 Coming up on DTNS, if a downvote on Twitter isn't public, does it make a sound? Why are so many people in the U.S. not taking advantage of emergency broadband benefits? And the next gen extreme mini desktops are coming for you. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 22nd, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Before the show, we were just talking about why pants is a plural word? Who fenced as a child? And all sorts of other things. If you want that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, please do so by becoming a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a policy statement pledging to take on unlawful right to repair restrictions and encouraging competition in product repair markets. Under this new policy, the FTC will use its existing authorities to support independent repair shops and lower repair costs for consumers. Google rolled out backup by Google One, an update to its existing Android backup service. This adds support for photos, videos, and MMS messages backup to the previous services backup of app data, contacts, SMS messages, and preferences. OnePlus announced the OnePlus Buds Pro earbuds alongside the Nord 2 smartphone, which go on sale in the U.S. and Canada on September 1st for $149.99 and comes in either white or matte black. The Buds Pro have what OnePlus calls smart adaptive noise cancellation that auto-adjusts based on your environment and supports Dolby Atmos audio. A little bit more Google news today. The company updated the information displayed in the About This Result menu and search to display some context for why its algorithm selected the displayed links. The menu now shows what words from your search appear in the displayed link, what words related to your search are in the result, and display relevance based on language and geographic considerations. It's available for English results in the U.S., least initially, with Google hoping to expand in the coming months. Uber Freighton tends to acquire the shipping software company TransPlays from the private equity company TPG Capital in a $750 million deal. The acquisition will complement Uber Freight's existing supply chain management and shipping software suite and is expected to help the division reach profitability. Let's talk a little bit more about broadband in the U.S. and why more people don't have it, even if there's emergency funds for it. Nearly 4 million households have enrolled in the FCC's $3.2 billion emergency broadband benefit program since it launched in May. But a new report by the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society found that this represents only one in 12 eligible households and that 36 million households are there about that also qualify for the benefit aren't currently enrolled. Areas with small locally focused internet service providers seem to have particularly high adoption due to proactive enrollment efforts. Some of these areas include Apache County, Arizona, McKinley County, New Mexico, an area in Easter, Kentucky. One of those local providers, sacred wind communications which serves tribal and rural areas in New Mexico where the poverty rate is about five times the national average has one of the highest rates of EBB adoption with more than 35% of households already enrolled in the program. But in areas where large ISPs dominate internet service that's not always the case. Some customers are even discouraged from enrolling. For example, Spectrum is requiring people to agree to continue service at undiscounted rates after the EBB runs out. Verizon was formally forcing customers into more expensive plans in order to qualify for the EBB service although it changed its policy to include legacy plans so rolled it back somewhat but not all the way. Geography also seems to be playing a pretty major role here. The study found that some large cities like Houston and Chicago are way behind in their enrollment rates where traditionally lower broadband areas including Puerto Rico cities like New Orleans, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia seen higher adoption rates in the program. An FCC spokesperson said in a statement that the EBB program had been set up in record time. Interesting choice of words there. However, Jonathan Mayer, assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University and former chief technologist of the FCC says of the study's findings, quote, I think it's now very likely that the overwhelming majority of the EBB will be unspent by the time the pandemic has come to a close for many Americans. Well, that is, I don't know, a PR nightmare of sorts. You know, you put together some sort of an emergency fund for broadband and Rich, what are your thoughts on why it's going so widely unused? Well, I mean a lot of it comes down to the motivations that we're seeing from these ISPs. When we're talking about something like sacred wind communications or areas in general where there is lower broadband adoption already, it's easier to go from nothing to some broadband. Like if you don't have customers, if sacred wind communications doesn't have customers and this program makes it easier for them to onboard customers, they have a lot of motivation to be like, hey, you need to know about this program. We're not going to make you jump through hoops to get onto this. And then later on, if you're able to still afford it, you can see the utility that can allow for that expense given what generally probably are very low budgets in some of these areas. We're talking about a place with very high poverty rates, maybe then that they can continue on. And kind of the motivation behind all of this is that broadband is like this transformative force for a lot of employment opportunities and stuff like that. So, hey, if you can go from no broadband to some, get a job, then you can keep getting the broadband. There's a lot of motivation there for sacred wind communications. When it comes to Houston, Chicago, where at least according to the study here, there are higher broadband rates, not as much motivation for that outreach. And indeed, probably, I think