 Coming up on DTNS, Apple says it'll announce so many things this year, but don't count out Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, who bought up so many companies last year. And also, let's save some heat. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 24th, 2022. In Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty, sir. Before the show, we were talking, we were talking about football. Well, we were also talking about the over and under is on all sorts of things. If you'd like to get that wider show, it's called Good Day Internet. Have a lot of fun before and after the show every day. It is available at patreon.com slash DTNS. And of course, we want to give a big thanks to our top patrons, including Hector Bones, Tim Ashman and Johnny Hernandez. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Meta announced that it's building an AI research supercluster, or an RSC, which is a supercomputer designed to train machine learning systems and set to be complete later this year. Meta says the RSC will be used to build, improve content moderation systems, also develop augmented reality features and design experiences for the metaverse. Phase one of RSC is already running using 760 NVIDIA GGG. A 100 systems with 6,080 connected GPUs and providing a claimed 20 timed improved performance on machine vision research tasks. Phase two will bring the total GPUs up to 16,000 and be able to train AI systems with more than a trillion parameters on datasets as large as an exabytes. In December, a UK high court judge ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be extradited to the US. This overturned a district court judge that blocked extradition on mental health grounds. However, a high court judge is now granted Assange the right to petition the UK Supreme Court for hearing over his extradition. There's no guarantee that this request for hearing will be granted or what would happen at that hearing. Just this is the latest update going on with Julian Assange. Attorneys general from the District of Columbia and also the states of Texas, Washington and Indiana filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company deploys dark patterns to influence users to share their location data. The lawsuit also alleges that from 2014 to 2019, Google made false claims about information collection when people turned off the location history in in their settings. Panasonic will start mass producing new lithium ion batteries as early as 2023, which are twice as big as older versions, but offer five times the capacity estimated to provide 50 percent more range at the same weight while costing up to 20 percent less to produce. Panasonic began development of these batteries at the request of Tesla. And no surprise, they'll be the first to receive the first shipments. Apple extended its exemption from its in-app purchase commission for online group and event apps until June 30th. Apple introduced this exemption back in 2020. The company said that the extension was due to the recent resurgence of COVID and its continued impact on in-person services. All right, Rich, let's talk about big companies buying smaller companies. Yeah, I mean, if it seemed like big tech went on a little bit of a buying spree last year, it's not just you. We have some data from the Analysts at Deologic and they found that Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet each announced more acquisitions in 2021 than any year in the past decade. Microsoft publicly announced 56 deals, Amazon 29 and Alphabet 22. The value of those deals also hit 10-year high for Alphabet at over $20 billion. Amazon's $15.7 billion deal volume only trails behind 2017. And that's when they bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. So that kind of spiked that year. Microsoft's only bigger year for acquisitions was 2016. And that's what it acquired LinkedIn for a cool $26 billion. So, you know, a lot of these figures are a little inflated for based on one large acquisition in 2021. Microsoft bought Nuance for $19 billion and Amazon is buying MGM Studios or closed on buying MGM Studios for $8.5 billion. So those are some big deals. Alphabet actually had their big deal with Fitbit closed. That was valued at $2.1 billion. So it only accounts for about, you know, 2.1 percent here. You know, Sarah, I know there's been some regulatory speculation about, you know, maybe why these deals are closing fast and furious these days. I'm curious, you know, at the end of the day, like, I guess, what are your thoughts on just the kind of the scale and scope of these acquisitions? I mean, a lot of the acquisitions over the past couple of years, you know, but let's use 2021 as an example, because that's what we're talking about specifically. You know, a lot of this seems to be a company saying, OK, life has changed for a lot of folks. Here's a company that we can acquire to make us the supplier for that, you know, clouds situation that somebody has to now deal with now that they're working from home. So some