 Coming up on DTNS, do you trust Google to help doctors be better at their job? Why you'd hide your Instagram likes and why Amazon is not a tech company? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 26th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, we were just talking about getting your driver's license as a kid and the BTS meal. If you would like to know why and get that wider conversation, go join our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The USB Implementers Forum announced that as part of the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification, USB-C cables will be able to send up to 240 watts of power. And that's up from the current USB-C power delivery spec of 100 watts. So quite a bump. This will be called extended power range, but it also will require new USB-C chargers and cables. That's a lot of watts. WhatsApp has sued the government of India over its new laws passed in February, going into effect May 26th, which requires messages to be put in a traceable database to identify unlawful content. WhatsApp said those laws are unconstitutional and a violation of a citizen's right to the preservation of privacy, comparing the traceability requirement to laws of mass surveillance. Bloomberg sources say that Uber will strike a deal to allow 70,000 drivers in the UK to organize as a trade union under the GMB labor group. This would give drivers the ability to collectively bargain with Uber and preserve the ability for drivers to choose where and when to work. Tesla says it will stop building forward-facing radar sensors into its Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs in North America and transition to relying on cameras for the driver assistance system. The company said that temporarily these camera-only models will have the features like auto-steer, smart summon and emergency lane departure avoidance disabled or limited upon delivery, though the company plans to reactivate the features with a series of over-the-air software updates. In Xiaomi's Q1 earnings, the company saw net profit increase over 250% to 8.7.8 billion, rather, billion one, which is about 1.2 billion US dollars, with revenue up 54.7% to 76.9 billion one, both beating analysts' expectations. According to Xiaomi president Wang Jiang, the company will keep its target of shipping 200 million smartphones in this year, 2021, with 49.4 million ships in Q1 alone. Well, 27 years to the day after Amazon launched, Andy Jassy is officially going to take over as CEO from Jeff Bezos. That'll be July 5th. Andy Jassy taking over July 5th, and he'll eventually be in charge of a movie studio as part of that. Amazon announced it has reached a deal to acquire MGM Studios for 8.45 billion dollars. Though once you exclude debt, that values MGM at 6.5 billion. It had been valued at 5 billion a couple of years ago, so it's 8.45 seemed like a lot, but now that you figure out, oh, Amazon's paying off the debt as part of this, 6.5 billion seems to make more sense to me. Amazon said that MGM's catalog of 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows, because they've been around forever, would bolster Amazon Studios. Wall Street Journal sources say Amazon also approached Sony to buy Sony Pictures Entertainment, but Sony wasn't interested in selling. In fact, Sony CEO Yoshida Kenichiro told the Financial Times, I think our strategy of creating content as an independent studio while working with various partners will work. So aside from their anime streaming, Sony doesn't plan to get into the big streamer game, they just wanna sell their content to other streamers. Meanwhile, Amazon gets movie and TV studios and a library of that valuable intellectual property like James Bond, Rocky, The Silence of the Lambs, Raging Bull on the TV side, it gets the Handmaid's Tale, Fargo, The Apprentice and Vikings, or at least gets the studio that makes those. The library does not immediately benefit Prime Video though, as much of it is made or licensed to other services. Handmaid's Tale goes to Hulu. Bunch of the movies are contracted to go to Paramount Plus, some stuff goes to HBO Max. But all that intellectual property does provide father for making new material. And MGM also owns the Cable and Streaming Movie Service, Epic's, which is already sold as an add-on Amazon Prime Video, so we'll get that too. We talked last week about the need for companies like Amazon to consolidate production, intellectual property and streaming services in order to compete these days. We've seen that with AT&T spinning out water media into a merger with Discovery, Viacom, CBS, Reuniting, and with Disney's acquisition of Fox Studios. But here's another aspect of this I find interesting. Amazon is looking more and more to my eyes, like an old-fashioned 1980s-style conglomerate in ways that Apple, Alphabet and Facebook don't. We often say like, well, Alphabet's really an advertising company, but all of their other bets are still technology. Amazon now owns the biggest e-commerce company in the Western Hemisphere, a publishing company, Game Studios, a grocery chain, a pharmacy, a robotics company, a cargo airline, a cloud services company, a search company, a hardware maker, a logistics delivery company, and now soon a movie and TV studio. And those are all fully distinct businesses that doesn't even get into the variations under distinct brands, like Audible, Twitch, Comixology, Goodreads, Pillpack, Ring, Zappos, Woot, and Whole Foods. These are not as unrelated as some of the 1980s conglomerates like IC Industries, which owned a railroad, Harley-Davidson and Pet Milk, what do those have to do with each other? But if you consider that every business in the world is using tech these days, the fact that Amazon uses tech for some of this stuff doesn't matter. You can look at Amazon and say, it's not a tech company anymore, it's just a big conglomerate. Yeah, the technology helps Amazon sell things, but Amazon sells things, but Amazon does, does it really well too. You know, the idea when you were listing off all of the businesses that Amazon is the umbrella company for, Tom, you kind of go, it's easy to go, it's too big, there's too much. Yeah, there's not a common enough thread of technology to make it make sense. This is just a company abusing market dominance, has too much money and can just buy what it wants. Okay, I know that Amazon and its video division could be loosely compared to Netflix, but they're very different companies, but is it so different for Amazon to say, let's pay, you know, 8.45 billion, which is, you know, it can be seen as a bit of a deal for MGM Studios instead of putting a ton of money internally into making original content that's gonna be as big as what Netflix has been enjoying in its original content categories. And Amazon has experimented with that, but this seems to me like it's just an easier way than to build within which companies do all the time. Yeah, not only that, I think this is just their way of jumping to the front of the line a little bit. This sort of thing that the Bezos has long wanted in all of these categories you mentioned, you know, we forget about the newspaper and everything else that the dude owns, I swear he's not gonna be happy till he owns everything and maybe not, cause he's officially stepping down and watching somebody else run it. But my point is, I think they just wanna hurry the process up and when you have that amount of money, you can do that. And also, I think it's reasonable for people to say that's an abuse of market power a little bit to be able to swoop in and just say, yeah, we'll just make ourselves a movie studio overnight, whereas everybody else took 150 years to do that. We'll just go ahead and do that overnight. I can see why that rubbed certain people wrong. It's not necessary. The counter argument here is that Amazon is already a movie studio. Amazon Studios has made award-winning movies and they have hired people from some of the great studios, including Sony, to work for them. They need to buy MGM for the studio, although it does beef them up right away. It really is about the intellectual property. It's about the catalog. What I want is a global... Getting the studio helps. It's not not valuable, but what they couldn't create is more than 100 years of intellectual property, which they get in a snap with MGM. Right, and it's also a chance, just a chance, a small chance maybe, but a chance nonetheless, that we'll get a regular multi-season Robocop series because Robocop is part of this deal. I'm all for things like that, like little offshoots. That's the kind of thing you're gonna see on IMDbTV because Amazon also sells a lot of advertising and IMDbTV is advertising supported. And so when you're talking about sales, Sarah, that's another thing they can sell, is ads on a Robocop series that runs on IMDbTV. Yeah, I think that that's an important part of the IP part of this discussion. Because you kind of go like, raging bull, okay, I mean, it's a classic movie. How many times are people gonna re-watch that? And why would that be so lucrative for Amazon to get control over? But yeah, it's all of the imaginative ways that we can re-spin this IP that we now have, whether it means more James Bond movies or getting a little bit more creative with something like IMDbTV. Keep an eye out for the other thing they're gonna buy, right? Like they've been buying airplanes. Buying MGM is like buying airplanes to create their cargo airline business so that they can ship things faster and be more in control of how they get there or buying the delivery services where they offer their own logistics service for themselves and other companies. Look for the other things in pharmaceuticals, in advertising and groceries. Look, what else are they gonna buy? I think Whole Foods cargo airlines now, MGM, are just examples of them saying, hey, we need another piece to fit in with this business. Well, Amazon continues to be part of our discussion today because the US District of Columbia sued Amazon on Tuesday for violating antitrust laws. Amazon has agreements of some third-party sellers that in exchange for promotion of their products on Amazon, sellers will not offer