 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Paul Teeson, Ollie Sanjabi and Andrew Bradley. Coming up on DTNS, the Large Hadron Collider has switched back on and Dr. Nicky tells us about its new discoveries, plus opposition to Microsoft acquiring Activision and new standards for quantum proof encryption. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 6th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, of course, are science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermans. From New York City. How's it going, Dr. Nicky? Roger put your line in the Introduce column, so I introduced you. I apologize. We should have just let you introduce yourself, huh? It's okay. People might forget about me. I'm not here every day. And we will never forget about you after today. We would never, never forget. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple announced a new feature for iPhones called Lockdown Mode coming in the autumn. So when activated, it blocks attachments and link previews in messages, certain attackable web browsing features, and incoming FaceTime calls from unknown numbers. It also requires the device to be unlocked to accept accessory connections, like headphones and blocks installations of remote management software as well. The mode is only meant for users who feel they may be a target of a sophisticated attack, such as the Pegasus software from NSO Group that can infect phones with little or no action required with the target. A developer version is being tested now, and Apple plans to expand Lockdown Mode over time. According to a new report from Nikkei, Nintendo saw switch sales decline 33% from April through June on the year to around 840,000 units. Part of that appears to be supply chain related. They just can't make it off of them. A Nintendo spokesperson said, quote, the shortage of chip materials resulted in a 10% decline in switch production on the year during that quarter. Microsoft split its beta channel for Windows 11 as part of a transition period. One group will have majority of testers and include an enablement package of new features on by default. The others will have new features on off by default. This may result in some testers losing access to beta features. Testers can choose to install a Windows update to add the enablement package with new features. Amazon announced a partnership with Grubhub owner Justy Takeaway to offer a free Grubhub Plus membership for one year to US members of Amazon Prime. Grubhub Plus ordinarily costs you $10 a month and gets you free delivery. You don't have to pay the fee. Last year, Amazon offered Grubhub Plus for a year to Amazon Prime student members. Bloomberg sources say that the US proposed expanding its existing ban on sale of advanced chip making systems to China pressuring the Netherlands to ban the company ASML from selling its older deep ultraviolet lithography machines. The Dutch government would need to agree to the restrictions, which could cut ASML sales by 5 to 10%. The US already banned sales of more advanced extreme ultraviolet tools to China. US officials also reportedly pressured Japan to stop deep ultraviolet chipmints as well. Alright, let's talk quantum computers. Let's do it. Quantum computers could totally break all current encryption someday. Thankfully, we're getting prepared. Really, some people are. So quantum computers are not a 100% replacement for current so-called classical computers. Those are the computers that we probably have at home. But they're far superior at certain things. One of those things is math, and math is used to make sure encryption is secure. Here's a short lesson from Tom Merritt on encryption and apologies to those who already study encryption for some of our shortcuts here. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to oversimplify. The product of two large prime numbers is really hard to figure out. The larger the number, the more difficult it is to figure out what primes were used to make it. And if you know the primes, you can decrypt your data easily because you know what went into it. Suffice it to say, that's the kind of really hard math that goes into encryption. Easy to do if you know the answer, hard to figure out if you don't. Another way to protect encryption is something called an integer discrete logarithm, also very hard math. Humans can't do it in lifetimes if it's sufficiently complex. Computers can, but it's really hard, and it takes a lot of resources. The largest key ever solved was a 795-bit RSA 240 key in 2019. The same team that broke that also computed a discrete logarithm from a key the same size. Both those efforts took the equivalent of 4,000 core years using Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs. So if you only had one core, it would have taken you 4,000 years. Obviously they had more cores than that, but suffice to say, you need a lot of machines using a lot of power to spend a lot of time to crack that kind of encryption. It's pretty secure. However, a quantum computer theoretically can do it instantly. The math is there as long as you can make the quantum computer work. You could try making the keys even bigger, but that won't help. Quantum computing uses the superposition of bits to essentially try a lot of possible solutions all at once rather than cranking through the attempts. So you could make it bigger. It still should solve it instantly. Thankfully though, quantum computers are still in the experimental stage and so they can't practically do that yet. We do have some things that should go to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology which on Tuesday announced the first four candidates for Post-Quantum Cryptography or PQC. Those are algorithms that can't easily be broken by quantum or classical computers at all. Four more will be