So what am I going to talk about today? So to begin with, I'm going to introduce you to something called micro VMs, explain what they are. I'm then going to talk about the liquid metal project, which is maintained and sponsored by Weaveworks. I'm going to talk about why the liquid metal project and micro VMs are useful. And then I'm going to demo the thing. So let's begin with an introduction to micro VMs. So let me just expand my notes a little bit bigger. There we go. Micro VMs are exactly what they sound like. They are smaller VMs. They are smaller subset of virtualization tailored for a specific need so you don't have any unnecessary overhead. This makes them almost, almost, as fast to put up and tear down as containers. So if you think of your standard VM, it has to be ready to run any operating system for any possible use case. You don't know what people are going to throw at it. It's going to be ready for anything, which means the hypervisor has to do a lot of work and allocate a ton of resources to accommodate any of these possible scenarios. With a micro VM, you tell the hypervisor to basically half-asset and only set up the exact things that you need. So if you don't need any hardware devices or you only one or two, you only do those things. So micro VMs are designed to give you the best of both worlds. So VMs give security. Containers give you speed. So in this case, you have the speed of almost as fast as a container with the security of having your own kernel, your own operating system.  And because you're excluding a lot of unnecessary functionality, you have a lesser attack surface anyway. So those are micro VMs. So what is the liquid metal project and why a micro VM is relevant for it? So liquid metal is a set of tools to declaratively provision Kubernetes clusters on lightweight VMs, so micro VMs. So this is built and maintained and sponsored by Weaveworks. And it's comprised of these four components that I'm going to go through right now. So the first one is Flintlock. And I'm now regretting not having any notes here because I have to keep looking up to see what's on the slide. So Flintlock creates and manages the lifecycle of micro VMs. So it's a GRPC server it's written in Go. And it runs on a bare metal host that can technically run anywhere, but here I'm talking about bare metal hosts. And you say, I would like a micro VM. I would like a ephemeral throwaway environment started out really fast to run a very specific use case. And Flintlock will handle that for you. See, it's too small here. So this Flintlock can technically be used independently of liquid metal. And I actually do this myself sometimes if I want to create a micro VM real quick to run some tests. And I don't really want to use a container because it doesn't give me enough functionality for the test I want to run. I'll quickly spin up Flintlock. But it is primarily designed to run Kubernetes nodes. And it works with cluster API provider micro VM. So CAPMVM is a CAPI provider. It's an infrastructure provider. So when you're creating a brand new CAPI workload cluster, you say, I want to use CAPMVM. I want to create my Kubernetes nodes in micro VMs on bare metal hardware. So this as well as the Flintlock components, they're both open source in the WeWorks liquid metal organization. And yeah, that's all I've got on that slide. Sorry again. And then that comes to Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor. So these are both open source VMMs. Firecracker created by AWS, Cloud Hypervisor by Intel, they're written in Rust, and they're basically the core process executors. They're the things that are creating the micro VM. So Flintlock is wrapping either one of these two. So you can choose the one you want. And this will, they're based on the KVM in Linux. And so Flintlock will call out to either one of these and create starter process, which will run as a micro VM. And then once that's booted, you can then start your Kubernetes node. So the last component I want to mention is ContainerD. You all know what this is. You've seen it in Kubernetes and Docker running containers and stuff. In our case in liquid metals case, we use it to pull down images. So when you start your micro VM, you say, I want this kernel. I want these kernel modules. I want this operating system. ContainerD goes on fetch as those and prepares them for mounting into the micro VM. So let's just go through what I said, but with pictures. So this is me, you, whatever. Talking to a CAPI management cluster. Let's pretend it's on my Dell and it's a kind cluster. I've got CAPI controllers running. I've got CAPM VM running.  I want a cluster. CAPI and VM will look at my list of bare metal hosts and it will go and talk to each one of them. And it will go and talk to Flintlock, the GRPC service running on each of those hosts and say, hey, I want a micro VM. Flintlock will say, okay, it will go to ContainerD. They say, all right, I need this kernel. I need these kernel modules and I need this operating system. Go get them. ContainerD does that. Once that's down, one too fast. Once that's down, FlintlockD will talk to Firecracker and Firecracker will then boot the process. So we'll start a process. It looks a lot like container actually, because as you know, containers are just processes. They're not actually real. So when you're looking at it on the command line, it looks like a process. So Firecracker will start the micro VM process. At which point, I assume we'll know how CAPI works, but CAPI will have set up some user data to bootstrap the machine into a Kubernetes node. That will run. The Kubernetes node has started. And then I can use it as like a cluster doing stuff. Whatever you use a cluster for. So use cases. Why would you want to use liquid metal? Why are micro VMs cool? Why all of this? So these are all kind of related to the first obvious one is edge computing. Micro VMs have a lower footprint, so you kind of can just use them at the edge. We have lower resource environments. That makes sense. Similar again to number two. So I've got like a homelab here. This is my Raspberry Pi setup. I'm going to get on to that in a minute. I know this is why you claim you didn't come to listen to me talk about it. Like it's coming, it's coming, I promise. Bare metal again. It's all really related I know. I was just trying to write the list, right? And the last one is an actual practical use case, which is CI cell-posted runners. Because if you want to maybe run test more efficiently, but containers aren't quite doing it for you, this is actually a very practical use case. You don't have to do it on Raspberry Pi again. This is a toy. You don't have to run on Raspberry Pi, but you can do CI runners on actual larger systems. So demo. It's a fake out. There's more stuff, don't worry. There's more slides. We'll get to the demo in a minute, okay? So yeah, this is the use case. This is a proof of concept, and I cannot stress that enough. It is a proof of concept that I wrote just for this conference. So I'm using cell-posted give hub actions, and I've got a liquid metal cluster running on these Raspberry Pi boards.  There are some links people who are watching the slides later. So what components am I using? I'm using something called the actions-runner controller. This is an open source project. I can't remember these stuff, so I believe it's sponsored by HelloFresh. It's now part of the official GitHub Actions organization. At least I can see what it is, because I can see the URL moved. And it's quite cool. It lets you create a runner deployment where you can have a pool of ephemeral runners that are just in pods. They will be registered as runners in GitHub Actions. And when you start a job, it will run in the pod, and then it will self-destruct afterwards, and you'll get a brand new pod. Very exciting. The other component I'm doing, this is the one that I made for this demo, is the micro-VM action-runner. It's a proof of concept. It's an HTTP service, and it responds to a GitHub webhook. So it will create ad hoc micro-VMs.  