 coming up on D T N S big tech gets targeted with a world tax. Instagram is no longer a photo app and Amazon is part of the rebel alliance. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 1st, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about Twitter's new test feature that they they introduced as an idea facets giving you personas under which you could tweet under your main account. If you'd like that wider conversation, get good day internet. Become a member of patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google opened up Android's integrated passive system to support locals storing digital vaccine cards from healthcare providers, local governments or other organizations authorized to distribute them. They will be supporting them. The card will show what vaccine was received and when and the card won't be saved to the cloud or used for advertising purposes. Oh, speaking of all 27 EU member states along with Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein have officially begun rolling out a digital COVID certificate which will provide a locally stored QR code with COVID-19 vaccine information that will exempt the holder from testing or quarantine when crossing an international border. Paper versions of the certificate will be available through a fish though officials warn it does not qualify as a travel document like a passport. You still need a passport. The US Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency or CISA released a ransomware readiness assessment module for cyber security evaluation tool say that three times fast. It's a self assessment tool to help organizations figure out how well prepared they are to recover from a ransomware attack. It's meant for IT as well as operational technology and industrial industrial control systems. The assessment adapts questions based on the responses in tiers of basic, intermediate and advanced and then offer steps to improve readiness. Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have all signed a pledge from the World Wide Web Foundation to change their moderation systems in order to better address online gender based violence. Companies pledge to provide more granular settings for curating feeds, give users the ability to track and manage reports of abuse and provide more guidance on how to report abuse. Prior to Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO and handing the reins over to Andy Jassy. It's coming this coming Monday. The company is adding two new leadership principles to it is it's existing 14 principles designed to guide Amazon's day to day operations. The new principles are number one strive to be Earth's best employer and number two success and scale bring broad responsibility. Amazon previously added its 14th principle back in 2015. It's been a while. That one was learn and be curious. All right. Well, let's find out what Earth's best employer or the company's striving to be that is up to in our first of these main discussion stories, Justin. Curious leadership point for somebody who wants to go to space. But anyway, Bloomberg sources say that there that for more than a year Amazon has held talks with several workplace productivity app makers about forming a rebel alliance to take on Microsoft where Amazon Web Services would be offered in partnership with a bundle of business applications sold for a single price. These potential partners allegedly include Dropbox Slack and Smartsheet among others. This alliance could potentially take on Microsoft 365 sweet which bundles office productivity apps emails Microsoft teams among other tools. I can hear Google over there shouting. You're taking us on to don't forget. Yeah, we're also really big us too. Yeah, this is this is a this is very interesting because Amazon has been wanting to be an office sweet competitor like Google is for a long time and this almost feels like them giving up a little and saying, you know what? We're not going to develop it ourselves. There's a lot of good partners out there. We'll just we'll just be the bundle from from lots of different brands instead of trying to bring it all in house. Well, I think that it's very very interesting because it number one a cheers to Microsoft because I feel like 20 years ago as you watched Google make product after product that gave free very credible sometimes even more feature rich alternatives to the kinds of things that the office sweet was selling specifically to the corporate market. Many of us might have said, oh, well Microsoft will wane as we go forward, not the case. They are stronger than ever and even now one of the biggest companies on the planet is looking to build a stable of people to try and erode from them. Essentially to me this boils down to one thing. Amazon for web services has a lot of corporate clients when they meet with those corporate clients. Now they have a credible opportunity to say, hey, would you also be interested in going with our productivity suite as Microsoft when they are meeting with their corporate clients that they sell the productivity suite are saying, hey, would you be interested in switching to Azure? Like this is basically just their their their competition to that. Yeah, you know, there's an angle here where it actually works a little better for AWS because I'm certain Dropbox Slack and Smartsheet all pay Amazon to use AWS on the backend, whereas Microsoft pays itself to use Office to use Azure on the back end. So, you know, also if Microsoft