 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Hi-Tech Oki, Logan Larson, and Mike Aikens. Coming up on DTNS, Google Play makes exceptions to its in-app payment requirement. Does Amazon want to become a delivery company, plus tech might wipe us all out, or it also might save us. Or both. Aaron Carson helps us understand. Daily Tech News Show starts now! This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 23, 2022 at Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And thanks to the Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, senior reporter for CNET, Aaron Carson is back. Welcome back, Aaron. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for helping us come to grips with existence on today's show. We're very excited. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reuters sources say that Broadcom is in talks to acquire VMware. The talks turn into a deal. This would be Broadcom's third big enterprise-related acquisition after acquiring the B2B software company CA Technologies for $18.9 billion back in 2018 and Symantec's enterprise security business for $10.7 billion in 2019. The UK's Information Commissioner's office fined Clearview AI $9.4 million for violating its data protection laws and ordered the company to delete all data on UK residents. In recent months, privacy watchdogs in Australia, France and Italy have also ordered Clearview to delete data on its residents. At Computex, AMD announced its desktop Ryzen 7000 series processors. These are built on TSMC's optimized 5-nanometer process and will use a new AM5 socket, support PCI-3 5.0, and offer up to 16 Zen 4 cores. AMD claims some chips in the series will offer 5 GHz plus max turbo clock speeds with a 15% increase in single-threaded performance. Ryzen 7000 also includes integrated RDNA2 graphics as part of the IODY, meaning that it will ship on virtually all CPUs. The CPUs will come out in the fall. AMD also showed off Mendocino, a new APU for low-priced high-volume Windows and Chrome OS laptops. The chip will include four Zen 2 cores, RDNA2 graphics, and offer up to 10 hours of battery life Mendocino will launch in Q4. Yeah, so if you have a server farm made of those, that would be a Mendocino farm. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against a Florida law that would prohibit social media companies from de-prioritizing posts to buy or about political candidates or removing any content by a journalistic enterprise. The court ruled that the law violated the company's First Amendment protection saying these protections, quote, do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears. The court did allow one provision of the Florida law to stand. That's the one that would require platforms to have clear content standards and require users to have access to their data. This does set up the potential of a circuit split. If you listen to DTNS regularly, you know what that is because there's a similar law in Texas that was upheld, whereas the Florida one was struck down. That law is awaiting Justice Alito's decision about whether an injunction should apply to it or not before it goes to trial. The ad plans to share targeting data on individual ads with pre-vetted researchers through its Facebook Open Research and Transparency Project. The company will also offer more information on political ads in its ad library, showing aggregate data about the number of ads a page has running, targeting a given demographic, including ad spend. Ad library data is open to all users. All right, let's talk about this Play Store. We talked last week about changes to Google's Play Store, which requires apps to use Play Billing going forward as of June 1st. Last Friday we mentioned that Bandcamp had received a reprieve, if you want to recap on that, Epic bought Bandcamp in March. So Epic owns Bandcamp. Of course, Epic is suing Google over the requirement to use Google Play's in-app payment system. So Google and Epic agreed that Bandcamp will put 10% of the in-app payments it gets through its own system in escrow until Epic's court case with Google is settled. In the meantime, Bandcamp can keep using its own system, and Bandcamp said that it will not reduce the cut it pays to artists. That all that stuff going into escrow will be from its own finances. And Sarah, we have a new player in the game. Yeah, Bandcamp is not the only company that is dealing with us, because when Google announced that in-app payment enforcement was going to begin match group, which has a variety of apps, filed a legal complaint that Google illegally monopolized the market for distributing apps with its Play Billing requirements. Now Match had asked for a temporary restraining order on the policy change, but now it has reached an interim agreement with Google. So we're fighting, but let's agree for now. Seems like losing the biggest dating apps in the Play Store was not in either party's best interest. I guess not. Google has agreed not to remove match apps from the store for using third-party payment systems, while it makes a good faith effort to create additional billing system features for Match. For its part, Match will offer Play Billing as an option and will keep track of all fees it would have paid through Play Billing, backed up by a $40 million escrow fund until it reaches an official agreement. So similar, but not exactly the same as Bandcamp. Yeah, there's no indication that official agreement of some kind is forthcoming, at least in the near term, or