 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. That's you! Thanks to all of you, including Steve Ayerola, Jeffrey Zilx, and Tony Glass. Coming up on DTNS, the UN asked countries not to blow up satellites in orbit seems reasonable. Amazon wants to eliminate barcodes. And do you know what the fastest growing brand was in 2022? Worldwide? It was META. What's unpacked there? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, December 9th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. I'm drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland Ambulance Peralta. And on the show is producer Roger Ching. Sarah Lane's off today. I almost wish Roger or I would have gone to New York just so we would have all four major time zones. I would like being in New York. Because usually Amos is here. Amos is still off, so we don't have Alaska. Maybe one of us should go to Hawaii. I don't know. We'll figure that out. Oh, I'll go. Okay. But then we wouldn't have the mountain time zone. Keith can fill in. Time for the quick hits. Elton Ring took home Game of the Year at the Game Awards Thursday. But the Game Awards is as much or more about game announcements as it is about game winners. Here are some of the big announcements. Final Fantasy 16 coming to the PS5 on June 22nd. Diablo 4 got a release date of June 6th. Star Wars Jedi survivor arrives March 17th. From Software announced that Armored Core 6 Fires of Rubicon is coming to the PlayStation Xbox and Steam sometime next year. And Horizon Forbidden West and Cyberpunk 2077 will both get expansions next year. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit to halt Metta's proposed acquisition of Within Inc began on Friday. Within is the maker of VR apps like Supernatural. The FTC says that Metta is attempting to dominate the VR fitness market by buying its competitors. Metta told the court it believes the FTC improperly defined the market in underestimated competition coming from companies like Apple, Alphabet and ByteDance. Yeah, this is the new look at FTC trying to stop people from buying potential competitors. We'll see if they can convince the court to do that. Google added pass keys to Chrome Stable M108. That allows password free logins if a website supports it. There are a few out there that do PayPal, for example. If you're using Chrome on Windows 11, Mac OS and Android, you can now use pass keys on participating websites. And Google also added pass key syncing support to Android. So you can sync from Android using either Google's own password manager or a third party like Dashlane or one password. Yay, pass keys. Apple and Ericsson reached across licensing agreement on patented cellular standard essential technologies. The Settles lawsuits over 5G patents from October of 2021. A trial on the lawsuits began this week in the Eastern District of Texas. And PlayStation VR2 pre-orders are open for everybody with PlayStation account. They opened last month, but you had to register and then be chosen by Sony to put in an order for the PSVR2. But it appears you can now order the VR2 headset from the PlayStation Direct website. And you might even get it within a week or two of the February launch. Let's talk about exploding missiles. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution Thursday asking countries not to conduct direct ascent anti-satellite tests, aka ASATs, if they will result in space debris. You can conduct one, just don't blow anything up, okay? A Russian missile test in November 2021 where they blew up their own satellite. Nobody's blown up other people's satellites, but Russia blew up one of its own satellites and it caused enough debris that the International Space Station, staffed partially by Russians, required crew to shelter and docked capsules temporarily. Russia, China, India, and the U.S. are the only countries who have conducted ASATs, but the U.S. was the only country to vote in favor of the resolution out of those four countries. So some celebrities will get an up-close look at any of the space debris and the ISS if a planned SpaceX mission actually takes place. And it sounds like it might. In 2018, SpaceX auctioned off seats on the first crewed test of the Starship vehicle, which will take eight days to circle around the moon, coming within 200 kilometers of the surface. Japanese fashion industry billionaire Yusaku Mizawa bought all of the seats for the entire mission, which will be called Dear Moon. He then recruited people to join him and announced his picks on Thursday. All right, let's talk about who he picked. The crew will include Korean group Big Bang's lead rapper Top, aka Chae Sung-hyun, USDJ Steve Aoki, Indian actor Dev Joshi, YouTuber, the everyday astronaut Tim Dodd, Czech multi-disciplinary artist Yemi A.D., Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, photographer Karim Ilya, documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall, and then two alternates in case one or more of those folks can't go for some reason. On the wait list, on the standby, the standby list for the trip to the moon, US Olympic snowboarder Caitlin Farrington and Japanese dancer Miu. So she had an space tourism, not just for billionaires anymore. It's also for their celebrity friends. And apparently photographers, the photographer part makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, I want a documentary filmmaker on there. What do you think of this though? It's, I have feelings. I'm most excited to see like everyday astronaut, a fellow content creator, a fellow YouTuber going up there. And for me, the photographers, the documentary, those folks make sense. The fact that he is going up there as well, that makes sense because he's very educational. And I kind of wish that this entire team was a little bit more educational, especially for like younger generations, because I have a feeling that we're going to see space tourism kind of act like planes did when planes were first invented. Extremely expensive, only the very privileged people could go up and, you know, actually fly on a plane across the country. Now we're seeing the same thing with space tourism. Only the billionaires can actually afford to go up into space. Hopefully in the next few decades we'll see that price decrease over time and be able to see, you know, less privileged middle income folks also be able to go up there. Will that happen? Maybe it'll be after my lifetime, but I would like to see it happen. I also sort of wish that, you know, he had a website, Yusaku did. And apparently about a million people applied for this. And the people that he chose seem to be very well privileged folks. I mean, let's be honest. And I wish it was a little bit more like folks that we hadn't heard of, maybe like a teacher from a middle school like NASA has done that in the past. Unfortunately, that shuttle blew up, but they've done that in the past. And I would love to see the same thing happen with SpaceX to kind of show people and promote that space tourism in the future can be for everybody. And it's something that we can look forward to for our younger generations. Yeah, I get what you're saying there. I think the fact that this is going to be expensive to begin with makes sense to me. Just like you said, airplane travel was incredibly expensive. That's why people dressed up to get on airplanes, even when I was a kid still. So I get that. I'll give him a B plus on the selection, right? So let's set aside, like, well, it has to be a billionaire to afford it. I like that he decided to not just invite his friends, but open it up to submissions. I think these photographers, most of which I'm unfamiliar with are great because it's going to make me more familiar with them. It's going to be the kinds of things you would want people to do, which is take photos, you know, document the experience there from around the world. Granted, you picked an actor from India to represent India. I don't know. Maybe Dev Josh, he's like a huge, you know, proponent of astronomy. And that's a that's a possibility, right? There are certain actors we could have picked here in the United States that you'd say, oh, yeah, but they've always been, you know, promoting with NASA and stuff like that. Maybe that's true. I just don't know enough about it. I have no idea of top. Should be working on his comeback album instead of going up to the moon. I'm not sure why he's there. I love Steve Aoki like Mike drop Steve Aoki. Good job getting on there. But again, I don't know what he brings to that. Maybe composition, though, maybe maybe top and Steve Aoki are going to like collaborate on music inspired by the trip. And that would be very cool. So I'm not against anybody on this list. But when it does come down to it, the reason I'm saying B plus instead of an A is exactly what you said, I would have liked to see somehow someone unexpected chosen, you know, like you say, like an educator or something. But again, I like that everybody on here at least probably has something they're going to bring back with them from it. It's not just like, hey, I was friends with this guy, so I got on it. Yeah, yeah, I would like for all of them to bring something back, something so that I can feel like it's an experience that I can feel emotionally connected to, especially if I have kids in the future and I want them to look forward to this as something that they can potentially experience in the future. So for me, it's very much like future driven. I just I want to see I want to this to be as much about like, you know, regular people as it is for the celebrities. Yeah, but don't forget it's dangerous. Like, yeah, it is. I don't mind waiting a few decades. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about Amazon trying to get rid of barcodes. You know, when they were new barcodes were revolutionary. They were a way for a machine to identify a product, something that you really couldn't do very easily. But robots are more sophisticated now and therefore have just as much trouble finding a barcode as you do at self checkout at the grocery store. That's that's no joke. Amazon is therefore saying, you know what, we make a lot of fine warehouse robotics. Let's kill the barcode. Let's kill the barcode. Amazon started by taking pictures of all the products that travel through its warehouses in order to build up this library of product images. Amazon is what is they're using what is called a multimodal identification, which is this fancy way of saying that it uses more than one way to identify an item, like they'll look at the size, the appearance, etc. Amazon uses its multimodal identification library of images to train a model to be able to identify those products without needing to scan any kind of code, a bar, a QR or otherwise. So initially, they got accuracy around 75 to 80%, which is still really good. But they have refined that model enough to claim 99% accuracy now. Yeah, so they haven't brought it to the robots yet, but they have started with cameras. There's a test poly they they operated in Poland, and now have the full thing running in Amazon warehouses in Barcelona and Hamburg. Here's how it works. A conveyor belt moves trays with products in it. That's that's just the way the Amazon warehouse automated system works. The algorithm then uses cameras to scan as the products fly by to see if the right product is in the tray. There's a list as this stuff goes out of what it's supposed to be. If you've ever got the wrong product in your Amazon box, that list failed. This system is going to check that the longer they use this system, the more images they get and the better the model can become. That's important because it's fairly easy to scan an item that's sitting motionless in a tray moving at a constant speed. That that's what they're able to do with 99% accuracy now. However, robots and even humans pick items up, move them around, they move them fast, they move them in weird ways. So it's more difficult to recognize things in that situation. But Amazon is confident that it can get there. Eventually, Amazon wants this system to be good enough so that robots could just pick up an item and know what it is without having to scan and turn it around looking for a barcode. I feel like over time, this is going to make warehouse ordering and shipments so much more efficient and more accurate for customers as well as Amazon itself. And it will probably save them a ton of money on things like returns and refunds whenever you do receive the wrong product. In fact, I was talking to my mom on the phone this morning and she received the wrong product in the Amazon order and she didn't understand how to send it back to them. So I had to walk her through the process. So this will also be really good for consumers who don't want to deal with like that stress and deal with that, especially around the holiday season. Have you ever been in an Amazon go store, like one of those fully automated stores where you just pick things up and walk out with it and it knows who you are and it charges you after you've left? It's so efficient and it's so fast and you don't, like if you're very introverted, you don't have to talk to anybody. It's kind of nice. We have a Whole Foods in Los Angeles. I think we have two of them, maybe, where they put the Amazon Go system in the Whole Foods. So you walk, yeah, you walk in, you throw stuff in your cart and then you literally just walk out and you get charged. I, that's why I sometimes look at, when I was looking at this today, I was like, this is less than it seems in a way because they already do this in grocery stores, right? Now granted, the number of individual SKUs inventory items in a grocery store is lower than Amazon's entire retail operation, right? By an order of magnitude. You probably, I don't know, I'm going to guess you might have a thousand or so, maybe a couple thousand individual items you have to track in a Whole Foods, whereas you literally have millions of items that you've got to track in Amazon. So it's a bigger deal if you want to get above 99% and given the amount of things that Amazon ships, 99% is still going to allow a lot of misidentification, right? So you want to get that as close to 100% as you can get it. I guess what I'm saying, what I'm coming around to saying is this shouldn't surprise us that the company who's able to tell that you picked, you know, a box of granola off the shelf in a grocery store is going to apply that to their warehouses, right? Makes perfect sense. It almost feels like the grocery stores and like the Amazon and Whole Foods are like tests so that they can eventually bring the same technology to the warehouses on a much grander scale because like these miniscule tests with human beings, like that's a good start. But what if you can really, really compound that and make it into a huge thing for the warehouses? Like talk about profits. They're going to make so much money off of this. They're going to save so much time and it's going to be so efficient. Like I can see, of course, this is where Amazon is going to go with it. It's good news for them. That's a really good point because what Amazon did with AWS was say, instead of just running a website, let's be a cloud company. And I think what I think what you're pointing out is with with their retail operations, they're saying, let's not just run a store. Let's be a logistics platform. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, we get a lot of great ideas about what to talk about the show from our subreddit. If you haven't checked it out, there's a great community over there submitting stories, talking to each other about the stories you want to get over there and submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Now this caught my eye on MLB.com of all places today. Business Intelligence Company Morning Consult, which does lots of surveys, released their fastest growing brands of 2022. So I know a lot of you are immediately going to ask how they determine what a fast growing brand is. Here's what they say. They survey tens of thousands of people worldwide every day. If you follow politics, you've heard of Morning Consult. They do surveys in all sectors of businesses, politics, and all kinds of stuff. And for this survey, they measured, quote, the share of consumers who said they would consider purchasing from a brand over the course of the year. So I didn't see the survey, but I expect it means that they said, hey, here's a list of brands. Which of these do you think you will consider purchasing something from? Growth was determined, so the measure of growth, by taking the share of consumers who said they were considering purchasing from the brand in October, so October 1st through the 31st, and then subtracting the number who said the same thing in January, right? So it's just how you figure out growth, right? Number of people who said in October they were going to buy from DTNS was 10, in January was 7, so it grew by 3, and then you make a percentage. 1,689 brands were included in the survey. So now that we know how they did it, Shannon, what would we find out? Okay, some of this might surprise you all. The fastest growing brand overall, and one of the reasons that we're talking about this one on DTNS was Meta. Since the question is whether you are considering a purchase from the brand, and since sub-brands, forum companies like Facebook are treated separately, this likely has to do with the MetaQuest headsets. Now Crocs, this is the one that I was surprised about, was number two, and Beats by Dr. Dre was number three. Zell was interestingly number six, and Adobe is number seven, T-Mobile was number 12, Boost Mobile was followed after them, number 19, and no other tech companies made the top 20. Yeah, so we're going to get to, why is Meta worldwide the fastest growing brand in a second? But there's some interesting tech companies showing up when you break it down by age range. The number one fastest growing brand among Gen Z was Roku, right? Yeah, that would not have been my guess. Also, the other tech companies showing up on the Gen Z list, Google Sheets at number nine, and Samsung Galaxy Watch at number 14. So strange. Let's get into the millennials, because the millennials dominate all online conversations, right? So the millennials, what do they care about? Actually, not much. Meta was number 11. No tech companies in the top 10. Airpods was number 16. Microsoft Excel was 17. Univision's streaming service VIX was 18, and Beats by Dr. was 20, Beats by Dr. Crossing the generations in its appeal. All right, our generation, Generation X had online clothier she-in at number one, and see, I thought this was a Gen Z brand. We're the one, maybe that's why we're like, hey, we should buy clothes, wear the young people clothes. Meta was number two amongst Gen X. Boost Mobile was number three, Google Docs number six, Google Sheets number 10, Zelle number 11, Microsoft Excel number 12, and then the old folks, the boomers, T-Mobile first. I'm going to buy that one of those T-Mobile phones. Meta was also second among boomers, booking.com third, because more retirees, so the traveling, Microsoft Outlook number four, Apple finally shows up on a list at number nine, Xfinity number 10, YouTube Shorts number 11, they don't truck with the TikTok, but the boomers, they like the YouTube Shorts. Microsoft Start, which is number 17, that is the Air 2 MSN. That's the news app from Microsoft, and Zelle number 20. So, Zelle's showing up across the generations here. Shannon, what's your best guess for why Meta showed up number one worldwide overall, and so high on the older folks' lists? So, that is so weird to me. So weird. I'm going to guess it has to do with VR, but I honestly like, that one surprised me a lot, because I think about Meta, and I think about how younger generations are like, ugh, Facebook, like no, we're on TikTok, but TikTok's not even on this list. So what's going on? Where is everybody? I think what's going on with Meta is that people are considering buying the Quest. That's got to be it. People are thinking like, you know what, that VR. I know about the Meta Quest. It could be that they're thinking about buying ads on Facebook, I suppose, and they attribute it to Meta, because again, this is self-reported. Are you thinking of buying something from Meta? And a lot of people said yet. Yes, it's good news for Meta that there's so much brand awareness around Meta, because when they changed the name of the company from Facebook to Meta, a lot of people weren't sure that was going to happen. Yeah, it does make sense from that standpoint. I will agree with you there. Another one that kind of surprised me was that Gen Z topped Roku on their list, and Roku's been around for such a long time as kind of an underdog when it comes to streaming. It sounds like they're really getting the gears rolling in terms of getting more brand recognition, which I'm happy to see because Roku's always been a really good player in that field. So it's kind of cool to see them there. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel being on different lists is not very surprising to me, since a lot more people are working from home. There's a lot more remote work and using cloud platforms to do collaboration work, that makes sense. The other ones are kind of odd there. Zell also kind of makes sense for payment platforms. That's definitely been growing in the past few years. But can we talk about Crocs at number two? So weird. Overall, right? If it was a generational thing, I probably have more theories. But yeah, number one Meta, number two Crocs, number three Beats by Dre. Beats by Dre makes perfect sense to me. People are considering buying some headphones, some earbuds, and they're probably like, I'll probably just end up buying AirPods, but let me see. I'm considering Beats by Dre. And so they're more likely to say that on here. That makes sense to me because they're cool. I have some Beats by Dre AirPods or earbuds, earbuds, and I love them. Yeah, I too. I think the Roku thing is very telling that Gen Z is not into cable, right? Xfinity is the boomers. Roku is Gen Z. But it's Roku. It's not Fire TV. It's not Chromecast. Not Chromecast. It's not Apple TV. And it's not any specific TV brand either, although Roku does work on TVs. They have operating systems in TVs. So that makes more sense, especially since they're growing their brand awareness in that segment too, not just using boxes. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good point. It's very interesting. Folks, if you have theories about this, especially if you're from one of these generations, which I assume you are from one of them, unless we have some Gen Alpha folks out there listening to us, send us your theories. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Well, it is all the rage with Google being the latest to release its annual year in search report outlining the top global searches of 2022. The New York Times Game Wardle held the number one spot with all search terms. Not super surprising there. But the second most searched term this year was India versus England, which was in reference to the Cricket World Cup. The word Ukraine held the number three spot. Obvious reasons there. Ukraine held the spot in this year's list of trending news topics. And Queen Elizabeth Passing was the second most trending news topic. Election results was number three. As for people of interest, Johnny Depp was the most searched person globally. Thor, Love and Thunder saw the most searches globally for a film. And Euphoria was the TV show with the most searches on Google. Google also said the most popular search query starting with what is was what is NATO? Okay, that goes with Ukraine. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. India, England was huge. That that makes sense to me. Euphoria was huge. Interesting to know that it was huge worldwide. Wardle, I didn't expect to last all year, but it but I'm not surprised. You know, it did. The only one that I think threw me was Thor, Love and Thunder. I was like, was that this year? Like, yeah, we had to like look up the when it released. It feels like it was so much longer ago, and there've been so many other movies come out since, but it dominated the search results. I kind of love that people are looking up what is NATO so they can kind of educate themselves on these these very global, very important agencies. And that's that's a big one. So that's really cool. I like seeing that. Yeah, and it was a huge topic in February when the war began. So it makes sense that that people would be looking for it then. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Tyler weighed in on our conversation about notifications from yesterday. Tyler says, I definitely hit notification overload a long time ago and have learned that it needs to be managed. Having a smartwatch has actually been the biggest help in managing the impulse to check every single notification all the time, at least for me. I'm not sure if the Apple Watch has this functionality, but with my Galaxy Watch, are you a Gen Z? Is that who had the Galaxy Watch on there? I'm sorry. But with my Galaxy Watch, I have very few notifications that get to the watch, even if those notifications are turned on on my phone. Gmail, for example, notifications are on my phone, but not on my watch. I do want the notifications, but I don't need Gmail notifications right away. Messaging apps, yes, those notify me on my watch because I probably should know if my mom's texting me. What this lets me know is that if a notification hits my watch, I should probably check it. But everything else can wait and will be waiting for me on my phone the next time I pick it up. It has really helped me not pick up my phone for every single notification, while still allowing more notifications to hit my phone than I probably should. Just my two cents. But they're Canadian cents, so they weren't even less. That is not true, Tyler. Your cents are worth, I would say your cents are undervalued. Your cents are worth very much because I do the same thing. I use my watch as kind of a filter and I only send certain notifications to it for exactly the same reasons he's talking about. Me too. I just pulled out my Pixel Watch and I was like, yeah, I've been doing the exact same thing with my Pixel Watch. Like less notifications, it's great. And it has kind of taught me over time not to pull out my phone constantly. So it's a good thing. It definitely helps. An excellent, excellent tip there, Tyler. Thank you for writing in. I'd say these are worth at least three cents, probably a lot more, to be honest. You know who else is worth three cents and a lot more is Len Peralta. Len, you've been drawing millions of dollars worth of art I am unapologetically Gen X, okay? Yeah. And I feel like, get off my lawn sort of feel, so you can have the story about the barcodes. I was like, must we get rid of barcodes? Come on. I get why we want to move. You're old and stuck in your ways. I am. I am very old and stuck in my ways. So I took today's art from the view of the barcode. If you guys, and I said I'm unapologetically Gen X, people wouldn't probably recognize this as a little take on Schoolhouse Rock or as someone in the chat called Schoolhouse Mock. But this is a song. You know, I'm just a code that Bezos wants to unload. He's only a bill or a code. That's so cute. So yeah, if you like this piece of art, you can go get it right now if you're a Patreon backer, patreon.com forward slash Len. You can also just get it the old fashioned way at LenPeraltaStore.com where I am also taking orders through the 20th for my custom holiday card. So why don't you jump on that if you can? Get them while they're hot. Get them while they're hot. Shannon, I know you just got back from Japan. What do you got going on for people to look at? Well, I am jet lagged. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morris. Two things. One, I'm super close to 85,000 subscribers. If you want to subscribe and help me get to 85K, I would appreciate it so, so much. And also, I just did a video called five best VPNs. It's my choices for five best VPNs from my security and privacy background. It's not sponsored by any VPNs. I know most VPN reviews are sponsored. So this one is not. It's sponsored by a completely different company. So definitely check it out if you want an unsponsored review of some really good VPNs in 2022 slash 2023 to choose from. Excellent. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Ted, who just started backing us on Patreon. Ted's middle name is Patreon, according to what Ted put in on Patreon as well. Thank you, Ted, for starting to back at us. Welcome. Here's what you're in on, Ted, because you backed us today. Just last night, I updated our loyalty merch. The loyalty merch on Patreon gives you a piece of merchandise every three months that you stay as a patron at that level. In the past we've done this, it might mean you end up with four stickers or four t-shirts. And we've had different art from Len on each one of those t-shirts, but it's still four t-shirts. This year, we still have art from Len. It's our ninth year anniversary art, because we're hitting our ninth year anniversary on January 2nd. And you'll get a different product every three months that you stay a patron with that logo on it. It's kind of a USB meets a floppy disk and the floppy disk looks like a nine way cool Len out did himself with this. So if you want that merch, be like Ted, sign up and then stick around. Every three months, you're going to get something and associate producers are even getting something this year. We haven't been able to do it at all the levels this year, all but the lowest level get merch. That's just what we're doing as Patreon makes it easier to do this sort of stuff. So fun stuff for you to get as a thank you for supporting us at patreon.com. slash D T N S. Another thing you get if you stick around is of course the ability to listen to Good Day Internet, our extended show. It's going to start now. Could also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back on Monday with I as actor. Talk to you that 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 Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lamos, 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. Scott is one bio cow Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J. D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean way, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A. Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A. Cast ad support from the amazing Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari, contributors for this week's show included Nika Monford, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Shannon Morse, guests on this week's show included Andrea Jones Roy, John C. Dvorak and Rich DeMuro and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.