 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Mike Acons, Norm Physicus, and Chris Allen. Coming up on DTNS today, Roku and Walmart are going the extra mile. How much fun are EVs to drive really? And how can ratings reviews get better? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, June 17th, 2022 from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From north of the wall, I'm technical producer Amos. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We've got all sorts of stuff to talk to you about, including, yeah, making those ratings reviews better and EVs. What's good and what isn't good if you're kind of a car nut? But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Snap confirmed that it's internally testing a subscription service called Snapchat Plus. Snap says this could include sharing exclusive experimental and pre-release features. And that researcher, Alessandro Paluzzi, found some examples like the ability to pin a friend as a number one BFF, see who rewatches stories, and changing the icon. Last year, the UK began a data reform consultation to outline how it will diverge from EU-based data rules. The government published a final response to this consultation, which called for switching to an opt-out model for most online tracking, eliminating things like cookie consent forms. Oh, they love those consent forms. It will also simplify legal requirements for processing data for scientific research, and remove requirements for smaller entities to appoint a data protection officer and perform data impact assessments. Reddit announced it intends to acquire Spell, a cloud platform to run machine learning experiments founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino. Some of the Spell team will work on ML projects and customizing ad placement and community safety. LG announced its dual up monitor back at CES in January, effectively offering a two 21.5 inch QHD monitor array stacked on top of each other within a single monitor, able to display two sources at once. The dual up is now shipping for $700. A group of Senate Democrats sent the letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo asking the department to develop a strategy for requiring common sharing ports on mobile devices sold in the US. The letter does not specifically call for USBC to be the standard, rather acts commerce to create a comprehensive strategy on adopting a standard. Boy, if it isn't USBC, what would it be? I can't. I hope it is USBC. Please just let it be. I know. It works. It's fast. I can't imagine what it would be otherwise, unless we're talking USB-D or whatever. All right, so let's move on to Roku announcing a partnership with Walmart to make TV streaming part of its online shopping experience by closely tying entertainment to an e-commerce store. You might say, okay, what does that mean? That's not just a QR code thing, although that is already possible on many platforms. TV viewers in this partnership would be able to use the remote device using a shoppable TV commercial to choose a product and then check out using Roku Pay, which is Roku's payment platform. Products would be fulfilled by Walmart directly on Roku's streaming platform. So by tapping okay on the Walmart checkout page, the order goes through, the customer gets details about the order emailed with shipping, return and support information, and then eventually the product is delivered. William White, who is chief marketing officer over at Walmart, said in a statement about the partnership, quote, no one has cracked the code around video shoppability. By working with Roku, we're the first to market retail to bring customers to a new shoppable experience and seamless checkout on the largest screen in their homes, their TV. Rob, what do you think about this? Is this something that you've ever delved into? So it's one of those things to where, oh, just more advertising, more advertising, more advertising. But this is the way the things are going. I mean, what it sounds like to me is that you're going to be watching something, something comes up, you hit a button on your remote because, oh, I need popcorn or I need whatever it is that they are advertising. And it just orders it for you. It shows up at your doorstep a day or two later. That's just the way that things are going. And, you know, it kind of makes sense. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, are we going to get to a point to where you're going to see the Roku's of the world, you're going to see the Amazons in the world, they're going to start offering some of their lower end televisions that have this stuff built in for free just to get you to view their advertising, potentially buy stuff, or at least offer their services for free. Yeah, I mean, if you're, I mean, use Amazon as an example, even though this is a Roku Walmart story, I mean, as an Amazon Prime member, if I had that much of an easier way to just like subscribe and save, oh yeah, I need that again. I would probably do it. What that means for the entertainment that you're watching and how that's going to be bundled in, you know, if this is just, you know, kind of overlay stuff, commercial stuff on top of a series or a movie, that's one thing. Whether you like it or not, that is one thing. If it's baked into the content itself, that's another thing. And that might shape how, you know, we see content going forward in the future, especially if this is successful. I think it's going to be some all of that eventually. I think it'll start off with just commercials as we know them today. So you're watching the commercial. Ooh, I need to get that. You hit a button. And it's almost, I know this is a Roku story, but you know, let's talk about Amazon. Amazon has that buy now button. It is very easy to do. It's very quick. It's not going to take you away from your watching experience. My gut tells me it'll be something like that. You click a button. It makes the purchase with, you know, your Roku, you know, account or your Roku wallet where you've already entered your information in. And it's a pretty seamless, you know, process for you to get whatever it was that you saw, you know, that was being advertised. You know, the Roku pay thing too is, is potentially very lucrative for Roku. You know, Roku has, has had a lot of success. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's ad market section, sector. And I, I, I'm not a regular Roku user myself. I have a Roku TV, but I, I just kind of go Apple TV, but I feel like if this is successful on any level, and when I mean any level, like the level of, yeah, we need to, now, like you said, sell or at least give people extremely cheap Roku enabled hardware so that they, you know, they, they get used to this and this just becomes part of their experience. You know, it's, it's, it's the smart TV plus for shopping. I mean, if they were, if they were really good at this, if they really had a, had a together ad sales team, you would combine things that would make sense. For example, hey, we got a, we got a, we got a championship game on. Why not have a pizza party and you get these discounted, whatever pizza buys, you get five pizza buys or whatever, pepperoni on it. And you can combine that. So it feels less forced and just very organic. Of course I would have pizza because I have a bunch of people over to watch this game with me. It totally makes sense. And I think, you know, if they go that model, I could see it being a lot more successful than if it was, oh, here's an ad. If you want to, if you want to get, you know, new car insurance, just click here and then, you know, we'll bring you to the site and get something like that where it's a little less comprehensive. But at the same time, I don't know if maybe that might be off-putting to people who are already, you know, marketed at in so many different ways, especially when it comes to online content, whether, you know, it's a website dropping, you know, pop-up ads and stuff. Or, you know, hey, why don't you sign up for a free month of, you know, whatever service, you get a free phone, but you need to subscribe or whatever to this service. I think, I don't know, I mean, it sounds good on paper, but I don't know in practice if people will necessarily gel to that idea, even if it's very innocuous, people might have a mental block of, I don't know if I really want to just be sitting here absorbing ads all the time, even if the TV is free or the service is free or whatever is free. Yeah, that's a really good point. Go ahead, Rob. I was going to say, I think a YouTube though. People will sit and watch YouTube videos all day long. Some of them will pay to not have ads. Many don't. Many just, they'll sit there and they'll watch the ads, or they'll skip through and get to the five seconds, you know, after the five seconds or however long YouTube is requiring these days. But I think that for, you know, particularly younger generations, they're just used to seeing ads on everything always, all the time. So I don't see this as being, you know, terribly intrusive, because once again, you know, I think that they're going to do it more so from a commercial standpoint. Commercials, you're used to watching them anyway. How convenient is it to be able to just click a button to get the thing you see in the commercial or not click a button and not pay attention to the commercial like we generally don't do. I don't see it, you know, people being necessarily turned off by it, because those who would be turned off simply would just never use it. Yeah, yeah. And you might be onto something. There may be a generation gap of sorts here, you know, where I say, my TV watching is the most passive experience I have in my entire day. If I'm online, it's totally different. Yeah, I'm being served ads left and right. But there might be folks who go, well, no, that's how you buy things. How else would you know about things? This is organic. This is natural. And yeah, we'll have to see what the youth tells us. Well, Jonathan M. Gitlin wrote a story on Aries Technica, philosophizing about the dilemma EVs present the serious drivers, serious drivers or folks who enjoy driving performance cars to their limits. He gives a comparison between BMW's i4 M50 and electric sports sedan and BMW's gasoline powered M3 competition. Both are four door cars with all drive or excuse me, all wheel drive and produce more than 500 horsepower each from an everyday driver and cost perspective, the EV i4 M50 is the one to go with. But for those who want fun, Jonathan prefers the M3 competition. It's a thousand pounds lighter than the EV equivalent, making it more agile, comes equipped with impractical racing bucket seats and produces loud throaty engine noises. He opines that EVs for the immediate future will be focused on designs for everyday use and not for performance seeking drivers. Do we agree with this? So I, I mean, full disclosure, I am just not a person who cares about, I don't even really know what horsepower is. I know it has something to do with going fast and quickly. But, you know, a big old loud engine, you know, I got a lot of neighbors around my neck of the woods who care very much about these things. I don't. In fact, I feel like the quieter, the better. But the fact that the EV is just heavier by nature, because, you know, you got different stuff in there, including a really heavy battery does play into it. And I wonder, yeah, how many folks who say, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm really into cars and I'm really into performance. And EVs just aren't there yet. I, I, to take off from one something you said in the last story, I think it is a generational thing. People who have, like myself, I was a big gearhead in high school and in college that there was an expectation of what a car culture was about certain aspects of an automobile. And as that car culture developed around the internal combustion issue between gasoline, specifically gasoline powered cars, there was a modding culture you could, you could tweak the car to handle perform in a specific way, right? You could adjust the carburetors and now fuel injectors changed, you know, your, your, your, your valve cam. And there was very much a feeling of accomplishment because learning to drive, right, before automax were a thing in the US, people had to learn how to drive a stick and to drive a stick well, took some skill. And so there was a badge of honor. I can not only, you know, build my car or buy one, I can drive it really well because I know how to roll my own five, five speed and I can do an autocross and, you know, whatever time that the course is set. And so I think in a way, it reminds me of the dilemma that people had or some people had when we moved from a command line interface to a GUI interface where, well, why would you need a mouse and a screen to tell you just to open up a program? I can type that in the command line very quickly. I don't need that. That's just as fast. In fact, it's faster. So I look at, you know, one of the things that, you know, Mr. Gitlin says, you know, he opines that EVs for the immediate future will be focused on designs for everyday use and not for performance seeking drivers. And then we ask the question, do we agree? And I think, yes, I do agree. And also no, I don't agree. I think what you have is that all cars are generally geared for people who just drive them to get from point A to point B. When you get into race cars or high performance cars, those are generally almost always something extra or something, you know, or something special. We do already see that with EVs. I mean, you've got, you know, you've got your Teslas, but you got your Tesla Plaid. That thing does something different than regular Teslas does. There are other EVs that are in the high performance, you know, areas just not high performance in the way that we think of it. Roger, where like we had, you know, shop back in high school where you learned how to actually work on cars that had carburetors and you could do things to make them go faster. I think that we just think of things from that standpoint, whereas in the future, it'll be more of the electrical engineer or the electrician that is figuring out how to make these cars go faster. And what I'm reminded of is that I have a relative who is really into electric RC racing and the amount of things that he does to get more juice out of a battery into a motor without actually burning the motor or the trans, you know, the conduit between the battery and the motor out is ridiculously, he spends that kind of time on that. But just a little bit here can get you a second or, you know, over the course of the race. What do they do? Well, that I can't tell you. Okay, they are definitely doing things to, you know, to the stock parts that make cars handle a little better, go a little faster, you know, you know, actually be a little bit lighter, but I can't I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you what they do. But my gut tells me that eventually, you're going to start people start saying people do those same kind of things with EVs that where they're going to be tweaking, how can we get more, you know, how can we get more, you know, electricity out of this battery into this motor to turn the wheels faster. I think you're going to see those things, you know, going to get a big old loud muffler and an EV car where people go, what, what is going on here? Well, you know, that's, you know, car enthusiasm. You get it sometimes. All right, Epic Games has added user ratings to its store. You might say, all right, doesn't pretty much every company have that sort of thing. Well, Epic says reviewers have to play a game for at least two hours and then be able to rate it on a five star scale. If you don't, maybe you don't care about the game enough and Epic doesn't want your review. Not everybody will be able to rate a game, however, so it's not just if you've got two hours to spare. Epic says it'll randomly offer players the chance to score a game after they finish a play session with the idea that this approach will prevent review bombing, which is pretty rampant, certainly in game reviews, but in reviews all over the internet in general and make sure ratings are from people who are actually playing Epic's games. An overall rating will be determined by player scores, which will appear on a titles Epic Games store page review bombing exists across apps and podcasts and game stores. If you are a content creator or if you have rated anything before in the past, you are probably familiar with us most often, at least on mobile, as a person who might enjoy a piece of content. You get a push notification to rate something and you might not even be ready to rate it at that time. So, Rob, what are you thinking about Epic's idea here? I'm glad that they're trying something and they're trying things to get it right. I don't know that I would consider myself a gamer these days to the extent to where it's like something I do every single day, but I do play at least every week, twice a week possibly. I am playing a game for probably more than an hour at a time. I can tell you that I probably don't look at a game that's been rated all the time and say, oh, I need to go buy that game, but if there's a game that's rated low that has low ratings and the reviews are all so bad, I tend to maybe hold off on making a purchase until I can do more research. So, I'm glad that they're trying to figure out a way how they can actually get legitimate ratings. They're going to make you play at least a couple of hours before you get the opportunity and then it's random whether or not you even get the opportunity to do a review. I don't know that that's the answer, but I'm glad that they're trying because I do see value and legitimate ratings of games and really any kind of content that you're purchasing. Absolutely. I mean, for a really long time, especially because I have, in my case, podcasts, several of them that I want people to rate. Five stars, of course. The five star rating standard, and it's not the same across the board, but that's pretty standard, has always been problematic to me. Myself included. If I, for example, go to a restaurant and I have a terrible experience, it's like, all right, I'm going to go to Yelp and tell them why it was so terrible. If I had the best night of my life, I might say, this is the best restaurant I've ever been to, five stars. The two, three, four stuff requires a little bit more. Well, why is it two? Why is it three? Why is it four? And some people take that pretty seriously. Other times you end up getting, yeah, like you said, Rob, you'd be like, this thing has like a lot of five star reviews, probably a little sus, you know, or a lot of one star reviews, probably a little sus. I mean, unless it's like the worst game ever. And I kind of wish we could get to a point where we figured out a review system that A is not being gamed as much as it is, and B just doesn't have this sort of sliding scale thing that we've all gotten so used to. But I think that most of us don't take that much advantage of. Yeah. And really, I think what Rob said earlier is the important part here. There's, they're taking steps to make this not the system that it was. And this may not be the answer, but this quite possibly isn't the answer. I'm a really, really big fan of Netflix's thumbs up, thumbs down. Like you don't, it's just a binary thing. That's how I rate all my movies and anything else. Yeah. Like it or don't. Yeah. But this is at least somebody pushing that envelope, the ratings forward, so that we can find out a new way of doing this. And this is an interesting way of doing it, where the longer you play a game, the more likely you are just randomly to get selected to rate the game. You know, so you're going to know more about it and you don't get to rate it if you've played less than two hours. At least they have a window there that, you know, is taking it from, oh, I played this game for five minutes, didn't like the intro, one star. You know, they're not doing that anymore. Or, you know, you got to at least put some time into it. And I think that's, that's important. Just push the algorithm forward, make it more useful by trying to change things and seeing what works and what doesn't. And if this doesn't work and they get rid of it and it's like, oh, that was a bad idea. Fine. But at least it was tried. Indeed. Well said, Amos. Well, if you'd like us to hear, uh, talk about something specific on the show, one way to let us know is in our subreddit, we look at it every day and we pick a lot of stories that float to the top of the subreddit. So submit your stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right. Nikkei Asia reports that many Japanese organizations may not be prepared for Microsoft Sunsetting of Internet Explorer this week. It was announced and officially sunsetted on Tuesday, but this report points to a March survey from the IT vendor Cayman's net, which found that 49% of respondents at larger organizations were using the browser for work with over 20% saying they didn't know how to transition to another browser. The report also notes that the Japan pension service, government procurement sites and mutual aid corporations either require or at least recommend IE. So you have to assume, especially in the government sector, a lot of people are still using this and don't really know what to do afterwards. Since April, Tokyo based software developer, computer engineering and consulting services says that requests for help have been on the rise. Its customers are mostly government agencies, financial institutions, and marketing and logistics companies that operate websites only compatible with Internet Explorer. Japan's pension service notices concerning online applications must also be viewed in Edge's Internet Explorer mode. And Internet Explorer is the only recommended browser for government-backed mutual aid corporation for private schools. Yeah. IE became the global standard over Nutscape back in 1995. If y'all were here, you remember it well. As of 2009, had a 65% market share, but some folks argued didn't work well with JavaScript and other programming languages that are necessary for creating interactive websites. Obviously, Internet Explorer has gotten quite a bit of competition even since 2009. People have a lot of options now, but Rob, I know that you've worked in the corporate sector enough to know that this probably rings pretty true. You get a lot of people saying, well, wait a second, this is the only way that I can do my job. Now what? Yeah. A lot of big companies, not necessarily tech companies, just companies that use tech, which is pretty much all of them at this point. They're not necessarily moved by Internet Explorer is ending of life. They don't necessarily see that as a business critical issue. They probably should, but they don't necessarily see it as like this works for us. This process is working. It's doing what we needed to do just because Microsoft is deciding not to support this anymore is not necessarily a good reason for us to change and stop using it. I'm not saying that it's what all these companies are doing, but I know that there is a segment of them because I've worked for some that that's just how they think about these things. And it's not until a company like Microsoft says, after 27 years, we're going to go ahead and actually really end life on this thing that they actually start to think about, okay, what do we do next? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that the Nikkei Asia report focused on Japanese orgs, which is interesting in and of itself, but I wonder how many other organizations or people who work with them or for them around the world say, yeah, we got this problem too. I know most of our audience is like, I know how to change my browser, but you probably know a few people who would get a little, you know, confuddled by that sort of thing. And a lot of this is not even any user. This is what the company is not sure what they're going to do because they've just baked and they've built stuff into Internet Explorer and now I have to figure out something different. Well, you might be wondering if you're the only gamer playing games using Netflix. Netflix announced games has a limited title of games, but it's something that the company is definitely putting some effort into. Sensor Tower published a report on Netflix's mobile game popularity since launching some last year. And according to the report, Netflix games have generated over 13 million downloads globally. I mean, that's not terrible. I mean, it's not huge, but hey, you know, people are curious. December 2021 had the most popular month with 2.3 million downloads at the same month that Netflix's second most popular game was launched, which was asphalt extreme, which is now an exclusive to Netflix following a shutdown on other mobile stores last September. Rob, I have not played one Netflix game, but I'm also not a Netflix subscriber or something. So I am a Netflix subscriber and it's interesting. My daughter just turned 18 last month and I got her an iPad for her birthday. I don't know, probably after a week or so of her using it, she's like, hey, Dad, did you know you can play games on Netflix? I said, Dad's a tech blogger. Yeah, I knew, which I did know, but it was like it was just kind of interesting. Someone who doesn't pay attention to any of this just on her iPad or new iPad looking at Netflix. Oh, there's games here. And she played now. Has she ever gone back and played a game since? I don't know, but she's one of those 13 million who's downloaded something. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think that that's sort of iPad slash mobile experience probably has a lot to do with some of these numbers, just because as we were talking about passive TV experiences earlier on the show and the idea that you might want to buy something that you see in a commercial, you know, as you're watching, you know, your favorite reality show, which would be me. You know, that feels more counterintuitive to me than the mobile slash tablet experience. Yeah, I can see that. I haven't actually done it on mobile, on TV, on phone. I haven't done it, but I imagine there's a fair amount of people who are just, oh, this is here, let me click on it and see what it does. Kind of go for it. Yeah, well, you know, congratulations to your daughter on, what'd you say, graduation present? Birthday. Birthday graduation all in the same week. Graduation of life. Moving on to the mail bag, by the way, if you have mail for us, please send it our way. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Carl wanted to pitch in to the discussion we were having yesterday on the terms misinformation versus disinformation and how they differ. Carl says, as a former Swedish special counsel for the protection of democratic dialogue charged by the Swedish government to mitigate effects of disinformation, propaganda, and hate speech in a Swedish context, I have some thoughts on your definitions of these concepts. Generally speaking, says Carl, disinformation could be seen as information that's false. The person who is disseminating it knows it's false. It's a deliberate intentional lie and points to people being actively disinformed by malicious actors. Misinformation, says Carl, is information that is also false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it's true. Malinformation is information that's based on reality but used to inflict harm on a person or organization or country. Again, this is, you know, Carl's context based on where he's worked. Carl finishes up with mitigation strategies for these three types of malign information are different as the target who spreads has different intent and different interests. Robert, where do you fall on, you know, when you when you see the term misinformation or disinformation, do they mean different things to you? I think so. I just want to know which bucket does alternative facts fall into? I'm saying that facetiously, but not really. It's like, you know, I do believe that there is a difference between telling somebody something that you believe that is wrong and you just don't know it as compared to telling something to someone that you know is wrong. You blatantly just misleading them. So I do see differences in the words, although they are spelled very similar to each other. Well, and I think Carl totally is laying out the exact points that you made is like, if it's misinformation, it means that you're just kind of wrong, right? If it's disinformation, it means that you know you're wrong and you're doing it anyway. And then there's this other category of, well, it's true information, but I'm going to spin it in a way that ends up harming someone or something. And we did get quite a bit of feedback on this, by the way. So it's good that we're, it's always good to get feedback from folks. And a lot of people feel differently about the terms. And they are very charged terms, certainly politically, but definitely in tech as well. So thank you to Carl and thank you to everybody who writes into us every day, keep those emails coming. Again, feedback at dailytechnews.com is where to send your thoughts. Well, thanks to you, Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. It is always a pleasure when I get to come and host here on Daily Tech News Show, but folks can find me pretty much everywhere at Rob Dunwood on all the things. And also, check out, check out my tech show, my weekly tech show, The Tech John, that is thetechjwn.com. I actually kind of like that. Check it out. Thanks also to our brand new boss. Whose name is Terry? Terry just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Terry. You are our gold star patron for this fine Friday, last day of our work week here. Also a reminder, there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We roll right into it after this show. And it's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you'd like to know more about it, just a reminder too, we are live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern. That's 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Just a reminder also, we're off for the U.S. Juneteenth holiday Monday, but we'll be back on Tuesday with Shannon Morse joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer writer Tom Merritt, host producer writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chan, video producer, writer and host Rich Trappellino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koons, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Don Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding, our mods, beatmaster, W. Scottus Juan, BioCow, Capt. Kipper, graduate Berseroso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens and JD Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. 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