 Coming up on DTNS, Trevor Kroker is here to tell us how Tech Meme picks the news. It shows you, Professor Michael Geist on Facebook's fight with Australia and how you can play paintball with a Boston Dynamics robot. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer Roger King. Yeah, Roger forgot that he is the producer, but we have not forgot the Trevor Krokers here to join us, editor at Tech Meme. Trevor, thank you for being here. Oh, thank you very much for having me. We were just talking about how to make mustard gas and how to survive frozen lakes on good day internet. If you want to become a member, join our Patreon, patreon.com slash DTNS and get good day internet as a bonus. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Netflix launched a new feature called Downloads for You on Android, which will automatically download content based on your watch history. When the feature is first turned on, users can dedicate one gig, three gigs or five gigabytes of storage for downloads and downloaded content can be cast to larger displays directly from a phone. Security researchers at Red Canary discovered a new type of Mac malware called Silver Sparrow that has infected about 30,000 endpoints as of February 17th and is adapted for the Apple M1 chip. How nice. It's unclear how the malware is installed on those machines. It could be, you know, social engineering delivered like particular malware always is, but it works on the M1. Nobody knows what its purpose is either as researchers have not seen any second stage payloads sent to it while they've been monitoring. According to Microsoft 365's road map, Microsoft plans to add machine learning text predictions to Word in March. The feature will highlight grade out predictions as a user type, which can be accepted with tab or rejected with escape with the option to disable the feature entirely. Samsung has committed to provide security updates to devices for at least four years after their initial release, extending back to hardware originally released in 2019. That extends to even entry level phones, although some lower end phones will be limited to quarterly security upgrades. Gartner analysts report that Apple grew iPhone sales 14.9 percent on the year in Q4 to 79.9 million units, surpassing Samsung as the top global smartphone vendor for the first quarter since 2016. Samsung saw sales decline 11.8 percent on the year to 62 million, while overall smartphone sales decreased 5.4 percent in Q4. We have another foldable phone. This one from Huawei. Sarah, tell us all about it. All right. Huawei announced the Mate X2, which now folds the screen inside like the Samsung Galaxy Fold rather than wrapping around the outside when you close it. Huawei added a second 6.45 inch OLED 90 Hertz screen to the Mate X2 for you to use when it is folded. The inside foldable screen is eight inches, 2480 by 220 display. And the company says the Mate X2 has less of an internal gap so it folds flatter than the Galaxy Fold. So they're obviously making some comparisons there. The screen folds into a water drop shape at the hinge when closed to prevent creasing and also breaking. The Mate X2 launches with the Android 10 based EMUI 11. No Google services, but Huawei says it will be one of the first devices upgraded to Harmony OS, that's Huawei's own OS in April. The Mate X2 comes to China on February 25th for 17,999 one, which is about 2,785 US dollars. The announcement was conducted in Mandarin, not in English as is as it was in previous announcements. In fact, Huawei may run out of parts in Q2, even Q1, if US trade restrictions do remain in place. Nikkei Asia reported last week that Huawei told suppliers its smartphone component orders would be 60 percent lower than last year. Yes, on the one hand, we see Huawei moving over to Samsung's form factor. On the other hand, they are touting an improved hinge that they say, well, we've moved there because we've made it better. But outside, this is obviously targeted only domestically in China. And it's a question of even how many they can make to sell in China. Trevor, have you been paying attention to this? Yeah, I mean, I think if you're running out of chips, then maybe a good strategy would be to put out a phone that's this expensive that you know you're not going to sell a lot. Now granted, they've they've probably been working on this for years, but like that's going to help like how many people are going to spend $2,800 on a folding phone. But it puts Huawei in a good position where they're innovating on this new form factor. And personally, I think that the the fold actually works really well because you don't have that sort of lopsided gap that you do in other foldables. Yeah, and I think Huawei is kind of playing out the clock here. They're they're hoping they can find a way out of this. And they just want to keep making models. They sold off on her, but they do not want to sell off. Huawei itself, which would be the only other way out of this. But if the US doesn't budge, which it doesn't look like it's going to, I'm not sure how long they can go. Obviously, not longer than Q2, if things stay exactly the way they are now. Well, the foldable itself looks pretty nice. I didn't watch the entire announcement, you know, again in Mandarin, but there were subtitles and I could follow along pretty well. But it does look at least, you know, when someone's standing on stage telling you about specs, it looks to be very nice when it's, you know, when it's when it's being used in tablet form. You've got a nice little eight inch screen when you've got when it's when it's folded, but you can still use it as a phone kind of blocky. But I think for anyone who's like, yeah, but I have, you know, multiple devices in one, that makes sense. It does seem pretty sturdy. No, one thing I did like about it was that they said that it was weighted on one side and it reminded me a lot of the e-readers and that they'll put more weight on one side because it's a more natural way to hold the device when you're holding it open. So I think that's something that hopefully other foldables will adopt because right now they're sort of even because they're trying to just distribute the parts evenly across with it. Yeah. Spotify made several announcements at its stream on event. Haven't had one of those in a couple of years. The big announcement, Spotify Hi-Fi coming to select markets later this year. No details yet, but promising lossless CD quality streaming. Spotify says it'll be priced competitively with other high quality audio streaming tiers. So what do we know? Well, that means probably around $20 a month. Spotify is $10 a month now for 320 kilobits per second. Tidal offers what is often considered lossless at 1,411 kilobits per second with 360 reality audio and Dolby Atmos and such for $20 a month. So if Spotify added $10 a month onto its base package for Hi-Fi, that would make it about the same as Tidal. Spotify is also working with speaker makers to make sure it'll be compatible with your most common high quality speakers out there. Bunch of other announcements, too. The Anchor podcast hosting platform partnered with WordPress to turn written content directly into podcasts. No more, Sarah and Tom will just be writing it all WordPress and pushing it out that way. Anchor will also let podcast creators more easily add video directly into podcasts similar to functionality that Spotify gives musicians. Anchor also getting into integrated polls and Q&A features. Spotify will use your music listening history to suggest episodes and shows of podcasts now. So Search will also get smarter. Spotify announced new podcast content deals with the Russo Brothers to make a universe of content that didn't say what kind, but a universe of content from the Russo Brothers. New shows coming from DC Universe, starting with Batman Unburied. Spotify opening up its full screen sponsored recommendation tool Marquis to promote new releases as a self-service offering to artists rather than having to go through partners. Also a beta for Discovery Mode, which let artists select music they want to prioritize to show up in your discovery. Spotify announced it's launching the Spotify audience network to let advertisers reach listeners across Spotify original podcasts, megaphone and anchor, as well as music, all from one place. More details on that later. Companies also expanding to 85 new markets across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, adding native language support for 36 new languages and good news for the recording industry. Spotify noted total revenue for the recording industry was $17 billion in 2008. It dipped to $14 billion in 2014, but it went back up to $20 billion in 2019. Also, Spotify notes 33,000 albums were released in 2002, whereas 1.8 million albums were released in the US on Spotify alone in 2020. So there has been no lack of music being made because of streaming. But really, I think most people were probably paying attention to that hi-fi announcement. I don't know about you, Trevor. Yeah, I mean, that definitely is interesting to me. I don't know how many people will actually take advantage of it. I mean, if you're using their web player, you're already not at their max kilobits. You have to have a mobile device or download the desktop application. So I don't know how many people will take advantage of it, but Spotify, like, you know, they have every reason to get into this. And it's sort of surprising that it's taken this long to get to a point where they would offer it. I I've I'm with you, Trevor. I I I've subscribed to Apple Music, not Spotify, but for all intents and purposes, they're kind of the same thing. And I've got friends who swear by title and say, but you don't realize how much better it sounds. And I'm like, I I I believe you, right? You know, if I got a headphone amp and I really took it seriously, we'll just rock my world. But I think for most people, it's kind of like, you know, we all listen to MP3s, too, and they were pretty crappy and everyone was just happy to get free music back in the day. But something like, you know, a company like Tidal, which we've been talking about for a while, it's like more expensive, better quality, way less users, way fewer users. When Spotify gets on this train, Apple Music is probably not far behind. And and you wonder who's really competing, you know, with those two at that point. We just started using Spotify in the living room because we got new Visio Elevate speakers in there. I don't know that I would pay for it, but I'd do a free trial to see if I can I can tell the difference now that I got decent speakers. And before I move on, Tom, I know you kind of made a joke about that we could just write DTNS every day. And it would automatically become a performance. But, you know, like all kidding aside, I don't really understand how the execution of this works, because if you have a podcast with multiple voices, if you could somehow program that in written form to become a voice of your choosing and the finished product, I can see some really creative uses for this. Yeah, I think it's just an easy way to turn text into podcast deliverable at this point. But yeah, worth worth watching. Well, hopefully we're all worth watching here on DTNS as well. And we do a lot of work. In fact, every day we search through a big, thick stack of tech stories to determine what's going to make the cut here on the show and all help us have a better understanding of the tech world at large. It's a tough job, but we love doing it. On Editor's Desk for Patreon patrons, Tom has described a lot about how we decide what to pick, why we might choose to focus on a certain story rather than another, even if they're both important. One of the ways we do that is to monitor what's being featured on TechMeme. How many outlets are covering the story? Social media conversations around that story. But how does TechMeme select those stories in the first place? Thankfully, we have Trevor Croker with us today to tell us a little more about the goings on under the hood. So, Trevor, starting with the most basic question, how do you and your team decide what outlets you're pulling stories from and how do you find them? And