 Coming up on DTNS, Ford gets more autonomous. Baidu leaves the partnership on AI and Google takes on Pinterest, sort of. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 18th, 2020. From Studio Redwood, I am Sarah Lane. And lovely North Olmsted, I'm Rich Strafilano. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, we were talking about dog etiquette, shocker. We were also talking about all sorts of other stuff. And you can get the wider conversation on our expanded show, which is Good Day Internet. It's a lot of fun. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS to get the expanded show. Let's start with a few text things you should know. Google released the link to text fragment extension for Chrome. They have a way with names, which lets users create a link to a specific portion of highlighted text by right clicking on a highlight. Google says the link will work with all Chromium-based browsers from version 80 upwards, but note that Firefox and Safari teams have not confirmed they will support the feature. Earlier this month, Google released the ability to navigate to search results based on highlighted snippets. Trying to search giant Baidu has left the partnership on AI, which is a US-led effort to solve ethical challenges raised by artificial intelligence. Baidu cited the cost of membership and recent financial pressures for the move, and in a statement said it, quote, shares the vision of the partnership on AI and is committed to promoting the ethical development of AI technologies. We are in discussions about renewing our membership and remain open to other opportunities to collaborate with industry peers on advancing AI. However, everybody declined to say what Baidu's cost was for membership in the first place. In a regulatory filing, Tish disclosed that it will close on the acquisition of Boost Mobile on July 1st. In terms of the deal, we're not disclosed, but it was estimated to be worth about $1.4 billion. As part of its acquisition of Sprint, T-Mobile was required to sell Boost Mobile and provide seven years of network access to Dish in order to create a fourth national carrier. Several publishers, including Square Enix, withdrew games from Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service soon after it launched after Nvidia listed purchases made on Steam as available to play without publisher permission. Now Square Enix has returned 14 PC titles to the service, including entries in the Dave's X and Tomb Raider franchises. Square Enix told the Verge that this was due to Nvidia's new opt-in policy, where the company would only list games after getting explicit publisher approval. Several Square Enix titles included in that original GeForce Now launch are still not available on the service, including the Batman Arkham series, Final Fantasy XV, and Octopath Traveler. Researchers at Awake Security speaking to Reuters report that a series of Chrome extensions available through the Chrome Web Store were part of a spyware campaign to obtain browser histories and also gain access credentials to internal business tools. Awake estimates that these extensions were downloaded 32 million times and were mostly positioned as tools to either convert files or warn of questionable websites. Google was alerted by Awake last month and said it removed more than 70 malicious add-ons, although it's unclear who organized the campaign at the first place. And Facebook took down ads run by US President Trump's re-election campaign for breaching its policies on hate speech. The ads featured an upside-down triangle, which was used by Nazi Germany to classify political prisoners in concentration camps. In a statement to CNN, Facebook said, We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol. All right, let's talk a little bit more about autonomous vehicles. And specifically what Ford is doing, the company revealed how its hands-free driving feature will work on the upcoming Mustang Mach-E. To use this Active Drive Assist feature, customers will have to purchase the Active 2.0 prep package, which options the vehicle with a forward-facing camera and also radar sensors. The Active Drive Assist feature will launch later in 2021 and will require a separate purchase to activate it, although no pricing was announced. So you don't really know what you have to pay in order to get this. Until then, though, Mach-E owners will have access to lane-centering, adaptive cruise control, Active Park Assist, Blind Spot Assist, through Ford's existing co-pilot 360 driver assistance program, and Active Drive Assist will work on highways mapped by Ford. The company also plans to have 100,000 miles of highway across all 50 US states and Canada available at launch. Ford will also use an infrared camera installed on the steering wheel to ensure that drivers are paying attention when they have Drive Assist activated. You know, it's funny. We talk a lot about how this is going to be a thing at some point, you know, autonomous vehicles completely. Well, that's sort of another conversation, but having assisted autonomy for drivers sounds great. Everything that Ford laid out that's coming next year also sounds great. Everything that it's like, well, but for now, here's what is available to our customers. I'm like, my Volvo does all that. I mean, it's cool. It's great. I mean, it's actually really cool technology. And if you understand how it works, fine. But it's not like this is somewhat of like a, what, what am I excited about right now? You're excited about paying for an additional skew on your car so that you can have the opportunity to pay for a software, you know, for a software license effectively later. It's interesting to see Ford take this very Tesla approach to this. While at the same time having a fairly conservative approach to the actual autonomy, right? Be limiting it to highways, you know, having a much more aggressive way to monitor that drivers are paying attention and pre-mapping essentially all these highways. I wonder if that's part of the delay too. I wonder if the software is there and they're just waiting to get to that 100,000 mile mark. I have no context for how much of U.S. highways that is. That seems like a big number. I have no idea though, like, you know, I guess how comprehensive that could possibly be. But yeah, it's, I mean, to me, the story is, you know, Ford kind of having it both ways where they get to be this forward facing tech company and hey, we're going to sell you this license Tesla style, but also being like, we don't want to get sued out of existence. We're still an old car company. Let's not go crazy here. Well, on the infrared camera on the steering wheel, you know, which will in some capacity know if you're there and paying attention kind of thing. That's interesting because the way that my car works now is if I have Drive Assist enabled, I got to tap at the very least. I have to just like tap the steering wheel every so often or else it just shuts down as like you're not paying enough attention. But that's not a camera, you know, and there are times where I'm like, this is a bad way to do this. You know, it's like, I was here, I'm totally paying attention kind of thing. So the more that we can sort of go forward in the senses is interesting. By the way, 47,432 miles of road in America. So I think there's about 28,000 of the Internet Interstate Highway in Canada. So that's a lot of road. If it's 100,000, that's that's the vast majority. All right. Well, next up here, the UK government announced that the National Health Service will no longer use a centralized coronavirus tracing app back end and will shift to using Google and Apple's Exposure Notification API. The agency has been testing both models with the centralized model providing more accurate distances between users, but only detecting about 4% of iPhones and only about 75% of Android phones. The Exposure Notification API offered weaker a distance calculation, but better device recognition across both platforms. According to the head of the UK's Trace and Test Program, Baroness Dido Harding, releasing the app will be dependent on solving the distance calculation issues. While the government says the app is on track to be released in the fall, Harding has said that there are no guarantees the distance issues could be resolved. It's interesting that the UK is not the only country in Europe or across the world that we've seen kind of say we want to get the centralized approach. We want to get all that information to our health services that we can by having that centralized approach and running into privacy or functionality issues down the road now. They're certainly not the first country. Yeah, but although it is interesting to see that Apple and Google are the faces of where people want to go. Yeah, definitely. What's interesting to me is holding out that idea that, and this may be a regulatory issue, this may be a case of covering your liability or something like that, but holding out that possibility that, hey, we may never get this working, it speaks to the degree of issues that they're having. Essentially, one of the findings of their report was saying that they couldn't tell the difference, the Exposure Notification API, the Google and Apple one, whether someone had a phone out or in their pocket, which is a matter of a meter or two in some instances, and that was having a major impact on how practical it was. A meter or two, that's a large pocket. That purse is far away from you, sir, but no, I think that that's the interesting thing here is saying, okay, well, we need to know, we have to have information on devices, and distance calculation also really important, but when we've crunched the numbers, it's better that we have device recognition, and that's why we have to move over to the API. A lot of people are being like, this is crazy about face by the UK government. It's like, I mean, they were testing both, it doesn't seem so crazy to me, they just were like, this one seems like it will give us the data that we want in a better way. Well, because there's no reason to roll it out if it's not going to recognize devices, which is the entire point of contact tracing is that you are blasting out saying to everybody that you were around that you now have this thing, it'd be better if you went and got tested. So my question here with any of these programs is, are we going to get a contact tracing app at a point where contact tracing is not quite the same a burning issue that we need to have it probably now? Like is this going to be much in the same way that vaccines historically, you wind up getting the vaccine after the virus has kind of run its course? Are we going to see a similar situation with some of these apps? And at that point, how mandatory will they be? Moving on, Google's in-house incubator called Area 120 launched a new project called Keen to help users track their interests. It's sort of like the Google Alert service meets Pinterest and lets users monitor the web for specific content. I set up one for Jeb Bush. It then surfaces results using both machine learning and human collaboration. Keen is available on the web and Android and starts with you entering a topic you want to research, Jeb. Then you get a pinboard of images linking to content from Google that's supposed to match your interests. I indeed got pictures of Jeb Bush. Well, and if that's what you wanted, great. I actually found this whole thing very interesting this morning because I don't pay that much attention to Pinterest even though I know it has a huge user base. It's sort of like, I don't know, the pinboarding culture just, I never figured out why it was right for me, but I think it's cool. And the idea that Google's like, oh, we can replicate this, but just using AI based on all the data that we already have, I set up a board as well, not for Jeb Bush, but for Boxer Dogs this morning because I think about dogs a lot. It asked me right off the bat, what do you want to know about Boxer Dogs? Breed, information, where to buy them, rescue centers. It was pretty well propagated. I chose a few things and I got my visual board and I was like, this has some legs, especially if you're one of the people like me who still does use the concept of Google Alerts, which is like an antiquated, crappy way to follow things, but I still do that because that was just my option with Google. This is a nice step forward. The Google Alerts lets me know whenever the Strafalino Bridge in Connecticut is under construction, but what's interesting to me is that this kind of solves my issue with Pinterest, which I was kind of interested to check it out in that after a while, I love the idea of getting started on Pinterest where it's like, oh man, I'm really into this vintage design thing and I'm going to pin all this stuff and then you kind of get exhausted with it and then keeping up with it with fresh content almost feels like, to me, it always feels like a chore. I was like, oh, if I can just, if Google can just feed this to me, my results were a little bit more mixed. I did one for like film photography or something I'm kind of into and it really brought up like the most surface level. I mean, it was really like just googling for film photography and auto-filling what that was. To me, it didn't really, and it wasn't clear like what I would dismiss and what, like, if I dismiss something, is it like, okay, is it going to take that entire category away? Is it helping to filter it out? So I like the idea. We'll see if the implementation still goes. I mean, the thing is that the results aren't going to be any better than Google results. They're just trying to give it to you in a, you know, more pleasant modern way type thing. And I mean, I mean, before we move on, I mean, the whole Pinterest thing, one of the reasons that Pinterest just befuddles me is half the time it's like, oh, there's a clickable link because maybe there was a couch in a Pinterest image that I liked. And so I'm supposed to like click through, but it doesn't really click through to where the couch would be bought. It just, you know, a lot of that stuff is, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So Sarah, what you're saying is Google Keen, please clap. Perhaps. Speaking of clapping, Amazon announced it will stream four Premier League matches on Twitch as well as making them available for free on Prime Video. The first match will be Crystal Palace versus Burnley on June 29th. And Amazon worked with EA Sports to provide the option of watching the matches with synthetic crowd noise through EA's at Stadium Atmosphere Tech. I hate that part of it, but I did pull a couple of people that I know who care about Premier League a lot more than me and said, is this a big deal? And they were like, yeah, it is. Well, look, I mean, the Premier League is something that is tremendously popular throughout the world. I believe that the most, I mean, certainly in professional soccer or football, as it's known, around the world are the most followed and valuable franchises. The Premier League certainly has a few of them. What is interesting here is, or two things. Number one, we are coming into a world where Apple and Amazon specifically are going to be big rights players as we go along, especially now that we have kind of this massive adoption of internet technology. I think that places like Twitch will be more of an attractive place for major sports leagues to think about putting their content. Amazon has already done this with NFL games for Thursday night sports. They obviously have struck a deal here. I'm curious. Two things. Number one, is Twitch the place where they want to put live sports? Do they not want to build out a live prime video product that is specifically dedicated for this is where you can see live sports? If that's the case, it's very interesting, and it really adds a whole new pillar to what holds up Twitch beyond just video games and chatting and mobile live streaming. For me, this really kind of leads into something that a lot of sports leagues and I think a lot of broadcasts and trying to solve that kind of a nut to crack is adding that kind of live engagement to sporting events. We've seen all sorts of follower hashtag on Twitter and tweet about the Super Bowl or whatever you want to do. Having it on Twitch gives you that immediate platform where you can have that kind of interaction. Depending on how that's done, I imagine that could be quite chaotic, although Twitter can be that same way. I think that could provide a really meaningful way for possibly even some additional revenue. I could just think like advertisers just drooling with super engaged fans engaged in chat and interaction on that platform going forward. Don't even think about chat. What they're allowing here is co-streaming. Okay. Now you will be able, if let's say, and I know that the three of us have long talked about it, becoming commentators for Premier League Soccer and we're all looking forward to Crystal Palace versus Burnley, we can unite as a three-person booth on this Twitch channel and we can co-stream that and do our own commentary on top of it. Now that right now is a novelty, but in a world where Major League Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football becomes something that is on Twitch and they do allow co-streaming permanently, that's a career possibly for some people. That's a whole new genre of entertainment. Well, the whole idea of podcasting, what we're doing right now is there are some limitations with what we could do. Do we all want to watch a movie together? Well, we can't do it on the show. That's a takedown. But if there's a certain kind of genre that you're interested in, like you said, Justin, want to be a sportscaster? Well, you have a lot more options with something like this than you ever had before because of the licensing that the company already has. Yeah. Now the question then becomes whether or not these leagues are going to be happy with the idea that their products will have whatever voices at whatever language that they, and I mean that in terms of course, like bad language and not like English or French, but it'll be interesting to see. Well, folks, to get all the tech headlines in each day in about five minutes, subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, so this story, it actually kind of broke right in the middle of yesterday's show. So we wanted to give ourselves a little bit of time to kind of parse it out and figure it out. Twitter has rolled out an update that allows people to record and tweet sounds. This is iOS only for now, but you know, they say that it will be available to other platforms soon. So each voice tweet captures 140 seconds of audio. How cute of you, Twitter. Ah, bring it back to 140, which is sort of silly because 140 characters doesn't even apply anymore, but that's what it is. The company also said it would continue to work on accessibility and work for anybody that the problem is that accessibility is going to be an issue for anybody hard of hearing. And that's where some folks are taking the company to task, saying you rolled out a feature and the first question was well, what about people who can't hear anything and what are you going to do about those people? And the company says we'll get there. Vice also as well as several other publications made the point that audio is more labor intensive to moderate than texts or photos. Somebody's got to listen to this whole thing. You can't just like glance at it, right? It requires moderators to listen to the audio. They have to act on it. Typically, moderators are asked to make a decision on whether content violates a platform's rules in a matter of seconds. Well, when you have 140 seconds of audio, you can't do that. So there's sort of this moderation issue. The company doesn't have a really good stance on that either. And so you get a lot of pylon of oh, here we go again, Twitter. You know, you're offering something that's going to be exploited and you haven't thought it through. Again, limited rollout. If you have access to it, you'll see a new waveform icon beside the camera icon when you're composing a tweet, which would allow you to add an audio tweet. Audio can only be added to original tweets. And I think that that's something that a lot of people are being like, you know what? If somebody's going to stalk me, now they're just going to give me a death threat via audio on Twitter based on something that I wrote. That's not actually how it's going to work, at least according to Twitter. So you can't include audio, replies or retweets with a comment. You can add them as your own original tweet, but that's not a way to be able to harass people. So I think some of that might be misconstrued. The company says, quote, your current profile photo will be added as static image on your audio attachment and will not refresh if you update your profile photo. That part of it is a little weird, because I don't know, I guess the company is just like, let's keep it visual. Let's just, let's make sure that some sort of profile imagery is attached, but it won't be updated based on your actual profile photo. I don't really have a huge problem with this. I don't feel like as a Twitter user, I am in danger of getting these horrible audio replies. Again, not even a feature, but there's not a huge way that I feel like I would be harassed more than I normally would. But maybe I'm missing something. What do you guys think? I mean, look, it's not audio. It's video. They're just processing your audio and making a video out of it. And that's the reason why your image won't change. If it were an audio player that they were building into this, then they would be able to dynamically change your thing. But they are effectively creating what is a totally similar thing to what people have been doing forever, which is uploading audio clips with static images or finding a clip from a song or something like that. And you have to usually have to go through a video editor and then upload it as a video. This is an internal way that now you can generate these short videos that are essentially audio. That being said, Twitter should have known that they were updating a feature on Twitter. Like this is not the this thing is innocuous, right? And but at the same time, they should have known I'm shocked that they didn't roll this out as a beta for some country first so they could understand what some of the issues were and catch a little bit of the blowback and at least have the safe position of saying, Oh, no, when we roll this out to the US, of course, we'll have closed captioning. Of course, we'll have all these other things for accessibility. Instead, they roll it out. Twitter does what Twitter does, which is complain. And it's it's mind blowing to me that Twitter doesn't realize who they're changing this platform for. You know, Justin, it's I didn't even think about that is they're literally just doing audiograms for. Yes, for Twitter. At this, you know, like they contact the folks at Headliner and they're like, OK, we're just going to we're going to put this on the platform. Now, I do think it has, I guess, outside of that moderation at you, which is really the same moderation issue that they do have on video. And it's a valid conversation to have, but it's it's a conversation we could have been having. We have been having for quite some time now. The accessibility stuff I do think is important. I don't understand it. It would be fairly simple to integrate a, you know, a caption API, I'm sure, on the back end. Now, would they be laughably bad almost certainly? And I'm I'm sure part of the reason is the reason the reason why is that everything's programmatic right now. And if you if you do a programmatic closed caption, because again, this isn't an audio thing that can be updated. There's a reason why it won't change because they're creating video. That's why. Well, and that that also answers a little bit my question of why because at first I was thinking like, oh, it just auto cycles, right? It just goes through and, you know, and kind of in a very viney kind of way, I guess, or just like a gift, an audio gift that makes no sense. But that kind of raises or answers the question because their video does the exact same thing. And it's just basically video with a static image. I do think it has some fantastic potential for some completely unlistable Twitter rants, which I'm really looking forward to seeing. I am as well. You know, it's funny. It's when you when you talk about like, anytime a company like Facebook or Twitter, Google to some extent or Apple, release something, you know, you have, you know, the mass of people saying like, this is a terrible idea. You haven't thought this through. And and and one thing that we didn't even mention is, you know, people saying, you know what this is, this is big data. And Twitter knows that voice information is really, really important. And, you know, look at this space. There there is so much. And I'm not saying that that's, you're necessarily being like conspiracy theorist, but there there's a lot of if a company like Twitter releases something where they're like, hey, new feature. People are like, oh no, how could you, you know, look at what you did and the timing of it. You know, you get a lot of that. And so it's like, it remains to be seen if this is even going to be like a feature that anybody uses, because that happens too. Yeah. And also it does bear mentioning that they have had a almost identical similar feature with audio cards for certain sites that they support it for like a sound cloud, where the ability to have this kind of audio there is an actual audio player and not a, you know, a video. Well, the conversation always continues on our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. And thanks everybody who does that. We really appreciate your support. Rich, what's in the mail bag? Sarah, I'm glad you asked. Jeff wrote in, he said, I heard you all talking about putting your desk facing the middle of the room versus facing a wall. I hear you, but the problem I always had was all that cable ugliness you see coming into the room. How do you handle that when your desk is facing the middle of the room? Yeah, this was a GDI conversation, but I felt like, you know, Rich and Justin, Roger, Tom, myself, like we all have gone through this. And Justin, I wanted you to weigh in because I know that, you know, one of the rooms in your house is the room that is dedicated to doing this. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. We took our studio apartment and made it a studio plus studio apartment in that one room apartment. We made it a studio plus studio. So yeah, the one room that I'm in, my desk is in the middle of the room. Now I will say this, I don't know if it would be, if it weren't for the fact that both of our walls, there's only one wall that actually is a wall. Everything else either has a doorway or a closet or windows on it. So that's part of why it's in the center of the room. But it does, it is extraordinarily helpful from a studio perspective where you do need to upgrade things and get behind and unplug wires and plug wires in sometimes on the fly. So it is very helpful. And I will say, you can get a cable management, you know, thing to kind of go on the back of your desk, you know, like if you have an IKEA desk, they sell those all the time. And the thing you can get decorative power cords, right? These are the big new hotness. You can get them in all pretty braided colors, make it a feature, not a detriment. No, it's true. But Jeff, to answer your question, it is something that you kind of have to just get used to. The back of your situation is going to be in the middle of the room often and not always the prettiest. Yes, you have options to dress it up and everything, but it kind of, I don't know, at least for me, it's sort of like, what's best for my day to day operation rather than like the person who might walk in here once a month and be like, oh, look at those cables. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Sonya Viney and Ruchan Brantley and Martin James. And thank you to Justin, Robert Young for joining us on the show today. Justin, where can people find more of your great stuff if they are so inclined? You can find me on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast, which I'm told may or may not be the first result that pops up when you type politics in on Spotify. So it is for me. Your results may vary, but go ahead and do this science project for yourself. If you want to subscribe on Spotify, I'm heading out tonight to go cover the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma over the weekend. So if you want content about that Friday, and we're going to do a special episode Monday, then make sure you go on there right now and get subscribed. Excellent. Hey, you might have noticed Tom Merritt isn't here. Maybe you didn't, but you probably did. Tom is doing this thing once a month where he works on a new series called Know a Little More. It's a deep dive of sorts. And he's really, really good at that. In the first episode, Tom is explaining 5G, what it is, what it isn't, and how you might benefit from it, or how you might not. Know a Little More is about 5G and look for it in your Patreon feed and subscribe at KnowALittleMore.com. New stuff from the folks here. You can always support our show at any level. And we really appreciate everybody who does so at DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern Time, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Len Beralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Time and Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.