 Coming up on DTNS, good news for ride hailing companies, the right to repair and people who like water. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 4th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And producing the show today from the Arctic Tundra, I'm Amos. Yes, Amos in for Roger Chang who's off this week. Thank you, Amos. Good to have you along. Good to have all of you listening or watching along as well. We were just talking about how we got through last night and our admiration for the data nerds out there that help us interpret all this stuff. That was on Good Day Internet. Become a member of Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Spotify's Apple Watch app can now stream without connecting to an iPhone. The feature is in beta and rolling out to some users. The watch will need its own Wi-Fi or cellular connection, offline listening not yet enabled. Google patched two zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome being actively exploited. One was a remote code execution bug in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. The second was a heap-based buffer overflowing Chrome for Android that would let attackers escape the sandbox. If you haven't updated yet, go do it now. These government has fined Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Periscope, and TikTok each the equivalent of 1.2 million US dollars for missing a November 2 deadline to appoint a Turkish representative. According to a law adopted this summer, social media companies must have a permanent representative in Turkey or store Turkish user data in the country and execute court-ordered takedowns. Yep, they have to do all three of those. Alright, let's talk a little more about a potential partnership. Who's hooking up, Scott? Well, the Wall Street Journal has got the scoop. They say Comcast and Walmart are in talks to develop a smart television. Comcast would provide the smart TV software, which would run on TVs made by a third party and promoted and sold by Walmart and possibly carry Walmart branding on the television. That's not for sure, though. Comcast software would work nationwide and not be tied to its cable service, though it might encourage growth of Comcast, Peacock, and Zoom-O products. Walmart has an existing partnership to sell TVs running Roku under the on-brand or ONN brand. But this could change and you might see Comcast and Walmart selling you a TV or trying to soon. Yeah, it might not change. They might still do the Roku, too. It'll be interesting to see what effect it has on that Roku partnership. But super smart for Comcast, if you think about it. Comcast knows that cable television revenue is not going to increase for them. It's going to decrease over time. The way they take advantage of what they have built for cable and turn it into a revenue-generating business in the future is to take that software. They've done a lot of work developing software for their Xfinity boxes. If you're not a Comcast customer, you may think, like, yeah, you're set cable set top box. What good is that? But they have set top boxes that run Netflix, run Disney Plus. They're essentially like a Roku, but they just also give you your cable. And in fact, they even have a service called Flex that is meant to run just on a box, an Android TV box, rather than have to have a cable box. So they're taking all the work that had been doing that. If you heard years ago, like, Comcast is adding Netflix to its cable box, how weird is that? This is why they did it. So they could take that software and now use it for other things like embedding it in a smart TV, which then people walk into Walmart. They don't care about Comcast. They care about cheap TV, Walmart's promoting it. It's got a cool interface. I'll buy it. And then once they get it home, not only does it have Netflix, Hulu, et cetera, but it also will probably put Peacock nice and up in front, which will also help Comcast, because Comcast owns Peacock. Zoom-O is very similar to Pluto.tv. It's a leanback free interface. It's ad supported. I can't imagine they wouldn't put that front and center as well. So this all makes sense to me as a way for Comcast to pivot into the new world that we're moving into. Yeah, I mean, listen, if we're talking about, like, a 45-inch TV versus an 80-inch TV, obviously, those prices will be different. Otherwise, what do we think of something like this would cost? Because clearly, if Comcast and Walmart are getting into the business of selling a bunch of TVs together, they want to undercut some of the competition. Oh, yeah. I'm sure they're aiming for lower price points. I mean, if I had to guess, we're talking $900 basic 4K LEDs. Oh, I think even less. They might go that TCL price level, right? They might even get TCL to make it for them. Yeah, they totally could. And one thing that I should point out, because I had this question earlier and I did a little digging, their X1 boxes that Comcast already makes integrates things like Netflix and other services. One would assume, but they don't get explicit about this. So one would assume that these TVs would also support other mainstream services that aren't Peacock, as an example. But we don't know that, for sure. I would hope so, though, because if you're going to tell me on a TV, yeah, if you're going to tell me on that TV and say, well, it's just got Peacock, but you're going to pay a lot less money for it, I might still say, I think I'll get this LG, because it'll run everything. Yeah, and actually, GPAC84 in our Twitch chat points out, it's about your data, too, right? Because Comcast can also leverage what data they're allowed to collect from an operating system like this into delivering advertising, not just through the software. I'm sure they'll do that. They're going to sell advertising on the software the way Roku does, but also help inform selling advertising across all of their other properties, which includes a lot of NBC Universal properties, as well, including Zoom-O. Yeah, it's just a tip, here's a whole side thing that's just about marketing, and it's hard. Companies like this, where they're established brands, we know them from their service, whether it be internet or cable. And then while they're busy doing their business model, a whole bunch of other weird things happen. Netflix happens, Hulu happens, HBO Max happens, all these things happen, and they all feel right and good coming from the directions they're coming from. But then you hear, oh yeah, hey, we here at Comcast have an idea too, and we're going to put it in TVs and sell it at Walmart. And part of me goes, oh, well, that seems like Johnny come lately kind of boring, and you're just sort of barely making up for not really being on top of this trend. And I don't know how I get away from feeling that way unless they just blow my mind. You get away from it by not knowing it's them. I think that's the key. That's the key, I agree. As you walk into Walmart, and Walmart says, we've got this amazing new TV, the Flexstar. Check it out, cool new interface, got all your favorites, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney Plus, it's all there, and it's only $199 for a 42 inch, little more for the bigger ones, and you're like, man, that's a nice looking TV. I think I'll pick that up because I'm the regular Walmart shopper always looking for a deal, and then you take it home, and you don't ever really know that it's Comcast because I don't think, I mean, they don't even brand cable as Comcast anymore, they branded it as Xfinity, so, you know. Yeah, I think I totally agree with that. I would be much more excited about the price point and getting it home and saying, well, it's got all these features and functions and not really care that Comcast has had anything to do with it. Not that it doesn't necessarily tarnish it to know that as an aside, but it's not the selling point for me, and it just makes it feel cheap to me, and I don't know why, I don't know why I feel that way. Yeah, because you know, right? But if you don't, you'll just think like, oh, it's a new Walmart house brand, I mean, you won't, but somebody will. Right, the other thing is too, if they're aiming just for price, you know this thing's not gonna be the latest OLED freaking, you know, whatever. It's not gonna be high-end. Yeah, and that's okay, nothing wrong with that. In fact, I- It's not gonna be micro-LED, it's not gonna be quantum dot maybe, yeah. Exactly, probably not AK, those sorts of things, but it'll be enough, I think, for a lot of people who are just still sitting on some 1080Ps that are gathering dust in their basements. Well, OLED 4K TVs, you can get them for like 500 bucks now, so I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped in that range somewhere, right? Yeah, something happened recently, by the way, with OLED, and I don't know what it was, but I'm sure glad about it, because everything with OLED got cheaper, and I don't know who's responsible, was it phone makers, and they just made it cheaper because of the production got better? Like, when that happened, I don't know, but before all this, I'm old enough to remember when anything that said OLED or OLED, I went, oh, well, I won't be affording that for the next 10 years. Oh, they led me out because I couldn't afford it is what it used to be, but yeah, no, I think they just hit scale. You know, the big panels hit scale, and maybe I think that brought the price down. Yep. Well, Scott, before we get to our next story, when's the last time you watched Waterworld starring Kiven Koster? I watch, I try to watch it yearly, the last time I watched it was April of this year, I watched Waterworld again. Okay, so not that long ago. Well, you might find this next story interesting then, because at some point, many of us who watch something like Waterworld say, isn't it weird to have a water shortage because most of the planet is 70%, 71% water, right? Like, what's going on here? The problem is salt, not just in sea water areas. Some natural sources called hypersaline have 10 times as much salt content as oceans. It's often a side effect of industrial processes like oil and gas production. Hypersaline water is expensive to salinate, expensive to dispose of, and scientists at Rice University are using boron nitrate, also sometimes called white graphene, which is often used in electronics and advanced solar