 Coming up on DTNS Verizon ditches Yahoo and AOL, what three words sends more than three words in a cease and desist? And Sony partners up with Discord. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 3rd, 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, tech editor from Bloomberg, Nate Langson. Welcome back, Nate. Thank you very much for having me. It is a pleasure as always to be here. It is a pleasure to have you. It was also a pleasure discussing Canada geese with Nate and other animals like woolly bears on Good Day Internet. If you'd liked that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Facebook Oversight Board will announce its decision regarding former President Trump's account at 9am Eastern time on May 5th. The account was suspended indefinitely back on January 7th, and the Oversight Board said it received over 9,000 public responses regarding the case. And Facebook is bound to that decision, whatever that decision ends up being. Epic Games acquired the online marketplace for digital artists' art station, which Epic says will continue to operate as an independently branded platform. Epic reduced standard art station fees on solo works from 30% to 12% with pro-member fees reduced from 20 to 8%, and the art station learning section will be free for the rest of 2021. Security researchers at the University of Virginia and University of California, San Diego, published details on three new specter vulnerabilities impacting all modern AMD and Intel processors with micro-op caches. No existing specter mitigations protect against these new flaws, with the researchers saying any new mitigation would incur a large performance penalty. However, as Tom's hardware points out, quote, exploding micro-ops cache vulnerabilities is extremely tricky, as such malware would have to bypass all of their software and hardware security measures that modern systems have. And even then, the attack has sophisticated and likely limited to nation states. Twitter made its audio chat room feature Spaces available to any account that has 600 or more followers on iOS and Android. The followers can be anywhere. It's Spaces that's available on both iOS and Android. The company also announced it will soon add multiple co-host support, reminders for scheduled events, and the ability to charge four Spaces access with a trial to start in the coming months. The supermarket chain Kroger plans to launch a drone delivery pilot program for groceries and over-the-counter medications later this spring in Centerville, Ohio. Kroger will offer pre-made bundles of items meant to fit the size and weight restrictions of the drone, including baby care items and a s'mores bundle. Something you just got to have with your prescription meds. Yes, sometimes. Kroger, man, doing the autonomous car deliveries in a bunch of places, testing the drones. Interesting. All right, let's talk a little more about the chip shortage. We've got some news here. We've been following the impacts of that shortage on the auto industry in particular with numerous manufacturers doing things like temporarily halting production at factories, cutting projected revenue, even some stories of leaving out components from vehicles and parking them until they can get them. When will it all end is what everybody would like to know. And we finally have a chip maker calling its shot. TSMC says it projects its supply will catch up to the audio auto industry's demand by the end of June. So if TSMC is right about its supply, it will be able to meet all its orders and not be delayed by the end of June. One customer who might be using TSMC fabs is Volkswagen. According to VW CEO Herbert Dease, the company's plans to have its Kariad software unit design and develop its own chips for future vehicles. Dease specifically cited apples and Tesla's use of custom chips calling out their higher competence and semiconductor performance. And while the move won't alleviate any future chip shortages, it could help Volkswagen develop new features faster than its competitors. Of course, Intel recently saying they're going to start opening fabs to take orders means that Intel knows that this is going to become more common. Not just tech companies like Apple, but other companies in this case, car companies like Volkswagen designing their own chips for their exact needs and then having somebody else build them. Volkswagen's not going to become a chip fab, but that gives you the ability to innovate faster. And we've seen Tesla do that. Nate, what do you make of this? Well, I'm interested in another knock on effect that this has all had, which I was reading about this afternoon and it's with rental companies. So companies like Hertz and Enterprise, they have not been able to buy new cars as quickly as they otherwise needed or thought they would need, particularly coming out of trouble restrictions in many parts of the world. And so they've started, I was reading, have started going to auctions and actually buying up used cars, which is just not something that these companies have done before. And that, I think, is one of the most interesting trickle down effects to chip shortage. It's not just about us buying, excuse me, buying a car ourselves or not being able to get components for a new computer or anything else. This is company saying, right, well, we're going to have to stop buying used. And I actually think that's kind of a good thing. It should be promoted that people can get perfectly good use out of something that someone has owned before them. And I wonder if this itself will have a trickle down effect. I guess my only question is, and I can totally see where a company like Volkswagen would be like, this is, I mean, yeah, if we have something that's specifically made for Volkswagen and can give it any sort of unique edge and help it compete with Tesla and, you know, I assume Deez is talking about Apple's M1 chips, but, you know, Apple car, it'll be around one of these years. But I wonder how that affects, I don't know, you know, third party car shops that would not necessarily have access to something that's a little bit more proprietary if more companies get on this train. That's a really good thought. I don't know what the answer to that is. Is it that even though the chips are standardized right now, it's the software that is the impediment to repair. And so there's already a system in place for repair shops to be able to get around that laws in place in various countries. Or would this make it more difficult? And could Volkswagen say, well, normally, yes, we would, but this is a proprietary chip design. And therefore, I don't know, it certainly makes the part only obtainable from Volkswagen, right? You're not going to be replacing that chip with an off the shelf chip. Well, according to SEC filings from the British Electronic Startup, Rockley Phonotics, Apple was the company's largest customer over the past two years as part of an ongoing supply and development agreement. Rockley's two biggest customers account for 99% of its revenue. Rockley has developed optical sensors to detect blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood alcohol levels. And according to the filing, the company expects to deliver final sensor samples to customers by the first half of 2022. Doesn't explicitly state which customers will get this, but it seems extremely likely that Apple would be one of them with the sensors seemingly fitting in well with the Apple Watch's existing health and fitness offerings. Yeah, I looked into this company. And one of the things that their sensor can also pick up on is things like the amount of alcohol in your blood, which I think is very interesting when you think about not just fitness, but also readiness to drive or operate machinery, interactions with other chemicals or foods or what have you. And so there is a potential for this to be far more than just, okay, how is your blood sugar? This could go to like, well, hey, it looks like your alcohol in your blood is a bit high. You might not want to drive. Probably shouldn't drive. And I think that's super interesting. As far as the company's concern, Rockley, it's not a business that I'd ever heard of before. Now, I mean, despite the fact that they're British, there are still apparently some British companies doing really interesting things that I have never heard of. This is definitely one of them. And a quick browse through their website, it seems that they're doing some really interesting stuff. I'm going to look into these guys a bit more. I think everybody, nobody's surprised that there will be an Apple Watch coming soon that has more health features. I think everybody expects that. Blood glucose is the one that everybody was expecting. So I think the story in that respect is also not surprising of like, ah, now we know where they might get the sensor from this Rockley place. But I think you make a really good point, Nate, about the fact that these are going to be more capable devices, not just because they're adding this individual sensor, but because the combination of sensors can start to do really interesting things. If you've got an EKG and an oxygen monitor and a blood pressure monitor and a blood glucose monitor, it might tell you that your alcohol level needs to be lower than the average, right? It could suit that to you. You probably shouldn't drive at this particular level or just looking for all kinds of different signs to be like, you might want to ask your doctor to look into this because even though no one of these individual statistics is off the chart, the combination of them could indicate something. I think there's a lot to be said for where we go with the multiplier effect of all of these sensors. Yeah, absolutely. Particularly given the ubiquity of smartphones now and how absorbent they are to other technologies. I think about things like car keys. Well, you can open cars, unlock cars, start cars with your phone, whether it's your car or a rental car that's been equipped with a sensor. It wouldn't be that far in the future to think, well, if a device knows that your alcohol is over a certain limit, maybe you have to get somebody else to authorize your car to start. I'm going several layers down the potential life of technology like this, but it's worth thinking about because if you don't think about it now, then it may become a problem in future. Thank me in future. Even just having the data points, you go like, okay, well, maybe I don't drink alcohol at all. It's like this is just not really a metric that I'm going to care about all that much. Sure, I mean, everyone's mileage will vary, but it wasn't that long ago where I didn't know how many steps I took in a day. Certainly didn't know how many miles I went or how many floors I climbed or how many calories I burned. All of that is at my fingertips right now. Some days I care about it more than others, but it's something that I've gotten used to having and knowing, and that is helpful to me. This is just more of the same, especially when it comes down to being able to, well, not diagnose a health problem, but being able to flag a possible health issue that you can then look into. I want to rush to remind folks that these are not replacing the actual devices. If you really have a blood pressure issue, you're going to want a dedicated blood pressure monitor. You're going to want a dedicated glucose monitor if that's essential to your health. These are advisory things that kind of help you decide whether you need to talk to your doctor about whether you need that dedicated device or not. What three words is a service that assigns three native language words to every three meters square on the planet to make it easier to tell where something is? We've talked about it on this show before. I know Nate has talked about it on text message before. This is especially useful for things like emergency services and what three words makes its money off licensing its system to companies, including emergency service companies. Recently, security researcher Andrew Tierney found that what three words often in Tierney's opinion has similarly named squares within a mile or so of each other, which possibly could cause confusion. For instance, deep pink start is just a few miles away from deep pink start. And if you say them fast, they both sound the same, but they're in different parts of a large park. If you've got a broken leg in that park and you can't tell which one of those it is, the rescue people might go to the wrong place. Tierney believes this makes it inadequate for safety critical causes. Finding issues like this is difficult because of the proprietary nature of the system. An open source alternative called what three, not three, but three words was created in 2019 for security researchers by reverse engineering what three words system and implementing it for JavaScript and go. The project did not use any of what three words code and only enough data as was necessary for interoperability. They weren't copying the database. They were just finding a way to access it. However, what three words filed a takedown notice and got tweets about the project removed from Twitter, that was until last week when Tierney published his findings. A CIS admin named Aaron Toppence helped Tierney with his research. Tierney did not use any what three words code in the research, but on Twitter, Toppence offered to share a copy of the what three words code with other security researchers who wished to help Tierney. Toppence then received a letter on Thursday from London based law firm JA Kemp representing what three words requesting that he delete tweets related to what three words and tell them who he shared what three words software with. They made it clear that they didn't mind him criticizing. They just didn't want him promoting the use of what three words what three words insist that what three words includes its copyright protected code. But as Tech Crunch's Zach Whitaker points out, there are no actual court cases that would show that there is in fact any code in what three words that violates its copyright. This is a really interesting company. I wrote a feature about them for business week a couple of years ago. We spoke to their CEO, Chris Sheldrick. That's difficult to say without pausing halfway through a word as well. And they're absolutely fascinating. And I sort of believe that this is like a very realistically is a very small problem because it's something that can be very quickly addressed. I think in the same way that, you know, if a daughter property is incorrectly addressed on on Apple Maps or Google Maps, you know, you can kind of file a ticket or an alert and say, Hey, can someone review this and someone can just go in and fix it. And there are some really odd examples on what three words where it looks like somebody maybe has kind of played fast and loose with satire and given three suggestive names for political buildings around the world. And I'll let you each Google those to your heart's content and find some of them. But ultimately, it's a really useful product, particularly for delivery drivers and people where roads and street addresses are not necessarily very well mapped, because you don't need any formal institution, a government, a postal service, anyone else to say this is where we acknowledge a certain road or building is. It's just the whole of the world is mapped. A drone can can can take a parcel to a what three words location in a way that it couldn't necessarily do with a postal code or zip code or similar. And I think it's the company's been around for about 10 years, think Intel's backed them before now. I'm going off the top of my head from the old reporting, but but I hope that this this particular situation gets resolved because I think the technology is generally quite useful to the people who use it. Yeah, I don't like that what three words is going after security researchers. I understand that the legal departments are always wanting to defend copyright as far as they can get away with to set the barrier way far away. But it is legal in most jurisdictions to reverse engineer for security research purposes. It's quite likely that this would be considered fair dealing in the UK or fair use in the US, because they're not trying to undermine the business model. And what three words is going to benefit if you let security researchers work with you on it and be a little more open as a platform? And it's disappointing to see that because I'm like you, Nate. I think it's a really, really interesting and good system. I agree with you. I think the name is problematic. What three words that goes a little bit above and beyond maybe what's necessary. And perhaps if they could just get around that this this issue could go away. All right, folks, we have a day, a weekly technology news show available in Spanish. If you give us five minutes, you will get the most important tech news of the world in Spanish for nothing. Listen to the Noticias de Tecnología Express disponible in Español at DailyTecnucho.com Verizon announced Monday it attends to sell its Verizon media division, which is made up largely of Yahoo and AOL, to Apollo Global Management. The company will be called Yahoo after the sale. Verizon bought AOL back in 2015 for $4.4 billion and bought Yahoo in 2017 for $4.5 billion and will sell the combined media division for $5 billion. So you can do the math there. The new Yahoo company will include properties like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, TechCrunch and Engadget. Most of its value likely lies in ad tech and sports betting. Now Yahoo had to partner on betting, but Apollo is licensed to more than 200 jurisdictions for gambling. Verizon Media revenue was up 11.4% to $2.3 billion in Q4 of 2020. Q1 2021 revenue was $9.9 billion. That's up 10.4% on the year. So the numbers don't look horrible, but you know, Verizon wants to invest elsewhere. Verizon will also retain a 10% stake in Yahoo and Verizon Media. CEO, Jiru Go-Rapin will continue to lead the company after the sale, which is expected to close in the second half of this year. $1.9 billion is not nothing. It's not enough to drive your business as a networking company. I get what Hans Vestiger is doing here. He's saying we're a networking company. We're going to be networking as a service. Content doesn't fit in that. The only way it fit would be to drive sales of our network services, and it's not doing that. So let's get rid of it. Fine. That makes sense. I do think that Verizon had a play here to be more like Comcast or AT&T where it had a content arm. AT&T has Warner Media. Comcast has NBCUniversal. I think they could have built up Oath or Yahoo and AOL into something like that. They just didn't want to do that, because the ad tech here is valuable. And I think that's why Apollo bought it, because they're like, yeah, that ad tech is valuable. We've got sports licenses, betting licenses, so we can juice up the gambling, which is already making money for this. So I guess it makes sense on all sides. I don't know. What do you think, Nate? I just kind of feel really sorry for Yahoo. I don't ordinarily feel sorry for companies. It's my job to not care whether they do well or go under, but just to tell people about it. But there's something about some of these early web properties that you just have a natural nostalgic leaning towards wanting to see them succeed in a weird way. Yahoo is one of the last companies that I can honestly feel that way about. But at the same time, what is Yahoo these days? It's such a strange entity in the world of technology history. We're well over to you in your book to be written about it's lifespan. And it's come a long way since it was, what was it, Jerry and two? Yeah, a guide to the worldwide web or something wasn't in the early days. But I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again. I'm sure somebody will do something good with the fact that a lot of people still go to Yahoo's homepage. A lot of people still use Yahoo Mail, so it's not dead in the water yet. I actually, a lot of people already know this. I worked at TechCrunch, so I was working for AOL when Verizon bought AOL day to day. By the time that decision gets made and the folks where we're trickled down into whatever unit that we're in in the larger company, nothing changed. I mean, it did eventually, but these sorts of things don't change much overnight, but a lot has happened since then. Verizon made AOL and Yahoo into Oath. Oath sort of just, that didn't really stick and then renamed itself to Verizon Media in 2018. 2018 was also when Go 90, remember Verizon's video service, that sort of, it just didn't get any traction in that shutdown. So I think, sure, the company's going in another direction and also just doesn't have a good track record for a lot of original content. Now, you think of something like, I don't know, on the journalism side, TechCrunch and Engadget, read those blogs all the time, every day, in fact. And a lot of the video efforts, which was something that I was part of way back in the day, they don't really exist anymore. So yeah, the ad, the ad tech is a very different beast than it was in 2015, 2016. Yeah. I also fear for the future of Yahoo Mail, because if Apollo is going to make this into an ad tech sports betting content company, you don't really want to be running a mail provider. So I'm curious what they do with those little corners of the business that don't really fit into the profile of this being a slim and trim content company like Red Ventures owning CNET or even farther back, Ziff Davis, which had the magazines bought by an equities company and continued to operate the magazines for a long time, even though ZDNet was part of CNET, Ziff Davis itself was not, stuff like that. So there will be some shakeout from this. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, those are very successful, still widely used, tech crunch and gadget very successful. I feel like those are probably in safer hands now, to be honest. Sony announced a partnership that will see it integrate Discord into quote, your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network end quote by early 2022. You don't know any details other than that quote. Sony made a minority investment in Discord's latest funding round. It's not clear what the integration is going to look like, whether it's a dedicated Discord app on PlayStation, integration of Discord and PSN friends list seems to make sense. Could be something else. This comes after the Wall Street Journal reported last month that Discord had ended its talks with Microsoft about a potential acquisition. So you're not going to see Discord sold. What you're going to see is them partner with Sony and Sony cash in on an IPO is what it looks like. Yeah, I mean, I use Discord every single day. I use it mostly for the podcasting side of my life, rather than purely with gaming. But it does mean that I see a lot of these features that the company is trying to roll out. And it has tried to push the benefits of getting its Nitro subscription, its monthly subscription, where you get higher quality streaming and and better quality audio and things like that. And that sort of feels like it would tie in nicely to a game console making business, because maybe that means you can more easily stream and discuss the games you're playing than you can today. And that makes sense. But it also made sense for exactly the same reason it made sense for Microsoft. And from what we know, that deal, as you say, was concluded without without a deal. So it makes me feel like there's something else in it. And I hope it's not purely financial, as you say, that Sony just wants to make a buck because, you know, Sony is doing all right these days, doesn't I don't feel it really needs Discord to get it over the next few quarters or anything. So I don't know, I just hope they don't destroy it because Discord did a lot very, very right, I think. Well, and Sony isn't going to own it. Discord's going to stay independent. So I think the chances of it being destroyed are very slim. Jen Cutter, one of our Daily Tech headlines hosts, pointed out that Sony has run more than three betas of improved party chat and integration over the last couple of years. So maybe it's just Discord's going to fix that for Sony. Yeah, Sony's like, let's just, everyone likes Discord better. Let's partner. Yeah. Well, speaking of gaming, if you love playing multiplayer Tetris on the original Game Boy, but you like the convenience of playing online, Twitter user Staxmashing has made your dreams come true. Using a custom PCB attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico to connect the Game Boy's link port to a USB connection, Staxmashing created a local client to run on the connected PC and a web-based online game server to host the matches, assign bricks to players, and create access codes for players. It's all available on GitHub. Hardware costs are steep, though, about $20. I know. A lot of tetrominoes for 20 bucks. Yeah. Listen, I know $20 isn't 20 pennies, but I was like, that seems like a really fun weekend project. I don't know. I've seen my wife sit in the corner playing multiplayer Tetris for hours on end as recently as a couple of months ago on a Switch. And clearly, there is a very sticky demand for something like this, so I can see it working. Yeah. I mean, somebody do this, send us the pictures, please. Please. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. This is right up several people's alley. I know. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Laurent wrote it and said, your discussion on butchered names in DTNS 4020, so that was last year, or last week, rather, highlights one of my major gripes with Google Maps. Laurent says, I live in Montreal, Canada. Half of our street names are in French, the other half are in English. So no matter what language I use, the street names are butchered. What I would really, I mean, really, really like would be for Google to tag street names with languages. So when it speaks the name, it uses the correct pronunciation, provided I tell it I understand that language. Hopefully, someone on the Google team listens to the show. Yes, bilingual locations. That's amazing and very québécois. I totally thank you, Laurent, for sending this to us. Because, yeah, you could say, do it English style and it'll get half of them wrong and do it French style and it'll get the other half wrong. There's no way to win that. Alison Sheridan wanted us to point out, in reference to the discussion on home assistance mispronouncing names, that Apple has a method for you to teach Siri the correct pronunciation. So if you're a Siri user, you can do that as well. And there is a way to do this in Amazon. We'll include a link to the skill that can help you do that in our show notes at dailytechnoonshow.com. Very good. See, we had more power than we realized the whole time. We want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster level, speaking of powerful Matthew Stevens, Carmine Bailey, and Eric Holm. You are all superheroes to us today and every day. Also, thanks to some brand new bosses. We've got Cartond, Connor Pendergrast, Zafod Dumbledorf, Khan, and Joshua Hilton. All just started backing us on Patreon. Welcome to the team. Thank you, new bosses. Also, thanks to Nate Langson for being with us. Nate, good to see you again. Let folks know what you've got up your sleeve these days. Well, my sleeves are rolled up, but high up above is my podcast text message, which I brought back after a few weeks of spring break just a couple of days ago. If you had read the news that our Prime Minister Boris Johnson's phone number leaked online 15 years ago, I wonder what would it be like if somebody tried to call him live on air? Well, I can tell you we tried. It's a bit disappointing, but you can join us for the journey, at least uktechshow.com. Excellent. We are live Monday through Friday here on DTNS at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more. Tell a friend dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Alison Sheridan. She's always got good tips for us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.