 Coming up on DTNS, Meta wants to reach out and touch VR. Amazon and Visa are on the rocks, and Apple wants to fix its record on write to repair. This is Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 17th, 2021 from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. For the show, we were talking about all the ways that rotary phones were fun back in the day. Who had the oldest TV and a whole lot more. If you want to know more about what we talk about in the pre-show and post-show, which is called Good Day Internet, do so, by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Ali Sanjabi, Andrew Bradley, and Dil McKayhi. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mozilla announced a paid version of its Firefox Relay service, offering one subdomain address that can be used to create an unlimited number of email aliases. Users can also reply to emails directly from an alias. This is in comparison to the free version, which provides five email aliases, which will all forward to a primary account. The service costs 99 cents a month, although this is listed as a limited promotion. Security researcher Tommy Miske discovered that emails sent through the Apple Watch mail app don't use Apple's mail privacy protection. This feature on mobile or a Mac routes all remote content downloaded by mail through proxy servers to mask IP addresses. However, on the watch, the watch's real IP address is being used. Fujifilm announced the Instax Mini Evo, a digital camera with an integrated Instax Mini printer. They are Fujifilm, they still make film. It offers retro styling, includes a film advanced like lever that will actually print out the current photo that you've taken with double the resolution on the instant photo printer compared to previous Instax printer models. It launches in Japan on December 3rd, coming to the U.S. in February from $199.95. Instagram confirmed that it's asking suspected bot units to verify that they're actually human and not bots by submitting video selfies, requiring multiple angles of a user's face. Instagram said this doesn't use facial recognition and that the selfies are reviewed by internal teams. And Microsoft began testing a new media player app for Windows 11. It's rolling out now to Windows insiders in the dev channel. This supports both audio and video and will replace the Groove Music app, the legacy Windows media player app, as opposed not to be confused with the new media player app for Windows 11, will still be available in Windows Tools. All right, let's talk a little bit more about the future of VR and AR. Potentially, Meta's Reality Labs showed off a haptic glove prototype designed for VR and AR interaction, which the company says has been in development for the past seven years, been working on it for a while. The glove is lined with 15 ridged and inflatable plastic actuator pads, which create pressure on your hand as you interact in a virtual world. Reality Lab sees the glove as one of the multiple controller methods for future mixed reality experiences. And according to Reality Labs engineer Catherine Healy, the glove needs high density actuators to let users feel texture, also to have a svelter design when you're wearing it, and to be fully wireless before it can be considered ready for consumers. Meta is diving into the field of soft robotics, which motors can in some places be replaced by air valves. When Meta, and this was Facebook at that point, acquired Oculus VR back in 2014, it developed its first prototype, one finger with a single actuator in 2015. You might remember that. It does seem that behind the scenes, there's been some big progress being made here. Yeah, this is really exciting for me because as cool as head tracking and kind of inside out tracking, the advance that we've seen in VR on the headset front, this kind of interaction stuff, having the hand tracking controllers, that's cool, but the whole believability of a virtual experience is still like, okay, I'm manipulating these controllers, and the ability to add touch to me is that next big frontier when it comes to immersive experiences and stuff like that. And what's interesting is, going into some of the history of this, they said that model with that one actuator, I think the demo was someone picked up a plate or something in virtual reality, and they said even just that added a giant level of immersion. They're now at 15 of these actuator pads, so they're able to get, obviously, much more fine pressure response to it. But really, yeah, once you get into that area of texture, I could see that having a lot of applications just for room sensing, where you could, as your hand approaches, like the wall of a room, you could be like, oh, I can actually feel that there is a resistance there now, or for a productivity standpoint, I could also see it like, you could even do some kind of virtual keyboard stuff where it's like, oh, I can actually feel I'm pressing down on something, maybe that's not even there. There's a whole huge range, obviously, with gaming, a whole huge range of possibilities, but some interesting stuff, although it does definitely look Nintendo power glove-ish in its current iteration. Yeah, I mean, as somebody who's, I'm a quest enthusiast, obviously a meta product, formally Facebook, and there are times where there's only a few apps that I use with regularity, and most of them are exercise apps, and there are times where I'm kind of like, this controller works, I got to hold something. It's the only way they can track my hands, but it could be less sort of clunky. There's all these buttons I'm not pressing, and I'm just trying to smash balls in the arrow type thing. And go ahead, Roger. Oh no, what I was going to say, it's like it dawned on me, one of the things that make it so interesting and what's so fascinating is that this will eventually be a mass market product in the same way that game controllers are now just seen as a mass market product. Back