 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Alexander Nisev, Hector Bones and Tim Ashman. Coming up on DTNS, Dr. Nicky tells us why a warming world might be bad for your cloud data, plus we actually know about Musk's takeover of Twitter and how Google let people know about an earthquake before they felt it. And yes, there's a cat on the show. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 31st, Halloween 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Spooky Sarah Lane. From New York City, I'm Dr. Nicky Ackermanns and my familiar is Gummi. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Yes, thank you for introducing Gummi. Gummi wanted to introduce themselves as well. Good to have you all including Gummi on the show. Let's start with the quick hits. A few tech things you should know. Microsoft's head of Xbox Phil Spencer says he's still planning to ship Call of Duty games on PlayStation as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to. Spencer's promise comes after Sony said it received an inadequate offer to extend Call of Duty's cross-platform access for three years past the current agreement. Microsoft is also under continued scrutiny from international governments over its proposed $69 billion purchase of Activation Blizzard. As long as there's a... I want there to be a musical version of what Phil Spencer said. Google acquired startup Altar, which first launched as FaceMoji. That might be how you know of it. For approximately $100 million, they picked it up about two months ago. They didn't talk much about it. We're just learning about it. Altar has a platform that lets developers add avatar creation systems to apps and games. Very meta-versey stuff these days. TechCrunch's sources say the purchase is meant to help Google compete against TikTok. On Monday, China launched the third and final module necessary to complete its permanent space station. Meng Cheng was launched from the Wen Cheng satellite launch center in the province of Hainan. It will join with the second laboratory module Wen Cheng, which is already connected to the crew and their living quarters. Tian Hei, the 23-ton Wen Cheng is heavier than any other single module spacecraft currently in space. Next year, China plans to launch a space telescope, which won't be part of the space station, but will orbit in sequence with it. The station is expected to have a lifespan of 10 to 15 years. China still pursues a zero COVID policy these days, locking down factories, apartment complexes, even sometimes whole cities, in response to any number of cases. And Foxconn's Zhenzhu facility is the largest assembly site for Apple products. And workers at that factory have been locked down for almost two weeks now, meaning they cannot go anywhere but between their homes and the factory. And for those who live in the dorms at the factory, that means not leaving the campus at all. The town has recorded 95 cases in the past four days. However, there are scattered reports of workers just leaving their jobs, hitting the road, getting out of Foxconn. And there are some reports that that might even be slowing down production lines. The Verge notes that while the new iPad has a USB-C connector, it's not a USB-4 port or even USB 3.2. It's USB 2.0. So transfer speeds top out at 480 megabits per second. That is the same transfer speed as the ninth gen iPad with lightning. So apparently Apple changed the connector, but they didn't really change much else. It's also a good reminder that USB-C connection doesn't imply a USB version number. All other iPads with USB-C connectors support faster speeds, but even all of those aren't the same. All right. Let's talk about the, it's not an elephant. It's a bird. It's Twitter. Let's talk about Twitter. Oh, it's a bird. It's a sad bird. Well, you know what? It depends on who you are. Maybe sad, maybe not. Sources talking to both Casey Newton's platformer and the Verge say that Twitter owner Elon Musk has given engineers until November 7th to create a paid verification system for the company. Details of which are still in flux, but one plan floating around would currently have folks who are verified needing to pay $19.99 per month to continue on with Twitter blue up from the current $4.99. Now, if you're verified and you don't pay for Twitter blue, you might say, does this apply to me? It may, it may not. Details, again, pretty sparse at this point. Currently, though, verified Twitter users would supposedly be given 90 days to subscribe after which point the blue check mark would be removed. Musk has only confirmed that the whole verification process is being revamped right now. Yeah. So they're considering a lot of things. A lot of them are leaking out, but we don't know what they're going to do yet. There are other things like that that are reportedly happening according to reliable sources. Some of them saying Musk wants to lay off anywhere from 25 to 50% of the staff, depending on which reports you read, including managers who haven't recently contributed code, saying there's there's too many managers, not enough