 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, and Pepper Geesey. Coming up on DTNS, Elon Musk had an interesting weekend. Clothing is smarter than ever, and when self-driving cars go rogue. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 11th, 2022, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we've got a lot of news to talk about today, so let's just get right into it with a few tech things you should know about. Let's get right into it with a few tech things you should know about. Last year, Meta asked its oversight board for guidance on handling private residential information. In February, the board recommended Meta Titan policies on sharing private addresses, citing doxing concerns. Based on that recommendation, by the end of 2022, Meta will remove an exemption that permitted users to share a residential address as long as it was publicly available. Meta will let users share their own addresses, but other users cannot reshare them. Nikkei Asia's sources say that leading chip tool makers warned clients of wait times of up to 18 months on crucial machines with shortages on everything from lenses and values to microcontrollers and engineering plastics. The shortage could reportedly impact plans by chip makers like TSMC. Samsung and also Intel to open new fabs as early as 2023. Delivery of chip production tools already increased from three to four months back in 2019 to between 10 and 12 months in 2021. The sudden increased demand as chip makers build new factories has combined with existing logistics problems to cause these delays. Coinbase temporarily disabled using the payment system UPI to buy cryptocurrency in India. The National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, issued a statement after Coinbase enabled support for UPI, stating it is not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI. China's National Press and Publication Administration approved 45 games for monetization in the country. Its first game approval since July 2021. Notably, no titles from Tencent or NetEase were included in these approvals. And the US Food and Drug Administration have proved Fitbit to use an algorithm that can passively monitor heart rhythms. This would allow for a wearable to monitor for atrial fibrillation while someone is sleeping and alerting them if detected. In a May 2020 study, Fitbit found the algorithm correctly identified a Fib 98% of the time. Fitbit will roll out the algorithm in the US across a range of heart rate enabled devices. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about smart clothing and where we are on that front. Yeah, like sometimes when we think about smart clothing and like, hey, let's throw some sensors in here, but there's another kind of way to do it. And we're starting to see it with custom clothing. This isn't a new category by any means. I mean, you can always commission custom clothes or something like that, but affordability is another question. Amazon made forays into the custom clothing category with its experimental custom clothing service made for you. This initially launched back in December 2020, offering casual t-shirts. Amazon has now expanded its made for you offerings for the first time, now offering athletic shirts that can be customized in roughly 50 ways from things like a different fit, necklines, sleeve length, and of course color. Both the casual and athletic shirts are $25. It's not a starting cost, it's just what they cost. Now to get your custom shirt, Amazon measures your body in the Amazon app with a combination of entering your weight and height. So, you know, kind of self-reported metrics with two photo uploads made for you compiles this data to get your actual measurements. And you can see a virtual try-on of the shirt with a 3D avatar with roughly your build. And if the shirt doesn't fit when it arrives, you can alter the measurements online and then get a free replacement. As Sara Perez at TechCrunch points out, Amazon has been playing around with this idea for a while, going all the way back to its discontinued echo look camera from 2017. This kind of focused on doing things with comparing stuff in your closet, but doing kind of the AR try-on aspect of it as well. While other mass market retailers haven't quite taken the full plunge on offering similar custom clothing offerings, Walmart launched similar AI-powered virtual try-on technology on its app last month. And that was powered by its acquisition of the startup ZKit last year. So, Sara, I'm just curious on your end. I mean, have you ever ordered, I guess, any custom clothing with this kind of 3D try-on? Have you tried any 3D try-on and then custom clothing, I would ask? I have for the purposes of being on a tech news show. And I've been doing it since like the late 90s, honestly. I mean, the whole idea of virtual try-on, make sure it works for you, make sure that you minimize, you don't have to send something back because it wasn't quite right, or whether it was the fit or the color and all of that stuff. I've been waiting for decades, literal decades, for this to just become part of common life. And part of that is I always use shoes as an example because it's like, shoes gotta fit, shoes don't fit. You can't just sort of like make it work, the way that I would maybe just like make it work with a T-shirt kind of thing. And it surprises me that after all of this time and so many companies throwing money at the problem, Amazon in particular, that we're not really at a place yet where we're out of the testing phase of all of this. Let's test it and see if Rich gets the perfect T-shirt that he so desires. I just feel like we would have been further along at this point. Yeah, and a couple of years