 Coming up on DTNS, Xiaomi wants to make a car. Why Dodge will let a thief slowly roll away with your car. And Patrick Norton helps us all stay safely backed up, whether we're in a car or not. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 26th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Draw on the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Glenn Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Patrick Norton, host of AVXL, is back bookending the week. That's great. Yeah, look at that. Hey, folks, if you're wondering where Sarah Lane is, she's doing fine. She's resting up on her second vaccine. She'll be back with us on Monday. We were just talking about Meximeltz and a fully homomorphic encryption on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, yes, Patrick. Fairly, Meximeltz were sold for 30 years, but I don't remember ever seeing one for sale. I'm just going to leave it there. If you want to know how it even came up, get Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Razer plans to produce its Project Hazel Concept N95 reusable face mask. It's the one that I talked about at CES with RGB lighting and voice projection. Pricing and release date was not announced and it still requires certification from the US FDA, but they're really going to make it. Tech in Asia reports that Beijing based online mutual aid platform, Qingsong Huzhu, stopped operations on Wednesday prior to the shutdown. The site had 17 million users at the end of May last year. This is a 10 cent company. So if you were wondering about the fallout of 10 cents meeting with regulators and antitrust, this would be the first example of that. WeWork agreed. Yes, WeWork, it's still a company. Even though it went through all of that craziness, it's still in fact a company. WeWork agreed to a merger with a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company, Boax Acquisition, that will take the company public with a $9 billion valuation, including debt, deal expected to close in the coming months. SPACs are just a way to IPO without having to IPO. It's a whole thing. A 2019 funding round from SoftBank previously valued WeWork at $47 billion, still, like, because it's still a company. Areolink, a communications company that helps route text messages, announced that the major US carriers will no longer support SMS or MMS text enabling on their respective wireless numbers to prevent attackers being able to easily reroute a target's texts. This comes after that motherboard report about someone paying 16 bucks to reroute text messages and break into a number of online accounts, including Postmates, WhatsApp and Bumble. And Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has sources that say Apple is considering launching an Apple Watch model with a rugged case, potentially in late 2021 or early 2022. The watch would feature extra impact resistance in addition to a ruggedized case and be marketed as an additional model like the Apple Watch SE is. All right, let's talk a little more about Xiaomi getting into cars. Reuters sources say Xiaomi plans to market electric vehicles under its own brand and the cars, according to these sources, would be made by Great Wall Motors. Great Wall Motors said in a securities filing Friday that it had not discussed such a partnership with Xiaomi. Great Wall makes pickup trucks and has not offered its manufacturing capacity to other companies before, though it is partnering with BMW on an EV factory in China. Still, one of Reuters sources said a public announcement might come as early as next week with a release date for a car in 2023 at the earliest. The plan apparently would be similar to what Baidu announced earlier, which is them working with automaker Geely to make electric vehicles. Xiaomi does have an announcement coming up where they could mention something like this and the announcement is March 29th. Xiaomi has said publicly it will release details then of a self-developed computer chip and a smartphone camera with a liquid lens. Liquid lens lets you do telephoto to macro all in one lens. Xiaomi has not teased any announcements related to cars as part of that, though. I guess we'll find out for sure on March 29th. I mean, the liquid lens thing is interesting. Xiaomi making its own chips. That seems to be de-regure these days for companies, but the car thing seems to be getting the most attention, Patrick. Well, it's also because the car thing was, great walls was like, yeah, we haven't, what? Excuse us. We don't remember this. Did we? I don't know. I feel like every, you know, every so often at this point, there has to be an announcement or suspicion or speculation that, you know, I'm waiting for the LG electric car, the General Electric electric car, Bob's house of fries and burgers electric car to be a little mocking. I don't know. I look forward to the March 29th announcements to see if, in fact, the rest of the electric car announced there whether or not involves Great Wall, but... I am intrigued, yeah. Because Reuters