 Coming up on DTNS what Netflix's reorg means to you Apple and Foxconn might be in a spat and the lowdown on why Twitter Facebook and Google are talking to Congress about section 230 This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday October 28th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane. It's all like city. I'm Wednesday Scott Johnson and The show's producer Roger chain We were just talking about the old times the good times the things you forget like the savings and loan scandal on good day internet If you want that and a wider conversation become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS Let's start with a few tech things you should know Microsoft's first fiscal quarter of 2021 beat expectations with revenue up 12% and all three of Microsoft's operating groups seen year-over-year growth Azure saw a 48% revenue increase Xbox content and services revenue increased 30% gaming revenue as a whole increased 22% Windows OEM revenue was down 5% but Windows commercial revenue increased 13% CEO Satya Nadella said on the company earnings call that Microsoft Teams now has more than 150 million daily active users which is up 53% from April Windows central sources say Microsoft is readying a big Windows 10 update for 2021 That's usually the thing we get a small one and then a big one This expected a big one would redesign the start menu action center and file explorer among other things The UI project is codenamed Sun Valley and expected to be included in the upcoming Windows 10 cobalt release scheduled for holiday 2021 Amazon launched a dedicated portal for Sweden at Amazon dot se the local storefront will launch with 150 million plus products in 30 categories and will provide free delivery on eligible orders above 229 Kroner, which is about $26 us and are fulfilled by Amazon. This is Amazon's 17th local portal and While tiktok waits for its court cases to wind its way through the courts it announced it will expand some resources in It's in-app election guide in the United States adding direct access to polling locations and hours Guides meant to help people having voting difficulties other details how the voting process works Tiktok is working with the Associated Press to offer an interactive map on election day in the United States as well Showing live results for both federal and state elections as well as ballot initiatives. All right Let's talk about Netflix. Netflix has reorganized its content division and you may think Does that impact me? It's just internal politics, right? Well daily tech news show talked Merrill Barr into writing up an explanation of what it means and how it will affect us This came as a result of me texting with Merrill last night where he was explaining all this I was like, can you write this up for us? And he very nicely did the short version is that Netflix used to be organized in a really odd way It would be organized by genre and then budget and then territory and you'd have executives in charge of these little tiny silos So Barr wrote in his article for us one exec would handle high-budget dramas while another handled low-budget sci-fi and fantasy and another took charge of Canadian imports while another Managed the Irish mysteries and they all competed with each other Now under this new organization the division will be a more traditional one with an executive in charge of drama All drama no matter the budget or whether it's Irish or whatever an executive in charge of comedy an executive in charge of Unscripted etc with all the territories in the budgets mixed together Barr suggests this might lead to Netflix making more traditional television rather than what he calls expensive 10-hour movies So if you're looking at Netflix and and you often think like gosh That's kind of a high production value But those episodes were long and it didn't really feel like a series and and it's it's kind of fitting into a weird genre I'm not sure I get it if you like that bad news They might be changing that if you don't more traditional formats may be coming out of this I Kind of like this and I don't like this Scott. I don't know how you feel Netflix is only one of some streaming services that I sometimes just peruse and just find a weird series and just give it a go and With good or bad results, but I kind of like that randomness I love you. I love the fact that yeah, like someone was like, oh, I'm in charge of the Irish mystery section you know and and and It getting a little bit more mainstream Especially because Netflix has a lot more competition than it did just a few years ago That does make sense for the company, but I wonder if it it kind of I don't know We we get a little SOL on the consumer side if we like a little bit of randomness. Yeah, I don't know what this will mean I'm a little worried about the same thing. In fact, I what you said is exactly how I feel Some of my favorite things I've discovered on Netflix not necessarily stuff that was pushed to me or that was promoted Well, but things that I just sort of discovered Dairy girls as a good example of a comedy I've never heard of it before loved it loved every second of it. I feel like I don't maybe get that without this more fractured competitive Girls is an acquisition not original. That's true Originals have been suffering a lot of cancellations a lot of people going yeah, I tried it, but it wasn't that great Yeah, I think that may be what they're trying to address here. Maybe maybe that's it Yeah, the original stuff is competing with the stuff. They're importing which is maybe that's bad, but for me It's been good. I like the weird stuff out of nowhere that I didn't know I wanted and I hope they just don't lose that It's funny. I was talking to a friend recently because you know, we're in spooky season, right? That's what we all call it now. I guess and you know, it's a you know a lot of horror horror movie stuff And that's not really my jam, but I can see a company like Netflix Using that kind of like we need some just very obvious buckets And so everybody who's been doing this kind of esoteric stuff Like we're all just gonna you know, let's let's get a little bit more cut and dry because the new people who sign on Aren't maybe like Scott and me looking for that rando series that no one's ever heard of Yeah, well, if you want some more details about this kind of a new thing for us to Hire folks to write for the site and give you a little more information. Go check it out daily tech news show dot com The information sources say that Foxconn has been telling Apple that it hired more workers for project than it actually has Using Apple owned factory equipment to make products for rivals and cutting corners on component and product testing Some of the more than two dozen sources also say that Apple has increased monitoring of Foxconn employees and equipment as a result of this The sources say that since Tim Cook took over at Apple It's put pressure on Foxconn to reduce costs to Apple this pressure on Foxconn's margin is thought to be the reason for the corner Cutting Foxconn has tried selling equipment for manufacturing and component testing to other manufacturers to a little success Reportedly it also developed its own polish for iPhone screens rather than buying it from a Japanese company And in a specific example of corner cutting Foxconn allegedly decided not to disassemble rejected iPhone 7s But instead opened them removed the debris and then resealed them to avoid wasting materials Apple wasn't informed of this deviation from protocol. Yeah, this is a well-sourced thing They've got a couple dozen sources. It is the information. They've a fairly good track record And it does seem to imply that Apple and Foxconn have been a little bit at loggerheads that that relationship is on the rocks Apple under Tim Cook who was their supply chain master for many years before he came became CEO Really pressing the margins which is causing Foxcon You know under that pressure to cut some corners and then when Apple finds out about it they don't release the pressure they just put in more audits and more checks and If you go further into this article seems like they may be diversifying their supply chain partly because it's just a good idea to diversify your supply chain as we've all recently learned but also Because because of this issue and because if they go with a Wistron or somebody else to make certain things They may find it easier at least in the early going when they're trying to please Apple back when I worked full-time for company we dealt with companies in China all the time and The margins are ridiculously thin just from the get-go even in a small company environment It was always tooth and nail to try to cut costs, but also keep quality up And I think this just feels like that But writ large. Yeah, it's a scalable problem where if you are constantly pushing for lower margins You do get to a threshold where the factory maybe just has to cut corners and hope that no one knows I guess I guess what I'm saying is I'm not super surprised by this but it also represents a lot of time iPhone 7s is that's an old phone at this point and Tim Cook's been in there some since what 2011 Almost 10 years So that's a lot of time to cut said corners and try to you know Adhere to Apple's pressure for lower prices and at the same time keep up your quality and your processes And I just don't know if it's a table or tenable in the long term Yeah, I am doing battle. Let's talk about AMD. They have you know, they're around they got stuff They introduced three new Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards that compete with Nvidia's RTX 3000 series about to get my hands on one of those soon So we'll see if the hype is all there or not all three new 6000 series cards are based on our DNA to Also used in the PS5 and Xbox series X if any of that sounds familiar That's why they support hardware accelerated ray tracing and use a 2.5 slot design with regular PC Connections they all come up with 16 gigabytes of GDDR 6 memory But use high speed 128 megabyte cache TP feeds data Sorry, excuse me to feed data into the graphics pipeline rather or better without increasing power draw the RTX Rx 6,800 is $579 the 6,800 XT is $649 and both of these go on sale on November 19th the 6900 XT is $999 and that cool price will come to you on December 8th So competitively priced with Nvidia's current offerings and in theory performance wise as well So I've said from the get-go of the voodoo days. It was really important that graphics Card suppliers or graphics card innovators have competition in this market And you could argue that Nvidia has gotten a lot of spotlight lately But AMD has always been strong with deals with console makers and other device makers This puts them hopefully, you know in parody with the PC side It's gonna heat up for for desktop graphics processing moving forward. What's what's interesting is that? Ray tracing as a feature is now a Tick box that you need to have on your product before like when it was first introduced by Indie video everyone was like Well, I mean, what are you gonna really see over what traditional? shading offered you and apparently enough for in AMD to crank out cards as well as GPUs for for the ps5 and the Xbox one series X Further machines. I don't know. It's it's really exciting at the same time It's also kind of unnerving to see that the and granted