in the early days, they were very exclusive and they were very limited to a particular set of industries in the same way that we have haptic feedback technologies now, but they're very expensive and they're limited to flight simulators, they're limited to medical instrumentation. But if you can mass market these, then you not only open up people's access to these, but you open up the ability for developers who might not have the huge resources of a government funded agency or a large corporation to develop really interesting and nuanced products that you normally couldn't because there was this cost-availability barrier. Yeah, that's a really good point. And we talked about this a little bit in our pre-show meeting about how I was kind of taking this to, okay, how does this make games more fun? And it will, if the technology works well, but more for accessibility stuff. I think that that makes a lot more sense in the case of, okay, somebody needs to be able to simulate real life on some level. It's not the same thing, but to be able to do that in a situation where that becomes more lifelike than ever, rather than you're not looking at photos, you're not watching videos, you're there. And I think that that's where this becomes really not just interesting and cool, but really helpful. And I mean, just, oh, go ahead. Well, I was going to say the next step beyond this, though, has to come into more overt resistance, which I think is, again, that's another thing where software robotics could become a major stepping stone for this. But I always refer to it with the VR gaming, like the lightsaber test. It seems like that's everyone's first tech demo when they were doing VR, was like, give you a lightsaber. Look, you can swing it around. It's super cool. Without any kind of resistance to that, it always seems to fall apart after the initial excitement of that. That to me is like, at least from a gaming perspective, certainly from a immersive VR perspective would be the next kind of major breakthrough. But the fact that this is, they're even showing this off, shows that they obviously have some plans for this. I mean, they renamed themselves about it, so obviously have big plans for VR and AR. But yeah, it looks like it's a few years off from being a consumer product, but maybe on the horizon. I mean, Rich, think about if you're really allergic to cats, but you've always wanted to go to a cat cafe. We're getting closer. It's just true. I mean, it's a virtual. And that's just one use case that I've been thinking about today. I was like, how will this benefit people? There are so many use cases that it would. All right. Well, one thing I definitely have a use case for is repairing some devices, and Apple announced something right up that alley. They announced a self-repair, or a self-service repair program, and that lets customers buy parts from Apple directly. Apple will publish repair manuals online and charge the same price for tools and parts that they charge authorized technicians. Customers can then download software for parts that require calibration or programming. This would be relevant for like that screen replacement, that small microcontroller that they had there that need to be authenticated to the cloud. This would presumably extend to that. Completed repairs also won't affect a device's warranty if I'm assuming you follow all of their steps. Parts of iPhone 12 or parts for iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 models will be available first in the U.S. in early 2022, followed by M1 Max. This is a big win for proponents of the Right to Repair program. However, there are those that do feel that this maybe could put some repair shops out of work, Sarah. I mean, is that within this overall, will enough people take advantage of that, that that will become a long-term issue, do you think? Oh, boy. So I'm not a person who wants to open up my phone and repair it. It's because I don't trust myself, not because I don't think that should be available to me. I think this is a really big win. I would have gone to a mall and perhaps found some repair kiosk. There are others, but you know that the types of repair shops that I have, and when you're talking about Apple, it was always official certified third-party repair shops that could fix something here or there that I had broken. And this has happened for a few of my Apple devices over the last decade or so. I don't want to do this necessarily the way that I don't want to change my own oil, because I'm like, I don't, I just don't want to do it, but you pay the premium for someone else to do it. And for people, and I know in the audience, they're like, I want a tinker. I've built, you know, however many PCs. I know what I'm doing. This is a, I think this is a really good thing. Yeah, and especially for either people that, you know, like especially when I was younger, I mean, I would build PCs and stuff like that. And where I was definitely more price conscious, when it came to repairs and stuff like that, a huge boon for that kind of stuff. The other, I guess with this announcement, I was just trying to like figure out, okay, what's the catch here? Like I'm looking for the fine print or something like that. Yeah, I mean, the thing, I think the oil change is a perfect example where it's like imagining a world where there was, you know, cars were proprietary closed systems and you couldn't change your own oil, and then suddenly they did it. Probably it would not be that much different. Like the market share wouldn't be that much different. We would still have, you know, authorized repair, loopstop technicians, or whatever, you know, you want to call that. I think it's a really great comparison too, that whereas there are some people that are going to take advantage of this that are really going to love it, and the vast majority of people probably don't have, don't want to invest the time and take the risk, certainly of damaging further