 Coming up on DTNS, Tim Stephens is here to talk about the class defining Mercedes EQS electric vehicle. Facebook and Reddit get into the clubhouse led audio revival and the premiere of our new segment, highlighting black tech innovators from snobo s's Nica Monford. Starting right now. This is the daily tech news for Monday, April 19th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. Joining us editor in chief of CNET road show, Tim Stephens is back on the show. Welcome back, Tim. Hey, Tom. Thanks for having me. We were just talking about all kinds of cool things in the electric vehicle universe, like when we're going to get some of the cooler electric trucks, whether a Clydesdale or a Mitsubishi Colt can win in a fight. If you want that wider conversation, get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. In a letter to Congress, Apple said it approved the return of the social network parlors iOS app to the app store. Apple informed parlor on April 14th that its changes to content moderation were acceptable to approve the app that the app would be available for download as soon as parlor releases it. Microsoft's Xbox cloud gaming is arriving on iOS and the PC on April 20th. It'll be an invite only beta and you have to be an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriber. And then if you pass those hurdles, you'll get a browser based version of the cloud gaming service that you can use on Edge, Chrome and Safari. Sony had previously announced it would shut down the PlayStation stores for the PS three and PlayStation Vita over the summer. However, the company now says it will keep those digital storefronts open for the foreseeable future. The PSP store will still shut down as announced on July 2 2021. Sony powered by backpedaling. The UK government filed an intervention notice over the sale of arm to Nvidia. What that means is before that acquisition can be finalized, the government will review the national security implications of the sale. The competition and markets authority in the UK will file a report on those implications by July 30th. On April 12th, Discord blocked access to NSFW or not safe for work servers on iPhone and iPad apps, although they could still be accessed in a browser. Now the company will only block servers focused on explicit pornographic content with users able to opt in to accessing other NSFW servers from the apps. Alright, let's talk a little more about a more serious topic. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States and the National Transportation Safety Board have both sent teams to investigate a fatal car crash involving a 2019 Tesla Model S in Spring, Texas. The car went off the road coming out of a cul-de-sac after failing to negotiate a slight curve at high speed. Harris County constable Mark Herman said one occupant was in the front passenger seat and one in the back seat. Neither occupant was in the driver's seat. Now it's not clear. You might jump to the conclusion, but it's not clear if Tesla's autopilot was active when the car crashed. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had retweeted news just earlier that same day that Tesla's autopilot feature was, quote, approaching 10 times lower chance of accident than the average vehicle. Constable Herman also noted that the car caught fire when it hit a tree and took more than 30,000 gallons of water to extinguish because the battery kept reigniting and apparently they had to get in contact with Tesla for some advice and how to get that fire to go out. Tim, it's hard to know what to make of this yet when we still don't know the investigations, everything. What's your first blushed blush interpretation of this? Yeah, it's a terrible story on many levels. Two, two big things. One being the fire, of course. Tesla's recommendations on how to put these things out basically state that firefighters need to have access to 3000 gallons of water to reasonably extinguish them all last. But of course it took 10 times that to get this thing to stop reigniting. It went into what's called thermal runaway, which is where the battery pack gets hot enough that it can just basically continue to ignite and cause the other cells to explode and kind of chain reaction all the way through the entire battery pack. And there's really no way to stop that with the tools that a firefighter has. They just kind of need to wait for the thing to burn out and hopefully prevent other fires from being started. So that's one thing. But obviously, the bigger concern from a technology standpoint is the fact that there was seemingly nobody behind the wheel of this car. We can't assume, as you said, that they were using autopilot. But the investigators said they were very confident that there was nobody behind the wheel of the car. So it seems like a pretty safe assumption that they were overusing a technology like that, which is really disconcerting. And it's another sign that Tesla really needs to implement some kind of a driver monitoring system in these cars to disable those systems when the systems within the car can tell very easily if there's somebody behind the