 Coming up on DTNS, why the U.S. Congress is savvy about cryptocurrency. Really, they are a study on the effect YouTube has on radicalizing you. And Google gets a coherent hardware strategy. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty Sarah Lane's got the day off. But Justin Robert Young on the road in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, yeah, podcast movement is the convention. I am here. It's my first con since, you know, all the all the COVID stuff. So a lot going on. But considering I missed two weeks, I could not let a third one pass without being on here. Happy to be back. We were just talking about what it's like to attend a con in the age of the Delta variant. If you want to get that wider conversation, get our expanded show Good Day Internet become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS where you can join our top patrons like Dale Mulcahy, Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre and more. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Tencent resumed new user registration for its messaging app WeChat in China. If you remember it stopped signups last week for a rather vague security technical upgrade. China's in the midst of a six month campaign to combat illegal behavior online. Ted said got caught up in that. A newspaper in Tencent's home base of Shenzhen argued Thursday that the government in China should end tax breaks for game companies like Tencent because they get all that global revenue. They don't need that break. That's what the Shenzhen folks say. Asus released a BIOS update for a variety of its motherboards going back to some that support the KB Lake processors from 2017 in order to prepare them for supporting Windows 11. The update supports AMD and Intel systems and can automatically enable TPM. The Verge notes that Gigabyte, Asrock, Biostar and MSI have all released lists of supported systems that will work with Windows 11. Oh, finally, come to the table. TikTok confirmed it's working on a stories feature available in a newly added slide over sidebar, which will show content from followed accounts for 24 hours. Stories content on TikTok will be limited to video. It's unclear how widely the feature is being tested and unclear how it really differs from the rest of TikTok, frankly, except I don't know. Being in that one little section. Yeah, and it goes away. John Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green posted on Twitter that he received a quote, independent confirmation from multiple people. Unquote that Apple will introduce a new client side photo identification feature that will use hashing algorithms to match the content in a user's photo libraries with known child abuse materials. Since this hashing occurs on the device, an iOS device would download a set of fingerprints representing illegal content that would be checked against user content. Apple has previously said that it employs hashing techniques on media uploaded to iCloud. The old London hard fork probably sounds like a cricketing term, but it's being used these days to apply to a change in the way transaction fees are handled on the Ethereum blockchain. Previously, Ethereum used a blind auction when proposing transaction fees. Now that the fork is activated, Ethereum's protocol will algorithmically decide the transaction fee or gas price as it's sometimes called based upon overall network demand. And that should make the fees less volatile, even amount a little. Other changes redirect some of the fees away from miners and move up a deadline to December for upgrading mining software to prepare for a proof of stake system that Ethereum is eventually going to move to. Once they moved a proof of stake that will essentially end mining and its energy intensive activities. Alright, let's talk a little more about cryptocurrencies. Three US senators are proposing an amendment to the infrastructure bill making its way through the US Congress or right now in the Senate that would exclude some crypto companies from a tax reporting provision. The Wyden-Lomis-Toumi amendment named after the three senators who proposed it attempts to counteract language in the bill aimed at digital asset brokers, the people who trade in cryptocurrency. But the fear is that because that language is vague, it might be applied to miners and software developers, unduly burdening them with things that they don't need to do to avoid confusion. The amendment specifically excludes people validating distributed ledger transactions, aka miners, or developing or selling hardware or software wallets. US Senate held a hearing earlier this week called cryptocurrencies. What are they good for? But absolutely nothing was not what they responded. There were the usual questions of whether two people can control cryptocurrencies. Who's doing the mining and what effect this will have on the financial industry? But protocols, Tomi O'Garron and Benjamin Pimentel noted a increasing sophistication from Congress on crypto, arguably a sign of crypto's increasing importance in mainstream finance. They're like, man, their questions seemed educated and informed. In fact, Monday, US Representative Don Bayer in the House side of the US Congress introduced the Digital Asset Market Structure and Investor Protection Act. That would define how to tell which cryptocurrency should be treated as a security. Under the bill, if your cryptocurrency gives you equity, profits, interests, dividend payments or voting rights, a token would be treated as a security if it has an ICO, an initial coin offering. That also would be treated as a security, though the bill does lay out a path for a token to go from being a security to becoming a commodity. It will also give the US Treasury Department veto power over the creation of stable coins in the US and would authorize the Federal Reserve to create a central bank digital currency or CBDC, something the US among almost all countries has been investigating that. We've been talking about that a lot. But if you're listening closely, you're like, Oh, that makes sense. You shouldn't treat all cryptocurrencies the same. And that seems like a sensible definition and having stable coins apply. Okay, that might be a little harsh, but at least it understands what a stable coin is. A common theme of reports across all these stories, Justin, is the surprise at the sophistication and understanding shown of the cryptocurrency industry by the US Congress. It should surprise nobody because when it comes to money, and specifically when it comes to the money that will fill the coffers of the federal government, they are going to be more sophisticated. They have to be more sophisticated. A reminder that part of this infrastructure bill was going to be paid for by increased IRS funding so there could be additional tax revenue that comes into it. Now, I'm not saying that these two things are connected, except that both of them are about bringing money into the federal government and figuring out the best way that they can do it. I think that it's obviously good news that they are sophisticated on this and they are not Mr. Magooing their way through what is an increasingly serious part of our financial landscape, but nobody should be surprised that on this subject they have gotten smart. Yeah, that's a point well taken is that the fact that it's actual money focuses the mind in ways that other things might not. But I guess that's the point is the Congress is looking at this as actual money as not not just fraud and abuse, which in years past the reaction has been cryptocurrency sounds like a scam ban it. Now it's cryptocurrency could be an actual way to make money. Let's regulate it. Let's bring it under our supervision. Yeah. Oppo showed off a new version of its under display camera tech. Previously fewer pixels have been used where the camera is to make sure that the camera had enough light, but that leads to a dim spot on the display where the camera is in this prototype. Oppo was not reducing the number of pixels, but making the pixels over the camera smaller. That way the entire screen stays 400 pixels per inch. Oppo also says that it has refined the algorithms that it uses to improve the quality of images taken by the under screen camera. Oppo has shared a couple extra a couple example pictures taken with the new design, but has no info on when it will use its tech in any of the phones that it sells. But if you like the idea of an under display camera, Andrew, police reminds us that all signs point to Samsung having an implementation in the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 3. Deck to the notch, right, Tom? Ah, man, what? OK, I do understand the pleasing aspect of having no notch. If the camera doesn't have to somehow be compromised, but if you have to make the pixels smaller, granted, may not look as bad as when you have fewer pixels, but still not the same size pixel. There's going to be an effect and you're not letting in all the light that you would otherwise. So you have to use the algorithms to improve the image. Isn't a notch better? Like why is the notch bother people so much? Is it just perfectionism? What is it? Uh, it's perfectionism. Uh, it is a mobile web design, which oftentimes will reliably try to take up as much screen as possible. And if all of a sudden you have a little notch in the middle of it, it sometimes is even hard for certain navigations on non-optimized apps and websites. Uh, but ultimately it needs to be there because for as much as people might hate the notch aesthetically, they love taking selfies and they buy these phones, specifically the high end ones, so they can take a lot of different selfies. It is a very bad customer experience to spend the kind of money that you, Samsung will be asking people to pay for a Galaxy Z Fold 3 and then have your selfies look anything other than the best you can possibly take. Uh, so ultimately I believe that this is going to be a function over form decision that a lot of people make until we get to the point where it is totally non-existent. But for right now, I think the notch is going to be here to stay because pictures and cameras are just a very, very, very, very, if not the most important reason why people buy cell phones these days. The selfie camera has always suffered from being the the the undeveloped cousin of the the rear camera, right? The rear camera gets all the megapixels. It gets the extra lenses and the selfie camera, you know, plods along at 720p for years and then finally it becomes HD. So I guess in that vein, putting it under the screen, if you can just improve it to be a little more like the rear camera means extra cost, but a nicer design. But again, I I don't I'm with you. I don't like the notch when it gets in the way of the interface, but it doesn't have to. You can you can implement it in a way that it doesn't or you can just put a black bar across the top, which again, I know people scream like a black bar. I hate that. But I don't know. I'd rather have that than a compromised front facing camera. Although frankly, I don't use the front facing camera all that often. So I don't know what I'm complaining about. Maybe I'm the hypocrite here. No, I you sent me photos of you wearing a hat or a new t-shirt or something like that. I think you use the front camera more than you think you do. Maybe I do. Maybe I do. Well, chin haters, notch haters, defend yourselves. Feedback at DailyTechnicsShow.com Google announced four new Nest home security cameras and a video doorbell running on its homemade tensor processing units. We're seeing a little more Google putting chips in their own things. All four of these products can detect people, animals and packages with separate alerts for each, all done without the need for the cloud or a subscription because of those Google tensor processing units. So let that run through your head for a minute. Google is like, yeah, you don't need to pay us the money. You don't need to let us see any of your data. We'll do all of this identification on our own TPU on the device. That's very ungoogly of them. You can still pay for a cloud subscription if you want. That's if you want more than three hours of event history or you want to do more sophisticated things like facial recognition of friends and family. You want the doorbell to tell you who's at the door when mom comes by or your friend Janice stops by. The camera can store an hour of event clips locally with no subscription, though. So if you don't want the facial recognition, you just want a little bit of storage. You still don't have to give Google any money for that. The new one hundred eighty dollar Nest cam works both inside or outside, has a three month rechargeable battery. So, you know, once once a quarter, you're going to have to go out there and recharge records. Ten eighty P 30 frame per second video. Google saying 4k doesn't really give you that. It sounds great, but it doesn't give you that much at this point. We'd rather put the investment into other aspects like the tensor processing unit. The hundred eighty dollar Google Nest doorbell comes in four colors offers a one hundred forty five degree vertical view. Google saying like the vertical view is more important at the doorbell than the wide angle and a two and a half month battery. So you're going to have to replace that one a little more often. Both, however, can be wired if you don't want to rely on the battery and both are open for pre-order right now, ship in August 24th. The other two products are a two hundred eighty dollar Nest cam with floodlight and a one hundred dollar Nest cam indoor. Neither of those have a release date and neither of those run off of battery for the floodlight you've got to wire it and the indoor you're plugging in because you're indoor. All four new products are cheaper than the models they replaced. Still not wise, cheap, but cheaper, which again is another thing I don't know if everybody would expect new products coming out and having improvements, but being less expensive. I don't know just that this feels like a coherent product offering. It's not just coherent. It's extremely competitive. If you look at what the comparable stuff is for ring, which is obviously their competitor that is owned by Amazon. They are very aggressive. The ring ecosystem is about getting you on their subscription service like like you are are within two weeks beat that, you know, had your have your the rug pulled out from under view on your on your free trial. So you can start ponying up that mild subscription fee, but a subscription fee nonetheless. And as a person with a ring doorbell who does not pay the subscription, you get video when someone has just rung your bell and not a moment later, unless you're paying. Yes, exactly. And so you you miss what is the most worthwhile stuff. And that is the alert of somebody just leaving a package and the pre-roll that it has on there, especially if you're already shelling out a couple hundred dollars for one of these devices, which is pretty industry standard at this point. The fact that Google goes and puts their own chips on it, they do it all on device, making it more privacy conscious, making it more, you know, to reduce a little bit of that creep factor of now everybody, you know, up through the cloud, they're going to understand more and more of who comes to your house every day. That is a very compelling product. And I'm happy to see it. I hope it continues to move this entire industry forward in that direction. One last thought on this. I am very heartened to see a nest product line that is as forward-thinking and coherent as this, because when I was making the decision of whether or not we were going to be in the Amazon ecosystem or we were going to be in the Google ecosystem, one of the reasons why I made my decision was I don't know how long Google might want to be in the nest game. Google certainly has spun stuff off before, seemingly capriciously. This gives you peace of mind from my perspective that they are in this game. They want to play it for the long haul and, of course, tomorrow they'll probably announce their divesting. But still, I think that this is good for people that are already in nest or are thinking about getting into the nest ecosystem. Yeah, there was a lot of confusion around nest. They spun it out as an alphabet company. Then they brought it back in. Then they started calling some things nest that had nothing to do with nest. And this does feel like they finally got a handle on it. And it's your home slash security, home plus security. It could just be home stuff, but it could also be security stuff. Cameras, doorbells, this all makes sense. And I have a couple of really old nest cams that work great. You know, just use them to kind of keep an eye on the dogs when we're not at home, frankly. And I'm tempted to move to this doorbell simply because it doesn't need the cloud. And three, two and a half month battery is not great. I bet I can squeeze more out of it by turning off a few settings here and there. That's what I do with my ring doorbell. So, so yeah, I don't know, I'm tempted. You can wire it up, right? Or I could just, yeah, bite the bullet and stop being lazy and wired up. That's true. Yeah, Google is getting the word out that starting September 13th, links for Google Drive files and folders generated before 2017 may stop working. One last Google thing here, Google is adding resource keys to all its share links to improve security. The change does not apply to docs, sheets, slides and forms. It only affects new users clicking on an older link. So if somebody's already got access to that link, you're fine. It's if you have a link up saying like for my old tech history book, I had a link up saying, hey, go here for the tech history citations. That link might stop working for people who clicked it for the first time. So you might want to be aware of that. Before we move on, though, do you want to expand your Spanish tech skills? And TX's Dan Campos is here to help. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for the word of the day brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. This one is a tricky one. Friolera is a word that we use when talking about a trivial amount of money, something really small, but more often it is used in an ironic way when referring to a huge amount of money. Like Fortnite generated a whopping nine billion in revenue, which could be translated as Fortnite generó la Friolera de nueve mil millones en ingresos. In this case, because of the amount of money, we know that Friolera is used ironically. After all, we are not exactly talking about pocket change. You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express available every Friday. Common wisdom holds that YouTube's algorithm tends toward radicalization as it narrows in on your interest and can show you more and more fringe ideas and conspiracy theories about Game of Thrones or whatever it is that you're looking at. Scientists across multiple universities and organizations, including the University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft Research got together, conducted a study and published a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS called Examine the Consumption of Radical Content on YouTube because they want to do examine the radicalizing effect of the platform. They got anonymized data from Nielsen for more than 300,000 users who watched more than 21 million YouTube videos between 2016 and 2019. They then classified the political content of those videos into about 1,000 categories, just shy of 1,000 categories that ended up accounting for about 3.3 percent of the total videos in the data set or close to 700,000 videos. People who watched a particular type of content in 2016, wherever it was on the political spectrum, mid-right, center, extreme, generally continued to watch that type of content in 2020. The data showed no growth in the extreme categories. If there was radicalizing, you'd expect to see maybe some movement of the videos from the center into the extreme categories. They also found that for one extreme category, viewers were more likely to arrive at them from websites, not from YouTube's algorithm. So that kind of said, well, it's not the algorithm that's bringing them in anyway. It's websites out there on the web. This study did not find evidence that YouTube's algorithm encouraged radicalization. So that's that. But keep in mind, this only included desktop, not mobile use. We're not saying mobile use does radicalize, but they didn't study that. And the data did not include what the algorithm was recommending, just what was watched and from where the view came. So there was no way to look at the data set and saying, oh, with this algorithm's only recommending puppy videos. No wonder. This also applies to average users, meaning there can be dramatic exceptions that don't show up in the data. Or as the paper put it, on a platform with almost two billion users, it is possible to find examples of almost any type of behavior. Yeah. All right. Here's a controversial statement to some. I don't believe that we are as extreme as we tend to think we are. In fact, there is data to back this up beyond this particular YouTube radicalization study. Joseph Joseph Uzinski of the University of Miami studies polling around extreme views. And he has said that even going back to polling pre-internet, we still have around the same percentage of people that believe in extreme views. They kind of have. There's always been a certain percentage of our population and it is not really budged at all. What is different is that we have receipts. The internet gives us the ability to watch and understand the behavior of folks who do consume radical views and what they say online in a way that we couldn't when they were just raving and screaming at a bar. So I think that we have a bit of a confirmation bias when we talk about stuff like this simply because we can see it. We can see a YouTube video. We can see a tweet thread that gets retweeted. And then we assume that it is happening more when in reality it's just happening more permanent. Yeah. There's so many biases that could be could be confirmation bias. Like you said, it could be a recency bias or a proximity bias. But it's a bias. The data continues to show that it's a bias for us to think everybody's saying X because we saw two people say it. In fact, from the abstract in this article, our results indicate that trends in video based political news consumption are determined by a complicated combination of user preferences, platform features and the supply and demand dynamics of the broader web. In other words, it's people who want the stuff tending to bring it in. It's comforting to have someone to blame if you're upset about something. I'm not unsympathetic to that, but it also isn't going to help you solve a problem if you blame the wrong thing because if you spend a lot of time with YouTube changing its algorithm, A, you might introduce something worse by accident and B, you won't stop the behavior that you were trying to stop anyway. Well, Tom, at the Black Hat Security Convention, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative. Collaborative is partnering with Google, Microsoft and Amazon, Telcos, Verizon and AT&T and security companies FireEye and Palo Alto Networks. It'll start by combating ransomware and cyber attacks against cloud computing providers. But it's a broader goal is to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector. CISA director Jen Easterly says, quote, this will uniquely bring people together in peacetime so we can plan on how we're going to respond in wartime. Yeah, that was some aggressive language from director Easterly there. But I think people are taking this seriously after SolarWinds and Easterly said SolarWinds would have been in a much different situation had we had better communication already in place. So I think this is probably what's called for here, which is bring together the Voltron of Google, Microsoft and Amazon and the torso, Verizon and AT&T as the legs in FireEye and Palo Alto Networks as the feeder, whatever metaphor you're going to put together and have them communicate with CISA, which Seth Rosenblatt was saying earlier this week is fairly well respected across the board for its efforts across the past couple of years that it's been in existence in wanting to just secure things, not not really wanting to do anything else but but make the infrastructure more secure. Yeah, I think obviously the federal government has put a large priority on cyber security in the wake of some of these attacks. We've seen it applied to foreign relations when it comes to our relationship with Russia, specifically. I think that political football is a little stupid, but this is actually just, you know, opening up these lines of dialogue so we can have a better communication with our law enforcement as this burgeoning world only gets more and more crucial to our own lives is a smart idea. Yeah, because no matter what you think about the wagging of fingers of world leaders at each other, the fact of the matter is somebody is out there attacking things and causing vulnerabilities to be exploited and dated to be accessed that shouldn't be accessed and you want to stop that. You know, it kind of doesn't matter who's doing it. You want to stop them from doing it. Reuters reports on a company called Aquair that is using a machine to extract drinking water from the air to be used in places experiencing drought. Aquair is using the machines to deliver clean water in Namibia and Lebanon already. 82 year old, 82 year old Enrique Vega invented the machine during a drought in southern Spain in the 1990s. It uses electricity, which could be solar generated, but any kind of electricity to cool air until water condenses from it. It's basically the same thing that your air conditioner does if you've got one when you see the water condensing on the unit. The Aquair machine works in temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius. That's about 104 degrees Fahrenheit and in humidity as low as 10%. A trolley sized machine could produce 50 to 75 liters per day and a bigger version does 5,000 liters. It's not the first machine to be able to do this. It's just one of the most efficient machines to be able to do it at cost. Look, clean, drinkable water is a crucial, crucial, crucial key to life. You know, I mean, I had to be reductive here, but I don't think that you can overstate the ability for water to come out of thin air literally is a potential game changer considering how much, you know, digging a well and access to water restrictions from water when it comes to local governments, specifically in some of these areas, is oftentimes a death sentence for people. This is a great tech done good story in my book. That's Kelly, 2909 says what I think a lot of people are thinking moisture farms, evaporators and the like. But also, and I'm not even kidding when I say this, Aquair should get together with Warner Media around the launch of Dune and promote this. Like it's a match made in heaven where it goes with the storyline of Dune and could actually, like, you know, promote something that is a good piece of equipment out there. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Mark wrote in said, hey, guys and gals, I heard a letter read on the show regarding text message junk mail. I remember the letter mentioned that one could call their provider to help mitigate the problem. I'm looking for the show this letter was used in. I think it may have been in good day internet, but I can't find it. I'm really hoping it can help me seek out some peace and quiet from the onslaught of marketing texts that I get daily now. Anyway, thanks for everything. I've already answered Mark directly, but if anybody else was having that question, I'm not even going to send you back to the DTNS episode that that was on. I'm going to send you to know a little more dot com. We had a recent episode with Jake about text spam. Jake was kind enough. He was the one who sent the original email. He was kind enough to sit down with me for 20 minutes or so and just talk about like this is how text spam happens. This is how it gets into the system. This is what we can do to stop it. This is what we're doing to stop it. And that'll give you that information that you're looking for, Mark and anybody else. Go check it out. We'll have a link in the show notes for this as well. Do you get much text spam there, Justin? Text spam is rare, but it is not totally eliminated. No, the most haunted tech that I have is the phone itself. I get more spam calls a day. I get more spam calls than I get spam text. If I get spam text there, I usually know why. It was like, all right, I bought a button for my political button campaign and now I'm in your database. You know, that's on me. I don't get a lot of stuff where I'm like, I don't know where this is coming from and I have to block it. Maybe once every few months. Yeah. Keep those emails coming, folks. We want to hear from you. Feedback at DailyTechNewsshow.com. If you've got a thought, you've got a consideration, you've got a question about a story, you've got information and insight to a story like Jake did, email us feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Also, special thanks to all the patrons who have been supporting us for a long time and have really funded the show on an ongoing basis like Howard Yermish, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Howard, I've exchanged many an email with you. So thank you, Howard, and everyone else for all the years of support. And thank you, a lot of people don't know this. The oldest, longest-running patron of DailyTechNewsshow is Justin Robert Young. Oh! Look at that! I am honored to have that distinction. I am also honored to let everybody know that the episode that will come out Friday for the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast will be the first ever live edition of the political triad. Myself, Jen Briney from the Congressional Dish podcast and Andrew Heaton from the political orphanage. I'm going to leave right here and we're going to go do a meet-up and then possibly a few beers in. We are going to record for the first time in person. I am very excited to do it and I'm excited for you guys to listen to it. Check it out, px3podcast.com. I am very excited about that as well. All right, folks, we're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. Come and join the fun. There's more about it at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live back tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.