 Coming up on DTNS, Yahoo Japan bails on Europe over GDPR, why Whirtle sold out, and Nika Monford highlights the woman who brought animated gifts and much, much more. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 1st, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. As I mentioned, co-host of this novel, S-Cast, Nika Monford is on the show, hey Nika. Hello, hello. Good to have you. We are, we're trying something new in 2022. You may have heard Nika do her Teching While Black segment on the show. Those were always prerecorded. This year we're going to have Nika here so we can like chat about it. I love it. It's good. We were just talking about whether Calendly links are rude on good day internet. If you'd like that wider show, that's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of big thanks to our top patrons, today they include Pepper Geesey, Eric Holm and Carmine Bailey. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg sources say that Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal will be reviewed by the FTC instead of the Justice Department. The FTC will investigate whether or not the takeover harms competition. And under FTC chair Lena Kahn, the agency also sued to block Nvidia's proposed purchase of ARM. We all know how that worked out, as well as Lockheed Martin's deal to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Incorporated. India announced plans for its central bank to launch a digital rupee by 2023. So if you're playing digital currency bingo, add that to your card. There's also a new tax scheme for NFTs and cryptocurrencies coming in India, transferring any virtual assets will be taxed at 30%. And there's a proposed 1% tax deduction at the source on payments related to purchasing virtual assets. This proposal was not made through a still awaited cryptocurrency and regulation of official digital currency bill. And India is going to introduce a battery swapping policy. I feel like India has just been watching our show and is like, hey, those are great ideas. India will introduce a battery swapping policy in an effort to encourage electric vehicle adoption. India's Sun Mobility and Honda recently set up a battery sharing service in India already starting with three-wheelers, but they want to expand that to other vehicles. Google announced that Gmail has a new integrated layout available to start trying February 8th and will become default by April of this year and eventually will become the only option by the end of Q2 2022. The view makes it so that Google Chat, Google Meet and Google Spaces will get their own screens in Gmail that are accessible with large buttons on the left-hand side, replacing what we see now as the floating windows that they have. Also, people really excited at Google VPN came to iOS and notice a lot of people talking about that too. Meta is winding down a couple of big projects. Meta will sell most of Diem. Diem is the stablecoin project that was once known as Libra. They're going to sell it to Silvergate Bank. Silvergate plans to use it to foster the open source community that supports the technology. So they're going to keep working on a stablecoin of some sort. Also, Meta is ending its Express Wi-Fi program, which offered discount connectivity in a few countries, including India, South Africa and the Philippines. iPhone in Canada reports a notice of opposition from Apple against Ukrainian film director Vasyl Moskalenko over his Kickstarter-backed action comedy movie called Apple Man that involves a superhero who can levitate apples. That is the premise of the movie. The film raised about 120,000 US dollars on Kickstarter. Moskalenko told iPhone in Canada that Apple initiated trial proceedings only after Apple Man hit post-production. Even though Moskalenko says that the US Patent and Trademark Office already approved the film's name, Moskalenko says, my movie is about apples, the fruits. I'll have to spend almost all my Kickstarter money on litigation. But I mean, all of us would be confused if we saw a movie called Apple Man. We would immediately think it was an Apple TV plus show, right? Or a movie about Steve Jobs or, I mean, sure. I mean, there's a little bit of it can't copyright a title. So I mean, apples, apples existed before you, Apple. Yeah, it's the fruit. I'm not sure about that one. All right, speaking of Apple, Google Messages is rolling out iMessage reactions in beta for Android users. Yeah, you heard that right. That barking dog or cement truck rolling by just now while you're listening to me did not obscure the meaning of what I just said. Google Messages can now display Apple Messages tap backs no longer. Will you get a little text message describing the reaction? Sarah Lane just used a heart to respond to your thing. You'll get an actual heart. Actually, not exactly, though. Google Messages is going to convert the tap backs to appear on the bottom right corner of sent messages with RCS emojis. So Google will use face emojis instead of symbols. If you respond with a heart on iOS, it's going to show up as a smiling face with heart eyes on Google Messages. So you still get the hearts. They're just in the eyes. You get the point. Yeah, it's a little different. You'll get some hearts. You'll get more hearts, actually. A question mark will show up as a thinking face. Exclamation marks become