 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by Howard Urmish, John Atwood, Pat, and you! Thanks to all of you for making the show possible. Coming up on DTNS, Uber's new innovation, phone booking rides. Plus, Amazon hasn't given up on voice assistance yet, and an on-the-street report from Tesla from Allison Sheridan. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 17th, 2023 in Los Angeles on John Merritt. And from Studio Wedwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the PodFeed Podcast, I'm Allison Sheridan. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. I accidentally said from the Tesla, that was over-promising. Allison is in her home. She's not in her Tesla right now. But that would have been good. Yeah, you could have done it, though. Like, you got the power. From the mind of a Tesla. There you go. All right, we are going to get to that discussion of Tesla with Allison, but let's start with the quick heads. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted and charged Weibo Wang for theft and attempted theft of Apple's autonomous driving tech. Wang worked for Apple as a software engineer from 2016 through 2018. Reuters reports that Wang is head of intelligent driving at GDU, that's a company owned by China's Baidu. Wang is accused of accessing confidential databases from Apple days before his departure and taking that information with him in violation of confidentiality agreements. After law enforcement searched his house, he boarded a flight to China. Now, if I'm guilty, he could face up to 10 years in jail and fines of up to $250,000. The top-level domains .zip and .mov have been around since 2014, but they just became generally available to the public earlier this month. Bleepy Computers Lawrence Abrams notes that some platforms, including Twitter, automatically convert file names with .zip or .mov extensions into URLs now because they're domain names, but that opens the door for malicious actors to squat on active URLs that sound like file names with those endings and then send users to malicious sites. Silent Push Labs already discovered someone attempting to do this with the URL microsoft-office.zip, while others have registered domain names for other common .zip archives to point users to information on the risks of these domain names. So you got some white hats in there too. Keep in mind, this is not a new problem. This was a problem for .com, the file extension for some executables in the earliest days of the web itself. Motorola announced an event for June 1st, showing the profile of two foldable devices using the tagline Flip the Script. Now, based on some previous leaks, it seems likely a new Razer foldable device might be announced at this event. The financial time sources say Volkswagen began talks with Huawei to use its software on vehicles sold in China. This comes after VW restructured its own software development unit Cariad earlier this month by restructuring. That meant dismissing most of its senior execs. Microsoft began rolling out support for continuing Bing chat conversations on mobile that initially started on a PC that's coming to iOS and Android within the next week. It also began rolling out support for contextual chat in the Microsoft Edge mobile browser, letting the chatbot read the site of users on. Microsoft will also release a Bing chat widget for quicker access on iOS and Android later this week. Alright, let's talk about those Uber announcements. Let's do it. Uber has been experimenting with all sorts of things as of late, rental cars, flight bookings. At its annual product showcase called GoGet, the company showed off a few more everything app-esque features. Here's the first one. If you invite somebody to a group ride, Uber will now let you enter your own pickup or drop off location. So let's say I'm having a barbecue. Tom, Allison, and Roger are all coming to my barbecue, but I don't, yeah, well, yeah, I hope you all show up, but I don't know everybody's address off hand to make the group ride work. Allison maybe is somewhere unusual. Maybe she's not at her house and I don't know where she is. They can set up their own locations from within this group ride and even pay for their share of the ride afterwards. So I say, yay, thanks for going to my barbecue, but I'm not paying for all this stuff. You guys live in LA. You were all over the place. It would cost me a lot of money otherwise. Uber also announced teen accounts. Those are designed for parents and caretakers of anyone from 13 through 17 years old screening for highly rated drivers, making sure that only the highest rated drivers are picking up kids, live trip tracking. So if you are a third party, you can still see how the ride is going and also offering always on customer support to either contact the driver, call them specifically, or if you have an issues there, calling Uber directly during a ride. So Tom, what else did Uber announce? Yes. I'm a big fan of using Uber Eats. So if you want to use Uber Eats to send a gift, you know, like your Aunt Sarah's favorite chicken soup takeout, you can now record and attach a personalized video message like, hey Aunt Sarah, get well soon or happy birthday, Uncle Roger. The feature is currently only available on gift cards though, but they do expect a full item roll out soon. Finally, Uber announced it's partnered with car seat company Nuna to let parents and caregivers request car seat equipped cars that is available in New York City and Los Angeles to begin with, but Allison, let's talk about Uber's other groundbreaking new features. Well, first, Uber Eats now offers group grocery store shopping, so various members of a household, family, roommates, maybe a group on vacation that happens for us all the time. Everybody can enter items needed and deadlines for those items, and then they can split the eventual bill. I really like that part too. But the truly groundbreaking feature is that Uber will now let you request a ride with a toll free number, 1-833-USE-UBER to schedule an immediate or future ride in English or in Spanish. You get a text when your booking is confirmed. Now, that seems kind of silly, but you know, there are people who don't have smartphones or are just not into the app experience, so I actually think this is a big deal. I agree. There are times when I have wanted someone to be able to use Uber or Lyft or any of the other similar services, but they didn't have the app. They had a smartphone, they didn't have the app. They didn't want to install it. You know, there's just some people like, yeah, I don't want to get into that. I don't want to create an account, any of that sort of stuff. Now granted, if you call this phone number, you're basically going to have to create an account. Somebody's going to have to pay for this, but it does take away that impediment of I have to install something. So I do like this because to me, Uber long ago got past ride sharing and now it is moving past ride hailing to just be a travel app. So I like the idea that, you know, I would like to see Uber work with more taxi companies to say like, yeah, we have our own Uber drivers, but if a taxi is the closest thing and the best thing, we'll send you a taxi. I think that'd be great. That would be cool. I know Steve's parents are in their 80s and they both still drive, but they started experimenting with Uber because their retirement facility would actually hail the Uber for them and then build them through the facility. And so, you know, anything that encourages them to maybe not drive all the time wouldn't be the worst idea. So, and he's just got a flip phone. She's got a smartphone, but he's got a flip phone. No interested in going with a smartphone. So this would really be perfect for him. He would really love this. You know, one of the car seat company, Nuna featured that you mentioned, Tom. This is not something that has ever applied to me because I'm usually not traveling with kids who need to be in car seats. I have a lot of friends who do. And over the years, let's say, I don't know, maybe there'd be like some friends of mine coming up to wine country and, you know, I'd sort of say like, Oh, but I mean, why drive? You know, they'd say, well, you can't do Uber because of the car seat thing. You know, we got a kid and, you know, that that does come up quite a bit. So even though this is Los Angeles and New York is is not taking care of that big of a market. It is a step in the right direction. And I know people will be like, Yes, finally, I'd like to see a combination of two of these things. Now that you said it, I put these pieces together. The part about being able to vet a the drivers a little more when you're doing it for teens, combined with a car seat thing, because I know we've we've wanted to go out and we're going to deal in with a car seat thing with my grandkids and stuff. But also even if your kids aren't by themselves, parents are a little more protective. Like, I'm willing to take a risk with myself, but maybe not with my child in the car. And so to be able to say, OK, I've got this upper tier of cars I can request. And it's going to have a car seat. That would be that would be ideal. There's so many levels of car seat. That's going to be going to be tricky. You got your infants, your your regular kids, toddlers, and then they got the booster seats. So kids, that's a tough problem to solve. A lot of folks in the chat room are like, shouldn't all drivers be vetted? Shouldn't shouldn't you always be screening for highly rated drivers? Yes, all drivers are vetted. These are these are raising the bar to say, we're only by default going to give the teens the best of the best. You could do that yourself if you want. But these accounts don't let you get anyone else. So you're you're having the cream of the crop. Because mathematically, there's always a top 10 percent of anything, right? So I think that's all that's saying. It's it's not implying that the rest of us are getting crappy drivers. Combined, it looks like Uber's doing a lot of stuff. Yeah, they're they're becoming a travel service, which is very interesting to watch. I also, you know, Alison, you mentioned that the the idea of like being at a vacation rental and having a bunch of people who want stuff at different times and being able to pool what you want and when you want it together, because you're all in a household of sorts, or maybe this is just like your regular household or, you know, you have four roommates or whatever it might be. This this comes in handy too. I don't know how much I would use it because I live alone, but I often go on vacation with a few people and that's that's sort of a fun option to know. The main thing we need to know though is whether Chris is actually cooking at your barbecue. Oh, it better be. If you still get at my barbecue, I don't eat anything from Uber Eats. We are good unless you need some ingredients. Unless you need some groceries. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, some folks speculate that Amazon and other companies might be pulling back from those smart assistants. Or maybe not, because on Wednesday, Amazon announced new Echo devices, quite a few. So let's go through this, Tom. What are they and what do they tell us about Amazon's intentions? Right. So probably the biggest departure is a new form factor, the Echo Pop. Some people describe it as a slice of Echo Dot. It's sort of a half sphere with a flat part on both sides, has Euro built in so you can use it as a Wi-Fi extender in that system as well. You can get it in black, white, lavender or teal. 40 bucks. So 10 bucks cheaper than the Dot ship in May 31st. You know, the whole sliced sphere. I think the sphere is sort of the cooler look, but the slice feels more speaker to me. And maybe that's just in my mind because I'm just I'm used to speakers having a flat surface, even though I have various sonar speakers upstairs that are, you know, cylindrical. But yeah, for this price and with some fun colors, I, you know, kind of a new brainer. Allison, you were asking me earlier, we were trying to figure out whether the Euro in here is the modern hardware, because this thing at $40 is $10 cheaper than the old Euro that they still sell. Right. And they don't really, I wasn't able to find quickly what kind of specs it is. Is it Wi-Fi 6? Is it 6E? What is it doing with the back call on that? And really, if it is an Euro, I would buy these to extend a network. Yeah, why not? My son has Eros and I think he needs a couple of more, but he's also an echo kind of a household. So I'm thinking of throwing some speakers. Were any of them that had displays? Were they also, does anybody remember, were they also Eros inside? No, this is the first one I've seen. Yeah. Okay. The Echo Show 5 and the Echo Show 5 kids both got upgrades, new chips, so 20% faster, re-engineered microphone array, clearer sound. They say that you'll double the bass. I'm not sure how you exactly measure that. The kids version in the US, UK and Germany includes a year subscription to the $5 a month Amazon Kids Plus. So you pay $10 more, but you get $60 worth of service. And they're both shipping May 31st. These aren't big updates. These are just the next model with newer hardware inside, basically. What's that song? We will, we will rock you. That's my grandson, six-year-old grandson's favorite song. That would be, he could use twice as much bass. Yeah, there you go. Good, good example. Also a popular song with American Idol contestants, but is it really? A digress. Oh yeah, it used to be anyway. The new Echo Ear Buds promise better sound thanks to a 12 millimeter dynamic drive. Battery life is increased. Five hours of continuous playback or 20 hours if you use the case. Sports multi-point pairing. That's kind of the big advance. So you compare and switch audio between two devices simultaneously. That's something that the latest version of Bluetooth can do. No active noise cancellation though. So you can still buy the old Echo Ear Buds that have active noise cancellation. They're just more expensive. The Echo Ear Buds here are only 50 bucks, shipping June 7th. Well, active noise cancellation is important to me, but if you've never had it or you say, I really don't care, 50 bucks, that's a great price. Yeah, for something, you know, if it's good audio otherwise that compare to a variety of devices. And, you know, nobody ever loses earbuds, right? That isn't a problem anybody has. Yeah, never done that. Never once. No, they are weird looking though. They kind of, I think it was the Verge described them as looking like they'd been 3D printed. I'm sorry if it wasn't the Verge, I may be getting that wrong. Well, but what's wrong with that? 3D printed things are, you know, that's just like saying a website looks like it's from Linux, right? It's not a compliment. And then finally, Echo Auto, which is that little dongle you can connect to your car to get voice command features while driving, is now available in more countries. So not an update to the hardware, but Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan can all get it now. So we got a brand new form factor. We got a couple of updates, new markets for one of the products. Allison D, what do you think this means for Amazon's voice assistant strategy? Well, it seems surprising that the reports are that they're losing a whole lot of money on this, right? But they sure seem to be coming out with a lot of products. I'm amazed at the imagination of how many different things they can come up with to shove Alexa into, right? That's a lot of different products they've been announcing every single time. Yeah, they're retiring them all the time. They've retired a few, but yeah. Yeah, but the plethora of options that you have is pretty astonishing, really. So it does seem like they're still throwing a lot of money into it, doesn't it? And I don't hear complaints about these products. I think they feel like AI has to happen. They have this is their advantage in AI, and they'll figure out the monetization down the road somehow. Yeah, I mean, with all the talk of Amazon and Google both potentially scaling back efforts for assistance, part of me thinks, well, these products were maybe in the pipeline