 Coming up on DTNS hope for solar and wind as battery installations rise We try to make sense of Jack Dorsey's attack on web three and the tech hero you crave may have been with you for decades This is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday December 21st 2021 happy solstice everybody in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane I'm Rogers Roger Chang is just producer and here it is ended up the season your boy big Chris Ashley. What's up my people? We have Chris Ashley Yeah, but folks we got we got some good stuff coming on we were reduced having some fun with Whammy get in and more talking about our favorite holiday songs on good day internet You can get that wider show at patreon.com slash DTNS Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Dan Boyles Logan Larson and Mike Aikens Let's start with a few tech things you should know Show me announced on its official Waibo account that it will launch the Xiaomi 12 series on December 28th The company started phasing out its me branding earlier this year. So people have been Interested in what's coming up a marketing poster for the new phone features Chinese sprinter Sue Bing Zhang which may point to the 12 series being China's China Market focused at least at first Devices and the lineup may include the Xiaomi 12 the 12 pro the 12 acts and the 12 ultra according to at Gadget 360 AT&T announced it's selling its programmatic advertising marketplace Xander spelled X a NDR to Microsoft terms of the deal were not disclosed Xander has formally been a part of Warner Media and its ad unit going to Microsoft is Kind of contingent on the broader deal of Warner Media merging with discovery in related Microsoft news The European Union has granted unconditional approval of Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Transcription tech and AI company nuance the EU found that the acquisition would not harm competition in its opinion The UK is competition and markets authority has just started its own review. So the deal is not done yet still a few more hurdles Back in 2015 Google launched on hub a $200 smart router and home hub Year later it launched Google Wi-Fi that had fewer smart home features with what was also less expensive And focused on mesh networking the writing has not been on the wall for six years or so And the writing has been scribbled on hub routers will stop receiving updates on December 19th 2022 so there's some time yet, but it's happening After that date the app won't work with it anymore and on hub users can get a discount on a nest Wi-Fi router as a replacement The pixel 6 pro can now support playing g-force now streaming video games at 120 frames per second in 1080p That's the first non Samsung phone to do so This is of course the g-force now plan that supports up to 1440p on desktop and 4k on the Nvidia shield Costs you a hundred bucks for six months and video says pixel 6 users will need to change their quality settings to get that 120 frames per second it won't turn itself on users also need at least a 25 megabit per second internet connection as well DuckDuckGo posted details about its privacy focused desktop web browser that it's developing as a companion to its privacy focused search engine CEO Gabriel Weinberg said that it would be yet again a browser like Brave and Firefox and Vivaldi That aims to give you privacy by default It'll have a fire button already seen on DDG's mobile browser that erases your browsing history Also your stored data and also your tabs in one click All right, let's talk a little more about a Jack Dorsey Twitter rant. Oh, let's do it Tom so web 3 Which a lot of people consider the decentralization of everything is Hot here in the waning days of 2021 web 3 you hear it a lot Whether you care or no or do care or all the other things it is a you know, it's a hot word for Instance Radio Shack just announced its own decentralized finance or D5 venture Letting users trade tokens on the Ethereum blockchain That surprised some people other people said well, you know, it's the person who bought Radio Shack Render networks a decentralized service for 3d rendering of art backed by NTV artist people just raised $30 million and square CEO Jack Dorsey says, you know what this is all a bunch of BS Dorsey stirred the crypto Bro pot on Monday by posting Quote you don't own web 3 the VCs and their LPs do he's talking about limited partners Which is venture capital it will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label Know what you're getting into? Few hours later Elon Musk posted in response has anyone seen web 3 I can't find it To which Dorsey responded and it's getting silly at this point, but he did it's somewhere between a and z So if you're not already laughing about the crypto Twitter jokes going on here Maybe you're like, what is it? What are they even talking about Musk is joking about the ephemeral and variant definitions of web 3 The one that you could probably figure out Dorsey's response a little bit more of a sub tweet of a VC firm called a 16 z Which funds a lot of crypto projects and has been, you know, very much in the mix as far as crypto projects Go so to go back to what? Dorsey was making as a point The point he was making was VC companies with the normal incentives that VC companies have of making returns on investments That's why they're in business