 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's smart shopping cart for grocery stores. The UK bans Huawei from its 5G networks and a robot platform with reach. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 14th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. We were just talking about the Queen of Cows and Milo Ventimiglia in Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google will prevent users who aren't logged in into a Google account from joining Google Meet sessions hosted by G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education subscribers. Over the next 15 days, the option will be turned on and can only be turned off by contacting G Suite support. The Wall Street Journal sources say that SoftBank has hired Goldman Sachs to explore the possibility of a sale of ARM or ARM. CNBC sources say SoftBank was preparing for an ARM IPO but received interest from an outside party about a possible sale. It wasn't me. Spotify is adding two podcast charts in 26 countries to be updated daily, a chart called Trending ranks 50 shows partially on the speed of growth in listener numbers, and a chart called Top ranks the 200 most popular shows overall localized by region. Top also includes subcategories like business, comedy and technology in some of the regions. Google's PlayPass app subscription service is now available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the UK. The service launched in the US back in September of 2019. All right, let's talk a little more about those smart cards, Patrick. Let's, but not before I've told you that apparently La Ronde de Voutek is on the top 100 on Spotify for four. Well, congrats. That's awesome. So thank you. Amazon plans to open a grocery store in a Los Angeles suburb later this year. The grocery store will not have the wide array of cameras and sensors used in an Amazon Go store to track what you take off the shelves and charge you automatically when you leave. Instead, Amazon announced the Dash Cart, a shopping cart with a touchscreen and sensors to detect what you put into your cart. A ring of cameras detects most items. Things like produce let you input a price code before you put the item in your cart. Once you're done shopping, you take the cart dash. You take the dash cart through a special checkout plane that calculates your total without needing a human cashier. The cart can only handle up to two bags of groceries. So this grocery store will have normal checkout with cashiers if you need more than two bags of groceries. It's just if you don't have that much, you can use the dash card. And I don't know, Sarah, it kind of strikes me as the self checkout but in your cart. Yeah, there's the whole Amazon Go, which I've never tried. There's one in San Francisco, which would be the closest to me. And I just I've not had the opportunity to, you know, check it out yet. You know, that is a slow rollout. I would love to think that this would work for not just Amazon but lots of other grocers in a future world, you know, and just have a lot of less contact, less, you know, payment situations, especially when you're on the go. All good. But this is not, you know, our reality today. So the idea that Amazon's like, OK, we got Whole Foods. We have our kind of, you know, futuristic Amazon Go situation. And then we got something in the middle here. It's an Amazon grocery store that's neither of these grocery stores. And we're just going to see how this works with folks, see how it catches on. And I like the idea of it. I mean, you know, my initial reaction is like, now you got to input stuff for your own produce, blah, blah, blah, you know, but I think that, you know, folks kind of wanting, especially these days, wanting to have limited interaction with other people. This is a this is a very good timing move. And Amazon has always been really good at trying many different things and kind of seeing what sticks out of the many, many different types of pasta. They throw in the wall. This also seems like it might be a little bit more easily accepted by privacy conscious people, because it's really, as you said, Tom, it's a self-checkout counter in your card. So it's really nothing that concerning. And it's also probably it seems more easily integratable into any kind of existing grocery store. Maybe they're going to sell the technology and get all the data from everyone. Amazon Go is the brand for the whole sensor array stuff. It's mostly convenience stores, but they have two grocery stores in Seattle. But those are smaller grocery stores. I have seen this Amazon grocery store that is not Go branded. It's not open yet, but I've seen it from the outside. It's huge. It's an old Toys R Us. It's gargantuan. It's over in Woodland Hills. And so, yes, I think you guys are right. This is Amazon trying something out, saying, OK, our Go system just doesn't scale to a store this size, but Patrick, you're right. We want to sell this technology to other people because that's what Amazon does. Right. They develop cloud systems for their bookselling and then turn that into AWS and sell their cloud services to other people. That's that's proven to be incredibly successful. So I imagine that that's what they're doing here is saying, let's figure out how this works for us. Probably create our own grocery stores using the in-house experience we get from the Whole Foods folks to operate it. And then once we've proven it, we can sell this to the large grocery stores that wouldn't be able to take advantage of the entirely cashierless system that is Amazon Go, because it just doesn't scale up that hard. That far. Well, moving on, UK digital minister Oliver Dowden announced that telcos may not buy 5G equipment from ZTE or Huawei, starting in January of 2021. Existing equipment from the vendors must be removed by 2027. The new policy must still be passed by parliament. Now, back in January, the National Cyber Security Center determined that Huawei's equipment could be used as long as it wasn't in the core infrastructure. Then the US introduced new restrictions to prevent companies from selling parts to Huawei if they use US based parts or IP. That means that Huawei would have to source chips from new vendors. And the UK says, well, we can't properly vet for that kind of security. So 5G rollouts in the UK are expected to be delayed at two to three years as a result of the new policy. The ministry will now begin consultations on what to do about non 5G networks. Meanwhile, Huawei reported year over year revenue growth of 13.1 percent for the first half of 2020. Consumer business accounted for 56 percent of its revenue with carrier businesses making up to making up at 35 percent. Huawei's profit margin increased from 8.7 percent last year to 9.2 percent this year. So Huawei weathering COVID-19 and the US trade restrictions, which started last year, fairly well to date, but probably better than a lot of people would have expected. But they are facing increasingly heavy countercurrents and the UK is one of them. Here's the interesting thing to me. The UK is saying very reasonably, I think the Cyber Security Center is saying, well, wait a minute, now that Huawei can't use the parts that we vetted from TSMC and others, they'll be using parts from manufacturers most likely within China that we can't properly vet. And so therefore we can't say they're secure. We can't we can't properly vet that. That would mean that new buildouts wouldn't be able to use new Huawei systems. But it doesn't explain why they are now saying the digital ministry is now saying you also have to go pull the old stuff out because those have been vetted as being OK for the non-core network. So there is a political aspect to this that isn't reflected in the finding from the NCSC. Yeah, this is, I mean, it's a consequence, secondhand consequence of the U.S.'s claims, allegations, war, whatever you want to say about them. And it does, even though Huawei has fared well, as you said, even through the COVID crisis, does put the pressure on them. And France has also been saying, even though they don't have a problem, they don't have as much of a problem with Huawei as the U.S. We're also having to reevaluate how much of their hardware we're going to be using for the exact same reasons. So it certainly seems like whether or not it is a trade tactic by the American government, it is having an effect that is beyond their direct banning of the company locally. And it's going to delay UK rollout. It's going to cost UK telecoms to do this. It doesn't seem to be immediately hurting Huawei, though it still could. Huawei probably is going to try to make up what it will lose from the UK and the U.S. and any potential other European vendors by selling to Russia, by selling to Africa, by selling to possibly India, although it's still touching go which way India is going to go because India is not real friendly with China. But certainly Russia and Africa would be potential markets there, probably Iran and a few other markets as well. So again, this is another example of how technology is going to continue to be segmented rather than be a worldwide global market. You're going to have places in the world that have cheap proven Huawei networks that may have some security flaws. The NCSC found it to be maybe not intentional, but to have vulnerabilities. And then you'll have other parts of the world that will roll out slower because they're having to change tactics here. NBC's streaming platform Peacock launches to everyone in the U.S. on July 15th. The free tier with ads will have about 13,000 hours of programming paid tiers will have about 20,000 hours. So you get more content if you pay, but it's not bad on the free tier. The paid tier will cost you $5 a month with ads or $10 a month if you don't want any ads at all. Broadcast shows from NBC's broadcast networks will be available the next week on the free tier. So if you watch this is us, it'll air. And then the next week, it'll be available on the free tier of Peacock. If you pay, though, you get it the next day. Apps for Peacock are available for the PlayStation 4. They just announced that's coming July 20th. The Xbox, Apple TV, Google boxes like Android TV, Vizio, LG, Comcast. The Flex TV box has it and Cox. Of course, Comcast owns NBC, so that makes sense. But Cox Cable will have it on their box as well. Peacock does not look like it will have apps on Roku or Fire TV. That is similar to HBO Max, which launched without apps for Roku or Fire TV as well. One of the main sticking points for both HBO Max and Peacock have been that Roku and Amazon want to continue to sell these channels as add-ons to their own apps. The Roku has a Roku channel and, of course, Amazon has Prime Video. Add-ons would mean sharing more revenue, but also sharing the subscriber relationship Peacock and HBO Max want to control both of those. Roku and Amazon also ask partners for ad inventory and a commitment to spend money on their platforms to market. And that's the amount that they want to spend is also in contention. So I mean, if anything, this just points out that streaming's time has come because you've got the platform saying we have the leverage. You have to give us a sweetheart deal for revenue sharing. And we want to have a part in the subscriber relationship and make it really easy for people where the platforms themselves, like Peacock and HBO Max, want to control everything themselves. They do not want to give over that revenue and that subscriber relationship to Roku and Amazon. Yeah, I mean, if there were, I don't know, back in the day when Hulu launched, for example, you know, everyone sort of going like, is this going to work? Is this going to work? Well, yeah, I mean, it's it's changed. It's taken on many forms, but the whole streaming model does work. How many of these streaming models are going to survive though? Not all of them just not possible. People just aren't going to pay that kind of money. So yeah, it really comes down to a, you know, NBC saying with Peacock, this is what we want. And, you know, companies like Amazon and Roku saying, this is how you're going to win and you're going to win by playing nice with us. And not every company is doing that. Yeah, Roku and Amazon have 40 million, you know, so or so people. So they feel like if you want to survive, not even win. If you want to survive out there, really, you need to be on our platform. We feel like we have the upper hand and the and these these folks like Peacock and HBO Max are saying we are not going to give in from the beginning. We don't want to start with a bad relationship just to get distribution. We feel like people will want to watch the things on our platform. And if you don't have them, you will suffer. It's it's exactly the thing that happens with with cable TV disputes. It's just happening for streaming and and in a world where people do have more choice. So with cable TV, you couldn't easily go somewhere else to find your TV subscription. With this situation, if you don't like the fact that Roku doesn't have Peacock, you can switch to Apple TV or using your Xbox there, you do have more choices. Scientists from North Carolina State University and Microsoft will present a study at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and symposium on the foundations of software engineering in November on the effectiveness of technical job interviews. So specifically, the study interviewed 48 computer science students. Half were given a technical problem to solve on a whiteboard with an interviewer watching in the same room, watching them as they do it. The other half solved a problem on a whiteboard in a private room. They were alone. Those in the private room didn't have to explain their solutions. They just came up with one and talked about it afterwards. Performance was measured by the accuracy and efficiency of the solutions. Those who took the traditional in review performed about half as well as those who had a private room. And notably, all of the women in the public interview failed and all of the women in the private interview succeeded. A larger sample size obviously needed to draw some firm conclusions. But this does shine some light on why, you know, this oh, this whole kind of like test taking thing under pressure is not necessarily going to give you the best candidate because they just might not work that well that way. Yeah, it seems obvious that, you know, oh, you won't perform as well in front of someone. But the fact of the matter is, some people do perform well in front of someone. And those are the people who got the job, especially if they had a preexisting relationship or had something in common with the person in the room, because that reduces anxiety. Whereas if you feel like an outsider and you're unfamiliar, you're going to have potentially more performance anxiety. I really hope that there is more. Studies made about this, because obviously this is an interesting thing to look at from a an academic point of view, when it would have significant ramifications for the hiring process. But also the part about all the women in the public interviews failing and all of them in the private interview failing is kind of a, I don't want to say eye opener, but it's really striking. And again, this sample size is very small. It's less than 50 people. So I would like to see how much of this is replicated with a larger sample size. And if it is, there could be other findings like this one that are interesting to take into account. And I think it's important to point out that it is in company's best interest to pay attention to this, because if you are only hiring people that perform well on the interview, you may not be hiring the best people for your job. That's right. Just because you perform well on the whiteboard in front of the person doesn't mean you are the better coder for this. So it's not a fair test of the skills you're trying to hire for. Yeah. I mean, you kind of like flip it, flip it around a little bit. It's like, okay, are you as a manager willing to stand over this person every time they're trying to solve the problem? No, that's not actually how the workplace works. You don't actually want that. I mean, it's cool to have somebody who works well under pressure, but a lot of people work differently. And especially in the engineering field, you kind of open it up. And you would think that maybe that's a stereotype, but coders might not be the ones that do their best work under pressure having to present their back office workers. And the way this test is presented, the study, is basically saying you're testing for anxiety and presentation skills, not for coding. And that's not what you want when