 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, and Rodrigo Smith Zapata. Coming up on DTNS, Apple will let you pay with your eyes. Google keeps a product going instead of killing it, and do we even need headsets for the metaverse? Maybe we don't. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 14th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Draw on the top tech stories. From Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Man, I wish Baseball had a California-Ohio match-up going on. We're representative of that today. I got two Ohio, three California. Let's do this! Alright, let's start with a few tech things you should know. The quick hits! After launching direct storage earlier this year, Microsoft is bringing GPU decompression to Windows PC games soon with the effort to improve game load times on PCs. The company says it's a popular request from game developers because it offloads what's needed to decompress assets and games onto the graphics card from the CPU. Yeah, seems like everybody wins with that one. Some folks got their wish on this one as well. You won't be able to buy the $899 12GB RTX 4080 card because enough people complained that it shouldn't be called the RTX 4080. The confusion is that the 16GB RTX 4080 has more VRAM, more cores, and more teraflops than the 12GB version. So just the 12 and the 16 are not the only difference. It's almost an entirely different card. People complained that this was confusing, so Nvidia has shown them it's given into the pressure and will sell the RTX 4080 16GB $4,999 November 16th on schedule. But it has polled the less expensive 12GB RTX 4080 while it rebrands. That means it's got to choose a new name, change the inventory system, change the box names, lettering, all kinds of little fiddly stuff that seems easy to change until you're the one that has to manage all the changes. Nvidia has not announced when the newly named card will go on sale. MULVAD VPN reports that the Android operating system is leaking traffic every time the device connects to a Wi-Fi network, even if the block connections without VPN, aka always on VPN, feature is on. This includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic. MULVAD discovered the issue during a security audit that is not yet published but issued a warning on Thursday. Yeah, this is one of those things that's not really going to affect most of people. But if you're a subject of advanced persistent threats, you shouldn't be using this for your VPN anyway. You should be using something else. That's good to know. CNN reports that SpaceX told the Department of Defense in the United States in a letter dated September 8th that it may no longer be able to provide Starlink terminals to help Ukraine's war effort with Russia by providing connectivity and asked the Pentagon to pay for more terminals. Earlier this month, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed that there are around 25,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine, but responding to the CNN report tweeted, SpaceX is not asking to recoup past expenses but cannot fund the existing system indefinitely and send several thousand more terminals that have data usage up to 100 times greater than typical households. So basically saying we paid for it up to now but we can't pay for it forever. Somebody else got to figure it out. Google began rolling out a change in how it marks ads in search. It will now show a sponsored label in bold next to search ads with the label appearing above the site URL rather than in the same line. This will roll out first to mobile with Google saying it will start testing on desktops sometime in the future. Alright, that is the quick hits. Let's talk a little more about Apple's mixed reality set. The information sources say it will feature iris scanning. That is not the flower. That is the part of your eye that's in the middle. It'll work similar to what Face ID does on Apple iOS. It would let a user do things like authenticate payments. You could pay with your eyes in the headset. And it could automatically switch users based on who's wearing it. You put it on. It sees what iris is there and it switches the account. Same sensors that track eyes for foveated rendering could be used for this iris scanning. Foveated rendering is that thing where the headset only renders the image in high res for the part of the screen you're looking at. That saves a little processing. And Gadget reminds us that Apple bought eye tracking glasses maker Sensomotorix in 2017 and that Ming-Chi Kuo said this year that Apple is buying premax's iris detection modules. So those two together kind of make sense that they would do some iris tracking, right? Yeah, the information sources also said that the Apple headset would be made of mesh fabric, aluminum and glass and would let you attach prescription lenses magnetically to the inside of the headset. Not exactly sure how that's going to work, but cool if it does. An Apple mixed reality headset is expected to launch sometime next year and rumored to cost between $2,000 and $3,000. Let's let Rob get back up off the floor from hearing that number. Yeah. So when I thought the Facebook joint was kind of expensive, it's half the price of what this thing is. I fully expect that Apple is going to do what Apple does. This thing will be beautiful. It will work great. But man, is it for regular people? Are regular people going to go out and spend $3,000 on a headset? Well, you know, I mean, I totally agree with you, Rob, like a sticker shock for sure. But I also feel like this is what Apple does best. They make a thing and people go, what? That's insanely expensive. I will buy it. I would never pay that much for a phone slash laptop slash tablet slash watch. And what happens is I don't know how you define regular people, but people who are fans of Apple buy the thing in large numbers. The next version is maybe not as expensive or they come out with a less expensive version of it. And so the song remains the same. I mean, we don't know what it's going to cost. This might not be right. This is just what people are expecting. But usually these things do end up in the ballpark. So I expect it's going to be more expensive. And you see Mark Zuckerberg out there saying, our thing is less expensive than the unannounced thing from Apple that they haven't given a price to because of these rumors. Yeah. I mean, listen, I am a VR enthusiast. I very much like my Quest 2 and the Quest before it. Yes, they've raised the prices for the Quest, but we're still in the sub $500 range. Anything like two to $3,000 is like, what in the heck is this thing going to do? But you know what? Maybe it will do things that have kept a lot of people to be like not really all that into VR until now. Yeah, like I said, I am not into VR like you are. But if anyone can pull it off, you know, we know that Apple creates wonderful hardware. So I expect this to be wonderful. They surprise and delight us. I was shocked. I was like, ooh, that's a couple car notes. Aluminum mesh fabric and glass. I can already picture the sleek design. It's going to let you pay with your eyes. That's going to be an amazing demo. And by the time they have finished dazzling you with all that, a bunch of people will be trying to pay with their eyes the $2,000 to $3,000 that they need for this. Master says my wallet is up here, buddy. I also, you know, there have been a few folks I've seen, you know, online, which being like, oh, now we're scanning eyes, you know, this is, this is, you know, some sort of scary movie in the making. And it's not unlike Face ID. Yeah, yeah. You have to put this thing on your head. You have to authorize it. Face ID is very well vetted at this point at being fairly secure. I don't get the sense that this is anything than fear mongering if you're upset about the eye tracking. It's what the way to see the details, of course, but it seems pretty easy to make this pretty harmless. Yeah. All right. You know, you could dunk on Apple if you want, but it's more fun to dunk on Google. Sometimes we get it. Stadia, Reader, Wave, almost every messaging app they've ever made. There's a whole site devoted to documenting what Google has killed. It's called killed by Google.com. So let's take a moment to appreciate that Google seems to have turned its destructive gaze away from one of its products. Technically, Google Fiber is part of Alphabet's access company, not Google. And maybe that's the key. It's not actually Google. So it may, it may not suffer the internal incentive system that rewards Google engineers for launching products but not for keeping them going. Whatever the reason, Google Fiber has bounced back from its near-death experience in 2016 when it laid off 9% of its staff, paused fiber rollouts, and indicated it would switch from fiber to wireless. Indeed. Instead, fiber is rolling out once again. Google Fiber announced it will offer 5 gigabits per second and also 8 gigabit per second symmetrical service for $125 and $150 a month, respectively. You'll be able to get it if you're an existing customer in the state of Utah, also Kansas City, West Des Moines, as early as next month with other existing markets getting it in early 2023. Yeah, it's not cheap, but 8 gigabits per second. I mean, it's not unlike what I'm paying for a service that is not that vast. Now, this means that the expansion plans that Google Fiber announced in August might actually be real. West Des Moines was the first new state, West Des Moines being in Iowa, made Iowa the first new state for Google Fiber Service in five years. And they're going right into the 5 and 8 gigabit per second bucket. Google Fiber is also talking to communities in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Idaho as well. Those states will be the focus for growth as well as expanding in the existing metro areas that it's already in. Now, the company wrote on its blog in August, we'd also love to talk to communities that want to build their own fiber networks. Apparently that's how West Des Moines got going. So they're willing to help communities start community fiber and then they would have an easier way to come in and start offering service on that fiber. Rob, can we celebrate a thing with Google in its name sticking around? Is that even possible? Some people will, Tom, but I got trust issues when it comes to me and Google and stuff that they released that are not email, search, Android and Google Docs. That's all that I know that they will actually keep going on pretty much forever. For me, I kind of feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football from Lucy. They just keep pulling it out from under me every single time. So I'm happy for the folks who can get this. But like I said, me and Google, we got trust issues. I just want to see them keep something. I don't want to talk about it because I don't know, people have told me that me talking about it is the reason this stuff gets canceled. So I'll just try to stay silent. I mean, if there's if there's anything that, okay, so Google likes to start lots of things, not necessarily finish them. But something like what we're talking about as far as what is being promised Google fiber wise, people will pay for that. And why would Google yank that? You know, it's like it's it's sort of you have a home run here. It's not, you know, like Google saying, well, we're going to get a little crazy and, you know, see, see what sticks. People want fast internet. That's what they want. Yes. And it's expensive and not terribly profitable to roll out, which is why all the other telcos stopped rolling out fiber as well. Because the difficulty of getting the permitting, running the cables in especially in metro areas was just too much. And so when in 2016, I'm like, that's a Google fight. Google's getting out of this business. It is it is just not worth it when the telcos are not it's their business or the telcos don't want to run fiber. How is Google going to make a go of it? It seems like they figured it out, which is go to areas that are easier to roll out in more, more rural areas, it seems like. And get the word out that it works and try to develop community fibers so that it makes it easier so you don't have to do all the work. I don't know. I'm pleasantly surprised that they got back into this. So here's what I when I started looking at and researching the story with what Google is doing is kind of like what they're doing with RCS. They, you know, that the carriers just didn't roll that stuff out. So Google had to do this. You know, if you want this to be a thing, we need to make it a thing. And I think they're kind of doing that with fibers. Like, you know what, you know, the telcos are not doing this. So if you want it to be a thing, we need to make it a thing. Will Google, you know, you know, will this be available in every city, everywhere? I don't think that that's Google's plan. I think as you said, Tom, they want to get this rolled out where it is easy to roll it out. And then when you have places like, you know, like Iowa that has this level of access and you have, you know, states right next to it. Hey, how come I can't get access like that? That's going to put pressure on the telecom companies. And then maybe they will have to kind of follow Google's lead. Yeah. It's confusing because it's called Google fiber, but this isn't part of Google. It's part of Alphabet, which owns Google in a different company called Access. And I think that's the key for the fact that it didn't get killed because it doesn't need to use search to monetize it. They figured out like, oh, we can make a business out of it. Like Sarah was saying, it's like, it's not easy, but since we don't have any other part of the company making this money, we didn't go, wow, but it's hard. So let's not do it. They're like, this is our only business. If we want to stay a part of Alphabet, we have to figure out how to make it work. And it sounds like maybe they have. I mean, if enough people pay, it's worth it. It's also spooky season. And Dan Campos down in Mexico City, down from where we are anyway, has an update on how you can join in on the festivities where he is, no matter where in the world you are. Hello friends of DTNS. Here I come with some Noticias de Tecnología Express. Do you want to join the Dia de los Muertos Parade, but you are not in Mexico City? Fear not. The City's Ministry of Culture announced that the parade will be present on the Metaverse thanks to a collaboration with Spatial and the Central Land platforms and a three-dimensional environment created by SL Life. There will be an international avatar party where participants can design their own characters to participate and join the parade recreated by SL Life within the platforms. You will be able to catch the bend through your cell phone, tablet, computer or even in more traditional media such as social networks or local TV. The Dia de los Muertos Parade is an ancestral Mexican tradition that was established in 2015 thanks to the arrival of James Bond. After the release of Spectre, the props from the movie were used for the first time in this kind of event. This year's parade will take place on October 29th. Back to you, amigos. That's funny, Dan, and I love that Decentraland is part of that. I believe Snoop Dogg owns some real estate in Decentraland, so maybe you can go hang at his place. Can't wait. Folks, if you're feeling social, talk to us on the social networks. You can get in touch with the DTNS folks on DTNS Show on Twitter at DTNS Show or on Instagram. DTNS pics, DTNS, P-I-X. So at Connect this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a big deal about the fact that avatars and horizon worlds would get legs next year, like actual legs. He even demonstrated what the legs would look like, sort of. Upload VR's Ian Hamilton was the first to pass along Meta's statement that, quote, to enable the preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture, end quote. So legs are apparently coming, but that video was not really a sneak peek at that specific technology. All in all, the media reaction to Connect was not very good. IGN even titled a piece by Logan Plant called The Metaverse has had a very bad week. Yeah, there was like leaks of people inside Meta saying like we don't like horizon worlds and a memo saying we all have to use it or it's not going to get better. That led Steven Levy to ask on Wired.com, what if the Metaverse is better without virtual reality? Levy was pointing out that in Meta's announcement they said they would bring horizon worlds to the web. They talked about working to integrate 2D participants into things like horizon worlds, 3D VR meetings. There's integration with Zoom coming, integration with teams coming. The pitch was a good one, make VR spaces accessible for everyone until headsets become widespread, seemed smart. Levy points out that other VR companies like Mesmerize and Spatial have also made the decision to allow 2D participation. And in fact, Spatial says about 80% of its customers are on the web or mobile now, not on a quest headset. Levy wonders, quote, could it be that the Metaverse doesn't require VR after all? So I'll point out the Sims and Second Life brought 3D worlds to a 2D screen and at varying levels of success over the years. And until Apple or somebody else popularizes a VR interface that everybody wants to wear and pay for, 2D is necessary if you want to gain any kind of scale. Is Levy right? Can we have some kind of 3D avatar filled Metaverse-like space and have it succeed without even needing a VR headset? I think we have to or it dies because we talked about it just a few minutes ago. Not everybody is going to be into the VR thing. It's cool, like you either are or you aren't. Maybe you will be later and you just aren't yet. But yeah, I think the idea of this Metaverse being some virtual reality thing is putting so many people off before they even really know what it means. And let's be honest, none of us really know what the Metaverse means yet because we're just talking about it rather than living in it. But I don't know, Rob, what are your thoughts? So I wholeheartedly agree with you because I think that when you, you know, for this thing to take off, you have to have critical mass and you're never going to get critical mass. You're just not going to get enough people using it if it costs 500 to 1500 to potentially $3,000 to get a peripheral because you're talking about spending that kind of money. People spend less on phones, they spend less on computers. They can do a lot more than what these headsets can do. So if you can actually make these virtual worlds to where you can participate and you can play and you can actually, you know, be a member of a community without having to go buy a really expensive peripheral to allow you to be a part of that community, which you may see is that people get into it and then down the road they're way more open to spending that 500 to 1500 to $3,000 on a device so that they can actually do it in 3D. Yeah, and possibly the price of those devices comes down, you know, in the meantime, right? There could be, you know, more people want to decide like, I don't want to leave. He calls them second-class citizens. If you're a 2D in a 3D space, maybe more people like, I don't want to do that. Maybe I should buy it by the headset. Headsets start to get cheaper. They meet in the middle. And then suddenly there's something that everybody's doing that that's a potential scenario that could play out. My thing is going back to what Sarah said, we kind of all know what the metaverse sorta wants to be, like a virtual world where we have an avatar that can wander around and do stuff, right? But what is it good for? What is the thing that people are going to say, yeah, I want to do it even if it's 2D, right? That's the question, right? Or have to for work. Yeah, if it's not immersive, is it beneficial for me to go into the metaverse and use an avatar to do a meeting even in 2D versus just being on Zoom? Like, otherwise people are just going to be on Zoom. They're not going to go the extra mile to do this. Yeah, that is, that's kind of the unanswered question is how does this make my meeting better? Let's just, you know, let fun aside, let's say that this is something that you, you know, is part of your workplace, and you're supposed to connect with your coworkers better. How exactly is that happening? And I don't, I think a lot of us are kind of, even, I mean, even me, the ear enthusiast, for sure, you know, I kind of shrug and say, I don't know how it makes it better. And I'm not sure. The answer is it brings presence. It brings a sense of being in the room with somebody in a way that a flat Zoom call doesn't. And you can do stuff with 3D on a 2D screen that provides a little bit of that. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I can see situations where you go, oh, this is really cool. But so many more where you say this is, I mean, somewhat cartoonish. Really cool can be considered a gimmick. Is it useful? Does it help you get work done better? I think that when they can figure that part out, that's when it'll start to take off. Yeah. Or there's something else that none of us have thought of that some developers would hit on and everybody's going to go, oh yeah, that's fun. Even on my monitor, that's fun. It would be even better with a headset. That's what's happened with every platform out there. It was news groups. It was email. It was the web. There's something that happens that everybody goes, oh yeah, no, this is worth doing. This is worth getting the PC for. This is worth getting the smartphone for. We just, call it the killer app or the killer platform or whatever. That thing for the metaverse, for virtual spaces, whatever you want to call it, we're waiting to find out what it is. If it is. Well, some of us are also waiting for autonomous vehicles to take over the world. You know, it's slow going, but we're on the path. It is normal. If you're a pedestrian crossing the street, you make eye contact with a driver who might be coming towards you. Make sure that they see you and they know you're crossing so they're not going to hit you. But autonomous cars don't have eyes like human eyes. They don't have eyes at all. But maybe they should. Scientists from the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University put an oversized pair of manually controlled animated eyes on the front of a golf cart with a human, but otherwise non visible driver. So nobody could see the driver. They just knew that a golf cart was coming towards them. They recorded four scenarios. The first two with the cart with the eyes and two without nine women and nine men used a virtual reality headset to play through various scenarios and had three seconds to decide if they were going to attempt to cross the street in front of the approaching golf cart that might not be seeing them. Participants said when the vehicle had eyes that were looking away, the crossing didn't feel safe. When the eyes appeared to be paying attention to them, the crossing felt safer. So googly eyes put googly eyes on autonomous cars. That's right. And we all win. I mean, you know, haha, but like, but that's what makes perfect sense. That's the science. Like literally that's the science. You just have to be able to control the googly eye, right? So that so that it's actually looking at you when the sensors know you're there so that it's meaningful, right? Otherwise, it's luring you into a false sense of security. I was sort of thinking about like, okay, how like, silly is this, you know, the googly eyes kind of thing, like, if a car looks like it's looking at me, like, we're good. There could be other ways that the car could let me know that it's looking at me, you know, maybe it blinks green three times or, you know, there, there are other ways to do this. But this is the right call. Because yeah, if somebody is not behind the wheel and you can't make eye contact, you want to make sure that the car knows where you are. Yeah. I just like the googly eyes. I mean, yeah, right? The, you know, the self-automated or the automated driving is cool. Can you put that on a golf cart? I don't golf often, but I would golf more if I could get a golf cart with googly eyes on the front. That would be kind of cool to me. I know. It's like a cool golf cart. And imagine where else we can go, like customized kinds of eyes for your car, you know, you could, you could have like, like bloodshot eyes or, or, you know, like, like those decorative contact lenses. You could have cat's eyes on your car. That's the way that many vehicles, I mean, there are a variety of ways that you can, you know, blink to turn left. They don't all look the same, but you know that they're, they have one purpose. Yeah. And that's to let you know what's up. Googly eyes may not end up being the thing, but a notification system is a, I'm glad they're thinking about stuff like that. Yeah. This is, this is really interesting and, and peer reviewed research that says, yeah, if you, if you think the car can see you by whether it's googly eyes or something else that you feel safer. And you probably are because that way you know that the car is sensing you as long as the system works. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Mark. This is in response to a conversation earlier in the week. Mark says, it seems to me that Zuckerberg talking about Mark Zuckerberg is conflating PC and Windows as exemplified by his comparison of Mac and Windows, not Mac and PC. The openness of the PC is what allows for different hardware, etc. Getting it to work with Windows is always challenging. Yeah, that's a good point. People pick on this all the time and people I think casually can use PC and Windows interchangeably, but it's an important distinction in the distinction that Zuckerberg is making, right? The PC platform is more open than the Windows platform. The PC platform isn't entirely open. It's, you know, under the Intel thumb, but, but it is more open than Windows. So that's, that's a fair point. And then Scott wrote in and said, I agree with Tom on this one. Microsoft is making a huge mistake ditching the brand recognition for office. I don't think it's a huge mistake, but okay, you're agreeing with me. I'm not going to, I'm not going to fight you. However, I don't find myself carrying all too much says Scott. As many years ago, I switched to open office and now LibreOffice and haven't looked back. I've also moved a significant percentage of my clients to LibreOffice, which they have been using without issue and they certainly love the price. So yeah, satisfied LibreOffice fan. No kidding. Well, thanks to everybody who, who sends us emails do keep that feedback coming. And it always helps make our show better feedback at daily technewshow.com is where to send your thoughts. For now, we would like to thank Len Peralta for drawing the tech stories. And Len, what do you have for us today? Well, first off, I'm googly eyes on my car. I'm taking my car in for service. I'm asking for googly eyes. I think you should need to have those. I'm liking it. Yeah. So big bad week for for Metta. And I think do we need headsets? Well, maybe we do need headsets, but why don't we just go with this whole legs thing? And that's what this is. Metta just give people legs. I think that's terrific, man. You get with a headset drawn someone with a headset holding legs. Yeah, you get those. You get the legs with the headset, right? The plastic legs or something. I don't know. Kind of weird. I think it'd be a selling point, maybe. I was worried that that was the leg bone sticking up out of the leg. Well, it might be because it is near Halloween. No, package the googly eyes with the legs. I think you got something going on there. Anyway, this image is available right now on my online store. It's LenPeraltaStore.com. Or if you're a Patreon subscriber, go to patreon.com. This is yours for the taking right now just for just for backing me up. So go ahead and do that. Well, good stuff as always, Len. Also good stuff from Rob Dunwood hanging with us today. Rob, let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. As always, it is a pleasure being on DTNS. And folks can get with me everywhere at Rob Dunwood. And also check out a couple of my other shows. The SMR podcast and the Tech John. Please share here. Always a good supplement if you're in your DTNS diet. Excellent subscriptions. Take it from us. Also a special thanks to Eric Pfeiffer. Eric is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. And you know what, Eric? We want to thank you for all the years of support. You the best. You enrich in our lives. And you can't spell enriching without Eric. That's right. Yeah, somehow. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show. Good day. Internet GDI rolls in right after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, you can catch this show live. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, that's 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. I will be out next week, but the team will be back on Monday talking about the impact of social media on animal conservation efforts with Blair Bazderich and Jen Cutter as well. This week's episode of Daily Tech News Show is 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 Kuntz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dedderding. Our mods, Beatmaster W. Scottis 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadirama, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Scott Johnson, Lamar Wilson, Rob Dunwood and Chris Christensen. Our guest this week was Annaly Newitz and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.