 coming up on D T N S duck duck go wants to protect your email privacy a new messenger alternative to WhatsApp and why Venmo why just why this is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday July 20th 2021 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane from sunny Canada I'm Jen Cutter and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang we were just talking about those Netflix earnings that just came in losing 430,000 in Canada and the US but picking up 1.5 million worldwide and doubling down on gaming if there's more out of that earnings call we'll we'll be covering it in the days to come but you can hear our first impressions on good day internet become a member get that show patreon.com slash D T N S let's start with a few tech things you should know China's ministry of industry and information technology named 142 apps currently violating users rights and given until July 26th to take corrective actions Amazon's China app and NetEase's dash in were cited for illegally collecting user information and 10 cents live streaming app who ya reportedly deceived misled or forced users to turn on unspecified permissions amnesty international's researchers have provided a toolkit to help identify if your phone is one that has been targeted by NSO groups Pegasus Skyware it's called the mobile verification toolkit or MVT so if you want your MVT here's how to get it works on the command line will take an entire iPhone backup and feed in for any indicators of compromise even if the backup is encrypted on Android MVT can scan the device backup for text messages with links to domains known to be used by NSO and be able to tell you like hey you better watch out the toolkit can also scan for potentially malicious apps installed on your device it's available at amnesty's get hub page square is launching a suite of savings checking and lending services for merchants called square banking powered by square financial services industrial bank it started operating back in March square savings let sellers put a percentage of each sale into a high yield account and also create folders to track specific priorities and goals like taxes emergency funds things like that square checking supports the square debit card and a CH transfers and team payment with square payroll and square loans offers financing options and let's merchants repay loans with a percentage of their daily square sales YouTube has acquired Sim Sim a social commerce startup that helps small businesses in India transition to e commerce by connecting companies with influencers and customers idea is that micro influencers that means they have small amount of influence not that they're small themselves can reach a targeted audience create entertainment build trust and offer personalized messaging more effectively than trying to run ads on a big social platform in order to reach the Indian market terms of the deal were not disclosed valves new steam deck maxes out at 512 gigabytes of internal drive space which might make you wonder how many games you can realistically play on the portable PC and how well when asked about that on Twitter valve engineer Lawrence Yang said that steam deck games run really well in a micro SD card Yang said games will load faster off internal storage but games still play great off an SD card fact when IGN came by all the games they tried and shop footage of were played off a micro SD card all right let's talk about duck.go privacy focused search engine duck.go is offering an email protection feature you get a free at duck.com email address I mean right there that's fun just to have a duck.com email address but it also will allow you to have anybody who emails you at that address get analyzed for trackers which are then removed before they are loaded the rest of the email is then forward along to regular address you'll see a small bar at the top of the email telling you what trackers were removed you can also create unique disposable addresses from the duck.go mobile browser or browser extension those are meant for free trials or anything where you think you know what they might be selling my address to a spammer let me just let me just give them this one and then you can easily deactivate that address without having to cut off everyone you've ever given your duck.com email to to set it up go to duck.go's mobile app go to settings tap email protection and join the wait list because duck.go says it's going to be a couple of weeks before we can give everybody an address you get a notification in the app when it's time to set up your account now if you're a little wary of letting duck.go have all your email the company says the tracker stripping is done in the server's ram it never actually downloads the trackers so your email is also never written to a disk it just does it in RAM and sends it along never gets stored so that's a good way to do it this is not a new thing there's lots of services that do similar things even Apple offers kind of a similar thing and at least as far as the disposable email addresses go but it's all nicely packaged up in one service and it's from a company that I think has built up some trust with people as far as protecting your privacy. Yeah, Jen, did you get a duck.com email yet? I'm hoping to I will say for everyone else who's trying to get in if you don't see it yet update the app because I was like oh no are they not offering it in Canada and they did I just had to update the app and it showed up so I'm hoping to and like the duck.com email address will make all of the phone auto correct finally helpful for that work. I suffer from spam is such a part of life and also spam filters I mean I've got a Gmail address that I use it's not my only email address but it's my primary email address and it doesn't catch everything but it catches most things and I it's very rare that something goes into spam that actually wasn't spam so I think I've just gotten used to a life where I'm like the spam filters aren't perfect but they mostly work but that doesn't stop my information from floating around all over the place so this