 Coming up on DTNS, Sega's new Genesis is many-year-than-ever. Can AI consciously uncouple from humans? And Gen Z resumes are out of control. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 15th, 2019. From Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Tom Merritt is out this week and next. We've got Justin, it's Thursday, so it's a regular all Thursday. We've got a great show ahead. And before the show, we talked about all sorts of things on Good Day Internet, including how far away from a skunk you can be and still smell it, plus hippie drum circles and much, much more. As a patron, you get all of this wider conversation, patreon.com slash DTNS. But for now, let's start with a few tech things you should know. L.A. Bobba's quarterly earnings beat expectations as e-commerce and cloud computing business growth helped bring in 114.92 billion won. That's about 16.3 billion US dollars in the first quarter, ending June 30th. That's a 42% increase from the same period last year, which raised US listed shares 3% to $166.72. Analysts expected revenue to be around $111.73 billion won. TechRadar reports that at a press event in Shenzhen, Huawei announced that the Mate X foldable phone would not be released in September. The reports say that the device was unlikely to ship before November, but that Huawei was certain it would come out by the end of 2019. The Mate X was originally scheduled to ship in June and had previously been pushed back to the now delayed September release. Foldable phones, they are getting delayed all over the place. The US House Homeland Security Committee issued a subpoena to Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan as part of a probe into extremist content online. Watkins has until September 5th to appear before the committee, a resident of the Philippines. Watkins posted in an online video this week that he's currently in Reno, Nevada and plans to testify. That's specific. UBS has publicly announced that it is taking a minority stake in TwoSimple, an autonomous trucking startup headquartered in San Diego. TwoSimple's experience includes a previous partnership with the US Postal Service carrying mail between its Phoenix and Dallas distribution centers. TwoSimple uses Navistar trucks using the startup's own autonomous driving tech, including nine cameras and a pair of LiDAR sensors. The company says it's been helping UPS, quote, better understand the requirements for level four autonomous trucking in its network and quote, where level four refers to full autonomy that's locked to a designated geographic location. UPS, 21st century, look at you. Speaking of delivery, Amazon is launching fulfillment by Amazon or FBA donations, which is a program for third-party sellers in the US and the UK to donate their unsold or unwanted products in Amazon warehouses, of which sometimes there are many. Amazon often has to dispose of or destroy unsold or unwanted inventory. So starting September 1st, the donation program will become the default option for all sellers. They have an option to opt out of the program if they want to though. FBA will access a network of US nonprofits through a group called Good360 and in the UK charities like New Life and Bernardo's. Amazon currently charges 50 cents to return unsold inventory, I assume that's per unit to sellers, but only 50 cents for disposal. So you can see where often it would be more attractive to just say, I just get rid of it, but where is it going? Not only would it be attractive, Sarah, it indeed was attractive to me personally. And I've talked about this in the talk that I've given at various conferences about how to lose $40,000 on Kickstarter, which is the story of our contender Kickstarter, the card game, which you can get right now, their contender, the game of presidential debate on Amazon if you'd like. But part of it is that we way overordered. And so we wound up putting a lot of units into Amazon fulfillment by Amazon, which is a great deal in that you can just ship them a bunch of stuff they will load it in for free. The problem is price on the package starts going up the longer that you leave it in there. And at a certain point, we found ourselves looking at a very steep bill to keep our items there that we're not selling at the rate that they were supposed to. So we had to look at our options. It would have been great. Cause one of the things, whenever we talk to our friends about, hey, we have a bunch of inventory, what people said was, oh, donate it. Why don't you donate it to schools, donate it to nonprofits, donate it to places where kids could experience the game for free. And boy, we would have loved to have done that. But there wasn't any obstacles contacting charities. It was a whole nother job, to be totally honest with you. And there is probably some work to be done by nonprofits in terms of accepting these items. Here's the only thing that I would question about Amazon in this specific situation. If we were to dispose of our excess inventory, which we thought about doing, Amazon still retains the right to sell your items at auction before they dispose of it. So basically they take control of it. It's disposed of it off of your hands, but you have no say over where it may land. They will take your product from you for a price. And then on the way to the trash can, they will text anybody who wants, hey, anybody want to put a bid on this garbage? And if people do, which often happens, there's a whole business of buying unsold items and selling it for cheaper than it's being sold on Amazon. But that's where a lot of that comes in. If you see something that's five cents cheaper, a dollar cheaper, $5 cheaper, but it's the exact same item, that's where that happens. And I wonder if that's the case with their donations as well. And more and more as sustainability and the issue of landfills and recycling needing to be better comes more into focus. A company like Amazon, obviously, they need a program like this because if they didn't have one, eventually people would just, you know, they'd complain about it as if they