 Coming up on DTNS French digital tax compromise the new number two in smart speakers and the most annoying thing about the iPhone reveal This is the Daily Tech news for Monday, August 26 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio feline I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the shows producer Roger change. Yes I am back from two weeks of doing sword and laser in Ireland covering world con and And and just taking a little break in France if you want to hear more about that, of course good day internet Our expanded show is full of my praises for my Irish tour guide And hopefully some other things as well. So go check that out at patreon.com slash DTNS Let's start with a few tech things. You should know NASA officially opened at the eight Kim super computer at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley Capable of three point six nine petaflops of theoretical performance eight can uses 46,080 second gen Intel Xeon cores and 221 terabytes of storage eight can uses uses a modular design to save energy and easily expand Compute or data storage capabilities supporting up to 16 additional modules an earlier prototype was able to save two million Kilowatt hours of power and over three million gallons of water in 2018 using a similar design the Supercomputer will first get to work modeling and simulating the entry descent and landing to the moon for the Artemis project Cool. I'm looking forward to that Nvidia and VMware announced a partnership to let virtualization of GPUs on-premise or in the cloud using VMware cloud on AWS Nvidia's V compute server will provide the virtualization framework and is optimized to run on VMware's V sphere This will already say this fear This will allow a single GPU to be shared by multiple users as well as aggregate GPUs for larger techs Compute server will support Nvidia's data processing and machine learning libraries called Rapids as well as containerized applications All right, let's talk a little bit about that French digital tax piece. Yes, French president Emmanuel Yes, my French. Yes, he's Tom gets it. He was in France recently Announced that he and US president Donald Trump have agreed on a compromise regarding French taxation of tech companies So essentially France will continue with its current plans to tax tech companies under a new organization for economic cooperation and development Or OECD framework, which they agreed will happen next year The framework is meant to tax companies based on where they operate not where they're headquartered The current French plan requires that marketplace and advertising companies that generate more than 750 million euros in global revenue and 25 million euros in France to pay 3% of French revenue in taxes That impacts mostly US tech companies tax paid under this French scheme before the OECD framework is implemented Will be used as credits for the OECD plan and any over payments will be refunded. So Okay, what's actually going on and then what what what what it means if you didn't quite follow that Maybe maybe a short way of explaining it is France wants to have a law that taxes companies That otherwise avoid tax in France by headquartering themselves say in Dublin a lot of companies do that And say oh well all of our taxes are under Ireland which Ireland has a lower tax rate So France is trying to say hey if you're making a lot of money you're making a lot of revenue in France We should get a cut of that that of course angered the United States who said yeah but the way you wrote this law pretty much targets US companies and So what Macron said here was okay? The organization for economic cooperation and development the OECD has been working on a framework To kind of get rid of this loophole Europe wide. So why don't we do this? we will implement our version of this and When the OECD comes in with their version, which everybody is going to have a say in then we'll Basically retroactively apply it and if companies had paid more under our scheme We'll give them money back. Otherwise we'll credit it towards their OECD taxes now whether the US actually has said great That's cool Then we don't have a problem with that is somewhat unclear, but it seems to at least be the hope of France yeah, I mean I Completely understand where the French government is coming from on this It it in many ways it makes a lot of sense Okay, you can headquarter wherever you are But if there's enough operation happening in our country, there's some taxes that that have to be implemented And yeah, it sounds like people are playing nice with this Yeah, I mean it's a loophole that companies legally exploit to say oh We want a headquarter in the European Union Ireland has a lower tax rate We'll put our office in Dublin and then we'll have all the revenue go through there on the books So that we get the lowest tax rate why you would do the same thing, right? Sure Yeah, if you're allowed to do is say hey, you know what? Let's change the rules so that they can't use that Chromebooks are getting serious about the workplace Dell unveiled the latitude That's right. The good old workhouse horse Dell latitude now has a Chromebook edition the latitude 5400 Chromebook enterprise and the latitude 5300 two-in-one Chromebook enterprise so one's a two-in-one They're both available in 13 and 14 inch screens both laptops offer 8th gen Intel processors up to a core i7 and Claim to be the first Chromebooks to offer up to 32 gigabytes of RAM So pretty spec'd out like a normal latitude just running chrome both include enterprise grade SSDs up to a terabyte optional LTE connectivity USB-C docking and The biggest advantage if you're an IT professional deciding whether to buy a fleet of these for your for your business is 24-7 del cut pro support Google's Chrome enterprise support Google admin console for managing Linux environments So you can deploy these easier and faster the latitude 5400 starts at 699 bucks and the 5300 two-in-one starts at $819 both available starting August 27th. I really like these specs. In fact They are very similar to my most recent purchase, which is a Mac mini which was a whole lot more expensive than these Chromebooks But yeah, I mean, I guess I guess I don't know the knock against it is like, eh, they're not real pretty looking They're they're just kind of gray Dell laptops. Yeah, but the innards are pretty pretty nice good They are not uglier than any other Dell latitude as far as I can tell But yeah, these are these are enterprise books They're they're meant to not annoy any purchase manager anywhere with how they look And and look professional And and their spec dwell so so they'll be powerful enough to stick around for a while. I think that's one of the biggest Concerns when you're when you're rolling out these in the enterprise is we don't want to have to upgrade these in a year So you want to have 32 gigabytes of RAM as a potential Option here you you want to have a lot of this stuff, you know And this is Google trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's market It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft responds with its more limited version of windows that is that has been going after chrome And whether they'll make any price deals But expect to see Google have similar announcements soon with HP Lenovo, etc Because they really want to move from being considered To be the education market, which is how a lot of people think of chrome os to also be an option in the enterprise market I will be curious to see how many two and ones go to the enterprise versus the the the The less expensive 5400 the 5300 is the two and one And how much more in a workplace environment? Employees will be like the two and one come on for meetings. Please you got to give me that one Yeah, I feel like I don't know. This is what I'd like to hear people weigh in on feedback at daily tech news show dot com But I feel like sales people can often make that like well I need to be able to you know manipulate it and be able to show off presentations with the easier. So, yeah uh, good questions Cannellus estimates that Baidu is now the world's number two vendor of smart speakers Baidu claimed 17.3 of the worldwide market despite only selling in china with 4.5 million shipments and q2 of this year Google shipped 4.3 million units and fell to third Baidu's basic speakers start as low as 89 one, which is about 12 us dollars Cannellus attributed google's fall in the rankings to the change to nest branding and a focus on smart displays over smart speakers amazon still leads the world with a 25 share of the total market shipping 6.6 million units the global market grew 55.4 to 26.1 million units in q2, although it did decline 2.4 percent in the us So there's lots of interesting things to pick apart here one baidu Coming in at an aggressive price point in china at 89 yuan and just toppling alibaba Alibaba was the top smart speaker maker in china And they there aren't even mentioned in most of the stories about this because baidu just put them to the dust And became the number two globally while only selling in china Second interesting thing of this story is google which sells everywhere, but china having a lot of Branding confusion with the change to nest focusing on displays which people are already a little creeped out by smart speakers Adding a display sometimes with a camera makes people even more creeped out Sounds like there's been some muddled messaging hurting google in this space amazon not hurt by that running away with it As the worldwide leader Except in the us though and that's the third thing i find interesting Where the market declined in the us and the us is where you're getting all these scare stories about people Listening to your conversations i mean i guess you get them in europe too But maybe that market just hadn't grown enough to to show that kind of decline Yeah, i don't think we're at the well everybody has a smart speaker plateau point yet the decline definitely has to do with Probably some bad press a little bit of market confusion, but yeah i mean baidu sort of coming out of Almost smart speaker obscurity in china alone Just goes to show you not only you know If you price something attractively enough people will buy it and how strong the home market is To to to to surpass google's global Pretty much everywhere in the whole world besides china you get a google smart speaker. So i mean granted It's available at every single market worldwide, but it's it's available in a lot of very large markets. Yes, exactly Yeah, uh and granted china a huge market So it's it's not impossible for to do what baidu did but it's significant that it did it And i think it's really interesting to see that and and as i've said before this is this is uh a story about Transparency when we have these things about like oh they're listening to you They should have told you that there is a very small chance That your recording could be listened to by someone uh and because they didn't they opened themselves up to these scare stories That make it feel like oh, they're listening to everything you say Uh, which is how a lot of people perceive these stories when zero point two percent of recordings even get forwarded Most of those recordings are very mundane things But you have a couple of salacious items in there and that makes a good headline creeps everybody else out And then your market declines by 2.4 percent I wonder how much the nest branding really confused people to the point where they're like Well, I want to google home speaker not a nest I mean all of that would be pointed to by google I think if you're if you're Unaware of money of many of the differences and if you're not creeped out and you go into the store and you're like Okay, I heard there's google and there's amazon and you go up to the shelf and you're like wait that one's called nest Is that google i mean it has a google logo, but this one's called amazon. I'll just get that one Yeah, right It's it just it causes enough friction that it it doesn't stop people. It's not like they sold zero, right? But it might close them Also taking part in the g7 meetings in france was australian prime minister scott morrison Announcing his government will seek to create a framework to block domains that host extremist material So this is they want to do a thing to do a thing a 24 7 crisis coordination center would be set up To monitor the internet and look for extremist content Australia's e-safety commissioner would then be in charge of determining on a case by case basis Whether material should be blocked or not specific criteria have yet to be determined But they'll know it when they see it I bet the commissioner will work with companies to be able to block the content quickly during an attack So they need to set up a thing They need to define a thing and then they need to figure out how to get the tech companies to do the thing Right, whether it's the telcos blocking the domain or if it's particular sites like youtube or facebook removing stuff Large tech companies and telcos therefore have until the end of september to tell the government how they'll cooperate with the scheme Now that they've told them they want to do this vague thing It's on the tech companies and the telcos to tell them how to do it The australian government is also considering legislation to force tech companies to improve overall safety. That's even a little farther in the open Okay, so first thing it sounds like this is all a great idea You know the government's like we shouldn't have to see this stuff is you know It's hurting our community the tech companies need to be on board But we don't exactly know how to implement this So at the end of september tech companies come to us and let us know what you're going to do to help us meet our initiative Yeah, I feel like this is the worst example of government by press release You're taking a very specific example And a very horrible example and I don't mean to minimize that with what happened in christ church And you're saying let's create an entire system based on making sure that you don't have live streaming like that again And that's just going to lead to disappointment because that is not what's going to happen again Uh, and you don't really it's very clear to me that they don't really know what they're looking for and how to stop it They just want to make it look like they're doing something to stop a horrible thing from happening Uh, and so while I laud the goal of saying yeah, we we we should not Have a world in which someone can live stream themselves killing people Uh, I'm not sure this is the best way to achieve that goal Well, yeah, I mean and if you if if you go, you know a little bit further with what the government also wants to do which is Introduce legislation to force a facebook live to not exist for example because it's sort of like, okay Well, how does that how do we make sure that something like that doesn't happen? Well, the tool would have to not exist and the tool would have to not exist on lots of other platforms Where they also exist. So that is I mean that's a that is that would be a big Turn around for how the world works right now Yeah, I'm more and more of the uh of the opinion that that's an area worth investigating is The fact that companies don't curate more Uh, because they don't for for multiple reasons. They don't curate more Some of them think that the algorithm is better. Some of them know that the algorithm brings more streams They just can't get off that, you know, they just can't let go of that that huge amount of traffic Uh, and some of them just purely believe that you know curation is is picking a winner And they they don't want to be in that position But I am more and more of the belief that that's some kind of human curation would solve a lot of youtube's problems right away And their resistance to it is actually making things worse Uh, not making things better and that is an area to investigate. See if I'm right. See if my instincts bear something out Uh, but but also figure out how to actually change things to Disincentivize bad content from being picked up and spread Well, if you've ever wondered why things show up at the top of search results I've got an interesting story for you. Let's all scratch our heads on this Monday the google webmaster's twitter account responded to a post from july 29th by suhask 93 That's the twitter handle that asked if referral traffic was considered as a ranking factor in search The response read hi suhas. No traffic to a website isn't a ranking factor If you're starting to get relevant traffic and users love your site. That's a good start though Now on the se roundtable.com website, which talks a lot about seo Readers have joined in with a range of skepticism about this response from cogent theories on what google actually might be doing like monitoring back links and then a lot of sarcastic posts like Websites themselves not a ranking factor. Yeah. Yeah, this caught my eye today because I I think maybe Privileging some sites or or incorporating the idea that sites get a lot of traffic Would improve search results because then you wouldn't have these gamified sites that that have zero visitors Otherwise showing up at the top of search results. I think sometimes when you're looking for things on google It's a mess. It's worse than it was in the early days because there's all these sites. You have to wade through go No, that's just seo. That's just gaming the system. Okay. Here's the actual thing So I feel like google really has to take that into account somehow Oh, I think it's weird too that this post happened About a month after the original question, but maybe they just you know getting getting through the backlog. Who knows It would be nice and this is you know, I'm I'm Suggesting something that I'm sure google has uh would not want to implement But it would be nice if you know that there's websites where it's like the common misspelling And they end up getting a lot of traffic because just someone's going too quick or whatever It would be nice if google could somehow Have some sort of a you know a black list of like commonly identified misspelled websites and give you a little pop-up that was like did you mean to go here and the more times No, no, no, no, no, they do that sometimes. It's just that I haven't seen that in a while The websites stay ahead of it so so easily. Yeah, I mean granted. There's a lot of downsides to Saying like oh if you get more traffic, you get higher seo that that that that's the rich get richer and the poor get poor I I I wouldn't say as simple as just give higher results to The most trafficked websites, but I do think it's a valuable piece of data that they should be taking into account Yeah, you know and balancing it out with a lot of other factors So they don't want to appear to be making the rich richer That's I think that's what that's about. Hey folks If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com do it now We're back. See Nets Patrick Holland posted an impassioned plea sunday titled apple needs to fix the iphone 11's buttons So accidental screenshots go away His his overall column is full of a lot of things he yearns for including a stylus. He has some note 10 nv usb c Inbox bluetooth headphones the ability to use the back of an iphone as a wireless charger But the one that seems to have struck the cord is when he writes The volume buttons don't need to be directly across the screen from the power button. Seriously I take so many accidental screenshots. My gallery is full of images of my lock screen Stagger the buttons so there's room to put a finger for the extra leverage I occasionally need to change the volume Android fans you could take a breather and chuckle right now, but for us iphone users Sarah This is a regular source of pain. Oh, it is keep dreaming about those inbox bluetooth speakers Or headphones rather patrick, uh, that's not happening But it's funny I actually have the opposite problem with patrick because I take a lot of screenshots sometimes because I want to take a screenshot and sometimes because my eyes are bad and I take screenshots so I can read things that are too small I take a lot of screenshots and I'm constantly using the volume down button by accident instead of the volume up button And everybody knows that that just makes my screen go to sleep So then I have to like open up my phone again and then take the screenshot It's it's mildly annoying mild inconvenience, but drives me up the wall and I agree that The buttons, you know, yes, you feel them and if you know what everything does and yet I am constantly making mistakes and that's not my only gripe uh with my current iphone because More than once now, I have dialed 911 and successfully gotten through to a dispatcher while I was jogging With my phone safely in a snug fanny pack Nowhere near me trying to like sos anybody just got squeezed in the in the pack Yeah, and you know sometimes Well, you know my flashlight will be on when I take my phone out of my bag You know, I'm like my flashlight on you know because you can do that while it's locked You can take photos while it's locked as well But I also again mild annoyance, you know the volume will get it will hit something So I'm listening to a podcast and I'm kind of like why is the why the volume is going away and you know Sometimes I I can do it from my bluetooth wireless Ear buds and sometimes I got a rummage through a purse or or what have you but but the calling 911 thing is like I mean I am Mortified and I do not want to waste a 911 dispatcher's time and I absolutely didn't mean to do it But I was simply running I have done the 911 thing. I I generally notice it before It becomes a problem, but it's usually when I've like It's when I'm jogging too and I take the phone out And I'm holding it because I maybe I want to change a podcast I changed my mind or I'm like, oh, you know what? I want to listen to a baseball game right now And I'm holding it and I'm waiting for a good moment to stop and do that, right? Uh, and and suddenly I'm hearing Oh my god, the first time you hear that noise for no for somebody who hasn't maybe you've done it on purpose You actually called me Yeah, the first time I was like, well, that's a kind of an aggro ringtone someone has around me And then I was like, I think it's me. Oh, it must be an amber other. Oh gosh. I'm calling 911 You know, I've been lucky enough to be able to catch it before it ever got picked up But yeah, I'm sure they they get it a lot If there's any 911 dispatchers in the audience Let us know if that annoys you or relieves you that it wasn't in fact an emergency And if it's a rampant problem Because the first time it happened I went well, that was embarrassing You know, and then the second time I was like, this is a problem You know, this is this is a user interface problem that's like above and beyond like, hey I wish the buttons were staggered a little bit better I do hear that, you know, the button issue is is is is another one I used to take screenshots of audible all the time because I had this weird thing with my headphones where I would press pause and then They wouldn't come off pause, right? I'd do the tap on the earphones to press pause and they wouldn't come off pause And and so I would take the phone out and as I'm reaching in and taking it out I would accidentally take a screenshot. So I mean, I definitely I definitely had that problem for a long time The earbuds don't seem to do that anymore. They don't seem to lose it But on my recent vacation, as you can see, I was taking the 10 line to the eight line While holding my phone running to the train stop I made sure that I took a screenshot And there's a couple of pictures and then oh look there. I did I did it again. So yeah, it happened to me just on this most recent trip Well, you're you're an android user. Do you have anything like this? Do you have any versions of this that happen to you on android? Kind of but you can change like even even in In the an android os you can tweak some of the basic stuff like the buttons and what they do I used to have buttons that would not buttons but the app buttons would would move because I would I guess they were in my pocket or whatever and it felt like someone's touching They would move over but you can sit how long you can press before you can move things And there are third-party apps that allow you to literally overhaul What any of the buttons do and what functions you can and cannot access There you go. That's the benefit of android the customization helps you work your way around those those problems Well, the nice uh, the good news is that any day now we'll get an announcement for apple's new iphone event And iphone 12 will solve all these issues. Of course, absolutely and bring a whole bundled in bluetooth wireless headphones All of it. Yeah, yay Spoiler thanks everybody who participates in our sub reddit iphone stories welcome android stories Welcome any tech stories that tickle your fancy welcome smith stories and vote on them at daily tech news show We also have a facebook group join it if you haven't already facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show All right, let's check in with the amateur traveler chris christensen Who's back with some news on trip advisors newest and serious filter? This is chris christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute Trip advisor is a popular site for finding reviews about hotels. They're adding a new filter and this one is a little serious They're basically adding a filter that will let you find which accommodations restaurants and tours have had reports of sexual assault Rape or sexual harassment. They're basically going to flag particular hotels that have safety warnings But they're going to look at reviews with safety warnings that include rapes drugging Sexual assault robberies and they're researching other safety filters that include if the neighborhood of the hotel is walkable at night Or if it has 24 by 7 security So they were under some pressure to do this But I think it's a good move on trip advisor's part And so another reason to use them to try and find a safe hotel room Which I think we can all agree we would like this is chris christensen from amateur traveler yeah, very serious topic, but When you're staying in a city you're unfamiliar with you may not realize You know where where the riskier areas are or if a hotel is It just happens to have a risky clientele or something. Yeah Yeah, I have definitely stayed in some hotels where I was like it wasn't even so much that the hotel was bad But I was like, oh, yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't stay in this area again Yeah, I've done the same. Yeah, well heads up never hurt us. Absolutely In the mail back today carol wrote in about our discussion with jesson robert young last thursday about Robo calls and how awful they are carol says I want to tell you about my anti robo call strategy I have I have an apple watch to get all my non-call notifications on So I have my phone set to do not disturb with contacts and still get all those notifications I call this the nuclear option. I get about one per day average She's talking about robo calls over the last month, but even that's too many they seem to have slowed down for me lately Yeah, um, wow, that's an interesting that's an interesting way of doing that I I feel like mine have slowed down too. I bet they're gonna pick up as we get closer to the election though Because we're gonna get lots of those robo calls. Oh My healthcare robo calls are on a tear right now. I mean I I I definitely I think I said last last week was particularly bad. I said something like I was getting five a day That's probably not the average, but the average is at least three Yeah, I I even got them I got two I got two over the past two weeks when I was out of the country Um, and so it was very easy for me to know that they were not calls that I wanted to take because I was like, no It'd be golly me right now Um, so yeah, well, it's usually like, do you know anybody in North Dakota? No, did they leave a voicemail? No, okay? Yeah, well, I don't care whoever that is didn't You know see an area code that I don't recognize and I'll look it up Not because I'm gonna answer the phone because I'm like, who what what area code is that? Yeah Yeah Well, thanks for writing in carol always good to hear solutions of what's working for our Our community and especially our patrons. Thank you to our patrons for making the show what it is Yes, our goal each month is to get one more patron than last month And you could be the person that puts us over the top become a dts member get an ad free rss feed special episodes from myself On how we do the show i'll be back to doing those editors desks this week Special episodes looking back on the tech news of the past and more Sign up at patreon.com Slash dts and special treat if you're in austin texas tomorrow. I will not be on dts again I know I just got back, but I'm traveling to austin for the out-of-bounds comedy festival To take part in a live night attack with bryan brushwood and justin robert young So come on by and visit it's downstairs at the hideout theater in austin texas 10 dollars Cover charge gets you two openers plus the live night attack as the headliner of that particular section of the comedy festival Doors open at 8 I think it's running from 8 30 to 10 It says on the website you can go check it out at oob fest oob fest.com That's no b at the beginning just oob fest.com and see the schedule there and Hopefully i'll see some of you when we're in austin very cool Got something on your mind got a question got a comment our email address is feedback at daily tech news show at dot com We are also live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live Back tomorrow. Well, you are patrick beija is talk to them tomorrow and i'll see you on wednesday This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Hope you have enjoyed this bro