announced at a later date. So let's walk you through these candidates now. Yeah, you're going to love these names, folks. The first one is Crystal's Kyber, like Star Wars Kyber crystals. Crystal's Kyber is used to establish digital keys for two computers that have never interacted before to be able to encrypt their communications. So that'll be the one that'll get used the most. Crystal's Dilithium, so Star Trek gets a little love, is for digital signatures and identity verification. So like what's used in email encryption, it's the companion to Crystal's Kyber. Both are considered to be strong enough and have excellent performance for most uses. So really they could have rested there and said Crystal's Kyber, Crystal's Dilithium. There you go. You got your digital signature. You got your regular encryption. And Dilithium is also the easiest of the digital signature algorithms to implement. However, they implemented two others. I'm sorry, they offered two others for consideration as a standard. Falcon is harder to implement and it might not even work on all devices, but it's included for use where Crystal's Dilithium signatures are a little too large. So you're talking about sensors, Internet of Things devices, things that have a small amount of space. And then Sphinx Plus, but it's spelled S-P-H-I-N-C-S-Plus, is larger and slower than these other algorithms, but it's based on different math, which is good to have as a backup in case someday somebody discovers a weakness in the lattice approach they used on the other three algorithms. So Sphinx Plus uses a hash function instead of structured lattices. It's just good policy to have a diverse number of ways to encrypt. To that point, NIST has four other algorithms under consideration that don't use lattices or hash functions. They'll announce one or two of those as additional candidate standards within the next year, so they say. But this is a huge step for multiple reasons. One is that while companies can use whatever they want, NIST is seen as a guidepost around the world and a lot of companies want to know their choices before they hop on board. The second point is that while quantum computers can't break current encryption just yet, malicious actors are capturing encrypted data and then holding that data for the day where they can decrypt it using quantum computers. So the faster new encryption goes into place, the better protected data is for the future. Still, NIST devices organizations not to make these into their systems quite yet as they may change slightly before the standards are finalized, which is expected to happen by 2024. Yeah. When I first saw the story, I was like, oh, good, we're getting ahead of the game. And it's kind of true, but we're also kind of behind the game because there's data out there that's still useful that's encrypted that a quantum computer could eventually break. So the hope is we get this in place fast enough and it takes long enough for quantum computers to get practical that that data becomes useless because the older it gets, the less useful it is. And take it from somebody who knows precious little about how quantum computing actually works to hear that they're at least eyeing standards because that's really what this comes down to is, you know, let's all decide on some good practices now ahead of time before, you know, we're faced with issues. We learned a lot from the last big wave of what we did with computing. Now, as we enter this new phase, let's be a little more prepared for what's to come. And I see that as only positive, even if it's not finalized. Yeah. And these look at finalized pretty soon, to be honest. Yeah. So, yeah. So it just seems like it's better. I just imagine the malicious computer has like the same, but the LEDs are red. There you go. If only it were that easy, right? Hold on. My computer's been hacked. All the lights turned red. Well, away from quantum computers and into the realm of humans, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, the CMA said it will consider whether Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will harm competition. Is it going to raise prices? Is it going to reduce quality? Is it going to reduce choice? That's the kind of stuff they're going to look at. The CMA said a September 1st deadline for its decision. They could do it anytime before them, but they say they'll have it done by September 1st, and they'll be taking feedback for the next few weeks from interested parties up until July 20th. Microsoft announced this deal back in January. They'll say they expect it to close by June 30th, 2023. They're not surprised that they're reaching these regulatory headwinds. They say they expected that. The U.S. and Australia also reviewing this acquisition for antitrust considerations. Activision Blizzard would add games from Call of Duty to Candy Crush to Warcraft to Microsoft Stable, which already includes Zenimax Bethesda and the 15 studios under the Xbox Game Studios division. Scott, you've covered Blizzard for decades now. A half year in from this announcement, how are you feeling about Activision Blizzard possibly becoming part of Microsoft? Are you cheering for the antitrust or for the Microsoft? I am cheering for the Microsoft acquisition, mainly because they built a lot of goodwill around their current trajectory. It doesn't mean, though, that they shouldn't have scrutiny that this is probably absolutely the right direction for any number of governments and regions to look at this and have scrutiny regarding it. Certainly Microsoft's no stranger to how Europe and the UK and others react to certain antitrust allegations. I feel like this is par for the course, but also a good thing. It's good vetting. What Microsoft's counting on here is being able to make a successful argument that they're not talking