their products at lower prices anywhere else. If they do, they may sell on Amazon but not take part in the promotions program. So a little bit of a fine line there. So if Amazon is promoting your stuff, they wanna guarantee that it can't be found somewhere cheaper. Some store another online source. The suit claims that the fees Amazon charges for selling on its platform, particularly in the sellers let Amazon fulfill orders part of things combined with this promotion policy, this raises prices they claim off of Amazon, distorting prices market-wise, meaning affecting other retailers and in a very negative way, an anti-competitive practice, you might say. It also criticized Amazon's fair pricing policy, which among other things prohibits, quote, selling a, sorry, setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off amazon.com. This is only gonna affect DC, could have been filed somewhere else and have more wide-ranging effects, but where they filed it's gonna limit its effect. Also, I don't know that it is illegal or even should be illegal to say, you can set whatever your price you want, but if you want us to promote it, we're not interested in promoting things that you could get cheaper elsewhere. But I mean, when you look at it that way, it seems reasonable. Not that Amazon doesn't have lots of ways to abuse its market position, I'm just not sold that this is one of them. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel too. I think if it was just take the word Amazon out of it, company says, hey, we'd be willing to get swing some business your way, but we don't wanna be going through the trouble if someone can just go to website B and get it for cheaper, that's not worth our promotional muscle. But it is interesting timing to have yet another, Amazon is acting in an antitrust way, right? Considering the news that Amazon bought a huge movie studio. Agreed. Good, I'm glad. Google and the National Hospital Chain HCA Healthcare have announced a partnership to use patient records to develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients, and guide doctors' decisions. Now, before you get worked into a frenzy that this is a huge issue with data and why would Google need patient information, HCA patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being used by Google and the hospital system retains control of its data. HCA is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It operates 2,000 locations in 21 US states. It's a big one. Generates data from 32 million annual patient visits. So there is a lot of data to do something with. Google software can only access the anonymized data with HCA's consent and then develop tools without patient records to let HCA test them independently. So you can think of this as a very large on-device machine learning training project but the device is the entire hospital system that HCA is running. The data is anonymized. It never leaves the hospital's control but Google's algorithms can train off of it to develop systems that can then be brought back in to help doctors in real time. The algorithms can do things from advise on potentially better treatment towards patients, more efficiently tracking inventory of critical supplies. You know, the possibilities are endless really. I mean, it's a overall, I think that if you are paranoid that this kind of highly sensitive information is just that much more in jeopardy of being used maliciously if there was a data breach or something you're not gonna like the story. Otherwise, I think more information that folks working for HCA is a good thing. Yeah, if you take Google's name out of this and you tell me we're going to do a machine learning project we're gonna do our best to de-anonymize the data. We know that there are ways to reattribute data that's de-anonymized. And one thing I would like to see is are they using differential privacy? Are they using, you know, what kind of de-anonymization are they doing? Because the more methods they add to this like differential privacy the better I'm gonna feel about it. But still, if it's not Google and you're saying HCA's in control of the data it's anonymized, let's say it's really strongly anonymized and so what we're gonna do is train machine learning to help doctors make decisions in real time so that when they're looking at your records the machine learning system can say, hey doc, have you considered X? And then the doctor with her knowledge can say, ah, that's a really good avenue to pursue. Let's do a couple of tests, right? I think that's great. That's gonna save lives. It's gonna improve everyone's health. Inventory management means there's gonna be less waste that brings down hospital costs. Soon as you put Google's name back in the story though suddenly I'm remembering that Google got in trouble for Project Nightingale with Ascension, a different hospital network where they were getting names, dates, birth, medication information. Now they said it complied with privacy laws but Google really likes to push things up to the edge and that makes people uncomfortable. Yeah, it's so weird because