 Do you want a holiday card from DTNS? Well, become a patron and give us your address by November 15th and we will send you a special DTNS holiday card. Coming up on DTNS is Amazon copying others work again in smart homes? Has AMD whipped the chip shortage? And Sean Hollister from The Verge is here to explain why GeForce now might just be the best gaming streaming service and you still might not want to do that. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer and joining us senior reports editor from The Verge, Sean Hollister. Welcome back, Sean. Hi. Glad to be here. Thank you for being here. It's good to have you. We were just talking with Sean about which Stephen King and novel he should read first. If you have thoughts about that, you're going to want to listen to Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. And by the way, big thanks to top patrons like Mark Gibson, Reed Fischler and Michelle Serju. They're just a few of the amazing supporters of the Daily Tech News show. Folks, after nine long years, Instagram has returned to supporting preview image cars on Twitter. But let's start with a few more tech things you should know. This one only took seven years, but Spain blinked. Back in 2014, Spain passed a law that created an inalienable right to compensation for any use of news content in a news aggregation site, like particularly Google News. Google could not exclude sites who required payment and publishers couldn't decline to be paid. If Google operated a news aggregator at all in Spain, it had to pay. The only way around the law would be to not operate a news aggregator, which is what Google chose to do. Google shut down Google News in Spain, and it hasn't been available since 2014 in that country. Now, lots of countries have passed similar laws, but none of them made payment unavoidable by either side. And in 2019, the EU passed a copyright directive that, among other things, required news aggregator sites like Google News to negotiate with publishers, but did not require payments if both sides agreed not to have them. Spain has now adopted the EU's copyright directive into its own law, which supersedes Spain's previous law. And so, early next year, Google News will relaunch in Espana. Well, that's good news. Metas, Quest and Quest 2. That's right. Get used to saying it, everybody. Metas, Quest and Quest 2 headsets, VR headsets, are getting version 34 operating system updates starting right now. You may already have it. This update brings Space Sense, which shows you in real time if somebody or some dog perhaps has entered your VR space, Space Sense can sense people, larger pets, and highlight them with a pink glow so you know where they are and who they are. There are also expanded voice commands and Android app notifications in headset. One refrain in criticism of autonomous cars has been that they need to be tested to work in cold weather and chaotic urban environments. So Waymo's heading to New York City. Five hybrid Chrysler Pacificas will begin mapping Manhattan from the south side of Central Park down to the financial district and even through the Lincoln Tunnel into a small section of Jersey. This is not Google Maps style mapping. This uses the autonomous car sensors to collect all the information an autonomous car would need about crosswalks, road edges, boundary paint, more. It'll also be a chance to collect data about rain and snow conditions. Waymo has not yet applied for permits to operate autonomous cars in New York City. They're just collecting data. Though TechCrunch notes that Intel's Mobileye does have permits there. The Office of Australian Information Commissioner ordered ClearView AI to destroy all images and facial templates belonging to individuals living in Australia. The order came after a joint investigation with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office that found ClearView's database breached citizens' privacy. ClearView intends to appeal this decision. And the US Department of Commerce has added the maker of the Pegasus software, Israel's NSO group, to the US Entity List. That's the same list that Huawei is on. This requires US companies to get a special license in order to do business with NSO group. NSO is accused of supplying Pegasus to governments that used the software to track journalists and activists. Israel's Kandiru rushes positive technologies and Singapore's Computer Security Initiative Consultancy were also added to the Entity List because of allegations of misuse of their security tools. Now someone is shouting, what happened to Sarah Lane in our chat room? Sarah has been off for a surgery. She's been recovering. She's doing great. And if all goes well, we might see her by the end of the week. So just hang in there. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon's matter. Well, Amazon does have some matters. And specifically this, Amazon has confirmed its support for the matter interoperability standard. So now we have the big matter players. We have Apple, Google, Samsung. They're all on record for support. Amazon will support matter over the thread standard and its Echo and Arrow devices. Thread is a low power protocol that sits on the physical level while matter is the standard for the application level. Think of matter for software and think of thread for hardware. The promises of all of this is that you can choose to use Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, smart things or any matter compliant system to connect any matter compliant device in your smart home setup. Matter enabled smart home products won't be available until 2022. But turning to what's out today, though. Amazon introduced a new smart air quality monitor. It will detect carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, dust, temperature and humidity, all that kind of stuff. Alerts can be sent to the Alexa app or spoken to you over a smart speaker. And if you want shown on one of your smart displays, it's available for pre-order now for $70 and ships this December next month. So yeah, for the first smart air quality monitor, no one's ever made anything like this. Sean, you were saying you have something that that seems eerily similar to this. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't say mine looks exactly like this, but there are a number of these multi chemical sensors on the market, dust and air quality, all of that. I bought an aware element, A-W-A-I-R, I believe, element a while back. Things like a hundred bucks, maybe 130. And I wanted to know how much CO2 was going on my bedroom. I've been I've heard maybe this is something that if the levels are high in the evening, it can keep me from sleeping properly. I don't know if that's true, but I figured, OK, let's check. Let's see what this is like. I bought one of these things, set it up in my house. And sure enough, CO2 levels were very high. So now I've got this little alarm in my smart home that'll let me know if I need to open up the windows for a bit, get some of that out of there. No matter what I do, it still goes up in the evening, though, when we're sleeping in the room, a lot of CO2 in the room when you have multiple people breathing in that room. But so Amazon, though, it's putting out something like this. This is something we've seen them do a lot of recently, is they will find a product that is doing very well on their store, something typically in the smart home space where they already play a lot with Alexa and Echo devices, and they'll come out with their own version that undercuts the ones that are already there. And they know exactly how much the others are priced and how many people buying them, what features they're buying them for. They even got in a little trouble with Ecobee over this a while back. Do you remember the Ecobee story? Oh, yeah. I have the I have an Ecobee and have been very happy with it. But I remember that, you know, I remember there was a lot of talk about that. I wish these things would do radon detection, maybe some of them do because that's something we were known for out where I live, at least this side of the valley. And nothing I've really looked into. But I keep hearing people say, oh, you got to get a radon detector. You got to get one in there. Maybe now's the time. Is that something you can do automated and smart? That'd be neat because I had to get like a special little packet. I had to mail back to a facility to see if I had a lot of levels here. In our case, they got to come out and actually do an inspection and they do a whole bunch of stuff. And then if they find any radon traces, the option is you put in some big piped in filtration thing. And it's all very physical. It'd be way cooler if I could just do this like carbon monoxide or some other some other method and, you know, have it be smart enough to tell me on my phone that levels are high or whatever. Yeah. But but here's Amazon, you know, at least we've got these five sensors or so and they're undercutting the competition by like 30 bucks. And of course, they've got the all the marketing and the placement in their own in their own store that they can they can count on for that. They're they're aping Fitbit with their latest fitness tracker. They've been caught, you know, copying shoes and bags in the past because they saw those things selling well. I mean, I kind of I can't complain about less expensive product that does what I want and jumps into the ecosystem. But I do wonder if they're going to get in trouble for this kind of thing. It's yeah, to me, it's it's very easy to throw stones at Amazon and say anything you do is copying. But there has to be a line where it's not unfair for any company. Target, Kmart, Kmart, there's no Kmart anymore. But you know what I mean? Like, you know, any company to have a house brand of something that that's perfectly normal. When is it unfair? When is it when is it fair for for a company to say, like, hey, we're selling lots of two percent milk. Let's have a house brand of two percent milk on the shelves. And when is it using an unfair advantage because you're running the platform? I think that's the question with Amazon. I also wonder how much of it is just disclosure because with this device, it's very obvious that it's Amazon's product with a lot of the Amazon Basics products where they are literally a house brand for all kinds of household supplies. You see it, you can tell it's them. Of course, they're contracting some other company to make those devices but those products, but at least, you know, they're Amazon. But there was also a report out was a few weeks ago about all of the private label brands that it owns. You know, I think over 80 of these, maybe there's hundreds at this point, but it was like 2018. Maybe there's hundreds now of these other brands that it knows. And you do not know that they are Amazon. They just live on Amazon store. You have to look very hard to tell that it is an Amazon sponsored link to the to the product when it shows up. Otherwise, there is. Yeah, there is. We talked about that on the show when that study came out. And it's, yeah, it's difficult. And consumers are going to work to figure that out. So they're just going to not know, right? All right, let's check in on cryptocurrency, starting with our favorite burgeoning trend out there. Central Bank digital currencies. I've been telling you about these for months and months and months. CBDCs. The Bahamas, of course, was the leader on this and implementing it. But China has been doing the most widespread tests. And a Chinese central bank official said Wednesday that 140 million people have opened wallets for their digital yawn as of October, used it for transactions totaling 62 billion yuan. I think it's 1.9 million merchants can take it. These are still limited tests, though, even with those big numbers in China. They they turn it on and turn it off in various cities. And they still have not issued a date for when the digital yuan will officially launch. On the other hand, Australia's biggest lender, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, aka CBA, will be the first big Australian bank to offer cryptocurrency trading to its retail customers. That's you and me off the street. This is bucking the trend of the big five banks who were otherwise saying or big four otherwise saying, we're not going to get involved in cryptocurrency. New York company called Gemini Trust will operate the service, which will be offered in the CBA mobile app. A pilot program will start this year with 10 cryptocurrencies, including the usual Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin. More features are planned for 2022, and they haven't ruled out the idea of paying with crypto using this app. CNET's Laura Hotala has another story noting that Venmo, PayPal and Cash App all now offer the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrency. PayPal and Venmo won't let you transfer it to your own wallet, though Cash App will. On a Monday, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers announced he would take a portion of his salary in Bitcoin through Cash App. You can also now use Bitcoin to pay AT&T and the Dallas Mavericks. You can buy Amazon Delta and DoorDash gift cards with Bitcoin and Coinbase announced that it's testing a subscription service where you pay a monthly fee and then you get things like your transaction fees, waived, prioritized phone support and all of that. All these coming, you know, at the same time and more and more of them I'm seeing coming more regularly. These kinds of stories of adoption and use, not just a Bitcoin, but a lot of cryptocurrency. I don't know about you all, but it makes me think we're now seeing momentum. It's not just like, hey, this cryptocurrency might be catching on. It feels like this is now flowing towards cryptocurrency, whether it's any of these or not, but something's going to catch on. Yeah, my whole thing has been, I've talked to us on the show before, I have concerns about the NFT market as a digital artist of some 25 years now I've been doing stuff in that space. I'm concerned about a lot of the weak parts of what NFTs represent and kind of where we're at with it and its impact and everything else. And it just makes me wary. What one thing that would take it much further down the road to make me less wary is just general acceptance of cryptocurrency in general, bigger names accepting it, bigger banks accepting it, getting it to the point where it's so much more sort of normal and moving dollars to crypto and back and forth is not some weird thing on only one website that does it, that it's a much more, you know, accessible type thing. I think goes a long way to make that at the end of T market and other kinds of blockchain markets just more tenable and believable and trustable. So I'm all for this general movement in that direction. John, I feel like we're, yeah, it does feel like we're slowly getting to something, a place where we might begin to call this stuff normal. And I kind of I kind of want it to be that way because I do I do buy into some of the arguments about about fiat currency versus, you know, what you can do here instead. But but personally, I haven't been eager to get anywhere near this for one reason. I'm not allowed to, ethically, the Verge has a policy where our journalists do not get to hold any cryptocurrencies. And one of the important reasons behind that is because everybody who's reporting on this stuff, you can't tell whether they are doing it because they're just covering it as a journalism service or because they have some kind of speculative investment in themselves. It's very hard to tell very often. And we don't want to get into that place where even in the tiny back of our minds were incentivized to be pumpers for this stuff. We need to wait to see where it's going. And so that that's a great signal when when outlets don't feel like that. First of all, when they don't feel like it's all pump and dump and when they get to the point of like, oh, now now we're preventing our employees from holding money like it then you're not there. But when that starts to be the conversation, that's another sign that this is really catching on. Yeah. And I have to admit every time I've been every time I've been like, hey, Sean, maybe you should buy into this. It was the little voice in the back of my brain saying, oh, speculative investment. That sounds great. Let's gamble some money on this. And I want to I want it to not feel like that anymore. And when it doesn't feel like that anymore, I like some of the potential advantages of cryptocurrency. Well, we're getting there at the Web Summit Conference in Lisbon, AMD Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, the greatest name in technology, in my opinion, said it has avoided most of the negative effects of the chip shortage because, quote, our supply chain, excuse me, our supply chain team has worked to make sure that we have months and years of forecast ahead into our supply chain, adding everybody has has had to increase their focus on the supply chain. But we did so from the very beginning of the pandemic. AMD does not make its own chips, though they contract them out to companies like TSMC and Global Foundries. AMD says the forecasting of demand years in advance helped to avoid many of the problems facing other chip makers right now. Of course, AMD also makes advanced chips that had been less impacted than older chips like, I don't know, display controllers as an example. Sean, what do you think about this? Has AMD beaten the chip shortage? I think it's I think it's a little bit overblown. The idea that I think the headline in this piece was what chip shortage AMD books capacity year as I had to ease crunches ease crunches sure. And certainly AMD is doing very, very well in their last quarterly revenue. We saw they were up like 54% 44% up year over year in terms of like computing and graphics, the actual consumer chips that they send out there, whereas Intel was down 2% in that same segment, their client computing group, which handles those kinds of things. So AMD is doing very well. But on the ground floor, if you actually go out in the street and you try to buy a graphics card, you've not been able to do that practically at all as a consumer. And you might say, oh, well, yeah, you can't buy a PS5 either. You can't buy an Xbox Series X either. You can't buy an Nvidia graphics card either. The difficulty of buying an AMD card has been so much more so much more difficult to get an AMD card, it's been so much harder to do that, that it was only just this last month that any one of AMD's recent graphics cards managed to make it into the Steam Hardware Survey, which is a very easy to take, very well respected survey of everybody who's plays games on the biggest PC gaming platform. You press one button, it takes your hardware specs, and it compiles it with everybody else who takes the same survey and gives you probably the most accurate picture of what's actually out there in the PC gaming market. It was only just the beginning of October that one of their cards finally made it in there. The statistical analysis suggests it's like Nvidia's new cards are outselling AMD's maybe 18 to one or something like that. We can barely find any AMD cards on the second hand market on eBay, just extremely hard to find those even compared to the AMDs, even compared to the PS5s and so on. Yeah, you got to remember too that you mentioned it a little bit, but the consoles in question outside of the PC market, PS5 series X and S, those are all using AMD graphics processors, GPUs, and no one ever talks about why their consoles are really hard to find. It's other things. It's not just Sony. It's not just Microsoft's not just tons of other chips in there. A lot of times it's straight up that AMD GPU that's holding the train up. Yeah, and I would say that one thing they've mentioned, AMD has mentioned a few other companies have come out with this kind of a message. But AMD in particular has said that they are focusing on their high margin products. They've publicly let people know we're focusing our capacity on the things that are going to sell and make us the most money. So if we're seeing a shortage somewhere else, it's because they prioritized one kind of chip over another. So the fact that we even have the kind of supply for Sony for Microsoft consoles that we do might be because some other part of their business is seeing the hurt. Yeah, we were talking about that with Apple yesterday, moving chips from iPad production into iPhone 13 is just as an example of that. Yes, yes, that's finally happening with Apple as well. It's true. They weren't hit by the chip shortage publicly at least until very recently. Yeah. Okay. Well, you may not need to get a GPU. I know GPU problems predate the pandemic and the chip shortage. Those have been around forever. But we're going to talk about an alternative where you don't you don't own the GPU, you just just rent it from the cloud. But first, don't forget, if you've got thoughts on this, you