 Coming up on DTNS, a display technology that will increase power efficiency in your phone by 25%. Annalie Newitz is here to talk about how tech has helped fans impact the content they love. Also, Yikyak is back. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us Annalie Newitz, journalist, editor, podcaster, host of Our Opinions Are Correct and author of Four Law Cities, A Secret History of the Urban Age. Welcome back, Annalie. Hey, thanks for having me back, guys. We were just talking about county fair food. Well, actually all kinds of fair food, state fair, county fair on good day internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS, where you can join our top patrons like Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith, and Justin Zellers. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google released the Pixel 5a. It's the bargain version of the already fairly mid-range Pixel 5. The 5a has IP67 water resistance, 4,680 mAh battery, 2.2 megapixel main rear camera, I'm sorry, 12.2 megapixel main rear camera with optical image stabilization, only offers sub six gigahertz 5G. So no millimeter wave or c-band support, which rules it out in a few parts of the world. Pixel 5a is available for pre-order in Japan and the US for $449, shipping August 26th. Separately, Google announced that the 5a will be the last Pixel phone it will make to include a charger in the box. CES 2022 will be a hybrid online and in-person event. And the CTA announced Tuesday that if you want to attend CES in person, you'll have to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination. The CTA will allow, or sorry, will also follow other protocols as recommended by the US CDC. CES takes place in Las Vegas, January 5th through the 8th. Only fans, sure, mostly known for its NSFW content, has released an app called OFTV, Only Fans TV, which contains no nudity and is therefore available on iOS, Android, Roku and Amazon Fire. Chief Executive Officer of Only Fans, Tim Stokely told Bloomberg the company is able to be on the app store since there's no adult content and no monetization in OFTV. The service is free and ad-free. Tinder announced it will bring the ID verification system it offers in Japan to all of its users worldwide in the coming quarters. ID verification will begin as voluntary and Tinder will work with experts in each country to determine which documents are most appropriate for that country. The magnetic stripe. We salute your slow departure. Mastercard announced the beginning in 2024. It will no longer require that little black stripe on the back of its partner credit cards in Europe. US has until 2027 and the rest of the world until 2029 and all magnetic stripes will be gone from Mastercard debit and credit cards by 2033. Those cards will all either have a chip or contactless tech like NFC by then. All right, I mentioned Yik Yak. Anybody remember Yik Yak? Who was a big Yik Yak fan? Who was on the Yik Yak? Oh, I mean, I think it was a thing to dabble in, but like Camelot, it was a silly place. We didn't know who was on Yik Yak in the early days because it was an anonymous social app that connected you with conversations from other users nearby. It ran from 2013 until 2017 when it was sold to Square and then shut down. It had the reputation of being a place for hookups, finding pot, parties, and unfortunately, especially in its waning days, a lot of harassment and other abuse. Well, a group has bought the rights from Square back in February and relaunched Yik Yak. Users can post and comment on posts from other users within a five mile radius. You can vote those posts up and down. There's a hot feed compiling the top voted posts from the last 24 hours and posts that get a negative five score will be hidden. While the service is anonymous, there is a list of what they call community guard rails to prohibit, quote, anything that could be construed as bullying, abuse, defamation, harassment, stalking, or targeted hate or public humiliation, as well as sharing personal information. Violations can lead to an immediate ban. They have a one strike and you're out policy. So why? Why bring back Yik Yak? Well, the site says, quote, we're bringing Yik Yak back because we believe the global community deserves a place to be authentic, a place to be equal, and a place to connect with people nearby. So the idea of the relaunch is apparently to promote conversation without labels, without people knowing who you are, what you're like, what your status is. In fact, the site says the most popular celebrity on earth appears exactly the same as an average person on Yik Yak. I looked at my neighborhood and when I looked at it earlier today, a lot of talk about sex, favorite types of pot, getting ready for school. So it didn't really feel like things had changed a lot. Do we need Yik Yak? Is there a place for Yik Yak? Do they have it right this time if they figured it out? What I think is so funny about the new Yik Yak is if you go to the website, they don't say who owns this company. They say they're the new Yik Yak. They say, hi, we're the owners. So this anonymity extends to the owner. So it's a little hard to know what they're aiming at without knowing who they are. I looked them up on LinkedIn to see if I could find out anything about where they're located or who these people are. The only information I could get was that the majority of their employees are located in Turkey, which may just mean that they have a developer team in Turkey. It's really hard to say, but they're obviously a global company now. And yeah, I'm dubious. I'm like, is Yik Yak supposed to be telegram but for pot? I don't really know why we needed it, but they're sailing along. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Yik Yak mostly because when I initially got onto Twitter, and I forget what the app was initially, but it had exactly this format where it was like, you could just swipe to the right and it was now just all the tweets that were around my physical area based on location. And that effectively is what Yik Yak is, although theoretically made to be a little bit more focused on those kinds of conversations. It just so happens that anonymous conversations that happened locally wind up being about things like sex pot and where to get the best back to school deals, at least in Tom's regional neighborhood. And I would presume that that's probably similar throughout other places. Eventually, can this be a thing? Is this idea of local chatter important? Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of Nextdoor and some other similar apps that have tried to find the communities where you can talk to neighbors and it facilitates that conversation that a interaction physically doesn't lend itself to quite possibly. I don't know if Yik Yak is the brand that's going to do it. Oftentimes the medium is the message when it comes to online communities and Yik Yak had such a reputation for partying and weed dealing that I don't know if this is going to advance beyond it. And they also had an incredible reputation for abuse. Any company that launches its new website with a giant link to suicide hotline and suicide prevention information right there on their front page, you got to wonder what's going on here, guys. That's good information to have, of course, all the time. But if that's your first step forward in your service, I think maybe you're anticipating that things are going to get a little dark. Yeah. It's almost like you doth protest too much. You know what's coming. It says on the website they're made with love in Nashville, Tennessee, apparently also Turkey. I mean Nashville and Istanbul, two great cities. For anyone who was wondering, Blue Dream and Gorilla Glue. Those are the two recommended strains on Yik Yak. Well, Blue Dream is a classic. You want to know what else is a classic, the Android operating system. And they have something called Switch Access, which lets accessories connect by USB or Bluetooth touch control targets. This enables accessibility devices to work with Android. Well, now Google is rolling out camera switch. This lets you control certain phone functions with facial expressions. You can choose from one or two switches. One switch lets you initiate a scan with an expression and then select a target with the same expression. Two switches let you use one or more gestures. Supported gestures are opening your mouth, smiling, raising eyebrows and looking left, right or up. By default, you associate expressions with next select and pause. And you can add previous touch and hold, scroll forward and back, home, back, notifications, quick settings and overview. Users are notified when the feature is active and the camera is in use and all processing is done on the device. Camera switch is available for Pixel phones running Android 12 right now. Yeah, the only thing I find negative about this story is that it's only on the Pixel, but Google often does that to kind of load test features before they make them available, especially with accessibility stuff. So hopefully they will speed that along. Hopefully it all goes well. But an excellent set of accessibility standards. The switch, if you're not familiar with Switch Access, things like blow tubes and everything can interface with Android because of that. So this is huge for people who only have control of facial muscles to be able to interact with the phones. Great. Yeah, absolutely. I think that if one of the most heartwarming stories we are, we are very, very quick in our black mirror world to point out every negative thing that has come along with our interconnectivity via smart devices in the internet. But one of the things that I do always like to point out is that accessibility that has come along with these smartphones in our pocket is something that has evolved at a very rapid pace and continues to give people that otherwise would not have access to a lot of the stuff, very, very easy in your pocket access to, you know, the things that we take for granted as able-bodied people. Yeah, it's terrific. All right. You might get more battery life out of future phones thanks to a new display technology from Samsung. Now reminder, reminder to those unaware, Samsung displays are used in lots of phones, not just phones made by Samsung mobile. We're talking about Samsung Display Company. Samsung Display Company announced a new OLED panel called ECO 2 OLED with the 2 as an exponent. It makes it really hard to type, but that's how they, they, they spilled it. It gets rid of a polarizer layer and they claim it uses 25% less power as a result, which is a big jump. OLED panels are copper colored. So to make your screen look black, a polarizer layer is put in between to only let light from the display itself go through the glass. Otherwise you'd get a reflected copper color from your screen. That polarizer layer absorbs some of the light as it does this. Samsung estimates about 33% of it, meaning you need more power if you want to keep that screen bright. So Samsung has created a non reflective OLED panel that appears black and therefore doesn't need that polarizer layer, which means you're not absorbing 33% of the light. Samsung Display says that ECO 2 OLED has already been implemented in the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3. And there's another technology out there developed by Apple called LPTO that also saves battery life in a different way. That one lets the device dynamically change the refresh rate so that you're not always sending power through all parts of the screen. That's how the Series 5 Apple Watch can always be on without draining the battery. So between these two technologies, Anantek notes that coming phones should see a significant jump in power efficiency and longer lasting battery as a result. That's exceptional. Anytime, I mean, when you really look at what people in their daily driver use of their phones, yes, there are edge cases in terms of what people want to do in terms of pushing hardware to their absolute maximum. But the two things that an average user thinks about when they get a new phone or are frustrated with their old one is the camera and the battery. That's it. The more that you can build in ways that as our phones get more complex and are doing different things and are more interconnected to the internet and therefore burning that battery at a higher rate, the more you can save on that, I think the better the baseline experience is going to be for not only power consumers, but all consumers. Yeah, it's super fantastic. And I love how we see such incredible leaps forward with OLED technology all the time. I remember when they were first talking about how to bend it, and I'm looking forward to OLED devices where I can just fold them up, stick them in my pocket, and then pull it back out and open it up like a map. That's kind of what I imagine will be the end game here is something that's super light, has really great battery life, and just looks like a folded up piece of paper. Yeah, I remember the first time I saw an OLED screen at CES years and years ago, and it was tiny. It was like seven inches, and they were bragging about how they'd gotten it to seven inches. And it was like, man, someday I guess we'll see this in TVs. And of course, now we do. This technology in particular, I'm not sure if it benefits TVs a lot. It could make them more power efficient, obviously. But I don't know if it changes your experience of the TV, I guess, but still excellent for any battery-powered device that it ends up going into. Yeah. All next week is DTNS Experiment Week. While much of the world is on vacation, we're swapping out our normal Daily Tech News show and trying out some new show ideas hosted by DTNS producers and contributors. So we're going to have a Chris Ashley-hosted barbecue tech show. Jen Cutter's got a state video game show coming. Rob Dunwood's got a real cool second look at tech. Rich Strafolino's Ask a Luddite is coming and a few others. It all starts next week. So be prepared. Not your normal DTNS starting Monday, August 23rd on all the regular DTNS feeds. Annalie recently wrote a guest essay in the New York Times called From Loki to Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Fans are calling the shots. Annalie, your overall topic was the growth of fan influence on how content is created going back to the renewal of Star Trek and even beyond for a third season in the 1960s to studios developing shows like Loki sort of in response to meme activity. What are some recent examples of this fan influence? Yeah. So as I said in the piece and in the title, if you're enjoying the new season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which just started, that was partly a result of a fan campaign to bring the show back for a final season. The idea of a fan campaign influencing TV has been going on for quite a while now. One of the things that I was sort of embarrassed to recount in that article was that I was a huge Vampire Diaries fan, as many right-thinking people are, and that was a show where the fans kind of took charge of the main romantic couple. The fans really wanted to see the main character date the bad boy. There's two brothers, of course, she's dating both of them at various points and one's a nice boy and one's a bad boy, and the writers kept saying like we want her to be with the nice guy or some other guy. The fans put so much pressure on them to put her back with Damon, the bad boy, that they finally caved. And that was a huge controversy. Another huge controversy that folks probably remember is that the show runners of the show Westworld were reading the subreddits devoted to Westworld and were trying to figure out if the fans were ahead of the plot. And if fans started to figure out too much, they would try to change the plot in advance to prevent them from figuring out the different loopholes and weird twists in the show, which I'd say were mixed results. But this all goes back over 100 years to a fan campaign to bring back Sherlock Holmes from the dead. People may not realize that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so sick of writing Sherlock Holmes that he was like Jesus, I'm just going to kill this guy off already. Fans lost their shit. They wrote letters, they canceled subscriptions to the magazine that was running Sherlock Holmes stories, serialized dramas. And finally, under huge amounts of pressure, Arthur Conan Doyle did what I think might be the first modern retcon where he, in Hound of the Baskervilles, is like, well, you thought that Sherlock was dead, but actually when he fell off that cliff, he survived somehow. And he's back. So Hound of the Baskervilles is in fact a retcon, beloved to all fans of the Marvel Universe, of course. So yeah, I was really interested in how recently we've seen so many fan campaigns organized online and how that's sort of changing from the traditional like letter writing campaign or just sort of tweeting a little bit here and there. Yeah, because there's more access between the creators and the fans, more real time access between the creators and fans. Therefore, no amount of vervein could stop the Vampire Diaries fans from influencing what is going to happen. So that is the story of the internet, right? Oh, we've got more access, more communication, and it starts good, but are non-fans taking advantage of that pipeline? Yeah, so that was one of the things that I found out as I was researching this piece is that Hollywood studios are starting to hire fan consultants to help them kind of separate out, I guess what you might call legitimate fan requests or legitimate fan upswell in in support for a show or a movie. And to tell that apart from basically troll farms, you know, agents who are working for even a state power or who are just part of a political movement. And a really great example of how this plays out on the internet was with James Gunn, who was the director of the original Guardians of the Galaxy film. And he, in fact, the new Suicide Squad movie is his film as well. So he is a really outspoken guy on Twitter. He said a lot of crappy stuff back in the day. And he kind of apologized for the crappy sex of stuff he said back in the day, but in the present day at the time that he got caught up in a fan controversy, he was criticizing Donald Trump a lot in great detail and with lots of flowery language, shall we say. And Trump supporters organized an online campaign masquerading as fans and demanding that Disney take him off the franchise, which they did. They caved to pressure. And so he was taken off that. And that's why he ended up doing Suicide Squad. But then a new fan campaign came along and created its own pressure. And now he's back on Guardians of the Galaxy. And this is a perfect example of how it's really hard to tell real fan sentiment from people who were just engaging in kind of political trolling. These were just people who were pissed at James Gunn because they didn't like his political beliefs. So it's become really hard in a lot of instances to tell the difference between what the fans really want and what is propaganda, basically. I think that that's a fascinating example, too, because the James Gunn thing really can't be separated from what happened with Roseanne only weeks prior, where this was a political back and forth where Roseanne gets removed from her show for making controversial comments toward the liberal side. And so then a side on the opposite side of the aisle is selected. Old tweets are resurrected and now all of a sudden Disney feels like they're in a position where they need to equally punish these two people. But really, this had very little Roseanne's show and Guardians of the Galaxy have very little to do with each other. Not a shared universe, no. No, although that would be an interesting shared universe. Look, the faster we can get John Goodman in the MCU, I am very, very thrilled for it. Oh, same. I do think, and same with Laurie McCabe, I think that there's really a, the internet is in charge of the internet's own story. And it's so fascinating to look at these other industries seeing it as a mirror for how people are processing their product when really it's as much about the back and forth as it is anything else. Yeah. And I think, I mean, what I would say is it's easy to think, okay, fandom is becoming this kind of terrible place where people are just screaming about stuff and they aren't really expressing love for their shows and their books. But I talked to Tracy Dionne when I was working on this article, she's a fantastic fantasy writer. Her latest book is called Legend Born. And she came up through fandom and this book that she just published, it's become a huge bestseller, it already has its own fandom. And she really feels like having a fandom community online is what helped her become an author and to break in. And she and a lot of other BIPOC writers and women and queer writers have found a place where they can prove that their writing is going to be popular and financially lucrative for publishers. And so it helps groups that have traditionally been kept out of publishing to make a case for their work being brought into kind of the mainstream where it of course has belonged all along. But publishing is a slow moving beast and doesn't necessarily, has not yet necessarily gotten out of the 1950s mindset. And so having fandom is, it's diversifying lots of genre, whether the publishing industry is excited about that or not, it's just happening. Yeah, when I was reading that part of your essay about the influence of fan fiction as part of all this, it really reminded me of, I don't know if anybody's familiar with Wattpad or similar type platforms where people can publish their fan fiction and get a following. And people who do that sort of thing in China are frequently turned into hit television shows in China. And similarly in Korea, webtoons, a lot of webtoons bubble up and become hit television shows. So I almost feel like the US and Europe needs to take a cue. There's a goldmine of content to be mined there in the fan fiction world. Yeah, here in the States, we have archive of our own. If folks are interested in looking at really quality fan fiction, start there. And in Hollywood, yes, keep an eye out. It is crazy that post 50 Shades of Grey, which started in that realm that there wasn't a hunt for literally every, like instead of making a random screenwriter say, oh, we wanted this plus of this, just literally go get the fan fiction version of these exact characters and change the names. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the next phase for sure. You know, we're going to be as soon as the zoomers are in control, that's like our whole media landscape is going to be fanfic. And I am here for it. All right, Justin, what do we got to do before we get out of here? Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked before we get out of here. There's a couple of robot stories in the news. And Annalie, if you're willing, I'd like to find out which robot appeals to you more. Now they both may appeal to you like some kind of robot reality show, but we do need you to pick just one. Here's robot candidates. Let's call them robot candidate A. Another Boston Dynamics Robo demo video. This one shows the bipedal Atlas robot doing flips and vaults and other gymnastics feats and even recovering from an almost fall. And to Boston Dynamics credit, there's a second video that actually goes into some detail explaining how it was done and the significance of the tech involved and how it benefits Boston Dynamics engineers. But maybe you are more interested in robot candidate B. It's the launch of a pizza making robot from the company Picnic just announced at the International Pizza Expo and Conference in Las Vegas. Picnic pizza robots are out of the pilot phase and can be ordered under a robotics as a service model for the low, low price of $3,500 to $5,000 a month. Pre-orders are now shipping after the first of or are now open and they will be shipped after the first of the year. Annalie, what do you think the Boston Dynamics gymnastics robot or the pizza robot for the $5,000 a month fee? The low, low price. The robot that pays for itself in pizza. I was initially really tempted by the pizza bot because of course everybody loves pizza. But I looked into it and it's nothing more than just a standard kind of assembly line machine. It isn't really a robot. If it had been an actual humanoid cutting up all of the sausage and tossing it on and throwing the dough in the air, then call me when that's happening. But if it's just like a giant box that squirts a bunch of tomato onto a pre-made piece of dough, I don't know. I'm going to have to go with the Boston Dynamics robots. I fear them. I love watching them. I like to see them jumping up on top of boxes. That's always exciting. If we're lucky, they'll be making pizza in the next video from Boston Dynamics. It could happen. I agree. I'm for the Boston Dynamics robot because eventually they're going to gain sentience and just scan the entire internet. I want you guys to know. I was always with you. We're on your side. Folks, if you've only seen the parkour tricks, which are very impressive, definitely watch the behind the scenes video because it's the most transparent that Boston Dynamics has ever been. You see them falling over and getting broken and getting fixed. They show some really interesting ways they go about making this in that video. Well, Boston Dynamics gets the rose. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Nick just wrote in quickly because we were talking about the company making ice cream out of whey protein secreted by a fungus. So no animals involved ice cream. Nick says, can we please have more stories on food made without having to kill or exploit animals? I look forward to not having to kill a cow for my steak. Nick, I can't make them happen. But yes, we will keep an eye out for these kinds of stories if you're into it for sure because they're coming fast and furious. Yeah, I will say one of our favorite vegan ice creams that we found in the bay was this brand called Brave Robot, which that's the one we were talking about yesterday. Oh, perfect then. Yeah. Brave Robot. Amazing. Go get it. So good. Yeah, I love to milk fungus. That's like my favorite. I plan to retire and become a fungus milker. That's, you know, after I'm done as a tech podcaster. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Keep those emails coming. Special thanks to EO, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Been with us. May not hear that name a lot, but been with us for a long time, helping us out at a top level. Thanks to all the years of support to EO. And remember, if you are a new boss, we haven't had a new boss in a while. If you're out there listening to the free feed and you're like, you know, maybe I wouldn't like the ads. Maybe I'd like to hear my name at the end of the show. You can get it like that. Just become a new boss, patreon.com. slash DTNS. Thank you, Annalie Newitz, as always. Let folks know what you've got going on because you always have some great stuff. Sure. You can always listen to my podcast. It's called Our Opinions Are Correct. You can get it where any fine podcast is found. And we have a new episode that just came out about how to do research for your writing if you're interested in writing some science fiction. We're always on that. And yeah, you can always find my latest articles on The New York Times or on my website, which is AnnalieNewitz.com. Excellent. Thank you so much, Annalie. It's always great having you. Yeah, great to be here. Justin, Robert Young, do you have any intelligent and fine smelling guests coming up on Politics, Politics, Politics? Funny, you should mention that, Tom Merritt. We have a guest called Tom Merritt on the show tomorrow. He talked about all of the technology spending that is in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which although it is currently in a log jam between two sides of the Democratic Party in the house right now, we expect will eventually be passed what is in there and not only what is being spent, but also the cryptocurrency tax revenue that will possibly pay for it all explained on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast featuring your boy Tom Merritt out tomorrow. That was a blast. Go check it out, folks. Don't forget we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.