 Coming up on DTNS Hulu is going to give special ads to binge watchers. The state of AI is not what you think and whether it means anything that Apple news is cosponsoring a democratic debate. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 12, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Yogg. And from wherever I'm at, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. We were just talking about all the places we've been. Travel nightmares in good day internet. If you want to catch up on all the different topics we talk about there, of course, you got to become a member, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook said it will not meet its goal of announcing members of its independent oversight board this year. The so-called Facebook Supreme Court is intended to make decisions on content independent of Facebook. The company's head of governance, Brent Harris, said that the delay was due to unforeseen issues creating the board's trust along with nearing down the 1000 nominees to just 40. Facebook now plans to announce three co-chairs in January and the first 20 members after that. The company also pledged $130 million to the trust, which should cover operating costs for the first six years. How many people bought that $2,000 Galaxy Fold, I wonder? Well, the Samsung electronics president Young Sohn told TechCrunch disrupt Berlin that the answer is $1 million, or at least they sold 1 million units of the Galaxy Fold. Sohn emphasized that the product is part of Samsung's practice of releasing products in order to get feedback and improve next generation devices. That's right. If you want to be a beta tester, you always pay more. The Wall Street Journal sources say the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering seeking a preliminary injunction against Facebook over how its apps interact. Sources say the FTC would ask a court to stop Facebook from enforcing policies on how its apps work with potential rivals and forbid Facebook to integrate subsidiaries it has purchased, particularly Facebook wants to connect messaging between Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. The injunction might come as early as next month. Credit Suisse reports that iPhone shipments in China fell 35.4 percent in November compared to last year, the second straight month of decline in China for the iPhone. The Chinese phone market in general saw a slight increase in November. However, Credit Suisse attributed the decline to aggressive local competition. All right, we got some cool things coming from Google today. Let's talk about the first one, Justin. Indeed, Google announced two new features for its messages app. The first is spam detection launched in January in some countries. Now coming to the U.S., this feature shows you a warning if it thinks that text is a spam and lets you confirm if it is or isn't. You can report any message as spam and block conversations as well. The second feature coming to messages is verified SMS. When sending messages to a verified business, you'll see its name and logo alongside a verification badge in your message thread. Verified SMS is coming gradually starting in Brazil, Canada, the U.S., UK, France, India, Mexico, Philippines, and Spain. This is this is interesting, right? Because it's the attempt of Google to add features to messages and get people over the idea that Google has too many messaging apps and none of them do everything. I think they really are finally starting to focus on messages. Well, and they should, because I don't know the benefit of splitting this out into various different things. Specifically, since chat as a service has been a major function in technology for the past several years, and iMessage are now messages in ILS is very robust. Yeah, indeed. We actually meant to tell you that the European Union antitrust chief, Marguerite Vestiger, is looking at Apple Pay as our antitrust regulators in the Netherlands and France. A German law goes into effect January 1st that requires operators of digital money infrastructure to offer access to competitors for a reasonable fee. The iPhone's NFC chip may qualify as technical infrastructure, which would then fall afoul of that law. Banks want direct access to the chip, but Apple requires banks to go through Apple Pay, right? You can't just access the NFC chip directly. And Apple says the reason for that is that opening access to the NFC chip increases the risk of fraud and other security issues. Yeah. Without having to speak yourself. I love this. Yeah. Google Translate already does this. If you have the Google Translate app, which can get on iOS or Android, but having it in Assistant, especially if you have an Android phone, means you don't have to bother launching it. You just talk to your phone. Exactly. Oh, God. Number one, Google Translate, an absolute necessity if you're traveling in a nation with a different language. 100%. It made, honestly, like not to get all healthy on soft, diffused lights. But when I went out to visit family in Italy, it was necessary, like not just good, not just helpful. It was something that greatly bound us more together as distant relatives. It was exceptional. So any easier, the one thing that was bad about it was having to, you know, I wound up settling on iOS, downloading the Italian keyboard just so I could use for them just the single push button where they could talk and then translate that into things. Or I could just hand them the phone and they could type it if it was easier for them to type than talk. But the easier and better these functions are as core elements of any phone, the better off we are all going to be as humans. And Google Translator now will just listen and detect the language being spoken. So you don't even have to switch around. You can just say, you can just have people talk and I'll go, okay, that was Italian. I'm going to translate that to English and vice versa. Yeah. Definitely