 Daily tech news show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Reed Fischler, Michelle Sergio and Mike McLaughlin Coming up on DTNS has cryptocurrency helped Russians avoid sanctions how COVID in China is affecting chip supplies and the NBA goes volumetric This is the daily tech news for March 16th. It's a Wednesday Wednesday March 16th 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson coming in hot from north of the wall I'm Amos and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang Sarah Lane has the day off, but we are full of tech news bursting. Let's start with a few tech things. You should know Norton's life lock purchase of cybersecurity company Avast is under investigation by the United Kingdom's competition and markets authority over the deal possibly harming competition and giving British customers a Possibly worse deal the CMA called on the companies to submit proposals about the concerns or face an in-depth probe Norton life lock said the investigation will delay the completion of an 8.6 billion dollar deal which was previously expected to close on April 4th or Sometime mid-late 2022 now axios reports slack cutoff access to some customers in Russia To comply with the international sanctions as well as policies from parent company sales force Which will exit business in Russia several directly sanctioned organizations were locked out of accounts without notice And we're therefore unable to download any data before this shutdown the company told axios in a statement quote Slack is required to take action to comply with sanctions regulated in the US and other countries where we operate Including in some circumstances suspending accounts without prior notice as mandated by law unquote Samsung CEO J.H. Han bowed in apology in front of shareholders for the controversy over Galaxy S 22 phones Performance throttling using the game optimization service app if you don't realize that's a big deal Following a software update last week the app can now prioritize performance You get a little more control though. You cannot remove it South Korea's fair trade commission has already launched an investigation Into whether Samsung violated fair labeling and advertisement laws by over promising capabilities of the Galaxy S 22 Miso robotics announced a trial with Chipotle for Chippy a robot able to follow the steps for frying Chipotle chips The test is currently in an R&D facility with deployment at a Southern California restaurant schedule for their schedule for later this year Miso also has a deal with White Castle for bringing its flippy to burger frying robot To 100 locations Miso hungry Metta announced family center a hub of safety tools to try to protect young users Which parents can use to control what kids see and do across Metta's apps beginning with Instagram? The tool will be available in Metta's VR platform in May and on the rest of the company's offerings like Facebook in the coming months Supervision feature lets parents monitor how much time a child spends on an app Accounts recently followed and notifications about any reported accounts right now teens can access the tools from their own account And the ability for parents to turn on supervision mode will come in June All right, let's talk about Metta Cuz Metta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was talking at South by Southwest Are you ready to hear what Metta has to say about NFTs Scott? I am I'm if anyone's gonna tell me about NFTs surely It's Mark Zuckerberg and never a more 2022 sentence was spoken NFTs are coming to Instagram quote in the near term those Zuckerberg did not provide specific details Only that over the next several months the ability to bring some of your NFTs in and hopefully over time be able to mint Things within the environment is coming Instagram head animus area previously said the company was actively exploring NFT technology Zuckerberg also said NFTs could be part of the metaverse whatever that ends up being Adding quote the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse You know can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places Whatever those places are and assuming they all cooperate on a standard for how to honor what the NFT says the clothing is Which is why he also said technical issues need to be worked out first and if you don't like this Well, you just don't care about the future apparently because Zuckerberg also said quote I think on some level the future sort of belongs to the people who believe in it more than others I just think we care more. You know, I think we're the company that cares about helping people connect Scott they just it's so much caring He also said use cases for the metaverse Include gaming productivity and fitness that actually makes sense to me And that we're a few years away few years away from augmented reality glasses that are truly augmented reality and look like glasses Yeah, our giant things on your head. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna surprise a couple of people here with this take I actually think Instagram in particular and Maybe meta at large, but Instagram in particular is really well suited to be a transition point of access for NFT creation And I believe this for a couple of reasons I think Zuckerberg's talking a lot of nonsense as well, but Instagram is already Much to the chagrin of the founders ideas about being only a photo site. It's a place for artists to go show their stuff That's where we go the biggest artists I follow they have the biggest followings and the most stuff happening on Instagram so Instagram has become a gallery of sorts for artists and a very serious one And so if you're going to have a legitimate mechanism to take your your art and convert it to NFTs and That being an entry point for it. I actually think this is a really good step forward Yeah platform that will benefit from this and I think that we'll benefit from the fact that it's a legitimate Regardless how you feel about meta or other issues with Facebook a legitimate entry point that is a little bit more Mainstream trustworthy because you know the name it's been around forever and It's a big spotlight on a company like that They're not gonna they're not gonna be a scam-ridden nightmare at least, you know, we hope not and I feel like as an artist Somebody who does this already a big part of my living is made doing this This might be my entry point So I'm actually kind of all for this now whether or not it's and then take it to the next space or place and all these things He talks about him whether you believe in it or not Forget all that if we're just looking for practicality and NFTs This might be the the one or at least one of the first I've seen that actually has me excited It almost sounds like you care about the future Scott. I think I do I think I believe in the future I just don't believe I used to think children were the future But now I think NFTs of children are the future No, no all kidding aside If you hate NFTs, you hate NFTs and none of this is gonna change your mind about it I get that and if you're like super NFT excited I actually don't think this changes your excitement either But you're right there in the middle and I think that's what is interesting about this is a Trusted platform is what's missing in NFT open see look like it might become that and then People started finding that they were not as good at scaling up their enforcement as you might have wanted them to be To fight fraud and abuse and that's the problem with NFTs is people taking your stuff and putting it on a platform and profiting From it without your approval, which you just need good enforcement to do We've already seen Retail platforms do that with physical goods. It needed to happen with NFTs. It does need to happen So I get what you're saying. Maybe Instagram becomes that trusted platform when it comes to NFTs and And I think you made the point very well It's a natural thing for the art and photo part of this right because you already go there and I could absolutely see people making an Instagram photo It gets really popular and if there's minting in there saying oh well We'll mint that and somebody can own the NFT of it now Yeah, my experience has been the people that are the most excited About NFTs are not actually artists. They're people don't want to trade in NFTs. They want to make money They want to do some cool ideas and it's fine. Whatever. They're the ones that are the most stoked on the other end You have people just hate it to hate it and that's fine for them, too I'm not interested in either of those extremes at the moment. What I'm interested in is like you said this middle space Mostly made of artists. We have a lot of concerns and I think rightly so and we're looking for The these channels to kind of clear up and it feels like maybe this is it. Yeah All right, let's talk about chips COVID-19 infections are spreading through China which up until now pursued a zero COVID policy Which means that it did very well through most of the pandemic But its populace has less exposure and the more transmissible Omicron variant is spreading fast in response to this China has been locking down and that has affected the city of Shenzhen Where a large portion of China's tech companies operate including Foxconn one of the world's biggest media tech and TSMC being other huge ones Foxconn gets outsized attention sometimes Because it makes chips for Apple and it's a player while Foxconn has operations all over the world They have them in India and Brazil and Mexico and Malaysia Taiwan and elsewhere It makes a significant number of its chips in Shenzhen So when it had to pause operations there Monday, that was a blow to the prospects of the chip shortage easing Especially because officials said originally that the lockdown would last at least a week ending March 20th at the earliest However on Wednesday Today as we're recording this Foxconn says it has restarted operations Not full but limited operations after meeting government conditions for staff to live and work on campus in a closed loop China has done this before most famously with the Beijing Olympics this year having a closed loop situation So they're doing that for Foxconn Additionally production can be shifted elsewhere in the company the Henan factory is not shut down for Foxconn And that makes 50% of the iPhones that Foxconn assembles Foxconn also had an earnings call where chairman Liu Yongwei made some remarks that may or may not make you feel better on the bad side He said the pandemic has not eased inflation is high and global politics are getting tense These all further complicates supply and demand and lead to great uncertainty to our outlook So that sounds pretty doom and gloom, but he also said he was cautiously positive and Said the war in Ukraine would have limited impact on Foxconn's business because Russia and Ukraine are not the company's main sources of raw materials specifically nickel and neon which we've talked about Come out of Russia and Ukraine in large amounts. So Foxconn feels like they're okay That's good news to see