 Coming up on Daily Tech News show, Google picks a fight with advertisers, Snap imitates TikTok, and Robert Herron's here to help us find some good stuff for our home theater. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 23rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty soon. As I mentioned, Robert Herron, co-host of AVXL is with us. Welcome, Robert. Hey, thank you. Always good to be here. It's I think it's the first time we've gone back to back AVXL hosts. We had Patrick on on Friday. Yeah, I'm sure he got into all the headphone goodness and speaker goodness and audio. GPU CPUs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was good stuff. Good stuff. We were just talking. Well, I was mostly talking about my new monitor, but you guys were talking about like cool restaurants and all kinds of good stuff. A good day, Internet. If you want to get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The California Public Utilities Commission approved the driver and driver list, autonomous vehicle deployment programs that allow for paid autonomous ride hailing services in the state. Operating an autonomous ride hailing service will require submitting quarterly reports that include anonymized pickup and drop off information, the availability of wheelchair access rides, fuel and electric charging types of vehicles, vehicle and passenger miles traveled and working with accessibility and disadvantaged communities. China's National Radio and Television Administration announced tighter regulations on live streaming requiring that hosts and gift givers register with real names. Real names is a big deal in China. The regulators also set caps on how much viewers can gift streamers and ban teenagers from giving gifts entirely. The regulator also said it will ban streamers from platforms if they have repeated violations. Google Assistant can now schedule turning on and off smart lights. This works with assistance scheduled actions features and can be set to either specific times or for events like sundown or sunset or sunrise. Previously, Google Assistant could turn on or off smart lights and use them as part of an alarm. So this is just a little bit of a bonus. Twitter confirmed that a bug in its ephemeral fleets feature allows a developer tool using Twitter API to pull in fleet URLs that can be used to view the content even after the 24 hour posting limit has expired. Now Twitter clarified the API only pulls fleet URLs less than 24 hours old, but it's working on a fix to make sure those older URLs become unviewable after the 24 hours. Twitter does store fleet content for up to 30 days and is available in the user's Twitter data for download until the platform deletes it. China plans to launch the Chang'e 5 probe to the moon this week with a mission to bring back lunar rocks to understand when the moon was last volcanically active. The probe will deploy two vehicles, a lander to collect two kilograms of samples from the ocean of storms lava plane and an ascender which will bring back the samples back into the orbiting probe. The Soviet Union last brought back lunar samples back in 1976 been a while. Over the next decade, China plans to establish a robotic base station for further unmanned exploration. Now we just mentioned Twitter and fleets, which a lot of people say is Twitter ripping off Instagram. Sarah, is anyone else ripping off anyone else today? Oh my goodness. So many, so many designers angry about this snap launched a new feature in Snapchat called Spotlight. If you don't know about it already, it's a dedicated space to feature certain snaps in a vertically scrollable feeds. Okay, got it. Snapchat, snap says that its algorithms will personalize feeds with the most engaging recent snaps and the feed will be human moderated. So if you get a lot of likes or if people scroll past you real quick, you may or may not get into spotlight. To determine if something should get shown in spotlight, the algorithm will look at views that a snap gets, how long people watch it, if it was frequently skipped, and whether it gets shared outside of someone's view. However, guidelines suggest that snap should have audio, be up to 60 seconds long, include a hashtag, make use of captions, sounds, lenses or gifts, basically using all the tools that snap offers you, and be appropriate for a 13 plus audience. Last month, snap launched sounds on Snapchat, letting users add music from a curated catalogs to snaps. Okay, so there's a couple rules here. Users with public or private accounts can have their snaps show up by either sending to spotlight directly or posting in Snapchat our story feeds. If your profile is private though, your spotlight snap won't say that you posted it. To encourage folks, Snap will split up $1 million a day among users who create top spotlight snaps for the rest of 2020. So we don't have a ton of time left, but you know, it might get some money if you're pretty popular on Snapchat. So yes, to answer your question, Tom, remember when other apps were copying Snapchat? Because it sounds a lot like TikTok. Because honestly, Twitter mimicking stories is really mimicking Instagram mimicking Snapchat. So now that Twitter has caught up to imitate