 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Brad, Kevin, Paul Thiessen, and our new patrons, Donald, Michael, Antonio, and Saud. On this episode of DTNS, Threads Becomes More Fetter Verse C, Disney Plus Raises Prices, and Shannon Morse tells us all about the latest from Black Hat USA 2023. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 10th, 2023. From Studio Daraje, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And the show's producer, Roger Chan. Well, we've got quite a bit to talk about. We are excited to talk about Black Hat with you, Shannon, a little bit later in the show. But first, let's start with some Quikats. Instagram's Threads Social Network, obvious ex-competitor, has placed a new Fetter Verse friendly feature in our interoperability with Mastodon. Now you might say, how does that work? Well, by placing links in a Threads account that you control, and also having a Mastodon account that you also control, the Mastodon account can show a link to your Threads profile with a check mark indicating you're a verified owner of both accounts. The news for Google Docs users who need their remotely signed documents. Google has moved the feature from alpha to beta. Access for individual Google Workspace users is rolling out over the next couple of weeks. If you're an enterprise admin, you'll need to request the feature through a form. If you're a free Google Doc user, no word yet on when or even if you'll get access to the feature. U.S. President Biden issued an executive order on Wednesday prohibiting U.S. citizens from investing in advanced semiconductor and quantum computing business in China. The order also requires investors to report to the U.S. government on direct investments in Chinese companies that make AI and other semiconductors. Good news for Google. Oh, I just read that one. Let me read the one I'm supposed to read here. Amazon started scaling back its private label business last year after disappointing sales and also criticism from lawmakers. The Wall Street Journal sources say Amazon is now eliminating 27 of its 30 clothing brands such as Lark and Rowe, Daily Ritual and Good Threads. After Amazon sells off the remaining inventory, its own clothing division will be streamlined to Amazon Essentials, Amazon Collection and Amazon Aware. Sources also say Amazon is dropping private label furniture. Autonomous sidewalk delivery robot startup Serve Robotics, which previously spun out of Uber's acquisition of Postmates, is going public. Now you might have been familiar with something called Postmates X, which under the hood was Serve Robotics, delivering to Postmates customers in multiple neighborhoods in the LA area in 2018 with a commercial service launch in 2020. The deal was completed this month and regulatory filing show it's a reverse merger with Patricia Acquisition Corp. Now, as of the merger closing, Uber holds a 16.2% stake in Serve and Nvidia has an 11% stake. All right, Rob, let's talk about Disney. What's going on? Well, Disney has some bad news and some more bad news. The company announced Disney Plus lost 11.7 million subscribers in Q2 due in part to India losing IPL cricket broadcast. Disney Plus now has 150.1 million worldwide subscribers, but there's more that's going to make us feel some kind of way. Disney announced it will raise prices across its live streaming packages starting in October. And Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company plans to begin cracking down on password sharing in 2024 and potentially better news. Disney will expand its less expensive ad supported package to Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden and Denmark starting in November 1st. So as of October 12th, Disney Plus premium, that's the one with no ad jumps from $11 to $14 a month for US customers. Hulu without ads goes from $15 to $18 a month. And then the Disney Plus and Hulu standalone ad supported tiers will both stay at $8 a month and the bundle for those two will stay at 10. But the main thing is that the big ones get more expensive. Shannon, what do you think about it? I'm so disappointed. I'm one of those people that has constantly had all of the streaming services. And honestly, I was going through them all just last night and looking at my watch list and going, which one of these should I cancel? Because all of them are raising their prices right now. And I'm not a big fan of watching ads. So I never really pay for the lower tier options, which are ad supported, just because I don't want to waste time watching those advertisements. I can fully understand why there might be families with smaller children who may not want to purchase the ad supported options for Disney Plus either. Like they might be more interested in doing password sharing so that they can get the non advertisement tiers that do cost more, but then they could share it out to more people. So the fact that they are cracking down on the passwords and then they're raising the prices, I can just see a lot of negatives here. Well, Netflix was in the news quite recently for the exact