 Coming up on DTNS Tim Berners-Lee's plan to save the Internet, eBay sells off Stubhub, and Rob Dunwood shares why he chose Adele over the new Apple laptop. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 25, 2019 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Very happy to have cohost of the SMR podcast, Rob Dunwood back with us on the show. Welcome back, Rob. How's it going? Thanks for having me, folks. So we are going to talk with Rob about laptop choosing, something that Rob has a long history with. I know a lot of you are probably thinking about or have thought about or are going to think about again. Also, just now on our Good Day Internet show, we were talking about ham and turkey and power washing. Sarah had her first power washing experience. If you want that wider conversation, you got to become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Tesla's Cybertruck on veil last week included designer France Von Holzhousen successfully smashing two of the vehicle's armor glass windows on stage with a metal ball. They were not supposed to smash. Now we know why the glass broke. According to Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who tweeted when Von Holzhousen smacked the metal door with a sledgehammer before the metal ball test, the impact cracked the base of the glass, which weakened it. This is why you always test the demo exactly the way the demo is supposed to go, although I guess maybe it didn't crack it in a test. The risk five foundation, which sets chip standards, told Reuters it plans to move from Delaware to Switzerland. Universities, governments, of course, companies outside of the United States helped to develop risk five's open source technologies. But some of them are concerned about possible disruption from US trade restrictions. While no restrictions are in place against risk five, it's possible that say a Chinese company could contribute to the open source technology and then be unable to take advantage of it due to a future restriction such as those applied to Huawei. So risk five's members have suggested it move to neutral territory, which it's going to do. Finland's Solcomp, which supplies iPhone chargers to Apple is investing 20 billion rupees. That's about 278.67 million US dollars in Chennai, India to make mobile chargers and other smartphone components starting in March of 2020. The facility was formerly owned by Nokia. The sales expected to generate 10,000 new jobs. And on July 18th, Amazon closed parts of its e-commerce operations in China to focus on cross-border sales and cloud services. Now, Amazon announced it will launch a pop-up store on Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. The pop-up will list about 1,000 non-Chinese products. All right, let's talk a little more about the big decision that came down in London today, Sarah. Yeah, kind of big story today. Transport for London announced it decided not to renew Uber's license to operate in the entire city, saying it found a pattern of failures by Uber. Specifically, TFL said that Uber allowed unauthorized drivers to upload their photos to other drivers' accounts, meaning they were often uninsured. TFL says that this happened on 14,000 trips with 43 drivers. Uber will appeal the decision and continue to operate in the meantime. Yeah, I've seen that described as allowing unauthorized drivers to do it, but I've also seen it described as a vulnerability. In other words, something Uber wasn't meaning to happen, but figured out a workaround or a loop in the system to do this. And the idea was you go to a friend's account and say, hey, I can't pass the background check, but I want to make some money. Let me use your account that upload that person's picture so it matched. But it really wasn't that person. And transport for London, I feel like, has been looking for a reason not to renew Uber's license, and they seem to have found it. Although, again, for now, Uber's going to continue to operate in London. It's got 21 days to appeal. It's going to appeal, and then it could probably end up working its way through the Supreme Court for a couple of years. So this is far from done. Rob, what do you make of this from your seat? So you characterize this, I think, perfectly. They were kind of looking for a way to not renew Uber's authorization to work in the city. So you had that working with you. And I don't want to minimize this. It is a big deal because security gets in there. You've got one driver that's been background checked, but you're somebody else that hasn't. It's showing up. I mean, there are definitely issues that could pop up from that. But yeah, I think that Uber is going to, this is the vulnerability. We're going to fix it. They're going to come back and we're going to hear additional court cases on this. I don't think they want to just give up and say, okay, well, we're done in one of the largest cities in the world. Yeah, I know that there's probably pressure being put on Mayor Kahn of London to fight Uber because the Black Cab people, the folks who have to train for years, who have to pass the knowledge where they have to memorize the streets