 Coming up on DTNS Uber and Lyft, share lists of blocked drivers. Allison brings us some highlights from the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference and is Netflix cracking down on the password sharing? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 12th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, where it's my mother's birthday. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm Allison Sheridan from The Podfeat Podcast. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just having a good old time talking on Good Day Internet about all kinds of things, including the reason that Sarah's gate conspired against her. It was a gate's conspiracy. Well, just one gate in this case. If you want that story and a whole lot more, including some smart home discussion, get a membership at patreon.com.dtns and get Good Day Internet. Disney World announced you will have the option of replacing its Magic Band wristband with a Magic Mobile service that works with your phone or your watch. You'll create a pass in the My Disney Experience app and add it to your wallet. The Magic Mobile service will launch first on iPhone and Apple Watch later this year. According to new data from IDC, China's Transins suite of brands, Transin is T-R-I-A-N-S-S-I-O-N and the brands include Techno, Infinix, and Itel, have a 48.2% share of the African smartphone market, well ahead of Samsung, which is in second place at 16%. Although African mobile phone sales increased by 4.6% in Q4 from the previous quarter, 2020 sales overall were down 10%. Transin invests in or has operational shares in several apps and services, including music streaming service Boom Play, social video app V-Skit, and money manager Palm Pay. As Google faces out support for third-party cookies, it outlined how it's expanding the functionality of the Publisher, Provide Identifier, or PPID, and Google Ad Manager to run personalized ads using first-party data. Publishers would create a unique ID for users using logins or first-party cookies, which would then be input into Google Ad Manager for privacy hashing, then passed on to buyers. Google is in the early process of automating parts for the PPID process for small publishers. The United States amended the licenses that it's given to companies to let them get around restrictions on supplying parts to Huawei. These licenses are now more strict. They increased restrictions on selling items used to make 5G devices. The amendment brings earlier, more permissive licenses that were issued in 2019 in line with later, more restrictive ones that were issued toward the end of last year. China's Ant Group confirmed that CEO Simon Hu resigned for personal reasons with Chairman Eric Jing taking over as CEO effective immediately. Hu had served as CEO since December of 2019, previously serving as CEO of Alibaba Cloud Computing, and is revamping its business after having to suspend its IPO last November, which was followed by fines in December for failure to properly report business deals. Alibaba received similar fines in December. On Friday, China's State Administration for Market Regulation fined 12 companies, including Tencent and Baidu, 500,000 won each for the same reason. Alright, let's talk about Netflix. Are they really cracking down on the sharing? Well, before we get to Netflix, Tom, there are other companies that are rethinking how we all pay for streaming services. What do you want? How much are you going to pay for it? One way to get more subscribers to a streaming service is to make a cheaper version available, right? Sure, why not? HBO Max will launch an ad-supported version of its service in June. We don't know how much it will cost as of yet, but another way to get more subscribers might be to crack down on password sharing, and that's where we get to Netflix, because the company is now testing out ways to detect password sharing. Some users of Netflix on TVs have reported seeing a message when they access their account that says, quote, if you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching, end quote. They can then choose to verify that they are indeed the owner by receiving a code by email or text message at an address or number associated with the account. Netflix told the streamable of this new move, quote, this test is designed to help ensure that people use Netflix accounts are authorized to do so. Netflix's Terms of Service doesn't allow accounts to be shared beyond your household, so this isn't Netflix saying, oh, we've changed our policies here. This is Netflix just enforcing those policies a little bit differently. The company hasn't seemed that worried about password sharing in the past. You might recall that back in 2016, Netflix CEO Hastings said password sharing is something that you have to learn to live with because there's so much legitimate password sharing. However, Netflix does limit the number of simultaneous streams to one, two, or four devices depending on your plan. So the company does care and it has cared, but it seems like it cares more than ever. Yeah, I still not convinced that they care. My theory here, because of the way it's being done and it's a test and it's very lightweight and they're not even denying it, they're like, oh, yeah, no, we're just taking a look at this. I think there's pressure on them from production partners because they partner with movie studios who might be like, you need to stop sharing because they're just so anti-piracy or maybe they want to syndicate stuff and they don't want people to too easily be able to get stuff. Also, investors, some investors in Netflix may have decided that password sharing is depressing the value of Netflix. But I think Netflix's internal attitude is still the same that's always been, which is password sharing happens among people who wouldn't pay for it anyway and is probably as much of a gateway to people paying later when they don't want to go through the hassle of having to keep their password straight with their parents. I'm with you on this one, Tom. I think that specifically and particularly because of the reason that you can get past it without having to do anything. I mean, it's going to send you a text message or an email, but even if you don't get the text message or email, you can still bypass it and then go watch whatever you want. I don't know that Netflix per se cares all that much and they really don't want to, harm is probably a strong word, but they probably don't want to upset many of their current customers because it's kind of like, this was the deal. I got this, my kids are grown, they've moved out, but they've been using this for the last 10 years. Now they've got to go get their own account, kind of know if you've never changed your password. So I understand what they're doing because some of their competition is really, I mean, Hulu, for example, it's like, even if it is you, it's difficult to watch Hulu outside of your own house. So I see why they're doing it, but like you said, I just don't know that they care all that much. I think they've got a little interesting messaging here when I started sharing with my two kids, I increased my plan so that I could share with four people at the same time, it's actually three. So I would be cutting my plan almost in half if I wasn't able to share with them. So I think I misinterpreted that as that was the legitimate way for me to be able to share it with my family. I mean, yes and no, the terms have always said you're not supposed to share outside your household, but Netflix really has relied on the simultaneous streams limit to be the way they monetize needing more streams. So I don't know why maybe I'm naive. I just don't think Netflix itself is really into this or they would be testing a more robust way to do it. Like you said, Rob, there's a button you can say like, eh, bug me about this later and then it doesn't even matter. Even if you do it, you can have mom or dad text you the code as soon as they get it, right? Like this feels like Netflix going through the motions to please someone else. Yeah. I mean, when I first signed up for YouTube TV, which was a few years ago, I lived in LA at the time and a friend of mine had an accountant. He was like, oh, I, you can be part of my family plan. I don't mind sharing with you. Like, you know, tell me your Gmail address, whatever. And I was like, that's so cool. Okay. Great. And eventually it worked out, worked out for a couple months and eventually the service was like, wait a second, you don't live in Phoenix, Arizona. No, no, no, no. This is not going to work out anymore. And I kind of at that point was like, well, sure. I mean, I don't want to be a freeloader. But I think that yes, either Netflix itself is like, we could get a lot more subscriptions if we clamp down on this, but more likely somebody that has a high profile content on the service has said, you got to do something about this. Uber and Lyft are partnering with background check company hire right to share data on drivers who are deactivated for serious offenses like assaults and murder. The two companies will share data as part of the industry safe sharing project, which is administered by a third party. If a driver commits an offense, it will be shared with the project and the other company can use it to decide to deactivate the driver on its own platform as well. New drivers on these platforms will also have their name checked against this database. So if I'm understanding this correctly, this is using the records of the courts, right? So this is you got, you were convicted. You went to court and you were convicted. And that's how you get your name in this database. So I think, you know, if there was concerns about who gets to decide whether it's an assault or not, I think that is the standard if I understand this, right? And then this is really a matter of the companies saying, look, we want to cooperate with each other so that someone who is convicted of a crime and gets kicked off our platform doesn't run to you and try to be on your platform because you don't realize that about them. Yeah, I mean, this is, listen, I mean, if somebody has been convicted of all sorts of crimes, it doesn't mean that they're going to commit the same kind of crime again in the future. That's certainly not what we're saying, but I would like to know if I, and I've gone between Uber and Lyft in the past. I mean, I haven't been in either one of those cars in quite some time for obvious reasons. But I would like to know if there was a history of something, I would like to know it. And I don't care, you know, who I'm, you know, right-hailing from at that time. So yeah, the more you know. I like the fact that they're going to be talking to each other. I had an employee a couple levels below me who punched his boss in the face. And I obviously fired him right away. And we found out like a week later, he was working at our sister company literally across the quad. They had hired him and nobody had had a conversation. So there you go. Yeah. And the background checks part isn't new. Theoretically Lyft would do a background check and find this out themselves, even if it happened on Uber. But this, this makes it easier. It makes it harder for, for somebody to try to get around that. I see some comments in our chat room. We're like, Oh, finally, they're doing background checks. That part isn't new. They've been doing background checks for a while now with these companies. And so I understand it. Uber and Lyft will let others, other companies join this if they wish, because it's a third party independent system that they set up. And I think also it's this, you know, murder and assault. I mean, these are pretty, you know, serious charges. It isn't someone, you know, was, you know, disorderly conduct or they were, you know, that, you know, or something like that. You got an argument with someone. This is for, you know, for pretty serious stuff that you were convicted of. I think also the timing of this is once where I mean, hey, we're not back to regular life yet. Nobody thinks that. But I think some people for the first time, myself included in a while might be like, okay, well, I have to get from point A to point B, would I maybe take one of these services again? It's been a while. I want to make sure that the person that I'm in the back of the car from who's driving me is top notch. Well, folks, patents get filed all the time for odd things and they usually don't predict any kind of actual product from a company. So we don't cover them a lot. They're usually meant to just make a larger stack of patents for when you get threatened by somebody else. But a patent from Apple is intriguing and we're going to talk about it today because it could be used to make a MacBook battery life longer without using any new technology. Or it could be used to make MacBooks thinner. We'll think about that. Back in 2015, Apple started using lithium polymer batteries or more properly lithium ion polymer batteries in their 12-inch MacBooks. The advantage of these so-called pouch batteries is that they're a pouch. They use a gel, not a liquid. So therefore they can have a flexible case and can be made in almost any shape. That lets the batteries be used in the available space, meaning you can have more battery, meaning more battery life. They're just a little easy to squeeze into what you're doing there. However, the sealed edges of the battery pouches do need to be kept away from any other conductive services. And that means you can't just squish them right up against everything because you might be squishing up against something conductive. So they can't use all of the available space. They can use more than the hard-sided lithium ion batteries that have a liquid, but not as much as they could if they could squish right up against stuff. Well, the solution is this patent. Put the pouches inside rigid enclosures. This prevents the edges of the pouches from touching other components, but you can still have the batteries made in irregular shapes, unlike the previous types of batteries where it was more difficult to make a lot of different shapes because you don't have to encase the liquid. You just have to encase the polymer, which can squish up into the case that you're building for it. Best of both worlds, possibly meaning more battery life because you can squish more battery into the available space, or Apple might decide to just use that to make thinner MacBooks. Allison, which do you think they will do? My first thought is how did they get a patent on something that is basically the way Canadians get milk, right? They get made milk in a bag and then they shove it into a rectangular container that holds it in the right shape. But trying to stick to the technical side here, I would really expect that they would go for thinner and lighter, mostly because they've had such massive advances in their power efficiency with the M1 chips. They've got battery life that is just insane. I helped give my daughter-in-law a MacBook Air for Christmas and in February she complained to me that she had to charge it. So they pretty much cracked the battery problem now from a power standpoint. They could afford to go thinner now. So you're saying I'm going to get a paper cut on the next M1 MacBook? Won't be the first time, right? I know. How thin is too thin? That's 16 inch, man. I want that to be thinner and lighter, Tom. That thing weighs about 150 pounds. I would like it to be thinner and lighter. I don't think it weighs quite that much. But yes, I get that the thinner and lighter idea is still alive and well. Rob, what were you going to say? I was going to say that I was hoping for these batteries to look like middle jigsaw puzzle pieces. So that once the laptop is run its life, you can reclaim them and actually make art out of your battery by making a puzzle. There you go. This is a cool patent, though. Anything that advances this is certainly awesome, right? I caught my eye because it seems simple and probably likely to be implemented versus some other patents where you're like, okay, they just came up with something cool. They may or may not ever use it. Is this technology only available to Apple or are other companies making these types of batteries as well? Or is this just their thing? The lithium polymer technology is available to other companies. The patent on how to squeeze it into the rigid cases is patented by Apple. So they could conceivably stop others from doing it or license it, etc. So the lithium polymer batteries are the gel ones? The pouches, yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's just being able to stick them in a milk box. The method for getting more out of them. Hey, folks, if you've got thoughts on this patent, you got thoughts on Netflix password sharing, do not share your passwords in there, but you can go to our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. The CSUN Assistive Technology Conference is held every year to show off an assistive technology this year for the first time. It was held virtually, obviously. Allison has attended the conference in person for several years and attended virtually this time. Allison, I know there's so much to talk about. What are a couple of the highlights you saw there? Let me cover all accessible technology in, I don't know, what do you think, seven minutes? Sound good? So this conference I've been going to like you said for a real long time. Steve and I have gone to it and we have gone to it before because it's virtual. As press, I was able to go to a lot of the sessions and it's still ongoing even as we speak and it's been fantastic being able to attend the sessions that you want to go to being done in a virtual environment. Before I get into that, though, let me back up a little bit. This thing is four days long and it's only $425. That's for a conference for four days. That's really, really inexpensive. There's extra money if you want to go but the exhibit hall is always free. So if you're in the Southern California area, it's worth going to this and just playing around in the exhibit hall and seeing all the amazing toys that they have and they cover everything, visual, hearing, mobility, cognitive impairments. I've learned a lot more about cognitive impairments than I knew before just from going to this. Couple of the cool things. I'm just picked two. I went to a couple of sessions on section 508. This is the government regulation that says that all government services have to be accessible. Well, one of the things the government then has to do is they have to be able to test their own websites, for example, to make sure that everything is accessible and they've built a tool called ANDI and I can provide a link to that if you want it. It's a book market that you put into your browser and it runs on all the browsers, even Internet Explorer and when you go to a website, you just click that button and it shows you for all these different categories what isn't accessible on the site. Like there's an image that doesn't have an alt tag or there's a button that doesn't have a description or low contrast and the low contrast stuff is super hard to do. I've worked really hard on my site to get it. I've got everything that I can change. There's something in my theme I can't change but it's really hard because it says low contrast or you don't meet the contrast standards. It's like, okay, just tell me what numbers to type in. What do I do to make that red be the right red on pink or does it have to be red on white? What do I got to do? This tool actually tells you, consider using this and you'll be able to meet the AA standards for. That's cool. Yeah, it's really cool and the tool highlights what's missing. I ran it just on a lark. I ran it on iMore and I discovered that they had wrapped their this main navigation bar that has search and links to the top level topics. The whole thing was in an element called aria-hidden equals true, which means the entire nav bar was hidden from screen readers. I'm 100% certain that's just a mistake and I've contacted them. There's no way you would do that on purpose. You do that for frivolous images that would just annoy a screen reader, decorative images. The other thing they did though was just a tool doesn't work. Those are really fast, but you need a human to look at it. They've created something called the Trusted Tester Program where you can get certified to be a Trusted Tester and then you're allowed to evaluate websites and I think getting certified in that would be a great way to get a job personally. I think that would be really cool. There was another session on section 508 that was really interesting. I found out that the National Intelligence has an exemption from 508. They're allowed to go, yeah, it's national security so we don't have to be accessible and they've gone back and said, yeah no, we don't think that's the right answer to just blanketly use that as an excuse whenever we don't feel like it. The guy from the DNI, from the Director of National Intelligence Office said, if you don't have diversity of opinions, you get group think and that leads to mistakes and we can't afford to make mistakes when we're in the business of national intelligence. That's dangerous. We have to have all the diverse opinions we can get. So we just decided that we aren't going to do those exemptions unless, like you can apply for one but you have to go to the top to get exempted for that. Did they explain what the reason for wanting to be exempt in the past was? Was it speed? Was it cost? Well, it's not wanting to be exempt but having to be exempt like there were, but I haven't been looking for the documentation on that and I've got the presentations the keynote presentations aren't up yet. So I want to go back and re-listen to the beginning where the guy explained it because I didn't get to write it down. But it's in the, it's in section 508 that they have this exemption. So they don't have to do it but they said no. I'm just wondering how section 508 came about is it I guess what I'm wondering. Yeah, there's a lot of why did they even give them the exemption in the first place but it sounds like that that wasn't addressed. It wasn't clear to me yet but another thing went into place. Two executive orders 13163 and 13548 put in by Clinton and Obama called for 100,000 more people with disabilities to work in government and so all of a sudden this floodgate of people with disabilities are brought in. You darn well better have everything accessible and this presentation was probably the best recruiting video I've ever seen for an organization because they had a woman at a PhD who's been blind since birth and she just talked about how like I have never felt like anything about my disability held me back. The reasonable accommodations always taking care of. She gave advice on improvements that she saw that would be possible. There was another guy who was was able most of his life and he was working there. He started as a co-op but then he had a stroke and he lost like he described it as half of his brain and so he ended up as you know later on in life getting the advantages of the changes that had happened and he said you know I get to he's running part of this disability effort and accessibility effort and he said I go to work every day just so excited and I feel like we're actually at the stage where we're putting that last piece of the puzzle into place. That's how good we're doing it this. It was really, really exciting. Well I'm so glad you took the time to go to that session and come on the show and talk about that because we've had several people write us in the past about the fact that there were certain parts of the government sometimes they didn't know is the intelligence service who were exempt from the standards so it's good to know that the agency itself looks at it and says like yeah that's not even in our own best interest to be exempt from the standards. That's when you get really good at this stuff is when you realize it's a competitive advantage not oh it's nice to these poor people it's like no I'm going to tell an anecdote I may have told on this show before but I did a talk years ago called how to improve or increase your audience size through accessibility and I went through and I explained things like putting all tags and not using audio only or visual only captures on your website. When I finished this is like 15 years ago when I finished this guy came up to me and he said Allison I run the section 508 website for the United States government and I didn't know about visual only captures I had three of them on our main page and I took them off because of your talk there's two sides of that it's awesome Allison told him where was his training yeah right yeah right what it sounds like they're turning that around now which is great thanks for doing that. Yeah it was really really interesting plus a million other things. Of course which I will be talking about on the NoCillicast this week well if you I don't know you're a person who likes to think about years past you might miss your handspring or perhaps your palm handspring visor maybe you wish it was part of your modern life but how could it be well Gizmodo passed along a tweet from our new hero Jorge Cohen who has Twitter running on his palm OS device using its hot sync cradle he tweeted I I think I build a Twitter client from palm OS and he has video showing proof oh he did he also said it's kind of buggy but hey this was a device released back in 1999 so give Jorge a round of applause everybody. Oh man that's great handspring visor if everybody doesn't remember was the one that had cartridges that you could plug into the back to expand its functionality and they were eventually bought by palm hence the hence the palm handspring visor reference there as well but yeah I used to use oven go to bring over certain headlines onto my handspring visor then jump on the 16x to take the bus downtown to go to work and I would read the news I thought it was amazing because I was reading the news while I was away from home on my handspring visor this is the opposite this is I can get Twitter on my handspring visor you don't have to sit in the cradle you can't take it anywhere if you want to do that that video is awesome it's so great yeah it's like it works buggy sure but works I wish I still had my handspring visor I'd give it a shot it's one of the one of the things I never kept and that's saying hello for you I know yeah everything else is still here except for that I'm a palm edge still sitting around here somewhere anyway that's cool check that out with the link in the show notes let's get to the mail bag a few folks have asked in various places about the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies in relation to this week's episode of know a little more which is about the blockchain first blockchain and crypto mining are not the same thing so the energy usage question doesn't particularly apply to blockchain so much as applications of the blockchain like mining a blockchain itself doesn't use any energy it's usually the mining that is associated with proof of work or proof of stake that's where you get the energy consumption second I have seen lots of conflicting information from people who are very sure they're right that it either does or does not use an not okay amount of energy and this this issue is right for exploiting by multiple angles on the issue so I am waiting to see a really rigorous analysis from a couple of sources not even just one but a couple of sources that I know and trust before I form a solid opinion so those who've been asking like hey could you address this why haven't you addressed this in the blockchain I don't address it with blockchain because it doesn't really apply there and I haven't addressed it elsewhere because I'm still waiting for the good analysis out there to be done that says oh yeah no this seems like what's really going on with it well if you have feedback for anything that we talk about on the show or anything we might talk about in our future show please send it to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com thank you in advance we'd like to shout out patrons at our master and our grand master levels including Irwin Stur, Pat Sheeran and John Adwood also big thanks to our brand new boss Mitchell we see you Mitchell he just started backing us on Patreon thank you so much boss also thanks to Rob Dunn with lots of thanks today Rob you always can check me out with my partners over at the smrpodcast and you can reach that just smrpodcast.com and we are doing much less produced talking about tech over there with two couple other guys that Alison discovered I don't know 10-12 years ago speaking of Alison Alison Sheeran thank you so much for being with us and let us know what you've been up to where can people keep up with more of your work they can always find me at podfeed.com but I want to give a special shout out to Steve Sheridan we have been married for 38 years as of today who could not do what I do without him that's adorable congratulations congratulations to you both that is something special hasn't killed me yet hey folks we have a Spanish language version of dailytechnewshow hosted by Dan Campos so if you speak Spanish and you'd like to hear a weekly roundup of the tech headlines in Spanish maybe you know somebody who only speaks Spanish and they're like yeah I don't know where to go for tech news go to Noticias de Tecnología Express and you can look it up under N-T-X or that in your podcast episode Dano 5 minutos y te daremos las noticias mas importantes en el mundo de la tecnología o te devolvemos tu dinero escucha noticias de tecnología express disponible en español we are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. eastern and as of Monday 2030 UTC change those calendars if you haven't already and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live Tom is out Monday but we have rich feeling in for him and we'll talk to you then this week's episodes of daily tech news show was created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merritt host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer and Booker Roger Chang producer and writer Rich Stratholino video producer and twitch producer Joe Coontz associate producer Anthony Lemos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos news host writer and producer Jen Cutter social media producer Shannon Morse our mods Beatmaster W. Scottis 1 Zoe Brings Bacon BioCal Captain Kipper and Jack Shid and video hosting by Dan Christiansen video feed by Sean Wei music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Looters a cast ad support from Tim Ruggieri Patreon support from Stefan Brown contributors for this week's show include Patrick Beja, Scott Johnson and Rob Dunwood guests on this week's show include Nate Langson and Allison Sheridan and live art performed by Len Peralta thanks to everybody who makes the show possible music this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com timing club hope you have enjoyed this brover laughing