of that, I think, is definitely part of it. You know, my first reaction was like, well, where's Activision Blizzard? That's 2022. So that's not even factored into this. I wonder if when we get to the end of this year, what we're going to look back, you know, are we going to look back on the 2021 numbers and say, yeah, well, you know, the Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, you know, certainly made some big purchases, but I wonder how much the same trend is is is going to continue. Or I wonder how much if the FTC gets involved, how much of of of this kind of land grab won't be possible anymore. Yeah, and that's kind of where everyone is is try. I think that some of the speculation is the FTC is trying to hedge their bet or these companies trying to hedge their bets against the FTC. They've already started the FTC has started, you know, sending out letters to some companies that, hey, it might be in the merger acquisition talks, letting them know that we are going to be reviewing this, possibly rolling back mergers if, you know, we find, you know, there are there are competitive reasons to do so. So kind of not taking necessarily strong action, probably the biggest action the FTC is taking is trying to block the Nvidia arm deal coming out with a bunch of global regulators to that degree. And that's where I think it's interesting because Microsoft, you know, buying nuance that I don't see that as a competitive issue. Necessary. That's a huge deal for Microsoft. Obviously signals, you know, where they're continued investment in things like AI and around health care and that kind of stuff. Amazon buying a movie studio, not surprising, given the current landscape of streaming, it's it's, you know, seeing that the FTC has already moved to block that Nvidia arm deal with the Activision Blizzard now acquisition. That, to me, seems a lot more analogous to that in terms of how it's positioned in the market. And I feel like that, to me, feels more like a move to, hey, this is a I mean, in terms of any of these other deals, this is, you know, twice as big as or more than twice as big as buying LinkedIn, you know, for Microsoft. So that, to me, feels like if we're going to say something as a reaction to potential FTC scrutiny, that deal, to me, feels like that more than what we saw necessarily in 2021. At the same time, every single one of these deals, I remember thinking, hmm, is this even going to happen? You know, so, you know, it's a little bit too much. I definitely felt that way when Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016. Like that was not last year. Now it's sort of like, oh, yeah, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, whatever. So much of this, I think, is the company that is acquiring the smaller company or, you know, they're acquiring whatever company for how much of a lump sum says, we can't do this. We can't do this without them. It's not about hurting competition. It's about the fact that we need this and we, you know, we're not able to do this without this, you know, extremely talented group of people that we're now going to absorb into our company. And that works sometimes, not always, but in many cases, as we sell in 2021, I mean, we'll see if there's some pushback on it. But Fitbit is the only deal I can really point to where it was like, it was kind of touch and go for a while. Well, and it seems like that arm deal is going to be the same way. And that's a great point, though, is to think about what that deal is, the FTC is not the only game in town. You know, the EU and increasingly China have a big say in a lot of these deals too, and the FTC is not operating alone for sure. Well, there's a Chinese firm called Fuzhou 985 Technology. Might not be a household name for you. Not, it wasn't for me until recently, but it has made news after it acquired a WeChat account previously set up for Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. So just an account, not WeChat itself. This wasn't Morrison's personal account either. His office used it to message Australian voters of Chinese ethnic origin with messages in Mandarin. You know, talking to the folks, this isn't unusual either. Both of Australia's major political parties use WeChat to communicate in this manner. Other countries do the same. Morrison had about 76,000 followers on the account. So it seems like a lot, but maybe not so much for a political figure. But this was the way that he was talking to certain folks who were interested in what he had to say, emphasis on what he had to say. These WeChat accounts were set up for political leaders in Australia through outsourced agencies. Records show that this particular account of Morrison's, or at least was attributed to Morrison, was registered back in 2019 with the name of a Chinese citizen in mainland China as the operator. The agency reported that it lost access to the account in July of 2021. And then emailed WeChat on January 10th, asking for the account to be returned, saying, hey, this is our account. The account renamed itself Australia, China, New Life in January and notified followers it would promote Chinese life in Australia. According to a Fuzhou 985 employee, the company that bought the account did so because it had a big, large fan base, but was unaware that it was connected to Morrison at all. WeChat owner Tencent said the dispute would be handled in accordance with our platform rules. WeChat just kind of saying like, hey, read the terms and conditions. Yeah, we don't want to get into it. This was kind of a headscratcher for me today, Rich. So I'm like, OK, there was an account that was not Prime Minister Scott Morrison's personal account, but something that people attributed to what he was doing and saying that was designed to help the Chinese community in Australia feel more included. Using Mandarin as in our language, for example, and then all of a sudden it's sold and then it's somewhat changed in its goals for how to reach everybody that would follow this WeChat. And sure, I mean, we're talking about under 100,000 people, but if those are highly engaged people, that's still a lot of folks. Well, and it's still a politician trying to reach a constituency in a way that other political parties in Australia are doing. And doing so, like, there's been a lot of reaction from Morrison and others in his party, saying this is censorship of free speech. WeChat needs to do something about this. I think that's a little, maybe a little hyperbolic. It seems like what's interesting to me is I wonder if we crawl into a WeChat subreddit, if this kind of, hey, we someone sold, I used an agent to buy an account if I'm a business or something like that. And I registered it with this person living in China and now all of a sudden it got sold, if that doesn't happen. And it just so happens that, hey, they had the head of the Australian government and so it makes international news now. I will add very quickly that this is one of those situations where as a politician or a political party, often said is like, you need to control the messaging. You need to control your message. In some ways it's also about like, you need to make sure the platform you're on isn't gonna be sold from underneath you because that can be incredibly detrimental to your messaging. One thing that won't be detrimental to our messaging is reclaiming maybe some waste heat. Now you may be saying, Rich. It's big for yourself. Seamless, let me just tell you this. Listen, Sarah, in the world of energy, waste heat, it's all over the place, okay? Right, you're paying for heat. It's not going, you're not warm. It's going somewhere else. It's going somewhere. I mean, if you ever touched a hot water pipe in your basement, even though your parents warned you not to and you thought better of it and you still tried it anyway, that waste heat is what caused that first to be burned, Sarah. The idea of using something like a thermoelectric generator is also not necessarily a new idea. These operate by putting the generator by heat source and it generates a current as electrons move from the hot to the cold side of the device. So in 2020, scientists at Penn State and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory created a thermoelectric generator that proved more efficient than commercial units in high temperature situation. The only issue was that it was rigid. It needed to be glued onto something like a heat pipe, which having to go through the glue decreases, the efficiency of the glue is absorbing some heat after all. Now the team has published research on a new flexible thermoelectric generator, which can wrap around common waste heat sources without any glue. Think of any number of heat pipes that you come across. In tests on a three inch squared area, the generator maintained a 150% power density advantage over competitive units in the market with a total power output of 56.6 Watts. The researchers envisioned these being used in something like an industrial power plant on pipes where you have hundreds of feet of these and able to generate kilowatts of energy that would otherwise just be going out into the ether probably causing the need for additional cooling if all of these heat pipes are generating heat and not being used. So, Sarah, we're in an environment now where we're looking to decrease carbon footprints, we're looking to increase energy efficiency kind of across industries here. This is really exciting to me because this is something that can be used if this can be commercialized at scale to kind of, okay, we can increase the efficiency not really having to change the infrastructure as kind of a stop gap. And I feel like- Like wrap around the infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, now this is a big step. This is a research, we're talking about three inches square area here, but the initial research is showing that this does scale fairly well in their initial trials. So that is exciting to see for sure. Yeah, I mean, when we're talking about what's going on at a power