about making Xbox a closed system where now I can only get my Blizzard games or my Microsoft, or excuse me, Activision games via the Xbox, or even via Xbox on PC, PC games that are Xbox games. What they're saying is the platform is an open one. It's called the Internet and it'll be everywhere. You'll have TVs that can just play it. And also we're going to put this on services like Steam and Epic and other distribution platforms, including our competing console manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo. We're happy to put not all of these games, but a bunch of these games on their platforms. For example, they are no mood to say, well, guess what, sorry everybody, but Overwatch and World of Warcraft and sadly Diablo 4, they're all going to be exclusive on the Xbox and nowhere else. There's no way they would do it. It'd be ridiculous for them to do that. I think they can make a pretty successful argument that they're coming in to turn things around on some levels at Activision whether the European Union cares about that. I don't know, but that's one aspect of this. And then the other aspect is we're going to inject it with a ton of money and we're going to grow this business and we're going to do it in a way that's platform agnostic. And I think they can make a successful argument about it, giving Cloud and a few other things that they couldn't have made say 10 years ago. So I'm more optimistic than not, but I'm not 100% sure this gets past the muster over there because they already are, you know, they're already kind of gun shy with Microsoft. Yeah, I'm curious to because I think they'll be tempted to make the argument that Microsoft owns the platform Xbox consoles and therefore that that is an antitrust consideration. And I agree with you that the console is not the platform that they own, but Xbox Game Pass is the platform. They are Xbox cloud gaming is the platform they own. You could still make an antitrust argument that they'll have too many of the games and they could, even though they say they won't, they could lock them down. So maybe make them promise not to lock games to their platforms for a certain amount of time or something like that might be expected. But I kind of think these will get approved because I think even with Bethesda, Microsoft still can make a good argument that there's plenty of other game makers out there that they don't control. Yeah, absolutely. And they may have eyes on other acquisitions later. This one really needs to go through before they do any of that, I think. But but yeah, there if there are concessions like you need to guarantee to the European Union or whatever powers it be that you're going to put Diablo for as one example. I'm just using this as a basic example, but you need to say to us, yeah, that'll be on PlayStation. That'll be on PC. That'll be on, you know, handhelds where possible. Like you're going to not just say Game Pass is the only place and our platform is the only place. If they can get assurances like that out of Microsoft, which I think they already want that. Microsoft really is not that interested in being just the Xbox. They want to be all over the place and in every hand possible. They'd put Game Pass on Switch. They want their app everywhere when they're possible. They want their app everywhere. You're absolutely right. Do they want their games on every app? That is correct. But they'll put it. They've already shown they'll put it. They put it all back on steam that was off there for a long time. Now you can get every Halo game, including Halo Infinite on steam. You can get it in all those major platforms. Can you get it on PlayStation right now? No, but I think that there's some wiggle room there. The reason they're doing that is it's in their best interests. The question will be if they get Activision Blizzard, will that change the math to where they'll control enough of the games that they'll have more leverage and they'll be able to force people into worse agreements and that sort of thing. Yeah, it'll be interesting to watch this whole thing play out. Well, folks, if you have a thought on this or anything else we talk about on the show, email us. We'd love to hear from you, especially if it's an area of your expertise, as we'll hear later on. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. On Tuesday, July 5th, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and Geneva, Switzerland, successfully restarted a third run of the large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. Dr. Nicky, I must know what this means. Well, this is exciting for nerds all around the world because this run has come after three years of upgrades and maintenance and the LHC is now going to run for four years at the record energy of 13.6 trillion electric volts, which is just a lot. They have increased many things during these upgrades, including particle collision rates, collision energy, upgraded the computing infrastructure and the detector systems. And all of this goes towards increasing precision and discovery potential for things like the origin of the matter, antimatter, asymmetry in the universe. Intense. So the Higgs boson particle was discovered at CERN ten years ago, bringing with it new understanding of the composition of our very universe. So what is the new discovery? Yeah, so they had a really exciting week at CERN. They celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Higgs boson and they also announced some new findings. So they announced the discovery of three new particles from the pentacorque and tetracorque family of Hadron particles. So there's one new kind of pentacorque and the first ever pair of tetracorques. And this is starting to sound complicated, but they're basically different flavors of elementary particles that are called quarks. Quarks can group together in twos and threes and form Hadrons. And the most common Hadrons are the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom, which like you can imagine in your brain, I think. In rare instances, they'll combine into four or five quark particles which are called tetracorques and pentacorques. So if you're still following me, all kinds of Hadrons were predicted by physicists and theorists about 60 years ago that we would eventually discover them. And actually in the past 20 years, the Large Hadron Collider has actually started to find these by doing experiments. And I just have to mention that these particles contain things like a charm quark and a strange quark and just objectively physicists are great at naming stuff. And a quote from the LHC physics coordinator, Niels Turing, he says that we're witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, which they called a particle zoo of Hadrons that started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional Hadrons in the 1960s. But now we're creating the particle zoo 2.0. So overall, all of these quarks and any quarks and all that, they help their discovery that help researchers better understand how Hadrons work. And because of that, we can better understand the theory of our entire universe. Yeah, I think that is the key here is if people didn't catch it, the announcement of these new tetracorques and pentacorques was made at the same time they turned on the LHC, not because they turned on the LHC. Well, they were just having a party. It takes a while to comb through the data, right? Like they turn on the LHC, they collect data, and then they have to look at that data sometimes for quite a while, do some analysis before they can find the signals that they can clearly say, OK, for sure we're seeing a tetracorque. It's not like they're just looking at a screen and they see a tetracorque fly by and go, there it is, yeah. Oh, we predicted this for 60 years. It's right there. No. Yeah, absolutely. This is data that they've analyzed and that they sort of had this week of events and they announced it just recently. But it's really exciting. CERN, I've actually been to CERN. You can visit the museum. It's really cool. And it's a big deal for people who are interested in physics. And if you're not interested, it does somehow impact your life because we better understand things like gravity and how the universe works because of these discoveries. Yeah. I mean, you without the work of these physicists over the decades, you don't have smartphones. You don't have computers. You don't have processors because insight into how subatomic particles behave is what gave us the insight to be able to manipulate subatomic particles. One of the things that I was hearing them talk about on the Economist podcast about this was the idea of the leptochork. So I know we're really deep in the particle zoo now on the show. But the hadrons that you were talking about are the most common ones are protons and neutrons, right? And the other part of an atom that you learn about in high school is the electron. The electron is what's called a lepton. It's not made of quarks. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. Electrons are not. But there's the theory that there's something called the leptochork, which bridges the gap. And they think that if they can find evidence of a leptochork that they might then be able to unify gravity into the standard model, which would make a simpler equation to describe all the physics, which has been what, you know, physics, white whale has been for decades, right? Yeah, the physicist Moby Dick. I really love that this is stuff that people were working on 60 years ago, and they calculated that we would probably figure it out eventually when we had the right technology. And we did. Like, I just think, can you imagine being that person that's like, that's, yeah, that's a leptochork. We did it. I'm like, so excited. Yeah. A lot of those folks aren't around anymore, but it'd be great if they were. It'd be great to see some of the fruition of that. It also just hit me that that was 10 years ago with the discovery of the. Yeah, I could not believe that that's been 10 years. Like that. Yeah. And CRISPR was also 10 years ago. There's another anniversary recently. So yeah, we're getting old. I'll be honest. I'm a bit of a physics stan. Yeah, we can tell. When I hear them say, when I hear them say that we are reaching the particle zoo levels that we had in the 50s, that makes me really excited because up into the 50s, I remember talking to my dad about this. He's like, yeah, the electron. He's like, I, I was still learning from textbooks that said the atom was not divisible. Right. When he was a kid. And then the electron was the big discovery. And in the 50s, they started to suspect all of these quarks and things and gluons and muons. And we've been living with that for decades now. The idea that we would be discovering all kinds of other particles that would shed light on dark matter and dark energy and unifying gravity. That's, that's incredibly exciting. And it's the extra power of the LHC that makes that something you can even contemplate. Yeah. And once they analyze this data, who knows what they're going to find? It's in four years. We'll be having this conversation again. Yeah, let's do it. Make an appointment July 6th, 2026. Well, speaking of appointments, Kotaku reports about an update to a project that it reported about back in 2020 that was seeking to find every Super Nintendo manual in existence, then scan those manuals, then upload those manuals to the internet for all to enjoy. Okay, fast forward a couple of years. The team, including Arachnus, Buffalo Joe, Timber, SNE Essential, Grant Kirkhart, and led by Streamer and R. Kravitz-Pleebs, Peebs, rather, has since completed a pretty significant milestone. They have a little bit left to do, but they've done a lot. They have a manual for every single Super Nintendo game ever released in English officially. So this could mean a North American version, or a PAL, which would be a European or Australian version, or both, if there were differences outside of cover artwork, maybe some different spelling, maybe the mail addresses on the back were a little bit different. For example, and I just learned this today, Contra 3 was called Super Probo Tector in PAL regions. The team, still on the case, looking for an original scan of the German language version of days before Christmas, days with a Z. And there's a Super Famicom manual section yet to archive. So I say team, if you're still on it, go forth. Yeah, there's a real push toward archives, or archiving the internet, or excuse me, video game information, and manuals are a huge part of this. But also, you kind of hinted at it there. There are so many weird differences in that era when it came to regions. Super Famicom in Japan in North America was called the Super Nintendo. Everywhere else but here, the Genesis was called the Mega Drive. It's weird, and a lot of the games had different names as well, again, as you alluded to. So getting this kind of preservation and archival stuff going on right now is such a cool thing. I'm absolutely in love with it happening, and I suspect this will happen across platforms and sort of build its way up to wherever we're sort of, you know, what we consider to be modern and still kind of ongoing projects and games and systems. It'd be great to have just a better path, a better archival, you know, archive for lack of a better term for all these old systems in these old games. I am so for this, I can barely keep myself straight. Love it. Yeah. History, man. Good stuff. Yeah, archives are good. Yeah. I'll hail the archivists. Blessed we forget Super Nintendo manuals. Let's check out the mailbag. Tuesday, we mentioned that Chinese car maker BYD had passed Tesla as the world's largest electric vehicle maker. James and Andrew both wrote in to point out that Tesla doesn't make plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and BYD does. So Tesla still makes more battery-only electric vehicles. Side note, in June, BYD executive vice president, Lian Yu Bo, told the press that his company was going to supply Tesla with batteries to help erase material shortages. So that could help Tesla boost their output. BYD makes a little money on top of that, too. So I don't feel like these two are deadly enemies or anything like that. And meanwhile, Toyota is entering the chat, selling its 200,000th plug-in EV in the US, which makes it the third electric vehicle maker after Tesla and GM to pass that mark, which phases out their tax credits. So over the next 18 months, Toyota's tax credits would phase out because they passed the 200,000 sales mark of EVs. And most of Toyota's EVs are plug-in EVs as well. We also got a good mailbag from Comey, Comey noting that the mailbag response from Ross, which was in our show yesterday, mentioned Equinor, being a Norwegian company. Comey says, yeah, it's partially state-owned energy company. It used to be called State Oil until 2018. And as you know, Norway became rich with oil, but it's amazing how the whole country is going toward renewable energy now. Comey says, when we visited Norway, we went to see their Oslo building with unique architecture. I had just learned about Equinor and the building because it was featured in the Norwegian TV series called Occupied as the fictional government offices. In Occupied, when Norway tries to fully convert from oil to thorium-based nuclear power, Russia invades the country and occupies it. There's no warfare in the show, but the theme is timely now. Yeah. Oh, that's cool, Comey. Thanks for sharing those insights. Yeah, I kind of want to watch the show now. I know, me too. Well, thanks to everybody for being on the show with us. What fun. Scott, we'll start with you. Where can people keep up with what you're up to lately? Best place is frogpants.com. It's got links to every show that I host, everything that I make. If you're looking for games or more games discussion, then definitely go there. Frogpants.com has a number of games podcasts that will look at some of these issues we talked about here and more. So check it out frogpants.com for everything. And if you're trying to tackle me on Twitter, you can find me over there at Scott Johnson. I like the idea of somebody talking to you. Yeah. Twitter tackle. We will not tackle you, Dr. Dr. Nicky Ackerman's, but do let us know where we can keep up with the rest of your work. Yeah. I mean, if people want to chat about muons and strange quarks, I'm also on Twitter at Ackerman's Nicole. And then my website is Nicole Ackerman. So either or if you want to find out what I'm up to. Very cool. Well, we've got good news today for the Patreon community, because we have some brand new bosses. Those bosses are Mikhail, Toby, Timothy, and Nate Bob. All just started backing us on Patreon. Boy are our hearts full. This is so great. We're really on a roll this week. So thank you, Mikhail, Toby, Timothy, Nate Bob. Yes. You don't know how relieved we are because we had a few weeks there where we weren't getting any new bosses and to have so many two days in a row is amazing. So huge, huge thanks. Very much so. Just a reminder, we do a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. Talk about a lot of stuff that we talk about on DTNS and much more available at patreon.com. DTNS. Reminder, we are live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. If you want to find out more, you can do so at dailytechnewshow.com. We are back tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.