 Coming up on DTNS, Google and Roku are publicly fighting who's your money on, plus Lidar for Better Driving, Zoom's new virtual environments and texts that print themselves. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 26th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. For the show, we were all talking about the kinds of salty snacks that we like and don't like and how well candy lasts when you've forgotten about it for some time in a drawer behind the silverware and all sorts of other things. If you want to get that wider conversation, because we cover it all on Good Day Internet, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com. DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The short film Collette from Facebook's Oculus Studios and EA's Respawn Entertainment Game Studio won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, the first project from the game industry to win an Oscar. The film was created for the VR video game Medal of Honor above and beyond and is available to stream on YouTube, Oculus TV, and The Guardian's website. The New York Times reports that the Indian government ordered roughly 100 posts critical of the country's COVID-19 response to be removed from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. India claimed the posts were misleading and could incite panic. The platforms complied with the order with Twitter blocking the tweets in India, but leaving them available outside the country. On Monday, Apple detailed its plans for US development over the next five years, including investing $430 billion, building a new campus in North Carolina, and adding 20,000 jobs in the US. Apple also pledged tens of billions of dollars for the development of next-generation silicon and 5G technology. Apple says the North Carolina campus will support at least 3,000 jobs in machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and other fields. Facebook rolled out support for a new Spotify mini-player in the news feed, which will continue to play content as a user continues to scroll their feed, part of a partnership that the company has announced last week. The feature is available to free and premium Spotify users who will now see a Facebook and Facebook news feed option when selecting the share option from within the Spotify app. In a separate blog post, the company also confirmed it's building its own in-app podcast player, which shows having to opt into the service and expected to roll out in the next few months. And Mac rumors confirmed that the Reval ransomware group removed all references related to an extortion attempt against Apple, which previously included images and schematics stolen from the ODM Quanta. The group had pledged to leak additional information through May 1st, if not paid a $50 million ransom, and it's not clear why the information was removed. All right, let's talk a little bit more about wake words. You know, that word that wakes up your personal assistant, and then you say something and hope that it understands you. Depending on what your assistant is, sometimes it works better than other times. If you've ever experienced wake word fatigue with your virtual assistant, and you're like, gosh, I'm just always waking up, Google might have something in the works for you. Android Central reports that an update to the Google app on Android shows a menu item called guacamole with a toggle to skip anything, to skip having to say the, hey Google, wake word to perform quick tasks. The toggle isn't yet functional in the app, but it has been seen. But the setting could reportedly be used for tasks, like answering a phone call or stopping an alarm that's already in progress. Rich, I don't know how much of a wake word fatigue you experience in your home. I don't know how many smart assistants you have. I have quite a few. I use Amazon's assistant pretty exclusively. I left some in my car and then it's a Siri thing. But I do find, because I use audio commands a lot, whenever possible. And I know how I have to stay certain things in order to get what I want. And if you deviate too much, it confuses easily. But the wake word itself, I know that you can't just expect a personal assistant to understand if you're talking out loud, just those specific moments where it now needs to know that you're talking to it without it being pinged. Like, hey, I have summoned you. The next thing I say is now directed towards you. But it is annoying and it never has felt very human-like. Yeah, even as arguably it's improved over time or like you can have different virtual students kind of learn your voice. And so theoretically, that it gets better over time. It's like, whenever that doesn't work, it kind of breaks the magic of that experience. So like on its face, seems like a good idea, especially for something like an alarm, where when that is happening, it's a very specific event that I'm sure their data shows 99.9% of the times the only thing you say when an alarm goes off is stop the alarm or you tap the screen or something like that to do that. The one question I have, though, is there's been a lot of skepticism or concern over the last couple of years about what voice