 Severin Pick has supported independent tech news directly for five years. Be like Severin. Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 26, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Oh, I guess I'll go next. And Salt Lake City, Utah, because Sarah's not here. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. Yes, Sarah Lane out for one more day. She'll be back tomorrow. Hang in there, folks. She's coming back. But we have some good news and bad news about robots taking your job. So let's start with a few tech things you should know. U.S. chip maker, Micron, has resumed some shipments to Huawei despite U.S. restrictions. And in fact, Intel and a few others have as well. The New York Times says goods made outside the United States may not be considered U.S. made, and therefore not subject to the restrictions, even if the company's in the U.S. Micron cautioned that it is unable to predict volumes of these shipments, how long this will last. But Huawei is Micron's number one customer. And the restrictions have cost Micron as much as $200 million in missed sales. You can understand the motivation. We have a gigantic Micron plant right here in Utah. Well, none of the stuff they're making is going to Huawei. No, it is not. Apple confirmed it has acquired Drive.ai, which has been running autonomous shuttles to Texas. Drive.ai has filled papers, excuse me, filed papers with the state of California that it will cease operations and lay off all 90 of its employees. It is unclear whether Apple will hire back those employees, but it will get Drive.ai's assets. Cover your assets. Apple is expanding its business chat feature to the 820,000 or so merchants on Shopify. So if you are a merchant on Shopify and you enable the service, it'll show an iOS message button on every page of your Shopify site, which as a consumer, you can click on to just send messages and ask questions. You can pay for the purchases using Apple Pay from within the conversation, just like you would with a lot of big businesses that have already been doing this. Seems like a big boon to Shopify. Yeah, and Shopify merchants. All right, let's talk a little bit about Oppo. They've got a cool new thing for phones. Well, Oppo demonstrated an under screen front facing camera at MWC Shanghai. As you know, right now, many of you have a little lump on the back of your phone. The reason you do, if you want good quality photographs, they kind of need it. So that's what modern phones do. But the display uses custom transparent material with a pixel structure designed to let light through. The sensor is larger than most front facing cameras with a wider aperture lens. Oppo says touch control and display quality are not compromised with this system. Oppo says it uses software to compensate for haze, glare, color issues. These are all things that normally arise with cameras on your phones. And they get that all worked out. Oppo also showed off a proprietary decentralized network protocol called Mesh Talk to allow users to chat without using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for up to three kilometers. Yeah, there's a few other people working on stuff like this. There's been some systems that have been around for like five years that do this. And the idea is when you're at a big concert and the cell phone service gets overwhelmed, but you want to chat with your friends or find out where they are, you can still do it because they've got this protocol that will send messages. Sometimes they use Bluetooth for that. This one doesn't. That's really kind of interesting. But the under screen camera, for those who hate the notch, and I know there's many of you out there like, I don't care about bezels, much less a notch. This could get rid of all bezels and notches if it works well. That's a big F, I guess. Yeah, it is a big F. I'm looking at my, so I'm taking my case off and I'm looking at my phone and that thing sticks out. I don't know, probably two millimeters or something. It's not terrible. The front-facing camera does? You know, the back-facing. Oh, no. This is only about the front-facing. Right, right, right. But I guess my point is like, that's never bothered me. So when I turn my phone over and I see a notch on a full-screen screen, does that really bother me? No, not really. I guess I've gotten used to it. So if you then said to me, hey, the new version of your phone you're going to get will be notchless because it uses this hot new tech. I would be, I'd be pretty stoked, I guess, but it's one of those things where I guess I don't miss it until I have it. And so you are going to have, I mean, Oppo even admits you're going to have haze, glare, color correction needs. When you've got a screen in front of your lens, basically it's another lens. It may not be focusing or meant to, but it's something you have to deal with because the light goes through and gets affected by it. So it is all down to whether Oppo's software can compensate for that, whether this works or not. Right. And it's certainly never going to be as good as the front-facing camera that doesn't have to go through a screen, but it's the front-facing camera and people are kind of used to the front-facing camera not being as good as the rear camera anyway. Yeah. And if you're Apple, you're counting on that a lot more for, you know, face recognition for security and everything else. Oh, right. Yeah. Apple would never, I don't think they could do face ID through a screen. So probably not. And I'm guessing there's other stuff in that notch that will have to be thought about. Like on the one hand it's like, oh, the camera doesn't have to have all this black around it anymore. Great. But then we've also hidden some other stuff up here. What do we do with those now? There's a speaker there, for example. So maybe we're getting a little bit of a border back after all of this. I don't know. But be curious to see how that thing performs. Yeah. In-screen fingerprint readers. So manufacturers don't think they're there yet, but they are out there. Pretty much every Chinese phone has one. And this may be the next wave. We'll keep an eye on it. Sources tell the New York Times that Libra Association partners have signed non-binding agreements, meaning they are not obliged to use or promote the token and may leave the association at any point. In other words, to get people on board to become one of those 27 partners, the partners had to be like, we can jump if this turns bad, right? Because we know everyone hates you, Facebook. That seems to be the situation here. Executives from seven of the association's partners told the Times they are cautious about their membership because of Facebook's association with it and the regulatory scrutiny that Facebook will bring to the project. The sources say members, some members have not paid the $10 million required of founding members. Although this is a little confusing. The Times reports a number of partners said they would decide whether to join the association and make the payment after there is more clarity on how Libra will work. It's unclear to me from the New York Times story if this is members in addition to the 27 or if there are, these are members within the 27 or if there's some people within the 27 that haven't paid the $10 million or all of them. It's a little unclear, but it does seem like there's a lot of concern about joining this because of Facebook being associated with it. A spokesman for the Libra Association, however, said it's gonna have a wait list for people wanting to join to be the first 100 members by the end of this year. Don't you worry, they've had a lot of interest to sources to the New York Times that J.P. Morgan, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs were all approached about joining and we're interested, but held off again due to regulatory concerns. And I think it's less about we don't think Libra Association can conform to regulations. It's more about with Facebook associated with this, we know that regulatory agencies are going to be as strict as possible and it's difficult in uncertain times regarding blockchain and cryptocurrency to get anything through. They're probably not confident that even the Libra Association can get the regulatory scrutiny. And if you're a massive multinational bank or financial institution, this isn't probably your only way to get somewhere cool. Like Facebook being associated with this is already making it kind of a pain. I feel a lot. This tells me there's cold feet. Whether or not the article makes clarity out of who's waiting to pay the 10 million because they're trying to wait and see or whatever if regulations stick or not. That feels like cold feet to me. Maybe Facebook's association with the project is going to ultimately stall things or slow things or whatever. I still understand so little about this and why Facebook and not somebody else, we're really just talking about a technology and its ability to move money around and why Facebook is the best position to do that. I don't get it. They haven't really sold me on that. Well, Facebook is not the best one to administer it and they admit that. They created the Libra Association and made themselves a very minority part of its governance. Within the next couple of months, we'll have a charter for that if all goes well and be able to scrutinize that a little more. But Facebook is good at creating software and engineering and they hired some blockchain experts. They might be the right ones to build the foundational technology for. I just wonder where the billions of users come in. Billions of users is why anybody's even agreeing to deal with this because they're like, yeah, but we get access to billions of users. That's always it, isn't it? That's basically where my brain was going. Alright, let's talk about YouTube. YouTube is adding more user controls over recommendations. When you click the three dot menu next to a video and choose don't recommend channel or not interested as well as some other options, that's now going to be a thing. YouTube will also show buttons for categories related to the interests when you scroll, your interest rather, when you scroll up on the home page as well as when browsing up next. That is to say the link that says up next. YouTube is also adding information about why you're seeing a video suggestion. The new controls are rolling out to Android and iOS now with desktop support coming soon. Man, you couldn't bring this fast enough for me. I don't watch recommended videos on YouTube. When people talk about going down the YouTube rabbit hole, I generally stay silent because I know it can happen and it's happened to me once or twice. But quite often I'm like, really? No, I don't want this. And it keeps happening. And so there's no way for me to tell it not to. Now, on the one hand, I'm like, well, do I want? I mean, that is kind of a safety valve that keeps me from wasting time on YouTube, I suppose. But it will be nice to say to those channels that keep being recommended like, no, no, you've got it all wrong, YouTube. And I do not want that. Yeah, I have the same exact problem, except mine's even weirder because I spent a lot of time on YouTube trying to track down weird stuff to play for clips and sounders. And so if I'm looking for some like old 1970s commercials and I want to have some sound clips from these cheesy commercials from yesteryear, I'll go do that. And then what happens is YouTube now thinks that's all I care about. So they just send me these recommendations. I'm like, I don't, I mean, this is great for if I need to find some more, I suppose. But I'm also pretty adept at searching for what I want. I know what I want when I want it. I don't, I'm not going to just be sitting there going, oh, a Burger King ad from 1985. Let's have a look. Like it doesn't work that way. Give me more of those. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's my problem too, is I don't use YouTube enough for entertainment for it to really know what's entertaining for me. Right. I'm finding things for stories and such a good amount of the time. This kind of goes back to what you were talking, what we were talking about with kids, the kids YouTube app and why you use the main YouTube zap, not the kids app. But you were saying this might be handy for when you watch with your daughter. Yeah, she likes to watch a lot of music based videos and there are a lot of them. Unfortunately, not all of them are of the same quality, but they may, for some reason, they get snuck in there because, for example, she likes BTS, which is the Korean K-pop band. And those kind of insert one that might have someone just singing their songs, but not very well. No one's going to enjoy that. So it's being able to kind of tweak that so it's not just whatever YouTube's algorithm decides, hey, you might like it because it has Korean in the title and people are singing, maybe off key and maybe with lyrics or something. Having more control over that would be so helpful. Yeah. You want to bring the soul in a Korean way. That's what he's saying. Yeah. Exactly. Google is rolling out the ability to auto-delete your location history, something it announced back in May. You may remember us talking about it back then. Users have always been able to delete location history or turn it off entirely, but you can now choose to have your location history disappear after three months automatically without you having to remember to go out there and flush it out. You can also choose to have it go automatically at 18 months, but Google says it's going to delete everything after 18 months anyway. So if you choose that, it's kind of not necessary, but features rolling out over the next few weeks. Yeah, a lot of this stuff going down lately. I think that's a good move. I think. I mean, I don't really care. It's not the best move. The best move would give me more fine-tuned control over it. Right? The best move would be like, let me choose the period myself. Also, let me choose which services particularly can use my location history instead of like yelling at me off. You turn off your location history. All these services are going to break, but this is better than not having it, right? Yeah, it'd be cool if they brought to the surface more of that front-facing data in a way that reminds me of the way I use Gmail a lot. Gmail gives me so many cool little incremental controls through command, basically a command line interface in the search window to find things, you know, that are in a certain date range or have a combination of keywords or this exact sentence. Like I can, there's all sorts of controls for that. It'd be cool if my data could be seen, extracted, deleted, archived in the same way or recovered in the same way. Like I know that they don't necessarily want to give us all that or maybe they don't care because honestly, I don't care about all that data. That's fine, whatever it is, what it is, I'm not that concerned about this. There are people I know who are, but giving me more control over that data, deciding what I want to keep, what I want to get rid of would really be great. I think that may mess with their core business model a little too much if they gave me that power. Yeah, there's probably an internal debate about how far to go with this sort of thing. And there are good reasons to give your location history to Google. There are benefits to that, especially things like Google Maps and stuff, which as long as you know what it's being used for, who gets to share it and all that, I don't have a problem with, but that's usually where it comes down. What we're saying is I'm a boy with love for privacy. I sometimes have a flirting affair with privacy. All right, let's move on to Vivo. They've demonstrated the Super Flash Charge, 120-watt phone charging protocol at the MWC in Shanghai, which we talked about earlier, that can charge a phone in 13 minutes. I like the sound of this. It uses a custom USB-C cable and travel charger tested with a 4,000 mAh battery. The Xiaomi, I did it wrong, didn't I? Did I get it? Xiaomi. I'm glad you had a handy. Thank you. Has charging tech going into mass production that charges in 17 minutes? No word on when Vivo's tech would go into production. I would argue not a minute too soon. I like fast charging in theory. I've never made it a decision-maker if my phone doesn't charge as fast. Don't really go, wow, I better get the one that charges faster. I don't know. This is cool, though, and the faster we can charge phones safely without them exploding, the better. 13 minutes seems pretty good, especially if you're in an airport. The problem is, like, can you find a cable? Can you get the right power source to do this, all of that sort of thing? But it sounds like it's promising, although it's not coming to a Vivo phone anytime soon. No. I can tell you this, though, from a little experience. The iPad Pro 12.9 inch, the latest one, I picked up and passed the older one to one of my kids, and I noticed a distinct difference in charging. The old one uses a regular lightning cable, and the new ones use USB-C, and I don't know what the wattage is or what the amperage is, or any of that, but it's like the one they used to charge MacBooks now, that sort of thing. And it's so much faster of a charge that I guess I wouldn't say it made it purchase decision for me, but I do think now I feel like I've gotten used to that to the point that I would now look at that feature and say, how fast does it charge? I would actually consider that as part of my mind than I would in the past, but I'm with you. It's kind of a small thing, and if it's 14 minutes or 17 minutes or two hours, probably not going to make that big of a difference. When we get to a place one day where it's literally walking the room and it's charging while we're walking around or we plug it into something and it's done in five minutes, we're nowhere near that, but if we ever get to that, well, then we can talk about that being a feature, but right now it's a little bit secondary. It's almost like, I know the device I want. Oh, and luckily it charges fast. That's kind of the... Yeah, yeah. What we want is longer battery life. We want a new technology that means our battery can last for weeks and weeks, right? Right. And fast charging is a way to go, well, since you can't get that, how about we charge it up real fast in between? Yeah. Does that make it right? I want both. That's what I want, both. Yeah. Oxford Economics estimates that up to 20 million manufacturing jobs could be replaced by automation by 2030. Each new industrial robot is estimated to eliminate 1.6 manufacturing jobs, mostly affecting the least skilled regions of the world, which unfortunately also tend to have higher unemployment and weaker economies. So this is not a good situation. Now, workers leaving manufacturing tend to move to other jobs. It's not, you know, remember jobs aren't like, there's not like just a box of jobs and if we eliminate one while now we have fewer jobs, jobs can be created and destroyed. So if a worker leaves a manufacturing job, that worker will tend to move to something like transport or construction or maintenance office administration. Those, however, are kind of next on the tier below manufacturing for being, guess what, vulnerable to automation. So you may find that, oh, I lost my manufacturing job and now I can't get a construction job. I can't get a transport job because those are also being automated. However, the good news is automation should also create as many jobs as it eliminates, according to this Oxford economic study. Yes, it's going to get rid of a lot of these manufacturing jobs, a lot of these other kinds of jobs, but it will create new jobs. That's a part that gets left out of the headlines is automation will actually have opportunities to create new jobs that you couldn't afford to pay people for before or weren't necessary before. Jobs which require compassion, creativity, social intelligence, according to Oxford economics, will continue to be done by humans. And a rise in robot installations of 30% worldwide will also help the economy. They estimate that that 30% rise in the use of robots would create $5 trillion in additional GDP. So it's going to be better for the economy. It's not going to cause a net loss in jobs. But there is a problem and that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The displaced worker can get the new jobs if they have the right skills. But as we mentioned, the displaced workers usually have the right skills to go into another job that is also at the lower tier of wage generation. It's also probably vulnerable to automation. So can people losing their jobs to automation get the new jobs that are created by automation? Is a big question. And will these economic benefits, this $5 trillion, actually benefit the people who are being displaced by automation? Those are your two big questions to focus on. China and South Korea have seen the greatest growth in robots between 2011 and 2016. Japan actually saw a decline in the use of robots in automotive factories, although a rise in non-automotive situations. But yeah, we're seeing big rises in the use of robots worldwide, specifically in China and South Korea, China, like crazy. But we're not seeing a lot of good plans on, oh, and here's what we're going to do with those workers to get them ready for the jobs that will be created. Yeah, every time this comes up, or a related topic like this on the show, it reminds me of that conversation we had about Lotus 1, 2, 3 coming out and all my accounting friends freaking out saying, this is going to destroy my accounting job or this is going to ruin my firm or this is going to change that industry so hard that it will become all computers doing everybody's taxes and we're all out of a job. There's an entire industry going away. And instead what happened was the exact opposite. Huge amounts of new jobs were created in and around that kind of automation. And so I'm actually really bullish on the idea that when these sorts of things happen, the displacement is real and the anxiety for that is real and there's a reason why a concern should be there. But the idea that, like you said, there's a box of jobs and we're running out of them is just a fallacy. It doesn't work that way. And I think that there will probably be a lot more left over at the end of this than there was going into it and things that we don't even know about. It's easy for us to go, oh, there'll be new jobs. We don't know what they are yet, but they'll be there. That's absolutely the truth. We don't know. And just ask anybody who went through the accounting world through the 80s and made it through the Lotus one, two, three days, years, and then the Excel years, and then where we are now years, they'll all tell you that I had no idea that these opportunities were going to be there. They just don't know. We've been through this before, right? It shouldn't be difficult for us to imagine new jobs being created because we industrialized, right? And suddenly there were a lot of jobs involving looms and axes and pulling carts that were gone that we didn't need anymore, right? But we found new jobs for people to do. We created new jobs because of the industry, right? Because we didn't need somebody to pull the cart anymore. Now we could have them do deliveries or inventory and we created factories and all of this sort of thing, right? And the beat goes on. Where you see the differences with industrialization, we had a bad situation where the folks who were displaced by industrialization didn't find a nice easy path to the newly created jobs and thus you had riots, the rise of the Communist Party, anarchists, labor unions being formed. I'm not saying these are bad things. I'm saying you had a lot of things that had to arise to address that fact and sometimes they were bad things. In accounting, you didn't see a whole lot of accountant riots, right? There was a better path for people like, oh, we don't need you to do this anymore but we do need product managers and customer service reps and things like that that had transferable skills. Well, and I think that's a very important point is that not all skill sets are fungible, right? Someone who's been a minor or in the petroleum industry doesn't necessarily have the same skill set that someone would need in an engineer or someone who does some sort of customer representative or anything. So I think really, I think this points out that there should be a comprehensive policy of how we can transfer these people over if they want to be transferred over. Is it simple retraining or is it something more comprehensive? And I think that's where a lot of discussion seems to be there's a detachment. I think what I like about the Soxford Economics Report is it's saying, hey everybody, this isn't the accounting automation. This is closer to the industrial automation. And this time we have a chance to get ahead of it so that we don't screw it up because they had never done industrial automation before so they didn't really realize it's coming. We realize it's coming. Do we want to prevent bad things from happening or not? It's up to us. Here we go. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. I feel like it's been going on that we could pick up a rock and bang out something with another rock and we're just going to have to deal with another one. And it's, I think it's going to be okay. It'll be okay. There'll be outliers. There's always outliers. I'll put it this way. I think we could make it okay. Yeah, we can help make it okay. How about that? I hope we will. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. And thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com and Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. I can't wait for Sarah to come back and help us out with the mail bag, but we've been getting some good stuff from you. So keep it coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. This person writes in and says, I want to offer a compliment that's C-O-M-P-L-E, like a supplement and an addition, not a rebuttal to Chad's email for Monday. I'm an IT auditor, CISA, CISSP, with a public accounting firm. We work with many clients that still have XP and Server 2003 running. While some take appropriate steps, air gap, firewall, lock operating system files, et cetera, I estimate 80 plus percent don't do anything until we point it out to them. I have yet to see a single vulnerability scan showing the MS-17-O10 patch was applied to these XP and Server 2003 machines that fixes eternal blue, the vulnerability so bad that Microsoft released a patch for unsupported systems. Most recently, we pointed out that our new manufacturing client had a couple of Server 2003 systems running. The disconnected them from the network but got upset when we included it as a finding in our report. Sure, it's fixed now, but the fact that it hasn't been patched in four years says a lot about the competency of an IT department. I don't mean a rant, just want the audience to know that these risks can be mitigated if you have good IT people, but like any other job, there are lots of people who don't know or don't care how to do things properly. That's why you have audits, parentheses, shameless plug. Yeah, that's a cool job. The IT auditor, I hadn't really even considered that there'd be such a thing, but that makes sense. Go in there, make sure those guys are doing it right, keeping everything up to date. Like he's doing the Lord's work, man. Yeah, I think we got a great perspective from Chad and this person could be a lady. I don't know. Who both said like Chad was saying, hey, on our side, sometimes we want to do the right thing and the bosses and the managers, you know, drag their heels and dig in their feet. And the auditor here is saying, yeah. And then sometimes the auditor is like, hey, you really need to do this thing. And the company's like, yeah, we probably should, but I don't know. We'll just pay you anyway. Well, thank you, Scott Johnson for joining us today. As always on Wednesdays or mostly always on Wednesdays. What do you got going on? Well, it is my pleasure. As always, as my dad used to say, look, I've always got something cool going on. That isn't the day of the tech news show. That is a cool thing. But when I'm not doing that, head on over to frogpants.com. Check out all the shows that are available to you. I've got monthly, weekly shows. I even have a daily show, a morning show that happens every day. Tom comes on Wednesdays on there and talks about the tech of the day before we even get to this thing here in the afternoon. So do check it out. That's at frogpants.com. For everything else you're looking for from me, you can find it over there on Twitter. I'm at Scott Johnson. Now, we are getting close to the end of the month, four days until the end of June, which means we need 13 more people. Lucky 13 of you to join in on the Patreon and help us get to the goal of one more patron than last month. That is always our goal. We just want to get more of you in the tent to realize like, hey, there's some cool benefits. You get a commercial free feed. You get some bonus episodes, get access to the Discord where you can have some fun chatting with people, listen to the show live in the Discord. All that sort of stuff is available at patreon.com. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin, Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.