 Coming up on DTNS, India's tightening regulation on social networks. Paramount Plus is ready for its close-up and want to be a Twitter super follower? Great, it'll cost ya. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 25th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Warmish, Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And the show's producer, Roger Chen. For the show, Len was giving us a little lesson on NFTs and the art world, and how NFTs are changing the art world, and how it's kind of confusing. But it's very cool, especially for artists, yes. If you want to hear more about that and everything we talk about before and after the show, get the wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internets. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nvidia reported it earned $3.10 per share in Q4 on revenue of $5 billion, both beating analysts' expectations with revenue up 61% in the year. Data center revenue grew 97% in the year to a record $1.9 billion, while gaming revenue also hit a record in the quarter of $2.5 billion, up 67% of the year. AMD announced it will provide details about the next Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card at a virtual event happening on March 3rd at 11am Eastern time. AMD released the RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT last year, and at CES AMD promised more desktop GPUs in the line would arrive in the first half of 2021. Nine to five Google reports that the upcoming smart TVs running Google TV will feature a basic TV mode that strips out smart features and only shows HDMI inputs, live channels, and a stripped down setting panel on the main dashboard. Google confirmed that this mode is not part of Android TV 12, so you won't get it on set-top boxes, and only applies to TVs powered by Google TV. The FCC's 5G spectrum auction that began in December raised a total of $81.2 billion for 5G wireless spectrum. Verizon was the top bidder by quite a lot, committing $45 billion, almost doubling AT&T, which came in second at $23 billion. T-Mobile spent $9.3 billion, and pay TV providers such as Dish Network, Comcast, and Charter Communications also participated. CD Projekt Red announced its major patch for Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed until late March, setting a recent ransomware attack as well as the massive scope of the update for the delay. Bloomberg sources say, however, that the ransomware attack has left developers unable to log into the company's VPN for weeks now, and were asked to ship their computers back to IT departments for further malware checks. All right, let's talk a little more about antitrust reform. Justin, what's the latest? Well, Washington DC is back up to their usual tricks, but it's going to certainly affect Silicon Valley and every other affiliated tech company. During opening remarks at the U.S. House Antitrust hearing Thursday, Democratic chairman David Cicilline and Republican Ken Buck, both top members of the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee outlined a series of bipartisan reform effects that could affect the power of big tech. Included would be increased funding to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission's antitrust efforts, enacting data portability and interoperability rules that could require dominant platforms to make their services compatible with rivals and allow consumers the ability to import and export data more easily. Reforming the burden of proof in merger cases would require dominant firms to justify why certain mergers aren't problematic rather than place the burden on the government to prove that they are. Well, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission saying, you know what? We need increased funding so that we can go after big tech more easily, not surprising. Yeah. I think that that part, you know, it's a little bit sure. The big stuff that you would have to look for is, you know, beyond the idea of unwinding mergers, which is something that gets a lot more headlines and certainly was more of the conversation during the political season a year ago. The idea of changing merger rules for tech specifically to say, oh, no, you've got to make the argument that this company we're bringing on is not going to cause anti-competitive issues. That is a huge change. That is a massive change. And that's something where all of a sudden you're in a situation where the arguments that the government would need to attack are on the framework set by the companies as opposed to the company getting the benefit of the doubt of every other argument on the planet. And that's what that's what Amy Klobuchar is kind of proposing in the Senate, right, Justin, that specific kind of change in that status? Yeah. Yeah. We'll see exactly how much this can stand up because I think tech will say, well, wait, why are we different? Like, why are we in all in the entire history of anti-competitive rules in America through oil and telecommunications before us being the biggest examples? Where the industry that has to have special rules show us the material harm that we are causing America? And I think it's interesting that I don't think we're certainly seeing like the, you know, in some other industries we've seen, you know, I push for self-regulation so the government doesn't have to come into regulate you. But the closest I think we are seeing that is in this interoperability landscape where we've seen in recent years not in substantial moves. I'm thinking specifically the Dataport Ability Project, which, you know, at first maybe would have been lip service or something like that. But we've seen, you know, substantial moves of, you know, being able to take your Facebook photos, back them up to Google Photos. We've seen integrations with Google Photos and Apple coming out as a result of that. You know, we've seen improved kind of granularity in what you can download from Twitter and Facebook going forward. So I do think that there is, there's a realization by a lot of these