 Coming up on DTNS, why Twitter is becoming a publishing company. Do you want Amazon deciding when your lights should be turned off? And Annalie Newitz is here to help us understand what effect tech is having on where people work. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us for Lost Cities, a secret history of the urban age author, Annalie Newitz. Welcome back to the show, Annalie. Good to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me back. We were just having a wonderful conversation about Kaiju and Smokey Bear and Prophecy Bear. And you'll have to listen in order to really understand it. And you can do that by becoming a patron and getting good day internet at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Vodafone and Orange all pledged to prioritize the development of OpenRAN, an interoperability standard for 5G network equipment. 5G in Europe is dominated by end-to-end vendors like Ericsson and Nokia, making it difficult and expensive to switch providers or use smaller providers. Google's Threat Analysis Group has identified a group of ties to North Korea that has been targeting security researchers in order to gain access to their research. Blog and Twitter posts about public vulnerabilities have been used to get those researchers to click and then compromise them by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in Chrome and Windows 10. A novel social engineering method is also being used that offers to collaborate on research and then sends a malicious Visual Studio project file. Google published a full list of the blogs and Twitter accounts it found as part of this campaign. Motherboard reports someone is selling access to a database of approximately 500 million phone numbers associated with Facebook IDs. Customers can access the database using an automated telegram bot. Facebook told Motherboard that the data is related to a vulnerability that was fixed back in August of 2019. Got a couple of pro cams from Sony. $2,500 5G smartphone called the Xperia Pro has an HDMI input and it's meant to be used as an external monitor and Internet hotspot for live streaming video from a professional camera. If you need a professional camera, Sony also announced the A1 full frame mirrorless camera. It can shoot 50.1 megapixel images at 30 frames per second, as well as 8K 30p and 4K 120p video. Preorders are available January 26th for $6,498 and that just gets you the body shipping February 25th. The main YouTube site is now available as a progressive web app. Chrome users will now see a prompt to install the app which will display a red play logo in an app launcher and then open a window without the traditional browser URL bar. YouTube music and YouTube TV have offered PWA versions for more than a year now. Yay, progressive web apps. All right, let's talk about Amazon's horrible, no good, I don't know, maybe it's great idea. Let's find out. You and I might fight about this. Amazon has a few voice assistant announcements to make, actually already made them. Guard Plus has launched for $4.99 per month that can have human agents call emergency services on your behalf if it detects certain types of sounds like glass breaking for instance, something that seems like something might be wrong. And the app is getting an energy dashboard to help you estimate how much power your compatible devices are using. A big one though, probably the one that Tom was referring to is proactive hunches. Not like physical hunches, but a hunch that maybe you might want something before you want it. Since 2018, Amazon's voice assistant has had a feature called hunches that would anticipate something you'd want done and ask you about it like, do you want to do this? And then you could kind of say yes or no, still does this. Turning lights on and off, adjusting the thermostat, kind of starting to understand your routine. Now, Amazon is launching proactive hunches. So if you turn this feature on and you have to turn it on, Amazon isn't going to ask when it thinks you want something done, it will just do it. But if you're freaking out, don't freak out just yet, because proactive hunches really does need to be turned on by you. The robots aren't going to take over your home unless you so desire. Your echo won't start shutting off the lights when it thinks you're done in your room again, unless you've said, yeah, I want you to do this, and then you go from there. You can toggle automatic actions on or off for each device. Amazon can have a hunch about. So I don't know, I've got friends who are like, I don't want to smart anything in my house, no speakers listening to me, none of that stuff. They air on one side of the spectrum of, I don't even want to say paranoia because, sure, maybe they're right and I'm wrong. I am very much on the other side of the spectrum. I love this idea. I have so many routines and I'm barking all sorts of things or questioning or correcting my sort of smart home and that's all going through Amazon's assistant. That's the assistant that I use for almost everything besides Siri on my phone. And it works great. But there are things that I'm like, I am a creature of habit. And if it just kind of gets a sense that it knows what I want, I'm cool with that. I don't like using my wake word 100 times a day. It's probably not 100, but it's like more like 20. Yeah, let's set aside how much information you want Amazon, particularly to have about you for a moment. I am cool with a smart assistant of any kind, theoretically saying like, hey, you usually turn off the lights about now, you want me to get that for you? And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's great. I'm less confident