 Coming up on DTNS, Twitter's CEO flies the coop, Intel created a PC builder's dream in Costa Rica, and your 3D printer could be alive. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 29th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And before the show, we were just talking about, gosh, what were we talking about? Here goes Thanksgiving and Nutella. There's a whole longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We do it every day, and it is available at patreon.com. DTNS. Do join if you can. Big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Mike Aikens, Norm Physikus, and Chris Allen. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Russian communications regulator, Roskom Nadzor, said it will continue to throttle mobile access speeds for Twitter until the platform removes all content deemed illegal, claiming Twitter still hosts 761 illegal posts. The regulator began slowing down Twitter traffic back in March, saying Twitter ignored calls to remove banned material going all the way back to 2014, although it does admit that it's taken down over 90% of illegal posts. The Financial Times sources say that UK Competition and Markets Authority, or the CMA, will block Metta's acquisition of Giffy, originally announced in May 2020 and valued at $400 million. This isn't terribly surprising. The regulator's initial enforcement order stopped Facebook from integrating Giffy during its investigation. Also fined the company $70 million for not providing enough information into its investigation. And in August 2021, Provisional Finding said that the acquisition would harm competition, giving Metta an estimated 80-90% market share of searchable animated sticker libraries. It's a vital market. The automaker Stellantis signed a five-year supply agreement with the Lithium producer Vulcan Energy Resources to help shore up its EV supply chain. Beginning in 2026, Vulcan will supply between 81,000 and 99,000 metric tons of Lithium Hydroxide to Stellantis. Automaker Renault signed a similar deal with Vulcan last week. Vulcan produces Lithium Hydroxide by brine deposit extraction in the Upper Rhine Valley in Germany. eBay announced a deal with SneakerCon Digital to acquire its footwear authentication business. The company previously worked with eBay to vet high-value sneakers sold on the platform, launching an authenticity guarantee in October of 2020. Since launching, eBay said that the program authenticated 1.55 million sneakers worldwide. SneakerCon will continue to operate its separate events business. Nissan revealed its electrification strategy pledging to spend $2 trillion, that's about 17.6 billion US dollars, over the next five years to accelerate its EV rollout. The company plans to produce 23 new electrified models by 2030, including 15 full EVs. The company targets 50% EV model sales across Nissan and Infiniti brands globally by 2040, although has a more modest 40% target for EV sales in the US by that time. The company plans to pursue a strategy of all solid state batteries by 2028, kind of a big deal, rather than using traditional lithium ion batteries. It will prepare a pilot plant for solid state batteries in Yokohama, Japan by 2024. The company hopes this can bring battery prices down to $75 per kilowatt hour by 2028. Alright, let's talk a little bit about legacy tech and what Intel is doing with it. In the second half of 2019, Intel created the long-term retention lab and warehouse in Costa Rica to provide access to its legacy hardware and software going back at least a decade, until it began planning the warehouse in mid-2018 and currently stores 3,000 pieces of hardware and software with plans to double that by next year. Sourcing the materials for the lab was no trivial matter, with Intel GM of Product Assurance and Security Mohsen Fazlian saying that the team resorted to buying used equipment on eBay. Nope, didn't have it in the house, turns out, had to get it on eBay. Sending the knowledge base around these legacy products also critical, with Intel getting contributions for technical documentation from engineers who worked on the projects, even those who have left the company, but might have still been able to contribute some knowledge. The lab provides a centralized secure location to run security tests globally, until engineers can request specific configurations which are assembled and made accessible through cloud services, and the lab currently gets about 1,000 requests a month to build equipment for security tests. They are getting a lot of requests here, everybody, with about 15 new devices added weekly. This is one of those things when I saw this. Another is kind of mind-boggling. Yeah, the scale of it, and I guess I just assumed in the back of my mind that Intel just is like, we'll just keep one of these for us, and then we'll sell the rest of them. Now, obviously they have the designs and all the IP associated with this, and for some of this, they can simulate virtually a lot of this equipment. They can simulate the functionality of a lot of this through virtualization, and they do that very frequently. But it's for this security research, what you're looking for, I'm thinking of things like Rohammer attacks, where that literally is hitting a particular piece of hardware and seeing the physical movement of electrons and stuff like that. That's not something that you can necessarily simulate. That's not maybe not even the best example for this. Just for me personally, though, this is like 20-year-old Rich's dream job is working in this lab and being like, all right, I need a Core 2 Duo and all this RAM and a Windows Vista, SP2 installed and all this different software, like just the physical reality of putting that together and then making it available through the cloud. I can see a lot of cool applications for security researchers. The big question I have for this is, is Intel going to make this available to vetted security researchers? Obviously big for patching drivers and that kind of stuff internally. What would be a game changer? And if the big question is this, they could scale this, is if they could do that for independent security researchers, that would be a game changer. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned, ha ha, this would be a fun job. But I guess the job really is to say if you have some outdated product that Intel had some hand in, Intel is going to help you make sure that you don't have a security attack based on that product. Yeah, well, and I can also, if I have an eBay listing for an old piece of Intel tech and all of a sudden the bid gets jumped up a little bit, I'd be like, is Intel, what are they, what are they doing? This has a lot of applications for really obscure stuff, like your mainstream stuff, like your gigabyte motherboard that you bought on Newegg and stuff like that, like that's not, I don't think what they're so worried about. It's this very specific, a lot of embedded industrial use case stuff that is a lot hard, one, a lot harder to find and two, has a super long shelf life. Yes, that is supported a lot of times by software companies. But we're talking about SCADA systems or any kind of industrial kind of use case where there's going to be dust on this machine. Those a lot of times don't get the security of support that they need. And if they can if they can make this comprehensive and they can make this really a really valuable resource, that could give a lot of visibility to a lot of hardware that just gets forgotten. Yeah, no kidding. I also found and I in our pre-show meeting, we were talking about Costa Rica as a as a place for this seems like to me, I'm like, well, it's a very small country. Like, why Costa Rica? But as Roger pointed out, it's it's it's very central in a lot of ways. And yeah, the idea that Intel is. You know, has been planning this for three years, right? Plans to double capacity by next year, plans to whether or not they will. You know, that's that's to be seen. But it clearly is something that that really benefits the company and obviously all the renders as well. And I did some when you asked that I did some research. They do have an R&D facility there. So they may be building off of that kind of going forward to as well. Next up here, a team of researchers from Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital with Harvard Medical School published a paper in Nature Communications outlining a living ink that could be used in a conventional 3D printer. This is made from genetically engineered E. Coli and other microbes. Don't freak out people about E. Coli. Other microbes are involved to to create living nanofibers, which isn't a terrifying phrase at all, which were then bundled with other materials to create a workable ink that could actually go through the printer. The researchers use the ink to create materials that did things like secreted medications when exposed to certain chemicals or absorbed toxins. So that's kind of where we are at with the research right now. The big issue that they're having is mass producing this ink is not exactly like scalable for an industrial use case or anything like that. The researchers hope to develop a way to let the microbes replicate in a controlled way, letting them not only grow new print materials, which would kind of be awesome if you just have a tube of print material that just kind of, you know, feed it some raw materials. You can get more, but also heal already printed objects. If that happens, the researchers see application for using it as potentially a building material. Yeah. So, wow. So this blew my mind. Uh, this story came out over the weekend and I was really racking my brain to understand. Okay. Sounds very cool, but what practically I, and I know we're a few years out now, this is not something that I'm going to be able to put on my roof tomorrow, but if I, if I were able to, what exactly is that going to do for me? Help to repair my own roof. Uh, you know, I don't know, help shield me from, you know, harmful UV rays. Uh, you mentioned, uh, you know, medical, uh, devices as well. I mean, the, the possibilities are sort of endless. Yeah. And what's interesting is, you know, a lot of the stories we're talking about are, uh, supply chain issues on DTNS, at least in the past like year or so. And, and what this could theoretically do is bring your supply chain to a much local level. And you're talking about things like, like, like, uh, like living medical devices that like theoretically a hospital, you know, you could, you could, I'm assuming buy the blueprint for it or license the blueprint or something like for that, for something that could, you know, deliver medication or, or absorb toxins for something like, uh, you know, like a waste recycling or something like that, instead of having to have something manufactured somewhere else sent over to you, you could have this, uh, you know, this micro based ink that you could theoretically grow, uh, you know, that brings everything a lot more local, maybe is not as efficient in the grand scheme of things, you know, it might still be worth it going to a factory for that kind of stuff. But then when you get into the, the, the building use cases for it, I mean, there were some speculation they were talking about, like, we could just send this stuff to Mars and just build houses out there. I don't necessarily know that, but like self healing, uh, you know, we're getting into like some sci fi, biotech, uh, you know, uh, this is like, this is the stuff the vorlans use. Let me just put it that way. If anyone understands that, you get a point. Yeah. I mean, Mars aside, Mars aside, just put Mars aside for a second. Okay. We still, we're still on earth, everybody. But, uh, yeah, the, the idea that anything that is sort of repetitive, um, especially in the medical world, uh, you know, maybe you got a bad kidney or you, uh, got diabetes and, you know, you need to be administering some sort of medication on a regular basis. I don't know exactly how this plays into that, but the idea that there is, there is something that you can build that is self aware on, on some level, um, that and, and, you know, I'm, I'm still just talking about medicine. I'm not talking about anything else, but, uh, that is, that is crazy. Yeah. That the, that the finished, like the printed product is not like the final state of that functionality. Like it can live in and like develop to have further functionality is super fascinating. And again, and the fact that you could do that with a consumer grade 3d printer. That to me is like, it's, it's not a specialized thing. We've seen other attempts at like living tech before. And, you know, maybe this isn't the final solution, but this is an interesting approach, uh, to do that. That's very consumer oriented. If they can figure out all this, you know, mass manufacturing kind of stuff. Indeed. All right. Let's talk about some Apple rumors. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had a couple interesting Apple reports and his weekly newsletter. His sources say that Apple's working on short and long distance wireless charging solutions with an eventual goal of allowing each of its major products to charge each other wirelessly. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. I've, I've had one device die when another device has some, some charge in that. It could be cool. The company reportedly remains working on a true multi-device inductive charging mat. That's reiterating a June report that we had previously talked about on the show. In AR news, Gurman also reports that while Apple's AR VR headset is set for a 2022 announcement, set for 2022. That's coming right up. It may follow the pattern of previous product debuts with a longer window between announcement and launch. You might remember, and Gurman points out that the Apple Watch was launched 227 days after its initial announcement. You got an announcement and you almost waited a year before that Apple Watch to become a reality. This comes after a note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo last week that claimed that Apple's augmented reality headset would be able to operate untethered from a phone or a Mac using a pair of processors to power two 4K micro OLED displays from Sony. One processor would be similar to the initial M1 chip for general work, reportedly, while a lower end processor would manage sensor-related tasks. Kuo also predicts the headset would launch in Q4 of 2022. Very, that pattern by Apple, I don't think, again, that we're talking about like they're entering into new product categories, right? You know, and with typical Apple fashion, they are not never the first two market or very rarely are the first to market. They're instead, you know, obviously the Oculus Quest is kind of the known commodity in this space, that kind of family of products. It would be very, certainly be Apple kind of flexing its reputation to come out like maybe at a WWDC or something like that, effectively announce the product, even if they don't show off the headset, say, hey, here's a bunch of software development stuff for an AR VR headset that will be, you know, throw everything out there and let everybody know that that's coming and see what that does to the AR and VR market. If that, you know, everybody is, oh, we can't buy anything. We have to wait to see what's Apple's going to do in Q4 or something like that. That to me is a, again, German points out, this is kind of an Apple pattern. Did it with wearables? Did it, I mean, the phone market was a little different, much more nascent, I would imagine, or I know at that time. So definitely a big flex by Apple. If this turns out to be the case and we shall see coming in 2022 what they're going to be announcing. But honestly, like the power stuff to me, I don't know if it's just like that's just more like live, like more everyday living stuff. That to me is like, has me more excited. The idea of like, should put on a VR headset more often, Rich. This is true. This is true. I am a VR ignorant. No, I totally get what you're saying. You know, the power stuff actually is like that, that is, that is something that would be helpful to me today. The the VR headset from Apple. I don't doubt that this is the thing I would love to see it in the next, you know, four quarters. Let's see it, Apple. Right now, the Oculus Quest is is is kind of the the only viable VR headset on the market. I know there are others. I know there are others. But this is sort of this is the consumer friendly kind of only option that you got. And there's a decent app store going on there. And if Apple can can can I'm not even saying like, oh, like, you know, take the throne away. But if Apple can just get that development circle to become a little bit more interesting between platforms. And, you know, right, you know, sure, I'm talking about Meta's Oculus. I'm talking about whatever Apple may have going on. But there are certainly plenty of other companies that can be contenders as well. Yeah. What does that app store look like five years from now? The other really big important thing is we've seen Apple concertedly, especially over the last year, making plays more into, like, small to medium business, like enterprise kind of market with a lot of their service offering solutions, that kind of stuff. I wonder if an extended launch window also, you know, we've talked about the Oculus Quest as a consumer like finished product. It's kind of the only one on the market. A lot of enthusiasm stuff. Enterprise is a completely different space where there is there is a lot of successful enterprise kind of VR, AR stuff. I wonder if that is also a part of a plan to maybe, you know, try and plant a flag in that market as well and give people more advanced time to roll that out or look at it, at least. Yeah, definitely. Definitely, possibly. Hard to say. Talk to us in key four of twenty. Join the conversation and our discord. It's going on twenty four hours a day. And you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. All right, big news this morning. Pretty much the biggest news in the in the Twitterverse. Ha ha. Twitter's Jack Dorsey stepped down from his role as CEO effective immediately. The Twitter board unanimously named current CTO Parag Agrawal as CEO. Dorsey will remain on the company's board through the end of his current term in mid May, after which point he will not be on the board at all. Rather than stay on his chair of the board, Dorsey said he felt, quote, it's really important to give Parag the space he needs to lead. And, quote, so who is the new CEO, Parag Agrawal? Well, he joined Twitter as a distinguished software engineer back in 2011. Been there for quite some time, previously holding leadership positions at Microsoft Research and Yahoo Research. At Twitter, he's worked on AI initiatives and perhaps most notably headed Twitter's decentralization efforts with Project Blue Sky that started back in 2019. When he became CTO, Twitter described his roles, his role as focused on scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach across our consumer and revenue product and infrastructure teams. OK, Dorsey remains CEO of Square. You might recall that he's been CEO of Twitter and Square for quite some time and a lot of folks said, how can he do it? Well, he's CEO of Square at this time. He was Twitter CEO from founding back in 2006 through 2008. He was ousted and then he returned back to the role in 2015, but not without some controversy. In fact, as recently as last year, a investment group that has quite a few Twitter shares tried to oust Dorsey. And I I wonder, Rich, when I first saw this article this morning, I was like, whoa, this is crazy news. Is that what this is about? But, you know, it seems different to me. It seems like especially vacating the board seat, there's perhaps there's probably more to the story. But but to me and and I may be being a little bit naive here, but I feel like Jack Dorsey might actually just be done with Twitter. And it's kind of a behemoth that he'd rather not run anymore. It is. It's interesting because when we've seen other, especially founders, but someone that's been with the company has a long history of the company move from that CEO role. Right. There's that effort like the being the chairman of the board or being on the board is like seen as, OK, there's going to be continuity within the company that's going to be a smooth transition here. And and we are definitely not getting that. Now, I actually, you know, Dorsey in his in his kind of goodbye letter that he posted on Twitter was saying, you know, that kind of wanted to break up like like a lot of this founder myth that's kind of cropped up in Silicon Valley and that seeing like that founder kind of as being a single point of failure, which I thought was an interesting approach, especially kind of within the context of like Twitter itself looking to further decentralize kind of a lot of different things as a long term objective for the company. That language to me really, really stood out. But then the other thing is it was interesting for me in this morning because doing this is covering the story for Daily Tech headlines. I was like watching this in real time because it initially came out in the morning that CNBC was reporting that he, you know, he was looking to step down or he will step down, but it hadn't been confirmed yet. And all the sources I was looking at had like there was no speculation of who was going to succeed him as CEO. It was kind of an open question to be like, well, well, you know, we'll see whenever they announce it. So to have that as a done deal that Parag Agrawal is going to be stepping in in that CEO role, it's interesting when he took over as CTO, he originally took the role in October 2017. It was not announced until March that he had actually filled that role. So kind of giving him some time to to get into that role. I would not be surprised if that was exactly the case here. Especially given that he's now the CEO, like there's there's no time from announcement, you know, to to into an action plan that that he's been involved in a lot of the recent big changes that we've seen and tests and stuff like that that we've seen from Twitter as a subscription service to just a lot of the different like media and kind of changes that we've been seeing on Twitter, especially over the last six months. Yeah, I think I think you're onto something there, especially, you know, Twitter waking up on Monday morning and saying, well, Jack Dorsey is out as CEO, effective immediately. That's on its head, sort of insane, but not if you've had somebody who's, you know, getting ready to get into the role and and and the company certainly feels that he's leading it in the right direction. We've talked about the idea of Twitter becoming more of a decentralized platform on the show as of late. It seems like Agrawal is the is is the person behind Twitter leading that effort already. I don't think that this means that Twitter changes at all. I know, you know, the stock went up earlier today and everyone said, oh, yeah, wow, you know, nobody wanted Jack Dorsey to be CEO anymore. I don't think any of that matters. I think what matters is how does the platform change? Does it change in a good way? Does it become more of an ad focused company? Which Twitter has been moving towards for quite some time now with with mixed results, depending on who you ask. But I, yeah, I don't I don't think, you know, this is like a, you know, RIP, Twitter type of a thing at all. I think it's I think it's pretty much business as usual. Well, that being said, though, I mean, I feel like the service has I don't think fundamentally change. I think fundamentally I still use Twitter the same way that I have always used Twitter. There are just a lot of different like kind of extensions onto that. And in some ways it does the it feels like the way that Twitter wants you to use it is getting a little more specific when we're talking about things like reactions kind of coming in the potential for like up vote down votes. There's been some speculation. Certainly the subscription model on top of that. That to me seems like Twitter, the service versus Twitter, the underlying potentially decentralized infrastructure that, you know, Parag has been working on for for a couple of years now might be at some point we could see the product of that work. And I think that is is super interesting as Twitter kind of pursues itself as a service. Yes, that sells ads, but also that is looking increasingly newsletters, other source of subscription revenue with Twitter Blue. This is, you know, potentially I could see that kind of diverging happening and who better to do that? And then under new leadership to kind of give a new face to the company. Indeed. Oh, yeah, that's me. Well, we've known now that Cyber Monday has mostly been marketing bluster for a while. We've talked about kind of debunking that on this show and definitely in GDI in years past. The idea was that everyone went back to work. The Monday after Thanksgiving shopped online since they might not have broadband at home. Most people have broadband at home now and they shop online all the time. So what's interesting, though, is this might also be now coming for the sacrosanct bastion of holiday season commerce Black Friday. We have numbers from Adobe Analytics and they found that spending on Black Friday hit eight point nine billion dollars. That's a lot of money to me, perhaps to you, Sarah. But that's actually down from nine billion dollars in 2020, the first year on your decrease for online spending on the day, that day being Black Friday. And Thanksgiving day shopping was a mere five point one billion dollars. Supply chain issues might have been a factor of this, of course, out of stock messages on websites were up one hundred twenty four percent through Black Friday versus pre pandemic levels. So definitely having an effect there. Part of the slow is definitely that people aren't waiting for Black Friday to start holiday shopping. The National Retail Federation or NRF found 61 percent of consumers were already shopping before Thanksgiving. And this is comes as the NRF estimates record year on your growth for holiday spending or holiday shopping overall, expected to grow between eight and a half to ten and a half percent on the year. So spending is going up just not on these previously, you know, blockbuster sale days that we've kind of assumed here. Sarah, did you do any Black Friday shopping to add to this number? Did not. Black Friday, Cyber Monday did not participate. I and I didn't not participate because, you know, I was sending a message to the world or anything. I just I just simply kind of bought things other times and I don't know. I mean, for years now, I've thought I know that there's a fun thing where the idea of here's a day and we're all going to participate and you might get some deals might get some, you know, some some some pretty great deals by participating in this kind of frenzy type thing. I am not sure that this year was the year to expect any growth from Black Friday sales. And maybe that's just because I feel like my own life is so out of whack and has been for some time. And I think a lot of other people feel the same way. But also there are just so many ways to get deals or to buy that TV that you want to buy when you want to buy it from the retailer, you want to buy it from kind of thing that I I don't know how how much you know, how many legs, you know, this whole thing has. But then I can hear Tom in my head right now saying, well, look at singles day. You know, there are there are lots of different ways that you can make a a spectacle around the idea of people buying things. I I I'm not surprised about about the U.S. numbers anyway. Yeah. And maybe those just have a shelf life. That single days is kind of riding that that crest. And yeah, exactly. Well, and it's, you know, that's it. That seems like the way it's been built up, at least for me, as a ignorant American is like a digital, more digital native. Like Black Friday is all about like getting the store and waiting at 4 a.m. and stuff like that. So maybe that's also part of it as well. Yeah, I think so. Well, listen, before you plan your next overseas trip, whether you live in the U.S. or you live anywhere in the world and you'd like to go somewhere else, check out Chris Christensen's excellent web resource for folks wanting to travel internationally. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you're planning on traveling internationally right now, it's a hassle. But here's a resource that can make it a little easier. Airheart.com. Go to airheart.com and then click on explore where to travel. You can specify what country you're traveling from and you'll find out what countries you can travel to. And then if you select one of those countries, you'll find out what kind of mask mandates they have, what kind of documentation you will need to get there, whether they have quarantines and what kind of tests you need to get through the border. You can also subscribe to updates so that when that information changes, which it will, you get notified. Airheart.com and I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Thank you, Chris. Airheart. Yes, that is that's new to me. I'm I don't know, Rich, if you're going anywhere anytime soon, I'm not internationally anyway. But but yes, very important, especially because it changes all the time. If you have feedback for anything that we talk about on the show, you have questions, you have comments, you have a suggestion for something we might talk about in a future show. All of that should go to us. Please, we're begging you. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thank you in advance. We also would like to thank our brand new bosses. We got two of them today, two over the holiday weekend. You are our lucky stars, Caleb, Dedrick and Alan Galang. They both just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you, Alan. And thanks to all our patrons, of course. We couldn't do it without you. Keep it coming. Thank you for helping us make the show every day. We truly couldn't do without you. We're live on the show Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Rich, who will join us tomorrow? The one and only Lamar Wilson. See that? Yeah. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.