same thing, as far as crackdown on password sharing. And over the most recent quarter for Netflix, we're not talking about Disney, talking about Netflix. The company said, yeah, I mean, some people canceled, but by and large, we got a lot more signups, which indicates that a lot of people who might have been password sharing with others said, you know what? It's time. I'll go ahead and sign up and give the company, you know, my money. I would assume that Disney is thinking the same. At the same time, you know, if you have declining enrollment, so to speak, what do you do besides raise prices? Unless you're going to make everybody who's, you know, looking at your public company numbers disappointed. So I think an issue that streaming services are going to now have it. I know for me, I've been, I've been a court cutter for several years now. And, you know, a big reason was, well, it's cool technology to be able to stream TV, you know, to basically any device with the screen. But another big reason I did it was because it was just simply less expensive. Now with all of these price, you know, price hikes, or literally every single one of these platforms, you're getting to the point to where cable companies are actually not looking unattractive any longer as far as what they charge you. So I think that it's a game that these companies are going to have to pay. We, you know, we need to be profitable, but we also can't put the prices up so much that our customers start dropping us and going back to traditional cable because cable is really, really inexpensive right now. Yeah, I was always sort of wondering at what point do people start saying, you know, is cable really the worst idea in the world? Shannon, you were talking about being a court cutter and, you know, looking through all the things that you pay for and, you know, maybe deciding that you might drop something that isn't really offering you the content that, you know, you feel is worth the money, you know, would going back to cable ever be an option? Uh, probably not for me, but one thing I have been looking into a lot more is the over-the-air, live free streaming services like Pluto TV, like Plex. There's a lot of them out there, and I've been using those a lot more often lately. And much of it is just because it's one less decision that I have to make. I just go there and choose a channel and then it plays. And I don't have to think about what show I'm watching. It just turns on a show and it's really nice. So in that sense, like there's a bit of that reminiscence of when I was younger and I watched a lot of cable TV, but there's a lot less decision making there. Well, and you're watching what's being offered to you. Yeah. And you kind of go like, okay, great. And the content works really nicely. It is really good. It's really good content on those, on those free platforms as well. I regularly watch Crackle and Pluto all the time. Yeah. It's because there's good shows on there. Pluto TV straight up has an entire channel dedicated to Sailor Moon. So like I'm good. Well, I think Disney, yeah, the next quarter or two will probably be, it will be enlightening as far as how things are going. And this is not just Disney plus. I mean, I think, you know, all of the standalone cable alternative networks are going through the same stuff. You might have a head show and then maybe have a good quarter. But it seems like most of them are experiencing the inevitable, oh yeah, well, they're not going to pay for everybody. So if they don't pay for us anymore, how do we get them back? Well, if you are wondering why urban drone delivery systems seem to be taking their sweet time arriving in your area, you aren't alone. I wonder the same thing. Where is my urban drone delivery? Tom recently got a chance to interview Zipline co-founder and CTO and platform architect Kenan Y.O. Beck to make sense of what is holding up widespread urban drone delivery that we've been promised. One of the things that has been frustrating to me to explain to people over the years is that you will see a company talk about drone technology and drone delivery. And I've tried to remind people that there are companies doing it, not just Zipline, but Zipline was the first one that I was ever aware of. And you've been doing it for a long time. It has been largely rural. What does it take for Zipline-like services to be more common place in urban locations? Because I feel like that's where people get hung up. They're like, sure, I guess they're doing it, but I don't see it in my neighborhood. Yeah, a great question. I think it comes down to two challenges. One challenge is the delivery experience. Can you deliver precisely enough that, I'm taking a picture you're on a row house in Boston. Can you actually hit that back porch? I noticed I said back porch. We can talk about that later. But can we deliver that back porch? Not easy. And then are you quiet enough that this is actually acceptable? This can't sound like a swarm of bees. I can't say that often enough. I describe that as a neighbor problem. We all hopefully