 Coming up on DTNS in Real makes a stab at another smart glasses form factor. You asked for a repairable phone, but are you gonna buy it? And the war between the Wall Street Journal and Facebook continues. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 30th. We're all out of September 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Marath. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. I can't remember who we were supposed to wake up, but wake them up. September has ended. We were just talking about AI and whether AI can be artisanal. That was one of our good day internet conversations. You can listen in by becoming a member Patreon.com slash DTNS. That's where you can join our top patrons like Jeff Wilkes, Paul Rees, and Dr. X17. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Some iPhone users report that several accessibility-focused Siri commands that share details and can perform functions on things like phone calls, voicemails, and sending emails are no longer functional on iOS. It's not just iOS 15. It's across multiple versions. For example, asking Siri to play my voicemail messages now returns a, sorry, I can't do that response or something similar. A user on the Apple Vise forums, like Apple Visual forums, say that they were told by Apple support that Apple is aware of the issue. Apple Pay has a feature called Express Transit that lets you make a contactless payment without unlocking your device pretty slick. You just tap your phone at a metro station gate and get right through. Well, scientists at Birmingham and Surrey University found a way to use this feature to make an unauthorized payment from a locked phone linked to a Visa credit card, had to be Visa. An attacker would need equipment to mimic a transit ticket machine, so it's not something everybody can do, and then relay signals from the phone through that machine to an Android app to a contactless payment terminal. The signal is modified to trick the payment terminal into thinking the phone is unlocked and the payment is authorized. The mimics ticket machine would need to be near the targeted iPhone, so the most likely scenario would be using this on a stolen phone that you can't unlock. The attack has only been shown to work in the lab. Visa does not believe it's practical in the wild, and so therefore it doesn't sound like they're going to bother fixing it because it's confident its fraud detection system would spot the activity. However, Samsung Pay and MasterCard, even on Apple Pay, are not vulnerable to the attack. The USB Implementers Forum introduced new logos to be used on USB cables that indicate if they can charge with up to 240 watts of power, a feature recently added to the spec. The new logos are to be used if a cable or port supports that 240 charging or 40 gigabit per second transferred speeds or both. There's also a logo for 240 watt chargers. USB logos without the numbers are still used for cables that only support 20 gigabit per second transfer speeds or 60 watt charging. It's that easy. Intel announced its second gen Neurotrophic chip, Luigi2 and Lava, an open source framework for developing applications for it. Members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community, or INRC, can get two cloud-based servers running on Luigi2. Neuromorphic, not Neurotrophic. Neuromorphic computing mimics the human nervous system. Members of INRC have used Neuromorphic chips for advances in applications like speech recognition and autonomous navigation. An Accenture test found the previous version of Luigi was 1,000 times more energy efficient and 200 milliseconds faster at voice commands compared to a standard GPU. On Thursday, Honda announced plans to build its first electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft the EVTOL, or EVTOL, built with a gas turbine hybrid unit and enough range to take passengers between cities, not just within a city. In a new robotic advance, Honda also showed off a proof-of-concept avatar of a robotic hand with fingers controlled remotely by a human in another location, which Honda says it'll be ready to show off in more detail by 2024. Honda also has a new partnership with Japan's JAXA space program to build a circulative renewable energy system on the lunar surface with oxygen and supplying living quarters with air for lunar colonists while the hydrogen refills their rockets. This is what the car companies are doing. Hyundai, Honda, Toyota, they're all trying to be robotics companies, AI companies. All right, let's talk about Fairphone. You ever heard of Fairphone? Fairphone makes easy to repair smartphones with sustainable materials. You can use a Phillips head screwdriver, that's all you need. No special screwdriver even and swap out modules for displays, batteries, back covers, USB-C ports, loudspeakers, earpieces, rear cameras, and selfie cameras. Fairphones always receive a perfect score from, I fix it, and Fairphone recycles one phone or an equal amount of e-waste for every device it sells. And it just announced a new one, the Fairphone 4. Now the knock on Fairphones have been that their specs aren't usually very impressive, but the Fairphone 4 not only has the usual modular design, but a 6.3 inch 1080p LCD, 6 or 8 gigs of RAM, and 128 or 256 gigs of storage, as well as a micro SD card slot, along with two rear cameras, one of which can record up to 4K at 30 frames per second. These specs aren't going to blow you away, but they're decent, they're mid-range now. Despite the removable rear cover, which is good for repairs, it's still managed to get an IP54 rating, making it splash-proof. It's the first waterproof of any kind on a Fairphone. That means they did have to lose the headphone jack though. That's going to be a ding. Got to have a wireless Bluetooth headsets to use it. Its major upgrade is a five, or I guess a USB-C, because it does have a USB-C port. Its major upgrade though is a five-year warranty and a promise of two major Android updates and software support until the end of 2025, and they're hoping they can extend that to 2027. Fairphone 4 ships October 25th, starting at €579 or £499 sterling. It's a hobby phone. If you're really into this, if you really care about these elements, then buy it, but it's likely because you're a very specialized market. Now, that market might be big enough for Fairphone to have a lot of success, and I very much wish them well, but I don't know if these kind of issues, which tend to bubble up to the surface during technology kind of conversations when we talk about how hard it is to repair certain kind of flagship phones, necessarily bubbles into a mainstream market. Well, I think Tom's point that this, you know, you're reading out the specs, it's not super impressive, but it's not a crappy phone either. I know Fairphone has been around for a while, and yes, the folks who love that modular design, who want to be able to swap out parts, whether you're just swapping them out or because there's something wrong with them. I mean, it is a pretty big group of folks and to have a phone that, sure, it's not going to be the flagship phone that you might pay a little bit more for, you're still not paying top dollar for it either. So it's cheap. This is like over $500. It's not cheap, but it's not for a $1,200 phone. It's upper mid range, upper mid range, not bargain, but also, you know, it's not above a thousand bucks. So, yeah, I don't know. I would be calling people on the carpet here, like, hey, you want that repairable phone? Here it is. Are you going to buy it? Except they didn't include a headphone jack. So I know every single one of them that isn't going to buy this would be like, well, I would have if it had a headphone jack. Of course, because, you know. Okay, moving on to some AR. Why don't we? Augmented Reality Company and Real announced a new project called Air Glasses, a more compact and cheaper version of its smart glasses. The company expects it'll be a fraction of the price of the previous version. Previous version was around $600. So, okay, whatever a fraction of that is, the Air Glasses connect to a phone for power. They don't have any cameras for sensing the world around them. So in that sense, they're like totally different than the Facebook, Facebook. What are they called, Tom? The Facebook. The Ray-Ban, the Ray-Ban. The Facebook Ray-Ban. How quickly we forget. Yes, the collab, the Facebook walk, the Facebook. Anyway, let's go back to the Air Glasses while we're thinking of this. You can control the Air Glasses with a smartphone app, so you can think of them as pretty much just a wearable display that are on your face. They have two micro OLED displays with a refresh rate of 90 Hertz, pixel density of 499 PPD, and a 46 degree field of view. And Real says they should be about like sitting three meters away from a 130 inch screen. So that's either gonna seem like you're not far enough away, or just right, maybe too close. The lenses can tilt at three angles to make the view a little bit more clear. And because they're focused on display alone, the Air Glasses are lighter than the previous Unreal Light Glasses, 77 grams, and look more like regular sunglasses because there's just less in there. Unreal Air Glasses work with iPhones, iPads, and most Android devices and are expected to begin shipping in December in Japan, China, and South Korea with Europe and the US to get them next year. Ray-Ban Stories. The Facebook Ray-Ban Stories. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I forget stories. Not to be confused with Facebook stories. Anyway, this is another interesting take. What we're seeing as companies going, well, the big hold up is people don't want a big bulky thing on their face. So what can we pack into glasses that still look like glasses? Facebook Ray-Ban Stories did it by saying, we'll just put cameras and wireless, and that's it. Won't do anything else. It's not gonna be augmented reality. And Real is saying, we're gonna put lenses in there. We're gonna put the ability to see a display, but you're gonna have to plug it into your phone. No wireless. And this is really just, I'm on a plane, and I wanna lean back, or maybe a train, and have a display. Or I wanna have a huge display without having to have a big, huge heavy monitor or something like that. Maybe. I could see people wanting that, yeah. Yeah, I like this idea in theory, mostly because I want people to take more swings at smart glasses. I like the idea that