 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you including Kevin, Paul Teeson and Ali Sanjabi. Coming up on DTNS, can Instagram take down Twitter and Blue Sky? China bans US chips from Micron, and why that big story about Facebook being fined will be back in about three years or so. Just, we'll tell you why. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 22nd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino from deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert. Yeah. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We got lots to get to. Let's get right into the quick hits. Now we've been covering the pivot of manufacturers away from China for quite a while. And of course, Apple's one of the biggest ones to watch pivot. So it's notable that Wistron, the first company to produce iPhones in China for Apple, is shutting down its Indian plant. Wistron blamed Apple, saying they negotiate prices too close. The margins are too thin for us. We can't make a profit. And this isn't the first time Wistron has had to back out of Apple production and complained about the margins. Wistron stopped iPhone production in China in 2020, selling its plant there to Lux Share. Foxconn and Pegatron will continue to make iPhones for Apple in India, and they are making the most of them right now anyway. Plus nine to five Mac reports, Lux Share bought two of Wistron's India plants now and will make iPhones there. A third Wistron plant is reportedly going to be bought by Tata Group and Tata Group will continue to make iPhones in that plant as well. So really only Wistron is losing in this deal. Well, next time you want to buy a beer at a baseball game, you might have to tell the person taking your order to talk to the hand or at least your palm. That's because Amazon One added new age verification services. It's starting to roll out now first to Coors Field in Denver. Now let's customers scan their palm to buy age restricted items, things like alcohol at a sports event. Users have to upload the front and back of a government ID as well as a selfie to use the feature along with payment information to Amazon One. And the images on the IDs are not stored after verifying it's you just to make sure it's you. Vendors will see though your selfie for additional verification. So make sure you look nice there. Amazon says the technology will roll out to additional venues in the coming months. But at concerts, you'll still have to have somebody pour your beer into a plastic cup so you don't throw the bottle at somebody. Meta has released the massively multilingual speech or SMMS model under an open source license. It can recognize more than 4,000 spoken languages and create text to speech voices in 1,100 languages. Now most languages don't have the thousands of hours of data usually required for speech recognition and text to speech to be properly trained. So Meta used multiple religious texts because religious texts tend to be translated into and recorded in more languages than other texts. While it uses a more constrained approach than large language models do, Meta still cautions that the model isn't perfect and is making it open in order to allow more people to work on improving it. Venmo launched an option to let parents open accounts for children aged 13 to 17 colloquially known as teens. Venmo teen accounts come with a debit card, parental controls and monitoring as well as parent controlled privacy settings. Parents have to set up the account and the account is tied to the parent's account. Up to five teen accounts can be connected to an adult's personal Venmo account. So one account, five teens should be covered. Venmo teen accounts will begin rolling out in June. So if you have more than five teens in your house, what are you going to do? Well, 10 if you have two adults in the house. Okay, so five on each. I'm doing the math. I'm like, okay, yes. Big family, maybe. What's app added a wish list feature with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing editable messages. These can be changed within 15 minutes after you send the original. So you control your friends. You just press and hold on a message and tap the edit option like other editing features. These messages will then have an edited tag next to the timestamp, but recipients won't be able to see the previous version, just the fact that it was edited. Previously, what's app users had to either delete a message or just send a clarifying message. And last year, what's app increased the amount of time you had to delete a message from 48 to 60 hours. All right, the headline on tech meme.com today reads the EU finds Meta 1.2 billion euros over sending European user data to the US, a record GDPR fine, and orders Meta to stop transfers and delete the data within six months. It was actually the lead story on the BBC World Service news update for me this morning as well. So this is a big story. If you really want to deep dive into it, I recommend reading Natasha Lomas' full write up on TechCrunch. But here's the ultra short version. In 2000, back 23 years ago, the United States and the EU created a way to make it easy to put your data wherever it was best for the platform, rather than worrying about where the citizens were from. Because it's inconvenient and actually costly to try to keep everybody's data in the same country where they're from and still take advantage of the efficiencies of the internet. That system was called privacy shield. It lasted until 2013 because Edward Snowden revealed the extent of US surveillance and Austrian Max Schrems led a legal movement to stop EU citizens' data from being stored in the US. They're like, well, if they're doing that with our data, we shouldn't want it there. It's not properly protected. That led to the European Court of Justice striking down privacy shield in 2013. All right. So it took him a few years to rework it, address the court's concerns. In 2016, the US and the EU created an improved version called Safe Harbor. But Schrems' legal actions kept going and he got that one struck down just four years later in 2020. That left no framework at all. That doesn't mean you couldn't transfer the data, though. You had to rely on boilerplate legal language, commonly known as a standard contract clause. The EU even put out some example language for companies to follow. But that put the liability on the company. You no longer had a governmental shield that you could point to and say, we were just doing that. And Monday, Schrems' legal actions resulted in the EU ruling that Facebook's standard contract clause also is not sufficient to protect EU citizens' data. And that's when they find them the 1.2 billion euros ordered them to stop sharing data and delete previously shared data. But they have six months to comply. So here's what's going to happen. One, Meta will appeal and ask for a stay and that will buy them some time. They also have the six months, but this will make extra sure they've got time. That will get them to July when the third attempt at an EU-US data privacy framework called EU-US data privacy framework is expected to go into effect. They're like, no more cute names. I like that they completely gave up on the idea of coming up with these like cool sounding names for these. Have anyone on either side of this actually consulted like, hey, Max Schrems seems like you are like are going to sue over this, no matter like, could you like, are they consulting with them? Like at this point, given the amount of sway that he has had or like, you know, obviously like putting these to the metal as soon as they get on the books. Has there been any consultation to like? Well, okay. That's where we're going with this, right? If that new privacy framework goes into place in July, Meta will claim that the current decision is moot under that framework. Schrems will then continue his legal actions. He has said, I don't know, I'm looking at this and I think the EU court of justice is going to toss this framework out as well. But that's going to take some time. So we'll return to this story again in 2026 is my guess. Framework goes in in July. We'll tell you about that when that happens. And then it'll take three more years for Schrems to push this thing along. But to answer your question, Rich, yes, they are paying attention to what Schrems is saying. They are paying more attention to what they think the EU court of justice is going to rule because it's not Schrems that decides it's the court of justice. And every time they think they've satisfied the EU court of justice and they've been wrong. So it's not that they're ignoring him. They're just not getting it done correctly. And really what Schrems is doing is saying, I think the solution to this is the US has to change its surveillance law and the court seems to agree with him. And what's happening on the US EU side is they're trying to figure out, well, but if they don't change their surveillance law, what if we do this? And I think that's where the gap exists. So what is different between the one that just earned meta this gigantic fine that framework and the new framework that is going? Well, one of the biggest differences is this was just a standard contract clause. So this was this was not an entire governmental system. So it was down to like, well, Facebook is not properly protecting the data, but in some ways meta or Facebook cannot properly protect the data. If the United States doesn't have proper ways for EU citizens to protect their data when it's in the US. Basically, what they what the EU is saying is storing EU data in the US doesn't protect it under the current system. You need a new system. So what they've continued to do is say, well, we will limit the times that we can collect the surveillance and will provide a way for EU citizens to appeal any surveillance of their own data that they discover. But every time that goes to court, the court says, well, that's not the same as having it under 100% protection, especially now that they have the GDPR. Where your data is presumed to not be surveilled. And you have to have a reason to surveil it, not the opposite. In this setup is, is this a obviously some meta problem for the fine perspective, but any platform that's using these standard contractual clauses that any large online platform essentially could have been fine, right? Like this is not a meta specific problem. Right. No, that's a good point. Like, if it weren't for the new framework coming in July, this could cause a lot more problems because the EU isn't saying Facebook did something unusual. They said the standard contract clause, it's called a standard contract clause because everybody uses it is not sufficient. And again, it goes back to the fact that you just can't write us. Basically, what the court seems to be saying is you can't write a standard contract clause under the current ways that the US operates like it. You just wouldn't be able to protect it. The cyber space administration of China or CAC, if you want to keep it casual, warned critical infrastructure operators against buying components from the US memory chip maker micron. They were citing relatively serious security concerns in its products, I guess not critically serious. The action comes a month after China announced an investigation into micron imports. The CAC did not detail any security risks or identify specific vulnerabilities in micron products just they're relatively serious. The action also comes after years of US imposing restrictions on the use of Chinese telecommunications equipment in the US as well as more recent pushes against exports of advanced chip making tools and, you know, working with with allied countries to kind of do the same. The US Commerce Department said the Chinese action had quote, no basis in fact. So Justin, you know, we've spent almost a decade now hearing about unspecified risks from Chinese firms. I think Huawei is the one for first one that comes to mind for me. Is this just what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Best I can tell in watching this from afar is that you are seeing a lot of political will on either side of the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate that China is tough on the United States when it comes to technology and certainly we are seeing that on on this side of the divide as well that the United States is tough on Chinese technology. Now it is complicated by the fact that we are inextricably tied together China and the United States in terms of our supply chain for the things that are the fastest growing and most popular products in America and in many ways it is American technology that continues to be iterated on and become popular in China as well. So nobody can really fully try to untangle this partnership it is so tied tightly together. But if you're looking for political wins, you can do worse than picking on the opposite. Yeah. And to be honest, I've always found the security claims on the US side to be thin. They are conceptually possible. It's conceptually possible that Huawei could have put some firmware in their network switches that was hard to detect that could shuttle information somewhere that you can't tell. There's never been any evidence. But the concept was enough for some people. It's really hard for me to understand how memory from micron is a security risk that that one seems to be even more of a stretch such that this is purely retaliatory and not that the Huawei one wasn't mostly punitive either. They're not even really hurting micron much because micron business in China is so small. They're not hurting themselves domestically because SK Heinecks and Samsung can jump right in and fill the gap. So this is almost a risk free way to slap back at the United States. Yeah. Sorry, Rich. Go ahead. Well, I was gonna say it's definitely it feels, you know, very like a symbolic gesture time like kind of viewers. I'm symbolic is perhaps entirely symbolic. But this will hurt microns bottom line for sure. But they are the last remaining maker of memory in the, you know, based in the US, right? So that it is a very clear signal, even if, you know, they like 11% of their revenue right comes from China. So it's like not like not not that big of like 11% comes from China 11% comes from China, but most of that is consumer electronics, which aren't affected by this ban. Now, there might be a chilling effect there, but they aren't even going to lose all 11%. Well, and yeah, a lot of that comes down to the signaling that the CAC is giving to companies of and we saw this in the US right when we saw you have to take, you know, every piece of Huawei telecommunications equipment out of there. It still took years for that to have any impact in the rural ISPs and stuff like that. Now, obviously, those are two different regulatory regimes. So we will see if if everyone's like, Yeah, let's not make, you know, the regulator that kind of had the, you know, big tech crackdown for the last couple of years. Maybe maybe we don't want to make them mad and buy our memory chips for our phones from micron. Right. I don't think that's too much of a stretch either, especially in China where there are a lot of unspoken rules that go along with every spoken rule. Yes. Folks, if you would like to speak to us, you can go to our Discord, join in the conversation there. You can link up with Patreon to get access. Go to patreon.com slash DTNS. Since November, we've seen a lot of attempts to create Twitter alternatives and competitors. Instagram is no stranger to generously taking inspiration from other services. So it's probably not surprising to hear that Instagram confirmed to money control that it is quote exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. Instagram reportedly has been briefing some creators on the plans to release a text based Twitter competitor code named P92 or Barcelona. This could come as early as June. It would be a separate app, supposedly not the Instagram, not inside the Instagram app, but it would let you connect to your Instagram account. Use your Instagram handle and verification and all that. You'd sign in with Instagram. A screenshot of the app's description was shared by UCLA instructor Leah Haberman who said and that screenshot said soon our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon. Indicating that that decentralization they referred to to money control was in fact activity pub support. Now it's serious enough and getting enough buzz that Twitter CEO Linda Jacarino retweeted a tech crunch report on the Instagram effort with the comment. Game on. Yeah. If Instagram gets into the activity pub pool alongside Tumblr and others, the question is rich. This is game over. Let me just pull up the meta product development playbook page number one find successful thing that people are excited about and make some version of that it doesn't matter if it's successful. Instagram, Meta, Facebook, whatever platform they have. This is what they do. What is interesting about this is usually it's hot new startup has hockey stick usage growth that might eat into our stuff. So we need to have video. We need to have reels. We need to have e-commerce. We need to have whatever hot live streaming whatever hot new feature is we need to have a version of that on one of our platforms. The interesting thing is it's an old they're making a competitor to an old social network that isn't like the hottest thing ever. That is what is is the stand out here for me right is is going after potentially like kind of that decentralized market. Let's muddy those waters up enough. It makes sense to go after Snapchat when Snapchat's hot with stories make sense to go after tiktok with reels and both of those arguably successful. Does it make sense to go after microblogging not because microblogging is so popular but that because there's an opening because people are looking for alternatives. Can I offer this? Yeah. They're not. This is a a a hack it together skin on the activity pub system that makes master good for them. It's it's a you know but it's not something that has been beyond the capabilities of very very small development teams and we have no idea how many of the folks from that went into making this but every other example that you guys have given. They all have something in common. They worked into the main app sometimes frustrated. This isn't that this is going to be a thing that'll come and maybe they'll put a little effort into it. Maybe they won't. Maybe it goes away immediately but I don't think I think them not jamming it into their best real estate shows you what they think of its growth. Now here is what I will say this also looks very similar. We've seen a lot of people saying this looks very similar to Twitter or Mastodon or whatever. I mean it literally doesn't even have a retweet like a retweet. Now looks similar. Well but but that specifically is a very like activity pub Mastodon thing right not having a retweet but one thing that seems like the most similar to is maybe like a substack notes situation and Tom I know that you have like I have a feeling of exactly what it's supposed to be and that's not a Twitter competitor right that's like an audience engagement thing with with your existing substack audience. There's tons of engaged creators on Instagram that have these communities. Could this almost be like the hot thing to say is this is a Twitter competitor but is it really more of just like that continuing engagement like you know where substack notes is rich in substack. Yeah it's not it's not it's not a separate app so I don't know I that's a compelling theory there Justin I feel like Instagram's done separate apps before and none of them have done terribly well. They've done a couple where they brought them into the main Instagram app later and they did better there. If they were to do both say yeah you can access your messages in Instagram but we also have a separate app that's more tailored to the experience. Maybe that's a better way of going about it. I do see a scenario that this because it has Instagram behind it catches enough people on board gets enough people to try it. That it kick starts mastodon and activity pub and as popular as blue sky is with the people who have been invited into blue sky. It doesn't take much for all of those people to leave it if a really cool popular alternative comes along. A friend of mine once said that you're never really having a great time at a party if you keep texting people who aren't at the party saying oh my God I'm having so much fun at this party. I will leave that commentary out there for the world without attribution. Want to know what the more we talk about this this actually sounds like it's more of a competitor to then Twitter. Yeah. Discord based on an account. I can now have a real time communication not with the person who is running the account maybe with them but not necessarily with them. Instead I can have a communication with people for whom are looking at that person's account right now just like I am. And if that is the idea then I actually do kind of like this and it gives a little bit more of a purpose to mastodon or activity pub in general beyond what we have seen in in the future. I do think that we've seen kind of the upper limit of what happens when you just try to do Twitter. It's where things are happening. But if you skin it over the idea of hey I would like to talk to other fans of House of Highlights or Cardi B or or any other Instagram person that has a ton of followers that that seems interesting. Now I could understand why that would want to be on another app because good Lord it could probably get hairy fast and they want to make sure that that's not on the same app. I do think that that that would be an interesting idea for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I could see them operating it the way they used to operate Messenger with Facebook. Now they've since blurred that line more but it used to be yeah you want to do Messenger tap here and it would open Messenger. You want to engage with the other fans of this Instagram account. You want to you know talk to other fans of August D tap here boom opens the other app. That was that they did that with Messenger because they wanted Messenger to take they wanted it to be. But they wanted it to be SMS. They were the messages in in Apple. Like that's what they wanted that to be. It never really hit like that. So they kind of kept it but it was popular enough that it never failed. No even as a separate app. So maybe if they get the right two creators which they're going out and they're wooing them right now. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe it works. Well you know what I'm looking forward to finding out in June. You know how this is all going to go down as early as you know I'm looking forward to finding out in June. You hear me Meta. Yeah. Put this out in June. I won't write any longer. All right. But one thing you don't have to wait for Tom is May 22nd because that is today with the day we're recording this. And it's also the 43rd anniversary of the release of Pac-Man in Tokyo to celebrate. Let go announce a $2,650 piece $270 premium set that sets you out to build a Pac-Man arcade cabinet. When you finish it has a coin slot, a four-way joystick and a mechanical chase scene. There's a crank on the side. It moves the characters around in a maze. It goes on sale June 4th possibly when there's an Instagram Twitter competitor out as well. It's all linking together. This is great. The fact that it's got a mechanical scene where the Pac-Man chases the ghost and obviously you're not playing. But that reminds me, remember there used to have that little like handheld Pac-Man arcade game. There was all LEDs. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And you could only like you had to keep hitting the joystick and everything moved one at a time. You could almost do that with this. This is cool. The mechanical aspect of it, that is like the just the pure delight button, right? Like just the cabinet itself is like, okay, that'd be nice sitting a shelf of a big Pac-Man fan, you know, whatever. But man, having that mechanical action to it, that's the move. Also, if you're watching the video on Twitch, Joe is showing the back of it has a little diorama of a little person playing Pac-Man. Yeah. Playing. It's like inside. Very inception. Yeah. Yeah. The Pac-Man is coming from inside the Pac-Man. Lego friends come in June 4th. Let us know if you get one and send us pictures if you build it. Let's check out the mailbag. An anonymous worker who may or may not have had a contract job inside a secretive tech company whose name begins with A, wrote in regarding the remarks Rob and I were making on Friday's show about how much of Apple's reported resistance to chat GPT had to do with it being a rival product. We were talking about the fact that, yeah, there's there's some legitimate confidentiality issues at play here, but also Apple might be developing their own thing and doesn't want people to, you know, use a competitor. Well, our anonymous commenter said when they were working on their contract, they number one had to use Microsoft Office, not Google, or even pages or numbers, which is kind of odd, had to refer to Google as Moogle when they were inside the company. Like you weren't even allowed to say they were Google. That's what this person is saying. And number three, when they wanted to purchase an inventory system for the equipment they were using, they were told not to because the company would build it themselves. But then that never happened. So they just didn't get an inventory system. So you're saying Apple may be very particular. In that context, this does not seem all that unusual for chat GPT given this is one person's experience. One contractor. I just wonder if when they're talking the search, the deal team and Apple, do they have to call it Moogle too? Just imagine like Tim Cook, we have to beat Moogle at AI. I wonder whether or not how widespread that is and how much that is a unique situation. I would encourage more people to email in to see whether or not that is consistent with their points of view on it. Also, and I'm not familiar with the story that inspired this email, I will say, I still think that that chat GPT and Apple seems like a match at some point in some capacity. My gut tells me that too. So I am not 100% sure that this is a case where Apple doesn't want you to use a competing product. But there certainly are plenty of cases. So the email was appreciated. I would like independent confirmation of the Moogle thing. Moogle is pretty fun. Also, pretty informative and funny at times. Justin, Robert Young, thank you so much for being on the show rocking and rolling as always. We're working on Justin. Where can people find your great stuff? You can find my podcast with Andrew Heaton and Jen Briney. We're not wrong. Available wherever you get your fine podcast. And thank you, folks, who support the show on Patreon. We got some nice group of bosses over the weekend. SoCal, Exile, Chris, Rob and Robert. All started back on us on Patreon this weekend. Thank you, SoCal, Exile. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Rob. And thank you, Robert. Do not confuse Rob and Robert, but welcome them all into the fold at patreon.com. Make them feel welcome. And tell them to stick around and enjoy the extended show now that they're a patron. They get good day internet. We're going to be talking about Neva, the search engine that is getting out of the consumer search business, and why the technology wasn't the hard part, or why the cost. They wanted to do a pay to get rid of ads thing. The cost was not the hard part. It was the technology that was the hard part for that search startup. Stick around. And remember, you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We'll be back tomorrow with the one, the only, Chris Ashley. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.