that this is going to do the right thing if I just let it do it for me. Now, maybe I'm being ridiculous, but I've had Amazon Echoes, you know, offer to order things for me that I'm like, no, no, I don't need more Sardines. Why are you even bringing that up? So I'm not confident that it's going to get it right enough for me to trust this. Annalie, what about you? You know, I also think it's fine to have a little bit of automation in your life, especially if you're someone who has routines, which I don't really. So it's a little harder for me to imagine this being helpful. I think the thing I worry about most is the fact that all of the stuff is still running off those algorithms that we know are incredibly biased and have not really been, you know, it's still very, very difficult to get rid of bias. So let's say proactive hunches is working with your guard plus, and it's a family of white people and a brown person comes to the house and proactive hunches says, this is probably an intruder because you don't usually have people that look like this coming to your house. And if that's not an unrealistic idea, we've seen over and over how a lot of these, especially facial recognition, how it works badly when it comes to faces of people of color. And so I just, I feel like I want this to have more troubleshooting before I would trust it with something more than just turning on the lights and turning on the heat, which I'm fine with. That is where it's very good that they're like, you turn it on. So it's not going to just turn itself on. And you can turn it on by device. You can say like thermostat, yeah, okay, you can control my thermostat, because if it gets too out, I'll just go turn it down. But other stuff, maybe guard plus is stay far away from that. So it is giving you some control over that. And that's great. I think the more control, the better. I just worry about if we have less controls, or it's just like, please turn it on for everything. So take it with a grain of salt. Something to think about. Twitter has a couple of API announcements and an acquisition. Let's get to the API stuff first. Twitter announced an academic research product track for its API. That'll help researchers get easier access to the history of public conversations on Twitter. You get a higher number of tweets you can pull, access to more operators for more precise data, a few other perks. You have to be a student or employee of an academic institution to get on that track. But that'll be helpful for research. Twitter also has taken the text editor it uses for its iOS app and published it as a standalone flexible open source API for iOS. So if you're an app developer, you don't have to spend a lot of time tweaking things around to make a really good text editor for your app. You can just implement this as a Swift package, add it to your Xcode project. It's a free and easy way to add some robust text editing to your app. That's nice. The big news today, though, is Twitter acquired the newsletter platform, Review. Review can email newsletters for up to 50 people for free. Or you can do a paid version that can take you up to 40,000 subscribers. Twitter says it's going to lower the cut that the company takes right now. It takes 6% when Twitter gets a hold of Review. It'll only take 5%. Review will remain an independent brand and continue to operate its service as it does now. But Twitter plans to invest in it as well. Twitter plans to make it easy to sign up for newsletters from people you follow on Twitter, for instance, make it easy for newsletter writers to host conversations with subscribers on Twitter. And the review team will be charged with building out discovery, reading, and conversational experience centered around long form content on Twitter, something that we're not used to thinking about outside of maybe a 10,000-word DM. Protocols. David Pierce notes the acquisition of Review comes after acquiring Video Chat App Squad, podcast app Breaker, new features like Space for Audio and Fleets for Video, and notes that everything that Twitter does is built around speed. How fast can you say or type something and get it out there? In fact, he points out back in 2016, Dorsey said that at its core, Twitter is public messaging, a simple way to say something to anyone that everyone in the world can see instantly. And Review fits into that. It makes it easy to add commentary to links and email that to subscribers. So it fits with Twitter fairly well. Pierce also notes that Twitter seems to be going from being a place where writers can send people to their works to being a place where writers can send people to the works they created on Twitter products like Review, Breaker, or Spaces. This could be the Twitter subscription plan that's been rumored for years, not paying access to tweets, but paying to access the things people are tweeting about. Yeah, because these products all exist other places. When I think about Review, I go, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Sounds like sub-stack. That's the new hotness. Medium is part of that general category as well. Video chatting, podcast apps, audio. Clubhouse just got a huge run to funding. So something this kind of audio rooms and messages, fleets for video. Like you said, Tom, it's all this short form, easy, snackable content. And Twitter, obviously it's a very different platform than it was when it launched back in the end of 2006, whenever that was. I think I'm right. And has figured out a lot of multimedia solutions and experimented with stuff. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. But it really still is, oh, you go to Twitter to say something, it's kind of short form, and then link out to all this other stuff. So the more it can be internal, the better for Twitter. Yeah, Annalie, what do you think of this idea that Twitter less of a social network and just more of a way to connect writers with an audience? I mean, I think it's always been that. And I think Sarah is right that this is really a response to Substack, which especially right now is kind of having a media cycle about how important it is, even though it's incredibly tiny compared to something like Twitter. But it also feels to me kind of like that desperate move when Yahoo was kind of approaching an end of life moment where it was buying a bunch of stuff and it was like, we're going to have upcoming, we're going to have Flickr, we're going to have this, we're going to have that. And it was like, and then we were oath. And, you know, or maybe Twitter is also trying to imitate Facebook by gobbling up a bunch of other companies and kind of creating a more holistic experience. I just don't see it working that well because of all the stuff we've already talked about. Twitter we think of as a place for short little bits of stuff, not my giant ramblings on something. So we'll see how it goes. We'll see if Twitter lasts any longer than. I mean, people have been predicting the demise of Twitter for a while. And I think we're all a little shocked that, hey, look, it's 2021. And there's still not only around, but they're still relevant. I think I can look at this and say this makes way more sense than what Yahoo was doing, right? Yahoo is just buying stuff. It didn't have a strategy. At least this is a strategy, but I think it's a fair question to say, is it a strategy that's going to work? It's a bit of a leap, not an entirely illogical leap, but it's a bit of a leap to say, oh, everybody who likes just chatting with each other in short messages will also want to carry on those conversations in other places like breakers, spaces, etc. We'll see. Plex launched a game streaming service called Plex Arcade, offering access to 30 classic games like Asteroid, Centipede, Missile Command, Adventure, Ninja Golf, and others. Plex Arcade was a passion project spun out of Plex Labs because the technology was already there to do so. The company partnered with remote desktop maker Parsec for low latency streaming and then licensed classic titles from Atari, though you can also add your own ROMs because of licensing fees, you'll need to pay $4.99 per month, or if you're already paying for Plex Pass, which I am, yay, and extra $2.99 a month, so it's still extra, but you know, half as much. You'll need a Plex media server on Windows or Mac, that'll bum a few of you out since Parsec's libraries aren't available for Linux, and you can play the games on Android, iOS, Android TV, TVOS, and Chrome. Plex Arcade also supports Bluetooth and USB controllers. This is a nifty experiment by Plex, and I like the way they're positioning it in their blog to say like, hey, we like this stuff, so we made this thing, and we're going to try it out. If y'all like it too, we might keep expanding it. Here you go. Yeah, realistically, I'm probably not going to use Plex Arcade all that often. In fact, I don't know anybody who uses Windows or Mac for their Plex server, but I'm sure there are tons of you out there that are like, this is super cool, yay. And yeah, I mean, it's not an exorbitant price for some of the classics. Sounds fun. You know, playing centipede again sounds like a good plan. You know, we're in the pandemic. What else are you going to do? And the normal criticism of this sort of thing would be like, why would I have to pay to play my ROMs, right? But I think Plex has enough goodwill built up that people are like, oh, well, I already paid for Plex Pass, like somebody like you, Sarah. And so why not have a much smoother, easier way to collect all the art, the posters, the manuals, and that's what Plex is really good at. So I could see people, you know, popping down an extra three bucks for this, at least to try it out. Yes, same. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit. Go in there, submit some stories, or even just vote on the ones that other people are submitting at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. We've been hearing a lot about the migration, the great urban migration. All the tech workers have realized they can work from home and they're all abandoning cities. Cities are empty. There's no one left in San Francisco. It's probably exaggerated. I'm certainly exaggerating it right now, but there's some truth to it. Annaly has been looking at this idea, not only from a current perspective, but from a cultural and historical perspective. Annaly, first of all, let's start with why people are even thinking about leaving urban centers. There are definitely people who are leaving them. Why are they doing it? So there's two things going on. I think the most immediate one that we've been hearing about a lot is what's often called pandemic flight. And this is something that we heard about a lot kind of in the very early months of the pandemic, like April, last year, March. And there were a lot of stories that came out of data from places like Redfin about just where people were buying houses, where people were selling houses, housing availability. And it became this meme that people are fleeing from cities. And then it turned out once we had a lot more data and subsequent studies were done late last year, November and December, that showed, in fact, people really were not doing that. And in fact, real estate was depressed in the past year. There were fewer people moving than usual. However, a lot of people, a lot more people than average, were fleeing from San Francisco and Manhattan specifically. And so there was a trend, but it was really isolated to these incredibly expensive cities with lots of high-tech workers. And the flight was almost exclusively rich people who could afford to move out of town. So there's that. Then the other piece of it that I think none of us want to think about right now, because we're still in pandemic times, is all of the Western fires that we had this past year and in 2017. And of course, all the flooding that we've had in the South, in a lot of different regions along the Gulf. And these are much more long-term problems. And we're likely to see a lot of urban flight from that, from people who just don't want to live in places where they can't breathe three months out of the year. So those are the two trends that we're looking at. And I think, as I said, the most immediate thing that we're all thinking about is what does it mean that people are able to work remotely and kind of move away. So what I was interested in in my book, which is about archaeology, and it's about really ancient cities that existed 9,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, was is there a longer trend in reasons why people abandoned cities? And can we kind of use that information to understand what's happening right now? So that was what was fun for me is kind of seeing that, in fact, this idea of urban flight, it's been with us for thousands of years. People have been fleeing cities, and they don't generally flee because of things like pandemic, things that are short term. It's because of almost always because of climate changes, often floods, sometimes fires, sometimes volcanoes, in the case of Pompeii. The ones who could flee, anyway, yeah. Yeah, the ones, although actually, the vast majority of people in Pompeii did make it out and were able to evacuate. Yeah, it was actually not as sudden as it seems. They're just not still around, so we forget about them. Yeah, and also we all saw the movie Pompeii. We know what really happened. So yeah, so climate change tends to be a big driver of urban flight, as does political instability. So take that as you would like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting to think about that because I know several people who moved out of larger areas, and like you said, they went to smaller cities. They didn't go into the sticks. They didn't go up into the mountains to live alone. A friend of ours went from the Bay Area to Colorado to Denver. Another friend of ours went to St. Louis. Both of those had already been planning to do it. So that was a trend that was already happening, and they did it. They just timed it, sadly for them, in the middle of a pandemic, but they would have done it anyway. I'm not trying to say that my personal experience is statistically valid, but it sounds like there is a reflection of this was already a trend for other reasons. The pandemic may have provided a little accelerant to it, but it wasn't the biggest factor. I think the pandemic absolutely wasn't accelerant, and there have been a lot of people who are much smarter about these topics than I am, who've talked about how a lot of technology trends were accelerated because of the pandemic. The other thing though, as you said, is that even when people are fleeing cities, this isn't a rejection of urbanism. It's people moving to smaller cities. Of course, the very rich can afford them to also buy a house out in Wyoming, for example, but people who are more middle class, that's what they're doing, is they're like, I still want the amenities of the city. And we often forget that people don't just come to cities for work. That's kind of our stereotype is that, well, why else would you go to a city if it wasn't to work? And it's like, well, actually, cities provide you with lots of other stuff, and entertainment and nice restaurants and opportunities to meet cool people who are nerdy that share your interests in classic video games or whatever it is that you want. And so when people leave a city that's very expensive and highly impacted like San Francisco, they still want all that stuff. They still want to have the amenities of a city, but they don't want the high prices. They don't want having to spend a year just to find a house to buy because there's so few available. So given the chance, these are people who are like, I like the urban lifestyle, but Manhattan and San Francisco are just too much. A couple of friends of mine, this is the Bay Area sort of specifically, but it applies to New York too. New York is just on a larger scale. A lot of it too was, okay, I'm a high paid worker in tech, let's say. I work at Twitter. Twitter has now said, eh, it's a forever work from home policy if that's what your job description can deal with. And I think there are enough people who sometime around mid last year were like, this isn't going away for the next couple of years. 2021 isn't going to be this like magic year where everyone just goes back to the office. A lot of companies are just never going to revert back to the olden days. And if that's the case and you're going to be inside for a while, why do you pay so much? That's absolutely right. And I think that is the main reason why we're seeing this movement. The other thing is that a lot of real estate experts are predicting that these moves are temporary and that once the pandemic is over, we're going to see the same conditions return to places like Manhattan and San Francisco. It's interesting to compare it again with this deep history that I looked at in four lost cities because there actually have been times in human history where people completely rejected cities. Like it wasn't just like they fled from Pompeii, which I write about to go to Rome or to go to another city that wasn't buried in ash. So during the Neolithic period, which I know you guys are all excited about, 9,000 years ago, the Stone Age, people actually did at a certain point just move away and back to villages and kind of didn't build cities again for thousands of years. So if you want to know why that is, you can check out the book. But yeah, that's not where we are now. I think we're still very much at a time when people just want a smaller city. Before we wrap this up, I'm curious, are there things that urban planners think they should do to prevent flight, or is it just something that urban planners need to react to versus plan against? I mean, I know urban planners would love to be able to build cities that were more robust against a lot of these problems, including pandemic and climate change. It's very hard. I mean, cities are physical infrastructure, so to rebuild them takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of buy-in from the population. But things that urban planners are thinking about right now are kind of good old classic Jane Jacobs stuff, like how to make a more walkable downtown so that it doesn't feel so alienating, how to broaden sidewalks, how to bring in more bicycles, how to have public transit that's more resilient and responsive to where people live, which may mean more buses rather than trains, for example, because you can change their routes, and having more public parks. That's another something that I think has really been brought home by the pandemic, that we need these kinds of big open spaces that are there for the public, and not every city has them, and certainly not every city has them in vast quantities. And so I think going forward, we might see a lot more urban planners insisting on that kind of stuff, and also building cities in areas that aren't likely to flood or light on fire. Yeah. That just seems sensible now that you put it that way. It's hard, though, when you want to have a coastal house, and you want to have a view of the ocean, you don't want to hear that, guess what? This might be on a cliff that's going to erode in five years. It might be in the ocean. That is a really close-up view. Make sure you have the hovercraft part of your house all ready to go. Well, like we said, check out the book, of course, and folks, it's called Four Lost Cities, Cahokia, near and dear to my heart, because I grew up near St. Louis. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So go check that out. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Ryan from Maryland wrote in and said, I've been a listener follower since the late days of Buzz Out Loud. Love all the shows. I have you to credit for the vast majority of my tech knowledge, and I truly appreciate your even-keeled approach to everything. Thank you, Ryan. But Ryan has a reason for writing. He says I was catching up on episode 3952 of DTNS, that was yesterday's show, and I was excited, or actually it was Friday's show, wasn't it? I was excited to hear about the Microsoft chatbot patent. That was the one about being able to talk with people from beyond the grave or vice versa. I immediately thought of the Sun Stone Simulator. Ryan said I had to look up what it was actually called in the Fortress of Solitude that allowed Superman to interact with his father, Jor-El, if he was still alive. This would not be for everybody, but I personally would love this as an option for myself and my loved one someday. So, Jor-El, Fortress of Solitude, a Microsoft product? Is that what Ryan is implying here? I think Ryan needs to watch Black Mirror and see that episode where we find out where all of this goes. If you haven't seen that already, Ryan, definitely look that one up. And then we also got an email from Tim, who points out that January 25th was not only Robert Burns' birthday, but also the 100th anniversary of the first performance of the play Rossum's Universal Robots by Carol Chopek. It is the play that introduced the word robot into English and, spoiler, featured robots rising up and killing all humans. It is not a highly regarded play, least of all by Isaac Asimov, as says Tim, although it is said to have inspired him to create the three laws of robotics to prevent the play's robot revolt from happening. So, happy 100th anniversary robot coming into the English language, because it just means worker. In Polish, was this written in Polish? I know it's Slavic. Check? Check, yeah. But Polish, Russian, all the Slavic languages have a variation on that. But yeah, look at that. Rossum's Universal Robots, 100 years old. Keep those emails coming, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today they include Craig Meyer, Philip Less, and Dan Pullback. Big thanks to Annalee Newitz for being with us today. Annalee, your book sounds fascinating. Your work is always fascinating. Let folks know where they can keep up with it. You can find me on the internet at annaleenewitz.com, which has all the info about my book and my book tour, which is starting next week. You can also follow me on Twitter at annaleen, and I have a podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct at ouropinionsarecorrect.com. Hey, folks, if you want an ad-free version of Daily Tech News Show, support us on Patreon. Get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you, nobody else in between us. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We would love to have you, and we'll be back doing this tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.