have great relationships with our neighbors. And nobody wants to put up with your neighbor getting a swarm of bees all on a regular basis as they're getting deliveries from a drone. And so you have to solve that delivery experience problem. But then you also have to solve a really interesting airspace integration problem. How do you fly safely and responsibly with all the other traffic? And really, we call Platform 2 at Zipline, which is this new platform we're working on at Zipline. This was the answer to this question. Our customers have been asking it for years. Can you deliver to homes? Can you deliver to urban and metro areas? And our answer was, well, no, because our Platform 1, like I mentioned, this long-range platform, it needs a couple parking spots to deliver it. And most homes don't have that. So why the back porch? Yeah. Security is a big thing for deliveries. We obviously started in the healthcare space where you just don't want prescriptions and whatnot in someone's mailbox or even on their front stoop. And you don't always want to have to be home. So the security and the privacy of the back porch is really powerful. It's one of the many reasons drone delivery is transformational, assuming you solve the noise. Right. Because most delivery people are not going to walk around to your back porch or can't because you've got locked fences or whatever. Exactly. And so being able to walk out there in your slippers and get what you want, the privacy of your backyard, and not needing to be home and stuff like that, it's sort of the ultimate solution to the porch pirate problem. And yeah, that's really powerful for all kinds of deliveries. Do you think it's difficult enough to operate drone delivery that porch pirates would not be able to create their own drones with grappling hooks to come and try to steal your packages? I think it'd be extraordinarily challenging to do that. I'm just imagining the kind of questions I could see in my chat room as this goes by. What about folks who don't have a back porch? What about folks in apartment complexes or smaller buildings or things like that? Is it just, well, we'll deliver to the front porch or we'll deliver to a doorway? How does that work? Yeah. So the common area is how I think about it. Right. So depending where you are in the world, this can be a courtyard. It can be a lot of places spot up on the roof where you can hang out and have a barbecue and there's a patio we can deliver to. And so it's all about common areas. And one of the things that's nice about what drone delivery versus other types of delivery is we're on time. So if you pick a window that's a minute or two to deliver and we'll hit that window. So you don't have to be waiting there. And you can just wander. When your app says it's coming, it's actually coming then. And you can step out to that common area and grab your order. Let's talk a little bit about platform two specifically. How does that work? Walk me through loading the burrito or whatever on till the person gets it from their courtyard? Sure. So first of all, you have to kind of describe it because it's definitely not, at least what we assumed we'd be building. We started this design process. I don't think what anybody assumes you would solve this until you get into it. But it's a two part system. Okay. So there's the zip up high. That's the drone. And then there's the thing we call the droid that's lower down from the zip, but the line and the droid is active, right? Has its own fan so it can fly itself and its own sensor so it can find the delivery spot. Is it a quadcopter or is it something else? Yeah. It's tricky to describe. So I just, I picture it as like kind of a toaster, like a old fashioned toaster aesthetically, a very cute toaster with a little fan on the back. Okay. So kind of like a cross between a toaster and like maybe a miniature fan boat, if I'm trying to bring this to life. And it's tethered then? It's tethered exactly. So the tether handles the literally the heavy lifting weight of the delivery. And then the fans on the droid handle the basically the any kind of gusts that might hit it and things like that. So it can stay precise delivering that really tight spot you have on your porch or wherever we're delivering to. And so, okay. So when it comes in, I'm going to go backwards through the story here. So when it's delivering, the zip will fly out and hover over the delivery site. And then the droid will lower down on that line. And the zip is way up high, like, you know, as high up as like a football field is long. So it's way up there. So imagine that helps with the noise then because it's farther away. Oh, absolutely helps with the noise. It helps with general like kind of the we give it as the UX of the experience. How does it feel like the drone that's capable of heavy lifting? It just doesn't feel like it's in your yard at all. It feels like it's way up in the sky. And it feels great and helps with the noise helps with the overall safety challenges of the layered safety systems helps with lots of pieces of