 Coming up on DTNs, striking ISP workers build their own ISP, why the chip shortage may last for two years and do you need a right to disconnect? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 15, 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer Roger. I almost said Text Day. And then I remembered they delayed it. So you know, it's the tradition, it's tax day traditional, not the actual tax day here in the United States. We were just talking about the wonders of home ownership and solenoids and compressors. If you'd like to to hear that, get our expanded show Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. DJI announced the Mavic Air 2S, a drone with a larger one inch sensor able to shoot 20 megapixel photos and capture video at 5.4 K or 4 K at 60 frames per second. The Mavic Air 2S starts at $999, $200 more than the outgoing Mavic Air 2. Dell Technologies is going to spin off its 81% stake in VMware into an independent company. Zane Rowe will stay on as interim CEO. Michael Dell will be the chairman of VMware's board. Dell plans to use the proceeds of the spin off, which are estimated to be between $9.3 and $9.7 billion to pay down some debt. A new US US executive order placed sanctions on Russian companies and individuals in response to interference in the 2020 presidential election, and formally names Russia's foreign intelligence service as the perpetrator of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack. As part of the order, the US Treasury Department added six Russian technology companies that provided support to intelligence agencies to the US entity list. The entity list just keeps getting bigger. LG now lets US customers inquire to buy its motorized 65 inch 4K rollable OLED RTV. Exact US pricing is unknown. Basically, you have to ask, you can't afford it. But the TV went on sale in South Korea in October for 100 million won. That gives you any idea. 100 million won is about $89,600. Oh, it's a lot more affordable than I thought it would be. Really on my wall. Yeah, can't wait. Lift launched lift pass for healthcare, which as the name implies, lets healthcare organizations and social service agencies create prepaid passes for lift rides to doctors appointments. The orgs created a budget to provide pickup and drop off locations, and then patients can apply it to their own ride. Now lift already partnered with some healthcare organizations in the past to schedule trips for patients. But this lets the patient request the trip themselves within lifts app. A similar service from Uber Uber Health launched back in 2018. Alright, let's talk about those plucky strikers creating their own ISP Justin. Indeed, Tom, New York City Spectrum workers have been on strike for four years and the 200 or sorry, the 1200 or so striking members of IBEW Local 3 have now created their own ISP called People's Choice Communications. The company operates on a fixed wireless service using a mesh network. A building that wants to sign up for service pays People's Choice to install the antenna on the top of the building to receive service and then run ethernet cable and routers into apartments. Once it's installed, residents of the building own the building's network and enter into a co-op relationship with People's Choice so profits are returned in part to customers. Installation fees right now are estimated at around $200 to $300 per apartment and paid off in monthly installments of $10 to $20, which also covers ongoing service, so pretty cheap. People's Choice main intent is capable of providing service to most of the Bronx right now with 25 megabits per second down and three up. It has completed installations at two schools and connected 121 units at housing for survivors of domestic violence who have disabilities. As more customers sign up and with service, people will get cheaper and People's Choice can offer higher speeds. One way to expand service faster would be to get on the city's bid to provide affordable wireless networks for underserved areas. An unnamed spectrum employee is telling me right now with RF interference in New York City, that'll work like a fork for grits. So not the it's not easy, but these are 1200 people who know how networks in New York City. So I'm gonna bet they can figure out how to at least make this palatable and they've got some installations going. But it's not easy. Any kind of ISP in New York City is not easy. It is an interesting roll your own situation. We've seen towns in Colorado and Idaho decide that it was better for them to just go their own way. Sometimes it was neighborhood associations. Sometimes it was whole towns. This is New York City doing it. My guess and I don't say this because I want it to fail. My guess is this probably won't catch on. This is going to have too much opposition from entrenched interests. And and it's going to take the city cooperating to really give it the boost it needs or a lot of buildings being convinced to do this. And those are those are both hard roads. Well, yeah, because if you're a landlord or a superintendent why deal with the hassle why lay out any money even if it's fairly nominal compared to any kind of other infrastructure that's going to be there. That being said, I want to take a sentence you you said that running any ISP in New York is hard and shorten that to running an ISP is hard. Well that doesn't mean though that we shouldn't have them. I love micro ISPs. I think that the internet is getting to a very interesting commodity phase where specifically in certain contexts, you can have somebody a company that is more agile that's serving a smaller portion of the population and in high density cities like New York, that could be possible. I don't know if this is the particular solution. And I would also wonder, Hey, let's say one day you resolve this strike. Where does the focus of the people's communication, the people's choice communication network go if this is not a startup, if it's kind of a side project, I don't know if I want to commit to it. The pricing also, it looks great when you look at the, you know, installments, you know, 10 bucks, but that's installment's going to take a while, you know, when something's three to $400 to install. I mean, that's for anybody that would be a hefty price, you know, to look at upfront to get something like this. Also, and listen, underserved areas, any internet is better than no internet for sure. But you know, this is not internet that I could use for something like the show. It's it's limited. And that's not even taking it to account the complexities of of a city like New York City. But I like this idea. And yeah, like you mentioned, Justin, having, you know, a landlord of a, you know, multi unit building, sign onto this. And instead of just kind of doing what everybody does already, that's, that's a, that's a goal as well. Well, and the thing is like, sure, all the residents can put pressure on the landlord, maybe get him to do it. All the people in the co-op can put pressure on the board president and get her to do it. But each building is going to be its own fight, right? This is not an easy situation, right? So you, you've got to go building by building or get that city contract that lets you build up the momentum where people go, Oh, I'm getting 50 megabits per second. Now this is great. And it's so much cheaper. There's just a lot of hurdles. Not that it's impossible. There's just a lot of hurdles. I mean, yeah, by the way, shout out to anybody in the Bronx who's still waiting for their superintendent to fix that leak. And then you can go ahead and email us and let us know how likely it is that they're going to roll the dice on an experimental ISP. Well, here's some good news or at least more evidence that VR is becoming a fitness device. We talked about this on the show yesterday. And the timing is impeccable because Facebook has just added the ability for VR developers to sell subscriptions to apps within the Oculus store fit XR trip with two P's and VZ fit are all fitness and wellness apps that are among the first apps to be able to do this virtual monitor app V spatial social app rec room and DJ app tribe XR are also starting in headset subscriptions. Gosh, these names really have to come up with better names. Anybody who downloaded or purchased these apps already will keep access to what they have now. So having a new subscription doesn't mean you have to buy an add on that you already bought. So that's kind of nice. Supernatural, which is obviously a fitness app that I love told the verge it will also bring subscriptions into the Oculus store as well. Oculus will require every app to offer a free trial period. Although the length varies per app. So it's not like 60 days across the board. But free trials are good. At first I, I was like, Well, I have a subscription to Supernatural. Didn't I already do this? But no, I didn't not within the Oculus store. It was something that I download the app on my phone, which is an app you want anyway, but that's where I had to pay for it, and then get a code, and then put my headset back on, and then enter the code. And it was pretty cumbersome. It worked. But it was not something where I was able to, you know, do a little VR click and purchase a subscription within the app. So that's a nice, I don't know, erasing one barrier to entry, I guess, for folks and letting app developers experiment with with stuff to keep retaining customers. Yeah, I mean, if you're going through the checkmarks of things Facebook has to do to make Oculus profitable, offering in app subscriptions that it can take a cut of it is absolutely one of them. And developers want that to subscription revenue is recurring. You don't have to ask again. You just have to keep people from going through the trouble of canceling the subscription in app purchases only happen once. Certainly, you know, single purchases of apps only happen once. So this is important for the revenue streams of developers, it's important for the revenue stream of Facebook. And it shows that there's more than just gaming going on here, because the you know, like like Sarah said, a bunch of the first apps to jump on this are fitness related apps. It furthers that narrative we've been talking about of, you know, VR becoming not solely for fitness, but certainly fitness becoming one of the main reasons people use it. So we're getting a few more of these reasons besides just gaming. And not just VR, Oculus, because what Oculus has is a non tethered solution, which means fitness is more of a reality. But I think that this goes far beyond that I would love to know exactly what the cut is that Facebook is doing, whether or not they're trying to make it a little tastier for some developers to come on there. And it would not shock me considering Facebook has a lead here with Oculus, they have a product that nobody else has been able to match. And it doesn't look like there's anything on the horizon, at least for the next year, if they want to develop a an app store community here where they can build not Apple ask, but certainly maybe a nascent version of that, then I also think things like Netflix, HBO Max, some of those entertainment options are a possibility here. And now they can be the ones that taste that sweet recurring subscription revenue each and every month. Well, let's go from sweet subscription revenue to Oh, my gosh, how are we ever going to sell chips when we can't make enough of them? As we've covered many times on DTS, there's a worldwide chip shortage impacting automakers the most but affecting a lot of industries. It was caused by mistaken estimates of when demand would fall and recover during the pandemic, complicated by winter weather in Texas fires in Japan, a drought in Taiwan, and also companies building up inventory for fear of future shortages, little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy there, but also caused a little bit in China in response to US trade restrictions. So we all know how we got here. How long is this gonna last? How long before we get back to a normal supply chain? Well, this week, multiple tech companies filed public financial disclosures, which included forecasts on chip production. And they're not rosy. Intel offered to step up supplies of chips for medical suppliers and in car computers, which is good news for those industries. But CEO Pat Gelsinger told the Washington Post he expects the worldwide chip shortage to last a couple of years. Now that was the worst, most pessimistic estimate, but the rest aren't that much better. TSMC CEO, CC Way told investors quote, in 2023, I hope we can offer more capacities to support our customers. At that time, we'll start to see the supply chain tightness release a little bit. Though TSMC did tell automakers that its chip supply could improve next quarter as they're throwing a little more their capacity at automotive. TSMC is running current fabs at more than 100% utilization. So without building more factories, they can't make any more chips. Thursday, the company said it hoped to offer more capacity in 2023. Nvidia CFO Colette Krebs said quote, we expect demand to continue to exceed supply for much of this year. So she at least was holding out 2022 as a possibility for easing this for Nvidia, but did say that the supply should steadily increase throughout the year. It just won't outstrip demand until 2022. It's interesting to see Intel and TSMC focus on extra capacity as the way out of the shortage because up until now, most analysts that I've been reading have believed that current capacity might be enough once the hoarding ends and the logistics problems get resolved. So these companies are betting on, Hey, you know what? Maybe this doesn't go away unless we're able to make more chips. Either that or Intel at TSMC or both saying, let's sign up some bunch more new customers while we can. Yeah, you know, this is this is a fascinating like you mentioned a real perfect storm of a lot of different factors. A lot of things kind of not necessarily going wrong, just going at the same time that that results in something that I think is is going to be felt at the end point with the consumer, both in terms of availability and in terms of price, which will of course mean that aftermarket price is going to be bigger. Yeah, P P squared one, two, three, four at our discord says chips have become industry's toilet paper hoarding. And we've we've compared that does kind of remind me of that at least, you know, on large company scales. Let's let's keep some of these chips. Yeah, we better better buy more chips because we might run out of chips, which is causing chips to run out and and big consumer demand. Consumer demand went up during the pandemic for laptops, cameras, you know, a lot of stuff. They sort of underestimated the demand for cars. So yeah, all those things contribute to this. And I do still think it just seems to me that demand will work itself out. And this will go back down. And so if you build up all that extra capacity, are you going to have too much capacity? Or our Intel and TSMC looking at this like, well, we want to throw extra capacity at this anyway, because we have older plants that we want to retire, etc. Yeah. But then we talk about how the display chip shortage for automotive is based on older plants anyway, you can't really build new plants to add to that. So I don't know. I mean, the worst problem would be consumer demand has plummeted. You know, but he wants to buy our products, right? I mean, that's that would be the real problem. This does seem like, yes, it's, it's a little bit of a, you know, it's, it's a guessing game. You got pandemic, and then you have natural disasters, not one, but, but several that that impacted this whole thing. That is not something that is normal. Is very unusual for all of that to happen in such a short amount of time. I mean, you always have to plan for emergencies, but it does seem like a lot of these companies are like, yeah, if we, if we go to overboard, then we're going to have a surplus because consumer demand spiked, and then it's going to ease back and, you know, dip as it does every few years anyway. And, and yeah, we, we don't, we don't want to be caught with, you know, warehouses full of chips that people don't want. And if it's a supply chain issue, if it's just transportation, building more chips doesn't make it better. Just more chips sitting in the port, you know. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's the size of the pipe. They got to figure out how to get it through. Hey, folks, we're doing a crossover show this weekend with this week in science. I'm really excited about this Saturday, April 17th, 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific, myself, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang, along with Dr. Kiki Blair and Justin from TWIS. We have been taking your topics. Thanks for sending them. We're in the middle of figuring out what we're actually going to talk about, but you should come watch the show happens this Saturday, April 17th, 7pm Pacific, 4 or 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. And you can watch live at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. The UK Union Prospect, which represents scientists, engineers, tech workers, is lobbying the government to create a right to disconnect. The law would stipulate when companies could communicate with workers, but require that companies negotiate with staff on rules about when and when not you can be contacted for work purposes. A poll by Opinionum found cross party support with 65 percent of labor and for 53 percent of conservative voters supporting this proposal. This month, Ireland introduced a code of practice on April 1st that says employees have the right to make a right to communicate with workers. That says employees have the right not to be penalized if they don't work outside normal hours. Canada, meanwhile, is investigating a similar policy. This is a problem. Does anybody disagree that there is a problem of people feeling like I have to work constantly, especially now that I work from home. There's no more lines. I have to work constantly. I agree on that. I don't know it because I have the world's worst boss myself. It is hard to draw lines, but I know for my wife, for example, she's had to set alarms. Alarms are constantly going off in our house, not for things she has to do, but rather just it's time to eat lunch. It's time to stop working. Turning on various different alerts so the rest of the company knows. I remember in the early 2000s working at Tech TV. Tom, Roger, you were both there. We had a mail system Lotus notes and there was a way to VPN from your house if you weren't at work, but it was early days of that stuff and most of us never set it up or didn't know how. I remember that. I had to plead to get it. It was not something I had at work. It was, you know, for years, it was like you leave the office, your work is done because you can't work. There's nothing I can do from home unless I was sketching notes on a notepad, until I come back to work the next day and as long as I'm getting there on time, I'm good to go. That is not the life that most people lead anymore. You are available 24-7 technically through some device of sorts and yeah, I think it's a good question. Do we need a right to disconnect? Really what this is is a framework for lawsuits that if you are saying, okay, my employer said I'm going to sue them for wrongful termination. Well, they said that I wasn't productive. Well, I'm going to say, well, the law says I did everything that I possibly could within the hours that I could and they were going to sue me. So, in that respect, I think it's fine. What this really should do, and this is what bothered me about every job that I ever had with an actual boss, is that you need to set up definitions of what your work day is, as opposed to it just being a thing where if you clear your plate fast, then they're going to fill your plate with more stuff. That is a top-level management problem that I think exists in the better we get at that. Just give me what I need to do today. When I do it, if it's done by 11 a.m., then I'll see you at the bar. I'm day-drinking today. That should be the way it goes. Unfortunately, it's not and it runs into problems like this. Yeah, and not every job works that way, right? So, it becomes problematic in that respect. I think, you know, every single person in our audience is going to have a different position on how much the work day is going to be. So, that's a problem. But I think we can't agree it's a problem. And I like the idea, whether it's the government should do it or not, I like the idea of companies saying we need to have a policy and we need to stick to that policy so that everybody knows what the rules are and you can't say, well, that person never answers their email at night and the rest of us do, that's unfair. Let's all agree that we need to have a policy and we need to stick to that policy. So, let's start with the focus. So, let's start with the focus. I've collaborated with London Design Agency layer on its latest bookshelf speaker, the BioSound Merge and it is the most book-like bookshelf speaker yet. And that it literally looks like a book. It has a knitted fabric spine that says bang and olive sin like it would on a If you want to save money, there's also a black anthracite version with an aluminum grill and a polymer side panel. Same form factor, doesn't look quite as much like a book. Controls on the top, control play-paws, volume and track changes along with a couple of programmable buttons for things like playlists and radio stations. And like Bang & Olufsen's Biosound level, the Biosound Emerge is future-proof. It has a replaceable connectivity component that B&O says should be software-upgradable for several years, but when it does eventually get obsolete, you can swap it out for newer components. That'll work and keep the look. You don't have to forfeit your book look if you want the latest new processor in the future. Inside the book-like speaker is a 37-millimeter mid-range driver, a 14-millimeter tweeter pointed out the front. There's a 100-millimeter side-firing woofer that kind of points towards the back. It supports AirPlay 2 and Chromecast. Google Assistant for voice control has an ethernet port and a line-in optical jack combo. Coming to Europe, April 15th, elsewhere in the autumn, priced at $899, or if you want to cheap out on the Black Anthracite version, only $699. I love how the one that looks more like a speaker is $200 cheaper. Listen, I don't have the money for a $900 speaker that looks like a book. It's very pretty. Bang & Olufsen makes high-end speakers. We already know that. It's a cool form factor. I would assume if you really wanted it to look like a book, to have it squished between a bunch of books is going to defeat some of the purpose, especially with the sub in the back. But it is lovely and as sort of an art piece that also works as a speaker, nice and thin. If the sound quality is great and someone's got the money, it's very nice looking. But yeah, the Black version, same form factor, but it definitely looks like, oh, that's a piece of electronic equipment, certainly not a book. It is fascinating to see kind of where the fashion has gone with stuff like this, that ostentatious, gigantic speaker stacks are kind of out. And now what we want is something that is as invisible as possible. We just sort of want great sound to permeate everything. We don't need to necessarily show off to our friends, or at least I'm speaking with the royal us and the we buy $900 speaker club. It's, you know, you're right, especially with all the smart assistants where you don't have to have any. We were talking about remotes the other day, right? It's like, put away the remote unless you really need it, right? You can kind of just talk to your TV and declutter the place. I used to have these huge Bowers and Wilkins speakers. They were like my pride and joy. Still miss them. I ended up moving somewhere where they just didn't fit anymore. But I wouldn't have them back now because I'm like, I just have like all these other small speakers that are perfectly fine for me and actually just kind of streamline the place. Speaker has also got better. And when they got better, they got smaller. And that also kind of, it's not just people wanting rich people wanting to look poorer for, for fashion, but rather like we have the ability to now. Listen, if you're going to buy these Bang and Olufsen speakers, back us on Patreon. Yes. First, first, first, do the Patreon backing. Just do it. An update to Google Earth will add a 3D time lapse feature to see how maps have changed from 1984 through 2020. These time lapses use 24 million satellite images to create one 4.4 terapixel sized video mosaic with users able to search for places of interest or view five guided tours based around specific topics. Man, I remember these are neat 3D images were, you know, instead of flat 2D. I'm sorry, go ahead, Tom. No, no, I was, I was just gonna say, I remember when Google Earth first came out and I downloaded it onto my IBM ThinkPad running Windows XP. And that was, it was really cool. Here it is. First update since 2017. Did I read that right? Yeah. Yeah. I really hope that they do a VR centric rollout on this because if you've never screwed around with Google Earth and VR, it's really, really fun. And that would be something really cool to just watch the world slowly change in front of you and being able to zoom in. I mean, it's cool and it's also kind of depressing depending on which part of the world you're looking at. Sure, I guess so. And you don't really need to update Google Earth. Honestly, this is a counterpoint to everybody's like, oh, Google always just cancel stuff. Look at Google Earth just sitting there, just sitting there, chilling out, being there, just chugging away, spinning around. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Komei, also a big fan of the VR Fitness app, Supernatural. Komei and I have actually been talking about this since I since I got my quest last year. Komei says it has the best implementation of immersive 360 degree scenes, real locations, not CG with stereoscopic depth among many VR apps I've seen. They really pick the beautiful exotic locations that you don't usually see even in travel magazines. So I created this map listing all the locations that we saw in Supernatural, hoping I could visit many of these spots in real life someday. We'll have the link in our show notes, but Komei, it's awesome because within the app, for anybody who's not used it before, as a song starts, you kind of be like, we are now in Peru and you look around and go, oh, this is so pretty and it tells you where you are. But unless you look it up on a map, you might not know exactly where in the country or where in the world you really are. So it gives you a perspective of how many scenes are actually involved. It's awesome. And then Nick wrote in and said, the news of the new Air Link feature for Quest 2, while not unwelcome, made me think they finally killed it. No, they didn't kill a quest, but rather an app called Virtual Desktop for the Quest. Virtual Desktop is an independently developed app that has allowed Quest users to stream their PC VR games to the Quest for years now. Granted, the process for using Virtual Desktop never was the most user-friendly process. It required you to buy an app on the Quest, then put the Quest into developer mode, sideload a patch to enable desktop streaming due to Quest app store rules. And while I look forward to an easier way to stream PC VR games to my Quest, I feel bad for the developer of Virtual Desktop. Yeah, Nick, man, I'm with you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Virtual Desktop is a crowd favorite for sure. Yeah, there was a great meme on the Oculus Reddit of the Virtual Desktop and Facebook like, I made this, you made this, I made this, you know, things. So that is a meme going around. But ultimately, it's like, this is suffering from success. They pioneered something that people loved, but it just wasn't spectacular technologically enough to beat back the tides of change. Am I nostalgic for the Cydia app store on a jailbroken iPhone? Sure. Would I replace the app store with it? Probably not. Yeah, that's gonna happen. We all have those, the examples of like, I used to do this the old way. Remember when the OS didn't actually have this natively built in and we all had to do it the old way? It happens. Well, if you have feedback or questions or comments, send them all, all of them, every single one to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We do love to get your feedback. So keep it coming. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Brad, Ken Hayes, and Tony Glass. Also, thank you to our brand new boss, Chase Ludwick, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you to our new boss. Chase is our new favorite boss. Yay, Chase. Today's your day. Have a cake. Don't contact me after work though. It's too late, Chase. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young, who will not like to be contacted after work or while he is playing VR mini-golf. Indeed. Yeah, when I'm not playing mini-golf, I am producing the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. Got a great episode coming out tomorrow featuring the one and only Andrew Heaton, who was on this show with me last week. But we go do a deep dive into the laws, the new voting laws in Georgia and the proposed laws in Texas. He did a ton of research on it, and I think it is a very illuminating conversation. You can find it at px3podcast.com. Excellent. Well, we're live on this show, Monday through Friday. It's only Thursday. You got one more day in this week, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we will be back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.