 Coming up on DTNS why Russia should not be cut off from the internet away for YouTube and Instagram creators to offer on-brand food delivery And do we want ads in our streaming video, but what if it's free? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday March 4th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane From Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang There is a longer version of this show where we discovered Sarah Lane still has a cassette player within reach You can get good day internet by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Brad, Kevin and Paul Thieson Let's start with a few tech things you should know Samsung announced it will release a software update soon to let users control performance while running game apps This is in response to the discovery that Samsung's game-optimizing service seemed to reduce performance for more than 10,000 apps while not affecting benchmarking apps. No timing on the update was announced Tech news outlets love to tell you when a deal is struck But they don't often follow up and tell you when it closes good on Geekwire for being among the outlets to make sure folks know that Microsoft has completed its acquisition of voice technology company nuance Microsoft plans to use nuance to combine voice AI and cloud for health care retail telecommunications and financial services Sony and Honda sign a memorandum of Understanding to form a joint venture to design and sell EVs with the first models plan for 2025 Honda says it will develop the first model handling vehicle design and sales with Sony developing a mobility services platform The venture hasn't been finalized or named yet expected to be formed later this year A group that claimed to have copied a terabyte or so of data from Nvidia has demanded the company remove the light hash rate Or LHR feature from the RTX 30 series GPUs or it will release some of that stolen information If you're not aware LHR limits GPU mining Capabilities so these folks are saying we want you to let us use Jeep RTX 30 series GPUs for crypto mining The group previously demanded Nvidia open source its drivers as well Have I been pwned says it has found credentials for more than 71,000 Nvidia employees including hashed passwords in the data dump The group also claims it has source code and information on unreleased GPUs All right, let's take a quick look at the many tech stories related to the war in Ukraine First up Microsoft has suspended all new sales of products and services in Russia And it's proactively assisting Ukraine to defend itself against cyber attacks EA announced it will also stop selling its games in Russia and also Belarus Airbnb suspended all operations in Russia and Belarus AMD and Intel confirm that they've stopped shipping chips to Russia and Belarus Google suspended all ad sales in Russia Deir Spiegel reported that Russia is now blocking access to Twitter Facebook the BBC Duchy well and app stores the BBC has also Suspended the work of its journalists in Russia after a new censorship law was passed and for the first time since 2008 rather BBC World Service is broadcasting in shortwave in Ukraine and also parts of Russia Elon Musk tweeted that because Starlink is the only non-russian Communication system working in some parts of Ukraine the probability of its signal being used to track users is high Apple has changed its maps to show Crimea as part of Ukraine Except when it's accessed from within Russia where the law requires maps to show primary Crimea rather as part of Russia It's software co-founder John Romero released a new level for doom 2 and said he will give 100% of the proceeds to the Red Cross and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund in Ukraine Russia's Yandex said it will pause its autonomous sidewalk vehicle testing with Grubhub in the US and shut down its RoboTaxing testing in Ann Arbor, Michigan Finally data transport and internet provider cogent communications has cut its internet service with Russia clients saying it did not want to be used or outbound cyber attacks or disinformation either that is a big one cogent is You know used to call them backbone transit providers, but they do so much more than that There's an argument over whether they're a tier one or not, but they they are one of the biggest ways to get data around the internet so cutting off Russia is Making it a lot harder for anyone within Russia to access the rest of the internet not impossible But but certainly certainly a big deal All right, let's switch from that to talking about streaming video Rob So yeah peacock has a free tier with ads and limited content a paid tier with ads It has all the content and a paid tier that costs a little more that gets rid of the ads Paramount plus Hulu HBO Max and Discovery Plus all offer a tier with ads the cheaper than a tier without To be as free with that for everything as our Pluto zoom-o and several others like Samsung TV Which I really love and now Disney Plus announced that it will launch an ad supported tier in the US some time later this year and Internationally in 2023 Disney did not say how much it would cost and from where I said this is was inevitable I believe that Disney Plus came out and was the fall of 2019. So they're you know, they've been around for a little while They have been growing like mad I believe that they they got just under 130 million subscribers as of the end of last year with a 30% increase in Q4 But Disney understands that okay in order to continue to grow at this rate We probably have to have cheaper plans with you have cheaper plans. We make less How can we make more? Let's have cheaper plans with ads. So yeah, everyone else is doing it Regardless of what we feel so I think they're now doing it too. I mean this was this was the whole Confusion at least that I had with Hulu's original model where it was like, okay I could pay to not have ads or I could Still pay less to have some ads But I got used to it pretty quick and I think yeah, you know, all of these, you know all a cart offerings They're all trying to figure out. Okay. Well, if somebody doesn't want to pay seven dollars a month or whatever, you know That monthly fee is how can we pepper in ads that? You know makes people not get you know upset and and and leave but but they can deal with Yeah The reaction I always see in fact the reaction that we got from several of you when I posted on Twitter that we were gonna talk About this was I don't pay if there's ads It seems like a lot of there's some people are like I'm never gonna watch anything with ads I don't think there's as many people who actually do that as there are people who say they do that But there's definitely a larger number of people who are like I'll pay if I if I can get it ad free or I'll watch it free with ads because it's free and I understand that I'm I'm the product now. I get it But paying and also getting ads really rubs people the wrong way So that said all of you who are rubbed the wrong way by that I'm sorry, but you're outnumbered Because look at the number of platforms who are making a business out of saying it's ten dollars a month without ads or Maybe six ninety nine with ads There's a lot of people who may on principle agree with you but say yeah, but I really need that extra three bucks, you know I'll watch the ads. That's fine Is if I could still get the content There's still a lot of people who are just new To you know to getting streaming services. They're coming from cable. You were paying for cable and you were getting ads So paying for I'm already getting ads I might as well go ahead and just pay for this and pay less and still get the ads You know, it's really not changing anything for me except I might be paying a little bit less per month So I get up in arms about this we all get up in arms about this But this is what everyone is going to do they're going to make more money by doing this so they're going to do this You know, it's funny in the last few months I was at my mom's house and we were watching something on an account that I had logged into and she was like where are the commercials And I was like there aren't any mom That's the beauty of this and it was like wow cool, you know high five But at the same time, I still actually sometimes welcome those changes, you know, like, okay I've 30 seconds to two minutes maybe to like, you know, use the restroom microwave my burrito whatever so I think you know, they're Exactly there there are there are kind of like these built-in Breaks that a lot of us are used to even though it's kind of cool to say Oh, we don't have to have them anymore, but we're used to them Yeah, yeah, I think so and I think a lot of people who may have lived a few, you know Cutting edge they got ahead of the game used to Netflix which has no ad tier, right? Everything is paid and it's also more expensive, you know They could they could offer a lower-priced tier with ads if they wanted but they've said they will never do that Hence it is more expensive I think those people Come back to ads and it's more shocking than somebody who's coming straight from cable into streaming services and going Oh, okay, so there's a few ads. I'm used to that Because usually there's fewer ads in the streaming services than there were on cable Yeah, two minutes 20 seconds to get on will of fortune. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I know, right? Whatever I have to watch like a broadcast TV. I'm stunned feather in your cap people feather in your cap The one thing so so there's the holdouts like Netflix and stars and a few others that are like still not offering with ads You either you pay for it or you know, that's the way we offer it I have yet to see someone who makes you pay and you get ads and there's that's it There's no there's no free tier with ads and then pay with like like there's always a pay to get rid of the ads That is so far been the case knock on wood. We'll see This is interesting in the standards arena of the web Apple Google Microsoft and Mozilla are working together on something called interop 2022 which you can kind of guess from the name means to improve interoperability They they are hoping to quote improve the experience of developing for the web in 15 key areas those areas are all related to how things appear not necessarily the underpinnings So you're talking about cascade layers color spaces CSS color functions new viewport units scrolling if you know what those are those are all interface appearance elements The ultimate aim is to solve compatibility issues across safari chrome edge Which is also chrome and firefox so web kit chrome and gecko the three main engines out there They all follow web standards. It's not like they're not standards compliant But sometimes those standards have wiggle room for different implementations Sometimes the standards have gaps and those can lead to problems in the display They hope the end result is that web apps will look and work the same no matter which browser you're using They have some work to do interop 22 zone test dashboard Measures these 15 areas firefox gets a score of 69 out of 100 chrome and edge 61 because they're same engine and safari 50 but Experimental and preview releases of these browsers already show improvement into the 70s. So they're making progress If you're like was it there's something else like that's there was something last year called the compact 2021 effort that made some progress on five very specific issues But interop is more wide-reaching and compact did not include apple So this is a big one because it's got all the major engines on board as well as software consultants bocu and egalia They are also part of interop 2022 so the idea here is there would be fewer of those situations where you're like This doesn't work in Firefox. So I have to launch chrome or vice versa or safari or whatever It's been a while since I you know fussed around with anything CSS or otherwise But is there any takeaway from all the stuff that Apple Google Microsoft and Mozilla are working on that that we would say cool awesome better browser I Think it's more like cool. Awesome. I don't have to think about which browser like it I could just get this web app to work It's not like because there's so many things that even you and I like we're gonna be switching to using stream yard You know for streaming and it doesn't work as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome or vice versa depending on someone's thing I'm not sure if that that seems like it's more of a a non interface issue So I don't know if it would be solved by this, but there are a lot of other things They're like, oh, yeah, this kind of breaks in safari. I should probably use Firefox for that, right? Getting rid of that stuff. Yeah, and I used to do a fair amount a fair amount of you know Front-end web development and this is like a big thing because you literally I've got to write this for edge I've got to write this for Firefox. I've got to write this for You know, you know for Chrome. So if we get to where everybody's if everybody's like it 80 It's just gonna create a lot less work and you may even get better websites You're gonna get you know more functionality just because you can develop at once and it works for everybody Yeah Sort of like matter for smart home devices, but for browsers I mean, it's probably not as comprehensive matter really wants to like make it Just likening it to something like everybody plays nicer with each other It's it is that it is it is like all the biggies are cooperating. So yeah, yeah, it's the rising tide boats everybody's lifted well, you've heard of Mozilla and Apple and Chrome, but you may not have heard of pop-chew and you wouldn't be alone New York based pop-chew has gathered a list of Infrastructure and restaurant partnership ingredients so that independent creators can build also launch and grow their own local digitally native food brands Nationally within weeks if you're saying what in the heck does this mean allow me to explain if it sounds like a lot of buzzwords it is but Creators decide the type of food that they want to sell so maybe I say mac and cheese I want mac and cheese all mac and cheese But I need all the ingredients to be able to scale this and to sell this to all the people who want to buy my mac and cheese Pop-chew then looks into restaurants unused capacity and then helps creators optimize it to create another Revenue stream all of the orders flow through the company and it splits the proceeds between the creators and the restaurant So middle man of sorts pop-chew has partnerships with more than 100 restaurants already and growing to a pop-chew's current brands are Bitcoin pizza with cryptocurrency Enthusiast and investor at Anthony pomp Pamp liano also one of my favorite names for a restaurant ever wing season SCN in partnership with Zs who is a popular youtuber available through third-party apps or also the pop-chew website Co-founder of pop-chew Ruchar Parikh told TechCrunch quote We realize that the way that we are eating is evolving. It's turning into content You see food everywhere on Instagram and TikTok and we felt the future of food could be Creators, however, it's hard for creators to get into food unless there are make mega celebrity working with a food company Hold on. I just need to pull out my BS machete and I'm gonna do a little little Little cutting through here. I think there might be an idea inside of all of this somewhere Okay, I Yeah Yeah, cuz there's a lot of like as soon as you say Bitcoin pizza I saw like half the audience shut their ears off But but forget that forget, you know What was is it wing season choosing our food or turning our food into content Season yeah, I love wing season. I'm into that but imagine What Zazzle did for t-shirts and merchandise this could do for food, right? So right now it's very influencer oriented and very buzzword oriented But what if you as as somebody with maybe a small podcast or YouTube channel or Instagram following could be like I always talk about tacos. We talk about tacos all the time on good day Internet What if we could have DT and S branded tacos and all we had to do was go to popchew and say hey I want to sell tacos and they they set it up for you They find the restaurant that makes the tacos and all of that and then suddenly people can buy through your website through your Social networking account the food that you're talking about, you know a lot of this as as much as I I I'm really into the Business model here. I just don't know what the market is beyond novelty This is an idea and I'm always up for new ideas I don't know if this is going to be the thing though The the thing that immediately jumped to mind for me on this is that not so much Prepared food, but maybe more like a hello fresh type model to where you're able to get excess inventory You kind of put your logo on it You're talking about the meals that you would make if you're one of these creators It talks about cooking and all that kind of stuff So you're sending someone a box of food that they can actually prepare for themselves seems like that may have a little more You know a teeth to it, but We'll see like I said it will be interesting and I've stopped second guessing what creators can do on the internet because it's like it's like wow That's a business. That's amazing. I So I I think the the the prepared food is an interesting spin on this I'm I don't want to discount that but the or the the box food, you know, the the hello fresh style That's interesting. I think that could be part of this too But I wouldn't discount the idea that like oh, I I followed this woman who talks about Her noodles all the time and the noodles she loves and then she is using pop chew to be like you can get the noodles Delivered to me. What's unclear to me is how you do quality control Roger brought this up When we were talking about it with him He's like, how do you make sure that this food is good that it's consistent that it's you know done by the same Restaurant not 15 different and everybody gets a different Bitcoin pizza, which I guess could be accurate You know and that doesn't sound like that's part of this model at least not right now You can't you can't tell from their website I think you have to sit down and get pitched by one of them to find out those kind of details But but yeah, I I I can't tell if pop you might be 12 seconds It might be vine. It might be tiktok. I you know along that line, right? It could be way too early. It might be just a little too early or it might be the thing But I think there's an idea here that if it's not popped you that somebody's gonna be able to make work Because we have the confluence of dark kitchens. We have everybody getting used to food delivery Like those are the pieces that are coming together here All right, folks if you would like to order DTNS tacos, let us know in our discord Which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com Alright, let's check in on a couple of ways that the war in Ukraine is affecting the technology world directly We're gonna check in on the chip shortage and internet operations interesting demands requests reactions going on there We mentioned last week that Russia generates 90% of the neon that is used in chip lithography That's the way you make chips and that a plant in Odessa, Ukraine does most of the refining of that Which you have to refining if we find it for it to be used So about 50 to 60 percent depending on who you ask of the world's neon comes out of Ukraine Ukraine also supplies 40% of the gas krypton make your Superman joke Okay, krypton which is also used in semiconductor production There's also a threat to the supply of xenon because of this war now last week the semiconductor industry Association said it was not concerned because the industry has a diverse set of suppliers of key materials and gases But remember the toilet paper phenomenon you can have plenty of something and Still run out of it if all your customers start to buy more than they usually would Because they're afraid it will run out. It's that self-fulfilling prophecy that happened with toilet paper It happened with chips and it might be happening to these gases Ars Technica reports that the president of the trade publication gas review Yoshiki Koizumi said quote the supply of neon xenon and krypton is definitely getting tighter Because chip makers and trading houses are making more orders in expectation that in the future They won't be able to get as much as they want There's also a scramble to find other suppliers. There are many other suppliers around the world. There's a plant in Texas There's some in Europe. There's many in China But switching suppliers sometimes involves compliance That takes you a while and product certification You want to make sure that new supplier is giving you the stuff that is good as the stuff that you got before that It's properly refined that it works in the meantime chip makers may face some material shortages Which will reduce yields and lengthen the existing chip shortage issues and Don't expect the reduction of chip sales to Russia to make up the gap You may be like wait, but aren't we stopping selling chips? You just said Intel and AMD, right? They confirm they're not doing that as we previously mentioned Russia accounts for about 0.1% of the world's semiconductors per year a Significant portion of those are analog semiconductors used in industrial equipment things like motor controls Germany's Infineon has been the largest exporter in dollar amount of chips to Russia But that business makes up less than zero point zero one percent of Infineon's revenue still every little bit of extra capacity is gonna help right I Could not be more surprised that the market share is that low point one percent? Yeah It's Russia. We're not talking about the chips that are already in something We're talking about sending loose chips to Russia to be fabricated into something else. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I would have thought it would have been a little more than that Yeah, it's not a lot. It's not a lot. So Now as we track at the top of each show these days lots of individual companies and social media news platforms have decided not to sell or Distributed in Russia because of the war we talked about cogent even going so far as to just stop providing transit and internet service To any Russian company But there have also been calls to take even more extreme action and remove Russia from the Internet Ukraine asked I can to revoke Russia's top-level domains including dot are you and asked to ripe the people who manage IP addresses For Europe to revoke IP addresses delegated to Russia Despite the fact that neither organization could just push a button and do that in either case Both organizations declined to even entertain the notion The EFF lays out several reasons why these sorts of actions should not be taken It sets a bad precedent if you do it now for one reason then other reasons become more plausible It could compromise security and privacy because have how it would alter altered the existing system It would change tables and stuff it would deprive people in The affected country the majority of whom have no responsibility for this war from being able to access information and you may say Yeah, but it's all disinformation, but it's not it's not all Disinformation in fact shutting down internet access is what governments often do to control a populace because they're not afraid of the disinformation They're afraid of the good information that does exist and it undermines Trust in the network the internet works because of a neutral multi-stakeholder approach I can ripe and the rest are concerned with making sure bits move securely from place to place And that's it Countries can decide if they want to put up a great firewall and all that other stuff companies can decide who they want to transit with and who they want to Peer with if you have these neutral organizations cross that line According to the EFF and I think this is well said it undermines the trust upon which the internet is founded Yeah Good points. Um just to to to address one of the points that it sets a bad precedent I definitely agree with that but The whole idea of like well if you do it for you know rushing Ukraine then who's to say that you won't do it for you know Some other conflict in the future those conflicts don't exist yet. Those conflicts might have You know people on both both sides or all sides might have very different views about this So yeah, the precedent thing is I mean that's something that we think about all the time when it comes to to legal Situations, but I'm you know, I'm not sure that this sets a bad precedent. I think Laying down the law is is important here But but it I think there are really good points about how existing systems work in the future I look at this and I say, you know as a company as a country You can determine whether or not you want your bits to cross over into Russia. You can actually make that decision I don't know that the pipes need to be Shut down so that you don't even have the opportunity to make that decision for yourself So I get it but when I just think about, you know, how the internet came to be Why it was designed the way that it was designed to be You know, it's supposed to be this big giant network that you can't just take down So if we're now doing that because we don't like what's happening there I do see that as a slippery slope and I want to be careful how I say this I am not in support of what russia is doing in ukraine at all But there are a lot of people in russia who will be adversely affected by this and you know It's no fault of theirs. Is there a government that is doing these things But we would really be, you know, you know squashing, you know, their opportunity to get information to send out stuff to receive stuff So I just don't know that that's necessarily the way to go There is a role for referees umpires line judges that you want to be neutral. It's important to have that And that's what I can and right and organizations like them are and if you ask the referee to start playing for your team That changes the game quite a bit. Sorry for the sports analogy, but it just seems to be apt Uh, well author brandon sanderson who you might not know has a new record pretty cool One in fact he can claim the most successful kickstarter crowdfunded project of all time surpassing the 20,000,338,986 dollar milestone Previously set by the pebble time back in 2015 I remember that. Yep. Yep. Yep. Sanderson's project includes four new novels that he wrote during the pandemic He didn't tell anybody about them though after he announced the project on tuesday march 1st Just a few days ago. He broke Kickstarter's funding record by early friday morning march 4th Now he might say okay. Well people are interested. Here's how interested they were sanderson's original goal was to raise $1 million in 30 days and the new york times reports that he hit that number in About 35 minutes. Wow The campaign has more than 82,000 backers with 27 days yet to raise additional contributions People want to read these books Uh as a host of the sorden laser podcast at book club. I am not surprised brandon sanderson fans are very loyal very enthusiastic And brandon sanderson has proved that he can he can write a novel In fact, he was the person entrusted to finish the wheel of time series when robert jordan died before it was finished jordan Jordan dubbed him the successor and and he very capably pulled it off. So Uh, you know as much as I loved the pebble time being the the record holder here I I think brandon sanderson might be a worthy successor Yeah, I uh, I I had to look up the pebble time to be like, what were we all so excited about back in the day? But yeah, just goes to show you give give us six to seven years and all of a sudden, you know, people are like Lots of smart watches out there. How about some books? And now I feel like I have to clarify when I pulled out the bs machete earlier It was not for brandon sanderson different b Different one Well, listen, thanks to everybody who supports our show Uh, because of you we find out about all sorts of stories that make it into the show Extra special thanks to high tech oaky high tech oaky. You're one of our top lifetime supporters for dtns We thank you for all the years of support Yay Love and oaky love a high tech person even more even more of a high tech oaky Yeah, beloved beloved member of the fam also beloved is rob dunwood. Thanks for being with us today rob Let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do It is always a pleasure to be on dtns And uh, folks can find out more about me by just looking up at rob dunwood on all the things I'm everywhere and check out my other podcast smr podcast.com and the tech john. That is the tech jawn dot com Well, we are live on this show monday through friday for 30 p.m Eastern 21 30 utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live and do join us live if you can We're going to be back monday to talk about the technology used to research and organize material for a politics podcast with jennifer briney Have a great weekend everyone This week's episodes of daily tech news show were created by the following people host producer and writer tom merit host producer and writer sarah lane Executive producer and booker roger chang producer writer and host rich straffolino video producer and twitch producer joe coots Associate producer anthony lambs spanish language host writer and producer dan compos news host writer and producer jenn cutter science correspondent dr. Nikki ackerman's social media producer and moderator zoe deadarding our mods beatmaster w scottis one bio cow captain gibber jack shit steve guardorama paul reese matthew j stevens and jd galloway modern video hosting by dan christensen video feed by shan wey music and art provided by martin bell dan looters mistoffa a a cast and len peralta live art performed by len peralta a cast ad support from trace gainer patreon support from dylan harari contributors for this week's shows included lamar wilson scott johnson chris ashley and rob dunwood And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this brover