 Coming up on D T N S is Samsung throttling your apps. HTC shouts out metaverse while returning to the smartphone battle and a machine that can make any drink you want. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 3rd, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and coming from the backyard barbecue. Your boy Chris Ashley draw the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta and I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty sir. We're just talking a bunch about chicken wings. If you don't want to be hungry, don't go subscribe to Good Day Internet and become a patron at patreon.com slash D T N S big thanks to our top patrons including Ken Hayes, Philip Shane and Paul Boyer. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Security firm Cleefy that's C L E A F Y reported Tuesday that a malicious app called QR code and barcode scanner to QR code app, at least it appears to be was downloaded more than 10,000 times from Google Play before Cleefy reported it and Google removed it. Why'd they report it? Well, the malicious app contained a T bot, a remote access Trojan or rat that can do things like steal your passwords, look at your text messages, access all your confidential data. This particular version of T bot targeted banking insurance and cryptocurrency apps. The app did not contain T bot at download. That's how it was able to get in the Play Store, but it would prompt users shortly after installation to apply an update and the update was not pulled from the Play Store. It was pulled from GitHub and was able to install T bot there. I wonder how they knew this would work because you know the modern phones they have QR codes gainers built in so I'm just that's what's fascinating to me about this. It never ceases to amaze me how that you can get people to do things that they don't even need to do anyway. Amazon will close all of its Amazon books, Amazon four store star and Amazon pop up shops. That's a total of 68 stores across the US and the UK. Just another example of brick and mortar stores getting driven out of business by Amazon, this case itself. The company said it's going to focus its retail efforts on its grocery stores, Amazon Fresh Whole Foods Market and Amazon Go. It remains committed to long term physical retail concepts like its style clothing stores. It's also developing platforms for use by other retailers. Sennheiser announced new earbuds that are 3D printed with the material used in drill bits on the Mars Rover. Or if you don't want to read their press release version of it, Sennheiser launched metal earbuds, but the metal zirconium so it resists corrosion and is lightweight and durable. That's the reason they're doing it and it has the usual rubber tips so it shouldn't be more uncomfortable than any other plastic earbud. The IE 600 as it is called are wired earbuds as well, not wireless and that's so they can support lossless audio. The cable is replaceable. It plugs in on the end with the earbuds. So if it gets worn out, you can swap it out. They will be coming this spring for a mere 699 euros aside from looking super cool like the metal looks like like a weight plate like the 45 pound plate. Yeah, you're right. Really cool. But man, the price tag on a yikes. Yeah, that's that's that's a grip. I mean 699 euros is pretty close to $700. It depends on the day, but you know, it's probably around 750 or something like that somewhere in between there. If you've looked at all the people driving Teslas these days and thought it's just not the status symbol it used to be may we present the arc one a 24 foot long electric boat. That is backed by Will Smith, Kevin Durant and Diddy Sean Combs. It'll cost you $300,000 to so you won't look cheap if you buy one arc release new images and video of a pre production model of the arc one has a top speed of 40 miles per hour last four hours under power on a charge and battery is 220 kilowatt hours powering a 500 horsepower engine arc CEO Mitch Lee would like you to know that that engine is three times the size of a Tesla Model Y battery pack. If you'd like you can reserve one right now. There's a refundable $1000 deposit required and they say they're going to start delivering in the summer defective. He put I don't understand why that matters because the reason you're buying one of these is to be able to say things like that to the your friends when they come over to hang out on your boat. Alright, we've got a roundup of Ukrainian news here. Netblocks reports a telecom outage in northeastern Ukraine in Sumio Blast residents of the region reported blast coming from a power plant. This is the first widespread major telecom outage since the war in Ukraine began. There's also a bunch of tech company reactions. Poland's CD project red is going to halt all game sales in Russia and Belarus, Oracle and SAP have stopped all business and sales in Russia. Spotify has closed its offices in Russia indefinitely though the service itself remains operational. RT America is shutting down in the United States and laying off its staff. TripAdvisor and Google Maps have stopped users from posting new reviews on their listings in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. They were being used to spread non review related content like news. The GitHub repository for the Facebook Maintained React open source library was spammed with protest messages. Russian regulator Roskomnozor ordered the Russian version of Wikipedia to roll back edits from articles related to the war or be blocked. The Wikipedia Foundation responded that it will not comply with those requests. Russia's Roscosmos Space Agency said it will no longer sell rocket engines to the United States, which may affect flights by Northrop Grumans and Tari's rocket and Roscosmos paused a planned launch to deliver satellites for satellite ISP OneWeb. OneWeb is owned by India's Telco Barty, but has a major investment from the UK government as well as SoftBank and UTEL sat. Alright, you're caught up on the tech related aspects of the war in Ukraine. Let's talk about a phone now, Chris. What do we got? So, HTC's Vice President of Asia Pacific Region told Digitons that the company will come out with a new smartphone in April. HTC hasn't released a new flagship phone in three years. He said the phone would have metaverse features. Stop the eye roll just for a moment. HTC's last phone in 2018 was the Exodus One blockchain phone and it did support decentralized apps built in cryptocurrency wallets and the ability to mine very small amounts of cryptocurrency. Alright, we can argue about what good a blockchain phone is, but at least in that case, HTC was true to its word and delivered what it said it was going to do. So what would a metaverse phone be? HTC announced its Viverse platform at World Mobile Congress, MWC, that will someday include VR, XR, NFTs and oh heck, they threw in 5G and blockchain too because why not? And don't forget, HTC's five headsets are legit VR headsets. So a smartphone that tied into all of that could legitimately be called a metaverse phone, especially if it tied into platforms like Microsoft Smash or Qualcomm Snapdragon spaces. Folks, let your imagination run wild because HTC is not talking yet. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I kind of hate that they're like, hey, we have a new smartphone coming out in April metaverse in order to get everyone to pay attention. I mean, honestly, HTC just announcing that they have a new phone is all they needed to get my attention. I'm like, oh really? It's a flagship phone from HTC. Let's see this and HTC has legit cred when it comes to virtual reality. The Vive platform is a good one. I don't know if this Viverse is going to be great or not. It's too early to tell and so a phone that ties into all of that, that they're good at, makes perfect sense to me. They didn't even need the buzzword. It has a chance. I'll make a confession. I was a fan of HTC phones, especially when they were making all the Windows phones. I did like what they made. So to me, they legitimately can make a good phone. But there is a kind of little thing in the back of my head is like, is there a chance? And I'll tell you why. The other day I got sent a video and it was a depiction of what the metaverse could be. And here in the DC area, we have a music called go-go music. This was born and bred in the area, started on buckets and you know, it's just in this area is huge and not too much anywhere else, but they had a metaverse that was a go-go and the little character walked into the go-go. The music was playing. They could see people at the bar and I was like, what a brilliant kind of video to kind of tout this. So I was like, if something as obscure as go-go music in our area made like a video like that where it kind of made sense to people, maybe, you know, HTC might be on the something to at least attach themselves to this idea of the metaverse. So it's kind of interesting to me. Yeah. This is one of those stories we're going to be talking about again in April and we'll have a better idea than of whether this is legit or not, right? Because we'll see what they're actually doing with it. So even as much as I don't love them saying metaverse, I get why they did, gets them more attention and they may be able to follow it up. But like you said, they said blockchain phone, which was an eye-roller and then followed it up with real blockchain stuff. The argument is whether blockchain is worth it or not. Not whether the phone actually delivered. All right. How about this one? I kind of adore this product, but there are problems with it. U.S. startup Kana, C-A-N-A has a new take on a home beverage dispenser, but it's not like SodaStream or other similar setups that use pods. This one can make any beverage off the same cartridge. They liken it to 3D printing drinks. The machine uses a cartridge of flavoring that has 84 ingredients that they say they can deliver in the perfect precise proportions to create almost any flavor profile from coffee to tea to a mimosa. The flavor cartridge does have to be combined with some raw material cartridges. So there's a sugar cartridge, an alcohol cartridge, if you want to do alcoholic drinks, a carbonation cylinder, and then of course your water reservoir, because most of every drink is water. Use all four of those to create your drink. The device has a touch screen on the front where you select the type of drink you want. Now, for now, it can only do clear cold drinks. So it can do a version of cold brew coffee. It can do a grapefruit sparkling water. Kana says it's working on a future versions of the device that could replicate viscosity, opacity, and pulp and also maybe do hot drinks, but those aren't there yet. This Kana machine, though, detects when your cartridge is near empty and can automatically ship you a refill. Cartridges should last about a month, according to Kana. Here's where it gets interesting. The drink menu is provided by Kana, and it includes drinks created by brands like the Hella Cocktail Company. You can replicate their, you know, their bottled cocktails and recipes from creators like Simone Geertz, the YouTuber that does all the robotics stuff, all the cool robotics stuff. You can customize their recipes to your preferred level of alcohol, sugar, caffeine, vitamins, and other supplements. You just can't create a recipe from scratch. At least it doesn't seem like you can. But it gets even more interesting. The cartridges are free. So it automatically reorders cartridges when you need them. Does have to be on Wi-Fi. That's how it gets the recipes, too. And you don't have to pay for the cartridges. Instead, you're like, well, how do you make money? You pay per drink. Sparkling water, 29 cents. Ice tea, 79 cents. Craft cocktail, $2.99. If you want to try this out, you can reserve one right now for 99 bucks. The first 10,000 orders will be sold for $499. The regular price of the machine will be $799. And they say sales will start sometime early 2023. This is one of those stories that is a complete roller coaster. Because when I heard hear the initial idea of it, I just want to be like, get out of here. But then as you get into it, I'm starting, my mind starts to wander. It's like, oh, wait a minute. This could be pretty cool. And then you come with a sledgehammer. You got to pay per drink. And it's like, ah, man, it was, it was so close to being super old. You know, because who does not want to walk into a room and tell me this thing will at some point have voice activation. And, you know, once they get to the hot, who doesn't want to walk into a room and be like Earl Grey hot? Who doesn't want to do that? It's so close, right? Why not? You're right there. So but the pay per drink is is a killer to me because the problem with it is the psychological effect of it. When I'm home, I want to get stuff out of my fridge because I'm like, I bought it here. So I don't have to go out and pay for it. So that's a huge bummer when you're at home and you're still paying for, you know, those you think along those lines with food and drink, you know, obviously when you're Internet of buying movies, it's the mindset is different. So I don't know how they're going to get people to get past that portion of it. With that said, everything else is pretty cool because there's a, have you ever heard of the life fuels? No, what's life fuels? So life fuels is like a bottle that you can carry around like those, you know, but it has like the different drinks or syrups, if you will, at the bottom of the bottle. And then it has an app on your phone that allows you to, you know, put in your recipes and make it. So it's almost identical to this, except it's portable. And my buddy has one of these and he swears by it. And it's probably less precise or less wide variety. Maybe. Yeah. And then you just manually change the cartridges in the bottom. It takes like four, but, uh, but it looks so cool that I was like, I was really interested in seeing what he did with it. So it's kind of the concept is already exist. And this is something you can buy today. Um, so the, I like, I like the start of this, but man, it, where it ended kind of hurt me. Yeah. I love the idea. Like this is brilliant. Don't, don't sell me pods. Uh, just make a machine that can replicate any profile. Now I start to get weird when I'm like, okay, but you're not really having a mimosa because there's no actual orange juice in here. Right. So, but they, the people at the verge who tested this were like, but it tasted like a mimosa. It wasn't bad. It's at least as good as any other bottled drink. You'd get off the shelf at your grocery store. So I'm starting to come back in like, okay, you wouldn't replace everything, but, but I'm, I'm into this idea and the fact that they, they have this combination of things where I could get like a cold coffee. Maybe someday they'll have a hot version and I'll try it. So I think the technology is, is wonderful and promising and I cannot wait to try it. That business plan though, I just, I mean, I know they're trying to say like, Oh, these prices are less than you'd pay at the grocery store. Sure. But, but psychology, you nailed it. It's like, even if they're not showing me the price every time I use the touchscreen, I