 Coming up on DTNS, Apple wants you to go on a walk with Draymond and Dolly. Twitter tries community moderation and the WWE finds a new streaming home. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 25th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, we were just talking about pole position and wind and all kinds of good stuff on Good Day Internet. You can get that wider conversation. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Spotify has released nine new exclusive audiobooks. The books themselves are public domain, but the performances are by celebrities such as David Dobb, Rick, narrating Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Forest Whitaker reading the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, Hilary Swank narrates Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Spotify is also releasing a companion podcast called Sitting with the Classics, hosted by Harvard Professor Glenda Carpio. Last year, Spotify partnered with Wizarding World to release weekly chapter installments of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Although the Verge notes, this no longer appears to be listed on Spotify. Earlier this year, a group of alphabet workers announced their intention to form the Alphabet Workers Union. Now a new coalition called Alpha Global is attempting to form a global union alliance across 13 different unions that represent alphabet workers in 10 countries, including the US, UK and Switzerland. Alpha Global is affiliated with the UNI Global Union, a labor union federation that represents 20 million people worldwide. The coalition will look to organize worker solidarity on issues like content moderation decisions and forcing employers to sign non-disclosure agreements. Apple updated support documents to advise that MagSafe equipped devices and accessories may interfere with medical devices like implanted pacemakers and defibrillators when in close contact. Apple recommends keeping devices six inches apart in normal use, 12 inches apart when wirelessly charging. However, the company states that while the iPhone 12 models contain more magnets than previous iPhones, the devices are not expected to pose a greater risk of magnetic interference to medical devices than prior iPhone models. Italy's data privacy regulator ordered TikTok to block all unverified accounts in the country, preventing those accounts from uploading videos or interacting with other content. The move comes after the death of a 10-year-old girl from asphyxiation while attempting to do a blackout challenge on TikTok. TikTok is also banned from quote, further processing user data for which there is no absolute certainty of age until at least February 15th pending an investigation. Google announced it will start rolling out COVID-19 vaccine site information and search and maps in the coming week with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas getting the information first and more states and countries to follow. Searching for COVID vaccine will surface access requirements, appointment information and if a site has a drive-through. Google also said it will make select facilities available as vaccination sites as needed partnering initially with public health authorities in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Kirkland, Washington and New York City. All right, let's talk about this new Twitter test, this experiment called Birdwatch, which lets users flag and discuss tweets believed to be misleading or false. Birdwatch right now is a separate section of Twitter rolling out to a small group of users with accounts that are tied to real phone numbers and verified email addresses. Tweets get flagged in Twitter's main interface, so people who are part of Birdwatch might flag a tweet and then notes can be added to the Birdwatch section for context. Users can also rate others' notes to try to combat bad faith usage. Twitter says, eventually it wants notes to appear on the tweets themselves for its global audience with birdwatchers just acting as moderators. A sample UI and waitlist are available at birdwatch.twitter.com if you're interested. Kind of taking some of the way Wikipedia operates where you have users kind of police each other and build up a reputation and then applying that to Twitter, which is not really about editing articles, but about clarifying whether a post is a fact or not. Yeah, I initially launched this in Firefox and I was like, yeah, Birdwatch doesn't even work. It worked on Chrome perfectly fine. And it's a really limited sort of, here's what this is going to look like we think. And again, small test of users and it makes a lot of sense. You see something where you're like, is that a true statement? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. And then you see a little notes area underneath. You can expand and sort of see what the birdwatchers have said. And Twitter itself, you know, trying to be transparent, I suppose, but the company has kind of said, yeah, this might be sort of messy at first because somebody annotating a tweet is going to be better than somebody else who's also making some sort of a note about it. You know, just because you're in the program doesn't mean you are going to be as helpful as the next guy. So that is probably why the test is rolling out. You know, of course, they're going to choose people who have real phone numbers and email addresses because it's just going to cut down on sort of spam. And again, like you said, bad use that much more. But I like the idea of this. I think Twitter has been in the real hot seat about its moderation policies and trying to stop bad actors on the platform. They've really dropped the ball in a lot of places and the company has said short of banning people because we've seen that lately. And that is problematic in its own way for a lot of folks to be able to be able to have a little bit more of, hey, we've got a trusted community. We've kind of vetted these people and we'll continue to, it'll