of London in a six mile radius, don't like the idea that somebody can just sign up for Uber, pass a background check, and be competing with them out there. So there's pressure on that. And I think there's also a little bit of the political backlash where you're seeing the Labour Party, and they have an election coming up December 12th in the UK, the Labour Party sort of pushing against technology companies as part of their platform. And here's an example of a Labour Party Mayor pushing against one of those technology companies. And I'm sure that is, even if it doesn't play a part in the decision is certainly going to be used in the campaign. No doubt. When you look at the numbers here, 43 drivers, 14,000 trips. So that's a lot of people taking a lot of trips supposedly being those 43 drivers, which they in fact were not. This does not seem like a widespread problem in London. You know what I mean? And it's definitely on the company to figure out how to make sure that this doesn't happen in the future. But it does seem like a small number of people saying, huh, we can game the system. I can't drive right now. You drive for me. You'll just be me. Well, and certainly these kinds of, it's sort of an arms race with this sort of thing where people will come up with workarounds that you didn't anticipate, and then companies have to figure out how to crack down on them to prevent them. I don't know enough about the situation to tell you whether this was an unanticipated thing about Uber or if there was some amount of negligence, if they knew about it and let it happen. But I do know that under Kosar Shahi, Uber has seemed to be more attentive to this sort of thing. So I'd be surprised if they just turned a blind eye to it. That's more the Travis Kalanik era of Uber. Kalanik. Yeah. There have been some harsh words with some media figures about Dara Kosar Shahi based on these recent events. And again, like you said, Tom, it's, listen, if Uber knew about it and turned a blind eye, that is one story. But it doesn't really sound like that's the case. It sounds like some folks in London were figuring out how to get around some stuff and Uber's being punished for it. Well, we'll all circle back in 2021 and find out what's really happening with the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee launched Contract for the Web, a set of nine core principles meant to fix the internet and prevent a digital dystopia. The initiative has received the backing of more than 150 organizations including Google, Facebook, DuckDuckGo, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Microsoft, the governments of France and Germany and Ghana. It's a widespread of backers here. Governments are called on to make sure that everyone can connect to the internet, that it's available at all times. In other words, don't shut it down. And that fundamental online privacy and data rights are protected. Companies are called on to make the internet affordable and accessible to all. Respect privacy and personal data and develop tech that supports, quote, the best in humanity and, quote, challenges the worst. And then we, the people, citizens are asked to be creators and collaborators. Well, check here. All four of us are doing that right now. Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity and fight for the web. Going a little easier on the citizens, I feel like here. What do you think of this platform, Rob? It's very grandiose in its aspirations. I'm all for it, but at some point, you're going to have to get down to, how do you determine what is one thing as compared to what is another thing? There's going to be disagreements. For example, what is acceptable from an expense standpoint? What's acceptable here is not necessarily acceptable in India. What's affordable? How do you figure those things out? What is being a good citizen as compared to not being a good citizen? How do you figure those things out? So I'm all for this. I like that there are big company names that are signing on to it. But as with everything, eventually when you get down to the minutiae, it's like, okay, what does this mean really? I think that there's a lot of things that would have to be figured out with this just because it's kind of vague in how these edicts are being pushed out. A lot of these, well, I say a lot of these, Tim Berners-Lee's contract for the web is its own thing. But you see this come up over time because people get upset and sort of disenfranchised with the way that the internet works these days and the corporations and the manipulation and all the things that come along with it and we're all used to it. Some of us are better at navigating it than others. I love this idea. I also think that the altruism of it is just, it's very hard to get a, I don't know, a majority? No, I do. I'm just saying. I think it's really hard to get a lot of people on board who are doing things another way already, whether or not it's the right way. No, I think you're both hitting on something that I've been thinking about too, which is, gosh, it's Tim Berners-Lee. So that's somebody who doesn't give up, right? He pushes hard