 Coming up on DTNS, Apple and Google cave to Russia, free streaming TV is on the rise and Utrecht plans to power its city with solar cars. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and I'm Chris Ashley, co-hosting today on DTNS. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about our favorite burgers on good day internet. You want that wider conversation? You got to become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS where you can join our top patrons like Justin Zellers, Eric Holm and Carmine Bailey. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Financial Times and Cyber Intelligence Group Cyberint released data from a recent investigation into Telegram that the messaging service has seen a 100% plus rise in Telegram usage by cyber criminals, following users switching to Telegram after a change in WhatsApp's privacy policy that asked users to accept a revised policy, allowing it to share data with its parent company, Facebook. So basically, like everybody else switched off WhatsApp, the criminals did too. An English inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair passed away at the age of 81. Sinclair was the inventor of the ZX series of computers, which were famous for being the UK's first mass-market home computer for less than 100 euro. He also invented electric vehicles, releasing the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle in 1985 and the Sinclair Zike electric bike in 1992. So rest in peace, my man. Microsoft announced it will release the perpetual version of Microsoft Office 2021 on October 5th for general consumers. It's available for enterprise right now. That's the version that doesn't get feature updates or cloud services, but doesn't require a subscription. You pay for it once, you can keep using it as long as you want. Microsoft is also testing a new Windows 11 photos app in its dev channel, offering a film strip of small thumbnails at the bottom of the window. When viewing an image, there's also a new multi-view feature to compare a selection of photos in a single window, and the editing toolbar now offers quick access to third party photo editors. WeChat updated its messaging service to let users link to previously blocked services from Taobao and ByteDance's video app, Dou Yun. This comes after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for large tech platforms in China warned tech companies to stop blocking links to rival services. OnePlus is bringing Hasselbad's cinematic X-Pan camera to the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro through a software update. The nine series cameras didn't initially offer much around OnePlus's multi-year collaboration with Hasselbad, but the new update adds an X-Pan mode for the OnePlus 9 series camera, as well as some patches. The X-Pan mode replicates the focal lengths, the colors and the processing of the original Hasselbad X-Pan camera for the phone, which lets users capture wide aspect ratio images right there from their OnePlus phone. All right, let's talk about Russia. The Russian government has ordered Apple and Google to remove an app called Umnoye Golosavnye, or smart voting. Umnoye Golosavnye. It was meant to guide supporters of Alexei Navalny and how to deprive President Putin's party, United Russia, of votes in regional and federal elections. Russia's communications regulatory agency Roskomnozoar ruled earlier this month that the app constituted election interference and warned that Google and Apple would be fined if they did not remove it. TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and Twitter have all been fined by Russia this year for failure to remove illegal content. So at first, Google and Apple held the line. After that warning, Baylifts visited Google's offices to enforce a court ordered measure against the app, but Google didn't budge. However, neither Apple nor Google removed the app until the government said it would prosecute Russian employees of the companies for violations of election law. It appears that rather than subject employees to imprisonment, the companies complied with that order. Chris, Apple and Google are taking a lot of heat for this today. A lot of people accusing them of caving to an authoritarian regime, etc., etc. Apple and Google, not really commenting a lot other than I think Google saying it's the law, we have to comply with the local laws. But some folks are saying you've you've stood up to other regimes. You've stood up to other countries. Apple famously wouldn't give in to the FBI of the United States. What made this different? Do you think? Yeah, well, you know, those companies have plenty to be held accountable for in the world of tech. But my God, guys, come on, let's step back for a second. There are employees who are about to be imprisoned for this. That this, you know, you can tell the line as much as you want. But once you start affecting your own employees' lives, that first off, you got to imagine the PR for that. It's going to be absolutely horrific. But just the humanity of that, you don't want