 Coming up on DTNS, the U.S. brings anti-trust charges against Google, Adobe's new AI features for Photoshop and more, and why social media is making people angry at each other. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 20th, 2020, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And this is Allison Sheridan of the Podfeat Podcasts. And I'm the show's producer, Lost in Time. That's Roger Chang. We were just talking about plurals and the definitions of folk and y'all and proper gendered pronouns. If you want to get our thoughts on that, get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google confirmed it's discontinuing the Nest Guard home security system. The product was initially released in 2017. Google says existing Nest Guard systems, however, will continue to function as normal. I'm just wondering if you have a text expander snippet that says Google has discontinued. All right, Microsoft began pushing out its Windows 10 October 2020 update includes a refresh start menu with a transparent background to tiles, the addition of edge browser tabs to Alt tab and the ability to set monitor refresh rates in the Windows 10 settings panel. This is also the update that officially bundles in the Chromium based version of Microsoft's edge browser. Intel agreed to sell its NAND flash business to SK Hynex for nine billion dollars in an all cash deal, including its solid state drive business, NAND component and wafer operation, as well as its factory in Dalyang, China. If you were listening to a good day internet yesterday, you already know this Intel will keep its Optane memory business developed in partnership with Micron. The deal will make SK Hynex the second largest NAND flash provider behind Samsung. We've seen LG's rollable OLED display at CES for years. And now it's finally going on sale in South Korea. This is the 4K TV that rolls up into its aluminum base. The base can even be engraved with a personal message to the 65 inch LG signature OLED R costs 100 million one or about $87,000 US. I'll get mine engraved. I can't afford this. The app stadium, that's the one that lets you stream Google Stadia on iOS by providing a multi-purpose browser app that could integrate with Bluetooth game controllers. They thought they had got past all the app store rules, but they haven't. Apple has determined that the way the app extended WebKit to work with Bluetooth violates rule 4.7 against exposing native platform APIs to third-party software. The Apple no longer appear in the Apple app store, but if you've downloaded it, it will continue to work. And the developer said on Reddit, he's not even mad at Apple. He's like, they just didn't like the way I extended their WebKit APIs. That's fine. All right, let's talk about the big news of the day. The US Justice Department filed an anti-trust lawsuit in Washington D.C. Federal Court Tuesday alleging Alphabet's Google engaged in anti-competitive conduct to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising. The suit alleges Google uses exclusionary and interlocking business agreements to keep out competitors. For instance, Google pays billions to make Google the default search engine on mobile phones and browsers. Google also requires its search app to be preloaded and undelatable on Android phones. And Google allegedly prohibits competitor search apps from being preloaded on phones as part of revenue sharing agreements. By dominating search, it rakes in billions on advertising, which it shares with distributors of its search products and quoting from the filing now, these enormous payments create a strong disincentive for distributors to switch. The suit alleges Google effectively owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for roughly 80% of the general search queries in the United States, allegedly preventing competitors from building scale, leaving consumers with fewer choices because people can't get into the market and advertisers with less competitive prices. So the emphasis here, Allison, is they are dominating this market so much that competitors can't get in. Remember, monopoly is not illegal on its own. It's illegal if it harms the consumer and they're alleging that the consumer is harmed because they're not getting access to innovative alternative solutions because Google is just edging everything else out of the market. So, but it's the fact that they're tying the two together that actually makes the difference that they're it's not just that they're dominating search, it's that the dominance in search causes the dominance in advertising, which causes the dominance in search like they pull the money together. It's bad that they dominate search because that keeps competitors out. It's bad that they dominate search advertising because that gives businesses no price competition. And it's bad that they use the money from the search advertising to further reinforce their dominance in search. OK, all right. So so it's all of it. Each one of these is individual. In fact, one of the things I'm seeing from some lawyers out there is they don't think this filing is very strong. They think that better cases could have been made. But we'll we'll see about that in the future. Google respond by arguing that it does face vigorous competition, that it helps businesses reach new customers so it's not harming its consumers. Also says the fact that most of its services are free undermines allegations of consumer harm. Senior Vice President of Global Affairs and Google Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker wrote a blog post with lots of gifts. That's how Google always does this. Showing, for instance, how