 Coming up on DTNS, Tinder will help you get background on your matches. The HomePod goes the way of the iPod Hi-Fi and the chip shortage keeps hitting automakers. This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, March 15th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. Before the show, we were talking about libraries and how they differ, depending on where you might be, also gaming stores and painting figurines. You missed quite a conversation in our wider conversation that we have every day on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. If you'd like to join us, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras issued an initial injunction halting a forthcoming U.S. investment ban on Xiaomi, agreeing with the Xiaomi lawsuit that it deprived the company of due process. The investment ban comes from an executive order signed back in November, which bars American investment in firms with ties to the Chinese military, with the U.S. Department of Defense putting Xiaomi on that list, and the ban is set to go into effect next week. GM subsidiary Cruz acquired the self-driving startup Voyage, which currently operates a fleet of low-speed autonomous vehicles providing trips to residents of several retirement communities. Voyage was spun off from the online education platform, Udacity, in 2017. Udacity. Facebook integrated new features into its coronavirus information hub, now displaying vaccine sites from vaccine finder with links to book appointments. These hubs are available on Facebook and also Instagram, with Facebook partnering with health authorities to use WhatsApp to send notifications to get people registered for vaccines. U.S. District Judge Lucy Co. ruled that Google must face a class-action lawsuit that claims Google collects data on users in Chrome, even when in incognito mode. The lawsuit was originally brought in June 2020 and seeks at least $5 billion in damages. This morning, Oscar nominations came in. Apple TV Plus received its first two noms, with Wolf Makers nominated for Best Animated Feature, Wolf Walkers rather, and Greyhound nominated for Best Sound. Although Apple TV Plus still has some catching up to do, Netflix led all streaming services with 35 nominations, including 10 for David Fincher's Mank and 6 for the Trial of Chicago 7. Amazon received 12 of its own nominations. All right, Rich, we're going to talk about online dating. You ready? I am more than ready, because as part of an investment in the nonprofit background check company Garbo Match Group, who operates a whole range of dating apps, will integrate the ability to run background checks on potential matches using a last name and a phone number. The feature will roll out first to Tinder and then later across matches other dating apps. Garbo collects public records and reports of violence or abuse, including arrests, convictions, restraining order, harassment, and other violent crimes, and eventually plans to support manually submitting police reports and other documents to their records as well. Notably, these background checks will not surface drug possession convictions or traffic violations as these offenses don't meaningfully predict gender-based violence according to Garbo. These checks will also be a paid feature for Match, although it's unclear if this will be through a microtransaction where you just pay for each background check or bundled in as one of Tinder's subscription tiers. Match also said it's not sharing users' data with Garbo. Rather, users will submit this information themselves. They'll just be an integration to kind of do so more easily through that interface, and then all the payment will be processed through Match in some way that we don't know yet. So obviously staying safe when you're doing some online dating kind of key here, Sarah, does this make sense? Is this something that's making more likely to use an app with this integration? Okay, so it makes a lot of sense and it also doesn't make a lot of sense, and that's because of the way that it's rolled out. I will preface my thoughts by saying I have actually been in a situation in the past where I met somebody on a dating app and I'll keep the details brief, but that person did have a record, and that record, and I also want to say, as you mentioned, not just traffic violations, drug possession violations, that sort of thing that is not included in this. It's whatever Garbo and Match Group and all of its subsidiary apps have decided are important for kind of match stuff. However, this particular situation that I'm talking about was something that I would have wanted to know about beforehand, and there was no way to know about beforehand because if anybody is used to being on a dating app, they know that there are, depending on which dating app you're using, for example Tinder, makes you sign up with a Facebook account so that it can hopefully grab your real name and your real age, although you can still, there are ways around it, but most of the time you meet somebody, look at a couple pictures, you might know their first name, don't know their last name, and you might know slightly a little bit about who they are, what they do for work or do for fun, that kind of thing, and you don't have much else to go on. And so if there is some danger, stranger danger going on in there, you want to know. At the same time, this gets a little bit tricky because as you mentioned Rich, if it's a paid feature, and it sounds like that's what Matches is deciding to do, there are lots of paid features on apps. You can jump to the front of the line if you're trying to get to know somebody that you've seen on an app, for example. There are lots of ways that you can pay to have a better experience, but to pay to know if somebody is a violent offender, that is something that I think is