 Coming up on GTS, will you pay for movie tickets with Bitcoin wireless fiber at 20 gigabits per second proves itself in Central Africa and an $18,000 knee rehab device becomes a $399 wearable. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 16, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. Sarah Lane has the day off, but this is still the definitive tech news show on the planet that comes out daily by us. We're just talking about television shows and how they've changed. Is there still a fall season? Get that expanded show, Good Day Internet. Good Day Internet comes to you on Patreon.com slash DTNS. And that's where you can join our top patrons like Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher and James C. Smith. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung Display has begun mass producing laptop sized 90 Hertz OLED panels, which will be used in several upcoming 14 inch Asus ZenBook and VivoBook models. The company announced back in January that it was planning to ramp up OLED laptop panel production in 2021. And here they're doing it. Razer announced the Huntsman V2 and the V2 10 keyless, meaning that it doesn't have a number pad, both have a polling rate of 8,000 Hertz, eight times faster than the original Huntsman keyboard line. The keyboard's optical switches used infrared to detect when they have been pressed, Razer is promising near zero latency. The full size V2 costs 190 bucks with clicks switches or 200 bucks with quieter linear switches. The tech keyless is 150 or 160. All of them are on sale right now. NFTs has had its biggest controversy yet. Trading marketplace OpenSea announced Wednesday it has accepted the head of product, Nate Chastain's resignation and has asked a third party to review its approach to unethical behavior. The announcement follows accusations that Chastain operated secret wallets that consistently showed purchases of NFTs happening shortly before, coincidentally, they were featured on OpenSea's home page. Which would make the price go up. Little insider trading. Blockchains showed transfers from Chastain's wallet to another wallet that was used to buy those NFTs and then flipped them after they were featured on the homepage and the price went up and now Chastain no longer works for OpenSea. Out to OpenSea more like it. Perhaps less environmental protection agency has rated Lucid motors air dream engine car rated at 520 miles on a single charge, making it the EV with the longest range in the United States. The air dream engine is a dream for most people at the $169,000 price point for the base model. So yeah, but you get that range. Take you far. And GoPro launched the hero 10 black action camera able to shoot up to 5.3 K at 60 frames per second as well as 4K at up to 120 frames per second and slow mo at 240 frames per second at 2.7 K with a $50 a year GoPro subscription. Users can upload videos directly from the camera to the cloud while charging the hero 10 black cost $499 or $399 with a GoPro subscription. All right, let's talk more crypto Justin. Why not? Who doesn't want to use crypto currencies to buy movie tickets and popcorn? Quiet. That was a rhetorical question. In case you missed it, US AMC theaters announced back in August that they plan to accept Bitcoin. And then on Wednesday CEO Adam Aaron announced that the theater chain will also accept Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin cash. When? Well, AMC hasn't announced a hard date that you can officially use crypto to get into the theater, but Aaron did say it'll happen by the end of the year. So clock's ticking. As long as you can afford the gas quote unquote or other transactional costs and the value hasn't dropped too much since you bought it and you figured out which wallet to use to pay at an AMC theater. You too could soon use a cryptocurrency to buy a $7 coke and a ticket to see matrix resurrections. And remember that all upgrades on your popcorn are only whatever 25 cents is when you convert it to the cryptocurrency of your choice. AMC Stubbs members get free gas. Yeah, who knows? I imagine this is going to only work on the AMC theater website. Yeah. They will. They probably they haven't named a vendor, but they're probably partnering with somebody to process the transaction. But that's where it's going to break down for me. I'm wondering why they're doing this beyond just the press hit. I think, you know, AMC diamond hands, all of that makes it makes it maybe worthwhile to say like, yeah, AMC, we're into the cryptocurrencies too. But it does cost some money to set up something like this. And most people are not going to have any idea, even if they hold some cryptocurrency, how to go about putting it in the wallet that will work with AMC. I mean, I guess they could use PayPal and maybe that's what they're going to use and that'll make it a little more accessible to people. But I can't see a lot of people using this. Do you? Can you? Well, I don't think the point is necessarily that it's going to be an off the shelf hit. The reason why all these companies do this kind of stuff is for the same reason that we still talk about the Bitcoin pizza, right? How much did it go up since people bought something so very simple about it? If you are in business, you want to have the idea of holding something that might get more valuable. And so if you can exchange a ticket to a movie, that's fine. I do think that this is going to be something that is seen more common. It just so happens that it's a sexier story with AMC because we don't know where movies are going. They were obviously hit hard by the pandemic and they had their own little moment in the sun with the stock. So it's interesting to look at this particular case. But in general, I think there's going to be a kind of meat and potatoes business trend for anything that does large volumes of cash. Yeah. And for whatever reason, AMC Theaters is doing it. It is good for cryptocurrency holders because the more big places like that to take it, then the more other places will decide, well, we should take it too, which could help increase acceptance, which could increase stability and make this kind of thing more normal. Look, there's a reason why that Walmart Litecoin thing, that kerfuffle that happened earlier in this week was something that was plausible. Because at some point, somebody who does gigantic transactions like Walmart might want to start taking in some cryptocurrency to sit on it. Yeah. Well, 5G means a lot of things, but two broad ways it's delivered are over a millimeter wave frequencies or what's called the sub six gigahertz bands. Both have improvements in latency and capacity over LTE, but there is a difference if you get one service or another. We have a whole episode at know a little more dot com about 5G. If you want the full explanation, the short version is sub six 5G has about the same range as LTE, but it can be 25 to 50% faster. Millimeter wave 5G is a lot more faster, but it has shorter range, meaning it needs more base stations than LTE. It's the one that has problems going through walls, etc. And carriers largely support both services these days, but they want you to know when you're on that ultra fast millimeter wave service. However, millimeter wave and sub six aren't considered consumer friendly terms and they don't fit in that small space at the top of your phone that tells you what service you're on. So T-Mobile USA has named its millimeter wave service ultra capacity. And when you're connected to it, it will show you the letters and numbers 5G UC up there on the top of your phone, not just 5G Verizon already does this. It calls its millimeter wave service 5G UW for ultra wideband, which is slightly confusing since there's also a wireless protocol called ultra wideband. These are things like Apple's air tags. One is an IEEE low energy high band with communication standard. The other was made up by Verizon. At least it's not as bad as AT&T though, which calls its 4G LTE service 5GE. AT&T does have a name for its millimeter wave service 5G plus. So the upshot of all of this is if you see 5G without letters on your phone, you're probably getting sub six service and it'll be faster than LTE, but not as fast as some other 5G service. If you see 5G with more letters after it, it's probably millimeter wave and much faster unless you're on AT&T. You know, I think I saw 5G UC versus 5G UW during college football Saturday last week. And, you know, I think there was a very, very escorting day. This is fascinating though. That was on ESPN 2. ESPN 3G. Yeah, I think if we were to really go back and maybe this would be a great PDF book or an ebook that you could put together, Tom, it's just like the great taxotomy of all ways that we have labeled commercially available cellular connections and what they actually mean. I feel like you could do like one of those like, like books that they were reading to brand at the beginning. Where you're just like going through all these house names and it's like, and then AT&T adopted LTE, but it wasn't really LTE. So it was just 4G plus. Like this is, it's interesting. And I'm glad that you are here to kind of put a handle on it. People can understand it, but boy, howdy is it a jungle out there? Yeah. 4G has some of this. Like T-Mobile was the perpetrator there of calling its 3G service 4G, even though it wasn't 4G, which made everybody talk about LTE because, well, when you've said 4G, who knows what you meant? So let's talk about LTE. At least AT&T has not caused that with its mislabeling of LTE as 5G. And there really is a difference between millimeter wave and sub six. So I don't really hold it against them for saying, Hey, you're on millimeter wave and coming up with a way, it would be nice if they all use the same thing, but they're not going to do that. So yeah, there you go. See, if you see the letters, you're probably getting faster service. U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair Lena Khan is expected to crack down on big tech and here comes the first wave. The FTC voted three to two on Wednesday that health apps are subject to a rule requiring reporting of data breaches. So the rules that apply to your hospitals, records handling vendor also apply to your period tracking and fitness apps. That's not all. In February 2020, the FTC started an inquiry about 616 unreported acquisitions by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft between the years of 2010 and 2019. And that study is now done. 94 of the acquisition studied exceeded 92 million in value, which normally means that they should have been reported under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. However, those 94 acquisitions were not reported because of the statutory or regulatory exemptions. Three more acquisitions would have met the threshold if debts and liabilities had been counted. And nine acquisitions deferred compensations to founders and key employees to keep the value of the acquisition under the threshold. The report doesn't name these companies, but Bloomberg sources say Giffy paid a dividend to investors in order to keep the value of its acquisition by Facebook below 92 million, even though it's estimated to have been worth 400 million. So Khan wants these kinds of loopholes closed. She also wants to take a look at the use of non-compete clauses that some people at acquired companies are required to sign. Khan is one of the people who believe big companies are buying their way out of competition, Tom. Yeah, and so the theory goes, if there are fewer loopholes, more of these acquisitions will have to be reported. They can find out more about them and maybe discover anti-competitive behavior in those reporting and block some of these acquisitions from happening. The non-compete thing is on the other end of, well, if we do approve one, the founders should be free to go start another competing service now that they've cashed in rather than being prevented from starting something they're good at. And I do think that there is a real case to be made for that, although there are soft pressures that come along with some of these things when companies are acquired. The one thing that I would say is that especially when things were really, really hot in this space, I would say about five years ago, maybe even something a little bit longer, a lot of these companies were built to be acquired, either in spinning up knowing that certain companies need or are expecting that many players will need a plug-and-play acquisition to bolster a growing market. But when you are getting funding from venture capitalists, it is often with the idea that, hey, let's build this as hot as we possibly can. And then in five years, we ring up Apple, Google and Microsoft and we see which one of them really wants to buy it. So I don't know if, especially on the smaller side, the acquisitions are necessarily things that are going to stamp out competition. Now, when we're talking about the ones that they got to kick and push to get it under certain limits so they don't have to disclose everything, there's probably room to say, hey, look, if you're under five feet and you can't ride the roller coaster, don't try to stand on your tippy toes. I mean, there's certainly something to the idea that if a company doesn't sell, it has a chance to become a competitor. Look at Facebook. Everybody thought, well, not everybody, I didn't think this, but a lot of people thought that Facebook was crazy for not selling to Yahoo back in the day. Well, who's laughing now, right? Right. You know, Facebook did the right thing. And the idea is that now these companies are so big that you can't avoid selling to them and therefore competitors are crushed. And that's why we don't see any competitors to Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera. I'm not sure that's true, especially when you look at somebody like Netflix who everybody's like, you should sell to Apple, you should sell to this. And they have it and they've grown big. There's something doesn't ring quite right because there are plenty of examples of legitimately employees leaving a business because that business is like, we can't take the risk to develop this. But go do a startup, get some funding, see if it works. And if it does, we'll buy you. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's exporting the risk. And if it cashes in, then the company brings it in. It's all above board. There's no conspiracy there. So I'm not sure that stopping acquisitions will have the effect that people hope. I'm not sure it won't either, though. Yeah, I don't think that this is necessarily even about stopping acquisitions. But if there are rules and people are kind of pure wedding around them, then I do. I'm okay with there being a traffic cop to, you know, police then. Hey folks, we figure you like different perspectives on tech news. That's why you're here. So you're going to want to check out the tech. Tech, John podcast, J A W N that Philly slang feature and Rob done with Terence Gaines and Stephanie Humphrey. The tech. John takes a second look at the week's tech headlines delivered from an African-American perspective and the pilot episode received so much positive feedback during our experiment week that Rob has turned it into a full show. First episode is out. You can get it right now. It's it's it's available. They're talking about Facebook AI. They're talking about a TikTok strike by African-American collaborators. They're talking about can you even get a dumb TV? Rob wants a dumb TV these days. So it's a good, good fun conversation and you're going to learn a lot. Go check it out. The tech. John T E C H J A W N the tech. John dot com. For good or ill, Apple announcements always get a lot more attention and analysis and that means usually the week of an Apple announcement. There's a few good tidbits that percolate percolate out later in the week. This is one of those weeks. For instance, all four new iPhones support dual e-sim. You can find it right there on the site. It kind of slipped by in the announcement. If you want to use the phone with two carriers, you won't need a physical SIM card for one of those characters. One of those carriers. They'll still have the SIM card slot if you want to, but if you don't want to, you don't have to. There's also been a lot made of high trade in values. The AT&T max trade in value is $1,000. T-Mobile is $1,290. That makes a new phone cost nothing extra in certain cases. In all cases, the discounts come as monthly credits though. So you need to stay with the carrier for two to three years, depending on the offer. You may not want to lock yourself into that, but it might be worth investigating. And then there's the independent benchmarks. Apple chose to compare the new A15 Bionic chip to unnamed competitors this time around instead of comparing it to its previous generation, which is as done in the past. So we're just now getting actual benchmarks from folks with advanced access to these new phones. Mac rumors reported a geekbench metal result showing a 55% GPU improvement for the 13 Pro over the 12 Pro. That's pretty hefty. On that same benchmark, the GPU and the iPhone 13 showed a 15% improvement over the iPhone 12. The difference between the Pro and the 13 is because the Pro has five cores in its GPU compared to four in the regular iPhone 13. That's probably one of the reasons it's got a big jump over the 12 Pro too. Now to the CPU. The six core A15 Bionic is the same in all iPhone 13. So the benchmark scores are same on the Pro as well as the non-Pro. Mac rumors surveyed multiple geekbench scores for iPhones and found the A15 Bionic has about a 10% single core increase over the A14 Bionic and an 18% multicore improvement. There's a lot of arguments about whether it's good or not. It's a decent improvement. It's not stunning. And a lot of folks are wondering if maybe some departures in Apple's staff caused them to not have as good of an increase or maybe it's the chip shortage and having to make some compromises and how they're produced, etc. But overall, I think Apple just looked at the numbers and said like, oh, compared it to the competitors, works better this time. So we'll use those numbers till they're bigger. Yeah. So Apple has a particularly flashy flagship phone from Samsung with the Z Fold now. I think that for the first time in a while it seems like there is a little bit of a heat in that market. Not all the phones are just different versions of gigantic slats right now. One folds in half and does different things and is a bigger device when you want it to be. So Apple, I think that there's a reason commercially why you can say, all right, look at all that. That's very, very nice with your misshapen websites, but look how fast this thing goes on the flagship phone that we want to sell you. That being said, I think you're right. This does not strike me as a particularly necessary upgrade. Indeed, I was thinking about skipping this upgrade for the first time in a good long while until I remembered that I'm on the upgrade plan. So because I have the upgrade plan. I find that very telling that someone on the upgrade plan so they can always have the newest and best was still thinking about skipping the phone until they remembered they were on the upgrade plan. Yeah, so I'm already paying 50 bucks a month or whatever it is. I think that may say something there. One hurdle to rolling out broadband access to new areas is having to dig and lay fiber. Wireless technology can avoid a lot of these complexities and makes roll out faster and cheaper. By the way, this is something that is worldwide, even though we're going to go ahead and take a look outside of the U.S. borders. But this also affects regional outlay for broadband. While Project Loon is no longer in operation, beaming internet from above, one of its ground technologies is showing promise below. Alphabet's Project Tara successfully transmitted 700 terabytes of data over 20 days between Brazzaville of the Republic of Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo using wireless free space optical communications or FSOC links that operate at 20 gigabits per second. These links were originally developed to transmit data between Project Loon's helium balloons. Project Tara reported a 99.9% availability using these links. The Kinshasa, Brazzaville area was chosen because of the deep and fast flowing river that makes ground fiber in installation very difficult. The two cities are only a few kilometers apart, but a fiber link between them would have to run 400 kilometers to get around these pesky natural obstacles. While not the most challenging weather conditions on the planet, the link did operate through haze, light rain, birds and other obstacles including, quote, a curious monkey. The links work by automatically adjusting mirrors to keep a laser beam hitting a five centimeter target that's about five centimeters away. That monkey just wanted to grab the laser. That's what that was about. He's like, I'm going to use that. I'm going to mess with it. Yeah. This is all kidding aside. This is a good use for technology that was developed for something that didn't pan out for Alphabet with Project Loon. So they sent it back into the X lab. And now they're realizing that it's not just on the back hall in areas like this where it's just the terrain just doesn't lend itself to digging in the ground and laying fiber. Then we can expand access to the internet to more places on the planet. I think it's something that I hope continues to expand and gets even cheaper because not only I think for places like this and beyond America that we can go ahead and bring the internet to more and more places with natural boundaries but boy is the idea of avoiding everything that comes along with digging and laying fiber a benefit to the world. Not only for places that have natural barriers but also some places don't allow digging in certain areas and whenever you're talking about property that whether it's owned by a government or owned by a private citizen it's very rarely applies. A version of as fast as things need to go you can often do that with these kind of lasers where there's not the same kind of regulation. So I think this is a great idea. Yeah. Three nines probably doesn't sound like a lot to some folks in the industry. But I think you know given the situation they're in that that's probably not bad and they said that people in Kinshasa in the U.S. have a connection that they have and I think that that right there tells me OK so this worked it may not be the only way you know you may be going to have to build in some redundancy that's what the Internet is all about but it is a way that you can you can extend connectivity and if it's this or nothing then it's certainly way better than that. Well if you've ever rehabbed a serious knee injury maybe you're an athlete but if it's if it's real serious often you need a machine to do something called thermoelectric cooling it's a Peltier effect that can be used for either cooling or heating and in medical uses is more precise and therefore more effective than just ice or a heat pad plus it doesn't need water. CNET's David Carnoy points out that one common example of a machine that uses thermoelectric cooling is the game ready med for elite but that one you have to sit inside so it has to be located somewhere it's pretty big and it cost $18,000 so you're probably even if you have the room going to put one of these in your home. However CNET reports that former UC Davis soccer player Alex Aguiar has developed the Hyper Ice X it's a wearable version of this part of the reason the med for is so big and expensive is it uses a lot of power to make the Hyper Ice X efficient and therefore wearable the company developed hockey puck size modules with fans and temperature sensors built in it runs off a compact rechargeable Tesla battery and all of that together brings the size down to a wearable sleeve you can not only wear this thing but you can walk around with it it can run on battery for an hour but you can also plug it in if you need a longer session the Hyper Ice X cools to 32 degrees and heats to 113 degrees Fahrenheit it does not do compression therapy though which the $18,000 med for does include but then again the Hyper Ice X only cost you $399 you're likely to see it on the sidelines soon tennis champ Naomi Osaka skiing legend Lindsay Vaughn NBA stars Anthony Davis and Chris Paul and NFL stars and Patrick Mahomes and Christian McCaffrey are all investors in this company and I kind of see why it's not just lending their name recognition it's probably something they want to use well if you are an athlete to the caliber of the names that we just mentioned buying the $18,000 machine and putting it in your your home with your performance team so they can supervise its use is probably an option for everybody else and look this is you know right now they're using it for knees but you know when I went through a bulging disc back injury alternating between ice and heat on my my lower back was something that I had to do in the middle day and spoiler alert when you're sitting down with a bag of you know frozen water on your lower back it gets a little sweaty and a little sloshy really really quick this is great I'm really excited that people seem to be pumped about it because I'll tell you what when you're in a situation where you need to rehab something even if you're not like a regular athlete you just pull something or you injure something $400 you know there's a reason any kind of health tech will always be a good bet if it works because results in that field mean it's time to pull out the credit card and we don't see big consumer level advances like this as often as we see digital advances this is a nice hardware medical advance plus I mean sure Naomi Osaka might be able to afford that big clunky med four but she can't throw it in a bag tennis stars are jetting all over the world right she could take this and so can you and hyper ice to your point Justin does want to do this for other parts of the body you know for for the back for shoulders so look for that coming soon but this is available now if you want to check it out you can take a look at hyperice.com all right let's check out the mail bag natron wrote in regarding our continuing conversation of whether scanning it to get into a concert with your palm is actually a benefit he writes good day regarding the question of whether palm scanning will help or not in speeding up entry into concert venues security checks metal detectors pat downs won't go any faster with palm scanning is a really good point natron but people lose tickets while on the other hand it's rare and very unsettling to lose a palm so peace of mind alone will be enough for some maybe many people to switch your phone on a paper ticket but phone's break battery goes out so that is an upside to this if you link it to your palm chances are very high that your palm will be with you when you go to enter the concert but that security check thing is the one that torpedoed it for me I'm like you guys are missing the point it's always the same getting to your seat whether you're in the seat it works well except the security checks the security checks always back everything up yeah and of course that will be the bottleneck until we figure out another way that it was even faster but you're right this is an interesting question of you know exactly is the battle between palm and ticket like and that seems I never thought of it is really the halfway evolutionary point between a paper ticket and my own hand but you know at least metaphorically it certainly is it's a thing that I almost never forget or I am always reminded if I leave it somewhere immediately and it can scan just as well as any ticket can I'm just I'm just saying I think people are underestimating when you're standing there in line and you've got your phone out right and you're like I have to make sure and you know so it doesn't go to sleep okay and now I'm going to turn the phone down all of that goes away I know it doesn't sound like much if all you have to do is put your palm down palms on palms not going to go off remember of registering your biometrics with God knows what company that's going to sell it to God knows Amazon who says they won't sell it to anyone Justin sure okay so let's but understand that there is a trade off there is you know the benefit may not be worth the trade it's live perfectly valid feedback at dailytechnewshow.com folks keep the comments coming not just on this topic but any topic you know you got a need for some hyper ice or do you see a problem with it let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com special thanks to Mark Wansel today who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS thank you for all the years of support Mark really appreciate the people who stick with us over a long time and contribute at a high level thank you Mark this by the way does break the streak we had gone since August 18th without having a day that didn't have a new boss this is the first day without a new boss but gives us a chance to thank Mark so thank you Mark and thank you Justin Robert Young well thank you Tom I love being here on this dailytechnewshow every Thursday I want to remind everybody that I've got a politics show called politics politics politics and on the episode that will be live tomorrow morning we have a great conversation between myself and Andrew Heaton who is a political commentator and stand-up comedian about the political comedy legacy of the dearly departed Norm McDonald somebody that obviously was very pointed never shy about going after political figures how do we understand his legacy all tomorrow on politics politics politics with Andrew Heaton I'm looking forward to that not just for the conversation but just to hear the sound bites that I know you'll be including in there oh yeah hey folks we are live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC a whole big chat room in there join the fun dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Chris Ashley and Len Peralta will be here to illustrate the show this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program