 Coming up on DTNS, what Twitter will include in its paid membership, Adobe leads the fight against Deepfakes, and what the heck's going to happen to TikTok? And why would Microsoft want it? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 3rd, 2020. I'm Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And making the wrong month happen on the show's producer, Roger Chang. No one would have known, except for my sarcastic reading of August, that that was mistaken. Hey, folks, we were just talking about William English passing away. The co-inventor of the mouse and Roger found a very interesting tidbit about the mouse and the trackball. You can get that by becoming a member of Good Day Internet at our Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start right here with a few tech things you should know. News from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or CSAIL, developed a machine learning system that can either make a prediction about a task or defer the decision to an expert and adapt when and how often it defers to its human collaborator. Snapchat announced it's adding the ability to embed popular songs in little videos you make. Why does that sound familiar? Tick-tock, tick-tock. Rolling out first in New Zealand and Australia starting now and to English language users more widely this fall. Facebook globally blocked a host of Brazilian accounts linked to political disinformation and targeting the country's 2018 election as extreme, which the company also says poses a threat to freedom of expression outside the country. On Saturday, a Supreme Court judge fined the company for non-compliance, citing the risk of criminal liability for a local employee. Facebook is now appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn the order. Sky News sources say Garmin paid a multi-million dollar ransom to recover its files from the wasted locker ransomware. Garmin supposedly used the services of Erité IR to negotiate the payment and obtain the decryption keys. Sony confirmed that the PS4 DualShock 4 controller can only be used with PS4 games and older on the PlayStation. Other peripherals like, quote, license, racing wheels, arcade sticks and flight sticks as well as the PlayStation camera, headsets and VR controllers will be forward compatible with PS5 games. No good. Just the DualShock. Google launched the ads transparency spotlight plug-in in the Chrome Web Store. It shows data collected by Google's ad disclosure schema API, including how many ads are on a page, a list of ad providers serving the ads, and why the ad was shown on the page, such as like, oh, you are a subscriber to this and that's why you ended up seeing it. It also shows you links to each ad company's privacy policy. Google announced it will buy a 6.6% stake in home security company ADT. ADT will integrate Google's Nest devices into security monitoring. Google and ADT will cooperate on marketing, product development and investment in technology and employee training. Interesting. Old meeting the new there. Probably a very good move for both of them. All right. Speaking of Google, let's talk a little bit about their newest phone. Oh, let's. So Google announced the Pixel 4a phone with a blog post with some deets. The Pixel 4a has a 5.81 inch, 2340 by 1080, 60 hertz OLED display, a Snapdragon 738G system on a chip, 6 gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of UFS 2.1 storage and a 3140 milliamp battery, a single 12 megapixel camera on the back and an 8 megapixel camera on the front and a USB C port and a headphone jack as well. A headphone jack. Wow. I know. What about that? The 4a has a bigger battery than the 4. A smaller top bezel as well doesn't need the depth sensing required for air gestures. It's nicer looking than the 4, but it's not as powerful as the iPhone SE or OnePlus Nord, but it's also about $100 cheaper. The Pixel 4a is available for pre-ordered now for $350 shipping on August 20th. One more thing. At the end of its post announcing the 4a, Google also announced it will have a 5G version of the 4a for $499 and a 5G Pixel 5 coming this autumn. Yeah. The only feature we didn't know because of the long delay was everybody thought this was going to come out in May and almost every detail about it leaked over the intervening months was the price. The price seems to be everyone's favorite feature at $350. It's $100 exactly cheaper than the OnePlus Nord. It's about $50 to $150 cheaper than the iPhone SE, depending on what model you're talking about. It's quite a bit cheaper than other mid-range phones as well, but then Google goes and undermines, or as some call it, Osborne's itself by announcing it will have a 5G version of the 4a out in the autumn, almost like saying, don't buy it yet, we're going to have a version with 5G. Also a Pixel 5, which we kind of knew that that one's less of an undermining, but the 5G version of the 4a will cost you more, it'll cost you $499. So if you're into that $350 price point, I guess maybe you don't wait for the 5G because you're like, 5G won't be widespread for a few years anyway, but I don't know. It seems like Google just wanted to get this out there and say, look, okay, we made it, it was a pain, maybe they're not making as many of them as they had wanted and so they're not pushing it as hard. I don't know, but it's an odd launch for something that for people who want to mine their pennies is a very attractive phone. It is. That said, the timing is curious. As you mentioned, listen, a $500 phone, a lot of people are like, that sounds great. That's not even really expensive based on what a flagship phone will run you these days. It kind of feels like to me that, I don't know, there was some supply chain issues going on here where Google was like, eh, just release it and sell it for real cheap and let's move the merch and then we've got other stuff going on this fall. We don't have to push so hard since we didn't make as many of them. You're kind of right. It