 Coming up on DTNS, the secret trend of digital gardens, Burger King Tech accelerates and does Facebook's election ad policy deserve the term policy? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 3rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. Sarah Lane has a well-deserved day off today and tomorrow, but we were just talking about the movie Mulan. We were talking about a New York Times article that we might get some antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. government against Google. If you want that wider conversation, go to patreon.com slash DTNS and sign up for Good Day Internet. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple told the information that it has pushed back its change in device ID collection to 2021 to give developers more time to adapt. If you recall, Apple announced at WWDC that in iOS 14, it would start requiring users to opt in rather than opt out of sharing their device ID, which is used for tracking purposes like advertising. Facebook recently told its ad customers it might have to stop operating its audience network on iOS as a result of the change. So Apple's given them more time to figure that out. Google has partnered with fellow Alphabet company DeepMind to improve arrival time estimates in Google Maps. Google says it has been 97% accurate using historical and current traffic conditions, but DeepMind helped improve accuracy by predicting future traffic conditions using a graphic neural network. Google says it has approved ETAs by up to 50%, even predicting traffic jams before they form. So just so you can keep track of that, they were 97% accurate and then they were 50% accurate. Tom, 60% of the time it works every time. Thank you. Apple will let developers offer codes for discounted or free subscriptions in iOS 14. The codes can be included in physical products or delivered online. Developers could previously set limited free or discounted pricing in the App Store, but Apple says the offer codes will offer more granular controls to acquire, retain, and win back subscribers. We shall win you back. China's Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gal Fong confirmed Thursday that companies quote should consult provincial level commerce administrations for any overseas transactions involving technologies listed under new export rules. That means tic-tac. Because China just added personal information, push services based on data analysis and artificial intelligence interactive interfaces to the list last Friday. Those are two things tic-tac uses to be successful. If you recall, Microsoft and Walmart are partnering on a bid for tic-tacs operations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. And we just learned today SoftBank is apparently interested in buying tic-tacs Indian operations. The service is currently blocked in India. China launched Alexa for residential that lets property managers set up and maintain smart home experiences in condos and apartments while letting residents control features like timers, alarms, and weather. Property managers can create custom skills for things like maintenance requests, amenity reservations, or even potentially paying rent. Renters can link their personal accounts to Alexa devices and property managers have no access to personal data with the ability to remotely reset devices when a resident leaves. TCL announced several products including a 10.36 inch widescreen tablet, the TCL 10Tab Max, with far-field microphones starting at 249 euros in Q4. There's also the 8 inch 10Tab Mid that's starting at 229 euros in Q4 as well. The Move Audio S200 earbuds come in at the end of September for 99 euros. And the MoveTime Family Watch, targeted at seniors and with health tracking and fall detection, is coming in the autumn and to move North America and Europe for 229 euros. TCL also showed off a prototype tablet called Next Paper that provides full color HD definition with no flicker or blue light to make for a paper-like experience. Display tech, I like it. And Facebook's FRL Research, which is now the name, so don't get me for like, but Facebook's already in the acronym. It's now just called FRL Research. It's like, and I don't know, like KFC. FRL Research showed some of its research for the use of sound in augmented reality. One example determines what you're paying attention to and then amplifies those sounds above others using noise canceling. Great for hearing a conversation in a crowded bar, for instance. Another example would be to project voices from remote participants in a video called a certain parts of the room so they feel present like they're there with you. It's similar to what hearing aids do, but using data from AR glasses to help refine it. Commercial applications are considered to be years away. This is just prototype research stuff. Oculus has temporarily paused sales in Germany, telling German news site Heisei online that it was a proactive measure as part of talks with German authorities. Facebook recently announced that it would begin requiring the use of Facebook account Facebook had to log into Oculus Services, which may be the subject of the talks. Sounds like a threat to me. All right, let's talk a little more about what's going on from Qualcomm. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon HCX Gen 2 5G chipset. This is its flagship arm processor for use with Windows. The HCX Gen 2 doesn't change much from the Gen 1. It does add Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1. It can do 4K now at 60 frames per second. It could do 4K, but now I can do it at 60 frames per second. Microsoft is extending app assure to Snapdragon now as well. So developers can get Microsoft help making their apps compatible at no cost. That should help bring a few more apps over and not require emulation. The HCX Gen 2 will arrive later this year on Acer's first 5G laptop. The Acer Spin 7, as well as on some HP laptops. Qualcomm also announced adaptive active noise cancellation for wireless earbuds, which kind of like what happens in AirPods can adjust your sound performance in real time. In fact, Qualcomm claims that it can work with a wider variety of earbud styles and not require an ear tip fit test. It'll just work. Qualcomm finally also announced 5G support coming to its Snapdragon 4 series chips. That's the ones meant for phones generally sold for less than 200 bucks. Oppo, Xiaomi and Motorola all say they're going to put out cheap 5G phones using the tech starting as early as Q1 2021. So new hope for windows on arm, cheaper 5G phones. Everybody likes that. But what about this adaptive active noise cancellation? Yeah, I think it's it's interesting what market Qualcomm is trying to target here, because if you look at a recent breakdown of kind of the market when it comes to wireless earbuds, it's Apple has the biggest share kind of point research to this in Q2. Apple has the biggest share. That's like Xiaomi and Samsung have, you know, like a quarter or less than that. There's Jabra and JBL have a tiny slice. And then there's the vast majority, the bulk of these wireless earbuds come from, you know, Chinese OEMs. If you look on Amazon, that's like if you search as wireless earbuds, that's usually it's like AirPods and a bunch of brands you've probably never really heard of. And so it's interesting that Qualcomm clearly wants this is targeting this at people like Audio Technica at Sennheiser, stuff like that. And it's, you know, you know, if it's good technology, that's great. High end audio is always just such a weird market these days. Apple still struggles with it in some ways. They've managed to do it really well with AirPods. But when you look at something like the HomePod stuff like that, it's it's tough to market like really great audio in that way. And I just think there is a really there's a relatively small addressable market for that. I mean, if you look at it, JBL and Jabra are kind of the two other kind of high end makers. They own six percent in there, maybe two. But yeah, there's not a whole lot of them. Sony is not like they're not even a pie slice on the counterpoint thing, so it's less than three percent. They're not looking for market share. They are looking for a high price luxury item. And what I think that we are looking at here is the wireless earbud market has been dominated by connectivity. And I don't mean that in any other way than how fast these things can connect to your device. The longer you got to fiddle, the more you got to go into a menu, the less that they are exciting. And this is the reason why the AirPods and the AirPods Pro have been hits because Apple controls that entire relationship. They just go boom. And next thing you know, you are walking down the street listening to what you need to do. They can go in and out of your ears very, very quickly. It's a revolution. If these chipsets and the the the standard start to continue to settle down, then maybe we do see some differentiation between brands that have a reputation for great sound, Pang and Oliveson, JBL and Jabra are three of them that you could say, OK, well, maybe they do sound better. Maybe there is a measurable different experience that they can deliver that lets them get into that iPad or iPod or AirPods Pro price tab. Yeah. I mean, and that's usually the way a lot of these markets have gone is Apple controls the whole stack, right? So it leaps out in front with its thing. And then somebody like Qualcomm comes along and makes the chipset and then a bunch of people can jump on board and you get a wider variety of competitors. I think what your point now, Rich, is we're still in that first stage, right? We haven't got that second stage. And maybe this this announcement from Qualcomm seems like it will potentially introduce that second stage. Well, speaking of next stages, perhaps Fujifilm announced the XF 50 millimeter F 1.0 RWR, a new auto focusing lens for its X series of mirrorless cameras. While camera lenses with apertures at or below F 1.0 are not unheard of, they're out there, this lens particularly will offer the fastest aperture in production with auto focus, kind of a big deal. If you're not a photographer, not into this, the kind of stuff. A lower F stop number means that the lens can gather more light and provides a shallower depth of field for a blurry background, kind of portrait effect like you would find on your phone, perhaps. It includes 12 lens elements in nine groups and weighs 1.86 pounds. Preorders are available now