 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon launches a crime fighting unit. Goldman Sachs won't let you use their font to criticize them, and Google offers to pay publishers. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 25th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from LA County, I am the show's producer, Roger Shane. And the fact that Justin was in Oakland the last week on the show and is in Oakland this week on the show shouldn't sound weird to you, but it is. And he explains it all on good day internet. If you want to find out about his journey, his COVID tests, his staring at his heel, got to become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Rank 1 Computing said Wednesday will add legal means and look at other ways to prevent its software from being misused by clients. Rank 1 Software was used in the mistaken arrest of a black man in Detroit for 30 hours back in January. In addition, Wayne County prosecutor Kim Worthy said the police lacked any corroborating evidence to justify the arrest and apologized. Michigan State Police and Rank 1 Guidelines state facial recognition should not be used as the basis of an arrest. Apple introduced a way for web developers to support Face ID and Touch ID to log on to websites. That is, of course, in Safari. Face ID and Touch ID were built into the web off, so devs can build authentication using the FIDO2 spec. Technology is already supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. Sony announced a bug bounty program Wednesday in partnership with Hacker 1 that'll pay you up to $50,000 if you find a major vulnerability in the PS4. The bounty program also pays between $103,000 for PlayStation Network issue reports and $550,000 for PS4 issues. The Hey! email app from Basecamp is now open to anyone to try without needing an invite code, which is just a day after I got my exclusive invite email. The Apple app is now updated to include the feature that allows it to stay in the app store free temporarily 14-day email addresses. Remember, that's the way Hey! is getting around this. The update also includes support for multi-user corporate accounts. Comcast is the first ISP to join Firefox's Trusted Recursive Resolver program. In addition to encrypted DNS, the program requires ISPs to pledge not to block or filter domains by default unless specifically required to by law enforcement and not to, quote, retain, sell, or transfer, and quote, information from DNS queries to third parties. A bipartisan bill to overhaul Section 230's safe harbor provisions in the United States has been proposed by Senators Brian Schatz and John Thune. The Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act, yes, the PACT Act, would require an acceptable use policy, quarterly reports, and a defined complaint system. Sites would have 24 hours to remove content deemed illegal once a site is aware of it. NASA is working with the European Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency to collect and organize satellite-based data into a dashboard to help monitor the impacts of COVID-19. The dashboard combines photographic, air quality, temperature, and climate satellite data operated by each of the agencies. The COVID-19 Earth Observation Data, as it's known, shows global changes in water quality or climate change or economic activity, even agriculture, so that policymakers, health authorities, city planners, and others can study both short and long-term impacts of the ongoing global crisis. Google is adding the ability to do group video calls to its smart displays. You can do a group call of up to 100 people on Google Meet or 32 people on Google Duo on smart displays that use Google Assistant like the Nest Hub Max, Lenovo Smart Display, JBL LinkView, and more. The features will not roll out to compatible, sorry, the features will roll out to compatible displays next week. G Suite Meetings will also come to the Nest Hub Max in beta in the next few weeks. And Volvo and Waymo announced they're partnering on a new Level 4 Autonomous Electric Vehicle Platform coming for you ride-hailing services. Level 4, of course, refers to no driver engagement while in a geofenced area or under a specific set of road, weather, and traffic conditions. It's essentially what Waymo is operating without drivers in Arizona right now. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Google Photos. Well, tech sites are as excited as I am to be out of quarantine about these Google Photo redesigns. The app now opens up in a tab called Photos. At the top of the tab are Memories, an archive of older photos, including a section called Recent Highlights. Below that are Recent Photos in reverse chronological order. Google will enlarge photos it thinks are more interesting as you scroll. The search tab shows people and pets that appear most often. And below that, a Places section that lets you explore your photos based on where you took them. There's also a Things View that tries to collect photos about interests like baking. The final tab called Library has the utilities like printing, scanning, et cetera. The update is rolling out to Android and iOS as we speak. They say that, but I'm looking at both my Android and my iOS phone and I ain't seen it yet. Yeah, I don't have it either. I've been refreshing every hour or so. It's, which sucks because it'd be a lot more fun to talk about the changes if I could see them firsthand. But I actually kind of, it's not that I didn't realize Google Photos existed but I didn't realize how many of my photos were on Google Photos. It wasn't really, I was backing up to Flickr for a while and Flickr sort of a mess now. And I back up to Dropbox. And I guess at some point I was also backing up to Google Photos because I don't know a third place to back up all my iPhone photos. So there's actually quite a bit of stuff in there and it'll be nice to see it organized differently. I really like Google Photos. I think the machine learning that they employ there works really well. I did one of those printed books of our trip to France where it picked the photos and I could go in and tweak and edit it but it picked them really well. So I'm interested to see what interests it thinks I have. That'll be, I'm curious about that. And the ability to like find all the pictures of my dog Sawyer or Ray or even Django in these photos will be fun. That already exists to a certain extent but it sounds like they're cleaning up the interface and making it even better. Yeah, you know, I just, I wonder, I don't know what the market share is for Google Photos. Obviously it's pretty big. A lot of people on iOS use it. Yeah, I mean, I would assume so because obviously it has a gigantic install with Android and also, you know, in my opinion of the iOS experience is rarely better than iOS stability with Google software or sorry, Google web services. So I hope it just provides another opportunity for people to be able to use their photos. Although I do think that we're probably due for another just large idea of exactly what we're doing with all this stuff and how we wanna use it and how it can interact with our lives. Well, speaking of interacting with your life, especially if you're an advertiser, TikTok launched a brand and ad platform called TikTok for Business is the home for all marketing offerings. Businesses can access TikTok ad formats like Top View, the ad that shows up when you first launch TikTok. Other products include three to five second brand takeovers in feed videos up to 60 seconds, hashtag challenges, hashtag plus, which is the challenge with a shopping feature. There's also branded effects which lets companies offer their brand during the creation of a video as a 2D or 3D or even an AR effect called brand scan. TikTok is also testing a creator marketplace for branded content similar to YouTube's brand connects. Yeah, this is TikTok. First of all, trying to make it easy for people to give them their money saying let's create a really like centralized place for you to buy ads. But it's also TikTok stepping up and saying we are at the table with Facebook, Google, Twitter, et cetera. We are ready to take your advertising and we're showing that we're serious about this. It's not just an experiment anymore. I don't know if that's going to work. Now I know that TikTok's hot. I know that TikTok is something that they want to make it as easy as possible for you to spend money with them. But what some of those platforms that you mentioned have an advantage in are they are tech space. Whenever you add video as a component to it unless you are programmatically creating compelling or interesting videos for people to upload, you are always going to have a, you're not going to be able to scale at the level that a Facebook or even a Twitter or a Google can where all you need to do is type a few words and that's the effort you need to put in as an advertiser. It just gets so many of those low dollar campaigns. But TikTok does have the idea that at least in terms of the user experience, they know who their customers are better than their customers know themselves and therefore could theoretically push the right ad to them. Well, I think the better comparison is Snapchat, right? Because these ads are in the experience. That's the difference. Facebook ads are still kind of intrusive. Twitter ads also tend to blend in but then sometimes they don't. But what TikTok can say is we are part of the creation. We are just like a Snapchat lens could be branded R2D3D or now augmented reality effects can be branded as people are creating TikToks. There have been examples of people creating TikTok videos that are imitations of ads. They saw ads that went viral. So I don't know. I mean, it doesn't scale as easy as text. You're not wrong about that but I think they've got something pretty good especially with that user base. And I would say their best case scenario is we are Snapchat plus plus plus not Facebook or Google. Amazon has created a counterfeit crimes unit to try to keep knockoff products off Amazon. The unit includes former federal prosecutors, investigators and data analysts and we'll use data from both Amazon and external sources quote and open source intelligence and leverage on the ground assets to connect the dots between targets. Amazon says it will pursue civil litigation and aid in investigations by brands and law enforcement. They're working with these big textile makers, these big Louis Vuittons and high-end brands to fight this stuff now in partnership to the point where Amazon in this announcement sort of pushed it back on government to say you need to give us better tools to work with these folks to catch the scoff laws. Oh, Amazon. I mean, it just goes to show you what an issue counterfeit products are on Amazon. I love how, you know, to crackerjack crime team within Amazon because we really care about this stuff. However, I mean, what other choices does the company have really? It is a huge problem. It's been a whack-a-mole problem up to now. If you take it more seriously with some actual department, is it going to get better? I mean, it's probably not gonna go away completely but it's, what else are they gonna do? Well, I'll take what they have been doing, which is telling vendors, we'll get to it. We're working on it. Don't worry, we'll take care of it. And sometimes they do, but it's slow and the communication's bad. What this division does is give a central hub with a name where people aren't just, you know, emailing into the general abyss of Amazon. They know exactly where to go and maybe there will be stages to this. It is my opinion that this comes now with the announcement that it comes with because they are going to face antitrust and a lot of it is going to be because vendors, big and small, have many problems with the Amazon Marketplace. Counterfeit is probably the biggest version of like, well, why are you allowing other people to just rip us off wholesale and optimize their SEO so they're literally stealing our traffic and making identical listings. But this kind of vendor friendly move, I don't think that it is a coincidence that this happens in a close proximity to when I believe we are going to see antitrust. Oh yeah, no, this certainly doesn't hurt their push against antitrust investigations, but it's not at the core of them. The core is they let third parties on and those third parties create a product and then Amazon sees it do well and creates their own. In fact, a kind of counterfeiting in a way, even though it's not counterfeit because they're not making it the same brand, this is easier for Amazon to do. In fact, this doesn't help the smaller third party vendors all that much because this is targeted towards big luxury brands and they definitely want to keep those folks happy because they don't want those folks jumping in on those antitrust complaints, but I don't know if this addresses the problem but it doesn't hurt. No, no, no. I don't think that it addresses the problem head on that they're going to have with antitrust, but they can have a choice to either have a happier vendor community or a very angry vendor community. And right now, the Amazon vendor community is happy that the money's coming in. The money is so big that they deal with a platform and a company that at times they can very much hate and this is part of the problem is that from what I have heard Amazon vendors both in the big side and the small side, if somebody else is ripping off your product and you lose days, days actually matter against your bottom line. Yeah, the problem is scale, right? Easy solution to this is to vet every single vendor and every single product, but Amazon doesn't want to spend the time and money to do that. So they're spending the time and money to catch people on the other end, right? Because that is actually better scale if you just go after the people who are breaking the law rather than have to look at every single, I mean, there are millions and millions of products every day being added to Amazon. It's a similar situation to moderating against abusive or misinformation on social networks just with products. Moving on, Facebook announced Thursday that it is introducing a notification screen to warn users that if they share content that's more than 90 days old, the notification will give them a choice to go back or click through and post it anyway. Old story shared out of context can lead to the spread of misinformation and Facebook is also considering other kinds of notifications, including pop-ups that steer users to public health sources if they are posting about COVID-19. This will keep, yeah, I mean, and it'll help in some way. I mean, there's gonna be some, however small, portion of people who go, is it old? Yeah, I thought this was like posted today. I mean, that gets me sometimes. You know, when I look at an article and I think it's a lot more current than it is and even if it's not wrong information, it's been much updated since then, so that's good. You know, it's not gonna stop the spread of misinformation, but anything helps. Well, I think that the dangerous point for this is when you're not the one finding it, but rather you are the ones just sharing it. And what Facebook doesn't wanna do is hamper your ability to share it. So they're gonna try and cut it off at the root. And this is something that's very, very interesting. Tomorrow on Politics, Politics, Politics, I'm gonna talk to a friend of mine, Pete Friedman, who runs a website in Dallas that serves the Dallas arts and culture scene called Central Track. And he has recently seen massive traffic, gigantic traffic on a story about how the Dallas City Council was going to make it illegal to have police officers run into protesters with their cars. The problem is twofold. Number one, that article is from two years ago. And number two, the proposal that was going through whatever body it was going through was shot down. So this has no bearing on our modern era of police and protesting. And yet it became I think 40% of their traffic overnight because of exactly this situation that could have been rectified if the first person to put it up got a, oh, you know this is two years old, which normally is what happens to everybody who shares it in their comment section about five minutes afterward anyway. Well, and even if somebody was resharing it, they're still gonna get this notification. And that will help too, because there could be somebody who's like, I don't care if it's two years old, I'm mad. I'm gonna share it anyway. And this will maybe slow it down from being shared because now other people are like, oh, I didn't realize that this was two years old. Yeah, that's a great example. Well, in this world, you have a choice of a lot of fonts, but you should be careful which font you choose. Because if you choose, Goldman Sands made by Goldman Sachs. Yes, they released a typeface called Goldman Sands. You may be sued for breach of contract. This particular typeface is somewhat unremarkable since there are a set of characters that Goldman Sachs is designed for the needs of digital finance because fonts do that, I guess. If you are a font nerd, it's X high, it is larger, it's optics are balanced, it's letter shapes are more open. So you might say, this is actually kind of nice. What isn't so nice, or at least open, is the license which states, quote, the user may not use the licensed font software to disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs. Which maybe you don't care about because another term says, Goldman Sachs can terminate your license to use the typeface for any reason or no reason at all. Like I'm almost curious why they put any other provisions in there. Cause if they have like, look, we can suspend your use for whatever we want. We can suspend it for no reason. Kind of covers everything. Also, this typeface is for Goldman Sachs to use on its own stuff, right? It's a way for them to say, we have a distinctive typeface that we think is easier to read financial information. We did a lot of work on the numbers, make it easy to scan. And anybody who works with Goldman Sachs on partner materials probably wants to be able to download it so they can put it in their partner materials. And that's why it's available to download why they would go to this extent to put such a restrictive term of service on it. I don't know. We also have our article that's in our show notes for the show is from The Verge. But there were several outlets that picked this up this morning and all of them used the font to write disparaging sentences about Goldman Sachs. You know, just to show us what it looks like. Come on, folks, you know why this is here. Lawyers, this is what lawyers get paid for. Lawyers get paid handsomely to write that sentence, not because they're going to enforce it, because they want to have it covered. And when you're on retainer, you might as well show that you're doing your work by the word anyway. To be honest, I can understand saying that, you know, you shouldn't use it to suggest you're affiliated or endorsed by Goldman Sachs. But disparaging is literally just an excuse for everybody to write all the nasty things you never want to say about, you know, Wall Street or banking and in this company in particular in the most open, lettered, optically balanced way possible. Our letters are open. Our terms are not, basically. So after, I don't know, a minute or two of consideration, we've decided not to switch DailyTechNewShow.com to Goldman Sachs. It just seems a little restrictive. Yeah. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, you can be unrestricted with the rest of your time. Subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, folks, we've been talking for a long time about the push to get Google to pay to index news articles in their news section. This is usually not about the search. Everybody's cool with the search, but a lot, sometimes not sometimes, yes, but it's always focused on Google news to the point that Google actually stopped operating Google news in Spain. When Spain put a law that said you not only have to pay publishers to use news in Google news, you can't not use their links. And so Google is like, well, if that's the case, we're just not gonna do the product. This has been happening in a lot of countries and Google has finally come up with their solution. They're creating a licensing program that will pay publishers for content. Executives talk to Axios about this program ahead of its formal launch later this year. So consider this a preview. Google's like casting its bread upon the waters to just see what the reaction is ahead of the launch later this year. My guess is so they can fine-tune that launch to address any concerns. The program has two main parts. One, select publishers. So not every publisher, but select publishers will be paid to have content in a new news product. This isn't just Google news, this is a new function and that function will offer an enhanced storytelling experience within both Google news and Android Discover. So this is Google saying, we're not gonna pay you just to index your site, that's silly, but we will do more with your news, we'll make a enhanced experience. We really don't know what that means yet, but we'll make this enhanced experience and that's worth paying for because we'll probably want extra access to your content. We wanna be able to do things with it. We couldn't do just by spidering your site. So that makes sense. We're gonna pay you to do more with your content. And number two, Google will foot the bill for access to otherwise to pay walled content on the publisher site. So if Wall Street Journal was part