weren't already. But I've noticed this on certain clothing websites, for example, who offer either free or for a very low price a way to donate unused clothes, stuff that maybe isn't even really good enough for goodwill. But you don't want to just throw in the trash because that's wasteful and it could still have new life somewhere else. So more, particularly the larger companies, but more companies like this, I think that they should have their feet held to the fire to be able to say, yes, this is what we offer. These are the organizations that we work with and have that very clear to customers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Gen Z set commonly understood as folks born after the year 1997 is making their resumes more visually appealing and exciting by using colorful backgrounds, Instagram photo layouts, and even Bitmoji. What? One employer in the report received a digital resume with a sweating Bitmoji on it to show that the applicant was willing to work hard and hustle, but the journal noted that those in positions to hire were generally of an older Gen X set, maybe turned off by what they considered to be unprofessional first impressions. Oh, clutch your spoon albums, Gen X. This is so unprofessional. Some companies are proactively trying to combat the flashy new resumes by running submissions through tools called applicant tracking systems that remove photos and other design embellishments to reduce hiring bias. Oh boy, yeah. I mean, we're getting to the point now where, I mean, some people still think emojis are stupid. You know, I lost that fight a long time ago. I decided to just join the train and have a little bit of fun, but I don't know, the hiring bias is, that's an interesting part of this. If you see someone's name, if you know someone's gender, if you see a photo of somebody, that can all introduce bias into a hiring process, even unintentionally, even if the applicant wants you to have that information. So I get that there is, I get that there's a strategy here at the same time, flashy resumes have been around for a long time. I don't know, I can't tell you how many resumes I've seen where it's somebody's, I don't know, like class senior portrait where it's a funny color and you kind of snicker at it, but at the same time it does stand out. Unsaid in this is that Gen C is going to be the most digitally aware and competent generation. They are going to understand programs and apps that effectively replicate what used to just be one option, which Photoshop or a typewriter or a Microsoft Word template. So you're going to get more complicated resumes just because the people that are making them are far more familiar with the tools than any generation that came before them. And in fact, are probably finding, inventing and adapting more tools to do exactly that. Sure. And it goes without saying hopefully that for the most part, it's all digital resumes. When you say Instagram photo layout, on a piece of paper that you mail to somebody, no, we've gone into an age where yes, the resume is fully interactive. The bitmoji, you gotta read the room, right? There are certain jobs that that might go over well. There are other jobs where it would not. So in that sense, hiring is like it always was, but the hiring bias conversation is important. The hiring bias thing is a whole nother thing. And by the way, if that's the case, then you should probably be paying more attention to resumes as opposed to recommendations. But yeah, look, I mean, every interview, every resume is a two-way interview. If you're not willing to hire the person with the bitmoji, then maybe the person with the bitmoji was not a fit from a hiring perspective. And the Gen Zers are eventually going to become somebody else's bosses. So there you go. I'll be annoyed with all the holograms they're getting. Right, yeah. Why do we have to have all these 3D resumes? Sega's Genesis Mini is launching on September 19th. Some people are very excited, not only because it's $79.99, it's also 55% smaller than the original Sega Genesis. It connects to your TV with an included HDMI cable. It has two three-button USB controllers that mimic the original Genesis game pads and features 42 built-in games. Sonic the Hedgehog, Echo the Dolphin are included. That's not a big surprise, but some third-party titles like Castle of Illusion, Castlevania, and multiplayer games like Streets of Rage 2 all are part of the library that comes bundled in. The price is about the same as the SNES Classic and cheaper than the $99.99 PlayStation Classic. So, Roger and Justin, will you buy it? I probably, I mean, really, I probably would have bought the SNES Classic if it hadn't started selling out almost immediately. And I would say that this will probably be yet another hot Christmas present. But look, I was always a Genesis guy before SNES, and I will be very excited to get another run on Echo the Dolphin. I will say no because I have bought compilation CDs that have a bunch of Sega titles. I have Steam and they sell all these games on Steam. So, yeah, there's a nostalgia factor, but the thing is you can get these games in a multitude of locations now. It's not just, it's exclusive to this one device. And so- No, but these are, these are throw it in your bag when you're going off on the road, man. You know what? You can get some of these off the Google Play Store. Altered Beast. Altered Beast. Yeah, my man, Earthworm Jim. I tangentially knew the guy who actually created Earthworm Jim, the cartoon character. Weird flex, but okay. But, well, you brought it in. You brought it in. It's not that weird. It's just a small hop to the side. Gold bag. Well, this is the thing. At some point, these are all very much of a nostalgia play, but the truth of matters, you can get a majority of the games if not all of them somewhere else. And if you already have them on your phone, you already have them on a device that's attached to your TV set, top box. You have them on your PC, whatever. Are you gonna spend more money yet again to play the same games you already have? This isn't