face with open mouth, like. Ha ha is face with tears of joy. Really going to upset Gen Z with that one. And thumbs up and down display as thumbs. So those don't change. You still, you'll get the thumb up or the thumb down. The reason they're doing the conversion is these map to the reactions that Google Messages uses over the RCS standard. Although RCS has one extra reaction that Apple does not, the angry face. Nika, do you have a fair amount of Android users who have said, wow, your reactions come across in very strange text to me to the point where this might actually help everybody out? I only know a few people that actually have Androids. I can probably count them on one hand. And because I know that they don't come through, I don't even send them. I'll just send, you know, just a regular, you know. Well, I feel the same way. One of my very best friends has an Android phone, and I know that things just don't show up well on her end to the point where I no longer send them because I'm like, eh, why even introduce the confusion type that's going to happen, yeah. Yeah, so this seems like a step forward. I think it's closing the gap a little bit between the green bubble, blue bubble, but I don't think it'll ever be really closed. But it's getting the Android users a little bit more of the experience, I think, so. Well, now Google Messages people can respond to Apple Messages with an angry emoji that won't be converted. That's the other thing. I don't know that this works the other way around. I don't know that iOS is converting it, yeah. Yeah, probably not, because, you know, Apple can be petty like that. I mean, Apple will eventually incorporate RCS. They will. They're just dragging their feet because they don't want to have to until they have to. Right. Well, let's talk about Word Games Online, shall we? And a follow up to Tuesday's announcement that the New York Times was buying Wordle for seven figures, didn't we? We didn't get any more information than that, but hey, we're in the million dollar range. Wordle creator, Josh Wordle, wrote, I'd be lying if I said this hasn't been overwhelming. After all, I'm just one person and it's important to me that as Wordle grows, it continues to provide a great experience for everyone. Okay, he also noted that the New York Times games played a big part in their origins of Wordle, which he created. He wrote, I've long admired the NYTs approach to their games and the respect with which they treat their players. Their values are aligned with mine on these matters and I'm thrilled that they will be stewards of the game going forward. Many people have parsed the language of these announcements closely to seek clues on whether or not the New York Times will or will not put Wordle behind a paywall going forward. It's important to remember, it doesn't matter at all. What either party writes. You know, somebody bought somebody. They can say whatever they want. If the New York Times wants to put Wordle behind a paywall, they will. They may not do it tomorrow, but they will if they want to. And if they don't want to, they won't. A press release and a news article are not legally binding. That is one of the takeaways here. But obviously a lot of people would be disappointed if Wordle wasn't free anymore, but others would pay. So it's a little bit of, you know, what does it matter to you New York Times? Do you want fewer participants that pay? Or do you want more participants and nobody pays? Josh Wordle says, he will work with the New York Times to make sure that you will be able to keep your play history. That's important to some folks, but there does seem to be a lot of disappointment at the fact that it is no longer some sort of like indie game that we all discovered and word of mouth. And you know, when a big company buys something like this, understandably, a lot of people say, oh man, you've ruined it. So do we begrudge Josh Wordle for getting a little bit of a payout, getting out of this game? Should we be surprised that he sold it? I mean, seemed pretty quick to me, but hey, it was also very popular. Is there a world in which this doesn't eventually go behind a paywall? Not disappointed that he sold it. I could only imagine the amount of maintenance that he has to do on his own to keep up with this as more people got sucked into the game. It had to be an extreme amount of effort on his part to manage this whole thing when it started out as a gift for his girlfriend, a single person. Now there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people playing this game. Oh, I think we're in the millions at this point. And then just the upkeep of the servers, trying to house all this and keeping it up, it's probably another full-time job and something that he didn't intend to even be this. So I get why he sold it. I am a little skeptical of the New York Times. I saw his post saying that it would remain free. If he doesn't get that in writing in the contract that he signed to sell it, it's not going to do any good. I enjoy the simplicity of the website. It's bare bones. It's none of the excessive things. So what I fear is either one, it going behind a paywall, or if they don't put it behind a paywall, ads just popping up everywhere. And it really, for me, just kind of takes away from the experience. It's just like a five to 10 minute point of my day