 Coming up on DTNS, tech CEOs provide information on misinformation, memories of Samsung's future and is Google's memory all alone in the moonlight. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 25th, 2021. Welcome to Unpurchasable. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. Drive the show's producer, Roger Chang. You know, before the show, we were talking about all sorts of stuff, when you can get vaccines, the depth of Lake Erie, everything and anything in between. So if you want that wider conversation, you can get on an expanded show, Good Day Internet, by becoming a member at patreon.com. Alright, let's get started with a few tech things that you should know. The information sources say that the U.S. Justice Department launched an anti-trust investigation into Sony's announced 1.175 billion dollar acquisition of the Anime Streaming Service Crunchyroll. The investigation will look at if the deal will give Japanese animation studios fewer options to distribute shows in the United States. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 780G system on a chip, offering double the high performance cores of the 765 SoC with 40% better CPU performance, 50% faster graphics than the 768G SoC, an improved AI engine, and capable of reading 3 25 megapixel cameras at once. It includes an integrated X53 5G modem, which does not support millimeter wave and is expected to be in devices starting in Q2. The Arizona State Senate was scheduled to vote on HB2005 on March 24th, which would have required Android and iOS to allow alternative in-app payment systems, but it never came up for a vote. In fact, we're still unclear as of press time if the bill was pulled or not. An investigation by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority found that Facebook's planned acquisition of Giffy could reduce Giffy's incentive to expand its digital advertising, ultimately leading to a loss of market competition as well as harming Facebook's rivals by offering worse terms or just cutting off service entirely. The companies have five days to offer legally binding proposals to address the competition concerns. And Chrome Unbox noticed that Chrome source code shows reference to a new game mode coming to Chromebooks, although the mode and any features aren't yet functional. The code references Borealis, a Steam gaming container in development for Chrome OS. All right, let's dig into one of the big news stories of the day here, Justin. Anxious to get your take on this, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey all testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee ostensibly to discuss spreading disinformation, extremism, and misinformation on social media. Questions from representatives involved potential forums to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, how platforms screen underage users, the responsibility social media has for the January 6th capital riots, and of course a lot more. In opening statements, Mark Zuckerberg made the case that Facebook is building systems to deal with misinformation by contextualizing and limiting the spread of content. Sundar Pichai pointed out that Google Search was a vital use for information about the COVID-19 pandemic, and that Section 230 makes it possible to serve that content across a variety of platforms that Alphabet and Google own. And Jack Dorsey made the case for Open Protocols for Social Networks, specifically pointing to Twitter's Blue Sky initiative. So Justin, obviously there was a lot there. Did you hear anything that wasn't purely political theater? Any kind of nuggets of truth? And I guess when we cover these hearings, I guess what should we expect out of them, if anything? I don't know. This wasn't even the biggest political story of the day, which traditionally it has been in previous versions of it. You know, that was dominated by Joe Biden giving his first press conference of his presidency. So this isn't even really going to make the front page of the political world. To me was a lot of playing the old hits, some informed. I think, by and large, the questions were more informed than they've been in the past. It seems like some senators are listening to their aides a little bit more. But by and large, it was not anything that I think that we haven't heard before. So specifically, there was a couple little nuggets here. I just kind of wanted your take on real quick. So one thing that was talked about, Zuckerberg was asked directly about Facebook's oversight board and said that he would abide by their decision if they ruled to reinstate President Trump. I know we're kind of all, you know, that's one of the big decisions that that board is going to have to make. But it was also interesting at the very start of the of the testimony. Zuckerberg was very quick to, you know, when asked if Facebook had any responsibility for those January 6 capital riots. And he, I mean, very squarely kind of put the blame on President Trump's incitement rather than Facebook. Obviously, I think that's in Mark Zuckerberg's interest. But should we read anything into into, I guess that, you know, abiding by that decision, but also, you know, framing the situation that way. No, not really. I mean, unless unless you're going to see any kind of counterbalance here before we get email, let me also point out that it was not senators that we're talking to the tech CEOs, but rather representatives. This was a house hearing. Unless you're