Bing and Yahoo are featured in Safari when you choose a search in Safari. Yeah, it's when you go. Yeah, it's when you go to a certain screen. It's not the default. You have to dig to find it. And they also showed how to change default search engines in Chrome saying, look, it's easy. If you want a different search engine, you can do it. And they also pointed out that Microsoft Edge is preloaded on Windows. Just mentioned that Windows 10 and defaults are just a Bing. Other cases are in the works still. A group of 11 state attorneys general did join the Department of Justice in this case. Some states may still join later, but they're still evaluating bringing their own case, largely a political decision. All the Republican attorneys general joined now. The Democratic attorney generals might be joining later. That's because of the election. A large group of states led by Texas is considering a separate case on Google's position in ad tech. That's not search advertising. That's that's AdSense, providing advertising out in the world. And another group of attorneys general is reviewing Google search business. That's one that could be folded into the current case, possibly, or it could be on its own. Again, a lot of people are thinking this isn't a very strong case. It seems like it was rushed. I bet we could create a better case on our own. I know that you said it was split because of political reasons. And of course, we'd apply that to absolutely every sentence. But I don't understand why if the DOJ is doing it, doesn't that cover all of the states? No, the whether the state attorneys general want to join the case on their own is what's political. The Department of Justice brings the case federally. You're right. Right. But if you get a state attorney general to say, I also joined this case, gives you a little extra firepower, right? It's not just the US federal government states, even if they didn't join. The result will apply. Yes, of course. OK, but it's not about the result. It's about, listen, judge, it's not just us. It's also the attorney general of Texas. It's also the attorney general of Montana. We're all we're all parties to this case and also that allows the attorney general when they're running for re-election to say, like, look, I was part of that. OK, gotcha. If you recall, the EU also has done antitrust cases against Google, three of them for a total of about nine billion dollars in fines, as well as remedies such as auctions for placement on a search choice screen when you set up a new Android device. Europeans, help us out. Have you noticed any of these effects? Alison, I know you talked. You found a few Europeans in their natural habitat of Europe and asked them. I did some vast research on a sample set of three, someone from the Netherlands, someone from Ireland and someone from Germany. And all three of them said, no, we haven't noticed any difference at all. Yeah, but maybe there was a screen that popped up and I just absentmindedly clicked it away, but I don't remember seeing it. Email us feedback at DailyTechNews.com if you have noticed a difference. We also did this in the US before the Federal Trade Commission investigated for a year over favoring its own over Google favoring its own services and search. The FTC eventually decided not to bring a case in 2013, a different basis for a case than the DOJ, though, and the timeline. This will take several years. We won't be going to court for months. There will be a long court case. There will be appeals by comparison. Microsoft's famous antitrust case around Windows took from 1998. The year Google was founded till 2002. So call us in 2023 and we'll check in on this. We're so much more efficient now, though, Tom, I bet we'll get that done faster. Down to three years before. Exactly. Sure, we will. Well, moving on, we've got another big story here. According to the digital 2020 October global slatshot report, more than four billion people worldwide use social media each month and an average of nearly two million new users join every day. That's not a big story. Research from Northwestern University political scientists show that exposing people on social media to content they disagree with makes people more polarized than if they blissfully just stayed in their echo chambers. Now, there's two kinds of this polarization. There's effective polarization, which is how much you dislike the other side. That's gotten much worse in the US over the past 60 years. Now, there's also ideological polarization. How much do you disagree with the other side? Not dislike, but disagree. And that has stayed pretty much the same. So we've gotten angrier with each other, but we don't actually disagree any more than we used to. I'm just pausing for a second. I thought that was I thought that was really, really interesting. That's an important thing to note, right? Is that is that it's not we're not in more disagreement. We're just mad. Thanks. All right. A 2018 study led by Northwestern Dr. Christopher Christopher Bale used data from US users of Twitter and found that when you repeatedly expose people on social media to viewpoints different than their own, it reinforces their own viewpoint and makes them less likely to change their mind. The results have been replicated in other studies. That's really sad. This is a psychological phenomena that's been shown outside of this topic, which is the worst way to influence someone is to try to convince them you are right. They will just dig in. And this bears that out in practice, saying, yes, when you're on social media and you're exposed to a bunch of people threatening your belief, you will dig in and believe what you believe more. You will be less likely to change your mind. Now, they don't offer any ideas of how to change someone's mind, but let's keep going. In another model, David Saban Miller and Daniel Abrams found that when we were exposed to differing viewpoints on social media, it's usually in the more extreme forms meant to provoke an emotional reaction because that leads to heightened engagement. They found that this repulses people away from considering these different viewpoints. And that's a model trolls use. Mr. Saban Miller told The Wall Street Journal, a reason we have some confidence in our model is the people who are trying to polarize us are already doing what they should be by our model to be optimally effective. Yeah, this is this is worth thinking about again. In other words, it's not just that we dig in when we see opposing viewpoints. The more extreme that opposing viewpoint is, the more likely we are to dig in and like our own viewpoint more. And YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, especially YouTube and Facebook, have algorithms meant to show you the most extreme version because that's engaging because that's clickbait because that makes you really excited to read it and share it with friends. Look at this crazy thing. Can you believe what they're doing at the party that I don't like? And that makes people more entrenched. And I love Mr. Saban Miller saying, hey, and we kind of think we might be right about this not only because the math works, but also that's what people who want to disrupt a population do. They go out and they push these extreme things in front of people who disagree with them to make them angry. So could Mr. Saban Miller, please do a study on how to make people be less angry and understand each other's points of view. That's the next step. Yep, there's probably no money in that. Anyway, many of these kinds of studies show that social media itself does not drive polarization, but rather amplifies the things that do drive it. The studies don't point to an easy solution, though banning inflammatory content and slowing down the rate at which content goes viral may or may not work on a personal level, though, you can look at your own feeds. Again, Mr. Saban Miller told the Wall Street Journal if I'm only seeing things that are good for my own side and really crazy from the other. Maybe I should look for something slightly towards the center. I would like to find a source of the center. Well, OK, yes, I know where crazy is. That's that's that's a slippery slope, right? But the center means less crazy. Let's just let's just put it in relative speaking, right? If it's seeming less crazy than what you're seeing, then it's probably moving closer towards the center. But this is the here's here's some areas for further research. We're getting enough studies saying this is what seems to be causing the problem. It's not the fact that Facebook exists. It's a little bit that they push the most extreme stuff, but it's mostly how humans work and how humans react in this situation. So if you slow down retweets so that stuff doesn't go viral as fast, maybe that helps. We should study that. We should find out if you try to ban inflammatory content. Maybe that helps, but we should study that. We should try to figure that out. That's what these scientists are saying. Like, all right, we we're starting to nail down what the problem actually is. Now let's look at whether the solutions work and what solutions may or may not work. And I loved again, what's been Miller told the Wall Street Journal is that in the meantime, you have control over what you see and who you follow. And while that isn't the solution for the world, it could be the solution for you. If you want to put in the time to curate that and say, oh, you know what? Every time I see this person post or even this person retweet, it makes me angry. Maybe I'll stop following that person. And then you'll get less angry stuff. I think a lot of us are doing something slightly different. It's just going, you know what? Reading Twitter makes me sad. I'm going to just stop. Right. I used to feel that way. People blame Twitter rather than who they've curated. I have approached Facebook that way, to be honest. I'm never on Facebook because of multiple reasons, but that's certainly one of them. Whereas Twitter, I put in the work and said, whenever I see someone who more than a few times in a short period of time has made me go, oh, my gosh, I unfollow. And I my my Facebook feed is just mostly I'd say 95 percent. People just being happy, showing baby pictures and some food and stuff like that. So as much as I hate Facebook as a as a concept and a threat, it doesn't get to me that way. But my faith, my Twitter feed is definitely deemed doom scrolling. So what I've actually done to help that is I've started following a bunch of black in hashtags. So like there's black in neuro, black in bio, black in Cam and then a whole bunch of code people. So now I'm slowly starting to shift it to where I'm seeing things about like code newbies and seeing coding stuff. Yeah, you find fulfilling. And I would say you should prune to people are like, I don't want to unfollow. It seems rude, not rude, protect yourself. And it sounds like you did with Facebook, what I did with Twitter and vice versa. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our sub reddit. We have a great crowd in there. And we get a lot of these stories that we talk about from our sub reddit. So get in there, submit some stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. Man, hits keep coming. Adobe announced a lot of stuff at its Max conference Tuesday. Let's talk about some of the highlights. Please hold your concerns about the future of mankind based on fake images till the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen, starting with Photoshop. Sky replacement is officially coming to Photoshop. It uses machine learning to determine what the sky is so that you can just easily swap it out and it'll adjust masks and lighting to match the new sky that you choose. Want to put a space landscape up there? You could totally do it. They demonstrated that at Max. Neural filter options are coming. Neural algorithms can do things like skin smoothing or colorizing a black and white photo or smart portrait, which actually can transform a person's age. You can D age or age people transforms their expression, their hair, their pose. You can change where they're looking. Eight filters are shipping six of them in beta. Adobe skin smoothing uses GANs, Generative Adversarial Networks, to generate new pixels instead of copying and pasting up to including things like putting in teeth to give subjects a smile. Photoshop also can now refine hair and do some object awareness refining. This helps with hair and other things that blended in the background because of colors that are similar and textures that are similar to the background. They added a discover panel that uses machine learning to offer context aware tools and tips. But how does this? How do these some of these Photoshop features strike? Alison, I'm thinking this is pretty awesome. It's been a long time that I have taken portraits of people who are maybe older than they wish they were. And I will go through and actually using some Photoshop techniques that I learned a long time ago. I use it on other tools now, but I'll whiten their teeth, maybe soften the wrinkles, but keep the sharpness around the eyes. And they think I take spectacular photos. Now, I'm not going in and putting a smile where there wasn't one, but I have been known to, you know, open one person's eyes when there were 12 people in the photo and one person looked bad, but go get their eyes from another photo. So it all I guess it all has to do with whether you do this for good or for evil. But the thing I'd really like the most is the sky. I think that would be really fun to be able to mess around with the sky and then not have to spend hours trying to figure out how to change the the lighting of the rest of the photo to go with the sky. You just put in because that's where it always looks like garbage when I'm done. Yeah. And of course, as I joked at the beginning here, you know, it does bring up the idea of like, oh wait, so people can just change images to mean whatever they want. That's always been true. This has just been an arms race the whole time. Photoshop just keeps getting better and better and it's getting better and better. So they are doing something called the Content Authenticity Initiative. We've mentioned that previously on the show. They added the beta to Photoshop in this release. So it attaches metadata supported by Behance, Adobe's own social network for photos. The metadata it'll track are the thumbnail, the creator's name, broad types of edits done to the photo and original assets. And that's cryptographically protected. So if it's there, you can tell, oh, this person created it. This is what the thumbnail should look like. This is what they did to it. So I know, oh, they changed the sky. That'll be in there, stuff like that. So Burbushat's talked in his Let's Talk Photography podcast one time about we get all up in arms about, well, then it's not a real photo. You've modified it. And he said, you know, Ansel Adams, when he created some of his most spectacular photos, he did not have the dynamic range capability in his film at the time to create some of the images you see. What they would do back then is cover up the sky during the first part of the exposure and then remove that physical piece of cardboard or whatever in order to expose the rest of the sky for the rest of the film, you know, absorption at that point. So from as far back as photography has been done, we've been modifying what we could actually capture, you know, natively. Yeah, no, it's a really good point. Photos are never what real life looks like. This is all about what you want to modify. Do you want to modify it to look more like real life or less like real life? My answer takes way better pictures of the sunset than they look in real life. Lots of times they go, well, that's awesome. And I go, oh, it's not that good. The sun doesn't look that good. Have you ever seen the sun in person? Man, it looks horrible. It's all shopped. We got some other things that Adobe announced here that we can mention. Premier Pro now has automatic speech to text caption generation in 12 languages, including translation. So I'm not sure how good it works. I'm sure it works fine. But yeah, that'd be cool to not only be able to do auto-generated captions for accessibility, but even for translation to say like, oh, let's let's turn this into Spanish. So we got Spanish captions. I would use this for turning Korean to English for myself. Character Animator now automatically animates a character based on speech. So you do the voice track, you put the character in and it'll do head and eyebrow movements and all that sort of stuff. That's back to us being doomed. Well, it's animated, though. How are we doomed? OK, friendly cartoon characters, Allison. Sure, that's all it'll be used for. It's all it'll be used for. Illustrator for the iPad is now out. And you can move your projects back and forth between the iPad