 Coming up on DTNS, how hackers are getting swept up in the war in Ukraine to scored ups its moderation game and a VR headset that turns your car ride into a rollercoaster. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 25th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse. And who's the show's producer? Is it Roger Chang? Oh, yeah, it is. But you can't hear it. You have to say the show's producer. If he was here, he would tell you that he is the show's producer, Roger Chang. Hey, if you're a patron and you're enjoying an ad-free version of the show, good for you. If you're not a patron and you'd like to enjoy an ad-free version of the show, head on over to patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons. Today they include Vince Power, John and Becky Johnston and Chris Benito. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Gamebeat sources back up what Bloomberg has reported that Sony plans to expand PlayStation Plus into a bigger subscription gaming service internally referred to as Spartacus. Sony is reportedly planning three tiers. An essential service at $10 per month would give you monthly games, essentially PlayStation Plus. An extra service at $13 a month would add a back catalog of downloadable games. And a premium tier at $16 per month would include streaming, game trials, and also classic games. Game Speed says Sony is moving into the testing phase and might be ready to announce in March. The information sources reported Friday that Metta had broken up a 300-person team working on operating systems for AR and VR headsets. Metta told The Verge that it has moved those mixed reality operating system engineers into its hardware teams to, quote, speed up the development of solutions that are hyper-tuned for each product line. So if I could interpret that speak, it sounds like they're like, yeah, they're still working on operating systems, just one specific to the hardware platforms. Google developed accelerated mobile pages, aka AMP, as a way to speed up delivery of pages on the mobile web. AMP is supported by an open-source working group. But those simplified pages contain fewer ads. So Vox Media, BuzzFeed, and Bustle's parent companies are considering moving off of AMP to their own mobile optimized systems. Several publishers have stopped making AMP versions of their pages after Google reduced AMP's effects on search engine rankings last year. Russia's state communications regulator Roskomnozor said Friday that it would restrict access to Facebook after the platform ignored orders to lift restrictions on four Russian media outlets. Facebook has restricted distribution of content from the RIA news agency, the Russian Defense Ministry's Zyazda TV, as well as two news websites. According to an internal memo seen by Mac rumors, Apple will soon provide authorized technicians with access to true depth camera service parts, allowing for same unit repairs to Face ID. Currently fixing the Face ID system requires a whole unit replacement. Apple will make service parts available for the iPhone XS and newer devices. Alright, let's talk about that HTC VR headset, Sarah. Let's do it. HTC has partnered with a company called HollowRide to let Vive flow VR headset users wear their headsets in a car as passengers, not as drivers, and then simulate riding a roller coaster or some other experience with the motion inside the headset pulling from data points of the car to match the car's actual movement. HollowRide, which has partial investment from Audi, will also offer virtual worlds along with 2D content on what it calls a virtual motion synchronized cinema screen. The Vive flow is $500. It offers two 1.6 K 75 Hertz displays with a 100 field degree field of view, but with fewer motion sensors than some competing headsets requires a mere mounted dongle to help track vehicle motion. So there's a little fancy footwork going on, but it works. No official release date if this excites you, but HollowRide says it will show off the experience at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, starting February 28th. On the technological side, I find this incredibly fun and impressive that that they can pull even with the dongle having to hang from the mirror like being able to pull those motion points and then sync them up to a game. I watched a couple videos of people testing it and they were fairly impressed. They're like, Yeah, yeah, it does. It does seem to match. Then we get to the point of would I buy a $500 Vive flow just to do this? And I'm not sure. I'm not I'm not sure I want this more than just to try it once. I'm not sure this is something that I will, I will make a regular part of my passenger experience in a car. What about y'all? I'm kind of in the same boat as you like if I'm in the car going somewhere it's yeah, if I'm in the car with somebody it's usually my husband and I prefer to like have a conversation or something. But I gotta say like whoever you're in the car with when they're driving, I just hope you trust them not to like slam on the brakes and do crazy stuff while you're in the car in your own world trying to deal with the movements of the vehicle while you're watching something completely different because that lack of control that lack of view sight of what's going on around you that would kind of freak me out a little bit. I don't know. It's been a really long time since I've sat in the backseat of any car. I guess it was probably an Uber the last time I was, you know, I mean you could sit as a passenger in the front seat too and have I guess the same experience. But imagining or harkening back at least to all the long road trips I used to take with my parents, you know, where I'd sit in the back, look out the window, be listening to my Walkman music or whatever it was and and how you just sort of have the time pass and my parents were probably always relieved that I was just sitting back there quietly