platforms that, hey, this is something that we can, you may not even argue that's not portability. That's, you know, I don't know. It's a big text file of tweets. But it's something that they can do. I also think that the embrace of a lot of more ephemeral, you know, like the the storification of all social media is, you know, partly generated to, hey, we want to get some of that, you know, the Gen Z action. But we also want to, hey, if we don't, if this is all ephemeral and all goes away, we don't have to worry about dataportability on that regard specifically. Well, we can still monetize it. Even then, it is interoperability that that it will be the thing that you will know these companies care about specifically on the social media front we'll focus on for now. When you're able to very easy and seamlessly link your Twitter and Instagram and you are able to post things of, you know, without any kind of problem and things are working in more of a capacity there, you will know that these companies at least believe that they are of a certain level, that they want to work with each other to stave off some of these concerns. Yeah. I mean, the not being able to see in line Instagrams on Twitter is a great example of this, right? Because who gets annoyed? I do. I'm a Twitter user and every time I add an Instagram, I'm like, oh, yeah, it's like one more click for the person who saw my tweet. It's not the end of the world, but I'm the only one who suffers. The companies are just, you know, they're just not playing nice behind the scenes. Well, this might play nice with your pocketbook. I don't know. You tell me Viacom CBS's CBS All Access, which will rebrand to Paramount Plus on March 4th. That's in the US, Latin America and Canada announced pricing for this new streaming service with an ad-free $10 tier that includes more live sports, more news, and more live TV launching in March, and an ad-supported tier costs $5 per month. That's available in June. So you got 10 for no commercials, five for the ad-supported tier. The service will offer more than 30,000 TV episodes, 2,500 movie titles, and over 1,000 live sporting events at launch with select Paramount movies coming to the service 30 to 45 days after theatrical release. That's going to be a nice perk for some folks. Paramount Plus will launch in the Nordics on March 25th and comes to Australia later this year. Viacom CBS also reported that in its Q4, CBS All Access and Showtime streaming subscribers grew 56% on the year to 30 million, with 19.2 million of those in the US. All right, who's signing up? I actually already did sign up. I signed up because I wanted to watch a playoff football game and I was up on my roof and that was the easiest way to get it because I am slick and I couldn't get it over there. So I did sign up so I could watch Tom Brady advance to the Super Bowl. I will probably cancel it until I again need a time to watch live sports. But the most fascinating part of this is the idea that we're now seeing post Disney Plus and Netflix kind of hit a glide path now that they are saying that they're profitable at a certain level, that everybody is understanding if you want to play in this realm, you're pricing yourself below Netflix. Nobody at this point has said, no, our value proposition is more than that. Netflix is now going up. They all want to nestle in below that, but we're not seeing the micro payment. Well, I guess we are with ad supported of like $399 or something like that. Now it's $10, it's $11. That seems to be where this has settled in. I also think it's interesting that we're seeing them coming in also undercutting Disney Plus, which is they just kind of pumped up their numbers and seeing crazy growth. I think we reported on a couple of weeks ago and offering that $5 now admittedly that's coming later. They'll give you the taste of the expensive or relatively expensive live TV version of it first and then let you roll back to that $5 a month one later on. We mentioned about the theatrical releases. I don't think that's also insubstantial. We've seen that certainly playing into HBO Max's marketing in a big way. It's not like they're just pushing no-name movies or things that would have gotten released in January or something like that. We're seeing the latest mission impossible is going to be in that 30-day window. It's not day in day that it's going to be in theaters. I feel like for a lot of people that's an academic distinction, at least for the time being. An interesting combination of pulling together all of these pieces. Again, for me, a lot of it comes down to how easy is it to subscribe and unsubscribe to these? I think that's the value in a lot of these services. I need to be able to drop them quickly for them to get the most value out of them. UI platforms at the launch on that kind of stuff. One thing on the live sport before we get out of here. Number one, the NFL is doing their rights deal. CBS has a big play in the NFL. They currently are the rights holders for the AFC on Sundays. It looks like they are going to secure those rights again. It comes at a gigantic premium. The NFL is looking, according to the New York Post, to up their price by 100% and including some digital-only games, including Thursday night football, reportedly only for Amazon. This being a part of CBS All Access or Paramount Plus' play here, I think is very, very interesting because we're not far away from Sunday games possibly being digital. Well, if Paramount Plus ever launches in India, they may have to contend with some new rules because India announced new regulations for online platforms with social networks now required to acknowledge government takedown requests in 24 hours and comply within 15 days as well as disclose the originator of any content deemed objectionable. Firms will have to keep local offices with name compliance officers in India and produce monthly compliance reports. Platforms must also offer voluntary account verification to users. Not all accounts need to be verified, but they have to offer it to people that want it. Streaming services also now fall under these new rules. They must now include content ratings on their titles and institute parental locks for content rated for 13 and older. These guidelines go into effect immediately for smaller firms with services deemed significant, having three months to be in full compliance. Well, yeah, I mean, okay, a bit of a mixed bag here. On one hand, you say, okay, well, if something's objectionable, inappropriate, harmful, mean to people, possibly illegal, that sort of thing. For India to say, listen, we're just going to make you work harder as a network that's operating in the country. First of all, you have to have some sort of a local way for us to keep tabs on you as this company that might be based in another country originally or spread around the world. But we aren't going to give you as much time to fix stuff once we find that it needs to be fixed. We also want to know where it came from. So it's not enough that it just goes away or that a bad actor is blocked from the person that was seeing the stuff that didn't want to see the stuff. We want to know who did it, because we want to keep tabs on these people. And that's where I think it gets interesting. And that's where it gets in trouble for services like WhatsApp, which they're saying, hey, we're end to end encrypted. We actually can't tell you because we don't know who may be the originator of this content with that specific provision. I do think it's really interesting to see, obviously, some of these requirements are a lot easier for local firms to comply with, having local offices and that kind of stuff. These aren't anything new. They've been talking about these kind of regulations for 2018. And we've seen them having ongoing disputes with companies like Twitter and platforms like that. So going into effect, I don't think surprising any of these platforms, certainly. Well, if you want to hear us talk about anything particular on the show, maybe you say, I love it when you talk about India. And there's this other story that I've been waiting for you to cover. One way is to let us know by submitting that story to our subreddit. Submit stories. You can also vote on other stories that you think are cool at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, gang. It's no secret that Twitter has been looking into subscriptions as a source of revenue. At its Analyst Day presentation, the company announced that its first offering in this lineup will be superfollows, which will allow users to charge their followers for access to additional content. In the demo, Twitter showed one attempt of a user paying $4.99 a month for access to exclusive tweets, deals, and discounts. A supporter badge, newsletter, and community access. It is unclear what Twitter's fees will be for superfollow subscriptions. Twitter also announced communities, which will let users create and join groups around shared interests, which will surface tweets focused on those topics. No timeline was announced for either feature. Twitter also demoed a new safety mode, which, if toggled on, can quote automatically block accounts that appear to break the Twitter rules and mute accounts that might be using insults, name calling, strong language, or hateful remarks and quotes. Oh boy. Well, yeah, like you mentioned, Justin, Twitter wants to start bringing in some revenue by offering some add-ons to their service. So we got superfollows. So Justin, let's say that what you do a lot of with politics, politics, politics on Patreon, let's say there is some offshoot of that where you say, you know, a lot of people follow me on Twitter and I'm not totally sure that they're jumping out of Twitter all that often to follow my other stuff. Does it make sense for you to start building that added content within the Twitter platform itself? As somebody who already spends more time than he should explaining to people that no, if you subscribe to me on Twitch, you don't get my Patreon bonuses and no, if you subscribe to my Patreon, you will not get exclusive stuff on, on, on sub stack. I think that we are at least for some creators, industrious creators, we are getting to a world of maybe too many ways that we can offer these tools. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not an effective way to do it. I think that it's, it's a good thing for Twitter to get into the game on it at least by their demo feels like it's something between a Twitch subscription, which is what the demo kind of looked like. Even the price point was around what, what a subscription is versus a sub stack or, or Patreon where you're often paying a little bit more to get a more substantial meal of exclusivity. We'll see what is built on top of here, but my initial reaction is like, boy, if Twitter did this right and that would mean kind of building out maybe a medium version that would nest perfectly inside the Twitter app or something like that. I feel like this could really succeed, but I don't know if it's just Twitter, you know, like their, their version of stories and, and TikTok, if it's fleets, it's going to come and go. If people are figuring out ways to do this, to, to build on this as a platform, I feel like it could succeed. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting to me is like the whole supporter badge, very, very, like a Twitch subscription kind of feel to it, extraordinarily easy for them to implement, roll that out there. And I could see a lot of people being interested in that being an actual useful sorts of revenue. Like you were saying, Justin, all those other things require them to build things that aren't like Twitter is not the timeline. And that to me is the biggest question of it's like, okay, what does that longer form content? What does that, does that kick out to, you know, am I going into a separate window? Does the Twitter feed become a pain? Obviously all of these will, you know, they're working on these. And that's why we don't have an official announcement. That's why it's on an analyst day where they can say, Hey, invest, you know, it recommend our stock because we're adding subscription revenue and that kind of stuff. But it's a lot of disparate elements that I think the danger might be that there's a lot of stuff that isn't natively shareable on Twitter. Also, maybe that's where the communities kind of come in. And you can share. Oh, like talk about, Hey, talk about this long form thing that your favorite creator put together in the community page that's pay walled only to the people that are supporting them that I can see having maybe a little bit of value. But then it gets, it has the potential to be very convoluted and kind of messy. I just, I just don't see where Twitter is not that place. It's not the place that you spend a ton of time. And that's, that's why community, I mean, you do spend a ton of time, but you spend a ton of time doing little things. It is the once you pop, you can't stop social network. Like you are never not just eating one Pringles chip, but you are not sitting down. But that, but that's, that's what could be so genius about this is I'm with you. I, I, if I want to know what is breaking right now, I go to Twitter and then Twitter bounces me to a variety of places where I get more information about it. Now, if you're an independent person and you're building up your sub stack and maybe used to write for the verge and now you're doing your own thing. I'm kind of describing someone specifically, but I was trying to, you know, I was just whatever hypothetical, but that sort of thing. It's like, well, okay, you don't need it to be inside Twitter because what do you care? But if for whatever reason, someone learns to say, Oh no, this is where I get all my information. It's in Twitter. And this person is this trustworthy person. And I subscribe to them within Twitter. I can get past the Twitter paywall, then then Twitter retains a lot more users potentially again, I will say the UI bar for this kind of service is kind of low. Like Patreon is a place that you plug in a bunch of different things. You plug in like, you know, private YouTube videos, you plug in podcasts, beats and stuff like that. And then you get out, you don't spend really any time in there from my experience as someone consuming it. And so I feel like if they do put in the UI work and put together something that has some value in and of itself on top of obviously Twitter's, you know, kind of stickiness as a platform. One last thing. It's been sitting there for Twitter the entire time. Thomas Sling, become an over the top TV thing and make your own channel that just explains hashtags 24 seven. I would, I would get off Sling. I would subscribe. You want money? Twitter, I will pay you with directly. You don't have to skim off creators. I will give you my 40 to $60 a month so you can be my cable redistributor and just have one place where I can just click a button and be like, Oh, that's why Haley Bieber is trending. Perhaps also trending in a news feed of yours hardware startup framework, which was founded by former Oculus engineer, Nerof Patel announced its first product, a 13.5 inch modular laptop that lets users swap out many components for repairs or upgrades, majority really. The framework has a 2,256 by 1,504 three to two display 1080p 60 frames per second webcam, optional quad core 11th gen Intel Core CPU, Wi-Fi six optional up to 64 gigs of DDR4, RAM and up to four terabytes of gen four and VME SSD storage, the battery, the display, the keyboard, SSDs, memory, Wi-Fi modules, all replaceable. The CPU itself would need a main board replacement framework says it'll have a store and it'll sell these when new chip options do arrive. So they're going to try to help you even though it's a little bit more work there. The framework laptop shipped sometime this summer. We don't have a price yet. The company says it'll be competitive with other stuff that's out there. You can get pre configured models running Windows 10 home or pro. There's also going to be a DIY addition to ship unassembled for those who truly want customization. Rich, I know you were saying this was something that you might be interested in. This is about a year and a half ago. I bought ThinkPad P1 partially because I wanted something that I could get in and kind of was repair friendly. This is more like repair tech friendly. Like yeah, I can upgrade the RAM and the storage and stuff like that, but still like not a lot of stuff is soldered down that kind of stuff. This to me it's really interesting and if I'm going to buy it, I'm definitely getting that DIY addition and putting everything together myself because that's cool. The mockups that they had of it look really interesting as opposed to other white box laptops that you can get which are a little bit on the chunky side. I know there's companies like Za Reason and stuff like that that have offered kind of similar kind of white box offerings that you really customize stuff and get in there. The fact that this looks really nice. Two issues I have with this. One, there's no ecosystem. The upgrade ability is like the product, so that concerns me a little bit. And then two, I feel like all of these upgrades are you do once. Maybe the keyboard wears out or you have a dead key or something like that. That's nice that you can upgrade it very easily, the display too, but I feel like you're only ever going to upgrade that CPU once. You're only ever going to upgrade that screen once unless something again outside of damage or something like that. How much does that extend the life? When you have a 10-year-old laptop, I don't know. And I don't know if they'll be around for 10 years, even if they do come out with this product. Interesting. Again, want to put together my own laptop. Definitely want to do that. Not sure how viable long-term without an ecosystem. I'm going to drop in here real quick and say this is not going to go anywhere because it's going to be very expensive, especially with the specific with the modules. They're all going to have to be designed and you're going to have a heck of a time to get a bunch of OEMs to create a bespoke form factor for this particular laptop when there's already industry standard for pretty much 90% of what goes in a laptop. And honestly, laptops are a commodity product. No one's going to shell out more than the grand if they don't have to. Also, there's no provision to upgrade graphics, which is huge. And you're locked into kind of a thermal envelope based on what I understand of this. So it's upgradeable to a point where you're not going to be able to throw a 45-watt CPU if it's designed for 15 watts. If you're not able to upgrade the graphics, you're limited to whatever Intel or AMD is going to provide you. That's a big caveat too. All right. Next up, a job listing for Sergey's brand airship company, LTA Research and Exploration. Remember that? Reveals the company plans to develop a 1.5 megawatt hydrogen propulsion system for an airship to deliver humanitarian aid and ultimately service transportation. Given the weight savings over lithium ion batteries, this would likely be powerful enough to cross an ocean. LTA's planned prototype Pathfinder 1 will use batteries on its test flights later this year with a 0.75 megawatt fuel cell with from a third party eventually retrofitted on before while they're developing this own system. A 1.5 megawatt system would be a considerable advancement as the largest hydrogen fuel cell to fly to date is a 0.25 megawatt system in the Zero Avia small passenger plane we've saw last September. Hydrogen airships, what could go wrong? Let's focus on what's wrong with this idea. Humanitarian aid, terrible. It's a clever idea, although personally I think you would get more mileage if you figured out how to put a solar ray on top of a blimp and generate electricity that way. The thing is people have been trying to revive blimps as a commercially viable form of long-distance albeit slow alternative to transporting cargo versus like using a jet aircraft. The problem is it's not commercially viable yet and the ones that have been built, the test mockups, have only been sustained through government research dollars either through the military or just some sort of aviation offset. But the last one I think there was a British company that was developing what they called the heavier but lighter than air blimp which essentially combines the aspects of lighter than air but also kind of an airfoil designed to the envelope to allow it to kind of fly in the same way that you would have fixed wing aircraft. Not a great idea, also one of those things I don't think is going to go anywhere. Well, all I'll say, Roger, is just because people have taken a lot of swings at it doesn't mean that it's not something that can take an advancement forward. I think that's kind of been one of the defining thoughts of our age, quite frankly, that things that we thought were either not viable because enough people had tried quote unquote like the reusability of rockets, for example, or the vitality of mass market electric cars. It just wound up finding the exact right way that the engineering kind of made it make sense. Now that said, I don't know whether this is that because I don't know enough about hydrogen fuel cells to know whether or not this is any kind of super smart breakthrough on this. I have never seen, I have yet to see a hydrogen fuel cell be powered up that didn't involve a larger amount of energy converting the fuels into a hydrogen fuel cell in the first place. I think that's what Sergei Britton is trying to put together. More power to him. More power. Get it? Get it? We're full of them today. Hey, if you have thoughts on fuel cells, you have thoughts on modular laptops, you have thoughts on anything we talk about on the show or anything we might talk about on a future show, send those ideas. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We want to give a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Mark Gibson, Martin James, and Degrassia A. Daniels. Thank you. Len Peralta has been busy illustrating this entire show. Len, what do you have for us today? Super follows. This is what I think super follows would look like. It's the only thing I can think of. It's like better than just a regular follow. It's a super follow. Big, veiny, weird kind of creature that is following you. A swole creature. You got to check this out. It's over at my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com. Also, if you're a Patreon subscriber, Patreon.com forward slash Len, you can get this immediately. And also, we were talking about NFTs at the top of the show. Go check out my NFTs at openc.io. And if you want to, go ahead and buy one. Yeah. And like, like, like Kanye, this, this Twitter bird, all chess, no legs. Well, he does have little legs. He's right at the bottom. I mean, not, not, not in the same way. Holy smokes. Thank you so much, Len. This is good stuff. Definitely check that out. Also, thanks to Justin Rubber Young for being with us today. Justin, politics never die. They only multiply. That is true, Sarah. On tomorrow's episode of Politics, Politics, Politics, we are joined again by Bill Scheer of Washington Monthly and Politico Magazine talking about the reality of bipartisanship. It's not just some West Wing Aaron Sorkin for the good of the country stuff. No, no, no. Only through mutually assured destruction and both parties being equally scared of each other. Will anything get done that represents the whole of the nation? Hear that conversation at Politics, Politics, Politics.com. Excellent. Hey, thanks to all of our patrons who support us. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support is where to find out more about that. And if you don't already subscribe to Daily Tech Headlines, that is our companion show that's a tighter, shorter headline version of the show. All the essential Daily Tech news in about five minutes, DailyTechHeadlines.com. We are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson.