 Coming up on DTNS, can the big tech boom last forever? Plus the right approach to content moderation and how to use an Oculus Quest 2 without a Facebook account. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 29th, 2021. Happy birthday to my sister Meg. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We're going to talk about tiny spaces, living rooms, let living rooms, houses, hotels. If you want the wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Canalus reports that Q1 smartphone shipments increased 27% on the year to 347 million units. Samsung remained top of market share with shipments up 28% to 176.5 million. Apple and Xiaomi remained at numbers two and three with strong 41% and 62% annual growth respectively. And Oppo overtook Vevo for the fourth most market share with shipments up 60% on the year. In February, NVIDIA released a driver update for the RTX 3060 cards that limited the hash rate for Ethereum mining by around 50%. Then accidentally rolled that back in a beta driver that was released in March. The limit is back again in the GeForce 466.27 driver. It will be required for all future RTX 3060 cards starting in May. Videocards.com reports NVIDIA is working on hash rate limits on other 30 series cards as well. After a CES unveiling back in January, Linksys is now selling the Hydro Pro 6E router for $500 and a three node Atlas Max 6E mesh system for $1,200. Qualcomm-powered Linksys Hydro Pro 6E supports up to 6.6 gigabits per second Wi-Fi speeds, can cover 2,700 square feet of space, and can connect to more than 55 devices at one time. The Atlas Max 6E uses the Qualcomm Networking Pro 1210 platform covering up to 65 devices if you just have a single node, 130 devices with a two node system, and 190 devices with three nodes with each node covering up to 3,000 square feet. The products have a 5 gigabit per second WAN port, a USB 3.0 port, 4 gigabit LAN ports, and still support the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled to reinstate a federal order that removed plans for 3D printed self-assembled firearms from the State Department's munitions list so they can go back up. Weapons on the list need State Department approval for export, and being removed from the list means plans and parts can legally be posted and sold online. Amidst heavy storms in Texas back in February, Samsung was forced to shut down its plant in the city of Austin for a month, which Yonhawk News now reports cost Samsung over $300 billion, which is about $270 million. SVP of Samsung's foundry business, Han Seung-hoon, said that the shutdown affected around 71,000 wafers. This Austin plant makes microprocessors like radiofrequency integrated circuits and solid-state drive controllers. The Financial Times reports Samsung still saw its highest quarterly profit since 2018, driven by its mobile division and strong sales of its flagship Galaxy S21 series. Speaking of earnings reports, the earnings are in, and everybody won. Apple won the most, though, reporting a 54% year-over-year revenue increase. iPhone sales up 66%, Mac up 70%, iPad up 78%. Gross margin, the amount left over after cost of goods sold, rose to 42.5%, driven by services. Apple services margins rose to 70%. Apple also bounced back with sales in China, which looked a little vulnerable for a while, almost doubling sales there year-over-year. There was some bad news for Apple, too. Nikkei Asia reports Apple will reduce production of AirPods by 25% to 30%, because it's facing more competition in that market. And Tim Cook himself on the earnings call warned that supply issues in the chip industry could affect iPad and Mac supplies. He was quick to say there won't be a drop in demand, but we may not be able to make as many. Overall, though, the reports were sunny. Same for Facebook, whose revenue rose 48% on the year. Ad prices growing 30%, driving that revenue. Its monthly active users are still on the rise up 10% on the year to $2.85 billion. That's what a third of the planet. Daily users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp up 15% to $2.72 billion. Add that booming earnings from Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. And there's an interesting picture pointed out by protocols David Pierce. The landscape is just starting to change. Microsoft and Amazon's ad numbers now put them in the same conversation as Facebook and Google. So we're getting a little competition there. And Microsoft's LinkedIn, with $3 billion in revenue and 750 million users, is now effectively the number two social network to Facebook. TikTok's close in users, but not yet in revenue. Although if you want to fit YouTube in as a social network, it brings in $6 billion and is more popular than ever. It's actually more popular than Facebook in the United States. But that's still all the same names for the most part. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google. Can anything stop the wild bull ride of big tech company success? In the short term, supplies will be a problem. We heard Tim Cook talk about that. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Samsung all warned of real impacts to supplies because they won't have enough parts. But beyond that, which will eventually go away, there are two major forces that can unseat the Big Five. Regulation and competition. Facebook is making noises about the Apple ad tracking changes, but still projecting big ad sales rises driven by price increases, not lack of tracking. In fact, on its earnings call, I noticed this. CFO Dave Wainer indicated that Facebook may change tactics in its criticism of Apple now that it has lost the tracking battle. Wainer said, quote, we think the impact of the Apple approach is really much bigger than this particular update, which we totally just lost. He didn't say that part about losing. Apple has a number of private APIs on hardware and software that advantage their own products and services in ways that are challenging. We face that issue in places like our messaging products and even with the hardware products we're launching. I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like Facebook is going to shift to antitrust accusations, not ad tracking accusations. And regulation is the other thing I mentioned. Regulation is going to be a challenge for the companies as the US and EU have them in their sites. Pierce, in the protocol article, thinks competition may be increasing too, pointing out that companies like Shopify and TikTok continue to grow and they're coming for those big five. So Justin, is the party over? Allow me to pitch the opposite idea that the land of milk and honey indeed will never end for these companies. Remember, Tom and Sarah, you guys have been covering this stuff when Steve Jobs was threatening thermonuclear war against Google for Android. And I might suggest that even then, it might have been the smaller the pie, the sharper the knives. Yes, these guys are going to battle, but right now the money is so big and we are moving into a world where these services are so much more relied upon that I don't even think them batting against each other or whatever we call competition between them is materially going to affect the fact that they won. They crossed into our modern world. To ask them when will the tech boom end is like asking when the automobile revolution is going to end. We're going to measure this in decades. Yeah, I don't know what else I can add, but when the Apple numbers came in yesterday, I was like, is this for real? What? This is insanity, which is a sentiment echoed by a lot of other folks. And sure, Apple's saying, listen, chip shortages are going to catch up with us. But yeah, that's a temporary problem. And they had an extremely, extremely solid year for some of the hardware categories like the iPad, which has not had great quarters historically, not every quarter anyway, and certainly not Apple's Q2. As far as Facebook goes, unless Facebook numbers drop, I'm like, all right, we're a third of the world. We're going to get to two thirds of the world probably before this gets away from them. I could be wrong, but I don't see any data to prove otherwise. To lose tracking. Let's say they totally lost tracking. What they effectively replaced was an advertising market that had nothing, that had no way to even prove that anybody ever saw your product, except for whatever social proof that you had as a business. I think that they are going to be doing fine going forward. I agree with you, Justin, that the pie isn't going to get any smaller, but all the car companies we had in the early 1900s aren't still there. So yes, and it took 120 years to shake some of them. Things move a little faster in tech time. I don't know. Let's look at what's actually happening in the world. Tell us what Microsoft's up to. You know what, Tom? I'm glad you asked. Microsoft will reduce the cut it takes for PC games sold through the Windows Store to 30% to 12 as of August 1st. Xbox console games in Microsoft Store will still be subject to the 30% commission. That's probably because consoles are loss leaders, making the company money on software, not hardware sales. The 12% Windows Store cut matches Epic's take on the Epic Game Store. Valve Steam still takes a 30% cut, which is reduced as you hit the 10 million and 50 million sales mark. Yeah. I'm 50-50 on whether I see Valve changing their policy. As long as they're as popular as they are, I don't think they do, because you need to be in there. Microsoft has to cut its commission because it needs people to go back to the Windows Store. They need more developers to move there. So I think this stays that it is, but it is a big shift, for sure. Yeah. You're seeing a maturing market effectively. Yeah. And look at those numbers that we just mentioned about Apple services. A lot of that comes from ownership of the store, of these kinds of commission cuts. Now you have a lot of options. Consumers, that's good for consumers. Consumers have a lot of places that they can buy stuff, depending on what ecosystem that they are in. But that means that some of them that are less popular are going to have to be more competitive, and that ultimately is a good thing, not only for consumers, but also developers. And Nick with C points out, Valve does some things for smaller developers. You know, the bigger cut is for the bigger developers. So, yeah. I don't think we see any other shifts there, but that is significant. Well, speaking of gaming, PC gamer notes that there's an option if you want to use an Oculus Quest 2 as a gaming headset or any of the apps in the Oculus store, but you don't want to log in with a Facebook account. That is a sticking point for a lot of people who otherwise might be interested. You could just pay more, and then you get around it. Oculus for business offers the Quest 2 for $799. After the first year of use, you pay $180 per year for software and service. This includes enterprise customer support, provisioning and device management, as well as business channels, which if you are an individual, you're not going to need, but that's what it gets you. But as PC gamer notes, it does show a bit of what your Facebook data is worth to the company as a subsidy of that $299 price for folks who say, yes, I will use a Facebook login. I'm curious whether or not there is an enterprising entrepreneur who would like to start a new business wherein they could offer the service to employ somebody in their business so they could enjoy all of the fun games and ecosystem that Oculus brings you in what is, in my opinion, the best in class VR experience without giving your data to Facebook. And I would be curious to see if Oculus would shut that down. So I don't know this for sure, but let me assume that the $180 a year for software and service and support is per headset. Maybe it is a flat fee, but it seems pretty generous if it was. So I'm going to assume that you're talking about for that service $800 per headset plus after the first year an extra $180 per headset per year. So let's divide that up. If you do like, I don't know. If you do that, the thing is the Oculus Quest 2 is not going to be the newest headset forever so you can't amortize this out over several years. I don't know. I am going to exclusively sell this as a boutique service to only Bitcoin millionaires in Miami. That's it. Yeah, I mean, honestly, what van that's going to drive around Miami, it'll be the least sketchy van that I will bring you a headset and I will not give Facebook any of your data for this premium. Gotcha. I was sort of floored by the prices and I understand that, yeah, in certain business settings, it makes sense. But there are a lot of individuals who are just, I don't want to have to use a Facebook account. Even if it was like some burner account that you only use for your Oculus, it's the principle of it, right? So it's like, okay, well, you got an option and it's really expensive and it's $180 on top of it and it's expensive at the outset. I don't know. I guess if you thought, I'm only going to use this for a year so I'm just never going to have to pay the $180. I'll cancel before then. I could see some people decide that $800 is fine. If a bunch of people started doing that, I wonder if Facebook would start vetting people closer and say like, wait, you have to really be an enterprise to get this. And also, when does that set any kind of line, right? Like who's to say what an enterprise is and what it is. And I guess that there would be certain, I mean, they would be able to control who gets into that program, but I don't know. I guess this is just really finding some very, very, very hyper-expensive Cluj to get around what is kind of ultimately looked at as the only drawback for the Oculus Quest 2, which is kind of universally beloved except for the fact that it's connected to this almost equally universally loathed or at least skeptical. People are skeptical of Facebook. I don't want to say loathed because everybody's on it, but it is a frustrating platform for many. Yeah, I think PC Gamer nailed it. What this shows is how much of a product you are if you own an Oculus Quest, right? It's $500 a year for the first year and then $180 a year after that is what your Facebook data is worth to Facebook. It'd be interesting if Facebook offered a consumer version of this of like, hey, don't want to log in with Facebook and let us collect your data and monetize it. Here's the cost. I'd never do it. Never, never. In the same way that the deal for platforms like YouTube or Twitch that are primarily ad sales platforms, it really costs an arm and a leg if you want to kind of opt out of that. Folks, we love to hear from you. We always want to improve the show and make it better. It is our ongoing quest. So if you have some time, please fill out our latest survey. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you and what isn't. It's an easy survey. Go visit it at dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. The battle to combat harmful speech online continues latest salvo is the European Parliament formally adopting a law requiring internet companies to remove or disable access to flagged terrorist content within an hour of being noted notified by the EU national government. It includes exceptions for by an EU national government. It includes exceptions for terrorist content deemed part of any educational, artistic, journalistic or academic material. You do a news story on it that's different. You may think, oh, that makes sense. You may think it's too far. You may think it's not far enough folks in our audience and so we are going to go to the next slide. This is a video shared has an interesting post from Gillard Edelman called on social media American style free speeches dead major platforms policies aren't actually inspired by the First Amendment. This legal scholar says that's a good thing and it walks us through things that longtime listeners to DTNS know tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have long touted themselves as free speech bastions and then in 2020 began censoring law doctoral student Evelyn Dweck who is also an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She published an article that I recommend you read in the Columbia Law Review called governing online speech from posts as trumps to proportionality and probability a lot of alliteration there. Dweck says that there are two main ways of moderating speech around the world a categorical way and a proportional way and the US traditionally has used the categorical way we're not talking about government we're talking about in practice right on a Facebook platform the categorical method says that all speech is okay unless it's in certain categories like spam or porn now that can get tricky because you could say no bare chests that's our category none but that ends up removing socially important things like breast cancer research or breastfeeding or dealing with what is considered acceptable and what isn't in varying communities as far as nudity goes categories are blunt the proportional way of doing content moderation still starts that all speech should be assumed to be protected but it makes exceptions for circumstances the reason for restricting any speech needs to have a compelling reason options like slowing it down or reducing its reach or more often used because in the categorical approach it's an all or nothing situation you can have more nuanced approaches this is more complex and therefore easier to implement but it is recently where we've seen Facebook and Twitter moving do act believes the proportional approach has more advantages because as she told wired the proportionality approach might be more speech protective because it will require platforms to look at these less restrictive more proportionate response to harms there's also the matter of how to judge success in her paper do act notes that success at content moderation is not elimination of every violation it's about the direction of the error rate do you want more false positives or more false negatives when you moderate speech you shouldn't focus on individual cases but whether the error rate is acceptable to that extent you need transparency about what those error rates are and do act points out that the real problems are social and that content moderation is essentially treating the symptoms you do need to treat the symptoms though until you can cure the disease there's a lot of other stuff in this that's outside of this but I thought this idea of categorical versus proportionality was an interesting way to look at it I think it is fascinating and it's also fascinating to understand that Twitter and Facebook have long been censoring speech they started censoring speech that became controversial in the last year and a half and even then they were pressured to censor that speech because of their audience because of backlash both by their users and the press to say that they were derelict in their duties if they did not do that which really brings us back to what this legal scholar points out that you have to have a relationship with your audience and the rules need to be understandable if not fully transparent and that's where something like categorical rules tend to be more easily understood you can say even if it's convoluted no bare chess except in these instances that we are going to carve out one by one that's look up a bowl if you Google what is legal and what is not legal when you are doing things proportionally there's a lot more that happens on the back end and let's be fair here no social media company I think has set a sterling example of being as transparent as I think many of their users was what would want they want to protect their ability to evolve their own philosophy on this and they don't necessarily want to have their own words be slapped back at them so I do think that while proportionality is an interesting argument if part of this is your audience has to understand what you're doing then that's going to be inherently more complicated I mean just look at Facebook's outside the I'm calling it the Facebook Supreme Court the oversight board the oversight board you know it's something where this was such an issue that Facebook was like okay well we've got our systems in place but you're right you know the breast cancer research part of bare chess should be allowed and ah okay let's bring in more people who don't work here who will take things on a case by case basis and there's still you know some appeal stuff that goes back and forth but this is our attempt to try to make sense of this and put as much effort into this as possible and I think that's a good thing you know it's fairly new but I think they're moving in the right direction but yes especially the larger company that you are I don't think categorical moderation you're just going to have too many exceptions you just are because there's too many categories right but companies would like to do whatever is easiest and least expensive if they can get away with it and I think categorical as you start to make exceptions starts to become proportional and that doesn't undermine your point Justin it does become hard to explain and you know twitter trying to explain its fact check labels and when they showed up and when they didn't you know it was certainly fun for us who had to try to explain it to people on this podcast but it was not immediately apparent to most people who were like yeah I'm not taking the time to read that thousand word post just tell me what I can say and that's where a lot of the silicon valley ethos of move fast and break things really meets a a test because you if you move fast and you change and change back and you're like oh no agility means we're able to get the best result that is a tricky thing when you're talking about speech where people are basing a lot on top of it all right let's move to something that I think we can all agree on yes Tom Google assistant will soon let users teach it how to pronounce correct names using the record your own option in the contact field recordings will be kept locally and not not uploaded to google the feature will come to other languages beside English eventually assistant can also now process phrases holistically instead of one by one with google claiming that it will result in nearly 100 percent accuracy for alarms and timer tasks and that are able able to follow a user if a command has changed mid-sentence like when you say set of timer for five wait I mean ten minutes also contextual awareness is improved so if you're talking about Lake Michigan and then later say where is the best beach it will assume that you mean the best beaches on Lake Michigan which by editorially don't count as beaches only things that put our oceans are beaches wait upset everybody Google assistant before this update agreed with you you'd say something about Lake Michigan you'd say and where's the best beach they'd say Miami obviously yeah so yeah I mean this this is a this is a this is a these are good good improvements I like it yeah no I think especially for names that get butchered and I think we all know somebody for whom a name gets butchered in these assistants or if you're trying to call them and on over your headsets or a car system it always has a hilariously incorrect version of it I would hope that this continues to roll out not only throughout Google's but also all of the voice assistants because it is something that I think it the honeymoon is over we should probably be able to get these names right yeah I've gotten used to various assistance just pronouncing something wrong and I'm like I know what you mean you're always going to pronounce it wrong but it's just this is just when it's your name it's even more annoying I think oh for sure yeah we're just a name that you say a lot you know or and get repeated back to you so yeah it's moving in the right direction getting smarter every day well speaking of smart tiktok user dress us christ I think it's dress us christ jesus christ jesus christ jesus christ jesus christ decided to make a joke cryptocurrency it's called scam coin that's what they called it scam scam standing for simple cool automatic money obviously the fun part of the story is that within an hour after selling just a few coins the market cap rose to 70 million us dollars of course the dev wallet still had 95% of the coins at that point so a crash was inevitable if the user tried to cash in but it's estimated based on the actual liquidity that he made about $2,100 that's not should we that is not a bad simple cool automatic money I just found this hilarious should we hear it from Jesus Jesus's own words let's hear this coin only been out of hour 70 million dollar market cap I did this with no promo this is the first time anybody's hearing about this this coin is an hour old did you see this oh yeah get in where you fit in I ain't telling you to gamble but hey I made the coin you do you scam coin I I I mean that's just where we are with cryptocurrency that that he could make a coin that he intentionally called scam coin not tell anyone about it and have it just a few people buy it enough that it it's just about $70 million can I just say shout out to tiktok and the tiktok community because all this stuff it reminds me so much of the early days of youtube where there's like all these little like fun japes and little things that just kind of explode and right now it's just fun japes this is a fun japes Jesus Christ a tip of the cap to you good sir a fun jolly jap you have perpetuated on the world and I for one have a twinkle in my eye because of it I don't know why I became a Charles Dickens character talking about Jesus Christ and his scam coin I and of course I thought of it as like Jesus take the way dress house Christ no Jesus that makes a little more sense all right let's check out the mailbag let's do it so last year Nick ordered and paid for an RTX 3080 the day of launch Nick says even though I ordered less than 24 hours after the cards went on sale I was looking at potentially six months or more of waiting to get my RTX 3080 Nick lives in Australia so your mileage may vary but that's how long it was for him so when RTX 3090 started becoming available without a wait I changed my order over from the 3080 to 3090 just to get a card ASAP but that meant I went from spending around 1500 Australian dollars on a card to about 3000 so I decided to mine crypto with the card when I wasn't using my PC for other things to help offset the increased cost enter windows and it's anti malware protection the current situation with setting up mining is horrible not only does Microsoft claim open source crypto miners that have been verified as safe by the community are things like worms Trojans and root kits they also will often destroy the download without letting you whitelist it I honestly don't trust Microsoft to introduce their new anti crypto jacking features without hurting legitimate mining given the poor state of the experience of mining well it's good to hear the other side of this story from somebody doing cryptocurrency mining thank you Nick longtime member of the community too and good thing you got the 3090 because that's the one that the driver is not going to limit cryptocurrency mining on so yeah I guess you dodged a bullet there we'll stand up for miners' rights we need to make sure that we look out for our miners who are doing the Lord's work yeah I mean six months or more wait I mean I'm with you Nick this is no jpe from John this is no jpe no the absence of a jpe really uh uh yeah I'll tell you what it's interesting to even look at it like that that the idea of spending extra money on a card like oh I'm going to defer that cost by mining cryptocurrency what an amazing world yeah just fun shapes all around if you have questions comments anything we talk about on a past show might talk about on a future show send that email to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today they include John Atwood Daniel Dorado and Phillip Lass we also have brand new bosses Maurice Hickey and David Fretz both just start backing us on Patreon welcome all and thanks to our new bosses be like Maurice and David yes we do oh we like them but also be like them thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us keeping our heads on straight Justin how's your week been oh you know just another world of politics you can get my immediate thoughts about Joe Biden's first address to congress on my Patreon take politicsseriously.com but on the main feed on Friday not only will we talk about vaccine diplomacy considering what's happening in India our thoughts of course with everybody there but also somebody who is a well known name in the world of tech news Andrew Zarian has come on as our New York City mayoral race correspondent we will discuss whether or not Andrew Yang is indeed a runaway force to be the mayor of the largest city in America that's all on politics politics politics find it a px3 podcast.com we're also live on this show Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. eastern 2030 UTC find out more at dailytechnewshow.com live and we will be back tomorrow doing it all again with Chris Ashley and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.