Snapchat, Snapchat's imitating TikTok. This is really, from my way of looking at it, just a new way for you to discover snaps. If you're not following someone directly and you just want to discover some popular stuff out there, the spotlight section will show you that. So in that respect, it's not necessarily imitating TikTok except in the style of presentation. It's not like Snapchat has changed how you create things. You decide when you create a snap, oh, I'd like this to be in the spotlight section too. Or if you send it to our stories, which is already what a lot of people do to have their things discovered, it'll automatically be considered for spotlight. So it's just a new tab. I don't know if that's such a great idea. But at the same time, Snapchat's thing, and I have not been a regular user for well over a year at this point, but I got in there this morning and was poking around and boy, has the UI changed in a very short period of time. And the whole thing with Snapchat was, I mean, remember when it was like, oh, this is what teens use to sex each other. It wasn't that long ago that that's what people thought Snapchat was mostly being used for because you're under the radar. This is a whole different situation. And yes, I, if I posted something that I don't know would be questionable or something, and I have a private account and I say, no, no, no, I wanted to go to spotlight, but I want the rest of my account to still be private. That makes sense. And it gives you maybe a little bit of a, you know, you can kind of dip your toe into the public water. But I don't know, I don't know, Robert, when the last time you looked at Snapchat was, but it is more and more confusing to me every day. I would say at least spotlight gives me an opportunity to check out the service in a way that as somebody who really doesn't know much about it, at least it would, in a sense, that the hand-moderated, hand-selected, carefully curated collection of what's cool for that day, at least, to get me just a good idea of what it is that's flowing around out there that people obviously seem to love that service so much for. And that is one of the things that TikTok does really well, is that algorithm brings in stuff that works for people. That's why they get addicted to TikTok, is they're like, oh my gosh, it knows me and it's showing me things that I find hilarious or entertaining or useful or whatever. And so I think what Snap's doing here is putting a little moderation on top of an algorithm to say like, we're going to make an even better one. Let's see if they could pull that off. But that, if you're going to imitate something about TikTok, that does seem to be a good thing to imitate. I also appreciate that they're educating their users as to what goes, what should be included in your Snap for this particular service in terms of the length, the hashtagging, doing it as good as possible to hit, apparently, this is what triggers their metrics internally, but just to get the biggest audience possible for whatever it is you're going to post. Yeah, and on that note, the Snap that I posted earlier today of my Celine fan did not get a lot of traction. I don't think it's going to show up on spotlight, but I tried my best. You gave it an effort. That's all. Add a baby Yoda. Yeah, seriously. I mean, come on. You know, what was I thinking? While we're on the subject of TikTok before we move on, 16 year old Charlie D'Amelio, if you're not familiar with her, I wonder why she's from Norwalk, Connecticut, because she has become the first TikTok user to gather 100 million subscribers. Take that Snapchat. Yeah. Last August, Google announced plans to launch something called Privacy Sandbox. They plan to launch this in early 2021. The initiative is meant to provide a browser compromise between fully blocking cookies, which is what Apple does with Safari, right? That hurts advertisers because if there's no cookies, they can't do any tracking at all and fully allowing cookies. That would be the other way, which of course people don't like because it compromises your privacy. Well, fully blocking cookies leads advertisers to do things like engage in fingerprinting, which is harder for you to get around. They just look for aspects of your browser that you can't stop because you need those aspects to be reported for the browser to work and you have less control over and it compromises your privacy more. Well, Privacy Sandbox was a way to strike a balance between those two things. Privacy Sandbox is an open standard within the Chromium project that would replace cookies with a browser privacy budget that would let a site make a limited number of API calls so it could access enough information to include a user in a cohort, which is just a larger group of people for targeting, while still protecting anonymity. Now, Google hoped this would be an incentive for advertisers not to fingerprint, but still let cookies be blocked. So they're like, we'll do this for the advertisers. It'll keep them from wanting to have to resort to fingerprinting, but they'll be okay with cookies being blocked because they'll still be able to target all the people that visit cooking sites or whatever they need to target. Now, as I mentioned, Apple blocks cookies and fingerprinting without giving advertisers any concession. So I think Google thought, hey, we're working with you. Well, a coalition of digital marketing companies calling themselves marketers for an open web or MOW filed a complaint with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. The coalition wants privacy sandbox and the phasing out of support for third-party tracking cookies to be delayed until regulators can devise quote, long-term competitive remedies to mitigate Google's ad dominance. The MOW companies are complaining that, hey, if the standard is controlled by one of the biggest advertising companies on the planet, Google, do you think it's going to be fair to us or do you think it's going to benefit Google? The other reason they would want to do this, though, besides that is a delay would buy time for ad tech companies to develop the partnership for responsible addressable media or PRAM, a replacement for tracking cookies that is being developed by the ad industry itself. There's also momentum for the cookie replacement Unified Open ID 2.0, a centralized self-regulated so-called trusted ads ecosystem, again operated by ad companies, involving storing hashed versions of personalized data like an email address or phone number. Now, I doubt, as the TechCrunch article does as well, that people are going to be really excited about having a centralized resource with their personalized information run by the ad industry, but that seems to be what they're pushing for here. The efforts to delay privacy sandbox, along with the effort we talked about last Friday to stop Apple's system from asking for opt-in tracking on iOS for every ad, would give the industry time to create their own tracking systems as an alternative to these platform-level privacy protections. What we're seeing, Sarah, is the shaping up of a battle where the ad industry that doesn't involve Google is going after the platform makers, Google and Apple, to try to keep control over tracking of you. Yeah, and after your explanation, I'm sort of like, which is more evil? It's easy to go after Google and say, oh, you're the ad king of the world. Of course, you'd want to be in control of this new standard, and that's dangerous, and doesn't everybody think it's dangerous? It's Google, after all. But these are also advertisers who they are not in the consumer's best interest, their own best interest. So when I look at both of these options, I think, okay, I think we're going in the right direction here. I think that the cookie situation should be rethunk, but I don't know what I like. Well, it's the problem with Google is it's so big. This is part of the Chromium project. It's open source. Microsoft Edge can use this as well, if it wants. So can Opera. So can any other browser that uses Chromium. But because it's Google, it's easy to tag them and say like, yeah, but they have a whole ad side of their, you know, what do you think is really going on, whether there's any evidence for that or not, whether there's any meaningful substance to that or not. But the alternative is to say, and they tried to do the Facebook tried to do this with Apple to say like, yeah, but Apple does sell some advertising. If they're trying to tag Apple with being a selfish advertiser, it's going to be easy to tag Google with that. And then the alternative would be having the advertising industry in charge of this. I'm not I'm not sure about that. It's on our best interests. Honestly, I don't know about you, Robert, but I want neither of these. I want a system like solid where I'm in control of the stuff and I decide who gets to get my personal information and it's decentralized, not stored centrally by anybody else, Google or otherwise. It is that balance between your own privacy versus the convenience of having something like a cookie to be able to do a login for you or whatever. Personally, as long as at least within Chrome in the Chrome environment, I mostly use as long as Google retains those settings to allow me to not only block all third party cookies, which are really the ones I hate the most. I find advertising and cookies are really different if it's the actual website that I'm visiting currently is delivering that as part of their feed from that website. I really don't have a problem with that. I accept to be there on that website, but when it starts integrating third party services and products and currently I'm staring at my own settings within Chrome and I have not only block all third party cookies, but clear all this clear cookies and site data when I quit Chrome, send a do not track request with my browsing traffic. I go through all those steps and it makes it more inconvenient on my end just simply because I am deleting all that data and it's like I'm a brand new user every time I open my web browser. The only thing that saves my sanity in this case is the fact that I have a good password manager that at least does all the logging crap for me on a semi-automated basis. Well, I don't know how happy any of us are going to be about the next story. It's up to you to take this kind of a privacy situation into your own hands. These companies want your data. They're going to do everything they can to make it as easy as possible for them to collect it. And as long as the browsers at least retain the settings, whether or not anybody actually looks at them to affect the security level you're most comfortable with or, hey, screw it, let me have all the cookies make everything automatic every time I open my browser. I ain't going to roll that way, but the option is there and as long as I have the tools at least to take control of what data is being collected. And if I have to literally mind wipe my browser every time I close it, it's kind of minor. It costs me a few seconds every time I open it, but otherwise, my ability to stay private is still there. As far as I know, that in my VPN, which I should probably change to an offshore account somewhere, but that's another story. Well, from data to data caps. Oh, who doesn't love a data cap? Back in July of 2020, Comcast reimposed data caps in 27 states, but raised that cap to 1.2 terabytes. It was one terabyte previously. Starting in January, this coming January, Comcast will expand data caps to the rest of its territory, but won't start charging until March. Overages cost $10 for every 50 gigabytes, with a max of $100 in a cycle in a month that you're paying your bill. Comcast offers unlimited for an extra $30 a month, so clearly they're pushing that. Comcast also says that the median usage among its customers is 308 gigabytes, well below the 1.2 terabytes that it's offering. Data caps are mostly used to generate revenue and are considered ineffective in managing congestion. So sounds like Comcast wants some money. Yeah, great way to make an extra $30 a month. Comcast, good job. Yeah, I mean, I'm a Comcast subscriber. We've got gigabit internet where I live, which is part of the reason that I can do all of this without a hitch, and for the most part works great, but it's kind of the only option. And I don't think that I'm in a data cap territory because I think I'd hear about it because I also go through a lot of data every month. I'm thinking 1.2 terabytes, I might be in that camp. Of course, Comcast is only less than 5% of all of our users. They're the data hogs. This is something that probably won't even apply to you. In fact, it most likely won't apply to you. It's just these few people that we're giving other options for, but again, it's a way to make money. Yeah, 5% to 28 million people. That's a lot of people. You're going to hear a lot of screaming about this, I have to say. Hey, folks, if you want to join the conversation in our Discord, you can do that by linking a Patreon account to Discord. And then you can be chatting about all this stuff with all kinds of other folks in the DTNS audience. Go do it right now, patreon.com slash DTNS. Well, Friday, Patrick Norton gave us some tips on hunting down out of stock gear like GPUs and CPUs, while some tips for finding good TVs and AVRs. Robert Herron is Patrick's co-host on AVXL and helps us carry on that conversation with some tips on finding great deals on home theater gear today as well. First though, Robert, let's arm some folks with a little knowledge, some things that folks should know when they're out there shopping. And let's start with HDMI. There is the latest and greatest standard for HDMI. That is the plug in essence that runs all your audio and video between most of the common consumer devices we use today with your TVs and projectors out there. HDMI 2.1 is out and about now. The new 30 series graphics cards from NVIDIA, as well as the new, I'm going to say the five or the six series cards from AMD all feature HDMI 2.1. The big deal there is that you can do true 4k and at very high refresh rates upwards of 120 plus frames per second. The thing is, is that with all of these devices, there are different signaling types and there are different color standards, and we're also pushing even more data than ever through these cables, and we're seeing lots of little cracks in terms of usability. Graphics cards have been receiving regular updates in terms of their drivers to improve compatibility with the variety of devices you might plug a 4k 120 source device into. Game consoles, it turns out, are actually not even using the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, which is 48 gigabits per second, yet they're actually keeping that just short of that in the 30s or so in order to maintain better compatibility. Most of the AK AVRs that are out there that offer AK pass through or support for signaling like 4k 120 actually all feature a similar chipset. And the problem with those right now is the fact that depending on what signaling you're sending that for a 4k high refresh rate it could not work. And at least in the case of the AVR receivers I'm seeing, they are now starting to receive some firmware updates that will address that. And basically the bottom line is that if you're an early adopter for the latest and greatest tech right now related to 4k above 60 Hertz, it could be a little tricky in terms of getting everything to work right, but be patient. It seems like folks are working on those updates and getting them fixed. Good stuff. Good information. We also want to know about some