and the Mac version. Lightroom has added advanced color grading tools similar to the tools you have in Premiere for video offer separate controls for tweaking colors and images highlights, mid tones and shadows. Adobe Fresco is now available for the iPhone. This is a digital drawing and painting app. And the iPhone version has the same functions as the iPad version, although they did improve some of the controls to be a little more touch forward and you can sync your project across both devices as well. And I thought that I immediately thought of you and I saw this one, Allison, live streaming now built into the iPad version of Photoshop and Illustrator. So you can show your screen in a small inset of yourself from the iPad's camera or a camera that you have attached. They only will stream to Behance, again, Adobe's own photo social network for now. But they didn't rule out that they would add capabilities to stream elsewhere in the future. And that's interesting. So they're probably using the screen recording feature built into iOS in order to build that stream. I would think that's the way Loom does it. You could do tutorials direct to the Internet on Loom, but that's pretty cool. And they Behance has had the ability to do lots of streaming from apps before, but you had to use another piece of software to do it. This is in Photoshop. So, yeah, if you're somebody who even knows what Loom is, maybe this isn't for you because it's not going to give you all the control. But if you've been like, I'd love to live stream, it's just too complicated. Well, now you'll just have a button there, right? You just hit that button and and live stream granted only on Behance for now. But maybe they'll add Twitch in the future or YouTube or something like that. Anyway, there's there's lots more out of Max. They announced a lot, but I felt like that was some of the highlights. Yeah, that's really getting to be fun. Well, our last story here is, Imore points out that YouTuber Zolotek has a video showing Apple's MagSafe charger working with a Pixel 5. Apple says the charger only works with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro. And Android Police says reports that it works with the Galaxy Z Fold 2 as well. And I wouldn't watch this video and it's kind of interesting because it's not just that it worked as a Qi charger. It's actually sticking to the phones. Yeah. And and I got to say, Zolotek says at one point, oh, it's sticking to the aluminum and you need iron in order for a magnet to stick. So that's not why it's sticking. It's got to be sticking to something else inside the inside the phone itself because magnets don't stick to aluminum. So we in our production meeting had suspected that maybe it was the coil that it was sticking to. But you were saying the magnetic coil isn't in all the models of iPhone that the video was able to attach that thing to. Right. In all of the examples where he showed it sticking like he sticks it to an iPhone eight and an iPhone 11 and the magnet sticks to the magnetic coil sticks to it. And so I of course referred back to Heliode and Resnick physics into the Maxwell's equations checked into that to make sure I was at least close on this. But I don't believe that the the one thing we were wondering was whether the induction coil itself for them for the charging could be causing enough of a current or enough magnetic field for it to be able to hold on to that magnet. And it's it's not going to do that because it's an oscillating coil. So it's just it's kind of flipping polarization or something along those lines that may be fudging them my exact facts there. But I don't think that's it. There's got to be other iron based things in those phones that it's sticking to something in the frame somewhere. But it is the coil the way Apple described it in their announcement. It is the coil in the iPhone 12 that it's connecting. Yes. Yes. So the iPhone 12 does have that's magnetic. It's not just electromagnetic. It's it's actually got a magnet. It's got it's got a bunch of little bar magnets and in kind of a not a not a full circle, but almost a full circle. So there in there it actually does have a magnet in it. So I'm not exactly sure what it's sticking to in those other phones, but it's sticking to something with iron in it is all I could say for sure. All right, let's finish up by checking out the mail bag. Why, Tom, I am glad that you asked. We have an email from Nick says, hi, Tom, thanks for the little change of pace with David's game on today's show. I still learned something, but it was nice to have instead of the standard discussion. Oh, that's nice. I enjoyed that as well. I thought that was a lot of fun. David Spark is the will do more games in the future. He's the bomb. He's so fun. I loved it. David's great. All right. Keep those emails coming feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Let us know what you're thinking. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Dan Colbeck, Chris Benito and Carmine Bailey. And thank you, Allison Sheridan for joining us. What do you got going on these days? Well, I think of my favorite blog post going on right now is I put one up called your zoom drinking parties need an agenda and I talk through how I got my friends to follow an agenda so that we never talk about COVID when we get together and have drinks once a week. So we know that that's a full hour where nobody's going to talk about it. And it's the agenda that makes it happen. And I give you step by step instructions on how to make that happen for your zoom drinking parties. Excellent. 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