 Coming up on DTNS, Google's attempt to limit bias in machine learning, HTC's latest crop of VR and AR headsets, thrill and delight, and will Apple finally loosen up on iOS defaults? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 20th, 2020, that's a lot of 20s in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Justin Robert Young often with us on a Thursday, but he is flying out to Las Vegas for his coverage of the Nevada caucus. Check out politics, politics, politics for that. If you want to hear a discussion of songwriting and fair use and all kinds of good stuff, you got to get good day internet, hang out with us, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Some Galaxy phone users reported receiving an apparently accidental notification from Samsung's Find My Mobile app. The alert read one with another one below it. As you can imagine, few people kind of freaked out about this. A few hours after the incident, Samsung said that the messages were unintentionally sent during an internal test. It's made your number one. Good job. At the RSA conference next week, Microsoft will preview versions of its Defender antivirus software for Android and iOS. The apps will come as part of Microsoft's Enterprise security platform. It also announced a preview of Microsoft Defender APT for Linux. YouTube TV reached a deal with WarnerMedia to offer HBO and Cinemax on its linear TV lineup as well as sell access to the HBO Max streaming service when it launches in April. YouTube TV already offered access to WarnerMedia networks like TBS, TNT, CNN and others. All right, let's talk a little more about the story that's captured the hearts and minds of everyone on Twitter. Yeah, well, we'll see. Twitter announced it's rolling out a continue thread option. This is a new way to provide an easier way to connect multiple tweets together and not necessarily in succession. This could be a tweet you sent a while ago, connected to a tweet you sent just now. So users can now scroll up when composing a tweet to see a list of their previous tweets. Selecting one will present a continue thread option, which will then allow that user to add the composed tweet as a thread to the older tweets. Now at the very base, I get that this is a useful thing for people who like to do what used to be called Twitter canoes where you just kind of throw everybody on. I guess you have to be replying to somebody and this wouldn't have to be replying. But when you do a tweet storm, let's use that phrase. This makes it easier to say, OK, I'm going to add it to that. And Twitter, not that long ago, made it easier for these to be read. So instead of just polluting your timeline, they're all grouped together in a thread. And you can click the little thing that says show thread. So it makes sense that they would create an easier way for you to create this intentionally. I still think Twitter isn't the best way to do this sort of thing. If you've got a long form post, it probably belongs somewhere else. But OK, a lot of people like to do it. And sometimes they're very informative. I will admit that. But man, people got excited about this today, Sarah Lane. Like it was the top of tech meme. And I said, my Twitter feed was like, thank goodness, finally. Our national, nobody said our national nightmare is over. But yeah, I was not as excited about this and maybe because I don't create these kind of threads. Yeah, I'm sort of the first person to get annoyed with threads because threads, I understand how they work. I happen to use a third party app, both on Mac OS and iOS, which is tweet bot. So a lot of what Twitter rolls out doesn't necessarily even apply to me. But threads annoy me because if you're tagged in part of a thread, you end up getting all these sort of, I don't know, it gets it gets very disjointed very easily. I understand how it works. I still don't think it's very implemented very well. I am. I can't think of one time, at least in the last few years that I ever thought like if I had tweeted five years ago, my dog is really cute. Didn't have a dog at that point. But let's just say I did that. And I and I wanted to like update that and say something like still true. People do things like that all the time for all sorts of things, like or maybe they predicted something some sometime back and they want to come back to that conversation. So I get why this is kind of cool because it doesn't have to be, you know, you sort of scrolling through all of your old tweets at the same time, depending on what you're looking for, you know, if there aren't like obvious keywords or it doesn't go back in time far enough, this tool is only going to be so helpful. Well, I took this to mean you've just tweeted and you want to you want to keep going that because that's the more that's the more frequent use case that I see is somebody isn't going back and finding something from a while back. They're they're just creating a thread. And this is a way to make sure that that thread is easier to compose and make sure that it that it's intentionally part of the thread. You know, it's part of the thread because you entered it this way. So you would like put your post and then you'd go to that post and say, I want to keep going. I want to keep creating this thread. I don't know how often people are going to use it for older stuff, though. It feels like this is more for like I have something to say on Twitter that is more than 280 characters. And so I'm going to put 15 posts in a row and this will make it easier to compose that. Sure. But you also have multiple previous tweets to choose from. So it's not necessarily what you just said. Well, you do. But that doesn't mean that I think that's just a feature to be like, oh, if you want to go back to something earlier, you can. But I don't foresee people