them specifically saying that of course Foxconn is the only chipmaker in Chenjin The lockdown has also affected touch panel maker GIS chip packager and tester GM services So it's too early to tell if this is going to have a lasting effect or not But reading between the lines here Scott It feels to me like Foxconn is not preparing their shareholders for a really bad rest of the year because of this They they think they're gonna be able to weather it fine. Yeah, absolutely. They're giving themselves a bit of an out Not really an out but by saying they're they're optimistic or they're cautiously positive as the actual phrasing Is it is a great way to say I mean who knows but we feel pretty good and that's usually an Okay thing to say to shareholders and we'll at least give them some confidence We talked about this bit this morning on our TMS segment and it reminded me of the two weeks I spent in Shenzhen back in the early 2000s and We were there to visit factories and to inspect processes and all this stuff for the company I worked for at the time and It struck me then And this was post SARS the big SARS breakout in China that part of China as well southern China That they kind of had closed loop systems already there when we got there and the way it worked as people lived in Basically, I don't know if makeshift's the right word Campuses that were built into the factory as part of the campus and they literally would just out the door down the hall you're at work down the hall back home and They at the time they were talking about how they were gonna make that kind of standard now This is some you know 18 years ago or something So I'm sure things have changed evolved and who knows where they are now But it seems like if anything Foxconn and others in that region are more suited to do this closed loop Described then almost any other manufacturing in the world. Yeah, and and because of that And because the fact that it's right now just Shenzhen and and they have factories in other places in the world Foxconn is thinking will be fine They really did seem to not think that the war in Ukraine is going to be a material impact at all Which has been my worry is that just as we're finally getting supplies to even out, right? We're finally getting demand is settling into a more predictable pattern One of the biggest causes of the chip shortage was unpredictable demand We thought it would be zero and it was way higher than we thought and that threw everything out of whack In addition to weather and pandemic related stuff So demand seems to be finally coming into a more predictable pattern The war could have thrown the logistics out of whack It's certainly going to have an effect, but it sounds like at least for Foxconn They don't feel that that will be as big of a problem So there's still hope for them on being able to get back to meeting their chip demand Well Netflix made a post on its website Wednesday called paying to share Netflix outside your household But this is not nearly as bad as you would think just from reading that headline They're launching two new features as a test in three countries Chile Costa Rica and Peru The first feature is called add an extra member It lets anybody who has a standard or premium account So not the basic account, but the top two accounts add up to two people to their subscription For around three dollars a month extra. It's all in local currency Although for Costa Rica that is in fact 299 because they use the dollar But it's around three dollars equivalent per person So that's way cheaper than forcing that person to go get their own account The idea being here is those people get their own logins and passwords But you only have to pay three dollars extra to make them legit if they're not in your household The other new feature is called transfer profile to new account Basic standard and premium subscribers can take advantage of this one It lets people migrate their profile and their recommendations and view history to a new account So if you're going legit, you don't lose all that view history Which has been an impediment to some people like, you know, I would like to pay for my own Netflix account But I'm gonna lose all my recommendations. So that includes the extra member accounts as well If you're adding someone with their own login password, they're gonna keep their profile This is all a very soft way to encourage folks to start paying for their own accounts If they don't live in the same household, it's cheaper in the add an extra member than getting your own account You can keep your history Netflix has been testing all kinds of ways of notifying people if it thinks they're not on their own account And those notifications have been very soft as well They come with an option to just ignore it Netflix has not taken to forcing people off accounts In fact, even if it detects something odd, it gives the option to verify later So Netflix is trying to softly encourage people to start paying for their own subscriptions In what I think is the nicest way possible if you're gonna do it at all The only thing nicer would be not to do it I agree. I also think it's effective I have always said that the thing that gets people away from sharing passwords All the way down to more nefarious stuff like sharing bit torrents and, you know, getting into real piracy Is making it convenient and affordable to switch and make it more legit And it feels like these are good softball ways of encouraging people to do that And as somebody who has a whole bunch of shows in various states of