 Coming up on DTNS, should you worry about Google teaming up with a hospital company? How big was the biggest shopping day in the world? And why Disney Plus is no exception with its launches. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 12th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Patrick Beja was supposed to be with us, but he's feeling a little under the weather, so we send him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. Hope he's feeling better. We were just talking about the meanings of words, particularly the word rock, as in we will rock you. If you want to have a little etymology in your life, you got to get good day internet. Check it out by becoming a patron at patreon.com. slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The New York Department of Financial Services is investigating how Goldman Sachs awards credit lines for the Apple Car. Multiple women have reported that they received a lower credit limit than their husband, despite having similar assets and similar credit scores. Basecamp founder and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinmeister Hansen was the highest profile complaint saying that he was offered 20 times the limit that his wife was, despite filing joint tax returns. In response, Goldman tweeted, it doesn't make decisions based on gender and, quote, reviewed our credit decisioning process to guard against unintended biases and outcomes. The company also said it will reevaluate decisions on request. CNET reports Amazon said Monday it plans to open the first Amazon grocery store in a former 35,000 square foot Toys R Us location in Woodland Hills, that's a neighborhood of Los Angeles, in 2020. So that's coming next year. This is going to be distinct from Whole Foods, not going to be like Whole Foods, not going to be called Whole Foods. It's not going to use the Amazon Go Cashier free stuff. We don't know what else it's going to be, but it's going to be an Amazon grocery store. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported sources saying Amazon was also working on a location in Chicago and Philadelphia as well. Instagram is launching a new video feature called Rails for iOS and Android. It's only in Brazil for now, where it's actually called CNOS. Rails is similar to TikTok. It's going to look a lot like that to you, which lets you make 15 second video clips, set to music, share them with stories. There's a new top Rails section of Explorer where posts that go to viral will end up. Rails comes with a huge catalog of music as well. Anybody can remix audio from anyone else's video. So it's encouraging the meme evolution. The company points to Brazil being a good market to start with, iron out some potential technical issues and see how people like it. Due to the country's big Instagram population, musical culture, and thriving creator community. New data from OpenAI shows that the amount of power required for training AI models doubled every two years from 1959 to 2012, and then took off, started doubling every 3.4 months from 2012 to the present. That means the cost of training new AI developments is rising much faster than it did up until 2012. OpenAI suggests increasing funding to academic researchers to bridge the resource gap between academic and industrial labs researching artificial intelligence. Let's talk a little bit about Facebook turning on your camera. Oh, let's. This is the sort of story that is going to freak some people out. So here's the deal. Multiple Facebook users reported that their iPhone cameras seemed to be turned on in the background while they were scrolling through their news feeds looking at photos and videos. After watching a full-screen video, for example, then going back to the normal view, a bug appeared to slightly shift content a bit to the right with the camera view visible in some open space on the left. Seeing it reports that it was able to replicate the issue, although it seems limited to iOS 13, doesn't affect Android, at least not from anything that we've heard so far. Facebook's Vice President of Integrity, Guy Rosen, tweeted Tuesday that this seems like a bug and the company is looking into the matter. Yeah, I mean, it is certainly fun to just be knee-jerk and say, oh, a bug, I get it. But this isn't terribly useful for Facebook because a lot of people have their, for instance, the person who first put this on Twitter, have their camera pointing the other way. So you're going to see a lot of people's knees and carpets, and I don't think this is a terribly useful thing for Facebook to do on purpose. I don't believe that that's the case. Why the camera is already on and accessible is my question, right? You give Facebook permission to access your camera because you want to take a picture and load it up to your stories or add a photo to a post. So having access to your camera is not controversial in these cases. None of these people have said, I told it not to have access, and it's still there. But why it would be accessing that camera, maybe they just code it to do that at all times so that when you do open a post and start adding something to your newsfeed, you can get to the camera access quicker. I'm curious about that. I'm not sure that there's any kind of privacy violation there, even if that's what they're doing, though. But this is also a company that many people swear is listening to them via their smartphones, microphone, right? In fact, there's, I mean, long podcast episodes are made about, well, but how did they, how did they, you know, it's too, it's too coincidental. Facebook's obviously doing something even though they deny doing so. So you're going to get a large amount of folks saying, all right, well, even if it's not pointed at me, something's weird here, but it seems so clunky in execution that it does sound like a bug. Yeah, no, the fact that you can see it is definitely a bug, right? That's not intended behavior to show you your camera as a background. Right. You know, this is them priming stories to launch faster is my guess. Yeah. By having that camera already available whenever you need it so that when you pull it up, you're like, oh, wow, that camera opens super fast rather than having to launch the camera access from scratch every time you want to do a post. It's my best guess thing. Hey, we got some explanation about Netflix deprecating its older apps on Roku's and Samsung's and Visio TVs. Gizmodo talked to a spokesperson from Netflix and it turns out that those older apps that are losing access use Windows Media DRM. That is an older version of digital rights management provided by Microsoft. Netflix started using its replacement Play Ready, a newer version of Microsoft digital rights management, in 2010. But those older apps still use Windows Media DRM and are not able to implement Play Ready. So the culprit for losing your Netflix and older devices is digital rights management. If there was no DRM on this stuff, you wouldn't have a problem. But because I don't know why the older devices can't support Play Ready. They may just be that they don't have the processing power. They may not have the proper processors to support some of the DRM technology. That's a possibility. But for whatever reason, they're like, we can't do the DRM and we can't provide movies without DRM because that's what our license requires for us with stuff that we don't own ourselves and they probably want DRM on their own stuff because they're worried about making piracy too easy. But once again, DRM makes it harder for law-abiding people than it does for the pirates. Yeah. Well, I mean, we've got an answer. It doesn't sound like Netflix is going to do anything about it. They're like, here's the issue. That's what it is. We've got our own thing on newer TV sets. So too bad to say that, I guess. I don't know if they can do anything. It may be that Play Ready just won't run on these older devices. On something older, yeah. That's not impossible. So it may be that they just don't have any choice in the matter. The choice would be to take away DRM on the older apps. That would make them work great. But again, legally, they're probably not going to be able to do that. So sad, but also now more understandable to me why they're, it's not just a matter of not wanting to support these because of the cost. I'm sure that plays a part in it. Maybe they could spend some money researching how to implement Play Ready on these older platforms. But it mostly has to do with just an older, no longer supported version of DRM. Well, speaking of something that legality issues I'll always play into, healthcare. The Wall Street Journal reports that hospital operator Ascension has contracted Google to provide data analysis of health records for patients in its 150 U.S. hospitals. Project Nightingale will use Google Cloud Systems and A.I. as well to scan electronic records and help identify medical conditions. The data, including birth dates, lab results, diagnosis, hospitalization records, is collected legally by Ascension. But Ascension and Google have not told doctors or patients how the program is actually going to work. HIPAA rules let hospitals make data available to business partners without notification as long as the data is only used to help the hospital provide healthcare. Yeah, so I think this is well put here, which is put yourself in the mindset again. It's fun to just go after Google, right? Like, now they want our health records. But Google is more than one person. It's more than one division. And one of the divisions does cloud services the way HP, AWS, IBM, Dell, a lot of other companies do this. And one of the cloud services they provide is the ability for health professionals to store HIPAA compliant data in the cloud. That's not impossible. That's something that can totally be done. And what's going on here is Ascension went and said, oh, let's hire Google as the place where we'll do our cloud data. And that's not controversial. The fact that a hospital wants to do some cloud data analysis is not controversial. Google's got some great AI that can provide some great diagnostic benefits. The only things that are of any note here are that they didn't alert the patients, which they don't need to. If you take all of your HIPAA stuff and protect it by HIPAA and store it off site, you don't have to tell the patients, hey, it's being stored off site in a data center. And that's essentially what's going on here. They also didn't tell the doctors about it, which probably made the doctors uncomfortable. So really, I'm left with the only controversial thing here is that they hired Google and didn't plan for the fact that people freak out when Google is involved with your data these days. But Google wouldn't know that. Google is very used to this. You would think that the company would say, you know what, there's going to be some pushback because we're talking about medical and potentially sensitive data and records. Let's make sure that we're really forward-facing about exactly how this is going to work. It seems like that just would have been a better idea or we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. Yeah, it's a little failure and anticipation of the marketplace, perhaps. There is precedent where Google-owned DeepMind, Alphabet-owned DeepMind, had a situation where they interpreted UK law to say that they could work with a health company to develop and train an AI as long as that data was still under the management of the National Health Service and then a court ruled against them and said, no, you need to notify people if you're doing that. That's not the same as managing their health records. That's taking it and using it for another purpose. So there is some history of Google thinking they were doing something fine and not following it. But that's just more to your point, Sarah, of Google saying, hey, you know what? We might want to go to the extra step of informing doctors and patients. However, they may not want to do that because informing doctors and patients might cause more of a backlash than not. We've got a little backlash here, but what if a piece of mail went out to every patient and suddenly these patients who didn't know anything about this and wouldn't have cared otherwise think that the worst thing is happening? Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about healthcare and patient data, it's always going to be a very fine line to walk. Again, yes, you're right, Tom. There would be people who really wouldn't care about this one way or another, but if they get a little something saying, all right, just so you know, we're Google. We're great. We're going to put your data in the cloud. People go, oh, no, here we go. And that's the key here. This isn't Google doing it. This is Ascension doing it. And everybody's reacting as if Google went in and grabbed data. No, Ascension hired someone to store their data and provide them some diagnostic tools. If this wasn't Google, if they're like, we put your data on a server in a data center over here and we bought some software to run and look for diagnosis, no one would care. That's exactly what they're doing. They're just doing it from Google. So people are like, well, wait a minute, I don't trust them anymore. What else are they going to do with this? Yeah. Hey, November 11th was Singles Day in China and several other countries, mostly in Asia. It is the biggest shopping day in the world. Black Friday ain't nothing compared to this. Alibaba, which popularized Singles Day as a shopping day, set a record for sales with $38.4 billion in 24 hours. That's more than Amazon made from online retail sales in a quarter. They did in 24 hours on Singles Day. Wow. Almost all the brands that were involved with this chose to do a live stream this year on Alibaba's Team All in order to boost sales. So that's kind of a new trend in Singles Day. Taylor Swift did a live concert to kick off the whole thing. So they get in the biggest names in the world for this thing. The total for Alibaba was up 26% over last year, which sounds like a lot and it is, but it's the smallest growth percentage since Alibaba started promoting the event back in 2009. Well, I guess Singles Day is over. I actually, every year I sort of go, I wish this was sort of a bigger deal here, even though I understand it's not just for somebody who doesn't have a partner of some kind, right? It's turned into something completely different. It's used to buy things. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, that is quite a lot of money to be pulling in in such a short period, even considering the kind of revenue that Amazon could make in an entire quarter. Trumping that is really something special. I wonder what the best-selling item was, because there's so many companies participating at this point. It's just sort of like... There's so many items, yeah. Yeah, it's like year-end sale. Probably like a 100-way tie. Yeah, exactly. Because everything, like it's not just technology. Technology is certainly a part of it, but this is also like with all these live streams. I mean, they have celebrities coming in and doing comedy skits at concerts like Taylor Swift. She was the biggest of them, but it's a day of entertainment. I'll be honest, if we didn't already have Black Friday in the United States, I have a feeling Singles Day would be conquering the world. I think retailers would have jumped right on this, but retailers are sort of like, well, we already have ours here. So it'll be interesting to see where the Black Friday... Because Black Friday has started to move into Europe a little bit, where the Black Friday area will end, where the Singles Day area will end eventually. I don't know. Can't we have both? I like a good sale, you know? I mean, it's just going to become November at that point, right? They're just going to do sales all month long, because there are already some Black Friday deals out already. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if they're going to have a Black Friday deal, but Facebook announced Facebook Pay Tuesday, launching this week in the U.S. It'll let you store money in a wallet that can then be used to pay for fundraisers or payments between users or event tickets or in-game purchases. Some things on Facebook's Marketplace as well. It will support PayPal, most credit cards, and debit cards as well. Facebook Pay will be available in your settings of either Facebook or Messenger and eventually will come to Instagram and WhatsApp as well. I feel that it's incumbent upon me to say this has nothing to do with Libra or Calibra, either one. Libra is an independent association that Facebook is a part of that's trying to develop a cryptocurrency that Facebook developed. Calibra is the Libra cryptocurrency wallet that Facebook all caps the company wants to start for you to use your Libra. Neither of those are this. This is like your Sony wallet where you just put some money in and then you can spend it on your PS4 and on any other Sony stuff that you want to get. This is just Facebook's way of saying, hey, we'll make it easier to buy stuff across our platforms. There are so many competing platforms that are less restrictive. I understand that Facebook's whirling this out slowly. It'll be across the Facebook, all the Facebook big platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp among them. It's only in the U.S. and it's only on Facebook and Messenger for now. I get that because you've got a lot of users to deal with and you want to roll out a little bit more slowly. This is just not something that anything in my life is that I'm ever like, gosh, I wish I could just put some money in my Facebook wallet. That's probably because you don't buy things on Facebook. No. I buy things all the time, other places. I use Cash App sometimes or Venmo or PayPal. This is for, I want to send you some money. We only talk on Messenger or eventually WhatsApp. That makes it easy because I'm already talking to you there. I can transfer some money to you. It's for, oh, I go on to Facebook Marketplace and I buy stuff regularly. There are people like that and they're like, I don't want to have to come up with some kluji third party system to pay people. It'd be nice if I just had something in Facebook where like, oh, do you take Facebook pay? Great. If you're not thinking about Facebook as a place for sending money or buying tickets or buying things off the Marketplace, then yeah, this doesn't make sense. But really this is no different than putting your payment information in Amazon, to be honest. It's also very American of me to be like, why would I want it to all be in one place? Like WeChat does. I already have all these other third party solutions. Yeah, but this isn't, no, but I think that's a really good point. This isn't like WeChat. This is like Amazon. This is like saving your payment information in Amazon. It's just that Facebook is like, oh, well we own a couple of more properties. So we'll add it to those too. So once you've signed up in one place, you can use it in all the stuff we own. If they add this to Oculus so that you can use Facebook pay in your Oculus, that would make sense too. But they're not talking about making this a way to pay for other things the way WeChat does. WeChat lets you pay a merchant. This isn't that. This is definitely just when you're on Facebook you can use your Facebook pay to buy things on Facebook. Now they did call it Facebook pay, not Facebook wallet, which makes me think they sort of left the door open for someday this to become a bigger deal. We'll see. Hey, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. It is Disney Plus Day last night at around 10 o'clock. My wife came in saying, Twitter says it's here and we downloaded the Disney Plus app and watched the Mandalorian immediately. But we were lucky. It's an old story, highly anticipated thing launches and the interest exceeds even the high expectations of the company launching it to cause some users to have problems. And even if those users aren't most users, they're loud on social media and they cause the headlines to call the launch a rocky start. And Disney Plus fallen right into that category in the grand tradition of HBO. We're launching Game of Thrones on HBO now. Disney Plus experienced some users reporting problems logging in during its U.S. launch Tuesday. The company posted on Twitter that demand exceeded our high expectations. Disney owns a majority stake in the Disney streaming services, formerly called BAMTech, formerly Major League Baseball Advanced Media. It's one of the premier back-end streaming providers. It does not appear to be a problem with the streaming. It does not appear the problem with the CDN, with the hosting of the video. Variety says the problem appears to be rooted in Disney Plus's authentication system. And that is a place that you would see more of a problem the day that everybody is signing on for the first time on multiple apps. Those are the processes which handle the process of verifying a user is a valid subscriber with Disney's own apps and third-party devices. Now, that could be the first time you're logging in. You get a problem because the authentication server is swamped and it can't validate you. It can also happen when you're already logged in because every so often an app will go and check to see if you're valid, to be like, wait, is this person still logged in? Is that token still good? And so if the authentication server can't validate, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that token's fine, you can keep them logged in, that could log you out. So this seems to be a likely cause of many of the problems, maybe not all of them. Theo Schlossnäggel, CTO and founder of Circonus, whose platform provides real-time infrastructure services and monitoring for customers, including Major League Baseball, which still uses Disney streaming services, said you can design for the whole world to show up, but unless it's a one-day event like the Super Bowl, at a certain point you get diminishing returns, he said they probably made wise investment choices. So he's saying these problems today mean they stopped spending money to anticipate the problem at some point, and he's guessing that probably was wise that even with people having problems today, those problems will probably go away tomorrow and the day is unusual, and spending all of that money wouldn't have ended up saving them money, even if they're getting a little bit of a bad press today about the login problems. And as you mentioned, a few people having login problems, you were not one of them, saying, ah, something wrong here. Of course, that's the way the headlines always go. Disney Plus, highly anticipated, but boy, they messed that one up. I don't think anybody that I have talked to who's very excited about Disney Plus, for the most part, I'm hearing this is really nice, great library, this is a very nice, beautiful platform. Pretty impressive. That's what I've heard. So no one has said, ah, I've been having login problems, although I'm sure it's very frustrating for people who were also excited who did have those. Yeah, Chuck Windig, an author and a friend of mine on Twitter was complaining that he had to try six different platforms before he got one of them to install. He wasn't even able to get the app to download and install. I think one of the things Disney did wrong and I think this was a marketing-based decision, I could be wrong, but it feels like a marketing-based decision was to not allow you to download and log into the service ahead of time. Yesterday, during the day, I was looking like, hey, is that app there? I'll go ahead and get it downloaded and get ready. And they didn't have it. So they did this to themselves where they wanted it to all come out at once, and everybody was hammering the app servers, everyone was hammering the authentication servers, downloading and logging in at the same time. And you had to know that was happening. I don't know why, unless you want to make a big splash, you don't put that app out earlier and say, here it is if you want to get ready, the service will actually launch on November 12th. Maybe they thought that would confuse people more. I don't know. Yeah, it's probably, there probably aren't that many people who said, well, this seems to be a janky rollout. I'll never come back, Disney Plus. I've canceled my subscription. That would be the kind of worst-case scenario, right? It's probably people saying, I don't know, I'll try later. It's launch day. People are frustrated if it's not working for them. I would be too, absolutely. Especially if you're paying for something. If it works tomorrow, which it probably will, I think they'll be fine. If they keep having problems tomorrow every day after that. Then you're sort of like, there might be servers out there that need to be upgraded, that sort of thing. Well, yeah, if you're enjoying Disney Plus or if you're not, if you've had issues, let us know. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, Disney Plus Stories. Been very active there lately as anticipation of the rollout was reaching a fever pitch. You can submit stories on anything that you find interesting and you can also vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in our conversation in our Discord. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. Let's check in with Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler who's back with a tip for mobile bank app users. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you use credit cards, you might also want to check to see if it has a smartphone app. Chase, for instance, which does a lot of the popular travel credit cards has an app and if you go into that app they often have special deals that are limited time and you just click that you're interested in that deal and all you have to do then is use your credit card at that particular merchant and they'll give you money. I don't know about you but I hate to turn down when somebody's trying to give me money. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. It's kind of annoying. I've had these sort of situations where you go in and you're like, oh, I have to click to say yes, give me a discount on stuff at FedEx and I'm like, do I want to do that? I probably won't go to FedEx and I'm like, well, why not? What if I do? If I don't click this, I'm definitely not getting the discount so I might as well do it. I got some discounts on some gas cars. I don't remember what the company was. It was 76 or something from through my bank at one point and it was a little cumbersome. I never really knew how much money was on the card after I started using it but again, it felt like free money anyway. Alright, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. Brian Sweeten says, I just wanted to let you know in case it helps you with your marketing. What finally caused me to decide to finally start helping DTNS is Tom's extra show on Wi-Fi 6 a few months ago. Thank you, Brian. I want to do more of those sort of explainer episodes in there and I tend to give them to the patrons first so it's a good thing to know about. The Wi-Fi 6 one, if you're wondering though, is in the main feed for everybody. You're just going to scroll back a few months to find it. We also got Kenji and a bunch of other people. I apologize, there's like Apple, I'm just using Kenji to represent you all. He said, I don't have AirPods Pro but I saw a Mac rumors post in my feed and thought of you. The first tip is about removing them from the charging case. It says, Apple has designed them in such a way that you simply have to push on the back of each earbud and it will swivel right out between your thumb and forefinger. That actually makes it sound more complicated than it is in practice. I was complaining about how hard to get a hold of them because of the little rubber thing at the end but once I saw these tips from Imore and Mac rumors I realized, oh, I'm just stuck in old habits and so you just push from the back and they come right out. It's super easy. I will take away that criticism although I did respond to a couple of tweets and emails at first saying, I shouldn't have to be taught how to use these. They still should just work the way I want them to but I haven't been having any problems since then. I'll give you that one. Thank you, Kenji. Thank you everybody else who sent in that same tip. It has been very helpful. And also special shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Martin James, Bjorn Andre and Tim Aschman. We also have a bunch of new patron rewards. Right now there's a special offer going on. If you sign up before November 28th you will get a greeting card sent from DTNS with Len Peralta Art on it. It's our holiday wishes for you in art form. So you can actually buy the art yourself at LenPeraltaStore.com or just sign up at patreon.com. And have it mailed to you by us in December. That's just one of the ways we're trying to show appreciation for the folks who get value out of our show and give that value back at patreon.com. DTNS. www.dailytechnewshow.com We are also live Monday through Friday. That's 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.