 Jesse Bartley has supported independent tech news directly for about five years. Be like Jesse. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. A couple of programming notes. Scott Johnson was supposed to be with us today, but he had a dog emergency. We hope his dog Rainer is doing okay. He was called away for that. He will be back next week. Also, no Daily Tech News show tomorrow. It's the Independence Day holiday in the United States. And different people running the show on Friday. Rich Strafilino will be hosting. Amos will be producing. Keith Townsend will be the guest. There will be a show on Friday. It just won't be us. Also, we're just shaking all kinds of things up. Today, we're going to start off with an email. Some insight from one of the members of our smartest audience in the world. Yeah, Sumya Dip from Fiery Dully. Sumya says the temperatures have reached 48 degrees Celsius, which is about 118 Fahrenheit. Yikes. Sumya Dip wrote, The reason India tops mobile data usage is because it has the lowest mobile tariff plans in the world. This mobile data revolution in India started back on December 27th, 2015, with the launch of Reliance Geo. Geo forced other Indian mobile service providers to drastically slash their rates. The competitive environment in India following the arrival of Geo has for all practical purposes left only three players in the market. Many of the smaller companies shut down their operations as a result. Among the bigger ones, Vodafone and Idea merged. And the third is Airtel. Phone calls within India are free on Reliance Geo and only data is billed. So a typical prepaid plan, which is preferred by most Indian users, would cost about 498 rupees at about $7.23 US for 182 gigabytes of data. And with the validity of 90 days, the average monthly cost is about $2.41 US. And a gigabyte of data would cost about four cents. Even home broadband plans have been getting cheaper and cheaper. Sumya Dip says, I have a 100 megabit per second unlimited plan at home. It cost me about 885 rupees per month or $12.86. The low cost of data has been the single most important reason why India is consuming more than anyone else. This is very interesting. We knew Reliance Geo was dominant, 300 million subscribers, but really getting a kind of an on-the-feet-on-the-ground background about them is really helpful. Thank you, Sumya Dip, for that. Just today, Reliance Geo announced a literacy program in partnership with Facebook because they are bringing so many new people to the internet and those people aren't familiar with how to tell what's fake information, what's reliable information, or even just how to find information on the internet. They're going to do training programs. So in 10 regional languages, every Saturday at 200 locations across 13 states in India, the goal is eventually to have 7,000 locations. So I think that's a nice step for Reliance Geo to say, not only are we providing cheap access to the internet, but we want to help people use it better as well. All right, let's continue with a few tech things you should know. Reuters reports an internal letter from the U.S. Commerce Department's Deputy Director of the Office of Export Enforcement, John Sonderman, told staff to continue to treat Huawei a restricted entity. Applications from companies that want to sell to Huawei should be considered on merit and be viewed under a presumption of denial. This appears to be the only official guidance on Huawei. Since the president told press, some U.S. companies could resume selling hardware to Huawei in some cases. App designer Mike Rundle discovered a FaceTime feature in the iOS 13 beta called Attention Correction. It appears to redraw your video frames so that your eyes are looking at the person, not looking at the camera. You know, with FaceTime, your eyes are always a little bit off if you're looking at the camera. Or I guess they're a little off if you're looking at the screen and most people don't look at the camera. So this is going to redraw them to make it look like you're looking at the camera using some image analysis. So far, it's only been found to work on the iPhone XS and XS Max and it's in the beta if you want to try it out. Windows 10's Your Phone app now shares Android notifications on the Windows desktop. New messages from WhatsApp or Facebook or Twitter or Messenger or other apps will appear in your phone and if you dismiss them there, it'll also dismiss them on your Android phone. An upcoming feature will let users click on a notification and then pull up a mirror of their phone screen where they can take action. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Uber adding more options for eating food. Yeah, UberEats is testing a Dine-In option that lets users order food ahead of time, then go to the restaurant to sit down and eat the food that they ordered, waiving the normal delivery and service fees. Restaurants pay a fee for the feature but keep 100% of tips which can be paid within the app. You pay ahead of time and can choose to Dine-In as soon as possible or in some cases schedule your meal into the future. You'll be shown estimated time until your food's ready and then you'll get notified as your order is prepared and when it actually is ready. The feature is not integrated with Uber's ride service, totally separate. Uber's Dine-In option is now available in certain cities, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, San Diego. Other apps like Allset have provided similar services for a few years so this might already be familiar to some of you. Yeah, so you're an UberEats fan, I know. Very much so. Does this make sense to you? Is this something you wanted? Well, no. And I'm trying to figure out why I want this because to me, UberEats is I'm ordering delivery to my house. For whatever reason, I'm not going anywhere. I want it to come to me. If I go to a restaurant and I want to be served at a specific time, okay, maybe I'm in a hurry. But it seems like all it's really doing is reducing the friction of having to talk to a human, which doesn't really bother me. I think it's more than just that because you're still going to have to talk to the waiter when they bring your food. You may be asking for other things. But it's pre-paying, so you don't have to wait around at the end for a check. That's a little more efficient. It's pre-ordering. It's not just a reservation. A reservation is you'll be seated at this time and then you can start the process. This is you've paid for it. You've ordered as soon as you get to the restaurant, you can get your food, sit down and eat right away. It's akin to those tablets at places like Chili's where you order at the tablet and then the waiter comes and brings you your food. You don't ever have to wait for the waiter to come over. So I think it's just a little bit about efficiency and time management more than anything. Well, okay. So is this something that appeals to you guys? Well, it depends on how it works. Scheduling, I think, would be great if I could say, hey, you know what? I'm going to eat at seven o'clock. So let me put in the order. We already know what we want. We don't want to sit around and wait. If you ever had those restaurants, we have to wait to sit down. And then when you sit down, you have to wait for the waiter to come and bring you the menu. Then you have to wait for them to bring you your drinks before you. This gets rid of all of that. Now, sometimes you want that. Sometimes you want a leisurely dining experience and this isn't for that. But sometimes you don't. Sometimes you're like, look, I just want to get my tacos. And I know I'm going to want them around seven o'clock. So we go, boom, when I show up, the food's ready. I think that's kind of cool. Yeah, maybe I'm just so used to the old way we do things at restaurants, right? Something like Uber Eats coming to my house. Great. It's a wonderful service. Use it all the time. I pay a premium for that, obviously, because there are delivery fees involved. But the idea of being more efficient at a restaurant because you want to actually go to a place. You like the ambience. You like the music that they play, all that stuff, but be able to shave off, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes of your total dining experience. I don't know. Might be a hit. And there's a couple other things. First of all, you save the delivery fee, right? You're like, oh, I'll go there. I'll drive my own car to go there. But you also get the food. You get to eat the food right away. It's not a like, ah, it's going to get cold on the way home sort of situation. The other interesting thing is one assumes that the restaurants that are part of this are part of the Uber Eats program already. So they already have the system set up where they track the creation of the dinner and they notify through the app. Like that's part of the Uber Eats delivery service. So this is just cutting. This is saying use that same service. But instead of a guy coming in and picking it up and taking it to a person, the actual people who want to eat it will show up and get it. Now, Roger, I know your dad's a restaurant tour or was a restaurant tour. If they already have this system built in, does it cause any other problems other than the scheduling part, which I think could be a little tricky. I'll say this. It really depends on the restaurant, right? You have your fast food. You have your fast casual. You have your casual sit down and then you have your full service sit down. They open a bottle of wine and the rest. And so it really depends on which market they're aiming for. If they're aiming for a full service restaurant, I mean, for the restaurant tour, a lot of what you earn is also by upselling on different things like alcohol, beverages, appetizers, things that you might not necessarily. Oh, I want to order all this stuff before I go in. The other thing is if you want to get it during their rush, they might not have tables available for you to sit at. Yeah, I think what you're pointing out is this probably is meant for the fast food and fast casual restaurants, right? So you show up McDonald's and you just get your food. You don't have to stand in line. You don't have to wait. Your food's already ready or or you show up at the, you know, what is it? Bennigans? Is that even a thing anymore? Apple. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like that. Yeah. And you know, the other thing though for me from Uber might be a little bit of mission creep for the business. And I'm not necessarily sure if that will benefit Uber in the long run. Well, I bet you can make the other argument that it's diversification and that's a good thing. They're taking a system they already have in place with restaurants and figuring out a new way to use it that doesn't add a whole lot of complexity. But it's, but it is a different business. If you, if they continue, I mean, like doing that whole thing is a is a is. No, it's not. It's the Uber Eats system. Exactly. It's just they don't have to have people in cars to carton the food around. So in a way, it's exactly the same business they have. It's just actually simpler for Uber Eats. Yeah, but you also have to know what you want ahead of time. It just it's rethinking, rethinking dynamic on the consumer side, but not on the other side. I'm just talking about what Roger's saying about mission creep. I don't know if it's mission creep or not. I think it's an efficient use of a system they already have in place. U.S. Representative Maxine Waters sent a letter to Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg and Calibra CEO, David Marcus, formally requesting that Facebook cease implementation plans of the Libra cryptocurrency system. Cease implementation plans. Stop planning to implement this thing you're developing. The letter expressed concerns that without proper regulation, the service could pose a danger to global financial stability and be exploited by bad actors. Hearings on the project are scheduled in the U.S. Senate July 16th and the U.S. House July 17th. Yeah, so, okay, we get it. You don't understand how this is going to work. And so you say big company that has lots of power just put this all on hold until we understand how this is going to work, but it's not even in process yet. Calibra or the Libra Association are not ready. They don't have a launch date. They said sometime next year. So, ceasing implementation plans means nothing. This is a congressperson standing up and saying, I'm against the big tech. We know that's popular. There's no force behind it. There's no cost to her saying it. And really what's important is these hearings and what might or might not come out of them. I don't expect much to come out of them either, but that's where you could actually have an impact is in the hearings, not so much in the C-simplementation plans. Like, it doesn't make any sense to me. It's fine to plan. You would tell them to stop doing it, but they haven't started doing it yet. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting wording. But yeah, I think you're right. It's perhaps posturing more than actually being concerned that it's a bad idea. The European Union Air Safety Agency or EASA, they release certification guidelines for hybrid and electric vertical takeoff and landing or VTOL craft. Basic and enhanced certifications are now available for the craft, which carry fewer than 10 people and weigh 7,000 pounds or less. Both certifications are required to operate commercially. The regulations are not considered to be a full framework, but a step toward seeing what that final framework for VTOL commercial service would look like. Yeah, so in the world of air taxis, VTOL is one of the favored services, vertical takeoff and landing from the tops of buildings and such with a pilot probably to begin with, but eventually maybe autonomous. But this is less about the autonomous, more about like the question of, okay, they want to do these air taxis, but how are they going to get regulatory approval? Well, in Europe, this is the first step to regulatory approval. So I think it's a significant milestone that they're saying, all right, we're going to give some limited commercial approval to operate these as a pilot program. It's not the full framework yet, but it's a significant step along the way. Yeah, I kind of expect the same thing to happen stateside. I mean, as long as there aren't any issues that arise from this. Yeah, maybe, but Europe got there first. Good job, Europe, way to go. And I would expect to see this in a lot of places, not just in the United States, in Japan, Saudi Arabia. There's a lot of markets where people want to operate this sort of thing and getting that regulatory approval has been one of the big objections. You're not going to get approval for this. And so I think it's significant to note that. Chris Allen sent us a story from his hometown of Willoughby Hills, Ohio, where the fire department is piloting a tool called Haas Alert. That's H-A-A-S. Haas is a company that does this sort of vehicle to responder vehicle to vehicle emergency response connection. This implementation of it warns drivers using ways who are within a quarter-mile radius of an emergency vehicle so they can move over to allow it to pass. This could also help prevent accidents caused by people unexpectedly coming upon an accident. Vehicle collisions and struck by incidents are the second leading cause of line of duty death for firefighters after heart attacks. So this is an incredibly important safety procedure to improve. And on the one part, it's letting you know, hey, yeah, that's siren you're hearing. It is close to you. You should be on the look for it and pull over to the side of the road to let it by. But even more important than that is there is no siren because the emergency vehicle is parked and responding to the emergency. And if you're coming up at a high speed, you will benefit from knowing that that's ahead of you so that you can slow down. Yeah, and before the show, we were talking about using ways. And I was kind of the only one who was like, sometimes they say there's a car pulled over on the side of the road and it's not actually there and whatever. But I try to give as much feedback as I can while I'm in the process of going to and from. But you hear a siren and you immediately is like, where is it? Is it to the left or the right? I want to get out of the way. And so anything that builds this in and just helps keep EMT folks and anybody who's saving the world a little bit safer themselves is a good thing. Yeah, from what I can tell, Haas has a few clients. They have a 911 alert integration going on in Oregon. There's some tests going on in Michigan. I was just talking the other day with a friend of mine about vehicle to vehicle and whether that was dying on the vine because we hadn't heard a lot of news about it lately. So this is interesting that it would be vehicle to responder vehicle, particularly as a way of keeping it going. And this seems to be the first implementation that works to consumers. A lot of the other stuff that Haas has done is helping emergency responders connect with 911 calls and things like that and very important traffic regulation within the service. But this would tell the people, the other people on the road, hey, there's something you need to pay attention to. I mean, quarter mile radius, you have to be using ways that's obviously not going to affect everybody that might need to know about it, but it's another signal, right? And it's not replacing the need for sirens or paying attention, but it's another signal to help you deal with these kinds of situations. And I think that's really important. And one of my questions when I was reading the story was, okay, a quarter mile, do I hear a siren? That's a quarter mile away. I mean, it's fairly close, right? But again, you know, I don't know the way the wind's blowing or you're paying attention to something else or you're listening to music really loudly. So it just seems like it's a good, it's another good metric to have. Yeah, absolutely, especially because like we said, these emergency vehicles may be stopped and their sirens not on once they're stopped and actually responding to the emergency. And as often as they can, they try to pull it out of the road and get it off to the side safely. But that doesn't, that doesn't always happen. I was coming back from the dentist yesterday and suddenly traffic just went from 60 miles an hour down to five because a truck had hit another truck. And this was before any emergency response had been on the scene. It had just happened and there wasn't a chance for them to pull it off to the side of the road at that point. And it was dangerous. Like I was like, oh my gosh, am I going to hit this car ahead of me? Thankfully, I didn't. Thankfully, nobody hit me. But you know, that kind of stuff is scary enough as it is. Absolutely. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Amazon's Vice President of Public Policy, Brian Huseman, has responded with a letter to U.S. Senator Chris Coons. Senator Coons had a question about Amazon Voice Services privacy practices, especially after there was the reporting on how long Amazon kept your recordings and whether you had control over deleting them. In the letter, Huseman says that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings of users until they are manually deleted by users. So this is not a surprise that a lot of people are making a big deal out of this, that there isn't any automatic deletion of them. But I don't think Amazon ever promised that there was. It's nice that Google is now doing location information auto delete. It would be great if Amazon provides some automatic deletion, but at least they're upfront and clear that you have the right to go in and delete your transcripts. But we don't have any automatic deletion if you don't, if you don't they stay there and the reason they say they stay there is they use them to help improve the artificial intelligence that runs the Amazon Voice Services. All right. Now, there are also exceptions. Amazon says some records are kept by the skill provider even if deleted by users. Immediately, you may be starting to scream like, aha, they say you get to delete them yourself, but you don't. But here are the examples that Huseman gives. You have subscribed to Amazon Music. So they keep a record of your subscription and that you requested it. You have ordered a pizza and then you go in and delete all of your stuff from your history while you're waiting for the pizza. They keep a record that you ordered the pizza so that you still get the pizza. And they probably the third party skill provider like the Domino's probably has a record that you ordered the pizza because keeping records of transactions of commercial transactions is a standard thing that companies do. They so so no deleting your recorded history from an Amazon Echo will not cancel your pizza order or remove your purchase record from the Domino's Pizza System. Other examples recurrent alarms and reminders. If you say, hey, Echo cetera, an alarm every day at 7 a.m. to wake me up and it says great. Then you go in and delete all of your history. It doesn't delete your alarm because you want your alarm to go off and you'll be even matter if your alarm doesn't go off. So they very sensibly don't do that. They keep the record that you requested that alarm so that it keeps going off. Same thing for recurring reminders. Oh, remind me when it's Sarah's birthday every year on this date. It'll keep that even if you delete your history. So I feel like there are some things that Amazon could do better here, certainly, but but there's a little bit of overreaction to the fact that he said, oh, and we do keep some data that is even we do keep some records of data even though you've deleted your your history. Yeah, I had a somewhat similar not an argument but a conversation with a friend of mine. It wasn't about this particular story. It was about an email app called Superhuman, which is something that people pay for that that gives read receipts and some IP information about when an email was viewed and by whom and that sort of thing. And he was outraged. He was like, this is crazy. And I was like, but that's the service. It's it's a feature emails. Yeah. And I mean, and also it's not the only company that does this, but but okay. So I was like, all right, so why are you so mad if this is something that you can opt out of? Where's the problem? And this is the Amazon story and strikes me as very similarly like is is it just a messaging issue? Because if someone's upset about this, I don't know from what I understand. Amazon's like, hey, we're trying to do everything is, you know, we're trying to work with the human mind as much as possible. Yeah. If you delete a bunch of information, you still want your alarm, etc. How do they do that better? Yeah. And and what's what's interesting about this is I think Amazon tried to be very transparent to say, look, you can go in and delete all your data. And if you do, there are instances where third parties will still have records of things and that's what's cause because Amazon, I think is trying to be transparent and cover all their bases. Some people are leaping on stuff that is a little bit like saying, oh, no, I've been drinking all this dihydrogen oxide all the time. And it's like, oh, wait, you know what? That's water or or websites always know where I am by my IP address when I visit them because that's how the internet works. They need to deliver the webpage to an IP address. So if you don't have one, they can't deliver the webpage to you. There's a little bit of that flavor here. On the other hand, I don't think Amazon is blameless having some better privacy controls that allow things to auto expire would be good. I think that would be better than making you go in and delete it all yourself. I think allow allowing you to at least turn that on would be good. I know they want to keep the data for training purposes and giving you some some information maybe when you delete your records. So if you delete the alarm request from your history on your Echo app, maybe have it do a pop-up that says we have deleted this recording, but the alarm is still set and the record that you requested it is still there. Do you want us to get rid of that too? Like maybe give you a chance. If they really want to dot their eyes and cross their teeth, that'd be great. But I don't think they're criminal for keeping your alarms. No, and I also besides this particular story and highlighting some things like just, you know, as a user, think about this sort of stuff. Think about the way that the data still might be collected and and be sitting somewhere. Even if you think that you're deleting it that again, it's like that. That's something that we're, you know, we're, we're using new forms of technology. This is a great example of this like smart devices. How smart are they? You know, how much control do I have of my smart device and it's somewhat uncharted territory for a lot of folks. And in those cases, people tend to get a little paranoid, you know, or because you're unsure of how it's working. In this case, I just don't find any faults with Amazon. Yeah, you could not trust Amazon. And I think you probably should have a healthy distrust of Amazon. They're too big no matter, you know, what employees there would like to happen. There's just too many of them and there's too many profit motives. So hold their feet to the fire. Analyze this stuff. I think it's great that Senator Coons asked for this information, but when they give the information, you know, give it a fair evaluation and criticize them for the things like, well, you know what, you could do auto delete. Why don't you do that? You could let us know that some of these records are kept in better ways and give us options to even delete those records. That'd be great. But I don't think you pillory them for, you know, letting your pizza be delivered. I think that's, I think that's okay. Yeah, you make a good point. If you, if you don't trust Amazon, then you don't trust Amazon and using Amazon's products or something that you got to figure out for yourself. And this goes for lots of other companies, but Amazon being one of the biggest in the world, I, I, I see where it has, it's gotten some, some attention. Yeah. It's the right kind of attention. It, I don't even blame people for overreacting because they've been led to believe things were safe and then found out they weren't in many instances. And so it's just natural for humans to say like, okay, now I don't believe anything is safe from these tech companies, but hopefully we can, we can recalibrate to focus on the things that actually need to be fixed. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our sub reddit. You all need no fixing at all. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. If you hang out on Facebook, join our group facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech new show. All right, we love getting emails from you folks and they go right into the mail bag and then sometimes they come right back out and Sarah reads them on the show. Yeah, like right now, Peter wrote in and said, am I the only one thinking that this would be a great opportunity to make all our cars sound like the cars in the Jetsons. He's referring to our conversation yesterday about hybrid cars, electric cars being needing to have a little bit of sound so that, you know, the pedestrians and everyone else on the road are safe. Peter says not only would it feel futuristic the Jetsons car, at least a cartoon flying car future, but I suspect that the Doppler effect from the pulsing Jetsons car noise might make it easier for pedestrians to locate a moving car. Yeah, it doesn't seem like that's allowed. A lot of people have made this exact comment about Jetsons and similar like, oh, can I have my own ringtones on my car? It sounds like the laws are being designed to make the noise very identifiable as a car. Yeah, and that's that's part of the issue is if you if you don't have sight, you want something that immediately sounds to you like a vehicle so that you can like, oh, okay, there's a car coming. Whereas if it's the Jetson, you might think somebody's just playing a radio. You know, you might not identify what that noise is right away. Yeah, you want something a little bit more standardized talking about safety stuff. Governments like to keep it really clear and boring, but you know, that that avoids fatal mistakes in the future, which is what the whole point is about. But man, it really would be cool if we could like make our cars make Jetsons sounds. I would love that or anything. Maybe a DJ Khaled sound. Yeah, and another one. And another one. Another stop sign. Yeah, we the best car of the green light. My angels. I'm about to accelerate. Yeah. Hey, folks, we want to accelerate our Patreon because there's a choice to be made by you, how we fund the show. 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Tomorrow we're off to the fourth Friday. We're back with Rich Travolino and Amos filling in and their guest Keith Townsend. They all talk to you then. This show is part of the broadband network. Get more at frogpants.com.