 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Howard Urmich, John Atwood, and Pat. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's health care goals continue, have Google and Meta planned to deal with news, and what has sewn us up to hardware-wise? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 25th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Straffolino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we've got all sorts of stuff to talk about today, including speakers that may or may not work for you, and many, many other things. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter's former security chief and whistleblower, Peter Zetko, will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 13 to discuss allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter. Ireland's data protection commission and France's CNIL data regulator both confirmed that they were investigating Zetko's allegations as well. Sony will increase the price of the PlayStation 5 between 6 to 21 percent in select markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Canada, basically any place that's not the U.S. they don't plan to increase prices here. Sony cited high global inflation rates for the move. On Nvidia's earnings call, CEO Jensen Wang hinted that the company would reveal its next-gen GPU architecture lovelace at its GPU Technology Conference next month. On the call, Wang also said that Nvidia had excess GPU inventory due to a fall in PC sales and is working with distributors to price position current stock to sell through it. Bloomberg sources say Meta is spending a bunch of time on building out customer service, specifically around giving users support when accounts or posts are removed. This move is in part due to feedback from its oversight board, which last year reported it received almost a million user appeals about Meta's content moderation. In other Meta content news, Instagram updated its settings to now default new users under 16 years old to the app's most restrictive content settings and prompt existing teams to do the same. In June, Instagram introduced settings around sensitive content, letting users opt to see more, less, or standard amounts of this content. Those under 18 were able to choose either standard or less at launch, and now those under 16 will be just defaulted to less. The nutrition and weight loss app My Fitness Spell, you may use it, will make its popular barcode scanning feature a premium paid feature. The feature was available to free accounts with ads, letting users scan food to log and track calories type thing. Existing free users can now use the feature until October 1st, and users creating free accounts after September 1st won't have access. Premium plans cost $20 per month or $80 annually. I know. Well, I know. My Fitness Spell is a lot of fun. You want to lose weight? You're going to pay for it. Well, that's because people take their health very seriously, much like Amazon, Sarah. That's called a... Yeah. It's called a circuit. Amazon does that also. Not when you call it out, Rich. All the pros do. Amazon has been making a lot of waves in the healthcare space as of late. It's been scaling back, though, some of these previous plans. That's at least according to what we've been seeing in the news today. With Amazon informing employees, it will shut down its virtual health service, Amazon Care, at the end of the year. The service initially rolled out to Amazon employees in 2019, made a bunch of waves at the time, and it offered virtual health services that paired with the option for in-home visits from registered nurses. Yeah. So if you've been following the story, it's not like Amazon's service was treading water and forgotten by the company. It expanded to all companies in Washington state in March of 2021. Then in February of this year, Amazon announced a national wide rollout plan to make it available in 20 U.S. cities throughout 2022, began offering in-person care in eight cities, including Seattle and also Los Angeles. Yeah. And while this is, it seems like a significant rollback, this isn't exactly Amazon getting out of the healthcare field far from it. It still runs Amazon Pharmacy, which is based on its acquisition of Pillpack that it completed in 2018. And in July, it announced plans to acquire the primary care provider, OneMedical. That's still pending some regulatory approvals, but it seems like that is at least on the path to go forward. And earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was interested in acquiring the home health services provider Signify Health, although that's far from a done deal. It sounds like there are multiple companies vying for that as well, but they are interested and that would be around an $8 billion deal. Yeah. No kidding. So you say, okay, sounds like Amazon is really interested in healthcare. So if healthcare is a clear focus for the company, why would Amazon shut down Amazon care? Well, according to his SVP of health service, Neil Lindsey, wasn't just a compelling offer to big business telling employees, quote, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers that we have been targeting, end quote, which means absolutely nothing to me. I mean, but I don't know, Justin, you know, hearing all this stuff, what are your thoughts? Among the most entrenched, protected and regulated industries in the United States of America is healthcare. You've got hospital networks, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, all of which make a lot of money in this, all of which want to protect their ability to do it. Getting into this field is incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive. So with Amazon, you would think, oh, they have all the money in the world, expensive doesn't matter. Well, Amazon is also a company for which that got rich by selling $11, 18 packs of paper towels for $11 and one cents. So they are they are understanding of the bottom line. I would say that this is just as much of a play to understand how they're going to solve the problem and less of a situation where they ran into a wall. They're they're figuring this out as they go. It's not a natural strength for them. And yet they understand that with their war chest and the fact that people rely on Amazon and look at it as a reliable brand, this is a natural field that they can move into if they do it right. Well, and to your point, Justin, this isn't even their first attempt to figure out the enterprise with this kind of solution. Not a lot of people remember it now, but in 2018, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase made a big, big news that, you know, kind of was shaking up, you know, the health care field when they announced a joint venture called Haven that was going to see all of them working together to kind of figure out a similar kind of system to Amazon care, like how to innovate with offering health care services to employees, you know, combine those three companies have like over two million employees. You know, so like so like like three massive enterprises were going to try and figure out how to improve enterprise health care. And they called that quits in early 2021. I think right at the start of the year, they announced that that was all shutting down kind of as they were starting to ramp up the rollout of Amazon care. So I, you know, I think Justin, I think that actually proves your point in that this is something where there are so many entrenched interests. There are so many different considerations that it's like this is not something that they need to study this from multiple different angles. The weird thing with that statement from Lindsey, though, is that it wasn't able to create something for a large enterprise customer. Amazon is like the largest, one of the largest enterprise customers. I mean, like if they can't figure that out with dog fooding it on themselves to make it a compelling offering, that to me is like tells me, is it even possible for them to do that? And they're going to keep trying. But part of that is the regulations. You know, even for telehealth, you have to be in the same physical area to get your telehealth professional to talk to you, or you have to lie and say that you're in the area that you're in. There are rules to this. And I would say that they probably are archaic at this point. There's no reason why I if I have a telehealth physician for which I like I should be able to contact them wherever I am in the world just like I can a therapist or an accountant or anything like that. But, you know, there's a reason why when they're because they're they're looking to sell this to gigantic businesses, businesses that have employees in many states and many countries, if you can't create a one-size-fits-all offering for that, then it is a problem. So Justin, if anyone's listening to this saying, well, I'm outside the US, what is going like, why would telehealth have anything to do with where you are physically? Like, I mean, what, what is the answer there? We have rules in America and I don't know what the rules are outside of America, but that you even telehealth is an extension of your physical relationship with your health care provider. Yeah. Be that a primary care position or hospital. New information for a lot of folks. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, when we were, yeah, when we were in, in Europe recently, my wife took a wrong step down a train station, twisted her knee and I was like, oh, well, why don't you talk to your telehealth person? And she's like, oh, no, I can't. I have to wait until I get back or I have to lie and just tell a bunch of Germans to start doing their best American accent. She was too far away. Too far away. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, the, with Amazon here, it seems like they moved, you know, it's always when you want to build on a new feature, it's always a classic to be buy or build and they've tried build twice and now it definitely seems like, you know, because one medical is offering almost the same service. They don't offer the nurses coming to your home that you go to a, you know, you go to a doctor after the telehealth visit, but it's very much the same service and it's solved. They have the infrastructure already in place on the ground in the areas that they operate in, Justin. So they're, they're solving a lot of the problems that they were probably running into with, with Amazon care by buying into that. We'll see if they run into regulatory scrutiny, if they continue to make acquisitions though, in that area for sure. All right. Well, in these increasingly partisan times, finally, we have an issue. Both parties can rally behind paying news organizations. Turns out a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress. We will see. They put their names on a piece of paper. That's something a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress introduced a new version of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act designed to remove legal obstacles to news organization's ability to negotiate collectively and secure fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that regularly access news content without paying for its value. They're, they're all for slogans here with this legislation. This comes after a prior version of the bill stalled out last year. This revised version would allow publishers with fewer than 1500 full time employees to collectively negotiate with large platforms over access to news content with publishers able to demand arbitration if talks stall out after six months. This would apply to platforms with over 50 million US users that have at least a billion monthly active users globally or a market cap of over 550 billion. So what we're talking about here is not other media outfits, but rather the tech platforms that often access this. So that would mean that this law would apply to Google and Metta, but not Twitter. Google and Metta have offered payments to publishers in the past, but generally only through patchworks of partnerships. Google has done this most recently through its news showcase program, reaching agreements with publishers in Canada, France, the UK, Japan, India, many other countries. Those are some of the big ones. Metta has made deals with publishers in several countries to pay for content in its news tab. Although after its recent revenue dip in its earnings for the first time, it reportedly told US publishers it would stop paying for news content to run there. Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament passed the news media bargaining code last year that required platforms like Metta and Google to pay for use of news content. You know, Justin, this seems to be, you know, we we we covered a lot of the updates when everything was going down. And you know, Facebook and Google were playing their their brinksmanship in Australia over this. I'm curious, do you think this legislation has legs this time and will this have any impact on the news industry in the US? Well, this certainly has some dueling flavors in terms of the issues that various parties like to talk about. On one hand, Republicans are not going to be on the side of the lame stream media finding another revenue source. But also if it means that the big tech monopoly state, as they are want to call it, can have another reason to pay out, then maybe they could be a swage to do it. What's funny about this particular situation is, as you mentioned, with with Metta already pulling back on paying US publishers, considering that the ad markets for both of these companies are not what they were five years ago, you have to wonder exactly what the fair market price would be going forward. And while certainly any kind of media enterprise, which has also experienced the downshift in display advertising, is going to be thirsting for another revenue model. I don't quite know what material benefit to the bottom line it would have. I mean, certainly the like I was thinking about this in terms of the value, right? Like, OK, so like the question is like, why is why is this building being flooded out here in the first place? And I think even if, you know, there there is certainly on the right, you know, questions about the utility of, as you said, the lamestream media that some form of media, right, is like good, right? Like, I think I think so, yes. And so and so this is this is a way for for for Congress to say, OK, if we pass this, we don't have to do any kind of public, we don't have to expand public funding. We don't have to raise a tax. We can go after not go after we can use the the money that big tech firms are getting in monetizing this content already and give this back to the publishers. I guess my question is like the alternative seems to be we do some other tax and then we we we I don't I don't I don't know why I don't know why you're going there as as as a binary to this. I mean, certainly no, I'm sorry, I don't I don't mean to position it as such. I guess my my question is is like if this doesn't happen, like what is the what is the course of action, I guess, for for publishers? Is it just cutting individual deals with these platforms without? Yeah, like, yeah, no, it's the exact same thing that's happening now, right? And like this would be the government mandating that these larger tech platforms have to play ball with these guys. And if they don't agree with the terms, then they're going to have to agree with the mandatory arbitration. So this is creating a protected preferential agreement for these smaller publishers because the big tech companies have so much money and so much influence and so much reach and so many eyeballs that they are unfairly represented in these situations. So if this doesn't happen, then we're basically where we are right now where they are the 800 pound gorilla. However, you know, whether or not Google and Meta will want to be more friendly with these companies is a different story, especially as they might find themselves in a situation where they do want more reasons for people to stay on their platform because, you know, Facebook just reported that people left their platform for the first time a few months ago. Well, you probably have thoughts about this. And if you do, you can join the conversation in our Discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's talk about expensive speakers, shall we? The verges sources say that Sonos began work on a completely new high end speaker called the Optimo 2, roughly the size of the Sonos 5 speaker, if you're familiar with the Sonos line, featuring drivers around the device for immersive Dolby Atmos audio and mics to fine tune audio within a room. It'll support playback over Wi-Fi and also Bluetooth, as well as possibly USB-C line in. I would be interested in that. Sonos also began work on the Optimo 1 and 1SL to act as smaller satellite speakers with the Optimo 2. Again, this is, these are rumors, but it's, it's, it's a, this is what the verge is saying. Yeah. The verge seems to have some good sources when it comes to