the design challenge. And yeah, so that droid lowers down. It takes about 10 seconds or so and it's got its fans so it's flying as to get right precisely to the delivery site drops the package and then zoop retracts back up and then it flies on back. And so the way that when it gets loaded so it flies into this dock. The droid then lowers down so in the dock is where it gets charging and things like that. And then it lowers the droid down from the zip again to an operator who then just opens a lid puts in the next order and sends it on its way. Well, if this is all exciting to you, it certainly is to me. You can hear the rest of Tom's interview with Kenan on the latest episode of A Word with Tom Merritt. It's a podcast. You can find out more at awordwithtommerritt.com. Thanks to everybody who became new patrons and increased their pledges. As of late, we were doing kind of a push for Molly Wood because we love Molly Wood. Because of your support, we can bring Molly on the show one Friday every other month. In fact, we have Molly coming on the show tomorrow. Yay! But to reach our goal of having a Molly on one Friday every month, we need more help. If you haven't already, if you feel like you can help, do consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com slash DTNS. Today is the final day of the annual security conference known as Black Hat where researchers report on security vulnerabilities found on online networks, software, communication tools and connected devices. Shannon, I know this is right up your wheelhouse and you've compiled a big list of what's going on. So what stands out to you? What should we be looking at? Yeah, there was a lot of exciting news, but there were three top stories that really stuck out to me this year. One of them is super fun, another one is kind of interesting, and the other one's kind of scary. So researchers from the Technical University, I know, right? Trailer, teaser. Researchers from the Technical University of Berlin figured out how to jailbreak the infotainment system in Teslas with only about $100 in tools. That's the part that I was like, wow, that's so cool. This can let you extract the encryption key used to authenticate the car on the Tesla service network and access features like seat heaters and the acceleration boost, which actually is a paid feature. So technically, you could get that for free if you jail broke your Tesla. The researchers used it for late hacks like these, but this could also allow for more sensitive data snooping like access to session cookies, Wi-Fi passwords and more. So it is a vulnerability. It could allow somebody to do independent repairs or modifications as well. Now, this flaw was disclosed to Tesla and Tesla has not fixed it yet, but they are aware and they are working on it. The second one is the one that's kind of like, ooh, that's a little spooky. The Intel and AMD CPUs. Both of those brands had kind of exciting weekends at Black Hat. Google's security team found a bug in Intel CPUs that allows an attacker to access data stored by programs, all your different programs in the system's memory, such as encryption keys, for example. So that's the scary part. The team of researchers over at Comsec found the AMD issue. This one leaks data from Ryzen, Threadripper and EPCY CPUs. So it's a pretty vast vulnerability that affects a lot of different CPUs. Both of these issues were disclosed to both of the brands and they have fixed them with software updates. So if you have a motherboard in your computer and the CPUs, just look for firmware updates for those and you'll be able to fix those and patch them on your own systems. And there were no in the wild attacks that have happened that either of those brands know of. So this was just a researched vulnerability. It looks like it has not been used in any kind of real world attacks. Now, the third one is all about radios, which kind of has a place in my heart because I'm a licensed ham radio operator, not currently practicing researchers at ODA found that the Tetra or the terrestrial trunked radio, which is used in Europe Europe for law enforcement. It's also used worldwide for like government agencies for police for prisons, emergency and military operations. It turns out those can be leaking broadcasts. Yikes. But also Tetra is used for industrial setups. So that includes things like encrypted data and voice commands for ICS is like pipelines, like gas pipelines, freight trains, railways, electrical grids. So that includes multiple vulnerabilities that they disclosed in the cryptography that could allow for decryption of all sorts of different traffic, voice and data being sent via this trunked radio protocol. Mitigation techniques were shared with the affected industries, so they will have to work on patching those. So those are my top three stories. I mean, it's a little scary, but I'm happy that we have this event happening every year where researchers can share this information. The more everybody is familiar and hopefully, you know, knows what to do. I don't know, Rob, I got to say, just