then how do you make sure that they're coming from a reliable source? Well, at TechMeme, it's really sort of a marriage between a web crawler that we have, that algorithmically finds stories, and then also human editors looking for stories. So, the technology that we have will crawl the web and find stories that are sort of percolating around and then recommend those for us to post and then we also look at Twitter feeds and RSS feeds in conjunction. So, it sort of sets out what we should post. And so, it may seem arbitrary why we pick one story or another, but we're looking at a lot of metrics for measuring what people are talking about, what's being shared, and that's sort of what determines what gets put on TechMeme, but ultimately human editors are in charge of what actually gets posted to the site. I imagine if you left it to the algorithm, every day would just be Apple, Facebook, Google over and over and over. Is that part of the human element? Is adding some balance? How do you keep variety in without ignoring those big stories? I think we have pretty good variety. One reason you might see more of those stories from Apple or Google is because they float to the top of the page. If everybody is talking about an Apple story, it's going to float naturally to the top of the page, but if you pay attention to all the stories that we're posting, there's a good amount of variety in there. They just might land lower, but we're not trying to cover every incremental upgrade. Every time that Apple pushes an update for macOS, we're not going to necessarily cover it unless there's something interesting about that update. Well, because we ran into that same problem of people saying, all you ever cover are the same stories, but the reason those stories are in there all the time is because they're popular and everybody's interested in them, so it's having to strike that balance. You have to pay attention to what people are talking about, because if you just post whatever you want, that's why it's important that we look at what the algorithm is telling us and what people are talking about, because I may not personally care about a certain story, but if everybody's talking about it, we're going to post it because that's what's driving conversation. Now, I remember some years ago when TechMeme made the decision to write alternative headlines to the headlines that might be at their original source. For example, if the Verge has a headline that might be a little insider-y or it makes sense in the context of the Verge universe, but out of context on TechMeme, someone might not totally know what they're clicking into. I remember it kind of being a, hey, we're going to try this out, and it was so much better afterwards that it just felt clearer. So how do you decide how to rewrite a title that might be great on its own, but maybe not provide the context that TechMeme's readers are looking for? That's great to hear that. Our headlines are actually useful there. I think a lot of headlines, they sort of work backwards. They want you to click on the story and then find out what's going on inside of it, and we try to pull out the most important elements, which might not always be located in the story, you might have to dig through it. So we try to bring that value to the people reading so that they don't have to necessarily dig through the story or maybe focusing on the element of the story that is sort of the key, the heart of it. And so, yeah, it's a collaborative process. So it's not just me sitting there typing out a headline. We're always working together with another editor at least, determining it. So I might come up with a retitling of a story, creating a new headline, but my colleague might say, what about this part of the story? Isn't this important? Maybe we should focus on the daily active users in the story because they look at how much they jumped, and so we'll work it out, we'll hash it out, and then we'll post the story collaboratively, trying to come up with what... Hopefully you can read TechMeme and see just the headlines and take away the most important news, and hopefully you click on the links, but if you just don't have any time, you can just scan through the page. Yeah, I mean, all this fighting over whether you can use snippets and links and all of this stuff on Facebook and Google, I mean, you are making it more useful to me by not making me have to click unless I really want to. On Apple announcement days, I look at TechMeme's page as like an outline of like, okay, here's what they announced. It's such a good guide for that otherwise the sites themselves want to use headlines that make me need to click to find out more. So it's incredibly useful. How often do you decide to kick something off the page? How often are you updating and checking in and changing what's on there? Well, the machine running everything is what decides when it gets kicked off the page. So if we have a lot of stories and there's a story that's been sort of hanging around for a long time, it will boot it off the page, we will almost never intervene and manually kick something off the page. It will just be more, it's sort of like Reddit in the way that Reddit will decay stories over time. TechMeme looks at stories and will decay them according to various factors. You mentioned you're always working with another editor at least. How big is the TechMeme team? Is it 24-hour situations? Somebody at, you know, our time 4 a.m. is making sure that everything's always covered and it's not ever sort of dormant or dark. Right, yeah. There's always somebody on there, at least one person who's watching it and typically a lot more than that, watching and making sure. Because, you know, if Tim Cook wants to come out and say Apple's releasing a holodeck and he does it at two in the morning, we want to be there to cover it, you know, because it's always happening and it's global, so you can't just, you know, be awake during North American hours. All right, we're going to talk a little more with Trevor about some other things in a second. Microsoft announced it will partner with the European Publishers Council to develop a way for news outlets to get paid by tech gatekeepers. Microsoft calling for the EU to implement Australian-style arbitration to determine the rates to pay for news content. So Microsoft coming in on the side of the government against Google and Facebook. That model in Australia has caused disruption to the Australian market even before it passed into law there. We've been talking about that on DTNS. So I sat down to talk to Professor Michael Geist about that and we'll hear from him in a moment. Joining the conversation in our Discord, If You So Desire, you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. Facebook has taken a hard line approach preemptively blocking all Australian news from being shared on its platform and all news from being shared within Australia. Here to help us unpack all these issues and what they might mean for the world is Professor Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa. He also holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law and is a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. Thanks for joining us, Professor Geist. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Right now these laws say, well, it's only for those that are market dominant. It's only for news. How slippery do you think that slope could get? I think once you've opened the door to this very idea that a link can be treated as content in the way that you would typically look to license or fall within an exception, you've really opened the door to almost any other. Anyone else coming to the table and saying, you're linking to me, there's some value there and you're gaining value from it. I'm deserving of some amount of compensation there as well. So I think it really starts, of course, with those couple of companies, but I'm certainly not convinced that it ends there. Do you see any evidence that governments are accounting for unintended consequences like that or any others? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the answer at this point in time is an absolute no. They see the political winner, they push ahead, and there's very little consideration, I think, of the implications. And so in an Australian context, for example, with Facebook moving to block that kind of content, what we've seen take place is there's over blocking, which was a predictable consequence of moving towards a blocking system. But that's simply what's going to happen. We haven't even seen them really account for what is likely to be a financial hit for the publishers themselves when they find that there is reduced traffic because they don't get some of that referral traffic. And I think it's worth noting that caught in the middle in many respects are a lot of the smaller independent publishers. It's the big players, the big media, so to speak, that are the most vocal when it comes to this lobbying. But they're in a position to weather the storm. Smaller independent media really are pretty dependent on social media and internet referral traffic. Many of them have spoken up saying they're not interested in seeing this kind of fight because if we were to move towards exactly what's happened in Australia, this would dramatically impact their ability to survive. Now, rather than going to governments, publishers could do things of their own. They could modify the robot's TXT files. They could block referrals from Facebook. They could stop posting their articles on Facebook. But the arguments have been that while they have that leverage, the market dominance of Google and Facebook is such that they would have no effect. They would lose that face down, which is some of the underlying reasoning behind the Australian approach. Is there any way publishers could influence these companies without government help? That's a great question. I think we start by recognizing that, yes, they could stop, in the sense of the sharing themselves of the information on these services, but they need Facebook and Google far more than Google and Facebook need them. I think that's pretty clear when you just look at the percentage of the content. It's just trivial from the perspective of the platforms. It's really important from the perspective of the publishers themselves. I think the message that those companies are sending out is that they won't pay for links, but they will pay for content. That's where I think things like the Google Showcase program comes in. Google and Facebook are pretty similar and seemingly aligned on this issue. No to links, but yes to added value content. I guess it does fall to the publishers to decide whether or not they want to provide or license that value added content on the platforms. As you noted, that raises its own set of risks where you become more dependent on these large platforms in doing so, but at the same time, it certainly offers up an opportunity. Now, of course, there are concerns. Is there an imbalance in the negotiations that might take place between big tech and some of the media organizations? But what's interesting is at least in some countries, for example, in my own in Canada, at this point in time, the only companies that have signed agreements with Google as part of the Showcase offering are actually smaller players who see opportunity. The big players have held off, and I suspect that's because they'd rather have the government do the negotiating for them in the form of some kind of legislation. Yeah, it seems like a lot of our discussion around these issues is Facebook and Google are hard to influence. Only the biggest media companies can even get them to come to the table, and sometimes only with government help. It's starting to sound like this really is just another aspect of antitrust issues. What do you think the government should do to address this? I think there's a couple of things, and one is antitrust. And so I think there's no doubt that competition law, not just on this issue, but frankly on a number of issues, has really emerged, I think, as the go-to solution or at least proposed policy measure to begin to examine potential abuses in the marketplace. And listen, these companies provide a lot of value to a lot of people and are obviously many of us rely on these services. So I don't think it's about having these services go away altogether, but where there is abuse of that power, the law needs to step in and regulators charged with enforcing those competition or antitrust laws ought to be doing their job. So I think that's certainly an important part of the equation. I think the other, and I would say this is someone sitting outside the United States and I think it's true for many of the countries outside the U.S., is tax policy. One of the sources of frustration for many countries right now, including Canada, is that there is a perception, and I think it's grounded in a fair amount of reality, that these companies do not pay their fair share within the jurisdiction. The companies are always going to engage in tax minimization strategies. That's true whether you're a tech company or any other kind of company. But when you're a technology company that has the ability to offer up most of your services from outside of the jurisdiction, you've got the ability to kind of position yourself in a way that really limits the amount of tax that may be payable in other jurisdictions. And we've got many countries now that are saying that simply isn't fair. And so what I'd like to see happen is to really advance some of the global consensus development around tax policy. Countries can get their fair share and if they want to use some of those tax revenues to help support local journalism. I mean, that's a perfect way to try to solve this issue without getting into the muck of some of these regulatory approaches. You can find more from Professor Geist, including his Law Bytes podcast at michaelgeist.ca. And if you want the full half-hour conversation that Tom had with Professor Geist, check out your Patreon RSS feed or become a patron at patreon.com. All right, y'all, let's talk about SPOT. You know, SPOT the robot that people either find really cute or really scary. SPOT Rampage, this is a project from a company called Mischief that spelled M-S-C-H-F. It's a Brooklyn-based ideas factory. Focuses on SPOT, the robot made by Boston Dynamics, equipped with a paintball gun controlled by the internet. You might say, what? Also on Wednesday, February 24, starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time, you can try to control a two-minute session remotely using the robot's paintball aim by going to spotsrampage.com. People are chosen at random every two minutes, so you got to care in order to possibly be picked and I guess splatter paint around. However, you might say, is this a Boston Dynamics thing? It isn't. In fact, the company is not involved in the project beyond selling the $75,000 robot to the company Mischief. And Boston Dynamics has expressed concern that putting a gun of any kind even if it's a paintball gun on the robot files outside the things that it would like associated with SPOT. Now, there's no immediate way of bricking the robot, but Boston Dynamics could potentially find that its terms of use have been violated. It says it has not yet, but it is still looking over its legal options and then it could revoke a license that stops the robot from being able to connect with the Boston Dynamics server for periodic firmware updates. Oh, I see what Boston Dynamics is doing. They're like, okay, we don't love this because we're trying to get away from people thinking of military. But they're not actually doing any, they're not shooting the paintballs at a person or even a living thing. So we probably can't object yet, but we're going to keep an eye on it because if they put a squirrel in that thing, we might have to try to take a stand. I don't know. But honestly, I think this is good. It kind of sheds the light on like, hey, you can make these robots. For a while, I think people were too scared of the robot. So it was good to make them cuddly, but you can make them too cuddly. So this is the show like, hey, it's just paintball, but it could be something else. I don't know, Trevor, what do you think? Yeah, I think it, I mean, it sounds kind of awesome to me, the way that it reminds me of those Twitch, like when people input into the chat to play games on Twitch, the way that you can get people like working together, I could see this being adapted for any, like it doesn't have to have a paintball, but any sort of collaborative, like let's control the robot to achieve some sort of goal. I think that would be great. And it familiarizes people with a spot. And I don't know, I think I can understand why Boston Dynamics is afraid of where this could go, but I think it has a lot of potential. Well, if you have thoughts on robots carrying paintball guns or anything else that we talk about on the show, or may talk about it on a feature show, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send your thoughts. We like to shout out patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels today. We're shouting out Chris Benito, John and Becky Johnston, and Gadget Virtuoso. Hey, big thanks to Trevor Croker, first time on the show, hopefully not the last. It was great to have you on to talk a little bit more about Tech Meme. Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Well, of course you can see all of the stuff we do on Tech Meme. You can also follow me on Twitter. I'm at Trevor Croker. I just posted a couple of stories, one about NVIDIA's cryptocurrency cards and another one about China's standardization process for technology. So check that out if you're interested. Other than that, just check out Tech Meme. Excellent. Thank you, Trevor. That's Trevor Croker, C-R-O-K-E-R. Folks, if you want a DTNS hat or a hoodie or a mask or a mousepad or more, we got coffee mugs, all that kind of stuff, show your DTNS pride at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. We're live Monday through Friday. That's at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Carrie Goosecoase, EP at Bungie to talk about breaking into the video game industry. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.