 Coming up on DT&S, can Facebook turn this whole downturn thing around? Twitter's trying to make DMs better, and let's talk about Microsoft making the world a better place. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 7th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Mitch Trafalino. And I'm Roger Cheng. The show's producer. Want to remind everybody, there is a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. Some of you have already listened to this, but if you haven't and you're interested, go check it out, patreon.com slash DT&S. And of course, we want to give a big thanks to our top patrons, including Pat, DeGrasia A. Daniels, and Irwin Sturr. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bite Dance is getting in on the booming fast fashion market, launching the site Demon Studio. The site claims to serve over 100 countries with a focus on women's fashion. The site doesn't name direct ties to Bite Dance, but sources tell Tech Note that the company's e-commerce business lead, Kang Zeyu, is heading the project. Amazon confirmed it will increase the maximum base pay for corporate and tech employees from $160,000 to $350,000 in an effort to recruit top talent and also retain employees. This brings base pay more in line with other large tech companies, and Amazon will keep existing restricted stock units and cash compensation incentives. This reflects a tight market for tech talent, with a comp TIA analysis of Labor Department employee data finding an 11% increase in unfilled IT job openings in the U.S. up to roughly $340,000. U.S. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosen-Worsell informed Congress that network service providers applied for $5.6 billion of reimbursements for ripping and replacing equipment deemed insecure by the U.S. government. This mostly applies to equipment from ZTE and Huawei. In September 2020, the FCC estimated the effort would cost $1.8 billion, and Congress allotted $1.9 billion as part of the supply chain reimbursement program. Toby, that's T-O-B-I-I, says it's in talks to provide eye tracking technology for Sony's NextGen VR headset. Now, Sony previously confirmed the PlayStation VR2 would use eye tracking, but didn't say much else about a partner or even how it would work. The headset will reportedly also use camera-based inside-out tracking to detect head and controller movements. The price comparison provider PriceRunner sued Google for $22 billion. That's about $2.4 billion U.S. dollars in Stockholm's patent and market court, saying the company manipulated search results in favor of its own shopping services. This follows an EU ruling from November that found Google violated antitrust laws for preferring its own shopping services in search. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about the future of Google Stadia. Yeah, I got an interesting report from Business Insider. Their sources say Google demoted its entire Stadia project internally and is now focused on providing a streaming back-end for other companies rather than attaching games to the Stadia service itself. Google calls this back-end Google Stream, and it's already reportedly being used to power Peloton's first video game, Lane Break, that was announced in its early access right now. AT&T confirmed it used Stadia attack to power its browser-based version of Batman Arkham Knight last year, and Capcom and Bungie both reportedly were looking into building platforms on Google Stream. Of course, we'll see that with the Sony acquisition if that goes through. The unit now prioritizes Google Stream proof of concept work and white label deals, kind of like what they were doing with AT&T, with sources saying about 20% of the focus is now being put into the consumer Stadia platform. So we've kind of heard rumblings that, hey, Stadia wasn't hitting the targets. We've seen them kind of spin down their independent game or their own game development studio for Stadia. But Sarah, will this be the Google Glass of game streaming where we don't hear about it, but it's used in a lot of places that we just maybe don't think about in terms of an equivalent Google product? It might be. I mean, Google Glass, depending on who you are, if you are a consumer who is excited about the future of it, you say, what a spectacular failure. Google Glass is alive and well as our competitors in the same market. And we will see more of that going forward and still inch back into the consumer market. With Stadia, people who care about gaming more than I do have always said from the beginning, like, Stadia is just okay. I mean, what is Google doing here? Google cannot compete with the big guns when it comes to gaming. And whether or not that is true and certainly depends on who you talk to, this seems very smart. It seems very smart on Google's end to say, listen, we can provide platforms that can provide all sorts of fun experiences for all sorts of other platforms. And we'll work more on the back end and we'll stop trying to compete with other companies that are, frankly, just doing it better, at least with market share. Yeah, if you're a AAA gamer and I guess you're really bullish on cloud streaming AAA games, like not, I guess, great news that there's one less player in the market potentially long term. They're not spinning this down, you know, Stadia as a service still exists for consumers. But I don't think long term, this is necessarily like that horrible for Google. Like being the AWS of game streaming, where a lot of the issues people were having were for AAA titles where like reaction times are like super critical. And, you know, like having any kind of lag and that kind of stuff causes a problem. When you're doing something like, you know, what they're doing with Peloton, with Lane Break and that kind of