 Have you been interested in the culinary art that is barbecue, but not sure where to start then you got to listen to barbecue and tech Hosted by Chris Ashley and Rod Simmons They take you into the techniques and technology that will grow your barbecue skills find it at barbecue and tech That's bbq and tech com Coming up on DTNS highlights from the Facebook papers a roundup of Tesla news and cryptocurrency has a big moment It may even be for real now This is the Daily Tech news for Monday October 25th 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt and I'm Allison shared into the pod feed podcast And I'm Roger Chang the show is pretty sir We were sharing a lot of our opinions about a movie about sandworms tremors on good day internet You can get that wider conversation by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS And that's where you can join our top patrons like Dale McKay he Scott Hepburn and Bjorn Andre Let's start with a few tech things you should know Well in videos g4's now game stream streaming service works in the Microsoft Edge browser now This means you can now use the service on an Xbox one and series access console If they're updated to the chromium-based version of Edge Speaking of Microsoft Microsoft announced the nobellum threat group previously behind the solar winds supply chain of tech Breached at least 14 managed service and cloud providers since May 2021 overall Microsoft said 609 customers were notified of 22,868 attacks between July and October although nobellum saw a low single-digit success rate imminent Amazon announced new programs to integrate its voice assistant into hospitals and senior living communities Senior living facilities can now use echo devices to send announcements and messages to residents rooms and residents can also use the devices to place calls and Hospitals echo devices can be used for nurses to communicate with patients Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles Bay care health systems in Florida and Houston Methodist are among the announced partners Twitter engineer Mata off lock initially showed off a way to show NFTs on a Twitter profile back in September and now reverse engineer Jane Manchin Wong found updates to these efforts in code That is part of Twitter's mobile app This includes a dedicated collectibles profile tab for NFTs of you to provide a close-up look at NFTs and a detailed information screen The collectibles tab looks to take the place of the likes tab on a profile if they implement it The Swiss federation the Swiss federal administration court upheld an appeal filed by proton a G The parent company of proton male ruling that email services are not telecommunications providers in Switzerland This means email providers are not subject to requirements to store data necessary for surveillance The Swiss Supreme Court ruled in April that email chat I am and void providers were over-the-top providers not telecom services All right, let's get into the Facebook papers folks and let me tell you there's more than a dozen news outlets Publishing stories based on these documents. We are not gonna cover them all you are Definitely going to not hear us talk about what you think is the most important one of these because there's too many of them But I I picked a selection that I think give you a good overview if you haven't heard any of these stories or at least point out Particular trends in the kinds of stories in here If you're not quite sure what I'm talking about Friday multiple news outlets publish stories about Facebook's policies and reactions based on Documents that had been provided to the US Congress and SEC the stories are collectively being referred to as the Facebook papers Most of the stories are based on documentation provided by former Facebook employee Francis Haugen she gave those documents to Congress and to the SEC and To these news outlets the reports provide more examples of previous allegations that Facebook prioritizes growth over safety And that it does not apply its moderation practice is equally something Haugen said to the US Congress and said to the UK parliament Just today. All right some some show the company being slow Facebook employees raised concerns about vaccine hesitancy in March 2021 But it took six months for the company to create and implement new rules like most people They were taken by surprise by the events of January 6th at the US Capitol as well Sometimes they knew a problem existed and took no action A policy set up in October 2020 to stop recommending civic and political groups to users was found not to be working Because it only looked at the last seven days of posts to decide if a group qualified as a civic or political organization On an ongoing basis. It might have been a civic organization But if it had seven days of post without that then it dropped out Of that block list several groups then Gamed the system by posting non political items long enough to pop back up into recommendations and Facebook has not Appeared to fix that one So that that's kind of a little bit of a mixture there right time We're talking about them being slow and bureaucratic like any big company And then knowing about a problem and not taking action But that's we were sort of almost into a third category there of where They did a fix but they did it poorly And now