 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Matt Zaglin, Scott Hepburn and Bjorn Andre. Coming up on DTNS, where have all the Twitter users gone? Plus, a mixed earnings report for Big Tech. And what did that GPS outage really mean in Texas? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 26, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we were talking before the show about Barf and Poop, and we're not going to do that on this show. But if you are interested, please do stick around for the GDI segment after the show. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know with the QuickHits 2 Starts. Microsoft earned $2.35 per share in its Q1 earnings on revenue of $50.12 billion, which be analyst estimates. Azure grew revenue 35%. Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions increased 13% on the year to 61.3 million. But in its more personal computing unit, Windows license revenue decreased to 15% on the year, its deepest decline since 2015. Surface to hardware revenue increased 2% on the year, Xbox hardware revenue increased 13%, but content and service revenue fell 3%. On its earnings call, Microsoft said GitHub now has over 90 million active users. That's up from 73 million in November of 2021. That's crazy growth. In more earnings news, Alphabet missed analyst estimates on its quarter three earnings of $1.06 per share. On 69.09, that's billion in revenue, up 6% on the year. YouTube ad revenue fell 2% on the year and to $7.07 billion. Google will cloud beat analyst estimates though, increasing revenue 38% on the year to $6.9 billion. Well, in more news of revenue increases and maybe the consumer is being part of that. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Spotify CEO Daniel X said that subscribers can expect a price increase sometime in 2023. Spotify individual premiums $9.99 per month price has remained the same in the US since launching back in 2011. So you haven't seen a price increase in quite some time, although the company raised prices of family plans last year. Tech also said the service increased prices in other markets outside the US without losing subscribers. So it feels like maybe you can do that here too. Maybe Apple might have an answer to that. We'll see. Two more companies signaled the continued slowdown in tech demand in quarter three. Memory chip maker SK Hynex saw operating profit fall 60% on the year. That's a lot to $1.66 trillion won below analyst expectations, which is kind of a bummer. It also plans to reduce capital investments by over 50% in 2023. And this came as overall memory chip prices fell 20% on the year in quarter three. Meanwhile, hard drive maker Seagate announced plans to cut 7.5% rather of its employees. That's about 3000 jobs at Seagate and projects to have its lowest quarterly revenue revenue since 2005. I mean, I love they, you know, but only 7.5 also 3000 jobs. That affects a lot of people. Also potentially affecting your matches match group will roll out a new selfie verification feature to let its dating app hinge. Next month, give users a video selfie, which will be reviewed using an automated system and human moderators also once confirmed as it's authentically you, you'll receive a verified badge on the app. That's actually kind of interesting. I hope it works. We're entering a phase where AI can fake a lot of stuff and I hope that's not counter to this. Well, no kidding. Um, yeah. So those are the quick hits and we will get into some more news. Okay. Now you may remember on Tuesday show, we talked about some iOS 16.1 updates that include an apparent blow to meta in specific. With an in app, within app purchases, for example, a way that you can boost you are sorry, a boost that you pay for in a Facebook post to be seen by more people. Well, to be subjected to Apple's 30% revenue grab some networks like Twitter and Tinder already agree to this. But there's some fresh hot new outrage out there. Oh my gosh. Is there is there ever and yeah. Just to, um, to, to clarify, um, the whole Apple 30% grab, um, has, you know, had a lot of people saying, well, hold on a second, you know, what are we really doing here? This is a little bit different. Um, uh, the Apple iOS store is being dragged a bit because some Apple developers, in fact, some of Apple's most prolific developers have complained about ads for gambling apps appearing in their own app store listings. So for example, if you go to, you know, Sarah's app, I don't have one, but let's say I did. And you, you know, you know the name of the app, you look it up. Um, you might see an gambling ad, um, in, uh, in the area for the, my app to be downloaded and I might not have, uh, good feelings about that for a context. Apple gives advertisers the choice to have their ads shown in app categories different than their own apps category. So that may happen. Apparently has let ads for gambling appear in listings for unrelated apps such as the podcast app overcast by noted Apple developer Marco Arment. That is just one, uh, example of this happening with developers saying, uh, uh, we do not like this. We did not want this. What do we do about this? And as of this recording, Apple doesn't really have a good answer. No, they're probably going to have to address it though. Um, and I have all kinds of questions we've, you know, I was talking earlier about how, how does this happen in say states where gambling is illegal? Uh, why do we get those apps at all, let alone advertisements for them? Um, but aside from that, there's only really two explanations here. Either the gambling apps are extremely good at their SEO game. They're really good at getting that, that ad in front of things in some automated way. Or they're really prolific and paying for placement that Apple currently just like, well, you pay us the most. We put you everywhere kind of situation. If that's the case, Apple should probably address that. And thirdly, the only other third option is that Apple maybe gets so much from that 30% cut revenue from the gambling apps. That this is to their benefit themselves. Yeah. This helps, this helps their services numbers when quarterly reports come up. I guess, I don't know. Well, and I think, I think that third option that you mentioned, Scott, is what has people spending their wheels a little bit. Like at what point, you know, Apple is a money making machine. Certainly the app store is part of that. Um, but Apple makes money in lots of other ways. Um, and you, I've seen, uh, certainly, you know, with people who are, uh, pretty, pretty upset about this for personal reasons, of which I don't really have my own, but, uh, saying, at what point can you just, you, you can't just do the bottom line for, you know, you're a public company, right? So, you know, you have folks that really care about you making money every quarter. Got it. But at, you know, at what cost? And, uh, I don't know. Um, I think that, uh, you know, a lot of people are saying, Apple, you used to say that we weren't this kind of company. And now you're just, you know, screwing over everybody. You used to say that you were family friendly and you're not. Now you're just screwing over everybody. You know, the gambling thing is like really, really bad form. I don't think they're wrong at the same time. I don't know how much Apple, unless there's an antitrust issue, how much they care about people being mad about this. Yeah. And they may not. I mean, I just, the way I imagine it is when earnings reports come around and they have to talk about how services grew some percentage year over year. They have to talk about the app store revenue. And if this represents a sizable chunk of that, I don't know that it does this pure, you know, guesstimation on my part, but let's say it's $500 million as part of whatever 1.2 billion in revenue they made. As an example, that's sizable enough that they, they could be at least accused of favorable treatment to those apps. And if so, they're going to probably have to answer for it. I don't know. It's a weird platform because a lot of games are basically gambling anyway with loot boxes and everything else. So it's a real blurry line. But yeah, yeah, it's weird. Oh, yeah. Well, I wish we could go on to better news, but apparently folks on Twitter are also upset Scott. That is true. According to internal reports seen by Reuters, researchers at Twitter determined that so-called heavy tweeters, people that tweet a whole lot, have been in absolute decline since March of 2020. Interesting timing, I think. Anyway, these heavy tweeters log in six to seven days a week and tweet at least three or four times weekly. If that doesn't sound like you, you're not alone. These accounts reportedly make up less than 10% of monthly users, but they generate 90% of all tweets. I feel like I'm part of this problem. I tweet a lot. Accounting for over half of Twitter's global revenue, the report found interest in news, sports and entertainment declining among those heavy users, rocket the currency and NSFW are not safe for work content. We're the highest growing topics on the platform. Yeah. So if you're saying, well, on March of 2020, wasn't that, yes, that was the sort of the pandemic where quite a few other platforms. Let's think of Netflix, for example, experienced surges in user engagement. People couldn't go outside. They were gaming. They were watching stuff. They were apparently not using Twitter. So if you were a heavy Twitter user, then all of a sudden you're stuck inside for months on end and you choose to go somewhere else, which is what, you know, Twitter itself, apparently, according to this report means that you were a heavy user who just wasn't heavy using anymore. Where are you going? Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think I have a partial answer to this. During the pandemic in particular, but also just in general over the last, let's say, decade. Twitter has become more and more a place where you are going to be faced with your normal followers or your normal timeline where there's stuff you've followed for a reason. But you're also going to come across stuff that you've tried to block and keyword for and not have as part of your timeline. But there it is anyway. It can be a negative scroll. And even my Twitter use is mostly about posting and interacting with replies and very little to do with my main timelines. My main timeline, I think, is a little depressing at times. So I think in 2020, early March, when things were getting weird, I think a lot of people probably just said, I don't want to be depressed about this stuff anymore. And also other apps like TikTok as an example, not saying it's the only example, but as an example, has this algorithm that quite well, pretty well does this thing where it feeds you what you want. And it's a good kind of dopamine head over there for lack of a better way of explaining it. And so if you're getting nothing but negativity over here, why wouldn't you spend more time over here? I just think that was the natural thing. And if all they're going to have is crypto and porn, that's a weird future for Twitter. And I don't like those trends in terms of a place I want to visit and hang out. Yeah, I mean, I would say, well, on Twitter, the amount of DM and even just like direct reply stuff that I get that spam is all kind of crypto based and doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That aside, though, if I think about how my Twitter use case used to be and I enjoyed it a lot, you know, you know, just kind of talking to my friends. And then at some point it became like, OK, this is like a mass machine. I'm more using it as a news tool. And I still do that. But it doesn't bring me joy. No, right? Right. I think that's the key is I feel exactly the same as you. And even though I tweet, I still think I tweet too much. I don't do it like I used to feel like you tweet all that. I was a mega Twitter back in the day, like, yeah, I don't know, 50 tweets a day wouldn't be weird. But now, you know, you might get four to six of them out of me. And almost all of them are just me saying, here's the thing I'm working on. Here's some art. Here's a show I put up. Sure. Yeah. So that kind of stuff. And I'm trying to I kind of avoid the place. I avoid my own timeline because it's just I know what's going to happen in there. I'm going to run into stuff is going to make me mad. And I think this is a real issue for Twitter because the platform has become a place to go complain or, you know, tell everybody something terrible happened. And then you're all supposed to gang up and be together on something that's terrible. That's the evolution of the of the service. And I don't think I think people have a limit on that. I also think, I mean, Twitter has for years now been accused of horrible content moderation, which I think is true. I don't feel personally, you know, that much, you know, it has upset my life that much. But I also feel like, man, you know, there's so much nuance and kind of inside jokes on Twitter. And if you really want to be part of that, you can be. And it's fun. Sure. It's fun. You know, it was up today, you know, stuff where I was like, what does this mean? Let me figure it out. Kind of stuff. But it is not really all that helpful to me on a day to day basis. And being kind of what you described yourself as God is kind of a heavy Twitter. I definitely am not. I feel like I don't have that much to say about it anymore because most of my replies are either spam or just like weird or, you know, the people that I kind of care about the most, we can find ourselves in other places. I don't know if TikTok is that place. You know, I think that that, you know, might be a fad that it will wane eventually as well. But, but yeah, I, you know, I don't know what Twitter does about this. If you got heavy Twitter's that haven't been tweeting for a couple of years now, well, what are you going to make money off of? Yeah. If I was Musk, I'd be more concerned about that than I would be bots and things, even though that kind of kind of correlated a little bit or they happen at the same time. I don't know what the ultimate thing is. The only final thing I'd say on this is I don't know where to go for what Twitter used to be for me. Exactly. I know where that is. Like right now a lot of communication between listeners, fans and so on happens there, but it might mainly because we don't have a great alternative. The other services that currently exist just have a different bent. They go different directions. TikTok's not a place. I want to go chat with somebody. So what are my options? Well, but a lot of people do a lot of people do. And a lot of young people are like that is the only place I go right now. So what, you know, what all this pans out for you and I? I don't know, but I'm bummed. I'm bummed about it. I am kind of too. Yeah. I mean, there have been a couple of think pieces. I've read as of late like, well, maybe blogs are coming back, you know, take back your personality, you know, and have it at your own domain and do that. And it's like, okay, I mean, I know how to do that, but like people stopped caring about that a long time ago. Are we going back to that? Perhaps. Hard to say. Maybe. Yeah. Well, you may have heard of a somewhat mysterious GPS outage around Dallas, Texas last week. And you might have been wondering what the heck is going on here? Tom Merritt has some details on what happened and what might have caused it. On Monday, October 17th, the FAA issued an advisory that GPS was unreliable within 40 miles of Dallas, Fort Worth airport. The interference ended on Tuesday evening. Now GPS interference happens. But when it does, it's usually obvious what the cause was. Ars Technica reported that John Wiseman of GPS jam.org didn't say it looked like the typical interference that he tracks. The FAA said it found no evidence of intentional interference, but also hasn't reported that it found a cause. So I asked friend of the show Captain Brian Hoffman, who's a computer scientist and a pilot to help us understand what may be going on here. Brian, thanks for doing this. Absolutely glad to be here. All right, so let's start with what happened. Okay, sure. While flying arrivals to DFW airport pilots stated that they were unable to maintain the required positional assurance for certain arrivals. We call this the RMP. That allows us to fly closer together while we're going in and out of larger airports to maximize the airspace and get everybody in and out quickly and safely. Well, when you use the GPS, you get a much tighter signal, we get to be able to use that feature. If one aircraft says, hey, I've got a problem and I can't assure everybody else of my accuracy of my position. ATC says, okay, we're going to adjust this spacing around you. I'll probably break you out of the arrival pattern, give you vectors, get you to the airport. When you get on the ground, you're going to write up the airplane, maybe this is going to fix it. And no harm, no foul. So when 20 or 30 airplanes start saying the same thing. Now ATC has a different process that they're going to, they're going to do and it's going to be pretty simultaneous. They're going to turn off certain arrivals, but at the same time, they're going to stop everybody who's on the ground coming to Dallas from coming to Dallas because why gym up the airspace with more airplanes. Airplanes that are in flight will get slowed down or placed in holding to again give ATC opportunities to advance the space and give everybody more space. And then start the flow in to the airport again. Obviously less airplanes are going to be there. And that's exactly what happened. So let's say you're flying from Greenville, Illinois to Austin, Texas through DFW because you got to have a turn. You can't get there directly. You're most likely going to be late to DFW. You might miss your connection, but you're going to be safe. And the airspace is going to be less crowded and we're going to have the greater separation and everyone's going to be safe. And that's pretty much what happened. So that's why everybody got delayed. That makes sense. If multiple planes can't tell with as much precision where the other planes are, you need to keep them farther apart. That makes sense to me. What are the possible explanations for the GPS going out? Well, military equipment obviously can jam GPS. It's built into the process. The problem is it can happen either on purpose or by mistake or malfunction. When it happens on purpose, they tell us, hey, we're going to be testing, we're going to be playing war games way in advance and we can go around that airspace. When it happens by mistake, we go back to the same kind of problems and ATC again uses the same solutions. Now there's the, I don't want my boss to track me device. Like a jamming device. Yeah. A little jamming device, yeah. And they're not legal, but you can get them. But if you cause interference or someone notices, the good news is your boss probably won't find you, but there's some really highly motivated people who are going to find you and they're not going to be happy with you. Okay. So that's harder to hide, it sounds like. It's pretty impossible to hide. They're going to get found. You might get away with it once, you're not going to get away with it twice. All right, third is sun activity. The sun's just a big transmitter, let's be honest, right? We're coming out of a solar minimum. As it becomes more active, it can cause interference. That interference is typically local to a specific area. Think like the coverage of an eclipse. It's going to show up. It's going to go away. So we should know if that was the cause sounds like most of the time we should know in advance that that's coming. So that's always good. Now finally, as everything gets more crowded and we turn on more and more devices and more frequencies are getting jammed together. Kind of like the 5g versus rate altimeter interference is going to happen. It's an unintended consequence. So it sounds like if it was military, we would probably know if it was a jammer, we'd probably know if it was the sun, we'd probably know. So it's probably something else that we don't know. And that's why nobody said what it is yet. I'm going to place my money on somebody didn't want to be tracked by the boss. And when they found out what their device did, hopefully they got rid of it permanently. And it will never be seen again. All right. All right. Yeah. And that was they got they got away with it the one time. And then they stopped themselves from being found. Are there any chances that this was malicious? Well, clearly there's technology that exists to jam GPS is it's illegal. But if there's somebody that's nefarious that wants to bring one into our country, which is very open country here in the United States, they're probably going to be able to bring it in. But again, the highly motivated professionals have really good equipment. To catch them and they're going to catch them pretty quick and they're not going to be happy with those guys either. So yes, you can do it, but it won't be very long. Gotcha. Well, thank you, sir. If folks want to thank you for this explanation or find out anything else about where you do your things, where should they go? I'm going to say DT and then we're going to go to the next slide. If folks want to thank you for this explanation or find out anything else about where you do your things, where should they go? I'm going to say DT and a solar is going to be the next place where they're going to be able to hear me talk about anything. Amos and I are working on a next our next podcast for this for the solar roundtable stuff and it should be a lot of fun. There's there's a pretty good twist to the plot. I may or may not have gotten some sneak peeks on that. So keep your ears open, folks. It's coming and it's going to be good. Thanks again. Thank you, Tom. Also, thank you to Katman Hoffman. Joining the conversation in our Discord, if you have thoughts, you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. Scientists published a paper in the journal Original Investigations. Pediatrics called Association of Video Game with Cognitive Performance Among Children. Sadly, not middle-aged men like me. Anyway, scientists use data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development or ABCD study, which looks at brain development of thousands of U.S. children that measures cognition, memory, motor skills, similar stuff like that. While also asking kids about their behavior, one of the questions is how often and for how long you play your video games? Yeah, and this has been a question for kids for some time, is are video games making you better or worse? How much time are you spending on them? The scientists pulled data from 2,217 children aged 9 and 10, so pretty small sample size, and divided the data into two groups. Kids who reported playing more than 21 hours a week and kids who reported playing no video game during that same period of time. Data for those between 0 and 21 were not included in the study. They then took the kids' test results for attention, impulse control, and memory and used that to inform their results. The results showed that children who said that they played a lot of video games did better at remembering things, paying attention, and controlling their movements. They also showed more activity and fMRI scans for brain regions associated with attention and memory. The study also looked