stuff, like those kind of experiences aren't as critical for like, you know, millisecond latency as it comes to that. And if they can provide that, that provides them a very steady, you know, potentially provides them a very steady, you know, kind of revenue source that they can back end. And again, thinking of AWS as an example, not the worst position to be in terms of, you know, profitability and seemingly no end of customers for it. Well, let's talk about Metta and Metta's users, or lack thereof. Just kidding, they still have billions of users. But Metta's earnings report last week made headlines for showing a decrease in Facebook's daily active users for the first time, gave a lot of people pause. This is the beginning of the end, still an ongoing conversation, but the company could face another decrease in users, like not providing services to all of the EU. That would be a big deal. And Metta's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Metta emphasized the need for a new data legal framework, framework rather, to govern the transfer of data from EU users to the US saying, quote, complex and evolving US and foreign laws could harm its business. Now the Court of Justice for the European Union invalidated the privacy shield data transfer framework in July of 2020. It's been, you know, a year and a half now. Metta now uses standard contractual clauses also known as SCCs for data transfers, basically boilerplate conditions that have been pre-approved by the European Commission. However, back in 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that US law did not ensure an adequate level of protection, particularly around mass surveillance in the US. Metta received a freeze on this order and Metta's use of SCCs is being reviewed in the Ireland Data Protection Commission. Metta expects this decision in a few months, we will see. Now, if you're Metta, if the decision doesn't go your way, the lack of a framework means you could be hit with a substantial GDPR fine. If a new framework isn't adopted and SCCs are successfully challenged in the EU, Metta says, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram in Europe. That is potentially bad news. Rich, do you think that Metta is just kind of, you know, fluffing the whole thing here and making it sound worse than it is? So the context of where they disclose this, I think is super important to how, I guess, where Metta sees this kind of in their, you know, existential threat versus annoyance or something like that, because we saw them be very public when Facebook or, I'm sorry, when Apple was making changes to its app tracking transparency feature, taking ads in newspapers, trying to get ahead of the public messaging on this. This comes from a deep inside of an SCC disclosure document, an annual disclosure document that they have to file about things that could impact, you know, income and things that would impact investors. So the idea that they're putting it in there does mean that, at least in turn, like this isn't just a saber rattling for the sake of getting a press release out there and trying to set the tone of the public conversation. This is, hey, we need to inform investors, this is a possibility. Now, where this gets interesting is based on everything I'm seeing, I don't necessarily see there's something on the horizon that will solve all of these problems. They've tried several different kind of framework, you know, privacy shield is not the first data transfer framework that was out there, right? There is kind of a long history of these kind of agreements, these kind of frameworks being set up and then being invalidated by courts. And now we're seeing SCCs kind of fall or SCCs, yes, falling into that category as well, confusing with SCC. But the idea that there's not something on the horizon as kind of a, oh, we just have to hold out until this thing gets approved by the EU or by the in the US or something like that. Basically, the complaint about the SCC is basically US privacy law would have to come up to the standards of European privacy law, which it all practical. Yeah, don't hold your breath. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I, a lot of this sounds like posturing on Facebook's behalf to me, not on their behalf, it's Facebook doing it, Metta, I'm sorry, still trying to get a hold of the two names. But, but yeah, I, it would, I'd be very surprised if some agreement was not made in advance of Facebook and Metta's properties, Instagram, all just going dark in, you know, many countries of Europe. I mean, not gonna happen, but Yeah, Metta has a huge financial interest in that not happening. And I think very interestingly, we don't see what's that mentioned, even, you know, being potentially impacted by that, which obviously has a huge user, not that Instagram or Facebook doesn't have huge user bases in the EU. And certainly don't want to lose either of those. But interesting that that's not part of it. This is one of those policy things where I feel like in the long term, not having these kind of frameworks doesn't benefit a lot of businesses. So there is a lot of financial pressure, not just from Metta, but kind of from the tech industry or anyone that's dealing with data transfers, which is kind of all being held in legal limbo right now to figure this out. But it's surprising that in the story we didn't hear, oh, and this is being hammered out as we speak. So it needs to get voted like that component to the isn't here yet. Again, I think it's a very remote possibility that Facebook and Instagram go dark. But they did feel like they had to disclose that as a possibility to investors, which is not insignificant. Poor Metta. What an underdog. Just just having a rough, you know, rough 2022, you know, just think of the Metta. All right, well, speaking of social networks, Twitter announced its testing an icon on iOS to send direct messages to a tweets author directly from your timeline. Sending DMs right now requires going to a user's profile page. Twitter says users will still be able to close DMs entirely if they don't want to engage with unwanted DMs at all. So why are some people upset about this feature being added or at least being tested? Well, as the Verge notes, one extra step to go to someone's profile to send a DM, which is generally how it's worked thus far, cuts back on harassment. This new feature would make harassment theoretically much easier, even if it makes it perfectly fine discourse easier as well. But as another Twitter user noted, when someone wants to harass you, they're going to tap that one extra step to DM you anyway. So Sarah, you know, I guess where do we kind of come on, you know, this kind of addition to, I guess obviously what I imagine Twitter is trying to do is put DMs more front and center, not make everything a timeline conversation, right? Like being able to kind of sidebar stuff a lot easier. But the harassment angle, I mean, I think that's on Twitter certainly a valid conversation to have. Yeah, I mean, listen, I am knock on all the wood. I don't feel like I have a harassment problem on Twitter of being personally harassed. You know, every once in a while there's a tweet that, you know, grant somebody's gears. But the idea that I would have to, and my DMs are open, anybody can DM me, mostly at spam. And I sort of look at it once in a while and whatever. But a lot of it is legitimate. And I just made that decision sometime ago to like, you know, just open it up. You know, floodgates are open. You let me know what you think. And I can choose to do with that information how I like. But if I felt as though I was being targeted for harassment and many people on Twitter do feel that way and have felt that way for years. And I thought that the company has not taken appropriate steps to make people safe on that platform. Then yes, this seeming like, Oh, it's just one step. You know, I mean, if someone's going to harass you anyway, they're going to harass you, right? Like, what does it matter? But we all know that taking one little, you know, adding one little step on any journey online will weed out some people who go, it's too hard. No, I don't care anymore. So the, so I, so I definitely get the idea of people saying, Twitter, this is a bad move. That said, to me, to be able to, because I don't know, I DM and get DMed pretty regularly. I think, especially on the iOS app, I mean, I am a Tweetbot user, but so it's a little different for me. You know, my whole, my whole situation is a little different than if you're using one of Twitter's native apps. But it, it should not be a bad thing, what they're doing. It's just that there's so much harassment on Twitter that the people who say, no, no, you're making a bad thing even worse is you can't ignore that. Well, the, the one thing I would say is this is a test. And the reason you test things is to see like, Hey, is this a good idea that explores conversation? Or is this, is this a horrible idea that makes this into an unlivable hellscape? So like, I, I'm, I'm fine. I guess I'm fine with them testing a feature because how else are, I guess are you supposed to know? However, this seems to do go opposite to a lot of the ways that Twitter is trying to tamp down on harassment, which, you know, as Sarah, as you said, speed bumps do matter. Twitter's own research has shown that putting up, Hey, are you sure you want to send this warnings? All that is, is clicking one extra button to say, Okay, I'll send it. And yeah, maybe it makes you more aware, you know, maybe it takes you a second to think, but that speed bump, you know, face Twitter has shown that that does have impact on the shape of discourse. They have to click through someone's profile. I would think humanizes someone to a little bit more degree than anonymous comment that you, you know, a reply that you don't like, and that you want to reply to, if you have to click through their profile, maybe see a picture of somebody's dog, maybe you see a, you know, like, you just see like even their bio of like, Hey, I'm, you know, I'm a family person or whatever, I like dogs, whatever. I think that is a not insignificant speed bump to kind of contextualize the person that maybe you want to send something that's not so great to. So it that that is the most interesting to me is that this seems opposite to what Twitter is kind of trying to do in to fight harassment in other ways. It does seem like Twitter is trying to help communication while also not really saying the big part out loud, which is harassment is a really big problem. And, you know, so the the people who have experienced and do experience harassment are like, No, this is only going to make things worse. On paper, I was sort of like, Oh, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like a good feature. But you have to remember what Twitter's problem has been for years now, and has been, you know, drugged through the mud about not thinking about, you know, people who have been harassed or or are in positions of feeling marginalized and, you know, all that stuff, you know, that that's that is Twitter's problem. It continues to be Twitter's problem. The one thing I will say is this feature does seem to appeal like this almost feels like a request from brands where they use DMs as their help desk and they're contacting people that are complaining about services. It'd be really nice if I had a DM button right there. I wonder if this if either the feedback on this is, Oh, this will only be a brand exclusive feature, or this was this was feedback from brands and Twitter is testing this with a wider community. That that seemed like a logical use case for this kind of feature. Well, listen, if you have thoughts on anything that Rich and I have talked about today, anything we might talk about around a future show, we want to know your thoughts, please do email us. Email us at feedback at daily tech news show.com. All right. I don't exactly know when in the pandemic I decided that I was going to go all in on VR, but it was partly because I couldn't leave my house. I wanted friends. So in that same vein, at some point, many people also realized they wanted home fitness gear. Maybe they were weights. Maybe it was a treadmill. Maybe it was a Peloton. Peloton definitely rode that wave of interest reaching a market value of $50 billion in January of 2021. We're just now one year past that time. How's it doing? Well, a competitive landscape and a somewhat reopened world have brought the company back down to earth, which now sits at an $8 billion valuation. That's still a lot of money, but a far cry from the $50 billion that we heard of January in 2021. So while the company denies it's halted bike and tread production in the face of winning demand, CEO John Foley did say it was resetting its production levels for sustainable growth. That doesn't sound like it's saying a whole lot, but let's try to parse this. So what does a still pretty trendy brand? I know a lot of people who have Pelotons and like the platform very much that combined with a market influx mean might mean an acquisition. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Amazon is considering acquiring Peloton, but Amazon isn't the only one. The financial time sources say that Nike may also acquire the connected fitness company. Now both companies have apparently discussed this internally. And as far as we know, nobody has approached Peloton about an acquisition formally yet. But given the early stage of both companies interest, it would not be surprising to see other companies perhaps get into the mix. Rich, can you think of others? Yeah, there was a investor out there that suggested this make sense for Apple to do so. But I mean, there are like a fitness plus thing. Yeah, integrate. And I could as a lifestyle brand it very much that in that regard reminds me of acquiring beats, right? Where it's a brand that has a lot of value to customers, a lot of customer loyalty and image associated with that brand. And then you can kind of build off of that. And kind of the difference is that before that Apple was into audio devices, maybe not high end audio headphones, Apple is already very much into the fitness world, I guess not the fitness device world or at least the bikes and the treads and that kind of stuff. So that would be a departure for them. I actually think it's interesting. I think Nike in terms of that same kind of lifestyle brand of these two companies makes the most sense to me. Amazon has been kind of getting into more of the very heavily into the quantified self, not necessarily like, hey, you're going to be looking at your personal trainer. A lot of it has been like, hey, we're going to give you apps and stuff for our wearables so that you don't need the personal trainer. You can algorithmically get this in the app and stuff like that. But they are investing a lot into fitness. So it wouldn't surprise me entirely if they went ahead with this acquisition either. I think Amazon makes the most sense here. I mean, you couldn't buy anything on Amazon. You want to buy a $2,500 bike that then you have to pay a subscription for it going forward. Listen, I am not poo-pooing the Peloton brand. I know a lot of people who like it. I am not personally a member of the crew, but think of how many little add-ons Amazon could sell if you were also buying that bike on the Amazon network. Well, but for that same reason, I could see, first of all, obviously subscription revenue was like the meta-narrative for all of tech right now. So there's no reason that Nike wouldn't also do that. Personally, I think Amazon's probably just financially off the top of my head. I assume they have the money and the market presence to make that acquisition. Well, and all of the three-party stuff that you could make this whole thing your own. I'm not sure Nike is in the position to be able to offer even a portion of that, even though, yes, as far as fitness goes, Rich, I think Nike and Peloton actually are a better marriage. But yeah, you don't go to Nike.com to be like, hey, where do I buy my new sweatpants? But you can, okay, so here's the question. If Amazon were to acquire it, do then we see a certain voice assistant start being integrated? It would be an Amazon product then at that point. Oh, man, I would love that. Okay, so that's a value add for you. Oh, yeah. I want to talk to all devices in my life. Touch them only when necessary. But yeah, imagine just being like, Peloton, crank up the resistance, and it just would. And you don't have to touch anything because you're biking. You're trying to bike. We will have to see if there are more rumors and speculation going forward. Yes. So moving on, our next story, there was an interesting study released by Microsoft. They released their sixth annual civility, safety, and interaction online report. This is part of, they released this as part of International Safer Internet Day. I hope you celebrated, Sarah. This surveyed teens and adults across 22 countries asking about experiences and interactions online. Survey results are used to generate a digital civility index score or DCI lower the score, the higher the perceived level of online civility. So you want a low score? It's like golf. You want the low score. Yeah. So the 2022 report found that the global DCI, and they do break this out by country