 Coming up on DTNS, good news for the VR market, why your Apple card cost your grocery store more money than other cards, and Jack Dorsey's plan to decentralize Twitter. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 11th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just discussing gin and Peloton ads and non-controversial subjects like Chick-fil-A versus Popeyes and more on Good Day Internet. You got to get that conversation by becoming a member at patreon.com.dtns. I solved one of my laptop dock problems today. Thanks to a listener. Get the tips, patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Chrome 79 is out for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. Among the new features are the integrated password checkup tool that checks hashes of your Chrome stored passwords against lists of leaked passwords, real-time black lusting of malicious sites, predictive phishing protections for all, no mixed content on HTTPS, tab freezing, which unloads all tabs inactive for more than five minutes, and back and forth button caching so you don't reload a site every time you use the back or forward button. Well, before this tab gets uncached, let me tell you the next story. Google released Android 10 for Android TV with mostly security and performance improvements. That's what you're looking for. That's what you're going to get at the time. Or at the same time, Google released the ADT-3 HDMI 2.1 dongle for developers. It's a full Android TV platform with a quad-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and a 4K HDR at 60 frames per second. The device might be used in white-label devices for TV services or provide a platform for a new Google-made Android TV device in 2020. The New York Post and Reuters report that the U.S. Department of Justice will investigate Google's proposed acquisition of Fitbit as part of its wider antitrust investigation. Justice Department antitrust chief Mekhan Delrahim has previously said that privacy concerns can play a part in antitrust analysis. Sources tell Bloomberg that private equity firm Francisco Partners Management has partnered with Hedge Fund Elliott Management in a bid to take log man private for more than $4 billion. Sources say the deal could be announced in the coming weeks. Let's talk a little bit about YouTube's new anti-harassment policy. Why not indeed? YouTube announces expanding its anti-harassment policy, as Tom alluded to. The policy now bans implied threats, as well as direct threats like holding a knife while criticizing someone. YouTube will not take into account a pattern of insults, even if one insult doesn't meet the criteria for banning insult based on race, gender expression, or sexual orientation, are banned against anyone, and not just creators or other creators, I should say. Machine learning identification of comments to be reviewed by creators will be expanded as well. Well, yeah, if you're threatening somebody while holding a knife, it doesn't look good for you. But, you know, all this sort of, I don't know, kidding aside, if you can kid about anything in this realm, this is good. This is good on YouTube. It is good that YouTube is saying it's not just creator versus creator because we've seen some of this, and a lot of that stuff gets a lot of attention and kind of turns into a new item of its own. But if anybody is targeted in the means that YouTube is laying out, it is wrong, and it shouldn't happen. I'd like to make a prediction I don't think is actually going to come true, but I'm going to make it anyway. Call this ass, Tom, a little bit of one. One day YouTube will ban prank videos. And I know that some people are going to go, no, they never will or no, that's not a problem. I can't stand them. To me, they are a form of harassment and they so you think they're going to ban them because you don't like them? Yes. I think because of my fervent hatred of them, but like, but like, so, so Scott, like what, like, give me an example of like the worst prank video that boiled your blood. A costing people in a public place and making those people feel like their lives are in danger. I see. Yeah. No more Japanese television. Well, here's the problem. Here's the problem though. And we're going to talk about this when we talk about Twitter. There's disagreement about where the line is. And what we're seeing is YouTube going, well, okay, we had a line here, but then some people were doing some things. We don't think we're okay. Cause they were brandishing a knife. So we're going to put the line over here, but now you're going to get more false positives with people getting banned saying I was wasn't brandishing the knife threateningly. I was doing a cooking bit. You know, it was a joke, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So where do you set that line? We might actually have an answer to that in our Twitter discussion coming up. For now, let's talk about workers and the best place to work Facebook and Google both dropped out of the top 10 best places to work in the US. This is according to glass doors, annual rankings released on Tuesday, which uses employee reviews on areas such as compensation, benefits, culture, senior management, HubSpot, a cloud computing software company in the Silicon Valley, grabbed the number one ranking, DocuSign, and ultimate software were three and eight, respectively. Now you might say, okay, well, we're the big guys Facebook, which has been rated as the best place to work three times in the past 10 years. Now ranked 23rd, which is quite a drop from being ranked seventh just last year. Google was ranked 84th, so it was not even in the running. Amazon didn't make the list at all either. Microsoft, though, moved to number 21 from number 34 just a year ago. Just to be clear, Amazon never makes the list. So that's not a surprise that it didn't make the list. It has never made the list. Apple used to be much higher up, though, like you said, Facebook, because one Google has won this list. It is now 11th. So it is quite a change in the tech landscape where niche companies like HubSpot, kind of the best kept secret as a place to work. DocuSign, getting the props from the Glassdoor users, that's great. Yeah, nice to see In-N-Out still up in that list. Every time I go there, I always get the impression that those employees are either alien zombies or they really love being there. And I think this list maybe indicates it. I think the secret with In-N-Out is they over-employ. It always looks like they have 20 more people than they need back there. But it's the only way to deal with those lines. And it means they're going to be happier because they don't feel like they're overworked because they got all this help around them. I guess so. They're just so efficient and so into it. We could learn something from those people. I don't know what it is exactly, but I fear that it's something in the water or something in the drinks. There's something's going on to make them the most aggressively responsible 16 to 19-year-olds I've ever met in my life. Well, they're no HubSpot, but they're OK. Well, yeah. And something like In-N-Out, working for In-N-Out and working for HubSpot are going to be two very different, very different roles. But I thought it was interesting that, you know, compensation clearly kind of the number one thing. You pay me well, you know, I'm going to complain less, right? But then benefits and culture and senior management and even on GDI before the show, we're talking about, you know, fun snacks that companies might, you know, give you. All of that stuff does play into your quality of life. Well, one day maybe ByteDance will become one of these companies. They're launching a new music app separate from Doyin and a TikTok. Rezo has been installed 27,000 times through the end of November, according to senior or excuse me, Sensor Tower. Rezo is being tested in India and Indonesia shows lyrics in real time while it plays music and lets users comment on songs. Users can also make gifts and videos with the music. Sounds a lot like TikTok, actually. Users who pay 119 rupees can download the songs from, or excuse me, for offline play and listen ad free. Rezo has deals with T-Series and Times Musics in India, but not yet the big three Warner, Universal or Sony names in there. Yeah. And in this Bloomberg story, they quote a guy named Michael Norris, who's a research and strategy manager at a Shanghai consultancy called Agency China. And I think he nails it. He says the dilemma for all of these companies is how to monetize a price sensitive user base with low relative income. So if you're wondering like, well, wait a minute, why isn't TikTok catching on in India? Different market. And that's the thing. One app, it's very difficult for one app to meet the needs of the entire world. Facebook's very unusual in being popular worldwide. Netflix, very unusual in being a popular worldwide. And this is a bite dance saying, you know what, there's particular price sensitivity and feature requests from these markets that maybe we don't want to change TikTok to adapt to. Maybe we just need a whole new app. It's interesting. This is absolutely anecdotal, but I I'm a semi usual regular TikTok follower. I like there's a lot of artists and animators I follow on there. And that takes forever, by the way, to get down to the to finding all of those because the algorithm makes it sort of hard to find what you want. But once you do, it's not bad. And I have noticed again, anecdotal, a big uptick lately in my feet. Anyway, of content coming out of India. And I don't know why that is, but I guess I'm not. I guess what I'm saying is I'm not saying that that counters what they're saying about what's working in India. But I'm sure seeing a lot of content by creative Indian folks. And I don't know why that would be. I'm curious if there is a cross pipeline, if they're taking Resso created videos and pushing them into TikTok and vice versa. Oh, maybe I don't know that that's the case. But I wonder if that might be one explanation for what you're seeing. Yeah, it's it's interesting, though. That app is enormous and the the idea that they you would start to see companies behind apps this big, you start to branch out to other things like a music app or a service like that makes perfect sense to me. And like, why wouldn't they do that? Well, I'll say that the Indian market, I mean, in India, the amount of languages spoken is is is vast, right? So the idea of Resso being at essentially, I think, if I understand this right, an app that is showing you lyrics kind of, you know, as if you're kind of doing karaoke real time, playing music, and then everybody kind of talks about it afterwards. That probably plays into the Indian market in a way that maybe the rest of us don't understand all that well. All right, let's get into something you didn't understand about your Apple card. Bloomberg reports that the Apple card is what you would call an elite card. Apple card, of course, the one that you get inside of iOS. So any iPhone user can get it. Now, an elite card or a premium card gets higher fees for merchants. The idea is they want to make more money off these cards to provide those rewards, your cashback rewards, your frequent miles like like your Capital One type of stuff. So to do that, they make the merchants pay them a higher fee than they would for a regular card. And the justification to the merchant has always been, well, folks with these elite cards spend more money. So you want you want to get them in your shop and take their card and it's worth it to pay them a little more money because they'll spend more money on you. Well, there's a backlash against that. Payment processor, RX says the average purchase made with a premium Visa card was $50 higher than regular cards across the entire landscape of retail. But it's not always true at grocery stores. Food is inelastic in demand. And people with these premium cards don't spend that much more money than people with other cards. So Kroger temporarily stopped taking Visa cards in a lot of its locations as they renegotiated the fee on these premium cards from Visa like Signature and Infinite. Online use generally also carries higher fees than in a store as well. And going back to the Apple card, the Apple card is a lot easier for people to get. You just go into your iPhone and go boop, boop. And if your credit history isn't too bad, you're going to get one. And when you use it, now it's going to cost the company you're shopping with more than if you had used just your regular Visa card. So why are the companies partnering with Apple on this? If it's so bad for them? Well, they're not. There's no partnership involved. If they have to take Mastercard, they take Mastercard. The Apple card is a Mastercard, so they have to take it. But now a bunch of people are using elite cards that might not have had these premium or elite cards in the past. Well, that makes you feel guilty. Now, if I go, OK, admission time, I'm a big Apple guy like iPhones. I have an iPhone, just got an 11, blah, blah, blah. I went and signed up for the card. I got approved for it immediately. And I haven't done a damn thing with it. It's just sort of sitting there like a bag of apples in the sun. I'm not using it at all. But now I don't even know if I should like that. See, I feel I don't want to. I don't want to ding my favorite place to shop if they're feeling the heat. Yeah. And this is the reason a lot of people will use a debit card at a mom and pop shop instead of an actual credit card because the fees on a debit card are lower for the for the shop to take it. But yeah, you can't say I won't take Apple cards because Mastercard is going to say, well, if you won't take our Apple card, you can't take any Mastercards like it's all or nothing. Right. Yeah. Wow. That's why Kroger had to just stop taking Visa in order to renegotiate. They had to play hardball. Well, that's the important thing about this, right? So this isn't just an Apple problem, obviously. It's a it's a premier card problem or potentially one. And yeah, if they had to shut down over Visa, maybe somebody will do it over Mastercard. Who knows? Facebook's Oculus Quest is helping to bolster the VR industry's overall hardware spending by 31 percent this year, according to Nielsen's super data research. Quest sales have risen to two point one billion dollars from one point six billion dollars last year. Facebook bought Oculus for more than two billion dollars back in 2014, you might recall. And at the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, beyond gaming, Oculus would remake education, medicine, communications and the tech industry itself. Scott, Scott, how's that happened? I believe he's correct that it will eventually potentially lead to those things. I don't think he didn't really say this or quantify it, but I don't think that meant right away. I think right now it's more, hey, games are the kind of the edge of this. And then we'll see how things go as we get better at things like full hand tracking and smaller form factors and more reliable or wireless powerful systems and blah, blah, blah. But the quest itself has been a pretty by all VR standards, a pretty big success for them and for VR in general. The only real downside to the quest has been it's made a few people mad who invested in their other options. So if you bought an Oculus Go some year or so before the quest was released, then you ended up with a very underpowered, sort of not great solution. If you really wanted a good VR headset moving forward with lots of software support. The last year when they sold the quest, I guess this year, they also the same day launched the Oculus Rift S, which was their follow up to the Rift from their previous generation. It featured inside out tracking, which meant you could create room scale without a bunch of towers and wires everywhere, which is a huge thing. But it was still tethered to your PC and is the quest was a wireless solution with a lot more power than the go and inside out tracking and all the full functionality you expect from a Rift S, except now you're by yourself in any room you want to be in running autonomously on this thing, but it meant it was a closed system and there are other ups and downs to that sort of thing. Then they announced the link, which is an upcoming free update, which is now out, by the way, in full beta that let you plug in a USB C cable that carries power and data. And it turns your quest into not only a quest, but now a quest that behaves like a Rift S, which a lot of people bought and they don't have that swap swap that we do now. So if you bought a quest, you're in fat city, it's awesome. You got I think the best one moving forward as things currently stand. But if you got as you're probably a little ticked, because you spent the exact same amount of money and you're not getting any additional benefits, although you are getting hand tracking this week along with the other. So they seem to be going all in on the hand tracking stuff. So anyway, there's a lot more to say about it, but I think that these numbers are great for VR in general. And I also think that speaks volumes about how people want VR moving into the future. They want wireless, easy, not hard to set up things you don't have to fudge with and fidget with all day to get we're working right. This so far is the one product that seems to have that that in mind the best. Thirty one percent sales rise. Very good. Two point one billion in sales is equal to what Google wants to buy pay for Fitbit. So you could you could essentially say they made one Fitbit of revenue last year and and also it's it's worth pointing out that just the wearable health care market next year, not the entire wearable market, just the wearable health care market is predicted to be 41 billion in 2020. So ways, ways to go, ways to go. But we were seeing these kinds of numbers for the entire wearable market, you know, five, six years ago. So this is this is a sign that maybe we're finally starting to see that slow takeoff here that we saw with wearables as well. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, announced the company will fund an independent project called Blue Sky on one word to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. He gave credit to Stephen Wolfram and Tech Dirt's Mike Masnik for a couple of posts that inspired him about emphasizing protocols over platforms and using algorithms in a responsible way to help provide choice for moderation of the social media you see as a user. Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal will find a lead with experience to run Project Blue Sky in blockchain. He will then let that lead put together a team. So this has to be a leader with experience in blockchain. Dorsey says Twitter's only direction for the project will be to either take an existing decentralized standard and help move it forward, figure out which one is the best out there. And there's a bunch. They're solid from Tim Berners-Lee's company. There's there's also Mastodon. There's a ton of them. So either do that or create one from scratch. And then, of course, Twitter would become a client of Blue Sky standard. Now, why would you do this? One of the things Dorsey said was that centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and mislead information is unlikely to scale over the long term. The more users you get, the more posts you have to manage, the harder and harder this problem gets. It doesn't scale. Also, the value of social media is shifting from hosting the content like Twitter does to directing your attention to quality content. People aren't just saying, yeah, I want a place to post my thoughts. People are saying, I want to be able to see the best thoughts out there and not the crappy ones. And he says, blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance and, of course, monetization. Dorsey says, quote, it will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms, which promote healthy conversation and force us to be far more innovative than in the past. Now, the CTO, who's finding the lead of this project, Blue Sky, posted some of the challenges they'll have. He said, first of all, a standard that lets consumers choose between a lot of data intensive algorithms while protecting privacy might struggle to compete on quality. Also, viable and sustainable incentives and business models need to be found to make people want to create products on an open standard like this and the traditionally slow and deliberate consensus building approach to evolving standards might not keep up with the rapidly changing ecosystem and consumer needs that we've seen happen in social media. Masnik and Wolfram are really worth reading because both of those posts talk about using a platform in a way that lets you choose your where your data is stored. So kind of like Tim Bernalese Lee's solid, like in other words, Twitter wouldn't store your data. You would store your data with a third party service that you trust and allow access to it. And then most importantly, the interface would be created by multiple parties. So even though you wouldn't be on Twitter anymore, you'd be on a particular interface. And this goes back to the early days of Twitter with Tweetbot and Tweetdeck and all of those different interfaces into Twitter, except instead of being interfaces into a centralized company, they'd be interfaces into a decentralized standard. And the most intriguing thing that Wolfram and Masnik both talk about here is choosing your algorithm for moderation. Wolfram has a lot of ideas about how you can make an algorithm that doesn't keep you in a bubble, that understands where the line is. Because the problem isn't making an algorithm to moderate. The problem is telling the algorithm what should be allowed and what shouldn't. And both Wolfram and Masnik say, what if you had multiple companies marketing different algorithms that say, our algorithm will show you a more libertarian side of thing. Our algorithm will show you a more conservative side of thing. Our algorithm is a more socialist side of things. Now you may say that's a bubble and Masnik has some answers to that. But the idea is that instead of people complaining that Twitter took down my post, you would say, well, you're available. You're just not available in that particular interface because that algorithm doesn't like it. And you as a user would be able to move to algorithms that show you the people and types of posts that you want. EFF, ACLU, Cato Institute, those all could be examples of places that might provide third party nonprofit type of algorithms for you to choose what kind of moderation you want instead of having a monolithic company like Twitter or Facebook do it. In the Masnik article, I really liked that read because there was a whole bunch of stuff in there that resonated with me because of how long I've been around for this internet stuff. And he made some interesting comparisons, talked about the early days of the web and the internet when it was very decentralized. Let's like before the World Wide Web at all, use net groups, that sort of stuff. And it was so decentralized that it was kind of chaotic and not great. So some centralization starts to eek in and starts to happen. As comparisons he used were use net forums way back in the day and something modern like Reddit. And in a lot of ways, those those two things are very close cousins. But one has a, you know, a fully fleshed out sort of interface and and flow and sort of workflow and that sort of thing happening over over at Reddit, where it was very Wild West in the old days. And so it didn't it didn't strike me that what he was saying. Well, it was well, all of the decentralization is is what we want. Nor do we want to have everybody be centralized that there's a place here in the center in the middle somewhere where we can figure out a way to take everything we've learned from both extremes and come up with a better solution. And it really resonated with me. It was a great article. I know you get I like this point about email being an open protocol that succeeded where people can make lots of businesses on email, even though it's an open standard. Right. And without even really knowing that we did it, we did it. And that's fascinating, like because you don't think of it in that way. Right. And some of this we just stumble upon, but I think this is about attitudes. And if Twitter, even just at a very basic level, if Twitter got back to a place where I could go to more third party, even just apps and services that let me access the API, that's still better than where we've ended up, which was so far from those early days and to a place where I cannot stand the official app. And I'm always afraid my favorite secondary apps, which are fewer and far between these days, is going to get pulled any minute or lose core functionality because Twitter decides one day, and we don't want to have access to this or that. So I want everything about this. It still feels like it's very much in the, Hey, we're talking about philosophical stage. And sometimes Jack can make it seem even more philosophical than maybe even is. But I have really high hopes for, for this thing. The story got a lot of attention today, you know, partly because Twitter, but also because it's sort of like, huh, all right, let's rethink this social networking conundrum that many of us kind of sit here and think, Hey, there are a lot of good things about it, but a lot of bad things as well. How long, let's say this works. Let's say this works for Twitter. How long until Facebook, Reddit, you know, other social networks, big social networks adopt the same strategy? Now, that's the question. I mean, Dorsey himself said this is going to take years to even get going, to get rolling. So the answer is more than years because Facebook certainly not going to jump in on Twitter's thing. They're going to come up with their own thing first. So this is just like you say, the very earliest days of this, but it's starting to look like a swing back towards decentralization from a more powerful company, right? Twitter's not the biggest company, but it's a big company to be doing something like this and pushing something like this forward. And it's smart because Twitter has a hard time competing with Facebook in a way. And this is if you decentralize the platform, that's good for Twitter. Might not ever be good for Facebook at the size that they're at. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our sub Reddit Twitter stories, always welcome as are others. You can submit the stories that you care about and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord. It's a lively bunch, everybody. Join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Laurent wrote in about DTNS 3674. That was yesterday's show. Laurent says you were asking for a use case with the new kind of cool AR glasses with a heads up display. Well, the ones from North, the vocals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Laurent says picture this, a guitar, a bad memory, some lyrics, voice recognition. Basically, you sit around the campfire with friends and you can play any request. All you have to do is give the wake word to pull up the lyrics and the appropriate chords, then start strumming and become the life of the party. I've been dreaming of something like this forever. You could actually teach me to play guitar, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you you the campfire sounds great. All of a sudden, we have the tech to do exactly what he's asking for. Like, we could just do this now. Why not make it happen? Just need the money in the right company. Well, I'm not guaranteeing it's not already out there. Scott might actually be. I haven't looked. Yeah, you just. Well, you put on the glasses. That that's the rounds point. Put on the glasses. You're good to go. It's like, all right, who's ready to rock? This is true. I've been playing campfire. I've been doing a new workout app on the quest that's a boxing thing, basically. And I was in there so long the other day, I was so sweaty and messed up by the time I took it off. I took it off and I was shocked what room I was in because I'd forgotten where I started doing this and that kind of presence is the future. I really think that. So what he's describing is a kind of presence and here we go. Get a are a learning assistant in augmented reality. See, there you go. Already out there kind of. Well, all right, we're there, people. And if you if you have other ideas, please do let us know. Feedback and deadly tech new show dot com. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Kevin S. Morgan, Dan Dorado, Hankins and John Johnston. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us. This fine hump day of ours. Scott, what's been going on in your world? Well, lots of stuff and they can all check it out at frogpants.com. But what I'd like to do today is defer my my promotion to one. Justin Robert Young, he put out a second episode of his Raise the Dead podcast, which is really, really, really good. And I can't recommend it enough if you've got a moment to go check out any of your podcast players or directories where you get your podcast, just search for Raise the Dead and you will find it and you will not be. Sorry that you did. It's very, very good. That, again, is Raise the Dead and you can find it at RaiseTheDeadpodcast.com. Folks, if you'd like to hear your name on the show and get a mug with a special six year anniversary DTNS logo, just become a master or grandmaster at patreon.com slash DTNS and stick around for three months. We're going to be adding some grandmaster benefits as we go along here in the year as well. So if you get value out of the show, just give a little value back. The more you give the more thanks we can give like the mugs and the T-shirts and the stickers, it's all at patreon.com slash DTNS. I mentioned sending us email earlier in the show. We love your email. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you can join us live or live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, that's 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.