 Coming up on D T N S can arm survive without the man, you know, the man being in video. Also the IRS backs down from facial recognition and Leslie Jones demonstrates why copyright is broken. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 8th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood and I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty sir. We have a longer version of this show. If you'd like more of it, it's called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash D T N S. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane and Paul Boyer. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung will stream its February 9th unpacked event in the metaverse or if you want a less buzzy way of putting it, Samsung will show a 2D stream of its announcement in a virtual space called Samsung 837 X hosted by Decentraland. If that seems underwhelming to you, you can also explore a virtual version of Samsung's New York Experience Center, collect NFTs and play many games. That's kind of fun. Signal now lets you switch phone numbers without losing existing chats, groups and messages. You have to enter both your new and your old phone number, go through the usual registration process, but you can keep your history. Contacts will see a message in threads telling them that you changed your number. Starting in April of this year, Microsoft Office will block all macros for files downloaded from the internet by default. Right now, office shows you a banner warning about macros, but you can still click through to use them. Microsoft will also make this macro blocking default on all supported standalone versions of Office going back to office 2013. You can still unblock macros in document properties if you wish. Peloton co-founder John Foley is stepping down as CEO, still owns like 80% of the company. He'll become executive chairman, former Spotify and Netflix CFO, Barry McCarthy is going to step in and become Peloton's new CEO. The company also plans to cut 2800 jobs. It's about 20% of corporate positions. The cuts will not impact the instructor roster, though. Jess, a DT, they're all going to be fine. The independent oversight board of Metta now issued an opinion Tuesday, recommending that Facebook and Instagram tighten their restrictions on sharing home addresses. Facebook allows such information to be published without restriction if it's considered generally available, defined as published in five separate news outlets. The oversight board recommended removing this exemption and creating specific enforcement channels to prioritize reports of doxing. Metta is not bound by the recommendation, however. All right, let's talk about the big news. It's off. Ready your puns. Softbank stays armed. Nvidia lays down arm plans. We could go on. But the upshot is that Softbank announced Tuesday that its plans to sell arm to Nvidia have been canceled. And effective immediately, Renee Haas is going to step up from arms IP group to take over as CEO from Simon Seegers. Tech crunches, Frederick Laudanois pointed out that Haas interestingly used to work for Nvidia. He was GM of computing products earlier in his career. Anyway, Seegers is out arm has a new Haas. I mean, a new CEO and video CEO Jensen Wong promised to continue to partner closely with arm and said, quote, I expect arm to be the most important CPU architecture of the next decade. So you know, we may not own them, but vote of confidence. The deal was originally scheduled to close in March of this year. That would have been 18 months after it was first announced in November 2020. But they extended that deadline to September. And now they've canceled it before either one of those deadlines. Despite canceling the deal before those dates, Softbank is still going to keep the $1.25 billion breakup fee and video will have to pay him that Softbank says its new plan will be to take arm public with an IPO expected sometime in the next 12 months. That's interesting because arm has consistently said that it needed the merger with Nvidia or it would not have the resources to grow into new park markets and protocol.com reminds us specifically that Seegers, the departing CEO wrote, we contemplated an IPO but determined that the pressure to deliver short term revenue growth and profitability would suffocate our ability to invest, expand, move fast and innovate. But you know, he's quitting. So I guess that's all out. The new CEO Haas now says being a public company actually gives us access to capital should we need it. What do y'all think is going to happen with arm? This is this is all about data center and the AI and video is going to still be able to use all the arm designs. So they march forward. I mean, but but arms going to be out there on its own. Softbank is very clearly getting out of that business. I think that the 1.25 billion is a drop in the hat, but it's still 1.25 billion. That's going to help arm a little bit, but Nvidia is still going to use this technology to the extent that they were going to use it if they would have acquired the company. So I don't see, you know, a big issue, you know, for this going public, you know, they may, as they said, run into a little bit of stagnation trying to expand into other areas, but mobile devices, you know, IoT devices, these processors are necessary. There is a huge demand for it. So if not, if not Nvidia, I think they can probably do it on their own or there will be somebody else just as big as Nvidia that will want to swoop in and scoop them up in a year, 18 months time. Yeah, I mean, this whole Nvidia arm deal always struck me as a little bit odd because it seems like arm is better as its own public company on its own. This is technology that lots of companies want and use and will use in the future. So the whole sort of like, well, how will it change for everybody else once Nvidia owns this entire property? That's a that's moot now, like it's not happening. It always seemed to me like arm was better off figuring out who are the best partners for us? Not an exclusive partner, right? And Nvidia could certainly say, yeah, we'll go ahead and license, you know, arm technology as we have been in the past, but it always seemed like, well, that would change somehow. How will it change? And now it won't. It's always about, do you have enough cash to keep going, right? It's not about how you're doing now. It's about, do we have enough resources to be able to develop the next thing so that we don't end up like Intel where we're just drifting, drifting backwards because we're not developing new stuff. And that's what arm is afraid of. That's what they've been afraid of and Nvidia would have given them that cash. All the resistance was that's too much chip power in one place. But the fact of the matter is, Nvidia, even if they had the arm licenses are going to be moving into a world of data center chips that AMD and now Intel are catching up in. But AMD and Intel are well ahead of an AI, which everybody's making neural processors and arm isn't necessarily dominant in that. So I don't think it would have ended up being as much of a problem in dominance as it looks like now because conditions were going to change. Now the problem is, is arm going to have enough to continue to develop and stay ahead of the game and not fall behind in data center and AI and IoT and all those other things that it's developing in. And that's where I'm with you, Rob. I think we just end up seeing somebody else not going to be in video, but somebody else comes along after this IPO and snaps them up. But who? If not Nvidia, who? That's a good question. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. If you've got an idea, let us know. Or if you'd like to buy them. I mean, we don't have them for sale, but you know, I mean, we could, you know, send it along. Yeah. Well, folks, it looks like a lot of people were right about Apple's acquisition of MobyWave. That was back in 2020. A lot of people said, what are they going to do with this company? Turning into a payment system for iPhones. Apple announced a tap to pay feature for iPhones today, Tuesday, that'll let users accept Apple pay payments on an iPhone XS or newer. And XS is a few years old. I have one myself, but you know, you've got newer phones with a tap from another phone, a digital wallet, or a contactless credit card. Apple will launch this first with Stripe compatibility. Other payment platforms will be integrated later this year. We'd have a specific date for that. But later this year says the company and the feature will be open to developers to integrate their own apps. That's really important. This is not something that is built in natively to iOS. This is Apple saying, we're just going to let third party developers figure it out so that you don't have to buy some sort of hardware solution. The framework is in the OS, but then the functionality has to go in the apps, right? Exactly. So the first will come from Spotify. Shopify, I'm sorry. Definitely not Spotify. Whole different conversations. Shopify. That'll come this spring. Again, no specific date, but you figure we're in February. It's probably going to be pretty soon. That is in partnership with Stripe. So tap to pay will work with the Shopify point of sale app. That means with the Shopify app and a newer iPhone, you know, tennis or newer, you now have a cash register that you don't need any separate hardware for. And like I said, not native to iOS. So this is Apple finally allowing the NFC chip for use in tap to pay for third party platforms. And there's some speculation online of, you know, folks saying, well, this is how Apple gets around antitrust issues because it's not Apple, right? They're just allowing other companies to do their own thing with each other. And you can, you can feel all sorts of ways, isn't that any trust issue long working? If they're like, this is how they get around it by actually allowing open access. I would say so. Yeah, we don't have a solid date on whether. Well, we know other platforms will get this. This is going to be an iOS beta feature that has yet to be rolled out. But Shopify will be able to use the feature at first. And then later this year, others will will get the functionality. And there's some, there's some other details here. But I think, you know, my first reaction is like, hmm, this is great for so many small businesses. What large business is going to be like, yes, finally, we can take off our point of sale, you know, hardware that we paid so much money for however many years ago and now use every day. I don't see large businesses saying, let's just give everybody iPhones and let them take payments that way. So I'm with you on that. If they eventually move this over to iPads to where the iPad now can become your POS system and those things are mounted or you're able to walk around your establishment with it, maybe where I see this playing a lot with those small companies, small vendors, those who are current like, you know, your barbers, beauticians, you know, hairdressers, those type of, you know, service businesses. Someone coming out to, you know, a plumber coming out or something like that to where you can just take a payment right on his phone that he has with them or her. I see those types of businesses, you know, potentially flocking to this because they don't have to have another device. They can just use the thing that they already have to try to, you know, take payments and not have to worry about cash and those kind of things. Now, we don't know if or when the expansion will move outside the US. This is US only for now. One would think it would, but that's Apple seems to be rolling this out slowly. One of the other things I wanted to, you know, to bring up to the group is something that I saw quite a bit online where people said, well, this is Apple's square killer. So what, you know, what you're talking about at a barbershop, at a, you know, at a small business, Rob, this, the square dongle, or even a square point of sale hardware device, it's a little bit, you know, kind of hanging out on the, you know, at the front. Those were always options. So does this kill square? Now, I don't know if Apple and Square have some beef that, you know, we have yet to know about, but Square could 100% use this software solution just like any third-party application. But what is it due to Square's hardware business? Well, might not be such a horrible thing. In Square's latest quarter, Learning's Square announced that it made a little over $1.2 billion. Pretty good. But of that total number, less than $44 million of that revenue came from selling actual payment terminals. And I'm wondering if a company, not only Square, but others, but, you know, mostly Square are kind of going like, okay, cool. We don't have to do the hardware anymore. It's just going to be built into a lot of phones using NFC. They definitely are. They're saying, thanks, Apple. Now, Square's going to still have to make hardware because there are a ton of people who are using Android phones that would want to still be able to use their, you know, their platform. But yeah, I don't see this as being a big issue to, you know, to someone like Square, so long as they can, from a software standpoint, use the services that Apple's going to be provided and actually makes things easier for them. This only becomes a Square killer if Square doesn't use it. Exactly. So I don't know if Square has some beef, like you said, but I would fully expect that Square just gets on board and integrates this and says, yeah, if you don't want to buy the hardware, great, we will still take a cut of your transaction. Sure. Anybody who equivalent of one payment penalty of Nvidia losing arm. So we want to keep that coming in. Well, and, you know, like I said, large retailers are probably going to be the last folks to implement something like this. But even Square users who say, oh, no, it's just not going to work in there. That's for sure not what we're saying. Not yet. That is all that is all still an option. Well, who knows why Apple partnered with Stripe first? But that does not to me immediately mean that Square and PayPal and anybody else won't won't jump on this as well. Right. All right, so let's talk a little bit about NBC and Leslie Jones and copyright. So so here's some facts you need to know to understand this next story. Comedian Leslie Jones says that she has loved the Olympics since she could walk and became famous for entertaining live 20 excuse me, live tweeting of many things, including the Olympics. Leslie Jones. Yes, she's very good at it. And, you know, Leslie Jones was not the first person alive to the Olympics, but she sure took it to another level with the extreme excitement and fanaticism she brings each of it. You have got to see some of these if you if you can still find them on. So she was employed by NBC for Olympic coverage back in 2016 and 2018, but she's not employed this year. Copyright law. And, you know, is in any U.S. is written or on the side of protecting rights for holders. And NBC is definitely a rights holder for the Olympic coverage because it has paid 7.75 billion for those rights through 2032. So OK, let's move on to the story. So some of Leslie Jones tweets about the Olympics were taken down for potential copyright violations because she occasionally includes shots of her TV with the Olympics actually running when she's doing her live tweeting Sunday night, Jones, you know, just about gave up writing. They block my videos and they get folks that think they can do it like me to do it. And I'm tired of fighting them. I love the athletes and they love me doing it. And I know y'all love it, but it's just gotten too hard and no one is fighting for or with me. So I guess I'll leave the leave this to the professionals. But thank you all for the love. Hashtag up to y'all now. Now, Tuesday, which is actually earlier today, NBC told Variety that posts were being taken down because of a third party air, which has been resolved. The NBC spokesperson said she is free to do her social media posts as she has done in the past. She is a super fan of the Olympics and we are a super fan of her. We're super fans of Leslie Jones, too. But is this the thing? Are we super fans of how copyright is actually working in this situation? So here's a couple things that I want to say about this. I think that the way that she was taken down is exactly the way that's supposed to happen. The problem or the air, in my opinion, was the NBC didn't give this lady a contract and actually pay her and give her clearance to put up these amazingly hilarious videos that she's been doing for free. So, you know, I think what's probably happened is that their third party company, anytime you find offending content, pull it down. That's actually happened and maybe there was an air that, unless it's Leslie Jones, don't pull hers now. But yeah, it's just like, you know what, NBC, you could have, you know, you could have avoided a lot of this, in my opinion, if they simply just paid her to do this because she's doing it on her own. It is promoting you. She is getting an audience that you probably never would have gotten with just, you know, the 7.75 billion that you spent. So this is something that, you know, the air was probably not paying her to do this for you. Or was there really a third party error at all? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'm 97% sure I know what happened here because I've been the victim of it on our YouTube channel. There are companies that are contracted to just go and cast as wide a net as possible for stuff. And they just automatically send takedowns for that stuff, knowing that most people are not going to be able to fight it. And what the error was, is that third party company didn't have an exception for Leslie Jones account, build into that wide net. And NBC realized that and said, yeah, take her out, you know, tell your bot to ignore her account. We don't want to have out of bad take down against Leslie Jones. But boy was that too late. You know, all this kerfuffle before NBC was like, no, no, actually you're driving eyeballs to our content. And we want we want you to keep doing that Leslie Jones. I saw one of her tweets about the ice dancers that that were using Dove punk on Sunday. And I looked at it, I was like, if she's not getting paid for this, she going to get a takedown and then she did. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's the world we live in. It's like, you know, I recommend anybody go out there and try to see some of her live tweets. This it is it is pure comic gold. She is really, really good at doing these things. And I'm just, you know, NBC, get a hold of her people, get her a contract and remove well, you've already removed the barrier, but it's like she's free to use it. No, she's able to use it for free. No, pay this lady to do these live tweets because they are really, really good and are boosting your bottom line. I know it's from the heart with her. It really is. But she deserves she deserves it, right? She means earning it. Think about it. She was on contract. She was paid to do it in previous Olympics. She's still there for free. They brought her on set. Yeah, exactly. So no, she loves this. Well, folks, if we got you in a social mood now, you can get in touch with us on the socials daily tech news show on Twitter. That's Daily Tech News SH and DTS picks P I X on Instagram. Go give us a shout out. Tell us your following us. We'd love to hear from you and we'll be back in just a second. The US Internal Revenue Service, the good old IRS has decided not to use facial recognition from a company called ID me to authenticate people wanting to look at their tax records. The IRS trans will transition away from using ID me over the next few weeks. So if you've already had to go through that, you're done. But over the next few weeks, if you try to sign up, they'll stop using it. It will be replaced by an authentication system that does not involve facial recognition, though the IRS hadn't announced yet which one last time I looked. Now there are a lot of things to consider about this story. Remember, this isn't about filing taxes. This is for accessing special records, things like transcripts, requesting payment plans, other account information. You can still file without it. You can still get this stuff with a paper request too. This is just making it easier to get some of these things online. Records that need strong identity verification are the ones we're talking about. The IRS isn't the first to use ID me 30 states and 10 federal agencies already use ID me to screen for identity thieves that are applying for benefits in someone else's name. So IRS looked at this and said, Hey, 30 states and 10 federal agencies will use the same thing. Keep in mind ID me was not using facial recognition for logging in. This wasn't to get into your account. It was using it for account setup. This was meant to verify that you were the person who you said you were. Now at first glance, it might not seem as bad as it sounds ID me said it was using one to one facial recognition. That's like Apple's face ID. One to one is used when you have an actual image of the person and facial recognition is used to verify that the right person is being authenticated. One to many on the other hand is when you have a database of faces and you use facial recognition to figure out who is requesting authentication. That has more problems ID me was definitely using one to one for the identity verification. That is true. You uploaded a driver's license and a selfie and they were matched. If they failed to match, you got put on a video call with a human who would review it. That was actually where there were bigger problems was trying to wait for someone to do your review if it didn't match. Then reports came out that ID me also used one to many verification. And on January 26th ID me CEO noted that yes, it uses one to many verification to check on selfies to make sure a single attacker is not using multiple identities. It has an internal database. We've gotten these selfies. They're encrypted. We don't use them for anything else. But we're going to check to make sure somebody's not trying to sign up for multiple accounts. But they didn't make that clear from the start. The CEO said the company does not normally disclose methods used to fight identity theft because it reduces their effectiveness. That's their excuse for not making it clear from the start. And that led to another revelation. Bloomberg reports that ID me was using Amazon's recognition system. That's the one that has previously been criticized for not being accurate for people with darker skin color. Amazon says its current system is more accurate. than it used to be. And ID me told the Washington Post that its system is exceptionally accurate with incredibly small variation across demographic groups and skin color. However, that hasn't really been demonstrated. So the IRS has decided not to use ID me. After all, it's not clear what it's going to use instead. It might use login.gov. The federal government uses login.gov for 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies. That system is run by the General Services Administration, which is committed to not using facial recognition. However, login.gov does not meet some of the stronger security standards that the IRS was attempting to meet, including requiring some kind of biometric authentication. But I know you talked about this on the tech John a while back, Rob. It's it's it's not going to happen. Are you happy now? I am. And I have had many people say, well, you just understand what they're doing. This is not for you to log in every time. This is just for verification. I understand that what I need for you to understand is that when it comes to women of color in particular, black women in particular, facial recognition systems are tens of thousands of percent more inaccurate for them compared to their white counterpart. I did not miss speak tens of thousands, tens plural with an S. More times inaccurate. You know, because of that, I think that I don't want to use this because I'm putting my face into the system. Your face is already on your ID. So the government already has it. The concern that I have is are they going to be able to accurately match your ID to what you look like when you are putting your phone in front of your face and just report after report paper after paper, you know, study after study shows that for dark skin people, this stuff just doesn't work all that great. That was my biggest concern. And then you can get to everybody is using ID. Me is saying this stuff is not it doesn't work that great. I have issues. It's not, you know, if it doesn't recognize me, I've got a call into a queue and it's hours before I can actually get into the system I was getting into when you're talking about people's paid, you know, they're not paid checks. But when you're talking about their income tax rate, you know, you know, stuff that you can't have someone waiting for hours trying to get an answer or trying to figure out what form they need to fill out. So they just need to do a better thing. They need to figure out something better than facial recognition because we're just not there yet for a large part of the population who have dark skin tone. Yeah, I was I was actually I was actually on board with ID. Me at the start, because I thought I first of all, I didn't think they were doing one to many at all. I don't love that they hit that I get the excuse why I also don't think the one to many is as bad as some people think because it was one to their own many. But your concerns and your description of them on the tech John really got me thinking because I'm like, well, OK, it's not about facial recognition being wrong. It's about facial recognition causing some people to have to wait longer for their service because that's when those reports from Krebs about this this failed for him. And he got shoveled to the front of the line. But he's like, I don't want to be shuffled to the front of the line because it was taking hours and hours and hours, even for him to get it. And if it's not working for people with darker skin, that means people with darker skin are going to get authenticated slower than other people. And I'm not OK with that. I don't think anybody should. Well, if we'd like to talk about the future of neural networks, calling their