ago, I wanna say it was like 2019, 2018, I did one of these like scan yourself with your phone, get your measurements and then this company, it wasn't Amazon, it was a startup, I don't recall the name now, I'll tell you ahead, but they would give send you like a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that would be based off your measurements. And neither one of them fit me quite right. I don't know if it was more of like a streetwear style, so I knew it was gonna be a little baggier, but like jeans never quite worked. So I am open to this category because not that, I feel like T-shirts though are the easiest thing to solve in this equation in a lot of ways. One, just in terms of like holding up your phone, it's easier to take a selfie of like your upper body than like your full body if you wanted to do more custom stuff. To me, I feel like pants are the trickier part of this, right? I guess there was more elements to it that you need to kind of customize from the professional producer perspective. Yeah, you got a waistline, length, it all matters. No, I'm with you. I mean, T-shirts, I can't tell you how many extra large T-shirts I've gotten, where I'm like, okay, I'll just like cut it off, halfway through and then it'll fit me. Still gonna be kind of baggy, but you have some fun with it, but yeah, there are a lot of clothing items where it actually really does matter. And I love this idea. And I think the pandemic, I'm surprised that we don't have a more concrete solution at this point because so many people were sort of like, I gotta order clothes and live inside my home and I'm not gonna be able to try them on beforehand. And maybe they're looking at second market stuff, et cetera, et cetera, that we wouldn't be further along on this, but it still seems like every few months you get this like Amazon is testing and new way to like virtually try on clothes where I'm like, we've been doing those for a long time. Well, and I do feel like it speaks to not just the technological challenge of, hey, take two pictures yourself and build a 3D model based on your height and weight or something like that. The virtual trend is its own aspect, but I imagine a lot of the reason Amazon is slow rolling this is also when it comes to like figuring out how to work the supply chain for this, whether they're doing T-shirt creation on demand or they like stockpile, like we're just gonna have a whole bunch of different combinations. We'll algorithmically know which ones are the most popular. I'm sure a lot of that is just figuring out, okay, how do we do this in a way that we can actually someday make money? I don't know if they're making money on $25 a shirt. I imagine it's with Amazon's practices, pretty razor thin margins if they are making margins. So I feel like the technology of it is what gets my attention, but then the more I think about it, the more the supply chain of it has to be pretty tricky to kind of figure out to do in a cost effective way. $25 is kind of crazy for what they're offering. I feel like that's just what you pay for regular T-shirt a lot of times. Yeah, well, I don't know. I welcome being able to virtually try on things and it'd be a commonplace part of life because nothing ever fits me. But moving on, back in February, GM's cruise self-driving unit started offering public taxi rides in San Francisco. And some folks had tweeted and other ways talked about the fact that they had gotten the rides. It's a real thing. A video, which was first posted on April 2nd, but also shared by nine to fives, Seth Weintraub, who posted on his personal account on Saturday, so a couple of weeks later, where San Francisco police tried to pull over a driverless cruise vehicle in San Francisco's Richmond district. For anybody who's not familiar with the Richmond, it's a pretty big kind of grid district where a lot of people live, very residential. The cops found the car not only did not have a driver in the front seat, but then it just left. Cruise has since commented on this particular video clip saying its car yielded to police and then moved to the nearest safe location for that traffic stop. So it wasn't fleeing the scene, was simply moving to a safe location, adding an officer contacted cruise personnel and no citation was issued. Cruise also said about the incident. We worked closely with the SFPD on how to interact with our vehicles, including a dedicated phone number for them to call in situations like this. Cruise also produced a video to teach first responders how to approach its vehicles. You know, Rich, I sort of wondered when this would happen for the first time, when, you know, there is some sort of a, not necessarily this autonomous car is in the wrong, but we'd like to ask this autonomous car a couple of questions and the car goes, I'm not a human, bye. And where we go from there. I mean, I think Cruise probably is doing what it can, considering that this is a limited test. There aren't that many people who are hailing these autonomous cars. It's, you know, it's a small test, but with potential to be much bigger, obviously that's what the company is interested in. And what happens? Yeah, when there's no one to blame, there's no one liable necessarily. There's no human, right? I mean, you could say that the humans at Cruise are liable if you were upset about what had happened at any particular scene, but yeah, it's kind of the wild west. And the fact that, at least in this situation, Sarah, as you said, this is extremely limited test in one specific part of one specific city. So this is not indicative of a wider autonomous rollout or something like that, but in this particular instance, Cruise is pretty much explicitly asking police to kind of watch this training video. And this is how you interact with it as opposed to, I think what all of us are kind of used to is like, the police are gonna tell you what you're gonna do and then you pull over, you do whatever. And that's like, to me, when I have an interaction with the police, I just assume the onus is on me to listen to what they're saying, I don't know. So it's weird to see this training video where they're like, here is what police need to do to properly interact with this vehicle. And a lot of it seems to rely on calling this support number. They have a couple of support numbers that they give out over the course of the video, but effectively, they have people standing by. I was curious about what are the mechanisms for how Cruise is kind of determining when to pull over for police. And it sounds like it's mostly based on sirens, which I guess is also how humans do it. They just have some really high frequency microphones that can determine all sorts of emergency services coming through and know when to pull over. Knowing that and watching the video, it kind of, it all makes sense once you kind of hear Cruise's explanation, right? The vehicle heard the siren, it pulled over, but then when it realized that it was going to have an interaction with the police, at least what it looked like, it then pulled over to what it considered like a safe spot for a prolonged interaction. Which again, like if there was a human behind the wheel, I don't know what the police interaction would be in that situation. I imagine these vehicles are all well, they have giant sensor towers on the top. They're all bespeckled with Cruise branding. So they know it's an autonomous car, right? I mean, I think they'll know it more and more as we go forward, but yeah, it's sort of like, okay, let's say I'm behind the wheel, I've done something wrong, illegal, I don't know, whatever, even if I didn't mean to, you know? And if there's a cop car behind me, woo, woo, then you pull over and if I don't, I'm in a world of hurt, right? High-speed chase time. But a cruise vehicle is not going to do that. A cruise vehicle is just going to be like, let's go somewhere safe. And I think that that really changes the dynamic a lot of trying to figure out, okay, who's in the wrong here? You know, what did someone or something do that is dangerous to others? Because that's the whole traffic violation thing, you know, in general. And then, yeah, like, I mean, we're calling a 1-800 number to be like, hi, Cruise, this is Officer Lane here, and you know, your car did something kind of weird. It's didn't, you know, it's parked in a safe parking lot, but like, need to talk to its mother. It just, I just, I feel like these situations, not that we can't solve these situations, but I feel like this is a big question mark to me right now. Well, yeah, and it's a matter of scale, right? Because yes, cruise in one specific part of one specific city can just say, call this 1-800 number and we'll take care of you, no problem, you know, we have operators and we know exactly what cars are there. When we get to the point where we have multiple companies doing this across multiple countries, I have to imagine there's gonna be some sort of infrastructure where this could be handled on almost a dispatch level, right, where there are APIs that can interact, you know, that can kind of programmatically do this with oversight or, you know, whatever needs to happen. But the idea that it's basically like calling, it feels like it's calling on-star, right? To like, hey, your autonomous taxi didn't behave the way I need you to shut it down so it doesn't like roll over my foot or something like that. Yeah, it's not unlike that, but I think on a much wider scale. I mean, if this gains the wide adoption that I think, you know, many of us kind of go, okay, you know, this autonomous car thing might have some legs, ha-ha. But yeah, if that happens, yeah, how do we deal with these sorts of things, especially when, you know, rolling through a stop sign if nobody was hurt, okay, you know, might get cited. But, you know, these are vehicles, you know, they're killing machines if they wanna be and we have to figure this all out sooner than later. Well, one thing that's a vehicle for watching entertaining videos is Netflix and it began rolling out a new feedback option for users to power better recommendations. Users can now select two thumbs up in addition to the far more pedestrian standard thumbs up and thumbs down. According to Netflix's director of product innovation, Christine Dua-Carde, users didn't simply, didn't feel simple likes and dislikes were sufficient options and hope the new option will help increase surface recommendations in Netflix's considerable library. Of course, Netflix used to offer an even more nuanced feedback option, offering five star rating systems until 2017. And interestingly, when they said they did that, when they switched to the thumbs up, thumbs down, they said one of the big side effects of that was they got way more ratings as a result because it was a simple binary. I liked it, I didn't like it as opposed to was it three stars, was it four stars? So, yeah, it seems like, okay, maybe the binary doesn't quite get you the recommend Jason juice that maybe a love. I've heard some people say this is a love versus a like, Sarah. So are you gonna be giving the double thumbs up to anything anytime soon? Maybe, maybe. I mean, we were joking about Siskel and Ebert for anybody who's familiar with the franchise from, you know, back in the day on, I don't even know what channel it was, ABC, I think, but yeah, the idea of two thumbs up kind of meaning more or giving more credence to something than a single