 Coming up on DTNs, the PS5 is finally profitable. Facebook bans researchers of political ads and an MIT study of the fastest improving technology. DTNs starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty... We were just discussing having Bluetooth in your tooth and bone-conducting audio and all of the wonderful things that would happen from them and why Scott Johnson is worried about firmware updates. If you want that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Paul Thieson, Ellison Jobby, and Andrew Bradley. Alright, let's start off with a few tech things you should know. NBCUniversal's Fandango acquired the on-demand video streaming service Voodoo from Walmart last year for $100 million. Now, Fandango will merge its Fandango Now streaming platform with Voodoo, but it will keep the Voodoo name going forward. This Voodoo service will offer 200,000 new release and catalog TV and movie titles to rent or buy, as well as thousands of free-to-stream titles. Voodoo will also take Fandango Now's place as the official movie store on the Roku platform. And my wife is an employee of Fandango and doesn't know anything about this, don't ask her. According to a company message to Apple retail employees seen by Bloomberg, Apple will launch a buy-now-pay-later program along with a firm holdings in Canada. The program will debut later in August for online and in-store purchases available over 12 or 24 months. Microsoft paused its two-month free trial offers of its new Windows 365 cloud PC service, citing the need to boost server capacity to meet significant demand. Where have you heard this story before? Customers can sign up to be notified when free trials are available again, and all tiers of Windows 365 are still available for paid subscribers. What's that rolled out? View once messages which automatically delete photos and videos after they are viewed and dismissed. Senders will see a message as opened in chat once it has been viewed by the recipient. The information sources say that WhatsApp owner Facebook is hiring AI researchers specializing in homomorphic encryption in the hopes of building the ability to analyze the content of encrypted data without having to decrypt it. Such an approach could open the door to eventually targeting ads based on encrypted messages. In a response to the report, Facebook told the information it's too early for us to consider homomorphic encryption for WhatsApp at this time. But if you'd like to know more about that kind of encryption, check out the homomorphic encryption episode of Know A Little More at knowalittlemore.com. Alright, let's talk about Sony. Let's do it. So Sony beat expectations with operating profit of $2.6 billion and a 9% increase in net income. The music segment saw profits almost double with strengthening streaming and physical media sales. Operating income from Sony Pictures fell $20 million to $232 million with the lack of theatrical releases lowering home entertainment revenue. And games split the difference with sales rising but profits falling. Hardware and peripheral sales rose but revenue from non first party games fell and hardware was largely sold at a loss with the new PS5 dominating sales. However, that number should turn around as the $499 PlayStation 5 is no longer selling at a loss. That's according to Sony's CFO and the $399 PS5 digital edition looks to have its losses offset not only by accessory sales but also the PS4. Sony sold 500,000 PS4 consoles last quarter. It's still selling well. Sony also said that there are 104 million monthly active users on the PlayStation Network. And they also spend an average of $37.09 per quarter each. A lot of money turns out. Yeah, it's really good to hear the one thing that surprises me the most about hearing the PlayStation 5 is out of the red. First of all, it's not unusual. These consoles, especially from them and Microsoft typically are sold as loss leaders for a while and they make up those profits on the back end either with game sales or more increasingly subscription type content like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass and the like. This is just sooner than I expected mostly because it seems a little odd when you compare it to the stories you guys have been talking about here on the show a lot about how Sony can't keep up with demand for this device. And what that normally tells me is that yes, the pipeline is slowed. Yes, there's chip shortages. Yes, there's all those reasons. But a lot of times that means that stuff goes up in price because the demand is higher. So you're going to be paying more for those components. So I would have thought this would have taken longer for them to pull themselves out of the red. And by comparison, Microsoft is still selling series X models at a loss. I kind of thought they'd both be doing that for at least the first year of this thing. So the fact that they've done that is pretty impressive. Yeah, what that tells me and this is just a guess is that the components that make up the PS5, the majority of them are getting cheaper. It's only a few of them that are slowing down production and maybe those are getting expensive but not expensive enough. That's what it sort of applies to me or that one of the one of the problems with production isn't making the parts. It's shipping them. And it's just it's just the slowdown and shipping lanes. Like we talked about Big Jim on Saturday is causing the supply shortage because you can't get the parts to the factory fast enough. Yeah, there's also whether people want to put a lot of stock in this or not. There's a lot of talk right before the price announcement of the PlayStation five that they were scrambling in the wake of Microsoft coming out early with pricing and going, Oh, that's about 50 to $100 less than we were planning. So we got to decide what to do. Now, if those stories were true, that adds to even more reason why I thought this was going to take longer. But none of that was really sussed out. So who knows. But the point is all of these companies want to get to a place where every time they sell a box, it's at a profit and services and games just add to that profit. Yeah, they got there much quicker