 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Tony Glass, Phillip Lass, and Daniel Dorado. Coming up on DTNS, Arizona adopts Apple's digital driver's license, driverless taxis are everywhere. We'll tell you where, and Sony smooths out your PS5 gameplay. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 23, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. We have got some news for you today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. I mean, we always have news. That seems obvious for me to say, but we have some really fun news, including all that stuff that I said. This one's fun for ZTE. US Judge Ed Kincaid ruled Tuesday that China's ZTE should be allowed to end its five-year probation in the US after pleading guilty to charges of illegally shipping US technology to Iran and also North Korea. ZTE had been accused of violating the probation by committing visa fraud to bring researchers to the US under J-1 academic visas. The judge found ZTE was legally responsible for the actions, but there wasn't a justification for extending the probation. However, the judge did encourage the government to pursue criminal or civil penalties against the company. ZTE's probation is now ended, and it can operate normally in the US. Yeah, so it might be guilty of the thing, but that was not the thing that would end their probation or extend their... Yeah, anyway, I guess it makes sense. Snap acquired NextMind, a French neurotech startup working on brain-computer interface technology. NextMind's existing headband developer kit designed to let users control aspects of a computer with their thoughts will be discontinued though. The startup will work for Snap's hardware group called Snap Lab. On Tuesday, we discussed the breach at Okta of a Citel Group support engineer's laptop that had access to Okta consumer data like JIRA tickets and also lists of users. It could also reset passwords and MFA tokens, but not access them directly. Okta further clarified in later blog posts that they believe a maximum of 366 of their more than 15,000 customers would have been accessible to the attackers, so a small portion overall. Citel has not commented much other than to say that there's no ongoing security risk and that it received the forensic report on the incident on March 10th. Okta says it's disappointed that the report took from January till March to be completed. The same group also released some Microsoft source code. Microsoft says that the group accessed one employee account with limited access to the code and no customer code or data was compromised. Microsoft also noted that it doesn't rely on secrecy of code as a security measure and doesn't believe that the leaked source code elevates risk. Also, thanks to Mike for the note on pronouncing Okta. Nothing CEO Carl Pay announced the company will release the phone one in the summer. The device will use a Qualcomm chipset. I mean, that seems obvious, but it's confirmed and run a version of Android with just the essentials where every bite has a purpose according to Carl Pay. Other than that, we don't have any specific specs, release date or price or anything, so we'll get back to that in the summer. Man, a lot of hype for something with very few details. And the company's called Nothing. SpaceX informed customers of price increases for its Starlink Internet service. Internet service increased 11% to $110 per month with the cost of a terminal to access the service of 20% to $599. Alright, let's talk about digital driver's licenses. Yeah, I thought this was a pretty cut and dry story about Apple Pay or Apple Wallet rather being opening in Arizona because we've talked about this in the past, but I'll set it up again for everybody. Arizona, US state has become the first to support driver's licenses and also state IDs if you don't drive in the wallet app on the iPhone and also the Apple Watch. The residents of Arizona can tap to present a select TSA security checkpoints in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. So this is a limited rollout, but that's where they're starting. Apple says more states will support driver's licenses and also state IDs in the wallet app soon. We've talked about some of them in the past, but the list has grown now including Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, territory of Puerto Rico. That had previously said Georgia, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, Utah, also rolling out the features to residents. Right now we got Arizona. So if you're interested and you want to use it, you need an iPhone 8 or a newer iPhone running iOS 15.4. And to use an Apple Watch it needs to be Series 4 or later running Watch OS 8.5 and up. The process works as follows. You register the ID and Apple wallet. You take photos of the front and the back of your license or ID. That seems pretty obvious. Then Apple has you do a series of facial and head movements during the setup process to kind of say, yeah, this is me. This is what I look like. You know, almost like setting up face ID. Your Apple, then Apple states it will not be responsible for approving requests. This is going to be a state thing. So that, you know, remains to be seen. But if it works as intended, the card details will then be sent to the state on a secure connection for verification. Then the state says, yes, you're good to go. You can fly. Go to TSA. Once you're at a TSA checkpoint, it works very much like Apple Pay. You tap your phone or your watch against a reader and the device tells you what information is going to be sent. Then you use face ID or touch ID, dependent on your advice to approve sending that info. You don't need to unlock your phone and you don't need to give over your device to anybody. A lot of people have been a little bit unclear on that. Apple says at this point in the process, the TSA will also capture a picture of you as a traveler for verification purposes. Now, there is some question about where that info is stored and what happens to that information. And just a side note, Google has developed a framework for digital driver's licenses as well for Android and formed the Android Ready SE Alliance last year, which will handle standardization of Android digital IDs, SE standing for secure element. So we're getting somewhere here. It sounds kind of complicated, but I'm excited to try it. I hope your explanation addresses a lot of people's misconceptions or worries about this. A lot of people have said, well, I don't want to use a digital driver's license because I don't want to hand over my phone. You don't have to. A lot of people have said, well, I don't want to have to unlock my phone. What if they take it away from me? You don't have to. You're using NFC to transmit information. Well, I don't want to transmit all the information of my driver's license. You actually transmit less than if you handed over your physical card because it'll tell you they're only going to look at this and this. So the concerns that I see in this are knowing in your state that they're using a secure, encrypted way of transmitting the verification data from the phone in the first place during setup. And whether any facial information is being sent along with it or just the driver's license information, they could do the facial verification on device. So that would be one question I have. Is it on device? What information is my state getting? And the other is the TSA taking a picture of you. How are they handling that data? Is that just used in the moment? And then it goes away? Is there a database? Obviously, the TSA is probably taking pictures of you all the time. So maybe it's a fool's errand to even wonder about that. But those would be the two things that I think you'd have legitimate questions about. The part where you're actually verifying your driver's license at the TSA checkpoint seems pretty straightforward and pretty secure. Yeah. I'm all for this. If anything, I don't see it as anything potentially troublesome. I see it as the natural iteration of where we are with our phones. They're slowly becoming so much a part of our everyday lives. And it seems even silly to say it. Obviously they are. But why not in this way? And why not moving forward in this way? We're already doing it with payment. We're doing it with other stuff. And it's also not an on-off situation where as soon as this gets accepted in a more wide ranging way, it doesn't mean that you can't just use your license and your other forms of ID in the other ways that you currently do things. It'll be a long time before that stuff goes away. In fact, may never go away because you're going to always need to fall back of some sort. But yeah, this feels natural to me. I'm ready. Let's go. Yeah. My number one gripe at airports. I've been scanning the QR code for my boarding pass on my phone for years going through TSA. But you still need to take your driver's license out of your purse. No. I happen to have a purse that has all sorts of things in there. So I always put my driver's license in my back pocket so that it's easy to access. And often I forget that I've done that. And so however long later, when I get to my destination, there's a little bit of a panic going on. This is just like one step less convoluted for me. And I do have Apple devices. So I'm excited to use this if I ever fly again. Yeah. And you mentioned Google is working on a similar thing. They're a little farther behind in implementation. This is obviously just the first toe tap step towards digital driver's license. My engine video is like, I can't imagine being a store clerk using this as an ID to purchase alcohol. This would be great for that. You just go up and tap it and it says, oh, I'm just going to send your date of birth and your picture. And so the store clerk doesn't see any of the rest of your driver's license information like your address or anything. And the store clerk would be able to go like, oh, yep, that's them. And they're over 21. Great. And that's probably alcohol. I feel like in that situation, it would be a huge improvement. So I'm looking forward to this becoming widespread, not just being Apple implementing it and seeing what it can be used for and how it could make things easier. Yep. Well, for years on this show, we have documented the slow progress made by autonomous cars, the fastest being with autonomous trucks. But even that is stagnated a little lately. Remember, we got very excited when Neuro launched their autonomous shuttles back in Singapore years ago. And then Waymo started offering driverless rides in suburban Phoenix. Other tests have sprouted here and there around the globe in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Boston. Recently, Waymo got approval to launch driverless taxi service in San Francisco. There's no date on that. And if you look at tests with drivers in the seats, there's loads of those. They're everywhere. Aurora just launched a small fleet of custom designed Toyota Sienas in Dallas, Fort Worth. So it's hard to keep track of all the services out there, especially since Waymo tends to eat up all the headline space because it's owned by Alphabet, while companies like Neuro and Baidu have often led the way and not gotten as much attention. Thankfully, the next web has an excellent write up on where in the world you can actually take an autonomous taxi with no human except for you on board. That excludes the shuttles like the one in Singapore or the bus in Las Vegas. These are actual cars taking actual humans around with just the computer driving. Get ready for the tour. Baidu's Apollo Go and Pony AI operate commercial autonomous ride hailing in a zone in Beijing. That means they're charging people. Apollo Go, Pony AI and We Ride AI operate commercial service and charging people in Guangzhou. Apollo Go, Pony AI, AutoX and Didi all offer free trial service in Shanghai. Didi, AutoX and Deeproot AI operate tests in small areas of Shenzhen. Deeproot AI and We Ride AI offer free service in Wuhan and in Chongqing, Changsha and Guangzhou all have service from Apollo Go. Waymo offers commercial service in parts of the Phoenix area and Waymo and Cruz have announced launches in San Francisco for free rides later this year. So those companies offering or close to offering driverless rides in one or more cities around the world are Apollo Go, Pony AI, We Ride AI, AutoX, Didi, Deeproot AI, Waymo and Cruz. And boy, seems like the US is lagging a bit behind. I'm excited for Waymo and Cruz, certainly. I'm not too far from San Francisco. That could be something that I could try out in the future. But yeah, I think it's so easy to kind of sit around and go, but when is this really going to happen? When is this really going to happen? Oh, it's happening. It's happening in quite a few places. Turns out, mostly in China. It reminds me of broadband rollout. It always felt like we were behind. Still are in some ways. And it bums me out because I don't know if it's just not an important thing or if we just want to take our time with this or our roads are a certain way and we're just weird. You know, a lot of that. This is me. I want to. The reasons that we know of, right? That that that we're maybe lagging behind. So it's nice to be in second, but it's nice to be at least close to first, you know. So what is it? Is it the worst? We're slow. You know what I mean? Like when you're running a race, but we're not last. Nobody wants to be at a marathon where the first guy goes over the line and then the second guy is six miles behind him. You know, like we want them to be kind of right in there. So I don't know what it is we need to do to be more competitive in that space or even more cooperative in that space with say somebody like China. What if we, what if we being the US don't need to do anything? What if this is fine? Maybe it's fine. Maybe we're doing it right. Maybe you're right. Maybe second place is best, Tom. Sometimes the second look at Facebook was third. Look at them now. I know this is looking ahead, you know, quite a bit, but there's so much conversation that I see anytime an autonomous story gets enough traction that people tend to weigh in. It's like, this is going to make traffic better. This is going to make traffic worse. This is going to make urban areas more congested. This is going to make urban areas better. And I don't think there's any one solution here. I think we just need to see how this works in different areas and, you know, how it's going to affect the general population. And in all honesty, at some point, the fact that China had so many more tests in place is going to be immaterial. There's going to be lots of tests in Europe and India and the US and China and everybody's going to be looking at who's succeeding at it and who's doing well and not who got their tests out first. Yeah, good point. Well, speaking of a whole lot of people trying to do a thing, it's not enough people still have PS fires or don't have PS5s, but Sony made an announcement that Mike PS make PS5 owners like me very happy. They announced it will release a variable refresh rate feature for PS5 otherwise known as VRR in the coming months, like G sync or free sync, but for the PlayStation five VRR will sync the refresh rate of your display to the PS5's graphical output. So the display is getting exactly what it can handle, thus reducing tearing frame pacing issues, other visual artifacts. If you're playing a lot of games, you know, we're talking about here VRR will work even if the game doesn't support it, but it will work best with a game that is patched for full optimization or game that supports it at launch. Those are, those are going to be the best still pretty cool that older games are going to take advantage of it in some way. If you apply it to all games that doesn't officially support it, it may look a little better. But if you can, if it has problems, you're getting weird artifacts or something, you can just turn it off. So it's not mandatory to have it on. AMD or AMD as if on queue, announced details about its fidelity FX super resolution 2.0 or FSR 2.0. This is a lot like GSura, excuse me, Nvidia's DLSS service that you can get through their video cards. One big deal or detail that is coming to Xbox consoles and they did not say when it would be available for the Xbox GDK or developers. And this is like DLSS way less like GSync. So not really the same technologies. The ultimate goal is a smoother, better experience though in either case. The way that this works though, unlike DLSS, you won't need machine learning cores to do it. In fact, FSR will work on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. You just need to top top of the line card to get the 4k. This will require the game developer to support it. Another really important note here on the PlayStation 5 VRR front. You need HDMI 2.1 compatible television or monitor of the console that will support it, but you need to be running HDMI 2.1 or better. I assume there's a spec or two better now, but even if not, that's where you have to be to make that work. I do think it's weird that AMD made this announcement about the series SNX console, certainly X console with FSR, but not for PlayStation. And also not VRR for Xbox because they both use AMD GPUs and they're very similar GPUs. So I don't understand these two weird, almost contrasting features for almost the same hardware. It's weird. Yeah, I feel like I almost feel like I'm repeating what I said with the China Autonomous Car story. But I feel like at some point they'll both have both. It's just a weird route to get there, right? Like we're probably going to see FSR on PlayStation at some point and we're probably going to see a VRR or VRR like thing on the Xbox. So it's just weird how these things roll out, but it's all good for everybody, right? Oh yeah, everybody benefits from this. As far as like an end user, there's a lot of terms in here and acronyms near people are like, what does that even mean for me as an end user game or consoles are supposed to plug in and work? Well, the end result for you will be a clearer image, better performance at the frame rates the games were supposed to run in. So if you've got a TV that supports 120 frames and you've got a game that seems not to be performing that well with that new TV bot, this should resolve that, especially if the game supports it outright. And we're talking most of your first party, third party, big AAA games will absolutely support it at launch. The fact that this will have some backwards compatibility is pretty cool. But yeah, they'll have it eventually. These devices are both capable of what is being described here on both ends. And there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to take advantage of it. So get your HDMI 2.1 on everybody. Time is now. Hey, if you have a thought about something we talk about on the show, maybe a question for us, but you don't know the email address. Let me fix that. I'll answer that question right now. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. In May 2022, Google is going to remove movies and TVs from the Google Play Store, moving the ability to buy rent and watch movies to the Google TV app. Previously purchased content and wishlist will also be available on Google TV. Let's say you live in the Google ecosystem and you want to buy a movie or TV show. For clarity, we'll just call those shows, whether they're movies or TV. In 2019, the answer was go to Google Play Movies and TV section or go to the Google Play Movies and TVs app. Go to something called Google Play Movies and TVs and you can watch the movies. You could use those apps or you could use YouTube, which also access shows you purchased from Google. Then the following things happened. In October 2020, Google changed its Android Google Play Movies and TV app to be called Google TV. They also put out an operating system called Google TV. That's a different thing. In June 15, 2021, Google ended the Google Play Movies and TVs app for smart TV platforms. And on Tuesday, as I just mentioned, Google announced that in May, Google Play Movies and TV section is going away from the Google Play Store app. This is all to simplify things, alright? Here's how simple it is. If you want to buy a movie or TV show from Google after May, go to the YouTube app or website. On Android, Android TV and Google TV, the operating system, you can also use the Google TV app. And then to play them back, you can find them on YouTube and YouTube TV, as well as the Google TV app on Android, Android TV and the Google TV operating system and the Play Movies app, which also works for TV shows on iOS and Apple TV. It's that easy. Oh, well thank you for the clarification because I was a little confused until right now. And now it's all very clear. What is going on with Google with the naming of the things? I understand that there have been many moves over the last couple of years where you go, okay, maybe Google Play Movies and TV was a little bit confusing. It's a mouthful. Yeah. Sure. So it's like, okay, let's try to siphon into the right verticals. But I am more confused than ever, to be honest. And as a subscriber to YouTube TV, which is a cable alternative and is different from YouTube, it's very much a looks like cable, acts like cable. You have a lot of things that are cable, but it's streaming with some live components. Also different than Google TV for now, will it be forever? Don't know. I mean, given the track record here could be another story in a week. Yeah, I'm still confused about YouTube Red and where that went. Yeah, that's YouTube premium. Oh, okay. Now it's all coming together. I get it now. But this is typical Google really fine services. They're all fine. But it's as if they're all in a room going, I don't know. I'm kind of bored of this one. You guys want to change it up and just change the name for what reason? I don't know. Just because, well, they already call it Google TV over there in that other department. What do they know? I don't even see them at lunch. Let's just do it. Like it's a weird thing. But it's not. That's not what's going on. They are very, this is all the same team. And if they're listening to you right now, they're screaming at you, Scott, because they're like, no, no, no. The thing is we had to simplify because well, there was a really good reason to have Google TV differentiated from Android TV because Android TV is the underlying operating system that has different licensing. Like there's a reason. There's a reason for everything. But it's not the reason of making it easy for the consumer. That's the problem. Yeah, they need to get some as much as I hate saying the phrase. I'm about to say get some of your marketing people in the same room because it feels like they're not involved. I bet the marketing people are also screaming at both of you. Maybe we tried. Maybe. I don't know. Somebody on Twitter had brought up the point that I made a couple of minutes ago of like, well, there's YouTube TV, but then Google TV and YouTube TV are not the same thing. And Google doesn't want you to think that they're the same thing. I guess brand recognition-wise, if you just had anything you want to like watch movies, TV, whatever those shows are, maybe go with YouTube. But then what is the Google and Android branding going to do that is helpful to folks who are either not interested in anything YouTube or think that they're not, or, you know, I don't know, get into some sort of a confused wormhole. Subscribe to something and give Google money. Yeah. I mean, I think it does make sense to shift things around when they're in the wrong place, which is what this sounds like. Or, you know, it's just not best put wherever they're being and play has changed and evolved. What does that even mean anymore? I get it. But it can be a little confusing at first. And maybe Google people are like, whatever, I get it. I'm good. And maybe they'll get there. Maybe everything will be Google TV except for YouTube. Maybe they'll merge YouTube TV into YouTube somehow. I don't know. But maybe they're like, just give us a minute. We'll get there. It's going to be a little more confusing until it gets less confusing. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Darker before it gets lighter. Right. That's right. I think if you remember the game colossal cave founders of Sierra online, Ken and Roberta Williams have remade that texture venture game colossal cave now known as colossal cave 3d. Now, if you're a fan of the original game, you know, it goes way back to 1976. It was developed by Will Crowther and Don Woods. The new version will feature comparable gameplay efforts sending you off on a quest. You're looking for treasure. You've got a bunch of different locations. There's dwarves. There's trolls. There's a giant snake, a dragon, a bear. It's got it all. But now it's graphical instead of just text. Yeah. So I kind of say them real quick about this. These guys were featured in that Netflix series video. Oh, I forgot the name of the series. There's a video game series on Netflix. It's basically the history of video games. It goes way back. They as a couple were featured and they talked a ton about this game. So if this is like sounding familiar to some of you, you may have seen that and how cool this might be based on that. Yeah. Now, Roberta Williams told PC Gamer, you know, just if you're curious like what, where did this come from? Why did you do this after all this time? She said, Ken and I were locked down like everyone. Ken was bored. And I suggested he write a book about Sierra. The process of writing the book brought back long forgotten memories resulting in Ken deciding to learn unity and deciding to make a game. Is it high score? Was that the name of the? It was. Was it high score? I would really like to tell them the right thing. I think that might be it. The docu series tracing the history of classic video games. It's got, it's got to be high score. Yep. 2020's high score. It's very good. There's some, there's some stuff in it that's a little left out, but that's, you know, it's nitpicky. It's very good. And then that whole segment with them goes deep into why text adventures are responsible for so much of where the industry went creatively. And the fact that they're being able to take this old thing and make it graphical is on one hand, very cool. And on the other hand, a little nerve wracking, because part of what makes text adventures good is that the graphics are in your head and you don't need to be shown them. Zork and others would be good examples of this. So when you add a graphical element, now you're adding somebody's version of graphics that maybe don't match what you had. So I think it's fascinating in the direction, but some players might be a little nervous about this. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. We got a good one from Deborah from discord letting us know this article. And we will link to it in the show notes. It's from Ars Technica. Explains the Mac Studio of storage really well. TLDR version. The memory in the Mac Studio isn't an SSD in the way that a PC person thinks of a self-contained drive. It's flash memory that combined with logic on the chips gets used for storage. Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say it from the Ars Technica article itself. This means that the Mac Studio's SSD cards while removable instead of soldered down are just NAND plus what Martin calls a raw NAND controller bridge. They aren't self-contained SSDs that could be swapped in and out at will as they can be on a PC. They're NAND chips that are read from and written to by the T2 or the M1's built-in controller. Yeah. So this is a little bit. Now that I understand this, I apologize for falling for the hype on this one, but this is a little bit like complaining about integrated memory. People complain, well, I can't remove the memory. It's like, yeah, but you also can't do memory the way Apple is doing it with the M1 and have it removable. And the fact of the matter is 16 gigs of RAM that's done the way Apple is doing it is way more useful than 16 gigs of removable memory. You can decide you don't like that, but it's actually true. So I get why they soldered the memory down on the die, and it sounds like there's something similar going on with the SSD. In order to take advantage of the integration with the M1, they're doing this raw NAND controller bridge instead of a normal self-contained SSD, which means you're going to get better performance out of the drive. It does mean that it's less repairable though. So it's a trade-off. That's true. It's not, as I thought yesterday, an anti-repairability move by Apple. It looks like it's just a design move that the design improves performance at the expense of repairability. Keep in mind too, in terms of actual storage, they've given you enough ports there, and you can chain enough Thunderbolt drives together that you can have almost unlimited storage. So if that's the issue of like, well, now I've got this drive integrated, I can never make it bigger. I think they are trying to offset that by saying, well, here's all your Thunderbolt ports. Go for it. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in and helps us clarify things. You do it every day, and we thank you for it. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Questions, comments, we'll take it all. Thank you to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. What's been going on since Besaya last? Well, speaking of old games, and one day we will do the text adventures, but if you're a fan at all, or have ever played a Castlevania game or a Metroid game, the last two weeks of the show Play Retro, we have gone deep into the creation of those games. Who made them, where they came from, why are they so influential today, and why do people literally call the entire genre Metroidvania? If that sounds interesting to you at all and you like old video games, Play Retro might be your jam. Go check it out at frogpants.com slash Play Retro, or just search for it wherever you get your shows. That's Play Retro, and it comes out every Tuesday, so go check it out. Excellent. We also have a couple new bosses to thank. Oh, thank goodness. I know, Dennis and Louis. Could I call you Denis and Louis? I don't know. They just started backing us on Patreon, so thank you, Dennis. Thank you, Louis. You are our gold star patrons. Yeah. And the Patreon tiers are simpler than ever, folks. There's just one tier at each price point. Now, you get the show. The show starts with DTNS. Once it's done, you can skip it, but if you want more, there's more. Yeah. In fact, there is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS, which starts momentarily. But just a reminder, we are live here on DTNS Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. The show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.