 Coming up on DTNS, did Google and Facebook team up to fix ad prices? TikTok and Walmart are going to team up to live stream shopping, and Los Angeles Electric Veal Company deals with its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 17th, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about the follies of setting a routine for your smart home lights, as well as haircuts and chocolate colas. Get that wider conversation. Become a member and get good day internet at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook ran another ad campaign Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post against Apple asking consumers if they would pay for apps that are currently free, suggesting that content makers will have to turn to subscriptions to replace lost ad revenue. You might recall that on Wednesday, Facebook also outlined its arguments in full-page ads against Apple's privacy change, which it claims, quote, threatens the personalized ads that millions of small businesses rely on to find and reach consumers. Coinbase announced Thursday it confidentially filed for an IPO. Coinbase did not announce how it would structure the IPO. Although co-founder Fred Ursum previously told Fortune that the company is spiritually built to go public via an offering involving digital tokens on a blockchain, which I imagine the US SEC would have something to say about. So don't expect that, but at least, you know, fun to think about. Security researchers at Ben Gurion University published a paper demonstrating how a computer's RAM could be turned into a weak Wi-Fi signal to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped system. The paper showed that perfectly timed to rewrite operations to a computer's RAM can make the memory bus emit electromagnetic waves consistent with a weak Wi-Fi signal. The researchers were able to leak data from an air-gapped system to machines several meters away with rates up to 100 bits per second. Unlike exploits published by Ben Gurion researchers in the past, this can be done without obtaining root access. A judge has ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook and Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to testify for Apple in the Epic lawsuit. And they must produce required documents before the next hearing, which Epic has asked for. Apple asked that Tim Cook's deposition be limited to four hours and also requested Eric Neuenschwander, who runs the App Store, be present instead of Federighi. The judge denied both requests. Next deadline for court filings is January 6th. That's also the day they count the electoral college votes 2021. Oh, this is going to be a long one, isn't it? Yeah. Qualcomm announced that it's working with Google to provide support for its chipsets for three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates, starting with the flagship Snapdragon 888 system on a chip. The support will extend to even low-end chipsets as well. These updates will be provided to OEMs who will need to update their Android skins and shipworking builds of each of their devices for consumers to receive the updates. Google also announced that Android 11 has seen the fastest adoption rate ever, slightly outperforming Android 10 at the same point in its release life. All right, let's talk a little more about Google's acquisition of Fitbit. Where are we at, Justin? I'll tell you, Tom, the European Commission provisionally approved Google's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit. Google committed for the next 10 years not to use European Fitbit users' health data for advertising and must maintain technical separation of Fitbit's data from Google's. Google also committed to let users link competing apps to Fitbit data and also competing wearable device makers access to Android functions. The acquisition was originally announced on November 1, 2019, how young we were, and is still under review in Australia and the United States of America. Yes, so a short 13 months later, we finally get approval in Europe. We're not done yet. I mean, we were busy. We were busy. We had a lot on our plate. Right, Google Fitbit. Let's shelve that just for a minute. I like the idea of competing apps, being able to use Fitbit data. I have a lot of Fitbit data that kind of has to stay within Fitbit itself, using my watch and my Fitbit app. So that could be cool. You know, we're going to get into this a little bit more with some of the other major companies for which now we have a decade-plus worth of data invested in, but specifically in a product that is about the quantifiable self. You want as much data that you are collecting if you are wearing a Fitbit and have been a loyal Fitbit customer. You want to be able to plug that into whatever services come next. That is incredibly valuable. That we protect some of this, our own rights to our own data, and not to be locked away from it when the approvals come from the other countries. The other question that I have is considering some of the other topics we're going to go over on this show. Is this a prequel for the next antitrust suit that we will see against Google ten years from now? Are you saying it's a trap? That they're just saying, it's a long con. Ten years later, we'll be unwinding this acquisition. In terms of seriousness, I do think that part of what we're seeing is that the approvals on these processes were done in a world where the regulators didn't quite know exactly how fast and how important these companies would be, and this data would be specifically. The real puzzler now is when a merger like this is approved, are we further along on the understanding curve from these governments to say, let's allow this to go just because we're afraid of where it might go from here and so forth, the EU has said no. They're addressing the concerns that people have of letting Fitbit be bought by Google. But what are the concerns that they don't know they are going to have in the future is the question. Or are there any? And that's where I don't love these one-off things where it's like, well, if you don't want health data to be used for advertising, I don't know, Europe, maybe have a law about that instead of doing one-off. If you want people to have data portability, maybe encourage data portability instead of doing a one-off. That would be my only objection here. I don't object in principle to these ideas. TikTok is partnering with Walmart to test live streamed shopping within TikTok's app. This is a big deal. It's huge in Asia and China and Southeast Asia. A lot of companies doing it here in the United States as well. Amazon, for instance, already does this. But TikTok wants to get in on the game. They've already taken some steps into allowing shopping on their platform, but this would be the first live stream shopping. So on December 18th, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, Walmart will host a holiday shop-along spectacular. Viewers will be able to shop from Walmart's fashion catalog within Walmart's TikTok profile. The fashion items for purchase will also be featured in content from 10 popular TikTok creators, including Michael Lee, Anderson, Taylor Hagers, and Zara Hashimi. As products are shown on screen, a little pin will appear that you can tap on and add that item to a cart. Or all the items are going to show up in a big event cart that you can tap on eventually and see everything that was in the stream. And that'll stick around for a while. So you can shop even after the live stream is over. Walmart says there's no rev share on this because it's a test. TikTok just wants to see how it goes. Not only is this something that has a worldwide adoption rate that is greater than ours, you're kind of waiting for whatever the American thing that helps this latent desire sort of break through, at least if you're TikTok or Walmart. But it really is yet another example of how not only is the transaction important in our modern digital ecosystem, but the method of the transaction is really important. And when you watch companies like Rakuten or something like that that are effectively based off the idea of kickbacks from these sites that they are doing a rev share with or front loading, this idea of live stream purchasing is likely going to succeed. I think Walmart's a smart partner. TikTok obviously now that they seem to be outside of the specter of being booted off American soil seems like it's a good quality. I mean, it's also, you know, it's the creators. I'm not familiar, as far as I know with any of the creators that are the partners off the top. Yeah, the influencers. I'm not going to go to Walmart's TikTok profile probably unless it shows up in it for you and then, you know, it's my own fault. But if somebody says that's something that's offered at Walmart and you think like Walmart, well, okay, there's not going to be I don't know, like Gucci clothes there or, you know, a makeup that's like a million dollars. It's sort of the everyday stuff. If I've got somebody that I like on the platform already who's like, I really like this and you should get it. And here's why that kind of stuff. I mean, it's going to sell like hotcakes. Oh, yeah. And do your point with like the makeup. Yeah, it might not be the fancy makeup, but if some influencer that you like is walking by the Walmart makeup counter and saying, oh, you want to know what this is exactly like this fenty thing that you're going to spend $5,000 more then you're like, okay, well, maybe I'll give this Walmart finger shot. Exactly. Well, back in October, Twitter announced a temporary change that any retweet would be a quote tweet, meaning you see the original tweet and then you add a little sum to it rather than just retweeting it. Twitter announced that it will no longer prompt users to quote retweet content by default though. Twitter initially changed the default in the hopes that it would lead to more thoughtful amplification while quote tweet volume increased after the change. Twitter also found that 45% of them included a single word of affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters. The increase in quote tweets was also offset by an overall 20% decrease in sharing through both retweets and quote tweets that came from Twitter itself. And another end to a temporary change, Facebook has restored its news feed algorithm to show how it worked prior to the US election. Shortly after election day, Facebook had tweaked the algorithm to favor mainstream outlets in its NEQ that stands for News Ecosystem Quality. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge, quote, this was a temporary change. We made to help limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election and we're still ensuring that people see authoritative and informative news on Facebook. So a couple different things going on here, I think. In the 10,000 foot view, it's two social networks who had a policy in place for the election now reverting that policy and you can decide whether you think it's a good idea to have special policies for something like this or not. That's one thing. But the other thing I note is that Twitter said, hey, we tried a thing. It didn't work. So we're reverting that thing and we probably won't try that thing again. You could blame them for, you can say like, I knew it would never work, but I don't blame them for saying look, we tried it. We thought it might work. We looked at the, we did a test. It seemed like it would work. But in reality, it didn't. Great. Now we've learned. Whereas Facebook is saying, hey, we tried this thing and everybody actually, our own staff want us to keep it. But too bad. We're getting rid of it because that's what we're doing. And I didn't see a whole lot more explanation about whether it worked, whether it didn't and why they are reverting it. Well, I mean, if we are going to take the political side of this, then the conversation is, all right, well, Twitter took active means and Facebook took active means to suppress certain information in the run up to the election. They have now decided that that specific topic is something that you are allowed to cover. And that specifically is investigations into Hunter Biden. But these both were there to site-wide tamp down certain modes of speech, either by what you're going to see or by in Twitter's possibly misguided idea that you would think more about what you would retweet if you were forced to think about what you would write on top of it. All that being said and look, there's a lot of conversation to be had here politically. What I think is fascinating is what we expect from these companies. Do we expect them to be the scrappy Silicon Valley move fast and break things? Let's change it. Don't worry. We can always change it back. We don't really have a whole lot of we're not beholden to our audience to explain exactly what we're doing or explain it in advance or leave it there for a certain amount of time because we want to optimize and min-maxing means a lot of changes or have they matured to a point and possibly have enough heat on them from the federal government to say, no we're going to announce what we're doing for the election in June and we're going to stick to that. We're putting that boat in the water and if it sinks during it then we'll address it afterward but we want to remain an even-handed thing and sometimes we do have to flip the switch to DEF CON 1 but you're going to know what that means. We're going to be transparent about it and then when it's done we're going to flip it back at a certain date and right now it seems like they are far more like the companies that they started as than institutions in the way that I think they're both really they're looked at as. Yeah the Facebook one in particular it just seems like it was reacting to public pressure like people wanted a nicer news feed so we made a nicer news feed but now we don't need to do that anymore so we want to go back to the one that makes us more money that's kind of the way I read that the twitter one they did a small test and saw an effect they said yeah re-tweeting of of certain kinds of information did slow down and slowing down passing along of information I think is much more palatable because you're not telling people what information they can pass along WhatsApp does this where it limits how many people you can forward things to it doesn't matter what it is it's all treated the same and so this is a situation where the small sample size of their test look like it would work the large sample size of doing it in public didn't work and that still is the min-maxing original you know silicon but I'm much more comfortable with that than Facebook just saying like we decided what news you wanted to hear during the election and now we're going to go back because either it means they decided you shouldn't hear some stuff or it means there was bad stuff and now we're going to let you hear the bad stuff again like can't have it both ways yeah the whole quotey thing which I use all the time because I often think that if I blindly retweet something well I'm not blindly retweeted it but if I don't have anything on top of it to say people kind of go you know it's whatever but if you say like hey this is a really interesting article you should read it and then you see the original tweet quoted below that makes a lot of sense I'm sure what Twitter found was in trying to get people to stop blind retweeting without having thoughtful commentary about it and saying this is why this is important to me which makes the conversation richer in theory you probably got a lot of people saying like I don't know putting a period and just not saying anything so that they quote tweet even though you could still you could still retweet the other way but having it as a default probably just got a lot of engagement that wasn't what Twitter was looking for yeah they saw a 20% decrease in sharing which if the point is to slow things down then it slowed things down hey folks what do you want to hear us talk about on the show one way to let us know is our subreddit you can submit stories there and vote on them both of those things help us quite a bit go over and check it out dailytechnewshow.reddit.com all right let's take a closer look at the antitrust suits filed against Google a new one filed Thursday 35 states as well as Guam Puerto Rico and DC led by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson both those people from different parties have brought the suit against Google that accuses it of anti competitive behavior including designing its search engine to favor its own products above competitors so this is something Yelp is often used as the example of someone who complains about this you put your own Google reviews above Yelp reviews in your own search results the suit asks the court to restore a competitive marketplace and quote counter any advantages that Google gained as a result of its anti competitive conduct including possible divestitures so it says you might even need to break part of Google out to fix this the suit claims Google limits ads in some categories that compete with Google and extracts customer data from the advertisers it does allow on the platform and then uses that data to compete against them that's similar to the accusations brought against Amazon where they they use the data from people who sell on their platform to compete with them now this suit is separate from the one we mentioned briefly yesterday Texas State Attorney General has taken issue with requirements for ad publishers and we know a little more about that suit than we did because it was breaking right as we were getting ready to record yesterday this one alleges that Google and Facebook had a secret agreement that manipulated ad auctions to benefit both companies Google and Facebook did publicly partner to let advertisers in Facebook's audience network bid on ads in Google's network in September 2018 this is not unusual there's a lot of ad software that interoperate this way the secret part was that Facebook allegedly agreed not to support a competing software that was using something called header bidding at the time which would have brought more competition to Google in advertising placement that's the allegation is that they dropped their support of header bidding in order to get special treatment from Google Facebook allegedly received access to Google data some policy exceptions and was given a quota allegedly that let its participants win auctions even if they didn't have the highest bid which of course if true would be price fixing and a restraint of trade if you can prove that that happened that's an easier antitrust accusation to carry because that's a violation of section one of the Sherman Act which only needs to prove that you can prove that section two is the one you usually hear about where you have to show consumer harm and showing consumer harm is a higher burden of proof anyway Google says Facebook is one of 25 companies in its open bidding program and does not receive special treatment and interestingly Facebook is not accused of any wrongdoing in this complaint but it could be subject to a separate suit on these same points in a different time the Texas lawsuit also alleges Google had like a misunderstanding it likely refers to an agreement that lets users back up their messages to Google Drive because WhatsApp messages are encrypted and so it's saying all these things about Google had access to messages and they stored them on their own servers and yeah they do you can back up your WhatsApp messages to Google Drive they're still encrypted so Google can't tell what's in them and don't forget the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Google in October that one is about search engine exclusivity contracts on browsers and Android so where we want to start Oh waiting for somebody in our antitrust fall season to finally go after what I believe is the heart of both Facebook, Amazon and Google's possible if they're going to hit on anything in my opinion it's going to be their ad market because they are such dominant players in it while I do agree with you that if you are able to prove what happens in this price fixing lawsuit that is more of a slam dunk although I don't know exactly what the lasting damage might be to either Google or Facebook beyond paying a fine and maybe you know doing some kind of restitution I don't know what a permanent change would be the lawsuit that was filed today with the 35 states including Guam, Puerto Rico and DC I think is also very interesting because if you are saying that the prioritization of these in-house products and then taking the data for when these other what they're called vertical searches so just for restaurants like Yelp does or just for kayak like just for air travel like kayak does and they have said and it's in this lawsuit that they've watched their traffic fall that that to me is a fairly provable harm to consumer if part of what you consider the consumer are people that buy ads on kayak and Yelp and you are killing very realistically competition that for that ad dollar I don't know I think both of these compared to everything else that we've seen to Facebook and Google thus far these are the most compelling to me because of what they go after and the fact that if Google is going to have made a mistake or stepped over the line it's going to be in protection of their golden goose that is laying the golden eggs and that is AdWords I think it's going to be harder to prove consumer harm you would have to get a court to define the advertisers of the consumer I'm not sure you can get a court to do that and if you can't then you have to show that this drove up prices in an ancillary way because these businesses couldn't compete as much and that becomes really nebulous but it does seem like the more orderly and straightforward of the two suits the Texas suit is a little bit all over the place has some outlandish and exaggerated claims maybe they're not exaggerated I don't know a lot of it's redacted so it's kind of hard to tell and we'll see because that's the one that's it's got the lowest probability of being true but the highest probability of being sensational if it is true and also it it feels like something that might just be a deal that Facebook or Google didn't particularly think was controversial and now in the cold light of this level of scrutiny might feel like something that was over the lines Google is saying they don't get the special treatment so they're outright denied it LA based electric vehicle company Canoe will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange at the end of the week and has announced its second vehicle another van that's not what it's called but it is another van the first van was a subscription only passenger van that included registration maintenance insurance management and charging and is set to launch next year this new announcement is for purchase and meant for last mile deliveries starts at $33,000 for 230 cubic feet of cargo space and three different battery pack options there is no price for the second model that has 500 cubic feet of cargo space with options for things like storage lockers, ramps and a roll up door so new electric vehicle company that's interesting on its own especially for a show like this that tells you about such things some folks may be just interested if not for this corporate shake up however Tony Achillea invested $35 million in Canoe this summer and was recently elevated to chairman the Verge says he compares himself to Elon Musk who came in and took over Tesla and made it what it is today Achillea was the founder of risk management and asset protection software company Solera Holdings and is an army veteran and Achillea is making some changes he has removed CEO Ulrich Kronz a former BMW executive from the board of directors and it's unclear if he'll stay on as CEO Achillea told the Verge that he needs different from what Kronz has and as one of Canoe's founding investors Pactam Li has been removed from the board Li is the son-in-law of G Quinn Lin who is the fourth most senior leader in China before retiring in 2030 my goodness yeah yeah if you didn't catch that the fourth most senior leader in China is definitely a member of the Chinese Communist Party and if you got someone who is even related by marriage member of the Chinese Communist Party on your board you're going to get interest from the committee on foreign investment in the United States they want to avoid that so they took him off the board he still owns like 32-36% of Canoe though so that's that's just a fact Tony Achillea really trying to paint himself as being the guy who's going to make Canoe into the next Tesla here I wouldn't be shocked if he makes himself CEO and he just doesn't want to do that until the IPO so all kinds of crazy stuff happening in the corporate board there but also a very interesting electric vehicle company that has yet to ship a product but is targeting the more businessy end of this industry if you're a smaller business and there's some delivery that has to happen getting a van and they sound great starting at 33 grand for quite a bit of cargo space and all battery powered I would love to see the adoption rate on this but I can think of certainly restaurants and other retail stores that have been hit particularly hard this particular year to be able to make sense of Canoe and what the business model is so many people love those Mercedes Vans these look very similar to that and the whole thing with Canoe is they're modular so they can use their vehicle system with lots of different body models and stuff like that so we'll probably see more from them as well well company called Capella space have you heard of them if not launched a satellite several months ago which is capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world night or day, rain or shine and even through the walls of some buildings yeah before you freak out it's actually pretty cool technology on Wednesday Capella launched a platform letting governmental or private customers request images of anything in the world with six additional satellites set to launch next year CEO Payam Bhanadze a former system engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells Futurism quote there's a bunch of gaps in how we're currently observing Earth from space the majority of the sensors that we use to observe Earth are optical imaging sensors. Capella can see through cloud cover and because it uses synthetic aperture radar also SAR works similarly to how dolphins or bats navigate using echolocation the satellite uses a 9.65 gigahertz radio signal towards the target and then collects and interprets the signal as it bounces back up into orbit that is but also can see through walls you said something about see through walls some walls some walls well okay so I was like before you freak out I mean people are like what about this yeah depends on who is buying the technology you hear that governmental organization hmm what's going on here are they going to look at me in my bathroom or whatever but just the fact that the company is saying listen for the longest time a satellite up in the air if it was yeah there's a bunch of cloud cover because you're way above the clouds or it's nighttime sure there are certain imagery that you could get but not the same kind that you could get on a clear sunny day and our technology is circumventing that and we can do better and that's what satellite should go forward doing yeah um you know right now it's uh limited by the resolution of of synthetic aperture radar uh someday they'll improve that resolution I'll be able to see right inside your buildings hey let's check out the mail bag go ahead and look I don't have anything to you know come on you may not right I know I know yeah well if you don't have anything to hide Tom why do you care I'm doing some dirt in here no I'm hiding uh in the mail bag Jeremy wrote in in response to our conversation about Facebook and taking out ads against Apple this is actually Facebook taking ads against Apple yesterday they've since done it again Jeremy says listening to the conversations the page adds against Apple and ATT which is Apple's new nomenclature for the privacy settings made me wonder Apple push back ATT because companies said that they needed time to integrate it including Facebook should Apple come back and tell the small businesses that Facebook is helping that ATT is going live in the next iOS update and if there are any concerns with implementing it those small businesses should thank Facebook since it clearly lied about what what it didn't want Apple pointing out that Facebook is the bad guy and potentially hurting the people it claims it wants to help would be funny to me just a thought uh sure Jeremy if that makes you feel better laugh laugh away I'm I'm pretty sure they that wouldn't really help the situation any but alright if you have feedback for us maybe you have ideas like Jeremy I don't know I mean reach for the stars people feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send those emails we also like to shout out patrons that are master and grandmaster levels today they include Bjorn Andre Scott Hepburn and Dale Mukahi also thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today Justin what's new look over the next two weeks you're either going to be bored or you're traveling either way you can do yourself do for yourself an audio book and that's what you can get with my history series Raise the Dead both season one and season two are now available on Audible both contain bonus content and season two which covers the 1964 election contains an hour long conversation with your DailyTechNewShow host Tom Merritt me so go ahead and get it right now use your Audible credits at raisethedeadpodcast.com slash complete hey folks if you can afford two dollars a month you don't have to listen to ads and get a bunch of extra stuff go support us on Patreon DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon do it right now don't put it off we're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. eastern 21 30 UTC we'd love to have you if you've got the time find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live we'll be back tomorrow with Le Mar Wilson and Len Peralta talk to you then