than usual. And I guess that's it's the it's the fastest selling thing you can't get. Yeah, if you're out there, there's so much stuff about that math that I'm like, how? Well, if you're the person out there who's like, I can't even buy one. I want to buy one. But I can't. That's a good reminder that you are a single data point. And there are lots of people who did get them apparently. Yeah, good point. Scientists at MIT analyzed the US patent system in an attempt to determine which technology is improving the fastest, which are improving the slowest and which just have the most work being done on them, but maybe not improving all that fast. They used an algorithm with machine learning and natural language processing on patent network data, and we're able to measure something called centrality. Now, if you want to know how that all works, read the paper, but the central patents are essentially the hub of citation. So that means they refer to a lot of patents before themselves and are cited by a lot of patents that come after them. And that centrality is used to make predictions about how fast a category is improving. The more centralized patents you have, I think the faster it's improving. They used a previously defined classification system to identify 1,757 categories, which in the paper they call domains, a domain of invention, like cryptocurrency or something like that. And that covered about 97% of patents. They found that the more work being done on a category does not necessarily lead to greater improvement. The fastest improving areas were mostly software-based, particularly internet and enterprise network management, and overall they estimate that technology in general is improving about 19% per year. Mechanical skin treatment, hair removal, and wrinkles was one category, and that had the lowest rate of improvement at 1.9% a year. So if you're looking at your wrinkles wondering why you still have them, that's why. But dynamic information exchange and support systems integrating multiple channels, another category, has been improving at a blistering 216% a year. All right, so what's fastest besides that? Top six fastest categories are all network-related, including client-server applications, messaging and advertising, network addressing and access, enterprise security, enterprise access management in that order. Spots 7 through 10 are video delivery, CDNs, being able to deliver video, encryption, mixing encryption and unencrypted data, and data management for e-commerce. You can search the database yourself too. They put a link up at technologyrates.mit.edu. It will tell you the estimated improvement rate and the number of patents in the category. So you can do just natural language stuff like cryptocurrency and it will show you their domains that apply to that. Well, I think this stuff is so fascinating and seems like the kind of stuff you should expect out of somebody like MIT. Here's my biggest takeaway. That 216% increase in what they're calling dynamic information exchange and support systems integrated across multiple channels. What that sounds like to me is my doctor or my dentist should never have their software go down again. That's what that tells me. Or at least we're getting to a place where it's so much better that those kinds of systems where they got to reach out, talk to the healthcare providers and other stuff and have it all come back and pull up old data and have it all mesh together and work and be easy for an average human being to pull up and have. It seems like that's where the biggest gains are being made and not me looking any younger. So I'll take that. That's fine. Well, I mean, speak for yourself, Scott. I actually found the idea of a central patent being, this was really eye-opening for me because you hear all the time, oh, a company has been granted a patent or has applied for this patent. You think, okay, well, they're going to corner the market on all of this. And many patents are only part of all sorts of other technology that's being developed that also has its own patents but are related patent-wise. And there may have been patents in the past and then yours and then patents in the future. And it's all part of a certain category that then you look at collectively and say, oh, there's some movement going on in this aspect of technology. Yeah, I'm having fun just looking through this database and finding out like, okay, what are the things that are improving? I put in phones and it gave me five domains and the domains don't have natural language names. I tried to dig into them, but one that's improving like 112% per year includes packet routing and switching, dynamically limiting output queue size, providing loop-free routing tables, high-speed fiber channel switch element. This is all like super technical stuff, but it means that the networking aspect of things, which is borne out by that top 10 I read, is where all of the advancements are being made. And that is heartening, right? Because when you think about the problems, a lot of the problems we have are with networking. It's with the network just not communicating fast or dropping packets or things just not being smooth or not having enough bandwidth. And it's good to know that folks aren't just sitting around waiting for that to get better. Like, they are banging their heads against it and we're making progress. Hey, folks, would you like to make progress in your apparel? We have brand new DTNS stuff with the Daily Tech News Show album art logo. If you've seen the multicolored album art logo of Daily Tech News Show, you can now get a hat. You can get a hoodie. You can get all that kind of stuff with that new logo on it. Check it out at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. All right, let's get to this Alibaba story. Alibaba Cloud posted a branded article on tech in Asia detailing their partnership with the Olympics for digital content. If you've been watching a bunch of that online, probably getting it out of there. And while it's all from Alibaba's perspective, the fact is Alibaba Cloud is the main partner for Olympic broadcasts this year and maybe moving forward. The Olympic Broadcasting Service or