a device. But, you know, is this Apple maybe trying to get ahead of, or seeing where regulation is going and saying, hey, we might as well get some good will out of this while we can? I mean, that's certainly, yeah. That's exactly what I'm reading into this. If Apple had the capacity to do this in the past and said, no, no, no, no, no, you're going to ruin your device. Trust us, it's better this way. And then all of a sudden says, we're a first course. Here's some manuals, you know, it's opt-in. You could still have somebody else do this for you. But now you have the option to do it. I don't think Apple loses anything here, but people saying, okay, Apple listen to us. We now have more options. And that's true. I just don't think the company is gaining much, except good will. And in the current landscape, that's probably a good thing. The warranty thing for me was the biggest surprise, where it's like, okay, you can do this, but you're kind of on your own. No, I mean, they're saying, if you follow the steps, the warranty will be extended. And there's also a component to it where you can send in your old stuff to be recycled and they'll give you a credit, I guess, on the new parts based on what you send in to be recycled, which again, is like, again, kind of getting that consumer good will. I think this is a big deal, actually, when they're really gonna be coming out with this for the max, because I know there was a big concern. Obviously, max have been kind of a close, even when they were x86 based, kind of a close system. But you know, there was some, I don't know, they used some kind of industry standard parts that weren't completely mounted to the board and stuff like that. I feel like that kind of, for anyone that was maybe on the fence when it came to, okay, I don't know, I have to take this to Apple. There's no other place that can work on it that does give a little bit of, I guess, reassurance. I mean, you still have to go to Apple for all the parts, right, they're all proprietary Apple parts for the most part. But yeah, an interesting move by Apple certainly doesn't, especially with all of the concern that people had over that whole screen replacement thing that we were seeing over the past couple of weeks and saying like, oh, Apple had to bend to public pressure with some of the reactions to that. Not if this was already, clearly it was already in the pipeline for them going forward. So it's an interesting thought. I'd also like to see, and I'm not saying maybe it'll be seamless and I can eat my words, but I'd like to see how making sure that you did it properly would not void a warranty. If indeed you have to go back to Apple for something like that. I did it right and the company goes, did you though? You left out that screw. Sorry, no warranty. Yeah, no money for you. Well, if you have thoughts on this and anything else we talk about on the show, you can always join the conversation in our Discord. That's what you can join by linky to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Story that made quite the rounds this morning. Amazon announced that it will stop accepting Visa credit cards issued in the UK, UK specifically, because of what Amazon says is too high a fees starting on January 19th. And Amazon spokesperson said that the high interchange fees on credit card transactions mean higher prices for shoppers when, as Amazon says in a quote, these costs should be going down over time with technological advancements end quote. In response, Visa said that it was disappointed that Amazon was threatening to restrict consumer choice but was working on a solution. Now to be clear, this does not affect Visa debit cards attached to Amazon accounts. Although, the number of Visa debit users said that they received Amazon's warning in an email as well, which caused some confusion, obviously. When an Amazon user pays with a credit card, not a debit card, but a credit card, Amazon pays a fee to the bank that issued it. That could be Visa, MasterCard, American Express, just to name a few. Amazon isn't the only large merchant complaining about the fees that have ended up suing Visa and MasterCard and large card issuing banks as a result. You might remember a few years ago, Supermarket Chain Kroger temporarily stopped accepting Visa cards at some of its stores, kind of over the same thing. Amazon is offering some customers affected by this UK move, 28 pounds or about 27 US dollars, off of a purchase to encourage those customers to update their payment method or into another type of credit card or a Visa debit card. Also, and this was something that confused me a little bit this morning, even though I don't live in the UK, Amazon and JP Morgan Chase offer their own Visa credit card in the US. I am a member of this program, with Amazon Prime members getting cash back on purchases for using the card, with some other kickbacks as well. So Rich, when I was trying to say, okay, what's Amazon doing here? What's Visa doing here? Who will fold first? To me, the fact that probably not everybody, but a fair amount of users could say, this is annoying, but okay, maybe I can switch my payment option to another card that isn't my Visa credit card. Maybe it's a debit card, maybe it's another card. That's fine. For those who can't, extremely prohibitive. And I feel like Amazon wants this to be as public as possible so that Visa says, okay, okay, you have other options. We know you do. Let's play ball. Yeah, I think it's certainly Amazon, as a ginormous retailer, has an incredible amount of leverage when it comes to this. And it's interesting though, because people complaining about, or I don't even want to say complaining about, changing business practices because of higher credit card transaction fees is nothing new with smaller retailers, usually like at a gas station. There are some gas stations that say, hey, if you pay with a credit card, it's this amount per gallon. If you pay with cash, it's