because I know a lot of people who have test laws, I was like, ooh, not great. Not great. I am not an EV owner yet. But I do know one of the things that I was not liking about just where things were seeming like they were going is that, oh, we're going to charge you per month for this thing that is already in the car that you apparently paid full price for. But now you have to have a subscription for your tush to be warm in the cold months. And I remember reading about this hack a few weeks ago. And one of the hackers said the reason that they did this is because they didn't want to pay for heated seats. That was what led to them trying to figure out how they could get around this. So I'm just wondering, are we going to get to a time to where people are actually going to be jailbreaking their cars? I mean, we already have heard of like Teslas that run on the road that they were like damaged by water and people got the parts and literally built their own Frankenstein car. So they're not really official Teslas. But are we going to see, you know, folks, you know, when these cars are used, are these the kind of things that owners are going to do? You'll take it to a third party shop and they actually will go in and hack your car to get you features that you ordinarily wouldn't have. I kind of love it because I feel very, very similar opinions about jailbreaking your devices so that you have the availability of, you know, all of these paid features. I mean, if I had to pay extra for heated seats, I would go to a different brand. That's just how I think. If it's available in the car, I want to be able to use it as well. This isn't the first time we have seen Tesla jailbreaks or any kind of Tesla hacks happening at Defcon or Black Hat. Tesla is very, very popular as one of the big events that happens during the weekend at like the car hacking village at Defcon. So it's not the first time that we've had something like this announced at Black Hat. And I'm glad that we have, you know, these researchers coming forward and kind of helping the jailbreak community so that we can do things like this. Yeah, I mean, I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you a little bit more about Shannon was the radio frequencies, you know, the possibility of them being hacked. I think a lot of people say like AM, FM, AM radio, what else is going on here? But there is more to it. There is a ton more frequencies and a lot of different cryptography that goes into radio. Most of radio is not encrypted whatsoever. Like you can tune into whatever broadcast you want to. I could make a broadcast from my studio and it is not going to be encrypted. Like I don't have that. Lawfully, I could not do an encrypted broadcast because that's not what my ham license allows for. But when you have law enforcement, you have medical emergency response and everything like that, like they do have access to this terrestrial trunked radio system. And apparently these issues with the cryptography have been very widely known for a really long time, at least internally with all of these systems. But it hasn't really been a consumer known fact until now. So it's a good thing that this research paper is coming out and making this more known so that these industries know that, yes, these can be hacked. And yes, it's a problem, especially if people could potentially hurt industrial control systems and like take down an electrical grid. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to think about how these things actually are quite serious. It really does. Yeah. I mean, we have the pipeline that went down back in 2021, 2022 on the East Coast. And this is kind of similar to that. Like those are the kind of issues that you need to think about whenever we're talking about like ICS and how those could be vulnerable. Well, while you're thinking about this, you might also think about the fact that you might want to just clean up your office room. Maybe you have a separate room. Maybe it's just part of your bedroom. Maybe it's part of your kitchen. We all in the remote world that we all live in make the best of what we have. So if you want a computer setup that folds and tucks away when not in use, you might like Logitech's new laptop best stand designed to be exactly that. It's called the Casa pop-up desk comes with a wireless keyboard, trackpad. They all pack up together in a case that is designed to be stored away easily. And in fact, if you look at the what the company tells you, it's sort of like it kind of looks like a book in a bookcase. The Casa pop-up desk is available in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It's in off white rose and green graphite options. And it sells for £179 sterling, which is about $229 US dollars. So, Shannon, Rod, what do you think about, you know, putting away your, I don't know, work desk to the point that you want it to be invisible into a bookcase? Would you pay for this? No. I love my work desk. It's so like aesthetically pleasing. I have like cute plants and stuff up here. Like I don't want to put it away. Yeah, I like my desk so much that I've actually got a desk here. And on the other side of the desk, there is another desk facing it. So I can go around there and do other desk related things. I like my desk. Well, you know what? I mean, could as to both of you for being like, no, I like this. My desk, I would love to put this away and just not have this, you know, in the middle of my garage where I am right now. But that isn't always, you know, an option. I think that, I don't know, I guess this is probably marketed to people who are like, I'm going to be working from home for the foreseeable future. I don't really have an office. You know, I've been sort of, you know, cobbling together, whatever, to make this happen. And wouldn't it be nice to be able to put this away? But honestly, I mean, if you're working like regular hours, let's say Monday through Friday, nine to five, are you putting that thing away every day? No, no. That's just more work. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to be like, bye. Bye desk. See you tomorrow. Bye desk. I'm going to go in the living room now. All right, Rob, let's talk about what we have in our mailbag today. So Patrick wrote in with a take on yesterday's conversation about YouTube no longer showing recommendations when watch history is turned off. And he says YouTube might be trying to get more people to turn on watch history by disabling the recommendations. Those people who have the watch history disabled now still get recommendations. If YouTube turns off recommendations, perhaps those users will turn it on turn on watch history to get the recommendations back. I mean, I don't know that I would do that. Um, I, you know, Rob and Shannon, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. I, I feel like the recommendations. Okay. Every now and then I'm like, maybe I'll watch this. Oh, actually, thank you, YouTube. But otherwise I don't know that this is moving the needle too much for me. I click on them every now and again. But if they weren't there, I don't know that I would miss them enough to, oh, wow, I need to go do some things to make the recommendations come back. That's just me and my watching happens. But I do, when I think back, I do click on them every once in a while. So, you know, I kind of like them being there. So I've had a lot of conversations with YouTube employees at different events and they have kind of explained the algorithm as the algorithm shouldn't be thought of as the algorithm. The other algorithm should be thought of as your audience, other people. So how are you uploading these videos to other people and how are people being recommended your content as your audience? And the fact that they are using, well, it sounds like they're using watch history to recommend, you know, specific videos to you. And for me, that makes sense as a viewer and a YouTuber. So personally, like this does not affect me. The fact that they're saying like, Hey, you need watch history turned on to be able to see recommendations like that just, it makes sense. I don't know if I'm, if it's just me, that's just like, yeah, that's not a problem. And in terms of me, but yeah, but it's like, how else will they know what to recommend to me? Yeah, I'm like, welcome to the, welcome to YouTube. Like this is how it's been working for years. The only time I can see this being an issue is if you have like a team account, because then if, if other people are seeing your watch history, that might be kind of cringe because a lot of it is very based on personal opinion and things like that. Or at least, you know, irrelevant. You might not want to see that watch history. But if you're using a team account to figure out like, who are your competitors in the market or anything like that, then yeah, you might want to see that watch or you might want to see those recommendations. So that's one way where I could see people saying like, I don't like this, but just for like a personal account, this does not bother me. Well, Shannon Morse, you always have really good, really, really good thoughts on all the things that we bring to the DTNS table. Thank you for being with us today. And also let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse, just like my name is spelled. I recently uploaded a couple of pixel fold videos. I have a z fold five in hand. If you're watching the video, I have that in hand right now and I'm about to go pick up my z flip five as well. So I have a ton of foldables coming up on the channel. Definitely keep an eye out for those reviews, the comparisons, the camera recommendations, all that good stuff. Well, patrons, patrons, patrons, you know who you are. Stick around for the extended show. Good day internet. We're going to be talking more about YouTube making changes. YouTube has been very busy lately. This time designed to fight spam. But just a reminder, DTNS is live Monday through Friday. Catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Molly Wood joining us. We're so happy to have Molly Fridays. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.