is a good habit to get into and like you said Tom there are other services that have been offering this exact thing for some time but duck duck goes pretty trusted and it's it's a it's a cool service. Yeah I mean you can set Gmail to just not load a bunch of stuff which would probably do most of what duck duck go is doing here and most people aren't going to want to go to the trouble of setting this up and telling everybody oh send it to my duck.com email address from now on or using that this is goodwill though for duck duck go to say you know what we're providing this they they're also creating a browser they have their mobile browser they're going to have a desktop browser soon so so they really are just trying to brand themselves as the company that is not trying to invade your privacy to make their business work they still sell ads on their search engine that's where they're making all their money for right now but those ads are targeted based on the keywords you search not on who you are. All right tell me about another way to protect your privacy here's another alternative. All right so before Facebook bought WhatsApp. Naraj Arora was the chief business officer and Michael Donahue was the engineering director. Arora left in 2018 and Donahue in 2019 the two former WhatsApp employees have just launched a new private social network called Hello app. Hello is available on iOS and Android supports encrypted chats and find your friends by phone numbers so you'll have to give it access to your contact list to use it. It has four tabs post from friends group chats individual chats and settings. Everything is sorted entirely chronologically there is no algorithm that's it really simple. There's no ads and intends to eventually make money by charging subscription fees for some features in the future. You know it strikes me now with the duck duck go story and this that when when the dot com era was happening in the 2000s the idea of charging for a subscription was a negative right. It's like why not just give it to me free because free with ads was not considered to be a problem. We have totally come around to where we're going to charge you remember there used to be this scares of like Facebook is going to start charging you and people would freak out right and get angry. Now it's like hey we're starting a Facebook competitor but don't worry we'll only charge you. We're not going to sell ads on this. I signed up for the Hello app not too many of my friends have signed up so it's not terribly useful now that's always the rub with messengers is can you get enough people to use it but it is nicely designed. It's very simple so I could see where there's some features in there that people are going to want that they can say hey you know for you know five dollars a year we'll give you some of these features and maybe for ten dollars a year we'll give you a few more. Remember that's what WhatsApp was doing. You paid 99 cents once to get a bunch of features in WhatsApp back before Facebook bought. This is yeah I don't want to say that Hello is a bad idea because it actually doesn't sound like a bad idea at all and there are plenty of folks who say as great as WhatsApp might be and as many people that there are out there using it I don't want to use a Facebook product. Lots of people feel that way or you might just you know not want to use WhatsApp for other reasons so it's nice to have an alternative and it being not just a oh this is the way that Jen and I talk to each other you know one on one but more of a social network that's a little bit more locked down also great but yeah it's it's where everybody is you know I I think this is you know I don't know how similar it's going to be to something like PATH which was actually a private social network but for a while my PATH friend group was really active and it was cool it was like not so much secret conversations but just a place that was a little bit more for us away from the big social networks and then it kind of died out and then I had no use for it anymore so if everybody is having these fun conversations on hello I will eventually go there as well but I kind of follow the herd in that sense. I am hoping to lead some of the herd on that I am I am actually legitimately excited for this app these are people who saw what Facebook was doing and said no we don't want that and left and are starting their own thing and like most of my fun private chats are with my hockey team and a lot of them are trying to get away from Facebook which is impressive for a not tech audience that tells you how Facebook is kind of plummeted in that regard and also for a lot of people who I know who have Twitter's and then locked it and don't want to have to deal with like the whole discourse if the posting is good enough here and if enough of their friends are on it now you're kind of running your own private Twitter and it's streamlined and it's chronological oh my god I just want more things to be chronological yeah yeah so far I have two friends on on hello app rich straffolino and Leo Laporte and Leo is the only one I've actually communicated with on it we we talked about shrimp on the north shore of Hawaii so it's it's got a little ways to go but you're off to a good start yeah delicious start exactly well this might be delicious if you are a fan of speakers because Sony announced two high-end home theater products with hdmi 2.1 pass through ports that support 8k 4k gaming at 100 Hertz Dolby vision HDR e arc and more first one is a sound bar called the hd a 7000 it supports lots of things like Dolby at most 7.1.2 channel audio has two hdmi 2.1 inputs which the verge notes means you could run something like a PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X through this single sound bar also has two up firing speakers two beam tweeters five front speakers and a built in dual subwoofer subwoofer in the sound bar I'm jealous already it can auto adapt your room and supports 360 reality audio high-res audio and is compatible with Amazon's assistant Google's assistant Chromecast Spotify connect and Apple Airplay