 Coming up on DTNS, Google wants to help you help the environment, Uber wants to help you leave the airport faster, and wow, that Twitch data breach was big, but was it also bad? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 6th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is producer. We were just talking about Thanksgiving dinner flavored candy corn and the new Twitter warnings for intense conversations. If you'd like that, get the expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Dan Voiles, Logan Larson, and Turning Bones. Yay. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced it intends to auto enroll an additional 150 million users in its two-step verification process by the end of 2021. Google said it would auto enroll accounts that have the proper backup mechanisms in place to make a seamless transition. Physical security keys, as well as Android phones and the iOS Google smart lock app are supported as a second factor. They did this with Nest and I was a little skeptical, but it kind of worked. So why not? Canon announced the $1,999 RF 5.2 millimeter F2.8L dual fisheye lens designed to be part of a new system to simplify VR and AR production called EOS VR, EOS VR. This lens is designed to be used with the 8K capable R5 mirrorless camera, supporting 190-degree capture, allowing for delivery of stereoscopic 180-degree 3D footage. Canon also announced the EOS VR utility and EOS VR plugin for Adobe Premiere to edit content from the EOS VR system. Amazon added a new feature in the Alexa app that gives users more time to finish speaking before the voice assistant begins processing and then answering the command. Users can opt out on any device using Amazon voice services to the feature through the device settings page. Cineverse is a company that helps route text messages for more than 300 operators around the world. It's one of the companies working behind the scenes to make sure that when you send a text from your Vodafone account to someone on SK Telecom, it gets there. In a US SEC filing, Cineverse revealed that in May of this year, it discovered someone had gained unauthorized access to its IT systems and upon investigation, Cineverse determined that the access had begun five years ago in May 2016. The filing says it gained access to databases of carrier customers but did not clarify if the attacker gained access to the content of text messages. You may recognize the name Cineverse. It was the company that delivered those 168,000 messages nine months later after one of its servers failed in 2019. HMD announced the Nokia T20, the first Android tablet with a Nokia branding since the 2014 and one. This 10.4 inch tablet includes a Unisoc Tiger T610 system on a chip, four gigs of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage, starting at $250 and available November 17th. The UK will also get a version with LTE for £200 sterling. The T20 ships with Android 11 with HMD promising two years of major OS updates. Wow, 2014, DTNS was less than a year old, last time we had a Nokia tablet. Google added options to search, maps, travel and nest thermostats to help individual users make more sustainable choices. So hey, if you're out there searching for climate change topics, you're going to see high quality climate related information, they say, in a dedicated section. Maps users will be able to set the most fuel efficient route as their default helps the environment, helps your pocketbook. Now if that does add a lot of time to a trip, it will present other options. It doesn't want you to have to spend hours on the road when you don't need to. This comes to the US first and then Europe will get it next year. Bike and scooter sharing info, also coming to 300 more cities worldwide. So-called light navigation for cyclists will be added in the coming months. That adds route info like your estimated time of arrival, elevation and such without having to leave the screen on, much safer when you're biking. Google announced research that's doing in Israel will be expanded to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to help cities optimize traffic lights to reduce wasted fuel when you're stopped waiting for the light to change. That is a big one for me. The travel searches that you do will now show which hotels have made meaningful commitments to sustainability, whether they've actually received environmental certifications. And when you look up an airplane flight directly, you're going to see the associated carbon dioxide emissions for that flight, including the impact of your seat choice, because economy seats take up less space. So Google considers them to have less impact because they're using less of the plane. Shopping searches will start to suggest sustainable and cost-effective options when searching for energy intensive applications. If you're buying a new furnace, dishwasher, water heater, stove, dryer, et cetera. For cars starting early next year, Google will add information to your results when you search for electric vehicles, like how many charging stations that are compatible with that vehicle are nearby. And when you're searching for how long that EV model takes to charge, it'll tell you that. All right. So lots of a potpourri, a basket of things to help you find more sustainable options. Obviously, this all requires somebody to be looking for them, I suppose. But what do y'all think? From the broader camera, I like that this feels like Google getting back to why they exist. This isn't so much a, they benefit from it for lots of reasons, but it's not so much of an ad play or this is some new service like Stadia or whatever that we don't know if it's going to have legs or not. This is them expanding upon what made Google great in the first place, which is better search and. Organizing the world's information. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. And in regard, you know, some people may feel weird about that. I don't know. But for me, this is really helpful, especially the light thing, like nothing more annoying than getting behind all the wrong lights. Obviously that research isn't happening here. And it's not, you know, more broadly available. I have a feeling it'll take a lot of sort of local cooperation to make that meaningful for a lot of people in their lives. But, but still this is them expanding on search and I like search. So I love this kind of stuff when Google talks about it. Yeah. I mean, I over the weekend, I was in San Francisco, which I know the city pretty well, but because I was going somewhere that I had never been before I was using. Well, I do Apple Maps and Google Maps in tandem sometimes just because I'm a crazy person, but I'd like to know how they differ in exactly precisely how they're telling me to get there. And so let's just say, you know, that that's sort of a masochistic way to be driving. But but let's say I'm just going with Google, you know, for now, Google is very good at saying, OK, you want to go to this place, we're going to show you the best route. Here's your estimated time of arrival, best of luck. So just to have more kind of pinpoints of, yeah, there's some up with these, you know, the the red light that you might be at for longer than you need to be there might be, you know, an eco-friendly way to go about your route that isn't going to cut into your total driving time to the point where you feel like it's not worth it. All of that stuff is just it's just it just makes the whole thing smarter. And I love it. Yeah, I think what is good about a lot of this sort of thing is most of it is good in more than one way, not just about sustainability environmental impacts, but saving you time in the case of better traffic lights. You're not sitting there, you know, just wasting not only fuel, but your life just waiting for that light to change or or a, you know, a situation where you're you're able to just get better information when you're bicycling and not not having to kind of juggle things aren't really meant for that. A lot of this is just good in that way too. Well, let's let's keep it in the family a bit and talk about Nest. Nest will roll out Nest Renew. This is a free service to users of third gen Nest learning thermostat next or excuse me, Nest thermostat E and the 2020 Nest thermostat new renew can be automatically or will or excuse me, can automatically adjust your thermostat usage. So you're doing more of your heating and cooling with renewable options like wind and solar, that sort of stuff when they're readily available. And if your utility charges different rates at different parts of the day, it can reduce usage when power is more expensive. So again, an effort to make things a little more efficient. If you want, you can pay $10 a month for Nest Renew premium, which enrolls you in a clean energy match. This will attempt to offset your energy usage by buying energy credits from the Bethel wind project and more projects to be added later. This is similar to the service provided by Arcadia and others, both the free Nest Renew and premium version will be available in the US by invitation only, at least for now, before becoming becoming widely available to everybody else. Yeah, I am part of a program that LA's power utility does with Nest and I think other utilities around the country do this too called energy rush hour. So when we have a heat wave recently, this has happened quite a bit, it gets above 100 degrees, everybody's turning on their air conditioner. Because I participated it, I get a little rebate on my bill, but I'm also contributing to lessening the stress on the power grid, making it less likely that we have a blackout, which is good for all of us, by letting them control my thermostat. And the way that works is when they know, for instance, that there's going to be an energy rush hour between, say, six and eight PM, right, because they want to reduce the load, they will actually lower my thermostat ahead of time. So they will cool my house lower than I normally do, so that it is cooler going into the rush hour when they've raised it. So let's say I normally do my air conditioning at 78 degrees, they'll lower it to 74 ahead of time. And then they'll up it to 80 during the rush hour so that it's less likely