 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, Brad, and our new patrons, Victor, Patrick, Marko, and Hayden. On this episode of DTNSX changes how articles are shared on its platform, Blackberry enters yet a new frontier, and Dr. Nikki Ackermans is here to explain quantum dots. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 5th, 2023. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Alabama, I'm Dr. Nikki Ackermans. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Earlier today, Microsoft let all of us know that it is rolling out a new version of Teams designed to be less resource hungry on both PCs and Macs. All right, let's get into the quick hits. Samsung announced the $30 Galaxy SmartTag 2 with a revamped design, similar to AirTag. Samsung is simplifying things with a single variant that supports Bluetooth and UWB with a new loop design that can attach the SmartTag 2, something like a key chain or a bag or some other item that you want to keep track of. Samsung claims that the new battery can last for up to 700 days. It's also IP67 rated for water and dust resistance and supports Bluetooth low energy with a maximum range of 120 meters. The big limitation is it only works with Samsung smartphones for now. Imagine, if you will, a world where DuckDuckGo is the default search engine in private mode on Apple Safari browser. In transcripts unsealed by U.S. District Judge, Amit Matai overseeing the ongoing U.S. versus Google and iOS trust trial, Apple did at least consider this when it also considered buying Microsoft's Bing search engine both in 2018 and 2020. DuckDuckGo CEO, Gabrielle Weinberg, testified that his company had about 20 meetings and phone calls with Apple executives, but John G. Andrea also said to his knowledge, Apple hadn't formally considered switching to DuckDuckGo. I love that, 20 meetings, but we were never serious. Amazon's space initiative, Project Kuiper is set to launch its first two satellites, Kuiper Satellite 1 and Satellite 2 in a mission called Protoflight on Friday, October 6th at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The satellites will hitch a ride on the United Launch Alliances, or ULA Atlas V rocket, or Atlas V. This is Amazon's real first foray into the satellite broadband market that would put it on par with something like SpaceX, Starlink, and London Vases, one web. Compass and Charter unveiled the first Zoom-O Stream Box, which are two companies first announced in April of 2022. Zoom-O is a next generation streaming platform on a variety of branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs, which is designed to combine inexpensive subscription bundles with live television, fast or free app supported television programming, and will include third party streaming apps like Disney Plus. The UK's competition and markets authority, known as the CMA, has turned its attention towards Microsoft, specifically Azure operations, following questions from the EU about major cloud service providers, which by definition would include something like Amazon's AWS. Telecom's regulator, Offcom, says it found issues with charges that cloud customers have to pay to move their data out of the cloud, discounts to only use one cloud provider, and technical barriers to switching between cloud providers themselves. All right, those were the quick hits. Let's talk a little bit more about X. Rob, what's the latest? Well, yeah, on stage at Vox Media's code conference last week, ex-CEO, Linda Jacarino said that 1,500 brands returned to the platform over the past 12 weeks, and that 90% of the top 100 advertisers that stepped away after Elon Musk purchased what was then called Twitter are back on the platform. What has changed is advertisers not buying as many ads as they once did. According to ad analytics firm guideline, monthly US ad revenue has declined at least 55% year over year each month since Musk acquired Twitter and was down 60% in August of 2023. I mean, that probably speaks to a lot of the reasons that Twitter is at least experimenting with different revenue models, but here's what's getting the lion's share of attention today. As previously indicated, it would do, so it wasn't a huge surprise. X also started removing headlines from posted links, which Elon Musk claims will, quote, greatly improve the platform's aesthetics, end quote. He also said the best way for journalists to thrive on X following this change to just post long form content there rather than linking to it elsewhere. So if you're saying, well, what's changing exactly? Here's how it works. For now, at least in a mobile experience, let's say I'm a writer at TechCrunch. I wanna post a link to my latest story on X to get people to click through and then read my article that's living on TechCrunch. What you used to see from me would be a tweet, including a featured image, a headline, a brief description of the story by way of Twitter cards, they existed for some time. You can see them embedded all over the internet, not just on Twitter itself, now X. Now, X cards only display the featured image from the article that I wrote without additional context. I could manually out a headline and entice somebody to learn more, but it's a lot clunkier. The real question here, I think, is whether or not people are going to actually do this or if people are going to use X less as a way to drive clicks. Now, Rob, let's start with you. Does this anger you? Does this bother you? What do you think? It doesn't anger me, but a question is this truly for aesthetics, or is it because, well, we know that the more time people spend on our platform, the more money we can ultimately make. So let's up the character count from, I don't know, 250 to 25,000 or so and see if we can get all those reporters to actually write their reporters, not at their newspapers, but to write their content right here on our platform so we can keep all of the users that stuck around for us right here on the platform. That's kind of what I think is going on. Whether it will work or not, we don't know. I'm still on Twitter. I would have to see how this, or Twitter, I'm still on X, I would have to see how this works. I don't know that it would make me, that I would change how I actually view content there, but it may make me change how I post content there if I don't feel like people are going to be able to see my content and then come and come and link to it because I don't necessarily try to build content on social media platforms. I try to use social media to get people to my content elsewhere. So I understand why Twitter's doing it. I don't know how this is going to work. We have to see how it will play out. Yeah, I mean, even the long form content, the way that it has worked on Twitter now X was what we would call a thread, right? I mean, to the point where people now add the thread emoji, like, okay, buckle up everybody. I'm going to tell you a big old story and there might be 20 tweets or more as part of the story. That has always been clunky in and of itself, but that was sort of the fun of the Twitter thread. Nikki, clearly Twitter cares more than just aesthetics at this point, but does this change feel like it impacts you or anybody that you know? Sure. This as with every new development from Twitter slash X in the recent times makes me just sigh. I feel like it's the, not to make a joke, but like the X that you can't stop checking on, like you want to leave, but you can't because there's still kind of stuff happening there. This is a good metaphor. I'm just stretching it all the way. Gosh, it really is. Threads were clunky, but they were really digestible as someone with a like short, you know, interest span. I could see a thread tweet and be like, all right, I know that's a thread. I'm either going to look at it or not. If I see an entire huge block of texts, I'm not going to look at it. Another thing is if you're posting only the image with no title, that's incredibly misleading. It's probably part of their plan to create more clickbait, create more anger and frustration. We know that like people getting angry on Twitter is like part of the point, like part of the way that you keep people engaged is using potentially misleading images. How many times have you seen an article where the image exactly, like it doesn't make you refer back to the title to be like, wait, what is this about? I don't like that idea about it, confusing users that way on purpose, potentially. I don't, I mean, I don't know. I feel like everything they do is just like, oh, come on. Well, and even, I was trying to think like, okay, you know, everybody likes to, you know, dunk on what's going on with X these days because it does seem sort of chaotic from an outsider perspective. But okay, what if long form content was just the way that it thrived moving forward? You know, everything about the UI has to change in order for that to work properly. Is that the place where you want to go read that? Not really. Not now. No. It's like, yeah, I get where they're going with this, but it's like, that would be, yeah, that would be something that's very different than why we've all been there for so long. And that's- A lot of half measures. Yeah, and just kind of like, oh, we're going to make this tweak. And it's like, that's a really big tweak. It's a really big tweak. All right, well, moving on to something that has been tweaked quite a bit over the years, BlackBerry announced on Wednesday it would separate its internet of things and cybersecurity business units with plans for an IPO for the internet of things business next fiscal year. BlackBerry CEO, John Chen said of the move, both the IoT and cyber businesses address large and growing market opportunities. The new proposed structure would further increase both of their operational agility and ability to focus on delivering exceptional solutions. Sounds like a lot of gobbledygook. Reuters reported back in August that private equity firm Veritas Capital had made an offer to buy BlackBerry. Even earlier back in May of this year, BlackBerry itself said it would consider strategic options for its portfolio of businesses that could include the possible separation of one or more of them. So none of this is a huge shock. BlackBerry is selling off stuff, trying to figure out what has legs, what doesn't. Rob Dunwood, you know a thing or two about BlackBerry and its evolution over the years. Parent company formerly known as REM, how things have changed since the former company went public back in 1997. So what do you think? Yeah, so BlackBerry changed its name from research and motion. It's 10 years ago, it was back in 2013. And it stopped making BlackBerrys in 2016. So the company that we know today is a very different company than what it used to be back when it was research and motion. And although I don't really follow BlackBerry like I once did, this split kind of makes sense because the IoT stuff, the Q and X embedded systems, definitely the car systems, that's really all I know BlackBerry for these days. So the fact that they're saying that they also do the security stuff, which I'm being honest with you, if I wouldn't have gone to their website, I wouldn't have known that that was like a thing that they were still doing. I really just thought it was the embedded systems and cars and just other IoT type of things. I would have said, yeah, that's probably the company that I, part of the company that I would wanna spin off into its own thing and see if we can take it public and make some money from it. So from that standpoint, it kind of makes sense. I wonder what's gonna go on with the cyber business side of things. I think about the company that made the offer to purchase them a little while back. And usually what those companies do is they buy the company and then they scrap it for parts. So I don't know that that part of the business is truly viable. I guess we'll see here going forward if once they do this split, if it truly is or if it'll kind of get sold off or just kind of go away. But I understand, it's like, I take my feelings out of what BlackBerry, what research and motion used to be and it's like, well, this is what they are now and they're trying to make a buck. And they definitely are doing with IoT. And you look at like Ford and GM and Toyota and Honda and BMW and Volkswagen, their entertainment systems are driven by Q and X. It's driven by BlackBerry's operating system by their IoT type stuff. So that stuff is pretty prevalent. So they may be onto something by splitting that off and then taking that part of the company public. I mean, especially with autonomous cars and a variety of kind of infotainment stuff that could be more of a moneymaker in the future. I wonder if BlackBerry really has something here. What I'm hearing is that BlackBerry is about to become a spirit Halloween. You know, it's sad because I keep hope out. Guys, this is not just here for today's story. I keep an actual BlackBerry brand new in the box on my desk just in case Jim Bazalé comes back and says, hey, boys, we're back. I'm just holding out hope. But it's not it's not looking good. It's not looking good. What model of BlackBerry is this? Let me say that's not yet unpacked. So I did take I did open it up because I wanted to take the battery out. So that the you know, so it doesn't explode. But I've got, you know, the battery for it, you know, somewhere. But this is the BlackBerry bold 99. Oh, the bold. So yeah. But I actually have probably five or six unopened packaged BlackBerry's that I've actually stuck in a vacuum seal bag. Just hanging on to them just, you know, 30 years from now. Maybe they'll be worth something. I don't know. I've got I probably in my life have had 60 or 70. You're wrong. Maybe during the zombie apocalypse, you'll have really good typing ability. I still the last BlackBerry, I had a few over the years. The last BlackBerry I had was the Pearl, and that was what I had when the iPhone was announced in 2007. And I remember vividly, I liked my pro. The pro was it did big, but I was used to it. You know, I was good at typing. It was fine. And I was like, I don't want my phone. No, I like my pearl. And I I stuck with that for a while. Eventually I caved and now I don't know what I was doing. But yeah, you know, shout out to BlackBerry. You know, let's hope your next incarnation is a fruitful one. Ha, ha, fruit. That's good. Get it? Yeah. If you want to stay up to date in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence, because it is very fast moving, do listen to AI named this show. It launched during DTNS Experiment Week back in August. Each week, rather, Twitch and Jutra and Tajikastodi way through the hype and the doomsday to keep you informed about the latest news in the AI world because there is a lot of it. Catch it at ai-name-this-show.com. All right, Nikki, we talked very briefly on yesterday's show about a new Nobel Prize that was awarded for chemistry. It was awarded to Monji G. Bawendi, Louis E. Bruce and Alexei Ekamov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. Now, that all sounds pretty great. But what are quantum dots? How do we explain them and how they help us? Yes, I'm so excited to do a Nobel Prize rundown. This is going to be fun. All right. I'll start with the quantum dots. So they are basically very, very tiny crystals, only a few dozen atomic diameters wide, and they have a very highly tunable, optical and electronic properties that you can use in the field of nanotechnology and a fairly important contribution. These dots fluoresce in bright colors and they have applications in screen displays, LED lighting and medical imaging. And scientists think that future applications could improve solar cells. They could help with the speed of quantum computers and also making lasers way smaller than they currently are. But let's talk about how they came to be. So people actually, physicists actually theorized about the existence of these quantum dots in the 1930s. And they thought that these tiny crystals, the millionth the size of a pinhead, they act like a box around electrons and they compress their wavelengths. So a smaller box would compress the wavelength smaller and this then would emit a blue or light because of the shorter wavelength and a larger box would have a larger wavelength and emit a more yellow light. And then someone actually was able to create these crystals in the late 1970s that would ekimov. So one of the laureates and alongside his team, he created these crystals and they were embedded in glass. So they existed, but they were not very useful because they were in glass. You couldn't manipulate them very much. But then in the a few years later after that, another one of the current laureates, Bruce and his lab were able to suspend them in a solution. So making them a little bit more manipulable. And then finally in the late 90s, Bawandi and his colleagues were able to devise a way to produce these crystals at specific sizes and specific colors, which made them a lot more practical for commercialization. So today around 8% of the world's TVs market uses quantum dots to add spectacular color to their screens. Really probably dumb question here, but something that stuck out to me was, why would the smaller box be bluer in color and the larger be more yellow? So the color blue is a shorter emission of light and then wavelength spectrum and towards yellow and reddish colors, it's a longer light emission. So when you compress it, it gets shorter and turns blue quickly. So Dr. Nikki, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Caitlin Carrico and Drew Weisman for their discoveries concerning base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Why don't we talk about that for a little bit? What do you have to say about those things? Yeah, so the physiology award is my favorite one. I'm biased. I'm a biologist, but I was definitely looking forward to this one and this one people kind of predicted. Nobody's too surprised. Nobel likes to make a big splash about current events. So the fact that this is a COVID related prize is not too surprising, but nonetheless quite good and exciting. So this team pioneered the research on messenger RNA or mRNA in the early 2000s and they engineered these mRNAs to make chemical changes to molecular components of base mRNA. And the reason that this is important is that it allowed the body's inflammatory response to lower in response to these mRNAs. And that means that it removed a huge barrier to clinical applications, meaning that you could inject these mRNAs into people without them having a huge immune response, right? And thanks to this, future groups were able to deliver mRNA to human cells and induce these cells into making viral proteins like those used against SARS-CoV-2. And interestingly enough, this research was initially rejected. I believe it was from science for not being novel enough in 2005. But I guess Benjits has gone since they got the Nobel Prize. We were so young, Hong. I know. And actually in the 2010s, several companies picked up this research eventually and applied it for fighting against Zika virus and MERS and creating vaccines. And because those vaccines were able to be created at the time, that's why our COVID vaccines were able to be developed so quickly in 2020 and save a bunch of life. So this is obviously key findings. And I'll also note that Carico became the 13th women to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 120 years. So we still need to pump those numbers up. There's also been no black awardees of the science Nobel Prizes yet. We're still waiting on that. Well, speaking of science, the Nobel Prize in physics of 2023 was awarded jointly to Pierre Agostini, for rank Krause, and Anne Lilier for experimental methods that generate atosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter. All right, Nikki, what's an atosecond? I'll break this one down for you, too. These are actually all quite fun. Like, they're not as ethereal as last year's ones. But an atosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second. So it's a teeny, tiny second. Oh, just, yeah. Yeah, easy. No worries. Really short second, yeah. And this is actually the length of a time between laser