 Coming up on DTNS, Epic and Apple make their court arguments public, a peer-reviewed study of the power usage of Bitcoin, and Andrew Heaton is here to tell us about the tech he uses while traveling America like a modern-day podcasting Woody Guthrie. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 8, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. For the first time ever from Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm Visya's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, the host of Alienating the Audience and the Political Orphanage, please welcome everyone, Andrew Heaton. Hello, I am so glad to be here. Hi. Hey, Andrew. Good to have you. We were just talking a lot about language, second-person plurals, and Texas maybe having the most woke usage of the English language on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei Asia's sources say that some production of MacBooks and iPads have been postponed due to shortage in chips and display components. Production plans for iPhones reportedly not been impacted, but sources say that component supply is quite tight. Also related to ship shortages, GM announced temporary shutdowns at more plants and extended others, bringing the total idle factories to eight. It will restart production at one plant in Wentzville, Missouri. The latest Windows 10 Insider preview adds Microsoft Paint and the snipping tool to the Microsoft Store, letting them be updated outside of major Windows operating system updates. Paint 3D was introduced in 2017 as a replacement to MS Paint, and it will no longer be pre-installed in fresh Windows 10 installs, but still available in the Microsoft Store. HMD Global, which makes phones under the Nokia brand, announced a new affordable 5G smartphone from between 75 to 349 euros. The top-of-the-line X20 gets you a 6.67-inch screen and 64-megapix camera running on the Snapdragon 485, the 5G chipset. Also has a slight dual-site feature to use on the front and rear cameras at the same time and comes with a warranty and promise of security updates for three years. Samsung will release its previously announced Galaxy SmartTag Plus on April 16th for $40, unlike the already released SmartTag that only uses Bluetooth. The SmartTag Plus adds an ultra-wideband radio for more accurate tracking and added augmented reality effects. Lenovo announced the Legion Phone Dual 2, which offers a 6.92-inch 144Hz OLED display, pop-up selfie camera on the side, two batteries, two USB-C ports, and two cooling fans. The devices use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 system on a chip, offer up to 18 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage and are coming to China in April and Europe in May, starting at 799 euros. All right, let's talk a little bit about something else. Justin, what do you have? Oh, hi. My name is Justin. I'll be your host this segment. Our chefs have prepared Facebook news three ways today. Let's start with the first. Facebook's research and development MPE team released a public beta of Hotline, an audio, Q&A web app. That's not exactly Clubhouse. Wink, wink. You can type in questions, which will be voted on by the audience. You can do video and events can also be recorded. Yeah, I think this will be as successful as Facebook paper. Oh gosh, Facebook paper. So long as I can ruin some of my friendships with it, I'm in favor. Our second special is testing of the US on small labels on posts from pages to distinguish them from being a quote public official, quote fan page, or quote satire page. So now that story from the Babylon B about Governor Ron DeSantis getting a spray tan will carry the helpful satire page label. So you'll know that his tan is real, maybe unless a fan page or a public official make another statement at which point that will be appropriately labeled. I love that a very small gray satire page showing up on my news feed is all we need. I just I've been struggling to figure out if the onion is for real or not for about 20 years. And I'm really looking forward to when they clarify. And finally, may I direct your attention to our third preparation, Facebook open sourced its casual conversations data set designed to identify age, gender and skin tone based in computer vision and audio machine learning models. This data set includes 45,186 videos from more than 3000 and 11 paid participants who provided their age and gender skin tone were measured on the Fitzpatrick scale by trained annotators from a range of backgrounds in Atlanta, Houston, Miami, New Orleans and Richmond. You can have your ML algorithm make its best attempt to identify age, gender and skin tone, and then compare it to what the participants actually said about themselves. Yeah, this will be great for combating bias. No joke here. This is a good way to say like, hey, let's let's make a data set you can use to double check your machine learning algorithm to see how it does against what people actually say about themselves or with skin tone, what people who are paid to know about this actually say about what that tone should look at, which is a good way to fine tune a model. It is a good way to fine tune a model, although I would I do have questions about exactly whether or not it will fight bias in the way that we have defined it in machine learning and AI. Ultimately, no matter what that's going to come to, even if you have the most accurate machine learning algorithm, the application of what you look to do with that will oftentimes for the end user be what defines the bias. So whether or not you've got a perfectly running machine, if you're directing it in a way that that might not hue with where your customer base is, then I think we're still going to have this larger AI ML conversation. Yeah, I mean, you're not going to get rid of all bias that that that's right. But this is at least a step towards getting rid of it at the beginning of the process. I have to say going back to the hotline, the