 Coming up on DTNS, a robot that hangs from your ceiling, new laptops from Microsoft, and relax everyone it's over, Google has finally saved journalism. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 1st, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Spooky Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from Triple Digits Southern California, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, it's a spooky 104 October degrees, Los Angeles. Yeah, don't put your pumpkins out yet, it'll melt. We were just talking about Ted Lasso and Apple TV on a fire TV and all kinds of good stuff on good day internet, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. I'm more reports that Apple has added the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle to its worldwide vintage collection. The iPad Touch, iPod Touch rather, is now on the obsolete products list. So here's what it means, Apple labels vintage products as those that haven't been sold since more than five and less than seven years ago. Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple TV vintage products will still receive hardware servicing from Apple service providers in Apple retail stores. However, obsolete products were discontinued more than seven years ago and Apple won't service those products, no exceptions. Salesforce forecasts that this will be the e-commerce's busiest ever holiday season. The company says it expects 30% year on year growth in digital commerce globally. Last year the sector saw only 8% growth. Salesforce predicts that digital sales are expected to account for 18% of all retail globally and 30% here in the good old US of A. I feel it's incumbent upon me to point out that only e-commerce and digital sales are expected to have an amazing holiday season. Yes, yes. UK Cyber Spy Agency GCHQ says its National Cyber Security Center believes Huawei has failed to tackle the flaws in security in its equipment used in the UK telecom networks despite previously having complaints. We talked about those complaints. They're like, we don't think Huawei is malicious. We just think it's not very good and they need to fix this stuff. It said a vulnerability quote of national significance had happened in 2019 but had not been fixed before it could be exploited but had been fixed before it could be exploited. The agency said that while some improvements had been made by Huawei, it didn't have confidence they were sustainable and the board can only provide quote limited assurance that all risks to UK national security could be mitigated in the long-term. Bossa Studios, which develops Surgeon Simulator and the recently released Surgeon Simulator 2 has made Surgeon Simulator 2 free for doctors, nurses and surgeons working in Britain's National Health Service. For a copy all one needs is a working NHS email address, a PC and the appropriate link which we will have in our show notes. Surgeon Simulator 2 is now live in the Epic Game Store and NHS workers can pick up their free copies of the game until October 22nd. Good luck doctors. IBM and Dr. Morbya Jha, the University of Texas at Austin launched an open source space situational awareness project designed to track space junk. The SSA project plans to use machine learning to create a model to determine when standard physics base tracking incorrectly predicts where space junk will be. And the founder of the Indian fitness startup Gochi, Vishal Gondal confirmed to TechCrunch the dozens of executives quote from nearly every top startup and firm in India attended a call this week to discuss creating a third party Android App Store. Reportedly on the call where executives from India's most valuable startup Paytm as well as make my trip policy bizarre, razor pay and share chat among others. All right, Sarah, tell us about all the hot new products from Microsoft. We'll do Tom, Microsoft made several announcements on Thursday. The updated Surface Pro X uses a Qualcomm SQ2 processor has 15 hours of battery life LTE and is available in a new platinum finish for pre-order now starting at $999 and shipping on October 13th. The company also announced the 12.4 inch Surface Laptop Go with a 1536 by 1024 screen, 10th gen Intel Core i5, either four or eight gigs of memory and starting at 64 gigs of storage. The Surface Laptop Go weighs 2.45 pounds, supports Wi-Fi 6 and fast charging and has an optional fingerprint reader. The Laptop Go ships on October 13th starting at $549.99 on up to $900. Depending on what you want. There are also some new accessories including a $25 wireless number pad and a $69 4K wireless display adapter and Microsoft also announced that emulation of 64-bit x86 apps for Windows on-arm will roll out to Windows insiders in November with plans to bring it to all Windows users in 2021. Microsoft said it will also update Edge to be faster and more energy efficient on-arm and will release a native Microsoft Teams client for the platform. Yeah, that last one's probably the biggest one. If you're using one of these arm-based Surface Laptops, the complaint has been that some of the software is a little buggy and not everything that works on Windows 10 is compatible even with the emulation because they can only do 32-bit. So adding 64-bit has been one of the biggest complaints and they're addressing that here. So that's good news. That the rest of the, you know, these other announcements, the SQ2 processor is supposed to be faster. So that's good. Otherwise the Pro X, really, I mean, it doesn't have 5G. It's not that much of an upgrade. It's a little bit of an upgrade. Oh, but the platinum finish, Tom. Oh, right, sorry. I did forget the different color and different color keyboard covers as well. Surface Laptop Go, on the other hand, Thin and Light is kind of the big story there. Wi-Fi 6 and stuff like that, the optional fingerprint reader on the more expensive bottles. You know, these are definitely the definition of evolutionary product announcements to me, but they're not bad. Which of these do you think will be the biggest contributor to the 30% rise in digital sales in the United States of America, Tom? The $25 wireless number pad. Who has it been complaining that their Microsoft keyboard cover doesn't have a number pad? If only I could add one for $25. Well, some people do care about that. Actually, that's true. And the people who care can email feedbackanddailytechnewshow.com and tell me just how much they care because they care a lot. I know they do. And please do it in all caps. Right. Get angry. Yes, exactly. No, no, do it. Do it at T9 so we can please read it. So we can be sure that you typed this out. All right, the two political parties in the United States can't agree on much. In fact, in the Senate, they really can't agree on much in an election year and they certainly can't agree on much considering they have a Supreme Court nomination to fight about, but they can agree on one thing. Their attitude toward tech companies. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee voted unanimously to subpoena the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to answer questions about Section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act, a.k.a. Safe Harbor. Took a little controlling. Ranking Senate Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington opposed the subpoenas until language about media domination and privacy were added to the agenda. Finally, Tom, peace in our time. Yeah, so no matter who we get controlling this government after this next election, they're gonna go after Section 230, maybe for different reasons, but they're all gonna go after it. To refresh your memory, Section 230 is the Safe Harbor law in the United States. It's based on the idea that if you are a distributor of something in the United States, case law says you shouldn't be held accountable for the legality of what you're distributing, unless it can be shown you knew it was illegal. This goes back to a bookstore case in Los Angeles in the 50s where a guy said, I didn't know there was illegal material in these books. I can't be expected to read all the books. The court agreed. And what Section 230 did was say, okay, we got this new thing, internet platforms, let's call them distributors. They're not publishers of comments and they set some rules of when they are publishers, but if third parties like us are commenting, they're considered distributors, right? And so the rule was you're only held responsible if you know what you're distributing is illegal. There was case law testing Section 230 though, where a judge said, you know what? The way this law is written, I think even if you do know it's illegal, you're still not responsible. And that allowed for some much more broader coverage. It allowed for the prevalence of online forums. And now it's allowed for people to decide like, well, it's not about illegal stuff anymore. Let's not just fix that. Let's make it about privacy and censorship. And that's where the issue now comes in for different reasons. The idea that, you know, the internet does not protect you. It is this very specific slice of it. So for example, just because the New York Times has an online version, they are not protected by 230 because they do determine what goes into it. And in the same way that although it's difficult to prove, let's say a newspaper guilty for libel, you still can do that. If you show that they have actual malice, this is going to be, and this has been a ever-evolving row between specifically conservative politicians in some of these websites because they believe that the increasing encroachment of tagging or shadow banning or outright banning or de-platforming are encroaching on in their mind the position of section 230. And this obviously was, yeah, this was also the subject of an executive order by the president, which has not really happened. Oh yeah, there's an executive order. There are like a stack of bills high enough to let me boost my seat at Thanksgiving, none of which have gained any traction yet. So I think this subpoenaing of people is meant to say, all right, we could all agree we wanna rail on these guys and score points with our constituents. Let's at least do that even if we can't all agree on the same bill yet. Well, and of course it is there for the reason why most public hearings get or happen when famous people are involved because they get on the TV and they can record ads that they will eventually show on television when they're running for things. Yeah, so we're gonna get the CEO, we're gonna get Mark Zuckerberg, we're gonna get Sacha Nadella, we're gonna get Dorsey still in charge of Twitter. Yeah, he is, okay. They're the ones being subpoenaed in and they will be asked, when did you start violating everyone's privacy and free speech? Yeah, it's not as fun now that they don't have to come to DC though. It's not as fun as Zoom calls, yeah. A few follow-ups from yesterday's big Google announcements. Google's Rick Osterlo told the Verge that gestures and face recognition which were in the Pixel 4 and are gone in the Pixel 5 will return like MacArthur to future models of the Pixel. He said the Project Soli Sensor, which is the one that handles the gestures and makes it easy to do the face recognition was too expensive for the Pixel 5. They wanted to keep the price point down and that apparatus was just too pricey at this point but they do intend to bring it back in future pixels. Also a couple of updates that have evolved on the Google TV front. The Google Play Movies and TV app for Android has been renamed Google TV. The app will collect your purchases of movies and TV shows just like it did before but it will also now integrate other streaming services. So you can tell it, oh, I get Netflix, I get CBS All Access and then you can use the newly named app to find movie and TV shows whether you bought or rented them from Google Play or have them available on Netflix or some other service. We also mentioned the watch list in the Google TV interface which is different than the Google TV app. The interface is what's on the new Chromecast which is different than other Chromecast because it has Android TV on it and has a remote and Google TV. That watch list in that interface will now track what you watch and let you add things to it and integrates with Google search. So you're searching around on your desktop and you see something you wanna watch in Google search. You can say add to my watch list. It'll show up on the interface in Google TV on Chromecast. Actually, it will show up in your Google TV app as well. Also, that integrates with the Google TV app. So if you're in the Google TV app, you say add something to my watch list. It will show up on Google TV on Chromecast as well. So Google TV is no longer the thing that was in the Logitech review six years ago. It is instead both an app and an interface. And my Google Play and Movies app has changed to be Google TV when I open it, although the icon hasn't, which is quite confusing. You know what's going on though. I don't know. I mean, listen, this Google TV stuff is pretty cool. Pretty seamless, unless for some reason you stay out of the Google universe for whatever reason. I have to say, the gestures and face recognition, which was part of the Pixel 4 being pulled from the Pixel 5 and the company saying it was just too expensive and we want to sell you phones that are at your price point. So we did this for you. But we'll bring it back in a future update. That is very unusual. The only time you take away things like that is because people are like, it wasn't helpful. I wonder if this was COVID related, or at least COVID, like a long tail element of it, that look, we had a massive disruption in the supply chain at around the time that these kinds of orders are going in and getting processed. So even if it's not necessarily that they couldn't get their hands on it, but maybe they couldn't get their hands on it at the price they wanted to keep it at the final price point and they just figured the features weren't popular enough to fight for, then I wonder. My guess is it was both. They probably were looking at the supply chain and saying, we can do it, we can even do it at the price we want, but the yields aren't gonna be right or the timing's gonna be a little weird. And by the way, selling a $1,000 phone right now doesn't seem like as good of an idea as it did a year ago. What if we just drop projects solely, don't even deal with that whole mess and having to figure it out and make it work, even though we can, and market this as a more affordable phone? I mean, I think it's a confluence of events that led them to make, I find it a very reasonable decision, honestly. I do think if everybody is just kind of assuming that this year is gonna be a stay away for a lot of every year phone updaters, maybe it's just, eh, you wanna know what, this is fine. Well, you might also think this next story is pretty fine because if you would like a robot that hangs from your ceiling like a bat, have I got a story for you? Toyota hopes some of you want this among the prototype shown off from Toyota Robotics in California was a robot that hangs from the ceiling using sensors and two arms to complete tasks like cleaning, loading a dishwasher, for example. The gantry design was used to eliminate the robot taking up floor space and folding up out of the way when not in operation. The robots were trained by having humans control actions like wiping down a table, using VR controllers, the motions are captured and used to train gate robots so they're getting smarter over time. The robots demonstrated our prototypes meant for further development, so we have a ways to go yet. They're not ready for commercial application yet, but I for one welcome our new bad overlords. Yeah, I liked this idea of using VR to train it. Like, so in the VR, the trainer was pretending to be the robot so they were looking down and saying, oh yeah, that's what I would do, that's how I would approach it and that trains the machine learning in there. But it's brilliant to hang this thing from the ceiling, they have a prototype that rolls along on the ground, but it wouldn't fit in a lot of apartments because it needs to carry all of its sensors and batteries and everything in the bottom. Not a big deal when you put it in the ceiling because you can just have long cords getting direct power, it never loses power, never has to recharge, I can just drop down when it's needed and be out of the way when it's not. I'm telling you, of all the chores I hate the most, emptying a dishwasher and folding laundry are at the top. If I know exactly where to put things so that they can be put away, or at least put into a dishwasher and or folded and put somewhere nicely, man, I would love this. And yes, it makes a lot of sense to put it on the ceiling because again, you don't have to use precious floor space especially in people with smaller square footage. And it's human proof because you don't have to worry about a bunch of random stuff on the floor. That happens because we're humans and that's where stuff goes sometimes. And that's a problem with Roombas, it's a problem with other kind of like rolling around sort of a robot assistance. Well, what's fascinating is they've basically taken a cue from industry where they use gantry elevators to manipulate large objects and warehouses. You can't have them rolling on floors because the things you're moving are so big, the machinery would be in its own way so they literally do it from the ceiling down. They have the cranks and stuff so this actually makes perfect sense. The thing is, whatever apartment or how she put this in needs enough ceiling space to accommodate it without you bumping your head against it while it operates. Yeah, but that's why they picked it was for small apartments because they're like, we can keep this out of from bumping into your head. We can't keep it from rolling over your toes in a small apartment. So they definitely thought of that. My concern is this is a lot of installation, you know, a rolling robot. They just unloaded at your door and you're ready to go. You have to have people come in and put this on your ceiling. And like you say, Roger measure it and make sure that, okay, we can put it here and it won't cause any problems. And I imagine it's probably costlier because of that. Yeah. Oh, what a feeling. It's a robot on the ceiling. Wow, Lionel Richie Toyota combo. That's great. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines on each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Google plans to spend more than $1 billion over the next three years to create something called Google News Showcase. The product focuses on giving publishers control of what appears in panels in news products. So Google News, instead of just having a list of stuff would have a little panel from a certain publication. And the publisher gets to decide what goes in there. Participating publishers will be able to package stories together in a panel to provide extra context, maybe include some timelines and bullet points and eventually add audio and video as well. And the panels will then be surfaced within Google Showcase by an algorithm. But what's in them is curated by a human. So it's trying to use the best of both worlds. Publishers will curate what's in the panel and users will be able to personalize feeds to follow specific publishers. So you can let the algorithm give you everything or you can say, gosh, you know what, I want the Wall Street Journal. Give me that stuff for sure. Google will offer free access to some paywalled stories too in order to help drive subscriptions. So, you know, we send you with a free story or two and then maybe you sign up for the rest. They will share anonymized data with the publishers about the performance of their panels and publishers will be selected country by country based on how many publishers are willing to sign up. Once they get enough publishers signed up then they'll launch in that country. Google says it will prioritize signing up publishers with established audiences that serve a community. Now not to be huge, they just have to be something that's been around for a while and says, yes, we serve this locale. So local news is a big part of this. Google News Showcase is launching in Google News on Android. It will eventually come to iOS and also eventually show up in Google's Discover and Search platforms. Google has signed deals with more than 200 publishers around the world in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the UK and Australia. None yet in the United States. Google News Showcase is going to launch where it has critical mass in Brazil and Germany. So you guys are getting it right now. Some of the German outlets include Handelsblatt, Der Spiegel and Infobay, but you may notice, not Axel Springer. They're the publishers of Build and Develte. Axel Springer pushed the first German law that caused Google to stop showing snippets in Google News. An EU copyright directive was also supported by Axel Springer. That's the one that requires Google and others to license snippets. Now France has been the first to make that a law and require Google not only to pay for the snippets, but when Google said, well, we just won't use snippets then, France forced Google to negotiate, said, no, the law says you have to actually engage in good faith negotiations. So Axel Springer isn't signing up for showcase because they're holding on to see how Germany implements this copyright directive. They think maybe they can get a better deal that way. Google is obviously doing this in Europe and Australia. Don't forget, there's a negotiation going on in Australia over paying for news because they think they can make this the answer. To say, look, you don't need to have this law, we'll have this great showcase product that will save journalism. Well, Tom, finally, as somebody who came out of the journalism industrial complex, I'm happy to see that the news has returned its eye to the rightful real story, the people who make the news. This is a response to the EU. This is a response to those businesses. And Australia, I'd say, but yeah, definitely. And Australia. It is them trying to head off at the past any possible thing that could happen in the United States going forward, which I think is more likely than ever, considering the adpocalypse that we have seen in journalism full tilt, you might begin to see some of the sharp knives come out for Google and they don't want yet another front that they would be a soft on here state side. As for the idea, it feels to me like a lot of these similar initiatives that Facebook has done in the past, where the concept is, hey, here's a pile of money. Do you want to optimize things for our platform? We'll pay you to do it. The history of these projects is that the money goes away and Google just says, all right, you wanna keep optimizing these pages? We're not gonna pay you anymore, although they did have a $300 million project before this one and now this one's a billion, so this is bucking the trend in that case. And I will say in Google's defense, they are already in the news game in a very significant way that Facebook has kind of paid more lip service to. And I think Facebook's also a little bit more erratic of where they would like to see their news product. Google has Google News, which is tremendously popular with a lot of people. This is them trying to not only make those panels something new and different and better, but also create a product that people would already have shown the behavior to engage with. I would wonder about exactly how long this money goes and exactly how dynamic these panels are. Well, it goes for three years and Google has even said, we'll continue to fund it past the three years. The billion is just for the first three. So they're anticipating that question and trying to answer it, right? Yes. And I'm glad that they've said that it's for three years and they plan on doing it for more than that. The question is where the state of journalism is going to be by then, because we really don't know what these big publishers are going to look like. And the only saving grace for them for the last five years has really been building up their paywall content. There's a reason why the New York Times and the Washington Post haven't wanted to do anything that could really crack that because they view that as their only lifeline into the future. Yeah, I mean, we don't have time to go into my own thoughts on journalism and where it's at. And because the short version is, I think this has more to do with suddenly throwing multiple non-competing news platforms onto the same platform. You used to have everything broken up. Radio didn't really compete with the newspaper, which didn't really compete with TV. Suddenly they're all on the web. And I don't think that's all shaken out yet. Google's doing a campaign in Australia with a comedian where they make, I think, a very simplistic but appealing argument, which is if I was a bus driver, you wouldn't expect me to pay the restaurant to drop off people at the restaurant. No, you'd expect the restaurant to pay for the bus route to come by the restaurant, right? And that's Google's attitude here, is like really, they should be paying us to bring subscribers to them. But look at us, we're giving them the money instead, voluntarily. Yeah, look, they've got a lot of different plates to spin on this, but I'm curious to see what version of it makes its way to America. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. All of you global folks submit stories and vote on them to find out what everyone thinks is the most important. Daily Tech News Show dot Reddit dot com. Let's check out the mailbag. Got a good one from Anasio Lanari Bo, who wanted to give their two cents on the Google antitrust case in China. We were talking yesterday on the show, didn't make a lot of sense domestically, but maybe it would make more sense for exporters like Xiaomi. Bo explains why that might in fact be the case, writing, Google services is a fundamental input of the production of smartphones for markets outside of China. Xiaomi, for example. Google does participate in that market, selling licenses, signing contracts with all of these producers who sell phones with Google services. That is Google's dominant position gives it almost monopoly power on the competition for exports between smartphone producers in China. China's domestic market is not at stake in this issue. A perhaps imperfect analogy would be if you had a company in the US that exports trains that are incompatible with American railways using steel imported by some other country. The US enforces its antitrust laws abroad in this kind of situation. For example, the department would take action against a foreign cartel, ambit limiting purchases from US exporters or depressing the prices they receive or a boycott of American goods or services organized by competitors in foreign markets. Inacio says, love the show, have been listening since the Buzz Out Loud days and have been a supporter since the very beginning. Yes, we were circling around this idea a little bit, Inacio, and thank you for crystallizing it. If the train analogy doesn't work for you out there, think of it from the Chinese perspective. Let's say China makes trains that only run on railways in the United States, but they import the steel from the United States and then the train maker starts saying, well, you can't buy steel from anywhere else, yeah, you gotta buy them from us. And that's the only way you can make those trains and send them to us. That's what's happening with Xiaomi, right? Xiaomi is like, well, we can't use anything but Android. And we wanna export these phones to the United States and India and Europe, et cetera. And so China could say, it doesn't even have to do with Huawei. It has to do with Google dominating the market for the operating systems that are used by our Chinese phone makers to make phones meant for India, Europe, et cetera. Again. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and Hi-Tech Oki. Also, big, big thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, the politics, they keep on coming. What else has been going on with you? Well, not only can you find my take on current politics at politicspoliticspolitics.com, in fact, if you wanna get on our Patreon, you can get four episodes a week during this, the crunch time for the US election by going to takepoliticsseriously.com. And you can do that for $12. If you just got the $3 level until election day, that's only 12 bucks. You've spent $12 on far dumber things, I assure you. I'm very, very happy with the kind of content that we're producing, and we have even better bonus stuff coming your way. However, I'm also very excited because in the grand tradition of American politics, I got an October surprise for everybody. And that is the return of my political history series, Raise the Dead, my three episode version of, telling of the epic tale of the 1964 election, taking place right after season one of Raise the Dead, which did the 1960 election, tells about the greatest political power vacuum that we've ever had in modern American history as JFK is assassinated. And now everybody wants a piece of the pie. Learn how Bernie Sanders was taken out of this year's primary by a strategy that was employed back in 1964, as well as the birth of our modern negative political ad. I'm very proud of it. It's the best thing I've ever done. You can go find Raise the Dead at raisethededpodcast.com or anywhere that you find podcasts, just to make sure you're signed on to that RSS feed because the new season comes on October 4th. I'm so excited. It's a good season, folks. You got to go check it out. And don't forget, next week is Creator Theme Week on Daily Tech News Show. So make sure that if you know any folks who are interested in visual effects, costume and props, narrative game design, you get them to listen to the show next week because there's gonna be lots of good stuff, lots of great guests. That's starting Monday, October 5th. And again, I've been saying it all week. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the folks picking us up. We've been getting a few new people joining us because more people now are finally reaching the end of that rope where they're like, you know what? My financial problems are finally affecting me. I didn't get another check and I can't support right now. And there are others of you who can and you are picking those people up and making it possible for us to keep making the show for all of you. So thank you for that. If you can support us, now is the time. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. And if you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com and boy, do we love your feedback. Keep it coming. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.