 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane, and Paul Boyer. Coming up on DTNS, what's actually going on with the social media moderation law in Texas? Microsoft's plans to let you use game discs on consoles that don't have optical drives and Meta's plan to mix reality for the workplace. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 12th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, it's so good that you're from Texas and originally from Florida today, Justin. Oh, yeah. No, they don't do troublemaker states, always. That's what it all means. All right, they're in the spotlight today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, sent a memo to employees announcing that head of product, K-Von Bacore, is leaving the company and Jay Sullivan will take over the chief of product job that Bacore had for the last several years. Twitter is also freezing most hiring and cutting spending. On Twitter, Bacore interrupted his paternity leave to say, this wasn't my decision. Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction. The oversight board, sometimes called the Facebook oversight board, but the actual name is just the oversight board, rules both on appeals over moderation decisions as well as policy questions, so far entirely related to Meta's Facebook. Facebook is bound to respect the moderation rulings, but only has to consider the advice in the policy rulings. That said, the board has made 18 policy recommendations and Meta has implemented 14 of them. Recently, Meta asked the board to advise on its policies regarding the war in Ukraine. You may recall that Facebook has made an exception to its prohibition against calls for violence if the posts are about Russian soldiers operating in Ukraine. There were also questions about when it should be allowed to show dead bodies or videos of prisoners of war criticizing the conflict, whether it should adapt its rules to this particular situation. However, late last month, Meta withdrew the request to review those policies. The Verges Casey Newton talked to the members of Meta and the board and found that the withdrawal was done over concerns that whatever decision the board might make, Russia might use it as an excuse to retaliate against employees and relatives in Russia. But Newton points out that's something that Russia has already done in response to previous Facebook decisions. NVIDIA is publishing their Linux GPU kernel modules as open source. NVIDIA has offered Linux drivers for years, but they were always proprietary. So NVIDIA's user space software remains closed. Well, but it's mostly good news. That's good. Swedish-backed scientists have published a paper in the journal Scientific Reports showing their findings on the effective video games on 5,000 children aged 10 to 12. The children were asked to report how often they played video games. On average, they reported an hour a day. The scientists then tested the children on reading comprehension, attention and memory, visual spatial processing and learning ability. They controlled for socioeconomic and genetic factors and found that over the space of two years, children in the top 17% of hours playing games, the children who played more than an hour of video games a day, showed an increase in their IQ of 2.5 points over the average. Sonos officially launched its budget sound bar, the Sonos Ray, starting at $279. So, you know, it's budget, depending on who you are, it's budget for Sonos, I suppose. It supports AirPlay 2 and most major music streaming services. It also features touch controls on the top two rays that can be used with a Sonos One for surround sound. No built-in mic though, no HDMI and no Dolby Atmos support, but it does ship June 7th. Sonos also announced its voice control service will launch next month, which lets users control music streaming on Sonos speakers with built-in mics. Alright, let's talk a little more about Meta's mixed reality strategy. We've heard about Project Cambria before. Meta has now demonstrated in a video, although they blurred out the form factor because it's not ready yet, so they didn't want you to get any ideas. It's kind of weird that they blurred it out, but they did. It is the follow-up to the Quest 2 that's supposed to launch this year. It's supposed to launch by the end of the year. Sarah, what did we see? Well, so Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a video. We didn't really offer much, honestly. I mean, kind of look cool. You know, you sort of had like a Pokemon type thing going on. But yeah, as you said, the headset itself was pixelated out. And, you know, it was a teaser video. That's what it was. What we do know is Cambria is a VR headset that is going to use its camera to use pass-through color video from outside and blend in virtual objects. Now, if you're not familiar with VR headsets, this is something that has been done before, but, you know, we're still on the early days of this. Protocol has seen how it works and says it's not photorealistic, but it's akin to decent quality home video, say. So definitely a step up from the Quest 2 for anybody who's familiar with that. Cambria's image sensors are also higher resolution, and that allows for better object separation. It also has an active IR projector for accurate depth sensing. Now, content and apps are created on something called the presence platform. Access to presence is being added to the Quest SDK. So mixed reality could and will be cross-developed to the Quest 2, but that'll be added a lower quality than the Cambria because they're just different headsets. It's positioned for professional work, you know, support for virtual monitors, that kind of thing. Also might be usable for fitness. In fact, Zuckerberg said that specifically. And I would say that would be especially if the headset could be designed to use outside because the Quest 2 