 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Jeff Wilkes, Paley Glendale, and Dr. X-17. Coming up on DTNS, a cheap low power way to desalinate water, a first for fully autonomous cargo ships completing a journey, and what all those headlines about stable coins crashing was about. And that is not all bad news. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 18, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. I stayed up late. Not really. I worked a lot though to try to figure out how to explain stable coins to y'all today. Right? Are you ready for this? Well, I appreciate that. Hold your horses. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Waymo announced it will expand its driverless service to downtown Phoenix. Waymo has operated in Phoenix's downtown area with safety drivers for about two months now. So driverless rides will only be available to employees to begin with. But if all goes well, we'll expand to members of the general public in the coming weeks. Amazon refreshed its Fire 7 tablets. Now double in the RAM, 30% faster quad core processor, 10 hours of battery life, USB-C port, Fire 7 and Fire 7 for kids are available for pre-order now for $60 and $110 respectively. Amazon also launched smart commerce in India, which will offer a range of services to retail stores, including creating digital storefronts, digitalizing billing, inventory management and chest based shopping integration. So if you weren't online before, now your small shop can be. Amazon said stores of any size in India can sign up for this new program. Speaking of program, Samsung announced a partner early access program for its smart things home platform, which will allow companies to start testing devices compatible with the matter smart home standard. Samsung says it's working with several smart home vendors on device testing, indicating that matter compatible light bulbs, switches, motion sensors and door locks are in development for matters fall launch. I still believe Google's Russian subsidiary submitted a notice of intent to declare bankruptcy. A Google spokesperson said the seizure of Google's Russia bank account, the bank account for Google Russia, was made by authorities making it untenable for it to meet its financial obligations and continue to function. Google will continue to offer its services in Russia for free. Back in 2020, Parallels desktop came to Chrome OS, letting enterprise users run Windows apps. At launch, this required an Intel Core i5 or better processor and 16 gigs of RAM. The latest update to Parallels desktop now brings the software to lower end Chromebooks, now requiring an 11th gen Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 5000 series CPU and only eight gigs of RAM. I wouldn't correct myself. I said it would continue to offer its services for free in Russia. It will continue to offer its services that are free in Russia. It won't like we're bankrupt, but you don't have to pay us anymore. If you had to pay before that service goes away. Glad I cleared that up. We now turn to noted Waterworld fan Scott Johnson to introduce our story about water. I do like Waterworld. Thank you, Tom. It's quite the irony that our world is covered in water, but the water is not drinkable. Desalination, removing the salt helps, but it's difficult and very expensive. I feel like you and I have had this conversation about water for years, so we're really getting into it today. Desalination, or sorry, I mentioned that most approaches are reverse osmosis to draw water out while leaving the salt behind. That requires a high pressure pump, which uses a lot of energy, but we found a better way. Yeah, by we being scientists at MIT, not me and Scott. Scientists at MIT have developed a system that uses electricity to remove salt and bacteria from water without needing that high pressure pump. Need a pump, but it can be like low voltage. The technique uses ion concentration polarization or ICP. For ICP to work, a channel of water flows between two membranes and electricity passes through the membranes. That repels any of the charged particles, including bacteria and salts and any other solids. The membranes are semi permeable, so the good water separates from the bad water. Electro dialysis is also used to remove any salt ions that might get past the ICP process. And it ends up meeting World Health Organization standards for drinkable water. They used a machine learning algorithm to find the right balance between two different stages of ICP and then a single electro dialysis process. So that AI helped them figure out the optimal way to chain that all together. And that optimized energy use and keeps the process self-cleaning so you don't have to replace those membranes. Neutral water passes through all of this and is collected for the drinking. The charged particles flow out a separate channel as waste. Whole mechanism fits in a carry-on suitcase size device. A small carry-on too, like not one of the tall ones they have in the