as well, score was at 65% the best since the survey began in 2016 and a 2% improvement since 2020. Sarah, I know you looked at the report quite a bit. Was there any kind of standout finding for you beyond that takeaway of, hey, it's lower than it's been? Sure. First of all, yes. Lower than it's been sounds great. I, as a U.S. woman, I definitely, what gave me pause was U.S. women experiencing 57% of risks that includes consequences of your actions, worry that your actions will lead to a bad result, pain because of interactions. I stand with the woman of the world. I'm a U.S. woman, so that's not great news, but it also is, I think, really cool of Microsoft to put a lot of this data out there and be like, here's what we're seeing. And for the people who are in positions of power or who at least care about the people in positions of power to help those people do more, this is good. This is good overall, even if some of the data might not be a birthday party. Yeah, this is one of those studies where the narrative is like, oh, online's worse than it's ever been. And everybody has to feel that same way. And it's like, this is the data points to that we need. Yes, this is a survey. So Microsoft knows how to do a survey. I'm assuming this is representative taking a wide number of countries into account here. The big story for me, though, is all the headlines I saw on this were online civility score best it's been ever, best since 2016, best in five years, that kind of stuff. But the second line of that is that this improvement is led by teen boys and adult males, men, I guess, as a category. They experienced 5% less trolling, 3% decrease in hate speech. That's great. Great for online civility. However, women experienced almost 60% of all risk and all time high, which like, again, kind of, yes, that top line figure, that's great. But just drilling down a little bit into that, see that, you know, I guess, not all as well for everybody online. And again, that figure is global in like you said, in the US, that figure for women was 50, you know, accounting for 57% of risk. Overall, the US score was at 58%, so significantly lower than the kind of global average. And that, but that did increase 2% on the year as well. So I guess, you know, again, this is all about, for me, this is all about data points. This is all about, okay, like, you know, your sentiment, your feelings, that does matter for you and for your own mental health and how you interact with people. But it is important to get this context and to get that kind of stuff. Was there anything else that kind of stood out to you, Sarah? Actually, yeah. So I know that particularly for everybody on the DTNS team and who is part of our audience who has kids, or otherwise had to, you know, kind of figure out how to make the classroom be your house. 67% of folks in the US, so US-specific, saying that online medians in classes drove improved civility. Meaning, you know, you have less people yelling at each other or, you know, otherwise making somebody feel small or making them feel unsafe kind of thing, because the medians were online. Now on the surface, that makes sense. Because it's like, yeah, I mean, if somebody's threatening me and they're not right in front of me, that's a little safer, hopefully, feeling because they're, you know, on the other side of a Zoom call. But you hear so much of the opposite of how this is hindering, you know, learning and communication. And I think this just points to this whole conversation being a lot more nuanced. Yeah. And the fact that the study showed that civility was better in like online and classrooms and in meetings than in person actually speaks to like the power of oh, you're talking to people you know, you're in an accountable group. The settings definitely matter. It's not just that it's online, the setting where you're interacting online definitely matters when it comes to civility. So a lot of interesting findings in that report for sure. Well, speaking of civility, we hope that on your next trip, you are a very civil person and you meet other civil people as well. Chris Christensen has a great recommendation for those of us who do love to learn more about the places we visit when we do. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. An interesting app, if you're looking for more information about your surroundings, is the Hear Hear app. And that is one of the worst app names to try and describe in audio. It's H-E-A-R-H-E-R-E. So here is in hearing and then here is in not there. And the Hear Hear app, you can put in your destination and you can listen to audio snippets that have been recorded about things in that area. When I brought up my surroundings in the Hear Hear app, I learned some things about the local history of Cupertino, California. You will have to pay for some of these, but the first five you can get for free, so check it out. Here, here. And this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Aw, thanks, Chris. As always, I've not heard of this network before, but I love it. Great idea. Lots of good stuff. We would like to thank a few brand new bosses that we got over the weekend, Rob Arnold, Nick Papajorjo, Rob Leslie Jr., and Rohan Pulakar. All just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you for joining the team. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Rob. Yeah, two rubs. And thank you, Rohan. We also want to always extend a big thanks to our patrons. You make the show what it is every day. We couldn't do it without you. Thank you. Oh, and I guess we're at the end of our show. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. If you'd like to find out more, you can do so at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all tomorrow with Rob Demud. Talk to you then.