is very much nonce. All right, because the Quest 2 only offers a grayscale view of the real world. You can get a view of the real world, but it's very blurry and gray, right? Yes, it's very like silence of the lamp. Like when you watch it, you're like, okay, I can kind of see my room. I'm just going to like, you know, make sure that my room boundary is okay. There's not much else you can do with it. And it's somewhat of a disconcerting experience when you're in there because it's like, they even have like a kind of like a low rumble when you're using the grayscale video, like... Yeah, because it's meant for boundary setting. It wasn't really designed for this. There's nothing really more to do except kind of make sure you have your bearings and know where you are. So you can use the presence to create something for the Quest 2, but it's going to be a little weird, whereas it obviously Project Cambria is going to be good because it's color and it's high res. Well, it's going to be better for sure. So yeah, so Zuckerberg also announced that there was going to be a demo Mixed Reality app called the World Beyond. Downloadable soon in Quest 2's App Lab. So, you know, people can play around with it. The app was mentioned kind of in passing, honestly, at last year's Connect conference. So obviously the company's been working on it for a while. It seems like a way to explore what Mixed Reality can do on VR headsets rather than doing a whole lot itself. And as you mentioned, there are other Mixed Reality headsets that are blacked out VR headsets that do pass there, right? Yeah, so Meta expects Project Cambria to ship sometime this year. Sounds great, but you might be listening to this and saying, but other companies are doing this already, right? Yeah, like Project Barjo, the XR3, similar headset already available. Also tailored for things like training, engineering, medical research purposes, very much still not in a consumer bucket, but it doesn't mean that we can't get there. So what I find fascinating about this, number one, is that, like, Loki, this is a pretty important product for Meta. You know, Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus, has I think correctly said that when Facebook bought Oculus, Oculus became Facebook. There's a reason why they changed their name to Meta and not something else. They want this to be a hardware hit for them in the way that the Quest 2 has been, in my opinion, the best of breed in terms of commercial VR. I'll say this, though. I thought that teaser was bad. It was terrible. I don't think that it made that platform look interesting. I don't think that it gave any kind of real-world context for what you would want to buy on there. I think that game looks kind of silly. And I personally think it is only designed so Zuckerberg looks more human, which is an uphill climb. I don't know how human he was. This is meant for the enterprise. So it's probably not going to hurt it because you're going to sell this thing. Is it meant for the enterprise? Yeah, that's what they're saying. They're like, this is for the workplace. This is for the enterprise. They're going to have other consumer follow-ups to the Quest. I know we called this the follow-up to the Quest. Let's follow up the Quest in technology. This is going to be pitched for uses in the workplace. So the demo that includes the Kmart, Lilo and Stitch creature running around your floor. Well, that's what's so weird about that demo. I don't think the demo hurts them because they're going to sell this hand-to-hand, but it certainly didn't advance that notion, did it? I was not impressed. I love the Quest too. And I am a huge, huge believer in what they do. Same. Use it all the time. But I don't know. This was not something that particularly buoyed my spirits. And I'm always coming from the consumer perspective. And I know that the use cases of this are not always consumers. In fact, very much more enterprise. But I was sort of like, OK, OK. If the pass-through video can be a little bit more real world. Not the best, but better than what I have right now. I could, I don't know, do my workouts outside and feel a little bit more like it is a real thing rather than something that I put on the headset and now the real world around me doesn't exist anymore. Both are fine, but they're different experiences. Just one last very quick thing on this. Facebook needs this to be a commercial hit. They don't want this to be an enterprise product. They want this to be a commercial hit. They want to go diversify themselves from the game they're in now, which is effectively what Google is doing, ad sales, and make it a little bit more Apple. For that, they need this to be more iPhone than Google Glass. They need the Quest to be that, not Cambria. I think Cambria is a new part of the strategy. Cambria is a new part of the strategy, which is let's get a high-end business use case and then we could trickle it down into the Quest. They'll have follow-ups to the Quest and you're absolutely right about the Quest. But that doesn't mean Cambria has to be a consumer hit. Yeah, I'm not saying Cambria specifically. I mean this higher genre. Well, let's talk about Microsoft's patents. GameRant noticed that Microsoft had a patent published last week on a method for validating Xbox game disks for the Xbox Series S. The S is the one that doesn't have an optical drive. Patents always use vague terminology, so it kind of goes all over the place, but essentially it describes a system where you put the disk in another device, presumably another Xbox, maybe a Windows PC, and then you validate your ownership on that it then describes all the possible ways it could transfer that game to the Series S. But among the ones that seem possible are validation with an Xbox Live account and then you download the game to the Series S. I think that's the one that