at mental health indicators, but didn't find a difference between the two groups. So a lot of unanswered questions here. What's important to note is that the study does not say that video games necessarily cause effects. Not necessarily good, not necessarily bad. What it does say, though, is that kids who had the better memory and such also reported playing more video games. Yeah, it's easy to associate or to do some causation here and say, well, clearly from this study we learned that if you play video games, you're going to be smarter, better memory, problem-solving scales, blah, blah, blah. That's not what this data says necessarily. Or on the other side, you won't be socialized. And there's all these bad things that happen because you're playing too many video games. And I don't think either of these are true. Those are the conclusions for sure. Or at least they're more data needed perhaps to get closer to some of those questions. But the questions and answers are pretty interesting. I've said since I've heard about this, the likelihood here is there's a combination. There's probably some kids who got a real burst out of playing games in those areas of cognition. And there are probably a group of kids who were already really proficient in those areas that gravitate toward games because games not only challenge those skills, but they're also, it's sort of adjustable. It's scale, so you can kind of come into them at whatever level you're at and feel pretty good about what you're doing in those games. So none of that stuff really got answered. That's not really what they were aiming to answer. The bigger question I have is we don't know from the study what games they're playing. They may know, but they didn't publish this as part of it. So I don't know if all of this talk back and forth with these kids is about their phone games and them playing puzzle games or whatever it is they're playing there. Or if it's Fortnite, is it Call of Duty? Is it something more cerebral and more narrative driven? We don't know. And there is so much granularity when it comes to game genre right now. It's just huge and everybody's playing them. Kids and adults alike. So I wish they would have drilled down a little more on that. I think that can be done again in further study just to kind of see is there a difference if a kid is playing nothing but first person shooters. What's different there in that group versus the group that played match three puzzle? Yeah, because a lot of people would say, well, it's a gun thing. That's not good for kids. But is it actually helping that particular child focus on things that maybe they would have had a hard time with otherwise? That it's not sort of a one and done type of thing. Yeah. And they, you know, the old days, the 80s and 90s version of this was all games are going to make our kids violent, games are making our kids dumb, they're making them lazy, whatever the answers were, or depression comes out of gaming. I mean, they also said that about television. They've said it about everything. It's just not necessarily untrue. Exactly. You can go movies, television, comic books, you can go back to the beginning of time. Some cave drawings probably drove some parents crazy. But the point of that is, is we're now finally to a point where gaming as a thing, a collective thing is bigger than it's ever been. And it's in the lives of everyone. Most people running big business or in government these days, they went to an arcade and played asteroids. That's the age we're at. And so because of that, I think this is a great time to start gathering this kind of data. We did the same thing when it came to viewing habits at home with TV and other things, like you mentioned in radio and whatever it may be. I think it's a great time to gather this information. This study has some really important points to it. I think more work can be done. And hopefully we'll talk about it here when it does. Yeah. You know, as a, you know, I would say like, I'm not really a gamer, but I mean, I play word games every day. They're very important to me. And when I do well, I feel cognitively like ready to take on the day in a way that I feel less so when I don't do well. This is true stuff and we're all different. But yeah, when it comes to impressionable younger set, you know, it's good to continue the research. Yep. Also good to continue is having Scott Johnson on the show. Scott Johnson, thank you so much for being with me today and talking about all the things. Let folks know what you do when you're not on the show talking about all the other things. Well, good news. I talked more about video games on a show I do called CORE. It happens on Thursday nights. We will likely mention this study and some of its ramifications this coming show, which will be tomorrow night. But if you'd like everything from the top level business end of it, the industry side of gaming all the way down to some weird little indie title I'm playing this week, that's what we cover. And we have a really great time doing it. I think you'll like it. Check it out over at frogpants.com. Or you can find it wherever you might find podcasts. Well, you're a busy man and we appreciate you being with us. You know, most Wednesdays. We also want to expend a special thanks to Don Banks. Don Banks, you know who you are. But for anybody else, Don Banks is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. So big ups for all the years of support. Don speaking of patrons, patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We talk about, well, gosh, I don't know. You just have to, you know, tune in and find out. You cannot catch the show, though, live. We do DTNS live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. If you're having fun, tell a friend. Join us tomorrow. We'll be back with Justin Rubber Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.