 Coming up on DTNS, why Larry and Sergei are stepping down, but won't be gone from Alphabet. AI that thinks like a three month old and why that's a good thing and why Instagram wants your birthday. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 4th, 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 from under rainy LA County skies, I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just having a million dollar idea as a startup competitor for Peloton with Roger Chang on Good Day Internet. If you want to be in on the ground floor of the hottest new exercise trends, you have to support Good Day Internet, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Craigslist, which launched way back in 1995, just launched its first free app for iOS. The company quietly launched beta testing for the app on its website some time ago, but didn't make a deal out of it. A link to the Android beta test app, if you're interested in that can be found in the Google Play Store. That took them a long time. The latest version of Firefox supports picture and picture video playback on Windows. Did you know? Well, on most video playing in the browser, a blue picture in picture option will show up when you hover over the video. Clicking it will open the video in a window that will not be obscured by other Windows. Mozilla says the feature will come to Linux and Mac in January of 2020. Motorola announced the one hyper featuring a pop-up selfie camera. That means no notch, a 6.5 inch 2340 by 1080 display with 90% screen to body ratio, and a 45 watt USB-C charger that charges so fast they call it a hypercharger. Hence the name, Motorola One Hyper. Otherwise, a typical mid-range Android 10 phone available for $399 starting December 4th. Plex launched its ad-supported free streaming service with movies and shows from MGM, Warner Brothers, domestic television distribution, Lionsgate, and legendary. Plex's service will stream in 220 countries worldwide. Users don't need a subscription to access the service, and Plex says the ad load will be more like 50 or 60% less than broadcast television. All right, let's talk about another feature coming to the Android users out there. What is it, Scott? All right, this is pretty interesting. We'll see if it's something we want to use, but Google's focus mode is out of beta and available for users of Android 10 and Android 9 Pie. Focus mode lets you blacklist apps you find distracting. So when in focus mode, they get grayed out and shut down in the background. Attempts to launch them and give you a pop-up reminding you that you are in focus mode. Keep on task, basically. Though a second tap will launch them, so it doesn't take much to get a taxi launch. The mode can schedule, excuse me, schedule to turn on and off automatically. It includes an option to take a break from the focus mode for five, 15, or 30 minutes. So when we were talking about before the show, it's like, is this something that we would use? And I think that there are a lot of similar type services that are designed to help you stay on task, like you said, Scott, or stand up every once in a while. Your smartwatch might buzz at you, that kind of thing. I could see me using something like this, maybe at the end of the day, because I've already kind of shut the internet off. Maybe I'm kind of looking through something on my phone in bed or something like that, and I just really don't want to get sucked back in, because I'm already kind of done anyway. During the day, I know myself, and I think that if I get distracted and it tells me, well, no, you're in focus mode, I'll be like, I knew that and I want to bypass this because you're not the boss of me. I'm sorry, I was distracted by looking for focus mode in my Pixel 4, which apparently isn't there for me yet. I'm a little curious. It's supposed to just be in the digital well-being settings under a submenu called Ways to Disconnect. I'll have to investigate why that's not there later. But yeah, this is not something that I feel like I need to have. And I think it's because when I'm using my phone, I've managed notifications so that I don't really have notifications that bother me. And when I'm wanting to focus on something, I'm usually not using my phone. I'm not using my phone for that kind of stuff. I'm using a laptop. So I feel like maybe I just fall outside the parameters of the need of this. I don't know. Yeah, I was going to say something similar. I don't know. I can't think of a case where I would need it. I actually needed it in the desktop environment because the problem with a sort of multitasking OS on a desktop is that there are windows everywhere and there are tabs within those windows. And there's a million other things running at the same time. And one alt tab is enough to have you go, oh, I forgot I had that thing running. Let me go over there for a minute and get distracted and now you're off to something else. That's kind of a problem for me. And I wouldn't mind more desktop reminders that would do this sort of thing. But on phones, I'm either in it to use it or I've decided not to use it. Or if I'm reading a book, I've turned off notifications anyway, because that's the only real focus mode I need. Otherwise, my phone is to let me know about notifications or stuff to distract me from what I'm doing. So I'm notified of something. So I don't know if it's for me either, but I would, there's got to be, you've got to have a throng of people in your audience will call in or write in and say, here's the 10 reasons I would use this and I'm ready for it now. And I'm really curious to hear those. Yes, let's play the game of throngs. Please email us feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. If you're like, no, I definitely need this here. Let me explain why we'd love to hear from you. Again, that email is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. A team of scientists at MIT have developed an AI called ADEPT, that's A-D-E-P-T, that can understand some basic laws of physics the way infant humans do. So kind of intuitively, although not exactly, we'll explain, ADEPT can accurately predict the expected motion of objects in a video and register a form of surprise if an object breaks those rules by, say, disappearing or teleporting. That's kind of the key thing here is that it matches human reactions of when we expect things to work some way and our surprise when it doesn't. So one module of ADEPT examines an object shape, pose, and velocity, but not the specific geometry. It doesn't care if it's a square or a circle or an octagon, whatever, which makes it easier to predict movement of a wider variety of objects. This ADEPT AI works much better than other neural networks that just sort of observe and try to learn physics on their own because it's not getting too specific. That's very similar to how humans work. A separate module, so there's two in ADEPT, another module, takes the data from the first module and then simulates how it thinks it should act based on the laws of physics. If it notices a discrepancy, it sends out a signal and the strength of the signal is considered a level of surprise. ADEPT's surprise matched that of humans shown the same videos most of the time. The team compares ADEPT to how a three month old sees the world and wants to study young children more with the idea of incorporating findings into how children see the world into this model. So it's a two way street. We can do a lot of improvements to AI based on this model, but also we can learn a lot about how young children see the world by modeling it in the AI. It's interesting because I'm living this right now with an actual little kid. He's 10 months old, he's a little older, but he's in this mode of finding out what his physical world does for him and what he does to it. And it's really fun to watch. You try to create a safe surrounding, but you kind of want to let him figure out that when he pulls that pillow off the couch, it's going to land in his face because he doesn't have a way to sort of grab it with both hands because he can't walk yet. Doesn't have that kind of dexterity. Other things like what certain foods are going to taste like versus others, they may be pretty to look at, but the actual taste is bitter and he's not used to it. Watching that is always fun just from a developmental standpoint. This fascinates the heck out of me figuring out a way to duplicate that. That's huge because this isn't just, hey, I hope our AI is good at recognizing faces. That's cool. Don't get me wrong. Very cool. But it would be really cool if he said these AIs need to know how to recognize everything from the ground up so that they're kind of like us. Now that may be scary to some people and I'm not trying to freak people out, but if we're really, truly going for an artificial intelligence, it makes sense that they would learn and they would have stepping stones and they would have, oh, my reaction to this is not only a surprise and a certain level of surprise, but now I remember next time I do this that that thing's sometimes hot. So I'm not going to touch it now or whatever. I think that kind of stuff is super, super rad. Also will give me a baby robot that gets smarter over time. A baby robot, Yodoff perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. I something like that. Honestly. Yeah. It's tempting to look at these stories and say, okay, but what will this be used for? And this is one of those stories where I don't know that the best way to look at it is what you could use it for as it is, but what it will lead to. I think we fall into the trap sometimes of, well, an AI should become a perfect replication of a thinking human. And while that's a possibility, that isn't all it's good for. An algorithm that can do a very specific task like project good physics could be useful in simulations, could be useful in research, could be useful in video games and movies and visual effects. There's all kinds of things you can use this for short of it becoming a world genius. So this more realistic way of predicting physics may not be the best way of predicting physics, but it may be a very insightful way that's useful in a whole lot of ways, including shedding light, like you said, Scott, about how humans actually think about the world. Right. And if you're going to build something like, let's say, a robot that's designed to help disarm bombs or rescue people in a cave where actual people can't get down there, but a machine might be able to do it and not worry about killing the machine, think about a greater AI understanding of physics in that world. I mean, that starts to make practical sense. So you're right, even trying to predict what another person is going to do by understanding, well, they're probably going to think this way. Yeah, that stuff's really cool. I like it. Four extensions from Avast, Avast online security, AVG online security, Avast safe price and AVG safe price have been removed from the Mozilla ad on portal to warn about suspicious sites and to show shopping deals. Mozilla removed the extensions after investigating a complaint from Vladimir Palant, creator of ad block plus. Palant found the extensions were collecting more data than necessary, including site visit length, clicks, open tab counts, and tab switching. Mozilla and Google prohibit this kind of extensive data collection. Avast told ZDNet that the URL history that somebody has is necessary for proper functioning of the extensions, but that user identification is not stored. Avast is working with Mozilla to create updated versions that are compliant and also transparent. The extensions are still available for Chrome. Yeah, so no word on why Chrome hasn't dropped these out because Palant has told Google about it as well, not just Mozilla. But this really strikes me as an example of where it was more expedient to collect a bunch of stuff just in case you needed it, rather than collecting just the things you knew you needed and working to be transparent about that collection and its reasons. Because yeah, okay, you needed to collect some URL history to be able to see what the patterns were and kind of crowdsource what sites are being visited the most often. But you didn't need to collect tab counts and tab switching, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but it also seems like they think they can fix it to not collect the things they shouldn't. So maybe they should have done that in the first place. And it feels like we're heading into an era of everyone's being a little bit more careful with their extensions. Extensions are getting smarter and better and cooler, but in the other side of things they can be a little more intrusive. I found myself stripping extensions not just for reasons like this, but also just performance issues. And do I really need this? Do I really use that? So I kind of like it, actually. I think this is a reminder that if you're going to make an extension and if it's going to be poking around on people's data and maybe make it the most, you know, or have a really good reason why you need to collect the data. Yeah, exactly. And only get the info you need. Can I guess they can come back? I don't know if they have like a two strikes and you're out, three strikes and you're out. No, no, they say they say they're working in Mozilla to get back in the store. So I don't think it's a, they're gone forever. So that's good. Instagram. We all know about the gram doing it for the gram. The story. Instagram announced it will now require birth dates from all new users. So that's anybody who hasn't joined yet, I guess, which will expand the audience for ads for alcohol and other age restricted products. Although the company said it is not the focus and mentioning Reuters or in the Reuters article, rather that article or excuse me, that age could be the basis for recommended privacy settings or an in app education about staying safe online. Birthdays will not be visible to other users. So I will not be able to see Sarah's birthday. She cannot see mine. Although I think we probably know each other. Previously, the app only required users to confirm that they are at least 13 years old, which is pretty standard across a lot of services. Instagram is also rolling out options for users to block messages from people they don't follow. And for businesses and popular creators to more easily restrict minors from viewing their posts, Instagram has not decided whether to make existing users enter that birthday, but they might and they can. And I bet they will eventually, right? Really? I'm not certain they will. Well, they've got a billion users and to have better ad targeting towards, I don't know, all sorts of things that are age specific. The blowback of making someone change something. It's one thing to make you do it at the sign-up when you don't know anybody, right? But to tell us all like your Instagram account's going to get shut down unless you entered your birthday, I don't think that's going to fly. Well, unless it was carefully crafted by, you know, the PR agency to say this is about keeping children safe. But even if, even then, if I have to do it, as soon as you make the internet, do anything, I don't know, especially when it's giving personal information. I kind of agree with that. It's possible. They'll just say, Hey, we'd love to serve better stuff to you. Would you mind putting your birthday in? This is optional. Now, obviously that's not going to get everybody. And you know what? I would probably do it because I don't care that much, but I don't want to be told I have to. For some reason, that's where I, my switch gets flipped. And I don't, I don't want to comply. Yeah, I will say that, and it's sort of, it was sort of a, you know, off-handed addition to this article about birthdays, but rolling out options for users to block messages from people they don't follow is something that I have been pulling my hair out for some time over why Instagram didn't already do this. Because you get, you get a little notification and you kind of go, Oh, who talked to me? And then you have to decline or accept. And it's not somebody you follow and you can't tell if they have something good to say and they usually don't. It's, that's, that's a feature I've been asking for. Maybe they'll figure out a way to do a trade here. What I mean by that is services who want additional info for you, from you will often give you something in return, a feature you can't live without, some other reason that you think, Oh, well, I should put that in because now I have access to this. I have no idea what that is for Instagram, but it's something maybe they could explore. Also, they're not verifying these ages. So you could put whatever you want in there. Yeah. I mean, I've been January 1st, 1900, when, when forced to enter my birthday for some time now, but not all of us use our actual birthday. You, you look seriously 1900, you hold up is what I'm saying right now. Yeah, I know, I know. It's night cream. I'm just gonna, just gonna boast about that. That's the secret. Something you also might not live without. Amazon announced the Echo input portable smart speaker edition, which includes a 4800 milliamp battery promising 10 hours of music playback or 11 hours of standby battery life. The new portable smart speaker will be available in India for 4999 rupees. It's about 70 US dollars shipping on December 18th. Amazon intends to bring it to other markets eventually. We don't have dates for other markets as of yet. Amazon's previous portable smart speaker, the Echo tap was discontinued in December of last year. Yeah. So Amazon is definitely trying to really take it as much advantage of India as a market as possible along with Walmart, with through Flipkart and Apple and lots of other US companies are really trying to make inroads there to the point that India is actually passing some rules to make it more difficult for non native companies to compete here. But this is a good one. People want a relatively affordable portable smart speaker. They want to be able to move it around and take it with them and not just have it plugged into a wall. That seems to be the demand in India. So why not go for it? I personally have an Echo tap that I use in my backyard. I keep it around for barbecues and stuff. And my only complaint about it is I wish I didn't have to go and tap it, especially when my hands are covered in barbecue sauce to make it react. So I'm kind of excited about the idea of this maybe coming to the US, especially at 70 bucks. Although I bet it's 99 or more here once it gets here. Yeah, I, I'm, how do I put this? I feel like we're getting a little bit of a, there's an echo in every corner of the house kind of here in my house. There's an echo in here. There's a lot of echoes. The fact that this isn't here yet is probably good for me because I do tend to like these. I tend to want to try their new stuff. Hasn't all been, you know, wonderful or whatever, but I, I, I think that, I mean, I don't know if we're getting tired of them or if we're getting to a place where we're sort of peak echo. And if you're in that ecosystem, like how many more echoes can you use echo system? I like that, but I only use like two now. I mean, like consistently we use an echo show in the kitchen for a lot of stuff and a couple of the little pucks, the dots. And that's it. I say puck because I've watched way too much of the Mandalorian and now everything's a puck. But anyway, that's all I really need. So this stuff doesn't do me many, too many favors. Cause part of me is like, well, hurry up and come here so I can get one. And then another part of me is like, you don't, you're not going to use it. You just, well, like you, you mentioned Tom, you know, you're outside barbecuing kind of thing. When I first read the story, I was like, gosh, everybody's making a portable speaker now. There, there's quite, quite a few on the market, but they're not all smart speakers. And yes, if I was far enough away from, from my house and, and maybe I was barbecuing or sitting by the fire pit or I dunno, whatever, it would, that's just an added bonus for me. Cause I, but smart speakers is a big part of my life at this point. Yeah. One of the big uses I had for it was really just as a Bluetooth speaker though. So maybe I'm overthinking it. I would stream baseball games from my phone to the speaker while I was barbecuing most often. Cause I had to pay for it. If I wanted to do it from within the Amazon Echo, which is kind of silly. Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. Tuesday, Alphabet announced that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will step away from their duties as CEO and president of Alphabet. We, we talked about this when it broke yesterday on the show, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take on the additional role of CEO of Alphabet. Page and Brin will retain their board seats and the controlling stock ownership. So that's something on Good Day Internet yesterday in the post show. We talked a lot about our speculations, our sort of hot takes on this, but thinking about it and looking at a lot of the coverage, it became clear that Page and Brin can still make something happen at any Alphabet company, including Google, if they want to, because they control ownership of the entire company. And they're going to remain employees of Alphabet. They're just not going to be CEO and president anymore. In their statement about it, Page and Brin said they will continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we're passionate about. And to me, that, that kind of signals what's going on here. I don't think it's consolidation of Google and Alphabet. I do think it is an example of Larry and Sergey saying, gosh, we don't like running Alphabet. By all accounts, they've been fairly absent from the running of Alphabet over the past several months, but they really still do like certain things about it. There are certain projects that they still care about. So they want to talk with Sundar about those projects that they care about and have an influence on them and let Sundar Pichai take care of everything else. Now, this is very similar to what Pichai has done at Google. Dieter Boen pointed out that Pichai's rise through Google's ranks was deserved because he consistently delivered good products, the very first Google toolbar to Chrome, Google's online apps, ordering up the hardware efforts into a more cohesive system. He took on one or more of Google's user-facing products one by one until eventually he got the CEO job. Now, all the stuff Google made was innovative and smart, but also directionless and unpolished, says Boen. Pichai's job was to take Google's products out of permanent beta. At the same time, he's had to ensure future technologies like AI turn into real products. From a purely product perspective, which includes the lucrative ad products that make the whole thing go, Pichai has been very successful. So you could still criticize Google for being a little scattered, but it's way less scattered than it was before Sundar Pichai took over as CEO. And I think they want him to do that to alphabet. So I wouldn't be shocked if you see Pichai close down a couple of the other bets that aren't working. Sell off a couple of the other bets that just don't make sense for Alphabet, but maybe another investor thinks they can make work. But most of all, push those other bets to work towards becoming self-sufficient. That was one of the promises of creating Alphabet in the first place was, okay, we're going to take these X projects that have just kind of been in the lab, but without anybody pushing them to have any metrics for success and make them companies that have a metric for success. To some extent, that has happened. A lot of these companies do have contracts, do have commercial stuff, but they're still not turning over the money that Google does. And maybe the hope is that Pichai can place more adult pressure on them than Paige and Bryn were willing to do. Interesting. Do you think, though, Tom, do you have any inkling of an idea that, and I know we're kind of talking against this, but not against it. But if he does an amazing job at Alphabet, brings all that in, figures out what to cut, it's the smartest idea ever. Stocks go through the roof and he brings huge success over there. Wouldn't they just get a new CEO at Google and he wouldn't have to do both? That's the part that's throwing me. It feels like you're having one guy do two really big things. Well, because he's so good at the one thing already. Feels like, yeah. I mean, I'm sure he hasn't been forced, you know what? You have to run Alphabet now. He probably thinks, yeah, I'm capable of doing this and we'll hire folks under him who can again reach those metrics, like you mentioned, Tom. I do also think that Sergey and Larry still being able to say, at any time, we don't like this. We're passionate about this and we don't like the direction and we control everything and kind of stay maybe out of the way a little bit more. Is it just a win-win for them? Right. No, absolutely. And it's a fascinating question of when does Google get a CEO and Pichai just become CEO of Alphabet? Because right now what it implies is, A, Pichai is too valuable and his work isn't done at cleaning up Google, which I think even from the outside, we can all see that. There is still room for improvement. And B, the obvious air has not been obvious yet. There's not a person that can say, well, Google will be just fine in X's hands, so Sundar can focus on these other bets. I think what makes sense to my mind right now is, Sundar continues to be the steady hand that guides Google and keeps it on the straight and narrow, helps move these other bets into becoming self-sufficient companies. Once that's happening, once Google isn't the golden goose anymore, and there are multiple geese that are all golden, then you have a little more latitude to say, okay, now we can take the pressure off Sundar on Google and maybe hand over the reins to someone else. Also, that gives you time to identify who that person might be. Yeah, it's just interesting that Google has him as their dedicated CEO. Now he's going to be splitting these other things. And at the same time, a Google company like YouTube has its own CEO. And I just feel like it's just weird to spread them that thin. And maybe it's not that easy. It does feel a bit like a temporary measure. Before we move off of this, though, I really want to make this clear to people, because I think there's a misperception of what the alphabet other bets are. It's like, ah, these are just crazy things that don't work. They're working fairly well. Waymo, we talk about a lot. It has autonomous cars that are definitely on the path, certainly leading the way in the United States to providing an actual service, although they don't yet. We've covered Loone and the various contracts that they've signed in both Europe and South America. So they are actually starting to get customers. Wing Aviation is doing delivery services in Canberra, Australia and Helsinki, Finland. Makani Power is partnered with Royal Dutch Shell to build commercial versions of its power generating kites. Verily is the Life Sciences tech unit that works on machine learning for wearables and is partnering with several pharma companies. Sidewalk Labs we've talked about on the show has a contract with Toronto to make a smart city area in downtown Toronto. And of course, DeepMind gets a lot of press as developing artificial intelligence. Calico is the one famously that wants to stop the aging process. That's a little farther out there. Access is the name of Google Fiber. And of course you have their venture capital and their capital and private equity fund as well. But most of these are in the stage where they have a customer. They have a business plan. They just need to be pushed to expand it and make it work or not. And I think that's probably what Pichai is going to do. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories. You can vote on your peers' stories and, again, push stuff to the top. If you want us to see a daily tech news show, dot reddit.com. Please join in on the conversation in our Discord as well. Chat as much as you like. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Oh, I see we have things in the mail bag. Oh, my gosh, we do. First one comes from Daniel saying regarding the new threads that could be started on an individual photo in Google Photos, we talked about that yesterday. Daniel says, just want to share a really good use case. My first child was born five months ago. My family lives all over the country. None of them live near me. Same goes for my wife. So we started a shared Google photo album when Ella, that's his daughter's name, was born. Since then, almost every fun and interesting photo and video that we take of her has been added to that shared album. Both of us have multiple relatives, parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, and they all get notified when new photos and videos are added. Many of them love to comment on these photos, but the way it used to work, it was just one straight long feed conversation. It got jumbled up. This is going to be a nice way to keep the comments regarding specific photos and their own place. I welcome this feature. And by the way, if you haven't been using shared Google photo albums for long term events like trips, or perhaps a kid or a child's birth, you should really give it a shot. It's a great way to keep everybody in the loop at once. Yeah, actually a fun evening event for the Rivera Merit family is when we get the inevitable update to our niece's photo album, June the toddler years, as the Google photo notification pops up. And we're like, oh, let's take a look at what the new photos are. So yeah, I get that, Daniel. That's cool. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels, including Mike McLaughlin, Philip Less, and Frederick Hoobner. And thanks also to Scott Johnson. I didn't forget you, Scott. I was just trying to dramatically pause. She was thinking about whether you deserved the thanks. No, I liked it. I was dwelling on Hoobner. So I was good. I was happy to be there. Thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us. It's Wednesday. Scott's with us almost every Wednesday. In fact, it's, I don't remember Wednesday that you weren't. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Well, I'm definitely here today. And it is Wednesday. 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