wheel or not. There's absolutely no excuse for Tesla not to do that. Yeah, this is what, oh, go ahead, Tom. No, no, no, I was just going to say that Ford recently announced a similar improvement to being able to like tell you are you actually behind the wheel? And that that's the kind of thing that you're talking about, right? Yeah, absolutely. I was gonna say my car does not actually have the Tesla type autopilot, but it does have, you know, help within, you know, within a certain miles per hour in in to for to stay in your lane, right? But I got to touch the steering wheel every 30 seconds where it'll just turn itself off because it's like, no, you're not doing this right. As I understand it, and I have never owned a Tesla, but I've driven one once or twice. I mean, you've got to be in the driver's seat to start autopilot. So there would have to be a little bit of fancy footwork just to and again, it's not totally clear that this is what caused the accident. But if that's what was going on, and there were two people in the car trying to, I don't know, see if they could get somewhere from point A to point B without anybody driving. I mean, it's not just like you get in the passenger seat and you press a button and the car goes, it's more complicated than that. Isn't it? Right, absolutely. These people clearly knew what they were doing. And they were doing taking steps to basically defeat any safeguards that were in that system. The problem is the safeguards in autopilot are way too low. The barrier is way too low. It's basically just monitoring the torque sensor on the steering wheel to see if somebody touches the wheel every now and again. What you can do from the passenger seat, this is easily as the driver's seat. What they need is a camera that's actually monitoring the driver, which a lot of Tesla's already have and software to look to make sure that the driver is actually in the seat and a pressure sensor in the seat, which again, Tesla's already have. It's just a matter of connecting those dots with some simple software, but Tesla refuses to do that because Musk has gone on record saying that we don't need to. And so it's kind of turning this sort of a hubris thing where they don't want to implement it because Musk is they don't need to. And it's ultimately causing people's lives. It's a real shame. Yeah, I mean, I should remind us again, we don't know whether autopilot was engaged, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where we get this situation where they weren't trying to do something with autopilot somehow why they were going at that high rate of speed, coming out of a cul-de-sac, a lot of questions, a lot of questions still to be resolved here, but but nonetheless, very unfortunate situation. Well, next story might be more of a promising situation we could all use on this Monday. Last summer, Akili Interactive's EndeavorRx became the first game to receive authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration as a medical treatment authorized for treating ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for kids aged 8 through 12. It helps improve functions like the ability to do more than one thing at a time to multitask. Dr. Faith Gunning, a neuropsychologist at Wild Cornell Medicine in New York, is launching a study to see if the game could also help patients deal with the after effects of COVID-19. People who are hospitalized with moderate to severe COVID-19 sometimes experience lingering memory and attention problems after they start recovering, difficulty with working memory, difficulty with multitasking. There are similar to symptoms of ADHD that the game has proven to be effective treating some people. So a group of people with COVID-19 related cognitive problems will play the game and be compared to a group with the same symptoms who don't play the game. Dr. Gunning is also studying the game's effect on other conditions like depression, multiple sclerosis, and looking for evidence that it may improve brain connectivity in other places. Yeah, this is a fascinating pivot, if you will. It was fascinating already that this game was able to help ADHD and to say, like, oh, well, it's not treating ADHD so much as it's treating the symptoms of ADHD and relieving them. So if you've got similar symptoms from depression, from multiple sclerosis, from COVID-19, it might be effective at treating that. The early indication is it probably is. That's great because it's really easy to prescribe this because it's accessible to a wide variety of people. You don't have to go to a pharmacy to get it. You have to have the technology to get it, but you don't have to go anywhere to get it. And it's fun. People are more likely to want to do this than some other kinds of therapies. Tim, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's hugely encouraging and exciting to see this kind of technology being deployed in this way. What's discouraging to me is seeing some of the early studies of the long-lasting effects of COVID. There was just one I read a couple of weeks ago that said that one out of three people who had COVID after six months were showing some sign of neurological disorder or some kind of a mental health issue, which is really huge numbers and really hugely disconcerting. Since it's only six months, we don't know what we're going to be looking like in 12 months or a couple of years. So the idea that we can get some very easy, and as you said, Tom, easy to access and fun to enjoy solutions or at least help for these people is encouraging, but I'm really concerned about what other effects are still to be found. Yeah. Well, folks, social audio. It's the spicy fried chicken sandwich of tech these days. Two more tech platforms announcing new audio products. Reddit has launched a clubhouse like audio feature called Reddit Talk. Subreddit moderators apply to try it out. So get ready for a different take on ask me anything. Moderator will initially be the only ones to create a Reddit talk room, but other speakers can be invited as co hosts and listeners able to access Reddit talk on iOS and Android. Now listeners can react with emojis and also just like in clubhouse raise their hand to ask to speak. Moderators will see users karma scores. If you raise your hands, they could decide. I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to let that person talk or not and can kick and block users from the talks. Facebook also announced plans to build out audio functions on Facebook over the next three to six months. Company is going to start testing live audio rooms so that individuals in group and public figures would be able to get a live audio room expected to be available later this summer on Facebook and messenger. Another new feature is called sound bites described by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an audio version of Reels and every tech reporter as an audio version of TikTok. It offers short forum audio with a stream of brief clips that you can scroll through. Facebook initially uses an audio creator fund to pay creators for sound bites just to kind of jumpstart that and Facebook is building a podcast discovery tool. Podcasts would be able to be played in the background of the app or possibly directly open an app from a content partner to the podcast. One of those partners might be Spotify because Zuckerberg also talked about a partnership with Spotify known internally as Project Boombox, which lets users share any audio content from Spotify in their feed. And that will appear as an in line player. So obviously he talked about it in relationship, mostly to music, but one would assume that they wouldn't restrict podcasts from being there as well. So yeah, everybody thinks audio is real easy and they could just jump right in and make a success of audio. I mean, as a podcast host and producer, the idea that podcasts could be discovered within Facebook to somebody that just I don't know, isn't going to discover it somewhere else hangs out in Facebook a lot. I'm all for it. Absolutely nothing wrong with that to me. Getting a lot of news feeds with Spotify play buttons. You know, I'm listening to this right now. It's kind of like when people do that on Twitter, I almost never click through, but whatever. It's it's probably again helpful for discovery and sharing for folks. The audio rooms, the live audio rooms on Facebook, they could be really interesting. There are certain Facebook groups, not all of them, of course, but are, you know, thriving, lots of members, very active. I belong to some of them. There are certain Facebook groups I enjoy very much and live audio room could be extremely helpful. I mean, certain products have good Facebook groups. I belong to like a Facebook group that has to do with a VR app that I like a lot. And I'd love to have the founders come in there and tell us about updates every once in a while. That sort of thing. Clubhouse already does all of this, by the way. So these are features being built into platforms, which is also a standalone product, which is currently valued at $4 billion, which I'm not totally sure about. But yeah, I mean, the the clones are coming, everyone. Yeah, I'm with this here. I think that there is a really interesting technologies and applications here, but I feel like we've got more platforms than there is interest, honestly. And I'm not sure that there's enough legs in the interest around social audio to really make even, you know, a fraction of these platforms be successful. You know, I've seen that we've got a lot of very talented people who have a lot of great things to say. And so we're always looking at which platforms are doing what. And for sure, Clubhouse is very successful, but it's not really that successful. And so, you know, I just don't see the, you know, everybody throwing everything at the wall to try to make this work. I just don't see the majority of it having any success. But we'll see. Yeah. Soundbites is the weirdest one here. It could be way off base. It might take off like like a house of fire. It seems like the one where people went, audio, audio is hot. Let's do an audio thing. Like, I don't know. I'm not not seeing that one. Like you said, Sarah, I think you made the case for for live audio and Clubhouse has has pioneered that they're like, yeah, people like live audio. And here's how you do it well. And I think that is the problem for Clubhouse is like, yeah, Facebook putting it into a group makes perfect sense. It's just going to be a function of a group. It won't be a separate product. Reddit putting it into subreddits for AMAs, Discord putting it like it does seem like, oh, this is a really good way to do a feature that can be in a lot of things. It isn't a business on its own necessarily. And, you know, podcast discovery, obviously, you know, we're biased. We'd love people to have easier ways to discover podcasts and sort of all for that. But but yeah, I think what all of this is showing as you see more of these companies add live audio is that Clubhouse showed how to do it right, whether Clubhouse can turn that into a successful business is a whole other question. Hey, folks, if you need just the headlines, check out our related show Daily Tech Headlines, all the essential tech news in about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com. Alright, last Thursday, Mercedes Benz, perhaps you've heard of the company made waves unveiling the EQS, which is an electric S class luxury sedan being hailed as defining the top end of electric luxury vehicles. But even if you do have the money to buy one, how good is it? And is it worth the money? Thank God, we have Tim Stevens here today to tell us if we should sell our dogecoin and get an EQS ourselves? The big problem right now is we don't know how many dogecoin you'll actually have to sell to get one because they still haven't told us how much it's going to cost. But what Mercedes is doing with the EQS is really defining a premium luxury in the EV space that no one else has done before. People consider the model as to be a luxury car and it does have a lot of luxurious aspects to it. But it's not a true premium luxury car in the space of like a BMW seven series or Mercedes Benz S class. There's no, you know, ionizing scent filters for the car. There's no massaging seats in the back. You know, there's not the stuff that you really expect from these premium cars. And that's what the EQS is finally bringing to the EV space. And it makes so much sense because EVs are so quiet. They're so calming. They're so nice to drive already. And we add that to all the other luxurious stuff that Mercedes knows how to do. We wanted this amazing product, which pretty much blew me away. I got to drive a final prototype a couple of weeks ago. And it's really remarkable how good it is. It drives really nicely and smoothly as you'd expect. But they've got this thing called the hyper screen, which is a 56 inch panel that runs all the way from gauge cluster and left all the way over to the passenger compartment on the right. One big flowing experience where the passenger can look up, you know, pizza restaurants and send that over to the driver for navigation. You've got to pop up augmented reality heads up display that tells you literally points of the road that you need to turn on so you can see it. It's really just amazing technology and I can't wait for it to hit the road later this year. And it has its own operating system. I think that's that's that's what's interesting. It's the it's Mercedes MBUX operating system. Do you know you may not know this and I'm sorry if I'm putting you on the spot. Do you know how much it is just something off the shelf like a QNX that has been rebranded and how much of it is actually Mercedes, you know, creating its own version of operating system. All I know is that it's Linux. So the majority of these systems run on top of a platform like QNX. So I don't think that Mercedes has disclosed exactly which layers are beneath. But certainly QNX really just gives you the basic system functionality and reliability that you need for an automotive system like this. So everything on top of that, all the voice recognition, all the beautiful UI and all the flowering crystals and everything you see in there. That's all Mercedes Benz and they've really done a lot to kind of reinvent their software development procedures to kind of come up with this level of technology in the car. It works really well, whether in the front seat or the back seat, you have access to the same systems, the same infotainment experience and again, the ability to send destinations and pull media from anywhere in the car, which is really, really nice. So that's definitely all Mercedes Benz technology and it's only available in Mercedes Benz cars. So they've done a good job of bringing a lot of stuff you've come to expect from your smartphone and be able to say, hey Mercedes, take me to wherever. And it happens right in the car natively, which is great. I think the other thing people may be wondering is, is this just the, is this just a pretty car? Like, is it a better EV? Is it the same EV as I would get from somebody else? Like, is it just, you know, the scented ions that I would get? Is that what I'm paying for? That's definitely a lot of what you will be paying for and you will be paying a lot for this car. I mean, I'm expecting it to come in probably in the low $100,000 range, maybe around 120K, something like that. So it will not be a cheap car by any means. But certainly from the experience that you get, a lot of it's going to be on those premium features in the car. And when you get in the car, it's going to look like nothing else you've ever been in before. But the drive quality is actually really, very, very good. It's certainly on the next level above a model less or something like that. And the range they're promising 480 miles of range. That's on the European cycle. The U.S. cycle is a little bit more harsh. It'll probably come in closer to 400 miles. That's on par with a Tesla model less long range. And with the charging speed they've got, you can actually get almost 200 miles of range in about 15 or 20 minutes. So you can imagine doing some pretty long road trips on this thing without having to stop that often. So it's got the technology in the drivetrain to match the technology of the luxury side of things. And in terms of being pretty, I actually think it's a little bit underwhelming looking myself on the outside anyway. But it is the most aerodynamic production car in the world, 0.20 coefficient of drag. So that makes it the most slippery car in production today. I mean, the hyperscreen seems like, I don't know. I mean, I've only seen photos, but I was like, wow, that is that is a very cool interior. Yeah, I mean, that's but you said if you had to guess something like 120 K, I mean, that is so far like into outer space of the kind of car prices, the most people are looking at. I mean, even compared to a Tesla, if it's on, you know, when it really comes down to it, it's like, OK, how far can this car go? You know, on a single charge because all the pretty stuff I'll just get used to it after a while. And it's not going to be such a novelty once it's your car. Or I don't know, maybe it would, but you probably get used to it. And then it really just becomes how great is the car itself? I mean, who can afford this besides precious few folks? You can actually price a model X up to about that range. If you take all the boxes, you'll be up over 100 K. So they're actually not that much cheaper and the build quality, the comfort is definitely on another level. So for sure, there are a lot of people looking for these cars. A lot of them are driven around in these cars. So it's definitely a different sort of clientele that certainly I'm not in a financial position to relate to myself. But certainly when it comes to, you know, they're being in need, Mercedes Benz sells a fair number of S classes. And I think they'll sell quite a few of these two. Last question. I know Rocho mentioned the zero layer interface on that big hyper screen where the idea is you don't have to dig down into a bunch of submenus. Do you find in your time with it that that worked well? It did. Yeah. And that's one of the luxuries of having that giant screen is you don't have to always be going from one menu to another menu to another menu, which is a huge problem in Tesla's as well because it buries so many things into the touchscreen. And it's on the Model 3, for example, it's pretty small touchscreen. So you are always jumping between menus. Now you've always got the navigation up. It's always a big map display and then things just kind of pop up as you need them. And it's even smart enough to know that if you always get in the car and turn on the heated seats when you're below certain temperature, the next time you get in the car, it'll pop up a little control. So hey, you want to turn on the heated seats and just hit the button and then it goes away. So it's got a lot of intelligence built into it, too. Very cool. All right, folks, time to introduce a new segment to Daily Tech News Show. Every month, we'll be highlighting innovative voices in the black community in a segment called Teching While Black, produced and hosted by Nika Monford. Take it away, Nika. Hi, this is Nika Monford, a.k.a. Tech Savideva of the Snobel West Show. And the Teching While 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. The Teching While Black inaugural innovator is Angie Jones. All of the Java enthusiasts out there may very well be aware of who she is. But for those who may not know who this dynamo is, she is the first black female Java champion to let you know just how exclusive this group is. There are only 299 Java champions globally. Wow, that's a pretty exclusive group. This group consists of Java technology and community leaders who are community nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. In addition to being a Java champion, Angie is the senior director of Test Automation University, which is an online platform providing free courses in test automation. Furthermore, she is an international speaker and instructor of test automation techniques and strategies. Additionally, she is an inventor with 25 patented inventions in both the US and China. How amazing is that? And if that isn't enough, she leads Diva Chicks, which is an online community for girls and women in gaming. To find out more about her and her amazing work, be sure to check out Angie on Twitter at techgirl1908 or on her website, angijones.tech. 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 continues to thrive. Be sure to tune into the next Teching While Black, where we highlight Black tech innovators from around the globe. Thank you, Nika, for introducing us to Angie Jones. Devs, you're going to want to check out angijones.tech. Looking forward to next month's segment, too. You can hear Nika every week on SnobOS at snoboscast.com and right here on Daily Tech News Show tomorrow when we discuss the Apple announcements. Good news coming out of NASA. NASA completed the first powered flight of an aircraft on planet Mars using the Ongenuity helicopter on board the Perseverance rover. This was a 42nd autonomous remote flight with NASA using data collected from the flight to inform future flight missions on the red planet. Yeah, and this is one where they had kind of downplayed ahead of time, like, we don't know if it's going to work. It might not work. Don't everybody get rid of this planet. There wasn't a lot of fanfare. Yeah, even, you know, from the folks that I follow who really followed the stuff closely, yet it seemed like NASA was kind of just like, eh, we'll congratulate ourselves afterwards. Yeah, and they were obviously very excited when it worked. And I watched the video probably a dozen times today and it's it's amazing just a short, simple flight, but it's amazing to think that potentially. Yeah, because it feels like, oh, well, we've flown on Mars because we've landed things, but we really just dropped things on Mars. We haven't we haven't actually flown until now, like from. Yeah, this is to be able to like send something flying around. They're going to be able to use that. Should it continue to work, right? They'll be able to use that to explore parts that they wouldn't be able to explore with the rover. It'll be able to go a little farther afield and into places that the rover couldn't even get to, like like the walls of craters and stuff. Very exciting. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Mike in what he calls shockingly comfy Dubai, it wrote in and said, count me in asking the people who ask you were asking the people who want the book cover displayed on my Kindle. Mike says, as a noted snob, I want to broadcast what I'm reading. I'll be paying to remove my ads as the most common ads I get. And my wife and I can't figure out why our self published bodice rippers. Thank you for alerting me to this development. You know, now that Mike puts it that way, I realized like everybody probably thinks he's reading those, if that's the ad that shows up on his Kindle. So, of course, he'd much rather show what he's actually reading. I actually I missed this news last week and I actually paid money to get rid of ads as well because I wanted this feature. I thought it was just what was going to happen. So, I was really disappointed when I learned that they didn't support this years ago. So, I'm very excited to turn this on on my Kindle too. And then Thor wanted to express his enthusiasm about CHIP, the home automation project to kind of have a standard across platforms. Thor says, until now I have tried to find devices that work well with the home assistant platform to get a unified control point for all my smart home devices and CHIP will make this a lot easier. Instead of the home assistant community writing elegant little hacks to integrate a lot of different clouds, interfaces and whatever the company's come up with, the CHIP standard will hopefully become pervasive enough to let me just buy what I want and integrate it or at least look for some CHIP logo and have some confidence that I can integrate it. Thank you, Thor. Yeah, thank you to everybody who wrote in. We got a lot of mail over the weekend and it was very heartwarming. Keep it coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com is where you can send questions, comments, ideas, the like, all of it. We'll take it. Also, we'd like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Mike Aikens, Johnny Hernandez and Norm Fezacus. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses. We got three of you, Jonathan Lloyd, Wade Osborn and Anthony Rodriguez Jr. You all just started backing us on Patreon and we couldn't be happier. Thank you to our new bosses. Also, big, big thanks to Tim Stevens for being with us today, besides riding around in super fancy cars and being able to tell everybody how it was. How's your life been, Tim? It's been good and I'm excited to say that people can find me in this month's Analog Science Fiction. My debut publication of my short science fiction story is on newsstands now. So go find a copy of Analog Science Fiction and let me know what you think. That is so exciting. Congratulations, man. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Well, we are live here on Daily Tech News Show Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Charlotte Henry plus Nika Montford in person, along with Terence Gaines. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.