 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook's going to pay some publishers, HP has a very pretty laptop and why we are at risk from too few robots taking our jobs. This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, September 30th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just reminiscing on Good Day Internet about the dangerous world of the 1970s we grew up in. If you want to get that and other wider conversations, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reuters sources say that ByteDance, makers of TikTok's app, posted revenue of 50 to 60 billion won. That's about 7 billion to 8.4 billion US dollars in the first half of 2019. And the company looks to be profitable in the second half. Most revenue reportedly comes from the China-focused products like the news aggregator Jinri Tuntau and the domestic version of TikTok, which is called Doyin. The company also recently launched a search engine, a work efficiency app called LARC, and plans to launch a music streaming app as well. Amazon announced that YouTube TV is now on the Fire TV platform. Hooray! The streaming service can be accessed on Fire TV sticks and set-top boxes as well as Fire TV edition smart TVs, though Amazon notes first generation Fire TV stick and Fire TVs can't support the app. That's just because they're old. Apple released iOS and iPadOS updates to the iOS and iPadOS 13.1.1 software that was released on Friday. Yes, just a few days later, the iOS and iPadOS 13.1.2 updates are now available on all eligible devices over the air in the Settings app and include bug fixes for several issues, including problems with the camera, iCloud backup, and the flashlights. Alright, let's talk about Facebook. Sources tell in the Wall Street Journal Facebook at this point is going to pay between 40 and 50 publishers, depending on who you talk to, for content shown in the upcoming Facebook News tab. That's the tab that's going to have curated news from curated publishers expected to launch by the end of the year and going to feature headlines and links from about 200 publications. So either they still have a lot of work to do to figure out who to pay or they're not going to pay a lot of these people. Facebook is still in content negotiations with publishers over how much content and how much access would be granted in the News section, so maybe that number will go up. Fees are reportedly in the $2-3 million a year range, at least for national publications on a three-year contract. Really interesting look at why this is good for regional publishers, the ones getting less than $2-3 million probably, like Dallas Morning News, that sort of place. Maybe not as attractive if you're the New York Times because it's a smaller percentage of your incremental revenue and you're having to give up some control of your stuff. Yeah, based on the fact that the New York Times and other very large publications have seen ad revenue shrink so much over the last few years, last decade, really. I wonder how much this would be a viable revenue stream going forward. Yeah, because the New York Times has, there have been a lot of stories saying that their subscription revenue is doing very well. Their ability to get people to pay for their content seems to be working for them. But yeah, a lot of these regional newspapers do not have that story going on, even though they're trying to get people to pay for their digital versions. My argument has always been that it's because everybody's competing on a national level these days, and so the ones that were already at the national level like Wall Street Journal and New York Times are going to have an easier row of that. However, Facebook paying publishers when they don't necessarily have to. There's no US law that says they have to do it. Is them trying to play nice and say, we know that you're worried about us having control of your content, so let's work something out. I'm very interested to see if it rises to be the majority of the 200 publications, or if there are publications that are just like, yeah, we're apparently in there, but we're not getting any money out of it. Yeah, 40 to 50 publishers is nobody. You know, if you're talking about everything that would surface on Facebook, otherwise just being shared by people who use Facebook. And I don't want to speculate too much, but yes, how much of this would be, hey, publisher, we're going to go ahead and pay you. This is great for you, right? But let's make sure that your next headline is a little bit more Facebook friendly than it would be otherwise. So there might be a little tit for tat going on here. I want to help you on that. Yeah, exactly. HP's Specter X 360 13 2 and 1 still has glossy edges and one USB-C port, but is also slightly smaller and uses Windows precision drivers for the trackpad instead of synaptics. Has a 90% screen to body ratio and the world's smallest Windows Hello enabled IR webcam. You can choose an OLED 4K screen. Also has a new display control that lets you switch between color gamuts. It features Intel's 10th Gen Ice Lake quad core processor and Iris plus graphics and claims to last 22 hours on a single charge. It also arrives in October starting at $1,099. You forgot the most important feature. What? Pretty. So pretty. It is pretty. In fact, before the show, I was, you know, Tom was like, I'm excited to use Sarah. And I'm like, well, I don't really need a new laptop. But yeah, if I want to compare this to like a MacBook, it, I mean, it's just as nice looking. In fact, it is becoming less and less distinguishable really. Well, the spectre has always been, let's put it charitably, been compared to the MacBook in its look. That's certainly not new. But over the years, I think it's become beloved amongst those who want a Windows laptop because it is quite a bit cheaper, at least on the starting price than than a MacBook and or a MacBook Pro. And, you know, it's a two in one has a touch screen has all that kind of stuff and it's gorgeous. And I don't think it's gotten less gorgeous. In fact, the big actual legitimate feature that everyone's talking about is the fact that it's lighter and smaller, but it doesn't feel that way because the screen size is the same. They just cut out the bezels. They made them thinner. They made them. They made the whole laptop way less. And it just feels more compact now. I get it. Stacked Vanessa in chat says, I want one. And you are not alone. No, you are not. Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Google on September 13th inquiring about the company's plans to adopt DNS over HTTPS or DOH in Chrome. DNS over D. Sorry, DNS over HTTPS passes DNS data over an encrypted connection, which means it prevents man on the middle attacks. It's great for people who aren't going to use a VPN. It's going to help prevent their connections in more cases. However, the House letter says the committee is worried that this would give Google an, quote, unfair advantage by denying access to user data by cable and wireless companies. The poor ISPs won't be able to see your traffic, says the letter. According to a Google spokesperson, Google has no plans to centralize or change people's DNS providers to Google by default. Any claim that we are trying to become the centralized encrypted DNS provider is inaccurate. Google is expected to begin testing DOH rollout in Chrome next month. And for comparison, we got none of this concern when Mozilla started testing DOH on Firefox in March of 2018. So this is entirely about Google. Now, DNS over HTTPS does not stop your ISP from being your DNS provider. It also, you know, that's entirely up to you. It's probably not going to keep the DNS, the ISP from seeing what your traffic is, if that's how they make money off you. But man, it strikes me that this is such a different story than it was five years ago when we would have simply said, oh, good on Google, providing more tools to keep you private. Where now, there's those of us who know that Google is made up in part of a lot of engineers who are very consumer friendly and just trying to make things good, even if that's not the entire company. And the government, which just sees Google as the new Exxon, as the new whipping company that you can pick on if they do anything that smells like it might be anti competitive. Well, you mentioned the Mozilla started testing the same features on Firefox earlier, just about a year and a half ago now. And OK, so that went under the radar, no problem. So if something like this were to be found that, yeah, OK, this is unfair advantage of Google got to roll this back, even though the features in many cases are really good for consumers. What does that do to smaller companies who provide the same services? Yeah, I mean, it's not that problem. This is Chrome saying, hey, we want to give you a way to make sure a man in the middle attack doesn't happen when you're at a coffee shop or even at your home. It's not about any ISP or other company being cut out of the endpoints. This is middle encryption and also the kind of DNS that we should be doing. The DNS system is redundant, I get that. But DNS is horribly insecure. We should be shifting DNS to be totally encrypted so that you can decide who sees where you're visiting. And while I understand the impetus for this house letter, I think it's counterproductive. And this is where it's now certainly politics over what's good for the consumer. Well, on an entirely different note, Wired's Adrian So has a roundup of the best tech and accessories for your dog. The best camera is the pet cube bites to which has an app, 1080p camera, 160 degree viewing angle night vision and zoom and the ability to dispense a treat remotely. $249 plus a monthly fee if you want pet detection and smart alerts. We also have whistle go listed as the best fitness tracker for $100 you can track by GPS set fitness goals for activity based on breed, age and size also has a nightlight. Ms. So also recommends the geobit pet tracker if you just want to know where your pet is. The spot on virtual fence costs $1,500 that can use sock alerts or sound alerts to warn the dog it's near the boundary line. Those are the techies on the list with number 10 best toy being a stick. Yeah, man. I mean, I found this first of all commendable job by Adrian So. It's a great read and good recommendations in here because some of the stuff is, you know, just like really good water bowls and stuff that isn't particularly technology related. It does show that there's just not a lot of great pet tech out there right now. I mean, the ones she mentions are really good ones. But yeah, this weekend I pulled out a tree that was growing a little too close to the house and cut off, you know, I cut off the tree, put it in the brush bin and then went back was like, I should cut that a little closer, tossed the little bit of the stump, which was, I don't know, it's like an arms width, right? It wasn't a very old tree over to get later. The first thing I know