 Coming up on DTNS, it's Farm Day. Tractor hailing could help farmers not only get more crop yields, but better bank loans too. Airponics could make your airplane food better than what you eat at home, plus Microsoft's attempt to secure our smart home future. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 25th, 2020, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the increasingly lighter forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Peja. And we were just talking about horses, actually, and all manner of farm animals. If you want that wider conversation, become a Patreon, get a good day. Internet, patreon.com, slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google updated Chrome to patch three security bugs, one of which was a zero day vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The attacks were discovered on February 18th by Clément Lassigne, a member of Google's threat analysis group. The zero day vulnerability was identified as type confusion and Chrome's V8 component responsible for processing JavaScript. Type confusion tricks software into initializing execution, thinking that the code is one type and then changing the type to cause logical errors that can be exploited to run malicious code. Intuit confirmed that it plans to acquire credit karma for seven point one billion dollars into its biggest acquisition to date. Credit karma lets people check credit scores, get credit cards and loans and file taxes. It has more than 100 million registered users and 37 million monthly active users. Intuit also owns Mint, TurboTax and QuickBooks. Samsung unveiled its first 16 gigabyte LPDDR5 mobile DRAM chips for sale built on the 10 nanometer process. It's not only more memory, but also faster, about 30 percent faster. 5,500 megabits per second also uses 20 percent less power than the last generation. Samsung's working on a version that's even faster to the 16 gigabyte LPDDR5 chip is in the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra already and is now available for other manufacturers as well. Qualcomm announced a reference design mixed reality platform for the Snapdragon XR2 chipset meant for 5G enabled VR and AR devices. In addition to 5G, the XR2 can support up to seven cameras and up to 3K display panels per eye, although the reference design used 2K panels. XR2 also supports cameras that can track eyes, lips and external space. AR2 powered devices are expected by the end of the year. Indeed. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Amazon opening a big version of its Go Store. Indeed, if you're in Seattle, you might want to check it out because they opened their first Amazon Go grocery in Seattle. A 7,700 square foot space without cashiers. Amazon previously opened 25 smaller Amazon Go convenience stores in the US. The new grocery store in Seattle, Capitol Hill neighborhood. Yes, the capital, Capitol Hill. That is really hard to say for me today. In Seattle has 5,000 different products, including meat and produce. And like the convenience stores equipped with cameras, sensors and computer vision to keep track of what a customer has taken when they leave the store. Yeah, so we talked about the idea that Amazon was working on something like this before. And this is the test version. It's now open for people to try. If you're up there in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, like Patrick said, you should go check it out. It's much more difficult than the convenience stores. So they're like, like you said, there's 25 of those convenience stores. Everything's pretty much prepackaged, comes in cans or boxes. And it's a lot easier to keep track of a grocery store. First of all, it's much bigger. It's like a 10,000 square foot building. 7,700 square foot is in play, right? That's where the people can just roam around, pick up stuff, put it back in the wrong place. And if you look at the Geekwire story, there are pictures of open produce. So it's not all packaged up. You can pick up one apple, two apples, three apples. It looks to me like everything's priced per unit, not per pound. So that's the way they get around, you know, having to weigh things, which would be really tricky. And I guess every apple is priced the same, like a dollar twenty nine each for an apple. That sounds crazy expensive. But but yeah, but the convenience, if it works, is there. But this is this is a much trickier thing to keep track of. Obviously, Amazon thinks it's good enough to test. And they're only opening one store to kind of work out the kinks. How do you guys feel about this? You know, it's funny, you mentioned the expensive apples. And for a lot of us, it's we're used to. Yeah, you weigh produce. Sometimes it's per item, you know, like it'll be like four dollars per artichoke where I'm like, OK, I'm not going to buy those. But you do you you are used to in general, when it comes to produce or cheese or meat stuff that you it's not always priced the same because it depends on how much it weighs. So for Amazon to be like, OK, well, we can't do that. So maybe we'll hike up the median price just across the board and people will just sort of deal with that because it's more convenient overall because they're saving time after, you know, after not having to wait in a checkout line. You know, I I wish you were around the corner for me because I'd love to try it out. I I think this is a really great idea. I just wonder how much the pricing is going to is is going to dock them. Because it's probably going to be higher overall. Amazon, what they do best? Well, there are a lot of things they do really well. But one of the things they do best is convenience. And the if it is indeed as convenient as the theory would make it. I think price matters a little bit less because you just go in, you don't have to worry about queuing or having cash or anything like that. Although nowadays people pay with their phones all the time. But if, you know, the one click by is something that actually matters, it will be interesting to see if that translates into real life. And if that kind of fluidifying the shopping experience as much as possible is going to be successful for them in the real world as well. I think on the point of it working or not, it seems like they're moving forward quickly enough that if it's not working well enough now, it will probably fairly soon. Yeah, they must feel confident that they think they have a solution and they're ready to try it out in real life. And in case somebody doesn't realize, we sort of assuming you all know what an Amazon Go convenience store works like. But this is not self-checkout. This is not even pay by phone. You scan your Amazon Go app as you go into the store and then you are tracked from that point on. And you don't have to talk to a person if you don't want to. And you don't have to check out. You just walk out with stuff and it knows what you've got and charges you accordingly. There's no chance to weigh anything or anything like that. So that's where this becomes complicated in a store of this size with this kind of selection. It'll be interesting to see how it works out. It's not exactly the same, but the Apple store is one of their strong points is that they make it really easy for you to pay for something. You just grab it and talk to someone. You can even walk out in some cases when you use the app. But that works and I think it might hear too. Well, this is way more complicated than that. Just just because in case people are confused now. It's like, no, this is not scanning an item off the store. You don't have to do anything once you've scanned yourself in in the store. You just grab things and walk out with them. That's what I think. I think your your point, Tom, to somebody, you know, putting a potato down in the wrong place type thing. It's like that's where a lot of, you know, the cameras, the sensors know all that is really important because it's like it's there. I can see it being a little problematic because people just do things like that. That's, you know, that's that's the shopping experience. Tom, on aisle two, there's a potato on this plate. It's the A.I. telling you, Tom, aisle two, potato. But there is no Tom. There are no cashiers. There's no cashiers, but there are actually humans there. Yeah, there are humans there. Mozilla announced it will start switching Firefox browser users to cloud flares encrypted DNS over HTTPS, commonly known as DOH, today by default and roll out the change across the U.S. in the coming weeks. Any user worldwide can turn DOH in on in Firefox's network settings under general DOH helps prevent ISPs and other third parties from seeing what DNS lookups a browser is making, which could make which could be used to deliver targeted ads, among other things. Firefox will offer a choice between cloud flare and next DNS for DOH, but cloud flare will be the default. ISPs have been lobbying against encrypted DNS, focusing on Google's plan to use DOH in the Chrome browser. Yeah, Google's plans a little different. It will turn it on for you if your DNS provider supports it. It just goes based on your DNS. Firefox is providing the DNS provider for you, saying like, hey, we'll we'll give you DOH if you want to go into settings and turn it on. Or as we're seeing, it'll just be on by default for cloud flare. You can change it to somebody else if you want. So this is this is a significant step. Firefox doesn't have the market share, so the ISPs aren't quite as targeted on them as they are on Chrome, but it will take away a data stream from the ISPs that they are beginning to monetize. I wonder how important it really is. I know it is because I've been told it is, but I don't know how, you know, how much to ISPs, you mean? No, like actually, yes, to have to make sure I'm actually talking about the fact that you need your DNS over your DNS to be encrypted. Oh, how important it is to us to have it encrypted? Yes. Well, there could be man on the middle of tax, domain hijacking, some really nasty stuff. And then there's a lot of people just general privacy concerns, right? But but yeah, there's some nasty stuff that can happen that this makes impossible to happen. So it reduces the attack surface area. All right. Microsoft built an end-to-end secure IoT platform called Azure Sphere that is now in general availability and ready to scale for any size customer. Azure Sphere combines a secure system on a chip, a secure operating system and a secure cloud service. Let's start with the chip. The microcontroller design isolates each subsystem securely from each other. The hardware-based Microsoft Pluton security subsystem protects against tampering. An Azure Sphere microcontroller then boots into a hardened Linux OS. A lot of people made a big deal when they first announced that this would be Linux because it's not Windows. The Azure Sphere security service in the cloud checks that the device is only booting with genuine approved software and then provides a secure channel for operating system updates. All of this, if you're like, I'm a little lost, all of this minimizes the risk of infection so that your IoT devices don't get infected with malware. It keeps devices patched and up to date, which limits the chances of other kinds of infection and makes makes things secure so that you don't have to worry about the devices you're using. Now, granted, Azure Sphere is probably going to be used most in the enterprise, but security is a huge concern there as well. MediaTek is helping design and build the chips. Qualcomm is using it for 5G, and NXP is building a certified crossover applications processor. You know, Tom, you mentioned people, you know, to kind of waking up when they were like, Linux, what the heck? Why would Microsoft do this? Oh, that's old news. Yeah, that was last year that they announced this. And the reason they're using Linux is it's the best operating system for this particular application. And Microsoft has now, years ago, abandoned the idea of saying, oh, we have to make Windows do everything. They're willing to say, like, oh, if there's a Linux version that fits purpose better, we'll use that. And it seems, yeah, it would be difficult to fit Windows into that kind of application. It seems maybe it isn't, but that's the impression. You know, they've had embedded Windows and they still do. But I think they're me, you know, like you say, Patrick, they're maybe just not really that great at that sort of thing. And under such an Adela, Microsoft has said, we're going to make this, we're going to make money off of cloud. So let's not get all hung up on whether forcing Windows onto a microcontroller if Linux works better. And we feel more confident we can secure that. Yeah, and on the concept of the actually having a ready-made system to secure IoT devices, it seems like this should have been created by someone already. And it's surprising that it's taken so long in that Microsoft. I mean, I'm sure there are some systems that work sure, sure, better than others. But it's like we could have used this a while ago, but, you know, I guess not all the horses are out of the barn. So why not still fix the door? And and Adela has been talking a lot about the fact that, you know, there are a lot of computers and a lot of mobile devices. But if you compare that to the number of IoT devices that are going to be in the world in the next few years, that's that dwarfs the in terms of numbers. It dwarfs the existing devices. And so that is definitely an interesting way to approach trying to conquer that that that ecosystem is is providing security, which is what is definitely missing in that space. So I think this is an interesting one. Bruce Schneier calls it like a worldwide robot. The Internet of Things. Yeah, it can be scary if it's not properly handled. Google announced three new Stadia Pro games instead of the expected two. Racing Game Grid has a 40 40 player endurance mode exclusive to Stadia. There's also a role playing card game, Steam World Quest, hand of Gilgamesh and Steampunk platform, Steam World Dig 2. Two titles dropped out of pro, leaving a total of seven titles. So Stadia is still being Stadia to someone who doesn't follow games specifically. This might seem as cool. I'm getting three games instead of two. Those aren't going to set the world on fire. So they're OK. But the launch, even by everyone's expectations, which were pretty low, the launch and following months of Stadia have been very disappointing. I even unsubscribed, which is very surprising for me. I was sure that they would give subscription additional months to people who had been their founders. I guess they didn't. And I think, even though it's disappointing, it's because they know that, again, as we've been saying from the start, the real launch is going to happen when they launch the free service. And that's still a few months away at least. So anything that happens before that doesn't really matter. And since we're talking about game streaming, NVIDIA's GeForce, which has some very good features, has been losing a few big, high profile developers and publishers who are saying we don't want to be on your platform anymore. So again, that also, I think, is a pretty good sign, because it means they are getting serious and they want either to license their properties to those platforms or to make their own. So I think it's actually a sign that things are moving faster than we might think. And that's why we want you to tell us all this stuff, because, yeah, that's that's interesting. And and we're we're still it sounds like a ways away from this really being the thing that everybody was hoping that it would be at the beginning. So if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, keep up to date, subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. We got some farm stories for you today. Deer and company, the folks who make the John Deere tractors are partnering with Hello Tractor, an app maker and cloud service provider to make John Deere tractors available on demand. For farmers in Ghana and Kenya. So it's a tractor hailing service. Hello Tractor lets farmers hail a tractor when they need it using an app that then monitors the usage and fuel levels for them. A black box is installed under the dashboard of the tractors. And that's what keeps track of all that stuff. Agricultural services firms like Agromec Africa in Nairobi manage a lot of the deployment of the tractors. They've they've agreed to let these black boxes be put in on their tractors. They're already in the business of renting out tractors to farmers and sometimes just got operating the farms for farmers. First test of the partnership is using 400 tractors. If all goes well, the company plans to expand in the second half of the year to more countries in Africa. Deere also believes, and this is where it gets interesting to me, that it could boost sales of tractors by letting farmers make use of that information they're tracking to secure bank loans. Around 80 percent of cropland outside of South Africa is cultivated by hand. So making tractors easier to get a hold of could increase yields substantially. And one of the ways they think they can do that is, look, farmer has no credit history. It's going to be hard to get for the bank to take a risk. But if they can go in and say, look, I've got data verified by these independent companies that show I was doing this kind of farming for this long with these yields, that might make some banks be willing to say, OK, that's that's a better risk. We'll give you a loan. Yeah, that part is really fascinating. And yeah, this is this is one of those use cases where I never would have thought about it, but it makes perfect sense, especially if if all of that if all of that labor is happening by hand in many parts of Africa and the fact that a tractor would be able, you know, a farm would be able to be like, look at look at all the work we did because we have we have this we have this, you know, rented equipment and can get loans in order to ramp up production and and and do more things. That's that's really cool. It's essentially not Uber, but probably Airbnb for tractor. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit Uber, a little bit Airbnb. Yeah. And and we we see those things and and we look at it and we're like, oh, wouldn't it be great if we had like Uber for, I don't know, cats or for my TV and it's like, no, these kinds of innovations, what they're really great for is getting farmland cultivated by machinery where it needs to be to be done better in that way. So this is really and and it's funny because anytime I hear the name John Deere, it's because of the fact that they fight repairs on their yeah, I know they have a pretty bad bad name on that. Yeah. Exactly. And here it's such an innovative and interesting way of looking at a problem. It's almost difficult to reconcile the two identities of John Deere. Yes, turns out companies are made of a lot of people and have differing qualities depending on what they're engaged in. But yeah, I I you know, I think if someone's not quite clear here, a company like Agromec Africa already without John Deere's involvement, without Hello Tractor's involvement will go out with certain farmers and say, OK, we'll we'll provide the equipment and operate the farm for you. What this does is it allows a farmer who can't afford that full service to go to Hello Tractor and say like, all right, if I had a tractor for these three days or this week, I could afford it and it would help a lot. So I'm just going to I'm going to on demand, get that tractor out here and use it and then they could take that data to say, look, I was doing this by hand and then I was able to afford a week's worth of tractor through Hello Tractor and look what it did to my yields, Mr. Bankman, will you please give me a loan so that I could buy my own tractor and look what I could do if I had that. And and that's that's pretty powerful if it works. Absolutely. Singapore Airlines is buying food from a farm in New Jersey that's in a warehouse in the city. It's a hydro. I'm sorry, it's an aeroponics company. Arrow Farms, which provides fresh vegetables on flights. Quartz notes, typically, salad greens are harvested about three to five weeks before they're served on a flight. So when you're eating that salad, it's not particularly fresh. You may have guessed that based on the salad you ate on an airplane. Arrow Farms makes it possible for the greens to be harvested hours before being served in the air, which means it's fresher than a lot of the produce you're going to get in a grocery store. JetBlue already does a similar thing. They use a rooftop garden at JFK airports to be able to serve fresh vegetables on their flights. But Arrow Farms operates the largest indoor vertical farm in the country from that warehouse in Newark. So they can provide a lot more than that rooftop farm at JFK can. Aeroponics grows vegetables and tubers and other things like that in the air, using sensors, fans, sprayers and LEDs to precisely control the growing conditions. It offers 300 percent more efficient growth rates than standard crop yields, though it does use a lot of power. So that crop yield is like based on the amount of water and things that you'd have to put on something in the ground, because they can be so precise with the sensors. They save a lot on that. They do have to spend a lot of money on the computers, on the data servers, on the LEDs, etc. But Arrow Farms not only delivers vegetables fast. It can also, because it has this control, customize the growing conditions to produce specific characteristics. Like Momofuku in New York buys from a different aeroponics company and asks for a particularly firmness in the kale they want. And you can do that. You can say, oh, do you want your kale firm? You want it less firm? Do you want your arugula a little more peppery? We know the growing conditions that will turn out the vegetables that way. It also lets Singapore Airlines have more data on where and how the vegetables were grown, which saves them a lot of time in meeting the food safety requirements they have to for airline food. So if you're like, hey, how do I get one of these fly Singapore Airlines out of JFK and Newark and order a salad, I guess. I am very much looking forward to that technology coming not only on airlines, but everywhere. This seems incredible for everything. Like I might not know how the production chains work. And maybe I'm mistaken. But it seems like this is better than most things we get even not on airlines. Well, it's the the proximity, right? Like you can have vegetables in your grocery store that were harvested that day. That's not impossible. Happens all the time. But depending on where you are, that may be harder. And a lot of times people are buying vegetables from across the world. So they've been on a cargo ship. And that's where you get like the fruit that isn't really sweet because they they grow it so that it ripens slowly and all that sort of thing. So if you want really local food, having it in a warehouse that's really near where you're buying it makes it so that more of your vegetables and more of your produce, fruits, hard to do with aeroponics. But vegetables, particularly, you could do that with. Yeah, that's what I mean, we do buy local, but this seems like it makes it possible because you can grow in any environment. Imagine the soil in there. Yeah, take an aeroponics farm, hook it up to an Amazon Go grocery store. I have the robots just go and get you your arugula like fresh off the vine when you want it. Oh, or you want it because it's Amazon. It knows what you wanted. So as soon as you scan yourself in, they're like, oh, that's the arugula buyer. Let's go get him some fresh arugula. Do you want the pet? Oh, he always gets the peppery arugula. So make sure we have that one. But once every third shopping trip, it will offer you the slightly different one to, you know, it's the recommended. Yeah, we see you like this kind of arugula. Would you like to try this? Would you like to try buttery arugula? Do you know there's arugula shortage right now because of because of the growing conditions in Arizona? I just bought arugula yesterday. So glad it hasn't hit me. I'm glad you're wealthy enough to be able to afford that arugula. Well, I guess who knows how old the arugula was. Well, Tom, we're going to have to have a conversation after this. I'm very, very wealthy. Yes, obviously. But, you know, it's funny before we move on, the story is interesting because plain food historically is like we all laugh like, haha, it's so horrible. If you're in first class or lucky enough to be in first class every once in a while, it's a little different. Assuming that this is going to be for the entire cabin or that's the idea. That's awesome. But, you know, we've also gotten used to airlines making you pay for every little thing that you get. It's very rare that you get anything free besides peanuts, which is going to, you know, give somebody a life-threatening allergy anyway on the plane. So I wonder what the idea of making food better on planes is great. But what happens to the consumer at that point? Prices get higher. Maybe, maybe not. This may be cheaper because of the the the time savings in the tracking on the food safety because of the the fact that it's local. And so it doesn't have to be shipped very far. It's possible. I'm not guaranteeing this, but it's possible that it's a big cheaper. And honestly, I don't think my guess is this doesn't affect it. The whether they charge you for food or not an airplane entirely has to do with them trying to set fares, not with the cost of the food. Sure. So I imagine that economy you're still going to have to pay for that rap, whether it's got aeroponics, lettuce in it or not. And first class won't like that's just not going to change. Right. Well, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. Whether you fly first class or not, you can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. What's in the mailbag today? Well, you know, it's not really a mailbag, but I thought I thought I would just remind folks, Patreon folks, you already know this, but we have a threat wire cross pose from Shannon Morse that come out each week, focusing on security and privacy and how to keep yourself safe and how to be how to be woke. And it is second to none. She does a really good job. Some of my favorite content each week. So this week, Shannon focuses on car hacking, all sorts of things that happen in the automotive industry and what to look out for. It's good stuff. You can get all the deeds at patreon.com slash DTNS. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Justin Zellers, Tim Deputy and Kevin S. Morgan. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja. We missed you last week, Patrick. What's been going on in your world and where can people keep up with your work? In my world, my son has been sick. And so I am, as you might have noticed a little bit out of my element, but in my world, there's also Instagram. I've been playing around with Instagram a little bit. And if you are young enough and hip enough and cool enough to be on Instagram, then maybe you should give me a follow. I'm not Patrick on Instagram as I am in every other on every other social network. So give it a go. Excellent. Thank you, everybody who supports us on Patreon, by the way, it's near the end of the month. And this is the time when we see the most people cancel their patrons, honestly, because they know they're getting close to being charged and if they're needing to save some money, this might be the time that they decide to do it. 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