the expectation from those larger ISPs is that, hey, people are already going to be paying for this. Let's already try and get them on either the more expensive plan or tie them up long term. We know the ISPs, they love their contracts. So not surprising to see that behavior. I mean, the encouraging thing here is to see, like, hey, municipal broadband, not just good for competition, but good for getting the word out on these programs. I don't know if sacred wind communications qualifies necessarily as a municipal broadband, but these smaller ISPs, not just for competitive reasons, but for getting out this program at least, it seems like they are getting the job done. But a real shame, though, that these programs aren't, it doesn't look like they're going to be able to spend all of this allocated money for its intended purpose. Well, yeah. I mean, looking at larger ISPs, I pay money every month to a large ISP. Now my ISP is Comcast. I've got nice, fast internet, but is Comcast in its best interest to let me know about something like this? No, of course not. And the idea that a spectrum, which is the last ISP I had back when I lived in LA, saying, well, sure, yeah, you can go ahead and take advantage of this, but when you come back to us, when the money runs out, don't expect any fun discounts or six months half off or anything like that. I don't know. The whole idea about internet with a lot of people, I include myself in this number, is you just don't want to rock the boat. And so when a large company like that is like, no, I mean, the deal that you had before is not going to be the deal that you have after you go through some sort of government subsidy. A lot of people, even if they know about the program, which I believe a lot of people just don't even know that it exists, but even if you know about it, kind of go, maybe we shouldn't. It's going to get weird. Don't want our service to get cut off. I mean, you are putting people in a very precarious situation. And listen, this emergency broadband program is obviously tied to COVID. You have a lot of people who are working from home. There are livelihoods at stake. It's not just a matter of like, internet went down. It's a pretty big deal. And it is disheartening to me to see that so many folks have not taken advantage. And I believe that it's really because they simply don't know that it's an option. And I will say, I went to my ISPs site, AT&T was just kind of looking around, click through the broadband option, seeing if there was some information kind of upfront about this. I didn't go through the entire like, hey, try and sign up for new service and see if it was available. But there was no mention of it on kind of the first couple of pages that you have to go through with different tiers or anything like that. Or mention like, hey, you might qualify for this if you want to go through this program. To their credit, if you do search for the emergency broadband benefit program, that does take you to a dedicated page. But then it's a little bit convoluted because you have to go sign out a form on an FCC site, then it takes you, and you have to submit that form back. It's not a one-click solution. Obviously we want people to, if they qualify for this, I'm not saying it should just be like one click and you're done. There was a little bit of a, you had to know what you're looking for, at least in my, when I was looking around. So not surprising to see that some people just aren't finding it. One thing we did find was something cool from the chip designer ARM. They published research in the journal Nature, showing how it created Plastic ARM, a processor core in plastic rather than silicon. Plastic ARM is a flexible, fully functional, binary compatible M0 microcontroller. This is ARM's lowest power microcontroller, hence the zero, but it's incredibly popular in integrated electronics, gets a lot of use. However, while compatible with the silicon, with the silicon-based M0s, Plastic ARM has a number of major differences. On an architectural level, its register file is banked in DRAM or then integrated into the CPU itself. It's also quite a bit bigger with a die size 1500 times bigger than the silicon M0, and that's due to using an 800 nanometer TFT process rather than a 90 nanometer process. It's also quite a bit slower running at 29 kilohertz rather than the typical 500 megahertz M0 clock, or, sorry, 50 megahertz M0 clock. So if it's slower, if it's bigger, why is it a big deal? Well, using the TFT process opens the door to cheaper chip production. The TFT process has been used on things like LCD transistors since 2012. The specific process, TFT processing has been around for way longer than that, but the specific one used in this has been used since 2012. And while performance isn't yet up to silicon standards, ARM claims it's still 12 times more powerful than other plastic compute design. That's when they're kind of building a much more simplified chip specifically for plastic processes rather than adapting an existing one. The hope is that if it continues scaling up the level of complexity capable in this TFT process, you'll be able to create flexible chips that can be used in things like packaging, clothing, medical bandages, use cases like that where flexibility would really come in handy. And eventually, have these processors printed using conventional ink techniques, I think that's quite a way. And this still definitely is in the science demo. It's in nature, not showing off as something coming in CES. But a really big deal to have kind of a non-custom plastic CPU kind of taking something they already have and making it work in this medium. Sarah, you're looking forward to some smart bandages with plastic processors coming down the road. Sure, yeah, absolutely. I cut my finger just the other day. But yeah, you mentioned, this may not come to CES. This is more of a science journal type of interesting story. How far away from something like CES, which many consider a forefront of technology already, are we here? That is the question. They've already come over a number of hurdles. To get the M0, they had to solve, essentially being able to do replicatable components that are used in the M0. It's a big manufacturing issue that they've overcome. Basically, the issue that they have now to do something beyond something the M0, like I said, it's a very low power, relatively simple microcontroller to go on to more powerful things that you might find in a phone or something like that. They need to be able to very quickly design different components of the chip. The TFT process doesn't have that kind of flexibility yet. Again, though, when you're talking about, the first demo of them doing anything with this was back in 2013. Now we're in 2021 and they've kind of replicated an existing thing that works, albeit quite slow. What's interesting, though, is they're not really focusing on making these chips smaller. That's not necessarily the priority, because when you're talking about, if you're building into smart clothing, you have a lot of real estate, as opposed to a phone or an IoT device. They're not really interested in making these smaller. They're more interested in, okay, we need to bring the power down. Right now, the power ratio is not great on these chips. It's literally 2,000 times slower right now than the standard silicon M0. If they can get that with any kind of parity, you could see some really interesting use cases coming out of this where, hey, we can do that, maybe we could throw in a radio, and all of a sudden, a lot of interesting products are possible with this. The question is, though, I keep thinking of this, though, we're going to develop these plastic arm chips, and then the next conversation is going to be whatever we're going to do with all this this new wonderful e-waste that we're going to be putting together after this. What am I going to do with all this e-waste? Roger, I know you had some thoughts before the show on the idea of plastic arms. It's definitely a product that has been toyed around with for the past two decades. I mean, people have been kicking around this idea forever. One of the things is rich elititude. It's a much cheaper process to build on plastic. Of course, it has caveats. One of them is size, which does allow you to integrate into clothing, but it also reduces the efficiency. So it's going to be a power hog a lot slower. But the idea, of course, is that it's not going to replace your standard silicon, but rather be in a complimentary device. So what you could see is probably starting somewhere in a medical field where you could, for example, have, like, in a disaster zone, you could have smart bandages that you could apply, and then they could give you a couple of simple measurements, but you don't need someone standing around them with a thermometer or something, and you could work with other people. And, you know, right now this particular chip really can't do anything other than run what's already hard-coded into the logic portion of the chip. But it's definitely much further along than it was even five years ago. So if they keep it up, you might be able to see something under a decade, crossing your fingers if all goes well. I mean, part of it is, you know, it's a chicken or egg thing. Yeah, you create it, then you got to figure out what to do with it, and then, I mean, it's a lot of investment. And, you know, if ARM can really pull this off, they have a potentially huge market ahead of them. And I will say this gets into kind of a wider conversation. Now, this is obviously on the low-power end of this, but just kind of this conversation I think is becoming increasingly important around non-silicon-based compute resources for a number of different reasons. Obviously, flexibility is like the primary goal with this. But we're seeing at least, you know, kind of, you know, working on this show, seeing a lot more stories about, yeah, they're still in like the early venture or in the science experiment phase, but a lot more of the stories than we were seeing 10 years ago. Let me just put it that way. Yeah. So, you know, this is the beginning of science. In the fourth and final installment of our Seniors in Tech mini-podcast series, Dr. Nicky Ackermans will introduce us to Dr. Ruth Ports, whose career includes running IT from multiple particle accelerator and physics labs, also helping develop the World Wide Web. Dr. Ruth Ports has been very busy, and we can hear all about it when the episode drops this Saturday, July 24th, in the DTNS Fees. Right as the show was starting, Twitter announced their Q2 revenue, which grew 74% year over year in the quarter. That is a very good quarter for the company. The fastest revenue growth since 2014. The company cited a broad increase in advertiser demand in a shareholder letter, you know, to their own horn a little bit. But yeah, in the prior quarter, revenue had risen 28%. More rise, but much more of a rise. Over 100% more. But speaking of Twitter, yesterday we mentioned just in passing, because that news had broken right as that show began, that Twitter confirmed that it's at least testing, just testing, showing a dislike, otherwise known as a downvote option with some iOS users. Downvotes would not publicly be shown. So if a tweet or a reply to a tweet got a lot of downvotes, it wasn't a thing that everyone else was going to see, but it would sort of disappear from view eventually if it got enough of them. Upvotes would publicly appear as likes. We're all used to Twitter likes already, so that really wouldn't change. Adding behavior but not really taking away behavior. So essentially, if the test works properly, conversation continues as normal with less popular tweet replies sinking down as they receive more downvotes, which might sound familiar. Unsurprisingly though, the Twitter has some thoughts. I will read a few examples now. Reddit co-founder Alex Orhanian tweeted, Not only did I design the upvote, I am proud to be the first person on the planet to have been downvoted. May there be many, many more. Nice. But Twitter user Addy Rising had a little bit of a different view. Addy tweeted, Given how Reddit operates, I think this presents a larger problem of people once again using automated processes to adversely affect reach for marginalized people, but go off. Quite a few folks have also used this test to draw more of a comparison of Twitter becoming more like Facebook, even though Facebook did have a dislike option that it phased out some time ago, but again, a little bit more of that algorithm in place that people, some people anyway, don't like to see on Twitter. Twitter user lumpy the cook, which is a great handle, but that's your name, fell somewhere in between all of this noting every big new feature that the site implements just bolsters algorithmic data collection and provides no tangible benefits to users. So how do we all feel about this? I think there are some good points made. I think I might agree with lumpy really, when I say there is a there's an obvious reason that a tweet that's inflammatory or trolley or otherwise not helpful to just kind of get it out of there. It's not necessarily that you're blocking a user or that you're forcing someone to delete a tweet that was already public. It's just the community is saying not helpful, don't want it. In essence that works really well and you can say depending on how much time you spend on Reddit that that usually works really well. But again, there are all sorts of reasons that people could band together and say I don't like that person. Let's make sure that we downvote everything that that person tweets. I'm sure Twitter is well aware of this as other companies are. YouTube has gone through this as well with the idea of disliking a video and how there are there's bullying and piling on that goes on for a variety of reasons whether it's well intentioned or not. So Rich, what are your thoughts on the downvote on Twitter and whether it should be widely adopted? I always take new Twitter features kind of in that mode of Twitter is looking for more engagement. They're looking for more people to interact on the platform. How does this do that? I can sort of see this as a way to avoid the ratioing problem of the comments to retweet your ratio if someone has a tweet that people don't like or something like that. Maybe if you use that downvote mechanism certainly this does give Twitter is certainly going to I think that's the perfect point here is that ultimately this is a great data point for Twitter to kind of pull on and is certainly will get a lot of value out of that. The it is odd. I'm always curious how Twitter will react whenever the like button change or what used to be known as the favorites button when that change happened there was a big uproar of using Twitter because a like is different than a favorite and does this then does the upvote becoming the like also then change that behavior. I don't necessarily see how this gets people that have never tweeted to tweet again which is usually one of when Twitter makes a change that's how I want to think about it. I don't see how that makes it better other than maybe if you're late to a thread there is a chance if you have a really good comment that someone could upvote it but you're still going to have one you know you're still going to have no likes and it's going to be buried if you're too late to something anyway so I don't see this as a way to keep like threads to make threads better if you're not like jumping in on it right away maybe this will decrease retweets of thread replies I don't know it's it's I don't I can see why they're testing it I hope they don't go with the thumbs up thumbs down that bums me out I don't like it but I don't exactly other than being some great algorithmic data points I don't necessarily see this coming out of a test I could be wrong you know so much of this too it really depends on how you use Twitter there are so many Twitter threads that I simply do not see maybe because I just don't follow the person who originated the thread but but I also I use a third-party Twitter app I use Tweetbot and Tweetbot behaves differently so my Tweetbot experience is vastly different than if I log into web Twitter and look at my timeline that way and I like it that way on purpose mostly just because I don't see promoted tweets but threads and conversations within threads and a reply that might you know I want to say it's sort of inflamed some people it doesn't necessarily have to do that but gets a lot of attention it sort of sparks the conversation there are a lot of times I don't necessarily see that I kind of have to look at Twitter in a certain way but I think that I think those are the cases where this makes a lot of sense where it's kind of like the conversations going in a direction let's not derail it with that one person who said the thing that might be off topic or just you know just a little bit too too much I can see where Twitter almost incentivizes people to have more longer conversations with their community because that stuff may get filtered out over time but yes I think that at the end of the day at least at this point and again this is just a test Twitter and I am you know 50% of me is like they're not even going to roll ahead with this because it's going to get you know so much controversy that it's not even worth it but I think that this is a way for the company to learn a lot more about what we don't like and less about you know changing Twitter itself well one thing Intel likes is its next unit of computing or nooks this is a line of small form factor desktops introduced in 2013 and over the years they've typically offered something like a bare bones PC with a very small footprint relatively low power usage the lineup has had some gaming potential over the years with the 8th generation Hades Canyon nooks the using a custom AMD GPU integrated on the Intel CPU notably and the 9th gen nooks supporting a dedicated graphics card for the first time now Intel has opened up pre-orders for the nook 11 extreme mini desktop and it's looking to become a full on gaming PC it's available with 11th gen core processors up to an 8 core core i9 11900 KB CPU I think that has like a 65 watt TDP there's also room for in the enclosure for a 12 inch