 Updater, let's not do that right now. Probably not. The camera you're using right now, maybe not. Probably not. Thanks OS, but no. Yeah. I don't know why it looks like this. It's very strange. It is just, you know, it's just a sunny day over here. Muddle through something. Yeah, somehow, some way. This is us. I think maybe it's just because it's been so rainy around here lately that I'm like, oh, I got to deal with sun again. Yeah, you're just not used to having to deal with the sun. Now, we're going to, we're going to, yeah, we're going to do a little, a little more work on the, the old students. Let's go start random again next week. Don't worry. Oh, great. I'm sorry, I've really missed it. Although the, the park that's close to where I live, big park is lush as heck right now. Man, it's nice. Is it in a super bloom? It is, I would call it a super bloom. Yes. It's great. It's, it's, I suspect it rarely looks that green, but a lot of trails for the dog and stuff. It was real nice. Do you really care two minutes before Showtime that Facebook product guy, Chris Cox is leaving? No. I mean, we tack it on to the end of. He's been, he's been with the company for a long time. I want to share some important updates. I'm sad to share the news. The Crix Cox has decided to leave the company. We've worked closely together. Wow. Oh my gosh. That's a long goodbye email. We could throw it into line 17 as like a little thing at the end. Chris Daniels is also leaving. The Chris's. Yeah. No one named Chris is allowed to work at Facebook. Left and right. Get out. Wait. You said line 19. 17. 17. Oh, that makes more sense. Throw it into line 19. Why would that go with Dropbox? Keep him guessing, Tom. I can't get your angle there. Hey, use Dropbox for free. What? The Chris's are leaving Facebook. Take that. Oh, now that one's not super short. It's just kind of short. Yeah, I'll read quickly. But not too quick. What's up, boss? Chris Daniels is leaving. Boss as in CEO? It does. Well, I'll be even have a CEO now. Hold on. All right. Ask all the right questions. I could also just find my own answer instead of asking you. What's up? Since the founders left. Got it. Okay. I don't know if he is technically CEO though. I think he might just be. Boss guy. Yeah. Recodes just calling him boss man. Really? Peter Kafka is really good with that kind of. No, they're saying boss. What's that boss? Not boss man. I wanted it to be boss man. Peter Kafka is cool. I don't know if he's that cool. All right. Here we go. Are you guys ready? Ready. Do it. In three, two. Alyssa Bergo has supported independent tech news directly for five years. You could be just as cool as Alyssa. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 14th, 2019. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Today, my friends, we have a packed show. Lots of updates, some follow-ups, and an interesting article on Wired about why Facebook and Apple might not be monopolies, but they might still need to be trust busted anyway. Let's start, however, with a few tech things you should know. EU competition commissioner Margaret Vestiger told German newspaper that her commission would examine Apple's app store following a complaint from Spotify. She said that the case would be comparable to Google. Do you like my German? Talk to Spiegel. Apple announced that the 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference will take place June 3rd through the 7th in San Jose. Apple's tagline for the event is, Write Code, Blow Mines. Registration ends March 20th at 5 p.m. Pacific. So they want people to write code. Yeah. Okay. It's a developer's conference. Come on. Google will release the first developer version of the next version of Android. The New York Times reports a grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records on data sharing deals with Facebook from at least two unnamed device makers. Facebook said it is cooperating with investigators in multiple federal probes. In a related story, longtime Facebook product manager Chris Cox and WhatsApp boss Chris Daniels are both leaving. Staying in the court system, Huawei officially pleaded not guilty to a 13 count indictment against it filed in the U.S. Federal Court of New York. Huawei is charged with bank and wire fraud violating sanctions against Iran and obstructing justice. And finally Dropbox now restricts its free users to three connected devices at a time. If you're an existing free user and you have more than three devices, you can keep them all. You just can't add any more. Paid plans, however, allow unlimited devices. So Dropbox just wants your money. That's what that's about. All right. Let's talk a little bit about a cool announcement from Microsoft. Indeed. Microsoft announced a cross-platform mobile SDK for game developers to let them bring Xbox Live functions to games on Android and iOS. Achievements, gamer score, hero stats, friend lists, clubs and even some family settings will be available. Developers who implement Xbox Live into mobile games can choose which parts to implement. Though a Microsoft account login will be required for the user. So this is Microsoft pushing its cloud agenda into the gaming space more. We're going to see them doing this all over the place. We're seeing them doing it in office, in the enterprise. And it's no surprise to see them doing it in Xbox saying, hey, we don't care what game you're playing. We don't care what device you're playing it on. But we would like to be the company that's providing a cloud service to that game, whether it's logging in to shared space and keeping track of your gamer score and your achievements. And so the way to do that is to get developers to use Xbox Live instead of, say, Game Center as the way to connect all these players across platforms. Am I the only person who thinks it's odd that Xbox as a sort of lifestyle and Xbox as a console are two different things? And the name is a little bit strange? It's like ESPN, right? Microsoft wants you to stop thinking about the box part of Xbox. Xbox is no longer a thing. But how can I? It's a service. You'll get used to it, Sarah. Xbox just means gaming wherever you are. As long as it's fun, it's Xbox. That's what I mean. This is a fairly fundamental shift in this model. So there is a confusion there of like, well, haven't you only made decisions that were fundamentally based on everybody buying one four to $500 piece of hardware when you add in all the different peripherals every few years? And now that first got turned on its head in their incremental models that would come out. And now the full embrace of mobile is here. They want to figure out what is Xbox's place on your phone. And this is their solution. Microsoft Studio Games have had Xbox Live in mobile on iOS and Android up to now. But that was more like, well, but it's a Microsoft game. Okay, I guess I get that. So it's bits and pieces. They've been taking steps to say, oh, you can play your Xbox game streaming to your PC or your PC game streaming to your Xbox. Or guess what? Now you can do a little bit with Microsoft Studio Games on mobile. Now you can do it with any game on mobile if the developer implements it. So bit by bit, Microsoft saying, we don't want to be tied down to hardware sales for our bottom line. We want to be able to be charging people for Azure Cloud development, basically. Yeah. SoftBank backed Neuro launched autonomous grocery delivery in a small area in Scottsdale, Arizona back last August. We talked about it on the show. You might remember that. It's now expanding to four zip codes in Houston, Texas. As it did in Scottsdale, Neuro will start with self-driving Priuses with human drivers on board. Then a few months later, Falls going well deploy its fully autonomous R1 delivery bots that have no safety driver at all. They're on their own. Neuro has been operating the R1s in Scottsdale for three months. Yeah. I think this is undercovered, to be honest. They are operating autonomous cars. And granted, this is not unlimited fully autonomous everywhere. They're within a small region close to Kroger store as it's in partnership with Kroger. But the fact that it's gone from, all right, we tried the fully autonomous cars in Scottsdale and we didn't have anything go horribly wrong. Let's move it on to Houston. A little bit of a bigger area, I think is significant. These are the bots, right? The little pods that roll. They're bigger. They're bigger than they were. And they roll on roads. They roll on regular old roads, not on sidewalks. I would love to know what goes into deciding your next test city. Scottsdale and Houston both strike me as relatively flat. So that probably works well for a test like this. But yeah. But it's wide freeway. I assume Houston, there's more to it than that. It's kind of fascinating. These are definitely not going on freeways. These are only going on surface streets near the grocery store. And my guess is that they're fairly uncomplicated neighborhoods to navigate. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Wide boulevards. But they want to eventually expand beyond groceries. They want to do things like, oh, it'll deliver your dry cleaning to you. Or even they keep bringing this one up. And I'm not sure how many people need it. You left something at your friend's house, and you don't want to have to go back to get it. Your friend can have a NeuroBot come by and pick it up and take it to you. Well, because they want to break into that market. They want to break into the, oh, just get a Neuro. Yeah, yeah. Just send it to me by Neuro. It's fine. Yeah, just Neuro it. Hey, people had trouble accessing Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram for large parts of the day Wednesday. Facebook announced the troubles were caused by a server configuration change. The last time Facebook had an outage was back in November. That was attributed to a routine test. Meanwhile, Telegram announced it added 3 million new users in a 24-hour period yesterday. I found out about this Facebook outage not by using Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram and being frustrated because I couldn't use it, but by seeing headlines about it. I never personally ran in. I even checked Instagram yesterday. I don't think I ever used Facebook yesterday. But I never ran into an instance where this impacted me. So I mentioned that on Twitter. I said, I'm probably the exception. Granted, it's unscientific, but most of the people who responded me either said, yeah, it didn't bother me either or, oh, it affected me, but I can get upset about it. Yeah, I had a problem accessing Instagram in the morning and I thought, oh, my wonder if it's down. And sure enough that a lot of people were talking about it on Twitter as they do. Hey, Instagram's down. What are we going to do? Ah, you know, the company's failing. But besides that, yeah, I sort of went on with my day because outages tend to happen not that often. I mean, it's obviously Facebook going down for the better part of 24 hours or at least being intermittently down. Yeah, they're staying around 14 hours that it was out. Yeah, a lot of people are affected. But yeah, this sort of breathless reporting about it is kind of like, all right, we'll come back up and then what? Well, yeah, this kind of felt more like a mini version of one of those AWS outages stories where a bunch of different things go down and you realize that the foundation of the internet are built on a few different server machines. But it really just reminded me of back in the day. I just remember, I longed for my youth and the fail whale and everybody... It's the fail whale. I know, Twitter being down for everyone or justme.com. Exactly. Well, that is actually still really useful. I love that. There is a fundamental psychology to that site that I think it reveals the human condition. Yeah, I do want to note that we generally don't cover outages on this show because generally they're over by the time we cover them. They generally have no lasting impact. And honestly, they're not that interesting. Tech companies have outages all the time. It's not a big deal. Even with five nines availability, you still have that small percentage where it's not online. So really the only reason I wanted to talk about this was Telegram adding 3 million new users, which seems like an overreaction from people, but maybe it has to do with all the privacy scandals on top of it. And the fact that most people I talked to weren't really upset about the outage despite what the headlines were telling them to think. Valve announced it's expanding its Steam Link game streaming feature with Steam Link anywhere. You'll not only be able to stream your games in your home network, but anywhere that there's an internet connection. Android, Raspberry Pi, and the discontinued Steam Link hardware all work with Steam Link anywhere. We take what I said about Microsoft. You can apply to Valve now trying to get into that cloud game, although they don't have an Azure business behind them. But trying to say we need to make sure we stay ahead of Discord, Amazon, Google, all these other people who are getting into our space of providing access to your video games and create kind of a DIY, roll your own cloud service here. Yeah, this is definitely an interesting play for Valve here. But yeah, it seems like a logical extension of we want to be the place that you go to to keep your games. And if that means providing you access to them on other platforms so you don't go subscribe to a streaming service from Sony or Google, we'll make it easy for you to do that, although it's not a game streaming service. You still have to buy it and put it on your PC. Yeah, they're just going to make it easier for you to access it. Yeah, yeah. One of the trends in robotics these days is something called soft robotics, which to oversimplify means using softer materials, not hard metallic pincers and such. In the soft robotic space, a team led by Daniela Roos at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL for short, has developed a robot gripper that can lift 100 times its own weight. The gripper is a skeleton shaped like a starfish covered in a loose rubber skin, and it's that rubber skin that makes it a soft robot. So you pump gas in or out of the rubber enclosure. That causes the device to open and close, kind of like a flower. And it can pick up delicate objects like bottles without harming them while still maintaining a firm grip. That's hard for hard robotics. It's difficult for hard robotics to do. This new soft robot can also handle irregularly shaped objects. That's something soft robots are good at. Roos thinks her gripper is better than previous soft robot models. And there have been lots of these. They work like tentacles or beanbags, etc., because this sort of starfish shape can approach items from a variety of angles and that origami-like skeleton has strength beyond what a lot of other soft robots have while still having the flexibility of the soft robotics. So an interesting advance in making soft robotics not just good at the agility part, which is always what they have been better at than harder robots, but having the strength to pick up heavier objects, too. 100 times its own weight. Although it doesn't weigh that much, so... That's good. Yeah. It's a weight of a penny. This is pretty cool. And it also just looks... It looks like it works, which I think is a very dumb commentary, but it definitely has this like... I could definitely see this being a part of like a factory or some kind of robotics area where you just need to make sure that there's a delicate lifting of a thing that gets put into another thing. Yeah, the one in the video that impressed me the most was when it picked up the drill, right? Because that's kind of a hefty thing. And it was able to just grab the drill by the handle. Now, granted, it's not necessarily going to manipulate it easily, but just showing that the amount of weight that it could handle, I thought was pretty impressive. Soft robotics, though, that's one of those terms that if you... One of the things people tell us they like about Daily Tech News Show is they feel up to date. And when someone mentions something, they can say, oh, yeah, I've heard about that. Soft robotics is one of those, and this is one of those advances in software. Agriculture. If they can make it in a way that supports agriculture, then it's going to be huge. How? For picking? For harvesting? Yes. Okay. Agriculture is not a buzzword that will make you sound smarter, but I get what you're saying. You're saying that we're not going to hear the rise of the soft ag robots? We might. When you see Davis changes this mascot to a soft robot. Yeah, and then you know it's... Yeah, you know, I mostly make my money in soft ag. I'll be honest, though. Now that I understand why you're saying agriculture, that is a really good point. You know, the ability for soft robotics to do that delicate work, which, you know, picking is you need force, but you need to be gentle, or else you'll ruin the thing you're picking. Also, Fabergé egg manufacturer. All right, yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, let's talk about a column published on wired.com by Ryder and former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia-Martinez, arguing that Facebook and other tech companies are not monopolies. They're monopsonies. M-O-N-O-P-S-O-N-Y, monopsony. A monopoly, as we probably all know, is when one seller or producer dominates a market. I make the thing, I make most of the things, and so you kind of have to come to me to get it. A monopsony, a monopsony, is where one buyer dominates the market. For instance, let's say there's a situation with a bunch of local sellers of lumber but only one construction company buying wood. That construction company would be able to dictate the price of lumber by saying, hey, I'm your only customer for wood. I'm gonna say I won't buy it unless you charge me this much. Construction company would be a monopsony. Another more relevant example in the real world is Walmart is often called a monopsony because it can dominate the purchase of wholesale goods for retail, so much so that it often can dictate prices. Amazon, too, sometimes can operate as a monopsony, and that's where you see where Garcia-Martinez is going. Remember, a monopsony doesn't mean that it is dictating the buying for the consumer. It's usually the wholesale space. So I'm the one who buys all the stuff and then sells it to the consumer is what Walmart does, but that could still be an monopsony. Garcia-Martinez points out that Facebook doesn't produce any media. It's not a producer. Airbnb doesn't own any hotel rooms. Uber doesn't own any taxis. However, Airbnb does aggregate the demand for lodgings. So it acts as a wholesale to a large number of people who want to buy places to stay. Uber does this for rides. Facebook does this with attention. US antitrust law is ill-equipped to address monopsonies because it focuses on pricing and consumer harm. And if you're a monopsony buyer like Walmart, there is no consumer harm as far as US law goes because the prices are low for everybody, but there is harm to the manufacturers of the goods that the wholesaler is buying. Garcia-Martinez argues that the FTC should shift to evaluating the lack of consumer benefit rather than looking for consumer harm. In other words, it's not that the prices are high, but maybe choice goes away. Or maybe there's, you know, I don't know, an implication on your private data that's not good, even though it's free. That's an interesting way to look at this that I had not considered before. And I'll think it not only applies to Facebook, but also applies to Apple, where you can say, hey, what's the harm to the consumer? They get all these great apps. They don't have to use iOS. They can go somewhere else, but you could definitely call Apple a wholesaler, although there have been court cases that said Apple's not the one selling. So they may be able to defend themselves, but that court case was in the United States, not in the European Union, if I remember correctly. So there may be more danger to Apple from this side than I gave them credit for yesterday. Anyway, I thought this was fascinating. And it was the first time I'd ever heard about monopsony. The idea has been around since the 30s. Justin, I know it was the first time you'd heard of this concept as well. What did you think of it? Previous to this, the only time that I had said the word monopsony was mispronouncing monopoly at 3 a.m. would be a too long conversation. This is a very interesting idea. And if you do shift the burden of proof to lack of consumer benefit as opposed to consumer harm, then there you can start to dovetail into arguments like, hey, isn't it been a while since we had another viable social network that, I remember as Facebook overtook MySpace, the next thought from anybody who was smart was like, well, hey look, MySpace can get to, or Facebook can get taken over just as easily by some other competitor. That has improved to be the case in well over a decade and it doesn't look like it's going to become any more likely now. So are they monopolizing our attention to the point where it has gone past the benefit of somebody investing in something that could compete with it? Well, and attention is very, it's a very relative thing too. You know, someone may have a, I mean, we call, we say we have short attention spans, you know, and other people are better at it and being able to multitask and that sort of thing. So it's hard to quantify how much attention is, you know, attention is not finite. So it's a hard argument to make. I don't think it's impossible though. You know, to be a monopoly, you don't have to have 100% of the market. You just have to have a large enough amount that your competition is somewhat irrelevant. And I think you could make the argument that with Facebook, at least, you know, in the past few years, their demand on your attention was such that someone else creating a similar social network has not been able to break in. There is no other social network competing with Facebook other than social networks doing different kinds of things, right? Twitter isn't doing exactly what Facebook's doing. Instagram, before it was owned by Facebook, wasn't doing the same thing that Facebook's doing. So there is no competitor to Facebook. And like you say, even though it's hard to quantify attention, I think you can show dominance in other ways. Now the question is, even if we can draw a circle around the problem, how do we prescribe the remedy? And that is where I think this argument, although very interesting, tends to fall apart in terms of it being a real-world kind of solution because how do you punish a monopsony? Well, you break it up is one thing you do. If you