 Coming up on DTNs, Europe goes after Google's ad practices. Brave starts a privacy-focused search engine, and David Woodbridge explains how Yatella for product accessibility features are working. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And this is Allison Sheridan from The Podfeat Podcast. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jane. Joining us, David Woodbridge, the National Commercial Assistive Technology Advisor for Vision Australia. Welcome, David. Thank you. And I've always wanted to say hi from down under. So I've just said it. Ah, fantastic. It is day two of Accessibility Week. And as I mentioned, we'll be talking about evaluating accessibility in products with David. We were just talking about how David's dogs evaluate new people they meet on good day internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com. Slice DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Last week, Facebook announced it would test VR ads with a few developers and Oculus Quest apps. But Resolution Games BlastOn was the only app mentioned by name. Now Resolution Games says after weighing feedback, not all of it was good, as you can imagine. It's decided not to move forward with a test in BlastOn. BlastOn is not free, but Resolution says it still might try this out in its free fishing game bait. London Mayor Sadeg Khan announced the city's underground metro system is set to have a mobile reception available across its entire network of stations and tunnels by the end of 2024. So good mobile data there. Busy stations such as Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Bank Houston, and Camden Town will get serviced by the end of 2022. And coverage will expand in phases from there. Transport for London says the new infrastructure will support 5G networks as long as mobile operators themselves offer it. That's a big subway system. Good for them, even in the tunnels. The European Union voted to grant the UK an adequacy decision recognizing the country's data laws do as good of a job as the European GDPR at protecting personal information. Granted, the status, granting the status to the UK gives businesses in the country the right to receive and process the personal data of EU citizens. One more Bruxett thing knocked down. Canadian House of Commons passed Bill C-10, which amends the Broadcasting Act to require streaming services operating in Canada to meet the same requirements as traditional broadcasters to finance and promote Canadian content. The bill still needs to pass the Senate though before becoming law. Twitter is opening applications for iOS users in the US to test its new SuperFollows monetization feature and to both iOS and Android US users for its ticketed space feature. I might recall SuperFollows will let users charge $299, $499, or $9.99 per month to unlock exclusive content. Ticketed spaces will let users charge between a dollar and just under $1,999 to be exact. To access a social audio room also offer extra features like capping your room size to 100 people, something like that. If you are interested, check your eligibility to apply in a new monetization option in the sidebar of your mobile app. Yeah, and only keeping 3%. Unless you make $50,000 or something, then they keep 20%. That's still not 30%, so that's interesting. Let's talk a little more about the European Commission beginning a formal investigation of Google for possible anti-competitive conduct. Yeah, you may have heard a song like this before. Europe is once again investigating Google for antitrust. Basically, this one's about the money maker, advertising. Google collects data for ad targeting that you can use to get your ad in front of the right people if you're a company that wants to buy an ad. Google will also act as the ad broker to help you find sites that reach those people. And Google will also host the sites where the ad will get put. So end to end, they can basically control the whole process, pretty much covering all aspects of the ad market in one company. So the main points for investigation here, 0.1, if you're using one of Google's products, either DV360 or Google ads, it's a lot easier to use Google's own ad-exchange. If you use an ad exchange sometimes to help manage the ads, you can hook another exchange into DV360 or Google ads, but it sure is a lot easier to just use Google's own ad-ex, 0.2. If you're putting an ad on YouTube, you don't have a choice. You gotta use DV360 or Google ads if you wanna buy an ad. 0.3, you have to use Google ad manager to display the ads on YouTube. And there are restrictions on ads not served by Google. Sure, you can serve the ad from somewhere else, but it has to go through ad manager any way you do it. And gosh, if you're already an ad manager, it's much easier to get that ad from another Google service because they integrate so well with ad manager, don't you think? 