graphics card with the power supply able to power up to 350 watts something like an Nvidia RTX 3080 TI so very powerful desktop card pricing starts at $1299 with 8GB of RAM 256GB of storage higher end versions will start shipping in September and the core i5 version in December also new free this year the new CPU options will be available as an upgrade to last year's nook 9 extreme although front port audio is disabled kind of a bummer but this to me kind of signals they've been kind of experimenting with this kind of nook line for a while it was popular for you it sometimes it was thrown out there as kind of a Mac mini kind of competitor but usually like with things like system integrators or hey you want a desktop that's fairly powerful they'll sit behind your monitor you want to put together like a DIY enterprise networking cabinets or something like that these were these were very capable machines in a very small footprint but always very much on more of that consumer level this this to me kind of I don't know if this still qualifies as a nook I mean it's still very compact for holding a full-size graphics card but I don't know sir does it seem like Intel losing the thread with this line with you know going with this 11 extreme I don't know I mean are they the comparison to the Mac mini that you mentioned I have a Mac mini and it certainly has its limitations but it's great as kind of a desktop that I've got a lot of stuff feeding into powering the show in my part of the show right now but yeah when I look at the 1300 bucks I say to myself well perhaps a couple of years ago this would not be considered a high-end gaming PC but it sounds like from the specs that you just mentioned we're getting into that territory yeah definitely and where I think what I think would actually be a very interesting use case is this seems to me maybe to be more on the content creation side now this is festooned with LEDs and Intel's like kind of skull graphic that they use for their for their kind of extreme lineup of gaming stuff so I don't know maybe a little gauche for some creatives but I actually think you know not maybe not an RTX 3080 or something like that but having an 8-core CPU in a very small package that you can has some expandability could be very useful for you know video editors photo editors that kind of stuff that need a very good amount of power but maybe not 4k 120 frames per second gaming performance or something like that an interesting kind of spin on the nook we will see if this goes forward but Intel they make gaming PCs evidently yeah I mean what don't what doesn't Intel do Intel's trying to get into all sorts of markets now gaming PCs why not alright let's move on to the mailbag Rich what's in it today alright well we got an email from Trevor and he had some thoughts about Netflix and something that's been bothering him with them having a gaming service which we've talked about especially with an initial focus on mobile is how they're going to implement it as Apple showed with services like Game Pass and GeForce Now apps aren't allowed to host games within another app because they need to be individually approved so does Apple make yet another exemption for Netflix do they change their policy to better align with the services like this or is Netflix going to be forced to develop a webkit app for iOS users Trevor great question I actually hadn't thought about this I wonder initially if Netflix will only come out with three games maybe they could then be individually approved by Apple I guess they would need individual apps right they Netflix app can't be a hub for that what I think is going to happen Trevor is we're going to see Netflix pretend like that rule doesn't exist until Apple says something about it and then magically I mean good luck then magically the webkit version will appear the second they're blocked for one day on the iOS app store I mean imagine Netflix sitting and saying Apple won't care there's no historical evidence that Apple cares about the sort of thing let's just do it I highly doubt this rich I mean we've kind of talked about we were talking about Netflix gaming over the last week plus get it plus but and yeah I mean there are a lot of questions how is this going to be rolled out is this something that's going to be on mobile devices only I mean a lot of people use Netflix that way a lot of people don't is this something that can be enjoyed in some sort of a living room setting with a smart TV no one really knows but I think the biggest question is yeah how does this get rolled out is this simply a tab within Netflix somehow that is not considered a standalone game to get around an Apple restriction I mean that doesn't make a lot of sense to me but I mean it's going to have to be figured out one way or another well or even as they get into interactive content more I wonder even if you don't call it a game you know if there's some sort of interactive content what qualifies as a game the Supreme Court of Outlet kind of a show and in which case you know yeah it's going to be fascinating to watch anyway well if you have questions like Trevor did or you have answers which lots of you do and we welcome them or feedback in general please send them our way feedback at daily tech news show dot com thank you in advance also shout out to patrons that are master and grand master levels today they include Mark Gibson Reed Fischler and Michelle Sergio also thanks to our brand bosses we got three of them today yeah Alah Matt Lee and Skip Berger all just started backing us on Patreon and we couldn't be more thrilled thank you Al thank you Matt thank you Skip also thanks to all of our patrons for supporting us for sticking with us we could not do it without you I do not say that lightly we really really really appreciate it you make the show that we do every day thank you we're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow but Tom Merritt heard of him yeah he's great we'll be joined by Patrick Norton as well it's going to be a great show talk to you about this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program