data is being collected, how soon, you know, what's being done locally on device, what's being sent back to the cloud and stuff like that. And when you start opening up more times when you're not actively activating, that made sense, when you're not actively turning on your voice assistant to receive a voice command, I feel like even if they do everything right, the perception may not be great for some of these voice assistants, unless it's in these extremely narrow situations. I do think there is maybe some way around that where you can program in routines, but I feel like the more you have to ask an end user, the more chance it's not going to be specifically tailored for a task, so then there will be less times that it works, and then again, it goes back to kind of breaking that magic. Yeah, I'm with you. The stopping an alarm, I use my Echo Show as an alarm occasionally, and exactly the same thing. It's like, what would I be saying, you know, over the alarm, and just like, yeah, keep their alarm going. I'm going to go talk to this guy over here, kind of thing. It's mostly going to be me either saying turn off the alarm or, I don't know, reset it for another time or something like that, answering a phone call, where it's the device is like, I'm engaging in letting you know that there's somebody who, you know, you want to pick up. It's like, yeah, that probably makes sense. So in those instances where I also get notifications when I'm cooking something, because I'm connected to my June oven, I can see where that could be of help, you know, and maybe having, because I have a few routines where I prompt my assistant to say something to me, and it's text that I've given it ahead of time, maybe in situations like that where you could have the device prompt you to, you know, prompt you with, Sarah, it's sunset. Would you like to turn the lights on? Kind of thing. Then that it's essentially, you're not using the wake word, right? Because you've already programmed it to start the conversation for you. So this feels like a little bit of an extension of that, which I love. But yes, you're right. I think the biggest potential issue or something that will need to be thoroughly explained is, because there's not a wake word, and we want you to speak as naturally as possible, so that you're more comfortable than ever with your with your assistant. We are not just listening to you the whole time, but in the early days, one would think that the company would have to do a lot more of that, get all the data, and then start getting better at filtering out stuff that for sure is not being directed at the device. Well, luckily, they're getting better neural processing, on-device local processing. So hopefully, all of that can be done locally and that minimizes, I guess, legitimate privacy concerns. Well, you probably think of The Washington Post as a news publication, right? We cite their stories and stuff and editorials and stuff like that when there's something breaking or they have an exclusive that we cover on the show. But The Washington Post also has other businesses, like they launched a software subsidiary ARC Publishing in 2015, a software as a service publishing platform that was sold to similar media organizations like The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News. Now, the subsidiary is making moves outside of the publishing world, renaming itself ARC XP and launching a second service, the e-commerce platform ARC Commerce, very creatively named. ARC now counts the Golden State Warriors, BP, Reuters, and Avalon Bay communities as large enterprise clients, with sales up over 100% in 2020 and counting on ARC Commerce itself to triple revenue over the next three years. The Washington Post is the first media company to try and figure this out and sell their internal tools as a service. Vox offers its own CoraCMS, Axios launches Axios HQ internal comms tool back in February, and even Gawker Media attempted a strategy like that with its KinjaCMS in the 2010s. I believe they abandoned that project in 2015, but it seems like the media industry has its own particular needs when it comes to CMS and tech platforms and that kind of stuff. So it wasn't surprising, I think, especially for a Jeff Bezos owned ARC Publishing to launch in 2015, but getting that that commerce side, Sarah, do you think this could take off as a substantial source of business like the Washington Post is planning here? Kind of, yeah. I mean, the idea of the Washington Post news publication, whether or not you read the post, you look at it and you go, news publication, okay, things are laid out, it's done as well as would be expected for an online platform. Boston Herald, Dallas Morning News, not small outfits either, but, you know, at some point the folks in charge there thought it made sense, all right, well, let's use this platform that's already working well and users are perhaps familiar with the layout and there's less that we need to recreate from scratch on our end. This is a good investment. The whole e-commerce side of things is also very Amazon-y and I feel like it makes a lot of sense. Now, as you mentioned, Washington Post, not the