 Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. Supreme Court frees Google to use Oracle's API code, while Justice Thomas suggests maybe somebody should pass a law calling Facebook a common carrier. I mean, why not? And LG quits the mobile phone business. Kinsha Nilgaya, LG. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lean. Rich, that's you. Oh, I'm sorry. From Lovely Clueless, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm Roger Chang, the shoes producer. We were just talking about Easter traditions and French toast pro. Get that and more by becoming a patron and getting good day internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The New York Times sources say that Pinterest is in talks to acquire the photo platform VSCO. Proposed terms of the deal were not disclosed, and VSCO's last funding round in 2015 valued the company at $550 million. Question, is Yahoo answer shutting down? Favorite answer. Why are you even using it? Here's the site I like better. Next answer. I saw another site shutting down recently. It's really sad to see site shutting down. Next answer. Beautiful day, isn't it? The real answer is that Yahoo answers in operations since 2005 will be shut down on May 4th with posting disabled on April 20th. You have until June 30th to request your data with Yahoo advising, quote, you won't be able to download other users' content questions or answers. Just your own. Microsoft confirmed it will hold its build developer conference virtually from May 15th through the 27th. Microsoft has not yet updated its build event page with any scheduled events for the conference or opened registration as of yet. Google now allows third party developers to submit Android Auto apps in the navigation, parking and charging categories to the Play Store. The company initially announced plans to expand the apps available in Android Auto back in August. Previously, they only let third parties submit messaging media apps. The analyst at eMarketer report that in 2020, in store mobile payments usage grew 29% in the US to 92.3 million consumers using it at least once over a six month period. The firm also estimates that this will grow 10% rather in 2021 and also predicts half of all smartphone users will use mobile payments by 2025. All right, let's talk a little more about the Facebook breach you might have seen kicking around. In June 2020, a data set with personal information on more than 533 million Facebook accounts began to be offered for sale on a hacking forum or, I don't like calling them hackers because hackers are sometimes good folks, but on a forum for $30,000. After purchase, a private telegram bot was set up to sell search access to the data. The data set included publicly available information scraped from profiles. So things like a Facebook ID, name, gender, location, relationship status, occupation, date of birth, private mobile numbers associated with the accounts were included as well. Facebook subsequently confirmed the data was obtained in 2019 through a now patched vulnerability in Facebook's ad friend feature that let you gain access to members phone numbers. So that's how the phone number part got in there. Everything else was pretty easily available otherwise. Over the weekend, the data set started to be offered for free on the same site that was initially charging for it. Egypt, Tunisia, Italy and the US had the most users listed, each with more than 30 million with 107 countries included overall. The data breach notification service have I been pwned has been updated to check if your account was impacted. And it's worth repeating this is not a new data set, or except for the phone number, even particularly private information. The significance is that it is collected in an easy to access way. And the significance today over last year is that it's now made available for free. So anybody can get at it. This will make it easy to conduct targeted phishing attacks where you know a person's name and country and just need their phone number. And Troy Hunt points out it is gold for spam based on phone number. Oh man, the phone number spam. Oh, I mean, that's, that was my takeaway from this is like, yeah, I mean, this is, it is what it is. But if somebody has my phone number and they're going to be calling me in any given day at any given time, that is annoying at best. It's, it's, it's worse. It could be worse than that. But this is, this is actually just, it's just a, it's just a bunch of information that's out there that shouldn't be. Yeah. And really the thing that jumps out, I mean, obviously, you know, you see 500 million accounts impacted by this. I mean, that's like quite honestly, like it's become very easy to become numb to these kind of even new data breaches at this point, because we see them so regularly, you just have to go to have, I've been pwned and look at the volume of, of data sets that they just have on there. It definitely is, I mean, like the ultimate impact of this is that, I guess, potentially lower quality actors that wish to do harm with this information now have access to it, you know, it sold for $30,000. Now it's, you know, then it's sold to a telegram up for considerably less as effective, you know, it's free now. Not again, not the end of the world. Again, though, social engineering can be pernicious