can say this is literally like, you know, I am not saying that it's at that point, but if you can go to court and say, hey, the consumer benefit is being reduced in this way and it's because there's too much control over the demands on attention. And again, with Facebook, it wouldn't just be Facebook.com. It would be Facebook.com and Messenger and Instagram and WhatsApp. And then you can start to make a compelling case. Like they're dominating the attention. Then the question is, well, if there isn't a Google out there that is in the same space, then maybe we should pull these companies apart, right? And that's the, in fact, Antonio Garcia Martinez is saying, I didn't like the arguments that Senator Warren made to get there, but in the end, I might agree with her conclusion just for different reasons. Yeah, and look, last week we did, I think we did a fairly thorough job of pointing out the holes in the Senator's plan. I do think that there are, if I were to rank the possible future problems for these companies, I think Amazon probably is going to run into them before Facebook does, largely for the reasons that Sarah just pointed out. Who says that we have X amounted? Not like we wake up every day with, I guess we technically probably could quantify all attention based on when we wake up to when we wake up. But what amount is an unhealthy enough percentage so that now we are looking at it as a consumer by a consumer product? And well, it's like Facebook companies already own 70% of all available attention and therefore it is impossible to try and launch something in that sliver that they don't already have marked for themselves. I'll be honest. I think this might be a bigger problem for Amazon and Apple than it is for Facebook because I'm sitting here as a living example of someone who virtually never uses Facebook. So you can get along just fine without it. And I think it's a harder argument to make for reasons that you're saying Justin and for what Sarah said earlier about that quantification. But if I'm Apple and I'm trying to make the argument that, hey, I'm just passing along stuff and these are just the rules of my market you could start to make an argument that you're also acting in ways that are similar to a wholesaler and the fact that you won't even let an app maker mention in its app. This is Spotify's contention, right? With their complaint in the EU. The fact that you won't even let us mention that we have a website where you can sign up. In fact, Apple held up a Spotify app because it was asking for people to subscribe to create an account and after they created the account there was an email that went out telling them how to sign up online without using the app and Apple said, nah, that's getting around our rules. We don't like that. That starts to feel like anti-competitive behavior of a monopsony who's saying we're setting ourselves up as the only person that you can go through to get to this marketplace. We are the only buyer. Yeah. Apple's defense there is that they're not actually buying. They're just passing. They're not buying anything and everybody is free to not wander into their market should they not want to. You can probably make the argument that, well, I can't be a mobile app developer if I don't have an iOS app. So I have to scale. This is just a necessary thing that I have to do. I think Apple will run into more of those problems the more that they focus on them, which seems to be the way that they are trying to get around slowing. iPhone sales, but Amazon's the one that I still have. They have real monopoly problems. They have anti-competitive problems within their ecosystem just because they have so many different ways of selling that the way that they've tried to shuffle people from one to the other is, I think, the larger problem. Although I will say to Mr. Martinez, it is a great thought experiment. I'm still stuck on the quantifying attention spans. And in a world where Facebook was deemed a monopsony and needed to be broken up, it's like, well, okay, how do you break up that up? So it's demanding less of my attention. A countdown clock maybe? When I'm checking in with all my friends. You just break up the companies. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp become separate companies. Boom. You've reduced their demands on your attention by a third. Well, I mean, they're still going to take all of it. So right now, it's conceivable that there are plenty of people out there who are using Instagram, then going to Facebook, then talking to their friends in WhatsApp, and Facebook has a hundred percent of their communication going on. You break it up to three companies, now you got three different companies doing it. Right? There you go. Yeah. Knocks me no more. That's simple. They would all thrive. I'm not saying they would. I'm just saying that if you want to fix that one little part, that would be one of them. I mean, if you want to shave things off a larger company, you certainly can. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. It's a fun group. Also, a fun group on Facebook. Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech New Show. We should start a WhatsApp. And we do have an Instagram. And then we could be part of the breakup someday. Let's look at some email Ted wrote in and says, he's been using DuckDuckGo for years. We talked about how it has become an option within Chrome, mobile Chrome. He says, my favorite feature is the iBang command that let you search other websites privately from within DuckDuckGo. You can go to duckduckgo.com slash bang to learn more. For example, you can enter a search query like, what is this weird rash on my face into DuckDuckGo? And it'll take you directly to Google search results page for that query. Better yet, it blocks Google and their ad partners from knowing that it's you with a weird rash on your face. For example, this works for hundreds of popular sites across the internet from the biggest like Amazon or Wikipedia or Twitter to smaller niche sites as well. The feature stores feature alone has a huge impact on my productivity by letting me search as fast as I can think. I thought that the smartest audience in the world. That's you would get a kick out of these new superpowers. Yeah. So you use the bang G command. That's the exclamation point in the G and then your query and it does that cool thing with Google search where Google doesn't know it's you but you get the results through DuckDuckGo and then it's bang A for Amazon, bang W for Wikipedia, bang TW for Twitter. I did not know I could do this and now I'm going to do it all the time. Thank you, Ted. Thank you. Speaking of DuckDuckGo, Scott had thoughts on DuckDuckGo being added as an option to Chrome Scott says I just like to point out that Firefox has had DuckDuckGo is a baked-in option for longer than I can remember. And not only it's Firefox on mobile, quite nice but DuckDuckGo has their own browser on Android and iOS with additional features for the privacy conscious. I bet Scott knows about the bang command. It would behoove somebody who is concerned about how Google handles their privacy and information to not use a browser made by Google regardless of what search engine is their default. Wink, wink. In fact, privacy combined with the better performance of Firefox over Chrome is why we distribute it as the default browser to our 1,500-plus employees at my enterprise. Yeah, man. Very cool, Scott. Thank you for that. Lots of Firefox fans out there. Good stuff. Wink. Thanks, Ted and Scott and everybody who wrote in. Got a lot of good mails in the mail bag over the last 24 hours. Also thanks to Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, where can folks find what you're up to next? Well, friends, I would like permission to board your inbox five days a week. If you want a way that you can keep in touch with politics but not want to tear your hair out, then I would suggest you sign up for our free political newsletter at freepoliticalnewsletter.com. Five days a week, five stories a day, mostly gifts, some hot takes, and every once in a while some feedback or an opinion piece. It's a very quick read. Right, Tom? You're a subscriber to Free Political. I love it. It comes into my inbox. I feel smarter and more updated after every issue. So go ahead and check that out. It's free, freepoliticalnewsletter.com. Folks, don't forget to support this show too by becoming a member. Did you know that five years ago, Tim Berners-Lee wrote another post about the anniversary of the web, targeting government surveillance? Well, you would if you were a co-executive producer or above and got our flashback episode in your Patreon RSS feed. That's right, every month Sarah, Roger, and I, and sometimes Scott Johnson will look back at the old stuff, the things that happened in the past by just looking at the old Daily Tech News Show rundown from five years ago and looking for interesting stories. That is just one of the many benefits you can find by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Do you have feedback for us? Well, guess what? We've got a place to send it. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We are also live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC, and you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The timing club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Monopsony. Monopsony. Monopsony. What was that static? I don't know. But it faded out kind of innovative. Yeah, I don't know what that was. I did not hear it. So maybe it was on my end. It's awesome. Yeah, everything on me was muted. I definitely heard it. Although Chrome did lock up on me. Maybe it was pirate radio. Perhaps it's the conspiracy we were alluding to yesterday. It was a soft robot. The rise of the gripping ass. Squeezed too hard on the plug. Microsoft thinks outside the Xbox. That's nice. Facebook down. Nobody cared. Robot with a soft touch. Need groceries? Just neuro it. So there's sass. Xbox is a service. How do you punish a monopsony? I kind of like. I mean, I like the idea of having monopsony. The word has to be in the title. Absolutely. Yeah. Licing up the monopsonies. Monopsony. How to scrabble monopolies. Monopsonizing attention spans. That one's good. Dorek Squirrel just says, just call it monopsony. Yeah, monopsonizing attention spans. We could do that. That's good. I think, yeah, yeah. Monopsonizing attention spans. Without contact, someone's going to be like, what? It's the show about. I know it's not a typing, but wow. That's a very strange autocorrect. I'm already going to Twitter's at ace detect. You've misspelled the title. There's no ass. Monopoly. There's an L that's missing. I have to say, and this is the nerdiest thing ever. I'm excited to go to an Apple store. I've never been to today. Why do I care about these things? I don't know, but I just like that. Which one are you going to? It's called Americana. It's in Glendale. It's over in. Well, that's Rogers local. Oh, the Americana. Have you been there? Oh, yeah. I always go through it and they come back out without buying anything. Now, is it part of a shopping mall? I couldn't quite figure it out. So the Americana is combination. There's another Apple store in Glendale, but this one's closer to me. The one in the Americana. The Americana's combination, public space, condos, and a shopping mall. And some retail. It's got it. Okay. Ish, but with condos. Oh, see, I like. And a movie theater. Like, if you lived there, there's a concierge service that will deliver food from any of the food. Does it use Nero? It uses the concierge employee who runs around. Not for long, sir. No, it does not use Nero. Not that cool yet. I do look forward to if the Nero rollout continues that we will start using it as a verb. Just narrow it to me. No, it didn't. Nero though. I left my phone in your car. Can you just narrow it to me? The Nero of your attitude. I haven't done it in a long time, but in a pinch, I will have an Uber driver deliver something for me without me being in the car with them. So you. Not really what Uber's for. But yeah, you call an Uber. They come. I say. You show up and you're like, I'm going to put this in the back seat and then go to this address and my friend will run out and get it. So, okay, I'll give you an example. I was, I was up in Northern California, visiting some friends, get to SFO, coming back to LA and I look in my purse and I'm like, why are there two phones in my purse? I had somehow like grabbed a friend's phone that looked just like mine. Yeah. Not realizing that my phone was already in the purse. Stealing your friend's phone and you're like, I can't do this to them. I can't do this. Well, cause I was like, oh, oh no. You know, I'm about to get on a plane. Like this is actually really bad and it was like, what are we going to do? Because there was limited time. I didn't have time to go get what's that? You can't call them. You have their phone. Well, and I, well, it was my friend's husband. So they, they knew everyone knew what was going on, but we were sort of like, ah, Sarah only has 10 minutes to like figure this out. They didn't have time to come to me. I didn't have time to, I definitely didn't have time to go back. So it was like, call an Uber. I explained to the driver. I'm like, I know this is irregular, but you got to help me and he was like, it's fine. I don't care. I don't care if you're in the car or not. So that was, I was, the phone was me. No, I, I, I did the same thing. A buddy of mine, a John, my co-creator for the contender and action news was over here. And then he left and he went all the way back out and it was like way into San Francisco and he calls me and he's like, hey, do you have my keys? Oh gosh, sure enough. I did. So he was going to come back and I'm like, no, let me just call an Uber and I'll see whether or not they're cool with that. And sure enough, I'm like, hey, I'm just going to leave these keys in the front seat and John will be there and he's like, cool. That was it. Yeah. Well, cause it's like, I guess they could refuse, but most drivers are, I mean, it's still a fair. It's still going from point A to point B. Yeah. It's, their job doesn't really change. A place where it would become difficult is if the person on the other end wasn't there and then they're like, well, what do I do with your personal property now? Right. But I suppose that's covered on under the normal. Like I left something in your car policies. So maybe it's not a big deal. Yeah. I would probably just throw it out the window if I was that Uber driver. I'd say, look, I've done my business and just toss those keys or that phone right out the window and say, have at it world. I'm not saying that's not the right thing to do, but I can see someone suing you for that. Hmm. Steal me, stew them. Everyone sue. Yeah. I actually left keys in an Uber once. It was New Year's Eve of all nights. And I was, yeah, it was sort of bouncing around town. This is a few years ago. And I realized after I had the Uber was long gone that what had happened, you know, so I went through the proper channels and and got a hold of the Uber driver and she was like, yeah, I've got your keys. But it was like, she was like super busy tonight. Like, you know, I'm, you know, taking people from party to party. Like maybe we can like meet up tomorrow and I was sort of like, okay, well, yeah. And it was like house keys. It was like kind of a, I had a spare. I was like, this is super inconvenient. You know, and there were like a couple other keys on my key chain that didn't have copies of it was like a week and she kept saying like, you have to get an Uber to come to me and she lived like in recita, which is very far away from what it was like. It was kind of a hassle. Even though she was, I mean, she shouldn't do anything wrong. Yeah, it was nothing malicious. She just wasn't terribly cooperative. She was just like, well, this is where I am. Come get your keys. You left your keys, not me. Well, cause I was sort of like, well, are you driving today? Maybe you could like get closer to my neighborhood and then let me know. And yeah, it was, it was more complicated than that for some reason. Or even just the story of your keys and a week just mail them to be like, you know what? I'm dropping them in the mail. Here you go. Right. Yeah. It would get there the next day. Startup idea. So we'll have like a small courier service with drones and you'll just call it whoops, like you forgot something and you can put in the box and this little drone will come and pick it up and well, that basically just saying neuro with drones. That's what cause that's what neuro wants to do with with their with their little car. It's neuro for drones. Who could could just do that with drones as an extension of their existing planets. Don't give them the idea, Tom. Why not? Would you want to, you know, aren't you going to have a shelf shelf there with your FBI dreams? No, I'm just saying like that was exactly what neuro is saying they want to do with their cars. So it's it's sort of an extension. You know, the drone thing is just an extension