 Coming up on DTNS, Uber gives up calling drivers contractors in the UK. Wikipedia is about to charge and the chip shortage hits Samsung. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the shows producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about relevant saints days and the naming of hurricanes on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, we also talked a little bit about NFTs. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook said Wednesday will impose new restrictions on individuals and communities who repeatedly break its company rules. So people joining groups with past community standards violations will now see a prompt to review that group before they join. Facebook also wants to give moderators more responsibility, specifically in groups with a substantial number of people who have violated the company policies in the past or were part of communities that Facebook previously shut down. Someone with repeat violations in Facebook groups will no longer be able to post or comment between seven and 30 days, also losing the ability to invite other people to a group or create new groups. Twitch sent out an email to its streamers announcing it added new tools for creators to deal with take down requests and copyright strikes, because that's efficient that they had to develop an entire new system just to deal with copyright strikes. Specifically, Twitch added tools to let streamers mass delete their recorded streams to avoid being permabanned. A Tampa, Florida teen who took control of some well-known Twitter accounts last summer, you might remember a few of them. President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, Apple Uber, just to name a few and solicited more than $100,000 in Bitcoin to restore those accounts has pled guilty in a deal with state prosecutors in exchange for a three-year present sentence. Because of his age at the time, the man who was a minor at the time was tried as a youthful offender, avoiding a minimum 10-year sentence that would have followed if he'd been convicted as an adult. Riva Health, which was founded by scientists Tuhin Sinha and Siri co-founder, Dag Kitlaus, is attempting to monitor blood pressure using software for at-risk patients to potentially indicate early signs of heart disease. To use Riva, you just need to open the app on your phone, tap Go, and then put your finger over the camera sensor. It uses the flash to send light through your finger and then it can track your blood pressure. They have a special algorithm to do it and it creates a rendering of it on the screen. HIPAA compliant, but not yet FDA approved. Amazon will expand its health care program. Amazon Care to employees outside the state of Washington as well as other companies. Amazon Care offers virtual meetings with doctors in an app and the ability to dispatch medical professionals to your home for things like physical examinations and also blood draws. It's run in partnership with a company from Washington called Care Medical. Amazon Care will now be available to other companies in Washington as well. Later this year, the virtual service will be made available across the US and in-person care options will be added in Washington, D.C. at Baltimore as well as other cities. All right, workers of the UK drive, says Uber. Unite as drivers, I suppose, kind of. Anyway, hey, speaking of Uber, Tom, they announced they have reclassified all 70,000 of its UK drivers as quote unquote workers in the UK, the worker category has fewer rights than an employee category, but more than a contractor. It's a third category that we don't really have over here. Workers are guaranteed the national living wage of 8.72 pounds, holiday paying, contribution to pensions. Uber will treat the national living wage as a minimum, meaning if the driver earns more than that on their fares, they will get paid more. But they'll always have that minimum, but they can never make less than that. However, Uber will calculate hours from the moment a driver accepts a trip, not count the time spent waiting between trips. This contradicts the UK Supreme Court's ruling on February or in February that Uber would need to count all time a driver is logged in and available to accept rides. Uber believes the February court case only applies to older policies it ended years ago and that it should not pay drivers while they may be logged into competing apps as well. And Nate Langston did a great video about this on Bloomberg. And I really do think that the worker category is right. The worker category, my limited understanding means I am entitled to some benefits like a pension and minimum wage, but I don't get all the benefits of a full time employee because I am allowed to just not work when I want. And that's essentially what an Uber driver is. It's like you're sort of at the mercy of Uber about getting rides, but you get the freedom to not work one day without having to call in or anything like that. So I think that category makes sense. I think it's interesting that Uber has just decided to wave the white flag and say, you know what, fine, we're just we're just going to call them workers. We're not going to fight this anymore. But I do think it's interesting that they want to fight if somebody wants to bring the fight to them over paying people while the app is logged on. I think they have an argument. If I've got Lyft and DoorDash and Uber open, should Uber be the only one that pays me