 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its elicitors. Thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, Mike Cortez and brand new patrons Ernest and Tim. Welcome in Ernest and Tim. On this episode of DTNS, what happens if Apple dumps Goldman for its credit card? The reality behind the unity layoffs and why you might want to avoid the new outlook. The new one, give the old one. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, we have a show packed with technology news for you. I don't know if I can pick a favorite story, Scott. It's going to be hard. It's going to be hard for me not to say sack Goldman instead of the other way around because they might you do you do you man. I won't stop you. Okay. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Remember when Facebook stopped letting people link to news articles in Canada because the online news act that was going to require them to pay for the privilege and how they did that ahead of the law taking effect because it doesn't take effect until December. Well, remember how Google didn't block news links but said that starting in December when the law went into effect if things didn't change, they would. Well, things changed. The CBC now reports Google has reached a deal with the Canadian government and will not in fact block news links for Canadians. Supposedly Google is going to pay $100 million a year to news publishers which is less than the 172 million that the government had previously estimated they should pay and Google will negotiate with a representative group over how the money will be split up and paid. They won't have to negotiate with every single publisher. Meta has not returned to talks. So the links to Facebook news in Canada are still absent. They arrive precisely when they mean to. Let's move on to Blackstone's private equity funds. They're going to acquire Rover. If you haven't heard of this before, it's an online marketplace for pet care services in a $2.3 billion all cash deal. Bloomberg notes that Nielsen and IQ market research data from October shows that the pet care retail services were up about 6% from last year higher than overall inflation rates. Yeah, that's a expensive business to be in at AWS reinvent AWS announced a chatbot service called Q. This is for companies not individuals. And yes, it is in fact named after the Q from the James Bond films. Amazon owns MGM, which makes those after all Q the chatbot is meant for companies to run on their own services. It'll start by being able to explain AWS capabilities to you like what what tools are out there? What can you put together and use it etc. etc. It'll also let you make some changes to source code which they'll save developers some time and eventually Q will work with more than 40 enterprise systems letting users ask you questions to query your company's own data. It'll be able to work with data stored in Microsoft 365 Dropbox Salesforce and Zendesk as well as of course AWS's own S3. Q will cost $20 per person per month for companies. However, if you want to try some of the features out a few of them are available in preview now for free. Nice. HTC announced the Vive Ultimate Tracker. This is a motion tracker that can track your feet or various other objects that you may want to strap that thing to. It has the distinction of the first external tracker with inside out tracking. So it doesn't have to rely on external base stations, which is kind of nice. Price is $199 and it works with standalone HTC headsets with support for SteamVR planned in the future. If you're a Google Drive user and you're one of those people who found some of your files have gone missing from Google Drive. Well, good news Google says it will have an update soon but they know where the problem is. It's in Google Drive for desktop. So if you're not using Google Drive for desktop, you're not at risk of this. If you are using Google Drive for desktop, Google says a small percentage of the users were affected by it and if you are affected, do not disconnect your account in the app. Do not delete the app or move its app data folder but do make a copy of the app data folder. Wall Street Journal reporting that Apple and Goldman Sachs may be breaking up. Scott, they were such a cute couple too. It looks so good together. Goldman provides the financial services that power the Apple card most famously as well as the Apple savings accounts and a few of the other Apple financial products. A lot of times if you're doing the payoff thing, you know, the Apple, that's Goldman providing the financing on the back end. But Goldman as a company has been backing off from doing consumer lending earlier in November. It announced it would end its partnership with GM on that consumer credit card. So it wouldn't be shocking to see Goldman pull out of their only other consumer credit card. Wall Street Journal says American Express and Synchrony, JP Morgan Chase have also heard bandied about are possible new partners for Apple though supposedly AMEX has some of the same problems with running a consumer credit card that Goldman does. Scott, do you have an Apple card? I do but I never use it. I don't know why I don't. I like to build credit. I have a number of cards that I use for various things and I pay them off immediately and it builds credit. And so why don't do it with the Apple card? I don't know. Actually has a better payout than other ones I use in terms of bonuses at the end of the year, points and stuff. Savings account has a better interest rate than most savings accounts. Yeah, you're right. I really should use it more or at all, I suppose. But I think it's just because I had so many already already had two or three that were kind of doing everything for me, one for work, one for, you know, stuff at home. And it's easier to track adding one more seemed crazy. But I did do it and got the card in the mail like a lot of people did. My big question is if they end this deal with Goldman then and let's say, well, all right now we're back on the market everybody we're looking for new partners. American Express is like, we don't know we were kind of having the same problem we're trying to cut down on our consumer services stuff. Synchrony seems like maybe the better option right now. But let's just say none of these guys want to do this. It seems like a trend to me. What does Apple do? Is their future like we have to be our own financial service and they suddenly become a bank as well as a consumer electronics company? Funny, you should ask. But Apple has been acquiring a lot of financial services, small organizations. A lot of it seems to have been organized towards the buy now pay later stuff. So the payoff things. But I think Apple eventually would like to just handle it all in-house. I don't think they're ready yet. The timeline we're talking about here if the Wall Street Journal is right is 12 to 15 months. Now that's interesting because Goldman announced the deal was extended through 2029 last year. And this would mean that Apple and Goldman both agreed. Yes we're contracted through 2029 but let's just agree to dissolve that because if both sides agree you can dissolve a contract, right? Which would mean Apple was ready to shift somewhere else and I don't think they're ready to shift it in-house yet. I could be surprised. Maybe they got more going on than I expect. I think it means they have somebody they think they can rely on and there are plenty of companies besides American Express and Goldman that do this. Goldman didn't do this. They were just starting to build out consumer side and now they're backing off of it. Amex does it and obviously they have their own card, right? They were just looking at the way Apple does things and saying, yeah, we don't want to agree to that because Apple provides more favorable terms. They require everybody to get their bill on the first of the month which is a consumer support nightmare because then everyone calls with questions on the first of the month. That's the reason your payoff date is a weird day. Usually a credit card company staggers the due dates for everyone so that not all the calls are coming in at the same time. So Amex may be looking at that and say, we just don't want to do that and if nobody would do it, Apple might buckle. They might say, okay fine, we can have different due dates for people or something. But my guess is that synchrony, which is the largest issuer of store credit cards in the U.S., is built for this and so maybe Apple has figured out a deal with synchrony for the time being. Yeah, I think it feels like synchrony is maybe the easy choice or at least for now, but if they are slowly building up to the point where they would want to do this themselves and that sounds like a very Apple thing to do even with financial services, they would really rather not rely on anyone else or a partnership necessarily. I could see them getting to the point that that happens, but with the Federal Reserve bugging Goldman about their consumer lending businesses, some execs blame Apple and that partnership for the scrutiny. Do you think that holds water? That that's why they're after them? They're like, oh, Apple, it's big enough. We got to pull you in here and have you start testifying. I don't know if they've gone that far. Yes and no. I think Goldman partnering with Apple brought a lot more scrutiny on its consumer lending business, but because it's Goldman, not because of Apple. You know what I mean? It would have been any other client. I'm talking a little bit out of my butt here because I'm not a financial expert, but it looks to me that it wasn't anything specific about Apple just the fact that Goldman was like, okay, they're doing more consumer lending. That's not something they normally do. Is this a conflict of interest? Is it a monopoly? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Are they doing it right? I don't think Apple partnering with somebody else is immediately going to bring scrutiny to that company. At least that's not the sense I get. Sure. If the future is Apple or others, Google, whoever doing their own bank, I kind of don't have as big a problem with it as I thought I might. I kind of like the sound of it. And the reason that is, in fact, I would trust probably Apple's bank a little more than Google's is because Apple pushes so hard to convince me they really are worried about my security, whether they actually are or not. People are going to argue both ways, but they're very good about making me understand my devices, what they take from me, what they don't when I have to give permission, all that sort of thing. I like that kind of thinking when it comes to banking. So whether or not they do that sort of thing or bathe this in the idea that we are also very security focused over here at the bank and that means you're going to have the most trustworthy experience you've ever had banking and doing that sort of thing. And then I'm kind of down with that. That's only if you believe them though. So I might be naive. I kind of believe them. I mean, Clinton just threw out another possible idea. Maybe Apple is about to buy somebody. And it's like, oh, we won't need you after 12. We're going to close within 12 to 15 months on our acquisition of such and such company. And then we'll be able to just issue our credit ourselves. Because that's another one and Clinton brought this up too in the chat room that, you know, Apple was approving riskier lenders than Goldman was comfortable with. A lot of other companies will not be comfortable with approving riskier loans credit card loans as well. But synchrony again, they do store credit cards. So those are kind of the riskiest credit cards you could do. And it's another way that it fits the profile. I do think you're right though that Apple is not in this to be a financial company. They're in this to provide another service that keeps people in the Apple universe. And so they can afford to offer riskier loan terms, offer better interest rates, offer consumer friendly things that the companies that are solely in the financial industry don't. So maybe it's not so bad. I don't know. I get a little skeptical. I haven't all this power in one place though. Yeah, it