has got a really good track record, not that they never make a mistake, but they got three sources on this stuff. It wasn't just one. And so it's interesting that Great Wall did a securities filing saying, we haven't had any discussion. So there could be an end date on that report that's like, oh, our discussion's happened the next day after the part we're reporting on. I don't know. I'm very intrigued to find out if there is a car announcement of any kind, whether it involves Great Wall or not from Xiaomi on March 29th. But before we get off that, I'm also very looking forward to their use of a liquid lens. That is confirmed. They put that on Weibo. We're doing a liquid lens. Liquid lens is usually used in industrial situations. So this would be the first time someone tries to bring it to a smartphone. But if they can pull it off, that means one camera. You don't have to have that big, honking thing of four different cameras. You could, at least some of them, pull it down into one. It'll be interesting. I'm laughing because I would fully expect them to do a liquid lens and another two lenses because maybe they felt they had to look like they had 17 cameras to be competitive at your local cell phone, at your local ATT slash Verizon slash T-Mobile. But I will say, I would love to see liquid lens. I would love to see the liquid lens work. I would love to see a liquid lens do all of the things we've been reading about them for years and years and years and people have hinted that they would be coming in cell phone, smartphone cameras. I just want to actually see one released in the wild, much like the electric car from Xiaomi. Well, you're gonna get to see that because Xiaomi said they're gonna do it unless they change their mind between now and the 29th. The car, I don't know, who knows. And if anybody wants to know, we're not gonna go deep into liquid lens, but it uses electricity and a liquid solution to change the focal length and all that sort of thing. Kind of like your eyeball, but mechanical and in a phone. It squishes and it changes the lens. Dodge announced a new security feature for its Challenger and Charger cars that requires a driver who has the key to also enter a four-digit code on a touchscreen to unlock the car fully, sort of to factor authentication for cars. Now, this is common. Dodge is certainly not near the first to ever do this, but what puzzled the next web's Matthew Beatum is that the way Dodge implemented it, if you only had the key and not the four-digit code, the car would still turn the engine on in idle mode. So it would limit it to 675 RPM and less than three horsepower. So if you could fake the fob, get into the car and turn it on, you could technically still steal it, but you would only be able to roll slowly away. It would not be a fast getaway. Beatum followed up on why allow that at all? Why not just not have it turn on? And Dodge explained, backwards compatibility. Any owner of a charger or Challenger with either the 392 cubic inch Hemi V8 or the supercharged 6.2 liter Hemi V8 engine and made after 2015 can have this feature installed on their car for free. You have to take it in the dealer, they do a firmware update, but it's backwards compatible on those cars because they have what's called valet mode. Valet mode limits what the car can do so they can't go speeding around in your car while you're in the restaurant or hotel or whatever. And the new security mode uses the valet mode with different restrictions, making it easier to port it over to older models. You're telling the older model, do a version of valet mode, but way stricter. If Dodge had made the security mode not turn the car on at all, that would have required more complex programming changes, impacted more systems, and would certainly have been costlier to program and possibly riskier because you'd have to test what systems it affects. So Patrick, do you think that compromise is worth it? I think it's gonna make certain Dodge owners really happy that they had a chance to go back to the dealership and get it upgraded with the cool thing like the new Dodges have. I don't see it as being particularly great security feature at that point. If it will still roll away, then it makes it incredibly easy to steal because you can literally move the car, it's not locked down. I'll also say, if you really wanna steal a car, you're gonna steal a car, but I don't know. Dodge made the argument that being able to idle away is so slow that it would be much harder and it would deter criminals because they're like, ah, I'd rather get away clean, I'd rather be able to roll down the street. That said, I've seen cars driving down the street with the car alarm going off. Yeah, I was gonna say like everybody's envisioning gone in 60 seconds and this magnificent high-speed chase through Los Angeles with lots of jumps. But if you can back the vehicle out of somebody's driveway and behind a tow truck, it's just as stolen and it doesn't draw as much attention as physically dragging the vehicle out of the garage. I will say I have also seen a car being towed by someone who is with someone still inside the passenger seat and hammering the horn and slamming on the door while they were being physically drugged down the street inside of their vehicle, which I'm pretty sure it was a repo. It seems weird. It really seems weird to me to do this. I mean, I guess it becomes hard to drive even if you do get away with it, right? You have to do a lot more work to make it drivable in that case. You're assuming they're not just gonna split it into enemy, I'm not assuming they won't. I'm just saying it makes it harder. A lot of cars that they are stripped. They are worth more in small pieces on other people's cars than they are as a large physical unit driven around. All right, we've had foldable screens for a few years now. We've also had rollable screens, though we really only see that for purchase in the very expensive LG TV, the signature R. And now CNET has seen designs from TCL to combine the two, foldable and rollable into one device. The concept would unfold from a phone into a tablet so far, so Samsung Galaxy Fold. But after it's unfolded, you could then unroll it to make the screen even bigger. To enable that, it looks like, according to these diagrams on CNET, it folds up trifold into thirds. CNET says TCL will show the device at an event in mid-April. So we may get a better look at it yet, but seems like it would be kind of thick when it's in the phone form factor. But the way it would work is it would unfold where two thirds of it are the part that you can expand, and the other third is just a regular part. And then the rollable is inside the device. If you haven't seen that before, the way it works is you kind of open it like a scroll, and you don't see the scrolling, it just makes the screen work. We saw that at CES, and it looks pretty cool. What do you think about this combination, Patrick? Mostly any time I get to say dragon hinge, I get really, really happy. So TCL, mostly known as a television company, I think they do some really, really good engineering. It's a really, really smart engineering. I've seen pictures of the, I think they showed off the dragon hinge originally, like in Mobile World Congress a couple years ago. I don't know. I can't decide if this is an interesting combination or the most annoying parts of a tablet and the most annoying parts of a fat phone, not a phablet, but a physically fat phone brought together. I will reserve judgments until they actually show me something more than a black and a very striking, but still a small black and white drawing of a theoretical concept. Yeah, I'm sure TCL, were they sitting right next to me right now, would say we aren't ready to tell you about it yet. That's why we didn't tell you until mid-April. But yeah, I will reserve judgment on this as well. I'll put it this way though, on the positive side, on the concept, let's say it's not as fat as it looks in this diagram. And let's say it all works. I love the idea. I love the idea of being able to open up a tablet and then also have a third form factor of like, oh, I'm gonna watch a widescreen movie now or pull that thing open and also being able to fold it up into something I can put probably in a bag more than a pocket, but still, that's a little more convenient. I like the concept, it's all in the execution for me. Yeah, I like the idea, as soon as I can't comfortably fit it in a pocket, it stops being a phone for me and then it's a tablet and then do I really want a folding tablet in place of an actual tablet at that point? Yeah. Well, I guess I'll find out in mid-April. Hey folks, you wanna join in the conversation, you got thoughts on foldables and rollables and I don't know, fanables, what's the next one coming? Tell us in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Yesterday, we read the email from Prof Metcalf saying that Patrick's story about his Plex server on Monday's GDI hit close to home. His Drobo died during lockdown, he lost all his data in his DVD backup, so at the risk of repeating yesterday, he built a custom VM or hypervisor box with four 12 terabyte hard drives, direct link to a Linux VM, 24 terabyte ZFS data store, he spent six months backing up thousands of DVDs in Blu-rays, ripped to MKV, local Plex media server, set up as a file server, so all the Macs in the house, automatically time machine backup, you get the full email in yesterday's show, but the point was, software cost was the $3 Plex app for iOS, everything else was freeware and that inspired us to ask Patrick to cover some of the best practices for backing up your data, because, man, it's never the wrong time to talk about backing up data because you're always in the point where you don't need the backup until you do and by then it's too late, so think about it now. It's like planting a tree, the best time to plant a tree is yesterday or 20 years ago, right? Because yeah, by the time you need a backup, it's too late. So I'm sure, if anybody's familiar with me and any of the 19 shows I've done in the last 20 years, the 321 backup rule, this is fundamental, three backups on two different media with one in another location. That is the ideal, the platonic ideal for backups. And that last one location is kind of critical for folks worried about earthquakes, fires, flooding, which seemed to be covering an expanded portion of the United States and the rest of the world as I get older, you know? And I'm gonna say it right now, statistically, are you likely to use your data? No, but it's better to have a backup and not need it than to need a backup and not have it. So assuming you have a decent internet connection, it's really, really easy these days to backup your data. If you're working on your master's thesis, if you have a critical business project, if you are working on schoolwork, if you have a favorite collection of files that you can't replace, they shall be backed up. It's really easy. Most online storage services give you gigabytes, several gigabytes. I think it's like, I want to say like 15 for Google Drive or one, I guess they call it now. What I actually think of as Microsoft's stupid one drive thing, they keep reinstalling my Windows 10 system, not that I'm bitter, drop box, box who's having issues, but it's still a good place to back stuff up. They make it really easy to backup stuff in the cloud. And unless you have a spectacularly large master's thesis, it's going to be really, really easy to back it up online. You know, you can backup your system off site. I prefer to use back plays for my system backups, but I also have like a terabyte on what used to be Google Drive and is now Google One, but you know, the SSD or the hard drive in your system is your first copy. You can throw your second copy on a drive or thumb drive, external drive or thumb drive. And then one of those services is your off site backup. Then you have two different mediums on at least one different location. Things get really interesting if you have massive amounts of data. For example, to bring up something that may sound familiar from a few seconds ago, huge amounts of media files. Back plays, for example, I have 11 terabytes of back plays backed up on my desktop account, which costs $6 a month. It is the best bargain ever because it is physically attached, it is part of my desktop installation. Back plays will cheerfully back that up for me. It's a stupid good deal. I can't use back plays for NASA. So when you say back plays, back plays is backing it up in the cloud to themselves and also to your Drobo. Well, no, I actually have a Drobo that is attached to my desktop by USB cable. It's not a natural. I see, and then that data from the Drobo is going to back plays, gotcha? Yes, so that's my, I only have two copies of that. My local copy and my copy on back plays. When I get my NAS set up again, maybe I'll have three copies of that, but I am comfortable. And this is not the way smart people do it. This just happens to be the way I am doing it for this large collection of media data. I have a single copy locally and I have a secondary copy up on back plays. If you have a NAS or a server box, though, you can't use back plays. You have to use something else. And it gets really, really spendy. So you're looking at, for online storage, when you get into terabytes, there's not a whole long list of stuff that's really, really affordable. Back plays B to B, archiving with Amazon S3 Glacier. They have like a deep storage version of Amazon S3 Glacier. The basic version of Glacier costs about $5 per terabyte. The deep storage version, which basically means if you need to re-download your data, you're going to give them about 12 hours to kind of pull it out of deep storage. And it gets... Yeah, the idea with Glacier is it's cheap to store, but the trade-off is you can't get it back fast. You don't, it's not like Dropbox where you get instant access. Yeah. And that's, you know, may or may not be a big deal for you. The deep bar guide from Amazon S3 Glacier though, it takes the cost of storing a terabyte of data from five bucks a month down to a buck a month. And then it's about the same price as, for example, back plays B to B to recover your data, in which case it's going to cost you about $2.50 a terabyte. It's something to think about, right? Aspendi is putting terabytes of hard drives into a NAS or a free NAS, well, it's true NAS, now Box. Once you start realizing, if you have 30 terabytes of data, it's going to cost you like 150 bucks a month to back up all of that data offsite. You might start thinking about building a second server and storing it at another location. And again, you know, that's kind of why our friend did the most excellent VMware build because he wanted a secondary copy of that data. What gets challenging is when you are actually, if you're in earthquake country, if you're in forest fire country, if you're on a flood plain, you do want that copy of the data to be offsite. So one of my favorite ones is if you have a friend somewhere