 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Dustin Campbell, Tim Deputy and Brandon Brooks. Coming up on DTNS, Europe wants to mandate five years of security updates for phones, microbe-grown proteins could drastically cut land use, and why companies insist on making a new model of phone every year. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 6th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the Upper West Side, I'm Ayaz Akhtar. And on the show's producer, Roger Jain. Oh my goodness, we have moved on up to the Upper West Side in Ayaz's case. That's great. He was always there. Yeah. And to a lovely new week of Tech News, thanks for letting us enjoy our U.S. holiday yesterday. I think it was a holiday in Canada too. One of those rare times where they overlap. They like to offset them by a few days sometimes. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced an event will take place on Thursday, October 6th at 10 a.m. Eastern to announce the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, the Pixel Watch, and new Nest smart home devices. Google says all devices will be shoppable the day of the announcement, which we assume means you'll be able to buy them on that day. You can also stream the event online. Wouldn't be awful if they're like shoppable, but you cannot, you can't buy them. You just have to think about it. Yeah. The U.S. Department of Commerce announced more details on how it's going to spend some of that money it allocated as part of the CHIPS Act. The law allocates a total of $280 billion, but as we talked about when it came out, the majority of that is meant for research and development. Most people, however, have heard about the $50 billion that is meant specifically for semiconductor manufacturing. About $28 billion of that is going to be used for grants, loans, or loan guarantees, quote, to establish domestic production of leading-edge logic and memory chips. So that's to get fabs going. About $10 billion is going to be awarded to increase production. They specifically called out Defense Automotive, ICT, which is Internet Technology, or Information Technology, and Medical Sectors. And then $11 billion will still go near-term manufacturing research and development, ways to make production lines better. If you're going to apply for this for your company, application guidance will be released by early February. Ireland's Data Protection Commission, or DPC, find meta 405 million euros, approximately 402 million dollars, for breaking GDPR rules when handling teenagers' Instagram data. Instagram let users 13 through 17 years of age set up business accounts which made user contact information publicly available. Instagram also made some user profiles public by default, and some of them were young. The DPC previously fined meta 225 million euros, about 265 million at the time, of the fine for WhatsApp, not properly notifying EU citizens about how data was collected and also used. Meta says the settings in question were changed years ago, and it may appeal the ruling. We've got a zero-day-in-the-wild alert here, folks. As I mentioned, Google has released Chrome 105.0.5195.102, basically new version of Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux in the stable desktop channel. It is going to patch, if you haven't gotten it already, a single high-severity security flaw caused by insufficient data validation in Mojo, which is a collection of runtime libraries that let messages pass across arbitrary inter- and intra-process boundaries. Basically, it's a zero-day exploit that was discovered by an anonymous security researcher and is believed to be exploited in the wild. Google acknowledged the exploit in a security advisory published on Friday, says that the patch should reach the entire user base within a matter of days or weeks, but in a hint about how serious they're taking this, the fact that it's in the wild, Google says it's not going to publish technical details until a majority of users are updated with the fix. So go update your Chrome now. Signal has hired former Google manager and co-founder of NYU's AI Now Institute, Meredith Whitaker, as its new president. Whitaker was one of the organizers of a mass walkout at Google back in 2018 in protest of the company's handling of sexual harassment allegations against top executives. She was also known at Google for her advocacy for ethical AI. Whitaker joined the FTC as a senior advisor on AI in November of 2021. Signal founder Moxie Marlin Spike stepped down as CEO earlier this year. Yeah, Marlin Spike's still with Signal, just not going to run it. Going to hand that over to Whitaker. That'll be interesting to watch. Alright, let's talk a little more about these EU rules. Let's do it. So Apple is often held up as a good, if not best example of long term support on a phone with iOS updates continuing to arrive for six or more years after the launch of any given model. Hardware support offered for seven years after the sale. Right now, iOS 15 works all the way back to the iPhone 6s, just shy of seven years old, but the 6s won't get iOS 16 when the new OS comes out this month. On the Android side, though, Google is the only one usually giving, you know, given any credit while other manufacturers are generally criticized for stopping support too early. You know, you buy a phone and then three years later, what are you going to do about it? Google recently extended its support to three years for OS updates and five years for security updates. Samsung usually offers four years of OS updates and five years of security patches, but that doesn't apply to some of its more affordable devices, only some flagship models. Europe would like to change that, isn't that right, Ayas? That is correct. The European Commission has published a draft regulation that replaced minimum support times on phones in order to discourage waste. In other words, manufacturers need to support phones longer so consumers aren't tempted to trash them and buy a new one. The regulation is looking to require three years of functionality updates, which means OS updates and five years of security updates. And updates would have to be pushed within four months of them being made available. Brand-wise, this is specifically for Android and, oh, sorry, Android or iOS. It would also require manufacturers to make professional repairs available for at least five years from the phone's first sale date. In addition, users should have access to displays, SIM and memory trays, microphones, ports and hinges. Repair instruction manuals would need to be made available for at least seven years after the last day of marketing the devices. The draft regulation also requires batteries to retain 83% of capacity after 500 charge cycles and 80% after, I think, a thousand cycles. I've got to double check that number. Alternatively, the manufacturer could make the battery easily replaceable instead. Right now, Apple claims 80% capacity after 500 charge cycles. Yeah, so the EC will take feedback on this proposal until September 28th with the goal of adopting final regulation by the end of this year. Probably won't go into effect until a year after it's adopted. This isn't going to happen overnight, but they're taking feedback. Manufacturers point out that a side effect of these regulations might cause them to stop selling older phones and also spare parts and therefore increase waste. Sometimes the cost of adapting older processors and other hardware to work with newer operating systems is prohibitive or even impossible. Xiaomi pointed out that OS support is often handled by telcos and the manufacturers don't have control over those rollouts at all. Yeah, Andrew Heaton has a saying that you cannot legislate intentions or outcomes. You can only legislate incentives. And I think Europe thinks they're legislating an incentive here. You need to get your support house in order or we're not going to let you sell the phone. But I wonder if they're legislating an outcome because I don't think Apple does the longer support because they're nicer or because they like you better. I think Apple does longer support because they own the whole stack and so they can. It's way easier to continue to develop the proper drivers and develop your operating system to work with older hardware if you own the hardware and the software like Apple does. What happens with Android is you not only have different makers of the drivers for the individual components like Qualcomm, like MediaTek, and then a different maker of the operating system, Google and the open source Android project, but often you get the carriers involved as well who are saying, well, we want to push out the update. That's what Xiaomi was referring to. So that's why you hear the manufacturer is saying, well, we might just not make lower priced phones then because it is way too complicated in this Android ecosystem to guarantee that we can push an update to them. And if the law says we can't sell them, well, then we'll just get rid of them. We trash them. Yeah. I think some of this can be seen as like, well, Apple cares about consumers more. What a goodwill thing that Apple is providing service for a longer period of time in a variety of ways. But like you mentioned, Tom, Apple works differently than a lot of these manufacturers. The fact that a variety of companies making Android phones say, okay, well, I mean, there's like four of us companies working together and we're just kind of trying to do our best. And actually, this might increase waste is not a bad argument necessarily. I think it probably varies from company to company, depending on the warehouses that they're working with. But yeah, it is an Apple and orange situation. I get it? Yeah, yeah, I do. That's good. Thank you. Yeah, I'm thinking that if this is actually going to go through and let's say it goes in its draft form and nothing changes, it seems interesting that one of the exceptions for this was for really high security devices, they wouldn't have to have these updates. So in theory, if you pass a certain set of regulation, if you pass a certain set of tests, your device doesn't have to be guided by this. And it also included or excluded, I should say, devices with flexible displays that unfurl or fold. So Samsung devices that fold like the fold for the flip wouldn't be set to this. So that's kind of an interesting little wrinkle with this. But I would also I'm really curious if anyone's got the guts to go. All right, look, I can't make my batteries discharge any slower. We're going to put an actual removable back back on a device and you can pop in and out of battery. That seems like a step backwards in technological terms because like your phones get fatter and things are different that way. But for consumers, it's a total win. So I want to see what other things would change when it comes to the manufacturing of phones, whether they would kill off, whether big manufacturers kill off their smaller budget lines to make sure that their top of the line devices can be sold in the European Union without running into any issues. Yeah, I'm not saying they couldn't do better at providing longer term support, but I'm saying it is not as easy as it looks. There are some real world impediments beyond just wanting to or not. Because don't get me wrong. I don't think Apple has any lack of incentive to sell you a new phone every year if it can, but it still offers the longer term support. So I don't think it's as simple as, well, they don't offer as long a support because they want to sell more phones. I think there's more to it than that. Okay, so I guess we should be talking about fermentation now because that's what I want to talk about. Just go right into it, man. All right. You don't have to make any excuses if you want to talk about fermentation. No dang excuses. All right. Great kefir every morning. I love kimchi. Let's hear it. All right, let's go. You probably eat something that's currently fermented like Tom does. There's beer, there's kimchi, there's sauerkraut, canned bread, cheese, coffee, and a lot of things we consume are fermented. TechCrunch is reporting on a Finnish company called Solar Foods, which is harnessing fermentation to create a protein as an alternative to animal proteins. They call it solene. Solene, not S-O-L-E-A-M, but S-O-L-E-I-N like protein. It's a single cell protein harvested from microbes that oxidize hydrogen. So you don't need much to make it. They just sort of stumbled across this microbe. You mix the microbes with some CO2, plenty of that around, a little bit of water, a little bit of electricity, and poof, they make protein. Its byproduct is also water with some bits of solene left in it that you don't harvest. And the company thinks it can recycle that to make the process a closed loop so that the only thing you'd have to be adding would be the electricity. You don't need to use other food to feed these microbes either, just the air and water is all they need. So it doesn't need as much area or even as much energy as most foods. Even alternatives like Beyond Meat rely on plants, like peas, and you have to use land to make plants. It's less land than you use to make meat, but it's still using a fair amount of land to grow, and this wouldn't need a whole lot of area. Solene in itself is 65% protein. It contains a blend of vitamins and amino acids that are somewhere between dried meat and dried soy according to TechCrunch. It ends up as a yellow powder, not in taste by the way, but in nutritional makeup. It ends up as a yellow powder that would then be used as an ingredient. Solar Foods told TechCrunch it has a mild taste, which is good if you want to include it as an ingredient and not have to cover up a strong flavor. Yeah, mild would be better than strongly pungent. It could be used in other food products like meat substitutes made by Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods. Solar Foods also believes it could be used to feed cell cultures in lab-grown meat, and because solene potentially can be produced in a closed loop, it might be useful for space travel as well. Now the one hurdle to reaching scale will be energy, especially given the high cost of energy in Europe right now. For now, Solar Foods will create a demo facility powered by a single wind turbine, which is set to go online in 2023. Full-size factories would use 100 times that amount of energy. The company hopes to have the first product containing solene on the market by the end of next year. It has applied for approval in Europe, the US, and multiple markets in Asia. I cannot wait to taste how this mild taste tastes. Because that's the whole thing, right? There have been so many alternatives, not just protein, but whether it's a sugar alternative or a meat alternative. And there are so many examples of companies getting pretty close here and for reasons that are really beneficial to the planet in lots of ways. And people go, hmm, it doesn't taste right. I don't want this. And it doesn't go anywhere. This May, and I mean, we all need protein. I don't know how much protein y'all are eating all day, but I have to think about it every day to make sure that I get enough of my own. This would be especially something I could maybe sprinkle on something else. Sounds pretty great. Yeah, I don't think the idea is to sell you solene, although I guess they could to sprinkle on your breakfast cereal. Solene-powered whatever. They want to sell it to people who make foods, especially vegan foods, right? So that you can have like a totally, like no animal was harmed in the making of this protein that is just as good as other proteins. And they're even saying like, we'd love to sell this to your Beyond Meets of the World. They could add it to the Beyond Meat and, you know, it would give it a true protein texture. It's got a lot of beta-carotene, and they say it's got a faint taste of carrot, though. And that kind of stuff can show up if you're like expecting chicken nuggets and you get carrot nuggets instead. I'm like, as a carrot fan, I'm like, faint taste of carrot sounds okay, but that's probably a sweet something, right? Because carrots are pretty sweet, especially once they, you know, get cooked. So yeah, the eye of the taste bud, I suppose, in situations like this, but... Taste is in the bud of the tongue? Something? But, you know, as somebody who... I will go meet alternative wherever I can. I don't need that much meat as it is. But, you know, if I could have a Tofurky Kielbasa that tastes better than the Tofurky Kielbases that are on the market right now, that's a particular brand for anybody not familiar, I'm thrilled to do it, especially if, you know, at the end of the meal, I feel like, wow, I got quite a bit more protein than I thought I would get, and maybe a hint of carrot was all I needed. I mean, to me, the taste part does matter a lot. If you're talking about carrots, I know that you can buy chicken nuggets for kids that have vegetables in them already, but the kids aren't noticing the vegetables because it's such a small amount in there and the taste is overpowered by the breading and everything else that goes in there. If this can be added to all kinds of foods like breads, bagels, all the carb-rich stuff, because I know I've gotten a ton of those... Every time I'm on Instagram, it's like, would you like this 25-gram protein in this bagel? And like, that can't possibly taste right. There's no way it's going to feel right in the mouth. So if this product can be used in a way to add protein to pretty much anything without having to require this heavy chocolate taste, that's why a lot of protein bars are really, really heavily chocolate because that hides a lot of stuff, I think that'd be a huge win for people who just want to get more protein in general, and if they just want to go away from using up animal products, and theoretically, if this is closed loop, if the energy's efficiency goes up, you're not really wasting as much water as would be necessary for lab, actually, meat or harvesting beans even, I guess. Yeah. And if you can power it off solar, like you said, Ayaz, this could be used in space to create food on a long-term space trip. So lots of great possibilities for this if it pans out. If you have a thought about something you would like to put Solene on, send us an email. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. On Wednesday, it'll be Apple's annual autumn announcement, which rightly or wrongly does tend to attract the most attention from consumers and certainly the media. The iPhone just passed 50% market share in the US, so it's easy to understand why the announcement gets so much attention, particularly now. But why does Apple announce a new iPhone every year? You know, if your iPhone is good, you don't need a new iPhone every year, right? For that matter, why does Google announce a new pixel every year? Why does Samsung announce a new Galaxy phone every year? CNET's Abraah Al-Hidi addressed that question in an article on Video Tuesday. You should definitely take a look at this. It's good stuff. But let's go through the pros and cons of the annual update cycle that he addressed. Here's what doesn't make sense to some folks. If you're holding onto a phone for a lot longer because it works. It's great. Nothing wrong with it. Built well. Part of the reason for that is because upgrades are incremental. I have an iPhone that I bought a few months ago because I had to. And I'm not in the market for an iPhone this September. Very excited about it, but I'm not going to buy one because they're too expensive. The flagship phones, which have the most compelling of what new features are available, are very expensive. So you don't need a new phone all that often these days. So why pay a lot for a small change? Why does it make sense, Tom? Yeah. So why do they do it then? Because you laid out a very compelling case of why it doesn't make sense to buy a new phone. So why make a new phone every year? Here's why it makes sense for the companies to keep to that annual cycle. CNET says there are 40 million upgrades in the last four quarters in the U.S. and 105 million phone sales, this according to recon analytics. Essentially, the market is there. You may not be upgrading this year, but somebody is. Millions of somebodies are. Part of the reason for that is the longer you hold on to your phone, the more compelling the upgrade looks. You know, yearly upgrades make the new phone in the store always feel cutting edge, at least compared to your two or three-year-old phone. This is why car manufacturers update their car models every year. And at the two-year mark or more, the cumulative upgrades just look more compelling. There's also the simple matter of battery life. If you can't swap out the battery yourself, a new phone may just seem easier and more tempting because of those features than paying to have the battery replaced or doing it yourself. And of course there's also those annual upgrade plans that get a lot of people on this automatically. You subscribe so that you always have the latest and greatest, and therefore it's automatic. You're getting a new phone every year because that's the plan you signed up for. Having a new phone every year makes those plans feel worthwhile and it keeps those monthly revenues flowing to the company. So, how do you decide whether to upgrade or not? When does it get to the point these days for you where you say, you know what, I need that new phone. Is it because it's new and shiny and they announced a new thing? Is it because of the battery life? Send us your method for determining that to feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We'll read a couple of the most interesting ones that you make that call. For me it's pretty much use case scenarios. Like when my kid was born, I wanted to make sure I had a really good camera on my phone and then I wanted to make sure that all my photos were being uploaded really fast. So if the radios changed, maybe I would get a new phone from 3G to LTE. If I wanted to write down stuff on a device that became something that I really needed to do a lot more of. I ended up using a Galaxy Note for that. I had to replace the Note because it fell to its untimely death and forced me to get another Note and then Samsung killed the Note. So usually it's use cases for me. I'm not necessarily dragged by technology with it but if there's newer and faster wireless speeds that might get me to change up things but I don't find the need to change a phone as much as I used to because these days it seems like the two-year-old phone is still really, really good. Yeah, it's, you know, just using Apple as the example here I feel like somebody who's got a three-year-old or more phone might be like, you know, this is my year, 2022, I'm getting that new iPhone. For me, earlier this year I had to get the iPhone that was released in 2021 because my iPhone was horrifically disfigured already and then got water damage and it was never going to come back to life. It had been a long time coming. I would have liked to have waited until knowing what was going on this week to, you know, maybe stretch it out a little bit more but I had already been stretching it out for a few years. So I was kind of one of those people who was like, I got to do it. So I think that there are plenty of those people because it all depends on the cycle of when you had your last phone. If you have enough people who just want to stay in the iPhone ecosystem, you're going to get that a huge amount of people that are going to buy whatever phone is because people have been waiting for that. If you, for whatever reason I don't know, have a huge user base of people who just bought your phone last year, well then that's going to be harder for you to sell more phones. Yeah, for me it's usually because I feel like the phone is slowing down. It's just not able to handle things. A phone will be supported certainly Apple's phones will be supported for longer than it's very fast. And I like my phone to be very responsive. I have found that at about three years is when my phone starts to feel too sluggish for me. Not too sluggish to use but too sluggish for me to be satisfied and then it's worth trading it in, selling it, whatever and getting something new. Android phones I find I get to the end of service upgrades. I get to the end of software support and that's when I turn them in because for some reason they don't feel as sluggish to me. So for me it's that I might do an upgrade to my iPhone after two years this time because I want to get a bigger screen. I find myself using it for more media and the last time I got the regular not the the max and I might want to just go to a max. I've been thinking about going to a max but I was like let me wait until they come out with a new one not go to the max of the same one I've got. So I might go a little earlier because of that which would be me wanting a feature and then deciding to get whatever's new I also want to feature even though that feature already existed. Well let's move on to text to imaging tools because they're all the rage. Indian architect and computational designer Manas Bhatia has published a conceptual product called AI versus future cities using the text to imaging tool Mid Journey which we've talked about on the show before Mid Journey, Dolly there are a few of them. Text prompts like futuristic towers utopian technology, symbiotic and bioluminescent material created a series of images that Mid Journey created using these prompts and then Bhatia used as a basis for further prompts in fact he said up to 100 times per project at times then he ran those images through Photoshop for a final result of his vision which included residences built into trees or buildings themselves made from living material. He says he was inspired for the tree residences by a 380 foot tall redwood tree in California quite well known Hyperion which is thought to be the world's tallest living tree. Now Bhatia is no stranger to architecture he works at the architecture firm Ant Studio which is based in New Delhi which specializes in retrofitting buildings with new facades to maximize things like natural ventilation, energy consumption reduction, those sorts of things. Now we'll have some that article in our show notes so you can see some of the the images they do look like crazy urban tree houses but if you're an architect and you're saying you know what I need some inspiration this is going to be very interesting in the next few years. Yeah it's another good example of using these things as a tool right this is a little bit of a press release for Ant Studio honestly because it's just concept models of buildings that they used mid journey to help them make but I think it is interesting to show that no we're not seeing the algorithm replace a person we're seeing the person use mid journey as a tool to make their images more interesting. And the tool could probably spread out something that makes no sense it's refined by people so let's go here's the actual mechanical things we know we need to worry about here's some code we need to worry about at least with the building codes and make sure to actually be these massive tree houses. I mean this kind of reminds this seems like as a tool it would be what a musician would do in the 60s with I guess LSD this is about the same you just have to type in stuff into an AI. Mid journey the much safer LSD of the modern artist LSD but with computer. Yeah and less side effects. Alright let's check out the mailbag. We got a good one from Victor this is in response to our conversation with Terence Gaines on Friday's show about the idea of avatars for YouTube videos and you know where where that might be taking things Victor wrote I heard Terence's position about allowing kids to use avatars for their YouTube videos I know it may be tricky some years ago my daughter wanted to share her art on Instagram I was concerned and I forbid her from using her name or post pictures or videos with metadata that could allow a person to identify her or our home. Fast forward a few years and she just published at age 20 her first short film very good product in my opinion but it was linked to that handle now the challenge is how to get the name recognition without alienating her historical followers tricky things we have to deal with to protect our kids or our former kids or our adults and there may be unintended consequences Victor wrote I get you Terence. I forwarded this to Terence and Terence responded to Victor it was like yep yep yeah right there with you also got an email from Allison Sheridan who heard us talking about the guy who several folks actually who made money by writing songs with names kids will yell at echoes Allison said I only had a home pod nearby so I said let's go to Siri play poop poop poop poop song and she said playing poop in space with Brian brushwood and Justin Robert Young from the alls well night attack album on Apple music Allison says it is repeatable across all my devices worked on my iPad too so it's good to know that our regular Thursday contributor Justin Robert Young and his comedy partner Brian brushwood are preferred on Apple devices when you say play poop songs a combo made in heaven and Siri I love it you know I as you're a dad but you're also a very busy man let folks know where they can keep up with what is up with you these days as I'm aging I'm getting older I'm still nerdy or some still doing stuff with this old nerd I am working on so many projects at this house and it's driving me bonkers that's why there's no videos up yet but they're coming so go to this on nerd.com you'll get everything you need to know about making your house the most tech forward as possible when you've got a little time because you might be worried about whether your kids information is going to be online or not because I'm also currently dealing with that problem well it's always good to have you feels like old times love being here yeah well we love having you we also love new bosses and we have a new boss we got over the weekend and that boss's name is Jim Jim just started backing us on Patreon thank you Jim welcome Jim now Jim deserves all the limelight today but you don't have to leave the limelight just to Jim you can be the next Jim and get all that applause for yourself and all the extras you get like editors desk and live with it and all that stuff at patreon.com slash DTNS speaking of Patreon patrons you know you can stick around for the extended show good day internet what joys will we talk about today only patrons know you can also catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4pm turn 20 hundred UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we'd love to have you join us live if you can we'll also be back tomorrow talking about the Apple iPhone 14 announcement with Scott Johnson Nika Mumford and Terence Gaines talk to you then