where I can go and play something pure and simple and then go about my day with the injection of a large corporation. Is that going to take some of the simplicity from it? And that's my greatest fear. I think disappointed might be too strong of a word for my reaction. I'm wistful. There was this beautiful moment in time where we were all playing this surprise hit that Josh Wardle said, I made it for one person, my wife. And it just kind of took off and I'm stunned and it's great, but I can't maintain it anymore. I was inspired by the New York Times Puzzles section. So to me, they're the best steward. I don't begrudge any of that, but there was this one moment in time where we were all just playing this independent progressive web app. It wasn't even a progressive web app because it doesn't have the calls that let it cash, which I kind of wish it did because then I could just save it to my home screen and never have to worry about it moving anywhere. But I know a lot of people are saying, sure, but because it's such a simple little game and because it's not an original game, there are games like this, there's plenty of clones out there. That's not the same. It's not the same as everybody playing this one really cool implementation that limited it to once a day. They'll let you share your boxes without spoiling. There's just something nice in the implementation. That's what New York Times found valuable is that huge audience that likes this implementation of it. And New York Times doesn't have to ruin that. They could just keep it as it is at a different URL and kind of seamlessly move you over there. But they're not, I don't think they're gonna resist the temptation to wanna move that audience. They may never put wordle behind the paywall. I wouldn't be shocked either way. They might, they might not, but they're going to try to use it to get you to pay for New York Times puzzles. And then that's gonna break the spell, I think for me anyway. What has struck me about all of this is how fast it happened, right? I still have friends, like friends who are very dialed into all sorts of internet things. As of yesterday being like, what is wordle? Who is wordle? Like, is this a joke? Like, how do I do? How do I do it? And that was made just a couple of weeks ago. However, and we don't know what the New York Times is going to do with this. Hopefully we will all be able to do our wordles every day and go on with our day, which was sort of the point of the game in the beginning. But if you are worried about a future where wordle is screwed up, seeing it has a story with multiple wordle-like clones, very similar. Again, this is not a complicated game. It's a game that if you like it, you like it. You like words, you can do it. And some are free to play for now and we will have that link in our show notes. Yeah. All right, here's a story that involves words, but not wordle. Yahoo Japan is a separate company from Yahoo. This is like knowing that Marley is dead at the beginning of a Christmas Carol. This story will not make sense if you don't understand that Yahoo Japan is not Yahoo. It's not the one that Verizon owned. It's not the one in the United States, totally separate. They just licensed the name more than 20 years ago. And also, Yahoo Japan is a vital and popular service in Japan, unlike the Yahoo in the United States in Europe. Yahoo Japan is huge in Japan. It's still vibrant. You see billboards for it, people use it for everything. There's a complicated nest of holding companies, but it is ultimately co-owned by SoftBank and Naver. Naver are the folks who made Line. But the important part is that it's really, really popular in Japan and it has designs on expanding outside of its home market. When they merged Line into Yahoo Japan, they got access to Thailand and a few other places. Well, back in March, Yahoo Japan CEO, Kentaro Kouabe, indicated the company would like to launch a global smartphone app along with Line. So we know they want to expand, except apparently they don't want to expand in Europe. Yahoo Japan announced that most of its online services will stop being accessible in the UK and the European economic area, that's the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, as of April 6th. So only email, credit card and e-book services from Yahoo Japan will stay available in those markets. If you're a Yahoo Japan email user and you travel from Japan to Europe, you'll still be able to get your email. But a bunch of the other services aren't gonna work there. In a statement, Yahoo Japan said it would be too difficult to comply with European regulations, which of course include the GDPR. A representative told IT media that cost of that compliance was a main factor. Now granted, Yahoo Japan's user base in Europe is small, since the service is almost entirely in Japanese and it's meant for a Japanese market, but it is an interesting move for such a big company that wants to expand to say, yeah, but not there, especially because there were a lot of scare stories when GDPR first came along saying, this is gonna drive business away, which didn't happen, except now it has happened with this big company. That was, I think, some people's fears coming true. I wonder how much, I mean, Yahoo Japan, like you said, Tom, is different than the Yahoo of yore and it is a huge market, but it's