 Andrew Marshall has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Andrew, become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for July 1st, 2019. Patreon day. Thank you patrons for supporting us in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, sweltering in the summer heat, Roger Jane. We are going to talk a little bit about how to drive safely some research that I don't know if it contradicts, but it steers you away from what I have always thought. See what I did there. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. Strategy analytics reports that Roku now powers 41 million OTT devices and smart TVs globally and now accounts for more than 30% of connected device sales as of Q1 of this year. Roku's 41 million market share is 36% more than Sony PlayStation, which is in the number two spot. Strategy analytics also predicts that Roku's lead will stretch to 70% by the end of 2019 with 52 million devices in use accounted for 18% of the market. Uber now includes jump bike scooters and Lyme scooters in its main map in Atlanta, Georgia and San Diego, California. Lyme, which Uber previously partnered with a year ago, also added Uber branding to its scooters in those same cities. The Independent reports that in an interview, Samsung CEO DJ Koh was quoted as saying about the Galaxy Fold postponed launch, quote, it was embarrassing. I pushed it through before it was ready. Koh went on to say, at the moment, more than 2000 devices are being tested right now in all aspects. We defined all the issues, some issues we didn't even think about, but thanks to our reviewers, mass volume testing is ongoing. Thanks, The Verge. Samsung also launched a dedicated app store for third parties to offer their own Bixby-compatible services called the Bixby Marketplace in the United States and South Korea. Bixby Marketplace will be available on the Bixby page on your Samsung phone with plans to eventually include it in the main Galaxy app store. Users can browse for third-party services called capsules or be prompted to install one just using their voice. At launch, transactional capsules will be supported, allowing payment to process through Bixby will not be supported with plans to launch subscription support at a later date. Spotify has shut down a program it started in September last year to let independent artists in the U.S. upload their own music tracks to the service. Artists have until July 31st to find another distributor and will only be paid for streams through that date. A few hundred artists have used the feature and still had to use distribution services to get their music on other streaming platforms. Spotify recently invested in distribution service DistroKid. And the Robot Exclusion Protocol, or REP, or you probably know it as robots.txt, is a file that website owners can place in their root directory to tell automatic clients like web crawlers not to access the site. Don't want to show up in Google News? Put a robots.txt exclusion in. Google and the robots.txt specs original author have documented REP how it's used and submitted it as a standard to the IETF. All right, let's talk a little bit more about the good news question mark for Huawei this weekend. Yeah, possibly. Saturday, U.S. President Trump announced that U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We're talking about equipment where there is no great national security problem with it, that was his quote. The president stated he didn't think the ban was fair to U.S. suppliers and would consider resuming sales that didn't impact national security. Talks between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping also committed to no new tariffs, but didn't discuss extraditions of Huawei CTO Meng Wanzhou. In a press statement, Huawei said, we acknowledge the U.S. president's comments relating to Huawei and have no further comment at this time. That's pretty much the gist of all the stories. It's like, the president said something. And then nothing happened. Something, but we don't know what yet. I'm sure we'll get more clarification as the week draws on, but the president said, yeah, we'll let you sell Huawei as long as there's not a national security problem, which is a really easy thing to say, but the devil's in the details. Does that mean Android? Does that mean processors? What exactly does that mean? And it is one of those things where, you know, he was talking to his pal, President Xi Jinping, and said, oh, yeah, no, we can ease up a little bit. And I'm sure his staff is like, okay, I guess we need to get work on reviewing that whitelist. It doesn't sound like the entity list is going to remove Huawei from what he said. He said it depends on whether there's no national security problem. But the way the entity list can work is to issue a license, and it sounds like what the president is saying is we'll issue more of those licenses so people can sell some things to Huawei. Very confusing. Yeah, one would think that if Huawei had given a statement that said anything besides we have no comment at this time, it might be in better favor to Huawei. But again, I, you know, it's hard to read these sea leaves. I think what they said was we know he said that we're waiting for someone to confirm it to us. Yeah, now what? Yeah. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Johnny Ive, Apple Chief Designer, left the company after frustration that it was less design focused and more operations led. Remember Tim Cook comes from the operations side and the story kind of talked about how, I don't think I've hated Tim Cook or anything like that, but got a little frustrated with him, according to sources. I've pushed for the Apple Watch to be made even though other executives weren't sure the device would be a hit and reportedly I've wanted the watch to be seen as a fashion accessory, but settled for it being tethered to the iPhone at launch. Apple sold around 10 million watches in the first year, a quarter of what Apple forecast, which led to a lot of people thinking might die on the vine, but it has survived and seems to be flourishing. Survived and thrived, yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny because when the Apple Watch first launched, I was, I don't want to call myself a nace there, but I was like, I don't, I mean, I still don't have an Apple Watch, but at the time I was like, I don't want this. And the tethering thing, which is, you know, that it's not the case anymore, but I remember it being like, wow, this is a real limitation. And then there was, you know, an expensive gold plated version of the watch if you wanted to spend a lot of money that I never really understood. I don't know anybody who got that. It was definitely a status symbol. I felt the launch at the time was odd. This report is in line with what I found odd about it. You know, maybe Johnny, I've, I don't know. I mean, you know, you have to either believe these sources or not, but the fact that he's like, this is going to be a fashion thing. You know, the product people, Tim Cook, of course, at the helm of that, with an Apple saying, you know, we're not necessarily going to do that. And then coming to some sort of a, you know, an agreement somewhere in the middle, it kind of is in line with the way that it played out. Yeah. There's a lot of those things in this Wall Street Journal article about him not showing up for meetings, not being as engaged, et cetera, et cetera. We talked about that last week quite a bit, but the really interesting fact to me too is like, oh, that's why they had the $10,000 version of an Apple watch that didn't really make sense to me. I always knew what the purpose was, like, oh, they're trying to make it a fashion accessory, but it always did feel like it was a stretch and they backed off of it, and it would appear that this is why, that Johnny, I've had a vision for the Apple watch that was a little different than Tim Cook's. Yeah. Tim Cook also, ever since Tim Cook took the reins, people have been saying, well, he's a product guy. How is this going to change the future of Apple? I don't even know what the answer is to that yet. I mean, Apple has been doing quite well in various ways, and maybe arguably not so good in other ways, but it is interesting that in 2015, somebody who was very high up, certainly in the design aspect of the company, was feeling some heat. Yeah, for sure. In a blog post, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced new policies to combat misinformation on the platform regarding the 2020 U.S. election and census, coinciding with the publication of Facebook's Civil Rights Audit Progress Report. Facebook will ban ads that discourage voting with the new policy and enforcement details promised before the 2019 U.S. gubernatorial elections. The company also announced it's treating the U.S. census with the same priority as the election, with policies that forbid any census interference or misinformation on the platform, dedicated training for employees working on census ads and content, and working with external organizations to promote census participation. Yeah, this is two parts here. One, the discouraging, or banning ads that discourage voting, it's the same Facebook conversation all over again to me, which is like, I guess they get to decide whatever they want on their platforms. There's nothing illegal about this, but I don't know that every message that talks about voting to be, I don't know. I have several friends who are like, no, you shouldn't have to vote. They make a good argument for them. I disagree with them, to be honest. I think everybody should vote, but I get where they're coming from, and I wouldn't want them to be banned. On the other hand, I know where it's coming from, which is we don't want campaigns that stop people from voting in order to favor a particular viewpoint or other. Well, and especially the target certain areas. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But on the other hand, the helping with census, gathering census information and trying to stop people from census interference seems like a positive thing, because census collection is a very important thing for allocating funds federally for various things, for redistricting, et cetera. So you want to get that sample to be as representative as possible, and any effort to help with that is good. So as far as these are combating misrepresentation or voter disenfranchisement, I'm with it. It's just the devils and the details on how you implement this stuff that make me a little uncomfortable sometimes. Yeah, I think yeah, the Facebook stories just get weirder and weirder around these parts, and of course, US elections have a lot to do with it. But Facebook having to take a stand like, hey, we do not want anybody to discourage people from voting and we have to do something about it. I get it. I also agree with you, Tom. It doesn't always mean that it's a bad thing and people should be allowed to make the choices that they make. Yeah, it's not even just a free speech thing. These feel like Band-Aid solutions to me. They feel like they're going to cause three other issues because they're trying to solve this one issue, and then now they're going to have three other issues and they'll have to put Band-Aids on those or Epicycles. I think the biggest problem is Facebook just needs more competition. There needs to be an alternative to Facebook and for a lot of people, there really isn't. Bring it on. I cannot wait. Who is going to take down Facebook? We're waiting for you. Yeah, I don't know who that is, but yeah. I'll just sit here. Look at my well-designed Apple Watch waiting for that to happen. Alphabet's balloon-based internet service, Loon, will launch a test with Telcom Kenya after Kenya's aviation authority issues final approval later this month, which is absolutely expected. People who live in the mountainous regions of Kenya who don't have 4G service will be offered 4G service at market prices. Telcom Kenya is the number three carrier, so it's a chance for them to expand into a region where there's no other competition right now, and it's a chance for Loon to test commercial service in non-emergency situations. Loon has successfully provided wireless service in both Peru and Puerto Rico as an emergency measure during natural disasters in both places, but this will be the first time that they're saying, okay, we're rolling this out commercially as a test to see if we can really bring good internet to places that there just isn't the ability to bring the infrastructure of internet yet. Telcom Kenya being number three in the region, getting this agreement with Alphabet seems like a pretty cool boon. Yeah, you know, SafariCom is the dominant one there. You always hear about SafariCom regarding M-Pesa. Of course, recently they tragically lost their chief executive, but they are number one. And so Telcom Kenya getting in on this, I think they're motivated to want to cooperate with Google on this. It's 4G service. I haven't seen an exact speed on this, but the speeds that were delivered in Peru and Puerto Rico were not complained about. They were thought to be pretty much what you would expect from a 4G service. So it will be interesting to see how this works in practice and also how many people decide to take advantage of it. You know, when it's at the same price you would get if you were down in, you know, the flatlands. It could prove to be a game changer or people may just not pick it up in large numbers. Hard to tell. Yeah, for anybody who might be listening and is more familiar with the region than me, I mean, if you live in the mountains, if you have historically, you know, really hard to get internet, you know, how much are you necessarily going into a place that has greater internet? You know, how much does the service that you need at a certain elevation, you know, matter if you're really not leaving that area? Yeah, I mean, and it's about information, right? It's about being able to find out what's going on, communication. It's hard to get down the mountain, right? It just always is. And so if you can get video information, you can get news information, you can communicate with suppliers if you're a farmer or a herder or something, this could be huge. Moving on to Europe, a new rule came into force in the European Union Monday requiring all new four-wheel electric vehicles to have a noise emitting device. The acoustic vehicle alert system or AVAS must make a sound when in reverse or traveling slower than 12 miles per hour. The sound needs to be similar to a traditional combustion engine and synchronized with speed. The US will require all hybrid and electric vehicles to make artificial noises by September 2020 at speeds up to 18.6 miles per hour. Yeah, because I guess we need to be warned at higher speeds than Europe. I wonder why 12 versus 18 was decided. That's interesting. Also, as I was writing this today, I thought, shouldn't we just say at speeds slower than 12 miles per hour? Because how often are people traveling in reverse faster than 12 miles per hour? But the idea is when a car is going in reverse or when a car is going slow is when people are more likely to be surprised by a quiet car. I mean, as far back as 2005, when we first had our Prius hybrid, I remember coming up to an intersection and stopping. Somebody was kind of talking to someone else and started to step out in front of me right as I started to go right because I didn't think they were going to go and they were stunned because they didn't hear me rolling forward. I've experienced this as a real issue. Yeah, I don't have a hybrid, but I remember when Prius is in specifically Prius, but hybrid cars in general in San Francisco a few years ago, it was like every third car was one. And so you started to get used to coming up to a stop sign. And if there's a car there, it kind of seemed silent like the car is off type thing. To this day, I am very wary of walking around when I'm listening to something or I have like a noise canceling headphone situation in effect, specifically because of hybrid cars because they really can creep up on you. And I mean, no, I'm not asking the driver to honk or anything. Nothing they can really do about it, but there are a few situations where I was like, whoa, didn't see you. Yeah, and this feels like maybe a transitional period because they want it to sound like a motor because that's what people are used to hearing. Especially if you're visually impaired, right? You listen for a motor sound. So they want it to sound familiar so they know, okay, that's what that is. And synchronized with speed is so that you know, oh, the wine is increasing, it's getting faster or it's slowing down. You can tell, but basically faking all of the sound cues that we're used to. I'm wondering if there'll be a different solution down the road. At the same time, isn't it weird that we're like, hey, some of these hybrid cars, they're nice and quiet, need to be louder to save people. Well, there's a limit on how loud these noises can be too. They're like, we're not too loud, just loud enough so you know it's there. Right, yeah, yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, please subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. In research published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, it's a Springer or peer-reviewed journal. Scientists at MIT found that keeping your eyes on the road is the biggest contributor to preventing distracted driving. Now that might sound obvious, but yeah, a lot of times people have thought, oh, it's not about keeping your eyes on the road, it's about thinking about something else. It's about thinking about that conversation on the phone or it's thinking about the composition of your message. So MIT Postdoc Benjamin Wolff designed an experiment to test whether what we're thinking about or what we're looking at affected driving the most. He's not saying it's one or the other. He's saying, yeah, they both probably affect your driving. Which one has the bigger effect on your driving? Volunteers were asked to view a video from the point of view of a car driving around Boston. So it's as if you're in the car, you're following traffic, and you were asked to press a space bar every time you saw a brake light. So they would test your accuracy, how many times you pressed a space bar when you saw a brake light, and your reaction time, how fast you pressed that space bar when you saw the brake light. Now all the tests did that, but there were three different tests. The first test asked people to look straight ahead or off to the side or below center. Okay, so they were testing there is, I'm looking straight ahead. How fast am I? I'm looking off to the side. How fast am I out of my peripheral vision? I'm looking down. How fast am I out of still peripheral vision but at a different direction? A second set of tests required users to track when the arm of a green cross in their view turned white as well as when they saw the brake light. So they still had to tap the space bar for the brake lights, but they also had to tap a direction arrow when a green cross that appeared in their vision turned white. And the idea there is they're testing, okay, we're making them think about something else while they're looking for the brake lights. Does that slow them down because they're thinking about something. A third test required identification of which direction a visual pattern was rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. They found where people were looking, not whether they were thinking about a second task, was the main factor affecting accuracy and reaction times. The best performance occurred when people were instructed to look right at the center of the screen. And the worst performance came when people were looking 20 degrees down below the center of the screen like maybe you would down at your phone, right? Looking at a region of the screen other than the center increased reaction time by 458 milliseconds on average. Higher cognitive load making you think about another task only increased reaction times by 35 milliseconds on average. So 458 for not looking dead center, 35 for thinking about something while you're doing it. So it had an effect. It did slow your reaction time when you're thinking about something else. But it was not nearly as much of a delay as not looking at what you're supposed to be looking at. I mean, I am, you know, I definitely talked about this on the show before. I am a scared driver in general. You know, looking at my phone is that is not, I mean, it's illegal first of all, but I mean, not an option. I can't do it. I can barely get to, you know, from point A to point B looking exactly at the center of my, you know, straight ahead. I happen to have a heads up display in my car. And it's something that you can sort of program. Like I have the speed limit. If I'm near a school, something will flash. Like just stuff that I feel like it's really important for me to have. I kind of forget it's there because I sort of look through it. And I'd be interested to hear if any other people, you know, have the, I think I just have to kind of get used to it because I've only had the car for a few months. But, but yeah, I mean, thinking about something and feeling distracted and being like, oh, don't talk to me right now or I can't be on the phone right now. I have to, you know, navigate whatever. That's normal. But looking down, I mean, it seems like a no brainer that of course this would be the worst way to drive. Well, yeah, but it's not just looking down all the time that they're worried about, right? The test may have done that. But what it's showing is when you just glance down, like, oh, I'm just going to glance down for a second, for whatever reason, changing the radio dial, I dropped something in my lap that you are definitely increasing your danger. And the real silver blade points out in our Twitch chat, 35 milliseconds when going 60 kilometers an hour can be, can make a difference, right? So it's not that they're saying that thinking about something isn't a danger. They're just saying the danger that, like, if you want to be the safest, don't think about anything but driving and look straight ahead. Everything else adds a little bit of danger. And I think the point here isn't as much about what should you be doing while driving? Because I would still maintain, as the old bitty that I am, when you're driving, you shouldn't be doing anything else but driving. But what do we do to design the dashboard so that it is safer for people? And maybe those Tesla touch screens down there aren't the best way to design a dashboard. Maybe those heads-up displays like you have are a little bit safer. Yeah, it's interesting because I don't have a Tesla-sized sort of iPad in display, but my Volvo has a very decent one. And there's lots of stuff you can do while driving. Certain things are disengaged if you're going over a certain mile per hour or whatever. But there's a fair amount that you can do and navigate that's kind of like cool car software while you're driving. And it sort of befuddles me because it's like, okay, well, as soon as I do that, then I'm not really looking at the road. And the whole thing is very dangerous. And I rarely have a passenger in the passenger seat anyway. Or even taking phones out of the equation, I don't know. Let's say, Tom, you're driving with your dog and your dog's in the passenger seat and you got to do something and you look away for a second. There are so many reasons that just people in general are taking their eyes off the road, even very briefly, that can really impact safety. I've always contended that the problem has not been hands-free. The problem has been I'm doing something else. My attention is distracted. This study actually shows, well, it's not so much the attention as it is the where you're looking. But the point of this all is not absolutes, right? The point of the study was to say, you're never going to have a perfectly safe environment, right? There's always going to be something that distracts you. What you're looking for is how to minimize the distractions, how to make the distractions be as less of an impact as possible. Yeah, if you're driving stick for the first time, you might have to look down a little bit, but you'll get over that. And yes, you're going to have to look down for this or that from time to time for whatever reason. But as long as you know that's a risk, you can minimize those amounts of times. And you can design things to set people up for success. And just knowing what I should be doing is looking forward will help you do that more often. You know what we would like to maximize? Everybody who participates in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, hang out on our Facebook group as well, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. And now let's check in with Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler, on why selfies might be more dangerous than sharks. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. We've talked about selfies before in this segment, but a new study has just come out from an Indian medical journal that says that your chance of being killed taking a selfie are five times higher, more than five times higher, than your chance of being killed by sharks. Between 2011 and 2017, 259 people died taking selfies around the globe and just 50 people were killed by sharks. The interesting thing is what India that has more than half of those deaths, 159 so far is doing about it, they're declaring a number of places, 16 in Mumbai alone, as no selfie zones. Do you think this will work? Will anybody pay attention or will they be too busy taking their own picture? I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Don't want to get bitten by a shark? Just don't go in the ocean. Yeah, this is a great example of cherry picking your stats, obviously, but people are like an inordinately afraid of sharks and they are not afraid of selfies. So remember, don't take selfies, look straight ahead while driving and then you will not get eaten by a shark. That's right and you'll stay safe. Thank you, Chris. Get to your point B. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Matthew had some thoughts on our discussion we had last week about how Lotus 123 shaped the accounting industry. And Matthew says, I entered that industry at the tail end of Lotus 123's revolution. This freed people to use their mind rather than spend all of that time recalculating rows and columns. I remember that some of the senior staff started their career rolling over the depreciation tables for every asset in the organization owned. It took them all month by which time. It's time to start again for the next month. That is the previous automation revolution increased the productivity of staff as it helped them to do tasks. The current automation is different in that it automates whole tasks rather than helping people do their tasks. An example is that through a combination of OCR and B2B tools, it's led to a massive loss in accounts payable and accounts receivable staff. For higher accounting areas, there are now tools that reconcile accounts, including bank accounts. In reporting, there are now tools that are so powerful that senior managers can develop it themselves rather than a specialized team to do it for them. This has led to a massive decrease in staff required. This is shown in that the organization that I worked in 15 years ago had 60 accounting staff with a $2 billion turnover, and recently I ran an organization that had a $3 billion turnover with eight accounting staff. Yeah, this is a great example. I love that Matthew is like, and I'm not trying to say therefore, you know, panic, but here's an example of where the technology has reduced staff in this section. And this is a really, really good point, is that it's not a box of jobs, right? And Matt isn't even saying, and therefore, all of these accountants are just out on the street, and you'll see them in a tent, you know, on a road near you. He's saying this means that accounting doesn't need this much staff. So the challenge is, are we using those available resources to do something else at the company? Is there something else that could be done that those people with those skills will now be able to provide that they couldn't afford to do before? And we talked a lot, I think one of the reasons he probably wrote in is we talked a lot about that regarding factory jobs. But here's an example of a non-factory job that might be impacted that way. Thank you, Matt, for bringing that to our attention. Thanks, Matthew. And thank everybody who supports us on Patreon. We didn't get our goal of one more patron than last month, but we'll try again this month. And hopefully we get enough people who understand that right now, we are beholden to the people who support us on Patreon. We are beholden to people who listen to the show. We have other ways of making money, but the money we get from Patreon right now vastly outnumbers the money we get from other sources, and we like it that way. So we try to make it useful for you to subscribe to us. You don't get any ads. You get some perks. You get some bonuses. If you haven't taken a look, check it out, patreon.com slash dtns. If you've got feedback for us, we'd love to hear it. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you'd like to join us live or live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC, find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back at you tomorrow. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Love hopes you have enjoyed this program.