to go on, but the house is cooler. So that's, I think, how this is going to work. Nestri knew would say like, hey, we'll cool you down when it's cheap and when there's solar and wind available ahead of time of raising it when it gets more expensive. I mean, as somebody who, I mean, the air conditioning is a great example of energy usage, that is very costly. And I have an air conditioner now. I know my mom does as well, but she's pretty up on the, and I know this totally depends on where you live and the grid that you're a part of, but she's very up on, well, you know, you can't run the dishwasher, you know, between these times, same goes for energy sucking things like an air conditioner and a thermostat to be a little bit smarter to say, yeah, I know it seems like during the high time, you know, it's 80 degrees, like you were saying, Tom, because we've dropped down the temperature, you're probably going to be okay. Of course, you can override this as a customer, you know, and you're probably going to have to pay for it. But I think having something that is in place to say, you know, you as a human want to be comfortable in a variety of ways, and we're going to take all of that off of your plates. That's great. Because there are other things you can do to save energy with your with your heating and cooling as well. And you don't have to think about them with Nest Renew. Nest Renew is going to use its machine learning and its intelligence to kind of do it better than you could do it, because you'll forget to go over and change settings or things like that. I think that's pretty cool. Exactly. Yeah. Well, what isn't totally cool comes from Twitch. No. Twitch confirmed that its data has been breached and boy, was it breached. Attackers posted at 125 gigabyte torrent that includes Twitch's entire source code, common history, an unreleased competitor for steam from Amazon Game Studios, Univi source code for a game called Vape World and details of creator payouts going back to August 2019. The file doesn't appear to include passwords or addresses or email. However, it's worth noting that the torrent was labeled part one. Some users report that they have been asked by Twitch to change their password. One would think all Twitch users should change passwords and enable to factor authentication if you haven't already. And now is the time. Twitch also says it's working to understand the extent of the breach. I'm a little surprised they haven't emailed everybody. I haven't gotten one when I used Twitch every day. I haven't either. Yeah. I think that's a little odd, unless they knew of some specific cases or something and we don't know about that yet. But it seems like something you want to tell everybody in your service. In fact, I've found some bots that tie into Twitch that have been like on the money today saying, by the way, Twitch had a major thing. It has nothing to do with us, but we're going to recommend you change your Twitch password. So they're kind of, I don't know, it's weird. The bot community is sort of doing it anyway or reminding its users. And they're not owned by Twitch or not told by Twitch to do anything. So that's pretty interesting. But this is really massive. Like Tom was saying this morning on TMS for our tech segment. During that conversation anyway, we talked about how how big it actually is. And the fact that it's called part two doesn't mean anything or part one rather doesn't necessarily mean there's a part two or three or four. But everybody who hears this or otherwise, if you have a Twitch account, change your password, enable two factor authentication. If you haven't, and if you already have two factor authentication, still change your password. It's just the safe thing to do. But hopefully this, you know, we'll hear more about this. We'll hear if there's anything more drastic about it. A lot of people are freaking out about the idea that all comment history for every video is in this export. And I would say calm down because it's not that big a deal. The they were public to begin with. I I feel like comment history is like the least of my worries. Yeah, I agree. You know, if I'm if I'm active on Twitch. Yeah, I mean, the key to remember in case you're getting lost in the confusion here, there were no emails, passwords, addresses in this file. They didn't claim to have any and nobody's found any. The reason everybody say, change your password is gosh, there's some things in here that are hashed that could be passwords. Maybe they're not. And it's called part one, which means maybe they got more out of the database. If they got this much, they might have got hashed passwords. So it's just smart to be like, you know what, if there's even a question, just change your password and then you won't have to worry about it, right? You won't have to be gambling about it. It doesn't mean that they have passwords. It doesn't mean that there is an actual threat. It's just playing it safe. What they did do was get a huge amount of data out of Twitch. And that's where it starts to get interesting. It almost feels like they image to drives. They have so