very, very regional. So how much does the idea of Yahoo Japan saying, nope, not even gonna go into Europe, even though probably a lot of Japanese people in Europe would like to have access to that, right? Without using a VPN or something. How much does that kind of hamper the growth going forward? Yeah, I think this is notable. It may just be a blip and no one else ever has a problem with GDPR. It may just be a cost-benefit. If we didn't wanna really be in Europe anyway, we could afford to comply if we had a big enough market there and maybe someday we will, but for now we're gonna cut costs and focus on Southeast and East Asia. That all makes sense to me. I just found it notable that a very successful company, if confusingly named, was saying, nope, GDPR, do expensive. Hey folks, if you're feeling social, why not get in touch with the DTNS audience on the socials daily tech news on Twitter because we ran out of characters. It's daily tech news, S-A-H on Twitter and DTNS pics, P-I-X, DTNS pics on Instagram. Go say hello to us there, please. Well, 2022 is a year of new beginnings and one of those new beginnings is that we're going to try the tech in well black segment live with Nika Monford, partially because we just wanna hang out with Nika and she's here and it's cool, the tech savvy diva, but also the content is the same. Nika's here to bring awareness to black technology leaders who are advancing the tech community through their innovations across a large spectrum of industries. So, Nika, we're so excited about this. Who are we highlighting today? Today we are highlighting Lisa Galopter, computer scientist, technologist, and chief executive. I think we all enjoy using GIFs, right? Heard that, hard GIFs. I might say GIFs, but yeah, you may not. Some of us enjoy using GIFs, some of us enjoy using GIFs. We welcome all kinds to this show, but yeah, yeah, no, GIFs are great, right? They're cool. Yeah, and they really live enough to give a little spark to the conversation. Well, we have Lisa Galopter to thank for that. She is the mastermind that developed the animation behind using and creating GIFs. So that's pretty a base to see with that. We're pretty much used GIFs in pretty much every interaction that we're using on social media and tech, so that's always something good to highlight, something that I'm not sure if that's what she intended for it to be, but it's pretty much in the lexicon of how we communicate with each other. She also is the brains behind Hulu and Shockwave, which ultimately led to the ascent of interactive media, web animation, and video games that we all use today. So she's kind of a digital expert, I would say. So those, that's pretty cool. And she's been able to parlay that expertise in the digital space to lead BT Digital as its cheap content officer. She was also, as I mentioned earlier with Hulu, she was a part of that senior management team that launched the technology and software behind that platform. And a third thing that I found quite interesting is that she is a former member of the Obama administration, where she served as the chief digital officer for the Department of Education. So she pretty much has parlayed her experience into actual development into leadership of other large companies. And currently what she's doing is she's focused on TechQuitable, which is the company that she founded and is CEO of. And what this company does is it helps other companies to solve workplace issues around harassment. And like I said, it's a third party tech-enabled bus platform, and it addresses issues in the workspace bias, discrimination, and harassment. And in addition to creating this company, leading it and pretty much bootstrapping it, she's raised over $2 million for the company, which makes her one of the first 40 black people ever to raise over a million dollars in venture capital. So ultimately, her lived experience has pretty much shown and proven to be the embodiment of what we say in this segment, advancing the tech community through innovations across the spectrum of industries. I think she's pretty much well nailed all of that. So it's one of those things where she pretty much, helped create the way we consume all digital content. She's of course on Twitter, and you can follow her at Lisa Galopter, and it's L-I-S-A-G-E-L-O-B-T-E-R. Sure, that'll be in the show notes. And you can also follow the company on Twitter, Tech-A-Table, which is T-Underscore Equitable. So that's pretty cool. And it's even more cooler that I get to bring you Teching While Black today as we celebrate the first day of Black History Month. So it all lined up. Indeed, this is so cool. I've benefited from so much of her work that I didn't even realize until GIFs, Hulu, so cool. I feel like we should all go on Twitter and send a GIF of thanks to Lisa Galopter. And also, I mean, there are many companies that are running great, but there are also companies that have a lot of workplace harassment issues. And to have a company saying, listen, this is what we do. We want to help you. We want to make everybody better. And this is why you would hire us to come in and make your workplace better is a pretty cool thing. Definitely. Indeed. Definitely. All right. I'm gonna put on my Sophia Petrilla voice for a second. Picture it. Sometime in the 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci drew a design for a one-person helicopter propelled by an aerial screw. Yes, 1480s people. Back in 2019, not that long ago, as part of a design contest, the University of Maryland engineering team designed and tested da Vinci's vision, put it in practice. Since then, team member Austin Preat has built an unmanned quadcopter drone called Crimson Spin that incorporates da Vinci's original aerial screw design to successfully fly in it on a few brief journeys as part of his master's degree. Preat also presented his results, including the first video of the aircraft flying at the transformative vertical flight 2022 conference in San Jose, California last week. Wish I would have known about it. I would have gone. Although Preat says he's only built and tested this small drone, it's small. The technology could work with a model large enough to haul a human or maybe more than one human. It's important to note that Leonardo da Vinci did not have access to things like aluminum, plastic, electric motors, batteries, or computer control systems that today can actually make his aerial screw design a reality. He just couldn't get the venture funding for it back in the 1400s that he needed to get this off of that. He also had like leather and cloth. Yeah. Where are the capital? Where are the VCs to help this guy along? For some people, it may be weird to find out that this design, this 1400s era design works at all. We've had other people demonstrate that, but to turn it into a UAV, to turn it into a quadcopter drone, that's genius. I love this. And especially being like, yes, in the 1400s, somebody had a pretty good idea for this and look, it works. Yeah. With some modern technology involved, of course, but he was a wrong. Where's the lie? All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Bodie from the Kilowatt podcast wrote in with some great thoughts on TVs in reaction to our discussion with Rob last Friday. Rob DeMilla, among Bodie's thoughts were some stats on battery fires. How often do they happen? How much do you be worried about it? Bodie writes, it is true that EV battery fires can be more difficult to extinguish and reignition is more common, but there's not a special chemical that we use to put it out. We use lots of water to cool the battery pack below the ignition temperature, and then we watch for a reignition or if we fail to put out the fire, burns the car to the ground. In that case, the fuel and the car is removed and the fire still goes out. On January 1st, 2022, says Bodie, auto insurance EZ, that's the letter E and Z.com, wrote an article on EV fires versus ICE fires, which is safer and based on the data from the National Transportation Safety Board, Bureau of Transportation Statistics and recalls.gov. According to the article, hybrids are more likely to catch fire. Bodie gives us some stats involved in that, says in closing, as best as I can tell, the data that they use for this comes from a 2018 report from the NTSB spanning from 2013 to 2017. But they also looked at recall data, which means the data may be more up to date. Anybody? Those stats are where the devil lies in these details. Per 100,000 hybrids sold, there were 3,474.5 fires. Gas vehicles or petrol vehicles, there were 1,529.9 fires, so roughly half. But electric vehicles, there were 25, 25.1 fires per 100,000. So electric vehicles quite catch on fire a lot less, according to these stats. Yeah, sounds that way. Nika, do you have an EV? I don't. I would like to. I actually think so. That's always my reaction too, it's like, no, but I would like to. I've looked into it, but I want an SUV now, and there's a particular company that I'm quite familiar with that has an EV SUV coming out, but we'll see, we'll see. I definitely think the benefits will definitely outweigh having a petrol vehicle. So it's definitely something that's, yeah, we're getting there. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, we want to, first of all, thank all of our patrons for supporting us, and we'd like to occasionally thank a special patron who's been with us for quite some time, and today that person is Kome Harada, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Kome. Not only for all the years of support, but all of the great feedback that you give us all the time, please never stop doing that. Yeah, love your emails, Kome, keep coming. We absolutely do. We also thank you, Nika Monford, for being with us today, and happy first day of a special month, and let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you might be talking about this month. Sure, definitely on Twitter, at TechSavvyDiva, I'm pretty much there most of the time. You can also definitely tune into my podcast that I co-host with Terence Gaines, Novel West podcast, where we also, where this whole teching while black kind of, was birth over there, so you can hear more weekly throughout the month, particularly about that, and just other Apple-focused and tech-focused things as well. Well, excellent. So glad to have you here. I can't wait for you to come back. We are live on this show Monday through Friday. Did you know? Yeah, we're live, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson, and boy, does he have thoughts on all those game company acquisitions you've heard about this week. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.