they know that it's not working and they're not fixing it yet Right. They they they did something that they thought would help fix But when it was shown not to be effective, they didn't go back and fine-tune it, right? Right, right. So we're almost into a third dimension of poorly managed so far Sometimes they also needed to be pushed apple threatened to remove facebook and instagram from the app store on october 23rd 2019 after a bbc news arabic report on instagram being used to sell domestic workers Facebook had been aware of the content but less than two percent of the content had been reported by users So they didn't think it was very widespread. They say after apple after apple escalated the issue However, facebook disabled a thousand twenty one accounts and removed a hundred twenty nine thousand one hundred twenty one pieces of content So So that's There there's somehow that much content and that many accounts But because less than two percent of the content have been reported by users. That's why they didn't do anything about it Yeah, part of this is I think it's easy to get in the headspace of facebook. There's mr. Facebook Mr. Facebook sits there and he knows everything on facebook But if only two percent of people are reporting it, he's going to be like It's not that big of a problem and you're sitting there going even if two percent are reporting You should look into this but the problem is there isn't a mr. Facebook There's you know several thousand facebook employees and they all can't do everything because facebook has billions of users So I think it's legitimate for facebook to say If something's being reported at a low amount we have to prioritize and address the things that are being Reported at a higher amount first. It's not that they only had this problem that day and ignored it It's that it didn't get up on their radar because it was being reported less often than other problems It'd be my guess in in project management one of the things you do when you're doing risk assessment is you not only look at what the The the the probability of that risk is which would be like this two percent thing But you look at the implications of that risk So selling humans I would suggest would be high on on that second category even though it's only two percent But you might also have 10 other things that are higher in that same category like terrorism, etc Well, yeah, Facebook has all of the human behaviors that you can think of on it Yeah, I guess I thought I I guess I thought selling people would be really high. But yeah, you're right I'm not trying to say selling people is not high. I'm just saying they have so many things that are high I could see them missing it on the other hand They could have seen this bbc news arabic report as easily as apple, right? Right, I have to wait for apple to threaten them before they investigated that right, right? Sometimes they tried something and it worked a team tested a new classification called harmful topic community for an aggressive anti-lockdown and anti-vax group in Germany That test led to a new policy called coordinated social harm In september So that is actually a piece of of effective Behavior out of this some internal facebook research showed that superinviders could quickly rebuild a group after it was banned Facebook has since changed a policy that prohibits persistent violators of its policies from creating groups or inviting people to other groups So once you get caught once you can't be released to start another group. You're you're done for that There were lots of examples of employees feeling overwhelmed by the situation. You'll see a lot of that This is the the less scientific part of it just people feeling freaked out about what they're A part of politico quoted an employee saying in october 2019 If we really want to change the state of our information ecosystem We need a revolution not an evolution of our systems If you don't have enough good content to boost it doesn't matter how much you downrank the bad The biggest examples of prioritizing growth over safety came around likes and reshares Plans to hide like counts on instagram were shelved because tests showed they hurt ad revenue And there was a worry that if facebook didn't hide likes and instagram did facebook wouldn't look good Next to instagram So instagram instead let people choose to hide likes if they want but it doesn't hide them by default Some employees recommended killing the reshare button altogether Or limiting promotion of reshared content in the news feed to only those from your close friends But facebook's head of ads john hageman Objected noting that quote if we remove a small percentage of reshares from people's inventory they decide to come back to facebook less Shocking right Yeah, uh, I mean a clear example of like yeah, that might help, but it'll hurt about a line So don't do it uh ceo mark zuckerberg allegedly stopped a plan to run spanish language voter registration on the platform for fear It would appear partisan facebook did run english language voter registration And what's that partnered with someone to run spanish language, but they didn't run it themselves So mr. Facebook did make that decision Well, they yeah part a very important piece of mr. Facebook made that decision in that case uh bloomberg reported that facebook's