flashes that were used to observe the movement of electrons. You need super, super fast lasers to observe these movements because electrons move super, super fast. And the applications of this type of science have been used to observe how tightly electrons are connected to atoms and to see how electrons move inside materials. So really important for material science and things like superconductors. This started out in 1988, where Anne Luye and her team shined an infrared laser through a noble gas. And this was kind of fortuitous finding, and they found out that it emitted UV light at super high frequencies. And when they overlapped these frequencies, they were able to at least hypothesize that it was creating atosecond pulses. And this was confirmed by Augustini, the other laureate in 2001. And they developed the standardized technique for using this for making these pulses. And then the third laureate, Krauss and his lab were able to produce a single long 650 atoseconds long pulse in 2001 as well. Some more future applications of this, because it still feels a little bit nebulous. Like I said, it has applications with superconductor materials, as well as potentially fingerprinting disease markers in blood molecules. I'll also note that Luye became the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics out of about 120, another one that we're working on, hopefully for next year. And we still got some prizes going on, so the prize for peace will be announced on Friday. And the last one, the economics prize, is coming out on Monday. So you can look forward to those. But as I said, the science ones are the best ones. So that's the most important stuff already happened. I mean, I think myself included, I learned a lot just now. But honestly, sometimes I go like, oh yeah, the normal peace prize, right? There are many different prizes to be awarded. And there are a lot of ways that these prizes get nominated and then awarded, which we will be talking about in good day internet after we're done here with DTNS. So stick around for that if you want a little bit more. I'm gonna find out how to get nominated. Insider science track, yeah, with Dr. Nikki. But before that, let's check out the mailbag. So Robert weighed in on our conversation earlier this week on Monday, in fact, about AI pins from the company Humane. We talked about the fact that Humane had showed off this idea of more or less putting something on your hand that was sort of a smartphone alternative to be able to do a variety of things, but didn't really offer a lot of details at that time. Okay, so here's what Robert says. If these pin or roaches are going to be screenless, I could see them replacing something like the iPhone or iPad device that is used by museums for location-based tour guides. Assuming they're smart enough to use the location-based Bluetooth dots, somebody would wander a site or exhibit, perhaps point these devices at a QR code, use the location-based tech to trigger information about the exhibit. These devices should be quite cheaper without having to have a screen and less likely to need repairs. I think that's actually a pretty good use case for this. There's something there. I always have my hands full when I'm in the museum. I've got like my latte, my cookie, and I don't know how I would like, where I would project that, but I'm down for more technology in museums. I mean, you know, if it was something you were wearing rather than something you were holding, I could see that being- Projecting it like- Yeah, yeah, like from your lapel type thing. You know, this is again just Robert sort of pontificating on use cases. Humane probably has something beyond museums going on as far as what it would like us all to do, but yeah, yeah, a little bit. A little bit, it seems a little bit more real than it did at the original announcement. Well, Dr. Nicky, you're not going anywhere because we are gonna talk more about the Nobel Prizes after DTNS wraps up on GDI, but for now, let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Absolutely. So it's just my name everywhere. I'm at nicoleackermans.com on my website where I've got updates about my research and all that. And I'm Ackermans Nicole on X and nicoleackermans.blueski.social, blue sky. I still can't say it right. I like blue ski better. It looks like blue ski. It does look like that, doesn't it? B-ski. Yeah, B-S-K-Y. Yeah, good stuff. Well, we are so thrilled to have you here with us as always, talk about some science stuff. And yeah, we're gonna be doing it more often, so I'm glad you're back from baking. Yeah. So patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We're gonna talk more about Nobel Prizes, how they get nominated, how they get decided, and all the drama that happens in between. Indeed. But just a reminder, you can catch DTNS Live Monday through Friday. We do it at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we'll be back tomorrow doing it all again with Andrea Jones-Roy joining us. Don't miss it. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha