 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Chris Benito, Steve Aderola, and Jeffrey Zilks. Coming up on DTNS, a real smart city sensor system in the wild. Our predictions on when we'll get driverless cars, or if, and we make sense of the whole FTX debacle. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 10th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Layton. And coming from, you know, your backyard barbecue, your boy, big Chris Ashley. And I'm producing today's show. I'm Anthony Lemos. Look at your backyard folks. Chris is back there barbecuing. That's right. I got you. There's Chris! That's a great dream that that would happen one day. I would welcome that, honestly. What's that wonderful smell? That's right. Let's start with the quick hits. Foxconn executive said Thursday that the company is trying to bring back iPhone assembly to its site in Zengzhou, China. That experienced a COVID outbreak and thus worker shortages. Foxconn is operating under a closed loop system at the moment, which includes having workers only moving between their lodging and the production lines. Swiftly. They said swiftly. Bloomberg reports that Apple placed time restrictions on AirDrop in China following widespread use of the feature to share images in a way that cannot be detected. So if you're in China and you've upgraded iOS, the everyone option in AirDrop, which lets you do wireless file sharing, is now limited to 10 minutes. You can't just leave it open for anybody to get your image anytime they want. And after that limit, the sharing switches back to contacts only. Apple told Bloomberg that the new setting will be made available globally in the coming year. It's just launching in China first. In other Apple news, the company said Thursday it's going to spend $450 million on satellite and ground equipment for companies like Globalstar to continue to support Apple's emergency satellite texting feature. Twitter's chief information officer, Leah Kistner, has left the company. Security. Security officer, particularly. What did I say? Not the security. That's all. Oh, information security officer. Thank you, Tom. Leah Kistner has left the company. She tweeted about it. And the Verge says that it has seen internal documents showing Chief Privacy Officer Damian Kiran and Chief Compliance Officer Marion Fogarty have also resigned. Microsoft said iCloud Photos Integration is rolling out for the Photos app in Windows 11 and will be available to all users by the end of November. In Windows 11, users will have the update the Photos app and install the iCloud for Windows app from the Microsoft Store. You got to go do the Microsoft Store dance. Once signed in, photos or libraries can be selected to automatically sync with the Photos app. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy is leading a cost-cutting review of Amazon's less profitable businesses, particularly it's a business. Place recognition. Yeah, that one, which has more than 10,000 employees. Now, this would not be Amazon being alone here. Obviously, this is a bit of a shift in the tech world. But internal documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show that in recent years, Amazon's Devices Unit had an operating loss of more than $5 billion per year, which includes those working on that assistance. And those are the quick hits. All right, let's talk a little more about driverless cars. The California Department of Motor Vehicles approved an amendment to Waymo's permit Wednesday. Waymo will now be able to charge for autonomous vehicle rides without anyone in the driver's seat for grocery and food delivery. Waymo still needs a driverless deployment permit if they want to start carrying passengers without a human driver. They can apply for that permit once the company's driverless cars carrying the groceries and the food have operated on public roads for a minimum of 30 days. Now, we've seen these stories inching along. This is not a new one. Normally, these would be in the quick hits. Slow progress, restricted areas, restricted permits, little bit at a time. Companies like Waymo or Neuro out in Houston, GM Cruise, Lyft in Vegas, offering actual driverless car service just little by little. So I thought it'd be fun for us to make our best bets. When, if ever, are we going to see this become a normal option for people? Maybe not widespread, but a thing where you're like, oh yeah, you can get a driverless car. You just go here. Chris, what's your best bet? So if you had asked me a year ago, I'd have been like probably never. But the fact that I have this, you need to experience because my truck drives itself. And I am super impressed with its ability to maintain the highway lanes and even drive on some roads off the highway. So I'm going to say two years, this is going to be a way more mainstream. Okay, that's pretty. Yeah. And that's because, you know, obviously the more the vehicles out there are doing these type of things, the more data that's gathered, and then the more they have to learn from on the back end. I'm saying two years. 2024 or 2025 since we're close to the end of 2022. I'm going to say 2025. All right. All right. I am in a, after living in urban areas for quite some time, most of my adult life, I live now in a pretty rural area, not too far from metropolitan areas, but definitely rural. And the idea of an autonomous car getting out to me does seem farther away than two years. What I have wondered about is, okay, well, we're going to get there. I don't know if it's going to be tomorrow or it's going to be a lot longer than, you know, some people hope, but we will get there. And what does that actually kind of mean for the reasons that I would hail a car out here to begin with? I might hail a car to take me somewhere. And that is a little bit different than this. But if I were to hail a car that was autonomous to bring me food, for example, well, then, and this actually happened yesterday because I ordered some pizzas. And I ended up tipping the driver because, you know, I'm trying to be nice, you know, 20% of course, you know, because they're working. But do you tip a car that doesn't have a driver in it? I don't think you need to. I don't know. I don't know. Would have saved me some cash. I'll tell you what. I'll just plug it in. And I just kind of wonder what that looks like, how that changes the way that we hail four things, you know, whether it's a thing that takes a person from point A to point B, or it's a thing that brings me the person, the thing that I want. Do you save money? And who, who does that potentially not help on the other side of things? Okay, but I didn't hear a date. I didn't hear a date in there. I don't know. I mean, out here, probably never. You're going to go with the never. I'm going to go out at Studio Redwood, not holding my breath. All right. All right. So we have 2025 and never. I'm going to fall in between those two. Easy. Addressing some comments in the chat. The groceries thing already works with neuro. You have a code that'll unlock the door. You open the door and you pull out the groceries, right? So that's solved. Yes. Some people are going to protest this, particularly taxi drivers and probably Uber drivers, but that's not going to matter. If it works, it's going to work and people will take advantage of it. I think that the pace they've been going is the pace they will continue for the restricted, mappable city driving. And then to get to Sarah is going to take a lot more work, a lot more permitting, a lot more, a lot more of a learning curve for the cars to deal with, with new things or putting in infrastructure so the driverless cars can get into rural areas with minimal training. I'm going to say 2050 is when it will be normal. That we'll just continue to inch along and there'll be places. There'll be places like maybe San Francisco, like maybe Phoenix, where you're like, oh, you go there and downtown you can get a driverless car, take your places. I think grocery delivery and delivery will be a little ahead of that. But for Sarah and Chris and me, most anywhere we go in the United States, being able to say, yeah, we'll probably be able to get an autonomous car 2050. That's fair. The one thing I'll say that'll make this go a lot faster is if you order food like in one of these driverless cars, you don't have to worry about the car dipping into your French fries. Are you worried about that now? I think you're right. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's always a worry, but really? Oh, yeah. I watch videos all the time where the driver's just housing the person's food and then put it back together. Here's the solution. Just don't order French fries. They're going to be dipping into something. All right. That's the thing you got to watch out for. That's why I like to order from the places that do the ceiling. They do the tape and everything. So it's harder for them to do that. Yeah. When you order food and it's like coming out of the passenger seat, you're like, oh, no. All right. Coming out of the trunk, you're like, okay, we're good. Good point. Yeah. Yeah. Nuances everywhere. There you go. Well, London and Krakow based clean tech startup called Airly's business is designed to help communities around the world improve air quality with affordable sensors and software. If you're not familiar, Airly is currently used by more than 500 local authorities in over 40 countries. With 5,000 of its sensors covering a total of 40,000 active measurement points, including in Warsaw, Poland, some parts of the UK and some Indonesian cities. Yeah. So that's smart city stuff that we kept hearing about. Like it's actually happening. This is one of the companies that's doing it. Airly co-founder and CEO, Victor Varkalovsky tells TechCrunch the idea came while he and some friends were training for a marathon explaining during the course of our training, we found it hard to cope with the intensity and realized it was down to air pollution. So we devised a system using our own air quality sensors to tell us where the cleanest air was and we used those spaces for our training. So now they want to share what they did with themselves with the rest of the world. Airly wants to build a dashboard that'll let users monitor more data and get insights on how air quality is affecting their health and how to improve it. A report generator, insights, impact tracker and a city ranking are all part of the plan to supplement online maps and mobile apps that already let people in a community check the air quality around them based on Airly's data. Yeah. So if you're saying, well, I mean, aren't there systems in place to do this? My weather app already tells me air quality. Varkalovsky says that, yes, there are state-owned air quality monitoring stations, but they're usually only affordable for large cities. They can have delays of several hours in reporting data. So if something is going on, you're not going to get it immediately. Airly says that its app perceives data every five minutes based on WHO standards on illegal emissions. Also, the company currently has 500 paying customers using sensing as a service model where people pay a yearly subscription based on how many nodes that they can access. Pricing starts from $540. That's US dollars per node per year with a one-time set-up fee for installing devices. Airly does have some competitors though. Again, even beyond anything that's a municipality solution, Breezometer is a company that Google acquired last September of this year. Clarity is another which also is building an end-to-end air quality and control platform with software and hardware as well. So, Chris, wanted to send this off to you. What do you think of all of this? Is this something that you're thinking about on a daily basis? So it's something that actually has crossed my mind from time to time just listening to different news reports. And while I really like this, and I like the kind of the funny aspect of how they came down this path in the first place, right? The guys that invented it were running. They're like, what's going on with our running? Oh, we can't breathe. Pollution. Let's do something about it. Awesome. And then Howard blew up and gone on for there. But what I didn't see is how they intend to hold the companies accountable that are causing the pollution in the first place. Certainly, they said they could use the data to go out and address these companies and address the municipalities so that they can put things in place. But the reality is, and we all know, that a lot of these companies put out this pollution because it's cost-effective for them, right? They don't have to manage it. And this is something that I think about because I know folks that live in poor communities and pollution affects poor communities very, very hard and very drastically. From test-taking scores to behavioral problems, this is something that really affects these folks. And I would love to see, are they going to actively shame these companies? Are we going to make this data more public so that folks can get on these bandwags and start shaming these companies into doing better? So I like the idea, but I really want to love the results of what they're doing with this information. Well, and I think companies like Airly, Breezometer, Clarity making this more affordable for municipalities so that they don't have to have laggy responses or inaccurate responses so that they can cheaply make it available to all their citizens of like, hey, you can get an air quality app. You don't have to wait for an email. Like that's what I do in LA. I get an email once a day saying, man, we think your air quality is going to be this. Instead, I rely on my Apple Watch to tell me air quality, which is doing something similar to Airly, like pulling it in by the minute, but Airly sounds more accurate. And I think Breezometer and Clarity probably are more accurate and up to date too. What they're doing is if we make the data cheap and accessible, then that sets up people to pay attention. It's one thing to go like, yeah, I guess the air is bad. It's another thing to have everybody talking about it and having a number that they can say like, oh, I see it's getting worse today. Who's going to do something about that? It doesn't solve the problem you're asking, but it makes it harder for people to evade the question. Exactly. And that's the gap I'm looking to bridge, right? You can't even do anything without the data. So I love the fact that they're providing the data and making the data cheaper. But do something else to make people want your data more, right? So don't just provide and say, hey, municipality, you should buy this data to make your city. No, no, here's some strategies to help you shame these companies and make them get on board with what we're trying to do. And I'm always on the more positive side, put it in more people's hands so that more people are bringing up the question and putting pressure. Maybe it takes both. I don't know. But yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, folks, it's time to get our holiday card list in order. Each year, we send every patron who wants one a holiday card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. He's made some beautiful art this year. If you'd like that card in your hands and you're a patron, check patreon.com slash pledges to make sure we have your proper mailing address. Now, if you don't feel comfortable sharing it, if you do want the card, make sure we have your mailing address by November 15th and get the exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed right to you from us. Thanks. All right, I feel like this is one of the things DTNS does for people, which is you may not be out there clamoring for this information, but once we tell you you're going to understand something better, you're going to find yourself being the smartest person in the room on a topic and there's a whole lot of news about FTX, a whole lot of news about what it means, a whole lot of actual dropping of the value of cryptocurrency attributed to it. So for those not already in the know or those of you who want to make sure you got the story straight, we're going to attempt to explain this whole FTX mess as simply as possible for y'all. Now, a note to you financial pros and those of you really into cryptocurrency in the audience, you're going to be attempted to well actually us a few times here. And while I welcome your expertise, do keep in mind a few things on purpose to make sure that the widest number of people understand. So thank you for your understanding. Sarah is going to brush us up on a few basic things you need to know to understand this story at all. Yeah, and I had to brush up myself to be honest. So number one, a cryptocurrency exchange is a place where people can buy and sell various kinds of cryptocurrencies. Okay, we all got that. Exchanges make it easy to send digital currencies to other people, but also to cash out in multiple currencies. Big examples of cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, Binance, and of course, FTX. Now FTX is a company headquartered in the Bahamas, founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman Freed running a cryptocurrency exchange internationally called FTX and also one in the US called FTX.us You sometimes hear them interchanged, but they are different. The problems are focused on the international exchange. So when we say FTX from now on in this conversation, we mean the international one. Bankman Freed, which sounds like a bank, but is actually a man, also founded a company called Alameda Research, which is not an exchange, it's a trading firm. It pursues risky investments for higher returns. Not legally related to FTX except that it shares that founder. Those are the basics, but Chris, you have an important clarification, I think. That's right. An exchange and a trading firm are different businesses. An exchange is supposed to hold a client's money and make it easy to exchange it. Exchanges make their money on transaction fees. Now a trading firm borrows money and makes investments hoping that its investments will pay off. So it can pay off its debts and make a profit. In traditional markets, an exchange has to keep client funds separate from other company assets. They can't invest client funds. If they do, they get fined. However, cryptocurrency exchanges are not subject to the same regulations. So now that we know that, let's talk about what exactly happened. Essentially, Word got around that FTX had around $16 billion in consumer assets under its control, but had loaned out around $10 billion, so more than half of it, to its sister company Alameda Research. And the other part of this rumor was that Alameda's investments weren't looking like they paid off. Whether this is true or not almost doesn't matter. Wall Street Journal sources say it's true, but people were believing it. And so the toilet paper phenomena began. A lot of folks decided to get their money out just in case there was a run on FTX because of the rumor about Alameda and other leveraged assets. That caused a run on FTX. The worry that there would be a run on FTX caused a run on FTX. About $5 billion worth of withdrawal requests happened on Sunday. FTX could only fulfill around 80% of those which caused FTX to have to pause withdrawal requests, which of course fueled the panic even more. As Fadi Masih, Vice President at Moody's Investor Service said the lack of regulatory oversight and the sector's overall opacity, in other words the opposite of transparency, facilitate risky financial strategies exposing firms to an environment in which rumors of illiquidity can become self-fulfilling prophecies. So it sounds pretty bad for FTX at this point. Is there any way they get out of this? It almost did. Bankman Fried says the company needs about $8 billion to get liquid. So it started pitching companies on a takeover. Give us $8 billion to make it through and you get a chunk of the company to profit from in the future. Maybe all of the company to profit from in the future. One of the biggest exchanges and already an investor in FTX, Binance temporarily agreed to do that. You heard us talk about that in the quick hits earlier this week. However, their acquisition was contingent on looking over FTX's finances and it took them less than 48 hours of looking to determine that FTX's problems were, quote, beyond our control or ability to help. Alright, so Binance got what some people would call cold feet. Me and my homies would say they punked out. But what about another boulder company? Binance is an FTX only investor. BlackRock, Canada's Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan, SoftBank, and Hedge Fund Billionaires Paul Tudor, Jones, and Easy Englander are all investors too. And FTX has reportedly been pitching non-investors like other exchanges including Coinbase. Yeah, so far, no takers. In fact, quite the opposite. One of FTX's investors, Sequoia, officially marked its $214 million investment, a smaller investment, but still an investment as worth zero. That is a step you take to help your tax burden if you're certain the investment is not going to bring a return. Because once you do that, it makes things complicated if it does. It's not the kind of step you want to take if you're trying to send a message of stability. It's certainly not the message of potential saviour so Bankman Fried took to Twitter on Thursday to essentially pitch whoever is listening. He says that FTX's total holdings are enough to satisfy its debt. Now you may ask, well, how can that be true if he needs $8 billion to stay liquid? A holding is not the same as cash. It's sort of like needing a payday loan. A check is coming, and you'll get back on track. You just need to pay that electric bill before the lights go out, right? Even if FTX survives though, the damage to its reputation is severe. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating FTX's lending products, its management of customer funds. Alameda Research is done for. Bankman Fried announced Thursday that Alameda Research is winding down trading, so it's over. And then remember FTX.us is separate. FTX US is separate from FTX International, and Bankman Fried assured everyone that the problems are limited to FTX International not to FTX US. Okay, well, believe him. Even if that's true anybody who follows the space in any capacity has seen cryptocurrencies tanking. Why? Why? This is an FTX problem. Right. It's because of the cascade effect. FTX owes a lot of money to other crypto firms. That in itself isn't a problem, right? People borrow and leverage and stuff all the time. If you're stable and if you're properly regulated and properly financed, it's not a big deal. However, if it defaults on all those debts because it has so many of them and it's leveraged in so many places, suddenly a lot of other firms are going to have problems in their liquidity because a big chunk of the money they expected to come back to them from FTX, even if over time is no longer going to be coming. That triggers a cascade. A very similar scenario played out earlier this year with Terra. We talked about that back in May and June, but FTX is bigger than Terra. The good news is Moody's doesn't think this is going to spill over into the traditional financial market. It'll be bad, but it will be limited to being bad in the crypto space. The crazy thing about this is that this cryptocurrency was supposed to be the replacement because these same exact type of things are happening with regular money. Banks over leveraging, taking customer money, investing it where they shouldn't have been. When you look at something like this, I understand why people are more and more starting to get cold feet about leveraging crypto. The idea was we don't need regulation, blockchains are transparent. While blockchains are transparent, I'm a big proponent of the blockchain as a technology. Companies can still hide this. They can still invest in ways that aren't on the blockchain and that seems to be what happened with FTX. So I was asked, do you really want no regulation? Because this is what no regulation looks like. Yeah, and you're actually seeing a bunch of crypto fans calling for regulation right now. Yeah, it seems like well, I am really not a financial expert. This has been a fascinating story to follow. And even though I dabble in crypto and I certainly feel like I understand for the most part what's going on, it's been a tough story to follow, honestly. And I think if there's any silver lining and I don't have any skin in this FTX game at all, thank goodness. I think that I feel a little bit wiser about how this all works in some sort of a post bank world that we are going towards. And really even if you don't care about FTX or cryptocurrency hopefully this helps you make a little sense of those headlines when you see them from now on. And the hopeful thing I would add is that if once they've worked through this, like they did with Terra and Luna earlier this year, there will be changes especially to the already fairly stable companies like Coinbase and Binance. There will be regulatory regimes put in place and what does survive whether FTX survives or not will probably be more stable as a result. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So this is in response to conversation we had earlier in the week about wake words and how assistants might get a little bit smarter over time. Brian writes, regarding assistants that activate without the trigger word, I have that issue with mine. I have a Samsung Note 20 before that, a Note 10 and both have had issues with Google Assistant activating without saying the hey G. Many times while driving, listening to podcasts, just the word G will trigger it. Well, I use Google Maps while driving and one podcast was mentioning mobile services. They mentioned Google Mini, triggers my assistant, then AT&T and the next thing I know my maps is showing AT&T store locations. Maybe I went through a cosmic ray that flipped a bit during that assistant. And then we got an email from Jamie. When I take my dog best to the park, she occasionally is bold, which means naughty in Ireland, and I need to shout her name so she can ignore me and keep on doing whatever she was doing. Sounds like my dog. Almost every time I'm running towards her, shouting, Bessie, stop that. My watch thinks I'm summoning the S-Lady and then the S-Lady doesn't understand what I was not asking her. Will this get better if the wake phrase is shortened? Not holding my breath. That's so funny. Bessie sounds like a grand time. Bessie sounds like my dog. Chris, do you have wake word situations where you're like, stop it. I wasn't talking to you. Yeah, especially it's always awesome when you're talking in a meeting to a customer and then I was like, I didn't get that. It's like I wasn't talking to you. That's why you didn't get it. And then you start having these mean snarky conversations with a speaker in the back of your room. Yeah. No, happens to everybody, I think. Indeed. Indeed. In fact, that happened to me just this morning when I was on the phone and my watch was like, sounds like you're looking for it. I'm like, stop that. Just stop. They need I'm not sure how much data all these companies are getting from people just screaming at their various devices being like, be quiet. No, probably good. The best part about sending a wake word is probably the fact that, you know, I clearly speak differently on a podcast or at work and I do amongst my homies. And so, you know, looking to be able to say, hey, look slim. And then like, hell, what can I get for you? I would love to be able to do that. Programmable. That's going to be the big innovation when they can do on device programmable wake word. It's a big advance in AI to be able to handle that kind of autonomous cars. Let me choose my wake word. It's going to be great. Chris, Ashley, we hope that you speak the way that you want to speak on the show because we're always happy to have you here. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work when you're not on DTS. Oh, God, thank you so much for having me once again. Always you can find me on SMR podcast with my two homies, Rob Dunlitt and Rod Simmons. And then, of course, we try to do our best to get you some backyard barbecue tips and tricks with BBQ and tech. So you can check us out on BBQandtech.com. Awesome. Also, we have a brand new boss to thank. And that boss's name is Robert. Robert, we see you. We hear you. We're glad you just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Robert. Robert, Robert, Robert. The patron of the day. Indeed. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. What will we talk about? We'll be back on Monday. Only the universe knows. But you can catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'd love to have you join us live if you can. But we're always on demand. By the way, we're off tomorrow for Veterans Day in the U. S. But we'll be back Monday talking game picks for the holidays with Trisha. Have a great weekend. This week's episodes of Daily Tech live by Channel One. We're now on the news. By the way, we have a lot of positive news. We have two writers and a writer Tom Merritt host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer and Booker Roger Chang producer, writer and host Rich Strathilino video producer, Twitch producer Joe Coontz technical producer Anthony Lamos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan compost news host writer and producer Jen Cutter science correspondent Dr. Niki Ackerman's social Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J. D. Galloway. 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