first media company to do this. I mean, as far as CMS platforms from various companies like Squarespace or WordPress or, you know, this goes on and on to be able to launch something that has e-commerce functionality built in, you've got a lot of choices and some things are more expensive than others, but yeah, we're talking like NBA basketball league, BP, Reuters, you know, those are big clients. If you're launching something that's on the e-commerce side that is associated with a client like this, I can see where ARC commerce and ARC publishing make more sense than kind of going, all right, well, here's this tool and then we're going to do a lot of customization and code on our end. It's already sort of done for you. And the thing that is kind of important to, as the background for this, is ARC publishing was kind of very early in using the public on Washington Post in general, has been very aggressive in using the public cloud for a lot of their IT, specifically AWS, again, not a surprise, considering owned by Jeff Bezos, but the fact that it's already kind of a cloud native eliminates, or it makes it a lot easier for organizations to kind of spin it up, give it a try as opposed to being something that needs to be installed on-prem, deployed that way. So that could be not to say that most of these are, again, as a software, as a service, it just makes it that much easier to kind of get your whole infrastructure kind of going with it when it has that kind of model. So we will see if that can make it take off the way they're envisioning. Indeed. Well, a new paper from the Journal Optics Express shows researchers at University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and University College London developed the first lidar-based augmented reality heads-up display for vehicles, which creates ultra-high-definition holographic representations of road objects which are beamed directly into the driver's eyes. The researchers scanned Mallet Street in central London using terrestrial laser scanning, which uses millions of pulses for multiple locations on that street. This was then combined with point cloud data to create a 3D model. The researchers then used separation algorithms to identify and extract the target objects like cars, trucks, people, signs, which were then further converted into computer-generated diffraction patterns. Those were used to project 3D holographic objects to the driver's eyes. The end result is the AR system can project multiple holographic layers, which can align with the position of the real object that's on the street or near the street, letting users see visually obstructed road signs and the like. Current tasks have been based on a stationary platform. The researchers are now working to miniaturize the technology to fit into a car with plans to test the system on public roads in Cambridge going forwards. This is neat. My first reaction of this, and there's a, in the article from fizz.org, and we'll have that in our show notes, there's a little sort of model video that you can play. And when I first played it, I was like, yikes, I don't, this is crazy. I mean, it's sort of like a strange infrared view of the area. And I thought, well, that's crazy. I mean, you would never want to be driving and be seeing that instead of the real world. But what I understand a little bit better now is this is very selective. This kind of thing is supposed to be selectively popping up as you're still keeping your eyes on the road and not being an distracted driver. And I can see where this actually comes in really handy. I have, in my car now, I have a heads-up display. Depending on how tall you are and where you're sitting in the seat, you have to adjust it just so you can see it. But it's pretty basic. It's 2D. It's just a reflection from the windshield. And it tells me how fast I'm going. And it'll flash if there's like a school coming up, kind of thing, like, oh, slowdown, 25 MPH kind of thing. So it comes in handy, but there's not a whole lot to it, what I would love. And what I think the researchers are going with this is, let's say I'm on a windy road and I'm about to turn a corner and there's somebody or something that's about to dart out in front of me. And there's no way for me to know unless I get around that corner and I either see it or my car at that point does the emergency like, you know, something's right in front of you to have just a little bit more of a heads up and be able to see motion, which would be obstructed otherwise until potentially dangerous moment. That's really helpful. Yeah. And being selective, because we've seen, like you were saying, the HUD concept is nothing new. It's been around almost, I think, decades now at this point in the automotive industry and never has taken off, I think, necessarily as a mainstream feature, certainly as like something nice to have, but not quite taking off. And this is obviously a whole new technological leap to take onto this. I do think it would be really great if, you know, you're a tree, you know, a tree branches all of a sudden blossomed and you can't see the no turn on, you know, no left turn sign or something like that to be able to just have that kind of pop in to your eye. I mean, what I don't know if we want holograms like beam directly into our eye, like I don't know what that experience is like as a driver. I'm assuming they're going to test that and make sure it feels fine. But it, you know, we have seen efforts like this. BMW, I believe, had their own kind of, I want to say it was Lidar based kind of mapping for when you're driving at night to kind of give you a sense of where the road is and stuff like that. And that never seemed to go kind of to the next level. So obviously, a lot of testing will still need to be done, but some really cool technology that hopefully can make people safer. Well, and let's say something like the Waze app, right? I've got CarPlay. So if I'm, if I've got Waze going and, you know, I'm kind of, you know, trying not to keep my eyes off the road, but you know, you're glancing over and it will give you all sorts of helpful info like, you know, police ahead or accident or, you know, debris and road. There's all sorts of little things that it's trying to help you with. Well, you're still kind of having to look at it, right? You might get a little beep boop here and there, but something that is kind of giving you just a little, hey, you got some information that you're going to want that does not require you to kind of be a little bit distracted here and there. That's, that's, I'm pumped about that. I would love that. Well, if you want to hear us talk about LiDAR or anything else on the show, one way to let us know is by submitting stories in our subreddit. You can submit them. You can also vote on other stories. So they rise to the top at dailytechnewshow.reddit. Well, Sarah, I don't know if you received one, but I received an email from Roku. They sent it out to all their customers Monday that said that YouTube TV app might stop working on Roku in the next few days because of Google's anti competitive and discriminatory terms. Like many big video providers, Roku and Google have an agreement to give each other a few extra things that you wouldn't get just by submitting an app to Roku's app store. That usually involves things like ad revenue sharing, extra promotion and placement in the app store. Last year, Roku added a dedicated search results row for YouTube for universal voice searches on the platform after it claims Google threatened to remove the YouTube app from the platform itself. Roku now claims that Google is requiring voice searches to only return YouTube search results when in the YouTube app. If it is open, even if customers have previously purchased requested content on other platforms or set something like a music service preference. So if you're using YouTube music, it would default to that if you were already in that app. Roku also said that Google is requesting customer data outside of standard industry practices and tying new hardware certification requirements to its YouTube TV license. This would sensibly make things Roku hardware more expensive as a result of these certification changes. Roku maintains it is not asking for any change in economic terms as part of this licensing deal. In response, Google called these baseless claims. Roku makes a lot of claims in this email. Are they all baseless, Google? Every single one? Google goes on to say, we've seen this pattern of behavior from Roku and contract licensing and stuff like that. Ordinarily, we don't talk a lot about these kind of carriage disputes. These are things that usually just involve two companies arguing over money. It does stink and consumers are impacted when services are cut off. A lot of the cable providers are very famous for a sports network or something like that would go off the air because there was some kind of dispute like this. But these are a very different set of allegations of Google really interfering with Roku claiming that Google wants to interfere with kind of core Roku customer experience. Yeah. A couple of things here. First of all, Roku really needs YouTube TV. That would be a really bad thing. I feel like Roku is there's some bluffing going on here, right? Making this a big public thing and saying, Google's strong arming us and this is so unfair. Look what they're doing. Google's saying these claims are baseless is, well, they can't both be true. Roku's either exaggerating or misunderstanding about Google's asking for or Google's lying. So that's one part of this and it sounds messy. But the other part of it is, okay, well, I know in, I do have a Roku, but I don't use it very often. I'm mostly an Apple TV person and a voice search will always launch something within an Apple, the TV or movie library unless I specifically navigate to a particular search button in a particular app. They don't all work exactly the same, but I have gotten used to that where it's like, I'm not cut off from searching the way that I want to search within a certain app or on the Apple TV in general, but Apple will do its very best to guide me to its own areas whenever possible. For Google to say no, you can only return something from the YouTube library when doing a search and you have no other option to do so, even if it's a little bit harder requires a few more clicks. Well, that didn't really seem fair. And especially if you've got something like another music service preference, it almost reminds me of when iOS just any time you didn't launch the dedicated Chrome app, for example, everything would surface in Safari, whether or not you were wanting to use Chrome that luckily changed somewhat recently. Same idea where it's just like, it's just extremely frustrating for the end user and who wins? Sure, some companies are having a little spat about shifting some money around, but I don't see how this helps anybody and certainly not an end user. Well, and I've seen this kind of portrayed as especially with the change in hardware certifications that oh, this is Google speculating that they're trying to make Roku's hardware more expensive to make Chromecast hardware seem more affordable or more competitive or something like that. I actually think Roku is increasingly an ad tech company that happens to have a very successful hardware business and Google is an ad company. So I think it's more about kind of dictating the terms on that. I don't really think this is about hardware at all from the Google perspective. Ultimately, I think this is Google saying, hey, we're the bigger ad tech player and we want more control over that experience and forcing stuff to our properties. However, in terms of Google saying that these are baseless claims, I will say this may be a situation where this is now the standard YouTube TV license and so it's baseless in that this is not special treatment to Roku in this particular situation. That's kind of how I might be reading that. We will see if the app disappears. I'm a frequent Roku user and a YouTube TV user, so here's hoping now. Right. I know. Get it together, everybody. Rich got to watch his shows. Got my programs. Well, this might be good news. If you do a lot of zooming and you like options, Zoom launched its immersive video feature both for free and paid accounts originally announced back in October. They're finally rolling it out. This will let you as a host arrange participants in a single shared virtual environment with support for up to 25 participants. Similar to how Microsoft Teams Together Mode works, that launched back in August of last year and supports up to 49 participants. So, Zoom's at 25 and I'm struggling, Rich, just because any time we do any sort of Together Mode on Skype, we all sort of who did that? We don't need to feel like we're all in a stadium. We're about to watch a movie together. But I can see as a teacher in an educational environment, this might be just one more step closer to making the students or whoever you might be giving a talk to, you know, or some sort of auditorium, sort of a feel, feel a little bit more like the real thing. Yeah, this definitely has a, feels like an educational focus for this. Certainly, I think a lot of, you know, people that do, you know, replacing conference or meetings basically can also get some value out of it. But the fact that Zoom emphasized in this announcement that, oh, you can rearrange the participants and stuff like that to exactly how you want them as a host, that to me kind of has, that seems like it would have a lot of applications as a teacher with your students kind of being able to establish some order in what might be otherwise a very unorderly experience that they're used to on, you know, whatever teleconferencing platform, Zoom, or otherwise. You know, it will be, I'm interested to see when we are, when these are no longer required and these are optional, how much of these modes, whether it's Zoom's immersive or Microsoft's Teams Together mode will actually be used, you know, when we can all have the choice to get together. That will be interesting to see. Yeah, well, you know, there's been, you know, the studies of, of how people's behavior in a pretty short amount of time for, if you do a lot of virtual video chatting, I mean, we do, this is how we do our show, right? It's like some of us are just kind of used to this. But other people have had to get used to it really quickly, quite often in a short amount of time. And you know, been a lot of studies of, you know, behavior changing, where you're constantly looking and, you know, what's a, what feels like a mirror, you know, like, oh, God, you know, it's really weird having to kind of notice myself and what I look like and what my background looks like and having, you know, feeling like people are all staring at me. So especially with the younger set, you know, with kids and trying to kind of get that comfort level up, I can see where at least just having some options and saying, you know, the kids were way better when I did it this way. That's a good thing. Well, Manuel Lucio D'Alo, a senior engineer for software firm Plastic SCM, built what he calls the Yah-Yah Gram. It's a switchboard, physical switchboard, to send and receive voice and text messages over Telegram, Telegram, the app, but in physical form. It's powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, runs on Python, uses some several third-party software libraries to make it run smoothly. As a user, you physically plug a cable in next to a recipient's name to send the message. Then they press, well, you press because you're still doing it, you hold a button, you record audio, there's an integrated USB microphone, then the message appears to the recipient's phone as a voice note. So they don't, you don't need two of these. You can just be like, analog person on one side, other person using Telegram, you get your note. When the Yah-Yah Gram receives a text message, it's then printed out with a built-in thermal printer, sort of similar to a receipt that a cash register would print out. D'Alo says he used Telegram rather than WhatsApp or another messaging service because Telegram is not only more open, but he also does not Facebook. Now, this is awesome. I love this idea. The execution is great. The idea is great. It's helping us. I think his grandma is like 92 or she's in her 90s. Yeah, she's his Yah-Yah, which is what, hence the name. Not that you have to be a grandmother to want something like this, but this is, it was actually built for a person that he knows. The one thing that's a little weird is like, even if you're 90, you might not necessarily know how a telephone switchboard works, unless you were a switchboard operator. I do wonder if it's like, if she still had to be trained to figure out how to use a switchboard. Well, I don't think Yah-Yah is doing that much texting, right? It's like, I get to talk to my grandson. There's like four or five slots to plug into. It's not like there's a ton of options, but just awesome. I want to see Manuel put this out there. I want to be able to buy one for my Yah-Yah. Yeah, it's really cool. I just think that just the fact that he made it work is, I love it. It's just great. It's like Maker Faire all over again. You know what? I love Sarah's What's in the Mail bag. Can you tell us what we got in there? Indeed, I can, Rich. I'm really glad that I have something for you. It would be so awkward. Okay, so we got an email. This is a quick one from Joop, or Joop. I hope I'm one of those. This is the proper pronunciation who says, well, deep fakes are becoming a thing. Links us to a story from the Netherland Times, and here's the context of the article. I'll just summarize it. So Dutch parliamentarians had foreign affairs conversation, a foreign affairs conversation last week, used Zoom with what who they thought was Leonid Volkov, the chief of staff of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. However, it appears it was a deep fake imitation of Volkov, not actually the man. So this is last week. This is, I believe, last Wednesday. By Friday, the national newspaper de Volkskrantz in the Netherlands reported that the registry of the Dutch House of Representatives confirmed, yeah, that's the case. It was a deep fake. Reards Colds, chair of the Latvian Parliament's foreign affairs committee, had also a short video conversation with, he thought was Volkov, in March. That, too, was found to be a deep fake. So the Dutch parliamentarians, and there were some other people on the call from other parts of Europe, this is not the first time this has happened, but it seems that in a few cases now, this is something that has been discovered after the fact and has a lot of folks worried. You know, producer Roger Chang on the pre-show, and we were talking about this, said, you know, I think a lot of this could just be maybe we should have better Zoom passwords on some of our calls for some of this. But I do also wonder if this ends up being like Zoom bombing, where, you know, even though Zoom is not, I guess, responsible for this, it helps them out if they put in some sort of filtering to detect some sort of deep fake going on and kind of alert people to the possibility. I don't know if that's possible, but maybe we'll see that. Yeah, it's sort of befuddling how this is sort of continuing to go on. But yes, Joop, your point is made. We talk about deep fakes ever so often here on DTNS, and it's always sort of like, when is it going to get really bad? We see that technology can be very convincing. But what's that situation where it's like, oh, we're in for it now. You know, it's over for us. No one knows what's real anymore. And you get a situation like this, and you go, yes, that is concerning. You know, maybe nothing to, I don't know, under wraps was discussed on the call last week. I wasn't part of it. But yes, that's not something that you expect when you're in politics. Well, if you have any questions, comments, links to articles that we might want to know about, we want it all. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send your brain trust. Thank you in advance. And of course, we want to give a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Scott Hepburn, Dale Mulcahy, and Allyson Jaby. And we want to thank our brand new bosses, Ryan, and someone who calls themselves only for Patreon. Both just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, bosses. Thanks, bosses. Hey, folks, we're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Tom Merritt's back tomorrow and we'll be joined by CNET's Aaron Carson. 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