 If you want a holiday card from DTNS, become a patron and put your address into patron. Don't put your address somewhere else. You got to put it in Patreon or we won't find it. Do that by November 15th and we will send you a special DTNS holiday card as designed by Len Peralta. Coming up on DTNS, an NFT that is not a collectible and might make the internet work better for your privacy. The coming collision of quantum computing and blockchain security and Chewbacca for text-to-speak. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 12, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Sarah had a sad pet situation to deal with. She will be back on Monday though. Don't worry, she's doing great. We were just talking about my brand new cutting board that I got from the barbecue and tech folks and how wonderful it smells. Get that on our longer show, Good Day Internet, Patreon.com, DTNS. Made possible in part by our top patrons like Pat, Negrachea Daniels and Irwin Sturr. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. November 11 is Singles Day, the largest online shopping event of the world. And Alibaba's Singles Day sale is the largest of them all. They're the ones that vaulted it into popularity. This year, total customer spending on Alibaba hit a new high of 540.3 billion yuan. That's about 84.5 billion US. Spending rose 8.5% but that's the first year Alibaba's event did not reach double digits. Amid China's tech crackdown, Alibaba toned it down a little. No, Nicole Kidman, celebrity, Taylor Swift performances, those are all things they've done in the past. Instead, they promoted socially conscious goals and raised money for charities. Spotify announced it acquired the audiobook platform called Findaway. The company plans to quote accelerate the addition of an audiobook catalog onto the platform so that users can effectively get all of the audio content that they want all in one platform. Foxconn told investors it believes the supply chain problems will last into the second half of next year. It also expects its current quarter revenue to decline because of component shortages. It probably was going to come down anyway from last year's unusual high, but it might not have come down as much if it weren't for the component shortage. Some supply areas will rise faster than others. Foxconn says optical modules used in smartphone cameras should be back to normal by the end of the year, but power management chips remain tight. Earlier this week, Pegatron said it expected its supply chain problems to improve this quarter. U.S. President Biden signed the bipartisan Secure Equipment Act of 2021, which requires the FCC to adopt rules explicitly stating it will no longer review or approve any authorization applications for networking equipment that poses a national security threat. This will ban any approval of licenses for U.S. companies to buy and use network equipment for companies flagged as national security threats, including Huawei and ZTE. This closes a loophole left open so that smaller ISPs could transition off their hardware. And Toshiba plans to split itself into three companies with the goal of completing the spin-offs by the second half of fiscal 2023. Toshiba will spin out its infrastructure services business that includes energy systems and batteries and its business for technology devices like semiconductor manufacturing and hard drives. Those will be two separate companies. The remainder of Toshiba proper will focus on its memory chip business. All right, we got a bunch of Instagram news. Some official, some not. Let's dive right in. Starting with official news, Instagram Reels now has text-to-speech and voice effects, just like TikTok. This continues the TikTok pattern of release for Instagram, where they look at a feature on TikTok and release it on Reels. Text-to-speech is pretty obvious. You can add text to a video, have a computer voice, read it. Voice effects modifies your voiceover. Instagram is launching this with settings like Helium, Giant, Vocalist, Announcer, and Robot. These are both things that are very popular on TikTok. Makes sense that Reels would want to have them do. Instagram is also paying people more to create Reels. There's no standard on how much you get paid, but most recently said the payments could range up to $10,000. They won't every time, but they could. One creator on Reddit said they were offered $35,000 for more than 598 million views in a month. Instagram told TechCrunch, quote, we're continuing to test payments as we roll out to more creators and expect them to fluctuate while we're still getting started. And the final official announcement, Instagram head Adam Massari announced they are testing a Take a Break feature that lets users set a reminder for themselves to take a break after 10, 20, or 30 minutes. You have to opt in to do it. This is not going to be on by default. That feature is rolling out to a small test group and Instagram expects a full public release in the coming months. Finally, the unofficial news. XDA developers notes that engineer Alessandro Paluzzi has found code that indicates Instagram is working on a feature that would let live creators add moderators to their stream to kind of help keep the comments going. Instagram has not shared any information about this feature. It's just some reverse engineering that uncovered it. Shannon, any of these strike your fancy? Raise a thought, make you go, hm? Actually, yes, kind of. The Instagram Reels thing, I've known for a little while that Instagram is going to be focusing more on video even though they say that they're not. But you can definitely tell based on where they're putting their money. And I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I was just looking at my Instagram account, which is fairly small compared to most Instagram influencers. Is that like 14,000 subscribers? Low engagement overall, because I never use Instagram. But I just turned it on and it says I could get $800 for up to 1.77 million views. And that's using it up till December 10th. So they're giving me a few weeks to get this like bonus option of getting 800 bucks. But I mean, it seems pretty easy to get views on there based on some Reels that I've posted on a much smaller account, which is very focused on Sailor Moon anime. And I've gotten thousands of views there just because people kept on resharing it or they would watch it more than once. So I'm wondering if this is a reliable income string for influencers. It could be because the views are so easy to get. Depending on how long Instagram wants to continue that program. But right now everybody's doing it, right? YouTube is doing this as well. TikTok is paying people. TikTok is probably paying people the most because everybody wants to get the creators to use their platform. So it makes sense. And $800 from what I can tell, and you are another data point in this now, seems to be the entry level. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's the minimum they'll give you. If you're just starting out or you're just kind of jumping in like you are, where you're like, oh, I don't really do this. It's enough to make you think like, oh, maybe this is worth it. And I'm already a videographer. So it wouldn't take me much to post a reel over there. I could just take a snippet from one of my YouTube videos, for example. But I do wonder, like this must be an incentivizing plan for Instagram to get more creators to use their platform and to really get some more advertising income. That's what it seems like to me just as a small creator myself who has not used it for any reels really. Now you got to shop around and be like, all right, TikTok, YouTube shorts, what do you got? Yeah, there we go. That would be nice. All right, let's take a trip down memory lane, Shannon. Yes, let's do that. So do y'all remember MoviePass? It was that company that, yeah, oh, I do. It was that company that created a way to see unlimited movies for a monthly fee, but they didn't exactly have the movie theater owners blessing. So the major theater change, the movie theater chains, they all started competing programs. And MoviePass went bankrupt. And in January of 2020, before the pandemic could kill them off. And it seemed like that was the last that we would hear of the MoviePass tale. But Stacey Spikes, he was one of the people who co-founded MoviePass in 2011. At launch, it wasn't unlimited and it tried to play nice with the theaters. Then in 2017, Spikes and his co-founder named Harnet Watt sold the company to analytics company Helios and Matheson, who fired Spikes, lowered the price, made the movies unlimited, and the rest is history. So since then, MoviePass' assets have been working their way through bankruptcy court and they were put up for auction. Spikes heard that they were having a little bit of trouble finding a buyer, so he put in a bid. Well, Business Insider reports that it was less than $250,000. On November 5th, the court told Spikes that nobody had objected to his bid and nobody else had put one in. And a few days later, the MoviePass assets were in his again, his hands again. Now Spikes company, which is called PreShow, now owns the remains of MoviePass. Spikes notes that MoviePass data shows people went to more movies and they spent more on concessions. And he thinks the idea could still work just not for $10 a month for unlimited movies. And post-pandemic, theaters are more receptive than ever to things that will get people back in the theaters. So Spikes is talking to theater owners, movie makers and movie goers and plans to launch something next year. He told Protocol MoviePass' job is, quote, ultimately about smoothing out your decision to go to the movies, but we need to do it right so it is sustainable and everybody wins. Yeah, this, so the Helios and Matheson era was let's aim high, let's move fast and break things. You know, like $10 unlimited will bring in as many users as possible and then we'll figure it out from there. And that obviously can work, but did not in this particular case. And I think it's because they underestimated just how recalcitrant theater chains would be and how they would not want to work with somebody that was acting that way. Because MoviePass until Helios and Matheson bought it was a going concern. It wasn't growing, that was the problem, but it was getting users, even at the limited number of movies per month at a much higher price. Now, I think that combination of theaters saying, hey, we kind of really need help, especially theater chains that aren't the big ones like AMC that already have their own subscription plans. I think there is a place for MoviePass to be like legendary theaters, indie chains, you know, smaller theater chains. Let's be the Amazon web services of MoviePasses. We've got the software, we've got the technology. Let's help you roll your own and maybe interoperate so there's a MoviePass Uber brand that works. I don't know, but I think Spikes is right. I think for $250,000 too, if that's what he said before, bargain for a company like that, especially with the name recognition. You know, I didn't even think about using this for like indie movie theaters and trying to get them all kind of collaborating with each other, like building it into an application so you can easily see what's playing all in one app for all the indie theaters. That would be so cool. Like something like that, integrating all of those different theaters to kind of play nice with each other, that would be so cool. And I'm one of those people who paid AMC for one of those cards through the pandemic because I forgot about my membership. So I just, I just let it go. I mean, it was cheap. So why not? And you got a free upgrade at the concessions. Well, and AMC was never going to want to cooperate. They're going to want to roll their own. They did. It's successful. They're probably not going to play with MoviePasses. They're probably not going to play with MoviePasses. It's successful. They're probably not going to play with MoviePasses. But I think it could be compelling with that data of, hey, when somebody signs up for a lot of movies, they go see more movies, which means they buy more popcorn and that's where you all make most of your money anyway. That's very compelling for a small chain that's very nervous about whether they can get people to get back in the seats now these days. Tom, I'll be straight with you. Like I will pay whatever price I have to pay to have popcorn at the movie theater. Like I can't go to a theater without having popcorn. AMC, we had the story the other day that AMC is going to sell its popcorn elsewhere outside the movie theater because of that. Oh, I'm so excited. All right. Let's talk non-fungible tokens. And I know a bunch of you roll your eyes whenever you hear the word NFT. But this is not about collecting cats or NBA dunks. This is about an NFT for domain names. Because if you can be proven the owner of a token as NFTs can do, that could be used to show domain ownership. Right? That seems a match made in heaven. Well, the Ethereum name service, or ENS, is an attempt to create a decentralized domain name service usable on Ethereum blockchain. It issues NFTs that can represent your Ethereum wallet address. If you don't want to give out that big long address, you could just give out, you know, Tom Merritt.eth. It could be used to point to a website like a regular domain name. There's all kinds of uses you could put it to. ENS tokens were distributed Monday night in what's called an airdrop. Basically what happened is people who had bought domain names on ENS got issued ENS tokens. That's the coin that powers the ENS system, and those shot up in value. In fact, the market cap of trading inflated really fast to above a billion dollars. The longer you had held your registration, the longer the term you had bought, let's say you had registered a domain name for three years, the more tokens you got. To claim tokens, users did have to vote on governance articles for the system, including things like future integrations with other naming conventions like DNS. Then you had to delegate your voting power to a participating organization like Rainbow Wallet or Coinbase, which is actually the biggest one. All of the success of the airdrop and the money potentially rolling into early adopters aside, the system seems popular enough that it could serve as a basis for a portable profile that you control. You could point your personal name.eth at a container that had your personal info and be able to prove that to you and control who gets access to it. Very similar to what Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt is doing with solid. In fact, it's not impossible that solid could work with ENS here. I'm not saying that's going to happen, Shannon, but I'm intrigued by this idea. Yeah, I am too. I do have a Bitcoin wallet, for example. I've dabbled in the cryptocurrency world, but I'm not so deep into it that I feel like I have to have my own personal link yet. I'm not sure if this is something I would sign up for immediately, but it may be useful to just do it anyway so I can claim my name because it sounds like you get to have it forever. And that could be extremely vital and useful the more cryptocurrencies and the more like NFTs become mainstream. So I'm wondering if this is something that's going to become very normalized in the near future and they're just like right on top of it. That's why I thought it was worth talking about because it's the kind of thing that works if it catches on. And as much as this story today is really about the airdrop and all the people who like, yeah, I spent $200 on an ETH a few weeks ago and now suddenly I've got 15,000 because I got all these tokens. I made all this money. I'm less interested in that. That's the part of the cryptocurrency world that I'm like, yeah, that's speculation and that stuff comes and goes and that's what gives it a bad name. To me, it's like, but that popularity, that buzz around it will cause people like you and me, Shannon, to go like, you know, maybe I should register a name just so I have it. And as soon as you get a bunch of us going in and we're doing that, then suddenly the system has expanded. It becomes more viable, more people jump on and those kinds of things can snowball into something useful. Now I use a wallet that does not appear to be included in here. It's not Coinbase. It's not Rainbow wallet. I don't know if I want to say it out right now. Maybe I will. I don't think your wallet has to be part of the governance though. I think you can, just like with a domain name, you can point it at whatever you want. I think you can point your ENS at your wallet. Oh, okay. That's interesting. Okay. If I'm understanding this right, and of course feedback at dailytechnewshow.com if I've got that part wrong, but that's my understanding is those people like Rainbow wallet and Coinbase, those are just the governance element of it, not the compatibility element. Yeah. You know, I think I would love to learn more because if that's the case, that would make it super easy for me to like accept more payments through more options, especially for viewers, if they like want to donate to one of my shows or whatever it might be, or pay for merchandise. That would make it a lot easier for me since I don't have to sign up for some kind of additional optional wallet or whatever it might be. Yeah. And granted, for the ENS to resolve to your wallet, people have to be implementing the ENS system. Right. So it requires that chicken and egg thing that we were talking about earlier, right, to happen, but there's a chance that that might. Hey, folks, join in the conversation in our Discord. Yeah, you could email me. You could also just tell me in Discord, like, no, Tom, that's not how ENS works, or whatever you want to say. Just join by linking a Patreon account at patreon.com. All right, more blockchain stuff. All blockchain systems rely on the strength of the cryptography to work. That's what stops duplicate coins from being minted. That's what stops NFTs from being stolen. It stops forgeries. It stops all the attacks, you know, or at least it goes a long way to do. It makes it really hard for attacks to be successful. It's what makes it possible to have coins and NFTs that are provably unique. I've seen it. Stephen Shanklin has an excellent write-up about the coming collision between blockchain-based systems and quantum computers. The short version is that blockchain systems from Bitcoin to OpenSea use public key cryptography, which is very solid. Quantum computing, however, is advancing toward a day where it will be easy to crack every existing public key cryptography system with a quantum computer. Now, the good news that Shanklin brings us is that while people are working hard to advance quantum computing, other people are working hard to advance cryptography. The U.S. National Institute of Standards, or NIST, is leading a worldwide effort to find quantum-proof cryptography. That's the holy grail. Ethereum is building quantum resistance ideas into Ethereum 3.0, though that system is not even fully transferred to Ethereum 2.0, so 3.0 is a little ways down the road. The quantum-resistant ledger and Bitcoin post-quantum are examples of projects that want to build blockchain tech designed for quantum computing. Cambridge Quantum Computing and Honeywell are merging and working on quantum security that can be applied to a blockchain, and there's an open-source project called Hyperledger Foundation that has a project called URSA, U-R-S-A, to develop post-quantum cryptography software. So a lot of people working on this problem, no matter what, quantum cryptography, if any of these projects works, is going to need more processing power. So you're going to need new computers, you're going to need more processing power, and you're going to need new systems of cryptography. How long do we have? Well, a few years is the standard response for quantum computers that will cause problem. That could be two, that could be 10. Nobody really knows exactly. The response will need to happen before whenever that is, which will be easier for centralized efforts. As we noted, it's taking a while to transition to Ethereum 2.0 because of the decentralized nature of it. Government coins might have a better chance of getting ahead of this, to give those central bank digital currencies a little bit of an advantage, but the earlier post-quantum designs are implemented the better. This is one of those, it's not something to worry about today, Shannon, but it's something to be on your radar, right? It's coming. It's coming soon, Tom. I hope you're ready. I agree. It's still a few years out. So for the normal consumer, when it comes to your own protocols that you use for security and privacy, like you're fine at the moment, so don't let the stress yourself out. What I do think about when we talk about quantum cryptography and computing is how is this going to affect environmental issues because that's been a very, very hot topic as of late when it comes to using the blockchain and the power consumption that is required for these kind of things. But also, what kind of protocols are cryptography going to be building on top of to keep up with this? It's very much a tennis match, and this is not the first time in the history of cryptography and security protocols that we've seen this kind of tennis match between better computing power and better protocols for security. So I am really curious and fascinated by the whole idea of upping our security with new protocols that we can look forward to in the future and how that's going to protect us further. Yeah, if I had to guess, just based on the way things usually go, it's usually not as bad as you fear. It's usually not as good as you hope. So my guess is somewhere in the middle, we're going to have new quantum cryptography that can protect blockchains from the advanced crypto breaking properties of quantum computers by the time quantum computers are widely available. I can't wait. The downside to that, though, is going to be implementing it on existing blockchains. It's one thing to like, hey, we can totally start a new blockchain that's perfectly secure. That is something we need to make happen. I'm pretty confident that'll happen. What will happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Ethereum? I know Ethereum's getting out ahead of this, but what will happen to these organizations that are built on public key cryptography right now and will have to adapt? Will they? And some of them will. Some of them won't. Will the ones that are trying to adapt adapt fast enough? That's where I'm going to be training my eye. I'm going to be watching that to see, like... That's interesting. When is it time to jump off a platform because it's fine now, but they're way behind and they're not going to be future-proof. Oh, I'm sure that there's going to be some smaller cryptocurrencies that are... You're just going to have to jump ship because they won't be able to keep up. Yeah. So keep an eye out. We'll keep you updated on this stuff, but keep an eye on that aspect of these advances. Well, moving on, we have a little bit of news out of Patreon. So CEO Jack Conti told the Verge that Patreon is building a video hosting solution and player. Conti said this would be available to any creator no matter their medium, no matter the upload format. No launch details were announced quite yet. Right now, video creators must use Vimeo or YouTube to upload and then embed them into Patreon. So you're not actually using the Patreon platform to upload any videos. You're just posting them there. Unless they have a video that is less than 200 megs, in which case they can attach it to a post. Now, I don't know about you, Tom, but I'm excited about that. There's a lot of videos that can fit into it or megabytes these days. So yeah, the idea that we could, instead of uploading good day internet video to YouTube, making it private, putting it on, this is weird dance that we have to do, we could just upload it directly to Patreon. I'm all for this. I think that's great for us as a Patreon user. I do wonder if it's as good for the user who is like, oh, but now I'll have to use the Patreon app in order to view it. Right now they can just click out and watch it on their YouTube app. So it may not be as user friendly. I don't know. You know, I recently did a totally unscientific poll of some of my patrons, and they told me that they usually watch or they will listen to audio directly through an email notification from Patreon. So I know that they're using the media application on Patreon, but I am curious if what they're currently doing with audio will also sound off with video as well. Since it would be embedded in Patreon. Also feels like a little bit of a change of strategy where Patreon was partnering, right? They partnered with Acast, and it felt like Patreon was like, we just want to do the monetization. We'll let Acast do the podcast hosting. This feels like they're saying, well, but on the other hand, maybe we do want to host some of the content. Maybe we do want to be a one-stop shop for the creator so they don't have to use other things. You know, I think that's interesting to watch as they grow and learn. I'll use it for sure. I'm excited. All right, folks. While Instagram is busy catching up to TikTok, TikTok's voice effects are moving ahead. TikTok is partnering on text-to-speech capabilities with Chewbacca. Let me explain. As part of Disney Plus Day, which also made 15,000 other announcements about new Marvel series and stuff, Disney announced that it will let you use Disney characters for text-to-speech. So along with Chewie, you also have C3PO, a Stormtrooper, and non-Star Wars Disney characters like Stitch from Lilo and Stitch or Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy. You heard a preview of what it will sound like when you type in text and have Chewbacca say it. Like, is that what it's going to be? You just have text on the screen and you hear Chewie. You know, if they do that, I will totally use it just to troll people. Sounds awesome. I wonder if you know, and there's somebody out there who does, if you know how to speak Wookiee, if you're a Kashiq native, will you be able to just type that in and have it like properly translated into Chewbacca? I mean, I know how. Yeah, see? I didn't realize that I was talking to the person that I was talking about. That's amazing. Keep those emails coming, folks. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. A special thanks to Mike Weisman today. Mike Weisman, thank you for being one of our top lifetime supporters at DTNS. Thank you so much for all the years of support. If you're a lifetime supporter, we're working our way through thanking all of you at the end of the show. Or if you're a brand new boss, if it's day one, if you've never supported us before, you haven't supported us in a while and you support us today, we'll mention your name on Monday or tomorrow or the day after. So patreon.com. Before we get out of here, let's see what Len Peralta has drawn for us today. Sorry, I'm sorry. I was speaking a different language there for a second. No, Shannon, we're talking about. I was connecting with my Kashyyyk friend there. Anyway, yesterday is Disney Plus Day and I've got to admit I was pretty excited. They know exactly how to excite the nine-year-old kid inside of you. This is kind of an image of that. Disney Plus Day announcements can't contain geekiness or bladder. So yeah, it was kind of a big day for me and my nine-year-old son as we were watching and a lot of cleanup afterwards too. This is available at my patreon, patreon.com. Also at my online store, where I am also drawing custom-drawn holiday cards for people. So if you want to get one for me, just hit me up. I can take care of you. I can hook you up. We commissioned Len to make our holiday card that will go to everybody who gets their address into Patreon by November 15th. So if it's good enough for us, it's good enough for your own holiday card. That's right, absolutely. All right, thank you, Len. Thank you, Shannon, of course. Before we get out of here, what do you got going on these days? Oh, gosh, so many videos have been being posted on my YouTube channel. Have been being posted? YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse for all the tech videos. Just go crazy. Go crazy on my channel. Watch all the new ones. I've posted so many lately. I think the Pixel 6 Pro review is my favorite that I've done in the past couple of weeks. That was a really, really good in-depth review with battery tests, because I know everybody was curious about the battery. Yeah, so don't forget that address. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. All right, folks, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. If you want to catch us live, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be doing that on Monday with Stephanie Humphrey from The Tech John. Join us then. And so I'll be back in two. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuntz, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods! Beatmaster, W. Scottis 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shid, Steve Waterama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J. D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast, Creative Arts and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor. Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show included Patrick Norton, Scott Johnson and Shannon Morse. And thanks to all our patrons who make this show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.