 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Jeff Wilkes, Pele Glendale, and Dr. X17. Coming up on DTNS, Meta has strong AI tech that it shares freely with the world and will use to serve you ads plus Nintendo's cooling on mobile and never got into clouds, so what's Nintendo's strategy again? We're gonna talk about that. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 5th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I am Scott Johnson. And on the show's producer, Roger J. If you, like me, thought Deutsche Telecom owned most of T-Mobile US, you were wrong, but now we're all right. The company reached a majority stake in T-Mobile US late Tuesday. Let's get to the rest of the quick hits. India's Ministry of Electronics and IT published a detailed explanation of the government's plans to regulate AI. The ministry said, AI is a kinetic enabler of the digital economy and innovation ecosystem. So while it's developing policies to address concerns, it doesn't intend to introduce new legislation. There aren't as many AI-related startups in India as other markets. So it seems, at least for now, that India is trying to appeal to entrepreneurs in the space. Apple will open its first retail store in Mumbai, India later this month. Apple shared a picture of the upcoming store called Apple BKC at the Geo World Drive Mall. The company plans to launch its second India store somewhere in New Delhi later this year. Apple launched its online store in India only in 2020 and originally planned for retail in 2021, but that was delayed due to, what was that thing that happened all in 2020? It was a pandemic. It was a virus. And anyway, I'm sure it'll come to me. Beyond retail, JP Morgan analysts estimate that Apple will produce 25% of all iPhones in India by 2025. I have been to this mall, by the way, in Mumbai. Oh, you have. Yeah. And it is a big one. I would think this is going to be a pretty big deal for residents of Mumbai. And if you live there or you go there and you see the Apple store, do let us know. A consortium of international law enforcement agencies teamed up to seize domains used for a Genesis market. That's a marketplace for hacked user data. The data on the marketplace included information from autofill forms, saved login info, also cookies. Hence the name by law enforcement for the effort, Operation Cookie Monster. See, they can have fun too. Genesis sold a custom browser that could be used with the stolen data to run bots that impersonated people. Bots sold for as much as $450 each. While the domains have brought the marketplace down temporarily that operators have yet to be identified. So basically they'll just start at them somewhere else later. But hey, it's got a fun name, Operation Cookie Monster. TikTok's troubles with the U.S. government get the most attention, of course. But TikTok is having issues of a more usual sort for a very popular social platform elsewhere in the world. Rest of World reports that several TikTok creators in Nigeria were arrested, two of them for satire against a governor and several for allegedly violating religious and moral sensitivities. Digital rights lawyer Veronica Igube told Rest of World that TikTok has a responsibility to advocate with the government on behalf of these creators. So there's a little bit of a backlash, but the company may be concerned that the government would ban it if it gets too forceful. Nigeria did that to Twitter for seven months in 2021. In another example, Vietnam plans to begin an investigation into TikTok. VN Express quoted a representative from the government saying that TikTok has allowed offensive and quote toxic content in the country. Well, hopefully this one isn't toxic. Kobo announced the Ellipsa 2e, a $400 e-reader that includes the Kobo Stylus 2 for taking notes. It also features a 300ppi, 10.3 inch e-ink screen, Comfort Lite Pro feature that can adjust the front light to reduce your eye strain, and also supports an optional magnetic sleep cover. Pre-orders open now, shipping April 19th. Kobo also announced the subscription called Kobo Plus, which offers unlimited access to a catalog of more than 1.3 million e-books and 100,000 audiobooks. $8 per month gets you either e-books or audiobooks, depending on your choice, or $10 a month for both. Excellent. Well, Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming has sources that say Sony began development on a PlayStation handheld. Hey PS Vita owners, don't get too excited until I tell you about the limitations. It's codenamed the Q Lite. The Verges John Porter picked up this report, so it lent it a little extra credence, but you'll need a PlayStation 5 to use it. It will supposedly use Sony's remote play to stream games from the console over the internet, 1080p 60 frames per second. It also reportedly would have an 8 inch screen, use a control layout similar to the PS console controller. Insider Gaming says its sources say the Q Lite is in its QA phase and would come out before the legendary rumored PlayStation 5 Pro and after a possible detachable disk drive PS5. Now, given that other rumored hardware devices like those two have never materialized, John Porter over at the Verge recommends taking this report with a pinch of salt, but mobile gaming handhelds are hot, so it wouldn't be shocking if Sony's working on them. Steam Deck has taken the world by storm. Scott, what do you think, knowing that this may or may not actually pan out even if it's happening, they might not put out the product, what do you think of Sony's purported strategy here? Well, coming from the perspective of it will probably happen. That's just going to be the stance I take. I don't actually really know, and who knows, you're right about these other rumors. They haven't so much come to fruition as they've just sort of died on the vine, but I think that this wouldn't be that crazy of an idea. The big issue for me would be cost, because if this device