 Coming up on DTS, the effect of a California law on ride hailing worldwide, how three little words could make navigation significantly easier and how Fortnite could return to iOS. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, the fifth of November. Remember, remember in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young and producing the show from what's left of the daylight. I'm Amos because you're in Alaska. Yes, indeed. Roger still has the week off. He'll be back next week. Thank you, Amos for filling in this week. We were just talking a little bit about the little bit. Just a tiny, tiny bit about the state of things these days. But we're talking about a bunch of other stuff on good day internet. If you want to get that wider conversation of us rambling around, become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. What's app began rolling out ephemeral messaging across Android and iOS. So when disappearing messages is on, messages and media will disappear after seven days, whether they've been read or not. What's upset it will keep an eye on user feedback to see if seven days is the right length for this new feature. Sony announced that the PS5 console will not be available for purchase in person on launch day. You can't just walk into a store and buy it. The company reiterated that all launch sales will be the online stores of their retail partners. So if you want to go to Best Buy and Buy, you have to go to bestbuy.com and buy it. And if you place an order online, you will be able to go to pick up the purchase in person. You have to buy it online first. Bloomberg sources say there's a shortage of power management chips used in iPhones and other devices. The shortage is caused, at least in part, by supply chain disruptions and stockpiling by Huawei. It's unclear how this will affect the availability of iPhones, with sources saying that suppliers will likely prioritize Apple over other customers. The National Payments Corporation of India announced that starting in January, it will enforce a cap somehow on payments processed through UPI, which is their payments infrastructure, such that no single payments app will process more than 30 percent of its transactions per month in India. Google Pay and Walmart's phone pay regularly passed 35 percent. So how they're going to make that happen? Nobody's really sure. Meanwhile, though, maybe competition will do it because WhatsApp has been granted approval to fully roll out its payments in India. DJI announced the Mini 2, smallest and lightest drone. The Mini 2 offers 6.2 miles of range compared to a 2.5 on their original Mavic Mini and now includes DJI's prepared proprietary Oculus sync wireless control that can control the drone from up to 10 kilometers away. The drone also features updated motors for faster accents, a sense, and the camera can now also shoot 4K video at 30 frames per second, as well as capturing raw still images. The Mini 2 is available now for $449. Now, I know a lot of you are paying attention to other things right now, but Justin, has anyone checked in on Nintendo lately? I have, Tom, and I'm here to report. Nintendo announced that it has sold 6.86 million switch consoles between July and September, up 40% on the year and up 30% on the previous quarter. Nintendo has now sold 68.3 million switches since launch in 2017. That makes it the second best-selling console in Nintendo history, passing the NES, but still 31 million or so behind the Nintendo Wii. The newly released Super Mario 3D All-Star sold 5.21 million units this quarter while Animal Crossing New Horizons continued to sell well with 3.5 million units. Animal Crossing is the second best-selling switch game after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Nintendo's big holiday title is the next in the Zelda series Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity. That is a crossover with Dynasty Warriors. Nintendo has raised its operating profit forecast 50% since May. Dang. So, Nintendo's doing great. Eee! Profitability! Yeah. And not a ton of titles. They're just doing it all in the backs of a couple Mario games and Animal Crossing New Horizons and selling lots of units. They've got quite a long way to go before they catch the Nintendo Wii, but until all the units are sold, we can't call it yet. They still got a few more years left for the switch. I wonder whether or not being a lower-cost entry point and this being obviously a very well-reviewed system has helped them during the pandemic with people that might not be super gamers or wanting to get in at the end of the cycle of some of the bigger, beefier, more expensive versions of an Xbox or a PlayStation that instead it's lower-cost. It's got friendly, big-name titles that like Mario and Zelda that you can get into, but I think that obviously the switch is a very well-regarded piece of machinery and I think it kind of met the moment. Especially at Animal Crossing. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Justin. I mean, not that there were families that didn't want to buy this anyway, but being a parent and being like, okay, what are we gonna do for the next four hours? Animal Crossing might be the right call. I think that that's why a lot of those units were moved. Yeah, we had a GameCube. We had a Wii. We had a Wii U. We have two switches. We have a switch and a switch light. And the big difference for us is that we play the switch in every room in the house, because you can carry it around. In fact, I don't remember the last time we actually used the television to play it. We've done it, but we more often use it just sitting on the couch holding it in our hands. And I think that is one of the advantages of the switch. Lower price point means you're more likely to maybe buy a second one and you can use it in more places. Even if you're not going places, you can use it in more places around where you lived. Although that was not a slam dunk. I remember when we were first reviewing going over the trailer for the switch and saying, well, you know, does this look mushy middle in a world when mobile gaming has never been bigger and has only grown since it came out? Is that something that you really want? Or is it just gonna be kind of a PS Vita, a thing that has its devotees, but never really breaks through to the mainstream? Is it too underpowered in terms of resolution on a television to be a good sit-down system and not your phone enough to be a mobile gaming? But that's the thing is there is a fine line between kind of being the perfect product and a product that's trying to be too many things and winds up being nothing. Yeah, it ended up being, I think being thought of more as a mobile game device than a console for many people. The BBC sources say NVIDIA has developed a version of its cloud-based GeForce Now gaming service that runs in Safari on iOS. Now the way the BBC wrote this, it sounded like it would run in the browser, but it kind of sounds to me like it's a progressive web app, which is what Amazon's doing with Luna. And that happens from the browser. You install it from the browser, but it doesn't stay in the browser. You then have it downloaded and you use the Safari engine to run it. So that's what I would expect, but the BBC story sources didn't make that clear. Here's where it gets interesting. Fortnite is one of the games on GeForce Now. Now it briefly disappeared back in December, but it is back, it came back rather quickly. And if there was a GeForce Now that worked on iOS through the browser or as a progressive web app, it would mean you could play Fortnite on iOS, at least as it is right now. So that brings up a lot of questions. First of the questions, if Fortnite was available on Safari, would that help Apple's case against Epic by saying, hey, they're trying to say we lock them into the app store, but clearly they have an alternative. Here's one right now. People are playing Fortnite on iOS and GeForce Now. Do you think that would help their case? Yeah, I think the Fortnite is not on iOS because Epic wants to prove a point. Epic is, they have cut off their nose, whether or not it will be a startling and grisly demonstration that proves that Apple is unfair or they are doing it despite their own face, we will only all be able to watch play out together. But yeah, if somebody else is able to make a way to play Fortnite on Apple, then not only does it help Apple's legal case, I think it hurts the point of what Epic is trying to do with Fortnite right now. And if that's the case, does Epic then pull Fortnite from GeForce Now so they can't make that case? Well, and the question is, okay, if it's app-based versus Safari-based, is there any difference in gameplay? If you really care about this, this is the platform you're going to use, do you somehow miss out by circumventing what Apple was trying to do this way? Yeah, that I think will be the biggest question. Even if GeForce Now loses Fortnite, people will want to know, can I really play GeForce Now through Safari or as a progressive web app? How laggy is it going to be? And we don't know. And if Fortnite didn't get pulled and you could play it on iOS, but it wasn't a very good experience, it certainly wouldn't please the users. I don't know that that would have any impact on the case or not though. No, I think the popularity of it, if it's an option, but it's a laggy buggy mess, then I think it probably still helps Apple's case. Apple will still be able to say, hey, look, we're not banning anything. Hey, they pulled it out of the store because they have a problem with the deal that we're offering to everybody and users can still play it. I don't know if it would really be a big thing in terms of the popularity though. I think that that is where it would suffer obviously. I actually think if you have GeForce Now and Amazon Luna as progressive web apps on iOS, it would help Apple's case somewhat. They could demonstrate that here are two real world examples where there are alternatives. And Epic pulling Fortnite from GeForce Now or not really wouldn't impact that argument. You're right. It would be something they could point to and say, Epic could do it. They could put it in GeForce Now. They could put it in Luna or they could create their own progressive web app just for Fortnite. That's up to them. They don't want to do it, but that doesn't impact our case. Yeah, and then that's a secondary point because Epic pulled it from the app store. Apple's position has always been, yo, they can be on the app store tomorrow. There's no problem except for them violating the agreement knowingly and then making a big deal about it with a little viral video. Hey, actually, that's good. Beatmaster points out that W. Scott has one mentioned if you're playing Fortnite through GeForce Now, you're playing the PC version, not the mobile version too, which could impact how much you want to play it or not. Well, some spooky news. I know Halloween's over, but here we go. Tuesday, about one billion worth of Bitcoin suddenly moved out of a wallet that had remained dormant since the seizure of the Silk Road Marketplace in 2013. Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice said it had seized 70,000 Bitcoins generated from sales on the Silk Web Marketplace by someone referred to as Individual X. Yeah, not to be confused with Terminator X. The seized Bitcoins are now subject to forfeiture procedure. Yeah, so if you've been following this one, this was quite a mystery that suddenly a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin got transferred, and nobody knew for a couple of days this week who it was and who was moving it. Well, now we know it was the U.S. Department of Justice, and it was money that had been sitting since the Silk Road Marketplace seizure, and the Department of Justice now believes it has the right to seize the 70,000 Bitcoins. So, I mean, if you've ever been to those forfeiture sales, and seen them auction it off a Lamborghini or some gold chains, you might see 70,000 Bitcoins at the next one. I mean, I need more information here. Who is Individual X? But Bitcoin, the whole thing is there's so much anonymity on purpose, and that's great for many reasons, but that's a lot of money, my goodness. The Department of Justice says they know who Individual X is. They just aren't revealing it at this time. The fact that it's associated with Silk Road, the fact that they successfully prosecuted Silk Road's founder in 2015, I think it's probably Ross Ulbricht. Ross Ulbricht was arrested, the site was seized, Ulbricht was convicted in 2015, sent into two life terms, and an additional 40 years for his operation. And if anybody had that many Bitcoins from Silk Road, it would be Ross. It would be that guy, right? I mean, like a billion dollars in Bitcoins is something that usually you know where it's connected to. So I think that those are pretty reason. Oh, yeah. No, the filing says they know who it is, but it's gotta be that guy, right? Like, yeah, exactly. Because who else has got a million dollars in Bitcoin connected to Silk Road? I mean, a billion. A billion, with a B, folks. This is a not Trump change. And Tom, like you mentioned, how would one go about finding one of these auctions? Like, how does this even work? I don't really know. Like, I've seen stories about the forfeiture auctions and people buying all this fancy stuff that's seized from drug dealers. I really don't know how you get in on them though. And I also don't know how you put Bitcoin in there. And is that how they do it? And if they did, like, do they just transfer it to the people and then those people sell it on the open marketplace? Are they flooding the market? Right, is there a discount? So many questions. So if anyone's up to speed on DOJ forfeiture auctions, let us know. I also don't know if this would be a forfeiture auction or if the DOJ would just slowly sell the Bitcoins out on the open market to cash in. But those of you are like, oh, that's a lot of money for the government. Yeah, it is. They make a lot of money on forfeiture. Sometimes they can see stuff and people don't even get prosecuted and they can sell it. There's a lot of weird laws, especially when it comes to the drug trade and silk web marketplace, obviously, part of those drug laws. So real quick, I'm looking at a Bitcoin forfeiture auction from 2018. It is a totally online affair. You submit your bid, highest bid, gets it, but that's a way to get yourself some Bitcoin. If that's, if that's what you, if that's what you want, all bids or cash offers, all bids are contingent on financing terms and all bids must be made in US dollars. But just keep an eye on the US Marshall service. They will let you know when you can get your hands on some hot Bitcoin. Oh, please do a PSA with Timothy Elephant. Like, would you like some Bitcoin? One more thing about the Bitcoins. Hey, thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. As we mentioned yesterday, Prop 22 passed in California, creating a new employment classification. There used to be basically two employment classifications, full-time worker and independent contractor. It gets more complicated than that, but those are the two big classes. Well, now there's a new one, App-Based Driver. An App-Based Driver is neither a full-time employee, nor an independent contractor. They're a new category. The App-Based Driver. They arrive precisely when they be like a wizard. They are exempt from full-time status, but they get some benefits. Not all the benefits that you get from full-time status, but some benefits. This campaign was expensive. Couple hundred million dollars were spent on print, radio, TV, billboards, and interview tours. It was considered the most expensive ballot initiative campaign in California history, and companies like Uber and Lyft used their apps to send messages, asking Californians to vote yes on the prop. You're about to order that burrito. Do you want to lose the ability to order burritos? Vote yes on Prop 22, or you'll never get your burrito. That's not the wording exactly, but that was kind of the sense of it. The company prompted- And effective. The company not only prompted the customers, it prompted the drivers in the app. And actually some of the drivers sued to stop the pressure, but the court ruled it was not an improper use because there did not appear to be any evidence of a driver being punished for not supporting 22. So the rules in California were you can't coerce someone politically and punish them if they don't do what you want, but this wasn't punishing anyone. It was just giving them a message, and that was doing legal. In California, getting the yes on any proposition is tough. They mostly are no. Prop 22 appears to have passed with 58% saying yes. So that's a pretty high percentage. Now the calls have begun for new rules around when a company can use its app to push political messages because they spent that much money, they use their apps, and they got a resounding victory when a month before, people weren't sure they could win. Erica Smiley from Jobs with Justice told The Verge that they are suggesting companies be required to create political action committees to talk to consumers or work about, or their workers, about political messages and build their list from scratch. In other words, they wouldn't be able to just push a message to everybody who's a customer. That would be a new rule, that would be a new law if it was put in place. Uber disclosed its pop-ups as non-monetary contribution in its campaign finance statement. They technically didn't have to disclose that, but they did. They're trying to put that out there that they're being transparent. And California's Fair Political Practices Commission told the LA Times that political advertising only needs proper disclosure to let the public know who's paying for it to be in compliance with the law and all of these pop-ups did say, you know, that's paid for by Uber. Similar measures may be headed to other states and countries. So even though this all happened in California, Uber is hoping that the UK Supreme Court will decide whether to overturn decisions that granted British driver's benefits, and Prop 22 will be an example of what could happen if they don't. Massachusetts sued Uber and left over employee benefits. Washington State and New York have threatened similar action. So even though this is just a California thing, and even though in the end, what's gonna happen for consumers is nothing changes, Justin, it's gonna have an impact. Oh, yes, it will, Tom. This is something that I believe is going to be an emerging question about any kind of political messaging. I think of how effective this is. When me and you did our PX3 DTNS crossover episode about Proposition 22, the latest we had on this was that it was not gonna pass. It was mired in, I think, the high 30%. If you're unaware in California, it needs to cross the 50% threshold to win or to become active. This is fairly extraordinary, and it was fairly suffocating. Like anytime that you ordered anything on Uber Eats, Instacart, Lyft, remember, all of these companies were all in alignment on 22. There was, at the moment you were interacting with this service the most, getting the targeted, do you want this to continue? Take this political action. I suspect because California has not met a law it didn't like that we are probably going to get some kind of restriction on this going forward in some way, be it declarations or labeling them as being part of a political action committee. But I would have a hard time imagining that you would be able to force these companies to build lists from scratch or in any way restrict them in a meaningful manner. Basically, that you wouldn't just have Uber sell their list of customers to the Uber pack for $1. I think that would be very, very hard to manage that. It would at least leave a paper trail, I guess, but it wouldn't really change much. This reminds me of a lot of the conversations around Facebook and Twitter and their impact on speech where Uber and Lyft on paper didn't do anything weird. I mean, if I was part of the Restaurant Association putting for a proposition that would help restaurants and I put up a sign in my restaurant that said, vote yes on Prop Restaurant, nobody'd think twice about it. You're like, oh yeah, I'm in a restaurant. That's gonna help restaurants. So that's why he's got that up, right? That wouldn't be controversial. What catches people's attention is that it's an app that is pushed to millions of people because they have millions of customers. And suddenly it's an outsized level of communication compared to what we're used to. Yeah, and part of it is also, I think just even the way that Prop 22 was worded, obviously the app companies were not in favor with the way that it showed up on California ballots that it was like denying benefits was part of it. Exempting benefits, yeah, yeah. Yeah, accepting benefits. And so this I think was their way of saying, no, no, no, we're gonna put our own spin on it. Like as if we could name the Prop 22 is, do you never wanna use Uber and Lyft again because the government banned it? That's how they wanted the messaging to be and they found the exact audience they had, which was a bunch of people ordering burritos on a Wednesday night. And you put a button on this, people down in California keep an eye on similar campaigns and similar issues and similar approaches by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates to try to get propositions or measures or referendum or however it works in your state or country if they run into problems with the government. They now have the experience with this and they've got a playbook that they can implement anywhere. And by the way, to follow up on one more thing that we had in our special episode, the Pro Act, which did pass the House, which does include the same wording that AB5 uses in California. That's what brought upon this whole app-based drivers controversy that is still there and based on what happened on Tuesday, there will now be a special election in Georgia this January, wherein two Senate seats will be decided. Those two Senate seats will determine who controls the Senate and we could be seeing similar stuff on the national level, at least in terms of feasibility in the next few months. So this is not an issue. Get ready, citizens of the United States for pop-ups in all your apps that say, oppose the Pro Act or something similar if that were to happen. Well, whether or not you want to order burrito, maps are important. Here, H-E-R-E is a mapping company started originally by Nokia that is now majority owned by car makers, BMW, Daimler and Audi. What three words, that's what with the number three words is a system that is labeled every three meter square space of the planet with three words. They've done this in 35 languages as well. The idea is to make it easy for you or anybody to identify a precise location without having to use latitude and longitude, sometimes imprecise addresses or something that's just really long and hard to share. This makes it faster to identify location but also makes it easy to identify locations that don't have specific addresses like our particular entrance to a music festival or a stadium or a place in a large park, et cetera. What three words is going to be integrated into car sat-nav systems that use here? So how many cars would be able to take advantage? About 150 million cars on the road right now and four of five cars sold would sat-nav in the future. What three words is used by emergency services but this might propel it into mainstream use? Man, the first thing I thought of when I heard of what three words years ago was getting picked up at the airport. When you try to tell somebody where you are like at LAX particularly on the long strip of cement and you're like, I'm on the Alaska airline. I'm not that Alaska airline sign. The other, just being able to say three words. Yeah, I think I'm at gate 23. Just say three words and they'd know exactly where you are. And that applies to all those things you talked about like stadium entrances are all at the same address, right? But if you want to get picked up on one part of the parking lot versus another, that'd be great. And getting that into a bunch of cars will make life easier, I think. I think so. It sounds great. In one sense, my initial reaction of this is like, what? I mean, not everything can be described in three words but really when it comes down to places that we're talking about, yeah, airports, a stadium, somewhere that is very dense where it can be a little bit confusing where the car is and where the person is and how to get in touch with each other. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's just more precise. And the three words aren't descriptive, they're random words, but they're different enough that when you say them out loud, it's clear, it's easy to understand what you're saying, which makes it easy to send them, makes it easy to remember them when you're typing them in rather than having to put like 1,312 Langerborn Street West, this is so much better. I've lived in two places where there were an alley behind my house and had deliveries try to come to the alley behind my house to deliver something. If I had what three words, they would have come exactly in front of my house. For whatever reason, a quirk in the mapping system has the front door to my apartment complex for deliveries on the side of the building and it is forever frustrating to have the exact same conversation. If this were more regulated or more integrated into stuff, boy would it be great to just tell them, a teddy bear, a caterpillar, a soft one, whatever it is. I want my burrito. Hey, don't get away your address, man. Oh yeah, sorry, I doxed myself. All right, after we finish our burrito, will we have any desserts left on earth? Oh, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Let's harken back to 1912, shall we? Because in that year, Nabisco's Oreo cookies were introduced to the world with an estimated 34 billion of the cookies now sold worldwide every year in over 100 countries. Oreos are popular still. The company recently built a special concrete bunker on the permafrost of Spalvard, Norway, to stash many iconic Oreos, like the regular ones, but some seasonal stuff, all the Oreos, alongside a copy of its secret recipe in case of an apocalyptic impact. Now you might say, why wouldn't Nabisco do this? What are they worried about? According to NASA and CNET, there's an asteroid, which has been shown to be zooming into our solar system, but has practically no chance of ever colliding with Earth, but Nabisco, still pulling no punches and says, we need to protect that recipe. Let's bury the Oreos. They won't last, but at least the recipe will. I think it might last a long. This is Spalvard, where the seed bank, where the worldwide seed bank is that protects all of our seeds from catastrophe as well. So you could use the seeds to plant the plants that you would need to harvest to make the Oreos. Yeah, eventually. Nature would be healing. We would finally have Oreos back in our post-apocalyptic world. What are the new Mano's people thinking? I'm a Hydrox man. Get on it. Yeah. Well, then I can't wait for the asteroid to hit, Tom. Or eradicate your kind, so we can have only one true cookie. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Rob from Brisbane, Australia wrote in and said, we were talking about time zones on GDI the other day. And he said, you may remember that Swatch, the watch company, tried to create a new time standard without time zones back in 1998 called internet time, where the day is divided into 1,000 beats. They were Swatch watches, desktop widgets. They displayed internet time alongside local time. Their information page for internet time is still alive. So didn't go away, but didn't catch on perhaps as much as Swatch would have liked. Yeah, so Swatch internet time and what three words? The new future? Well, maybe not beats, but. I mean, you know, why not? Thank you, Rob. I've forgotten all about that. I think we covered that on Tech TV, like way back in the day. You know, I don't really remember that at all, but man, did I like a Swatch watch back in the day. Oh, the early, early. And some of the some of the bands were sniffy. You know, you could like smells like raspberry. I I do just think that late 90s, early on internet optimism of just like, oh, look, look at what a beautiful world we could make. Yeah, look at what we're going to do. Yeah, internet time. It's just the beginning. Finally, we can create an open standard time that won't be controlled by governments. No gods, no masters, just internet time for the people. And how right we were. Utopia is here. One beat at a time, Tom. One beat at a time. Well, if you have an idea for Utopia or anything else, got some on your mind, want to get off your chest? You can write us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Pat Sheeran, Joan Atwood, and Daniel Dorado. Also, extra, extra special thanks, PX3. Thanks to Justin Marbury Young for being with us today. Justin, been a long week. It's probably going to be a long week next week. What do you got going on? Well, folks, if you would like to keep up with gesticulating wildly all this, then you can head on over to politics, politics, politics. We are keeping an eye on everything. And like I mentioned before, we're not done with the control of the Senate, as David Perdue has now fallen below the 50% threshold in Georgia. That means he goes to a runoff with John Ossoff. Kelly Loeffler will still fight for her seat. That happens in January. So as we wrap up who gets to sit behind the Resolute Desk, we have more in store at PX3. I am the Senate. Folks, if you want DTNS as a video podcast, get the video RSS feed, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash subscribe. And you can support our show directly at any level, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. And if you'd like to join us live, guess what? We are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 PM Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Chris Ashley and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.