most people would find compelling. There was also live streaming from one device to the other. That's kind of something that's already sort of available. And one intriguing bit about downloading the game from the disk to the Series S over a LAN so that you weren't using your internet. You would actually legally rip it from the disk to your Series S. One of the, I think the best parts of the patent described is the need for the system. Like what do you need to make use of this? Microsoft wrote, quote, many owners of physical video games media have emotional attachments to their physical video game media. These owners simply appreciate the feel of handling the physical video game media and were the nostalgia associated with the physical video game media. Moreover, many of these owners view their libraries of physical game media and paraphernalia as valuable collections, similarly to rare coins collections or baseball card collections, et cetera. So they're going to make NFTs out of them. I don't know. Or they just want people to still buy physical media. No, it's kind of crazy how much about the feelings are in this patent. Because let's forget about arguing whether this is actually patentable or not. It actually hasn't been granted yet. Maybe it won't be. But it probably will be. Microsoft went to great lengths there to be like, we care about video gamers and that is why we would do this. Because video gamers have aged into their prime spending years and they can sell a big super deluxe copy of a game that has already been purchased probably three times by some super gamers. But this is the super elite deluxe version. They will do it. And they just want to make sure that you are able to authenticate it and play it even if they come out with a diskless option. But yeah, look, all technology. I think this was a fascinating thing that we saw with the iPod being discontinued and then becoming a gigantic seller as Apple burned through their remnants just by saying that there was going to be no more. All of a sudden, all of the nostalgia that comes back from people living their formative years with these gadgets come back and you realize, oh, I got some extra money. Let me buy one of these last things. Yeah, it feels overly complex. I mean, we've seen EA. Roger was reminding us earlier today that we've seen EA and Blizzard do versions of this where you can just register your game and then it's stored in the cloud for you. You don't have to have the disk anymore. Voodoo has been doing a thing where you can pay a little bit of money and register your DVD to your cloud account and have the movie there. In none of those cases, do you actually need to put the optical disk in a drive? But that's part of the experience, right? That's just the same way that you open up your baseball card collection or the creek of the plastic. That's part of that tactile experience. Well, if you want to discover more tactile experiences, you can get ideas from people in our audience, in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. Hey, Tom, do you remember September 2021? Yeah, I do. Well, in that time, Texas passed HB20, a law against the banning, demonetizing, or otherwise restricting of social media content based on, quote, the viewpoint of the user or another person, end quote. And that kicked off lawsuit. Indeed, indeed it did. A trade association called NetChoice has sued Texas, alleging that law violates the U.S. First Amendment protection against the government abridging freedom of speech. And in December, a Texas federal district court judge granted a preliminary injunction against the bill going into effect until the court case was resolved. It was an injunction. It said, let's not apply the law until the case is settled. However, Texas appealed the decision to the Circuit Court Court of Appeals, and it was heard by a panel of three of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges. That's a normal way of doing things. You don't have all of the judges. You have a panel of three. So Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit ruled two to one to grant a stay on the preliminary injunction. Meaning, basically, we're not going to let the injunction go into effect, meaning the law goes into effect instead. Now, a lot has been made of statements by the judges during deliberation. One of the judges said that social media platforms weren't websites. Another tried to compare social media posts to phone calls. They talked about common carrier. In the end, as much fun as you may have batting those comments around, it doesn't bear much on the case because the court did not rule on the merits. They're discussing the merits when they say those things. They did not rule on the merits. They didn't even issue their opinion yet, although we will get that eventually. They just sent out the stay saying the preliminary injunction doesn't go into effect. You, Justin, live in Texas. Tell them what this law does for you. Y'all, HB20 allows laws by private citizens as a remedy for violations. It's similar to some other more controversial laws that we have seen in Texas recently. So, if a social media network with more than 50 million active US users discriminates on viewpoint, the state of Texas or any Texas resident can sue. Here's the actual text. A social media platform may not censor a user, a user's expression or a user's ability to receive the expression of another person based on the viewpoint of the user of that or another person, the viewpoint represented in the user's expression or another person's expression or a user's geographic location in this state or any part of this state. But, bro, I'm also from Florida originally. Florida has a similar law, SB 7072, but with the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida, granting a preliminary injunction against that law while a court case also from