comes out, my guess is this will support PlayStation Remote Play, and that's about it. If they want to include other services of the third parties, GeForce Now and others, that would be great. I don't know that that would be in their plan or not. It is definitely not in their plan to support Game Pass via this device. Then price matters. If you're going to charge $299 plus or north of that price for a device like this, that's just ridiculous. I can currently do everything that this device would do, or all the other devices like the Razer's Edge device as well as the Logitech G Cloud device. Those are pretty expensive, and I can do all of what they do plus everything in native hard drive and all other built-in features that a Steam Deck has on a Steam Deck for not much more for the base model. Yes, you're going to pay a lot more for the high-end version of the Steam Deck, but I just can't, as a consumer, see getting up to that edge and go, wait a minute, for 50 more, I can have a hard drive and full Steam integration and all these other advantages plus the things they're giving me. We don't know enough about what this device would be, so we have to make a bunch of guesses about it. I think cloud-only or online-only or direct-to-console-only devices are a viable path forward, but I think the price really has to come down to match the expectation or else nobody's going to buy it. If this thing's $99, the conversation changes entirely, right? Oh, a complete 180-degree change. It's not going to be $99. Well, yes, exactly. But if it were, yeah. Even if it was $149 to $199, let's say it's sub-$200, even by a dollar, I think that's a device I would grab and I would be very interested in it. The fact that these will have dual-sense controller capability, or at least that's the rumor, would be really cool, but that also makes me think the price will be higher than $200. So I don't know. If Sony really is working on this, and I have no doubt that they've at least thought about working on this if they haven't, I'm sure they've thought of all those things. But then again, we're still basking in the afterglow of PSVR2 being too much money for people right now. Nobody wants to buy that thing. Its sales are in the toilet. And this is very analogous to the PSVR, because the PSVR1 was like, well, why would you buy that? You have to have a PlayStation for it and it sold decently. And that doesn't seem to be happening with the PSVR2. Sean Hollister from The Verge is actually around the house today. It wasn't able to be on the show, but I asked him about this, and he speculated what if they bundled this into the PlayStation Plus tier? There's some reasons he said that that would not make sense, but he's like, that's an idea. That's one way they could go about this. Well, I mean, look at what Microsoft did when they released the Series S and X. They made a monthly payment plan where you got the device, you got the Series X in your house, you paid 20, 30 a month. It included the console plus access to Game Pass ultimate for as long as the period was. I don't know if it's a two-year plan or whatever it is, but at the end of all of that, you actually saved 50 bucks on the whole if you'd have gone out and just paid cash for the device and then paid monthly for Game Pass. Something like that would be pretty good if they said, hey, you can buy the device outright for 300, or we'll give you the device for 15 to 25 a month, and that includes our mid to high tier of PlayStation Plus. That's not bad. That I would also consider. So that could be on the table. Hardware is a subscription. Isn't that crazy of an idea these days? Entirely possible they do that. Well, in computer vision, something called segmentation is the ability to tell which pixels go with which objects within an image. Meta is releasing a new segment anything model, also known as SAM for short, along with a training data set called SA-1B. That's the largest of its kind. SAM is being released under an open source license and the SA-1B data set is being made available to researchers. The whole thing is called the segment anything project. So what does it do? Segmentation is tough because it can't be trained on public data and therefore is just more expensive to create and run. SAM can identify and mask new types of objects beyond just those that it was trained on. So you might say, what would this be used for, Tom? Yeah, the model could be combined with others to create a system that could identify text and images. Say look at a web page and tell you everything that's on the web page, whether it's an image or text. Could also do interesting things in virtual spaces. They talked about perhaps you look at a 2D item, it sees your attention, can interpret what you're looking at and then create a 3D item to put in a virtual world. Or you could just create 3D items by describing them. It would be able to take your description and create a 3D item. Or because it's Meta, you can use it for ads. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth in a separate story told Nikkei Asia that commercial uses for Meta's AI are coming by the end of this year. As an example, he described a system that could and now a quote, ask the AI, make images for my company that work for different audiences, and it can save a lot of time and money making ads more effective. Yes, it's good that Meta is being a good customer and open sourcing things. Segmentation right now feels like transformers did when Alphabet shared them with the community and look what open AI did with transformers. Someone may be able to do something with segmentation and the rising tide will lift all boats. I think that is all wonderful and it's an advantage that Meta has that people forget about when they talk about the future. Well, if the ad market tanks, what's Meta gonna do? Well, they've got a huge advantage in AI that they can leverage. I talked about on the editor's desk