employees being locked up because of a fight, you know, that that's not really your fight. You know, you can do the best you can to kind of effectuate change in other countries, but it's not your country and they have their rules. And honestly, the people have to rise up if they want to make that change. So don't put that on the companies. Yeah, the counter to that is this app was a way for the people to rise up. And now the companies are complicit in in making it harder for people to rise up if that's the case. I think you're right, though. If if I'm Tim Cook or Satya Nadella sitting in the United States, it'd be one thing if I were going to prison for this, you know, then yes, sure, maybe maybe I take a stand. It's another thing to say my employees didn't necessarily sign up for that. You know, when they signed up to be executives or app store reviewers in Russia, it's another thing to send them to prison in Russia, where I'm guessing their prison experience might be a little different than it is here in the hundred percent. And honestly, you know, now if they want to evacuate their employees and their families and then put the app back up, more power to them. But as long as you have people that, you know, the goal is not to make your own employees suffer. You know, so unfortunately, you know, when you have folks that try to rise up and try to make changes, they're going to be some obstacle in roadblocks along the way. That's to be expected. Hopefully they continue to fight and they continue to move and do what they can to get the country that they want. Well, that's the difficult position they're in now is Russia now knows, oh, if I threaten to imprison employees, I can get what I want. So I think rather than condemn Apple and Google for what they just did, I would look at what are you going to do now? You know, pull out of the country because, man, if you did that, I mean, obviously now you're sending your your employees out of work, perhaps, but that would make a statement. Are you going to do something else to counter this? Are you are you going to protest? You know, I don't know what you do, but it's now now it's Google and Apple's move to counter this so that they don't end up being like, oh, OK, so if you put in CSAM protections in Russia, Russia can just tell you to also use it for something else. That's, you know, the worries are things along those lines. Yeah, so hopefully they do do exactly that. They find another way to help and to allow these type of things. But yeah, I don't know if it's necessarily fair at this point to give them grief about the decision. It's the right decision to make. I it's I don't want to come off as excusing them, but I'm with you where I'm not sure they had another move at in this particular instance. Yeah, the here's some happier news. The Netherlands fourth largest city, Utrecht, famous for the piece of Utrecht wants to become the first region in the world with bidirectional electric vehicle power. That would mean in addition to the power grid charging vehicles, there would also be a system for what's called vehicle to grid or V to G charging, where cars send power back into the grid. Utrecht has ordered one hundred fifty bidirectional Hyundai Ionic fives by early twenty twenty two. Utrecht has also ordered a fleet of one hundred Scion S I O N solar electric vehicles from Sonomotors. Scion vehicles have fifty four kilowatt hour batteries and will work with Utrecht's five hundred bidirectional chargers since the solar car can recharge in the sun. It'll be able, when it's not driving itself, to feed up to eleven kilowatts into the grid. It can also directly charge other EVs or even power homes. All one hundred Scions combined could provide one point one megawatt peak power to the city. That's about the same as a photovoltaic plant the size of two football fields. And this is in Europe, but you know, soccer and a grid iron field about the same. So, you know, it works either way. The Scions and the Ionic fives will work with we drive solar solar powered car sharing system. So the way this works is they'll have these bidirectional vehicles charging themselves up and then feeding into the grid from their solar arrays until they're ready to be used by somebody who wants to drive them somewhere as part of this car sharing issue. So there's two parts of this that I absolutely love. One, this is technology that can remove the additional hesitation or excuses of why we shouldn't be going down this path at a faster rate, right? Because one of the things you constantly hear is how can the system handle charging all these cars? In fact, I was at the car wash the other day and I told her she lady was admiring my truck and I said, well, I put a deposit on the F-150 electric and she was like, I just wonder how the grid can handle all these, you know, power. So it's even just regular people, little lady, they all consider this. And you're like, well, actually, they'll be contributing to the grid. Love that. The second part that I love about this is not coming in five years or 10 years. They're talking about next year that they're starting to put these devices out. And that's the problem when you find you hear like a lot of these announcements. They're so far out, but this is not the case with this one. Love those two pieces. Yeah, I think this is really interesting to watch. Great that Utrecht is willing to try it. And I think it was in the Netherlands. It was somewhere in Northern Europe where they were testing roadways that could charge cars as you drove over them. So imagine if you throw that in the mix where the cars can charge not just from the sun, but from the road while they're driving. I there there is you could you could imagine a world in the future where, you know, cars are just always powered and range anxiety just becomes something we're like, oh, remember back in the old days when grandpa had to worry about range on his electric vehicle? Yeah, love it. Yeah, it's crazy. All right, tell us about this new Ikea line of furniture. So. Then. Ikea partnered with Asus to bring out a collection of gaming oriented furniture. And in October, it will launch for the rest of the world. Some of the items in the so called gaming range are existing Ikea items like pegboards, but there are few gaming specific items, including gaming chairs ranging from $69 to $349 gaming desk for around $599, as well as a CPU stand with wheels. There are also smaller accessories like a headset stand, mouse, bungee cord, mug holder, ring lights and mouse pad. So they definitely kind of went all out with this. There are the piece, the pieces come in black with red accents, which I love echoing Asus is raw gaming lineup. But you can also get some of them in white. There are about 30 gaming products across six product families. So I actually took a look at some of this stuff and the furniture. Not so exciting, but the accessories actually looked pretty cool. What do you think? Yeah, the furniture is pretty basic, right? It's Ikea stuff. So, you know, these chairs kind of look like office chairs with red piping on them. Yes. I imagine there's something more to it. But at first glance, it's probably not going to knock you out as a gaming chair. Although there's there's one of them that has like the diamond pads and the, and the, you know, the higher neck, which my wife has a gaming chair that she got for work from home kind of looks like that. So I don't know. Those are the kinds of things you definitely want to go try them out. You want to go to an Ikea and sit in one, right? So the file cabinet with a little hook on the side. I actually thought that one looked pretty cool from the furniture standpoint. But the most even though is like kind of resurfaced old stuff, which is what gaming items tend to be. The pegboard look pretty cool. The straps that they had to kind of strap up your keyboard or your controller. Although I don't know how you naturally charge your controller while it's strapped up there. But if you're going away for some time and you just want to pack everything up and keep it nice and neat. You know, I think some folks will enjoy this. It's not my style of stuff, but you know, just the headset hook. I'm actually been looking for one of those. So if anything, I might, I might actually scoop that. You're going to, you're going to get the headset hook. Or do you want to get the wooden block headset hand that holds your headset? They can't. I'm just going to do the hook is creepy hands sitting on my desk. I'm sure somebody's going to love it out there. And I apologize for that person. But yes, I apologize as well. But yeah, interesting nonetheless. I think the one that caught my eye the most was that that CPU stands with wheels and that's nothing new, but, but it looks solid, you know, and it's like, oh yeah, that's a great thing to have. You can just wheel that thing out. So I'm not sure what they're charging for the CPU stand though. I didn't find a price on that yet. But to be fair, you know, the lights do look pretty cool. Right. With that, you know, that typical CPU. Yeah. Asus, you know, look and feel. So for a younger fella who, who doesn't mind having their whole room lit up in neon, you know, I could definitely see that as something that was pretty interesting. Now listen, we know we've got a few people who punched through the firewall in China and get the show. So if any of you tried this out because China got this earlier in the air and want to let us know what you think and to figure out how to get us an email, let us know. Feedback at daily tech news show.com or if anybody's jumping on it right away. And they're like, yeah, I went down to the IKEA immediately and bought some stuff. Let us know. Hey, if you like tech news, you're in the right place. First of all, we kind of assume you like tech news. If you're listening to us, you're going to want to check out The Tech John, J-A-W-N podcast featuring Rob Dunwood, Terence Gaines and Stephanie Humphrey. The Tech John takes a second look at the week's tech headlines delivered from an African-American perspective. Pilot episode received so much positive feedback during our Experiment Week that Rob has turned it into a full show. The first episode is out. You can go get it at thetechjohn.com. Again, that's T-E-C-H-J-A-W-N dot com. They talk about people stealing stuff on TikTok. They talk about the need for a dumb TV. They talk about ransomware at historically black universities like Howard. So go check that out, thetechjohn.com. Brand new podcast. You're going to want to have it in your feeds. Protocols sources say Google's planned to add free TV channels to Google TV and is currently in talks with several free ad-supported streaming television channels. This is similar to what Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Amazon do on their devices. The industry calls these kinds of services free ad-supported streaming television or fast channels. They usually show you a cable TV-like grid of free streaming channels. You can see this kind of presentation on Zumo, Pluto, or Roku's app. For Google TV, the free channels would reportedly appear in a dedicated live TV menu and show up alongside over-the-air programming on smart TVs. Google may have deals in place by this autumn, but may wait to launch the feature in 2022. Content makers have been experimenting with multiple fast channels that show up on multiple services. AMC Networks has a Walking Dead channel and a Portlandia channel. Smaller outfits like Rotten Tomatoes also offer free channels. So this is good, and the reason why I like it is because I looked at my last Hulu bill and almost fell out of my chair. It was over $70, and that was not what I started out with. So if content creators gravitate to this because it's just another way to kind of get their content out and they're making good stuff. I'm so ready to drop Hulu as well. It's so expensive, and I'm like right back where I was. You're getting the live TV service to be clear. Because some people are like, how do you spend $70 on Hulu? The live TV service is the bulk of that, I'm guessing, right? To be fair, yes, it is the live TV, but it didn't start out as that expensive. It was a great replacement for a direct TV, and now I'm just, you know, I'm looking for other content, and I don't really watch it that much. Direct TV, though. Oh, $100, right? Oh, easy, easy, easy. Yeah, so any avenue for folks, to creators, because there's a lot of talented people that may never make it through a network gatekeeper, but can use a service like this, and all of a sudden you're watching some hilarious stuff, you know, somewhere else, and I'm all for it. So, you know, alternative avenues as well is the ability to allow me to drop this price. I have a feeling that this might be where we're headed. The popularity of these free streaming channels is essentially the internet version of broadcast television versus Peacock, Netflix, Hulu, they're all the internet version of HBO Showtime, and in fact HBO Showtime are part of that too, right? I wonder if we're headed to whatever device you have, whether it's your smart TV, your Chromecast, your Roku, they will all have a built-in free streaming grid with it, and that'll be the way people think about TV. Like I get it on my device, and then I can choose, if I want, to add channels for premium shows. I can choose HBO Max, I can choose Peacock, I can, you know, I can choose one or one of the other of those. Instead of right now where everybody thinks, well, I have to pay to get everything. I think we'll get over that. I think people won't have to see everything because they'll have some free TV here. It's like, yeah, okay, maybe I don't get the walking dead early, but there's a whole channel of it so I can catch up. I think patterns, pattern behaviors might change because of that. And the other, you know, potential side effect of this is you're starting to see a lot of content creators on YouTube who are having their content taken down because, you know, a network has hit them with some kind of cease and desist, even though, you know, a lot of times they're, you know, false claim, they just want to drop their content. So, you know, the network content can take a rise. So, you know, and, you know, obviously Google, I mean, you make money from these guys. So they don't even ask questions. So having alternative locations for a lot of these news folks to be able to put their content so they don't have to experience those type of takedowns would be an awesome thing to happen. Yeah. And Lyon Jim Video in chat asked a question I didn't even think of. He's like, does Google require subscription to its core channels to watch the free channels? And the answer is no. That's not though. None of these services do. If you get the Roku app or if you fire up Pluto or Zumo, you're just watching TV. Now, it's not the most recent thing. It's not like the premium HBO Netflix shows, but it's streaming right there for free. In fact, Fubo even has originals and stuff, and it's entirely free. It's ad supported. That's the rub, right? You have to sit through ads. Yep. Yep. Oh, and thank you. Thank you for mentioning rotten tomatoes where my wife works. Oh, she's actually in charge of that channel, which is why I wrote that in and made Chris say it. Oh my goodness. I need to disclose that. Slide that in there for you. No problem. A paper published Monday in the journal Nature Communications describes using an algorithm to discover why creative artists, painters, writers, filmmakers often have what are called creative hot streaks. CNET used Van Gogh as an example with his famous sunflower paintings or Star He Nights or the bedroom paintings. Those all came within a few years while most of his life's work is uncelebrated. He painted for decades. To examine these hot streaks, the scientists used algorithms originally designed for autonomous cars to scan creative works. For artists, it would look at things like brush stroke trends or linear orientation or the use of objects in the paintings. For film, it would look at things like cast selection. What genres did they work in? The plot structure. For scientists, they would look at which publications they were in. What kind of citations did they use? They analyzed thousands of examples of these hot streaks and came up with a pattern. The algorithms discovered that the hot streak manifest an artist that moved from what they call an exploratory period to an exploitative period. So some artists make this transition, some don't. But when an artist made this transition, they were likely to have a hot streak. The exploratory period is characterized by experimenting with diverse styles and topics. You try a bunch of different things. You're not always doing it the same way. The exploitative period is more focused on a particular way of doing things. Artists that continuously evolve and experiment all the time or artists that are always focused on a single angle don't experience a hot streak. They may have celebrated works, just not all in a short period like Van Gogh. Other examples of the hot streak include Jackson Pollock's drip period between 1947 and 1950, or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Van Gogh and Pollock both had a lot of variance and brush movements before their hot streaks. They were trying all different kinds of things. And Peter Jackson worked in a lot of different genres with a lot of different cash choices before Lord of the Rings when he focused. While this work identifies how a hot streak begins, the scientists are going to continue to do research and they hope to discover how to tell what sparks a hot streak before it begins, what causes artists to make that change, and possibly whether they can do things to maintain it for longer. Coming with the hits. Keep bringing the hits. This was really cool. When I first read it, I was like, okay, some more sciency stuff. But when I started thinking about, these movies, they just mentioned movies and stuff like that as far as where they've already taken the science. I just started thinking about, okay, look at your favorite hip hop artist and when you have these records that are trash and then all of a sudden, boom, the next three records are out of this world and then they go back to making trash sports. When a player comes up and then all of a sudden he's unstoppable, just name your sport and your athlete. It happens quite a bit. Being able to extrapolate this and then if it becomes something that small companies can take on, it's like, okay, you got your small company and then all of a sudden you kind of, because you think about it, what they said makes sense. You're exploring around, you're trying to find out what works and then you hit something and then you focus down your interest and your actions to what hit and all of a sudden, boom, you're off and running. This is just science and hopefully something more comes out of it. And the technology of this, obviously, is this is something that maybe now you could say like, I could have figured that out but you didn't. Until they could look at the algorithm and until they could have the algorithm look and go like, oh no, no, we're finding that transition. We're finding that point where things change and we're finding it across different disciplines. We're finding it in painters, we're finding it in filmmakers, we're finding it in scientists. I'm talking right now, I'm like, maybe Jay-Z just kind of knows this and that's why he's like, yeah, my hot streak's over. That's why I'm not making any more albums, right? Just in business now, I'm good. Yeah, exactly. Maybe he's going for a new hot streak in business, right? And maybe that's the answer, you can have multiple hot streaks, maybe not all in the same discipline but you can manage that transition. I don't know, that's fascinating. All right, earlier this week, I'm going to give you an overview of LED, the DV LED Home Cinema Display lineup which ranges from a 108 inch HD screen up to a 325 inch 8K panel that'll only cost you $1.7 million and weighs more than 2,000 pounds so the shipping will also be very expensive. LG reserved these displays in the past for commercial buyers but they've decided to start selling them to I say anybody, anybody that can afford $1.7 million. So if you have the cash, now you can buy one. The displays use LEDs with some using smaller micro LEDs according to CNET. That's not unlike what we've seen from Samsung's The Wall or Sony's Crystal LED lineup. I feel like these really are the way of taking these big commercial displays and starting to make the transition into the home, right? You sell it to the millionaires first to kind of prove the concept and work out the kinks and then eventually you scale it down to something that maybe you or I could afford. Yeah, so I definitely put a deposit on one to get it in my third lifetime. Can you do a live with it on that? Yeah, that'd be great. Right on. And first I thought, you know, this is a flex so that folks can say I got the biggest TV but now I'm like, well, you know, COVID's still there so all they're doing is doing this so people can watch TV from their own home sent to somebody else's home. Yeah. You know, in a way this kind of reminds me what American General did the makers of the Hummer vehicle when they originally just sold to the US Government and a very famous action movie star was starting to drive one around Hollywood and suddenly there was a lot of consumer interest in the Hummer and that kind of segued that particular product into a broader audience. You know, they're looking at, hey, you're building a new house. You might want a wall that has this. Right. If you're the kind of person that won't miss $1.7 million, your house is probably big enough for this 325 inch 8K panel. Oh, man. Well, if anybody out there gets one of these, please let us know. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and support us on Patreon if you're that person too. If you're people who support us on Patreon, you don't have to be able to afford a $1.7 million TV to do that and even though we broke our streak yesterday, we've started a new one thanks to James White and Turning Bones, brand new bosses backing us on Patreon, keeping us above the zero level, making sure that they're picking up for the people who are, you know, maybe struggling a little and can't keep supporting the Patreon. So thank you, James White. We'll be back in us on Patreon and starting the new streak. Who will keep the streak going tomorrow? Let us know by becoming a Patreon. Patreon.com Thank you, Len Peralta for being with us to illustrate today's show. What have you drawn today, Len? You know, I hope I haven't hit my hot streak yet, but maybe this image is the start of it. You know, you forget I'm also a graphic designer, right? I'm also along being an illustrator and I'm a big fan of Ikea and their advertising and I just thought this would be a fun way of, you know, it basically is an ad for their for their gaming collection. But here you have all these, you know, they have all these names of their furniture. Oops, I'm not going to try them. Well, match spell match spell and then underneath it says your party has logged on. So are these names of the furniture or are these screen names? Or are they? I don't know. I guess it's for us to figure out. But if you're into Ikea and you like ads, graphic design ads, you can get this right now on Instagram, or actually at my online store, which is where there's all kinds of other great stuff you can pick up for yourself. So check it out and go Ikea. Yeah. And in case it's not obvious Ikea didn't pay or any of us. Let's just doing this for kicks. But they should hire you honestly. Definitely, I agree. Chris Ashley, thank you, my friend for being with us today. What do you got going on to tell the folks about? So the newest episode of the SMR podcast just went up. Go on and check that out. Me and Rob doing a chicken wings and beer version, which is a lot looser. If it can't get any looser. And because you ask for it, it's coming very soon. We will have episode one of barbecue on tech. Yeah, keep your eyes peeled. We will tell you about it when it is ready to go. But like any any good barbecue, you know, you got to you got to let it cook for a while and let it got to let it cook. Got to let it let it let it simmer kind of based. Ah, man, I'm looking forward to that. Hey, folks, don't forget. We are live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live now. I'm off Monday working on know a little more but Sarah Lane will be here with Rich Trafalino and Rob Dunwood. So we'll see you next week. This week's episodes of daily tech news show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Trafalino, video producer, Twitch producer Joe Coons, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language, host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermann's social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterty, our next. These include Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young, and Chris Ashley. Guests on this week's show included Sherlyn Lowe, Nika Monford, and Terence Gaines. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this brover.