 Coming up on DTNS, why Shonda Rhymes means Netflix might do virtual reality, Waz gets behind right to repair and robots to replace bees. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 8th, 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from StudioRibbit, I'm Sarah Lane. Boston, Texas, I'm Justin Robert. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. We were just talking about Houston, Texas, and if you'd like to hear all of our various opinions on that city, become a patron and get good day internet. The wider show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. According to a research report by Boku, a London-based fintech firm, Asia is set to lead the E-wallets space globally, with Southeast Asia in particular getting traction as growth slows in China. In the Philippines, around 50% use G-cash. In Malaysia and Singapore, Grab Pay is number one. And in Indonesia, Ovo sees 38% of user adoption. Grocery delivery app Instacart has named Fiji Simo as its new CEO. She was formerly the head of Facebook's mobile app and among the highest-ranking female executives at Facebook, right after COO Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Business Officer Martin Levine. Simo takes over from Instacart founder, Apurva Mehta, on August 2nd, who at which point will transition to Executive Chairman of the Board. A lawyer for Twitter told a Delhi High Court under oath that the company had tends to fully comply with India's IT laws. Twitter said it already appointed an interim Chief Compliance Officer with plans to name a grievance office by July 11th and open a local office within the next eight weeks. Moderna has started giving out its first doses of an mRNA-based influenza vaccine called mRNA-1010. It's part of an early-phase clinical trial that will target H1N1, H3N2, Yamagata, and Victoria strains of the flu. They expect to improve on the current 40-60% effectiveness of existing flu vaccines and be able to adapt to new strains quicker. If successful, Moderna intends to combine it with other mRNA-based vaccines, possibly for COVID, and two other respiratory viruses that don't have vaccines yet. If that all happens, they'd combine it into one yearly shot. Qualcomm and ASIS are releasing a smartphone for 1.6 million Snapdragon insiders. The phone will be available for everyone after insiders get really access. It has 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, a set of master and dynamic earbuds, and of course it runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G chipset with 2.84 GHz octa-core processor and the Adreno 660 GPU. The phone will also include an 8K video camera. Not too shabby, but it will cost you $1,500. All right, let's talk about something cheaper, filing a lawsuit. Indeed, Tom, in the grand American tradition. A group of 37 U.S. attorneys general from states and the District of Columbia have sued Google in California federal court, alleging it unlawfully maintains a monopoly with the Google Play Store. Google requires Play Store apps to use its payment system for purchases made through the Play Store and announced it will begin enforcing this more strictly in September. It also lowered the commission from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million in sales and for video, audio and e-book services. Google says the lawsuits are motivated by larger developers who want benefits of the store without paying for it, and pointed out that most Android devices ship with two or more app stores like Samsung's and Amazon's. The complaint notes that even so, Google controls 90% of the market for Android apps. No other Android app store has more than 5% of that market. That it prohibits other app stores from being accessed through the Google Play Store and prohibits competing app stores from buying ads on Google Search or YouTube. The complaint also claims Google offered to pay Samsung to stop pursuing exclusive deals for the Samsung Galaxy Store and pay developers not to remove their apps from the Play Store. Finally, the complaint alleges that Google misleads customers about the security of downloading apps from outside the Play Store and imposes technical hurdles. For those of you who are just catching up, here's the US lawsuit count for Google. From August, Epic suing Google over its App Store terms. That one is scheduled to go forward in April of 2022. From October of last year, the US Department of Justice in 14 states accusing Google of dominating mobile search. And from December of last year, 38 states and territories accusing Google of dominating search. Also from December 15th state or from December, 15 states and territories accuse Google of abusing power over ad tech. That is for those of you keeping count at home. Five ongoing lawsuits in the United States even. I mean, are they laughing? They're laughing the lawyers. Keep laughing in the face of these lawsuits, Todd. Yeah, so let's run through this real quick. It's always about abuse of monopoly power, not necessarily how big your market is. That's going to be Google's defense. They're not abusing it. People just choose them because they're better. It's going to be all this stuff about, like, even if we pay developers, we have the right to do that because it's our App Store and we're open. And we let other people on, yada, yada, yada, yada. It's very similar to a lot of these other court cases. We're going to be wading through these things for years. If you remember the Microsoft breakup cases, those went on for years as well. The one that is interesting here is the idea of accusing Google of misleading customers about security. That's a newer wrinkle that I haven't seen trotted out in legal terms quite as often. But yeah, I don't think Google's surprised that they got lodged another lawsuit. That's the order of the day. There you go after Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. You mentioned whether or not Google was misleading potential customers about security. I mean, I don't, I can't really think of where Google would be accused of that. When you try to download an app directly or you try to sideload, Google gives you some very stern sounding warnings that, hey, if you download stuff from outside of the Play Store, we can't guarantee that it's not malicious, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But isn't that what they should be doing? I mean, what else? I mean, that's the question, right? It's all the wording, I guess. But yeah, it's not irresponsible to tell people that, especially folks who aren't as tech savvy as we are. Because, by the way, Apple does the exact same thing on their desktop Mac Store. And they have had a robust and healthy, independent app community for decades. But when they had the app store, it became a warning. By the way, you're downloading this from the internet. It's very, very scary. Yeah, if you're not dominating the marketplace, which on the Mac, Apple is not, then there's nothing you can complain of. Practices. The other big thing here is denying advertising. If that is something that is provable in court, then you are protecting a monopoly by way of the fact that you are also this ad search giant, which adds another wrinkle and does not exactly make you more sympathetic. That being said, Google makes a lot of money. They got a lot of lawyers. I think that they can continue to bear this for as long as these things come in. From the political side, if anybody thought that a crusade against tech companies was something that was only being done by a reckless and out-of-control Trump Justice Department, it seems as if that rumors were true even then that it wasn't necessarily that there wasn't a desire from bipartisan, a bipartisan gathering of states and attorneys general to lodge these lawsuits, but rather a disagreement on exactly the tact to take, we are now seeing yet another one of these suits, those similar ones were launched last year. So it is time to pay the piper. We are officially at the reckoning time for big tech of their unfettered hooray. We've created a new sector of our economy. We're done with that. Now we're wondering about exactly how powerful we want them to be. Yeah, who wants to bet me a delicious bar of chocolate that there won't be another Google lawsuit filed against them? I will not be taking that position. Nobody take that bet. Louis Rossman runs a popular YouTube channel and he has been campaigning for the right to repair for years. The right to repair mean laws that make it easier for you to fix your own stuff. He used the Cameo app. Remember I was talking about Cameo where you can like pay Paula Abdul to sing happy birthday to your friend? He used the Cameo app to pay Steve Wozniak for a personal message and asked him about the right to repair. Wozniak said in the video that has now been made public that he hadn't really looked into it as closely as he would have liked to until Rossman's request. And he went on to talk about his history of repairing things himself and how that helped him become a better engineer. He talks about tube testers. Remember those things in the hardware stores and the grocery stores? You go stick a tube in a kid's ask your parents. He talks all about it in there. He talks about repairing radios and TVs with tubes, talked about not being able to afford teletype for input and output. So he did it himself by looking at the TV schematics and then was able to use his own TV as the output for the Apple One. Here's a little piece of what he says at the beginning. We wouldn't have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world, an open electronics world. He talks about how parts that meet specs aren't going to hurt your product if you know what you're doing. And he talks a lot about the satisfaction of repairing something yourself and through his support by the end of this video fully behind right to repair. It's time to recognize the right to repair more fully. I believe that companies inhibit it because it gives the companies power, control, you know, over everything. And I guess a lot of people's minds power over others equates to money and profits. Hey, is it your computer or is it some company's computer? Think about that. It's time to start doing the right things. Apple. He doesn't say. He doesn't. He doesn't, but it's pretty heavy-handed. I mean, I love the fact that someone says, hey, Steve Wozniak, who I assume maybe a hero or a mentor of some kind, I would like to pay you to respond to me about this thing that I also care about. Steve Wozniak is like, huh, actually, I hadn't thought about this as much as I should have. And I have some pretty interesting thoughts, but it kind of comes across as an advertisement. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't totally know where we go from here. I mean, maybe it's just Steve Wozniak being Steve Wozniak. Cameo is a fascinating platform. It is very, very interesting because what I think it has evolved to be is more akin to what you get at comic book conventions or other fan conventions where you have the ability to have a brief interaction with a celebrity for a certain amount of money. It is a preset dollar amount. You get a preset amount of time. You have a small little conversation that you would like to have and then you can take a picture and move along. A lot of these things where people will get their friends' bands, you know, a famous person to hold up a friend's bands t-shirts happens there. And so it is no surprise that cameo as a platform has done stuff like this. That being said, I can also understand why it's happening from the cameo side because I'm on cameo. So I'm bookable just in our young, if you'd like to do birthdays, bar mitzvahs, gender reveals, whatever you need, head on over to me. It's not quite as interesting as Steve Wozniak endorsing the right to repair. But for me, I did one yesterday actually where I wished a lovely young lady, Andrea, a happy birthday in the voice of R.L. Stein, which is a character that I've done on the internet for a while. But you can see where it gives you a lot of leeway when you're booking to write whatever you want and to let people know it is very above board. I don't think that anybody who's listening to this who thinks that Wozniak was either tricked or led down a path on this, it's not that. Yeah, no, I don't think so. Yeah, this is very much, you are in control as the person doing the cameo to say exactly what you want. But I think with that being said, it has become a publishing platform and the fact that these are downloadable for everybody and in many times, public. You can just publicly make this. It is, in its own way, a bit of a vlog. Listen, Van, Louis Rossman is a genius in promotion. And thankfully, he seems to be using his powers for good. But he has done a great job of getting his channel out there and using Right to Repair as a great way to build an audience. And I don't, when I say that, I don't doubt that Louis Rossman truly does believe in the Right to Repair and is campaigning for it. But this is a genius move. Because you could tell that Woz really hadn't, like he was probably favorable to Right to Repair, but he really hadn't looked into it. Well, Rossman just got him to look into it, changed his mind maybe and become the face of it. Now this went from that YouTube guy Rossman promoting this to Steve Wozniak from Apple promoting it. And I can't, Wozniak is still technically on the payroll. He gets paid like 50 bucks a week. It's nominal, but he's still on the payroll at Apple. And so I think this has leveled up the discussion of Right to Repair. We already had an executive order being drafted by the White House. Europe is talking about Right to Repair Law. So it's not like it was, you know, shrinking violet of an issue in any way. But this has certainly pushed it a little farther down the road, I think. Well, would you all like to talk about bees versus robots? Yeah. Good, I thought you might. The Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything series has a story about replacing bees with robots for crop pollination. Australia's cluster group holdings will deploy robots to pollinate tomatoes in a greenhouse. Israel's Aruga AI Farming has developed the robots and the company used deep learning to train a neural network to recognize flowers for pollination. So the robots don't fly. They actually roll. A pedestal that can extend up to 13 feet high goes down rows in the greenhouse. So when the cameras detect the flowers, they blast air at them, circulating the pollen. Normally, greenhouses use bumblebees, but bumblebees are hard to get in Australia. So the robots will replace human workers. Those human workers are usually paid to shake leaves with a vibrating wand, because, you know, that's what you got to do. A test of two of Aruga's robots did as well with the humans. A Kentucky company called App Harvest tested Aruga's bots as well. Bumblebees that are easy to get in the U.S., but bumblebees are easy to get in the U.S., rather. But the concern there is that a tomato plant virus is spread by the bees, so that's an issue. The robots never touch the plants and are less likely to spread the virus in this case. Aruga hopes to improve the algorithm to make it more than manual and bee pollination and add other capabilities like pruning. The robots cost about $10,000 each to manufacture, so not cheap, but over time, one can see how this would be beneficial. Other companies, including Edite, Precision Technology, Bumblebee AI, and several universities are also developing similar systems for other crops. Yeah, this is fascinating. I had no idea that bumblebees were rare in Australia. I did know that Australia had very strict rules against bringing in wildlife from other parts of the world. So I could see why it would be hard to get bumblebees, but I also didn't know that they paid people to shake plants in order to pollinate in a greenhouse. So that does feel like something you could easily get a robot to do. I'm tempted to say that the AI almost seems superfluous. Can't you just get a robot to just wander around and shake the plants? But this is more precise, and that's how you get it to be better, is to have it shoot the air directly at the flowers so that the pollen poofs out and then lands on other flowers. And I was really hoping this was going to be very small flying robots that replace the bees. Of course, yeah, you want little tiny robots with little eyes. One of these days. Robot bees, I know. We'll get there. We'll get there. This is very cool, though. Yeah, and to your point, Tom, I also did not know that bumblebees were hard to get in certain continents. But we have too many of them around my house. But yeah, it's kind of fascinating how humans, and again, we can always talk about the human versus robots who's taking jobs away from humans, blah, blah, blah, but it sounds like the humans would be much better off perhaps just supervising the robots rather than shaking a bunch of plants all day. It's, you know, we can get drawn off, like you say, into the like, is this going to replace jobs that could be done by humans? But generally that ends up just allowing companies to save money and come up with other better jobs that humans are better at than machines. Well, if you would like to catch the second episode of the mini podcast series, Seniors in Tech, we are episode one down, second one on deck. It's hosted by our science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, and an episode two, Nicky Interviews, former U.S. robotics engineer, software hardware developer, and part-time paramedic, Michael Musil, about his lengthy career in the industry from the late 70s through today. The virtual uper, Michael Musil. He's a fascinating guy. It's a great conversation, so go check it out. Anantex, Andre Frumusano. Notice that the OnePlus 9 Pro posted much lower browser benchmark scores than other devices using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Sock. You know, like, hey, it's the same browser, same chip. Why is it so slow? When running Chrome, the OnePlus appeared to disable the Cortex X1 Core, throttle the Cortex A78 cores, and eventually isolate Chrome's workload to the lower power Cortex A55 cores. As a result, Geekbench has now banned the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro from its charts, saying it considers this behavior to be benchmark manipulation, although usually if you're going to manipulate a benchmark, make yourself look faster, not slower. In a statement to XDA developers, OnePlus said, following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we can improve the device's battery life and heat management. And so it matches 300 of the most popular apps on Android, including Chrome, with what OnePlus considers appropriate power. OnePlus added, quote, while this may impact the device's performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus, as always, is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users. So OnePlus is betting that the average user won't notice a slowdown, but will notice better battery life and will not care one bit if it doesn't get a benchmark from Geekbench. And I think they're right here. In fact, I almost wonder whether or not in a world where a lot of cell phone technology is commoditized in a level that it was not 10 years ago, that it was not even five or eight years ago, if we are not at a point where things are taking substantial leaps forward and you're making these kinds of decisions based on things that consumers do care about. My phone doesn't let my phone's constantly dying. My phone's too hot in my pocket. Isn't that something that should be taken into consideration as opposed to figuring out how fast you can run it as if you're Dom Toretto trying to race for pinks? Andre Frumisano, for the inentat guy who first noticed this, was like, I actually didn't even notice that the browser was slower. I did a side-by-side comparison with the Galaxy S21 and then I could tell and now I can't unsee it, but it is that weird thing of like, yeah, I mean, I guess it really didn't make a difference, but it also messes with the standard by which you compare phones with each other. But is that a problem with the standard or a problem with the phone? I don't know. You're swaying me over to OnePlus's side. I don't like the idea of messing, you know, give me the choice. That's what I would say. Give me the choice to turn it off. To say, you know what, don't matter. I don't care if I take the battery life hit. Let me just have it run the way it's spent to. And then you can do a benchmark and everything is compared. Don't do it for me. That's, I think, where OnePlus is running into a little bit of friction. I don't know. That to me seems like a decision that is made all the time of whether or not it is going to go as fast as it possibly can go versus battery life. Make it on by default. That's fine. Just give me a little checkbox where I could turn it off. I mean, okay. Or maybe just don't buy a OnePlus phone. It's not like there's not a billion other phones that you can have. Or the checkbox. All right. Don't waste your time, Tom, making deals with TV powerhouses like Shonda Rhimes that you don't expect to benefit from. That's one of Hollywood's oldest laws. And so Netflix following it said that they've expanded their deal with Shonda Rhimes to invest in her programs to diversify Hollywood, open the door to feature films and exclusively produce and distribute potential drumroll please gaming and VR content. Yes. That's right. Netflix and Shonda Rhimes have a deal to make virtual reality stuff. This would take it well beyond occasional experiments like interactive storytelling and into the gaming world for real. Netflix is Greg Peters indicated in April that Netflix thinks quote games are going to be an important form of entertainment and an important modality to deepen the fan experience and quote now. Netflix has been dabbling in games. They have their band or snatches. They have their mobile stranger things stuff. But this seems to indicate that maybe Netflix might be planning to make games, like be a studio. And it certainly would be the first time Netflix has ventured into VR. They've almost steered away from VR. They have an app on the Oculus Quest, but it's not optimized for VR. It just slaps you in a virtual theater and everything else. Well, yeah. And the whole sort of like, oh, getting into VR is like, there are, you see a lot of companies saying, oh, here's a VR companion to this series that you might have liked very much kind of thing, which is not a bad thing. But that is not the same thing as a standalone VR experience. I would be very interested to see what this looks like, especially because, I mean, Shonda Rhimes, like you said, a powerhouse. This is a definitely a production house that is very good at what they do. But what would VR look like? It would look like whatever Shonda Rhimes wants it to look like. Virtual Bridgerton. You can do that. Well, fine. But like, is that something that as a VR enthusiast, I will enjoy? You know, like I want to see, like show me what you got. Well, I guess that's really what the big thing here is freedom. Shonda Rhimes is a huge part of Netflix's original content. She is about as big of a name as television is going to mint in her era. And that means that she gets whatever she wants with the entity for which she is going to sign with. What Netflix has that places like other studios would not, is the ability to own their tech side. Everybody else in Hollywood is partnering with somebody else to do a thing with tech, right? Or that is another element of it. It's Netflix's bread and butter, which means that it's already something that I'm sure they have enhanced VR versions in the works for their, their, their Oculus thing. And I think what they're looking at is much in the way that they were ahead of the curve with phones, with a set top or with, with, with television devices. I think they look at something like the Oculus quest too and say, if you're even a kid and you're going to college, not only not getting a television, like I did as a dinosaur, not only are you not getting a laptop, maybe you're not even getting a phone like your older brother did. You're getting that Oculus and you're putting it on your head and that's how you consume all sit down big screen entertainment. And if you're doing that, then you want to have best Shonda Rhimes is the person to do. I, I couple of things. This could just be a clause in Shonda Rhimes contract that's meant to plan for future things just in case. And it never ends up being anything. It could be that. I don't think it is though, because of what you said about Greg Peters indicating like, Hey, video games were kind of into them. And that's what Netflix does so well. They do the thing before everybody else thinks to get there. They were streaming when everyone went streaming. That's just, that's crazy. Why would you stream? And they were a DVD company and now they're the dominant streaming company. This could be the beginning of that. I'm not guaranteeing it is, but this could be them figuring out like, Ah, I think we know what we would do in virtual reality. And I'm like you, Sarah, I want to see what that is too. But it could be that that they've got an idea of what that is. And this is the first step towards that. One last very boring business explanation for this that it could be is that much like their digital games as they create IP, they can license them out. Like another game developing company can say, Hey, we can skin this game. Let's change your things, kids. Their Netflix is like, great. Here's what it's going to cost to do that. You make your money back running the game. Shonda Rhimes could just say, All right. Yeah. Anything that I make, that also comes to me. I get a cut out of that. Exactly. Well, many of us are not looking to watch new shows, but looking to escape. If you have the urge to travel, but you don't really know where you want to go. Have no fear. The amateur traveler has two newsletters to help you decide. This is this is Kristen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you're ready to travel right now and you're not sure where to go or you're flexible in terms of where you're going to go, you can look for a cheap flight. There are two different travel newsletters that I'm going to recommend for you to find cheap flights. One is the dollar flight club. And the other is Scott's cheap flights. Both of those have free and paid versions of the newsletter, but the free versions are going to find you some good flights. So check it out. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. It's good to have regular travel tips, even if even if you can't travel everywhere. It's pretty nice. It's pretty nice to thank you Chris. I agree. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. We got a nice one from Gautamon who said Owen, meaning Owen JJ Stone. Owen made me laugh so much in the last two days while also being insightful. I'd love to see him on more often. That is all. We 100% agree and will endeavor to meet his fees. Yeah. I think I think we've happened to Owen's alt. Yeah. I mean, Owen, you're great. Come on, we're often. And thanks that everyone also agreed. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks. All joking aside. Thanks to Owen for doing two days this week. That was really awesome. Indeed. If you have feedback, questions, comments, anything that we talk about on a show or might talk about on a future show, please do send that feedback to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, I'd like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Pat Sheeran, Dagrasha Daniels, and Irwin Ster. Also, we have three new bosses. Count them three. Jennifer Hamill, Chris Eich, and Ari Takalo. All just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Ari. Oh my gosh. I mean, we said it's true. If you become a new boss, we make a big deal. We love it. So look, Jennifer, Chris, and Ari, you guys are our new favorites. Thank you. You indeed you are. But I mean, but nobody comes before Justin Roberyong. Justin. You are a scholar among men, if that's a term. Let folks know they can keep up with your scholarly work. Indeed. A feral dog that cleans up nice enough that has become scholarly in my own pursuits, and therefore I am amongst men of scholar. Guys, thank you all. Walk more time for all of the DTNS support for the World's Greatest Con podcast, the dog and pony show audio, my production company produced with Brian Brushwood. The final of the five episodes is out now. That is a Q&A episode answering all sorts of questions. And we have just set up a brand new Patreon. Indeed, patreon.com slash greatest con is where you can continue to support that program. It has been a tremendous ride and with your help, we can get you new episodes a lot faster than the eight months it took us to make these four. So head on over there, patreon.com slash greatest con. Excellent. Well, if you if you want to keep up with this show, good news because we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech new show dot com slash live and we are back tomorrow with Bob Dunblitt and then for all time. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program. It's time to recognize the right to repair.