 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including DeGrascia A. Daniels, Irwin Stur, and Ken Hayes. Coming up on DTNS, GPUs are in abundance. Prices are plummeting, but is that true for the card you actually want? Patrick Norton's gonna tell us, plus the Twilio breach gets worse and worse and our best guess at why you won't want to buy Meta's new VR headset this October. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 26th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Oh, we can't hear you, Patrick Norton, but somewhere in Portland is Patrick Norton, who muted himself so he wouldn't cough earlier, and then on, yeah. It's all good. Podcasts are hard, Tom. And Len. Drawing the top tech stories, I'm Len Peralta from Cleveland. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. It's Friday, and a bunch of people tried to convince us Amazon wanted to buy EA, and then a bunch of other people tried to convince us they won't, and Amazon isn't saying anything. That's not news, but this following stuff, there are a few tech things you should know. This one. Fry, yay. Last pass confirmed threat actors reach its developer environment through a single compromised developer account, ultimately accessing source code and technical information. There's no evidence that customer data or encrypted password vaults were compromised. T-Mobile announced a partnership with SpaceX to connect phones to its Starlink satellite internet service. This coverage above and beyond, as they are calling it set up, will provide a combined two to four megabit per second connection in the areas that it covers. That would be enough if it works to let someone with a clear view of the sky send a text message or two. Eventually, they say they wanna try to offer voice and data. After Starlink launches some second gen satellites with larger antennas next year, T-Mobile will launch the service in beta in select areas. It will use its existing mid-band spectrum, so most current phones will work with it. It will also work with Tesla vehicles, and they hope to add partners in other countries along the way. Google has two main operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. So for years, folks have been wondering what Google might do with the third OS, that one being Fuchsia, which it built from the ground up. Nine to five Google now reports that Google has rolled out Fuchsia to all Nest hubs and Nest hub maxes. The only change that users are likely to notice from this is the addition of a Bluetooth menu in settings. The Nest hub, second gen, would look to be in line to get Fuchsia as well. It was a big day for Twitter. Chancellor Kathleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery, that's what they call a judge in the Court of Chancery, a chancellor. That said, Elon Musk's demands for user data were, and I quote, absurdly broad, and that what Twitter has agreed to give him is, quote, sufficiently broad to satisfy most of plaintiff's obligations. Now the judge did order Twitter to hand over data from 9,000 accounts that it sampled in Q4 in order to estimate spam or bot users, and it has two weeks to do that. That is the data that Twitter used to estimate that 5% of its accounts were bots. That's the number they've been banding about. So the chancellor said, give the data you used to come up with the 5% to Musk's side. Twitter Musk trial starts on October 17th, but that's not all. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeted that his biggest regret, quote, is that it became a company. Dorsey believes Twitter should be a protocol, like email. I actually kind of get this. It's funny the way you put it though. And Twitter announced its integrating podcast into the spaces tab for English speaking audiences on mobile. Spaces hubs called stations will now include popular podcasts as well as the live and recorded spaces rooms it does now. Desktop support for podcasts in spaces will depend on how well this does. Chat Nougat, Tennessee's municipal utility, EPB has provided gigabit municipal fiber internet since 2010. So it has a new trick. EPB announced on August 24th, it will offer residential and business customers a symmetrical 25 gigabit per second plan. If you're keeping score, this is the fastest multi-gigabit broadband service currently available in the US. The plan will only be available to everybody in EPB's 600 square mile service area. So room to grow, but boy, if you live there, it's limited. That's the problem with municipal broadband. Sure, they'll give you 25 times the gigabit that I can't actually get in my neighborhood. Yeah, if you only live in a 600 square mile radius. I have so many rude things to not say right now, Tom. No, I feel you, man. I feel you. So, do you think that's moving to Chat Nougat? I don't know. Maybe soon. I mean, it sounds pretty good. All right, let's talk a little more about that VR headset coming from Meta. Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that came out on Thursday. He said a lot. He said a lot about how much it sucks to try to moderate almost three billion people. I'm sure y'all feel real bad for him. Yeah, I know, it sucks. It didn't really say anything particularly insightful on that topic, although he's getting quoted everywhere. Nothing you wouldn't predict, he would say, is the way I would look at it. But here's what he said about VR. Yeah, so Meta will launch a new VR headset in October. According to Zuckerberg, which is when Meta's Connect conference takes place. So that would make sense. It would be a successor to the Oculus 2 and also have features meant to give users a feeling of social presence. Again, says Zuckerberg. It will have eye and facial tracking, virtual avatars will be able to reflect facial movements. Zuckerberg didn't say exactly if Project Cambria had said that is something that the company has said that they've been working at for some time and announced at last year's Connect conference is the same headset, but it seems like it probably is. More poetically, back in May, the information sources described it as a Chromebook for the face. We may know the name too. Bloomberg sources reported in July that Meta's VR app for iOS had references to a MetaQuest Pro. Zuckerberg also said augmented reality glasses a few years away still. All right, so, but the rumor has been that this thing might cost around 800 bucks. It's gonna be a Chromebook for the face called the MetaQuest Pro and will allow you to feel social presence. Patrick, are you ready to feel social presence? You're asking the wrong guy. Oh my goodness. First of all, I'm still trying to imagine anybody selling products anywhere as describing something as a Chromebook for the face. To be clear, that was sources telling information. That's not the official marketing plan, but yeah, yeah, I got you. You know what I mean? But it's like, if sources said that, they either really hate this product or boy, this is gonna be a fanciful marketing campaign, the likes of which we can't imagine. Good day internet, pre-show, talking with Sarah. I think we're both like social presence. So you're gonna bring, what is this gonna mean? We're all gonna be sitting in a conference room with our, you know, 3D present avatar, giant dragon faces, cats, memes, whatever it is. You raise your eyebrow, your avatar will raise its eyebrow, Patrick. I mean, you know, and I'm so excited. And that's how you know you're mad and a median. I've been joking for years at the whole point about Facebook buying Oculus originally, now Meta creating Meta or the Metaverse is because, you know, we're bringing virtual makeouts to the internet. But you know, this is just, I just, what are they, what is their plan here? What is, where are they going with this? Can they make it, I don't know. It just seems like, it's just, you know, really, this is the plan, not more games, not more accessibility, not making it more affordable, not actually doing things people want it to do now. In fact, the Oculus too, just got a price hike. I, you know, I'm with you on this, Patrick. When I say, when I hear social presence, it's like, oh, okay. So I actually, I have a Meta quest too. I use it often. Anybody who listened to the show knows that I do. I don't really use the social aspects of it, but I know that they're there. And that's, you know, that's cool. That's fine. I feel like the whole like ideal of social presence, at least from what Meta has teased thus far is all about, you know, we're virtual and now we're in medians and this is, you know, we're doing business and this is going to be the future of business. I do not see that at all. I think it's like a cartoonish version of business that nobody asked for. I think they're making a common mistake here because the idea of being able to have your avatar track your facial expression is absolutely beneficial. You do communicate non-verbally and being able to communicate non-verbally in VR will be essential. He's not wrong about any of that, but it's not the next step, right? It's like selling a touchscreen tablet because you can touch it. Microsoft did that. They got up on stage at CES and said, look, it's a tablet and I can touch it. People are like, great, what do I do with that? Apple came along and said, look, it's an iPhone in a bigger form factor and look at all the things you can do with it that you can touch it. And they had already demonstrated what you could do with multi-touch. He's thinking, everybody wants to have virtual meetings. I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, I mean, I'm making a... Well, and even if they do, we don't need to do it with avatars. That could work in certain situations. Live video conferencing that works perfectly well to allow us, you know, for $800, you could produce a pretty bad ass camera and a decent headset. I'm saying, you know, having virtual meetings where there's 3D and you have an avatar. Sure, I think there are companies that would benefit from that, but I don't know that that's something companies