 Coming up on DTNS, what is new at Mobile World Congress? Why Swift Banking Matters, and the Raspberry Pi is all grown up. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 28th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty certain. We were just talking before the show about what to do with all those DVD plastic cases that you might have in your closet. If you want the wider version of our show, it's called Good Day Internet, and you can join it by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Of course, we want to give a big thanks to our top patrons, including Steve Ayadarola, Jeffrey Zilx, and Tony Glass. Indeed, let's start with a few tech things you should know. TikTok began rolling out support for 10-minute video uploads to all users. This comes just after video upload length increased from 60 seconds to three minutes back in July, 2021. Instagram head, Adam Masseri, tweeted out that the company has not yet developed a dedicated iPad app because he says there's not a big enough group of people to be our priority. He calls these finally features. So an iPad app, if it ends up coming across the pike, along with dark mode, scheduled posts, and deleting a single photo from a carousel. Uber began testing a new driver algorithm in 24 US cities that will let drivers see their pay and where they'll have to go before accepting trips, as well as increasing incentives for drivers to accept shorter rides. Consumer fares are not impacted by this change. The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Market, or ACM, levied a sixth 5 million Euro fine against Apple for non-compliance with its order to allow dating apps to use third-party payment systems. Writers saw a letter that Apple sent to the ACM claiming that the solution it proposed previously would require a minor technical change for developers that would not occur in technical cost. That's common practice for devs. But the ACM said that this place is an unfair burden on developers and that this letter does not constitute a change in Apple's position, hence the fine. And Toyota suspended all 14 of its factories in Japan due to what a spokesperson called a supplier system failure with their supplier Kojima Industries. Kojima said it appeared to be a victim of a cyber attack. This will result in the company losing about 13,000 cars of output per day by the third of its global production. It's unclear if the shutdown will last more than a day. We just know that it's scheduled at least for March 1st in Japan right now. So we'll see how long it goes. All right, well, we've been covering some of the tech fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Tom Merritt's latest know a little more, breaks down a big financial move taken against some Russian banks in the wake of these events, how it works and also what it means. Let's hear a little bit from him on that now. European authorities in cooperation with the US and Canada will compel select Russian banks from accessing the Swift networks. That's a network that enables payments, security transfers and more. Swift is a messaging network. It was created in 1973 and created a standard to make sure banks knew where they were sending money. Prior to Swift, banks often used written messages on Telex, which could lead to misinterpretation and mistakes and was not very secure. Swift is a standard for messages that avoids mistakes, adds security and operates the network and software to send those messages. More than 11,000 financial institutions use Swift worldwide. There are few alternatives and those that exist are slower and they cost more. There's also a blockchain alternative to Swift called Ripple that's been in operation since 2012. It promises instant transactions at very low cost. Ripple has a few hundred banks using it. Swift continuously tries to improve its service and launched a new version called Global Payments Innovation in 2018 and Swift is also considering a blockchain based system of its own. Suffice to say that if you want to balance ease of use with cost and efficiency, Swift is essential and it's what almost every bank uses. Banks that lose Swift access will still be able to transfer money around. They can use Russia's internal system called SPFS. China has one called CIPS and India offers one called SFMS. Those options have limited membership though, but some members are also members of Swift and may be willing to route transactions into Swift networks. That will slow things down and cost Russian banks more and may inconvenience consumers who want to use bank cards within Russia. A move with more impact may be the decision to cut the Russian central bank off from its overseas funds. This would deprive Russia of its own money, though it has been reducing its reliance on foreign currency. If you'd like to understand more about Swift and how it works, check out our Know a Little More episode on Swift at knowalittlemore.com. Very, thank you, Tom, and a really great way to learn a little bit more about Swift, especially since Rich I have at least, especially