0.4, the fact that non-Google advertisers don't have access to the same user data that Google's own ad services have will be investigated as well. Now, that is kind of Google protecting your privacy because it has the info on you already. So why hide it from itself? But if they hide it from competitors, that stops it from spreading outside Google, the European Commission is also going to investigate Google's privacy sandbox. That's the plan to replace tracking cookies with aggregated cohorts of similar users, the so-called federated learning of cohorts or flocks. It will also look at Android's plans to let users opt out of personalized ads to see if Google's executing an advantage there, saying like, yeah, yeah, opt out of all the personalized ads. Well, Google won't really affect us, but it sure will hurt our competitors. Those are the things that the European Commission will investigate. This is an official investigation, but it doesn't mean they have determined that Google is guilty of anything yet. So can I ask a really simplistic dumb question without you mocking me? I'll try. Okay, go ahead. So the thing I, in listening to this, they do, people do have options, but it's always easier to go with the Google options from what you said. If Google is the one spending all of the money to host all of the YouTubes and searches and spending all of that money, the thing I never understand is why should somebody else get to do it and not pay them to use that? Right, I mean, it's the same old refrain. If Google has 10% of the market and they're trying to gain an advantage, then being able to say like, hey, we've made it easier to use all of our stuff. You don't have to, but you can, and it's easier if you do, makes perfect sense. And I think that's where your question is coming from. What the European Commission is going to evaluate is when you own 95% of the market, are you now abusing that position? It's no longer like this helps us get a leg up, it's we're actually reducing the effectiveness of the advertising market by keeping people out. Has your scrappy way of getting an advantage become a weapon that makes a less efficient marketplace? And that's what they're supposed to be investigating is like, ah, at this point, it is unfair for them to use that because no other competitors can get a hold of the marketplace and create an alternative that might be better. So it'll logical remedy be if they made it just as easy to use the other ad platforms to place your ads? Yeah, and that's always the end of the process is like, well, now you have to have a browser ballot. Now you can no longer charge people to be a search option when you set up Chrome. Like, yeah, those are the kinds of things they'll consider at the end of this process should they decide that there is an abuse of the market position. Any other questions? That's the best I understand. You're confusing. I, yeah, it was kind of like you said, Tom, you might have felt you heard this song before once or twice. Yeah, it always comes back to, at least to me, it's like, yeah, I mean, it's Google and Google working in various departments, but all still Google. It makes sense that it's easiest, you know, if you're trying to get into the ad game to work with a bunch of Google products that know how to work together. What, you know, what's the solution here? Google just makes it just as easy for any other platform to be integrated into its tools. I mean, how does Google do that? And then, you know, you want to tout your own product as the best product because you're proud of it. And, you know, that itself is, you know, a competitive advantage that you are supposed to have as a company, you know, unless it dumbed down anything. At a certain point, it's not a competitive advantage. It's a lockdown, right? And that's what the European Commission is going to be looking at. There are alternatives in the browser space, and we might be getting an alternative in the search space, Allison. Tell us about that. The privacy-focused browser Brave, built on the Chromium engine, has about 32 million users. It's a dedicated audience that values the built-in privacy protections like blocking ads and trackers by default. Brave also uses a cryptocurrency that pays users for their attention if they agree to see some ads. Users can use these basic attention tokens, or BATs, to support participating content creators. Now, Brave has introduced a public beta of a privacy-focused search engine at search.brave.com. Earlier this year, Brave acquired tech and developers from Clix, an anti-tracking search browser company that developed a technology called Tailcat that delivered search results without logging user activity. The Brave implementation of Tailcat lets Brave users volunteer to share anonymized search data machine learning algorithms used in that data to learn how to return better results. Brave will soon offer community curated open ranking models to help combat algorithmic bias and censorship. Brave will rely on some third parties like Microsoft for some areas like image search. However, Brave says it will post an independence metric to make clear which results come from its own index and which don't. There will be no ads on Brave search during beta, but eventually there will be a paid ad-free version and a free ad-supported version with contextual, not personalized ads. Brave is exploring using that on search as well. Man, swinging for the fences there, trying to create a search engine from scratch, but I think that's the right way to do it. Brave has got enough awareness out there that people know what it is. So it's not coming out of nowhere. You've got more people willing to try another search engine these days than before because there's just that feeling of like, I don't wanna have to give all my information to Google all the time. So if they can make it a useful search engine, that's how Google won away from Alta Vista and InfoSeq back in the day. It was like, oh, this one just works better. And that's the big question here for Brave. No matter what kinds of privacy protections they do, it has to work as well or better in what you're searching for. I use DuckDuckGo by default on mobile, but every once in a while I'm like, I have to use Google to find this because it's just, it's pulling data from other search engines, not creating its own index. So I think it's smarter for Brave to say, let's come up with something that will work better for ourselves. It's a big bet though. So just to clarify from what Tom has said, is this an actual web browser or a straight search engine? So Brave makes a web browser that this will become the default search engine for, but it also is just going to be a search engine at search.Brave.com, whether you're using the Brave browser or not. Oh, okay. And it's already up. Because I must admit, I mean, I use DuckDuckGo all the time because it was funny, I accidentally used Google the other day to search and it said, I can't remember where it said it, but it said something like, you know, oh, you haven't used this for a long time or something weird like that. And I said, well, yes I have been, I just haven't been using Google. So no, but that sounds interesting. And I'm assuming is Brave a Chrome backend? It is. It's the Chromium open source for the browser. The search is this whole tailcat thing that Allison was telling us about. So I'm also intrigued about this. It's a little offer, community curated open ranking models. Now community curated, there's a lot of internet to human curate. Do you have any idea how they could possibly do that? This one's interesting. I read a little bit in the white paper on it. The idea is that anybody can create a filter for the ranking model. It takes a little bit of work. Not everybody's going to do it. What they expect to happen from what I can tell is that a few of these models work really well. And those will be the popular ones. Brave will probably put those in front of you. Like, do you want to use the most popular ones? Those are the ones that seem to work well. And most people will use that, but you don't have to. You'll be able to choose from these other community curated models and be like, oh, I want one that actually excludes the top 100 sites because I want to find some off the beaten path stuff or I want to use ones that exclude certain regions because I want certain languages, whatever. So you'll be able to choose from those. Most people would probably just use the popular ones, but it gives you some flexibility and most importantly, transparency because you'll be able to see how every model works. Whereas right now with Google, you just know they have an algorithm. You have no idea how it works. Yeah, I mean, there's certain filters that you can apply to a search on Google, but I got to hand it to Brave taking on Google. As far as search goes, everyone else is all, but just thrown in that towel long time ago. And I kind of like the idea of almost mood-based searching. You know, like, this is what I'm looking for today. And I kind of know what I'm going to get versus this other way that I might search another time. That's pretty cool. Yeah, the rainy day felt good. So is there anything that sort of distinguishes it from duck-duck right then? I mean, is it better or worse? Does it add more features? It's certainly got even more transparency. Duck-duck goes pretty transparent, but this has got even more transparency. It's kind of too early to tell if it works better or worse or otherwise. But its search results are coming from Brave, not when they're coming from something like Microsoft, they let you know. They tell you like percentage of this search was sourced from Bing. But the idea is that eventually none of it will, whereas Duck-duck does use Microsoft as its backend. I just did a search for David Woodbridge on site colon podfeed.com and it found the last time David was on my show. So it's good. Yeah, I did a couple searches and popped right up. I haven't really put it to the test with obscure stuff yet, but I will. Hey, folks, there's lots of ways to support the show. We have some merchandise. If you'd like a DTNS hat, a hoodie, a mask, a mouse pad, Allison is wearing a lovely classic Daily Tech News show shirt today. We have all of that and more at the DTNS store. Go check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. We've been talking about accessibility this week. Accessibility functions are usually an out-of-the-box feature on most devices, but how do you determine if they're working well and if a product really is as accessible as the market says it is? Thankfully, David is here to give us a firsthand account of doing product accessibility reviews. And let's start with that, David. Can you explain what you do as an assistive technology advisor? Yep, indeed. So what I basically do is, so this is software and hardware is probably slightly different. So software-wise is a lot easier in some ways because literally, you know, do the buttons, do they have to correct labels? Can I go through the application in sequence? Can I access all the windows? Can I access the pop-up windows? Does it work with large-point speech output, braille displays, all that sort of stuff? So software stuff is much easier in some ways to say, yes, this is accessible, but along with that is also functional accessibility. So, you know, just because I can quote, access the interface, you know, it doesn't take me five minutes to get to somewhere that a sight of person would get to in about a minute or less. Where it comes to hardware accessibility, that's much harder these days because the hardware may not be accessible, but the apps or smart speakers that drive it may make it accessible. And I remember, I still have these weird conversations, you go into an electronics store and you say, can you show me your, I don't know, your current microwaves or your current heating systems for home? So they'll drag out, you know, the touchscreen-based one, you go, yeah, but it doesn't have quote, real buttons and they go, well, of course it has real buttons, you know, on the touchscreen, on the screen, there's these buttons that you can touch. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you can't see them, how do you actually touch them? And they go, oh, you can just get somebody to tell you. And it's like, well, so every time I'm gonna use this microwave, I'm gonna ask somebody to come and press the button, am I? So that's really hard. So when I start off, I start off with, probably the more the hardware type of thing. So I take it out of the box and go, one, can I set this up as a blind or low vision person? Once it's set up, which can be very challenging. Once it's set up, can I then operate the basic functions of the device? And I'll just give you an interesting example, which is a bit weird. The Amazon Echoes show, so of course, they're the Echoes with the, you know, the five, eight, 10 inch screens. Whilst they're accessible to set up, there's a little bit of an issue going on with this transition with smart speakers to go from, you know, your traditional speaker only to screen based. And that is where they say, we've found your information, have a look at the screen. So, you know, with your special access technology, you go and have a look at the screen and you can't read it. So that's where the accessibility drops off. So with the taste application that runs on Amazon Echo, it brings up this beautiful list of, you know, if I said, you know, show me some interesting recipes for scrambled eggs, for example, brings up this lovely long list of scrambled egg recipes. And if I drag my finger down the screen with the speech screen reader, it'll just go tick, tick, tick, tick, and it doesn't read out any of the actual recipes for me. So, and that's not the only example. There's quite a few other examples, but it's that sort of trend that I'm getting a bit nervous of these days where it's almost like the screen based smart speaker is going back to the, you know, almost when Windows 3.1 came out and went, oh my goodness, this is gonna make it harder and harder for blinded layer vision people to access. Would, I imagine there's someone out there saying like, we'll just get the ones without a screen. Is there something that you want out of the Echo show or the smart displays that you just can't get out of a smart speaker? Yep, probably, I think in some ways, yes, because one of the things about speech that I don't like is speech doesn't tell you, for example, how things are spelled. So when you hear, you know, when they brought out the new Mac OS and they said Monterey and I thought, oh God, how the hell do you even spell that? I'm not being an American type person. So at least with a screen based, you know, Amazon Echo, for example, I can ask it to read or spell out the word for me. I don't have to rely on the speech just saying, you know, Monterey, for example. So being able to read proper words, punctuation, spelling, all that sort of stuff is that's why you need, you know, better access because there's no way that I can say to, I mean, I probably can say to probably the Echo, you know, spell Monterey for me. But I just think there was some information that you just want to read in a sequence or an article online rather than just having speech read it out to you. And the display, if you're low vision, the display can display it in a way that you can read it, right, versus, you know, the recipe where it was like, this is too small, I can't really, I can't see that. Exactly. So you can do things like, you can do high contrast, you can do reverse video, you can zoom in, you can zoom out, you can change your font. So you can do all that really, really, really cool stuff. So you can do all that. But, you know, it's, I guess on the positive side of things, so I've just been negative about the poor Amazon Echo, the positive side of things with all the white goods coming out now, like your dryers and your washing machines and your dishwashers and so on. Because they're app driven, that means that I can effectively use a system that may be a touchscreen only, but as long as I can have the app that drives that device, then I can use it. So for example, we updated our kitchen a couple of years ago. So of course I had to go and buy a three and a half thousand dollar coffee machine to actually celebrate the fact that I had a new kitchen. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. As you do, indeed. So, and look, that's a touchscreen coffee machine. So, you know, if I wanted to use it, I couldn't physically, but because it's driven via an app on my iPhone or my Samsung phone, it's 100% accessible. So when I say accessible these days, I'm just gonna say, well, number one is the machine accessible. Number two, can you also drive it via an app and is the app accessible to drive the machine? So that also is a matter of something that I've got to keep in view of. Although one weird thing is with some of the washing machines, and this is a bit of a bizarre one, let's say for example, I'm reading the screen, so it's saying, you know, the different cycles. If I get to the second screen, where you as a sighted person would scroll to the next screen, because voiceover says, oh, I'm just reading the second screen. The problem is the application doesn't see those new icons or objects as being live, because the actual application hasn't scrolled there. So I'm tapping away on start or whatever else it might be, and the silly thing's not working. So they're those small things that whilst those controls were accessible, because the voiceover, the screen reader on the iPhone's giving more accessibility, they're not accessible. So there's those little sort of idiosyncratic type of things that go on, the fact that, you know, you can't use it sometimes. Before we wrap up, is there a common flaw that you've come across in assistive technologies? Things aren't labeled properly. So, and that's both with web accessibility. And though you had Shelley on yesterday and she was talking about things not being labeled with AI stuff being on the web and applications and that sort of stuff. So the two main things that I always get trapped by on both the web and the applications are number one, buttons not being labeled. And then this really annoying thing that developers do, they have these pop-ups that come up on the screen. So visually you can go, oh yeah, I've got a new pop-up, I can access that voiceover or talk back on the Android stuff, ignores it. So I'm happily trying to find this dialogue box and, you know, my sighted friends and my wife and so I'm screaming at me and going, look, Woodbridge, it's on the middle of the screen while you're watching me and you can't access it. So they're the two main things. So I'd say web accessibility, applications, pop-up dialogue box and buttons are the bane of my existence. Gotcha, gotcha. Thanks for sharing your insights on all of this. I know there's worlds more that we could talk about but even this little look inside of it, I think is super helpful for people to understand. No worries, welcome. Well, we've got Nika Monford back on the show with a spotlight on another awesome technology leader in our monthly segment, Teching While Black. Hi, this is Nika Monford, AKA Tech Savideva of The Snobble West Show. In the Teching While Black segment, I will bring awareness to a black technology leader who is advancing the tech community through their innovations across the spectrum of industries. Today in Teching While Black, let's highlight Angela Benton, the entrepreneurial aficionado. Angela is an executive, founder and CEO. Angela was an executive at IAC, Interactive Corp, as well as holding multiple roles in design, development and strategy. In 2007, she launched Black Web 2.0, a multimedia platform that focused on the intersection of black culture and technology. She created this platform to fill a gap that she noticed in the digital space. In addition to launching Black Web 2.0, Angela was the editor and primary writer for the site. In 2011, she founded New Me, which is the first accelerator globally for minorities. Under her leadership, New Me helped hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies raise over $47 million in venture capital funding. In 2018, New Me was acquired by another company. Currently, Angela Helms Streamlytics, a data analytics startup that facilitates media consumption data to bring transparency to streaming platform data that helps users reclaim ownership of their data and monetize it. In 2020, Streamlytics raised nearly $1.1 million in one week through the crowdfunding platform Start Engine. Sidebar here. I tried to get in on that offering, but it was already sold out. I missed out on that awesome offering. Guess I'll have to wait for the IPO. Now back