 Coming up on DTNS, Bose wants to come to your house to silence the noise. A new handheld to play Game Boy cartridges and why world leaders won't be treated the same as you by Twitter. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 16th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And Salt Lake City, you, Tom Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about radio edits of songs and all kinds of cool stuff on Good Day Internet. If you want to hang out with us a little more each day, hear what we have to say about the wider world a little bit or extended discussions of technology news. You got to get Good Day Internet by becoming a member at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Federal Communications Commission formally approved the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, an FCC official told The Verge earlier today. Now the companies must deal with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general who are suing to block the deal. Sprint and T-Mobile both said they won't close the merger until that lawsuit is resolved. Good luck to them. Intel is buying Toronto-based Pivot Technology Solutions smart edge software for $27 million to help Intel split up data and store it closer to users to make devices work faster. Smart Edge is designed to run on Intel chips, which Intel intends to sell in 5G-capable equipment. The UK has decided not to go through with a plan to require internet users to verify their age in order to view adult content on the web. Or another way of saying this, the UK has decided not to go through with a plan to require kids to borrow IDs from adults in order to view adult content on the web. After delaying the scheme several times, the UK's digital secretary, Nicky Morgan, said the government will focus on protecting children online through our proposed online harms regulatory regime. For some of the older people in the audience who might remember Yahoo Groups, you should know something. Starting on October 21st, you will no longer be able to upload content to Yahoo Groups. That's right. I know. Sit down. Take a glass of water. Starting December 14th, all previously posted content to Yahoo Groups will also be removed. You can download your Yahoo Groups posts using the privacy dashboard. Yeah. I'm not joking when I say this. I put in my request to download my Yahoo Groups content because there's some early 2000s content that I might be sentimental about in there. And still waiting. Still waiting for Yahoo to tell me, yep, still haven't got a... Yeah. You know, I couldn't even really laugh about it. I was like, I might have content on Yahoo Groups. I should check this. I don't think I ever did once, but I know of. I don't think so. All right. Let's talk a little more about meeting up in real life, Scott. Yeah. Let's talk about LinkedIn, not Yahoo Groups. LinkedIn wants to try networking in the real world. They're already a big social network. How about in the real world with a new free tool called Events, which lets users plan, announce and invite others to meetups and get together. Events will appear as a menu item and is first rolling out in English speaking countries October 17th with other markets to follow. So no more making your own events with all your pals in LinkedIn. There's a tool to do it. Yeah. I mean, at first my reaction was, oh, this is interesting. A social network really steering into real life meetups, which is important and a good way to make connections stronger. Certainly applies in the world of business networking where you might want to meet your next job, especially if you're a freelancer or something like that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, well, this is just something LinkedIn users were already doing. And LinkedIn is creating a way for them to do it easier, which, wow. A member when that's what social networks were mostly talked about for is taking things that users wanted and making features out of them. Well, there are several tools to, you know, put together and get together. I don't know. Eventbrite comes to mind. Sure, sure. Or, you know, or you just put a bunch of people on an email list and, you know, blast it out type of thing. So the fact that LinkedIn is offering this tool is, I mean, frankly, I'm surprised that they didn't do it sooner. The company obviously realized that there are enough business related and focused events that were happening with users within the platform that it was something that they should just offer. Yeah, it makes sense to me as someone who's ran a few events over the last 10 years and knows what it can be like on all sort of aspects of it. This seems like a cool thing for them to do. The other option is you have, you know, Twitch, you could argue as a social network and they have TwitchCon. You have big social groups that gather around the thing they're social with, but this feels like the right plan for them. Get the tool into people's hands. They're going to make their own events. They're going to go to the LinkedIn event. There's no annual LinkedIn show that I'm aware of. So, yeah, this is a good tool to put into people's hands because, to be honest, having run a bunch of these, it's really hard. It's freaking hard. And all the help you can get through tools like this, the better, I say. They announced its third quarter revenue was up 27% thanks to strong smartphone shipments prior to the enactment of U.S. trade restrictions in May. The U.S. has allowed some exemptions to the restrictions that expire in November, but not all that technology is exempt. For instance, the Mate 30 smartphone, which was just announced last month, can't run the Google version of Android. Still, the company shipped to 185 million smartphones so far this year, which strategy analytics estimates means about a 29% rise in Q3. That is slower growth. It's big growth, but it's slower growth than Huawei has had. It seems like we haven't quite seen the effect of the trade restrictions hit for several reasons. One is this quarter partially took place before the restrictions went into effect. Two, in China, they're seeing increased sales from people who want to support their