 This 10th year Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listeners, thanks to every single one of you, including Matt Zaglin, Kelly Cook, Scott Hepburn, and Lewis Butler. On this episode of DTNS, Mollie Wood talks about why product design can help combat climate problems, why CNET removing articles is Google's fault, and finally, a touchscreen you can use when your fingers are wet. Finally, this is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 11, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merrick. And from Studio Dan Flashes, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Mollie Wood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. It is wonderful to have you all along for Mollie Friday! Fry, yay! Fry, yay! We have got a good show in store for you and patrons. We've got another fun Who Am I? lineup. Let us start with some news. Zoom updated its terms of service again, this time to make it explicit that it does not use your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content, such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions to train Zoom or third-party artificial intelligence models. So that's nice. Let's see what else we have in the quick hits. Android faithful contributor Michelle Rahman reports that Android is getting a device linking feature similar to the continuity features that run across the Apple ecosystem. The new functionality could unlock features like call switching between connected devices signed into the same Google account, internet sharing, which could also be an easier way to get a set up personal hotspot across linked devices. The U.S. Cybersecurity Review Board, which investigates major cybersecurity incidents, said it will seek a broader review of recent intrusions of U.S. government email systems with data provided by Microsoft. The board has been seeking a probe after learning of the Microsoft Cloud breach, which saw China state-backed hackers, or at least we think they were from China, break into government email accounts, including U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, several officials at the U.S. State Department, and other organizations which have not been made public. Robo-taxi services Waymo and Cruz were both approved to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week in San Francisco in a three-to-one vote by the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, after a six-hour hearing in which residents voiced both support and opposition to the vehicles. CPUC Commissioner and former General Counsel at GM-backed Cruz, John Reynolds said, quote, today is the first of many steps in bringing AV transportation services to Californians, end quote. Reynolds had recused himself from previous votes but said the passage of time allowed him to vote on this resolution. And I guess I would have been a 2-1 without him, but it seems not. Huawei reports that sales grew for a third straight quarter with cloud services and its smartphone unit helping mitigate the fallout from U.S. sanctions. Huawei says improvements in operational efficiency, sales strategy and product mix were all part of its return to growth. A new Instagram music feature lets users add a song as a soundtrack to their carousel posts. Olivia Rodrigo's new song, Bad Idea Right, is the first to try it out, where Instagram users can attach her song or another of their choice to soundtrack a carousel post with multiple photos. IG is also letting followers add their own content to original arreals like Rodrigo's by adding an add your sticker to make a video based on a prompt at which point they'll have a chance to be highlighted by the original crater or artist. OPS. Rodrigo making it popular. Let's talk about that thing we teased at the top of the show about being able to use a touchscreen with our wet fingers. Yeah, okay, so if there's a drop of water or multiple drops of water on your touchscreen device, sometimes it messes things up. You know, you can't click in, you can't unlock your phone, you can't do lots of things. Sometimes the screen thinks the water drop is you touching it, other times the wet means that the touchscreen is not detecting any touches at all. Both problems. The problem though is that capacitive touch screens work by detecting a small change to natural electricity conducted by your hand. And water also conducts electricity. So there's an issue here. But OnePlus says it has solved this. So tell us more about that Tom. Yeah, OnePlus shared a video on Weibo showing one of its upcoming phones working in rain. I think it was simulated rain because it looked like it's in a studio video shows a one plus ace to pro alongside an iPhone 14 pro with water falling like rain and the one plus works while the iPhone really doesn't. One plus says it uses a custom ship set to achieve this and three new algorithms that can tell the difference between the conductivity through water and conductivity through skin. Ace to pro comes to China this month. We don't know when it's coming to the rest of the world. It might even have a different name. Sometimes they do that with one plus when it comes internationally. But Molly would about darn time, right? Oh my God. I mean, I still can't switch to Android until they actually get the feature like continuity since it is the year of our Lord 2023. And oh my God, I really still can't get text messages easily on my computer on an Android phone. However, I would be pretty tempted by this feature because I like to listen to my audio book in the shower and it is dumb and surprisingly difficult. And I think over time is even sort of screwing out my touchscreen. But I'm like, I haven't done like I have a great idea. It's a great idea. I just put it on top of the shelf and like, yes, some water splashes on it occasionally. But if I'm under the shower though, right, it's just yeah, yeah, on a shelf, like it's the perfect. I'm like this one plus feature is built for my literal use case, which is that I want to be able to and maybe I want to listen to a podcast and then I want to be able to skip ahead 30 seconds. But my fingers wet so I can't like that. Yes, please. It sounds like this is really hard to do surprisingly difficult, you know, based on how the articles are describing it. But yes, please let me have this. I want this. Mine is cooking. So you're you've got a recipe on your phone. First of all, always goes to sleep. You're in the sink. You're wet. And so you're like, I do the clean as I cook thing. So I'm always running stuff under the water. My fingers get wet. Ah, my recipe, the phone went to sleep. I need to check the recipe. Now I got to make sure I dry my hands. Be great if I didn't have to. I mean, it is funny, right? It sounds it's one of those features that sounds sort of minor. And in fact, is kind of a really big deal. Now, would you buy the question? Would you buy a whole new phone? Would you potentially switch operating systems for a feature like this? I think that's probably a tougher sell. But in the universe of sort of incremental life improvements, this is actually a really real one. This is a good one. You know, when we were first talking about this story this morning, I was like, well, hold on. Sometimes I shower with my Apple watch on like, I mean, nothing bad happens because, you know, it can handle a little wet, but I'm not really touching it, you know, during that time. If I were to, I don't know, get a text message or something, it wouldn't, it wouldn't. I know enough about it to know that like, if I touch it at that point, nothing happens. I have to, you know, dry up my hand and, you know, do that later. So, yeah, I guess your mileage may vary, but I think the idea that you just would never have to think about the fact that your hand might be wet, whether you're in the kitchen or in a shower or at the pool or whatever. I mean, that's great. It's actually pretty great. Now you're reminding me of another use case, which is that now I want them to bring this technology to fitness watches because I have been swimming or treading water with my Apple watch and then had it be like, oh, it looks like you're working out. Do you want to activate the working out thing? Oh my gosh. Yeah. And then you sit there going like that, that, that, that, that, but you can't start it, but it keeps buzzing because it thinks you're working out. Yeah. And then finally, you throw it over the side of the fence. I don't know. It's like a Seinfeld episode. I was in the pool. I think OnePlus keeps this exclusive to themselves for at least six months, if not a year, and then starts just raking in some bank on licensing this out. That's got to be what they do. This will show up on other phones if it works. So we, we still going off a Weibo video here on a promise. So let's get it into people's hands and see if it works well. But if it works as well as it looks like it will, everybody's going to want this. Super cool. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about this CNET dustup. Gizmodo recently reported that CNET has apparently deleted thousands of old articles, which is still a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands that the site has, but Gizmodo compared older versions of authors pages that collect all the stories from particular authors to the ones on archive.org. So they were looking at ones now and ones from the past. And it showed that stories began to disappear from those pages in July and eventually within the last couple of weeks have numbered in the thousands. CNET confirmed to Gizmodo that it has removed some stories, but it did not confirm how many. Yeah. So CNET's Taylor Canada told Gizmodo that these pages are not currently serving a meaningful audience and that this is an industry-wide practice in response to search engine rankings. Ms. Canada also said, unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site. Now the idea is that Google's search ranking algorithm rewards sites for fresh content, for redirecting, for refreshing. And even some people say for removing URLs so that the sites look dynamic. The company weighs historical significance and other editorial factors as well. So CNET is saying, look, we won't just remove something if we think it has some historical significance. If we think it's editorial significant, we're saying these are things we don't think are important and it's hurting our search end in ranking. And CNET says it maintains archived copies of the deleted pages and sends those to archive.org to make sure they're included in the Wayback machine. Now Google does not necessarily think that this is necessary. Google's Danny Sullivan posted on X, yes, we're calling it X quote, are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like old content? That's not a thing. Our guidance doesn't encourage this end quote. He also wrote, removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we're able better able to crawl other content on the site. SEO expert Chris Rogers also told Gizmodo that this kind of pruning is an advanced practice that might be beneficial, but deleting pages should be a last resort. All right, Molly, we've thrown a lot of stuff out here. Do you think it's Google's fault? Yeah, like 100%. Everything that happens in modern digital journalism is on some level Google's fault or Facebook's fault. And Google is not, I mean, seriously, right? Like everybody, anybody who is practicing media online is 100% at the behest of Google's algorithm. That is where the traffic comes from. Google is not transparent about what's in that algorithm. Even this statement that sort of says like, yeah, it can make our search engines crawl your site more efficiently. And that would probably raise your status in the rankings. But we don't advise you to delete pages because imagine the outcry if people were like Google tells websites to delete pages, which is terrible for archiving. Nevertheless, Google rewards your site for deleting pages and making it easier to crawl. So like no question, this is Google's fault. And it puts everybody in a frankly terrible position. I'll buy that it probably doesn't help in most cases and that Google is an outright lying when it says we don't advise you to delete pages, maybe it'll help in some cases. But the cases it helps in are the biggest cases, apparently. This isn't just CNET. I feel like CNET's getting picked on. I don't love everything that Red Ventures has done with CNET either. But this does not seem to be an example of CNET gone crazy. Ars Technica pointed out a 2021 Harvard University study found that 25% of links to specific pages from the New York Times were inaccessible. So this is something that very large sites, sites that have been around for a long time on the internet, can look at and say it's a small number, 1000, even 1000 articles on CNET is a very small percentage of the amount of articles that are on CNET. And it's a small number that when you're that large, makes a big enough impact to be worth evaluating. And I like that they're saying, look, we keep those pages, we try not to delete things we think are significant, and we send them into archive.org. So they're not deleted forever, that there is a preservation, which is what archive.org is there to do. So yeah, this is the search algorithm working against our best interests. Yep. I actually think this is not even, I think this is a complete binary. It is black and white. It is a totally straightforward case of all of these big digital media sites having to, Google is the tail that wags the dog without question. And then Google is not transparent. Like they're just not, if Google would just say that's true, then this wouldn't, you know, I mean Google, CNET would have its own PR issues. Is Google not saying that though? I mean, I feel like Google is hinting. Exactly. That's not transparency. Publish the freaking algorithm so that sites don't have to like change everything that they do all the time because the algorithm changes. If you do publish the algorithm, do you get spammers and bots and things taking advantage of it? That's their argument, right? Of course. Which is why the problem really is the amount of power that Google has over what you can access and wear. Because if they change the way that they're crawling or serving or responding to content, you, a business built on that, will suffer and or have to respond in ways that may or may not be good for your audience and your employees. Yeah. And I think that I believe that Google is telling the truth. And it's a subtlety to say we don't think most sites should delete things. We actually don't want small sites to delete things, but they don't, they don't, it's uncomfortable for them to admit. But actually in some cases it really is a thing that helps you. And those cases are huge. So, yeah. Listen, if we didn't have these kinds of controversies, life would be boring and you'd need coffee, which is why I have a new top five out about the top five things you need to know about coffee. Now you may say, Tom, your top five is usually about tech topics. Why is it about coffee? Well, A, our amazing social media director, Zoe Brings Bacon, is a big fan of coffee and suggested this. And B, I would argue, most of the world's greatest technological advances have been driven by coffee. So, go check it out. DailyTechNewShow.com is the place that you get all of our stuff. Go to youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show to catch top five coffee drinks. And it'll, it'll, it'll wake you right up. I see what you did there. Back on February 17th, we talked about mill. Mill makes a trash can specifically for food waste that dehydrates it and turns it into powder. That stops it from rotting in landfills and generating methane. And when it fills up, you mail a shoebox size container to mill and they turn it into chicken feet. So, it gets used for something. The service costs $400 a year. Now, there are plenty of other devices that will do this for you if you want the remains for your own compost. We talked about a lot of them because you all emailed us with great examples. So, we get it. If you don't want to pay someone to take this stuff away, you're not going to use mill. But if you want to help reduce methane and you do not want to deal with using your own compost materials and you can afford $400 a year, well, mill is there for you. And Molly sat down this week on everybody in the pool to talk to Matt Rogers, who is a co-founder of mill. And what was most interesting to me, Molly, in your conversation was talking about how design, product design, technological design plays into how Rogers thinks about designing tech to help solve climate problems. Yeah. This was such an interesting conversation because if you're not familiar with Matt Rogers, you should know that he spent a decade plus at Apple running the software teams for first the iPod, five generations of the iPhone and the iPad. So, he learned about this aspirational design at the temple of such things and then became the co-founder of Nest. So, there are a couple really interesting things about this. One is that he is about creating these beautiful aspirational products that tackle huge problems in the climate space in what is almost like a in the back door, like a side direction sort of way, right? Nobody was necessarily thinking that a thermostat could be the key to energy efficiency writ large. And it was a really expensive thermostat and people were like, why do I need this super fancy thermostat that looks so good? And then pretty soon it was like, you need it for the same reason you need iPhone because you want it because it's pretty and it makes you feel cool. And then pretty soon utilities were having partnerships to make Nest free or super affordable to people and then partnering to with your consent, help determine your energy usage. Say, this is a peak time, so I'm going to turn the heat down a couple of degrees, you'll still be comfortable, but you'll save a ton of energy and that's massively impactful. And then after he made all his money on Nest, still wanted to go and tackle this huge problem of food waste. And so built this beautiful, expensive aspirational gadget in hopes that it will have the same kind of adoption curve as Tesla, Roadster to Model 3, iPhone to mass adoption, Nest to mass adoption, and hopefully now this kind of thing too. I mean, you mentioned the first time that I ever lived in an apartment that had a Nest thermostat, I was like, whoa, very fancy. This is not all that exciting anymore because they are far and wide. But yes, I mean, it was a better way to get a lot more data about energy usage and how that would affect what I'm paying and how I could do with that going forward. The mill tagline of food not being trash. And this is a way to make the best use of this. Again, not being like, ooh, we're so precious type thing. We want to make this part of your routine. And I think that's a really tough sell when it comes to just sort of the daily goings on in a lot of people's homes. Yeah, I mean, behavior change is really hard. It is really hard. That's fundamentally why, well, it's fundamentally one of the reasons that we have not tackled the climate crisis at the kind of consumer level. I think way, way back in the day, George W. Bush said something along the lines of the American lifestyle is non-negotiable. Like consumer change is really hard. And that's kind of what I find so interesting about this idea that one of the keys to consumer change is without a doubt it's design. It's FOMO. It's the idea that you've got something that's so cool. I'm super cool about my food waste is definitely a new approach. It's easy to tell everyone else that they should be doing something, so before Nest, I love this part of the story. Before Nest, it was easy to be like, well, if people would just turn their thermostat down, if people would just change their thing, we would all be saving more energy. But those people are us. And you know what? We know what we don't want to have to do? Remember to go do something, especially in this modern world when there's so many things to remember. One more, even with the best of intentions, is just difficult for people to do. So what Nest did was said, we'll remember for you. Buy our thermostat, put it up there, we'll turn it down, we'll take care of it for you, and suddenly you get a bunch more compliance. I understand not wanting to pay $400 for this, and if it's not worth it to you, then you shouldn't. But for a lot of people, it will be because they want to do it. And hopefully what happens with this is what happened with Nest, which is Nest prices came down and competitors came in and started offering the same thing with different prices, and suddenly you have a competitive marketplace where you have choices. And then maybe there's one of these that does a really good job and is free because they're like, we figured out how to sell the stuff at such a profit that we don't even need to charge it. We can collect it for free. I don't know if that's going to happen or it won't, but you've got to have somebody start this process to make this kind of product catch on. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not, in no way am I telling you this is the one you have to buy. There are competitors to this exact product. The important thing is everybody doing something like understanding that a food waste were a country. It would actually be the third largest emitter. Oh, look, oh my God, you have that exact chart. That is food waste. It is the third largest emitter after China and the United States in terms of carbon emissions. And as it breaks down in landfills, it releases methane, which is 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide. So like at a minimum, ideally, we'll listen to this episode and be like, huh, maybe I should just eat that or figure out if I can compost it. But then there's also kind of the fact that like 30% of global agriculture emissions come from food that we don't even eat. It goes to feed other animals. So actually, you could make this argument to yourself that like, well, not only do they take this away for me, it turns into chicken food. And then that makes like that it's a carbon negative food product for chickens. It's just super, I just think it's like super interesting. I love when somebody has a clever way to come at a really big problem. And I, and this is that and the end of it, the adoption curve always works like this fancy expensive thing that everybody thinks is dumb. See also my feelings about iPad originally, you know, which Roger's worked on, by the way. Yeah, like Roger worked on the original iPad. Matt Rogers from Matt Rogers. Yeah, exactly. Our Roger. He was probably back there like, yeah, he's like, that would have been kind of a fun thing. I didn't know that. And then it gets cheaper and broadly adopted and it shows up everywhere. I want this and rest like if this were in like senior homes or like the Google cafeteria, that's impact. Yeah. And if you're sitting there saying, well, you can buy a perfectly good composting thing and take care of it yourself. Do that to it. Yes. That is also a valid option that you should consider. I would say another valid option you consider is listening to everybody in the pool. You can hear Rogers talk about Mill and why he thinks it important with Molly on this week's episode. Where did they get it, Molly? Anywhere you like to podcast and you get the companion newsletter at mollywood.co and don't worry, the homepage is coming soon. Currently, just look for it in your podcatcher. Well, speaking of things that might sound expensive to URI, Virgin Galactic launched its first space tourist from a rocket-powered space plane, the VSS Unity, at 8.30 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday of the three customers on board paying customers to actually won their seats in a fundraiser drawing. The third was former canoe Olympian at John Goodwin who participated in the 1972 Munich Summer Games and also became the second person with Parkinson's disease to travel to space. Virgin Galactic's spaceport in New Mexico was the site of liftoff where the passengers ventured more than 50 miles above Earth's surface. That's the altitude that the U.S. government considers the edge of outer space. The journey lasted an hour and they were safely brought back home. Yeah, so it's not the first time Virgin Galactic has even done the vomit comet thing to the edge of space, but it was the first commissioned, like, they paid for it, although two of them won it, but somebody paid for it. Yeah, we wanted to go and we went. And now it's happening. Book your seats now. All you have to do is compete in the 1972 Munich Summer Games. May I just suggest that if you were going to spend a lot of trivia in that story, so much, there's a lot of good trivia in there. May I suggest though if you're going to spend a crap ton of money on something, like maybe make it mill instead of a ride to the edge of space that is new. I'm just saying, like I'm not trying to be a jerk. Anybody who listens to D18S knows that like I would rather do anything than go to space and like space for an hour. You need to pay me to do that. I'm not going. You mean almost space? Almost. Like I'm sorry. I don't care what it is. You get to feel weightless. That's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. We got a good one from Cappy writing in with another example of Bluetooth wristbands at large events. This is after Tom talked about going to the Taylor Swift concert the other night and having one of these Bluetooth wristbands. Cappy says my hometown hockey team, the Tampa Bay Lightning, has similar lead wristbands for home games in special moments like when the home team is going out on the ice, the whole stadium will go dark and the wristbands are synchronized to make patterns in the stands. He also said, side note, T Swift had three shows here in Tampa at the Buccaneer Stadium. It was sold out. My wife's elementary school is only a couple blocks away and they sold out their parking lot bringing in $20,000 every day. All money went to the school to help funding the kids and teachers and school events. But just to show you T Swift bringing money to schools far and wide. Or at least at this one parking lot in Tampa. I don't know why it meant to make it sound somber. It wasn't. Yeah. And the LED wristband thing for the Tampa Bay Lightning is cool. I didn't realize that that was happening in more wide areas. But it's also something that K-pop groups do with people bringing their light sticks. But in this case, I think with the Lightning and with Taylor Swift for sure, they give you the LED wristband. And then you go in and they use Bluetooth beacon. That thing that we always talked about being used for advertising. They use that to be able to create patterns in the stands. It's really impressive. The video, I have not been in person like some people on this stream, but when I have seen video of it happening, it has blown my mind. It is delightful. Talk about a level up. I was going to say, Molly, have you been? Because I have not. Oh, I'm sorry. I have FOMO. I have super FOMO. I have Tay-Tay-Sized FOMO. My wife just lucked out. I got a code. What can I say? The tour is headed to Europe now, Sarah. Maybe we should go. You all should go. Yeah. It'll be fun, right? Toronto. It's not even that far. If you go to Toronto, she had a date in Canada. Or dates in Canada. All right. Well, before we go to Toronto, Molly Wood, lead folks know what they can keep up with. What you're up to lately because you are a very busy lady. Find me at mollywood.co is where that's the home of all of the things. And please, please subscribe to everybody in the pool on your pod catcher of choice because that's my baby. It's my baby right now. All right, patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's time for another round of Who Am I? Are They Celebrities? Inventors? Science of Science? Maybe all three in one. Find out on Good Day Internet. This is my favorite new show or game, show and game, whatever. You can catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash life. Next week, Experiment Week on DTNS. This is really fun for us. Keep your ears glued to the feats to hear new ideas and new concepts in podcasting starting on Monday with a great behind the scenes look at Tech TV with Keith Batello. Have a great weekend, everybody. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-host Megan Maroney and Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coots, technical producer Anthony Lamos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dettarding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, BioCow, Captain Gipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, aka Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music and Art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. A-Cast adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows included Justin Robert Young, Mika Monford, Scott Johnson, Shannon Morse and Molly Wood. Our guests this week included Kenan Ry-Rebek and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Time and Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.