company Hacker BCI, a PhD student and an artificial intelligence expert are teaming together and planning to sell some brain computer interfaces that they've they've made, giving the project the tagline from hackers to hackers. The website describes it this way. Hackers are creative problem solvers and will find something that others won't be able to find and think that the way others won't think. So BCI is if you're not familiar, means brain computer interface. It's a big deal, at least in theory. Neuralink is a Elon Musk back project has shown off some impressive videos, a monkey playing Pong with its brain, a pig creating a computer beeping sound with its own piggy snuffle. But Hacker BCI doesn't seem to be doing anything along the lines of what Neuralink is doing. Neuralink is extremely expensive. You know, it's really off the table for for a lot of consumer folks, and it doesn't even seem to be targeting the medical community, either. A recent article on hackster.io describes as an entry level brain computer interface. Many of them that are affordable and easy to build designing an open source add on for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers to interface with electro and cephalophagraph sensors or the P I E E G. The company's paper says it cost about $350 for 24 electrodes. One would think $350 pretty cheap, but the Raspberry Pi community might say that sounds kind of expensive to us. So not exactly manipulating things with your mind, but would we buy it? I mean, it's not the first package of this that has been out there, but it's cool. Listen, hacker, I like that they're using hacker the way I try to use hacker on this show. It's an attacker. If you're doing something malicious, it's a hacker. If you're just trying to find a workaround, this is a way to hack together some mind control. Yeah, that's cool. Maybe a little pricey in the Raspberry Pi community, but still, it's a fun project. I like it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it, Mike, and what he says is oddly chilly Dubai, wrote in and said, he was kind of agreeing with Justin Robert Young's assessment that meta might be in trouble. That was from last Thursday's show. He says, regarding meta's bad earnings report, I'm starting to believe things might be looking bad. The youth tell me I'm an old whenever I tell them if they're on asked them if they're on Facebook. And as I tell them to get off my lawn, it's the best way I find to keep up with friends all over the world. Instagram mostly tells me what they had for them. However, over the last few months, I've all but abandoned the mobile app because the algorithm, at least for me says Mike, has gotten weird case in point when posting my word'll score this morning, which was three out of six. Congratulations, Mike. The top post that the app showed me was from a thread from July. More and more, the app prioritizes posts from days or weeks prior, including ones that I even saw when they originally posted that this is happening now effect lost on me. Mike says the web app is slightly better, but still its features are less robust. Other than the time I accidentally gave away the word. I won't say it just in case you're catching up on word'll, but it was a word on word'll after posting you next to my score because because of the word. My engagement has gone down. I see that amongst my friends as well. Mike says in conclusion, even if they do fix this algorithm glitch, I have no idea how they turn this around. The Facebook memories feature reminds me how good it used to be, and I have no faith that it will get back there. Yeah, more and more of these kind of reports, and they're all a little different. I'm not enjoying Facebook as much because dot dot dot. There are people close to me, people very close to me who have echoed my my sentiments quite recently, you know, like, should I delete my account? I was like, I mean, I'm not going to tell you what to do. But, you know, your life will go on. Yeah, if you want to do that, more and more people are asking the questions. And if, you know, it's just a few here and a few there over time, the those fuse as a tool, you know, to a lot. So Yeah, then it becomes momentum. And then it becomes a problem for the company. Anyway, we want to thank a brand new boss. And that brand new boss today is Edwin. Edwin just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Edwin. We are so glad to have you. Yay, Edwin gets all the attention to himself today. That could be you tomorrow. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Absolutely. Also, big thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Rob, I know you're a very busy man. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Oh, well, it's always a pleasure being on DTNS. And folks can find me pretty much everywhere at at Rob Dunwood on whatever platform and also check out my other podcast SMR podcast dot com and the tech john dot com. Excellent. Well, we are live on the show Monday through Friday. You might be listening to us after the fact. But if you'd like to join us live, we'd love to have you for 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more at where you can do that at daily technique show dot com slash live. And we're back with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.