 Coming up on DTNs, Google replaces third-party cookies with group targeting, cameras that spy on your neighborhood, and Brave wants to build a new search engine from scratch. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom 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 Chang. We were just solving time travel on Good Day Internet. If you would like to get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter announced it's opening its Twitter Spaces audio chat rooms to Android users previously available as a private beta on iOS only. Android users will now be able to join Spaces conversations, although they can't start them for now. That functionality is arriving soon. In an SEC filing, Lyft said the last week of February saw its best week of ride volume since the start of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company narrowed its expected Q1 loss to $135 million and expects to show positive year-over-year growth in ride volume for the second half of March. Epic Games acquired Tonic Games Group, which includes the publisher of Regular Corporation, as well as Studio's Fortitude Games, and Media Tonic, makers of Fall Guys. Media Tonic says there are no plans to make Fall Guys free to play, but hopes to bring features of Fortnite and Rocket League to the game, including account systems, cross-play, and squad versus squad modes. Netflix launched something called Fast Laughs on Wednesday for its mobile apps featuring comedy clips from its stand-up specials, TV series, and movies. Netflix says the new auto-playing feed of vertical videos will provide up to 100 curated clips per day. And what? No, we've never heard of TikTok. Google officially removed its cardboard VR goggles from its online store, a product originally launched back in 2014. The move is another step in Google's shift away from phone-based VR, having already released a cardboard open-source project for developers and discontinuing its Daydream VR headsets in 2019. My cardboard right here. Oh, look at that. Oh, my gosh, look at it. Did you ever do it? It's still sealed. Yeah, never opened up. Well, now it's a collector's item, Tom. Now it's too late. Worth something. Speaking of Google, as we mentioned at the top of the show, Google's going to eliminate third-party cookies. This is part of the privacy sandbox coming to the Chrome browser. Third-party cookies had already been blocked in Safari and Firefox for a while, so becoming less useful. Google, however, is an advertising company, so it's got to do something to make that advertising money. Here's what it's going to do. In a blog post, the company clarified, quote, it will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web. They said, you know, some companies are going to offer email address trackings that we're not going to do any of that. They're going to replace identifiers with aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing, and other privacy-preserving technologies. One of these alternatives, and probably the biggest one, is called federated learning of cohorts or flocks. We're going to have another product called Flock later in the show. Don't get these confused. This is the cohort-based one. Some in-browser machine learning determines which flock you belong to and then only shares that identifier with advertisers. So the advertiser knows nothing else about you. They can't track you individually. They just know, oh, you're in the person who likes BTS, the St. Louis Cardinals, and fudge flock. We can now target you. Chrome's Privacy Sandbox calls this a web crowd and it lets you target large groups of people with similar tastes without having to know who they are. Google will begin testing this with advertisers in Q2 this year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized cohorts because you don't know which cohort you're in and what it's saying about you or how it's constructed and interpreted, and it can reveal sensitive information about you. And of course, a website that does know who you are because maybe you're logged in now knows what flock you're in, which tells them a lot more about you than it would otherwise. Now, granted, third-party cookies can also tell them a lot more than a flock can, but a flock can tell a lot about you too. Yeah, I don't know how to feel about this. The EFF, I always wait for them to chime in on stuff like this, changes like this. But on the face of it, it seems like a good direction for me as a user who's interested in his security and would like to use Google products and have greater confidence that I'm not being so specifically individualized and targeted all the time. So on the face of it, I like what this sounds like, but when they pipe in and say, hey, some of this isn't transparent enough, that just tells me maybe Google needs to be more transparent about how it's constructed, how it's interpreted, and how it can reveal sensitive information about you. Like if they go all the way on the transparency, then I'm probably going to be okay using Chrome again. I mean, the whole idea of the flock of, you know, Tom, you mentioned, you know, do you like