 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith, Zapata, and John and Becky Johnston. Coming up on DTNS, why your BMW can't update its firmware on a hill? It's true, and it makes sense. Microsoft swears it still loves HoloLens, and Shannon Morris tells us about Colorado City's retaking their right to build the Internet. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 3rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morris. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Perralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shannon. We have got a battle. Shannon's going to tell us about a battle. We've got a heartwarming story of love with the HoloLens. And we have a mystery solved about why your car cannot get its firmware update when it's on a hill. Let's start all of this with the quick hints. All right. How'd Apple do? Time to look at the revenue. It dropped 5% on the year, biggest quarterly revenue to clients since 2016. Net income down 13%. iPhone revenue fell 8%. Max down 29%. Wearables, home and accessories down 8%. Two divisions grew, though. iPad, apparently people like those new iPads, up 29.66%. And services, which includes iCloud and Apple TV Plus and Fitness and all that stuff, rose 6.4%. By comparison, though, so those two departments that did really well, let's look at iPhone. iPhone brings in $65.78 billion to Apple. Services brings in $20.77 billion. It's not nothing, but it's like what? Around a third, a little less than a third. iPad brings in $9.4 billion. So they really do need the iPhones to sell still. In a call with investors, CEO Tim Cook said iPhone revenue would have grown if not for supply constraints. He says it wasn't people didn't want them, which could make enough of them. Apple says it now has 2 billion devices in use, up from $1.8 billion last year. The EU has formally objected to Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The principal objection is that Microsoft might reduce competition specifically by owning call of duty. Microsoft said it is confident it can address the objections. In a distantly related story, Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay the US SEC $35 million for claims that it violated federal whistleblower protections for workplace misconducts, as well as not maintaining appropriate disclosure standards. All right, we got another report card in. Let's see how Amazon did, at least in the things that might impact us as consumers. Amazon says revenue was up 9%, but net income fell 98%. Amazon likes working on a thin margin. So that's probably not that horrible. What is interesting news, though, is AWS revenue was up 20%, though it was up, but that's a slower growth for what has become a cash cow for Amazon. And in the earnings call, Amazon wasn't rosy about it. They warned that AWS revenue is not going to grow faster. In fact, AWS growth was only in the mid teens for January because customers are continuing to cut costs. Amazon also said it spent $16.6 billion on content for Prime Video in 2022. That's up 28% on the year before. And I bet most of it went to the Lord of the Rings show. Researchers at Sentinel Labs spotted threat actors spreading information stealing malware through Google ads for Blender 3D software. So to get around Google antivirus screening, it uses KoiVM virtualization technology to make it appear as a .NET loader. KoiVM obfuscates a program's op codes so that only a reading virtual machine understands it. Interesting method. All right. One last report card. Alphabet reported last quarter's revenue was up 1%, but net income was down 34%. Google Cloud saved the day. AWS, bad news for Amazon. Google Cloud, good news for Google. That's interesting. Google Cloud revenue rose 32%, though it's coming from a smaller base. Ad revenues fell at Google by 4% and YouTube by 7.8%, missing expectations. So it's good that the cloud's doing better because the revenue at the advertising side of the business not doing so hot. Alphabet's non-Google businesses, so Waymo, Verily, those kinds of things, increased their losses by 12%, but revenue also rose 25%. That's kind of as expected. On its earnings call, CEO Sundar Pachai said, in the coming weeks and months, we'll make these language models, referring to Lambda AI, available starting with Lambda so that people can engage directly with them. This addresses a lot of those rumors that Google is panicking about open AI. Later, Google announced an event called Live from Paris. We'll take place next week, February 8th at 8.30 a.m. Eastern and stream live on YouTube. The invite description talked about AI and how it will reimagine how people search for information, mentioning maps specifically. Very interesting because we have Google I.O. just coming up in May, so did they rush something here just to kind of beat back some of that chat GPT buzz? Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, contractors for YouTube music have voted to strike over return to office orders going into effect February 6th. It's the first time a group of Google affiliated workers has actually gone on strike since the first ones started to organize. All right, let's talk about Microsoft and the HoloLens. Microsoft's Robin Siler wrote a blog post for Microsoft called Microsoft Committed to HoloLens 2 and Mixed Reality. A lot of signs, if you've been listening to DTNS, have been pointing to the end of Microsoft's Mixed Reality ambitions, but Siler countered those fears. Shannon, let's go through the fears and what the counter arguments were. Yeah, let's do it. Microsoft caught 10,000 jobs last month, and many of those cuts were in the Mixed Reality group. Not looking good, but Siler wrote, quote, we continue to produce and support HoloLens 2. Inclusive of monthly software updates to ensure our enterprise customers can leverage HoloLens 2 and the supporting platform to complete critical work. And Microsoft's Mixed Reality toolkit, which lets you make cross platform apps, will continue as an open-source project. Okay, so backing off a little bit, but not closing HoloLens quite yet, right? That's what it sounds like, right? So next. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's the next one is a lot of news that the US Congress would not let the army buy more custom HoloLens headsets this year. We talked about that. They wanted them to make modifications. Siler says, we recently contracted with the US Army to revise the IVAS product to address soldier feedback, a testament to our partnership with the government, commitment to the program, and ability to rapidly iterate on product designs to achieve results. So that's kind of what we thought, not ending the relationship, making some customizations to see if they could improve it enough for them to actually buy a bunch more. I'll buy that though. I think that's fair. What else? Yeah, that sounds fair. So Microsoft also shut down AltSpace VR, but Siler says Microsoft Mesh is in, quote, in preview with enterprise early adopters. But there's no word on a new version of HoloLens. Now, Thura.com notes that Microsoft VP Scott Evans said in November that a successor to HoloLens 2 would need to be a meaningful update. So it sounds to me like everything mixed reality at Microsoft is firmly focused on enterprise. Yeah, I feel like this is a story that we see with mixed reality all the time, which is having a hard time finding a foothold in consumer applications, particularly good with gaming. But even then, it's not 100% convincing. But there's lots of great enterprise uses, lots of great business uses. So I do think that's what's going on here. And Microsoft probably being cautious and seeing what happens. I guess the question Shannon is, what everybody's going to wonder is, can Apple's mixed reality headset should come out sometime this year, change that conversation as Apple has done in the past in other device categories? You know, that's a really, really good question. And I think you're probably onto something here. We have in the past seen Microsoft very much in this HoloLens promotion aspect of trying to tell people how they can use it in enterprise relations. I remember going to CES years ago and them letting me put one on and being able to see how people would use it for things like architecture design and even outer space. Like you could stand on the moon or was it Mars or something? I don't remember at this point. But they were using it for different ways of helping people understand how it's B2B relatable, how it's enterprise relatable. They weren't really advertising for consumers at that point either. But we've seen so many people talking about using this for gaming. I'm a little surprised that they're not pushing more for that aspect. But it's probably smart of them to kind of be cautious given the current economy and how prices are raising and everything right now. So yeah, maybe it's a good thing that they're sticking with enterprise. Yeah. I feel like if I wander out from what I know to what I speculate about, I might speculate based on the fact that they are kind of shutting down future development. They're not talking about HoloLens 3 even to enterprise. That they are looking at this as either a lower profit business. And so they don't want to spend as much on the R&D or they're diversifying into custom things like what they're doing with the army to say like, oh, if you have specific needs, we'll build you something for that. But we're not making a generic platform anymore. We're just going to keep iterating off of the one we have. And that makes sense. They have a lot of competition in the consumer market. So if they can do custom things for enterprise, that would be a smart move. Although at some point, you're going to need a new platform to customize on top of it. Yes. I'm curious about that. All right. This is a little mystery that I discovered on TheDrive.com. Rob Stumpf at The Drive has a story called BMW owner discovers car software update won't install when parked on an incline basically on a hill. So basically anywhere in San Francisco. Why would that happen? You may wonder as many did. Well, Stumpf decided to go find out. BMW told him that it's likely a catch all every worst case no matter how unlikely scenario safety precaution to prevent any chance of the vehicle moving should the programming be interrupted or go wrong. So in other words, you don't want the software update to go wrong and cause an actuator to open up or turn off the parking brake or do anything that's going to cause that car to start rolling because the firmware can control all the parts of the car that keep it in place. BMW also listed a bunch of other things that you have to have in place in order for your firmware update to complete. Some of them are obvious like, you know, the firmware file has to be fully downloaded. But there are a few other conditions you might not have guessed. The car must have sufficient battery charge makes sense. You don't want the power going out in the middle of firmware update must be in park. You can't have it in D and the engine has to be off. I guess that might kind of make sense too. This is so funny. I'm not totally surprised by this given now we understand that the firmware can control those different aspects of the car. So if something did go wrong, that would be very bad. But also, that would be kind of hard if you do live in a very hilly area like San Francisco. Do you have to take your car down to the East Bay or something to update the firmware and how long does the firmware take to update? Yeah. I guess you could go to the mission. There's some fairly flat areas there. But yeah, that is a real deal for somebody who lives in a neighborhood where all the streets are hilly. You're going to have to drive out of your neighborhood to update your firmware. I get why. I had never thought about this. I thought that was a fascinating little piece of information. I don't know if there's any BMW drivers out there who have run into this or run into something like this maybe on another car platform. Let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. I'd be curious to hear about it. I like what Batman's saying in our chat. Unable to mount install disk. It's just too steep. Can't mount. Oh my gosh. I love that cars act very similarly to doing updates on a smartphone, which obviously you don't have the danger of it rolling down a hill if you're updating your phone. But you have to make sure the battery is fully charged. You have to make sure that specific things are in place to make sure that it goes off properly. Don't turn off your laptop or car during this firmware update. You don't want to brick your car. Yeah. No, you'd really, I mean, that's, you think a laptop being bricked is a bad deal. Imagine bricking your car and now you can't move it anywhere. I would worry me. Does AAA do flash installs firmware? I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah. My car is bricked. Do you cover that? Folks, if your car has been bricked and you figured a way out, let us know on social media. You can get in touch with us at DTNSShow on Twitter. That's at DTNSShow with two S's. DailyTechNewShow on TikTok or DTNSPIX with an X. DTNSPIX on Instagram. We've talked a lot on the show over its 10 years, 9.1 years, about municipal governments wanting to start public broadband internet services for the community, usually in smaller communities where everybody has gotten together and said, yeah, we'd like the city to just build the pipes and then usually what happens is the city opens that up for competition for service providers and they just maintain the infrastructure like roads. We have also covered a lot of state legislators at the behest of big internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox Communications, putting in laws that say, oh, cities should not be allowed to do that. We have a story from mid-December that we talked about a case like that. In 2005, Colorado passed Senate Bill 152, blocking municipal governments from involving themselves in the online infrastructure space. In other words, private companies would not have to worry about competition from a public entity like a city. The bill had no provision allowing communities to override the law. So in 2008, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, voted to ditch restrictions on municipal providing broadband. Since then, hundreds of miles of fiber active lines have been installed across the state. In the past 14 years, voters in cities and towns across Colorado have voted in favor of bypassing SB 152 122 times. Only one exception, the city of Longmont in 2009, failed on their measure. Shannon, you own a home in Colorado. What does this all look like from your perspective? You know, it was interesting. I moved here in 2020, and I had no idea that Senate Bill 152 was even a thing until after I had moved here. But a big point of me choosing to move to Colorado State is I knew that the state itself had a lot of fiber infrastructure. I didn't know why it existed, but I knew that it was here. So when I started looking for a house, I constantly asked my realtor and the builders, is fiber available in this neighborhood before I purchased a house, because that affects my job, and it affects the future. It's like future proofing my industry and my job, my career on YouTube. So I did get to vote in over bypassing the Senate Bill 152. And I'm super happy that I did, because even though I have fiber at my house, I knew that this would potentially affect the infrastructure of the town that I chose to live in in the future. Okay. So in your case, or in the other cases you might know about, is it a community led effort where people favorable to the idea of having their city and town provide internet broadband? How much of a fight was it? Yeah, that's a good question. It was so weird, because when I was able to vote on it, I didn't hear any advertising or any promotion or any kind of back and forth or arguments about the bill. All I had was the blue book, and I read up on the bill and what I was voting yes or no on, and it gave me the pros and cons, and that was about it. So I really didn't see anything like on advertisements on Hulu, because I don't pay for ad for Hulu. I didn't see anything, and usually you do see a lot of that for a lot of the other bills. And I think it might be because I came into Colorado so late into this. It almost feels like everybody already knew about this bill. The conversation was already over by that time. The conversation is already over, and a lot of places are just saying, yeah, we're going to vote yes to bypass this Senate Bill 152. It seems like every single town, except for Longmont, which what do you do in Longmont, has passed this bill already, and coming in in 2020, we were kind of on the late side. Okay, so this may not apply then if not a lot of people are talking about it, but maybe just from your own perspective, what were the expectations for areas that voted to ditch the restrictions? Are you expecting lower prices, better availability? What are you getting? Well, one of the arguments that I was able to read up on was lower prices and better availability, which is kind of interesting because even though you're bypassing this bill by voting yes on it, that's just allowing your town or your municipality the freedom to do something in the future. So that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to put fiber in right away. It just means that they're opening up that opportunity for more competition. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything's going to change in the next one, two, five years down the line. They really have to have that yes or no in place before they can do anything else. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're just getting rid of the impediment that doesn't mean that you've actually built the thing. What is the next step? Do you know once you voted to bypass SB 152, what would happen next? Yeah, so I looked this up before I voted on it myself because I was like, okay, what's going to happen now? Are we going to get more competition? Cool. So the next thing that they have to do is once they have the freedom is start looking into partnerships with potential ISPs that will work with the municipality or figure out if there's grants or monetary availability for them to be able to lay the fiber lines. In my case where I live, the fiber lines were already laid and there's a couple of different ISPs that I had to choose from. So I went with the one that was the cheapest already and the other one just didn't even come into the question because they did not have an offer that was comparable. So in my case, I don't expect anything to change for me unless maybe some partnership ISPs come in, but a lot of the municipalities and towns are arguing that they don't want to take away what ISPs are already doing if they're giving people cost-effective options for fiber already. So they don't want to mess with that if they already have good contracts in place for these towns and these suburbs. They're trying to focus, it seems like a lot of these Colorado towns are trying to focus on places where they don't have anything already. They just have dial-up, they just have satellite or whatever it might be. They're trying to focus on laying fiber there in order to at least get the lines in place so that they can build those partnerships. Yeah, I know there's a lot of different ways to do this. I've talked to people in Korea who've described it as the government really, all it does is guarantee you could run lines. They're like, you get to tear up the street, you get to attach to the apartment building, etc. But that's all the expense and there's some expense to doing that for the government, but that's all the government does than everybody else fits the cost. I've also heard of like Chattanooga, Tennessee where the city paid for most of it. They bought the lines, they put the stuff in the street, they own the whole thing. Do you know, is it a mix of things? Is it usually mostly public money or is there private ownership of the completed infrastructure when it's done? Yeah, so well luckily in all the towns that I looked up, including my own, the taxes don't increase for the people that live there. A lot of the money, and I even looked this up for like Lone Tree is one of the towns here in Colorado, they're doing federal and state grant programs to get the funding to lay fiber lines once that vote had passed. Douglas County allocated 8 million in federal grant funds towards improvements. And a lot of other towns are also looking at those partnerships with ISPs, like I believe Google is one of them that chose to move into a town in Colorado and they're doing a partnership with a local government to bring fiber to the existing infrastructure once they have that fiber in place. So it seems like a lot of it is coming from these grants, whether that's federal or state or specifically partnership. So yeah, public money, lots of public money is going into it and they just have to like allocate those funds for internet infrastructure. And then I assume the infrastructure stays owned by the city. They might contract out management maintenance after that. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. So I'm happy about it. I think that it's great for growth. I think it's wonderful to see them connecting, especially more like rural towns in the mountains and on the west side of Colorado. There's not a lot of infrastructure over there like there is here in the Denver area. So I think it's going to bring a lot more growth to the state as a whole when you're thinking about the fact that we do need fiber connections, the more that we grow, the more that we rely on internet, we do need that. So it's good to see them bringing this to all sorts of communities. And we'd love to hear your stories of your own municipality out there, folks. Send them our way feedback at DailyTechnoShow.com. We know a bunch of you are going to watch the Super Bowl in a little over a week, not this Sunday, but a week from this Sunday. Whether you like Kansas City, Philadelphia or some other sporting team, you might be watching stuff, including the halftime show, you might be more into the music than the football. Well, check this out. Sweetie is joining the ranks of metaverse performers with a Super Bowl tie in concert in Warner Music Group's Rhythm City area in Roblox. That's right. Sweetie is going to be performing in Roblox as part of the Super Bowl. This is an official Super Bowl event. The Bay Area rapper will perform a family friendly set as an avatar on Friday, February 10th at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. The performance will replay every hour until the Super Bowl begins. Sweetie is best known for her hit singles Tap In and Best Friend. That's so cool. Now I want to play Roblox or that's a game, right? Yes. I don't even know. It's like a whole world. It's not just a game. Yeah, it's a world. Okay. So it's like Minecraft or something, right? I mean, I imagine Minecraft and Roblox players could go on for hours about the differences between them. But yeah, sure, there's a lot of similarities. They would. I just started some hate, I'm sure. But no, that's so cool. I love the idea of this because it makes concerts so much more, it gives you the ability to go even if you can't afford to be there in person. So I love that idea. Yeah, this is becoming a regular thing now. I remember when Marshmallow did Fortnite, it was a huge deal. And then Blackpink this summer did PUBG. I think that might have been the first PUBG. I might be wrong about that. And now Roblox, I know they've done other things, but they're being associated with the Super Bowl. I'm telling you, I've been saying this over and over. When something that ends up being called the metaverse actually comes into existence, it's going to come out of something like Roblox. I'm convinced. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Ben posted this comment about yesterday's episode on Patreon. They said, I am invited once a month or so to guest on ABC Radio Brisbane here in Australia. And I suggested chat GPT as a topic as I have been using AI tools like this for ages in marketing for clients. Jarvis has been my tool of choice, though it may interest people to have a listen. That's very cool. Ben's been in the patronage of this show for a long time. So good to hear from you and good stuff for folks to check out if you want to support a fellow patron of DTNS. Thank you, Ben. And also, thank you, Len Peralta. Let's check back in with you. You've been illustrating something for today's show. It's been so quiet. What have you drawn for us, Len? Yeah. I'm all for non-private Wi-Fi and everything else. And I think you know, this is something I don't know what I was thinking today. But this is a sign that I think can be seen all over not only Colorado, but everywhere, really. You know, just a sign, hands off a broadband, a broadband. Private Wi-Fi is good for all. And that's what I agree. I agree. Private Wi-Fi. I love it. This is like your don't mess with Texas, but for Colorado Internet. Exactly. It feels very ad-like. So I was like, it's almost like I was promoting non-government interference in broadband, which I think is a great idea. I don't know. Hey, yeah. MunyNetworks.org. If you're looking for a logo, we've got someone who could help you out. I'm your man. There you go. Yeah. If you're interested and you want to hang this up in your cubicle, you can get it traditionally at my store at LenPeraltaStore.com or get it at my Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Len. Back me at the Len Lover or a DTNES Lover. And then you get this automatically for free. So check it out. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Len. Yay. Good stuff. Go do that right now. And also MunyNetworks. You know my email. I can put you in touch with Len. Give me a message. All right, Shannon, what have you been doing these days? I know you got some good info over there on your YouTube channel. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh. I had so much fun researching this. I did an entire video about the LastPass hack. It was pretty in detail. So I went pretty in-depth. If you are interested in that and why I suggest you should leave LastPass once and for all, I know. Finally, check out that video, youtube.com slash Shannon Morse. I'm going to ask you a little bit about that in Good Day Internet. So if you're a patron, we'll get a little insight there as well. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Jason, who just started backing us on Patreon. Jason produced today's show, you know, because if it wasn't for new patrons, we wouldn't be able to keep doing the show. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Patrons, stick around. All of you, Jason and everyone else, first of all, welcome, Jason. Then tell them, hey, stick around. We've got Good Day Internet. We're going to be talking more to Shannon. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live back on Monday with Ayaz Akhtar. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dettering, our mods, beatmaster W.S. Goddess One, bio-cow, cat and kipper Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, ACAST ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, Scott Johnson, Rob Dunwood, Chris Christensen, Justin Robert Young and Shannon Morse. Our guest this week was David Spark and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible.