 Coming up on DTNS Google wants to pick your news a robot to help you read terms of service And who's at fault for the uber self-driving car death? This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday, November 20th 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood's mom's house I'm Sarah Lane from a rainy Salt Lake City. I'm Scott. It's got Johnson Oh, and I'm Roger Chang the show's producer. I thought you're gonna go for a new nickname Skull Johnson Yep A pinch of me between your cheek and gum more like the King Kong Skull Island kind of feel is what I was going Hey, we were just talking about the magic bullet remember that and fried chicken and ladybug infestations and all kinds of other good stuff I'm good day internet and if you want to be a part of that fun conversation You got to become a member right now patreon.com slash DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Facebook's experimental app employees called the NPE team have released whale an app that lets you decorate photos with text and stickers a Meme creator if you will that's the idea anyway It's free to use but no in-app purchases or subscriptions The app is only available in Canada for now though The NPE team is charged by Facebook with rapidly developing apps to experiment with new ideas speaking of Facebook Facebook also announced as f8 developer conference will take place May 5th and 6th and 2020 at the McEnry and Convention Center in San Jose, California You can sign up to get notified when registration will open at f like the other f eight dot com If you hit the f8 key on your keyboard, it doesn't doesn't register. Oh, well, we're automatically go there. Dang. I tried Alibaba has set a likely price of a hundred seventy six Hong Kong dollars for its secondary stock listing Remember they're on the New York Stock Exchange, but they're also going to be now on the Hong Kong stock exchange That's the price for institutional investors But a CMBC source says that's likely to be around the same level for retail investors as well Apple launched a lineup of battery cases for the iPhone 11 11 pro and 11 pro max in the same black white and pink colors as Their predecessors and also with wireless charging support What's new though is a physical button that auto opens the iPhone's camera app even if the phone is locked All right, let's talk a little bit more about what went wrong with Disney Plus last weekend Scott Well the Verge reports that the head of Disney's direct to consumer division Kevin Mayer Says difficulties with Disney Plus app at launch had to do with the way the company quote Architected the app. A lot of us would say developed or made whatever. That's a fun word Anyway, Mayor said that the BAM tech aka Disney streaming services had never seen the high volume of streams when they are You know when when hosting things like HBO and MLB Exposed the quote limits to the architecture Mayor says Disney will recode the app within the next couple of weeks and fix the issues affecting That kind of stuff. So you won't have a problem in the future like hey my I got kicked out of my movie Or I had to leave and I came back and I started and it made me start over that sort of stuff They they pointed out they're gonna try to fix as well I think I think architecting the app is actually I think he's trying to say It's not just the way we developed it. It's that we structured it to follow a certain path when it does things and we Didn't Understand just how big the demand would be for this I mean to say this is the biggest demand that BAM tech has ever seen is saying something BAM tech has Handled the largest streaming events in in some of anyway, the largest streaming events launches any anyway that have ever existed HBO now with the Game of Thrones coming back was Huge for BAM tech and they weathered it fairly well, even though it had some problems back then So this was just gargantuan. This is unprecedented and when that happens It starts to expose things where when you were developing the app you architected in a way say well Then it's gonna go over here and make that call and you know that can handle 10 million at once So that ought to be fine and then suddenly you get a hundred million and you're like oh I should be you know changing this so that it's not all hundred million going at once and swapping the server I should be logging continue watching in a in a place in memory that doesn't get flushed out And then people don't get to continue watching I'm making this up But those are the kinds of things that can happen and that explains to me why you had these weird issues That weren't related to streaming. It's not like they didn't have enough bandwidth It's not like they didn't have enough servers. It wasn't simple like that It was the actual architects with the app that makes a lot more sense to me Yeah, no, it's also you can imagine like two different conference rooms, right where the IT guys are like This is the worst and the producer people are like we have a lot of demands, you know it's kind of it like a It's a good situation to be in depending on who you ask. Yeah, that's true But also I would argue it's easy to look at and be critical But I would actually argue given the demand given the fact that this wasn't a measured rollout the way HBO now was where it was Only available on Apple Apple TV at first and then they went to other platforms and kind of took it in a different way Having this all land on the same day on every platform on all these different apps on a pretty varied You know group of of ecosystems and have it go as well as it did. I think it's kind of impressive So I'm sure there's room for concern and I'm sure that it's great for them to look back and say well Here's what we could have been different and I'm even sure it's okay for them to do that in light of shareholder concerns about How well it went and how retention is going to go as a result But it worked pretty good like I was having problems the first day a little but I kind of did get in that day And then from the day after that I had no problems and I haven't really had any problems since I think they did pretty good All things considered I've seen a lot worse launches of a lot worse services. So it's not so bad Google Assistant has a new feature called your news update that can be played by telling the assistant to listen to the news Google assembles the update from various Google partners based on what it knows about you including your location among other parameters Among several dozen participating partners are Fox news the NBA Al Jazeera wired and more Stories in your updates can come from multiple sources with the source read out before the news item plays So you know what you're listening to and you know where it came from Updates generally start with big national and international stories followed by local news And then more personalized bits like sports for example, you can go into assistant settings to prioritize or mute various sources Yeah, and one of the things I found out when I went to set it up is if you already have news set up in Google Assistant It's not going to give you this new Algorithmically generated one. It's just gonna give you whatever you set up before So I got the BBC when I tried this and I'm like, wait, that's not right And I went and I had to go into the settings for Google Assistant, which you depending on how you're doing it I was doing it on my pixel 4 can can be a little little tricky to find But once you find it then you say, oh give me the your news update And I did that and once I got it going it said it said, okay pick a few sources But even if you pick sources, it's not going to limit it to those sources It's going to try to bust you out of your bubble and show you things that maybe you wouldn't have chosen that it thinks you'll like Anyway, based on what Google knows about you and the more Google knows about you the more accurate it's going to be Mine was interesting. I I didn't like the sources available. Honestly, BBC is my go-to and it wasn't on there And also the first time I tried it it played the same story from CBS News back to back Like it started it gave me two world stories Well, actually two national stories US national stories and and they were the same they were the exact same recording So might be a few bugs to work out. I don't know the local stuff wasn't bad though It was actually the Santa Rosa power outages were on there and and a thing about An event up in Santa Clarita, which is just north of Santa Rosa isn't really local to you But I suppose, you know, if you was like state thinking like state local Yeah, yeah, you know this this whole idea is and like you mentioned It's not gonna work that well the same way that if I use a streaming music service and it you know I kind of hit like Selected for you radio. It's like, you know, sometimes they get it right Sometimes they don't get it right, but it's interesting especially, you know Spotify's news yesterday about trying to you know a handpick at cherry pick play Podcast playlists for people. This is you know an extension of the same thing. It's like, you know It should machine learning try to figure out what it knows about me enough that it could deliver me in the news that I want Well, I don't know that has yet to be determined But I I like the idea that in theory. Yeah, what I like is eventually we get to a place where Deeper data can be found like good if Google's good at anything It's integrating search into every one of their products in a way that's useful And what I would love this to be able to do is say it's clear Scott really likes tech news So I'm going to pull The morning headlines from the Daily Tech news show feed or whatever I'm gonna place something from somewhere that isn't just a mainstream partner like these guys That's when I know they've really made it with this when they dig a little deeper go a little further I mean that has other implications like Extreme sources of news and whether you want any of that in your feed or not So part of me likes the idea of curating partners, but I Feel like this is a good step in the right direction And I actually look forward to using it even though I mostly use Google's assistant on my iOS devices The robot lawyer behind the do not pay parking ticket dispute service remember we've talked about that for years It'll automatically file things to kind of help resolve your parking ticket for on your behalf Has a new service called do not sign That is included in the do not pay three dollar subscription Do not sign will let you upload scan or link to a license agreement like a terms of service type thing The service then uses machine