get better over time, very much like Wikipedia. I mean, it's not working exactly the same, but that's the idea of how Wikipedia started back in the day. Then in general, we just have more fact checking going on. And this would, you know, it's a whole separate site for now. But if it eventually is something that can be added into the Twitter experience, and who knows, maybe it's opt-in, maybe you can toggle it off. I don't know, it seems noisy or something, but it's a very interesting move. And I'm excited for it to work well. I don't know that it will, but I hope it does. Yeah, it's a separate section, I think, because they're testing it. And that's smart. Don't just unleash it on everybody when it's not working yet, right? You're trying to get it to work. And it might never work at which point Twitter would never roll it out to the rest of the site. It is the right idea to have some kind of community moderation, although this isn't moderation. This isn't about taking things down. This is about clarifying, right? This is about, oh, you know, there may be some debate over whether this is true or not. And I think it's a smart instinct for Twitter to take itself out of the idea of always judging what's true or not. Wikipedia has provided a model for how to let a community to decide, like, you know, what, we don't have to have one truth. We can have a consensus around how to describe the facts that are known around a particular topic. But we're not doing Wikipedia here. You're not going to be able to edit somebody's tweet, right? You're only going to be able to add notes to it. So I don't know if this really has the same, when I say I don't know, I don't mean I doubt. I mean, I don't know if this has the same effect as a Wikipedia when you can't actually change the tweet. Like you say, will you give people control so they can turn this on and off? Will you be able to build up enough moderators that you can get that culture like Wikipedia has where the best actors do tend to rise to the top? I mean, Wikipedia's not perfect. You can all find a mistake that it's made and point out that it doesn't always work, but it works more often than it doesn't. And so I think it's the right model for Twitter to look for. Yeah. Yeah, I think that trying stuff out when it comes to making something a safer place for the users on the platform, if it doesn't work, they're going to scrap the project or they're, I don't know, we'll go back to the drawing board. But I don't hate the idea of trying to get creative with this stuff. Yeah. And I don't think Twitter's trying to say this is a silver bullet. They're like, oh, this will fix everything. It's like, they're trying lots of different things. This is one of them. Let's see how it goes. Google says that tests of one of its proposed third-party cookie replacements, the Federated Learning of Cohorts, or Flock API, showed that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads compared to cookie-based advertising. Flock is a Chrome browser extension for now, which uses machine learning to group people into cohorts of thousands of similar users that advertisers can target rather than targeting individuals. Google's Privacy Sandbox effort has other third-party cookie alternatives in development, so this may not be its ultimate third-party cookie replacement, but it's given it a shot. Yeah, kind of similar to the Twitter thing, right? This isn't the thing that will fix everything, but it is one of the things they're trying. Interesting to compare to Apple. What Apple's doing is saying, first-party cookies, fine. Third-party cookies, not fine. We're just going to say, you can't track across sites. That's great. First-party means I have a relationship with the website. I'm logged in. I have an account. I have a better chance of knowing what they're collecting on me, and that's fine. Not every company can get effective advertising off first-party. It can be expensive. So what Google's trying to do is say, for legitimate companies that do benefit from third-party, how do we protect the privacy of the user and be able to provide third-party cookies? And this is an interesting way of going about it and saying, okay, what if we say, look, what you're looking for in targeting isn't really all the detail about an individual down to what they ate for breakfast. You want to know, oh, this person is likely to be interested in my product. And we can group people together that we think are interested in your product and then let you target those cohorts. So we have 1,000 people that are really into oatmeal, and the oatmeal makers can advertise to them. We also have 1,000 people that are really into flying all over the world, and we can let the airlines target them. So I get what they're trying to do here. On the other hand, it's Google. It's an advertising company. So of course, they're going to want to be nicer to advertisers because they make all their money off of them. And honestly, I mean, I don't know that this is bulletproof. We've often found that you can take data sets and be able to figure out who people are out of them. And I'm not sure that this will be good enough for all advertisers. I don't know. Maybe it'll be good enough for enough of them, though. We shall see. Yeah, I mean, it's something we will have to see as they implement it. Right now, it's a Google extension, but it won't necessarily stay an extension if it works out. Peacock used to be notable for being a streaming service that hasn't yet added plus to its name, but recent moves by NBC Universal look to make it a destination for sports internally, the company plans to wind down NBC Sports Network, NBC SN by the end of this year. Its coverage, including hockey, tennis, NASCAR, that's going to move to USA Network and or Peacock. So you're going to have the sports that you normally see on NBC SN showing up on either USA Network, which has larger distribution or being moved to Peacock, which they're trying to build distribution for. That alone is interesting, but here's something that's really interesting. Wrestling is coming full on to Peacock. NBCU and WWE reached a multi-year agreement to make Peacock the exclusive place to stream the WWE Network in the U.S. starting March 18th. The 1.1 million existing U.S. WWE Network subscribers will just become Peacock premium with ads subscribers. Their monthly rate will fall from $9.99 to $4.99 a month, and Peacock will get 17,000 hours of WWE programming, along with a 24-hour channel that will carry all WWE live events at no additional charge. Another piece of news that's coming along with this, not Peacock specific, Twitter and NBCU are expanding their partnership. That includes more broader sales of support globally, some live streams like Bravo streams. Watch what happens live is going to stream on Twitter. There'll be some awards show stuff that will stream on Twitter. But yeah, it's mostly the big news here, Sarah, is this WWE partnership, which if you're a WWE subscriber, I can't imagine you'd be too upset except for you have to change, but you're getting more for less money. Yeah, I think it's slight inconvenience. I think a lot of WWE folks are pretty happy about this. And let's not forget that there are a lot of people who love WWE. I think it's smart in every way for NBCU to say, okay, let's consolidate. Let's make Peacock a more attractive on-demand brand anyway. But let's also give folks less of a reason to say, huh, I want to watch this thing, but where is it? Because I do that all the time. We got lots of services, people mumble and grumble all the time about it. I am no exception. And I truly will Google what channel is such and such on right now, even if it's not going to be a television channel, but I'll eventually get to the point where I'm like, okay, this is where I find that thing. Sports in particular, sports can be really wily if you don't have just straight on cable subscription. And even then there's blackout stuff and it gets weird. But yes, Peacock being a player in a crowded space where people don't have infinite amounts of money to pay for all of their streaming services make this that much more of a money grab. Oh, money grab. I feel like it's a good thing. It's a good thing for Peacock, obviously, because you get some more people in the tent, folks coming for WWE and staying for the rest of the programming, they hope anyway. I think it's also interesting from the consolidation side of this. You've seen NBC shutting down a lot of their television networks, the smaller networks that maybe you haven't heard of. NBCSN will probably be one of the biggest ones they've done so far, but NBCSN only had distribution, I think in the tens of millions, if that, whereas USA is on pretty much all 80 million cable households out there. So hockey's probably not going to be upset to be moved to USA because it'll be in front of more people. Some of the other sports that they had on NBCSN, they can hopefully move to Peacock and still increase the viewership because Peacock is rising and getting more distribution than some of the secondary networks. So we're looking at NBC doing what I think more of these companies are going to do, which is shut down some of these niche cable networks that all popped up over the last 20 years and move that into streaming. So for a while we'll be in this awkward position where there will still be television channels like USA Network or NBC Broadcast that have the stuff you want to watch, but all the stuff that used to be on these secondary tier channels will now go into the streaming services. Hey folks, if you want to join in the conversation in our Discord, do so by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Apple added some new features to Fitness Plus called Time to Walk, or if you happen to be a wheelchair user, Time to Push, a series of self-contained podcast episodes featuring stories, images, and music designed to enjoy while you are specifically walking or pushing. Playing an episode on the watch begins the workout and the host serves celebs of sorts, Draymond Green, he's a basketball player, Uzu Aduba, Dolly Parton, Sean Mendez. They recorded their episodes while walking as well. So the idea is you are virtually walking together and talking about, well you're not really, I guess you could talk, they can't hear you, but you're sort of going about some stories in meandering and maybe everybody's huffing and puffing, going up a hill type thing. The first four episodes are out today with a new episode every Monday through the end of April. A slideshow of images relevant to the episode shows on your screen, while the episodes progresses, I guess if it's on your Apple Watch the screen's pretty small, and when it's done the host introduce a short playlist of songs that's relevant to their story. So it really is mostly a podcast that is marketed specifically to a walk. And I think this is interesting because we all have gotten used to whether it's music or an audio book or a podcast or anything that's audio that you can do while you're doing something else. You're not watching anything, whether it be an exercise or you're commuting or you're just sitting there. All of those things is we now have the choice to do it, lots of different ways using different speakers. But there are certain podcasts that I specifically walk to because maybe there's a certain length that just works for me. SMR podcast is great when I got some time on a Saturday and I like what they're saying. I like the content and certain albums or music playlists, same thing. But to have something be specifically like, hey, you don't have to. I mean, you're not required to walk, but it's best enjoyed this way. And Apple kind of saying Fitness Plus is the company's way of trying to get everybody more fit and active. It's specific enough to maybe be pretty cool. Yeah, I think a lot of folks' reaction to this is going to be, well, I can do this already. I can play a podcast. I don't need a special thing that's