 Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft clarifies about Windows 11 upgrades. Half the world has smartphones now and Patrick Norton explains what we actually need to care about regarding lossless. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 28th, 2021. Happy birthday, me in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane somewhere in St. Louis. I'm Patrick Norton and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about baked goods on Good Day Internet. So if you don't want to be hungry, don't support our Patreon. Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft announced that the Nobellium Group behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack compromised a system from a customer support agent using it to launch highly targeted attacks against its customers. It's unclear if this attack occurred on Microsoft's network or contractors or how long Nobellium had access, but the system included information on billion contact information and also services paid for it by the customers. Microsoft's xCloud game streaming came out of beta now available to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. Game streaming with xCloud are available on iOS, PCs and Mac OS through the browser with more than 100 games now available. Game streams are powered by Xbox Series X consoles available at 1080p up to 60 frames per second. And of course, all of those numbers depend on your connection speed. US Federal Judge dismissed the US Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, saying that it provided evidence of monopoly and antitrust violations was too speculative and conclusitory to go forward. The FCC had filed the lawsuit claiming that Facebook abuses a monopoly position over social media that it created by acquiring competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp. Far from being the end of the issue, though, the judge noted that the FTC now has 30 days to file an amended complaint with sufficient evidence, which it is expected to do. Honda announced its first all electric SUV will be called the Honda Prologue going on sale in the US and Canada in 2024, which along with a forthcoming Acura SUV were co developed with GM using its Ultium battery packs. In the second half of this decade, Honda plans to release a series of EVs built on its Honda e architecture with a goal of battery electric and fuel cell vehicles accounting for 40% of its sales by 2030. YouTube TV announced 4k streaming package today brand new also includes a feature for downloading shows for offline viewing and unlimited streams on your home Wi-Fi. The 4k package will cost $20 extra per month that'll total you $85 per month if you don't have yet more extras like HBO and stuff existing customers can get it for $10 per month for the first year. So could be worth your while at least for the first year if you're existing. All YouTube TV subscribers also get 5.1 audio support as well. And a new Olympics feature will let you jump to the sport you want to watch with a recording. You can also search for upcoming events by sport and record them. All right, let's all talk about Mobile World Congress, Samsung having a big event where they were going to announce watches and they announced no watches. But Samsung did provide more details about its new smart watch where OS partnership with Google sort of. We still don't have the official name or any new hardware. But the company showed off its own one UI watch software interface. This is a UI layer specific to Samsung devices similar to one UI for Samsung phones. And it will run on top of the forthcoming OS being developed by Samsung and Google together. The big feature in one UI watch is apps installed on your Samsung phone will automatically install on your Samsung watch before you had to do that manually in Tizen. And you had to go into the little app store on Wear OS. Well, in one UI, they'll automatically install. So hopefully that will carry over to Wear OS. Settings from your phone will also automatically sync over to a one UI watch, things like clocks, time zones, lists of block numbers, etc. Samsung will also make a new watch face design tool available for Android developers next year. It's unclear if existing Tizen or Wear OS watch faces will make the jump over to one UI, though. And a new Galaxy watch running one UI will be announced at a Samsung unpacked event expected later this summer. So we're going to get some new hardware eventually, probably get more information about Wear OS then. But for now, Samsung Google working together on a new watch OS under the hood. We only know what Samsung is doing to the interface. Who's excited about that? Well, I'm excited about continuity. If I were to have Samsung smartphone, and I had more like, I block a number either from my watch or my phone, and the other device automatically shares that information, little things like that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think it looks really nice. I think we're kind of getting to the point, I don't know, it's sort of like car design, smartphone, home screens, watch designs where I feel like we get to a point where everyone kind of wants the same few things that are the core of the design. And so it looks nice to me, but it doesn't look super unlike, I don't know, navigating other watch faces. Does anything seem to scream different and new to anyone else? I think they're just screaming, we need to catch up with the market share that Apple has. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of these are catch up features, but good features to have. Nonetheless, and, and really the kind of thing that at a Mobile World Congress, you might expect Samsung to do, which is like, some nuts and bolts stuff for their own product. And more and more often, companies want to push their big announcements off away from other announcements so they can dominate the news cycle. So I'm not I'm not real shocked with that. Well, on Friday, you might be shocked at the story depends on how closely you've been following it. Yeah, Friday, we thought we were clear on Windows 11. We talked about Windows 11, big announcement, lots of features. TPM 1.2 would be supported, except on new OEM builds where it would then need TPM 2.0. But just to make sure we weren't so sure after all, Microsoft posted to its blog today, and through all that certainty into more doubt. So Friday, Microsoft had said its PC health check tool was not giving accurate information for Windows 11. Now Microsoft says the PC health check tool has been temporarily pulled. Microsoft also says it will get it back online in preparation for general availability this fall. So sometime before autumn, we'll assume it'll be back. The post doesn't talk about TPM 1.2, though it says, quote, we are confident that devices running on Intel 8th generation processors and AMD Zen 2, as well as Qualcomm 7 and 8 series will meet our principles around security and reliability. Microsoft also says, quote, we will test to identify devices running on Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen 1 that may meet our principles, end quote. So 8th gen sounds fine, 7th gen maybe. So the Windows 11 preview released today will not require TPM 2.0. For now, maybe for longer, maybe not. I liked where I thought I was on Friday, which is like, Oh, TPM 1.2 makes perfect sense, right? And I can see if lots of, lots of machines have TPM 1.2. I get why they would want new OEMs to use TPM 2.0. Just a little confusion. All good now. And then Microsoft went and blurred this by saying, Okay, it's going to be 8th gen makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, okay, 8th gen, but maybe not 7th gen we need to test it. And that's where it starts to fall down for me. Obviously, there's more to this than just the TPM. They want to make sure 7th gen can support everything they're doing here. But it's the kind of thing that I know, because we've been through this before, everybody says like, Oh, no, Microsoft's gonna ruin my ability to use Windows. And eventually, they figure out a way where you end up being able to run Windows, except on the oldest of machines, right? So I fully expect that to happen again. But man, it is confusing right now to understand where they're going and why. And I guess there's a small possibility I'll be wrong. And, you know, some machines that aren't even that old wouldn't be able to run Windows 11. But I sort of doubt it. Patrick, what do you think? I almost smell that that we're going to end up with sort of a consumer and an enterprise level of Windows 11. When there is, there's obviously enterprise pro and home. That's all right. Sorry. Let me let me let me make that a clearer statement. I have a funny feeling that if you want to get enterprise level protection, because a lot of what Microsoft is alluding to is their concern over firmware attacks and a lot of stuff, it's more difficult to secure. And if you go into the compatibility for Windows 11 webpage, deep in the docs on Microsoft.com, they are currently stating that you needed, you know, system firmware has a trusted platform module or TPM version 2.0, which in theory can be implemented in firmware and still meet their specs. But in other cases, you have devices that are supposed to have TPM 2.0 modules that don't actually respond as as being compatible with Windows 11. It's I think we are in, you know, we're not even in beta mode. We're in like, you know, I think the operating system may be fairly beta. But I think a lot of this back end stuff is going to be in constant flux until they actually start shipping the operating system are pretty close to it. This feels like they made an announcement, they got a huge pushback, you know, the enterprise people like I can hear enterprise and like consumer vice presidents arguing, you know, I mean, that kind of thing were, you know, the the other way they could have done this also leads to confusion, which is to make the minimum requirement be 1.2, but then still make OEMs do 2.0 and then run into a situation where even if an older seventh gen CPU has TPM 1.2, there's a way that it is implemented that doesn't work and have to say, well, most systems that run 1.2 will work, but we have found some exceptions and get the heat on the back end when they release that. Maybe it is to Microsoft's credit that they're getting in front of it now, during the pre beta during the preview period. And and that way, when when they do finally say this is the solution, we will have followed them along the way. Maybe that is better. I don't know. I mean, part of it's also we were talking on good day internet, or even before, I think we were talking about, you know, TPM 2.0 modules, which are designed to plug in your motherboard, which are being scalped. I think it has less to do with anything other than people sensing an opportunity to make money by video cards than anything else. But it's it's a little crazy to watch, right? Because it's it's, you know, it seems they seem to have changed the requirements possibly twice in the last 24 to 72 hours. So they certainly have changed the explanations. That's for sure. All right, let's let's have some happier news. In 2018, we reached the milestone of more than half the world's population using the internet. And now strategy analytics estimates that 3.95 billion people, which is more than half the world's current population uses a smartphone. That makes the smartphone the most successful computer in history, but more widespread than a laptop, more right widespread than a desktop. Analyst predicted that figure will hit 5 billion by 2030. And the report goes all the way back into the lifetime of smartphones to 1994, when the IBM Simon kicked off the category of smartphones, it grew slowly through 2007 sped up to 10% of global population by 2011. And then we got the hockey stick growth for the next several years, hitting a billion users in 2012. And now here we are sitting at just under 4 billion. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had a smart, well, not a smartphone, but I had a mobile phone in the late 90s. But, you know, I was I was kind of one of the first. I remembered not caring too much about, you know, anything beyond phone or text, even until I guess it was really the iPhone launch, you know, and even I wasn't in the first wave of iPhone users. But I was sort of looking around like, huh, yeah, they all seem to be having a better time than I am on whatever device I was using at the time. And but but yeah, it the category it's funny how at one point it was like, ooh, status symbol, luxury device. Wow, look at you. You've got like a fancy new smartphone kind of thing. It does all the stuff. It can even access the internet. And now it's almost more of, well, you have the smartphone because that's like your base work machine. Do you can do pretty much everything. Lots of people only have a smartphone that is their computer. So anything else is like that's the added extra like, you know, a tablet or, you know, laptop is kind of like, oh, look at you with multiple machines. Yeah, I remember when I was using WAP on a feature phone and felt like I was super smart. But I I didn't get a trio. Man, I really wanted to get that cell phone plug in for my handspring visor, but I didn't. It wasn't till the iPhone came along that I actually got a true smartphone. Then for years it was, well, remember, not everybody in the world has a smartphone. In fact, most people don't have a smartphone. But smartphone prices have been plummeting, you can get smartphones for less than $100 and many parts of the world now, like legitimate smartphones, not just feature phones that do a lot of stuff. And now most people in the world have a smartphone. And that's that's significant because it does change them the the way you think about how you roll out technology when you're like, Oh, yeah, most of the world has a smartphone. So we're we're not leaving out most of the world still got to pay attention to the part that doesn't of course, but it's an important milestone. Hey, patrons, did you know your ad free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just GDI or both of your patron, you get your own custom RSS feed, check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS or GDI or all. And if you want to change just change cheers. The feed will stay the same and just after you change tiers within a day or two, you'll start to get your new selection. Go to daily tech news show dot com slash Patreon. Well, this year, we've seen the options for lossless streaming audio expand quite a bit Spotify and Apple joining established offerings from title, Amazon music, there are others. These mostly claim to offer CD quality lossless audio with various monikers like high definition, high res ultra HD, not everybody totally understands the differences. And sometimes there's not really much of a difference, depending on which company you're talking about. So Patrick, being the audiophile that you are, what exactly are we talking about when we hear about lossless music offerings, and perhaps more importantly, does everybody have the gear that they need to make all of this matter? Oh, boy, I think I would prefer to self identify as an audio geek. Because a lot of people he well, a lot of people that they hear audiophile, or if you go into like, you know, the audiophile section of Reddit or something, you get a lot of people that are very, very firm in their opinions of what actually makes a true audio experience. Oh boy. Yes. Yeah, it's it's unpleasant. Right. So, you know, a lot of audio enthusiasts, yes, choose your, well, I had somebody okay, so put it into perspective, I had somebody I was at a trade show, and this guy was like, Oh, you know, you're on the internet. And I'm like, Okay, I know where this conversation is going. You know, we've got some great setups for people there. And we start talking and I'm like, So what's your entry level system? Because he's you know, he realizes I live in California, and I'm on the YouTubes and I'm just like, Oh, dear. And, you know, they're affordable entry level system. The thing that you know, people under 30 are going to love because it's like this miracle in the audiophile industry is getting people under 30 to buy stuff. Because most of those people don't know about this massive headphone community. It was $13,000 without speakers. And I remember being Wow, you just have no idea who you're selling to, or trying to sell to and the amount of money they don't have. So here's the thing, right? A lot of stuff audiophiles say just just politely ignore it. If they're mentioning things that cost thousands of dollars and cost staggering amounts of money, right? When we talk about lossless, that's everything that was on a CD file, right? If you think of the original CD audio, but you know, it's smaller. It's usually a flak file. You know, there's a couple other formats out there. When you talk about lossy or compressed audio, that's what most of us have been listening to for approximately forever. MB3 AAC, Agborbus is used by Spotify for their streaming last time I checked. And there's there's differences in quality on on lossy or compressed audio. For me, Spotify premium is already a fantastic deal because it sounds so much better than the free version of Spotify, right? Because you go from 160 kilobits per second to a much higher bit rate of like 320 kilobits per second. Premium is a huge upgrade in quality over the standard version of Spotify. Now when people talk about high res audio, CD audio is 16 bit 44.1 kilohertz, right? That's Redbook audio. High res audio is anything with a higher sampling frequency or bit depth than that. So you see like 96 kilohertz or 192 kilohertz at 24 bit, for example, those can be sold or distributed as wave, a flak, a lack files. So that movement started to pick up speed amongst audio geeks or audio files, maybe like 10 years ago, I want to say eight years ago, maybe not quite that long ago, but I'm getting older just like Tom and the brain, it sizzles. But in the last couple of years, it has become a big deal with title and Cobuz and some other platforms are doing that are giving the opportunity to stream or purchase high res audio. So one of the things I mentioned that's really funny like Amazon, they do Amazon does loss of CD tracks. They call them HD and their version of high res tracks are called ultra HD. I just want to point that out because it's really weird. They have a pretty good catalog, which is kind of tempting, but like, you know, their ultra HD is basically what everybody else calls high res audio. It's like 24 bit, you know, from 44.1 kilohertz. So it's actually good audio. They just call it something different for whatever reason. Yeah. I find it annoying that they make their lossless audio sound like it's something fancier. And here's the thing. A lot of people talk about, you know, I'm saying cruel things about audio files and certainly I have often self identified as one, but you know, I've literally wanted to people with a straight face that are like, you know, you can't really think about spending anything less than like $300 for your speaker cable. And I'm like, you know, and you can find, you can test speaker cables and you can test them with very sophisticated implementation that's vastly more accurate to the human ear. And you'll find like a little tiny one DB increase in a little free in a little part of the frequencies, depending on how the amplifier and the cable and the speaker interact, right? So that's part of the reason why they just quietly ignore the audio files. They're nice people, but they're a little insane sometimes, myself included. But what is out there is when you start getting into sort of scientific testing, blind testing when things are level matched, because if you hear two, if I, if I play you two tracks and one of them is a little louder than the other, you're going to be like the louder track is so much better because of the way our brains work. And the reality is, is most people can't actually tell the difference between an mp3 or on Morvis file somewhere around a 256 kilobits per second, which is what most of the platforms are offering. Is loss is better yet by lossless tracks almost, you know, all the time or buy CDs and rip them. But you don't need to obsess too much over this. And you don't need to, you don't need to freak out. If someone tells you you need to spend thousands of dollars, just need to politely say no, thank you. And I'm going to use, you know, my Sony, whatever you have now. So if you want good audio, but you're not, you're not trying to be, you know, the person who appears to know all you just, you just want the best experience. Sounds like Spotify premiums fine. If you want to step up and lossless later this year. Yeah. And if you want to step up, go for high res or what Amazon calls HD. Yeah. Anything that's 256 is probably the probably fine above that. You get to likely not to notice. Yeah, I mean, the truth is, is a lot of people aren't going to notice the difference between Spotify premium and Spotify premium when they go lossless. If you want to experiment with lossless audio now, Cobas is my favorite title is what a lot of people love. Amazon HD is pretty good. Their player, I think has some issues that I'm still trying to sort out through testing at this end. But you know, high res, if you want to buy high res files, I'm not going to stop you. I think more often than not, if a high resolution files sound different, you may find out it actually came from a different master or source or a modified master compared to what you would get off of the CD. And that's where things get crazy. But it's still but high res is still better than mp3. You're saying it should be. Yeah, I think I think the reality is, is if you have the same track from the same source, most people are not going to hear a difference between a lossless CD quality file and a high res file. Feel free to send hate mail or tweet hate mail at Patrick Norton on Twitter. Right. So so if I want to step up from a AC mp3 ag vorbis, those those are the options. It sounds like those are the things to know about and and don't waste your time and money on on other acronyms or other promises that are trying to lead you down a Primrose path. A lot of the promises are a lot of things that a lot of audio files obsess about with like DST and MQA and other things. A lot of those are just they are so few albums are actually available in those formats. You know, for most of us, we're never going to find most of what we want to listen to in those formats. Yeah. And then and then we're not talking about today, but then a lot depends on your hardware. They you know, yes, if you're using good, yeah, if you're using the default headphones that came with your phone, it obviously is not going to sound as good as if you're using a nice pair of headphones. So yeah, you know, your mileage, my price, 8323 for 20 bucks is a good step up. Sony's MDR 7506 is a fantastic professional headphones available for 100 bucks. You know, if you want to get higher than that, we can talk about that. So we can do an annual review of headphones. Yeah, yeah, we should do that again one of these days. That was a good one when we did that. Well, speaking of speaking of audio files, people who collect vinyl, you know, whether you're dabbling or you're super serious about it, you like it for a reason. Amazon wants to give you a reason to give more money. Amazon's new vinyl of the month club will send you LPs from the 1960s and 70s every 30 days. Your record club. Well, yeah, it's just, you know, Amazon, it's don't you want to be part of the Amazon's Club? Patrick, it's going to be so much fun 60s and 70s every 30 days. It's only going to cost you twenty five dollars per month. You might say that's crazy or you might say that's affordable selections curated by the Amazon music team. And in a soft launch for the service, Amazon sent subscribers, Pink Floyd's the wall and the clashes London calling. So we're not talking deep cuts at this point. An obvious vinyl stuff. But hey, you might not have it yet. The vinyl resurgence has stayed course in 2020 with sales up 29 percent on the year to six hundred nineteen point six million dollars and PS, you could also consider supporting your local record store telling you what to do. We're just saying you got to listen for twenty five dollars a month. These better be in pristine condition. They better arrive in pristine condition and they matter better be like nice pressings of this stuff because having done used record sales at half price books in Austin, Texas back in the 90s. Most of the stuff they're showing on this, we used to sell for $399. If it was really good, we'd sell it for 10 bucks. Now granted, inflation happens. You know, that was the 90s. But you can find these items for less than twenty five dollars a month by by looking around at a record store might be worth for you to say like I don't have the time to go do that to search through my local used shops. That's fair. In which case, this is a cool service. You may not you may not live in an area that hasn't. That's true, too. Yeah. And that's a bigger challenge. I would be curious. I I went through my every five years. This time I'm really going to love vinyl like I did when I was 13, which was an epic failure. But it was amazing. I ordered an album three times because the first two times it showed up damaged from Amazon. Well, actually the first time it showed up used the second time it showed up sealed but damaged. And the third time I used a different source and actually got something that was not scratched or physically damaged. So mileage may vary. I just don't you know, I don't care what form it's in. I don't want Amazon's music team to pick my stuff. I don't hate them. I'm just like, you're not going to know what I want. You're just not going to get it right. You know, I'd feel that way with any service like that. Yeah. Why is your laps? Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. I'll stop. I was gonna say like the Columbia Record Club was an actual thing I subscribed to when I was a kid and they would send you if you didn't they would send you sort of a letter and like this is coming and if you didn't choose something else, they would send you their selection and hopefully Amazon offers something like that because I remember seeing some of the albums I refused. They were terrible then and they're terrible now. I actually got the clash through the Columbia Record and Tape Club. So, you know, it really is very similar. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Sean wrote it and said, I think the wonderful minds of DTNS might be able to help me understand a question around cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency has a finite number of coins and infinitely divided. Does the fine number of coins really matter? If you can continuously divide something into measurable units, does the starting amount matter? Try to think of this like DRM and infinitely copyable MP3s. The DRM was supposed to be a cap, but the nature of digital data means it can always be copied. Can DRM be likened to a total amount of coins? Correct. That's an interesting question, Kevin. It's just like with real money. I'm sorry. I'm looking at someone's whose name is Kevin. I'm sorry, John. It's just like real money. You can infinitely divide real money in a bank as well. If fractions and fractions and fractions of a cent. But it does matter how much money is out there in supply. Kevin, whose name I was looking at just now while I was talking on Cora, had a really good answer to this. The real answer is value. If Bitcoin were unlimited in supplying coins, people wouldn't invest because there would always be more of them. Just as importantly, if you purchase a currency and shortly after the currency amount is increased 100%, you'd be concerned because you're like, oh, they're devaluing it by flooding the market. Bitcoin value is based on its limited supply and not the divisibility of each unit because of that. Divisibility is important for transactions, but the amount of supply and the slowness at which it enters the system has a has a bigger impact on value. If you want, you know, full explanations of stuff like this, we have them over at no little more, no a little more.com. Separate show goes deeper into these exact kinds of topics. In fact, we recently did one on NFTs. Thank you so much for the question, Sean. Hopefully that answered things somewhat. If you have questions, you have comments, you have answers about anything that we talk about on the show, we'd like to hear it feedback at daily technewshow.com is where to send that email. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. Who will they include? I'll tell you Norm Physicus, Chris Allen and Mark Gibson. Also, we have a brand new boss just in time for Tom's birthday, Jacob Evans, he just started back in us on Patreon. That's exactly what I wanted, Jacob. You got me the perfect present. Thank you. It's actually exactly what Tom wanted. You could not couldn't have gotten it better. You are a shining star in a world of. Well, there are lots of stars, but you're a great star. Everybody listening could be like Jacob. I know a lot of you already are, but not all of you are. It's true. Yeah, yeah, always room for improvement. Thank you, Jacob. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us this fine Monday. Patrick, you're a busy person and people want to know where to keep up with the rest of what you do. Oh my goodness. A V Excel dot com is the podcast I host with Robert Herron. You can ask questions about home theater and audio gear to ask an A V Excel or do me a favor tweet, especially if you have questions about headphones or lossless audio or streaming audio or any of the stuff we talked about today. Tweet at Patrick Norton. Excellent. We're live Monday through Friday on this here very show for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live and tune in with us if you can. We'll be back tomorrow with bloom birds made Langston talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this brover.