cells. The Rice University team coded a heating element with boron nitrate that can force water vapor through a membrane, leaving the salt behind. The boron nitrate not only protects the heating element from corrosion, but also uses solar energy to power the heating itself. Tests produced fresh water at 42 kilograms per square meter, about 10 times the capacity of current solar membranes, and a professor of civil and environmental engineering, Rice University, quellently says that the team's ready to pursue commercial applications, but need external support to scale up. This thing's ready to leave the lab. This isn't one of those like, wow, it's just in the lab right now and we need to work out the kinks. They're like, we get somebody in the industry that can help us make this bigger. We can put this out in the field and start using it. And an oil and gas industry does have a cost problem with disposing of its wastewater because it is hyper saline. It's really been expensive to desalinate, but it's also just as expensive to get rid of in a responsible manner. So this could fix that and provide extra water at places that are doing this sort of thing. It doesn't have to just be used for oil and gas. It can be used for any hyper saline resource. And so yeah, I love this because it's not just a really cool solution to a problem. It's not the only solution to hyper saline. They mentioned in the new Atlas story here, a Columbia University project that's adding an additive to the water that can desalinate cheaply and efficiently. So there's a few of these. It feels like this may be one of those advances where we're not going, gosh, it will be nice when this is finally practical. It feels like we've got several approaches to desalinate water, which has been something that could solve water shortages for a long time. We just haven't been able to make it efficient. It'll also avoid all those water wars that Tom and I predict on shows like that we've had in the past where that's always seems to be a prediction on forecast and other stuff. And I always wondered like one of these days we're gonna get to a place where it's cost efficient. We figure it out. And then all that water is there for us. And then there's new questions though. Like if it gets super cheap to do that, well then how flippant are we with water use? Again, are we using too much of it? We affecting ecosystems that are part of the ocean. Like I have a lot of questions about the longterm stuff and just good stewardship of this sort of thing. But as an exciting almost there technology like ready to go, like this is great news. This is great news. And if our water world happens and we still have this technology, that'll be a little easier to take it off. Exactly. Like who doesn't want to live in the water? You know, you just drink it up. Yeah. Great. If you can get a handheld one of these, actually they do think they can make it transportable. They think they can make it so that you could actually bring it out into the field. You wouldn't have to have it be a fixed location. I don't know if it's handheld for when you're floating around. But you know. Well there's probably some other like an archeological agricultural uses right now. I always hear about how it takes two gallons of water for every single almond that you produce to then make it into almond milk. It's like a really water-expensive process to make almond milk. And it always makes you feel a little bad drinking almond milk because I'm like, oh, how much water was wasted doing this? Water like that now suddenly has a new life potentially. It's not, we're talking about salt. Yeah, you could provide another source of water. And basically if you make water and not be scarce, fresh water and not be scarce, then you don't have to worry about feeling guilty when you drink your almond milk. Yeah, there you go. Hey folks, if you wanna join in the conversation in our Discord, you can talk about almond milk in there. There's folks in there that'll talk about anything with you. Join it, link to it, Patreon account. Get a Patreon account, patreon.com slash DTNS. Now, we're not going to talk about most of the kind of election coverage you're hearing everywhere but there were some technology related propositions on the ballot. There's a whole special episode along with politics, politics, politics about Proposition 22, the ride hailing one. So we'll start with that, but there's a few other things like right to repair and privacy laws that were passed around the United States. Now, these only affect the states that they're in but a lot of times other states will copy propositions if they're successful and sometimes even other countries will copy these. So even if you don't live in the United States you might find these interesting to compare to your own laws or look at maybe something that your government might be looking at putting into place soon. Let's start with Proposition 22 because this is likely to be one used across the United States and possibly elsewhere. Voters in California passed Prop 22 which exempts what they call app-based drivers. It's basically defined as somebody using an app to coordinate ride hailing or to coordinate food delivery. So I'm an independent contractor and I use Uber or Lyft to go pick people up and drive them around or I use Uber, eats, DoorDash, Postmates, et cetera to go grab food and bring it to people. There will now be an exception to the state law AB5 in California that would otherwise have required app-based drivers to be full-time employees. AB5 was passed mostly to make app-based drivers full-time employees but Uber and Lyft and Postmates and DoorDash spent millions of dollars on Prop 22 and it passed. The new law will leave drivers as independent contractors but it does give them a little more than they have now under the law. There's a minimum wage, there's a limit on how many hours you can drive only 12 hours out of every 24. For certain drivers that drive enough you can get some health insurance and accident insurance subsidies. So they're not giving all the benefits you would get as a full-time employee but they are trying to appear as if like well we're actually adding benefits to what an independent contractor otherwise would get. Oh man, I mean, this is, if you live in California this was a big one and the voters have spoken. I just, my kind of takeaway is like, listen if somebody is working 12 hours a day and they have no benefits. Yes, it's great that they're getting minimum wage. They deserve more. Well, they're not getting minimum wage. They're getting a minimum wage. The wage, the minimum of Prop 22 is actually higher than the California minimum wage. Right, but still. Yeah, sure. But we're still, it's independent contractor stuff and it's funny, you think well if you wouldn't you of course want to be an employee because then you get all the benefits that an employee would get. Not every person who drives for any of these companies actually wants that. Some do, some do not. So it's been a very divisive measure and I will be interested to see how things go over the next let's call it six months. Yeah, the other thing I wondered about is how much does this spreads to other cities? Like, are we gonna have something on the you know at the polls in four years or two years here in Salt Lake City where we have a lot of Uber and Lyft Sturridge or we did before the pandemic? I know all that stuff slowed down for a lot of places. You do a lot of food delivery, I bet. We do a lot of food delivery out here. And this covers that too. Yeah, yeah. Right, sorry about ride ailing. Cause that's how this stuff goes, right? Something successful in some cities makes sense somewhere else before you know we're all voting on it. So yeah, I'm really curious about it. And it feels like the right thing for you guys. I mean, I don't know a ton about that prop but other than what Tom's taught me and a few people have always said, oh yeah, this thing, we're voting it down. It's, this is a terrible attempt to, you know really mess with gig workers and whatever. So it seems like you guys got the right thing but we'll see if it spreads from there. Here's the thing before we move off of this one to keep in mind. I talked about this with Justin Robert Young on his live coverage of the election yesterday. This was supposed to fail. A month ago, this looked like it was going to fail. And these companies spent, as I mentioned millions and millions of dollars advertising it. You couldn't turn on anything in California including like your toaster without getting a Prop 22 ad it felt like. But one of the things they did is they put it on cars and they put it in the apps. I know there's going to be a backlash against that. They don't, they won't even bother to try to find out of putting it in the apps or putting it in cars was effective. They're going to say that was unfair. It was unfair for Uber to have a pop-up saying you should vote yes on Prop 22 every time you ordered some chicken in Uber Eats. So that's the next thing to keep an eye out is there will be a movement to restrict how companies can advocate for propositions they are behind in their own products specifically doing pop-ups in apps or asking drivers to put out signs in their cars which a lot of them were doing as well. Yeah. Massachusetts voters, let's hear from you. You passed question one which will prevent car manufacturers from locking up cloud-based advanced telematics data that is collected by driver assistance tools. This is an extension of the right to repair law that was passed a couple of years ago in Massachusetts. They have a law in the books already that says you can't lock up the data in the car but a lot of these companies are storing their data in the cloud and saying, well, now it's in the cloud. We can't let you into our cloud. That would be a security problem. Well, now you got to let them into the cloud. When the revised law comes into effect in 2022 car owners will be able to authorize third-party repair shops to access remote diagnostic systems through an open data platform that will be administered by a third party. So they're trying to make it secure by putting that third party in there. I fix it founder Kaveen's called it the most advanced right to repair law in the world opening wireless automotive diagnostics and unleashing a world of possible apps. I tend to agree with that. Score one for the car owners. Yeah, right? Like all of us who bought a car we should be thrilled about this but also I don't like this logic that it somehow puts a burden on the car manufacturers to give people access to this cloud data. When we have an entire cloud business world that is interested in giving us ways of accessing our data on the cloud. So I don't think you can have it both ways guys either you can get people can either access this data and pretend it's just a virtual hard drive or not. And the answer is yes, you can and it's not a huge burden. This is totally a good thing for car owners and for repair shops for that matter. And for hackers and by hackers I don't mean malicious attackers. I mean hackers somebody just wants to mess around with their car and they're like I need this data to see how my car acts. And I think I fix it is right. This is going to allow app makers to say well let me do some cool apps that will be able to access your car data securely and tell you things about your car or help you improve your driving help give you preventative maintenance. Who knows like the point is now that anyone can do this we'll get apps we wouldn't have been able to imagine otherwise cause people will try different stuff. Yeah, I think it's cool. My dad would love this he's no longer with us but he was all about the future of computers in our cars. He had no idea it would be like this but he would love this concept that this stuff would be accessible by like you said fiddlers hackers people want to mess with the thing they bought. That's good. Fiddlers on the trunk. There you go. California voters approved Proposition 24 which will replace California's Consumer Privacy Act. If you remember CCPA was passed in 2018 it's kind of like GDPR for California. But don't worry folks if you're like wait they're getting rid of that I don't want that to go away. The new proposition keeps all the protections of that original act but it now because it's a proposition passed by the voters will require a super majority of the legislature or a new proposition to overturn it if you want to change it. The people who passed this proposition were worried that companies were gonna keep lobbying to weaken the California Consumer Privacy Act. So this makes it harder to change. It adds the ability for California citizens to require companies to limit the use of sensitive personal information. It creates a brand new government agency to handle privacy law enforcement. And it says that companies that violate the data privacy rights of minors could be penalized up to $7,500. So it's trying to put in more protections for children. In fact, that new agency is charged with protecting the data of children. California businesses will now have until January of 2023 to comply with the new provisions. So it's giving them plenty of time to get used to what is not that big of a change? Cause the main point of this was really to make it harder to change that law. Makes sense. California got all the good ones this year by the way. You got well done. Yeah, well, you seem good. Well, you say that Scott, but you know, things happen in Maine as well. Yeah. I mean, just one last thing on this. I don't know if it's such a great thing to make this unchangeable because technology moves fast and suddenly we'll have a new situation that this law doesn't cover. It'll be really hard to change it. So I'm not sure I love that. I also don't love adding new agencies, but all right. Voters in Portland, Maine. Portland, Maine, not Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine made an ordinance against the use of facial recognition by city employees fixed for five years. The measure lets citizens sue to receive $100 per violation or a total of $1,000. It requires the city to suppress any illegally obtained evidence and be grounds for a city official's termination. So the Portland, Maine is now joining Portland, Oregon and many other cities, San Francisco, Oakland and others that are saying the city can't use facial recognition until we figured out how to best use facial recognition without trampling on people's rights. You were quick to clarify on the EMS today during our segment that this is not about your ring doorbell doing facial recognition or Facebook on your phone recognizing that your sister's in this photograph. We're not talking about that at all. It's just the government slash state city, that sort of stuff. Well, the city, I guess. Yeah, yeah. It's usually that's the case. This is for city employees. And Michigan voters approved proposal two that amends the state's constitution to require law enforcement officers to get a warrant before searching a suspect's electronic data. The amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, but that effectively means you got to get a warrant. It's unreasonable if you don't get a warrant. And it defines it as electronic data and electronic communications, which is much broader than what the courts were doing piece by piece. So this just says, you know, instead of waiting for the courts to try to litigate on everything, let's just say you got to get a warrant for electronic data and electronic communications