when that app is open? Should I be able to get paid by three apps when I'm sitting there and I'm going to turn the other two off as soon as I accept a ride from the other one? If you're if you're a company that pays you or let's say you're an employee to a company that's taking phone calls from some customers, that makes sense. You're getting paid for that. But if it's a technology that allows you to then take calls in between those calls, but it's for another company and not to the benefit of the one you were just taking calls for, you wouldn't pay them either. So I do think they have a point there. And I hope I hope they don't get stuck with that because that seems too far to me. I mean, a lot of this also is OK. Let's say I'm an Uber driver. I'm in the UK. I'm in maybe a more rural area or otherwise just not getting a lot of fares. And I'm not working for a competing service at all. I'm just kind of waiting to get some money by somebody using the service that I have signed up to do. I can see where there are times where, yes, it makes perfect sense that being in that employee category that is not a full-time employee, but also better than a contractor makes sense, especially because you're allowing the workforce to be able to work for competing apps. But what if you're, you know, it's not really up to you. I mean, yeah, I guess you can make the argument if I gave up other money making opportunities to sit in my car and wait. And I just never got a fare. Shouldn't I get something for that? I think Uber is saying that that rarely happens, but to the person it does happen to, they're going to want to get paid for that. So I get that. The other outcome here is if this sets a precedent for other fights around the world, if they're going to look at the UK and say, that's a precedent, I'm not sure it does because we went through this in California. We went to the Supreme Court in California. They made a ruling. Uber then got laws changed. And they've kind of gone through this process. This is the end of the process in the UK. So it's a little different in each region. Snap has acquired Berlin company Fit Analytics, which helps you get correctly sized clothing and shoes when online shopping from 18,000 partners, North Face, Aces, Calvin Klein, Patagonia, Puma and more. Right now, if you're on one of those sites, you may see the ability to enter your measurements. And then Fit Analytics is what that site is using to use some machine learning and match you to the proper size from that brand, because, you know, sizes may be a large, but maybe you get a medium from Puma or something, you know, they vary across brands. Fit has also developed, though not yet launched, technology to use an image to match clothing. So now that Snap is going to acquire Fit Analytics in the future, Snap may be able to suggest an outfit that will make your selfie look better and then send you the right size. Snap has a service. I love the idea, probably just because I'm like, OK, my selfies, I don't really care about that anymore. I'm not using Snap that much in that regard. But I cannot tell you, and, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of hands being raised when I explain this. How many times I will say, OK, I need a new pair of jeans, for example, and I'm at a retailer's site and I kind of go like, well, but do they run large? Do they run small? Let's look at the size chart. And then you look at the size chart and you're like, I mean, I'm kind of probably in that area. I don't know. I wish this was a little bit easier just to know, or you end up like Googling it and going to forums where people have been talking about that particular brand of jeans, you know, for 10 years. So it's all out there, but it's kind of convoluted. Something like this I can I can find at least for me, especially because I have size fitting problems all the time would be great. Yeah, I have this thing where no XL shirt is the same ever. So I can't order them anymore because some of them come fine. Some of them come too long. And this is a simple t-shirt we're talking about. Some have the sleeves right where I want them. Some don't. And I end up having to get extra large excuse me, double X as a default. Now, not because they're big enough, but because I know I'm covered on length. I'm a tall guy and there's not much I can do about it. So anytime I've used any service where there's some sort of even basic fitting kind of services attached to it, the better. And, you know, speaking in a time where, you know, we're we're getting a lot more of our stuff online, more than we ever did, more goods and services that we're used to seeing in brick and mortar stores, clothes being one of those. The more we're going to do that, the better that experience needs to be and the more accurate that experience needs to be. And right now it's a little bit of a crapshoot. So I'm all for this. It also. Oh, go ahead, Tom. Just real quick, given that Snap is a camera company, too. This makes sense in piping the camera and the e-commerce together to get brands into Snap. Oh, and I mean, listen, if this worked well, and I was like, I don't know, just look at my body and tell me what size I need kind of thing. That works great in theory. However, you also have companies that for years have been saying, oh, used to be a four, now you're a size zero, because it makes you feel better about yourself. And that's how we're going to sell more jeans kind of thing. So the whole thing is a little bit more like real reality. What size are you really? And that made, you know, that that may backfire in some cases. Well, if it reduces returns, that's a big cost saving. So true. Yeah. You might see them just call everything a zero and then fit analytics to size you actually. Yeah, like what no one cares what your size is. Just send us a photo and we'll send you the G. Right. That's a good point. Well, Pinduoduo has passed Alibaba as the Chinese company with the most annual active users with seven hundred eighty eight million to Alibaba's seven hundred seventy nine million. So just ahead, but ahead, China has around nine hundred eighty nine million internet users. Alibaba is a shopping and content giant. Pinduoduo offers a shopping app that started by connecting buyers directly to producer growers, but now offers everything from oranges to iPhones. It's just a shopping marketplace. Alibaba still makes more money in Q4 revenues, specifically of two hundred twenty one billion one to Pinduoduo's twenty six point five five billion one. Pinduoduo was started in part by a former Google employee, Colin Wang, who stepped down as chairman Wednesday to devote all his time, as he says, to researching food and life sciences to improve China's agriculture. Besides connecting farmers with shoppers, Pinduoduo also has been working with farmers to pilot AI farms. Yeah, if you if you haven't been following this as closely as some of us have, Pinduoduo passing Alibaba in annual active users would be a little like Shopify passing Google in active users this past year. I mean, Alibaba is a little more like Amazon than it is like Google, but it's that big. It's that large. I guess it'd be like Shopify passing Amazon, maybe. But Pinduoduo is really fascinating because it's not trying to be a marketplace like an Amazon or even an Alibaba. It's trying to be a connector to say, hey, you got a bunch of strawberries you want to sell, let me connect you with a hundred people in the city that want to buy strawberries so you don't have to pursue each one of those relationships and vice versa. Pinduoduo does the group buying thing where if everybody gets into buy a thing, the price goes down. It's it's really fascinating and they are skyrocketing. Pinduoduo just started in 2015. Yeah, that was crazy. Like you your comparison of saying, you know, this is like Shopify suddenly having more visitors per year than Amazon was a pretty apt comparison. It just doesn't feel like that much momentum should have made or that much ground should have been made up in just five, six measly years in internet time. But I don't know markets different over there. So different conditions or whatever. But that's that's amazing. Like that's just crazy. That's like saying, sorry, Google, you were finally taken over by DuckDuckGo. Like it just seems like an improbable overtaking in in this age. Usually when you get the numbers that high, you stay there and you kind of own them and no one ever, you know, quite competes with you. It's crazy. Yeah, it is skyrocketed growth for sure. I also found it somewhat interesting that Pinduoduo's Colin Wang stepped down as chairman Wednesday. It doesn't mean that the company will do anything badly going forward, but might do things differently going forward. But this is a very nice number and metric to say, you know what, look at us. We've done quite well. And by the way, I would like to step down and do more research on food and life sciences, which Pinduoduo has tapped into already quite nicely. And it's going to benefit them. It's a little like Eric Schmidt taking over Google. So Sergei can work on the algorithm. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, you got thoughts about Pinduoduo or anything else. Link your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. During an annual shareholders' meeting, Samsung co-CEO Kodong Jin said worldwide chip shortages will impact its business next quarter. That's significant. Co said, and I quote, our business leaders are meeting partners overseas to solve these problems. It's hard to say the shortage issue has been solved a hundred percent. You don't tell shareholders that unless you have to, unless you're worried that you would be culpable if something bad happened and you hadn't warned them about that. Samsung is the second largest made-to-order silicon supplier in the world after TSMC, but it does rely on suppliers for parts, just like any other manufacturer, including things like power management and radio chips. Samsung Securities Analyst, M.S. Wong, said shortages of Qualcomm chips, some of which are made by Samsung. You may not realize, Samsung is a manufacturer for Qualcomm, even though they compete on some chips. It's affecting everybody, except Apple. Apple seems to have weathered the storm well, but Wong said PCs will soon be hit due to the short supply of display driver integrated circuits and the profitability of television will be affected by soaring LCD panel prices. So we're still in the point where these chip shortages are going to get a little worse before they get better. Everybody's saying about six months. Samsung's Austin, Texas plant was affected by power outages last month, so that doesn't help. Reduced its production of Qualcomm 5G chips, which could reduce global smartphone output by as much as five percent, according to TrendForce. And Co also said the company is considering skipping a new Galaxy