hotline beta, which is again, as you mentioned, Justin, not exactly clubhouse. It's more of a Q&A, but an audio audio app that obviously the company is hoping will catch on. And everyone who's hanging out on Facebook will start to use this as well. I am interested in this, actually. I mean, it's kind of more of a quora thing, I feel like, than anything else. In the sense of, hey, I've got this question, hive mind, help me get some answers. I will be interested to see how many people want to use that. The question isn't, is it a good idea? The question is, do we want to go to Facebook for it? And that ultimately is the larger thing. Yeah, look, Facebook for my money has the best messenger app, the best text app. It's faster and more responsive than Instagram or DMs or or in a lot of ways SMS and iOS messages. I am loath to check it. When I check it, I want to get out of it, like as if it's a haunted house and very slowly, because I don't want to be in Facebook's ecosystem. The second that I spent them, every second that I spend there, I feel like that I'm not just trying to keep the self confidence of my friends and family high by liking the posts of their children. Like that's that's what I want to do. I want to give them that and then I want to leave as fast as possible. I briefly hired a personal assistant at one of those outsourcing international companies to go through my Facebook feed and send me an email of all of the news involving my relatives so I could just read that rather than go on Facebook. And then that person got tired of doing it and quit and I haven't bothered coming back. I was like, I'm done. I checked the messenger periodically, but otherwise I'm off. Yeah, as far as hotline goes, clubhouse's advantage is you don't have to look at each other, right? It's easy. You just turn it on. So adding video, I don't know. Previously on Epic versus Apple, Epic tried to add a way to pay for things in Fortnite that didn't use Apple's iOS payment systems. Apple kicked Fortnite out of the Apple store for violating its policy and then Epic filed a civil anti-trust suit against Apple. That all happened back in August. Thursday, Apple and Epic's findings of fact and conclusions, aka discovery, became public, which gives us a look at what to expect from each side of the trial once the arguments begin. Apple is going to argue that the, quote, vast majority of apps on its app store are free to download and Apple makes nothing off them. So they need to make a little bit of money off the people who do charge. And as for that 30% commission Apple takes from those that they do charge, it points out Epic made $700 million off Fortnite on iOS and that Epic pays similar fees on the other platforms it's on. Also, Apple will claim it competes with Google Play, Microsoft Store, PlayStation Store. They're going to say, hey, there's lots of competition for us out there. Apple points out that some other app stores don't even let you synchronize your in-game purchases between different platforms. But Apple's key argument is going to be, quote, Apple has no monopoly or market power in the relevant product market for game app transactions. That's really what it's going to hinge on. Epic is going to argue that iOS is a key market and that Apple works to make sure its customers can only be reached there. They want to redefine the market as Apple's customers. Epic has found some pretty salacious conversations and emails in Discovery, quoting an agenda for a 2010 executive meeting where Steve Jobs says he wants to, quote, tie all of our products together. So Apple further locks customers into its ecosystem. I think we caught it of all guests that, but he's got him saying it on the record. Epic also quotes Phil Schiller saying that moving iMessages to Android would hurt more than help Apple. And Craig Federighi saying, quote, iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones. Now, if you're like, wait, what does message have to do with this? That's just an example of Apple's lock-in thinking that Epic is going to try to demonstrate. Epic also will argue that consumers and developers have a worse experience because Apple is in the middle of customer complaints over payment. Epic will say Apple enables fraud, since it is the one to verify complaints and it doesn't have access to Epic systems. Therefore, it wrongly refunds money sometimes when there's no problem or does not refund money when there is a legitimate complaint. Epic is also planning to call Apple's security justifications for vetting apps a pretext. Epic will point out direct app sales happen on the Mac without needing to have an app store, which Apple seems to consider just to secure on the Mac. Why isn't it secure on the phone? Finally, though, Apple will argue that the app store and iOS are its intellectual property and it is free to choose which parties with whom it will deal. The judge expects to begin the trial May 3rd but has not fixed that date permanently yet. How long do we think this is going to go? If we had an over and under. All right. So then what? 2023? All right. The 2024 election or the end of this lawsuit, that's your over under. That's a tight one. Yeah. I think this lawsuit finishes at the end of November 2024. So after the election. So after the election of 2024. Yeah, I mean, because this is kind of here for larger reasons than whatever damages they are claiming, right? This is this is to a road from Fortnight's for Epic's perspective to a road taking a good shot at a vulnerable moment to a road. Apple's hold on the app store. It's why they've garnered support from other folks who are in similar situations. And for Apple, it's defending. They're going to keep this money train rolling as long as they possibly can because it's likely to be a split decision. The judges indicated she's sympathetic to boot in Fortnight out for not following the rules, but she thinks Apple went too far suspending Epic's developer account. So