 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook is down. Siri is celebrating the birthday and get which space captain is actually going to space. This is Daily Tech News for Monday, October 1st, 4th, rather at 2021. I'm from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane in lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Strafilino and from a balmy Southern California and the show's producer Roger Chang. Oh boy. Before the show we were talking about all sorts of stuff and if you would like to get that wider conversation, please do so by becoming a patron of our expanded show, Good to Internet, patreon.com slash DTNS. This is where you can join our top patrons like Alexander Nesef, Hector Bones and Tim Ashman. Let us start with a few tech things you should know. Netflix launched its play something shuffle feature globally on Android with plans to begin testing the feature on iOS in the coming months. The feature was limited to TV connected devices before. The company also rolled out its last last feature on Android in select markets. It's already available on iOS, which provides funny clips from Netflix content. And Netflix is bringing its downloads for you feature to iOS this month, which automatically downloads content to watch based on viewing habits. And that is already available on Android. Apple will open pre-orders for the Apple Watch Series 7 on October 8th, shipping October 15th. The device was originally announced with the iPhone 13, but at the time only promise it would be available later this fall. Now we know. Microsoft is launching Windows 11 powered hardware worldwide on October 5th. So one would assume that's when it's coming out. And it is because it's October 5th in New Zealand, even when it's October 4th in North America. But we're seeing some widespread reports that Windows 11 came out early when it arrived in New Zealand midday, October 4th, from our perspective. Qualcomm and investment group SSW partners announced that they intend to acquire the Swedish automotive tech company Vianir for eight hundred million dollars. The automotive supplier Magna International had previously announced it intended to acquire Vianir last month, but was outbid. Don't feel too bad, though. Vianir will pay Magna a one hundred ten million dollar breakup fee. That would make me feel better. A new note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims Apple dropped plants to launch an OLED iPad Air in 2022, citing performance and cost, not meeting requirements. Kuo expects mini LED displays to come to the upcoming 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros as well as an 11 inch iPad Pro slated for 2022. In other Apple rumors, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say a new Apple Silicon 10 core M1X chip is still on tap for 2021, set to launch with those aforementioned MacBook Pro models in the next month. The free tier of YouTube music currently doesn't support background listening, meaning if the screen is off, you're using another app and you don't have music. However, on November 3rd, free tier Canadian users will be able to use background listening on standard, ad supported, personalized radio mixes, as well as user uploaded content. No specifics on when this will roll out to other markets, however. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about what Amazon is up to. Yes, some interesting new feature they roll out. They're letting prime subscribers in the US send gifts using just an email address or a phone number. Don't actually need the address, it seems. Gift givers do not get access to a recipient's address when sending a gift. So even if they know that information, they don't kind of get the rest of that. Recipients receive an email notification about the gift and can choose to accept, decline, or convert it to an Amazon gift card without the sender. Without the sender knowing it, if they choose to get the gift card, they would know if they declined it. And if you don't reply to the email, it'll refund the purchase in a couple of days. Amazon confirmed there is no way for recipients, though, to opt out of receiving gifts entirely. And yeah, and I feel like that's where this is running into some murky waters. Right, Sarah? Yeah, I mean, listen. If somebody is going to send me a gift, they don't know where I live. They don't know the address. They only know that they can do this through Amazon. There's probably not too much of a physical privacy issue going on. But the fact that I might get something that I didn't ask for, don't necessarily want and could potentially, you know, in a worst case scenario be stalker-ish, I don't like that. Well, and the other thing is we've been trying. I mean, one of the big draws for this from Amazon's perspective is prime subscribers can send this to anyone. You don't need to have an Amazon account to kind of receive this. It'll prompt you to sign up for an Amazon account if you click on the link. But this seems to me to be like the opposite of all anti-fishing behavior that we've kind of trained people on is like, if you get an unprompted email from someone, don't click on the link, whatever you do. Now, I know, hopefully, like