today on Patreon, I wouldn't be shocked in five years if we're talking about the big three AI companies, Alphabet, Open AI and Meta. But in the meantime, they got to make the ads work and so using that AI to try to figure out how to get around to the limitations that crackdowns on ad tracking have made is a real thing. Do we think this is Meta's way to deal with those increasing limitations? Probably, right? They're as much as anybody and certainly Alphabet's under this and Google's under this pressure as well, but that's getting harder and harder for stuff to get through trackers and browsers are getting better and better at blocking things and consumers are getting more and more savvy to that sort of stuff. And so, yeah, they want to protect that end of the business. Why wouldn't they actually kind of don't have a huge problem with it? It depends on how invasive it is. But these are the kind of tools I'm interested in in AI, the way these things have been described to me and the way segmentation works. Yeah, I love the idea of me saying, here's a bunch of 2D objects on my screen, make 3D models of them, and then use those for something else. These sorts of tools that we're having to do a lot of manual work for is what I like about AI and about language models and all of this is because it's doing a lot of the footwork so that we can get to the inspiration and get the thing out. It doesn't mean I like all of it, but I do kind of like this and the idea that some of this would, like Tom said, raise all boats and be on the same tide. I'm all down with that. I just don't want to get bombarded with new ways of advertising to me. I'm not going to. That's the short version of the story, but I'm with you, Scott. I'm sorry to bother you. I am with you on this. I mean, there are many ads that I am either just fully capable of ignoring, you know, pretending that they're not there, not clicking on, and then there are ads that are served to me where I'm like, ah, I know why you did this because I looked at that website two days ago type thing. And for, you know, some of that stuff is stuff that I would want to buy, you know, I want to part with my money for this thing, whatever it may be, something like a 3D model of a nightstand, for example, where it's like, well, the picture's cool, but now I really see what the nightstand would look like in my house. Now I'm going to buy it, you know, because this ad is serving me more information that is, you know, generated from what I want it anyway. That kind of stuff is like, all right, well, if we can't get rid of ads and we can't, let's make it better. And I think Metta is probably more well-served to do this than just about any other company. Not that we should get thrown over to Amazon, but it feels like if I'm shopping this, these are cool tools I'd want, you know, like this isn't being advertised to me, it's me searching for a product and going, all right, let's see that in full holographic view. All right, let's zoom in and see the details and the seams on the plastic work. I love these ideas, but that's really not what Bosworth was talking about from what I've done. He should be, trust me, he should be. What he was talking about is we have limited ad tracking, but we do know like, oh, it's a woman in Illinois, or it's a man in Texas. And so he's going to ask the AI, like create images of this nightstand that appeal to a man in Texas, also one that appeals to a woman in Illinois. And I think that's what this is. This is talking about. And if I'm that woman in Illinois, and it appeals to me, then it works. Yeah, that's a good point. It's effective. Well, folks, you may know, I do another show called Know a Little More that does deep dives into individual topics. And it's coming back for a new season Thursday. Better than ever. If you have not yet sampled the show, go get subscribed right now. The first episode in the relaunch is going to be about RSS. It's rocky controversial history, how it ended up being the underpinnings of podcasting, despite a fight over its future and factions that make the early Catholic Church look tame. Don't miss it. Subscribe by Thursday at know a little more dot com. Nintendo designer and legend Shiguro Miyamoto told Variety mobile apps will not be the primary path of future Mario games. When making a Mario game, he noted, we try to define what is the gameplay, what is the method, and then define what devices we go on. He went on to say, Nintendo's core strategy is a hardware and software integrated gaming experience. The intuitiveness of the control is part of the gaming experience. When we explore the opportunity of making Mario games for the mobile phone, which is a more common generic device, it was challenging to determine what that game should be. So that was frightening words. Nintendo still doesn't like mobile. But if the company is pulling back from mobile, but also not leaning into the cloud, which is also popular, is its strategy still a good one? Scott Johnson, what say you? Oh man, there's so much to say around this Nintendo stuff. Nintendo is Nintendo for a reason. They have a combination of IP ownership and a history of quality games, as well as innovation and hardware, although sometimes a rocky history with that stuff. But nonetheless, they have put themselves in a very unique position over time that is just a very different place than other mainstream gaming companies. And I think the tone that I got out of reading the article in the interview is that he's not saying mobile will never be the place where specifically Mario will appear, and he already has appeared a couple of times, two, three times now if you count Mario card on the phone. But what he's saying is that's not going to be our primary place in the future. And I agree with him. I don't think it is going to be. I think touch screen only has turned out to be a very limiting factor for a lot of game designers, developers