of the deals that you might be seeing out there because I know you value quality and you know a good deal when you see it. And one thing speaking of HDMI that people might need is they might be running out of cables, getting frayed cables, that sort of thing. Truly. And if you're dealing with a really old HDMI cable with some of these new high bandwidth devices, you may need an upgrade. And there is no reason to spend a lot of money on this. Monoprice makes a terrific assortment of 48 gigabit and 18 gigabit compatible cables. Just look for something offering that HDMI 2.1 compatibility. There's even an app you can download from the HDMI resource group that you can scan the barcode on a cable to get confirmation that it is actually compatible going forward. These cables are also backward compatible. So it is so cheap to replace a cable if you ever have an issue where that could be the problem. Make sure you have a spare hanging out just in case. And you don't need gold plated cables. Hopefully they are, you know. Gold's great for minimizing corrosion and things like that. But no, it's more about just having the certification at a minimum that 18 gigabit rating will usually work, especially when you're dealing with cable lengths under 10 feet or three meter say that generally just about any cable is going to work pretty well. But when you start really pushing the bandwidth or the length of the cable, that's where you want to step up and make sure what you're getting is certified. Now, in terms of what's out there and on sale right now, November has turned into one long month of Black Friday like sales. It is not just a single day anymore. It is not the day after Thanksgiving. So if you have a premium thing in your head that you're like, man, I really want this in the living room for the holidays, shop early and keep an eye on what the pricing is out there. There are some great deals on like my favorite OLED TVs, all of them based on LG's panel technology. Their 55 inch CX is hitting about 1350 right now. If you shop around for that, that's a terrific price. If you have your eye on that 48 inch version though of the LG CX OLED, it turns out that that because of demand, it is simply priced often more expensive than the 55 inch version. So do keep that in mind. Also weird because there's just more people want that size. Is that why it depends on the room? You know, sometimes it's just what your room can handle. Totally. If that's the side, it's also to it seemed to be a trend for a lot of people to grab one of those displays, a 48 inch 4K OLED that can do 120 Hertz and make that quote unquote, the ultimate PC display. You know, and for about 1500 bucks, the pricing really isn't that bad for it. And if you could make that work great. But because of that, it turns out that the 55 inches often can be had cheaper than the 48 inch, which is pretty damn funny. And OLED, oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. Oh, I was just kind of on the subject of OLED as somebody who's got a seven year old Samsung smart TV, one of the first really, I think, and it's fine. You know, I feel like I can see everything on the screen. How great is OLED? OLED is the single greatest piece of eye candy yet invented that I have put my eyes on in terms of piece in terms of TVs you can buy today and put in your living room. I'd go back to what plasma used to do in terms of looking really good in a dark room. But now we have these OLED displays that can not only match that that contrast for a dark room environment, but also deliver light output approaching 800 nits, which is literally two, three times what a regular TV puts out in terms of light output. So when you're looking at things like HDR content or Dolby Vision and streaming some of this fantastic content, you're going to get the very best image quality possible. Now with gamers, it is probably, I always think about Burnin and potentials for uneven screen wear. And I've had this issue with old plasma panels. And I have seen this issue with older OLEDs. But as we've gone forward through the years and for the last few years, I find that OLED or OLED Burnin is not as great of an issue as it used to be. It's still entirely possible. You can burn in any display technology if you leave a high contrasted static image on the screen for extremely long periods of time. But otherwise it's not something I generally worry about. It's just that if the size works, if something like a 65 inch panel is something that will work for you or 55 or 48 OLEDs great. It's when you get into larger sizes, in particular OLED jumps from 65 to 77 inches. At that 70 plus inch screen size, OLED gets very expensive. So if you are looking for a bigger screen than 65 inches and you don't want to break the bank on OLED, there are still terrific brands out there like TCL 6 Series as well as the Hisense H9G panel. Both of those are available, I believe in larger sizes. I know the TCL 6 Series is. The H6510G from Hisense is available for $250 right now, the 65 inch. There is an H9G that they have built and that is an Android-based TV that for image quality and for compatibility with HDR formats like HDR10 and Dolby Vision, that is one of the most, it