the Ray-Bans were, wear the camera glasses. Let's see if people like it. I like that this is, we are the heads-up display. What I don't love is the fact that it does need to plug in. I think that there is a world now where, in looking, and I always keep going back to the Google Glass experience, because that I think was a very interesting example of what we liked and didn't like about a heads-up display. But the fact that you got phone alerts on your face could be very interesting. It probably is less intrusive than looking at your watch to do it, which makes you seem kind of a jerk. But if you have to plug it in, then that takes away some of the ubiquity. Yeah, it's hard to call something air glasses that have to be plugged into something. I know that folks plug their headphones into smart devices all the time, but being that the wireless option is pretty good these days, and you don't need that. It's a tough sell. That said, I like the idea of a heads-up display if I'm wearing glasses. I have heads-up display in my car. It doesn't give me a whole lot of information, but good stuff, like how fast I'm going, and if I'm getting into a school zone, and the time of day, and that sort of stuff. It's helpful. It's helpful to just kind of know that that's there, and you don't really see it unless you want to engage. I like that idea of a heads-up display. I don't think I really have the need to take a lot of photos with my glasses, and maybe that's just because not enough people do it that way yet, so I'm just not used to it, but the having little information on something that is just sort of there when I'm looking straight ahead, or even to the side, that I am used to, and that I do like. I like the idea of being able to watch video. Getting the equivalent of a 130-inch screen to watch Netflix when I'm in the back of a lift, or on an airplane, and sitting in an airport. For goodness' sake, so I don't have to hold a thing in front of my face. That depends on what that fraction is, right? Is it five-sixth of $600? Yeah, don't be a coward. Put on the oculus. Hey, the president of the U.S. and two European Commission vice presidents met on Wednesday as part of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council. The council was created in June to focus on security and trade, and by trade, it seems that they mean export controls for tech. The council also released a joint statement Wednesday saying it would deal with technology misuse and misinformation. Now, this council has set up 10 working groups. Some are pretty obvious, like technology standards, supply chain security, data governance, combating unlawful surveillance, and export controls. There are also working groups for connectivity in developing nations, screening foreign investors, and promoting digital tools for small business. And then there's one group, which will work on non-market economic policies and practices that distort trade, which you could probably colloquially spell as C-H-I-N-A. Meanwhile, China applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was signed after the U.S. with Drew in 2018. Taiwan and the UK have also applied to join. I can't imagine this will be entirely bad or entirely good for the internet or technology in general, but it's certainly an indication that the battle lines are being drawn. It's not that we didn't know that, but here they are. They got their big marker out, and they said the U.S. and the EU are going to draw a line right around here. We're going to try to get developing countries on our side by helping them out, and we're going to try to combat China with this very long-winded named working group, and at least we're seeing countries cooperate on technology possible to see, which is certainly important for things like the supply chain right now. Yeah. I mean, our supply chain is in absolute disarray. So the idea of having not only everybody be on the same page, but also maybe take a look to the future so we can think about situations like this before they arrive and maybe learn some lessons through this process is a very, very, very good thing. The question is exactly how effective it will be past that and whether or not it actually means anything to China. Obviously, they swing a very, very big stick when it comes to the fact that there is a lot of production over there, and they have a massive, massive market. Yeah. I don't know if you have to affect China's opinion to be effective though, right? You can put in place rules, and I think probably the biggest opportunities for this to have an effect is on security, for sure. Hey, folks, know a little more is coming back October 7th. If you haven't subscribed yet, now's the perfect time to get in on it. You can catch up on all the back episodes, and we will kick off the season October 7th with an interview with Stacey Higginbotham on Matter, the smart home interoperability platform. We also have episodes on RCS, lithium ion batteries, the trusted platform module. There's even an episode back there on USB4, if that story in the quick hits earlier confused you. Go get subscribed right now. Know a little more at knowalittlemore.com. Oh, who's ready for a little tech and media tussle? Yeah. And the Wall Street Journal. A bit at odds over the last week or so, because of a series of reports by the Journal about internal research at Facebook. So Facebook released by themselves two annotated PDFs of slide decks presenting its research on the effects of Instagram on teen health. That's what this entire situation has been about. The documents are called Hard Life Moments, Mental Health Deep Dive, and Mental Health Findings, as well as Teen Mental Health Deep Dive. Now, the Wall Street Journal published those plus four additional documents they say relied upon for their reporting on this subject. The additional documents that the Journal published are Teen Girl's Body Image and Social Comparison on Instagram and Exploratory Study in the US, Appearance-Based Social Media Comparison on Instagram, Social Comparison Topics, Celebrities like Count Selfies, and Teen and Young Adults on IG and FB. Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz claims that Facebook published its two versions of the documents after the Journal notified it on the paper's plan to publish all six. Now, a lot's being made about how to interpret the findings, and really that's been the scandal here. But let's talk about what we think of what Facebook did here in releasing their own slides and what we think they should have done or should do going forward. Yeah, we talked about a couple of these stories when they were released by the Wall Street Journal last week. I didn't think the research itself was as damning as a lot of headlines seem to think. It seemed to say that there is a negative effect, especially on people who are already having a negative effect, and that's useful to know. But to me, it was more about the fact that this research was there and helpful to understanding how social media is affecting folks, and it wasn't released. I think what the Wall Street Journal did in releasing all six arguably is a good thing because it allows more people to see what's going on. It's a bad thing because the people who best would look at these are people who actually are well-versed in the topic and can contextualize it and understand and see, like, ah, this is statistically significant. This is understandable in light of other research that's been done out here. Just kind of putting them out on the Internet in general is going to lead to a lot of misinterpretation. But frankly, because Facebook isn't making this kind of research readily available outside of its walls, you kind of have to have something like what the Wall Street Journal did happen for us to get a perfect picture. And I think it would be in Facebook's best long-term interests to open up this research even at the risk of having some of those misunderstandings because instead of it becoming a viral hit on Facebook, because it's a big headline, you could just be releasing them into the academic community and having people discussing them there. And then it's not as big of a story when it breaks because it wasn't a secret Facebook was hiding. It's actually research that's being done to help make the world better. Yeah, I mean, there, it is, if you want to think of like any silver lining here for the average Facebook hater, I know that there are a lot of you out there. It's well, at least Facebook has been doing this research. Facebook is not just completely blind to the fact that there might be negative results from somebody hanging out on Instagram, using it too much, being of a certain age, getting results for stuff that is particularly harmful based on other stuff that's going on in their life. It is good that Facebook, whether or not they're changing their products and their platforms because of the research, but at least conducting the research and getting it a little bit smarter about it, it does, yeah, it turns into something where it's like the Wall Street Journal is like, we're gonna publish this, so you better be ready to respond. And Facebook said, okay, well, we're gonna publish slightly different versions of at least two of these research studies that you obviously have gotten a hold of anyway. So then it becomes kind of a reactionary thing like, ah, Facebook had to respond, but I'm with you, Tom, if Facebook, they're in kind of a weird position because if the company was like, hey, we're gonna do quite a few studies that are very particularly focused on young people and possible negative harm that these sorts of platforms are doing to them, you really have to let the public know that in a well-thought-out way so that there isn't just this knee-jerk reaction of people saying, I mean, even internally, Facebook thinks it's harmful. Look at what they're doing. Thanks, when you hide it, I'm sorry, real quickly, it's when you hide it that people assume it's really bad. The reason you're hiding it is because it shows you're horrible. And actually, these don't show as bad of a thing as you might expect. Nor does it show that they were hiding it, right? Like this may or may not be something that they ever intended to be for public consumption. This was for an internal dialogue that theoretically would be more effective than litigating this through the press. Facebook has no choice but to double down on their product, especially when we're talking about something that is as complicated as an effect on teens or teen girls specifically. You want to know what's harmful to being a teen or a teen girl? Being a teen! Like this is a rough time in life, and Facebook certainly being the mirror of its own cohort is going to be associated with that element of one person's path to adulthood. There is nothing here to me, either in this story or in the way that Facebook has responded to it, that is anything less than a moral panic argument by The Wall Street Journal. This is the same as saying that MTV was creating sociopaths, by the way that it depicted people in music videos, which compared to what music videos look like today is an exceedingly quaint and ridiculous argument. I'll only disagree in that I think the moral panic is being done by others reporting on The Wall Street Journal. If you read The Wall Street Journal articles, they're fairly balanced and they're not, I don't think, egregiously fanning the flames of panic, but still having that effect. I also think when I say Facebook is hiding it, I mean, Facebook is combating NYU researchers from using publicly available data. Facebook, while they have a system to share data with academics, academics complain that they restrict what data they can get and make it less than useful. That, when I say hiding it, I mean, they could be doing a lot more to help people study all this stuff rather than doing studies and then leaving them inside. Go publish them. I agree. I agree. I do think that they could do it. I can understand internally that they could. Why are we going to hand people knives so they can stab us? And I think you end up getting stabbed more when you don't cooperate, you know? Put the knives in the hands of people who want to, like, dice a cabbage with them instead of stab you in the back. Beat your cabbage knives into plush. Stick with cabbage. All right. Real quickly, back in 2009, Blue Stacks was founded to make software that lets you run Android apps on Windows and macOS. And now, Blue Stacks is moving into the cloud with the aim of playing Android games in the browser across iOS, Windows, macOS, Android and Linux. Not just the aim. You can do it today. Blue Stacks X is launched. It offers ad-supported free mobile game streaming. The ads are pre-rolls. They don't interrupt the gameplay. You don't have to pay anything, though. And the whole thing runs on Blue Stacks corporate sibling now.gg. That's a hybrid cloud platform running with AWS Graviton servers. So the whole thing is kind of also an advertisement for now.gg if you're a business looking for something like that. You can try out these games and see how that platform works. Blue Stacks X can also offload some computing graphics to the local machine, but you don't have to download anything. This is also different than the Android app compatibility. Microsoft is bringing to Windows 11. That integration uses Amazon's Android Store, whereas Blue Stacks works with Google Play apps so the developers don't have to do anything. Blue Stacks X also works with a Discord bot called Cloudy that can be used to share gameplay sessions. So you can connect all the players in a session to a Discord voice channel automatically when they begin playing. It launched in beta with 14 cloud games, including Raid Shadow Legends, Disney Sorcerers Arena, and Lord's Mobile Kingdom Wars. Try it out right now, x.bluestacks.com, if you like. You don't have to, but it's there. I think it's well. I'm surprised no one else has called a bot Cloudy before. Maybe they have. I was a little scared. Like, is that the only Cloudy you can get? But yeah, this is great. And I think an excellent example of a company that does one thing really well, which is this emulation of Android in another operation system, particularly Windows, although they do work on MacOS, starting a cloud service Amazon style that's out there. They also have an online game service, so they're leveraging that with x.bluestacks.com. So a great example of something that's been, you know, bubbling under since I was doing Buzz Out Loud back in the day and has succeeded without, you know, getting a lot of controversy or a lot of attention. So I think it's worth checking out. Another thing that succeeded, at least in one place, is something called the station. This is an automated landing space and payload control tower made by MatterNet and now fully functional at the EOC hospital group, medical facility in Lugano, Switzerland, down in the south. The station provides a safe place for a cargo drone to land, swap its battery out, and it's protected from the elements and anybody who might have interests in its medical cargo, because again, this is a hospital. The first packages will be temperature sensitive hard shell cases with vials of things like lab samples, medication, even blood inside that would normally be transferred over land but have a short shelf life. So going by drone can be advantageous. The station includes a small collection door, could be opened by an authorized party kind of like restricted areas of a hospital itself. The station's first big deployment will be an Abu Dhabi where MatterNet is working with SkyGo and the city's health department to roll out a network of 40 stations across the city. Tech crutch pointed out too that this is one of those rare cases where the prototype, like the concept art, is what it ended up looking like. Like this big flower thing that they showed off before is not just the concept art, it's actually what they built. Yeah, it really does, it looks like some sort of steel art thing that you might see in the front of an office building of some kind. But yeah, it's neat. Up above the ground enough so that, yeah, it would be quite difficult for somebody to get in there and it sounds like they're trying to keep it as locked down as possible so that sensitive material can fly and land safely. Yeah. To all those people who are like, why are you just going to land blood samples on the lawn? People will steal them. Here's your answer. It's MatterNet. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Okay, so we got the iPhone 13. We covered it in depth a few weeks ago now and Ryan says, the ProRes Rock video capture on iPhone 13 is perfect for his work and he gives us an example. Ryan says, I run a small media entertainment business, do quite a bit of video recording in a small studio with my clients. I've been using a Canon XA10 for close to 10 years. I also have a Canon 7D DSLR and a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 1080. The XA10 lets me record to a memory card, set it and forget it while I interview clients in front of a green screen. The Pocket Cinema shoots raw but is suffering from a slow and painful death. Because my space is small, post-production can get tricky with regards to camera focus and color correction against the chroma keyer, especially if my subject is moving around in their seat a lot. I was looking at a Pocket Cinema 4K for my studio space, but when Apple announced ProRes raw on the iPhone 13 Pro made me reconsider my decision. Then when my phone carrier offered me a sizable trade credit for my current iPhone to keep me paying them for another three years, made it a no-brainer for me. That's great. I love getting this in-the-field example of what it's good for. And this is a great example of a small business which we kind of talked about with Schleicher, a small business that needs what the phone can do without having to spend extra on a separate device. That's perfect. It is fascinating as the term prosumer has kind of gone out of favor that we are seeing exactly how much the low, middle, and high realms of stuff like video equipment which used to be very, very pricey and very stratified are now kind of collapsing. And then Corey Kay wanted to know, is it just me or did anyone else think about the ED209 from Robocop during Wednesday's story about the Amazon Astro? It follows you on Century Mode. It can't go downstairs. I will never be able to unsee this, says Corey. If you think about Robocop and any of our other stories or if you have questions or comments or any feedback at all and anything that we talk about on the show do send it our way because we love to know what you're thinking. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd also like to thank our brand new bosses. We got two of them today. Shafiula and Jonathan Lockhart just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Shafiula. Thank you, Jonathan. Now listen, here's the secret. A lot of times when we get two new patrons, the next day we don't get any. So if you want the spotlight all to yourself, Patreon.com slash DTNS. That's right. Yeah. You don't have to dance with anybody. It is a solo show. Thank you also to Justin and Robert Young. Justin, how's Austin, Texas treating you? Well, you know, as much as I love doing DTNS every single Thursday, I gotta say I've had one eye this entire time also on everything that's unfolding in Congress right now. If you're not up to speed on what's happening with the infrastructure, bills, plural, and whether or not the Democrats are going to fight with each other and implode the entire situation, then you can catch up on it on the Politics Politics Politics podcast. We laid everything out on our Wednesday show later today because I gotta wait for the news to happen before I talk about it. We will be posting our late edition and then on Friday's episode which will come out tomorrow. We take a look back in time at the last time we had something like this and that was the passage of Obamacare. Indeed, two recalcitrant Democrat senators stood in the way of passing that gigantic law as well. What happened? What did they get? And is it a roadmap to what will happen this time? You can find it all out on the Politics Politics Politics podcast wherever you find podcasts. I'm most upset at the U.S. government right now for not having a decision in time for you to explain it to me during my dog walk this morning. So, come on people. Totally thrown my Thursday into this gray. I am all over the map right now. I don't blame Justin, by the way. He's doing the right thing. Yeah, it's the government. Think of Tom and his dogs. Zach. Also think of us live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC because that's when we're live. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and join us if you can. Lots of fun. We'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.