this amount. See it at stores where they'll give you, they'll only give you maybe a discount if you pay with cash or something like that. So that is, I don't think is too controversial to say like, hey, these fees can be onerous even at the scale of Amazon. It's this kind of, hey, we're just going to cut it all off. Yeah, that's my question is why not just say, okay, we're going to, I guess they don't want to see even the bad guy there if they're forcing people with a visa credit card to pay more. As a result, it's an interesting tactic. It really reminds me of an old, like a carriage dispute between like YouTube TV and NBC or something like that, where there's two giant companies that have giant piles of money and they're arguing about over how to switch between the two. As a consumer, the interest is just figure it out, don't disrupt what I am doing. The fact that they're giving credits and stuff like that to me, signals that this isn't maybe just, it is maybe going to be a longer term issue though. Well, what's interesting is what you brought up is the consumer sentiment. And Amazon has tremendous, tremendous leverage. I mean, a while back in the US, Costco accepted exclusively American Express cards, which is if you know the consumer landscape, American Express is one of the smaller held cards compared to Visa and MasterCard. And they held up for a very long time against allowing or accepting Visa until they could come to some sort of agreement in terms of fees. And I think Amazon has maybe a two-track mind of this. One, they want lower fees from Visa, but if they make it uncomfortable for consumers, they can say, well, hold on, if you have a Visa and don't want to pay higher prices, they could, Amazon has enough, has enough dollars behind it or pounds sterling behind it to offer their own sort of payment option where you get a Amazon card, because how many things do people buy off Amazon? I would hazard to guess at least 50% of the goods people buy typically come from Amazon, whether it's small stuff like soap or big things like a big screen TV. It's kind of one of the shopping avenues that people have besides going to a store. That was what confused me the most this morning. Again, don't live in the UK, so I realized that this conversation didn't apply to me today, but I thought, well, hold on a second. I have an Amazon card. It's a Visa card. Amazon marketed it to me. Chase is doing the whole backend of it. And yeah, I'd get points for buying things Amazon or Whole Foods, or there's a few different cashback scenarios, and it does come in handy. That would be extremely confusing if the two companies couldn't come to some agreement, if that sort of thing became unavailable to me in the future. Not saying that that's what this story is about, but I think that it's a little bit of mudsling in order to get Visa to back down. That would be my guess, is that Amazon saying, well, I mean, everyone's just going to switch to another card if you don't lower your fees. Amazon arguing, yeah, it's easier to switch payment methods than it is to switch giant global retailers, for sure. Yeah, where else are you going to get those blankets? I don't know, I buy a lot of blankets. Come on, come on. All right, and our final story of the day, the rise of social media entrepreneurs nothing new, not breaking any news here, but there are personalities and brands on different social platforms, reaching well into the hundreds of millions of followers at the very top of those platforms. Interestingly, however, having a large following on one platform often doesn't translate to another. Axios looked into this phenomenon, looking at the top 50 most followed accounts across Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Some curiosities kind of came out, some kind of fun tidbits here, like the fictional British character, Mr. Bean, is the fourth most popular page on Facebook. Okay, sure, why not? But it has fewer than 250,000 Twitter followers, so I guess the charm of Mr. Bean is tough. Yeah, Twitter's not the place for Mr. Bean. But what really stood out, though, is that TikTok kind of stands alone in that none of the top five accounts on TikTok ranked in anywhere in the top 50 on other social media platforms and that the combined followers of all other platforms, not even being half of the collective 480 million of those top five accounts on TikToks. So really just kind of creating their own stars and kind of living within that ecosystem. So Axios kind of looked what breaks out each platform or what are the top accounts kind of have in common across the different platforms. Unsurprisingly, TikTok favors creators that have built out a presence on that app rather than things like large entertainment organizations. On the opposite side of that top, YouTube accounts are dominated by bigger entertainment accounts and it's also international, which is really interesting. 55% of the top 20 most followed are coming from India, South Korea, and Russia. Facebook preferences brands, thanks to more of its like style of following. So even if they don't create a lot of content, you just kind of, oh, I like Coca Cola, so there you go. Top Instagram accounts are celebrity driven and have the largest total numbers of any of the platforms. I think the top accounts have like 200, 300, 400 million. Twitter also prefers celebrity driven accounts, although just at a smaller scale, given that it just doesn't have as big of audience, although it's the only one with politicians and business leaders in the top 20. So Sarah, what kind of stood out for you in this report, kind of look at over the findings? Well, so I recently started working on a show and I don't know, I'll tell you all about it some other time, but it's a couple of creators who have big TikTok following, but it's very short form, comedy driven, quick cuts type of TikTok humor and doing really well and decided to launch a podcast recently and we're trying to drive folks to their YouTube channel, which had a lot of room to grow. And it has been very enlightening to try to figure out, well, okay, if you have some sort of a longer form podcast, which this is, it doesn't seem to resonate with the TikTok people all that much because you kind of have to do what you were doing before, but that's where your audience is, but why are you trying to tell them to go somewhere else? And if a YouTube audience doesn't know you from TikTok, there is no real crossover there. Sometimes there is. If you're Christian Ronaldo, hats off to you, good sir. But I think that this is something that content creators, and I would count myself as one of those people saying, okay, where do we decide to build our audience? And if it's not all in one place, what makes sense to spread the content across multiple platforms? Because that's time consuming, sometimes money consuming as well. And sometimes it doesn't really give you the results that you're looking for, but everybody's different. But it seems like from the Axios report that you were laying out, Rich, that this is, I'm not alone here, that there's no formula that necessarily works. Yeah, and it kind of reminds me of that famous Marshall McLuhan observation. The medium is the message. And I was thinking about like TikTok, like literally TikTok content up until a couple of years ago wouldn't even, if it was possible to create like really short, musically driven kind of content, at least for a lot of TikTok content, like it would have gotten taken down by Content ID if you posted on YouTube and short form content wouldn't get prioritized by YouTube's algorithm and portrait orientation. So like just the whole idea of audiences, like on a very technical level, like the channels that allow TikTok content to flourish aren't possible on other platforms. And there's a lot of other things like that. Like a lot of Twitter content is obviously is very text-based, text-heavy, a lot of link sharing on there. If you're that kind of account and you prosper on that, turns out Instagram for a long time, up until they've had links and stories, is like a really terrible way to kind of transfer that audience. So if that's what you're looking for on a Twitter follow, Instagram might not be the best one. And then, you know, like all of these obviously have their own kind of charms or attractions or addictions, depending on what you want to call them. And it's tough to translate that through. And really one of my favorite bits from the Axios report was that there were only three accounts that had, that appear on the top 10 on more than one platform. You mentioned Christiana Ronaldo, we have Ariana Grande and Will Smith. Well, and you know, all pretty well-known folks in the entertainment slash sport world. Yeah, it's a, I think the takeaway from anyone listening to the saying, well, okay, I, you know, I'm a burgeoning content creator. What do I do is there's a lot more about figuring out, okay, well, who else is doing well on these platforms and why and what, what bucket do I fit into in order to leverage that if you so desire to do so? And if you can be Will Smith, that'd be my recommendation. Or that, yeah. All right, before we get out of here, we have something coming in from Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler. If you're traveling to your next station on an airline, you might find the whole process a bit faster. Can't wait to hear from it. Take it away, Chris. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. As a software geek who loves travel, I was really interested to see that the FAA has begun rolling out new software that will help manage the flow of airplanes in and out of airports. The idea is that with this software, you don't need to spend as much time on the runway. That saves passenger time on the plane and it also saves fuel. So much so that a trial at the Charlotte airport, it saved around 275,000s of gallons of fuel per year due to a reduction in taxi times. That's about the same amount of fuel as 185 flights between New York and Chicago. It also reduces greenhouse emissions, so score one for software. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Yeah, that's nothing to sniff at. That's a lot of fuel. You're saving some fuel. Yeah, that's good stuff. Thank you, Chris Christensen. As always, also, we had a great mailbag. This one comes in from Sam in Belgium who wrote just a reminder. Well, this is just a reminder of all the things that we talk about on GTI. We were talking to Dan Campos yesterday who was explaining how quesadillas in Mexico City where Dan lives don't always include queso or cheese. And you might say, but what's a quesadilla without cheese? Sam says, I found it hilarious when you were started the discussion about quesadillas seen queso in Mexico City. My wife is from there. I've often heard her discuss the topic with her Mexican friends here in Europe. Who are from other parts of Mexico? So they do things differently there. So of course I had to mention to her that you talked about it on the podcast and she immediately started talking again with the arguments of why quesadillas can be without cheese. And this is what you're missing if you don't listen to GTI every day, everybody. You learn something new. You do? Yeah, you can send those in to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, GTI or DTNS related. We love to see them either way. And one thing we want to do before we get out of here is give a special thanks to Peter Carrero who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Peter, thank you for all the years of support. Truly appreciate it. Thank you, Peter. Thanks to all our patrons. Y'all are the best. We do the show every weekday. We are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. slash live. And we will be back tomorrow. Tom's joining us again. You know, he does the show most days. We'll just from Robert Young joining us as well. Talk to you then.