 Coming up on DTNS, CES 2022 rolls on with funky laptop form factors, new features to make your Android life easier, and a brewing war among autonomous vehicle platforms is coming. Is Tesla Apple to mobilize Android? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 6th, 2022, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Sarah Lane has the day off. We were just talking about our CES experiences on Good Day Internet. Some truth, some not. Get that extended conversation at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons who make that possible, including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, and John and Becky Johnston. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. WeChat Pay will begin supporting China's digital yuan. That's a central bank digital currency, a CBDC. This follows Ali Pay's trialing of digital yuan payments last year. People's Bank of China continues to gradually expand the currency, moving from making the digital yuan app invite only to a full launch in certain regions and cities in China starting this week. The makers of the Brave browser announced it has surpassed 50 million monthly active users in December, doubling growth on the year for the fifth consecutive year. Daily active users average 15.5 million in the month. A VROS is back on the Meta menu. Meta VP Gabriel All said reality labs is still working on a highly specialized OS for our devices and was, quote, growing this team. The information sources said Meta had halted development of such an OS and would continue to use a version of Android. Meta says that it is not halting or scaling back our operations in building a reality operating system. There you go. Politico reported it saw a document detailing French regulator CNIL's plan to fine Google's US and Irish operations 90 million euros and 60 million euros respectively. And Facebook's Irish arm 60 million euros itself for none of them letting French users easily reject cookie tracking technology. CNIL has since confirmed the plans to fine Google and Facebook also face a daily penalty of 100,000 euros if the CNIL organization isn't satisfied with changes made within three months of the decision. This applies to Google.fr and YouTube.fr websites as well as Facebook's French platform. Intel has made its new 12th Gen desktop CPU official, the Core i9-12900KS, which is available of boosting the 5.5 gigahertz on a single core out of the box. It's a stage demo at CES until showed off the new CPU power in Hitman 3 with a processor running at a sustained 5.2 gig across all of its performance cores. But no info on what the power draw or cooling solution was in order to get to those benchmarks. Intel EVP Gregory Bryant says the CPU would be shipping to OEM customers soon. All right, so we're not going to be able to buy one unless we buy a thing that has it in it. But we can get a bunch of new software features out of Android. Tell us about them, Shannon. Yes, we can. So Google announced several new software features at CES. One of the features getting the most attention is fast switching of Bluetooth headsets on Android Chromebook, Android TV, and Windows PCs. Google did not announce yet which headphones will support it. I'm hoping all of the things will. Google will also add full support to Android for head tracking for spatial audio. Again, no word on which services and which headphones will take advantage of it. Those features are both part of FastPair, which makes it easier to connect Bluetooth devices on Android. Most FastPair features are on the way as well, including FastPair coming to Google TV and Chromebooks as well as Windows PC from Acer and HP. In fact, as part of a push branded as Better Together, Google is working with Intel, Acer, and HP to use FastPair to also add Android nearby share, file sharing, and text message syncing to Windows machines, at least Windows machines from Acer and HP. Anyway, we'll see if any more join the crowd. Google also plans to mirror any messaging app from Android on a Chromebook without having to install the app. So think of apps like Signal or WhatsApp, for instance. I currently have Signal installed on my Windows 10 PC, for example. And there's a feature coming called Camera Roll on Phone Hub that will make it easier to move photos from your phone to your Chromebook. So cool. You will also be able to add to pair an Android phone. Excuse me. You will also be able to pair an Android phone to a new Chromebook to transfer over settings and account info if you want. And at some point in the coming months, you will also get the ability to unlock an Android phone and a Chromebook with a Wear OS 3 smartwatch. Now, FastPair will also incorporate the Matter standard to make it easier to set up smart home devices as well. Then we have Chromecast. Chromecast is coming to some Bose speakers and some soundbars. And we also got some news out of the cars. So BMW will be the first car maker to support unlocking and starting a car with a Samsung or Pixel phone. And later this year, Android phones with ultra-wideband will be able to unlock a car door without having to be pulled out of a purse or a pocket. Ah, a lot of good features there. And yes, Apple fans, maybe this time you had some of these before Android did. But good features nonetheless, right, Shannon? I mean, you're an Android user, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm very excited about the fact that I can use a lot of these new features with my Chromebook. Currently, I have a lot of issues with syncing with my Chromebook from my Android phone, no matter which Android manufacturer I'm currently using. And I'm really looking forward to that. It's going to be so cool. I often think of stuff like this, the Mad Men meme of Don Draper in the elevator where when Android and Apple is yelling, you have the Android guy saying, you know, I think you're horrible. And Don Draper says, I don't think about you at all. I don't think that there is a ton of Apple people saying, ha ha, gotcha! Now you'll really, you look, Apple did these features first, whereas that is a thing that I hear a lot from Android folks. That being said, fast pair is great. I will say with spatial audio, I think that that is a tech that I don't know is fully there, especially with podcasts. It tends to make the podcast experience a little weird when it's not trying to balance out kind of stereo audio. If it's a very simple sort of audio setup, it is a bit odd. That being said, better to have it than not. Congratulations, Android folks. Now I do want to mention some manufacturers of Android products already have their own version of fast pairing. For example, with Samsung, you can quickly switch between your different phones. If you have multiple phones with some Samsung Buds, but being able to use this cross-platform is going to be real cool. Yeah. I know that the Apple versions of this for me are spotty in how they work. The pairing across devices sometimes gets it wrong. It's like, no, I really want to connect to your laptop. And I'm like, yeah, but I really don't want you to connect to my laptop right now. So I'm curious if they'll have the same kind of issues here. Tech-syncing, man. Like I'm very much looking forward to being able to have that. On Windows. And I think the message thing, I know you can do signal on Windows, but it is kind of nice to be able to be like, you know what? I just set it up on my phone and that's it. It'll just mirror over there and I'll have to set it up separately, which is kind of nice. Tesla often takes heat for its self-driving modes. Autopilot, full self-driving. Some of the reactions are level-headed concern about balancing driver responsibility with convenience and safety. Some of the reactions are more tied into personal feelings, positive or negative, about Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal points out that the Musk factor might be about to become less prominent, as more automakers than Tesla are going to be launching similar systems in the next few years. Can't blame Elon for someone abusing GM's self-driving system, because he didn't have anything to do with that one. So where do we stand? Well, level-four automation, that's where the car drives itself in most, but not all situations, but already being tested in RoboTaxi fleets right now. You probably hear a lot about fleets. Fleets are leading the way because they can be geographically restricted and the high cost of sensors is not as big of a roadblock when you're buying a whole fleet as it is on an individual level. When you're like adding $10,000 to the sticker price, may make me not want to buy the car. But multiple car makers are talking about selling autonomous cars to consumers at CES. Mercedes-Benz and Honda already let drivers disengage at highway speeds in Germany and Japan, respectively. And technically, that qualifies as level-three automation, meaning the human driver has to be available, but isn't in control 100% of the time. We mentioned yesterday that GM CEO Mary Barra has promised a self-driving car for the general consumer by the middle of the decade. And even if you don't believe her, GM's hands-free ultra-cruise tech, which is fairly equivalent to Tesla's full self-driving, is launching in 2023. So that's just a couple of years down the road. Intel's Mobileye and China's Geely are planning to launch an EV under the Zeker brand in 2024. And they think that one will qualify for level-four autonomy. And Mobileye is in a lot of cars. It will likely be the first non-Tesla car that consumers will get a high level of autonomy from. Mobileye has been estimated at having between 60% and 70% market share in driver assistance computer vision. The exceptions to Mobileye and Tesla's dominance here would be GM, which is partnering with Qualcomm and Mercedes, which is working with Nvidia. But the main battle in autonomous consumer cars is shaping up to be Tesla versus Mobileye. And one of the battle lines is that Tesla increasingly is relying on just cameras. They got rid of LiDAR. Elon makes a big deal about how dummy thinks LiDAR is. And they're eliminating LiDAR as well, whereas Mobileye is still using all three, cameras, LiDAR, and LiDAR. And, of course, it seems like a two-year analogy at the top of the show that Tesla is building technology that you buy with their specific products, not unlike Apple, whereas Mobileye is something that would be able to be deployed upon any other car that might want to include LiDAR radar in these cameras. Yeah, Tesla has the whole stack, right? Like Apple does. But also, it has to do everything itself, whereas Mobileye can get a whole lot more data because they're partnered with more automakers. I feel like a lot of the bringing autonomous cars straight to consumers, as opposed to just seeing these in fleets, like I've done a partnership with Waymo and they have fleets of these things. But just like you said, they're geographically restricted so they can't go places. With autonomous cars for consumers, a lot of this, I feel like it's going to come down to educating the consumer, having them really have a grasp of how autonomous cars work and understanding that you literally can't fall asleep behind the steering wheel because just in case something happens, you should still be there even with level four. And we're still seeing some of those misunderstandings or misconceptions of how level four works. And I just want to see more consumers understand it because it's really, really cool and it's very forward-thinking, but there's still a lot of misunderstandings. Not to make this a larger conversation simply about self-driving itself, but Snubbs, I think that you could probably just say that about cars, right? People just need to understand that cars are very dangerous. This is just another way that cars can be very dangerous. In fact, to your point, Shannon, I almost feel like level two plus, which is kind of what Tesla's full self-driving is, and level three are more dangerous than level four. Because with level four, it's like, as long as the weather's fine or you're not in some weird terrain, the car will handle itself fine most of the time, right? And that's better. That's a better safety net than level three or level two where it's like, well, you really should be paying attention. I mean, we can kind of drive ourselves, but we're going to lull you into a false sense of security. And it's harder for us as humans to make ourselves pay attention to stuff, right? Very much. We need to train ourselves. Yeah, yeah. Well, as China cracked down on Bitcoin mining last year, the practice of Bitcoin mining moved out of China. One of the biggest places it went to was the United States, but the second biggest was Kazakhstan. In fact, the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance ranks Kazakhstan second in the world in Bitcoin mining right behind the U.S. with an estimated 18% of the global hash rate. That's a way of measuring activity on Bitcoin as of August. Starting this weekend, citizens of Kazakhstan began protesting spurred by rising energy prices. Tuesday evening, Netflix detected internet service disruption across Kazakhstan. You might be like, well, yep, you got protests in an authoritarian country. It's not unusual for them to turn off the internet. In fact, by Wednesday, the company described it as a nation-scale internet blackout. There was not zero, but almost no internet traffic happening within Kazakhstan. And without the internet, those Bitcoin miners cannot add new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain or contribute the proof of work that allows them to compete to complete and mint new coins. I mean, they could do it, but they wouldn't have the internet to get the credit for it. So Reuters notes that data from miningpoolbtc.com indicated a 14% drop in the hash rate between Tuesday and Thursday on Bitcoin. It's pretty close to the 18% that Kazakhstan contributes. So given that there might be a few people still able to eke out a connection there, plus other people being able to jump in where they wouldn't otherwise, it kind of feels like Kazakhstan turning off the internet took a big chunk of the Bitcoin blockchain out of commission. This should have the effect of making it easier for the rest of the miners to mint coins in competition, although it does not seem to have much effect on the price. Other factors like rising interest rates, for example, are bigger when it comes to price, but it was interesting to see a country have an effect that wasn't just like, oh, it's an inconvenience for the people in the country, or us getting information out of that country. It affected something else, in this case, the actual creation of coins. And by the way, if you have not followed what is happening in Kazakhstan, which, you know, based on popular culture here in America, you might only know from Borad, it is a fascinating country, a breakaway Soviet Republic that has very much modernized over the past decade, but this modern, or this current situation that they're in right now is crazy. A uprising from the people, the president has resigned. He is now looking to regain power there as all former breakaway Soviet Republics that has a complicated relationship with Russia one way or another. But there's a lot going on there, and it's interesting to see that it was so much a part of the Bitcoin community, because again, it is a very, very, very western-looking technology forward nation that is currently undergoing a lot of strife. Home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. That's where all the Russian space launches happen. Going back into the Soviet days, when it was part of the Soviet Union, they put their launchpad in Kazakhstan. So yeah, don't sleep on Kazakhstan. It's a very forward-looking, very modernized nation. Hence all the Bitcoin miners going there, which is why this is so disruptive, because it's not like, oh, this is a failed state. You wouldn't have Bitcoin miners going there if that was the case. Hey, folks, if you're feeling social, get in touch with the DTNS audience on the socials at Daily Tech News Show, Daily Tech News SH on Twitter, and DTNSPIX on Instagram. There are always a lot of laptops at CES, and this year, many announcements center around the fact that they have the 12th Gen Intel chip in them and some other specs. Good stuff, but that's something you can find out on your own when they actually hit the market and you understand the details. There are some new form factors, though, that can turn a laptop user's head. And Shannon has tracked down a few of the more compelling ones for us. What you got for us, Shannon? Okay, the first one is from Dell. So Dell introduced this one called the XPS 13 Plus, which you're either going to love this thing or you're going to hate it. I promise you. So the keyboard runs from edge to edge with larger keys. No surprise there. That's not scary. They have less room in between them, which you may like or dislike. The weird thing is they nixed the physical trackpad and they went with an all glass palm rest with this hidden haptic touchpad that runs from alt key to alt key. So you're going to have to kind of train yourself on this as well. You have to guess where the trackpad is. You can't see it. Yeah, you can't see it. So you're going to have to kind of guess and figure it out and train yourself along the way of using this laptop. Very spiritual. Sure, Justin. You are yourself to find this trackpad. It's the tech spirit guide. They also added a capacitive function row key at the top, which includes no haptic feedback. So you're going to kind of have to guess and hopefully you hit the button. It's not a touch bar. Everybody's comparing it to the Mac touch bar. It's just flat LED characters. It's not like a screen like it was with the Apple touch bar. And they do light up. They do have backlighting. So at least you have that. There is also no headphone jack on this one, which is unfortunate. That's the unforgivable sin that they punished for, I'm sure. But it's, it's a fairly priced laptop. This one is 1199. It's supposed to release in spring of 2022. I think it's really interesting. It is very nice looking and Dell is one of those companies that pays attention to consumer feedback. For example, their older XPS line had the, I believe my old co-host Patrick Norton called it the nose cam or the nostril cam. They used to have a webcam underneath the display, but now it's at the top of the display like a normal laptop would be. So they do listen to consumer feedback. If we hate this, they would probably bring back the touch pad. Or the headphone jack. Don't get me started. Lenovo also has the Thinkbook Plus, which I know y'all discussed with Scott Johnson, but I wanted to shine light on another use case that kind of calls back to what he mentioned. This one is for video editing though, not art. So well, I guess video editing is kind of art as well. So this one can function as a secondary display in my case for assets or a media library that you could drag and drop onto your video timeline on the main ultra wide display. So you want to have to switch back and forth between a bunch of windows. And I absolutely love that. It'll make it a lot easier to find media assets as you're editing a video. So if you're a video editor, good thing to look at. This is the one with the little screen to the right of the trackpad, right? We're to the right of the keyboard. I go back and forth to whether I think that's idiotic because I'm like, well, I could just get an accessory and plug it in. But then I'm like, but it is nice to not have to plug it in. But now it's taking up space on my keyboard. I haven't decided. I haven't decided where I come down. It's a laptop, but I would prefer to not have to carry around a dongle white monitor. Nobody loves a dongle life if they can avoid it. Lenovo also introduced their Thinkbook 13 X Gen 2. This one can be charged wirelessly via their previous product, which is called the Thinkbook wireless multi device charging mat, which basically charges the laptop up to 65 Watts. And it also charges a phone or any other accessories right next to it at the same time. The Thinkbook. This one is 1099 and it comes out in April of 2022. No, this got me not $10.99. Okay. Oh, I wish it was 1099. That would be nice hoping or my tax form. I think this is cool and very interesting because it makes me think, are we going to start seeing more laptops that can charge quickly wirelessly with devices such as this wireless charging pad? Since this is the second generation of this Thinkbook, that makes me wonder if we would start seeing more laptops like this in the near future. So I'm very intrigued and I kind of hope it happens. This really strikes me as the first step in what would eventually become a standard, but it's not there yet. Right. Wireless charging. Yes. Fast wireless charging. Let's wait and see. It took a long time for Android to get around to fast wireless charging. So I can imagine it'll do the same thing with laptops as well. The last one I wanted to mention is from Alienware. So they introduced the X14. This is their smallest gaming laptop yet, at least since like Windows 8 days. So it's been a long time. It includes a 12 gen Intel i7 processor, just like all the other laptops this year, and RTX 3060 graphics. So it's not top of the line, but that's going to get you quite far when it comes to video gaming on a laptop. Also includes G-Sync, up to a two terabyte NVMe for storage. And it also includes 32 gigs of non-upgradable RAM. So when you're checking out, if you wanted to purchase one of these, you would definitely want to choose the RAM that you want to stick with forever. Or at least until this laptop dies. This one is going to be about $1,800 starting this winter. So we don't have an exact release date yet. Before you max out your RAM. Correct. Yeah. Starting at that price. Top it off. Treat yourself. But I have to say though, that's a powerful looking laptop in a very, very thin form factor. Very thin. That does not look like a gaming laptop. I think I have the M15 back here. It's very thin as well, but it is larger. So there are certain backpacks that it won't fit in, but the 14 inch would, because it is about an inch smaller. So I'm very interested in this one. I would love to review it. Hopefully that happens this year, because it does look powerful. Even with the 3060 graphics, as opposed to like a 3070 or a TI version. This is still a very powerful machine. I think it could edit videos quite well. All right. Justin, let's save a life. Oh, Tom, I've been waiting for you to ask me that. Drone company ever drone reported that in December, a 71 year old Swedish man had a heart attack while shoveling snow. Who would have thought? Dr. Mustafa Ali was driving to work and noticed the man collapsed in his driveway. So he stopped to help. As Dr. Ali described it to ever drone, quote, I started doing CPR while asking another bystander to call 112. That's the Swedish emergency number. And just minutes later, I see something flying above my head. It's a drone with a defibrillator. The defibrillator got there in three minutes and the man has now made a full recovery. Ever drone developed the emergency medical aerial device service along with the center for resuscitation science in Keralinka Institutet SOS alarm and region Vastra Gotalan. Yeah. So this is like an official government project that was put together to be able to say, when you call 911 in certain cases if it's needed, we'll have a drone deliver you an AED, a defibrillator. And it worked. I mean, we don't know. Maybe the guy would have lived anyway if he would have waited for the ambulance to get there. They say you need to get there in about 10 minutes after a heart attack in order to save somebody's life and that defibrillator got there in three minutes. And now granted, he was also lucky and have a Dr. Ali happen to be passing by. But he could have been a non-doctor who knew CPR or the defibrillator getting there could have meant that anybody else could have grabbed it, followed the instructions and maybe saved his life. So a few things combined here that make it a particularly favorable solution. But the fact is this is increasing the speed at which emergency medical attention can be given in situations where minutes count. Yeah, as quick as our streets and everything seemed to be more and more congested, this is such a great idea. I do have a question, though, for y'all. Can this deliver anything other than defibrillators or is it just those products? Well, theoretically, the drone could deliver a burrito, too. But I don't think that's good for the guy when he's had just had a heart attack, Shannon. I'm not sure. I'm talking about like an EpiPan or something. Oh, other medical devices. Yeah, I didn't get the sense from reading EverDrone's site that this particular system was set up to deliver other things. But it could be, right? You're absolutely right. It could be adapted. Yeah, it definitely could. It becomes a logistical problem on the organizational end of how to make sure the right thing gets in the drone and it goes to the right place and you determine that. So keeping it to just AEDs and heart attacks, I guess, makes it simple. But yeah, I mean, now that they've got the system running, they could start to get a little more complex. I'd be interested to see that. I would be very much interested, especially in areas of our country that have vast rural expanses to figure out, you know, how much faster and as the crow flies a deployment of something like this. And I will leave it to all the doctors and med tech educated folks here in the audience to know exactly how effective a defibrillator at the exact right time be. But if it is as much of a kind of interventionally a life saver as it could be, then that's something that I would not be shocked from a political perspective to possibly see in state budgets or at least city budgets that have it. Yeah, yeah. A county budget level thing or parish level thing. Yeah, I would say it's probably something that you would either be looking in the very dense cities or the very rural areas. Yeah. Or in a suburb with a lot of open streets, maybe it's less of a effective use case. But in those two edge cases, I think that that kind of stuff is very important. Yeah. Well, folks, if you are somebody who's like, man, hearing about Sweden, I know it was a heart attack, but it just makes me want to travel to Sweden. But I can't because COVID or whatever. Well, Chris Christensen is here to share an idea on how to make use of the time you have before you get to that point when you can finally travel again. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in Travel Minute. The idea I have today comes from a listener of the Amateur Traveler podcast from Mario, who suggested though you might not be ready to do traveling right now, you can certainly get ready for traveling. One way to do it is to learn a language. There's a number of different ways to do that. There's obviously a number of apps out there. But you can also get an online language tutor and he recommends italki, italki.com where they have 1,224 French tutors alone, not to mention other languages. And he's taken more than 400 hours of Italian and his kids have worked on their weekly Spanish lessons with tutors. So italki.com and this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Ah, fantastic. Good idea. Get ready to speak the language and you can finally get to Sweden. And it's italki. Hi, clever. I get it. Italki. Very, very interesting. Hey, folks. We have lawnmakes in our Twitch chat saying it could be a medical burrito. Do you agree? Let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thanks to our brand new bosses. We love that when we get new folks supporting the show, that's what powers the show to get better and better. Thanks to Kevin Slayton, Robert Kubiak, Feng Peng, and Adam Becku, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you again, Kevin, Robert, Yifan, and Adam. Y'all are great. Really appreciate having you in the show. And also, appreciate having Shannon Mortz in the show. Thank you for being with us. Thanks for giving us the laptop scoops. Absolutely. And I promise I don't always have Con Crud whenever I do shows on my own channels. Never would have known. You never would have known. If folks want more of what you got going on, I know you got some really cool videos up these days. Where should they go? Oh, my goodness. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morz. I just built my own home server rack, and I'm very proud of it. And for some reason, that video has been taking off. So if you want to learn how to build your own, this is my first server rack. Definitely check it out. It was a really fun video to make. Very cool. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morz. Justin, Robert Young, what do you got going on? You know, me and Tom Merritt were having a conversation the other day about why there is a visceral hatred from some elements of the internet toward NFTs. Whatever you might think of the technology, the culture war is real. And so I made a whole episode about it that is coming out tomorrow on politics, politics, politics, culture war on the blockchain. What is at the root OS of this divide? What I believe it is might shock you. Tom's on it. So you're going to like it. I wasn't sure. I agreed with Justin, but he started to bring me around. You're going to have to listen to find out how he did that. We are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show.com slash live back tomorrow with more CES coverage. Robert's given us important home theater highlights from CES. Allison shares her picks on the cool and unusual products you may have missed. So see you tomorrow. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.