coders. Tesla engineers have apparently been brought over to Twitter to interview Twitter developers and review their code. Axiosis sources say the former head of consumer product, Kavon Bacepour, was seen in the building. If you recall, he was fired back in May by former CEO, Parag Agarwal. Those sources also say that PayPal's founding CEO, David Sacks, Tesla engineer Thomas Dimitrik, and venture capitalist Jason Calcanus are all listed on Twitter's internal directory now as contractors with Twitter email addresses. And there's supposedly been some discussion of how to provide Twitter over Starlink satellites in countries where Twitter is blocked. We also have a few things that we know for sure have happened. The first one is that Twitter's homepage changed from just a sign up page. So if you were to go to twitter.com and you weren't signed in, it now shows you as a visitor the Explorer page, trending tweets, news stories instead of a sign up homepage, which is what it was in the past. Number two is Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter on Sunday asking, bring back Vine, getting a lot of attention, as you might imagine would be the case. And the third is that General Motors released a statement that it had temporarily paused its advertising at Twitter while it works to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership. Very careful wording within the company, but one might assume that if you're GM, there's probably a lot of advertising dollars there. Yeah, so for the things that did happen, these all make sense. GM is pausing its advertising while it figures out if the competing car maker that owns Twitter is going to treat it fairly. I find that thoroughly unsurprising. Elon Musk says bring back Vine because Vine's really popular and he wanted to say something really popular, also thoroughly unsurprising. And actually changing Twitter's homepage to show you actual tweets, I've always thought was a better idea than just showing you the sign up page. That just seems like a reasonable thing to make happen. This other stuff that we don't know anything about what's really going to happen and how much of it is a serious conversation and not is interesting to me. I could imagine a situation where they make verification free as in like basic verification because the entire blue check mark thing has always been about whether it was actually a status symbol or not. And I could see Musk saying like let's just lean into it being a status symbol and if it's a status symbol make people pay for it. If that were to happen and verification was separated for it then that I don't know that wouldn't bother me that much. Nikki, what do you make of this whole mess? Well, I was in Tumblr back on the day. Okay, so I have PTSD from the whole thing crashing under our eyes and maybe this will happen again and also second point. I spent a lot of time curating my science Twitter to be like a nice place where people aren't horrible and I get like good information and collaborations from there. And science Twitter right now is thinking about jumping ship. Not sure what's going on and I would like to not have to jump ship because it takes a lot of work. So I don't know. I'm like in stasis. Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't know. There's so much. I guess just the there's there's a lot to unpack here. There's a lot. We don't have any info. Right. And the whole kind of idea of like bring back Vine. I know, you know, a lot of folks are like, Ah, that's just like a thing that you say to get people riled up because so many people used to like Vine when Vine was owned by Twitter. I mean, Vine already exists now just in other places. You know, yeah, this. Right. Right. You know, or, you know, or TikTok competitors, you know, short form viral content, like, I mean, Twitter could maybe do that again. Sure. It didn't necessarily work out the first time, but it worked for a certain amount of people for a while. Yeah. And it might not be a bad idea for Twitter to be like, Hey, we were the original place of Vine. There's a lot of good will out there. Maybe we can give TikTok a run because the timing is right now because people understand short video. That's that crazy. And I don't think it's crazy for must to float it out there as a point winning gesture, whether they end up doing it or not. So I think there's a lot of a lot of hand wringing going on right now. And really, we just kind of have to sit back and wait and see what Musk is actually going to do with it. I mean, I will say. I know. Tell me exactly what's going on right this second. I am verified on Twitter. I actually don't remember the circumstances under which I got verified. It was a while ago. I think it was sort of in the earlier days when maybe it was like a public figure. You're obviously who you say you are. I knew a couple of people at Twitter type thing. I think the idea of paying $20 a month for Twitter in any capacity is completely insane. I'm not doing that. You want to unverify me. Go for it. You know, people who want to like figure out if I am who I am, you can do that. However, I think that I have the privilege of saying, well, just, you know, figure out who I am if you want to. There are other people who have very rightly some real qualms with us. Mainly, you know, being impersonated, you know, there being, you know, scam efforts to undermine somebody who is who they say they are, but can't necessarily identify that. So there are a lot of circumstances where this is really problematic. Yeah. And to be clear, there's no good verification system on Twitter as it is. They've gone back and forth and all over the place. So people saying, well, if he does this verification will be bad. It's like, that's no different than it is right now. Right now it's not a good system for verification anyway. Hopefully what ends up happening is that verification gets fixed. And I'm not saying it will or won't, but yeah, I'm not paying $20 a month to keep that blue check mark either. I got it because we interviewed Biz Stone and Evan Williams on CNET Live, like in 2008. It could be $4. I'm not even sure how it showed up if it goes away. If it was $1. I'm just not doing it. I'm not sure I'm going to pay. We also had a few people write in saying they felt like Justin and I cut off Sarah during Thursday's discussion about Twitter. Sarah, I apologize for that. I know you read those responses too and wanted to respond to them. Yeah, and we'll make this really quick. There were a few of you who wrote in and we're always asking for audience feedback. So we want to address feedback when we get it. And a handful of you said, yeah, I didn't, you know, didn't really rub me the right way the way that the conversation went. I went back and listened to that segment a couple times from Thursday's show. Just so everybody knows, I don't think Justin, Tom, or I all felt that there was any sort of discord during the segment. And, you know, we just kind of kept it pushing because that's just what you do on a live daily show. And for anybody who felt like, ooh, Sarah should have had a little bit more to say, thank you for the feedback. That's good feedback for all of us. But just so everybody knows, we're all a team here. So, you know, there was, there was no, no, no bad vibes on our ends. Yeah. And I always take those things as a chance to double check myself and be like, oh, maybe I should have made sure there was a chance. You know, even if, even if Sarah didn't feel that way, you always want to make sure that the audience and everyone feels like everybody had a chance to say everything they want to say. So thank you for the honest and polite feedback. Really appreciate it. Yes. Great communication. Yeah. On Tuesday, our video producer Joe Koontz told me he got an alert on his Google watch moments before a 5.1 magnitude earthquake hit San Francisco. Joe, if you could switch to yourself for a moment to tell us about what happened with that on Tuesday last week. So I was walking into the bathroom and my watch had a very distinct and unique notification. And I looked down and I just got to read earthquake alert 5.0 and I didn't even get to see where it was from and I felt it. It was probably three to five seconds at the most. But after everything calmed down, we knew it wasn't near us. I was really impressed with it. Like that three to five seconds would have made a difference depending on where I was. So the technology worked at least in this area. And you definitely got the alert before you felt it. That's interesting. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I guess not really enough to do much about it. But at least you kind of knew what was happening when it happened. Five seconds later, I would have been in a position where I really would not want to be in an earthquake. Mm-hmm. I was... Well, for anybody thinking, well, wow. I mean, has this ever happened before a house? It wasn't the first time that Google has sent an earthquake alert. But because of the location that was near San Francisco, it reached a lot more phones, a lot more people who had phones, and around a million Android users did see it. ARS Technica also has a write-up on how the system actually works. Doesn't actually predict the earthquake. It detects it faster than people can feel it, though. Yeah, the Android alert last Tuesday came thanks to ShakeAlert. ShakeAlert is not related to ShakeShack in any way. It is a project under the United States Geological Survey that detects the first signs of earthquakes. Earthquakes generally start with softer waves called P-waves. And people don't usually feel P-waves, but they are detectable. So when at least four of the 1,300 USGS sensors on the West Coast feel the same P-waves at the same moment, they send an alert to a data processing center for analysis. And if it meets certain criteria, then ShakeAlert sends warnings to FEMA, local transit systems, and other systems like Google's that can tell you that the stronger and more damaging S-waves may be on the way. S-waves are the ones you do feel. ShakeAlert warnings, if you're close to the center of the earthquake, probably won't get to you before you feel the S-waves, like if you're right on top of it. But if you're a little farther off like Joe was, you will get a few seconds anyway, which could be something that can help you find a safer location. Yeah, the USGS plans to increase the number of West Coast sensors to 1,675 by 2022, by the end of 2022. And Google has plans to help extend the network beyond where the expensive sensors can be placed. Mark Stogatis, the project lead for the Android Earthquake Alert System, told Ards Technica that Android phones can use accelerometers to detect earthquakes when they're plugged in and when they're locked. So while people aren't always around the epicenters of earthquakes, they can help supplement coverage. And Dr. Nicky, you covered this for Daily Tech headlines earlier this year. So it was interesting to see this affecting more people now. Yeah, it's really cool. I also anecdotally saw that the Android phones were quicker at this than iPhones, and it's probably just like a software thing. And it may not be this exact instance, but it's just interesting to see it in place and it's hopeful for the future that, OK, even if you have five seconds, it's five seconds to duck under the table. I like seeing technology progress in real life. Yeah, it's something where you're right. A few seconds doesn't seem like a lot. And as Joe pointed out, it took him a second to be like, what is that? But if we become more used to it and prepared for it, then we might start to be able to say like, oh, cool. I'm getting the alert. Let me get into a doorway. Let me get away from a window, whatever it is. Yeah. On the second time you get it, you'll be more prepared. You'll be more prepared. Yeah. Well, it is October 31st, which means in many places where people celebrate it is Halloween. And then a couple of days, it's also Dia de los Muertos, AKA Day of the Dead. And NTX's Dan Campos has a way to celebrate video game developers. In NTX, we're celebrating the Day of the Dead and also the week of the games. Every day we'll have an interview with the minds behind mech zombies, dark tales from Mexico, beyond the nightmares, candlelight, and mostroscopy to know how their games were developed. There you have it. Practice your Spanish, get free games, and know a little more about game developers around the world, only in Noticias de Tecnología Express. La Semana Day video game developers. Las Vegas videos. Yeah. Go check it out. Thank you, Dan. That's great. Hey, folks. If you're feeling social and you want to let us know about stuff, we are on Twitter at DTNS Show, or Daily, yeah, DTNS Show, and on TikTok, Daily Tech News Show, and on Instagram, DTNSPIX, DTNSPIX. As it is Halloween, as Sarah just mentioned, Dr. Niki insisted we pick a spooky science topic, I insisted it involved data centers, and gosh darn it, if Dr. Niki didn't come through, what have you got, Niki? Can you tell that I like Halloween? You do, yes. A recent article on science is what caught my eye, and I picked a spooky topic, which is climate change. So why is climate change a threat to supercomputers? We're going to get really spooky, don't worry. So in 2018, people started opening their eyes to this when a California wildfire burned 230 kilometers away from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and this place houses a supercomputer. And what happened was all the smoke and the soot from the fires kind of clogged up the air that they would usually use to cool down the computer, so they had to close that off and use recirculated air, and this drove up the humidity within the facility and created condensation, and then eventually a blowout in the racks, which is pretty dangerous for a supercomputer. And this is not the only time this has happened. There's been other threats to this same facility with big storms that almost caused power lines to go down in the same area, or in Japan, for example, where a power line did go down and the facility had an outage and floods for over 45 hours. So to kind of link this to climate change, a 2022 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper says that Earth's average surface temperature has risen 1.5 degrees since the industrial era, and this is on average, and so in places like the tropics, this is up to four degrees higher. And if the projection continues to follow this trend, the authors are predicting a 30-fold increase in heat waves, a 60% increase in extreme rains within the next 100 years. So obviously this is going to start causing a lot of problems, and all of these factors require these supercomputer facilities to invest even more in extra power-consuming humidity and temperature control, and of course, those create more emissions, and it kind of starts to create a vicious cycle. Yeah, it kind of seems like the combination of a supercomputer being threatened by climate change and climate change threatening the climate in general means how do we win here? Well, we're a little bit stuck. I mean, these facilities use up to 100 megawatts of power. That's as much as like a small city. In hotter climates, there's higher energy demand even from all of the people around who need to run things like air conditioners, and this can lead to more power cuts and blackouts. Some facilities have experimented with moving north, like geographically north, into cooler climates, but those cooler climates are now warming up and becoming more humid, so that's not really doing great. Of course, these facilities also require water to cool down, another thing that we're starting to run out of. Other facilities have considered moving underground. This is something that could be interesting in the future, but they're still going to require electricity. So the solutions are like not great, but there are some options. Some places are switching to renewable resources for their electricity rather than fossil fuels, which are the main resource right now to power these places. Obviously, this depends on what grid you're on. Not all countries have a great source of renewable resources. For example, in the EU, a lot of data centers have signed the Carbon Neutral Data Center Act, which aims for them to be carbon neutral by 2050. Other things that people are doing are carbon offset policies. You must have heard of people like, we're going to plant 1,000 trees to offset our carbon emissions. These are actually kind of problematic because there's no real control to say that it's working. In fact, the trees that get planted usually, it's like a monoculture, so it's all the same tree, and they're not native, and they're not used to the climate. They tend to die and end up emitting more carbon than they'd absorbed. You don't really hear the, you know, let's check out those trees that we're supposed to, you know, really save everybody, you know, and make this company less evil. You don't hear those follow-up stories. Yeah, so it's just like a political stunt, more than an actual ecological thing, and people don't really listen to forestry people who talk about this, so it's definitely something I wanted to mention. Yeah, I've also heard of some test pilot runs to do data centers underwater. I think Microsoft was involved in one of those. So the cooling is done naturally by the ocean, and I could imagine, this is not part of those tests, but I could imagine if they could figure out the corrosiveness, keeping it from degrading too much with salt water, they could add wave generators to power the undersea containers. There's no end of potential solutions, but there isn't a solution, right? That's the problem yet. Yeah, and hey, even some places, they don't have to move. The water is going to come to them pretty soon. But yeah, the solutions are like, well, we have some ideas, but it's expensive to enact, and this is all about money, so it's kind of hard to get there. Ideally, countries would regulate how their data centers and supercomputer centers have their energy with national legislation, but yeah, this is something that's kind of difficult to control. And if you want to feel a better about it, you can think about what kind of tech you buy frequently, you buy tech. This is not a popular place to promote that, but if it makes you feel better, then you can do that too. Yeah, and I'm not advocating against consumer action, but consumer action is always smaller than industrial action 100% in everything. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but the bigger solution is going to come from figuring out renewable energy sources for these data centers because the demand for the data centers isn't going to go away either. Forcing them to do it, because some of them do it by themselves, but they're not really incentive. Yeah. Or I would advocate against forcing, because I think when you force, you just end up making people find clever ways to get around what you're forcing them to do. Use some incentives. And sound device, totally. So that it is attractive to do this sort of thing. And raising power costs is going to be one way that it'll make these companies go like, you know what, solar powered or a wave generator that we run is a big deal. That's kind of a good deed. And also our bottom line agrees. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you've ever thought, if only my e-ink tablet could also take photos, you might like this next product. The Bukes Tab Ultra is an e-ink tablet from a company called Onyx. It's $600. You might say, wow, $600, but it has a 16 megapixel rear camera with a 10.3 inch paper link display. The company says it's a device for professional and business usage primarily. I mean, anybody could buy it. But with the rear camera, you could use it for scanning documents, stuff that, you know, in a professional setting that actually might come in handy for a lot of folks. Another company called Big Me launched a similar tablet earlier this year if you're saying, well, hasn't this happened before? Yeah, yeah. This one launched on Indiegogo with a color e-ink screen, hoping to start shipping next month. But back to the Bukes Tab Ultra. Powered by a Qualcomm Octa-Core CPU, has a 6300 milliamp battery, four gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of expandable storage. You know, a decent tablet. Software based on Android 11, and it's designed to work, hopefully, work better with its displays, more basic capabilities compared to either a standard LCD or an OLED panel. Yeah, so these e-ink screens as replacements for paper make perfect sense if you put a camera on them to scan in the paper so that you don't have to keep the paper. Yeah, I get that. Save a tree. See? Full circle. Yeah. Don't need to make copies. Just scan it in. It's only $600. Yeah. Just gotta make that first. I scan with my phone. I don't even use the scanner anymore. I just did. There's so many good scanning. Even Dropbox has a good scanning app. Yeah. Yeah. So somebody was going back to Twitter for just a second. Somebody was talking about, remember how awesome it was when the bank started to make it easy for you to scan a check? You know, if you get a paper check, you can just scan it and not go to a bank. And I was like, when's the last time I got a paper check? I found out about that. It's been a while. Really? You know what? You found out what? I found out about scanning checks this year. I'd never... Oh, wow. I didn't think you could do it. What are the banks do? I have to do it. You're probably... A lot of people are probably like, oh, I didn't know that either. I guess it depends on the bank, too. Health spending accounts. My wife gets a flexible spending thing, and then they always give her checks instead of direct deposit for them that we then have to scan in. That's what I scan checks for. That's the one thing I can say. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. This one came in from Brian Hoffman over the weekend writing in with some very reasonable points about why it would be difficult, if not impossible, for drone delivery to make any headway in dense urban areas. Brian says bird strikes, weather, air space restrictions, wind, power lines, traffic control, all factors here. Not hard to come up with dozens of reasons why it might not happen. Yeah. So I challenged Brian to steal man his own arguments. I'm like, coming up with the impediments is the easy part. We could all do that. Come up with some ways to overcome them. And he did. So thank you, Brian, for taking me up on that. It was pretty awesome. Among his ideas for overcoming his own objections were sonic defenses to keep flightplats clear of birds. Just kind of, you know, some noise that keeps the birds from wanting to fly there. Improved sensors and guidance to help the drones make it through bad weather using secondary systems like cell towers and Wi-Fi to help provide redundant location info if GPS is interrupted. Time slots for drones. I thought this was intriguing. For restricted flight areas to say you're allowed to fly your drone through these areas in these times. Better sensors to avoid power lines. Neighborhood delivery stations to help overcome the logistics of like, well, how do I get the package in my apartment? You know, I'm up on the fifth floor or whatever. And data sharing so that the drones know where each other are and don't run into them. The one thing we both had a hard time overcoming was lawyers. One drone crash is definitely still going to bring out the lawyers. So neither one of us can come up with something around that. But thank you, Brian, for engaging in that. That's what I want to foster on DTNS is not the knee-jerk like, well, that'll never work. But how could it work? Let's go pass just the objection to like, OK, but how could we get past that objection? I'm visualizing Blade Runner with drones going around. It's very exciting. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you do have feedback on anything we talk about on the show, we do want to hear it. We listen and we read every bit of feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send your feedback. So thank you, Brian. Thanks to everybody who writes into us every day. And also thanks to Dr. Nikki Ackermann's spooky Nikki aversion for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. People can find me for now on Twitter at Ackermann's Nicole and my website, Nicole Ackermann's where I just posted a bunch of resources for academics. If you're an academic, it's under resources. Excellent. Thank you to you. And also thanks to a brand new boss that we have. That new boss's name is Sean. Sean just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Sean. Good to have you along. Yeah, man. Sean understood that we are supported by people. We are an independent technology news source. We're not funded by some big company. What we're funded by is people like Sean. So thank you, Sean, for understanding that and finding some value of what we do. Really appreciate it. We sure do. Patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We roll right into it after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20, 800 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Join us live if you can. We'll be back doing it all again tomorrow. Talk to new EV safety designs for first responders and passengers with Tim Stevens. Talk to you then.