 Coming up on DTNS, Roku is now an ad company. Why a British Lord says the Uber driver is a worker and how those little icons in your address bar can track you now. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 19th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were having a lovely trip down memory lane on good day internet, including corporal punishment if you would like to get that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei sources say that Huawei informed its suppliers that it expects smartphone orders to drop 60% in 2021 down to 70 million units, million, not billion. IDC estimated that in Q4 of 2020, Huawei shipped 32 million phones down 43% on the year. Podcast advertising company Acast announced the acquisition of Radio Public, the company that was spun out of public radio marketplace PRX in 2016. Radio Public will continue to support its podcast app, but will work to bring its listener relationship management platform to podcasters on Acast. That includes custom embedded players and websites for shows it calls pod sites. We should disclose that Acast does sell the ads for the public feed of Daily Tech News show. Neiman Labs published data from Chartbeat showing a drop of 15 to 20% in traffic to Australian news publishers on Friday after Facebook began stopping people from posting links to those sites. Australia's treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Friday, he will be talking to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the situation. Microsoft completed its investigation into its own solar winds related breach and found no evidence that the attackers abused Microsoft internal systems or official products to further their attacks. Attackers did get into some networks and were able to use SolarWinds Orion IT platform to access source code for parts of things, a small subset of Azure components, a small subset of Intune components and a small subset of Exchange components. But in each case, they didn't get the entire repository, just some amount of files. On Thursday, Nvidia announced it would artificially reduce the performance of its upcoming $329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards. That's for Ethereum cryptocurrency mining specifically saying gamers should have these. But the company tells the Verge it won't do this. It will not nerf existing GPUs. How it defines existing is a little up in the air still. Nvidia claims its new CMPs that are designed for mining specifically won't impact the ability to produce GeForce gaming cards. All right, let's talk a little more about Roku. Rob, how are they doing? Well, Roku keeps rolling on reporting a revenue rise of 58% in the fourth quarter. Roku ended 2020 with 51.2 million active accounts up 39% over 2019. The ad supported Roku channel which you can even get without a Roku device doubled its audience reaching an estimated 61.8 million people in Q4. Streaming hours on Roku hit an all-time high of 17 billion and out of 17 billion with a B hours in Q4 up 55% on the year. Roku now makes most of its money on ads and subscriptions with that business scoring 81% in Q4 also doubling year over year. Roku does make money off its devices which saw a modest rise of 18%. 38% of all smart TVs sold in the U.S. in 2020 where Roku TVs and I can attest I bought three of them last year. Company didn't comment much on its acquired Quibi content or the prospect of ordering more seasons of that content which it has the option of doing. It did mention growing traction in Mexico, Brazil, Canada, the UK and Ireland with plans to expand to more countries. Yeah, I have to say I'm impressed with the way Roku has executed this. They didn't get caught up in trying to sell more boxes. They made themselves a platform for televisions which as you noted is doing very well and shifted their revenue focus on advertising. In this world where we talk about Google and Facebook as ad companies because that's where they make most of their money. Roku is doing the same thing to the point where they've got more people using the Roku app than our registered Roku users which is a good way to be able to make some money off your ads, I guess. Especially since that model is you can get that model elsewhere. It's like kind of that Pluto TV model. Roku also getting into original content. Perhaps the company has been looking at the rising numbers and saying now is a really good time for retention by giving people something that they want to keep subscribing to for those who do pay. Yeah, when I think of like the Roku channel I don't actively go there to intently watch something. It's kind of like background noise when I'm doing something else. A lot of the time when the TV is just kind of just on. And for that I don't really mind the ad so much. I don't wanna say it's surprising but I can understand how they are doing this well because Roku isn't, we never talk about them first. It's always what is Apple TV doing? What is, what's going on with Hulu? What's going on with Chromecast and Google TV and all that kind of stuff? And Roku is just kind of there. And it's like, yeah, throw it on the TV and we'll make that television very cheap and you can come pick us up because that was the reason I picked up three. They were Christmas gifts. And it's like, I can get a regular TV or I can get this one with Roku and it costs no more. Yeah, they've been around for more than 10 years now so they've got a nice install base and name recognition which is I think one of the reasons people probably are watching the Roku content more so than being Roku registered users because somebody in your family has the Roku and maybe like you Rob puts it on for background and you see, oh, what app is that on? I wanna watch that. Can I get that on my phone? And Roku very wisely made their channel available on your phone without having to have a Roku. So, that gamble has worked. They've expanded that audience. I'm very curious, like