learning to highlight clauses It thinks you might want to know about and any methods for opting out of data collection It'll even send letters on your behalf to opt out just like it does with the parking ticket stuff Do not sign is available in the united states on the web and in its iOS app man Yeah I mean just the fact that something like this exists Just goes to show you how how bamboozled you can get by by license agreements otherwise I you know, I I haven't had an opportunity to use this, but I can think of lots of scenarios where If for some reason it could help me You know figure out like hey, is this is this legal? Do I what do I got to do here? You know, should I sign should I not I I do it Some years ago there was somebody and I don't know where the link is anymore if it even exists anymore But there was and I I brought this up with tom this morning But there wasn't a lawyer Who was just and this was human controlled obviously not machine learning, but it was somebody who was taking common Ula's from various common services and I felt like there was kind of a gaming bent to it if my memory service It was like sony's ula or microsoft's xbox or something But anyway, it would take these and boil them down to one or two small paragraphs of the gist of it Like the gist of what you're giving up what you're signing off what they can take away from you What they can cancel you for these sorts of things and I really liked that because i'm not going to read the nine page Scroll that pops up when I install a new version of world of warcraft or whatever I'm not going to see what terms change for blizzard and i'm just going to hit okay and and assume that i'm going to be okay And I really liked that because somehow it just made me feel like somebody out there was watching out for other people Maybe the robots can do it. They can look out for their their humans Owners and make us all do better. I don't know. I would I will probably use this I guess is what i'm circling around here to it makes sense to me to To try to simplify that process if we're not going to legally make these guys make that stuff more common language And easier to understand then I don't know we'll work. We'll do a workaround and here's here's a workaround Yeah, I I like this um because it reminds me of ulilizer That's another service that was attempting to do this but it didn't really have the machine learning It was it was doing some other tricks to try to analyze License agreements and and highlight things and it's not just about privacy I mean some of this stuff is compliant with the gdpr and still in the terms of service So you have to you know, you still have to look at it even though it's more It's more it has to be more plain language with the gdpr has to be more upfront This still might be helpful for stuff But it's also they have one example in this verge article about a gym That basically put in its terms of service that you couldn't cancel unless you moved away Like you you were like stuck in the gym forever, which can't be legal But again, like are you gonna take them to court or you know, you're gonna find some other way around it And this was the do not sign was able to find the loophole that said tell them you moved and then they have to cancel your service Oh, I Man, I didn't know about that one if that was if that's a thing that happens What needs to happen there is just a good round of public shaming for that gym So that they take it out of there and never do that again because that's terrible To do that to your users my gosh And this is that's the other advantage of this kind of service is it will bring more of those sorts of abuses to light Yeah, good point Well, something that I think is actually very positive is google adding new tools to google earth That lets you set landmarks draw lines from one place to another add text add images Even add videos to every point along any particular journey And then share it with your loved ones or whoever you want to google is also experimenting with pre-made tours It's calling them stories Which is a term that I don't know it references lots of things But if it sounds familiar to you google earth already had guided tours in its voyager tab The new tools now allow anyone to make and share a tour and then invite others to collaborate on their tour Web only for now so it's not on mobile, but google says you can view tours on the latest versions of ios and android So it's uh, it's getting there google earth already had something similar to this But they were all like professionally done, you know by by documentarians and stuff So this is a chance for you to just be like, hey, you know I had a great trip to minneapolis And here are the cool things I did there and then share it with your friends I was joking that it could also be used for bragging if you go on some like amazing Caribbean vacation or something like that Sure, I mean, but like brag, but I still want to like follow along on what you did. Like, was it that great? Let's see. Where'd you go? What'd you do? Yeah If you're going to the same place as someone else went this is a great way to pick up some tips Yeah, this will this will solve a problem I have the very specific problem Which is we get every year people on my morning show ask us About the best places to go when you're in vegas because we go to vegas a lot We have a big meet up there We're there a few times a year and it makes sense that we might have some suggestions So here's a great way to say instead of having to explain it in 50 emails or build an email template about it I can just Link him to this to this map and say here's all the places that we recommend going You've got pitchers. You've got everything along the way like I think it's a kind of a Brilliant thing and a little surprise. They didn't make this available more I don't know sooner into the more broad public. I think well and the in the era of air B&B and Google street view and being able to sort of virtually be in a place that you've never been before Or maybe you've been before but you know, you're you're figuring out how you're going to do it better the next time kind of thing When when it's your friend, you know, tom and eileen go to japan They come back and they say that we had the best two weeks of our lives Here's everywhere we went you got to do with us like that is so motivating for me And it's not like you have to do it all while you're there. You can do this later As I understand it So you're not like you're this isn't a system where you're like, okay Hold on a second before we get off the bus I gotta hurry up and do the post about what train we took like it's not like that You can go later and say all right. What pictures did we take? Oh, this would be good to have up here and we went to fuji and blah blah blah blah But that's a That I mean, honestly, I would love to follow one of tom's trip to japan or hawai All right, he's taken everyone I will definitely document our trip to japan So I'd like to be included in your trip to japan, but if you guys can come with me Better get into google earth asa. Yeah get in there Hey, I want to say this first big. Thanks to sp shared and for submitting this on the subreddit Bill Gates back to energy company heliogen if you haven't heard of it because neither did I nobody else did It's kind of a little secrety thing, but it's finally making some noise Anyway, they have used computer vision software and automatic edge detection To direct a field of mirrors to use sunlight to create temperatures Above 1000 degrees celsius. That is very very warm About a quarter of the temperature of the surface of the sun That's just how warm the solar heat could be used to make Cement steel glass other materials no carbon emissions. The next step is to demonstrate the process at scale Being a little tricky. We'll see anyway later on heliogen believes it may be able to create hydrogen at scale as well kind of a big deal One of the things I noticed in in this article is is the heliogen people are at least saying that They can demonstrate at scale. This is not like well now We have to solve how to do it at scale which is often the case with scientific studies Like well, we did it in the lab, but now we have to figure out how to do it practically They are like this is practical. We just now have to we did we did a one-off to just prove that And now we know how to scale it and we'll do that next It'll be interesting to see if they follow up on what they say they can do but if they can This would take out a huge carbon emitter If it's adopted by industry and save a lot of power to boot Yeah, there was a um, you know that I don't remember the name of it Bill Gates has there's a documentary series about Bill Gates on netflix. It's a netflix original They follow him around And a big part of it is like here's one of the innovations We're working on and then they'll kind of show the work in progress and show the people involved in it It's very good. I liked it a lot And they also end up dispersing it with questions like Why were you so hated in the 90s or Or did you and steve jobs really hate each other? So you get plenty of that drama But really it's about these things he's investing money in And one of them was this self Not perpetual machine, but basically it was an energy source for a small village That could run perpetually and not have any carbon emissions Never need new fuel Like that was the goal was to create something that just kind of kept on pumping I have to think because I never mentioned this thing I have to think that this is somehow connected to that or it's not the very least it's connected to his It's not because this isn't creating energy. This is creating heat. Sure. But if you're creating Hydrogen at scale, which they just say they're not they're saying they think they could adapt this to do that at some point But they haven't gotten to that yet Right, I was just saying that so if they if that's what they're saying and if they do and if they can Then that means a whole lot of demonstratable Capability here not just hey, we can heat stuff up real good. So I mean, honestly, no I disagree with you. This is this this tech particular technology is we can heat stuff up real good And that at this level of heat is incredibly useful Without even getting into electrical generation. You don't think it has any any potential for for well No, I mean, of course, I'm not going to say that because we we use heat to burn coal and push generators So yeah, maybe this could You know push a generator to create electricity too, but I don't I don't know that that's the biggest advantage of So I think there are more efficient ways to do that I do understand because the french developed one that looks very similar and they're set up to heat a water tower to generate steam For power generation, but it isn't On the same it is like this is too powerful for that. Yes, right because you'd melt the tower Yeah, your steam wouldn't be steam very long You'd have it would yeah your steam would needs the tower like you'd have the tower would turn to steam I just I bet there's a lot of wiggle room between zero and a thousand degrees celsius where they could find Oh, yeah, no, you're absolutely right about that You know, there's all kinds of derivative technologies that might come out of this as well But I think those are actually fairly common like roger says there's other projects the the real big Advancement here is to be able to create create this kind of heat and a sustainable useful level People have tried to do it before and they just couldn't quite get it to this level At a hearing tuesday the u.s. National Transportation Safety Board determined cause and responsibility For the death of a pedestrian who was hit by an uber autonomous car safety driver Raphael Avazquez was found partially at fault for being distracted by her phone Uber's advanced technologies group was also Partially found to be at blame for inadequate safety procedures and ineffective monitoring Of vehicle operators uber did not have a system to keep safety drivers from becoming complacent So all three of those things The ntsb said mail uber you are partially to blame for this death as well And the victim herself a lane herdsburg was found partially at fault for having methamphetamines in her system Which may have impaired judgment when crossing outside the crosswalk And the state of arizona was found partially to blame for insufficient policies to regulate autonomous vehicles and encourage uber To put in place the proper safety procedures and to make sure that that there were regulations to ensure safety This is obviously, you know, not a fun topic But I think what I find most interesting about this decision is it points the light on the fact that We all want to just say well, it was it was the pedestrian's fault She shouldn't have crossed outside the crosswalk. Well, it was the driver's fault. She shouldn't have been none on her phone No, it's uber's fault. They're an irresponsible company. It's the state's fault They should have regulated things better and the fact is yes. Yes to all four of those Everyone had something they could have done better to prevent this And man, can you imagine if we spent that amount of time and care in determining the blame in a regular auto accident That didn't involve an autonomous car Of of of the of these Of these readings the one that sticks out to me the most is uber not having a system to keep safety drivers from being complacent What would that system be? So something to train them first of all and the importance of of of paying attention But that's like saying like if you're gonna You cannot you look if there's what I'm saying is you could have no things to keep people From being complacent or you could have several to try to encourage it And if you do there's less likely that something like this happens You could have alarms that go off You could have like what tesla has where if you don't have your hand on the wheel and it says hey, you know what? You need to get back to doing this Yeah, I uh I had the same question pop up in my head sarah like what else could they do and they're probably a number of things And who knows what they already did there's probably a list of Of things that they do do to try to keep those people attentive or whatever Well, no according to the ntsb. They did not have a system to keep safety drivers from Anything they could have done like it's such a larger conversation, right? It's like if you are driving a vehicle you you are the driver of a vehicle I mean you are you got to be on point 100 of the time right because you're not you're not sitting back and and being complacent ever But if you were a safety driver in an autonomous vehicle that's supposed to be working as advertised You're kind of chilling Right. Yes. Well, that's exactly what you're doing. That's exactly what the ntsb said is first of all This isn't a tested and approved vehicle. This is a test vehicle And as such you need to make sure that your drivers aren't complacent on top of that I think you're right sarah that this is going to be an issue for autonomous cars for the foreseeable future until they Get to the point where they can be fully autonomous that we're going to have to come up with ways To make sure that people keep paying attention so that they can take over if there is a fault Use some of that computing technology they're using to make these cars drive themselves use some of it to notice that you're on your phone and go Hey Get off your phone, right? No, and that's why you mentioned tesla tesla already does this with their autopilot system It tries to to bug you to make you pay attention Now arguably Maybe it doesn't do that good of a job. I don't know. I mean that's a separate conversation But what with the ntsb was saying here is look, this was a complex issue And there were a lot of factors and not any one of them was the reason But if you've done These things it's less likely that that would have happened and having any kind of way to keep the driver from not paying any attention Would have possibly saved a life Well, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit You save lives every day by giving us news that we may not have seen otherwise Voting and submitting stories daily tech news show dot reddit dot com keep them coming We'd love the feedback join in on the conversation in our discord as well Which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns And if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com Let's check out the mailbag We got a couple good ones first one from ellison chariden friend of the show Ellison said two thoughts on self-driving cars speaking of self-driving cars Learning about the selfishness selfishness level of drivers, which is cool Ellison says steve and i are constantly noting that the tesla sees somebody turn in front of us And can't tell that the car is moving at a rate and with enough momentum to make it across well before we get there And so it freaks out and slams on the brakes or sets off an alarm That is a timely a timely email that just sort of Yeah, which is yeah, I mean based on our conversation. It's sort of like that sounds like what it should do Even though it's being a little bit dramatic, right? Like right. It's over side of like Save people at all costs. I mean i'm sure there's there's a point at which over correcting this would make it riskier because then you're more likely to Have someone hit rear end you because it's doing this and it's an unexpected behavior But that's our that was our whole conversation yesterday is if the car can start to tell the intention and be like Oh, that that car is turning. I don't need to slam on the brakes because it's got plenty of room Then that that makes all of this better for everybody. Yeah Uh, we got a lot of emails from folks worried about rob demillo After he talked about sleep tracking yesterday And some of them were saying, oh, I think you have this this medical problem or that medical problem And you didn't talk about seeing a doctor. Are you just trying to self-diagnose? So rob was nice enough to write us a little email today saying dear dtnsers Thanks to all of you who wrote in expressing concern for my health and well-being with regards to my sleep patterns And sleeping disorders in general, please rest assured that I take my health very seriously Especially as I unwillingly age I'm kicking and screaming into the future And I know that home remedies are not an adequate replacement for calling in the professionals The tools that I described on dtns are meant to be used as guidance and confirmation of the impact of small changes in One's daily habits, but are never intended as a replacement for help from physicians I'm already working with doctors and sleep disorder experts on potential causes for my issues. So I am Getting professional assistance. However, being a technologist I cannot help but do my own data collection and analysis of my sleep issues As well as data collection of the rest of my health and habits And I don't anticipate that stopping anytime soon by monitoring my sleep patterns with low cost low invasive technologies I've been able to make changes in my daily and nightly routines that have impacted my sleep positively So that will continue and I'm happy to continue to report on new technologies and techniques going forward Thank you again for all of your concerns Feel free to reach out to me on twitter I'm there as uber rob if you'd like to start a discussion or see what sleep tech i'm tinkering with now peace rob I I want to add to that that one of the reasons that I didn't bring up the like well It sounds like you have this disorder is i'm not a doctor I shouldn't try to diagnose rob any more than rob should try to diagnose himself and second of all His medical problems are none of my business the point of our conversation was like oh, what's the sleep tracking tech you're working with? Yeah, yeah What do we have at our disposal not being doctors or sleep specialists? You know, we're we can you know get a little bit more insight on on what's going on with with ourselves Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including paul boyer Dustin r. Campbell and andrew bradley also thanks to scott johnson for being with us today Scott you're the best. What do you've been what what you've been doing over the last week? Well, uh as the best I've been trying my hardest to do the best things. Um, you can find everything. I'm up to over at frogpants.com Uh, a lot of sort of rushing around trying to get certain things ready for christmas Uh that we like to do on our store and stuff you want to check that out We're having a huge clearance sale to make room for new things So if that's your jam and you are all a fan of any of the work I do you can find all of that at frogpants.com Or you can follow my daily ramblings over on twitter at scott johnson Hey, uh, we have new patreon rewards. If you haven't checked them out lately, go take a look They're all brand new patreon.com slash dts and if you stay a patron or become a new patron Which you can totally do right now by november 28th You'll get a holiday card with some lemperolta art on it sent to your house Of course, you have to give us your address. 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