 Coming up on DTNS, Apple launched a $99 MagSafe battery pack. Well, that's actually the whole story. But we'll talk more about Google getting fined for not being cooperative with news publishers, Twitter verification getting faked out by bots, and grocery delivery in 10 minutes. OK, fine, Apple fans, which is plain why Apple didn't ban the number 69 from its weather app, too. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 13th. Tuesday the 13th, 2021 in Los Angeles, downtown Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us from Engadget, senior editor, Nicole Lee. Welcome back, Nicole. Hello, happy to be back. We were just talking about various ways to consume macaroni and cheese on Good Day Internet, if you would like that and actual thoughts about the Apple battery pack, although not that many. Get our wider show, Good Day Internet, patreon.com.slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. After a technical preview involving eight Ring cameras in the US earlier this year, Ring is now globally rolled out increased security features to 13 doorbells and cameras. The update enables end-to-end encryption, a choice of authenticator apps for added login security, and captures to better prevent automated login attempts. A couple of Google product announcements worth noting here. Google Meet will resume enforcing its 60-minute time limit. If you got three people or more on a call, they disabled the restriction back in April 2020, but it's coming back. One-on-one calls can still run for 24 hours on both free and enterprise accounts. Google also announced Drive for Desktop will replace the consumer-focused backup and sync and business-focused Drive file stream. Drive for Desktop will sync local files to Google Photos or Google Drive. Users should expect a prompt to get them to make the switch in the coming months. Mozilla released a privacy-focused update in Firefox 90 that lets you use Facebook to log in to websites in private browsing or strict mode. Firefox uses SmartBlock 2.0 to do this. That's the new version of the third-party tracking blocker introduced back in Firefox 87, which cleans up web pages that are broken by Firefox's content protections and replaces tracking scripts with stand-ins so that sites can render normally. SmartBlock previously restricted scripts on Facebook as a known tracker that was collecting your data across the web. Ransomware Operation Our Evils Infrastructure and websites went offline Tuesday night. The operation uses a number of both clear web and dark websites for negotiations, ransomware data leaks, back-ended infrastructure. The Tor projects Al Smith told Bleeping Computer that the error generally means that the onion site is offline or disabled. The decoder.reclear website is also no longer resolvable by DNS queries, indicating the DNS records for the domain might have been pulled or that back-end DNS infrastructure has been shut down. A new report from AppsFlyer in collaboration with Google analyzed activities from 6,000 mobile apps and 2 billion installs across three of Africa's largest app markets, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. But between Q1 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021, obviously some pandemic numbers to be factored in here. It found the predominantly Android mobile app industry there increased by 41% in overall installs with Nigeria registering a 43% rise, South Africa increasing by 37% and Kenya increasing 29%. Gaming apps saw a 50% growth compared to an 8% increase in non-gaming apps and in-app purchases, the revenue for which in fact grew 136%, accounting for 33% of 2020's total revenue. I wanna make an app over there. All right, let's talk a little bit about Google getting fined by France. France's competition authority fined Google 500 million euros for not negotiating in good faith to pay news publishers for the right to show their headlines in snippets and search and news results. To catch everybody up, Europe passed a copyright directive back in 2019. Remember, requiring businesses of a certain size to pay publishers for neighboring rights, carrying snippets that describe the news they link to. Sometimes just the first paragraph of the story. Each European country has to implement the directive on its own national laws, into its own national laws and France was the first to do so. They did it in October 2019. So this has been coming for a while. In response to France passing the law, Google at first said it would just stop carrying snippets altogether and started showing only the headline and links. Saying if we have to pay for the snippets, we won't show the snippets in the French version anyway of Google News. But France said that practice was an abuse of Google's dominant market position. In other words, if there had been proper competition, France alleged Google couldn't afford not to negotiate for payments. They wouldn't have been able to get away with just doing the links because they would have gotten out competed by somebody who did pay. But since there isn't proper competition, it unfairly could play hardball. So if Google operates search in France, France's competition agency says it has to carry news and it has to pay publishers to do it. In April, 2020, France gave Google three months to negotiate in good faith and ordered it to display snippets in the meantime. All right, they went longer than three months. That was okay because they were in negotiations. However, news publishers AFP, APIG and SEPM all complained in August and September of last year that Google was not providing the information they needed to make proper payment negotiations. However, by February of this year, Reuters reported that Google had reached an agreement with APIG's 121 publishers to pay a total of $76 million over three years for appearing in Google News Showcase, a new product from Google. So you have the complaint, but APIG comes to an agreement in February while the complaint is being investigated. All right, they made their decision this week and in that decision, France's competition authority noted that Google wants to pay publishers for Google News Showcase, the one that I just said APIG made a deal for and include the search and news rights for other products under that agreement without additional payment. They said, we don't think that's okay. Showcase would sometimes show much more than snippets, sometimes whole articles, that's separate product. The authority took issue with how Google counted revenue as well and some other requirements that it insisted on in its deal. So France is saying, Google, these deals don't seem like they're in the spirit of the law. Google says it's been negotiating in good faith, has reached several agreements, including one with AFP, one of the other big organizations that had filed the complaint, that it expects to finalize soon. A spokesperson said, the fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement and the reality of how news works on our platform. French competition authority head, Isabel de Silva said, when the authority decrees an obligation for a company, it must comply scrupulously, both in the spirit and letter of the decision here, this was unfortunately not the case. So they've given Google 60 days to give the publishers the information that they're saying they weren't getting or face further fines of up to 900,000 euros per day. I don't think any of us are shocked by any of this, but Nicole, do you have a sense of, you know, where you think the next move might be? You know, Google has been in this anti-trust situation for a while now, and this is just one of many issues that is faced, especially in Europe. Yeah, I think at this point, it probably behooves the company to pay the fine and try to approach France in good faith, just so that you can say that, you know, it can get out of this whole anti-trust kerfuffle that it's gotten itself into. It seems though that, and sure, Google can pay the fines, even if Google wants to delay this, you know, 90,000 euros per day, it's like, we're okay for a while, it's Google. But this is now, it's starting to, a few months ago, we were like, well, I know the whole Australia thing, how is this gonna shake out? You know, are more countries going to come forward and say, well, this is how we do things here, and this is what we need a company the size of Google, you know, with the reach of Google to do for us specifically. And yes, when does that end? Because the company does not wanna keep doing this over and over. Yeah, I mean, they obviously, you're right, Nicole, they will pay the fine. And I think they probably feel like they have deals ready to go. My question is, if they make a deal with AFP and then SCPM, does the French competition authority still push this and go, sure, but you made those deals for showcase. And like we said, showcase is a different thing. You're not paying them for the other stuff. Or if the publishers get their deals, do they back off and say, okay, fine? Because it does feel a little bit like the publishers are using the French government as a leverage tactic on Google. And I don't think the French government is even uncomfortable being in that position for what I could tell. Well, if you like hearing things in your ears, you might like hearing us in your ears right now. We certainly hope so anyway. We have a couple of product announcements that you might also be interested in. First up, Sony will release another of its glass lantern Bluetooth speakers that vibrated glass tube as the tweeter. The supposed advantage of this soup form factor is that it can send sound in all directions. Also, there's a light inside the tube that you can use as a lamp. So you put it on your nightstand. It's kind of a two for one type thing. This is the third version of this speaker. The original cost $799, kind of steep, but the LSPX S3, the newest version will sell for $349 and that starts in August. Now, if you'd rather have sounds directly in your ear, wear an earbuds of some kind and you wanna get some health benefits at the same time, perhaps, then you might like the Amaze Fit Power Buds Pro. They have active noise cancellation. They have heart rate monitoring and they can also nag you about your posture. Now you might say, why would you ever want this? Well, an accelerometer in the earbuds measures your sitting angle and maybe if your neck is in the same position too long, you're hunting up your computer, et cetera, and then it'll nudge you to improve your posture. Pre-orders of the Amaze Fit Power Buds Pro start July 15th at $150 or 130 euros. So anybody here want some earbuds that help tell you to sit up straight? I definitely started sitting up straighter as you were reading that. Yes. So the reminders work. It's already working. Yeah. Maybe, you know, especially if you deal with ergonomic issues, you've got back pain, wrist pain, that kind of thing, that might be a nice, nice to have. These earbuds from Amaze Fit seem fine otherwise. I don't know that they're the greatest earbuds out there, but they don't seem like they're the worst. So yeah, maybe if that's a particular issue for you, that might be a cool thing to have, plus they