 Coming up on DTNS, a fintech trend to watch for unbanked people, why NVIDIA is disabling its own video cards a little bit, and why Facebook is blocking all the news in Australia. There's no more news! This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 18th, 2021. Can you hear us, Australia? In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about refrigerators, quite a bit, on Good Day Internet. How many they... Amos has a lot of refrigerators. If you want to know why, get Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple TV's app is now available on Chromecast with Google TV. First announced back in December, Google also announced the Apple TV app will come soon to 2021 Sony and TCL Google TV-powered TVs. Apple has offered an Android TV version of the Apple TV app since October, but it was limited to just certain Android TV-powered Sony TVs. Newly unsealed documents in the 2018 class action lawsuit against Facebook's ad practices show that Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, acknowledged in 2017 that, quote, potential reach metrics shown to advertisers included false and duplicate accounts. In 2018, documents show Facebook estimated removing these would reduce potential reach by 10% and have a significant impact on company revenue. Google announced new Chromebook features today. A built-in screen reader arrives in March. The company also promised 40 new devices that include convertibles, touch screens, stylus support, dual cameras, LTE connectivity. They didn't give too many specifics beyond that, though. Google also added new accessibility features to its ChromeVox screen reader, like improved tutorials, ability to search ChromeVox menus and smooth voice switching. And parents can now add their children's school accounts to their personal accounts managed with FamilyLink. Microsoft's head of Windows servicing and delivery, John Cable, posted about some of the features coming to the next major update to Windows 10, version 2.1.H1. The spring update usually has the bigger features, but they're flipping it this year. 2.1.H1 is going to be focused on remote work features. Windows Hello will support an external camera now, by default. Windows Defender Application Guard's going to get faster at opening documents. Performance improvements are coming for remote work, as well as to Windows Management Instrumentation and Group Policy Service. 2.1.H1 started beta testing Thursday. The larger update this year will come in the autumn Windows update. Back to Google News. The company released first developer preview for Android 12 right on schedule. Developer previews this early don't have a lot of consumer-facing updates, however. This release includes support for the AV1 image file format, the ability to transcode media into higher-quality formats, faster and more responsive notifications, and the ability for developers to toggle individual changes easily for testing compatibility. Android 12 runs on Pixel devices from 3 on up and the Android emulator. All right, let's talk a little bit about what NVIDIA is doing to their video cards. Justin, what is it? Oh, they are differentiating their markets. Tom, drivers for the forthcoming NVIDIA RTX 3060 video card will detect cryptocurrency mining and reduce the hash rate by about 50%. NVIDIA says the 3060 cards are meant for gamers, but NVIDIA would also like to sell cards to Ethereum miners, so it's offering new cryptocurrency mining processors or CMPs that don't do video at all. Because they don't have display inputs, the CMPs have greater airflow. They also have lower peak core voltage and frequency to help keep power costs down for miners. The 30HX, which does 26Mhz per second, and the 40HX at 36Mhz per second are available this quarter. From vendors, the more powerful 50HX and 90HX are coming next quarter. The RTX 3060 arrives February 25th. So this is one of those things where people can decide, oh, this is the best for everybody, right? The crypto miners get a chip that's made just for them and is power efficient, and that means they don't have to go by the 3060, which means the gamers have a better chance of getting ahold of one, and everyone's happy, right? Yeah, Tom, everybody's happy. There's a brand different differentiation that leads to a happier world. Why aren't you smiling, Tom? Smile. I pulled some folks about this. I said, listen, on the surface, if you want to use a particular chip for mining versus the gamers who have been... I mean, we talk about it all the time on the show where it's like chip shortages. There are a lot of people looking for a particular GPU that's astronomically priced or not available at all. That's been going on for some time, and it doesn't seem like things are going to let up anytime soon. Yes, doesn't this help kind of funnel the traffic into the appropriate places? But, and Tom, I know you kind of agree with me on this, is a lot of people I know who care about these sort of things are like, but let me make that choice. I want something that's powerful and I'm willing to pay for it, and I don't want someone to turn off a feature that, you know, what's it to them if I paid for it and I may or may not use it? Yeah, I will take the principled stand of, I don't like it when companies disable things in their own products artificially like this. If the NVIDIA RTX 3060 can hash Ethereum at a certain rate, let it hash it at that rate. Don't use a driver to kind of, you know, cut off the legs of it. Providing the CMPs, I think, should be all you need to do. I understand that it's not a perfect world and I probably wouldn't, but providing the CMPs would be a way to say like, look, Ethereum miners, you don't want to buy the 3060. It's inefficient. It's going to eat up too much power. It's too costly. Buy these CMPs. They're great. They're meant for you. I know that means, that doesn't mean that everybody will do that and what NVIDIA is trying to do is push them even farther. It just rubs me the wrong way. I'm actually with you. The more I've sat with this, the more I tend to agree with your point that this is them trying to force this issue more than they have to. And now it is coming at the cost of user end user utility that these are not inexpensive processors. You should be able to do everything that the horsepower allows you to do with it. And it's a free country. You should be able to spend your money and do it, do with it what you will. That being said, I can understand in whatever boardroom in which this decision is being made, when they see that the pain point is, we have overlapping markets and we could have two separate, totally separate, different vectors. We want to split this trail as harshly as we can. I get the decision. However, I think that Tom, I tend to agree with you. You didn't have to take an anti-user move to do it. It's because there's a chip shortage. It's because NVIDIA is taking so much heat for gamers not being able to get orders. Gamers only feeling like their only option is to overpay for some shyster who was able to get a no order and is now reselling it at a higher price. They're trying to do something that shows they're helping that segment of their market. I get the impulse to do it. It's the scarcity in the market that's driving them to do that. I just still don't like it. Well, because it's too cute, right? It's them trying to make sure that this happens or at least they can say, well, we did everything we could. We even put this restriction on the gaming thing. Well, there are 1.7 billion underbanked people in the world. A lot of people who don't benefit from an online-only neobank. That's a bank that just has no physical place for you to go, neobanks, but also don't qualify for commercial loans like microfinancing. And startups are using algorithms to provide instant credit to those who can't get it elsewhere. This is a trend. It's worth watching. For example, Nigeria's fair money was started in 2017 to provide instant loans and bill payments for underbanked customers. In 2020, it dispersed $93 million in loans, which is up 128% from the previous year. It has 1.3 million unique users who can borrow between $3.30, all the way up to $1,110, yeah, money. For up to 12 months, nonpayment has been less than 10%. So customers are playing by the rules. Fair money expanded into India in August and has processed more than half a million loan applications there from more than 100,000 unique users since. Fair money has staff in Lagos, Nigeria, Paris, France, in Latvia, and also hopes to expand engineering into India as well. Other companies in the space include Brazil's New Bank and Nigeria's Paga, which also operates in Ethiopia and also Mexico. Yeah, this is interesting. And it caught my eye because microfinancing has been around for a long time. That's the idea that companies make small loans to people who don't have a lot of credit for commercial purposes. But a lot of times people need a loan for a noncommercial purpose or maybe something that doesn't have all the commercial paperwork that could get microfinancing, but they don't have enough money to open an account with an online bank or a brick-and-mortar bank or they don't have the credit to open it. So fair money and companies like that are trying to fill in that gap to say, look, you've got a lot of people with feature phones and smartphones who could do banking on their phone, they're using things like Safari Com's and PESA to do transactions. Let's help them bank. Now, the APRs on this are insanely high because 10% is still a large nonpayment rate, but it's something that doesn't exist otherwise. It's something that can help people get through some bill payments in ways that they would face even harsher penalties if they couldn't get the loan. Yeah, I think that Africa has long been one of the most fascinating tech markets in the world because you see a lot of outside-the-box kind of solutions for stuff for years and years. This is, I think, something that we could probably see on a larger scale even here in America, the idea of these micro, micro, micro loans considering like in that world, like with that utility, if you think of an immediate loan as less like, here's $3,000 but more, here's just a way to get through your bill this month, that's an interesting concept. Yeah, their Chief Product Officer at Fair Money came over from Gojek in Indonesia, so bringing some of that financial ability to do payments and everything into this. Definitely something to watch, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Southeast Asia, a lot of interesting things happening in fintech there. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. We look at it every day to be like, okay, what did our subreddit folks want us to talk about? So get in there, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. During yesterday's DTNS, Facebook had just started blocking news links from Australian sources worldwide and blocking Australian Facebook users from seeing any news links in anticipation of Australia passing a law that would require Facebook to pay publishers to link to news content, not just for snippets, for any kind of linking. Well, we've learned a little more about what Facebook's doing since then. Facebook used a machine learning model for their blackout. They didn't take the list of companies they would have to negotiate with, they put the AI on it. This meant that fake news and propaganda efforts might not be as likely to escape the block, although a lot of people are still concerned about that, but it also meant several unintended consequences. Australian Facebook users reported the block affected pages for hospitals, fire and emergency services, universities, unions, government departments, the Bureau of Meteorology, you couldn't get the weather report on their Facebook page. Facebook's own page was temporarily affected by the block for a couple hours. Now, why would Facebook apply it so broadly? Well, Facebook said, and I'll quote, as the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted. However, we will reverse any pages that are inadvertently impacted, and they have been doing that, they've been going and cleaning up their mess, but it's unclear how to get that mess cleaned up, and they're still blocking news, while Google has not blocked news. Google, as we talked about yesterday, signed a deal with most of the biggest Australian publishers, including News Corp, the biggest. Why the different tactic? Well, the economic calculations are different for Google and Facebook. If Google blocked all the news links, other search engines would soon benefit because they don't fall under this law. Only Google is targeted by the Australian law. So DuckDuckGo, Bing, et cetera, would just start being like, hey, come here for the news. So it makes sense for Google to reach deals preemptively to avoid third-party arbitration that would definitely benefit the publishers if the law goes into place. Facebook, on the other hand, says news content makes up less than 4% of the content people see in their news feeds. And Facebook sees this as 5.1 billion free referrals that would be worth $407 million if they charged for them like advertising, and it doesn't make a cent off it. So they're betting that people will still read Facebook for baby photos and community reasons, even if they block the news. Now, you may be wondering why Australia is fighting this anyway. Well, the whole point of the bill is to address the decline in publisher income. Nobody's arguing that publishers are making less money than they used to. Advertising money that used to go to publishers now goes to Google and Facebook, who also, and you can decide whether there's a connection or not, use the publisher's content without paying for it. Publishers have control over this. They can stop their content from being indexed by search with one line in a file in the root folder of their website, but they never do. Publishers can stop operating pages on Facebook. They could conceivably block referrals from Facebook domains. They could make those links network themselves. But publishers argue that that's not the point. The market power of Google and Facebook is too strong for those methods to have any effect. It would only hurt themselves and it wouldn't move Google or Facebook. That's one of the reasons Australia has pursued a competition-based law, whereas Europe is going with a copyright-based law. Facebook doesn't mind making payments. It will pay to include publishers in a special Facebook news section. It's been talking about that in other markets besides Australia. But what it objects to is having to pay for every link that every user posts. So where are we now? Well, Prime Minister Morrison said the country, quote, would not be intimidated and encouraged Facebook to constructively work with the Australian government as Google recently demonstrated in good faith. So Australia is like, why can't you be more like your brother, Google? Facebook told the Verge, quote, we will continue to engage with the government on amendments to the law with the aim of achieving a stable, fair path for both Facebook and publishers. In other words, all right, we played our card. Now let's talk. Justin, where do you see this all going? Oh, I don't know. I genuinely don't know. This is something that we've never seen Facebook play hardball like this with a competitor as strong as the country of Australia. A major English speaking media market, one that is very tied into the global community. You have a tremendous amount of interconnections specifically in large massive advertiser markets like New York and London. I mean, on one hand, Facebook does have a much more unique problem because for them, they don't just have a section that says, here's the news. Their product is based on the news being there. Man, the biggest thing that I'm shocked here is culturally that this was a betrayal on a level. It wasn't just like, oh, the crazy tech people did the crazy tech thing. It was, oh my God, this thing that I rely on every single day has been ripped away from me. That kind of visceral reaction to me makes me think that Facebook's going to have to think about making a deal that's closer to what the government is asking for if not complying fully. I don't like this law as it is currently being prepared where you require people to pay for links that fundamentally breaks the way the web works. The web works, and it has worked since the early 90s, by you get to link to anything on the internet. The link is never the problem. It's what you write. And so when Europe took the copyright approach, I was like, yeah, there's some issues with it, but that is the right discussion to have. Do I have the right to take snippets? If I do, how much? What's the fair usage of that? But the linking wasn't in question in that. Australia took it farther. My theory was they took it farther in order to push these companies to yield, to come to the table and make some concessions. And it looks like that worked with Google. Google has struck big deals. They've paid more than they would have without this law. And it looks like Australia, as we talked about yesterday, is willing to compromise and say, okay, maybe we won't include search in our enforcement of the rule. But I don't like that the rule is still there. And so I like what Facebook is doing in saying, hey, making it illegal to link to stuff looks like this. Let's show you what it looks like. What it also is showing though, is just how much people have relied on Facebook to be the web. Facebook shouldn't have this much power, right? It shouldn't affect so many things. That is, that's the, our conversation yesterday on DTNS, if you didn't catch a show, I mean, it was a lot of sort of like, huh, Google and Facebook taking very different approaches when it comes to Australia. And did Google give into easily? And is this going to be a ripple effect? And that's a whole separate conversation. But over the last 24 hours since we were talking about this, a lot of organizations that consider themselves news sources saying, okay, we're not on Facebook anymore. Like what, this shouldn't apply to us. A lot of users saying, no, it shouldn't. This is where I get emergency information about a potential wildfire in my area. I mean, Australia's got its share of problems. It's a big country. And so there's a lot of people saying, well, this is, this cannot stand. And Facebook saying, yeah, well, the rules are pretty vague and pretty broad. And this is what it looks like when we're forced to do something like this. Now, if it was any other company besides Facebook, I think Facebook would get a little bit more sympathy or at least empathy when it comes to this. You know, people saying, yeah, it's true. Maybe that law should be written better so that we don't have a situation like this because Facebook's not exactly doing anything wrong. They're doing what they have to do, right? But again, it's Facebook. Facebook is untrustworthy to a large swath of the internet already. That said, people get information from Facebook. And there are a lot of organizations who say, yeah, sure, we have another president somewhere, but that's not how people are accessing our information. And you are being unsafe by effectively turning off all these light switches. Yeah, I mean, here's the reality politically, right? And I don't know the Australian political scene enough to make a specific judgment. But in general, when you make moves like this and let's use an allegory of what Uber did as they were expanding, they would expand into a market. The city council would say, you need to stop doing that. They'd yank their service so you would get an outcry. What you're hoping is the people rush to your defense and say, no, no, no, we like the tech. We like the tech. Mean government, stop being so mean to this technology. I don't think. And this surprised me because it usually is fairly reliable that the tech can get the thing that you're interacting with free or little costs will get the benefit of the doubt over the government. People don't, in general, like government. But this has been visceral. This has been way more. And Facebook wanted to make a mess of this. They wanted to make it be as ugly as possible. They wanted as much of Australia to be deleted as possible. And the reaction to it, I think, is fascinating. Not just for this, but going forward, because we're going to see a lot of situations like this in the next five to 10 years. Yeah. I don't expect Facebook to blink either. This could drag out and it could spread to other markets. So that will be interesting to. For them, they can't say. Oh, yeah, cool. We'll take this deal per link, of course. Please, everybody, link all you want. Drinks are on mark. Yeah, and that's why I think it's going to drag out because I don't see Australia giving them anything that they'll find acceptable. Yeah. The only thing is when you have some of these publishers that then start to look at a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, absent Facebook traffic that they might be saying to their advertisers that, oh, wait a minute, these clicks aren't coming through. Now you're going to have a larger conversation amongst very high level parties. Indeed. Well, moving on, friends, every week on the Snob OS podcast, Nika Montford has been highlighting engineer, scientist and entrepreneurs from the black community who are making significant contributions to technology. Nika calls it teching while black. And she was kind enough to give us permission to share an excerpt for you. Here it is. So this week's teching while black is Lisa Jalobiter. She is the current CEO and co-founder of a tech-enabled platform called Tech Equitable, which uses tech to create a more diverse, equitable and inclusive tech ecosystem. But she is a well-known computer scientist and she got into the computer science game. I think she's been in this tech space for over 25 years. She cultivated the ascent of online video. And she is the mastermind and brains behind software that we use in products such as Hulu and Shockwave. And basically, this technology that was created by her back in 1995 has pretty much led to the development of pretty much all of the interactive media that we use now, including web animation and video games. Additionally, she developed the animation behind being able to create GIFs. So because you can go and select all your GIFs and make your bunnies and improve your tweets and add a little flair to it, you have this lady, Lisa Jalobiter, to thank for that. So she is our honoree in this week's teching while black. That is awesome. Thank you, Nika, for letting us know about that and let us excerpt that from the Snobo S podcast. We're going to see if we can get Nika to do some more of these for us. For more discussion on that and all things Apple plus more teching while black segments all month long, check out SnoboScast.com. Well, YouTube user ReVideo has remastered a 4K, 60 frames per second version of Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit. Never going to give you up. Now you might remember bouncing along to that song back in 87, but you might also remember it perhaps better than 2017 when it had a resurgence in the form of what is now known as the Rick Roll. Is this something that we need? Do we want never going to give you up in 4K? Maybe not, but it might be something you want a bookmark for a rainy day prank. A little background, by the way, if you've forgotten on how that whole web 2.0 era Rick rolling trend started, I had to look it up because I didn't remember how it started either. Back in March of 2007, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4 was posted on Rockstar Games website, but so many people were super excited and they tried to watch it and they crashed Rockstar's site. So as they want to do, several users posted mirrors of the video saying you can watch it here, one of which was a user on 4chan who promised the GTA trailer but instead linked to the never going to give you up video and thus Rick rolling was born. It looks so good in 4K. I actually put it up side by side with the 1080p version on my monitor muted in order to compare the video and it really does look better. Rick absolutely looks good upscaled. He does. He does. And it like things often do in 60 frames per second. It looks more like a home video than what you would imagine it a professional video looks like. And actually looks so much younger. I mean, I guess you get a truer sense of how young he was when he shot that video because you don't have the video artifacting that kind of cements it in your mom as a late 80s piece of art. Yeah, a little motion smoothing effect but otherwise it looked really good. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So Russell wrote in about our conversation with Alison Sheridan on Tuesday show about the pros and cons of working from home. Russell's in the business of workplace design. So he says, not a good bit of research on this, especially over the last year. We also had looked at this with our clients before the pandemic. Few things to consider, Russell says. When you work day to day with people in an office, you build up social capital with your teams through interactions that aren't necessarily fully related to the job. Over the past year, some teams that have been separated and working from home have burned through what was built up over time without replenishing it. Also newer, younger employees that have not had the benefit of the spontaneous interaction with coworkers that can foster learning and cultural integration. Russell goes on to say, working from home seems proven to work in the short term for most businesses, but they haven't had the time to go through a full innovation cycle and understand the facts that separation can have on creativity and development of new ideas over time. Before the pandemic, there were a number of companies that experimented with remote workforces, and for the most part, the outcomes weren't favorable to the business overall. Russell ends with saying, thank you for keeping DTNS running through all of this crazy, I enjoy it every weekend as I walk the streets of an ever improving and more hopeful New York City. Good insights. Thank you, Russell. Yeah, absolutely. Also, thank you to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Pat Sharon, John Atwood, and Daniel Dorado. Big, big thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, you're back in the old CA state. I am. Yes. I don't know why I said it that way. Classic reference to California. I am. I am. Back in Oakland, and of course, all my thoughts are with everybody in Texas, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and all stops in between with all their power issues that they have. We're talking about so much, though, on the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast, including a look into a resetting of our political expectations past COVID. And on tomorrow's episode, Friday's episode, we talk a lot about super PACs and specifically the Lincoln Project, which is something that I've got a lot of very, very, very strong opinions about. Oh, I cannot wait to hear that. I'm intrigued. Hey, folks, if you need a little more explanation on big tech topics like Wi-Fi 6 or 5G or Patreon, are you one of those people who is like, why do people like Tom use Patreon? Don't they just rip him off? Well, this week's episode of Know a Little More explains Patreon and how it works and how it benefits creators, what it takes, what it doesn't, how it compares to other creator revenue-sharing things like Twitch and YouTube. If you want to know how Patreon works, as well as lots of other stuff in the back episodes, check out our related show Know a Little More. You can Know a Little More about all that and more at KnowaLittleMore.com. We are live Monday through Friday. That's at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC, and you can find out more. Tell a friend, bookmark it, dailytechnewshow.com slash live, and we'll be back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood. Talk to you then.