going to be using this on my upcoming trip to Japan. I have no doubt about that. Oh, for sure. And I will say, I mean, Google Assistant is the best at this, the best by far. I, you know, having traveled many places in the last several years where there are a variety of tools that are available to interpret a speech that I don't understand otherwise. It is the absolute best. So the fact that interpreter mode comes to phones, I'm sure is a welcome feature to a lot of folks. The annual AI index report that comes out of the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence documents the strides that AI research has been making every year. That's why you call it annual. The index is put together in cooperation with researchers from many organizations, including open AI, Harvard, bunch of others. Among the detailed findings in this report that just came out, here are a few noteworthy ones. AI is now the most popular specialization for computer science graduates in the North American continent, double the interest of the number two most popular computer science specialization for graduates, security and information assurance. I personally would like security beauty top, but there you go. Those are the facts. China publishes the most AI papers out there, but work from US AI researchers is cited 40% more than the global average. So China putting out the most research US research having the most impact would be another way to look at that. The US also files the most AI patents three times the number of second place Japan. Japan files the second most patents for AI. And the time needed to train a machine vision algorithm on the data set image net has fallen from about three hours in October 2017 to 88 seconds as of July of this year. Costs fell from the thousands of dollars to do that training to tens of dollars like less than $100. Just less than 10% of all private AI investment is going into autonomous vehicles, but that's the highest number. That's followed by medical research with facial recognition next to that. Well, actually, they're tied medical research and facial recognition. The fastest growing AI field is robot process automation RPA. I actually did a tech or public top five about this that'll be going up soon, followed by supply chain management. But the point James Vincent from the verge took out of this index, I think may be the best one. The best AI systems, the ones that beat you at Starcraft to or help identify breast cancer better than humans can't do other things. Vincent points out that the Starcraft to AI is crap at chess and the chess playing AI do anything at Starcraft too. In fact, the breast cancer assistant for AI can't do anything about lung cancer and vice versa. Vincent reminds us of a quote from Andrew Ng who said, if a typical person can do a mental task with less than a second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI. He didn't say this, but past a second, that gets really, really difficult. So yes, it's fair to be worried about the hockey stick of AI development and to be concerned to be ethical and all that. But don't let those fears carry you away. What AI can actually do right now is fairly limited, even if it is impressive. Yeah. So, number one, this is a very, very, very good GPS point, metaphorical GPS point of where we are on the road of AI. Indeed, we are seeing some fantastic fruits from all of this research and development, but we are not anywhere near Skynet just yet, which has been the kind of fear even from people that are very big and influential in technology like Elon Musk, for example. That being said, where we do need to understand is it is when the AI start training AIs that we begin to see a further complex benefit from this kind of research, but also, I think that's where some people get a little dicey. I gotta say, back in the day when computer science was a degree that I might have gone for, I didn't, but I knew a lot of people who did. Imagine if AI was kind of at the forefront of that. It would have changed that degree so much. It's kind of exciting for anybody who's looking into going into that field as a career, what the options are now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many applications, and really it's one of those, I think AI being a burgeoning degree that people are getting, the world is robust enough that the exciting degree there can go almost anywhere you want to go. You can go public sector, private sector, into government. There are so many places where a skill like this can be developed and it's different than let's say something like web development or computer training where things had been a little specialized in a world where the various different sectors of our economy and governance weren't really on the same page on how much this stuff matters. Yeah. I hear people talking all the time about AI is overblown. People are exaggerating what they can do with AI. And I don't feel that because I ignore those arenas. I don't listen to those voices, but I know they're out there that there's a lot of people claiming that things are AI that aren't or that they can do things with AI that you can't. So I feel like it's super important to bring out reports like this AI index report to just help us all reset our expectations of AI is very good. It's not just vaporware. And it can do some amazing things and it's growing and research is proceeding at pace and it's probably about to hit a hockey stick of development, but there are limits to what it can do. And we could all, myself included, use better appreciation of what it actually is. And so I think this is a good opportunity to kind of reground ourselves in that 100%. Hey, Microsoft's Your Phone app now lets any Android 7.0 or newer user make calls from any Windows 10 PC. The feature now out of preview requires a Bluetooth connection. It lets users look up contacts and call history in addition to placing calls. Users can use the Your Phone to check messages and also look at recent photos. This is, of course, the thing that a lot of iPhone slash Mac OS users use on that closed system to great benefit. You can text message and even make calls right from your laptop without having to pick up your phone. And it's one of the things that I wish I could do easier with my Android phone. And now I can. This was available to Windows insiders and now it's in general availability for anybody with a Windows 10 PC. So if you've got Windows in your life and an Android phone, you might want to try this out and sync them up because, you know, with photos and messages and contacts all synced across, apparently it works really well. Yeah, as long as it's stable, this is a huge element for me of being inside the Mac ecosystem because sometimes I even get distracted. Like I'll send somebody a text message over the laptop and then all of a sudden I'll get a text message back and I'll look into my phone and I'll type the response there. But it is awesome having that unified thing. I'm so pumped that Android folks and Windows users have it, which is great. We have some folks in the chat room asking, isn't what Skype does? But Skype's not an actual phone. You can't call 911 with it. It's not the phone number that most people give out to other people. So even if you're like, yeah, but I use Skype that way. Okay, great, you could already do that. You can also do that with WhatsApp. You can do that with a lot of other things if you want to adapt the way you proceed. But for most people, they just want to have a phone number that works with whatever phone they have that's not dependent on an app. And so, yes, this is dependent on an app, but having this ability to sync just a regular phone without having to worry about going into another product like Skype, I think this is a different thing and it's significant. Well, if you like watching TV and you like watching TV for a long period of time, Hulu launched a new tool for brands to specifically target viewers who are watching multiple episodes of a favorite program over a long stretch of time, aka binge watchers. Binge watch ads uses machine learning to determine, rather, when a viewer is binge watching a show and then ads acknowledge a binge is underway. And then when a viewer reaches a third episode, they're informed that the next episode is ad-free, or they get a personalized offer from the advertiser. Oh, I feel about this. Yeah, like, how do we feel about this? I don't have the, I use the Hulu without advertising, so I don't have to feel this all the time, but there are a few services that I use that do have ads. And I guess if those ads are less intrusive or kind of acknowledging me, maybe it bothers me less. Something gonna bother me less if it's saying, hey, I'm not gonna give you any more ads for the next episode. That's a positive, right? I mean, number one, here is a absolute market pain point. You're watching one of these services, especially with ads, and you get the same ad over and over and over and over again. If I had a dime for every time, I'm like, look, Ford, if I give you a receipt saying that I bought your car, will you please stop advertising for this thing over and over and over again? So this cuts down on that. However, where we are going to, I think, see the new pain point is not in that they are identifying binge watchers. That's fine. We all binge watch. It's when the binge watching advertisement starts to become a judgment on your binge in. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, if it's like for cheese, it's whatever cheese. It wants to advertise to you during the game, during a binge watch, when you're sitting on your couch, whatever, like they want to always be aware. It's going to be different when they start advertising for talk therapy or weight loss programs or something like that. Like that, that's where the targeted advertising goes from thank you for not giving me ads to what the hell did you just say? Well, it's interesting you say that because cheese it through what is the Kellogg's is one of the advertisers that it's going to use this at launch. The other is Sparkle paper towels and maker's mark. So I feel like those are all okay. Those are all okay. I might be trying to some burdens. Sure. You know, I'm on the couch. I need paper towels. I need a paper towel to clean up. I'm just saying that next year, next year when Peloton wife is saying how happy she is, not binge watching, we might get some blowback. Yeah. Well, it's going to happen right at some point. Unless we'll just 100%, 100% this is going to happen. I don't know. I mean, the targeting of ads, you have your ideas about it, right? I care about that less and less. I understand when it's happening. I go like, Oh, yeah, because I was looking at that couch. Now I'm going to get couch you know, advertisements, you know, for the next 30 days type thing. The fact that Hulu is doing this for somebody that they know is kind of in in, you're in mode, you're watching, you're going to be watching advertisements over and over. I don't hate this. I think it's actually so. No, I think, look, if you are binging on a with ad service, you're getting the same ads over and over and over again, even in the year of our Lord 2019, the ad sales is not as robust. And I will tell you this, it cannot roll out soon enough for people in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, where political campaigns are pouring gigantic amounts of money to make sure that you are aware that Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are running for president. Well, there's a presidential election. I had no idea. 