homeland business. And three, they can still build phones with stuff in their inventory and with some of these exemptions. So at an event in Zurich, Huawei showed off its new 5G antennas for the Blade AAU base station. The new antenna is double bandwidth and boost power output while weighing less and using less power. And Huawei says it's shipped 400,000 of those base stations so far this year and estimates 56 carriers worldwide have deployed its new equipment. Part of the reason for those trade restrictions was to get people to stop buying this kind of equipment from Huawei. It does not seem to have had an effect yet. Well, back in August, I believe that Huawei said we may be $10 billion shorter than what would have been normal for us. The company, you know, it sounds like this third quarter earnings call, which was, it wasn't a full earnings report. There was certain earnings that were reported. Others not for obvious reasons, I suppose. But it sounds like the company is like, okay, we might not be in as bad of shape as we thought we'd be, but we're still going to be down on the year. Well, yeah, because you got to get on the other side of the actual trade restrictions and whether or not those make a dent or not is super curious, right? Like, will we get to the end of all this and go, oh, yeah, those really messed them up. They're going to have to change course or whatever. Or are we going to find out, nah, they made ways around it, shipped more around the world and hardly shipping here. Like trade restrictions in the US big deal. Like I'm actually really curious about that to see if that ends up being that way or if, you know, if this really does hurt them in the long run. Well, look, these trade restrictions could have upended them right away like it did ZTE. We have something to compare it to ZTE paused operations and had to come to the table and agree to restrictions. It has not done the same to Huawei. That's what this tells us. It doesn't tell us that these trade restrictions aren't going to have an effect. And like you say, Sarah, that effect is already being anticipated by Huawei itself. So it's just sort of a milestone along the route. Like said, who knows if this goes away. Let's say China and the US, you know, even though the US says this has nothing to do with tariffs. Let's say they do come to an agreement on trade. Maybe suddenly this restriction gets lifted. We'll see. It may not. May not. All right. Here's everyone's favorite story of the week or the day rather. Some users of Bose quiet comfort 35 to headphones noticed a recent firmware update reduced the effectiveness of noise cancellation. Whole point of those headphones is, well, one of the main features is that some of those users downgraded the firmware to bring noise canceling back up to snuff. But Bose has blocked the ability to downgrade citing security concerns. Instead, Bose engineers are visiting the houses of Bose users trying to figure out what the heck is wrong since they can't replicate the problem in the lab. So the Bose. So, so Bose says it has modified how users update firmware, but hasn't identified the problem. Users within a reasonable distance of Bose's Farmingham, Massachusetts headquarters can apply for a visit. So they're actually going to come to your house, take your headphones, put there, put your cans on their head and try to replicate the problem. Well, I mean, okay, how, how many times have we all been like, I'm sorry you're having this issue, but I can't replicate it on my end all the time. Happens all the time. So the fact that the company is like, can we come and like, put your headphones on and try to figure out what's happening. Like, yeah, we'll come a day's drive. Yeah, that sort of Upper East Eastern State area, whatever you call it. But, but yeah, it's, you know, I kind of had to laugh when I read this this morning, but at the same time, these are not cheap headphones and users saying, whoa, something's wrong after the firmware update. No, I'm going back and the company saying, well, no, you can't for security reasons, which is probably well within the rights of the company to do that. They probably have good reasons to say that. But then, you know, they don't want upset customers either. So what else are you going to do? It makes me want to know. Well, I want to know the results of this because how much placebo effect is going on when people hear about the brand of thing they have. And someone says, Oh, there's this problem. Sometimes we're pretty good at saying, Hey, my battery life does seem terrible. I must be. Yeah, this is my noise very well either. I read on a forum that the new firmware upgrade causes noise canceling not to work. And I just did the firmware upgrade. So I'm going to see if it doesn't work. Right. It's, it's a selection bias. You start to look for things like, Hey, I bet I couldn't have heard that before. I wonder how much of it is that too, especially because they're going to people's houses and all they've found so far as an oddity in the way firmware upgrades are delivered, which wasn't the problem. I mean, great. They found that, but good on Bose for taking the extra step to say, you know what, we need to figure this out. It's not that we don't believe you. We want to find out what's going on here and doing the legwork literally to make that happen. Yeah, I'd give him dinner. If I lived around those guys, I'd make all dinner. We'd have like a nice little time and then you could fix my headphones. I was about to say, yeah, if I lived in the area and I had these headphones, which I don't, I'd be like, please come to my house. Like I want to know more about you. I want to know what questions you asked me. Plus we're at the next Wednesday's DTNS, multiple Bose engineers reporting food poisoning after being set for dinner. Oh yeah, don't eat the lobster beans. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Apple's upcoming Apple TV Plus service has outspent its initially projected $1 billion annual content budget. Sources say that Jennifer Aniston, the vehicle, the Jennifer Aniston vehicle morning show cost $15 million and an episode for a total of $300 million for two seasons total with $2 million in episode fees that producers Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston negotiated. Okay. Well, CE, starring Jason Momoa, is said to cost $240 million for two seasons. You know, it's a lot of money. Apple, while not banning explicit content outright, has reportedly said such content must be in service of the storyline and all projects should be in line with Apple's aspirational brand identity. Yeah, we've heard that before. We've actually talked about that on the show before, the sort of uneasy tension between creatives and Apple saying, well, it's okay to be edgy, but only in the Apple way. Right? Like there's some learning going on between Apple and what these folks want to do. A lot of this stuff about the amount of money they're spending, though, goes the other way as well. There's a quote later in the same Hollywood reporter article where they're like, I can't believe they're not trying to outspend Netflix. Sure. In fact, maybe they should just buy Netflix, which Netflix is not going to sell itself. Netflix is not up for sale. They don't want to buy. They don't want to be bought by anybody. But everyone keeps thinking Apple should buy someone instead of creating it themselves because they're running into all these bumps in the road. Yeah, but we talked pre-show about how welcome to Hollywood, like the bumps in the road are not uncommon. They are only uncommon because we're talking about Apple in the context of here's the big tech company fronting the money and they don't really have a huge past of experience in this particular industry. And that what's the difference between this and hearing about directors falling off for projects, movie scripts getting scrapped and started over, movie that was supposed to come out five years ago, got shelved and now finally out of the end. Like this is just Hollywood. It's same old same. And yeah, when you're talking about Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, the numbers, yes, for the rest of us, $300 million is a lot for Apple dropping the bucket. So that's not really the issue. It's a drop in the bucket, too. I mean, that's cost. That's absolutely right. I think it's a little bit more of, OK, well, what is going on behind the scenes? And is there something wrong with Apple as a company at the helm of making sure that the stuff, you know, comes to the point where the rest of us can watch it? I have a feeling it's the same bumps in the road that every other network deals with every other production house. Everybody's got to deal with this stuff. And I think it's probably no different again, except for the fact that it's Apple and everyone wants to go. Ooh, maybe the tech companies get too fast. Maybe they shouldn't have gotten into the content booths. Right. I mean, I think the same. Also in this Hollywood reporter article, there's a top producer who worked with company with the company saying the biggest problem is Apple's insistence that the industry adapt to them and not the other way around. Whereas Edward Kitsis, who has been brought in to work on I think the amazing stories project said while they're a new network, they're really not meaning from top to bottom. Everyone we dealt with was a pro with tons of studio and or network experience, some of whom we had actually worked with back at our ABC days. It's not like you have like Johnny Ive and they're trying to produce a TV show. Like they hired actual people from the business. It's not like they called down or down a couple of floors and said, Hey, the guys that used to make the 16 pin connector for the old iPod bring them up here. We got a new job for them. Like totally analog, a company that makes modern takes on classic video game consoles announced their next model will be the analog pocket at launch. The pocket will play cartridges from Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Eventually analog will put out adapters for the Game Gear Neo Geo pocket color. And they want to keep doing more. The goal is eventually support all handheld game systems, at least classic ones. The pocket has a 665 PPI LCD display with a 1600 by 1440 resolution and a built-in backlight plus USB C for charging an SD card slot, a headphone jack and set to launch in 2020 for $199. Yeah, now if you are somebody who dabbles in games and you hear that price and you're like, Oh, wait a minute. I can get a switch for that. No, you can. And maybe you should. I think it's really important to kind of quantify what this is. This company is about two things. One, bringing really cool retro nostalgic stuff back to life in some way and creating preservation for those experiences, but also creating a bit of a premium. iconic device that you'll hold in your hand. It'll be the only kind that ever comes out this way. Nobody else is making these. Certainly Nintendo's not. And they've been able to do it in such a way that they've avoided lawsuits up to now. And they are, they want you to use cartridges that you already have or would procure through other ways. So they want you playing old Game Boy, Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color Games. And they want you to do it on this shiny, either white or black model that is obvious. This is a super sexy device. It reminded me, and I told Thomas this morning on this TMS segment, they remind me of watches. It's like watch culture. If you're into watches, you know you are and you're ready to get one. Otherwise, this sounds expensive and ridiculous to everybody else who's just happy buying whatever the current thing is. That's who this is for. And I might be that person. I don't know. I kind of want one. It's a good comparison. The watch community, if you're not into it, you're not into it. And there, you know, there's a lot about particularly retro gaming that I think is similar to that. If you're into it, you know you are and you'll be willing to plunk out a little bit of money. Yeah. And the goal, like you said, the goal of this is also historical preservation to encourage people to want to preserve these games by continuing to play them by making the cartridges usable so people are less likely to throw them away. Archive.org does a lot of work in this area as well. The analog and archiver are friends in that respect. They do collaborate on some stuff. So I think this is a great, this is a great project for making sure that we preserve some of our video gaming history. And this isn't the first one. Analog has done three consoles before as well. So this is just the latest effort. First time they've done mobile though. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, you need to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Twitter made a post called World Leaders on Twitter, Principles and Approach, explaining that in cases involving a world leader, quote, we will err on the side of leaving content up if there's a clear public interest in doing so. This is in response to a lot of people claiming that a particular world leader they don't like, not only the one you're thinking of, but multiples out there shouldn't be allowed to break the rules. The post from Twitter said that a world leader would be subject to enforcement of the rules no matter what if they did one of the following. Promoted terrorism, threatened violence against an individual, posted private information, shared intimate images, video or still without consent, encouraged self-harm, or engaged in child sexual exploitation. So world leaders don't get a pass if they do any of those. That's the line. Twitter's like basically we will enforce the rules against them in certain situations. Here are examples. But Twitter announced it will not always remove something that breaks the rules in the interest of public discourse because silencing a world leader is a power that they don't feel they should exercise without really, really needing to. Twitter also announced it will no longer let users like, reply, share or retweet tweets sent by world leaders that do violate its rules if they're left up. So they're saying, look, we may know something broke the rules. We may decide that we're going to leave it up in the public interest, but we won't let you share it. We're only leaving it up as part of the public record. Users would still be allowed to retweet with comment in those cases. In other words, you can add your own comment and then retweet it. But you wouldn't be able to just blindly retweet it out there or add likes or reply or extend the thread, things like that. Now, there's a couple of things that strike me as important to understand where Twitter's coming from here. On the one hand, a lot of people may or may not realize that there are laws in the United States that treat public figures, particularly government figures, differently than they treat regular folks. Liable and slander are two examples. If I am going to prove liable or slander against a public figure, especially someone running for office or in office, there has to be a higher standard. The courts have said we want to err on the side of letting the public have commentary about their government and commentary about their public office candidates. So to prove liable and slander, you have to meet a higher standard for a public figure than you would against just any other person on the street. So they're treating public figures differently in the law for this same principle. Now, Twitter's using this in a different way, kind of in the way that we preserve presidential papers. It's against the rules for a president to not keep papers that are associated with how the president conducts the office so that later we can see history and also just understand how the government worked. It's part of the public record, even if it has to be classified for a particular amount of time. So Twitter's combining those two principles and saying we want the public to be able to see what the world leaders have said and we want it to be part of the record out there. We don't want it to be hidden and we don't want to be in the position of deciding what should be hidden and what shouldn't for a public leader. So we're drawing the line here and that's what this post was about today. It's pretty interesting. My brain immediately went because this is where I go, but it went to this thing about world leaders would be subject to the same enforcement of rules no matter what about terrorism, threatening violence and so on. And I looked at those and I thought, Oh, well, that just opens you up to talking in code or that just opens you up to saying it in a certain way or putting it in a quote and attributing it to somebody else. But really it's still a threat, even though the person who said it didn't actually have a tweet that you could track. Like there's a lot of ways you could dance around that stuff, but that's also true right now. It's totally true. And for anybody. So that's why I think I like this is because at least it's something and it feels like it's adhering to principles we already recognize as good governing principles of the exchange of information of the red, the readily available status status of information. Like all of that stuff I think is important and needs to be preserved. And so I like the way that they're doing it. I think it's better than not doing anything which is kind of what we have felt for a long time and you know, Twitter's right now very it's a hotbed of political discussion. If there ever was one Twitter's it. And it feels like Twitter just sort of sits back and, you know, strokes Jack's beard and doesn't do anything or not that they need to do anything, but they just don't say anything. It just like watching the chaos happen in a white room and, you know, sipping on whatever. I feel like this at least is them acknowledging that they know this is a thing that it's existential, that it's kind of tricky, that it's complicated and then trying to apply some logic to it and shocker. They thought about it. Right. There you go. In short, they thought about it and for whatever reason that gives me hope in all of this. I like it. What's interesting about this is, is what they have disallowed people to do. So the whole quote tweet or retweet with comment idea is not unlike just taking a screenshot of something and then adding your own, you know, witty banter and tweeting it like this is not going to stop anybody from spreading information. What it does do is keeps things from the top of algorithmic timelines, which Twitter is did themselves. Now you can you can go back and and and and opt out of that and go and and and have a timeline that's just, you know, based on time stamps, but I think that that is a big part of this as well as that Twitter understands that if you're savvy enough like you're actually not like stopping any spread of any information good or bad. Yeah. But but but it but it's the way that the you know the platform works in general. Yeah, I mean I think what Twitter is trying to say is we're not trying to police this we're not trying to we're not going to try to stop world leaders from deleting their tweets it's not their job to preserve things. What they're saying is, if we start deleting certain things from world world leaders, it will have a more harmful effect on the public interest than than not so we under we're acknowledging that someone who runs the United States of America, or Russia, or China is different than you are for me, and we have to recognize that treating their tweets differently is is just the way it is. So it's not perfect. They know that people can take screenshots and reshare in other ways, but it slows down resharing that stuff that they feel like they have to leave up so they're saying look. I believe certain things up that we wouldn't otherwise because we recognize these are special situations that these are these people are in different positions than most people, but at the same time we're going to do some things to try to slow that down from being spread so that we're preserving it there so people can see it without having it, you know, catch on like wildfire and at the same time saying hey if you threaten violence against an individual know you're not we are we are going to enforce action against it is a line that even a world leader will get some enforcement action against I feel like there's a good analog for people to remember it helped me understand this better, but it's the reverse that you talked about before if I go out and say of the US President eats babies. That is going to be more protected speech than me saying my next door neighbor is cooking and eating babies. You can feel the difference in your head. You're not sure why it's different, but you know it is. So I'm just saying all you simple heads like me are down on the ground trying to figure this out. Think of it that way and you'll go oh yeah, I mean obviously it is different. So be different also Daily Tech News show and some brilliant LLC does not advocate the eating of babies. That's their baby lobster pizza. Then really don't eat them. Trust me on that one. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit whether you eat lobster pizzas or not, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're also on Facebook join our group. A lot of good discourse there as well. Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News show. So let's check in with Chris Christensen at the amateur traveler who has a tip that may save you from having to pack for your next trip. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. I found an app this week called Duffel D U F L which is for business travelers but not people like me. This is probably for people who travel in much nicer clothes than I do. It is a service that you can use where you send them clothes that they warehouse for you. And when you go on a business trip, you can pick from their smartphone app which clothes you want to bring on this trip. They will then ship them to your hotel in a suitcase. And then when you're done, they ship back to the warehouse and clean the clothes ready for your next trip. I can't imagine using this app personally especially because there's a $99 round trip fee each time you use it plus a $10 fee each month. But if you're a frequent business traveler, maybe this is for you. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. We don't have a lot of time left in the show but I did want to acknowledge that Dan Campos gave us an on the street report from Mexico City about Uber acquiring Cornershop after Mexico blocked Walmart. He said, while Cornershop is only present in 10 cities in Mexico, it could have solved one of Walmart's main problems and since the sales overlapped, Mexico said you can't do that. But it makes more sense for Uber because Uber isn't even the number one ride sharing service. Didi and Beat have more market share in Mexico than Uber and they don't offer food delivery or fresh good delivery yet in Mexico anyway. So Uber buying Cornershop there makes sense. Thank you Dan. And a shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including James P. Callison, Juan D. Hernandez and Jonathan Price. Thanks to all of our patrons. Also thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what's new in your world? Oh man. Well, I'm all about that little weird Game Boy coming out. No, that's not true. I am thinking about it kind of obsessively. But if you want to find out what I'm obsessive about and you like podcasting, head on over to frogpants.com. There's a whole podcast section with lots and lots of shows. You're bound to find something you like. You want to hear a bunch of commentary on the weird blizzard happenings lately? Well, I look no further than that, especially the instance we go deep on that and probably will for some time now. So enjoy and have fun over there. Also find me on Twitter. I'm at Scott Johnson. We have new Patreon rewards. Become a member of DTNS and get all kinds of cool stuff. Roger's working on a column. I'll have an editor's desk this week about what we did Monday as far as putting a different kind of episode out at DTNS. There's all kinds of cool stuff you get as a reward for supporting the show. One reason for the support the show, though, is that you get value out of it, but we like to thank people for it. And in fact, on November 1st, everybody who is at the $2 level or above will get a PDF copy of the official DTNS Internet cookbook with recipes from the show host and some listeners. 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