NetChoice challenges it on First Amendment grounds as well. So, how are these cases going to go in the two most Justin Robert Young Union? So, we have conflicting decisions on the injunctions. We have the seemingly opposed by legal precedent and federal statute. Keep in mind a few of these facts. These are those facts that you can now say you know when this comes up in the future. In 2017, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously 8 to nothing with one abstention, one recusal, really, 8 to nothing in a case called Packingham vs. North Carolina striking down the idea of a state government putting limits on social media. There had been a line of law passed prohibiting registered sex offenders from accessing commercial social networks. The court ruled that the law was unconstitutional because the state was attempting to restrict lawful speech. This is the decision in which the justices referred to social networks as the modern public town square. That opinion was written by Justice Kennedy and a concurrence was written by Justice Alito. The Florida's judge referenced Section 230 of the CDA. That's the other thing. So Packingham is one legal precedent. There's also a statute that was referenced by the Florida judge when the preliminary injunction was issued saying that Section 230 would seem to prohibit this law from going into place. Section 230 specifically says any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access or availability of material that a provider, in this case social networks, considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or, here's the key part, otherwise objectionable. If this platform finds it otherwise objectionable they can limit it and they're protected by Section 230 and they can't be held liable for anything that happens on their platform because of that. In other words, if a platform takes down content it finds objectionable. Section 230 protects it from being sued for making those decisions. This is exactly what the Texas and Florida laws were trying to make happen. Sue them for making decisions about taking things down they found objectionable. So, all right, let's talk about what might happen next. And you would think that the chaos is the point in this, in the case of both these laws. They want these companies to change their ways because they're afraid of dealing with the static whether or not it is legally in bounds. So if there was an opinion from the Texas Circuit, NetChoice could bring a district split decision to the Supreme Court where the two districts, in this case Texas and Florida have ruled in conflict with each other on a similar issue. However, the Fifth Circuit is notoriously slow in bringing out its opinions so NetChoice may not want to wait. NetChoice could ask for what is called an unbunk review of the decision where all the judges of the Fifth Circuit, not just the three judge panel review the case again. However, it's not necessarily likely that they'd get a different decision when they ask the same people. Another option would be to appeal the ruling on the injunction directly to the Supreme Court. The idea would be to get the Supreme Court to review the case on what's called the shadow docket which means they review the oral arguments. This is done rarely in cases that might cause large disruptions if a decision is delayed. But the opinion may not come fast if they go that route. And don't forget this is all about injunctions. The main cases still need to be decided. If the Texas case and the Florida case ultimately come to opposite decisions the outcome would then need to be settled by the Supreme Court at oral arguments. Tom legal scholar though you are how do you think that would go? Yeah, so this is probably going to end up in the Supreme Court. It kind of looks that way one way or another. And so everyone's focusing on Justice Clarence Thomas who has previously indicated that large tech platforms with substantial market power might be akin to common carriers and there is legal precedent for requiring common carriers not to exclude legal uses of their service. But would that mean Thomas would uphold the Texas law or even the Florida law and would any other justices join him on that. That's hard to say. Thomas joined Alito's concurrence on the case that overturned the North Carolina law. So he'd have to find a difference between these and that that he found legally compelling. And in a another case called Manhattan Community Access Court versus Halic the court found that private operators of public access channels that are receiving government funds are not subject to the constitutional requirement not to abridge free speech. In other words they don't have to abide by the First Amendment because they're private. That opinion was written by Justice Kavanaugh and joined by Justice Roberts, Alito Gorsuch and particularly Thomas. So both by looking at the precedents in the law and how the justices have ruled in the past these Florida and Texas laws do not look likely to stand up. And in the meantime right now it is illegal in Texas to moderate content based on the viewpoint of the poster that applies to Yelp Reddit, Tinder, Facebook Twitter and more. Meaning all these platforms risk a lawsuit whenever they remove a post or otherwise moderate what's on their platform. Sarah, before we move on for this, does any of that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's a mess. I mean, what I think we're dealing with right now is, yeah, it's it's we're trying to figure out state by state how these things are going to play out. And yeah, it's very messy. I mean, and I think the chaos is the point here, just to underline that again. On the political side, the reason that these states put these laws in, is that what you're saying? No, no, I'm saying the mechanism by making this about suing and not making this illegal where the