and horrible. And I, you know, people find horrible ways to use this information. So not great that it's out there. I don't think it's as, you know, all the headlines that said, you know, half a billion people that have, you know, data impacted. Yes, the scale is bad, not new information, not that bad. It's important to separate the fud from the facts. I think the facts here are you should be aware, if you're in this data breach, so that when someone contacts you out of the blue and has all this information, you have it in your head like, oh, but they could have got it from Facebook, right? Because my information was in that breach. It's all about being able to protect yourself. There's nothing in here particularly that allows them to do something without your knowledge and cooperation. It's really more about harassment, spam, phishing, etc. LG Electronics Board of Directors approved a plan to shut down the company's mobile communications business, which makes it smartphones. LG plans to fully close down the division by the end of July. LG was in the cell phone game long before the rise of smartphones, you may recall, making high-end feature phones like the LG chocolate and LG Prada in the mid-2000s. The company was fairly early to adopt Android, releasing its first device with the OS in November of 2009, and becoming a partner with Google on well-regarded Nexus devices like the Nexus 5, the Nexus 6, and the Nexus 5X. But the company's mobile division was unable to generate a profit in recent years with operating losses of over $5 trillion. That's about $4.4 billion US dollars since 2015. Counterpoint research estimates that in Q3 of 2020, LG had 1.91% of global market share, not a big market share. Some analysts blame a lack of leverage over chip supplies as one of the contributing factors to the LG mobile handsets demise. Also, LG will continue to develop mobile technology in other areas like 6G. It will provide service support and software updates for existing products over a period of time, and we wouldn't be too surprised if the name is licensed to another manufacturer, as has been done by Nokia and Blackberry. I mean valid efforts, right? LG with a scrollable screen, even of late, trying to bring innovation to the market, that will be missed. Perhaps because some of that stuff comes from LG Display, a separate company, but in the same umbrella group. Perhaps that will continue to happen. They'll just be innovating for other companies instead of making their own models. But it is the end of an era, and like you mentioned, Sarah, we've seen the dominance of Nokia and Blackberry. Man, back in 2004, it was Nokia and Blackberry, where the top sellers of phones, and it looked like that would never end. LG was up there then, and they survived quite a bit longer than I think maybe some other people expected. They certainly outlasted Nokia and Blackberry. I sometimes look at Samsung and Apple up there at the top of the charts and think, oh my gosh, it looks like they're unassailable, that they'll never end. But all things do come to an end. So it's a matter of when, not if. Listen, LG makes them beautiful refrigerators. I have an LG washing machine. It's very nice. There you go. Yeah, I mean, so do I. Where I did at my last apartment, however, I never had an LG mobile phone. But I remember, not that long ago, it being a, oh, this is a premium brand. I mean, they made nice phones. And I think it's really sort of a, I don't know, a matter of the market getting saturated enough and the company being undercut to the point that they just couldn't compete in this particular arena. Yeah, it seems to me that initially, it seemed as Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, in the early days of Android were kind of the big players in those markets. And Samsung very clearly kind of staked out, I think, the high end successfully, obviously, with their Samsung line of phones. And then the rise of, and we've seen Motorola have these same struggles, HTC have these same struggles, right? LG is not the first one to kind of struggle to figure out this market. We've seen the rise of Chinese manufacturers. I think in 2015, we might have still been like, oh, this Xiaomi, they're up and comers and they're really making waves back then. I would have to go back and check the copy on that. But you can look at the huge impact they've had, not just in China, but in India, the EU and stuff like that as kind of staking out that kind of premium mid to low range, really, where you're getting a lot of features for not a lot of money in those markets. LG of late just kind of seemed to just want to be a weird lab to see what would catch on. They were doing DACs in phones. They were doing that dual display phone. They were doing that wing phone, which I don't even know if that ever came out. But it looked like it was an interesting idea. I don't know if they ever, if as of late, they really considered that like, hey, this is going to catch on and we're going to do this. We're going to light some fire there. Yeah. And, Sarah, I think you pointed it out. One of the big things is that LG didn't have chip leverage like Samsung and even Apple does by designing their own chips. And they didn't have a feature phone plan after a while. They really bet on the high end of the market almost too much. And BBK Electronics, those are the folks. BBK Electronics includes Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Realme, and iTunes. And those are like, when you look at the top five, three of those are in the top five of cell phones. So BBK Electronics had the right idea. They had the regional advantage with being near chip manufacturing in China or assembly plants in China. So yeah, I think LG is going to be fine. They're going to be fine. Just handsets was not going to be their thing. All right, let's talk about the Google Oracle case. An API, if you don't know, is a description of how to work with a program. ZDNet quotes Mulesoft, CTO, Uri Sirid, describing it, describing protecting an API like copywriting the instructions for using an ATM. So if I told you, oh, you walk up, slide your card in and punch your code in the keyboard, I would violate the copyright of the ATM maker. It doesn't make any sense. Maybe patent that, but that's not something that you can copyright. So APIs for a long time have been considered to be uncopyrightable. That has recently been put to the test. And when I say recently, I mean for 10 years, Google and Oracle have been fighting in court about whether 11,500 lines of code in the Oracle API or 11,500 lines of code representing 37 APIs in Android violate Oracle's copyright. Google developed these APIs themselves in order to make Java work, but Oracle claimed, and they were right, that the structure, sequence, and organization mimicked Oracle's API. And then Oracle also claimed that it violated copyright. Now the copying is in fact not at issue. Everybody knows they copied it, whether Google developed it themselves or not. The courts have determined this is a copy. The case here at the Supreme Court was conducted to determine if Google's infringement, their copying, was a fair use. In the United States, fair use provides a defense. If your infringement is for a certain purpose, like educational reasons or meets other criteria, like you just took a very small amount, or you're not undermining the marketplace, or it's transformative in some way, you can say, even though it technically infringed, I'm not guilty of a copyright infringement because I have a fair use defense. And the US Supreme Court ruled Monday that Google had a fair use defense. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the 62 majority, quote, as part of an interface, the copied lines are inherently bound together with uncopyrightable ideas and the creation of new creative expression. So the court ruled that Google only used the API in so much as to let Java programmers build Android apps, which is found to be a transformative use. The 11,500 lines of code in question represent 0.4% of the 2.86 million lines of code in the entire Java API. So it's a very small amount. Breyer compared that to the gas pedal in a car telling the car to move faster, something you might be able to patent, but the idea of which would not be copyrightable. Copyright is meant to promote new ideas by giving protection to them so that creators are incentivized to create. And fair use is meant as a balance to make sure that copyright protection does not suppress more new ideas than it encourages. Justice Breyer identified the Google's use of the API code enabled new creative expression, Android apps, that would not have existed otherwise. The Justice wrote, quote, the upshot in our view is that fair use can play an important role in determining the lawful scope of a computer program copyright. Now writing for the dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas joined by Justice Alito criticized the majority for not ruling on whether declaring code in an API is protected by copyright. They just jumped past that like, let's assume we're not going to rule on that. Let's assume it's copyrightable. We think there's a fair use defense here. Justice Thomas thinks addressing that copyright issue would show that Google's actions were not fair use, hence the dissent. But the majority opinion here, 62, is that the limited amount of use that Google made of the API is not a copyright violation. Well, shoot. This has been going on for some time, as you mentioned, a decade. And yeah, I think really, I mean, Oracle and Google both have, they both have good arguments here. And the idea that Google's saying, well, sure, yes, we copied this code. This is something that we did. But you can't call this a copyright violation. Well, the Supreme Court agreed with them. And I also, I have to say, not that the Supreme Court isn't well-versed on these issues, but this is, I mean, it's a very nuanced thing. I would love to know what was going on in the chambers, you know, where they were like, what do we think? What do we think here? Oracle or Google in this situation, you know, knowing what we know, because it is a, it's a kind of a, it's a messy deal. The one thing that stood out to me though, is that this over, did overturn, right, Tom, a lower court ruling that ruled in favor of Oracle. Right, the lower court ruled it was not a fair use, and Supreme Court overturned that. Yeah, yeah. So, so I mean, I think that's why there was a lot, you know, you know, there was a lot riding on how this case would come out. And so I'm glad we have some, we, you know, we have a final to the Supreme Court. There's no appeal. It is interesting that there wasn't, I guess, a wider present. This was relatively narrow in the scope, at least, you know, compared to what Justice Thomas wanted to see. So, but interesting that, you know, this was not a foregone conclusion, right? I mean, I think sometimes, you know, we think, well, you know, it makes sense to me that it's only 0.2% of the code. So of course, how could that fall under copyright? But other courts did not see it the same way. And the decision was based on it being transformative, not on the amount of code. So even though it was a small amount of code, that was not the basis for the fair use defense. The fair use defense was, hey, an API is just a description of how you use your thing. They're still using Java, and the people using Java are still dealing with Oracle. It's just, you're saying, hey, Java can, you can declare that, hey, Java, if you want to work, here's where, where you'll work. That should not be copyrighted because it reduces innovation. Hey, folks, would you like a DTNS hat, a hoodie, a mask, or a mousepad? We have all that and more at the Daily Tech News Show store. You find it by going to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. Oh, you thought we were done talking about the US Supreme Court, did you? Well, we're not. The US Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling which had said that the president acted unconstitutionally when blocking followers on Twitter. The reason it was vacated is because the president in question is no longer in office. So the question is literally moot. This is what moot means. This case doesn't matter anymore. It's a fairly mundane and uncontroversial ruling. But in a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, again, this is in a concurrence. He's agreeing. It's like, oh, yeah, this is moot. In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to argue that social media platforms might qualify as common carriers. Thomas wrote, a traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way. Now, keep in mind, if something is deemed a common carrier, it does not have the right to exclude, right? If you're a common carrier, you have to accept all the packages on your network or all the trains on your railroads or whatever it is. Justice Thomas suggests, quote, if the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, he's not asserting is it, it is. But he's saying, if it is, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked, laws that restrict the platform's right to exclude. He's saying, hey folks who are upset about Twitter blocking people, here's what you can do. Justice Thomas also argues that Facebook and Google hold outside market power over speech, even if there are alternatives, writing, quote, a person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is. Points for the Oregon Trail reference, Justice Thomas. And what he's saying is, sure, you can talk elsewhere outside of Facebook, but it's kind of hard to have the same impact if you do. In the end, Justice Thomas says it's up to the legislative branch to enact laws about what is and is not a common carrier and that it doesn't apply to the case he's writing about. But you know, while he had your attention, he just thought he'd bring it up because he says, quote, we will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated privately owned information infrastructure, such as digital platforms. This is a weird concurrence because it's just as Thomas just saying, you know what, I just want to talk about this while I have a chance. Oh, boy. Where to start? Where to start? I mean, the idea of Facebook being a common carrier, you know, on one hand, I'm like, that's ludicrous. But on the other hand, I'm like, it makes a lot of sense, depending on who you are and how you communicate with people and how you consider that to be your lifeline, really. Yeah. Like, I mean, if you run a small business, like I do feel like there is a legitimate case of being like, you know, we have to have a presence on this, you know, this is such a ubiquitous platform that we have to have some kind of presence or people will not think we are open or something like that. It is very bizarre. I mean, kind of going back to the last case, it would be like if in that decision, they talked about why like Microsoft's Windows license couldn't be copied. Like, you know, like it's so far afield. And I know he establishes that this doesn't apply. But like, if Common Carrier Status doesn't apply to one, like I guess, of the major online platform, it's like the scope of Twitter is like an order of magnitude less than when we're talking about the reach of Facebook and Google, specifically kind of what he's kind of laying out here, which makes it, you know, at the one hand, it's a very interesting idea. And we've kind of become familiar with this with the whole net neutrality, you know, reclassification that we've kind of gone back and forth on now over the last 10 years as well. So like, we're a little bit more familiar with that than I think we might have been. Interesting idea just seems to be coming out of the blue, obviously setting the precedent for if this comes before me, you'll know how I'll look at this, you know. Keep in mind, he's not saying, I should decide if it's a Common