 Coming up on DTNS is Woblox screwing over recording artists? Can the US government help ease the supply chain strain? And is Microsoft entering a post-console existence? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 10th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Drafalino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. For the show on Good Day Internet, we were talking about the perks you get when you get a new haircut, depending on where you live. And all sorts of other things. If you want that wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, also known as GDI, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet network, is reportedly in talks with several airlines to provide their in-flight Wi-Fi service at a panel at the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit on Wednesday. SpaceX's VP of Starlink and commercial sales, Jonathan Hoffler, stated, we've already done some demonstrations to date and looking to get that product finalized to be put on aircraft in the very near future. Motherboard sources shared forum posts made by hackers claiming to have stolen source code for electronic arts, FIFA 21 code for EA's matchmaking server, also source code and tools for the Frostbite engine and various frameworks and SDKs totaling 780 gigabytes of data. EA has since confirmed to Motherboard it suffered a data breach and the hackers claims are correct, but that no player data was accessed and EA doesn't think there's any risk to player privacy. Sony has revealed its Airpeak S1 drone specs geared toward professional videographers. For a mere $9,000, the Airpeak S1 works with Sony's A7S Mark III, FX3 and 8K capable Alpha 1 mirrorless cameras that attach with a custom Grem CT3 gimbal. The Airpeak has between 12 to 22 minutes of flight time depending on the load, stays stables and winds up to 44.7 miles per hour and can go from 0 to 50 in 3.5 seconds. Sony expects shipping to start this fall. GBS, world's largest meat supplier, announced that it paid ransomware hacking group REVOL about $11 million. The attack led to meat plants across the U.S. and Australia shutting down for more than 24 hours. In a statement, GBS claims it was able to get its systems operational again without a decryptor from REVOL, but it chose to pay to keep the files safe. And following a New York Times report into the practice, Google is altering their search algorithm to lower rankings for sites specializing in posting negative information about people and charging them to remove it. The head of Google's search quality team, Pan-Duneak, said the company has been fighting slanderous content websites behind the scenes for a number of years and their removal request forms get millions of visits a year. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about Microsoft and how it may pull away from the pack when it comes to gaming hardware. Microsoft announced it's working with global TV manufacturers to expand its Xbox Game Pass subscription service to third-party smart TVs and is also building its own streaming devices for cloud gaming to reach gamers on any TV or monitor without the need for a console at all. Currently, subscribers can use the beta version of Xbox Cloud gaming service on Android and iOS, but that's limited. Xbox Game Pass has up to now let users download games locally to capable hardware like a console or a PC, and that's in order to deal with video game file sizes and network requirements. Now, this could help differentiate Microsoft from hardware competitors, Sony and Nintendo come to mind. And with any luck, it might fare better than Google's Stadia, at least Stadia so far. Game Pass's numbers as of April 2021 show 23 million subscribers, you know, and that's as it was before this announcement. So there's certainly potential and room to grow. This news comes ahead of Microsoft Sunday showcase at E3 where it's expected to announce more information on Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda software titles. So this could tie into some interesting gaming announcements. The company also announced its expanding cloud gaming to more countries later this year, including Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Japan. You know, looking at this announcement, obviously big kind of almost, definitely coming for Stadia's launch, almost kind of getting in this Chromecast space with like this dedicated streaming hardware. I could see having some other extensions into that as well, depending on how they want to take it. But, you know, going back to Microsoft's original plans with Xbox, it seems like services have always kind of been baked into that. And they're like a console was just a way to do that. You know, going back to Xbox Live Gold, I'm kind of setting the, you know, setting the tone for charging for multiplayer gameplay and that and other kind of services and stuff like that. Even on through the Xbox one where you see Microsoft having other ambitions beyond just being a game console and the recent disclosure of that they've never actually made any money off Xbox console hardware. Now everyone assumes these are kind of lost leaders, especially for the first couple of years of console life. But I think Microsoft would be thrilled if they didn't have to make a console and they could serve, you know, they could provide these services and make money the way they've always been making money, which is people paying for either titles or access, you know, to a subscription service. I think they would be thrilled if they didn't have to make a console sometime soon. You know, the industry seems to all be in agreement that at a certain point, when all of the connections get fast enough and now obviously the cloud computing is certainly there, this will be the reality. It depends on when you jump on the boat and when you don't. If we are going to roundly assume that maybe Stadia was too early or Google was not the right player to make it happen, Xbox and Microsoft, which have big AAA titles that are exclusive to them, offering a different lower price of a barrier or at least a subscription price and not a one time fee to buy oftentimes rare and hard to get hardware makes a little bit more sense. The question that I would say going forward is going to be exactly how aggressively they push into this and we'll probably get a roadmap for that at E3. Yeah, I mean, it's somebody who I do not own a gaming console and it's always just been, do I care enough about any particular games where I would have to go Xbox or PlayStation or you know, the Nintendo route and it's always sort of like, I don't know. It's all very segmented and that was for a reason, right? You know, Xbox got sold, Xboxes got sold because whoever was buying them is like, well, this is, you know, this is, this is the ecosystem that I want to be in and this is the way that I play the game. So I think that even though Game Pass has 23 million subscribers, all of the potential subscribers, perhaps like me or even people who are that much more interested in gaming than I am saying, oh, great subscription service, got it. This is, yeah, much lower barrier to entry. I don't have to buy a console. I don't have to, you know, you're still gonna have to think about exclusives and who has what. But if it's working with a smart TV that I already have or yeah, it's a low price streaming stick of some kind, that yeah, maybe like you said, Rich does other things. Not Nintendo, Microsoft didn't really go into details on whether it's just one device or if it's going to be multiple. But yeah, it sounds like the company is like, okay, let's just forget this whole sell the console only. That's the only way that you can get this. Sure, enough people are still going to want to go that route. But for all the folks who don't, you're just gonna sell them a lot more game passes. Yeah, let me just say on top of that, the idea of that streaming stick doing something else I think is something that has sailed. We now see so many devices that do so many of these kinds of things and all of them stream the same kind of apps that you would have previously seen on a device like this or in an Xbox and in the way they were trying to sell it as a media container. This is a way to get Halo into somebody's hands that wouldn't otherwise buy a console to play Halo. All right, well the National Music Publishers Association or NMPA filed suit against the gaming company Roblox for illegally using songs from artists and is seeking a minimum of $200 million in damages. The NMPA is representing a handful of publisher plaintiffs in this case. NMPA president and CEO David Israelite claims that Roblox's user base of 42 million active players earns Roblox hundreds of millions of dollars by requiring users to pay every time they upload music onto the platform, taking advantage of young people's lack of understanding about copyright and then they take virtually no action to prevent repeat infringement or alert users to the risks they are taking. Israelite also said the NMPA will increase efforts to ID and remove all unlicensed music from Twitch. So they're kind of targeting two pillars of the modern gaming community here. Twitch previously said in response to compliance that it acts on each valid DMCA notification and removes the allegedly infringing content as soon as it's validated in compliance with DMCA requirements. In its response, Roblox says it will defend itself vigorously as we work to achieve a fair resolution with the music publishers. So what are the options here? I guess like Roblox changes its TOS so that liability shifted to creators. Are we gonna see content ID kind of style system going on? Justin, how do you read the tea leaves of the 3D chess here? There's only one way that this ends. And it's with the publishers getting a cut of the money that Roblox is charging. There's a reason why they're going after Roblox and not the users, even though they acknowledge in their lawsuit that it's the users that are putting themselves in a perilous legal position. It's because Roblox has the money. If Roblox wasn't charging to have them upload it, then maybe they would be able to take some other action. I mean, hell, that's what they are doing with Twitch. With Twitch, they're saying, look, we're gonna DMCA the users. By the way, if you're streaming on Twitch, make sure to delete your bots, especially if you play copyrighted music on it because those are the kinds of things that get DMCA for content stuff and you could get strikes on your channel. Resuming this particular talking point, that's the only thing that they want. They want the cash from Roblox because Roblox is extraordinarily popular and they want to taste. They want to wet their beak. Yeah, I can't imagine, especially because Roblox's user base skews so, so young. And there probably are a great number of users who just have no idea how copyright works in Roblox is not spelling it out and maybe it occurs none of the radar are a little bit too long here. But yes, for the company to say, well, read the terms of service and if you do something illegal, then you're probably gonna get sued by some large music industry trade group. That's not gonna fly either. It will become something where, yes, there is a sharing of the pot between Roblox and the NMPA. And what that is, I mean, the only way that would really change much for the user is if the user needs to pay more in order to do that because Roblox wants to say greedy and still take a cut and give music industries that much more of the cut that they're getting. I don't really know. Maintain their profit margins, Sarah. I think it's interesting to see Roblox's, clearly the money that they're bringing. I mean, they're bringing in billions of dollars in revenue that the NMPA is saying, oh, the poor young user that just wants to use this music, they don't, like that's a very different tone than that we've heard in the past. Yeah, because the kids don't have the money. Last year, Google's head of AI research, Jeff Dean told ZDNet that he was experimenting with AI to design chips in order to cut costs and produce more efficient designs. In research paper published in the scientific journal Nature, Google Research explained that they've developed algorithms to design computer chips more efficiently. Designing the physical layout of a chip, also known as floor planning is a complex and time intensive task. Researchers developed algorithms to treat floor planning like a game with components as pieces and canvas acting as the board. The winning results based on the performance used valuation metrics based on reference data sets of the 10,000 chip placements. Researchers claim this method can generate manufactured chip floor plans in under six hours compared to months of intense effort by human experts. The researchers also say that Google has already adopted the method and used it to produce the recent generation tensor processing unit. So being able to say, hey, this could be less than one full workday versus months of intense work by humans, it's tough to argue against this being a great idea, at least for some kinds of chip development and manufacturing. This is cool. It's clearly Google's been working on this for some time. They have some examples of it working in the tensor processing unit, as you mentioned, Justin. And that argument of, well, I mean, what are the experts gonna do, right? If this is, you just teach AI to treat this all like a game of chess. What does this say about human expertise? And I think it says a lot about what humans can have already built. They've built the system. This came from humans, right? So, you know, the humans now can hone this process and have so much more time to be experts. So the one thing is that at first blush, like this seems like something, oh, they can really speed up new product development with new chips. And yes, that may be a component of this. But I hope this provides the opportunity, you know, in terms of, you know, people being willing to use their time in different ways. Sure, this would be great if this could speed up product development. But also, you know, we've seen now, for a number of years now, big architectural problems that we're experiencing with chip architectures like X86 with Spectre and Meltdown. There's a couple other on the ARM side that, you know, aren't quite as devastating, perhaps stuff like that. We're seeing stuff with row hammer attacks where like the infrastructure of memory is at risk because it's becoming more increasingly dense. I'm hoping that because, okay, we don't have to spend the human time designing this chip layout. We can just have a machine learning algorithm take care of that for us or take care of most of the workforce. We could spend more time looking for things like that that are way harder to fix once that chip is actually out there. One thing on this in terms of the AI component, I think it's a great example of what AI is and is not. AI effectively, a way to think of it is instead of an Oracle at Delphi or some magic in the machine that's able to just think of things faster than humans can. Think of it like a guessing machine. And if you're looking at something like designing a chip, that's a complex series of guesswork, but because it has the horsepower, it can do it. This is not a replacement for humans, but it is a tool that can lead humans in the direction that can perfect these kinds of floor plans that can make better things. Indeed. Well, if you'd like a DTNS hat, they're very nice. Hoodie, also nice. Mask, mouse, pads, we have it all. We have all that and more, in fact, at our DTNS store. If you haven't looked at it in a while or you never have, do it now. DailyTechnewshow.com slash store. Well, this is shaping up to be a pretty big week of news for tech out of the Biden administration. On Tuesday, the administration released its findings after conducting an interagency review on how to shore up U.S. supply chains. As a result of the report findings, the Department of Energy will create a 10-year plan to create a supply chain for EV lithium batteries that's based in the U.S. with the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, catchy name, set to distribute $17 billion for domestic R&D. The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, will lead a task force looking at U.S. sites for 17 rare earth metals, which mostly come from China and certainly mostly from overseas. The report will also see greater supply chain transparency from the semiconductor industry and devote $100 million in grants to trained government workers on these new initiatives as well as prioritizing existing grants that provide for domestic production. In other news, political sources say House Democrats could introduce a series of five tech regulation bills as early as this week. One draft bill will let federal prosecutors sue to break up tech companies if they're found to have a conflict of interest. Another bill would require platforms to easily let users move data to other services, so data portability, mirroring a bipartisan 2019 Senate bill. A third bill would bar platforms from self-preferencing, targeting things like the Apple's App Store and Amazon Marketplace. The final two draft bills would also require tech acquisitions to show clear and convincing evidence in court that a potential rival startup couldn't compete with it or pose a competitive threat and increase merger fees, which there is bipartisan, that increasing merger fees seems to be some bipartisan support there as well. These are draft bills right now. They're not even, you know, kind of circulating out there, so we will see what final form they take when they're out there, and then it's into the political wilds. So Justin, which is the bigger piece of news and I guess, you know, could help us out here to understand where this is, both of these are going. Before we even choose from these two, let me add two other things for you. Number one, passing the Senate this week was a bill that is meant to keep