 Coming up on DTNS, it's the internet's birthday. Sony announces the end of PlayStation View and EA returns to Steam. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 29, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson, not Patrick. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Yes, indeed. We're swapping Patrick and Scott's days if you're if you're into paying attention to that sort of thing, because Patrick Beja is in the air on his way to my house. He's not going to land the plane at my house, but he is going to be here tomorrow in the studio with me. I can't wait. Yeah, it's a good switch. He's actually going to be in town for BlizzCon. He's going to be our eyes on the ground for that thing this year. And yes, indeed. The fact that he gets to hang out with you a little bit bonus, I would say. Yeah, it's absolute bonus for me. That's for sure. We actually just had a conversation with Sarah Lane. She's doing fine. She's not able to get into her new place. And so she will not be on the show today. But if you want to hear our talk with her, we had it on Good Day Internet, which you can get as a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. The short version is it's been a rough few days for her, but she's doing fine. She's safe and her dog and her cat are safe and her mom and her mom's two cats are safe. So that's the important thing. And it was good to hear from her and hopefully, you know, fingers crossed we might get her back tomorrow, certainly by Thursday it's looking at. All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Well, it turns out WhatsApp is suing mobile surveillance company, NSO group in federal US court. WhatsApp accuses NSO group of creating malware used to quote access messages and other communications after they were decrypted on targeted devices. WhatsApp patched an exploit in May that may have been used. WhatsApp says more than a hundred human rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society in their words were targeted. Yeah, so it's suing over damages for breaking into their system. It's an interesting approach. Nvidia announced the GeForce GTX 1650 supercard launching November 22nd, though a price has not yet been announced. At least I haven't seen one GPU throughput of the 1650 supercard will rise 46% and the card comes with 12 gigabit per second GDDR6 memory, the TU 116 GPU. That is the same one used on the 1660 and is a significant upgrade over the not super GTX 1650. It'll also be a hundred watt card compared to the not super 1650 75 watts. So that's something to take into account. Nvidia also launched a super version of the GTX 1660 with faster GDDR6 memory that one shipping late November for $229. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing Google for false or misleading representations to consumers about the personal location data Google collects, keeps and uses. That's a quote. The issue sorry. The issue is that when setting up an Android phone, users can disable location history, but that does not disable collection of all location data to do that. You have to go to the web and activity setting as well. I didn't mean to give you all the lawsuit stories. It's just kind of the way it happened. Correspondent Scott Johnson. Hello Apple released Mac OS Catalina 1015 one adding support for new emojis support for the AirPods Pro the same Siri privacy controls that went into iOS this week also includes HomeKit secure video support and support for airplay to enabled speakers and Apple released an update for watch OS watch OS 6.1. That also adds AirPods Pro compatibility and can run on Apple Watch Series one and series two. Nice also at the same time Apple pulled the latest update to its home pod speakers because users were reporting it made some speakers unusable. If you have installed the 13.2 home pod update Apple recommends avoiding resetting it or removing it from home app until or correct or removing it from the home app until a fix is released. Yeah, and if it does get bricked, you know, I mean do what you would do, which is contact Apple support. They say they will try to help you. All right. 50 years ago today in room 3420 at UCLA's Belter Hall, a graduate student named Charlie Klein sat at an imp the internet message processor and ITT teletype terminal and sent a digital data transmission to Bill Duvall a scientist sitting at a terminal at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto California 350 miles to the north. Klein typed L and L appeared on Duvall screen. They were on the phone with each other so they could confirm this then Klein typed O and then Duvall's computer crashed. So they got the L and the O through then it crashed after about a 20 minute software fix on Duvall's and they tried again and sent the word log in Klein was then able to use the Stanford computer from UCLA to run programs. It was a test of linking academic computers into something called the ARPA net. That was a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency aka ARPA set up in the Department of Defense in 1958 by Professor Leonard Klein Rock of UCLA. Within a few weeks of this successful test by Stanford and UCLA, the network had added computers at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah and room 3420 has recently been restored to its 1969 look and is called the Klein Rock Internet History Center. There's an excellent article with more about what happened on that day some interviews with Klein and Duvall and Klein Rock and it's all by Mark Sullivan at FastCompany.com. Wow, that's cool. What a cool thing to look back on. I think a lot of people think the Internet started in 1994 and maybe effectively for you it did given those advances at that time with the web and everything. But yeah, it goes back this far. I was literally in diapers and breastfeeding. Tom was probably still incubating. I was in a womb. Yeah, I was further in sconce weren't even here yet. But but yeah, I also love this story obviously because it's got a nice Utah connection. There's a lot of cool stuff up at the U now that talks about this history and its role in it and and sort of what came after but but yeah, a big deal for the Internet and us because look at where we are now. Look at us talking over this weird Internet we're doing. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things they were doing was getting around having to pay the phone company because you could connect to computers before, but you had to lease a line and you had to do it every time for two computers. They wanted to just be able to connect to a computer whenever they wanted, which just seems outrageous and and they wanted to connect more than one computer at a time. And so so hence the ARPA net was born and thank goodness for us. It did or we wouldn't be talking to you right now. Hapa are happy ARPA Internet days. Happy birthday Internet. You don't look a day over fish. You really don't. You don't look that much older. Google uses dot new domains so that users create new things like Google Docs or calendar entries. Well, they have now opened the domain for others to register. Trademark owners can register a domain until January 14th and others can apply for a new dot new domain starting December 2nd. Microsoft has registered word dot new to start a new word document and Spotify registered playlist dot new and play and podcast dot new, which is interesting eb registered sell dot new and stripe registered invoice dot new even Drake's label Ovo sound registered music dot new. Tom, how quick are you going to make a dot new domain? I don't know that I will. I don't know that I need to some of these are cool like the ability to start an invoice by doing invoice dot new. If you're a stripe user, they only work really well if you're already logged in. So some of these like if I'm not always logged into eBay, maybe if I'm a big seller, this would be great to be able to just type sell dot new and Drake. I mean, I don't think you're creating new music on his label. I think this just takes you to his website. So it doesn't have to cause something but word dot new if you're always logged in to office 365 and you just want to start, you know, a cloud version of a document. It's kind of cool and I'm very glad that Google is opening this up to others. It would be unconscionable for them not to and they've got some cool uses of their own there. Can you only register through Google's domain registration stuff or do you kind of get a home? This is one of those top level domains that that you can own and Google owns it. So they administer it and they're the only places you can register. I don't know if you could use a third-party register to buy it from Google, but Google's the one you end up buying it from. Gotcha. Razer launched its low latency wireless earbuds. The hammerhead true wireless Razer modified Bluetooth 5 to be claimed 60 millisecond latency. So these are these are typical earbuds with all the typical earbud controls and taps and everything that you would expect. But if you use them for gaming, they have 60 millisecond latency, which is a much better latency than other wireless earbuds, buds last three hours on a charge. Case can give an additional 15 hours and they're available now for a hundred bucks. They look actually weirdly a lot like black AirPods and and that's cool because I like that look and I think it's a good fit and these are fit my ears really well, but it is an interesting move by a company like Razer to say, Hey, I'll bet you want a game with earbuds in because that is typically the domain of a purely wired setup. Most gamers are not interested typically in some sort of, you know, wireless sort of solution, but these look great. I also I question whether they'll be able to market it outside of that narrow group because that's really where they cater. That's their market. What would drive somebody who just is looking for a good new pair of earbuds to find these and you make this their choice? I don't know, but I think a hundred bucks isn't bad, especially in light of the cost of some of these other higher end version. I mean, you can get them for less than a hundred bucks. They're just from, you know, they're not from Apple and and Samsung and Microsoft. They're there from other other folks. I saw some for $29 today that had some pretty good reviews. So they're definitely out there. Razer getting into it. I think it's smart for Razer, but it also to me, the first thing that hit me when I saw this was this shows that the earbud industry, the earbud section, the wireless earbud without any kind of wire connected to it is definitely the dominant one right now. And I have to say, my new Pixel 4 I can use with AirPods, but I don't want to have to keep switching it back and forth and repairing it every time. And I haven't found an elegant way to do that. So I got these USB C headphones in the meantime because they were cheap and I don't want to use them because they have wires. Scott, I'm spoiled. I just want to stick things in my ear and have them automatically connect without me having to do anything, which is what all of these do now. And it's great. No, I've gotten completely spoiled by it. I don't want to go back. I use nothing but wireless headphones now. I don't remember the last time I plugged regular wired buds or headphones into my phone and I split between a pair of AirPods and a big sort of over the ear cans, kind of like these, but they're wireless that I get from Jabra and I really like them and it's to the point where I don't want to. And I know I'm not getting perfect sound, right? I know that wired people are definitely going to get better audio quality than I am, but I find to myself not caring at all because the convenience is more important and also the quality quite frankly is better than it's ever been and will probably just keep getting better. So yeah, I'm all in on this. You sold me. I'm not I just want them to make it way easier to use wireless Bluetooth earbuds on multiple devices. I agree. I want that Apple ease of use on every phone. I put them on even Apple could be easier. But yeah, I want it to be cross platform. I totally agree. Now please ruin my day, Scott. Now here comes the funeral news. So we had the birthday of the internet. Now we have the funeral of PlayStation Views. Sony's going to shut it down. This is their PlayStation View live TV subscription service and that's going to happen on January 30th. So in a blog post, Sony said the highly competitive pay TV industry with expensive content network deals has been slower to change than we expected. P.S. View launched in 2015. All those head of years ago. Sony sold its crackle video service to SC or excuse me, CC SC last year. Tom is a avid user of PlayStation View and I am very curious how this news lands on you. It hurts. PlayStation View is not the best service. It has its especially its streaming issues, but it has all the channels I need and it has them at a price that I can agree to. So it is one of the few that has all those channels. It also has the widest number of integrations with network apps. So even when PlayStation Views own app isn't really working, which does happen, I can always go to the network app and it works great. And so I don't even think of PlayStation View as an app. I think of it as a thing I pay to get access to a bunch of channels that I want. And in that respect, it's been the perfect situation. I haven't looked at suppose.tv lately, but I'm going too shortly because I the last time I looked, PlayStation View was the only one that had all the channels I needed in one place. Sling TV I know still doesn't, although it does have NHL and MLB I think still. So maybe it's close, but those are usually the two I have a hard time finding in one package and actually and still recently PlayStation View didn't have the NHL network either. So once they got it, I'm like, Oh, now it's perfect. Oh, wait, now it's shutting down going away from the personal though. This is not shocking to me. Sony is there's two things going on here. The biggest reason I think the one that I don't see people talking about enough is that Sony is focusing on gaming. This department has realized what Microsoft also realizes, which is if you want to have a successful game console, you need to have a wide number of apps available for it, but you don't need to run them. You don't need to be the provider of entertainment. And so shutting down PlayStation View is mostly a symptom of them wanting to focus on gaming on that rig and say, Yeah, you know what? We want Sling TV and YouTube TV and all of those to be available on PlayStation. We want to provide the gaming service. That's what we want to do. I'm glad that's why we had the rumors that they were going to sell PlayStation View, but apparently they just couldn't find a buyer. I'm glad you brought that up in context with Microsoft because if there was any hallmark moment of learning that happened during the current generation of consoles as we get ready to roll into new hardware, new services is Microsoft's very early education that people didn't want them to force this thing down our throats as a set top box that was all about entertainment and other computing uses that really gamers wanted the focus to be on gamers and they have fully gone the other way now and embrace that. And I think this is a sign of Sony doing something similar, even though you could argue this generation, they have been very focused on games and they certainly led this generation. But while why, you know, meanwhile, they've got they've got this small effort PlayStation View and other things to try to get more stuff happening with home entertainment that isn't video game related. And sadly, there are a million companies trying to do that, including some very, very big ones that are doing it successfully. And why fight with that? So I see no problem with this other than of all the services I tried and I did do a little taste test of a few of them is the only one I liked. So Sony Sony also doesn't want to operate streaming services. So if you're like, well, why don't they just move you to another department? They, you know, they have movies and stuff. They make TV shows. They want to be a producer. They don't want to be a provider. That seems to be clear and that's why they sold off crackle. So yeah, at that point, it's let's sell it and it didn't sell because I think because of the PlayStation brand being attached to it. They just haven't really got the usage and they weren't apparently going to be able to transfer all the deals over. So in the end, they just didn't have a valuable enough piece of property to sell. And this is this. This is not the death of cable online. This is the maturity of it. This is what happens. You start to see people withdraw from the market. There's plenty of options out there. There's Fubo. There's sling. There's Hulu live. There's YouTube TV. And those are now pulling ahead as the winners. There's AT&T TV now. So there's plenty of competition. This is the first victim of that competition. We'll see the same thing to happen to these Disney plus HBO Max Peacock Netflix competitors in a few years as well. Amazon announced its grocery delivery service will now be free to members of Amazon Prime in the US firing a shot across the bow of Kroger and Walmart. The service will offer one and two hour delivery windows for both Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods. You won't be able to shop cross-platform though. You have to pick whether you want to shop at Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods, whichever ones are available in your area. The service used to cost you $15 a month, but if you are subscribing to that, you will just stop paying if you're a Prime member anyway and you'll get that for free. I saw some people say you had to sign up to apply to get invited to the grocery delivery service. But when I went into my Amazon, it was just there. So I don't know if I was grandfathered in somehow for some reason or what, but you may want to look you might have to sign up or you might just get into it and get free grocery delivery, which is Amazon's way of saying we just want to take this market. Yeah. It feels like five minutes ago that Amazon was starting to or maybe seemingly pull back a little bit by not giving too many services away for free because you're a Prime subscriber because it's either that or Prime subscriptions go up in price and they have and probably will still. So it was actually a surprise to me to see a $15 a month subscription item get nestled in here. My only answer as to why they're doing that is they very much want to grow that side of the business. They want to make that investment in Whole Foods and for that matter, Amazon Fresh pay off in a much bigger way. So what better way to do that than make it a value added product to a subscription you already have. It does slim their margins, but like you were saying in our prep show today or a prep conversation, there's no, you know, there's no margin too thin for Amazon. They're happy to do it. They still care about margin. No, he doesn't care at all. But I'm this is. I mean, I'd like to make an announcement. This is the first day that subscription or a grocery delivery service has had any interest in my head because up till now just haven't done it. Haven't tried, haven't cared. Just go to the grocery store, get the job done. I don't want to pay the extra fees. It's not worth it. I'm happy to drive over there to Smith's or whatever. This is interesting to me because I'm already paying that Prime and they got me on there. So why not take advantage of it? So I think, I mean, I'm anecdotal here, but I think it's going to work. They will make more money off this product this way than they would have leaving it at $15. They already reduced the price. It used to be $99 a year. I think it used to be 250 before that, but they did the envelope calculation. They said, how many Scott Johnson's can we convince to use this by making it free and how much will they spend even though groceries are low margin? That probably brings in more money and has a halo effect on our other products in a way that leaving it as a pay hasn't because it hasn't caught on. Kroger is doing a great job with grocery delivery. I would use them if I weren't so close to the nearest Ralph's, which is owned by Kroger. Walmart is really ramping up grocery delivery in a big way. And so Amazon needed to do something like this. If they didn't want to lose that market to those too. Yep. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. Electronic Arts announced it is publishing games on Steam again first time since 2012. I guess they had some DLC still kind of trailing along into 2013, but the last time they published an actual game on Steam was 2012. And now they're back with a pre-order page for Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. EA says other major titles like the Sims 4 and Unraveled 2 will arrive in the next few months and even multiplayer titles like Apex Legends, FIFA 20, Battlefield 5. Those are going to arrive next year and they're going to enable, they say, cross-play with folks who get them from EA Origin. Yeah, this is fascinating in so many ways. This is a part of the industry that I've followed very closely for years. And the stuff that you would see after Origin happen, stay around on Steam, like you said, is some DLC, but mostly it was old games that had a publishing agreement that people paid for it there. And so yeah, I can still go get my old copy of Kingdoms of Amalur, because that came out before this all changed over and got away from Steam. But really, since then, if you wanted to be a PC player and enjoy anything EA made, you had to go over to Origin. And Origin has never been great. It's always been, you know, good games that EA makes when they make good games, but not a huge selection otherwise, some decent stuff. They also were the first to introduce kind of a subscription model. That was super interesting. Like there's a lot of reasons to actually look at Origin and see some innovation there, because now there are people copying it and doing pretty well with it, including Microsoft, I would point out. But this is kind of a big deal. First of all, nobody expected or saw this coming. We all knew this game was coming. It's a big, highly anticipated game. The same makers of Apex Legends are making Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, Respawn Entertainment, big developer. Everybody loves those guys. And this makes me wonderful to see the Titanfall series to come over, because that's also their games. But anyway, to make a long story short, the fact that they're coming over here at all to me signals something that seems to be happening in general. Microsoft's doing the same thing with a little less fanfare, but I can now play a bunch of games, including their most recent and popular releases like Gears 5, for example, on Steam. That's unheard of. They've never put Microsoft products. Well, actually, Microsoft's been kind of bad about making PC versions of their Xbox titles as it is. But when they started doing that, the idea that we could just go get them on Steam is pretty crazy. At the same time, they've got their Xbox Gamer Pass for PC at a very low price right now on PCs for their own store, which I can go get Gears 5 and only pay, I think, four bucks a month right now is what I'm paying to play that in any other new games they put on there. So they're they're not leaving their other plans, but I feel like everybody and their other examples of this are kind of going, you know what? Maybe Ubisoft is right because Ubisoft never let let or never left Steam. They just had you play as an as another option, right? It was another way to go buy their games, but they never totally left. Well, now everybody else is like, yeah, we probably ought to just take it back because the gorilla in the room is the gorilla, whether you like it or not. And what's the problem if we sell a bunch there? And yeah, Valve gets a cut, but we'll also sell a bunch over here because we've got some pretty good reasons to use our launchers. So a lot of savvy gamers are going to come here anyway and we'll make more of that money. I feel like there's a move back. There was kind of a move away, obviously. And now there's like this weird trickle back into, you know, Steam should be our friend again. Yeah, I think it I think part of the calculation is looking at Stadia and Microsoft's upcoming service companies are starting to realize that they won't be if these things take off, they won't be able to keep their games to themselves unless they want to run their own streaming service, which yeah, maybe some of them could get away with that, but that's a whole other business and a whole other competency. And that way for a company like EA, I think would lie madness, you know, the first time the EA streaming service went down, it's, you know, forget it. That's non-starter for EA. So I think when they look at that and say, well, we're not going to be able to keep everybody in origin anyway, unless we spend a lot of money making a streaming service, let's just loosen it back up. Well, keep origin because we still want to take more of people's money when we can because when they sell it direct, they get to keep more of it, but we shouldn't limit the audience. And who knows, maybe there's also a part of it where they want to keep Steam around as a competitor to these other services as well and not just seed the ground. Yeah, it's smart. I believe this is the smart way to do it because there is a sense in the industry that platform exclusivity and truly the the walled gardens that have always been console gaming are going and PC gaming for that matter and launchers and all that it's going away or at the very least we're starting to see the artifice of it fall away and things like cross play, which you never used to happen is happening. You mentioned a bunch here with these titles, but this has been a thing for a while. It was most most explosive in the news when Epic wanted to, you know, push it so that Fortnite was playable everywhere. If it was your phone, if it was your console, if your PC didn't matter, they wanted all of that save data that one account serves them all and Sony resisted and they fought and fought fought against that. And then Nintendo and Microsoft both kind of jointly came out and said, yeah, we're going to let that happen on our platforms. Don't know what wrong with Sony over there. And then Sony had to capitulate and now they do it. That's a huge breaking down of a barrier, especially from the leader in the console wars. That also speaks to the power of Epic right now. But anyway, aside from all of that, there is a sense that all of that stuff is lifting and what we're left with is this platform really matter when you want to make sure your game is kind of everywhere. That's certainly now Microsoft method without actually putting their games on PlayStation or Nintendo device, but they are wanting to say, look, as far as the PC crossover, we should be as crossover as possible and on those platforms as agnostic as possible. And this is all good. I mean, in some ways we're talking about steam getting back some exclusivity, but really we're not. We're just we're just acknowledging that steam is a monolith. It's Coke. You probably should carry Coke if you're going to sell Coke. You know what I mean? You better have it, but that's okay. Because you got all these other specialty ones over here, but Coke's not going anywhere. And that's not so much a brave thing, but I think just the obvious step right now. But I love watching this so much fun to watch these guys kind of, you know, twist and turn and change and to see that pop up in steam was a bit of a shock. So, uh, and currently number two, by the way, on the, on the sales charts on, on steam, it's not even out yet. So it's doing well already. Well, it'll be interesting to see, uh, uh, what people find wrong with this story because it involves steam and EA. So who knows? It's video games. You know, it's got video guarantee though. Someone will find something wrong. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories of vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and just talk about it with other folks in the audience at facebook.com slash group slash daily tech news show. Let's check out the mailbag. Uh, John had some more thoughts on the Nvidia shield. We announced that Nvidia has two new models of the shield yesterday. John says the Nvidia shield is one of a few devices authorized for DRM decryption. I have a cable card HD home run prime. While Plex can't see or record all of my cable channels, the shields native live TV app can and though some tech trickery and through some tech trickery on my part, I've integrated it into Plex. Shield also natively supports almost all VPN Android apps and you can side load Chrome. So it's perfect for hotels and or being in a different country than your content. Lastly, and most importantly, it's the only streaming device I've found that has a Twitch app. I can now watch DTNs live on my living room TV without some kind of Cluj, although the Twitch apps are showing up on other places like Apple TV now, but it has had one for a long time. Didn't have to worry about that. Only thing I wish is that I hadn't bought it three months ago. Had I waited, I would have had a faster shield, but it's already light years faster than any Roku I've ever used. I use a program called MCE buddy to grab files that the shield records onto an external hard drive, strips the commercials and drops it on my Plex drive. So there you go. Thank you, John. Yeah, those things are cool. Me and Roger were talking pre-show about them and I don't know why, but Netflix bet looks better on it. It's still snappy and I have the first gen one. So I know mine's not as good as this latest thing, but yeah, that thing's a nice. It feels like a weird little dark horse though. Nobody knows about them or get some, but those who do, they know, they know. Well, that's the thing. There's not as many people have them. And so they don't get brought up in the conversation as much because you're always talking about the ones that are most applicable to people's experience. And then as soon as you do, someone who owns a shield writes in and castigates you for not mentioning the shield. But so we've talked a lot about the shield. We'll keep talking about it just for you. We swear. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Philip Less, Frederick Kubner and James P. Callison. Thank you so much for supporting us. And thank you, Scott Johnson for being on the show. Yeah, it was my pleasure. Patrick's seat was nice and warm. When I got here, I'll leave it nice and warm for Justin to earn for Patrick tomorrow. He's taking my place. That's right. So yeah, no, it's been great to be here as always. I love being on. People are interested in any of the stuff I do. You can find it all over a frog pants. Tom frog pants. Tom. No, that's not true. There's no dot Tom. I need to buy one of those top level domains. It's dot com and you can find me on Twitter. Of course, over there at Scott Johnson, we have new Patreon rewards and you've got two more days, probably two and a half, depending on how you calculated it. November 1st, everybody who is paid up at the $2 level is going to get a copy of the DTNS cookbook with cover art by one. 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