 Coming up on DTNS, Google has a bad labor relations day, more robots for more restaurants and Warner Media takes the 90-day theatrical exclusive out back and tells it to look at the flowers. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about new merch options for patrons as well as our thoughts on theaters on good day internet to get that wider conversation become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Brazilian state of São Paulo's consumer protection agency called Procon SP asked Apple to show evidence that not bundling a power adapter with the iPhone would not harm consumers and would in fact benefit the environment, as Apple claims. The agency wasn't satisfied with the evidence and determined that the sale of iPhones without chargers is against the Brazilian consumer defense code. Apple must respond to the decision or face a fine. Brazil's national consumer secretary is considering a nationwide requirement to bundle in chargers. Some accessibility updates to note Apple has released screen recognition in iOS 14 that uses computer vision to identify and label all button sliders and tabs automatically in any app that is not already labeled. The labels can then be used by voiceover to read them out and Google updated its voice access app to let users speak the names of labels rather than the previous method of assigning numbers to controls and then the user had to say that number. New commands can combine tasks like launching search and typing the search term as one command instead of two separate ones. A few more updates from Google to mention. Android users in limited locations can submit street view photos to Google Maps from our core compatible phones. Google will also shut down its 3D object library poly meant for VR and AR creators. Upload stop on April 30 and downloads on June 30th of 2021 and Android users can now let Google photos set wallpaper at random from the memories section. Memories are selected by a Google algorithm. ZTE will release the AXON 25G in 11 countries and regions on December 21, including the UK, European Union, Japan and South Korea. The 6.92 inch FHD plus OLED screen includes a hidden 32 megapixel selfie camera. No cut out. No notch. It's just there under the screen. The AXON 25G is a mid range phone otherwise with a Snapdragon 765G chip, 8GB of RAM, 90Hz refresh rate and DTSX Ultra 3D sound. No price yet either. A couple of multi factor authentication updates. Google's authenticator app for iOS has added an account transfer feature that you can use to move to a new iPhone. The mode generates a QR code to transfer up to 10 accounts at a time to a new phone and Twitter announced that it will now support logging in on Android and iPhone with hardware security keys. Previously, Twitter only supported hardware MFA on laptops or desktops. All right, let's talk a little more about Google's day. Oh, Google, when aren't you getting into something? On Wednesday, the U.S. National Labor Relations investigated the termination of several employees in November 2019. As a result, it has issued a complaint alleging Google violated the National Labor Relations Act by surveilling employees and interfering, restraining or coercing employees who tried to exercise rights under Section 7. Google is accused of discouraging employees from forming, joining or assisting a union. This all centers around Lawrence Burland and Catherine Spiders. They filed a complaint with the NLRB claiming that they were fired for organizing around treatment of temporary vendor and contract workers as well as retaliation against workers protesting Google's work with Customs and Border Patrol. In November 2019, Burland and Rebecca Rivers were placed on leave for allegedly sharing confidential documents not pertinent to their job. A protest in support of the two led to Rivers, Burland, Paul Duke and Sophie Waldman being fired. The complaint will be evaluated by an administrative judge after which the NLRB will decide whether to prosecute Google and pursue reinstatement and damages. But on the same day, Google fired its co-leader of ethical artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru. Gebru sent an email that she said laid out two conditions. Those conditions have not been made known, which, if met, would lead her taking her name off a paper. If not, she would work on a last date for employment. Gebru says in response, one of her bosses' reports replied, quote, we cannot agree to number one and number two as you are requesting. We request your decision to leave Google as a result and we are accepting your resignation. However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the Brain Group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager, unquote. That email was sent to Google Brain Women and Allies, an email group for company researchers. Gebru studies bias in facial recognition, among other things, and is an alumni of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She worked on a landmark study in 2018 that showed facial recognition misidentified dark-skinned women 35% of the time while working well for light-skinned men. So a government agency, not just a pressure group, but a government agency has filed an complaint with a judge about the way Google treats its employees, mostly regarding union organization. There are rights in the US to organize a union. Companies aren't supposed to mess with that. Apparently, I saw a report that Google has the Pinkerton's involved, which makes this feel like a 19th century coal mine thing. And so that's significant. It's like, okay, Google's got a real labor relations problem that they have to deal with. And yet on the same day they decide to fire, it's an ethics person for AI. It's not their labor relations ethics person, but a person involved in the ethics of AI. Even if, and I'm not saying she was, but even if she had written something horrible in that email and it was worthy of dismissal, I think you go a little softer with that. You work a little more carefully than firing her on the same day you're getting an NLRB complaint. But Google is a massive company. And I do think that there's an element of when it rains it pours here. Obviously, this was based on what's publicly aware, a high tension situation where management was a very forceful on what they wanted her to do and having her get out of the door earlier rather than later. As for the rest of this, add it to the list of things that Google has to deal with. The idea that now they're going to be looked at as union squashers is probably something that they prefer they could escape 2020 without. I mean, I just want to see somebody with a guitar that kills fascists standing out in front of Mountain View. Solidarity forever dot at gmail.com. Food robotics company Karakuri announced the DK one robot. It's first automated meal making system. DK one can make hot or cold breakfast bowls and eventually will expand its capability to other types of meals. But it's essentially a big robotic arm that sits in a circular enclosure. So the robots in the middle and it's surrounded by bins on all sides. They are as tall as a person. So there's 18 ingredients. So imagine 18 different bins and the ingredients can include wet, dry, soft or hard food of varying temperatures. You can have hot food, cold food, etc. And then a customer would use an app to order precisely what they want. I want just this many blueberries, just this much oatmeal, etc, etc. And once your order is done, you get a complete report on your exact order with the exact nutrient level vitamins, minerals, calories, etc. Karakuri claims it can speed up orders increase cleanliness because only the robots touching the food limit food waste because it's precise in what it gets. It doesn't drop anything. DK one is a pre production demo machine right now. But the first on site trials with customers are expected to take place sometime in the first half of 2021. Yeah, my first thought was of this was like, haven't fast food restaurants been using automation to speed up the food assembly line for years? Yeah. But I love the idea of being able to make it, you know, a made for you custom made poke bowl or rice bowl or whatever kind of thing it is. Certain certain dishes are not going to work as well as others, of course, but for me to be able to be like, yeah, I mean, I'm looking to, you know, max out at this amount of calories or, you know, let's, you know, get a little lighter on the sour cream and something where you're not necessarily needing to like explain this to a person or order extra. It's something that becomes part of the meal of your dreams. Yeah. And for the restaurant, like you don't have that one server that's always a little heavy on the salmon and it runs up the price. Yeah, obviously, this is a long standing trend and I will only expect that it intensifies in an era where particularly germ conscious, but also I wonder exactly how utilitarian this is if, if like, you know, all things in a bowl does count for a lot, but not everything, maybe it's going to be too limited in its application. They think they can diversify how it works. I'm not sure how based on it, but yeah, we'll see. All right, Sarah, talk to us about Hulu. All right, let's do it. Hulu released its co-watching part of watch party feature to all subscribers, whether ad supported or on commercial free tiers, everybody gets to watch stuff together. So clicking on the watch party icon when viewing an on demand show in Hulu will then give you a link that can be shared to watch the program together with up to seven other Hulu subscribers. So you all have to be subscribers, but you can do it together. Watch party includes an integrated chat so you can chat along with folks. The feature was originally released as a test for just commercial free subscribers back in May. So I don't know. I guess they probably have enough data to say, everybody can benefit from this. Now, if you pause something, whether it's a movie or TV show, it won't pause the movie for anybody else. And then when you return, you can either choose to stay back or click to catch up and get back in sync with everybody. Probably want to stay out of chat if you're 10 minutes behind though. Amazon, Twitch, HBO, Plex, Instagram and Facebook have all launched co-watching features this year. It's all the rage and third parties offer co-watching for Netflix and other services. Yeah. This is a thing that everybody wants to have as a feature in their thing. Yeah. I don't use co-watching features and it's not because I don't think it's a great idea. In fact, if we all decided, hey, we all want to watch this movie, say, and is everyone kind of more or less ready at 7 p.m. Pacific time? I think that'd be a lot of fun. I find most of the people that I like to talk about entertainment with just are on different schedules than me. So this isn't a thing that I use all that often. I wonder how many people are like, oh, yeah, I mean, if you don't have a co-watching option on one of your platforms, that would be a reason that I wouldn't give you money. I'm not sure. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there saying, no, this is great. You know, this has brought my family and friends together in lots of different ways over the last year. I think of this as kind of like an accessibility feature that it's just a thing that everybody wants to add because when you need it, it is invaluable, but it isn't a thing, at least for me and I think for a lot of people that they're like, oh, finally I get to do it. But at the same time, if you have the opportunity to watch something with a dear loved one, especially during these trying times, I'm sure you would much rather have it be a part of the suite of things that you can get. You know, Gardner VH in the Twitch chat asked a very good question that I don't know the answer to because I've never used the Hulu version of this. So anybody out there that has, maybe you can email us with an answer. If some of the people co-watching have commercial free and others don't, how does that work? That's a good question because I, and again, I don't know whether Hulu only shows the commercials at the top of the movie, in which case they could just like have everybody that's commercial free wait and catch, you know, or something. But yeah, I'd be curious, curious to know how that works. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Oh folks, someday you're going to tell your kids how movies used to come to theaters and you couldn't watch them anywhere else for 90 days and the kids would gasp for 90 days. And then the great pandemic of 2020 changed it all. The window of my friends appears dead, or at least in critical condition, because Warner Media announced its entire slate of movies in 2021 will debut on HBO Max in 4K HDR at the same time they appear in theaters. That means Dune, that means Suicide Squad, The Matrix 4, Godzilla vs. Kong, the whole slate of Warner movies. Each movie will be available on HBO Max for a month. They will be running in theaters like AMC, although I have yet to see what the theaters have to say about this, but that's what the stories imply. And the theaters can continue to run them after the 30-day HBO Max run, so there would be kind of a post-exclusive, I suppose. Coincidentally, HBO Max just stopped offering its free seven-day trial, so you won't be able to just pop in and get a free look at these movies. Warner Media had already decided to do a simultaneous theater and HBO Max release with one movie, Wonder Woman 1984. We mentioned that, but in that case, theaters were given a larger cut of ticket sales as a sweetener. Variety reports that will not be the case with the 2021 movies. Chair and CEO of Warner Media Studios Ann Sarnoff said in a release, most theaters in the U.S. will likely operate at reduced capacity throughout 2021. With this unique one-year plan, we can support our partners in exhibition with a steady pipeline of world-class films while also giving moviegoers who may not have access to theaters or aren't quite ready to go back to the movies the chance to see our amazing 2021 films. Chief Operating Officer Warner Bros. Picture Group Carolyn Blackwood said, we don't think we're changing the economics of these movies any more than the pandemic has. In other words, if we didn't put them on HBO Max, nobody was going to go see them in the theaters anyway, at least for a while. By the way, Disney's investor day is coming up December 10th, so another shoot might drop then. We'll see. I know that, of course, Warner Bros. is going to say exactly what they said. Hey, it's not our fault that this happened. We're just trying to make it easier for people to see movies, and they're not going to go to the theater anyway. So an AMC or a regal can complain about this, but they're going to be empty theaters anyway. So why should we suffer when we're trying to make sure that our bottom line is up to par? There's also HBO Max, which many have said doesn't have the subscribers that it should. It's sort of a long bet, but a potential really good bump because there's some really big movies coming out this year. I think that the thing that people seem to be talking about the most online and is the most interesting is, sure, this whole thing could be a, let's just call it for 2021. Let's try to at least recoup as much money as we can for some of these huge big budget movies. Probably going to lose some money, but maybe we're going to lose less than we would have if we just did it the old way. But I don't think we're coming back from this. I really don't. I think that once people are comfortable enough that a theater is, sure, you can go or maybe drive-ins will have more of a resurgence. We've seen a little bit of that more of like a novelty thing. I think more and more people are going to say, oh, I have a home theater. We talk about that all the time. I'm comfy at my house. I can make some popcorn, can be around my family and friends. And I think that that's the new era that we're in. In the next two weeks, we are going to see NBA basketball again. And the reason why, despite the fact that only a month and change ago, they ended the last season that they are going to start playing again, despite the fact that the NBA has a pretty strong union, is because they don't want to violate their collective bargaining agreement and then be forced to renegotiate when the market is absolutely at its lowest. What HBO is doing here, what Warner is doing here is two-fold. Number one, they are saying in a fork in the road, do we want to be a studio or do we want to be Netflix? What is the biggest money-making proposition? And right now, they're saying, to choose among the two, I would choose Netflix. The secondary thing here is they're basically declaring what was, I mean, it certainly wasn't a collective bargaining agreement, but it was a set of norms that studios have had with theaters for generations an end to that. And they're going to renegotiate whatever this is by the time that people start going to theaters again at the absolute low point in the market. Whether or not it stays like this, I would actually expect that the thing that happens at the end of this 2021 plan is that HBO Max eliminates the 30-day window restriction that they have put on themselves because that's really the only kind of give back that they have. They don't know, and neither do the theaters, know what this year is going to bring. And what Warner can do now is the theaters can stomp their feet and get really, really mad. And Warner can look at them and say, you want to know what? Talk to Gavin Newsom. Talk to Governor Cuomo. Talk to Governor DeSantis. Talk to anybody else that is making the rules about how many people can be in any space. They have a bigger boss to fight right now. And in the meantime, Warner Brothers is basically voiding these generations old packs that they have had with these exhibitors and basically saying, you want to know what? When the sun rises, we'll come up with a new deal. But if you're in a weak position now, we'll see how many of you are even standing in six months. Yeah. I mean, when you think about this, from the perspective of just the studio making money, it's about cutting your losses. They're in my way of thinking, just writing off these movies. Like, let's write them down. We're not going to make what we expected. But that's just 2020 for you. So let's write that down. Let's make, like Sarah said, as much as we can out of it. But we have a backed up release schedule anyway. We're back in production on movies. So let's clear that out. We don't want to have too many movies in the pipeline so that we actually shoot ourselves in the foot because we're stealing from each other, you know, from our own movies in the future. So let's make that not be a problem. We also have an activation problem on HBO Max, not just a subscriber problem, but an activation problem where people have access to it and haven't activated it. So we need them to do that so they can start spreading the word. And at $15 a month, we're around the same price as Netflix. If this can skyrocket our subscribers, well, yeah, we're getting into the game that Netflix is in where they make all their money off the subscription. And then add into that a comparison in the fight over the window to Universal. Universal threw around its weight and got the theaters to agree. If we, if you cut us in some of the digital subscriptions, we'll have a shorter 17 day window. We'll, we'll work with you on, on different windows for different types of movies. Universal could afford to do that because they're owned by Comcast, which makes a lot of money so they can let Universal eat the cost of waiting out the pandemic until people go back to the theaters. Warner's owned by AT&T that's in serious debt. They can't afford that. So they actually need to just like write it all down now. Just get the, get the hard part out of the way and start getting these movies out there. I think that explains part of it as well. Plus don't forget they will release these internationally in theaters and they'll get some money. Warner knows from Tenet. They're not going to get a lot of money international, but vaccines are not. People are not going to come back to the theaters until late in 2021 at the earliest just because they're out of the habit, even if they wanted to come back. I, I, I again also think that when all these players come and talk after the ball, all the bombs have fallen and now we are rebuilding all these deals, the people around that table might not be the people that are running these companies now up to and including the fact that some of these theater chains are in serious, serious dire financial straits. And now that it's not illegal for some of these companies and studios to buy their own exhibition houses and chains, I think you might see part of this be like, no, you want to know what? Now we're going to talk about how much our own theaters are going to get exclusive exclusivity on our own movies. This is going to be a totally different conversation by the time that we're looking at summer movie season. The paramount to consent decree is on its way out. Yeah. And so the thing that prevented some studios from owning theaters, not all, but some is over. We will see windows because people, studios make a lot of money off of big blockbusters being in theaters. We will see windows, but the windows will be dictated by the studios because it benefits them in the future. I'm almost certain of that. Oh yeah. And you'll get, you'll get the movies in your living room faster because even if you don't like staying in theater, there's still people who do. I mean, look, I think Wonder Woman is going to be the social coup on Christmas. People like watching movies on Christmas that can't go to the theaters. This is going to be the thing that everybody is talking about and HBO Max is going to see. I think that was a brilliant move by them, specifically if this was going to be what it is. And now it's like, oh, HBO Max, what's HBO Max? It's the place where I can watch Friends. Why can't I get it on my Roku? Oh, a little pressure on Roku there. Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's like, what is HBO Max? It's where big movies appear day in date. That's now their brand. It's all 2021. That'll be their brand. Exactly. And the likes of which that Netflix can't match the likes of which that Hulu can't match. Like this is what they do best that and your HBO series. It's a pretty good brand. Yeah, I think there's this is not a decision that Jason Calar, former Hulu CEO now in charge of Warner Media Studios makes because he thinks it's going to make them money now. It's a thing that he thinks is going to ensure them money coming in later. And that's why you do it. Yeah. And having it. I mean, look, Disney Plus is huge because they were able to ramp up to Netflix level, you know, an adjacent kind of subscribing numbers very, very quickly. HBO has not, despite the fact that they laid out a lot of money for a lot of different programming. All right. Let's let's get into a little bit of a different topic. How we navigate the universe. Let's do it. This one's cool. The European Space Agency's Gaia Observatory has made the most detailed 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy to date. This new dataset may help scientists understand more about the universe's future expansion. What we're all doing here, what the stars are doing. The Gaia Observatory measures stellar positions, distances, motions and brightness with more precision than any previous instrument. Each object gets observed about 70 times to track its motions and velocities over a period of time. And the technique is accurate enough to measure the width of a hair from 2000 kilometers away. That is pretty precise. Two billion stars are now being tracked with highly accurate measurements of about 300,000 stars within 326 light years of our solar system. And data shows that Earth's solar systems orbit around the Milky Way is accelerating toward the center of the galaxy by 7 millimeters per second. Gaia is said to be operational until about 2022. But scientists say if it stays operational, its mission may extend to at least 2024 because it's holding up pretty well. Yeah. When we had Kiki on and we talked about the sad fate of the Arecibo Observatory, we talked about the fact that there are other kinds of observatories, either radio telescopes or satellite. This is a satellite telescope. This is a space-based telescope bringing us the kind of information that's going to help us figure out the history of the Milky Way, how it was formed, where other star systems are headed, what the expansion of the universe looks like. That's some big stuff in astronomy. This kind of precision map helps with all of that and more. And a great distraction to everything else that's happening. If you ever want just at a release valve, then read about astronomy news. This is a good, wholesome way that you can understand our place in the universe. I really want an app that will let me move around 3D through the galaxy. And I know that's not what this data is about, but it could help. I thought the same thing. I was like, can we 3D print this as the large egg that it looks like? And I just want to kind of look at it all day and spin it around. It's very cool looking. Yeah, because if you've ever seen a picture of the Milky Way, that's not the Milky Way. We haven't sent a camera outside the Milky Way yet to take a picture of it. That's a picture of another galaxy we think looks pretty much what we expect the Milky Way to look like. So this is kind of the closest we've gotten to really understanding what the shape of our own galaxy is. Well, folks, if you have thoughts on our galaxy or any other thoughts or questions, comments, anything like that, you can always send us an e-mail. We appreciate them. Please send them. Thank you in advance feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd also like to shout out a couple of patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including John and Becky Johnston, Gadget Versuoso, and Carmine Bailey. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin Robert Young, how the heck have you been? Well, busy, busy, busy. Obviously, with all the news and politics that you can find at politicspoliticspolitics.com. But also, at long last, the audiobook complete version of season two of my history podcast, Raise the Dead. Raise the Dead, Goldwater versus Johnson is available on Audible. You can get it right now at raisethedeadpodcast.com slash complete. What completes it, you might ask. Even if you listen to the podcast, it's worth it to burn an Audible credit on it because we have a conversation with Tom Merritt, somebody that has been invaluable in my research and writing for both seasons. We actually talk about largely about both seasons, as well as where future seasons are going to go, and it is available exclusively on the audiobook version. So raisethedeadpodcast.com complete where you can get both the season one and season two audiobook presentations, perfect binge listening for any kind of holiday driving. Listen, the first presidential museum I ever went to was the LBJ Museum, and I say things about LBJ you won't have heard anyone else say. No. That audio. No, not at all. Hey, folks, I want to send you a holiday card. If you're a patron and you have given us your address by December 10th, we'll do it. You can check if we've got your address by going to patreon.com slash pledges, find a DTNS, look in the right hand column, and make sure it's there. Make sure it's right. So if you want that holiday card, become a patron now, dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon. Thanks to all our patrons. Also, if you'd like to join us live, guess what? We are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more, tell a friend, dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.