Coming up on DTN Assets, Microsoft Hardware Day and one of the new Surface laptops has caught young Scott Johnson's eye. Plus, Facebook isn't really biasing its own stories in the news feed and why Lithuania told everyone to throw away their Xiaomi phones. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm young Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, a rather old Roger Chang. We were just talking about our high school experiences. Scott, have you been to high school? You're so young. Yes. I mean, I just finished, but yes, it was a fresh experience. If you want to hear about the swanky school Roger went to or the one I went to that had a gravel parking lot, get our expanded conversation on Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Tony Glass, Philip Less, and Daniel Dorado. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple plans to bring verifiable COVID-19 vaccine cards to Apple Wallet. This would use the international smart health card standard that will be signed with a private key and create a public key to verify your info. No word though on when this will roll out. Netflix has acquired the Rowald Dahl Story Company or RDSC, which administers the rights to the works of the late author Rowald Dahl. Netflix had reached a deal with the company back in 2018. You may be thinking, wait, didn't they already have something going on? Yeah, they're creating several animated TV shows, including one based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from Phil Johnston and Taika Waititi. Netflix will now be able to adapt all of Dahl's works that are not already licensed to other companies under existing agreements, but they'll also profit from those agreements. Netflix says all 26 RDSC employees will remain and the company will work as an autonomous unit under Netflix. It will continue to develop and expand on the 19 TV shows, films, stage shows, and live experiences currently being worked on. Apple has told Epic it will not change its mind about suspending Epic's developer account for breach of contract when it added its own payment system to Fortnite. Under the recent court decision, Epic had asked Apple to reinstate it. CEO Tim Sweeney published an email from Apple's lawyers denying the request and saying it will not consider further requests until the appeals process is exhausted. Google Maps and Android Auto will now automatically orient its user interface optimally based on whether it's being used on a right or left-hand drive vehicle. Hooray, Japan, Australia, Ireland, UK. This will place key controls within easier reach of the driver. Users will also be able to manually toggle this setting. Previously, Google Maps always placed key controls on the left side of the screen. Facebook VP of Marketing Graham Mudd warned in a blog post that, quote, we expected increased headwinds from platform changes, notably the recent iOS changes, to have a greater impact in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. The company also revealed it inadvertently under-reported iOS web conversions for advertisers by an average of 15%. Oops. All right, let's talk about something else with Facebook. The New York Times sources say Facebook launched a program called Project Amplify back in January to project a positive image of Facebook in light of negative press. That in itself is uncontroversial. Every company has similar programs to make it look good, but the New York Times alleges that part of that project was to give positive stories about Facebook higher placement in the news feed for users. So you may have seen a lot of headlines flipping around about Facebook preferencing nice stories about itself in its news feed. It's technically true, but not what you think. Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne told the Times there has been zero change to Facebook's news feed ranking. Osborne also tweeted that, quote, the story of the Times could have written is that Facebook ran a small test of an informational unit on Facebook in three cities, clearly labeled as from Facebook on the top of the unit. He included an image of a box of stories about Facebook. So this seems to me to be an example of a small test of a self-promotional unit. They weren't just taking stories from other sources that were nice about Facebook and secretly surfacing them up on top of the news feed, which is what I thought when I first saw a headline, which I think would be deplorable, but they were creating a box that was clearly like, this is stories from Facebook. And that just seemed pretty typical of most platforms to do some self-promotion, right?  If you're on the Washington Post, they're going to have a little place where they want you to sign up and get extra stuff because we're awesome and you know how awesome we are because we're telling you how awesome we are. It's not an unusual thing. I think what makes this hard or harder for people to read is obvious, which is Facebook already does what a lot of people perceive rightly or wrongly a bunch of skeevy stuff. And so when the stuff like this happens, which would normally be normal for any other platform, it's perceived as them doing something underhanded because it's kind of piling on. And that's unfortunate because in this case, it looks like it's just something any company would do, but it looks bad because they already do a lot of stuff that's questionable.  But I also think you're right. This isn't really what people think it is. Yeah, I mean, any company, Facebook is a great example of this because it has gone through quite a bit of crisis management as of late. But any company who's in that position is going to spend some time reminding its users, hey, we're actually really great. Look at all these great features. You love it here. Facebook is not alone in this, although you get something like The New York Times, which is a publication that many people read and also trust, not everybody, but a lot of people do, saying, well, but here's what's going on here. Facebook's tricking you and you don't know what Facebook's doing and they've made changes to the news feed. And that, yeah, that would be bad. But for Facebook to kind of like you gave the Washington Post example, Scott, for Facebook to be like, hey, you know, a messenger is the best messenger for these reasons from Facebook shows up on my news feed, almost like an ad, right? But it's just Facebook reminding me of all the great things that it does that I don't feel like is very underhanded. I could confuse some people, which is a separate issue. But yeah, and the fact that the test was in three cities and, you know, Osborn coming forward to be like, this is exactly what we did here. Look at some screenshots. Yeah, this is not what you're saying. It is sounds like, yeah, there was maybe a little too much a do over something small. And honestly, this is good for Facebook. If I'm Facebook, I love this kind of story because it's easy to refute and it allows you to go, hey, next time these these jokers post something, remember this, right? Because you can't believe everything they say. They're always saying stuff about, look at this. They made a big deal about this, you know? And so people may start to be less likely to believe the next thing unless they already want to believe everything that's bad about Facebook. And I think what I would like to see outlets doing is hammering Facebook on the actual changes they've made to make it harder for independent research to happen on what's happening on Facebook. Because that's where damage is being done. And we need to understand what that is. And instead, we're getting to this sort of thing of like hammering them for something that's really, you know, just kind of normal corporate behavior and wasting a bunch of time and energy on that instead of the thing that actually needs to be fixed. It's not like Facebook is perfect, but let's hold them accountable for the things that they're doing that are wrong. We don't need to make up stuff. There's like, yeah, if you went in there, if people were offended by it when they saw it, they were probably there to hate on Facebook anyway. So yeah, it's a complicated thing. Let's move on to Lithuania. What you say, Lithuania? I haven't been in the news lately. The Defense Ministry of Lithuania issued a statement recommending citizens, quote, not buy new Chinese phones to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible. Don't buy new stuff. Get rid of what you've got. The recommendation comes after the ministry discovered censorship software on some Xiaomi handsets. The minister claims Xiaomi Mi 10 T5G phones have software that can detect and censor 449 terms like free Tibet and democracy movement. The software is disabled on phones sold in Europe, but still present, it's still in there, just disabled. The Lithuania Defense Ministry believes the software could be remotely activated. Huawei is mentioned in the report for security flaw. One plus was not mentioned. China and Lithuania are currently having a bit of a domestic dispute over the naming of a mission from Taiwan to Lithuania. And diplomatic missions from Taiwan usually use the name of the city Taipei because China claims the island of Taiwan as its own territory. And they're pretty strict about that. So you break that rule, they kind of fight with it. So, yeah. Another example of that is the Olympics. If you've seen Chinese Taipei in the Olympics, that's because China won't allow them to call themselves Taiwan. Same goes for missions. There's a dust up between Lithuania and China. And so Lithuania is bringing down the hammer on the Xiaomi Mi 10 T5G. I don't like that that software is there but I don't know that I would freak out about it because I think Microsoft and Apple probably have software that they only activate on phones in China. It may not be present on every phone worldwide. That's an interesting question. And certainly it is a thing of concern that Xiaomi could activate this but you'd also notice it really fast, right? If suddenly you couldn't use the term democracy movement on your phone. I think that would, I don't know, I think somebody would notice that. So I don't think this is as big of a deal maybe as get rid of your phone. Certainly good to be aware of it though. Yeah. And I guess the implication is sure you might notice that you can't type free to bed on your phone and you either have a big issue with that or you don't. But I think what it sounds like the defense ministry over in Lithuania saying is well, if we figured out this, what else is in these phones? Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of fear mongering, you're right. And it doesn't have to mean that Xiaomi wants to use it anywhere else. It may be just efficient, right? Xiaomi's trying to be a low-cost phone, an affordable phone. So putting the same piece of software everywhere no matter what the different regional variations are, it makes sense. I imagine there are also less controversial pieces of software that are only active in the EU. Say, I don't know, maybe related to roaming or something like that. So that kind of makes sense to me. Also, don't get me wrong, makes me very uncomfortable and not want to get one of these phones to know that that's lurking there under the hood. I just didn't have Lithuania on the bingo card. You know what I mean? Like it just came out as such an interesting story of, hey, guess who's fighting with China over these phones? Oh, Lithuania, you still hear about that. So I guess go Lithuania if you think like they do, I guess. Yeah, I was not aware that China and Lithuania had contentious relationships over missions, you know, and or electronics. I don't think they normally do, but they certainly have. Right, right. Yeah, an unlikely pairing, I guess, is what I meant. Unexpected, perhaps, unless you're in Lithuania, then you're like, yeah, seeing this done. We've been talking about this for years. Yeah. In fact, if you are, let us know. Yeah, I know we have Estonians, T2T2, among others. There's got to be somebody in Lithuania. There is also a new episode of The Tech John Out, episode two, Rob Dunwood, Terence Gaines, Tech Life Steph, AKA Stephanie Humphrey. Doing a great episode, folks. Listen, I listen to this because we're involved in making the show and then I keep listening because it's just a really good show. They're talking about the new Apple announcements, some information and insights you might not get otherwise. They are talking about China's limitation on TikTok used by children. There's lots of good stuff in there. You want to get this show in your life, The Tech John, T-H-E-T-E-C-H-J-A-W-N. Dot com, go subscribe now. Microsoft's got its big announcement. All the big Surface devices. We got a new mouse. We got a new duo phone. Sarah, where should we start? Should we start with that big new Surface laptop? Let's do that. So we got the Surface laptop studio. That's going to replace the Surface Book. It's got a 14.4-inch screen, 120 Hertz display, quad core Intel processors, support for a Thunderbolt 4. The display, you might be happy about this or not happy about this, no longer detachable. So it's a typical hybrid now that can fold into a tablet form and kind of that stage position. Stage mode pulls the display forward, covering the keyboard, but leaving the trackpad for gaming, streaming or presenting. So you have some options there. Also comes with a Slim Pen 2, which docks under the front edge of the laptop. We'll talk a little bit more about the Slim Pen 2 in a second. And this is shipping October 5th, starting at $1,599. Also... Yeah, keep going. I have so much to say about that, but... I know, save it, Scott, save it. Because there's quite a bit more to talk about. Surface Pro 8, 13-inch, 120 Hertz display. It's a laptop. Dynamic refresh rate is needed for touch and stylus tasks. Also supports Thunderbolt 4. The Slim Pen 2 comes as well. The Slim Pen 2 is housed and charged in the keyboard, has up to 32 gigs of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage, shipping October 5th, starting at $1,099. And that Slim Pen 2, you can get separately too. It comes with the Pro 8 in the laptop studio, but it's Bluetooth 5.0, has a new chip, they're calling the Microsoft G6, uses some haptics, which it says will help simulate things like drawing on paper. 125 hours on a charge. Charger is sold separately, although your existing Slim Pen 1 USB-C base will get an update to support charging the Pen 2. You can pre-order that now for $129.99 if you're not getting it with a laptop that you already get. All right, Scott, go for it. What do you think of these? All right, so I was really excited for this event because I was a big believer in the Surface Pro Studio when it got launched, the desktop version of all of this. And sadly, I don't think it did incredibly well. It was also kind of panned a little bit by reviewers as not being quite the creative powerhouse that it was being presented as and that maybe further iterations would solve a lot of those problems, latency, riddled pen, this sort of stuff. And now we're here. And it looks like they've decided to go more portable. The screen is still very generous. 14.4 inch screen, 120 Hertz display is very competitive with the other creative painterly device everybody buys these days, which is an iPad Pro, 12.9 inch. That's a larger screen and larger is better for artists. 120 Hertz is important also for not just latency, but just for the overall feeling that you're not drawing on a slow computer, you're actually working on a fast surface, no pun intended. The specs are really good. Everything about this sounds great. I'm more interested than I've ever been. I do wish the tablet part came off and wasn't just foldable. It's not gonna matter to most people, but I think that that would be just a nice feature to be able to remove that. And it's important to note, it's as expensive as that new pen is. It sounds like they've really improved it. I'll have to see it to know for sure how it'll compete with something like the Apple Pencil or other competing devices from Waycom. The thing about that pencil is it's not really that badly priced. 129 bucks may seem like a lot, but that's exactly what a pencil costs. And like Tom mentioned, if you're buying this device, you get one with it. And that's not true with an iPad of any sort, let alone the Pro. I also think that price is really good. 1599 is not cheap, but as a starting price with those specs, that tells me that they're trying to be competitive and also deliver on the promise that you can be a creative professional with this device. So overall, totally stoked to get my hands on one. Can't wait to see how they handle it. If this could be the one, finally in the surface line that gets me excited. When you say excited, do you mean excited enough to pull out the wallet and buy one? Maybe not. Maybe excited enough to wait for the early reviews and then maybe go to one of their stores or a kiosk somewhere and get a little hands on if they'll let me in COVID time. It's possible they won't, I don't know. It's been a while since I've done that with one of them. I, they do, they do. They have a lot of hand sanitizer at these stores, but I went and saw the Samsung Fold and they will let you touch it. Yeah, and they didn't say anything about that weird puck that they released with the desktop. I'm assuming that's a bygone item that will only ever live in the Surface Pro desktop life and whether they make a new one of those ever is probably questionable at this point. But I think it's the right move. Everybody wants to be on the go more. Nobody's looking for a more big junk or big chunky stuff at home. And this is like a really nice middle ground. So if they can pull this off and pull away some of the Procreate faithful and the iPad Pro faithful that are out there now, which is really grown, that's really good. For artists, good for Microsoft. I'm really glad they're gonna stay with it for a while. Besides the fact Scott, that the Apple Pencil is sold separately no matter what else you are going to use it with. Is there anything about the Apple Pencil you don't like that you hope this limb pen too could deliver on? Well, already the battery life is exponentially better for this new pen from Microsoft. That's very impressive. You'll never need one to last that long because your actual device is gonna run out of juice before the pen does. Right, or you have to take a nap before 125 hours. And it's kind of true the Apple Pencil which I'm holding on to my hand right now, but on the whole, I think the Apple Pencil is really impressive tech. And I think that the low latency combined with a 120 Hertz screen has made this an incredibly awesome tool, maybe the best there is. It just sounds to me like maybe Microsoft's finally got one that will compete with it and maybe not just compete but supersede it. And that will all come down to performance, how this runs with things like Photoshop and Clip Studio and some of the more big standards that professionals are used to using on their tablets. And I think what this spells either way was already starting to whittle away, but I think companies like Waycom and other competing tablet manufacturers are kind of in a bad spot. They've got to come up with some really creative ways to get people interested in this or in their products more because this stuff really is kind of taken over and this feels like a really strong play by Microsoft to push that forward. Yeah, I see evidence here that Microsoft is designing for its audience, not just throwing specs at the wall, not just doing a detachable screen because, hey, it looks good in a demo and even though Scott says he liked it, most people weren't using it. They're saying, look, we're not gonna have the laptop studio do everything. We're gonna have it do the three things that are the most used cases. We're gonna have adequate prices. We're gonna have good specs, not crazy specs, but really good specs. This feels very purpose built this time around, which in the past, Microsoft's have always felt a little more like demo products. These feel like they really have taken in the needs of the consumer into designing them. And like I said, good price points, not cheap, but adequate. Exactly, and two of these things, like removable storage up to two terabytes, that's enormous for creators who are trying to stuff their drives full of content and work. That's huge for high resolution. It's huge for a lot of reasons. And that pen, if they can do some of that haptic stuff and succeed, that's one of the big weaknesses across the board for tablets is they all feel like you're writing on glass. Can you fix that? I don't know. That's the thing I'm most skeptical about, but most curious about. So we'll see. We'll get our hands on that. All right, let's talk about the Surface Duo. I have the original Surface Duo. It was a cool demo is how I always felt about it, but it was a little hobbled to get it under a price point that was still very high. They had to do a lot of compromising. For instance, no rear camera. So the Surface 2 Duo 2 tries to fix all that. Let's see how they did. Two 8.3 inch 90 Hertz displays and three rear 12 megapixel cameras, an ultra wide-wide and a telephoto. So the normal big bump on the back that you see in other phones. Snapdragon 888, like the top of the line processor, 5G built in, curved screen for exterior notifications on the hinge now. You'll be able to see a time and maybe an email notification, stuff like that show up even when it's closed right there on the hinge because the screen curves around the hinge starts at $1,499. So they did not get the price down, but it'll be widely available October 21st in Australia, Canada, Germany, France, the UK and the US. I mean, you're the owner of the previous one. How does this land for you? It feels like they filled the gaps. They filled all the gaps. They didn't add anything surprising, but they filled the gaps and it's going to perform better. It's gonna be more practical. If you didn't have a use for it before, I'm not sure it changes that, but it now can fill those uses better. It's kind of the way I would see it. Still expensive though. This is not the one for everybody to get yet. Yeah, it's pretty pricey, but it's nice to have some additional people doing curves and doing folds and doing all the new fancy stuff so that one day Apple will make theirs and claim they invented it. It'll be great. I mean, at some point I imagine Microsoft might come out with a Surface Duo that doesn't have the gap. Like right now it's basically two phones, one with the processor in it and the other just with storage connected by some wires. And I think they're gambling that that is just as productive as actually doing a foldable which is much more difficult even though Samsung's trying. All right, we got a few more, right? Back to the laptops, yep, yep. We got the 10.5 inch Surface Go 3 that's supposed to be a much more affordable. New processors which are 60% faster than the last generation. Also Windows Hello support is now included. Starting at $399.99 for order now with LTE models also coming in the coming months. And a couple other interesting things. The Microsoft Ocean Plastic Mouse. This is a Microsoft mouse made of 20% ocean recycled plastic. And the Surface Adaptive Kit. This is a set of stickers and keycap labels to help make it easy to identify and grab cables, find important keys, find your ports, be able to grab those cables with things like a lanyard tab for pulling out the kickstand. This is all to make Microsoft products more accessible. Coming later this year, they didn't talk about a price so I don't know if they'll just be given this out when you purchase something as an extra or what the deal is. But another innovative idea for making things more accessible by saying here, but let's actually take the device that you're buying from us and give you some ways to improve its accessibility. I'm curious people, I know you're out there, people who might make use of this. Is this attractive? Is this like, yeah, yeah. No, this is something I've wanted or not. Let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Yeah, this is, instead of the, hey, you need fewer cables than ever and everyone's like, well, but we wanted more ports type thing. Microsoft is like, you're gonna have lots of cables. You're gonna have lots of ports. We want to help you identify all of these things. That's helpful. I also love the concept of reaching behind a computer of any kind and knowing intuitively because of what I'm touching, even though I'm not the target of say a blind person trying to do this, but knowing that, oh, well, that's the, that's my external drive cable because I know that because of the way I'm touching it. Like that's really helpful when you're trying to move things around and do it in a quick way and maybe on the air even like shows we're doing and we want to quickly identify a cable.  Yeah, love it. Well, you might also love this new report coming out of nature. Nature reports that engineers from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois have developed microchips capable of passive flight. The micro flyers, as they're known, surf the wind much like a leaf might or a flower. They fall in a slow and controlled manner and you might say, well, why? The researchers led by engineer John Rogers studied various plants and trees to mimic how wind blown seeds that might fall from these trees or these plants or leaves use four different strategies when falling depending on the wind. There's the helicopter, there's the flutter or spinner, there's the glider and then there's the parachuter. There are different techniques that nature has sort of evolved to make sure that seeds get scattered around and that tree is procreating, so to speak. The point of the research project was to distribute functional miniaturized electric devices at a large scale which could then in the future help monitor things like environmental pollution, toxic spills, even the spread of diseases. Modified micro flyers could create networks, they could communicate wirelessly even with external devices effectively becoming IoT sensors. This is really, really fascinating and if you're worried about like, what happens if these things land on the ground and clutter up and litter the place? They're trying to design them to be dissolvable in water for one thing. So if you are doing it over a spill on the ocean, they would do their sensing and then just kind of dissolve into the ocean and be biodegradable. So they just return to constituent parts and disappeared.  If they're made of plastic, even if they biodegrade, that just fills the ocean with plastic. So there's some questions there, but the technology itself I think is fascinating and they're really tiny. Like yeah, you have to look at the pictures to really understand. They're like grain of sand tiny. There's different sizes, but they get very small. Yeah. So they're not nanites per se, but they're getting there. Do you guys remember? Oh, what was the tornado movie with? Again, think of the name of it. Yeah, that's the one, Twister. Twister, they had all those Pepsi cans and they were empty and they made these great flyers out of it and then throw it in the tornado. This feels like a way better version of that to me when you're trying to test stuff like that, whether it's storms or like they said, environmental stuff or whatever. We've come a long way. No more Pepsi cans. Let's go this way. Yeah, yeah. This is good stuff. Folks, what do you think? Micro flyers, you want some? Send us an email. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. In fact, if you have any feedback at all on anything that we talk about, we love to hear it. I asked for dog photos yesterday and many of you delivered. So thank you. Oh my God, there was so many good dog photos. That was amazing. They were really amazing. Cause I wasn't kidding and thank you for all of you for indulging me. Special thanks to Nick F. Nick F is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. And Nick, we thought you deserved a big ol' thank you. Thank you for all the support over the years. Nick F, Nick F, Nick F, Nick F. Nick F, also thanks Scott Johnson. Oh Scott, I was just gonna say it doesn't mean we didn't get a new boss today. So like you're the slots open.  You'll get that, you'll get that mentioned tomorrow. Yeah, it's a sure thing. Also a sure thing, Scott Johnson. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. Sure. Cause you know, it could be taken, yeah. Scott Johnson, where could people see the rest of your work? Well, if you're like, who is this guy? It's my first Wednesday, never heard of him before. Go check out the podcast, the art, the all sorts of stuff that you will find over there at my website, frogpants.com. There's surely something there for you. And if part of that is wanting to communicate directly, well, you can find me on thegoodoldtwitter.com, twitter.com slash Scott Johnson. And thanks for having me. Well, we're live on this show Monday through Friday. Did you know? It's at 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. If you want to know more, go to dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And thanks to everybody who trains us live. It's a lot of fun to have you. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young and Steven Schleich. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.