 Coming up on DTNS ZTE kills the notch Apple makes peace with third-party repair sort of but not peace with epic and Allison Sheridan tells us how cool it is to make an open source e-book this is the Daily Tech news for Monday August 17th 2020 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and from the pod feed podcast. I'm Allison Sheridan on the shows producer Roger Chang we were just talking about Insurance but also some fun stuff on good day internet get get the get the expanded Show and become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know Canada and Germany have launched separate antitrust investigations into amazon related to third-party sellers Canada is looking at how amazon policies affect pricing and availability of products off of amazon Encouraged use of amazon services like fulfillment or advertising and whether amazon favors its own competing products for sale Germany's investigation is focused on how amazon affects the prices that sellers set The u.s. Department of Commerce announced new restrictions on selling chips to Huawei Trying to close some loopholes off the shelf designs from third-party design houses based on u.s. Processes will now require a license It also expands the definition of win a license is needed to include any time Huawei acts quote as a purchaser intermediate consignee ultimate consignee or end user and they added 38 Huawei Affiliates across 21 countries to the list affected by the restrictions that brings the total of Huawei affiliates affected to 152 On Friday Instagram users started seeing a list of new messaging features Including a way to chat with users on facebook the update also added a colorful redesign swipe to reply More emoji reactions and change the dm icon to the facebook messenger logo However, actual cross-platform chat does not yet appear to be enabled North Dakota and wyoming joined virginia as us states with contact tracing apps available based on the apple google exposure Notification platform alabama is also expanding its contact tracing app to be available statewide Washington and pennsylvania are also expected to launch their apps within the next few weeks The president of the united states issued an executive order friday giving bite dance 90 days to sell or spin off tiktok in the us A previous order would have blocked all transactions with bite dance by us companies if tiktok had not been sold by september 20th The new date is november 12th and not my wedding anniversary. So that's nice It also includes a requirement to destroy all us user data after a sale google wrote an open letter arguing against proposed rules from australia's competition and consumer commission Those proposed rules would require google and facebook to negotiate payments for carrying news stories in all search results public comment on the proposed rules ends august 28th In an interview discussing gig workers just eat takeaway ceo jitsi grain said quote It's our intent not to have those in europe Grain further said that the company may use freelance workers in other countries if it could pay for workers insurance Just eat takeaway is currently evaluating how to classify workers in canada with plans to look at the us later on Just eat takeaway announced in june. It intends to buy grub hub Oh grab your popcorn fans epic Shared a letter from apple that tells epic games to cure its breaches of the developer agreement Or apple will terminate epics membership in the apple developer program on august 28th Termination would stop epic from being able to distribute ios or mac apps In fact on mac you have to be notarized to run on current os's it would stop that Epic says it asked the court to block the move. It's unknown what effect this would have on epic's unreal engine Which is used to power thousands of games including many games in apple arcade microsoft announced to will end support for internet internet explorer 11 across its microsoft 365 apps and services august 17th 2021 so you have a year folks ie 11 support for microsoft teams will go away sooner on november 30th Sites built for ie can still be accessed in the ie legacy mode built into edge Speaking of edge the old non chromium version of edge will lose support march 9th They're actually getting a simple world on windows. Yay. All right Let's talk a little more about in display cameras zte announced that its upcoming axon 20 5g phone will have an under display selfie camera meaning No notch. No punch hole. No bevel nothing. Uh, no pop-up Oppo a different company has shown a prototype of an under screen camera before That one had a little bit of haze in it at least to people with keener eyes than me This however would be the first mass produced phone to have an under display camera zte did not release any more specs about the axon 25g They just wanted to make a note about that the phone launches september 1st You know, I've said for a long time and this is probably just because I've never had it any other way The notches just don't bother me. I don't feel like gosh. Look at all that screen real estate That's just being taken up by this stupid little black thing on the top of my iphone The pop-up I that would not appeal to me. That's just it's like a you know me sitting on it It's an accident waiting to happen And then you know, there's the punch hole type thing I mean everyone's kind of trying to get around the fact that we want a full Uh 100 of the front screen available, you know, the fingerprint reader now that's in the screen So you don't have to add anything to the the rest of the phone that makes it bulkier or takes away from the visuals The camera, you know in in theory. I'm like that's impossible right because the camera would have to be Going through whatever is on the screen Because you're going to have things on the screen from time to time but I guess if The phone and you know the sensor and everything involved is smart enough to say, okay everything that we're seeing You kind of flip it and take it out and you get a clear picture that way I mean, that's awesome. It seems impossible to me But I I can't imagine that we would be going in any other direction at this point So one thing about that sarah you make a really good point is That what what I think you're going to end up seeing I'm going to predict right here Is that the images from this will be at the very least slightly darker than you would get if it didn't have to Also provide transmission of the of the imagery on the glass Because you you pretty much can't have both think about like a one-way mirror You know how it's you can see through it, but it's kind of darker I think you're going to get an effect like that just by the nature of you know the physics of optics And then it comes down to how good the algorithm is at re-brightening it, right? None of these images are ever left Alone they'll they'll try to make it look back to natural and we'll see how good that that works It is the selfie cam, right? It's not the front. It's the front facing cam. Those are always a little less High resolution than then the camera on the back of a phone So I think that's why they're thinking they could probably get away with it And they may have cracked the algorithm. Who knows I can't wait to see it Well, and when it comes to selfie cams, I mean everybody we we've all got our own little tricks But it tends to be the camera that is of you You know or you and a friend that's next to you or that sort of thing So to be able to kind of like add a little of the right hgr And maybe a little smoothing on that selfie cam It might end up that people are like zte has the best selfie cam ever and it's invisible. Yeah. Yeah Well notch haters rejoice Here's your phone You win The messenger app telegram added an alpha version of video calls to android and ios in the us As with messaging and audio video calls now can be end to end encrypted call participants can confirm A call is encrypted by comparing four emojis shown on the screen and the feature also includes picture in picture Now Allison, I know you you actually wrote a blog post about how much you like telegram So so so how does this new encryption feature make it all the more sweeter for you? Well being able to do video inside the app that is end to end encrypted is is definitely cool And I am a card carrying apple fangirl. You know, I've got it a tattooed on my shirt But I still just can't stand Messages, you know the blue green bubble wars. I just I just want everybody to be able to play on the same field Playing field, you know and and the way messages get Get tangled the threads get all messed up. You can't edit what you've done That's kind of the stuff I wrote about adding this video In in the app being able to do video chat along with audio chat. That's all encrypted. That's awesome. I love it Yeah, it's I mean telegram is extremely popular in large swaths of the world, uh, especially your eastern europe And and turkey and places like that. I know it has a huge user numbers it is One of the more secure Messaging systems out there when you hear it criticized for being insecure It's usually because telegram was often marketing itself as comparable to signal which signal is By all accounts the best encryption you can get in messaging and telegram doesn't quite measure up to that But when you compare it to whatsapp telegram is perfectly secure And certainly when you compare it to messenger or like you say the messages app built into android or ios It's crazy more secure than that. So not having video calling. I think it was an essential feature for telegram Yeah, yeah, and they've they've open sourced their encryption algorithm They did roll their own and that's what security Specialists get annoyed at them for but they did open source it so you can look at it and see if you think they're doing it right All right, uh, let's talk about something happening in the schools Well axios is uh Dan pre-mech reports that american students are facing a laptop shortage particularly among low cost crumb books Commonly used in k-3 8 schools sales of crumb books began to surge as covid 19 lockdowns began in march with analysts at mpd group consistently seeing weekly sales Up 20 to 40 on the year Even as analysts at gardener saw pc shipments increasing much slower at 0.8 percent in q1 and 3.5 percent in q2 Acer america president greg prender gas says that there are they are not even close to enough crumb books to meet the demand as schools Reopen part of the issue is the overall shortage of components for laptops further disrupting laptop manufacturing capability Yeah, uh, this is a tough one because uh, you had a spike in demand beyond what was expected So even if everything else in the world was working perfectly they would have had trouble meeting demand because we suddenly saw More demand than logistics experts would have been expecting But of course the reason for the spike in demand was the same reason that manufacturing Experienced some interruptions And so that caused a shortage in both fully assembled crumb books as well as the parts So this this is a problem. I don't know if it's The thing that is you know, there's so many problems with with schooling right now because of Worries about transmission of the virus and mixing remote learning with in-person learning safely and and all of that in fact Justin robber young's politics politics politics program did a great Special on those issues if you're interested in that go listen to it He talked to some folks about the brookings institution over saying. Yeah, you know Tech is a problem, but there are even bigger problems like just having Parents home if they have if both parents have to work to be able to help kids with distance learning I didn't see any estimates of how fast Manufacturing might be able to catch up And I'm curious how long this this shortage might last because it may be something that where schools can sort of get by with the equipment They have temporarily The problem is they've been using this equipment so much because of distance learning that The chrome books they have are starting to wear out faster too, which means higher replacements I mean, I'll say this for for my child Who's going to be attending kindergarten two days up the block? This the the school district basically had you fill out a form if you needed Equipment if you needed like a wi-fi router and you needed a chromebook but most of the stuff is Applications that can be installed on my wife's six-year-old mac book pro And would also work on my you know all the stuff I have so I think for for parents who already have Equipment that's maybe within the past five to six years They're pretty much covered on being able to interact and do all the stuff all the lesson planning stuff That the school has in chart has in mind but For for you know areas where access to technology is going to be a little tighter I'm wondering if they're going to have to either You know Buying more or maybe just ask for donations from the community. Yeah, the the the situation is so interesting it Presents such logistical challenges because you know, I remember Not even I don't even remember going to a school district where it was like known that we didn't have enough budget Although I'm sure teachers would disagree with me But you know, sometimes you double up with books, right? There are too many kids in the class and we don't all have our own book And so you do that sort of thing. Well, okay Let's say Roger's daughter has a chromebook and the kid down the street doesn't have a chromebook And and there's like no way that they can participate without this particular piece of technology Well, you can't just go over to the friend's house and share the chromebook Doesn't work that way at least not right now or not without a lot of pre-planning and and you know And everybody feeling safe about you know, there's some sort of an educational bubble. So yeah kind of a mess All right, here's another school related mess But it's for university students or at least people headed to university the uk has decided not To issue exam results graded by algorithm for students in england, wales and northern ireland After accusations that the algorithm was biased against students with poorer backgrounds Scotland already had made this same decision earlier the exams If you're not familiar and known as a levels and are instrumental in acceptance to university Formal exams were canceled because of the lockdown. So this is where the problem came Usually a student might get provisional acceptance based on their a levels By looking at what their ranking was or what the teachers estimate they would get on their a levels And then they just have to take the the test, you know to fulfill it But they didn't get to take the test because of the lockdown So the uk's office of qualifications and examinations regulation or of qual used student rankings and The historical performance of students from an individual school to estimate a level performance Well, guess what poorer schools have historically poorer performance But that doesn't mean that all the students in a poorer school perform poorly So there were problems the overall curve of what they determined did fit normal expectations because algorithms are good at big data sets But thousands of students received grades that were lower than teachers estimates 35.6 percent were lower than teachers estimates by one full grade So you can say well a few of them might have not just not done as well on the a level had they taken up But that's quite a lot more than you would expect and 3.3 percent were down by two full grades Which seems unlikely fee paying independent schools what we in the u.s. Would call private schools saw their grades rise faster than state funded schools as well because again that historical data was causing a problem Yeah, that doesn't sound good. Yeah, it's it's Like you said tom if it was you know a few sort of like this data doesn't quite fit 35 percent being lower by a full grade when You know it might be the difference between getting into a really important university for what you Like to study in order to get a job later on in life huge deal two grades That's insane But then of course if you've got a bunch of public school kids saying oh cool. All right. Well now we're In a pickle, but some of these independent schools that are expensive that only certain people can go to Are seeing a bump in the grades from this algorithm. Of course people are going to be mad about that They're gonna be mad about everything, right? Well, and it's not like the uh the teacher Estimates aren't also capable of bias. They certainly are it's just that everyone was used to using those As the way to provisionally get accepted. So I even though it's probably biased as well I think people are like, yeah, but that's a bias i'm familiar with Well, this might be good news On this monday apple expanded its program to provide parts and training to independent repair shops for non warranty repairs to include max Previously you might recall that apple only authorized shops to repair iphone's or repairs that were covered by warranty Third-party shops must be admitted to apple's independent repair provider program to be eligible to buy parts and also receive free training materials Yeah, I am so excited about this I happen to have the complete and utter luxury of having not one two three but four apple stores within easy driving distance of my house And when I needed warranty work on a on a brand new macbook pro, I could not get an appointment It's not that I couldn't get one soon. It was the appointment time was listed as never And so I just I had no choices at all And it's like, well, why do you even bother to have that as as an option if I can't ever get an appointment? So to be able to go to authorized shops and there's a ton of authorized shops around me would be really nice for warranty level work I've even I even had apple when this happened to me I called him and I was like, well, what am I supposed to do if I can't get an appointment And they said, oh, well here's a certified place you can go to and I went to them and they said No, we can't help you apple actually sent me to a place that couldn't help me So to be able to have this for for max is really good I do have to say being in the aftertimes not the before times now my husband Steve Had a problem with his macbook pro and he sent it in for repair and it was not gone from our house for 48 hours It was unbelievable. We got he got emails like every three hours. Okay. It's a ups It's here. It's being shipped. It's been they've opened it up. They've figured out what's wrong They've replaced the party. He just got mails all the way along. It was like 36 hours. It was crazy good I don't know if that's Demons or you know, all of them are gonna be like that, but it was great Right, right. Your mileage may vary but but yeah, at least at least it worked And if you're out there saying well, wait a minute. I took my apple Product to a third party. I took a mac to a third party to be repaired In warranty repairs were authorized previously. This is the change here is now Non warranty repairs can be done by third parties, which means the third parties They could make those repairs before but they weren't supported in any way by apple now. They'll get parts. They'll get training They'll they'll be able to have better access to the information they need and I can't imagine that you know The pushes for right to repair laws Didn't you know, maybe coax apple along this path. They'd already done it for iPhones Of course, they were going to do it for max, but uh, certainly didn't hurt Put it that way. I couldn't even get it on the warranty once I know that's really bad. I love that. Bring your bring your product in never Uh, folks, if you want to get all these tech headlines each day in about five minutes on those days when you don't have enough time To listen to the full 30 minute dTns get daily tech headlines. We deliver it five minutes each Subscribe at dailytech headlines.com Allison hosts many excellent podcasts and one of them is called taming the terminal a delightful journey Where bart buchats teaches allison how to use the command line Bart has created a set of comprehensive show notes to go along with that series So allison you wanted for a long time to take those show notes and make them into a book Which you have now done congratulations. That's super awesome What finally got you going on this project after wanting to do it for so long Well, when I first looked at it So part has these terrific show notes and like you said, I'm just the stooge in the audio I don't do any of the heavy lifting of writing the show notes But he's got these in a blog format and I tried doing it like using iBooks author and some other tools and it was just a nightmare It wouldn't work and I tried to get good friend of dTns Shelly brisman to help me and she said no it's it's it's hell on earth I'm not going to do it for anybody and I said, okay, teach me. She said no It's too hard to do that So I just kind of had it on the back burner for a while But a wonderful listener of the show a woman named helma van der linden It has a phd in I forget what but she's a really really smart person. She was able to write Code and take open source tools to turn this website Into an e-book and it's not just an e-book in one format. It's in all the format So she has a nightly build that creates a pdf in a for it does a pdf in a late and half by 11 It does an a mobi that you can email to yourself on your kindle book It does an apple books version with an embedded hdml player Which apple will not allow in the bookstore and an apple books version that goes into the apple bookstore that doesn't have the player So she the the the really luscious thing about this was bark created all of this content under a creative commons license I created the podcast under a creative commons license. So we open sourced what we were doing She was able to take like 12 different open source tools open source programming languages open source libraries Using we used git to write the book So so I do all of the editing of the book and and writing all of the the pieces of it and automating It was all done with open source tools And then we were able to give it as a gift to bar Where we put it into his git repository at bar to fissure dot net So it's just like this circle of happiness If you want the full details on this they're they're fascinating and allison has them uh over at pod feet dot com We'll have links to to post about that here But I think one of the most fascinating part of this is the open source community Making this possible in a way that proprietary didn't Yeah, yeah, so when when I went around, you know, putting it into different places I went to put it in the kindle store. You'll notice. I said you can email yourself the mobi That's because uh amazon would not let me put it up for free I have to put it up for a minimum of a dollar and it's kind of like well It's worth way more than a dollar So i'm not going to put it for a dollar We're actually looking at is there some way I could put it up for maybe five bucks and the revenue We give it all to archive.org which is where all the audio files are Try to do some sort of transfer like that But it was kind of kind of funny especially in these days and times that i'm not allowed to give something away for free on amazon Yeah, and you would think that there would just be a tool out there that's like, oh Upload your your text and we'll convert it into all the book formats you want But but there was no service what there was was a sequence of of open source tools that you definitely You know needed someone to go and navigate if you read through Her experiences dr. Vendor linden's experiences You know, it didn't didn't work the first time out But because it was an open source situation It wasn't costly to switch to a different thing or to you know Once she had converted it down to mark down to say like well now I think I wanted to convert it in this other thing Because everything was free and there were people willing to help In fact, didn't she even get a bug named after her or dedicated to her or something? Yeah Yeah, so she ended up figuring out there's a a Tool called ascii doctor which came from the original ascii doc which predates markdown And ascii doctor is a lot like markdown, but it allows you to write a book It's made for making a book and she got into it. She got to know the developer We she brought the developer into our private secret from bart get repository and he was helping with it so the the people who were contributing and now we're in the process of uploading a A new chapter to the book right now. We just recorded a new one yesterday And a guy just submitted fixes typos that he found in the latest version So there's just people helping each other and and they've They've come out with updates to ascii doctor that solved a couple of problems that we had and it's just been It's been really joyful to be able to do all this not just for for free as you say But to be able to have people helping people and it all based on a product That in and it's of itself is an open source project Yeah, the the free I think is most important in in making you feel like you didn't waste your time like Oh, no, I sunk all this time and now now I have to pay for something else, right? It's like well, I tried that let me it's it's it's easy to try something else But I love that idea that in the course of making this and granted this isn't for everybody This isn't the the one-click solution that you would recommend to the novice You you have to want to do this the way dr. Vanderlinden did But the payoff is not only was she able to make your Dream come true so to speak, but she actually improved ascii doctor In in in the course of doing it too is you know, so it kind of pays it forward Yeah, yeah, that was fantastic. I do want to mention Tom said we have a link to the blog post But it there is an audio recording about an hour of her explaining the process she went through and it's If nothing else you will walk away realizing that she's a freaking genius Amazing so the fact that my name is on the title of the book And she did all the heavy lifting of that bartered all the heavy lifting of the of the text I took you know second billing on it But my name should be in a real little font because I just did the podcast part You're the you're the steve jobs I'm the visionary to her wasniac. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She does all the work. I'll take the credit she and Bart And then of course, I you know if people don't know the whole point of this was to make a wonderful surprise for Bart I mean at the point was I guess to make it easy for people to read it as well But but you were able to to put a smile on his face. It sounded like Oh, yeah. Yeah, and Bart has been on dtns. So see it's another big circle of uh, of happiness here. Exactly Well another circle of happiness. Oh go ahead, tom No, I was just gonna say if you want to check out the book pod feet.com slash ttt book, but we'll mention it again Uh, we'll also mention discord. Yes We're not gonna forget you discord because we love you so much If you want to join the conversation that's going on in our discord 24 7 You can join by linking your patreon account patreon.com slash dtns Oh, look at that. It's a mail bag. Oh my gosh. There is a mail bag And it comes from john John points out that creators and viewers on youtube May be wondering why they're not getting email Email notifications about new videos that are getting posted by people that they subscribe to john says I was wondering why dtns hadn't posted for a couple days. Then I came across this This is from youtube support quote If you're opted in to get emails about new uploads live streams and premieres from channels You're subscribed to these emails are going away on august 13th You'll still get notified on mobile via the youtube app or on desktop via your chrome browser If you've turned these notifications on if you haven't turned them on yet You can do so in notification settings now john says he suspects that many channels may see a large fall in views However, youtube says they did this because less than 0.1 percent of these emails were even opened And that the company was getting feedback from users that they were just annoying I turned on these email alerts and now i'm getting them. I'm annoyed I wonder how many people saw the email and went oh, okay. I can go look at it now Like why do you need to open it? To click. Yeah, but you're right If you already have youtube open and you know or or it's easy enough to get to you You may just see the email and not go to it. Uh, I don't know It's it's probably not going to to affect traffic Precipitously, but if you are someone who was listening to this because you had to find it otherwise and wondered why you weren't getting your youtube alert Well, now you know Also came in right before the show because that epic news with apple With apple threatening to cut them off from the developer program also came in right before the show Dennis in rainy capedown Wanted to point to a keynote from tim sweeney at dice 2020 that kind of presaged all of this He says that the heart of his strategy is the two mobile platforms themselves in his view They are general purpose computing platforms and that the restrictions being applied is limiting and arbitrary and it should be challenged He has challenged microsoft on that very point and got microsoft to adapt its policies to his satisfaction So as tinnis says buckle up It's a long road ahead at the heart of the matter is the business model of google and apple on their respective mobile platforms So we will be following as the battle continues. Yes, we will We will also be shouting out patrons at our master and grand master levels as we do on every show today john and becky johnston Justin zealors And someone who would like to be referred to as you know who and i'm we we do know who you are But we're not going to say because we're respecting your privacy, but you know who but also because you know who Yeah, well, you know who you are and we know who you are and everybody else can just take a wild gas I suppose Hey, thanks to allison shared and for being on the show today and bringing the knowledge as usual allison What have you been up to and how can people follow your work? Well, the best place to go is pod feet dot com unless you just want to go straight to the book Then it's pod feet dot com slash ttt book Taming the terminal ttt book Hey, thanks everybody for supporting the show We have lots of extras on our patreon And if you're not already in there you might want to check them out You get bonus shows that look at old rundowns from five years ago and kind of compare them to what we know now Some great finds in there I do a weekly editors desk column where I talk about the creation of the show and the thought that goes into it Roger does column every week sarah does live with it. It's all there patreon.com slash dtns If you have burnin questions or feedback or anything in between our email address to send that feedback to is feedback At daily tech news show dot com. We're also live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc Put it on your calendar and find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with lemar wilson talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you've enjoyed this program