 Coming up on DTNS, are you game to stay at an Atari hotel? Apple's all glass desktop patent and the effect of big tech on open source projects. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 27th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Lovely Cleveland. I'm Rich Strafolino and I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty sir. Sir, Elaine could not be with us today, but she should be back tomorrow. We were just chatting though on Good Day Internet. But the origins of broccoli and some of our favorite supermarkets, it's always a different conversation, often food, often tech, often fun, always fun to be honest, go and become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nintendo announced that after March 31st, it will no longer accept Nintendo Wii units for repair in Japan, setting parts scarcity that we originally launched in 2006. And sold over 100 million units. Part scarcity. We stopped making the parts. So now they're scarce. Motorola released a series of videos related to the launch of its foldable Razer phone, one of which is called Caring for Razer. In it, Motorola advises screen is made to bend bumps and lumps are normal. The company also suggests to close the phone prior to putting it in your pocket. That same advisement goes out to humans as well. Earlier this month, Microsoft released the final public security update for Windows 7, except it appears that last update caused wallpaper to wear as black when set to stretch. Microsoft announced a fix available for businesses who had paid for extended updates, but then went ahead and said it would release the fix to everyone. But this is this is it, folks. Last one. Yeah, say that. But I'll say 10 years ago today, Apple announced its third category device, the iPad, of which many of my friends and co-hosts made fun of the name. Doesn't seem so strange. Ten years later, though, had a 1024 by 768 9.7 inch display. Single core, single core Apple A4 processor and a price of $499. The original iPad was $499. All right, let's talk a little bit more about some shenanigans that Grubhub got up to. Yeah, and this came in response to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation that found that Grubhub and as a result, Grubhub stated it began adding some restaurants to its sites, all the sites that it owns for delivery without a formal agreement with that restaurant. These are usually high demand restaurants. And in those instances, Grubhub sends someone to the restaurant to place the order or has someone call an employee of Grubhub with a driver coming for delivery later. Grubhub did state that it partners with over 140,000 restaurants and that most listings are with explicit partners. Restaurant owners say in these cases, Grubhub often had inaccurate or out of date listings and prices, which I imagine caused some confusion when someone came to pick it up. Yeah, not with the explicit partners with the people they were adding with the restaurant's knowledge. There's there's some confusing things in this story, to be honest. They talk about an incident where a restaurant that's got a Michelin star in San Francisco and does not offer take out just dine in, got a call from someone asking for delivery. They said, we don't do take out or delivery. And the person said, well, why are you listed on seamless? Then seamless owned by Grubhub. And the restaurant said we looked and there we were. I wonder about that. I wonder because if a restaurant doesn't do take out, it would seem to be a bad idea to add it. So either Grubhub was just aggressively looking at the highest searched restaurants in San Francisco and throwing their online menus up and whether they delivered or not, which is sloppy, that kind of is what it sounds like to me. Or they were more nefarious trying to pressure these restaurants into signing up for Grubhub by trying to get people to want to order from them and then being able to show like we have all these people interested. You should sign up with our service. I think the most interesting thing here is that or maybe the most notable is that this seems like it almost has to be a small scale operation. Because if you're having people individually call from Grubhub to place these orders, they couldn't be doing this on a mass scale, just kind of just hitting every single restaurant that has any degree of popularity. It seemed like the restaurants in the story in the SF Gate story were like I said, these were Michelin starred restaurants. These were pretty high demand, pretty hip hot restaurants. So again, doesn't it doesn't excuse the behavior or make it feel any less kind of cringy in some weird way? And it seems like, yeah, maybe a data entry error caused someone to flick the, you know, does take out versus no take out you know, on some back end somewhere. And a data entry or just not paying attention. Right. Yeah. Just adding things, maybe even through through some kind of script or something like scraping menus from the top sites, something like that. I mean, on the on the other hand, if Grubhub wants to say like, call us and we'll pay someone to go pick up from a restaurant that does do take out, should the restaurant be able to forbid that? It's just more business for them. I don't know. In and out, stopped DoorDash from doing that very same thing. But they were asserting it more on trademark grounds and would seem like a workaround to try to get them to stop it. And they did they already have plenty of business. So maybe it was causing problems. I don't know. There's there's lots of questions about this. In the end, though, as a as a consumer, if you're using Grubhub, I would use it by going to the restaurant's website and clicking on order online from there, which will often take you to Grubhub. Thursday, Universal Orlando confirmed it will build a fourth theme park featuring characters from Nintendo. So it'll be a 750 acre park located just a couple of miles from the three existing Universal Orlando parks. And Nintendo Park is also opening in Osaka this year and one is planned for California as well. In Osaka, people in the park will wear wristbands that pair with an app and then they can play games, immersive games in the park, including things like gathering coins for achievements. Locations in the park will include Mushroom Kingdom, Peaches Castle and an incredible Mario Kart ride, Bowser's Castle, blah, blah, blah, this goes on. In a somewhat related story, Atari announced a deal to create eight Atari branded hotels in the U.S. with eSports studios, gaming playgrounds, possibly arcades, I would imagine. Apparently, the Atari hotels will also have restaurants, bars, movie theaters and even a bakery. First one coming to Phoenix will be the first one built. And then they're also going to add them in Austin, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle. Do you like gaming in your leisure resort, Rich? I guess I will have to. It does seem interesting that we're at this, you know, gaming nostalgia where, you know, one was where they like the original Disneyland and Disney World built right at the 60s, right? Disney Land in the 50s, Disney World in the 60s. And that seems like what? That was maybe 20, 30 years after the initial introduction of kind of the Disney's, a lot of the Disney canon, right? And I feel like we're roughly in that same, you know, kind of time span where it comes to, you know, these iconic Mario characters. And certainly we've gone that far from Atari, where we're almost on like a second wave of Atari nostalgia in a weird way. But it just just kind of shows that, you know, what what worked for these iconic characters on a movie scale, you know, maybe works on for video games as well, has that same has that same impact. Yeah. And this version of Atari, unlike Nintendo, this version of Atari is is quite removed from the original Atari. It's a French company. It owns all the all the rights to the games and the names and all of that. But it is it is sort of sort of a company that has collected the intellectual property of Atari. And I think it's done, you know, as far as those companies go, has done a fairly, fairly good job of putting out products that take advantage of that, like the joystick that has all the games, the app you can buy that has all the games. I don't know so much about the Atari VCS that's out that's coming out. We'll see how well that goes, but it is a Linux machine. So that's kind of interesting. This seems like a good way for that company to take advantage of that. I'm not sure how much demand there is for an Atari hotel, though. I mean, it sounds cool in concept, but I don't find myself going to stay there unless it's the only one with rooms when during CES, which may just be the case, which may end up be why an investigation by Motherboard and PC Mag reports that data collected from computers using a vast antivirus was being sold by an vast subsidy, a subsidiary, excuse me, called Jumpshot. Jumpshot sells a variety of products based on the info collected from the top 10,000 domains visited to users to the all click feed, which shows all the vast user clicks on a particular domain, you know, where they're going, how they're navigating on there. Avast previously used a browser extension for data of data collection, but these were removed from Google, Mozilla's and Opera's browser stores until last year after security concerns were exposed by Adbock Plus creator of Vladimir Palance. Now, Avast is reportedly asking existing desktop antivirus users to opt into data collection on its antivirus software rather than just in the extension. Data is anonymized with unique IDs hashed by Jumpshot, but they do offer inferred genders and ages based on browsing habits to their customers. It also includes full URL strings and device IDs do not change unless you fully uninstalled and reinstalled Avast. So theoretically, if something goes wrong with how they are securing those IDs, that's kind of like a fixed marker there, which I think is causing some concern. But now, Tom, is this a story of, you know, anonymized data being sold from someone who's offering an opt-in? Is this a major security story or a major optic story for Avast right now? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I don't think it's much of a security story. It's a little bit of a privacy story. On the one hand, a company that has a lot of aggregate data, say Google, Apple, Microsoft, might want to make use of that data to sell trends. Right. When you go look up Google trends, you don't think of it as a privacy violation, right? You're saying like, oh, what are the most searched for terms? But underneath that data are the timestamps and search keywords for all the actual people who searched that. And if you really wanted to dig down into that data and you could get your hands on it, it's possible to de-anonymize pretty much anything. So to me, this is all about how it's handled in practice, who it's sold to, and is it transparent to the user? And Avast has a pretty poor record of this being transparent to the user. They got caught with their extension, collecting some things that they didn't say they were collecting. They didn't used to have opt-in, although now they do. So they were kind of not good on that point in the past, but they've cleaned up their act. But the fact is we also don't know who all they're selling this data to. I'm okay with them saying, hey, we know what the most visited sites are and we'll sell you that list. Really hard to de-anonymize anything out of that. But they're also selling more detailed information, which includes timestamps. And even though that might not show the actual digital ID even, which is also not anonymized, if I'm a bank, I can probably find out when you were online. If I'm another kind of service, I could take information I have, add it to the data I'm getting from Avast, and then that can help de-anonymize. So the problem with this sort of thing is in a lot of cases this is done for a non-horrible reason, but can be used to violate privacy. Yeah, I think it's also just an awareness and kind of a information is identifiable until proven otherwise, perhaps is the mindset a lot of people have now. Yeah, and transparency, transparency, transparency. If you're doing this, you need to be above board about it, give people the chance to opt in. They did the right thing there when they finally changed to say like, we won't do it unless you tell us it's okay, because it is valuable data and it can be used for very good purposes. It's just people are fed up with it not being used in a transparent way for good purposes. You know, patents generally don't mean a lot. Companies file them for the idea that's patentable, not on the off chance, that maybe some competition wants it or they might put it into place in the future. They don't generally turn into products, but a patent filed by Apple last May seems to have captured the imagination of a lot of people today. It describes a method of combining the display and input area of a computer into a single continuous curved glass surface. Basically it looks like an all glass iMac. Chips and ports would be housed in the support structure. So you'd have a glass keyboard and mouse area that just bends right up into the display with everything else hidden in the little block that holds the whole thing up. Another take would be to do this with a hole at the bend rather than an interactive area that you would pass a MacBook through and act as a dock. So you basically give a bigger screen to your MacBook but you're still using the laptop's keyboard. The glass display could in that case be fold up and stored. Yeah, Apple is a company that values user experience, design certainly. I can't think of like the way I wanna use a laptop like converted to a monitor least than like the super awkward pass through. I'm like, again, maybe it's interesting idea. This is like a concept car. Like I wanna see this on a CES show floor but this looks like an ergonomic nightmare that you can't repair. I just see iFixit giving this like a .001 score or something like that. It's like, oh, we cracked all the glass. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. It is a patent, right? So we shouldn't be too hard on it. The idea of an iMac made out of this is more attractive to me. I like you. I'm like, that's kind of a nifty trick for a laptop but it might be a really cool form factor for a desktop. If you want an iMac kind of situation, having that whole thing be glass looks really nice. But again, I don't know what practical benefit that is, especially if now I have to type on a piece of glass instead of an actual keyboard. Yeah, and just the idea that, I mean, Apple has had had some keyboard issues in recent memory, I think we can all agree. Having that being part of theoretically something that you cannot easily replace out of a giant expensive thousand dollar car or multi-thousand dollar computer is something I'm not too fond of. Yeah, I mean, granted, repairability, never Apple's first concern. But I think people are just fascinated with this because it looks eminently doable, right? We know you can do folded glass, putting all the chips and everything in a box behind, that's, you know, look at the Intel NUC. You can do that. So I think that makes people go, so maybe they will. I think they shouldn't. I think it's also brushed aluminum fatigue, a little bit at this point, you know, in terms of that design language has been around for a couple of decades now. And, you know, finally here, Bird announced it acquired the scooter rental company Cirque. Cirque operates in 40 cities across 14 European countries and the United Arab Emirates. In terms of the deal, we're not disclosed, but we're announced as part of a $75 million extension to Bird's latest funding round. So I'm going to assume less than $75 million. In the announcement, the company said it's focusing on improved unit economics, especially the lifespan of each scooter and basically how long you can keep one of those in service means you can get more value out of that scooter as you pay it off and it can actually like make money on it. Bird bought another scooter startup Swoot in early 2019. So Tom, does the path to consolidation or does consolidation of unprofitable companies eventually lead to some sort of viability? Question mark. We'll make it up in volume. Yeah, no, there is one part of this that might lend some credence to that idea, which is a lot of the cost of these is in getting the fleets up to speed and making sure that the fleet is still up to date. And what you see Bird arguing is we're getting longer lasting scooters. We're learning how to make them last longer. And as we buy these, now we have the scale to be able to keep these fleets in place without having to constantly buy them to implement them because we're buying companies instead of creating our own from scratch. And that does bring the cost down. Whether this is still a sustainable business model since none of the companies Bird is buying were sustainable businesses at the time they bought them is still in question. I'm not willing to go out and say like, no, no, this is all doomed, but it does seem questionable whether this is going to work. It's kind of on the fence on that. Yeah, and the big deal with this food acquisition just for some background is that they got Bird the ability to operate in San Francisco or theoretically, I don't know if they actually got the extension to go ahead but that ease that process back there. We've seen all of the major scooter rental or scooter startups or scooter divisions of companies kind of have layoffs and scale back with draw for markets and that kind of stuff. So if they have solved that problem and the fact that this is tied to a funding run means that they had to have something to tell investors that was going to be a different story than, hey, we're gonna lose another $100 million this year. You know, again, if they have solved that question that does ease a lot of the big questions that are around these companies. Folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser has a feature that lets you move multiple tabs to another window, kind of nifty. A Reddit poster noticed a quiet but in some ways earth-shattering conversation happening on the Chromium-Garrett source code management thread indicating what can happen when you get a company as big as Microsoft working on the same code base as a company as big as Google. Google software engineer Leonard Gray wrote in this thread about the tab moving feature saying, if you're still interested in upstreaming this from Edge we'd be happy to take it. In other words, hey, that's a cool feature. Can we put it in the Chromium source code? Justin Gallagher, a software engineer at Microsoft responded, sounds great. I'll take ownership of the issue then, saying, yeah, I'll upstream that and I'll handle the process of getting that into the code. Two weeks later, Microsoft committed the code to make the change at Chromium, meaning now any browser based on the Chromium code base, that's Opera, that's Chrome, that's Brave, can now have that same feature too. Microsoft is also committing changes to the Chromium project to improve accessibility, performance and compatibility, which again would affect not just Edge but also Chrome and other browsers that use the Chromium code base. Now, that's one part of this story, but open source is fast becoming the realm of big tech. It was once the realm of the roguish independent minded dev and it still is in a lot of cases, don't get us wrong, but it's now often only implemented by the roguish independent minded dev who is employed by the big tech company. Take for example, WhiteSource's recent report on the most popular open source licenses of 2019. Of the 4 million open source packages and 130 million open source files covering 200 programming languages that WhiteSource surveyed, 67% were permissive licenses like Apache and MIT, 33% were copy left licenses like GNU GPL. As recently as 2012, that was flipped. In 2012, it was 59% copy left, 41% permissive. If you don't know permissive licenses, place fewer restrictions on how you can use the components. They generally allow for your use in proprietary derivative works, whereas the GNU GPL licenses say, if you change the code, you have to contribute that code back to the product open source under the same GPL license. So the permissive licenses give you the freedom to do some stuff that the GNU GPL licenses won't allow, which when you're a big tech company making a big complicated product is an advantage. The MIT license, a permissive license is now the most popular, though the Apache 2.0 license has been making gains. Rich, a lot of this just has to do with legalities and making it simple. That's why the MIT license is so popular. What do you make of all this? Yeah, it seems like we're coming to a point with open source. And I feel like we've come this with a lot of like larger tech concepts that were seemingly very simple to grasp at the outset, I think open source was like, the code is open, you can look at the code, you can copy the code, you can use the code. Oh, that sounds great. I think we've reached the same point with kind of like a net neutrality situation where there's this abstract principle, but then when you get into the details of it, there's a lot of like weird exceptions or a lot of nuance that doesn't immediately appear. Like once you've been talking about it for a while, you start realizing this. We're definitely into that point now with open source, where we're really starting to get some pushback kind of. For the longest time, I mean, Microsoft tried to sue Linux out of existence. I mean, basically everyone has tried to sue Linux out of existence from whatever angle you're coming out of it, right? And in various other open source projects about all sorts of legal issues over the years and stuff like that. And as everything now becomes software and API driven and stuff like that, all of these big tech companies all of a sudden are realizing, hey, if we could just stand on the shoulders of all of these people that did all this hard work and then we can take all of that and also contribute that there's tremendous value in that. I don't want to sound like they're coming in and they're taking the software and really contributing nothing back. If you look at the top 10 biggest open source projects, they're all owned and top contributors are Microsoft, Facebook, Google, IBM, stuff like that. IBM, I'm not 100% sure. Those top three are definitely though the top contributors for a ton of open source projects and the biggest projects out there. Things that power huge enterprise systems are entirely based on open source code, something like Kubernetes, which is not something that's a lot of consumer awareness, but is really starting to emerge in the enterprises as a vital infrastructure component is an open source project from Google that everyone contributes to at some point. So again, tons of value there for those companies, but it does get to a point where, and not just on the big corporate side where there is interest in being able to pull some of that code back, not being forced under a GNU GPL license to by the nature of using that code, you have to put everything that you fork or anything back open source under that exact same license as well. We're seeing smaller companies trying to figure out a way around some of these restrictions with open source. There are a lot of companies that deal with AWS, for example, where it's really easy if you're an all open source company for Amazon to take your stuff and spin it up and all of a sudden their service model is servicing the technology that you built. So they have a real invested interest and maybe like, hey, maybe not put everything out there and there's been all sorts of community feedback. And those kind of issues are like I said, where it is getting a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more complicated. And we're kind of seeing that pure play, open source purist versus the more pragmatic corporate interest kind of diverging into there. And I don't know if there are any easy answers but I don't think it's as easy, like kind of your lead up was saying, it's not as easy as thinking like, open source is for the plucky little young guy and I'll run my puppy Linux on the CD and I don't have to run Microsoft anymore. I think the landscape has definitely changed. Yeah, and it's not that GPL can't be used but a lot of companies want to use code in a way that GPL doesn't allow. So a permissive license allows them to do that easier. There are ways to carve off components and make some components GPL and some not but that's trickier. Whereas the permissive licenses especially the MIT license just make it simple. Like we know where the liability is, we know what we can do with the code. There's less questions about it and that's attractive. It can also be misused. Permissive licenses do allow you to take code and use it yourself without contributing back to the community. And a lot of people are worried that that might start happening and companies will take advantage of it and abuse it and there are examples of that happening. The hope is that companies, at least companies like Google and Microsoft will realize that's not in their best interest because that could kill the project. And if you kill the project, then you're not getting the benefits out of the open source project that you joined in order to get. So there is some pressure on that which is why I think you've seen slowly since 2012 permissive licenses happen as people go get a little more comfortable and a little more comfortable. Well, I guess it won't be a catastrophe if we use one of these licenses. Yeah, next time you hear a news story or something like that and I've been trying to be very conscious of that and on headlines is to, if something, company says they're putting something out in open source let's set up the context for what license that's under. Again, because I do think that's an increasingly important distinction. And the other thing is you're really starting to see this having an impact on one of the core open source projects that everybody knows is Linux. They were having some licensing issues looking at file system components and stuff like that and Linus Torvald saying, I don't want to get sued by Oracle at some point. So this isn't going in the kernel and he said in the very Linus Torvalds, I'm annoyed by everything kind of way. Sure. So yeah. We're rolled for sure. But yeah, I mean, that gets right to the heart of it, which is the license makes it hard to know what your liability is. And in that case, I think Linus is right. It's just safer not to include ZFS in the kernel and avoid a very litigious company, perhaps interpreting something the wrong way. Even though for the writers it's best as well. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can get into by becoming a patron at anylevelpatreon.com slash DTNS. Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler is back with an interesting story on one travel booker's efforts to be more environmentally responsible. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Hopper, the online travel booking app has just thrown down the gauntlet for other travel CEOs. In terms of being a green company and addressing global warming, they are now going to include carbon offsets with every booking. So if you book an airline ticket through Hopper, Hopper will pay for carbon offsets for that trip. An interesting step and I applaud it. If you spot a travel technology tip or story that you think the DTNS audience will enjoy, ping me on Twitter at chris2x or amateur traveler. And this is again Chris Christensen from amateurtraveller.com. Yeah, there's a growing trend to shame people for air travel, especially in Scandinavia. This is becoming a bigger and bigger. And one of the ways people try to deal with that is by purchasing carbon credits. A lot of airlines will offer that. So I'm not surprised to see this advancing even more with bookers getting into that because they don't wanna have people not booking air travel. They wanna try to help assuage their conscience on that. Whether this actually does what people hope could or should do is a whole separate topic. But I'm not surprised to see this sort of thing be implemented. All right, let's check out the mailbag, Alan from the cornfields of Southern Illinois. Ah, I am also from the soy fields of Southern Illinois. Very close to the cornfields of Southern Illinois. Alan chimes in and says, while listening to the last DTNS and the discussion about doing something yourself versus paying to have it done, you hit the nail on the head. As I tell younger coworkers, when you're young, money is more important than time. As you get older and you get more money, time is more important than money unless you enjoy spending the time. And you may have gotten me on the driverless car bandwagon with the idea of long range trips. I'd love to not have to drive the car all the way to Pensacola Beach for our annual trip. As always, DTNS makes me think. Thank you, Alan. Yeah, really great point. I think that leads into the whole piracy versus streaming discussion as well. Yeah, and why piracy when it is a problem is always a bigger problem with younger audiences who have less disposable income because they are willing to try to save that money because they're not making that much money yet. And maybe by streaming wars might lead to more piracy, who knows? But there's also something to the idea. I mean, granted, I have been lucky enough to make more money as I've gotten older up to a certain point. Certainly more than when I was in my early 20s. But there's also something to having the energy to spend hunting down that thing that will save you money as you get older. You just are like, you know, I'd forget it. I'll just pay the five dollars. It's fine. I don't have more money now that I'm older, but I am lazier, so it kind of works out the same way. But we want to give a big shout out to our patrons at the master and grandmaster levels, including Ruchan, Brantley, Adam Carr, and Bjorn Andre. Thank you, people. Oh, so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Rich, for teaming up today. Appreciate you stepping in. That's a lot of fun. If people want to find you, of course, DailyTechHeadlines.com is one place, but I know you've got some other projects going on. Yeah, you can find a lot of the stuff I'm going to be doing on gestaltit.com. That's, again, a more enterprise focused. We actually talked about that white space, white source paper, open source paper, quite a bit on our weekly IT news show, the Gestalt IT Rundown. You can find that on YouTube, just search for Gestalt IT Rundown. Odds are, we'll be the only one there. And I do that every Wednesday at 12, 30 p.m. We stream on YouTube, so check that out. I do that with my boy Tom Hollingsworth. And we also have a podcast, the On-Premise IT Roundtable that comes out every other Tuesday. So look for that in your podcatcher of choice. You can also find me on Twitter at Mr. Anthropology. And we have new Patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of Daily Tech News show. Len Peralta created a six year anniversary DTNS logo. If you back at certain levels at patreon.com slash DTNS for three months, you can get either a sticker, a poster, a mug, or a t-shirt. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. You can find out more of that about that at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Talk to you with Patrick Bezier tomorrow. 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