 Coming up on DTNS, can Q-Commerce conquer India and then the world? Also, what the heck is Q-Commerce plus examples of NFTs that are useful and how one of the best security policies of the year just came from the U.S. government? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 27th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Austin Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. I draw on the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's producer. We were just talking about Cleveland and how it rules and rocks both on good day internet so you can get that longer version of this show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Chris Allen, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fishler. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Meta's Messenger, formerly Facebook Messenger, started rolling out end encryption options to users back in 2016 and it's now available to all Messenger users. You can toggle it on for any message or group chat or call, although it isn't on by default. You have to turn it on yourself. For new conversations, you can toggle on secret conversations that shows up as a lock icon so you know that it's secret. Or in an ongoing conversation, you can use vanish mode by swiping up on an existing chat, which will cause messages to disappear when the window is closed as well. You can also now use GIFs, stickers, reactions, and verified badges in encrypted conversations. There are a lot of tech acquisitions waiting on approval out there. Warner Media and Discovery, and Media and Tech, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. Some look like they may not happen. We just talked about Nvidia and ARM, just might not ever close. So let's turn the tables and talk about two tech acquisitions that just got the big old thumbs up. China's notoriously fussy state administration for market regulation has conditionally approved AMD's acquisition of chip specialist Xilinx. The conditions involved avoiding tie-ins and discriminating against customers. So that deal is now expected to close this quarter. And Metta got the European Union to approve its acquisition of CRM maker customer. That's customer with a K. Metta had to agree to not limit it. Anybody's access to the customer API for 10 years. Then Europe said, that's fine. Go for it. If you're hoping someday to do some serious gaming on a Chromebook, here's an important story to note. Wednesday, nine to five Google spotted a feature flag in the code for Chromium Garrett to enable support for RGB keyboards on supported devices. It includes per key color programming and custom RGB color selection. These devices are associated with the feature flag, including two Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake laptops and a detachable keyboard. Next stop, formal Steam support and RTX based Chromebooks. Right, perhaps maybe. Speaking of gaming coming to places people would like it to come to, if they use those things, compatible 2021 LG TVs can now download the GeForce Now app from the LG content store. That follows a beta period that had begun last November. So now everybody gets it. The app allows access directly from the TV to NVIDIA streaming service of games that you already own from Steam and Epic. You won't need to have an NVIDIA shield to play them if you don't have one already. But if you do have an NVIDIA shield, got good news for you too. You can now take advantage of the 4k upscaling that the shield does for video streams on GeForce Now games. That is also available to GeForce Now users on certain 10 series or newer NVIDIA GPUs on a PC. The Adobe led coalition for content provenance and authenticity or C2PA for short. Has finalized version 1.0 of a digital content standard. The standard when implemented can identify when and where an image or a video was created and document changes that were made to that piece of media. Microsoft, ARM, Intel TruePic and the BBC are all part of the coalition. All right, let's talk a little more about my local food truck that I'm always worried is going to drop their square dongle into a big pot of refried beans. Is there any hope for that, Justin? Yes, they might now drop their entire iPhone into a refried beans if this is correct. And this is a Bloomberg sources say report that, quote, in the coming months, small businesses will be able to use iPhones to accept payments without requiring extra hardware like those dongles or those little card reader squares that connect via Bluetooth. Apple bought a contactless payment company called Moby Wave in 2019 that would make this possible. The company previously worked with Samsung on a similar project with Samsung phones able to accept payments from contactless cards and NFC payments, including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. Yes, you could tap a Samsung phone with an iPhone and pay the merchant with the Samsung phone. What a wonderful world we live in. The report does not reveal if Moby Wave's tech will be a brand that is part of Apple Pay's service, though it does potentially mean we might see it show up in iOS 15.4 soon. A reminder that iOS 15.3 was just released Thursday. So we don't know whether it'll be part of Apple Pay, but we know it'll kind of point that way. Now, this would this would be, OK, I go up to my favorite food truck, staying away from the refried beans. I tap my phone to their phone and that's that's and the payment is OK, because they would still need the dongle for cards for credit cards for chip for chip payments, but anything NFC for chip cards that don't have contact that don't have any contactless. Right. Yeah, exactly. So if you were and fewer have, I mean, if it if it has a chip, many of them have contactless, although it's not exactly a universal standard. Yeah, I think of all the technologies that through the pandemic, I think leaped ahead about five years in the one year that we had the intense lockdown. Obviously video communication was one of them was Zoom. I think contactless payment was as well, not only in situations like this, but also in a lot of a lot of restaurant situations or bar situations where you're doing a lot of mobile ordering and running all of the via a drop down menu on your phone. This is another part of it, although iPhones are not exactly cheap, I would imagine that the real worth of something like this is it being a standard and older iPhones being able to use be used as total just, you know, registers effectively iPads as well. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that aspect of it. As Apple does try to emphasize service revenue, I wouldn't be shocked to see them try to implement Apple Pay and through Moby Wave and Apple Pay merchant payments platform off iOS, right? Certainly so. Yeah, I say and also the ability just this isn't just a merchant thing in the way that we've we've often thought about it, digital currencies and we're not even talking about right, but you're getting money, the $5 from your friend, you know, Venmo transactions are all over the place right now to make it something where you could do it via Apple cash from phone to phone might be something that you do. Well, while we are talking about e-commerce, let's stop and talk about Q commerce tech in Asia and the business times both have reports out on Q commerce taken off in India, especially in India, we've touched on this emerging trend before. But now it's got the snappy new nickname. So it's worth looking at again, Q stands for quick. Generally, Q commerce is the idea that you can get something delivered in less than 30 minutes. That's what we've talked about before. We just didn't call it Q commerce. Most of these companies are trying to promise 10 15 minute delivery occasionally might see five minutes but usually around 10 or 15 business times used grab and food panda as an example in their article. Tech in Asia highlights Zepto Dunzo Blinkett and Instamart in India. In the United States, it's Dordache go puff Joker getter bike with B Y K gorillas and fridge no more. In all those cases, it's the old story of offering an astounding service that consumers love. Oh, I'm out of pasta sauce. This apple get me pasta sauce in 10 minutes crisis averted. Then the company pours money in it to make it actually work while they also try to learn how to make it more efficient and hope that the logistics technology that speeds up the fulfillment and maps things out and cues up orders improves enough. And the customer base grows enough that those two lines cross and they can reach profitability at some point. Now these companies rely on something called a contribution profit. This is key to not misunderstanding what the actual problems with these business models might be to convince investors to stay with them. They report contribution profit because contribution profit if I'm going to oversimplify and I am means the amount of money you make per order when you ignore your fixed costs. So you'll hear about these companies losing money on every order but that usually includes the entire cost of the operation. However, your rent, the equipment you bought, those don't count in contribution pro profit because those don't go up. So the more customers you get the more your rent doesn't go up. So more customers does mean you can make more money. If you have positive contribution profit then theoretically, you just need to get enough customers to outweigh your fixed costs and then you would become profitable. In fact, GoPuff told Tech in Asia it is contribution profit positive. So they just need enough customers. They've figured out how to make money. They just need to have enough customers to pay off their fixed costs. The other aspects of QCommerce is free delivery. You can't keep that going. Not all QCommerce companies forgo the fees but the ones that do run their own stores, dark stores where they stock their own items rather than having to get them from existing convenience stores or restaurants. And most analysts think that the margins are thin enough that even dark stores are eventually going to have to charge delivery fees at which point you start driving away customers. One executive told Tech in Asia it thinks a dark store would have to make about a thousand deliveries a day per location to break even. Resisting the siren song of all this is Flipkart. Flipkart's CEO told The Economic Times he thought 30 to 45 minute deliveries were a more sustainable model. And with the QCommerce craze, he sounds really slow. 30 to 45. What are you? Domino's in the 80s? Come on. It depends on where you live, of course. And these sorts of models are just going to scale in urban areas way better than in, for example, somewhere that I live. It's like, I can't drive anywhere in 10 minutes. How would I expect them to get it to me in 10 minutes? It's just not going to happen. Or, you know, there are very few things that I really want that are that close by. So you kind of have to take that into consideration. But yeah, the idea of contribution profit is interesting because, like you said, Tom, you have these fixed costs as a company. The company goes, okay, we know how much how much churn we're going through just making this whole thing sustainable. But if we have 10 cans of pasta sauce that are ready to go out instead of one doesn't change those fixed costs, we have the opportunity to make that much more money off of the people who want the pasta sauce, you know, in a very short amount of time. So yeah, I wonder, for me, it's like, okay, when I used to live within walking distance to several grocery stores, how much would I take advantage of this? Because I not only have the benefit of being in a more dense urban area, but I also am closer to those areas. Even if I drove the cost of gas, I'm probably saving over delivery fees. If and when those those become an issue. Do they not go up? Do they really not go up? Because this is a logistics business. And if your consumer base expands, then not only do you need more product to serve them, which is something that does go up, but you probably need new locations and more drivers and all these things that they are counting as fixed. At the end of the day, and I'm glad you brought up India where this is growing, because in the grand tradition of South Asia, this Q commerce craze is the graveyard of empires for venture capital. It has always been an insustainable holy grail for these companies. For whatever reason, they always try to reinvent it. And they think that now that we are further along with mobile data, it'll work better. Now that we pay for more things on our phones, it'll work better. Now that we're used to delivery, it'll work better. If Amazon could not make it fully work in with Prime now, which is they still exist on some level, but hasn't expanded like you would expect, then nobody's going to do it because nobody is better at logistics than Amazon. None of these companies. Yeah, getting back to that contribution profit point, your fixed cost doesn't go up per dark store, right? Certainly pasta, the number of cans of pasta sauce is a variable cost. So that one counts, right? But the but the the store rent wouldn't count, right? But sure, you have to increase the customers for that store. If you increase customers by opening up another store, well, you just had to do your fixed costs. So, you know, that that may sound like, Oh, well, you know, but you just need more customers. Like, Yeah, but that's a hard thing. A thousand people from one store and to deliver in 10 to 15 minutes means you have a compressed area to serve in. So it has to be dense, like Sarah was saying. Otherwise, you won't have a thousand people within five minutes of the of the dark store location. That's only going to work in certain highly dense urban situations. I'm not saying it can't end. And I know we're going long on this, but even then you are talking about customers that have more opportunity because they're walking more to just pick up the one or two things that they need. This is not a situation where they only have one moment a week or six moments a week for which they're crossing by their their local grocery store. These consumers have a lot of options to do it. And so I don't know. It has to be an affluent area, right? It has to be a tech forward area. So I mean, graveyard of of empires, the ghosts of Cosmo and web event, or maybe all the grocery stores just, you know, die and dark stores are the future. And that's the world that we live in. Well, we'll find out tomorrow, but it will be safe way that pioneers this and maybe that's it. Maybe maybe a lot of these companies are just they just want to make sure that they are there so they can get swept up by a Kroger or a Publix or, you know, any of these other major change. That's a lot of that. A lot of them just have an exit plan. You're not wrong there. Yeah. That's they sell the logistics learnings that they had in the end. That could be the exit for a lot of them. Well, speaking of the future of technology, several folks have asked us to highlight uses of NFTs non fungible tokens that aren't, you know, trading pictures of apes or maybe Beatles member of Delia couple of things we've talked about recently on the show. Not that those aren't important, but we found a few examples of where NFTs might be going and we can kick those around today to kind of just the idea of, you know, of expansion. What what can NFTs really be used for that could be helpful to you? Well, this one Lamborghini partnering with Sotheby's and NFT pro to auction off five pieces of digital art might be on your wheelhouse. It might not. You kind of got to be a Lamborghini person, but let's say you are. Each NFT has a physical companion space key that includes carbon fiber that has been to the International Space Station and back. Each space key has a QR code linked to the digital art associated with the NFT that was made by Swiss artist Fabian Offner. OK, so that's got a physical thing. It's not just digital. I get it. So there's something you can you can hold in your hand with that one. Yeah, it's definitely if this is if if this is something you like Lamborghinis, you like spaced, you might really like this. It's something that is a little bit of bragging rights, I would say. The NFT here is effectively a digital version of the piece of paper you would get that. Yeah, the certificate. Exactly. Yes. Second example of something kind of interesting. Warner Music Group is opening the location in the virtual worlds. You could call it the metaverse called the sandbox, where it will host what it calls a combination of musical theme park and concert venue. It'll also sell nearby plots of real estate to fans starting in March. The sandbox uses NFTs to handle sales of that digital property so players can not only own their own space be like this is my part of the grass. This is where I hang out, but also monetize and game resources in this particular metaverse. So in the sandbox, I could own a location so I can log in really close to Marshmallow playing in Fortnite. Totally. Warner artist in sandbox. I feel like this is me buying the cool VIP pass at Coachella, where you get to have a certain area where nobody else can go because you've sort of paid a premium. This is your area, your plot of land. And if you're into that kind of musical experience or just live experience in general, which many other platforms have experimented with, with varying degrees of success, but sometimes very successful, could be cool. Yeah, I would think of it like local theaters will sell you like the entire slate that they are like that they're going to put on be they dramatic performances or musical performances or anything like that. So it's like that, but for digital only things you are getting for every event. Yeah, that's a good comparison. Yeah, all right. The third option here in the new NFT world, this actually might have some legs, especially if you're in the market for a new home. TechCrunch reports on a startup called Propi, P-R-O-P-Y, that used an NFT in connection with the sale of an apartment in Ukraine successfully and is now bringing that platform to the U.S., limited at first, but definitely coming to the U.S. The idea is to put the legal paperwork on the blockchain, reducing the cost and simplifying the purchasing process for everybody. Brokers, Asians, title companies, buyers and sellers could all benefit from an automated paperless closing, such as this, although Propi is marketed towards owners and brokers for now. This is using the smart contacts aspect of blockchains. U.S. states, Vermont and Arizona recently passed legislation affirming they are legally admissible. This is not an illegal thing happening. This can this can be done. So Propi will start by auctioning two properties in Florida on February 8th, so just two for now, but we'll see how it goes. It works as such. The record of the purchases goes onto the blockchain, provides access to the legal documents that prove ownership, you know, because it's in the blockchain, and buyers save a little bit this way, also makes the purchasing process process quicker, which if you're ever about a home, which I have not, but I know people who have, it is not a quick process. Now if the buyer is successful, gets the house, let's say, they get a Florida-based investment property owning a U.S.-based entity that owns the property, the ownership rights of which are associated with an NFT. It's not a fractional ownership. This is not some like, oh, I don't really own it. I only own a digital version of this. It becomes a DeFi asset that can be borrowed against like any other property. So it's a little end around. The company owns the property, and so you're buying the company, and therefore because you own the company, you own the property. But in the end, you don't have to have this huge pile of documents that you have to have normally when you buy a property. I like it. That's pretty cool. Well, I mean, it certainly is a way that you can get more crypto into the world of investment of real estate buying, which is its own. I don't know if in the world of NFT criticism, easier and more frictionless ways that crypto money can be poured into investment real estate is going to win a lot of fans. But certainly you can see the idea of NFTs being a digital collectible for whatever reason is something that I think as a standard, very much has legs, despite the fact that obviously there is backlash to the kind of current moment it is having. Yeah, I feel like the end around there in Florida where you're buying the company is probably because Florida isn't recognizing deeds on the on the blockchain. But in Vermont and Arizona, I'm guessing you might not even need to do that company owning the property thing. You might be able to just do it all on the blockchain. And man, if that if that means like one less day of like here are the 13 docusigns that you have to do in your email today. I'm in. I'm in for it. All right, folks, join in the conversation in our Discord. We don't require you to have an NFT. Just a Patreon account, patreon.com slash DTNS. Get in there and talk about your favorite NFTs. The United States Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to federal agencies calling for new security strategies, including moving to a zero trust model. That's pretty security forward. Agencies have two months to present their plan for transitioning to this new level of security and they have to get their plans in execution by 2024. Zero trust if you don't follow security news means you don't assume just because you're inside your own network that every user or service is trustworthy. You realize, hey, bad folks get inside networks all the time. So let's let's just always be securing everything. Corporations have been moving to this model as attackers get better at infiltrating networks and you want to still catch the malicious actors even after they get in. So among the strategies with zero trust are multifactor authentication so that you can log in multiple times, not just once into the network. Access controls, no matter where you're logging in from. VPN not being considered enough, not relying on VPN for security. Everything that attempts to access data in a zero trust model, user, device, application, transaction needs to be verified. I found a great post from Dr. Sharon Goldberg, she's CEO of Bastion Zero reviewing this memo. People familiar with zero trust won't be surprised that the memo deals with network segmentation, role based access control, stronger authentication. But Dr. Goldberg pointed out that it includes creating public vulnerability disclosure programs. The U.S. is going to do some bug bounties. It implements encrypted DNS, requires encrypted DNS on government websites, puts a stop to requiring rotating passwords or special character requirements that end up inconveniencing users more than thwarting attackers and have literally been showed to cause people to use weaker passwords. That's out. Passwordless login is encouraged. They also deprecate VPN saying, users should log into applications rather than networks and again from the Office of Management and Budget, enterprise applications should be able to be used over the public Internet. In other words, authenticate people for real and securely, don't rely on VPN as a crutch, secure the application itself. Here are a few points Dr. Goldberg emphasized. Credentials don't live a long time, meaning attackers won't be able to steal a token and last forever in the network. The memo describes something similar to just-in-time access control, which gives an authenticated user access to a resource only while she needs it, and then revokes the access. You don't just leave people logged in. A lot of this relies on good multi-factor authentication, and the memo tells agencies to discontinue SMS or voice calls as second factors. You might say, oh, thank goodness. But it also dismisses one-time code protocols like Authy or Google Authenticator. Users should use cards or USB keys like a UB key. Those are harder to fish. You could still fish a Google Authenticator code really hard to fish a USB key. It also needs to consider the device being used when logging someone in. So if you're logging in from a device that's never been authorized on the network, you won't get to log in. Your laptop or your phone needs to have a security certificate pushed to it, or you can't use it even if you've got multiple factors. This is not only state-of-the-art, folks. This is the U.S. government in consultation with security professionals putting forward a cutting edge, like bleeding edge security protocol, which certainly by 2024 won't be as bleeding edge as it is now. But this, I don't know. To me, I was shocked. This is definitely the right thing to do. At the speed of the federal government, this is Sonic the Hedgehog. This is insanely, blazingly forward. And the fact that they're probably going a little bit more where the puck is headed than where the puck is in terms of the general consensus of security, as you rightly pointed out, this would be something that would be forward for a private company. The fact that these are standards for the federal government is, I think, encouraging. And also, it's smart in that they are not applying standards that are already understood to be kind of theater, like rotating your passwords or stuff like that. You know, I don't know. I don't really have a ton of commentary other than good on you, right? This is why you don't get good news in the newspaper because you can't make fun. You can't have Schaudenfreude about how bad the government is on this one. No matter what your political stripe is. And also, to be fair, this is necessary. If you look at the reality of cyber warfare, how much it's been stepped up throughout the entire known world, how much of a target the United States is, probably the biggest target. We also saw the story last week about the IRS stepping up their security. That's because it was hilariously weak and led to a lot of very, very costly and harmful phishing and identity theft. This is just good. And it's not just good. It's necessary. And some of these, some of these are things you can only do because you're the government. Because because you're a, you know, you're not serving the kind of client base that, say, a bank is, right? You can have stricter requirements and say, well, if you want to be an employee, this is what you got to do. Amos is pointing out in our Twitch chat right now that sometimes classified computers have USB ports disabled. So, right, USB keys might not work on those, but you can still set up card keys and second factor that uses NFC in those situations. And I'm sure that's considered in the memo. I didn't see that in particular though. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Okay. We got a few emails in response to the question from yesterday's show about Android apps on Windows. What are they good for? Kevin wrote in and said, one reason why running Android apps on Windows might be useful for streaming, video streaming services. As far as I know, says Kevin, apps are the only method to download episodes on streaming services for offline viewing. Many streaming services lack apps made for Windows. I want to emphasize that might is in that statement. Chrome OS has this ability and some streaming apps are still unavailable or have bugs that aren't present on Android. Crossing my fingers that Android apps on Windows will make offline streaming on a bigger device or without the need for a second device a reality. At this point, I'm only cautiously optimistic though. Andrew M. wrote in, had a similar point about downloads adding, quote, my wife currently spends way too much time trying to edit Instagram videos on her phone because she doesn't want to deal with the transfer complications in the phone app and the phone app the main experience with features missing from the browser site or so she tells me. Oh, Andrew M. Okay, you don't use Instagram. And finally, Andrew B added, what about Android apps on your portable Windows tablet? Microsoft can make an iPad or even a phone competitor and say, hey, we know the Windows App Store isn't the greatest, but you get all the best Android apps there too. Well, I'd let this back off of having Microsoft make a phone competitor after Windows phone for a minute. But they already make tablets with keyboards, right? That's the surface. So I'm with Andrew B on that kind of emphasizing like, hey, you now can get all your favorite Android apps, maybe not all your Android apps, but the best ones on a Windows tablet on a Windows surface. Yeah, that's compelling. Good stuff. Good things. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you both Andrews for writing in. Indeed. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send emails. You know, we often say, hey, high of mind. Yet you have ideas about the story that we talked about. Please do send them to us. And you did. So keep them coming. Makes us all smarter in the process. We also have a brand new bosses. One, two, three, four of them, in fact, to thank Michael Kamachi, Aaron Spinelli, Mike Weber, Jason Harris are all our new bosses who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you, Mike. And thank you, Jason. But that's great. That's great. Because we always lose people at the beginning of the year when everybody has to reshuffle their finances and we totally understand. So it's good that there's other folks coming in to pick them up and getting a chance to maybe get some cool new loyalty merch if they stick around. Speaking of our loyalty merch, that was designed by Len Peralta, who's with us today illustrating the show. Len, what have you drawn for us? Well, you know, I missed the discussion about the ape NFTs. And I haven't really done anything with NFTs on the show for a while. So I decided to kind of, on that note, create a mascot, an NFT mascot for the show. And I'm going to show, I'm premiering it here. This is DDNS. DDNS, D-T-N-S, get it? DDNS. Yes, maybe related to KK Slider. This is the tech savvy Wheaton Terrier. They have apes. We have Wheaton Terriers. And this is the official mascot, the official NFT mascot of D-T-N-S. It's DDNS. The other cool thing is the only place you can get this NFT is at OpenSea. And I just, I put a link in the Twitch chat. If you're interested in taking a look for it. It's DDNS, the tech savvy Wheaton Terrier is up there for 0.25 Ethereum. So check it out. Check it out. And, you know, maybe we can create a bunch of DDNS. Yeah, with different attributes. Possibly. Tech-Sided, tech-savvy terrier. I'm holding a smartphone that says that Ethereum has dropped to $29.36. Yes, it's $29.36. If so, I am poorer than ever. Yes. I've lost lots on that. So check it out. Good stuff, Len. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, anything new to tell the folks out at home? Oh boy. Every once in a while, the news, it just falls from the sky, like so much rain. A new Supreme Court justice is on the way. If you want to know the entire roadmap of what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and a few guesses and predictions, including answers to all your wild questions and theories, like whether or not Kamala Harris, the sitting Vice President, will be on the bench, answered and explained on the upcoming episode of Politics, Politics, Politics, that comes out tomorrow. Well, thanks for being with us, Len and Justin. We are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. We'd love to have you join us live if you can. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we'll be back tomorrow doing it all again with Rob DeMillo. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.