the trial between Match and Google, set to begin in April 2023, almost a year away from now. And Google is planning to countersue Match for breaching its developer distribution agreement. Yeah, it's a good point. So even though we have these temporary agreements, neither Bandcamp nor Match have settled things with Google, just kept the status quo or some version of it until the legal wrangling is done. Well, yeah, because it's, you know, let's say, use Match as an example. If Match says, all right, no more Tinder, no more Match, I guess that's an official app that would be in the Play Store as well and a few others, then that just hurts Match more than Google. Yeah, but it wouldn't have to be this way, right? Yeah, so if you look at Spotify, who along with Epic and Match is a member of the Coalition of App Fairness that's organized around fighting App Store payment system requirements like these. Spotify isn't assuming though, because it's the first platform to test its own payment system on the Play Store and that's in partnership with Google. So that might be something going forward for other companies as well. Yeah, so Erin, I don't know if you're watching this ping pong match over there, but it does feel like all this means is we're gonna have to wait till these lawsuits are done, right? Right, and that's something that I was thinking about is it seems like Google is going to keep finding itself in these types of legal battles and kind of like Sarah alluded to earlier, this trial is not even gonna start until next year. So this is just something that's gonna be happening increasingly like in the background. And I'm kind of curious if there will be a cumulative effect eventually as some of these smaller companies kind of get tired of playing in Google's world and if so, and what that'll be. It does feel like Google saying they're going to work on additional features might mean that they're gonna do for match what they're doing for Spotify. Well, what would be the reason that Google and Spotify would come to an agreement such as this that match wouldn't also be allowed to do? Well, reason number one would be Spotify didn't sue us. So let's start cooperating with somebody who isn't like actively pursuing court action. Yeah. I guess reason number two would be Spotify is also a loud objector to the system. So let's try to get them on our side. And if we get them on our side and they're like, yeah, we actually like this new plan that would go a long way to swaying somebody like match to come over. I don't think you're gonna sway Epic. Epic has made it very clear that they just wanna win this court case on principle and they're more focused on Apple than Google anyway. Well, moving on here, a lot of tech companies have been feeling a bit of a pinch because we've had a boom in users during pandemic lockdowns for particular companies. And in a lot of cases, those have receded as people start going back to regular life at least in some cases. We've seen this from some streaming and productivity companies. Of course, Amazon as well, because for a long time Amazon was enjoying nobody leaving the house and buying a lot of things from Amazon. So they needed to increase warehouse space because they were shipping all that stuff. They didn't have anywhere to put it. But that is not true. Bloomberg any more. Bloomberg sources say Amazon is looking to sublet at least 10 million square feet of warehouse space in New York, New Jersey, Southern California and Atlanta. So they've got this space and they're looking for someone to sublet it from them. If you're wondering how much that is for a company as big as Amazon, that's about equal to 12 of its large fulfillment centers. So quite a bit of space. Amazon added a lot of warehouse space during the height of the pandemic demand. So you might expect to see that dip now or go away. Yeah, but these sublets only represent about 5% of the square footage that it added since March of 2020. So it may be letting go of more space because Amazon is reportedly looking to end some leases even more of its warehouses that it currently has leases with. Yeah, but even so, they're not letting go of all the space they added. And while this seems to be a response to less demand for warehouse space, Amazon's also making some interesting moves to potentially not need as many fulfillment centers at least for rapid deliveries. Bloomberg sources say Amazon's running a pilot program since last year to have its flex drivers. Flex drivers are drivers that are contracted directly with Amazon to do deliveries. Those flex drivers usually go pick up stuff from Amazon fulfillment centers, but they're using the flex drivers to pick up and deliver packages from malls. Now, it's not exactly clear where this is happening, but Bloomberg reports that malls in Chandler, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada and Tyson's corner, Virginia at the very least are participating. Also, if you listen to the show regularly, we talked earlier this month about Amazon's pilot program and that's to pay smaller businesses in more rural areas in the US a per package fee to deliver items within a 10 mile radius. So both appear to be trying to speed up that last mile delivery model, especially if you're talking about same day delivery. Yeah, we've talked before. Yeah, we've talked before about the idea that Amazon wants to make delivery logistics a platform that it makes money off of just like AWS has been. They needed to create data centers for amazon.com and then they parlayed that into a separate business. They're kind of doing the same thing with delivery and logistics, but this makes it look like they might even be trying to short circuit warehousing and say, you know what's faster than storing something in a warehousing and then repackaging it is just bringing it straight from the source, from the store. Yeah, and I would assume that, well, it depends on the business, right? But if you're a smaller business, being able to work with Amazon in this capacity could be pretty advantageous. It's less competing and more working together. Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of speaks this need for flexibility. I was reading a report from the International Monetary Fund that came out a little while ago that was talking about this very persistent narrative throughout the pandemic that the pandemic essentially accelerated digitalization. All kinds of consumers who had not previously had much to do with e-commerce, like how to learn how to shop online and do all this stuff. And there was this idea that, well, all of that is going to stick. That is now going to be the way that things work and that we're moving forward, but clearly we don't really know exactly the answer to that. And so it makes sense that a business would try and figure out something between radically changing its model back and forth depending on one point in time. Yeah, I think people are going back into stores and I don't think we should have expected that people would never go back into stores, but people have also learned the convenience of delivery if it's cheap and convenient enough. So it makes sense that malls would say, yes, come into our stores, but also keep shopping when you're not in our stores. And if Amazon could deliver it for us, great, we could do delivery that we couldn't have done before. That all makes perfect sense. I guess there's two ways to look at this story though as far as whether this is a good thing or not for the stores themselves. Amazon is either doing you a favor by making it easy for you to reach new customers and sell more stuff, or Amazon is trying to do to physical stores what it has done to stores on its online platform, which is get all their data, see the trends, and then sell the same things on Amazon.com and run them out of business. I mean, I'd like to say, oh, no, that's not what we're doing here. But I mean, we've seen quite a bit of evidence of Amazon doing this and getting in trouble in certain cases. They're going to have to be careful with that. And stores are gonna have to be careful with participating. There is a way that this ends up just being a good thing for everybody though. I'm also interested, I know it probably wouldn't be just one single company subletting these big old warehouses in various states across the US, but what would those companies be? Who are the companies that go, you know what? We're gonna sublet this big old warehouse from Amazon. Yeah, I imagine we have some folks in our audience who are like, oh, I work from the company that needs that warehouse space. So send us an email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And the other thing you can do to get us to talk about something on the show is vote it up in our subreddit or just submit it at all. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, Erin, when we look at the state of the world today, we've got some various conflicts going on in the world. We have climate change, we have pollution issues, supply chain shortages. We talk about all this stuff on the show and we can't help but think that if we as a species have much of a future ahead of us and if so, how does it get better? So you published a piece on CNET called Human Extinction Could Be in Our Future. The main thrust of the story is this existential threat facing humanity itself. Technology is at the core of these threats. Technology can be very helpful, but it can also be very detrimental. Variety of solutions that we might be able to make things more helpful than detrimental. So let's get existential. Erin, the idea of human extinction is not new. It's something that people have feared for quite some time. But how long has it been around? Yeah, so this is one of the most, I don't know, interesting things that I sort of discovered in this whole reporting process is that if you go back to like the 1700s, that's when you first found these first, like fringe whisperings that like, hey, maybe we could wipe ourselves out somehow. And nobody really wanted to talk about it. When you get to the 1800s, you've got folks like Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man, which was a story that had to do with like a plague wiping out humanity. Did not sell very well. And really the sort of one of the big important inflection points of when we as a species started to self reflect on the idea that we could wipe ourselves out is the atom bomb, right? And so it's kind of funny to think about in the course of human history, it's maybe a little bit more recent, even though we're talking about hundreds of years that we've kind of had this concept at all that maybe the planet would keep spinning and we're just not around for it. So all right, there's a term calling Ridge Dilemma that you may be familiar with. If you're listening right now and you likely are not. So what does it mean? Yeah, so the calling Ridge Dilemma is basically this idea that when we discover a new technology, we see all the benefits to it and it's really exciting and we integrate it into our societies. And at the point that we do that, we start to realize like kind of the ways that it can go wrong. So for example, take something like fire, you know, as we think of just this very fundamental kind of, you know, human tech in a way. And it's great for cooking stuff, it keeps the predators away, it keeps us warm, but you can also burn down a village, right? And so the reason that people in the existential risk space talk about this dilemma is that, you know, they argue that some of the technology that we're working with and building at the moment poses enough of a threat that if we make a mistake with it, we really don't have a second chance. You know, we make the mistake and we can't really learn from it, unlike if you, you know, burn your hand on a stove, you go like, well, I'm just not gonna touch the stove again. Right. Okay, so fire is a great example of something that can be used for good and can be extremely harmful. So when we're talking about existential threats, especially in the technology sector, what are we talking about? Yeah, so, you know, one of the groups that I talked to is called the Future of Life Institute and they're essentially kind of like a nonprofit that focuses on the ex-risk and all this. And therefore, areas of risk that they've identified are, you know, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change. And sort of like what they do is advocate for governments and policy makers, law makers and whatnot to look at those categories of risk and at least start to try and consider what could happen. You know, we're doing all these really interesting, cool, innovative things, but what kind of comes down the line and those are the areas that they are most concerned about, shall we say? Yeah, nuclear weapons is one where I think we all understand that a mistake could wipe us all out. Certainly those of us who grew up at the Cold War very clearly understand that hiding under your desk is not going to save you. But things like climate change, while we understand their existential, don't feel like they're the kind of thing that we could just make a mistake and wipe it out. It feels more slow motion. Does AI and biotechnology fall somewhere in between those two? Or in the course of talking to these folks, did you get the sense that even with AI or biotech, we could just accidentally create something that turns us all into gray goo? Right, yeah. I mean, this is one of the big challenges that when I was talking to these folks that they were kind of trying to explain is that we're in this place and time where we have so many problems in the world. And when you are walking into the office of some lawmaker or something and trying to explain to them that, hey, we could have this really massive problem with something like AI, it's not a thing that feels like it's gonna happen tomorrow. And that kind of lack of sense of urgency or whatever you wanna call it is a huge hurdle. But in their minds, there's like this interesting kind of nebulous space where I don't think any of them are arguing that like, hey, tomorrow, an algorithm that somebody built to optimize the production of paperclips is just gonna go rogue and decide that the best way to optimize paperclip production is to just take out humans? Or like, I don't necessarily think that anybody thinks that's gonna happen like in a month, but on some level, they're like, we know that there is enough uncertainty built into this risk and the risk is big enough that we should at least try to prepare for the idea that something could happen at some point. Well, that's the human problem, right? Trying to figure out to prepare for something before it becomes a risk. We only are ready to run from the tiger when we see the tiger. We're bad at planning ahead as a species. Yeah, that's actually, that's a good way to put it. I think that, Erin, you kind of used the example of walking into a lawmaker's office and saying, hey, we have a potential really big issue. You're the one who can make some decisions here. That happens all the time. The lawmakers aren't always listening because they're not necessarily thinking about human existential crises all the time or even something that they truly believe is going to offer imminent harm. Right, and it's kind of like Tom said too. I mean, it's this matter of like, well, whose problem is this really? Is it my problem right now? Or is this a problem for like 50 years down the line? And it gets kind of sticky when you're trying to think about like allocation of resources and this and that and how do you actually tackle it? Interestingly, one of the folks I talked to was saying that in some ways, some weird way like the pandemic kind of has made his job a little bit easier because there's this recency bias, right? That we have now seen an event that completely upended the world, changed our lives overnight. We're lucky that it was just one thing. It wasn't like the convergence of say like several strains of something, but it kind of creates a more colorful, more urgent immediate picture that like, hey, there's no guarantee that the way that we're living right now is just going to kind of, we're gonna like continue to shamble on and be okay. Yeah, and the other aspect of this that strikes me reading through it is, you need the technologies to help save you from the technologies, right? Machine learning, deep learning, neural networks are a great way to model and try out solutions to climate change. Biotechnology may be able to create new and interesting ways to capture carbon and cool the planet. Technologies that you create for climate change might also be the kind of thing that can help limit biotechnology from becoming an issue. So it's all interdependent. It's not like, well, we should just stop, you know, messing with any of it. Nuclear weapons, obviously not a good thing, but nuclear technology, especially nuclear fusion, could be something that helps solve climate change as well. So it's all fairly interdependent, right? Absolutely. And that's part of what makes this such a challenge is because I don't think any of these people are kind of sitting around going like, well, we should just not do anything with tech ever. Like let's just go back to living off the land, you know? So it kind of, you know, we're in this spot that we do have all this convenience, all this sort of innovation, you know, there's so many good benefits to the things that we've made over the years, but it's that sort of challenge in trying to look all of these sort of like chess moves ahead and see like, what are these potential outcomes that we might not account for? So, you know, for example, if we are messing around with the idea of genetically modifying mosquitoes, you know, because mosquitoes carry disease and plague and we need to do something about that, right? So if we managed to genetically modify them and sort of like tamp down the population, when we're doing that, are we considering like, do we know all the different sort of outcomes of what happens when you start affecting with a population of a critter that is plugged into all these other ecosystems and whatnot? And so it's, yeah, it's an interesting dilemma. Yeah, because the species that eats mosquitoes suddenly doesn't have as much to eat and then that species also eats other things and if it goes away, because it can't get enough food, does other things start to multiply and you know, you have all kinds of fallouts, which is why you named the algorithms that can help you model that so you can see what effects that will happen, so. Well, there's hope, right? There's hope for this because people are trying to get us to think about it early. In the meantime, you can distract yourself with a brand new typeface. Yeah, just to make a hard left here, Instagram has created its own typeface called Instagram Sans. If you're a font nerd, you might have seen the story already. This is what the company says was inspired by Instagram's logo with a combination of squares and circles. Instagram is calling them squircles, so you haven't heard that term. Now you have. Instagram said it worked with linguists to make sure that the typeface works in as many languages as possible. That includes script languages, think Thai or Japanese, for example. Instagram is hoping users try out stuff like this in stories and reels. That way, if a caption is using Instagram Sans as a font, it's gonna look a lot different than, say, a TikTok video. We all know, if we hang out on Instagram long enough that a lot of TikTok videos are repurposed on Instagram, Instagram wants to set itself apart from the rest. And I actually asked a graphic designer friend who's very into fonts this morning, like, what do you think about this? And he said, all big companies do this now. In fact, I'm surprised that Metta didn't do this quite some time ago. It seems like they're catching up. That's okay, yeah. And then, of course, the word squircle reminded me that Apple made popularize that term when they implemented the squircle in their design. But I went and looked it up. It goes back to 1966, the word squircle. Squircle, yeah. I kinda like it. It's a classic. Yeah, it sounds like, I don't know, like a fun dessert or something. Well, if you're wondering what London Zoo's baby penguins and HDMI have in common, you're not alone. Nate Langston explains more about what they do have in common in the latest episode of Text Message. Hey, thanks for having me back. There's surely only one podcast this week that's spent as much time talking about penguins as the history of HDMI cables, which turned 20 this year. And that's my show, Text Message. London Zoo decided to name some of its baby penguins after tech and science luminaries. And we go through the history of the world's favorite high-definition multimedia interface. All that and more at uktechshow.com. Look for episode 276. Or just look for the word penguins back to you. Yeah, would you like to find out how many of them were Linux expired? The answer may surprise you. Thank you to you, Nate Langston. Bring in, these are good stories. Also, thanks to Aaron Carson speaking of good stories. Wow, thanks for letting us know what you've been working on lately. And I know you're working on stuff all the time. So let folks know where they can keep up with that. Yeah, you can always find me at cnet.com. I'm also on Twitter at Aaron Carson. Perfecto. We also have a brand new boss, got Darren joining the crew over the weekend. Darren just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Darren. There's also a longer version of this show. It's called Good Day Internet. We roll right into it after DTNS wraps up available at patreon.com. Reminder, we are live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we're back doing it all again tomorrow with David Spark joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.