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. Oh, hey, speaking of that presidential election, the US Democratic National Committee announced its slate of four debates for 2020. This is one of a series of, I believe it's a thousand and 12 debates that will be happening over the course of the presidential election. Anyway, yes, there's still a debate to be done in the pre primary stage, but there's four debates coming in the primary caucus states in early 2020. Among the announcements was the debate on February 7th at St. Anne's Elm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, that will be co-hosted by ABC News and Apple News. Wait, hold on, the debate on February 25th in Charleston, South Carolina will be co-hosted by CBS, the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and Twitter. The other two debates are CNN and the Des Moines Register and NBC and the Nevada Independent. So boring old newspapers like traditional, but we got Twitter and Apple News in here. Now, this is not the first time we've seen an internet company in here. In fact, Politico is co-hosting the PBS led debate still to happen here in LA on December 19th, the same evening of the rise of Skywalker showing up in theaters. This also reminds me that Facebook co-hosted debates in 2012 and 2016. So let's start there. I mean, I'm very curious to find out what you think about Apple News joining this, Justin, but why aren't we seeing Facebook co-hosting these things? Well, I would think it's because whenever Facebook finds itself in a headline with politics in the title, they don't like the fact that it happened. And in this particular case, if Facebook could sponsor, if let's say this were a two-party primary and you had Democratic debates and you had Republican debates, Facebook might be more comfortable sponsoring one in each. Regardless of the fact that this is just the way things go, I don't know if Facebook is going to want to do it at this juncture. And also this could become far more of a PR problem for Facebook than it would be a boon of pitching into the public discourse. If let's say some of the candidates that have come out very hard against Facebook are pressured by their supporters or see political points to gain by, let's say, skipping a Facebook-sponsored debate because they disagree with some of their policies. So if I were to take a guess, that's part of it. The other part is it costs a lot of money. These things are very expensive to get the rights to. So if Facebook were to do it, they'd have to say, not only are we willing to take the risk, but we're willing to put a ton of cash on that risk. But Facebook has the cash. It's not as if Facebook is like, we're priced out. Sure. But getting punched in the face feels bad. Paying somebody $1,000 to get punched in the face is often worse. Yeah. But it sounds like it's mutual, too. The DNC probably is like, Facebook would take your money, but maybe it's not the best idea. And Facebook is like, no, we totally agree. Probably not the best idea. So we're not going to give you that money. I don't know if that's a DNC decision. My guess is that probably would carry. You're right. As long as the check cash is on the other hand, what do these companies do? What do you get if you're Twitter out of so-called co-hosting? Is it just kind of a sponsorship by another name or is it more to it? A lot of these, as they've started, YouTube hosted one with CNN, Facebook's hosted one, they both are in the video streaming game. So obviously as technology platforms, they are letting everybody know that, hey, you can, right now, when you're on our platform, we'll put a big old banner that you can click right here and watch this public service. Look how much we care about our democracy. That's one side. Stealth advertising, the fact that streaming is available on these platforms. The other side is just being a member of the election process. And the third side on the DNC, by DNC standards, is the fact that they got a lot of money and they are willing to put it down. Yeah. So I mean, I definitely get the money part of it. But so there is a little of, there's a little, there's a tiny bit of substance to this. It's not just slapping their name on it. No. I mean, depending on, see, this is where the Apple news thing, if we can, if we can pivot to the Apple news thing, that gets interesting. Because Apple news is a curator. Apple news does have hired people there to get all the news together and then to put it to you. If not, right, they haven't really put a ton of effort into writing a lot of independent stuff, but they very, very well could. If Apple news wants to put itself out there as not just a dumb pipe, but rather a very smart and cool service that you should be a part of by way of one of their personalities asking smart and good questions of these candidates, then that could be something where Apple is trying to get out there. We're not just a place where you stream video. We're kind of more like the New York Times or the Washington Post that have sponsored or New York Times just sponsored a debate that we are a pointed thought leader in this arena. The weird thing about Apple news though is it is a curator period. They don't have original reporting yet. Yeah. Even though they've hired journalists that could do it. Chris Bream used to be a well-respected, well, it still is. He is a well-respected Mac journalist, but used to report on things in Apple. And now that he took a job over at Apple, you don't see him doing that original reporting. I'm sure he's doing a lot behind the scenes. And I assume that that's the case for the political journalist as well. Does Apple want to make them into personalities? Do they want to push into a more front-facing role where maybe they would do some original content? Maybe it's just op-ed pieces. Who knows? I mean, Tom, Apple, the TV app. What did it used to be before October? Just a place where you could get a curator, where you could get it would surface in a smart way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the natural layer on top of that was original. If they want to go into something like this, this would be a smart way to do it with either exclusive interviews before and after with the candidates where you're not necessarily putting a personality out there, or like you mentioned, original op-ed commentary on top of it. So something to watch. Again, the date of that particular debate, whether you want to watch it or not, but if you want to just know what's going on, that'll be on February 7th. Hey, thanks, everybody, who participates in our subreddit, political stories, and otherwise, you can submit what you are interested in and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com.dtns. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. So we got a kind of an interesting one from Chase who says, over the last few months, I've been testing out tiny projectors to try to solve the problem of the most ergonomic way to watch TV. I figured if we could place a small battery-powered projector in the center of our bed and pointing out the ceiling, it would be the most ergonomic way for my wife and I to watch TV in our room without disrupting the baby who's adjacent in the living room. Chase says, I just want to put a projector in the middle of the bed for the hour or so that we watch a show before going to sleep. We actually, we were all sort of confused by this, and we wrote him back and said, are you really wanting to put a projector in the middle of your bed? Chase said, yes, this is what I'm trying to do. But he's not leaving it there. He's not building it. Exactly. It's coming and going, but it is definitely projecting to the ceiling above the bed. Chase says, I've purchased and returned four different projectors so far because none of them lived up to the expectations, issues, fan noise, audio controls that were broken, Android capable ones couldn't download newest apps to play Disney Plus or other content. Projectors with auto keystone had poor implementation that messed up picture quality. Airplay capable ones couldn't airplay copy protected content, lack of USB power plugs for simple device charging. So Chase says, I'm contemplating a continuation on my search for the perfect solution. Thought I'd reach out to you guys to see if anybody had pointers. The first ones I purchased didn't have a ton of bells and whistles, but they were under 200 bucks. I could plug in a Fire TV stick, get content from Disney or Amazon or Apple, etc. When I first tried it, I didn't have a Fire TV stick and I used a Chromecast, but that was annoying having to cast to the device. Yeah, so either the Fire TV stick or even a Roku stick would work. So if you have a Fire TV stick, he's kind of halfway there on the battle of the apps part of it. Speaking of keystone, Roger pointed out, we're looking at this email earlier, that you wouldn't have to put it in the middle of the bed. You could put it off to the side and keystone it, but Chase says he wants it in the middle of the bed just for an hour or so. So yeah, I mean, the easy answer would be to contact Robert Herron and we probably will do that and see what he has to say. But if anybody else out there has some answers about the best battery-powered projector that's lightweight, it's not too big, so Chase can pop it down on the bed and watch some movies on the ceiling, don't tell him, don't watch him on the ceiling. He wants to watch him on the ceiling. Yeah, if you've got an idea, send us an email, feedback in Daily Tech News Show. I really feel that you should put a projector in the middle of your bed as the cats can have a little salami of the Daily Tech News Show Yeah, we're like, are we understanding you right? Yeah, yeah, you are. That's what I want. He shouldn't do that. Just answer, if you have like, oh, no, this would be the perfect thing if you want to do that. And I got to say, Chase, when he sent us the photo, I was like, that's pretty cool. I would also like a projector above my bed. Hey, thanks to that's exactly right. Yes, let's figure it out for Chase and myself. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Chris Smith, Jeff Wilkes and Sonya Vining. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us on this fine Thursday, Justin politics, you know, kind of, kind of a quiet week. Oh, geez, Sarah, I'm really glad it's opposite day because that makes sense now. Boy, howdy. Not only the impeachment continues to march on, but also we've got international elections as the UK goes to vote today and likely by the time that anybody hears this, you will know the results of that. But the big thing that I really want to point out is that episode two of my new political history series, raise the dead is now live. It talks all about the beginning of the modern primary system and the feud among many other things. Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt so hated the Kennedy families? She tried to kill JFK's career before his campaign for president ever got started. I did not. Well, there you go. Where do you get that story again? Oh, raise the dead podcast.com. You can find it on any and all of the podcast platforms. Now this just in one minute ago, according to exit polls for the BBC, ITV and Sky conservative set to win a majority in the UK general election. I don't know why I felt I had to pass that along, but it just that alert came up while Justin was talking. So I figured that I would include that as well. Hey, we have new Patreon reward merchandise. If you want to celebrate six years of DTNS and get your hands on some Len Peralta art that you can only get by being a patron, become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS stick with it for three months. And depending on the level, you might get a sticker, a poster, a mug, or a t-shirt. Get all the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Got something on your mind? Let us know. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Blair Bazderich from this week in science as our guests talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.