America competitive with Chinese interest specifically in technology. That has a bit of a tricky road to pass in the House before it gets signed by the President, but something to keep your eye on. In terms of politics, the Biden administration, which Joe Biden is in Europe for conferences over the next week, has said that during his meeting with Vladimir Putin, he is going to directly bring up the fact that he holds Russia specifically culpable for some of the ransomware attacks that have originated from Russia and basically accusing them of turning a blind eye to it. Where we go from there, that is a big question. But if you are looking at all of this, the thing that matters the most right now is the first story that you talked about. The idea that this supply chain, which is a problem here, we found out during the pandemic that even if you are not a China hawk and you don't believe that China specifically poses a diametric conflict of interest with the United States of America, if you have an interruption of an overly distributed supply chain, then you have problems getting products here to America. We saw it with not only some of these rare earth metals and stuff like that, but also on a smaller scale with PPE and with drug manufacturing. When you have a lot of that stuff that happens overseas and all of a sudden those supply lines are cut down for reasons that are out of your control, you need to maybe rethink how much is produced here in American borders. Yeah, big week. Politics, politics, politics is, well, you're always busy, but a lot of news close to home. I stay busy, Sarah. You see, I'm busy. Well, also busy. Delivery drivers, ride-hailing and delivery companies are always looking for ways to utilize their drivers most efficiently. The UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo has a new idea for their drivers, and that is reporting crimes. Now, you might say, that's crazy, how's that gonna work? Well, the company is partnering with the Crime Prevention Network Neighborhood Watch to offer optional training, non-mandatory, it's optional, to help drivers spot signs of street harassment, domestic abuse, human trafficking, drug smuggling, in many cases, you know, kind of big deals. All training will be verified by the Metropolitan Police and include safety and awareness training for drivers. This isn't Deliveroo's first foray into driver training, partnering with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children last year to train 7,000 drivers to spot signs of child abuse. Now, on the surface, you might say, well, yeah, I mean, we don't want bad people doing bad things, and if the delivery drivers are out and about and see something funny and have been trained, you know, more than just sort of maybe that there's something funny going on, so that they have a little bit more of a leg up as to what's right and what's wrong. That's a good thing, right? But there's so many potential problems with this. I don't quite know where to start. There are so many ways that this could go sideways. I mean, the one, again, harassment, domestic abuse, all human trafficking, all the things are horrible, like horrible, we don't want these things. But at the same time, like as a driver, if I get this optional training, is does the UK have some sort of, I don't even know if it would qualify as a good Samaritan law where you're liable if you're, if you accuse someone or pass on a tip about human trafficking and that turns out to not pan out. I mean, at the very least, you've potentially severely disrupted someone else's life. They may come out, you know, what kind of, what kind of, I guess. Or even if it does pan out and you get like pulled into some legal thing where you're like a delivery driver and you're kind of busy and, you know, it's, or these, yeah, these are, I mean, getting into, these could also tie into organized crime. This could also tie into, if you exist in a society where there are perhaps biases within your society, this is, it does nothing, but it passed those directly on, right? We even get to what they will do and whether or not it is a net good. The question is, why are they doing this? And to me, there's only two paths, either A, there is some kind of connection where they can get a local or national grant from some governmental organization that says, okay, we'll pay you money or cover the costs of your drivers getting trained at some base level. So effectively maybe think of it less like human CCTV cameras and more like everybody knows how to do CPR just in case, right? That there are in horrifying, very clear examples. You know how to identify that as opposed to just somebody walking down the street or they are trying to play a PR game and say, hey, look, we're not just a company that delivers you ramen. We're also a place where somebody might have their life saved. Now, if they did not lead with the fact that somebody had their life saved during an announcement like this, that means that that has not happened on some even anecdotal level. Good point. So I guess the bigger, one of the other questions is that does this imply that these delivery couriers are somehow obliged to do all this as part of their normal job of delivering food? One would think, yeah, if you opt into the optional training, you're saying, I want to take this on. So if you don't catch something, are you then liable? That would be ridiculous. If somebody, nobody's getting punished if they deliver a pizza to somebody and they accidentally, and they miss the fact that a guy is doing, got kidnapped or something. Like, that's not, I think the idea is they can identify these things. And so if they do talk to police and they say, oh, well, what did you see? They know the signs that they can then say. You know, it goes back to what Rich says. There's a lot of ways this goes sideways. And I'd probably, I don't know if this is probably the most effective way for any of this to happen, but it's not the most effective at all. But also the question, why are they trying to make these delivery drivers into? It's because it's feet on the ground. This is the thing, at least in the UK, the number of metropolitan force police officers is going to be cut due to budgetary constraints. So if you can somehow, what you are alluding to, Justin, somehow get some sort of grant and say, hey, we can have extra eyes out there for you because you don't have enough officers because of budget cuts. Then, hey, you can save a boatload of money and still have quote, unquote, the same kind of surveillance that you would require to, you know, the prosecutor job. Yes, and just because everybody who knows CPR is not personally required to save somebody that is choking. Now they should, they might want to. They'll know how to do it if they do, but it's not like they're going to get, you're not going to get arrested because it's like, you knew CPR and that man was choking on a cannoli. Not less that you'll get, no, no, not that you'll get arrested, but you could, I don't know in Britain if this would be a thing, but somehow get caught up in a lawsuit. But that's just me paranoid talking. Well, one thing that doesn't make me paranoid is something that Arcade One Up announced. They're adding this Simpsons to its retro home arcade cabinet lineup 30 years after Konami first released the game. No official price yet, but word is around $600 when pre-orders begin July 15th at arcadeoneup.com. Arcade One Up's parent company, Tastemakers has already sold over two million machines with popular licensed titles like Street Fighter, X-Men, Atari and Pac-Man. The Simpsons machine will have a few bells and whistles like a light up marquee and Wi-Fi connectivity for online play. And I believe it also comes packed in with one other game. If you get tired of beating up people with legendary side scroller. This was this along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the game that you played when it was your friend's birthday and somebody's parent would just break off a $20 bill, pour quarters into this thing to the end. I always played Homer. What a game. I don't know. Maybe I should get it. You should get this. It could be it could be a kind of a cool thing for the PX3 studio. I think I need more friends to come over to play because it is always calling to you that you need four people playing at the same time. But Wi-Fi connectivity for online play, Justin, modern world. Ooh. That is not true. Yeah. Scott Johnson, we were talking about this yesterday and I know he has one of the other home arcade. I don't remember which one he said he had, but from Arcade One Up, someone was like... Joust. I believe Joust. Yes, yes, yes. And said, this is so great. I regret to say I have not played The Simpsons, at least in my recent memory. The reason why you want all four controllers is you can not your buddy who's right next to you. There is a certain level of... There's a certain level of social etiquette that goes out the window. And it becomes very friendly at first, but then it gets kind of visceral as you get toward the end and you eat the one power-up that you want. I mean, that's a Mortal Kombat move. That's a Street Fighter move when you're playing against people, but Simpsons is you're all playing together. No, not the way I used to play. We used to like... You would steal the power-ups. So don't go over Roger's house. Yeah, so I never go over Roger's house. You were definitely not at my birthday party. That's crazy fast. All right, Rich, what's in the mailbag today? All right. Well, last time Allison Sheridan was on the show, we were talking about Amazon Sidewalk Network going live, but Allison didn't have an option in her settings to disable it. She did a little research and then wrote in. She said she determined that her Amazon-owned products are either too old or not quite the right models to be part of Sidewalk. For example, I have an Echo 2nd generation, but Sidewalk requires a 3rd generation. I have a ring spotlight cam that is fairly new, but it's battery operated and it's only the wired version that is part of Sidewalk, understandably. My ring alarm system is also not part of Sidewalk. If you don't have any devices compatible with Sidewalk, Amazon doesn't want you worrying. You're pretty little head about it. That's so considerate of Amazon not to confuse me with my opt-outs. It's also, I mean, you'd think like, oh, that's all pretty obvious, but Amazon did not do a good job of explaining that because we were all sort of like, I said, well, I see Sidewalk in my settings and Allison said, I don't know, what's up? I did the same thing. I did the same thing. But if you have thoughts about Sidewalk, arcades or anything else, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Dan Kolbeck, Jeffrey Zilx and Michael Bolik. Also, very, very, very, very, very special. Thanks to Daniel Dorado, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We appreciate all the years of support Daniel and thanks to all our patrons. Also, thanks to Justin and Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, what's new in the world of politics? Well, everybody listening to me in New York City, I will be coming to your windswept Hamlet in a couple of weeks for the big New York City mayoral Democratic primary, which will effectively decide who the next mayor of New York City is going to be. It's a wild race, including a new controversy wherein the frontrunner may or may not live in New Jersey. Oh my gosh, I saw those photos. About his fridge might be the smoking gun. You can listen to all of it and of course follow all my coverage of my trip out to New York City to cover that at politicspoliticspolitics.com or px3podcast.com. Excellent. We're also live Monday through Friday on this here show for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Join us if you can and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom's back tomorrow and will be joined by Chris Ashley and Lynn Feralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.