 Coming up on DTNS, host a talk and get paid by Twitter, Snap makes some big strides in the AR race and Patrick Norton catches us up on right to repair and what our rights actually are. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 21st, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. Some more in St. Louis, I'm Patrick Norton. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, we were talking about rubber bands and the fact that Patrick has a lot of them and uses them, in fact, for all sorts of things, such as entertaining the children. If you want to know more about that wider conversation, get on it. Our expanded show, Good Day Internet, is all yours if you become a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A new tax agenda from the U.S. Treasury Department proposes that any cryptocurrency transfers worth $10,000 or more must be reported to the IRS. The IRS updated its guidance late last year requiring taxpayers to declare if they purchased, traded, sold, or received cryptocurrency in 2020. The cyberspace administration of China announced that 105 apps, including LinkedIn, TikTok, and the video-sharing app, Kuaishou, used overcollection and excessive authorization to illegally infringe on personal user information. New regulations on data collection by apps from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology came into effect May 1, and the apps now have 15 working days to correct those issues. Amazon will shut down its standalone Prime Now app and website worldwide by the end of the year. Amazon will move third-party partners, local stores, and all expedited delivery options to the main Amazon app and site. The information and Reuters sources say that Netflix is looking to hire an executive to oversee a new video game division, which could make the Apple versus Epic case that much more interesting because Netflix has been the non-video game video service. Netflix has tried interactive programming in the past with Black Mirror, Bandersnatch, and You vs. Wild where users could decide characters' moves. Also, it's created games based on shows like Stranger Things and La Casa de Pepelle. The information also noted that Netflix could offer a bundle of games similar to Apple Arcade as an option to subscribers. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Google called off long-running negotiations with its DeepMind artificial intelligence unit seeking to grant DeepMind more autonomy. The founders of DeepMind had sought autonomy as far back as 2015, including proposing a partial spin-off looking to establish an independent legal structure used by things like non-profit groups, which reportedly did not make financial sense to Alphabet. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what Snap is up to. We talked about a new video editing app that Snap had launched yesterday. Snap also confirmed to The Verge it has agreed to buy Wave Optics for more than $500 million, which is Snap's largest acquisition ever. Wave Optics makes WaveGuides a display technology that helps users overlay virtual objects into the real world through transparent surfaces and light projectors. This is used in Snap's fourth generation of Spectacles glasses, which the company announced on Thursday. The new Snap Spectacles have a 26.3 degree field of view and also ARFX, those are called lenses by Snap and are designed to be bright both indoors and outdoors. Cons, kind of big. Battery life is only 30 minutes if used the whole time and the glasses weigh 134 grams. That's going to be a lot heavier than your standard sunglasses. A spokesperson for Snap says Wave Optics will continue to supply other companies with its WaveGuides but will make custom optical systems for Snap. In February of last year, Wave Optics announced they had made a thinnest color WaveGuide available and several months ago it unveiled a WaveGuide for prescription glasses in partnership with Luxxcel. Now, Spectacles not widely available to buy yet, at least not this new fourth-gen version of them, though the company is offering units to developers and also content creators to create new experiences and filters with SnapJet's own Lens Studio tool. So consider this Snap's attempt to pull ahead in the AR glasses race because we've talked about this in the past but Google recently posted a handful of job listings around building WaveGuides. Apple bought holographic WaveGuide maker Aconia back in 2018 and is said to be ready in AR glasses perhaps even as early as later this year and Facebook is also building custom WaveGuides for future AR glasses. Now, Patrick and Rich, I don't know if you saw these glasses. They're a little futuristic but it does seem that Snap is all in on technology that clearly we're still a few years out from this becoming a mainstream thing. Sorry, I remember seeing that number and thinking a half billion dollars is a lot of money and I don't remember the original Snap glasses being that super popular once the initial sort of this influencer has them and you don't. So go to this machine somewhere and get yours. A half billion dollars is also in general a lot of money but specifically a lot of money for Snap too. They brought in I think it was $770 million in revenue in Q1. This is a significant spend for them. Obviously, this is a developer, I mean it's being sold to developers. It's a developer kit. I can't imagine anything like this directly will be sold to consumers. We will see. They kind of remind me of the old spy tech glasses that were a toy that had mirrors in the back of them a couple years ago. The big thing it stands out to me though is this field of view. It's 26 degrees and WaveOptics has been making thinner and thinner lenses like Sarah as you alluded to but they're also getting narrower and narrower field of view as they get thinner. I don't know if that's something they can overcome. For comparison the original hollow lens which was criticized for having a very narrow field of view had a 35 degree field of view. It's basically like 26 is like basically looking down like a 90 millimeter lens like that kind of crop. It's a pretty tight area of AR effectiveness or something like that. I mean the part of the problem with the hollow lenses is they share all these demonstration videos and you were looking at the wall and they were showing you where the pipe was and where they wanted to put the door and this is going to solve all these architectural problems and then you put the demo goggles on and there was this like the equivalent of a bar of soap directly in front of your eyeballs and everything around that was black and you were peering through this little cutout in the wall. So yes I would hope field of vision gets bigger rather than smaller. Well Snap CEO Evan Spiegel did say when kind of talking a little bit about the spectacles and where the company saw it going that we're about a decade out from this being something that that we're really prepared to to have people embrace in an everyday level. Snap also released a video that gives you a little bit more of an idea of where it's hoping development goes with spectacles as far as content creation. There was an interesting example of a woman who had spent a lot of time in New Mexico and there were all these points of interest that she was trying to guide somebody who would have gone to the places after her to to know what's cool and where you know if you look at a certain sign you get more contextual information that's great but she has to make that and so Snap banking on the fact that a lot of these creators are going to want to make this sort of stuff for Snap specifically that's where I think you know this this all really hinges on adoption on the creation side because if you have a bunch of cool stuff sure you're going to sell a lot of glasses but if there are only a few things especially with you know battery life being woefully low it's a it's a bit of a harder sell. I think it's it's also interesting that Snap chat or snap is is like they're they're the amount of money they're making has increased spectacularly maybe more than I think people are aware of especially me. Well yesterday we covered about how the citizen app had used its on air live broadcasting feature to share personal information of a suspected arsonist of a Los Angeles area fire along with a $30,000 bounty 860,000 citizen users received a broadcast and the on air host encouraged them to help bring them into justice though after police detained the man he was let go due to lack of evidence citizen says it failed to follow its own validation protocols today now citizens back in the news mother board reports leaked internal documents plus its own sources at citizen detailing the company's plans to add private security work presence to the scenes of disturbances based on app user requests so you could report a disturbance and theoretically have a security worker dispatched right now citizen uses a merely reported incidence in their neighborhoods using that info along with police scanner transcriptions the app sends real-time safety alerts to users about crime and other incidents happening near where a user is located the security response project is being actively tested according to those internal emails two former citizen employees tell mother board that it would work uh excuse me uh tells mother board that would work uh that when summoned a private security company working with citizen would provide the response staff securitas a private security contractor is said to be one of the company's citizen is working with as is la ps or los angeles professional security on friday mother board reported that los angeles professional security is also linked to a citizen branded vehicle seen driving around los angeles a citizen spokesperson says it's part of a pilot program but the client to offer more details citizen currently has a subscription product called protect which sends a user's location to a citizen employee when it's turned on they can stream video to a protect agent just someone watching the feed when activated using a safe word it costs 19 dollars and 99 cents per month uh if this uh this service ever launches i'm assuming it would probably cost more than that although we would have to see on that um but i hope so yeah uh but you know sarah uh kind of uh private security as a service uh kind of a uh interesting direction for citizen yeah listen i know that okay there's two different worlds right here's the world that citizen goes like well hey if if sarah is a citizen user and something terrible is happening in her general area you know she's she sees somebody and she knows she's about to get you know robbed right and she's able to hail a private security uh worker that is working for a company that is a has a contract with citizen and that person comes in time and saves the day isn't that great for sarah she had no other choice i mean let's not even get into the fact that i used this rather than uh contacting law enforcement for a second because that's a whole another issue but okay so that's that's in theory okay sure right you want to help keep good people safe the problem is is that yeah as you mentioned rich you're already paying 20 dollars to be like heads up citizen i want to broadcast where i am when i feel unsafe at this particular time but it's why do i feel unsafe what is going on we for an app to be employing rather whether it's direct employees within the company or contract workers working with the company people coming out to like you know have some muscle over anybody that i find suspicious type of a thing this gets weird really quickly uh and we've seen as you mentioned in yesterday's show that uh you know a manhunt on citizen got out of control extremely quickly and luckily it didn't get worse you know you didn't get somebody convicted of a crime that they they didn't commit that almost a million people that were citizens users were told to actively help in the the uh apprehension of yeah and the i mean just i just think of other kind of internet manhunts that we've had like the boston marathon bombing or something like that where we had people doing their own investigation and pointing fingers at people or like just even something like swatting all of a sudden using these security forces now obviously if you have a citizen profile it'd be very easy to point the finger back you know it's it's one thing if you live in a gated community or it's not it's not uncommon to have you know pay private security to drive around your neighborhood or something like that or have something on call it's when you introduce this level of scale where you can instantly broadcast a manhunt to 860 thousand people as a private company who you know you these are your paying customers this not it's a it's a different relationship i guess than you know then like a then like a government or a citizen or something like that that you know it like you said serah it can it can go off the rails pretty quick yeah there's you know there's also the the question of okay sure if i've got the money and for whatever reason i feel like i need a layer of protection private security sure you know you see it with you know people it sort of the celebrity sphere all the time right and sometimes for a good reason but then what happens okay let's say that there's some sort of the incident there's some sort of altercation well you know that citizen taking on quite a bit of risk if the company is saying well this is a tool that we set up that our our citizen user is just use it's just using a feature that we gave her but it has turned into a mess you know and how does that how does that shake out legally yeah i can imagine this screwing up a lot of things for actual law enforcement if you have you know like like you said they had no evidence even though they you know identified this guy he was eventually released i could see if a security force getting involved especially if you know if situation got violent or something like that that could actually you know mess up an investigation indeed well this one hopefully won't be violent as long as you like audio rooms before the launch of its ticketed spaces feature in the next couple of weeks twitter is previewing this feature so that us users can know what to expect when they host a ticketed space all right so this is how it works users can apply to host a paid live audio room if they have at least 1000 followers they have hosted three spaces in the past 30 days remember spaces is basically twitter's clubhouse competitor they also have to be 18 years old or older twitter will cover transaction fees it's partnered with stripe so stripe is handling the payments however there is a little bit of a breakdown and who gets what money 30 percent of app store fees either from apple or google are going to apply and this is a mobile feature so of a ten dollar ticket let's say i'm charging you ten dollars to come to my uh my ticketed spaces talk well that becomes seven dollars then of that seven dollars twitter takes 20 percent of that seven i get the other 80 so still i'm making money but you know it's something to consider twitter says when applications open they'll be processed within a few weeks and include a small us test group of hosts although anybody in the world can buy a ticket so they're starting the rollout for hosts but they're opening it up to the world as far as being able to come to the audio room spaces recently started allowing anyone with more than 600 followers to host free events they can also schedule events those are two new features and twitter says it's working on co-hosted event capability patrick what do you think about this is this is is if you're a big celebrity and your audience is on twitter and you've got something to say i can see you this being a lucrative thing but how many of those people are there patrick i think you're muted that'll teach me to actually touch my keyboard during a show um one you know there's there's an entire series of conversations between epic and apple right now about whether or not uh 30 percent is too much but 30 percent it is um this is an additional revenue opportunity this is an opportunity for twitter to have the most famous people on twitter generate money off of twitter and therefore consider twitter more valuable than say hosting a room in clubhouse i mean there's there's a lot of complicated messy stuff here there's the whole you know there's been a whole huge debate about newsletters and our news our newsletters a legitimate source of revenue or does it only happen when there's you know it's it doesn't you know it doesn't really matter if it you know if a hundred people pay you five dollars and that's five hundred dollars you wouldn't have made otherwise that's fantastic if you have 50 000 people paying five dollars that's a large number uh two or fifty thousand dollars and that's fantastic or maybe it's not if you make that much money that you can laugh at that but i think google a you know i you guys were talking earlier about like snap needs people to make content to make sure snap stays viable and this is twitter wants to figure out reasons to make