 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. That's you, especially you, Tony Glass, Philip Less, Daniel Dorado and brand new patrons. It's now you too, Elena, Michael and Brian. Welcome on in on this episode of DTNS. Did Apple pull off its pivot to services? Arm faces its greatest risk and Google lets you edit yourself right out of search. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 4th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Puff and Fluff. I'm Sarah Lane and not too far from your nation's capital. Your boy Chris Ashley and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. So if they didn't drain the swamp, it would all just flood into your neighborhood is what you're saying. I'm far enough away. Let us drain the other direction. Yeah, yeah. Well, we have got some good stuff today. Whether you're an Apple fan, a not Apple fan or Apple ambivalent, there's something for you in today's show. Let us start with the quick hits. That's the wrong one. There we go. Thursday, India announced restrictions on imports of many electronics, including laptops and tablets and servers. Companies would need a license to import such devices. So Dell, Apple and Samsung complied with the order immediately by pausing all imports. So India's deputy IT minister said on Friday, well, hold on a second. Let's give companies a transition period of at least one month so they can obtain licenses to conduct imports. I feel like India's deputy IT minister never gets listened to at home and was like, wait, they actually actually followed the rule. Oh, man, we don't want them to pause. We just want them to, you know, get a license. Amazon really beat the street this time, earning 65 cents a share when analysts expected it to earn 35 cents a share. Revenue rose 11 percent, ad revenue rose 22 percent. CEO Andy Jassy said that that revenue growth should continue. Talked about the ramp up for Thursday night football on Prime Video this fall. Amazon sales rose 12 percent and AWS, the cloud part of Amazon. AWS sales rose 12 percent. But that's not as fast as it has been growing. In fact, it's the third straight quarter that AWS growth has been lower than the quarter before. But Jassy has a plan for that. He wants you to know the company is working on AI just like everybody else. Telling analysts on the Amazon earnings called that every one of our teams is working on building generative AI applications. Now, most of those will be built using other companies AI. But the key is they'll run on AWS and then they can sell them to other people to run on AWS and therefore make money on AWS. Speaking of AWS, Chief of Angeles, Jeff Barr announced in a blog post on February 1st, 2024, AWS will start charging for public IPv4 addresses, whether they're attached to a service or not. Barr noted that Amazon's cost to acquire an IPv4 address rose 300 percent over the past five years. That's just how rare IPv4 addresses are now. So he'd like y'all to adopt IPv6, if you please. A few bits of Microsoft news today. US Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the US Department of Justice asking it to hold Microsoft accountable for negligent, negligent cybersecurity practices. The company is being called out in the wake of a major breach targeting its Azure platform last month. It affected over two dozen organizations and resulted in unauthorized access of sensitive emails from US government officials. Microsoft also shared a registry tweak. Registry tweak. Those are fun to mitigate a bug and outlook that unexpectedly asked users to restore windows closed in a previous session. Confuse some folks. And finally, good night, sweet Prince Cortana. Microsoft is shutting down the digital assistant app this month in favor of Bing Chad and other AI powered productivity features across windows. Microsoft's been tinkering with lately and in the edge browser as well. Cortana will still be available in Outlook Mobile, Teams Mobile, Microsoft Teams Display, Microsoft Teams Rooms, at least for now. But the company has also laid out plans to bring Bing Chat to the enterprise. That would be probably where something like Microsoft 365 Copilot would replace Cortana in the places it still exists. Well, maybe they could use AWS. Maybe so. Just don't ask for IPv4 address. A new VR headset for Meta showed up in the US Federal Communications Commission database. Now, the filing doesn't call it the Quest 3, but it kind of looks like one. In fact, the FCC label is in the exact same place it is on the Quest 2. Also, Meta promised it was going to share more about the Quest 3 at its connect event, which happens September 27th. So we're getting close to needing more information about it. They said they're going to launch it in the autumn. So it's a fair bet that this filing is in fact the Quest 3. And if it is, well, now we know it would come with Wi-Fi 6E. The EU's Digital Services Act requires large social media platforms to let users choose whether or not to see content recommendations that are based on tracking and profiling of their activities. In compliance with those rules, TikTok Europe announced that users in Europe will soon be able to switch off the algorithmic for you feed that TikTok is so well known for. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to Reuters that the social network is also in early stage talks to obtain a payments license in Indonesia. TikTok says an Indonesian payments license would help local creators and also sellers be able to make money and get some more eyeballs on the platform. Google released a tool last year to help you request the removal of personal information from search. So phone number, home address, email. An update to that just rolled out. It's called the results about you tool. And it includes a dashboard that will alert you when such information shows up in search so you don't have to go find it at yourself. You'll be able to request removal right from the dashboard. If it's found something it thinks is is personal information, it'll list it. You can say, yes, please remove that right away. You can get to the tool from either the Google app. Just tap your profile photo and select results about you or go to goo.gle. I had no idea GLE was a top level domain. Goo.gle slash results about you. All one word. It's available in the US now with more countries to follow. So if you're not in the US, hang in there, it's supposed to come to you shortly. Google is also expanding its policy on removal of explicit image. Now, previously, you could request the removal of non consensual explicit images of yourself, but you can now request them to be removed even if they were consensual, even if you put it up yourself. This also might apply to content you had uploaded and later removed, but showed up on another site without your permission. Policy does not apply to content. You are commercializing yourself, though. And Google is going to start blurring explicit images by default now in Google search. You'll have to change the setting in the safe control settings. Parental controls are now searchable. You can just put in a query like Google parental controls or Google Family Link. And they'll show up right away. These all seem like pretty good tweaks, right? I mean, what's not to love, right? Yeah, I think this is absolutely awesome. And my deepest thought is why am I still nervous to search for myself on Google? I never do this, but I would hope that they bring this type of stuff more to the forefront to let people realize that this type of service is actually available to them, because I don't know how many people actually know that I'm sure everybody knows they can search for themselves, but I don't know how many people realize that they can make requests to have information removed. You know, did you go to Google Google slash results about you? No, you don't want to know. I don't want to know. How do you not search? Oh, my gosh, I can't. I don't know what it is. I just there are a lot of things I don't look at either, you know, like the scale on the bathroom. But oh, no, I immediately went and I was like, all right, let's let's see what we can remove. There really isn't anything that, you know, all the results for it. If I search for myself, right? It's a lot of it's me and a lot of it is a very well known ballerina named Sarah Lane, and she and I, you know, we have nothing we've never met or whatever, but she has crawled up in the Google search rankings over the years because she's, you know, really good at L.A. So some of it's me and some of it's her. And I actually just just out of curiosity, I clicked on the little hamburger menu that dots next to one of her results. It was like her Instagram account that, you know, is now like trending higher than mine. And, you know, it it was I you I could see because I was trying to think like, OK, let's think of nefarious ways that this could be abused. You know, if you're trying to get somebody else's result, you know, taken out so that you you're trying to rank yourself higher. You know, it's it's possible for me to go through it. But Google asks you a lot of questions. By the way, I did not do this to this woman. But but I was just I wanted to see how far I could get before you confirmed. Yeah, I mean, she could then, you know, dispute it. She could dispute it and then I would look pretty bad and Google would probably, you know, you know, that that would be on my record if I really had an issue in the future. However, the idea of getting sensitive information, you know, the company was already doing their best to help you. Yeah, I get stuff like, you know, is it my current phone number? I don't want that on the Internet. I don't want that, you know, in a Google search result, rather. That that's all that makes a lot of sense. As does sensitive material, you know, like you had laid out before, Tom. There are companies that will do this for a fee. I don't know any company that does this for free. Right. Reputation Defender is a company that gets promoted on certain podcasts. So I'm just throwing that name out. I've not used them, but I know someone who has. In fact, I know more than one person who's used more than one company for a fee to get certain things scrubbed from the Internet, because it was either misleading or embarrassing or something like that. Whatever their reason was, it cost money. And some of that stuff feels a little predatory to me because you've got a company saying you want that photo to go away forever. Well, if somebody found this photo of you. Yeah. And it doesn't sound like, I mean, Google's not promising to take something down that you just don't, you know, you don't, you're not happy about, you know, we're not going to rewrite history here, but it doesn't cost any money. So it's a good place to start. My only downside to this and it's a very minor thing is that I wish Google had included the dark web search as a one stop shop service of this as opposed to having a separate service because people should definitely get into habit. A lot of password managers give you this opportunity to search the dark web to see if your accounts are on there for any or your username or passwords are on there or any type of information that people should get in the habit of actually using these types of services to do this. I wish they would combine those two things together. Yeah, it feels like a good feature request. Like, yeah, just, just, you know, merge these interfaces together. That's a good idea. One last Google thing here. Kevin Toffols about Chromebooks spotted a new feature turned on by default for Chrome OS 116 and up. Lacrosse stands for Linux and Chrome OS and splits. Chrome OS is Linux operating system away from the Chrome browser. You may not have realized, but the browser and the operating system were one because the idea was the browser was the operating system interface. Google says now that they're splitting them apart, it lets it update each one independently, so you don't have to update everything at once. They can update the browser separately from the OS. Lacrosse has been in development for about two years and is designed to make updating Chrome OS easier and might even extend the lifetime of old Chrome OS devices. I was hoping it was pronounced lacrosse. Let's let's change. Yeah, lacrosse for now. Yeah, until someone says no, we're doing it. All right, we've talked about risk VRISCV before on the show. It's an open ship instruction set and it's provided royalty free. You can think of it as a competitor to what ARM does. ARM provides instruction sets and designs that companies pay to license, but risk VRISCV provides those for nothing. So it's interesting to see that Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic, Robert Bosch and Infineon have joined forces to create a company to promote the development of risk VRISCV. The group plans to start with a focus on automotive applications before expanding to mobile and internet of things devices. The as yet unnamed company will set up shop in Germany and lobby industry associations and also governments and provide reference architectures and established standards. They're kind of trying to do it all. This takes place, probably not coincidentally, as SoftBank is planning to launch ARM as a public company with the stock IPO rumored for next month. Yeah, I don't think it's a mystery why Qualcomm would like to have a royalty free version of ARM. Oh, wait, we're still seeing cream here. I always find it interesting and fun when I see these companies make these power moves to save a ton of loot, right? And but at the same time, if I love competition, especially in spaces like this, because inevitably, if it's done well, you get some great features on both sides and you can kind of choose which one suits your purposes better. So even though it's clearly about the money, I welcome these type of things happening all the time. Now, the interesting part about it is the fact that they are releasing it first on automotive because, you know, in the last couple of weeks, a lot of companies announced they're moving away from, you know, having iOS in the cars and stuff like that. So and, you know, might be developing their own. So it would be kind of interesting to see if these this has a faster uptake just because people are putting themselves in that position. Yeah, I think it's it's perfect. It's not even greedy to say, hey, it looks like Arm might raise licensing fees. They're about to IPO, which means they're going to have more pressure to show profits, which means there's more prefer pressure for them to raise licensing fees. So having a counterweight to that to keep the licensing fees from Skyrocket is just a good idea. And the fact that it's everybody, it's Qualcomm, it's NXP, it's Nordic, it's Infineon means that everybody understands we're all going to benefit from this. It's the kind of thing that if Arm is super smart, it might even join in the future at some point to kind of help perform it. I doubt that's going to happen. But there's a route where it could that could happen in the future. It's going to take a while, though. Like you say, they're starting with automotive chips because that is an area where they I guess they feel like they have a better chance of getting uptake. It's lower powered. It's not like servers or anything like that. So Arm is going to be fine for years. It's not like risk is going to just come in and take over immediately. But this is going to apply some pressure and slowly over the years, they will, just like Arm did, move from embedded systems and Internet of Things to mobile, to laptops, to servers, if all goes well. This is definitely something to watch, though. Yeah, for sure. Well, is there a world where Arm could join this alliance and also keep a separate, you know, specialty arm instruction set and design part of the company? Yeah, I don't see why not. Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't really know why it would. But yeah, I mean, if there was stuff like that, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I realize that that us saying, you know, Arm supporting risk sounds like in the year 2000 saying Microsoft would support Linux, but it does. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I could definitely see them doing a branch, you know, for specialty things and then joining something like this to move forward or vice versa, using something like this for, you know, a low cost way to support things they don't really want to support anymore. It could go in either direction, actually. Yeah. And Arm is more than just its instruction set. It's the support. It's the design, you know, obviously companies like Apple don't need all that stuff. They just want to license the instruction set. But and, you know, that's a big chunk of change for Arm. Don't get me wrong. However, there's all kinds of things that Arm does that if they were supporting a risk instruction set, they have talent and they have ability to do that. I don't think they're going to do that anytime soon. Don't get me wrong. But yeah, maybe 10 years from now, we're like, man, remember when it sounded crazy to think of Arm supporting risk and and now it does. Or maybe both of them will flop and end up in a top five this week on Tom's top five. Roger wrote up the top five failed home video formats you don't know about. And I count them down for you. If you're like, oh, it's Laserdisc. No, Betabax, not on it. HD DVD. Now we have bigger failures than all of those. If you want to know what they are, check out the video. YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Depending on how you look at it, Apple's latest earnings report is either bad news or great news. It's bad news if you consider that it was the third straight quarter of falling revenue down 1.4 percent and that sales of iPhones, which still make almost half of Apple's revenue, were even lower than analysts expected, falling 2.4 percent. So declining and declining a little faster than we thought it would. Now, the earnings report is great news. If you consider that net income rose 2.3 percent on the year and that Apple services revenue reached an all time high of 21 billion, just a little more than 25 percent of Apple's revenue now comes from its one billion paid subscribers. That's three times or I'm sorry, that's two times as many subscribers as they had three years ago. Knowing the smartphone market would eventually saturate like laptops did. Apple's plan for years has been to grow services and pivot to services as its next big revenue generator. So, Chris, when you look at this, do you see good news or bad news for Apple? I see ridiculousness in the fact that this system exists in the first place. But aside from that, honestly, I think it's actually more good news to see that the company's still innovating and and finding ways to make money. And the phones aren't totally dead for them. So I don't know if the fact that they anticipated this and didn't sit there and say, who wants a phone with just a screen on it and then do nothing about it? Right. They saw what was coming and they started pivoting and making moves, much like other companies have done as well. You like to see that those type of things. My only question is, will this whole push to services switch up at some point and people are like, all right, I'm done with this. Just within the last two weeks, I canceled three services because it's just getting way out of hand. Yeah, it's not even just streaming anymore. It's everything, everything, everything. It's just getting way out of hand. And and I was just I just started reassessing. I was like, this is too much. And even now, even looking at canceling more and maybe going back to just getting a basic service from my internet provider, just because it's getting crazy. So I think that's something that'll be interesting to watch. But overall, I think this is good news for Apple. Yeah, I depends on how much you hate Apple. Some people like see Apple couldn't sustain it. It was although there was some dip in revenue. It was mostly in line with what analysts expected slightly lower, but it wasn't like some like crazy like shock and surprise. Jean Munster, who's an Apple analyst, had a really good breakdown. He's bullish on Apple, but he had a good breakdown about Apple's potential in India. You know, we talked earlier in the year about Apple opening a couple of stores. The company certainly hopes that its physical presence in India will be a lot more than that in time. Cook had noted on the earnings call that the opportunity in India was a big deal. Also, the company didn't break out India numbers, but Cook commented that India had hit a June quarter revenue record, grew strong double digits, also said the company open noted that the two new stores are beating expectations. So, you know, however, I don't know, none of us have been to either of those stores, if you have, let us know what you thought about it. But it sounds like there's a lot of interest there. And Munster also compared this to Apple revenue in China. It wasn't that long ago that China was an emerging market for Apple. And now it's a really big one. And India has a lot of people in the country. And if it goes into, you know, a double digit billion dollar revenue in quarters to come, then that's a bright light. Also, he mentioned, hey, we got the iPhone 15 coming next quarter, you know, and you got holiday sales and that sort of stuff. So, so yeah, I think that, along with the Vision Pro coming next year, makes this conversation a year from now really interesting. Yeah, we don't always talk about earnings reports on on DTNS. And if we do sometimes we just have them in the quick hits up at the top. But Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world, not just the biggest tech companies, and their bet on services has been something that is crucial to the survival of the company. So I thought it was worth paying attention to this earnings report, because it does seem like we are seeing the pivot. We are seeing the finally the slowing of even the iPhone. The iPhone outlasted most of the rest of the smartphone market. But even the iPhone is slowing down. But services is still rising. It's a record high, but it's been a record high every quarter, which is good. That's what Apple wants to see. So yeah, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. As Sarah just explained, it used to be like, well, sales are slowing down for Apple. But maybe China sales can pick it up. And well, guess what they did? So maybe India can do that. Past results are no guarantee of future results. But seems logical that that could happen. And we saw laptop sales slow down. And at a time people probably don't remember when the iPhone was still so young. A lot of people are like, well, Apple can't build its entire business on the iPhone. Can it turns out it could and it did. So that, I guess, is the bigger question. Can services be the next thing that comes half of Apple's revenue? Well, I think definitely. Obviously, they have to recognize their revenue differently. But in the end, not only does this serve to show that Apple made the pivot and looks like they're making the right decision, but we should probably be less surprised when other companies start to continue to make this pivot. I know just within the last couple of weeks, we were all pretty surprised about the announcement of some of the car companies kind of doing services so that you can get additional features in the vehicle. And, you know, honestly, when you look at something like this, it kind of says, you know what, I should probably be less surprised that people are finding ways to make services a bigger part of their revenue stream. I mean, I don't love that they're trying to turn heated seats into a service, but I get why they're trying to do it. Yeah. Heated seats are lovely, by the way. Are they worth a monthly subscription, though, when they're already in your car? Oh, that would make me so mad. I mean, I have heated seats in the front, not the whole car. But if I if I knew they were there, you know, that's what gets you out. That would be cool. But you know, you got to pay for that little guy to come in and light the fire under your seat. Free, true, yeah. Little green men, they power a lot. Mario, Mario of Super Mario Brothers, also a very powerful character. And that is why Pauli Gohan, employee and writer, Extina G.G. decided to live for a work week, five days in a row in the shoes of Mario. And you might say, what does that mean? Well, for five days, they live in New York City. They wore a full body Super Mario costume, got the mustache and everything and did things like plumbing the polygon office toilets, jumping around a lot, eating Italian food, powering up with raw mushrooms. They noted they did not enjoy eating them, went go-karting at Coney Island, went mini golfing and also danced typical Mario stuff, you know, Extina Mario, as they call it themselves during this experiment, tried running five miles to work the first day instead of taking the subway because that's what Mario would do, right? But then admitted that was unsustainable. But then they got creative and decided that by riding Yoshi, which in real life was a green dinosaur head on a stick on the subway, that they could ride the subway and still feel authentic. I know, Extina admits being Mario for a week was not easy. But you know what, we're just going to go ahead and respect their commitment to research. Fair enough. That sounds like a fun thing to do. I want to poo poo and hate it. This just this this took me back to a simpler time on the internet when like this kind of thing was all the rage on YouTube long before Tik Tok and everything else. I adore this. Yeah. I love that she's like a week, meaning five days because they don't pay me to be Mario on the weekends. Yeah, let's, you know, it's a, uh, yeah. I don't want to get to what I I love the idea, you know, so, OK, like first day was running five miles to work. OK, we're not doing that. So then, you know, second day is like, how do I ride the subway but still, you know, not just be sitting there and imagine like on Tuesday seeing somebody dressed up as Mario and you kind of go like, oh, well, whatever, New York City. Right. See them again. That was my exact thought. It was like nobody even paid one second up there. But like, what if, you know, because you're kind of going to, if you're commuting at the exact same time as somebody else, chances are you might recognize them again. Yeah. You know, you got the same, you know, you're on the same schedule. You're just going to expect them to get off at Times Square in that outfit. Right. Yeah. It's like, oh, or maybe, you know, they're like children's birthday party or, you know, all sorts of things it could be. 100% chances there was at least three more Mario's on the train too. Oh my gosh, you're not wrong. And they all like had like a dance thing and then brought around a hat. That would have been amazing if they found another Mario and did a like head to head or Luigi, right? Anyway. Yeah. Let's get to the mailbag. Let's do it regarding our discussion of Warner Brothers Discovery Sports Strategy for Max, Rick and Texas wanted to add to the discussion that Warner has your sport channels Discovery Plus Sports and GCN Plus. Rick subscribes to GCN Plus for cycling coverage and he says, quote, I watch most days through though right now there's a lull for the because of the build up to the UCI World Championships in Glasgow. Your sport might be the ESPN for the rest of the world. Thank you, Rick. That was good, good info to add to the discussion. I always appreciate that. Indeed. We also appreciate you, Chris, Ashley, thanks for being with us today and let folks know what you've been up to. Oh, Rod and I are getting ready to start season five of barbecue and tech with some really cool food to talk about. And of course, you can always check us out on SMR podcast, me and your boy Rob Dunwood. I can't even call him my boy anymore. He's your boy now. Our, our. I wish he's the collective world. Yes, he's going to say collective boy. That doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean? He's the homie. So yeah, we're still doing our thing. But yeah, I'm so excited for this season of barbecue and tech. Excellent. Go and subscribe if you haven't already. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's Friday and enough of you loved the who am I bit that we did with tech personalities last week that we're going to do it again. Stick around and see if you too can figure out the mystery person before the final clue is given reminder. You can catch the show live live or live or five. No, it's live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at twenty hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live will be back Monday with Justin Robert Young and Nika Monford joining us. Have a great weekend, everyone. Talk to you soon. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host, producer and writer Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-hosts Megan Maroney and Rob Dunwood, video producer and switch producer Joe Coots, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods Beatmaster, W. Scottis 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Waterama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and JD Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST and Len Peralta, ACAST ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeill. Contributors for this week's shows included Ayaz Akhtar, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Chris Ashley. And thanks to all the patrons who made the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.