plant, for example, you know, not having too much insider information on how much heat is being wasted at something like this, can't imagine that this wouldn't be a good thing. You know, if used responsibly and if it ends up being something that heat is saved and therefore, savings are passed along to the end user, great. I also wonder, you know, in household situations how something like this, and again, people have lots of different heat and so the solution's not gonna be the same for everybody. I mean, I've got a split unit. I don't know exactly how this would help me specifically in my apartment, but just the idea of, hey, let's make this more efficient. It helps everybody, it helps the grid, it helps people's monthly bills. It seems like research that's going to save us eventually. Yeah, it's one of those things that domestic kind of uses for this interest me because, you know, living in Northeast Ohio, like I can put solar panels on my roof, but it's gonna take like 40 years to like pay off like something like this. I feel like for a lot of people in a lot of different areas could be a really interesting way. Again, it's not an infinite energy generator, right? Like we're still burning stuff to make all of this heat come out somewhere, right? We're still generating that steam, but it does increase efficiency, which can't be a bad thing. Again, commercialization probably a long way off for this, but a really interesting advance and can't wait to see where that's going. Well, listen, folks, all this week we're making exclusive Patreon content available to everybody. You might be on the fence saying, well, you know, as a patron, is my experience gonna be really different? We hope the answer's yes. So keep an eye on your public feeds and see a little bit more about what you're getting in those feeds for patrons, if you were to be a patron regularly. And if you like what you hear, you can learn more about where you can get to be a patron at patreon.com slash d-t-n-s. All right, everybody, we all want faster internet and it might be a good day for faster internet news if you're an AT&T customer or you might be a potential customer. AT&T rolled out upgraded plans for its Fiverr-based broadband service with plans that top off at symmetrical speeds of two gigabits per second and five gigabits per second, respectively. The new plans are available in over 70 metro areas, including Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The two gigabit per second plans start at $110 per month, goes up to $180 per month for the five gigabit per second plan. AT&T also says it'll be imposing equipment fees and data caps and annual contracts on new customers. So a little bit of a same old same, but that was working. So real quick, that is a typo, they will not be. That is a change in policy for AT&T. So that is my policy. So much better news. AT&T says it won't impose equipment fees, yes. Data caps, yes. Or annual contracts on new customers will see AT&T. The company plans to expand its Fiverr network as well from 15 million to 30 million customers by 2025. But that's not all, because if you don't require wired internet or you're just really a lot more interested in wireless, MediaTek conducted the first live demo of Wi-Fi 7 to key customers and industry collaborators. The demo showed MediaTek's multi-link operation technology combining multiple channels on different frequencies. The Wi-Fi Alliance says that Wi-Fi 7 could provide speeds of at least 30 gigabits per second. That sounds good. MediaTek said it expects Wi-Fi 7 products on the market by 2023, so it's not gonna be tomorrow. But it's on the horizon, although the standard could still be in draft speculation, specification rather at that time, which could slow things down. Yeah, and theoretically might be some software updates needed to bring everything in line once those early products come to market. But those Wi-Fi 7 speeds, I mean 30 gigabits per second, we're talking Thunderbolt 3 kind of levels of speed, and that really opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for wireless. When, you know, I mean, I know VR and AR are like super buzzy words, but if you could have a wireless connection that could do, you know, point to point 30 gigabits per second, that? I mean, that's way better than my wired connection right now, and my wired connection is pretty fast. Well, and what's interesting about what MediaTek's doing is, you know, multiple channels, different frequencies. So theoretically it could work around any kind of interference. So if you're in an apartment or something like that, would be able to better deal with a little bit more crowded spectrum. But, you know, the other side of this is that AT&T news. So now I am a AT&T Fiber subscriber, full disclosure. It's interesting because I love speeds and feeds, five gigabit per second, amazing, but I'm also the guy that downgraded from the gigabit plan to the 100 meg plan because I just, like I ended up not justifying, I was looking at kind of how I was using