 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Brad, Kevin, and Paul Teeson. Coming up on DTNS, has video game news died? Well, Scott Johnson's gonna calm our fears about that, plus the state of mixed reality headsets, and I try to explain PGP by making Scott and Sarah do math. What could go wrong? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 8th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Please have your calculators out, and ready? I wasn't allowed in my math class to have a calculator out. Yeah, me either, actually, when I was a kid. In college we could, but, you know, that was linear algebra. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Washington Post sources say that Twitter will grant Elon Musk access to platform data in order to address his concerns about BOT accounts. Twitter previously offered to share its methodology for analyzing its platform data, but Musk said that wasn't sufficient, and accused Twitter of being in breach of his agreement to acquire the company. Granting him access to the fire hose addresses the complaint about limited data, but also doesn't directly answer the question of BOT activity, since the platform data needs to be analyzed to determine that. But it does leave Twitter able to argue that it has now given Musk their methodology and the source data. There must be arguments I had in relationships in college. Oh, you want the source data? Here, here's all the source data. Yeah, but I might still do something close to my chest. After suspending operations in Russia back in March, IBM announced it has begun an orderly winddown of operations in the country, including terminating its workforce in the country. In related news, Microsoft said that it is going to significantly scale down its operations in Russia, although it will continue to fulfill existing contractual obligations to its customers there. Amazon CEO of worldwide consumer, Dave Clark, has left Amazon and will become co-CEO of supply chain software startup Flexport starting September 1, and eventually taking over as sole CEO next March. So we've got a little co-CEO in interim action going on here. That's when Flexport's current founder and current CEO, Ryan Peterson, will move from CEO to executive chairman. An operation from the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Justice, all from the United States, and the police in Cyprus, combined to seize the infrastructure of the SS and DOB marketplace, which listed personal information for roughly 24 millions of U.S. citizens for sale. The analyst company, Sean Alice estimates the marketplace received $22 million worth of Bitcoin over 100,000 transactions since April 2015. PayPal announced new crypto features on Tuesday. Jose Fernandez de Ponte, that's SVP and general manager of blockchain for the company, crypto and digital currencies at PayPal, said that this would also let customers transfer supported coins into PayPal, move crypto from its app to external crypto addresses, including exchanges and hardware wallets, and also send crypto to other users within seconds. PayPal added the ability to buy, sell, and hold crypto back in October of 2020, so the company's been working on this for some time. In March of last year, the company announced the launch of Checkout with Crypto. That's a feature that allowed consumers to check out at millions of online businesses using cryptocurrency. All right. Let's talk about video game news. Sarah, is there hope? Maybe. If you are an E3, a person who's been, yeah, E3, are you an E3 stan? Raise your hand if so, and you've been kind of bummed that E3 has been a little under the radar the last few years. Event organizers for the Electronic Entertainment Expo say that they will bring back an in-person event in 2023. Although if you're excited about that, no real details on an exact date or exact details. E3 has not held a live event in three years. Yeah. And by the way, they had already said this. They're just out there saying it again, which I thought was interesting. Meanwhile, Jeff Keely's Summer Games Fest takes place this Thursday with reveals from game publishers and studios, you know, the kind of thing that E3 has to do. But Keely tried to set everybody's expectations. Video Game Chronicles noted that Keely told a Twitter Spaces chat that his event will be fun. It'll have lots of new content, but will be primarily focused on already announced games. He's like, there's a lot of crazy rumors out there. Everybody just settle down. There will be new content related to those games that you'll get to see. But a lot of content that's like brand new won't get announced there. For instance, Xbox and Bethesda have a showcase of their own on Sunday where new announcements will likely take place. So there's a lot going on with this. E3 has spent the last couple of years sort of recovering from the initial hit of COVID-19 in 2020, or at least that was what they said was the main reason that they kind of had to scramble. But honestly, those of us who have been following E3 and the industry for long enough know that E3's been in trouble for a while. And by trouble, I just mean we've entered a phase in games journalism where you can get this information just about anywhere and you don't hardly have to go anywhere to do it. And the very expensive show floors and the very expensive booths that these companies set up was no longer making sense when they could kind of have their own presentations. Nintendo really was the first to pull their plug some years ago and say, look, we're going to do these direct video things and that's just how we're going to do it. And we may have a presence here or there, but it's not going to be like it used to be and everybody freaked out at the time. But I actually think they were onto something since then and especially during the pandemic, Microsoft and Sony, the big platform holders have decided to use their own resources to talk to people directly via streaming. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. In fact, this stuff from Keely, what's been going on for a few years now is really just that. I'm saying, hey, here's a showcase for a bunch of games and it's more of a general kind of a conference event to show off games that are coming from lots of third parties. Meanwhile, the platform holders, like you mentioned, Microsoft, they're going to do one on this weekend. They do their own things now. So then saying they're going to have an in-person event, I don't know what that actually means. E3 was originally set up to be an industry event where buyers, let's say you're the big buyer of Walmart, you would go to that event and you would be sort of wind and dined by game publishers and platform holders to say, look, carry our stuff. Here's why you need to. Here's why you should order five million playstations in the first quarter, whatever the numbers were at the time. That's what those were primarily set up for. The rest of us just sort of caught the news when we caught it. Things have evolved and it's no longer that kind of shutdown. Only the industry gets access to this stuff anymore. So their need to exist has been challenged pretty severely. My expectation is what they do next year could be amazing. They may be able to bring it back in some crazy cool way. Maybe the public will go, whoa, hold on now. We don't need packs anymore. These other side gaming things were back in E3, baby. I just don't see it. I can't feel it. I mean, coming from the journalism side for years, you know, we were down at the center covering E3, you know, doing a variety of, you know, I'm Sarah Lane live from E3. It's so exciting. Look at all the people, you know, on the escalator behind me going up to the show type thing. I mean, it was very much an event, a place to be. And that's where when you wanted to get announcements. I mean, sure, you could follow it from somewhere else, but it was very much an in-person event. And yeah, most of the floor was for, you know, kind of for vendors and people to make deals. But it was a very exciting thing. And yeah, the tide has shifted and has been for some time. I don't even think it's totally COVID related. It's just the way that news trickles out now. But I'd be interested to see what does this look like if this indeed happens next year? Yeah, I would look at CES as an example. A lot of people thought CES would go the same way when Microsoft pulled off the floor, started doing more of their own announcements following Apple and Samsung and everybody Google, everybody's doing their own announcements. And yet CES persists because people like to have that focal event where they all get together. It wasn't like Microsoft and Sony weren't doing their own events. They were just doing them in the same week as E3. They weren't doing them at E3. So my guess is next year when they have an in-person event, a bunch of people show up, there'll be a bunch of fans who want to be able to get in because E3 is opening its doors to fans and want to go to the show for to play the things that were announced outside of E3. And there will be a lot of vendors who will want to get there and make connections and make pre-orders. And so there will be a reason for it is my guess. The bigger question will be, will Microsoft, will Sony, will Nintendo have enough stuff there to drive that audience to want to be there? Because if they're not there, then you start to ask the question, well, what's E3 for? Because if you're just doing indie showcases or third-party showcasing, it's already happening in a lot of other events. You know, PAX has kind of got that covered in multiple places in the country multiple times a year. So I'm not saying this is possible or impossible, rather, I think it is. But I think they may have to just kind of change their image, maybe even change their name. I don't know that E3 has the cache it used to. And with everything Keely's got going on, including the game awards where a ton of new stuff is shown every year, it kind of got it covered. There's your answer. You just spelled Jeff Keely with three E's, merged the two. There you go. The new E3, Jeff Keely. All right, let's talk mixed reality headsets. It looks like the race is on for one to get out there and gain popularity with consumers. Apple and Microsoft, however, just stumbled a little bit. That doesn't mean they can't still win this race, though. And don't forget Meta and Google are in this race. Let's start with Apple. In May, Bloomberg reported that Apple showed off its mixed reality headset to its board of directors. And while there was no mention of the headset at WWDC this week, within minutes after the keynote on Monday, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo posted, quote, I believe Apple's ARMR headset shipping date will postpone to Q2 2023 versus Q1 market consensus because Shanghai lockdown interrupts the development. In other words, it was going to ship in Q1 anyway, they might not have announced it at WWDC, but he thinks it's still going to ship in Q2. Kuo thinks it'll be launched in January and be on store shelves by next year's WWDC, possibly for a few thousand dollars. Also in May, the information said that it had access to Meta's roadmap for VR hardware. Meta obviously makes the quest and the quest too. A lot of success there as a consumer product and certainly not several thousand dollars, but who knows what's going to happen in the future. The information said Meta will release four VR headsets by 2024. The company also had already announced Project Cambria headset. That's arriving in September of this year. Project Cambria is rumored to cost around $800. So that's definitely a price hike from what you can get in the VR space, but one would think with better features. A Meta spokesperson said it would cost significantly higher. All right, Cambria will run on Android and is marketed as a work device. So if you're a consumer saying, I don't want to pay $1,200 for this, maybe this actually isn't for you. Funston will follow in 2024 and two cheaper quest devices will ship in 2023 and 2024 as well. And then Google showed off a very limited pair of glasses at Google IO, those translation glasses. They have lots of AR features and stuff. Remember Immersive View and Google Maps seems ready-made for her AR. But there was no hint toward Project Iris. Project Iris is what the Verge's sources said in January would be coming from Google shipping in 2024. So Google seems the farthest out. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean it's not happening, but company not talking. They do seem like they're out of ways. It's an interesting landscape because right now it feels like this is Meta's world to lose. If that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. But what about Microsoft, Sarah? Yeah, so that brings us back to present day. Microsoft had some news this morning. According to an internal email send scene rather by Geekwire, Microsoft announced that it's restructuring its mixed reality group with the division's head Alex Kipman, leaving the company. The hardware group will now be part of Windows and devices under Panus Panay, while the mixed reality presence and collaboration group will merge with the Microsoft team organization. Interesting. And May 25th report from Insider outlined reasons that Kipman might be leaving the company, which includes allegations of verbal and sexual harassment. All right. Microsoft's head of the cloud and AI group Scott Guthrie wrote in an email that this quote will align and further accelerate our overall metaverse efforts as a company this coming fiscal year, which feels like maybe it's a little bit of retconning something they had to do anyway. But he added over the last several months Alex Kipman and I have been talking about the team's path going forward. We have mutually decided that this is the right time for him to leave the company to pursue other opportunities. Yes, it is the right time for many reasons. I don't know that this is good for Microsoft. It's probably not what they wanted to do. Usually, splitting a product between two teams like that with two different strong leaders, Panus Panay and the other team led by Guthrie, feels like a compromise. And it feels like something that is going to slow what has already been a slowly developed mixed reality headset with HoloLens that is, if anything, drifting if not pivoting towards enterprise versus consumer. If I had my guess, it would be that they will continue to pivot toward enterprise just because that maybe is the place they're going to be the strongest in this market. I don't know why I feel this way, but it feels like everybody's going to leave Meta, Apple, and to some degree maybe Google, although Google may be spinning this toward enterprise or services focused anyway. But they're, I feel like everybody's kind of waiting for them to see what the market does like what does the consumer market do. We know that a lot of the stuff is already used in big enterprise situations and that's great. And it sounds like even Meta is making a stronger push in that direction with the significantly more expensive thing coming later. But man, they're so far ahead. I kind of hate that they are. But like we were talking about this morning on TMS, we had a quick segment about this with Tom. When Apple finally announces the thing, like it or not, that's usually when stuff starts to go crazy. That's usually when people go, okay, what are we doing? All right, now we're all doing this. This is a big time. We're all committing. And Microsoft, I don't know, it feels like Windows Phone. It's weird. Yeah, Meta is going to beat Apple to the punch. But will that matter? Yeah, I'm with you. Go ahead, sir. Yeah, I also think that as it's very true