 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's Echo tries to guess what you want. Google gets rid of unlimited photo storage and what tech policy you might expect from a Biden administration. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 12th, 2020 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 Roger Chang, who forgot his place, producer of the Bandoia Place. We give you one day off and you just can't remember where to come in. Hey, it's good to be back. Thanks, everybody, for letting us have a day off yesterday. We were just talking about turkeys and Disney earnings and how good Disney is doing on the streaming front. If you want that wider conversation, become a member. Get good day internet, patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Instagram began rolling out an update that puts shopping and reels on the app's bottom navigation bar. The Reels button is now in the middle of the bar, which replaces the new post shortcut with the shopping tab replacing Activity. Activity and new post buttons are now placed in the upper right corner next to the messages box. US shoppers know that Black Friday sales are no longer limited to the Friday after Thanksgiving. And the world's largest online shopping holiday, Singles Day, is doing the same thing. Singles Day normally takes place just on November 11th. One, one, one, one. That's part of the Singles thing. But the discounts started as early as November 1st this year. And Alibaba, the leader in Singles Day sales, estimates that a gross merchandise value of 372.3 billion yuan was taken in in its Singles Day sales. That's about 56.42 billion dollars US. It's a new record for the event for Alibaba. However, the record falls under the shadow of new proposed anti-competitive rules in China that would limit pricing flexibility. So it kind of dampened their celebration. Samsung announced the Exynos 1080 system on a chip, a premium phone chipset that offers eight CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, and an integrated 5G modem capable of both a sub, six gigahertz and millimeter wave. The Exynos 1080 is built on a five nanometer process and includes a dedicated neural processing unit and DSP with an image signal processor capable of supporting a 200 megapixel sensor. However, Samsung didn't announce any launch devices for this new SOC just yet. Speaking of ARM based processors, first benchmarks for Max running Apple's new M1 chip are shown up on Geekbench and they look pretty good. The MacBook Air recorded a single core of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. That single core performance outranks any other available Mac benchmark on Geekbench. The multi-core score beats all of the 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro models as well. Benchmarks are good for the other M1s as well. Thirteen inch MacBook Pro shows a single core score of 1714, multi-core 6802, and the Mac Mini shows up at 1682 single core 7097 multi-core. Back in September, PUBG Mobile was banned in India due to its ties to Tencent. The South Korean PUBG Corporation now says it plans to create a new Indium subsidiary to oversee a relaunch of the title designed for the Indian market. The game would maximize data security and cater to local preferences and feature changes like characters now starting fully clothed, no nudity, or using green liquid instead of blood and setting the game in a virtual simulation training ground rather than real life. All right, let's talk a little more about what Google's doing. Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Google announced that it's going to stop offering unlimited storage for compressed images and videos backed up in its Google Photos as of June 1st, 2021. After that date, Google will offer users 15 gigs of media backup with further storage requiring a Google One subscription. All media uploaded prior to June 1st will not count against this new cap. Pixel owners will still be able to upload unlimited compressed images to Google Photos. Google claims 80 percent of its users won't even hit the 15 gig cap for three years. Google will send alerts before you hit the cap and is adding storage management tools to make it easier to find photos you might want to delete like duplicates, blurry images, screenshots. Google will estimate how long until you reach a storage limit based on your past uploads. Unlimited free storage. The thing of the past. Indeed. Oh boy, are people mad? Google did this to gain market share to get you to use Google Photos. It worked and now they want to reduce storage costs and storage costs are not huge for Google because they have so many efficiencies, but they're still there. And if you've sort of eliminated all the competitors or most of them, then you can afford to start looking at ways to save costs. Another way of putting this is Google has run everyone else out of business, except for the biggest players like Apple and Amazon. So they can afford to try to do some cost saving now. Yeah, well, and also driving people who might be considering a pixel to say, oh, well, that's a nice perk. If I go that route, I also love Google saying 80 percent of users aren't going to hit the 15 gig cap for three years. And you say, OK, that's a long time. You still going to be taking photos three years from now? So this is just a delayed issue. Let me also look at this from another perspective, though, because it's it's funny. You mentioned