Note this year and you'd be forgiven for saying, well, yeah, I guess if they can't make parts, they're going to make fewer phones. But Co said this is unrelated to the chip shortages, saying it could be a burden to unveil two flagship models in a year, so it might be difficult to release Note model in second half. The timing of the Note model launch can be changed, but we seek to release a Note model next year. So he's saying and maybe what he's saying is there's not demand, but he's saying too complicated this year, but we'll do a note next year. Don't worry. Huh. Like the chip shortage thing feels like every time there's any kind of the shareholder meetings or hey, these were our plans for the next quarter or any of that stuff. I always feel like I'm just kind of on my on the edge of my seat with this sort of stuff, because I don't know what they're going to say. And it's always the worst idea in my head that it's going to be, oh, they're never going to make this again. Or this means that it'll be everything will be 50 percent more expensive because of whatever. And usually it's just, yeah, we might be a little bit delayed or whatever. In this particular case, though, you said earlier, you think maybe it's a demand thing. It may not even be like they have to be have to be able to talk about the chip shortage or acknowledge it that the elephants in the room, but it may just mean that that bigger phone or that that particular line just isn't seeing the same traction it used to see. Well, or both, right? It the chip shortages. I mean, it's a real thing affecting all sorts of companies in in in lots of different categories. But for Samsung to say, OK, shareholders heads up, things are going to be a little wonky this next quarter. And to hear the reasons that we, you know, we we can certainly point to true evidence as to why we would have a harder time with this. But at the same time, we're not going to sell that many notes. You know, we we we think it's the right time to not try to push a product that would eventually be seen as a lot of people as, oh, a failure, no one wanted it. Well, they might want it in slightly different circumstances for whatever reason. Samsung has decided to put all their oomph behind one flagship brand this year. And note fans have been worried about this day for a long time. So Co was very quick to be like, don't worry, we seek to put it out next year, but seek is different than promise. So, you know, if you want to be anxious about it, there's room to interpret that there. I do think it is probably more of a marketing market estimate decision that it is a temporary chip shortage decision. I think if they thought they could sell the notes, they'd figure out how to squeeze out a bunch of them. Well, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it's going to create a new paid service called Wikimedia Enterprise for used by companies that need customized access to its data. Wikipedia has an API available to anyone that's used by companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, all without charge. That free API will not change. Companies may still choose to use it for free, but Wikimedia Enterprise could deliver data faster, also customize formatting to make it easier to handle and also provide new options for sorting or posting. One example is an option to get the most community vetted edits on articles instead of just the most recent ones. Yeah, sometimes Google has been the victim of, you know, somebody does a little vandalism on Wikipedia at just the right moment. It doesn't get caught and it shows up in Google search results. So that could prevent that. It doesn't happen that often, but I think this is incredibly smart. I see it misreported in headlines everywhere as Wikipedia is going to make the big tech companies pay. They're not the big tech companies can keep doing it exactly the way they're doing it. What Wikipedia is doing is saying, hey, we think it would be worth it for you to pay us to make it better than what you get now for free. Are you surprised that this is their first much and say their first, they mostly fundraise. That's how that's how Wikipedia stays afloat. This seems like an interesting way to, I don't know, pivot a little bit. And they're not really taking anything away from anybody. This doesn't affect any users. You and I can still go to Wikipedia and get whatever info we want and benefit from the site in the ways we always have. But this is an interesting new way to monetize it. And sure enough, like I think Wikipedia could make the argument that their website, aka the vast array of content available at Wikipedia, is already this massive thing that everybody relies on. Every search engine shows, you know, up front results from Wikipedia. They all do it in some way or another. Yeah. And so they're all really important thing, right? But they don't pay for that in a meaningful way. So I guess this is just about Wikipedia making sure that they provide enough value for the price so that these companies say, yeah, we'll go the extra step and and do it your way. The formatting part of this seems like what is most beneficial for any company that would want to pay for it. Because like you said, Scott, there's that, you know, that little excerpt. You go, I know where that's from. It's Wikipedia and everything kind of looks the same. But, you know, the idea of delivering data faster, OK, there are probably some use cases for that. But to be able to customize the format into what kind of makes it seem like it's your own thing, if you're a third party, that does make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, I think of it, you know, you don't pay for Windows 10 anymore, right? It's just Windows 10 and you get the update. You don't have to buy a new Windows 10 when Windows, you know, 11 comes out, they just don't do that anymore. Where they make their money is charging enterprises for support. And in fact, those enterprises basically get Windows for free, too. But then they get all the support that goes with customizing it and rolling out patches in a better way at all. This is the same thing, but for Wikipedia information, which is, yeah, you can get it for free, but we could make it easier and better for you if you would like to pay us. Well, has anyone here ever wondered why I mean, birds hum the way that they do? Seriously, they scare the crap out of me sometimes in my backyard because they sound like hornets coming in. They hum is a very nice way of putting what a hummingbird does. There is an insect-like quality to it. Yes, I agree. If you don't know what you're listening to, new research from Eindhoven University of Technology, Sarama, a spinoff of the company from the university and also Stanford University explains how the birds wing generates its sound at 40 beats per second. You might say 40 beats. I mean, is it really that fast? Yeah, it is. It's really fast. That's what makes a hummingbird a hummingbird. The researchers observed hummingbirds using 12 high speed cameras, six pressure plates and 2,176 microphones and found the audio results to be not unlike insect wings, less birds, more insects. And this could help in the future, making certain devices like fans or drones quieter because they would mimic that insect-like quality rather than a bird. This explains so much because it sounds like a drone or it really does sound like a hornet. I always think like a hornet is aiming at my head and wants to sting me when a hummingbird shows up. And then I see this very peaceful, lovely hummingbird, you know, just hanging out by the flowers and everything. I'm like, oh, OK, it's fine. And science has made it all make sense to me now. I find them incredibly relaxing. I haven't been around a hummingbird in a while, but that, to me, is a synonymous with spring growing up. You just hear hummingbirds. And for whatever reason, that sound doesn't bring me out, but bees do. So if I hear a bee humming near me, it's like I want to run from those bees, but not hummingbirds. It's fine. We can land on my shoulder. Come drink nectar from my ear. I don't care. Ever seen the tech talk of the guy who spent like 12 months getting the hummingbird to land on his anyway. It's a really good one. I'll send it to you. Yeah, they might be able to take some of this analysis, too, and use it in technology, right? And be able to create new flying things. Oh, for sure. Yeah, because there's I think there's so many. There's so many devices now that it's like, I mean, helicopter, bird quality, maybe if, you know, we push the envelope a little bit, we might get devices that make more sense for us. Yeah, I just need to be able to communicate that my ear is not a flower hummingbird, and I'll feel perfectly safe before your ear was. Think of it that way. You're you're part of nature for them. Yeah, some curious hummingbird one day is going to be like, what's in there? Check it out. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So yesterday on the show, we reminded folks that a Daily Tech News show and this week in science, we are collaborating and we're going to have a crossover show in April. And we really want to solicit ideas from both audiences of what we should talk about, what we should what we should use for the hive hummingbird mind of ours. John Bailey wrote and said ever since and probably before Star Trek Voyager, I've been interested in the concept of bionural circuitry. We're slowly starting to work towards things like prosthetics that can interpret the body's electrical signals. But what about reversing that process? Could it be possible at some point to build a biological processor? And there are there are DNA computing and similar things, neural networks. So yeah, that is a good one, John. Thank you for sending a topic. We will definitely put this in the hopper for the upcoming this week in science crossover show in April, just about a month away. Keep them coming, folks. Feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today, they include a gadget virtuoso, Carmine Bailey and Eric Holm. Also, thanks to a slew of brand new bosses. So exciting, Bernard F., Brian Yeager, Amrit, Kepper 67 and Michael Gosling. And also Todd Pechota wouldn't want to forget you. You all just started backing us on Patreon and we thank you so much. Thank you, bosses. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. What's going on in the frog pants universe? So much. There's just a show for everything. If you're thinking, man, I sure would like a show for topic A. I'll bet you'll find one at frogpants.com. So go check it out. Give a show a listen. It's super easy to navigate and find what you're looking for. Bound to please somebody. So check it out. That's frogpants.com. And if you're trying to grab me on the personal, find me over on Twitter at twitter.com slash Scott Johnson. 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