you're gonna have a split decision, which means possibly two appeals in a more complicated situation. So yeah, it's gonna drag on. I know how everybody can win if the first judge recuses herself because she plays Fortnite loves it. And the second judge awards to Apple both. Okay, Fortnite gets the advertising Apple gets the revenue. Everybody wins. Could work could happen. And then both both legal teams did the floss dance. All right, let's talk about Bitcoin and energy usage for a tick, shall we? So the creation of a new Bitcoin is regulated by a computer intensive process collectively, collectively called mining. Basically, meaning computers solve complex equations and then the system rewards them with coins. But because of the computing power, it needs a lot of power, just a lot of power. So one of the few peer reviewed studies of power usage by cryptocurrency mining has been published in the journal, Nature Communications. The study called policy assessments for the carbon emission flows and sustainability of Bitcoin blockchain operation in China was written by scientists from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Cornell University and the University of Suri. The study estimates that China accounts for 75% of Bitcoin mining in the world. That's because specialized mining chips for mining are made in China and rural China has cheap electricity. By 2024, China's Bitcoin operations could account for 5.41% of all China's electricity generation emissions. The study believes that all else being equal, mining alone could cause China to exceed its own carbon reduction targets. Inner Mongolia announced plans to ban crypto mining in the province after missing 2019 energy targets set by Beijing. CNBC notes that the founder of coin metrics, Nick Carter, criticized the paper for not showing province level data on the energy mechs of Chinese miners. So I made a promise about a month ago to say I'm not going to cover the energy usage of Bitcoin until we start seeing some substantive information. This is the first peer reviewed article I've seen since I said that. And 5.41%, you can make comparisons and say that's as big as Denmark and stuff like that. But 5.41% is not dominant, but it's a lot. That's a lot. And it would make it difficult to reach carbon emissions targets if you just did everything the way you were planning to do it, but didn't account for that. That's something you have to account for. Well, I'd like because I've seen this floating around that Bitcoin is producing too much carbon, et cetera, and so forth. But I never see stacked up next to this what the traditional banking sector produces in terms of energy, which I'm assuming that like big bank buildings have computers in them and things that run it. I have no idea. I don't know whether they're more or less. Yeah, I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting for a good rigorous study of that as well, because the banking industry does use energy. It may not use as much. It may use more. I have no idea, even. Yeah. I think the other side of this is you are mining these coins for what? And this is not a criticism of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general. They obviously have some kind of use because they have persevered throughout tremendous skepticism in financial markets that long for any kind of stability. However, we don't know exactly what it's going to be in the next 10 years. We don't know whether it's going to be king currency. We don't know whether it's going to be something so niche because some calamity befalls it. So I while I am sympathetic to the idea of, all right, if we if we just keep drawing this line at this trajectory, it's going to hit five percent of all electricity usage in China. I still feel like this, you know, beyond the general idea that, yes, indeed, mining Bitcoin costs a lot of energy. I don't know really what this tells us. Yeah, it's there's a lot of other factors that need to be incorporated. And I don't fault this paper for not incorporating them. This paper is one piece of information in evaluating that. And we need a lot more. And I'm hoping we get those. Speaking of using energy, NFTs, you know, they use the cryptocurrency. A lot of people criticize NFTs because I don't know, maybe they use a lot of energy to Roger Chang writes a column on our Patreon every week about stuff. And this week, his Patreon covers several things to consider before you dive into NFTs, including that energy usage situation. If you want to get that column, become a patron. It's only a couple bucks a month, patreon.com slash DTNS. All right. So the reason we wanted to have Andrew Heaton on the show today is because, sir, you you have been traveling America in a scamp. And that is the brand name of your trailer where where you have not missed a beat in podcasting and posting two podcasts regularly covering an election. So we wanted to find out, OK, what kind of technology do you need to make that happen? So take us through it. What what what are what are the tech you rely on to make that work when you're going to be in Oakland one day in Los Angeles the next in Oklahoma the day after that? So in my mind, because I am podcasting, the two most important things for me from a work perspective and a technological perspective are electricity and internet access. So for electricity, I use a jackery 500 battery. So it's a portable battery. It's kind of like a really big lunch pail, and it holds 500 watt hours. So what ends up being about seven laptop charges? So I had that when I was when I was in Oakland collaborating with Mr. Young, I would schlep it to an office every day, like a bucket of water to fill it up with electricity and flush out the the old electricity, get fresh electricity in it, bring it back to the scamp and then I'd run my lights off and off of that kind of thing. And the other thing that I did was I switched to a mobile hotspot phone plan. So I do that for the most part when I'm on the road. But I have a backup thing as well. I got a thing called a Solis, which is a S O L I S. It's it's kind of like an orange hockey puck that operates as a standalone mobile hotspot. You don't need a SIM card for it. You can get a phone plan with it. You don't have to. You can you can do pay as you go. It's a lot clunkier than just using your phone as a hotspot. And in effect, it is the same thing as a mobile phone. It's just more limited. But I would recommend anybody looking in to do this, I look looking into this do that because for me, I've had several times where my phone didn't work for some reason. There was a problem with AT&T. And I just couldn't do it. But I had to do an interview or I had to get a certain amount of data. Having a redundant backup system was immensely helpful. And it's also helpful to in that my phone runs off AT&T, the Solis runs off of the Verizon network. And so I can kind of game it a little bit. I was going to ask you that because usually you see stuff like that run off the T mobile or sprint network. But this is Verizon. So that those are two massive AT&T. If you have AT&T and Verizon at your side, then you're going to get covered. And you can even one up that. So that's what I do. And I'm doing kind of step above duct tape level. I haven't built big technological harnesses for it. But there is a particular unit you can get where it's a mobile hotspot with four to six SIM card slots. So you could get a phone plan with each one of these things, a data plan with each of the companies you just mentioned, Justin. And just have that and have the internet kind of coming collaboratively out of that so that when you come into a zone that doesn't have sprint, but it does have AT&T, we just use that. There's also technology you can use. I've not bothered with this, but there are signal boosters that you can use. If I was going to be if I was going to be working from the wilderness, I would do this. Now in my case when I'm in the scamp, the scamps basically a mobile bedroom that I like to bring to people's places. So when I was in Austin, I was staying in Brian Brushwood's yard, but could use his bathroom facilities and his internet and that kind of thing. If I were going to be out in like national parks or the national forest, you'd probably need a signal booster because the signal is weak enough that you can maybe get email. You could probably text, you know, help by being murdered by an axe murderer or something if you really needed to, but you may not. So having a signal booster would be useful, although I haven't found that to be incredibly important on my end. So a signal booster if you're avoiding axe murders. Yes, exactly. The mobile battery, that Jackery, I've actually looked at that before. That's fascinating to me, but you also have a solar panel as well so that you don't have to schlep it to the office, I guess. Yes, that's right. So I got a solar panel. I originally, when I first got this, I wanted it to be a 100% autonomous vehicle that I could live out of for several years and just, you know, interact with bears and coordinate with people exclusively through Zoom. I found, like I said, that it works well as a mobile bedroom and that I'm probably most of the time when I'm traveling and working, unless I'm camping in an leisure state where I don't have to worry about this, if I'm working, I'm probably going to have a port of call through some friend's house or something nearby. However, I did want it to be fully autonomous or at least have the option of being fully autonomous from an energy perspective. So I bought a solar panel. They've become incredibly cheap and incredibly efficient. When I was a kid, solar panels were these dense black bricks that could maybe power like a flashlight and now they're much, much, much more efficient. I was going to originally drill holes into the roof of the scamp and I was going to put it on top and then caulk it and seal it and all of that so that it would just have a perpetual solar panel feeding into the Jackery. I elected not to do that, not because it would have been problematic from a technological perspective or an energy perspective. It would be much better that way. I didn't do that because the scamp does tend to heat up and I hate all temperatures above 80 degrees and I hate all humidity above 20 percent and so I didn't want to force myself into a situation where if I was going to be outdoors for a long period of time, I'd have to park the scamp in the sun. So I ended up keeping the solar panel mobile. I have a long cord that I can use with it and so if I want to park under a tree, I can leave the solar panel out somewhere else. The other benefit to that is that solar panels become far more effective when you're able to adjust the angle that they're at. Maybe 40 to 60 percent more efficient if you can tilt it and angle it. So theoretically if I were out camping but working and I wanted to recharge that Jackery, I could say set it up in the morning in one particular location and then after lunch move it to the other side of the scamp and the only issue would be security if somebody wanted to steal it. Gotcha. Well folks, we'll have links to all the products that that Heaton is talking about in our show notes at dailytechnewshow.com including a couple of the things he uses for podcasting. Well Andrew, with your scamp, I don't know. I don't know how many robots you have already but Boston Dynamics Robotic Dog Spot was one of several robots tested by the French Army during training sessions at a military school in the country. Both the Verge and France West both reported that Spot was used during a two-day training session with the intention of quote measuring the added value of robots in combat action according to school commandant Jean-Bet Piste Cavalier. The goal was to help students start thinking about how robots might be deployed in future combat situations. The students designed three offensive and defensive missions, Spot being used for mostly reconnaissance. The students worked first without and then with the help of the robots. Spot wasn't the only robot in testing by the way. Other bots deployed included a remote controlled vehicle called Optio X20 which has a cannon. Barracuda is another an armor plated wheel drone designed to provide cover to advancing soldiers. So it's Spot and others. Also important to note, Spot Root was provided by European distributor Shark Robotics, a Nexter group. Boston Dynamics had no knowledge of it and the terms of use for Spot prohibit using it to harm or intimidate any person or animal as a weapon or to enable any weapon. Wait so it's like a Mennonite robot? Like it's a pacifist robot? So they can use it to tow an old-timey carriage full of six soldiers, but they can't use it to shoot stuff. They can have it look around the corner and see if there's a sniper up there. This is more like when you really shouldn't be using the official enterprise level version of Microsoft Word because you should be paying for that. As far as Boston Dynamics goes, if you want to use these robots to kill people, that's going to be a price on the package beyond the one that's just there to drag you. You joke, Boston Dynamics is trying to fight that perception right now. They're very much like, no, we don't want these to be used for war. We used to save lives? Sure. But yes, no, we really, really don't want you putting guns in the hands of Spot. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So we were talking yesterday about the idea of photos being resurfaced because apps say this is something that you want, right? Look at this fun memory. And you go, this was a terrible memory. Not always good. So Corey wrote in and said, I got recently divorced. Corey says, I get a daily reminder of the fun times that we used to have. We took a lot of photos together. So it's very rare that the daily photo is not something heart-wrenching. And to make things worse, you took the dog. Talk about a tear-jerker. I've tried disabling the feature on the Amazon Echo, but it comes back no matter what. I've even reset the device. Google is easy because I could just swipe away the notifications. But please report if any ever solves this problem, love the show. Sorry, Corey. I imagine you want to disconnect Amazon photos from the Echo show. If it's showing photos, that's probably where it's getting it. If you've tried that already, it didn't work, then yeah, that's more tech support that we can give. But if you haven't disconnected the photos or gone in and changed your Amazon photos that it's pulling from that, that could be the problem there. But yeah, another example of this. I will also say in iOS, in that photo widget, there have been a few photos that I have not been excited about for one reason or another. The way that you take them out of the rotation is not exactly user-friendly. You have to go to edit. And then in the edit menu, down at the bottom, there's red text that says remove this from widget. So there is a way to do it. Good to know. Good to know. I just add lots of photos of women I'm dating where we both seem like we're kind of sad. That way, if it ever happens. Yeah, exactly. I've got a decent chance of being exactly neutral. Yeah, what's the difference? And now one where we're both like, you want to know what? We're better off. Good stuff. We'll listen. If you have ideas about how to remove photos that you might not like from any sort of app that you might be using regularly or you have any questions or comments on anything we talk about on the show, please do send them in to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Strengthen numbers. We love to get your feedback. I'll shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Matthew Stevens, Carmine Bailey and Eric Holm. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Jeff Smith, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jeff. You are our new boss. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young in his new studio for the first time. How's it feel? I'm just thrilled that nothing went wrong. As long as everything didn't start smoking and the mic didn't crap out, I am thrilled. But I am also continuing and have continued throughout this entire process to create politics, politics, politics episodes, including a great one last week that I did with Andrew Heaton and our friend Jen Briney, that I would encourage everybody to go find in the upcoming episode. We wrap up our greatest constitutional amendment bracket two versus one second amendment versus the first amendment. Heavy hitters who came out on top. You can find that out this Friday on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. Excellent. And speaking of Andrew Heaton, thank you to Andrew Heaton for being with us today. Such a pleasure, Andrew. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. My pleasure as well. Thank you for having me on here. I always like to talk about scamps and robot dogs. They're my two favorite topics. However, my podcasts don't have to do with all of them all of the time. You can check me out on the political orphanage, which is a policy and comedy podcast designed for people who don't really fit into the red team versus blue team thing and alienating the audience, which is a very nerdy sci-fi podcast. Yeah, honestly, between politics, politics, politics, the political orphanage and Jen Briney's podcast congressional dish. Yeah, the congressional dish. I feel like I have these are the three branches of my political podcast. So folks, go go check those out. We are live on this show Monday through Friday. If you can join us live, please do so for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We are back tomorrow. It's going to be a fun filled Friday with Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta draw on the news. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.