you said, Sarah, where they go next? I think Quibi is a way for them to safely test those original content waters. We talked about them hiring some people to kind of help them expand that. Probably use that to maybe just extend those Quibi deals with the content producers of the Quibi shows at first but if that works, we could start to see them venture out into other stuff. That'll be interesting to know. Yep. Scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago published a paper for the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium happening later this week about how you can use a favicon, the little icon that shows up in the address bar and in your tabs and in your history and such to track users when you're otherwise blocking tracking. Most browsers cache favicon separately from site data, browsing history and cookies and most of your privacy protections are focused on site data, browsing history and cookies. A favicon therefore can be loaded without being blocked even if you're in incognito mode. Now, a site that wanted to employ this method according to the paper would send a user's browser through a series of subdomains each with a unique favicon before loading the page you requested. Now, you wouldn't notice anything because they'd all have the same image but they'd have different file names and you might notice a slight delay, no more than a couple of seconds, but the site can check which of the favicons loaded from cache on each subsequent visit and go, oh, it's that set of five, okay, that's Sarah Lane. The technique does not work in Brave because Brave introduced countermeasures after the scientists who wrote this paper contacted them and said, oh, okay, we can stop that from happening. It does not work in Firefox because there's a bug. In fact, the original paper described the bug in a way that caused some people to say like, I don't know if that's responsible disclosure so there's this whole disclaimer at the top of the paper about the Firefox bug. Google says they're working on a fix, Apple says they're looking into the findings. I hadn't seen a comment from Microsoft yet about Edge but it is a problem there as well. You can stop it right now if you're worried about it by disabling favicons from loading, although that means you won't see all the pretty icons in your tabs or anything. But yeah, it just goes to show, doesn't it? That whatever you do to block someone from tracking you, someone out there is gonna try to figure out how to track you anyway. They definitely are gonna try to figure it out. In this case, they have figured it out but my gut tells me that you're gonna see a bunch of browser updates in the not too distant future that are going to block this one as well. But it's pretty cool. I mean, it's pretty cool the way they came up with a way to get around things that actively track you. And this is just one more thing that they're gonna have to start blocking in browsers. I mean, the idea to not have, I always called them favicons. I think fav makes a little bit more sense, although it's a made-up word anyway, but. Let's have a internet beef about it, shall we? Let's do a take to Twitter everybody, it's Friday. You said favicons, I said favicons and I think, Tom, you were favored. Favicons, which actually, as usual, Tom, it makes the most sense out of all of us, but no, but a world because I'm a very tab happy person. I have way too many tabs open at all times. I can't possibly read all the descriptions, but the icons, I know where my Gmail is, I know where my Fitbit is and blah, blah, blah. A world without that is not a world I wanna live in. So yes, browsers, please get on it. Yeah, and this should be easy enough to fix. I mean, I say that and the programmer that has to fix this is rolling their eyes because it's work, but it's not complicated to fix is what I mean when I say that. You just need to do the same kind of cash protecting for these icons that you would do with other things like cookies. It's just something people didn't really realize could be taken advantage. Until the scientists from UIC figured this out, which is good, we're actually figuring it out before somebody's taking widespread advantage of it, I guess. Well, remember last month, WhatsApp announced it would enforce new privacy terms that would let some businesses store some data from conversations with their customers on Facebook servers which the companies could use in their own advertising, including advertising on Facebook itself. The conversations would be labeled so you knew when you were chatting with a business that might do that or might be doing that. Similar to what happens when you make a phone call to a company and they record the conversation and they say this conversation may be recorded for quality purposes and they may use it for marketing purposes with you in the future. It's not uncommon, but people heard the word Facebook and personal data and a lot of people were outraged as a result. So what face, face app. So what's app postponed? It really should be called that, huh? What's app postponed enforcing the privacy changes was like, all right, hold on. Let's let everybody calm down. Let's figure out how to come around about this a different way. Has a new plan to communicate what is going to happen. So Thursday, what's app announced? It will roll out an in app banner in a few weeks, not tomorrow, but soon, that will ask users to review their privacy policies and include reassurances that what's app won't read or listen to your messages or your calls, which will remain end to end encrypted. What's app says it will do this for a few months and begin enforcing the new privacy policy on May 15th. Well, listen, they had to do something, right? They're not just gonna say, never mind, we don't want this feature to happen. The people have spoken. They're like, huh, okay. Nobody thought that this was a good idea and it's because they don't totally