 everything just slowed down. But Daily Tech News Show will continue to be here Monday through Friday, helping you understand how technology is affected and how technology can affect you. Today we're going to talk about how 3D printer enthusiasts are rallying to help hospitals pour over those new Xbox One Series X specs and help Allison share it and deal with her Android support frustrations. We're here for you and for Allison. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 16, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And this is Allison Sheridan from the Podfeat podcast. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. Ah, we were just talking about frozen food and the best preparations for keeping yourself entertained during some semi-isolation. Folks, it's a good time to hang out with us on Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft sent out an invite for a digital announcement at 9 a.m. 8 a.m. rather Pacific Monday, March 30. Microsoft says it will focus on productivity across work, life, and family. You could probably expect new Office 365 and Microsoft 365 announcements, but probably no hardware. The intercept sources say TikTok moderation guidelines blocked posts from the Your Feed section of the app based on physical appearance and environmental factors, ended live streams that carried political content and suspended and banned users. TikTok says the policies are either no longer in place or were never in effect. Bloomberg sources say the U.S. Health and Human Services Department suffered what was probably a denial of service attack Sunday night. It was reportedly slowing down things on the network there, or at least designed to slow the agency's systems down, but it did not appear to do so in a meaningful way. Data isn't thought to have been lost or exfiltrated in any way, and it's unknown what caused it. Alphabet's verily subsidiary launched its pilot COVID-19 screening and testing website on Sunday night. After completing a screener survey, the site can direct people to available mobile testing facilities based on capacity in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in California. The site appeared to reach testing capacity by late Monday morning. All right, let's talk a little bit more about some breaking news that happened just about an hour ago, and fulfilling a wish that I made on the show on Friday, Sarah. Yeah, Universal Pictures will make its movies available on home entertainment the same day as they hit theaters. The change will begin with Troll's World Tour on April 10th, and films currently released in theaters like The Invisible Man, The Hunt and Emma by the Studio will also be available for digital rental as early as this Friday for a 48-hour rental period at a suggested retail price of $19.99. And you said it was wild speculation on cord killers, Tom, when AMC, when you were talking about AMC with Brian, or not with Brian. Yep, no, it was with Bryce, actually. Yeah, you're right. It was not the theaters that did this, though. It's the studio. And the thing that changed between cord killers last Monday and this day, this Monday a week later, is a lot of the theaters are not open. There's no chance for them to have anybody in the theater to see these movies. And I think that takes away some leverage if the studio's like, look, if you can't even be there to show the film, you can't really hold us to a 90-day exclusive. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. I am really surprised at the retail price of $19.99 because a first-run movie is, what, like $16 at a lame theater here? So $19.99 when you can share it, that's pretty good. I don't know what the average movie price. Average movie theater. I think it's like $3 in Ohio. Good price. You say that, but everyone in Ohio just rolled their eyes at you because they outdo it. Rob Dunwood is always talking about going to the matinee and paying like $3, and it's like the matinee is $16. I don't know what kind of matinee is he? Lucky Rob has near him. I haven't seen anything at that price in quite some time. But yeah, I mean, this is the sort of thing where a large studio like Universal, there's not much choice. You realize people are stuck at home. This is something that they will welcome. You're going to get a lot of people who do pay the $20, especially if there's a whole family because like you said, all of a sudden you're saving a lot of money that way, and it can be a great experience and you're just staying safe at the same time trying to recoup some lost costs otherwise. Average cost of a movie ticket in the United States in 2019 was $9.26 according to the National Association of Theater Owners. So this is only double that? So this is basically assuming like, man, you and one other person, which is probably on average about right. Even if you have kids, they're probably not all going to watch the same thing as you unless it's a family movie like Frozen 2 getting put out early this week by Disney on Disney Plus. A lot of families watching that, but on average it might just be one or two people watching these things depending. Very curious what we learned from this. Very curious. Microsoft revealed the full specs of the upcoming Xbox Series X. We already knew it would include a custom AMD APU based on the Zen 2 architecture with that custom solid state drive. Microsoft now revealed the APU will offer eight CPU cores clocked at 3.8 gigahertz with an AMD RDNA2 GPU using 52 compute units, 16 gigabytes of GDDR RAM and a one terabyte NVMe solid state drive. Storage can be expanded by one terabyte expansion cards on the back with also support for USB 3.2 external drives. The disk drive is a 4K Blu-ray. That's the optical drive. Microsoft previously discussed the load time benefits of its custom SSD, but it detailed the Xbox velocity architecture, which lets developers dynamically load large environments from the drive into memory. Microsoft says it's targeting performance at 4K 60 frames per second, but it will be able to support up to 8K and 120 frames per second for some games. All of this sounds so great. My only question is cool for all of this. What will they cost? I think that's a lot of other people's questions as well. It is. It is a big question, because obviously consoles are generally loss leaders. You either charge break even or even a little bit of a loss and you make your money off of selling the games. You charge other studios a little bit to make develop for your platform. And of course they all have their in-house studios that they can make even more off of. With this level of spec, at least right now, we're talking about a fairly expensive piece of hardware. So how far down can they push the margin? How much can they optimize the supply chain with bulk buying and all of that? Because they're going to make a lot of these. And what is that price point going to come in at? Was it really necessary to go to NVMe for the SSD? That seems a lot of people really wanted that. Necessary is a whole different question, right? But a lot of people would have been very upset if it wasn't. They're making people happy with that, for sure. This was not supposed to be the finale, the final announcement of the Xbox Series X. We're still waiting on that around E3 time. Of course, it won't be at E3 this year, but it will be sometime in June that we're expecting to get the full details like date release date. But a lot of that stuff must be up in the air too. I mean, there is a date they probably expected and a supply cost that they probably expected. And both of those may have to change just based on the changes to the supply chain, the changes in cost to parts, because all of that stuff is up in the air right now. Well, the French competition authority fined Apple 1.1 billion euros for the anti-competitive practices regarding agreements with wholesalers TechData and Ingram Micro. The ruling found that Apple and the two companies agreed not to compete with each other, that Apple stopped premium resellers from lowering prices and unfairly limited supply to those resellers. TechData and Ingram Micro received fines of 76.1 million euros and 62.9 million euros respectively. The complaint that sparked the probe into Apple's practices came in 2012 from the premium reseller ebizcus.com. Apple plans to appeal the ruling in other shocking news. Yeah, no doubt. Apple, their response was, you know, this is a 10 year old situation based on old rules. We don't do any of these things anymore. And we didn't think they were even wrong when we did them, which is what you would expect. But, you know, Apple is famous for being very restrictive over its retail and service both. And this is about retail, not about service, but they're very, they try to push the law to its limit as what they're allowed to let you do or not do with its stuff. And since we're talking about Apple, I mean, it is Apple, Apple has a lot of money, 1.1 billion euros, not chump change. That's a lot of money. I'm a little bit less familiar with what kind of finances TechData and Ingram Micro have, but to be fined 76 and 62 million euros each for those two companies also a lot, but Apple definitely getting the lion's share of the blame here. Wouldn't you just bother yourselves anyway? No, you know, I tend to definitely support Apple and say, well, they wouldn't do that. But when I think about, would they be likely to do cutthroat procedures to try to get the supply chain to do what they want? Yes, I'm guessing. Probably. With no evidence, I have made that calling. It's possible, yeah. Some news that came in last Friday after we wrapped up the show, Microsoft announced that co-founder Bill Gates is stepping down from its board of directors. Gates plans to spend more time on philanthropic activities and will continue to serve as technology advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Gates had been progressively stepping back from Microsoft for almost two decades now. He served as CEO of the company from its founding in 1975 through 2000, then his board chairman from 2000 to 2014, leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft back in 2008. Has it been that long? Yeah, we talked about this on Good Day Internet. Did we even get to talk about it on Good Day Internet? I think it happened right after. I think it happened after Good Day Internet. We only talked about it in the Discord, honestly. Maybe that's true. But it's a big deal. Bill Gates not on the board of Microsoft is a different Microsoft. But it's important to note that he's still advising Satya Nadella. Basically what that means is Satya Nadella can call on Bill for the institutional knowledge that only Bill Gates has. He's not stepping back from that. It doesn't mean he's being ousted. It doesn't mean that he's not welcome there anymore or that he's done with it or anything like that. It really does seem to mean that he wants to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on philanthropic works. My suspicion is that with everything that's going on in the world already plus the coronavirus, that he wants to put as much of his effort into making the world better while he can. I think that's commendable if that's the case. Which one would you rather have him work on? Making Windows Neater and Azure really awesome and cool and Microsoft Teams or World Health? It's a tough call. Honestly, he's still able to do some of that stuff as an advisor to Nadella when they need him to. On the board it was more about how can I maximize Microsoft profits? That's my job as a board member. Maybe not the most important thing he can do with that brain. With that money. A hospital in Brescia, Italy ran out of valves needed for respirators that are used to keep patients breathing. Most of these patients, of course, have COVID-19. The original supplier couldn't send new valves quickly enough to replace them. An Italian journalist Nunzia Valini was covering this, so put the hospital in connection with a 3D printing company called Esennova. CEO Christian Fricasi and mechanical engineer Alessandro Romeoli took three hours to design a prototype valve to test. It worked and so because each valve takes about an hour to print, Esennova teamed up with another 3D printer company, a competitor named Lonati, to begin churning out valves for the hospital. They are already in touch with a second hospital that would like to maybe get some valves made for them as well. To encourage similar efforts, a Google sheet has been created called 3D Printer Crowdsourcing for COVID-19 and has been populated with several hundred people's names, email addresses, locations, and design experience around the world to say, hey, you need a 3D printer to make something. I've got one you can use and the design experience says that I might be able to even help with the design or not, depending. Some people are just saying, I've got the printer, I'll print up whatever you give me. Man, this story made me feel so good. The reality of not only medical personnel, but equipment and life-saving material being in short supply is real for a lot of people, in particular parts of the world being heavier hit than others. It'll be in one of those places. The fact that the journalist was like, huh, you know what, my work, and the 3D printing company goes, let's try it. And then a competitor is like, we want to, on the help as well, people working together to literally save lives. So cool. Maybe I'm becoming more jaded, but I want to step back to enthusiasm a little bit that I get worried about the quality control and the materials used, whether they're safe, have they been tested? I mean, I guess a valve that maybe ends up not working, but the next one does, is better than no valves at all. But I just, there's reasons that we have really robust testing processes on medical equipment. So it just left me a little bit trepidatious, but hopefully it's as good as it sounds. And they address that. Both the creators from the ESA NOVA team said, look, this is not something that we wanted to get wrong. This is a clinical issue, so we have to print it in a way that it won't be contaminated, it won't fail. And that's why they made the prototype and brought it to the hospital and had the people trained in that say, will this work? What do we need to change? What do we need to do? This is a, you're not wrong, Allison. This is a tricky piece. It's a 0.8 meter opening on the tube, but it has to be just right. You can't have it fall apart while it's working because it introduced particles. Quality control, very important here. But it sounds like they were aware of that and working with the hospital to make sure that this was a part that was going to work. I think you might have meant 0.8 millimeters. I'm sorry, millimeters. What did I say? Yep. The opening was this big. 0.8 meters would be a lot bigger. Sorry, millimeters. Yeah. It's real tricky, though. I should actually check that and make sure that I'm not getting that wrong, but it was a small opening. That's the point. Yeah. Right, right, right. But cool. People working together, working on problems. Yeah. Very good. It was 0.8M. So very small. Anyway, yeah. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget you can still subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Let's take a break from the world for a moment and get back to something that makes us all feel like things are normal. Horrible, frustrating tech support issues. Alison, you've been talking on your show and actually talking for a while about using an Android phone, and it's commendable that you, an avowed someone with a little bit of ever so slight Apple bias, is making the effort to use Android so that you expose yourself to it and understand how it works. But your support issue with your latest Android phone seems to have driven you to the edge. Tell us a little bit about it. Well, I've been really trying to be open-minded, and I know I'm not. So I own that, but I try really hard to get past that. And so I bought a Motorola G7, a Moto G7. And what I wanted was an Android phone, the least expensive Android phone I could get that was most likely to still get security updates and to get operating system updates, the new hotness whenever possible. So I went to the SMR podcast Facebook group and said, hey, everybody, this is my requirements. I want some to play with. I do need an Android phone for my Google Fi card in order to be able to tether my Mac when I'm out on travel in other countries. So they said, you know what, this Moto G7 looks pretty good. It was 200 bucks for a 64 gig model, and I got it. And this is actually a really nice phone. I mean, it's really hefty. It's got a nice little fingerprint sensor. The OS is fun to play with. It's fun to learn something new. And then, you know, I have Barbu shots on my show every other week. He does a segment called security bits and he tells us whenever there's a particularly terrifying security flaw in something and it tells you what you can do about it. And he said, okay, well, there's this security update is required for Android. And there's a, I think it's a maliciously crafted PNG file can cause remote code execution, which you don't want. So I went up and I said, okay, let me get the security updates. And it says December 2019, you're up to date. Thumbs up. I was like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's it's March. What about what about January? What about February? What about March? There's been three security patches. So I thought, okay, well, I must be doing some I must not know what I'm doing. I ended up actually wiping the operating system, which is really, really fun and super nerdy. You hold down the power and the down button and it goes into this Linux thing that, I mean, it's definitely command line code flash by. It's kind of fun. Yeah. Oh, you're actually, yeah. Yeah. It's like a boot ROM. It's really, really fun. So I did all that and I reloaded the OS and everything same thing couldn't get in. So I thought, okay, well, let me just contact Google. I'm retired. I can spend time fooling around with this. So I went to Google and I found a chat and they said, oh, yeah, you know, we'd love to help you, but you actually bought it through Google five, Google five. So let's direct you over there. So I get a hold of Google five and Google five says, oh, yeah, well, we can't help you with that. You got to talk to the manufacturer. I thought that Motorola was still owned by Google. What I didn't realize was they'd been bought by Lenovo at the time. A while ago now, yeah. Like five years. Yeah. It's a long time ago. I missed a memo. I was sick that day. Daily tech issues told me about it. So I said, all right, well, you make the operating system, but okay, I'll get a hold of Motorola. So I get a hold of Motorola and they said, yeah, all you have to do is download the Lenovo smart assistant to your PC. And I said, so wait, what? And I go look at it and it's a Windows executable. So she really meant PC. And I was like, I don't have a PC. I have a Mac. And she says, well, this is the only way we can help you. Otherwise talk to Google. And she dropped me. And so I ended up doing some tweeting and I sent, I got a survey on the call, which was really good. Oh, I ended up calling on the phone. That's right. I called Google. I'll get it yet. Motorola on the phone. And I got this guy on the phone who was like super apologetic. He said, we can't get you the update. There's nothing we could do. And I said, well, that's a horrible answer. And he goes, no, no, it's the truth. I said, oh, yeah, I believe it's the truth. It's still a horrible answer. So I got a survey on the call and so I responded to the survey and I did some tweeting and the tweet response was, oh, don't worry, don't worry. All you have to do is download the Lenovo smart assistant to your PC. And I explained that I was on a Mac and they said, and they said, don't worry, you can download it to your Mac. And I said, yes, I can download it. Sure, you can. I can't run it. I've since then gotten a letter from a guy named Joe at Motorola Tech Support because apparently my survey triggered this. And five days ago, four days ago, he said, oh, well, give me a number I can call you. I'm going to help you. And they haven't called yet. I haven't called yet. So this phone is seven months old. And I'm not getting security updates. You bought it seven months ago. Yes. And the latest security update you have is December. And I have a pixel model. I have a pixel for the latest security update on mine is February. So you're two behind. There's there's a March one. March is not on my phone. And I do that on purpose to see like, I'm just going to be an average user. When will that arrive? And that that is not there. I'll just go ahead and test it and see if it's I will add I have a pixel 3a and it automatically updated on March. Okay. So you have the March one. So you're two to three months behind, depending on how you look at it. But the point that I'm trying to get to is that that doesn't matter. You should have had someone tell you like, oh, February is the most recent one you can expect. And then you could say, well, I'm on December. How do I get to February? Or, well, you really should be up to March. Great. How do I get there? And you got none of that, no matter who you talk to. And you got this game of tennis where everybody was bouncing you around from somebody to another. They did all verify that I should be getting it, though. Yeah. So this wasn't I mean, my previous phone, I actually threw it in the bin, as Bart said, because it wasn't getting the security updates. And it wasn't going to anymore. It was a it was a Google. What was it? It was from Google. So I it's not just that it's not coming to my phone. They're telling me I should be getting it and will not cannot help me. This is not a situation of like, oh, she bought a phone near the end of life. Like, your phone should be getting that update. And it's not. And and this is this is the this is the tradeoff, folks. You can you can criticize both Google and Apple for being too controlling. But there is a balance of if they're not controlling enough, then no one takes responsibility. Like someone should be responsible for that update. And if Google takes responsibility for those updates, it also takes a lot of liability on it that they are increasingly being put under investigation for like, why are you the only one who could deliver the update? Which is why, in my opinion, if this was actually shifted back to the open source project, and Google actually let go of some more control instead of trying to live in both worlds, maybe there would be an option for you to be like, oh, there's a there's a vast Android open source project ecosystem that I can take advantage of and get help from. And I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's somebody out there in AOSP who could figure out your your situation. But it's not obvious how to get right. Right. And the title of the article that I wrote on this was I don't understand why anybody chooses an Android phone. But I think I got the answer. Nick had security at an article this week about the number of Android phones that are unpatched right now. And 40% of Android devices as of Google's dashboard in May, and I don't know why they haven't updated that since May, but 40% of Android devices are using Android five through seven. So they're completely unsupported 40%. So the answer of why does anybody who's Android is because they don't know or don't care. That's got to be the answer, right? And and you didn't know you were that far behind on your security updates either because it didn't tell you. No, I'm on March. I'm on March 5th now because Roger prompted me like you really should have the March one. And and I just restarted my phone and it gave it to me. But it again, I shouldn't have had to do that. So part of Motorola's answer was, well, we can't push this out to everybody on the same day. And I was like, sorry, Apple does it all within like the same two or three days, six years back. Yeah, it doesn't have to be on the same day, but maybe the same week wouldn't be asking too much, right? Months later might, you know, and I don't think that were that many Moto G seven sold. Yeah, it would overwhelm the network. So yeah, I'm frustrated. And if anybody knows how to fix it, I would like you to contact me Allison at podfeed.com. Excellent. Well, we don't ever want anyone on our discord to be frustrated, but it is a place where you can connect with others help help you help each other. You can join in the conversation in our discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's check in with our amateur traveler Chris Christensen, who has a money saving tip for those probably aren't traveling right now, but those who still might be able to snag a good deal in the future. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Now I know you're probably not thinking about travel right now unless you're trying to get home. But there are some amazing travel deals out there. For a couple months out, you might actually be able to book something and even have some crazy strange ability to cancel it because the airlines are really hurting right now as well are the hotels and the cruise lines. So if you're thinking that you might want to travel again in the future, you might want to start looking for deals. And I can suggest getting on some of the airline discount newsletters and a couple of the ones that come to mind are daily flight club, Matt's flights and Scott's cheap flights. Search for those, get on their newsletter and see what deals you can find. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Yeah, a lot of people aren't going to want to make plans. But if you're like, well, I've got that wedding in July, maybe things will be, you know, looser by then, especially if you can get a fully refundable ticket, which you might be able to get right now, even at a good price. That's something that a few people anyway, maybe not everybody, but a few people might benefit from. And those newsletters sound like good things to be part of anyway. Dave Hamilton just tipped us off that the hotel room that he had booked for CES in 2021, he just went and checked the prices right now. And this is a big suite with a bunch of rooms and it had dropped $1,500. So it's a good time to do Ray Future. Well, maybe a refundable. I mean, that's the thing, right? It's so uncertain. You just don't know, even if you're like, well, it's far enough in the future. But having a cancellation policy that's more lax can definitely work to your benefit. And while you consider thinking positively in the meantime. Let's check out the mailbag. Okey dokey. Ryan, AKA creative vast arts is offering a way to mitigate some of those uncertain financial times that a lot of folks in our community and elsewhere might be experiencing. Ryan says I'm selling a complete DTNS art bundle on my website, discounted to $25 from the standard 55. What I'd like to do is to use those proceeds earned from each sale to help cover the cost of the DTNS patrons who may be hit financially due to this outbreak. So they won't lose access to GDI and other patron perks that they enjoy today. Once I've reached about 10 sales, I should have enough to help cover 30 people. Watch for an update in Discord for further details. Another reason to get into Discord, good stuff there. I'm thinking that the offer would include enough to do a $2 level for about three months with the prerequisite that you have been supporting DTNS at the $2 or above level for at least six months. That's so nice of Ryan to do. You can help Ryan stay as a patron as well. This is art that he makes on his own. It's cool stuff. He's been working on these sorts of things for a long time. So go check it out, creative vast arts dot com. And if you've been wondering like, geez, economics, not just the virus, but economics are looking shaky. We put a post up at patreon.com slash DTNS just kind of describing like, hey, folks, we understand that you may not be able to continue to support. So I love that Ryan's doing this. That won't work for everybody. But we have free versions of the show available. Many of you are listening to it right now. We stream live at twitch.tv slash good day internet. And there are people who can step up and cover for you. And in fact, a few people have done that already just since I put up that post and said, you know what, I'm going to raise my pledge a little bit because I can pick up the slack for somebody who's having a hard time right now. And I really am very grateful that people have done that. So thank you to them. Also special shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Sonya Vining at Tony Glass and Ruchan Brantley. Also thanks to Alison Sheridan for being our co-host today. Alison, where can people keep up with your latest work? Well, my latest work is always at podfeat.com. And this week I had Dr. Mary Ann Gary on Chichett Across the Pond to talk about the story that Tom and Sarah talked about last week, which was that study that was done to find out whether language learning had more to do with aptitude and learning to program than numeracy. And so the two of us dig into the original report that's in nature and we dug in and talked about all the stats and what does it mean. It was really, really fun. And you can find that over at podfeat.com. And of course, you can always support our show at any level. I'm going to pitch the URL this way today to make Alison happy. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. Do we not usually say that? No, I usually just say Patreon.com slash DTNS. Oh, all right. Everything good starts with DTNS. Just keep y'all on your toes. Got a couple options. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. And we're also live if you can join us. It's Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Stay safe, everybody. Bye.