 Coming up on DTNS, Google makes its quantum supremacy claim official. Apple Pay hits a milestone in why McDonald's is becoming an AI company. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane and Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were talking about all kinds of fun stuff regarding pets and their attitudes and habits and moving. And if you want to get that expanded conversation by Golly, it's easy. Yeah, just go sign up on the Good Day Internet level at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook CEO, perhaps you've heard of him, Mark Zuckerberg, told the US House Financial Services Committee that the Libra cryptocurrency, quote, will extend America's financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. He also claimed that China is preparing similar ideas. He also said that Libra is not a sovereign currency, won't launch anywhere until US regulators approve it and is in the hands of the Libra Association. Now, not Facebook. Hmm. It also looks like data. That's the thing I wanted to throw out there for Star Trek fans. Notice that today. Anyway, hey, Samsung update. Oh, wrong one. Sorry. Snapchat added 7 million daily active users and quarter three to reach 210 million. That is up 13 percent year over year. Snap revenue rose 50 percent year over year to 446 million losing four cents a share. Both numbers better than expected, by the way. Snapchat also added five million users outside of the North American area. Total time spent watching grew 40 percent year over year in the Discovery tab. More than 100 discover channels or discovery channels. So over 10 million viewers per month in quarter three, you don't use Snapchat, do you? Not any more. It's the Discover tab. There's no why. There's no Discovery tab. No. Oh, I want to see Shark Week on the Discovery tab. I think Discovery does have some shows on the. Samsung updated the software for its Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones to fix that problem that led to any fingerprint unlocking a phone. If you were using a certain type of screen protector, when you registered your fingerprint in the first place and then left it on the phone, Samsung is pushing notifications for the update to phones that have registered any kind of biometric data. The Bank of China and Alipay both pulled their fingerprint authorized functions from their apps on some Samsung devices because of this. If you're paying attention to how Huawei is doing, given its tumultuous year, the company shipped 200 million smartphones so far in 2019, which beat its previous record. The company's Mate X is now set for release in China on November 15th for a whopping equivalent of $2,400. And Microsoft posted its Q1 2020 earnings fiscal year, hence the 2020 with revenue of 33.1 billion net income of 10.7 billion. That's revenue up 14 percent net income up 21 percent. Office and cloud led the way, provided most of that rise because surface product revenue dipped 4 percent. No new products in this quarter. All the new products they've announced are coming or came off of the Q1 books and gaming revenue dropped 7 percent. Also, because just not a lot of new stuff in that gaming department for Microsoft. Yeah, we're in between things there in the game side. All right, let's talk a little more about the quantum of supremacy. The new born James Bond mashup movie. I can't wait for it. I'll be there day one. Actually, Google published a paper in the journal Nature claiming the company's 54 cubit sycamore quantum computer has achieved quantum supremacy. A term I am still not totally coming to terms with. Anyway, it can perform a calculation in this case, a technique for determining random numbers in 200 seconds. That would take the world's most powerful classic computer and like normal computers, 10,000 years to perform. This is the paper inadvertently published on NASA's website a month ago. However, IBM researchers have proposed a method in which a classical computer could achieve that that calculation in a practical amount of time. A few days of using the hard drive space in addition to RAM and other optimizations perform that in 2.5 days to be exact, rather than much more lengthy 10,000 years. Oh, yeah, that seems more reasonable. Just a couple of days. Yeah, I mean, 10,000 years. Tom made a really good point on the morning show today. It came on and talked about this a bit on the segment, but you made a real good, a really good argument for that still kind of practical if it's only three days. That's not that bad. It's something you could do. You could do it. So the idea of supremacy, the reason they use the term supremacy is not about quantum computers being better than classical computers. It's that quantum computers right now are clunky and they can't do anything better than a regular computer. So the supremacy is when do we get to the point where there's one thing that quantum computers can do that classical computers can't and can't is defined as generally impractical. Taking 10,000 years to solve an equation may be great for the Stuart Brand folks who build 10,000 year clocks, but for most of us, that's too long to wait. So that was a fair comparison to say, OK, quantum computers can do this one thing, that one thing ain't totally useful. Maybe there's lots of ways to generate random numbers. But for demonstration purposes, we found a thing that quantum computers can do better. But as we told you yesterday, IBM says we think we can do this in two and a half days. Now, IBM hasn't done it. They've just proposed a method to do it that makes sense. So now somebody's going to have to like carry that out on a classical computer and show that it works the way IBM says it would work. And then that would undermine Google's claim to quantum supremacy. And we'd be back to waiting for that milestone to be reached. That milestone to be reached is just kind of a marker that says quantum computers have advanced to X point. It doesn't really mean that they're useful or practical or going to start breaking all your passwords or anything like that. Moving on to mobile payments. E-marketer reports that Apple Pay has passed Starbucks mobile payment as the most popular mobile payment app in the United States. The first time a generic mobile payment app has led this category. E-marketer estimates that 30.3 million Apple Pay users in 2019 are exist now compared to Starbucks's 25.2 million, followed by Google Pay with 12.1 million. And then Samsung Pay with 10.8 million. Apple Pay is expected to be available in 70 percent of U.S. retailers by the end of 2019. U.S. users are estimated to spend one thousand five hundred forty five per year per person using proximity mobile payments this year, which is up 24 percent over last year. That is quite a jump. Yeah, this is another one of those milestones, right, where we're looking at something and going, oh, we wondered if people were really going to use this, if Apple Pay was going to be the thing people would use, and it turns out, yes, they were going to use it and they're using Apple Pay more than other stuff. Can I buy coffee at Starbucks with Apple Pay now? That's a great question. That is a good question. I think you can. I think you can. Because I think they have the NFC card readers for other things. That would make sense, right? Like, that's how I feel this is going to go. So all of these big, these big numbers of Apple's more than double to the next guy, but well, not more than double. I guess 25.2 is closer to that. But anyway, all these other ones, Google Play, Samsung Pay, it'd be cool if every place just if one became prominent enough, let's say 10 million or more people using it, it'd just be cool to be able to just support it. They're just readers. Like, yeah, I don't have a problem with that. And that's the thing, right? CBS had it where it would work and then they stopped at work because they wanted to do their own thing. And then that thing never caught on. So they went back to letting Apple Pay work. And when Apple Pay works, generally Google Pay and Samsung Pay also work because they work all the same way. Although I have, I have complained about this on the show before. The natural food store that is near me, which is wonderful. And I frequent it often every so often. I kind of, you know, it's early in the morning. Maybe I'm walking the dog. I don't have my wallet on me. They only accept Samsung Pay. They don't accept Apple Pay. And it has gotten me into trouble more than once. They're not using the NFC system. Samsung Pay can use magnetic stripe to because it emulates the magnetic stripe. That's why that. But again, that said, you know, it has it has become a conundrum once or twice for me, you know, in in various places. But for the most part, yeah, Apple Pay has improved my life because, you know, I've got an iPhone with me at all times. Well, China, we know you're laughing at this because you use WeChat for everything. That's fine. Let's check in with Russia. Russia's Yandex, most well known for its search engine, announced Wednesday. It'll begin testing driverless cars in the US next summer. Yandex cars will offer driverless taxi service during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit from June 6th to the 21st. And then they'll keep those cars over in the United States for further testing. Yandex is creating its cars in collaboration with Hyundai. There's a couple of areas in Russia, Skolkovo and Inopolis that have working test zones right now where people can use Yandex driverless taxis. Yandex also has a license to test driverless cars in Israel and is considering an IPO for Yandex taxi, its joint venture with Uber that would also use driverless cars and maybe some of Uber's technology there. So just just kind of thought this was interesting because it points out that while you probably see Waymo and Uber in the headlines for driverless cars, especially in the United States, there are a lot of companies testing this in a lot of parts of the world. I'm super curious about I know this is not not even that important because we're talking about driverless is sort of the key feature here. I want to know what these look like. Like I want to see a Russian driverless car up close. And I want it looks like a Monday. Yeah, I was going to say, have you seen a Hyundai? Yeah, I guess it's like you kind of know what it looks like. I guess, you know, when I was in high school, it's not like a Soviet driverless car. Well, I think that's where your head is. Where my head is, you're not wrong. I'll admit it. I have Soviet ideas in my head. I drove a Ugo for a while, which is a Ugo Slavia car. But I was a piece of crap. The steering wheel came off during a date. It was the worst thing ever. I'm not saying these are going to be bad like that. I just have it in my head that they're boxy and mean looking. No, they look like a Hyundai. In fact, you do a search for a Yandex driverless car in Google Images and you'll see tons of cars that they say index taxi and Cyrillic on them. That's the only weird thing. What I think is interesting about this is it's Yandex is I mean, it's you might not use it, you know, it depends on where you are in the world. But that is a very big search engine used by millions and millions of people. And the fact that the company is like, OK, well, we're going to expand into driverless tech, the way that a lot of other companies from other parts of the world have done the same just goes to show you how much people want to be at the forefront of this new thing. We're talking about driverless technology, driverless technology. You know, they're very small tests that are going on in the US, for example. But they're small and and we're all still kind of scratching our heads, being like, OK, how's this going to work? Is it safe? Is it going to be OK? And a company like Yandex, a huge company, which you don't necessarily associate with any car technology. Well, you know, there they are with everybody else trying to get in here. You guys are right. They look like Hyundai Elantra hatchbacks. The Chrome 78 browser launched for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS offering an image gallery, themes and options for suggested shortcuts, curated shortcuts, or if you're like me, no shortcuts at all. That's not true. I like shortcuts. A forced dark mode setting will enable dark mode on all websites using color and version theory to keep them readable. Google's password checkup extension will soon be integrated, although it's not in there now, prompting you to change a password if necessary. Click to call, let you click on a phone number on your desktop and sends it to an Android phone. Chrome 78 is testing DNS over HTTPS as well. And last one is what got him in trouble with advertisers in the UK and elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's I think I'm running it now. And I think it's a little pepier or maybe I just feel like it is. Yeah, I thought this was interesting, given our conversation yesterday about Firefox 70, where all of the new features that we focus on with Firefox 70 are security and privacy. Firefox is out there like we're making this more secure. We're making this more private. We're letting you see these kind of trackers. Not surprisingly, that's not the big feature of Chrome. Although there are a couple, like you said, the Google password word checkup extension coming in. It's not like Google doesn't want to make things more private and secure. But if privacy and security are top of mind, Firefox definitely compares better between these two versions coming out within a couple of days of each other. I got to say it is so interesting to me. And this is coming from somebody who was like, I don't like the dark mode thing. I don't want that. You know, it just like it makes everything look like hacker news or whatever. I've actually I've really come around. It's more readable. And the fact that it's sort of like we now have a forced dark mode for websites. Even if the websites don't actually want you to have dark mode, we'll do it for you. It is that is that is a feature that like I would have chuckled about not that long ago, but now I'm like, I really like it and had tipped to sky. You're the one to text to me the other day about seeing the story saying that the OLED screens were, you know, maybe saving some battery life because of dark mode. Yeah, they seem seems to actually be accurate. I know I'm getting longer battery life in my 10 that I used to. But I thought it was just me having, again, some sort of observation bias or something seemed better. And I've also come to like dark mode on desktop, on tablet, on phone. And I was so not into this when it was first happening. And I don't know what Kool-Aid I drank, but I'm totally into dark mode. And I'm glad who's doing this. So yeah, if you're watching the video, I'm going to go dark mode now. There you go. There it is. Nice. You've filled our video. Yeah, looking good. Well, Sarah, what's up with Google Stadia? Oh, well, Tom, glad you asked. Google announced that it cannot fulfill all pre-orders for its Google Stadia streaming service in time for its November 19th launch date. Stadia's Founders Edition customers are the only customers that are being promised delivery. A Google representative told ours, Technica, that Founders Edition shipping starts the 19th and will be fulfilled in order received with Premier Edition shipments shipping in order after founders. Google told the Verge that it expects all founders and Premier Edition pre-orders to be shipped within the first two weeks of launch. But ours, Technica says, if you try to order premium right now, it gives you a shipping date sometime in December. So they're not rolling all these out of what, Scott? No, I'm not super annoying because I'm not into the first round of this. I kind of need to see it settle in on other platforms, PC in particular, browsers, all that stuff needs to happen before I get really on board. But it is a little weird. You're talking about a controller and a dongle that's basically a Chromecast, and that's it. And I'm not saying that everything's easy to make all the time, but it seems like Google should have the wherewithal to get that done. And I don't think it's because too many people bought them. I think part of it is they're charging like the same price for both editions, and that's weird. Although you get the founders edition first, if so, they should have realized that more people would want the founders edition because it ships first, right? That makes sense to me. There are a few reasons why this could happen. One is they just underestimated the interest. They made a certain amount of controllers and more people were interested in signing up than they thought. That that can happen to any company, right? Because you make a guess. That one's hard to swallow, though. Like, well, because because like the press release based on Google Stadia was a very big deal when you build hardware, though, you want to have a precise amount of hardware order. You don't want to overorder. It's very important. And there's no like, you know, accepted way of saying like, well, we made a big press release and it's going to be this many people, right? That could be a lot of people and still even more people. It doesn't take that many more people. I suppose I guess I guess I just, you know, when I see that it's Google, you think, well, if you're going to be bullish, be bullish. Well, if you're Google, you can't make mistakes. This is almost what you're saying, right? You're so big. Why would you make a mistake? Actually, there's there's value in saying that because I think that they need to be this needs to be as smooth as possible for them to compete in the way that they're planning on and to take on Microsoft and XCloud and to take on PlayStation and any other gaming platform that sees Stadia as the hot new next thing. I just think they have to be careful about this stuff. So I'm a little bugged on that end. But in terms of like supply and demand, I totally get it. Normally, the way this works is they know how many they're going to make exactly and then when they sell out, they sell out and you stop selling them. And you say they'll be back when they're back. In this case, it doesn't sound like they did that. It sounds like they're doing a lot of estimating and I don't know why that is, but that probably has something to do with it. I didn't even get to the other reasons, right? It's it's and I think this is this is emblematic of the situation. Like Google can't do anything right, except be perfect. Because it could be that they they didn't get the order right. It could be that there was an unforeseen problem in the supply chain that slowed down the orders. And so maybe they had some padding, but but they didn't get the yield out of the factories that they thought they could get, which Google not being great, you know, not being a big producer of hardware and not previously producing controllers could be part of it. And it could be that they want to have fewer people in here because they want to limit what can go wrong when a lot of people start using Stadia at once. And the more you can control the influx of people, the better chance you have of making sure those servers work well and those servers have to work well. I mean, just look at how we're we're talking about Google with the shipments part of it. This thing cannot go down. It can't have latency problems or people are going to rip it apart. Yeah, I'm nervous about that. We'll see. You think you're nervous. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines dot com article in New York Times today called Would You Like Fries With That? McDonald's already knows the answer. Ha ha ha. Because McDonald's has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring artificial intelligence companies. We've talked about Dynamic Yield, which does AI for drive through orders. We've talked about a print a voice activated platform for taking orders. So it recognizes your voice. You don't have to talk to a person that can handle more orders that way by doing voice recognition. McDonald's has a tech hub in Silicon Valley called McD Tech Labs. That's not unusual. Domino's has their own R&D innovation center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Engineers in data science all working on lots of things like voice recognition solutions. One of the things they're talking about in this article are smart drive through boards that take into account things like the time of day, the weather, popularity of certain menu items, the length of the weight and change the menu based on that. So for instance, it's simple, very simple version of this on a hot day. I might show you a soda on a cold day. I might show you coffee. Transactions now also have recommendations suggesting what else to order? Kind of like Amazon, like, oh, I see you ordered a Big Mac. Would you also like Fries With That? Right. That kind of thing. But on a grand AI scale, there's even the idea of recognizing license plate numbers with your opt-in saying, is it OK if we keep using your license plate numbers so that when you pull up to the menu, the things you like to order are up there and you can see what options are available. Personally, I would love that. It is where it's being tested, leading to larger orders. So it's working. McDonald's is selling more stuff to people. I kind of want to go test it. Does anyone else want to just go over there and just go, you think I want fries, but I'm going to say I don't want any fries. You know what I mean? Listen, McDonald's is I don't go through the McDonald's drive through all that often, but it does happen. And I'm with Tom. If you know what I got last time, it's probably what I want to get this time because, you know, I'm a creature of habit. So those sorts of things actually I find helpful when it comes to what I'm going to see on the board, what, you know, things like time of day, temperature, what might be offered to me as a beverage, you know, is it hot? Is it cold? You know, we're going to try to help you. That's that doesn't really bother me. The whole kind of license plate number identifying customers, which is opt in again, doesn't mean it doesn't mean, you know, anybody has to freak out. You have to say, you know, I'm interested in this. That is even if you are interested in it and even if that does actually make your ordering process better going forward. That does give me pause. But then again, why wouldn't McDonald's want to do this? Yeah, all companies do this. Totally, totally. And I think it's important to New York Times has a really snotty tone to this article like people that eat McDonald's. Am I right? And just kind of take it potshots at the healthiness of it. But I think that's more interesting to think about this story from the idea of a restaurant that is selling you food, whether you like the food, hate the food, whatever, it doesn't matter. This is interesting because a lot of restaurants when you drive up, the menus are organized to try to get you to order certain things. And that frustrates the crap out of me because I never want to order sodas. So it never makes sense for me to get their combo and then I have to hunt around to find the other stuff. If they could recognize my license plate and go, OK, this guy, I don't even don't even show him the combos. It's fine. He just orders all the card. I would love that. But you're right. This is going to cause people to start thinking about restaurants as tech companies, as privacy violators, because they're collecting data on you. And in this story, Daniel Henry, the chain's chief information officer says, you just grow to expect that in other parts of your life. Why should it be different when you're ordering a McDonald's? We don't think food should be any different than what you buy on Amazon. Oh, Mr. Henry, which is he has a point. He does. He actually does have a point. At the same time, I think that that is a very convenient way for McDonald's to be like, well, Amazon does it. We can do it. Also, read the room, Daniel Henry. What's happening right now is people are getting upset at companies for doing the things you're saying we expect in other parts of our life. Granted, it's totally hypocritical in the part of the human race to be like, I'm not going to read the terms of service. I want things for free and just suddenly wake up one day and go, you did what with my information? But that's what's happening. And so if you want to be a tech company in that sense, I think that's smart. I think it's a great way to make sure that your restaurant survives. But I wouldn't go around saying, and we're not going to do anything different. I think you need to actually say, and we're going to respect your privacy as they are with the opt-in, right, on the driver's license. We're going to let you handle your data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That that would be truly forward thinking. Yeah, that's some super, super sketchy language that he's using there. And I don't like it at all. But I'm kind of a Tom. I sort of want this like I kind of want smarter destinations for lots of things, not just yeah, yeah. And food makes the most sense. Like this seems like the good next step for the sort of thing. I think that tech is interesting. But they have got to get out ahead. Like you said, read the room and get out ahead of this stuff. Not just in language and PR, but like showing us what their plans are. Very explicitly regarding security or else you're just you're just asking for it. They're going to get just killed on this if they don't do that. So well, and one of the things of the New York Times article that we didn't really touch on was that apparently the fast food industry is is is lagging. You know, it's it's it's not growing, it's shrinking. So of course, a company like McDonald's, you know, arguably at the forefront of fast food in general would be like, OK, well, we're going to get somebody through the drive through already. How do we get them to, you know, like buy a couple more things, you know, based on what they know it's it's the exact same thing as as, you know, ad tracking, it really is. And I think it's very smart on the on on on the company's sake. I just, you know, I don't I don't know. I don't know how many people will be outraged about this. Will care about this or will love it? Well, it depends on how they do it, right? And the answer is it could be both. Domino's is trying to say we're a tech company that also sells food in restaurants. We're an online company. That's the mentality that a lot of these companies are starting to have. And we're just talking about drive through and ordering here. There's also understanding what things are being ordered, what kinds of flavors are emerging and knowing before the audience or before your customers do what kinds of food they're going to want to have. What should we add to the menu? When should the McRib come back? All of that stuff is a way to get people to come into the restaurant more often. Because it's not like people aren't eating food. It's just that they aren't necessarily eating your kind of food. And you you want to use this technology as a way to make sure you're super serving the audience that can mean better restaurant experiences. It can also mean privacy violations or, you know, leading to unhealthy behavior, trying to encourage unhealthy behaviors, et cetera. But those are all the kinds of controversies you can expect to see erupt around this stuff, especially if you read this New York Times article. You can tell they're just salivating at the idea of having stories to write about where they can expose the privacy violations of future restaurants. Well, privacy violation stories are very welcome in our subreddit as our other stories that you care about. You can submit your, in fact, they are. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Thanks to everybody who submits. You help us make our shows every day. We're also on Facebook. Join our group, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. You want your voice on our show, email us. And then we might read your email in the mailbag. Indeed. This one comes from Paul, although Johannes and a few others wrote in about our conversation the other day about why not, why don't Google and Amazon review voice apps that are updated for security reasons? You know, why don't they act more like an app store, the way that we know app stores to go? Paul says, well, it would be really hard to do that. Voice apps work more like a web app than a native phone app. That is to say, most of the code in a voice app lives on a server. And then the voice hardware acts like a web browser, just relaying voice commands to that server so you could get an app approved and then change your server code to respond differently without ever having to go through the approval process. There are some changes that would require getting re-approved, but most changes can be done without this. So to implement what you suggest, Google and Amazon would have to sample requests that look for bad behaviors, sort of like how an antivirus works. It's probable, but it would be really expensive. On another note, as for reasons not to switch to Firefox. This is Paul just, he had lots of ideas. The developer tools aren't as good. They've gotten much better recently, but Chrome still kills it there. I'd be willing to hear arguments against this, though. Commits me to use Firefox, please. Just keep using it. The more you use it, the easier it gets. And, you know, I mean, if you have to develop on Chrome, then you can use it for your development, but just surf on Firefox. On to the other stuff. Johann and a few others wrote in pointing out, and I knew this, I just forgot it because our own Daily Tech headline skill sits on our server. So, of course, I can go in and change that any time I want. And Amazon doesn't know. So it would have to be a different situation. It's not like Amazon can't afford to have the space to copy this over and host it and scan it, but maybe they just don't want to go through the expense that that takes to monitor. So that's a very good point. Thank you, everybody who pointed that that out to us. And thank you, Paul, for writing in. Absolutely. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Tony Glass, Ruchan Brantley and Adam Carr. And thank you, Scott Johnson. Yay. You know what that means on Wednesday? It means everything went fine. If I get thanked, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me as always. If people are like, man, what's the other weird stuff does that guy do? I have a great place to go. It's called frogpants.com. You'll find all the shows, all the art, all the projects, everything I got going on right there at frogpants.com. And if you're just trying to yapp at me online, you can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. 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