for things. It's 150 organizations that are spread across a lot of different viewpoints. So it's got a chance of actually making a change. But a lot of times these sorts of calls for action just end up being words and not actions. So I'm hoping this will be the exception. I'm quietly optimistic, I guess. Not even cautiously, just quietly optimistic. But yeah, yeah. And I don't want to throw water on something that I think is a very good idea. No, it is a good idea. So I'm going to hope that I'm wrong when I say we will never hear about this again. Well, moving on to eBay, who announced its plans to sell StubHub to the Swiss ticketing company ViaGoGo for $4.05 billion in U.S. cash. ViaGoGo CEO Eric Baker co-founded StubHub. So we're going full circle again here. But he left before it sailed to eBay back in 2007. Once completed, StubHub and ViaGoGo will sell tickets in more than 70 countries. eBay plans to use the proceeds for stock buybacks, dividends, and merger and acquisition investments. The acquisition is expected to close in the end of Q1 of 2020. So there's two ways to look at this, Rob. It's either bad for consumers because you've got consolidation or good for consumers because now you've got a bigger ticketing competitor to companies like Ticketmaster that have sort of dominated it historically. So I am a fan or have been a fan of StubHub. I just hope they don't mess this up. There is a reason why I would rather get tickets via StubHub than Ticketmaster when possible. Sometimes you just can't. You have to go to the really, really big guys on the block. But I just hope that this doesn't mess things up because there's a reason why people like it as compared to some of the other places where you can get tickets. Yeah, and Beatmaster is pointing out there was a UK regulator brought a case against ViaGoGo for some practices that they said were anti-consumer. Those accusations were dropped. A lot of people still think that maybe ViaGoGo is a little bit shady, so hopefully that doesn't affect StubHub as well. We'll see. Yeah, it's an interesting situation. I mean, StubHub also has its own amount of shadiness, not the platform itself, but people using StubHub to buy a bunch of tickets for stuff that they know are going to be in high demand and then jack up the prices. True, but I mean, that's something that's kind of similar to the Uber situation earlier, where you have to wonder if that's just an arms race. In a 4-3 ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment bars people from being forced to turn over personal passwords to law enforcement. The ruling overturned a lower court that ordered a suspect in a child pornography case to turn over his 64-character computer password. The prosecution argued that Fifth Amendment protection did not apply in the case due to what's called the foregone conclusion exemption, where the government already knows of the existence, location, and content of the sought after material. In the decision, Justice Deborah Todd wrote that since the password has no physical manifestation, it is treated as the content of the mind, like the combination to a wall safe, which Supreme Court precedent in the United States finds to be testimonial and therefore protected by the Fifth Amendment. I can't incriminate myself by saying the contents of my mind. Both the lower court and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court relied on the US Supreme Court precedents, even though they are in confliction on their ruling. Previous courts have ruled differently on the relationship of the Fifth Amendment to passwords and the whole content of the mind argument. Supreme Courts in Indiana and New Jersey are having similar cases before them right now, so this is going to end up in front of the US Supreme Court at some point. It's just a matter of when. Yeah, this one's a big one. Actually, before this even showed up in our show notes, I was kind of aware that this was going on, and it just seems like no matter how many times there are rulings this way, prosecutors are going to try to figure out how to make you tell them something that you know. It just seems like they are just pressed on that. To me, it seems like the password is something that is in my memory. I don't have to tell you what's in my memory. I can choose to remain silent, or I can just not incriminate myself by telling you something. In no way am I supporting what this person has done, but I don't think that you should be able to compel someone to tell you what is in their mind. So I'm kind of glad that this is going, at least the way that it's going right now, but we'll see what happens when it gets to the Supreme Court. I know this is obvious, but if I say, Rob, you need to tell me what's in your mind right now, what's your password? I mean, you could just be like, it's this. That's what's in my mind, whether or not it's the right one or not. To compel someone to do that is not really to force their hand in any way. The other side of it is the password was 64 characters long. What if you actually really forgot it? Are you going to be held in contempt of court because you can't remember the ridiculously complex password that you... That's up to the judge to decide if you're faking it or if you really can't remember. 