kind of feels like that. The one thing, and Roger, I don't know if you want to weigh in on this. For people who want the bargain price, $350 is very attractive. It's not very future-proof. That Snapdragon 730 is not the 760. It's not even the best mid-level Snapdragon processor. It obviously doesn't have 5G. Will you end up spending more because you'll have to replace this sooner? I would say that for a lot of people, like for example, my wife, she wouldn't use a lot of the additional features. She just needs a phone that does all the basic, does the contacts, does the photos I can share through Instagram or Facebook. The only problem with her phone is it's no longer being supported. It's a five-year-old OnePlus 3. It works great, but it no longer has any updates for security and all available apps. Having something like this also means that you get a new phone that's inexpensive, but it's also part of the whole Google, we strip it down to the bare essentials. There's no bloatware that's added, and it does 80% of what most people do on the phone. If she's still rocking a OnePlus 3, this processor will probably be fine for her. These aren't going to be doing heavily intense things that would use the processor. That makes sense. The Content Authenticity Initiative, whose members include Adobe, Twitter, and the New York Times, published a white paper outlining an open-source standard for photo and video authentication. This standard would be built into hardware, like cameras and phones, as well as in editing software like Photoshop and Premiere. Using a digital signature when media is initially captured and a new signature after each edit. Now, granted, this is only going to happen if you're using software or hardware from participants, and they don't have any hardware participants yet, but Adobe is a big software maker, so it's got a nice start. Basically, think exif metadata. If you know what that is, the metadata in your phone or your photo, that's encrypted, so you can't just make it say whatever you want like you can with exif. Users would be able to see a record of changes made to an image or a video. That signature could optionally include the creator's name and location information. Photographers might want to do that, like stamp their name, say, I'm the one who took this, nobody else. Any image that was manipulated on non-standard software, you're like, well, so Adobe puts that encrypted record in there, you just edit it on something that's not Adobe, but you would be missing these CAI tags, and the idea is to try to train people to think, well, if the CAI tags are there, this is a suspect image. You can't trust what you're looking at. The group will now work on prototyping the system. There's no timeline for when the standard might become widely available, although Adobe's pushing it forward, saying that users of Photoshop and the Adobe Behance social network will gain access to a prototype version of CAI by the end of the year. So this is like, I mean, you know, the initial reaction is like, oh, so that we understand deep fakes going forward. Right. You know, I was thinking before the show, this makes a lot of sense to me. Were I to be a person who, for whatever reason, did not want my identity associated with my creation, then what? You could choose not to do that. You can say, I don't want to put my name. If you're a photographer, because like you said, there's two versions. One is stop defects. The other is have attribution. But if you're a photographer, you know, you're Banksy and you don't have your, your, your identity on there, you don't have to. You can choose not to. I got it. Well, if you have the option to opt out, if for whatever reason, that's what you want to do. Otherwise, this makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, if it's something that is ironclad, then, you know, in, in the case of, you know, some of us kind of looking at photos or videos and being like, is this real? And being able to at least bring it back to somebody that is credible and or would be able to say yes or no. I participated in the creation of this thing. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. And you'd be able to see like, okay, wait a minute, was, was someone cut and pasted into this? Was a layer added to make it look like something? This would record all those changes. The weaknesses in it is it only works for the participants, like I said. So until you get Sony and, well, mostly Sony, but, but other, other hardware makers on board Logitech, maybe, to be able to add to this Olympus, Fuji, et cetera, you're, you're not going to have the dominance you need to make this reliable because unless all the major camera makers have this built in and all the major photo and video editing has it built in, final cut, et cetera, when you see it not there, you're going to say, well, it's probably just made on hardware that doesn't use CAI or it's probably just made on software that doesn't use CAI. It's not going to tell you anything until you get a predominance of use. All it will be able to do is if it's made on Adobe software, then you'll be able to be sure. But if it's not, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to say it's faked because you just wouldn't have that predominance. But eventually that's what Adobe wants. They want to get, this is open source, anybody can use it and they want to get everyone on board so that so many companies are using it that if you see an image or a video without it, then that would become suspect. They're just not there yet. Well, last week was quite an earnings week. If you were with us on Daily Tech News Show last week, you know this is true. Twitter said on its earnings call, it was looking into the possibility of offering a paid subscription to users, setting off all sorts of the usual wild speculation and fears. What does it all mean? TechCrunch actually reports on a survey that's making the rounds asking users to evaluate these features or supposed features in the future. Twitter confirmed that the questions are being asked to evaluate options for a membership model. So let's go through a few of them. Here are the options asked about in the survey. Undo Send, a 30 second window that lets you recall a tweet before anybody sees it. Cool feature, I wouldn't, that wouldn't make me pay because I usually don't see my typos until after 30 seconds. I mean, listen, when Gmail introduced the, you know, bring back the email feature, I was like, this is awesome. I have never once used it and I think just knowing it's there makes me kind of look at things just like a slightly a little bit more closely. And so I feel the same way about Twitter, but an Undo Send for 30 seconds, it's 30 seconds. Not only. Get it alone, yeah. What else you got? All right, custom colors, Tom. Would you like to change your fonts or your themes or both for your phone or your computer? Again, not something that's gonna make me pay, but definitely the kind of thing you throw into a subscription and make it feel like it has a lot of features. And you can change colors. All right, how about this? Video publishing up to five X longer than default with higher maximum resolution of 81.92 by 81.92. Hey, just a side note, that's actually higher than 8K resolution. Eight plus K, yeah. 8K plus. 8K plus, you're right. What about that, Tom? You're gonna pay for that? That if I needed it, which I very well might, would make me pay. That would be the kind of thing it's like, oh, no, I need to put longer videos. I wanna have higher resolution. Definitely the longer could make me, because we do video, it's like, oh, maybe that's worth paying for it, depending on how much. All right, well, I'm not done yet. Badges, links to businesses, for example, like a journalist badge that links to the publication you work for. I mean, it's like Blue Checkmark Plus. I'm not gonna quote the treasure of this year, Madre, but not the thing that gets me in. Auto responses also would be a menu of responses to automatically reply to a tweet. I could see Shannon making use of that for the Daily Tech News Show account, possibly, certainly bigger businesses, yeah. For sure, and we got a couple others as well, social listening, which means conversation around your account, total volume, stats, people in businesses talking most about what you're talking about, likely best for companies, and then brand surveys. So you could do a survey like the one you're taking within Twitter about your brand. Yeah, those last two definitely are going to be attractive to businesses, and make me think that this membership is going to be tilted towards brands, tilted towards businesses. More analytics, I absolutely expected to be part of some kind of membership, so that one doesn't shock me. I don't think custom colors are really going to be a big deal for businesses. So there's a couple of more consumer-y ones in here. But I feel like this indicates that Twitter is thinking like, okay, brands, we know you want to manage your Twitter presence better. What can we do to help you with that? And if you pay us a little, we'll give you those tools. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like, the auto tweet stuff when done well is a great feature, and there are plenty of third-party services that help you do that. When done poorly is super spammy, and it's not, you know, this is not just a Twitter thing, it happens on social media in general, but if Twitter can figure out a way to, you know, yeah, attractively bring brands in, or individuals, you know, people who are going to pay, and it becomes something that all parties feel has gained followers and helped engagement, then it's a no-brainer. Yeah, yeah, some kind of Twitter pro, right? That's what I expect. Twitter is free to use for everyone and will continue to add features for everyone. But if you're a pro, if you're a business, AKA a company with a line item budget that you can allocate toward the Twitter subscription, then boy, do we have something for you that will make it better. And I think that's smart, right? Because companies will be willing to spend even a small amount of money for something like this, and it's not the kind of stuff that's gonna make your average Twitter user feel like they're getting an inferior product because they're not paying. And I think that's important to Twitter. Totally. All right, folks, if you wanna keep up on all this stuff, we had somebody right in saying, ah, they're having a hard time keeping up on DTNS because 30 minutes a day, and we get that. I always tell people like, the older episodes are disposable, get rid of them, don't listen to them, always go to the latest. But if you wanna keep up in less than 30 minutes, say five minutes a day, be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech Headlines. Five minutes a day gets you all the information you need at DailyTechHeadlines.com. Definitely gonna take more five minutes to talk about TikTok, though. Microsoft, man, was it a weekend for Microsoft and TikTok. Microsoft said Sunday it is working on a deal to acquire TikTok's operations in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. So different than what we found out Friday, it's not gonna acquire the data portion of all of TikTok. It's gonna require all of TikTok, but only in a portion of the world. And Microsoft says that the discussions will end by September 15th, one way or another. Now, Microsoft may invite other US investors to take minority stakes, but despite earlier reports, at this point it looks like Microsoft would be the majority owner of whatever it buys from ByteDance, and ByteDance would retain no interest in whatever it sells to Microsoft. Right now, 70% of the outside capital investment in ByteDance is from the US, and minority stakes are likely to go to those people. That's my guess, is the current investors from the US in ByteDance would be transferred over to be minority investors in the