BTS? Are you from Illinois? Do you like Fudge? That kind of thing is like, okay, on the surface, I'm like, well, sure. You know, maybe a little bit less personalization as far as tracking me, but sure, I'm, you know, looking at TMZ.com once a week type of thing. Like you probably get that I have a mild curiosity about pop culture and celebrities type of thing. But do I have that in common with people that I would not like to be associated with? And I think, you know, that has been an age old question with tracking in general and the idea that, okay, we're going to, we're going to just think about more of like the trends that you as a person are associated with rather than you as a person sounds good. But the same problems exist. Yeah. I mean, the example I gave is probably too specific because that could start to narrow down into one and the flocks are meant to be thousands of people, right? Just enough that an advertiser could say like, all right, these are people likely to buy my product, but it's still information about you. And the whole point that I keep hammering on over and over is we want a system where we decide I would like to have relevant ads from certain companies that I trust and say, yes, you can target me. I have a good relationship with you. And yes, B and H, I don't want you to show me a list of all the things I already bought. I want you to show me things you think I will want to buy in the ad. But to do that, you got to give me control over it so I can decide who gets that and who doesn't, which is me bringing up MIT solid and interrupt and all that again. That's not what this does. This is a halfway thing. If you really want privacy, get Firefox, Brave, Safari, something like that. If you're like Scott, where you're like, you know, I want some better privacy protection, but I still want to use Google. Well, then this is better than what Chrome was doing before. Yeah, good point. Plus, I now know things about you that I didn't before like the fudge thing. So thanks for letting us know about that. That's fantastic. Smart light bulb company, LIFX, or is it LIFX? LIFX. It's just LIFX. All right. LIFX is now shipping LIFX clean a bulb that can potentially disinfect things clean near you. So I think, you know, microscopic pathogens and that sort of thing. LIFX announced the $70 bulb last August, how it works is a blue high energy visible atv light with a wavelength of around 405 nanometers, which studies have shown to sort of inactivate a range of bacteria. This includes things like salmonella, E. Coli, MRSA and lab based studies. However, three studies conducted between 2010 and 2013 on frequently touched surfaces in a hospital burns you and researchers found that the bacteria reduction varied between 27 and 90%. That's a big gap, depending on the factors like how many days the light was used for and how much activity there was in the room when it was used. But I got to say, I like the idea of light being used to kill stuff around us in a post COVID-19 world seems like a cool idea, but we're not there yet. Well, and that I mean, you, you, you hit the nail on the head of the, you know, COVID's people saying, what I can kill germs or, you know, viruses that are life threatening while still having a smart home. Great. And this is not really doing that, but it is a step in the right direction. I have a couple of lifex bulbs. Tom, I know you do as well. They work very much like you light bulbs. They're, you know, got an app. You can do all sorts of things with them. You can connect them to a smart assistant, depending on what you have going on in your smart home. So lifex does cool stuff already. The idea that the, the bulb that I have that sits on top of my microwave in the kitchen could potentially help me be safer when I am, I don't know, handling raw meat, you know, kind of thing. That sounds great. It does sound like at this point, what we're talking about is it's less of a, yeah, on a day to day basis. This is actually going to make your kitchen safer, Sarah, and more of a, here's what we could possibly do in the future. And here's where we have seen some, you know, germs become less so in hospital trials. This is a better idea than, than it is a product. I love lifex. I think they're great. And I think lifex is doing a good job not trying to claim things that aren't true. They put out their own studies that are validated. But when you look at those studies, this kind of light doesn't kill viruses, right? And lifex isn't trying to say it is, but it doesn't kill viruses. It kills bacteria, certain kinds of bacteria. When you spend two hours or more within 40 centimeters on a glass surface, this isn't like even a desk lamp isn't within 40 centimeters of most of your stuff. And I'm not putting a desk lamp in my kitchen right over my cutting area. So once you start moving it away from 47 meter, 40 centimeters, it takes longer for it sometimes eight hours or more to be able to have any effect. And it still only kills like 80%. It's, it's just not going to do much in most situations. So I get it. There might be a use for it. It's just this, this particular light disinfectant properties aren't great. And really only work in very specific situations in those specific situations. It's great. Most people who use this light are probably going to see much of a disinfectant effect from it. Having known a few people that came, went to a hospital, came home with C. diff, a terrible, very antibiotic resistant infection and had to go back to a hospital and deal with it. And it was horrible. The idea of getting to a place where at least in hospital environments, maybe this could be improved, even if it is just bacteria. Yeah, maybe they can find out some other kind of light. Now they have a way of delivering it someday. Amazing. We don't have that yet. Yeah. Yeah, it's not there. Well, we were talking about browsers and how they're getting better every day earlier and the brave browser announced that it acquired the open source tailcat search engine developed by the clicks that see a like QZ team, which will join brave as part of the deal. Unlike other privacy focused search engines like duck dot go. For example, tailcat doesn't use any data from other tech companies. It build its own index from scratch. Tailcat doesn't collect IP addresses either or use personally identify viable information to improve search results either brave plans to launch its new tailcat based search engine by the summer. If not earlier, it would be offered as a choice alongside Google Bing, Quant, Ecosia and others. Yeah, so I love this idea brave, brave doing another thing where they take it a step further and say, yes, using the Bing search index is great. And you can do privacy protection around it. But what's better is if we just do it all from scratch ourselves and that way we're not giving any information to Bing or anybody else. And that also means we don't know if this is going to work very well or not. Tailcat wasn't even implemented into clicks. It was just in development by the clicks team. So I mean, on the one hand, and they're saying this, they could come up with something new because, you know, Google has a harder time innovating because they're they're so old at, you know, they've been around for so long and and it's harder to move a big ship like Google. So tailcat is more nimble, but also is unproven like we don't know what it could do. They could do some a lot of things around transparency with the algorithm and be able to adapt faster and stuff like that, whether there'll be a good search engine or not. I don't know. Well, this is what I like about DuckDuckGo, which I use a lot. We talk pre-show a little bit about how sometimes even that which I think is pretty robust, you'll run out of options and you got to move somewhere else or usually back to Google to get, you know, the kind of results you're looking for. But I think that if there's ever going to be a search engine that really does break through and you could argue DuckDuckGo is already there, maybe this tailcat engine could do the same. But where it'll break in is not from the top or trying to compete with the massiveness of Google and its algorithm. It will be from these directions, better security, less information collected and keep improving and iterating on those. That is attractive to people as a thing to jump to whether it becomes dominant or not in the way that Chrome did in the browser market or other examples out there of coming out of nowhere and taking over market share. Maybe not, probably not. But I really like that these alternatives exist and let's see what they do with this one. Hey, folks, if you're like, I've got a search engine for you or I want to know why they can't just use destructive UV light as a household light. Join in the conversation in our discord. Do it by Lincoln do a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. All right, we're going to talk about flock again. But this is flock, the brand of camera that is used for neighborhood surveillance and can detect people, animals and bicycles, but is best at detecting cars specifically recognizing their license plates and their license plate numbers. Flock cameras can log the color, make license plate number in state of a car based on the license plate state. It can also learn which vehicles are resident and then only record the non resident vehicles. The cameras work across distances of 8 to 120 feet. Trade publication IPVM did some testing and found that the identification worked well. Misidentification happened mostly with buses, not with cars, or sometimes it wasn't as good at determining the state. Cameras are set up with a solar panel and a cellular connection so you don't have to wire them into anything. They can store images in the cloud for 30 days, then they get rid of it. A flock camera costs about $1,500 to $2,250 a year depending on your setup. They're usually sold to homeowners associations, law enforcement or businesses. Administrators have a flock camera saying your homeowners association can share that data with whomever they want. But flock has set up a program specifically to make it easy to share that data with police. Motherboard obtained hundreds of emails from about 20 police departments in the United States detailing the use of a program from flock called TALIN. T-A-L-O-N to look up information collected from flock cameras. TALIN scans approximately 500 million vehicles a month. More than 500 police departments in more than 1,000 U.S. cities have access. And flock claims it can help police solve four to five crimes per hour. That sounds like a lot. Flock, like Ring Before It, works with police departments to encourage residents to buy the cameras and participate in TALIN. Police can search by all the attributes TALIN collects, things like car color, license plate number, etc. But also things like spoilers, roof racks, stuff like that. A reverse image search feature planned for later this year will let police see previous movements of the vehicle that may have been captured on all the different flock cameras participating in TALIN. And flock is partnering with Axon, which makes in-car cameras used for detecting license plates that will feed into TALIN as well. Flock makes two models of camera. The sparrow model collects data for later review. And the falcon can send automatic alerts to police if a vehicle on a hot list is detected. The sparrow is not sold alone. You have to buy a falcon to get a sparrow as part of a set. Only the falcon is sold individually. So every setup is going to have a falcon which can ping the police. Seems like the falcon should eat the sparrow. Okay, this story is dense. On one hand, I think, okay, given the world that we live in at the very basic level of saying, okay, Sarah is from California. She has California plates, but she's in Idaho. That might help us determine how many people from one region of the U.S. are in this other region of the U.S. and be able to help, I don't know, medical professionals kind of get a sense of where people are and where we're all migrating. But in that sense, I'm like, this is pretty cool. And it seems to work well, of course, when you're talking about police departments and why you might want to target certain people and why certain people might be flagged. A very different story. Well, that's the good use, right? The good use is the police know that somebody sneaked in and robbed this house in your neighborhood. Let's go to the tape and find out which non-resident cars came in and out of the neighborhood at that point, and that'll let us possibly solve the crime. Right. I mean, my worry or my take on this is that the same scrutiny that now, you know, they got piled on top of ring, we'll just get piled on top of these guys. And they even have a cool super sinister sounding project name like Talon. Yeah. I think Talon literally is Falcon is the camera. Talon is the claw. Yeah. Right. No, it makes sense to me, but it also sounds like Batman needs to take down Talon before all of Gotham suffers. Right. Like it's just has this has this kind of weird sound to it. But personally, I always look at these things in my initial feeling is, oh, it's great. We're going to help with crime. Crime is no good. Nobody wants crime. We're going to have less crime. Good job thing that gets rid of crime. And then I remember not every police department slash cop slash system slash whatever is the same. And it's it. And so now it's problematic. And I don't know how you get around that because on the one hand, this feels like an important service. And on the other hand, it feels dangerous. If you had a person sitting in a lawn chair at the end of a cul-de-sac, writing down the make a model and license plate number of every car that came in and knew like, oh, I have to write Scott. He lives here. How would you feel about that? If that was only usable when the police said, hey, we noticed there was a robbery. Do you have who who drove in at that point that wasn't a regular? Here you go. I don't think most of us would be too uncomfortable with that. I think what makes us uncomfortable is the idea that this is happening automatically that that we could just be driving through a neighborhood and get logged. And is that OK? And and that there isn't a legal recourse for the collection. You don't have to have a warrant to be able to get the images out of here. So I don't really have a problem with, you know, some of these neighborhoods in LA. There's a neighborhood in Sherman Oaks that that that is using this are so busy that actually tracking all the cars that go through there is useless because there's too many cars unless you know which car you're looking for. So like, aha, we know that this person conducted a crime. And we want to know if they went through this neighborhood at the time because that'll help us to determine where they were and that'll help with the case. Well, then that's useful. But a lot of neighborhoods don't have that much traffic. And so going through becomes, you know, something that invades your privacy more. It's just about again, it's like all this stuff. It's about the controls around the data. Yeah, you made all kinds of good points there. The only thing I would say that is almost 100% true all the time is if you got that neighbor in the chair