U.S. Uses 15 to 20 watt hours per liter, meaning that it can be powered by a small solar panel. Now, this might be the time where you would say, oh, is this where you announced that it's 8, 20, 30 years off and that we're just starting to make progress? No, practicality and commercialization is like today. Yeah, NONA Desalination is a company that created a commercial version of this technology. A couple of the folks that worked on it at MIT are part of that startup, of course. And it won the MIT $100,000 entrepreneurship competition. NONA's implementation of the technology uses a tenth of the power of a reverse osmosis machine at half the cost and can make enough drinking water for 10 people. It uses less power than a typical cell phone charger. So you don't really need a big jackery battery or anything to run it. It uses very little electricity. NONA plans to start selling the units to ships, you know, people on boats and stuff who need to desalinate water at sea. Then they'll expand into the emergency preparedness and disaster relief markets. And they think they might also be able to adapt the technology for other things besides water, possibly hydrogen production or even separation of oil and gas. I mean, I know we joke about your love for the movie Waterworld, Scott. But I mean, living in California where water shortages are very real and getting worse all the time. You know, this is something that this is this is a this is a real solution that people actually need. It's not just sort of like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if I could just drink ocean water and it wouldn't be so salty. It's it's actually something that we need. It's a massive be a massive boon to not just human survival, but just our ability to avoid water wars and all kinds of other problems down the road. And I bring up Waterworld a lot, but also partly because one of the the key problems in that movie was that nobody could drink the water. You had to do some sort of process and they had a very complicated way of recycling water without getting into much detail that Kevin Kevin didn't early in that film. But anyway, aside from that, Kevin Costner, my good pal Kevin Costner on a first name basis, the thing that would have solved everybody's problem would be this desalination of water and that movie hinges on that not being possible. If it was possible, I'm not sure Waterworld would have been such a bad place would have been fine. Could you drink it? I mean, I'll hang out on a raft as long as I can drink, you know, nice fresh water. Sure. This this thing is not going to. This is not a massive thing where you could like do it on a water plant from the looks at it in the technology demonstration a couple months ago comes out pretty slow. I think they may have improved that a bit for the commercialization of it, but it's still it's it's meant for personal use. Ten people, maybe a small village somewhere that that has non potable water. You could you could purify disaster relief for for individual houses or apartment complexes, maybe something like that. But still, that's something that is really expensive and uses a lot of energy now. When you're talking about disaster relief, being able to put it out there with a solar panel means that you can do it even if the infrastructure is down, which is super important as well. Now I was reading through some of the coverage of this and I couldn't find anything, especially in the MIT news part that said, you know, while it does say yes, ready for commercialization, yes, ready for people to to use this technology is there. I don't have like a price or early state or anything. No price or release date. If you're talking at CES terms, so I'll be curious when they start shipping these and the fact that they're selling them to sailors basically means they're probably going to go through marine supply. So it's not as not important for them when they're winning an entrepreneurship challenge to put the price out there. So I don't think it means they're not going to ship, but it might not be super cheap. You know, it might be 1000 bucks something like that. Yeah, yeah, I would imagine that that will also get cheaper, which is not super cheap personally. But that's really cheap when it's like, Oh, this could be an ongoing solution for somebody on a boat. One comparison I would use, I'd say, Hey, campers, you guys know, or hunters, you know, when you go camping or hunting, you have those ones that work in rivers and, you know, other small bodies of water, lakes and things where you have a lot of stagnant water. This isn't the same process by any stretch. It could be used for that process. It sure could. And this and that kind of convenience is what we're talking about here, but on this massive possible level. It's very cool. Well, speaking of convenience, having a good laptop screen is top of mind for many folks looking to get a new laptop OLED screens are coming to more laptops. And Acer had quite a few announcements today, the