 Coming up on DTNS, a big milestone for solar. And should you use your EV to power your house, plus live streaming shopping meets its big test in the U.S. this week on Twitter. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Red, but I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us cohost of the Snobbo S-Cast, Nika Monford. Welcome back, Nika. Hello, glad to be here on a non-apple day. I know, right? We've been saying we need to do this. We finally did it. We just had a great old time comparing all of our thanksgivings and I kind of want to eat at everybody's. If you want that discussion, go to Good Day Internet, which you can get at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of, big thanks to our top patrons, including Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and High Tech Oki. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The location tracking service Life 360 announced that it intends to acquire Tile in a deal valued at $205 million. Tile will operate as a standalone brand under its current CEO. After the acquisition, Tile will leverage Life 360's 33 million smartphone users to expand its Bluetooth-based finding network. The deal is expected to close in Q1 of next year. Spotify introduced a new Netflix hub. Yes, I said that correctly. Spotify introduced a Netflix hub in its app. It's a place to discover official soundtracks, playlists, and podcasts that go along with top shows and movies from Netflix, like La Casa de Papel, Narcos Mexico, Outer Banks, Squid Game, Tic-Tic Boom, Bridgerton, Cowboy Bebop, the list goes on. The hub will also include Netflix-tied podcasts like OK Now Listen, Netflix Is a Daily Joke, 1010 Would Recommend, and popular podcasts centered around shows like The Crown, the official podcast, or Behind the Scenes of Shadow and Bone, and more. Roku confirmed it's aware of problems impacting a small portion of users that have certain older Roku TV models or older Roku Ultra players, following the update to Roku OS 10.5. Customers have reported freezing and crashing across a variety of major streaming apps, as well as unresponsive remotes. Some customers also report that Roku support downgraded devices to an earlier OS version to resolve the issues. Apple has followed Meta in suing the NSO group, maker of the Pegasus spyware. Apple's asking the court for a permanent injunction to ban an NSO group from using any Apple software services or devices. The complaint alleges NSO group targeted a legal surveillance at Apple's US customers. Pegasus lets an attacker access a phone's microphone and camera remotely without the user being aware and is generally marketed to governments. The US recently added NSO group to its entity list. That's the one that requires a US company to get permission to sell to any entity on the list. Apple also, in a slightly unrelated announcement, announced that its digital ID card program in cooperation with eight US states will not launch by the end of the year. It's gonna launch in 2022. Twitter created aliases for all users in its birdwatch pilot program for crowdsourced fact checking. These won't be tied to a public Twitter account, though. The company also rolled out a profile page to see a user's past birdwatch contributions with all past contributions done with their Twitter account now listed under the new alias. All right, let's talk about that solar stuff. Couple of items related to renewable energy. First, the milestone for solar generation is also leading to us talking about a way to get around the battery bottleneck. Let's start with the solar milestone. The Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, noted that rooftop power in South Australia provided 92% of that state's electricity need this past Sunday. That sets a new record. 92% came from solar panels. With a little boost from wind power, there was even a brief period, a couple periods of negative electricity demand. That's when solar and wind were combining to make more power than was needed by people between 1225 and 1240, and again between 125 and 150. They were adding more power to the grid than people were pulling out of it. Now, if you recall, South Australia experienced widespread power outages in 2016 due to storms, and that inspired Elon Musk to build a 100 megawatt battery system there in 2017, which has proved to be a success in helping to even out the grid. One of the problems with harnessing wind and solar, of course, is they aren't always around. The wind's not always blowing, the sun's not always shining. Now, there are a lot of ways to mitigate this. One of them is storing power for later use. Batteries are definitely one of the ways to store for later use, but also because of their limited technology, one of the bottlenecks. Multiple companies are working on the idea of using electric vehicle batteries to contribute power to the grid. No individual electric vehicle is enough to power more than maybe a house, but in combination, it could be a powerful way to store electricity. Two scientists from Anglia Ruskin University in the UK have an article on the conversation about how this would work. EVs have an attractive capacity. Only 1% of UK households right now have an electric vehicle, but that right now is enough to store 18 gigawatt hours of electricity. That's about twice what is stored in the UK's biggest pumped storage plant up in Snowdonia. And as more households get EVs, that capacity is going to rise, but you may, and you would rightly be saying, I wanna charge