much. I mean, this this torrent is so huge at 125 gigabytes. Nobody has actually confirmed every single thing that's in it because it's a huge tree of nested folders. To me, I mean, the easiest way for someone to get this much data out of Twitch is to be inside of Twitch already as an authenticated user. We don't. I'm not saying that that is what happened. But it's it certainly raises questions like if it wasn't someone inside the company, how did they get all of this out without you noticing? Yeah, the one thing we haven't heard is about Twitch keys, Steam keys, stream keys, rather I keep saying steam. Stream keys are kind of a weird way of authenticating your account and running a stream. And it's this key that only you have. Well, if those got out, the potential is there for somebody to take over your account, whether they have your or well, at least stream on your account. Stream on your password. Yeah, exactly. They don't need your password or use a name to do it. So when you reset your password, it resets your stream keys. So there's another reason to reset your password, right? Exactly. Yep. Yeah. All right, folks. Well, if if you've got thoughts on this email, let's feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. Also, if you've been admiring that new logo, it's not even that new anymore. We got that new colorful logo in our album art. You can get that on a hat or a t-shirt. We've got hoodies. We got masks. We got mouse pads. We got baby bibs. They're all over there at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash store available to ship to you now. Uber is adding some travel features for those of you who have returned to traveling by air. First, the old Uber in its announcement highlighted Uber Reserve that actually launched at 20 airports back in November 2020, but not that many people were flying in November 2020. So they've tweaked it a little and reintroduced it. I guess that's worth it. Uber Reserve lets you schedule an airport pickup from Uber's black car service, a little more expensive, up to 30 days in advance. So what you do is you enter your flight information up to 30 days in advance. And then Uber will not only let you know if your flight time changes, which is kind of nice, but it'll automatically adjust your pickup time. So if your flight comes in late or maybe it comes in early, the driver will be there. Drivers will also wait for you up to an hour after your flight lands. So you have time to grab a sandwich, get your bags, all that. But let's say you didn't plan ahead or you don't want to drop the bucks on a black car service. So you called Uber after you landed at an airport. Uber says it has now tweaked its machine learning to better match you with drivers. So you don't have to wait as long. Now, this only works at 15 airports, but that's a nice feature. There's also another feature called Ready When You Are. This is only active at six airports, but it lets you delay your pickup. You've already called your car and maybe you need another 10 or 20 minutes to pick up your bags or grab your lunch. Ready When You Are is available on the Android app with iOS getting it in November. Again, only at six airports. And finally, one airport, Toronto's Pearson Airport. YYZ will let you order food for pickup at airport restaurants through Uber Eats. Uber says it plans to expand all these features to more airports eventually. Well, I don't say when oh, go ahead, Scott. No, I was just going to say I'd like I'd like that they're expanding, but it feels like they're expanding features into the who can afford it range more than not. And maybe that's where the growth is. Maybe that's where you just talk about the black car service. The rest of it is just in the regular service. It is, but I don't know why it feels that way. I don't know why the expansion is in the cheap stuff. Yeah, that's true for the black car was already there. I guess that's true. I don't, you know, I don't know how these companies even do what they do in a post COVID world. But, Sarah, you were talking before and during our prep about this this interesting juxtaposition of sort of before COVID UBER use and post COVID UBER use and that you're using Uber eats more more than you do the driving service. But multiple times a week. Yes, I haven't been in the back of an Uber since late 2019 just because it I mean COVID for sure. But even before that, it was just kind of where I lived and and things had changed. The Uber reserve, I actually found the Uber reserve rollout to be sort of strange, you know, in November of 2020, less than a year ago, but still very much COVID times. I was like, well, OK, I guess some people, you know, if you're a business traveler, this is really going to be helpful to you. But I don't and especially because of that, you know, Uber black service and the fact that it's a little bit more expensive to use that. I can't imagine that many people who are landing at an airport would say, yeah, I really, you know, I I really want to make use of the service. You're probably just going to call an Uber when you're ready to go and you put your bags. I probably