my dog sitting there chewing on it like best toy ever. Thanks dad. You know, this is great. Yeah. The stick is the stick is a big hit in my house as well as somebody who was wearing a fitness tracker, my Fitbit Versa two, you know, for a couple of weeks now. There are lots of metrics where I'm like, huh, okay, I'm getting used to the fact that I have these and how much of them do I care about versus not care about when you when you when you get down to pets. That number decreases quite a bit earlier today. I was in the middle of something. I knew that my dog Otis had he had to walk. We hadn't had a good enough walk this morning. So I hired somebody to walk him for an hour. And this is the sort of thing where it's like, not that I really think that someone's kind of lied to me about where they went and what they did. But it would be cool to be like, okay, I have some GPS tracking information about where my pets going and, you know, did they did they go where they said that the walker said that they went and and you know, is there any opportunity for me to kind of like check in, you know, midwalk or that sort of thing. I get that. But yes, some of this stuff is the smart pet tech just to be smart. It depends on the pet but I know a lot of it would go unused in my house. In a more dense area like like I'm in. I don't think I would rely on a whistle go to keep my pet in the yard. Certainly not with my dogs. But I could see if you just kind of lived out in the country. And you're like, well, I just want to make sure they don't get too close to the highway. Right. You could you could probably use something like this. Great. But I don't think there's a lot of really great pet tech out there. If you're like, no, no, no, you guys are missing this one thing that's really great. Send us an email feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Let us know. Linus Tarvalds approved a new Linux kernel lockdown security feature which when enabled will restrict some kernel functionality from even root users. Feature comes with two modes integrity, which disables kernel features that let a user land process modify the running kernel and confidentiality which disables features that extract confidential information from the kernel. The features will ship as a Linux security module as part of Linux kernel 5.4 they will be disabled by default, although any distributor can turn them on. And those of you who are in the know what the sort of thing know that most of the distros red hat Ubuntu, etc. have been putting their own kernel lockdown patches in their own distros already. It's just nice to have it upstream and Linus Torvalds has been kind of fighting against this saying, yeah, you don't need it in the kernel, but security being what it is these days. So he finally flipped and said, all right, fine, we do need to make it available in the kernel still not turning it on by default. That's that's up to you. But but if you want it now you've got a couple of lockdown features there and there's the ability to make some more modules as well built into this. Yeah, I mean besides the fact that it sounds like he's kind of keeping up with some of the other Linux distros. And think that it was necessary before does he really now maybe that's not really the point the point is to to give the consumer the choice. Yeah, I think so the customer being the distribution makers in this case, I guess. The joke is Windows 7 locked down the kernel at a time when Linux was still saying, no man you don't do that. And now Linux is locking down a kernel at a time when Windows 10 is having some kernel issues. So there's a little snickering going on in the world out there if you look around on Twitter, I'm sure you can find it. That's all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes. Be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines dot com. I heard a report on the economist today about UK Parliament's Business Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee publishing a 54 page report a couple weeks ago called Automation and the Future of Work. The idea was to look at what effect automation would have on work, particularly in the United Kingdom. And after months of research based on hearings and written evidence from manufacturers, universities, trade unions, and other organizations. One of the conclusions was and I'll quote I'll read it right out of the report. The problem for the UK labor market and our economy is not that we have too many robots in the workplace, but we have too few. In 2015, the UK had just 10 robots for every million hours worked, compared with 167 robots for every million hours worked in Japan. By 2017 the UK represented just 0.6% of industrial robotics shipments. So the issue isn't robots taking our jobs so much as in the UK, not enough robots to give more productive jobs. Part of the problem is the fear news stories focus on jobs eliminated, which will happen. But it doesn't give you the jobs created part of the story in the same way they'll put 75 million jobs to be eliminated in a headline. When what the 2018 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report noted was 75 million jobs would be displaced by 2022 with 133 million new jobs being created. Now we've talked about that report particularly and reports like it many times on this show and emphasize that the focus should be on figuring out how to deal with displaced jobs filled by people who can't easily move into newly created jobs. Because even though it's good news that 133 million new jobs are created even if 75 million are eliminated, not every one of the people who had the 75 million jobs will easily be able to take one of the new 133 million jobs. And this report agrees with that, but also adds that you need a healthy adoption of robots to have those new jobs. There's a bunch of statistics. I got some of these from Digenomics. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the most robotics intensive manufacturing sectors in the United States, which are automotive, electronics and metals, employ 20% more mechanical and industrial engineers than other manufacturing sectors and pay them higher wages. If you thought robots would just eliminate jobs, that's not what you would expect to see. In 1993 through 2007, study by the London School of Economics revealing that robotics increased productivity in 17 European countries by the same amount as steam technology did during the Industrial Revolution, but in a quarter of the time. So in other words, robotics is helping increase productivity and it's doing it fast. Japan has more than 297,000 industrial robots in use, a 23% share of all the robots in the world and their unemployment rate is 2.4%. So from the UK report again, we have seen from previous inquiries that the practice of businesses such as Amazon and Uber can lead to workers being exploited by increasingly monopolistic firms who are in huge returns that do not flow back to the workers who help create that wealth. More cooperative ownership models, as well as greater employee engagement, stronger employment legislation and fairer corporate tax regimes are key to ensure public support for the benefits of a growth in automation, a rise in living standards and a fair economy and society. In other words, what this report is saying is we need to focus on figuring out how to get displaced workers into new jobs. We need to make sure that we've got new jobs for them, which means putting in robots and not will fearing that the robots are going to eliminate the jobs. And once that's done, we got to make sure that all the robotic automation jobs don't just benefit one or two companies or you're not going to see those jobs be as quality as the jobs they replaced. Yeah, and for smaller companies, I know this is a little bit different, but if you're thinking of a large automotive company, it is worth it for the company to say, OK, we now have 200 people who used to do this job that have been replaced by robots. Let's put them in a training procedure in order to place them in better places for them. You're not going to do that for like two or three people or 10 to 15 people that isn't advantageous for the company, but monetarily. So I can see where more and more if the company is like, OK, well, it's on us to not just fire a bunch of people and hire a bunch of robots, but make sure that the entire company is benefiting from this. When you have a greater amount of people that you can train at once, that that that just works better for the whole process. Yeah, and it may be something where countries that are developing their economies right now, I'm thinking Kenya, Nigeria, places like that might benefit by automating faster. Even though that might be publicly problematic, because it could create the efficiencies and new companies that provide more employment in those companies. And I say that more instinctually than knowing that for sure. But if you look at the International Federation of Robotics, 10 most automated countries in the world, number one is South Korea, number two, Singapore. Then you get Germany, then Japan, Sweden, Denmark, the US, Italy, Belgium and Taiwan. Now, some of those you would make sense because OK, these are developed countries that have been around for hundreds of years and they just kept up, right? That's that's the story in Germany and Denmark and the United States, etc. But South Korea, Singapore, even to some extent Japan and Taiwan. Those are countries that were developing countries 20, 30 years ago, but really worked on developing their economies through automation and adding robotics, and they are now very strong economies. Japan, somewhat like that with Japan, it was more like, well, we know our population is aging rapidly, but if we want to keep up, we need to have automation and that has kept their unemployment low. So I guess this kind of comes back to a discussion that we've had along these lines, you know, over the past year of if the company wants to replace jobs that were previously done by humans with robots, OK, we've got some we've got some workers that are still skilled and could be more skilled in different areas. Who, who, who does this fall upon? Is it, is it, you know, governments? I mean, who trains the people in order to have a quote, better job than they had previously? Well, we talked about the fact that Amazon is doing a training program where they're they're telling their workers, we will pay for you to learn new skills to keep up. New skills to get into programming and stuff like that. When you look at the landscape and you see the lack of qualified applicants in a lot of STEM careers, science, technology, engineering and math. I think it's pretty obvious that it would be in companies best interest to step up and provide this and say, let's figure out how to help transition people. And then, yeah, I think it is the government's place to to with a light touch. It doesn't have to be heavy. Look and say, where can we help? Where where can we be a clearinghouse for information? Where can we encourage programs and make sure that we're getting folks to do the things that they need to do to make this happen? In other words, I don't think the answer is one or the other. I think it takes a lot of efforts to do something that complex. I was going to say that I think you hit the nail on the head. It's the whole thing is everyone has been looking at it in a very singular fashion, specifically toward labor and what you do with labor policies. And what's needed is a more comprehensive, broad based approach that includes things like education, market controls and stuff like that, where you can't just focus solely on robotics and how they impact, but how automation will impact society as a whole. And I think looking at it as a glass half empty, instead of a glass half full, kind of the way you look at things determines what sort of policies you roll out. If you look at robotics as an opportunity, right? If someone said to you, we have all this new land that you can develop. People look at that as an opportunity. They look like, oh, there's more land. What are we going to do with all this land? It's going to put rental prices down and houses are getting cheaper. Everyone's going to lose money. If you look at it in the terms of what does this automation bring? What can you do with it? I think you would probably help at least get in people's minds a shift away from like, well, I'm going to lose out to, hey, I can benefit. Let me find out the number of ways I can do this sort of job. Or I myself can invest in automation and start creating my own products if I get an affordable loan from a government or financial institution. Something like that. Yeah, I think you're right. The key here is, yes, it's a reasonable fear that these companies are trying to sell us on automation is a great thing, but it's going to end up hurting me. That's a reasonable concern. What this report is saying is, yes, but if you let that be your only thought on automation, it's going to make things worse. And we do want to make sure that automation has benefits beyond just a couple of big companies. To your point, Roger, like making automation should help more people be able to start businesses or start projects or create careers that they couldn't have otherwise. And like you say, if you see it as an opportunity for that, I think it really does change how you look at it. In fact, it could be pitched as a way to make sure that big companies don't have all the power if it's like, hey, automation could help you as an individual. The way the internet has helped a lot of people as individuals, including the three of us, have careers that we would have required a large company to have had before. Yeah, required to live certain places and all sorts of restrictions that modern life has given us some freedom on. Well, if you like robots or don't like robots, guess what? You can participate in our subreddit either way. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook. Join our group, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. All right. We have lots of great conversations. Sometimes they come as emails. Sometimes they don't. Yeah, this actually happened at our Discord earlier today. We were talking about the new iOS update that came out. Jay at Nomadon wrote earlier today, dang, he said, 13.1.2 is out supposedly fixing shortcuts on the home pod, so that makes me happy. And SCWLung responded and said, is this where we remind ourselves that they could have skipped 13 and went to 14 instead? To which Jay Nomadon says, no, though, it's unfortunate. It's in the state that it is. It'll be interesting if things slow down to typical cadence in a week or two when the hardware is tied to the software release. They paint themselves into a corner as the hardware is the moneymaker. I know Lung was just joking about, you know, the number 13. But Jay Nomadon's very reasonable response, I think, is important to note if you're not the kind of person who has to try this out right away. Yeah, maybe wait a couple of days after this one to be like, OK, is it safe to go in yet? Because you don't have to upgrade to the new iOS right away. You can wait for the bugs to shake out. There have been a few more bugs to shake out this time. Yeah, the person shall remain nameless. But I was hosting a podcast yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, as one does. And there was a bit of an iOS meltdown that happened. And I was like, this is why you don't update things right before you have to do work. But it happens more and more frequently these days. Tom, Roger, I know we've all been there. I'm curious, did you upgrade to iOS 13? No, I did not. Because I keep hearing complaints about it and I want the complaints to stop and then I will. Well, folks, don't forget we are changing our Patreon rewards tomorrow, October 1st. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback about these new rewards. The current rewards will be delivered tomorrow and then the new rewards will first be delivered November 1st. And if you want to know all about it, you go to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon and find out. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you got feedback for us, that is a great way to give us some feedback. We're also live. If you'd like to join us live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Put it on your calendar and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.