else with a good connection, maybe you can beg an outlet, a little bit of shelf space and a connection to the network to put your remote backup of your data on there. So I live in earthquake countries, Patrick lives in tornado country. So we could swap hard drive space and say, I'll store some of yours, you store some of mine and then we essentially both have an offsite location. I love that idea. I so do I. And statistically it is unlikely for both of us to be smited by force majeure. But you know. Never say never, right? But yeah, you're always playing the odds in this. That's why you want to have three, two, one, right? It's the idea is hopefully that, one of those survives whatever's happening. And if they don't, you've probably got bigger problems than just your data, to be honest. Drew, also I want to give a shout out from something you didn't cover in your recap of Prof Metcalfe's letter, but the idea of using ZFS and avoiding bit rot or data scrubbing, which is a great subject for another day. Excellent. Yes. Thank you for that, Patrick. Good stuff. Don't forget three, two, one. That's the thing to pull away is you've got the data on the machine. There's one. You got to have a backup locally. That's two and then one somewhere else. That's three. In partnership with HP, Ford has started recycling 3D printed parts and the powder that is used in making them to make fuel clips for the F-250. The waste from the dental company Smile Direct Club, which reportedly has 63D printers making 40,000 dental aligners a day, gets sent to a company called Laverne with a G, LaVunia, that turns it into plastic pellets that can then be used in injection molding machines. Ford says the fuel clips made from this recycled printer waste are more resistant to chemicals and moisture and are 7% lighter and 10% cheaper than the clips it has used in the past. So not only reusing material to reduce waste and cost, but also making a better part out of it, it sounds like. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. I love that we've gotten to the point in 3D printers. They haven't revolutionized our homes the way a lot of people thought they would, but they are already in the industry moving into the part of like, oh, how do we make it more efficient? We got all this wasteful powder. We've got all this extra stuff. What can we do with it? Let's find ways to reuse that. And it's good for the Smile Direct Club. It's good for Ford. And it's good for us because we get cheaper parts. It's been interesting because recycling 3D printer material has been a big thing in the DIY community for a while and people trying to make it more affordable and how can we do it? And it's a really complicated process to do at home or at least an expensive one to do at home for most people. So it's really, really cool to see this being done on such a large scale. Also, it finally took me a while. It's fuel line clips. So I was trying to figure out what a fuel clip was. Oh, a fuel line clip. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Well, no, no. They've referred to it as a fuel clip and are as technical, but I remember being like, what's a fuel clip? Like I've owned a Ford pickup truck and I've never seen a fuel clip. I realized it looks like a thing to align multiple fuel lines and hold them onto the frame. And keep them together. So no, your Ford isn't entirely made of teeth, but if you have a liner like clips. Teeth aligners. Yeah, you could say that your Ford is partly made of teeth. Not real teeth, not human teeth, but aligners that would go into teeth. Braces. Braces. Brace, brace, brace. Yeah, so go check that out. We've got the link to the Ars Technica article in the show notes. So let's check out the mail bag. Daniel sent us a response to our electric car discussion, electric motorcycle discussion on yesterday's show. Daniel said, I've always thought that range anxiety had been a problem that is only relevant on long road trips. And in that case, it applies as much to ice as it does to electric cars. I've been on road trips in an ice car where I'm anxiously looking at the estimated range remaining at internal combustion engine. By the way, if you're like ice, what guy internal combustion engine? We're looking at an estimated range remaining and looking at Google maps, looking for the nearest gas station. And you've driven through Arizona, New Mexico. You definitely know that. But that's an edge case. Most people are not driving more than 300 miles a day most of the time. And with the ability to charge overnight at home, range is even less of an issue since every day starts with a full battery. Even the lowest range electric cars are plenty for just about any commute. A thought experiment I think is useful is imagining if every gas station was replaced with a supercharger and flip it. This is what I thought was interesting about Daniel. Every supercharger replaced with a gas station. Range anxiety wouldn't be a thing for electric cars but would be for gas. I also thought it was interesting that the team discussed electric motorcycles on the show as if they are super new. A company called Zero Motorcycles has been making electric motorcycles for a while now. And while their range is a little less than the higher end Teslas and such, they are still really good and the acceleration is insane. Yeah, these electric motorcycles have been all over Southeast Asia as well. Thank you, Daniel, for sending that along. And then Mark Johnson pointed out that bikes have had catalytic converters on them for a long time. Often they are placed in the crossovers of the exhaust pipes before the muffler but more modern ones are seeing the catalytic converters being incorporated into the muffler itself. And Ian clarified that four-stroke bikes have had catalytic converters for years but maybe some two-stroke bikes have not. And Roger just said, yeah, I'm old. The EPA and the carb were much more lenient on motorcycle emissions back of the day. But in California, carb required bikes to have catalytic exhausts in 2008, which, Roger's timeless, 2008. That seems like yesterday. Give the guy a break, all right? Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you have some emails, shout out to the folks who support us at the top level, master and grandmaster, David Mosher, Carol, hi-tech Oki. Thank you so much. Let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us today, Len? I decided to do a PSA for today, almost like a PSA poster about backups. I've been burned by backups in the past. And this is just a good reminder. The backup rule, like Patrick said, three, two, one, but this is back the F up times three. Times three, that's good. Yeah, it's, you know, I think that's a good reminder. If you would hang that in your cubicle, you'd be like, yeah, I think it's a good idea to start backing stuff up. Listen, man, I'm telling you, there's some IT folks out there who definitely are gonna wanna buy this from you and hang it around the office when people are headed back into the office. Absolutely, you know, like Patrick said, you know, when you need to back up, it's too late. So back up, back up, back up times three. This is available right now in my online store, as always, on lenperaltastore.com. Also, if you're a Patreon backer at patreon.com slash Len, you can get this immediately right now, download it, or if you're an NFT guy, go to OpenSea, search Lenp and find it there. Finally, I just wanna remind people if there is, if you have it in your heart, to back me up Kickstarter with my son Max, we're doing Geek-a-Week Masterpiece. We're about, we're two weeks in, about 50% funded and would really need, we're going to the third weekend here and could use some support. So check it out, just search Geek-a-Week over at Kickstarter. I have done enough Kickstarter just to know that that third week is always the terrified one, because it's always the bottom of your bell curve. So if you wanna, you wanna cheer up Len, today would be the day to pitch in on that. Come on, please, thank you. Patrick, Gordon, what do you got going on these days? You know, just recorded another episode of AV Excel this morning with Robert Herron. Got a new project coming up in the near future. So do me a favor if you have a tech question. Tweet at Patrick Norton or email patrick.norton at gmail.com. Do it, do it, do it, give us some stuff. Before we go, Dan Campos has a word for us. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for The Word of the Day, brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. I am sure you know about fake news and if you want to do a literal translation to Spanish, you can call fake news Noticias falsas, but we also have a wonderful word to refer to that term. Today's word is paparrucha, which means exactly that. A hoax or a poorly reported event. You can also use it to refer to silly things or nonsense. You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express available every Friday. That is not paparrucha, folks. Go subscribe at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash N-T-X. You can also support our show at any level, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. We're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Live. Back tomorrow with Tricia Hirschberger. Talk to you then. This week's episode of Daily Tech News Show was 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 Coontz, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, social media producer, Shannon Morse, our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus1, Zoey Brings Bacon, BioCow, Captain Kipper and Jack Shit, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed from Sean Wei, music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Looters, ACAST ad support from Tim Ruggieri, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show include Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Patrick Norton. Guests on this week's show include Peter Wells, live art performed by Len Peralta and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.