 Coming up on DTNS Google changes its search algorithm. Everyone panic. Netflix tests faster playback and Facebook launches its latest attempt at a news product. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 25, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Studio Snubs. I'm Shannon Morse drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Of course, Sarah Lane is off moving into her new studio. Fingers crossed, everything goes well. She'll be back with us on Monday. If you were listening to Good Day Internet, you just heard Len and I talking about his cord cutting experience. Len, just cut the cord. If you want to hear all about that, get Good Day Internet. You can find it by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Thursday, two U.S. senators wrote a letter to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence asking for an investigation into TikTok for possible security threats. We talked about that yesterday on the show with Justin. TikTok has now posted a response on its blog saying, and I quote, let us be very clear, TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content, and we would not do so if asked. They also added, TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future. If that confuses you, yes, Bite Dance with Jones TikTok is a Chinese company, but TikTok's not an app that operates in China. It actually has offices in Santa Monica. Bite Dance, as we talked about yesterday, operates a similar app called Duyen in mainland China. And TikTok also clarified in its blog post that U.S. user data is stored in the United States, and the only other place it's stored is a backup in Singapore. The information reports that Sony began talks with banks several months ago to explore the sale of its PlayStation View streaming service according to sources. The service reportedly has a subscriber base of around 500,000 households, and any potential deal would be valued in the tens of millions of dollars. Despite raising prices three times since launching in 2015, PlayStation View reportedly remains unprofitable for Sony. ARM's legal team has ruled that its V8 and V9 chip designs are of UK origin and therefore do not need to be restricted from use by Huawei as a result of U.S. trade restrictions. Huawei builds its Kirin chips using ARM designs, and they'll be able to do so for the next couple versions. Ah, interesting. Amazon reported sales grew 24% in Q3, but profits fell about 25%. The decline has partly attributed to higher costs for one-day shipping, which rose 46% over last year. Amazon says costs for delivering to Prime members will double in the holiday quarter to $1.5 billion. That's with a B. Amazon also forecasts $80 to $86.5 billion in sales in the holiday quarter, short of the expected forecast of $87.4 billion. AWS revenue grew 35% on the year, which is down from last year's 46% growth, and notably below Microsoft's Azure's 36% growth. Yeah, getting some competition from Walmart on the shipping side. Yeah. Getting some competition from Microsoft. Look, look, competition. That's what it looks like. We've forgotten. It does. All right, let's talk a little more about HBO Max, AT&T John Stanky told Reuters that the upcoming HBO Max streaming service, that's not HBO, that's HBO with other stuff, will be free to the 10 million AT&T customers who already subscribe to HBO, including Direct TV and wireless customers. So if you're currently an AT&T wireless or Direct TV customer and you get HBO, theoretically you're going to get HBO Max for free whenever it comes out. Source also told Reuters that Warner Media, which runs HBO Max, expects it to reach 80 million subscribers, 50 million in the US by 2025. Those sources say Warner will launch a lower cost, not free, but lower cost ad supported version of the service in 2021, followed by the addition of live programming. They've often said they want to do live news and sports on HBO Max. AT&T wants to use HBO Max to retain wireless subscribers and add to valuable data that they collect to sell advertisers. We should find out some more details on when this is going to launch, how much it's going to be on October 29th. That's when Warner Media is expected to make an announcement about this. I'm not sure that any of this is a slam dunk for getting people to try HBO Max. First of all, because HBO costs $15, HBO Max, which is HBO plus Turner and TBS and other stuff, is going to have to cost more than $15, right? Now they're going to try to do some subscriber acquisition by just giving it away temporarily for free to existing customers. But I don't know, what do you make of this, Shannon? I'm not an HBO subscriber nonetheless in any of their form factors. Now they have how many streaming services do you have to choose from now? Three? From HBO? From HBO. It's HBO Go if you have cable or it's HBO Now. That's it. That's so confusing. Why don't they have just one? Why is that confusing? You can't sign up for HBO Go. It's basically, that's the way you access your cable TV subscription. But I could sign up for now. And now it's just HBO Max, which is HBO plus other stuff that you could sign up separately later, differently than HBO Now. I don't see why that's so confusing. There's just three HBO's and they all have different words and different terms. Oh, right. Okay. You're so sarcastic, Tom. And they're also going to have this lower cost ad supported version. Well, that's like, that one is probably not as confusing because that's just when you're signing up, like, do you want to pay $5 a month and get ads? Or do you want to pay $10 a month? That kind of thing, right? Okay. So you think they'll keep it under the same name as HBO Max? That'll be the same name. Yeah, that's just a tier for HBO Max. So there'll be HBO Max with two tiers and then there's HBO Now with one tier. And then there's HBO Go which you have if you get your cable. This is so frustrating for me. I would love to sign up and watch Game of Thrones, but I don't know which one to go with. And now they have Max. Go with HBO Now or go with HBO through Apple TV plus channels. We don't have time for this. In a practice sometimes called big game hunting, ransomware operators this past year have been targeting larger companies that can afford bigger ransoms. Mauerbyte's estimates businesses detected 365% more ransomware attacks in Q2 than the year before. Coveware, which helps firms negotiate ransomware attacks, estimates that between Q1 and Q2 of this year, the average ransom almost tripled from $12,762 to $36,295. This is raising costs for providers of cyber insurance as well. Lloyd's of London insurer Beasley says ransomware incidents in Q3 rose 37% over last year. Chubb Limited says it responded to the same number of ransomware events by June this year as it did for all of last year. That's crazy. The average insurance claim from an attack by the Ryuk ransomware is about $2 million, according to a consultant for commercial property insurer FM Global. Insurance coverage is not always about paying the ransom. It covers data recovery and legal liabilities too. In regards to that legal liabilities, it usually has to do with what kind of data may have been leaked during a ransomware process and if any kind of data was personally identifying information and stuff like that, security and privacy type of stuff. The sheer ridiculous increase in ransomware events is obviously not good news. But if I were to try to pull good news out of this, it would be, well, if you're a small business, maybe you're less likely to get targeted. But that's cold comfort because you're still possibly going to get targeted and you need to defend against that if it's a possibility, right? Absolutely. In the hacker and information security genre, we have definitely been kind of talking about this happening, the rise of ransomware, but this is one of the first times that we've actually had numbers that we can associate with that rumor milling that we have been basing on just our feelings and just what we have been seeing in different companies. So knowing that it's risen so, so crazy much really means that we need to take a step back and make sure that all of these companies, especially infrastructure and city governments, local city governments and larger governmental facilities are protecting themselves much better. So they don't have to pay this in the long term. The problem with ransomware, of course, is when hackers see that they're making so much money off of these, they are going to attack much larger companies in the process. And we are starting to see that, especially with this rise in numbers from 12,000 to 36,000. That's a huge, huge, huge gain for hackers. Yeah, they're going after the middle size companies, right? The big companies have enough resources to defend themselves well against this. They're going after the middle size company that has a lot more money, but maybe not quite the network security that they should have had. And like you say, a lot of times that can be government institutions and things like that. So this could put a lot of pressure on cyber insurance, because sometimes just companies make the decision to pay out. And unless the insurance company can claim it was an act of war, like an act of a nation state, then they have to pay out. And whenever you see something outpace the index of its expectation, that's bad for insurance. Any, any actuary shutters at that idea. Yep. AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint announced the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative, CCMI. It's a joint venture with plans to bring rich communication service, RCS messaging to U.S. Android customers by next year. If you're like, well, wait a minute, doesn't Google Message just do that? And wasn't the problem that they couldn't get carriers to support it? You're probably asking questions that Google was asking today when they found out about this. The CCMI plans to create a single seamless interoperable RCS experience across carriers both in the U.S. and globally. And the Verge reports that CCMI will offer its own app compatible with the universal profile. So it should be compatible with Google Messages, but separate from Google Messages, but supporting RCS. The app seems targeted at businesses though, with one of the advantages listed by Verizon as driving a robust business to consumer messaging ecosystem and providing consumers with the ability to chat with their favorite brands. So this may be less about competing with Google Messages that we all just use on our phones and more about setting up a way for businesses to reach consumers, which also competes with Google Enterprise. Don't get me wrong, but it's targeting a different part of that. I can definitely imagine like Google developers that were working on RCS and like Google Chat for so long are just running around their desks like crazy right now, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Unfortunately, this doesn't affect me very much even though I'm looking forward to RCS because I use signal for their end-to-end encryption, which I don't believe we have seen any information pertaining to CCMI saying that they will include end-to-end encryption for their RCS platform. No, they were actually super cagey about talking about encryption, just saying, well, we're going to be private. I'm like, well, encryption is the way you think that something is private. Exactly. It would be nice. Why would you just say the words encryption, Mr. Yeah. It would be nice for Android users if we actually got some kind of proof that this would not only allow for encryption in security, but also be cross-platform with Google as well. It sounds like it's going to be wonderful for all of the different operators and carriers, but are they leaving Google out in the cold by doing this? And are users going to care? Are they just going to use WhatsApp and signal? They might just still use, yeah, exactly. They might do that, especially with Facebook merging all of those. It's definitely a possibility. I mean, the businesses might want to use the system, but the app, you need consumers to use an app. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Android police notes that some Netflix users on Android have seen an option on the video playback menu to adjust the speed of video to 0.5, 0.75, so slower, or 1.25 and 1.5 times. So that would be faster. So do we want this? You know, I could definitely see some situations where I'm, and this may be particular to doing like current geek and court killers, two of the other podcasts that I do where I watch things specifically for them, but maybe I just want to, like I don't have a lot of time and I'm like, let me just get through a couple of these episodes quickly. I'll do 1.25. I could see that. You can do it in a way that keeps the motion smooth, keeps the voices sounding normal, right? I could imagine cases for me where I would do that. I couldn't imagine any cases where I'd want to slow something down until I was reading one of these articles. I think it might have been The Verger and Gadget, where they said language learning might be useful. Brilliant. Right? So if I'm watching Arthdal Chronicles, and I'm trying to understand the Korean, I just slow it down so they're talking a little slower. I love that you mentioned that. Terrace House in Japanese. Oh, Terrace House. Exactly. Yeah. I oftentimes find myself trying to understand a different language when I'm watching one of these shows on Netflix, and I don't necessarily want to pay super close attention to the subtitles because I want to learn it. And having the ability to slow down the language would definitely help because then you can actually understand the dialect a lot better, and you can hear the pronunciation of all the different consonants and vowels. Oh, that would be so useful. I would like that. Vicki has a language learning mode. If you watch some of the shows on the Vicki app, and this isn't tantamount to that, but that would be another cool feature for Netflix to have. But I don't know. Let us know if you're like, oh, yes, I absolutely want to speed my video up or slow my video down and send us your use cases. If you think this is stupid and I don't want it, you probably don't need to tell us that. We assume there's lots of people who think that. But we're very curious about the people who might want to speed up or slow down and have use cases that we haven't thought of. I think it's fascinating what this could do. We also don't know if this test is really going to be rolled out. Netflix does these kinds of things from time to time where they just do a little A-B testing, roll out a feature, see who uses it, see how it does. And then we may never hear from it again. So it's hard to say. But yeah, I kind of want to be in on this test. I kept looking at it because it's only on Android. I kept looking at my Android app. I'm like, no, still don't have it. I'm going to keep an eye out. Google is incorporating natural language processing techniques into its core search algorithm. It's based on something called BERT, the bi-directional encoder representations from Transformers system. A technique that Google is using improves how the algorithm understands the way words in a sentence relate to each other. So right now, if you type a sentence into Google, it just looks at it as a bunch of words. And it tries to figure out which of those words are important. And then it creates a search based on those words that are in the sentence. But it doesn't understand the sense. It doesn't understand how the words relate to each other. So BERT is trained by having 15% of the words removed from a set of English sentences, a big corpus of work. And then the algorithm is asked to figure out what the missing words are. And that's how it learns, it's machine learning, to learn how to figure out how words relate to each other. Google gave a couple of examples of how this would work. So if you typed in, can you get medicine for someone pharmacy? Which isn't even a complete sentence. The current Google would look at that and go, medicine, pharmacy, here's a bunch of pharmacies in your area. But the BERT powered algorithm would understand that you want medicine for someone. You want to pick up medicine for someone else. And it would tailor its results to that. Or the phrase parking on a hill with no curb, instead of just giving you places where you can park on a hill, it understands that no is a very important word. No is often just thrown out of search request because it's so common, right? But here it knows like, oh, no curb, that is important. And so it'll look for places where you can park on a hill with no curb. I don't know why you'd want to do that. That's dangerous. Or maybe you're trying to avoid them. Anyway, Google applied the processes to the search product over 10 months and believes it may change results for as many as one in 10 queries, about 10%. And as with all changes to search, it was run through testing, including human evaluation and AB testing. And it's been slowly rolling out for the past couple of days. I am really excited about this because I often find myself going to Google search, if I'm not using duck duck go if we're being honest, and typing in a very garbled sentence because I'm going to assume that the algorithm is going to just forget about some of my words. And just trying to make it as robotic as possible so that I get the correct search terminology. And oftentimes, it just does not work out that way because it takes out the wrong words or it just does not understand what I'm actually looking for, especially if I don't know the correct terminology for something that I'm trying to find information on. So this is great. I'm really excited about it. This is kind of the way that I do search oftentimes. So I think I'll be able to use it fairly quickly and get much better searches out of it as well. Yeah, I've definitely run into those situations where I use that bang g command to duck duck go and I end up on Google and suddenly I'm like, well, wait a minute. You're just giving me, I could have just typed in two words and got the same search. You don't understand what I'm looking for. And so, yeah, I'm hoping that this will improve that. I'm also eagerly anticipating the story coming in the next 24 hours about the website that claims it has been totally removed from the internet by this algorithm change because that comes like Clark work anytime Google has an algorithm change. Google says they don't think this should affect search ranking for most sites, but there's so many sites and so many searches. It's going to affect somebody. So keep an eye out. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. All right, folks, let's get to that big Facebook news that Facebook is rolling out another news product in a limited test. A few hundred thousand people will get it. Again, not everybody. It's like everything we're talking about today for some reason. If you're in the United States, look at your home screen tab or your bookmark in the Facebook app and you might see this new news tab. It will be targeted at users in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Philadelphia, District of Columbia, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, and Boston. If you're outside of those areas, you're less likely to get it because they're working a lot with local news providers in those areas. News articles will continue to appear in your news feed. They're not removing news. There's been some talk about that from time to time. That's not happening. You'll still see people sharing all the same news stuff in their news feed as well. And the news feed will remain your default. You'll have to go over to the news tab. But when you do, the news tab will have algorithmically generated content alongside human curated content. So the Today's Stories section will be selected by journalists as a way to give you a broad overview of what those journalists think are the most important stories of the day. And then there will be other stories on that page suggested based on your interest in activity, trying to balance out the bubble. You can hide articles. You can hide topics. You can even hide publishers that you don't want to see. You can link your news subscriptions in some cases to Facebook. So if you have like a Wall Street Journal subscription, you could be able to read those articles within Facebook. It'll be broken down to a few sections, business, entertainment, health, science, science and technology, and sports. And the news page will organize sources into four categories, general sources, topical sources, diverse sources, and local news. Local news being a big push for this. If you're a publisher, to be included, you must be part of Facebook's news page index, which anybody can apply to before you just change your group setting to news page. And then you have to agree to abide by Facebook's publisher guidelines and not violate those. Facebook is paying a subset of publishers who they say can provide a steady volume of fact based on original content that seems to include BuzzFeed, maybe the Washington Post by some accounts, but not Reuters and AP who have come out and said, we are not being paid to be included here. So Facebook's trying to make it sound like that's a temporary measure to just kind of get this thing up and running. But certainly amongst journalists, that's a very popular bone of contention. Amongst those of us who just want to read the news, Shannon, what do you think of this? Well, it's interesting to me that they are choosing to put this on a completely separate tab instead of kind of forcing it into your news feed alongside what you're currently seeing from friends and family. I feel like it would be much more useful for the general populace if they included it just in the news feed so that you would actually get factual content kind of forced upon you all the time based on, of course, your interests and where you are located. But now you're going to have to be forced to actually click a button up at the top. And who's going to do that? I really wish that they included it kind of like just stuck everything on the news feed as opposed to separating it out like this because I feel like people aren't going to use it. Yeah. I mean, I get if you can get people to go to the news tab and they start reading the today's stories and look outside their bubble, they might start following news sources they wouldn't have otherwise. That's the theory, but you got to get them to that tab. And I also agree that just putting some other journalist curated stuff in my news feed is probably going to annoy people and reduce the effectiveness of the news feed. So maybe it would have to be separated. I don't think there's a really solid solution for that. Unless it's kind of teasing people with like from your news tab with some things in the news feed or something like that, right? Oh, I like that idea. And then they could click into it and see like more from this publisher or something. And I don't know that Facebook isn't doing something like that. But well, they should watch Daily Tech News Show and get some ideas. I do. I do think that this isn't a bad thing. It's hilariously. I don't know what Yahoo News used to do for me in 2000, right? Which was here are, you know, the Yahoo selected news of the day, and then you can add your own modules before. So this is more sophisticated version of that, right? Yes, absolutely. Do you think that this is going to help curate better content for the people that are looking for it? Or do you think that this is still going to create lots of clickbait and issues that people are still going to see? It sounds like it's going to be good because they are going to be vetting these publishers, but aren't they already supposed to kind of do that through their moderating on the news feed? Well, but the moderation on the news feed says we are not going to judge truth or quality. We're going to hold the line against absolute abuse, right? Promoting criminal activity. And we're going to try to help people understand what's true and what isn't on their own. But we don't want to, in Zuckerberg's big speech, he's like, we don't think we should be the arbiters of what people see or don't. But here they've got a separate area where they can say, but if you wanted to see what that would look like, here it is, right? So I mean, I respect that where I don't feel comfortable letting Facebook be the be all and end all about everything I see. If you want to share a source with me that has never signed up, like Daily Tech News Show is not part of the news index. You should be able to share that with me in the news feed, right? That's the way that should work. It shouldn't be shut out because I didn't bother to apply for the news feed index. But then that news area can be like, ah, but here's where Facebook tells us what it thinks is important. And to me, that's not that different than TechMeme or Google News. You brought up a really good point. I have a feeling that there are some legitimate sources out there that would either choose not to get vetted or they would try to get vetted and not end up getting through and being verified because of either biases that are included in Facebook's vetting process or just their roles or scale. Absolutely. It takes too long to get vetted, maybe, because there are so many sources out there. Popularity, yeah. There might be some very good news sources. Like Tech5, for example, we probably, if we even tried, we probably would not be able to get vetted and verified through this process because we are hackers and they might not see that as being something that would be a authenticated news source. I want to be careful here because as I have read it, the news vetting basically just says we want to make sure that you are a legitimate publisher, you have a history. I think you would get vetted. You think so? The question is, would they ever pick you for today's stories? Probably not. And would the algorithm surface you? Probably not. Most likely not. And honestly, that's why I haven't been rushing to put DTNS in there because I'm like, eh, I don't know if it's actually going to show up and make that much of a difference. And there's probably lots of news outlets like that that shouldn't be shut out by saying the only news that can be shared on Facebook is the ones that are in this index. I think this is going to be something, since I don't use Facebook, that I will be asking my family and friends about and saying, have you seen this icon? Do you use it? Are you interested? Yeah. We'll keep an eye on it. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. And of course, we do have our Facebook group, even if it isn't in the news index, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got a couple of emails that almost feel like they're answering each other. We talked about Chance the Hacker yesterday and the reason that he thinks developing animations for Chrome is superior to Firefox. Well, we got this email today. I tried the fun page from Chance the Hacker in Firefox and Chrome. It was a little faster in Chrome. I think it was a lot faster, but all right. But I didn't see any significant problems with Firefox 70. The privacy features of Firefox are far more important to me than some silly and distracting animation. My feedback to Chance the Hacker and all the other web developers out there is that I don't want animations. When I encounter a site with animations or autoplay multimedia, my usual response is to immediately close the window and never revisit that site. Signed grumpy old man. All right. Almost like two emails down from that was Chance writing back saying, hey, Tom and Sarah was really cool to hear Tom's thoughts on Firefox animations yesterday. And let me say I am in 100% agreement. Currently, what I have to do is implement browser detection into all my sites and turn animations off when users choose Firefox, which is a ton of overhead. And in all honesty makes me want to just not add in cool animations at all. I currently put in a disclaimer telling the user they're missing out on awesome animations by using Firefox. And I really hope people start paying attention to this and push Firefox to improve their animations. Their browser is amazing. And I hope one day I can use it myself as a web dev. That's so interesting. Yeah. So there you go, grumpy old man. Chance explained himself to you without him even knowing you had written it. That's awesome. I love this. And thank you. We've also gotten lots of other developer emails on all sides of this issue. So thank you for sending those to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Tim Ashman, Philip Shane, and Jeffrey Zilx. Now we check in with Len Peralta. What have you been drawing, Len? Well, you know, I don't know if I'm excited about the Facebook tab for news. I think it's sort of like whatever. But you know, I believe that Zuck might have a reason. This is going to be the story that I'm going to be waiting to see eventually on Facebook news is of course that Zuck is an alien as we all know. And I think it's everything from the black beady eyes to the eyes coming out of his back. I think that is the main story that should be led on every single one of these news items. Zuck alien? Yeah, probably. That's that's available right now at my online store. Or if you're a patron, you can download it right now. I also want to mention that there is less than half of the spots are still available to get your name on the DTNS Rise of Skywalker poster. If you remember, it looks like the teaser poster. If you want to go to my online store, go order now and help me sell these out. So yeah, hurry, hurry up. Get one of those slots before they're gone. Some people have been like, Oh, are they still there? Yes, they're still they're still there. Go get one. Len Peralta store.com. Excellent. Thank you, Shannon Morris for joining us today. As always, what do you got going on to tell people about? Well, thank you. I always love coming on the show and chatting with y'all about all the things security and privacy and ransomware. Most recently on my channel, which is youtube.com slash Shannon Morris, I've been reviewing some awesome tech products, including the new Pixel 4 XL, which I currently have sitting right in front of me. It's been very fun and rather to my little pixel. It is. And you may be surprised by what I had to say in my review, which I just so happened to do at a renaissance fair, because I'm weird like that. Nice. Definitely check it out. Now is a very good time to subscribe as well, because I am going to be releasing a ton of videos this coming month. So that's youtube.com slash Shannon Morris. All right, folks, only a few more days to be able to qualify to get the DTNS recipe book. Go get in there and sign up at the $2 level and more patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. That's a dailytechnewshow.com slash live. See you there again on Monday. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.