They're making decentralized web 3 projects to the tune of six billion in Q3 of this year alone 2021 Dorsey argues that participants in these projects won't realize the open advantages of decentralization if there is a centralized backer Looking to make more centralized profits. This may sound reasonable to you. You might say well, that's just how capitalism works, right? But calling a crypto enthusiast centralized is a grave insult A lot of people get a bit upset about this Dorsey's contention seems to be that Bitcoin rose on its own merits without any backer and therefore has no controlling entities although Ted crunches Alex Wilhelm points points out that point oh 1% of Bitcoin holders control 27% of the coins and circulation that is a lot of people well a Very few amount of people controlling a lot of money. That's far from a 51% attack But still a concentration Wilhelm also argues Goodness Wilhelm argues that Bitcoin enthusiasts are religious in his tech crunch article It's saying they have unending faith in the original project while what three folks He says are greedy quote in a manner that allows traditional investors to own toll booths and tax collectors throughout the decentralized landscape So really what we're talking about here is this just like like Sarah sort of implied billionaires joking around on Twitter fighting with other billionaires Or is this something worth paying attention to is Jay is Jack Dorsey making a fair point that There are projects like Bitcoin that are truly decentralized no one even though there's a concentration No one organization controls them and these web three projects are are as a lot of people say they're scams They're they're they're ways to fund a venture capitalist pockets and not Truly decentralized if if one group of investors controls it. So I look at stuff like this and I say, you know Oftentimes you find that these conversations are muddled because the wrong person is delivering the message, right? So there's merit in what he's saying if you're starting a company and you're touting that hey, you know We're gonna be part of this decentralized Era, you know that way we don't have to we're not beholden to anybody we can have more open source stuff We want to be a part of that to make the internet free But we need to take money from investors who are gonna want us to adhere to certain numbers There is actually truth in that right you if these guys are giving you money They want to return on their investment and therefore you're gonna have to hit milestones but at the same time you don't know the intentions of the people that are starting these companies and not and also It's like how else are they gonna get started in today's year? So so there is truth in it But it's just like man just be quiet Sometimes you just want certain people to be quiet on certain subjects because it's just like you're the wrong person to deliver this message. I Really don't know if Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk You know have some like personal beef and that's gonna come to fruition in some way that you know We don't know about now That's outside of that, you know both companies Seem to be like they were getting along that that Jack was like, yeah, right Elon like Yeah, because it was more of a coin supporter It there's their in opposition Positioned to a bunch of the the web three pushers out there That they try to to get folks to invest their money in their startup and yeah, I think you're right Chris I think you nailed it Jack May not be the voice that everybody's gonna listen to Because people are going to assume all you you're a CEO of a finance company square, you know, what's you what's your angle? I don't actually think he has an angle in this case I I think he is just trying to say like I think this is better technology because it is truly decentralized But then I don't know what got up his Behind that made him take to the web today right right now. Yeah, call everybody out. Yeah You've already made it. You're there. So people are not gonna look at your your comments and be like he's right Maybe a lot of this is posturing. I mean, who knows, you know, I couldn't pretend to know what What somebody might want to do to manipulate the market by saying something sort of silly and innocuous If you're Jack Dorsey you have the power to do that. Are you gonna do it? Probably not but you know, you do have the power to do it All right, let's talk about something practical bleep and computer reports on a large-scale study of phishing attacks conducted by ETH Zurich over the course of 15 months the researchers sent fake phishing emails to 14,733 participants at their regular work email address along with Deploying a button to make it easy to report phishing attempts so they didn't know these emails were fake But they gave them a button to be like if you see a phishing attempt report it whether it was real or part of the test The study was trying to determine which employees fell for phishing attempts how that vulnerability evolved over time how effective Embedded training and warnings in email clients were and what employees might be able to do to help stop phishing Previously there had been a gender breakdown on this but they found gender not to be a factor in this study Whereas age was the younger and older people in the study were more prone to fall for attacks than those in the middle and People who use software for repetitive tasks were more likely to get phished than those who did not need computers for their day-to-day work The more often people were exposed to phishing the more likely they were to fall for it You just kind of wore down their resistance and people who fell once were more likely to fall for it again Then then people who had not fallen for it Which I guess kind of makes sense because you've fallen for it once But it it was more likely for them to fall for any given phishing email if they had already fallen once before Warnings were effective in the email clients, but increasing the detail in the warnings didn't change it just having the warning was as effective as trying to tell people more info and simulated phishing exercises and voluntary training Actually turned out in this study to make people more Susceptible not less to the attacks kind of tying into that when they saw more attempts it wore down their defenses as to that Reporting button they implemented it was 68% accurate overall and usually submitted in a timely enough fashion that it could provide Increased protection without adding a sizable workload So that seemed to be a good idea as well take away seems to be that warning and Reporting buttons are the best ways to protect people from phishing attacks here Not that education is bad, but some of these training things can do more harm than good if you're not careful Oh, I mean as somebody who I feel pretty internet literate There are phishing attacks that I sometimes I'm like I'm about to press the button. I'm like oh wait a second. Ah crap. Oh I see what you're doing. It is not like you don't have to you know say like oh It's only people that don't understand the internet that are you know fall victim to this It's all of us And because they've gotten so much smarter over time and and yeah I think I think anything that is like the big red button to say don't do this. You're gonna regret it It's gonna be a problem is a good thing Yeah, so I looked at this article and the more I read it and re-read it It kind of invoked a couple of different thoughts that were Oh, it made me mad a little bit and first off Let me let me go to the first the biggest one which was the same the part where I said the training was Didn't help and it actually made matters worse and I think that's the wrong Take away from that part of the training right or that part of the study Honestly, if you're saying look at this email, is it good? Is it bad? Look at this email. Is it good? Is it bad? That's not going to help the person because you're asking them to Analyze things that they have no idea about Instead they'll take away should have been their training We're doing is ineffective and we need to find better training to help these people determine Not to click on these type of emails and it really should just get from a Basic starting point don't trust anything you get Right then move on If you're in a you know large enterprise company, right? And you're telling people, you know, you just got to look at the emails more closely and that's not working Then what do you do? Yeah to me? I this is the same advice. I give co-workers I give to my my own family do not trust emails that you get, you know Because inevitably slowly especially if they're out of character for what you get for emails, right? If you look at an email and you get a person Hey, here's a joke for you. Here's the document. You've been waiting for I haven't been waiting for any document Let me click on this document. No, no, no, no, you're not waiting for any document Don't click that email, you know me and I can't tell you how many times in my regular job That I'll send a message to a person like hey, did you just send me a document? Did you just send me an email? No, I did not okay. Check your email check your password I just got a spam message from you right as opposed to you know, yes I did I need you to see this and you know, take a look at it and get your opinion. Okay, then we're good You know what I mean? Just creating better habits for receiving those with it with the people that are supposedly sending the emails, right? If you can have a conversation about But you know, hey, did you send me this and the person's like yes or no Then you're you're kind of it's smooth sailing, but I think so many people don't do that Well, I don't reply to the suspicious email Right. No, we don't do that separately Directly, but you know a lot of these phishing emails are just sent at a bunch of people or Targeted to somebody who may have access to what these people are looking for or they don't know They just want to get and a credentials on the network so they can then span out from there, right? So they're just sending random emails to people and it's like, you know, they may send it in a spoof to header and try to get Somebody is to recognize it, you know, but if you're definitely getting an email from outside You know that it's gonna be easier to recognize that you probably should not click on it, right? But unfortunately, you know, if we're just telling people look at this this looks like fish and just look at this This doesn't look like fishing. I think that's the that's the wrong approach Yeah, and I don't think the the study was trying to say never train people I think that that may be, you know, I didn't think that was a study I thought it was the conclusion in the article, but I but I think what they're saying ETH Zurich is saying is simulated fishing exercises That's not it voluntary embedded training didn't seem to work there. There are other ways of training people that work and Like going back to what Sarah was saying everybody on our best day has a moment where we just almost get fooled, right? Oh, yeah And that makes perfect sense that the more often you're exposed to it the more chances at bat you have To strike out and and fall for it So warnings and other things that are automated to kind of backstop you like, you know The right kind of training and and some backstops That seems like a good takeaway from us. So and the other thing is though is I'm happy That they're actually doing a study on this fishing is is is real, you know, I mean a lot of these companies Get had because one person I remember it was a government agency in the last I think 10 years That got hit pretty hard all because somebody said hey, I'm your network administrator. I need you to send me your password Oh, yeah, no problem. Here's your password I told my mom very simply you when I gave her email I said mom if it doesn't look like an email You don't you're getting on a regular basis contact me. That's it, you know And it's been very effective. My mom has never Whatever you want to do it has never You'll been victim of that because I scared her on those messages, right? It was like, uh-uh, you know, don't ever click anything and she's very good about calling me. It's like, yeah I just got this message. I'll take a log into her email. It's like a look like now That's not a good one like no, no, this was okay And I think we need to be very diligent about that especially as we continue to see hacks and Network breaches on the rise, you know, we definitely need to be more diligent about Finding ways to break through to our co-workers and to our family members Well, a lot of it, you know as as our financial lives Turn more and more online at least for some of us, you know for me, for example It's like if I get it so somewhat strange email from Ben Moby and like hey I just want to like make sure that your last transaction was kosher, you know, I Sometimes I'm like, okay. Yeah, I did just do that. Okay. Let's make sure it's kosher. Oh good. No, no You know, like it truly it it preys on your habits your habits in attention Fatigue, you know, yeah, all of those. Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's let's let's move on to something a little more positive here This is shed some sunshine into this episode Chris. Yeah, Chris. All right, let me let me brighten it up a little bit So back in 2020 the US had less than a gigawatt of a large battery installations That's enough to power about 350,000 homes for a few hours How about now S&P global market intelligence says that US should finish 2021 with seven gigawatts worth of battery installations and looks on pace to add nine more gigawatts by the end of 2023 which would bring the total to 16 gigawatts Battery storage has been long-sighted as one of the limiting factors on renewable energy as the Sun doesn't always shine And the wind doesn't always blow But the installations are finally increasing at a significant pace The Wall Street Journal notes that battery installations often are replacing gas-fired plants that only fire up in times of peak demand So why is it financially picking up finally picking up? Battery costs have fallen steeply a pack that costs $1,200 per kilowatt hour in 2010 now costs $132 and this isn't a regional thing Projects are taking place across the country including Oklahoma, Michigan, Arizona, Maryland Not just California, New York, and Texas. It's not all rosy though higher prices for raw materials could slow down growth Though tax incentives might be able to offset inflation and it's not just industrial That's growing their residential market for home battery installations is expected to grow by more than a billion dollars next year Why are the battery prices dropping so much? phones and EVs we hit that economy a scale and improved technologies for Manufacturing because we needed to make all those batteries for smartphones and those batteries for smartphones kind of drove the price down They got EV adoption electric vehicle adoption has pushed it even farther So that seems to be part of it as well as some subsidies and things here and there in various states and countries Around the world, but yeah, we're we're finally getting the point where this is cost-effective enough It has enough scale that utilities that you see that number like going from one to seven to 16 Like that that's starting to snowball and this has been a long time coming where people are like yeah So there's great, but if you can't use it right away, it's gone And and if you can you can start to add enough gigawatts of this then it's not gone it's amazing to me that that Companies like power plants are not leading the way With this technology and it's like solar technology and batteries back because it behooves them to be able to constantly provide energy They can provide it and charge forward and even for the maintain maintenance of the plants, you know Like here in Maryland, we actually have a lot of power lines that are above ground which is terrible, right? It's a bad storm. They hit you go down and you lose power, you know, and then we've been after Folks, you know these companies for years to bury the line so they stop breaking and you know I was talking to a friend of the family who actually works for a mate who worked for a major power line They're like, you know, people say we want to bury these lines But they don't want to see the cost of that and that cost is gonna get transferred right back to you You know, so the fact that you can actually just do something like let's get this new battery technology going Let's get these solar information technology going because honestly if my power company says pay extra five bucks a month But we can guarantee you more uptime because we're investing in solar power with battery backups I don't have to put stuff on my roof, right? I can just rely on them and to me It's it just seems like you know them car dealerships. Why are they not leading the way on? EVs and stuff like that. It's just I never I never understand this stuff Well folks if you understand it and can explain it to Chris, please get in our discord You can you can you can do that by Lincoln do a patreon account at patreon.com slash DT and s For a while now we have bemoaned the Centralization of the internet and the rise of a handful of tech giants that dominate our tech choices more than once I have wondered who the next company might be that could rest power away from alphabet meta and Amazon the way they arrested it away from the IBM's HPs and oracles of the past We've looked at tiktok bite dance tiktok parent company other Chinese companies Is that gonna be it is it gonna be Spotify is it gonna be snap? But the answer may have been under our nose for a while protocols David Pierce has an article up today called can Matt Mullenweg save the internet now if you recognize that name you probably think of him as the WordPress guy and rightly so Mullenweg developed and continues to help develop wordpress, which is still a fully open source project his company Automatic does not own wordpress though It uses the open source project as the basis for a web hosting service called wordpress.com Daily Tech news show has been on the open source version of wordpress for all of its life And in recent years began being hosted by wordpress.com itself What you may not realize is automatic also runs an e-commerce plug-in called Woo commerce a private personal journaling app called day one The analytics tool parsley cloud note taking service simple note the classic simple blogging service tumbler That's owned by automatic now and more recently podcast app pocket casts It's quite a collection Mullenweg has said that his goal is to build the quote Berkshire Hathaway of the internet made up of what he considers are the most important products and services in tech and each one is Built with open source software and a commitment to the open web as a priority This isn't just idealistic automatic is a seven point five billion dollar private company and get this 43% of websites on the internet run on wordpress's open source platform if that was alphabet There would be constant antitrust investigation into the works right now But automatic doesn't exercise control over all those installations. They're open source automatic isn't controversy You don't hear about it in the rage-filled corners of the internet and it's a private company Controlled by Mullenweg so you don't hear about it in the hype filled money-making corners of the internet either a Lot of pierce's protocol article is about Mullenweg's belief that the pendulum always swings between closed and open And we're just at the end of one of those swings right now He sees web three as a manifestation of that swing back towards openness. He told Pierce There's an inevitable gravitational pull towards open source affecting literally every field finance health politics But that doesn't mean that he thinks that every web three project is good in a recent yearly company address Mullenweg warned for every project which is asking for your money Dollars for you to pay the cost of a house for a picture of an ape You should ask does it apply the same freedoms which wordpress itself does how closely Does it apply to increasing your freedom and agency in the world so there you go Jack There's the way to decide if a web three project is good or not ask Matt Yeah During their conversation for his article Pierce says Mullenweg sent him an email which Pierce thinks sums up what Mullenweg believes in It's a quote from Albert Camu the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion That is better than don't be evil that is better than move fast and break things What do you think? Well, it makes a lot more sense. But yes Chris, please win So I when I read this article it actually invoked quite a bit of emotional thought in me because I Was at first I was very Skeptic I was like, oh, come on dude You're not living in the real world and I got mad at myself because I was like man This guy's got so much hope for the internet. So why are you, you know looking down at him? Look down at yourself. Let this dude be him but as I got to the end of it and started realizing I Think it's great what his standpoint and I love the fact that he is Maintaining it and living his truth But I think the biggest problem we have is it's not that it the folks that listen to this podcast and podcasts like this Are educated in these things and they understand why people are mad at Facebook and Twitter for their Use of our data and our use of our information and the monetizing that information and how they you know Any company that comes up with an ability to gather more information? They snatch that company up as quickly as possible But the majority of the users that are providing this information have no idea What is wrong with Facebook and Google and Microsoft and all of these companies? In fact, I would be willing to bet that if you ask the majority of people, what is wrong with Facebook? What is wrong with Twitter? They'll say they're stifling our spree speech Not they're taking our data and monetizing it and so they're too big some kind of vague Yeah, and they can continue to do that and they can put themselves in this position to continue to do that So I love this article because it does provide some hope for Making a better internet But I think one of the things we need to do is we need to figure out how can we get more people to understand? Why this is important? Why would he saying is important what I what I like about this is mullen wags answer to that seems to be build it So that there is a compelling thing for them to go do Don't shout at them and hope you change their mind. Yeah, and you know when you spread stuff like that You're like, oh, man, this guy really is hopeful and I really appreciate that You know and so I love the article and I love what he mullen wig is doing You know and there's a couple of other platforms I would love to see because it really seems like he's laid out a path, right? You you create this one platform I'm gonna buy this other platform and keep it open source. You take this one. I'm gonna go buy the opposite If he goes after YouTube That's I think that's something that can have like a big You know impact, right so people to start paying attention, but like he said, I would also be totally crazy, but yes It would but it would make noise make waves But you know the guy has a plan and I love the fact of that too, right? He's like I can't take on every aspect of the internet, right? I gotta do it in in pieces where it makes sense But I really love, you know, how we in an article about peace by peace the companies that he Chooses to invest in or have him join, you know, they don't all just join in the same manner, right? Some of them are partners some of them become subsidiaries But he's he really seems to have some thought process of how he wants to achieve his goal And I think you know when one of the best things that I saw my company do that I work without a work at is like they started come out with these plans from The top level and then they said, okay, here's my agenda. How can you? Contribute to helping me achieve that goal, right? So it started from the top down and it seems like he has that same mantra, right? Here's a company that I want to get to keep the internet open and free and and open source How can this company help me achieve that? Do you want to be a part of this dream? And I love the fact of somebody the company that he purchased pocket cash and all of them Had that same aspect in that same inspiration So it's really hopeful at the end of this article about what he's trying to achieve And you know now I'm thinking how can I support this cat to make sure that he achieves his goals? I really love what he's doing But I think it really starts with making sure more people understand what's truly going on In the internet and you know the monetization because I don't think it's just gonna bounce back or it's gonna level itself out So easily right because these companies put themselves in a greater greater position To keep themselves in that in that in that pole position. And so we got a bigger It just takes time every every time a company looks too big to fail Just wait Well speaking of things We'd like to extend a special thanks to Jerry Tolbert one of our live top lifetime supporters for DTNS Thank you, Jerry for all the years of support Also, thanks to you Chris Ashley. You were on fire today. I'll let folks know where they can keep up with all of your Great musings in in the rest of the world First off. Thank you guys for having me this year I had a great time on every single episode folks if you want to check me out Always come check me out me and my homies on SMR podcast We just may talk about anything on there, but also check us out on our new venture barbecue and tech rod and I Are having a blast sharing our conversations about barbecue and the tech that we use to facilitate it You know could be something is using a spoon to take the Membrane off a ribs all the way up to a controller to keep the perfect temperature on your smoker So just having a blast talking that stuff and sharing some of our cutting boards and the new lane board is up on the store Some of our favorite people out there. So, yeah All right, I was so excited to see that today. Well, thank you Chris Ashley for being with us We are live on the show Monday through Friday all Weekdays 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show comm slash live We're gonna be back with it all again tomorrow. It's got Johnson. I'll do that I'm a club hopes you have enjoyed this program