my EV up, not deplete it and run the rest of the power grid, right? The idea is that software would manage things so you're charging when energy is cheap because there's varying prices for energy throughout the day. And you would be contributing to the energy at peak times when it's most expensive and get paid for it. So you would make money on the transaction. That software would also have to manage it so that your car is charged enough that you can drive it when you're ready to go. Now, there's a lot of ifs and that, but the motivation is that in addition to the yearly operating savings you get from having an EV over an internal combustion car, you'd actually make money by selling power into the grid, charge low, sell high. So people might be motivated to say, okay, I'll risk it, even if I won't maybe always have a fully charged EV, as long as I can drive it and I can make money off of it, maybe you can convince people to do this. Another problem that they need to overcome is battery degradation. If you're constantly discharging and recharging, that shortens the life of your battery. And there are three industrial things that need to happen to make this work. One is a vehicle to grid system. Japan has pired near this in the wake of Fukushima disaster to supplement outages. Second is home hardware charging adaptation so you can do it in your house. And then of course you need energy market policies to manage paying you for that and support from the grid to be able to accept all that power from this widely dispersed number of batteries. So it's not an easy solution, but the idea is that the UK alone could gain as much power from EVs as it would get from building 10 large nuclear power stations and that makes it kind of tantalizing it. Don't you think, Sarah? Yeah, for sure. I'm actually, you know, I'm a few months out from getting my next car. My current lease is almost up and I really want to figure out the EV situation but I'm kind of, you know, and I realized that, yes, saving out gas gonna be great, but you know, that, you know, how much actually am I going to have to be, you know, pulling off of another power grid and who's gonna pay for that in order to do so? The idea that I would be especially, because I'm not driving my car 24 hours a day, I could be feeding back into that grid, helping the grid stay up. Getting money for it is, and I know no one's offering that to me right now where I live, you know, in the US, but that is an extremely enticing way to get people on board with us. Nika, what do you think? Would you jump in on something like this if it were available? I think I would and I will, you know, say I work for an automotive company that was recently in the news with their latest EV release. So I think that's one of my hesitations with EVs is am I going to have enough power to be able to use this as my primary car? Am I going to have to think of, you know, am I gonna have to plan my outings to make sure that I have enough power to get where I'm going to get back if I need to charge somewhere while I'm out? Am I going to easily be able to do that? But the fact that you'll be able to contribute to the grid as well as pull away from it and get paid to do it and still be able to drive your device, your vehicle, it's very, as Sarah said, enticing. It's a very enticing project. My head went immediately to like, oh, if there's a power outage, you know, I could power off my car. But I think the idea is if you've got this many EVs out there, you probably are less likely to have a power outage because you've got all this spare capacity to pile in. So yeah, very tantalizing. Tantalizing indeed. And perhaps the next story will also be. Qualcomm will debut its next flagship Snapdragon chip at the Snapdragon Tech Summit, happening on November 30th. Now chip names sometimes seem ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as TV names. For example, the LG OLED 55G1 Pua, doesn't really roll off the tongue, but that's actually the name of a television. But Qualcomm announced that it would like to make the naming convention simpler. First, it'll just be called Snapdragon. Granted, most of us didn't call them Qualcomm Snapdragon every time anyway, but that is now official. Second, the number is gonna go down to a single digit. In the past, the number was the power. The first number was the power. Second number was the generation. Third was for indicating updates. If you understood that, it made sense. But for a lot of folks, it seemed like too many numbers. So the 768, for example, was the sixth gen chip on the second most powerful class behind the 800s and an upgrade over the 765. Perfect, right? Makes sense. Clear as much. Well, perfect sense. Yeah, that system hitting its limit, as noted by the next flagship, expected to be called the 898, which is the ninth generation. Where does it go from there though? One might ask. Apparently, single digits, though Qualcomm is holding off the details until the 30th. So Qualcomm saying, we're gonna make this easier, but we'd like you to pay attention to our announcement on the 30th. But gold will indicate flagship products in emerging markets, and there may be a hint in Snapdragon PC processors like the 8CX Gen 2. Yeah, the 8CX Gen 2, when the Verge pointed that out, I realized this is going to be the Snapdragon 9, that way they can have the Snapdragon 10 and the Snapdragon 11, and that's gonna be great. But my guess is it'll be the Snapdragon 9 Plus and the Snapdragon 9S and the Snapdragon 9CX, in which case they're really just gonna be replacing numbers with letters if they do that, so. And you know what, I have to always bring in a little bit of Apple into the conversation. Do you think it's possibly the amount of, I guess, publicity that the M1 chip has gotten, that it really rolls off the tongue, is very simple, it's not very convoluted, and how people are now talking, even outside of tech circles about chips, when that really was never the case. But when you talk about the new Max, it's the M1 Pro or the M1 Max, it's one of those things that is becoming a part of the normal name enclosure and I think they realize in order to keep up, they may have to rethink their approach. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's not necessarily a technological reason, right? Right. But when you see everyone able to talk about the M1 chip, suddenly you get jealous. You're like, oh, they're not saying 888, they're saying, we wanna get it to where people brand that. So I may be wrong. We'll find out on the 30th, I guess. Maybe they'll have some fancier, you know, snappier way that makes us all, I say snappier and it's a snapdragon. That was not intentional, but now it is. The Facebook papers are a term for the documents provided to US regulators by former Facebook product manager, Francis Hogan. We've heard a lot of reporting based on these, starting with the Wall Street Journal. The documents include internal research, memos, chat logs and more. Those documents were also provided to US Senator Richard Blumenthal and through that made available to about 300 media outlets. The idea was responsible disclosure, having them vet these documents to make sure they were real and then specifically report on aspects of them, but not releasing all the documents for the public. While multiple outlets have published stories based on the documents and some have made individual documents public in support of those stories, no one has published the entire collection. Whenever you have big papers like this, go back to the 70s and look into the Pentagon papers. There will always be a push to say, after a certain amount of stories, the public has a right to see all of them, but there is always confidential information in these kinds of papers that maybe the public doesn't have a right to see. So, Gizmodo intends to make all of the papers they have access to public and in so doing, they're gonna work with independent monitors to determine how to responsibly disclose the greatest amount of information while minimizing what Gizmodo says are costs to individual's privacy or the furtherance of other harms. Gizmodo writes that it does not want to hand, quote, criminals and spies a roadmap for undermining what controls Facebook does have in place. So it's not as simple as just redacting names in certain cases. There's also procedures and security measures that maybe they will redact so that it's not obvious to bad actors how to manipulate them. The independent committees will include ACLU Senior Staff Technologist Daniel Kahn Gilmore, Columbia University Senior Research Fellow in Journalism Pro Ben Ghani, Marquette University Computer Scientist Michael Zimmer, NYU Computer Scientist Damon McCoy and Laura Adelson and UMass Amherst Public Policy Expert Ethan Zuckerman. The documents will not all be released at once because Gizmodo says it will release the documents that require the least amount of inspection first, possibly ones that have already been released, but eventually they will release as many of them as they can. I am, I mean, I think this is the right call. I am a person who's very curious, like show me the documents, I wanna see all of it. But I understand why doing that and to say like, public knowledge, let's hold Facebook's feed to the fire type thing. Isn't, it doesn't make sense because there is a lot of sensitive information here. And I don't know how I would do this differently. Nika, do you have any thoughts on this? I think they're doing it as responsible as they can with this approach because even though we know what Facebook has done when it comes to data and access, you don't want to combine another wrong with another wrong. And I think it's key to make sure you're protecting not only the employees who have really nothing to do with this, they're just employees. I hate, I just work with Facebook. So you don't want people's names and those types of things out just in the open public. And as you mentioned, protocols as well because bad actors are always out there waiting to pounce on a way to kind of infiltrate the system when you have over a billion people on a particular platform. So I think they're going about it as responsible as possible. And while we do want to see the information, I think we have the right to the information is making sure that it's being put out there in the most responsible way to cause at least a amount of harm. Yeah, I think the other aspect I'll throw in here is the battle against misimpressions is important here too. There's some very important information in here that a lot of people think they know because they've seen a headline, but may not be accurate, right? What harms does Instagram cause? I bet if you ask 10 people on the street, you're gonna get 10 different answers because they've glanced at a headline, haven't actually read the articles. So it's important to really nail down like what is actually being done wrong because if you accuse Facebook of doing something that it hasn't actually done because of a misimpression, it's really easy for them to defend against that and just point like, that's not actually the way it is. If you're gonna hold their feet to the fire, you wanna have accurate information to hold their feet to the fire. So this is a great way of battling misimpressions too to say, let's get this all out here so that people can comb through and better say, well, that story may have tilted a little bit. Here's the actual document that you can check for yourself. Not that every one of us are gonna go check it for ourselves, but there will be more eyes on it and more of a chance for people to go, this is actually what's in here. This is the thing to really focus on. Hey, folks, if you have a thought about this or anything else we talk about on the show, send us an email. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shopping livestreams, big business for years in China and elsewhere in Asia. Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook, and others have been introducing them in the US. And now Twitter wants to join the game. Twitter's first shopping livestream is going to happen on Sunday, November 28th at 7 p.m. Eastern in collaboration with Walmart. Jason Derulo will host the 30-minute variety show featuring electronics, home goods, clothing, decor, the things that you would buy from Walmart. You'll see a video at the top of your screen, an online catalog focusing on the products highlighted in the video, and then a stream of tweets released to the video. Purchasing will be available on desktop and iOS and right users can watch but not buy. Keep in mind though that the Walmart stream can happen outside of Twitter. It's not an exclusive thing to Twitter. It'll also be available on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but Twitter is involved for the first time. The company called it a test, says it doesn't plan to make shopping streams available to all users to operate. Twitter launched a shop module for elect brands, select brands back in July to add purchasing to their profile. So Twitter at least cares about this in some sense. While this certainly is a move towards diversifying revenue with the company told TechCrunch, it doesn't take a cut of revenues from live shopping and brands don't pay to be included. Twitter's just trying to have fun. Yeah, and maybe they'll charge later, but for now just trying to have fun. This is huge in China. It's a huge revenue maker for Duyan, which operates TikTok. They've started doing similar things on TikTok. Hasn't quite got the traction in the United States as it has elsewhere. Do y'all think it will? Do you think it can? Are you interested? I think it probably can. I think we've seen more in-home shopping as the current state that we're in. So I think it could work, but I'm interested to see how it works in the US. I will be interested to see how that works. I'm into this. Now I'm also somebody who's like, let me sit back and home shopping network this whole thing instead of going out and getting anything. I like the idea of, I like the idea of whether it's Jason Deruehler, whoever may be hosting a shopping extravaganza that's designated to move as much merch as possible in a short amount of time. That's the whole idea. I don't know that I care that much about it, but to sort of be part of a spectacle, it kind of reminds me of a company announcing a new product and you really care about the company and you're like, this is fun. We're all gonna get on Twitter and we're gonna talk in the back channel together kind of thing. I mean, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that this isn't a bad idea, but I feel like Twitter is a good place for this to happen. I know that it's happening elsewhere, but I feel like Twitter is really good for real-time, fun extravaganza spectacle stuff. And it'll be interesting to see if the novelty of this because it is new, particularly to Twitter, if the novelty, people coming in is like, I just wanna kind of see what it's about and maybe participate to see if that transitions to anything, maybe retaining those people if this does continue. I don't think they'll be able to get a good sense of how engaged people are with just this one time. I think they're gonna have to do it a few times to really engage people's interests in this on the platform. Yeah, the sort of the major prototype of this is the Singles Day sales that happened on November 11th in China, Alibaba, and then this year much more muted because of the tech crackdown, but in previous years, international celebrities showing up. People who had no interest in shopping were watching it just to see who would perform. Taylor Swift performed one year. What surprise guests are gonna show up? Granted, this is way scaled down. It's 30 minutes, it's Jason Derulo. They say surprise guests, but they haven't told us who that's gonna be. Selena Gomez is gonna show up. I don't know, probably not, but you just never know. And Twitter, I think you're right, Sarah, even though this is gonna be across a bunch of platforms, Twitter is the place where if something crazy happens with Jason Derulo and some celebrity showing up and they drop a product and break it, like Twitter is gonna explode, right? Everybody's gonna be talking about that. Everybody's gonna wanna see it. The clips will get shared. If it's gonna get traction, that is a likely way it gets traction. I can see that. Definitely agree. All right, real quickly also in the shopping world, Klarna is known as a buy now, pay later, BNPL service. It's widespread in Europe. Had a toe in the US market already. Klarna Express Buttons are available at places like Macy's and Coach. It's also available as an option for some subscription services. It has about 21 million US customers, but now it's going head to head with PayPal with the Klarna Pay Now service. That's not a buy now, pay later. That's you pay immediately in full at participating merchants, just a full-on payment replacement service. Also launching a US version of the Klarna card, which lets users make four interest-free payments. So instead of your normal credit card where you carry a balance at a high interest rate, you turn every purchase into an installment plan. That is interest-free. It works as a physical card in store or online and also you can add it to your Apple Pay or your Google Pay system. Just a new competitor to note here in the US. I bought an area rug recently for my living room. And I used PayPal as my option and PayPal was sort of like, hey, you wanna make this for payments? Like there's no fee to do it. You just, we're gonna take out this much money over four times. And I was like, okay, that sounds fine. Actually worked out really well for me, just because I was like, wow, it was the, I spent the exact same amount of money. I didn't spend more, but it was just a little bit less of like sticker shock at least. So Klarna doing this, that was my first experience ever using PayPal in that way. It was something that was sort of offered to me and I was like, okay, let's give it a try. I think that Klarna, if Klarna can continue to make a relationships with large retailers that PayPal isn't already in, then that is a great option. And I think they're probably gonna have to do some sort of big rollout because what you don't want to happen is people see Klarna and think, oh, this is automatically kind of a buy now, pay later type of situation when that's what they're used to the company doing. And then they have this new pay now service. I think they're gonna have to have some sort of significant distinctions so that people won't think they're getting a buy now, pay later type of thing when it's just a full out deduction from their account. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. It's just too much out. Yeah, yeah. Well, Italy's cultural ministry commissioned its art. If you're not familiar with its art, some people call it the Netflix of Italian culture that's rolling out across 26 European countries on Tuesday with plans to expand to the US and China next year. Its art is ad supported, offers access to more than 1,250 live and on-demand events and shows including museum tours, opera shows, pop music, dance, theater, also movies, TV shows, the whole gamut. This is not a subscription service. You pay for each VOD item with prices between three and 10 euros. It's our CEO Guido Casalli said of the project, quote, our aim is to provide a common platform that can reach a growing audience of consumers of Italian art and culture around the world while also supporting the performing and visual arts sector. Yeah, I like the way they break this down. They've got stage, which is what you would expect, your opera, your concerts, and then they have a place for movies and documentaries. But there's also sites, which is tours of like the Coliseum or Venice, especially with travel not being as easy if even possible for a lot of people right now, taking a virtual tour of Italy makes sense. And apparently this was created because of lockdown when they couldn't have opera performances. They couldn't have concerts. They sort of developed this as a way to allow people to do their art and still expose it to the world. Which is pretty cool. And it's not a subscription. It's not another subscription. You just... I love this. You just pay for the ones you want. As you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not sure how many Italian operas would be watching, but the fact that they're on offer and the fact that I'm not gonna be in Italy anytime soon, I think this is such a great idea. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. Even if it's, you know, just watching some of the classic Italian movies, if that's more... That's true. That's very cool. Yeah. Hey, we wanted to thank a brand new boss. And that brand new boss's name is Benjamin Spears. Benjamin just started packing us on Patreon so thank you, Benjamin. Thank you, Ben. You get the goldest star. Yay, Benjamin got the spotlight all to himself today. All to himself, yeah. Also, anything that we talk about on the show, if you have ideas, you have thoughts, questions, comments, do send them our way, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to extend a big thanks to Nika Monford for being with us today. Nika, I know you are the tech savvy diva. Where can people keep up with everything that you do? I am tech savvy diva everywhere across all social media platforms. So you can check me out there. I am pretty active on Twitter, not so much on the other sites, but I'm pretty active on Twitter. And of course, you can always find me every week on the Snobo as podcast. Excellent. Well, we're always happy to have you here with us on this show. Speaking of the show, we're live Monday through Friday at four 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we are back here tomorrow. Scott Johnson, 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. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.