of this, for instance, if you were in Google news in this new product area, you could click on a Wall Street Journal story, be taken to Wall Street Journal, but not have to log in and the Wall Street Journal would get paid for that and they could still hit you up for a subscription but you'd still get to read their story. So that's Google saying like, let's help get people into your paywall we'll pay the toll to get them in there. Publishers will be selected from various perspectives. So they're trying to say, look, it's not gonna just be one political perspective. We're gonna try to balance it out. They wouldn't comment on particular sites, but they said, look, we're gonna try to use various perspectives. And they say they wanna focus on local and regional publishers, not national and worldwide. Google has reached agreements already with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil, and is in talks with publishers in about a half dozen other countries. Now, the short answer to what I'm about to ask Justin is, no, the regulators will keep coming for them, but how much, Justin and Sarah, do we think this will help Google's case and maybe take some of the heat off them? Well, of those first three that you mentioned, Germany, Australia and Brazil, we can really just tell Australia and Brazil to take a powder because in that particular conversation, you are mostly talking about European regulators that have had the issue with Google News indexing. There's a big push in Australia too though, which is why they put it there. But yeah, no, the longer fight has been in Europe. The longer fight. The question, I mean, will this satisfy European EU regulators? No, nothing satisfies EU regulators. In fact, it has proven a statistical impossibility. Is this a middle ground for which publications that are currently going through an ad crisis can get a little bit of extra money and maybe implore their governments to slow down or slow walk some of these regulatory hurdles that are being put in front of Google News? Maybe. I think that the idea that Google is going to solve this by paying money directly to the publishers is an interesting one. The next level conversation will be how much do some of these paywalled websites want to even do a per article, pay the troll toll to get in on these specific issues because there's a philosophy specifically with some of these American big paywalled organizations that they don't want anybody creating any kind of hole or bundle in the paywall. You pay to read the thing and we get our relationship with you and that's that. Well, and it depends. We don't know the details of how they'll implement it. The devil's in the details there. Is this a bundle? Is the user going to have to pay to access this thing? Or does this give you an account as if you were paid somehow? All of those are questions that need to be answered. Yeah, I mean, as we all do, reading all sorts of news from all sorts of different publications, some are completely paywalled. You get a few articles a month and then you got to open another browser if you want to keep reading articles. There are worker rounds anyway for people who don't want to pay for news. How much something in this upcoming Google news product, how many articles from the Wall Street Journal say would be covered? They're not going to pay for the whole thing because then people just go to Google news. It remains to be seen how this does roll out and what the relationship between Google and a publication really is because it's going to end up so that somewhere the newspaper is going to say, well, hold on a second, this all sounded really good until it didn't and we're not happy with the product that you have now because we want more money. That was the problem with Facebook. Facebook's still fighting this where they basically require publications to rework their product, to put it on Facebook and get paid for it and publishers started to realize they weren't getting the return for it. Then you have Apple news which is saying, look, we'll cut you in based on what people read. So they're paying us and then we'll pay you out of what they're paying us but that's what Justin was saying is like, yeah, but what's valuable is the relationship. So that's why I said, I'll be interested to see Google's take on this because I don't think it's going to be what Facebook did at all. I doubt it'll be exactly what Apple did, but maybe there'll be some kind of subscription service there and then who's going to want to take it up? Will the Wall Street Journal even be part of this? It's not a regional publisher. It's a niche publisher if you consider it a financial news, I guess, but I'm very curious who they get in here and then getting back to the original question, will in Brazil, Australia and Europe, will this cause the publishers like Der Spiegel? Der Spiegel is one that's already on board to go, you know what, we're not going to bug the regulators anymore about this. We're good, we like this situation and will that take the pressure off the regulators to the point where they won't be pushing these more extreme measures that they have been? Yeah, I think, look, it's Google making an effort. Well, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. We like your efforts too. Submit stories and vote on other stories. Let the good stuff float to the top. A Daily Tech News Show.Reddit.com. We did not pay anyone to send