64 character password, though, I'm going to guess is written down somewhere. Maybe it's in a password manager, which then would have a password that he remembered, and it kind of obviates it. But if it's written down on a post-it note, well, that's a physical manifestation, isn't it? So I don't know. This is why it's going to be interesting when this finally comes before the Supreme Court, because basically a password is neither the contents of your mind nor a key to a lockbox. It's somewhere in between those two things, and it either needs its own law or the Supreme Court's going to have to come up with some new brilliant way of categorizing it, because otherwise you're going to constantly have people seeing it one way or seeing it another, depending on the situation. Next story, also a bit of a headscratcher. The South China Morning Post reports that in October, China's government removed cryptocurrency mining from a list of activities set for elimination at the end of next year. This came after China's President Xi Jinping publicly endorsed blockchain. Operating cryptocurrency exchanges are banned in China, but mining is not, and Chinese miners make up about 70% of global cryptocurrency mining operations. India's number two at just 4%, so quite a discrepancy there, and the US number three at 1%. Chinese companies, Bitmain and Canaan control more than 90% of the energy-efficient mining hardware markets. Yeah, I think probably the biggest part of the story that stuck out to me was just how dominant Chinese companies are in the mining part of this. I mean, I've heard that before, but I've never seen these discrepancies between China at 70% and India at 4%. That is a much bigger lead than I would have guessed before I knew this. And I think it shows that China realizes the difference between mining, which allows them to economically benefit from cryptocurrency, and exchanges which a lot of governments, not just China, worry would undermine their own cryptocurrency. So China, of course, cracking down on that, saying, no, you can't pay under the table with cryptocurrencies, but we'll happily mine them for the rest of the world to undermine each other because then we benefit, and we're pulling money into our country. Yeah, I read that as, one, really good at doing this. Two, we control the hardware. That does the thing that we're really good at. Three, we're going to continue to allow it to happen in our, you know, within our borders. And you're absolutely right. They're not, you know, endorsing the exchanges or allowing the exchanges are just allowing you to make, you know, to mine money that goes into them or mine cryptocurrency that goes into those exchanges. So, yeah, this is probably going to be around for some time in China. Yeah, and part of the reason is cheap power. There's a lot less expensive power in many regions of the country than there are in other places of the world. So it's not exactly subsidized, but effectively a different situation that you might have elsewhere. I'd be interested to see, I mean, India's 4% because it also has some cheap power arrangements as well. Be interested to see if they can make any progress on that. They certainly could have, if China had remained banning mining, but they kind of realized the gold mine, if you'll forgive the expression that they would have been giving up there. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, Rob, before we get into this, real quickly, you've got some experience purchasing a laptop. How far back do you have in buying laptops and making decisions about hardware and that sort of thing? The first laptop that I purchased for myself was a PowerBook 520C, which is actually a Macintosh laptop. I believe I got that in 1992. So what is that? 27 years ago, 26 years ago, somewhere in that time frame. So I have been using, and then I was using PCs before that, you know, there weren't laptops since I was a kid. So I have personally been using computers for pushing 40 years. So they're not new to me. I've had many Macs in my experience, but over the years, I have tended to be more on the PC or Linux side of things, just because of some of the work that I was actually doing. And here recently, what I use just really doesn't matter to me. I could just as easily and effectively use a Mac as I could a PC. So when I decided that it's time to get a new laptop, I said, I really should go and look at the MacBooks, particularly the MacBook Pro, which is right at one of the best laptops you could do 4K video editing on, which is one of my use cases that I have for any high-end laptop that I was going to be looking at. So I was actually really earlier this year contemplating getting a Mac. And Allison Sheridan, a friend of the show, she told me, you might want to hang out a little while, because around the Thanksgiving time frame, Apple always comes out with, generally comes out with new MacBook Pros. You might want to just wait to see what comes out to either potentially get