 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Jeffrey Zilx, Tony Glass, and Philip Less. Coming up on DTNS, why Sheryl Sandberg really left Metta, and who is replacing her, plus is Amazon inviting you to try to buy a game console in a good way, and how export rules are affecting Russian tech? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 2nd, 2022, at Los Angeles on time. And from Studio Redmond, I'm Sarah Lane. And deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, we have so much to get to. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon will stop supplying Kindle e-readers to retailers in China starting next year. The Kindle China e-book store will stop sales on June 30th, 2023, with the Kindle app removed in China in 2024. Amazon says this was part of an adjustment of its strategic focus, not a result of government pressure, and that its other businesses in China will continue. ExpressVPN announced its pulling servers out of India, saying it cannot comply with recent regulatory changes that require VPN providers to record personally identifiable user information and store it for five years. ExpressVPN says it designs its servers to run in RAM specifically so that they cannot log information. The company will still offer virtual Indian servers that will be physically located in Singapore and the UK. ExpressVPN does this for more than 40 countries. In those cases, the IP address is for the country that you want to connect to, such as India, but the server itself is located in a different country such as Singapore. Valve delayed the launch of its Steam Deck display dock, citing supply shortages and COVID-related work stoppages. The company said it's working on improving the situation but gave no real estimate on when it might ship, though it did clarify that the dock delay will not impact Steam Deck console production. Visa and SafariCom have launched the M-Pesa Global Pay Visa Virtual Card that lets users of M-Pesa make digital payments globally. If you don't know M-Pesa, you have not been following my shows because I am one of the people who tries to remind people that M-Pesa has been around since 2007. It was the first widely used mobile payment system. Kenya was in front of all of us on this. It lets users of feature phones even. Mostly people have smartphones now, but back then feature phones make cash deposits at participating merchants and then pay by phone at now nearly 400,000 merchants. 51 million people use M-Pesa, by the way it's spelled M-P-E-S-A. 30 million of those 50 million are in Kenya itself. The new virtual card will let M-Pesa users make payments worldwide. SafariCom also has payment partnerships with PayPal, Aliexpress and Western Union. Google disabled RCS ads that's rich communication services ads in India saying that some businesses are abusing our anti-spam policies. RCS's business messaging feature allows verified businesses to send messages with interactive features and images. Users in India reported a recent deluge of RCS spam ads, pushing things like credit cards and gambling apps. All right, let's try to get a game console, shall we? If we go to Amazon, there's a new way to try. Indeed there is. Amazon has devised the way to buy game consoles because it's so hard to do it otherwise that are in short supply all over the world. In the US for the PS5 and the Xbox Series X that are fulfilled by Amazon, you can now sign up for an invitation to buy them. Amazon will use several factors to weed out bots, making sure that you're a real person. You don't have to be a prime subscriber, but you have to be a real person. When consoles come in, stock invitations will be sent out and you'll have 72 hours to make your purchase. You might say, cool, sounds great. Then I just get one, right? Well, not everybody's going to get one because they're still in high demand. Amazon didn't clarify how it's exactly selecting which genuine accounts are actually getting those invites, only saying it won't be able to grant everyone's request. Amazon also said this should help reduce price gouging and allow genuine customers to purchase genuine products at genuine prices. Any customer with an account can request an invite. Again, not restricted to Amazon Prime users. It is available now for the PS5. In fact, I went ahead and gave myself a request and invite just to see if I get one and within the next few days for the Xbox Series X as well. Yeah, so I like this idea of saying instead of being a mad scramble that a bunch of people that are going to resell it on eBay by getting it with bots win, we're going to try to weed out the bots. We're going to look at your purchase history. How long ago you created the account, et cetera. And we're going to try to make sure that genuine people get a chance to buy, not just the person with the fastest browser. I would like to know a few more details why they're not telling me it's first come first serve or within a certain time period, it's a random draw that you might get. Yeah, or like, or how long have you had an Amazon account? Or yeah, I have a suspicion why, Tom. Why is that? I suspect that the exact same data that allows them to profile you, so they are showing you relevant products and in the relevant order. So you are going to buy them is probably a lot of the same data that they are going to use to determine whether or not you genuinely want a PS5 or an Xbox Series X. And they might not want to share either for competitive purposes or to weird out the normies exactly how much data and what they are going to use for that. But I suspect Sarah, like you mentioned that the key here is identifying you as a genuine purchaser and not a reseller. And that's really to me where this either flies or dies, because if it's just another avenue for resellers to get more inventories so they can sell at higher prices, then this is not so good. If it is a way that you can say, Hey, look, well, this isn't the Christmas season anymore. If you're waiting on this for a birthday, then this might not be it. But if you genuinely want to buy this thing and you got the money and we believe based on our data in your browsing history that you are indeed somebody who uses this as your main account, then look, we'll put you in the lottery. And at a certain point, we will give you a fair and free transaction on this. If that's the case, that's an interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting because I wondered the same thing. It's like, I mean, I'm a very prolific Amazon user. By all the things from Amazon, is it a lot of gaming stuff? No, it isn't. I mean, certainly some hardware podcasting equipment, that sort of thing, but mostly no more household items. I wonder how much they will wait. That sort of thing of does Sarah actually seem like somebody who wants that? And considering they have not said this is first come first serve or this is a lottery that is determined like each bucket fills up over a two week period. And then we start doling them out. My suspicion is that they might indeed be doing exactly that. But all right, Sarah, you passed the test. You are indeed a genuine Amazon user. But have you ever bought Horizon Zero, Don? Have you ever bought another Sony? Have you ever bought the last of us? Because if you did, then maybe we would put you forward because we're positive we're going to sell to the Sarah like. Well, what if I'm getting into gaming for the first time? I deserve it as much as anybody else. Well, that's the problem is we don't know. So we don't know if that's what they're doing. And and yes, Amos point out in our Twitch chat that that not knowing helps keep people from gaming the system. But there are plenty of ways to let you know how the selection is made without letting people game the system. The best one is to say it is a random drawing. We are not considering anything but random numbers. We're not going to tell you the period in which we choose. You don't have to say anything. Just say it's random. We're not preferring anyone. And I'll feel good about that. I'll be like, OK, I like my chances. It does feel like Amazon's trying to make it sound like everyone should get one as long as inventories hold up. But we can't promise that. But but hopefully all legitimate people will get one. Even new people to gaming like you, Sarah. Yeah, but what if they're not? Yeah, but I want to sell units. So we're going to have people self identify and the people that based on our data are the most likely to buy within the shortest amount of time are the ones who are going to get it first. Yeah. I mean, if you sign up for an invite, you're probably likely to buy. So I don't think they're going to have any problems there. Are you going to buy? You just signed up. I mean, are they going to have any problems selling these? That's like, I want to be invited. That's for sure. I mean, I probably will buy one just because I know it's hard. And I don't think Amazon's going to get stuck with a PS5 because too many Sarahs signed up and didn't buy them. Yeah, just to see. And we didn't mean it. No, it's it's it. Listen, the PS5, if I am granted it, will end up in my living room or someone else's. That's that's you'll resell it on eBay for more. Something like that. I mean, come on. No, I hate the player. All right. Just like Amazon, we can't grant every request someone makes. But earlier today, I asked on Twitter, what do you want to hear us talk about on DTNS and Matt Neuchat's asked nicely if we'd cover the story about Russian tech companies getting hit by sanctions. So Jerry, let's do that. You asked Matt. We answered response to export restrictions to Russia imposed by the EU, UK and the US in February, Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm, along with other Taiwanese companies, have stopped selling chips, both to Russia and Belarus. So I want as a signatory to the Wassenar agreement in which 42 countries, by the way, including Russia and Belarus, are signed up in order to promote responsible trade in conventional arms and dual use technologies, dual use covers, electronics, computers, telecommunications, sensors, lasers and Mueller. This week, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs published details on what is allowed and not allowed under that agreement. So Tom, what are these restrictions? These restrictions are harsh because they were set under the Wassenar agreement when Yeltsin signed it in the 90s. Companies may not sell chips to Russia or Belarus that are faster than 25 megahertz. Oh my God. With a performance, the performance can't pass five gigaflops. And Tom's hardware pointed out that the PlayStation 2 peaked at 6.2 gigaflops. There are other restrictions. You can't have more than 144 pins. No more than 2.5 megabyte per second. External data transfer rate. There's a couple others in there, too. But you get the idea. The rules also prevent selling the equipment that you use to make chips that would exceed these limits as well. The Financial Times, Anna Gross and Max Satan reported on how these restrictions are affecting Russian companies. Russia consumes less than 1% of the world's semiconductors, which limits the immediate impact of the restrictions. I bet you all those restrictions were blazing fast to Yeltsin when he was more potgazin at 11 o'clock in the morning. But conditions, by the way, are changing. However, companies have been pulling their apps from being hosted outside of Russia. This combined with Russian laws requiring local storage of citizens' data has caused a boom in demand for cloud services from Russian companies like Yandex, VK Cloud Solutions and CyberCloud. Those companies are requesting help from the government in finding the servers that they need to expand. But where are they going to get these chips? Yeah, this one's a Russian dill of a pickle. Russia's domestic chip companies rely on foreign foundries. So they have domestic companies, but MCST and Baikal, for example, used to get their chips produced at foundries in Taiwan and Europe. Both those companies and another one in Russia called JSC Micron were importing chips from SMIC in China, Intel in the U.S. and Infineon in Germany. MCST has announced it will produce its Elbrus chip at JSC Microns Russian foundries. However, there's a problem. Elbrus was produced on TSMC's 16 nanometer process. JSC Micron's most advanced node is 90 nanometers. So if you can't make the chips, which sounds like a stretch, you can't get companies to sell to you. Well, Justin, there's only one solution. Indeed. If you don't like the rules, make your own. Russian now allows its domestic companies to parallel import servers, cars, phones, and semiconductors without the consent of trademark or copy holders, copyright holders, meaning Russian companies can get items from unauthorized gray market sellers without violating Russian law. But no matter what market you're talking about, there still is that dang chip shortage. Those sources are not as plentiful as they were before the lockdowns and COVID, which is why 5G rollouts have halted as mobile companies buy whatever 4G equipment they can on the secondary market. Yeah. Russia is having a problem with 5G and chips in general that Sarah's having getting a PS5. You can go to the secondary market, and it might be a little shady, but you're going to pay a lot more, and they might not have them either. This parallel market thing is interesting. If you didn't quite catch it, most countries have laws put on the books that say you can't buy from unauthorized sellers if you're importing. So that's the gray market, where you buy a TV, but if you're not buying the Samsung TV from Samsung, you might not get a warranty, and it might actually be illegal for you to import it. Russia got rid of all those rules and said, yeah, get that Kazakhstan-y import-export business to buy one legitimately from the United States and then ship it to you, and we won't stand in the way anymore. Yeah. Look, I think that among the ripple effects that have happened since the war in Ukraine, the economic ones are probably going to be among the most non-war-related that will linger in the global market. And Russia is having to adjust for the fact that this is going on for a lot longer than people thought it was going to. Yeah. And I don't think anybody really knows what impact this is going to have. These kinds of things always have less significant impact than some people think. People find other ways to get around rules. They find other ways to get by without the stuff they can't get. People are ingenious in that way. And so it's hard to predict when there really will be an impact and what that will be. My guess is you're going to see a lot fewer new companies start because a lot of more energy is going to be going into procuring the things to keep existing stuff going than just starting something new. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you have a thought about this or anything else on the show, but you don't know our email address, let me fix that. It is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd love to hear from you. Please email us. On yesterday's show, we briefly noted that Metta C.O.O. Cheryl Sandberg posted on Facebook that after 14 years with the company, she will step down this autumn, although she will remain on Metta's board. She says she wants to focus on philanthropic work. So who's taken over her role? Metta's chief growth officer, Javier Olivan, will take over as C.O.O. in the autumn. He's been with the company for 15 years, assumed the C.G.O. title five months ago. Nobody held that before, by the way. So it was, you know, a new title for the company. However, Olivan's role won't be identical to Sandberg's. C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg said, quote, I don't plan to replace Cheryl's role in our existing structure, end quote. What does that mean? Well, Zuckerberg wants to integrate business and product, which are separate right now. Olivan will take over integrated ads and business products while continuing to run infrastructure, integrity, analytics, marketing, and corporate development, also growth. So who is Javier Olivan? Tom, I think he did a bit of a deep dive this morning. Yeah, I looked around, you know, I looked at more than his Wikipedia article, but here's the gist of it. Olivan is from Spain. He got a degree in electrical engineering, and then in 2007 went back to school at Stanford and got a business degree. He led the international expansion of Facebook from 2007 to 2011. Thanks to those efforts, 91% of its monthly users now come from outside the U.S. and Canada. That was not the case when he started on that project in 2007. Quite the opposite. In 2013, Olivan started working on internet.org. If you remember, that's Facebook's effort to bring free internet to developing countries and then got them to sign up for Facebook. That boost Facebook usage abroad quite a bit as well. And by 2015, it had connected 7 million users who were not previously online. He also led the push for Facebook to acquire WhatsApp in 2014. So he has been important within, but don't expect to get to know him. He has a much lower profile than Sheryl Sandberg. CNBC points out that Sandberg has 900,000 followers on Instagram. Olivan has 17, and his profile's private. You can't follow him even if you want to, unless he approves it. Before Wednesday, he last posted publicly to Facebook in 2018. So Sarah, who do we think might fill Sandberg's gap there? Yeah. Well, it remains to be seen, but it seems like Andrew Bosworth, who's commonly known as Bos, who's been at Facebook for some time, will take up at least some of the slack for the public-facing aspects of Sandberg's role. He was once Sandberg's partner in Facebook's ad business, now leads the metaverse-related efforts, whatever they may be, and Sandberg pointed out to The Verge that meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, is also leading the effort to promote meta's safety efforts, especially regarding the metaverse. So it does seem that as much as Olivan is going to be a very key role here, it might be a role that a few other people who are already on the team can absorb some of. Yeah. Sandberg was ads on Facebook. Ads on Facebook is not the future of meta. Hence, they changed their name to meta. The future is whatever the metaverse ends up to being. So Bosworth seems like the heir apparent for the public-facing non-Mark Zuckerberg role. As far as Sheryl Sandberg, lots of exec companies, lots of execs leave companies and claim they want to pursue philanthropic efforts. Many of them do. Some of them don't. Some philanthropic efforts turn into political efforts because those were almost cross. Sandberg worked for the Secretary of the Treasury and the Clinton administration from 1996 to 2001. Do you get any sense she might enter the politics, politics, politics arena, Justin? I got a couple conspiracy theories for you. Why this could have happened if we are going to only look at it in a political lens. And let's understand that everything is almost certainly more complicated than that and everything that's gone on inside of Facebook is what goes on inside of Facebook. Although I will say that the future of Facebook is still ads on Facebook. It's just figuring out where the meta-owned property ads can go. They are still an advertising company, I think, through and through. That being said, I got a Sandberg left because they want to prepare for an uncertain political future conspiracy theory. And I have a Sandberg left because she wants to have a political career theory. Which one do you want first? I don't know. Sarah, you choose. The political career. All right. She is very plugged in in politics, Charles Sandberg is. Like you pointed out, she came from the Clinton tree before she went into tech. Tech and democratic politics have been very side-by-side over the last 10 years. She is an icon specifically with her Lean In book. If she wanted to step in to a very high-profile position in democratic politics, she might only have to look to the 88-year-old Diane Feinstein, who over the last few months, there's been a lot of little articles coming out that I've found to be a bit odd with unnamed sources that had to come from within the Democratic Party, insinuating in fairly blunt terms that she might not be all there mentally. One of them detailed Chuck Schumer trying to have a private conversation with her about stepping down only for him to reinstigate the same conversation two weeks later, and she didn't remember the first one. That's about as ugly as it gets when you're, when it's inside the tent, like it seems to be sourcing wise. So if she knows that at a certain point, sooner rather than later, there's going to be an opening there and whether or not she has to wait a few years to run in the, in a statewide election and kind of do a Meg Whitman sort of thing, or she is plugged in enough that she can get appointed to take over Diane Feinstein's senatorial role, that might be a reason why she would leave. Yeah. And even if you find it tasteless to speculate on Feinstein's health, at 88, she could step down for all kinds of reasons, right? For, forget about why. It's certainly within the realm of possibility that Senator Feinstein steps down, at which point, Sandberg might be excellent. And by the way, already won reelection two years ago, Chuck Grassley, who's also 88 from Iowa, is currently running for reelection. So nobody knows anything. I just found it odd. Yep. Yep. Those stories would be bubbling up when normally, especially age on any kind of political side, people close ranks because nobody wants to get pushed out. Yeah. And what about the other one? We've long thought that companies, Facebook is one of them, are going to face a rocky road ahead. The politically in terms of deregulation and other kinds of interactions from the federal government. If you are going through that and you are Mark Zuckerberg, do you want somebody who is as partisan defined as Sheryl Sandberg at as high of a level as she was? Now, this would probably have to double with some kind of internal conflict. But that would be, if I'm recklessly speculating, only through the political lens that maybe knowing that there might be a 230 fight coming. There might be a breakup Facebook fight coming. And both parties for various different reasons are upset with you for various different reasons. Do you want to have somebody like Sandberg as high in the company? At which point do you think Clegg is the one that takes up that mantle? I think somebody that does not have gigantic political donations on their record and help advocacy would be the very boring thing. But politically savvy, even if they don't have that. Yes, you need to know how to maneuver, but you need to know how to take a picture next to Ted Cruz the same way you take a picture next to Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, I don't get the sense that that's only Von in any way. They moved him into this position, as Sarah pointed out, five months. They created this position five months ago. This is a plan. They knew Sheryl had a plan to leave. They planned to put Oli von in a newly designed role suited to his strengths that leaves some of these other things that Sheryl did to other people. So it just remains to be seen. Who gets to pick up those things? Is it Nick Clegg? Is it Bosworth? Is it somebody else? And I'll be very curious to see if Senator, I mean, Sheryl Sandberg is just doing philanthropic works or something more. That sounds weird to me. Let me just say that like Sheryl Sandberg is such a name and has so much money that if she wanted to, she said that she was leaving because of the upcoming overturning of Roe versus Wade, and she wanted to be more philanthropically dialed in on that issue specifically. If she wanted to step out and start an advocacy organization that directly did that today, she could. She's got the money. She's got the money. That makes perfect sense. And you don't have to add anything on top of that for it to make sense. Yeah. No. Well, y'all, you might be familiar with the Orba $100 little synthesizer. It looks kind of like a hockey puck, also a looper, also a MIDI controller. Very cool. I have heard from some of my audiophile friends that it can be kind of hard to use, but if you're good at it, you are good at it. Now Orba's parent company, Artifone, has released the Orba 2, a very similar looking model with eight touch pads across the top, built-in speaker, synth engine, which was recently opened up for anybody to design their own patches. And now supports sample playback, so you can record your own samples using the Orba app on your phone and then turn that into a preset that it can be played. You want to go to a barbecue and impress all your friends, yada, yada. Orba 2 can also handle a 128 bar loop. That's up from eight bars for the original. I've got five minutes of music total. This is all for a new price of $150. Oh, that's not bad. Actually, yeah, that's a fun little thing. I know we got some sound junkies out there who are going to pick one of these up. Let us know. Send us your compositions. I want to hear these. Indeed. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So we got a good one from Vince. Vince wrote in, listen to our conversation about Tweetdex Mac OS app being retired from Twitter. We talked about it yesterday. It was Scott Johnson. Vince noted, it was mentioned that other companies, such as Discord, aren't retiring their native apps. Vince says, a key factor I didn't hear brought up, and I think might be of interest, is that companies like Discord have been adopting hybrid frameworks over the last few years, which allow our right once run anywhere experience. These apps are entirely written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so code and skills are more transferable within web development organizations. Examples are Electron. That's what Twitch and VS Code use. And React Native, Facebook Messenger, and Discord use that. Yeah, I don't know that they would have had to retire the Mac OS app in order to do this, but it was what I was circling around yesterday, which was the Mac OS app is just the website in Mac OS in a native app. And what Vince is pointing out is like, they really could have it just be the same exact code. And if they're wanting to rebuild Tweetdex on the web quite a bit, it would be easier to just focus on the web, create that, then turn that into either an Electron or a React or something like that without having to maintain the Mac OS app. That said, they definitely made a lot of enemies. I saw people I respect out there very upset that this is going away, and whether they ever bring it back or not, I have no idea. But it would be easy enough to do that if they are rebuilding the web Tweetdex with an eye towards what Discord and Twitch do. So hopefully they do that. Well, thank you, Vince, for writing in. Reminder, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send. Any email you got a question, you got a comment, you have an idea for a future show, do send it our way. We love your feedback. We also love having Justin Robert Young on the show. Justin, what's been going on in your world? I got a brand new podcast, and it's called We're Not Wrong. You can go ahead and get it wherever that you find your podcast. If you don't see it there, then please hit me up directly on Twitter at Justin Our Young. I will make sure that I submit it to every possible directory that we need to. So it is there for you. It is a panel show that discusses politics and more featuring myself, Justin Robert Young, with the Politics, Politics, Politics show, Jen Briney of Congressional Dish, and Tom Merritt, eventually will guess Andrew Heaton of the political orphanage. But surprise, Tom. Yeah, Andrew Heaton. Or as I call him, Tom Merritt dressed well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Tom Merritt with an ascot. Andrew Heaton also is on there, but we had a great episode. It was really, really funny. I had a great time doing it. I really think the show's gelling, and I think people would really like it. Yeah, and I like the new segment, You're Not Wrong, where you actually bring in the audience. It's pretty cool. We do, yeah. Well, thanks, Justin, for being on this show as always. We also want to extend a special thanks to Seth Cordes, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Seth, for all the years of support. A big old gold star goes to you. Yeah, you could be the next Seth starting today. Just back at patreon.com.dts. Indeed. Reminder, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's lots of fun. It's available at patreon.com.dts. We roll right into it after we finish here. But just a reminder, we're live on DTNS Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Len Peralta and Patrick Norton. Patrick's going to be talking about moving your TVs and other electronics without breaking them. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.