are prioritizing, right? I agree. Because of what you said about, like, you know what, maybe Zoom isn't quite that rich of an experience, but it's good enough, at least for now. Well, I mean, most of the challenges with Zoom have to deal with figuring out the protocol of having 25 people in a room or the fact that you have people who are sitting there, like I'm using the microphone and the speakers in my laptop in a room that is all hard walls and there's all this reflective echo and I've got this crappy camera and I have no light, right? If you invest some money in, you know, putting a lamp there, having a light, putting, you know, an earbud in or something. Hey, if you have an avatar, you don't have to do all that stuff. Yes, you just need an immensely powerful computer and an $800 headset that works on your face. Well, and your avatar has to look like you and the whole thing is, I don't know. I mean, there's, when I think about, you know, probably the only time, anywhere at any time, I'm gonna say, you know, I'm really sharing this feeling, this opinion, this thought space with Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, right, but when they reshared, I think it was Tati Brunning's post where she was just like, just let Instagram be Instagram, right? This company that has basically said, we're just gonna do what we need to do with Instagram to make Instagram TikTok. And if you don't like it, well, whatever, because we're gonna make revenue. And now they're gonna, you know, now they're gonna sort of like convince everybody to move into this. I just, I feel like, you know, Facebook has had a making new products problem for years now. And now it's like right at the time, they're stomping on these incredibly evolved and incredibly entrenched social environments. They're like, yeah, revenue, algorithm, competition, you know, screw what we've built. We're gonna force this into where we need it to be. And again, like it's, I just don't, I don't see a lot of people trusting or wanting to invest in this as a business tool, Tom, much less as a social environment. That is different than the tech itself not being useful. I think the tech itself is perfectly useful and will be exactly where virtual avatars go and there will be a use for virtual avatars. I just, I totally agree with you that there's not a business case or a desire for it yet. You have to build the ramp to that and have people start using it before you give them the improvement, right? They're polishing the banister before they've built the house. I mean, at this point it's, you know, just a snark one last time. It's so good that Facebook has, excuse me, Metta has done such a job of building a trust between its user base and their belief that the products they invest in will continue to deliver on the promise that they, you know what I mean? Like you create this environment and this thing and you're like, yeah, we're gonna jerk this hard, right, sorry if you don't like the cliff we're heading off of, but that's where we're going. Like, you know, I mean, they're not helping themselves in these larger attempts to move the conversations or the place where the conversations are held on the internet, if they keep sort of screwing over their user base. Well, speaking of users being screwed over. What a transition. I hear a huge hat tip goes to TechCrunch's Carly Page, who's been doing excellent work covering the Twilio attack, which as Lando might say, gets worse and worse all the time. So Tom, give us a little background here. Yeah, Twilio, if you don't know, is most famous for helping companies, big companies, including Facebook and Uber, manage customer text messaging. These include things like sending you a second factor over SMS. So not just marketing mails. We're talking about important customer direct communication. Twilio is a respected company. However, on August 8th, Twilio announced that attackers had fished login credentials from employees and accessed customer data for they thought 125. They now say about 163 customers. Twilio did not publicize the company names, though some like Signal have notified users that they were a victim. If you're curious, here's how that fishing attack worked. It looks like the attackers used data aggregation services that anybody can go to and pay money to get a hold of employee names and phone numbers that are associated with each other. They then sent targeted employees of Twilio text messages saying things like your password has expired or your schedule has changed. Click here to log in. And of course, that link went to a malicious site that captured the login credentials. Twilio worked with carriers and web hosts to stop the messages from being sent and shut down the malicious website. However, Thursday, single sign on provider Okta noticed that when the attackers had access to Twilio, they were able to access a small number of Okta customers one time passwords. Yeah, and so even after being shut out of Twilio, the attackers kept rotating their accounts and targeting companies that used Okta's services. Singapore based security company Group IB told TechCrunch, it believes that the attackers have compromised 9,931 accounts at 130 companies since March, mostly in the US. Group IB also believes that one participant in the attacker group may live in North Carolina. DoorDash has confirmed that attackers gained access to its internal tools and customers and drivers' names, emails, phone numbers, and delivery addresses. The company didn't say how many accounts were accessed, but they said it was a small percentage. DoorDash told TechCrunch that in this case, the attackers phished credentials from a third party vendor that was not Twilio. Yeah, so this group is attacking a lot of different companies. And one of those was multi-factor authentication code manager, Authy. Twilio confirmed that Authy was affected by the Twilio breach. Attackers were able to access the accounts of 93 users and register additional devices. Authy provides a service that lets you keep your multi-factor codes in sync on multiple devices. For those 93 accounts, attackers would have been able to add a device and then see the multi-factor codes for any accounts managed through Authy. If they also had the passwords for those accounts, then they would have been able to get in. Authy has since identified and removed the suspicious devices and advised affected users to disable multi-device support and review devices on their account. If you're an Authy user, probably a good idea for you to go into your app and look at what devices are associated as well if you use the multi-device thing or maybe just turn it off altogether. It's convenient. I'm an Authy user, so yeah. Suspect to, you know, it's susceptible to this kind of attack. Now, it's tempting to say like, how horrible all these companies are. But frankly, this is a pretty mundane phishing attack. The attackers figured out a good juicy target and they got lucky and got in. The weakness is always the people, right, Patrick? Patrick, you were whistling earlier, I think. It was just, being inside of Authy, I was just, I was literally, you know, I was one of the people that got an email from last pass this morning, which is, you know, a nightmare I've been waiting to have. Yeah, sorry, you know, I've been terrified that I would get that email for years now because it's such an app. But that was source code of their product, not the passwords, just to repeat that. I agree. Sarah said that earlier. No, no, and I appreciate that, but it was still that first like, that first getting that email and then you have to digest it and then your brain finally clicks on and goes, okay, it's source code, which is bad because people use source codes or try to look for flaws, but it's not like they accessed, you know, so many important things in my life, right? The Twilio thing here is just like, you know, this is painful. And I think, I just started working in a new company and one of the interesting things they do is they have a security training that's essentially, it's like a series of anime-ish cartoons with full-on Hollywood voiceover acting and they're presenting all of this, all of these potential scenarios because, you know, like the t-shirt from Def Conn always said, there is no patch for human stupidity. Fine, it used to be like, oh, you shouldn't have clicked on that link, but now the sophistication, the level, and for me, it's been nuts, all of the different directions that these are coming from. Like I was dealing with a ton of phishing attacks over by text message, you know what I mean? And it's one thing to have the, you know, to have the attacks always coming through email, but you know, to suddenly have this like, your bank is telling you that something has gone wrong and you're like, and then I'm like, wait a minute, you know, and I stop and I go and I type in the URL and I open the app and I check things the way I'm supposed to, not clicking on links. And I'm like, and then I do a little research and I'm like, okay, this is a new vector for attacks, but it is constant and unending and this is just particularly brutal and it's hard. I think, you know, like I said before, it's, you know, breaches are no longer news, they're a fact of life, but sometimes they're extraordinary or the avenues for additional attacks, they open up are extraordinary. And it's, you know, this is a hard one to deal with. It's another reminder that if you are not expecting a message, even sometimes if you are, but especially if you're not expecting a message, treat it with suspicion, don't click on links and text messages unless you are 100% sure that it's safe and tell your friends and family the same thing. Hey folks, if you haven't thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, here, send us your second, no, I'm just kidding. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Patrick Norton is here, of course, which means we need to check in on the state of chip availability. Patrick, it looks like we have finally switched from a shortage to an official surplus of GPUs, but let's get right to the heart of the matter. What is still cheap? What is now cheaper? What isn't and is it time to buy it? Oh my goodness. So, okay, so the video NCO, NCO, video CEO, Jensen Wang said during the company's Q2 2023 earnings call yesterday or the day before, whenever that was that they're dealing with a quote, excess inventory unquote of RTX 3000 series GPUs. They're talking about a $1.4 billion miss on quarterly projection because of reduced demand. I have officially promised not to make snarky comments about perhaps underestimating the importance of crypto to NVIDIA sales, so that's as snarky as I'll get. First of all, they're saying they're gonna reduce the number of GPUs that sells the manufacturer. Wang also said that NVIDIA is gonna price, position current products. And it's interesting to look at that, right? Because right now we're seeing, or we have seen price cuts at the high end. Back in July, there were rumors that a 3090, 3080 MSRPs would be cut. Recently, EVGA decided to beat the full on panic price dropping on 3090s. I mean, it was crazy. They cut $1,000 off the price of their high end 3090 TI cards. Like $2,200 is suddenly $1,200. Now the EVGA discount was done by a rebate, but still, I was on, I think Micro Center yesterday and I'm looking at 3080 TI cards selling for $100 or $200 less than the $1,200 MSRP, less than MSRP, 3090 TI's for literally hundreds less than the launch MSRP. And even less than, if NVIDIA did cut the MSRP by 25% from $2,000 to $1,500, they're still under that $1,800 MSRP. You know, so we were hoping these price changes would also drop to the more affordable cards. 3070s are selling for $600 right now. That's about $100 over MSRP. 3060s are anywhere from 60 to $130 over that $329 MSRP. That's a pretty heavy like 15 to 30% bump over MSRP for kind of the sweet spot for an affordable card. There were thoughts that Intel's ARC was gonna come in this year and provide a really powerful competitor to NVIDIA and AMD at the low end. It seems, I'll just say that NVIDIA's RGPU seems to be having challenges on the desktop. And the other crazy thing that came out is NVIDIA is gonna be revealing the 4,000 series GPUs, the Adela Lovelace architecture for the RTX 4000 series or at least quotes new advances of RTX, reinventing 3D graphics and gaming at GTC 2022, that's September 20th. So the overall rumor is that 4,000 series is coming. As always, they'll release it at the high end and boy, are they gonna push out that 4090 launch or whatever they decide to launch with as long as possible, because I think their resellers are just getting beaten down right now. Yeah. Inventory's high. 3,000 inventory. Inventory's high, PC demand is falling either because people already bought so much stuff during the lockdown that they don't need anything or they're being cautious about spending or they're an Ethereum miner that doesn't need it anymore because they're going to proof of stake. But yeah, that is all having effects. If you want the best deal, should you wait for the RTX 4000 announcement or is that still only gonna be applying at the high end? I think it's gonna, you know, the two sets of rumors I'm looking at, and I'll just flat out say the rumors is that, you know, most people are saying they're not gonna release it till late 2022, i.e. they're gonna sneak this out in time for holiday shopping. I've seen some less loud rumors, assuming I'm looking in the right places that say they're gonna push it out till 2023. I think Nvidia's gonna try to clear as much inventory as possible because as soon as that 4,000 cards hit the floor and if they're legitimately as powerful as they're claiming they're gonna be, that everybody's gonna be like, I don't want a 3,000 series card, they're trash. You know, again, that, you know, precludes that they deliver a 4,000 series card that actually delivers advances that we, you know, that gamers can actually see. I think demand's gonna fall through the floor, so I think you're gonna push that launch out as far as they can. So short answer, keep an eye on those 30, 60, 30, 70s and hold off as long as you can because I don't really see prices dropping. I think they've already probably cut inventory on those just to kind of keep things a little stiff because that's a, you know, it's a big old chunk of profit for somebody somewhere in that chain. So we'll see where that ends up. All right, good stuff as always. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Nick in Australia. This was regarding the Amazon A word. We know who she is. For Game Story that we talked about on Wednesday. Nick says, I'm not a gamer that's against this concept. In fact, I want it for a very specific type of game. There's a piece of software that integrates with most PC racing sims called Crew Chief. Among other features, it allows you to communicate to the games via voice what you want done in a pit stop. For example, fuel 40 liters, change all tires, lower pressure by one bar. The problem is getting Crew Chief to understand you consistently. There's nothing more frustrating than having about 40% of my calls result in a, sorry, please repeat that. If Amazon is successful, says Nick, then more interest from the developers should be forthcoming in this area. And hopefully the little independent app Crew Chief can employ more powerful speech recognition. Yeah, that's a good point. If Amazon does well with this, they will do what they do like with AWS and they'll democratize it. They'll make it available for a fee, but they'll try to make it available for as many game companies to implement as possible. Would be my guess. That's usually what Amazon does with its tech. In which case, yeah, Crew Chief could replace their own stuff with Amazon's. Of course, this is all assuming that the Amazon stuff works as well or better as the stuff in Crew Chief, which remains to be seen, but it's pretty good at what it does. So I imagine it shouldn't be too disappointing. One would, yes. The fact that we have to say a word all the time means it certainly knows it's wake word and it's not even gonna need a wake word in games. I don't think we've ever said, called it a word until Nick called it the a word. And I'm like, okay, that's what it is now. Yeah. Amazon's a word. A lady. Yeah. A word with time. The A lady. That's what Allison Sheridan calls it. Hey, if you're free Thursday, September 8th at 3 p.m. Eastern time, I will be on a free and publicly available panel with actual scientists. I don't know why they included me, but I'm happy to be there. To talk about how memory makes it harder to fight COVID-19, particularly about how it affects contact tracing, even when there are apps and other tech, that's actually why I'm there, is to talk about the consumer side and what consumer perception is. The panel is part of the Association for Psychological Sciences Global Collaboration on COVID-19. So if you're interested in this topic, you can get the link from our show notes or head on over to psychologicalscience.org for more. Let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been illustrating today's show. Len, what have you drawn for us today? You know, I don't know how many people know this or not, but I used to work in advertising and I know a good tagline when I hear it. When I hear Chromebook for the face, I just know that is the start of a great idea. So here- Look how happy they are. This is great. Who wouldn't want a Chromebook for the face with that presentation? It looks so fun. Those hands. Len, those hands. I was very alien-inspired. Meta, stuff for your face? Come on, that's just rights itself right there. So if you wanna check out this image, it's over on my Patreon, Patreon.com forward slash Len. It's also at my online store if you like the old timey way of buying stuff, LenPeraltaStore.com. Also wanna mention, I am looking for gigs and commissions. So hit me up if you want that. And also give a listen to my new show, The Back Nine, which just started. And you can listen to another episode next week. I'm working on it this weekend. Thank you. Excellent. Well, you've been busy, Len. Patrick Norton also always busy because we know you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Oh my goodness. Have you got questions about headphones or speakers or home theater, televisions or all that good stuff? Do me a favor, go check out AVXL, AVXCEL on your favorite podcatcher or AVXL.com. If you'd like to look for it, the old timey way as Len says. And I'm always at Patrick Norton on the Twitters. If you've got a question or wanna know what that strange pile of sand is behind my face on that page. Ah, well, Len and Patrick and the strange pile of sand, we're happy to have you as always. Also, we have some brand new bosses to thank. John Ulrich and Chris. All just started backing us on Patreon. We wanna thank you, John. We wanna thank you all right and we wanna thank you, Chris. Thank you. Yeah, you don't know how happy we are to have two straight days of new bosses and three of you, a trio, a hat trick. Y'all are the best. We really appreciate it. So thank all three of you for that. Indeed, speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. If you're a patron, you already know. But if you don't know, you can catch the show live. This show, DT&S Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC, find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, everybody, and we'll be back on Monday with Rob DeMello joining us. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino. Video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Koontz, technical producer, Anthony Limos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos. News host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W.S. Goddess One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Gatturama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. 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