that or see if you can get a price reduction on you know, the previous year's model. So that's exactly what I did. And so I waited until the MacBook Pro 16 inch came out, looked at the specs and the main reason, I know we'll start a conversation here, but the main reason I decided not to go with the MacBook was simply because of the Apple tax. It was significantly more for the same hardware than what I was getting into Dell. And I know that, you know, right now, Dell offers a ridiculous discount because of Black Friday deals that is, you know, you can buy a Dell cheaper at this time of the year that you can in the other time of the year. But that's still something that exists on the Dell that did not exist on the Mac. So when I looked at it, you know, all in, you know, I paid, I think almost $2,700 for my Dell, the comparable MacBook 16, you know, 16 inch MacBook Pro would have been just shy of 4,000. And when I'm looking at, you know, that that is a significant tax to pay for almost identically, you know, hardware, I literally would have had a bit of a bigger screen. But other than that, everything else was, you know, was apples apples. And I'll be honest, I have the 16 inch MacBook Pro, which did not cost me $4,000. Thank goodness, in the configuration that I got. But, but that 16 inch screen doesn't feel that much bigger than the 15.4 inch screen that I was using before. So I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would be to kind of, I probably depend on the person. But one thing I've noticed, and this occurred to me when you were talking about the comparison, it's always really difficult to make a, I want to say apples to apples comparison, of course, hilarious jokes will ensue. But, but to make that comparison between a MacBook and any other Windows because you can never quite get the configuration to be exactly the same. And what I've found is when you get close enough, you're usually within a margin where the Apple product is more expensive, but not considerably more expensive. If you're doing base models, as soon as you start adding more RAM, more storage, more process, or maybe that's when things really start to get ridiculous with Apple, because they charge you a lot more for RAM and storage than the configurations do at other places like Dell. That's exactly my experience. I believe that like the base models, the difference in price was straight 400 bucks. If you're not looking at the Black Friday deals that you're getting this week and last week. But when I started, you know, because I'm going to be doing some fairly intensive video editing on here, I bumped the memory up, I bumped the processor up, bumped the video card up, and it's like, man, this is like, you know, goes up $100 here, $100 there on the Dell, it goes up $400 to $600 on the Mac. And it's like, you know, and then the other thing too was that when I threw in like three years of Apple care, which is the max that you could get, at least the max that I thought that I could get, as compared to four years of next day Dell, with accidental damage, that really jacked the price of that MacBook up as well. So when I started to look at that, it's like, man, it's like for the price difference, I could just get this. And yeah, the monitor is a little bit smaller, but how often am I not going to be plugged into an external monitor anyway? I'm not a road warrior. This is something that just so that I can, you know, I can be mobile when I need to be. But you know, my use case is not going to be working out of a coffee shop doing 4K video editing most of the time. Most of the time, this thing will be sitting on my desk plugged into a 4K OLED monitor. Well, that makes a big difference, right? Because if you were a road warrior, you were always on the move, you didn't have an external monitor to be with you, it might affect, you know, your buying choices otherwise. But knowing that you've kind of got a place to be, got solid internet, you got an external monitor, I recently got a Mac mini for the same reason where I was like, you know what, I have a lot of other stuff here. I really just need, I need the box. That's all I need. So, and the other thing too was that, you at some point I might meet more GPU, but I want to plug an external one in. Same thing I would have to do with the Mac or I'm going to, you know, maybe I want a second OLED display. Same thing I would do with the Mac. So, you know, really, you know, I wanted enough of a base configuration that I can be out in the field and edit a 4K video and not literally want to just slam my head into the desk. But, you know, I'm not going to be doing it so much. Now, I will say this. If you are, if you're that wedding photographer and you're trying to get stuff done while you're in the truck at the wedding, you know, one of the huge benefits that I saw to the MacBook and it wasn't just a 16. This is actually previous models of the MacBook that when you're running Premiere, they work off the battery, literally orders of magnitude faster than what you get, you know, on the Dell XPS. The Dell XPS, it needs to be plugged in. The thing is very power