over the weekend, seeing so many posts from people saying, what does it really matter? All you need is cryptocurrency and Russia can circumvent this. Not true when you're talking about millions and millions of people in the country who aren't necessarily on that track yet. Well, and you've also heard kind of on the opposite, I guess some hyperbolic, does this mean Russia people in Russia can't use debit cards or stuff like that? So I think this can definitely contextualize what this is aimed at, what this actually means. And yeah, just a really great breakdown. But we saw a lot of other kind of tech reactions kind of across the board over the weekend, right, Sarah? Yeah, indeed. Over the weekend, especially, we saw moves from tech companies, quite a few of them, to help people on the ground in and around Ukraine. Google joined meta in cutting off monetization for Russia state-owned media in consultation with Ukrainian authorities. Google also disabled access to live traffic information in maps to protect Ukrainians. And this was actually a point of contention for some folks saying, wait, Google Maps data, Ukrainians need that? Well, it was in an effort to actually help Ukrainians. Although, traffic information will still be available for turn-by-turn navigation. So it's not completely cut off. To help keep people online, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said over the weekend that the company activated its Starlink internet service in Ukraine. A lot of people were excited about that with terminals on the way, but still not clear how terminals will arrive and what the scope is of the coverage area for Starlink. Now, to help refugees fleeing the conflict, Airbnb pledged to provide free short-term housing for 100,000 people fleeing the conflict and is in talks with surrounding governments in Poland, Romania, Germany and Hungary to coordinate long-term stays, longer-term stays, more than 30 days, say. Tesla will also offer free EV charging for all vehicles in towns near the Ukrainian border in Poland, Slovakia and also Hungary. Etsy also said it will write off all outstanding fees for Ukraine-based sellers to help offset the tremendous financial hardship for creators. On the flip side of that, some Russian folks who use Etsy say they have since been cut off. Yeah, I think the thing that turned a lot of heads was the Google decision on the map stating what kind of Sarah, as you alluded to. And I think the key there is in, obviously this was not a unilateral decision by Google, they are consulting people. The question I have is, I saw this speculated in a couple different pieces of coverage that this seems to be the first time that Google has done this, where they're taking data that could theoretically be used to target people that are amassed in an area or something that are caused harm, like could be weaponized in some way and kind of uniformly cutting off access to that, while still enabling people to do turn-by-turn. I do wonder though how effective that will be. I imagine theoretically it won't be too hard to spoof turn-by-turn navigation to then get still access to that live information. So I feel like maybe that's a little bit of a game of cat and mouse. But yeah, definitely, that one seemed to be making, at least from what I was reading, making the most waves in terms of these kind of online or these kind of on-the-ground reactions. It kind of seemed to me as though Google was saying, listen, if you're seeing reports of certain maps data that we have cut off, it's not from us, because there's so much misinformation or information that has been manipulated on all sides of this to create a narrative that is maybe or maybe not true. Why did that go on? Yeah, and we're all kind of on that vein, that kind of, I guess, misinformation or vein. We're also seeing a lot of changes from platforms to keep people online safe during this conflict. Meta has opened up the ability for fake information to be able to use the data that has been used to open up the ability for Facebook users in Ukraine to lock profiles. And this will be expanding to these protections for users in Russia as well, if they want to activate that as well. Basically what this means is once locked, your friends list become unsearchable. Poster hidden and profile photos cannot be downloaded or enlarged, you can just like extremely low resolution, just kind of flat image, so that you can't really do much with that. They're not the only ones though. Google also added protections for users in conflict regions, enabling two factor authentication for those that already haven't activated it. It's also providing the use of its advanced protection program. This is something that they've offered in the past to individuals that may have a higher risk, or higher than normal risk of being targeted by threat actors and things for like journalists, human rights activists. Given the scale of cyber operations in this conflict already though, it seems like this could be just a huge amount of people in Ukraine that could want to turn this