us an email in our mailbag. No, we didn't. Mike just did it because he felt like it. Mike says he's been in the same four walls he's been in for the past four months. Mike, I hear that. He says, my sense, and this is a facial recognition story that we talked about yesterday. This is Mike responding to it. My sense is that a law enforcement officer that uses facial recognition fails to confirm the suspect in front of them actually looks like the person in the original photo or video, which is what facial recognition is supposed to do, but humans as well, is now using new tools for old problems. I don't think ending the use of facial recognition stops biased or racist officers from picking up the wrong suspect, but rather results in that officer casting an even broader net and hassling or arresting people without links to an alleged crime. My hope is that we demand improved protocols for using facial recognition as just one piece of evidence an officer must use amongst several other pieces to effect an arrest. With improvements to facial recognition, I would hope that the police would improve their rates of arresting the right suspect, get criminals off the streets, thus resulting in fewer crimes and fewer reasons to potentially arrest the wrong suspects. I hope we don't judge the tool by the improper way that people use it. Improving both the tools, the rules for using the tools and the people using them could help reduce crime, improper arrests and might even reduce tensions between police and the communities they serve. Yeah, that is well said, Mike. I thought this was a really good way of putting it. I mean, those problems are not easy to solve, but that is the right way. Facial recognition could be helpful, but it has to meet these three tests that Mike's setting up here, right? You have to have protocols that will stop improper use that are really effective at stopping proper use. As we saw, protocols were in place with the facial recognition in Detroit and didn't stop improper use, and you have to make sure that the tools no longer have biases that affect the results, and you have to actually make sure that you're using it to arrest criminals and all of that. So, well said, Mike. Thank you for that. Thanks, Mike. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Mark Gibson, Dr. Carmine M. Bailey and Mike McLaughlin. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young, who's back in Oakland after a wild week. Mm-hmm. And in fact, if you would like to go and take a listen, both last Friday and last Monday, or this Monday's episode of Politics, Politics, Politics were created in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the Trump rally. And I know that this is an apolitical platform, but I would dare say that if you find yourself on the side of the aisle, that oftentimes would be very frustrated by what you hear at such political gatherings, I would ask you to go ahead and give it a listen. The biggest feedback that I've gotten on those episodes were that people who are staunchly opposed to the president and oftentimes find themselves very frustrated by his supporters found, if not agreement, certainly, context and a little bit more of a three-dimensional view of some of your political opponents. And I've been, I was, I'm very happy to hear that because it's what I try to do in giving people a non-narrative driven picture of what the front lines of this political contest is. Yeah, I'll second that. I forgot how good Justin is that this, because I only listened to him and not the outlets that benefit by outraging you. And I was like, oh yeah, no, this seems like a really, this is what I would expect from reasonable people who support the president to say, versus what you get, which is the other outlets trying to find the most outrageous examples that they can show. And I value that, I really do. Yeah, politics, politics, politics, politics. Trust me, I watch people with cameras walk up to the people that were screaming the loudest and waving the biggest flags. And you can realize very, very quickly how the perception becomes reality. Also, Sarah, you just finished trying out the Oculus Quest for three months, not that you're finished playing with the Oculus Quest, but you have now lived with it and we've got a new live with it in the Patreon feed. Is VR still in its early days or is it unexpected fun? Find out Sarah's opinion and get the full review at patreon.com slash DTNS. And of course, you can keep supporting us at patreon.com slash DTNS as well. Also over at patreon.com slash DTNS, we have a poll of sorts. You don't really have anything to choose from, but we just want some suggestions for what I should live with next because every time I think I've done it all, somebody comes up with a really good idea and then I get a new gadget and now I'm like this VR freak and three months ago I never would have said that. So, you know, it's a wild world out there, but really appreciate your submissions because it kind of helps us, you know, get our minds going. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com Write us early and often. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 20 30 UTC. Please join us if you can and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Robert Herron's gonna talk about outdoor projectors with us tomorrow and Len Peralta will be here to illustrate. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.