to the bar will sell for $1300 so if you're saying take my money that's how much money you're gonna need you can add a standalone 200 watt subwoofer if you're just like I need more base that'll be another $400 if you want even more base at 300 watt subwoofer goes for $700 you can also add wireless rear surround speakers for 350 now the other and in fact more expensive system is the hd a 9 has four wireless speakers that are just a little bit above one foot and a control box with one hdmi 2.1 input an ethernet port and an auxiliary jack a sony TV can act as the center channel on the system put the speakers anywhere that they fit and the system will tune performance accordingly in fact sony's claiming it can create up to 12 phantom speakers by synthesizing sound waves based on the positions of the speakers in whatever room you are using this set costs $1800 now both the I know I know I know it's it's it's hurting it's hurting already both hd a 7000 hd a 9 will start shipping sometime between September and October that's according to sony so they are right around the corner but they are not cheap they are they're high end I mean these prices are not outrageous for super high end speakers but yeah I think with sony everybody's like oh you know a mainstream consumer level speaker that's not what they're priced at and and they're specced out very well too I mean these these these are I don't know what they sound like because I haven't heard of but but these are specced out as high end speakers for sure and the idea of having that flexibility of just you know having four speakers put them wherever you want in the room the sony machine learning will figure out you know the best way to give you that speaker that kind of technology is advanced and it works really well now and Jen I know you are excited about having two hdmi 2.1 inputs for the game consoles right oh yeah like my TV is a bit older and I think like I can get more life out of it by increasing the sound fidelity in my space so all I have to do now is win the lottery that I don't play so I can get the two input thing because two inputs are the future I'm surprised that the other one the more expensive one only has one like that two inputs is such a great feature I hope other people in lower end stuff adopted so I can get one yeah I think I'm used to like oh I plug my consoles my Apple TVs and stuff into the TV and then I use eARC for the one speaker thing what what what do you like about having the two hdmi's in the speaker itself uh because I have a very old smart TV that I already had to put uh extra things on to get all of my things hooked up but in the future when I do upgrade I'm going to hope that uh future TVs actually have decent sound or I will look at a soundbar my brother's running just like a standard soundbar and I cannot believe how much better it sounds like watching movies and hockey at his place this soundbar is I have a soundbar it's a uh sonos beam very nice uh it works like a charm it is not this though so I look at this and I go ooh built-in dual subwoofer but I already have an external stuff that I paid for it's like the these are the sorts of things that I always get stuck in okay if I was starting from scratch this is perfect because so it's it's got everything but it's not that big and you know you can you can add so many um so much hardware to it but when you already have a system that you've paid for it's uh you know it just I can't I can't upgrade I have I have no incentive really except to be cool everyone at the twitch chat is saying put it on the live with it list so I'll do that right now I'm not guaranteeing it becomes Sarah's live with it but you know just in case yeah just put on the list it's not going to hurt us yeah just put on the list uh what else might be on your list is something from nothing yes I'm talking about nothing the company you might think that there's nothing left for nothing to announce about its ear one earbuds come in July 27th at least we're getting an announcement about it something very official but Carl pay has been leaking information to various outlets all the same his latest interview comes from Sina where he shared photos of the fully transparent case and mostly transparent earbuds they do look cool pay told CNET that the battery life will be 24 hours with noise cancellation on so more than that without noise cancellation and we'll still pay attention next week to see if there are any other details left to announce price availability things like that I had such an interesting strategy that Carl pay is taking with nothing where he just keeps leaking out stuff on purpose before it can get leaked out I mean I guess he thinks like the stuff usually leaks out anyway let me just go to CNET and show them the pictures instead of waiting for android authority or android police or somebody to get ahold of them and leak them for me I I mean other than price and availability I'm not sure what's left to announce next week but we'll see hey patrons did you know your ad free rss feed can have just dTNS or just GDI or both check your tier on patreon if it says dTNS you get dTNS if you could says GDI you get GDI if it says all you get them both if you want to change that just change your tier and it will change what shows up in your rss feed that's all at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon rss stands for rc colas no it stands for rich communication service it's a standard meant to replace sms a simple messaging service rss lets mobile carriers interoperate while sending higher resolution pictures video read receipts supporting group chats now you may say I could already do that in the messenger app on my phone right now that's because your app is handling some of that or your carrier is doing other workarounds the fact that you don't have rss on a lot of these phones is why sometimes people on phones with differing operating systems don't see messages the same way or if you've ever had a group chat broken up into separate individual conversations that's why but starting next year Verizon will support rss and preload preload android messages as its default texting app on all Verizon android phones that follows AT&T and t-mobile who have already uh said they're doing the same thing google's implementation of rss also interoperates with other rss systems around the world and there are about 473 million active rss users worldwide so full support in the us is going to boost that even higher but there's one big outlier rss is not yet supported by apple's ios which makes for an interesting security situation android messages implementation of rss supports end-to-end encryption for one to one conversations and will soon support it for group chats apple's messenger app the messages app has end to end encryption with other ios users but not if you fall back to sms your end to end encrypted with the blue texts not the green ones because sms doesn't support it but rss does support end to end encryption however because apple doesn't support rss that means when an apple user and an android user text each other it falls back to sms meaning android conversations with ios users are less secure so google did some gentle nudging today senior vice president of android chrome os in the play store hiroshi lockheimer told the verge the fallback messaging experience on the other platform i think we know what other platform he's talking about will not have encryption if it's still sms i think that is a pretty interesting dynamic and i would hope that is everyone focuses on security and privacy it becomes an important part of the discussion very gentle way of saying apple come on support rss i don't think he's wrong i don't you know i there's there's really no reason for i mean the only the only and incredibly dumb argument would be for apple to say well you should just get an iphone and then you don't have any issues that is just you know what i mean like otherwise it just it doesn't make any sense for apple to be a holdout on something that is is is is going to make compatibility better and security better for everybody my one question would be because like everything does sms is rcs more complicated on phones to run or can pretty much every phone out there handle rcs and chooses not to because say apple and i message because that would be my only concern worldwide and i don't know enough about phones to answer that so i'm putting it to you tom rcs has been around for a while my guess is all but the oldest phones should be able to handle it just fine it's a standard and almost every phone can send images and do group chats if you're doing it within the ecosystem right they can all do it on what's app that can all do it within messages on even on older iPhones so yeah i don't i don't think that would i can't think of any reason why that would be a hang up but the only other reason i could think of is apple looking at all the work they did to support read receipts and multimedia messaging and everything on messages and saying but our implementation is better than the standard which you often see apple do they're saying yeah there's a standard but ours is better in which case i could see them reluctant to support rcs but i i just if you support sms as your fallback why not just change to supporting rcs as your fallback maybe they were waiting for it to get popular enough to make it worth the effort to implement but i think we're there i think it's popular enough now yeah or at the iphone event in september which is not announced yet but let's just assume apple decides to invent rcs that is i mean i'm kind of only half kidding that sometimes you're like 92 percent chance of being right there is that apple announces a support for a great new standard out there better security than ever for our apple customer they never call it rcs it's only called rcs on the graphic that's up behind them right yeah yeah it's just magically compatible and they also have to do something about their security on messages because there's a couple of zero days where you don't even have to open the message for your phone to be compromised oh yeah well that's that's what we were talking about with the um um oh we just we just mentioned it at the beginning of the show uh the s o group yeah the pegasus thing exactly uh so yeah i you know having a having a fallback standard uh is not new for apple they did it with sms time to upgrade time to upgrade that fallback standard rcs i think now now is the time and maybe that's why uh heroshi is being being so gentle he knows he they're gonna do it it's fine next up we have snob o s's nikah monford is back with another spotlight on a black tech entrepreneur in this month's teching wild black hi this is nikah monford aka tech savvy diva of the snob west show in the teching wall black segment i will bring awareness to a black technology leader who is advancing the tech community through their innovations across the spectrum of industries today in teching wall black let's highlight tope atana founder and ceo of callin lee the number one and fastest growing company and scheduling automation a native of nigeria and transplant to atlanta georgia he bootstrapped callin lee single-handedly by emptying his retirement accounts maxing out credit cards and taking out small business loans all in the midst of quitting his corporate sales job the company that he founded is the fourth fourth u.s company with a black founder to be valued above one billion dollars with a 350 million dollar investment earlier this year from open view venture partners and iconique the current valuation is three billion dollars this is where he is now but where he started from was graduating high school two years early then going on to the university of georgia as a graduate and management information systems at 18 he patented his idea to use optical character recognition to determine which bills were being used and dispensed after noticing the cash register at his part-time job was not calculating correctly he pitched his idea to ncr which was interested in the technology but he ultimately turned down ncr's offer he had several other startup companies before callin lee including single to taken projector spot and yard stills needless to say his early years led him to be the ceo and founder that he is today to find out more about tope in his work you can follow him on twitter at the handle at tope ultana history is being made in real time every single day so let's celebrate it now when we are aware of all innovative voices especially those in underrepresented groups the tech community thrives be sure to tune into the next teching wall black where we highlight black innovators from around the globe thank you nika uh good stuff every month nika from snobo scast.com uh bringing us another entrepreneur and calamity i bet a lot of people use it and don't even know the story behind it so that would that was fascinating to me uh by the way in our chat bigfoot energy said uh or apple opens up i-messages protocol for all platforms to use and then chastise as other companies for not implementing it it's another better another possibility there all right we're saying goodbye to the inexplicable ten dollars paid for alien emoji or the twenty dollars for drugs haha you know you've seen it and that's right venmo is ending the practice of showing you a global feed of payments from people you don't know who paid for things and then told the world about it you will now only see payments from your friends or private payments between you and another person if you want to look at that view as well venmo says this change allows customers to connect and share meaningful moments and experiences with the people who matter most also money i um never understood and maybe i'm just too old but i never understood why venmo by default so a lot of people didn't even realize it was on put all of your transactions public in a feed on venmo i mean it was a different time when venmo launched everything was social and nobody was suspicious of it i guess i don't know i think in the early days it was meant to just drum up interest and then adoption like oh look at all these people that are sharing stuff and some of the you know the little reasons that because you always have to give a reason for what the payments for you know they're funny or clever or there's so much there's so much going on i felt that way i also quickly felt like oh god i don't need the whole world to know about you know me paying my landlord for something or yeah or it just it i couldn't think of any time that i would pay for something that i wanted to share although as a fly on the wall of global payments it was very interesting i know i wasn't alone i've seen a lot of people on twitter today going oh man i love global payment speed you know i wish i wish they'd let me still spy on everybody but it's it's honestly a huge security issue um i'll give you a quick example i used to pay one of my landlords on venmo and i moved out of this particular apartment a long time ago and for whatever reason he kind of showed up in my i guess he's in my friend's feed i was in a contact yeah right yeah he's in my contacts and i clicked on his name and i could see everything going in and out from his accounts so people who were for sure not in my contacts who were paying him were still showing up in the feed of his that i could see and like let's just say i wanted to know when somebody was about to move into my old apartment like i could kind of figure that out from the deposit that they just sent him and that is you know i'm not going to do anything with that information but i don't think they would you know if they really thought about it they wouldn't want me to know that either that is alarmingly public and i'm so happy that it's closed venmo's not as huge up here but like yeah people watching that would be just incredibly fascinating but the fact that you can click on one of your friends and see what like friends of their friends are doing and just oh no this is spiraled out of control yeah i know thank goodness venmo money isn't real all right uh let's check out the mail bag uh steven sent us a message he actually sent it through patreon and said really loving seniors in tech seniors in tech is our is our uh limited podcast series that we've been running on saturdays in our dts feed so thank you steven steven said definitely busting stereotypes and so brilliantly presented and you know we agree dr nicky ackerman's has done such a good job and uh actually we have one more episode that'll be in the dts feed this saturday and if you are enjoying stuff like this and you'd like us to do more whether it's the series or something that you think we might uh be able to tackle well please do let us know we'd love to hear about it yeah and phil messaged us through patreon saying he's always disappointed when he doesn't hear his name in the show so there you go phil phil you matter yeah we hear you phil there's anything else we can do for you please do let us know or any back at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email but seriously uh your feedback is super appreciated keep it coming also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels today they include david mosher dan voiles and logan larson we'd also like to give an extra special thanks to ruchan brantley one of our top lifetime supporters for dtns thank you for all the years of support ruchan you are the best yeah ruchan's been with us a long time nice really long time yeah top lifetime supporter uh matters matters uh matters a lot so thank you so much thanks also to jen cutter for being with us today uh jen what's going on when you're not doing headlines and and this show uh well i recently took up kayaking but that's the side thing uh everything uh usually about me yelling about games is on twitter which is twitter at jen cutter and that is jen with two ends very cool we are live monday through friday on this show four thirty p.m eastern twenty thirty utc if you can join us live we would love to have you you can also find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back at it tomorrow with scott johnson talk to you then bye phil this show is part of the frogpants network get more at frogpants.com i hope you have enjoyed this brover