 Coming up on DTNS, Roblox might have solved its music streaming issue, The Oculus Go gets new potential life, and is Instagram going to make a kid's app or not? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 27th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Lovely Cleveland, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, we were just talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up before we had grown up and why those ideas weren't so great. We also talked about the reboot of Babylon 5. If you're interested, get the wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, by becoming a member at patreon.com. That is where you can join our top patrons like Paul Boyer, Brad, and Kevin. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. According to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a union that represents TV and movie workers, Apple TV Plus, NBC Universal's Peacock, and Viacom's CBS's Paramount Plus all have less than 20 million subscribers each in the U.S. and Canada as of July. Streaming services with less than 20 million subscribers can offer lower rates to union workers. That's why they know. It's unclear if this figure only accounts for paying subscribers or those on promotional free trials. Interesting. At the World Internet Conference, Cybersecurity Administration of China's Vice Minister Sheng Ronghua named self-driving vehicles, online healthcare, and smart delivery as areas of the economy requiring stronger regulation. The comments indicate China's big tech crackdown could extend to new firms like the shopping platform Maituan. TikTok announced it surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. The app originally launched in August 2018, meaning it averaged adding about 10 monthly active users per second in that time. Probably feels pretty good about that number. Ferrari announced it signed a multi-year creative partnership with Love From. That's the design firm co-founded by former Apple design chief Johnny Eiff. Love From will also work with Ferrari's parent company XOR on a range of creative projects in the business of luxury. No word on specific products though, although hopefully they will involve aluminum. And Google Stadia added support for using a Bluetooth controller as well as an iOS or Android phone as a GameCad pad when playing on Android TV, Google TV, or a Chromecast Ultra. Previously, Stadia users on a Chromecast were limited to using a Stadia controller. All right, let's talk a little more about what Google's doing to make it easier for you to represent yourself when talking to other people within the Google ecosystem. The company announced some new options for user profile pictures with Google Illustration. So if you happen to be a user and you don't want to use a personal profile picture, you don't have any or you just don't like the idea of that when you're in Google workspaces or contacts on Android, for example, Google now provides a number of illustration options to use rather than that single no-picture default that might have your initials or look like, I don't know, an account that sort of got started and never got finished. Options include animals, even mythical creatures, locations, hobbies of the choices. There are quite a few. You might find something that speaks to you. Users can also adjust the crop of the image and the color for further personalization. You find a unicorn, but you want to zoom in on the horn itself, etc. Google illustrations will sync across Google products with the company planning to add more selections and support for iOS and even the web soon. You know, and I think about this, I think of that like the old Twitter egg, you know, and like the kind of stigma or whatever that came to represent of being like, oh, you're just this anonymous account, but there's a lot of reasons why, you know, you may choose not to represent yourself with a photo of you or feel comfortable doing that, or just for privacy reasons, want to have, you know, with anything that could be mined, I guess, for social media purposes, like having this cache of, you know, fun little images that are kind of consistent with the overall look of Google properties, I think is a really forward-thinking move, I think in terms of even like for identity, accessibility, I think there are a lot of reasons why something like this would be useful, although I do have to say like on my Mac, for the longest time, I think for like four years, I just had like the sunflower login because they give you like six images to choose from. So I mean, selection here is kind of like is key. They are coming out with quite a few from this initial batch, and they say they're going to keep upgrading them. I almost feel like these could take on, you know, Google accounts are pretty synonymous that they take on like almost like an emoji kind of feel, right? Where you change, you know, they kind of have like meme-able meanings after a while if they become popular. You know, that was exactly what I thought about too. And the comparison to Twitter is a good one because, yeah, the old school days, I don't use web Twitter all that much anymore, but back in the day, that was the only way that I accessed Twitter. And yeah, anytime there was an egg, it's like, it's either like not a real account, or the person isn't serious enough about, you know, social networking to, you know, go through with the whole thing. It looks a little rough around the edges. And I don't really feel that way just because there are so many different ways that people represent themselves because they use certain Google products, but not others type of a thing. I have photos of myself. I have a couple different Google accounts that I use all the time. And my face is on both of those, but I completely see why somebody would say, I'm just not really comfortable doing this. I'd prefer other options. I actually, I had to sign up for something and offer a photo profile the other day. And I, you know, I will go to my finder and type like, Sarah Lane, just be like, do I have any photos of myself? I'll just use whatever comes up. And sometimes there aren't any, but there's like a picture of my dog. So my dog has become more and more my profile photo. Sometimes my cat gets in there too. But I did sort of think, now, why would this not have just gone the emoji route? Is there some reason where that, that doesn't make enough sense for Google to just say, Hey, choose an emoji, um, crop it however you want. And that could be because everyone's so used to emoji anyway, because these, these profile pictures that Google is offering, and there are quite a few and they're nice and colorful. I mean, they're definitely not emoji. Well, I, the one reason I would say is emoji rendered different on different platforms. So maybe if you're going to bring this to iOS and the web, those all, you know, believe me, you changed the way the hamburger looks on iOS versus Android, you know, all of a sudden it's a, you know, it becomes a whole thing. So maybe like that's the reason I do think there's an important privacy indication here though, because if you go to Google right now and you type in someone like you try to log into anyone's email, it will show you their profile picture right away. And I know that's like very minor, but like getting confirmation that maybe you're dealing with someone or like, you know, like an email address belongs to a certain person because of a picture and just giving one more, making it easier to not necessarily associate that. I do think has important privacy implications as well. Yeah. All right. Next up here, a new note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Quo forecast shipments of Apple Silicon max will drop 15% in the first half of 2022. Quo name component shortages, particularly around power management integrated circuits as a major reason for the drop, but also set a decrease in the work from home demand and a potential redesigned MacBook Air and Q3 in 2022 are also contributing factors, people holding off upgrading until that is released. Shipments could also be impacted by recent news that several key Apple and Tesla suppliers have had to halt production to comply with China's tighter energy consumption policies. Fox kind affiliate, Asan precision engineering, uni micron technology, concraft holding have all halted production until the end of September. They're about Pegatron told Nikkei Asia that it's running as usual for now, but is prepared to use generators to keep production going. In addition, chip packaging and testing service providers supplying Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have also received notices to suspend production for several days. This comes as Beijing has intensified pressure on specific provinces that haven't reduced total energy consumption yet, basically saying you just have to shut down to meet these quotas really putting, you know, kind of continuing with, I don't know if this would technically fall under the China big tech crackdown, but they definitely becoming more serious about energy consumption, not building new coal power plants, that kind of thing. You know, one thing is Apple, you know, we've already seen some interesting stuff with the Apple Watch not having a firm ship date, even though it was announced what two weeks ago now. I wonder if, you know, this drop in MAC production, having production issues maybe on that whole iOS supply chain, you know, we could be prepared to see that as a little bit of the standard going forward until this chip shortage is, you know, this is resolved somehow. Yeah, the first story that you mentioned with Minxi Quo's forecasting of a dip in the shipment of Silicon Macs, 15%, first half of 2022, I mean, it's not 50, right? 15% is like, sure, you're accounting for, you know, if people are holding off on a new MacBook Air, for example, because the rumors are going to get more and more solid that that's happening in the later part of the year, of course, I'm one of those people, you know, if I'm pretty sure something's coming, like I wasn't going to buy an iPhone in August type thing. And, and I wonder a little bit about the decrease in work from home demand. I mean, I think it's less of the fact that fewer people are working from home and more the fact that we all just bought computers in the last couple of years. So we don't need to do it again, you know, in the early part of next year. That doesn't apply to everybody. But I think that that's probably a contributing factor. The energy consumption policy in China affecting so many companies as it is, that is, you know, potentially