understand what we're trying to do here. It's not as bad as you think. So I don't know really what other choice the company has unless they just were like, okay, we're just not gonna use marketing information, but they're not gonna do that either. So I think one of the things that Facebook ultimately is dealing with right now is that people are tiring of social media and just getting into your privacy and sharing things with everyone. So there's already that. And then unlike that company that makes phones and computers that also was a marketing firm, in fact, it may be a marketing firm first called Apple and they just happened to sell iPhones and computers, they didn't think about how they put this message out. And I don't wanna say that they did it in a poor way. They just didn't necessarily think of all the ramifications of people are gonna read this or not gonna understand it and they're gonna freak out. Clearly they didn't think that. So they're backtracking and doing a bunch of things on this. And I think that you're gonna see written in business books in school where they're gonna teach how not to put out a message when you're as massive as Facebook. Because like I said, I don't wanna say that they did a bad job with their initial message, but they could have done such a better job if they simply would have just thought about, how are people going to react? How could they adversely react as compared to just giving them the information and letting them figure out what it means? Yeah, I wonder if WhatsApp had been able to avoid using the word Facebook in their initial messaging if we would not have seen any of this. Cause up until recently WhatsApp, even though they were owned by Facebook was sort of seen as something trustworthy. Like, oh, end to end encryption and privacy and all of that. As soon as they said Facebook servers and Facebook advertising, it didn't matter the context of either one of those, people freaked and like, oh, here we go. WhatsApp, sharing my information with Facebook and then started doing what the internet does, jumping to conclusions. If WhatsApp had been able to say WhatsApp servers, which wouldn't have been accurate or just said internal servers and kind of obfuscated, it wouldn't have been as transparent, but it also wouldn't have flipped all those switches of people going, wait, you're sharing it with Facebook? Which, granted, I don't love what they're doing here, but it's not nearly as bad as a lot of people assumed. Yeah, and I think another part of this is that people don't think of WhatsApp like they think of Facebook. Outside of the United States, WhatsApp is the way you make phone calls and send messages, it's just, it's more widely used than SMS. So it's much more, I mean, clearly Facebook is a personal platform, but when you're talking about sending a message to someone in private or calling someone, you just think of that differently than you think of putting something on your wall in Facebook. So the fact that they had to say WhatsApp and Facebook servers, it just freaked Earth out and still dealing with it. I mean, because Facebook owns WhatsApp, every WhatsApp server is a Facebook server from a certain point of view. But don't let that freak you out. Hey, you know what, you can talk about this if you're like, no, you're totally wrong, Tom. Head into our Discord. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously upheld a lower court ruling in a 2016 case that Uber drivers are not independent contractors. This decision applies to the 25 drivers named in the case. It does not set a precedent necessarily legally for any other drivers yet. I guess it sets a precedent, but it doesn't rule on them yet. So it only initially applies to these 25 drivers who will now go back to the employment tribunal with this court order to say, okay, you have to determine what proper compensation we should get for this. There are around a thousand similar complaints against Uber waiting until the conclusion of the trial to be considered. So now in the light of this trial, those thousand complaints will have to be considered. So that right there is a whole mess of a bunch of complaints that Uber is gonna have to settle with the employment tribunal, given the fact that the lords of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom have said, these are workers. Uber says it has changed how the app works since 2016 so that the ruling does not apply to all Uber drivers, but you know that drivers are gonna be going to the employment tribunal to test that out. In its ruling, the court cited that drivers were not able to turn down rides without penalty as one of the reasons they say, well, that's a worker then, that's not an independent contractor. Uber says it now lets drivers see the destination and fare before they accept a ride and face no penalty for turning it down. We couldn't confirm that, but that's what they said in the Wall Street Journal, so maybe it applies in the UK. However, the court also noted that Uber drivers cannot set their own rates and Uber imposes contract terms on them as to other reasons that they are workers, not employees, or not independent contractors. And Uber has not changed its policies in those regard. The court said in its decision, in fact, one of the lords, because the people who sit on the Supreme Courts are lords, said that drivers, quote, have little or no ability to improve their economic position through professional or entrepreneurial skill. That's the test. If you can't take actions to make more money, you're at the mercy of Uber giving you the jobs, well, then you're a worker. And in fact, the court determined Uber drivers are workers, a classification in the UK that falls between a full employee and an independent contractor. Oh yeah, this debate, we've seen it in California. There are good arguments to be made depending on whether or not you are a driver working for Uber and what you are hoping that outcome will be in whatever area that you are driving for. Obviously Uber and other companies that work similarly to Uber, and this is not for Uber Eats, by the way, just for Uber drivers who are carrying passengers, human passengers usually. But yeah, it's interesting that this case in the UK has been decided for a very small number of drivers, but like you said, Tom, nothing's been decided on a larger scale, but if it does set a precedent, that's a big market for Uber. Where do we go from here? Rob, what are your thoughts on this? So I don't understand the nuance between an employee, a worker and a contractor in the UK, but my gut tells me that Uber didn't want these people to be workers because it's gonna ultimately cost them more, that they're gonna have to treat them differently than if they were not workers. And that's ultimately what this whole case was about. Where are you actually treating people that you were saying were contractors like workers? And it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. And as you said, they've already said that we've changed our app. We've made some modifications that we're not doing what we used to do, but that's only a couple of points that the Lords actually hit on. It's like, Tom, I think you said it greatly, is that if you can't improve your status on your own, if the company you're doing work for controls that, then you work for them. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out going forward because I believe this is the last straw for them. This is where it ends. Yeah. And before we move on, I do wanna point out only most of the Supreme Court Justices in the UK are Lords. Lady Arden is a lady. Okay, so Microsoft announced that Office 2021 will come to Mac OS and Windows later this year, designed for customers who don't wanna maintain a Microsoft 365 subscription. The price will stay the same as the last version. Microsoft will also release Office 2021, long-term servicing channel, or LTSC, for commercial customers with five years of support instead of seven and a 10% price increase from the 2019 version. The LTSC version will get dark mode support, accessibility improvements, dynamic arrays, and X lookup for Excel and more. Office 2021 will have similar features, but they were not officially announced. A preview of Office LTSC will arrive in April. There will not be a preview version of the Consumer Office of 2021. Microsoft also committed to another perpetual version of Office in the future. Yeah, so LTSC is more of an enterprise level thing. And there are some companies that regulations prevent them from doing subscription stuff. There are some business models, particularly the manufacturing, where having monthly changes like you get with Microsoft 365 just doesn't work because maybe they have to shut down the factory in order to do updates, and that's not something they wanna do that often. So having these perpetual versions is important there. On the consumer side though, I'm a little surprised that they're continuing to offer the one-offs to people. You don't get all of the interface changes that you get in Microsoft 365, but you do just pay once, and you can use it as long as it's supported safely. Yeah, you'd be surprised. There are a lot of folks who just, they just do not believe in a perpetual model, or they believe in a perpetual model. They don't believe in a subscription. My father, I literally just convinced him to get a 365 account, simply because there were some things that he wanted to do in Word that he sees me doing or my sister or my mother do, because we've got the latest, greatest, and he can't do it. He's like, oh, I need to go upgrade this. He's like, well, there isn't an upgrade for what you're using yet. You're gonna have to wait a little bit longer. So he finally decided to do this, but he understands that he's paying more for the 8% of the software that he will ever use, that's compared to just getting subscription and paying monthly, but that's how he rolls. He would rather buy it now because I own it, and they're not gonna jack the price up on me later. Yeah. I mean, it does make sense to only buy it once if you're never gonna buy it again, but the fact of the matter is, I long ago resigned myself to the fact that, you know what, when the next version of Office comes out, I'm gonna upgrade to it. And when I divide it out over the years, the cost of not getting the updates as fast is probably worth what few dollars I would pay extra. And I just subscribed to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft's done a good job of throwing extra things in there to be like, oh, well, I also get teams immediately. Oh, that's kind of cool and just keeping it going. So I have gotten on the subscription train for Microsoft stuff, but there's still a part of me that's like that where I'm like, I'd just rather own it. I'd just rather pay once and just use it until it's done. It's just software doesn't have a long shelf life like that. A team of scientists from the San Diego Zoo Global via GenPets and Equine, or Equine, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Conservation Group Revive and Restore successfully cloned a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann. She's an endangered species due in part to a lack of genetic diversity. The researchers were able to remove the nucleus with a maturing domestic ferret egg and then combine that with the cells of a black-footed ferret that had been dead a very long time. And they hoped to introduce Elizabeth Ann's grandkids into the wild in 2025. Now, this is a crazy story. And I know there's a crazy angle on this, but before we get to that, I do wanna point out that ferrets, this particular species of ferret is so endangered that like Sarah said, there's a lack of genetic diversity. So going and taking an ancestor and cloning it means that you're no longer having to possibly marry your sibling as a ferret. So that might be very important for the ferret community. But also, we're cloning almost extinct species. I mean, how much farther before we just cloned an extinct species? Like, believe me? I know we've told the DTNS crew that we're gonna be doing a crossover show with the this week and science team, but I feel like this is a great conversation to talk to the science folks. All right, like, listen, black-footed ferret, let's see what we can do here. You know, when is this a good idea and when is it not? Because we haven't heard a lot about, you know, remember Dolly the sheep? Haven't heard a lot about animal cloning, at least not in my circles in a while. You're gonna get wooly mammoths, you're gonna get saber-toothed tigers before it's all said and done. I will add with the wooly mammoth, because the animal is extinct, there is, you have to find a suitable animal host to gestate the embryo, which you can do with the ferret because they're still black-footed ferrets. Although they used a different, they used, I guess you're right about the gestation, but they used a different egg, right? Well, yeah, but like, you know, if you wanna grow a wooly mammoth, the closest relative is an Indian elephant. And, you know, will that cause problems with the fetus? Will it cause problems with the elk? Because elephants need to carry the, it's 12 months, 14 months. Like they carry the baby for a very long time. And so it's much easier to just, you know, marry something or not marry something, but to gestate something within its own species then to try something species-adjacent. So you're saying there's a chance? Probably. I don't know, yeah. If you haven't heard what Sarah was talking about, is true, April 17th, 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern, we're gonna be doing this week in the Daily Science and Tech News Show podcast. Cross over with Dr. Kiki's crew and ours. So if you've got ideas for stuff like this that you'd like to hear that the combined brain trust talk about, email us feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Speaking of email, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Vanessa. Last week, I had posted a video to patrons that I was going to be checking out the iRobot Roomba 675 vacuum cleaner, auto vacuum cleaner robot for my next Live With It segment. So in May, we're gonna check in and see how it's all been going. Vanessa says, thanks for the video. Love seeing your dog, because it would have made an appearance and your studio space. I was wondering how you have space to play VR. We don't have space anywhere in my house or garage that meets the minimum area. Vanessa, I hear that. I do not in my actual apartment either. So I'm happy to have a garage for that. But Vanessa also says, looking forward to more on the Roomba, I have one for each floor because apparently Vanessa lives in a huge palace. And they really do a great job of getting the floor clean while you do other things. The thoughtful design that makes cleaning it and replacing spare parts is easy, making spare parts easy is admirable. Although I will never let it run automatically again on a schedule because it used to get confused and run in the middle of the night. Also, it found cat poop once and dragged it all over. Oh, yeah. Which is like that episode of High Maintenance, which was actually really funny. Yeah, so early returns, I know we've got till May, but early returns on the Roomba, Sarah? So, Vanessa, I... Listen, you don't have to send me like floor plans of your house or anything, but I want to know how you deal with corners. I live in a compact space. Even my, you know, Studio Redwood is basically a big concrete block, right? Four walls, rectangular in shape. But I have a bunch of stuff in here. I mean, I'd have to completely rethink all the things that would be touched, although this area does get kind of dirty, so it's an area that I care about keeping clean. But my apartment itself, I don't know how you get anything out of the corner. The Roomba's, it's circular. I just, I don't know how it's possible. And I'm not going to make huge snap judgments yet because I got a long way to go. I'm gonna get creative, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know how that works. Corners get dirty. They're corners. Yeah, and Roomba's around. Yeah, if you have tricks, I want to know about them. If you, and you can send them to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, doesn't have to be vacuuming tricks, although they're always appreciated. I like a clean house. It can be a question, comment, anything we talked about on the show, anything that you hope we do talk about on a future show as well. We'd like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Craig Meyer, Philip Less and Dan Colbeck. Rob Dunwood, it's been a whole month since you were here last and boy did we miss you. What have you been up to? Not a whole bunch, just, you know, enjoying 2021 and hanging out over at the SMR podcast every Wednesday night. We have started live streaming the show on Discord, streaming the audio. Got some tips from Tom and the team here at DTNS. So thanks for that. The other than that, not a whole lot. Go check it out folks. SMRpodcast.com. Also, if you have friends or family who speak Spanish or maybe you would rather hear some tech news in Spanish, we have got a weekly tech news show en español, NTX is el podcast con la información que necesitas en el tiempo que tienes. Más tecnología en menos tiempo, hosted by Dan Campos. You can get it at dailytechnewshow.com slash NTX. And of course, it's made possible because we get support from you, dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Folks, we're live Monday through Friday. That's at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back on Monday with Trevor Coker from Tech Meme to talk story selection. Talk to you then, have a great weekend. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.