 Coming up on DTS Justin helps us understand new antitrust bills aimed at big tech in another addition of creepy or not creepy Amazon's drivers get surveillance cam strained on them and pay attention Web 2.0 kids delicious is back. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 4th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And the show's producer Roger Chang. Oh, we were just talking about Lil Yachty's new movie. It's going to be about Uno. That was on Good Day Internet. If you'd like to get that conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Myanmar's new military government ordered that local telecoms temporarily block Facebook owned services in the country from midnight on February 3rd through February 7th claiming that the platform was contributing to instability. The digital rights nonprofit access now estimates that there are 22 million Facebook users in the country. A new report by Canada's Privacy Commission found Clearview AI's facial recognition database to be illegal mass surveillance and said it sent a letter of intention to the company telling it to cease services in the country and delete Canadian faces. Clearview has not operated in Canada since July due to the investigation and says it will allow Canadians to opt out of the database, but will challenge the determination in court. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is on a bit of a roll this week. The latest from Kuo is word of another lens supplier for the main next-gen iPhone, perhaps called the iPhone 13 that's expected next year and its camera. Kuo says that Sunny Optical successfully passed Apple's approvals process for iPad lenses and are likely to be approved to make the main camera lens for the iPhone 13 lineup. Currently, Largon, Yu Jingguang, and Kankatsu supply lenses to LG Inatec for incorporation into the camera module so Sunny Optical would be yet an additional supplier for that lens. Parler co-founder John Matz announced he's been fired as CEO by the company's board. In a statement, Matz said, quote, I've met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech, and my view of how the Parler site should be managed. He supposedly proposed expanding automated content moderation on the platform as well as a full ban on accounts tied to designated domestic terror organizations. The blockchain-based service network or BSN backed by the Chinese government acts as an operating system for blockchain program development. China's State Information Center, an affiliate to China's top economic and reform planner, credit card processor Union Pay, Telecom China Mobile, and Beijing-based startup called Red Date are all involved in supporting both consortium and public blockchains. This week, BSN announced it will roll out a permission diversion of Cosmos, that's a network comprised of many independent blockchains, and calls itself the Internet of Blockchains. So Justin, you'd have no concerns of just jumping on an open blockchain from China, would you? No, Tom. Certainly no red flags there. I mean, the State Information Center is part of the deal. I don't know what you'd be worried about. Yeah. All right, let's talk a little more about the information given some details on Apple's alleged upcoming mixed reality headset. Sources have more details, including a rendering this time of what they say is Apple's VRAR headset. A lot of the details are similar to what we heard from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg earlier last month. It's expected to use fabric mesh, run on an Apple design chip, cost a lot, although we got a number as much as $3,000. The headset may have more than a dozen cameras for hand tracking, LiDAR sensors for room mapping and AR effects, dual 8K displays and eye tracking. To save battery life, the information sources says Apple would use foveated rendering. That's when you only render in full resolution what your eyes are looking at. Everything in the periphery can be a little lower. Sources say Apple has not finalized input control, but the options they're considering are a combination of hand tracking, eye tracking, a dial on the headset or something they call a thimble like accessory. Oh boy. Well, the thing that jumped out to me first because we have talked about this before, this rumor has been swirling really for years, but it seems to be more of a reality than ever is that $3,000 price point. Now, again, it's a rumor and yes, Apple tends to make things that are similar to other products that are more expensive and then says, but it's Apple. So, you know, we can do that sort of thing. $3,000? Oh my goodness. You know, compare that to the Oculus 2 for $300. That's a crazy price point. I don't know how the company could get away with such a thing. I mean, I hate it when we start debating this early in the process, exactly what the price point is, as if it were announced as a consumer thing and we're going to judge it against other consumer things. I could see by the time that Apple releases a headset like this that we do see a $1,000 version of the Oculus Quest. I don't think that that will necessarily be maybe the most important thing. What is very interesting to me here is the idea that they seem to be going away from any kind of physical, haptic feedback giving device. Oculus does do hand tracking, but this thimble like accessory might be a way that you could have something on your hand that could give you some kind of feedback without it being a controller that you are holding in your hand. The idea that this will be more expensive than every other headset of virtual lock. You can take that to the bank, mostly because you'll need to withdraw a lot of money to buy this, but the idea that it's $3,000, I highly doubt. Apple, specifically when they're in this rumors game, they have a habit of feeding a higher number. So even when they come above the rest of the market, it's lower than what has been reported and it looks like they're more economical than they would be otherwise. You know, the only other note before we move on is the dual AK displays, you go on paper, it's like, ooh, that sounds fancy. I can't tell the difference between a 4K and 8K television, not with my own human eyes. Maybe if something's that close to you, it will make a difference, but kind of remains to be seen, you know, what these specs actually mean. That's where 8K supposedly does make the difference is when it's really close up, which is why the TV thing. It's like, well, I don't sit right in front of the TV, but with the headset, that could make a difference. I do think it will make a measurable difference in a VR headset. Well, next month, Pixel phone owners will get a feature in the Google Fit Health app that can measure their breathing and also their pulse rates just using the phones built in camera. For measuring breathing, you have to prop the phone up against something. So it's facing you, then the app will guide you to frame yourself a certain way so it can see your torso and then measure the rise and fall of your chest as you're breathing. For heart rate, it can measure subtle changes in the color under your skin when you actually place your finger on the rear camera. So front facing camera for breathing, rear facing for heart rate. Measurement is calculated on the device. You actually have to choose to save results to your fit account, so it's not going to do that without your consent. You can also delete those results whenever you want and Google conducted clinical trials on multiple skin tones, multiple ages, multiple lighting conditions, but the features aren't yet FDA approved, so they aren't meant for medical use just yet. Even so, nice to have a lot of this stuff built in. If you don't have a fitness tracker and you have a Pixel, you can at least get certain things done. Yeah, it's not something you're going to use constantly, right? But it's sort of, in a way, it's sort of a proof of concept of look what your Pixel can do. And I imagine they will expand this to other Android models out there potentially if the cameras meet the specifications. But of course, they know what the cameras are in their pixels, so it's easy for them to roll it out there first. Samsung had something similar to this, but it was a separate sensor that you held your finger over to get your pulse. So the fact that they can just use the camera that's already there is somewhat impressive. How practical, but it's interesting. This is a Cluj, but it's a Cluj in the same way that Apple has hyped up their AR features on their phone. People very rarely use in their daily life the AR features on the iPhone, despite the fact that it does it very, very well. Where it will really sing is on something like a VR AR device that they're going to sell you for a price. I think that this stuff will eventually wind up really seeing a tremendous adoption and utility is in either another device, maybe a mirror or something for fitness specifically, or you build it into some of the Google Home smart devices where you can just look into a thing. Because what's frustrating about this application is that you're going to have to prop up your phone on something that's stable and you're going to have to look at it. You're going to have to touch it without moving it too much and you're going to have to frame yourself. Nobody's going to do that on a regular basis unless you have a tremendous desire to do this. And even then there's probably easier ways that you can get this data. If it's already mounted, if it's already on your kitchen counter, if you already know where you need to stand when you come back from running to see what all your data is going to be, that to me is a feature that sings a little more. Yeah, some kind of workout situation where you are looking at, like you said, like a mirror or even a smart display where you're working out in front of the smart display and they got a video playing with the coach and they can tell your respiratory rate there. You have to touch the thing to get the heart rate. So that seems like it's a more temporary thing. But yeah, I could see this leading to other stuff down the road. Amazon told CNBC that it's testing cameras from the company Netredine on some Amazon branded contract delivery vehicles. The camera called Draveri has four lenses to capture the driver, the road and both sides of the vehicle. It records at all times but does not live stream. On-board software can detect 16 safety issues including speeding, distracted driving, hard braking, safety belt usage and more. In some cases like speeding or following too closely, the system will issue an audio alert like please slow down or maintain safe distance. Other behaviors like hard braking or sharp terms will trigger an upload of data to a secure portal without alerting the driver. It does not record audio and drivers can turn off the driver facing camera when the ignition is off. Amazon's privacy policy issued with the camera says Amazon may use data collection on the camera in employment decisions. It can also be used to defend the driver in collisions or complaints of package theft. UPS began testing a similar system with its drivers last year. Yeah, so you could pick where you want to fall on this, right? Because having a system that tells me like, hey, you forgot to put your safety belt on. Or, oh, you're going a little fast there, partner, which is not what it says. But something that's like, oh, thanks. That's helpful. You have a very Pixar-esque version of it. The Disney version of this will be a totally different thing. But I could see some of this being like, as a driver, I'd appreciate it. On the other hand, the idea that when I break really hard or yawn, which was one of the examples that a driver gave CNBC, and that automatically gets uploaded and a supervisor asks me about it later or contacts me and says, I saw you yawn. You now have to take a 15-minute break at the side of the road. I might get a little annoyed at that. Like, I yawn, but I'm not tired. Or, you know, like, of course I hard-braked. I was avoiding an accident, and now I have to defend myself. Yeah, I think that the obvious privacy concern is, I mean, it's just obvious. Some of the stuff that made it less of an issue if I were an Amazon driver is not recording audio. So sure, maybe you're on the phone with your mom. It's hands-free. You're not doing anything illegal. You're driving. You know, that stuff is supposedly not getting recorded. You can turn the camera off if you're not on the road. I don't know. Maybe you're in a parking space or eating a sandwich for lunch. You just don't want anybody to see you doing that because you're not, you know, on the clock. And having safety warnings if something happens is mostly a good idea. I think that, yeah, if you yawn and that becomes something that the company might say, hmm, maybe the shift is a little long. We've been thinking about maybe, you know, splitting shifts up so that drivers don't get fatigued. This is good data for us. That would be one thing. But yeah, if it's sort of like now you're forced to not drive or you somehow seem like you're not doing your job well enough because we're watching you, that becomes a different issue. To me, it's, I don't know how different it is than, you know, having your boss kind of breathing over your shoulder and snooping at what you're doing. And if you don't seem like you're working, you get asked about it, but it's different when it's remote. You know, it's funny that you say, oh, if they're yawning, then we might lessen their roots because the inverse of that would be that if they're not yawning, then maybe they can take on more roots. Maybe they can. Right. Yeah. This is both, both. Yes, it is an invasion of privacy. But also, if you run over somebody with a truck that has Amazon on the side of it, the story isn't going to be about Steve, the delivery driver. It's going to be about Amazon and their culture of recklessness. So this is them covering not only for probably insurance claims, just as much as anything in terms of people looking to sue, you know, Amazon, again, for trucks that have Amazon on the name of it, because they assume they're going to be able to get money from a settlement, but also to try to proactively make sure that they keep as safe of a work for, or sorry, let me not even say safe because safe would even be loaded and biased in terms of Amazon. The least legally actionable drivers that they can possibly have. Lowering liability. Yeah. Liability lowering. Listen, I think every time there's a new system, and I'm not saying the system is better or worse than these other systems, but putting governors on trucks that say, well, we'll just keep people from going over 65 miles an hour and that'll stop our drivers from speeding, or just making people making it against the law not to wear a safety belt, right? Everybody always complains when it changes. So some of it is that, but DJ, a former UPS driver in our discord says, this is all annoying. So yeah, I don't think drivers really are seeing the other side of this. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? Well, let us know in our subreddit. We love getting those suggestions. It definitely helps us put our lineups together every day, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. The incoming head of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, Senator Amy Klobuchar, plans to introduce a new antitrust bill targeted at big tech companies that would place limits on acquisitions. If the bill became law, here's how it would shift the burden of proof onto companies with more than 50% market share. So that's how this bill would work. It would work by shifting the burden of proof, and I'll explain what that means in a second. And it would only apply to companies with more than 50% market share, which right now that's a lot of big tech companies. If you are one of those companies, you would have to prove that an acquisition would not create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition. In other words, if this were the law now and Facebook were buying Instagram now, Facebook would have to prove that buying Instagram wouldn't hurt competition rather than what they had to do under the current law, which is having investigators prove. Like you would, right under the way the law used to work, you had to prove that it would hurt competition for Facebook to buy Instagram. They want to change the law to say Facebook has to prove it won't. Some conduct would be presumed anti-competitive unless the company can prove otherwise. So let's say Amazon shuts a company off its platform for what it says were violations of policy. Right now, the company that got shut out would have to go to court and prove that it wasn't just a violation of policy. It's anti-competitive. Under this bill, Amazon would have to prove why it was not anti-competitive. And a large company could face antitrust liability even if the market in which it took place was not precisely defined by the claimant. There's a whole load of complicated case law around market definition. For instance, and we'll go down this rabbit hole now, but apparently Pepsi and Coke have been ruled in court not to be in the same market because brand loyalty makes customers less price sensitive. So let that boggle your mind for a second and then just realize that same kind of principle has been used for tech companies to say, well, they're not even in the same market as us. This would get rid of that loophole. Justice Department and the FTC would be given larger budgets and would be able to seek fines for first time civil antitrust violations. There's also another bill being drafted by Representative Dave Sisleyne of Rhode Island that would prohibit large companies from operating a platform and then competing with users of the platform. That's one of the accusations against Amazon. The App Association, a trade group of small and mid-sized software companies, opposes these kinds of restrictions because they say it could shut them out of working with large companies. If large companies are seeing them only as competition rather than potential acquisitions, that could cool some kinds of collaboration. So Justin, this is just Amy Klobuchar trying this again. She apparently tried it in the last Congress. It didn't float then. Got any chance of floating now? Well, to be honest, anything that would involve bipartisan support, I'm going to go ahead and bet against right now just because we are not in a particularly bipartisan mood in our politics. However, considering we have a newly minted power sharing agreement between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who have now finalized what that's going to be. We do have a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker, so essentially Schumer is in the lead. You need 10 members of the opposite party. So I don't know if immediately this would get all 50 senators from either party. It would be curious to see whether or not this is something that you could rally the banners and pitch a perfect game on if Amy Klobuchar wanted to get all of the Democrats on board. Some might not see that it goes far enough because it doesn't break up certain tech companies. I think that Elizabeth Warren has pushed. Some might think that it goes too far on the blue dog side like on Joe Manchin, who has been loathed to sort of push that forward. That being said, we live in a world now where a lot of Republicans would like to see big tech be punished. That's been some of the Sturman drawing around 230, but I think this specifically the idea that somebody getting kicked off would have to prove why it's not anti-competitive. That's an argument that you could say would maybe apply to Parler, who tried to bring a suit against Amazon for taking them off AWS, with their argument being that they were protecting larger clients that Parler could eat into their market share width. I think if you look at it from that perspective, you could say, yes, we want to have Amazon have to prove that the reason why they are doing this is not anti-competitive as opposed to Parler getting a lawsuit dismissed when they made the same claim. So I know it's a mushy answer, but a resounding possible. What I don't like before we move on from this, what I don't like about this kind of bill is having it targeted at big tech. I don't like laws that are made for specific companies and this reeks of that a little bit. What I do like about it is that it's not making major policy changes, it's just trying to adjust the levels and say, let's make it a little easier for someone to prove an antitrust case because we're going to shift the burden of proof. I haven't worked through all the implications of doing that. Maybe if I did, I would be horrified by it, but in principle, that seems to be a better way to go around adjusting things than to have these more extreme measures, at least to me. Microsoft launched a new take on a company intranet called Viva, a unified platform to handle everything from employee onboarding to collaborating and training. The platform includes Viva communications for things like policies, benefits, internal communications and the like, Viva learning, which integrates training platforms like SAP, Viva topics for knowledge sharing and Viva insights for employee analytics. The last one doesn't monitor individuals, but lets a manager get a team-wide numbers for things like adjusting priorities, avoiding burnout, and seeing work patterns and trends. Viva is powered by Microsoft 365 and integrates with teams, Yammer and other Microsoft offerings. Microsoft believes the intranet is more important than ever with so many employees working from home. That's true. I've worked at some large companies. One of the largest was AOL. When I worked at TechCrunch, because it was owned by AOL, big intranet used it all the time. You had to. That was the only place you could get certain information. Although TechCrunch had a physical office that I went to, AOL, that headquarters was across the US. In a way, we were kind of remote on a lot of that stuff. I wonder how much Viva is going to not resemble some of these large corporate intranets that I know exist in a lot of places. That training certainly gets managers being able to get stats, especially when a team is now spread out when you used to all get into one conference room. That's probably really helpful. Integration with Microsoft's other products for teams such as Teams, or Yammer, that, gosh, Yammer, I haven't thought about Yammer in a while, but that makes a lot of sense. Sure. I mean, it's Microsoft. Why not use your own stuff? But I don't know how revolutionary this is. If anyone uses it, let me know. A better intranet would not normally be getting the headlines that Microsoft Viva is, but I think that spin of, hey, this will help folks while they're working from home, raised a few more eyebrows, made people pay attention a little more because everybody is trying to deal with that. I'm not sure if this is the solution, but it certainly seems like a good intranet product. Well, if you harken back to, gosh, the early days of social, what year? Let's call it 2007-ish. You might remember a lovely little tool called Delicious. Remember Delicious? Oh, yeah. Save links, categorize them, find them later, be able to share with others. Delicious was the first of its kind and was sold and sort of went into relative obscurity some time ago. Well, if you still follow Delicious on Twitter, which is at Delicious on Twitter, the company posted, Delicious should be now back up in read-only mode for those who can remember their password. You can export your bookmarks or link them with a pinboard account and then links to del.icio.us, which was Delicious's very clever URL back in the day. I actually went and thought, oh, I'll never remember my password because it was so long ago because I signed up in March of 2007. So I was on somewhat the early side and I did remember my password because it was a stupid password that I don't use anymore, but I did use for Delicious back in the day. And you don't really get a sense of what it used to look like when you were using it. You just kind of have to export everything or link to pinboard, but it's there. It's there as read-only. Yeah. Hey, Web 2.0 kids. Enjoy Delicious. It's Delicious. Yeah, I used to use Delicious to prepare Buzz Out Loud. I had the Delicious button in my browser bar in my bookmarks and if I was on a page that I thought would make a good story for Buzz Out Loud, I'd hit that Delicious button and Molly and Veronica and Jason and I all shared Delicious pages that we would look at with each other and then eventually I moved on to Google Reader. That's how long ago it was. We went up the Internet uphill both ways. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Friend of the show and off to guest. Alison Sheridan wrote in and said, Hey, recently you mentioned the Scaleway M1 Mac mini cloud service on the show. Thought you might be interested to know that Mac Stadium, which is a different company than Scaleway, which is the company that we talked about. Mac Stadium has been offering M1s for rent for a while and they even have a server in Dublin. So Scaleway isn't the only European cloud service offering M1 Mac minis. Yay for more choice. Yeah, Alison and I were actually texting back and forth about this trying to figure out like is what Scaleway said technically wrong when they said they they are the first European because Scaleway is a European company and Mac Stadium is an Atlanta based company, but Mac Stadium has that double in server. But anyway, the upshot is doesn't really matter. You got more choices. You could use Scaleway or Mac Stadium. Go shop around. Take a look. You get some fast M1s in the cloud. Kind of cool. There you go. Thanks, Alison. Good find. Also, if you've got good finds, you got questions, you got comments, you got anything for us. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send it. Shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today they include Ken Hayes, Tony Glass, and Jeffrey Zulks. Big, big thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today as he is every Thursday. Justin, what is new? Well, politics, politics, politics. If you are in the Arizona state area or you're just curious why the Arizona Republican Party is censuring people like they're sitting Republican governor or Cindy McCain, you're going to want to listen to Wednesday's episode of the show. If you are a Tom Merritt fan, you're going to want to listen to Friday's episode of the show because he is on. And next Wednesday we have a deep dive into the concept of the California recall, whether it's likely, what needs to happen, when it would happen, and who might replace sitting Governor Gavin Newsom all discussed on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. I can say with some certainty that your interview with the Arizona Republic reporter was my favorite part of your show this entire week because I participated in the interview that's coming on Friday. Oh, you're selling yourself short. Yeah, we have a great, a very relaxed one. And don't tell all the politics fans, but it winds up going into more of just a tech conversation than a politics conversation. So if you like me on this day, you're going to have to go listen to it because it's a great, relaxed conversation. Hey patrons, did you know that your ad free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just GDI or even both? Check your tier on Patreon. It's a little confusing, I know. But your tier decides what goes into the feed. The URL doesn't even change. But if you change your tier from say the one that says DTNS to one that says GDI, then you'll start getting good day internet in your feed. Or if you change it to the one that says DTNS, you'll get just Daily Tech News Show. Or if you change it to the one that says all, you'll get both. You can change your tiers at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Hey everybody, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30pm Eastern 2130 UTC. You might already know because you watch or listen live, but you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be back tomorrow. We'll be back with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.