in Michigan. And Michigan is now the 13th U.S. state to include privacy protections in its constitution. Seems like a great thing to do. If anybody needs, you know, a bit of calm, right? Maybe you do. If so, behold, we have a live stream of democracy and action, everybody. This is actually a live stream from Philadelphia, who the Philadelphia city commission, who is providing a live stream of votes being tallied in the area. And TechCrunch says that TechCrunch is where we got the live stream from. It's calm, it's patient, and results oriented. The above video is what you write on your yearly self-assessment. It's the inverse of social media. This is great. If you, like many around the world, are glued to your TV, wondering when the United States is finally gonna have a decision in this presidential election, this is a nice antidote. This is a nice way to take a break and still feel like you're watching the process, because you literally are, but it's just- Totally, and I've been watching this all day because I was like, oh, let's check it out. There's not a lot going on from the actual camera angle that we've got, but there are people there, there's stuff happening, and it is somewhat calming in a weird way. It seems like they're all off on a break. Right now it's like five o'clock, so I think a lot of them may have gone home. Guy couldn't get in with the garbage. But it's got kind of a sea span. Yeah, a sea span, just sit back and let it happen kind of vibe, and I don't know how I'm gonna like it. Yeah, exactly. It is somehow calming. An antidote for our times. Look at that, internet. Sometimes we watch penguins, sometimes we watch people in Pennsylvania counting votes, it's amazing. Just depends on the day. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Gary writes, and this is actually in response to conversation we were having yesterday about time zones and standard time and daily savings time and 24 hour clocks. And Gary says- This was on good day internet, not on DTMS. Yeah, good day internet. Gary says, I have as many clocks as I can, set to 24 hour time because that's what Disneyland uses for scheduling. My phone, my Fitbit, my Apple TV, my Echo Show, all use the 24 hour clock. I also like the idea of ditching daily savings time forever and using UTC worldwide. I know, we know Gary. Yeah, yeah. Gary says, I have friends all over the world and it would be wonderful to be able to set a Pazume or Discord session using UTC so everybody just shows up at the same time no matter where they are. Plus, OS developers, database admins, sys admins would no longer need to worry about keeping the ever more complicated time zone tables up to date. I'm speaking from experience. Wow. I mean, yeah, I've been arguing for a long time. Give me a standard time zone that we're all in. I'm sick of this. I'm tired of time zones, I've had it. You're a one worlder when it comes to time zones. I'll get asked to whatever system you have. I totally will do it. I'll do the work it needs to change my brain to adhere to it, I'm fine. Yeah, and as we were, it was the Po Show yesterday, our GDI Po Show, it was like, well, if 4 a.m. means that it's sunny where you are, what does it matter? You'll stop thinking of it as being 4 a.m. Yeah, I'll think of it that time of day. Well, thank you, Gary, for lending your support to this campaign. I know someone who may not love it is Alison Sheridan because one of her projects on Taming the Terminal has been to create a, or Programming by Stealth has been to create a time zone app, which would be useless in this future world. So, you know, I'm not sure all those people making money off time zone apps would like it, but who knows? Yeah, I think Alison's got a few years left. All right, let us know, Alison. If you have feedback for us, if you have questions, comments, anything that we've talked about on the show, we would love to hear it. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. We'd also like to shout out our patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Paul Boyer, Phillip Shane, and Irwin Sturm. Also, extra, extra special thanks to Scott Johnson. What have you been doing last week? Well, you know, outside of all this stuff going on, I have been planning a launch of a new Kickstarter coming out roughly on the 9th. That's what we're aiming for. I'm launching a card game called Rock Runners. I've been working on it for about a year and a half. It's finally time to put it out into the world. If you would like details on what it is and why you might want it, go check it out, frogpants.com slash rockrunners. Indeed, and by the way, when we say Alison has a few years left, we mean to use her time zone app. I think she has many, many years left. Oh gosh, yeah, no, I meant the time zone app. We're not gonna go in UTC tomorrow. Hey, Patrons, did you know your ad-free RSSV can have just DTNS or just Good Day Internet or both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS, GDI or all. And if you wanna change that, just change the tier at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Hey y'all, we're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. I hope you have enjoyed this program.