I had hoped to do this really nicely, like have a controller with maybe hot pools and some scaling, but I quit. We've worked like a month ago, and then I haven't actually had time to do the thing, so I'm really sorry. You get the HTTP service, but dream big. Imagine it's going to be really cool. Well, cooler. Okay? So benefits. Why would anyone want to go through the hassle of setting up a separate CI system? Why not use Jenkins? So there's a lot of benefits. I've only had a certain number of space on the slides, so I'm just crushing old one. So CI infrastructure is kind of, I don't know, when you think about CI infrastructure, it's kind of a bit of an add-on when you are in a cloud-native software shop. We use Jenkins, we set the CI, we use GitHub Actions, and so it's kind of old-fashioned. There's a lot of traditional legacy infrastructure going on there, which is a bit of a bottleneck. Micro-VMs are actually sort of more performant, and because they have a lower overhead when it comes to setup, that you can get higher, faster feedback on your tests, and you end up using, obviously, because they're smaller, you have a high utilization of your runner infrastructure. You're using more of the box that it's running on rather than starting up a huge VM, which takes up more room than it needs, and you end up, your tests end up using very little of it. So traditional runners have a long wait to the spin-up times, Micro-VMs reduce that. Traditional CI provides speed at the cost of complexity and or safety, because yes, you can run your CI in Docker, I know GitHub actually gives you this, but it kind of encourages Docker in Docker, or encourages privileged host access and other work arounds, which isn't massively secure. As I said before, Micro-VMs provide the flexibility of container builds with actual sandboxing, so you don't, it doesn't share, they don't share kernels with a host and they don't require any privilege. They have everything that they need to test all the crazy stuff that you're doing without anything interfering with the host. CI infrastructure often requires that runners are available from a hot pool of nodes, because I know I said earlier, traditional CI takes a long time to spin up, but you're thinking, no, it doesn't, if I have my Ubuntu VM, it ready immediately. Yes, because there's a hot pool running all the time. And if you think of, so GitHub Actions, for example, because that's what I'm using, but I think they're using Azure or EC2 VMs, I can't remember which, they are running constantly to accommodate hundreds of thousands of builds a minute, probably. So this is stuff running all the damn time. Micro-IMs, you don't actually need that because they start fast enough that unless you need an answer within three seconds, you can wait 20 seconds for the thing to start, then run and you're golden. You don't need all these massive VMs just waiting, spinning for something to pick it up. Micro-IMs let you test things that require low level things like init system, system D, other low level kernel things. Containers and many other CI runners don't let you do this. For example, when I was testing Flintlock itself on GitHub Actions, I couldn't because they don't enable KVM, I couldn't do that.  But now we don't move Flintlock to test Flintlock itself. So I can test Flintlock on this, which is actually really neat. And other things if you're running tests and kernels of eight, like you've got an eBPF program. So you can run those in Micro-IMs, but you can't run them in containers or a lot of traditional CI. So I need to drink now. Okay, there we go. Nikki, am I speaking slowly enough? Sorry, she needs to check for me. Okay, other benefits are environmentally related. Because you've got faster build and start times, you're actually reducing your average time to results. So that's always nice. As I said before, warm pools aren't necessary unless you desperately want them. Even if you do have them, they're taking up less space so you're using your equipment or efficiently. And again, because you're using the right size environment, the smallest environment for your tests, you end up reducing the overall cost because you can fit more Micro-IMs onto the same hardware as you would regular VMs. Build caches can be shared between runners because they can be mounted, which ensures we're not constantly writing on changed dependencies to disks. I know that HAC can get her back to do this, but it's not by design. It's HAC. And finally, just that Micro-IMs require lower disk usage in general because they basically act like containers. So you've got all the kernel layers, all the operating system layers being snapped off and shared. So you end up having less on-disk to begin with. Okay, here's another picture, still no demo for you yet. I've just reiterated what I've shown you before, so it's fresh in your mind. So what we've got here on the left is my laptop, which is the Dell, running my kind management cluster. It's running Cappy and CathMVM. Then I've got four Raspberry Pi boards. These are all Model 4Bs. They're running Ubuntu 20.04 because that's one I like. They're four gigs of RAM with microSDs, so they're a little bit slower, simply because I didn't want to bring more stuff like SSDs on here, but yeah, we'll live with that as long. So three of these boards are running a liquid metal cluster, which I triggered before I got on stage just because the demo was quite long already. I've only done one node per board because I don't want to, it's very, this is a very low resourcing, four gigs of RAM, there's not a lot going on there. Really small microSDs. So I've done one node per board, not just not to push it. And more importantly, this is fun. Again, this is fun. This is a toy. Don't use this as a professional setting. Okay, so interesting stuff about the network if anyone cares. So when micro VMs start, they need an IP naturally. I could just connect it to something to let it connect to the Wi-Fi and get something automatically allocated as they come up from the conference Wi-Fi, but I wanted to control it, so I have a DHCP server running on my Dell. And the IPs are allocated from a private range in my dedicated VLAN, which is configured by this managed switch. So each micro VM gets a Mac VTAP interface with that IP, which is parented to the board's VLAN interface, which is parented to the board's Ethernet interface. Traffic from and to VMs is then forwarded via NAT rules, which are configured on the Dell. So any traffic coming in on the VLAN subnet on these boards will get sent out through the Dell Ethernet and then back again. More pictures. So this is a zoom out of the hackery to get this working. And this is what nearly broke me this morning when I tested it out to 10 a.m. and it did not work because the network would not connect because my hack originally began because I've done this at previous conferences before. So the hackery originally began as a Wi-Fi extender which would connect to conference Wi-Fi and then I could plug in an Ethernet cable to the switch, then further Ethernet cables to all the boards in my Dell. But the Wi-Fi extender trick wasn't working. Unfortunately, it was saved by the AV guys who showed me there was an Ethernet cable here. So the day was saved. You