twitter continue to be important to twitter users um or or the people on twitter that that that generate lots and lots of clicks and links and you know as you know somebody who's watched you know processing and handling fees go up and up it would be nice if these these fees were less um you know twitter taking 20 percent that's pretty hefty compared to a lot of other stuff out there but yeah i mean you know if you if you look at the map i mean you know the creator whoever's hosting that's getting 56 percent of whatever that ticket was um you know certainly so this is this is the bargain that every creator or every you know twitter user whether they want to go through the you know the extra effort of either managing uh patreon or some other sort of crowdfunding platform to then host that content which had its own set of fees and its own you know compromises and inconvenience uh but that's going to be i'm assuming it's going to be less for most instances than 56 percent like blanket fee uh whether the convenience of one click i'm instantly you know i i can pay with apple pay or google pay or whatever uh instantly kind of be in that room it's a seamless transaction if that's worth uh basically half of you know of your ticket price i i think that's an open question i'm certainly listen people will go for a long way for convenience i'm not saying that and this is definitely an integrate seems like it'll be a nice integrated solution that's just a that's a big slice of the pie yeah the whole the whole idea that there are so many clubhouse clones now and for the most part clubhouse is the only standalone product right all the other big platform said oh well let's just bundle something that clubhouse does into our existing platform which to me makes a lot more sense the nice thing about clubhouse and i'm not a huge fan of the app uh just because i don't know there's only so many audio rooms i can i can i can uh you know drop in on but that was sort of the beauty of it is i could kind of bounce around you know as long as i had access to the app i wasn't you know if i was sort of not into a conversation or i had something else to do it wasn't really a big deal if i if i jumped out or maybe switched over to something i thought was more interesting you know once you get me to pay for something and i feel like oh this is really worth my money you know this is you know my favorite i don't know guitarist teaching me how he made that one song kind of thing i'm just you know spitballing here uh that that might be great i'm gonna say yeah i'm glad i've had these ten dollars and i don't really care how they split it up i'm i'm just glad that i have access but if it's not great it i wonder how the content that's being offered will change because if you're a certain caliber of celebrity or otherwise notable person sure you can get away with just charging and you do whatever and people are happy to be there but a lot of people who are popular on twitter might have to rethink like eh you're not just going to start a stream and and rift you have to have a little bit more of a plan going in well if you want to join the conversation in our discord which is going 24 7 you can join it by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns well last week pre-orders for the framework laptop opened up it's a modular laptop designed to be easily repaired and upgraded over time there's even a diy kit available where you can you can put it together yourself if you're into that sort of thing it's great that consumers have these kind of options to buy something that's repairable by design although to be fair no one has had any time hands-on time with the framework laptop we've really haven't seen reviews out so we don't know if that one's any particularly any good but for consumers who own a laptop from other vendors the right to repair becomes a really important question so patrick i know this is a this is an area of passion and interest for you uh what right does i i guess kind of can you break it down what right does the everyday consumer or even an independent technician have when it comes to repairing tech boy this is a complicated and messy question um it was funny also because i was chatting online with a couple of friends uh or on twitter i should say about the framework laptop which led to one person being like oh you know people need to think about right you know if if it's not glued shut you know it won't be as waterproof and repairs in i'm babbling but it's interesting uh i babble because it's been kind of fascinating to watch the reactions because right to repair bills have have been you know floating up at the state level all over the place for the last few years and some of the responses to those get really fascinating but uh you know you had a link on here about uh the french repairability intakes uh there's been a lot of news lately like vice did an article about how leaked apple brood pins uh blueprints were helping independent technicians repair things and you know the first thing i should point out is upgrading or an upgradeable product is not the same as right to repair but devices that are designed to be upgraded are often significantly easier to repair because for example they're designed to be opened and that's one of the challenges with a lot of things uh there was one notable i can't remember maybe it was a debate in new hampshire where the uh the the member of the the uh the the the the response was like cell phones are supposed to they're just going to be disposable we don't need a right to repair bill and uh that's an interesting kind of response because the vast majority something in the neighborhood of a half a million phones get disposed of on a on a want to say a monthly basis uh maybe five or 20 of those depending on whose number you're looking at actually get recycled so all of this stuff is ending up in landfills which is generally bad and when you look at studies uh like pier did a study and increasing repairability can save families hundreds of dollars per year because their devices last longer they keep them running longer um you know being able to open devices modern repair and unlock and jailbreak the software electronics those are like the foundations of what the iFixit folks call their consumer bill of rights and i i mentioned iFixit because they were an organization that came out very very early to try to do things like help you repair your iphone for example uh they came up with tools so when apple was like we're going to put a special five star five pointed pentastar screw on our devices so nobody will be able to open them while they commission their own screwdriver so that you could open that up they have uh tens of thousands of guides repair guides not just for a lot of electronics but for stuff like washing machines and um you know you don't just need tools or parts or the ability to open something up but you need repair information um you know reasonably priced independent repair shops and a lot of people are like that's ridiculous but you see it already exists and this battle has already played out for your car for example uh there was a big fight in massachusetts to do things like make obd2 codes available so you could find out what that you know check engine line well that's an obd2 code okay well how do i do that well you go to the dealer and you pay a hundred dollars and then they tell you whether you'll have to pay thousands more um and uh you know this is this is an idea that if this information is made available then more things can be repaired and fixed and more affordable um there's a really weird article when you start to write to repair this is really weird opinion piece that shows up from uh iEEE.org's spectrum and you know i'm gonna grossly oversimplify it and i just want to say right to repair is not forcing you to repair your own items there seems to be a little confusion there at least in this one article and it's a very popular article which means it's linked to or you know in a lot of ways uh you know nobody's forcing you to get a screwdriver and a soldering gun in a magnifying glass and just dive in there right because not everybody wants to or needs to repair their devices but um you know there was a really kind of a the biggest recent update around this was an FTC report called nixing the fix or the full title is nixing the fix and FTC reports on to congress on repair restrictions and it talks about that you know uh warranties are being voided which is a violation of the magnus and moss warranty act which goes back to 1975 which basically says hey if you offer a warranty there's some things you need to do for it to be okay for you to offer a warranty which sounds a little strange until you start looking at sort of what was happening uh back then with warranties being voided for specious reasons um yeah I kind of cycled this back to cars again because the magnus and moss act is a big deal because it used to be like you would take your truck to the dealer because there was a carburetor problem and the dealer was like you put oversized tires on that you avoided your warranty so you're gonna have to pay full ticket for that carburetor that exploded well inside the warranty repair period um i'm oversimplifying and i'm using my goofer voice but but this is the kind of stuff that would that would happen um you know so there's a really great i'm gonna kind of try to synthesize this but that FTC report which was pretty you know across the aisle and and supported by all the political parties uh quote even when a warranty does not explicitly require that repairs be performed by the original equipment manufacturer the oem using oem parts many manufacturers restrict independent repair and repair by consumers through product designs a complicated prevent repair unavailability of parts and repair information designs that make independent repairs less safe policies or statements that steer consumers to manufacture repair networks application of patent rights and enforcement of trademarks disparagement of non oem parts or independent repair software locks or firmware updates and user license agreements um you know using things like the dmca to prevent people from repairing their hardware is a little weird um you know but it's an interesting battle that's going on and a lot of it is about whether or not things should be disposable whether or not you should be forced to you know and when you look at some of the studies it's like there was a i want to say an illinois study on hospital equipment uh and total life and if you had to use the oem for repair the cost was generally 20 20 percent higher 18 or 20 percent higher than if you the hospital is able to use independent repair shops so you know the one of the things the fdc commission came together and and said is you know based on a review of comments submitted in materials presented during the workshop there's scant evidence to support manufacturers justifications for repair restrictions and i'll be honest i'm not an unbiased observer in this i believe that you should be able to repair things i believe that you should be able to fix things to keep them out of landfills to conserve resources um and because i'm also an inveterate breaker of screens at least but they're not armored and i think it's nice when you can fix the things you own instead of you know recycling them or giving up on them but right now there is a lot of stuff out there in terms of or fights right to repair dot org is really interesting to look at and also be aware especially if you live in an agricultural state you may notice that there is a heavily supported bill for agricultural right to repair but the consumer electronics bill is kind of language which uh well there's conversation for another day well it's uh it's something that we'll definitely you know we'll keep talking about as we learn more about it but i think at the very least you know some of the points that you covered where you know a company could say it's just dangerous for you as a consumer to do this so we're just gonna we're gonna take that danger off of your hands maybe true in certain senses you mentioned hospitals well there there maybe is a reason that the hospital really needs to go through the oem but not always um and it's it's better to give some gives the control back to the consumer all right rich let's check out the mail bag all right sarah sounds like a plan well we got an email in response to chris christianson's underwater photo tip from yesterday's show and comey had an idea he said i believe a 360 degree camera would be great for underwater photo and video with the invisible selfie stick which is kind of sits in the blind spot of the 360 camera it would look like you took another diver underwater to film you you can keep the 360 360 video rolling and crop it later to get regular video in any direction the only downside is if you crop regular video the resolution is lower than something like a 4k gopro for example if your 360 video is 5.7k it becomes about 720p if you crop an 80 uh 80 degree uh field of view from it i had a good experience with the insta 361 series and he would recommend the one r and one x2 and the riko theta series which is like those little handheld uh riko 360 cameras some models are waterproof but i think you need an underwater case for diving probably well advised but uh but good thoughts i've heard i've heard good things uh about that insta 360 so i bet you uh i bet you'd be up for the task yeah that's good stuff thanks comey and you know even if it drops down to 720p it's like you know for an underwater photo it's still gives you some fun creativity to be had uh if you have any feedback on anything that we talk about on the show like comey did today please do send it our way questions comments everything is welcome feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also like to shout out patrons at our master and grand master levels today they include pat shiren urwinster and philip shane we'd also like to thank our brand new boss your name is kathryn and we love you we just started back at us on patreon so thanks kathryn you boss you well and you may have noticed len peralta on the show today and len has put together some fantastic artwork for us len what do you got for us today well thanks rich you know i find uh ticketed spaces and twitter very interesting uh however i feel that twitter is missing a um a marketing angle here i think they can call the tickets twickets right i mean am i am i alone in this right i think twickets right and not only that but the image i drew today someone had mentioned in the chat how does ticket master come into this well this guy uh the image is of a scalper who is skill scalping these quote unquote tickets and of course he's from ticket master selling them for 300 bucks a pop so uh who knows ticketed spaces interesting stuff who knows what's going to happen but uh this image is available right now at my patreon patreon.com forward slash len also at my online store len peralta store dot com and you can watch me every week on twitch.tv forward slash len for all that you can watch me put this together live and actually help uh me put it together just like some of the people in the chat room did so thank you very much for that thank you len great stuff is always tickets i mean you know they had it right in front of them how does twitter not pick that up yeah also thanks to patrick martin for being with us today patrick where can people keep up with the rest of your work because you're a busy man avxl.com is is always a good place uh that is the podcast house with robert here at about home theater and audio or just go over to the twitters and look for at patrick norton excellent we are live on this show monday through friday for 30 p.m eastern 2030 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live rich and i are back on monday and we be joined by nate langson talk to you then and have a great weekend this week's episodes of daily tech news show was created by the following people host producer and writer tom merits host producer and writer sarah lane executive producer booker roger chang producer writer and host rich truffleino video producer and twitch producer joe kunz associate producer anthony lemos spanish language host writer and producer dan compost news host writer and producer intern dr nicole ackerman's social media producer and moderator joe zoe dederlin our mods beatmaster w scottis one bio cow capt kipper and jack shitt mod and video hosting by dan christiansen video feed by shanway music and art provided by martin bell dan luders moustafa a a cast and creative ass starts a cast ad support from great trace gainer patreon support from steven brown contributors for this week's show includes scott johnson justin robert young and patrick norton guests on this week's show included gen cutter and rob demillo live art performed by lenn peralta and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible this show is part of the frog pants network frog pants network get more shows like this at frog pants dot com diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this bro