 Coming up on DTNS freedom from having to repeat your smart speakers name big broadcasters take down low cast and Apple will let reader apps link out to their own websites. How kind of them. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday the second of September 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert. Yeah. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. We were just talking about the secret life of our pets and Urkel. Those were two separate conversations on Good Day Internet. You can get both of them by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join top patrons like Kevin, Paul Thiessen and Ally Sanjabi. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced the ISO cell HP one image sensor, the first 200 megapixel sensor for mobile devices. This will join. Adaptively bin pixels based on this will adoptively bin pixels rather based on conditions using a technology called chameleon cell using groups of four and bright light for a 50 megapixel image and by 16 and low light for a 12.5 megapixel output. Samples of the sensor are available now, although it's unclear when it will actually be in devices. Sony announced it will hold a PlayStation showcase on September 9th at 4pm Eastern time. It's scheduled for 40 minutes and will feature games from PlayStation Studios as well as other developers and will be live streamed on Twitch and YouTube. Western Digital introduced a new mechanical hard drive architecture called Optet NAND and introduced a nine platter 20 terabyte drive using that same architecture. Western Digital was able to achieve better density by removing firmware accessible metadata from the disk itself and storing it on NAND instead. These are not hybrid drives as the NAND components never actually hold user data. Ireland's Data Protection Commission issued a 225 million euro fine against WhatsApp for failing to adequately tell EU residents what it does with their data. It's the second largest GDPR related fine yet. WhatsApp has three months to bring its communications to consumers up to compliance and the company plans to appeal the decision. Qualcomm introduced a lossless mode for its aptX Bluetooth codec available and able to deliver a CD quality 16 bit 44 one kilohertz sound wirelessly. Existing chipsets that support aptX will also support the lossless mode with the first compatible headphones set to arrive later this year. All right. Let's talk about Apple getting it from all sides. Apple's Reuters sources say the Competition Commission of India will review a lawsuit brought by nonprofit Together We Fight Society. It's a small nonprofit that accuses Apple of abusing its dominant market position with its in-app purchases. The review could result in dismissal of the case or the ordering of a wider investigation into the issue. My money's on the ladder. India is probably going to open up a wider investigation. So Apple's going to have to deal with that. Those kinds of investigations are starting to have results. For instance, in order to close an investigation into suspected violations of Japan's anti monopoly act. Apple has agreed to let developers of what Apple calls reader apps. Netflix, Spotify, Kindle directly link from their Apple apps to their websites for account sign up. Apple says it defines a reader app now as one that does not offer in-app digital goods and services for purchase. Apple normally requires these apps to use Apple's in-app payment system for any sign ups and not to mention any alternative to that. Rather than share 30% of the sign up fee with Apple though, companies like Netflix have apps that only have a login screen with no explanation of how you would get an account if you don't already know. In fact, Netflix says on their app right now, you can't sign up for Netflix in the app. We know it's a hassle because that's all they're allowed to say. They can't tell you where to go to sign up. They can't tell you why they're not allowed to let you sign up because Apple won't allow them to say go to our website to sign up much less link to it, but that's changing. Now, reader apps can share a single link to their website to help users set up and manage their account. And Apple says it will quote help developers of reader apps protect users when they link them to an external website to make purchases. We have no idea what that means. More details like what can be mentioned along with that link are yet to come. Apple says the rule will go into effect in early 2022. So we'll be on the lookout for the actual policy statement of that change in guidelines later. This feels very consistent with Apple's position in that they will fiercely protect the things that they believe they have invented and have the rights to. And when it's in hardware, it's a little bit easier to wrap your head around. But in terms of making money over internet services, something that has been a pernicious thing historically for Apple, although obviously the App Store has become a gigantic massive, massive, massive revenue stream for them. They will give up these, they will fight tooth and nail for every shred of the money that they can make here. So will they eventually start having to peel things off like they're doing right now in Japan? Will that eventually come to America? I would suspect. This is worldwide. Even though it's a Japanese decision, it's going to apply to everybody. So they will do that only when their hand is absolutely forced. I don't think that they are in the business of giving up what they conceive to be even a shred of money in terms of internet services revenue if they don't absolutely have to. Yeah. I agree. I agree with you, Justin. I also think that Apple having its hand forced in this, in this way, Apple's not going to stop making money. There's going to be plenty of people who still sign up for things within the whatever iOS app they might be using at the time. The whole idea of what constitutes a reader app is very interesting to me because you think of like, oh, reader app like, like a, like a news reader or that sort of thing. And I think that there will be apps in the future that don't fall under this category that will make sure that they do fall under this category in order to, you know, reap the same rewards. Yeah, my problem with this is it's always been artificial rule. It's not a natural division, right? And so you have to come up with these artificial exceptions to it. Oh, a reader app means something that's just accessing something you've already purchased. It's not a store that would compete with our store. Just let people tell folks stuff. I forget what should be legal or illegal. I don't think it's smart or sustainable to tell apps that they can't say things about what they legitimately do that they can't say. Oh, you could sign up for an account at our site. I know that that technically is like undermining the revenue for Apple, but it's so small. I mean, if no one would choose to do it that way, because it's going to be so much better to provide subscriptions within the app. So what Apple has done is made an anti user system where a user comes to an app and is like, I don't know how to use this. It's not a good experience for the Apple users. So I'm glad they're doing this. Obviously, they're only doing it because Japan forced them to do it. But I'm glad they're doing this. And I don't know. I think you're right, Justin. They're only going to do it as they get death by a thousand cuts. But it looks, you know, given what's going on in Korea and India and the United States and Europe that we are going to get a thousand cuts and it's going to change stuff. Here is the other reason why it is in their interest to do it specifically with the three companies that we name Netflix, Spotify and Kindle. They have directly competing services with all of them and their treatment of those companies is going to come to bear with any kind of monopoly conversation. Yeah, which is why they want a blanket system that doesn't let anybody do anything so they can say, hey, it's not because of us. This is just our policy. One last thing on Apple, the most recent beta of iOS 15 now asked for permission to run personalized ads in the App Store and Apple News. Currently in iOS 14, Apple uses information it already knows about your device, your Apple content purchase and Apple news stories. You read to select what ads it shows you. In iOS 15, it's going to ask you for permission to personalize those ads to use that information. Apple still does not share this info with third parties. That's not changing. Apple requires developers to request permission to share info with third parties for ad tracking. But Apple doesn't even ask developers for permission to use the information they already have. So they're actually applying a stricter rule to their own ads in this particular case. Hey, I got a couple smart speaker features to note today. 9 to 5 Google analyzed Google Assistant's app code and found a feature called Quick Phrases that lets users skip the wake word for specific tasks. Quick phrases need to be enabled individually and use voice match to prevent accidental activations. Categories for those phrases include alarms, connect, general info, lights, media controls, timers and to-dos. All that means is that you'd be able to say turn the lights on and the lights would go on or skip this song. And it would skip and you wouldn't have to say hey G word before everyone. 9 to 5 Google suspects that the system works by making the phrases become wake words of their own. Remember, this is in the discovery of the code so we don't know when it will be available, if it will be available at all. Something that is launched is adaptive volume for Amazon Echoes. When the Echo detects the room is louder than normal like say you're having a party. You can, or saying you're running a blender that TV is too loud as other examples. The Echo will respond to you with a louder volume. Once the room quiets down, it'll go back to normal. You can activate the feature by telling your Amazon device to quote, turn on adaptive volume. But you will have to use a wake word for that, not the Google one just so everybody's clear. Oh man, this is, I am not a Google Assistant user with any regularity. I am an Amazon Assistant user though. And just to, just the stuff that I bark at her or him, you know, depends on what voice you're using every day. There's just one weird step of that that I'm always like, it's so clunky. I know what I gotta do. I know what I gotta say. I know I gotta wake you up and then I gotta tell you what I want you to do. But I do it multiple times a day. And just to have a few routines that are feel a little bit more natural like good morning without having to say, hey, you know who you are. Good morning kind of thing. That becomes an actual, it's like a life hack that I'm really looking forward to. I imagine all this stuff is going to feel so primitive someday when there's like contextual awareness that's been created with machine learning and all that sort of thing. But yeah, the idea of listening to music and being able to just say, skip this song instead of Al Exa, skip this song every time is very appealing. On the other hand, like you used just now the good morning. I would never make that one of these quick phrases because I'll just say good morning, you know, to the dogs and then suddenly the routine goes on, right? I want the wake word in the way of that for sure. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, well, Tom, some of us live alone. I also do have a dog. You ever say good morning to Otis? I do. We have different ways of, you know, talking to each other. I also do, you know, over on the Amazon side, I do love the idea of if I'm running the coffee grinder or something, you know, and I've got my news briefs going. And just for the sound to kind of boost a little bit and then be able to drop back down without me having to, you know, in a complicated way, be like, be louder, be quieter and use the wake word for all that stuff. That would be nice. Yeah, 100% agree for exact exact same thing happens in our house. Well, the US state of Texas's House and Senate have approved a bill that would make it unlawful for a social media platform with more than 50 million users to use location or political views as a basis for removing a post, also banning or demonetizing a user. It's been sent to Governor Abbott to sign into law and Florida passed a similar law back in May that would find companies for banning political candidates. In June, a Florida district court issued a preliminary injunction against the law, ruling that, quote, balancing the exchange of ideas among private speakers is not a legitimate governmental interest and quotes. If this bill becomes lots expected to be challenged on constitutional grounds as well. It will also be challenged in terms of questioning how it's enforced and how all of these social networks define the issues that they take with some of these posts that are being removed. This is red meat for conservatives in states that have tilted red over the last, I mean, Texas specifically for a very long time, Florida more solidly read over the past couple of presidential cycles. It's Fox News bait. It's the kind of thing that will get traction in what is the political, the dark side of the moon for the political calendar, which is where we are right now. It is certainly not the most talked about thing coming out of the Texas State House as of right now. So I don't expect this to be something that necessarily gets a ton of traction, but it will certainly garner plenty of talk radio appearances and conservative television appearances for many of the players involved. So good for them and their campaign bank. So you're implying that these laws may not be passed or that these laws may be passed knowing that they will be thrown out in court. Yes, knowing that it's going to be very hard to enforce them and knowing that it's going to likely be held up in court if not outright thrown out in court. And by the time that all that happens, everybody will have bumped up the email lists and completed their television hits. And I don't I don't say that specifically to say that this is only state Republicans in Florida and Texas that do this. This is kind of the name of the game. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So, so I mean, because I would have a lot to say if this was a if this was likely to come into play about what you know the unintended consequences and all that. But it sounds like what you're saying is don't worry too much about it. It would be unusual if any of these laws stick. I have questions of how they enforce it. Yeah, it's about how they they agree. I mean, the Florida one's a little bit more straightforward of don't ban political candidates. But at that point, how do we define who's a political candidate? If I announce that I am considering running for it, then am I allowed to never be kicked off of a site? The Texas one is a little bit more specific or less specific in terms of saying that you can't ban things based on political views. But I don't believe that Facebook much fuzzier. Yeah, considers the things that they they they deep platform to be political views. They view them to be harmful for other reasons. So we get into a very, very tricky enforcement question. And again, that's that's even going beyond the fact that I don't know these things will stand up in court. At least that's my own amateur. Sure. Hey, folks, we're always interested in what you'd like to hear on the show. We do our best to provide a wide variety of stuff. But one way to let us know is our subreddit. You can get in there and submit stories and vote on them. We look at it every day. It's kind of the last word on the lineup when I'm looking. What are the subreddit folks thinking? What are they voting on? What are they submitting? So get over there. DailyTechnewshow.Reddit.com. Lowcast is a nonprofit service that streams locally broadcast channels over the Internet to people geolocated in the broadcast area. They're not trying to let people in Dallas see the TV shows up in Chicago. It's if you're located in the area, they'll give you your local broadcast in order to provide those without good signal reception. A way to get local broadcast. However, major broadcast networks in the United States get paid pretty good amount of money by cable and streaming companies to carry local channels. ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC therefore jointly sued Lowcast in July 2019 for retransmitting their programming without a license. Now Lowcast has justified its operation under a 1976 law that grants nonprofits the right to retransmit within the broadcast area if they receive no commercial advantage and do not charge users anything more than what's necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service. The law was meant to help improve accessibility for people who lived in areas with poor reception. Maybe you're in an apartment building that's blocked by a bunch of other buildings or in a mountain valley where you can't quite get reception from the tower and you're in the area. However, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton granted the network's motion to dismiss Lowcast's defense on Wednesday. That's a summary judgment Lowcast loses. The judge ruled that Lowcast has been using donations from viewers to expand into new markets and that that is not strictly local operation in the reasonable costs of maintaining and operating your local operation. Justice Stanton also denied Lowcast's motion seeking summary judgment that it qualified for that 1976 law exemption. At first, Lowcast responded to all this by removing the interruptions asking for donations and it looked like they'd keep operating and then Thursday morning it announced it would suspend operations immediately and it's no longer streaming. Lowcast could still appeal the case but it doesn't look good. Lowcast has said in the past it has more than 3 million users. It offers the service for free with interruptions every 15 minutes asking for donations or at least it did. A $5 a month donation would have gotten rid of the interruptions and you could also write and say, hey, I've got financial difficulties and they'd make exceptions in certain cases. And some companies including AT&T donated to Lowcast. In fact, AT&T integrated the service into their own services. 4.37 million of Lowcast's 4.52 million in revenue, though, came directly from users, not from the companies. And the judge used that against them too saying that that was too much money, that perhaps there was a commercial advantage at play as well. So let's understand the reason why these networks are suing Lowcast beyond them being the big old bullies is the fact that when you sell, when you are charging these other OTT streaming services to stream your content, it is your obligation to protect the exclusivity for which you are selling that content to. If you do not at least make the fight in court, then those rights holders slaying PlayStation, everybody else that buys the retransmissions rights now have the ability to say, well, I don't know, maybe we should renegotiate our deal if you're not holding up on the fact that we get some reasonable element of that. As for Lowcast, you know, I love this idea. I've been in apartment buildings where it's hard to get the clean signal on an antenna, but now Ario and Lowcast, I wonder if we're ever going to see one of these solutions work. Yeah, we were talking before the show about the Ario debacle and the fact that when Ario was operating, I never was a user, but I know a lot of people who were and it was a huge bummer. I also, I now pay for YouTube TV and partly it's to get just local channels that an OTA antenna would totally give me, but just because of where my apartment is and the wall that my TV is on and it's all just too weird and I can't get that anymore. So yeah, I mean, these are, you know, I didn't know there was a law from 1976 that would protect a nonprofit such as Lowcast, you know, to continue operating. Yeah, it doesn't sound good. That's also a long time ago and things have changed and you're fighting really, really big companies in this sense. But yeah, it's a bummer. We actually got an email from a listener who said, yeah, I was a Lowcast user or I am, I guess, you know, former Lowcast user who, you know, for financial reasons, this was something that was available to me and was really helpful. Yeah, can I engage in some reckless speculation? Please do. I was about to create a fantasy scenario of my own, so please go first. I wonder whether or not after Lowcast said that they were going to continue to fight the good fight. They took a look at the numbers. They took a look at what their financial situation was. They took a rough estimate of where the fight was going to cost them going forward. And then maybe there was some interplay between the powers that be on the other side that said, hey, what if there was a more equitable way that everybody could just get the hell out of dodge and end this? And I wonder if that if that was a play or if there was some kind of settlement. Yeah, the EFF has been defending them. So the cost is mostly borne by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I am not. In fact, your scenario of the broadcasters saying, hey, if you drop this, we'll do a thing fits into my fantasy scenario. My fantasy scenario is I want this because while I can get most channels over the air in the new neighborhood I moved in a few years ago, I can't get them all. I could get them all in my old neighborhood, can't get them all here. And so I used Lowcast to get over the an over the air channel that was not carried on my streaming service because not all the channels, you know, sign up for it in the past. What if my here's my fantasy scenario? What if what if the broadcasters pulled a hulu and decided, you know what we'll do? We'll create a competitor. We will all pool all of our broadcast channels together and it won't be a free service. It'll be a, you know, $7 a month service. And we'll use that as leverage because we can tell the cable companies, no, you can't use our service. You're not allowed and we'll use it as leverage against them when we go into these negotiations over carriage service fees. Maybe, you know, it'll never happen, but I adore the idea. It's with a lot of the affiliate deals because that's that's where a lot of that stuff gets really mature. Well, right, because they can do it with their own and operated, but the affiliate deals start to get very complex there. So, all right. Hey, enough of all this TV talk. It's time to check in on the progress of government digital coins. Yeah. Yeah. Monetary authority of Singapore, the Reserve Bank of Australia, Bank Negara, Malaysia and the South African Reserve Bank announced that they are developing a common platform for cross border digital payments. And that includes using multiple central bank digital currencies or CBDCs that will let institutions transact directly with each other. The banks are working with Singapore's BIS Innovation Hub and hope to show technical prototypes at Singapore's FinTech Festival in November of 21 with a plan to publish findings in early 22. If they get this to work, that would cut down on the need to move to use intermediaries used for settling cross border transactions, which would save both money and time. BIS says 86% of central banks are exploring CBDCs and 60% are actively trying out technology and 14% are running pilots. I've been telling you for months that this is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. And as Justin's tone of voice implied, it is. What's going on here is those intermediaries are the ones that cause like if Singapore, somebody in Singapore wants to send money to Malaysia, there's like a bunch of intermediaries you have to go through and each take a little bit of a cut. And it's not only costly, it's slow because everybody has to approve things and it's a very old fashioned system. So what these countries are saying is what if we just have all ran our own blockchains and we interoperated. And then when you want to send money, you just go through the government blockchain and Bob's your uncle, it happens fast. And it happens pretty cheap, like maybe free. So that's what they're doing now. Once they get these up and running, then they can use them for other things like letting the unbanked have bank accounts or using them as payment systems for people with government issued stable coins that are tied to the local currency, etc. That's a little down the road. But this is one of the more common ways I think we'll see CBDCs get launched and then they'll be used for other things going forward. All right, let's check out the mailbag, Sarah. Let's do it. So we were talking to Patrick Norton on the show yesterday about the idea of digital IDs being on your phone and how comfortable we all are with this and how comfortable we all are of the idea of things being digital in general. And Graham, who lives in Australia says, I no longer carry either a wallet or cash on a day to day basis, just my iPhone and my Apple watch contactless payment. Apple Pay in my case says Graham for credit and debit cards is ubiquitous drivers licenses stored in a state government app officially acceptable as ID for everything. Additional proof of ID is stored in an official post office up Medicare card. That's Australian Universal Healthcare for vaccination certificates are stored in a federal government app. Even event tickets, even back when we were allowed to roam are stored in Graham's iPhone and watch wallet. Graham says loyalty cards are on my iPhone. Any other info I might be asked for is stored in my one password with a photo if necessary. I think the only thing I'm really missing day to day is a private health insurance card, but that's soon to arrive currently in beta testing. And conversely to the problem of losing one's phone, a client of mine had to cancel his physical credit card last week due to fraud, but his bank was able to leave his Apple wallet version of the card active. This meant he was still able to make purchases while the replacement card was being mailed out to him. Yeah, we couldn't go down this rabbit hole yesterday. So I'm very appreciative that we had people email these examples. Most of the stuff I do to event tickets almost always on the phone, even at like little places like the New Beverly Theater here in Los Angeles. You have it on your phone. So we're not that far behind. It's just some of the government ID stuff. We also got an email from Frank in Denmark, who said both our social security card and driver's license are digital. The way the government here has chosen to solve it is to make separate apps for driver's license and social security cards. To get your cards in the apps, you have to log in with your national ID that is used for everything from public pages like taxes to your online bank. This features two factor through an app to make sure people don't just take pictures and screenshots of the cards in the app. They feature constantly moving patterns on the screen. Furthermore, on the driver's license, the QR code that the police reads are constantly changing every couple of seconds. So if you screen shot it for use later, it doesn't work. Having the QR code in the driver's license app and the barcode in the social security card app also means that you don't have to hand your unlocked phone over to someone else. Both apps feature PIN slash face ID slash touch ID or however you unlock your phone as protection. Well, it's nice to hear how the rest of the world is dealing with this. I'm all for it, honestly. If it works, I'm great with carrying fewer things in my pockets. I think it should come as to nobody surprised that culturally everybody has different temperatures on where they're comfortable with these kinds of things. What level of redundancy they want with some of these things. And whether or not you feel comfortable handing any kind of phone or even holding a screen open to a member of law enforcement. And that's something that, you know, I'm always curious to see how everybody else interacts with this stuff. But while I wasn't here for the conversation yesterday, I do understand and sympathize with folks who might feel like this is putting too many eggs in one basket. I think it's worth reiterating that the way the Apple driver's license ID works, you never unlock your phone. You never hand it over. You're in control of it. You're the one who decides to tap it, which is, I see it getting confused out there because there are so many other types of implementations of that sort of thing. No, no, I'm just saying that's how it works. You might still have objections to it, but I just want to reiterate that that's how it works. It brings you to a place where when you are in a power dynamic with a police officer, maybe that's not how they want to play it right there. Yes, that's how it's designed, but you know, will that be how it actually plays out? We don't know. Well, you might have thoughts on this topic or anything else that we talk about on the show. And if you do, we would like to hear your voice feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send that email. Also, we got some brand new bosses to thank today. They include James Buckin, Adam Reynolds, Scott Phipps, and Mo Mueppo Muppeso. They all just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, James. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Mo Mueppo. Wow. We did get a bunch. I was just like, hey, maybe we get a bunch tomorrow yesterday and then we got a bunch. So let's try it again. Who else out there was like, oh, I meant to do it, but I didn't have time. Well, that's your chance. Get on the show tomorrow. That's your chance. Yeah. I mean, we will thank you with, I don't know, lots of claps. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Also known as Justin Bobby, at least to me now because I realize that that's what I could call you. Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Jay Bob Young. That's what all my friends call me. I do a podcast called politics, politics, politics and certainly in the spirit of daily tech news show, which tries to look analytically at a lot of the news stories and maybe take a more level headed approach to it. I had a great interview on the Wednesday edition of the show with a writer by the name of Matthias Shapiro. He writes a subset called polymath PLO I M A T H and we went through COVID numbers, things that are very, like very charged subjects that I think are often reported in sloppy ways. He is a great level headed mind on that and I would greatly appreciate it. Folks go ahead and gave it a listen. Check it out. The most or the Wednesday edition of the politics, politics, politics podcast featuring Matthias Shapiro, polymath himself. Go listen and also listen to us or even watch us if you can because we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. And guess what? We'll be back tomorrow with Nicole Lee and Len Pearl. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com.