about the IP. It's not about the games. It's about the portability and it's about the HDMI port. That's what it's always been about. That's what all these little mini consoles are. It's not, yes, you can have them on your phone. And sometimes that experience is not the same as having that controller in your hand. Look, retro gaming is a big thing. Oh no, I believe me. I know it's huge. I'm part of it. But at the same time, it's like what you're buying is an emulated box that you can emulate just as well on something else. Well, so then it comes down to is the price point something that you, you know, is it low enough for you to say, yeah, one more device is actually gonna work well for you? $80 is a little high for an impulse buy, which is, if it was down to 50 or 40 or 35 bucks, yeah, it'd be an easy sell. But at $80, kind of price it. St. Louis University is continuing to offer Echo Dots in student dorm rooms for a second year in a row powered by Amazon's A word for the business platform. A private SLU skill Echo Dot can answer more than 135 questions about campus events, building hours and food operations nearby. No personally identifiable information is recorded or shared with the SLU IT team. And the IT team can collect some statistics across a group of devices like how many devices are listening to music but not from specific dorm rooms or what times of day. Streaming music is limited to the university's iHeartRadio subscription unless you connect your phone to the Echo Dot as a Bluetooth speaker. The team says that they can also see what school related questions can't be answered. Well, they can't see what school related questions can't be answered. Oh, they cannot see. Meaning, yeah, if you ask a question as a student that's not part of what the skill set is designed to answer, they can't collect that information from you. Although it would make the skills murder but yeah, it's privacy stuff. It is interesting. Apparently, and those in the know call it SLU, that's something I learned today. Yeah, the Kids at St. Louis University, the IT department sounds like it's pretty robust there. And after, first of all, before the project began, which is last school year, so just over a year ago, they did a poll of at least a segment of new students coming in and the students all were used to smart speakers in their houses. Oh, these are kids that they're like, yeah, we use this. This is something that we're, you don't have to train us how to use a smart speaker or ask certain questions. And the school being able to use a business platform that is, you know, the echo, they're echo dots, I think they're second gen. So they're not exactly the newest and greatest, which would be third. But they work normally, but they're also specialized, you know, to take care of what you would have previously maybe had to go to the help desk with the student union to figure out, you know, or access the school's intranet or anything that's kind of school specific. It's a little thing, but I can see this coming in real handy considering that they've obviously put some effort into it to have over a hundred customized school related questions about like, when does the library close or, you know, what's food nearby and things like that. I never lived in a dorm room. So this seems like something I would have liked, but I would love to hear from a younger person as to, you know, why this would be invaluable. Never lived in a dorm room? No, Roger and I went to a city school. So there were dorms at San Francisco State University, but most kids didn't live on campus. Did not live in, all right. This is gonna be a good, after good day internet topic. Well, continuing in the smart speaker realm, Google assistant now allows users to assign reminders to others within a family group. Reminders appear on phones and smart displays and can be set to appear at a specific time or based on location. Now a user can block another user in the family group from setting reminders for them and children under 13 need a privacy compliant account created using Google's family link platform in order to participate. The feature begins really not next month in English speaking regions, including in the US, UK and Australia. Google also announced in an email to owners of Nestcams, Nest Hello and Dropcams that it will deprecate the ability to disable the status light on those devices, meaning you can't turn that status light off. Status light is gonna stay on. Google announced a new consumer privacy commitment at IO back in May, along with the integration of Nest into Google and promised a clear visual indicator when Nest products were capturing content. So now you can, it is harder to use them as like spy cams, right? Like these are meant to be recording and surveilling things that you own, not necessarily keeping them for subterf... Clandestine surveillance, yes, on an unwitting subject. Yeah, I do not, I have exactly one Nest product. It's a thermostat. There's no camera involved. So this is not something that I've got. But Roger, you have a Nest camera. I do have a Nest camera. I bought it four or five years ago. It's fallen down a few times, but currently it keeps a watchful eye over my garage. Is this something, you get an email notification from the company, is it something that changes the way that you use it at all? Not really, but it's nice. It's nice to know that they're at least thinking about it. Oftentimes with some of these products, they can kind of go into a purgatory of sorts where there's no development on it and you don't know what's going on, but it still works, so you keep using it, but you're not really sure how long it's gonna keep working. Right. I mean, the privacy aspect of the light is great. I mean, if you really don't want it, just get some masking tape and you can cover it. But I'm glad it's still operating. I can still go to a Nest site and see an image, like something I paid for five years ago still works. Roger, could you see yourself using the Google Assistant Family Group, setting reminders and stuff for various members? Maybe, I don't know, because currently my smart speaker usage is basically yelling at my shield to change what I'm watching right now or my daughter yelling at the shield to change what she wants to watch. Well, let's say somebody in your family group was close enough to the Albertson grocery store and you're like, don't forget to get the butter. It's definitely handy. It's probably more handy, at least in my case, if it was on my phone and it automatically alerted me when I'm at the store, like, it's like, oh, you're near this store. You should pick up the butter and the ice cream. Which it would, just for other folks. And so for stuff like that, that would be perfect. But as for my whole family, I don't know. Yeah, I guess it depends on how many folks are in your household that are active in tasks that are assignable. When my kids are older, maybe. It reminds me of one of those, and it certainly is a better thing to have these than not. But solutions that are technically more simple and yet culturally are more complicated. And we see these all the time in terms of phone features of like, oh, it's the easiest way to share something. Just tap your phone next to somebody else. And it's like, wow, that does in a demo kind of seem like that's the easiest way to do something. But culturally, I don't know, I'm already on my phone. Why don't I just hit a button and it shares and we don't have to touch phones. Well, folks to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. So yesterday with Scott Johnson, we talked about the Facebook Messenger story of transcribed audio messages being heard by humans and then transcribed by humans because they started out as audio messages. In some cases, the human moderators and content listeners were like, there's some sensitive information that I just heard. So Facebook is not alone. Now the conversation is a bit wider and has gotten a little bit more attention in the last 24 hours. So there's a really good slate article that kind of breaks down some opinions about this wider issue. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they've all been criticized for allowing humans to listen to users' private conversations, even if it's just to make sure that the AI products that each company is working with is up to snuff. The quality is good and if it isn't, it gets better because humans are still better at understanding the sentence or request or what another human is trying to say than AI. Now Amazon is now allowing users to opt out of sending their voice recordings to humans for review. Google and Apple said earlier this year that they'd end human review of recordings. Microsoft had its own Skype thing. So a lot of the companies are rolling back this. Okay, this makes people uncomfortable. In some cases, the content moderators are themselves uncomfortable and feel that they're hearing stuff out of context that they shouldn't be hearing with personally identifiable information being shared. Companies all claim though, recordings are anonymized. Well, that's a step in the right direction. But again, if I'm getting recorded, even if it's inadvertent when I'm trying to talk to some sort of AI system in my house and let's say I'm on the phone with the IRS and I have to give them a bunch of my information, it could potentially be very easy for me to spell out exactly who I was unwittingly. AI doesn't understand everything though. So a lot of these companies say, well, yeah. I mean, we don't really want the humans to be the answer here, but that's the easiest thing we have right now. This is the cheapest way that we can solve this issue right now. In fact, Meredith Whitaker, who's the co-founder and co-director of the nonprofit, AI Now Institute says humans are just the cheapest and most possible way to do this because AI systems are trained by being told that they gotta answer either right or wrong. And the understanding of what someone said correctly and there just isn't an automated system that can replace a human at this point. Justin. Yes. There are some ideas being floated around such as, well, what if an AI system when it ingested my audio could garble up my real voice enough that, you know, like you see on detective shows, you know, when someone's in the shadows. So you wouldn't really be able to know if I was, you know, what my gender might be or what my voice sounded like. All right, so this is a personal thing for various different people because privacy is not a one size fits all concept. We want to have privacy for many, many different things and we should be allowed as consumers to have more of a say on this. So I'm going to propose here for you guys, this is my smart speaker, Bill of Rights, right? I'm going to lay this out. Here's what you should have. Number one, I'm very uncomfortable by the fact that these are contractors. Either you are going to put the care and time by hiring employees that you are understanding, they are going to take on the kind of job to hear possible sense of information and they are vetted or at least have some element that they are not immediately going to, if they do hear a social security number, they're not going to flip it to somebody else, right? Or you have some kind of redundancy to know that if something does get sold that there is a recourse. Number two, everything that is recorded, and this happens for many of the smart speaker, wild clips that are sent for accuracy purposes, we should be able to know what they are and we should be reminded that that tray fills up every once in a while and it is there for our review. But on the other hand, obviously, this is an arms race. All these companies are going as fast as possible to set up Market Share because they want you in their walled garden as fast as possible. And this has happened with Apple, with Amazon, with Google, with Facebook. Everybody wants to be in this game and they are trying to make their version as good as possible. Humans are the way to do it. So here's my proposal. I will allow humans to do it, therefore creating the better version of it. And when there are updates to make the product better, I get them faster. Maybe if you don't want to participate in making the product better, then you just understand that the product's going to be at exactly the level you bought it at and that's the deal. That is what our trade-off is, is I will pitch in to make this better if I get a better version that updates quicker. Oh, so it's like you end up with the opt-in people getting the firmware update and the others are in the second wave? And that's fine, right? Like if you care about privacy, you do have to understand that there's a trade-off. Like these are, at least to what we know right now, this information is, there is an attempt to be siloed, although I think that there's probably a better way to do it again. And they are doing it to make the product better. They're not selling the information for right now, at least we don't know that they are feeding it back into cookies or algorithms to feed you ads. This is to make the voice assistant more accurate. Right. I like this idea. I'm not totally sure how it would be implemented. I'm sure a certain company, the thing is that yeah, this situation of company saying, okay, well, we won't do this anymore. It does slow down the technology for those of us who are like, well, it's a good enough trade-off. I actually just wanted to get better and this is the best way to do it. And again, experts say this is the easiest way for a company to do it, not the only way, but it's the easiest way. Eventually there'll be an AI, eventually there'll be an AI that knows how to do it well enough. Yeah, exactly. But you still, it's like a chicken and egg thing. AI, human, AI needs humans, humans need AI. Do you think, Sarah, that there is a worth for being the organic voice assistant that does not do the promises that never a human will do anymore? Ask your raise. Ask your raise, cage-free voice assistants. I do. I feel like, you get this with the browser folks, right? People, there are certain products that are marketed specifically for, there's privacy-focused or this is fastest or this is, it has bells and whistles that you can't get anywhere else. And that's software and that's a lot easier to update. So it's a different animal. But yes, I do think that in the way that people care about different things, that there is something that is privacy-first, that is anything smart, anything AI that would be in your home is gonna be attractive to some folks anyway. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddits. You're privacy-focused folks. I would say that as a rule, as a blanket rule, that's what I would say about y'all. You're wonderful. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Join the conversation on Facebook as well, facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show. So Daniel wrote into our mail bag about our conversation yesterday about biometric data being unencrypted. It was a company called Suprema in the UK and quite a bit of information was publicly accessible. Daniel said, based on the 1 million people in the UK having their information stored unsecurely on a publicly accessible database, I work as a kind of operations engineer using programming language to build infrastructure for products. I could say a lot about how easy it is to build system infrastructure, both in the cloud and locally. Suffice it to say that with less than two hours of reading and copying and pasting, anybody watching or listening to DTNS could build the backbone of an app or a website either at home or in the cloud. And said backbone would include a password protected database with network access restrictions. There's really no excuse for what BioStar 2 did with their database. That was Suprema's product. No excuse at all, says Daniel. And there you have it. Yeah, Scott, if you missed our show yesterday, Scott Johnson invoked the voice of Tom Merritt to say the fact that researchers caught this, it wasn't something that was leaked out to the public and that's where the story came from is a good thing. Researchers are doing their job and companies have more tools to secure themselves as a result. But yeah, Daniel, you're right as well. It's a bit baffling why something like this was not closed in the first place. So thanks everybody who participates in our mailbag. Send your mailbags in. Justin, you haven't emailed us in a while. I look forward to your next email, but until then, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Absolutely, you can go ahead and find me at the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. We're in, I talk about politics. We had a great interview this week about the history of immigration law in America, specifically the Dillingham Commission, which set up the first framework for quotas of how many people from each country were gonna come in to America, but in what is obviously a very hot button topic, not only in our recent past, but also in our not too distant future. I think it's always good to get context. You can find that at the Politics, Politics podcast. Get it at Politics, Politics, Politics.com or wherever you grab Politics podcast. Also wanna remind folks that there is a DTNS meetup in Dublin, Ireland this Saturday, August 17th at 6 p.m. at Laguna, which is right in front of the Mayor Square, which is the NCI stop on the Luas red line. So if you're in Dublin, or will be on Saturday, go say hi to Tom, give him a Guinness, whatever you guys do in Dublin. I am a pint. Yeah, it'll be a lot of fun and looking forward to some of you being able to introduce yourselves or say hello again if you've met any of us before. Also thank you to our patrons. You can become a DTNS member and get an ad free RSS feed. You get special episodes. You get behind the scenes information. You get newsletters. Sometimes we look back on the tech history of the past. It's a good time. Patrons have the most fun and you can become a patron today at patreon.com slash DTNS. I mentioned the mail bag. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Aunt Pruitt and Lynn Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.