 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Erwin Sturr, Ken Hayes and Philip Shane. Coming up on DTNS and video's fast 3D conversion, AI, a peer to peer way around internet blocks, and we dig deep into Europe's digital markets app. Will you be able to message telegram people? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 25th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom from Studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sir Lane has the day off, but we still have a few tech things you should know. Netflix acquired the mobile game developer Boss Fight Entertainment, makers of the mobile RPG Dungeon Boss. Boss Fight will continue to operate out of its studios in Allen, Texas, Austin and Seattle. This marks Netflix's third game studio acquisition. Bloomberg sources say Sony may announce its competition to Xbox Game Pass next week. This is the service that Bloomberg has previously reported under the name Project Spartacus and would reportedly combine aspects of PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into a combined offering. The US and EU reached a preliminary agreement on a new transatlantic data transfer framework, though details have not been announced. European Commission President Ursula von De Leyen said it will enable predictable and trustworthy data flows between the EU and US safeguarding privacy shield, trans or safeguarding privacy and civil liberties. The previous safe harbor and privacy shield transfer frameworks were deemed illegal because the court found they did not provide EU citizens effective means to challenge US government surveillance of their data. Fifth time's a charm. Spotify has decided to suspend its service in Russia. The company said it had continued to operate until now because it considered itself an important source of news and information in the country. However, Spotify claims that, quote, recently enacted legislation, further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify's employees and possibly even our listeners at risk. The service will become fully unavailable in Russia by April. And Google announced two new search updates. It will now show appointment availability with health care providers directly in English language search. This will roll out over the coming weeks in partnership with Minute Clinic at CVS and other unnamed appointment schedulers. A book button will take users to a third party site to schedule an appointment. The company also is rolling out a change to search for English language product reviews over the next few weeks. Reviews that offer in-depth details include unique information and cover comparable products will be ranked higher in search. All right, let's talk about Nvidia's big impressive demo. They've always got one at Nvidia GTC. It usually comes towards the end of the conference. And this year, it's Instant Nerf, which sadly does not transform an object into a Nerf ball version of it. Instead, Nerf refers to neural radiance fields. That is a technique that was developed by scientists at UC Berkeley, Google Research and UC San Diego in 2020. It analyzes still images. So you give it several images and the algorithm can map the color and light intensity in those images in order to extrapolate different viewpoints and then create a 3D scene. Usually it takes about an hour or so to train up off of your images and then a few minutes to actually generate the 3D image. Nvidia's Instant Nerf does this maybe not exactly instantly, but really fast. Nvidia claims training can only take seconds and 3D generation, tens of milliseconds. Nvidia was light on the details around this, but said Instant Nerf trains a neural rendering model using dozens of still photos. They didn't give us an exact number, but, you know, maybe 20, something like that, maybe more. They have to include the camera angle for each shot and the images need to be from multiple positions, which is normal for Nerf, as well as not include too much motion. The system can run on a single GPU, although it runs fastest on cards with dedicated tensor cores. Nvidia says the speed of Instant Nerf could be used in virtual worlds or for 3D video conferences to, you know, make people appear like they're fully realized without, you know, by having multiple cameras. It could be used for 3D maps. It could also be used to train robots, including autonomous cars, to understand the size and shape of objects around them, just based on 2D images. And sometimes that is something that autonomous cars and even robots of all kinds have trouble with. This is not something new, but the speed of it is what's impressive here. Have you ever used all trails by question? No, I haven't. So it allows you to see like GPS coordinates when you're going on hikes. And as soon as I read this article, I was like, this would be so cool to be able to use real time as you're going on a hike, because oftentimes, even though you have a GPS map and you have pictures that other people have uploaded, you don't really have a very good perception of how far things are supposed to be from you or how long the distance is actually going to be. And I feel like this would really help with that kind of perception, especially if you're like out in the wilderness. I would love to see them use this kind of 3D mapping technology in real time while you are out doing those kind of things, because I think it would be helpful. Yeah, I could imagine. Because before Instant Nerf, you could have used Nerf to map things and make the map appear more georealistic. But what you're talking about takes it another step and says, use the device to capture images while you're walking. It could just be the same device just constantly capturing. And then convert those into a 3D image of, here's where you're going, and here's where you need to go. I love that. That's a cool use of it. I love that idea. I