year, they spun out the Postmates Robotics Division as an independent company called Serve Robotics. That company has been developing sidewalk robots, which are now fairly common in certain areas of big cities and in college campuses around the world. Star Robotics is one we've mentioned before, but there are a few others like Coco and Kibibot. There are the little cooler-on-wheels robots that roll on sidewalks for the most part. One thing all these services have in common is human oversight. Something, sometimes that's a person following along behind to step in if something goes wrong, but more often these days it's a remote operator observing multiple robots so they can take over, if needed, albeit from another place physically. Serve is launching Level 4 delivery robots, meaning under certain conditions, they do not require humans to intervene to complete a route. Serve's Level 4 robots operate in geofenced areas of Los Angeles, including Hollywood. Now, mind you, they're not Level 5, which means autonomy in all conditions, so they want to turn on its camera feed for remote supervision at intersections, during pickups and drop-offs and can request remote assistance if they encounter something unexpected. But for most of the time, in a designated Level 4 area, they're on their own. The bots run on NVIDIA's Jetson platform and use camera sensors along with Ultrasonics and LiDAR from Ouster. Serve's partners include 7-Eleven, Delivery Hero, and, of course, Uber Eats. A shared video on its website with one of the first commercial deliveries using the Level 4 capability. This is why I miss living in a city. Particularly in San Francisco, where, you know... The delivery of burrito? I mean, I can get a burrito delivery, no problem, but not by our robots, not coming out here. But as we talk about autonomous vehicles and what they can do and what people want them to do, you know, whether it's me getting in the car and going somewhere or you bringing me my burrito, because I'm very far away from the burrito place that I like the most. This is great. I have my feelings about Uber Aquarium Postmates. Seems like it was an acquisition that made a lot of sense for both companies. Not sure if it makes a lot of sense for me as a consumer, but yeah, this is, you know, it's just one step forward, I suppose. One wheel rotation forward in this case. Correct. Perhaps. Yeah, this is a big step or role to have Level 4 autonomy, to take the pressure off. This makes it easier. This increases the capacity. You can have more of these robots in action because you don't have to have the human supervisor looking at as many of them. When you went from having to follow the robot physically to being able to sit in a control room and monitor a bunch at once, that increased the capacity. This will increase the capacity even more. Granted, Level 5, which they're shooting for, who knows when they'll get there, would increase the capacity even more. But this is a pretty big deal. And yes, this is not going to work everywhere. It's not going to go over long distances. This is only going to work where they can put in centers, but it will decrease congestion because you don't have to put a whole big car on the road to deliver that one burrito. You can just take a little bit of room up on the sidewalk. And if you watch their video, these things are really polite. There's a one point where it gets over to the side and lets this one guy who's just not paying attention just barrel on by and then continues on its way. What's the alternative? Like an aggressive robot who's just kicking people? Well, I'm lover for delivering here. Get out of here. I think a lot of people assume that. They're like, oh, these things are going to run over your feet and they're going to be dumb and they're not going to tell I'm here. Like they work is really what I'm saying. Yeah, I actually think that the services that they would be more destined for are the ones that we were mocking a few weeks ago, which are the immediate I need toothpaste right now services that even who reads your refrigerator on wheels. Don't have to keep it in your house. Well, listen, I know we're having a lot of fun on the show and there was a time where me, you know, whistling the tune to baby shark. People would have thought was fun. I know that is not the case anymore because people have families. However, baby shark just became the most viewed YouTube video of all time. This actually happened in November of 2020. So, you know, it's a couple months old, but that is quite remarkable. Since then, it's also become the first YouTube video to surpass 10 billion views. Now, if you want to kind of make sense of the cultural impact, there's also a baby shark show on Nickelodeon, a baby shark movie, and even baby shark NFTs, which you may own. As far as YouTube numbers, you know, just to put this in perspective, the second most viewed is Louis Fonsi's Des Pasito, which was in first place before baby shark with 7.7 billion views, which seemed like a lot. This is the original with Daddy Yankee, not the Bieber version. We did original reporting for the show. We did some research on our part just to make sure we knew what Des Pasito version we were talking about. We did a search and looked at it with a competing article. It's baby shark, y'all. I mean, it just continues to surprise and delight, I guess. And Gungnam Style, now down at number 11. Seems like it was just yesterday. Well, and Gungnam Style was the first one billion, right? I believe it was. Yeah. And that was such a big deal, you know? And now baby shark has 10 billion. I had big hopes for Supertuna to catch baby shark, but I just don't think that's going to happen. Give up the ghost, Tom. Well, you know, there's always time. Let's check out the mailbag. There's other fish in the sea. Yeah. Speaking of the mailbag, Nate wanted to remind us that the Wordle web app, which we've talked about extensively on the show and in GDI, is a web app and such can be added to an app home screen. Nate reminds us when a website is loaded in Firefox on Android, just tap the three dot kabob menu button. Nate says, I just learned that's what it was called. And then tap install. Doing that creates a Wordle icon on the Android home screen. And then at any time you click that icon, Wordle goes into full screen mode with no menu buttons, no address bar, even went offline using Firefox as the engine. And now I know, Nate, you're talking about Android, but that would work on iOS as well. Yeah. Good reminder. Thank you for that. I mean, I think we made it clear that it was a web app, not an app store thing, but a lot of people don't realize that that means you can still use it like an app. You could still add it to a home screen. You can create it and it will be app-esque. I did not make my Wordle today. And that's all I have to say about that. You want to know what? Neither did I. And that is a BS word. I don't like it. And I think it was unfair. You know what? I thought it was unfair as well, because they use two consonants in a row. Come on. I didn't know that was a thing. Spoiler. Spoiler. Giving out hints now. Wow. Sorry. Sorry. It made me mad. It made me mad at 9AM. I don't like it. I don't like the games you're playing, Wordle. Yep. This won't go down while at Westminster. Boy. Well, you know what will go down? If you hint McGirt, who said that was a hint? Yes. I know. Come on. Spoiler's all around. Who said that was a hint? What is not a spoiler is us thanking our brand new bosses. Today they include Thomas Sorenson, Entropy UK, and Row Daddy. They all just started backing us on Patreon. You know what? We love your names. Keep them coming. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Entropy. And thank you, Row Daddy. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Three for a hat trick of new bosses. Really, really appreciate that. The trifecta of excellence. Shall we thank Len Peralta? I know it's Thursday. So we're getting used to this whole thing, Len. But what do you got for us? Well, by the way, I agree with you with the Wordle thing. Very upsetting. Anyway, chips, this shortage is so great, right? But you know what? For Kars, here's a guy who is not have that happening in his ride. He's, you know, I think I've done this joke before. But, you know, he's filling up his car with chips. But here's the fun part. All the chips are, you know, try to do a little bit with the, with DTNS. There's famous Zoey D's bacon chips. There's Johnson's, which I'm assuming are potato chips. Sarah Poofs, which is my favorite. And of course, who can forget Chango's, right? Because they're delicious, right? So, oh, and then the little license plate is DTNS. There you go. So a little lot of hidden things in this one. That's cute. It's fun. It's fun. I would love to know what my poofs are made of. I'd like to think that there may be like a Cheeto. Yeah, like a Cheeto quality. That's exactly what I would want. Good stuff. Yeah. If you are interested in owning this, you can go to my Patreon, Patreon.com. You can get it there right now. Or if you just want to go the old-fashioned route, of course, go to lendproldestore.com and get it for yourself. There you go. Well, Len, we're so glad to have you on Thursdays, which is a little, you know, it's a little different, but lovely all the same. So thank you. And we'll see you next week. Just from Robert Young, always a pleasure to have you as well. Let folks know what you've been up to. Well, there was a story that happened over the holiday season that the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, does not use Bluetooth headphones because she believes that they are more hackable than wired headphones. So I talked to a man who knows a lot about hacking, Darren Kitchen. We talk about that, the idea of politicians using devices that may or may not be hacked, how much you need to care about it, in not only your representatives, but also your personal life. That is at Politics Politics Politics, the podcast available for you where podcasts are. Check it out, everybody. Also, check out our show live if you can, Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with the Tech John and SMR podcast. It's Rob Dunlop. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.