 Coming up on DTNS, lasers generate random numbers faster and you can record them. Facebook has an app for rappers and AI comes to the drive-through. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 1st, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Coming in from Alaska, producing the show, I'm Amos. And joining us today from Engadget senior editor, Nicole Lee is back. Welcome back, Nicole. Hello, happy to be back. Thank you for joining us. We were just talking on Good Day Internet about Sarah's career as a lanyard maker. Also, a lot about squirrels. If you want that expanded show, get Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Walmart dropped its $35 order minimum for its two-hour express delivery service available to Walmart plus subscribers. Although the service still incurs a flat $10 fee and non-express same-day orders and deliveries still carry a $35 minimum. Walmart says the delivery service is available through nearly 3,000 Walmart stores reaching 70% of the US population. Ming-Chi Kuo is back with a note about Apple. Says the iPhone 13 will offer the same form factor and screen size as the iPhone 12, but with a reduced notch area with the Pro models getting a faster f1.8 ultra-wide camera with autofocus, well as 120-hertz screen. Quote further reports Apple has no plans to adopt USB-C folks. Sorry, he doesn't think so. Future iPhone devices, they will not integrate a touch ID sensor into the power button again either. Again, this is all according to Quo. The note also says the iPhone SE with 5G is coming in H1, first half 2022, and predicts 2022 iPhones will replace the notch design with a hole punch camera. The group distributed denial of secrets. Get it, BDOS, but different. Claims to have pulled 70 gigabytes of user data from the social network GAB through an SQL injection vulnerability, including public and private posts, as well as passwords. The group says it will share the data selectively with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. GAB CEO Andrew Torbo said that the site patched a vulnerability to an SQL injection attack last week, but has no confirmation a breach actually took place. The Epic Apple fight has a date, folks. In a case management conference Monday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California scheduled Epic the Apple to begin May 3rd. Judge Gonzalez Rogers expects the trial to last three to possibly five weeks. After launching in India last September, YouTube shorts began rolling out as a beta to all users in the US. Users can now create and view swipable one-minute vertical videos with the short section appearing on the mobile app section of the YouTube home screen. All right, let's talk a little bit more about going places. Remember going places? Barely, yeah. Good times. I remember doing that once, maybe 2019 or so. Well, people are starting to do it again, which means e-bikes are even hotter. E-bikes have actually been pretty hot during the pandemic, but Lyme announced it's going to add 50 new cities to its shared electric bike network by the start of 2022, including 12 new cities in North America. Lyme also is making a next-gen electric bike with a more powerful 350-watt motor, which will have a top speed of 20 miles per hour, wear your helmets, folks, and the same swappable batteries as Lyme's electric scooters, which are good for 25 miles of range. Lyme phased out bikes in favor of scooters, if you remember, back in 2019, but then they got bikes back when they bought Jump from Uber in 2020. Speaking of Jump, Lyme does plan to keep jump bikes in operation, even though it's bringing in its own Lyme branded bikes. Lyme also integrates pedal-less bikes from third-party company Wheels and plans to introduce electric mopeds for rent in Paris and Washington, D.C. Nicole, do you use any e-bikes getting around town? No, I've only ever seen Lyme scooters around where I live, but it's good to see that they're expending to e-bikes because I know the Lyft bikes are pretty popular around here, so it's interesting to see another competitor pop up for sure. I wonder how much the whole idea of when pandemic hit and everybody was quarantined and you couldn't get a Peloton bike or all sorts of things where people are like, oh, crap, I can't go to the gym anymore. I have to build my home gym. What do I need? This may have given the whole idea of the e-bikes a little bit of a Lyft, right? The idea of an e-bike is, hey, especially in a place like San Francisco or somewhere that has hills, you may need a little boost when you're going up a hill. You're not going to be able to pedal up all that, but you are also exercising and maybe the idea of the scooter, even though it's faster in our world now, the idea of like, well, but I'm also exercising is a little bit more attractive. Yeah, and the e-bikes let you throw stuff. Sometimes they have in a basket. These new bikes from Lyme are going to have a holder for your phone so you can securely have your phone there. I don't read your phone while you're pedaling the bike. Don't do that. But maybe if you're still using corded headphones to plug it in or maybe for navigation, could be useful for something like that. But yeah, I think people also look at scooters still a little bit a scant as that's a weird way to get about, whereas bicycles everybody's used to. It's a lot more acceptable, more socially acceptable, I think. Yeah, yeah, it takes a little bit to be a scooter person if you're cool, but not all of us are cool enough to be scooter people. I mean, I don't know, man. When I lived in Venice, which is a beach town in LA, I mean, the scooter life was hot. I mean, people also rode a lot of bicycles, both of those things were very accepted, but it was one of those things where I was like, you know, not everywhere in the world will be able to adopt this in the way that this particular town has, because it's flat and there are a lot of side streets and people are yielding to bicyclists and walkers and that sort of thing, but yeah, I've seen it work. Yeah, I used to live over in that same region and it was Scooter City. And then I moved away and I got scooter shock because there were no scooters where I moved for at least the first year. Now there's a few, I don't see any e-bikes in this neighborhood. Yeah, I don't either. Well, e-bikes or not, you might be interested in this new Facebook experimental project, Facebook's new product experimentation team, AKA the NPE team, that's what it's called, launched an app called Bars, B-A-R-S. Yes, bars as in bars, music bars, as a closed beta on iOS. Bars lets you create and share rap music using studio quality, vocal effects and professionally created beats. I'm laughing but I'm not, it's cool. The app limits videos to 60 seconds, has audio and visual filters, includes a challenge mode for freestyle rap and suggested word prompts and will auto suggest rhyming words if rhymes are typed into the app. Bars currently has a waitlist for access in the beta and Facebook says it will open access to invites in batches. If you're like, is this familiar to me? I'm not sure. This is NPE's second music based app having launched a private beta of Collab, a music video collaboration app in December of 2020. So I went ahead and signed up for this. I got on the waitlist this morning. I was accepted moments later. I tried it out a couple of times and it is a little buggy and that's probably by design because there are only a few of us kind of train it out. But this is all kidding aside, if you think of the, I don't know, think of the TikTok songs of the world. You can think of the top five TikTok songs that you hear over and over where it becomes a meme and then everyone creates content based on a meme that already exists. If you can, using Facebook's NPE Bars app, be able to create something that is yours and you created it and then kind of takes on a life of its own and you become known for doing that. I can see where this could be really, I don't know about lucrative but something that gives you new life as a creator. No, Nicole, you're not gonna start sharing beats with Sarah, come on. Well, I mean, for me, it's more of an interesting, I mean, I think similar to Facebook's other experimental apps, I don't think this is really meant to be a standalone situation. I think it's really meant to inform and seed existing apps with new features. For example, they've made TikTok clones in the past, they've had Instagram reels, which is kind of a TikTok clone by itself, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is kind of an experiment to experiment, like the name says, an experimental app, to experiment with new features and new viral music kind of features or tools so that creators can make those viral memes and viral audio. And maybe in the future, maybe they can get compensated for their songs because that's one of the big holes and the big missing opportunities for TikTok and stuff like that, but there is no real way to compensate the creator in a real way. So maybe Facebook, this is a way for them to do that and say, hey, can we credit the original creator of this rap bar or whatever or this beat and maybe that would be a way to make money, I don't know. Well, speaking of monetization, Instagram's pretty good at that. Instagram began rolling out live rooms to iOS and Android users globally, which lets four people livestream simultaneously. You can add guests all at once or bring them in throughout the live stream. You wanna have a surprise guest or something. Any people blocked by a live room participant will not be able to join. I don't know how that works. You get kicked out if you bring in somebody into the live room who blocked you, but the idea is that the people joining don't have to worry that someone on their block list would be in there and be able to get around the block. Hosts can report and block comments and use comment filters. Company says it's also developing further moderator controls and audio features that'll launch in the coming months. It sounds a bit like a competitor to Clubhouse or maybe Twitter Spaces, but it's also a competitor to Twitch because it's using the Instagram live streaming feature. One edge Instagram can offer though is monetization. Options for live fundraisers, integrated shopping and viewers of these live streams will be able to buy badges to support the hosts. That's what was exactly like Twitch. You could do a little donation buttons or something like that. Yeah, yeah. It's got the monetization of Twitch with the friendly informality of a Clubhouse, but also with video. When I see the stuff, I'm always sort of like, okay, Clubhouse competitor, right? Cause Clubhouse is like the hot new now. But I think, okay, what if it was DTNS? Would we be able to, four people? I mean, we're usually more than four people, but would this be something that would be possible to offer someone a regular show of sorts using this model? And in that sense, I'm like, this is actually pretty cool, especially if this is where you've built your audience and this is where your audience is and this is where they're going to make sense of new stuff that you're trying. Yeah, both bars and live rooms make sense to me, like Nicole was saying, bars is a creator tool that you can use to make things, in this case, wrap that could be used in lots of different places, Reels, TikTok, et cetera. Live rooms is a feature added to a tool, which is like, okay, we know people are liking getting together for informal chats. Let's make it easier for that to happen in something we already have rather than creating a brand new thing. So Instagram isn't creating a Clubhouse clone. It's saying, oh, well, let's look, this is a little smarter. Let's look at what is valuable about Clubhouse. Look at what people have been asking us feature-wise and implement that. So yeah, if we were starting Daily Tech News Show and we were all young Gen Z folks just coming up in the world, we might start it in something like live rooms. I wonder if people still think of Twitch as kind of a gamer creator space. I think they do. Oh, a lot of people do. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Well, folks, Discord is not just for gamers either. In fact, you can talk about Daily Tech News Show stuff in there, lots of folks in there talking about it. In fact, we have a channel devoted to our Folding at Home team where they're always checking in on their rankings and everything. I think we're pretty close to being in the top 150. You wanna talk about that or anything else in Discord? Become a member and link your Patreon account for patreon.com slash DTNS. Google updated its workspace productivity suite formerly known as G Suite with new features focused on fostering collaboration equity between employees who work from home and employees who work in the office. This includes an event type called Focus Mode which will limit notifications from calendar, Gmail and chat. Location indicators can be set across apps so coworkers know which days you're in the office versus which days you're at home. Calendars will now have a time insights chart that shows how much time you spent in meetings each week broken down into recurring and one-time meetings so you have an idea of where your time is going. Google Workspace Frontline provides a simplified way for admins to set up workspace for specific verticals and integrates with a no-code app sheet apps from Google Sheets. Google Meet now supports joining a meeting from more devices including the Nest Hub Max, also Tile View. Picture-in-picture and split screen support are also coming to mobile. Google Assistant is out of beta on mobile devices and can be used to send messages and hear items from calendar. And Google's lower cost Google Workspace Essentials Bundle now includes chat, jam board and also calendar. Yeah, I think a lot of these features are probably not terribly surprising to folks. They're like, oh, okay, either I didn't realize they didn't have this or this is something I've been expecting and I'm glad to see Assistant coming out of beta, et cetera. The focus on frontline workers, of course, makes sense in the times we live in. But I think what struck me most is how Google is positioning this as more people are gonna be splitting their time between the office and work from home. We're gonna see some people continue to work from home from here on out. We're gonna see some people coming into the office a few days a week and working from home the rest of the time. Let's promote what really is just a typical out of office setting as a benefit for somebody who's got a mixed workforce like that. And I think that's interesting to see them positioning that way because even if these particular features aren't like revolutionary in embracing that, they're just sort of taking existing stuff and massaging it. It means they're thinking along those lines and we might see some more innovative features coming in down the road. Nicole, how much do you use workspace apps for Google, if any? I mean, our, I mean, Gadget, for example, and a lot of companies, we run on G Suite or, I guess, Workspaces now that it's called. And it's our lives revolve around it, basically a calendar, Google Meet, Docs. That's our entire work life, is housed within Google's Workspaces. So this makes sense to me, especially in terms of seeing how available somebody is and seeing how, and I think it'll be interesting to see if you could somehow say in the calendar, hey, I have, especially for working families, if you could say, hey, I'm homeschooling my kids between this hour and this hour. And hopefully that will, you know, you can sort of like slot that in somehow. So even though I'm not like busy, I'm busy. Yeah, yeah. And like, it's like, you know, yeah, the half busy type thing. And we actually run into that with our team as well. It's like, hey, when are you like, for sure not available? Or like, kind of, if you really need me? So those nuances really come into play, especially when