 Coming up on DTNS, what we learned from an AI failure, using computer vision to keep people at a safe distance from each other and why the UK and France prefer centralized contact tracing over that Apple Google centralized plan. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 28, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the slightly lighter forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. That's from the sunlight, not fires. Yes, indeed. Good. Very glad to hear that. We were just talking about how darn cute Patrick's son is and Phil Collins, and they flowed seamlessly from one to the other. You got to get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, to become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. DJI announced the Mavic Air 2 with a bigger image sensor than the original Mavic Air and DJI's own OcuSync transmission technology, which replaces traditional Wi-Fi in the original model. It has up to 34 minutes of flight time and comes with a redesigned controller. Preorders start today for $799 and starts shipping May 11th in the U.S. DJI's Fly More Bundle now includes ND filters, a carrying bag, prop guards, a charging hub, and three batteries for $988. 34 minutes. That's not bad. UK payment company Checkout.com has joined the Libra Association. The Libra Association recently reconfigured itself to use one-to-one currency backed stablecoin on a centralized blockchain. Shopify, nonprofit, hyper-international, and cryptocurrency brokerage, the Tagomi, also recently joined the Libra Association. It's not dead yet. Facebook's going to host hashtag graduation 2020 on Facebook and Instagram May 15th at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Everyone is welcome whether you're graduating or not. Oprah Winfrey, Nora Lum, aka Aquafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X, Simone Biles, and others will address the 2020 graduating class and Miley Cyrus will perform. Wait, those other people aren't going to, whatever. Event video will be shared on Facebook Watch and highlights will be shared on Instagram's official account. Graduates can host their own ceremonies in a special virtual graduation hub, which includes custom filters and celebrations in messenger rooms. I Heart Radio is also hosting speeches for the class of 2020 from Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton, John Legend, and more. The NPD Group estimates consumer tech sales in the U.S. rose 23% year-over-year for the week ending on April 18th. Tech sales happened across work and entertainment. TV sales rose 86%. Computer monitors rose 73%. Soundbars were up 69%. Printers up 61%. PCs up 53%. Streaming TV sales were up 42%. And VVD and Blu-ray players up 27%. The biggest gain was for microphones rather because everybody's a podcaster now up 147%. DVD sales rather not VVD. Overall consumer spending across all industries fell 23%. So lots of ups, but a little down. Player unknown battlegrounds or PUBG is free for Stadia Pro users, including a season pass. Stadia free members can buy PUBG for $29.99 or bundled with a season pass for $39.99. PUBG on Stadia will support cross-play. Google is partnering with EA to bring Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, Madden NFL, and FIFA to Stadia later this year. And you all get pro accounts with the current version of Stadia, so you get it for free. Instagram is launching live fundraisers to let nonprofit donations happen during live video feeds, which the company announced last week. Broadcasters can choose a nonprofit to support and viewers make donations using their credit card, which then unlocks an iDonated sticker similar to the Stay Home sticker the company introduced back in March. Instagram users could previously fundraise for nonprofits, but only through their stories. Apple earnings will be announced Thursday. Nobody cares, but that's when they're happening. Ahead of this, Bloomberg reports that Apple's vice president of retail, Deirdre O'Brien, told employees that she expects many more Apple stores will reopen in May. One store in South Korea and several in China are the only Apple stores currently open. Candelus estimates sales of iPhones in China jumped 21% last year from a year earlier. Counterpoint Research estimates that iPhone sales in India rose 78% year-over-year in Q1. An analyst expects Apple to report a 6% drop in revenue and an 11% fall in net income. And then we'll probably talk about this a little bit more tomorrow, but Alphabet just releasing their Q1 quarterly earnings report beating analyst estimates for revenue. Google's had experienced a smaller drop off in advertiser spending than it had anticipated, given all of the economic turmoil. So not as bad of an Alphabet report as they thought Google ad sales were $33.8 billion up about 10% from last year. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about what's going on with Amazon. Let's do it. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley wrote a letter asking the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon over whether or not its employees used sales data from independent sellers, third-party sellers, in order to develop their own competing private label products within Amazon. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a report. We talked about it here on the show, indicating Amazon might have used third-party data to develop its brands after all. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge that the company bars employees, quote, from using non-public seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch. So they're saying we don't do that specifically. New York Attorney General Leticia James wrote a letter to Amazon raising concerns over the firing of five employees who have spoken out about health and safety concerns at Amazon warehouses. And Amazon says all of the employees were fired for policy violations, not because they expressed concerns. Yes, and all fired coal miners were always fired for policy violations, never for union organizing. You can always trust that to be true. Look at this Amazon third-party thing. Patrick, I'm curious what your perspective is on this, because Amazon could be looking at aggregated sales data that would be affected by 30-party sales and use that, and I think legitimately want to use that to decide what products it wants to make in-house. The whole problem is about Amazon making things in-house that compete with third parties. It's not really necessarily about the data. So they could be not lying when they say, oh, we didn't look at individual third-party sales data and still be able to use their own legitimate data to compete with people on their own platform. Which that would be okay. The big question is, did they look at the data that they have because they're operating Amazon.com? And I wonder how exact the language is here, but they're saying they prohibit employees from using not public data, but what if employees do it anyway? If they have the login or a friend who has access to that kind of data and they're within the company and they manage to find some kind of report, maybe it seems like Amazon is legally not saying it didn't happen. They're saying they have policies in place to instruct people so that it doesn't. But there are many companies where things are not supposed to happen, but they routinely do. So that could be a way that they are still able to say, well, we don't know anything about this and yet it might still happen. And they might legitimately not want to say it hasn't happened because they don't want it to come out later that some employee was doing it that they didn't know. And that's a thing that your lawyers will tell you, don't say it never happened because then you're in trouble later if you find out that you didn't think it was happening, but it was. Yeah, especially if you're the size of a company that Amazon is, there are things that even the best people in the positions of power aren't going to always know about. So yeah, you kind of want to err on the side of caution. You know, as it relates to warehouse workers, I know that Amazon has a current policy that's ending on May 1st for warehouse workers kind of blanket rule that it was work from home. You know, you don't have to come in, no questions asked kind of thing, you know, they're not going to grill you about whether or not you're sick. And that Bloomberg had pulled a lot of folks like are you ready to go back to work and doesn't sound like that is necessarily the case for a lot of workers. So it's going to be interesting when some essential work that has to be done in a place that people don't feel safe isn't happening. A webinar about Microsoft Surface Engineering was leaked on Twitter in the video. A Microsoft employee says that the surface does not have Thunderbolt support or removable RAM because of security concerns. The employee explains that Thunderbolt has direct memory access, which it does, allowing a well crafted stick to access data stored in memory and removable RAM can be frozen with liquid nitrogen, which it can, and removed and the data read. Laptops from Dell, Lenovo and HP, however, all support Thunderbolt. And in fact, Windows 10, made by Microsoft, has built in kernel level protection for Thunderbolt 3 that protects against devices using Thunderbolt ports for direct memory access. But in a possibly more controversial story, Microsoft is updating Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period as an error by default. Patrick, which of these makes you angrier? I made quite frustrated by the second one because it's not, let's say to me, it is obviously an error because we don't have that styling in French. We do put spaces before semicolon and colons, which I think is heretical to English speakers, but double space after a period. What are you talking about? What are you doing? This is badness. Once upon a time, that was the way you did it. If you were writing something formally, it was double spacing and it has changed over time. And there was a point where it was kind of like Oxford Commons where people were on one side of the fence or the other. And then the double space people started to really, that got thin, the crowd got thin, and now Microsoft is just like, no one wants that anymore. It's a space you don't need. Taking up too much space, it's an error. I'm with Microsoft on this one. You can change the default to not show it as an error, but the key piece of information to know when you make up your own mind about this hot issue is the double space after a period was put in place because typewriters had equal spaces for all characters. And because of that, a single space after a period didn't always read as an end of a sentence when you were scanning it. So double space made sure that you didn't accidentally think the sentence was still going. We now use fonts that have different spaces for characters based on the actual width of the character. And so that is not as much of a problem anymore. As factories, construction sites and stores begin to reopen around the world, social distancing will still be required to keep the spread of COVID-19 under control. Reuters reports on computer vision software being used for compliance. Chicago's Pepper Construction is using software from Smartvid.io at a project in Deerfield, Illinois. Samarth Diamond Polishing Factory in Gujarat, India will use glimpse analytics and two Michigan shopping centers will deploy RE Insights distance tracking software. Similar software has been used to detect helmet compliance at construction sites and counts people in shops but distance gauging and mass detection are new functions. So I wonder, once they have detected things like that, what happens? Are there sirens going off? Do you get a robot that shows up and scolds you and holds you up until you are far enough? That's what I wonder. Well, it depends on the situation. If it's a construction site, then the foreman can send somebody to go tell somebody to put their helmet on in the old one. And with this one, they could send them to go put on a mask or they could say like, oh, we're getting a lot of crowding over in this area. Go tell them to spread out or maybe tomorrow let's reconfigure our work schedule so we don't have that crowding happen. There's a lot of policy sort of things. In the shopping centers, I don't know. I don't know if you just send the security people out to kind of remind people to keep their distance. Or again, you just use it as a way to say, OK, I think they're clumping up here because we put this store's sign engineer here and if we change something, that'll ease the flow. But there's all kinds of information. I'm more curious how well it's going to do when this is new training. I mean, we've had a lot of training on the helmet stuff and using it to identify just how many people are going in and out of a shop. Even to identify whether someone might be a woman in a shop and therefore put the women's clothing in the area where more women are in a shop that's been done before. But they had to train these things up from scratch to be able to tell distancing and I don't know how good they're going to be at it. Well, folks, you learn from failures as much more as you do from successes. What works in a lab doesn't always work in practice. Google Health has recently learned that and to their credit published the fact that they failed. They created a deep learning system that examines your eyes for evidence of diabetic retinopathy. That is a leading cause of vision loss around the world. The tool worked with 90% accuracy in internal tests. So Google Health thought, wow, that's actually better than a lot of field work. Let's take this tool and test it. So they went to rural Thailand where it was a long time to get these tests turned around and they tested it in 11 clinics. The normal procedure in these Thai clinics was to take images of a patient's eye and then send them to an ophthalmologist. And it would take about four to five weeks to get the results back. The Google system was supposed to be able to give you a result in seconds. So a person could know right away and that would increase the number of people they could treat and increase the turnaround of the results. In practice, the machine learning wasn't the problem. But the project ran into a large number of images rejected by the deep learning system because the clinics just weren't doing quality images. They were sometimes a little too dark or they had something else in the way or they were obscured or they weren't taking well. Slow and intermittent internet uploads also actually ended up reducing the number of patients that could be seen. Because even though the test might take minutes, it was taking forever to get the image uploaded to the server to get checked. Some patients were actually uncomfortable with the idea that they might get the results right away and have to go to a hospital immediately. They liked the idea of, I'll go take the test, I'll go back home, I'll wait four weeks and then I can deal with going to the hospital. So a lot of them declined to participate in the study. In a paper about the project, the study's author said, and I quote, Attending to people, their motivations, values, professional identities and the current norms and routines that shape their work is vital when planning deployments. This is really interesting. First of all, it's great that Google Health was like, hey, we've got something here. Let's take it out of the lab and help some people, especially in a place where you're sitting there upwards of a month or two to try to figure out if you've got issues with your eyes, which is really important. In practice, it's like, well, here are all the things that's actually limiting this great technological development in theory. And so you can observe that. You can say, OK, now we can identify what needs to be upgraded, internet, camera tools, a variety of things. And then the people themselves getting used to, oh, this is totally different than what I thought I was getting into. And, you know, so it's sort of part education and part just dealing with what people want and how they expect to be taken care of. And it's all very interesting. And the fact that the machine learning was sort of, it's ready, you know, it was lab ready. Then you go back and you iterate. And that's based on the real world. Yeah, the conditions in the field are always going to affect how stuff happens. But this is a really interesting explanation of that. And I really, I really was fascinated with the fact that the machine learning itself wasn't the problem, but the technology was both in the imaging set. Some of it may have been training. Some of it was just the conditions of the clinics. They just didn't have the right setup. It was too dark or where there was varying light and the internet. If you're relying on a cloud service to diagnose, you need really good internet and not everywhere in the world. Has good internet. So Kudos to Google Health for publishing this because this is how you learn. You don't hide your bad results. You say, hey, we totally failed. Guess why? Here you go. We're going to try to do these things to correct in the future. Now you can learn from our mistakes as well. Maybe it's easier for them to say that they totally failed, but not because of the tech. Like the tech was fine. It's just the context and the setup and all of that, which didn't get possible to use in the real, you know, in real conditions. That's could be. Or they're just being scientists, which is also really the way this is supposed to work. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, go subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, we've been beating this drum. So I apologize to people who haven't heard it before, but comprehensive testing and contact tracing of infected people is considered the best way to limit the spread of the virus and let healthy people be able to leave their homes with low risk of infection. It's a way we can get back to work, get back to other closer to normal behaviors. And contact tracing is one of the things that technology can help improve. It can't replace manual tracing, but it can help augment it, improve it, make it more accurate, make it easier to do. We mentioned yesterday that Germany has opted for the decentralized system of tracking. That's the one being used in the Apple Google platform for what they're now calling exposure identification, because it tells you whether you might have been exposed. It doesn't actually trace any contacts. And the UK and France have decided that they're, for the time being anyway, going to go with a centralized system. That's where instead of everything being done on your phone, it's done on a server. Now both systems use Bluetooth to detect exposures. We've talked about that ad nauseam, but that's the thing where your device gets a rotating number. You don't know who the number is exposed to, but if that person gets diagnosed with COVID-19, the number gets sent out. And you can tell like, oh, my phone was near that number because we exchanged that number through Bluetooth. So I know I was near that person who was infected. On the Apple Google system, that's determined on your phone. On the centralized systems that France and the UK are thinking about doing, that matching happens on a server. And that's really, that's not the only difference, but that's the central one. The centralized system carries greater privacy risks because that's now all on a server. More people can access it than can access your phone. But because it's centralized, it allows for research purposes like graphing of data, look for patterns of spread, as well as the ability to ask a user to voluntarily share their location data to maybe help study how the virus propagates if they want. That's something you can't do with the Apple Google system. There's also a technical difference specific to the iPhone where iOS doesn't allow most apps to do Bluetooth data handshakes in the background. They will for their platform and they won't for other platforms. So the UK, Australia and others are planning to have an app kind of wake itself up regularly to be able to do these Bluetooth handshakes, which will use a little more power than if they were allowed to just kind of quietly be in the background. So the UK definitely doing this. France Patrick is also wanting to do this. What's the angle from there? That is a mystery. There are advantages as you mentioned to the more centralized system. Even the decentralized system does have a little bit of centralization because you have to upload all of the affected, you know, positive tested IDs to a server, which will then be redownloaded to everyone and they will check against the ones that they have come in contact with locally. But it seems like, yes, those added benefits of the centralized system, which is still very secure. It's a little bit less secure, but I think that should be mentioned. Anytime we hear centralized, we think, oh, one entity holding all the keys to the kingdom. And so it has to be, it is obviously a little bit more susceptible to bad behavior. But the way they've described it, and they're supposed to have open source applications. Hopefully, I mean, it wouldn't work if they didn't have also open source server programs. And so everything should be checkable open source. So it will be safe and privacy protecting. But France and it seems the UK are sort of entering an almost political battle with Apple. Because we know at least it seems to be the consensus in the tech community in France. We know that Apple is not going to cave. And for very defensible reasons, they don't want to open the door to these kinds of exceptions. What they would want in the French government would be for Apple to make an exception and allow this app to use Bluetooth in the background all the time. Of course, the reason this is not available on iOS is to protect users privacy. And it is very clear that enabling that on apps would endanger the privacy on users because Bluetooth can do a whole bunch of identifying if it's run in the background. So Apple is very unlikely to cave. So the fact that France is demanding this, which by the way, even waking itself up in the background, maybe it doesn't nullify the efficiency of the app. But it essentially makes it untrustworthy and almost unusable. Well, yeah, because it's not only going to drain your battery faster, but it probably when you have to have something do a workaround like that, there's more opportunities for it to glitch, for it to have bugs and go wrong and not work the way it was intended. I imagine that Apple says, yes, we could look at the French app and make sure that it's not doing anything bad and give it special permission to use Bluetooth in the background because we trust it. But then we'd have to do that for the UK. And then we'd have to do it for Australia. And then we'd have to do it for every country on Earth that wants that. You know, it's easier creating a platform where we don't have to get special permissions where everybody can just use it. That's more efficient. That's very Apple thinking. And that's what they did. But because it doesn't allow for centralization, because like you say, centralized server is fairly safe. Decentralized is safer. It's more safe. And Apple and Google know that the less safe that something is perceived, the less it's going to get adopted. So they're trying to make their platform as safe as possible to encourage adoption because you need 40, 60% depending on who you ask of the populace to adopt this to even have a positive effect. And it's not just that. If they make an exception for this app for these countries, what happens next time there's something a little bit different that someone asks an exception for? Then they can say, oh, you did it for friends in that context. Well, there's danger here as well. There's, you know, terrorism or even something legitimate that would identify more people. So it's really a mystery what France, the French government is thinking on that one. We've been scratching our heads and because again, I really don't think Apple is going to cave. And I really think that the French government is clever enough to know that Apple is probably not going to cave. So I'm not sure what the end goal is there. This is my interpretation. Of course, it could be different. It could not be the case, but I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve. And I guess we'll have the answer to this in a few weeks, maybe days, but there is certainly a, you know, something that is difficult to resolve here because again, without that special case from Apple, I don't think the app is going to work very well. There are already challenges to the deployment of these apps, and it seems the German way of saying, all right, we need something that works. We don't have time to argue. Let's just go with the system that is available to us, that everyone agrees is good. By the way, that decentralized system, the way it's described, is also vetted by an independent group of French research, of European researchers that designed, as I'm sure you talked about, designed something essentially that was inspired by... Apple was inspired by that thing. Apple and Google were inspired by that thing. Yeah, there was an MIT project. There was a European project. There are a lot of researchers kind of converged on the same way of doing things. It's like, yes, this is the best balance of getting the tracing done while protecting privacy the most. Right. So it's not like Germany is going with this one as a, oh, it's going to be crap, but we don't have a choice. It's still a pretty solid system, according to everyone who's worked on it. So, I don't know, maybe in the end, France will relent and will have to go with the existing system and will be able to hold it over Apple's head saying, you refuse to help us. But I don't know. A lot of stories about contact tracing and how companies and governments are planning to solve it their own ways. And you know, those often make it to our subreddit. You can submit stories that you care about and vote on them to get them up to the top so we can see them and we can know what you'd like to hear about at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Thank you in advance. Let's check out the mailbag. Somebody who wanted to remain anonymous wanted to chime in on our discussion yesterday about GDPR and whether or not it's being enforced and whether or not it was just a big waste of money depending on what countries we're talking about. Anon says, I work in marketing for a global technology company. Since the announcement of GDPR a few years ago, it's been a major priority to make sure we're fully compliant and in fact, extra cautious given some ambiguity in some of the wording of the rules. This meant changing online form entries, opt-in policies, not just for Europe, but all of our markets. It also meant changing web pages and web experiences, how we work with third parties, how we run advertising campaigns, back-end tools, platforms to make sure that the data is filtered, collected properly, et cetera. And we saw impact and major effects from these changes. Can't speak for all companies, but not wanting to be being an example of and being fined 4% of total annual turnover, our company made sure to follow the rules. Yeah, so it's not just lack of enforcement that might be keeping GDPR violations down. It could be that a lot of companies are like anonymous, this company here, and they're just following the rules. Yeah, exactly. Also following the rules, just kidding. We follow your rules if you're a master or a grandmaster anyway, including James P. Callison, Wanda Hernandez, and Degrescia A. Daniels. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. You're awesome. Also awesome, one Patrick Beja, who we have missed. It's been a sad two weeks without the Beja. Good to have you back. What's been going on? You know what, taking care of the kid and hoping that things will get back to normal at some point, so pretty standard, but also podcasts. If you enjoy gaming, you might enjoy pixels. If you enjoy reasonable discussions about things that are happening in the world, you might enjoy the Philius Club, and both of those are at Frenchspin.com. Go check that out or check me out on Instagram. I'm not Patrick over there. We are exceptionally thankful for our patrons, which means that the majority of the funding for our show is secure because you folks are still helping us out. Thanks to everybody who's been able to stay supporting us or even increased support to help cover those who can't. I can't tell you enough how thankful we are for that. 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