 Coming up on DTNS, a missed opportunity at a good use for NFTs. Someone lures LinkedIn and big ride hailing puts the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its sights. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 10th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Sudia, Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin, Robert Young, drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta, and I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty certain. There is more where this came from, folks. If you get to the end of this and you're like, man, I want more DTNS, get good day internet. It's the expanded show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of patrons, we would like to thank a few of them. Today, they include Allyson Jobby, Andrew Bradley, and Dale McKayhee. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple announced updates to AirTags and the Find My Network to help preserve privacy and also combat stalking, which has been an issue on the network thus far. A warning during setup will now make it clear that using AirTags to track people without consent is a crime and that AirTags are designed to be detectable by victims and law enforcement and can get identifying information about the user of them. Apple says it can provide account details in response to a subpoena or other valid law enforcement requests. It will also change the unknown accessory warning to specify when the accessory is actually AirPods instead of AirTags. A more precise way to find unexpected AirTags is in the works as well. Good news, everyone. MoviePass is coming back this summer, apparently, with a credit spate system. Also, Futurama is coming back, but that's not the good news. I'm talking about Foxconn announced at a company event that it's noticing, quote, major improvements in part shortages and overall supply constraints are expected to ease in the second half of the year. That's the good news. The bad news is that Western Digital Corp, aka WDC, discovered contaminants in two of its flash storage manufacturing plants in Japan. WDC expects this will result in a shortage of 6.5 exabytes worth of flash storage items. That's 6.5 billion gigabytes worth of storage down the drain. TrendForce estimates that's probably about 13% of WDC's Q1 output, and so they did the math. They think your NAND flash prices might rise 5% to 10% in Q2 as a result. Microsoft would like the attention of people who might be angry about the end of free Google Workspace access. Microsoft says, hello, hello, listen to us. Google Workspace costs $6 per user per month, although Google has said it will create a new no-cost program. Many of us, myself included, are grandfathered in, and there's been a lot of confusion around this whole thing. Now, while people wait for those details, Microsoft is offering legacy-free G Suite users, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, at 60% off for an entire year. That brings it down from $5 per user per month to $2. Might be more affordable for you, might be a little bit more attractive. Microsoft says it will make the offer available until August 2nd. If a company wants to use non-European Union servers to process EU customer data, has to ensure its privacy. That's the law. A law making that easy had existed since 2000, but was struck down by the EU Court of Justice in 2015, and its replacement called Privacy Shield was struck down in July 2020. That left every company's data processes open to legal challenge. In January, Austria's Data Protection Authority found that Google Analytics violated the GDPR and Thursday, France's CNIL found the same. The problem is the US Patriarch Act has some surveillance laws, and there is no agreed legal standard that companies can follow to protect EU data from potential surveillance in the US. That's why Metta said that the lack of legal framework in Europe could potentially force it to shut down there if it wasn't remedied. We talked about that on Monday. Europe and the US have been working on a new legal framework and Politico says that we might hear it announced at the Trade and Tech Council in May. So someone tells you Metta has threatened to quit Europe. If it doesn't get its way, you can tell them that's because there's no legal framework for any tech company to move data between servers in the EU and the US. And then you can add, but a possible solution may be coming in May and you'll feel real smart. And if you want to know more on Privacy Shield, we have an episode of Know a Little More about it. We can link to that in the show notes at dailytechnewshow.com. YouTube creators, some new features you might like. YouTube Chief of Project Officer Neil Mohan announced several new features rolling out to creators this year, 2022. You will be able to reply to YouTube short comments with other short videos, as well as in video shopping and gifted memberships are on the way in the coming months as well. NFTs. Yep, YouTube's getting into the game. Apparently YouTube is exploring ways for creators to sell NFTs to their fans on the platform. Also slightly related, YouTube TV will get picture and picture on iOS. All right, let's talk a little more about infrastructure. Huh? Okay, let me try to tease that a little better. Electric vehicle charging. All right. The US is going to start detailing how it will spend $7.5 billion of federal money on the installation of electric vehicle charging stations. The first $5 billion is designated for high use corridors. So we're talking mostly interstate highways. This is part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, which is not a fun acronym. It's NEVIP. States must get their request in by August 1st. Plans will be approved by September 30th and the first $615 million is expected to be available by the end of the year. The feds are going to pre-certify certain interstates and other highways to be authorized to get the charging stations. They expect it to cover approximately 165,722 miles of the national highway system, and states can ask for adjustments or expansions if they can justify them. Charging stations need to be installed every 50 miles. They can be fewer, but in the, you know, dained corridor, they have to be at least every 50 miles. They should be no more than a mile off the highway, so they want to keep them as close to the highway as possible. Each station must have at least 600 kilowatts of total capacity and at least four charging ports that can deliver 150 kilowatts to each vehicle. Stations must be open to the general public and cannot be limited to one company's fleet. Yeah, if you're open for fleets, you've got to be open to more than one company's fleet. Federal money is going to cover 80% of the cost of these stations, so states are expected to contract with private companies for the installation and operation of them, make some money off them as they go. That's just for the first five billion. Remember, there was 7.5 billion here. The other two and a half billion is meant to fill the gaps, including in rural areas, disadvantaged communities and other high-demand areas, and guidance on how to get those funds is coming later this year. But the main plan here, Justin, is every 50 miles on major interstate highways, let's have an EV station so people feel less ranging anxiety. Is that the point? Because the real point here is to incentivize electric vehicles, and that is the method by which they are going to do it. If you are trying to quell the fears that somebody might have in buying an electric vehicle, you want to be able to say, well, look, now when we do the map of charging stations that you are looking at in your area or on your commute, there will be more dots around there. You are also incentivizing both entrepreneurs and electric car companies themselves to get into the business of building these things. You would assume that they would do more than just the federally contracted and would probably build out some of their own with their own total money. But that is the way that federal subsidies work. We are now seeing it in action for charging stations. You know, my first reaction when I was looking over the story is like, OK, charging stations every 50 miles. If I am on a road trip, if I am on the I-5, which is, you know, if I am going from San Francisco to Los Angeles and California, that is the easiest way to do it. And you got a lot of gas stations on the way to get off the road and be like, I'm going a mile in some sort of direction to find the charging station. That doesn't sound right. It must be right on the side of the road. You can see them. You know, you can see the X on sign. But, you know, in five years from now, I think that that's probably going to sound quite silly because we will have so many of these charging stations that it will just change the way that people do long distance travel. I was thinking about that. If you look at this and you think like, all right, every 50 miles, I don't know if that's enough. And that kilowatt hour, that doesn't sound like it's fast enough charging. This is just putting in the bare minimum, right? We actually have a pretty good charging infrastructure right now. This is supplementing what's existing. Don't forget that you can actually drive coast to coast and charge your electric vehicle without running out of range. This is to make it super simple. Let's put in a lot of them. Let's make sure there's no gaps on the interstate highway. You don't have to take some weird route because that's where the electric vehicle charging is taking you. This is kind of a safety net for what I think people forget if they don't have EVs. All the EV owners tell me is actually a pretty good charging infrastructure already. It just could be better. And it looks like that's what this is meant to do. You put the exact words there, Tom. Safety net. And to Sarah, to your point, in no world will these be the only charging stations for every 50 miles. And if they are a mile off, then they will be the only thing open if the other two charging stations that are closer to the highway that are privately owned happen to be closed right then. This is all about just making sure that there are a in this phase, more of them along the main corridor. So you're saturating that. And then probably putting some out a little bit in the boonies in that second 2.5 billion. And incentivizing companies to, while they're getting this federal money, why don't you think about building more of your own while you're at it? Well, on the subject of vehicles, a lot of people wonder, besides collectibles, the obvious board-ape stuff, what are the best examples of NFTs that might improve our lives? I am one of those people who constantly ask myself that because I don't own an NFT personally. But I do own a car and I'm kind of in the market for a new car. So here's one that might interest you. Alfa Romeo will issue an NFT for each of its new plug-in hybrid tonal SUVs. Doesn't mean you're going to be trading your car value on open seed. What it does do, though, is it certifies the car on purchase. So it's on the ledger as yours. This is your car. And when your car gets serviced by a certified dealer, maintenance records are added to the NFT. You get your tires rotated. It's all on the ledger. You might say, well, OK, aren't service records already tied to VIN numbers on cars, for example? And that is true. They are. But the NFT might be more reliable and then perhaps more accessible than a centralized service record that only some people have access to right now. I can't go in and check out my VIN number activity, but somebody at my local Boval dealer can, for example. However, Alfa Romero, which is owned by Stellantis, which is the post merger of Fiat Chrysler and French automaker PSA Group, has not provided details on what kind of data will be stored from this, what blockchain might be used from this. Although Francesco Calcara, who is the head of alpha marketing and communication, did say, quote, NFTs are based on the same distributed information logic that protects your Bitcoin, end quote, which is basically a long way of saying it will be a blockchain. We still don't really exactly know what the details are. So I wanted to ask the group, what would it take to make a maintenance NFT superior to our current practices? Well, I think you highlighted one of the big reasons why it would have a utilitarian use, meaning that you wouldn't have to rely, if let's say you were buying this car in aftermarket service like car fax or something like that that would be able to tap into VIN number records and see what kind of work has been done on it. So you're not lied to by somebody. If it's a public record, it's something that you'd be able to see. And therefore you would incentivize transparency. But that's not why they're doing this. Yeah, I mean, I don't feel like there's a lot of sure. I mean, I could shave the VIN number off my car and like go black market on this. But like, that's not what most people are doing. So when I was thinking because I'm in the market for a new car right now. So this is something that where I was like, how would this help me personally? I'm not sure I can figure it out yet. I'm not I'm not saying this is just a bunch of marketing, you know, fluff that doesn't mean anything. But I'm just not sure how it helps the consumer today. I mean, I'll say it. It sure smells like marketing fluff to me. Because because the NFTs car brand, the NFT could it could do something. It could say on an open system. Anybody can access with your authorization because it's your NFT can access the vehicle records of maintenance from any shop. That's where it breaks down for me. The fact that this is still tied the Alfa Romeo dealer is no different than just having a centralized database that the Alfa Romeo dealers monitor. I guess it might make it a little easier to move that data around. It probably makes it more secure to do it this way. There's some security benefits you get. But the big benefit to me would be like, man, this car, this Alfa Romeo I bought, no matter who works on it, you're going to have a record because you have to enter the NFT anytime there's a record. And the fact that it's tied to the dealer means like, well, you won't unless you took it to the dealer. I was thinking, you know, if if there was a way, let's say I sell my current car on the private market and, you know, I'm kind of trying to keep dealerships out of it entirely. Yeah, the Venn number is still really important. But that could perhaps cut some corners from buyer to seller, making things easier and just making sure, like, yes, sir, is legit. Look at the ledger. Everything's on there. What she's done or not done with the car. But yeah, it seems like a bit of a bit of a stretch. Party systems that recommend service like, oh, we see from your NFT or do for the service. Here's some great places that service your car. Again, that's not what they're doing here, though. It really does feel like they just wanted to put NFT in the press release. How much more is a truck worth because it has Eddie Bauer's name on it, even if though it's it is a functionally totally identical to another truck around that same model? Or if you you put some other little hood ornament on it, that effectively does nothing for it. You forgot about any borrowers. Yeah, it's just the way that you sell cars. It's now somebody who's really in that is my only reason this frustrates me is that they're they have a technology here. They're talking about that they could use to do something cool. They're just not doing it. Sure. But we're in early days. Yeah, that's true. Hey, let's talk about something that never is without your attention because of how much they email you. LinkedIn. Testing a setting that will let you remove political discussion from your feed. The discussions will still be there for those that want them. But if you don't, you won't have to see it. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Rosalansky said the program began testing the filter in the US over the past few months. Keywords and signals can help identify content and the human editorial team makes final calls. The filters try to remove content about political parties and candidates. Election outcomes, ballot initiatives and more. Already, LinkedIn users can mark any comment as I don't want to see this. And one of the options when you do is to specify quote, I don't want to see political content. You can always choose a more generic. I'm just not interested in this topic if you don't want to tag it with politics immediately. But if you are in this test group, the idea is that you just flip a feed preference saying allow political content to off and voila, it is gone. LinkedIn is also hoping to add more creator focused features like video and streaming audio. But what do we think of a topic specific off button friends? I think that's a great idea. I don't hang out on LinkedIn enough for this to be an issue personally for me. But if I know a lot of people who use that as the workplace timeline, sure, like Twitters, whatever. But LinkedIn is kind of where you're networking and you're letting people know what you're doing job wise. And a lot of people take that very seriously. So I think, you know, taking anything politics is obviously a hot button. And a lot of people don't want that on their LinkedIn. But that could go for lots of categories in the future. It just seems like a no brainer. It's interesting to me. This comes from LinkedIn, which which has the reputation of being a less controversial place. People are talking about work stuff, so they're less likely to go off the handle than say they would be on Facebook or Twitter. I'll tell you what I like about this. I like that it's in the customer's hand. You're not editing the site. You're saying, hey, here's a tool to help you. They're not even guaranteeing it's perfect. They're just saying you could try this. You can turn it off if you want or you can go back to the old way of going piece by piece to try to teach us what you want to see. But here's another tool. I like that approach. And if this works well, then maybe it's the kind of thing that you could roll out widely on other social networks to be to kind of fine tune what you see in an algorithmic feed. Well, the reason why LinkedIn is able to do it is because they have a very specific way of making money, which is advertising your job listing or advertising yourself to people who might employ you that isn't tied to just raw tonnage of how many impressions they can generate. So they have a reason why they would just incentivize certain things showing up in your feed, specifically the kind of things that get you angry. I will say something nice about LinkedIn. I do believe that it as it has expanded and every website eventually tries to become every other website, the fact that it does have the social media elements has made it become something closer to Twitter meets Quora or something like that. A site where you are incentivized to lead with your expertise and not just fill up people's feeds with a bunch of BS. It also has a rising Gen Z audience, according to this according to this article. And I think part of it is because it is more sober than, let's say the Wild West of Facebook and Twitter, where the only incentive is to get as much attention as possible. Gen Z loves LinkedIn. It's also, you know, a lot of people who have recently graduated from college saying where the job's at? Yeah, yeah, out there. Hey, folks, joining the conversation in our discord, you got thoughts about this or anything else we're talking about. You can chat with it with other folks who are also interested in these topics by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and others are spending more than $200 million or I should say they spent it. It's already gone. $200 million on their campaign to get prop 22 past in California. You probably heard about it. That's the proposition that created a new class of worker in the state of California, specific to the gig economy. It's basically defined as people who deliver stuff, people or food. These delivery and ride hailing companies offer more benefits to a delivery driver than they would do contractors, but fewer benefits to these gig workers than they would offer to a full on employee. Those companies are now pursuing a similar campaign in Massachusetts. The battle there began in July 2020. That's when Massachusetts Attorney General Mara Healy filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft saying they should classify their drivers as employees according to the common wealth of Massachusetts laws. This would give drivers minimum wage, sick time and overtime. That lawsuit is not resolved still ongoing. As a result, the companies put together two ballot initiatives to go before the voters. I'll explain why there's two in a second. One has additional safety training for drivers and one doesn't. Otherwise they're the same. The companies will likely only try to put one of these on the actual ballot. Both have been certified. They just need to get signatures before they can be put in front of voters. So we're at the point where we got two very similar initiatives. They're all ready to go. You just need to have somebody in front of the A and P telling you to sign right here to put it on the ballot. One of the reasons there are two measures is to increase the chances of the Massachusetts legislature passing one of them ahead of time. They figure if they've got two versions, maybe they can get one through the legislature because in Massachusetts, the legislator can choose to preemptively pass a ballot initiative and then you don't need to take it to the voters. It just becomes law. That does not look likely to happen, though. If the legislature doesn't pass anything by May, the good companies have until July to get those signatures and put one of the versions on the ballot. Protocols Hershchikara and Anna Kramer have an excellent article on this going into the details, including the fundraising battle. We'll have a link to that in our show notes as well. But Justin, I know you were really fascinated with the Prop 22 Battle in California. What do you think of this one? So it appears that the key difference is that in California, the state legislator passed a law fully redefining a whole class of employment that Uber and Lyft and gig workers fell under. That had its own criticism for being overbroad and they already had to start cutting other certain things out of it and amending to it because one bad law deserves another bad love. The the solve from the gig companies was to just exempt themselves from this already thing, therefore making the initial law just the bad ideas that were happening around their intended target that had now missed. What it seems like the difference here is that this is being led by a lawsuit from the attorney general. And they are trying to preemptively protect themselves before that lawsuit can resolve or anybody can get any fancy ideas about passing a law. So I think this is it shows to me from the gig companies a more aggressive stance that that they're going to take as many swings at this pinata as they can. They don't want to be in a position like they were in California where they were really up to a ballot initiative that until the final two months looked like they were going to lose. They had to really pull one pull one out. So that's that's my take on this. Do you think this turns into a domino effect if they were to win in Massachusetts? Would that be enough to say like, all right, we're going to see a bunch of states start to fall in line and just do this before we come for them. I think that the fact that they won in California was already a chilling effect. You know, this happened around the same time that that that ballot initiative happened. But I think if you flash forward to now in 2022, the fact that the people of California, a fairly famously liberal state, I might add for those who are not aware of the context, rejected that particular proposal. I think even for progressive attorney generals and legislators, state legislators, I don't know if there's another place where you would say, oh, yeah, California, of course not, but here, like Massachusetts, maybe other than that, a smaller state possibly, but nothing with the kind of population that would really put a big difference in Ubers or Lyft's bottom line. Well, the Indonesian coffee app, Kopi Kanangon, if you're not familiar, lets customers order their coffees ahead of time. You might say, well, that's not new. Starbucks has been offering this for years to its customers. Other coffee chains do the same. And that is all true. But Southeast Asia in particular is seeing a rise of companies like Kopi Kanangon, which are considered tech powered coffee companies often referred to as coffee tech, which operate through apps that feature delivery, allow pre ordering of services, discounts and loyalty memberships, and also use a cloud powered heat map. This is the important part to help them build new physical locations based on demand. Got a lot of people ordering stuff in a certain area. Maybe you open a store in that area. You might say, well, this is cool. A lot of people want to return to the physical brick and mortar coffee shop experience, getting with the times. But coffee tech in particular startups also see themselves as having new and tech savvy retail formats. Kanangon, in particular, is extremely popular in its key markets. And when I say popular, I mean it now operating 600 stores across 45 cities employing 3000 people with offices in Singapore and Malaysia. Rest of world reports that as this coffee expansion explosion in the region continues, there are still some holdouts who prefer to go into a store, which is why the physical location data is so useful for this coffee tech. Yeah, one of the rest of world article parts of this article that fascinated me was Jago coffee uses algorithms to position electric carts so that it can have the fastest, freshest coffee delivery in town. They claim they're twice as fast as Gojek or grab at about 13 minutes from you pressing order to having a sip of the coffee. So it's a bit like the Q commerce we were talking about in India as well. But but there's also they bring up that word omni channel in here where you're you're getting a more of a trend of let's not just go online only. We might be digital first, but let's have a physical presence so you can decide today. I'm I just need to order from the robot and get my coffee real fast. Or today I want to I want to go to a really nice. We work looking place and relax and work on my laptop and have some coffee. Well, and this is I mean right now, if I if I'd write up for the show ends today, if I order a coffee to my house, it's a huge waste of money. Money on my part, huge waste of time on somebody else's part. If I get like a couple sandwiches and you know, kind of make it worth everyone's while great. But I also don't live in some of these more urban areas where this is obviously, you know, taking off. You don't live in a dense area. That's the real key. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I use the word urban meaning dunce. But but yeah, I I I love the idea that that coffee tech can be like, because when you want a coffee, you want to coffee like right now. So 15 minutes or less actually makes a lot of sense where I might not care about that sandwich that I ordered for like the next hour or two. But but yeah, but it's that sort of morning fuel kind of thing. All right, let's check out the mail bag. What do we got in there? Let's do it. David had a cue, cue meaning question about Apple's upcoming tap to pay. Talked about on the show earlier this week. David said, could it be used by any mobile app, not just payment processors like Square and the like? If Amazon decided that they wanted to accept debit cards as payment for those without credit cards, could that be enabled? How about paying for items purchased on eBay or Etsy? Then it brings me to buying gems and such for gaming. Lots of youngsters don't have credit cards, but they do have debit cards, at least with credit cards, you have some protection. But with debit, your money is usually instantly gone until you fight your bank for it. So it could be a big opportunity for scammers unless it gets regulated somehow. Yeah, so I don't think this is going to be a big scam problem because you really have to work within the Apple system to do it. And they're pretty strict about that. I don't have all the facts at my fingertips right now, but there were a lot of articles about the safeguards on this. So I'm not too worried about scams here, even with debit cards. What you can do, though, is become an Apple developer and use this. You can implement this. You don't have to be square. You don't have to be stripe. You they want developers to start using this right away. That was the first deadline is like the deadline to start submitting apps that use this to the app store. So these are great examples of eBay or Amazon might say like, yeah, it seems seems weird to say when you could just put your debit card into Apple pay. But why not? Let's let's accept tap to pay because some people just don't want to have to enter it into Apple pay. They want to use that card and tap it against their own phone and pay for their eBay purchases that way. I'm not saying they will, but that is an interesting thing that you might see app makers do. Well, we'd like to take a moment to thank a brand new boss and that brand new boss name is Beke Kuy. Hope I said that right, Beke. You just started backing us on Patreon and we see you and we thank you, Beke. Oh, I got all the attention. Got all the attention today. You could be the person tomorrow, Patreon dot com slash D T E N S. All right, let's thank Len Peralta, who has been illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us today, Len? Well, you know, this image I drew is called Freedom to Gig. And I took a little bit of creative license here. I know the the battle is happening in Massachusetts, but I felt that this the Statue of Liberty, this ability to sort of, you know, like I said, freedom to gig seem to make the most sense. This is my take on on the the Lady Liberty as an Uber driver or Lyft driver or even a Dordash driver and, you know, delivering with impunity, the your pizza or McDonald's, whatever you choose to eat. This image is available right now on my Patreon. If you're a Patreon backer, forward slash Len is where you can find that. Or at my online store, which is Len Peralta store.com. All kinds of great things going on there. So make sure you check it out. Well, great work is always Len and happy to have you on the show today. Also happy to have Justin Robbie Young on the show today. Justin, what has been going on in your world? Well, over where Len is broadcasting from the Great State of Ohio, there is a primary coming up in May. And we take a preview of the Republican side of it, including an author who is famous for writing a book chronicling the rural areas of the country, one that was skeptical of politicians becoming a politician. He was anti-Trump. Now he's very pro-Trump. Get all the details about that and much more on the politics, politics, politics episode that is out right now. Well, reminder to folks that if you're not joining us live, that's OK. But if you'd like to join us live, we would love to have you. We are live Monday through Friday. That is at 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 21 30 UTC for just a short amount of time left in the U.S. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow with Nate Langston as our guest. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.