want to join in our conversation in our Discord, you can join that by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Cloud streaming, game streaming, streaming from the cloud, gaming from the cloud, it's all shaping up as a way to get your video games without having to buy expensive hardware without having to worry about what OS you have, or how old your machine is, you will have to worry about how fast your internet is. But otherwise, you won't have to worry about a lot of these other things. You won't even have to get in line to try to buy a GPU. Sean, you recently did a piece for the Verge where you tested Nvidia's own cloud gaming service GeForce Now and compared it to Google's Stadia, the headline of the piece is Nvidia's GeForce Now just leapfrogged Google Stadia. But the first light of your story is even stronger. Nvidia just kicked Google's but why is that? Oh, boy, well, a little bit of backstory here. So a couple of years ago, I think it was was in November 2019, Google launched Stadia. And they've been promising for months that they were going to deliver a cloud gaming service that was going to be really, really top notch quality would deliver 4k 60 someday we go up to 8k and 120 Hertz. And when it came out, they were delivering you technically a 4k stream over the internet, meaning that the compressed images they were sending you video frames of were technically at 4k resolution. But the server that was generating the images that was creating the video frames to begin with was absolutely not you were not getting 4k resolution in those games, it would not look like we were playing a 4k game on a PC or even a console. In fact, we took a look at Destiny 2 on playing on Stadia, we took a look at Shadow of the Tomb Raider playing on Stadia, and we put up comparison images on our website that showed not only did they look far worse than a several year old PC graphics card playing those games at the time. But in fact, they looked worse than the latest game consoles at that point the Xbox Series X and the PS4 Pro. So just underwhelming launch for Stadia did not deliver the 4k. This I think it was a past week was a week or two ago, I can't remember now. GeForce Now. I booted up GeForce Now and I booted up those same games, and they looked as good as they do on my RTX 3080 desktop, which is a couple of caveats. We'll get into those caveats. Yeah, this has been my same experience, by the way, I was gonna I was excited to tell you that I agree with your take. Just I'm not doing as hard to look as that you and your folks have done over there obviously, I'm just sort of doing it by feel. But so far, comparing it to Stadia, Amazon's Luna, XCloud, and then GeForce Now. GeForce Now runs faster, looks better, launches quicker. A whole list of things I like better about it, but mainly its latency. I don't have the latency issues with GeForce Now that I have with other competing services. And I don't know why that is some have said, Well, you may not look close enough to the servers for those particular ones. And there might be a big server from right there in Salt Lake City that's running all the GeForce Now stuff for your for your region or for your state or whatever. Maybe those things are true. I don't know. But all I know is I'm having a much more immersive, not have to think about it kind of experience using GeForce Now that I do any of those other services right now. And there's and yeah, there's a there's a lot of caveats like in my testing and maybe there's a trivia as well. It really depends how close you are to the servers. I know for a fact that there are servers not far from where I live. And that is the one thing you can't control with any of these services. If you live in a part of the country that does not have servers near you, you will not have this fast response times as if you live closer to those servers. And it does not matter how fast an internet connection you are paying for, because you can't physically be close enough to those servers. They have enough of them that they claim they they can cover the United States, they can cover Mexico, they can cover. They've got other other servers in Europe, for instance, so they can cover wide swath. But I imagine 30 miles away from the servers, I'm going to get a better response time than 200 miles away from the servers. That's it. They're doing things in the GPU. Now, these new GPUs, they're compressing the frames more efficiently. They have a more direct pipeline. They are outputting the correct number of frames so that they mash up with your monitor or your TV in front of you more accurately so that they don't have stutters and pauses and skips and all kinds of other things that could impact your latency or your perceived latency. A lot of stuff going on there. I actually have it running here on a I don't know if you'll be able to see this. Let's see if my camera will focus on that. If it doesn't just tell me now it's selectively blurring. Looks good. It's kind of jumping back and forth. Most of you are listening on audio anyway, so just tell them what they would see. It looks brilliant on my phone over Wi-Fi. As long as you've got 5GHz Wi-Fi, live pretty close to the servers and are willing to pay for this because it's a bit of money too. It's going to be $200 a year, which is double what they were charging before. It's a lot less than building a gaming PC. If you were to build a multi-thousand dollar gaming rig right now to actually do this, which is the kind of prices you have to pay to get these components, if you spend that over a number of years, this is still a cheaper way to get into doing that. If you're willing to wait, though. The thing that's still the wrinkle here between... G4 is now kicking Stadia's butt or not. The wrinkle between how good it looks on your phone, on your TV versus having an actual physical desktop in front of you is two things. One is, the way cloud gaming fundamentally works, you're still looking through a bunch of compressed images that had to be sent over the Internet. You're not quite getting the one-to-one pixels. When I am looking at a still image in G4 Snap, it looks amazing, identical to a local 3080 desktop computer in front of me with an actual graphics card. When I start moving around, though, I'm panning around a scene with my mouse. I'm looking to the left. I'm looking to the right. I'm running through a field. I'm running to... I'm running in a... especially in a dark alley or something like that. Image compression fundamentally has issues with certain colors, certain shades, certain gradients. These things don't necessarily translate as well when you're beaming a bunch of compressed frames over the Internet, as they do if they're being rendered natively on the GPU in front of them and don't require that kind of compression. When you have this stuff streaming to you and you do things that involve a lot of motion or a lot of grays, a lot of neutral tones, gradients, you can get some weird smearing. You can get some weird blur that you don't see when you have a native GPU in front of you. That's one thing where you might be wondering, does it actually look as good? Sometimes it doesn't. If you add to summarize, who do you think should go for cloud streaming of their gaming and who should probably stick with hardware? It's got to be somebody who doesn't mind subscription fees. It's got to be somebody who lives relatively close to the servers. And there are some maps out there of where they are located. So you can take a look at that. You can check on that portion of it, mind you, just by starting their free trial. They offer you like an hour of free gameplay of whatever you want, not at 4k or whatever, but you can get a sense of whether you're close enough to make this work for you, just by trying it for free. So you've got that in mind. You're like, okay, I can do this. I've got the money to do this. I'm fine paying for a subscription instead of buying my hardware all at once. The question then is, could you physically get this kind of computer at all? And for most people, the answer is no, you can't. You can't find the console you want. You can't find the PC you want. Check and make sure your games are on there. If it's got the games you want to play, it's got the hardware you got to play them, you're close enough, give it a try because it is really good and it is the best way to play some of these titles right now. I tried it on an Nvidia Shield TV, which is the only place they let you do 4k streaming right now. And I can tell you, it is the best game console for playing a really intensive game like Control. Control looks better there than it does on any other game console. It feels just as responsive. You've got all your ray tracing. It's amazing. And then you're not getting that experience with even a PS5 or an Xbox Series X. You have to have PC powered to do that. And good luck getting that PC. Well, we're going to talk about this more on Good Day Internet. I have a feeling. But if you don't get that, definitely read Sean's article. We'll have a link to it in the show notes or you can find it at theverge.com. And send us your thoughts. Email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Real quick, we want to thank our brand new bosses, Christian Wieberg and Duff Curlin. Just started backing us on Patreon. It's great to see that. It's helping us stay at parity. There's some hard times out there for people and some people just can't afford to back anymore. It's good to have new people backing us as well. Thank you, Christian. And thank you, Duff. And thank you, Sean. A great explanation of this. Really appreciate you being on the show today. If folks want to follow your work, find out more of what you do, where should they go? Yes. I am Starfire 2258 on Twitter. But on theverge.com, we are currently celebrating our 10-year anniversary. We've got a brilliant package of all kinds of stories looking backwards and looking forwards at, well, the future of the future, really. Scott Johnson, you got anything to tell people about before we get out of here? Getting close to the holidays. That means, as usual, speaking of digital art, I make greeting cards every year in a little four-pack form that you can then use to send all your loved ones and friends. Those are going up soon. If you want to keep track of that stuff, check it out over at frogpants.com slash store. And for everything else, as usual, I'm on Twitter, twitter.com slash Scott Johnson. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.