it and just ended up 100 megabits was good enough for work and streaming and all that good stuff. So I do wonder for commercial use, I understand why you could use that. You know, a bunch of machines hooked up, faster is always better, I want all the bandwidth. The smaller, for the home use, I'm not saying it's not needed, I'm not saying this is not a good thing, but I feel like the use cases perhaps will be discovering once the service is available, right? So as a Comcast customer, you know, with a gigabit internet plan, you know, I hadn't done a speed test in a while. So I was like, you know, what I was researching this story, I was like, what am I really getting? It's quite well under a gigabit, honestly, you know, for download, upload is nowhere near. And I, unless Skype gets weird on me, every once in a while, my connection is extremely solid. I mean, even I run an Airbnb, we're all on the same big old mesh network, you know, and people are always saying, well, we're gonna work from here and we're probably gonna be doing video calls and our kids have to zoom into school, like, can you handle it? And I'm like, we can handle it, don't you worry. And again, when I look at these speeds, I'm like, that's crazy, who needs that? But the thing is, is that if you need it, you need it. And if you've lived in a space where you don't have that capacity, then you don't think you need it until all of a sudden it's offered to you and then you find all sorts of ways to use BandBit. Well, yeah, I mean, those kind of use cases, like you said, your Airbnb, I could definitely see you get that five gig plan, you have an apartment, you know, a small apartment or condo thing, and you know, hey, everybody wants to split it, we can figure out how to separate all the, you know, the accounts and everything like that. That's a lot of bandwidth for a lot of people. So again, good that they're expanding the 70 metro areas, not insignificant, big markets getting hit with this. And what's fun about this is seeing what people will do with this. And if it pushes companies like Comcast to roll out faster fiber as well. Indeed. All right. And finally, a few, not finally, a few interesting tidbits from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman's power on the newsletter. What are you ending the show? I am, I'm calling it a race. One of these bits of news involves a team on the long reported Apple Car or lack thereof. The team's head of software engineering program management, Joe Bass, recently updated his LinkedIn page to state he left the company and is now working on technical program management at Meta. According to Gurman, nearly the entire Apple Car management team in place just one year ago is gone. Of course, Gurman also has plenty of reports on more immediately available hardware saying Apple's spring event in March or April. We haven't set a date yet. That's where he's pegging it. We'll feature a refreshed iPhone SE with 5G and an updated iPad Air with an A15 SoC. That's the one used in the iPad Mini and the iPad, one of the other iPads. No, I can't think of it. Yeah. Yes, the iPad Pro. Thank you, sir. Gurman sources also say that Apple is readying the widest array of new hardware products in its history for the fall with Gurman estimating the new iPhone series, a low-end MacBook Pro, a redesigned MacBook Air, a new iMac, Mac Pro, AirPods Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Watch. So, Sarah, are you looking forward to the hardware bonanza that will be this fall from Apple? Yeah, it sounds like it's gonna be a long one. I'll go ahead and give myself four hours for this. So a few things to unpack here. First of all, it wasn't that long ago. In fact, it was Bloomberg back in November and said, okay, Apple's internal Apple car team, whatever you wanna call them. Maybe Apple's moving a little bit more to we're going to provide the guts inside the car that somebody else provides. And some car manufacturers were floated around as potential partners. So it doesn't, this does not mean, that was just a couple of months ago, this does not mean that Apple is not still working on this. It does seem to be that either a lot of executives bounced because they weren't getting anywhere or Apple made sure that they did. So I'm not gonna say that the car isn't still a thing, but it looks a little like, hmm, I don't know. I don't know where we are, especially because Apple's touting all sorts of other things that it's working on. For example, and of course Mark Grimman is one of the best Apple sources that we have working for Bloomberg now, but if Apple has just a slew of product announcements this fall, if the AR VR headset isn't part of that, maybe then Apple will be in a better position to not have to explain why the supply chain and heating issues and all sorts of stuff that is rumored to be part of the problem with this whole rollout could be shelved a bit. Yeah, I do wonder if that does play a part of it. Hey, we're gonna spread the field with all the new hardware to maybe because we can't ship the VR headset for the end of the year or something like that. But the other thing is this does, if they release all this, let's assume maybe Q4 is when these are gonna be mainly in the retail channels. Apple already has been maintaining a strong Q4. Like it almost, and again, I know we don't get into the financials too much on DTNS, but I feel like they can't get off that roller coaster, right? Like you have to keep increasing that Q4. And I know Apple does not have any problems selling hardware, they basically set a record, right? Like every other, so it seems like, it seems like, that's the anecdotal evidence. But that's putting a lot of eggs in that kind of Q4 basket. I wonder if the chip shortage has also played a role in them not being able, maybe they wanted to put, maybe the iMac or the lower end redesigned or the lower end MacBook Pro, they wanted to release that earlier, knew they weren't gonna have the supply at that time. And so they had to delay it, maybe something like that and forcing them to kind of push it all into this one seemingly kind of big fall coming up. Yeah, just personally, I mean, I've been thinking about getting a new iMac for some time. And my MacBook Air is a year and just over a year old really, so I'm like, okay, how are you gonna redesign the MacBook Air? Like I got an M1 MacBook Air, it's pretty great. I don't really have any complaints about it. I mean, it's just my little silent killer over in the corner. But yeah, a lot of the stuff is probably going to, if you're in the market for an iPad Pro, if you never had the AirPods Pro, a new Apple Watch, like all of this is great. It could also just be incremental and then meant to be like a bonanza of products that aren't really super wow on their own. Again, just speculating. All right, well, last week we talked a little bit about, well, we talked quite a bit about the idea of folks that may not be paying for Google Workspace for custom domains and the like, things might be changing. So in the mailbag, we've got quite a few reactions. Jeremy, Tony, Alison, Sheridan all chimed in. We're gonna read Jeremy's email. Jeremy said, Jeremy from Sony, Melbourne, Australia wanted to add some input on the changes to Google Workspace. Jeremy says, I've been using the service for about 15 years, Jeremy, you and me both. This is only used for family email, but I have 10 accounts set up, all I can set up on the free tier. So the concept of now paying $6 per account per month is very expensive just for email. The other thing to also consider is that Google has been continually removing functionality away from the Workspaces service. So you can't use a Workspaces account to access family sharing type service. Google Home Services are limited. Even managing additional storage can be difficult. This reduces the value of the service dramatically. Jeremy says, I've commenced to looking for alternatives with the most important to be able to maintain my personal domain. Costs will obviously be a defining factor, but it needs to be easy to migrate and then have all the family also easily reconnect. I'm with you, Jeremy. One of the things that a lot of folks who emailed us about this, because there were quite a few of you, said I have not gotten any official anything from Google about this. I have not either. I keep kind of waiting for it because I'm a grandfathered in free custom domain person and I've been using Google for many years for this reason, but I absolutely agree with Jeremy. I don't, so sarahlane.com is my custom domain that I use in this way. Nobody else is getting email. I didn't have to set up multiple accounts. It's really just me, but it's a personal thing and I've had it for so many years and it would probably not kill me to figure out another option for this, but it would change my workflow quite a bit. All right, Rich, you got nothing. Let's, yeah, I mean, I, hearing the personal story a lot. I want you to feel my pain, Rich. Well, and Jeremy specifically like seeing that, like, I have these 10 accounts, this 60, you know, all of a sudden it's going to turn into 60 bucks a month. It's easy to say, all right, you got to pay for it. You got it for free, you know, but like hearing that, like it does being like, man, and not to get any word is also like very bizarre from Google. It is a little bizarre. What is not bizarre is some of our patrons who have been with us a really long time who have been super loyal to us and we'd like to thank some of you each week and today it is Tim Ashman. Tim, you're one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS and we thank you so much for all the years of support. We are also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC on this here very show and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and guess what? We're going to be back doing it all tomorrow because we do whatever week, Monday through Friday, tomorrow Owen JJ Stone joins us and talk to you there. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.