for $1,500 and the lens will ship this fall. So I definitely want to talk about this. I am, you know, I like the photography and stuff like that. And this is this is really a big deal. And it's it's kind of tied to the larger trend in mirrorless like the shift to mirrorless cameras is basically complete now. They said Nikon Canon, they also still tell a ton of DSLRs. But mirrorless is clearly the future that everyone is banking on. And Fuji is kind of the only holdout in a certain way in that regard in that everyone else seemingly other than Olympus, who maybe doesn't have camera operations anymore at this point, is going all full frame with their sensor sizes. They're the size of like a 35 millimeter negative. Fuji is the only one that's kind of still banging that APS-C sensor sized drum. And one of the knocks against that as a technology is that you can't get as shallow of depth of field with a given lens. So an F 1.0 lens is going to give you less shallow depth of field, which is a big deal when it comes to photography. This is a statement piece for Fujifilm that they can do this with autofocus. The only thing comparable really out there is like the Nikon Noct, which is a five pound lens that costs $8,000 and is an F.0, I'm sorry, 0.95 lens. And it's like impossibly huge and just completely bulky. This is something that a wedding photographer could buy and create really great images with. It's relatively compact for the size. It's a huge lens for Fujifilm, but compared to full frame offerings and stuff like that. This is relatively compact and it's a real statement piece that they're able to jam in that kind of stuff and prove that they can still kind of get the effects that photographers want with this, what seemingly is not seen as the future of photographic sensors. I mean, yeah, I self identify as photography ignorant, but all the people that I see who know this stuff are just jaw dropping at this combination, seems like. And Canon has put out an autofocusing F 1.0 lens in the past, but it was riddled with all sorts of weird quirks. And so by all accounts, this thing actually works and it can autofocus and it doesn't fall apart in like weird lighting. I mean, the big question though is like, who is this marketed at? Because at $1,500, it's not necessarily put into. $1,500 is nothing. No, I'm well aware of the price of what price of glass goes, but in APS-C, I mean, there's a reason why it's going out of favor. It's because as the digital camera market shrinks, a lot of the people that are buying are basically either professionals or content creators. And so, I mean, there's an argument to be made that even with a lower F stop, you would rather trade, you would rather go with a higher F stop to get a fuller frame because you do get better resolution with less noise. And it does go against the strength of an APS system where it is heavier, like the reason you would go with that is you want a lighter rig. This isn't necessarily light. But if you look at the price of other high-end Fuji glass, this is pretty much in, it's near the top of that range, but it's not even their most expensive lens at this point. Hey kids, do you remember the US National Security Agency program that collected metadata on US citizen phone calls in an effort to track foreign targets? I do. The one revealed by Edward Snowden, oh hey, the courts got around to ruling on an aspect of it. Oh, that was fast. Yeah, that's all right. Thursday, a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the metadata program played such a small part of the conviction of terror fundraising of four people in the Basali-Mualin case that disregarding it would not undermine their conviction. However, in the court's opinion, Judge Marsha Bersen wrote that the bulk collection of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA is what you might know it as if you listen to 24-hour cable news. The court rejected the argument that the collecting of metadata did not constitute a search because customers voluntarily shared the information with telephone providers. The court said that the defendants had a likely reasonable expectation of privacy. Former FBI official, Sean Joyce, had told Congress that metadata led to the convictions in the Mualin case, but Judge Bersen wrote, quote, that impression is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record, unquote, the decision is subject to a review, but the appeals court's full 11-member panel, as well as a petition, sorry, it would require the appeals court's full 11-member panel as well as a petition to the Supreme Court. Yes, is this all somewhat moot? Indeed, the metadata program was shut down in 2015 and replaced by a program which left the metadata with the phone companies and that new program appeals to have been abandoned. In fact, two of the co-defendants in the case have already completed their original sentence and have been released, just in time. But in a slightly related, but much faster decision, federal courts in Chicago have three times rejected government applications for warrants that would force Google to release what phones were on near two commercial locations during three 45-minute intervals. Google says the request for these geofet searches have risen 100-fold in the last two years. Yeah, so dealing with the Walling case first, the case was we think the collection was illegal and therefore because the collection was illegal, his case should be thrown out of court because they based it on illegally collected evidence, right? That is a very common thing that you can do in a criminal case is to say the way they collected the evidence violated my rights and therefore we have to have a retrial. What the judges said here was, yes, we agree it was illegal and that's precedent setting. It's a little late to the game, but it's precedent setting. But they didn't think that the metadata was essential to the conviction which goes against every justification for the metadata program ever, right? They're like, yeah, that metadata thing was illegal but from what we can tell reading all this classified stuff, you made your case just fine even if you didn't have it. So we're not gonna throw the conviction out of court. That, I'm glad you brought up the Chicago thing because the modern equivalent of the metadata collection is geofencing. It's a more modern way of just saying like, hey, tell us every phone that was on near this burglary or near this shooting and it's a phishing expedition, right? It's like we wanna see all the phones and see if any of them match up with something we might know and Google resists those collections and the court is now saying like, yeah, that's overbroad. If these court cases do move up through the chain, we might get a precedent setting ruling on that as well which would be more restrictive about these kinds of warrants because some courts do grant them across the United States. Technology reviews, Tanya Basu reports on a trend called digital gardens which to my 50 year old ears sounds like geosettings but listen up. The idea does in fact have its roots in what Mark Bernstein called a hypertext garden back in 1998. Digital gardens are personal websites that aren't blogs and aren't meant to be a definitive resource on something. It's just stuff I like, my art, my essays. A lot of times they have personal wikis in them, photo galleries, personal lists. People use anything from a Google doc to WordPress to some of these new services that are like just a page of links and then people connect their gardens through good old fashioned linking to each other. They don't say web ring, but kind of reminds me of that. They are edited at any time. So you don't have to keep them up like a blog. You can go in and change stuff as you change your opinions. They're very wiki-like. That's why you do see wikis in a lot of them. And while most digital gardens require the creator to figure out their own tech, there are now starting to be a few services like one called Toast from Chris Biscardi in development. Toast is still an alpha, but if you want to compare a subculture, if you're like, man, I missed those days when the internet had a bunch of subcultures. Now everything's just huge. Digital gardens, check it out. It's something that's got a following. You had a great tweet, Tom, about the realization that we all have to make, specifically those that came up when the internet was young. And we thought that every one of these little, you know, explosions of popularity, we're all, if not counterculture, certainly apart from the mainstream. And now we just have to reckon with the fact that this is mainstream. Twitter is mainstream. Facebook is mainstream. And so it is very almost refreshing to shine a light on something that is apart from that. And this little nostalgia kick is just a fun little nugget one day. Yeah, I'm interested to see how, if there's other subcultures on the internet that are kind of doing this un-platforming, right? Where the point is not to go viral, the point is not to be connected to everyone at once, is to kind of own the thing that you're creating, that not just the content that's on there, but even the way it is presented, like the page itself kind of comes from either your ingenuity or your creativity or something like that, as opposed to fitting into the cookie cutter of another network or something like that, I think is maybe like a, this is part of that trend definitely as well. Yeah, well, it's sharing because you wanna share something, not because you want to monetize it. It's a hobby. One thing that's not a hobby is the Monarchal Fast Food Chain Burger King. And they unveiled two restaurants designed to offer a touchless experience for customers. These designed, one of them is called The Next Level and the other is Your Way. Use 60% less square footage than traditional layouts. The Your Way design features two drive-through lanes, a dedicated walk-up window for orders, a shaded outdoor dining patio, as well as a parking area with solar powered canopies where customers can scan a QR code and then place an order through the Burger King mobile app. The Next Level design, meanwhile, offers three drive-through lanes including a dedicated delivery lane and offers a two-floor design with the dining area that overhangs the drive-through to save, further save space with orders delivered from the kitchen by conveyor belt kind of vibe. I'm hope, I imagine it in an I Love Lucy kind of way because I'm a thousand years old. New