 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito and Steve Iotarola. Coming up on DTNS, the hot new app for high schoolers, you might want to know about it, especially if you have high schoolers in your family. The rise of the cookie paywall and Blair from This Week in Science is here to tell us why social media is good and bad for Aminals. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Toronto, Ontario, Canada, I'm Jen Cutter. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And I have to apologize to Blair Basderich, co-host of This Week in Science, who's joining us today for me. Like, I really didn't mean to say Aminals in the opening. That's the danger. You're going to say it wrong every time now. I was joking about it before the show and then it came out of my mouth. Blair, it's so good to have you here. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The quick hits. Last week, CNN reported that Elon Musk had been seeking funding to continue providing Starlink equipment and services to Ukraine. However, on Saturday, Musk tweeted an update that the service would continue for free, or not for free, but he'll keep paying for it. A stance Musk repeated to the Financial Times, adding that SpaceX will continue to fund Ukraine's access to Starlink Internet, quote, indefinitely. Social media platform Parler announced it has agreed to sell to Yi, formerly known as Kanye West. The deal is expected to close later this year. Parler had been removed from App Store in 2021, but was reinstated to the Apple App Store in May and Google Play Store in September after agreeing to standards of moderation. Apple had planned to source iPhone memory chips from China's YMTC, at least at first for iPhones just sold in China. But Nikkei Asia reports it has put those plans on hold after the US placed YMTC on its unverified list of companies. If you're on the unverified list, that means the US cannot verify all the end users of your products. So this is different than the entity list that Huawei is on. That's where they are like, you definitely sell things to the People's Republic Army. The US is concerned with companies that supply sensitive technologies to foreign militaries and governments. US companies may acquire components from companies on the unverified list. So that's a little different than the entity list in that way, but they are not allowed to share designs and specs with them. Hence Apple probably saying, well, that makes it kind of hard. So let's just stop. The 4K Google Chromecast, which came out in 2020, is getting an update to Android 12. This adds frame rate matching feature that should reduce judder and adds new settings for HDR and surround sound. And Monday, Netflix launched its profile transfer feature that lets anyone migrate a profile from an existing account to a brand new account. That transfer lets you take along your personalized recommendations, your viewing history, your my list, any saved games and a few other settings. It's going to be useful if you're leaving home, moving out of a shared household of any kind, starting your own account. But of course, it's also meant for people that Netflix catches sharing an account improperly. All right, Jen, let's talk about gas. All right, in our continuing effort to help us all understand what's going on with technology, we try to identify new apps gaining popularity like Breal, Ubo, etc. The Wall Street Journal has an article up about an app called Gas that was launched in late August. It has been downloaded more than 500,000 times since then and topped both the free apps and social networking charts. Tom, what is in this context gas? Gas is probably not for any of us on this show. It's for high schoolers. It's made by a company called Find Your Crush LLC. And it uses your location when you first download it to find your local high school. Then when you confirm which one is yours, it will ask you to match up with other people you know at the school. Now, that's one way it'll know if you're faking it is if you have no other people in your contacts and such things like that. So they have ways of trying to catch fakers. It will start giving multiple choice polls about fellow classmates, though, once you're in. Poll questions include things like the most beautiful person you've ever met or who's never afraid of getting into trouble. The questions are compliments. They're meant to gas you up, you know, make you feel good. You can only mention fellow classmates that have signed up for the service and both people must opt in to mention each other. Although if you're in each other's contacts, then gas will use that as confirmation. If you're mentioned in a poll, you'll get a flame, which in this case is a good thing. I know we usually mean other things when we say someone flamed you and gas world flame is good. When a poll is done, you can only see the grade and the gender of the people who voted for you. However, in-app purchases, the price of gas, let you find out who made compliments or let you keep your compliments from being discovered. Keep your compliments hidden. Answering polls earns you coins that are an in-app currency that can be spent to get you to show up in more polls because it tries to spread the love, but you can kind of boost yourself, see what other people are thinking of you more. And gas is only available for high schools in fewer than a dozen U.S. states, including Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Gas was made by Finder Crush LLC. Its president, Nikita Beer, co-created a similar app five years ago called TBH, to be honest, which was brought by Facebook and reached 8 million downloads before it was shut down. Yeah, so apparently Nikita Beer and their co-creator figured, you know what, this was a good idea. And while we cashed out by selling to Facebook, we just got shut down. Let's start it again. It's not even in every state, and it's already topping the charts just by being for high schoolers. There's so many things that says to me about the world, none of which I can experience because I'm not going to be using this, Blair. Blair, I'm assuming you're not in high school either. No, no. I do have a fair amount of experience working with teens. And I do think that at first this sounds like a great idea. It just sounds like pop polls, but all the time. It's cute. I do know that teens can be savage, though, and I do see a way that they can turn this negative. It'll be interesting to see how it goes. If there's a way to turn it negative, teens will find it. That is absolutely true. I think they are trying their best to make this about positivity. I don't think they're under any misimpressions that people won't find a way around, but I think they're ready for that. Everything they say says, we're going to try to keep this positive, spread the love around, all that sort of thing. I just don't know once you reach the maximum number of teens who are going to use this, and I don't know, maybe you do a more sophisticated version for college. Ajay could kind of see that. Where do you grow from there? Actually, one of the stats that I wish we had was of those 500,000, how many people are actually like a daily active user? Because I know if I'm in high school and I hear about this cool new app, I'm downloading it first, even though it may not be available in my state slash province. I also know that I would be all over this, even though I was not being a popular kid. I was a sports kid and running Comtech, which I'm sure is not a surprise to anyone here. I would have been all over this just thinking like, oh my gosh, somebody noticed me. I would pay for God mode, which lets me see or at least get some hints as to who's doing what. Man, I can see why people would rush to this and I would love an update in like a couple of months just to see how well it's still doing and if they expand to more schools. Yeah, without this pivoting away from its current purpose, I don't see that this is going to be the next TikTok or something like that. It feels like this is maybe what we need, which is a really good app for high schoolers. And that's all it ever needs to be. It can just be a really good app for that age group and it can expand by opening to new states and provinces and countries and adapting to that. It's going to face a lot of challenges in keeping bad actors off the platform and keeping from teens themselves from being bad actors. But yeah, when you see this topping the charts, it makes it feel like, oh, OK, well, is it going to be the next mass sensation? They would have to change it. They would have to change it to be something else. I guess they can widen it out to make like, you know, in your workplace, say nice things about your, you know, I was thinking about how Facebook used to just be for colleges and then they expanded to workplaces and eventually the rest of the world. I suppose they could go that direction. I think a big thing is going to be who copies it first. I think it's big enough. Does TikTok integrate this? Does B-real go for it? Then we'll really know that it's catching fire with the older group. Or will Facebook buy them again? Well, they didn't take any VC money this time around. So it's going to be, yeah, how fast before they decide to take outside money once high schoolers have spent all of their allowance on God mode. And the scare stories about, you know, people misusing the platform have already begun. So the bright light is going to shine on it right away. And we'll see how well protected they are and how well prepared they are. The fact that they went through this before with TBH though means that they've got at least some experience on the road with that. All right, let's talk privacy, paying for your privacy. In the European Union under the GDPR, websites are required to notify you about what data they collect and give you clear options to reject data collection like turning off cookies used to track you for advertising. Several news sites are taking that opportunity to sell you a subscription. Germany's Derspiegel, for example, lets you know that if you block cookies, you will not be able to see its news stories unless you pay the €4.99 a month subscription. Allow the cookies and the ad tracking that goes with them, then you can read for free. Austria's Dersstanders does the same thing. It charges €75 a year. An assistant professor of privacy and data protection law at Utrecht University, Christiana Santos, co-authored a paper analyzing the practice of what they call the cookie paywall. They analyzed 2,800 websites in the EU and found 13 with a cookie paywall. They estimated it would cost €728 a year to avoid tracking on the 13 most popular news sites in Austria and Germany. Is it legal? Answers vary. The GDPR requires that user content be freely given, but regulatory authorities disagree on whether a cookie paywall violates that clause or not. It has not yet been tested in court. I don't know if you realize you said it, but you said user content has to be freely given. You don't have to give away your content, but your user consent has to be freely given. Yeah, yeah, no worries. So that makes a difference, right? Whether they rule that this is allowed or not. On the other hand, there's a way to avoid the €728 a year, which is don't read any of these websites. If you come there and you turn down the cookies and they say you have to pay, just move on somewhere else. Blair, where do you come down on this? Well, I was thinking about the fact that there are so many sites I currently go to that the second they tell me you're out of free subscriptions or we're going to send you cookies and all this kind of stuff, I immediately leave. And that's exactly what I'm thinking about here is the fact that with information and the way people get news, especially now, you