these are these aren't mid-range cards But like, you know, you're starting around 500 580 bucks Although what's interesting is Nvidia is actually cheaper with the RTX 30 70 at 500 versus the RX 6800 Which it's paired against at which comes in at 580, but the rest the Radeon comes in a bit cheap Noticeably cheaper. Yeah a little bit more parody there. The other thing to just mention about this is the tier race tracing comment That's a really important pivot for all of these companies right now And it kind of came out of nowhere came very quickly I'll say it that way because people have been trying to figure out real-time ray tracing which basically is just rendering light physics for those not aware Forever we've been doing this forever It used to take a day to render a single frame of a ray trace single image and now we're doing it in real time And even games like I'm playing World of Warcraft right now in a 2080 Nvidia that is running ray tracing on a 15 year old game So it's actually a technology that in theory will affect Lots and lots of games not just new ones, but those who are still around or playing as services fortnight's a good example They're adding ray tracing capability It'll be there for their console release and so on for these new consoles So it is really truly a tick box now You're right and it will become a standard moving forward and we will just one day look back and say Well, that's just video game lighting and and that's when it changed And that's just how we get lighting in video games now and it's a big thing I think it's a huge thing for a lot of people seems Like I already have video games with cool lighting, but this is a big step and and what's interesting for AMD is they're trying to fight two fronts Right, they're trying to fight on the CPU front, but also the GPU front and they're with different companies It's not like you know, you're going at it for GPU market share with Intel or CPU market share within video So they they are they they're in a very robust position right now that they can work on both fronts Equally competently at this point. Yeah, it's interesting. Do you mention the the price point on the 6,800? AMD is saying you want to compare that to the 2080 ti not to the 3070 And I don't know if that's because the 3070 does it goes on sale later this week and they want to direct your attention away or for it from it or if it just Matches up better against the 2080 ti, but AMD is doing an interesting thing here betting on cash betting on performance to say look no you can get more Gddr6 memory out of an Nvidia card at the high-end sure But ours is managed better ours is beating it in the specs And you know, that's that's a typical Maneuver there. We'll we'll see if it bears out with independent tests and all that but It's an interesting way to say like we're gonna draw less power. We're gonna be more efficient even if we don't have all the same specs Hey, folks, if you want to join the conversation in our discord Do that you can talk about all kinds of things in there a link to a patreon account and join at patreon.com slash DTNS Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Alphabet slash Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before a US Subcommittee about the way they use section 230 or safe harbor section 230 of the CDA in the United States provides that quote No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider All that means is if I'm hosting an AOL chat room at AOL AOL is not responsible for what the folks in there say AOL is the Publisher is not the publisher or the speaker the the chatters are and that now applies to Facebook and Twitter It also protects the companies from civil liability for actions quote Taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider Facebook or Twitter considers to be obscene lewd lascivious filthy excessively violent harassing or otherwise objectionable This is important. This says they can remove stuff that isn't illegal and they're not Subject to civil liability for doing so. That's one of the main things that's at issue here Keep in mind that otherwise objectionable category when we get to this later on now section 230 does not exempt them from criminal law That's in the in the law does not exempt them from intellectual property law So DMCA takedowns don't get a section 230 exemption It does not exempt them from state laws were applicable electronic communication privacy law or more recently with the passage of FOSTA sex trafficking law a Subsequent case to the passage of section 230 in 1997 sarin versus AOL Determined that section 230 quote creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers Liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service So originally section 230 was building on case law that said if you don't know something's illegal Let's say you're a bookstore owner. You shouldn't be liable for what's in every book But if you know it's illegal, well, then you're on the hook This federal immunity to any cause of action took them off the hook for a lot more things Now a lot leans on the wording that shields them from liability for taking down otherwise objectionable content West Virginia senator Shelly more capito During the hearings asked all three CEOs how they define otherwise objectionable content That's what they're getting at is like do you consider? conservative opinions objectionable content of course none of them said that Mark Zuckerberg noted that the phrase gives them latitude to stop bullying and harassment and getting rid of that phrase Might limit the ability to fight bullying Sundar Pichai agreed and said yes that phrase gives us the flexibility to fight bad stuff Senator Roger wicker who chairs the committee said it was important to shield companies from liability Without giving them the ability to censor content. They dislike so he was one of the few people saying section 230 shouldn't be repealed But we should curb the ability for these platforms to say well I don't agree with these folks So let me moderate them down and those are the two issues that people with 230 have first issue is Companies are too slow to take down harmful content things like Holocaust denial for instance That is content that is not necessarily illegal under the First Amendment here in the United States But that's stuff that people would rather they didn't have up there and they're too slow to take it down There's also people accusing them of being too slow to take down illegal content like child pornography number two Removing content based on its viewpoint. That is usually conservative users being censored before section 230 internet companies had two options You could either leave everything up So you're not liable in other words they could say like we're not going to moderate anything it will be a cesspool Not our problem because if we moderate anything reliable or they could heavily moderate And say okay fine, we're going to keep it from being a cesspool. But since moderation causes us to be liable We're going to enact prior restraint not you know, you can't publish anything until we approve it Which would of course lead to a lot more censorship. So section 230 says well if We don't want a cesspool where people are doing Holocaust denial and child pornography. So But we also don't want full censorship where every platform is only allowing through the things that they're sure are safe So section 230 actually provided a safe space for both of these objections to be lessened Which is why i'm glad senator roger wicker said well, we don't want to get rid of section 230 that would make it worse Maybe we should consider new laws or new exemptions or new emphasis in section 230 During testimony to congress twitter's ceo jack dorsi described his own three point plan That could be expansions to section 230 could be brand new legislation altogether Or or if he's willing to do industry self regulation like like movie ratings, for instance Point one of his three point plan was to make clear what the moderation process is So everybody can see if it's being followed twitter already does this facebook already does this Here are our rules Now you can hold us accountable to our rules number two would require an appeals process So individuals could get redress if the process is not followed correctly Facebook is creating this with their so-called independent supreme court twitter doesn't really have anything But they i guess they're willing to set something up and number three Would be let users have a choice of filter algorithms based on their preference If you don't want, you know, if you want i want to see everything unless it's illegal You could choose that algorithm or you know what i don't want to see hate speech I don't even if it's illegal. I don't want to see this kind of stuff You could choose that algorithm there could be flavors of filtering that you decide Rather than having the company decide at least that's his suggestion Facebook CEO mark zuckerberg also supported an update to the law Specifically ideas around transparency and industry collaboration zuckerberg repeated his call for the government to regulate harmful content privacy elections and data portability A lot of people are accusing zuckerberg now that he's successful And has has rose to success on no regulation. He would like regulation to stop competitors from being able to catch him This is not just the united states either We should note the european union's executive commission is drafting a new digital services act And part of that act would address liability for harmful or illegal content Competition commissioner marguerite vestiger is due to unveil her proposals on december 2nd This is a really tough one, uh, and scott go ahead if you got got some money Well, I just something just occurred to me and I was to get off my chest the the three-point approach that say Jack has here from twitter I know that that's probably too simple But I really like it like I like to think that everything could be improved under those three ideas And maybe it can with adjustments to the law to account for whatever and them building the tools needed to fulfill those three points Like maybe that's as simple as that But to me that's that says everything and I don't even agree with jack dorsi half the time But I I really like that particular approach Um More than I liked anything else coming out of those other guys today So just just just off the cuff thought about the three-point twitter approach approach Yeah, the felt between algorithms point, you know, which is what was one of those points that came from jack dorsi Yeah, initially I was like, yeah That would actually that would make a lot of sense if there's stuff that you know It's protected by free speech or not technically illegal But really upsets me and I don't want to see it, you know I can kind of make my experience my own But we have a lot of those tools already and that does sort of defeat the purpose of the point of the social network As it stands today twitter and facebook are always the examples that we use as the most obvious ones, but there are others and Yeah, it's it's kind of I can see where the people in charge of these companies are like Okay, we've got some options. We definitely have some options here, but you know, it's going to Radically change the entire, you know, vibe of this whole thing that we've built over time and There is a very fine line between something that is wrong and Should not happen and something that just someone else doesn't like And I mean I see a lot of that, you know all the time where I'm like, well, I mean they're a lot to say that but It's just crappy It's when you start thinking about the actual content We really get stuck in the weeds one of the senators brought up a story somebody had made up whole cloth about him beating a dog to death words to that effect and Basically saying to zuckerberg what are you gonna do about that when somebody posts some fake thing about me beating up a dog? and It occurred to me. I'm like We're such bad stewards of our our corner of these social networks that There you have to be generalized, right? How else are you gonna have a net broad enough to catch every little problem when the problems are so So granular and so many like how are you gonna stop it? I can stop the story about the dog I don't know how you do that Well, I to put a button on this conversation. I I think what we're running up against is the problem is actually anti competitive If you have 30 facebook's and 20 twitter's You don't have the objections because it's like well, okay They're allowed to tilt their viewpoint to whatever direction they want because there's all these others you can go to And misinformation is hard to spread when you have so many different platforms and people are not all using the same one The problem is everybody's using the same couple in this case and mostly using one one or two of them Yeah, I it's gonna be interesting before it isn't You know what I mean? This is never going to probably be a thing that's totally solved. It will evolve over time Scott, this might also be interesting But in a good way to you Alphabet says that one of its loon balloons spent 312 days aloft well above its previously Stratix Spiric flight record of 223 days it launched in Puerto Rico It went to Peru it passed over the south Atlantic Indian and south pacific oceans And was eventually collected in Baja, Mexico 10 months and 135,000 miles later. Wow, that's pretty bad. Oh Yeah, good good work loon Yeah, this is uh, this is a good test like because what they want is these loons to be able to just go all the way around the earth uh and and sort of Spell each other right so if you're trying to provide connectivity in Baja It wouldn't be the same balloon providing you the connectivity all the time But there'd always be a few balloons over Baja and that's because they would just keep circulating around the earth But to do that, of course, you need to have a be able to make it all the way around the earth So this is this is good progress towards that goal Is it bad for me to assume that when they're done with one of these they shoot it out of the sky And it crashes into somebody's shed and that's just the end of it Because I like that idea in my head only in my head only happen over roswell and it will be misinterpreted. Ah, man. All right, fine I don't know. I mean you can crash your balloon into my property. It'd be kind of fun They're a little high to shoot with your with your own rifle too. That's that's another point Hey, let's wait any let's look at the mailbag anything in the mailbag. There's uh, oh tong There is uh, allen who actually wrote us on patreon said referring to good day internet 3895 the peri show I've been using tech coup the team major series cases for years and I just bought another one for my iphone 12 This was yesterday's show if you were listening We were talking about cases and tom was saying I kind of want a case and you know Do you case or do you not case allen says these are so cheap? This one was seven dollars eighty five cents on amazon and I like the two-part installation I think it's easier on the phone when going on Well, thank you allen. Uh, I I ordered a different case and now I can't remember which one it is But I ordered something that had some ballistic Protection, uh, so that if I drop it it's much less likely Or if the missile hits it even with the ceramic shield. Yep. Yep. Don't want any missiles taken out my phone You gotta just be care, you know, yeah, it's precious cargo, man You know, but thank you for the suggestion allen. Appreciate that. Yeah very much So also, thank you to our patrons at our master and grand master levels We'd like to shout out a few of you today chris allen mike akins and hi tech oaky. Thank you so much Also, thanks to scott johnson for being with us scott. What's been going on since we saw you last Well, lots of stuff Billions of things to look at and do over there frog pants dot com But I still want people to go grab this season that we just did of current gig chronicles all of it's there It's available at current geek dot com or wherever you get your podcasts Imagine me and tom blowing your minds. That's the show. Go check it out current geek dot com Like a loon balloon around the podcasting planet Hey patrons, did you know your ad-free rss feed can have just d tns or just gdi or possibly at certain tiers both Check your tier on patreon yet you go to patreon.com slash pledges That'll tell you what tier you're on if it says d tns Gdi or all that that tells you what is in your rss feed and if you want to change it Just change your tier to one that has what you want in it. Uh, that's all at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon We are live folks monday through friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 utc We'd love to have you find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live We'll be back tomorrow with justin robert young talk to you that This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Hope you have enjoyed this bro