 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's Project Luna faces its first real test, a $700 device to keep mosquitoes away, and paper, plastic, just walk out, or drone. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March the first. Happy St. David's Day 2022. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merri. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Also from Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm Roger Chang. This show's pretty ser... There's a longer version of this show containing curry called Good Day Internet. You can get that by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of Patreon, big thanks to our top patrons, including Philip Less, Daniel Dorado, and John Atwood. Let us begin with a few tech things you should know. FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced at Mobile World Congress that the U.S. will hold a 5G auction for 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum in July for better coverage over long distances and also the better ability to carry lots of data. T-Mobile is reportedly very interested as it already uses a lot of the 2.5 GHz spectrum and could use this to expand its 5G service. Rosenworcel is looking ahead to a 6G rollout. Not going to happen for a few years. But still, we're looking at that, which she says should be handled differently than how 5G was handled. All right. Just marking 6G off of my bingo card for 2022. Thank you. NVIDIA announced, quote, we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online. So, yes, somebody did get in their systems and is leaking some of that data. The attackers told NVIDIA to pay a ransom or they will leak all the data publicly. It's not actually ransomware. They just took data and are saying pay us or we'll leak it. NVIDIA says it became aware of the attack on February 23rd and has no evidence that this is related in any way to the war in Ukraine. Waymo received a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to let it charge for ride-hailing trips in its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. The California Department of Motor Vehicles granted Waymo a similar permit last September. This permit requires human safety operators on board. A big thanks to the folks on our subreddit for this one. The Daily Swigs Emma Wolcott reports that Oklahoma City-based DNA solutions determined that an unauthorized third party accessed their network and may have compromised certain sensitive information from sexual assault kits sent to them for forensic testing. That breach took place November 18th, 2021, and accessed medical information, but not social security driver's license or financial information. The Oklahoma City Police Department was among DNA solutions clients in the past, but no longer has a contract with the company. Several platforms announced new policies regarding Russia-based content. YouTube, Facebook and TikTok will block access to RT and Sputnik in Europe, and Meta has stopped recommending Russian government-affiliated media worldwide on Facebook and Instagram. Instagram is also offering encrypted DMs in Ukraine and Russia. Netflix said it will not comply with the December law requiring it to carry 12 local TV channels in Russia. Reddit limited the subreddits that are slash Russia and are slash Russia politics from showing up in search, recommendations or feeds unless specifically included by the user. In addition to content blocking, Binance and Coinbase will block accounts and transactions involving sanctioned individuals, but will not block entire countries. Snapchat stopped all ad sales to Russian and Belarusian companies, and Apple has paused sales of its products and pulled some Russian news apps from the app store outside of Russia. That was just going to keep getting longer, it feels like. Alright, let's shift our attention to video games. Lamar, what do we got? Yeah, so Amazon opened up its Luna game streaming service to all US users Tuesday. To use Luna, you pay a monthly fee for channels of games. So there's a Luna plus channel for $5.99 a month through though that rises to $9.99 a month starting April 1 and a family channel for $2.99 a month that goes to $5.99 a month on April 1 as well. So if you want to subscribe by March 31, you'll get to keep the lower price as long as you keep your subscriptions active. There's also an Ubisoft channel or Ubisoft for $17.99 a month. So Luna just added three new channels along so we have the Prime Gaming channel that was going to offer Amazon Prime members a free play of a rotating selection of games. Now for $4.99 a month you can get the retro channel with games like the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. Also $4.99 a month is the Jackbox games channel which added a Luna couch so that you can invite friends without having to subscribe to Luna. Sounds kind of cool. And Amazon also added one click streaming feature to go live from Luna on Twitch. It streams your game from a one camera overlay. You can also use your phone as the camera as if you're playing on a Fire TV. And finally Amazon now supports using your phone as a controller on a Fire TV as well. Otherwise you'll need to use some kind of controller. So here we go. The big test for Luna. It's certainly not the first game streaming service. Obviously we have GeForce Now out there. There's kind of Stadia in some form or other. Yeah Stadia and there's things like Shadow that just recently relaunched. But this kind of feels like the most collected and biggest name. And GeForce Now is very collected and very robust. It just hasn't got as much mind share. I don't know why. It probably should but it doesn't. Whereas Amazon is Amazon. So there in everybody's face they can push this out. They can put it on the box. So when you get your sardines delivered it can say like you guys sign up for Luna right now. So I feel like this is the biggest best test of video game streaming we've seen. They've got a decent amount of games. Certainly not every game you'd want. It's not going to replace your game console yet. But if you wanted to try it and you didn't want to buy a game console and you wanted to play some video games. There's some cool stuff in here. The one thing I'd say that I didn't figure out was how to use it with my Prime subscription. And maybe it's because I'm the secondary account. Maybe I need to log in as my wife who has the main account. You know sometimes they limit that on secondary accounts. But it kept trying to make me pay for Luna plus every time I tried to play one of the free Prime games. Yeah I didn't get a chance to try to prime gaming but I'm really interested. I don't know Sarah if you got a chance to say I'm really interested to see exactly what's in there. The kind of games are in there to play that are that are worth you know prime because you know just like with prime books. There's some good books but there's some other books. I mean I don't currently subscribe to any game streaming service. When I first saw the story I was like wow they're really siphoning off certain genres of games like $5 here $5 there. $18 a month which is pretty steep. But if you compare this to a video service where maybe you want a couple shows or a certain I don't know library of certain kinds of movies and you just don't want to pay you know $75 per month for some sort of alternative cable video streaming service. Maybe this makes sense. I'm sure there are people out there saying well now I have to choose and it's going to add up if I if I piggyback more than a few of these little bundles on you know to my entire experience but maybe that's what people want. I mean not all gamers play all games. Yeah, I really like the idea that the channels I I haven't examined it but I really have a friend who definitely will try to retro channel for some of those games but I love jack box games. It's you know and if all the games are I think there's up to seven now, if all of the games are there. I've got an event coming up five bucks to have access to to like several those jack box games for everybody playing your TV is a really compelling offer so I think I think these bundles going to be a win, except for that. Ubisoft one I'm not sure what what they're thinking with a limited amount of games and game game pass gives you a hundred for 10 bucks. So, you know, but there'll be somebody who will get it I'm sure. That's for the Uber Ubisoft fan who's like, Oh, I will spend more than $60 a month on an Ubisoft game. All I play is Ubisoft. I don't know how many of those people there are. But if you if you want to kind of option. Yeah, if you were to buy even an Ubisoft game once every two months. 1799 would still beat that right because it's still cheaper than buying the actual game itself. And if if you are like, this isn't for me, please, you can write in, but that's not that interesting. We hear that we see that that's the default operation. If you're the person who's like, no, no, no, let me tell you why Luna is perfect for me that we don't see as much. And that would be very interesting to hear from as well feedback and Daily Tech Newshow.com. A company called Thermacell has launched a mosquito repellent device called live. You might have heard of Thermacell. They make some camping mosquito repellent, but this is for your backyard. It uses metafluthrin, a synthetic molecule modeled after a repellent found naturally in chrysanthemums. For yard protection, you use at least three repellors that come on these little yard stakes. You put them around your yard, each one has about a 20 foot radius and each one contains a cartridge with the chemical in it. When you activate them, the chemical is warmed up and creates an odorless invisible cloud that they say is about 93% effective at keeping mosquitoes from flying into it. It doesn't even kill them. It just says they just don't want to be near that cloud. The whole thing is coordinated by a hub, which you have to plug into a power outlet, and then you connect the hub to the repeller units with these lightweight low voltage cables. You can then control the hub with an app over Wi-Fi, integrate it with Amazon or Google Assistant for voice control, and then turn it on manually from the app or by voice or schedule it to go on when you need it if you're always out in the backyard at a certain time. Company recommends turning it on about 15 to 30 minutes before you need it, and the cartridges last for about 40 hours of use. So it's not meant to be on all the time just when you need it. A three pack with a hub is meant to cover 945 square feet. That'll cost you $699. A four pack, which covers 1,260 square feet, costs $799. And a five pack, which does 1,600 square feet, is $899. Also, after your 40 hours, you're going to have to refill the cartridges. You can get a pack of six cartridges for $120. Oh man, so first of all, there are areas of the world where mosquitoes are, you know, they're going to carry really life-threatening diseases. This is not something that I think about on a daily basis. However, where I live is also partly an Airbnb, and in the summer, especially around dusk, mosquitoes are a real issue. This would be something that I can see certain folks investing money in because it keeps people from having to slather stuff on their own person. It sounds like when working properly, 93% of keeping mosquitoes away sounds pretty great, you know, when you're all sitting out on the porch eating your steaks kind of thing. But boy, is this cost prohibitive. Yeah, I have a different view of this. I think the cost is great. I think the cost is great if it wasn't mosquitoes, but bees. Why bees? You get chased by bees a lot? I do. They remember me from my younger days in Chicago. They have followed me here to LA. They say it may work on other small like gnats and flies, but they've got a submission to be able to say that for real, but they can't guarantee it. So maybe it would work on bees. I would pay that to keep all bees. Although if it's based on a chrysanthemum powder, it might actually attract. Honestly though, for 40 hours of use, you figure, okay, well, if it was a couple hours a day, you know, when mosquitoes are the most annoying, it's going to last, I don't know, a month. But also having to think about it up to a half an hour before you actually need to use it. There's definitely, there's some legwork going on here, even if it works as planned, it's going to change the way that you hang out outdoors. Gitpul Zander in our chat room has a personal size thermosel and says that it does give off a smell, they think. But for me, it's a solution for hanging out on the patio and having a cigar with no mosquitoes. So it sounds like it works. It's just a matter of whether it's worth. For me, it's like we get mosquitoes now in the summer. It's kind of annoying. I spray myself with off and it's fine. I think I'd prefer not to have to spray myself with off, but I'm not sure if it's $700 worth of annoyance to spray myself with off. I could see several hundred bucks if it lasted the season. If you're, you know, like Sarah, you mentioned a month, but like if they were able to extend this where it's like the summer season or the fall season, there's some argument that those refillable cartridges are then worth it for the peace of mind. I'm not having that around, but 40 hours can go pretty fast. What if you forget that it's on, whatever. I feel like based on what Gitpul Zander said in the chat, but I might just want to buy one of the personal size ones and just set it next to me when I need it. Not set up a whole system for the backyard. Yeah, it seems like something you'd maybe want to want to start small. And if you're getting good results, then think about extending it, especially as you have a lot of guests. Or yeah, if you're spending like our next door neighbors, they always eat out in the backyard during the summer. This might be great for them because of that. Well, moving on to Uber. Uber's main app is getting some new discovery features, not in a separate app in the main app itself. The company is rolling out a new explore tab in the app to make things like dinner reservations, booking concert tickets, reading Yelp reviews and getting photos and directions to feature locations from within that main app. You can pay for things from the Uber wallet and payment profile the same way that you would be doing to book a ride. And then the app will use prior Uber and Uber eats history to try to serve up relevant information based on your previous habits and what's popular in your given area. Uber says it's not going to charge restaurants a booking fee for reservations made to explore at least not now. But it may add a service or booking fee for some experiences. The company hasn't really elaborated on what that means. So sounds like a little bit in testing mode might get some money revenue to Uber in the future. The features now live in 15 US metro areas, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New Orleans, New Jersey, upstate New York, although not New York City, Orlando, San Antonio, San Francisco and Seattle also in Mexico City. So I opened up mine here in Los Angeles and there's a ton of stuff in here. There's there's restaurants. There's the Griffith Observatory. There's museums, but none of them let me book a ticket. It's all just booking a ride. So I feel like they've definitely partnered with Yelp to populate this thing with lots of stuff. And that's a great way to encourage you to be like, Oh, what should I do today? Oh, I think I'll go to this escape room and let me book my ride. That's all very convenient. The aspect of this, which is getting the most attention, which is and I'll be able to buy the ticket to the event through there doesn't seem to be as widespread. Like they got some work to do there. Yeah, you know, like I looked at the Warner Brothers Studio tour Hollywood right above the one you mentioned. And I clicked through and they still have the book right there, but lower down they have, hey, the WB studio tour calm. So if is that an affiliate like credit for yet, you know, but if you're trying to do like a one stop shop type of thing like quick click, I got tickets. And then you, it's because I think you mentioned this pre show. If I know if I get a ride there to the WB studio tour and they say sorry, we booked for the day. But as you know, that's kind of a wasted, wasted trip, but they can tell you, hey, two tickets are available. Do you want to order now? That's an excellent experience. If they a little fee to me if it's reasonable, it's kind of it's kind of worth that impromptu trip that you were taking anyway. Also, I just find it interesting that the selection here because I'm getting like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Broad, the Huntington, the Scurble Cultural Center, Sun Goddess Ashley. She does tarot readings. Oh, okay. But those are all right. Sun Goddess Ashley got some pretty good placement in there. Well done. Tom, you and I still have to take that TMZ celebrity tour. It just has to happen that bus. Yeah. Yeah. When it's bookable through the Uber Explorer tab. Exactly. We're totally there. I mean, why do you got to go through TMZ? They've been doing those buses for like 40 years. It's an experience, right? They got more dirt. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is smart for Uber because they're making their money off delivering things right now, mostly food, but also they're trying to get convenience store items and all of that. But they do want to get people back into using Uber as transportation again as people are venturing back out into the world more. And this is a great way to encourage that to be like, hey, do you want to go to the museum? You want to go to the baseball park, you know, whatever, we can make it easy for you to find the place and get a ride. Well, folks, if you have a thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, we're going to fix that right now. Here it is. Here it is. Listening. Feedback at daily tech news show dot dot com. Just the one dot actually. Yeah, one of your two dots. Alphabet's wing announced it has reached a milestone of 200,000 commercial deliveries, mostly in the Australian capital of Canberra. Wing says its unmanned aerial vehicles make one delivery every 25 seconds on average right now. Wing just announced a partnership with the supermarket Coles. Wing already delivers KFC and rolled and some medical products from a couple of outlets. Many folks think of Amazon when they think of drone deliveries, because man, Amazon did a great job convincing you that Amazon primary would be real someday. It has never launched. In fact, it's most recent news I could find was that they laid people off from that department. But Amazon is focusing on driver deliveries. They'll they'll drive your groceries over to you. And they want to make the in store experiences here. The first just walk out powered Whole Foods has opened in Glover Park, the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington DC. It's the first cashierless Whole Foods. Amazon has their Amazon go stores that are cashierless and an Amazon fresh store in Seattle that is cashierless. But this is the first Whole Foods. The DC Whole Foods is 21,500 square feet. So that's about the size of the Amazon fresh just walkout store up in Bellevue, Washington. You can use Amazon's palm scanning or a QR code if you want to get in, or you can choose self service checkout. That is one interesting thing here is they'll still have self service checkout. You don't have to do just walk out. If you don't want to. The second Whole Foods that is going to have cashierless technology will open in Los Angeles later this year. So let's talk about groceries. First of all, Lamar when this Los Angeles location opens up, will you commit to me that we will go and try it out? Grocery date? I will commit 100% to this grocery date. It is fantastic. Fantastic. So we will report back folks once the Los Angeles one opens. What is about but different kinds of great way to get your groceries here. We got drones. You can just walk in and use your palm to scan and then done not have to go through a cashier. You can have them delivered to you. What's your pleasure? I like it all. I'll go ahead. It's funny. I have a few friends who live in Washington DC. I am not personally familiar with the Glover Park neighborhood, but I asked a few folks this morning, hey, you guys know where this Whole Foods is and everyone went, yeah, yeah, we know. And I said, we go in there and check this out and just let me know how the experience is. And I got one of two responses. First of what's just walk out. Never heard of this before. And then other people saying, this has been going on in San Francisco for like five years, right? I said, you're both right. This is a whole foods though. And it's an option. It's sort of Amazon saying this is where we want to go. We need to figure out if the if our whole whole foods franchise that we bought some years ago, this is you know, the public is ready for this. Some people will be. But to have it as an option, I think is really smart because I think that there are plenty of people who don't totally feel comfortable with this yet or don't really understand why this is convenient or don't believe that it's all that convenient for them. And and yeah, this is this is a very much sort of proof of proof of technology before it starts to open up in other places. The Los Angeles store, I'll be really interested to see, you know, how how the uptick is on people saying, yeah, this is totally the future. Because if it if it does work well, I see this just this is how grocery stores will all be in 10 years from now. That's what Amazon wants to sell everybody that platform, right? Exactly. Exactly. But if but if people are like, I'm fine with, you know, I've got a, you know, a card, you know, tap to pay, or I'm using, you know, maybe Google Pay or Apple Pay or there are all sorts of other ways that people find shopping and paying for whatever you buy a lot more convenient than it used to be in the past. So I want this to succeed because I think it sounds great. That said, I've never used just walk out technology because it's nowhere near me. Yeah, I've I was interested what you were saying about some people will be interested in this and some not I guess my question and it might be, you know, one that just can't be answered is why would anyone be against this? And a couple answers could be just comfort level. Some people like just having a cashier do it for them. Some, you know, we have people who will have lines of 10 carts deep on each each line, but the self check check out is empty. I know they won't touch it. And so it just makes me wonder, is it just a comfort level or is the convenience of saying, Hey, as you walk in, you know, bam, bam, bam, you can walk right out, you know, and I'm guessing, Tom, you're itching to say privacy as one of the one of the things privacy. Yeah, because, because part of it self service checkout, I will find myself sometimes saying, you know what, I just want to go to the cashier, because the self service checkout has its own problems. And sometimes it doesn't work. Or you know, maybe I'm buying alcohol and you can't do that at the self service checkout. Whereas just walk out is always going to be easier. There's there's no like, so the only people that would object to it are people who are like just stuck in their ways are like, I don't even want to think about a different thing. You mean I have to get a QR code, forget it. I don't want to do that. Or privacy, like you said, it's people who are out by being tracked, even though it's just being tracked around a store. And even though you're always tracked anyway, in a store, because there's always employees looking at you to make sure you don't steal stuff, that people are like, I'm not comfortable for whatever reason with with cameras following me, I would like to not show up on your cameras. It's like, man, the cameras are there. Anyway, he might as well use them, right? Yeah. Yeah, I actually, before we move on, I asked a friend who said, I'm uneasy with this. And I said, Well, why exactly? You know, because if you're buying something, the cashier would know that you were buying it eventually. What about this bothers you the most? She said, Well, you know, what if I pick up a bunch of stuff, you know, maybe look at nutrition labels and put them back? Aren't they now getting a lot more intel on what I'm interested in in general, not necessarily what I'm actually going forward with the purchase of. And I said, Okay, that's fair. But you know, how does this negatively impact your next trip to the store? I'm not sure it does. Yeah, but again, everybody feels differently about this. They're getting that info anyway, whether you use just walk out or not, like that part change, right? You're in their store. So they're always looking at that kind of stuff. And as long as here's the key, as long as they're not building a profile on you from that and selling it without your permission, I'm fine. If they're like, man, we got a lot of pickups on the mayonnaise today. People are really into mayonnaise order more mayonnaise. That's great. As long as it's not ah, we know that Sarah picked up a lot of mayonnaise. So make sure to push a lot of mayonnaise stuff to her email address. And when she logs into Amazon suggests she buy lots of mayonnaise. That's that's where it just well and given history, I think the the fear that you will only be targeted as a mayonnaise person in the future is somewhat warranted. Yeah, right. So if you can convince me that you're you're not going to try to sell me, Sarah Lane, or Justin Robert Young mayonnaise, because he hates mayonnaise, then then we're okay. Sure. Listen, I love mayonnaise. There's just only so much I can eat. Yeah, I'm here. Scooter maker razor R A Z O R not to be confused with razor without no has experimented with E scooters in the past over the past few years, a fair amount of models. But scooter maker razor has a new model, the razor icon. It's an e scooter modeled after its original model a that you might kind of think of as younger kids scooting along the sidewalk using the icon has a 36 volt lithium ion battery and a 30 350 watt motor with a claimed range of 18 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 18 miles per hour, which is pretty fast if you're on a scooter comes with an LED head lamp and brake light to and is launching at Toy Fair in New York City today. Now, if you want to pre order it, the priors are open now on Kickstarter of all places for $550. The eventual price will climb up to $600. So if this is something you really want, you get 50 bucks off. And I am not personally going to buy one because I've never had a razor scooter in general, but I can see where the nostalgia plus modern life would make a lot of sense depending on where you live. Yeah, man. I'm going to jump on out of this to do a search on where to find this and tell everybody I can on aim. So Tom has made his feelings known. Lamar, what about you? Are you were you a razor fan at any point? I just the idea of the the the model a e scooter, um, titillate the razor senses? Never had never had the privilege of having a scooter and my younger my young in days. So, um, no, I don't even use the scooters at around LA now. I you know, I think of the razor scooter as dot com era people going down 8th street to the Townsend studio where towns and offices where ZDTV and tech TV were like, I would definitely remember seeing people on their razor scooters when they were new. Oh, for sure. For sure. It was it always sort of struck me as like like a skateboard, but a little safer. You can, you know, you could Yeah, you can you can you have a little bit more control unless you're like a great skateboarder and then go for it. But this is not something that I've ever used the e scooter stuff, especially if you live somewhere somewhere with maybe not really dramatic hills, but hills that something like this could go up and down just like a e bike or, you know, variety of other e scooters that are on the market. Kind of cool. Not super affordable, but not not the most expensive option either. Yeah, I didn't want to say real quick. I'm happy to see Toy Fair back. I used to go. I used to go a couple years. It's just it's in New York. It's just I'm glad. Glad to see you back. That's all hollow DLR said scooters are inherently kickstarted. Oh, right. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Louie or Lewis. Either one from Montreal said I was listening to your vetted or forget it discussion. This was a conversation we had with Justin Marbey Young last week on how we read the news and try to vet the sources for ourselves. Louie says my preferred way is to keep up with the news on Google news. My favorite feature is View Full Coverage. It'll group articles from various news sources about a topic giving you various viewpoints. It also aggregates relevant tweets on a topic. Not sure how many other people use Google news, but I've been using it as my primary news source since 2013 when Google Reader was discontinued. And I feel like I get a much more balanced story because it will surface sources. I may not have implicitly followed as well as the original source of a story. Yeah, I use Google news as one of the sources for putting together things for for Daily Tech News Show. My only negative on Google news is they sometimes will surface places that I don't I'm like, I don't know if I should trust the source or not. I've never heard of this place, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because there's new things coming along and you don't want to keep them from coming. But sometimes I drill down and I'm like, no, I should definitely not trust the source that Google News surface. So you got to be careful. But yeah, I agree with you. It is a good place to expose yourself to things that you might not otherwise see. I am a Google news user for sure. I am too. On a daily basis. Sometimes it's kind of the same stuff I've seen elsewhere. Sometimes not. It's definitely definitely a good source to have in your mix if you're a news junkie. We wanted to thank a brand new boss that we got since yesterday's show. Micael Soder just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you so much, Micael. Indeed. Thank you, Micael. Yes, you've got a new boss right now. We're going to get a lot of attention. See a lot of applause, not unwelcome attention, a lot of thankful, like grateful attention. So standing out standing. Oh, Lamar Wilson. Always good to have you back on the show as well. And so glad your power came back on before we started the show. Got to love tech, right? Let folks know where to keep up with everything else that you do. Yeah, if you go to LamarWilson.com, there's all of my links. I do short form vertical content everywhere from my boxings. Did a movie review for the first time yesterday because I saw the Batman early. So I did that under a minute. Let you know my experience being on a WB lot for the first time and all kind of things. The boxings are the best one. Just pull one up today. Tearing up some funko so you could just check me out Lamar Wilson.com. It'll take you everywhere. That's Lamar with two Rs. Check him out, everybody. He is prolific on the Internet. We are live on this show. We like to think of ourselves as prolific as well. Money through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC is when we are live. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.