 Coming up on DTNS, Uber wants to bring you booze. Boston Dynamics makes its dog-like robots more independent and bees. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are very excited to have the founder of 5x5, Dan Benjamin, back on the show. Welcome back, Dan. Thank you. Great to be back. I love being on the show. I'm here anytime you need me. Thanks, guys. It's so good to have you. Thanks for joining us again. We were just all talking about our dongle strategies on good day internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon announced that Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO in Q3 and take the newly created position of executive chair. Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS will take over as CEO. Bezos, who has served as CEO since the company was founded in 1994 said, quote, as executive chair, I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives, but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the day one fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. He's like, I own a newspaper in Rockets. You know, I'm going to go have some fun. Good luck, Jassy. In Apple and Epic Games ongoing lawsuit, Judge Thomas S. Hickson ruled that Apple CEO Tim Cook must sit for a seven hour deposition in the case. The judge also denied Apple's request to subpoena Samsung in order to access internal documents, which it requested to help prove that Apple's app store policies are similar to Samsung's policies. ByteDance filed an antitrust lawsuit against 10 cent in Beijing, alleging that the company blocked access to content from ByteDance's Daoyin platform on WeChat and QQ. This comes as China is considering draft regulations aimed at reducing monopolistic behavior among its large technology companies. French cloud computing company Scaleway claims it's the first service in Europe to rent out remote M1 powered Mac minis for 10 cents an hour to anybody in the world. Your 10 cents have to be Euro cents though. So that's about 12 cents US. The M1 Mac minis are housed in a former nuclear bunker 25 meters underground. I'll have macOS Big Sur 11.2 and Xcode 12.4 installed along with VNC SSH and more already enabled. Instagram is adding a new recently deleted feature. So if you delete a post, it will live in a hidden section of your profile for 30 more days before actually being deleted. You might just change your mind about whatever you deleted, but Instagram also says this will help safeguard against hackers who target Instagram accounts and then delete a bunch of stuff because both restoring or permanently deleting the recents requires two factor authentication. And that's even if you didn't have 2FA setup in the first place, which you should have. Alright, let's talk a little more about Boston Dynamics Spot Explorer. That's the little robot dog from Boston Dynamics went on sale last June for $74,500. There are about 400 of them out there now. Hyundai owned Boston Dynamics is announcing some new features for the Quadruped robots in response to requests from its customers. One common use case for Spot is site inspection. So you've got a big site with a bunch of pipes and gauges and things that need to have an eye kept on them. So you put Spot out there so it can go into places that might be dangerous. To that end, Boston Dynamics has introduced Scout, a web controlled system to pilot Spot robots remotely. So you don't even have to be on site. You can use Spot like a big telepresence robot. View the site, take photographs, works with your keyboard in the WASD configuration, or you can use a Bluetooth game controller to operate it. Company also introduced a new robotic arm for Spot. The new arm will be able to grasp, lift, carry, place and drag objects. The use case for this are probably pretty obvious. And while it's not integrated into Scout yet, when it is, you'll be able to operate valves and levers remotely. You'll still be able to do them when you're near the robot operating it in line of sight. But remotely, once Scout is integrated, you'll be able to do some minor maintenance without having to be on site. And they're also selling a thermal imaging option with 30X zoom. All of that works with Spot Explorer. That's the existing robot, which has a 90 minute battery life. So if you do start using Scout to operate Spot remotely, you're going to run into a time limit if you do it a lot, unless you get the other announcement from Boston Dynamics, the new Spot Enterprise, which has an upgraded CPU for more advanced autonomy. Most of that advanced autonomy is yet to be rolled out, but Spot Enterprise at launch can go plug itself into its charging station, making it even more suited to remote use. All the new features are available today. If you want to buy one of these, contact Boston Dynamics, because they're not telling us how much it is without sitting down and having conversation. If you have to ask. You know, the Scout system, at first I was like, well, but can't you already remotely control the Spot Explorer? That's the whole point. I mean, it's not like you have to like hold its hand, but I guess the idea is, you know, web control system is you could be anywhere in the world and be able to monitor something rather than, yeah, like in the office, kind of looking down on the warehouse, you know, on the same network. Yeah, and you wouldn't need to have like software preconfigured on your phone or something like that. If there was an emergency, you could just jump in front of a browser and do whatever it is that you need the robot to do, which is kind of cool. But I think the battery charging part is actually, they kind of added that on at the end, but I actually think that's really important because if it requires human intervention to charge it and it only has a 90 minute battery, then its autonomy is kind of irrelevant at that point. You know, it can't do anything, but now if it knows it needs to go and recharge or you can tell it to go recharge, that gives it some, I guess, additional usefulness. Yeah, and I try to remember too that, you know, we were making fun of Boston Dynamics for not having a product for years and robots sort of like, wait, how are they really helping anything? What are you going to use big dog for? And so we're, you know, we're finally seeing that. We're finally seeing them selling 400 of these things at $74,000 coming out with enterprise level features based on feedback. I mean, this seems to be turning into a business for Hyundai. I will not be buying one. I would have to forego two-year salary or more. Imagine what Spot Explorer might build for Hyundai looking ahead a few years. Oh yeah, hold that thought for a couple of minutes. Yeah. All right. Let's talk stocks. I know, I know, but this is important. No, this is a new twist, new twist. Many more of you perhaps than a couple of weeks ago are pretty familiar with zero cost stock trading since the whole GameStop, Robinhood, Wall Street, Bets, events over the past week or so. We all learned a lot. So for those of you who might still be fuzzy basically means you don't pay anything to trade stocks and companies like Robinhood make their money in other ways. One of those ways that they make their money is something called payment for order flow. We're going to oversimplify this a lot, but essentially Robinhood makes fees off of directing the trades to third parties because the third parties can sort of buy in bulk for a reduced price if they've got enough of them. So let's say I pay $10 for a share, but a lot of other folks are also paying $10 for a share. If the third party can get it for $9 because they're a bunch of them, it keeps 90 cents, gives 10 cents to Robinhood, and then you get the share for the price you asked for. So everybody's happy. This can lead to a conflict of interest though if, for example, too many customers want to buy GameStop stock and the market makers don't want to pay for the order flow anymore because they can't get it at a discount. So where's their incentive? It's more complicated than that, but you get the gist. So Robinhood has taken heat lately for restricting how many people can buy certain stocks because of this exact situation. Trading app public is taking a different approach. It's a zero cost stock trading service and it's taking a pro consumer stand and that's words. It will no longer take payments for order flow, meaning that instead of it making money off of your trades, it will now cost public money to make your trades because public is buying them direct from the stock exchanges. You might say, well, why would they lose money to replace that lost income and cover the new costs public is letting its customers leave them tips. Yep, you heard me right. You can tip your broker if you like their service and you think they did a good job. You could think of it sort of like Patreon meets Robinhood. All the awkwardness of dining out now in your stock app. I mean, listen, I love this idea. I would be very curious to see, you know, how the honor system works in a situation like this. If it's, you know, it's not compulsory, but but yeah, I mean, I think it's public's way of saying, listen, if you're disgruntled about what happened with Robinhood, whether or not you really blame the company for a very old fashioned system that, you know, can only be disrupted so much before it kind of falls apart and reverts back to the old days. We have, we have a different approach and we hope that it makes it more, you know, less exclusionary. Yeah, you know, I think, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this actually changes the stock market because if you think about it, you know, we've had computerization. We've had all the stock trades moving from a bunch of people yelling at each other on the stock floor to most things being computerized, but I wonder, especially with this sort of honor system and tipping type thing, are we going to see more independent people kind of stepping forward and making their own little funds or making becoming more independent because most of the time when you go to your broker, your broker works for a big firm. Is this going to kind of usher in the renaissance of independent brokers just working from their houses during COVID and, you know, and working from tips for giving good advice or something like that? I don't know. Yeah, because I mean, we've seen over the years and Daily Tech News Show is a beneficiary of the trend of people saying, hey, if I get value out of something, I'd be willing to give that thing some money to say thanks for being there, right? You know, Patreon was built on that model and so was Daily Tech News Show. But to do that, what we've, what we've found and I think a lot of others is that you have to have a community. You have to have people who are like, yeah, I feel part of what you're making. I value it and so I'm willing to support it. Public is taking a little bit of a gamble here that they can say, look, we know a lot of you are very angry at Robin Hood and others for the way they're doing. We're not going to do that. So we're going to divest ourselves of the whole, you know, payment for order flow thing that causes the problem. But if we do that, you got to step up and fill in the gap. And so we're trusting that you will. I don't use public. So I don't know what kind of community they have. Maybe they have a really strong community behind public that they know they could take advantage of that. But you have to have that or because if it's just a faceless app, you're much less likely to get people to say like, yeah, I'll kick in a few dollars. It's also, it's, you know, a strategic move that could be reversed later. Public could say we heard you. We listened. We realized that instead of making you tip us, the payment for order flow just makes more sense now that we have a lot of users we didn't have before, you know, the new strategy and then kind of hope that that works. Do I'm not saying that that's what public's doing, but that's an option. Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, it would be a lot of work because they're taking a long time to wind this down and then they're going to have to work to, they would have to work to wind it back up and then they'd have to say a lot of things that today they're saying like this just isn't to our values that, you know, they'd have to go back on that. None of that's impossible. So, you know, Uber announced it intends to buy the alcohol delivery company Drizly for one point one billion dollars. Uber plans to eventually integrate Drizly services into Uber eats. So while you're buying your other things, you could you could get some booze delivered Uber eats has a few liquor stores on there from another company at bot, but this will greatly increase the number. It also plans to maintain the Drizly app as a separate app online made up 1% of alcohol sales in the United States in 2019. That grew 80% in 2020 with people not leaving their houses. And so it's expected to reach 7% of alcohol sales by 2024. There's a lot of competitors in this space. The DoorDash also acquired a company that does this and will deliver alcohol. Instacart does it. Minibar, Kraft Shack, a bunch more of these niche services are out there. But it looks like alcohol delivery is is another one of the spaces that these companies that word like Uber doing all kinds of ride oriented services are now betting on you're going to stay in your house for a little while longer. Yeah, you're totally right. And didn't you guys talk earlier in the week about Uber's announcement saying that they spent too much money on autonomous driving and that they should have spent it more on like delivery services. Didn't you all cover that one? You know, it occurs to me that they kind of woke up to the fact that they already have a really good infrastructure for like tracking where their vehicles are and a massive army of vehicles in like every single city in the in the country. And you know, this really does make sense for them any kind of integration anything they can use on if you think about it, they now have a platform that is vehicles and drivers and tracking of those things and that is delivery. If you really think about it, whether you're delivering human beings to different places or or picking stuff up and you can also cover a lot of ground by doing both if you have a fair that's going to take you from one part of town to another and that's going to put you by the, you know, the liquor store. You can grab that and take it to this other person and then pick up your next fair. I mean like it's genius. It's really smart. And by the way, before the show, we were talking about drizzly in Texas. There is drizzly is here in Texas. I just have never used it. So I didn't know. Yeah, I've used it once. Yeah. When I lived in LA, I think I'd used it once or twice. I have definitely bought wine from Uber Eats. You know, same idea, but it was limited. You know, I'm like, you know, something with the, you know, steak. I'm making type of a thing. I think also, well, first of all, very few people are taking Uber as compared to a couple years ago and not that people aren't, but that's, you know, the delivery part of Uber's business has boomed while, you know, ride hailing has, has definitely sunk. And, you know, I used to, I try not to too much because I'm trying to make a lot of my own food and save a little money, but I used to get food delivery all the time. But any excuse for me to have to go to the store like, oh, but I also really like that certain kind of mezcal, you know, something like that, that I can't get online or I don't really know what app to use. I'll just go to the store and that's why I'll buy a bunch of other stuff. And Uber is smart enough to know that if they can get everything for me within the app that I'm in, I'm going to end up spending a lot more and not having to go to the grocery store at all. Great point. Yeah, it seems like a lot of these services believe that the loosened alcohol delivery rules will stay loosened, you know, once you've loosened above, it'll be harder to bring them back even, even once people are leaving their house more often. It definitely seems like Uber wants to become sort of the Amazon of delivery as does DoorDash, as does Instacart. So we're seeing an oligopoly developing as they start to buy up the smaller more niche providers. This is very similar to what Amazon did in retail. So I would keep an eye on that. And to your point about the autonomous cars, I think Uber thought autonomous cars was going to be their AWS to push that Amazon analogy a little farther and then realized web services were already a business when AWS was spun up. Autonomous cars, you know, still a decade off. So maybe too early for that. Good point. Hey, folks, if you want to hear us talk about something particular on the show, let us know on our subreddit. We take the link suggestions there. You can submit stories and vote on the links suggested by others. It's all at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. A new note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will use Hyundai's E-GMP electric vehicle platform for the first Apple car models. E-GMP has a maximum range of about 310 miles. It can charge to 80% in 18 minutes. It goes 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 3.5 seconds with a top speed of 160 miles per hour, which is fast. Hyundai Movies would reportedly do component design and production. And Hyundai's Kia would handle production in the U.S. itself. Kuo says that Apple will also work with General Motors and European manufacturer PSA, the folks who make Pujo and Citroen, possibly to become regional partners. Kuo believes Apple will handle self-driving hardware and software, semiconductors, battery-related technologies, form factor and internal space designs, innovative user experience and the integration with Apple's existing ecosystem. But Kuo does not expect an Apple car to be ready until at least 2025. That's still not that far off. It's not that far off. And this is something I'm really interested in, not because I'm like a car guy, I'm really not, but because this is another situation and it's a very rare situation for Apple. Apple likes to control everything. They like to do everything themselves. They like to make everything themselves. Case in point, the M1 CPU, that was a thing that they've wanted for a long time. They used to struggle with Motorola to get the speed and performance out of the chips that they wanted. So they switched over to Intel. And they're like, you know, we've got the resources and the infrastructure. Why don't we just do this ourselves? And when you consider what's going on in the car space, it makes sense for Apple to want to be in that space. But there's so much about cars that's well outside of Apple's wheelhouse. The idea that Apple has always been a hardware manufacturer making a CPU, that doesn't seem like a stretch when you think about what Apple is capable of, but building a car platform is really, really different. But what I'm curious about is for these vehicles to really be Apple vehicles and to give you the Apple experience, how is production really going to go? I mean, it's one thing for them to say, okay, you know, we're going to have our phones assembled in China at a plant that we can kind of control. Would Hyundai want to be controlled that way? How would the actual assembly work? Would Hyundai make parts and then deliver it to Apple? And Apple would assemble it? Or is it all going to happen at the Kia plant? Like, there's a lot we don't know, but it's fascinating because Apple is so notoriously secretive and controlling over their production process. Yeah, because on the face of it, it looks similar to what they do already, right? They don't build the iPhone. They have Foxconn do it, but they have so much more control over that Foxconn process, like you were talking about, versus this where we, as Sarah mentioned, they're going to have control over the software and any autonomous features. And that's it. All the other parts are made by somebody else, assembled by somebody else, certified by somebody else, pushed through all of the controls that the various governments have by somebody else. That's a lot less control than Apple likes to have. Now Apple does like to move slowly. They didn't use to make chips. They bought P.A. Semi and then they eventually started making mobile chips. And then they eventually started making laptop chips. So, you know, I could see that they'll eventually have their own car plant and be making their own cars. Is this just like a stepping stone? It's not impossible to think that maybe 10, 15 years down the road. That's what we're talking about. Or they just buy a lot. Hyundai becomes Apple. Companies that does this and brought it in-house. Yeah. But yeah, we're way far away from that right now. What was the, you mentioned the Hyundai situation, the unnamed executive from Hyundai told Reuters, it is not like working with Apple would always produce great results. Apple is the boss. They do their marketing. They do their products. They do their brand. Hyundai is also the boss. That does not really work. So, yeah. Sounds like it could be a... I'll tell you what, just to add to what you're saying, when I went to South Korea, you know, I was there for a few weeks and Hyundai over there is, I mean, they're everywhere. They make everything. We think of them as a car manufacturer here in the U.S., but in South Korea, they make everything, like the chair you're sitting on, they made it. You know what I mean? Like they're everywhere and their signs are everywhere. And they're, it's almost like, if you were just to pick the five most widely known American companies and smash them together, that's Hyundai in South Korea. So, they're equally as controlling as Apple is in that sense. And they get their own brand. They know what they do. And the idea of, of course, they would want to work with Apple, but they're not going to be cool with Apple coming in and saying, all right, here's how we're going to do stuff. Unlike Foxconn, whose job is to just cater to the customer, Hyundai doesn't do that. Yeah. No, Hyundai is one of the cables, right? Like Samsung or LG or Latte. Yeah. Real quickly, Google search results are going to add a three dot menu next to the search results. So when you tap on it, you'll get an about this result box that pops up with Wikipedia information about the site. That way you'll be able to tell, Oh, who is that? Who is giving me this link? It will also indicate if the site uses HTTPS and reemphasize if the results are paid ad or not rolling out in beta for the U.S. English language users on the web and on the Google Android app. Kind of nifty. Very nifty. This, well, I don't know if you're going to think it's nifty. I'll tell you the story first. Software company Invoka based in Santa Barbara, California has had its 210 employees working remotely since last March at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pretty big office. Three stories, but the offices haven't exactly been empty as a colony of 20,000 honey bees has been discovered inside the company. After noticing there's some dead bees around here. You know, people coming in and out periodically hired a bee technician who spotted bees flying into the building from outside use thermal imaging to track down the nest. It was big nests. 10 gallons of beeswax, honey and pollen. That's big. Then the technician estimated they'd been there at least six months and had entered through a hole in the building's brick exterior. You will be relieved to hear that the nest and the bees, including the queen, were extracted from the building safely and moved to a more natural environment. Also Invoka now pivoting to locally sourced honey. I was going to say they should have kept it in there and added to their their list of products. Yeah. You want some software and honey? Yeah. Locally sourced software. Put some CBD in it. They've got a whole new business. Oh, that's great. They could have diversified pretty soon to end up like Hyundai. They're just doing everything. That's right. They'll do everything. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. A couple more tab organization recommendations from y'all because I talked last week about how I can never close a tab. Lisa, AKA Squirrely, who I see in our Discord right now, suggested a tree sale tab. She says it provides a vertical tree of tabs. Lisa says, I don't personally care about the sub tree functionality, but I love the vertical tab bar. Carille also wrote in and said, the great suspender, which he uses for Chrome, wasn't sure if it worked for Firefox or not, said it suspends the unused tabs to free the resources that are used. And if you want to revive it, you just click on it. I was using it on Chrome and Edge and I got a notification today from Edge that they've copied that feature and made it part of the browser called sleeping tabs. I was wondering if it was available for Firefox. So I looked up the great suspender and there's actually a few articles, but in our show notes, I'll link you to the Life Hacker article just from a couple of months ago that said, you should probably uninstall the great suspender as an extension because apparently last year, the original developer sold the company, you know, the code to someone else who then took the code off GitHub, changed the code, uploaded sort of a different version of this extension without explaining why and has set off some red flags in the community. So just kind of a good PSA to always keep an eye on everything you've got going on. And periodically look them up, make sure that nothing's changed behind your back. Yeah. So to sum up, tree style tab, great, great suspender, uninstall and look for something else. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. All right. The brevity version of Mailbag. If you have mail to send us, whether it's a question, a comment, a suggestion, an idea, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send it. We'd also like to shout out patrons that are master and are grand master levels today. They include Chris Smith, Martin James and Degracia A. Daniels. Big, big thanks to Ban... Ban Dan Benjamin for being with us today from 5x5, one of our favorite podcast networks. Dan, what's been going on in your worlds? Thanks for having me like always guys. I'm here anytime you need me. Want to tell you about Fireside if you're a podcaster and you're looking for a really good host. Been running Fireside.fm. I started in 2016. The focus is on independent podcast publishers like you guys like me as a good tool that can help you get started and then take you all the way up till you're a pro. So Fireside.fm, thanks for letting me promote that guys. Appreciate it. Yeah, go check it out folks. Also, don't forget we've got some merch. You want a DTNS hat, maybe a hoodie or mask or mouse pad. We've got all that and more at the Daily Tech News Show store soon to get DTNS specific teas available. That's right, tea. Like tea, a drink. So keep an eye on that. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live and we're going to be back doing this all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.