on. Google also enabled Safe Browsing Mode by default in Chrome and this identifies known phishing and malware assertion attempts and proactively blocks those. Not to be left out, Twitter will also be making some changes, adding new labels to tweets with links from Russian state linked media outlets, stating their affiliation and adding an orange exclamation point to just kind of let you know, hey, this is something you should pay attention to or there may be some additional context you need to check out in this additional context warning. Twitter began labeling state-controlled account profiles in 2020, but not individual tweets with link back to their original content. The platform will add similar labels to other state-affiliated media accounts over the next few weeks. Twitter head of site integrity, Yul Roth, said that these labels are meant to add helpful context to conversations on the platform, setting the impact to similar labels using COVID-19 and election information. And then we saw just before this, Meta's Nick Clegg tweeted out that they were going to be blocking RT and Sputnik on their platforms as well. So definitely, I'm sorry, they're gonna be restricting, I believe, is the language that he used. I just wanna make sure I get that right. Restricting access. So we don't know details. I was digging into the tweet before the show just to see what they had any specifics. We don't know how that's gonna look. But this Twitter thing is, to me, seems very significant. Sarah, they've obviously been kind of learning that, hey, the more speed bumps you have along from even just past like retweeting information out, the more times it gives people to think and the more times it gives people, the more context you have, the better you have to make, I guess, an informed decision as opposed to kind of a reactive one. But this is a big, like a huge shift from what they're doing. I'm not exactly sure how they are, if they're going to be using that exact same list of state-controlled account profiles that they've already started tagging those account profiles and then using all the media from those outlets in these alerts. That wasn't exactly clear in these initial tweets. I was digging in that because I wanted to make sure we understood if this was going to be a reevaluation of those accounts and of those profiles or if this is going to be something different. What I thought was interesting, I saw this in my own Twitter timeline. I use tweet bots, so a lot of the stuff that Twitter rolls out on its official, either web-based or IOAS or Android apps is a little different than the experience that I get. But going to web Twitter, I saw a couple of these tweets be flagged this morning. Now, the information that was flagged was not necessarily something that was designed to get people on either sides of the board up in arms. But that is also important, I think. I think when Twitter, and again, this is Twitter doing this. This is not us saying that Twitter should have done this. This is what Twitter has done, saying this news source might have some innocuous news that comes out of it, but it also might have some misinformation or information designed to confuddle all the rest of us. And we're going to flag this no matter what they say. That is big, that is really big. If you are out there and you've seen this, we'd love to know about it. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. But yeah, we are seeing the big four, I guess you call them, kind of backs up against the wall and companies are handling this differently and it is a very fast moving situation. And probably tomorrow, there'll be all sorts of new things to talk about. But I think that in many ways we're all doing our best to try to have the flow of free information be helpful to folks and certainly those on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere. And certainly from where I stand very, very far away from this conflict, I think it's really helpful. The other thing is on Google's part, their advanced protection program, that's an extremely powerful suite of automated but also human managed responses to people that believe they're at increased presence of threat actors. I do wonder how that's going to scale given the fact that there are more than likely gonna have, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, like there's a possibility of an extremely large influx of people into this program. And yes, we know automated tools can be very effective if they're having specialized algorithms looking at these people's accounts, monitoring them for any suspicious activity. But if they're not able to scale that human element, I hope Google is anticipating that as they are expanding this as well. Welcome as that bit of protection is though for sure. Well, we know a lot of you have thoughts on everything that we talked about on the show so far. We would love to hear your thoughts. You make our show better. Join in the conversation, and you can do so a variety of ways, but including our Discord. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Well, Rich, on a more fun note, at least when it comes to new technology, today was the first official day of Mobile World Congress going on in Barcelona, Spain. We've had a ton of phone and mobile announcements. That's what the show is about. So phones, laptops, tablets, wearables, the list goes on. We thought we'd run down some of the things that have caught our eye thus far. Rich, what do you got? Well, the first one that really caught my eye is the Lenovo ThinkPad X13S. Now, this is one of Lenovo's latest attempts at a Windows On Arm. This is Windows 11 On Arm at this point. So it includes things like X64 or X86 emulation natively in the OS. But the big headline feature here is this is the first to use the new Snapdragon 8CX Gen3 compute platform. This is the SOC that's powering all of this stuff. And really the big problem that we've had, or I guess some of the struggles that Windows On Arm has had for adoption is the app compatibility certainly is one of them. But also that the battery life on these is usually very good. The performance though is not necessarily what people think of when they're thinking of a Windows machine, especially when you're talking about like this ThinkPad, the ThinkPad X line generally is like, hey, this is your power, you know, your power user travel machine, right? So it needs to be fairly capable. And, you know, there's some lofty claims here. We're talking, you know, Qualcomm has talked about multi-day battery life, 60% better performance per watt. It's fanless, less than two and a half pounds. You know, and it's reasonably priced, I feel like at 10, 1099. But I feel like this is like a make or break kind of device for like a proving point for Windows On Arm. Like if this can take off, if this can be for your road warrior, for your business person that's on the road all the time, but needs something that can be, you know, compute fairly well, it doesn't have to be a gaming machine or anything like that. But it can't fall on its face for like those common Windows tasks. That to me feels like this is a very important device for that kind of Windows On Arm ecosystem. I don't know, it sounds like a pretty good device to me. I mean, the price is, sure, it's not a budget laptop, but it's also not the most expensive option that we have either. Yeah, and a lot of, you know, the ThinkPad is like, hey, we're gonna put on the corporate expense account anyway, so we can live with that, right? Like that should be, is almost beside the point with this particular device. But yeah, for sure, it's kind of crazy. The next one that I thought was really interesting were the Honor Earbuds 3 Pro. Catchy name, I know these are coming from Honor. I don't, they're in, send the name. I don't know why I didn't say that, but the big headline feature here. You did, you did. Active noise cancellation. Hey, that's great, lots of people have those, but it can take your temperature when it's in your ear. And I just got this guy from a birthday, got an Apple Watch, very excited about this. All the health features, I kind of just didn't realize them. If this can fit into Huawei's larger health ecosystem, or not Huawei, excuse me, Honor's larger health ecosystem, if this can offer that same kind of thing, like constant temperature checks or like regular temperature checks. So you can be like, hey, you're like, let you know as soon as you're running a fever, like that's just another signal. We've seen what can be done with heart rate, with ECG, with, you know, your blood ox levels and stuff like that. Obviously this is not gonna be the last device that's going to have it. There's been rumors that Apple's been working on this for some time, but to me, that feels like a big deal. And it's not really at that much of a premium, 199 euros, that's in the premium earbud level anyway. So that's not like you're paying extra to get this feature. Yeah, I love this. I don't take my temperature daily, but for a variety of reasons, you either want to or you're doing it because, you know, we're in a pandemic. So yeah, I think, you know, good on Honor for offering this. And yes, I would like to see how this does fit into the other fitness and health efforts that other companies, you know, are doing with data collection. Yeah, I mean, that's the key. Like it can't just be, oh, here's a graph of this. Like, you know, it has to be, to me to the value of this is combining it with other signals and being able to give you a bigger and more comprehensive health picture, but very exciting to see, you know, kind of us crack that kind of wearable, you know, always in your ear thermometer, I guess. And then the other, one of the other things that really stood out to me is we've heard an update on OnePlus's Oxygen OS. This was supposedly something that was kind of going away, that we're going to be merging it with Oppo's ColorOS. And the plan was they already share the same code base, right? This could be a little confusing, Oppo OnePlus kind of affiliated sub-brands, that kind of stuff. They were supposed to be combining these and having a unified OS, but OnePlus has come out and said Oxygen OS, the next version of it, Oxygen OS 13, is going to be coming out. So it's not clear, okay, are they still gonna just call it this? They're actually unifying it, and this is just to make people happy that they're not changing the name. People don't like change, I understand that. So maybe that's just to appease everybody. Is this part of a larger separation from ColorOS? Not exactly clear, but kind of a big deal to kind of walk away from that. And then the other kind of part of that news is that the OnePlus 10 Pro is getting an international launch at launch in China already, and now it's coming in March to the US, Europe, and India as well. Yeah, I don't really, ColorOS, Oxygen OS, let's just pick one, go with it guys. That's how I feel about it. I understand like OnePlus is a very fervent following. They carved a really successful niche as like this power budget handset, and they kind of built a brand based on that. So I understand people take that very seriously, and it's interesting to see maybe a little community pushback changing their plans as well. But Sarah, one that really struck me for you though is Huawei announced the MatePad paper, and this is an E-ing tablet running Harmony OS, 10.3 inch screen, really good screen to body ratio, and it supports Huawei's M-Pen for no taking, pretty good response time. It's coming out in 499 euros in Europe, but it sounds a lot like the remarkable two. Have you taken a look at this? It sure does, it looks a lot like a two. The remarkable two runs a version of Linux, but if you're talking about a larger E-ink tablet, so a little bit bigger than an E-reader, designed for no taking, but also an E-reader, which the remarkable two, as I mentioned on my latest Live With It episode, it's not really an E-ink tablet first, but it definitely is an E-reader. Certainly has the functionality. This gives it a run for its money. This is very nice. In fact, they seem like more or less the same product to me. And I think for those who say, hmm, I really do, Jen Cutter is actually one of these people, she's like, I write everything down on paper. I am a paper loving person. This is exactly what you need. And the remarkable two was always a little bit of like a funny product to me, where I like it for certain things, but I'm not much of a physical note-taker these days anymore because I've just been weaned off of it for so many years. This is, it's not cheap. I mean, for 500 euros, it's certainly not a budget item, but if you are the kind of person who can make use of this, it looks pretty in line with the remarkable two. Given that the E-ink or the E-reader, E-ink E-reader market has been kind of stayed with minor updates, and the remarkable two is a fundamentally very different product, do you think this will be the last, do you see this as like, hey, Jones is gonna come out with one or another kind of big brand is gonna come out with one? Given that, you know, why not inconsiderable electronics maker? You know, I wonder about that. I feel like the market for folks who really want that I want a notepad, I want a smart pen, or pencil or whatever you wanna call it. I wanna be able to do all that stuff, but I also wanna be able to annotate PDFs or read articles or this, that, and the other, and I don't want to do this on either a tablet or a laptop that I already have that's part of my workflow. I don't think the market is that big, honestly. I think some people want this very much, but I don't think it's a wide audience. All right, well, Sarah, what caught your eye just looking at all the MWC news coming out there? Well, quite a few things, but one of those, because I love a good car, Fisker, if you've heard of it, Fisker has a new EV for the EU called the Ocean. Now, if you're in the US, you might say, is the ocean already available and you'd be right. In the UK, the base model is now going to become available starting at 35,000 pound sterling with a range of 275 miles using the WLTP standard, also front-wheel drive. The US version started shipping back in 2021. So Fisker, if you see them on the road, you punch your sister and say, Beaver, but you don't see a few of them all that often, but Fisker is building 47 prototypes of the ocean expanding to its European presence with a brand experience center in Munich, Germany, the first in Europe. The facility is in addition to the Fisker Magic Works, that's in England, which develops special editions of the company's vehicles. Fisker's base warranty is also a little bit more generous than what you may be accustomed to. Six years, 100,000 kilometers, and the powertrain and warranties at 10 years, 160,000 kilometers. I just love these cars, Rich. I'm not gonna Fisker any time soon, but boy do I like that. It is interesting that the ocean has now crossed the ocean. The ocean. You see, I had to make it extra obvious. See what you did there? Well, this is great for Fisker because I know they've had some financial difficulties over the years, so this is great to be expanding their market and not backing down from a fairly approachable price, pretty generous warranty there to get everybody started. So I know the EV market is heating up, especially in Europe, but great that Fisker can keep on chugging along. Indeed, also in other laptop news, Samsung launched the Galaxy Book Pro 2, the Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360, and the Galaxy Book 360 Pro. Three different models, keep them straight. They all run Windows 11 out of the box. The 360 comes with a price tag of $900. Galaxy Book 2 Pro will go for $1,049, and the 360 Pro price starts at $1,250. Both the Galaxy Book 2 Pro and Book 2 Pro 360 are available in 13.3 and 15.6 inch versions using a 1080p AMOLED display with a max of 500 nits of brightness. Both are powered by a 12-gen Intel Core i5 and i7 P-Series processor with Iris Z graphics. Although the Book 2 Pro can be equipped with an Intel Arc GPU as well. The big thing that stood out for me is the weight on these things. These things weigh like nothing for Intel-based laptops. I think the 15-inch comes in lighter than the current MacBook Air, which is a pretty spelt laptop. It's like two and a half pounds. So putting all that together, and for the possibility to get the discrete GPU there, kind of a showcase obviously for the Arc GPU, you know, Samsung has kind of wanted to put together some very unique laptops, and these are definitely catching my eye. Yeah, they're nice. They're nice. And we will see this over the course of the week. That is what Mobile World Congress is so good at. But I'm not in the market for a new laptop. I have that relatively new MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air that came out in late 2020, which I'm very happy with. But for the prices and for the specs, the Samsung lineup looks pretty good. Well, Rich, I thought you would appreciate the fact that we have a birthday to celebrate. It's not yours, it's not mine. Although yours is quite close to this day. But the original Raspberry Pi, if you remember, how old do you think the Raspberry Pi is? Well, I'll tell you, it's 10 years old today. The microcomputer was an open inexpensive Linux powered ARM system going for about $35. And although there have been additional models since then, the OG Pi Model B was where it all started a decade ago. Sort of confusing that the Model A came out after the Model B, but that's beside the point. The Model B used a BCM 2835 system on a chip, had 256 megabytes of RAM, ethernet, no Wi-Fi, and a 26 pin GPIO. The Model A came later as did the A plus and B plus variants with more memory. If you're a Raspberry Pi person, you won't know all about this. And that's all before the Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in 2015 with up to one gig of RAM and a newer chipset. Yeah, I remember when this came out, the big thing was it had a decoder that could do, I think it was 1080 video, like that was like on a $35 credit card size, like total system on a, I mean, you had to have an SD card or whatever for some storage, but like the idea that you could have that and make it into a little media server or something like that, like a Linux hippie in me. I just wanted to throw some puppy Linux on this and just like run like this, this lean and mean little Raspberry Pi system. I've had a couple of them over the years. I love using them for little projects. It's, this is like, when I remember this came out, it was like so accessible whenever they would ship. I remember the shipping delays were horrible on these when they first came out, but just so that you could get like kind of almost like this ambient computing for, I don't know, the cost of a couple CDs. It was 2012, we weren't using CDs back then anyway, but it was very affordable and that's what was good. Yeah, I remember back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was introduced, we spoke about it when a few of us were working on tech news today over on the Twitter network. And I remember at the time saying, wow, affordable, but what are you really going to be able to do with these? You know, but yeah, like some DIY project that doesn't really impact anything. Not so, not so. The Raspberry Pi is alive and well and people across the world have made extremely cool projects with it. So we salute you Raspberry Pi, happy birthday. We also want to thank our brand new bosses. Got some over the weekend, which always makes us really happy. Derek Selchow, Dan, Will Omira and Duster Lag, all just started backing us on Patreon and we thank you all. Thank you, Derek. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Will. And thank you, Duster Lag. We also want to thank all of our patrons, patreon.com slash DTNS is where you can find out more about becoming a patron. Patreon, if you aren't already one. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, join us live if you can. We'd love to have you and we'll be back doing it all tomorrow with our guest Lamar Wilson. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.