going to see legislature that is drafted up and even then it would make more sense in the House and even or sorry in the Senate and even then it would make more sense if there was bipartisan support for it, which right now there's not much bipartisan support for for anything. But no, this is about scoring political points and this is about kind of framing issues. This matters more for Zuckerberg's public relations than I think it does for anything legally. But but I did find it interesting that, you know, you put Zuckerberg in front of a microphone and say, if this board says that Trump gets his Facebook back, are you going to give Trump his Facebook back and he had to answer it point blank? That was interesting. The other thing that kind of stood out to me is just in general that big tech, at least in the US when it comes to these kind of issues is starting to get better about just getting in front of these issues as opposed to butting heads with them head on. And I think we, you know, we saw that yesterday with we talked about Zuckerberg's, you know, kind of comments on 230 and, you know, having to have moderation systems set up and having those dependent on the scale of a platform. And I think we saw some agreement from that from Jack Dorsey and specifically in regards to Twitter. I think that's also one of the reasons that we're not seeing this be so headline forging is that in a lot of in a lot of ways, you know, this is this is definitely something that they I feel like that came across as these platforms want to self regulate. I mean, obviously they don't they would prefer no legislation to come through but I think that. No, no, no, no, you're right. No, no, no, no, let me stop you. They do want regulation. They want regulation that they have input on. Yes, they want to say, look, we did something and they more specifically, I think if you're going to be cynical about it, would like regulation that prevents other smaller competition from playing in those waters. Facebook, Twitter and Google would love nothing more than if to get in the game. You had to have a gigantic legal team that cost millions and millions of dollars per year based on a sliding scale of users because they've got the money to do it and it would be hard for somebody else to do it. So yes, they do want regulation. Yes, they want to be in the room when it happens. All right. Next up here, speaking of Facebook, they announced they took action to disrupt. Oh, I'm sorry, Jerry, I'm reading your line. I thought you were going to do a segue, but you can read it if you want. It's very good. Facebook announced that it took actions to disrupt the group that secretly that security research called evil eye or poison carp, which targets members of the Uighur ethnic minority in the US, Turkey, Syria, Australia and Canada. Facebook first spotted the group in 2020. Use fake accounts posing as sympathetic people like journalists to get targeted individuals to visit malicious websites or download download Android apps that would install Trojan horse malware action spy and plug in phantom specifically. Although the group appears to operate out of China, Facebook did not link the campaign to efforts by the Chinese government specifically. The campaign targeted about 500 people on Facebook, although Facebook said most of the hacking groups efforts appear to be other places on the platform. Yeah, and this seems like something that Facebook was tracking, you know, for a little bit while now and kind of as a series of actions. You know, taking, you know, Facebook is also kind of notably obviously been very active recently in kind of moderating and blocking content coming out of Myanmar as of late. I, you know, with, I guess for Facebook is this. They don't want to be seen as an agent for any, I think, you know, foreign power or anything like that. Is this just simple, I guess we would do this if this was any kind of hacking group or should we I guess we would read just in anything more into, you know, kind of a hot button issue with the, you know, the Uighurs in China. It's both because on one hand, this is a lot of the thankless work that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Twitch and all sorts of any of these as much as we like to hate on what they when they don't do things that we want them to do. All of these platforms and sometimes at the cost of human moderation, might I add, remove a lot of malicious content of horrifying content of every day. So on one hand, this is, you know, just punch in a clock. This is what we do. On the other side, if you've got something that's in the headlines and Facebook knows this very well with what happened with Russia during the 2016 election. If anything that you normally do coincides with something that a lot of people care about for other reasons, then the messaging on this can be outsized and often is so yes, this is not anything new for them. No, this, well, yes, this is normal. Yes, this is also something that they do need to pay very close attention to because of the tendrils going away from it. All right. Well, something else you should be paying attention to is Samsung announced a 512 gigabyte DDR5 memory module. The first use Intel's high K metal gate production technology and through silicon TSV chip stacking. The DDR5 memory is capable of 7200 megabits per second speeds, which translate to roughly 57.6 gigabytes per second transfer speeds on a single memory channel. Double that of DDR4 and keep in mind that most production systems for estimating are going to have at least eight channels. So we're talking about some serious transfer here. The modules will initially be aimed at high performance computing applications, things like supercomputers and data centers and be supported by Intel's next gen sapphire rapids, Zeon scalable processors, potentially seeing supported consumer platforms in 2022. We don't have confirmation, but it seems like likely that AMD's next Zen platform is going to support it. That's what all the rumors are kind of saying. So, I mean, Justin, obviously you have a definite need for a 512 gigabyte memory dim in your next laptop, right? Oh, man. Well, you know, I'm building a new studio for myself at the new place in Texas. So absolutely. Yeah. I'm going to need a few of these. Like, let's see. Samsung, you got an offer code or anything? Like, can I type in DTNS at checkout and get 10% off? Maybe we can do it. No, this is obviously for supercomputers and AI, right? Well, at that size. And where this kind of fits into some broader industry terms is we recently saw another kind of high-performance memory ish memory standard. I'm thinking 3D cross pointer Intel's Optane. It might be hitting the skids a little bit with a micron kind of pulling out of production of that. And that's something where where these are really useful, especially for like supercomputers or data centers is the more of, you know, your giant data data warehouse or something like that that you can put into memory. You can put into memory the better for, you know, whatever, you know, SQL server or, you know, any kind of application that you have that you can just put directly into memory. You're going to get huge performance benefits out of this and, you know, more memories better. Again, right now we're kind of at the point where these are these are academic until the platforms that come out support them, you know, because right now this is kind of like a science fair project. But, you know, that kind of speed also kind of in the in the read here. It also uses I think almost 20% less power when compared to DDR4. So, you know, data centers faster memory that takes up less power that you can put a huge amount on a tiny little dim, you know, obviously some big applications when those speeds come down to consumers. Doesn't seem like it's going to be too far off in the future either. So some interesting stuff that way as well. All right. What do you, so before we move on to our next discussion, we want to know what you want to talk about on the show one way to let us know our subreddit submit stories and vote on them over at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com Reminders, thoughts and on screen content and will automatically extract URLs from screenshots and pull contextual information into actionable items like tracking shipments. Memories are organized into a feed of cards sorted in reverse chronological order with the ability to tag them by priority. Google is currently testing the integration with employees, although it's not clear if or when it would be rolled out to the public. So this kind of caught my eye, Justin, because right now Google has some very, some very good integrations with Assistant. I use it, I have a Google Hub. I generally enjoy it for kind of single purpose things, but I also use, you know, services like Google Keep or a lot of their other productivity stuff and all of that Google Assistant stuff when it comes to that is weirdly siloed. Like if you set a reminder in Google Keep, it doesn't sync with Google Assistant. So I feel like Google is trying to, I hope this is not just a little bit of paint on more Assistant stuff that doesn't kind of speak to their other ecosystem, because I feel like it's kind of a mess right now. Google's UI sucks with seven X's. It's really bad. And it's fascinating that they want to get into the world of productivity stuff, and they already have, like you mentioned with Keep to a certain extent, because that is, for me, famously a place where UI is a tricky thing. When you are trying to map effectively the human brain, something that is intuitive so we can keep an eye on what we have to do and make actionable decisions based on it that sometimes information is surface to you if you would forget it. That's a really tricky thing. If anything, that is kind of the ultimate double black diamond of user interfaces because all of us have different ways of thinking about a contextualizing our life and you don't realize how much that is built on hacks and shortcuts based on your own experiences. The idea of Google, which is great at offering raw materials, great at offering, hey, what if we threw a ton of storage at something and we engineered it in a way that made it work. Boom docs, boom spreadsheets, boom storage, boom email, right, they're great at it. When it comes to making that easy to interact with, boy, howdy are they not great and all you have to do is look at stuff like, Richard, have you ever played around with notion? Oh, yeah. That to me feels like what docs should be. If you looked at Google docs and said, all right, let's take it out of the 90s. Effectively, this is still in the year of our Lord 2021, a Kmart version of the Microsoft Office suite that came on your compact PC that you ran Doom on. Now, it's basically the exact same thing. So I have very little hope that, A, doing a productivity suite, B, integrating