 Stephen Wilhite, creator of the Graphics Interchange Format, died of COVID last week at the age of 74. In 2013, he told The New York Times, The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations, they are wrong. It is a soft G, pronounced GIF, end of story, end quote. Rest in peace, Stephen Wilhite, and thanks for creating the GIF. Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, and Degrescia. Hey, Daniels! Coming up on DTNS, robots need a black box. Who's going to dominate FinTech? Apple or Mexico's OXO stores, and Instacart realizes the platform. That's where the real money is made. This is the Daily Tech News Show for Thursday, March 24th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Let's get right into the news with some tech things you should know. OnePlus will hold an event on March 31st, 10 a.m. Eastern time to announce its international release of the OnePlus 10 Pro. The phone launched in China back in January, so you might be familiar with it, but it is launching wider now. OnePlus will announce availability and pricing for the phone in the U.S., Europe, and India. Uber started as Uber cab way back in the day and was meant to be used to hail black luxury cars till cab companies complained about the name and it changed the name to Uber. Then cab companies complained about the entire business model and they fought it out in cities around the world. And in some cities like Tokyo, Barcelona, and Hong Kong, Uber made peace and integrated abs into the Uber app. And now it is done so in the city most people think of when you think of a yellow cab. Uber has reached an agreement with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission to list all New York City taxis in its app. Passengers will pay roughly the same fare for a taxi ride as for UberX rides and cab drivers who take Uber passengers will be paid the same rate as Uber drivers. Back in April of 2021, just under a year ago, NASA decided to choose one company, SpaceX, to build lunar landers for the Artemis mission to the moon because of budget constraints. The latest budget gives NASA the flexibility to reopen that contract and solicit competing private companies to make alternative landers. SpaceX will still be making the lander for the first crewed landing of Artemis 3 in 2025, but landers after that may come from another company as well. NASA will issue a draft solicitation for the second lunar lander in the coming weeks before issuing a formal request for proposals this summer. Congratulations. Lots of attention has been given to the group that has accessed and leaked data from NVIDIA, Samsung, Microsoft, Okta, and more. Bloomberg reports that four security researchers working on behalf of attacked companies believe they have discovered the identities of some of the group's members. The leader is possibly a teenager who lives five miles outside of Oxford University. His father told the BBC that they are concerned and trying to keep him away from his computer now. The father was like, I just thought he was in there playing video games. It seems he may be the same hacker who was also doxed by a doxing community after a falling out. Another suspected member of the group seems to be a teenager in Brazil. The City of London police say they have arrested seven teenagers in relation to the gang, though it's not clear if the Oxford teenager is among those. The last message posted to the group's Telegram channel was on Wednesday, saying that members were going on vacation until March 30th. India has a very sophisticated digital payment system called UPI. If you live in India or you've been there, you might be familiar already. India's government also has been fairly antagonistic to crypto. So it's notable that Coinbase, one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges, announced that it is adding support for UPI, as well as another Indian payment system called IMPS. All right, you little almost made an imps joke there, but I don't know if they say it that way in India or not. Let me know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Let's talk a little more about Google with a somewhat impressive announcement. Justin, what do we got? You know, it is. Google's always required developers to use its payment system in the Google Play Store, but it hasn't always enforced the requirement. In September 2020, it announced developers had until September 2021 before it cracked down, then it extended the deadline to March 31st, 2022, a week from the day that this episode was recorded. But in advance of that deadline, Google announced a test program called User Billing Choice, a pilot program for developers of apps of the Google Play Store that will let them offer alternative payments alongside Google Play's own. The new system is still being built and all the details have yet to be nailed down, but Spotify will be the first to try it later this year. When it launches, Spotify users will see both payment options side by side. Should they use Google Play, they will see a subscription in their Google Play subscription center. If they use Spotify's own payment option, they will not. The Spotify test option will start in selected markets, but eventually roll out to all 184 markets where Spotify Premium is available. We don't know which markets will get it first, and we don't know what other developers will be allowed to test it. We don't know how much it will cost Spotify, most importantly. Google's alternative system in South Korea takes a commission of 4% lower than the regular commission and includes reporting requirements that are automatic if you use the Play Store's system. I guess that's my real question is, okay, what does this cost Spotify? And why doesn't either company want to say so? And will this satisfy some of the legal wranglings that have happened in proprietary payment systems, most notably between Apple and Epic Games? And Google and Epic. Don't forget, Epic also sued Google. That one doesn't get as much of attention because it's sort of being delayed until the Apple one is fully appealed and figured out. But yeah, will Google let Epic use this? Would Epic then drop its lawsuit? I think a lot of people may have looked at these fights as just let us use our own thing and we'll keep all the money. And Apple and Google both when they were forced to do it in Korea said, and Apple went in the Netherlands said, when we do this, we're going to charge you still. We're going to charge you to be in the App Store. We're just going to charge you less because we're not operating the payment system, but you're going to have to do all this reporting and stuff. My guess is Spotify is paying something around 4%. It is really interesting that Netflix has been one of the scoff laws that Google has been after to play by the rules and they are not announced as part of this. So March 31st, does Netflix drop the payment option or do we get an announcement that Netflix has reached a deal with Spotify? Is that why they don't want to give the percentage publicly because they're in negotiations with Netflix or other people? I mean, that's likely. Yeah. I always suspect that that's exactly it is that, you know, maybe they get the Netflix price and not a lot of people get it and they don't want to anchor that percentage for anybody else that they make this deal with. The one thing I do want to point out though is that there is a consumer facing idea to the payment processing via the OS like Apple or Google. I do think that for a lot of people, especially in our world where we have a lot of subscriptions that not everybody's able to keep track of in their heads, having them centrally located, if you are subscribing through your OS is a helpful thing. I have certainly found it to be helpful when I head on into that tab and realize, oh geez, I did not know that I was still paying for some art app that I used to make a poster five years ago. Yeah. Been there. Yeah. And this is going to take till later this year to even launch with Just Spotify. It'll be interesting to see who else joins it and whether it calms all of these bills and lawsuits and such, at least towards Google. And if Apple follows suit, maybe they will. Who knows? The world is crazy. A couple of interesting fintech stories today. Rest of world notes that Mexico's biggest convenience store chain, Oxo, with two X's, has been pushing a Visa debit card and app called Spin. It has gotten 1.6 million signups since it launched in November, which makes it a faster growing service than most Neobanks. You can sign up for Spin at any Oxo location and get instant access to the app's digital payments and transfers. So Dan Campos from our sister show NTX went down to his local Oxo in Mexico City to find out what he would need to do to sign up. I was checking the requirements that you need to get the Spin card from Oxo and it's really simple. Pretty much you only need a cell phone number and an email address and also this, an official ID and 50 pesos and with that you can get in any of the stores your card. So 50 pesos is your initial deposit because you're basically opening a sort of a bank account. That makes sense. Thank you Dan for running down to do that. The maximum amount of money you can receive within a month with the Spin basic account is 5,000 pesos. That's about $250 US. You have to go pro if you want to move more money than that. Spin has operated in partnership with a FinTech company called Compro Pago and the rest of world talked to a 65 year old unbanked janitor who said I paid 50 pesos, got the card immediately, 24 hours later, I was getting money deposited. So it's definitely an easier way for people to get a bank account. That speed of sign up is one of the hallmarks of FinTech in general. Take Apple which has a whole commercial about somebody getting an Apple Card while they're waiting in line to pay because they forgot their wallet. Financial Services is a growing market for Apple. They have Apple Pay, Apple Card, tap to pay on iPhone for merchants that we talked about not that long ago. Protocol Reports Apple is now buying UK open bank startup Credit Kudos. Credit Kudos makes software for more informed credit checks on loan applications. It's a challenger to Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. They are an open bank, an open banking treats banks as a service provider and your data as yours. So you can authorize third parties to access that data without having to get the bank involved if you want to do things like make loan payments faster or cheaper or easier, get better advice on financial decisions like opening a credit card or getting a mortgage, for example, an open banking service might tell you exactly how much you can afford to spend on a house rather than using guidelines for mortgage lenders. That could get you in over your head. It can also speed up approval of mortgages or other loans. For Apple, buying credit kudos could make it easier to offer the Apple Card outside the U.S. which could also play into the idea of a new Apple subscription model for hardware that Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says may be coming. Protocol also notes that Apple does not take a cut of retail or in-person payments of any of these services. Cut to the opposite of the App Store. The only thing it charges is a small fee for Apple Pay which all banks pay to all payment processors. So that was just kind of standard in the business. But tap to pay with an Apple Card and open banking could bypass credit card networks altogether. Justin, that could make Apple either decide to start charging or, I don't know, use the financial system as a loss leader. I think that it's the second. What Apple has done in the last few years is really reverse what was a deficiency in their DNA for decades. And that is be bad at services. They've gotten a lot better at it not only as more and more things have moved to the cloud but also in entertainment with Apple TV in finance like what we're seeing with the Apple Card. But if you look at their behavior in those two markets specifically, they want to spend a lot of money because they've got more money than God. More money than some of the players in those spaces are normally willing to spend and they are willing to take chances that others simply can't. They can afford to do this at a lesser fee than any other financial player because they don't need to make money on it necessarily. They need to make sure that you have your finances intertwined with their system and that you don't even think about ever buying anything other than an iPhone. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, for anybody who's familiar with Zell as I am because that's what Bank of America uses or a cash shop or a Venmo or all sorts of payments that still are tied to a bank account of some sort. I think a lot of people might listen to the story and say, okay, well, is this better? And if so, how? Yeah, I think what Apple might want to do is say we can help you open a bank account, keep your money, have it accessible, have it easy to track, get you the easy credit, and you will get all that for free with no extra fees as a member of Apple One, right? So you're already paying for Apple One to get all those TV shows Justin was just talking about and your fitness and maybe if German's right, your freaking iPhone will be part of that and you'll get a new one every year just as part of that subscription. They'll roll that all in together. It'll all be controlled by Apple and you won't be paying for the financial services part of it. You'll just be paying for the lifestyle that locks you into the Apple ecosystem. Well, we all know that 10-minute grocery is cool, but maybe 15-minute grocery is also cool. What I'm talking about is Instacart. Instacart announced it will offer its Instacart platform to grocery retailers, even retailers who have not partnered with it. This is something that any retailer can come to Instacart for deliveries. Instacart says its Instacart platform will help partners handle e-commerce, delivery fulfillment also adds scanless carts and handle brick and mortar operations while also offering access to insights and other data. So you know kind of how things are performing. These features can be purchased a luck card or as a single unified platform. Grocery chain Publix will use Instacart fulfillment services in Atlanta and Miami to offer 15-minute grocery deliveries. So again, not 10, but still pretty close. Instacart has competitors, GoPuff, DoorDash, and Get-Ear who are also trying out fast grocery deliveries. We talk about this on the show all the time. How fast is fast before it doesn't work anymore? Other retailers like Good Food Holdings and Schnucks Markets are piloting Instacart's ad service due to be rolled out more widely later this year. So I guess my question is what do we think the economics are for Instacart at this point? I mean Instacart used to be like Whole Foods BFF and you know it kind of spun out on its own was somewhat in the weeds for a while and appears to be back. Yeah, I think everybody thought Instacart was done for when Amazon bought Whole Foods but it may have been the best thing that ever happened to them that they were forced to innovate, forced to make more partnerships and now realizing that they've got the platform, they've got the AWS of food delivery for grocery stores here and you want 15 minutes? Great, we can set up a warehouse for you and give you that platform, you provide all the logistics and the delivery people will power the back end. You want it to be 30 minute delivery, same day delivery, do the same thing. You just want to take care of our ad tech for acquiring customers? Sure, Schnooks, you're the friendliest store in town, we can help you with that. So I think this is super smart for Instacart to just say let's take what we've built because of having to losing Whole Foods and having to because of the pandemic and let the low margin companies that are grocery stores shoulder the risk while we rake in the profits. I think that the other benefit to them here is that shopping changed over the pandemic and habits changed. The idea of delivery was something that a lot more people even those that used it a lot probably used even more and the reality for a lot of chains big and small and the ones that we're talking about here are no mom and pops. They also realized that they need to get into this game on a level that would probably take a lot longer if they had to develop the tech. B2B service for Instacart is very, very smart and I am very, very delighted that there is statistically probably one person who is waiting in line for a public sub listening to this segment right now to which I'd like to say go for the Borset treat yourself. That's good advice. Yeah, in case anybody didn't gather that from what we were saying here this isn't adding more grocery store options to the Instacart app. This is hey, Publix, you want to just have your own Publix branded delivery service that never says Instacart, you can do it. We can white label all the stuff that I mean and look, there's a lot that goes into this and processing to fraud protection to logistics. There are lessons that Instacart has learned that would take even gigantic grocery companies a long time to put together to be able to skip a few steps ahead I think is very, very smart. Now, will this be something that is worth the squeeze price wise? We have no idea. Is the idea that Instacart is pivoting more to the B2B side than their key marketing initially, we don't know whether or not that is a great omen, but it certainly looks like one. Yeah, the future of whether Q-commerce, 15-minute delivery, 10-minute delivery is actually a real market or not will play a lot into answering that question. Hey, folks, if you're feeling social why not get in touch with us on the social medias? We're out there, you can find us, DTNSShow on Twitter and DTNSPIX DTNSPIX on Instagram. Say hi. The conversation has an article from the University of Oxford Research Associate, Kariya Griman about how to investigate robot accidents. Robots are becoming common, folks. They're vacuuming floors, assisting the elderly, guiding people through airports, delivering food. They help workers in industrial processes, of course, and as we discussed Wednesday they're increasingly driving cars. It's all fun to joke about the robot apocalypse or welcoming our robotic overlords, but the joke's about to be over. It's about to be just reality. And, remember, robots are pretty safe in reality. But nothing is 100% error-free. So Griman discusses, what should we do when a robot is involved in an accident? How do you find out what went wrong? Especially with AI being such a black box. A robot arm in a diner may be a hot beverage on a customer. The robot arm might have had a mechanical failure or maybe it misjudged the movements of the customer. What if a care robot sensors don't detect a request for help? The care robot might not have been able to hear. Maybe there was noise like a fan or sirens outside. Maybe the person's speech was unintelligible and the algorithm just couldn't make sense of it. Or maybe the algorithm just misprocessed that particular request. Griman is part of a group called RoboTips which is developing an ethical black box for robots. Like the black box in an airplane. It will record stuff so you can look at it later. This logs inputs and actions whatever they are. Voice, visual, brain control. We talked about a snap by a brain control outfit. Whatever. It goes into this box. The box is being tested in a lab right now. They're doing simulated accident conditions. They're trying to make the box viable as a standard. I imagine it has to do with like who gets to access this data? Is it properly encrypted and all that? It's going to be stored locally. But is it useful? Is the big one? Once it's viable, they'll need to determine how to access and interpret that data in case of accidents. But the first step is making the black box a thing. I mean, in what way would it ever not be useful? In the way that if a plane crashes and people go, what happened? Okay, we can glean some information from what has been recorded here. My initial reaction to the story is like why don't all robots just have cameras? Just record everything and then you would already know. But then of course you have privacy issues. Something in between either not recording and fully video recording seems like a really good idea. I think also a camera is not going to tell you what the robot was processing. The key here is seeing at the point that it fails and let's hope that they are innocuous, silly failures and not anything that might be more important. But the more that we put in the hands of these kinds of robots, the more we are going to open ourselves up to larger problems happening, you want to know how that processing went. Where was the moment in which what you expected didn't happen? The standardization here is I think the most important part is in any situation especially technologically you want the most eyeballs on it. There is no security through obscurity as they say in InfoSec. The ability to have something that is universal a universal recording protocol I think is very very smart as we look to sand the edges of a new reality. Even if you get those internal processes you need it to record it in a way that is useful. It could record everything that happened like here is all the algorithms and you could look at it and say okay but that doesn't tell me anything. I think that is what this project is trying to do is say how do we make sure this is easily processable, you can find the data that is pertinent and have things stand out and again with AI sometimes the AI can't tell you why it made a decision. So having all the data possible to be able to deduce why it made that decision, what all the inputs were in everything and having the ability to process that will be important as well. Well, moving to the slopes of snow everybody. Travis Rice and Liam Griffin, if you are not familiar they are the organizers of the natural selection towards a snowboarding competition decided to broadcast their snowboarding event live with a modified racing drone outfitted with cameras and transmitters to capture live images of the sport. You might say, what's a racing drone? How is it different than a regular drone? Griffin whose natural selection COO explained that snowboarding footage traditionally is captured by a camera using a long angle lens set up way, way back on an opposing mountain range or maybe even from helicopters. So it's great but it doesn't get that you know, you're there kind of feel. For this particular event, Rice and Griffin used a Jerry Rigg assembly of a carbon fiber pole with a GoPro at the top stabilized by a gimbal gimbal's device that uses sensors and motors to keep a camera steady and went from there and Wired has a full article about all the details that they used plus some video and it's pretty cool it is truly like being there on the snowboard yourself. This is fascinating just from the angle of like how much we are familiar with using unmanned aerial vehicles at this point and like, oh, okay, so it's good for this but we could make it better for this specific purpose, right? We can hack it. Just what we have seen in terms of the utility of drones as they have gotten not only more capable but also cheaper is fascinating from stories like this to the battlefield of our modern wars seeing drones in action, the likes of which I think even the most optimistic person would be surprised at the speed in which a lot of this is happening. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from David this is in response to our conversation yesterday about being able to use Apple Wallet for IDs in Arizona. David says I live in Arizona and when I heard the license story I decided to take one for the team and signed up and a few weeks later I got the message it was ready. Inside the Wallet app, this is Apple Wallet either for iPhone or watch, it is in there but unlike the MID AZ app which the state of Arizona uses for virtual IDs before this option, it doesn't show a regular license it shows a 3D image of a card with no info other than your first name and last initial the name of your state and state seal image of a ring-tailed cat. That's the state mammal of Arizona and a Sakura O'Cactus with maces in the background again Arizona. David says it does the 3D lenticular thing when the colors change as you move your phone left to right the three dots at the top right hand corner of the Wallet app have all your info in it, your name your date of birth, your age, your address restrictions etc. It's pretty cool says David Arizona has been pretty forward thinking on Arizona Department of Transportation stuff so this is a great addition. I'm not flying again until later this year but it will be interesting to try. Yes, thank you David. When you do eventually fly and you use this at the TSA checkpoint let us know how it goes even though we covered this well yesterday, I really liked getting David's first person report on this because it kind of highlights that this isn't the same as taking a picture of your driver's license. This is hiding your personal information more than a physical driver's license does which is Apple's point they're like we are only going to send the information needed for the transaction in the TSA's case it's just your picture and your name and date of birth I think is all they get the rest of it stays away so I don't know I think this is a pretty good implementation I know people are going to beat up on it and try to find weaknesses and if they do hopefully Apple addresses them fast but it seems pretty good so far. Yeah and David thanks so much for taking one for the team as you called it when we talked about it yesterday you know we were trying to kind of parse all the information as best as possible and David did write in some details that you know we're kind of exactly what we talked about yesterday but that is so helpful because I thought we were right but you're on the ground so yeah thanks for checking out and thank you Len Peralta for being here to illustrate the show today Len what have you drawn for us well you know everybody's talking about the robots and how the robots make mistakes and how we can learn from the robots but has anybody ever thought about what it means for the robot and how he feels or he or she we all feel bad after a mistake yeah absolutely so this is called everyone unfriend Roboto and it's very sad it's a little guy named Roboto and he say Roboto make mistake Roboto heart sad everyone unfriend Roboto because he broke a plant he broke a plant and he has a broken heart if Roboto had a black heart then why if Roboto had a black box you could just show Roboto it's not your fault there was a sensor error exactly you know and he wouldn't feel so bad I think that should be the impetus the impetus should be the feelings of the robot opposed to what we can learn from it anyway we pay so much attention to like robots taking over they're gonna kill humans think of the robots truly think of them a little bit more often so I feel like this captures that really nicely this is over at my patreon patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store which is lennparaltestore.com by the way I am open for commissions if anybody is open and has a gift they want to give feel free to hit me up lennparaltestore.com excellent just from Robert Young also glad to have you on the show as always let folks know where they can keep up with your work production company dog and pony show audio is moving into the season finale of world's greatest con season 2 it has covered game shows so head on over there if you're the binge in type then now is the time to binge binge episodes 1 through 4 all about the 1950s quiz show scandals press your luck who wants to be a millionaire and super password great stories the four of them and then our big season finale is midnight this sunday all about the only modern perfect bid in the showcase showdown of prices right controversy abounds three different perspectives none of which can agree on basic core facts we parse through all of it on the season finale of world's greatest con do not miss it folks also do not miss our thanking of some brand new bosses that we got over the last 24 hours they include DJ Stangle Steven Bach Bach 2000 and Darth Reardon all just started backing us on patreon woo woo we had a good Wednesday night thank you DJ thank you Steven thank you Bach and thank you I needed this idea I was getting worried mid month here so having four of you all come in at once really perked us all up over here yeah yeah I mean we know times are tough out there but boy do we love your support speaking of support there's a longer version of the show called good day internet available at patreon.com for all those watching and listening live starts right in two seconds but for now reminder that on DTNS we are live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com we'll be back with Shannon Morse probably talking about some security stuff back to you then for more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hope you have enjoyed this program