pretty tricky, and I would be surprised if there isn't a bit of backlash about that. Yeah, it strikes me as a little problematic to kind of paywall the idea of safety, like you were mentioning. The other thing is obviously when this rolls out, I imagine it's going to be incorporated into the culture of using that app pretty quickly to the point where I imagine last name phone number is going to be a fairly, you know, freak, like you're going to know if you're getting that information, how it's probably going to be used. I do wonder if other users will receive a notification if a background check is run on them. I'm interested in the implications of that. I do think putting that, like giving users access to this, but not serving as the middleman is the smart way for Match to handle, like in terms of a privacy kind of policy. I don't think they want to get necessarily in that business. I think it's notable that they're also partnering with a non-profit. I think that kind of, I don't know, makes people feel like, I don't know if they're maybe more trustworthy. I haven't looked really specifically into how Garbo is operating. It's the first time I've really heard of them, but this is not like a profit-seeking company that's like trying to churn out, I guess, all of these background checks. I also see, though, if your intent is to do harm and to do violence, I imagine it's fairly simple if you really wanted to provide a false last name that matches to a phone number that has a clean record also. Like, it's a good start. Obviously, this isn't the final word on safety. I don't think Match is proposing it as this. More tools for safety are good, potentially problematic, though, I think. Yeah, and I think it's important for people to go like, gosh, online dating has really gotten horrible, isn't it? Like, who are all these felons that are going to hurt people who have restraining orders against them? Listen, I mean, it is no different than any other facet of life. I think that dating apps, especially in our time that we live in, have enjoyed some good and bad ebbs and flows of of user use because there is maybe a little bit more chatting online that happens with somebody that you haven't met yet because, hey, we're not going anywhere anyway, that type of thing. And then you get to a point where, yeah, you might, you might exchange some details, I might say. And it's important to know before we move on, I think, you know, for anybody who's like, that's just crazy, like, then you're going to have like a check mark next to your name, if you're a bad person kind of thing. That's not actually the case at all. It's more of, let's say that I met somebody and for some reason was like, I might want to pay just to kind of make sure there's nothing going on that I might want to know about that would prevent me from wanting to take it to the next step with somebody and give them a little bit more of my personal information. That's something that I would have to tell Garba I wanted it to do rather than match itself or any of match's products, which are Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, I think is also a match group. They do them all. All right, moving on, Apple discontinued the original HomePod speaker. We heard about this on Friday. It was right after DTNS ended on Friday. In fact, originally it launched in February of 2018. At the time of its release, the smart speaker had a lot going for it. Included eight speakers, customized sound setting based on the room you were in, all very Apple-y things, offered tight integration with Apple Music and Siri, eventually updated to get AirPlay 2, multi-room support, multi-speaker support. Initial reviews praised the sound quality as among the best in the category. Now, Apple never disclosed how well that HomePod sold, but strategy analytics estimated back in 2018 by Q2, Apple had 70% of the premium smart speaker market. Now, 6% of the overall market, but 70% of the premium smart speaker market, which includes speakers made by Sonos and Bose, stuff that's above $200. The company now says it will focus on the $99 HomePod mini going forward, so the HomePod mini survives. Original HomePod, going out to pasture. At least the HomePod lasted longer than Apple's other ill-fated $350 speaker. Rich, you remember the iPod Hi-Fi? I do. It's a glorious design and complete lack of features other than plugging an iPod into it, marked it for a swift demise. I don't think we can think of the HomePod as a failure. Clearly, it obtains some market share. I just think that that's not where the market for smart speakers is going, this really high-priced area. I think ultimately, the problem that it had penetrating into that wider smart speaker market is it really built itself on sound quality. That was the thing Apple had spent supposedly years. I think it was like four or five years was a lot of the reporting that they were working on this and doing all this audio testing for it. I feel like audio quality is a tertiary consideration behind cost, convenience, integration with other services when it comes for people looking at a smart speaker. That was something that the HomePod kind of emphasized. It did very good at something, but ultimately wasn't a priority for people, especially when Apple still doesn't offer a Hi-Fi music service to kind of, if you're really an audio file, to take advantage of that. Yeah. Back in, I believe it was the holiday season of 2018, where we routinely on DTNS have our prediction show. My prediction that year, because it was the HomePod's first year, was Apple's going to discontinue the HomePod and just make Siri more available in other speakers that are already doing very well in this crowded market. I wasn't totally right. It took a few years and that's not exactly what Apple's doing. Obviously the HomePod mini at 99 bucks is that's more of that sweet spot. But you make a really good point, Rich, is, and I think about this all the time, I like good audio quality. I have two Sonos ones. I use them all the time. I certainly listen to music, but I also listen to a lot of non-music stuff. For example, you know, I listen to my morning podcasts when I'm trying to catch up on the news, when I'm just waking up in the morning, do I need the audio quality to be top notch? No, because it's all podcast stuff. It's whatever that particular creator even submitted in the first place. I don't have a whole lot of control over that kind of thing. And there's not, for the most part, besides music stings here and there, are you here on this particular show? It's not super music focused. So I feel like Apple is late to the game in a lot of product categories. Apple's known for this and Apple kind of goes like, huh, okay, here's the market we need to get into. Let's introduce something that's way more expensive, but what we think is better than the competition. Very successful doing that in lots of arenas. HomePod, little late to the game. All right, the ongoing global chip shortage continues to impact a wide range of industries. Sure, the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards are nearly impossible to find in retail, but we're now seeing the automotive industry having to adjust production as a result as well. General Motors announced that as a result of the shortage, it won't include a fuel management module in 2021 light duty full size pickup trucks using GM's 5.3 liter Ecotech 3 V8 engine, resulting in worse fuel economy for the vehicles by one mile per gallon. A spokesperson said this degraded efficiency wouldn't have a major impact in GM's US corporate average fuel economy or CAFE numbers. GM also declined to comment if it would impact the overall volume of truck production, which would be interesting considering these are massive profit centers for all the automakers, all of these big trucks and SUVs. The last EPA numbers produced GM would have a fleet wide fuel economy of 22.8 miles per gallon in 2019, and obviously these larger vehicles kind of pull those numbers down already in general. Rival Ford has also seen an impact, saying it limited production of F-150 trucks and potentially digging profits by up to $2.5 billion. It's kind of a big deal on Ford's part to say that they are limiting production, and we also even heard kind of prepping for this story. Producer Amos said that this chip shortage has also impacted inventory on lots, seeing that there's like a six month lead time to kind of get something from the factory custom as a result of a lot of these shortages as opposed to just buying something that's on the lot. So obviously as these vehicles become more tech platforms, very tightly integrated with a number of, with the tons of computer systems and stuff like that, not surprising to see this impact, but to see pieces kind of being left out as a solution to that, surprised to see that, Sarah? No, I'm not surprised. We've been talking about chip shortages and how many markets it's affecting for months, many months now. What I wonder is, okay, let's say that I am in the market for a new GM truck, and I, I mean, maybe I don't realize it, but let's say I do realize, huh, all right, well, I'm going to have like one mile per gallon worse fuel economy, which is not the end of the world, but it does matter, right? It all adds up. Would that be something that the company might say, hey, we're going to give you a good deal on this truck. And in a couple years when everything kind of catches back up, we might be able to offer you some rebates or to figure out some firmware updates so that you are able to get the truck that you wanted in the first place because we want to sell you the truck right now. I just wonder, I wonder how, how much leeway we have on this, or is it just sort of SOL? What I also think is interesting is we saw a couple of years ago that it seemed like there was an increasing race for software on these. We saw a lot of these real-time operating systems either getting acquired or passed around or being seen more as assets when the chip supply was stable enough that they could kind of be counted on. Roger, I know you had some thoughts about kind of the overall importance of kind of this chip ecosystem for a lot of these major companies, any kind of suppliers really. So one of the, one of the, one of the things, takeaways from this is understand that auto manufacturing is one of the 10th bowl industries for any manufacturing economy. Even if manufacturing doesn't make up a good deal of a country's economy, in that manufacturing sector, automotive manufacturing is king. It's big in Germany, it's big in Japan, it's big in China, it's big in the US. And the fact that it's impacting the productions, production of those products means that now governments are going to take a closer look at what is deemed, what is termed semiconductor or digital sovereignty, the ability to create a supply line of semiconductors domestically in order to supply their own needs without having their entire production line put at risk because overseas supplies are somehow crimped either due to trade conflicts or manufacturing issues or what have you. And I think you're going to see, the EU just did a push to increase their production of chips domestically to 20% of global output by 2030 because it's deemed such a vital industry. And I think you can see a lot of other governments take a similar attack. Well, if you have any thoughts about chips, the automotive industry or all of them or anything in between, join in our conversation or Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. The information reports Amazon is expanding an existing program called FC Games, which encourages its fulfillment center employees to improve efficiency and compete against others for digital rewards such as virtual pets. FC Games includes six arcade style mini games that can be played once completing warehouse tasks. Amazon is reportedly increasing the program to warehouses in at least 20 states throughout the US. Amazon tells the information that the program is optional and is not clear about which digital rewards can be converted into real word currency or other goods. The Washington Post reported back in 2019 that some employees have used FC Games performance to procure company merchandise like t-shirts and water bottles and that at holiday times, warehouse employees have won pricier consumer electronics. You know, the kind of the background here that and the virtue did a really great job kind of, I'm sorry, the information did a really good job of breaking this down is that increasingly these warehouse employees are handing off more tasks to automation and their tasks are becoming much more kind of atomic and routine. Sarah, does this seem like a good way to kind of, I guess, keep things keep the synapses fresh for these employees? It might. I when I first read about FC Games, which stands for fulfillment center games, I was like, what? I mean, it seems a little like, okay, I work in a warehouse. I Amazon notoriously, you know, as people work in long hours, and it's it's it can be grueling work and somewhat monotonous, right? And I'm competing against my peers for virtual pets. Is this a great idea? Well, if it's something that brings me joy on the job, and this is my job, and this is where I work, I don't see this as inherently a terrible idea. And as Amazon tells the information, this is optional. So it's not like you are forced to play games, you know, to the death against your employees. Like, I don't want to make it seem like that's what Amazon is doing, because it doesn't sound like that at all to me. However, knowing that it's a little bit of a gray area, how much, I don't know, let's say I'm always wanting to play the arcade style minigames. And Rich, you're my coworker and you don't. Well, I'm racking up some virtual goods. Yeah. At what point do those virtual goods become anything else besides goodwill towards me? Well, at the workplace, if never, then okay, it's optional, whatever. It might be fun, might not. Not everybody has to play the same games. If it does become something where, I don't know, I can say, I've got 200 points, now I want a TV type thing. Then I think it becomes a, it's a little bit more problematic because you can't expect all employees to want to do that or have the time. Where would cross the line for me is if during a performance evaluation, a manager goes, you know, Sarah, I noticed you only had two virtual pets. You know, Roger has 37. I'm just noticing that I've worked in, I have not worked in a warehouse job, so I cannot speak to that, but I have worked in like repetitive data entry jobs where there's not a lot of thought that has to go into what you need to do necessarily. It's, you know, it's a lot of procedural stuff. And I know I built in not virtual games, but different tasks to kind of break that up so that, you know, I just, my eyes wouldn't glaze over and I'd just kind of stop paying attention to stuff and end up making mistakes. I think Amazon is realizing that as these tasks become extremely simplified and you don't have, you don't have that kind of latitude of a person to be like, okay, I'm going to do this thing that just is a different activity to kind of move a different part of my brain. I do think there is value in giving employees an opportunity, like if I was in a data entry job and I had to, you know, have a Pac-Man, you know, eat up a dollar figure that a plug into a form or something that for two minutes, I guess that'd be okay. I also think there is like a little bit of a team building of being like, hey, our warehouse is the top in Ohio and, you know, we're top at this game and, you know, that's, you know, everybody play on there, you know, play for five minutes and we can, we can win that, you know, set of steak knives or something like that. I don't think that's inherently bad. Again, when it comes to the performance evaluation stuff, that's where I would, I would definitely raise some eyebrows at that point. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Well, at Volkswagen's Power Day event, the automaker announced not virtual pets, but it did announce a lot of other stuff, including rolling out a new unified prismatic cell battery design in 2023, which expects to roll out to 80% of electric vehicles by 2030. The company also hopes the new battery design can drive production costs below $100 per kilowatt hour, which it estimates would put electric vehicles at price parity with gas. VW also plans to have six battery cell production plants operating in Europe by 2030, starting with plants in Germany and Sweden with a planned production capacity for each plant of 240 gigawatt hours per year. VW also intends to have 18,000 public fast charging points across Europe. 