Carrier, because that's not how it works. I think a lot of people misinterpret this is like, oh, he's saying bring a court case to me about this with Facebook and I'll rule in a, no, he's not. In fact, he may very well rule that Facebook is not a Common Carrier given the current laws. What he's saying is the legislature gets to determine what is and is not a Common Carrier. And the legal test for whether the law is constitutional or not would decide whether it should count. And what, so what he's saying here might be a little subtle is, hey, legislature, pass a law that defines a Common Carrier as someone with a big market dominance over communication online, call it a Common Carrier, and the courts will be able to support you. And I think he's right. He's not saying that it is a Common Carrier right now. He's saying it could be if the legislature passed a law and that law would pass constitutional muster. I know that's kind of nebulous there, but it's, it's a weird place for him to make that argument. But you know, Supreme Court justices don't have blogs. So this is what they do. It does very much pivot kind of the traditional dynamic that we've seen over the past couple years where most of this conversation that we've been having is around section 230 platforms versus publishers. And this kind of changes how you can, you can orient yourself to look at possibly to look at these platforms if there is future legislation to, you know, to, to, I guess, to actually make that a thing. Well, I don't know the last time y'all went to space jam.com, but it's been around since 1996. Oh, yes, it is, it is an old school URL. 25 years later, the sequel film called Space Jam A New Legacy starring Ron James has replaced the URL space jam.com to showcase the new movie's first trailer. But if you say, well, hold on a second, I really liked that old website. It's been around since 1996. The original website has a new URL at space jam.com slash 1996. Yeah, back several years ago, the fact that space jam had not been updated since 1996 became an internet meme. And it kind of percolates back up every so often with people talking about how amazing it is that that's still there. It's still online. The server's still there. It's up there with a few other long lasting websites. And so yeah, the idea that there's now a new space jam movie and they need space jam.com to make way, you know, for LeBron and the modern space jam almost lost us a piece of internet history right there with LG phones and Yahoo answers today. Thank you, Space Jam 1996 people. It does. It does warm my heart that I can still go online and get an extremely low resolution AIFF audio file of Michael Jordan saying a line from that movie. As someone who customized all of the notification sounds on my Windows 95 machine with clips that I would pull from stuff like that, it warms my heart. It's pure nostalgia, just like much like people still being interested in the original space jam is probably mostly pure nostalgia. I mean, it's an iconic movie. People love this movie. It certainly is to some people, Sarah. It certainly is. And it joins, you know. I say this never having seen it. I'm sorry. I've never seen it. But yes, I know the space jam memes. I get it. I get that people care about this and the fact that the URL was around for so long before it got messed with. Everyone, you know, deep breath, you've got a new place. Just go slash 1996. If you still want some original vintage website thrills, the Dole Kemp 1996 presidential campaign website is still available for you to go and check out text versions of all of their TV ads. If that's, if that's what somebody's a space jam, it's your jollies. All right, folks, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Stuart, the watch lives Cooper from Melbourne, Australia, who says your conversation last week about rugged phones, the caterpillar rugged phone seems to be firmly aimed at firefighters, water resistant, spray resistant, and a flur. This gives firies. I think that's what Stuart is calling firefighters. Maybe it's a slang term in Australia. A quick way to hot spotting fires when they don't have ready access to dedicated equipment. Yours from the emergency side. Yeah, thank you, Stuart. This is definitely being marketed towards construction sites. But if it's not also being marketed to firies, it should be. You're absolutely right. And it's marketed in multiple industrial situations. So I can't imagine it. It isn't also being marketed there. But well spotted, fire spotter Stuart. Thanks, Stuart. If you have anything that you spot in any of our shows or feedback or questions or anything in between, please send that email to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We love to hear from you. Also shout out to patrons and our master and grand master levels today. They include Philip Shane, Erwinster, and Pat Sheeran. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses, we have a few of them today. Matt Trino, Logan Larson, Ari Takalo, Ziad Fuzan, and everyone else who might be thinking about that, just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you to our new bosses. We are also live on this show Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we are back tomorrow doing it all again with Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.