we're on the precipice I think of some serious data acquisition over the pandemic. This could be part of that. In fact, there's a quote in this article that we're pulling a lot of this from that said during the pandemic, HCI used its own technology to monitor critically ill COVID-19 patients and then notify their doctors of potentially better treatment options on an individual basis and they found higher survival rates the more, you know, the better that got. So this is more in that direction. Seems like it helps everybody. That seems good. I'm not entirely sure what's in it for Google other than the research capability They get paid by HCA to provide service. I guess they get a lot of money from HCA, exactly. And then they'll have a model that everybody will want to use, I suppose. So they'll get paid even more by other health groups. Mostly it's the money they get from HCA. But yeah, maybe more people will pay them even more money. But my takeaway though is like, yeah, it seems really awesome. And then I go, yeah, Google's weird with data sometimes though, so I don't know. I don't know how to feel about it. I honestly, I don't believe Google is as bad with data as some people fear they are but they've proven not that they're malicious with data like this, but that they are a little cavalier. They push it a little farther than people are comfortable with. So I don't know, they're saying they're de-anonymizing it. I'll wait. Maybe they're using really strong differential privacy and some other technologies to make this perfectly safe. In which case, that'd be great. Cause I'm all for using machine learning in a health context like this for sure. Hey folks, sometimes you don't have a full half hour for Daily Tech News show. Well, no problem. If you need just the headlines, check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines, all the essential tech news in about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com. You can even pay there to get it without the ads. Our technical sources say that Valve has been designing a Linux based Switch like portable PC, potentially launching by the end of 2021. Remember, back on the 10th of May, we were talking about all these companies trying to make Switch like PCs. Well, Valve's now one of them. SteamDB operator, Pavel Djundik, found references in Steam's code to a Steam Pal device. That's what it's called in the code. This appears to be a derivative of the term Neptune, which was found in Steam's code back in September. That seemed to refer to some kind of game controller. Our technical sources say that it has an x86 system on a chip, a fixed gamepad controls like a Switch Lite, and a touchscreen, as well as a dock to use it as an external display. All this is prototype, all of it could change if they ever put a product out, which they might not. Earlier this month though, during a panel at New Zealand's Sancta Maria College, a student asked Valve co-founder Gabe Newell about plans for console video games, and Newell said, you will get a better idea of that by the end of this year, and it won't be the answer you expect. You'll say, aha, now I get what he was talking about. Maybe it was this. On one hand, you may be skeptical, given the history with the Steam machine. On the other hand, Valve did eventually get better at manufacturing and quality control with the Valve Index VR headset. And as Ars Technica's Sam Machavek points out, this, unlike those other two products, is an entirely new sector. Yeah, it is. And it's one that the chief competition for this is kind of backed off completely from. Sony has stopped doing portable gaming as any kind of priority. The Vita was it and they're done. They could in the future, I suppose. Microsoft never dipped their toe into portable gaming outside of X-Cloud's plans with streaming it to devices, which is still ongoing and in beta. Valve, Nintendo kind of just owns that space and dominated it so strong, it's pushed everybody out of it. So who better actually than Valve to figure out a way to leverage everybody's Steam library and a portable device and make that work? I think there's real potential there. I think it's tricky because licensing gets weird and you run into the problems that NVIDIA now has run into with some publishers not wanting their games served up in a streamed sort of way. So will this thing sink and let you download the games? Well, is that Windows or is that Linux? Like there's a lot of questions about how this works and how it would work best for a player like me. But I think that if anyone else is positioned to do it better, I don't know who it is. This is like a real opportunity for them and I'm kind of stoked to see how it turns out. Yeah, remember, this is not streaming. This is just Steam. So they may not face as many of the licensing issues. It's more about compatibility. Have they gotten enough of the developers to make a Linux version? If this is a Linux based switch or will they offer a Windows version? Will they team up with Microsoft? I don't know. I got to thinking it like a house. There is no way this thing won't let you just stream from your internal network, from your Steam box, from your computer to this device as an alternate way of playing it. But you're right, the real question is when the games are installed there, what are those? If they're Linux, well, then there's a big library of Linux games, but not that big. It's still mostly Windows-compatible product on your Steam library and there isn't a Linux version of the game or Mac for that matter. So how are you going to play those games that you already own? They've got to figure out a way to make all of that work or else this has got too many caveats and I don't think it'll work as well. If they make that whole thing work, oh man, I'll have one of these day one. I can't wait for that. And I'll shout out you, Roger, because you were making this point when we were talking about this off the air, but Nintendo owns the whole stack. So they can make a game that works great on a big screen and a small screen. Valve didn't make any of these games. So they may or may not translate well in this form factor. Right. I mean, as long as you've got, I don't know, there's a lot of questions. That's part of the reason why some of their other stuff hasn't worked out well. So you're right to be skeptical. Everyone's right to be skeptical about this, but it does feel like one of those things if they can hit it, oh man, we're in for a good time. Could be really interesting. So what you're saying is there's a chance. There's a chance, everybody. Check this out, Facebook, the place of chances. No, I don't want to give it that credit. Anyway, Facebook could be rolling out the option to hide likes on both Instagram and Facebook. They're two biggest social properties. The keyword here is option on Instagram. Users and creators can turn like and view counts each. So each point or each post rather, those counts can be turned on or off. You'll always be able to see them as the owner of those posts, but you can decide whether people can see that or not and on an individual post basis. Well, you could turn off like and view separately. You could leave views on but turn off likes. That I think that's what they even more granular control, which is probably good. So you can choose to never see them while you scroll through your feed. You can also choose not to let anyone else see them when they're digging through your posts. Like I mentioned, on Facebook, users can hide number or excuse me, hide number of reactions in news, feed groups and pages for your own posts and or posts from others. The feature is rolling out now. We'll reach all users in just a few days for Instagram and weeks for Facebook. Prior to the show, I still not entirely sure why this benefits anybody, but Tom made some really good points and I'm gonna have to think on them. I don't know if you wanna share it up again. I find this really fascinating because I have, I gave up on, oh, someone has a million followers on Twitter. They must be extremely famous a long time ago because well, sometimes that's the case, right? But the whole system can be gamed and likes and follows are only somewhat indicative of something's popularity or who's actually seen it. That said, I would love to try this out a bit and see if my kind of, I don't know, my own uneasiness with social networking. And of course, you know, this is only Facebook and Instagram that we're talking about, but if it changes at all, if it changes my desire to wanna engage a little bit more, if there's a little bit of pressure taken off the whole thing because right now I can think of, oh, let's say I watch a YouTube video and it says comments for this video are turned off. I'm always like, oh, maybe the creator always does that or maybe something bad happened in the comments. It's usually something that there was an issue and so that had to be some measure that was taken to calm everybody down. So taking likes and views out of the equation, I wonder if that, how does that level the playing field and how does it make people behave differently, especially when we have this kind of conversation that will never die about like, how good is social media for us? Is it making us depressed? Is it making us act erratically and that sort of stuff? Yeah, the idea was if there are no likes and view counts, then we don't have this constant comparison game, right? And Instagram looked at that and decided that was a bad idea because there were several people who were like, no, no, no, no, my whole business is built on showing the public how many likes and views I have and you will undercut my business. That is bad for me if you do that. So what they've decided to do is give you a choice. You can decide if you wanna get rid of them or not on an individual basis. If it's good for your business, for them to be public, keep in public. If you feel like that's too much pressure for everyone to see by comparison, you're like, oh, I only have a hundred likes, but all these other people have thousand likes, then you can turn them off and not feel that pressure. Yeah. Well, if you feel pressure to write an electric scooter, you have one more option. The electric scooter company, Scotsman, is offering models of its scooters with a 3D printed carbon fiber thermoplastic composite scooter body. So if you're willing to tell Scotsman your weight, your height, your arm and leg lengths, the body of the scooter can then be customized to your size and your writing style. You can also choose from a 500 to 2000 watt dual motor and either one to two, 500 to 550 watt hour batteries. Each battery adds six pounds and takes five hours to charge. So battery life versus weight, you got some options. Retail prices will start at $2,999, but you can back it on Indiegogo starting at 1,599. So if it's interesting to you. A thousand market for a scooter, that's a great idea. Anything to help me in my awkward gate. If you did this, Scott, then you could point at it and say that Scotsman is Scots. Good, yeah. You're right. Look, for real, like us, six, four guys, just these don't work great for us often. So the idea that they could, you know, let us have some say in how it fits or whatever is great. It's like getting custom clothes done or whatever, same thing. Like there's a real, there's a real benefit to this. It's a little expensive and I really don't need one. But if I did and it was gonna be a big part of my computer life, I would totally consider this. It seems smart. Yeah, when I compare it to something like a bicycle, if someone says, hey, Sarah, get on that bike, I might be like, I have to adjust it in lots of ways before it's gonna fit me. And a scooter, you ride differently, but yeah, it makes perfect sense. I don't know if it would work as an anti-theft device, but at least it, you know, give them pause. Like, ooh, that one doesn't look like it'll fit me. I'm not gonna steal that one. All right, let's check out some mailbag. Martin wrote in, and he's got a great story. He says, I was looking through my calendar and I saw an odd entry for July 10th. It was titled, DTNS is the future here. Martin says, I hadn't added a description for the event, so I had no idea what it meant. Turns out that you had a DTNS episode back in 2017 that covered various predictions for the year 2021, four years later. Martin says, I'm fairly sure that the majority of the things didn't happen. Some blame maybe due to an unpredicted pandemic, but towards the end of the show, you suggested to the guests on that day, Rachel Metz and Scott Johnson, to come back to as close as possible to July 26th, 2021 to discuss the outcome of those predictions. Yeah, I actually went back and thank you for reminding me of this. I had no idea. Here's an excerpt from that show. We do the Wayback Machine two, four years ago in July. Will you two, both of you, Rachel and Scott, commit to as close to July 26th, 2021 as possible, reconvene to assess how things are going? I will do my best, yes. All right, yes, with all this. And then I created a calendar entry for July 10th that I'm looking at right now that says, ask Scott and Rachel about follow-up DTNS episode about 2021. I'm all for this, this is great. I meant it then, I mean it now, so. Oh, so you had a reminder for yourself, but you wouldn't have seen it till July 10th. Exactly, and I might not have remembered what it was about, to be honest, yeah. Martin, it took him a minute, too. He's like, why do I have this on my calendar? Thank you, Martin. That's so great. We did Rachel Metz, she has not responded yet, but yes, we will do our best if she is available to follow up on that, that's amazing. We'll also have the link to that particular show in our show notes, if you wanna go back and hear all the predictions that were predicted four years ago. If you have ideas of what might be a cool tech thing four years from now or really anything else that's on your mind, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. We also wanna shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today they are Bjorn Andre, Jeff Wilkes, and Paul Reese. Also a special thanks to Phillip Shane, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Phillip, we love you, we thank you, and thank you for all the years of support. Also thanks to Scott Johnson. Scott, what's been going on since we saw you last? Hey, I know that guy. Busy just trying to fulfill a Kickstarter and if I'm not on the air, that's what I'm doing. However, trying to keep in touch with everybody who's interested in what's going on around the network and there's a few things happening. So if you wanna be queued in on that and also just sort of some random musings, I have a newsletter and you can find that over at frogpants.club. And for anything else, ping me on Twitter. You can find me at Scott Johnson. Excellent, we're live Monday through Friday on this here show for 30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC. Put it on your calendar and you'll know cause it's, you know, every weekday. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we're back at it tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program. If you wanna know what Frog Pants and Diamond Club are, get the editor's desk at patreon.com slash DTNS.