could go to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, the reputable source and be turned away by the fact that you're out of your free articles, but you could go to a non-reliable source and read that for free. I worry about that exact thing happening here, too, where there's another reason to turn people away from reputable information and towards nonsense. Jen, does this bug you? It bugs me as like a huge gut reaction is like, oh, that's terrible. What was wrong with the previous thing before when we just had to go manually select each thing or hit the reject all for the sites nice enough to have that option? Yeah, I'm going to get bounced from a bunch more sites after I hit my three, which is going to be tricky considering I read a lot of news, but I also know that currently I cannot afford that many euro a year for all of the sites. Now, I know that is specific to this region and I'm kind of hoping somebody tests this in court just so we have an answer. It doesn't have to be the answer I like, but I would like to know, like, is this actually the future or is this a maybe future? Yeah, I think we forget a few things and this may or may not change people's opinion, but you don't have to pay for all 13 news sites any more than you would have paid for more than one newspaper subscription back in the day. So you don't have to pay 728 euro a year. You just pick the one that you want to pay for and you can easily not be tracked and get the news by paying for it. I don't think that's such a bad thing. People talk about wanting to support journalism. Here's a way. Pay for the journalism. 75 euro a year, that's about $75 roughly a year. For a news source isn't bad. No, you don't want to pay that 13 times, but you don't need to. So that is an option. You can actually just pay to not have the ad tracking and I think that's fair. I think Blair, you did bring up a really good point of people will not want to pay. Some can't afford it, some won't afford it. They won't want to get tracked by the cookies even if they know that it's not that bad. They just won't want to do it on principle and end up going somewhere that maybe isn't as reliable. That is an unfortunate side effect of this because we have a culture of free, right? Yeah, I think defector is a good example of this. They are the former dead spin people. They do great work. They offer you free articles. They have a sign up once you're done your free articles, but it's just a sign up. You can still read more. You just have to log in. And then obviously when you really like them like I do, you can support them. And the same reason that I subscribed to the athletic when they first launched because it's like, yes, I want this very specific hyper focused sports content. So I think like new sites will notice a bump. We'll just see like whether that leads to fatigue for paying for all these sites or whether it gets tested in court first. Yeah, you know, I feel like this is actually one good side effect of the GDPR is it's made this relationship very clear. Like you are worth 75 euros a year to their standard if they let you track. Now you know, at least you know what the what the dollar or the euro amount in this case is, folks, if you want to join the conversation about this or anything else, get in our discord. You can join that by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S social media is a great tool for educating folks for raising awareness. But as you probably know, it's also a tool that often lacks nuance. And if you're not careful can easily promote logical fallacies, things like confirmation bias. We talk about that a lot in relation to society in general, but Blair, you have a perspective on the exact same kinds of issues from the animal corner. How is social media being used by conservationists? And then what are your concerns about that? Yeah, so the reason I wanted to start this conversation is there was a recent study looking at Instagram posts from wildlife conservation organizations. And there's an expectation that people love mammals and birds. They are cute. They're what we call charismatic megafauna. So they're the thing that kind of put butts in seats for animal stuff. But mammals and birds make up less than 10% of animals on earth. So despite that, there's this kind of bias towards giving airtime to birds and mammals because they're cute, because they're interesting, because they're charismatic. But there was a study done on 670 wildlife images posted on Instagram by wildlife organizations in 2020 and 2021. And they looked at the number of likes in relation to organization follower count. And they found that while the majority was birds and mammals, about 73% of them, mammals were more engaging, but only by a little bit. Birds, reptiles, invertebrates, amphibians, and fish were all equally as engaging for Instagram users. So the first thing here is that actually 94% of threatened and endangered species are not birds or mammals. So recognizing that, you could potentially give more airtime as one of these wildlife organizations to non-birds and mammals and therefore kind of shine a light on their needs. And you wouldn't lose followers. I think that's the concern, right? Is that you think that the birds and the mammals are the ones that are going to get people interested. And so you push on that. But this kind of pushes back and says, no, use your social media for good. The tough thing about that is that there's other studies that have been done that one of my favorites was actually looking at the animals that are shown most in social media and media in general, tigers, lions, elephants, and 10 animals in total. And they found that a lot of the time, an animal you see a lot in media makes you think that they're prevalent. A French person actually, on average, sees more virtual lions in photos, cartoons, logos, and brands in one month than there are lions left