of that. You can join the FBI. What one would think that starting with drones in the first place is the smart thing because then you don't have to worry about surface streets. No, but you got to get the FAA approval. Yeah. That's actually harder. One of the reasons they went neuro went into Houston is they said the Houston's really cooperative on letting letting them operate there. So yeah, Houston's also gigantic. So there's a lot more little for zip codes in Houston is really just two streets. I mean, everything is bigger in Texas. Yeah. Yeah. I've never been to Houston and I'm dying to go H town. I've never been to old H town. Yeah. I've had some good times in Houston. I I Houston means I knew you there were a few people who Joshua Brantano was a good example. Somebody did Tom and Roger and I used to work with. He was from Houston. He never had anything good to say about it. It's like, you know, you think you're Josh Lawrence. No, no, Joshua Brantano. He was Josh Brantano's from Seattle. Isn't that why Josh Lawrence was from Texas? Definitely from Houston. I mean, I remember Josh Lawrence was as well. Anyway, uh, but Brantano never had anything good to say about Houston. He may have like moved in high school or something, Roger. So maybe we're both right, but he's definitely from Houston and, um, so I kind of had it in my mind. It was like, you know, it's oil everywhere. And I just feel everywhere. Dumb stereotypical stuff, not physically like, you know, oh, I was just, I visited Houston once and one time only for my cousin's wedding. The one thing that struck me was the zoning laws and how different buildings could be like standing next to each other. It could be an entire like doors, one that kind of resembled the medieval castle and then next to it would be just your standard storefront. Then the homes along that same block were all very non cookie cutter. Yeah, like that in San Francisco. I used to like to go to over by West portal where they had like crazy houses like that. You know, I think there's, I don't know. I don't want to poop on Houston, but I don't know if I ever had a good time there in, in travel. I learned to use chopsticks in Houston. I visited the, uh, the, uh, space shuttle simulator when my friend was an intern at NASA right outside Houston. Um, I went to the museums, had a good time there in Houston, had some good meals in Houston. So I'll be, I'll be the Houston booster. You can, you can be the Houston booster. I, I, I'm going to get down there one of these days and because, because Houston is, it's, it's popping as the kids say. What, what, what's popping in Houston these days? I don't know. That's just not to say. I want to know. I'm going to, I got to get down there right now. It is considered the most diverse city in America based on demographics. So it is, I believe it's also the fourth largest by populace. We were looking that up the other day and I think it might have slipped. Uh, although, although folks in the Dallas Metroplex will tell you that if the Metroplex were considered one city, it would be big. Now, uh, I, uh, will, uh, because my mom told me if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, remain silent on the topic of Dallas. I went to Dallas once and I will remain silent as well. Oh, I will tell you what Dallas is actually kind of dope. You just need to know where to go. Yeah, I had a good time. Actually, um, you know, what I did when I was in Dallas, that's, that's a different thing than if you're just talking about dead. I never went to have yourself a good old time in deep Ellen, deep Ellen. Right. I'll give you that deep Ellen ain't bad. One of my favorite neighborhoods in America is teacher. Sure. No, it's fair. It's called a deep Ellen. I forget. I forget the deep Ellen part of Dallas. That's, that's what I think of the rest. I went to an Apple store in Dallas. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Houston is the fourth largest city by population, but I do believe that is not metro area. I am, I'm seeing if they like Dallas, Fort Worth is considered. Yeah. Fort Worth is listed separately here. So, uh, yeah. For still forth by, by city, not by metro though. I would, I would encourage everybody, everybody's listening to this in the Dallas area. If you are interested in knowing more about the cool things that are happening in the art scene in Dallas, go check out central track dot com and a website founded by a friend of mine, uh, an amazing job of building that out as a, an alt, uh, website for music and parties. How, wait, how far apart are Dallas and Fort Worth? Is it just like a 30? They're just, they border each other. It's, yeah, it's all one. Um, I mean, I wish between them, but they're basically one. Yeah. It's like Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, uh, all these like, and that's the Metroplex. Irving. You're absolutely right. Uh, uh, Justin Houston is bigger than Dallas by city, but DFW, the Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, uh, metropolitan area is bigger than the Houston, Woodland, Sugarland, uh, area by metro area. Yeah. Uh, uh, this is the regional Texas rivalries that for whatever reason I'm aware of. Yeah. Also, Fort Worth, the birthplace of me. What? Yeah. Well, this explains everything because Houston is the birthplace of my mom. Oh, wow. No, that's, that's the, the, the dirty secret of night attack is that the, uh, the, the, the, the Texas representation was born in California and the California representation was born in Texas. That's awesome. Uh, well, folks, uh, more secrets like that to come if you're an audio listener video folks. Thanks for watching though. And audio listeners stick around. There's more to come.