is. I don't like that. I don't like it all being in one basket. But hey, we just confirmed it. Apple's buying synchrony. You heard it here first. All right. XDA developers notes that German blog heise.de discovered that the new Microsoft Outlook requires you to sync email to Microsoft cloud. Yeah, that's that's not great. It's a really interesting way that they do it. If you get a pop up once you once you log on, it says we need to sync to the cloud start the sync or cancel. If you cancel, you're not setting up the email. So it's right there. You have to do it. The new outlook, however, is not just an email client. In fact, it's not really an email client at all. It seems to be a wrapper for a cloud service. Microsoft support site says this is to enable features like mail search and others, which is reasonable. But when you log on the new outlook and you get your credentials passed to the cloud, your emails are fetched in the cloud not from the desktop. So you're not just syncing with the cloud. You're operating in the cloud. Neither Heisen nor XDA could detect any communication between the desktop Outlook client and the email server after setup, which implies that everything is happening in the Microsoft cloud. I would be okay with that because companies do servers in the cloud all the time in a secure way that keeps their data under their control with lots of protections, except Microsoft has not given you any of those protections. XDA says that Microsoft's only mention of privacy on the support page is links to its privacy statement and its service agreement. And both of those allow for blanket access to your data for improving Microsoft products and services. I would not be okay saying, yes, you can access my email in the cloud and train JetGPT on it or Bing or whatever. I'm fine with it being a cloud service, just let me know and give me proper privacy and security protections and Microsoft's not doing any of that in this case. I would have expected at least telling, like you said, tell us that that's what you're doing. And then also it's very unclear what the software is in the normal pipeline. It sounds like a beta that's got issues, but it's not really, right? It's not like a proper beta program. It's not like, hey, you have outlook the way it is now. Keep using that. But over here, we're trying out this new thing. We're going to do any of that stuff. And GPAC84 is like, isn't email always in the cloud? So let me try again to explain this. When you have an email client on your desktop and you sign in, yes, the email is coming from the cloud. It's coming from the internet, but your credentials, your login is on your desktop. And so when you say like, yes, I'm the right email client, that's happening from your desktop. In this case, the outlook software is on your desktop, but the credential is in Microsoft's cloud server. And so it's there even when your computer is off. Theoretically, it could do whatever Microsoft wants because it has your credential. Now, I'm not saying I don't trust Microsoft to do this. Obviously they run Azure, which runs like entire corporations safely and securely on their servers, but you've got to give me all of those reassurances and privacy protections and things that those companies get before I am going to let you log into my email server from the cloud, not from my desktop. Otherwise, I want it under my control on the desktop. Yeah, they even said they went on to say that the IP addresses contacting the email server were from a block of IPs owned by Microsoft. So nothing from the home computer. Yeah. So really what you did without knowing you really did it is you gave a remote computer the new lifestyle of being your email machine. Yeah. And without all the protections in place that you might expect from such an exchange or at the very least some kind of notification that that's what you're getting into. That seems like bad practice, man. They got to get out ahead of that and fix that. Biocast is basically they're doing Gmail. I mean, if they were doing Gmail, I'd be fine with it. In fact, they do that outlook.com. You can go and do a version of Gmail. This pretends to be local, but also isn't your email server. Gmail is your email server. So it's like, oh, I'm just logging in directly to my email server, right? In this case, you can have any email server you want, including Gmail, but it's going to be connecting to the Microsoft cloud server instead of to the local. That's probably why they're like, you know, everyone's used to getting email online. That's how we do it. So just make this product and they just didn't think that hard about it. And as far as I know, you can still read your email offline. It is syncing. It is doing that as well. It's just not keeping your credential locally. It's keeping that in the cloud. And that's where all the trouble lies. They could have skipped all the trouble just by telling us. That's it. That's all they had to do. Yeah, just make it very clear. Yeah. That's it. Maybe that's why they're taking two years before they replace the other version of that. Folks, if you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, get in touch with us on social networks. We are DTNS show on X. We are DTNS show at mastodon.social, mstdn.social on mastodon. We're at Daily Tech News Show on Tiktok. And we are DTNS pics on Instagram and threads. We are DTNS P I X. Go find us. Say hi. Well, you might have seen the news that Unity Software is cutting 265 jobs. That's about 3.8% of its workforce. The layoffs, however, are part of a goodbye handshake agreement with the Weta digital effects company. That's right. Remember Game of Thrones? Remember the Lord of the Rings? Game of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and all that. That's where things started happening. This is the one that Peter Jackson's got his hands all in that cookie jar. Kind of a big deal. Anyway, Unity will also close offices in 14 locations. And this includes Berlin and Singapore. And they're going to revise its attendance policy for all employees to no longer require three days a week in the office. Some people are very happy about this. Unity attempted to restructure its developer fees in September, but backed off the quote runtime fee plan. Talked about right here on the show. We have a major backlash. CEO John Riccatella retired in October with former IBM president Jim Whitehurst taking over as interim CEO. And Whitehurst indicated more changes are coming down the pipe right now. Yeah. This is easy to misinterpret. When you see 265 jobs and you see 3.8% of the workforce, you think, oh, it's company-wide with that many people, but it's not. It's just the Weta part of this, which is basically Richard Teller and not Richard Teller Whitehurst saying, we're cutting costs, so we're going to stop this agreement with Weta. That gets rid of a bunch of costs. We had 265 jobs that were only for that. So we're not going to do that anymore. Since we're not going to do that anymore, we're not going to have those jobs. That's a little different than we're just cutting back and laying off people across the company. It's not great for those people with that job. Don't get me wrong, but it is a different situation when you're shutting down and then these office changes that you're talking about, Scott, those are just cost savings as well saying, you know what? It's costly to bring people to the office. Let's not make them do that anymore. Yeah, and this acquisition of the Weta stuff included at the time basically their tools or a lot of their tools, their pipeline technology and their engineering talent, that was the exchange. This was for a cool $1.62 billion just in 2021, December of 2021. We've been at this for two years and now they're pulling out and a lot of people went, oh no, they sold Weta to Unity and Unity is dumping Weta? No, that isn't how that's going. Weta FX continues on down its Mary Road. In fact, these guys meaning Unity are going to retain the tools that they purchased and some of that pipeline stuff and all of that and keep using it for whatever the heck they were going to use it for in the first place. They kind of explained that in some other documentation. We don't have to get into that, but it doesn't mean Weta's going away. If anything, it's just, hey, the partnerships over and part of that partnership was this shared, you know, we were going to use these engineering employees in potential perpetuity. We're not now. We're laying them off and also cutting this deal and I think it probably makes sense given the restructuring going on at Unity in general. I think they probably paid too much for that arrangement. $1.62 billion is a lot at the time anyway and I think that they are probably just looking for ways to cut corners as you do when you're a company trying to figure out your stuff and there was such a mess in the last couple of months with the Riccatello decision and the way their tools worked and the license agreement and all that. I mean the industry kind of turned their back on them in a real quick fashion and a lot of game developers that I know, some indie devs dumped their tools and quickly started porting their games over to Godot and a number of other engines, Unreal being one of them, as a result of that and it wasn't even finalized yet. That's how mad people were. So we are now looking at a Unity trying to find its bearings, trying to decide who are we, what are we doing moving forward, what are our core values. I think this is all actually a good thing in the long run. No one likes to see 265 people laid off right before Christmas. No one likes that but hopefully they take care of the severance and everything and everything works out. There's weird days ahead for Unity, I'm afraid. Honestly, I think the fact that they weren't able to restructure the developer fees and this is not me saying that the way they went about it was good, but there are two ways to handle your business. You either increase your revenue or you decrease your costs. They tried increasing the revenue with that developer fee structure and it blew up in their face. There probably are other ways they could have restructured it that could have increased revenue without blowing up in their face, but after that blow up, Scott, can you imagine them trying anything else? I think Whitehurst said, we're not even going to try that anymore. Yeah, if they had I kind of thought they would to be honest. I thought they might too but some revisions or whatever and say this is a much softer approach. Here's how we're going to white glove this and we've heard you. We appreciate your feedback. We would have gotten all of that, I thought. Instead, it does feel like they're saying, what is Unity? Let's get back to why we were awesome and how do we do that? Well, we got to cut some costs and some corners and this Weta thing didn't turn out to be what we thought it was going to be for whatever reason. The Weta inclusion, I'll be honest. I felt like that was an answer to all the inroads Epic is making with the Unreal Engine with Hollywood and production teams. The fact that 90% of the Star Wars content you consume on Disney Plus is filmed in a projection cave using Unreal technology is probably enough of a warning shot to other popular engines to go, well, why aren't we doing that? Why aren't we more a part of that? And acquiring the pipeline production and tools of a company like Weta seems like a big jump in that direction. I'll bet money, that's exactly why that all happened in the first place. But I think this is them pulling back and going, we can't. We got to walk before we can run. We got a lot of really cool things going for us and also we learned our lesson with this mess a couple of months ago. Rick Otello's out of here. Let's have a kinder, softer, white hearse takeover and let's do something good for their company and I think part of that is, yeah, well, they just say, I guess where I was going is if they can't raise the revenue through increased developer fees, then you cut the cost and that's what we're seeing as Kelly 2909 thinks that maybe Weta is going to just hire those 265 people now that they're not anymore. That's possible. That would be a nice