watching With a cursor or a scrubber right in the middle of a show or right at the end of a movie And I intend to get back to those things It would be really nice to know if I was in this situation that those things would move forward As it is right now, I am somebody who shares a password with my daughter who does not live here And we don't even think about it. We don't even think of it as being a weird deal We're just like, oh, yeah, well, it's my kids. They're gonna, you know, we're all gonna watch the The thing together It's nice to know that she has a way to a either inexpensively bump it up or b have a good transition to her full account I think we're probably gonna do this with her I mean it makes sense to me and I think that they can't be in the business of Raising prices and doing so kind of controversially and being hard-nosed about this So I think it's very smart that they're being For lack of a better way of saying it soft-nosed about it Because if they're being hard-nosed about it, you would have a lot of pushback from people saying Well, I already paid 20 something bucks for this thing. I'm not I may as well cancel if this is how it's going to be Like I could see the uproar And I think they may be avoiding the uproar here pretty well I like it Amos, you have a legitimate reason to be using Netflix in two different households Right because we we have a shared household where we well not shared But split household where half the family lives down in washington half of them live up here in alaska And we all have our profiles or anything else and we Like legitimately transfer between like the twins are here right now. They're about ready to go down to washington for a while I'll be going down there this summer and you know, we we share households It's it's I do be clear y'all are married. This is not a like well We split up or we're living in two different places, right? No, we are we are very actively just have jobs in two different locations That's right. We're separated because of employment and the twins are going to college down there And that's one of the reasons my wife took that job But we you know It's nice to know that if they do want to crack down and they if they do decide Hey, this is not a legitimate way to use the service as we feel it is At least there is an out There's a soft way out the you know the kid the twins could transfer their profiles over or whatever But to know that they're not taking the hard nose View on it like scott was saying that really adds a little bit of security and I know it's it's a minor effect Here but it's just one less thing to worry about that netflix is going to just force us to cancel and reestablish And we're going to lose all of our history and everything else It's really the perfect solution for how we live if they do want to take that next step But by the sounds of this We're good. Do you think this will spread like uh next thing you know hbl max and disney plus and everybody else? No, I don't because I don't either. Yeah, but again The same things are more worried with with the shareholders in the bottom line say and the distributors And the this paranoia of like every account without paying is a lost dollar Whereas netflix is like we understand that we don't want to go to war with our pot with our customers Right and with those services again We split those like those are all on the same account and we share those between the two houses because it's all the same family We're all still living together. We just have Two separate locations in which we live from you know, depending on what both of these solutions really show that they understand their audience I think you both have made the point well that you know letting you move your profile just takes away an impediment Right, it's like let's make it easy for you to get your own account adding the separate login as an extra three bucks Is a great way to get rid of one of the other things which is like I would get my own netflix account, but I can't afford it But I hate that I have to log in with my dad's password because he keeps changing it and blah blah blah This way you you get control Which then will eventually make you just be like, you know what? I might as well just pay for my own eventually And they're monetizing at three dollars People that they wouldn't get money out of at all Right, which is three dollars more than they would have got now Is this going to add to the numbers simultaneously streams that you can have or is it no it doesn't I well at least it doesn't say it does right because that that's one of the things we do have the premium accounts We can have maximum streams because we do have you know a couple people here at the house And that's your way to kick people like well, maybe you should just get your own account Right, right, you know Especially if you're on the premium to get those extra logins, you know simultaneous streams, maybe you know that that's I think it's really smart. I think netflix is doing the right thing by its customers here Well folks, uh, what do you think if you're like no, you're all wrong netflix is horrible Uh, you could say that or you could say something nice in our discord Which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash d t and this When the war in ukraine began and sanctions were levied against people in russia There were a lot of theories about what role cryptocurrency might play After several weeks we have some evidence to look at the economist did a great job At looking at how all of this is going so far It appears