should admit this, but we definitely called an Uber black one time coming out of LAX and paid the extra money because they would pick you up curbside. LAX changed it so that Ubers pick you up at this special location that you have to walk to. It's not that far, but it's a longish walk. They have shuttles that will take you there too. And we were so tired that we were like, you know what? Forget it. Let's pay the extra money so we don't have to walk over there. And so so it's that mindset that I think happens, especially like you say, Sarah, for business travelers that travel a lot where they're like, you know what? I just want to walk out there and walk out of my car. I don't want to stand there looking for it. I don't want to wonder if it's coming. I don't want to wait 20 more minutes. I just want to get home. And I and and yes, I certainly can't afford to do that all the time. But it you'll get some people doing that. I'm sure. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know this is only in Toronto's airport, but Uber Eats in the airport. I love it. Oh, do I love it? Just one last line to wait in. It's the same principle, right? Which is like, you know what? I just want to walk up and give my food. I don't want to stand there and wait to order. I want to order now. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and order. It's going to take me 20 minutes to get to the restaurant that I'm ordering from. It's perfect. Yeah, I used to complain that, like, well, I'm not paying two bucks extra to have, you know, door to Azure Uber Eats, bring this to the door. And now I'm like, oh, I think it's worth the two bucks. I don't want to go and I don't want to drive. You know, like, that's how they get you. They've got us. We're all in. We're in it. Black service or not. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, listen, you know, all kidding aside, I think this is, you know, it's kind of like how we were talking about Google Maps. That stuff earlier in the show, it's it's Uber is making the service make more sense for more people. What's not to like? If you save enough time by not having to drive and get your food that you can create something at your job that makes you more than the two dollar fee. Well, then it's smart. It's not lazy. It's smart. Yeah. That's what I say. Well, let's talk about TikTok and bands. Restofworld.org. It's got a story up about how this has affected creators since India banned TikTok in June of 2020. Kind of had an effect, it turns out. We don't hear about it a lot here. So we're going to hear about it today. The obvious effect is that you might have guessed this is that users have moved to Instagram's reels. But that's not the same story for creators. India had four of the top 15 paid TikTok creators in the world and 7.7% of the world's TikTok influencers before the June 2020 ban. So when reels launched in India in 2020 of or in July of 2020, it didn't go after those TikTok creators. Instead, it sought more aspirational upmarket lifestyle creators. It also put on this thing more strict requirements for getting promoted by the algorithm. So reels will not be recommended if they're blurry or bare a watermark or a logo or have a border, especially if they have the watermark from TikTok, they won't. They won't push those. This makes it harder for users on more affordable phones to get promoted. So yeah, a pretty massive effect at least in that, you know, this niche market of content creation for that platform. And think about it, if your way of making money or your number one platform is suddenly yanked away, you know, what are you gonna do? Well, that's what this rest of World Article focuses on is that TikTok was very accessible, very equitable in what it promoted. And so you had a lot of folks in rural areas on less bandwidth, putting short videos up and that Instagram with reels has favored a more celebrity-oriented, fashionable, upper-class lifestyle. And so folks that were making bank on TikTok suddenly with TikTok being banned because the government wants to teach China a lesson, these people now can't make money and Instagram's reels has not filled the gap for these creators. The way that you might have expected it would. Yeah, the takeaway I get from this is, you know, I consider myself a creator. I think we're all creators on this panel and we create something that is consumed by somebody else. I'm also a consumer slash user of all sorts of content that other people create. And just the idea that you get a platform yanked away from you and then you gotta just, okay, well, where is everybody? Where are all the users? I'm a creator, I need to follow the users or no one will watch or listen to my things. I have to go to this other platform and then I have to deal with all the ways that this other platform works for me in a crappier way than the platform that I used to have because of government stuff that has nothing to do with me. It's kind of a mess. And I really feel for folks that are in various parts of the world who are going through this. And I like to say that I'm always on the side of creators but it is kind