 Coming up on DTNS, how Amazon plans to keep you stocked up on the essentials, even online conferences are now being canceled and the major social media platforms unite to stop virus misinformation. This is the Daily Tech News for St. Patrick's Day, Tuesday, March 17, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about dealing with online delivery of movies. We were talking about our favorite Saints' Days. It's all there on Good Day, Internet Become a Member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sonos announced its new Sonos S2 app and operating system will come on new Sonos devices starting in May and arrive for existing devices in June. It will enable higher quality audio and better usability. Sonos device is made between 2011 and 2015. However, we'll need to keep the old Sonos app, which will be renamed Sonos S1 controller. Wah, wah. Apple announced its retail stores outside China will no longer reopen March 27, but remain closed until further notice. Return periods are extended until 14 days after the store reopens. Google. Whenever that is right. Yeah. Translate for Android can now translate from voice to text in real time, something they showed off in January. At launch, it supports English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai. It will require an internet connection to work because it sends it to the tensor processing units for all that machine learning magic. Starting on March 20, when, no, not 20th, that wouldn't be that March 9th, rather, when Indian mobile phone users placed a call, several carriers started playing a 30-second information alert about COVID-19 instead of the usual tones indicating ringing. Users can press the number one or pound hashtag key to revert to a ringing sound. Yeah, because once you've heard it a couple of times, you really don't need it again properly. The ringing sound is so much more entertaining, I guess. Waymo is halting testing on public roads in California and pausing its Waymo One service in Phoenix, Arizona, which lets customers hail autonomous car rides that include a human safety driver. However, Waymo's fully autonomous rides in the Phoenix area that do not include human safety driver will continue. That's interesting. TransferWise has partnered with China's Alipay for international money transfers. TransferWise's 7 million plus users can now send Chinese Yuan, converted from 17 currencies, to Alipay users, which make up about 1.2 billion people worldwide if you include its e-wallet partners. Let's talk about Amazon. I don't know about y'all, but I have noticed that things that I want to order from Amazon have much longer delivery times than they used to. Things like Amazon Fresh here in the United States where they deliver the groceries, pretty much unavailable to get a delivery time. Amazon running into stock shortages, these long delivery times because, of course, people are stocking up for self-isolation. Here are a few of the actions Amazon is taking as a result. Amazon says it will hire 100,000 workers for its U.S. warehouse and delivery operations. That means workers in the U.S., U.K. and Europe will also get temporary raises of either $2.00, two pounds, or two euros per hour through the end of April. There's a raise for Canada in there, too. Amazon has also instituted compulsory overtime at some locations, including in the United Kingdom. A clause in a lot of contracts allows for this implementation of overtime with pay. The clause is usually only used during holiday periods, so they're basically seeing what they expect to happen in November and December, unexpectedly happening right now. Working-time regulations in the U.K. at least limit overtime to a maximum of 48 hours per week, averaged over a 17-week period. And finally, the Fulfillment by Amazon program offers warehousing and shipping for third-party sellers. So if you want to sell your stuff, you can let Amazon keep it and ship it for you. And the other thing is that sales services, along with larger vendor shipment services, are being suspended through April 5th. So no new inbound shipments can be created before that time. If you're a store that has stuff in an Amazon warehouse, people can still buy that and they'll ship it for you. But you can't send anything to the warehouse until at least April 5th, and it might be longer. Sellers can still sell products on Amazon if they fulfill the orders themselves. So anything you were thinking of sending to Amazon for this program, you could decide to just ship it out yourself. Amazon is doing this because it wants to prioritize the shipment of, quote, household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products. And a third party that provides those products can still participate because they're making exceptions for these products. They want to prioritize that. A lot of things going on here, from the hiring to the over time to the shipment. But this is significant to me because Amazon is the best at this. We have almost taken for granted that you push a button on Amazon and you can get it sometimes that day. Patrick, how does this make you feel? I think there might be a worry from some that would be, oh my god, Amazon is having difficulties. It means the supply chain is constrained or might, you know, become, it might become difficult to get goods in the stores. I'm 100% not an expert. But what I do know is that Amazon is the destination where everyone is going to try to get something from. So I'm guessing that, yes, it will affect Amazon, it seems. But I'm guessing that other traditional retail stores, brick and mortar, might not get affected. It's what we've been hearing. But from Amazon's perspective, I think all of it makes sense. There are two concerns. One is the businesses that usually sell on Amazon if they don't have a lot of stock in their warehouses that might become an economic problem for them. And then the hiring of all of the workers, of course, is I'm guessing they're going to implement very strict safety regulations for them to work and not become transiting factors of the virus. But they're not the only ones that have to go to work. So I'm guessing they know what they're doing, hoping in that department. You know, for all of the businesses that are suffering a real drop in customers, there are the industries that are seeing a huge spike, temporary as it may be, something like a company like Amazon or a streaming service like Netflix. There are temporary spikes of demand in some industries just because of the nature of what's going on. Amazon hiring 100,000 workers and also encouraging people who have lost jobs or at least have jobs on hold in other industries, hospitality, restaurant, travel, for example. You know, it's not just going to be like, hey, we need a bunch more people temporarily, so everybody come work for us, it's all going to be great. I mean, it's more complicated than that, but to be able to absorb some of that workforce that wants to work and Amazon's saying, we need you because we don't have the capacity to be able to meet your demand at this time, it makes sense. I mean, it's moving around of jobs and I hope that at least for some folks, this is a good situation. Yeah, like you say, Patrick, this doesn't mean that the supply of things is drying up. This means that more people are ordering than Amazon anticipates even for peak demand. Demand has passed a normal peak and that's because a lot of people suddenly in many parts of the world are stocking up and you combine that with the fear of going outside. Some people are like, you know what, I don't want to go to the grocery store, even if they did have what I want, but maybe your grocery store is out of a particular thing because a lot of people are going to the grocery store and buying that particular thing right now. Amazon's running into higher orders and so inventories run out and they have to go back to their suppliers and get them refilled and you don't have as many delivery drivers. They hire on a bunch of extra delivery drivers every year in the fall to anticipate that holiday demand and then they let them go because you don't need them anymore and they were not expecting this. So yeah, that means that Amazon does have to increase its staff in order to deal with this. I'm also not an expert in how this works on the back end either, but the fact that nobody's saying there isn't enough stuff out there, it's the way we're getting it to people that is the problem and Amazon is trying to be a solution for that. Well, even more than just the way we're getting it to people is that, as you said, there was a peak so the existing warehouses are empty, but people are going to be stocked up for a week or two or three and those stocks are gonna get replenished in the stores in the meantime, probably even faster than that. At least that is what in Europe, the people responsible for the big retail stores have been saying like, we have so much stuff. The price of toilet paper is gonna plunge now because everybody has it. Basically, essentially, yes. Yeah, and I think more people are going to keep buying things from Amazon simply because they wanna avoid that interaction. Somebody leaving it on your porch is more reassuring to a lot of people. And just have it. I mean, I used to live within walking distance to several grocery stores, not the case anymore. So I order a lot of stuff on Amazon that I used to just kinda stroll down a couple blocks and pick up in person. So it's that nature of, well, this is how I get stuff. Oh dear, this is not how I can get stuff the way that I've been used to getting stuff and it's a disruption all around. Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and the White House Office of Science and Technology have released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19. The open dataset of more than 29,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus family can be used by machine learning communities to mine the data for insights to fight COVID-19. Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer, Eric Horvitz, said that the goal was, quote, to create tools that can help scientists stand top of thousands of articles to enable them to develop approaches to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Data mining like this can help researchers evaluate hypotheses, create research plans, understand works, and create question answering thoughts. Yeah, this is not a silver bullet, right? But there is no human that can read and understand 29,000 scholarly articles in the time that the scientists need to get this information. So this is an extra tool to put in their tool set to be able to understand what's out there and what could help. Indeed. I don't have a lot to add to this. I think it's a good thing and it's what should happen and it's happening, so hopefully it will help. Yeah, and it's good to know out there if you're somebody who is in the industry or you work with someone or know someone or have a relative who's in the industry who's working on this to know that this is another resource that people have in order to crack this, and hopefully they will. Yeah, I mean, with a lot of information out there, not all of it correct or what's best for the global population. This is a very good tool. Open data is, this is the perfect situation for those. Just to be clear, is this data, it's not data on the virus itself, on the illness it's like societal data, the people where they are. On the coronavirus family. So it's 29,000 worldwide articles that are about coronaviruses and they put them in this data set and structured it so it would be easy for researchers and scientists to say like, okay, have you seen anything like this in the research and then the machine learning can pull that out, do some Q and A, make recommendations based on hypothesis, like, oh, there's research that supports that hypothesis from this study, this study and this study. I want to believe that we would tackle this issue more quickly than we would have a few years ago, but we'll have to wait and see, of course. But this makes me a little bit hopeful because these kinds of tools, maybe we wouldn't have had access to as quickly, you know, a decade or two ago. No, that's fair, definitely. Google's cloud next conference was supposed to happen online, April 6th through 8th, but now even the digital version has been postponed. Google will focus on supporting our customers, partners and each other and put on the conference when the timing is right. Yeah, this is significant because this is the first major online conference that I've seen canceled, where a company is saying, not only can we not do it in person, but we can't even stream it. And there can be multiple reasons for that. Google's being a little vague when they say we want to focus on supporting customers, partners and each other. But what it sounds like to me, they're saying is, it's not necessarily safe to have all the people come together to do a streaming event that we would want to have come together if we don't have to. A lot of people out there that would pay attention to this are probably prioritizing other things right now. So let's wait until everybody can focus on these. These announcements are not time sensitive so much that we have to put them out now. There's other things to focus on. And Patrick, you know from working at Blizzard how hard it is to put on a conference, how much time that takes away from people. There are other priorities within the company that I think they want to reassign people to rather than working on a conference. Yeah, absolutely. I think even for something that is smaller scale than something public, it would take a lot of resources. And that might be one thing that is key there. They just don't have the resources and it's not easy to get them together even beyond the fact that it would bring people together physically, which could be a concern. They have to focus on other things. I'm wondering as well, the proximity of the conference, you know it's two, three weeks away, something three weeks maybe away and it would probably be more interesting for the business world. It's not a very public facing conference. And the IT people who might be interested in that I think have other things on their plate as well. Yeah, very true. Yeah, they're busy making sure that the IT infrastructure for their company is up and functional and adding new elements so that remote teleworking, telecommuting is possible. So that might be another factor too. Yeah, raise a glass to the people who are keeping the networks running. This is not an easy thing to happen. There was a lot of consternation that when everybody started working from home that it wouldn't work the way it has. And with a few exceptions, you know a few bumps in the road it largely has. So that's a really good point. A couple members of the DTNS Patreon asked us specifically to talk about this next story from TechCrunch's Zach Whitaker came out yesterday afternoon. Talks about an engineer, video operations engineer for Charter called Nick Wheeler in Denver, Colorado who resigned in protest over Charter's refusal to offer a work from home policy. He basically wanted to change the policy and they said, well, you can come into work or quit and he offered to resign and then they said, no, go home and think about it. And then they called him up and said, yeah, we're gonna take your resignation. So he sort of resigned, but sort of was forced into it. By comparison, AT&T and Verizon are asking their employees to work from home if they can. Obviously, there are some jobs you just can't do. But if you can, they're asking them to do so. Comcast is reportedly testing a number of work from home scenarios as well. I know that the NBC universal side has said everyone should work from home if they all can. But Charter is taking a different approach. Charter's CEO sent an all staff email Saturday saying it was preparing for the possibility of broad remote working policies. But it believes it's quote, approach to supporting frontline employees is the right way for us to operate at this time to continue to deliver those important services to our customers. So in essence saying, we don't think you should work from home. The email also went on to say, stay home if you're sick or caring for someone who is sick, but continue to report to your usual work location if you are not. While some back office and management functions can be performed remotely, they are more effective from the office. And again, that's from the CEO, Tim Rutledge of Charter. You know, my brain immediately goes to, okay, Charter did not plan for something like this and Charter doesn't have a good work remotely policy as far as the technology that would be needed for employees to work from home. And so it's just a scramble because I can't really see any way that this makes sense besides being hugely irresponsible because if you don't feel sick, it doesn't mean you aren't sick. It doesn't mean you're not gonna infect other people around you. I don't know how Charter can get away with this. Yeah, it feels, maybe there are some specific set of circumstances that mean our understanding of how all of this works doesn't apply here, but the only, that's a lot of caveat before I'm gonna agree with you. It's incredibly irresponsible. The one thing that we will remember after all of it is said and done and we are all better and hopefully the crisis is behind us. The one thing we will remember from this is that the point is to flatten the curve and to make sure that the virus doesn't spread too quickly so that the health services can deal with the influx of patients. And you can be a carrier even if you are asymptomatic. So I don't understand how you square that logic with what he is saying. It seems to me like someone who has the wrong priorities. Yeah, and if you read the Zach Whitaker article, there's some anecdotal information in there, of course, but it makes it sound like Charter just culturally is against working from home to the point that they're hostile to the idea of working from home even in this situation. At least, the one thing I could say is Tom Rutledge did say they're considering policies, but like you said, Sarah, maybe the culture is so against working from home that they're starting from scratch. Right, and it's okay to say the culture is against working from home. I've worked at lots of places where working from home was simply not an option for lots of reasons, you know, company morale and getting things done and being on the same conference room at the same time. This is a whole different ballgame though. We're not operating under normal life right now. So for Charter to be like, well, we just don't encourage working from home, you're gonna slack on us. I don't know, you gotta pause that whole rhetoric. I think within 48 hours that policy will be reversed and if only if not for the moral slash health risks, the legal risks will make this guy reconsider. Yeah, we need to get some negative kurtosis on that distribution as the statisticians say. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, last story today, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Reddit and Twitter, that is not just a greatest hits of social networking platforms. It's also a group of companies that issued a joint statement Monday on preventing misinformation about COVID-19. The statement said, we are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We're helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms and sharing critical updates and coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe. Facebook is working with partners to send all of its contract workers who review content home with pay though. And Google is similarly letting a lot of their human moderators either work from home or not work at all with pay. If you say, well, why can't they just moderate from home? Sensitive content, sensitive connections, it may be not secure to do that. It may not be good for the reviewer to do that. And Facebook said, with fewer people available for human review, we'll continue to prioritize imminent harm and increase our reliance on proactive detection in other areas to remove violating content. Now, so we have all of the social networks saying the right thing, which is we're gonna fight this misinformation seriously this time. On the other hand, they're also doing the right thing and saying, but we need to let these reviewers go home and we don't wanna put them in an unsafe situation. So YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have warned of an increase in erroneous takedowns as companies rely more on software for moderation. Appeals may take longer as well. Twitter said it's not gonna ban a user based solely on an automated, moderated decision, but it is going to not be as accurate because they won't have as many humans on this. How do y'all feel about this? I mean, it's good and bad mixed together, right? It seems like it's, I don't know, it's really interesting because if they can manage to do it, then maybe I'm jumping the gun a little bit on the end of the conversation, but if they can manage to handle and manage the misinformation on this, why couldn't they do it on the other stuff? That's where my mind goes immediately because it's been such a hot topic for the past five years. And if they can manage to do it, maybe they will learn enough that it will make the other things easier down the line, but I guess it just takes the most serious global pandemic we've seen in a century to get them to work this hard. But... Focuses the mind a little, doesn't it? I guess one might argue, and I'll say it for the sake of the emails we would get, there are other issues that down the line or will be even greater concerns and dangers to the human race than this, namely the climate change. So they could work similarly for that, but of course the urgency makes the mind weird. Having friends who work at Facebook, I know people who work at Twitter, Salesforce, I mean, Google of course, I mean, these are all Silicon Valley companies, at least based in Silicon Valley that I'm naming, but huge companies. And everybody's working from home. That's just that's kind of across the board, at least the people that I know. And it's sort of like, okay, well, this is necessary right now, but I don't think anybody was like, and nothing will be disrupted because we've completely changed all of our policies, even for a temporary amount of time. Something is going to fall through the cracks because of this, because if you could have just worked from home the whole time, then companies could save lots of money on leases for huge buildings and all sorts of infrastructure and that kind of thing. So I feel like knowing that there's going to be maybe a little bit of backlog, maybe some erroneous takedowns, stuff falling through the cracks, I feel like that's something that I can take that. It's going to be annoying for anybody who's more inconvenienced than usual, but I don't see how this could all just work as usual, given what everybody has had to do and how much they've had to switch the way that they do their job. That's the difference. If this was the election and no one's life is on the line directly, right? It's just about who wins. And you say like, you know what? Just to preserve honesty in the election, you might get some erroneous takedowns, no way. The backlash would be horrible, but given the fact that people are like, well, you're stopping deaths, I guess maybe that's okay. You're not going to get, I mean, I've seen some people who are like, you know, I'm kind of concerned about this being used to suppress speech, and that's a valid concern, but it's much less than you would expect given the situation here. I think it also really forces companies to say, look, you don't have any wiggle room or whether it's wiggle room or doubt, depending on how you look at it, to say, but if we do this, are we causing more harm than good? We don't really understand how politics works, et cetera, et cetera. With this, it's very clear that if you're telling people to do the wrong thing, you're endangering a life. Like I said, it focuses the mind. The Verge has a report published this morning by New America's Open Technology Institute, arguing that personalized targeting is the root problem and that moderation isn't the fix, and maybe because you can't just throw humans at the problem, you can't just hope that the algorithms get all the misinformation, maybe this will be put to the test. There's a senior policy analyst, Natalie Marshall, who told the Verge that the problem is the system used to influence you to buy something, advertising is also being used for news and propaganda, and she says, if there is less algorithmic boosting optimized for the company's corporate profit margins and bottom line, then misinformation would be less widely distributed. Boost first and moderate later doesn't work. So if they change the algorithm and how it promotes things, then the moderation will be easier, is essentially the way I read what she's saying. But they would need to have two different algorithms, essentially, and know which topics are pandemic related and which are just the thing they're used for. Just apply the algorithm to everything, but then you take it to your bottom line, right? Yes, and I don't think they would, maybe they would do this during these next couple of months because they're impacted as well. The longer it lasts, the longer their bottom lines are going to be impacted as well. Yeah. Big thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, those who submit stories, those who vote on other stories and make sure the good stuff res to the top. We love our subredditors. Join them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's. Nick wrote in about our discussion on some Xbox specs that we laid out yesterday. We all said, sounds like a pretty good machine. Nick said, ray tracing to this point in the hardcore PC gaming community has been perceived more as a joke meme than a real feature because of the massive performance penalty. And Microsoft's massive info dump on Monday about the Xbox Series X specs, they gave Digital Foundry the tidbit that the GPU of the Xbox Series X does 13 teraflops of ray tracing performance and they demoed a version of Gears 5 running at 4K with ray tracing at over 100 frames per second. You can't directly compare teraflop numbers between different GPU architectures but the performance shown in this demo and the fact that the mighty NVIDIA 2080 Ti only does about five teraflops of ray tracing performance and can't maintain 60 frames per second at 4K in any game with ray tracing gives me hope that ray tracing is going to go from a glorified tech demo with NVIDIA's Turing architecture to a must have feature with the next gen of PC GPUs. I can't wait to have smooth running ray tracing in my games. It's a really good. Yeah, first of all, it's 12 teraflops so I don't want to be the well actually guy but for someone who's deep into the hardcore PC gaming community, I feel that's okay. You could always use it slightly lower resolution, man, but I understand what you mean and consoles are always better optimized and they're ahead of the curve on hardware stuff. This is exciting. The PlayStation 5 tech specs will be unveiled tomorrow so we're probably gonna get something similar-ish, maybe a little bit less powerful but it will be interesting too. The ray tracing future is upon us. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Adam Carr, Martin James and Bjorn Andre. Also thanks to Patrick Beja wearing his green scarf today. Always a festive man. Patrick, what's been going on in your worlds? You know what, if you're interested in gaming, if you've had enough of all of this pandemic talk, you can go check out Pixels where we will by the end of the week have a summary and explanation of all of these new announcements and more doom and animal crossing are coming out. And if you want more about the pandemic, the Philius Club was just released this past, well, yesterday and we got people from South Korea, Italy, France, myself and Finland and the US to discuss how populations are reacting to all of this and at different stages of the contamination. It was really interesting. That's the Philius Club and you can find it at frenchspin.com. I have to second that, the comparison of the experiences of people in Korea, two places in Italy, the US and France, slash Finland from your perspective, it was incredibly helpful and enlightening. So thank you for doing that, Patrick, it was really good. My pleasure. If you can afford to keep supporting us directly, of course, please do. You'll be helping cover for somebody who can't. Direct support is the best way to keep us independent. It pays for Roger, Sarah and myself to be able to have our livelihoods. We're incredibly respectful and appreciative of that at a time like this. But just know if you have to cut this cost for a while, we have other ways you can support the show and other folks here on our Patreon have already stepped up to help cover you in the meantime. So if you have to cut us, you can always promote the show to others as a way to support us too at dailytechnewshow.com. If you've got some feedback, or email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and if you'd like to join us live, well, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, that's 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson, 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.