is disappointed with a productivity app, they can redo it themselves. If Amazon's disappointed with one of these partners, well, they just swap out a new partner, I guess, you know, so it's a different kind of flexibility there. Well, and let's say Amazon partners up with Dropbox, right? Supposedly one of the larger companies that Amazon the company's been talking to as a potential client, the client might be like, well, AWS is great. Don't get us wrong, but you know, we're really just there's just so many of us and we got Dropbox already in the mix already. It's just going to get too weird to move on to some probably wonderful product that you've made Amazon. But if Amazon is like, hey, look, it's Dropbox. It's AWS. It's all in one. You really did Microsoft. Then I think you get some folks either to sign up or switch. I mean, the biggest thing is going to be price competition on this. And also it's getting people over the fact the reason why Microsoft is still in a position that they're on is because companies don't like switching things. They like it continuing going on the way that it went on. That is what you hear over and over and over and over again. This is not a move fast and break things kind of culture when you're talking about these corporate clients. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money. Amazon's a big enough name that they could probably build in a competitive price here, but it's interesting that Amazon has to make its own ragtag group to take on the Bohemian that continues to be Microsoft 365 forever. May they rain. Also, don't forget Salesforce owns Slack. So there's that interesting weird angle on this where Slack's like going to be part of the Rebel Alliance, but also a member of the Trade Federation say, I don't know where they were to go with I don't think the Star Wars metaphors. Yeah, that breaks down there. I actually had to remind myself that Salesforce owns Slack the other day. It was a December news story and I was like, yeah, pre holiday. That happened. Yeah, kind of got wiped out in the Christmas road. Yeah. Well, here are a couple more indications that we are definitely in the age of social video. If you didn't believe it, this might make you believe it. Instagram head Adam Maseri said in a video that the platform Instagram will start experimenting using showing users full screen videos over the coming months with recommended videos no longer just restricted to people you are already following. Maseri explained, quote, we're no longer a photo sharing app or a square photo sharing app. He added, quote, we're also going to be experimenting with how we do we embrace video more broadly, full screen, immersive, entertaining, mobile first video. Instagram also confirmed to TechCrunch that it's testing a prototype feature to let creators publish exclusive stories content only for subscribers. TikTok, you know, that's that other company that Instagram might be emulating here a little bit. TikTok started rolling out the ability for all users to share three minute videos. The previous limit was 60 seconds. So 3x the company has been testing longer videos since December, but only with select users. So you may be saying, haven't I seen a video that's longer than 60 seconds? Yeah, probably, but more people are going to get that functionality a lot more. Yeah, that last part is a rite of passage, right? Twitter Twitter had its moment where it went from 140 to 280 Instagram increased its videos from 15 seconds at one point. So this is just TikTok growing up like, all right, fine. We can we can do more than 60 seconds. Instagram saying we're not a square photo sharing app fellow teenagers. It really does strike me as as as Instagram feeling some heat to try to reposition itself. And specifically feeling heat in a way that might fundamentally redesign the user interface in a way that when they felt the heat from Vine that they just added video and they were able to do it within its existing UI when they felt the heat from Snapchat, they were able to add stories and essentially it's its own separate thing. When they first felt the heat from TikTok, they added reels and reels has not become quite the you know out of the box adoptive success that I think they might have hoped or at least like stories did and like Instagram videos did in terms of dealing with those competitors. I don't want to be an alarmist here, but if Instagram is fundamentally changing their user interface from a scroll to a waterfall or a more immersive or a default immersive experience. This this smells almost a little dig version for to me. Well, wow, you cut there. Yeah. And if you're like, wait, what's dig? That's the point. So if if I can, you know, I saw a lot of people being like, this is insane. Instagram is publicly declaring that, you know, it's not a photo app anymore. And it's like, okay, well, they're not getting rid of photos could happen, I suppose, but that's not what's happening right now. It sounds like they're just trying to bring reals into the forefront a little bit more rather than it being some other, you know, platform entirely that's buried within Instagram. Instagram has this issue where I know a lot of people love Instagram stories. I often just don't have time to look at all my friends Instagram stories, but I get them. I like them. It's it's all fine and good, but you've got your people who kind of hang out in stories then you have the purists, right? Who are still posting photos, you know, like me or my dog. My dog is an Instagram and then you've you've you've got you've got some real stuff that that that is being used by some folks and and very creatively in fact, and it's just it's sort of like, where are all the people? So maybe Instagram is really saying we're not merely a photo sharing site, but it's getting a lot of attention that it's making some dramatic change. I'm just not totally sure how dramatic this is rather than trying to have all more features in one place. I guess my only thing is that they've already cloned TikTok, right? So now the question is, it's not the features that we have a that that that the Instagram universe is wanting. It's the UI and if they're changing the UI that and we don't know that we don't know that, but this seems like a thing that you might say before you change the UI to prepare people so it doesn't just show up one day and everybody starts screaming about it. If they do change it, I'm I'm I wonder I worry for you. I think you're absolutely right, Sarah, that this is not a huge change. Even if they do full screen videos for reels to make it look more TikTok like it's not a huge change in the entire Instagram, but it's a huge change in tone. Well, you know, when they did stories, they didn't really talk about Snapchat. Adam Mosari name checked TikTok alongside YouTube when he was like repositioning Instagram as video first by say of this. So that that I think is interesting. The Windows 11 preview came out Monday and by Thursday, French engineering student Gustave Montz had it running on a Lumia 950 XL Windows phone. I love this. If you don't remember Lumia 950 XL was one of the first devices to run Windows 10 mobile and one of the last Windows phones ever they barely got Windows 10 mobile out the door before they just stopped doing phones. Windows 11 adapts pretty well to a 5.7 inch screen, but the operating system and its animations particularly run pretty slow about four years ago. Montz and LinkedIn engineer Binshing Wong started a project now called Lumia W O A to get Windows 10 running on Lumia 950s like full on Windows 10, not just Windows 10 mobile and they collected about 15 people on the team working on on this project over there on GitHub. So the team took and ported drivers sometimes wrote its own drivers and all that work made it fairly straightforward to get Windows 11 working on the phone. They say pretty much everything works except the camera and battery life as you might expect is pretty bad because you're you're dealing with such old hardware, but but it works. It's it's not necessarily practical, but if you're into these sort of like hacking for hacking sake situation, it's kind of fun to see Lumia Lumia. Tom, do you have a Lumia on your I don't. I really wish I had a Lumia. Yeah, what an upset. Yeah, I know. Cabinet finally lets us down. But yeah, if you if you want to get involved, if you're like, yeah, this is just kind of the silliness I enjoy. Go to go to GitHub. Look up the W O A project. You can you can join increase that that team of 15 people. You'll get your own personal self satisfaction out of it. I don't I don't know that there are any terribly practical things come out of it, but you know, there's no one that 5.7 inches kind of works. Please look at that is interesting that the Windows 11's design adapts to that small screen pretty nicely on its own. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, on Saturday, in fact, this Saturday, July 3rd, our science correspondent doc doctor Nikki Ackerman's releases the first episode in a limited series called Seniors in Tech, where she interviews seniors examining how technology has impacted their lives in a variety of ways. The first episode kicks off with Allison Sheridan and now her engineering background ended up being a gateway to not only technology, but also podcasting. Check out your DTNS feed this Saturday, July 3rd. That's where it will be. The organization for economic cooperation and development released a framework Thursday to set a minimum tax of 15% for the world's 100 biggest companies. Now that's targeted mostly at tech, but the U.S. was able to get it to just apply to the company no matter what business they're in. It's a standard and legal practice for a company to headquarter itself in a country with a low tax. Not illegal. It's not even unethical. It's it's a thing companies do. They're like, you know what? We will charge our branches in other countries to move our taxable profits into the lowest tax area we operate in. The idea of this new agreement is to dissuade companies from doing that and provide tax revenue for all the countries where a company operates rather than just the one where headquarters as such, the agreement acknowledges the right to tax where your customers are not just where a business's physical presence is. That's how this tax works right now is like, oh, I'm headquartered in Ireland. All my revenue gets credited to the Ireland branch and then I pay the low Irish rate. This would allow countries to without causing a controversy with other countries set a tax like no where your customers are is how we're going to tax you not where your headquarters is 130 countries including China, India and the United States agreed to the framework. Only about nine countries did not sign or did not agree. That includes Ireland, which has a corporate tax rate well below 15% and is therefore the European headquarters pretty much all the big tech companies, but it also includes Estonia, Kenya, Nigeria, Barbados, Peru, Sri Lanka, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Hungary. Some of those like Kenya and Nigeria want more reassurances that they won't lose revenue because companies actually have real physical presences in their countries, but the tax ends up going somewhere else. Countries who do sign will agree to pass laws such that the minimum effective corporate tax rate will become 15% for companies that meet the following criteria. Global revenue of $20 billion and a profit margin above 10%. Again, the US pushed for this to be irrespective of what business the company is in, but that 10% profit margin would leave Amazon out. So France lobbied to allow business units to qualify separately from the parent company because the low margin part of Amazon is the retail side and AWS would therefore qualify for the tax. To meet the 15% target, a lot of countries, including the United States plan to change their tax rules to apply to where the revenue is generated before those transfers. So the transferring profits to low tax countries would have no advantage because you're going to get taxed on it anyway. US President's administration wants to raise the minimum tax on US based companies, foreign profits from 10.5%, which is what it is now to 21%. G20 ministers are meeting to approve the deal July 9th and details like possible exemptions will be hammered out by October. The new rules are intended to be implemented in 2023 at the earliest. Taxes, man. Talking about taxes. I think that this is a big push. Biden's administration has made the idea of a global tax a priority specifically Janet Yellen. That being said, I think we've got a we've got miles to go before this thing actually happens and there's a lot of potential of, you know, pitfalls for it up to an including the idea of what the exemptions are going to be and whether or not one of these massive players specifically, you know, China, India and the United States for one reason or another. Do not see eye to eye and bulk on it. That being said of all the global initiatives, the one that brings in more money into the coffers of these mega powers is something that I do think they can all agree on like their self-interest are aligned aside from some of these like kind of famous tax haven company or countries like Ireland and some of the other ones that you listed. I am I'm fairly confident that this will get passed somehow that they will come do an agreement. There's there's too much momentum for it. The tech companies aren't even fighting it. They're expressed reason for supporting it is they think it would be better to have clear rules and not this more complex system that causes them to jump through all these hoops. The unexpressed reason is probably regulatory capture, which is like, Hey, we're already here at this level of money. So yeah, set a rule that makes it harder for someone to grow into into our business. But I think there will be something here. I think you're right that what the exemptions are will be very interesting to watch. And whether it actually works, you know, the idea is that we're going to tax you anyway, whether you headquarter in Ireland or Barbados or somewhere else. So what's the point? And whether that that actually happens and whether that dissuades companies from doing that and whether it hurts those countries, which is the other reason that Ireland is against it. They're like, Hey, we don't want to have everybody suddenly move out of Ireland because. Yeah. Yeah. And that's and that's the thing is Ken an international tax framework run faster than all of the accountants on the planet. We'll see the fact that they got this far stuns me. So I'm like, Well, shoot, if they could get if they could get this far there's but like saying there's a chance it's there. Will it work? That's in May. The greatest state in the Union, Florida passed the law prohibiting social media platforms from banning anyone running for public office in Florida. It also stopped platforms from censoring journalistic enterprises based on their content. During though an exemption was given to companies that owned and operated a theme park. I wonder how that got in there. Tech trade groups challenged the law in court arguing that it violated a constitutional right to make editorial judgments and was preempted by section 230 which prevents platforms from being liable for their content moderation decisions. U. S. District Judge Robert Hinkel issued a preliminary injunction preventing parts of the law from taking effect. Judge Hinkel said the law would restrict speech by dictating to platform operators who can use their site and what content they can post. The judge did not find that Florida had showed a compelling public need for the law writing quote leveling the playing field promoting speech on one side of an issue or restricting speech on the other is not a legitimate state interest and quote state of Florida will appeal the ruling to the 11th U. S. Circuit Court. I can't wait to this get to the Supreme Court. Well, let's just put it right in front of Justice Thomas right now. I want to see what he says because that's where it's going to end up. It's all about whether the first amendment applies and if so how and whether section 230 applies and if so how this compelling state interest is is one that judges can justifiably have different viewpoints on when they're like hey but we're talking about campaigns. We're talking about public officials here. Maybe there is a difference that I could seal a legal theory being crafted for that. So I I I know where this is headed and I'll just sit back and relax and wait for that Supreme Court decision probably next year or sometime. There are folks who don't follow politics or are you know not dialed into the United States flavor of politics. The governor of Florida currently is Rhonda Santis who is not only up for reelection in the state of Florida which has become increasingly read over the past few years. In 2022 but is also somebody that is a possible 2024 Republican front-runner for the presidency of the United States. He's made a couple big splashy conservative leaning legislative pushes lately. This is one of them. But I do agree with you Tom this is not quite the slam dunk that I think some people who would be critical of the law think that it is when you're dealing with public service. Right like is there an element of freedom that you have some uncancelability and also are you which side of the first amendment are you on when you're protecting the rights of journalistic outlets to publish things like that that to me is a legitimate question. Well you might have a question about this next story a coding error has been spotted in a video displaying Sir Tim Burner's Lee's original worldwide web source code which recently sold for five point four a million dollars as an NFT to an unidentified buyer. Now the NFT included time stamped files of the source code and an animated video of it being written it's kind of part of the package that's what you're buying but Miko Hypenen from security company F secure notice that the symbols greater than and less than had been translated into HTML as ampersand I T and ampersand GT the website creator that was showing the video Marco Neil said the video for the website ran the original text file through something that just converted it to HTML he trust that the original code is error free but just goes to show you an NFT little little typo in there yeah now this is fascinating because I mean how many times does this happen to you where you're you're less than a greater Dan Dan's become LT's and GT's I've seen that happen a million times and ours Technica's Tim Deschant speculated that potentially if the code is fixed if the video was made off the actual code in the original NFT that would mean they recreated the NFT and the way NFTs work if you recreate one you don't destroy the original one yeah and so if that were true there's a lot of ifs there a lot of ifs there but if that were true sitting on a hard drive somewhere might be the mistaken code which then becomes the upside down airplane stamp of the NFT world yeah I mean that's that's what's fascinating to me is that if we are to understand that NFTs are simply just electronic collectibles then if you look at the collectibles market the most valuable ones are the ones that are kind of screwed up those are the ones that wind up going for the most amount of money they're rare yeah the rare albino worldwide web NFT you have only seen in the wild once you finally the the original went for 5.4 million but the ampersand LT version that one that one went for 10 that's the special one 5.4 million dollars I got to say I expected more not that that's not a lot of money but yeah seeing what NFTs do go for this is a pretty big one and it's the worldwide web for goodness that's what I'm saying I check out your yeah using a right now people come on but right now I still think we're in an emerging market where people don't like okay well that's a cool NFT will there be a cooler one that comes out in yeah weeks that that is that is more into my interest of the origins of the web like I don't know I think that the the big question with NFTs in general aren't necessarily what they're selling for now it's what they're going to resale for in years five years right right all right let's get to the bail bag so we know some of you don't have time to listen to GDI at least not every day are you just DTNS we like to give you options but Kevin wrote in with some feedback we found warm and fuzzy Kevin said today's been a pretty long day following a few rough weeks months year I was really feeling it and then I started today's episode I was so caught off guard at the flood of positive emotions I felt when the new music started talking about GDI that along with a bright cheerful artwork which we just updated by the way has instantly made me feel better and ready to have a good rest of my day can't wait to unpause the show and listen to my friends for the next hour yeah yeah thank you that was so nice of you to to write in and tell us that it made my day to see that I'm glad that we seem to have also possibly made your day so very cool thank you thank you Kevin warm and fuzzies all around if you have if you have anything like that or you I don't know you just want to I don't know you're having a bad day you're having a good day you're having a bad day of a question of a comment anything we'd like to hear its feedback a daily tech news show dot com be gentle please but we'll take shout out to patrons that are master and grandmaster levels including Eric Holm Carmine Bailey and Matthew Stevens also guess what thanks to a brand new bosses because we got two of them Alex oh la deli and Robert big love both are now back to us on patreon thank you Alex thank you 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