 Coming up on DTNS, happy 30th to Adobe Photoshop, the real scoop behind bendable glass, and it is glass, plus the mystery of why Twitter is buying and shutting down an app that does Instagram stories. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Wednesday's Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about the fact that the Oakland A's have got rid of the radio station in favor of internet streaming. A lot of other good topics on good day. Internet become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Android app for Mozilla's VPN service is now available in the Google Play Store. The Firefox private network is powered by Mulvad, which has a no logging policy and uses the WireGuard standard. It offers servers in more than 30 countries for a limited time beta price of $4.99 per month. Well, Google announced the release of Android 11 developer preview one. Developers will need Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL, a Pixel 3a or a 3a XL, or a Pixel 4 or 4 XL. Or they can just use the device emulators in Android Studio, which will need the new Android 11 preview SDK and tools. The preview includes new display types, 5G experiences, conversational experiences, and the neural networks API 1.3 and privacy improvements. The Internet Society's Chapters Advisory Council will vote this month whether to recommend that the society not proceed with the sale of the .org domain registry business unless a number of conditions are met. The conditions include a lot more details around the proposal to sell the .org domain registry to ethos capital. Now, the sale could go through without that council support, but there's a lot of complicated factors in how they keep non-profit status. One of that relies on public support and Chapters Advisory Council is usually used as a way to show they have public support to justify the non-profit status. So there is some influence there. The new Office App for iOS is now available after its Android release on Tuesday. We talked about that on yesterday's show. The app was announced last year and has been in beta testing for a couple of months now, combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single experience. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what's going on with parental controls on TikTok, Scott. Well, TikTok, the juggernaut of social video sharing announced a new set of parental controls, as you mentioned, called Family Safety Mode, so parents can set limits on their children's app use. The features include screen time management controls, limits on direct messages, and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate content. These features were already available on the app for users to set for themselves, but this allows parents or a guardian to take over these controls and toggle those switches on or off for their teens. The new features are available in the UK right now, and we'll roll out to other markets over the next several weeks as a fairly avid TikTok user. Honestly, the most powerful mention here to me is screen time management controls because that app is designed quite well. In fact, to just keep you there for eternity and perpetuity, you just go and go and go. And there are no final video to say you're all caught up. It doesn't happen unless you're looking at someone's individual profile. So, so I think those are actually going to be very useful. The other stuff I'm a little iffy on, but that stuff's going to work. Well, and this is particularly for parents to put these controls on children. Now, I already hear people in the audience saying, yeah, but children can get around that. Yes, of course, they can totally get around that. They can already get around the restriction that TikTok was forced to put into place by the FTC last February that says if you're under the age of 13, you have to agree to a more restricted TikTok app that restricts what content you see and doesn't let you post to the public, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, children are capable of lying about their age. This is not about building a 100% foolproof system. This is about giving parents a tool that they can use with their children and will work in a lot of cases. Don't you think, Scott? I do. And I think giving parents more tools has two effects. One, it gives them more tools, OK, a mission accomplished. They want more tools, give the give that to them, especially on a planet platform this big. And secondly, it gives TikTok a little better PR about the content. Truthfully, they're already kind of locked down on what they will or won't show. Like when we talk about appropriate content, that's obviously, you know, a lot of people define appropriate content in different ways. But there's no nudity allowed on that app. There's nothing that stays there for very long that breaks any of those rules. And the only other thing I could think of is there is often a bit of harsh language that a parent may object to for their younger kid or whatever. And so giving those parents tools to do something is better than doing nothing. So as a parent of kids who are now sort of on their own, I would have totally supported this in the day. The European Commission has set out a number of proposals for a new digital strategy in the EU targeted at promoting European tech business and providing a regulatory framework for AI. Use of AI in high risk sectors like health or policing would need to be, quote, transparent, traceable and guarantee human oversight. AI would be required to used unbiased training data. Other proposals include AI certification and safety testing for consumer protection, a voluntary labeling scheme for low risk AI, a proposal to ban facial recognition and to ban facial recognition in public spaces for five years was not included. Instead, the proposal calls for a broad European debate about the use of facial recognition. The other proposal for a European data strategy called for a regulatory framework to encourage responsible data sharing between businesses and governments, opening up the public sector data sets to foster innovation and incentives for energy efficient European cloud infrastructure. The European Commission will start drafting legislation based on these proposals and comments at the end of this year. One of the things I know people say they like about our show is that we help them stay kind of in the clear about what's really going on. So weapon one is next time you hear somebody say, well, they're banning facial recognition in Europe, you can say, no, they were thinking about it and they didn't recommend it. And the other side of that is even this proposal is just a white paper and a draft proposal. It's not actually legislation yet. So what will actually happen once this gets debated and turned into legislation could change this. But the significant step here, in my opinion, is the fact that we're beginning to see the European Union debate ethics and guidelines around AI. And this will not be the last we'll hear about it worldwide. This is an ongoing conversation of how best to regulate AI, how best to encourage good ethical practices with AI. And that's that's going to go on for a couple of years, I think. Not super surprised. They pulled back a little bit on the facial recognition stuff or didn't exactly put that in the proposal just yet about the five year ban or any of that. So much of Europe and specifically places in England rely on that for a lot of law enforcement. They've got a lot of facial recognition and close circuit camera work and stuff that goes pretty far into their legal system or into their policing system. So I don't know. I guess I'm just not surprised that that's not necessarily on the table yet and is up for debate because that is something they're already invested in and they don't necessarily want to stop doing that. I would suppose. Yeah, a lot of people are looking at this as, oh, the industry got to them and said, hey, this this will squash us if you ban it. And that may be true. Banning it may have been too big of a move. So encouraging a debate sort of says, well, let's talk it out. Let's find out if banning it really would be a problem. It is kicking the can down the road a little bit, though. The Verges, Sean Hollister has an excellent article on the glass used in the Galaxy Z Flip. And yes, it is glass. There's been a lot. This is another one of those things you're like, I heard it's not even glass. That is just a combination and well, sort of. But the glass is there. It's made by a German manufacturer called shot C S C H O T T. It does have a plastic layer on top, which is leading to the fact that it fails on scratch tests because plastic is way more scratchable than glass. So the the plastic layer on top is meant to protect the glass from breaking because to make glass bendable, you have to make it thin, which puts less tensile strain on it glass. That's aluminum foil thickness can bend like a flip phone, like what you see in the Z Flip. In fact, the Z Flip glass is 30 microns thick. To be able to bend like that, it has to be less than a hundred microns. So it's it's it's a third of that. You also have to get rid of imperfections when you make this kind of glass, because if there's a bubble or even a little dust might that can lead to breakage. Any kind of imperfection when the bending happens will cause that tensile strength to suffer, and you will have better chance of breaking. Hence the need for the plastic coating because a scratch is an imperfection that could happen on the glass. And even if it doesn't happen often, doesn't have to happen that often for that to reduce the tensile strength. And then suddenly you've got breaking glass. So you have the plastic coating to absorb those scratches and keep the glass from breaking. Now Corning, a different company that's making bendable glass, they make gorilla glass, but they're not the one that Samsung is using. Corning says it has bendable glass that won't need the protective cover and expects that to be on devices in the market within 12 to 18 months. We'll see about that. Also, you may have heard of a company called Do-Woo Insis. Samsung says it injects the glass it gets from shot with a special material up to an undisclosed depth to achieve a consistent hardness. So this is their special sauce to reinforce that glass. And it works with the partner Do-Woo Insis on that system to make the final product available for not only the Z Flip, but they're now willing to sell that to other companies to purchase to make their own devices. Wow, I'd love to know what that is. Okay, it's your special sauce. What in the heck are you doing? Because yeah, the whole idea of having the plastic out or cover in order to keep the glass safe makes sense. But if it looks crappy after a short amount of time, that's not going to impress anybody. What you want is to not have to have that protective layer or to figure out how to make that protective layer glass or something that's a lot harder. Yeah, and it's nice. I mean, the corning statement, I'm going to tell we see it. Who knows what that stuff looks like. But it seems like we're headed that way where we're not going to have to worry about stuff to make it look OK or to make it work exactly right. Like we're very early in this kind of technology. So I'm pretty confident in a few years you're going to have fully bendable glass on all kinds of devices and we're not going to worry about whether something's got a plastic coating on it or not. Well, we'll get there. Yeah, the upshot of this is this is early days. These are the first products to even use that. So, you know, if you're into this sort of thing, then great. This is this is something that you can try out now. And if you're an early adopter and you like adopting technology, then this should excite you. It shouldn't matter that that it's not perfect because that's what early adoption is. It's about imperfect stuff. But if you're like, I want this stuff to work right out of the gate. Well, you're going to have to wait a few years, I think. Yep, iteration. All right. Twitter acquired Chromalabs, which I guess means they're iterating, which makes iOS photo editors targeted at Instagram and Facebook stories, Snapchat, that kind of stuff. Twitter does not have a similar ephemeral post feature. By that, I mean a post you put up and it disappears after some time. Chromalabs is shutting down its products and will only update in the future if iOS ends up breaking it or making it not work. Twitter product lead, Kavon Becpore says Chromalabs employees will join the product design and engineering teams to quote, give people more creative ways to express themselves on Twitter. Unquote. So you may be soon doing storage style, something from Twitter or in my opinion, you probably won't be. But maybe they think that people will. Well, if they if they're not going to do that, why would they buy this? They said it wasn't just an aqua hire. They weren't trying to get these engineers and put them on different products. But they are shutting down the apps that work with Snapchat and Instastories. So what are they going to do with that? I mean, I mean, they already tossed they already tossed Vine for I mean, they bought that saying, oh, yeah, we're going to this is going to be great. We're going to incorporate all this stuff and and Vine is awesome. And this is great. Well, we don't like that. That was that was actually an entirely different staff, practically. Well, sort of. But same same central leadership. I mean, I don't I don't I think it wasn't it wasn't it under Costolo? That I thought it was still under. Well, yeah, I could be wrong. The point is, though, I'm not saying that they'll screw this up. I'm saying from a use case perspective, I don't know why they think I'd love to be convinced otherwise why they think Twitter is right for having an ephemeral story feature like stories. And is this just a me to move or do they really have something unique planned? Because yeah, yeah, that's what I'm wondering. Like, is it is it just something where it's like not obvious to us? It's because we're thinking Instastories. Why would you do Instastories on Twitter? I don't think I want that. Maybe I'm just being an old man. But maybe it's ephemeral messaging in a different way. And it's very Twitter way. And that could be that could be intriguing. So it's also something that it's I don't I don't know if I want this or not. But I also I remember when Instagram stories launched and I was like, oh, they're just copying Snapchat. How dumb and most of the people, not everybody, but most of the people that I used to interact with on Snapchat in that ephemeral way have moved to Instagram stories. It's a huge hit for the company. So Twitter saying, all right, at this point, maybe it's a little bit of a me too. We we we want a feature like this, that so much of the public is used to this type of thing that I think that that's actually where Twitter could win if there was a product that rolled out correctly. Because all the other companies have gotten us used to it. That's interesting. Social media. Everybody's got it. We may as well too, because now it's standard practice to have a social media. And there's a lot of Twitter that's a little, you know, he'd make a joke. It's kind of throw away type thing. I can see Twitter actually working out well for this type of thing. Like this doesn't have to be something that defines you. I'm not going to pin this tweet. It's just something I'm thinking of for the moment. And and and maybe it gets bundled into a DM experience. I'm not really sure. Speaking of platforms, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is testing a tabbed version of the news feed for mobile, including the current most relative feed, moves the most recent feed from the sidebar to its own tab and then adds a tab for already seen, which was previously only available at the URL, Facebook.com slash scene. I didn't even know that existed or even been there before. The prototype was found in the Facebook for Android code by engineer Jane Manchin-Wong. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing the tabbed interface internally. So, you know, it's Facebook for mobile versus Facebook for desktop have always been two very different experiences for me. The idea that I have more choice over what my news feed looks like, I like this idea. I mean, Facebook, Facebook went away, away from risk chronological stuff a long time ago. And I just kind of, you know, everyone mumbled and grumbled about it. And you were all used to it at this point, you know, to this day, there, there are very important posts that I would have liked to see from friends, but for whatever reason, the algorithm just buried it and I didn't see it till later or never at all. You know, you ruin friendships that way, Facebook. But to give me more options for how I want to look at stuff or go back to stuff I've already seen, that again would just be, you know, into the ether. Otherwise, I think that's cool. Go ahead, give me some choices. I mean, I agree, I agree. As a, I mean, of the people on the show today, we're probably the two most frequent users of Facebook. I don't use it that much, but I use it enough to know that the non unified experience between web and phones already kind of sucks. Uh, I would like at least them to be a little closer together, or if you're going to give me a really great experience on mobile, that would be wonderful too. Um, but the way you share things across groups and other stuff is different between the two platforms, which I cannot get my head around. Also mobile just felt like they just kind of kept laying things out on top of each other. Every time a new feature would happen and it just stacks forever, uh, feature by feature. And you're like, where does this even start? Where's my timeline? Like, I don't know anything, uh, about what I'm looking at half the time. So I'm all for improving that. Um, I kind of have to use it for things. And so, you know, I'd love to be one of those people who says, well, I don't even use Facebook, but I do. And so please improve it. That'd be great. Yeah. And for those of us who, and I'm the same way, you know, Facebook, because sometimes I'm like, all right, I haven't been on Facebook today. Let me just check it. But if I have, if there, there's a, I don't know, story that's sort of breaking and important to me, having a most recent feed is actually the reason that I'm on Twitter rather than Facebook. That's like the number one reason, because everything else on Facebook, it's like two days old and you're getting like happy Valentine's Day from last Friday and the whole thing. So again, more options because there is so much being shared on, on the network makes sense to me. I agree. I, I don't have the app on my phone to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes. Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. Well, folks, as we mentioned, it's the 30th anniversary of the launch of Adobe Photoshop. It existed before that, before it became Adobe, but it was Adobe Photoshop launched 30 years ago today. Adobe announced some updates to celebrate Adobe Photoshop for the iPad. It now gets the object selection tool. That's the one that first came to the desktop version of Photoshop three months ago. It uses some AI to detect objects in an image so you can just kind of loosely circle it and it'll be like, oh, you mean this and snap to it. The iPad version also gets additional type setting and formatting controls. The desktop has a lens blur feature now that runs on the GPU. It had it before, but it wasn't that great and it ran on the CPU. Now it runs on the GPU. That gives a little more juice so it can provide a more realistic bokeh type effect. And the content aware fill workspace now lets you make multiple selections and apply multiple fills at once. Scott, I know this is a tool that you use in your daily life. How do you feel about the fact that Adobe Photoshop is five years away from being old enough to run for president and these new features that they're throwing in? Well, it's one of the only pieces of software I can look at and say that I think at least multiple times a week and certainly in the last 20 of those 30 years, every day I use Photoshop every single day in some form, whether it's brief or a long period of time, Photoshop is a part of my everyday life and I have a love hate relationship, but I think it's bloated in some ways and has some issues. And from an artist perspective, perspective, it doesn't always sort of lean into some artsy directions that I wish it would. But I don't think we can overstate just how impactful Photoshop is as a piece of software. In fact, it's got to be in the top three most important pieces of software certainly in my life, but maybe to the entire industry. Yeah, kind of ever. Yeah. And it kind of touches everything, right? Like, it doesn't matter what you're doing, where you're going to do it or how you're doing it. Photoshop can be used to get you there, whether someone's finishing a logo or we're touching up photos for the, you know, my realtor side or we're trying to figure out a way to take imperfections off somebody's face so we can get it to print. Whatever it is, it is part of it is not only part of that important software history, but it's now part of just the zeitgeist of life. It is a piece of culture. And when people say, oh, that's been shopped, that's been photoshopped, that's not just the name of a product. That is now a term we use for a verb or otherwise when we're talking about just life. So I think it deserves the position that it has. I'm proud of its roots. So the guys who made all this happen, a lot of them went to the University of Utah, sort of famous here for this sort of stuff, a lot of those Adobe guys. And they pretty much created and now still own the graphics world. There's lots of competition now, lots of really cool up and comers and little offshoots and other things, no question. But Photoshop blazed an incredible trail and had they not been there to do it, maybe somebody would have filled in, but I'm not sure how well it would have gone. So a huge legacy, man, 30 years, it's just, it's insane and it's great. Yeah, as somebody who, I use Photoshop regularly as well, not the way you do those, God. I mean, free transform is still like, I feel like a magician and there are a lot of things about Photoshop I don't understand, but I do use it for various projects on a regular basis. And I thought the video for anybody who's just listening to the version of the show, you should really watch it because it is remarkable how much Photoshop has come along and how different it is now. And not so much the core tools, they've always been there, but it's such a nostalgic look at, oh yeah, that was the first time I saw Photoshop and I was trying to get my head around what I could do with this. And a lot of creative people were trying to figure out, okay, how do I make this part of my livelihood? I remember using it before layers existed and that was nuts. Like layers as a concept is earth shatteringly huge. Like it's just an enormous change, a sea change to creators, to artists, to people who work with photos. And for people who made to just be sort of tangentially aware of Photoshop, layers means that you can edit the photo on different levels within, right, Scott? So that in the original version of Photoshop, you made an edit and you can undo it. That was pretty much all the control you had. With layers, you can go and edit a layer and then have a layer masking it or over it. It just exponentially expands what you can do because you're not destroying part of the other layer when you edit one part. It's like for audio people, it's discrete audio tracks. Yeah, same idea. If you don't have that, then you're like, I don't know, I'll do my best, but with layers you can have so much control. That's a great comparison actually. And it's true that non-destructive quality of what layers brought to that world cannot be understated or overstated rather. And it's so part of everything I do now. And if you talk to any concept artist, anybody doing any kind of artwork using Photoshop, which is again the tool standard for the industry, they're using layers in incredible ways now that you just can't do on canvas. And it's Photoshop's fault that sometimes I'll work on traditional paper or canvas or illustration board and I'll be working away and I'll want to, my finger wants to hit control Z to undo something where I want to pinch and zoom somewhere because my Waycoms and TQL support that or in the iPad case for that app, same thing. Like it changes the way artists think about their canvas. And a lot of people don't understand because they don't necessarily hang around a lot of artists or whatever, but it is just profound. It is the impetus for digital art in the modern era. And without it, I don't know how far along we'd be. It's a huge thing. And this isn't just me pimping for Adobe. I like my Adobe stuff, there are things about it I don't like, there are plenty to say about lots of competing products. This isn't really what I'm saying, but just from a historical point of view, it's really hard to overdo it. It's a big thing. Yeah, I think that's fair because I don't use Photoshop, I use Acorn and I've used GIMP in the past too. I mean, there's a lot of alternatives, but those alternatives all really build on that language that you see. I know, Sarah, you said how much it's changed but it's also kind of odd how much is the same and how much of that Photoshop version one, if you see those videos that are flying around of 30 years ago Photoshop, how much of that is still the visual language of almost every image editing app out there? Yeah, that's true. Not only that, like specifically Tom in that UI, you look at that toolbox over there, it's essentially the same toolbox we have today with some additions and with some features like press and hold and then you get three more tools sub under that tool. And lots of other stuff, AI additions and everything else but really the lasso tool and the selection tool and the airbrush tool and the painter tool and the pen tool, like those are all there in that old screenshot from that black and white Mac. And there's something fun about that consistency and also the fact that that thing is just well beyond that now obviously and its capability, but it's a fun look back at a thing that I just don't know where I'm personally at in the internet and content creation without it, it kind of changed everything for me. It's also one of those subscriptions, $9 a month, gotta do it. Yep. Way to go Adobe, way to go creative cloud. Thanks everybody who participates in our sub Reddit, you could submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, also join in the conversation in our Discord, it's a good crew in there, you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mail bag. We continue to get really good feedback about the whole idea of Slack and Microsoft Teams and workplace, kind of the enterprise and making sure that people are staying on task. First email from Adam says, howdy folks, I'm at a small government organization and we've recently rolled out Teams. The following retention policy was set after lots of head bashing between HR, legal and Adam says, I'm gesturing vaguely at the deployment team. He says, personal chats automatically deleted after three days. Team chats automatically deleted after 90 days. Team files stored forever until a better policy is decided. This was the compromise they came up with so people could use Teams for short term projects and immediate collaboration, but not so much that it became a burden for data storage. Considering we're pretty smoothly using this as a full on internal email replacement, it doesn't seem like we're generating any more data than we would have otherwise. Adoption has been mostly embraced wholeheartedly after we pointed out the gift button. Ha, the old gift button. That'll get everybody all the time. And then David from Phoenix wanted to write in about the team's conversation, said, I work for a fairly large nonprofit in Phoenix, Arizona. We're in the middle of a Skype to Teams transition as Microsoft is killing off Skype for business, the old link. Previous person wrote in about their org not letting them create Teams. The challenge we had was people were creating team names that were not useful for finding Teams, like Test or Test Test, or Joe's House of Monkeys. Also, every time you create a team, it creates a SharePoint site, an email address, a OneNote library, et cetera, which makes it difficult for an IT person to keep things tidy and organized in an active directory environment when it is the Wild West of random names and groups being created. That is more likely the reason for the limitation I am guessing. There's gotta be a way to say you can create a team without creating all of that stuff, but yeah, that's kind of annoying. Thank you, David, and thank you, anonymous person who works for Small Government Organization. These are great insights. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Frederick Hubner, James P. Callison, and Juan D. Hernandez. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson. Scott Johnson, I know you're a busy man when you're not doing Photoshop, or maybe when you are. Where can people keep up with your work? Well, they can find everything I do. A lot of it was created in Photoshop, and a lot more of it's created in Adobe Audition. Over there at frogfans.com, you'll find everything I do. In particular, I'm really proud of a current comic project I'm working on. I put up a new episode on Monday. It is called Fred and Can, and it's a nice stark reminder that it's getting close to tax time. Go check out that comic at fredcancomic.com and send me your feedback. Let me know what you think of it. You can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Hey, folks, if you're listening to the free public feed of Daily Tech News Show, which most of you are, you know that occasionally there's advertisements at the beginning and end of the show, and that is a way for us to fund some of the stuff we do here, but it's a middleman. It's gonna take some of that money and keep it for itself, and it's gonna take some of your attention. And if you don't want either of those things to happen, you can, of course, cut out the middleman and fund us directly by supporting us at patreon.com slash dtns. You get an ad-free feed, and depending on how much you're willing to spend, there's lots of other perks involved as well. So think about it. You get your own RSS feed and a bunch more. Go check it all out at patreon.com slash dtns. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young as our guest. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha