 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Eric Holm, Carmine Bailey, and Vince Power. Coming up on DTNS, a project to put you in charge of your social networking data, augmented reality for speeding vehicles, and our passwordless future is just about here. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, Cinco de Mayo 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Buenos dias. I'm Justin Robert Young from Austin, Texas. And on the show is producer Roger Chang. Sarah Lane has the day off, but that will not stop us from starting with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft made a deal with Epic Games to offer Fortnite for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. The partnership lets users play Fortnite in a way similar to how they stream videos from Netflix. So it's over the web. It's using Azure. You do need a Microsoft account, but you don't have to pay Microsoft for it. You just need a Microsoft account. Microsoft says this agreement applies to anyone who wants to play regardless of whether they have a subscription with Xbox or not. Gamers will be able to play on an iPhone, iPad, a device powered by Google's Android software just through the web. Even though both Apple and Google have banned Fortnite from their app stores, this isn't going through the app store. So this is allowed. Indeed. Google started widely rolling out support for Google Assistant in Android to prompt users to automatically change compromised passwords. Clicking through a prompt will take users to the affected website with Assistant able to handle all steps using its built-in password manager. Android Police points out Google hasn't published requirements for websites to support auto change, so it doesn't work on all sites. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has added JD.com and NetEase to a list of firms that may face expulsion from American stock exchanges. The SEC added the firms under the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which is not an acronym, a hoof cock, which aims to remove foreign jurisdiction companies from US exchanges if they fail American auditing standards three years in a row. Well, the Financial Times reports that Elon Musk has raised $7.14 billion of funding for his $44 billion buyout of Twitter with investors including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, crypto exchange, Binance, and asset management groups Fidelity, Brookfield, and Sequoia Capital. For anyone asking what's the deal here, this means that Musk can cut the margin loan he has taken with a group of lenders by half to $6.25 billion and increase the equity portion to $27.25 billion with the remaining debt raised from global banks. Finance Chief Executive, Zhengpeng Zhao, told The Times his crypto exchange would offer Elon Musk a, quote, blank check. Yes, but can he cash it? That's a whole thing. Although good news for Tesla, though, I guess, you know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it certainly makes Tesla more secure if he is cashing out less of what he would need to. Yeah, because the loan was secured against Tesla stock if people haven't been following that. So that's why that's good. The Verge's sources say Sonos is introducing its own voice assistant initially rolling out to US customers on June 1st. We talked about this a little on the extended show yesterday. There will be an international rollout after the US rollout. Sonos Assistant will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, and of course, Sonos Radio at launch. It will use the hey Sonos phrase as its wake word. All right, Jerry, tell us a good story about going for a ride with your augmented reality glasses on. Well, baby, you can drive my car and maybe you can do it in AR. Microsoft announced a partnership with Volkswagen to work on tracking movement in vehicles for augmented reality. A HoloLens 2's car scan, or sorry, can scan the real world and overlay virtual objects, but tends to lose tracking when things are moving faster, like you would in a vehicle. Microsoft's new moving platform mode could work with a slew of apps, driver training, or even as a possible way for passengers to use AR while in autonomous vehicles. Volkswagen has developed a heads-up display that will work with Microsoft to sync up with HoloLens. This is the first car partnership, but Microsoft's moving platform is already in use on ships and has plans for elevators, trains, and other quote-unquote moving environments. Meta has a similar partnership with BMW focused on safety, and Finland's Varho works with Volvo to use headsets to model car safety features. What about planes? Because they got trains and automobiles in there. I don't know. We're gonna have to go to John Candy's estate. Yeah, yeah. I think this is fascinating. I think a lot of people think of HoloLens as a joke because it hasn't made it out of the enterprise yet. I don't think it's a joke because of that, but it certainly has, Microsoft would like it to be a consumer device, and they haven't figured out how to make it a consumer device. But it's far from a failure, and this shows that they are making progress in the technology portion of it. I had never properly given consideration to the fact that every time I've had a HoloLens demonstration, and I've only had a couple, but in all those times, I was standing still. You can move around a little bit, but I wasn't on a moving walkway. I wasn't in an elevator, certainly wasn't in a car. And with AR using positioning signals that change in a moving situation, I can imagine that might be an issue. It might be able to do your seat back really well, but if you look out the window, it's gonna lose all ability to do anything. So that's fascinating to me that they are making progress on that enough that they're saying, hey, Volkswagen, makers of Audi, let's get some of your really fast cars and try to put this to the test and make it useful for you. I know they're talking about autonomous cars and making it work in there, which would certainly will eventually be something important, but I think even the idea of having it be a heads-up display that you could put on would be cool too. Well, let's make this clear. People don't think HoloLens is a joke because it hasn't made it out of enterprise. They think it's a joke because like Google Glass, it was pitched as a consumer device failed and now has been relegated to enterprise. Was it really, I guess it kind of was, I think we also are guilty of over-interpreting the pitch, but yeah, go ahead. And I have succeeded, yes. The reality here is that when it comes to AR in a vehicle, for me, I don't think that the future of this is you're wearing your headset in the car. I believe that the future of this is there is a small projector for which is giving you more of a heads-up display as you are moving along down the road because that's where I think the limitations of AR right now, which both for Google Glass and HoloLens is field of vision, whereas when you put on a virtual reality headset, you are getting a fairly wide scope and you are getting fairly high definition and that is increasing every iteration. AR has always had a problem where while you might get your full field of vision through a camera, the AR stuff is always in a smaller window than you would expect. If you're in a car, you don't want a gigantic field of vision because you're looking out and driving, but maybe you would like to know in a way that is less intrusive than looking down at your phone or even one of those screens that have carplay or Android's automotive service that there is gas coming up and you only have a quarter tank or that there is a speed change coming up. I think there's a lot of stuff that you can do that works within the limitations of the tech right now that if they can get the tracking right, which I think also is more advantageous than a car because you are able to put more processing into a car version than you would something that has to hang on your head the entire time, then there's a lot of really cool stuff here. Yeah, I agree and also I would add to that field of view should improve and that may open it up to other uses that can take advantage of that wider field of view, but you make a great point that even under the tech we have now, which is going to get better over time, there are some interesting things that you can do with it. I don't think you're gonna see this in a lot of cars yet though. It certainly is future focused, but the fact that it's already being used on ships, it's already being developed for other uses means that even if it's not Microsoft, somebody is gonna crack this, it's a crackable problem and we will be able to use these in all of these different situations. These are the kinds of hurdles you don't hear talked about enough when you're wondering like, hey, why hasn't that AR thing ended up catching on? It's stuff like this that often is like, yeah, we can't make it work in this regular use case like an elevator and we wanna make it useful for that. Tom, happy Cinco de Mayo to all of our listeners. You might also know as World Password Day and in celebration, I think of both, Apple, Google and Microsoft announced a widening of their commitment to the FIDO Alliance project to deliver secure authentication without having to rely on passwords. Our password free lives just got a little bit closer, huh? Yes, yes, that's right. Up until now FIDO compliance enabled password list login within a platform. So you could have a passkey stored with a piece of software on your phone. You could have it stored on your laptop, but between those, you'd have to re-authenticate. You'd have to use a token like a USB key to log into each one, plug that thing in each one. It wasn't, you weren't able to move the token across the platforms. That meant you couldn't use your phone as the token on your desktop easily. If you got a new device too, you had to re-enroll, which usually meant companies made you create a password as a backup which gets rid of the whole point, right? Yeah. All right, so what exactly then is changing with this new announcement? Yeah, the announcement here is for cross-platform token support. So you'll be able to use your phone as the password list login device across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, as well as on Chrome, Edge, and Safari. You'll have support in all those operating systems, all those browsers. And you kind of need both because the browser's usually how you're logging in, but you will. You'll have them across all of those things. So the magic example they keep giving when they were talking about it today was I could use Chrome on Windows, but the iPhone would be my way to authenticate. And I'd never need a password, but I'd be across three different platforms. So the way it'll work is you'll register your phone as the device you wanna use to log in. Then when you're logging in, say on your laptop, it will ask you if you wanna use your phone to log in. If you say yes, which you probably will, if you've set it up this way, a notification shows up on your phone. Then you simply unlock your phone, whether that's a pin, a pattern, a fingerprint, facial recognition, no password strictly necessary, especially if you're using fingerprint, and then it will authenticate you and log you in. If you use last pass or one password, they have similar things where they'll give you a notification and then you press yes on the notification. This would be a simpler version of that that could be used by any website that wants to implement. Another part of this is that pass keys can be securely stored in the cloud in case you lose your phone, wouldn't be losing all access. Now, cloud storage has, that's good news for a lot of people, but there are some good benefits to this, right? Yeah, you don't need a password as a backup. If as a website you can implement this and just get rid of storing people's passwords. Because don't forget, if you have a password on your account, it's still only a secure as your password, right? The person trying to break into your account won't try to use FIDO first, they'll go for your password and any multi-factors you have. So with this edition, it's easier for a site to justify just no longer supporting passwords. And it means it's harder to be phished since a fake site trying to trick you into logging in won't send a notification to your phone. Right now they can trick you into typing in your password, but if you're waiting for that notification and you never get it, well, you're gonna be like, that something's wrong, that's not the right place. All right, though. Everything has a downside, Tom, tell us the bad news. On the downside, your phone is now your vault. So if you have a weak passcode on your phone, even if you have fingerprint authentication, if you have a weak passcode on your phone, all your sites could be vulnerable. Though someone would have to get physical access to your phone, so the threat is still reduced, but you want to make sure you use a strong password on your phone and you still need websites to implement it. It's not gonna work if the website you're trying to log in doesn't implement it. It doesn't magically rid websites of passwords and shifting over to this is gonna be a lot of work, though it's work that will pay off in reduced exposure to data breaches and such. So it's worth it. It's just not gonna happen overnight. All this sounds so phone-centric. What happens if my phone, which it is prone to do dies for an idiot, which I- You've left a phone in a cab or an Uber, right? I literally did once in London and then I left for Scotland and I had to wait until I got back to London to get my phone from a cabbie. So the cloud token that we mentioned earlier is one way to deal with that. Another backup method would be if there's like, there's no password. You can't log in without the password is to use your email address. Some sites already do this. Send you a login link to your email address rather than having a crackable password as the backup point. When is all this supposed to happen? Apple, Google and Microsoft have all said that they expect the new signing capabilities to become available across platforms within the next year. So this is gonna happen by the end of this year that it'll be available and then it'll take time for websites to implement it. Good to know. Yeah. Just in case you're wondering if you're like, wait, but how is Fido secure? Go check out know a little more, know a little more.com. We have an episode of Fido 2 or called about the Fido Alliance where I go deeply into the public key cryptography. But basically you have the private key, they don't. So even if they break into the website they don't find anything. They find the public key and the public key is meant to be public. That's the short version of that. Do you have ideas about who we could have on the show folks? We'd love to hear them. Let us know. Check out our guest survey. You can put in your recommendations at dailytechnewsshow.com slash survey. Back in 2019, Twitter began an outside research team to create a decentralized social networking platform called Project Blue Sky. We've talked about it before a few times on the show. In February of this year that project was incorporated as an independent public benefit company owned by the folks working on the project and led by CEO Jay Graber. This is an important point in understanding how this might be implemented. Twitter doesn't have a controlling stake in this. So it's worth noting that if Elon Musk does close his deal to buy Twitter that would not affect Blue Sky nor is he under any obligation to use it or cooperate with it, though he probably would. But it is a separate public benefit company public benefit means it is beholden to benefiting the public, not to making a profit. Wednesday, Blue Sky hit a milestone and released its first public source code on GitHub under an MIT license. That's an open source license. Graber emphasized that this code called the Authenticated Data Experiment or ADX is the beginning of a public development process. It's not a finished product. So he's like, don't go start. You're not gonna be able to go build a bunch of platforms on this but you'll be able to see how a platform could be built on it. And it does give us a good idea of Blue Sky's direction. The protocol is not built around platforms, it's built around your data. Each user would control a personal data repository, a PDR that would have data including posts and engagement in it and it would be yours. You could trust someone to store it in the cloud for you but you could also just keep it on your own device if you wanted to. Social networks that integrate with Blue Sky would then be able to accept data from your PDR and integrate it into their own system. Their system would be how things get displayed, how things get moderated, what things get shown, what algorithms are used but your actual posts and engagements would be under your control. And that means you could take the PDR out of a system and still keep all your posts, all your data. And then you could move it to another system. This is the opposite of what happens right now where your posts and data live on a platform and if you leave that platform you can export them to your hard drive but you really can't take them anywhere else. Blue Sky describes this as speech being under your control and living inside that PDR and reach being under the platforms control deciding who gets to see what. So let's imagine what this would be like. I'm gonna use Twitter, Parler and an imaginary future social network I'm gonna call OpenWorld. The idea would be you could post on Twitter but all your data lives in the PDR and if you get upset with Twitter's moderation policies or maybe run afoul of those policies you could remove your PDR and take it to say Parler and all your posts and engagement and followers would come with you and now exist on Parler. And anybody who uses Parler and followed you on Twitter might be able to immediately follow you on Parler then because it's the data is under both of your control. Likewise, if you then get fed up with Parler and are like, I don't like this either and move to OpenWorld you could do that too and everything you posted going back to Twitter and through Parler would follow you. So the idea is the platforms would market to you based on this is how we do business this is how we moderate these are the features we use to display but you don't lose your posts so you can switch easier between the different platforms without having to start over from scratch. Number one, your example is very obviously a toxic troll and I would like to unfollow on all platform. A few things immediately kind of come to mind. Number one, obviously this is a very, very interesting idea the fact that Twitter is funding it I think is largely a PR move although the product might be something that is very, very, very worthwhile in terms of giving an open source backbone to people that would like to make similar services. Who knows what the adoption is going down the road we can leave that for the future. What I'm curious about now because the Twitter that funded Blue Sky is very different than the Twitter that exists today and is currently in the middle of a takeover by way of Elon Musk is who has made part of his 99 thesis nailed to the door on Market Street that he wants to open source the algorithm for Twitter is this something for which will eventually kind of combine with what is put out there publicly by Elon Musk should he follow through on that? Or is this just fundamentally a different idea about what a utopian world would look like if all of these platforms played together? I think this is more than just a PR move and I'm not gonna dispute that it is also a PR move on Twitter's part but I think Jack Dorsey really saw it as a solution as an externality that he could not control at Twitter and said, you know what, if this existed Twitter could take part of it, part in it and then we could solve a lot of the problems that people have with Twitter by saying, hey, there's other platforms, go enjoy them. But he needed to create the ecosystem for that to happen. Now you could argue that Mastodon kind of does this but now that we see the source code we understand that it doesn't do it in the same way that Blue Sky is doing it. So I do think Dorsey wanted to solve a problem and knew that the only way to solve it was to spin something out that he didn't control because he needed to have a system outside of Twitter that he could point to and I have a feeling there's some overlap in the way Dorsey was thinking back then and the way Musk is thinking now. I mean, certainly, Jack Dorsey is somebody who very, very, very much wants to commit to solutions just look at his fasting habits, right? He is somebody that is there to try to fix a thing mentally, spiritually or technologically. What I wonder is, is the real problem with Twitter and I'm putting this in gigantic air quotes, capital P problem with Twitter that people can't leave easily enough or that we would feel better leaving if all of our tweets were coming with us and plugged back in, is that really the thing that is binding people to Twitter or is it just the fact that the town square is the town square and it's busy, it's humming, there's things always happening and that's why people want to stay here. Well, the problems you hear people talking about are this place is a hellscape, the moderation is awful and the moderation is awful comes from all sides of all issues, right? And I think this is an interesting way to approach that problem of Twitter can't please everyone. They can't have a moderation policy that works for everyone and we've talked in other arenas on your show and elsewhere about the fact that one of the reasons Reddit works better than Twitter is because Reddit pushed moderation into the subreddits so there isn't a moderation policy for Reddit. I think what Twitter's trying to do here is say, what if there were more than one Twitter and you could pick your flavor of Twitter? You want the freewheel in Twitter? You want the responsible Twitter? Do you want the crazy Twitter? Do you want the like super safe Twitter? There could be versions of them and Twitter wouldn't have to run all of them. So that you could still interoperate and still be part of the town square, but you didn't have to go down all the alleys off the square if you didn't want to. I guess there is a presumption that that's the way that this world will continue to evolve as opposed to micro blogging as it were, whatever we want to refer to as the genre for which Twitter exists, which is shorter form posts that our future holds, that there are going to be many different platforms as opposed to what I suspect Elon Musk might possibly be wanting to do with Twitter, which is say, all right, Twitter is the platform and we're going to give you different experiences within it and that's the solution. So I think that the tech here is very interesting. I am for the idea of an open source solution because whether or not it exists to the way that I think is the most exciting right now, there is no doubt that having those tools are very, very, very helpful, but I don't know if the presumptions it's making for the future of social media are something I agree with. Well, there's no reason Musk couldn't use Blue Sky to offer multiple flavors of Twitter. Possibly, yeah. Right, and then it doesn't matter if anybody else ever adopts it, but the technology exists and it's auditable and reliable outside and other people can create interoperability, I don't know. We are assuming, they are efforting to that position. Yeah, and they're not there yet, for sure. But I think there's something to this. I share your skepticism that this is the thing that will solve social networking, but I'm a little more intrigued in the idea of a protocol that gives users control over the data. I've been following Tim Berners-Lee version of this with identity management. It's central to the FIDO Alliance where you have your private key on your device. It's not stored with the service you're logging into. There's a long-term trend here, and whether it's Project Blue Sky or somebody else comes along, that makes a better version of it. I don't know, but I think there is a long-term trend worth paying attention to here. Tom, Mr. Blue Sky, please tell me. Just call me a yellow. Hey, you may recall the last year Stack Overflow and Mechanical Keyboard Manufacturer dropped off the key, did a little collab to make a miniature three-key keyboard, designed to copy and paste text, which is exactly what it did. But it's pretty cool for a $29 device. Now drop Stack Overflow and designer, Cassidy Williams, have unveiled the key V2 with three keys that are dedicated to Control-C and V out of the box and customizable to do anything else. Here's the cool twist. The key V2 is also RGB-enabled, with a case made out of acrylic, rather than aluminum to allow the lighting to shine through. The switches are also hot-smoppable, so you can remove them and replace them with different switches that have different fees. If this sounds like your jam, the key V2 can be ordered directly now from Drop, which has that quantities are limited to 3,900 pieces with an estimated chip date of July 20th of this year. Portion of the proceeds are going to digital undivided. A non-profit focused on helping Latina and black woman entrepreneurs. Ooh, Blinky Lights. Who doesn't love a Blinky Light? I mean, love a Blinky Light. Whoa, whoa, be to all keyboards before they were also a strip in Vegas light show. Yeah, check out the Blinky keyboards. And a mod, a cool keyboard mod. I mean, this crosses so many interests at so many levels. I think they're gonna sell a nice handful of these. So very good. Yeah, yeah, it does also give you a, I love the idea of trying to break out our kind of one size fits all situations to make workflows better. And there are certainly great examples of this, be they coders or video editors or various different situations where you wind up hitting the same buttons all the time and making another destination for that could be something that is more intuitive to your workflow. Yeah, there's a bunch of products like this that are catching on a lot of them with video podcasters where, yeah, I could hit a key on my keyboard but I have to find that key, put it in a little separate thing and I can find it really fast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, yeah, the stream decks of the world have made a meal out of the idea of like, all right, yeah, why am I finding the window buried underneath all my other windows of my OBS to switch various shots when you can just have big colorful fun buttons that you just hit bing bong boom. Yep. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Huh, not much in the mail bag. Thank you to everyone who has sent us an email in the mail bag. We need more of them. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Keep the e-mails coming. Thanks to you, Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. What you got going on to tell folks about? Well, obviously a lot in the news. Politically, we had the results of the Ohio primary. That is available right now in our most recent episode as well as all the latest on the Supreme Court leak. You can find that at politicspoliticspolitics.com. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Andrew. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew. Andrew got all the love to himself today. Thank you, Andrew, for being our brand new boss. We are having a good May. And you can make it better by becoming a patron at patreon.com. You'll even get a longer version of this show. We talk about more about the topics. We run off on tangents. It's a whole lot of fun. It's called Good Day. Internet, get it at patreon.com. Slash, DTNS. We're live Monday through Friday, 4 PM Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Slash live back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.