have all these other fitness capabilities as well. So for $150 for a pair of earbuds that can do all of those things you mentioned, sounds pretty good. I guess it all comes down to whether you really value the posture at a benefit versus like any other pair of earbuds. Yeah, yeah. And then the glass tube thing, I'm still thinking $349 might be just a touch more expensive than I wanna pay, but I love the idea of my bedside speaker also being a Bluetooth speaker and looking cool like that. It kind of looks like one of those floating candles. It does look cool, yeah. It is in light or something, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're saving space, you know. It's if you were to buy a nice lamp and have a speaker next to it, right? It's like, you're probably gonna get in that range anyway. Well, you likely will, not necessarily probably. I think it's already, sorry. Go ahead, Nicole. That is already a combo light lamp speaker. I think IKEA makes one, but yeah, similar idea. Yeah. I really, yeah. I am a sort of a data nerd. So this whole idea of telling me when my posture is not great, I'm like, I love this. I also think sometimes we start feeling a little bit silly about all the data points that we're gathering about ourselves. There are health metrics that are extremely important, of course. If you care about getting enough certain steps in a day, go nuts, all of those things. We have so many choices. The posture thing is actually, it's easy to sort of laugh off as like, oh, it'll just be annoying me all day about hunching. But posture, I have had issues with posture in the past, especially with desktop setups at home, or not sitting up straight or just having the wrong angle with a computer, which ends up hurting my arms and all sorts of stuff. So I think something like this, maybe a maze fit is just one product of many in the future that will start alerting us to these sorts of things, but it's not really to be ignored. All right, time to get on meme watch. If you say the number 69, some people are gonna think it's dirty. It's an adult thing, it's related to adult stuff. You probably know why. And if you don't, just accept that it's gonna make some people giggle. The Verges Hyam Gartenberg discovered that the iPhone's built-in weather app on recent versions of iOS never was showing the temperature as 69 degrees Fahrenheit. Clicking through to the source data would show a 69 degree temp as would Apple's home screen widgets, but the app itself either showed 68 or 70. So what's up? Is Apple being prudish here? Are they taking it that far? We can't even show the number 60. No, that's probably not what's going on. Gartenberg discovered there also seems to be a problem showing 65 and 71 degrees. And as far as Gartenberg or myself can tell, there's nothing particularly controversial about the number 65 and 71. Several people on Twitter suggested that Apple might be sourcing the data in Celsius, the temperature scale used by most of the world, except Liberia and the United States and a couple other places. And if source data says that 20 degrees Celsius is the temperature, that converts to 68 degrees. And the next up, 21 degrees Celsius converts to 69.8. So you'd go from 20 to 21, you'd go from 68 and 69.8 would round up to 70. That could also explain the issues at 65 degrees as well. So probably not an editorial decision on the part of Apple. And yet, so much press. That's true. That's a lot of press around. Well, I think, okay. So when I saw this kind of come through my feeds this morning, I was like, that is insane. This can't be right. And it was not, I mean, I live in a pretty warm climate, but at the time of me reading the article, I was like, okay, we're in the 50s. We're going to get to around 69. I'm going to keep looking at my phone and see if this is true. Cause it's kind of weird if so. But the weirdness about it, I think really has less to do with. Okay. So if Apple was doing something like that, that would be insane. But also people sometimes equate Apple with, well, they're the company who wants to pretend that, you know, they're like the most family friendly company and, you know, they're not going to get into, you know, some of that dirtier stuff that other companies will do. So there is a little bit of that legacy going on to the point where I think people believed Apple can't show 69 degrees Fahrenheit in an app where it's going to, I don't know, upset parents or something. Well, there is a whole meme of, you know, people screenshotting their weather app showing 69 and saying nice. Yeah. There's a whole meme, there's a whole meme around that. I find it would be unlikely too, but you could see how you might convince yourself like, oh, Apple doesn't want to have brand identification with those screenshots or whatever. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's rule 34, folks. Every number's got something, probably, if you look hard enough, I'm just saying. All right. If you need more explanation about more complex tech topics than that one, like, I don't know, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, stuff like that, check out our related show, Know a Little More, to know a little bit about all of that and more. This week, we have an explanation of cookies. Cookies are in the news a lot these days if you're like, what are they? Well, get Know a Little More. It's available in your Patreon feed or at knowalittlemore.com. On Sunday, data scientists, rather, conspirador Nortenio, discovered six accounts, all 26 days old, that had the same followers and had not posted once. These are Twitter accounts. Almost none of the followers had posted either. So you got a bunch of people. Nobody's posting. Followers are the same. Followers aren't posting. And the ones that had seemed to post were posting Korean spam. So it all seemed fishy. They might be bots. You might say, yeah, that happens. Well, yeah, except that the notice that all six had been also verified by Twitter. You got a little blue check mark and all the stuff that doesn't seem right. So what happened? Twitter told the Daily Dot, we mistakenly approved the verification applications of a small number of inauthentic or fake accounts. We now permanently suspended the accounts in question and have removed their verified badge under our platform manipulation and spam policy. CNET reports that Twitter attributed the mistake to a gap in training and procedures that the company says it's trying to improve. Twitter rolled out a new verification program back in May. So clearly some work to be done yet. Okay, the whole verification thing has had a torrid and controversial history, right? People started equating it with a mark of approval or credibility even though that's not what it was meant for. It was meant to say, this isn't the parody account. This is the real account. But Twitter never really made it clear how anybody could get verified. And so they finally reworked it and they rolled this out in May. You've got to train your people, right? Like, I'm usually very tolerant of like, hey, mistakes are made. One of these was a cat. Like, how do you make that mistake? Also, like six. Really good stuff. Well, true. But if it was a real cat, I wouldn't have a problem. Not a real. Yeah. Also, it's like six, you know, like, I don't know. It seems like, it seems like the kind of mistake, it seems like a very amateur level mistake that maybe an algorithm did instead of a person because I just don't see how a person would make the mistake. Your job is to verify, you shouldn't accidentally verify a bot, right? Well, and after years, many years of people saying, I am, you know, an authentic person. Look at, you know, I am, you know, proven myself in my line of work. Give me the verification. It was something that was a real point of contention for a lot of Twitter users feeling like, you know, you had to know somebody at the company in order to get it, blah, blah, blah. And for all of that to kind of come and gone and then Twitter saying, you know, we're actually gonna take this seriously and do something differently just a couple of months ago. And then you see this happen. It's easy for some people to say, well, you still don't know what you're doing. Yeah, to the point that Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook, person who likes to comment in public on these sorts of things was saying on Twitter that maybe it was an inside job, you know, my malicious or bribed insider. I mean, obviously Twitter is not gonna say if that was the case, but I almost believe that more than like, yeah, now our people just weren't trained very well. Like, I don't know. I find that if true to be very surprising, maybe not unconscionable, that might be too far. All right, let's get some groceries. United Arab Emirates scooter operator, Phoenix, just announced a new 10-minute grocery delivery service called F10. Sounds too good to be true, right? But it is true under certain conditions. The grocery delivery service is only available on Alrim Island, which is a dense, mixed-use development community off the coast of Abu Dhabi. So you're not dealing with a lot of air yet, you got a lot of people in a small amount of space. F10 will use its own scooters from the Phoenix fleet and the delivery drivers will be pulled from the folks who otherwise spend time changing out batteries on the scooters. The groceries are coming from dark stores located at Phoenix's charging centers, which are distributed around the island. So they're making use of extra capacity here. It's kind of genius from a business standpoint. But 10 minutes, full-time employees are trained to get an order and pack it for delivery in two minutes, they say, and then they hand it off to a rider who has eight minutes to get it to the destination. Now, the density of the island's 100,000 people make that theoretically possible, but man, if you missed that elevator, you're, you know, because there's a lot of high-rises there, you're done. Also, how many groceries are we talking about? Like, is it like five items? Is it 10 items? Good question. Like, what's the max, right? We're talking about a couple of bags at most. Yeah, I mean, even me, if it's like, if I'm in and out the grocery store and, you know, and I'm in a hurry and I need a bag max of things, yeah, I know where I have to go, but if I'm, you know, really going for it, and that's me shopping for myself, it's gonna take a while. Like, I'm maybe not gonna do this for myself in two hours. With the bins they can put on the back of these scooters and some wheelies that they could, on here, you could get more than I could carry around, but still, you know, you're not gonna be delivering 100 bottles of water or anything like that, right? That's assuming no traffic, that's assuming no delays. Well, the scooters probably help you get around the traffic. True, true. That part maybe I could buy, because apparently, Ream Island has horrible traffic, so it'd have to be scooters. It couldn't even be cars, that's a good point. But I don't know, 10 minute groceries does sound nice. I can't, Amazon says that their Amazon Fresh deliveries are two hour delivery. I've never been able