17,000 in China by 2025 also plans to have 800 in the US by the end of 2021. So we're well behind, but hey, 800 is better than zero. Starting in 2022, vehicles built on VW's modular MEB electric vehicle platform will also support two-way charging. That lets vehicles serve as a battery to accept solar power and discharge that power to home networks when needed. And the company introduced an EV charger robot intended for fleet owners that is reportedly adorable. I don't know, Rich, a lot of stuff coming out of VW today. What struck a chord with you? What strikes me as it's a very targeted kind of announcement by Volkswagen to address all of the pain points that we have right now in the electric vehicle market. You know, this is some market that is rapidly, it's not mature, I don't think, but it's rapidly maturing. Prices definitely have come down the last five years very significantly. But still not at a price parity with the ask, okay, we got this new battery design that's supposedly going to offer more capacity, be cheaper to make, that's great. There is a major problem Tesla is dealing with this right now in terms of we need to be able to produce all of these. If we're going to replace everyone's coming up with very aggressive projections to say, we are going to replace substantial amounts of our fleets with electric vehicles, we need to be able to make batteries for these. Volkswagen obviously targeting that let's not have that be the bottleneck going forward, Tesla doing the exact same thing. And then the charging network, that is for a consumer, that's where the range anxiety comes in. They're partnering very smartly on a lot of these with BP, with utility providers, putting these on major highways, very smartly deploying these, at least when it comes to Europe, I don't know what the partnerships look like in China. I would love to hear more partnerships in the US, selfishly for me, but I mean, Sarah, what about this two-way charging? I know that kind of struck out for you. Yeah, very much so, especially because I unfortunately have the power go out of my house quite often. Everyone knock on wood, hopefully it won't happen for the rest of the year. But when it does, I have many times been like, huh, well, shoot, my phone's about to run out of batteries. I got to sit in my car for a while and just charge my phone. I mean, I have no other choice. Well, I could drive around in my car, but it's my car. That is where the only power reserves are left. And if that could somehow feed into my home network in a way that makes sense and wouldn't necessarily require me to install solar panels on the top of my house, then as a renter, I wouldn't be able to do that anyway. That is really cool. What I think is really interesting with that MEB platform is it opens up this idea of electrification not just in your vehicle, but as an ecosystem for your whole home. And where I think Volkswagen has an opportunity there is they're opening up that platform. Ford is building a vehicle on it already. They're seeking partnerships with other startups to build off of that platform. Theoretically, this two-way charging, I don't know if that's a proprietary VW thing, but if they can expand that so that it's kind of a common thing with vehicles built on this platform, it opens up a much more utility for an electric vehicle in a really significant way that is exciting. Absolutely. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Boy, NFTs. People love talking about NFTs. We got a couple of mailbags. First one comes from Keith, the geeky trucker on this very topic. Keith says, I'm 63, so I'm old. Now, Keith, no one thinks that you're old, but okay, your words, not mine. My take on NFTs says Keith is a baseball comparison. If you're at a game and a player hits a historic home run, that ball is no different than any other ball used in the game. The difference is the certificate or authenticity that proves that ball was the one hit. That's my understanding as NFT acts as the certificate, and I'm interested to know what you think about this or if I'm wrong. Keith, I think you're actually spot on. That's a great way to think about it. I think a lot of people are like, well, hold on a second. Digital goods, can't they be replicated easily? What does it mean to have one version of something versus another? And if there is a ledger and a history of what you own and why you own it and why it's special, when you bought it and who you are, then yeah, that's a really good comparison. We also got another great email from Tony weighing in on NFTs, and he says, I just got a brilliant idea to use NFTs for good use. Imagine a scientist discovering a new species or something like that. Take the first video of it ever, NFT it, and then use the money raised to find future research. Just my two NFT cents. I'm glad those cents are non-fungible, so thank you for sending those our way, Tony. That's what I think with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff is. It has a lot of really exciting potential, and I think we're just really starting to explore this with the whole NFT landscape and specifically around digital art. I think that's where we've seen a lot of the interest and investment, certainly. I think people are just going to get more creative with this in being able to say, hey, this is digital. Yes, I can hit Ctrl C, but this NFT makes it a unique thing, and that's exciting. It's definitely exciting. Yeah, very cool. And by the way, Tony used to work with me and Tom at Twitter, so hi, Tony. Good to know that you're listening to the show and have thoughts on NFT. I think this is a good one. It's a good one. If you have other ideas of anything that we talk about on any of our shows, we would like to hear it. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Daniel Dorado, Craig Meyer, and Philip Lass. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses, Anders and Rick, who both just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you to our new bosses. Y'all are the best. And hey, do you want DTNS as a video podcast? Get the video RSS feed over at DailyTechNewShow.com slash subscribe. And remember, you can always show your support for the show at any level at DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon. Folks, we're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC. Happy day. Let's save it to everybody. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Tom's back tomorrow and we'll have Peter Wells as our guest. Talk to you then.