it directly with voice assistant, which you would think is a slam dunk, like they do a great voice assistant. But I, boy, do I got questions on exactly how well it will work. This almost seems like it's working almost from the, using a lot of the same tech like Google photos uses, which is, you know, a pretty well liked service from what I, you know, I use it, I enjoy it. But like coming out from the completely opposite direction where it's like Google photos does all of the cool OCR stuff. It, you know, it kind of looks at the image and no use machine learning to know what the images so it gives you really great search. This is kind of doing the opposite of that except that because the point of it isn't to store photos to store basically everything. And like, like everything that Google does like Google now or, you know, the Google discovery tab, like when Google does the algorithmic magic and gives you the thing that you want before you want it. It's awesome. But when they count on that to be the only way that you interact with something, and then it, even if it doesn't work 10% of the time it becomes infuriating. And, you know, obviously they're testing it and, you know, if and when it rolls out, we will see how successful they are with that. We'll see if we can add an 8X, an 8X. Here's hoping. It gives me somewhat like Evernote vibes. I'm just, I hope. But even then, Evernote man, and I have, I have, I've been there for things. I've been there for, what is it, 42 folders? Like, I'm there for all of them and they always confuse me. They befuddled the jerbs. Well, one thing I hope doesn't befuddle you is the British motorcycle maker Triumph, because they announced details about the TE1 electric bike project in development since 2019. The bike's electric motor can output 107 horsepower continuously throughout its battery charge, so whether you're fully charged or down to 1%, it's going to give you that. And it's able to peak at 174, which is a ton for a motorcycle. While its estimated 120 mile range will cure any EV anxiety by itself, it does offer fast charging, able to fill its 15 kilowatt hour battery from 0 to 80% in about 20 minutes. Triumph plans to test a prototype later this year, although it's waiting for the battery prices to actually come down before planning any mass production. So it looks like it may be a few years off, but, you know, we got fast charging. This is like phone level fast charging that they're offering on this. I was looking it up because I didn't know off the top of my head on a supercharger, a Tesla supercharger, if you're like, buy yourself. No one else is using it. I think it can get to 0 to 50 in about 20 minutes, but it varies wildly depending on a lot of different factors. 20 minutes seems like a real sweet spot to me. Especially if you're going on road trips, you could kill 20 minutes at a gas station real easy. Yeah. Or at a recharge station. I think you're at that under a half hour is a magic number. 20 sounds enough like 19, which basically sounds like nine. Right. So I think the idea of electric motorcycles is a fascinating one. I years and years ago, this is probably over a decade ago at this point, when to go see an attempt at a world record for an electric motorcycle, the killer cycle. I don't know if they still run, but something that I found out even then back with that level of technology is that power wise, if you are looking to optimize for speed, electric motors were faster than the structural integrity of the like drive trains and wheels and chains that ran this bike. And that was the reason why they weren't able to actually even compete because when they started revving it up, it would just rip right off. And that would be that. So I think that, look, one of, I think we're going to look back in our modern era and say the greatest through line that we had was battery charging or batteries in general. Battery tech from the last 20 years on has revolutionized so much. And the concept of this getting down to a 20 minute zero to 80% charge, if these numbers hold up, is amazing. That is kind of game-changing. This is real quick. The great thing about this is it kills two birds with one stone. Motorcycles pound for pound are more polluting than cars because there's no room to put a catalytic converter on the motorcycle. So they pollute just tremendously. Motorcycles already have a small tank, so you're gassing up a lot unless you have like a gold wing or like a Harley electric light or something. And, you know, it's this kind of does a really good thing because it allows you to create a product that's easier to ride because you don't have to shift gears on a motorcycle, which is, you know, if you ever tried it and you're not familiar with it, very complicated. It also does allow you to reach a broader market, but it also allows you to kind of reduce your emissions and say, this is a greener way of getting from point A to point B. And hopefully waiting for those better prices to come down might not be at least insanely expensive whenever it does come out. What you can pick up though right now, you can determine if it's insanely expensive is Dyson announced three new cordless vacuums, including its new V-15 detect vacuum. A $700 cordless with a laser emitter that illuminates dust particles on the floor, which Dyson's claims is situated at a precise angle to allow you to see dirt with the naked that the naked eye can't see. Dyson says the V-15 detect can