engagement metrics among young users have been falling and that the company may not be Properly accounting for multiple accounts run in order to hide certain posts so called finstas From parents and families haugen alleges facebook is misrepresenting its core metrics to investors and advertisers because of this Facebook responded to that saying it already notifies advertisers of the risk that purchases will reach duplicate account duplicate accounts So they're saying yeah, that's what's picked in after watching the The testimony By francis haugen. Um, I actually got rid of facebook and instagram off all my devices. I haven't officially quit But you didn't delete your account. You just got rid of the apps. Is that am I is that right? Right, right? I'm trying it on to see how it feels and you know what it feels fine Yeah, uh, in fact more and more people may be doing that, uh francis haugen Decided to release these all at once decided to work with news organizations to flood the market now That's different than what uh, we saw happen With uh, edward snowton where he leaked his things out slowly so that each one got its own news cycle Haugen did that because she wanted all of these out there Not only the day of facebook's earnings report, but also the week of facebook connect where they're going to unveil their metaverse strategy Uh an interesting way of going about this and facebook earnings did come out today Uh, they missed their estimates on revenue because of the slowdown in ads Based on tracking restrictions that have been put in place in ios And they also, uh had virtually no user growth during the past quarter monthly active users worldwide for facebook hit 2.91 billion Up seven percent on the air but flat sequentially so quarter to quarter they didn't gain any That's really interesting All right changing topics We've got a big one here mastercard announced a deal with the cryptocurrency firm backed To provide crypto options for merchants and banks on its payment network Banks and merchants that work with mastercard will be able to use backs technology to buy sell and hold cryptocurrency in a backed provided wallet and mastercard partners including not just banks But restaurants and other merchants could offer loyalty rewards in cryptocurrency as well as convert existing rewards Like airline and hotel points into crypto the idea is to keep customers from moving to crypto exchanges like coinbase There's more than 2.8 billion active mastercards and more than 22 000 banks and financial institutions on mastercard's network Yeah, it's it's hard to say how this will end up Appearing to you as a customer because what mastercard is doing is saying we're working with backs to make this available If you're a bank if you're a restaurant anybody that works with mastercard You can now take advantage of it, but it doesn't mean you will right So not every restaurant will take bitcoin because of this but some restaurants might Or they might just start giving you cryptocurrency As a loyalty reward if you continually go to that restaurant and pay with your mastercard stuff like that Uh, but definitely there will be banks that will Be able to issue a debit card that lets you access your bitcoin wallet For example, and like you said allison, it's they want to keep they basically mastercard is the first big traditional finance company to look at coinbase and all of these other wallets and exchanges and say You know what that's actually a real business and if we don't move now Everyone will go to them and we'll be left behind So i'm still trying to picture exactly how this would work. Let's say cvs who does royalty like Royalty loyalty like anybody else. Um, they they they take mastercard and they want to get in on this Is that where I go buy toilet paper and instead of giving me cvs extra bucks for a dollar? They're going to give me a dollar in cryptocurrency. That's going to go into my backed wallet Yeah, that that sounds like one of the things they could do I imagine there's other things they could do which is like let you then spend that cryptocurrency from that wallet into cvs Without necessarily taking bitcoin, but they could say like oh, we're just using this cryptocurrency as the way to track your loyalty points now Okay, okay, and then maybe you could convert that because it's already a cryptocurrency and say actually I just want to make that bitcoin and then sell it and they're you know That would be an advantage to their loyalty program as you could cash out your points that way so one of the advantages of of using crypto was Well, obviously of the authentication portion of it But wasn't there some elimination of the the speed of transfer of money between organizations? Is there am I mixing that up? And so that is a different that is a different aspect than this this is master cards saying Hey clients banks and restaurants Would you like to offer some cryptocurrency related things to your customers? What you're talking about is the banks transferring money between each other to say let's cut out the fees now There may be an element of master card Operating this and saying and we'll also do some you know fee reduction elements On the point of sale terminals and whatnot if we transfer through cryptocurrency That's not addressed in any of these these articles about it But yeah, that's a separate thing where they use cryptocurrency to to settle transactions faster and with fewer fees But this this is mostly not about that This is mostly about giving you cryptocurrency on your end and frankly because nobody's doing it yet It's we don't know exactly how it will be used most commonly It sounds almost like master card is saying okay You have this toolbox of things you can do now you have another tool So when you're ready to take that on we're already here. We've got back We're ready to go. We can offer that that service to you as well Yeah, let's say Your your bank works with mastercard your bank could could just come out with a wallet cryptocurrency wallet say hey Don't use coinbase use your bank. Where your bank use us You can have all your all your cryptocurrencies with us and then Mastercard is providing the back end. You might not ever even realize that All your crypto belong to us. Yeah, yeah A few bits of tesla news out there. I know you both have a dog and a car that go by tesla Yes, allison's dogs named tesla and she drives a tesla First up the company got an early christmas present from herts rental car Which announced the single largest ev purchase ever buying a hundred thousand tesla model three sedans Of course rental car agencies need cars because people are starting to rent them again. There's a shortage These will be delivered over the next 14 months for some context on how big this is herts reported its global fleet size in q4 2020 At roughly 568,000. So this is about a sixth of its entire fleet These will be available to rent major u.s markets and part of europe by early november Size of the order is about a tenth what tesla can currently produce in a year Customers will have access to tesla's charging network with herts building out its owner charger infrastructure If you want to buy a tesla yourself You're going to have to pay a little more base model s and x vehicles now started $5,000 more than they did While the model threes and y's are up $2,000 There was no reason given for the increase but continued supply chain woes might be one cause monday automotive news reported that panasonic has released details of a new battery it has developed for tesla These are not lithium iron phosphate batteries. Those are made by lg and catl for tesla However, panasonic Did announce that it will have five times the energy storage Which you could be good for your vehicle range and panasonic believes it'll cost 50 less to produce They didn't tell us any of the details of the chemistry though And you may have heard over the weekend the tesla briefly rolled back its full self-driving beta 10.3 software They reverted it to 10.2 But now they have released version 10.3.1 CEO elan musk said the company was seeing some issues. He didn't detail what they were The verge noted some anecdotal reports of phantom forward collision warnings a disappearing auto steer option traffic aware cruise control problems Occasional what they call autopilot panic where it just kind of freaks out on you No indication that these were widespread or indeed the cause of the rollback if they were but the rollback has now been rolled forward so Do you do you have this yet? Did you get into the beta? So, um, oh, I have so many thoughts on so many of these things, but uh, no, I have not Steve and I are both both have teslas and we've both been running the Safety test which is it watches you for several different metrics oddly enough you can speed as fast as you want You can accelerate like a bad out of the heck But you can't turn quickly You can get a collision avoidance warnings Those are those are terrible if you get those you don't have a chance So I went from 99 to like 71 because it gave me a one of those warnings I've managed to inch my way back up to 94 out of 100 But it's sort of like trying to get your gpa up in the fourth quarter, you know the last year It's it's it's quite a climb I'm really glad that they rolled back a beta if it had some problems and doesn't this just read like Company put out a beta product found some issues rolled it back and then fixed them and rolled it forward Yeah, which is what you want. I I think people still get freaked out that it's like my car is in beta I might crash And and so that that's what they hear. Yeah Well, and that's the thing is you shouldn't run the beta and and b None of these seem to have caused issues They were they were quarks that made it hard to use the program and like you said they did the right thing Rolled it back fixed them rolled them back out and remember all of this You can completely control by holding your hands on the steering wheel and using that brake and accelerator stuff That's all still there in the car So it's not like you don't have control of this and your car is going to just fly off the handle and do stuff on its own On the on the ev rental thing by Hertz. I thought that was really interesting I'm listening to bode grimm's Kilowatt podcast he talked about a company in germany That was renting out evs and they eventually got rid of all of their evs that weren't teslas because nobody would ever rent them And and I thought that was I mean that's really odd because there's some terrific Evs out there other than teslas But that would kind of point towards why maybe Hertz is going just teslas too. Yeah, uh, there's