is one of the brightest panels you can actually purchase for the money at any price point and it has a pretty good factory calibration as well. So it's going to look pretty good out of the box. I generally, if I didn't know anything else about a person, I'll steer them more toward probably something on the TCL side just for having Roku built in. That is just utterly fantastic. However, Sarah, like in the case of your TV, if you find the image quality still okay, I recently upgraded the Roku Ultra that I have to the new Roku Ultra that supports not only HDR10, it now supports Dolby Vision as well as Dolby Atmos. So if you're rolling with either of those devices, that is just probably my favorite overall streaming product there is. And sound quality, please don't ever forget your speakers of any kind. Even a modest sound bar is going to make it a dramatic improvement over what's built into most TVs out there. And for me personally, if you have the money and you want to have a more 3D style sound experience, there are terrific soundbars out there now that do support Dolby Vision to code or Dolby Atmos decoding. So you can enjoy that 3D style sound system without taking up the whole room or creating a situation where you have to run wires in the walls or whatever. You can at least get a good experience built right into a soundbar nowadays. It's not, I mean, granted, it's always going to be better to have four speakers or more mounted in the ceiling in addition to a full surround sound system, but that can be awfully complicated if you're not up for it. And having something like what's built into a soundbar nowadays from people like either Sonos with their ARC system or the new, oh, Vizio has a brand new soundbar that actually has motorized side channels. So when it goes into its 3D mode for sound, it'll actually turn the speakers to make them upfiring. So they'll bounce off the ceiling and give you a little more, a little more 3D effect. But it's kind of what Patrick Norton was telling us about on Friday, he was like, you know, the surround sound system that he's got in his house. Now he's like, you can just hear all these sounds that you just can't hear before and sound designers work really hard. He's the Mandalorian as an example. Like it's amazing what you don't realize you're not getting until you have a really good system. And I would think that the TV would be kind of the same way. Of course, I'm looking at my TV. I'm like, I don't know, I can see everything. It's fine. But the first time I got a retina screen, I'm at or MacBook Pro, I was like, oh my gosh, I can actually see everything, you know, the 4K monitor I'm looking at now didn't used to have one of those either. So I think it's once you upgrade, you go, okay, now I see it. And depending on how old your TV is, if it's say five plus years old at this point, the new backlighting technologies where it's able to not only maintain that wicked, clear crystal, just very dark detail in addition to providing very high, bright highlights on portions of the screen, that alone is the worth the upgrade, I think. And with the expanded color palette, we've the TV systems now with streaming HDR content and now this new next gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system is bringing improved color performance as well, something that matches what they're doing currently with 4K Blu-rays. And why not take advantage of that? I think the additional brightness alone grabs the eye, but that additional color that is more, that is simply closer to what we see in real life is, it's all so nice. And when I'm talking about TVs like even that TCL 6 series, the 55 inch I think starts at about $550. So it's hard for me to recommend anything less than that. I would want something with good color punch, good brightness, and then go from there. And if I can swing OLED for the given environment, I have more tempted for that. And then for gamers in particular, I see a lot of the consoles now, while they're not supporting Dolby Vision in terms of disc playback, they are bringing that to video games. And I think it would be nice if you're looking for a new TV and you're a gamer with a console to have a TV that supports Dolby Vision. And everything I've mentioned so far does indeed that. Well, for everybody who is a patron of ours and thinks this is really great information, I have my thoughts as well. Thank you for being a patron and also shout out, a special shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Roganald Vermedal, Jeff Wilkes, and Bjorn Andre. Also, Robert Herron, bringing the knowledge today. Thanks so much for being with us. Where can people keep up with your work? Hey, you can always find me with Patrick Norton over at AVEXCEL.com. Or you can also hit me up at HerronFidelity.com, named by your very own Roger Chang himself. Look at that. You can always support our show at any level, folks, DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. We are also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. We'd love to have you join us. If you can, find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live and we'll be back tomorrow with Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.