already. So why not just offer them? Let's sell some hardware, let's see what sticks. Maybe this will change direction. Maybe it won't. It could be that Amazon says, our assistant was V1 of how we really think that you're going to talk to your devices in the future. And that they're just getting rid of some inventory, but I don't know. I feel like they are specifying the stuff to the point where maybe the downfall of who was greatly exaggerated. Amazon's SVP Rohit Prasad told TechCrunch, you'll find qualitatively different elements of experiences that will be launching along the year, sort of vaguely teasing that there's more to come as well. So maybe those will be more indicative of the future strategy. Folks, if you're feeling social, get in touch with the DTNS audience on the social medias. We are at DTNS Show on Twitter, at DTNS Show on Mastodon, mstdn.social, at Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, and at DTNS Picks on Instagram. And we've had more stuff going up on TikTok, had more shorts going up on YouTube, youtube.com, daily tech news show. So enjoy all of the stuff that we have to offer. Thank you. Tesla held its annual meeting Tuesday and there was a lot. Short version is Tesla Cybertruck still promised to go into production. They're going to cut costs by moving off of Silicon Carbide power electronics in the drive units. Musk told CMBC that full autonomous driving looks like it's going to happen this year. He said I was able to drive for several days just dropping a navigation pin in random locations in the greater Austin area with no intervention and the same in San Francisco. However, what he's saying is different than what they told the California Department of Motor Vehicles earlier this year that the existing version of the software is not capable of autonomous driving and the company does not expect to make significant enhancements to the system. In other words, it's going to stay level two, which means the driver has to maintain control. What we like to do here on Daily Tech News Show is focus on what's actually usable by us, the consumers, rather than so much on the pre releases and the leaks. So we are going to ask Allison, a current Tesla driver and user of its full self driving beta 11. How is it Allison? Where should we start? Well, the thing to keep in mind is we've had essentially full self driving on the freeway for a long time. It'll change lanes, it'll get on and off freeways, it'll do intersections. That's kind of old news. I'm talking about driving in the city and that's where it gets really, really scary. I've talked on the show before when V10 was out about how I like to describe it as a teenage driver who is also drunk was what it was like, basically terrifying. It made a lot of mistakes. It would freak out at little minor things somebody would pull across in front of you where you had plenty of time for the intersection to clear and it would go, oh, it's a big thing. It was super tentative pulling out in the intersection, you're trying to get out. It made all kinds of mistakes. It kept trying to hit the medians when you go to turn left. There's often a concrete median, it would drive straight towards it and you had to rest control. So not good. Over the last couple of years or so, there have been minor updates and each time we go, maybe this time it'll be good and it never is. None of those problems got fixed. But we just got V11 and V11 is a huge improvement. I would say it's still a teenage driver or an inexperienced driver, but it's definitely not drunk. It is sober. Well, that's a plus. It's not even drinking a minor or like three, two beer. Plus driving is still drunk driving. So good. Yeah. No, it's not drunk driving at all. It's much, much better. So the big things that I've noticed is that it's very confident pulling out of intersection into traffic and it's not making mistakes when it does that. So you know how it's kind of bad when somebody is too tentative, that's actually dangerous? Yeah. Briskly, appropriately briskly pulls into intersections. It's not panicky at all. I was driving on a pretty wide road when this pedestrian just diagonally walked across the street and I know that in the previous version it would have freaked out and this time it just kind of slowed down, gave a plenty of room and very gently accelerated back up. It was no problem. It was exactly the way I would have done it. I had another situation where this idiot pulled his SUV up next to a fire hydrant blocking my lane partially and then he whipped open the door and got out of the car in the middle of my lane and the car didn't freak out. It slowed down. It stopped quite a distance from him and then it started trying to edge to the left. I actually took control because I was freaking out but it didn't have a problem with it. It no longer tries to hit physical medians. It does still drive over, paint it on the ground medians. In California at least we have a double-double yellow line means this is like a physical median. It does drive over those still so it's still making a mistake. But the reason I say it's not like an experienced driver is because it does things like it always stays in the center of the lane, the center of the lane no matter what. So if you're on a on a curve to the right you know how you hug the inside of the curve. Nope it goes in the center which is fine but it feels like you're sliding out of the lane