something to be said for branding You know, yeah, I was a genius at that I would rather there was variety because I'd like to go on travel and rent a different kind of ev I want to try out somebody try it out because you already drive a tesla. You know what that's like Yeah, and there's some really cool I'd listen to bode and I hear about all these cool options So, um, I'm definitely interested in that the last thing I wanted to say was the the price changes are so interesting Tesla's the only car company I've ever dealt with that is just constantly changing The price and the functions of the car So if you buy a model 3 on tuesday and somebody else buys one on friday It might actually have different features They're they're different that you don't know what you're gonna get exactly in this string of features Which is unsettling, but uh, I don't it's a cool car It seems to me that A price increase story for tesla is a story because tesla has fixed prices Whereas even though there's an msrp on cars. I may be wrong about this, but I feel like Car companies don't change the msrp. They just change what they charge the dealers and then the dealers change how they deal Uh to make up the difference whereas tesla. It's like, you know the price. That's what you're gonna pay done, right? You don't know what's in it Hey folks, uh, if you want to talk about tesla, you want to talk about rental cars You want to talk about the facebook papers joining the conversation in our discord? You can get that by linking it to your patreon account at patreon.com slash gtms Apple's new macbook pros are shipping i'm getting mine tomorrow. So is my wife. So is allison So is allison's husband And the first reviews have started to hit the web If you're thinking of getting one of these machines if you're starting to see all these reviews and you're like, hold on Okay, maybe i'll try to get one. I guess i'll have wait till december to have it shipped But how do I make sense of all the options allison has put together something to help you make that decision This this is brilliant allison your flow chart. Tell us about it Yeah, so when when the announcement came out like tom And i lean and steve we were we were all just sitting with our fingers poised above the keyboard ready to order right away And so when we got it we went uh, uh top of the line and we pressed all the buttons and we got day in day delivery So we're excited But we didn't have the time to sit back and really look at all the different model differences What's the difference between the m1 pro and the m1 max? And I decided to start just kind of trying to put it together to see if I could understand the model differences And uh as I went into it. I realized a spreadsheet wasn't going to be the way to explain it Which is where I always start things So then I moved into a mind mapping application and then that couldn't even do it I ended up going into using a tool called diagrams net Which lets you basically do little flow charts And I tried to describe in something very simple all the different configurations But it became more and more complex as I went along So basically you have two trees you're looking at one is uh the m1 pro and one is the m1 max And then it starts breaking down into the different number of cpu cores you can get and once you break down into cpu cores It changes how many gpu cores you can get and once you're down into that then you it changes how much ram you can put in it And then it turns out certain models which I definitely didn't realize at the beginning are only available as 14 inch I think there's three if I remember correctly. I'm not staring at it right now So I've got separate boxes to try to show okay this group of things or you can only get in 14 inch This can be 14 or 16 and then one of the models of the 14 inch We actually learned on dts has two different power supplies you can do So when I got all done, I had 18 different configurations you could actually buy And then uh, I realized all of a sudden. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot about the the disc size you could put in it There's five different disc options, which means, uh, you actually have 90 different configurations you can choose from and after I was finished talking about this on my show during my live show Steve piped in and goes allison. We forgot color So there's actually 180 different combinations that you can choose from But I think what what I tried to do was break this down in a way that you can look at it and you can follow down a path and go Okay, I want to be here Yeah, it's great. I mean at a glance I I was realizing things that I knew But hadn't really thought about like the fact that uh, the m1 max only has the 24 and 32 core gpu's like Just being able to see that separated In in your map here was great. And then, you know, all the different ram options And the way the gpu's and the cores of the cpu's flow together This is great. We'll have a link to it in our show notes at dailytechnewshow.com Of course, you could just go to podfeed.com and find it there as well However, that's not the only thing you've been working on You also recently updated your time shifter web app Which may I say I am very excited about because it's it's something I need Which is how to figure out what time it is for people in three or four different locations around the globe at the same time More than that in the future It's knowing what time it will be in the future. So it's exactly I need to schedule a meeting next Tuesday At 6 p.m. For me. What does that mean for Helsinki? Tokyo and london? You're your time shifter clock can do that for me Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. Uh, this was the result or the evolution from a project I started on the, uh, um Programming by stealth podcast taught by barb shots and me as the student in the class And uh, it's it's pretty cool. You can add I put no limit to how many cities you can add Dorothy tested it up to I think 30 and it didn't stop so you can add as many cities as you want You drag a little slider until it says the time you want in your time zone And then it's changing the time in all these other time zones and then you hit a copy URL And at that point you can paste that into an email and anybody who clicks it sees all of the times in all of the cities Exactly as it was when you uh, when you created it So if you need to schedule meetings with people all across the globe, I think it's a pretty handy tool I've been using an app called time scroller on ios since you recommended it to me like 15 years ago Yes, yes, so so this is great. This is going to be a nice nice little upgrade Over that because it's available on the web for free And you can put it on you can make it on your home screen on your ios To buy so it looks like a web app. See except an ugly logo Hey folks, uh, if you're thinking about taking a cruise on your next trip. Well, you're not me, but that's cool I respect that. Uh, maybe you're just interested in a bit of ship spotting You want to see where the cruise ships are and not get on one? I'm with you there Well, either way chris christensen the amateur traveler has the perfect app for you This is chris christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute This tip comes via the this week in travel podcast that I was a co-host on for about 10 years And it's vesselfinder.com It's an interesting site because it helps you find ocean-going ships So for instance, if you were on a cruise ship and you're wondering where that cruise ship is now You can use vesselfinder.com to find it this summer I was on the wind star star breeze and I was able to find that ship is now in french Polynesia using this site It has other applications not just for travel If you want to see how screwed up the supply chain is just use vessel finders map and zoom in on long beach california And see those ships piled up So whether you're trying to find where that cruise ship is or some other ship vesselfinder.com And this is chris christensen from amateur traveler. I mean just to look at the long beach backup alone. I think that that's worth it Thank you chris Allison, let's check out the mailbag Let's do that tom. I was listening. Uh, let's see our first article is from uh from nick He wrote in I was listening to dt and s 41 34 And everyone seemed a little surprised by the snapchat integration into the pixel 6 I think this is probably because snapchat is a heavy google cloud platform user Kind of like how microsoft saw tiktok as a potential boon for azure when they were considering buying them I think snapchat is currently a success story for gcp On another note, I just want to thank y'all for the show I started listening to do to tech news today when I was about 10 years old and jumped over to dt and s when that Launch it helped foster my interest in both tech and science And I have now just finished the first month of my phd in computer science I think the work you and the team do has made an important impact on my life So I wanted to share that also hi from new zealand Hi nick, uh, thank you that that's wonderful. I really appreciate you adding that that second paragraph And your point about snapchat and google cloud platform makes perfect sense to me If snapchat is a successful google cloud platform user It would be in google's best interest to be like, hey, what else can we partner with let then a lot of times That's how these other conversations Get rolling. So good insight there as well. Thank you for that Keep those emails coming feedback at dailytechnewshow.com real quickly want to thank our brand new boss All you patrons, please welcome brand new boss And uh, brandon brandon boyle Bant brandon boyer just started backing us on patreon. Thank you brandon And if if you would like to be uh shouted out and welcomed into the fold tomorrow, we'll start backing us patreon.com slash dt and s Thank you, allison. Sheridan for being here today. Uh, sarah lane should be back in the next few weeks We wish her well. She's she's doing great. I was texting with her over the weekend But it's great to have you here, allison. Thank you so much real quick. Where can people find more of what you got going on? Well, everything good starts with pod feet dot com and you can follow me on slack or on slack on twitter at pod feet All right, we are live Monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc you can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com Slash live We'll be back tomorrow with rich straffolino and trisha hershberg talk to you This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com I hope you have enjoyed this bro