if you get an email from someone, I would if like from like my brother sent me a gift, I would just text them and be like, Hey, did you send me an Amazon thing? Yes, OK, I feel better about clicking on that. But, you know, hey, click on this to get free stuff from Amazon. Now has a veneer of this might not be a scam. So you might want to click on that link just in case somebody sent you, you know, a free pair of slippers or something like that. That to me is is the bigger, obviously, stalker where, you know, however this could be used to make people feel uncomfortable or unsafe. It could be unsettling for sure. But to me, the not having the opt out for me is a big fishing concern at this point. Yeah. And I mean, as somebody who gets emails, I'm doing air quotes from Amazon all the time, being like, please, you know, something's wrong with your password, you know, please, you know, like really bad fishing attempts. This is part of life. And I know that the Daily Tech News show audience is, you know, you're pretty up on this stuff. But there is something a little unsettling about all of this. And part of it is, yeah, like the gamification of this is, you know, that's one thing. But just the fact that you might get something delivered to you from somebody who doesn't necessarily know where you live, but, you know, wanted to give you a gift that could be great. Sure, maybe it's from your aunt and it's Christmas or something. But if it isn't, that is something that I think a lot of people aren't totally prepared to deal with. I do like it, though, for the holidays. They do give you that out being like, listen, Aunt Linda doesn't really know what you do. But you get that gift card. You could sell, you know, you still spend it on Amazon. We don't care. We won't tell Aunt Linda. It's fine. Thank you, Linda. Yeah. All right, let's move on to Facebook news. And boy, is it a Facebook day to day. Let's start with the whistleblower situation, which is a story that we've been covering here on DTNS for the last several weeks. The whistleblower who provided documents that served as the foundation for the Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files series came forward as a former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen. She worked at Facebook for almost two years before leaving in May of 2021. So earlier this year, working with the company's civic integrity team. Following the breakup of the team on December 2nd, 2020, she contacted a Wall Street Journal reporter. Documents leaked to the journal came from Facebook Workplace and were open to all employees. So this is something that she had access to, but a lot of other people did as well. Haugen said she expected to be caught by Facebook's internal security as these documents were not related to her position. She's scheduled to testify before Congress this week and filed with the SEC for federal whistleblower protections. With the civic integrity team, Haugen focused on issues around how Facebook could impact global elections. She described Facebook using understaffed teams to build tools to deal with larger issues like malicious targeting of specific communities and detecting and combating human exploitation. Haugen described the civic integrity team as an understaffed cleanup crew in a written response to the story. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, quote, we continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content to suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true. End quote and completely unrelated news. But I mean, here we are Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and even Oculus VR are all currently down as of this recording. Going offline around 12 p.m. Eastern Stand of Eastern Daylight Time, rather on Monday, according to Cloudflare, Facebook's BGP routers have been withdrawn from the Internet. Facebook is showing a generic error message while Instagram shows a 5XX server error message. This appears to be impacting internal Facebook services as well. In fact, there are some folks who work at Facebook who say, yes, we cannot communicate with our other Facebook brethren. Everything is down. Social features and downloading new game functionalities are also offline. Basically, Facebook's DNS records, things that tell computers where to find the servers associated with Facebook's domain names, all gone. Facebook controls its own domain servers. So it's likely not an attack, but more to be a configuration error either by design or a mistake. Hard to say. So when you try to go to Facebook.com, the Internet just responds with a version of, I don't know what that is. I don't know where you want to go. That would affect every Facebook and Facebook related service, including internal emails and tools. Twitter user cpk underscore kc suspected that the configuration error may have made it impossible to fix itself remotely since the domains are all gone, meaning that they would have to get physical access of the machine to restore service. Or as Tom put it on Twitter, Facebook seems to have done the equivalent of putting the auto exec dot bat in the auto exec dot bat because Tom loves an Asian DOS reference. Yes, Rich, Rich, I don't even know where to go with this. It's so weird. This is this has been the weirdest day. And, you know, there are a lot of people who are like, well, I don't even use Facebook, doesn't apply to me. Well, you know what billions of people do. And this is this is this is downtime like I've never seen before. I was texting a friend that this is like being on the Internet in 2002 or something like that, where you're like, you're like, I guess, where do we go? I can't share a picture, you know, stuff like that. I know there's plenty of other platforms that can do that. Going back to the whistleblower story just really quick, since we're still kind of waiting for. I'm assuming Facebook is going to figure out how to bring up services. My instinct says this is a blackout. Like this does nothing given the news of the day. Like this has to be a technical error and someone's just having the absolute worst day possible on their technical end. In terms of the whistleblower stuff, this there's not a lot of new news on this. The 60 minute piece that came out kind of in conjunction with this disclosure. This is this whistleblower coming forward kind of reiterates a lot of the reporting that was already out there. The thing that stood out for me and I just think is very bizarre is that whole thing about this, all these documents that you pulled were from Facebook workplaces, wasn't her like using someone else's credentials or creating a shadow identity that had some sort of access. She literally was just going through there, like just looking through old slide decks, looking up old researchers and kind of looking at their notes and stuff like that. And the fact that insider threats are like a huge corporate of security priority and there are solutions out there that will analyze traffic patterns and how you're accessing networks and stuff like that. That to me is a huge eyebrow razor that nothing that she was doing and kind of going outside of her domain accessing all these files, downloading those files, didn't raise any red flags over the course of seemingly months to get to that point. You know, and in the story, you know, she kind of even like was putting in her search history kind of like a good buy to Facebook at a certain point. So that to me is the main kind of like eyebrow raising. You know, it kind of fills out the story of why these disclosures were coming out there. Certainly, that's very important. But like not anything I think particularly new other than, yes, Facebook was devoting resources to a lot of these very important issues on their network, but seemingly, you know, putting a lot of pressure on very small teams to solve very huge issues, which, you know, some obviously Miss Hogan sound that as being, you know, not enough inadequate or, you know, an understaff cleanup cruise, she said. Yeah, I mean, we don't cover all, you know, blackouts of various platforms because these things happen. This is a pretty significant blackout and not only for all of the people who use Facebook products, but all of the people who work internally at Facebook and from, you know, what I've gleaned from folks who do work internally. I mean, it has crippled a very, very large company. And again, this is as of recording who knows when it will be turned back on or affixed, but pretty big news for a Monday. And I'm sure we'll cover the details of what actually happened when and if those come up. But if you if you maybe we're taking the time with Facebook and all those other apps being down, maybe doing some online shopping, you probably noticed some by now pay later services wherever you were checking out. You know, this is something that has really been on the rise in the past couple of years, especially we've kind of seen that surge in the US. This is considered a form of consumer credit and is still relatively small in terms of market share as about $97 billion in volume. And that's about 2 percent of the global consumer credit market in 2020. $97 billion, a lot by my standards, but not by the global credit market. But with younger consumers, they're increasingly wary of large credit card balances and they've hit their lowest level since 2017 last year. So this is making more traditional credit companies kind of take notice of these services. In January, 2018, a firm owned the by now pay later market in the US with over 95 percent of market share. Since then, foreign competitors have entered the market with a firm now third behind Afterpay and Klarna, so just, you know, in a couple of years. All of these services have or will have big e-commerce partnerships. A firm is partnered with Amazon and Shopify, not not a small fish there by any means after pays in the process of being acquired by Square and kind of going after more of that, you know, that mega shopping all in one app kind of experience. And Klarna is targeting traditional retailers like H&M, Walmart, Sephora and in Germany, where they have an even larger presence, you know, and these by now pay later services in general in Europe kind of have a bigger market share. They're actually operating as a bank in Germany. So kind of, you know, very different ways of approaching