also keep a log of the dirt it captures in real time using a piezoelectric sensor that keeps the log amount and the size of the dirt that it picks up. I mean, just in log files for your vacuum, has the dream come true? Oh, our quantifiable life gets ever more interesting, doesn't it Rich? Now I can know exactly how much hair versus dead skin follicles versus dirt from my potted plant that I am vacuuming. I don't know what this says to me because Dyson really made their bones being this engineering marvel, the concept of a bagless vacuum that worked on a more powerful kind of level. Now we're really at the like, we're at the fins and racing stripes phase of vacuums, right? For even for something that kind of made their bones being a big rethink. If we're into the, you know, the laser lights and the smart app that tells you how much cat hair you just picked up, you know, I don't know. I think we've plumbed the depths of vacuum efficiency. I just like what is what information is giving you other than just to make you anxious about the overall cleanliness of your house, which like, oh, no, it's four OCD people. It's like, this is enabling. This is enabling. Yes. Oh my. Like, and I'm sure they're going to reboot the odd couple again. And in this version, Felix Unger is going to be with his with his laser vacuum cleaner. That's a modern reference for all the all the kids out there. I mean, why not just go whole hog? The one thing I was disappointed was I was expecting I was looking for robot anywhere in this read. Sadly, I guess I have to use my laser vacuum by myself. Yourself. Yeah. Well, no, because the robot's not going to appreciate it. Right. Like the robot's not going to if the robot texted you and was like, I'm having so much fun with my with my lasers. Oh, you're crushed up Cheerios. Please enjoy. Yeah. Just, I mean, you know, $700. You get your piezoelectric vacuum. There you go. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. We have a mail, an email even from a professor of Metcalfe regarding a conversation we had on GDI with Patrick Norton. He's talking about NASA's drobo is that kind of stuff. He says, my drobo died on me during lockdown and I lost all my data and DVD backups. I'm no sad. I originally that's editorial note for myself. I originally bought the dobo drobo because it didn't have time to do anything myself. Well, now I have lots of times because pandemic. So he did the only logical things. I built a custom VMware hypervisor box with 412 terabyte hard drives direct link to a Linux VM. So you can make a 24 terabyte ZFS data store because after two decades of being assist admin data rot terrifies me ZFS. That's what it's good for. I spent six months backing upwards of a thousand DVDs and Blu-rays, which I also ripped to the MKV format and made accessible through a Plex server. So my wife and I can watch any media we own from any device in the house. I also set it up as a file server. So all the max in the house automatically time machine back up to it. I don't want to say this is this is NAS spragging at this point, but also as a as a current drobo owner. I also like I just appreciate the utter frustration that that platform can provide you. So Professor Metcalf, I mean, you made the effort. Well done. Cheers. Cheers to you, Professor Metcalf. There is there's sometimes on this show that we just bleed so dangerously into nerd tool time where it is. It is just bragging about the most epic nerd gear head moments. And this is certainly in the Hall of Fame for that. So a hearty to you, Professor Metcalf. All right. If you have an extension for NAS that you built that you want to let us know about or anything else, you can send it to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And of course, we want to shout out our master and grandmaster level patrons, including Chris Allen, Mike Akins and Johnny Hernandez. And also thank you to our new bosses. We always have to thank them. Thank you. Super appreciative of all of our new bosses, including Lisa Baxter, Hermit de Frog and Todd Troush. We really appreciate you supporting us on Patreon. And thank you to all of our bosses truly from the bottom of our hearts. Appreciate it. Also from the bottom of my heart. Thanks to Justin Robert Young for being my companion on today's DTNS. Justin, where can people find more of your great stuff there? Oh, Rich, always a pleasure to be with you. And we hope Sarah is back with us soon as she is recovering from her vaccine shot. But if you would like to hear more of me, you can head on over to politicspoliticspolitics.com. Tomorrow's episode will feature actually somebody that many of you might know from the tech space. Andrew Zarian joins us for the first time as our New York City mayoral race correspondent. We talk about the state of the city, Andrew Yang's front running campaign at this point to replace Bill de Blasio. And we update our greatest amendments bracket. We're in the finalist legally required pause four of our greatest amendments bracket with Brian Brushwood. So please download that episode when it goes live midnight on Thursday, Friday morning, politicspoliticspolitics.com. Remember, you can't support the show anytime. Just head on over to dailytechnewshow.com slash support and join the patrons. And if you remember, if you need just the headlines, check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines. Hey, I do that. 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