 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power and John and Becky Johnston. Coming up on DTNS, movie passes back, but will customers return? Podcasting platforms take the next step forward and this is what it looks like when dogs cry. Not actually like this, but we'll explain. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 22nd, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From New York City, I'm Aya Zakhar. Another show's producer, Roger J. I had a dock and a USB-C port die on me right before the show, so if I seem a little flustered, I don't know what you're talking about. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Elon Musk's legal team has subpoenaed evidence from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. It includes documents related to the impact or effect of false or spam accounts on Twitter's business and operations. Twitter's use of MDAO as a key metric and any process or workflow other than the MDAO audit and the suspension workflow that Twitter used, has used, or has discussed or considered using to detect and label accounts as spam or false. I love legal use, don't you? Musk's team has also subpoenaed evidence from former Twitter head of product, Kavon Bigpour. App researcher Jane Manchin-Wong reports that Twitter began testing displaying if accounts have a verified phone number. The answer would appear on profile pages, but is not the same as the little blue check mark. That means a verified account. Company also began testing view counts for tweets available to some users under an analytics label. The UK's Conservative Party will offer internet voting for the first time as part of its leadership election. About 160,000 qualifying party members will receive a ballot pack in the mail that will include a paper, mail and ballot, as well as security codes to vote online. The party used guidance from the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre to build its online voting system. The winner of this election will be the UK's next prime minister, so pretty high stakes here. Britain's Labour Party also allowed online voting in its latest leadership elections, but that was to choose an opposition leader. I would just like to have a lot more details about what's the tech behind this. We didn't get much. The game awards will take place on December 8th, both as an in-person event and a live IMAX experience at select theatres, because what you want to see in IMAX is a bunch of people accepting awards. This year, the show will feature a new best adaptation category for projects that translate games to popular media, and I know you want to see the game trailers in IMAX, and that's kind of cool. Apple added M1-based MacBooks to its self-service repair program. This includes logic boards for the machines, although Apple will only offer trade and discounts on replacement parts with the same SKU, meaning that it would be pretty expensive to use a logic board replacement part to upgrade your RAM or your storage. Consumers will be charged the same for parts as Apple authorized service providers. Hey, I might need that. Alright, let's talk about a new company trying to make plants like Nespresso. Yeah, so if you have ever heard the term think globally, act locally, that sentiment often applies to food. A lot of times this means heading down to a local farmer's market to pick up produce, or maybe signing up for a community-supported agriculture like a CSA box, but a company called Click & Grow wants to bring fruits and veggies a lot closer to home, specifically inside of your home. Now, of course growing produce inside your house is not a new concept. Almost anyone can set up a few fresh herbs on a windowsill and hydroponic garden setups are readily available, but Click & Grow wants to take a lot of the maintenance out of the equation, offering a hydroponics as a service model and simple operation almost like a curig coffee maker. For a while, the company has offered the Smart Garden 3, which can grow herbs and some small tomatoes and peppers offered by the company as plant pods. It's $100 and designed to maintain the levels of moisture, nutrients, oxygen and pH without any user monitoring. A subscription of three plant pods every two months costs $8.98 a month. Their latest product takes this whole idea up a notch though. The Click & Grow 25 model offers the same automatic watering, the same LED lighting, but it can grow bigger plants like a variety of lettuces. The units are also stackable, so you could build up kind of a home vertical garden over time if you've got the space, or it makes sense to you. Plant pods available range from tomatoes and peppers to various leafy greens, herbs, even flowers. Now, the economics of this might be more complex than actually growing the plants. TechCrunch notes that a hydroponic garden setup on Amazon with seeds and nutrients costs $110 and 4,000 seeds cost $25. If you throw in nutrients, you could be spending a bit under $10 per crop. That being said, there's more work in the setup and a lot more work per week in maintenance. And you have to check pH values and nutrient levels yourself. The Click & Grow 25 starts at $730 with a subscription of $39.95 a month for 90 plant pods every four months. So this is not for, I want cheap produce, right? Because your salad bags at the grocery store are pretty competitive per price if you just want to get easy greens. This is about, I want the experience of immediate fresh vegetables, not something that's been in a packaged bag, not something that's been on a truck, but I don't have the time to do all of the measuring. I don't have the time to develop the skills, albeit small if you already know them, of like making sure that the pH and the watering and everything is balanced. Some people like to learn that stuff, but if you're like, I want the fresh vegetables, I don't want to learn it. That's what this is going for. Now, to that end, I look at Keurig and I look at Nespresso and I think, yeah, there's a lot of people who want really good coffee, but don't want to go to the trouble to make it themselves, even if arguably they could make it better if they make it themselves. Nespresso ends up being pretty good. I feel like that's what this is about, is if you're willing to pay the price, you probably come out about even, but you will get fresh vegetables easily. My question is, are there enough people who want to do that to make a business out of this? Especially because, you know, I mean, I'll say a fresh tomato grown in a, well, I was going to say a yard, but it could be a hydroponic situation in your kitchen or wherever. It's always going to be the best tomato you have. I mean, a good fresh tomato just will make store about tomatoes just seem like death. But, you know, a one tomato plant on its own takes up a fair amount of space. I think there's certainly a market for this. I don't have room in my house to do this, even though I really like the concept, even taking the price out of consideration because I think the price is really high. You know, at first I was kind of like, well, this is sort of like, you know, the difference between me baking my own brownies or buying a pan of brownies that somehow store about, right? But it isn't really because there is no sort of like, oh, the love of cultivating the plants is part of the reason that you pay for this. The whole point is that it's happening on site, but you're not really having to do anything. So I think that for, you know, for certain folks, this is very attractive because you are going to get nice fresh produce. But I just don't know how many people are going to pay for this. Yeah, I think I'm going to echo what you said, Sarah. It's like, conceptually, it sounds like a great idea. I'll just grow it myself. But like one of the things about K-Cups and in general, these single service devices that you get your stuff right away. So sure, you will be able to know when your tomato came in. And but you can't just be like, OK, I'm going to put my pot in and there's a tomato. That's what we got the supermarket for. So you might lose that time convenience. I love the idea. I think this is for somebody who wants to be like a better person. Like I'm going to wake up at five in the morning. I'm going to check my plants and make sure my pods are fine. And then I'm going to meditate and then I'm going to harvest. I think this is aspirational. I don't know who this is for. It's not me because I mean, I don't think tomatoes taste good no matter what they are. So sorry about that. OK, but there's lettuce. There's peppers. There's there's other vegetables. There's a variety of things. I would also disagree that this is for the person who wants to be a feeling good. That that's the person who's going to do hydroponics where they have to put in a little effort and feel good about the effort. This is I don't want to put in the effort. I just want the LED lights and the water and everything to be automatic. I don't want to have to think about it. I don't want to spend more than a couple minutes a week, but I will have lettuce available when I want to your point. I as it isn't as easy as you put the plant pod into the lettuce springs out. They do try to say, well, what you can do is you can time the growth with multiple trays so that when the lettuce is ready to eat, you can pull that tray out. And the lettuce will stay growing even outside of the tray outside of the LEDs and stuff for a while. And then you you have the next one growing so that it, you know, you can get into a rhythm. But getting into a rhythm is not the same as as like the Keurig where it's like, I don't have to get into a rhythm. I put the thing in. I press the button and I have coffee. And the price point is going to be a huge barrier. That's when like, if you better feel something, 730 bucks just to start and then you're paying $40 a month for these pods. And if you're not, if you're not even eating it, that's a whole other problem. You got a whole other behavioral subscription service to deal with. Yeah, it is like those those. What did you call them, Sarah, earlier, the CSA boxes? Those are those can be around $40 a month. And a lot of people end up throwing stuff away from those two. I think there's less waste in this because it's growing, right? You aren't going to take it until you use it and that'll keep it fresh. And there's a little bit more psychologically of you saying, but it's here. I watched it grow. I should eat it. All right, let's talk about something that is very similar to growing lettuce podcast production. Zencaster announced some significant new features to bring it closer to an end to end podcasting solution. So users will now be able to record up to 4k video and edit that video and audio with some new features right inside of the Zencaster website. They can also distribute to various platforms. They can monetize with ads all from within the service. Monetization and 4k recording are available on a new $59 a month plan. Some of the other things are available on other plans. The growth tier as that one is called the free steer tier is still there and we'll do the distribution and stuff, but it's only 1080p recording and you only get an hour of the post production stuff, the editing. But this is very much like Spotify's anchor except without being tied to Spotify. Now, not every podcaster cares about video, but for those that do and you know who you are, podcasters may have even more reason to focus on video. 9to5 Google notes that back in July, YouTube began publishing a new explore page for podcasts at youtube.com slash podcast and slowly been making available. The company's been making it available to more people, including carousels for popular episodes, popular playlists, recommended shows, groupings by category like comedy, true crime, sports, music, TV and film. There's a podcast for everybody. Right now, clicking through a video opens it as a standard YouTube video without podcast or audio specific optimizations. So this seems to be a first step into better podcast discovery on YouTube. It's not clear what this would mean for Google's other podcast products. How this is going to roll in specifically in YouTube music or the Google podcast app, which I think a lot of people assume its days are numbered now that podcasts are showing up in YouTube, but that's not necessarily true. You just never know if you're not with Google. Sometimes they live with 17 different versions of the same service for a while. So I think it's interesting that they are partnering up and trying to gather a little of that podcast magic in this way because it means that YouTube sees dollar signs there. It means that they see enough of a business in podcasting that it's worth trying to take up some of that homepage real estate with. Yeah, looking at this, we can discuss the whole Google's going to kill it. Whether or not they'll have a parallel product or they'll roll it out. The fact they're keeping it quiet right now is the smartest thing I've heard Google do. It's like, yeah, we have something. It's not rolled out everywhere. Shh, be quiet about the podcast. But then again, talking about the Zencaster story, like if you have more and more tools that make it easier and easier to set up a podcast. So there's a lot more solutions out there. Now you're like, okay, which show am I going to watch? And if YouTube is actually going ahead and they're christening, this is our page and you've got podcasts here. You've got the ability to find stuff. I think that'll be great for people who are looking for something to watch. Also great for people who want to actually create podcasts because they have a real home because the thing would be, where's your podcast? You're like, oh, it's on iTunes. Wherever it's available, it's on Spotify, it's on Anchor, it's on this, it's on that. And the other thing, maybe being able to say it's on my YouTube podcast page, a little bit easier. Yeah, I use Acast for, I mean, we use Acast on the show as well. But for one of my shows, Have Such a Good Day, which I co-host with my friend, Heather Frank, we send the podcast to YouTube. It's just one of those things that's in the Acast system of like, want to just send something. And it's just our album art and, you know, a video. And I always thought, eh, I mean, why not? It doesn't hurt us. I don't know who's consuming the show that way because there isn't any video to see besides the album art. But people do. You know, we get our, we get stats from that all the time. So anything that makes YouTube more of a player in podcast production, as far as I'm concerned, makes a lot of sense. It's where a lot of people are already. But I do feel like, yeah, Google has a long way to go before the, okay, you make a podcast on Google podcast, but then there's YouTube podcasts. And is that the same thing? And if it isn't the same thing, how do they differ? And this is very classic Google. Yeah, this youtube.com slash podcast looks to me more like folks like us who do a video version of their podcast that they put on YouTube. We have a video version of the podcast at youtube.com slash DTNS, right? You can go watch the show there. But it's not an RSS feed. That is a YouTube channel. And we can monetize that separately than we do other things because it's not part of the RSS feed. However, it does sound like maybe Google wants to move podcasts into YouTube that would threaten the Google podcast app and maybe provide audio only stuff that we do also publish our audio only from a cast straight to YouTube. Like it's a podcast platform. But again, that's a separate channel from the RSS feed. It gets messy when you start to think, well, what is YouTube really up to? Are they going to, are they going to take RSS feeds and pump them straight into YouTube? Are we going to have a situation where there's a Daily Tech News Show podcast on YouTube, but also the Daily Tech News Show YouTube channel? How do we reconcile that? I could get very confusing. In fact, it already is kind of confusing for consumers. I'm also thinking if Google is going to have a YouTube specific thing, they better have a really good way of searching within that audio because with all their machine learning advances and things, thinking about how great they got to YouTube. We've gotten all these chapters and got markers and things, audio podcasts, even if they don't have any video component. They're just the album or even if their algorithms are smart enough to actually pick out points of the show, which actually would be better for ad insertion as well. Like, hey, not going to trouble me in the middle of my point to go here. This has brought you by whatever. That's not a great thing. So maybe that'll be the way that Google figures out how to get customers. Hey guys, go to our podcast solution because the ads will make sense. You'll be able to find what you want and it's available on Google. So you know it's going to be at least running theoretically on the uptime. Yeah. I think clearly everybody would like a slice of the ad money that's available for podcasting. YouTube, Spotify, Acast, all of them. They would all like to get a little section of that. So there's a bit of a land rush to that right now. Hey folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? We love to hear from you. One way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Movie pass. Does it make you shudder? Does it make you wistful? Does it make you confused? I don't know, but it often carries a lot of baggage. The service dated back to 2011. Sarah and I as an eye covered the launch of movie pass on tech news today. Way back in 2011. I remember, yeah. It has offered theatrical movies as a subscription service at its launch. It was a certain amount of movies per month for a fee, not dissimilar to the fee that they're charging you for plant pods. I think it was around $40 a month. It peaked in subscribers with more than $3 million in 2018 when they were selling the subscription as an unlimited subscription for like $10 a month between that aggressive pricing model and fraught relations with major theater chains. The service eventually just ran out of money and shut down in September 2019. But wait, there's more. In November 2021, one of the original founders, Stacy Spikes, who movie pass fired in 2018. Well, he bought the assets. In February 2022, he announced he would relaunch the service on more reasonable grounds with a cryptocurrency flavor. Now we know a few more specifics. Movie pass will launch in beta on September 5th. If you want to be a part of it, you'll need to sign up for the wait list starting Thursday, August 25th at 9 a.m. through August 29th. If you're selected to become a member, you'll get 10 invites you can send to friends. If you were a member of the old movie pass, you'll get some unknown number of bonus credits. Now, we don't know if any of that Web3 stuff that he talked about in February is coming. In fact, there's a lot. We don't know like where it will be available. Movie pass says it will launch initially in markets based on where they get the most interest during the sign up phase, as well as where they have partner theaters. Right now they say they're partnered with 25% of U.S. theaters. So Insider says prices will vary by zip code. Just like prices at theaters, tiers will be around $10, $20 or $30 a month. You'll get a number of credits per month to use on tickets. We don't know how many per tier or how many credits per movie that is. We also don't know if it excludes any movies or which theaters it'll work with. It'll also have a black card, not a red card. You can use it to pick up tickets at the box office, though you can also book them through the app. And no details about anything crypto related have been announced yet. Movie pass says it'll have more details soon. Yeah, this comes as theaters themselves are struggling to stay afloat. Cineworld, which owns Regal theaters here in the U.S., said it is in fact considering filing chapter 11 bankruptcy. Chapter 11 is the one that lets you continue to do business while you reorganize your finances. So it doesn't look like they're going out of business, but they're certainly not booming. So the question is, is this a good time for movie pass to get into this business when there aren't quite as many people going to the theaters? Or is it the good time to get into this because the theaters need the help in generating interest? I feel like it's the latter. I feel like theaters are struggling and sure, pandemic stuff kept a lot of people out of movie theaters, but I haven't really been going to movie theaters regularly for some years now. It's not because I don't enjoy the experience. I just think it's easier to watch movies and content in general from the safety and security of my own couch. But if you get a bunch of people going back to the theater and movie pass can make money while, you know, in the theaters which make the majority of their money on concessions anyway, if everybody's happy about that, great. Crypto part of it doesn't make any sense to me. And they're pretty thin on details there. I would love to know where the Web3 aspect of me going to the movie theater is, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Well, what they were talking about back in February was this idea of like your credits could be transferable. You could send them to others on the network. So they would be on a blockchain. They were talking about, you know, your monthly fee would accrue ownership in the company somehow as an NFT, you know, that gave you a small stake in the company perhaps. But these were all just examples of the kinds of things they could do. And that's why people were curious what they were going to do and they didn't announce any of those things. I was looking at the chat and they said there aren't that many hits out right now. And the fact that people aren't going to movies so much, you know, maybe this is a great time for MoviePass to restart. It's like, okay, they can start off with a really low user base. They can find out any weird wrinkles in this new plan, see what incentives will keep people coming back. So that way they can actually succeed for real this time because the thing is the competition is pretty fierce. You got all kinds of things streaming. You've got AMC's got their own pass, Alamo's got their own pass. So not necessarily, we don't know if MoviePass will even work with those theaters. So if MoviePass is going to start off, if they're going to get a, what a number shot is the third, fourth, fifth, they're going to try it again, maybe try it while the demand is low, work out those kinks and actually learn from all of the years experience of, you know, what MoviePass was kind of a mess at times. I'm also curious if people have the long enough memory to remember, hey, MoviePass was a mess by the end. There was these blackout dates or blackout times. You might have to take photos of tickets just to be able to watch the movie thereby making everything way less convenient, pushing you towards other ways to watch content. So maybe the best time for MoviePass is now, but they better get rid of some of that really junky, bad consumer experience that they had at the very end of their last run. I'll be honest. I feel like most people, you know, who aren't us and talking about MoviePass on Twitter probably don't remember. They probably just recognize, oh, MoviePass, that was that subscription service. It's back, huh? Is it work? Is it a deal? The problem is MoviePass blew up because it was easy to understand, but that was not a sustainable business model, which was $10 a month. See any movie you want. And then of course there were problems with theaters not wanting to take it and all of that. This, which is like a quarter of the movie theaters and see some of the movies you want. Some will cost different amounts of credits than others is my guess. It's harder to explain. And when you've got AMC out there going like, hey, if you go to AMC theaters all the time, just buy our thing. You can see all the movies you want at the AMC theaters for this price a month and get a special line for the popcorn that feels like a more compelling argument. My guess is the move for MoviePass is to provide this for theaters like Landmark that don't have it and then make a play to manage the plans for the AMCs of the world as a sort of like an enterprise service provider. Well, it's not every day that we go straight science, maybe not even all that much tech, but today is one of those days because we just couldn't help it. A study in the journal Current Biology finds that dogs produce more tears when reunited with their owners than with other humans, meaning that Otis loves me the most. Now, if that's true, it would be the first evidence that emotions cause tears not just in dogs, but in other non-human animals. But scientists who weren't part of the study are totally sure that this conclusion is justified. Canine behavior specialist at Arizona State University, Clive Nguyen, says, if we accept the evidence of this paper, this is one of the most stunning discoveries in animal expression emotions of all time. But it would take a lot to convince me. Now, when dogs exhibit watery, shiny eyes that's shown to facilitate human caregiving, says Takafumi Kikusui, an animal behavior and veterinary medicine specialist at Abizu University in Japan, who's one of the study's authors. So, it kind of goes to show you when it comes to certain studies, a little bit of grand assault, depending on who you are as a scientist and what you believe. This is not about whether a scientist has belief or truth. This is about one study and this is science at work, which is a bunch of scientists poking holes in it. That's science at work. They showed this, but I want to see another study. You want to see more than one study. This is the thing the press does to us all the time, is pretends like one study is the definitive end of all study on the stuff. This could be a lot of other reasons for this. It might be that whenever a dog is around someone they're familiar with, their eyes just water more, not because of emotions, but because they get more caregiving because of that and it's an evolutionary thing and they don't even realize what's going on. I'm not saying that is the case, but you got to rule out all those other situations. I haven't read the paper. Maybe they addressed that in the paper. But Sarah, this is not a tech story. There's no technology in here. No. Unless we can figure out how machine learning can make dogs cry on command or something. Is that what we're doing? I don't know. Technology is about technology. It's about we need you, the folks who are into technology, to solve the problem of dog tears. That's right. Otis cries all the time. Wimpering is a whole different thing than the tears. Let's check out the bell bag. Dan wrote in responding to our story on Friday of Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation perhaps crashing 2005 era computers. This story reminds me that impossible is a variable function. Dan says some years ago, I installed and managed the sound system at the Key West International Airport. One day I got a call that an airline's departure gate microphone would crash their computers whenever they used it. It's impossible, I said. So I went out to investigate. Sure enough, an agent held up the mic and with a stony look hit the PTT button. There was no sound, but the local computer screen went blank. I would go into ultrasonic oscillation which was then broadcast throughout the terminal at hundreds of watts. It was that specific frequency that crashed their computer, but nobody else's. Since then, my That's Impossible threshold has increased significantly. I love this story so much. It's a great story on its own, but it also, I love Dan's like, I used to think things were impossible and then the impossible happened. And now I know better. Yeah, this is a great story. Thank you, man. Yeah, thank you, Dan. And thanks to everybody who writes in. Please keep those emails coming. If you have a fun anecdote, you have ideas for a future show, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also thanks to you, AyaazAktar for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with what you're up to. Yeah, go to Twitter. I'm at Ayaaz over there. I'll be announcing stuff about this old nerd. Dan from The Mailbag, I want to know when you start your podcast about impossible being a variable function. Sounds really awesome. I hear there's a lot of cool tools out there for you. So check out Dan's podcast when that starts. We also want to extend a very special thanks to Russ Clark. Russ is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Russ, for all the years of support. You are the best. Thanks, Russ. Yeah. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet, affectionately known as GDI. You can also catch the show. This show, DTNS Live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. We're talking EV charger installation with Chris Ashley. Don't miss it.