OBS. All right, I don't know that sounds familiar. Don't get confused. Provides broadcasters from around the world with the official video of the competitions. That's why the shots of actual events look identical no matter where in the world you're viewing them. If anyone of you noticed that Alibaba Cloud is OBS's partner using a service called content plus to give broadcasters the ability to grab highlights interviews and post produced content for use in reporting on the games. Alibaba live cloud is used for or by four broadcasters to submit in 4k video as well. Alibaba content plus makes live streams in short form ready to air content available. Alibaba cloud is also providing 3d athlete tracking using standard video and computer vision algorithms to track 20 points in 3d. That's where these visualizations you see bearing events are coming from. So that's what that's all about. The point being cloud video is coming into its own in these games specifically these Olympic games and centralized by the IOC and hosted by Alibaba, which as we mentioned on Tuesday here on the show is one of the Chinese companies with decent enough global revenue to balance the effect of China's domestic crackdown on tech companies. So are they more immune than others? Are they like bite dance and maybe a couple of other examples where they're a little less I don't know held down by their own domestic policies. I mean yeah they're not not entirely dependent on the mainland maybe that's a really good question. I think this is fascinating and I think it's fascinating that Alibaba is out there planting articles in tech in Asia and I saw them in other places as well to say hey we're doing this because they are. They are providing the cloud system for Olympic broadcasting. Now granted NBC is doing a lot of stuff themselves because they're Comcast owned and so they're able to just say you know what we'll just take the feed directly from OBS and we'll stream it out. They may not be using Alibaba cloud. I couldn't find confirmation about that. But enough are in fact for broadcasters even using it to transmit their own 4k video that this this implies that Alibaba cloud is reliable enough to provide service worldwide. And I think a lot of broadcasters that aren't even official Olympic broadcasters are using this to get the clips right to get the highlights to put on the news etc. So I think this is really fascinating because it does imply that Alibaba might be too big for China to affect as badly as they are some of the more domestic companies at least platform companies. I do like there's something about consistency that I like about this. I was reading through the article and my big takeaway was the reason everybody's getting the same clips is because they're pulling from the same source. And just my brain goes into kind of production mode and I think to myself well if it were me I would love this because that means I get to pick and choose from stuff that is you know on the ground there at the event getting the shots I want. And I'm not going to be using something that somebody else doesn't either have access to or they don't have access to something better than I do. There is something nice about that standardization. There are downsides to that. But that's one point of contact that's really interesting here but also just the fact that cloud in general. I don't mean to make this sound like you know synergistic freaking computer word terminology but the cloud is finally coming into this place where we were kind of promised it would go and and and even in places we didn't think about before. And what it actually means and what the real world applications are this is a really interesting one given that we're you know so also sort of glued to the Olympics right now. So it's a it's a really it's it's fun to see it get to this point. Yeah. Well and also it's true that it's worldwide. Right. It's it's not it's all I want to say is it's not just AWS and Google and Microsoft Azure. Yeah. Go ahead. The what I was going to say is it's sort of like OK sure. Cloud seems to be doing a pretty bang up job of this. Are there is there going to be backlash against the company for this or that that would affect something like this for years from now at the next Olympics. Maybe hard to say. Would that be Amazon Cloud giving us all Olympic highlights. You know in 4k video that are easily digested you know on on variety of platforms. It's a it's Alibaba for now. And it is a you know you mentioned NBC Tom and I always think of like NBC or NBC a variety of on demand NBC owned you know initiatives that I might be able to watch Olympics on. I have some options now but I it's interesting to know a little bit more about the back end that's actually providing everybody with this. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if the IOC picks Alibaba Cloud because it's not US based because they're dealing with clients worldwide. And there is a tendency to think like those US companies they they they're they tend to overreach. Maybe they're too big where Alibaba Cloud has the well it's China will my data be safe. But here you're not storing data with them. You're getting data from them. So so yeah. And I'm sure even NBC is using it to pull clips pull highlights because that content plus thing you mentioned Scott provides clips in real time. So if you need to pull highlights as they're happening if you've got the license for content plus you can do that. So it does seem pretty impressive. I think it's interesting that you know where what five days away from the end of the Olympics you know week and a half in and now is when Alibaba starts pushing these articles out. They wanted to make sure it worked. But they didn't melt down. And it sounds like it did. Yeah. Plus people just the idea of real time anything like it's like getting images but get them while they're being taken. Yeah. There's something really powerful about that. Well here's a real powerful story that's tearing up the Internet today researchers at NYU started the NYU ad observatory a little more than a year ago to study the spread of political ads on Facebook without having Facebook involved and or interfering in the process. A plugin called ad observer is voluntarily installed by users and collects data that Facebook provides to those users about why an ad was targeted to them. Usually a list of interests. So if you've ever had an ad delivered by Facebook you'll notice you can say why am I getting this ad. You can click it and it'll give you a list of reasons this this extension with your permission says we just like to take those reasons anything that's in that little list that you would click. We just like to automatically get that data at observatory collected only that data to determine what interests were being targeted by political advertisers at observatory says its plugin does not collect identifying information. It does not collect your name your Facebook ID your friends list just the data that's available when you would click that little button. Facebook does not offer the targeting info in that little window through its own ad library feature which is another reason why ad observatory wanted to do this themselves. It does Facebook does provide information on targeting through a special research program called Fort but that information is filtered by Facebook and NYU said we want an independent unfiltered information to look at. And in fact they found some discrepancies between what Facebook reports and what their extensions have found. Facebook says it tried for more than a year to convince NYU ad observatory to use Fort and that if it didn't it would be in violation of Facebook's terms of service. Facebook claims that the plugin does collect user names and that other information it collects is not publicly viewable and therefore scraping it as a violation of the terms of service. Facebook claimed the extension collected data about Facebook users who did not install the extension or consent to the collection and that is true. Advertisers are users of Facebook and did not consent to the collection of their publicly available advertising information. And that little box you check is not publicly available so technically it is a violation of the terms of service. Facebook has now and here's the news today disabled the accounts apps pages and platforms associated with the NYU's ad observatory project and its operators. So not just the project but also the personal accounts of the people involved with the project and that has caused the internet to blow up a little bit. Yeah, no kidding. This is a big story today and I've been following it the best I can. My first question is why would Facebook have what why did the company say yeah sure NYU ad observatory you can go ahead and do this we're okay with this and then later say well hold on a second. They never did not doing what they never said they were okay with it. They they're saying from the beginning we want you to do it within our program for it. Right. If you do that we're okay with it. It's the fact that they didn't do it within the Facebook Fort program that got them upset. I mean this sounds like Facebook probably. I don't know. I'm so torn on this. Are you saying what took them so long to finally like crack down. Kind of. Yeah, because I you know there's so much that I you know read from you know folks who follow the story pretty closely saying what were they thinking why why why did this get to this point Facebook. Facebook understands you know who's scraping and how that sort of stuff works and why is it now coming to a point where Facebook says well hold on a second. We told you use forth this entire time and you didn't and now we're going to shut down a bunch of personal accounts of people involved in a research project that actually might be somewhat helpful. Yeah, I think Facebook would say and they seem to be saying we were we were trying to give them a chance to do it right. We didn't want to just slam down on them. In other words they didn't want the bad press but they finally got to their limit why now I don't I don't know particularly why now and not earlier or later right. The question I have is, yes, Facebook has a program where you can do this that they say protects privacy. I assume that means it protects the privacy of the advertisers because that really seems to be the only victim of the privacy. That's the point of contention at this point right Facebook saying well hold on a second we have some advertisers that aren't super happy with this. Yeah, and that is proprietary information where advertisers are like well wait a minute we don't want our competitors to know all of this data about us. I get that that's a fairly reasonable thing to happen on the other end. I get why NYU is like we don't really care about that. We're trying to collect pure data for our research and the only way to do that is to not have Facebook interfering in the collection of the data on behalf of the advertisers. And there there is a study where they found that the reporting was different than what they were finding in the extension. And that kind of proved that they're like yeah we do need an independent way of looking at this. My only add to this would be having all these personal accounts get canned seems like a step too far. Like I like all the way up to the point of well we've decided we don't want to do this anymore so we're going to disable your plug in and we're going to stop this from happening. Okay, but then just go ahead and let's just kill all the accounts of everybody who had anything to do with the project. That seems petty and weird. That's how they treat every violation of a term of service. And you might be singing a different tune if this was terrorists violating a term of service or something where you had no sympathy for it. Right. You'd want them to like why did they leave their personal accounts up. That's a loophole and they can you know like you've got to have one set of rules for everybody. Yeah, that's dangerous though because one set of rules is so letter of the law you're going to have to apply it to you know mitigating circumstances and it's going to look bad. And that's where we're at. And that's where we're at. Yeah, I come down on the side of NYU. I get that Facebook has technically the right to do this. They did violate the terms of service. But if it's me, I'm saying Facebook, you need to come up with a way to accommodate the NYU ad observatory project. And I know that's an uncomfortable conversation for you to have with your advertisers. But I think NYU ad observatory project has an ethical an ethical argument on their side here. Yeah, I agree. Well, for years now we've been talking about meat alternatives beyond beyond meat and possible burger for example kind of red meat stuff but folks plant based foods are now coming for fish. What if you don't want to eat fish, but you want to pretend you're eating fish, you're in luck because Madrid based to NATO is using especially grown tomato. You might say to NATO. If you're, I don't know what also called tomato tomato tomato along with algae and spices to create faux tuna. They're not the only company doing this though. France's Otonella sells plant based smoke salmon that's actually made from algae and pea protein, which is funny because that's my favorite milk also made from pea protein. He is the best. It really can. I am so into this. Listen, I am a fish eater. I like fish. I think it tastes good. I also know that there are a lot of nutritional components to fish and mega threes, you know, there's a long list. But you also have to think about where your fish is sourced from. If it's farmed versus wild, if it's over fished and anything that could get me to a point where I could have my fillet of soul that is plant based and therefore making less of a negative impact on the environment. I am all for it. Yeah, I was I was first. I was like, no, but you want real fish because I am a person who believes in eating real food, not processed food. And essentially these these meat replacements are processed food processed foods. Yeah. And I'm like, you're not going to get all the nutrients if you're just eating a tomato that tastes like tuna, no matter how much like tuna tastes. But the companies do make an effort. That's why they include algae to replicate the nutrient profile so that you're getting omega threes. You're getting all those nutrients that are in fish. At which point, then it does go back to the like, well, OK, if salmon are being over fished and that's detrimental to the environment, then I suppose eating an Odentella pea protein smoked salmon every once in a while. If I'm getting the same nutrition, maybe that's not so bad. I don't know. Yeah, I did it. I'm ready. I like this artificial stuff. My Tom made me think a little harder though and more about, well, what's actually in there? This isn't just about replicating the experience. Like, can I actually get out of it? What you're supposed to get out of it? And if they can do that in a way that's like, I don't know, provable. I'm way more for that. Yeah. Because I do like me some fish. And you know what, if I can make, if I can have fish that's consistently like not too fishy or just kind of perfect fish. But it's like nutrients. Yeah. So that's more like a taste thing. Yeah. Sometimes you're, you know, it's Russian roulette with these fish. And this seems like a way to make it a little more consistent. A bio count. Our chat room is saying, will my coworkers get mad if I microwave? Oh, baby, that's the real question, right? Is to not going to be able to make fish that doesn't stink when you microwave it the next day. And no one will complain. That would be, that would be a great marketing. It's made of pea protein. You're good. Also, I can't wait for McDonald's filet of fish. With that, we should probably move on to the mail bag. This one comes from Ian. This is actually a question that Ian had related to a saying that we had some updated ways of voices, meaning our voices that you can actually install on ways if you would like us to give you directions. Ian says, I drive home listening to DTNS and I have DTNS interrupt DTNS to give me traffic traffic updates. How meta where can you get the updated ways voices? Ah, yes. So Paolo, thank you Paolo, is the one who has made these. There is a couple of DTNS sets. There's also a Roger Chang one, a Sarah Lane one and a Sarah Lane funny one. A me one and Shannon Morse and a Shannon Morse funny one as well. And you can find the link to all of them at dailytechnewshow.com. Right there at the top of the page. Excellent. If you have feedback, if you have questions, if you have comments, anything that we talk about on the show or might talk about on a future show, please do send it our way. We love your feedback. You help make our show what it is. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, we would like to thank a couple of new bosses. In fact, three of them. We got Igor Ackerman. We got Dennis Wharton and we got Chris Deepak. All just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you Igor. Thank you Dennis and thank you Chris. Yes, you made our day, all three of you. Every time we get a new boss on Patreon, one of us gets wings. I think. Have you gotten yours yet? Yeah. I mean, which one? Yeah, you only get one at a time. So you got to fly careful when you get the one wing. Also, angels and wings. I'm like, what's happening? The red dragon. Wait, that's him. It's not good. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson. I don't know if you have your wings or not, but we love you either way. You probably have made some illustration at some point of yourself with wings. But what else is going on in your world? I just have two bloody stumps right now. I'll work on them. Lots going on. Always something happening over at frogpants.com. So if you're looking for a whole bunch of insight into these recent problems that you've been having at Blizzard Entertainment, I've got shows about that. If you're looking for good old fashioned video game content, I've got that. If you're looking for comics, illustration, other stuff, it's all there. So I would just point you all to frogpants.com where you'll find all of it. That's frogpants.com. And find me on Twitter. I'm Matt Scott Johnson. Excellent. We are live on this show Monday through Friday. Every week at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. And we will be back here doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.