 Coming up on DTNS robots with sensitive fingers can plug in headphones now 3d printed lightweight carbon fiber bike frames are on the way And we try to guess the real problem with tiktok This is the Daily Tech news for Monday July 13th 2020 it's still 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt And from studio red red. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer I'm the show's producer Roger Chang I had to think about it. It's written right there It's also just your name We were just talking about new car smell and the human sexuality class at Sarah and Rogers College If you want that wider conversation get the expanded show a good day internet at patreon.com DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Alphabet CEO Sundar Pachai announced that Google will invest roughly 10 billion dollars in India over the next five to seven years The investments will focus on expanding the internet beyond English and other vernacular languages Google also plans to invest in artificial intelligence and education in India the Detroit Free Press reports a second case of using facial Recognition to mistakenly arrest someone in Michigan facial recognition was used to identify a man Who was also identified by the victim in a photo lineup so facial recognition first then the victim looked at photos and said yeah That's the guy. However video of the incident showed the perpetrator had tattoos and the arrested man That was identified by facial recognition and the victim did not have the tattoos So an attorney took photos of the mistakenly arrested man gave them to the victim and an assistant prosecutor who agreed Yes, we have misidentified him and a judge later dismissed the case Workers for grocery delivery platform shift told the verge in an email that they plan to walk off the job and not accept new orders Starting Wednesday July 15th Just in two days due to the company shifting to an algorithm-based pay structure That workers say will reduce their pay by at least 30% and sometimes in other cases higher Shift launched a new pay model late last year that really replaced its previous flat fee model Politico reports the California has opened an antitrust investigation into Google Details of what California's attorney general is investigating aren't known But recent scrutiny has focused on the company's acquisitions dominance and conduct in the ad tech market and search markets Those are kind of the typical things Google gets investigated for currently Alabama is the only US state that's not officially investigating Google After private alpha testing over the last few months Microsoft Flight Simulator will officially launch on August 18th for PC with pre-orders and pre-installs starting today The latest the last release rather of Microsoft Flight Simulator Simulator X steam edition was back in 2014 it has been some time the standard edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator will be 60 bucks with 20 planes and 30 airports There's also a deluxe edition going for $90 with five additional planes and five extra airports And a premium deluxe edition includes 10 additional planes in total and 10 extra airports and priced at $120 the Supreme Court of India ruled that services of court notices summons and pleadings and such Can be done not only through email facts, but also instant messaging and specifically mentioned WhatsApp The court said two blue ticks in WhatsApp would convey that the receiver has seen the notice The ruling observed that lockdowns prevent many Indian citizens from visiting the post office to receive service during the COVID-19 pandemic In the ruling Chief Justice essay Bob D stated we have to accept the present situation and change our mindset Eventually it must settle down to a system of new and old All right, let's talk a little bit about podcasting as an industry Let's the IAB estimates that podcast advertising revenue will rise 14.7% in 2020 which is down from the 48% of found in 2019 and a survey of advertisers podcast ad revenue was down 16% in April 15% in May and 19% in June but serious XM don't care because serious XM will pay EW Scripps $325 million to acquire podcast company stitcher with stitcher serious XM gets the podcast app obviously But also in the midroll ad network and content networks through ear wolf. This includes free economics W2F with Mark Marin comedy bang bang among others Scripps says that serious XM says Stitcher serious XM radio and Pandora combined will reach more than 150 million monthly listeners in the US alone Serious XM acquired simple cast for its distribution and analytics tools last month So it's a bit of a hiring spree. The company is also a shareholder in SoundCloud Yeah, I have to say I'm impressed by serious XM I remember when they were still two separate companies serious and XM And I thought well these folks are going down one of them is gonna go out of business The other one's gonna get acquired and that'll be the end of them because the internet's just gonna drive them out of business Who wants a model that requires you to launch satellites? But boy, they've proven my thoughts wrong Not only did they merge to kind of you know survive for longer, but buying Pandora buying ear wolf buying now stitcher This is a company that is positioned itself Well to take advantage of good content good personalities and say we will continue to operate Distribution models based on where people listen, you know, whether it's music podcasts radio shows whatever Yeah as a I have been a serious XM subscriber in the past because it has been Often bundled in for a few months with a new car lease that I've gotten and I really like the network But it's also whenever my subscription runs out the free version of it. I've never re-upped You know and they'll call you and they'll send you stuff in the mail and there's emails and it's a whole thing It's like and you get like it's it's the the trying to retain users model, you know, they're They're they don't want you to cancel they don't want they don't want you to cancel and they'll try real hard to get you back But you know for me it was always like it's not that I don't like the network I actually really do like there's like certain, you know music channels and and you know You've got you've got your Harold Stearns and that sort of thing that would would drive lots of people to the service But it was it always felt just a little like I don't know long in the tooth So these these acquisitions make a lot of sense because if the company doesn't do this sort of thing They won't exist Imagine one of the reasons you didn't want to pay for serious XM is you could get radio for free over the air And you could get cool content like serious XM had for free as a podcast so that you know as as we switch from To using the internet to get more and more of our entertainment Serious XM is positioned to take advantage of that stitcher will be a way that they can offer you like oh well You know we want to keep you as a user if you really want to cancel serious XM What about installing stitcher on your on your car panel and and using your internet connection for that? I'm curious if serious XM will continue to survive as a service Similar to Pandora as a you know online service, which it is when you pay for serious XM You also get online access to it. You don't have to get it over the satellite But it is also another example of the consolidation of the podcast industry as we see more and more content being associated with Distribution platforms wasn't a big deal that serious XM owned ear wolf and WTF with Mark Marin until they bought stitcher now It's like oh do these is this their Joe Rogan? Do they now make Mark Marin exclusive to stitcher and withhold him from Spotify? Or is everybody gonna keep playing nice and just you know put some exclusives on their own network That are perks, but still keep the majority of stuff available across platform. We will see yes We will and and I wonder if five years from now or I don't know even sooner. We'll say gosh remember when Podcasters weren't exclusive. Yes You wanted to on any channel, you know slash op that you liked. I don't know MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence lab aka sea sail has built a two-fingered robotic gripper with soft pads That can handle fine objects like wires and sheets This is something that's been very hard for robots to do because they don't have sensitive fingers Our fingers are very good at pressure sensitivity and touch sensitivity and robot fingers haven't been well Tiny cameras in the pads that use something called gel sight can detect position orientation and force Which was a big part of this to adjust their pose and grip on the fly That means the robot can hold a wire even if you're yanking it away they can still keep a hold of it and Be able to trace that wire say to the end of a headphone cable to find where the jack is or to the plug Is and plug it into a mini jack they can plug in headphones, you know the thing that no phones have anymore They get rid of these jacks, but the robots could finally do it. The scientists hope to expand This to do things like untie knots Sewing with thread Folding cloth you can get robots to fold cloth if you do a lot of like herky jerky stuff with flat panels But this would be them to say like any cloth you could pick it up and fold it like we do the team Intends to focus its applications at first on the auto industry for things like wiring Threading cables and cars, but there are plenty of other applications you could think about and like including sewing could be useful in medical For for sewing up wounds and sutures and the like. Yeah. Yeah, talk about something that has to be done extremely delicately The these stories are I'm always like, all right. They got a robot to do something cool And then you watch the video and you're like, oh, wow That is very precise This is really cool. Yeah, the the The implications of this, you know, I I I guess it'll take some time for us to to really understand You know how how science advances because of this, but but yeah the the it's It does seem Very impressive. It's it's going to improve if this pans out and it becomes available at scale for for cost and all the usual caveats it it stands to Automate things that it can't be automated right now thus taking away tedious work From workers. There's always a fear that it will eliminate work But I think that gets overstated with things like this this will allow those workers to focus on other quality items that they can't focus on right now that the human Brain is better suited to and and so less tedious work for people more fulfilling work for people and Possibly saving money and you know bringing down the price of cars or surgeries because the robot can take care of stuff In a repetitive manner that people can't it's better for work or health for sure. Absolutely Fewer RSI injuries. I'm into it right the register notes that IBM's that global technology services posted a job advertisement which called among other things for a minimum 12 plus years experience in Kubernetes administration and management That would mean the candidates would have started working with Kubernetes in 2008 or earlier 12 years plus But that's a tough qualification qualification to meet because Kubernetes stated with its first GitHub commit on June 7th 2014 hmm a similar observation came from Sebastian Ramirez who saw a job posting asking for four plus years experience with fast API which Ramirez thought that's kind of odd because I created fast API about one and a half years ago So even the creator couldn't have four years of experience with fast API Because it just has a bit around that long. I these are funny They probably really don't mean that much other than Somebody's using a template who doesn't understand the skills and I don't think that's a shocker to people But it but it does show that these years of experience in job descriptions are essentially meaningless like obviously nobody's paying attention to this because Very quickly the hiring managers would interview someone and say how many years of Kubernetes experience? You do you have and someone would say well six because that's the most you can have They're not going to say well We can't we can't consider your your application anymore because you need 12 and that's impossible Yeah, yeah, I mean it's I don't know I mean I Sometimes wonder, you know as you look at a variety of jobs, you know You could be in variety of of industries and disciplines the whole kind of like here's how many years or more We'd like you to have you know just to be you know Considered qualified on any level. I mean that's all It's pretty fluid. Actually, you know Captain Jack points out something Maybe it just means they don't expect to be able to hire anyone for six years So they're like, you know when someone has 12 years of experience It's gonna be a long process Yeah, no these these just shows that that people slap these numbers in here without really meaning them which is unfortunate or or it's Honeypot to catch time travelers. Oh Very good point. Yeah, right. Well, listen if you can time travel, you're probably ripe for the job See that it's a way to weed people out Arivo has announced what it calls the world's first 3d printed unibody electric bike. Yes, you're correct Arivo is an industrial printer Not a bicycle maker, but they're making some very interesting bikes with their industrial printers the Superstrada Terra is a custom lightweight frame and Superstrada Ion a class 1 e-bike with a rear hub 250 watt motor 252 watt battery and an estimate or watt-hour battery and an estimated 60 miles of range Arivo prints the frames as a single Continuous thermoplastic carbon fiber unibody. So no welding That's the key here is you don't have those stress points the Terra frame weighs around 2.8 pounds and the Ion 24.2 with all the extras or the Ion with all the extras weighs about 24.2 pounds The frames have no downpipe from the seat to the pedals. They're very interesting Customers can send in their measurements and have the bike printed to fit each bike takes about 10 hours to create So they're not gonna save money on making these actually But they are going to be able to do some cool things that you couldn't do if you assembled them The bikes were designed by Bill Stevens not by Arivo Bill Stevens works for some place called Studio West concepts, which has designed frames for Schwinn, Raleigh, Diamond and Yeti So he's well known in the industry Arivo is selling the first round of bikes on Indiegogo at a discount 1299 for the Terra and a thousand seven hundred ninety-nine for the Ion. Those are promised to ship in December The price eventually will be two thousand seven hundred ninety nine for the Terra and three thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars for the Ion Man, these are the times where I I wish I was a little bit more into bikes I pulled a couple friends of mine You know when I knew we were gonna be talking about the story and I was like is this cool and everyone was like Yeah, it's not cheap, but it's very cool The you know the idea that that an e-bike not just a bike but an electronic bike You know with a decent range and some pretty cool specs is getting 3d printed And yeah, I mean, I don't know maybe Ten hours will become five hours, you know as as the technology gets better, but it's pretty fascinating to me Roger you were you were saying you you've had some experience with these sorts of things and not having the welding is a big advantage Not having the welding is a big advantage in that what you were saying There are stress points at a co-worker who was riding down a street in San Francisco And his bike was less than a month old because he ordered it online And it literally cracked at a joint between the the front of the frame and The main bar and it cracked at that weld and so he literally his bike split in two while he was riding which is a very unsafe proposition But the other thing is how incredibly like this bike it typically you would need to go carbon fiber and carbon fibers are usually limited to Tracebacks I have never seen an e-bike actually made of that kind of composite material That says a lot of weight because you've ever ridden an e-bike and tried to pedal it It's a lot heavier than just a normal bike because you have the weight of the batteries and and the additional motor I mean the point is the the electric part of the e-bike makes it makes it easier to pedal, right? Yeah But it just handling wise this whole thing makes it a lot easier than it would have been if you just did it traditionally So I can definitely see the excitement about it. It's also very pricey I mean, I don't have I don't think anyone 12 to 1300 bucks seems kind of like the limit where people would actually Be normally able to spend for a bike, but you know the the three to four grand It definitely for the the people with bigger wallets Yeah, and that wallet will then weigh them down and outweigh the advantage of the lighter bike because it's so full of money But everybody's just gonna use you know we chat for everything you don't even need wallet anymore, right? You won't be carrying money, right? You'll just be paying the QR code. Good point. Yeah. Yeah, you know come on live in the now Microsoft speaking of living in the now Microsoft will spin off its empathetic teenage girl chat bot Jowice also known as Rina in Japan into an independent entity Microsoft will retain a stake in the company and get licensing revenue from Jowice The Microsoft also claims that the chat bot has a reach of more than 660 million users on 450 million third-party smart devices in finance retail auto Real estate and fashion industries Jowice or Rina wants to be her friend after which it claims It can mind context tonality and emotions from text to create unique patterns within seconds former Microsoft AI and research Executive Harry Schum will serve as chairman of Jowice and current GM Lee Dee will become CEO Yeah, this is interesting. So a lot of AI royalty in China have have graduated from this Harry Schum being one of them He was a Microsoft AI research and development executive but also worked In the Jowice sub division for a while a couple of the big names at Baidu like their COO have come out of Jowice So this is this is a big deal. It's an impressive Use of AI to to emulate empathy, which is something a little harder for these chatbots to do sometimes You you know depending on on what culture you come from may find the teenage girl aspect a little disconcerting But that that is sort of a common marketing trope In a lot of these markets and and it's used in finance retail real estate like this is this is not just your buddy Although it is sometimes referred to as your virtual girlfriend It's providing like actual customer support in these situations I think what's most interesting about this though is the fact that Microsoft feels like it's better for them to spin this off Still get the licensing money still get the benefit from it But not have it be part of their company if it's going to operate in China Folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each date about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines calm. Oh Did someone mention China? We mentioned Friday That Amazon sent an email to employees requiring them to uninstall tick tock from mobile devices that also received Amazon company email Later Friday in fact during good day internet after DTNS Amazon announced that that email was sent in error and there was in fact no change in policy regarding tick tock Well, that was odd enough, right? It's like, oh, well, then how did it get sam? Well, that's why'd you even compose it in the first place? That's weird However, Saturday Wells Fargo sent an email to its employees Asking its employees to remove tick tock from corporate devices due to quote Concerns about tick tock's privacy and security controls and practices and because corporate-owned devices should be used for company business only They're like we're worried about the security and besides you shouldn't be on tick tock when you're supposed to be working Also over the weekend the Democratic National Committee's security team here in the United States wrote in an email We continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using tick tock on personal devices If you are using tick tock for campaign work We recommend using a separate phone and account because they're like we know you need to campaign on tick tock Is it's the hot thing? But don't use your same account. We're worried about it In fact the DNC had previously sent a memo warning against tick tock use in December at that point in that memo They cited Chinese ties and potentially sending data back to the Chinese government Republican National Committee came out saying it has a long-standing recommendation that employees and stakeholders not download the tick tock app citing security concerns and as we mentioned on Friday tick tock is trying to address those concerns It's considering spinning tick tock out as a subsidiary with its own board and headquarters outside of China Remember tick tock is operated out of Santa Monica, California Where its CEO a former Disney executive Kevin Mayer a US citizen Runs the show but tick tock is owned by bite dance and bite dance is headquartered in Beijing and in tick tock was created By an acquisition of musically which was started in Shanghai. So there are definitely Chinese roots But what is tick tock actually done to cause these concerns security concerns? Well We've mentioned before checking clipboard contents regularly That's something that pubg mobile the New York Times and the LinkedIn were also found to be doing So it must not be just that we're not seeing you know people calling for the banning of LinkedIn from RNC phones Collect a lot of data. That's the one we talked about on Friday with Alyssa Miller It can that collects keystroke data background location. You're installed apps all so things that almost any game app or Advertising driven app collects. It's not the best right that it does this But it's certainly not the only app that collects this amount of data But people are like why does tick tock need to collect it and why don't they make it more transparent that they do? The argument against tick tock runs that yes It collects a lot of data that other apps collect but this could be used by Chinese intelligence to surveil specific users Now tick tock says no it won't our data stored outside of China We will not respond to request a handover data to the Chinese government and we have never been asked to do so Also, let's compare this to other companies that have actually been caught putting their data in China or Been caught losing their data to potential state-backed actors to zoom got caught routing conferences through China remember Equifax lost data for more than a hundred million people some people think that the attackers that got the Equifax data were based in Russia Tick tock has not been caught doing anything as serious as that But the concerns about tick tock are greater zoom and Equifax are not owned by Chinese companies This is all about the ownership Or is it there's also examples of Chinese companies that don't get this level of scrutiny Ten cents we chat is used by more than a million users in the United States. You never hear about that It regularly surveils its users its sensors sensitive topics Not much call to get we chat off phones But maybe it's because the RNC and the DNC and the Wells Fargo employees aren't using it What about pubg mobile though pubg mobile? It's no fortnight, but it's pretty popular It's owned by 10 cent same company that owns we chat it got caught looking at your clipboard No calls to ban pubg or remove it from phones The Verge notes that the play here may be to do with the US Committee on Foreign Investments trying to do what it did with Grinder Forced tick tock to be divested from its Chinese parent company. Remember they did that with Grinder They said you can't own Grinder anymore Grinder got sped off Maybe they're saying look tick tock is popular enough. We want to get it out of hand because it's gonna stay popular Mmm, would we see the same happen to pubg mobile? Maybe would we see it happen to we chat? I doubt it The move used to be to have a service for China and a service for the rest of the world, right? Like if we're gonna be a Chinese company, we'd have one for China do yen in tiktok's case and one for the rest of the World tiktok, but tiktok's becoming an example where even that might not work Yeah, I Mean lots of unpack lots of unpack So if for summary if if you are in the camp of listen if by dance parent company Originated in China then nothing tiktok does or says or where their Santa Monica headquarters are or who their CEO is Will will convince us that this is a safe company. Okay fine If you feel that way then the company would have to yeah completely not dismantle But you know that they're you would have to restructurize But there are so many other instances as you mentioned Tom of other companies that either have been found to do similar things Or have have kind of slid past scrutiny by doing similar things my You know that I my optimistic side is like this is all good because all this does is shed more light on What lots of companies do whether they are Chinese companies or a company to originates and many other places and the way that companies operate at times is By using data collection that is way above and beyond what most of their users would be comfortable with and the users just don't know So this is a good thing, you know, we're learning more about how this stuff works But again, yeah, like something like tiktok You're not gonna get a bunch of young people Predominantly tiktok users saying oh data collection. Well, that doesn't sound good. I'm gonna delete the app That's not gonna happen. So this whole surveil thing, you know, there's a lot more to this whole story of how you Educate people on what's actually going on and and more of her how you get them to care Yeah, I think Tiktok is the nail that stands out a little higher than the rest. I mean Lenovo Has headquarters in North Carolina Hong Kong and Beijing. It's a Chinese company Even though it lists its main headquarters at Hong Kong It did that a long time ago to kind of take some of the pressure, but it still has a headquarters in Beijing It also has a US office. I think tiktok's looking at that and saying we want to be like that I don't know if it fixes that because Lenovo Even though there have been some some data handling issues with Lenovo It's generally not handling a lot of your data tiktok is It's generally not seen as a company targeted at your children tiktok is so I think the fact that is Chinese hugely popular social network that isn't based in the United States and It's used by your children and is just getting more and more popular. I think that's what causes it to attract this attention well Hopefully you can join our discord if you haven't already and you know kick around some of these ideas because these are complex Complex stories you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com DTNS and talk to the DTNS family. What's in the mailbag Sarah? Tom I'm glad you asked because we've got a good one from Sam and Belgium who had thoughts on our discussion about Android updates and The Google Pixel phones being the safest bet to be sure to get updates Sam says problem with that Is that Google doesn't even sell the pixels everywhere? In fact last year I was considering buying the pixel for Excel, but Google doesn't sell it in Belgium They sold in the German Google Store. You can't order from Belgium though Then I noticed that at media market in Germany sells it so I was considering that But it was right before Black Friday I waited a little bit to see if there were any discounts was heavily discounted in the US But not in Germany So I decided to go for the one plus 70 pro seeing that Google doesn't seem to be really interested in selling me their devices Come on Google people in Belgium wanted your phone. Yeah, what's up with that? It's Europe for goodness sake You're selling it in Germany. Yeah, that is annoying Sam. Thanks for the I like getting these localized insights like this Like y'all in Germany with your pixels think everything's easy, but it ain't so easy over here in Belgium Not in neighboring Belgium. That's for sure Yeah, thanks for letting us know Sam and yeah Keep those keep those on the ground reports coming to us because it's always helps us to know How everybody's fairing hey shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Philip Shane Wandy Hernandez and Paul Teeson Also, thanks to everybody who supports us at patreon patreon.com Dtns you get all kinds of perks there It's the best way to directly support the show It funds the majority of what we do and it does it so that we're accountable to you and no one else if you get Value out of the show. We just asked they you give that value back at patreon.com Slash dtns we'll give you an RSS feed that doesn't have ads in it We'll give you extra content from Shannon Morris about security from me about how we run the show a column from Roger Sarah's live with it looking at gadgets. That's all available as a patreon. Go check it out at patreon.com slash dtns And if you have feedback for us, we'd love to hear it feedback at daily tech news show comm is where to send those emails We're also live Monday through Friday for a 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC And you can find out more at daily tech news show comm slash live back tomorrow with Patrick Beja talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com