latest to announce some of these cool screens. Scott, I know you care about screens. I think there might be something in here for you. I'm surrounded by screens, maybe too much. I do desire greater screens. I've been pretty excited about watching OLED enter the desktop market. Certainly exciting to hear that the laptop space is going to get into it more. I've experienced this on a big TV at home and that has changed the way I view things. It really did blow my mind and I'm not used to that. I'm used to screens kind of being samey for multiple generations. So I guess I need to ask you what is special about what Acer is aiming to do here. Okay, so Acer had a few announcements. So let's start with a highly praised student oriented student oriented student Acer Swift 3. It's getting the high quality OLED screen. It isn't 4k, but it's not like a cheap old OLED either. If you're into the specs at 2.8k resolution, 100% of the DCI P3 color gamut starts at $899.99. For $900, not the cheapest OLED in the world, but still on that more affordable end of the market. This is coming to Europe, the Middle East, and China, and May, and the US in July. I like a really pretty screen. I'm still a little frustrated with OLED's problem with Burn-In, which is a whole other issue. But it sounds like we're going to be paying for it if we want it in a more portable form. And I'm not sure that's totally for me. Well, perhaps, perhaps the Chromebook Spin 714 might be more to your liking, Scott. As a 14 inch, 16 by 10 aspect ratio, 2560 by 1600 display with an anti-microbial coating. So I guess it's, you know, keeping, you know, from getting the flu while you're using it. It has some other little perks like a fingerprint reader, HDMI port, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. Kicker, kicker for you, Scott, a built-in stylus with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and a slot for storage. Now, the Chromebook Spin 714 is coming to North America in August, and that starts at $750. Well, that's a much more affordable starting point. That is kind of exciting at a pretty high level of depth for those levels of pressure. That pressure resolution, a lot of artists call it, is really, really important these days. I am always looking for newcomers in the digital art space. I'm not saying they're aiming for that here, but these specs are intriguing enough that I'll probably play around with one of these. What else did they show off? Okay, 3D monitors. Let's get into it. The story is from today. It's not from five years ago. 3D monitors are a thing. The Spatial Labs view is a 15.6 inch with a 3820 by 2160 display, 323 nits of brightness, and glass is free stereoscopic 3D. There's a version for gamers and a pro version for designers. So depending on what you're looking to do, they're trying to market to you specifically. The difference, though, is apparently the bundled apps. So view comes with Spatial Labs True Game, which can add a 3D profile to around 50 games, including big names like God of War, Horizon 5. Spatial Labs Go can turn your photos and videos into 3D and then use plugins to render designs as 3D. And the pro comes bundled with Spatial Labs Model Viewer, which supports data information, also Sketchfab. It can also do some neat tricks with Maya and Blender. If anyone is using those software programs, it is also available this summer, starting at $1,099. Well, I'm probably as surprised as anybody to hear 3D is even being talked about anymore. I thought we were kind of past that. 3D display just did not take hold. But there's a specific focus here I've noticed on creation, specifically the Maya and Blender integration. That's interesting to me. I don't know what that will look like. I know the concept there, which is, hey, I've just made a 3D model. We're going to use this as an asset in a big project. I'm not actually familiar with Blender. Is it a Maya competitor? It's a competitor. Also, you see a lot of people using these products in tandem. It's also a lot cheaper. Blender is less expensive thing to subscribe to and use. There's some open source stuff going on. But the main point is these 3D apps, I guess to get a better sense of how your model looks in true 3D, quote, unquote, true 3D, this will allow you to do that. I don't know that artists or designers are scrambling for such a feature, but I'm at least glad to hear they're focused on something other than your game will pop out at you. Our movies have never been more real. Well, if they're not scrambling for it though, what is the solution that you feel like most people have already gone to? Well, here's what Acer says about this. Maya and Blender users can connect and edit on a 2D screen while observing their changes rendered in stereoscopic 3D on the Spatial Labs View Pro. Right. So does that the trick is like, oh, I can actually be working and see it immediately? I think that's part of it. I mean, the truth is you could see it immediately anyway. You would just see a 3D object on a two-dimensional screen. Right. So this is a little bit like, maybe the comparison is it's a little like 2D versus 3D in a VR scenario, but I still don't know that it gives them that much. Like there's not much about what a design will see. The viewer of your object that you're making isn't going to necessarily have one of these 3D screens. No. And even if it did, to what end? Like, oh, I now see it in this almost freaky kind of, I can shift around and see the perspective and the depth of field. It doesn't really change how you're going to design it because it's still going to be this 3D object you have to go in and tweak with and make vertices changes. And I don't know, I just not sure I'd buy that usage, but I also want to applaud that they are aiming at something that isn't just the typical whiz bang, hey, 3D is cool crowd because it isn't anymore. And KLS ASL in our chat points out it could be used for designing 3D printing stuff. Yeah. Anything with a 3D component I think is probably what they're looking at. I will add, and when you're doing 3D construction of things like ship designs, it actually does help to be able to look at something because you're going into a space that's designed for a person. And so you need to know how your pipe and utility plumbing that you're putting in lines up with the aviation fuel pipe with the Sure. But does that, is that better to have it in a 3D screen than just 3D on a 2D screen? They've been pushing heavily in some of the CAD work to VR glasses because it does help when you, because you're talking about 12 different teams working on the same thing and they're working on different parts of it. And VR makes sense to me. Like everything you've described, Roger, is a VR point of sale, and not maybe just VR or mixed reality, but that makes sense to me because you're actually moving around the object and you're in space that you couldn't normally be in. But when you're just displaying it in 3D because it's stereoscopic 3D, I just don't know that those same advantages apply. Maybe. I mean, that's what they're claiming. And so maybe we'll see that. But I think VR and AR are the future of that, not 3D displays. Someone remember that I said this today and then cheese me out in a couple of years. Well, we've said the very same thing about a lot of autonomous rides. And our Spanish language host, Dan Campos, has a report in English about the world's first autonomous cargo trip. Saludos, co-pinges of DTNS. Did you know that the Susaku merchant ship has completed the world's first autonomous commercial journey? Susaku carried a load of 759 tons and traveled 790 kilometers without human intervention during 99% of its 40-hour journey. She departed from Tokyo Bay and arrived at the port of Tsumatsumaka in Ice Bay. The vehicle uses an artificial intelligence system called Orca AI and uses 18 cameras to have a 360 degree viewing range. This system has been trained for a year to travel this route and managed to cross one of the most congested maritime areas in the world. The ship performed 107 collision avoidance maneuvers and avoided between 400 and 500 ships. If you want to hear about this and more news, check out Noticias de Tecnologie Express. Use it at your own risk. Back to you, amigos. Gracias, Dan. There's not much risk, but it's a good caveat to always have. Feeling social, folks? Get in touch with us on the socials at DTNSShow on Twitter at DTNSPIX on Instagram. Do it now. The PIX has an accent. All right, Tom. For the last, I don't know. I don't know. For the last however long, every time I open TechMeme, which is the first thing I do every morning once I put my contacts in and want to read the news, there's a headline at the top about a stablecoin or some other coin that's crashing out. Maybe the company's getting sued, maybe both. At least when the top space wasn't about Twitter or Elon Musk or both, which it often is. But this is the other big story that's been going on for a while. So rather than chase the tale of the story, we wanted to let the dust settle. And Tom, I know you dove in to help explain for all the rest of us who are like, what does this mean? What happened? So you can actually understand when your friends or your family or your fellow crypto folks bring it up and maybe ask you advice. So what did you find? Yeah. So I wrote this up for my new tech sub-stack. So some of you might have seen this already and free subscribers will get that right after the show. When I first saw these stories, I thought maybe they were just crypto hype. Maybe they were better covered on financial podcasts rather than tech podcast. But the more I learned about them, the more interesting the takeaways got. So the two main stories are about stablecoins. One's called Tether, sometimes USDT for US dollar Tether. Another is called Terra, sometimes UST for US Terra. That is tied to a reserve coin called Luna. So you got Tether and then you got Terra and Luna. This is all happening because the economy is bad and I expect you probably already knew that. But the bad economy causes investors to sell off their riskier assets. One of the riskiest assets is cryptocurrency. So there's a sell off of Bitcoin, Ether and pretty much every other cryptocurrency you could think of. Bitcoin has been through several sell-offs and rebounds. I imagine this one will not be different. But stablecoins are supposed to be a safe haven during financial uncertainty. And the fact that they aren't is grabbing the headlines. Yeah, so the idea of stablecoins, as I understand it, they are backed by an actual fiat currency. Usually the US dollar could be others. But US dollar, let's use that as an example. So each stablecoin is exchangeable for a US dollar or whatever its worth is against that dollar. So the idea is that the coin can be used like a dollar, but with the benefit of blockchains and all of the things that blockchains are supposed to be good for. All the benefits of cryptocurrency, but with none of the volatility. But it sounds like that's not really the case. Yeah, there's no rule about what you can call a stablecoin. That could call my nose a stablecoin. It's not against the law. And while people don't do that, they do put out stablecoins that aren't actually backed by currency, dollars or anything else. Of the coins we mentioned earlier, Terra is backed by an algorithm. And if that sounds like a bad idea, you're right. Tether is backed by cash and securities. Okay. So you mentioned that the algorithm is not the right way to go about this. Which one is in bigger trouble here? Yeah. Terra was the fourth largest stablecoin. An algorithm manipulated its supply to keep it worth a dollar. That actually didn't work bad until recently because it wasn't backed by nothing. It actually was tied to Luna. Remember we mentioned Luna. Luna is a reserve cryptocurrency backed by other cryptocurrencies, including $2.4 billion worth of Bitcoin. You know where this is going. The reason they did this, it was cheaper to set up than actually having to buy actual cash and securities. And the mix of reserves was diversified, such that it would take the entire bottom falling out of the cryptocurrency market to bring down the coin. Which is what just happened. The entire bottom fell out of the cryptocurrency market. So as people began selling off crypto, Luna's reserves, which were all crypto, started to lose value. As people worried about Luna's reserves, they started to sell off their Luna, and Luna's price dived. And that made it stop being a useful reserve to back Terra, which then caused Terra to dive, straining the algorithm's ability to correct. On May 10th, Luna was trading at $30 per coin. Its value is now indistinguishable from zero. That broke the algorithm's ability to maintain that dollar peg. And starting on May 9th, Terra slid down to about $0.10. And back on May 13th, they actually halted their blockchain in order to try to stabilize the algorithm. Well, okay. If you're just learning about this, it sounds, you know, sounds pretty dismal. But what about Tether? Yeah, Tether faced the same pressures that Terra did. But Tether behaved differently because Tether's backed by a mix of actual assets, corporate debt, cash, and treasury bills. We don't know the exact details, the mix, the proportions, but they're backed by actual things. Now, it's a problem that we don't know the mix. In fact, it's been a problem for Tether, because back in February 2021, Tether and its backer Bitfinex agreed to pay an $18.5 million fine to the state of New York for lack of transparency. New York claims that at some points, Tether had no actual reserves, that it was lying about that. Tether says that's not true. But there has not yet been a case where somebody couldn't go to Tether and say, okay, I want to trade my Tether coin back in for a dollar. And that has been put to the test. People panicked and starting selling Tether to each other. Remember, you could always sell Tether to Tether for a dollar, but people do trade Tether with each other, and they started selling it for 95 cents. Now, that's way better than the 10 cents of Terra, but still, it seems irrational. Why would I take 95 cents for a Tether when I could just go to Tether itself and cash it in for a full dollar? Well, you would do that if you wanted to get something out of the coin before there was a run on it, and you got stuck with 10 cents like the people who had Terra. However, Tether hasn't defaulted on exchanges, and so that panic didn't stick. The trading went back to a dollar, and Tether has been put to the test. It cashed out $7 billion worth of Tether between May 11th and May 17th. So people have been asking, can I please have my dollar back? And they've been getting it. I'd understand if anyone listening to this was like, this sounds like some sort of old bank run from the 1930s. I'm already not here. Well, with banks, I mean, whether or not you like your bank and maybe they gouge you on monthly fees here and there, but it's like FDIC insured, we are good here. That is not what's going on here with stablecoins. Yeah, this is not Jimmy Stewart. It's a wonderful life. There is no regulation of stablecoins in the U.S. or pretty much anywhere else. However, there is an attempt to do that. On April 6th, the U.S. Senator Pat Toomey proposed the Stablecoin Trust Act. It would require companies that issue stablecoins to back their coins with actual cash or cash equivalents. Cash equivalents are just fast ways to turn something into cash, so government bonds, things that are very stable like that. And that bill would require companies to be transparent about what those securities are, how fast they can turn around exchanges and all that sort of thing. So, one of the things I wanted to ask, and I don't know if we're going to have the answer for this here, and this is hopefully quick, but you threw out a ton of names of different cryptocurrencies, the two of which in particular that are maybe the safest and then all those that have taken a dive and the whole FDIC protection and what it means and how do we come up with a way to do that. All of these things have been talked about. These days, there's starting to be a lot of cryptocurrencies, a lot of named cryptocurrencies. And I guess I used to think, oh, crypto coin, or Bitcoin, it's a coin, it's one kind, it's a single currency. It made sense to me because it said to me, well, if there's one day this currency I can trade in, that will be my Bitcoin. And I'll have my dollars here, my Bitcoins over here. But now there's probably thousands, maybe more, different cryptocurrencies of different levels of different, all over the place. It doesn't feel sustainable. So once you get them back, one of my core things. But again, that is a feature of any brand new market is you get a lot of competitors until you figure out which ones are actually useful, which ones work, which ones the customers can get behind. So you have Bitcoin, which has been around for a long time and it's the most popular, and you have Ether, which is used for a lot of smart contracts. And then you have a lot of these other ones like Monero and Dogecoin trying to figure out like, hey, can we get in on this? Some of them might, some of them won't. Lots of them won't, most of them won't. So it's not like the market is done and it will always be this way with thousands of coins. This is the early part where everybody's out of the track trying to see who can finish the pod race. And in the end, we know it's not Subulba, it's just Anakin. And we don't know who Anakin is yet. All right. You know what? Somebody's finally given me an example or an analogy I can understand. There's an analogy for everything. Yeah, it was really good. Well, and you have different kinds too. Like there are the contractual ones like Ether that are meant for doing more than just coins. And then there's the stable coins that are meant for like, we want to enable other coins to be able to, you know, operate with a connection to the real economy. So we are tied to an actual currency, except when they're only tied to an algorithm and then they crash. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, Scott Johnson, you're a treasure, a national and global treasure, much like crypto. So let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do. Well, I am FDIC. I'm sure to say it right. I'm ensured by something, but I can tell you this, if you are interested in more video game talk from me, I have a show that we normally record on Tuesdays. We had to push it today. So right after this today, I'm recording a show called Play Retro. And it's all about old games, the technologies that drove games forward, the companies that made all that happen, and much, much more. This week we're talking about Golden 9, how it almost didn't get made. It is a crazy story. So if you want to check that out, look for Play Retro wherever you get your podcasts or frogpants.com slash play retro. Well, we're always happy to have you on the show. We're also happy to get new patrons and we got a new brand new boss. That boss's name is Matthew. Matthew just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Matthew. Good to have you on board. Thank you. Yeah, folks, you could support us on Patreon and if you want to get that full description beyond just what we talked about with stablecoins on the show, go to techtom.substack.com and you can just sign up for the free tier and get free expanded tech news there as well. You have lots of options, everybody. In fact, there's a longer version of this show. It's called Good Day Internet. Some of you know about it, but if you don't, it's available at patreon.com slash DTNS and it rolls in right after this year's show. But just a reminder that we are live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. eastern, 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Marbey Young joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, hope you have enjoyed this program.