enjoying myself, you know, and not bugging them every five seconds for a snack or, you know, to go to Taco Bell or something. I can see where this would be maybe a novelty for kids or adults alike, but I would totally try it out. And yeah, if it doesn't make you motion sick, and that's a big part of this, and it's it's what HTC and Hollow Rider claiming that it could help with, especially even watching like a movie or something that might kind of be a little icky on the tummy, when it's just a like a screen on the back seat in front of you. It sounds fun. It definitely why not? Why not past the time? One of the things that causes motion sickness is not being able to see the world, be able to anticipate the way the world is going to move. So a lot of people, they think get motion sick in a car because they're not driving, whereas when they are driving, they don't get motion sick, because they can anticipate the moves. And so I guess this could cut down on motion sickness, and maybe it's a therapeutic in that way, because the game can signal what's going to happen a little better. It still isn't the driver though. So it still doesn't know when a turn really is going to come until the turn starts to come. So I don't know, a little skeptical that people who get motion sickness in cars would benefit from this. But I guess you can get motion sick from VR, even if you don't get car sick. And so cutting down on that is a good part of this. I bet this could turn into a subculture where people like find the perfect route to play your virtual world. Right? I wonder, I mean, unless you're like on the Autobahn or something, the roller coaster probably won't seem like it's going all that fast. Lombard Street in San Francisco, everybody's popping on their VR headsets to maybe. Again, that's a slow roller coaster. Well, yeah, and they're gonna have to come up with more than just a roller coaster. Absolutely. And they already have. They already have. That's just one example of like, oh, cool. This is like, you know, I'm at an amusement park. I don't know. I think this is great. I don't take my headset anywhere. It kind of sits in my gaming area of my garage where I have a bunch of room. I like the idea and I have a quest too. So this is not compatible with that, but I like the idea of being able to use it for more fun experiences. Next time I take a long Uber ride, I'll give it a try. Yeah, yeah. All right, folks, we mentioned briefly on Thursday that the United States had issued restrictions on exports to Russia. Since that announcement, we've been able to find out more details about what's happening. US companies will need to license if they need to get a license if they want to sell computers, sensors, lasers, navigation tools, telecommunications, aerospace and marine equipment to Russia. There's a few other categories, but that kind of covers most of it. The US, of course, as we said yesterday, will deny most applications to do so. Non-US companies also faced restrictions if they use US tools to make chips. Most chip makers and most chip makers are not in the US. Most chip makers use either US based equipment, software or intellectual property somewhere in their chip making process. So this gives the US the leverage to control where companies using those tools can send their chips. However, some consumer electronics will be allowed. The US Department of Commerce fact sheet says that telecom infrastructure and a range of consumer items used by Russian people, including smartphones, are exempt from the sanctions. You can send those. You can keep sending iPhones to Russia. That's fine, as long as you aren't selling them to military or government officials that are under sanction. The restrictions may not end up being that effective depending on who you ask. Protocol says Russia accounted for less than 0.1% of global chip purchases. So they're not a big chip buyer anyway. US exports entirely to Russia, not just for chips. Entire US exports to Russia in 2021 were about $6.4 billion compared to $151 billion for China. Now, speaking of China, China may make up that 0.1% of chips for Russia, though China does not make its own advanced chip. So it could hurt Russia's military to not get the more advanced chips they might want. China's biggest domestic chip maker, SMIC, is also under the same US restrictions. So it's having a hard time ramping up its chip making. And most chips, even those made in China, are made by non-Chinese companies like Samsung and TSMC. And TSMC has said publicly that it will abide by the US restrictions. Of course, we also mentioned yesterday that Russia makes about 90% of the neon used in chip making for lithography. Protocol says the semiconductor industry association came out with a statement saying it is not concerned about that. They believe the industry has, quote, a diverse set of suppliers of key materials and gases. And protocol also noted that Evercore analyst CJ Muse wrote in a research note that there will be enough neon for as long as the next year. So it doesn't seem like that's going to be as big a deal as it may have seemed like yesterday. This is really interesting from a consumer standpoint of I'm wondering if, given how this seems to be happening right now, if for like, if you're interested in purchasing a GPU right now, is this going to affect your ability to purchase a GPU or some kind of PC components for a regular tower as a consumer in other countries, given that we already have shortages from the pandemic that we've experienced for the past couple of years? Yeah, this whole global economy, everyone's affected, even if, you know, there are restrictions on exports to Russia from the US. How it will affect, you know, me, let's say, you know, if I'm in the market for something or if, you know, somebody in Russia is in the market for something, it doesn't, I don't really know. I don't really, I can't see the the gravity of the