hungry. But as long as you can plug it in, the Dell does just as well, or in many cases, actually a little better than the MacBook does. So, when I just looked at my use cases, am I really going to pay that premium for not ever really being in a situation to where it's going to, going to make sense for me. So, that's why I decided to, you know, go with the, you know, if the Dell literally didn't take long as like when I saw the price, just like I just, I can't spend that much more on a laptop that's not going to do any more for me. Now, the last thing I want to ask you before we move on is about longevity. One of the things you'll hear Apple fans say quite a bit is like, ah, but the Macs last longer and then you can amortize that price out over the years. How do you feel about that? And especially considering Dell's longevity? So, I was talking, you know, to a friend. She told me that, that's uncertain, you guys know her. She just sold, I think, a five or six-year-old MacBook Pro and got like 700 bucks for it, I believe. She told him seven or 750. So, the resale value on a MacBook as compared to a Dell, yes, you're going to get that. But I look at it like this, if I keep it the same amount of time, well, I paid $1,300 less for it up front. So, that probably is about a wash. I know that in six years, I'm not going to be able to sell this thing for 700 bucks. That's not going to be the case. But I'm not paying that premium for now. And my support is going to go longer. Because I believe that the Apple care was only three years. I've actually got the Dell Complete Care for four, which because I am going to be doing like work functions on this, that was important to me to make sure that, you know, I'm not three years in, I'm not ready to go to a new machine yet, but because I have an issue, I really have no choice. It's going to cost half as much to get it fixed as it would to, you know, to just replace it. So the actual support was probably the thing that pushed me over. Because when I factored in just getting that Dell, you know, support next day, I was able to, you know, get that for practically nothing with the Black Friday Dills that were going on. Nice. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. We talk about computers there all the time. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord, which is very lively, I might add. And you can join by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's take a look at what folks are saying to us out there on the wider internet. Yeah, speaking of Patreon, Damian wrote in on your recent editor's desk, Tom, and said, I too have recently observed myself being resistant to change in tech. My last Android phone is dying for the first time in many years. I didn't buy a flagship since Sony is practically non-existent here in Australia. That's where Damian lives. I decided to change to another brand's ecosystem for future upgrades, options, Google Pixel 4, no fingerprint reader, face unlock, not supported by banks, deal breaker, Samsung S10, reviews say fingerprint under glass, unreliable. I don't like their custom software either. Nokia 9, reviews say fingerprint under glass is unreliable. By this stage of the process, I've already decided not to buy a new phone. I want the change. I need the change, but I'm so resistant to giving up the things that I am used to. Yeah, and the editor's desk he's referring to is one where I talked about the idea of having a certain amount of resistance and a certain amount of acceptance when you go into different things, like movies and TV shows, but also technology. So it was interesting to get Damian's perspective on that. Thank you for that. Yeah, thanks, Damian. I think we all suffer from that. It changes stuff, even if it's going to be better on the other side. Hey, thanks to our patrons. Special shout out at our master and grand master levels, including Jeff Wilkes, Sonya Vining and Tony Glass. Also, thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us on the show. Rob, where can people keep up with the rest of your fabulous work? Oh, they can check me out over at smrpodcast.com. And then I'm just at Rob Dunwood on pretty much everything. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. So hit me up there. Come check our show out. You'll like it. Yeah, it's always a good time. It's smart guys doing it and having fun. You'll feel better if you listen to smrpodcast. Say this from experience. You guys cheer me up some days. I really appreciate that. Folks, don't forget if you sign up to be one of our patrons within the next couple of days you have till November 28th, we'll send you some Freeland Peralta art, our holiday card, a special exclusive drawing that Len did just for this card of me and Sarah and our holiday wishes that'll be in your mailbox if you sign up or remain a patron and give us your address at patreon.com slash pledges. Look for DTNS. Make sure you've given us your address or just sign up and give your address when you sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is our email address. Email us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover.