 Coming up on DTNS, Sarah's back and has thoughts on how carriers manage their cell towers. Apple's earnings are good, bad, but not at all ugly, and the unwinnable argument over political speech on the Internet. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 31st, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Nomad, I'm Sarah Lane. From the macabre shores of Lake Merritt. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Shang, the show's producer. Happy Halloween, everyone. It's a spooky, not Brexit version of DTNS. We were just catching up with Sarah on her adventures, having our thoughts about the power company in Northern California on Good Day Internet. If you'd like that wider conversation, of course, all you got to do is become a member at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. In its third quarter earnings report, Nintendo announced it sold 4.8 million Switch consoles between July and September, which is up more than 50% over the previous year. 1.85 million of those sales were of the new Switch Lite. Nintendo said it has sold 41.67 million Switch units since launch. A Pokemon edition of the Switch Lite will be released Friday in Japan and November 8th elsewhere. Nintendo Mobile revenue remained flat, though, at 9.9 billion yen, which is about 183 million US dollars. Apple released a fixed version of its OS update for its HomePod speakers, version 13.2.1. Apple says it is now safe to update through anybody with inoperable HomePods should still contact Apple support. India's Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad says the government has asked WhatsApp to explain the privacy breach it's been talking about. WhatsApp told the Indian Express newspaper that not an insignificant number of Indian journalists and human rights activists were targeted by the spyware thought to have originated from NSO Group. We talked about this on previous show. WhatsApp is suing the Israeli company over that breach. WhatsApp identified the exploit in May and patched it, but it is continuing to investigate this issue. Multiple iPhone users are reporting background tasks being killed when they switch between apps, causing some to lose progress in the app that they just switched from. iOS 13 purges background apps to manage memory turns out when switching to memory intensive apps like the camera or iMessage. It will apparently kill other apps in seconds. Gone in less than a second. People are like switching out of it, you know, because they're writing an email and then they go back and email them. That's a good Al. All right, let's talk a little more about Apple earnings wise. We mentioned the top line earnings yesterday, but we've got a lot more detail now, Justin. Absolutely. iPhone 11 is now the best selling iPhone. iPhone revenue was down, however, 11%. Mac revenue was down 5%. iPad had a 17% growth and wearables, i.e. Apple watches and AirPods, mostly group 54%. In fact, when talking about wearables, Tim Cook said, quote, there will be a day in the future when we look back at Apple's greatest contributions will be people or will be to people's health, end quote. Service revenue rose 18%. Cook said that Apple Pay has doubled revenue year over year and doubled transactions to $3 billion in the fourth quarter worldwide. Cook said Apple Pay is growing four times as fast as PayPal. Cook also announced that later this year Apple will let customers who use the Apple card buy a new iPhone and pay for it over 24 months with 0% interest. Yeah, so you basically just paid. It's a great credit card, as long as you want to buy an iPhone. If you already have an iPhone and you want to buy a new iPhone, apply for this credit card. Although, I can't imagine many non-iPhone users that are like, oh, that Apple card, gotta get it. Right, yeah, it's definitely part of the ecosystem. A couple of numbers that kind of stood out to me. iPad enjoined 17% growth year over year. That is higher than I thought it would be, but I think that definitely points to the iPad Pro being a real favorite among folks. And the service revenue rising 18%, obviously Apple's going to want that number to jump a lot. And over the next quarter, I think we're either going to see the fruits of Apple's labor in the services arena, or it's not being what the company wants. But that number's got to be quite a bit higher coming forward. Yeah, it's good to see it rising, obviously, but with news in arcade and now Apple TV Plus launching, I would expect to see it rise. Apple card is going to be part of that. So this is the right thing to see at this point, but you're not wrong that it needs to continue to go up even more. I look at this, and my comparison is for iPad, I think iPad has settled into a PC-like growth cycle, which is you're going to be flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, and then there's going to be a replacement cycle that bumps you up. And you've got to have good stuff to take advantage of that replacement cycle. And Apple's been good about, you know, making sure, okay, we're developing that line enough that people want to get a new iPad from us rather than switch to another tablet. So I think that's why you see the 17%. That feels fairly uncontroversial to me. The other one that I'm trying this one out, let me know what you think of it, is maybe wearables are the new iPhone. Everybody's like, ah, the iPhone's leveling out. What's the new thing going to be? Well, maybe it's wearables. Maybe it is the watches, the iPad and the AirPods are the iPhone, not as sexy, but it's certainly bringing in some dollars for them. Well, yes. And certainly the Apple Watch is a legacy product for Tim Cook. It was one of the first that he oversaw from STEM to Stern. AirPods are very good as well, and they've kind of created their own little cult following. You know, if I had a dime for every friend of mine that asked me, you know, whether I also bought the new AirPods Pro, I'd probably have like five or six dimes, which is a lot. And also a lot of friends. Yeah, let's compare it to Samsung. Samsung reported its highest mobile business profit since Q1 2018 with a 32% rise in operating profit. Smartphone shipments rose 8%. Strong Galaxy Note 10 sales were part of that. Samsung did warn that Q4 mobile earnings would decline because of high marketing costs and the normal post launch leveling of sales. This is a difference from Apple. Apple says we're going to have a great holiday quarter because we just put out a bunch of new stuff. Samsung puts out their stuff a little early in the year so that you start to see that leveling out. They're not expecting as good of a mobile quarter because of that. However, they make most of their money from semiconductors and profit from semiconductors was less than a quarter of profit a year ago because of oversupply and failing demand. Overall operating profit for Samsung fell for the fourth consecutive quarter isn't expected to do so for one more quarter before Samsung think it's going to recover. Samsung thinks 5G will and data center demand will increase chip sales next year, but they really need it to. Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is, is this bet on 5G the right one for Samsung? I mean, we've gotten very used to Samsung's profit margins and overall quarters being at a loss in concession for some time now. And there's a lot of good reason for that and there's a lot of competition going on. But yeah, does Samsung saying next quarter, we're going to turn this around? We can see the market turning and 5G has a lot to do with the boost in sales of mobile products. Is that true? Well, I would say with Samsung, they've been in the component business in a big way for a really long time. Part of this is also just the declining in commoditization of that field. I think certainly you can hope that these data center and 5G demands mean that the chips are ordered faster. But I don't know if there's any guarantee of that. Well, everybody's going to be building 5G networks. The question is not whether they'll be building them. The question is, will they be ordering from Samsung? Yeah. And will they be getting the chips that they need from Samsung? I don't see any reason to think they will not. And I definitely don't doubt that there is going to be a lot of infrastructure turnover. There's also going to be a lot of data center demand as cloud continues to grow. So I think this is a pretty good bet for Samsung. I think they will be able to turn it around. I think JSC 315 in our Twitch chat says, is it going to be enough to offset any other kinds of slowdown or oversupply in the market? It's not that they won't happen. Will it happen in a large enough manner? Because there's no guarantee that Samsung's mobile business is going to keep having defy expectations, especially when they've been beaten down almost nothing in China. They're doing fairly good with their mid-range phones in India. They're starting to make some inroads into Africa, but those are far from being something that can turn the tide for them yet. So they really need that chip business to carry them. Speaking of something coming to market, automaker Fisker announced that its electric SUV slated for launch in 2021 will be called the Fisker Ocean. The company plans to show, quote, a fully running production intent prototype sitting on the actual completely engineered platform on January 4th, 2020 at a private event. I suppose it would be a DES. The vehicle will feature a full length solar panel on the roof, which Fisker estimates will add up to 1000 extra miles to the car per year. The target range, rather for the vehicle, is 250 to 300 miles on a charge of its 80 kilowatt lithium-ion battery pack. Fisker will also launch a smartphone app on November 27th that will let users do a variety of things, place early reservations, see more details about the car, eventually lease the ocean with no long-term contract. That'll be attractive to some folks. Fisker previously announced pricing for the ocean will also start below $40,000. The vehicles will supposedly go into production at the end of 2021 and deliver in 2022. So the solar thing seems a little gimmicky to me. It's extra two to three miles a day. It's not nothing, especially if you have proper things to take care of. Yeah, I just don't see what the downside would be. You know what I mean? It's like, unless it looked really horrible on your roof or something. Or if it raised the cost, but they're going to start below $40,000. So apparently it's not. You know, in $40,000, obviously, there are cars that are a lot cheaper than that. But when we're talking about kind of the future of electric vehicles, this is price so much more attractively than a lot of the other options. I won't be buying a Fisker, but this, yeah, this is cheaper than a lot of those. Yeah, I mean, I think, but one, one downside would be just another thing that can break, right? And oh, yeah, that's it. It's not something that you are using that is common on these cars. Then it might break more often. But look, I'm I'm always pumped that and more specifically when it comes to EVs that we have American car companies that are kind of in a little resurgence. I mean, it was it was a very, very long time before there was a successful American car company and it was electric motors that kind of really turned the tide. So I'm so you're a proponent of American electricalism. Yes, I am. I'm just I'm just excited that that there's that, you know, something that really, you know, I get a little weepy, you know, thinking that, you know, industry that helped build America now has roots back here. I like that Fiskars joining in competition, too. I think that's yeah. I also this is a small thing because I know that cars have been running out of things to name themselves for some time now. But ocean kind of a kind of a curious choice. That's the way. Yeah, right. Your car in the ocean, right? Yeah, it reminds me of a place. I don't want my car to be. Yeah. The ocean. No. The vast and salty car. Although a great chance to bring on Jason Momoa as a spokesman. There you go. Tech Dirt's Carl Bode notes that according to FCC data, 874 of California's 26,000 cell tower sites were out of commission on Monday, 702 were caused by a loss of power to the cell site, 88 due to cut fiber lines and 60 by wind or fire damage in 2008. After Hurricane Katrina, the FCC mandated cell towers have batteries or generators capable of adding eight hours or more of power. The CTIA with backing of the White House sued and overturned the regulation. Oh, what a great thing they did. All right. So where do we start for anybody who is listening to the pre-show, a good day internet and really probably all week knows that I have I was directly affected by this and it was the depths of my anger cannot be explained in several minutes. But what I will say is I was evacuated for just a precautionary mandatory evacuation from from where I just moved horrible timing, but I was in a completely different county nowhere near where the fire was going to be. But power had been cut and it was again. You just precautionary embers travel miles at a time. It's just it's a lot of wind, a lot of wind in the Bay Area and it's you kind of go like, all right, well, nobody wants to be in a fire. So, you know, do what you got to do. But we noticed very quickly at my friends where I was staying with my mom that our cell service was just abysmal and it was sort of like, what do you have? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, who's got what? You know, and there were a bunch of us and we were all just like, what's the deal? You know, kind of holding it up to the ceiling. And it turns out that we didn't have cell service because these stupid companies wouldn't, you know, add a little bit of money to pat on a generator to these cell towers. So when the power goes down, you go, okay, well, I can't use my laptop, but I at least I have LTE as long as, you know, they sort of like my phone's battery pack is still working or I could sit in my car and charge my phone. No, actually, not at all. We didn't have anything. It was it was you're sort of walking around completely useless and when you are worried about literal physical safety, that is unacceptable. Well, but Steve Largett, the head of the CTIA back in 2008 who helped the move against this onerous regulation pointed out that the carriers don't want their networks not to run during times of emergency. He said, we believe that having the flexibility to adapt to unique emergency situations will better serve American wireless consumers. Sarah, do you feel better served? No, I feel like a bunch of companies said, Hey, let's sue the government so that we don't have to put some money towards making our infrastructure better and people will suffer because of that because we were just cheap and horrible people. And I know I'm being a little dramatic, but it's like it's hard not to feel that way about something. No, I'm sure I can't argue against the sentiment. No, look, this is a literal life or death situation for some people and it is made in worse fact that the power goes out. You have situations where people who are dependent on machines to to live their life either comfortably or at all. Now all of a sudden have less of a manner to do that and on top of it, you can't even use any kind of mobile data to alert or, or, you know, preserve your life. It is disgusting what is happening. And the thing is, is, you know, having cell service would not have made fires go away. Right. It's it's this is this is where information is crucial. You know, and I was kind of, you know, I would kind of get some service and I'd get some people were asking me if I was okay and I wasn't able to answer them. I was doing the same for other folks. I couldn't get a hold of there is, you know, there's there's there, there is a real importance. Like, yeah, we can't turn the lights on. Got it. That's not going to happen. That's not coming back. You know, this is this is not what we're talking about here, but, but when people are panicking and scared and trying to kind of scramble to figure out what's going on with life and, and, you know, where's the good information coming from for a company to be like, you know, we just didn't want the government to make us make our cell towers better. We just wanted to do it on our own terms and just not do it is, is it just unforgivable. Yeah. Forget, forget about whether there should be regulation to make them do it. They said we'll do it and they didn't. Yeah. And we just know about it here in California, but it has also happened in other hurricane areas. Some hurricane areas have, have implemented this. Some haven't. This was supposed to be fixed 11 years ago and it hasn't and somebody needs to explain why that didn't happen. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com now for a lighter topic. In September, Facebook's Nick Clegg said that Facebook does not submit speech by politicians to independent fact checkers and allows it on the platform even when it might otherwise breach normal content rules. But noted, there are more stringent rules where the speech endangered people. So there is a line or when it was advertising. This is because he says Facebook doesn't want to be a referee over what political speech should be allowed. So it generally with exceptions, consider speech from politicians to be newsworthy. Clegg also wrote when a politician shares previously debunked content, including links, videos and photos, we plan to demote that content, display related information from fact checkers and eject its inclusion and advertisements. So there has been some exaggeration of what's going on. Facebook doesn't allow you to say whatever you want just because it's a political statement. If they don't allow you to say whatever you want just because it's a political ad, but it is much looser and they say that's because they don't want to be accused of picking sides. They want to be very hands off. So that debate has been raging since Nick Clegg posted this in September. Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg is testified in front of Congress and been grilled about it. He's given speeches about it. Wednesday, Twitter took themselves out of the idea of having to referee political ads by saying it just wouldn't take them. We mentioned this on yesterday's show. Jack Dorsey said machine learning based optimization of messaging and micro targeting unchecked misleading information and deep fakes are among the reasons that he just it thinks it's a no-win scenario. So Twitter's just not going to take political ads. Case closed. Pinterest, TikTok also have decided not to take political ads. So that's it, right? That's the solution. Just don't take political ads. Well, Casey Newton at the verge writes, I expect Twitter to have great trouble distinguishing what is an issue ad from what is not expect to see many false positives and many false negatives and depending on who is affected and how often you might even expect to see congressional hearings over it. So no, it's not over because someone's going to say, Hey, you rejected this as a political ad. It's not political. And someone else is going to say, Hey, you allowed this political ad and it shouldn't be because it's political and there's going to be disagreement about where that line is. Now, Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will work on transparency rather than not take political ads. He's put the line in the sand and to test this California named Adriel Hampton registered as a political candidate in the state of California and then tried to run an intentionally misleading ad called it out said this ad is misleading and I'm going to run it because I'm a candidate and Facebook said, Hey, you're we will just let political politicians say whatever they want. Except Facebook didn't say they'll let politicians say whatever they want. They said they would take a more hands-off approach to political speech and Facebook has blocked his ad saying that Mr. Hampton only registered as a candidate to get around its policies and that gives them the latitude to take it down. Now related to this are some examples of people trying to find the line. So they're just now we had a good example of Facebook saying we never said you could do whatever you want. Here's an example where we're going to stop you because we know what you're up to. But it's not always that easy. Mike Maznick at Tech Dirt pointed out that with anti-vaccine ads which Facebook has said we are not going to allow ads that argue against vaccination. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare bought 14 ads to promote a statewide program providing free pediatric vaccinations and Facebook removed them. Wait. But they said they wouldn't allow anti-vaccine ads and they removed a state's ads saying please get vaccinations. Children's Health Defense which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. successfully placed more than 10 ads opposing vaccination. A lot of people point at that and say hey isn't that what you said you wouldn't allow anymore. Now Maznick says this is an example of content moderation at scale being impossible to do well. Apparently auto blocking software accidentally flagged the Idaho Idaho ads as misinformation by mistake because you don't have a human looking at every single one of these and Maznick suggests that's probably how the Children's Health Defense ads got through is that they were crafted in order to evade the blocks. Now that's not necessarily political speech but Facebook and Google have banned political ads in the state of Washington because the state of Washington has very strict campaign finance laws and Facebook and Google both decided you know what it's just too hard to figure out what's a political ad and what we have to do to be transparent in Washington. So we're not going to allow them in the state of Washington. How's that going. Well the first test was Facebook's policy in Washington regarding the Seattle City Council elections. Here's a few things that happened. Candidate Heidi Wills ran ads on Facebook while Kate Martin tried to run ads on Facebook against Heidi Wills and her ads were blocked. The two got an argument about it on Facebook. Wills told Martin like just learn the rules. I did look my ads got run Wills advanced from the primary to the general election. Martin whose ads were blocked did not. Now Ari Huffman who also has been advanced from the primary in his council election told the Verge people just find workarounds. I found workarounds and it doesn't seem like it's very clear how people are getting around the bands and how they're not earlier this month the state of Washington charged Facebook with continuing to sell political ads in violation of state rules. Washington rules don't penalize candidates for trying to place ads. So hey good on you candidates. If you can figure out how to work it around you're not going to get punished. Facebook is. All of this is to say this isn't over just because Twitter said they won't take political ads and it wouldn't be over just if Facebook said they shouldn't take political ads. Justin I think you have a phrase that you've been saying for a while that covers this. Well Tom welcome to hashtag hell portal hashtag portal the hell we get find ourselves yet again in this situation where moderating what is political and what isn't political finds itself to be far more difficult and controversial than just saying that you're not going to have them. Although I do want to take this moment to say you know I saw on on Twitter there was a meeting where Jack Dorsey was giving an interview and he said to the audience that he sometimes you know he gets depressed thinking about the idea that if he were to die that the trending topics on Twitter would be people dunking on Jack Dorsey never we've ever walked into his mentions by accident it can be a fairly brutal place for the man that has invented this platform that people love so much so I felt happy for Jack Dorsey that he got a day in the sun yesterday all of his mentions were people applauding and standing up and saying you made a good big bold decision there Jack good on you which I hope he enveloped himself in like a warm blanket last night because it will not last this is going to be just as big of a kerfuffle as any of these other situations but for the exact same reason that was pointed out earlier if you're still allowing issue ads and again you got you had to draw that line somewhere of what is political and what isn't then what is you know is this going to help a candidate you can't determine that you can't like there's just too many vectors. You know Twitter has since its inception the community has kind of driven what Twitter is you know hashtags were were invented by a Twitter user you know the rest of us use them now in various ways and there there's a lot of kind of human behavior that sort of writes itself the company can can can draw lines in the sand here and there and you know change some apps and and and try to change behavior but with limited results so something like this is it's less of a alright we're gonna we're gonna you know stomp out the stuff that we we feel is you know perhaps harmful and confusing to you know the the general good of our platform and we're gonna put a stop to it this will not put a stop to anything because if you want to get creative you're going to and Twitter is the best place to do that but does it is it significant that the company took a stand yes I think it is. I'm not even saying banning political ads is the wrong move for Twitter I'm I'm just saying this isn't the end this isn't the end of the battle it's not you know but there we go problem solved right now this is a much thornier problem because moderating at scale is impossible that that that's becoming clearer and clearer and I don't think anyone has proposed a good solution for that it's very easy to sit here in my seat and say come on Facebook and force your terms of service you know what's true and what's not and much harder to do that for 2.8 billion people when when you even if you employ a few thousand people and have a bot that looks at it and then come across stuff where if you put it in front of a hundred people 50 of them are going to say it's fine and 50 of them aren't and I'm not saying it's an unsolvable problem but nobody solved it yet and so I don't think it's fair to just say like well it's easy if they just wanted to do it because nobody knows how to do it. Yeah look there is a massive technical problem here. I don't banning political ads the announcement that was made yesterday by Dorsey in my mind just puts you on the hook for enforcing that ban and that I think will be intensely difficult. It may be less difficult than allowing the ads right that may just be picking a smaller fight. Yeah, I mean I just but it doesn't solve the problem. I know and and I have a hard time believing that a broad a massive broadcast platform can't adopt some kind of governing rules or transparency or publicly available publicly available area where we can see these things in action that is is to me at the very least just providing more information beyond you know this this ban which God knows how much it'll be abused immediately. Yeah. Well something tells me we're not done talking about this and you know who else is going to help us keep talking about it with the best articles ever everyone who participates in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com we are also on Facebook join our group it's very lively Facebook dot com slash groups slash daily tech news show. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Brian wrote in about a conversation yesterday about clam shell smartphones and the form factor and Brian had he had some thoughts in fact he numbered them number one Brian says I think they'd be great if they caught on and caused an end to the abomination of a trend that is portrait orientation video number two Brian says yeah I think their success is entirely reliant on dual screens allowing users to multitask having a full screen video on one screen for example browsing the web or email on the other and Brian says you know number three forget all modern smartphones just bring back the T-Mobile sidekick everybody needs a sidekick you know I I I know it would seem silly now if I had one in my hand but I enjoyed my sidekick as well my sidekick and yeah yeah it falls into this awkward moment in history where pre iPhone it was a revolution it was it was a super fun reimagining of what a cell phone could be absolutely more Hey shout out to our patrons master and grandmaster levels including Michael Atkins Justin Archambel and Andrew Bradley and also thanks to Justin rubber young for being with us today Justin it's been a political week to say the least what's been going on in your world oh it's certainly has and on the most recent politics politics politics we looked back into those of six weeks in the winter of 1998 to draw some lessons of the last impeachment process that we went through including a lot of little things that I did not remember you know you've done a good job on a political podcast when I had to close my tab for Dennis Hasser before I started today's DT and go ahead and get some in your life politics politics politics folks if you're listening to this live or shortly after we publish it it's October 31st it's Halloween you got trick-or-treaters coming and if you haven't joined our patreon at the $2 level you need to hurry up and do that because on November 1st tomorrow I'm gonna send everybody who's given us $2 a month or more a copy of the PDF of the DT and S cookbook with recipes from Sarah with recipes from Justin with recipes from me and Roger and even some folks in the audience you want to get this it's got some Scott Johnson art on the cover and there's all kinds of other new rewards on our patreon as well you're gonna want to look at those to go to patreon.com slash DT and S and if you have feedback for us we would love to get it our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're also live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern that's 2030 UTC for a limited time only a few more days find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Peter Wells and Len Peralta illustrating talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com