of a punishing business. Yeah, and this is one of those examples when governments take action for one reason, you have unintended side effects and that good job to restofworld.org for making that accessible for people to understand. Well, if you need a new pair of shoes you might like this next story because Microsoft and Adidas are partnering to create limited edition Xbox sneakers celebrating 20 years, 20 years since the original release of the Xbox console on November 15th, 2001. I know, I couldn't believe it either, it's been 20 years. The sneakers will sport an Xbox logo and translucent green details and also a separate Xbox inspired sneaker will be available for purchase later this year. Let us not forget, also Microsoft is also planning to release an Xbox mini fridge for the holiday season that company has promised. It would offer more details about the fridge later this month. Way more excited about the fridge myself. I am too. I mean, it's based on the, it's funny because that whole thing is based on the fact that the Xbox series X when it was announced everybody had a heyday and put memes all over the internet about how it looked like a big fridge and or a server farm or whatever that people had lots of ideas but fridge really went out and the minute they announced that they were gonna do that and they showed a prototype and a video everybody lost their minds. It's great. It's a great way to sort of embrace your simplistic design of the series X and really go with this idea. I would love that fridge. Love it. Would get up one in a heartbeat. Don't think they're gonna be very many and I don't think they're gonna be affordable but I would love one instead maybe settle for the shoes but that is an amazing landmark. If you think about it, 20 years of that console that means think about it in 2001 that was what you go 20 years backwards or what 81? I thought it was a misprint when I read this this morning I was like crazy Xbox wasn't around in 2001. That's not right. But it's crazy. That's only six, seven years after Sony's even doing anything. And it was a crazy product. Consoles were failing. Why would Microsoft of all people make a game console when Sega can't even keep theirs going? It was nuts. I don't know about these sneakers. I mean, I'm not a sneaker person. So you sneaker folks in the audience, let us know what I miss him. But they just seem like green shoes to me. Like, shouldn't they do something fun? Like when it's time to replace them, there's a red ring lights up for you or something. Oh, nice. I see what you did there at the red ring. Let's bring that thing back to Vogue. I think that's a great idea. All right, let's check out the mail bag. We got a real nice note from Joseph who said, thank you so much for adding in gaming news monthly to the DTNS feed. Episode one was all the absolute video game essentials wrapped up into a short and digestible summary. The information was broken out into meaningful sections and explained in enough detail without getting into the weeds. Please continue the great work on this and the main show and of course GDI too. Oh my gosh, Joseph, that's the best. Jen Cutter is very pleased to hear it. That's exactly what we're going for. So I'm very glad that it came across that way. And good news, there will be another one in November. She's already hard at work making that happen. And we may be starting a science news monthly from Dr. Nikki Ackerman's. Look for that in November as well. Nice. Good stuff. Yeah, so Joseph, we're so glad you're enjoying it. Anybody else who has thoughts, comments, anything that we talk about on the show, any of our shows that we've been rolling out to you recently, please do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We also want to thank our brand new boss and that brand new boss is Dan Gilbert. Dan just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Who's going to be the next person to be as smart as Dan? Dan understood yesterday when I said, hey, if you want to get your name on the show, become a Patreon right now and you'll get it on tomorrow's show. And Dan was like, hey, I can do that. And he did. And it helps the show. And it helps Dan. Everybody wins. Yay. Thank you, Dan. Also thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today, Scott. Where can people keep up with what you've been up to? Well, check out frogpants.com because that's where most of it is. But these days it's a lot of art. We are fulfilling kick starters and having all kinds of fun stuff happen on the back end of that. So big stuff on the horizon. But if you want to catch the shows that are happening every day in some form, check it out at frogpants.com. And you can always find me publicly over at Twitter, twitter.com, slash Scott Johnson. Excellent. Well, folks, we are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We got a great show tomorrow. We'll be back with Justin Robert Young. Molly Wood will be with us promoting her new show, How We Survive. And Stacey Higginbotham will explain what the Matter platform is actually good for. 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.