that's marking down every car that comes in, everyone thinks that neighbor is weird. Even if that stuff helps with crimes, do you know what I'm saying? Like there's a feeling of why does he do that? And that I don't know how you avoid it even on a big tech level like this. I just, I think we didn't get into the idea that, you know, neighborhoods that can't afford to even group together and buy a $2,000 camera. Don't have the advantage in using it properly to catch criminals. And then there's more crime in those neighborhoods than there are in these richer neighborhoods that are able to buy this. Yup. Well, AMD made some announcements today. Let's start with Resizable Bar, a feature of PCI Express graphics that lets a CPU directly access a GPU's memory for better frame rates. AMD calls it Smart Memory Access. AMD also launched its 5,000 and 6,000 series processors and announced Wednesday it will bring Resizable Bar to the 3,000 series as well. You'll need a motherboard with a B550 or X570 chipset to its most mostly for people building new systems until adopted Resizable Bar back in January when paired with NVIDIA RTX 3000 series GPUs. And NVIDIA also supports Resizable Bar and AMD chips. AMD also announced the RX 6700 TX that's launching on March 18th for $479, which is $100 less than the RX 6800. The 6700 XT has 230 watts of power, 12 gigabytes of video memory and 40 compute units compared to 60 for the RX 6800 and 80 for the RX 6800 XT. It requires an 8-pin and 6-pin connector. Amazing price on this thing. Like that's really competitive, as you might expect in this very dog-eat-dog world of video card manufacturing right now. But I feel like we're in the same boat with like, when can you get one? Oh, it's impossible to get. Oh, while the boss got them, they got all sniped. Like I'm real concerned about that again, especially because that price is so low. That's really good for that power. And I don't know when this nightmare ends with like cards just not being available. Yeah, I mean, that's just something where the chip shortage has to work itself out. Capacity has to increase. You know, the market has to settle out. We've talked about that before on the show. I don't think the 6700 XT is going to be any more available than any other. It is more entry-level though, so maybe it'll be less appealing to some of the resellers because of that. But the resizable bar is a big deal because that's bringing something to existing chips, which you might have an easier time getting because they're lower level. But now they'll have better performance because you can do a resizable bar on them. So bringing resizable bar to the 3000 series AMDs could be helpful, especially if you're building a new machine because they may be a little easier to get a hold of as well. Yeah. Well, everybody who has pets, listen up because pet training company companion is ready in a smart device to help with training, particularly for dogs, but not just dogs. The companion trainer uses sensors to observe your pets, see what they're doing, then shares those signals to its own AI so that the machine can then respond with light or sound or a tree to reinforce good habits. Human trainers can also be added as companion coaches through video consultation. So it's not just AI. There's some other stuff going on here. Companion is taking pre-orders now. We have no word on pricing, but initial deliveries are set for mid-2021. Yeah, the CDET story noted that this was designed by FrogDesign, a kind of legendary Silicon Valley design company that designed Macs and stuff, and it really does look like an iMac. In fact, the iMacs of the late, I was going to say 1900s. That's not right. I mean, the latest 1900s because we became the 40s. I mean, listen, I live, I have a large dog. I want to say that my dog is, you know, always follows the rules, but that's not 100% true. And I also have limited space because I live in a small apartment. This is not a small device. There is no real corner that you could put this in without saying, okay, I have to move something. I mean, it's somewhat large. That said, the idea that, especially with people who perhaps not just adopted a pet because of the pandemic, but have been around a little bit more often than what might be real life in the before times type thing, and being forced to deal with behavioral issues that might result from a pet saying, wait a second, you're not around as much to give me all of the positive reinforcement that I need to be the best version of myself. To have something like this that's going, that's going to help the household in general is great. I know that it's not going to work for everybody exactly the same way because no pet is the same, but I love the idea. Yeah, I like it a lot. I always see, especially on TikTok, people put up videos of these dogs that have an array of buttons out in front of them. I'm sure you've seen these and one of them will say, I'm hungry. The other one says, whatever, and if they push it, they get a tone out of it and they've been trained to know, well, if I push this button over here in the upper right, that's the one that gets me a treat or that's the one that goes on a walk or I have to go to the bathroom or whatever. So it's clear that dogs can do more than we give them credit for sometimes in terms of these learning patterns. So why not a box that helps you do it? I think it's fine. I just think it's ugly. It doesn't replace your time with the pet. It replaces time that you would have a trainer working with them. It's because you can do the video training through here or time when you're not there, like Sarah was saying. I think it's good. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got one from Jesse. This is back to our conversation from last week about face recognition glasses and what that might be used for. And is it a great idea? Jesse says, are we going under the assumption that the glasses would recognize anybody or just anyone else with the glasses? Jesse's assumption was that it was meant for two parties, both were in the glasses. Jesse says, I assume when air glasses eventually come to market that they would have the capability to ping one another to ask for and then grant information. Glasses would be registered to an account and then you could set your privacy settings about who could see your information and who couldn't. Friends only, friends and friends or anybody. I personally would like a friends of friends option. I could identify people in future social gatherings as well as having an icebreaker to expand my own social circle without having my friend actively present. I mean, I like the idea of glasses that talk to each other like in the science fiction movie version of our AR life. I want to be able to walk by a friend and have it exchange some cool data and go bdbdb. Oh, cool. You've seen that. I was that's great. I'll have, you know, and not have to really talk to them just sort of go by and get the updates. But this idea of like, I need to both facially recognize you and exchange data seems redundant to me because if I know them, I know them. If I don't know them. I guess they'll tell me. Yeah, we were talking in our pre show about, well, I mean, if it's facial recognition, then it's facial recognition that this is not, you know, this kind of like handshake agreement that Jesse's talking about isn't totally what facial recognition is all about. But I get where you're coming from, Jesse, is like, if I am opted into this experience and someone else's as well, then that is great information to share between the two of us. But, you know, what happens when people differ on, you know, their comfort level? Yeah, I overall though, I guess I guess my my big take on this is I want these things to be extremely capable. But we talk about cameras and problems with people sharing information and have too much personal data going out. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the mess that that stuff represents. So we're nowhere near this, that utopian idea of all this information being shared in this way, but we'll get there. It'll be okay. We'll find a happy medium. Just let me control it. Let me have control over my data and everything to be fine. Oh, I love your positive attitude. If you have ideas about what we should talk about on the show, what we have talked about on the show, questions, comments, or anything in between, feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send that email. Also, we'd like to shout out patrons at our master and our grandmaster level today. They include Michelle Sergio, Johnny Hernandez, and David Mosher. Also, thanks to brand new bosses, Carl Dawson, and killing me softly just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you so much to the new bosses. Y'all the best. Also the best is Scott Johnson. Scott, it was good to have you every Wednesday. Hump days were never so sweet. What else has been going on with you? It's very nice for you to say lots of things. If you want to keep track of my goings on the easiest way to do it is over at frogpants.com. You'll find podcasts. You'll find artwork. You'll find comics. You'll find all sorts of stuff that I like to put out in the world and hopefully you like some of it. So check it out. That's frogpants.com. And if you want to interact with me directly, you can always find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Hey, folks, we're going to get together with This Week in Science on April 17. Now, I know that that's a ways off, but it's getting closer all the time. And we want to know what would you love to hear the host of the preeminent science podcast This Week in Science, Kiki and Justin and Blair talk to us about. We're going to talk about technology and science and how it crosses over. So we want your ideas. Email them to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com or you can also email them to twist. Just be sure to put twist in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. Send us those ideas. What do you want to hear? Kiki and Blair and Justin and Sarah and Tom and Roger talk about on April 17 and the big twist crossover. That's feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Meet you here. See you then.