outcome to this as well. Hopefully that's possible and there's been no slowdown with what is doing that. That's great. Yeah, I love hearing that. There's no slowdown in the effects business as far as I know, although there's a lot of talk of striking and unionizing with the effects artists, but still, there's probably a place for them there. That's good news, I hope. Hopefully that's fine. You have to scroll to the bottom of the PR, he says, and then you can see the confirmation of it. I also think that it's telling that Whitehurst is saying because this was in the FX guide story on this. We aren't requiring people to be in the office three days a week. In fact, many of our offices are only going to be open three days a week. It's a full reversal on the trend. Amazon's out there saying agree to disagree everybody, they're not going to come back to the office. Meanwhile, Unity is like actually we've closed the office, so there isn't an office for you to come back and if there is, we only want you to come in three days a week. I wonder if this as a cost savings move pays off and then becomes a precedent. Yeah, I kind of hope so because usually the companies that are complaining the loudest are the ones that have the most invested in the land and buildings that they're telling people to come back to. The ones who are just leasing or otherwise don't necessarily need this for what they do. Starting to see more of this. I think it's good. I understand Amazon's position, but I prefer Unity's. Take better care of your people and understand that the office doesn't always mean better productivity. Thank you again, Skelly, for finding this. We are endeavoring to hire back as many crews as we can. There may be a few roles we may not be able to accommodate for both Unity and Weta will be offering support to those affected. So that's great. There you go. All right. Let's check out the mail. Lee wrote in in response to us talking about Amazon's new palm scanning for the enterprise. This was another reinvent announcement we mentioned yesterday selling the ability to companies to use palm scanning for things like authentication when you come into the building. So maybe replacing a key card with your palm. Lee said, thanks to laws and lawsuits, my company removed biometric requirements, mostly fingerprint readers that were required for some employee functions. There's a law in Illinois and some other states that requires consent to store biometric data so an opt out is needed. Due to these laws, an employer would need a non biometric method along with palm print, which is more hassle than most companies would likely want to deal with if they're operating in multiple states. It can be easy to get people to opt in for shopping convenience, but those same people can be stubborn if not given a choice at work. I was wondering about that. I don't know what the laws are like in Illinois versus where I live, but yeah, that makes sense. And if you're a national company trying to operate in various states, what a hassle, man. That sounds like a pain. If you want to replace the key card and you're operating in Chicago, that's not going to work. But if you want to just provide a faster way into the building, you could do that. You could say, well, folks who want to keep their key card, we've got one lane for you. Everybody else use the palm scanners. You're welcome to opt out. Make it a sort of a TSA thing, right? TSA, you can opt out of going through the scanner, but you have to put up with pat down and the delay and all of that. So I wouldn't be shocked if some companies go that wet route. But I know what Lee's saying, that's costly because then you have to maintain two systems. I think Lee is onto something here at the end where he says it can be easy to get people to opt in for shopping conveniences, but those same people can be stubborn if not given a choice at work. I think that is a little bit of wisdom there because we love to make a decision in the positive. It's going to benefit us, but don't tell us you're going to take our info and, you know, I think he'd illustrate it really well there. And once again, proving that we have the smartest audience in the world and without them, we would be nothing. Mr. Froboz points out that indeed the new Outlook client has local storage of your emails on the roadmap but you can't get your email offline in that, which actually makes it a little less annoying to me. Yeah, but it's like it doesn't work offline anyway. It's like, oh, okay. So it's just a front end to an online service. So it's back to what we said though. They just need to be more upfront about what the frick they're making. That's it. Tell us about it. Show us your roadmap. Tell us even when the roadmap does arrive and you can read your emails offline that that's almost more deceptive because you feel like, oh, everything happens here. So tell me it's not happening there and give me all the protections that I want. I also want to know what you're up to. Scott, what are you doing these days? Oh man, I got so much going on. The one thing I want to tell people about today because you're hearing this stuff about, you know, Rick Otello again and about Unity and we got the game awards coming up. And to subscribe to my show CORE or me and my co-host John and Bo talk all about the world of gaming. Everything from big industry moves all the way down to some silly indie we played that week. And then some, so if it sounds interesting to you at all and you want to hear this roundtable check it out, frogpants.com. Or wherever you can find your podcasts. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We've got a couple things to talk about. Netflix is adding the GTA trilogy to its games library. So if you're a Netflix subscriber you'll be able to play those starting December 14th and Roger and lots of us are excited about the new fallout TV show coming from Amazon. We're going to talk about that as well. Stick around. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frogpants network. Get more at frogpants.com Time and Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.