thumbs up, thumbs down, that does make sense to me. I feel like, and this goes, you know, when I rate books online or movies, which I don't do that often, but sometimes I'm compelled or I rate podcasts and, you know, thank you for reading our podcast, everybody. We loved to read your reviews, but yeah, when you introduce something, like if it's a thumbs up, thumbs down, it's kind of like, I mean, what if I was sort of, ho-hum on a Netflix movie? Well, I have to choose one, right? So like maybe I would say it was a thumbs down, even though I didn't really hate the movie that much, but I really didn't love it either. And so there's a nuance that can't really be described. I guess this is a little bit more of a way to give people an option to have a little bit more say and what they don't like and like. I also do think that the rating system in general, and I'm not just talking about when you're, you know, watching cinema or anything, but the rating system in general is sort of like, you know, one through five, how you feeling? I mean, I almost always say as long as something terrible didn't happen, five. Yeah. Even though maybe it was more like three, but I'm like, I don't want to be rude, you know? I mean, if something terrible happened, then it's, you know, it's one and I'll tell you why. But I think that it's like a very delicate balance between offering not enough choice for someone to sufficiently explain how they feel about a content and just saying like, ah, too hard. You're giving me too many options. And so I'm just gonna say something easy. Yeah, I do like though, like in the classic, like how likely are you to recommend this? Very likely, somewhat likely, neither likely. Exactly, it's like. Like we're getting, if they have the double thumbs down, we're basically back to the, we're to a four star system at that point. I like never in my life think to myself like, I am somewhat likely to do this again. I either am or I'm not. The way I view this is like, for me the way the double thumbs up has to work is like those are almost have to be the movies or shows that are in like your canon, right? Like these are like, these are like the movies that defy, I don't know, like the all time favorites. Like, you know, whatever those happen to be, like the character defining movies and TV shows that you have, right? Like I feel like that's, that would be a more useful, like here's what's on like my top shelf, and then it's like, oh, that made me laugh. I'll give it a thumbs up. I maybe never watch it again, but I didn't regret watching it. I have a weird way of thinking about movies though. Well, I don't know. I mean, I think that this is, you know, obviously Netflix feels like their feedback data that they're collecting could be better. And so that's where this is coming from, right? It's like, sure, it's, you know, it's for the people, but it's also for the company. So yeah, it'll kind of be interesting to see how things get weighted engaged going forward. Well, if you have a thought about anything we talk about on the show, it might be about movies, it might be about something else. If you don't know our email address and you just have a burning desire to share your thoughts with us, please do so. We really, really like your email. Please keep it coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send it. Well, folks, it was a big weekend on Twitter, especially for walking back things on Twitter. The company reverted its change to deleted tweets embedded on third-party sites. Now, if you're not familiar with how this works, basically for a short period of time, if I had embedded a tweet from Rich and I posted it on my blog somewhere off Twitter, but I was using Twitter's API and Rich then deleted that tweet, then my embedded tweet would also be deleted. The embed would not be a deleted, but the tweet itself would be. Twitter says this will now continue to be displayed as the original block quote. And a Twitter spokesperson said, we're rolling back this change for now while we explore different options. There was also a little announcement, you may have heard of it, by the CEO, Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, that Elon Musk declined to join the company's board of directors after it had been reported that he would join the board of directors, at least get one seat. Agrawal said that as Twitter's biggest shareholder, Musk will remain open to, we will remain open to his input, meaning Musk. So Musk went from being a passive investor, owning 9.2% of Twitter to appointing to the board to then declining a seat on the board in less than a week. So you might say, well, why wouldn't he want a seat on the board? Doesn't that mean some power, offers some credence, he gets a say. In a note to employees, Agrawal hid on a potential reason. He said, quote, we also believe that having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interest of the company and our shareholders was the best path forward, end quote. So this would potentially limit Musk's activity in relation to Twitter or at least open up the door that he wasn't acting in the best interest of the company. There's also some direct financial limitation of being on the board. Those of us who don't sit on board seats may not know this, but as Musk would have to abide by a stock purchasing limit, limiting any future stake to 4.14, rather 0.9% of the company is part of the steal. Musk already owns 9.2%, but if he was sitting on the board seat and he really wanted to make some moves and he was capped at 14.9%, that actually might not make sense depending on what he's going for here. And of course, Rich, as you know, and as anybody on Twitter knows, there's been a lot of speculation about