in West Africa. So there's an expectation because you see them all the time, they're not endangered when they are. So you have to kind of couple that information. The other piece is that if you share that information in perhaps a not ethical way, if you talk about how cute or cuddly they are, you're promoting them as pets. And wildlife pet trade is a huge problem. It's one of the leading problems for species on Earth that are trafficked into often the United States and Europe, the wealthy developed countries from the underdeveloped countries where these animals live. And so, yeah, it's just this huge kind of push-pull of we want to use social media for good. It's like with great power comes great responsibility, right? You have to represent the endangered species, promote their needs, but you also don't want to overdo it, overcorrect, do the wrong species too often, and or anthropomorphize them to turn them into kind of a pet, I guess. I think what's most fascinating about this to me is it's an excellent way to analyze the problems with social media and the benefits without bringing politics into it. Usually when people start talking about social media, it starts to go, well, well, the conservatives and the liberals and the independence and suddenly nobody can really have a fair conversation. You've brought us a gift here, which is we can talk about animals and nobody's gonna get upset because nobody's in the lion corner as solidly and as angrily as they would be in other discussions. So I started thinking about this. I'm like, oh, well, it doesn't seem easy, but I feel like I can wrap my head around this easier because I don't have to worry about somebody misinterpreting what I'm saying if I say like, oh, so the thing to keep in mind is we as humans just have a natural tendency to see something and think it's common, right? Even if we only see it three times. So like coming up with a counter measure for that or expanding to show more creepy crawlies and stuff instead of just cute fuzzy animals and you're not gonna lose your followers, like you said. It starts to feel like it's easy to come up with remedies. And then what I'm wondering is if you come up with remedies for conservation, can some of those be translated to other areas that are too controversial to talk about in those terms? Yeah, so one of the ways to think about this that I was trying to get my brain around is there's the piece of the conservation networks that are releasing this information on social media. Their responsibility is to use good language and to communicate the threat and the potential solutions to these species when they are sharing out about them. It's also their responsibility to share out those creepy crawlies in a wide variety of endangered species. On our side, it is our job to like, share, comment on, promote those helpful posts as opposed to posts where there's an otter swimming in somebody's bathtub, or you're feeding a wild animal hot dogs. Those things need to be downvoted. They need to be commented on saying, this is inappropriate. Don't do this with a lot of animals. Obviously be nice about it. Yeah, right. Don't turn into a troll. I know this looks really cute, but the downside is dot, dot, dot, right? Yeah, and unfollow those accounts. I know it sounds hard, but you have a lot of power as a follower in social media, and you can actually up or downvote or increase or decrease reach of these messages based on the message that is being sent out there. And I think just raising awareness on how social media works, you know, we haven't kind of cracked what all the effects are. And this is another example of studying and learning some of those effects. Jen, what do you think? Well, you looked earlier, and it's available in the show notes, a snake ID group that has been teaching people to be less afraid of snakes and to, you know, protect them, to worry, learn the difference between what's venomous and not venomous. And I'm reading the story of people who, like, came into these groups afraid of snakes and left not being afraid of snakes. And I don't think I'm a big enough person to not be afraid of snakes. But I love that these things happen. Yeah, it's so interesting. So I love spiders in theory. I talk about them on twist constantly. But if I am face-to-face with a spider in my home, it's a problem. But recognizing that, I have started following all sorts of entomologists on Instagram and spider-specific accounts and all these sorts of things. And just by seeing them more, I have noticed my fear response decreasing because I am being exposed to these things normally. Like exposure therapy. So actually, I would challenge you and say, follow some herpetologists account, follow some snake Instagrams and see if that changes slowly over time. I can try that. There were people in this Scientific American article that you're talking about who were the same way as you. Like, I don't want to join a snake group. I hate snakes, right? But it was joining the group in order to identify and know, well, which ones are the good snakes and which ones are the bad snakes that led these people to go, well, none of them are bad. I now understand that the venomous snakes aren't even necessarily going to kill me on site. You know, I now know how to handle them and now I don't fear them as much because I understand them better. And I think that's a better four for all of this. It's like, once we actually understand more about the topics we're engaging with, we get less angry about them. We get less emotional because we understand them better. Right. So there's power on the side of the people sharing the information and there's power on the side of the people digesting it too. Yeah. Absolutely. Turns out it takes a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Not just a village. You need the people in the village talking to each other. Well, that's excellent. Let's bring a little positivity to our heads, Jen. Tell us about solar power in our ears. I would love to. The BBC notes that Sweden's Urbanista partnered with Adidas on solar powered headphones last year. No, these aren't the first ever solar powered headphones, but they may be the best designed ones. The over here, the over ear headphones have a 1.3 millimeter thick solar panel made by Sweden's Exager built into the headband. The panel is made from titanium dioxide which is about half as efficient as a silicon panel, but thinner and cheaper to produce. The panel charges a battery that can give 80 hours of playback on a full charge. Supposedly 20 minutes of English or Swedish summer sunshine will get you an hour's worth of playback. They can also charge off artificial light when they're inside. And if you get impatient, you can still charge them up from a wall socket. They're available now for $199.99. Urbanista also has a solar powered earbud set called Phoenix with a solar panel in the charging case, not on the buds, coming later this year for $149. Man, if 20 minutes of English sunshine gets you an hour, I bet LA sunshine is going to get me like a day. Yeah, Canadian winter, I'm all set, it'll work. No, this is good. And they're nice looking headphones, a little bit pricey, but they are also big Bose-like headphones. I feel like it's interesting that they have the earbuds coming up. I might be in for that. And the fact that they charge off natural light, they charge better outside in bright sunlight, but they'll even charge off the indoor lights means that you might not really have to plug them in all that often. They're pretty comparable in price to AirPods also. Yeah. Yeah. Which seems like I'd be willing to jump on board for them. I was expecting them to be way more than that. Yeah. And the Verge did a review on these and said, the sound quality of the specs of this is average. They're not going to be the best headphones you can buy, but they're decent. So if you're an audiophile, maybe this isn't for you. But for the average user who just wants the ability to have the convenience of the solar power and not have to be plugging them in all the time. I don't know. Might be worth a look. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Got an email from John said, you and Scott were talking about the guitar amp that was using machine learning to match the system performance by using pink noise. We have a research project with a university trying to apply this concept to mechanical systems. Yes. Machine learning is amazing. In mechanical systems, this is called system identification and the application of machine learning to this field is very new. I'm going to ask the professors to compare their work to this product that you guys talked about. Glad I heard about it on your show. Well, John, that's exactly why we do this. So I'm very glad to hear that. John goes on. By the way, did you know that Johnson noise is a thing in electronics? You mentioned it in the pitch to Scott. And I wonder if you knew about it already or it was just serendipitous alliteration. And no, it's not Scott knocking something over in the middle of the night. Rather, it's the noise generated by the atoms wobbling due to being warm. We have to take this into account when designing analog circuits. Keep up the great work. You're double e-boss, John. First of all, I did not know there was Johnson noise when I made that joke about Scott knocking something over and causing Johnson noise. And the fact that it's generated by atoms wobbling is like mind-blowing. I love that. It's very metal. Yeah. Well, it depends on which atoms. But it could be. Yeah. Well, thank you Blair Mazderich for joining us today. It's a pleasure as always. Hopefully we helped increase some animal understanding here. Let folks know where they can find more of what you do out there. Absolutely. I am on Twitter at Blair's Menagerie and mostly share animal things. Shocking. This Week in Science is my podcast. I'm on with Dr. Kiki Sanford and Justin Jackson. We are every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on YouTube. And we also are Everywhere You Find podcasts. Also, I will give a plug that I am working on a calendar this year made out of all Legos. Say that again. Yes. My calendar for this Week in Science for this year is Lego-based. So I'll share some photos when we're all done. Will I have to build the calendar myself? No. No, it'll just be Lego illustrations. Yeah. Here, I have one right. Okay. If you watch the video of this, of Daily Tech News Show, you'll see Blair's calendar. Oh, that's so cute. So it'll be like pictures of those? Yeah. Out in nature. Lego parrot. You include instructions? No. That's my artistic license, actually. Yeah. Security through security. Reverse engineering yourself, folks. You want to make that parrot? No, I can't wait for that. I love the twist calendar. It's one of my favorite things. It's one of my favorite year end rituals is getting the new calendar. I've got, what do I got behind me today? Oh, it's the hammerhead shark. Yeah. Yeah. Because it says great hammerhead, but when I read it, I always think get hammered. I mean, you are getting hammered by putting that up on the wall. Exactly. Yeah, every day as soon as I walk in. All right, Jen, we got a new boss, eh? We do. We want to say thanks to our brand new boss, Adam. Welcome back, Adam. Thank you so, so much. Yay. This could be you tomorrow, folks. If you want to join up at the Patreon, you get access to the Discord. You get bonus episodes. You get the longer version of the show. That's all available at patreon.com. If you are a patron, stick around for that extended show. Good day. Internet starting momentarily. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live back tomorrow. Talking about Wi-Fi 6 backhaul with Dave Hamilton and I as actor. 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.