Designers will open next year in Latin America, the Caribbean and Miami. So, I mean, Tom, I guess the question I have for both of you is which one I guess maybe sounds more appealing? Like Justin, like your thoughts? You know, I think that there is a lot of conversation that we've had on this show about how programs like Zoom and stuff have seen probably like four years adoption in about six to seven months. I wonder if this is part of it. These kinds of concepts would have been here but now we might see them a little bit faster because of COVID restrictions and the uncertain business market. Yeah, the Invadido saw me on me. That's all I have to say. Oh, and you didn't mention the lockers. They also have lockers. I'm curious if those keep your food warm. Because they could order ahead of time. Yeah, although Burger King based in Miami, so. Yeah, maybe there's a flame broiler in the locker. Yeah, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Facebook will stop taking political advertising soon. Well, seven days before the US election on November 3rd. Well, kind of. Candidates and political action committees can continue to buy ads if they received at least one impression by October 27th and they can still target those ads and adjust spending on those campaigns. But here's where they're drawn the line. You can't put out new creative after October 27th. Your message on October 27th is your message for the rest of the election. There you go, Facebook's sticking it to them. By the way, you all can turn off all political ads on Facebook yourself. It's not obvious how to do it, but if you go search for turn off political ads on Facebook, there's plenty of good articles out there that walk you through it. Okay, so Justin, October 27th, no new messages on Facebook for political advertisements. Will this have an effect? In a word, no. Well, thanks everyone. That's our show. I guess if you were going to draw up a fan fiction scenario in which this was massively important, it would rely on a massive news story happening or not being able to burgeon or bubble up to the top of people's feeds and ads that would have supported it. Even then, I don't know anything that would be that newsworthy that wouldn't organically rip through Facebook, through whatever media would normally be there. The reality is that most political ads are there to fundraise. And if you are a week away from the election, you are not looking at the fundraising so much as you are looking at spending the money. Facebook is giving everybody a heads up to just make sure your final orders are in before. But that would probably be the case anyway. There's not going to be much of a material effect. If anything, it reminds me a little bit of the quote unquote advertising boycotts that some of the companies had when people were mad at Facebook a few weeks ago or months ago where it effectively was just advertising for them that they were not advertising on Facebook when not a single dime didn't go to Facebook. They literally just reallocated it to another moment in time. So ultimately no, this is a Facebook pounding their staff in the sand and nothing really coming on it. Yeah, there were some other things they announced to just for completeness on the story. The Voter Information Center is going up at the top of Facebook and Instagram feeds. This is just voter information. Where's your polling place? How do you vote? All that stuff will include messaging that vote counting might not lead to a winner being announced on election night, trying to get ahead of people's expectations on that because we might have some slower counting. There's a partnership with Reuters to display election results as they come in in the Voter Information Center. Facebook will remove posts containing clear misinformation and add links to accurate information to post that try to discourage people from voting. They're gonna label any attempts by a campaigner candidate to declare victory before the results are official. They won't take it down, they'll label it. They'll label posts that cast doubt on official outcomes. Again, won't take it down, they'll label it. They'll expand policies against voter suppression to include implicit misrepresentations. The example they used was, I hear anybody with a driver's license can get a ballot, which is not true. And so they're gonna expand that to include in their policy against voter suppression posts. And they're gonna restrict the number of people you can forward links to on Messenger. This is something they've done with good effect on WhatsApp to prevent the spread of misinformation starting in places like India, but they've expanded it worldwide. So they're gonna do that on Messenger as well. These feel like, with varying levels, more significant attempts to provide some good. The last one, the last one to me is the only thing that I can look at and say, all right, you wanna know what? If you're going to thousands of people, that's not what WhatsApp is necessarily for, that is well within there, right, to just say, you can only forward it to X amount of people. So whatever any information can only spread so fast on this platform, with the idea of being, let's avoid the worst case scenario. Everything else, the labels, you guys know my, say it with me, hashtag Hell Porter, hashtag Portal to Hell. Like, for a million different reasons that are more political than they are technical, if we have a situation where somebody is declaring victory on election night, that horse is gonna be out of the barn. Also, a lot that anybody, including Facebook and their labels are going to be able to do them. Every presidential candidate declares victory before the official results are talented by several measures. One is a lot of times it's just based on the overwhelming evidence of exit polls. You don't get official certifications of an election until later, and even then with the electoral college, you're not really elected to the electoral college vote. So I'm not sure what they mean by official certification. I think a lot of this is announcing a policy before somebody does something that they have to put a label on just to say, we're gonna label things. I, again, there's only so much that you can curtail misinformation when it comes to political speech because all political speech is inherently designed to be informative very narrowly to the benefit of the person talking. Yeah, and, you know, Justin, to your point about limiting the forwards on Messenger and that kind of stuff. I mean, one, that's the one thing I'm seeing on here that we've actually seen evidence of, you know, having an actual impact of affecting people's behavior and actually, you know, changing a platform or limiting a platform in some way. And it's also the other one that doesn't explicitly, you know, that's not in any way tied directly to political speech. Now, it may happen to be that somebody forwards but Facebook doesn't know what's in those messages. It's just saying, hey, you can't blast every single person on your contacts list with your forward of a forward of a forward, you know, something horrible. So I think it's interesting that the one thing that isn't inherently related to politics is perhaps the one thing that might be the most effective. Real quickly, after public pressure, Facebook has suspended Indian politician, T. Rajas Singh. He's a member of the ruling BJP party for hateful posts. He will not be able to create profiles on any Facebook service and groups and accounts that are set up to represent him will be removed as well. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag, Rich. What's in there? All right, well, we got Daniel in Sin City writing in. He writes in, I lament Twitter adding context to trending topics because it marks the beginning of the end of my favorite segment, of my second favorite podcast, Reply All, called Yes, Yes, No. For the uninitiated, the whole premise of the segment is three guys of varying awareness of trends, memes, Reddit topics, and general internets trying to explain a cryptic trending tweet to each other and to the listener with hilarious in-depth explanations and banter. The goal is to get all three to answer the question, do you understand this tweet with a yes? If Twitter curated or contextual pinned tweets eventually expand beyond the very top trending topics, this may very well be dead. Who wants to hear a segment that starts with yes, yes, yes, because Twitter told me so. Besides, I'm definitely not one of those who scours Reddit every day or even uses Twitter very often. So when I listen to someone as bewildered as I am upon first reading a tweet about current internet happenings, which sounds like it was written in another language, I empathize immediately. Hoping Twitter doesn't take it too far simply from my own selfish entertainment. Thank you, Daniel. Yes, Daniel. I believe yes, yes, no, we'll still be safe. They'll just not be allowed. It's like, don't Google an answer during a quiz show. But yeah, it's a fair point. And of course we want to give a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher, and Justin Zellers. Thank you so, so much for your continued support. And thank you to Justin Robert Young for being on the show today. Justin, where should people check out more of your great stuff? They're so inclined. Well, you can go wherever you find podcasts to get on the Politics, Politics, Politics train. We are moving very, very quickly to the debates. Joe Biden has left the state of Delaware and is actually campaigning, which is a change for him. And we are breaking down each and every move that he makes as we get ever closer to November 3rd. Well, Justin helped me start my morning with Chappaquiddick on the PX3 Extra. Yeah, that was the most Patriot bonus episode that I got for whatever reason. I got heated at like 9.30 in the morning and started talking about Chappaquiddick. Hey, everybody, don't forget, you can also support us at patreon.dailytechnewshit.com slash Patreon. I've got an editor's desk that goes a little more into what Justin mentioned earlier about the idea that social networks are mass media now, not niche media. You can get that, you can get Roger's column and more at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern time, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Patrick Norton's gonna wrap up a lot of that hardware news out of EFA for us tomorrow and Len Peralta will be here as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.