This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you the listener. Thanks to all of you including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith Zapata, and new patrons Robert and John. On this episode of DTNS, you may have to make an appointment to sit for a fitting if you want an Apple Vision Pro and get pampered while you get one. We mark the end of the blockchain craze, but probably not the end of blockchain, and is a thumbs-up emoji a binding contract? Sometimes it is. Cowboy hat. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 7th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And suggested by George, I am from Studio Otis today, and I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang.  That is going to be a good time. Let's start. And let the quick hits. So Instagram's Twitter, like microblog, threads has proved to be very popular. Forget, however, tens of millions of meta claims to have downloaded it. Just look at anecdotal evidence. For example, still at the top of tech meme, more than a day after launch, which, you know, means it's a story that's getting a lot of traction, also dominating even our own DTNS subreddits posts. And how about this one? Bloomberg has a story about how many European users are using threads despite it not being launched in the EU, including companies like French lawmaker Francois Ruffin and German football club RB Leipzig. And you can't deny this one because threads is the number five most popular app in the Chinese Apple app store where the Apple, where the app rather is blocked from use. So, you know, people can get around it, but just goes to show people at least want to give it a whirl. One last note, even with the undeniable mindshare that threads has, at least for now, Twitter alternative Blue Skying also passed a big milestone, one million downloads, according to data.ai. Yeah. For you to want to get around the Chinese Great Fireball means that that is that is one app you really have to have. That's amazing. Google's Pixel line of phones is often seen as the trust fund, baby, of phones. It survives at the largesse of its parent company, but the scion of Google is standing on its own these days. Counterpoint research estimates the Google Pixel shipments rose 67% on the year worldwide in Q1. And that is a time when most of the smartphone market shrank. So it's not just rising, but it's bucking the trend. Its biggest growth came in Japan, which made up 34% of Pixel's worldwide shipments. 34% of the pixels shipped in Q1 were shipped to somebody in Japan. Pixel is the number two smartphone in Japan right now behind the iPhone and in front of Japanese companies, Sony and Sharp. The Pixel 7a saw the biggest boost as carrier DoComo began selling it alongside SoftBank and AU. The most recent update to Apple owned music identifying app Shazam adds the ability to identify songs that you hear in other apps, third party apps like, I don't know, TikTok, YouTube, places where you might hear a lot of music. Users can start a song ID within the Shazam app, then switch over to another app to identify the song at the song as I did. Then it shows up as a notification kind of handy. Open AI is releasing GPT-4 as API to general public availability. GPT-4 is a more capable version of the large language model than GPT-3.5. Four is the one that is used to power the paid version of chat GPT. Existing open AI API developers, existing open AI developers with a history of successful payments will be able to access GPT-4's API first and the new developers will be able to get it by the end of this month. Reddit and Twitter have taken dramatic steps to combat what the company say is unfair scraping of their data by AI companies building machine models. We're seeing the first sign that these protests are having an effect. Google's VP of trust, Danielle Romain, said in a blog post that the company believes, quote, it's time for the web and AI communities to explore additional machine readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases, end quote. In other words, something more sophisticated than the 30 year old robot, robot.txt file that sites are still indexing sites with now. Google launched a website to invite members of the web and also AI communities to start a public discussion on how to develop a new web crawling standard. Yeah, maybe it's time. Maybe it's finally time to update old robots.txt. While sources tell Bloomberg's Mark Gurman that the retail launch for Apple's Vision Pro headset may involve in store appointments, the company used a similar approach for the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. So it's not unprecedented. Here's what Gurman sources tell them. Apple may ask you to upload a prescription for your vision if you need one and a scan of your head from an iPhone before you show up for your appointment. During the appointment, an employee will fit the Vision Pro properly for you. White glove treatment, I don't know if they're going to wear white gloves, but that's what it sounds like. And in fact, Gurman found out that there may be a second smaller strap available for people with smaller head sizes to make it fit just right. Apple stores may be stocking hundreds of thousands of lenses to make sure that they fit the proper prescription for any given appointment. And Apple may also have a special machine in the store to scan your head in addition to being able to scan your head with a phone. This is all way more involved than what we heard at WWDC, where they just showed a vision test and an ear scan for spatial audio. Appointments might only be available at first in New York and L.A. stores and then eventually spread to all U.S. stores. Apple will bring it to the UK and Canada later in 2024, followed by Asia and Europe. Third party retailers won't get it until 2025 at the earliest. So it'll be an Apple store only thing for a while. It's a lot to go through to get one. And you're already paying thirty five hundred dollars. If the price didn't dissuade you, Rob, will having to sit for a fitting dissuade you from this? So two things. The first is that the price definitely has dissuaded me. But if I were to pay that price, this is the kind of experience that I would want with paying for that. So I think of it like now I've never done this. I've never bought or seen anybody buy a Louis Vuitton bag, but I heard that this is how they treat you when you go into the Louis Vuitton store. They will make sure that that bag fits on your shoulder. Yeah, it fits. It fits wonderfully. And actually, I have bought a nice watch of nice watches before. It may not be to this level, but they do take care of you and make sure that you walk out of the store very, very satisfied with the ridiculously expensive purchase that you just made. So. I don't know. So it sounds kind of cool. It will be OK. Yeah. So I think you would either they're like two camps here saying like thirty five hundred dollars. So pricing almost everybody out of it, you know, developers, you know, but but as far as the general public. And then we have to do all of this. But I kind of think of it the way you do, Rob. It's like, oh, OK. Well, if I'm going to buy this very expensive thing that I'm going to go in there and Apple is going to be like, what's your eyewear prescription?  Great. OK. Let's figure out the best fit.  And then I walk out of there like, yeah, I got the best AR headset on the market. I kind of think this is genius. I mean, you know, if it if it happens the way that it's being described. I have been a party to someone buying a luxury brand in a luxury brand store of bags and such. I looked at that and said, that looks like a lot of trouble to go through. Just especially if you already know what you want, like with the Vision Pro, it's not like, oh, I'm looking at, you know, six different styles of bag. Do I want one with the chain or do I want one that's a little bigger? No, you want the Vision Pro. There's one of them. Give it to me. I'll just take it home and put it on myself. That's I don't want to have to do this. However, if they're going to make me do it, then they better give me some cucumber water or a wine spritzer and a real flush seat. You know, like make it make it a whole experience and you might sway me over. I mean, let's not forget that the whole sort of Apple store experience that it has been replicated with some success by other companies. But, you know, that has been a singularly, you know, like easy turnkey, you know, you get what you want.    OK, probably a pretty cool mall type of thing. And if we're doing, if we're doing vision pro stuff in there, then I think, then I think that, yeah, I I don't know. I know maybe I'm just excited. It's going to keep people talking about it because they're making it an experience. I have had a tailor made suit once to where I went into a really nice place and they're taking my measurements and they're bringing me the cucumber water. It's different than buying a suit off the rack. Yeah. So I think that Apple is doing that and it's kind of brilliant from the standpoint that people who are spending this kind of money, you know, that they have it. But some folks, it might be their first big purchase like this and they're going to be treated this way and they're going to be talking about this all over social media. So it's just going to keep Apple's name in the news. Zoe Zoe said that price people might want to share with a partner. Will there be couples appointments? Were you and your significant other? There I mean, a lot of people share headsets already. I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, Apple would expect anyone to not share something like this, especially since it's not really supposed to be like out and about in the world. You know, it's family of five might all once I get my fitting data done, though, and once I have my prescription up there, they better store it securely, put it on a blockchain or something that. Oh, yeah. Remember, blockchain, everybody. We haven't talked about blockchain in a while. I'm kidding. But the blockchain buzz is kind of on the decline.  Case in point. Sega's co-chief, operating officer, Shuji Yutsami. Yutsumi, rather, told Bloomberg that the company will withhold its biggest franchises from third party blockchain gaming efforts in order to avoid devaluing its content. He did say lesser known properties may seem some blockchain based initiatives like NFT tie ins from third parties. But the company will pause its plans to develop its own blockchain gaming content as well. Yutsumi also said the action in play to earn games is boring. What's the point if games are no fun? Them is fighting words. So here's my thought on this. Blockchain is forever linked pun intended to crypto and NFTs in this and that and the other. It's just got bad marketing. So there may be a little bit that these games are basically trying to find a use case for blockchain. It's like, it's just not there. And with all the hassle that we have to go through, when we even say the word blockchain, let's just not do it. It could be part of that. But it really is just a marketing issue because, as I said, blockchain is linked to crypto, is linked to NFTs, and we have gone through a year now pushing into 18 months a year and a half of this stuff. It's just been toxic. Nobody wants to touch it. Yeah, I think people want to still. Well, sure. I made a joke with somebody who kind of works in the space earlier. And they were like, are you talking about Sarah? I mean, it's very much like it, you know, the burgeoning market. And I was like, well, if you're in the crypto space, yeah, if you're in the space, yeah, yeah, yeah, where I was like, I mean, it was dominating, you know, news, the news cycle a couple of years ago. And if you if you want to avoid an argument on making money, if you want to avoid an argument on the internet, never say never and never say always. So, you know, you pull pull away from those. And it's like, even if it's like, even if it's not nobody's talking about blockchain, many fewer people are talking about blockchain than they used to. Right. And I think that's down to what Rob was talking about is it unfairly got associated with crypto because it's used for crypto. But it's not the only thing it's good for. And it's not the only thing it's used for. And maybe video games aren't a good use of blockchain. I never actually saw why blockchain was like a dead drop. Great thing for for games. NFTs, I did see like, oh, I could see a way where those might end up being useful. Maybe, maybe not. And to that point, Sega is not dropping NFTs because that's something that makes a little more sense. So what I would ask is those of you who are thinking of writing into feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com, send us examples of blockchains being used well that nobody's paying attention to because I bet some of you are in an industry where you're like, oh no, this is being used well. And it's an industry that isn't crypto related. It's, you know, maybe it's supply chain or farming or something like that. I'd love to hear those kinds of examples because the technology itself, I think, got a bad rap. It's just a great way to validate things on the Internet. Yeah. And at the same time, I think, you know, we're seeing a lot of, you know, companies like, you know, Sega in this example saying, well, we're not seeing an uptick on people wanting to use it. So we're just going to not do that right now. Maybe we'll do it later. Maybe we'll, you know, like enter the market in some different way.  The technology, blockchain technology is really sound. It does what it does very well. But the way it's going to be used is simply going to be used and you won't know it. It's just, this is just how your app works. That's how companies are going to get away with using it. They're going to get away from calling it what it is because the calling it of what it is is where the negative connotation comes in. Marketing yourself as a blockchain company is like marketing your website. It's a TCP IP company. You know, it's like, you don't need to know that. That's not important. We use protocols. We're a hypertext transport protocol company. Check us out. Well, folks, you probably know about blockchain because you get a great podcast like know a little more. But what if you're an Android fan? You're like, wait a minute, where's my podcast? Well, we've got you. Android aficionados, Ron Richards and Wenzwe Dao bring you Android Faithful, a podcast devoted exclusively to Android news and information. If you've been wondering, well, what's going to fill the gap in my Android news? This is it. Go to www.androidfaithful.com. It launches this coming Tuesday, July 11th. Subscribe, be there live Tuesday at 8 Eastern. It's Android Faithful dot com. Well, Tom and Sarah, I know you guys have heard about these headlines, but maybe our listeners have too, because this is kind of a big one. Basically, there is a headline about a judge who ruled that thumbs up emoji is sufficient to sign a contract that is far from the whole story. So if you want to understand it, here it goes. The Canadian company called Southwest Terminal regularly has contracted with Chris Actors Farming Company to deliver various crops around 15 to 20 times. Actors agreed to deliver something. Usually a man named Kent Michael Burrell calls him to work out the details and text actor a photo of the contract and asked him to confirm it. Actor generally wrote back something like looks good, OK, are you up? And in all cases, he delivered on the contract. Yeah, so it didn't seem unusual when in March of 2021, Michael Burrell spoke to actor on the phone about an offer to buy flax. Flax is something you might use in food. It's used to make, you know, all sorts of grain. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, a lot of shirts are made out of flax, et cetera. So anyway, big flax delivery in November. Actor said he wanted to do the contract. Michael Burrell said, OK, I'll text you a picture of the contract as usual. He asked him to confirm it as usual and actor said he would. So Michael Burrell texted the picture of the contract. Would the words please confirm flax contract? Pretty cut and try. Actor texted back, thumbs up emoji. Michael Burrell said, OK, I think we're good, right? However, November rolled around and actor did not indeed deliver that flax. So Southwest Terminal that Michael Burrell works for sued for breach of contract. Actor argued that the thumbs up emoji was only confirming he received the contract, not that he had agreed to anything. I didn't sign anything. Justice Timothy Keane ruled it was reasonable from Michael Burrell to assume the emoji meant a cent, meaning, OK, actor was in breach of contract.  So, Tom, tell us why this might not be sort of out as outlandish as the story might seem. Sure. So I changed my mind about six times about this. From the moment I read the headline to reading the story to reading the actual decision today, we're talking about Canadian law here. But this is going to be similar to a lot of Western law. This just happened to take place in Canada. So under Canadian law, a contract is formed when you demonstrate a meeting of the minds. A written signature on a piece of paper is the most common way of demonstrating that. But it is not the only way. I think that's a misconception. It's like, well, if you didn't sign, then it's not real. No, you can have a contract. You can have a verbal contract. There's all kinds of contracts. All you have to be able to do is demonstrate we both were displaying an agreement to each other and a reasonable person would have thought we had agreed to that. It's easy to demonstrate that when you sign on a paper. It's harder if it's just recollections. But here we nobody is disputing that he responded with a thumbs up. So it's not I didn't sign it. It's I said thumbs up. I meant something different than he thought from the decision. The judge wrote, the question is not what the parties subjectively had in mind, right? This is not when I sent the thumbs up, what I meant was, but rather whether their conduct was such that a reasonable person would conclude that they had intended to be bound. So would an objective observer look at a thumbs up and go, well, it's to me like he's agreeing. Maybe he didn't mean to, but a reasonable person would assume he had agreed. In cases like this, the court relies on a lot of different things. But the most common use of a word is usually how they determine how it should have been interpreted. And the judge in building his decision noted the dictionary.com defines the thumbs up emoji as expressing assent, approval or encouragement. And then when you combine that with the pattern of behavior, which was just described by Sarah and Rob, actor usually responds with assent. They did the exact same thing they always did. Talk on the phone. You want the contract? Yeah, I want the contract. Great.  And he responded with a thumbs up emoji, which I think reasonably in this context kind of sounds like the sort of thing actor does when he's like, yep, I'll agree to that. His behavior fit the previous pattern of a scent. So knowing all the facts of the case now, knowing a little bit about the reasoning of the judge, Judge Dunwood, your honor, how would you have ruled? So I had to go back like you in read the judgment. So the thing that was the key here for me was that there was a telephone call where it was said, as usual, I want to send you over the contract. You just respond back affirmatively. That happened with the thumbs up emoji. So I think in this case, I'm ruling with the company, not with the farmer. It sounds crazy, though, because I know the way that I think about it, you send me an email and says, hey, here's a contract. Go over it and let me know what you think. And I say for sure, because that's kind of how I would answer an email. You know, Tom, you've sent me many emails. I, yeah, we're good. Bet for sure. Sounds good. That didn't mean that I was actually, you know, agreeing to what was in contract. It means that I'm agreeing that you sent me the contract and I'm looking at it. So I get that.  We're going to discuss it on the phone. You agree with me on the phone. Then I send you the contract and you just give me a verbal back on the contract. I think that thumbs up is what they normally do. So I kind of agree with the judge in this case. Justice Lane, do you concur? Well, yeah, more, I don't know. You know, this reminds me of why we have judged duty, right? You know, where someone says, we had a verbal agreement. And the other person says, I wasn't serious about that. If you haven't seen the show, it's all about, you know, binding agreements that were perhaps not very well-binded to begin with. This, this, this, I don't think a thumbs up emoji means anything. You know, and maybe it's because I recently for tax purposes had to sign a lot of things and, you know, they had to be signed a very specific way. And, you know, there would be no other way for me to do it, even if I said, hey, I'm cool, just sign for me. No, you can't do that. So, yeah, I, I think if there, if there is some decree going forward that, hey, if somebody wants you to, you know, enter into a contract with them, a legally binding contract and you give the thumbs up, then you're legally bound to that contract. OK, but we're not quite there yet. I think that's an important point because maybe you are, maybe you aren't. Remember, the judge isn't making a law. A lot of the reporting on this has been has been as if the judge said, and from now on, a thumbs up is legally binding. That's not what he said. What he said was in this case, we are, we don't have a clear contract that's signed, so we have to decide what a reasonable person think there is a contract there and which way should I go with this? Well, especially given their history in this context, there was. And the judge said, look, I know if I rule this way, that we're going to get a lot of frivolous lawsuits around emojis and people trying to use emojis and trying to, you know, but et cetera. But the judge wrote this court cannot, nor should it attempt to stem the tide of technology and common usage. This appears to be the new reality in Canadian society and the courts will have to be ready to meet the new challenges that may arise from the use of emojis and the like. So he's saying, look, I'm not going to not rule on the emoji because people are going to keep using emojis. It's going to come up. So you just have to deal with it. And the nine who in our chat room wrote, what bothers me here is that the emoji meanings change over time. Lots of trouble to be had sending the wrong emoji to the wrong person. Setting a precedent based off of generational understanding is perilous. But again, the judge isn't saying emojis now mean this. The judge is saying, we're going to have to interpret emojis to mean something. And I think nine who you're identifying why you shouldn't respond with an emoji because there's a lot more room for misunderstanding. This is why people sign things. This is why people use very precise legal language so that when they show up in court, they're not relying on a judge to guess what should have happened. It's very clear and you don't have this situation. So what I've learned from this is don't respond to legal agreements with an emoji. It's probably a bad idea. Tom, I'm going to have my lawyer, as soon as we get off the show, write up an email signature with a bunch of legalese saying that any of the emojis I've used do not equate to any type of consent. The use of an emoji in this email doesn't have to be close to that. That did not mean I accepted your contract. Rob, the use or non use of a poop emoji does not imply any kind of contractual application. Oh, man. No, I love this. I said send us your takes on this because this is a great court case. I love this a lot. Speaking of takes, people have some takes on other people in San Francisco specifically discovering that if they put a traffic cone on the hood of a cruise or waymo robotaxi autonomous vehicle operating without a person on board, it can stop the car from operating. Now, a lot of videos on the Internet have gotten some traction showing this form of protest, which it is against the autonomous vehicles. Some people claiming they're overly malfunctioning. They're making traffic worse. San Francisco, like many cities, has a lot of traffic problems. It's also always in some state of construction. So if you want to find a traffic cone laying around, it's not really that hard to do. Despite opposition from some city agencies and residents in San Francisco next week on July 13th, the California Public Utilities Commission or CPUC is expected to approve cruises and waymos autonomous vehicle passenger service expansion in the city. We've talked about that. In fact, earlier this week on the show, the CPUC doesn't actually grant permissions. The DMV does that in California, but it does grant companies the right to charge passengers a fare for the service. Cone hoods. That's what I call people who do this. The lawsuits are coming. Just just remember, don't respond to those lawsuits with an emoji. Now, I don't want to, my first reaction is like, don't do that. You're only making things worse. But I understand that if you have an issue with autonomous vehicles, maybe you have experienced or at least observed an autonomous vehicle doing something weird and say, you know what, we're not ready for this yet. We don't want the expansion to happen. I kind of get that. I'm not sure that, you know, chaos is the right way to get what you want. But, you know, stranger things have happened. ATL Brit wonders if it's taxi drivers doing it. Yes, somebody's going to get sued. Remember, these cars have cameras everywhere. They see you coming. So at some point, companies going to sue if they can figure out who did it. They're going to sue that person. And I don't see why they wouldn't win. This is really no different than I don't like buses traveling up and down the street. I'm going to go let air out of the tire. Yeah, you can't do that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. All right. The amateur traveler himself, Chris Christensen, who gave us a really good tip on yesterday's show, was also writing into Echo Justin Robert Young's sentiment on Thursday show about Metta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, saying I'm one of those people who tried out Threads. I don't think I'll be using it a lot in the near term. The way I use Twitter is I have thousands of people I follow. And then an even more curated list of maybe 200 people who have an A list. And when I go to Twitter, I just look at that list. So for me, the mainstream that included he's talking about Threads at this point, would Zuckerberg had to say what this politician or that person had to say? Wasn't at all what I was looking for. Rob, what's your take on Threads? So I don't disagree with Chris on this. I it is not a Twitter replacement at this point. There's, you know, you can't really search in it. There's no list.  There's a lot of things that Metta is going to have to add to this application. But here's the thing. It doesn't have to compete with Twitter. Twitter, I've said this many times before. It's already achieved critical mass.  The only way that Twitter is going to get knocked off is if they knock themselves off now, you can argue that they're doing that very effectively right now, but I don't think that this app is going to somehow displace the hundreds of millions of people who log into Twitter every week and love it. So I understand the point because this does not replace Twitter. Like there's too many things that you can do in Twitter that you can't do here yet, but I'm just impressed by the fact that it's probably going to be over 100 million users by next week. Yeah, all I was simply amazing to me. All I will add to the debate is every time a Twitter competitor has come along, even before Elon Musk, going to company, everyone said about Twitter or Facebook. Yeah, it's a great app. It might even be superior to Twitter, but it just doesn't have the users. And what people want is to be where all their all their friends are. Well, Threads figured that part out. So if that was always the most important thing for a competitor, Threads figured it out. Threads got it. So that it's a different conversation than I think it has been with everything else. Well, Rob Dunwood, thanks for your thoughts on this and also playing Judge Dunwood, which we'll have you do again. But in the meantime, where can people keep up with all the other stuff that you do? You can find me over on SMR podcast, that's smrpodcast.com, where we just dropped episode, I believe, 591 today. We've been doing the show for about 15 years. You can also find me over on the Tech John, where we released, I believe, episode 89 this week, and we've been doing it for going on two years. So that's where I'm at. And keep your ears out because you're going to be here and Rob Dunwood more on Daily Tech headlines as well. Pretty soon. Just drop in a little, little thought. All right, Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We might do a dramatic reading of the court case with the emojis, but we're definitely going to space history. Test your knowledge of the history of space exploration right along with us and get smarter in the process. It's the most fun you'll have in your years this week or your ears. I certainly hope so anyway. Just a reminder, though, DTNS is live. We do the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, that's twenty hundred UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechnewshow.com slash live. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. We're back on Monday with Justin Robert Young joining us. I'll see you back. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host, producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer, Twitch producer, Joe Koontz, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language, host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST and Len Peralta, ACAST ad support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, Chris Christensen and Rob Dunwood. Our guest this week was Trisha Hershberger and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.