 Coming up on DTNS, the first fully autonomous cars hit public streets in Houston, why Microsoft is not worried about Sony. And do you have the right to do whatever you want with data that is publicly accessible? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 6, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. We were just talking about DC movies. We were talking about stories that maybe we should or shouldn't include in DTNS. All kinds of good stuff on good day. Internet become a member and get that show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nintendo has postponed Japanese reservations for the animal crossing version of the switch from February 8 to an undetermined date. Nintendo said production and shipment delays were inevitable due to the shutdowns in China related to the coronavirus. That will also affect other switch models Joy-Con controllers and Ring Fit Adventure in Japan. Nintendo does not anticipate any effects on global supplies, including Europe and North America. Huawei announced its suing Verizon in both the Eastern and Western District Court in Texas over violation of 12 Huawei patents related to network operations. Netflix has added an option to turn off the autoplay trailers that play when you stay in a movie or television selection. Here's what you do. Go to manage profiles, choose your profile and uncheck autoplay previews while browsing on all devices and then let out a deep resonance sigh of relief knowing that you've done a good deed for yourself and your family. Strategy analytics estimates Apple shipped 30.7 million Apple watches last year. And then strategy analytics notes with a tongue, maybe a strategy analytic equivalent of a cheek that all Swiss watch brands combined shipped fewer 21.1 million watches last year. Yeah, stick to Army Knives. Twitter reported that it earned 15 cents a share on revenue of $1.01 billion in Q4, a new quarterly high analysts expected revenue of $997 million on earnings of $0.29 a share. The company reported monetizable daily active users increased 21% on the year to $152 million citing improvements to the algorithmic timeline, surfacing relevant content and better notifications. Advertising revenue increased 12% on the year to $885 million with total ad engagement up 29%. Twitter's earnings were all good. That's boring. Right? The beta release of iOS 13.4 references something called the car key API. And according to the system's internal files, car key would let iPhone and Apple Watch users unlock lock and start a vehicle just like a fob. The feature would work automatically, would not require face ID authentication, meaning you pair it with the car and you put it in your wallet app kind of like transit cards will work in some locations. And that means a dead device would still work with car key even if your battery ran out. Alright, let's talk a little more about another thing showing up in some Apple beta software developer Steve Trout and Smith got eagle eye eagle eye this Steve Trout and Smith over the years. Notice that Apple's Xcode 11.4 beta has an option for universal purchases. That means if a developer so chooses, they could offer you the Mac OS version of an app when you buy any of the iOS versions and vice versa. Previously, apps could only automatically be added across iOS, iPad OS, watch OS and TV OS, but not Mac OS. So essentially, we're putting Mac OS in that category. I presume this would work if you had a TV OS like app as well. Developers who create a new Mac Catalyst app will have the option on by default, though they can choose to unbuttle. Catalyst is that program that makes it easy to port an iOS app to Mac OS. So when you do the porting, it'll just say great, we're making this universal. You can unbundle it if you need to but by default, it would be an existing Mac apps can be added to an existing iOS app as a bundle as well. So if you previously had two apps and you had to sell them separately and you want to provide them, you can. Will they do it though, Justin? That's the question. Are developers going to jump on this? You know, it's always been a curiosity, right? That Mac apps had their own wild ecosystem that worked very, very well. You had a very, you know, well regarded group of developers that would write for Mac apps, then iOS comes out or phone apps come out. And now all of a sudden, you have this universe that really changes the world. They introduced the Mac app store and there has been this disconnect where, you know, because it was so day-regored to go download an app from a developer's website, the Mac app store has not had at least in my anecdotal experience, the kind of it just works sort of experience as it would be. But maybe now, maybe now that it is just so much dirt dumb simpler, it will be a little bit more seamless. The dominoes have to all fall. First of all, enough developers of popular apps have to bundle the Mac OS app in. If a bunch of developers do that, and suddenly one day people are like, whoa, I've got options for all these Mac apps that I paid for on iOS. This is great. That'll draw more people into the Mac app store. More often people will download something on iOS and get it on Mac if they want it. And that could rejuvenate the Mac OS app store, which is a little Borobund right now. Developers also might decide, you know what, those are two different ecosystems and we want to charge people separately because, you know, Catalyst is great, but it's a little difficult to do. And I just don't want to bother with that. That's that is also possible. I'm not sure which one's going to happen. Yeah. Google updated its Maps app to mark the 15th anniversary of the service. The app now features two additional tabs at the bottom, contribute, lets users add information to maps and updates which show you recommendations from locals or other Google Maps users you follow. The for you tab has been renamed saved. Coming in March, the app promises improved crowdsource information for public transit like temperature, wheelchair accessibility, women only cars and if there is on board security, the AR live view mode will add a red dot to show you where and how far away you are from a destination. In descending order of of my not caring, I care the least about local recommendations in Google Maps. I don't trust them. I never have. Maybe someday they'll get better, but I don't care about any of that personally. The AR live view mode right now just shows you arrows, having the dot up there to be like, oh, I'm headed that way. All right, that's kind of cool, not essential, but kind of cool. Having more details on the on the train stuff, though, super, super helpful when I was in Japan, having that map of like, oh, this car is usually the one you want to board to make it quicker to get to your next transfer. This train is usually crowded at this time of day. And maybe if you go to the end cars, it might not be so crowded. That's super, super important. And so, you know, having those women only cars like they do in Japan and India, if you're a woman knowing which car that is that could be helpful. I don't know how much I care about temperature, but more details, the better. I'm cool with that. You want to know what I would love for that AR live view feature to just do is just more seamlessly work into the basic view of the phone. I mean, it doesn't need to be its own dedicated mode. If it's literally just highlighting the side of the screen in red of like where I just need to start. That's 99% of what people use that feature for is literally just to just the first step. That's all we ever need is just the first step out of wherever we're coming from. Microsoft's president of gaming Phil Spencer told protocol side note protocol and new tech site from the same folks who started Politico, not from the same company, but from the same people. That's interesting. Anyway, Phil Spencer told protocol. When you talk about Nintendo and Sony, we have a ton of respect for them, but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward. That's not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony, but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position. I guess they could try to recreate Azure, but we've invested tens of billions of dollars in cloud over the years. Now that's interesting because Sony has had cloud services longer than the Xbox and PlayStation now is a customer of Microsoft Azure. That happened last year. So that's very interesting for Phil Spencer to be saying. Throwing Amazon in there is also weird. Amazon has Twitch, of course, but I'm not sure that's what he's talking about. AWS powers much of the industry for cloud gaming. So maybe he's talking about that as compared to Azure. But Amazon also on some of the game studios now and is expected to have its first games coming out in the next few months. And there have been a lot of rumors that Amazon might start its own game streaming service. So is he trying to out Amazon and that? Anyway, back to Spencer. He says, I don't want to be in a fight over format wars with those guys while Amazon and Google are focusing on how to get gaming to 7 billion people around the world. Okay. But in August, Spencer told GameSpot about cloud gaming. I think this is years away from being a mainstream way people play. And I mean years, like years and years. He was specifically referring to Microsoft's own Project X cloud. So when he's like, I don't want to get format wars. That sounds like, Hey, people should just be able to play whatever games they buy on whatever service they want. And then the service you would think might be like, Oh, Google Stadia, some potential Amazon service or Microsoft Project X cloud. But less than a year ago, he was saying years and years and years away. I don't know. Justin, maybe he's still saying years away, but is is thinking in the Sasha universe of we're cloud services company here. So that's the future of our gaming. So let's remember that when Sacha Nadella came into power at Microsoft, there were rumors that he wanted to cut Xbox loose that he did not see that there was the future in that particular vector. So I can see where now that we are about we are approaching another generation of consoles and there is certainly crackling around that how many times are they going to be able to sell a new consoles? We've already seen them refresh them in a more of incremental pace so people will be more excited to buy them year by year. I can see where he's coming from. Now I don't quite know if this is the way to do it because while Microsoft would have natural advantages, they're going to have Azure. They're going to have the experience of running their own game consoles. I don't know if when that happens that that's not just the platform that Azure Azure is selling cement, right? Like they are so they are going to want to sell do Sony. They're going to want to sell the Nintendo. They're going to be very competitive in their contracts for services like Sony already has with them or anybody else who wants to get into this game. So I don't know where Microsoft naturally would have an advantage beyond initial development for a platform that obviously is in-house. Yeah, on the longer term thinking this all makes sense to me, which is Phil Spencer saying, I think Sony and Nintendo might be fighting the last war, the console war. Sony more than Nintendo probably. Nintendo is a bit of an exception. And we're going to fight the next war, which is cloud streaming. Here's the thing when he talks about format wars that I'm going to pay attention to. I'm going to look in for is Microsoft going to release its games cross platform. Will there be no Xbox exclusives? Will they say, you know what, just like Satya started putting office everywhere, we're just going to put our games everywhere because winning the console war is not important to us anymore. It's just that would be putting his money where his mouth is. It's just not modern man. Yeah. Reuters reports that according to sources Xiaomi, Huawei and BBK, which make Vivo and Oppo are working together on a global developers service alliance designed to let makers of games, apps, movies and music to upload to all of their app stores simultaneously. The brands operate their own app stores for China and offer them outside China to alongside the Google Play Store, a prototype website seen by Reuters claims that the GDSA would cover nine regions, including India, Indonesia and Russia. The alliance was reportedly set to launch in March. Xiaomi, Huawei, Vivo and Oppo represent a combined 40% of all smartphone shipments in 2019. Yeah. Now, they didn't say Kenya. They didn't say Nigeria, but I would expect those to be one of those nine regions as well. Because Indonesia and India, particularly are huge rising markets, India, the biggest. And if you're going to make some headway with an app store that, you know, a new app store effort, you want to make it there. This is definitely born of Huawei's troubles with the United States. Huawei wants to solve the problem of being reliant on the Google Play Store internationally. They can sell out their inventory of current devices. Then they have to be reliant on occasional waivers from the United States. And they don't want to be held hostage to that. So if they can take what they've done in China with their own app store and make it easier for developers to populate that in these regions, they're not worried about Europe so much, I don't think, as they are the regions that are on the rise, maybe they can get these regions to think of their app store as the most important. And in order to do that, they get Xiaomi and BBK on board so that more developer interest comes. If a developer is like, oh, I'm going to hit all five of these brands at the same time. Well, that might be worth it. And that would help populate an international store for Huawei in a way that, even as dominant as Huawei is, might not happen just on its own. Yeah, I think that this makes a whole lot of sense for them to partner. By the way, a separate Huawei story. There were reports today that there was a very tense phone call between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom about that Huawei decision. So we have certainly not seen the last of the United States' crusade against Huawei. For the first time ever, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has approved a plan for fully autonomous electric vehicles on the street. Nuro will be deploying 5,000 vehicles with no human on board, no controls, no seats, no side view mirrors. They were given a waiver to the normal safety requirements by the U.S. and HTSA. Now, these these vehicles are restricted to no more than 25 miles per hour. They're short trips. They have to be on pre-mapped neighborhood streets and they will be monitored remotely by humans who can take remote control if necessary. These aren't the first. We've been talking about Nuro. If you've been following DTNS, you're ahead of this game. People don't talk about Nuro enough. They tested these in Scottsdale with grocery delivery for Kroger. They've tested them in Houston before. This is a big deal. The R1 was the vehicle they were testing in the past. The R2 will roll out in Houston to deliver things like Domino's Pizza and groceries from Walmart. Those are some of their partners. Public road tests will begin there in the coming weeks. So this is happening soon and Nuro has agreed to greater government oversight in order to get this waiver and committed to community outreach to talk to the public about what their vehicles do, how they'll act. Don't be surprised when you see them. It took three years for Nuro to get this approval. But if this was Waymo or Uber, this would be your top headline all over the place. Why is Nuro under the radar? Because it's not flashy. It's two former Google autonomous car engineers. So it's got a little bit of splash, but it's not flashy. Its cars are not sexy looking. They're little shuttle looking things. They basically call them robots and that's what they are. They're very large robots and they're not bringing us. They're not taking passengers, which would be the next big step. They're just delivering stuff. Is this the thing that I thought of when when reading this is that are they a very, very, very tasty acquisition target? Because if you have a thing that is very rare, right, that they have this approval to do stuff, they are moving at a speed that that nobody has seen. Granted, they decided to take the non passenger route. And that is likely why they're able to get this kind of this kind of approval. I look at that and I say, you know, at some point, I mean, are they going to be so valuable that they're unbiable or is this just a natural pickup for, let's say Uber, which, for example, has a lot of problems on their hand currently because they are so passenger centric and driver centric. Now, that's interesting. Does Uber buy would Uber want to buy them in order to get the good relationship with the NHTSA? That's possible. Walmart certainly would be a potential acquisition. Yeah. Provide, you know, because Walmart is already working with them and Walmart likes to do that. They like to work with you first. And then if things work out, maybe buy you Amazon could certainly come in and snap them up and just add them to the supply chain. The fact that we have so many different people that you could say, oh, my God, obviously they would want to be in the in the neuro business, I think kind of spells out what you have correctly identified as, you know, the leaders advantage here for them. And the fact that they aren't a splashy and it's only the very wise listeners of Daily Tech News Show that are going to be able to tell their friends about how much neuro leads this race. Yeah. The next time you hear someone say, well, it's going to be a long time before they let these vehicles on the road without people in them say that it's already happening. It's happening in Houston right now. H town, baby. No people, no people in them, no passengers. That's the big thing. Yeah. But you can get your Domino's pizza delivered by a robot in Houston. So there you go. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Last month, the New York Times reported on a company called Clearview AI. We talked about it here on the show. Clearview AI offers image recognition, search in a database. Apparently some 600 law enforcement agencies are customers. They search through a database of three billion images that have been scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, Twitter, and a few other online platforms. We talked when we talked about it before about is this useful? What are the safeguards we should have? Should they be prevented from doing that? But Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube. I know YouTube is owned by Google, but they both sent their own have sent cease and desist letters to Clearview, stating that the scraping of the images violated their terms of service and have demanded the Clearview stop accessing and using the images in an interview with CBS Clearview CEO, Hoentang thought, argued that the company has a First Amendment right to access data in the public domain. They're like, look, we're not going breaking into somebody's Facebook account. These are publicly available. Anybody can go and look at this stuff. Facebook argues that its terms forbid any scraping. YouTube says its terms explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person. At issue is whether your ability to access publicly available information gives you the right to collect, store, manipulate and otherwise use that information. What most of the terms of service from YouTube and Twitter and others say is you're not allowed to automatically collect and harvest information without prior approval. That's the key. Now, this is something that all search engines do. They go out and they scrape information to create their database, especially image search, right? Google image search, DuckDuckGo image search, all the image searches are scraping data. The difference is, and Google pointed this out when someone asked them about it, is there's a file called robots.txt that you can put in your route that says no crawling my website, please. Do not go onto my website and take stuff and that keeps you out of a search engine. There does not seem to be from Clearview the same option. They are not respecting a robots.txt file. I don't know. Maybe that's the solution to this. Justin has Clearview come out and say, look, you don't want us to access at Facebook, then, you know, block us in the robots.txt and we'll respect that. But let's be clear at what all these companies are really complaining about. It is this would most likely not be an issue if they were not monetizing it. In fact, one might say that if these law enforcement agencies or a federal law enforcement agency were scraping all this data right now so they could build their own database for which to identify people, there probably wouldn't be much that any of these companies could say about it. The reason why we have this kerfuffle is because there is a company that is very famously now making money off it that they are selling into law enforcement and that this very, very, very deliberately drives into a perception problem that all of these companies have that we are using your data inappropriately and in fact more so now we're collecting so much data it is bursting so far out of the seams that we are attracting other near-dwells who are now using it for something that is even creepier than we would ever suggest as part of our core product. So I get why they're fighting it, but Tom, I'm kind of with Clearview. I don't know short of them taking things out of publicly searchable areas of what they can really do about it. Yeah, there's not a copyright issue here. This this is that I mean Clearview can very easily create hashes based on the images they see and not copy them. Right. So so you wouldn't want them to use copyright law for this and it probably doesn't apply. This is terms of service and it's probably legal for Clearview to do this. It's one thing to violate the terms of service. It's another thing to be illegal and it's a hairy and weird line. The question I think is the most interesting, though, Justin, is maybe we're in a new world where we need a new law that says, look, yes, when you put something in public, your expectation was anybody could wander by and see that picture on Facebook. Your expectation was not that an automated piece of software would harvest everything you published up there and store it in a database to potentially match you as a criminal, possibly by accident. And does there need to be a law that regulates and says, yes, it's publicly accessible, but that doesn't make it available. Is it do we need to draw a line there? I mean, when the when the customer for this is law enforcement, to me, it is kind of fade a complete that these police forces can build their own, right? Like they are only a budget line item. But again, that law would prevent law enforcement agencies from doing the same thing and saying, look, you it's not it's against the law to go out and create an automated way of collecting this information without the approval of the places you're collecting it from. So then what I mean, I guess it's a very good conversation, and I'm very curious to read some of the email that you get from this. But I would have the next question I would go to is so then where is the line? Is it manual collection of this? Do you have to get arrested? And then they search your Facebook and then they have the right to match you more so if you run a foul of the law again or for probationary purposes, like that that is well, that that's always the question, right? Right? If it's manual, you know, it's going to take too long for this to be terribly effective. But I don't know, maybe you can use mechanical Turk and pay a bunch of people. And we're back to the same question. Exactly. The question isn't how is it done? The question is, is it OK for mass collection like this to happen when we're thought we were just posting things for our friends to see, even though they were public, the definition of public has been changing over time. Or is this horse so far out of the barn? We cannot even hear. It's like I can't I can't see the horse. The horse is so far out of the bar. I didn't even know. Is that the horse? Yeah, that was a fly. On my windshield. Hey, thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show about Reddit dot com and join in our conversation in our Discord, which you can join. It's easy. Just go to patreon.com slash DTS sign up for every level and link your Discord account. You can be in there chatting with everybody else right now. Let's check out the mailbag. Harish from Rainy Seattle wanted to chime in on Spotify acquiring podcast companies like Gimlet, Ringer, etc. Harish says I agree with Tom in that right now it's more of an additional revenue stream and they're unlikely to restrict shows from other podcast platforms, although they have in some cases. We didn't make that clear yesterday. They have restricted some, but not most. He says, but it got me thinking of what they might potentially do with this in the future. One model that comes to mind is offering ad free and bonus content on Spotify in their paid subscription tier. I'm an ardent pocketcast user right now and I do also have a paid Spotify account. If Spotify ends up offering ad free or bonus content for my favorite podcast on the Spotify premium tier, I could see myself potentially moving to that. It would be smart on Spotify's part to play it similar to Amazon's Prime model, where essentially you start getting value ads on a subscription you already have or as a way to attract more users to the paid Spotify account. I did not hear the discussion yesterday, but I'm far more suspicious that eventually these things are going to go behind the Spotify. Maybe not paywall, right? Maybe you'll be able to still get them free, but certainly restricted to the app. If the metrics they value the most are time spent listening, then that to me would be the natural the natural move for them. Yeah, it's it's a balance of it's a balance question for them. They don't want to put a podcast that is exclusive from Spotify that then ruins the viewership. That that goes against the that takes away a revenue stream for them. So they they they don't want to kill the golden goose, right? But they certainly want to start plucking some feathers and seeing if they can use them for things. Yeah, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, you power us the most. Thank you right now to Andrew Bradley, Justin Zellers and Tim Deputy for doing that among all the other master and grandmasters. And thank you, Justin, Robert Young. Thank you very, very much, Tom Merritt. I'll tell you what, I was I was thrilled to join you guys on Tuesday for all the discussion about the Iowa Caucus app. And if you want to follow what I am doing politically, I am on the road. From here, I go to Manchester, New Hampshire. So I cover that primary Nevada after that and then South Carolina after that. Obviously, all sorts of stuff to talk about on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast, which you can find on all podcasting platform. Yeah, if you heard us talking about the Iowa Caucus stuff, both Tuesday and a little bit yesterday and you're like, yeah, but what about the political side of this? PX three politics, politics, politics.com. You get get the best of the political analysis right there. Folks, we have a new Patreon reward. It is a mug or a t-shirt or a sticker or a poster with a DTS six year anniversary logo on it. That sounds cool to you. You can get one just become a patron at one of the qualifying levels for three months. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com we're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern twenty one thirties to UTC. And you can find out more about that at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're going to talk about picking a laptop tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta will be here to draw during the show. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.