don't have to watch a recording because if you watch a recording, then how do you know it's using boards at all? It could just be using EC2 and it was all, could have all been a fake out. Fully, no, it's a fake out map. Actually, I could be using EC2. These could be lights that I just turned on. Like you don't even know. You can come find me after just to verify if you really want to. So why did I go through all this drama? Why did I not just connect to the conference Wi-Fi and be done with it? Four reasons, one, I wanted my own private network. I wanted to control the NAT traffic. I wanted to control the DHCP, the IP pool. I wanted it all to be private. Second one is when the liquid metal cluster starts, it needs the API 7.8 and IP. I need to know what that is in advance because I couldn't be able to do DNS or whatever. So I couldn't exactly go and ask the conference people, can I look at your router to see where free IP is in your pool? That would be awkward. So this way, it's come from my private network. I know what it is, that's fine, that's fine. Third reason is I wanted to power the boards over ethernet. So I'm using a power over ethernet hat for each board. I don't want to have a mess of cables turning on. So each board is getting power out of the same cable, which is really cool. And the last one is, as I said before, the microvm's, when they start, they are created with MagVTab interfaces and MagVTab interfaces do not work wirelessly. They require a wired connection. If you want to know more about that, come find me after, bring a cookie, and I will answer the question. Also, by the way, I apologize for this really attractive shoe box. I kind of wanted to lift up to show it. And my running shoe box is kind of all I had. So, sorry about that. Okay, so I created the cluster ahead of time. If you want to see how that actually works, I did, I demoed that in Kubernetes Community Days. It was in the UK in November. And I should have linked it here, but I forgot, really sorry. So this is what I'm going to be showing. So the first job is going to be running in a pheromone pod. So I'll trigger a job in GitHub Actions. I'll trigger a job in GitHub Actions, which will go to the action queue, which will be picked up by one of the runners, which was started by the action runner controller.  The next one, I will ask the job to be run in a dedicated microvm. So I'll trigger the job in GitHub Actions. I'll get picked up by a webhook, which will be sent to the microvm service, which will talk to Flintlock on the top Raspberry Pi board. And it will create a dedicated microvm registered as a GitHub action runner for the job. It will run the job, it will self destruct, and we're done. By the way, the jobs that they're going to run, I did have them initially running like Go tests, but then you have to wait for like the Go stuff to download. And so it's just echoing like a string congratulating your test pass. So we get to feel good about it. Okay, yeah, let's demo the thing. Let's do it. That's the backup video, which you don't have to watch. So let me just, you know what? Actually, I'm gonna mirror now, I think, so I can see what I'm typing. No, that's not what I want. Can someone like, hum a theme tune to something while I'm doing this? Just like some mood music? Where are my display settings? There we go. Mirror. All right, I'm gonna, how do I make it bigger? Like that, no? Does anyone know how to work Ubuntu desktop? I don't usually use this. Not that. Oh, there we go. Zoom in, be bigger. Is that big enough for everyone? Can people see stuff? Cool, okay. So lucky you, this is all scripted, so nobody has to watch me type. So I did this ahead of time, but I'm just gonna show you what I did, so if you're following along at home, these are the commands that you do to get this up and running. So I've created my kind cluster, and yes, that's exactly how fast kind gets started on this machine. I then set some cap MVM variables, and I've done my cluster cut all in it. You all know how this works. And yay, that happened really fast. Not even cert manager took that long to install this time. Amazing. I'm setting some more settings now for my workload cluster. So this is the cluster that will be applied. Let's pretend I haven't done it yet. That will be applied to my Raspberry Pi cluster here. So there we go. I've set my IP, I've set my worker machine count, set my control plane count. Just one control plane, two workers, nothing massive here. I've applied it, and yay, it works. Cool. Let's have a look. At what that is. So this is your workload cluster manifest if you're creating a cap MVM cluster. Most of it, you already know if you've done CAPI. Key points are this is my list of bare metal hosts. Right now, we've only implemented static pool allocation. So I had to actually name my addresses of where my flintlock host is running. In future, we're gonna have some sort of clever scheduler where it will know exactly when new machines come up and down so it can find those bare metal ones and put more nodes onto it. So it's gonna be cool. Other things to note is, oh yeah, I am using an image registry because this is not my first time doing a conference demo. I'm not doing a single image from the internet today. So we see that we've got our replicas, we've got one control plane, we've got two workers, and here are some settings for our micro VMs. So you can see that I've specified my kernel, I specified my operating system. So that's all very exciting. Let's go back out of there. What's next? Oh yeah, so this already exists. So I'm gonna go get the secret, and there are my nodes, and let's use canines to look at our stuff. So there is my liquid metal cluster running. We can go have a look at that actually. So these four panes are SSH onto these boards. Again, you're gonna have to trust me on that. That's not EC2, it's not anywhere else. It's literally right here. It's these ones for real, okay? So that's definitely what's happening here. So the top left is the bottom one, so let's Raspberry Pi zero, then bottom left is Raspberry Pi one, top right is Raspberry Pi two, and bottom right is Raspberry Pi three. So I've got the control plane running here on Raspberry Pi one, and you can see these are the boot logs of Firecracker starting the micro-VM process. It's not massively exciting, it's just Linux booting. But here you can see that it was registered as a Kubernetes control plane. And then these are the two things that, these are actually showing the directory structure of Fluent-Norke State, dear. It doesn't prove anything, it's just a directory, but this is how I sort of check to see where things exist at any given time. So we've got a worker node there, and a worker node here. This one I've got, so Raspberry Pi three in the bottom right, I've got nothing going on there because that's the one I'm gonna use to do at hot micro-VMs in just a moment. So let's go back here, and let's use our cluster for stuff.  So this is where we actually put the network to the test.  Again, local registry. It's also gonna install the micro-VM service, and yeah, so talk amongst yourselves, it should be quite quick. And luckily it's behaving today, cool. So all components are healthy. So I did this with Flux because I was in a hurry to get it working, you could use something else. There's lots of GitOps tool like Weave GitOps that you could use to do this, which will give you some nice visualization as well. So that's the cert manager coming up, the action runner controller will use that. And let's give it a moment. I should have had some background music for this. At least my K9's color scheme is pretty right. So there comes the action runner controller. I think down the bottom, yeah, so the micro-VM action runner down there at the bottom is already running, so that's cool. I just need to wait for that to begin, and then it will deploy some runner pods whenever it gets round to it, there we go. And now if we jump back to, not that, go away. Where's my internet, there we go. We go back here, what do I actually want? So I want my, not that, action runners. So there are no runners configured yet. So if we keep an eye on this, we'll see runners eventually pop up. How am I doing for time? Okay, I'm fine. What are you doing? Okay, nothing, it's doing nothing, great. Are you up too? I don't know, it's got everything it needs. Just thinking about it. These, I wanted to show you the pod one first because it's actually exciting than the micro-VM one, but the micro-VM one is actually ready sooner. Conundrum. What else can I show you while I'm waiting? Do you wanna see some network interfaces? Yes, no? Yeah? Okay, let's do that. Let's look at that. I'd better as soon as I click over, it's gonna magically become ready. Okay, so if I control C out of there, and I look at that. So as I said before, so this is all, we're on Raspberry Pi one here. So this is the VLAN interface there, which is parented to the general ethernet port. And then here we can see there are two interfaces that were created for the micro-VM. So one is the Mac VTAP interface here that was created and parented to the VLAN interface. So this is what the micro-VM gets, it's IP and internet access and all of that. And this is another one, which I think is actually the metadata service. I can't really remember. I think it's that. There we go, now it's not ready. God damn it, what are you doing? Fine, I'll do the micro-VM one first. Be like that. Oh wait, no, it began. Okay, fine, fine, cool, it's fine. Everyone focus up again. Okay, stop doing, get off your phones. Cool, so we've now got a micro-VM, we've now got a pod runner. There it is, it's offline, get online. So this is actually something that I learned while I was doing this, is GitHub is, I mean, you all know this, not massively reliable, right? Which is a great thing to use for a live demo with lots of moving parts, very high risk. Anyway, let's trigger a job and hope it comes up eventually.  So what this is gonna do is gonna create a pod, no, a pod already exists, it's gonna run the job in the pod that should be online. Be online, there we go, it's active, it's running, it's running the job, how exciting. So we look at that, it's actually gonna be really quick because it's literally echoing a line. So this is running inside the, yes, thank you, I was quite pleased with that. So yeah, okay, the job already ran and yes, I am awesome, so they passed. Right, let's go on to the next one. So if we go back into here, you'll see that the original pod is destroyed and now we get a new one coming up. So that's fine, it's running tests in a pod on a liquid metal cluster, that's less exciting. We're gonna now look at the micro-VM, the ad-hoc micro-VM one. So we're gonna go to run test with micro-VM, we'll run that, do a thing. So that's gonna start. And if we go to here, oh yeah, the previous one died, don't worry about that. It should come back though. So that should be running there. Oh no, you know what I forgot to do? I forgot to port forward the service. I could have been doing that while it was waiting.  I don't know if it's gonna pick up what I did, so I'll just try it again, why not? Do it again, do the thing. Please work. I still look like Ngrok, by the way, I'm doing a hack, I'm using Ngrok to manage the service and the web hook because I can be able to set up DNS. And I really hope that works. It's done something. I wouldn't worry about that 502, because that's just because I, oh yeah, there we go, created micro-VM. You'll get to watch me have a panic attack in real time. And now we look at Raspberry Pi 3 down here, we can see that a new micro-VM has been created just for this job. If we go back to our runners, we can refresh that. And now we have to wait for the micro-VM to boot, the GitHub action runner to register itself, which is reliant on the GitHub action API, which is just what you want. So we go here, we can actually watch it boot all the way down to Firecracker standard out, follow that. It seems to think it's fine.  Yay, it did a thing. Runner successfully added, though, where are you then? There we go. Oh, it's active, it's already been picked up. See, literally, I click away and it's fine. It's doing its thing. Do the next bit. Wait, did it already run? I didn't, there we go. Yes, there we go. My test pass on a dedicated liquid metal VM. The runner should have self-destructed, but don't worry, that's the pod that came back. Really slowly, what was that doing? And if we look back here, my micro-VM should be being deleted. Oh no, it failed, never mind. Let's pretend that didn't happen, it's all cool, right? Don't worry about it. Okay, I think that's the demo. How do I get to the next screen? There we go. Okay, you did that earlier. I've actually got a slide that tells you when to applaud. Okay, so learnings. As I said, GitHub is not in the least reliable. A couple of times when I was testing this, I had a known issue where runners were available. Jobs were very good and yet they didn't notice them at all. So I was sat there and I was like, okay, when's it gonna pick up? Then I would go and do a tour in the house and then 20 minutes later, it's like, oh, now the job runs. Excellent, well done, GitHub. So there are a couple of merits. I was like, should I be using GitHub to do a live demo like this? I went for it anyway. When I was experimenting with all this, I wrote a 40-page document analysis on how this could be more efficient than running, not this, not Raspberry Pi, but a general bare metal liquid metal setup could be more efficient than using your standard enterprise CI package. And theoretically, it is more cost-efficient if you set it up carefully. But again, there's then the overhead of maintaining it. So it's kind of swings around about so whatever your organization can afford to do. But it is, I don't know if you noticed, but I keep seeing loads of comments saying, we're moving away from cloud. We're back to on-premise, like really? But going back to that time, it seems to be hot these days. So I think this is a really interesting thing. There's lots of other tools that are coming out that are using micro-VM technology. And liquid metal is one of those options. Now you can clap. So here's some documentation. The one on the left is how to get this billed. The one on the right is the liquid metal documentation. You can run liquid metal on any bare metal service. I test it on Equinix sometimes, or I test it on my Raspberry Pi setup. But yeah, that's all I've got for you. And I am literally 30 seconds until the end, so there's no time for questions, which I'm devastated about. Come and find me afterwards. Thank you so much.


Coming up on DTNS is Woblox screwing over recording artists? Can the US government help ease the supply chain strain? And is Microsoft entering a post-console existence? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 10th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Drafalino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. For the show on Good Day Internet, we were talking about the perks you get when you get a new haircut, depending on where you live. And all sorts of other things. If you want that wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, also known as GDI, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet network, is reportedly in talks with several airlines to provide their in-flight Wi-Fi service at a panel at the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit on Wednesday. SpaceX's VP of Starlink and commercial sales, Jonathan Hoffler, stated, we've already done some demonstrations to date and looking to get that product finalized to be put on aircraft in the very near future. Motherboard sources shared forum posts made by hackers claiming to have stolen source code for electronic arts, FIFA 21 code for EA's matchmaking server, also source code and tools for the Frostbite engine and various frameworks and SDKs totaling 780 gigabytes of data. EA has since confirmed to Motherboard it suffered a data breach and the hackers claims are correct, but that no player data was accessed and EA doesn't think there's any risk to player privacy. Sony has revealed its Airpeak S1 drone specs geared toward professional videographers. For a mere $9,000, the Airpeak S1 works with Sony's A7S Mark III, FX3 and 8K capable Alpha 1 mirrorless cameras that attach with a custom Grem CT3 gimbal. The Airpeak has between 12 to 22 minutes of flight time depending on the load, stays stables and winds up to 44.7 miles per hour and can go from 0 to 50 in 3.5 seconds. Sony expects shipping to start this fall. GBS, world's largest meat supplier, announced that it paid ransomware hacking group REVOL about $11 million. The attack led to meat plants across the U.S. and Australia shutting down for more than 24 hours. In a statement, GBS claims it was able to get its systems operational again without a decryptor from REVOL, but it chose to pay to keep the files safe. And following a New York Times report into the practice, Google is altering their search algorithm to lower rankings for sites specializing in posting negative information about people and charging them to remove it. The head of Google's search quality team, Pan-Duneak, said the company has been fighting slanderous content websites behind the scenes for a number of years and their removal request forms get millions of visits a year. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about Microsoft and how it may pull away from the pack when it comes to gaming hardware. Microsoft announced it's working with global TV manufacturers to expand its Xbox Game Pass subscription service to third-party smart TVs and is also building its own streaming devices for cloud gaming to reach gamers on any TV or monitor without the need for a console at all. Currently, subscribers can use the beta version of Xbox Cloud gaming service on Android and iOS, but that's limited. Xbox Game Pass has up to now let users download games locally to capable hardware like a console or a PC, and that's in order to deal with video game file sizes and network requirements. Now, this could help differentiate Microsoft from hardware competitors, Sony and Nintendo come to mind. And with any luck, it might fare better than Google's Stadia, at least Stadia so far. Game Pass's numbers as of April 2021 show 23 million subscribers, you know, and that's as it was before this announcement. So there's certainly potential and room to grow. This news comes ahead of Microsoft Sunday showcase at E3 where it's expected to announce more information on Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda software titles. So this could tie into some interesting gaming announcements. The company also announced its expanding cloud gaming to more countries later this year, including Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Japan. You know, looking at this announcement, obviously big kind of almost, definitely coming for Stadia's launch, almost kind of getting in this Chromecast space with like this dedicated streaming hardware. I could see having some other extensions into that as well, depending on how they want to take it. But, you know, going back to Microsoft's original plans with Xbox, it seems like services have always kind of been baked into that. And they're like a console was just a way to do that. You know, going back to Xbox Live Gold, I'm kind of setting the, you know, setting the tone for charging for multiplayer gameplay and that and other kind of services and stuff like that. Even on through the Xbox one where you see Microsoft having other ambitions beyond just being a game console and the recent disclosure of that they've never actually made any money off Xbox console hardware. Now everyone assumes these are kind of lost leaders, especially for the first couple of years of console life. But I think Microsoft would be thrilled if they didn't have to make a console and they could serve, you know, they could provide these services and make money the way they've always been making money, which is people paying for either titles or access, you know, to a subscription service. I think they would be thrilled if they didn't have to make a console sometime soon. You know, the industry seems to all be in agreement that at a certain point, when all of the connections get fast enough and now obviously the cloud computing is certainly there, this will be the reality. It depends on when you jump on the boat and when you don't. If we are going to roundly assume that maybe Stadia was too early or Google was not the right player to make it happen, Xbox and Microsoft, which have big AAA titles that are exclusive to them, offering a different lower price of a barrier or at least a subscription price and not a one time fee to buy oftentimes rare and hard to get hardware makes a little bit more sense. The question that I would say going forward is going to be exactly how aggressively they push into this and we'll probably get a roadmap for that at E3. Yeah, I mean, it's somebody who I do not own a gaming console and it's always just been, do I care enough about any particular games where I would have to go Xbox or PlayStation or you know, the Nintendo route and it's always sort of like, I don't know. It's all very segmented and that was for a reason, right?  So I think that even though Game Pass has 23 million subscribers, all of the potential subscribers, perhaps like me or even people who are that much more interested in gaming than I am saying, oh, great subscription service, got it. This is, yeah, much lower barrier to entry. I don't have to buy a console.  But if it's working with a smart TV that I already have or yeah, it's a low price streaming stick of some kind, that yeah, maybe like you said, Rich does other things. Not Nintendo, Microsoft didn't really go into details on whether it's just one device or if it's going to be multiple. But yeah, it sounds like the company is like, okay, let's just forget this whole sell the console only. That's the only way that you can get this. Sure, enough people are still going to want to go that route. But for all the folks who don't, you're just gonna sell them a lot more game passes. Yeah, let me just say on top of that, the idea of that streaming stick doing something else I think is something that has sailed. We now see so many devices that do so many of these kinds of things and all of them stream the same kind of apps that you would have previously seen on a device like this or in an Xbox and in the way they were trying to sell it as a media container. This is a way to get Halo into somebody's hands that wouldn't otherwise buy a console to play Halo. All right, well the National Music Publishers Association or NMPA filed suit against the gaming company Roblox for illegally using songs from artists and is seeking a minimum of $200 million in damages. The NMPA is representing a handful of publisher plaintiffs in this case. NMPA president and CEO David Israelite claims that Roblox's user base of 42 million active players earns Roblox hundreds of millions of dollars by requiring users to pay every time they upload music onto the platform, taking advantage of young people's lack of understanding about copyright and then they take virtually no action to prevent repeat infringement or alert users to the risks they are taking. Israelite also said the NMPA will increase efforts to ID and remove all unlicensed music from Twitch. So they're kind of targeting two pillars of the modern gaming community here. Twitch previously said in response to compliance that it acts on each valid DMCA notification and removes the allegedly infringing content as soon as it's validated in compliance with DMCA requirements. In its response, Roblox says it will defend itself vigorously as we work to achieve a fair resolution with the music publishers. So what are the options here? I guess like Roblox changes its TOS so that liability shifted to creators. Are we gonna see content ID kind of style system going on? Justin, how do you read the tea leaves of the 3D chess here? There's only one way that this ends. And it's with the publishers getting a cut of the money that Roblox is charging. There's a reason why they're going after Roblox and not the users, even though they acknowledge in their lawsuit that it's the users that are putting themselves in a perilous legal position. It's because Roblox has the money. If Roblox wasn't charging to have them upload it, then maybe they would be able to take some other action. I mean, hell, that's what they are doing with Twitch. With Twitch, they're saying, look, we're gonna DMCA the users. By the way, if you're streaming on Twitch, make sure to delete your bots, especially if you play copyrighted music on it because those are the kinds of things that get DMCA for content stuff and you could get strikes on your channel. Resuming this particular talking point, that's the only thing that they want. They want the cash from Roblox because Roblox is extraordinarily popular and they want to taste. They want to wet their beak. Yeah, I can't imagine, especially because Roblox's user base skews so, so young. And there probably are a great number of users who just have no idea how copyright works in Roblox is not spelling it out and maybe it occurs none of the radar are a little bit too long here. But yes, for the company to say, well, read the terms of service and if you do something illegal, then you're probably gonna get sued by some large music industry trade group. That's not gonna fly either. It will become something where, yes, there is a sharing of the pot between Roblox and the NMPA. And what that is, I mean, the only way that would really change much for the user is if the user needs to pay more in order to do that because Roblox wants to say greedy and still take a cut and give music industries that much more of the cut that they're getting. I don't really know. Maintain their profit margins, Sarah. I think it's interesting to see Roblox's, clearly the money that they're bringing. I mean, they're bringing in billions of dollars in revenue that the NMPA is saying, oh, the poor young user that just wants to use this music, they don't, like that's a very different tone than that we've heard in the past. Yeah, because the kids don't have the money. Last year, Google's head of AI research, Jeff Dean told ZDNet that he was experimenting with AI to design chips in order to cut costs and produce more efficient designs. In research paper published in the scientific journal Nature, Google Research explained that they've developed algorithms to design computer chips more efficiently. Designing the physical layout of a chip, also known as floor planning is a complex and time intensive task. Researchers developed algorithms to treat floor planning like a game with components as pieces and canvas acting as the board. The winning results based on the performance used valuation metrics based on reference data sets of the 10,000 chip placements. Researchers claim this method can generate manufactured chip floor plans in under six hours compared to months of intense effort by human experts. The researchers also say that Google has already adopted the method and used it to produce the recent generation tensor processing unit. So being able to say, hey, this could be less than one full workday versus months of intense work by humans, it's tough to argue against this being a great idea, at least for some kinds of chip development and manufacturing. This is cool. It's clearly Google's been working on this for some time. They have some examples of it working in the tensor processing unit, as you mentioned, Justin. And that argument of, well, I mean, what are the experts gonna do, right? If this is, you just teach AI to treat this all like a game of chess. What does this say about human expertise? And I think it says a lot about what humans can have already built. They've built the system. This came from humans, right? So, you know, the humans now can hone this process and have so much more time to be experts. So the one thing is that at first blush, like this seems like something, oh, they can really speed up new product development with new chips. And yes, that may be a component of this. But I hope this provides the opportunity, you know, in terms of, you know, people being willing to use their time in different ways. Sure, this would be great if this could speed up product development. But also, you know, we've seen now, for a number of years now, big architectural problems that we're experiencing with chip architectures like X86 with Spectre and Meltdown. There's a couple other on the ARM side that, you know, aren't quite as devastating, perhaps stuff like that. We're seeing stuff with row hammer attacks where like the infrastructure of memory is at risk because it's becoming more increasingly dense. I'm hoping that because, okay, we don't have to spend the human time designing this chip layout. We can just have a machine learning algorithm take care of that for us or take care of most of the workforce. We could spend more time looking for things like that that are way harder to fix once that chip is actually out there. One thing on this in terms of the AI component, I think it's a great example of what AI is and is not. AI effectively, a way to think of it is instead of an Oracle at Delphi or some magic in the machine that's able to just think of things faster than humans can. Think of it like a guessing machine. And if you're looking at something like designing a chip, that's a complex series of guesswork, but because it has the horsepower, it can do it. This is not a replacement for humans, but it is a tool that can lead humans in the direction that can perfect these kinds of floor plans that can make better things. Indeed. Well, if you'd like a DTNS hat, they're very nice. Hoodie, also nice. Mask, mouse, pads, we have it all. We have all that and more, in fact, at our DTNS store. If you haven't looked at it in a while or you never have, do it now. DailyTechnewshow.com slash store. Well, this is shaping up to be a pretty big week of news for tech out of the Biden administration. On Tuesday, the administration released its findings after conducting an interagency review on how to shore up U.S. supply chains. As a result of the report findings, the Department of Energy will create a 10-year plan to create a supply chain for EV lithium batteries that's based in the U.S. with the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, catchy name, set to distribute $17 billion for domestic R&D. The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, will lead a task force looking at U.S. sites for 17 rare earth metals, which mostly come from China and certainly mostly from overseas. The report will also see greater supply chain transparency from the semiconductor industry and devote $100 million in grants to trained government workers on these new initiatives as well as prioritizing existing grants that provide for domestic production. In other news, political sources say House Democrats could introduce a series of five tech regulation bills as early as this week. One draft bill will let federal prosecutors sue to break up tech companies if they're found to have a conflict of interest. Another bill would require platforms to easily let users move data to other services, so data portability, mirroring a bipartisan 2019 Senate bill. A third bill would bar platforms from self-preferencing, targeting things like the Apple's App Store and Amazon Marketplace. The final two draft bills would also require tech acquisitions to show clear and convincing evidence in court that a potential rival startup couldn't compete with it or pose a competitive threat and increase merger fees, which there is bipartisan, that increasing merger fees seems to be some bipartisan support there as well. These are draft bills right now. They're not even, you know, kind of circulating out there, so we will see what final form they take when they're out there, and then it's into the political wilds. So Justin, which is the bigger piece of news and I guess, you know, could help us out here to understand where this is, both of these are going. Before we even choose from these two, let me add two other things for you. Number one, passing the Senate this week was a bill that is meant to keep America competitive with Chinese interest specifically in technology. That has a bit of a tricky road to pass in the House before it gets signed by the President, but something to keep your eye on. In terms of politics, the Biden administration, which Joe Biden is in Europe for conferences over the next week, has said that during his meeting with Vladimir Putin, he is going to directly bring up the fact that he holds Russia specifically culpable for some of the ransomware attacks that have originated from Russia and basically accusing them of turning a blind eye to it. Where we go from there, that is a big question. But if you are looking at all of this, the thing that matters the most right now is the first story that you talked about. The idea that this supply chain, which is a problem here, we found out during the pandemic that even if you are not a China hawk and you don't believe that China specifically poses a diametric conflict of interest with the United States of America, if you have an interruption of an overly distributed supply chain, then you have problems getting products here to America. We saw it with not only some of these rare earth metals and stuff like that, but also on a smaller scale with PPE and with drug manufacturing. When you have a lot of that stuff that happens overseas and all of a sudden those supply lines are cut down for reasons that are out of your control, you need to maybe rethink how much is produced here in American borders. Yeah, big week. Politics, politics, politics is, well, you're always busy, but a lot of news close to home. I stay busy, Sarah. You see, I'm busy. Well, also busy. Delivery drivers, ride-hailing and delivery companies are always looking for ways to utilize their drivers most efficiently. The UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo has a new idea for their drivers, and that is reporting crimes. Now, you might say, that's crazy, how's that gonna work? Well, the company is partnering with the Crime Prevention Network Neighborhood Watch to offer optional training, non-mandatory, it's optional, to help drivers spot signs of street harassment, domestic abuse, human trafficking, drug smuggling, in many cases, you know, kind of big deals. All training will be verified by the Metropolitan Police and include safety and awareness training for drivers. This isn't Deliveroo's first foray into driver training, partnering with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children last year to train 7,000 drivers to spot signs of child abuse. Now, on the surface, you might say, well, yeah, I mean, we don't want bad people doing bad things, and if the delivery drivers are out and about and see something funny and have been trained, you know, more than just sort of maybe that there's something funny going on, so that they have a little bit more of a leg up as to what's right and what's wrong. That's a good thing, right? But there's so many potential problems with this. I don't quite know where to start. There are so many ways that this could go sideways.  But at the same time, like as a driver, if I get this optional training, is does the UK have some sort of, I don't even know if it would qualify as a good Samaritan law where you're liable if you're, if you accuse someone or pass on a tip about human trafficking and that turns out to not pan out.   Or even if it does pan out and you get like pulled into some legal thing where you're like a delivery driver and you're kind of busy and, you know, it's, or these, yeah, these are, I mean, getting into, these could also tie into organized crime. This could also tie into, if you exist in a society where there are perhaps biases within your society, this is, it does nothing, but it passed those directly on, right? We even get to what they will do and whether or not it is a net good. The question is, why are they doing this? And to me, there's only two paths, either A, there is some kind of connection where they can get a local or national grant from some governmental organization that says, okay, we'll pay you money or cover the costs of your drivers getting trained at some base level. So effectively maybe think of it less like human CCTV cameras and more like everybody knows how to do CPR just in case, right? That there are in horrifying, very clear examples. You know how to identify that as opposed to just somebody walking down the street or they are trying to play a PR game and say, hey, look, we're not just a company that delivers you ramen. We're also a place where somebody might have their life saved. Now, if they did not lead with the fact that somebody had their life saved during an announcement like this, that means that that has not happened on some even anecdotal level. Good point. So I guess the bigger, one of the other questions is that does this imply that these delivery couriers are somehow obliged to do all this as part of their normal job of delivering food? One would think, yeah, if you opt into the optional training, you're saying, I want to take this on. So if you don't catch something, are you then liable? That would be ridiculous. If somebody, nobody's getting punished if they deliver a pizza to somebody and they accidentally, and they miss the fact that a guy is doing, got kidnapped or something. Like, that's not, I think the idea is they can identify these things. And so if they do talk to police and they say, oh, well, what did you see? They know the signs that they can then say. You know, it goes back to what Rich says. There's a lot of ways this goes sideways. And I'd probably, I don't know if this is probably the most effective way for any of this to happen, but it's not the most effective at all. But also the question, why are they trying to make these delivery drivers into? It's because it's feet on the ground. This is the thing, at least in the UK, the number of metropolitan force police officers is going to be cut due to budgetary constraints. So if you can somehow, what you are alluding to, Justin, somehow get some sort of grant and say, hey, we can have extra eyes out there for you because you don't have enough officers because of budget cuts. Then, hey, you can save a boatload of money and still have quote, unquote, the same kind of surveillance that you would require to, you know, the prosecutor job. Yes, and just because everybody who knows CPR is not personally required to save somebody that is choking. Now they should, they might want to. They'll know how to do it if they do, but it's not like they're going to get, you're not going to get arrested because it's like, you knew CPR and that man was choking on a cannoli. Not less that you'll get, no, no, not that you'll get arrested, but you could, I don't know in Britain if this would be a thing, but somehow get caught up in a lawsuit. But that's just me paranoid talking. Well, one thing that doesn't make me paranoid is something that Arcade One Up announced. They're adding this Simpsons to its retro home arcade cabinet lineup 30 years after Konami first released the game. No official price yet, but word is around $600 when pre-orders begin July 15th at arcadeoneup.com. Arcade One Up's parent company, Tastemakers has already sold over two million machines with popular licensed titles like Street Fighter, X-Men, Atari and Pac-Man. The Simpsons machine will have a few bells and whistles like a light up marquee and Wi-Fi connectivity for online play. And I believe it also comes packed in with one other game. If you get tired of beating up people with legendary side scroller. This was this along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the game that you played when it was your friend's birthday and somebody's parent would just break off a $20 bill, pour quarters into this thing to the end. I always played Homer. What a game. I don't know. Maybe I should get it. You should get this. It could be it could be a kind of a cool thing for the PX3 studio. I think I need more friends to come over to play because it is always calling to you that you need four people playing at the same time. But Wi-Fi connectivity for online play, Justin, modern world. Ooh. That is not true. Yeah. Scott Johnson, we were talking about this yesterday and I know he has one of the other home arcade. I don't remember which one he said he had, but from Arcade One Up, someone was like... Joust. I believe Joust. Yes, yes, yes. And said, this is so great. I regret to say I have not played The Simpsons, at least in my recent memory. The reason why you want all four controllers is you can not your buddy who's right next to you. There is a certain level of... There's a certain level of social etiquette that goes out the window. And it becomes very friendly at first, but then it gets kind of visceral as you get toward the end and you eat the one power-up that you want. I mean, that's a Mortal Kombat move. That's a Street Fighter move when you're playing against people, but Simpsons is you're all playing together. No, not the way I used to play. We used to like... You would steal the power-ups. So don't go over Roger's house. Yeah, so I never go over Roger's house. You were definitely not at my birthday party. That's crazy fast. All right, Rich, what's in the mailbag today? All right. Well, last time Allison Sheridan was on the show, we were talking about Amazon Sidewalk Network going live, but Allison didn't have an option in her settings to disable it. She did a little research and then wrote in. She said she determined that her Amazon-owned products are either too old or not quite the right models to be part of Sidewalk. For example, I have an Echo 2nd generation, but Sidewalk requires a 3rd generation. I have a ring spotlight cam that is fairly new, but it's battery operated and it's only the wired version that is part of Sidewalk, understandably. My ring alarm system is also not part of Sidewalk. If you don't have any devices compatible with Sidewalk, Amazon doesn't want you worrying.  That's so considerate of Amazon not to confuse me with my opt-outs. It's also, I mean, you'd think like, oh, that's all pretty obvious, but Amazon did not do a good job of explaining that because we were all sort of like, I said, well, I see Sidewalk in my settings and Allison said, I don't know, what's up? I did the same thing. I did the same thing. But if you have thoughts about Sidewalk, arcades or anything else, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Indeed. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Dan Kolbeck, Jeffrey Zilx and Michael Bolik. Also, very, very, very, very, very special. Thanks to Daniel Dorado, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We appreciate all the years of support Daniel and thanks to all our patrons. Also, thanks to Justin and Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, what's new in the world of politics? Well, everybody listening to me in New York City, I will be coming to your windswept Hamlet in a couple of weeks for the big New York City mayoral Democratic primary, which will effectively decide who the next mayor of New York City is going to be. It's a wild race, including a new controversy wherein the frontrunner may or may not live in New Jersey. Oh my gosh, I saw those photos. About his fridge might be the smoking gun. You can listen to all of it and of course follow all my coverage of my trip out to New York City to cover that at politicspoliticspolitics.com or px3podcast.com. Excellent. We're also live Monday through Friday on this here show for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Join us if you can and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom's back tomorrow and will be joined by Chris Ashley and Lynn Feralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


Receiving necessities from one area food shelf will be a little easier this year. The Hubbard County Food Shelf has updated its intake process, eliminating a time-consuming step for those receiving their services. Melmeyer has more from Park Rapids. The Hubbard County Food Shelf will now provide on-site intake after learning that its former process did not meet regulations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Clients will fill out their paperwork in here. According to the 2014 Emergency Food Assistance Program Policy Manual, distribution sites must maintain an intake process for walk-ins. It also does not allow the food shelves to discuss private information with other providers, which the clients used to do before their first visit. Instead of them having to go to social services and or Mojave to fill out this paperwork and bring over a voucher, they are going to be a one-stop shop here. Last year, the food shelf served about 350 households each month. For a smaller location, with at times just two volunteers on duty, the change may negatively affect the volunteers at first. Because we have not done the front-end paperwork in the past, we're concerned about the logistics and how many people are showing up and how we're going to handle that. So far, eight people have been trained on the new process. Hansen says the rest of the volunteers will eventually learn it as well. Although it's going to be difficult to get through the first month or so, once we get used to it, it's going to work fine. The food shelf says that it could use more volunteers in order to make the process run smoothly. In Park Rapids, I'm Mal Meyer, Lakeland News. More information on how you can help is available on our website at lptve.org slash news. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.