using it that way very often, to be honest. I mean, me either. I'd love to know if I think that's who in the audience is like the important part of this feature. Well, maybe not. I would love to know someone in the audience saying you're missing it. You're missing how cool this is because I because I'm with you, Tom. I'm sort of like this. OK, it's that's cool feature, but something I I was not necessarily clamoring for. All right. But this feature, I don't think got enough attention. Gmail is adding a feature called Search Chips. Now, I don't know why they're calling it Search Chips. It could it could be named so many other things. But anyway, it lets you narrow down your search results when you're searching for an email and Gmail. So little buttons, I guess their chips show up on top of your search results. And it's a little bit of machine learning suggesting like, oh, do you want to narrow this down to just the ones that have an attachment or don't have an attachment or do you want to exclude your your G talk, your hangout chat? So we can get rid of that, get rid of that, or you could include just those. You could pick a date range like I know it was from 2020. You can do that a lot easier now. A lot of these features existed before, but they weren't easy to get to. Now they'll be super easy and be suggested for you. A feature is coming to G Suite users first with eventual availability for all Gmail users. I love this. I am I am a person who uses Gmail as it at least was originally intended, which means just archive everything. No, I have to delete it doesn't even work that way. And then just search for it later. That becomes problematic when you have too many emails and you're kind of like this happens all the time. I mean, I'm constantly searching or adding filters for various emails that I get. It's I try to maximize the importance of keeping your Gmail tidy. This only helps me that much more because I can't tell you how many times I've been like, OK, what did I say in that email? Yes, I used the word, you know, jurisdiction. I don't know why that came to mind just now. But you know, something like that where I'm like, I can get there, but this makes it way easier. Yeah, 100 percent. There are plenty of times where I have to trick Gmail search into showing me the thing I want. And maybe this won't help. I don't know, but it sounds like it would if I could be like, no, no, no, I don't it definitely has an attachment. We're creating new podcast trailers for DTNS right now. And so if I'm looking for older messages about that, I'm like, well, I know there's a trailer attachment. So give me that, you know, or I know there's not an attachment. Stop giving me the ones with the attachment. There's lots of reasons that this could help. Date ranges will help, at least, you know, again, you could do that right now, but it's so difficult. I rarely do it. So this this might help with that as well. Very exciting. We have a lot of Google News today, actually. Google plans to move UK user accounts under U.S. jurisdiction as the result of the UK leaving the EU. This was reported as a sourced story originally by Reuters, but they've gotten Google to confirm it. They're like, yeah, we're going to do this. Google told Reuters the protections of the UK GDPR will still apply to these users because you are going to see headlines out there that tell you the opposite that UK users losing GDPR production being ripped from the EU by Google. No, again, Google might be lying at any point, but Google said in no uncertain terms without wiggle room, the protections of the UK GDPR will still apply to these users. Now you could say, why did they say UK GDPR? Because there are two GDPRs now. In the stage we are in, Brexit, basically all the EU laws are now also UK laws for the time being until the UK decides to change them, overrule them, or whatever, and that's for the transition period, so they're not operating on two separate systems until the transition period is over. So it's just saying you've got GDPR protection. However, there are some other reasons why they would want to do this. UK user data is kept in Ireland right now, which is part of the EU, which would make it more difficult to recover in cases of criminal investigations in the UK. So having it under the U.S. means the U.S. Cloud Act applies, which makes it easier for British authorities to obtain data from a U.S. company. Now, a lot of people have pointed out that Google has a UK subsidiary. They could have put this under their own UK subsidiary, which would have made the most sense because then it's the UK. There could be technological reasons why that wouldn't work. Maybe the data centers just aren't up to snuff for that. But also the other reason, Sarah, is probably because the U.S. has more permissive rules than if they're going to move it out of the EU for the time being anyway, and they're not required to keep it in the UK. Why not put it in the place that is the easiest to access for all the good reasons? And certainly that could mean there are other reasons, like less maybe honorable reasons that they would want to do that. And that's what a lot of people who are suspicious of this whole thing are going to glom onto. It's like, well, what would be, sure, the data centers and making it easier to get the bad guys, that's all kind of the obvious stuff. What would be the less honorable reasons if someone was feeling uncomfortable with us? Listen, I look at this and I'm in my head. This is just in my head. I see them saying, well, we have to move it out of Ireland. Should we move it to the UK? And I see the answer being, well, if we move it into the UK, we don't have as a robust infrastructure. We have super robust infrastructure in the U.S. We can move it there. That will be workable and will probably increase the bottom line on it for a while because that data can be used. It's not that anyone wants to access something in that data. It's that, oh, when the data's here, the ROI goes up because we're allowed to do more with that data than we are in the EU and therefore we'll make more money. That's the less honorable reason, in my opinion. All right, well, let's see how you feel about this. The Google News keeps on Googling. Business Insider saw an email to developers noting that Google's Cloud Vision API will no longer use gendered labels for image tags like man or woman. The labels are used to identify what's in an image. Images with people will now be labeled person. Google says it's not possible to infer gender solely from appearance and mistaken labels violate its ethics principle against creating or reinforcing bias. Yeah, this one's gonna be controversial with some people because they're gonna see it as some kind of political correctness, I get that. But what I think Google's saying here is, look, we don't want to introduce bias that can harm people. It's one thing if we have a lower accuracy rate on identifying giraffes. I don't mean to come for the giraffes, but giraffes are less likely to be harmed by being misidentified as a raccoon or something. I don't know what a giraffe would be misidentified as, but there's less fallout there if it's misidentified. With people, with actual real people, if this label is misapplied, it could cause at the very least embarrassment up to more difficult problems because they're like, nope, nope, this form says that you are a man and that person's like, well, I'm definitely not a man. So that's the kind of thing that Google wants to make sure they eliminate. Now, granted, maybe that accuracy level is very high right now, but it's not high enough for Google. And they're like, you know what? We are providing labels for APIs here. This is us making a service that says to a developer, you can trust that this will be accurate. And the accuracy level we wanna require for getting someone's gender identity correct isn't met. And so for the time being, we're not gonna use that label because that label is not accurate enough for our standards. I think that's fair to say. Absolutely, and you mentioned political correctness and this is one of those issues and it is an issue for some people that is very real. Even if it was very good at identifying genders, that's a man versus that's a woman. Well, when it comes to humans, the lines are sometimes blurred and sometimes on purpose and people can look all sorts of different ways. So I think they're doing the right thing here. Yeah, and I think it's important to repeat this, that this is an API that feeds out to people who are using images to say, tell me what this image is. And it can be used for all sorts of purposes. Some of those purposes, it might not matter that much, but some of those purposes it might. And Google's saying, look, we don't know what the API is always gonna be used for, but we have an ethics principle that says we don't want to introduce bias. So we're not. And that feels like the right decision to make here. They're not trying to play politics. They're trying to do accurate labels and say, like, look, if we can't accurately tell from an image, whether someone is a man or a woman, then we shouldn't label that. We should just label it as person because we're pretty confident we're looking at a person. It isn't a giraffe, that's for sure. Yeah, hopefully. HTC announced new VR headsets under the Cosmos name. The Cosmos Elite is a new one that comes with two external tracking stations for more precise positioning. A lot of the new headsets have the inside out trackers, the ones that are on the helmet, so you don't have to put anything out there. This one's saying, you know what? We're gonna make you put the lighthouse trackers out there, or you can use the ones from Steam, but we're doing it because that is more precise still. Pre-orders for the Cosmos Elite start February 24th for $899 bundled with two base stations for the tracking and two controllers. Existing Cosmos owners can order an external faceplate update for $199 starting next quarter if they wanna update to this new one. The Cosmos Play will be a new entry-level model that has four inside out cameras, so no external trackers needed. More information on that in the coming months. And the Cosmos XR also has four inside out trackers and two pass-through cameras for seeing the real world and experiencing augmented reality in a 100 degree field of view. No, that's not a wide field of view as you would in real life, but it's pretty good. More details coming about the Cosmos XR at GDC with a dev kit coming in Q2 and HTC showed off a working prototype, although they really only showed stills of it. They say it's a working prototype, but they only showed stills of Project Proton. It's kind of a ski goggle looking thing, so it's not quite a headset. It looks more like goggles. It can be all-in-one, so it would have everything on board the way like the Oculus Quest works. Or they're saying it might be better to do it as what they call all-in-two, which I guess is technically accurate. That's where you would do more like a Magic Leap thing and have it tethered to an external pack. Could eventually work with a phone, they think. Uses pass-through video for the augmented reality the same as the Cosmos XR. It looks cool. I don't know, Sarah, what do you think? Is that a fashion accessory you could see yourself walking around with? Well, I like the goggle idea better than the full-on headset. I also do not own any VR or AR headset at all. And in fact, I asked Tom and Roger before the show, what do you guys have? And Tom, I know you have some older models of stuff that you may or may not use all that regularly. I don't know if the Oculus go up there, but I rarely use it, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, this is the sort of thing where I think as much as we've seen how the VR headset experience in various capacities and builds is really successful, has been really successful in the enterprise, even if some of the company's models for the consumer have been a little slow on the uptick as far as adoption. Yeah, I just want someone to say to me, this is the one. This is the one that's going to seem as real as possible. You will have the least amount of things that you have to wear. Tethering to a phone would be parfait because I've always got my phone with me. And I just, I look forward to use cases that really make sense. Yeah, I feel like if I had to guess, virtual reality right now is in the Commodore Amiga stage of personal computing. So we have some more advanced ones. They do some really cool stuff. There are some excellent business reasons to get these things. And for the enthusiast, there's some real great models that can do some really cool stuff. But it's not out there where everybody can use it yet. Nobody has cracked the Windows or Apple way of saying this is now accessible for everyone. We don't have the thing that makes it useful. I don't know if we ever will for VR or AR. I think augmented reality probably has the better chance of that because if you can get it into glasses or contacts that people are used to wearing and it's just allowing them to go about their regular life while doing interesting things on top of that, that makes more sense to me. And that actually is borne out in enterprise where augmented reality is usually used in the field and used more widely than virtual reality. Hey folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Bloomberg, the news outlets, Mark Gurman reports that Apple is considering letting users set third-party web browser and email defaults in iOS. What in the heck? Oh my gosh. Hicks are flying. Yeah, they're considering it. Let's cut the applause. They also are thinking about allowing direct integration of third-party music services on the HomePod, possibly in Siri on iOS. So when you say play a song, it could play it from Spotify or it could play it from YouTube music. It wouldn't have to always be Apple music by default. Sources are telling this to Gurman. Gurman always has good sources. So I believe that Apple is considering this. The sources don't even say they're going to do it. It says they're considering it. And I guess we'll find out at WWDC what their decision was. But Apple's been in trouble for prohibiting third-party defaults on iOS. I was questioned last year at a hearing at the US House of Representatives, Antitrust Panel. Cross Spotify has filed an antitrust complaint about Apple's app store policies and lack of HomePod access in the EU. We're not hearing anything about the app store policy here, but we are hearing about the HomePod. And Apple has not reached a decision on whether to change this default policy. But if they did, they could be rolled out as early as iOS 14. Now, this is not Apple's loosening everything up. My biggest bugaboo is the app store 30%. I don't even mind that they take 30%. What I mind is that there is no other option as there is on Android for someone to allow you to buy a subscription outside of using Apple's payment policies. That is why if you go into Amazon Prime Video or Audible, if you now go into Netflix, you cannot make in-app purchases or up your subscription because those companies don't want to share 30%. And Apple refuses to let them even link out of their apps somewhere else. This doesn't do anything about that. And that would be the thing that would get me the most excited where if I'm in my Comixology app, I don't have to go to launch the Safari browser to buy a comic or I don't have to do the same thing in Audible. But we are at least seeing a little bit of loosening up with the browser, the email, possibly the music selection. And my big question there is, well, how much does this really matter? Cause man, when I'm in Gmail, if I click a link, it opens in Chrome. Be nice for it, not to have to, but it does. And all of the browsers have to use WebKit. They have to use the Safari engine. So it's not like you're getting pure Chrome anyway. It's not like you're gonna get an Edge browser that's entirely different. Does it make that much difference to you, Sarah? Not really. I am a Chrome browser user on iOS. I just, I'm a Chrome browser user everywhere, even though I've got issues with that, but that's a story for a different day. I'm mainly, and I was thinking a lot about this, like, okay, where am I bugged by this? And it's pretty rare because most of my iOS activity is within apps. I am not linking out of apps all that often. If I'm on Instagram or if I'm, I don't know, catching up on Messenger or if I'm doing it, I don't know, in some sort of photography app or I'm looking at my bank statement or whatever, most of that is all pretty self-contained. I do have Chrome browser down in my little four, down at the bottom. That's the one that if I want to go directly to something, I am in the Chrome browser. So my question to you, Tom, is what is it about the Safari engine that keeps me from being able to enjoy the best of Chrome when it's on mobile? Well, yeah, I mean, some of the features are still there. Obviously it's able to share your history and stuff if you're using Chrome, but you don't get Chrome extensions. You don't get the same, all the same safety and security things under the hood. And that is not me saying the webkit is insecure. I'm just saying like, if you're like, no, Chrome does it right. Yeah, if that's what you want all the way. Same for Firefox, honestly. I mean, if you're using Firefox on iOS, the same thing, you are all as secure or insecure as a webkit at that point. A lot of people probably don't care about that so much. It's a little bit under the hood. And so it's mostly about that default and saying like, when I click a link anywhere, I want it to open in the same browser every time. There are 36 other defaults that aren't touched on by this. And so maybe if they did do this, it would be the beginning of that. But it's always bugged me that I could set a default on my Android device, but I couldn't on iOS that I was locked in. And everyday use, I've gotten used to it. It's a minor annoyance. It's not a blocker. Yeah, I would say the same. As much as I don't care all that much about the mobile browser experience on iOS, there are definitely times where I'm like, I know I open, where is that tab? Oh, it's in Safari because I link to it from something else. Okay, I gotta find it now. So this at least is a step in the right direction. And again, sounds like Apple's just considering it, so don't get too excited yet. But it is a step in the right direction to at least organize your open tabs and pages in a browser more efficiently. Yeah, and it's more of a principle thing, right? It's a principle where people wanna have the choice and not have to deal with those minor, even though they're minor. Isn't it better than, isn't it the Apple way not to have minor annoyances? Isn't that supposed to be Apple's big advantage here? And the answer is, well, if you just use what Apple calls the defaults, then you won't have those annoyances, Tom. Get over yourself. Yeah, we know what you want. Yeah. You don't know what you want, we know what you want. I think more compellingly is Apple learning that, wow, if we actually allow different defaults on the HomePod, maybe more people would buy a HomePod. Because I know, I don't know how many people are put off by that, but if you're in the Spotify universe and you're looking at a HomePod and you're like, oh wait, so I'd have to say Spotify every time or I'd have to stream it, that could make you go and decide to get a Sonos or an Echo or a Google Home or something else, right? Because you could set a default on those. Well, the HomePods, obviously more expensive than a lot of their peers in the market, but have not sold well enough for it to be like a huge hit for Apple when you're talking about smart speakers. So this would be a way to get more people excited about something that is expensive, but a very nice product. Yeah. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. Sometimes HomePod stories end up there. Haven't seen one lately, but you can submit any story that you care about and want us to care about as well. You can also vote on other stories at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord. There's a whole cool group right now. They'll be your best friends, probably, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's see what's in the mailbag today. Oh, let's. First one comes from Byron Sanford, who says, and this is in response to Roger's recent Live With It segment. I love my SHIELD TVs, 2015, 16 gigabyte and pro version. I wanted a box as good and flexible as the boxy boxes that I replaced. I've side-loaded a couple apps that don't have native versions, such as Patreon, Chrome, Gmail, Facebook Messenger and a couple more, and the box is great for vintage game emulators. I've had some success with side-loading Google Hangouts in Skype, but with no native support might do some weird things. Unfortunately, the later SHIELD TV revision seemed like a downgrade for me. If you wanna know more about the SHIELD TV, become a patron and get that latest Live With It with Roger Chang, breaking down his living for years, honestly, with the SHIELD TV at patreon.com slash dtns. Also got an email from Ruth, who was pointing out when we talked about the Facebook feed tabs, we sort of side-mentioned that you could get the chronological version and she's like, well, let me, let's explain to the audience how you get that in case they don't know. So if you want to get the post in chronological order on Facebook, go to the left sidebar menu under the username. You'll see a news feed button, press it, and choose Most Recent. It is not set automatically, so you need to do this every time you log in. That's why the tabs would be better. And if you're on the Facebook app, press the menu on the right side of the screen, go to Most Recent, and that's it. Lots of love from Israel. Ruth, thank you, Ruth. Thank you, Ruth. Yeah, I think that what Facebook is trying to do is make this all a little bit easier because as Ruth pointed out, sometimes this stuff is a little bit hidden. If you log out all the time, it's a little bit cumbersome to make sure that you're getting the feed the way you want it every time you log back in. For those who stay logged in all the time, maybe this is less of an issue, but I think choice is good. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Jonathan Price, Michael Aitkins, and Chris Allen. And don't forget, we have lots of perks. Live with it. The ability to get a shout out. I did an editor's desk today explaining the policy on advertising and the public feed and why we do it the way we do it and what I know and what I don't know about the advertisers. Mostly I don't know anything. So if you wanna find out about that and a whole lot more, become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've got feedback for us, and I know you do, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love to hear what you think. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tomorrow, David Ginsburg talks about using a tablet instead of a laptop, and Len Peralta is here to draw the episode. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.