what is going on here. Yeah, and initially reading Parag Agrawal's statement kind of on this and he kind of shared the note with employees in a Twitter post, the first thing that started to me was that fiduciary duty, right? I was kind of, you know, parsing, trying to read in between the lines there. And, you know, Elon Musk likes to use Twitter for public relations for a lot of the other companies that they're CEO of or a co-owner over something like that. So I could, and, you know, we've kind of talked about on this show about, hey, potentially, you know, creating a kind of analogous free speech platform that's built on a more, you know, decentralized Twitter that, you know, that's kind of been out there for a while, there was an ongoing project within the company and without the company in a lot of ways. So like I was like, okay, all of those combined, like maybe having that fiduciary responsibility would open up at least inconvenient investigations if, you know, he's going off on Twitter and something like that. But there was an SEC filing that was amended today that had some interesting notes and essentially it kind of took away a pre, it being, since he was about to be appointed to the board, the SEC filing mentioned that 14.9% cap on any future stake, but it was revised to say that Elon Musk may engage in discussions with the board and or members of Twitter's management team concerning things like potential business combinations, strategic alternatives. And it opened up, and it supposedly said Musk may express his views to the board and or members of the management team through social media and other channels. So I'm thinking of all of this and I'm like, okay, he already has a 9.2% stake in the team. He's like one of the richest people in the world. We know he has the money to just outright buy all the extant shares or all the outstanding shares of Twitter potentially, right? Like financially that is not a problem for Elon Musk, right? Yeah. Not being a board member though and having those stipulations that he can basically talk about potential business combinations, he can, he constantly now has the ability to say, I could just buy it tomorrow or I could just talk to members of the board. I could talk to members of Twitter's management as our biggest shareholder and they're open to his feedback or his input as Mr. Agrawal said in his post. I feel like then he doesn't have to necessarily buy it. He gets a lot of influence and he doesn't have any of the red tape of being a fiduciary on top of all of that. Well, yeah, I feel like I have a, I've read a lot of conspiracy theories about this because people are genuinely just sort of befuddled. What is going on here? Like is Elon Musk trying to burn Twitter to the ground? Maybe, I don't totally know what that would solve for anybody if that were indeed the case and I don't pretend to know what's really going on but for somebody with so much influence, obviously a celebrity on Twitter has been for some time, breaks a lot of news on Twitter. One would argue breaks a lot of fake news on Twitter. Depends on where you stand kind of thing. The idea that Elon Musk would gain a board seat and then have to maybe rein it in a little bit for the good of the company because that's what you do on the board and for him to be like, and again, allegedly for him to be like, I don't wanna do that. I want more control than this. I wanna be able to do what I wanna do. I wanna say what I wanna say. I don't wanna be held to the rules of the board. That introduces a lot of strange questions. I mean, we talk in hostile takeover. I mean, I guess that would be like a very dramatic way that this could end but then even then, well then what? I mean, then what happens to this social network that you either like Twitter or you don't but it's a very pervasive part of how what news is disseminated and it would be pretty strange for it to go away. Yeah, and to anyone that would think, okay, is he trying to burn Twitter down? I mean, I guess it depends. I obviously has a vision for Twitter. Say what you will about Elon Musk. He seems to be good about taking large, giant lumps of cash and then turning them into larger lumps of cash over time. Like, whatever you wanna say about his business strategy, he seems to like money. I don't think he would invest billions of dollars purely for the sake of the loals or just to burn people or just to do that. Currently he has a vision for Twitter. He's expressed it as much as expressing concerns about free speech, expressing concern about, definitely like very specific features, very specific implementations of subscriptions and stuff like that. So I would caution against any hyperbole in terms of like, oh, he wants to destroy Twitter. Now, you may not like the product that it turns into under, as he is a major stakeholder, I think he's seeing a way that he can exert a lot of influence on a company that's very important to his other businesses without, again, kind of running a foul of the SEC or other parties. Yeah. Well, this, the story is not gonna go away. I'm pretty sure of that. That's one thing I'm sure of. So we'll keep you updated best we can as things unfold as they have been hour to hour. But we do have a few brand new bosses we got over the weekend. We'd like to thank them now. Erin, Jesse and Matt here just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Erin. Thank you, Jesse. And thank you, Matt. By the way, there's a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Roll into it right after the show for now. Reminder, we're live Monday through Friday at 4.34 p.m. Eastern, 2800 ETC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with our guest, Chris Ashley. Talk to you then.