to Streamlytics. The public offering opened on June 25th and raised $30,000 in 24 hours. Again, $30,000 USD in 24 hours. Wow. The company's original goal was to raise $250,000 in 90 days, but obviously they smashed that goal. The company now has a valuation of $20 million all while under the leadership of Angela. As you would expect, her entrepreneurial prowess has earned her numerous accolades, including Goldman Sachs' 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, Fast Company's Most Influential Woman in Technology, Business Insider's 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology, Marie Claire's 50 Women Who Rule, Ebony Magazine's Power 150, and many, many more. Also, she has been featured in numerous media outlets, both nationally and internationally, including on CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg Inc., Forbes, and of course, many more. So my suggestion is to keep your ear to the ground on Angela Benton. I suspect we'll be hearing lots more about her in the very near future. To find out more about Angela and her ventures, be sure to check out her Twitter at Abenton or on her website, angelabinton.co. History is being made in real time every single day. So let's celebrate that now. When we are aware of all innovative voices, especially those in underrepresented groups, the tech community thrives, be sure to turn into the next Techingwall Black segment where we highlight Black tech innovators from around the globe. Thank you, Nika. And we will hear from Nika once again with the new segment in July. So keep an ear out for that. Let's check out the mailbag. Caleb had a good one, this came in over the weekend on how NFTs could be incorporated into software licensing. Caleb says, let's say XCorp has an NFT for Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio. They could send authentication requests to MS servers, mark the request with their NFT and retain control of their infrastructure and lower the need for key servers and the like. Granted, the wallet would need to be extra protected and backed up, but any reasonably responsible IT person could and should and really ought to be doing that already. This kind of exists already as Adobe Creative Cloud and other major subscriptions go, but they all have their own apps and they do their own thing and they have their own authentication infrastructure. If there was a standard around some form of NFT, they could all lower the cost of their servers and maybe lower the cost of ownership for end users. Also, the Adobe Updater has not been the most reliable thing in my experience as Caleb. I believe that that's in part due to how much Adobe is trying to get the thing to do day to day. Yeah, that's an interesting thought, Caleb. You know, lots of details to nail down there, but a fascinating other use for NFTs besides me owning Yan Cat and I like to hear from those. Yeah, if you have other uses for NFTs, do you have any thoughts or questions about anything we talk about on the show? Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. Shout out to patrons at our Master and Grand Master levels. Today, they include Tim, Deputy, Brandon Brooks and Alexandra Nasav. Also, very special thanks to Philip Lass. Philip is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you, Philip, for all your years of support. Also, big thanks to David Woodbridge for being with us today. David, where can people keep up with everything you do? They can follow me on Twitter, which is at DeWoodbridge. And if you just stick in David Woodbridge in your favorite pod catcher, then you'll find my IC Technology podcast and my Vision Australia Talking Tech show, which is a once a week show on technology for blind and low vision folks. Very cool. Thank you so much for being here. Also, Alison Sheridan, Alison, you're with us all the time, but you want to point people towards a particular episode today. Yeah, so when Shelley Brisbane was on yesterday, she was talking about the accessibility overlays that some companies use, and she explained that one of the problems with them is that they actually make accessibility worse in a lot of cases. And I wanted to point you guys to chit chat across the pond, episode 678, link in the show notes, of course. It's a discussion with Matt Campbell, who's a 15 year software developer. And in this episode, he talks in depth about why these are actually a bad thing. And in particular, he calls out Accessibee, which is the most well-known one. And he doesn't just tell you why it doesn't work very well. He actually wrote a browser extension that blocks it called Accessibibuy. Nice, accessibibuy.org, if you want to find out more about it. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you so much, Alison. It's good to know that we're spreading the word about how people feel. We're live on this show, and we always feel something. Monday through Friday, 4 30 PM Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTecNewShow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow, Accessibility Week continues. We're talking about incorporating it into video games. Scott Johnson, Scott Rasmussen. Brad