part of a special package to do it. I can just go for a walk. And that's true. But I know several people, in fact, I think it was Anthony Carboni on We Have Concerns recently was saying that being able to listen to a podcast can be a motivation to exercise because now is my time where I can go do that, right? And so it makes you want to get out and do the exercise because you get to do that other thing that's fun. So what Apple's doing here is saying, well, what if we made that even tidied even closer? So you're not listening to a part of a podcast. You're not listening to a podcast that isn't exactly timed to your route. You're going for 30 minute walk. You get a 30 minute thing from Draymond Green. And you get a personal recording that's not meant for wherever you happen to be listening, but it's meant for exactly what you're doing right now. I can see where that would tie in well and be like, well, as you're walking around, take a look up in the sky right now. Doesn't that remind you of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm with anybody who says, well, don't you just listen to podcasts if you feel like walking anyway? Yes. The answer is yes. But I can't think of really any podcast where I'm like, Oh, wow. The whole subject matter of this radio, Topia episode is about walking. And here I am walking. It's, you know, you kind of, that's just like a fun, serendipitous thing that happens sometimes based on, you know, what you're doing and you're mood at the time. But I like the idea of this. And I think a lot of this is it's geared towards people who aren't walking a lot. You know, if you've already like figured out your route and you're like, I don't need like one more, you know, thing that's like specifically for me, like I'm already good at this. That's great. But maybe you're like, I need some motivation. I need something that's maybe a little bit gimmicky, but it's kind of fun where I feel like we're all in this together. Yeah, it's something to get you going, to get you out the door. And walking isn't the kind of thing that you need a personal trainer for, right? It's like just go walk. Right? So this is, this is the next best thing to that, I think. A US company called Toki TOKI is building a school in a box meant to help people in African and Asian countries access information without local censorship. Their Wi-Fi ready devices can run an electric power or battery, use a decentralized sensor resistant search engine and come with a memory card that will store relevant local content so that you have something on the device, even if there's no network connection. They use Raspberry Pi processors, run a distribution of Linux, and Toki has working models of its servers while it's conducting field trials and expects to be able to deploy devices in 6,000 villages in somewhere in Africa in 2022 or 2023. They haven't said exactly where they're going to do this. The devices will be distributed by US based eRise. Worth noting here, Toki and eRise are owned by Rob Monster who also runs Epic. That's the domain registrar for Parler and GAB, but this is part of Monster's general free speech. You often hear his free speech efforts related to Epic and most recently with Parler, but this is another way of combating censorship by trying to help villages get access to information that they either can't because they don't have the devices or can't because they don't have the access. Yeah, I think and again you say certain African and Asian countries, well a lot of them in both areas, so certain local censorship laws or what's in place right this second are definitely going to be different depending on where you are, but I love the idea of having, it's kind of like a if Wi-Fi is available and encyclopedia that can be updated on the fly like the internet as we all know it these days or just kind of this cool encyclopedia that if there's a bunch of local content that I can at least access between internet connectivity sessions then you got to let go in for you. It also sounds like these are run really lean. You got Raspberry Pi going on there and 6,000 villages, you know some villages are bigger than others, but that sounds like a pretty interesting rollout not going to happen tomorrow, but I you know the whole kind of free speech around the world. I don't even really want to get into that epic discussion of the story, but I think in concept people knowing more is better. Yeah and I like this, I like the idea of this effort. Like you say it's it's got you know good power efficient seems like it's well thought through. I'm curious who's doing the curating of the information that goes on the memory cards, but let's assume that's that's good stuff as well. I could see this certainly in Africa in countries you know like Gabon that have had local censorship most recently the Bobby Wine election where they shut down the internet ahead of the election that happens in some countries in Africa not all countries in Africa, but it does happen in a few. So being able to help villages get through that sort of thing with some offline access that's great. I've seen a lot of these kinds of efforts happen over the years. They tend not to really take off. You remember the one laptop per child back you know 20 years ago. I'm sure it didn't do harm, but it hasn't revolutionized anything yet, but maybe it had you know some subtle effects that that we didn't notice. So I can't say this is a bad idea. It'll be interesting to see what they what they come up with. Yeah all right grocery chain Kroger. It's a big chain if you're not familiar. Lots of Kroger stores partnered with startup keeper on a pilot smart cart program at Kroger store in Madera, Ohio called Krogo. Krogo has a large touchscreen to cart with a touchscreen showing shopping less recommendations promotional offers how to find an item in the store if you don't know where it is yet also has a built-in scale and a camera so you can weigh your potatoes whatever it is you want to weigh then scan your items when you're ready to pay and the pay area is in a designated self-checkout area of that area when it comes time to check out you can scan your loyalty rewards card pay directly from the cart's card reader so it's all self-contained you do need to bring your own bags or you gotta buy them when you check out and things like tobacco hard liquor and pharmacy items or a Krogo no no cash is accepted debit or credit only but hey it's uh you know right unless I you know need that carton of cigarettes I think that this is yet another step and especially with a very large grocery chain sure it's at one store but if it's you know the self-checkouts used to just be you see them around every once in a while and now all the big chains have them well this is just basically taking the self-checkout and putting it on the cart pretty much right yeah I mean because same thing happens with self-checkout now you can't get tobacco you can't get liquor you have to you know you have to buy your own bags or or or bring your own bags they just put it in the cart and the fact that you go through the self-checkout lane means the security that applies to self-checkout applies to these carts I guess the cost of this kind of equipment has come down enough that they can just say well why not just put them on the carts you know what why even have a lane that you have to pull up to uh it would I think it would reduce traffic too because you don't have the carts blocking up the aisle while people are doing their own self-checkout it saves time because you've just scanned everything as you went yeah I mean it's sort of like the we were talking about EV charging at a gas station you know if if all you really need to do was pull up a car to a plug and you didn't need to deal with the gas infrastructure that's already there same kind of ideas like carts can be imagined all sorts of ways where you can have a lot of a lot more people doing self-checkout and the line's backing up less if you don't have to then go to this other kiosk and transfer everything all right let's check out the mailbag let's do it dominique a tech reporter at d standard in brussels said regarding google agreeing to pay for news snippets in france dominique says some money's going to change hands but the agreement creates a flue artisque as the french would say on what google is paying for exactly a google spokesperson told me google is most certainly not paying for snippets payments are mainly or perhaps exclusively for inclusion of news stories in google news showcase so it doesn't seem like google is acknowledging the european copyright directive at all but it's efficiently vague enough to allow the french to claim victory as they are doing without google actually conceding anything this explains the strange contrast with australia where google is saying that paying publishers would be the end of the internet pretty much lesson for the australians says dominique just make your internet law a little more fuzzy google is prepared to pay good money so long as it can pretend it's not paying for links dominique says also no one really knows what amounts to a snippet of news is the first sentence of a story a snippet often the first sentence is kind of the story but it's not actually defining the term snippet is part of what made the french deal work apparently yeah dominique thanks for writing in we had a nice exchange of emails about this and it is a it is a press war between google and france they both get to claim they beat the other one and google's really spinning hard to say like but we're not paying for x y or z and in the end it almost doesn't matter if the publishers are getting paid for something the big difference is the european copyright directive really wasn't going after search engines and it allowed google to create google news showcase which is a separate product that they can say well we're not paying you're not paying for organic results on search we would never allow that you're paying for special appearance in google news showcase i highly expect google news showcase to run out run into spain where for many years google has shut down google news because they didn't want to pay and spain tried to make them pay uh australia is doing it differently australia is mandating paying for a news link no matter where it shows up which i think is problematic because then i'm like well hey uh i'm i'm not a news publisher on your list but i would like to get paid for links to my content as well how do i get that why why only your list of publishers i have a feeling as i said before that australia and uh google are are just seeing where their lines are right now and they'll probably come to some kind of accommodation and that fights nastier right now because the law hasn't been passed yet whereas this french law is the first implementation of the copyright directive which was already passed well dominique thank you for the feedback email really appreciate it was great uh if you if any of y'all have feedback or questions or comments on anything we talk about on the show or anything we might talk about on the show feedback at daily tech news show dot com is where to send them we also want to shout out our patrons at our master and grand master levels today they include pat shiren john atwood and daniel dorado hey folks uh don't forget we've got a store you can get uh d t n s hats hoodies mask mouse pad if you if you can't support on an ongoing basis or you just like to support a little more uh you can uh support us by buying one of those and then spreading the word by wearing it uh daily tech news show dot com slash store folks we are live monday through friday 4 30 p.m eastern 21 30 utc and guess what you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live we're back tomorrow with annaly newitz to talk about how tech migration is changing cities talk to you that this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants dot com i hope you have enjoyed this program