to get a delivery time that is within two hours of my order time. It just doesn't seem to happen. I wonder what, you know, if this is the beginning of what is to be expected from grocery delivery, because I think, I don't know, I can't even get a pizza in 10 minutes, but that's a little bit different, right? Groceries, you know, I want all these different things, and yeah, I'm real picky about the brand, and that has to be factored in. To get to a point in life where that would be the utmost convenience for me, very interesting. Don't see it happening anytime soon, but. I'm also assuming these are convenience store level groceries as well, right? It's probably a limited selection too. Yeah. Well, everybody, we love a good record, and we have a new record. Dutchmade solar electric vehicle, the Light Year One, now holds the distinction of the longest distance traveled by an EV electric vehicle on a single battery charge. Back in June, the Light Year One drove at a speed of 85 kilometers per hour for nine hours straight, using 60 kilowatt hours of energy at the Aldenhoven Testing Center in Germany, covering 710 kilometers, which is about 441 miles for those of us who like the idea of driving from northern to southern California in a single day. With its five solar panels, the Light Year can add about 12 kilometers of range per hour of charging, which could extend the range for quite some time. You could get a little crazy per hour of charging if you'd given the right sunny conditions. You would have to have those at solar. The Light Year One is a concept. It'll be released in the first half of 2022 for about $177,000. Don't get too pumped about just buying this car outright just yet. There's some work to be done, but that is a record. Yeah, range record. I mean, think about records. Obviously, like you said, the Light Year One is not marketing to the general populace at $177,000. So this is not something accessible to everybody yet, but usually that stuff becomes accessible over time. So if range anxiety has been keeping you from buying a car, just hang in there. It looks like the technology is there to be able to make this happen. Well, and I'm thinking back to our EV special that we had a couple of months ago where the conditions are very important. A range expectancy, a lot of things will factor into what you end up getting. And this was obviously tested in a controlled environment. That said, yeah, for those who say, it's got to be this amount of however I want to go, even if I'm not driving that distance on a daily basis or I'm not comfortable, then this is promising. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So David was listening to a conversation. We were having with Charlotte Henry yesterday about Black Widows box office and streaming numbers collectively and what that might tell us about the future of movie releases. David says, I think there's an important factor that should not be overlooked. When people have children, the number of times they get to the cinema drops drastically. Not counting minion movies, I think I've only been twice in the past seven years. That's a lot of money that the movie companies are leaving on the table. With day and date releases, they're now able to get their hands on some of that money. And seeing that we are a very large demographic, he means parents, who are still as susceptible to the hype machine as everyone else, I think it makes it worth doing. Yeah, when we were talking about not everybody who rented Black Widow to watch at home would have gone to the theater if that was their only option. This is a great example of that, David. Thank you for providing that. There are people who are like, yeah, I would never have gone out to the theater. I couldn't have because of kids, but I was able to sneak away for two hours and watch this on my own after they went to sleep or wherever, whatever. So good stuff, thanks for the insight, David. Indeed, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback of anything that we talk about on the show, we would love to get it. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Ollie Sanjabi, Andrew Bradley, and Dale McKayhee. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, boy, are we on a roll. And today, we're thanking Kevin Miner, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Kevin. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Kevin's our new favorite person. I know we had other favorite people yesterday. Kevin, you could be our favorite person tomorrow. I'm just saying. We do have a lot of Kevin patrons. I want us to all get in a room together and just have a party one day. Or Kevin's patrons. All, everyone listening to my voice on the ACAST public feed, whose name, Kevin, become a patron tomorrow. Just below Sarah's mind. I want 11 new patrons named Kevin. Right, make our party grow. It's gonna be great. Thank you to Nicole Lee for being with us today as well. Not a Kevin, but invited to the party for sure. Nicole, where can people keep up with your work? Yeah, so you can go to engadget.com to find my reviews and things like that. You can also go to my sub-stack. It's kind of very new and young at the moment, but I'll get it going sometime, nicole.substack.com. Or you can just go check out my Twitter, twitter.com, slash Nicole. Very good. Look at that handle. At Nicole, how'd you get that? We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC on this here show. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com, slash live, and we will be back doing it tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.