mean, maybe it's just because I almost got lost on a hike last weekend, so it's on my mind. I'm like, please bring this to me. Yes, it definitely is. The idea of using this for architecture is a wonderful idea. Like, I'm doing some construction on my house right now, and it would be cool to see in real time, like if they took pictures and showed me what changes they might need to make based on the actual size and measurements that they're taking of my house construction. Like, that would be cool. I like these ideas. Yeah, if you could say this isn't necessarily for shopping exactly, although I suppose it'd be used for that too, but I could see scanning all the objects in your room and getting an instant 3D model of all your furniture and then being able to rearrange your room, you know, in a virtual space to figure out where everything goes. Man, every time I've moved, I've imagined something like that as like, oh, I wish I could just do that. That's pretty cool. I want to see them make this available on all sorts of platforms. I know that it would probably be very, very battery intensive, but it would be useful. Well, they say it could work on a standard GPU, so it may be slower. It might be minutes instead of seconds, but even then, they're still, you know, that's way better than the hours it was taken before. So it could be useful in lots of situations. Absolutely. Well, hopefully we'll see it come out soon. Yeah. Let's go ahead and move on. I have some really interesting stuff happening right now, and I wanted to share it with you. The Tor network, the Tor network, it's used to protect anonymity. It was developed in the mid 1990s by the US Naval Research Laboratory to protect US intelligence communication online. Everybody knows about Tor. Now, another project with US backing is routing around restrictions on the internet, and it might be worth watching. This is very interesting. The Lantern app has received funding from the US State Department's Open Technology Fund. That's OTF for short. It's made by Innovate Labs, and if you look it up on the app stores, it is available in Google Play as well as iOS on the Apple Store. You will see a lot of Chinese reviews, for example, as it was originally targeted for use by people wanting to get past the restrictions in China, but it is also being used by people in Russia to access block services there, like Instagram and Twitter. So it's touting incredible percentage growth, though some of that is because it's gone from very, very low numbers. They haven't done a lot of work as far as marketing. It's mostly just been word of mouth, and because the Russian blocks are very new. So it says it has 7 million active monthly users worldwide, which is about twice the number that it had three years ago, and Russia is now its biggest target market by traffic, which has pushed China down to second place for them. So it uses geo-optimized servers and proxies blocked sites. So technically, this is not a VPN. It uses multiple techniques, but it is kind of cagey about describing them, which makes sense because they don't wanna get blocked by government restrictions or firewalls. All of its traffic is encrypted, but it is not an anonymity tool. In fact, on their FAQ on their website, they do recommend using Tor if you want anonymity, but it's also using Russia as a chance to put together a peer-to-peer network or hosting content as well. Now this is useful if Russia executes a plan to cut off its internal networks from a wider world. Russia has such a contingency plan in development, but they have not acted on it quite yet. Lantern's peer-to-peer network should be fully operational next week, and it will let users post videos and other updates that cannot be blocked. Lantern is making that kind of hosting available worldwide, even in countries that have no serious censorship. So if you want to help the network, you can host a node, and node operators are paid in a cryptocurrency, which is called YINB. Lantern is free for up to 500 megs per month or $32 a year with no data limit. And in Russia, there is no data cap for free users right now. So let me get the negative out of the way. This is a private company. It's an LLC. It takes venture capital. It's doing a cryptocurrency, so you might start to get the whiff of like, wait a minute, is this just some way to get me into a crypto thing? It's not an open standard like Tor. So not everything is perfectly rosy about it, but I am encouraged by the idea, because I've been on the lookout for when we start to swing back from centralization to true decentralization. And so things like this, married with big unusual events, like a war, do tend to make me sit up and pay attention. It's quite possible. I'm not saying it will happen, but it's quite possible that if Lantern is successful in starting up a peer-to-peer network that gets around blocks, that other people start to use it because it gets around other problems with a centralized internet. And then maybe down the road, they decide to open it up and spin it out as an open source project or something. Again, I'm not promising that they're gonna do that, but there are a lot of possibilities here where the motivations of not just China, but now Russia can fuel development in a way that wasn't possible now before. I love this idea, this concept behind Lantern. I think it's so amazing, especially given my own model of like, having a free and open internet for everyone. That's how I feel that everybody should have access to the internet. It should be free and open. And the fact that Lantern is trying to fill this gap for Russian citizens as well as China, as well as anywhere else that there are a lot of restrictions is definitely something that makes my ears perk up. So I'm very, very interested in seeing how they do this. Decentralizing a platform like this and allowing people to access information and to be able to share information without having those firewalls and having those blockages in place is extremely important when it comes to having some kind of free and open internet that allows you to get the information that you need to get so that you're not stuck in some kind of echo chamber. And that's really what I feel like they're trying to fix here. Yeah, yeah. And to be clear, the cryptocurrency part of this is just the way they reward you for operating a node. You don't have to be involved in that end of it if you don't want to operate a node. And even if you operate a node and you don't care about the cryptocurrency, you might just want to do it to help out. Which would be fine too. Folks, we get some of the best ideas of what to talk about on the show from you. And one of the ways we get them is our subreddit. So if you aren't aware already, and a big thanks to everybody who submits over there and our mods, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, there's lots to talk about here. The European Parliament and European Council, the Parliament is the elected representatives, the council are representatives based on each individual country, agreed on a provisional text of the Digital Markets Act. So getting them to agree ahead of time smooths the way to approval later, but it's still just a bill at this point. It seems likely to become law sometime in October, if all goes well. The act applies to companies providing core platform services who are large enough to be considered gatekeepers. So this doesn't apply to small businesses, doesn't even apply to SMEs. A core platform service is, there's lots of definitions in this bill, but it includes things like social networks, messaging, search, browsers and virtual assistants. I think smart TVs are even mentioned, although we haven't got the finalized text yet. A company is considered a gatekeeper of one of those services and therefore subject to the DMA if it meets the following criteria. Has to have market capitalization of 75 billion euros or turnover in the European economic area equal to or above 7.5 billion euros. It also has to have 45 million monthly end users in the EU and more than 10,000 annual business users. That applies to Alphabet, Meta, Apple and Amazon. Possibly applies to Alibaba and Booking.com too, according to TechCrunch. And it probably applies to a few other platforms. Spotify appears to be exempt from this, but it's not tailored specifically to the big five. It'll bring in a few others. Here are the major provisions of the DMA and Shannon and I are gonna work through the implications of these one by one. Let's start with ad tracking. It will require consent. Keep that in mind. This is not prohibiting the thing. It's just saying you have to get consent before you can combine or cross-use personal data, especially for targeted advertising. Now, that seems like it would prohibit Google's effort to create targeting by topic, right? They wanna say like, we'll just take the topics you use and then we'll combine that and we'll put it out there. This would require them to get consent to do that. So that's a blow to Google's attempt to sort of strike a middle between personalization and privacy. It also appears to apply across first-party services. So Meta would not be allowed to combine Instagram and Facebook data without your permission. Also, the number of times they can ask you for permission is limited to once per year. So Shannon, you won't be spammed every time you go to an app or a site. They only get to ask you once per year. I like that. That's very nice. I mean, just to top it off, but the fact that they are specifically targeting something like Google's topics, which Google just announced for Chrome as a privacy sandbox back in February of this year. So this is very, very actively trying to fight against any kind of ad tracking that even Google is trying to implement in 2022. So I like the fact that they are very, very forward-facing when it comes to including this kind of information. Yeah. And some part of me is like, well, Google was trying to do the right thing. They were like, okay. They are. If we directly use your information, we need your consent. But what if we just combine it and sort of de-anonymize it a little bit, put it in a group. They had that cohorts thing and they're like, that's not even good enough. The EU is saying, it doesn't matter. Whatever thing you come up with, we're going to ask for consent, which is not what the advertising industry wants to hear. Technically, they still could use topics, but that's the piece on top of it is they would have to get your consent, which is great. Another provision requires the ability to install apps from third-party platforms. So side-loading would be required, as well as allow app developers fair access to supplementary smartphone functions, not core functions necessarily, because that's a security risk, but things like the NFC chip, which Apple famously restricts access to. Yes, they do. And this one I'm a little iffy on just because of the security implementations that a lot of these chipsets have to have included in them. So it might be hard to give third-party applications access to those without opening up some kind of vulnerability. So that's something to definitely consider, but having that access still might be very good for competition. So I'm a little iffy on that one. Yeah, devil's in the details here. And again, I haven't seen full finalized text, but what they define as fair access makes all the difference. If fair access means like 100% secure access, and if you're denying access because of security, that's fine, then I feel better about it like you're saying. It prohibits bundling of services. So browsers, virtual assistants, search engines and the like all must be actively chosen by the user at setup. This seems to mandate choice screens. It doesn't specifically prescribe them, but choice screens seem to be the solution to this. It would not allow pre-selected defaults. However, this does not appear to apply to email. Yeah, Proton Mail was a, they were very active about trying to get email to be included. They are a smaller email system. So that totally makes sense. They probably want to be included on that choice screen, but I'm kind of surprised email wasn't included either, given that that's how you log in to literally everything. Now, if you're thinking, okay, these seem to be targeting, well, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple. We got one for Amazon, prohibiting self-preferencing. That would affect Amazon's ability to promote its own products on Amazon. It would require platforms also to give sellers access to their marketing or advertising performance data on the platform, something Amazon has been criticized for not being fully transparent on. So you wouldn't be able to put your own stuff at the top and you also wouldn't be able to restrict what data you give the sellers. Which can be very useful for small businesses. I mean, say you're a small business and you're trying to sell things on Amazon and you're not really sure how you need to be targeting your potential customers with title and with specific words that you're using in your inventory. Whenever you do those listings, that would be extremely useful to have that kind of information. I'm surprised they don't already include it. I wonder, well, they include some, just not all. Some? And this says you have to give them all of it. I think that's probably overblown. I think they probably get a lot more than people think but the sellers themselves want all of it and I don't blame them. I also wonder if Amazon could create a separate store for themselves somehow. Maybe that wouldn't work because it would be two separate locations but could they have the, could they say like, well, could they more promote? Because you actually can already go to sections that just give you Amazon basics but could they promote that more and say, well, that's not part of the search results. We're not self-preferencing our own stuff. We're just giving you navigation to it. I don't know. We're gonna see a way around this somehow. Interoperability for messaging is the one grabbing all the headlines. You will be required, again, if you're a big enough company that meets these requirements. So not every company will have to do this but if you are, you will have to be allowed to exchange texts, video calls and files over an end-to-end encrypted service. You can't keep everybody in iMessage. You can't keep everybody in Google Messages. This does not mean SMS. This means WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Messages would all have to interact. As would Facebook Messenger. Non-gatekeeping companies can ask a gatekeeper to open up their API. Smaller messaging services, however, are not required to do the same in reverse. They're not required to open it up to the gatekeepers. If you ask them to open up the API and you use it, it is a two-way street once you've done that. The European Parliament's rapporteur, Andreas Schwab, told TechCrunch that, quote, it also has to be secure. If the telecom regulators say it is not possible to deliver end-to-end encrypted group chats within the next nine months, then that will come as soon as it is possible. The act apparently gives group chat four years to come into compliance. So they're trying to be secure and have interoperability at the same time. Yay, I applaud this. I applaud this action. It is so lovely to see somebody really taking a stance against group chats that are not encrypted, which if anybody knows, if you're doing cross-platform group chats right now, like between folks that are using iMessage and Google's RCS, there's no encryption happening there. And not to mention, it's so hard to send each other any kind of files. So the fact that they're trying to make this happen is so exciting, and I really hope it does. It's a nightmare of implementation, though. I don't know how this is gonna work in practice. RCS, if Apple adopts RCS, then it gets them part way there because they can at least do some of it, but not all of it. And then making sure that the encryption is end-to-end across separate platforms like this, I will follow closely the technical developments around this. I hope it happens. A few other things. Users have the right to unsubscribe from a service in the same method in which they subscribed, hallelujah. Platforms may not pre-install software applications or at least have to give you the ability to uninstall them. Platforms may not require the use of certain services like payment systems or identity providers in order to be listed in app stores. So that gets rid of Apple ID being required. It gets rid of Apple Pay being required. And for the details of how this is all gonna work, the European Commission will enforce these rules, not the individual states. It'll have the leeway to talk to platforms, give them a chance to correct violations before finding them, but the fine can be up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover on first infringement and up to 20% for infringements after that. As with the GDPR, a lot of people expect this to motivate other governments outside of Europe to enact similar laws. The finalized legal text will be sent to the parliament for approval, then to the European Council. After that, the text gets published and comes into force 20 days after that publication. Again, we're expecting that sometime in October. Member states will then have six months to implement the legislation. So we won't see this come into force probably until sometime in 2023. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final text and being able to read through that and really scrutinize it because I think that's gonna make all the difference. Yeah, yeah, there's a few questions I have still You're able to see the amendments, you're able to see the discussion, but we're not seeing the text that will be voted on yet. And I'm very curious to see how that shapes up yet. Well, we have a little bit of additional news. People with advanced ALS, they can lose control of their muscles and the ability to communicate. Turns out researchers from the University of Tobigen reported that this week, with the help of an implanted device that reads his brain signals, one man in this complete locked in state agreed to an invasive implant to try to maintain communications with his family. Researchers inserted two 3.2 millimeter wide electrode arrays into part of the patient's brain that controls movement. And after three months of unsuccessful efforts, the team tried neurofeedback where a person attempts to modify their brain signals while getting a real-time measure of whether or not they are succeeding. An audible tone got higher in pitch as the electrical firing of neurons near the implant sped up, lower as it slowed, at which point the man could then indicate yes or no to groups of letters and then individual letters. Three weeks into the system, he was able to produce a sentence. Wow. Yeah. And I've seen so many misleading headlines about this. The first thing he said was a request to reposition him, which makes perfect sense to me. He also said early on, I love my cool son. He asked for a tool song to be played at Loud Volume. Wow. I saw a Yahoo Finance headline saying something about him asking for a beer, but I found nothing in any of the actual documentation of the story about that. I'm like, why do you even have to make something up? There's so much that's already cool about this story, but... Seriously, it's amazing. Yeah, this is that thing where you can read the electric signals of the brain. You can't interpret them, but then you can say, well, if you can change your electric signals by thinking, then we might be able to interpret that. And that's that feedback you were talking about where he would just hear the tone change and think, oh, when I concentrate on my eye movements, which is apparently what he was doing, I can make the tone go up or down. And then once you can make the tone go up or down, then they can use that to tie in to like, all right, use the high tone to select the letter, use the low tone, not. And this is somebody where you couldn't even use like eye movement detection. It was that limited. So it's a huge, huge advance for communicating with someone who's trapped in their own body if it's really fascinating. Absolutely. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Big thanks to Jordan. I always like to give kudos to the folks who send us additional information on stories or even outright corrections and are nice about it and are not like, you know, being all braggie about it. And Jordan was just such a person. It's super kind and super helpful. Wanted to answer a question from Wednesday's show about variable refresh rate and FSR. Scott was asking why you didn't see Xbox doing the frame rate syncing that Sony was, but instead talking about FSR. Jordan says Xbox Series X and S have supported variable refresh rate through AMD's FreeSync since launch back in 2019. We, Scott and I both totally forgot about it. That's why the announcement this week was just for PlayStation 5. Additionally, the FSR implementation on Xbox that we talked about is a partnership between Xbox and AMD and it's integrated directly into the Xbox development kit for developers to implement. So Sony would need to do the same thing. At some point, Scott and I will talk about that and we'll forget that Xbox already did it at that point too and then Jordan could remind us, but Sony's gonna have to do the same for FSR to work on PlayStation in the future. Thank you so much, Jordan, for being kind and pointing that out. That's super helpful. That's awesome. And thank you, Shannon Morse, for being with us. This was fantastic. It's always lovely to have you. Oh, it's lovely to be here, Tom. Thank you so much for having me and of course, for anybody out there who wants to check out what I'm doing online, youtube.com slash Shannon Morse is the best place to go. It's super nerdy, but I'm a nerd. So I think this is cool. I'm gonna show you how to set up your home network on a ubiquity system so that you have a entirely secure LAN, even though you're sharing that LAN with a bunch of smart home gadgets and stuff like that. So I'm really excited to share that video with y'all. Yeah, until security gets built in better by default, that's an important one. That's not just nerdy. It's also... Yeah, it's important. So go check that out. What's the URL again? youtube.com slash Shannon Morse. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, we need more of you. It's hard times out there. So if it's not hard times for you and you can support us with a couple of dollars a month, it's like a dime a show. We could really use your help to keep the show going and strong. 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News host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterty. Our mod, Speedmaster, W. Scottis 1. Bio-Cow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso. Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees. Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Video feed by Sean Wei. Music and art provided by Martin Bell. Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A. Cast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. A Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor. Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Shannon Morse. Our guest on this week's show was Charlotte Henry. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.