and publishers. And while it works great for certain sort of point and pick type gameplay, when it comes to moving Zelda around a screen or Mario and the way you want to, something is lost when you have just a touch screen and sure you can buy controllers for this stuff. But there's also business models that a little bit weird, but they rather probably sell a premium product to people. Yes, but they're kind of forced in today's market to make it a free to play experience. So I don't think they're going to be hurt by not prioritizing mobile any more than I think Microsoft or Sony. Well, the bigger question is, are they behind the scenes or upcoming or some unannounced thing? Are they working toward getting their hand around what Nintendo's role is with cloud gaming? Are they ready for that level of stuff? And part of me says no, because they have a really rocky history with internet in general. They still do friend codes. It's still a terrible way to run a community, but they also have a really cheap online service. And so there's reasons to like it. But are they prepared for whatever's next? I think they know that mobile for them, anyway, is not next. I just don't know if we know they know what is truly next. And is Microsoft and Sony right? Is Microsoft right about heavy cloud and heavy games on everything and having it all run everywhere? Are they even right? Is Sony right about? Nintendo is different, though. Nintendo has always been different. Like they don't play by the same rules that Microsoft and Sony and Sega and EA and everybody else play. They're very Apple-like in their protection because mobile gaming is a huge business. And if Nintendo really wanted to do it right, they absolutely could. They could make Candy Crush for Mario. They could make Fire Emblem freemium games that would follow the models that the mobile games do. They don't want to do that because they're very protective of their IP. They don't want to push Zelda into a card trading game. That's what he's talking about here is we have a strategy around the design of the game and they don't want to give that up. Now, maybe that's bad. Maybe they should not be so precious about it, but it is one of the things that has made their franchises so successful. It's why people will go to great lengths to buy a Nintendo product just so they can play Zelda, just so they can play Mario, etc. It's a special experience. You're not wrong. And so that specialist experience that they have curated for all these years is watered down and I felt this when they put that Mario Run game out or the Fire Emblem game you mentioned, but there's still a thing, still a game people can play. When those games were put out, they lessened the brand. They made me go, now these are tainted by free-to-play mechanics. And why do you think that is? Because I've heard other people say the same thing. Why Nintendo specifically can't kind of dip a toe into these mobile waters, so to speak, and have something that people think doesn't bring down the quality of the brand itself? That's a great question. It's a little bit self-inflicted. They put themselves in a position of being, again, in their own little space. They're their own category in a weird way. They don't really compete with Sony or Microsoft or any big boys anymore. What they do is they make what they want to make, and they put it on the hardware they want to make, and then they sell it to you, and then we love it. And as long as that little transaction continues in perpetuity, they don't really need to worry about what's happening in other stuff. They can still dip their toes. But to answer your question, to see a Mario game on a phone just made me go, oh, well now they're like everybody else. The CA or the Sony or the Sony or anybody else, they're just doing games on mobile. It starts to disperse the reality distortion field a little bit. 100% that's what it is. And I think that they know this, at least they do now. And I think they will still see stuff in the future. I think things will drop here and there, but it will never be flagship content from them. It'll always be after afterthought stuff, or it'll be an add-on to be able to play something else or way to track a game that's popular. But Roger, you had a really good point earlier when we were talking amongst ourselves. I think one of the things that people forget is Nintendo at its heart is a toy company. And if you look as a toy company, you want to create a thing that is more than just a game. It's something you touch, you feel. And if you looked at the various technologies that Nintendo has tried, whether successful, I mean, you know, it's up for debate, but they wanted to create a unique experience. And I think part of the idea is that you can't have that if you are all over the place, right? If you have your IP, your game franchises all over the board. If you have it in a single siloed location that you control, you control the hardware, you control the software, you control the experience, you know, what they did with the Switch, what they did with the Wii U, what they did with the GameCube, what they did with the Virtual Boy. They were, you know, they were trying to make sure that you could get something that was unique out of the entire experience, that it wasn't just the game you were getting. Maybe that means they're the exception that proves the rule. Maybe they can continue. Maybe if Nintendo has a cloud, it's a cloud gaming thing that you can only get from a Nintendo device, right? But only Nintendo could pull that off. Yeah, you're right. Anybody else tries that, they get chastised immediately for trying to do that. And Nintendo could actually get away with it. I mean, there's a reason why the biggest news in the last couple of weeks was new information about Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Everybody's eyes glued on that release. It's on a piece of aging hardware. It looks a lot like the previous game. If this was anyone else, we wouldn't be losing our minds. But it's Nintendo and there's magic in there. And this is this is the toy I want. So as long as they keep being that, this other stuff will just be a quick 60 million here and 30 million there, and then they'll just keep making money. What's the cloud toy Nintendo is going to have to answer though? Wait till Apple buys Nintendo then. Oh, yeah. No, I love that. I love that conversation. That one hasn't circled back around in a while. It's about time. And trust me, I'm not, you know, there's no insider information. I just think that knows something. Sometimes they seem like similar companies that might have similar ideas. Different company now. And this is good for any of those of you who might be cleaning out the garage this summer. Maybe you're moving. Maybe you just want to get some stuff out of the house. Best Buy is adding a mail in option to its recycling program. What that does is sell you a box that then you can put old electronics in. You don't have to have bought them from Best Buy and then ship back for recycling. You buy the box, then pack in as many approved items as can fit within the box within a weight limit. You got a couple of options. Nine by five by three inch box for up to six pounds goes for $23 or an 18 by 14 by four inch box goes up to 15 pounds and that will set you back $30. Best Buy does free in-store recycling. So you can take stuff there and you don't have to buy the box or you can have employees come to your house to get stuff. Maybe it's a large TV where you're just like, it's not going to fit in a box anyway. And that'll run you $200. So you have some options, but this is Best Buy's way to say, hey, want to recycle some stuff? Pay us. Yeah. I mean, nine by five by three is not big. No. You might be able to squeeze a couple thin phones in there. Or like a variety of different strange cables that I'll never use again. Yeah, that's true. You can pour a bunch of cables in there. Some of that stuff that, you know, it just keeps sort of accumulating as I look around Studio Redwood, I'm like, I mean, yeah. Stoic Squirrel says, I hope the box is recyclable. How bad would that be if it was like, you know, a plastic, unrecyclable, like material? It's going to be around forever. It's made of mesh from Mars. We made the box out of asbestos, but it's a recycling program. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, you're winning either way. I have, as I look to an area of the studio that you guys can't see, I currently have four MacBooks that are so old that there's nothing I can really do with them anymore, even as a display not happening. And I'm just a lazy person. So I haven't done this yet. But Apple, if you say, Hey, I don't want any money back. I just want to recycle them. They will send you a box for free that you put your stuff in and you send it back to Apple. So, you know, sure, this is only Apple products. Apple's not saying, just give us whatever you got in the garage type thing. So if you, I don't know, feel like you have more of a hodgepodge, I guess that the best buy option might work for you. And again, I see a couple of people in the chat like, why should I pay them for this? Don't drive to the best buy. You're paying for the convenience of being able to mail this in, having the box sent to you and then mailing it back without having to go to the best buy. But they're still doing their free in-store stuff, if you're willing to make the truck. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Brian, who said, after yesterday's discussion of the Thunderbolt dock, Brian said, the Thunderbolt 4 dock doesn't have an SD card slot because surface devices already have an SD card slot built in. Rich and Aya Zaktar, who was the co-host on the show yesterday, had talked about this and Rich responded, and we thought this was good to pass along to the rest of you as well. Thank you for bringing that up. I believe I alluded to the fact that this might indicate their upcoming devices would have SD cards, but a good point that their lineup does feature many services with SD card readers. Interestingly, this doesn't include the Surface Studio or Surface Laptop 5, so possibly refreshes of those might include them. Thank you for the feedback. Yeah. Thank you, Brian, and thank you, Rich, for getting back to that. Good conversation with those two yesterday. Absolutely. Thanks also to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with you. Sure. Pretty much everything I have going on right now is over at frogpants.com. And if you're into podcasts, great, got you covered there. If you like gaming, lots of stuff there. And if you like art, lots of that as well. All sorts of things available for everyone. If they just put in this little tiny address into the internet, frogpants.com. That's simple. Thanks also to a brand new boss we got since yesterday's show, and that boss's name is Tom S. Thomas. Tom S. You just started backing us on Patreon. We see you. We hear you. We thank you for being part of the crew. Listen, folks, don't be left behind. If you're listening to the free feed with ads, which you can get rid of in the Patreon feed, we'll get over there and become a patron. What are you waiting for? Thomas did it. Don't get left behind, because when you become a patron, you get access to good day internet, the extended show of DTNS. And on that show today, we're going to talk about a Piper Sandler survey showing that teens don't use VR. Is this it? Is this the end of VR? Did it even begin? Are the early days already over for VR? Stick around. We're going to talk about that. Just a reminder, though, you can catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tell a friend, it's fun to have you live if you can be with us. We are back doing it all again with Justin Barber Young tomorrow. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.