ripple effect. There will be one certainly, unless, you know, a lot of things change and soon. But, but yeah, I I I wonder how this this affects the world in three months from now. Yeah, the general consensus is that it won't affect things much, because other than those those gases and some other minerals, there wasn't much anticipated effect. It sounds like they don't think that will have much effect. Some people were even wondering like, Oh, we will we increase the amount of chips available if we're not selling them to Russia and Russia doesn't buy enough chips for that to really make that much of a difference that way either. So except for the caveat of like anytime there is a war in an area as as developed as Ukraine, it's going to disrupt things unpredictably. It doesn't seem like there's any direct, obvious, immediate threats to the chip shortage. Whereas yesterday kind of looked like, Oh, maybe maybe there are some threats that the experts weighing in on this say, not not immediately, not obviously. Well, Discord has joined the world of policing speech. But before you get outraged or freaked out, let's explain. For the first time in almost two years, Discord updated its community guidelines and policies, which will go into effect on March 28. The crux of the update is that users quote may not share false or misleading information on Discord that is likely to cause physical or societal harm. Clint Smith, chief legal officer at Discord, gave examples of how the company meant to implement this, telling somebody to drink bleach to get rid of the coronavirus would be punishable because drinking bleach can seriously harm you, telling people to hold crystals against their chests to get rid of the virus would not be punishable because it's low risk. Discord says it will also try to take into account the intent and the context of a message when making judgment calls. The company will also penalize users for off-platform behavior and what it considers the highest harm categories that's violence or sexualizing minors. Again, Smith gave the verge examples that cheating on an exam or even getting charged with drug possession wouldn't be considered to be in those categories. Discord allows individual servers to moderate themselves with admins allowed to escalate moderation to the company if and when it's necessary. Discord also says it will continue to use machine learning to identify content but also relies on user reports and outside experts. It says it will continue to respect the privacy of DMs and private servers with machine learning moderation focused on public servers. Smith said the company had gone from a bunch of Californians serving a gaming audience as recently as 2020 to having employees in the US, Toronto, London and Amsterdam with a broad global audience. So things have changed for Discord in a relatively short period of time. Discord's all grown up. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, like this is Discord saying, oh, we have to not act like adults. I think that's too condescending. But, you know, we're popular. We have people here. Like, you know, you've got to have rules. But it also means they're entering the dangerous game of moderation, which as just Robert Young likes to say is, you know, hashtag hell portal, hashtag portal to hell if you get it wrong. And it's very easy to get it wrong. I think Discord seems to be doing its darndest to say, we just want to stop really bad stuff. We don't want to stop you talking to each other. This is really interesting because like I come from that old school time of using IRC since I was a kid. So I've always compared Discord to being like a web 2.0 slash 3.0 now to an old school IRC. So hearing that they're going to start, they're still letting moderators moderate their servers, right? But they're adding this extra piece on top of that so that they are acting like adults now. I love that terminology. That's great. Yeah, weird. Yeah, moderators can still moderate their own servers. But if they need help or if a lot of users are saying, hey, there's there's bad stuff going on here, then Discord has always been able to step in that. That part isn't new. It's just they have now clarified what kinds of things they'll they'll step in and kick you off for doing. I think some people will be surprised to know that Discord always had the capability to do this. You know, people going, oh, no, now they're listening. You know, now we're being censored kind of thing. It's that Discord is just saying like here in pretty plain terms is how we're we're going to going to deal with this stuff. There will be gray areas. There always is with how harmful something is. I might have a different opinion than somebody else. But but in general, I I don't I don't see this as cause for alarm. You know, if you're alarmed, you should have already been. It's tricky business. And there's always cause, you know, for for for mistakes to be made. But I think Discord is showing that they have learned from those who've made mistakes before them. Folks, what do you like to hear us talk about on the show? One of the reasons we got really good feedback in the survey about the story selection on Daily Tech News Show is because we listen to y'all. And one way to let us know what you want to hear us talk about is our subreddit. We look at it every single day. So if you haven't already, go over and submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. And big thanks to everybody in there. Hackers, malicious or not, are being swept up into the war in Ukraine. The government of Ukraine is calling on hackers to help protect critical infrastructure and spy on Russian troops. Yegor Achev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kiev, told Reuters he is collecting and vetting volunteers at the request of someone at the Defense Ministry. That's partially because Ukraine has no formal cyber warfare unit. The BBC has a profile out today of Russian individuals who are voluntarily organizing denial of service to attacks against Ukrainian websites in order to show their patriotism for their country's cause. So far, cyber attacks against Ukraine have included the wiper tool that we mentioned on Thursday's show. Obviously, the many of denial of service attacks we've talked about and a rise in phishing attacks. Ukraine's computer emergency response team, CERT UA, has attributed the ongoing campaign to the UNC-1151 threat group, which security company Mandiant has formerly linked to the Belarusian government. So it looks like Belarus may be involved in the hacking side as well. And people who post under the anonymous banner have declared themselves, quote, in cyber war against the Russian government. Netblocks reported that Russian government websites went offline Thursday evening. So, Shannon, there's more going on than just that. Absolutely. I've kind of been watching what's been happening in the cybersecurity community just for my own reporting on threat wire, but also because a lot of my friends own small businesses that are in cybersecurity and they want to do something to help. And I've seen a lot of them come forward and decide to do something, even though they're not physically going to a different country or anything, they're doing something from right here. So we've seen allegiances kind of form on both sides of these parties. So we started seeing all sorts of different allegiances unfold. Chris Krebs, which is he's the former SISA director, he tweeted that the Conti ransomware gang has officially pledged to strike back against anybody who attacks Russia, which basically does confirm in case anybody was still doubting their allegiance with Russia. And on the other side, we have a bunch of U.S. and European cybersecurity companies and tech companies that have been actively starting to support Ukraine in various ways. They're small businesses in the hacker and cybersecurity community that are using their specific tools that they have built to help. For example, Dragos, they have opted to give free incident response and support to other small businesses that need any kind of infrastructure control system or ICS cybersecurity support. Gray Noise is another company. You can look them up online. They have been using their own tool, which helps you kind of understand the noise that's going on on the internet, hence the name. They have published all the IPs of different devices that are attempting to compromise Ukrainian IPs specifically. So they are looking for IP addresses that are attacking within the confines of Ukraine. And that's really, really interesting that they are doing this kind of hacktivism. So we've also been seeing hacktivists and Ukrainian defenses that are also seeing a huge increase in cryptocurrency donations from all across the globe. All sorts of supporters are starting to throw money at all these hacktivists. For example, there's a Ukrainian Cyber Alliance. That's a hacktivist group. They have received about $100,000 in donations. And this is not the only one. We've been seeing a lot of this kind of activism happening, even though, like, technically, we haven't flown over there. We haven't, like, gone onto the very forefronts of this big attack or anything like that. Like, we're seeing this cyber warfare happening. And it's incredibly fascinating and it's very, very interesting. It's 2022, y'all. This is the new front. There are no borders on the internet. And we mentioned the South Ossetia War when Russia invaded Georgia back in 2008. There were no borders on the internet back then. But there weren't as many eyes on that conflict for whatever reason. And there also weren't as many people on the internet in 2008 as there are 14 years later. So this is the highest level conflict that involves the most number of tech people, both on the Ukrainian and Russian side. And it's really interesting to hear your description of what is essentially an asymmetric war where you're not on one side or another of a trench. And people who aren't even affiliated with one side or the other can jump in on either side and contribute to the cyber warfare aspect of that. I don't think we've ever seen anything like that at this scale before. That's both frightening and impressive, right? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of people are now realizing that they have this power in cybersecurity or online. They have the ability to take some kind of activist approach as opposed to just sitting in our own country and thinking, what can we do? What can we do? We have like open source tools that allow us to source IPs of companies that are attacking Ukraine. We have so much information readily available to us and there's so many companies that are already doing this kind of research to find out where ransomware is coming from and where malware is being formed. So now we're taking this as approach of we can actually do something and we're seeing that actually happen. And that's the big difference that I'm noticing just coming from being a part of this hacker community is people are doing something. Like it's very exciting and it is kind of scary. And unprecedented. I used that word a lot back in March and April 2020. And here we are again, we are going, no one knows how this can play out because we've never seen these kinds of conditions before. And so that's why I said it's impressive and frightening. It will be very interesting to see what happens, to see how people jump in, to see what rules of cyber warfare might arise out of this based on the actions and what's effective and what is it? There is going to be a lot of information come out of this because it's a real world attest of something that people don't want to test, but it's happening. So there you go. Well, this week, air traffic control of major airlines have limited flying over Ukraine for obvious reasons. You might recall when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by Russian separatists during a conflict back in 2014. Nobody wants that to happen again. However, a screenshot of a flight map using the plane finder app was tweeted Thursday, showing an Air India plane flying over Ukraine surrounded by countless other commercial planes actively avoiding that same airspace. Many a meme was created by folks off of that tweet. We don't know if this is the first person who uploaded it, but certainly that tweet in particular got a lot of traction. Folks trying to find humor in the situation because it's not a fun situation. Think Leroy Jenkins type of jokes. Leroy! Yeah. I'm Air India and I'm going the way the crow flies type thing. Oh my gosh. Twitter user UYJeromaya said, listen, you've all had your fun. But he pointed out to, he or she pointed out the genuine destination of the Air India plane was from India to Frankfurt, Germany and that it had not actually crossed into Ukrainian airspace and that it had already landed safe. Ah, well, yes, that's not as funny as one lone plane just deciding to go rogue and fly through space. But also good to know, good to know that no passengers were ever in danger. It was just an optical illusion, I guess, an artifact of the way things are mapped that it looked that way. Hey, it could have been as simple as like the application didn't update immediately. So it was just showing a basic track of where it would normally fly. But... It's kind of funny. Again, it was, I don't think anybody was trying to be malicious about this. People had their fun and then someone said, wait a second, this image might be doctored or otherwise misleading and everyone went, oh gosh, have you ever had any fun in your life? And that is, nobody's quite wrong here but in a time of rampant misinformation, you know, it's... Here's a harmless example of how easy it is to get fooled. Right, exactly. Right. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Brian says he understands wanting to give credit to AI for original works of art. This is something that we talked about last week. But Brian says AI is just a program. No matter how sophisticated it's a program. It doesn't have a soul or consciousness. Can't be held accountable. It can't take credit. The person who tasked the program is responsible. If not, level five autonomous car owners wouldn't need insurance or a sense of guilt when their level five autonomous cars injures or kills somebody. Further, Word, Excel, Adobe, all the other programs would hold copyrights to all their output if we take this to the nth degree. Brian says it's interesting to watch but life is special and without it there just isn't all that comes with life. In short, accountability, awareness and understanding on a human level will never be part of a program. No matter how hard we want it to be that way. Computers and machines and programs are just bits being processed. And I like it that way. Life is special even when we forget the day, even when we forget that every once in a while. Sorry, robot overlords. Well, I agree with the sentiment of Brian's email entirely but I think it might oversimplify the situation. I don't think anybody disputes that when you enter something into Word that's yours, not the coder of Word. But what happens when you didn't enter anything? What, how about this one? What if two people are using the same machine learning program? Two different instances of it. They both output the same piece of artwork. Who gets the copyright? Because there was no actual human intervention. Is it the one who pressed the button first? Gets the copyright on that? I think there are more subtle problems with machine-created stuff where you can't just say like, well, if a human did it, they're responsible. The level five autonomous car, is it the manufacturer that's responsible? And that would chill manufacturers from wanting to make cars if they're like, well, we're gonna be responsible for every death or every person in the car. So there's a lot of conversations about that. Let us know what you think about this and what you think about Brian's well-spoken email, a feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed, this struck a chord to the story. We've gotten quite a bit of feedback, so thanks to everybody for weighing in. Keep it up. We love to know how you feel about this stuff. Hey, special thanks to Irwin Stur. Irwin, you are one of our top Lifetime supporters on DTNS and we thank you for all your years of support. Yay, Irwin. Also thanks to, Hey, we've got an audience all of a sudden and they love you too, Irwin. They're also gonna clap for Shannon Morris. Woo-hoo, Shannon, thanks for being on the show today. You are a busy person. Where should people go to see all your latest? Well, I'll be honest, Sarah, I took a break. So I haven't been that busy, but now I am getting back to being busy. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morris spelled just like my name. This weekend, actually, I'm gonna be posting my 2022 password manager update of my best, favoriteist, greatest password managers. So you can definitely check that out for recommendations from somebody in cybersecurity. So hopefully it helps. Awesome. Well, we're so glad to have you with us today. Always a better show when there's a Shannon. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll be back on Monday. 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, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, 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 Detherdy. Our mods! Beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, Biocow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shit, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Shannon Morse. Guests on this week's show were Laura Shin 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. I hope you have enjoyed this program.