Meta Agrees to Change Its Ways, But Not Admit Guilt - DTNS 5340

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2:59This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 26, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and try to foster understanding. Today, Meta will change its ways towards teens, but stop short of admitting it broke the law. And right before the show started, Apple announced it will hold its September 9th event in Cupertino. Foldable phone. I bet it's going to be iPhones. Foldable phone. Yeah. This will be the first big product announcement after John Turnus takes over as CEO on September 1st. Anyway, I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

3:38All right, so we won't be getting a precedent-setting case about social media this time. The lawsuit from 29 U.S. State Attorneys General against Meta has been settled out of court, just as we were getting to the juicy testimony, or what we thought would be anyway. The allegation was that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to drive compulsive use by children and tried to hide known risks of using those products. They alleged that these decisions violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, as well as some consumer protection statutes. So, Tom, let's run through what got agreed to. Yeah, settle in, folks.

4:21There's a lot of stuff here. The settlement is a consent judgment. That means it carries the same legal weight and enforceability as a judgment issued after a full trial. So META can't weasel out of what it has agreed to. However, the agreement does not constitute an admission by META of any liability, wrongdoing, or violation of any local, state, federal, or international law. So it doesn't go on their permanent record. They're not admitting guilt, but they do have to follow all of the things they have agreed to under the force of law. And before we get to some of the details, for everybody out there who's sort of like, but guilt or not guilt, like it means we've decided to settle, but we're not a previous felon.

5:11Yeah, yeah. And that helps in the court of public opinion a little, I suppose, but it also helps in future cases. And Meta has a lot of future cases coming. If they had admitted guilt, then in future cases, that would make it easier for the people suing them for other things, right? Meta has agreed to implement the following changes to its apps. So if you are a teen, a default daily two-hour time limit for users younger than 18, that is across Facebook and Instagram, cumulative. So you spend an hour on Instagram and then an hour on Facebook. Boom, you hit the time limit. Now, parents can increase that limit, but only the parents or guardians can.

5:50There is a total block on apps from midnight to 6 a.m. That can also be adjusted by the parents. meta will deliver clear prompts and notifications to teens every 15 minutes of continuous screen time to let them know hey you're still going as well as reminders when they hit the 60 minute and the 90 minute of cumulative use marks they will not get any notifications overnight or from 8 a.m to 3 p.m during school hours unless they are direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety. So direct messages under a teen account has to come from a friend or family. It can't come from strangers.

6:31And if there's like, Hey, somebody's trying to break into your account, they'll get those DMS. But otherwise from midnight to 6am, they don't get any other notifications from 8am to 3pm when they should be in school, no notifications. Okay. Um, you know, I wonder how much, cause I'm just trying to think of myself as a young teen, you know, living this life right now and saying, oh, now I've only got a couple hours a day. Where do I go? How do I make the most of this time? Yeah. And I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing, but that changes behavior. Yeah. It's going to try to reduce it now.

7:10A lot of these kids are going to try to get around this by creating accounts that are adult, but we'll get to that in a second. Some other things that they're doing to reduce the addictiveness of the platform No longer displaying the number of likes or reactions on posts. Banning extreme makeup filters, in addition to an already existing block on cosmetic surgery filters. So they're going from the most extreme to just like things that do makeup. A way to view a non-algorithmic feed on Facebook and Instagram, as well as periodic reminders that it's an option. And giving parents the option to make the non-algorithmic feed the default on the children's account.

7:51Now, algorithmic will still be the default, but there will be a lot of ways for either the parent or the child to change that. And the teen or the parent can turn off autoplay so that videos don't just automatically start playing. Again, that's up to the person, not to the platform. I think that's a good reminder for all of us that you can do that. Yeah. For all of us who are just like, ah, I didn't want to watch that right now. That is a setting. That would be nice to have. Exactly. There will be, as I mentioned, an enhanced mechanism for teens to report harmful content with a promise to respond to 90 % of those reports within six hours.

8:28The enhanced mechanism, I think, just tries to make it easier for them to find where to report it. But the response time, I think, is the bigger, meatier part of this. Right. And then for those kids trying to be like, well, I'll just create an adult account. Meta has agreed to enhanced age assurance measures to identify not only those younger than 18 so that they can't get the adult permissions, but also to stop children younger than 13 who try to use the app, which is against the policies. They're not allowed to have an account until they're 13. And Meta agreed that an independent auditor will monitor these practices and give it feedback on what's working and whatnot.

9:06All of these changes, and this is where the consent part, I think, applies. They have to follow these changes and keep them in place for 10 years, except for the time limit part. Those only have to stay in place for five years unless YouTube and TikTok sign on to those time limits. In which case, Meta says, if they do it, then we'll agree to do that for 10 years. Very schoolyard. You're like, well, we'll do it for five. But if those other guys come over. It does sound a little like that. Yeah. And we are talking about teens and schools. But I think that's more of a it's a competitive disadvantage for us to do this.

9:47So we want to try to work something into this settlement that encourages YouTube and TikTok to do it. Now, why YouTube and TikTok would do it outside of their own lawsuits, I don't know. Maybe it would help them with their own lawsuits. But there's no other reason for YouTube and TikTok to do it, not just to help Meta. Yeah, it's not as if the three are exactly best friends. No, no. You know, they're frenemies at best, right? Competitors. meta will be subject to an injunction prohibiting it prohibiting it from making further false misleading or deceptive statements around its safety features so that was one of the allegations is that they were deceiving teens uh and the force of law on this one there is a quote that if this settlement is approved will be a court injunction that says you can't do that you can't make a false misleading or deceptive statement or you're in violation of this agreement and we'll be pulling you back in court for punishment.

10:40And the headline is the amount of money that Meta is going to pay. You really buried the lead here. Yeah. Everybody's like, yeah, but how much is this going to cost them? Meta will pay a total of$16.7 billion, most of which will fund state-designed youth online safety initiatives. This is similar to what happened in the New Mexico suit, where there was an abeyance fund. But essentially, they'll divide these up, a couple of billion to each state, and then the state will take that and create its own youth online safety initiative. So Meta's just giving them the money and the state has to implement it.

11:165.3 billion of that 16.7 billion will only be paid if YouTube and TikTok also implement those longer time limits and age assurance methods, as well as each of them paying 5.3 billion dollars themselves. So this might only be 11.4 billion dollars if YouTube and TikTok don't side on to this. Okay. So given that this was settled out of court or eventually settled out of court, I wonder how much YouTube and TikTok might say, excuse you. Yeah, we're not part of this. Yeah. This is not about us. You're only going to pay more if we also pay more. Now, Now, I understand where the attorneys general would be coming from on this saying we have the same issues with all of the companies.

12:08We're going to sue you, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like we're coming for you as well. So maybe, you know, we're all kind of getting that plea deal ahead of time. Yeah. And then Meta also says it will reduce the daily time limit from two hours to one hour and extend the nighttime block from midnight to six to 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. If TikTok and YouTube agree to do the same. Again, there's a lot of like, if you can get TikTok and YouTube to agree to this, I guess that's how this negotiation would go. Is Meta that's like, look, we'll make that nighttime block longer if you can get TikTok and YouTube to agree to it.

12:41And the attorneys general go like, all right, yeah, we'll take that challenge. We'll try to talk them into it. I mean, I'm not much of a TikTok user myself, but I'm also not a child. But good luck getting the youngs not to watch YouTube videos overnight. No, they won't be able to. They'll be blocked and there'll be no way for them to get around it. Because that happens. And honestly, that's not entirely the point. The point is to put up the roadblock and do your best. Because I don't think anybody thinks they're really going to stop everyone from doing it. But it'll stop some. A company like Meta, they can't stop kids from doing kid things.

13:19Yeah. But they can say, here is everything we did in our power to do right by this lawsuit. Now, if you heard me say$16.7 billion and you're like, Tom, I see I'm looking at this headline right here from a reliable source that says$17.1 billion. that's because Meta also agreed to pay$459 million in the related case about the misuse of adult information related to Cambridge Analytica. So that's a separate case, but that's being paid along with this. So total Meta is going to be paying$17.1 billion, but only$16.7 billion come from the actual case about children. Both parties are going to waive their right to appeal.

14:05if this settlement is approved by Judge Gonzalez Rogers, which I didn't see anyone expressing any skepticism that the judge would approve the settlement. Seems like it's probably going to get approved. And you can, in some cases, appeal a settlement if you change your mind later. And both parties are saying, we won't do that. We're not going to appeal this. But as I mentioned, this isn't the end. There are hundreds of other cases being brought, including one involving social media personal injury claims. There's a consolidated nationwide federal school district case. And there's a chance that Meta won't be able to settle them all.

14:40So if you're someone who's like, they're getting away without admitting their guilt, there are going to be lots of other chances to force them to admit guilt. And this is not a, you know, brush off, we'll just write a check and get away. There are some very significant changes that they're making to the teen accounts. And I, you know, as much fun as we're having with the YouTube and TikTok of it all. I think that is a significant effect if the attorneys general can get YouTube and TikTok to agree and be like, hey, you need to do this too. This is tantamount to legislation to say the major companies that teens use for stuff, although Snap's not part of this, but Snap's got their own lawsuits against them.

15:26The major companies will have nighttime blocks. They will have age assurance methods. So there are some significant outcomes to this, even if Meta didn't have to admit guilt. Well, you know what we're guilty of, Tom? What is that? Loving our patrons. If that's a crime, I don't want to be a law-abiding citizen. Lock me up. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. DTNS is made possible by all of you listening and some of you watching as well. Thank you today to Howard Yermich, John Atwood, Pat and Ian Smart. That's smart.

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20:08Pre-orders of the 25th anniversary Xbox Series X25 limited edition console. Open for all on August 27th for$900. Shipping November 13th. You can only order one per customer. We also have the Xbox X25 special edition wireless controller. Also available for pre-order for$80. Shipping on October 20th. Ikea also showed off its 25th anniversary Xbox line of furniture. including game controller displays, gaming side tables shaped like a D-pad, a thumbstick tool, and others. And probably the biggest news today, Xbox announced its Disk 2 digital program. That lets owners of physical game disks claim digital copies, saying, you know what?

20:56Yeah, I already paid for it. I should get both. Most disk-based games for Xbox One and Series X support this feature. Microsoft says that thousands of titles will be supported at launch, with more being added over time, saying players can claim a digital entitlement by inserting a supported disc into an Xbox One or Xbox Series X console and launching the game. So you can use those digital copies in Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Insiders can test the feature starting, drum roll please august 31st yeah that's the big one uh everybody wanted that this one's been rumored uh turns out the rumored price of the xbox 25th edition xbox series 25th edition was right and so was this that the dista digital was going to launch here uh and i think it's a good program i don't think there's a whole lot for people to pick at uh xbox didn't say anything about and this will of course lead us to phase out physical disks but just to digital programs do make it easier to phase out physical disks right because it gets a bunch of people with physical disks to understand the advantages to being able to store their games in the cloud it's kind of implied but again microsoft didn't say this is what we're doing and very wisely did not say anything uh about that and they haven't you know to their credit uh while sony has said we're going going to stop making discs, you know, at the end of next year.

22:26Microsoft hasn't said that. And probably the wiser thing to do would just be to slowly phase it out and just have more digital only releases and not hang a flag on it the way Sony had to do. Well, and at that point, for everybody who has physical copies and then say like, well, why not get the digital? Yeah. They're less mad later. Yeah. Especially this teaches people like, oh, but if I have a digital copy, I get to play it in more places. Now I can play it on my PC and I can play it in the cloud and all of that sort of thing without taking it away. I think that's the key and saying like, look, if you want to buy the physical copy, you still can and you get all of the benefits of the digital as well.

23:04Yep. Bill Gates caused a stir today writing a post on GatesNotes.com. You may not have realized that was his website, GatesNotes.com. I didn't until today. Today I learned. The post is called The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The choices we make now are critical. With a subheading, we need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad. I've seen most stories kind of characterizing this as Bill Gates turning against AI. I read the whole thing. I don't think it's him turning against AI. I think what it is, well, I'll get to what I think what it is, but it is him laying out risks as well as benefits.

23:47He was very specific on the risks. He laid out three big ones. Many jobs will disappear forever. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The debate is whether there will be enough new jobs created to replace those jobs that disappear forever. We no longer have all the buggy whip makers that we used to, but we came up with other jobs. And he addresses that. He says, I don't know that we're going to be able to replace these jobs as fast as they disappear. That's his worry. The second one is AI will empower people to do more harm. So pointing out that it makes it faster for people to come up with bad things to do, both cybersecurity, but also medical and bioterrorism, things like that.

24:27These are all well-worn paths. Water plant hacks. Yeah. These are real risks and everyone knows about them. And again, the debate is, but will we get good at detecting and defending against them as fast as they get good at doing harm? And again, Gates says like, that's not a guarantee. If we don't have a plan, we might not. And then he also worries that AI could stunt kids' development and replace human relationships. This feels like the weaker of his three arguments. This is always a worry with every new kind of media or technology. And he makes a couple of remarks in his statements that, well, in the past, people said it wasn't a problem, but this time it's different.

25:12So he's having that this time it's different. This time it's a real risk to kids' development, because if they have an AI pal, they might not make real friends. He also spent some time talking about benefits. He's a little less organized in that section. He didn't have bullet points. He just describes like, yes, there's amazing things we can do with health by detecting diseases. There's amazing things we can do with science. And there definitely are productivity increases. This is why I don't think it's him turning against AI, because he makes the point of like, yes, all the things I've said in the past that AI will do well, I am still in agreement with.

25:46But he recommends that we plan. And he spends a lot of time saying we should have a plan and I support a plan and I'll help governments create a plan and there needs to be a plan. He spends less time designing what that plan would be. But he does give us three things that he thinks should be part of a plan. one is set aside jobs reserved for humans uh in other words jobs that could be replaced by automation including robots and he does talk a lot about robots and saying like hey blue collar folks are not going to be exempt from this so we need to be prepared for that as well they're going to come for white collar first but then the robots are going to come for the blue collar manufacturing jobs he's like we should reserve some jobs for humans and we'll have to evolve that over time as we determine which jobs should be replaced and which jobs aren't.

26:35He says, I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. In other words, rebalance how we tax labor and capital. And I think this is really what he has come to the conclusion of, which is, uh-oh, if jobs get reduced, there's all kinds of ways we can make up for that, like universal income, and there will be benefits from the increased productivity of automation. But if jobs get reduced, income tax goes down. And if income tax goes down, governments don't have enough money. I think what he's identifying is not, well, we should worry about jobs being replaced, but we should worry about the current tax system not being applicable to the new world.

27:18This is very similar to worries with electric vehicles. We based an entire economy in government on paving roads and building bridges because we get gas tax. If cars aren't buying gas, you're not getting that tax. So there's like, well, maybe we need to tax electric vehicles on the miles they drive on road usage rather than on the fuel they use. And I think Gates is making that same argument here, which is before it becomes a problem, we need to start taxing the actual machines. We need to start taxing AI. We need to start taxing robots so that we have enough tax base to be able to fund the transition from the old economy to the new economy.

28:02None of this actually sounds too crazy to me. I know because it's Bill Gates. people go, oh, Bill Gates is spouting off. But what stands out to me is the idea that certain jobs would be reserved for humans. I don't know exactly what Gates thinks those jobs should be. One of the examples he gave was like, if you have been diagnosed with a fatal condition, a robot could tell you, but it shouldn't. A human should tell you that. I'm like, okay, I guess I could see that. Yeah. I mean, in any given year, I don't know how many instances that specific thing is putting somebody out of a job. Well, sure.

28:47And he's not saying that's the only one. But he's like, there are things like that where we could replace them. But maybe the human touch will be better and we want to make that the rule that we reserve. Or even kind of, you know, going back to this, you know, this idea that, you know, children's literacy is at risk because of AI and, you know, human to human contact is not physical. But, you know, just, you know, talking is very important to, you know, restaurants, critical thinking, libraries. I mean, yeah, just just various things that we as not young people are just very used to that. And so we're trying to figure out, like, how do the robots get involved?

29:30And so I think what he's getting at is if you're if you're younger and this is all, you know, and it becomes more and more the same, you know, who's at risk here? And I think that's a very good conversation to have. Yeah. No, I don't mind that one where it's almost like the greeter at Walmart, right? Like, hey, we may have robots stocking the shelves, but let's keep the humans out front. So you get a human touch and you get human relationships and maybe still have people walking around in the aisles asking you if you need to help. Even though a robot could totally do it, let's reserve that for humans.

30:03I don't know who gets to decide that. The idea of having the government reserve jobs for humans sounds like a recipe for arguing about which jobs were classified and which weren't. But I don't mind the concept at all. And I really think almost everything in this is a way for him to get you to listen to him so that he can push his tax. He spent several paragraph saying this, I know I'm involved in AI with my relationship with Microsoft still, but I'm not writing this because it's going to benefit me. And then he says we should tax AI. Now you could say that would be bad for Microsoft to have to have a tax on AI and reduce the usage of its product, but also its regulatory capture.

30:49Like if you have to tax AI tokens, then that means it wouldn't just be like something against Microsoft. It's everybody. Right. And the smaller companies would have a harder time competing with Microsoft in that case. But I honestly, I don't believe that's the motivation here. I don't think he's just trying to protect Microsoft. He's in the process of giving away his wealth. I think what he's trying to do is identify like this is going to be an unpopular solution that is going to have to happen. And when there are unpopular solutions, society usually puts them off as long as they can. So let me see if I can scare people into changing it before it becomes a problem.

31:26Yeah. I don't know if that's going to work, but I think that's what's going on. I will say, you know, before we move on, I mean, Bill Gates posting something on, what was it? Gatesnotes.com. Gatesnotes. Yeah. I'll bookmark that. But, you know, that's going to get a lot of attention because it's Bill Gates. A lot of people don't feel dissimilar from anything that he's saying. A lot of people do. So it's not like we have some one blanket solution here. But I think keeping the conversation alive, especially because this is all moving so quickly, is the right call. Whether his tax call is the right call, you might have very strong feelings about that.

32:11And, you know, once we get into government and politics, it's sort of the Wild West. But I do think the more people in positions of extreme power talk about what they're worried about and potential solutions, the less we feel like, oh, we just like flew blind into this new AI nightmare. Into the storm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, a headline that says Bill Gates turns against AI is going to get people to pay attention, even if it's inaccurate, in my opinion. He didn't turn against AI. He just wants you to look at what he thinks needs to be done to limit the bad effects of AI. Well, if you would like product reviews from people who put gadgets, services, platforms to the test, then your new show is live with it.

33:04Many of you are already following us and we appreciate you very much. Each week, we talk about the tech in our lives, robots, air fryers, smart TV solutions, the works. This week, DT &S producer Amos is walking us through his Ubiquiti Unify system in his house, which I'm just going to tell you is very, very thorough. If you want tips on total control over your home internet plus, this is the episode for you. We are on YouTube at youtube.com slash at livewithitshow. that's just just bookmark us there it's very easy to find our episodes that way and also huge huge thanks to all of our patrons who are keeping us trying out new things patreon.com livewithit

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35:19That allows it to process video alerts without having a permanent encryption key to other data. So you can still turn on end-to-end encryption, but you won't have the video processing alerts. Yeah. At first I hated this. Then I liked it. Then I hated it. Then I liked it. But I think I ended up liking it because they didn't turn off end-to-end encryption. They just said, look, if you want to do the processing, let's create a way where you can keep most of your stuff encrypted most of the time and you have less of a surface attack area. Because before it was all or nothing. Yeah. This isn't a, we took away a feature.

35:53It's we've added a feature. So. A week after video clips of GTA 6 leaked online, Rockstar Games finally issued the following statement. It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay leaked this way has been heartbreaking for our team. And this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time. They basically apologized for letting it leak. I also like, well, but nobody's played the game yet. it's still gonna be fun. Yeah, but now everybody's seen it and they were gonna have a big reveal on Netflix tomorrow and now it's just, it's ruined, Sarah.

36:29They ruined it. Well, you know, I'm sure, you know, the marketing team at Rockstar is just like, how? Why? But yeah, I think people are still gonna play the game. I think so too. Instagram is rolling out a new feature called First Draft that automatically trims video clips and removes pauses to pull the best moments out of an initial cut that then you can tweak further. So it's not doing everything for you, but it's sort of like, we think this is how you probably wanted to edit this. First draft is rolling out first on iOS. Lenovo launched its 8.4 inch Legion Y700 Infinite flagship tablet. It's available in China with a 2.5K screen, 165 Hertz OLED display, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip inside, 24 gigabytes of RAM, might be worth it just for the RAM.

37:19It starts at 4 ,999 yuan, which is about$744 US. Reuters sources say that Moonshot, that's the maker of the Kimi model, is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google over revenue sharing to let the companies offer Kimi K3 to cloud customers. Reportedly, Moonshot wants up to 30 % of revenue made off of Kimi K3. Dang, that's a chunk. It is. You know that Aux Alpha model that everybody was like, ooh, it's free, but who makes it? And it performs really well on Open Router. What is this about? It was Zipu. China's Z.ai says, we did it. We made Aux Alpha. It's going to remain free for now. And it will release the weights for the model on Wednesday night.

38:03If you're keeping track on models, Alibaba released its Quinn 3.8 Flash downloadable model on Wednesday, along with its weights. The 125 billion parameter model is comparable to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeq V4 Flash. A lot of U.S. policies against Chinese tech have been to beat them back so that they are unable to compete in chips. They do not appear to be entirely working as Huawei put a bid in to build data centers for the Egyptian government using its Ascend 950 series chips that it makes for training and inference. The US, of course, is preparing a counteroffer involving NVIDIA and Microsoft. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30th.

38:49The platform was launched in 2005. I almost said 2025. No, much, much longer ago than that, 2005, and employed people to do short digital tasks for micropayments. I should hurry up and use it before it goes away. I never had any Mechanical Turks do anything. I didn't either. I was never totally sure how it worked. I mean, it was more for people who had small businesses or startups. I need someone to crunch through all of these spreadsheets. Tedious little tasks. Well, guess who's mad? People who used to be paid that AI agents took their jobs. Right. Now we need to transition all the mechanical Turk workers, the Turkers.

39:32SoundCloud announced that artists will soon be able to sell their music directly on SoundCloud Instead of having to send people to third-party sites like Bandcamp, they could still do that, but they will be able to sell it directly if they want to. SoundCloud says it will beta test the feature first with 200 US-based Artist Pro subscribers. An analysis of DNS records indicates that the number of users hosting their own email server has dropped by half over the last decade. In 2016, 44.6 % of the top million domains ran their own mail server. In 2026, that is down to 22.4%. Meanwhile, Google Workspace hosts 21.8 % and Microsoft 365 hosts 16.8%.

40:18I'll tell you what, I moved my own server to Google Workspace because I got tired of chasing email blacklists and having, you know, emails bounce saying like, this came from an untrusted server. It's not something impossible to do, but it's a job to run your own email server. And it makes financial sense to outsource it. I'm with the folks who wrote this report saying it is kind of risky to have that few of email providers delivering all of the email of the world. So it would be nice to have a little more competition. But I mean, if they do it well, then you don't worry about it all that much.

40:58With great power comes great leverage. Mm-hmm. Well, we like to end every episode here on DTNS with shared perspectives. Today, Paul has some thoughts on drone delivery. Yeah, I really like this, Paul. Thank you for writing in. He wanted to chime in on the discussion Sarah and I were having about the logistics of drone delivery last week. Some of the possible problems that could interfere with it were what we were talking about. And he said, I've had a lot of questions as well. Like, what if I want a burrito delivered to my apartment on the 12th floor? And how can I prevent someone from stealing my burrito delivered by a noisy attention grabbing drone.

41:33And then Paul says, recently I watched a video where they tested a pizza delivery drone. The news story didn't reveal all the details, but they did show that the drone homed in on the location provided by the customer, probably by tracking the customer's phone location. This particular customer had chosen to receive the pizza in a public park, but presumably they could have picked any suitable location. The drone stayed high in the air, maybe 20 feet or higher, and lowered the pizza in a delivery bag attached to a cable. The reporter simply detached the bag and the delivery was complete. All in all, it seemed a pretty smart way to sidestep some potential issues.

42:09If you live in an apartment or have larcenous neighbors, no problem. Just step outside to a safe open area and the drone lowers the delivery to you and you take it. Like Tom mentioned, most of us have questions about this sort of thing simply because we haven't experienced it yet. It should be interesting to see what other potential problems and solutions come up as these deliveries become more widespread. As always, thanks for the great show, Paul. Aw, thanks, Paul. Yeah, I'm sure many of you have seen the video of the drone that dropped the delivery into somebody's pool. Yes. That, you know, made the rounds over the last couple of days.

42:46And, you know, it's one of those situations where it's like, yeah, we're going to run into things like this. This doesn't, first of all, not everybody has a hot tub. You know, we're just a large body of water in their backyard. Yeah. But, you know, it's, there are going to be, you know, weird little accidents. Right now, I get a ton of deliveries to my house, you know, dog food, stuff for myself. I mean, just, it's relentless. And every so often, you know, the delivery is either wrong, goes to the wrong apartment where I'm like, I don't even know where that is. or, you know, where it's delayed.

43:25You know, there are many issues that we're all kind of like, well, yeah, but the convenience of getting it delivered to your front door is worth it, right? So that's where we are with the drone thing. Like, there's a lot of talk about, like, how is this going to go wrong? And it will go wrong. But most of the time, it's designed to be great. Yeah, it would be like if automobiles were brand new and people are like, I'm not getting in one of those. You could run into somebody else. It's like, yeah, that's that's still true. And yet everybody still drives. So, yeah, I'm not getting an electric car.

44:03What if I run out of gas? Yeah. So I think, you know, what the takeaway I will have from this discussion we've just had, Sarah, is make sure that you're not standing by your pool when the drone comes to deliver your pizza. You know, go to the front yard or something like that. Yeah. And yeah, make sure that the rabid band of coyotes that live in the backyard are sleeping when the burrito gets delivered or, you know, it's going to be mayhem. Indeed. Well, you might be thinking about anything we talked about on the show. And if you do, if you have insight into a story we've talked about or may talk about in the future, let us know.

44:41Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Paul for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. My goodness. If you're a patron, thank you. If you're not, you can fix that really easily. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

45:02The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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46:23Thank you.

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