this, all kind of offering that same course service to draw here for merchants because this is something I've always kind of hadn't dug into is like, why would a merchant necessarily want to by now pay later options, get better conversion rates and overall higher purchases, often without having to discount goods as steeply to move them. The trade off here, though, is that merchants reportedly pay between three to eight percent of transactions for most of these services, much higher than traditional, you know, just card processing fees or stuff like that, but, you know, not having to put a big discount to clear merchandise kind of a big deal. I mean, Sarah, I'm sure you have seen, you know, no lack of these kind of services at checkout, right? Indeed. And what, I don't know, I feel like a story like this is sort of like, well, you know, look at these financial chefs based on, you know, human buying behavior to me. And please, you know, check me if I'm missing something. It's like, this is just credit card companies being like, this is how we prey on people who can't afford things, and we actually get more money out of them in the long term. And it's just presented to the customer as something different and something better. I've seen this compared to something like Layaway, even though in this instance, you're actually like getting the good, you know, kind of ahead of time. I mean, really what it comes down to for a lot of these companies with these kind of partnerships, especially I think with Afterpay and the Square acquisition is really trying to own that customer relationship when it comes to anything involving payment processing, whether it comes to credit, you know, short term credit, long term credit, or just immediate payment processing, just kind of owning that whole experience, owning all that information that comes along with it, which can be incredibly valuable. That acquisition has not gone through, you know, still waiting to close on that. So we will see if that does come to pass. But, you know, kind of an interesting, you know, need to keep a bead on this given how quickly it's kind of ramped up. And, you know, we have rumors that Apple is looking to possibly get into this market with Apple Pay. All of the big payment processes are also kind of looking on how to get into this market as well. So definitely not something that's going away. So kind of, I thought it was important to, you know, kind of talk about, you know, what are the implications of this? What benefit of it? What's causing the rise of this? And I thought the source of this was a really great protocol series. So definitely want to check that out if you want some more information. Indeed. And we will be following the story as it unfolds. If you're interested in video gaming, we talk about video gaming here on DTNS. Maybe you don't have time to follow all the stories. You can check out DTNS Gaming News Monthly. Every month, Jen Cutter rounds up the biggest video gaming news in about 15 minutes. Whether you're already a hardcore gamer or thinking about getting into video gaming, the monthly summary will bring you up to speed. Just look for it in your DTNS feed. And thank you to Jen Cutter for doing the work. All right, let's talk about a little bit of an anniversary that we have to celebrate today. Apple announced its humble personal assistant Siri 10 years ago today at the launch of the iPhone 4S. If that doesn't make you feel old, I don't know what will. Remember that iPhone 4S? Yes, that is when Siri was announced. According to Apple's Phil Schiller at the announcement, quote, what we really want to do is just talk to our device and your device, in that case, your phone will figure out what you mean and help you get what you want done. End quote. It was quickly followed by Samsung's S voice Google Now in 2012, then Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's voice assistant in 2014. Voice assistants are a big deal now, but you know, just 10 short years ago, it was kind of novel. While being one of the first personalized virtual assistants in comparison to Siri's rivals, it hasn't really capitalized on its first mover advantage. However, reporting on the years has laid blame to various factors from Google's larger trove of user data to train its voice assistant to confusion with Apple over what Siri's focus should actually be to a slower annual update schedule and lack of third party supports. Yeah, I mean, when I very distinctly remember that 4S launch, it's like my favorite iPhone design, so whatever reason that sticks out. But like Siri did, like at the time, and looking back at the reviews, the Virgin did a great job of kind of profiling the reviews back in 2011, you know, very glowing, very, this is a game changer with virtual assistants kind of definitely grading it on a curve in a lot of ways. But looking at, you know, up until that point, my experience with most voice assistants had been like Google's 411 service. I don't know if everybody remembers that, but like, you know, that was all like kind of automated voice prompts. And you know, it was pretty hit or miss. Or like, I mean, I remember like my dad had an old cell phone where you'd like literally had to train it how to like say people's how you said people's names so that you could call them. And the fact that it could, you know, Siri could handle a lot of very basic tasks seemingly within within some very narrow confines did feel like a big improvement. And, you know, not to, you know, you know, poo poo where Siri is at right now, there's like if you're in the Apple ecosystem, right? And you're right, you know, you have your iPhone in your pocket with your Apple watch and your AirPods. It is a very like that that is an ecosystem where you can do a lot with voice. And I think that is where Siri is kind of focused now is kind of allowing you to extend and even with the HomePod and stuff like that, being able to extend that have a very consistent feel. Whereas a lot of other ecosystems are talking about Google. Yes, it works very well on a phone, but if you don't have that whole ecosystem and there's less of a reason to buy into it, you know, it doesn't have a problem. Still, though, you know, I think that's been the narrative kind of dogging serious. Like it's like it's usually like considered, I don't know, maybe second best. And despite being the earliest seems unusual for Apple one to be earliest and kind of not to have the most refined experience out of the box is I think what always raises eyebrows with that. I have to say, I mean, I remember when, you know, Siri launched at the time I was commuting in my car a fair distance to, you know, my place of work. And so because I would be like warden my car for an hour at a time, you know, I would just be like, Siri, tell me, you know, two plus two or, you know, what's what's the giant score? You know, I would I was trying to like trip her up, right? Trip him up. Siri is, you know, omnipresent and it has no gender. But you know, at the time it was like, I was like, this is really cool. But like, how helpful is this to me outside of the fact that I'm, you know, in a car and I can only really, you know, use voice stuff to get answers because I can't look at my phone. I mean, 10 years ago, that was sort of Siri to me was like, Oh, this is like really helpful when it would be dangerous for me to look at my phone while driving. And the fact that the virtual assistants, you know, Dima doesn't, you know, and they mostly work the same way. And the fact that the Internet of Things devices in the home has exploded. All of that, you know, the whole Siri thing was back in the day was like, Oh, I just, you know, tell my phone to give me like a easy query and it will. That's Siri. And now it's, it's, you know, it's Apple Kit, you know, or HomeKit, rather, or, you know, it's a variety of other platforms that all do the same thing. And that is now what we think a voice assistant says. And that happened very quickly. You know, it didn't take that long for us to be like, Yeah, I got it. Yeah. You know, you can participate or not. But it's funny how these things get adopted so quickly. Yeah, I will say perhaps the most enduring kind of legacy. I didn't want to say that by an actively developed product. But like the idea that like a voice assistant has a personality, definitely, you know, that I feel like we can, we can always look to Siri as the starter of that trend for sure. Indeed. All right. Well, we've covered the semiconductor shortage on a number of levels on the show from the impacts to consumer technology, very obviously to national security implications and even in venturing into the automotive industry. Now a production cut on silicon metal in China has sent prices up over 300% in the last two months. China's Yunnan province accounts for about over 20% of the country's silicon output. But that order that was ordered to cut production by 90% through the end of the year to curb energy usage is kind of an ongoing story within China's why they were seeing a big crypto crack down there as well. Silicon is obviously used to make semiconductors, but also has a wide range of other uses from being the raw material in silicone to be uses in concrete and glass. This could continue to hammer automakers where silicon is part of aluminum alloys used in engine blocks. Silicon is also used in the solar industry for photovoltaic panels with the cost of solar grade polysilicon to its highest levels since 2011. However, this recent shortage has done nothing seemingly to curb investment in semiconductors so far. We'll see if that continues though. Crunch based reports that global venture fund semiconductor startups hit $3.7 billion in August already surpassing 2020's previous record year. US venture funding had already surpassed 2020 levels back in April and now stands at $1.6 billion of funding as of August. It's like toilet paper, but for, you know, the shelves are empty of all of our of all of our there there's some yeah, some hoarding going on here. This is not surprising to me, Rich. Yeah, well, what is what is surprising, I guess, is this I'm very curious to see how far we'll see this kind of China energy crackdown basically or this this, you know, this concerted effort by China central government to essentially bring down energy usage throughout the country. What other industries and knock on effects we will see, you know, we could, you know, obviously, OK, production of silicone and thinking how does that impact chip manufacturing, which already was strained because for a variety of other factors, like it just seems like the semiconductor shortage can never catch its breath for lack of a better term. And given how, you know, essential, you know, China is to just kind of the global supply chain, even with, you know, ongoing sanctions and stuff like that. Undoubtedly, we will see further knock on effects to this. It sounds like from from the pieces I was reading, like the solar industry probably is the most insulated from this. But, you know, automakers already kind of globally halting production kind of across a number of different lines. And, you know, if it goes from not having enough chips for backup sensors or for, you know, the ton of on suite security to, hey, we can't make engine blocks, you know, or it's much more expensive to make them. That's, you know, that that not great news for them. Indeed. And also anybody who's like, what's the difference between silicone and silicone? Well, it's hard to know. But, you know, look it up. All right. We've got some good news for William Shatner. There's some William Shatner fans out there. The man is said to become the oldest person to fly to space at 90 years old. That's right. Shatner is set to fly on Blue Origin's second tourist space flight on October 12th aboard the new Shepard and will break the record of 82 year old aviation pioneer, Wally Funk, who flew on New Shepard back in July. Sadly, the flight is only scheduled to go past the Carmen line boundary between the earth atmosphere and outer space. Will short of a second star to the right and straight till morning. I know that you people who understand space understand that joke. And I had to be told about it in Roger and Rich before the show. But I got to say, William Shatner, y'all ninety nine ninety years old ready to go to space. God bless you. I mean, I remember when it was a big deal when John Glenn I watched that in school. I remember we like shut down class to watch John Glenn go up in his in his in his, you know, his as a senior citizen go up into space. I do kind of feel bad for Wally Funk. You know, he gets like the privilege of being the oldest guy in space for like four months. Yeah, it's like you were 82, dude. I mean, William Shatner is 90. Yeah, by the way, William Shatner is 90. I mean, again, I mean, I'm both surprised but also not surprised by that revelation. But hey, I mean, it's the role he was born to play. I think that's that says something to the I want to say, maybe the smoothness of the flight. Like, I don't I don't know, like, obviously this puts strength will clearly put strain on a body. I hope William Shatner is OK at 90 years old. But like, I feel like this isn't like the same level of, hey, we're going to the moon, like bullet shooting out of a gun going up. I hope that, you know, that Bill makes it back. OK, that's what I'm saying. And before we move on, Wally Funk, a woman. I apologize. Wally, we appreciate you. And now I feel extra bad for Wally Funk. Double listen. Wally Funk is Wally Funk and she has done great stuff and she will never be forgotten. Let's before we put our foot in our mouths anymore, Rich, check out the mail bag. Well, we got an email from Toby on the Fairphone. And they say it seems to me that it is a great option for the security conscious. The ability to get inside the device easily and physically disconnect and remove components is a very low tech and relatively low skill way to de risk the device for sensitive environments. I had forgotten about the Fairphone until the DTS piece. But even as an iPhone user, I'm now giving it serious consideration, having taken a look at what I actually use, especially now as more computing time is done for my desk with increased work from home, a five year warranty and replaceable battery seems compelling. Yeah, it really does. I'm going to be on that, Toby. The one thing I will say is if you can open it, anyone can open it. So as long as it's in your in your physical presence, it is good for the security conscious. That would be my only caveat to that. I mostly agree with you in principle. Well, if you have any feedback for us, like Toby or questions, comments, anything we talk about on the show or might talk about on a future show, please do send that feedback our way. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send the email and thank you in advance. We would also like to extend some things to our brand new bosses. We got a few of them over the weekend. Martin Israel, Nathan Ernest, Mike and Plummer Sandrolin, who all started backing us on Patreon said thank you, Martin, thank you, Nathan, thank you, Mike, and thank you, Plummer. And thank you to all our patrons who support us every day. We could not do it without you. A reminder that we're live on this show Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Thank you to everybody who joins us live. And if you'd like to, please do Tom's back tomorrow and we'll be joined by Nate Langston. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.