Sonos leaks and they say they've viewed some early work in progress images of the Optimo 2, which is an evolution in design compared to Sonos' existing products, thinking like the Sonos 1, the 5, Arc, Beam and Roam. The verge describes it as, in case in a funky dual angled shell, the new device will be positioned as the best sounding speaker that Sonos has ever produced. According to people, the verge, say, are familiar with the products, Optimo 2 includes twice as much RAM and as much as eight times as much flash memory as any previous Sonos speaker. Calling it a powerhouse, clearly designed to kind of have a long road of software support and kind of potentially having, you know, feature add or continue to be relevant in the ecosystem for a long time. Yeah. From, from, from what we've gleaned here, what Sonos is hoping for is that the Optimo 2 will do what former speakers have not been able to do, support music playback over Wi-Fi, but also Bluetooth audio. So far, Bluetooth playback has been limited to portable hardware like the Move and the Roam. So Sonos is also considering USB-C line-in playback for the device, which would make it the only Sonos speaker aside from the five to offer those capabilities. I am a Sonos person. I've got, let's see, one, two, three, four, five Sonos speakers that are active in my home right now. Um, there are good things and bad things about, you know, the Sonos ecosystem. I use it with Amazon's ecosystem to, you know, to, you know, for voice controlled things. The, the sound is unparalleled. It's great. You could also say that about the home pod. Apple says, Oh, it's great. You know, I mean, it's, it's the best thing you could buy. And it's, you know, really expensive for that reason. How many did they sell? Well, they're many, you know, not, not, not compared to, to, to Hi-Fi levels of sales. Yeah. Yeah. The, the tens of people that will be excited for this. Yeah. I don't want to be the, the, the anti-audio file guy, because I, I know that that is a space with a lot of passion. And I know that, that there are, like, if you want to go in on your Hi-Fi setup, it's going to sound spectacular to you. But I think in the, when you can do the consumer electronic space, I always think about Bose, right? Like Bose was like this, this market, like they, they had commercials that told me they had waves that would make everything sound amazing. And audio files would tell you it was terrible, but you spent $500 on your radio. So it sounded a lot better. Like, well, it was also like ahead of the game when it came to like noise canceling, I mean, noise canceling, like lots of companies can do that. But those kind of championed that in the early days. And they made, they made their bones on the idea of selling two audio files or rather people that would like to think of themselves as audio files. The audio files themselves, as, as Rich mentioned, were, were, you know, very anti, anti-Bose. And I will never, I will never slander the audio files because by definition, they're always listening. If you do, they're going to come back for you. Years are wide open on those. Shuttleheads, but my, my, my point is that like, you can say you have the best sounding speaker and that's very easy to do because anyone says it. Apple said it when they came out with the home pod. They said, you know, they were using all these mics to beam form everything and make it sound substantially better. It's very easy to say you have the best audio sound. And unless you are like dealing with, you are an audio file where you have attuned your ear. It's like very specifically like, listen to that. There is a certain threshold where if I paid a certain amount of money for a product and it sounds pretty good, I'm inclined to think it sounds very good, right? So it's like, so my point is, my point is a lot of like the reason, like I feel like Sonos is going to have a hard time marketing this as opposed to a lot of their more mid market offerings that they've really been pushing in the market. Supposedly had their sub mini that's been delayed now for into next year. But a lot of their stuff is like a little bit more of a general consumer price point as opposed to premium. And I think that's because Google, Apple, Amazon have all kind of figured out like we can say it all sounds really good. No one's comparing these sitting in a room other than the five reviewers that, you know, a couple tech blogs. And if you hear it and you spend a certain amount of money and it works really well with all of your ecosystem, that's way more valuable than like what the trouble response is. I don't I don't agree. And I think that it's because we have a lot of speakers that say they sound good and then don't sound great, that Sonos should return to what brought them to the dance. And that is higher end priced smart speakers that fairly seamlessly integrate via Wi-Fi like Sarah. I have three of them in my house. I have been a Sonos, a devotee for a while now. And I would love another big flagship speaker. I would move my, my other one somewhere else in the house. And we would continue to build out gorgeous lush sound that would play at the exact same time. Sarah, let me ask you this design wise. Sonos has always kind of had fairly clean design. The one thing that made me wince a little bit was the funky case. The dual angled shell? Yeah, I don't know what the hell that's supposed to mean. And for a company that has really made its reputation on very clean, very beautiful speakers. The idea of funky dual angled shells is something that made me wince a little bat. Yeah, a funky shell. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if I, if I could as a very much not design, you know, a person who should be speaking of this, but still, I will. If Sonos is kind of like, well, okay, we made sort of like the like fun speakers that now all speakers look like now, and we were kind of at the forefront of that. Let's kind of make things a little different. They still look better than all of them, in my opinion. They still look better than all the others. 100%, 100% agree with you. But you know, if someone's like, well, I have $100, not $300. So I'm going to get this, this particular speaker and it's going to sound like pretty good for my podcasts, you know, and I think that that, that counts for a lot. I think that Sonos is, again, it is in that if you want to be kind of a diva about audio, Sonos is your jam. Um, and I sort of consider myself one of those people at the same time. How often am I really like pumping the jams to the point where I'm like, yeah, this is the best speaker ever, rather than some other speaker that I could have bought. Google Home Speaker probably pretty good in that sense. So, you know, grain of salt. Although now that it'll have line in, we're going to get turntables hooked up to Sonos. And then we let's circle back. Yeah, and talk about that because I've got some vinyl upstairs that I never use. Well, well, let's, let's turn to travel for a second because many people are traveling recently and kind of wondering how do I travel, you know, appropriately? Chris Christensen is our travel guru and says, if you're planning and communicating across time zones, it can be confusing for parties on both ends of the conversation. We've all been there. Thankfully, Chris has a few tips on straightening out the time zone confusion. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech and Travel Minute. I had a frustrating week this week around time zones. I was trying to communicate with the recruiter. I kept sending them that it would be 9am PDT Pacific Daylight Time and they kept saying, yep, yep, 9am Pacific Standard Time, PST. Those are two different time zones and they're one hour apart. Now, no one right now that I know of is using PST, but if, however, she was talking about Mountain Standard Time versus Mountain Daylight Time, both of those are in use in the US at the same time. Arizona never goes to daylight savings time. If you're trying to communicate across time zones, two easy tricks. One is just set up in your calendar, send an invite for whatever time you mean and let the calendar do the conversion for the person at the other end. Or if you want to know what time it is some place, you can just Google it. You can say 9am PT to Paris and it will tell you the time in Paris that corresponds to 9am Pacific Time. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Oh, how I know, how I know the plight, how I know the plight of the time zone. Even some insane PST, I'm like, it's PDT. Just leave the middle initial out. Never, it's always a mistake. It's Pacific Time, it's Mountain Time, it's Central Time, it's Eastern Time. I never get it right. To Chris's point, it depends on where you live. So yeah, good thing to remember and thank you always to Chris for giving us good tips on how we can travel more smartly. All right, let's go on to the mail bag. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send emails. We got a couple of emails today. Let's start with Russell who says, I've pointed out from time to time how things I learned listening to DTNS help me at work. That's awesome, Russell. Russell says, this happened today. I was in a meeting with a client discussing adding EV charging stations to one of their facilities. Based on the discussion on yesterday's show, I had learned that they're actually right to charge states. And I was able to use this fact in the meeting, which was helpful to the clients. And this is exactly why the hive mind works. Thank you so much, Russell. That's awesome. Yeah, and then in the same vein, Sam wrote in in response with the right to charge laws conversation. And he said, listeners should be aware that some states also have rights to solar laws. So a homeowner's association can't stop you from putting up solar panels on your house, even in Texas. Oh, gosh, even in Texas. That's what he said in Texas, even in Texas. Even in Texas, speaking of Texas, Justin Rubber Young, I don't know how you feel about solar panels on your house in Texas. But I know that you care about a lot of things and our show being one of them, but many other many other things that let folks know where they can keep up with your work. I know that well meaning but irritating 20 somethings come to my door about three times a week to try to sell me solar panels. So I guess they're popular somewhere. Did you know that you can get them effectively free? No, I'm gonna ask you to leave. I'm gonna ask you to leave my house. Okay, but I want you, the dear listener to do is give my podcast, We're Not Wrong, a chance that is the panel program with myself, Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton. This week, we discussed the expectations that you have for leadership in the wake of the Finnish Prime Minister scandal where she was caught dancing and singing drunk on Twitter and allegedly, I think she said she was drunk. She said she was not on drugs and then took a drug test to prove it. Although we don't know when that video was taken. And I force everybody else in the panel to say if she was on drugs, name what drugs you think she's on to those answers on We're Not Wrong right now available now. Yeah, I had some ideas, but I will save it for your show. Yeah, we can we can not not the time or place, but I'll DM you. 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