 coming up on D T and s tick tock begins messing with its algorithm. Adidas enters the NFT chat. And should you rent an RTX 30 80 from Nvidia? This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday, December 16th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm Roger saying the show is pretty sir. There's a longer version of this show where we talk about all kinds of stuff like annoying representations of podcasts and streaming shows. That's called Good Day Internet. You can get it at patreon.com slash D T and s speaking of Patreon. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Dr X 17 Dustin Campbell and Tim deputy. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reddit filed a confidential S one with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US starting the process of going public. The number of shares offered and a price range for an IPO have not been determined yet. H&R Block is suing block for trademark infringement. Block, of course, is the financial technology company formerly known as Square. They're both financial companies. They both have block in the name. H&R Block argues that blocks recent name change will confuse customers and harm its brand asking block to stop using the name and a logo that H&R Block says it feels is nearly identical to its own, according to a complaint filed in federal court on Thursday. Spotify announced a five star rating system for podcasts in its service. Listeners must play at least 30 seconds of a show to leave a rating. Then an average rating will be shown on the landing page after at least 10 have been submitted. Spotify encourages podcasters to say things like make sure to rate daily tech news show on Spotify. That's just one example. Yeah, just as an example. Wednesday night, a Waymo vehicle in manual mode struck a pedestrian in San Francisco's lower hate neighborhood. The pedestrian was taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. That's according to the San Francisco Police Department. Transdev, the company that supplies Waymo's safety drivers, has placed the driver of the vehicle on administrative leave. Huawei posted photos of the P-50 Pocket, its first clamshell design foldable, similar to the Samsung Z Flip devices. Pictures show dual rings on the front when folded for the cameras and a small external display. And the post also mentions a side mounted fingerprint reader. The P-50 Pocket launched in China on December 23rd. Unfortunately, no word on international availability just yet. All right, let's talk about GeForce now. Now, Justin. When will then be now, Tom? Soon. Because NVIDIA's GeForce Now Cloud Gaming service or streaming service removed the waitlist for its RTX 3080 tier. This tier launched in October offers 1440p streaming on most devices and up to 4K streams on the NVIDIA Shield hardware. The RTX 3080 tier costs about $200 a year. GeForce Now lets you play games in the cloud from Steam, Epic, and Ubisoft Connect slash you play PC from participating game publishers. It works on Windows, Mac, Android, and through a browser on iOS through 4K. Oh, sorry, though 4K is only available through NVIDIA Shield TVs. You do need to be in the range of NVIDIA servers for it to work well. But there is a free tier if you want to test it out. Yeah, so if you're somebody who wants an RTX 3080 and you've given up on being able to actually find one or at least find one that you can afford, you can plop down 200 bucks for a year of using a machine in the cloud that has an RTX 3080. And that actually lets you use it on more devices than if you put it in one single device. We turn to our in-house video game aficionado and known NVIDIA Shield owner, Roger Chang. What do you make of this story, Roger? You know, I used to be kind of skeptical about doing game streaming just because you couldn't afford the hardware. But having used GeForce Now, and I will admit it's been a year ago, I found the experience not too bad. Now, my connection was okay, but I could definitely see being closer to the servers giving you a much better qualitative experience. But this is really something for people who are very, very particular about their visual fidelity in the games they play. And so there is definitely a market for this. It's probably not very huge compared to the same market for, say, like something Xbox Live game, Ultimate Pass, or a streaming service like Luna. But it does offer something that no one can really get right now, and that's gameplay on a RTX 380. Do you feel like NVIDIA offered this because the shortage has become so bad that the company wanted to make money somehow? It definitely does feel like it's an alternative. And I don't think maybe to make money, but to keep people somewhat placated. If people got too upset, they might turn to the other video card compare, even if they don't offer, even if they have supply issues of their own. This is a way to kind of engage their user base and say, hey, you can't get one right now, but we can give you the second best thing, and that's renting it on the cloud. They were going to do this anyway. But I think you're right that maybe we got it a little bit earlier or opened a little bit wider. Maybe they were motivated to move it along with a little more alacrity in advance of the holidays to offer this end now. And keep in mind, folks, if you're out there listening, you don't have to pay $200 a year for the 4K, 1440p streaming version of this. If you've got qualifying, don't forget, not every Steam game is part of this, but it has to be from a publisher that's playing along with NVIDIA. But if you've got qualifying games in Steam or Epic or Ubisoft, and you're fine with 1080p, you can get it for cheaper. And by all accounts, GeForceNow is the best of the bunch right now. That seems to be the critic's consensus. Adidas is launching a line of NFTs called Into the Metaverse, because it means Adidas is now going into the Metaverse. Holders of Adidas NFTs will get access to special merch and can help determine what products Adidas will create for the NFT community. Adidas launched digital tokens last week, and if you got one of those, you're going to get early access to these new Adidas NFTs. Everybody else can get them starting December 17th. You can buy them from Adidas for 0.2 ETH, 0.2 Ethereum tokens. Right now, at this moment, is somewhere around 800 bucks. It's a lot of money. It's not cheap. NFT holders will be able to buy exclusive physical goods co-branded with partners Board, Ape, Yacht Club, Crypto Enthusiast G-Money, and Punx Comics. Adidas bought a Board, Ape, Yacht Club character named Indigo Hertz, who now wears special Adidas merch, which NFT holders can buy physical versions of, including a hoodie with a blockchain address on it. They could also buy a physical version of G-Money's Crypto Avatar's Orange Beanie, and Adidas acquired virtual land inside the blockchain based gaming world, The Sandbox. And if you buy virtual wearable NFTs for use in The Sandbox, you'll have the option to get a physical version of it to match. So you can wear your virtual shoes in the real world. Digital assets will be handled by Coinbase for security. This really doesn't tie back. We've been talking a lot this week about used items being sold and maybe NFTs being a solution. This really doesn't have anything to do with that. This is Adidas getting strictly in the NFT game in the sneaker culture world, which a lot of people earlier this week did point out, kind of has a comparison with NFTs. Sure. I mean, certainly they are ravenous markets that oftentimes have inflated prices due to scarcity. Those are all elements that NFTs play in. I understand the skepticism and problems that some people have with NFTs on a certain point, but I think judging the entire world whole cloth is a mistake while we're still kind of figuring things like this out, even if you are, hey, just a right click to save it. It's not really a thing. This is all a Ponzi scheme. There is no doubt that hypebeasts and sneaker heads will crawl over broken glass to get access to exclusive items. That is effectively what this is, and it's a value add on top of it where you get some kind of digital collectible so you can also authenticate and say that you did it. It makes sense to me. Yeah, the NFT stuff, Justin, you bring up good points. There are a lot of people say it's just a Ponzi scheme. It doesn't make any sense. Who is this for? Who actually benefits from this? Adidas would be a great company to use as an example of, okay, yes, you've got this built-in community that wants to know about every single drop you have. There are bots all over the world that are buying shoes and then selling them for more after the fact. That is all this sort of frenzy that the NFT culture can benefit from. Also, I don't think it like even though, okay, I don't have a board ape myself, but if there was one that Adidas is like, okay, this is our board ape, and this is what he's wearing today, you're going to sell a lot of those beanies. Yeah, well, the beanies are G money. It's the hoodie. Yeah, come on. I mean, okay, fine. But you get what I'm saying is this is you can create a whole merchandise ring around a fictional character, but it's something that can be tied back to actual currency, so it's valuable. Yeah, and they have certainly created Scarcity on far less than a illustrated day. Yeah, the NFT in this case is just another example of the holographic tag, you know, on a sneaker or something like that. It's another way to prove that you were in early, you got the rare merch. The idea that like, hey, I could wear my same sneakers I own in the virtual world has some appeal to it. Although that part of it is a little like Adidas started an AOL section, right? Like they're so early to this that it's not wrong for them to do it, but it's far from being like, and this is the way the NFT world will work from now on. Like this is the early days. This is the pre.com boom days, I think by analogy, but they'll learn from this and whatever NFTs end up becoming and being useful for, I think a lot of its roots here in this kind of thing anyway. Well, speaking of spreading roots, Tom, Uber will expand its same day courier service. Uber connect to 6000 cities here in the good old us of a senders can now include delivery instructions and have the courier come to their door instead of meeting them at the curb. Uber connect packages must weigh less than 30 pounds and be less than 100 dollars in value and you know, be legal. They also don't handle alcohol or medication if that's what you're trying to move. But those services still use humans. Uber will also partner with emotional to test autonomous food deliveries in Santa Monica, California. Human safety drivers will be on board during these trips. Starting early next year, people in Santa Monica will be able to order meal kits delivered by an autonomous Hyundai Ionic 5. Motional previously announced plans to launch driverless robot access in partnership with Lyft by 2023. Motional has been conducting driverless car tests in Nevada since November 2020. It will expand to California, or sorry, it expanded to California this past summer. Motional does not have the permit to test without safety drivers just yet, but there is precedent in California. Truly drivers can be tested by Cruz, Nuro and Waymo. We ride and Zooks. Cruz, Waymo and Nuro also can offer commercial services. Yeah. So, Motional hopefully can use this to get an application approved to go truly driverless. That'll be interesting in Santa Monica's sometimes narrow and hard to traverse streets, but you know, it's on a grid. So, there's that. This reminds me of the earliest Uber Eats before it was delivering from restaurants. The proposition of Uber Eats was that it would get you your food in 15 minutes or less, sometimes five minutes, because Uber Eats cars... A bunch of stuff in the trunk. Yeah. They kept a bunch of like chilled wraps in the trunk. And so, you had like four things to choose from, but they got to you really fast. These are meal kits. So, you can definitely keep that in a cooler, right? It's funny. A friend of mine just so happens to be moving to Santa Monica from the Bay Area in a couple of weeks. And I, you know, I sent the story to him and I was like, are you stoked? Kind of cool, right? I mean, of all the places you get to test it out. And he was like, we don't do like, we don't get, you know, food delivery to our house. We just go get food. I guess. But, you know, it's funny because to me, I'm like, this is amazing. I can't wait for my robot driver to, you know, bring me my food. But some people who are in the, you know, in the geographical market, certainly in the financial market are like, I don't do this. Not everybody does this. No. And I think the big question will be in a very highly dense area. Exactly how are these vehicles going to perform? I would suspect that they would perform pretty well considering some of the other stuff that's going on. What I think is fascinating from Uber's perspective is, you know, the former leadership of Travis Kalanick was talking very openly about how, boy, we can't wait until these drivers are not a pesky problem for us anymore. The faster we get to autonomy, the better. The kinder, gentler Uber that has kind of happened past him has been a lot more sensitive to the idea of drivers concerns, or at least they've made motions to do so and seem a little bit more communicative. But I think stuff like the Uber Connect is something that I've heard from inside Uber is a big question for them and a bigger question now, which is how do we just get drivers to be able to do more? What we want is whenever a driver wants to drive, we want them to have a thing to do and hopefully something that they are happy doing for money. This is yet another thing, much like Uber Eats, much like the regular Uber X that they can add to their repertoire that maybe you would also like to bring a package. Yeah, the package thing is spending makes perfect sense. I know you were doing this before Uber even had built it into its app. So, you know, I definitely had a few friends send me things by just ordering an Uber, throwing a package. Oh, I've done that. Absolutely. Yeah. In an emergency, and you kind of say to the Uber driver, you got me, right? I think that's probably where Uber got the idea of doing that. That part of the service is like, hey, people are already doing this. Let's make it easy. Let's put in some controls and make it part of the app. It isn't lost on me that Uber has largely abandoned its autonomous car development in the wake of the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. That was definitely the fault of the Uber safety driver, according to the the driver administration investigation of that. And they are now partnering. So it's not like Uber is not going to get into autonomous delivery. They're just not going to take the liability themselves. Hey, folks, if you have thoughts about this, maybe you want to talk about them with Amos or Grizzly silversmith or Dreadnecks. They're all in the Discord. You can be to join the conversation in our Discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Got a lot of news out of TikTok today. The company began testing TikTok live studio. That's a Windows app that streams directly to TikTok live and includes chat integration and users can also stream content from a PC or a phone or a game console. Though apparently you can't use a browse or window as a source. Yeah, you know, still you have some options. TikTok will see how creators use the software, although it's not guaranteed to be released as a product. Just a test seems pretty focused on video game streamers, at least at this point. TikTok also announced new features for its green screen effect tool as well as other updates to video enhancements and sound effects. One highlight is the update to the green screen effects specifically, which the company says is one of the most used effects on the platform since its 2019 launch. The tool allows creators to position themselves in front of a different photo or video background. Most of you are familiar with the green screen effect. We'll now support GIFs. TikTok has partnered with Giffy. So TikTok users will now be able to select from a library of GIFs to use as their background, allowing for different types of videos. Giffy owned by Meta. For now. Yeah. I mean, sure. But this might help them with their case in the UK, but that's a side note. This perhaps most importantly, at least to me, TikTok also announced it's changing its for you algorithm recommendation to prevent users from seeing too many similar videos that could be harmful when viewed in clusters, meaning you're watching, watching, watching cluster of videos that might all be related to each other is what you're seeing. These clusters of videos might reinforce a negative personal experience, including extreme dieting or sadness, or you're going through a breakup. That type of content. The Wall Street Journal previously reported how the app can push young users to see too much of that similar content repeatedly, which would then lead to them not feeling great. TikTok is also developing options to let you customize what that algorithm shows you. This actually is very interesting to me because my for you page is in many ways magical, but sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I could choose hashtags and other words related to content that I want to see or don't want to see. Oh man, it's so rare that we begin to see the slow walk down that gilded path because friends, the road to the hashtag hell portal, hashtag portal to hell is paved with good intentions, like we need to flag certain content, content that is obviously harmful, like extreme dieting and sadness. Okay, that's a little bit broad. Sadness seems like something, you know, you could define it in different ways or breakup content. Does that mean songs that reference breakups? Does that mean somebody explaining where they are in a breakup? The devil is in the details and that is the portal for which you are walking down when you begin to label content and then algorithmically put it in front of less people. Let me push the portal a little more closed for you. So I definitely think there's a crowbar in here that's trying to open it up, but what TikTok is saying isn't this is harmful content we need to get rid of it, which is what we're used to hearing like, ah, there's terrorist content. There's abusive content. We're going to crack down on misinformation. That's what we hear from Facebook, Twitter, etc. What TikTok is doing here is a little bit different. It is saying you're fine seeing this content, but maybe if our algorithm is only showing you that over and over for 20 to 30 in a row, that's too much. So we're going to look at certain content and say, bust those up. Once you've shown three stop, show something else before you go back and show them. So they're not getting rid of it. Yeah. They're just saying there's, it's like saying, man, you know, too many slow songs on the radio in a row. It's too much. Let's bust it up. The company's like, I think you might kind of be depressed. So let's make you happy again by not showing you too many breakup things to, you know, so, so then we're not sticking you in a rut, which I've heard people complain about with TikTok. And I totally see that. And I'm not saying that this is them walking down the path in the same way that Facebook and Twitter have. I'm saying that this is a first step. Again, my issue is not that they are making it because algorithmically you do need to sort certain things out. And Tom, you cited examples why everybody would agree that there are certain things that need to be algorithmically weeded out or at least looked at based on the information that you have. That being said, over broad categories tend to bring you into troubling positions. And that's when, when I see something like sadness or breakup content, that's when, when I don't know, I just had my ears kind of pop up. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I get where you're coming from. But I also think this will be harder to point to and go, ah, my, my content was mistakenly labeled as sadness and didn't show up as much. Like it might just be murky enough that you, I don't know, maybe, maybe. Yeah. I mean, TikTok just wants you to watch more videos and then it understands more about you. And then it's for you page can be even better. Yeah. And then it becomes you. What if all I want is sad breakup videos that involve that'll, that'll be like a TV special at one point. TikTok. The ultimate toxic creator. TikTok becomes you. Sad talk will be the new startup from Justin Robert Young that shows you only said videos. The goth serial data who is constantly yo yo BMI. Ticimo. Google's Project Zero has revealed details of a vulnerability now patched. That's the important part that was used by the NSO group to access iPhones and install spyware without interaction from the user. You may have heard reports of this out there. We now know how this worked. The zero click exploit worked in iOS 14.7.1 and earlier. The sophisticated attack used a component of how iOS handled gifts specifically how it compresses and decompresses them. The attacker only needed to know how to send an iMessage to the target. So an email address or a phone number would suffice when the phone received a specially crafted gift from the attacker. It would decompress it, which it always does with any gift without user interaction and then the phone would be compromised. This is wonky, but follow me. Here's how it worked. Apple uses iOS's image IO library to make normal gifts loop endlessly. So it passes them through that for some decompression. NSO used that capability and exploited a vulnerability in the core graphics PDF parser. Specifically, they targeted that parser's use of a standard called jbig2 for compressing and decompressing images. That standard was originally created for Xerox scanners to officially convert scanned paper images into PDFs. The vulnerability in jbig2 let them write to an arbitrary memory address. That's not that unusual for vulnerability, but here's where it gets impressive. They used that ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates. That, once they were able to do that, let them create an emulated computer, which they could then use to run scripts in. Now it wasn't as fast as JavaScript, but it worked. An entire computer architecture with logical bit operations, registers, and a full 64 bit adder and comparator could be created with a single decompression pass through of a jbig2 stream. You send that gift, it gets compressed, all of that happens, boom, you're compromised. Citizen lab reported the bug to Apple and Apple patched it in iOS 14.8 this September, but it's definitely got security researchers out there nodding their heads and going, this is terrifyingly clever how they did that. How much do you think they paid for that on the shadow market? Oh man, a lot of Bitcoin, three, four Bitcoin, which is a lot. That's a lot of money, actually. It's gotta be really rich, four Bitcoin. Hey, listen, we talked about Uber Eats earlier in the show, a little bit of different story. Uber Eats has made its first food delivery to the International Space Station, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Mizawa, a space tourist visiting the ISS on December 11th, delivered a selection of ready to eat canned Japanese foods to the ISS group, stuff that he thought they might like. Mizawa flew on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft last week, but he has loftier goals in mind. He's also funding a future SpaceX mission to fly around the moon and a Starship spacecraft in 2023. So good marketing ploy for Uber Eats, getting that Uber Eats bag up there on the ISS. That's off, that's impressive. Thumbs down, unless those astronauts ordered it on their app, it wasn't an Uber Eats order. I mean, I gotta say, and I've never hung out on the ISS, and I never will, but if I were to be and someone was like, Hey, y'all just walk it in here, got some food for you. And it's a little different than what you've got up here. That would be fun. It does not be from Uber Eats, but I like the idea of space food travel. If it was really Uber Eats, you should have left it outside. It's at the curb and it might not be there when you go get it in five minutes from the time it was delivered. That's just what your settings were. I didn't even ring the bell. I like the Saba and Miso beef bowl with sweet sauce, simmered chicken and bamboo shoots and some braised pork. Oh man. I mean, when you need it, you need it. I'll order it. All right, let's check out the mail bag. All right, this one comes in from Gonzo, who's been a listener since the Buzz Out Loud days. Gonzo says in the previous episode about using blockchain to authenticate luxury goods for resale. And this ties into our conversation with Adidas today. Gonzo says, what if brands use the feature of NFTs that allows the person who mince the NFT to get a small percentage of the proceeds whenever that NFT is sold? So when you resell your coach bag, if the transaction is authenticated by coach, then coach receives 2% of that transaction. Gonzo, I think you're on to something because our big objection was, yeah, NFTs might be a great way to track authentic resellers and make it easy for resellers to say, no, no, no, I've got the original. But why would any of those luxury brands start doing the NFTs in the first place? Here's why. Instead of fighting reselling, make some money off it, which NFTs is built in. You can do that. Yeah. Well, thank you for the feedback, Gonzo. And if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on the show, we'd love to hear it. Please keep that feedback coming. Makes our show better every day. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. We also have a brand new boss to thank, and we are on quite a roll this week. This one comes from DNTL Tech. We're going to guess that means dental tech. So dental tech, thank you for backing us on Patreon and becoming part of the team. Yes. And pay attention to that mouth. Indeed. Brush your teeth. Last break. Look at that dental tech. We've had three people understanding that, oh, well, if I back tomorrow, I get all the applause to myself. So smart, smart. I mean, it's fun to be part of a team, but it's also fun to be, you know, a star. Speaking of stars, Justin, Robert Young, so good to have you on the show today. Let folks know what they can keep up with all that you do. Brand new politics, politics, politics coming at you at midnight tonight. It includes an interview that I love doing. It's with a professor, historian and former speechwriter talking all about the rhetoric of politics. I'm just going to throw four names at you that are mentioned during the interview to give you a sense of the scope here. John F. Kennedy, Cicero, Donald Trump, and Frederick Douglass. Get it all at Politics, Politics, Politics, where all political podcasts and otherwise are found. That is a promo, everybody. Go do it. Also, go watch us live. We're joining us live at least on an audio Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Love to have you join us live. If you can, we will be back here tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com.