like like it's not going to be in control so it's that's a little disconcerting and if you have lanes merging in where two lanes become one instead of staying staying say to the left side of the lane it'll it'll move over to the center and then back over the left again. Oh that's rude. Yeah exactly well it makes the people behind you think you're going to be turning right or something. Right right. And then the last thing I noticed was on Sepulveda we've got three lanes in this area and nobody drives in the right lane because it's got dips and it's got little intersections and it's got businesses. People are always slowing down pulling in pulling out it's a terrible lane. It loved that lane it would I'd get it out of that lane I'd say no no turn this signal on I'd get it to turn move to the middle of the lane and then go yeah I'm going back in that lane this is great lane because there's nobody in it but there was a reason why not. That's a really good example of a hard problem for for a machine learning to understand because that that is a very intuitive thing of like oh no one else is in this lane looks like it's kind of rocky I'm just going to stay out of it that's not logical right right that's just something you have to intuit you sort of know because yeah driven it enough there was a I'm Allison I'm sure you saw this there was a video that went around um of a Tesla that had rolled up to a crosswalk had a green light and then somebody started going through the crosswalk but the Tesla was kind of in the right of way but and went you know and didn't you know there was no there was no issue with the pedestrian and you know the the person who shared this I think it was on Twitter was like what do we think here you know and people were like illegal you have to always yield to a pedestrian kind of thing and then other people saying you know what this is actually a better form of driving there was going to be no collision the person you know was not really obeying their traffic signals and you know this is just the future of of you know driving getting better my driver's ed teacher back in what 1975 told me had the six foot fall down rule which I don't think is a real rule but I always think of that it's like if the person fell straightforward would you run them over nah then you're fine I don't know if that's the law but that's reasonable that's perfectly reasonable yeah it's reasonable if you're trying to keep traffic flowing yeah and I feel you know I feel like it's like if you're talking about autonomous driving that is the goal obviously there are many exceptions but that is the goal so there was one much like what you're talking about Sarah where where we pulled up to an intersection the light turned green my car pulled into the intersection turned on the left turn signal because it was supposed to be turning left but we couldn't tell what the other driver was going to do they I think they had their turn signal on that they were going to turn left so we could have both gone but they didn't move and my car just went nope I'm just going to sit here till that person makes a decision and I think that was probably the right decision but that's not what I would have done right yeah it's the safer decision but yeah I'm going to get through it before that person wakes up and stops fooling around on their phone but I think I think I'm still such a huge believer in that we have to get to full self-driving we have to do it the child of some friends of mine was killed in an accident recently and I will I will keep working on this and keep giving all my feedback and trying to help it exist because we need to stop being the ones driving we are not good at this and we goof around on our phones and we we've got to we just need to stop it needs to succeed now let's go to the good point well um yes uh indeed and I'm so sorry to hear about your friends um uh what I I am happy about is salads that are smarter all right all right stay with me here yeah salad chain sweet green uh you might know it's pretty popular in uh various urban areas in the US is testing out a new device called the infinite kitchen it's a steel and glass unit doesn't really look like a robot but it is robotic hanging up behind the front counter designed to assemble various salads that sweet green offers if you've ever ever been to a sweet green you've got all these choices and you tell the person what you want and they make the salad for you and then you pick it up at the end of the assembly line so the test is in the Chicago suburb of naperville and here's how it works you place an order for a certain salad and use a touchscreen tablet so you don't even have to talk to a person then the infinite kitchen unit works along a populated assembly line of various ingredients that have already been put in by employees so they're you know employees still have to be part of this then they spin the salad as it goes if there's a special ingredient the robot can't handle or maybe somebody says at the end oh I forgot uh an employee can put the finishing touches on to the masterpiece I don't know maybe it's seeds are dressing or something like that the idea though is that workers spend less time on custom orders and more time interacting with the customers at least that's what sweet green is saying it currently has 200 locations in the US so if this test works you could probably expect a wider rollout of the infinite kitchen as for the obvious question of whether or not human jobs are being eliminated if this is a continued success sweet green says too early to tell but yes as this process might get streamlined fewer humans might be needed I like it it looks like a bunch of slurpy machines that your salad bowl goes under as it goes by right you still need someone to serve you your slurpy yeah a salad seems like something that is eminently automatable right because you just like even more you might say oh I mean sandwich burrito it's like yeah but a salad is almost like just throw everything into a bowl and then mix it up in it a little and you we're good yeah so it almost makes more sense than any other type of food well it also makes sense to check out the mailbag indeed it does we got a lot of responses to our conversation about not thinking of AI as human we had that with I as actor who was our guest on yesterday's show Damon agreed with the premise but said we have many amazon echoes and when our kids ask one a question the other and maybe another room will answer I've caught my kids saying oh shut up then I say something like don't talk to her like that James had a reason why it's a good idea not to be rude to an assistant even if you don't think of it as human James says we must not attribute human emotions or motivations to AI but we should still encourage basic politeness mostly this is because rudeness and abusiveness can and will carry through to other interactions and Daniel had a practical reason to act polite Daniel said when you say thank you you're also implying stop listening to me our conversation is over she'll make a quick comment then stop listening for another direct command you know I was struck by the number of people not not just the folks we mentioned here but other folks who wrote in who said but but if we don't think of them as human we shouldn't be mean to them and I realized as I was thinking of my responses to them that saying we shouldn't be mean to them is thinking of them as human in fact being mean to them is thinking of them as human right there is no being mean to a screwdriver there is no being mean to a hammer so so I agree with everyone here that yet like yes there are reasons you should act as if you're being polite because it can carry through to other interactions because it has a practical benefit of telling it hey I'm done listening to you but but any concern about the response is human it has nothing to do with the actual machine because the actual machine doesn't care although I Dr. Gary was talking about on DTS right yeah yeah but I do I do the line the the printer is malicious it is doing it on purpose for sure right no it's watching you right now oh minus so evil I unplugged it see exactly yeah we're not doing that anymore but that's different that's my printer it's out to get me but but all kidding aside I do I I get it where you know the everybody who wrote in is like we agree with you however here's where the lines get a little blurred you know maybe you know if you've got kids who end up saying like shut up you know to another person where you're like whoa no no no you only do that to AI practice to the person because you start getting used to responding a certain way and we should be clear we weren't advocating on the show yesterday be mean to the AI no because again that's treating it as if it's human right what we were saying is think of it as a tool don't think of it as a person and then you wouldn't want to be mean or kind to it because it's not a it's not a person it's not not even an animal it's it's just a thing just a tool well else and Sheridan we could never have a conversation about autonomous vehicles and new amazon products and AI either being human or not without you so let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do all right well I keep everything over at podfeet.com and one of the things I talked about recently with some actual metrics I took on how engagement is on mastodon versus twitter and it is ridiculously more engagement over on mastodon and I kind of dig in a little bit trying to figure out why and uh I think that was a lot of fun and that is over at podfeet.com and you can follow me on mastodon at podfeet at chaos.social can't spell allison without AI that's right well that's true huh interesting interesting um also interesting and great are our brand new bosses Errol and Jordan Errol and Jordan both started back in us on patreon since our last show always a fun thing to have in our inbox thank you so much for being part of the team yeah if you want to be like Errol and Jordan head on over to patreon.com slash dtns even if you don't have any dollars right now uh maybe a robot replaced you uh we have free options now to become a patron at patreon.com slash dtns and if you're a paid patron stick around for the extended show good day internet meta and bmw have made a big breakthrough for using vr in your car great great yeah I mean I don't know maybe yeah we we will unpack our feelings on this in just a moment but just a reminder you can catch the show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m eastern that's 2100 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live speaking of vr we're back tomorrow talking of vr smelling system with none other than Dr. Nikki Ackerman's she knows anybody does talk to them this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com