 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook launches its clubhouse competitor, why warehouse spaces is the new ship shortage, and Shelly Brisbane helps us understand what machine learning can do for accessibility. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 21st, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. As I mentioned, joining us, web editor and producer at the Texas Standard and host of the Parallel Podcast, Shelly Brisbane. Welcome, Shelly. Hello. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming back and Kicking Off Accessibility Week. We've got accessibility topics all this week to talk about from gadgets to a programming language that was started for vision accessibility to dwarfism. And Shelly, we couldn't think of any better way to kick it off than to have you on the show. Thanks for being here. I'm excited. And I'm excited about the whole week of shows. It sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. All right. Let's start with a few tech things we should know. Hyundai finalizes acquisition of an 80% controlling stake in Boston Dynamics, bought from SoftBank. The deal values Boston Dynamics at $1.1 billion. It's unclear how the robotic company's research wing will operate under Hyundai, but Hyundai has indicated that Boston Dynamics will work with its new Horizon Studio that oversees its uncrewed ultimate mobility vehicle development. Researcher Carl Shue found an iPhone bug that would disable the device's wireless networking by connecting to an SSID named Percentage Sign P, Percentage S, Percentage S, Percentage S, Percentage N. So don't name your SSID that. The device would only be able to regain wireless networking by resetting the iPhone's network settings. You could get it back, but you'd have to go into settings and do it kind of a hassle. Security researchers looking at the crash reports say this appears to be caused by an input parsing issue, as you might have guessed. Germany's Federal Cartel Office opened an antitrust investigation into Apple with a main focus on the operation of the App Store as it enables Apple in many ways to influence the business activities of third parties. The regulator received various complaints about alleged anti-competitive behavior by Apple, including about its app tracking transparency framework, pre-installation of its own apps, and use of Apple's in-app purchasing system, not supporting third-party app stores. Development of decentralized applications got a little boost here. Really, State Executive and former LA Dodger's owner Frank McCourt is going to spend $100 million on Project Liberty, a blockchain-based way to create a publicly accessible database of social connections. So imagine Facebook's social graph, but it's public, and anybody can access it. Project Liberty would run on a blockchain called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. The idea is that a company like Facebook would not own your data, but have to compete with others to get your approval to access it on this blockchain. $75 million will go into developing the system itself, and $25 million to encourage entrepreneurs to build products that use it. It's similar to Project Blue Sky, which is being promoted by Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Samsung updated its gaming monitor lineup with the Odyssey G728, which is a 28-inch 4K 144 Hz display with support for AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and Nvidia G-Sync. The company also announced the G5 27, a 27-inch QHD 165 Hz display. Pricing and availability, not announced for either, but Samsung did announce it will show off the new Wear OS that it's been working on with Google at a Mobile World Congress session at 1915 CET. How well do you know your time zones people on June 28th? If you live in Central Europe, you're like, finally, that's my time. Yeah, that's easy. All right, let's talk a little more about Facebook's Clubhouse competitor. Let's do it. Facebook began rolling out its live audio rooms on iOS in the U.S. with a feature now available to some public figures and groups. And not everybody rolling out slowly. Hosting live audio rooms includes support for up to 50 speakers, no limit on the number of listeners, which can be pretty big off the top. The service will eventually be available to any verified public figure or creator in the U.S. as well as to more groups. The rooms have options for live captions, a raised hand tool to speak. If you're familiar with Clubhouse, this will be familiar to you. Also some sharing features. Hosts can invite anyone to join them as a speaker in advance. Listeners can like a session and purchase stars similar to Facebook Live, which puts you in the front row. If you want to be a little bit more interactive. Hosts can also designate a nonprofit or a fundraiser to highlight for people to donate to. If you want to raise money to send it somewhere, you can do that within live audio rooms. Facebook also launched podcast support for a few creators, including the Joe Budden podcast, Carefully Reckless, the Lady Gang, Side Hustle Pro with more podcasts coming in the summer. So a bit of a slow rollout, but some notable names there. The feature uses a mini player to stream podcasts from regular RSS feeds offering playback and control from the lock screen, like traditional podcast apps also do. Yeah. I kind of like this podcast thing before we get to the Clubhouse part of it. We've submitted Daily Tech News Show to this. They sent us an email and said, hey, we see you have an RSS feed. Cool if we add it. And I'm like, yeah, it's cool. That's podcasting. It's open. And I love that Facebook is like, yeah, we're just going to stream from you. They want your permission because they want to do some caching and stuff to improve playback, but they're not rehosting the way Spotify is. They're not totally changing how your feed is delivered. So it's really just discovery. You might get some new discovery. Facebook's saying, yeah, we're not going to reinvent the wheel. RSS feeds work great. We'll just make it accessible within the Facebook interface, which, you know, not a big user of Facebook, but if you are, I think that's that's excellent. As a podcaster, you can easily link to your show from within Facebook instead of sending somebody off to go subscribe to your show. And because that's sometimes is awkward. And obviously, Facebook wants to keep people in Facebook so that you can listen to your podcast while you're doing other stuff in the app. Yeah. As far as this clubhouse competitor goes, this just seems like more evidence that clubhouse is getting meerkatted, which if you don't remember meerkat, meerkat was an app that took off because it let you easily live stream video. And then Periscope came along and did the same thing then Twitter bot Periscope. And then eventually everybody added the ability to live stream video like Instagram live, etc. And meerkat just kind of went away because it became a feature of other things and feels like that's what this live audio rooms, which is literally what Facebook is calling it live audio rooms is becoming. It's just a feature that you can have. Yeah. I mean, the clubhouse thing I, I try not to, I think it's because I've heard enough clubhouse rooms and discussions where I'm like, not into this. I hate clubhouse. I don't hate clubhouse as a feature. I think it's a great feature. And I think platforms, I mean, Facebook being that sort of obvious biggest platform that certainly has the money and can create a team to replicate pretty much anything that is busy on the internet. But it does make sense. It makes sense. Like you said, Shelley, for, for any platform that's like, we just want you to stay here. We will offer you anything that you need as long as you stay here and don't feel like you have to bounce out of Facebook to go do that fun thing that Facebook doesn't offer. So yeah, clubhouse, I don't want to say it's not long for this world, but when you can build the same thing that clubhouse offers as a standalone product and also offer a lot of other things and everyone's already there, I don't know how it can, how it can compete. Yeah. And I'm not a fan of Facebook particularly. I'm not sure that I personally would use this, but a lot of people who are never going to go to clubhouse or who may be tired of clubhouse for whatever reason, probably will use it. The other thing just on the sort of dark side of the world is Facebook has had all sorts of problems with kind of content that people create and whether they're going to take it down and whether it's controversial or not. I can see audio being even with live captions, which by the way clubhouse doesn't have. They've hacked to make it possible for that to happen, which is an accessibility thing. But even with live captions, it's going to be harder for Facebook to control what folks are saying in audio as in video formats than it is to control it in text. So it'll be interesting to see what if any new content issues this creates for them in terms of what kind of speech they want to regulate. Yeah, that was one of the parts of the announcement was like, here's the reporting functions we're going to do. Here's the steps we're going to take to try to crack down. And it's one of the reasons that only a limited number of people can start the rooms. I think that's one of their ways of heading this off is not everyone is going to be able to start a room. It has to be a group moderator or a quote unquote public figure. Not that that gets rid of all the problems, trust me, but you know, it limits it lower. It makes the pool a little smaller. People's Bank of China is in the news today. You might have seen that it said it recently met with financial institutions and payment firms in the country urging them to crack down on cryptocurrency trading on their platforms. China's making a big push to limit cryptocurrency. In response to the meeting, Alipay said it will set up a regular monitoring system targeting key websites and accounts to detect illegal crypto related transactions as well as create a ban list for merchants involved in virtual currency transactions. The province of Sichuan popular with miners because of available hydro power has ordered cryptocurrency mining operations in its province to shut down that that joins Inner Mongolia and a couple of other provinces that have done this as well on the upside. This move is causing a drop in price of graphics cards by as much as two thirds on several e-commerce platforms because Bitcoin miners are not buying them up anymore. However, the move is likely caused by China wanting less competition for digital yuan, that is, it has been increasingly experimenting with. We've documented that on previous episodes. As we've mentioned, China is not the only government setting up official digital currencies in order to stave off the threat from independent crypto. In fact, today, also Fabio Panetta, an executive board member at the European Central Bank, gave an interview to the Financial Times about the plans for the digital euro. Panetta emphasized that a digital euro could better protect consumer privacy because the central bank doesn't have any incentive to monetize user data, so they won't be collecting a bunch of stuff and selling it to third party advertisers or won't be trying to. About two thirds of the world's central banks are experimenting with digital currencies right now. It is coming. We've been saying that on DTS for a while. To avoid undermining banks or crowding out cash, the ECB is considering putting a 3,000 euro cap on how much you can hold directly with the ECB to try to kind of force you. You can still hold the digital currency with a bank, but they want to try to keep banks happy. They're looking at a few other kinds of penalties that would sort of incentivize you not to keep a bunch of stuff with the central bank. That's one of the things you're going to see the central banks experimenting with is how to keep banks happy while they bring about the benefits of digital currency. Well, I guess, thank China for graphics card prices coming down. I mean, it feels like it's smart for banks to get on this as opposed to just either ignoring it or trying to fight cryptocurrency. It's funny because the reasons that cryptocurrency was attractive back in the day before it became something that was so monetized and so speculative rarely get talked about anymore, but the central banks can make a pretty good case that what you were saying, Tom, about the security of digital currency and the ability to use it without having your own data monetized if it's a central bank, a base product. I think those make sense. And as somebody who has assiduously sort of ignored or chuckled at cryptocurrency, it's just not my jam for a long time, this gets me interested because it feels like maybe there's a few adults in the room, and maybe that's an old foggy point of view of me to have, but that's just where I'm at. Yeah, I mean, the technology itself provides a lot of benefits. You can have privacy, you can have anonymity, but because it can be a public ledger, it can also be trackable. We saw it with Colonial Pipeline that it was anonymous, but they were able to track the movements of the wallets to be able to get the Bitcoin back, and it was an operation, right? It wasn't simple, but it was something they couldn't have done with other ways of doing this. It also brings down the cost of transactions. Transactions can be done faster, especially if you've got a central operator like a central bank, and it's great for unbanked people. You can give them a wallet because in a lot of parts of the world, people are more likely to have a phone than they are to have a bank account, and we've seen that take off with things like Mpasa and other mobile payment operations. This would be a more efficient way of doing those same sort of operations. Well, the shift into and out of lockdowns has caused major disruptions to the world's economic and supply chains, causing issues like the chip shortage that we've covered here. The BBC notes that the resulting increase in online buying has led to a sharp rise in demand for warehouse space. Research commissioned by the UK Warehousing Association from Savils shows warehouse space has risen 32% since 2015. The dominant users of the space have shifted from retailers to logistics providers like DHL, for example. Online retailers have raised their floor space, physical floor space, the most for 8 million square feet in 2015 to 60 million in 2021. That is a lot more floor space. Savils notes demand increased 232% in Q1 year over year, tight warehouse space, and also the cost of storage may be a factor in Amazon destroying more than 100,000 unsold products per week. Now, that sounds like a lot. It's also Amazon, you know, so put that into perspective. But yes, that is a thing that's happening. ITV reported on the practice happening in Scotland, which it says is because Amazon charges more, the longer a party stores an item that just sits there and isn't getting sold. Yeah, so there might be a little warehouse pressure on Amazon, although my guess is Amazon's got the cash to buy new space if that was really the biggest problem. But we are seeing so much online ordering that it's causing this explosion in the need for warehouse space. I have the same question I have about this that I have with chip capacity, which is, at some point, we'll get over the hump. Will we need all the extra chip capacity that's being built now, or will it continue to expand, which it might? Same with warehouse, like there was a lot more online ordering in 2020 than there might be in 2022. So I don't know if we'll end up with some empty warehouse space at some point. Tends to be when you build capacity, though, you find uses for it. So I'm interesting to see if there's any knock on effect of that as well. And to this ITV story, it is interesting. It's an interesting story. It's one of those stories that trades on the fact that a lot of people don't realize that this is just normal practice, not just at Amazon, at a lot of places. A lot of places throw away products that don't get sold. I worked at a used bookstore that did that. And we recycled the paper, but we had a lot of books that we just couldn't afford to keep around because nobody wanted to buy them. And that's essentially what Amazon's doing at such a huge scale that it looks like a lot because it is a lot, but it's still a small percentage of what Amazon actually does in business. That said, we tried to recycle our paper. I'd be kind of cool if Amazon was able to show that like they'd gone as far as they could in trying to figure out other uses for these products rather than scrapping them because we don't need more trash. Yeah, you'd like to see whether they were the kind of products that would be beneficial to donate to somebody or recycle them if you can. I'm fascinated by the part of the story that says that this is about logistics, sort of middlemen, middle people, DHLs and other companies because it seems like absolutely if the capacity is increasing, those middlemen are going to find new ways to increase and speed up distribution to move stuff through the space that they have. And the more space you have, the more flexibility you have in terms of the way you use it. A lot of times those warehouses are located at some distance between large metropolitan areas so that you can serve multiple metropolitan areas with the same transportation resources. So it probably gives them a lot more flexibility in terms of how they get stuff to you, whether it's literally that there's a huge continuing huge volume of stuff. It may just be different stuff too. And I mean, for years now we've talked about, well, Amazon and enter company name here working on drones for that last mile delivery and you're going to get your pizza delivered to your backyard. And some of that is coming to fruition. A lot of it is still just, okay, that will be the next thing we have to figure out that hurdle. And then the same day delivery from these huge warehouses makes a little bit more sense because yeah, right now it's like, okay, does DHL buy a bunch more trucks and hire a bunch more people to get all the folks that got used to ordering online, maybe didn't before. But let's say during the pandemic, a lot of people said, oh, wow, this is actually a lot more convenient. I'm not going to go back to the way things were because this is actually just a more convenient way to be. You still have growth issues. You have scalability issues. There are still things to be solved within that sector and Amazon, as much money and as many warehouses as it has, you're destroying stuff that would be bought perhaps at some point, maybe just not tomorrow or same day, because you simply don't have enough space to jam all that stuff into the warehouse that it makes the most sense to be put in. It's worth pointing out too that Amazon sells huge boxes, lots of stuff. I don't mean lots, it is a lot of stuff, but like a lot that's like, hey, get this big box full of electronics that we couldn't sell at a cheap price. And people don't buy all of those. So at a certain point, it's like, yeah, I guess if you held on to it, eventually you might sell it, but there are also products that just never sell. And what do you do with those? Sometimes even donation places don't want them. They're like, yeah, we have all we can handle. That happens sometimes. So it's probably not as obvious of an avoidable thing as it might appear at first glance. But yeah, I mean, Amazon's a big enough company. They can be a little more transparent about what causes them to have to destroy stuff. Well, folks, if you are supporting us on Patreon, thank you. If you're not, still thank you. Thank you for listening. You get ads in your feed if you're not a patron. But if you want an ad free version of Daily Tech News Show, support us on Patreon. It's that simple. Get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you. Cut out the middle man. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. We often talk about how AI, machine learning algorithms are being applied to things like image recognition, pattern recognition, security, medical diagnosis. But it's also being used for accessibility purposes. Shelley, let's start there. How is AI writ large? I try to avoid using that catch all term, but it's good enough for our purposes here in encompassing a lot of different technologies. How is it being deployed to further accessibility goals? Well, image recognition is a great place to start because if you can identify what's in an image, you can explain what's in that image to somebody who's blind or has low vision. If you have speech, you can process that speech and turn it into text or turn it into some other format that a person who can't hear that speech can interact with or sounds. Basically, you can take what's out there in the environment and turn it into information that somebody who has a variety of disabilities can use. That's the big picture way to look at it. Is it good? Is it have results? Are there people able to use it out there? Are there examples? I think it is still developing. It's not like, okay, we've solved this, we can move on. There are examples. Apple in iOS last year, in iOS 14, I should say, added a feature that's called voiceover recognition. It has several components. It does image recognition. If you point your camera at something at your environment, it will say, here's a table with a pair of glasses on it. Here's a chair. Here's a red car. That might be useful to you if you want to take a photograph. If you're in an environment and you're trying to locate something if you're blind or low vision, another component of that feature is called text recognition. If there's text in the environment, like let's say you have one of those annoying tweets that's text made up of an image, you can use the image text recognition to figure out what that text actually says and have it read to you. Or text in the environment, like let's say you have a paper bill that's come to your house and you'd like to have that read to you. The third part of it is a really interesting way of solving a problem that is created by the operating system itself, which is called screen recognition. Whereby, if you have an app that is not accessible to the screen reader tool in iOS, for example, voiceover, then if you're a screen reader user, you'll hear button, button, button, which doesn't tell you what that button does. But what screen recognition does is use context clues and sometimes labels that haven't been made accessible to tell you, okay, this is a back button. This is a menu button. This is a home button. That combination of features under voiceover recognition has done something really interesting. Screen recognition is more about fixing the problems that the operating system might create for somebody who has a disability. But the other two features are actually giving you access to information you wouldn't otherwise have and giving you a feature that's purpose-built for somebody who has an accessibility need. There are other examples, but that's just one from Apple. What about from Microsoft? Are they doing anything? So Microsoft, actually, it's a really cool story. They built an app called Seeing AI. As it happens, it's on iOS. And I think I've talked about Seeing AI probably on this show before. I've talked about it a lot because it's a great app. But what Seeing AI does is, in various channels, it lets you identify everything from images as I just described to what's in a bit of text, a currency or what's on a bill. It'll also identify and try to recognize people. So if you enter somebody's face, it'll actually do facial recognition on it. Or if it doesn't know the person, it'll say, 37-year-old woman with light hair looking happy. Those aren't always right, but they give great demos. So if you point it at a scene of people or of objects, it'll try its best to tell you what it's looking at. And it'll also, you can take it into a store. You can figure out what color the shirt is that you're looking at. So this app that was basically created by a guy who happens to be blind within Microsoft as a scumworks project has now been embraced by the company. And they're doing a lot of other things, but Seeing AI was the first. And this predates, by the way, Apple's own machine learning accessibility tools. But it was really a great example of what could be accomplished. So how does this change the world out there? Practically, for somebody who's out there like, all right, do I have some new tools that I can use to make sites and apps more accessible? What are the results? Well, the results are that you, as a person with a disability, as I mentioned before, have the ability to do things you couldn't do that aren't a function of the operating system. I can go into a store by myself and I can find out what color the shirt is. I can find out what currency I have in my pocket in order to pay for the shirt. I can walk down the street and I'm going to visit my friend who, and my friend has told me that their house is blue. If I know that house is blue, that's verification in addition to the address that's in front of me. So I can actually move more independently through the world. If I'm a deaf person and I have sound recognition, which is another feature that's going to be available in Android 12, is also available in iOS, if I set it to tell me that there's a sound of a doorbell ringing or a baby crying or water running, I can take actions that are relevant to those experiences. I can turn off the water, I can check on the baby. And those are, as I say, it's different from accessibility that's designed to make it easier to use your phone. It's accessibility that's designed to make it easier to live your life. Go ahead, Sarah. I was going to ask you, Shelly, you mentioned that there are certain tools that have been around for a while and some of these tools have either been repurposed or built into OS-specific solutions. Is there anything that has not been addressed that the accessibility community says, hey, you're just not listening to us, this would be so easy for you to do? Here's an app that's already doing it. Apple, why aren't you listening? I don't know. I think there's more that can be done. It isn't that people with accessibility needs are looking around and going, well, this is a lack. I think it's as technology develops. So for example, when we get to the point that we have different ways of interacting with our devices, whether it be wearables or AR devices or VR devices, the question will come immediately, well, why aren't those accessible? And if they aren't, if they are accessible, why aren't they giving us access to more features than we otherwise would have? So it's typically not solving a problem that's created by the technology itself. And then I guess that's the big message of AI is that what's so smart about what's happening in AI and accessibility is that people are going out there and they're saying, all right, what can we do to actually improve the accessibility of an experience rather than the accessibility of a device? So what are some of the hurdles? What are some of the downsides of trying to use machine learning, algorithms, et cetera, and accessibility issues? Well, one of the biggest is an overreliance on AI. So you have artificial intelligence that can do a thing and you say, well, let's have AI do that thing. An example of that is web accessibility. So there are web accessibility guidelines out there so that when you're writing your web pages, you do so in a way that the HTML can be used by the screen reader to identify all the elements of the page and read them to the person who uses a screen reader or support persons with low vision or who need higher contrast or whatever the case may be. And so those exist out there for developers, web developers know or should know how those accessibility guidelines work. Well, now what's happening is companies that want to mitigate accessibility claims, usually for legal reasons, are creating software that's AI-based that is going out and rewriting websites in order to quote, unquote, make them accessible. So instead of as a developer, you're being responsible for the accessibility of your site. This software says, oh, we'll make it bulletproof. We'll make it so that you won't get sued. The trouble is it doesn't always work because usually those over, what's called accessibility overlays, usually those overlays are not really focused on the needs of the user. They're focused on protecting the company that has in good faith in many cases and sometimes not put the software on their system because they don't want to get sued. And in some cases, they genuinely would like their site to be accessible. But there are a lot of instances in which people in the disability community have gone and said, well, hey, you're physically, you're literally rewriting the page. You're giving me a page that is not the same as what the developer intended and you're breaking accessibility for me. Well, it's good to touch on. This is obviously a deeper topic than we're going to go into today. But it's good to touch on these things. Thank you, Shelley. I appreciate the explanations. My pleasure. Well, if you're an air traveler or you're considering traveling by air, now that life is opening up again, you may have used to use a service called Gate Guru, but you may have also noticed it's no longer a thing. And if that's the case for you, Chris Christensen comes to the rescue. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. I've previously recommended that when you're flying, one of the best ways to navigate around airports is Gate Guru, but that app is dead. TripAdvisor has canceled that app. And so I'm looking for alternatives. The best one that I found so far is ifly.com, which is a website, which also like Gate Guru used to have has airport maps. You can find out, for instance, what restaurants are in a particular airport that also helps you make decisions. Should I find something to eat before I go through security or afterwards? Should I get something in this terminal or that terminal? And so I find that a useful tool, ifly.com. If you have a tool that you prefer, let me know. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Thank you, Chris Christensen. Yeah. If you know the airport where it's better to eat before you go through the gates, we'd also like to know about that. If you have any any thoughts on anything that we talk about on any of our shows here on DTNS, please do send those our way. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Jeff Wilkes, Dr. X17, and Dustin Campbell. We also have some brand new bosses, and we'd like to shout you out today. Mark and name the alien. Yep, that's your name. I don't know if we're supposed to name you or not. Both started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. Name the alien. I name Mark and name the alien both awesome. Awesome aliens, both of you. Also, awesome. Shelly Brisbane, thanks so much for being with us today, Shelly. Where can people find out what else you're up to? Well, thanks for having me. First of all, people can find me at brisbane.net, B-R-A-S-B-I-N.net. My show Parallel is at relay.fm slash parallel, and that's a tech podcast with accessibility sprinkles. Very cool. Very cool. Definitely check that out. Also, check us out every week, fan Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20-30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are going to be back tomorrow with a firsthand account at how gadgets get evaluated for their accessibility with David Woodbridge and Ellison Sheridan. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this brover.