state is going to go seize a server or something like that, you are you are looking to affect the behavior of the platforms by saying, well you don't want to deal with a bunch of lawsuits, do you? Yeah, so maybe just leave everything up just in case. Maybe, maybe. Which is exactly why section 230 was passed on a bipartisan basis back in the 90s was they're like, but if we leave everything up, that's chaos. This is all happened before, Tom, and it'll happen again. Indeed. Well, let's talk about black holes. Speaking of messy, you might recall the movie The Black Hole from 1979 scared me a lot when I was a kid. I don't remember watching in 1979 I would have been too young, but I definitely saw it later. Anyway, scientific researchers using the event horizon telescope have captured a picture of a black hole at the heart of our very own Milky Way Galaxy. Sagittarius A star as it's known or SGR A star is bending all the light around it, which is something that's already been captured by the black hole named M87. That's something that researchers have have already done a lot of extensive research on, but they're very different black holes. Sag's hole, I know it sounds weird, but it's a hole is over 1000 times smaller and less massive. And you might say, okay, well, maybe it's not a big deal. No, it's still really massive. It's measuring at 4 million times more massive than our sun. Although the 7th counterpart is billions of time more massive. So, wow, we are talking about quite a bit of space being taken up in space. The researchers developed new imaging tools, including a mix of supercomputing power to analyze and combine data and black hole simulations to help compare their findings, make sure that they knew what they were doing and they saw what they thought that they saw. The project took 5 years to complete, factoring in 100 million hours of supercomputing time at the US National Science Foundation. So in other words, and this is why you don't go to space. We suspected there was a black hole at the center of our galaxy for multiple reasons, but now we've observed it, which is a big deal because now we can find out that it's an everything bagel. Interesting. When you put everything on a thing. It sucks in your galaxy. It's just, I mean, I don't know, I don't have any examples. No, thank you. You'll let me know how it goes. You need them at the center of the galaxy, but stay at the center of the galaxy. Don't come out here on our spiral arm, please. Even then. Yeah, I mean, because we're taking pictures of it. We're taunting this black hole. Yeah. A lot bigger than the sun. The sun is already very scary to me. I don't need anything else in the Milky Way. Our sun's like medium. At what point in the movie is the darkness rewarded for taking pictures of the great evil at the center of the universe? I don't remember. Consider that a writing prompt for your next sci-fi novel, everyone. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Doug regarding regenerative braking without brake pads that we were talking about in Future EVs last week. Doug wrote in, there are many challenges, but the main issues are not about making regen braking work or ability control, et cetera. It's a problem of peak power absorption. So other than exotic sports cars, vehicles are capable of braking with a much higher deceleration rate than they can accelerate. What you're doing when you're doing regen braking is you're using the same electric machine that you use for acceleration. It's just in reverse. So think of turning the motor into a generator. All right. There was some good stuff from Doug on this. We'll be right in with your expertise. Thanks, Doug. In defense of hybrid schedules, remember we asked people like, okay, if you like hybrid work, if you like being in the office a couple of days a week, staying at home a couple of days a week, let us know. Todd wrote, I like working from home. I like the flexibility of being able to take a break and do laundry or prep dinner. But I also like being around my coworkers. I feel like we have more productive conversation in the office in between and when I'm sitting in an office with them, they have great ideas. Hallway meetings are better than Zoom meetings. Of course, my ideal schedule would be to have the ability to pick which days I'm in the office and which I'm at home, but we can't always get what we want. Thank you, Todd, for coming to the defense of the hybrid schedule. It's good to get that perspective. Well, thanks also to Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, you're looking good, man. What else has been going on? Well, I'm heading out to Pennsylvania. So, you can follow my coverage there next week on Politics, Politics, Politics as we come to the close of the primaries in the Keystone State. But also get a primer of exactly what's happening right now on the Wednesday episode of that very program. A third candidate has entered the fray in what was a two-man race, Kathy Barnett making it a much more chaotic situation. So, follow that, Politics, Politics, Politics. Excellent. And just a reminder, if you have thoughts or comments on anything we talk about on the show, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that feedback. Thank you in advance. We love to hear from you. Also, want to send a special thanks to Travis Falstead who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Travis. Thank you, Travis. Appreciate you. We have a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. If you know about it, you know about it. But it is available at patreon.com. Please join us if you can. We're live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20, honey, UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com and we're back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Lynn Peralta joining us. Talk to you then. All right, this will work.