that Apple announces something and you know, everyone goes, oh, let's look at this industry, this VR thing, even though like 10 other companies are like, we've had really great successful products on the market for some time. Apple sometimes is late to the game. I mean, HomePod, I know people out there love their HomePods. I'm not bagging on them. In fact, I don't own one myself, but I know that, you know, that was by and large an expensive, overly expensive product that was late to the game. And this could be something that Apple fumbles as well. Yeah, or it could be the iPhone, which was also late to the game, but revolutionized the category. No, right? It's not guaranteed because Apple's doing it. It's either going to be the iPhone or the HomePod or something in between. Yeah. Well, folks, if you're thinking of adding solar panels to your home, we have a special for you coming into the feed this Saturday. Myself, Sarah and three guests explain the process, things to consider, what you can expect to spend and save. If you are a patron, you know, you already listened to it, you're already telling us what you think of it. And you can get this sooner by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, y'all, the password list future, we've heard about it, and it's starting to happen in front of our eyes. Big announcement this week was Apple's pass keys that will let you securely log into participating sites and services without ever needing to create a password. You might say music to my ears. Your device becomes your password. LastPass also announced and now supports password free login to its own vault using the LastPass Authenticator app, Touch ID or USB security key like a UB key. For now, the master password remains as a fallback, but in the past, that was what you needed to get into anything. And if you forget your master password, which I have full disclosure, it can be kind of an issue. One password already supported password list authentication through biometrics or UB keys, but is now officially joined the FIDO Alliance and Valmeto, which sells a multi-app device with biometrics also just joined FIDO. So if anybody's like, what's FIDO again, Tom, take it away. Yeah, the FIDO Alliance developed standards to create multi-factor authentication that does not require passwords. So it's still secure just doesn't require you to remember a password and a password is always the least secure part of any login. Websites hold your public key, which they must combine with a private key in order to authenticate you. The private key is stored on your device and secured in Apple's case with Face ID or Touch ID or on a Mac. So to wrap your head around this, let's walk through it for simplicity's sake. Imagine you're logging into a website on a browser and you're using an NFC device as your key. That could be a UB key or it could be your phone, but you're going to tap it. The browser has to support FIDO 2 and all the big ones do now. And then the website will use a little JavaScript to tell the browser it wants to log you in. The browser uses the JavaScript to talk to your NFC device. Authentication happens in the browser with your public key. So no secret information is stored by the website. The browser matches your NFC device to the site and you're authenticated. No password necessary. Okay, so this sounds pretty great, but how does that work securely and also what happens if I lose my device? Okay, so if you lose your device, they can back it up into the cloud. But let's understand a little more how public key cryptography works. Let's see if this works for me to try to explain this. We have an entire episode on Know a Little More. If you want to get into the details of it, but for simplicity's sake, let's do this. Get your calculators out, all right? And you can play along with this at home if you want. We're going to pick a constant, the number two. Now, in an actual cryptography PGP situation, you would pick a much bigger, more complex number to be secure. But for the simplicity of the example, we're going to pick the number two. And then you could pick whatever number you want in reality. But so that we're making sure that we're both picking different numbers. Scott, pick a number between one and five. All right, got it. And Sarah, pick something between six and 10. Got it. All right, again, in reality, you'd pick very complex numbers that no one else would guess. But this is for the sake of example. Those numbers that you pick, don't tell anyone about it. Keep them to yourself. That's your private key. That represents the thing that would be stored on your iPhone, for instance. And no one else would see it but you. Now, raise the number two, which is our constant, to the power of that secret number you just picked. So use the exponent feature on your calculator. Say two to the power of my secret number. Okay, got it. All right, that is your public key. That's the one you're going to give the browser and the browser can give it to the website and everybody can see it. And that's not going to compromise your security. So Scott, what's your public key? My public key is 16. All right, Sarah, what's yours? 512. Okay. So we can all know that and we have not compromised your security because again, if this is mathematically complex, I won't be able to figure out your private key from this public key. Now, in the simple example, some of you are probably like, well, I bet I can guess since I know the number two is the constant what this is. But in the sufficiently complex mathematics, that would be very hard. Okay. Each of you take the other person's public key. So Scott, you're going to take the number 512 and Sarah, you're going to take the number 16 and then raise that to the power of your private key. The number you didn't tell anybody. So Sarah is going to take 16 to the power of her private key and Scott's going to take... 512. Yeah. Sarah is going to take 16. So you're going to take Scott's public key and raise it. Yes, yes. Yeah. And then Sarah and then Scott's going to take Sarah's private key 512. 512. Yep. Got it. All right. Normally this next part would not be public. You would keep the result of that operation to yourself. But just to prove that it works, Scott, what number did you get? 687-194-7636. Sorry. 76736. Sarah, did you get the same number? I did. Yeah. So they... The exact same number. Know each other's private key, but through the math that we did, they were able to both get a number that they knew matched and no one else knew that number until I made them say it out loud. Now, that is a very simple example of public key cryptography. We all know the public keys, but using the private keys, you can share a secret, which is that last number. And granted, in actual PGP, there's a lot more going on, but this just demonstrates that they could each come up with the same number while only knowing each other's public key. And I would not have been able to know that number if the math is sufficiently complex. Now, granted, we use small numbers. So, you know, you might have been able to figure it out. But hopefully that helps demonstrates how you can have a public key and still be able to authenticate something. Okay. The passkey thing from Apple contains your private key that itself is encrypted, then can be used to match you for login, secure login. Then the encrypted passkey file can be stored locally on all your secured devices, laptop, phone, tablet, synced with iCloud Keychain. Sounds pretty good. Then the passkeys will work with Google and Microsoft products as well. All they need is your device registration and your public key, then they can generate the shared secret. The browser checks that they match, then tells the site, okay, Sarah is who she says she is, and I'm now logged in. Last pass is doing the same thing with its authenticator and USB keys do it with secured private keys stored within which some folks are already very familiar with. So, now begins the hard work, figuring out what to do for people with devices in multiple ecosystems. Can I have a passkey on my iPad and on an Android phone? I mean, I can use my iPad passkey to log in on Chrome on Windows. They're doing that. But can I have it actually be on my Android phone? There's also the even harder work of getting sites and services to support FIDO. You need everybody to support it to be able to actually get rid of passwords. And the even harder work than that of getting the ecosystem built up enough and foolproof enough that sites stop using passwords as a backstop. As we heard last pass still using its password as a backstop for now. So it's going to be a while before we can actually get rid of them, but we are on the road. So what about this whole I lost my phone? What do you do when you lose your computer? So the passkey being able to be on multiple devices is your backup for that, right? You can use the iCloud keychain to sync it over so that if you lose your phone, the passkey is still on your iPad. The ability to have a passkey that works on an Android phone, a Windows device, and an iPhone is the thing we need. Like if I created the passkey in Apple's ecosystem, how do I move it to a non-Apple device? We need to figure that out. But you can create separate authentication keys. So there is a way to do that. And there's a way to sync it, like we said through iCloud. Very cool. My math teacher is rolling in his grave. I just want to put that out there. I mean, listen, I, you know, I used to consider myself pretty good at math. And yet I was like, okay, the end power. How does these things work on the calculator on macOS? Good stuff. Well, listen, if you, if you got a pet in the house, specifically a dog company called Ferbo released the Ferbo 360 degree dog camera, smart home camera to watch your dog with the 360 degree rotating base that can either automatically follow a very good pop, pop around. Maybe if it's not being very good or be controlled remotely also has a new wide angle lens and color night vision. So you can see what's going on even if the lights aren't on like the original Ferbo. There's also two way talk support. It can also throw treats to very good dogs Brent. It's also available for $210. So I want this. I don't know if I want to spend $210 on it, but man, do I do I want the ability to throw the treats, which they already had, but the 360 degree rotating base, that makes all the difference because right now I've got a camera way up in the corner of the main room, because that's the only way I can see everything. But even then they get behind couches or whatever. And we're always spying on them when we're out to dinner. So, you know, I'm, I'm totally that person. We are totally those people are like, what are the dogs doing? Let's take a look. I've actually been with you out at a restaurant where you looked at the camera and you were like, is that swear on my couch? He's not supposed to be there. And I was like, no, that's my purse. Tom, I watched this. I watched some TikToks of you getting followed around by a drone. Do you think we get to a point where this sort of thing is just like a floating dog follower? That would be the next to the next generation, right? Is that dude do what Amazon's doing with that drone that falls around the house? But it just follows the pups around. My dog would lose it. My dogs hate that. I have the Snapchat pixie and every time I launch it, the dogs just run away from it. They're like, I do not like that sound. Get it away from. Yeah, they might get used to it. They see a vacuum. It's pretty loud though. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Got a good one from Mike in Dubai, writing in about accessing Disney plus in various areas in the world. Mike says, I've been using it with a VPN for the past few years in the United Arab Emirates. Not the greatest experience, but I needed to see Wanda vision. Mike, I get it. Mike recently traveled to Portugal and his subscription worked great. He says, I learned Disney plus was coming to the UAE tried signing in today, but I got an error on the app that told me that the service was unavailable. Mike says he went through a whole signup screen, asked for his phone number. He says, having the US account, I went to find the US country code. My only options were Middle East country codes. I put in my UAE number. It asked for my email. Let me in without a password and I could browse Disney plus. It seemed to have most Disney plus and Hulu shows, but I went to sign up for a subscription, which is less than $10, $10 a month in his area. But then my payment was rejected. So when I tried another browser, I was able to log in with my phone and an SMS OTP, again, not eating a password. Mike says he'd love to get Shannon's take on this sign in method. You know, what's going on with it, especially since one account allows for seven sub accounts and four simultaneous streams. So if it works, it should work for, you know, a family. Yeah, I can tell you one of the reasons that your US log in works in Portugal, Portugal, but not in the UAE. And it's basically that they are not running the service under the same business unit or under the same legal regimen that the other ones are running under. The Olympics runs all of their services under the same business and terms of service and everything. But Disney has a conglomeration of other stuff. So they may be, I don't know the details on UAE, but they may be using a vendor to provide things which would prevent the back ends from integrating. Or they may have just to more easily comply with UAE laws created a separate business unit to run it. Again, I don't know the details, but it's not unusual for that to happen. For instance, there's a Hulu in Japan, but you cannot use your Hulu login from the US to log into it because they're actually run by different companies. This is where both of them are run by Disney, but they may be different business units or different legal regimens or something like that. So it's not unusual for that to happen. In fact, Netflix is kind of the weird one in that it was able because it was starting fresh to just say it's always going to be us. We got the same back end so we can make that happen. Disney had Hot Star and some other things that it's trying to integrate in. So that could be one of the reasons you're experiencing some of this weirdness. Well, thank you to Mike and everybody who emails us with questions, comments, amusing anecdotes, and also dog photos. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with what you've been up to. Well, there's a ton going on, so I would recommend going to the big central source for it all. Go to frogpants.com. You'll find all the podcasts, all the artwork, all the other stuff I got going on these days. And there is a lot of it, and especially a lot of games coverage. You can expect a ton of that this week with these multiple showings that are happening, especially Microsoft's on Sunday. We even do some live coverage of that. We'll let you know. But follow us over at frogpants.com for all your needs. And if you want to tap me on Twitter, you can find me at Scott Johnson. Excellent. Also, right before the show, as of the time of this recording, we got a brand new boss. That brand new boss is named Andrew. Andrew, welcome to the crew. We're really glad to have you. Way to go, Andrew. Slipping in under the wire like that. Who will be tomorrow's Andrew? Exactly. It could be you. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We roll right into it after DTNS wraps up available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Just a reminder, we do this show live. Live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechnoShow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.