you want to hire coders. Definitely, definitely. All right. The Trusted Use Initiative, or TNI, a coalition of publishers and tech companies, announced Project Origin, an attempt to combat disinformation by digitally watermarking legitimate content. The watermark will be used to automatically flag manipulated or fake content. Standards for product origin will be published in September. Audiences will see a small color indicator along with a message on the content or in the browser to verify the content is the original. TNI has successfully combated misinformation in the UK 2019 general election, the Taiwan 2020 election, and COVID-19. TNI is made up of Agence France-Presse, the BBC, the Financial Times, First Draft, the Hindu, Reuters, the New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Associated Press, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, along with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. Yeah, so up until now, and continuing into the US election, starting a month before the US election this year, TNI has worked on keeping each other informed. So members here and the technology companies help alert each other when some misinformation is being spread so that the news outlets themselves don't fall for it, which you think they wouldn't, but sometimes, you know, scramble to cover, it can be difficult. So this has proved very successful in preventing misinformation from being accidentally passed along. This project origin is very interesting because this is consumer-facing. What we want to do is, on an AFP story, we'll put this watermark and that will be something we could train viewers to look for. People in the audience can say, well, if I don't see the little color badge there, then is it really the official story? Now, obviously, there are ways to just put a color badge up, so it'll be very interesting to find out what the standards here are to prevent this from being faked and actually make sure that that watermark, you know, can't be subverted. But there are lots of ways and encryption to do this sort of thing, so I'm interested in which one they pick, and it would be better than just going by branding, because branding and URLs can also be manipulated and faked to fool people into thinking they're looking at the original source. So this is potentially a better way to do it than just that. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Hello Robot was founded three years ago by former Google director of robotics, Aaron Edsinger, and Georgia Tech robotics professor, Charlie Kemp. On Tuesday, Hello Robot introduced the Stretch Research Edition. It's a platform that really is a big poll with an arm on it, aimed at research labs, corporate R&D, and startups. Stretch is a mobile manipulator robot. It has a single telescoping grabber for picking things up and putting things down, attached to a central pole that can move around a little bit as well. The arm is touch sensitive and can handle items that weigh up to 1.5 kilograms. The grabber itself is not a human hand looking thing or even pincers, it's a pair of rubber cups and some metal springs. They modeled this on the grippers that are used by people with disabilities. They looked at what do people who need assistance use to grab things. Let's take the stuff that works for them and put it on the robot. Stretch will move on its own 34 by 33 centimeter wheelbase, navigates around with a real sense depth sensing camera and a 340 degree LiDAR sensor. It uses a combination of ROS and Python and can handle voice commands with some limited autonomy. It's capable of moving around a room, maybe grabbing and passing objects. There's a demo of it cleaning a counter with a wet rag. It's not meant for you yet. The idea here is that Hello Robot wants to sell its stretch platforms to research organizations. So six stretch platforms have been sold to research labs so far. These kinds of platforms are usually heavy. This one's light. They're usually expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This one costs $17,950. So there's an open source aspect to this as well. I think it's interesting what Hello Robot is doing here because it may not sound that impressive to you because you can't buy one and put it in your house, but what they're trying to do is say we've created a really good platform that could be good for a lot of things and like putting out an SDK with software, we want to give it to folks who can experiment with it and find applications for it. It's really interesting to see what result you get to when you don't start with a preconceived idea of what it should be because this is really just a poll with a pincer at the end on an extent. I hesitate calling it an arm. It's just another poll going off the main one that goes up and it really looks like it is extremely capable and versatile and I'm really curious. This is a very interesting approach. I'm very curious to see what people come up with or companies or researchers come up with as users for this because even on this small little video it can do so many things that you wouldn't expect it to do when you're looking at it because you're obviously trained as a human to expect human behavior or human capabilities from something that looks like a human. This is completely different. I do want to bounce off that point that it's very interesting because it actually has all the range of motions that you normally have in a human arm, but it's not structured like a human arm which is generally like when I think of robots in an automotive plant, it's a giant arm. If I'm looking at soft robots in a factory that puts together fragile objects, it's an arm. This has the range of motion, right? You don't need to have joints, you just need a way to pivot and it can pivot on its axis because it's on rollers as an arm that can extend because it's on the telescoping device. It doesn't need all that and it goes back to what Patrick said. If you get rid of the idea of it needs to look like an arm to do all these things and just say what do we need to actually get this task done? This is what we came up with. Yeah, I like this too because the other thing to consider is $17,950 sounds like a lot to me. I didn't pay that much for my car, but if in a lab situation where you're used to having to budget hundreds of thousands of dollars, $17,000 is achievable in your budget and something you might be willing to take more risks with. You might be willing to try more things with it because you're not like that was a $500,000 piece of equipment. It's going to be hard to replace if something goes wrong. I'm hoping that we'll see more people take this to places they wouldn't have taken those more expensive versions of it. Plus it's lighter weight. You can move it around and have it do more things anyway. It's safer in an environment where you have small children or pets because it's not a lumbering around device. Or even just other people. This is going to be used not in places where small children and pets would be right out of the gate, but I think that point still holds. Even in an industrial situation, it's not going to roll over somebody's foot and crush it. For people who are just audio listeners, this is really imagine a Roomba with a pole going up about two to three feet and then in the middle of that or a pole perpendicular to that with a pincer at the end. That's it. That's the robot. It looks like a rolling hat rack. It really does. Well, I love from the TechCrunch article that showed me variety ways of how it could clean my couch. Or give me a glass of water. Or maybe take some laundry out of that. There are these kind of mundane things that we don't really say like, I need a robot for this because people just are used to doing it. But once you have something that is versatile enough and at the right price point, which it isn't yet, but you know, again, early days, then that's where it gets interesting. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our sub Reddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailyTechnewshow. Reddit.com. Oh, look, Mailbag. Oh my gosh. Wow, weird. I wrote in to chime in our conversation from yesterday about job requirements that sometimes didn't make a lot of sense. For example, a job requirement requiring you to have more experience in years than the software has been around. That doesn't make sense. Zach says, I've seen this a lot while looking for jobs. Usually it's a red flag for smaller companies. But when larger companies make this mistake, it does make me wonder, is it because they're forced to do a public listing before they could allow somebody within the company to take the position so they made it impossible? The other issue is just your requirements themselves. I've also seen impossible requirements, but I've seen requirements to have experience of the year different tools and languages were created that were different. This has made finding a job more difficult since I pretty much have to use most tools within a year of their creation and continue to use them for three plus years, which, unless you're really good at picking winners, is really hard to do. Not saying when filling out the applications that you have to click a check mark saying that you agree that you truly meet the requirements listed before submitting your application. Not all job listings are like this, but it seems to be at least in Zach's experience about 20%. Zach says, I hope to find a realistic opportunity soon. Yeah, and Allison Sheridan wrote in with I think he's a good example of what Allison was pointing out. Allison says, Hey guys, I heard you talking about bungled job application requirements for longer than technology had been around. There's a fantastic episode of the Code Newby podcast interviewing Aubrey Blanche about how to create equitable design and by that she means getting a diverse workforce and harnessing it correctly. The reason it's relevant to your story is that she talks specifically about how making too many and too specific of requirements in a job description actually gets you worse candidates. And I think Zach's an example of that Zach. It's probably a great candidate, but he's holding off applying for these things because he's like, well, I don't have 12 years experience on software that was out for 12 years, so I guess I shouldn't apply. Well, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Ali and Lisa Sanjabi at John Atwood and Chris Benito also thanks to the one the only Patrick Beja Patrick, what's been going on with your world? I have a feeling it has to do with working from home. I felt like evil kind evil for a second there. Yes, indeed, you can go to workinsanity.net if you want to check out the Work Insanity podcast that Tom and I do together it's 15 minutes every Monday and if you want to check out Laurent Desvous Jeux or Laurent Desvous Tech and you speak French go to notpatrick.com. It's very easy you get a link directly to your podcast app to subscribe to those shows Laurent Desvous Jeux and Laurent Desvous Tech just go to notpatrick.com and you're done you're welcome. 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