everybody's at home. And having a visually easy to see representation of when someone might actually be in the office versus not is going to become more important. Because if you're like, oh, I want to set a meeting with Nicole when she's in the office. But I know she's only in the office a couple of days a week. Let me see which days that is. And I can set that meeting. And of course, meetings are problematic and take up too much time. Everybody agrees. So we're seeing lots of tools to kind of help you chart just how much time the meetings take up. I don't see a lot of solutions. I see a lot of data. Like here, you can see just how bad your meetings are. It's sucking up your time. But don't just come up with the button that will like. Perhaps you'd like to join clubhouse. Yeah. And be in more meetings all the time. Well, this is not going to help you reduce your meetings. But it will help you stay a little more secure. Researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, along with some researchers from Yale University and Trinity College, Dublin, developed a one millimeter long laser. That's a very, very tiny laser, one millimeter long that can generate 250 terabytes of random bits per second. That's more than 100 times faster than computer-based RNGs, random number generators. And generating random numbers really important for computing, especially important for cryptography. This can also create multiple bit streams simultaneously. The light bounces between mirrors interfering with itself. That creates intensity fluctuations at 254 spots every trillionth of a second. That's how you create the random numbers. The camera they used to test it would fill up its memory every couple of nanoseconds and then have to upload. It almost could not keep up with this thing. Researchers hope to be able to incorporate the laser and the camera tracking system into a chip. That's, again, how small this is, so that it can directly feed random numbers into the computer with cryptography, of course, being the obvious application for this. This is cool, right? Yeah, it's very cool. I mean, I think if someone were to say, okay, Tom, does this mean that my password generator will be stronger? I mean, what are the real-world applications of something like this? Yeah, so random numbers are necessary in all kinds of cryptography applications. It means faster cryptography, stronger, one of the knocks on adding strong cryptography, strong crypto to certain aspects of your computer is it slows things down. And so this won't speed up all the aspects of it, but it certainly would speed up one of them. And the more of them you can speed up the faster cryptography gets. Of course, cryptography getting faster and faster all the time anyway, so yeah, it can help with that. And Nicole, who wouldn't want a very tiny laser inside their computer, creating random numbers? Nobody. I mean, why would you want only one? It's so great. Yeah, it's like having a pet squirrel or something. I'm not sure you could show it off. No, no, it was just behind the scenes. It does feel like the kind of thing where we saw some scientists with a great idea and it worked, the reading that I get from reading about this is that it worked even better than they thought. They're like, man, arc-centric, barely keep up. That's great. Yeah, and you don't see that too often. So hopefully we will see this turned into an easy to incorporate chip. My guess is at the beginning, it's an enterprise level thing, probably meant for data centers that really need speed and all that. So you might not say it in your own laptop, but a cool thing to keep track of. And this is being developed principally in Singapore if you're looking to look into it further. Yale University and Trinity College Dublin scientists participated in the research, but the team is centered at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Well, I don't know when the last time you were in a McDonald's drive-in was, but you might've noticed that your wait time has shrunken a bit. McDonald's is doing a lot of things to make sure that you get in and out and get on with your life as quickly as possible. The latest is testing out its own smart assistant to speed up its own drive-thru service at certain locations. Not all locations, but that's what it is working on. The results seem to be a mixed bag, however. Online reviews of a location that is tasting, testing rather the AI order taking include robot drive-thru, avoid. That person did not like the idea of a smart assistant taking the order. Another customer posted a TikTok video showing the McDonald's system executing an order for two Oreo McFlurries with a caption that read, this is the most dystopian thing I've ever seen in the 27 years of my life. So I've got the TikTok video queued up, but it gets... Here you go. We're currently serving a limited menu, so please review the menu before ordering. Let me know what I can get for you. It's not as natural as a series. Medium Oreo McFlurries. All right, would you like anything else? That's it. No, yeah. Okay, your total will be $6.58. Please pull forward. Yeah, so that's the one that said this is the most dystopian thing I've ever seen. I get it now. Well, do you though? I mean, to me, this is the argument that I have with people who are like, I do not wanna smirk anything in my house. You do not look at me. You do not talk to me. You do not hear what I'm saying. No. And I'm like, but it's so helpful. So like this is like, I'm like, okay, I mean, someone, whether it's a human or the AI version of the human is like, what do you want? I'm gonna say this back to you and make sure that that's what you want. To me, I'm like, great, even better. And perhaps that person who used to be sitting at the window can be better utilized to do something that they're better at, right? Don't you think the brightness needs to be turned up on that voice a little? It was a little bit soft. Oh, but honestly, if it was like, okay, your order is ready. That would be weird. Oh my God, it's so annoying. 100%. Yeah, they're not just doing this at McDonald's yet too. They're also doing it at White Castle, apparently. And White Castle in the CNN article was saying like, we do have to tweak it because somebody drives up and gives me and says, give me two castles with cheese on them. The voice assistant didn't understand what that meant. Like they were only programmed to handle a certain amount of variations in how you order. Let it out. Is it last time that the voice was actually really clear and we've had jobs for a couple of decades and we can't understand what they're saying, but with this, you understand it clearly? That TikTok order was from inside a car and it was that clear. Yeah, that alone was good. Sign up for this, I'm ready. Just let me understand what the other AI or person is saying and I'm in. Yeah. I mean, in all practicality, I'm with you, Sarah. Like this is great. It's clear, it's efficient, it's likely, it's less likely to get my order wrong. Yeah. This is something, something a little. I don't know. I mean, give me my nuggets. That's all I was here for, you know? Did it cut down my nugget wait time? Right. Did it cut down my nugget wait time? If so, I am happy. Thank you in advance. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Patreon supporter David Ward, who is a legally blind, assistive technology instructor, chimed in our discussion on AR glasses last week where we were like, well, if there's, you know, if I'm wearing them and I can identify Tom or Nicole, is that okay? What if they don't want me to do that? What about facial recognition in the future? And David says that technology could help people like him a lot by recognizing students or workmates when they walk into an office or a classroom. David said, we're a friend coming by to give me a ride in front of my busy apartment building. Warcam, which we'll put in our show notes, or cam.com has an integrated feature like this into their AR glasses. David says minus the cloud sourcing of the images. You have to program everybody's face into the system and assign them a name. Looks like they're even making a lapel style device that does that as well. David says, I'm not as interested in this as more generic or programmable object and people recognition, like a smart door cam that could recognize when my paratransit bus has arrived to take me to work or when there's a UPS man or a truck at my front door. He also adds Microsoft's scene AI app has a similar functionality built in plus LiDAR to tell you how far away a person is. If you can see, if you can't see well or at all, that kind of information can be really important, especially these days when you're trying to figure out if somebody has moved into the grocery line, if you're maintaining six foot distance during COVID times, et cetera. Yeah, you may not be able to see that person if you're six feet away. And this could tell you like, hey, time to move up. That's good stuff. Hey, and really appreciate you sharing that insight with us, David. Good stuff. Yeah, thanks so much, David. If you have any feedback for us, anything we've talked about, anything we might talk about in a future show, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also shout out to patrons at our master and our grand master levels. Today they include Ken Hayes, Tony Glass and Jeffrey Zilx. Also, we have a new boss and we'd like to shout her out. Amy Ray is our boss because Amy supports us on Patreon. Thank you so much, Amy. And thank you everyone who supports us on Patreon as well. Also thanks to Nicole Lee and Nicole. So good to have you back. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can check out all of my writings and stories on engadget.com. You can also go to my Twitter page at twitter.com slash Nicole for other updates on my life and work. Excellent. Nicole, the first person I ever followed on Twitter and the next person you should follow, twitter.com slash Nicole. Hey, if you want to know about blockchain, non-fungible tokens are all the rage these days. We've talked about them. We have an episode of Know a Little More coming out this Thursday on the blockchain. Explains what it is, how it works, why it works from multiple perspectives, not just NFTs, but Bitcoin and others as well. You can get that as well as explanations on a whole lot of other topics like Wi-Fi, 6, 5G and more at know a little more.com. Hey, folks, we are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnucho.com slash live. And guess what? We're gonna be back doing this all again tomorrow with our guest, Chris Ashley. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.