 Coming up on DTNS WordPress and Microsoft get pulled into different Apple App Store problems. The tech supply chain seems like it might start moving to Mexico and the slack lash begins. Also, Microsoft TV flash. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 24th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood adjacent. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, if everybody's wondering, I was just off for the last three episodes, but Sarah has been on the move. I'm glad you're you're in a safe place, Sarah. Thank you. Yes, Northern California. It's fire season and nobody is very happy about it. But, you know, safe and sound and happy to be back on the show today. We were just talking about our reminiscences of Windows 95, 98 XP, because it's the 25th birthday of Windows 95. Happy birthday, Windows. You can get that conversation and more by becoming a Patreon member. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A group of WeChat users calling themselves the WeChat users alliance filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco challenging the U.S. executive order that would bar transactions with WeChat. The lawsuit claims the order is unconstitutional and violates rights to free speech, due process and equal protection under law. Bloomberg reported Friday that the U.S. was reassuring businesses that the WeChat order would only affect its use and downloads in the U.S. Speaking of Tick Tock filed its own lawsuit challenging the U.S. executive order banning its transactions in the federal district court of the Central District of California. Tick Tock claims the order deprives the company of due process. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal sources say Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with U.S. President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton and Senator Josh Hawley and warned about Tick Tock before all three condemned Tick Tock publicly. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that it picked the hosting service Getty to construct an independent open source code hosting platform for China. This project would be managed by a consortium led by open source China with support from Chinese research universities and 10 private companies, including Huawei. Getty, that's GITE claims to have hosted more than 10 million open source repositories and served five million developers to date. Apple Korea has been accused of forcing mobile carriers to pay for advertising and warranty repairs, and the Korean Fair Trade Commission has announced that Apple has agreed to fix unfair terms, including splitting advertising costs, as well as providing 100 billion won, it's about the same as 84 million dollars US, for programs to support small businesses and consumers. Audible announced a collection of 7000 exclusive audio works, including ad free podcasts that are now available for unlimited listening to existing subscribers, starting on August 27th, $7.95 per month tier will launch. That includes access to that exclusive content, but no credits for audio books. Subscription plans with credits that will remain $14.95 for one credit per month and then $22.95 for two. Audible may rename those tiers Audible Premium Plus. That's the new wave. Everything's plus. This is now DTNS Plus. Unity Software, which makes the Unity Game Engine, which I don't know, maybe a beneficiary, given what's going on with Epic, filed its S1 form with the US SEC in advance of an IPO. The company says that in 2019 more than half of the top thousand games in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store were built with the Unity Engine. And in the first six months of 2020, one and a half million monthly active creators developed more than 8000 games and applications per month using Unity Engine. The listing of Unity Software will be on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker, you, just the letter you. Facebook has agreed to pay 106 million euros in back taxes. The equivalent of about $125 million US for unpaid taxes between 2009 and 2018. The company legally funnels French income to other subsidiaries in Europe to lower its tax burden. But to do that, it must show there weren't any sales from Facebook personnel in France to French customers. Amazon, Apple and Google have all previously settled similar tax issues in France and the release of Dynamite, a new single by Korea's BTS broke YouTube records Friday with 101.1 million views in the first 24 hours. Previous record was set in June by BlackPink fellow K-pop stars with 86.3 million views. The song also set a live premiere record on the platform with more than three million users. Dynamite is also the first BTS single to be sung entirely in English. All right, let's talk a little more about the supply chain. Oh, let's. Reuters sources say that Taiwan's Foxconn and Pegatron are considering building new factories in Mexico. Foxconn apparently plans to build iPhones in Mexico, though it has yet to bring Apple in on those plans. Foxconn already has five factories in Mexico, where it makes servers and sharp TVs, TVs that are sharp branded. Pegatron is supposedly in early discussions to move a production line from China to Mexico to assemble chips and other electronic components. Also, China's Lux Share Precision Industry, reportedly a leading AirPods manufacturer, manufacturer is considering a factory in Mexico as well. Yeah, lots of rage. Yeah, there are parts of the recently renegotiated North American trade agreement that make it beneficial to have some of your manufacturing regionally. So in other words, you get some tariff benefits if, say, you're selling something in the US that is made in Mexico. So that's part of this. Also, there is the fact that during the pandemic, people suddenly found that they had problems getting parts from China. And so they realized, well, wait a minute, we might need to diversify our supply chain so that so that everything isn't in one place. And so that's another reason to look for alternative sites for parts of that manufacturing, including Mexico. There is some criticism of Mexico's president, Lopez Obrador, saying that he's not doing enough to take advantage of this, that more companies even might be looking at Mexico if he were doing more to attract them. Yeah, quite honestly, reading the story, a lot of people might say, OK, well, why weren't there more factories in Mexico? Certainly, at least for the US market, it's adjacent. You know, if there's if there's land and there's there's willing people to work in those factories, it does make a lot of sense. I think for so long, the cheap labor in China, which was obviously very attractive to a lot of large companies and their partners who were running these factories, it didn't matter that you had to go by land or, well, you couldn't go by land, but see your air because you would get here and you just pay for it in order to get here effectively. Obviously, so much supply chain stuff, especially the further away you are from your eventual destination, has really thrown a wrench in a lot of these supply chains this year in particular. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if this is a permanent shift. Sounds like if it works out well, it would be. Yeah, I think some of this would have happened anyway and is accelerated by the pandemic and the trade war. That's where China's costs advantage are not as big as they used to be, as you said. Also, I think in the past it was thought, well, this is great because China has everything. So you get a benefit of having all your manufacturing in China because all the parts are made there, right? As Roger pointed out in our pre-show, now your parts coming to the Mexico plant might still be made in China. So you still might have a delay if you've got a delay in those parts. But I think what's happening is the benefit of diversifying is outweighing those concerns. And I think a lot of these companies are saying, well, we also are going to move some things to Brazil and to Vietnam and other locations. So eventually that supply chain won't all be located in just one place and no one thing having a problem will prevent the whole supply chain from working. Yeah. All right, let's get into the first of our two big app store policy problems today, Friday, right after DTNS, Apple seemed to get into another developer dispute over its policies. Some background is important here. WordPress is both a free and open source software distribution for managing blogs. You often hear people call that WordPress.org, because that's where you can get all the open source packages and just use it on your own under the license. There's also a service from Automatic, the owners of WordPress, that you can use to host and manage your blog. You can do that for free. They have some paid stuff, but you can do that for free. And that's often referred to as WordPress.com. So that's where you go and sign up for that service. WordPress.com, as I mentioned, offers a few paid services like domain name registration or premium plans that give you more space and a few other features like Jetpack, et cetera. The WordPress app on iOS, though, this is important, is meant to be used to manage your WordPress blog no matter where it is hosted and no matter if you pay for anything or not. Paying for things is not key to using the WordPress app. Now, Apple has a policy that says in-app purchases must be offered if your app accesses those purchases. There are exceptions. Reader apps like Netflix and Kindle, but WordPress isn't considered one of those. You also can't tell people about things they can purchase elsewhere in your app unless you also offer those things for purchase in the app. Now, an older version of the WordPress app mentioned the premium features in a tab called Plans. There were no prices. There were no links to go buy them. And Automatic WordPress's parent company removed those pages. And Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg even offered to block ways you could get to that description of the plans and their support pages on their website. Apple still didn't budge. It said, no, you offer these paid things, you have to offer them in your app. Even the WordPress was saying, yeah, but the app isn't taking advantage of those necessarily. So in the end, Mullenweg, not wanting to be like Epic, agreed to add in-app purchases for the out-of-app services. Within 30 days, Apple agreed to let the app continue to make updates. However, Sunday, Apple changed its mind and decided that apparently taking out the references and blocking the support pages was enough. And Apple even issued a statement. Quote, since the developer removed the display of their service payment options from the app, it is now a free standalone app and does not have to offer in-app purchases. We have informed the developer and apologize for any confusion we have caused. Wow. So a few things. Number one, Matt Mullenweg kind of coming forward and saying, listen, Apple says we got to do this. We want to keep a good relationship with Apple. We signed up to their terms of service. OK, we're going to do it. We'll be compliant. And there was there was there was no shade at all. You know, this kind of happened over the weekend. I think that that probably has a lot to do with Apple kind of going, let's look at this again. Are we being unreasonable? And it turns out that the company was like, yeah, we actually are being unreasonable and automatic. You know, Mullenweg's company going overboard to not get into any sort of a kerfuffle. And I don't know that that has anything to do with what's going on with Apple and Epic, but but the company just saying, OK, we'll do what you want us to do. You know, let's just let's just keep this whole thing running smoothly. Although Apple was getting a lot of backlash from people saying this makes no sense. Yeah. So, you know, and maybe that's what, you know, also put them over the edge. Yeah, we've seen this before where it seems like I don't know if this is actually the case, but it seems like one reviewer is a little overly strict. Maybe they had a bad day or maybe they're just always like that. And they enforce terms a little too strictly. Company complains a little bit in public. Apple hears of it steps. Somebody steps in an executive level and says, no, no, no, no, we don't. We can be reasonable on this. That sounds like what happened here. Well, OK, I mentioned Epic. Let's let's let's move over to the Epic Apple Epic Apple's fat, rather, because it just won't quit. And we'll get you a little caught up if for any reason you need this. As you might recall, Epic Games put an alternate to Apple's in at payments in Fortnite and Apple removed it from the App Store and threatened to cut off Epic's developer account if the company didn't revert the change. Epic asked for injunctions to prevent Apple from doing either until after the court case is resolved. Apple filed an objection to Epic's request, arguing there is no cause for an injunction since Epic can remove its alternative payment from the app until after the court case is over. So both companies are like, no, we're right. In the filing, Apple included emails between Apple executives and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. In one of those emails, Sweeney asked for the ability to offer competing payment options as well as the ability to offer an Epic Game Store app that would act as an alternative to the iOS App Store. Sweeney said he hoped that Apple would make those options available to all developers. Apple Associate General Counsel Douglas Vetter said in an email as part of this chain, quote, we cannot be confident that Epic or any developer would uphold the same rigorous standards of privacy, security and content as Apple. Indeed, since Apple treats all developers according to the same terms, Epic is essentially asking Apple to outsource the safety and security of Apple's users to hundreds of thousands of iOS developers. End quote. Now, Epic has also filed a declaration from Microsoft in support of the request for an injunction preventing Apple from cutting off Epic's developer account access until the court case between Apple and Epic gets resolved. And it might be a while. Cutting off developer access would degrade the unreal engine used by thousands of other developers to power games on iOS and Mac OS. Microsoft argues this would cause undue harm as it would place numerous game developers, including Microsoft, in the position of losing functionality in their game and incur the cost, which into another or remove their games from iOS entirely. If Epic were to prevail in its court case, this cost would have been for nothing. At least some developers feel that way. So the court is asking to force Apple to hold off until the issue is finally determined. So here what we have is usually in these situations, you do something, Apple changes a rule and then you roll it back and take them to court and that way you don't need an injunction. You leave things as they are and you say, I need to win this court case to force you to change things. What Epic's doing here is saying, no, we're not going to change it. You need to win in court and also attempting to convince the judge that it's somehow an emergency for them not to drop the in app payments. I think Apple's got the upper hand here because Apple can say, look, Epic's Fortnite was in our app store for years without having their own in app payments, they can wait until the court case is done before they force this issue. If they win the court case, great. So I think the judge likely to come down on Apple's side here. And the question is, will Epic then comply or will they force Apple to cut off their developer account? Because that's when Microsoft comes in and says, hey, wait a minute, judge. I know these two are acting irrationally, but if Apple does this, it hurts more than just Epic. And we didn't we didn't pick this fight. Right. That's where a judge might split hairs and say, all right, you can keep Fortnite off the app store, but you can't cut off the developer because that would cause more harm than good. I'm not saying that's what will happen, but I can kind of see that situation unfold. Yeah, I think the the more pressure and obviously Microsoft is going to bring more clout to use that term as maybe a smaller developer that a judge or the public at large hadn't heard as much about. But that is I think that that muscle is, like you said, Tom, really going to not necessarily for sure sway a judge, but that makes a that makes a big difference because other ways it's sort of like Apple versus Epic. OK, everybody's got their arguments, you know, who will win? But when you think about a whole ecosystem and developers having put in, you know, their livelihoods, money, time, you know, energy, all of that stuff, creativity into something that is now caught up in this mix that has absolutely nothing to do with them, then I I tend to feel like Epic might get a reprieve on some of this stuff. Yeah. And this is all about what conditions are going to pertain while the court case is being decided. It's not about who's right or wrong. It's about should should should Epic or Apple adapt their behavior until we decide which one of them is right. And that's what these injunctions are all about. And that's a different question than who's right. This is a like, OK, in case either one of them wins, what's the least harmful situation to leave them in? I also, you know, when you look at both these stories, the WordPress story and the Epic story together, whether you think Epic's right, WordPress is right, Apple's right, the policies of the App Store, which are, I think, legitimately meant to help Apple pay for running the App Store, are too complex. You can put a piece of software up in the Apple App Store, take advantage of all of its the expense of running the App Store and not pay a dime to Apple if you put it up for free. So Apple is willing to allow some exceptions to paying them for App Store access. But to do that, they need to have rules for when you have to use App Store access. And that's where they have these rules of like, well, you can't advertise off app payments because that would be just another way around like we can't leave all the doors open or we won't make enough to run the App Store. It's about where you draw the line. Apple has drawn a very complex line. That's hard to understand. Look at WordPress. They were trying to do the right thing. And even Apple disagreed about where that line should be. So I feel like maybe they just need to get even simpler about how they charge for these things. Yeah. And maybe it has to be based on the number of downloads that that's how Epic does the Unreal Engine, right? It's free until you make a million dollars off of it. Then you got to start paying. So I don't know. It does. It does seem that as reasonable as Apple may think they're being here, doesn't seem to be working well, even for folks who are trying to play by the rules. Great. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Alex Cantrowitz on Mediums One Zero wrote an article titled Why a Slack Backlash is Inevitable and the Wall Street Journal's Chip Cutter and Aaron Tilley wrote Slack has made remote office communication easier. It can also be less civil. Both these cases, the articles written about the same time indicate we may be experiencing a slack lash, also a Microsoft team's lash. We've seen conversations about how interacting through social media changes how people speak to one another, maybe a little less politely. Now we might be seeing the same thing when it comes to team messaging apps affecting corporate culture. Three effects are sort of highlighted in these articles. Employees are reported. They talk to actual employers and HR managers. More infighting going on over Slack and teams than you would see normally in the workplace, especially now that people are all working from home, increases divides within the company. So people kind of tribaling off, going into their own private channels and talking about each other and employee organizing, which you may think is a positive here, but employees getting together and saying, hey, let's hold our executives feet to the fire, maybe not even just for higher wages or typical labor issues, but also for policy changes. Just like email and social media before it, these team messaging apps can cause others to see accounts rather than people, Sarah. And so now we're seeing team messaging apps being the latest place where people aren't being nice to each other. Yeah. Also, I love the term Slack Lash, because it's just clever. But let's be clear, it's Slack and other messaging platforms that corporations often use, although you can use it for friends as well, but it's not just Slack. It's the way that, OK, we have various channels, there are topics assigned to channel, but then you've got DMs going on between two people. And for whatever reason, it's set up in a way that's just rife for people behaving badly in the workplace. Now, I, you know, I tend to think, well, I mean, if you want to behave badly in the workplace or at least be gossipy, right? Tom and I could go off in a corner and talk about employee C, which is, of course, not Roger, but, you know, some other horrible employee that we want to see was just just, you know, ABC, you know, we can do that in person. We could do that over some sort of IM or text application. We could email each other, although, yeah, paper trail, whatever. And I think that the way that this can all kind of happen in one place, I don't think it makes anybody behave worse. I think that it can facilitate more volume of that sort of thing and employees, employers at least, or people in, you know, HR positions or management being like, we just don't know enough about what's been, you know, is being said on the back channel kind of thing, that it worries them. You know, the idea of employees being able to mobilize and, you know, I don't know, decide to walk out or unionize or that sort of thing. That can happen lots of different ways. The fact that something like Slack or teams or gosh, I mean, Skype, really. I mean, all of all of these platforms can help people be on a sort of larger group chain to talk about something. This is a new, but it's more convenient. So I really don't, I kind of, I think the whole, oh, these workplace apps are making people, you know, cat ear or, you know, it makes people because they can say things that aren't, you know, in the public or able to be looked up in an email thread by an IT manager. It makes them behave more badly. I'm not so sure that's true. But again, you could say the same thing about social media. You could say, well, Twitter didn't invent trolls, but really helps them proliferate. So I kind of see both sides here. Yeah, I think the social media side of this, where it's similar to social media, is something we could have seen coming and I'm not surprised. This is accelerated because everybody's working from home and most of these companies, and that means they're using these tools more so it accelerates these kinds of issues, and you don't have the, I actually run into the person in the office later and feel bad and apologize and diffuse the situation. Right. So that's part of it. But also it's just, I mean, email before it. Facebook, Twitter, freaking Friendster, Myspace, written text on the Internet lacks tone. And so it leads to misinterpretations where somebody says something they think is innocent because they say it in an innocent tone in their head. Somebody else reads it as threatening because they read it in an accusatory tone. And then people get in a fight without really knowing why that's going to happen, that still happens. And so the problems with Facebook and Twitter that you're mentioning are going to be problems here, for sure. The other part of this is we went through this with email if people remember. People would complain to each other on email and talk to each other rudely on email, and eventually we learned partly because, yeah, your IT manager could see it, your employer could see it. Same is true for Slack and Teams, your admin can go in and look at all your conversations if they want to. So we just need to get over the fact that even though this is a new tool, it doesn't mean there are no rules. It's people learning that, oh, just like in person and on email, I moderate my behavior, I write in a different way to avoid misunderstanding. And I don't say things I regret because email lasts forever. The same is true for Slack and Teams. And we have to go through the process of learning that, I think. Yeah, I agree. And I think that there are, yeah, I think it also, the way I come out this is I kind of go, I don't know. I mean, you got something crappy to say, you're going to say it and you have lots of different ways to say it. But I also don't use Slack in a large corporation. I mean, I think the largest corporation that I ever had using Slack with a variety of channels and we were on it every day was like, I don't know, 40 people. And that seemed like a lot to me. I know that people are at very large companies where this all gets messy, probably a lot more easily or at least harder to be able to follow. And I'd love to know from anybody who's like, oh, you know, trust me, these workplace apps actually do cause more headache than, you know, the days in the email days before they were all supposed to kill email and make everything better. I'd love to hear from anybody who has experience of why this actually becomes really messy. Some of the solutions suggested in these articles are employers auditing private channels, which is totally possible, setting boundaries for how conversations should be conducted. That's just the learning process I'm talking about. Resolving issues over phone or video. EVITE advised this, according to the Wall Street Journal, like telling people who are getting mad at each other on teams or Slack to talk to each other on the phone to work it out, sort of reimagining that running into each other in the halls situation. And there's even asynchronous services like Yak that integrate with Slack and provide speed control voice messages, searchable transcriptions and screen share. So yeah, there are ways to resolve this that are being tried. I mean, as somebody who has sent plethora of messages that were received in a way I did not intend or someone was like, you matter me? And I'm like, no, why would you think that? Oh, you read it a different way. Sometimes voice as much as I don't really want anybody to send me, quote, voice mails in Slack. Sometimes that's that's all you need. Yep, we are humans after all. Hey, you can join in the discord. There is voice in discord, but there's a lot of text as well. You can join by linking to a Patreon account and join the team at patreon.com. DTNS. What's in the mailbag? Oh, glad you asked, Tom. We got an email from Rico regarding last Wednesday show. Scott Johnson was on the show that day. Rico writes, Rich and Scott were discussing the Wired article about no code. I'm happy that no code is a topic big enough that it has entered the DTS realm like delivery drones and machine learning, hopefully not like 3D TVs. Indeed, the term no code isn't great. I prefer visual development, but no code is so much shorter. It's one of the mind share wars. I've always wanted to learn to code. I bought books, but I could never get off the ground. No code turned these decades of frustration into tons of working products and prototypes. It's been a gateway drug as well. And the last three years I've learned how to program. No code gave me all the understanding of how to handle conditionals, arrays, databases, and it's also changed how I see the world. Oh, that's so good. Thank you, Rico. And Rico even provided some solutions for Scott's particular problem and sent those along. Scott was very appreciative of those. Thank you, Rico. Yeah, very cool, Rico. Thank you so much for that. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Chris Benito, Carmine Bailey and Mike McLaughlin. Folks, we cannot thank you enough for supporting the show. We're keeping us going for more than six years here as just an independent voice trying to help you understand technology. We constantly hear from folks that they feel like they're able to have conversations in the workplace about technology that they wouldn't have if we weren't helping them 30 minutes a day, kind of get the overview on the technology news of the day. So if you want to keep us going and you're not already a supporter, head over to dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. And for those of you who are already supporters, thank you so much. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You got something on your mind? Write us, even if it's rude. I'm just kidding. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with the triumphant return of Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.