Apple and Amazon. Both of those companies are excellent at one thing, having your credit card and allowing you to buy other things because you already feel comfortable with them with your credit card. Apple did it with iTunes. Amazon has been doing it forever since they've always been in the sales business. Google, including YouTube, has always had a problem getting subscriptions off the ground. They have historically not been able to let you give them their credit card, at least on a mass level. I think what what they've done here and what they've also done with Drive and Gmail is just have a soft way for a very lightweight Google One subscription. It's not very expensive that they can just get into that game in the same way that you didn't even think about it. The first time you wanted to buy an album off iTunes or you wanted to buy Christmas presents on Amazon. No, it's a great point. Everybody is trying to get subscriptions. Subscriptions are the way to get recurring revenue. Google's Google One starts at $1.99 a month for 100 gigabytes. So yeah, I didn't know it's a charge. That's the idea is like, all right, two bucks. And I just never think of this problem again. Sure, Google Microsoft's director of identity security, Alex Weiner, has spent the past year encouraging Windows users to enable multi-factor authentication, which is a good thing. In his latest blog post, Weiner advises that users avoid telephone based MFA solutions if possible, citing known security issues in phone networks. This is good. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time. So it's good to see Weiner on a platform like Microsoft spread that word. He points out that SMS and voice calls are often transmitted in clear text, the easy availability of phishing tools to acquire phone-based MFA codes, and the prevalence of SIM swapping, which can transfer your phone number to an attacker's SIM and then they can get your second-factor codes. Weiner expects the security gap between phone-based MFA and other solutions to widen in the future. Weiner, of course, recommends the Microsoft Authenticator app as a more secure solution, but he does point out that hardware security keys are the most secure option, and he recommends that above all. I use Authy for my second factor because it works across a bunch of them, although LastPass provides one as well. Google has one as well. There's a lot of them out there. And the only reason not to use one is if the service you're trying to secure doesn't support an app-based multiple-factor. That's the problem is that this is a two-way street. We would have way bigger adoption of these apps because they are easier than the text message solution. And obviously, there are major, major, major problems with SIM swapping, but any place with a password, please get on the train because that's the only reason why I think... If people who are very, very dialed in like we are, and I'm sure everybody listening to this program is, if we can't universally do it, then there's problems with the system itself. Well, I think for a lot of folks, it's sort of like when you're signing up for a new service and you have the option to enable 2FA, you get this, would you like to do it via mobile or you want to use Authenticator program? Got your choice of those? And a lot of people go, hmm, I don't have one of those. So I'll just go with the mobile option. Again, better than nothing, but not the most secure way to do it. I think people think it's more complicated than it is because, again, they're getting a choice of something that they're very familiar with. Well, and a lot of companies, and I've looked at the Patreon engineering folks in the eye and told them I didn't like that they went from using an Authenticator app to using a text-based way of securing things. But a lot of them know that there's going to be more uptake from phones because of the reasons you're talking about, Sarah. And it's less costly and less complicated to support one way of providing another factor. And because that's better than nothing, a lot of companies make that choice. And I like that Microsoft is putting some pressure on people to say like, let's raise awareness about apps, let's raise awareness about the actual security keys that now can use Bluetooth and NFC. And that will help put pressure on companies to do the work to make things more secure. Yeah, one last thing. I don't know if you can accurately say that it's better than nothing. Yes, on a baseline security level, but when we're talking about sites like Patreon and obviously we're talking about things that are close to home here, a failure to me and a failure in a area where we know that there are problems is a major issue and speaks to the fact that this might not be a secure technology. Well, we got a couple new announcements from Amazon. First one is called Care Hub. It's a feature for Echo devices that lets caregivers send alerts or get activity reports for things like lights left on inside the house and also receive push notifications when the Echo is told to call for help. Amazon also announced Amazon Voice Services for US-based English language users will now try to guess what you want when you make a request and then offer a helpful follow-up question. So let's say you ask the Echo how long to steep tee? You know, what's good? It might follow up by asking you if you'd like to set a timer now that you know. The feature, which is called latent goal inference builds on natural turn taking. Lots of terms here that lets users converse with the assistant without having to keep using that wake word over and over. The feature will learn over time based on user behavior including what suggestions you respond to. Developers don't have to change Echo apps to take advantage of this but using Amazon's name-free interaction toolkit in apps will provide natural hooks for more interaction. I look forward to this becoming good and they are using machine learning and learning over time and all of that to make it good but I have never had a suggestion from my Echo that I told it yes, please do that. I'm waiting for that day. I cannot wait. Yeah, I also, I don't know if it's just rolling out slowly or what but I've got quite a few Amazon Assistant enabled devices. Well, I mean, okay, a few. Not that many but a few and not once have I ever been able to ask a follow up question that then I got the answer for. Not once. I try it all the time and I'm sometimes standing right there like make sure she can hear me. You know, I'm right here. Never once. So the wake word is not the end of the world but it does, I've been promised something that I look forward to and I don't have it yet. And furthermore, my Echo has continually gotten more chatty in terms of asking me follow up things and very rarely the success rate of that follow up thing being anything that I would actually like to pay attention to far more often it's plugging another product or service that this Echo can do has made it dumber in my opinion. The more it's talked, the less it has been exactly the kind of perfect assistant that I want sometimes stripped down is better although I can certainly understand the goal in. Well, if it works, Oh, it would be even more magical or the way you get it to work is for it to fail. You're teaching it. Yeah, yeah, because Amazon eventually would be like that follow up question nobody wants. We're getting no traction here. Maybe we have something else. Gosh, I wish I remember the query that I asked my Echo the other day and I got such a strange follow up like, I mean, I think I don't ask it that many, I tend to ask it the same things over and over like, you know, play this or what's the weather, you know, kind of stuff and it was something like, would you like me to read you a poem? I was like, I don't know. I don't have time for this. And it learned per user. It learned per user. So someone, maybe that worked for somebody out there. You're like, yeah, that's exactly what I wanted. How did you know? But now it knows for you like, okay, don't do that for Sarah. She doesn't want poetry after turning on her lights. So, yeah, exactly. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. On January 6th, 2021, the U.S. will count its electoral votes for president and vice president. And right now it seems likely that the next U.S. president will be former vice president, Joe Biden. So we thought we'd look at what kind of tech policy we might see from a Biden administration. Now, keep in mind, tech would start as a low priority for a Biden administration. His website refers to COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change as the main priorities. Tech gets a brief mention regarding expanding broadband internet. So we'll start there, but we're going to look through some of the other policy things including antitrust in section 230. But let's start with digital infrastructure. I think this is one of the least controversial ones. Telemedicine, remote work, modernization of the federal e-rate program to promote home access for disconnected students. That's all on the table, including a promised $20 billion to build broadband infrastructure investments in U.S. manufacturing as well as technology research and development. Now, the Biden campaign also called for a partnership with municipalities for building fiber internet. That would be something new. But otherwise, that $20 billion continues the current administration's $20.4 billion to subsidize broadband infrastructure in underserved areas. This is a bit of a bipartisan issue, Justin. It is. It also tends to be a football for pork and where you're going to put it and who's going to go first and how much of that $20 billion gets spent and who are the vendors that are going to be used to build it. So, this is, you know, it ain't exactly the Tennessee Valley Authority, right? Like, this is not a gigantic, bold moonshot to make sure that everybody who doesn't have internet gets internet in the next five to 10 years or something like that. But indeed, it is continuing basically the same base that we've had for the last few years. All right. Everybody knows any trust is going to continue. Enforcement might even possibly be expanded against Google. It'll certainly continue and possibly be accelerated against the others like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. And Biden's administration would likely push for reformed antitrust law. More regulation, but probably not breakups. Part of that is that he just named Ron Klain as the chief of staff who would put a voice for startups in the White House. Klain has written in TechCrunch about how regulation could hinder startup innovation. He worked for a Steve Case-led VC firm called Revolution from 2011 until this week. He also chaired an advisory board for progressive investment firm, Higher Ground Labs. And don't forget that Biden also has appointed Brookings Institution scholar Bill Baer to his transition team for the FTC. Baer was the guy who led antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2016, including leading the legal battle against Apple's e-book pricing. All right, there's the... Tom, would you like this medium cynical or spicy cynical? You know, I like spicy foods. Go spicy on me. If you want to get spicy, then you can say that post the Obama administration, and I do expect that we are going to see a lot of similar names and faces in the Biden administration that we did see during the Obama administration. To me, I would compare it to George H.W. Bush's cabinet, to George W. Bush's cabinet between 1992 and 2000. A lot of those names and faces took board positions in Silicon Valley. A lot of them have drawn paychecks and run campaigns from a lot of Bay Area or technology-based industries. I would suspect that we are going to get a very light touch on some of these issues. In fact, unless there is gigantic public out-crying for which I don't think there is now, I think that there are clear-cut cases for antitrust with some of these companies as we've laid out pretty explicitly in the past, but there are people in the streets protesting. And until that happens, I don't think that we're going to see much of any kind of priority being made from a Biden Justice Department on any of these antitrust cases. You're going to get cases against Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, though, don't you think? I mean, I think that is for sure. Whether they will be heavy cases, I don't know. You certainly aren't going to get pushes for breaking up companies in this. And you're likely to get light-touch regulation because you've got people in the administration who would not want startups to be affected. And that's always the cry, is like, well, if you regulate the Googles, they win because they've already figured out how to make a business, and now you're stopping the startups from getting acceleration. We spend a lot of time in politics talking about for whom you owe your victory, right? And for the Democrats, it's often union interests and stuff like that. That's something that's just sort of baked into our modern political conversation. I think you are going to see part of that conversation at least in the Obama-era Democratic Party for which is now coming back into power that Silicon Valley is one of those industries that they have spent a lot of time in. So you might see less emphasis on antitrust, but a lot of the folks I'm reading are suggesting you might get more focus on a national privacy and data protection law. Though, don't forget, in the past, as Senator Biden co-sponsored several pieces of legislation for surveillance by law enforcement, including Kalea, which approved surveillance over the Internet, including VoIP for the first time. There is a phrase called regulatory capture. Are you familiar with this phrase? Yes, but explain it because I think I'm fuzzy on it. So regulatory capture is, let's say everybody's complaining about privacy, for example. That regulatory capture basically says, all right, in the interest of privacy, you're gonna need to hire 50 people that always make sure that you are complying to these new privacy laws that we are putting in. That means that all the big companies that are entrenched will always be able to hire the 50 people to do it. The bootleg startup might not or run into a faster bill that they would be able to pay and be more likely that they would sell out to a larger company. I do think we're going to get privacy stuff, but that's where my antenna goes up on that, considering the cast of characters that we'll likely be putting into place. Also, there will be continued attention to section 230 regarding disinformation, privacy, and moderation rules. Though Biden has said on the campaign trail that 230 immediately should be revoked, he also said the U.S. should be setting standards and would be likely to pull the FCC and executive orders out of the 230 debate and might instead push for new legislation. Yeah, this is one of those. Who did it? Trump? Absolutely not. Let's get out of this. The executive order stuff. There's better ways to handle it for which I think that you could certainly make a very compelling argument. I think he's gonna let this get fought about in the House and Senate. Of course, we'll get new leadership at the FCC. Here we go again on the net neutrality. Let's go back to America around, although as Senator Biden did not support the 2007 Internet Freedom Preservation Act, which was supported by Senator Sanders and then Senators Obama and Clinton. So he has a little different history. Also Comcast Senior Vice President David Cohen hosted Biden's first presidential campaign front-raiser. So he's very friendly with the ISPs. Yeah. Don't bet your heart on that neutrality, kids. Then lots of other stuff here, continued pressure on China, probably with a different approach more in concert with Europe. The gig economy, there's gonna still be pushes against Uber and Lyft, action on bias in AI and facial recognition, reform of the H-1B system for tech workers to remove limitations on green cards, and so much more. So you know what? If you want to follow more of that, you'll probably get a little of it over on politics, politics, politics, I would guess. Indeed. Well, let's switch from a potential Biden administration, Sarah, to a memorial, an anniversary of sorts. Yeah, kind of both of these things. Let us harken back to November 12th, 1970, when Doug Brazil and Paul Linman captured a historical event with a 16-millimeter color reversal motion picture film. You might say, what was that event? I wasn't around. Maybe I wasn't even alive. The Exploding Whale. Yes, the Exploding Whale of Oregon. Because three days earlier, that same year, a 45-foot sperm whale had washed up on the beach. Beached whale was not alive near Florence, Oregon. And not only was it too big to cart away, it had begun to smell very bad. Neighborhood, not happy. Back then, the whale was meant to explode into a million tiny pieces using around 20 cases of dynamite. Everyone kind of says now, yeah, we didn't have enough dynamite. It was supposed to be eaten by birds and just kind of disappear in general, become part of the circle of life. But that didn't exactly happen. Brazil and Linman say that they had to run to escape the flying blubber. And one chunk of airborne blubber was so big it flattened a car. So they're kind of lucky to be alive. Now, the Oregon Historical Society is bringing it back and has the original 16-millimeter footage from that day converted to digitally remastered 4K resolution for all to enjoy in the modern age. And by the way, if you're wondering if exploding whales are still happening, the protocol today is to bury a whale of this size. Not to praise it. That's right. This is one of the classic, the initial, like, internet meme. Meme, yeah. Like early 2000s. One of the first viral videos. And it's finally 4K. Yeah. That poor whale. I mean, I know whale was a goner anyway, but so it's such a violent way to go. A friend of ours knows a guy who was there. In fact, a military demolitions expert and knew immediately this was going to be a fiasco and moved his car a mile away. Yeah. I was five months old, but I remember it well. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Paul wrote in a few people did, but we'll read Paul's email. Having thoughts on our Apple coverage from Tuesday and the 16 gig RAM limit on the new M1 Max. Paul says to think it would even come close to using 64 gigs on a current Mac mini means that Apple is super magical with this new chip. A new chip architecture won't affect RAM usage by 4X. Also, if you're using 64 gigs right now, you probably want a workhorse computer. And there are two factors that indicate that the M1 computers are just not ready to be workhorses yet. I think the 16 gig RAM limit and two fewer USB ports indicate the chipset can't handle that same throughput. If the M1 were a car, I would say that Apple launched the Tesla Model S, but it's not a truck yet. And if you want the Apple Cybertruck chipset, think you have to wait. Yeah. I think you're right, Paul. I think that's why you still have the Intel based Mac minis that you can get higher RAM on in there. And I think Apple's intention is to either put out models with higher RAM or possibly an M2 chip, a more Cybertruck-like chipset. That's kind of what I expect when we get the round of updates that bring Apple Silicon to the Mac Pro and the iMac and the 15-inch MacBook or 16-inch MacBook Pro. So yeah, I like that comparison to the Model S and the truck. I think that's apt. Hey, folks, if you like board games or want to add some excitement to this year's upcoming holiday season, our very own long-time DTNS supporter, Creative Ast Arts, Ryan J. Officer, has officially released his run of Secret Santa Board Game second edition. So we like to support Ryan right back because he's supported us so well. So go check it out at creativeastarts.com slash holidays. The link will also be in our show notes. If you have comments for anything we talk about on the show, questions, anything, feedback in general, send it to feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Thanks in advance. We love hearing your stories. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Mike McLaughlin, Reed Fishler, and Mark Gibson. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young. Justin, politics just keeps rolling on. So where do people find out more about what you're doing? You know, like that extra scene at the end of a Marvel movie, we indeed have further exploration here after this 2020 election has begun to wound down on the presidential side. And that is the control of the Senate. It will happen via two runoff elections that happen simultaneously on January 5th in Georgia, and I'll be on the scene. So if you want to follow everything that's going to go on before that and then enjoy the coverage from the Peach State, you gotta head on over to the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast. Hey, folks, if you don't know what a micro-LED is, I have a solution for you, knowallittlemore.com. That's the latest episode of our series that explains big tech topics like Wi-Fi 6, 5G. This week, micro-LED, if you're like, what does a micro-LED in a television mean? What does it mean on a phone screen? It's all there. Check out our related show, Know a Little More, to know a little more about all that and more. If you're a patron, you get it in your RSS feed. If you're not, go check it out, knowallittlemore.com. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21.30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. We'll also be back tomorrow with Shannon Morris and Lynn Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program.