 Coming up on DTNS, Stacey Higginbotham explains the glorious world coming to our smart home thanks to a standard called Matter, the first pitches for alternatives to Apple's in-app payment system are here and Molly Wood tells us how we survive. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 7th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Mann. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Lost in Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. And of course, host of Marketplace Tech and Marketplace's How We Survive. Molly Wood, welcome back. Hello. It's so good to be back. Thank you for being here. We're going to talk a little more about Molly's new show in a few minutes. We were just talking about lots of ways you can get rid of skunks on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that, you might need those tips. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Mike Aikens, Norm Fezikas, and Chris Allen. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg sources say that Apple is developing a technology code named Iron Heart that would let you use your iPhone to control the climate system, radio, seats, and instrument clusters. The plus is that users wouldn't have to switch between CarPlay and their own car's infotainment system. Iron Heart is reportedly still in development and needs partnerships with car brands to go forward. Apple has declined to comment. AMD did announce that Windows 11 might cause an increased L3 cash latency on Ryzen processors, which would result in 3 to 5% worse performance on most applications, but it could get up to 15% for your games. The operating system also causes issues with AMD's preferred core technology resulting in a performance hit for CPU-reliant tests on CPUs that have more than 8 cores. Microsoft and AMD said they are both working on software updates set for later this month to try to resolve those issues. Twitter announced that it is testing tweet labels in iOS and Android that state, conversations like this can be intense in an effort to learn how to better support healthy conversation. Joining in the conversation will require users to click through a prompt encouraging users to be factual, consider their shared humanity, and also be open to diverse perspectives. Got a couple of earbuds to talk about here. Anker announced the Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro earbuds, 30% smaller than the Liberty 2 Pros, and they monitor ambient noise and in-ear pressure together to apply better active noise cancellation. Also a big thing for audio files, they support the LDAC codec for higher quality audio. Anker Liberty 3 Pro is available now in four colors for $170 and, if you want something a little cheaper, Audio Technica announced a new true wireless earbud product that supports Google's fast pairing for $79. Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming Service is now powered by Xbox Series X hardware. True story. The company told The Verge it completed that upgrade which improves frame rates and game load times for players streaming Xbox Ames over the web. All right, let's talk about the first attempt to provide a legitimate question mark, alternative payment system. Justin, tell us about it. Tom, it would be my pleasure. It feels like time is running out on Apple keeping alternative payment systems off its platform. Japan's Fair Trade Commission is investigating Google and Apple's dominant market positions in smartphones. The Netherlands determined that Apple's in-app payment system is indeed anti-competitive. Back in August, South Korea passed a law to stop App Store owners from requiring developers to use in-house payment systems. And of course, the big one, the ruling in the U.S. Epic Apple case that is against Apple, Epic and Apple, although it also was indeed grandiose in size. That was in September that said that Apple must allow links out to alternative payment systems. So now companies are starting to bet on alternative payment systems becoming a reality beyond all of the wrangling both legal and governmental. CNBC reports that Revenue Cat is building a browser-based payment system for iOS apps. And a company called Paddle has issued a full-press release and website saying it will bring its Windows and Mac app payment systems to iOS. The website shows a demo that links from an iOS app to a web page where a customer can pay with Apple Pay, PayPal, or credit card. Paddle says that it will take 10% for transactions under $10 and 5% for those over 10 and give developers access to super data-like email addresses. Paddle will also offer more subscription options, allow for variability in pricing, and let developers handle customer services like refunds. Paddle is set to go live on December 7th, just a few days before the deadline the court gave Apple to allow alternative payment links. Of course, nobody knows exactly how Apple would interpret the judge's ruling. So Paddle built three different systems and is waiting on Apple for further guidance. And of course, the Epic Apple ruling will be appealed by Epic, Apple, or both by December. And probably both. Yeah. So most likely this doesn't go into place in December. That's why Apple's not talking about it. It does give us a view of if it ever does become reality, what companies might do, which is kick you out to Safari, kick you out to a web browser, and leave you up to that company's protections for your customer data. I mean, it's a boon for developers to say, yeah, you can handle the refunds. You can handle all the customer data, not as good for customers though. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. If you're an entrepreneur, why not tip your toe into this water? Eventually there's going to be some kind of space for this. And what you want to do is set up some kind of market share. So you could be used as some sort of default for people that want to spin it in to their program or to their apps and stuff like that. The question that really I have is, I think that it's inevitable that this does happen for Apple. But we also know that Apple will not do anything until they absolutely have to. So on the road from, we're definitely not doing this to absolutely have to, it feels like we're pretty close, but I don't know. I mean, I don't know how long this back and forth with Epic is going to go and I can't see them doing anything definitive until then. Molly, I can't imagine you don't have thoughts. It's so funny because I'm just basically sitting here thinking about cryptocurrency. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that some investor put a ton of money into paddle and whoever else, what other company is deciding, yeah, okay, we're going to get in this game because there's a ton of money to be made in payments. If you can be the person processing the payments, whether you're Visa, Apple, paddle, you are in a position to take a cut. I know this is a little bit to the side of what we're discussing, but it made me think, this is the promise of Bitcoin. This is the promise of cryptocurrency. Why can't I just pay an app developer directly without anybody sitting in the middle? Where is my Bitcoin solution to this problem so that it's not such a big, I mean, great, right? It's great that it's a business opportunity for some, like Justin said, some enterprising entrepreneur who's like, I'm just going to wait right here until they have to open it up and then I'm going to start taking my big, but as a consumer, there is a part of me that's like, I don't need all these companies taking my big and my data to Tom's point. Let me like Bitcoin this. Because I think what paddle is doing here is hopefully positioning itself, they think, in being the first to be able to offer this by getting a bunch of developers to sign up for their mailing list, right? But also getting a bunch of people to realize that they already do this for Mac and Windows and getting immediate customers. Like, oh, I didn't realize paddle did this, but it's not the long-term solution. And I don't know, Molly, it makes me wonder if Apple isn't thinking along the same lines as you in providing some even better way that doesn't involve them and cuts out all of these other options as well. That's what I would do. Yeah. Well, we talked about Twitch on Wednesday's show and we got a little bit of an update, but just a little reminder that Twitch posted Wednesday that it learned that some user data was exposed to the internet dude who an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party. The post noted that there is, quote, no indication that login credentials have been exposed, end quote, which is good. Although changing your password is probably still a good idea and adding multi-factor authentication protection is a very good idea. We talked about this at length yesterday, to which also noted it doesn't store full credit card numbers, so those would not be exposed. And it took the step of resetting all stream keys last night, indicating that it might be worried that stream keys were exposed. Stream keys are strings of hard to guess numbers used in lieu of authentication to let somebody stream to a particular channel. The configuration change is vague enough to leave some room for speculation, however, could be something like a permissions error, leaving something with a read permission for any connection. People scan open servers constantly looking for this type of information. So we got some questions. We didn't get the full breakdown like Facebook gave us on their outage, partly because this is a security issue. And so I kind of doubt we'll ever get that. But it does show that Twitch, there were some doubts like, how much did they really get? Is this all really from? Did they combine it with public data? And from what Twitch is saying, it's like, no. There was a server left open. Somebody was able to get into that server and get an entire drives worth of data. And we're investigating more. And so it still leaves open the idea of like, okay, sure, maybe a permission was left open, maybe a server was left open to the internet and put somebody scanned by, or maybe someone was inside the network, either authorized or unauthorized and took it. That is the real question here. And the fact that this kind of data just hit the open internet is a little suspicious in that this kind of stuff, if sold to brokers that then sell it back to companies or other competitors, this kind of stuff can go for a fair amount of money if you know where to go. So I have a question on exactly how much of this might have been just a, let's throw the dirty laundry in the street situation at which point you have to ask, who would want to throw Twitch's dirty laundry in the street? Molly, who would want to throw Twitch's dirty laundry in the street? Who would want to do that? I know. I mean, Dishy, YouTube? Like how far down the rabbit hole are we going to go of the conspiracy here? What I also think too is that this, that configuration error is becoming the new like computer glitch. Like it's just sort of a, I know it's tricky to force companies to do breach disclosure in detail because in some ways that could leave them open to more exposure. But at this point, when I hear configuration error, I'm like, oh, that's bologna, right? That's just like a smooth way for you to gloss over whatever it was that really happened up to and including whatever actually happened at Facebook. Well, it's a convenient phrase that is not inaccurate, I would guess, but also doesn't tell you anything, right? Doesn't tell you anything. Does it mean that your servers are way too centralized? For example, Facebook, so that if you enter a configuration error, you break the whole ship. Does it mean, you know, does it mean that you have a malicious person inside your operation who just tried to leak all your dirty laundry onto the street? Maybe. It's just a very conveniently vague, meaningless phrase that we should probably start interrogating a little more when we hear it from these companies. It reminds me of when there are like public figures that are out like on video being extraordinarily drunk or passed out. And then the explanation is they were dehydrated. They were hospitalized for exhaustion because they were out in the desert, right? They had flu like symptoms. Exactly. They died of heart failure. Well, I mean, when your heart stops, you die. That is the last thing that happens. That's true. But like a lot of things. Okay. I made it dark. I'm sorry. I will say with Facebook, having commented out all of techTV.com's CMS at one point in my life, I am sympathetic that there could be a mis-type configuration error that could cause that. It could go all kinds of ways. The Twitch thing feels a little more like, man, that's a lot of data for somebody to get at once. It's a real big mistake. If it indeed was just a big old mistake, that's a big one. All the files available for public read, like that, I don't know. I will say this. It's very tricky in the world of either remote or hybrid office work to do the already tricky job of internal IT. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Especially for secure. Yeah. No, that is a very good point. All right. Stacey Higginbotham covers the Internet of Things space, in my opinion, better than almost anybody that's ever done it. You can find her work at staceyoniot.com. If you want to understand smart devices on IoT, you should definitely subscribe to her newsletter. I talked to her for our show, Know a Little More, about the smart home interoperability protocol called Matter. This is the protocol that has Amazon, Google, Apple, and a whole lot of other folks on board to make smart home devices work with each other without you having to do any of the work. Here's an excerpt from that show where Stacey explains how matter will work and how companies will still be able to try to get you to use them instead of competitors, even with real widespread interoperability. It sounds like what you're describing would take us from these devices just don't work with these other devices to these devices all work with each other, although maybe the Google Home works a little better with the Nest and has a few extra features, which overall sounds like an improvement to me. I think it will be. And I would give you a classic example of like movie time. Most people are like, hey, I want to have a movie time routine when I have my smart home, right? And it used to be, and that would be like, my TV turns on, my lights dim, my AC goes down, my doors lock, all of those things could happen, right? It used to take me like two hours to program something like that. You had to hope and pray all your devices work. Those kind of things are going to become like a default setting on your TV. Like your TV is going to be like, or maybe it'll be your light bulbs. It will know what's in your house. It will ask if you want to set something up. You can finagle with it if you want to, but you don't have to. And then it'll just happen. The types of services I think we're going to see and I don't know if we're ready to pay for them are going to be things like, hey, I want to pay for a healthy home. Thus, I want my various temperature and air quality sensors to talk to each other and talk to my HVAC and talk to my open closed sensors on my windows and make all of that work together. So my indoor air quality is always awesome, right? We're going to see those kind of things are energy savings. We're going to see them around security. And those will be differentiators, and it will be, I think, pretty cool. So if you'd like to hear more about what matter is, how it works, Stacey explains all of that in our No A Little More episode at NoALittleMore.com, or if you're a patron, you already have that in your feed. You can also help us figure out what we talk about on the show. One way to let us know is our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. As climate change impacts the environment and our lives, we turn to technology quite often as a hopeful way to solve the problem. What are the challenges and the solutions we can expect to find as we try to innovate our way out of this crisis? Molly Wood wanted to find out, so she launched a podcast so you can find out with her. It's called How We Survive. Molly, tell us about how we survive. I have never felt simultaneously more awkward and delighted to be here on a promo tour with my old friends. But, yes, How We Survive. So How We Survive was born out of coverage that I've been doing on Marketplace Tech for almost three years now, based around the idea, really inspired, not surprisingly for me, by SyFy, which is, okay, in all of these novels that I read, a lot of these problems are either worked out, worked out too late, a part of the landscape, you know, and I think actually it was New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, where he is writing about New York has survived two 50-foot sea level rises, and one of the things they've done is like invent this diamond coating to put around the bottoms of buildings, to keep the water out. And so I was thinking about that and all these other technologies in these books. And I was thinking, well, here we are in and around Silicon Valley where they're telling me all the time they're going to save the world. That's got to be more than food delivery, right? Like, what are we going to do here? How are we going to innovate our way out of that? And so all of that led to then this new narrative podcast where we decided to just sort of try to dig deep into one specific solution that's very large, the idea of an energy transition away from fossil fuels and into electrification, vehicles, buses, buildings, homes, the power grid. And in the process of sort of breaking down that big idea into its component parts, there's an aspect of it that I've actually been obsessed with for a long time, which is batteries. Like, you can't do any of this without batteries. Batteries to either store wind and solar energy and distribute it when the wind is not blowing in the sun, it's not shining, or to electrify the houses and the buildings and the cars and the buses. And a friend of mine who is like an incubator of new technologies tipped me off like two years ago to the fact that there was a big lithium rush, because lithium is the irreplaceable component right now of most batteries, as we know, right? Lithium ion batteries. And while other minerals and metals can be replaced in batteries, like they're trying to figure out how to do it without cobalt, lithium can't. It's like number three on the periodic chart, and it has, you know, apparently super conductivity relative to size. So every reason to need lithium, the U.S. produces essentially none right now, despite having a couple of big reserves. And the more we dug into it, the more it was clear that that was like the perfect, it's a technology story, it's a huge business story. And then it turns out that the personalities and the actual stories themselves about how we're going to spin up a new mining industry in the U.S. Arboretty bonkers, it's bonkers. Yeah, that first episode, while the technology is certainly present throughout, it's a lot more about the people. Why is this first episode more about the people, do you think? Yeah, it's not my normal thing either. It was sort of, it was a departure. I mean, it's about the people because solutions are complicated. And I feel like that's sort of the overarching message. So, you know, there's going to be eight episodes in this season, two of them, the first one and the second will be set in Nevada where there is a really controversial lithium mining project that they're trying to get off the ground. And it is this kind of perfect example of the difficulty of solutions. One, we don't do a lot of mining in the United States. We certainly do in Nevada, but the idea of like digging a huge hole in the ground and displacing potentially ranchers and struggles over indigenous land, like that's that's a resource extraction story that we're used to. But in this case, the resource is something that could like save the planet. And so it was, it just became this sort of perfect complicated question and complicated story. And then you have, right now, we're on the precipice of not just doing a lot about the climate crisis, but maybe doing it in a better way, a more just way so that we don't displace communities and like trample indigenous rights. So we're going to compare and contrast two different projects in the course of the season. There's the one in Nevada, and then there are projects in the Salton Sea in Southern California that people in communities are really excited about. We'll also look at why we need to electrify everything and what that could look like and what it'll take. And then the back kind of three episodes of the season will be like sci-fi, like the new coming technologies. So once we get all this Lithium, here's the stuff we could do with it. Yeah. Right. And like, what if we didn't need Lithium? You know, what if we did iron batteries? Finally, that is the battery technologies that you and I have been covering for 20 years. It's finally going to work. Yeah. Yeah. Have you found, I mean, having launched something that clearly, you know, a lot of it means that you have to go to the place and find out what's going on in that place type of thing with the, everyone having a very hard time being able to be as mobile as they used to be. Has that been a factor at all? We got so lucky because we did most of the, we've sort of been short-handing it as like a road trip through the climate crisis. And most of it happened in June and July, which you remember was the heyday of like we're reopening. Yeah. And then literally as all of those travels ended, everything shut down again, which was just blind luck. That is good. It happened. Yep. It was sheer happenstance. It couldn't have worked out better. And then now, spoiler for the last episode, we're actually going to go to, in November is this conference, this UN conference called COP26, which a lot of people who've been covering climate a long time are saying is, and politicians and diplomats as well, is probably the biggest gathering, diplomatic gathering of world leaders since World War II. Like this is it. We're at the super pivotal moment right now where we're going to decide as a species, like if we fix this or not, right? If we're just like carbon offsets, we'll be fine. So I'm sort of hoping that we're also going to ride the Delta dip to Scotland and back safely. That would be nice. Yeah. The one thing that struck me about the first episode is, I know there's a lot of folks in our audience right now are probably thinking like, I know who the good guys in this story are. I know who the bad guys are. You don't. You're going to be surprised. You really don't. And I feel really lucky to have gotten to do the stuff that Tom and I have been doing for so many years and now be like, it's great to have faith that nuance still has value. Like this is, these are stories where pretty much everybody's right. Pretty much everybody's wrong. The world is at stake. There's the way we've always done things. There's an opportunity to do things a new way. There's like people who believe that the only way to save the planet is to end industrial civilization, even if like a billion people die. A friend of mine is referring to one of these characters as baby Thanos. There's like, there's that point of view. There are ranchers who don't think that climate change is human caused. And so why do that? They're like, why do this mine at all? It's just a money grab because there's a ton of money in green, which is also true. There is a ton of money in green and it is a money. You're talking about an industry worth potentially trillions. Like of course, there's big greedy companies, but even the big greedy companies are like, dude, we are trying to do things the right way. It's complicated. And thank you for trying to at least make it a little less complicated. We'll remind you again by the end of the show, but it's called How We Survive. And you can find it in your podcast app of choice or marketplace.org. If you want more information, subscribe on Apple, big launch, big launch. Always good. Good guys win. Thanks team. Folks, you know, that Comcast own UK satellite broadcaster Sky. You ever heard of it? Yeah. Yeah. Heard of it. Yeah. So he just announced the Skyglass TV, which doesn't use satellites, just the internet. The box comes with a 4k camera meant to be used for social TV activities like watch together, but it also supports motion controls for games like fruit ninja. A mic on the box can be used for voice control as well. Now some of you are wondering why you need a 4k camera for stuff like that. Others are getting a tingling sensation that a box with a high res camera that can handle voice and motion controls sounds really familiar. And yes, it indeed is. Sky worked with Microsoft for Skyglass TV. So the dream of 2013 is still alive, friends. We now know what happened to Microsoft connect. Good to see you. I'm so thrilled about this. It lives. It does. Remember like when, you know, everyone was like the connect like had so much promise and guess it didn't go anywhere. No, there was still there. There were teams definitely working on this. And now we're seeing that, you know, the fruits of their labor. Sorry, kind of fruit ninja. I get it. Fruit ninja joke. I mean, everything that the connect did well for television watching that nobody wanted in 2013 is in the Skyglass TV. Yeah. I guess the jury is out on whether we still want it or not. Nope. I'm right here and I say that they I think that they say, I think that there's, there's, there's a huge opportunity for this. And to be honest, it feels like a product whose moment has come. We really turn a corner throughout the pandemic when we kind of accelerated five years in terms of user attitudes to things like video conferencing when zoom and similar AV communication technology is now something that everybody knows, or at least the colloquial everybody. I think that now the idea of these smart televisions and having these kinds of social features are just more of a reality than they would be otherwise. Well, folks, thank you for making it possible to do this show. Do we have anybody new in the, in the camp, Sarah? Tom, I'm glad you asked. We do. We have two new bosses, Matthew and Grateful Mouse, both just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Grateful Mouse. And for anybody who listens to the show, has feedback, has questions, comments, feedback at DailyTechNewShout.com is where to send that feedback to us. We are grateful to you, Grateful Mouse, and you too, Matthew. Yeah. Two smart people who knew an easy way to get, to get a shout out on the show, start back in the show. And Grateful Mouse, I believe, is a return patron. So thanks for, thanks for making it back into the phone. Grateful Mouse. Grateful Mouse. We also have other folks to thank. We'll start with Stacy Higginbotham. Thank you so much for telling us a little bit more about what you do best. Also, Molly Wood, congratulations on the new show. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Thank you at Molly Wood on Twitter and marketplace.org slash climate is where you can find all that how we survive stuff. Excellent. Justin Marbriong, thanks for being with us this fine Thursday, where can people keep up with your work? Well, of course, the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast is there for you. We've got a deep dive on some of the debt ceiling situation, which you might have heard about in the news, as well as an interview from all the way down under in Australia, looking at the very, very curious comparisons between the United States and that country in terms of governmental and cultural lockdowns, attitudes toward it. And the fact that they're at a very, very interesting point where they're going to have to kind of go from a zero COVID mindset to a post vaccine being tolerant of the fact that cases might go up. Is that going to be something that happens? We have a great guest to talk all about that. Find it at PX3podcast.com after you subscribe to How We Survive by Molly Wood and Marketplace on Apple podcast specifically so they can climb the charts. This was such a great show. All sorts of good shows that we all have to subscribe to. Just a reminder that we are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we will be back tomorrow with Len Peralta and Rob Denwood. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.