Microsoft version of TikTok. Now, some investors in ByteDance could sue if they see this as an unfavorable outcome. That is a scenario floated by Fred Hu, chairman of China's primavera capital group, saying, I don't see how this makes sense for ByteDance in any way other than being bullied. And so we could sue if this doesn't make business sense. I think that's an empty threat, but it's out there. There was a lot of pressure brought to bear on ByteDance late last week and into the weekend. Several US statements to the press that sort of vaguely threatened about banning TikTok in the US somehow. Various theories about how that might actually happen, but there's nothing substantial there other than threats. President Trump apparently told Microsoft that ByteDance has 45 days to sell TikTok or cease operations in the US. That's backing off from earlier threats to ban it right away, but that's where that September 15th date comes from. The president has said it has to benefit the US treasury somehow, and he thinks it should be for all of TikTok, not just the 30% we're hearing, but Microsoft's free to do the negotiation however they want. If you're like, how is this supposed to benefit the US treasury? Well, I don't know, but Microsoft said it's committed to quote providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States treasury. Maybe a tax, maybe a fee, I don't know. Also pressure coming from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is a government committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of US businesses. They opened a review in November of the ByteDance acquisition of Musically. Musically became TikTok, was previously located in Shanghai and Santa Monica, since they had one location in Santa Monica can fall under this review. CIFAS is reportedly involved in the negotiations between ByteDance and Microsoft. So in addition to the president laying out some vague terms, CIFAS is involved to say whether this acquisition would relieve its concerns based on the review. All right, let's talk about what Microsoft would actually get. There are 1,000 US employees of TikTok. Those would presumably stay with a Microsoft acquisition. If you just count Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada, there are 226 million app downloads in those regions so they would get something less than that number of users. Microsoft would also have to make sure that all private data of TikTok's US users is transferred to and remains in the United States and deleted from servers outside the country. TikTok says that US user data is stored in the US but it is also backed up in Singapore, which is not China but apparently Microsoft would have to even move those backups out of Singapore. All right, what happens to the rest of TikTok is a very interesting question. Nobody's really talking about the part that Microsoft doesn't buy, the part that's in Europe and India where it's banned and Russia, et cetera. The Sun in the UK reported that bite dance would announce it intends to move the headquarters of the rest of TikTok to London after this acquisition. So that might provide some insight there. And there's questions about whether the Microsoft version of TikTok would interoperate with the other TikTok in the rest of the world. Don't forget, there is a Chinese version of a bite dance app like TikTok called DuYen. So we already have two versions, TikTok in the rest of the world and DuYen in China so maybe we just have three. The reactions in China have been interesting. Bite Dance said Sunday that it faced, quote, complex and unimaginable difficulties in going global but CEO Zhang Yiming has been under fire on Weibo, the top social network in China as an example of a public intellectual. That is a term used in China to belittle entrepreneurs who appear to promote Western values. Zhang Yiming is one of those people that is suspected of being a little too friendly with the West. An example, here's a post on Weibo. Zhang Yiming used to praise the US for allowing debate unlike in China where opinions are one sided. Now he got a slap in the face. Why doesn't he go argue with the US? Other posts called him unpatriotic for negotiating the sale and Zhang's Weibo account has been suspended supposedly to protect it but that's interesting. There's also some potential effects on China businesses if this happens and probably even if it doesn't happen few Chinese businesses have been making the jump to the United States or the West these days anyway. Games from 10 cent probably the closest to TikTok in any kind of popularity but most Chinese companies don't even take the US market as a possibility anymore. So look for Chinese companies to expand first in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America from now on. All right, let's talk about this Sarah. Oh, that's, man. Why? This is, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning boy did things change. Yeah they did. But really besides, yeah a lot of you know you've got President Trump saying I'm gonna shut TikTok down. What I think is most interesting is okay on the surface let's say Microsoft does buy TikTok's assets operating in Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. That those are large markets, yes but certainly not a global market. And considering TikTok's wild popularity and how it is kind of caught on like wildfire and very much in a global sense, you've got some issues in certain markets but is that really the right thing for Microsoft? It seems to me so like, I mean you want the global market not for markets. And that's the question is would it be able to expand back into the global market after acquiring this portion of it? About 11% of US adults use TikTok at least once per week that's not small, that can do very well. The two reasons why Microsoft might want this would be advertising they've shown with LinkedIn that they can expand their advertising business beyond just Bing. And so TikTok would be fertile ground to do that. Definitely acquiring TikTok would be able to show off what Azure and Microsoft can do with regard to protecting user data so they could make it a showcase for user data protection. But this is a company of TikTok that has a bad reputation for content, conspiracy theories, weird moderation decisions. It's got a bad reputation for data management because it does all of the spying and that all ad-driven apps do. And it's got a bad reputation for its ties to China whether true or not. And Microsoft is going to be colored by that if it acquires it. So the president may be imposing his negotiating tactics on the situation threatening dire consequences to force a party to the bargaining table, putting on tight deadline on it to pressure a deal to happen with dire consequences still in the offing if the deal isn't reached in time. That's my interpretation of what's going on here. Microsoft in a statement said it fully appreciates the importance of addressing the president's concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing those economic benefits to the treasury. Microsoft was originally reported to only want the data handling. See my previous comment on Azure and another US party would take over the operation of TikTok. I would say that's too murky to get done by September 15th. But Microsoft might still plan to do that in the future to say, we'll continue to handle the back end but maybe we spin off the front end to somebody else. I don't know. Another theory is that advisors in the Republican party were afraid that the president would alienate young voters if TikTok was banned. Senator Lindsey Graham, for instance, came out over the weekend called a Microsoft deal a win-win. That may be why they pushed to allow Microsoft to do this negotiation, but this is another one of those uncharted territory sort of situations. Yeah, I mean, I find the whole thing remarkable. However, this shakes out just the fact that we can have this in-depth conversation about Microsoft acquiring a very large property and the first thing that people don't say is like antitrust, oh my gosh. There was a point where Microsoft was like antitrust queen and now it's sort of like, oh yeah, Microsoft, yeah, they should probably have more of a social presence. This makes a lot of sense. How does it work? How do the numbers break down where it wouldn't have been so long ago that it would have been, the idea of Microsoft buying something this large would be a huge issue. Yeah, I don't think this is an antitrust concern simply because Microsoft isn't big enough in social networking and where it is with LinkedIn. It's not in the same market as TikTok. Buying TikTok isn't gonna drive out Facebook and Twitter and even though Microsoft is the second largest market cap behind Apple, it's behaving well in antitrust concerns. Remember, being big isn't illegal. Abusing that bigness is and Microsoft maybe has learned its lesson, I don't know. Well, if you have thoughts on this or anything that we talk about in any of our shows, you can join the conversation in our Discord which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. We've got a couple. The first one comes from Gautamon who says great discussion on accessibility that comes with slowing down and speeding up Netflix shows. This was our conversation on Friday. Gautamon says, I recently started watching a lot of K-Drama and I think I would greatly benefit from slowing down video so I can take my time with the subtitles, especially during fast-paced scenes. This is a feature that would benefit almost anybody watching content in a language that they don't understand and I'm glad Netflix is getting around to it. And then Barry in New Hampshire, live, freeze and die. That's live, free or die is the New Hampshire slogan. When it's cold, I guess that's what they say there. Barry says, good day all. I have to say I do listen to all podcasts and videos at 1.5x speed. I subscribe to 52 podcasts so it helps me get through all of them in a timely manner. It also helps to have a one-hour commute. Speeding podcasts up also makes you the host, makes you, talking to us, the host, sound more intelligent. I don't know if you've ever noticed but smart people talk faster. I work with a bunch of brilliant engineers and they are all fast talkers. That's why we sound so smart to Barry. Oh, Barry, I, I don't know. I hope I talk fast enough to sound smart to you as well. But yeah, no, it's good stuff. Thanks to Barry and Gautam on both for weighing in our Friday conversation. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Ally and Lisa Sanjabi, John Atwood and Chris Benito. Hey, thanks to everybody who rates and reviews us, especially just rating us in any podcast store, but particularly Apple's podcast store because if you do, it helps us rise in the rankings there. We don't know how, we're not trying to game the system. We just know that it's true because everyone notices that that happens. So once again, we're asking for your support. Even if you've reviewed us before, you can go back, update your review or change your rating or add a line to it. Write whatever you want, but leaving a starred review definitely helps us rise in the lists on the Apple podcast app. So even if you don't use that app, it'll help other people discover us. Maybe they'll move to Pocket Cast at some point. I don't know, but go leave us a review if you can, we really do appreciate it. Thank you for doing that. And of course, support us directly dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. If you have burning questions or comments or just want to get ahold of us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love your emails. Keep them coming, please. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Oh, we're gonna talk about robots and cows on tomorrow's show with Amber Mac. Can't wait. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. 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