That it may be more useful for ukraine than russia But it's not a panacea for either one with a traditional bank. Your transactions are private But your identity is not that's why sanctions work with banks. They're like, oh sanctions against this person great We'll block transactions from that person With cryptocurrencies your identity can be private But your transactions are not because everything's out there on the public blockchain And in fact, if you use an exchange Then they know who you are too. So it's neither private The predictions of some were that people in russia would get around sanctions by using cryptocurrency And russian crypto activity has definitely risen rubel to bitcoin volumes on finance have risen by about 10 times Since the war began bitcoin is pretty stable in value right now while the rubel has plunged 40 percent against the dollars Since february 24th So what's happening here is people are moving their rubles into crypto to preserve the value because bitcoin is more stable than the rubel But most places don't let you pay with crypto Meaning if you want to use that preserved money you have to exchange it for another currency like dollars and to do that You at least need a crypto exchange and probably need to involve a bank at some point Most banks that would be useful are honoring sanctions as our big exchanges like finance and coinbase of course They just use your own wallet and move your crypto around without anybody having to be involved Uh, but even then don't forget your transactions are public and because some wallet IDs are known Government investigators have gotten much better at being able to deduce even if they don't know your wallet ID If they know the wallet ID that you're sending stuff to They can figure out who's behind an otherwise anonymous wallet Remember, we had laura shinn on the show february 22nd describing how you can trace back identities of folks And in december the fbi used these kinds of methods to get back 3.6 billion dollars worth of crypto stolen from an exchange back in 2016 so because of the public nature of the ledger Cryptocurrencies have not been a big help in avoiding sanctions The public nature is not a problem for the government of ukraine though It published its wallet address right there on twitter and has received more than a hundred million dollars worth of donations As you can see on the blockchain In addition, some companies that don't normally take cryptocurrencies of payment have been making an exception For the government of ukraine crypto transactions also can happen almost instantly Compared to the days it takes for bank transfers, which speeds things up Which is kind of important when you're being bombed Still a hundred million dollars is not a lot The united states just today approved 800 million dollars of aid And they've given billions over the the past couple months. Europe has as well. So Even though this is working for ukraine. I'm not sure that it's a big percentage Of of what's working every little bit helps of course doesn't it seem Okay, forgive me if this is over simplification But for the first time in the crypto world, it feels like its presence Turned out to be kind of a lucky thing in this moment By that I just mean and and you're right about it not being huge amounts, but It's something right and prior to crypto's adoption at least in a broader sense None of this would have been possible You just would have shut down local currencies and everything would have been very You know back alley black markety sort of transactions of any kind And I don't know. Is it a happy accident that we happen to be or I guess what I'm saying is is this showing the potential of of cryptocurrency In times of need and are we are we are we able to see it? I at least feel like I'm being able to see it in a slightly different light as a less of a Of a speculation market and less of an investment market and all the ups and downs and actually see it as a safeguard I think what what it what I think you're you're on to it, right? Which is it is showing what cryptocurrency is and is not good for and a lot of the conclusions that people jumped to aren't correct It's not great for hiding Everything it Certainly is good for hiding some things people use it to great effect a launder money Here and there I'm not saying it isn't but it's not a panacea for for hiding your transactions Especially if you need to use a bank now someday you might argue cryptocurrency will be accepted In more places in which case that need to get to the banks Won't be an issue But then at that point Exchanges may be the bottleneck exchanges may be able to to step in and and enforce sanctions and things like that so I think these things are always a little bit less Bad and a little bit less good than you think and to me that's what we're seeing is like They are of limited usefulness I'm not sure if they make a difference or not But every little bit helps like I said And they certainly aren't like this horrible thing that's engendering People to get around rules. Yeah, I guess what it strikes me is just similar to things not quite the same obviously But it's like the ubiquity of cameras the internet. So yeah, yeah those kinds of things all are Here and they were here As they got here and we've used it for all the reasons we've used it but It's really nice to have it during a time where in historical terms It would be that much more devastating with without some of these tools And it feels like deep fakes is another example here where where everybody's like oh with deep fakes now You won't be able to believe anything you see and it has not turned out to be true Deep fakes are fairly quickly exposed as deep fakes even now. Yeah Yeah, you're right This is not going to be a deep fake as far as I know But Wednesday's upcoming NBA matchup between the Dallas Mavericks and Brooklyn Nets will be broadcast on espn in 3d volumetric video First time an entire full game has been done in volumetric video Uh espn edge disney media and entertainment distributions technology team Which used to be easier to say because it used to be bam tech. It's the bam tech folks Have teamed up with the mba and canon who's providing the cameras Canon will use its free viewpoint video or fvv system with over 100 data capture cameras positioned around the basketball court To create a live sports broadcast merged with multi-dimensional footage Something that looks very much like you're watching a video game because it'll be able to just move around like like like you're riding on a little drone The brooklyn nets have already used dimensional footage for replay clips and post production content with the yes network But this is the first time it's been done in a full game And they are the only team from any of the four major us pro leagues to utilize that system I think this is rad and I have a couple of reasons why number one I actually think it looks really cool. Even the test footage to me looks cool Um, there's a gamey quality to it. I don't mean like bad meat. I mean like like, you know, uh video gamey There's a little bit of a a graphical Tell there that's kind of makes it look like a video game or a kind of a high end modern basketball game from 2k or somebody They have the big games every year Um, but it then hit me. I think the coolest thing about this is it's purely selfish for the game reason but game developers to get uh When they get the NBA license and the players license they go and they get everybody mo capped everybody on every team Except maybe some of the deep bench, but most of the big players they get mo capped facecapped Playing fake basketball. That's how they get it. They don't do real games with all these rigs on and all this motion capture on This represents potentially and I don't know who owns the patents and who has to pay who but potentially has The ability to change the way that stuff's captured and literally you could just say, all right Well, we did we watched the uh the mavericks game And now we have everything we ever need for any kind of mavericks mo cap because we have all this player data Just from that that broadcast you might still need to do a little bit of traditional mo cap, right? But but this this could take could make that process way shorter Way way shorter and the concept is that this is not restricted to any one angle You can zoom in as far as far away or as close as you want and I know I'm not talking about fidelity here I'm just saying you can take that camera from way up here skylight and go All the way down and look right into the face of your favorite player and see what expression he's making when he missed that free throw That's the data they need and I I'm almost convinced of this I've talked to some friends who do a lot of mo cap and I have a few that do but um, this feels like Huge for lack of you know, I don't like to use the word game changer We're talking about a game, but there's a game changer for that kind of mo cap It's not going to apply to everything But it could expand to like action sequences big armies rushing over a hill like turning all of that into polygonal You know posable data That's massive. So I'm excited about this for sports, but I'm maybe more excited about other uses Would you say it's a slam dunk? I'm going to call it a slam dunk. No, you know what I'm going to say It's a three pointer from downtown Okay, very good. Well done Thank you, scott johnson. Uh before we get out of here, what do you got going on to tell folks about? Well, speaking of video games, um, I have a show now called play retro Which is a show all about old games, uh, and when I say old it could be even stuff in the 2000s But games that we think of as yesteryear lots of pixelated stuff 16 bit 8 bit that sort of thing And uh, we just did a big deep dive my co-host brian done away And I on the the metroid series from metroid one all the way back on the nes Up to what we played today like with metroid dread on last year's title for the switch If that sounds interesting to you you want to hear all the crazy stories about its creation And why it's such a venerable part of gaming history Check out play retro wherever you get your shows if you need it all in one place You can find it at frogpants.com slash play retro We need eight new patrons and It would be worse if it weren't for cori steven james We had three people had to drop off for various reasons But cori steven and james stepped in to fill the gap. It could be you next. Thank you cori Thank you, steven. Thank you james And uh patrons get a longer version of this show that's going to keep going right now called good day internet You can get that at patreon.com slash d t n s However, if you don't get that, uh, we say goodbye. We're live monday through friday though You can watch us there too 4 p.m. Eastern 2800 utc by not more a daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow Len Peralta will be illustrating and just moderate young will be pontificating in the best way talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frogpants.com Club hopes you have enjoyed this program