pretty messy. I also wonder how Pegatron, I mean, how many generators do you need to have in order to keep that kind of production going? And how does that not fall into tighter energy consumption policies itself? I mean, if you told me that a Pegatron was a unit of measuring generator capacity, I actually, I would believe you, Sarah. But the, yeah, two separate issues here. I mean, part of the dip in Apple stuff, I also think is just, you know, having that initial Apple Silicon release kind of going across basically all of their pro mobile stuff and into the desktop space more than the consumer level. I just think there's like if people were going to make that upgrade, they've had that period to do so. Plus, there's also rumors of, you know, MacBook Pro refreshes coming later this before the end of the year. So I feel like there's, there's, you know, a lot of reasons why people would have bought a computer not just, you know, working from home demands kind of going down. This is though, you know, we've heard about auto manufacturers for a while now suspending production because they just don't have enough chips. Now it's, you know, we've seen those companies re-evaluate how they're buying chips, how they're supplying chips, Ford has kind of come out and said, you know, we're going to be doing direct relationships with the suppliers. Now though we're seeing, you know, the screws are kind of being put to these suppliers, not just for we don't have enough workers, we're using too much energy. And obviously that goes into a broader conversation about, you know, kind of limiting energy production or how China wants to, you know, shift its energy production more green going forward. But in the short term could lead to some major supply disruptions. I mean, it sounds like it already is. And as a consumer, we're just going to be feeling this even more. So it's going to be hard to sift that, I guess, from the stuff we're already dealing with this new stuff. So, you know. Yeah, when this all shakes out, whenever that is, I know we're going to look back on this time and say, and that was the moment that all these companies had to, you know, switch to plan B and then plan B was better. You know, we're not there yet. We're still in the messy parts. But I, you know, I feel optimistic that there will be a lot of good supply chain solutions that make things better on the other side of this. A girl can dream. And nothing else. There'll be many economics PhD theses written based on this time. Exactly. Well, Oculus's consulting CTO, John Carmack announced that the company will unlock the bootloader of the Oculus Go headset, providing users with root access. You might recall the Oculus Go or you might not because it had a pretty short life. It was released back in 2018. It was discontinued in 2020. It was succeeded by the Oculus Quest. And the Oculus Go really have much place in the market once that happened. So if you have an Oculus Go or you can get your hands on one, you can get root access through a forthcoming side loaded software update. Carmack hopes, quote, a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset 20 years from now would be able to update to the final software version long after over the air update servers have been shut down. I just imagine like there's this Indiana Jones moment, you know, where some like dust off an old crate, you know, it's like, yeah, let's go. Oh, my. It's buried in New Mexico somewhere. Go find the goes. Make them cool. There's top men guarding it. Top men. So my initial thought about this, and maybe it's just because the Oculus Go came and went pretty quickly and it was just head tracking. So, you know, obviously a lot more limited than something like the Quest and very hard to say, Oh, but the Oculus Go is so great for all these reasons. Once you have the Quest, you know, I can see why that happened. But I also know that there were a lot of disappointed folks saying, Oh, well, okay, the Oculus Go is there's not much for me to do with it now. There's not going to be any innovation with something that at one point seemed to have a lot of promise for me. So I just wonder how much it has promise even with new development down the road, just because the VR space has gotten so much more complex. I mean, that's true. If you're looking at this as I don't think we're going to be seeing like AAA games, you know, going to the Oculus Go for those kind of experiences. But I do think this is it's real one. It's really great from a reusability standpoint, right? This isn't just bricked piece of electronics that, Oh, well, there's going to be no support. So I'm just going to have to throw this out. Obviously, you know, if you're concerned about security, privacy, maybe keep an eye on that, check out XDA developers or whoever ends up developing stuff once this officially gets unlocked. But, you know, that whole kind of what we've seen with Android, right, with unlock bootloader is kind of the innovation around different kernels there. And the especially in the early days of Android, you know, we saw a lot of product or software innovation on that front. And that's not something we've seen from necessarily from VR in terms of having an unlock bootloader, getting that root access and kind of having an open playing field to kind of go nuts. I think this is really interesting, even if the Oculus go maybe isn't the best hardware that you'd want for this. I think this is a really great example to have of, okay, hey, those original snap spectacles, wouldn't it be great if, hey, we unlock the bootloader for that? Obviously, that's a much more dumbed down device in terms of capability. But, you know, saying, okay, we're not going to support these electronics anymore. They don't give us any value. So why don't we open this up so they don't end up in a landfill? I think it is a very compelling view. So I'm happy to see John Carmack and Oculus doing this for the go headset for sure. This does seem to be a bit of a trend. We've talked about a few companies now saying, listen, we're done with this product, but you don't have to be. Nothing hurts us by you innovating off of something that we have just, we've moved on from. So, yeah. It reminds me a lot of that HP web OS tablet that one gen that they came out with him was immediately like obsolete. You know, they kind of opened that up overnight. And yeah, it was it was still a dead product at the end of the day, but allowed people instead of going, oh man, I have this, you know, I paid 400 bucks for this brick to now say, hey, I still have a tablet that I can put Android on. I can get recent updates where I can get some utility out of. And again, a lot of it just comes down for me. I'm excited to see low effort things that companies can do to keep things out of landfills is always a good thing. Always a good thing. And if you're sitting here thinking, I've got a great use for my Oculus go that's collecting dust now, or I still really like my Oculus go. And here's why you should let us know feedback at daily tech news show.com. If you need just the headlines, sometimes you don't have time for both shows in a day. You don't have 30 minutes to get through DTNS. That's okay because we have our related show daily tech headlines. And that's all the essential tech news in about five minutes. Check it out at daily tech headlines.com. Instagram head Adam Osseri announced the company will pause development of a version of Instagram aimed at children 10 to 12 years old. It's been called Instagram kids. Even Adam Osseri points that out in the blog post, not the official name. So we're adding the clarification. Osseri said Instagram has is remaining bullish though on the need for such a platform for children saying they were they're already online at this point anyway. So better to have a platform designed around their use. He further clarified that any kind of Instagram kids platform will require parental permission to sign up, not include ads and have age appropriate content as kind of bad rock principles whenever they resume development on that. Instagram will still continue development of parental supervision tools designed to let parents oversee accounts for teenage users 13 and older. So kind of bringing the still planning on bringing those out. However, they will pause development in order to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators to listen to their concerns and demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today. Also in kind of relate definitely related news to this Facebook also formally responded to a September 14th Ball Street Journal piece on Instagram. We talked about it on DTNS, which suggested Instagram has data that suggests the platform had a harmful effect on teenage girls. According to Facebook's head of research Pradi Ray Choudhury, the journal focused the story on a study of about 40 users that was designed to inform internal conversations about teens most negative perceptions of Instagram. So not exactly representative of the entire platform. Facebook though has yet to reveal the actual data cited in the Wall Street Journal piece, which would then open it up to, I guess, third party validation and kind of let people make their own judgments. This won't be the end of the story for either of these. However, with Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis expected to appear before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on September 30th to answer for the claims made in that Wall Street Journal story and plans for Instagram kids. So, yeah, Sarah, this is clearly an evolving story, but interesting that Instagram is seeing which way the winds are blowing with making a platform for 10 to 12 year olds and saying, okay, we hear you freaking out about this. We're not going to force the issue yet. Although very clearly this is it sounds like this is still in the cards for Instagram. Well, and this tells me a couple things. Number one, the Instagram is well aware that 10 to 12 year old kids are already using Instagram. And number two, that Instagram feels that sure on the surface, the company can say, well, if you're not 13 yet, you need a safer space to play in the sandbox, but that that that age group is also monetizable. It's, you know, if not right out of the gate at some point, or the company wouldn't bother doing it. I know I'm being a very cynical person right now, but I'm trying to be as honest as possible. Now I am not a parent, but many, many parents have weighed in. I've been, I've been sort of trying to, trying to, to, to gauge the temperature of whether or not people think so. Okay, let me back up a little bit. The story is, you know, twofold. The story is number one, that the company Instagram is working on a kids app, but also that the company now responding to some backlash and perhaps just some internal stuff that isn't ready for prime time yet says, we're pausing this, but this is something that we're working on. It does seem to me that the general consensus of people with children or, you know, in the business of thinking about how apps affect children say, there's no reason that Instagram needs to do this. In fact, there was one Twitter comment that stuck out to me and this person said, wait, you were seriously building an Instagram for 10 year old girls? Do you have daughters? Do you have any mothers of 10 year old daughters on your team? And I thought, yeah, I mean, that's a very valid question. Now, I know that not all kids are the same, not no human uses social media even completely the same way. And I know that there is a whole conversation about is Instagram making everybody feel worse about themselves, particularly if you're younger, and especially if you're female. And I know that that conversation is evolving. And as you mentioned, and I don't totally have the answer, I know YouTube Kids is another seems to be sort of similar initiative that YouTube rolled out with somewhat limited success. There are a lot of kids who just use the regular YouTube app and parents either aren't supervising that behavior where they are. But the YouTube Kids app is a fair amount of users. But I mean, considering how many kids use YouTube all the time, completely dwarfed by it by the regular app, I don't know how many 10 to 12 year old kids who have figured out a way to get on Instagram are now going to say, yeah, I belong on Instagram kids, maybe some of them. But I would assume, you know, I'm kind of thinking of if I were that age, I'd kind of want to be with older kids. So I don't know. I don't know. The yeah, what what gets to me is the one thing I'm not hearing from Instagram in regards to this kids app is algorithmically like how are they going to be sorting content because Instagram and Facebook are designed to keep you engaging and using with that app. Like that's their business model is to keep you in the app to serve you content that you will enjoy. Like I'm not saying they're like, you know, they're they're trying to rope you into anything like that. But like their idea is to keep interesting things in front of you to keep you using that app. I don't want that necessarily for a 10 to 12 year old who already, you know, if you have any if you have any kids that are watching YouTube, the one thing they want to do is watch that next video, watch that next video, watch that next video. I like so that to me is yeah, you're not serving them ads, but you're still like what you like you're you're training them to then use the 13 and up one whenever they advanced to that. So that would be that to me is the big thing is like, okay, how are they doing content? And honestly, I feel like kids, if you're going to have a supervised app that parents are going to be watching, I'd almost rather have a chat app. I know that those are problematic in and of themselves, but when it comes to like, hey, sharing content, communicating with like I trust them to form those networks. Yes, I want to be monitoring those for any kind of harassment. I know horrible things can happen on those too. It turns out children could be horrible to each other. But I almost feel like that is a better use. And I wonder how chat like whatever Instagram kids ends up being because I feel like that's almost a safer route for them at this point. But yeah, like algorithmically how they're going to sort that content to me is the big question in terms of what's the point of this at this point? Well, and offering something to offer it and saying, see, we know the little kids aren't ready for the big app yet. We have an app for them. We built it. See, it's there. That does nothing to change behavior. And again, I'm not saying that they won't be successful in having some kids sign up to the app. If this app goes to market, you know, this could be something that Instagram just sort of says, all right, all right, all right, we heard you loud and clear. We're not going to do this remains to be seen. The National Music Publishers Association or NMPA sued Roblox for $200 million back in June for allowing players to illegally stream music. The two parties have since announced a settlement agreement which will provide the NMPA members an opt in option to negotiate their own licensing deals with Roblox. This comes as Roblox continues to push music on its platform, having already hosted high profile virtual concerts last week opening listening parties. That's a feature that lets artists debut new material. Following the NMPA lawsuit, Roblox also signed individual licensed deals with BMG and also Sony and users can add songs from a licensing agreement with APM Music. The deal is fairly similar to what Twitch and the NMPA announced last week, except that there's no mention of any change in how Roblox handles copyright violations. Yeah, and that was that was the big news out of that Twitch one in terms of like there's there's some specifics here, but this is about more career about creating a framework for more deals. Obviously that opt in to negotiate individual licensing deals by publishers like that's that's a huge deal as part of this agreement. What's interesting to me though is that previously when it comes to copyright violation stuff like that these kind of associations the reflex is put the genie back in the bottle go back to the status quo you know don't don't change how I'm making my money and the NMPA very clearly sees here both with Twitch and Roblox where the youths are that there is money to be made here and it's more profitable for them to settle especially for their members for them to settle not push this to court have a costly legal battle and hey this is now how we are going to to generate revenue going forward that is a huge shift when it comes to this kind of licensing and this kind of view of how people can use their media and honestly I mean I think is the model you know obviously I prefer no lawsuits and everybody just kind of figure this out but I feel like this is this is them kind of realizing this is what the situation is now we cannot go back to any kind of status quo oh yeah yeah nobody wanted Roblox to just shut down and be like well I guess we can't do the business model we've been running on so far it's like of course all parties involved his best interest is to like let's settle you got to start paying got to start paying some money and then you keep doing your thing and then we'll leave you alone you know and that's just all this was there was never any you know Roblox was not just going to stop offering music and it wasn't going to say well our business model is over it it it's posturing and if your Roblox you already knew that this was going to happen of course you did you just kind of did your thing as long as you could until you had to pay more now you do everybody wins except you know some Roblox shareholders or whatever all right moving on to the best story you're going to hear all day I guarantee it a hamster named Mr. Gox might know more about making cryptocurrency money than you or me Mr. Gox's humans two men from Germany they prefer to stay anonymous they're kind of behind the scenes have built a trading office attached to the hamsters regular cage so when Mr. Gox enters the office of trading a live stream starts on twitch his twitter account then auto tweets his followers that a trading session has begun so they can start watching and now by running his intention wheel you know hamsters have a wheel but this one is a little bit more special Mr. Gox chooses a cryptocurrency to trade then he's got a choice of two tunnels indicating whether he wants to buy or whether he wants to sell depending on which one he runs through Mr. Gox's lifetime career performance is currently up about 20 percent that's not that it's probably better than what my portfolio would look like if I was doing cryptocurrency on my own the office's technology includes software scripting microcontrollers single board computers computer aided design 3d printing even laser cutting Mr. Gox is pretty cool I mean crypto trading all right we've had a lot of stories about that adorable rodent crypto trading that to me is is breaking the ground I mean the cool thing for me about all of this is yes the hamster is adorable and I love any kind of weird random economics experiment that to me is it it makes me happy in my heart but it's all the the the cool raspberry pi you know hackery that was needed to make this possible you know the the bbc post that we linked to in the show notes you know kind of goes into they had to you know they basically had to write this from scratch in a lot of ways to make this happen and they were just like I don't know we're in covid lockdown let's make a hamster trade cryptocurrency I mean bravo anonymous German gentleman for uh for putting this together okay and and you know just just uh you know if it wasn't already extremely obvious the gox fund as it's known you know as as as folks are keeping up on mr gox's trading not a real fund not something that you can buy into and his choices of tunnels are not financial advice uh that said that said mr gox is up and we've seen weirder things in crypto believe it or not uh so uh this might be one to watch people I think one to watch if you have some interesting rodent crypto trading news updates or any other stories we need to hear about or we just want to let us know how you feel about mr gox send us to us at feedback at daily tech news show dot com we also want to spend a special thanks to nick af he's one of our top lifetime supporters for dtns thanks for all the years of support nick we truly appreciate it and we want to nick and then we also want to thank all of course all of our patrons you all help make the show possible you're our bosses so thank you patreon.com slash gtns is where to know more about becoming a patron if you're not one already for all those who join us live you already know this but if you'd like to join us live start tomorrow we're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. eastern 20 30 utc join us if you can and find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live tom's back tomorrow we'll also be joined by cnets erin karson talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com i hope you have enjoyed this program