would never know why I'm paying. Yeah. You know, I tell you what, the better model to me would have been, you don't own the machine. You lease the machine. Then it would have been a little bit more palatable. Right. It's like, I wonder if at some point they changed to say like, Oh, you can either pay per drink or buy the cartridges. Yeah. And or, you know, and I'm sure they'll have like the, you know, you get the first fifty free or whatever, you know, you buy packages and then once you go past that it's two ninety nine, hopefully if they're smart then that could kind of alleviate my anxiety around using this. But, you know, I just imagine the reason why it's so interesting to me as well is because, you know, when you read about how they came up with Beyond meat and how they came up with impossible, they had scientists in a lab recreating and figuring out what it is. What is the texture? What is the flavor that makes you that when you biting to something that you're like, Oh, that's meat. That's the iron from the bud and all of that stuff. But so I imagine they did the same thing, right? Cause they're not giving you the same ingredients, but they're like, if we put this and this and this together, yeah, that's orange soda right there. You know, that's it's like an md3. They're like, there's, there's all parts of the drink that don't affect the flavor. So we'll, we found a compression algorithm that figures out what parts are the parts you notice and that's the parts we put in the cartridge that has the flavor. But the idea that they could disrupt the soda industry, you know, it's, it's, it's, I like it, right? Because now you're going to have Coca-Cola sending you machines and at the house that are home based and, you know, and Pepsi and all of those guys doing the same thing. So I, well, I'm going to keep my on this and definitely want to wait to see what you say about it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to try it out. I can't, I can't not the technology, the business model may be flawed, but the technology is too good to super dope cleans itself and it has parental controls. You also can operate it without alcohol. You can say like, don't send me the alcohol cartridge. So I know people probably had questions about that. Yeah. All right. Tell us about this Wall Street Journal. Okay. So the Wall Street Journal has an article about how the popularity of at home COVID-19 test is causing some companies to develop at home test for other things. Detect Incorporated, which makes an at home COVID-19 test is working on at home flu and strep throat test. A San Diego company called Q is also working on at home tests for flu and Chlamydia. The interest is also making an argument for loosening up regulatory holdups. Currently, some tests that could be done in home are only allowed in a doctor's office or pharmacy. Lab Corp and Quest Diagnostics are offering home tests for fertility, blood, iron level and cancer. These are not rapid tests requiring the samples to be chipped in, shipped in, in order to or dropped off in a collection center. Lab Corp is considering including some rapid tests that give you the results at home. Results of rapid tests are usually less accurate than lab reviewed ones. So just keep that in mind. One way forward would be to use a rapid test for an immediate result, which is what we do today, right? And then but still mail it in for laboratory confirmation and regulators also want to make sure consumers aren't confused between what is a positive and what is a negative result? What do you think? Yeah, this is this is an interesting article. It's a little bit short on on a lot of details. But but I'm I'm curious at the fact that this is a another example of innovation coming out of necessity. Nobody wanted to have to deal with covid but because we did because we were forced to people are now looking at it and saying, well, we figured out how to do rapid at home tests for covid. What else can we do with that? And how can we make those lives better? I think I think that's fascinating. Yeah, this is really cool to me because, you know, I have a stack of covid tests here, you know, especially when I had my brother was living with me and you know, we had to be super careful. Sure. So but another thing that kind of dawned on me is like my wife and unfortunately, my daughter, they chronically get strep throat and every time my wife goes to the urgent care, they tested like, you don't have it. And my wife's like, I know I have it. I get it all the time. And so to avoid that headache of doing that, you know what I mean? It could be let me test at home. You know, and I because I'm pretty, you know, she knows the signs. Catch it because she doesn't have to wait until she can get into the lab. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and we talked about this a long time ago because I think when the last time we had a conversation around the innovation through tragedy, it was when there was a new watch or a band that reminded you to keep your hands away from your face. Right. So, you know, even though, you know, there's tons of tragic stories around this covid, the one thing I said is I always love to see the innovation that comes out of this and this is definitely something that we could, you know, definitely benefit from. Hey, folks, do you like what we talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can affect what we talk about. We get a lot of these ideas from the subreddit. So go there, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Users on Korea's Miko forum have been posting a list of apps they say are throttled by Samsung's Game Optimization Service or GOS. GOS is meant to improve gameplay on Samsung phones. The list on the forum has around 10,000 apps, including some of Samsung's own apps like Bixby and the secure folder. No benchmark apps seem to be affected though, and that's raising some eyebrows. Korean researcher and YouTube creator, Garyon Han, changed the name of the 3D Mark benchmark app to the name of one of the apps on the list and the benchmarking score of the Samsung phone went from 2,618 to 1,141. That's 56% worse just by changing the name. Android Authority could not find the Game Optimization Service on all of its Samsung Galaxy phones. Didn't find it on its S22. It did find it on its S21 Plus. So that implies it may have arrived in an update for some, but not all users. Naver's source says Samsung is looking into the reports, but Samsung hasn't spoken publicly about it. And if this sounds familiar, last July, OnePlus admitted that its latest phones throttled apps to save battery life and reduce heat. Apple has dealt with a similar issue where it was throttling things to save battery life. Geekbench delisted the OnePlus 9 from its Android benchmark chart back last July until OnePlus tweaked the settings. We'll see if they do a similar thing with Samsung here. Yeah, I don't like this one bit. If I buy a phone and you tout all these capabilities of the phone, don't then give me these capabilities because you're doing some shady business on the back end. I, if I want the option to turn on battery saving game functionality, let me turn that on. And, you know, despite what they may or may not say, there's no way you left the benchmarking ass off and be like, oh my bad. No, come on. This is silliness. It's not that big a deal, but it does. It does wreak of some cheating going on here. No, you just, you just have to be upfront. It's fine to exempt the benchmark and say like, look, we want the benchmark apps to be able to test the whole phone. We have this battery saving service that can go on. You as a user could turn it on or off. The benchmarking apps can turn it on or off. Just be upfront and everybody's fine with this because everybody likes to save battery. Sure. What happened with Apple? Apple was trying to save your battery when it got to the end of its life. It just wasn't telling you people were upset that they were trying to save your battery. They were upset that you didn't let them control it and that you didn't tell them it was happening. Exactly. If I'm gaming, I want to turn it off. But the rest of the time, yeah, sure. I don't mind it being on. Yeah. If you can save me battery life, of course, save me battery life. But when I'm trying to do something on my phone, like, and cause it even affected Microsoft apps and I can't tell you how many times I've edited docs on my phone while I'm on the plane. I'm going to go for a presentation like, oh, here's a typo here and this thing is taking forever to load. No way. You know, I don't I don't want that at all. So I would rather them be upfront and say, we have this thing installed. It could slide on your app. And honestly, the benchmark apps would have been their best friends in this scenario because then you could see here's what the app functions like with it on. Here's what the app functions like when it's off. You make the choice, but they just excluded them. And then, you know, so to me, that was just a complete wrong way to go about this. All right, we've been talking about a lot of different products coming out of Mobile World Congress this week. Here's one that caught our eye. Go sleep, an air purifier, wireless charger, Bluetooth speaker, mood light and a light level of carbon dioxide emitter designed to help induce sleep. Go sleep touted its tech by including a 2018 paper by Stephen Snow describing how elevated carbon dioxide concentration indoors stimulates the part of the brain that controls heartbeat and respiration. The wired went and talked to Snow and said, Hey, do you know these people are using your paper? And Snow said, yeah, my papers findings don't really correlate with go sleep's claims. He said he was studying the effect of CO2 on work ability, not sleep. And he said it's not technically a correct attribution to this specific paper. Go sleep is also doing their own research on the safety and effectiveness of their product. That's ongoing, hasn't been published yet, but here's how it works. It's made by a South Korea based company called NYX has a long rectangular arm that floats over you when you're asleep, distributing the sleep air. In other words, CO2 along with an aroma and ASMR sounds to kind of, you know, drift you off to sleep for about 15 minutes. It has a replaceable CO2 canister in its base. Once you're asleep, it analyzes your environment including humidity, temperature, CO2, concentration, light levels and noise set to launch in South Korea in April for $2,000. With a U.S. rollout coming this summer and more markets after that in 2023. Another bummer of a product because I have this quest to sleep better for years and years. I want to sleep better. Spensive, super expensive bed made a difference. Different, you know, pills you take made a difference. And I'm like, ooh, what device I could put next to my bed and oh, and possibly never wake up. No, thank you. I'm going to start a service and hire MMA fighters to go to your house and help you sleep. What the heck, man? Come on. Yeah, I mean, I'm always the one who's like it probably isn't as bad as it sounds or it sounds crazy, but it might work in this case. It probably isn't as bad as it sounds. I'm going to assume that they don't want to kill their customer base. And so it's probably using a light amount of CO2, but it's probably ineffective. And any, any way you look at it. It's a bad marketing pitch saying I'm going to pump your room full of CO2. You know, the thing that we have too much of in the atmosphere, right? Also the thing that, you know, people use to kill themselves in garages. In fact, their marketing pitch says ever felt drowsy in a closed car like, no, come on, read the room. That's bad. How long before there is a movie where this is the device that's hacked and wrong? Yeah. I mean, I think it has to get and great at everybody's saying in a garage, it's carbon monoxide, not carbon dioxide fair point, but, but still people are going to make that association. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Ernest wrote in the $700 mosquito repellent sounds like a great product for the hospitality industry. I think the theme parks outdoor restaurants and shopping malls, hotels, resorts and event venues would shell out the coin to keep the bugs away if it would improve the client experience to get more butts in the seats. Yeah. I like that too. I $700 is a lot for my backyard unless it's really works or I live in, you know, New Orleans where the mosquitoes are really bad or Houston. That really worked. I would be all in. I don't want to cause I hate mosquitoes and when I'm out back smoking food and, you know, they just seem to love my backyard and I've done everything in my power short of hiring the, you know, I always get to knock on the door. Hey, do you want to take your mosquito problem? No, get out of here. Yeah, I can put something up myself, but, you know, if they came up with something that was definitive. Yeah, that'd be in good news. Alison Sheridan says a member of her family is moving to Houston and she's going to make them buy this. So we may, we may find out if it works. Well, we'll get Alison to report back. Thanks to our brand new bosses. We have new folks joining us today and very happy to have you. Jason, Sikani, Nate and Adam just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Jason, Sikani, Nate and thank you, Adam. We are just going to go to thanking people by first name just to be safe, but we still fully, fully thank you and we'll shout you out if you become a new boss, patreon.com slash DTNS. Of course, busily illustrating today's show has been Len Peralta. Len, what have you drawn for us today? You know, there's so many great things on today's show. I decided to go with the, the Metaverse phone, what that's going to look like. It's so great because we don't even know what it's going to look like. So this is a, it's called phone dial you in the metaverse, the phone dials you. That's the only way you're not for us. That's the only iteration so far that I know that the phone hasn't dialed us. We're always dialing the phone. So we're going to flip it around and make it a little bit different. So, so yeah, that's my, that's what I say is going to happen with the metaverse phone. If you would like this print, go to my Patreon, patreon.com, it's also my online store, online store is Len Peralta store.com. That phone's about to eat someone. You're going to want to see this. Thank you, Chris, Ashley. What do you got going on today to tell folks about? Hey, you can always find you boy with his two homies on SMR podcast recording every week talking tech and yeah, new episodes of barbecue and tech are in the hopper. So we'll be putting that out soon starting out probably with some Super Bowl recap and some pulled pork and stuff and moving on from there. So cool stuff coming up. My mouth is already watering. Go get that folks sign up now. So you don't miss the new episodes bbqandtech.com. We are live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern for now. That's changing on March 15 21 30 UTC find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with back to back SMR podcast host Rob Dunwoods with us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.