 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher, and James C. Smith. Coming up on DTNS, why Amazon supporting EPUB is a big step is Spotify Island in Roblox, the metaverse, and the latest catch 22 in the chip shortage. DTNS starts now! This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Atlanta, Georgia, I'm Nika Montport. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. We have got good news, not as good news, chip shortage, but mostly good news. So let's start with a few tech things you should know. You may recall from previous episodes of DTNS that in December, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets, or NACM for short, ordered Apple to let dating apps use third-party payment systems, and Apple's been going back and forth about how to comply with that requirement. On March 27th, Apple said it would allow apps to either use a third-party system or Apple system, but not both. And it would require apps to warn users that Apple was no longer involved with a transaction if it indeed went to a third-party. Apple would also take a 27% cut of third-party transactions rather than the 30% it normally takes. And the NACM says, okay, that's an improvement, but they still consider the conditions unfair. So the Authority has fined Apple 50 million euros and plans to issue a new order to levy new fines. I'm sorry, folks. For months, Facebook has been sending us emails asking us to add our podcast to their list, and we just didn't get around to it. So this is probably our fault, but podcasters will no longer be able to add shows to Facebook as of this week, and the company will remove them entirely on June 3rd of this year. The Audio Hub and Soundbyte Services will close sometime in the coming weeks, but live audio rooms will continue by being folded into Facebook Live. A spokesperson said the move will help the company, quote, focus on the most meaningful experiences. What are you saying about podcasts there, Facebook? Meanwhile, in other social networking news, Twitter's rolling out a feature called Circle that lets you choose a subset of people who can see a particular post. You can choose up to 150 people to be in your circle, kind of similar to Instagram's close friends. Or like if Google Plus only had one circle. Or was a thing. And was still a thing. I liked Google Plus. I got no beef with Google Plus. Apple issued a clarification around its effort to remove outdated apps. The company had sent emails to some developers requiring them to update apps in 30 days or face removal. There were some uproar, of course, in the development community, unsurprisingly. Now Apple has clarified that apps selected for such removal have gone more than three years without updates and had not been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period. It's basically Apple saying, you know, someone's using your app, why are you crying about it? Apple also extended the timeframe from 30 days to 90 days for a developer to update an app before it gets removed. DTNS listener Motang has been submitting great links to our subreddit for years and this morning was no exception with the news from G-Hacks.net that a Thunderbird mobile application is coming. Yep, the email client, Thunderbird Product and Business Development Manager Ryan Lee Sypes said on Twitter that a Thunderbird mobile app is on the way, did not give a date but did reference an APK, indicating that at the very least you're getting an Android version and maybe even iOS. Razer announced its next version of the Blade 15 laptop will be the first laptop to come with the OLED QHD 240 Hz display. Now previously you could get a 240 Hz LCD display or a 4K display, not one that includes both. Now you get the refresh rate and 4K OLED. The 15.6 inch display covers the entire DCI P3 color gamut has one millisecond response time and 400 nits of brightness. For those who don't follow those specs, it will look amazing. It will have almost no lag. This is a nice monitor. The new Razer Blade 15 goes on sale in Q4 of this year for $3,499.99. All right, let's talk some eBooks. Let's do it. Okay, so just kind of to set us up here, Tom. Goodeereader.com noticed that several outlets had picked up a story that Amazon will now support ePub. Now, if you're familiar and you're an eReader person, you might know a lot about how Amazon has not supported ePub in the past, but what's going on here? Yeah, so a good eReader got picked up by a bunch of outlets. If you want the backstory ePub launched in 2007, it's the primary technical standard for the International Digital Publishing Forum and has been supported for years by Sony, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. But Amazon's Kindle, which is by far the most popular eReader out there, has never worked with the ePub standard. To get an ePub on your Kindle, you had to use third-party software. Most people use Caliber and you convert it to Amazon's proprietary AZW3 file, which is an Amazon version of Bobi, and then you would send it to your Kindle to read that way. This seems a way to make it just difficult enough to get books from other stores that you'll just keep shopping for eBooks on Amazon. I think that's a way people always thought about it. So what has prompted Amazon's change, you think? Amazon announced it's going to start doing the conversion for you, which is very helpful. It isn't as helpful as supporting ePub directly on the Kindle, which would be the most helpful thing, but at least you won't have to do the conversion yourself and it looks like it already works. You'll need to send Kindle, use the Send to Kindle email address, and then you can just email a DRM-free ePub. It can't handle DRM, but if you've got a DRM-free ePub, which you can get a lot of booksellers out there, you send that as an attachment to Amazon's, again, to your Send to Kindle email address, and then Amazon will convert it to a KF8 file, which is their own version of an ePub file, and add it to your Kindle. Later this year, the Send to Kindle PC and Mac apps, as well as the Send to Kindle Chrome plugin, will also add ePub support, so far just the email address is working, though. So if converting ePubs means you can't pull them off of the Kindle, you've got other readers, but the remarkable too, for example, is something that only supports DRM-free ePub formats in order to read books, although there are workarounds. I talked about that on my Live With It segment on the remarkable too, but what happens with these particular files in the Amazon ecosystem? Yeah, this is not just Amazon locking you in. Kobo does a similar thing. It turns ePubs into what it calls K ePubs for Kobo. That's because Kobo readers, the actual devices, use an SQLite database to manage books, and ePubs generally work with a different kind of database system. So the conversion helps them do things like highlight words, support multiple bookmarks, add annotations, things that the Kobo is able to do that aren't standard in the ePub. Amazon's likely making the conversion for similar reasons. However, Kobo will support an ePub. It just doesn't have all the features. It just wants to convert the ePubs it sells to K ePubs. Amazon is not giving you that choice. You have to convert it if you want to use it on a Kindle. So as far as this news, good news, I am a Kindle owner. The ePub thing was always like, hmm, it makes tinkering around with a different non-Kindle eReader a lot more fun for me than what Amazon is locking me into. So is the company changing anything else? Yes. Send to Kindle supports lots of other formats already, PDF, Word, et cetera. But one format it supports is going away, Moby. Moby doesn't support all the features that Amazon wants it to, which is weird because Moby's owned by Amazon and is the basis for the AZW3 file format. But if you have a Moby book on your Kindle, it'll stay there. It'll still work. You just won't be able to add new Mobies after a certain point later this year that they haven't said yet. Well, I for one welcome this change. I mean, I've got a library card, a digital library card. I support my local library and I have been able to using Calibra. I've been able to get various EPUB books onto my remarkable, but not my Kindle. And I just thought, ah, it's just, it's just impossible. So this sounds like it might be a little fancy footwork for some folks, but, but it is certainly opening up things more than, you know, even if you don't have a library card, it just, it opens things up more for all of us. This is a little bit out of my depth because I don't use Kindle. I do use my iPad for books, but it sounds like this is a way to, I guess, keep folks on Kindle, but make it a little bit easier without them, you know, possibly with Amazon still getting most of the profits. I know you mentioned that they are making it just a little bit less difficult for to keep people on use on the platform. So I think that maybe they're kind of hedging their bets to keep people engaged with Kindle rather than, you know, maybe trying something else. So I don't know if that's a huge selling point for Kindle users or not. Do you use iBooks on your tablet or do you use Kindle's app? iBooks. iBooks, yeah, okay. I think what's going on here is Apple bought mobile books or mobile pocketbooks. I can't remember the exact name and that's how they got control of Moby. And I think they were trying to make Moby supplant EPUB. And they tried for 15 years and it didn't work. And they've gotten to the point where the Moby standard itself just isn't catching on, isn't worth continuing to pour money into developing. So they are finally throwing in the towel and saying, all right, fine, we'll support EPUB since we can't support Moby. It seems like the point was we're going to sunset support for Moby. Yeah. So we'll add support for EPUB since we're not going to support Moby because you could get books from third-party sellers in Moby. And that was Amazon's point before. It's like you could still get them at third-party sellers. If they're going to get rid of Moby, then you couldn't at that point. So they kind of, if they were going to say, well, we're not being totally dominant, they kind of had to open up and support EPUB, at least in the manner that they are. Well, if we ever get to a point in history when we think, when did the metaverse begin in actuality? We might remember a moment like this. Spotify announcing that Spotify Island is coming to Roblox. Now, if you're like, what in the heck is Spotify Island? What is Roblox? What's happening here? Roblox is an open world platform where users can create and play games. Very popular with the younger set of folks, but people of all ages enjoy it. Free to play makes money off in-game purchases using its in-platform currency called Robux. Get it? Because it's Roblox. Spotify Island, which is a Spotify project, obviously, is going to be a place inside Roblox within it where artists and fans can play games, also get exclusive content, and also buy artist merchandise. You know, an artist that would be popular on Spotify, for example. There's also a new playlist on Spotify called Spotify Island that's available to stream. So you can, I don't know, get familiar with some of the music that you might hear inside the experience. The new Roblox area features a concert stage. No performances have been announced yet, but that's probably forthcoming. And you might recall Fortnite has been hosting concerts since 2020, and last year Roblox partnered with Sony Music to bring more artists to the platform. So this whole metaverse thing has been in the works for a little bit. The merchants will get in-game items that can either be used in other parts of Roblox and also special artist merchandise. Artists, if they're participating, will get to keep Spotify's cut of the sales minus the cut that Roblox is going to get. Multiple themed islands will make up the area, so it's kind of like Spotify Island's plural. It's not just one island, it's several. Spotify Island destination, though, in Roblox will actually consist of a central mainland surrounded by a collection of themed islands so players can explore and interact by walking or running or jumping or touching things, picking up various objects. The worlds themselves feature a color palette centered around Spotify's shades of greens and oranges and purples mixed in. It's probably going to feel pretty familiar, especially if you're already a Spotify user. Fans can also create music at a virtual beatmaker station powered by Spotify's soundtrack. You can move around on stage, you can shoot confetti, you can blow bubbles, you just kind of having fun. K-Park will be the first themed island featuring Stray Kids and also Soon Me. And Spotify Island includes a stage with a big screen behind that one would think would be meant for virtual concerts that they'd like to do in the future. The company didn't provide any details on that, but based on what has worked in the past for other companies, one would think that would be the case. And if you haven't already, you can try out the experience at Roblox.com. I did just that. I jumped in and I was like Stray Kids, huh? You got some K-POP in there. All right, let me check this out. I could not find the themed island, so I don't know if that's user error probably is. But it was dead simple to install Roblox and get in and start playing. It's a very simple game. And it was kind of fun, you know, running around collecting music notes and everything. It's still very Roblox, though. Nika, I know you have family members, younger family members that use Roblox. It's not particularly a sophisticated adult feeling world, right? Yeah, that's the interesting thing is I'm not sure it'll be interesting to see how this all kind of paints out because typically Roblox, this, you know, virtual space, Fortnite all is typically kind of catered towards the younger set. So it'll be interesting to see how having multi-generational folks in one type of environment is going to play out. That seems to be, you know, a fairly interesting concept, but yeah, he's 10 and he's in that world and, you know, having a good time as a kid. So it'll be interesting to see how it translates between the age groups as far as usability because the way a 10-year-old would use, you know, this virtual space I would think would be different for someone, say, maybe 20 or 25 or even a teenager, maybe 15 or 16. So it'll be interesting to see how they adjust this Spotify island to accommodate the different types of users that they'll have in the space. Yeah, this is, I feel like Roblox, if it does end up being some hub of the metaverse or some area of the metaverse, it ends up growing with its audience, right? The audience that is either under 10 or in its teens eventually grows up and becomes adults that still like it, you know, and the platform might grow with them. This is obviously aimed at the younger side of Spotify's audience. It's not aimed at me, but it's establishing that, you know, hey, here's a place, if you like music, where you can integrate your Spotify with music. And even if you're 18, I could see you saying like, oh, okay, I'm too old for all of Roblox, but this part's kind of cool. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the artist, right? You know, that'll be a big part of whether or not. Jay Park and Morani, not just Stray Kids. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I could get behind something like this if it was a concert I really wanted to watch. Yeah, especially on the concert series part, I could see, you know, that maybe being the divider depending on who the artist is that's on the main stage, the type of, I guess, demographics that you would get. So who coming to Roblox would cause you to be like tempted to install and go watch them? Beyonce. Beyonce? Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay, that's a good one. I didn't want to fool you right for the top. Yeah, yeah. The whole production space. Nika's like, hmm, have you heard of Beyonce? I'm going straight to the top. I'm not doing any interviews yet. No, that's good. Yeah, that's, I can't top it. Can't top it. All right, Beyonce, you've heard Nika's call, please. Yeah, let's get on the Spotify Island, everybody. Folks, maybe we could get Beyonce on the show, doubtful, but do you have any ideas about hosts and guests from other podcasts and shows that we could have on this show? Let us know. We're looking for ideas. Check out our guest survey and put in your recommendations. You can get there at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash survey. Go check it out. The chip shortage. Oh, the chip shortage, Sarah. Oh gosh, I know, I know. Instead of lamenting what we've all been, you know, our long suffering nightmare for some years. You know, maybe, maybe there is a little bit of, I'm sorry, my, my watch is calling me. Maybe, maybe there's a little good news to come. Chip shortage. What are we in our third year now, more or less, it's reached a bit of a catch 22. What is happening, Tom, that is delaying the end of this nonsense? Yeah, one way to end the chip shortage would be to increase capacity to make chips. So we've covered a lot of efforts to do just that here on the show. TSMC, Intel all have big plans to make chips. More than 90 chip factories are expected to start production globally between now and 2024. But to make more chips, of course, you need the equipment to make the chips and chip making equipment. It turns out uses chips and you see where this is going, don't you? If there's a chip shortage, you can't make enough chip making machines that would help you get out of the chip shortage because you can't get the chips to make the chip making machines. The timeframe on chip making machines has stretched from a few months to two to three years right now when you order a new machine. For example, a chip testing machine which just checks newly manufactured chip functions, that's a key part of chip manufacturing, requires 80 specialist chips. However, if you get those 80 chips, one machine can play a part in making 320,000 chips a year, many of which could be used in making chip tests, making machines. So, you know, if you get those 80, you can start cranking out a lot more. Okay, so if someone's like, huh, never really thought about the fact that chip making machines were needed to make chips and those chips that would end up, you know, in my iPhone, for example, would be that chip that needs another chip to make the chip. So, couldn't we just prioritize making the chips needed for chip making first and kind of get through this bottleneck? Yeah, chip makers have asked for just that and in some cases are getting it. Microchip Technologies CEO told the Wall Street Journal that it is treating chip equipment suppliers with priority the way it once treated medical device manufacturers with priority in the early days of the pandemic saying, look, special situation, we're going to change the way we do business here. So, okay, is that the only thing that is keeping the shortage going? Do we have other things that we need to consider? Even if we just got all the chip making machines priority, the shortage is also exacerbated by disruptions in supply. We've talked about that before, the chemicals and substrates you need to make the chips come from parts of the world that are in war right now. And just the supply chain in general is disrupted. There are also challenges finding enough workers to staff your new factories, not to mention demand keeps growing. Chip industry sales past $500 billion last year and are expected to almost double by the end of the 2020s, even with inflation and possible recession. The increase in smart devices, the increase in industrial automation and electric vehicles is expected to keep demand for things that need chips still pretty strong. Susquehanna financial group estimated that lead times on chips averaged more than six months in April. New factories are coming only this year that produced the older chips that caused initial shortages for automakers. So good news there, the chip shortage in vehicles might start to ease up, but that will not ease the shortage for cutting edge chips that has developed in the meantime. So it sounds like we're not getting out of this anytime soon. No, not for a couple more years. You know, listen, I bought a new iPhone last week. I had to. My other iPhone, anybody who listens to DTS knows what happened to it. But you know, I mean, chip shortage in the respect of me needing a particular device that was available to me, I am not touched at all. Nika, have you found chip shortages affecting your life? Not directly, but I do work for a company that uses lots of chips. So I, like I said, it hasn't impacted me directly but indirectly. For sure, I can see we're not just, you know, the lack of materials but then when you throw in the other things such as, you know, you need manpower need the chips to machines to make the chips that type of cycle and then, you know, materials needed. So I see it as something that may not directly affect me right now. But in the long term, especially with the expectation that this chip shortage is going to extend another couple of years. Who knows, I think at some point it's all really going to have a direct impact to our everyday lives. So it's unfortunate. I don't know what the remedy is, but it's, you know, results of where we are right now. So it's, I don't know. I don't know what the solution is. It doesn't look like anybody else knows the solution is either. It's a complex problem. And, you know, prioritizing the chip making will at least keep that from spiraling and extended it more. But then you just got to get the factories online. You've got to, you know, bring society back enough that that workers can move around enough to get the jobs and you can train up the skilled workers and hiring practices need to open up to people who are certified, not just people with college degrees. A lot of stuff we've been talking about on the show needs to happen. So the pieces are there. It's just going to take time. Speaking of time, it's time again for Tekin Wall Black where Nika Monford shines the light on a black technology leader you might not have heard of, but maybe you should have and maybe has directly impacted your life. So Nika, who are we highlighting that today? Today in Tekin Wall Black, we are highlighting Kunlei Olu Kutun. And, you know, it's very interesting conversation that we just had about chips. This guy is one of the folks who is foundational type innovator. He started as a professor in cadence design systems at Stanford in their electrical engineering department. He was the leader of the Stanford hydro chip multiprocessor research project that led to the first multiprocessor chips with support for thread level speculation. So yeah, thank you for threads. That's a good one. Yes, yep, yep. And the next thing, you know, after he led that team, he ended up founding a company called Afra Web Systems. And this particular company, again, in that chip domain, they built high throughput low power server processors for IP traffic. And this pretty much set up the next generation of IP access infrastructure. And it was so popular it made billions of dollars that in 2002, it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. So as this company was acquired by Sun Microsystems, of course, he made the transition over to Sun as well. While he was there, he was the chief architect behind the ultra spark T one processor, which if you don't know is a multi core multi threaded multi microprocessor design tongue tied there. And it was primarily used in the Niagara chip. And it's one of those things where again, the kind of the theme of this year's taking while black has been foundational innovators. And of course, that's obviously he's in that space, and not to you know, straight too far, he again founded another company along with the co founder, Samba Nova Systems, again, next generation computing platform for power machine learning and data analytics. So he kind of transitioned out of the chip space which he pretty much kind of been the innovator in that space. And you know, as I think many of us already know machine learning AI is pretty much top billing in our tech space. He went on to find found a company that pretty much focuses on that. Today he is back at Stanford, and he is the leader of the pervasive parallel lab, which essentially is is a laboratory that focuses on machine learning AI, and, you know, how that works into our society, not just on the technical aspect, but also in the bias and ethics realm as well because there's no AI machine learning, it can easily teeter on some bad ethics if you aren't, you know, one of those people who are focused on all aspects of of AI so he really has been, you know, a leader, innovator in, you know, multi core multi threaded chip multi processor as well as leading into the AI machine learning space. Yes, tons of yes tons of, you know, honors he's fellows at ACM I triple E has 12 patents written more than 150 scientific papers written to books so he is definitely one of our foundational leaders in the space of chip creation and AI going forward so pretty cool lots of work done in the space and innovation so you know, thanks to him, we have some multi threaded processors. We had the, we had some web servers for tech TV calm way back in the day that use those ultra spark T ones they they were they were nifty they were interesting designs and being a and working on that problem of, of making sure your training data set matches the population that your algorithm is going to serve. That's a huge one so. Yeah. Man, what a career. Thank you for for for highlighting that for us cool stuff. For sure. All right, let's check out the mailbag Sarah. Mark wrote in with some thoughts about what the new Twitter might be if it changes at all. Mark was saying, I was wondering if Elon plans to split Twitter into two pieces, for example, the hose, and then interfaces. The hose Mark says would be treated like a utility, it would charge as such, like any other communication utility not over the public airways. It would be treated as a common carrier, mostly free of moderation. The interfaces portion would be open to whoever would like to contribute to the hose, and also to moderate it. This could be a rich third party ecosystem of adding to and reading from the hose. Mark says this would free the host purse a portion of Twitter from the moderation conundrum and spread that over multiple interfaces that could cater to various groups, interests, countries, etc. Yeah, I, I don't care who does it. I like this idea. In fact, mastodon kind of does this. And, and the only knock on mastodon is that they do it in a way that is a little more complicated for people to wrap their heads around. And then that is easy for for a lot of people to adopt. I'm not talking about you out there listening who's like it was easy. I got on mastodon, but a lot of people find it a little more daunting. So, so making that system work easily where you can say, hey, we you decide which moderation plan works for you and then use that version and Twitter is just providing the like, like you say the fire hose of data. I feel like that's an interesting idea, especially if you make sure you get rid of bots and all that other stuff that are promised. I don't know. This is this is good, Mark. I like this. I like the direction you're thinking anyway. Yeah. Thank you, Mark for the email. And if you have questions, comments or ideas, you can always send them to us feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Also big thanks to you, Nika Monford for being with us today. And let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. You can pretty much find me anywhere on social media. I am at tech savvy diva everywhere. You can also head on over to the snobby west cast dot com for our podcast, get latest episodes. And if you want to get a little extra, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slab slash snobby west where you can watch our show live, but our show is produced and published every Friday. Excellent. Well, thanks for being with us today. Always good stuff. Thanks for thanks for bringing the knowledge. Thanks also to, of course, thanks also to a few brand new bosses that we got. We are on a roll in May y'all. Lee Bridget, Luke and Rodney are all our new patrons. Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Bridget. Thank you, Luke and thanks Rodney. The four hopes people of our Patri apocalypse. What's. I was trying to do four horsemen of the apocalypse, but it's really kind of, you know, daunting. Hope people. I was like, yeah, Lee Bridget, Luke and Rodney. We'll just call you Lee Bridget, Luke and Rodney. Thank you. Thank you. New hope. Yeah. There you go. Reminder there's a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. It rolls right through right after DTNS and it is available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Reminder, on this show, we are live Monday through Friday, 4pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Join us if you can. We'd love to have you. We'll be back to it all tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you soon.