 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Dr. X-17, Dustin Campbell, and Tim Deputy. Coming up on DTNS, Apple gets a 10-year contract for all Major League soccer matches, Adobe makes Photoshop free on the web, and Meta now offers a setting to garble the voices of strangers in Horizon Worlds. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 14, 2022, Flag Day. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. It's Judy Whitford. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, technology contributor to ABC News author and host of the tech, John Stephanie Upray. Hey there. Is today really Flag Day? It is. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Happy Flag Day. Whatever flag you fly. Imagine if Tom was like, no, it's not. I'm just kidding. No, Flag Day is when Mike Claybourne, the longtime St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster says, start paying attention to the standings. Don't pay attention to baseball standings before Flag Day. Wow. He uses Flag Day as a metric. That's his, yeah. That's his metric. So be like Mike Claybourne, I guess. Quick fun fact. Yeah. I live in a community right outside of Philadelphia called Yaden, Pennsylvania. And the creator of Arbor Day is from here. Really? Oh. I couldn't tell you his name, but we have a whole big citywide celebration every year for it. And yeah, yeah. I'm glad to see that Arbor Day gets some love out there. That's right. Yeah. All right. Let's start off with a few tech things you should know. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company will lay off nearly 1,100 people, which is about 18% of its workforce. Coinbase quadrupled in size over the last 18 months. Laid off employees will lose access to company services and email immediately, but get a minimum of 14 weeks of severance pay with an additional two weeks for every year of employment. This might sound familiar to you because Coinbase is not the only company laying off people. Redfin and Compass also announced today layoffs of about 920 people collectively today citing surging mortgage interest rates. WhatsApp is adding a feature in beta that lets users move chat histories, contacts, and your other WhatsApp data from Android to iOS. No more losing your history if you switch phones. It'll be a part of Apple's move to iOS tool. Data will be moved and encrypted and then made available when you authenticate in WhatsApp on the new iPhone. You'll also get the option to back up WhatsApp data to iCloud if you want. Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer on June 15th for most remaining versions of Windows that supported it. i.e. on the desktop will be disabled and replaced with Microsoft Edge. However, Windows 7 extended support, Windows 8.1 and all versions of Windows 10 long-term service client IoT and server will continue to make Internet Explorer available for the time being. i.e. 11 will continue to get security patches for those platforms as well. So it's not dead yet. It's mostly dead. It's mostly dead, exactly. Very company called Our Next Energy or ONE, ONE, announced a partnership with BMW to bring its Gemini Dual Chemistry Battery Pack to a prototype BMW IX EV by the end of the year. One's battery will use two types of cells and is experimenting with different electrode chemistries to reduce the use of cobalt, nickel, graphite, and lithium. It may offer three different sizes, including a low-end version at the same cost as current nickel and cobalt-based batteries. But here's the clincher if it works. ONE thinks its battery can almost double the IX's range from 324 miles to more than 600. Mozilla will make its total cookie protection feature on by default for desktop Firefox browser users. The feature keeps cookies isolated to the side on which they were created to prevent tracking and the feature launched in 2021, but users had to turn it on at the time. Now, on by default. All right. Let's talk a little more about what's going on at Adobe. Yeah, cool stuff. Adobe made some some announcements. Photoshop is getting a neural filter that can clean up old photos or photos that, I don't know, just need a little need a little help, removing scratches, restoring color, that sort of thing. Adobe Lightroom, which can adjust images will get the ability to handle video for the first time. You can call a grade footage and trim down the beginning and end on Lightroom if you use it. Yeah. So the Lightroom thing is available in one version of Lightroom, but it's even more simplistic than this. So that's kind of nice. If you're a photographer who has a video clip, it's really not going to be useful for long versions of video, but that neural filter, that's cool for, you know, taking old photos that you, Roger was telling us before the show, like you could do all of that stuff in Photoshop, but what's cool about this is it's one button. You can just click it. Yeah. I use Photoshop pretty regularly. I, you know, that have certain things that I have to use it for, but I'm not great at it. You know, I kind of, you know, I have my little tricks, but I probably use Photoshop, like 15% of, you know, what it is capable of. Something like this is one of the things that I want to use it for at the absolute most. So I can see a lot of people being happy about this. Yeah, that's a super cool feature. The Lightroom thing, I thought that was like super niche. I was like, what? Anybody really need to do this? Like for real ever? I don't, I don't know why. Like with, with all the other tools available to do that kind of thing. Like, you know, why are we adding that feature to Lightroom? I don't know. I'm going to give it a go. You're a photographer who does a lot of TikTok. Could be. Yeah, it's, which doesn't disprove the fact that that's very niche, even if that were it. We got another big one here. Adobe is testing a free web based version of Photoshop in Canada, with intentions to open it up to everybody. But right now, Canadians get it. Adobe says the service is intended to be a freemium service at some point, but the core features will always be available for free to try out. More sophisticated features will eventually go behind the paywall. Adobe launched the web version of Photoshop back in October, but it's only been for subscribers up till now. It offers basic edit tools. It offers layers. They've been adding more features to it as they go. But Adobe is pitching it as being more than just a collaboration tool. When they first launched it, they said, this is for making small tweaks and annotations. If you're sharing photos with each other, but it looks like they're now saying, we want it to be an entry way. We want, we want people to, to try Photoshop for free on the web. You could use it on a Chromebook, for instance, and then want to use it more and maybe eventually become a paying customer. Yeah. I mean, as somebody, I paid $10 a month for Photoshop on Creative Cloud, and I feel that it's worth it because it's a very robust tool, even though I'm not that great at Photoshop. This is, you know, my, my first reaction was like, ah, why does Canada get, Canada get everything first? My second was like, okay, well, what, what exactly does Photoshop offer that I'm not using right now that is free, fully free, where I would say, okay, let me pay for this, you know, because I, I like it so much and I'm using, you know, certain tools that they're, they're going to keep me back from on the free version. And see, I just, you know, I have such a disdain for the entire freemium model. I mean, I know, you know, this is capitalism, but it always feels like bait and switch to me, where you're getting people invested in using this particular tool under the auspices of it being free. And then, you know, flipping that switch when, when they need it the most. And, and I think people that can pay for software kind of already do for the most part. And, and you would just be, I think hamstringing, hamstringing some people that actually could benefit from a truly free version of, of the software. Yeah, it depends on how they do it, right? And I guess that's part of the Canadian test is, is for us as consumers to be able to, to see that too. So Canadians, let us know. I think if it works like a free trial where it's like, this is how it works. If you like it and you suddenly are like, oh, I want to get more advanced than paying for it's, that seems fair to me. Like it's, it's free to, free to use basically, but if you're becoming an advanced user then, you know, go ahead and kick us a few bucks. If it's more like you're talking about Stephanie where it's like, oh, you could use it for, you know, for a couple of things, but you won't be able to finish them because you're missing an essential thing. Then yeah, that's, that's not cool. I don't like that either. And as much as, you know, that whole sweet cost as, as is, it's just like, dude, you like, what are you doing here? How much is this even gonna cost? Like, why even bother? Just let this be the one altruistic thing you do, Adobe, seriously. Well, in entertainment news, if you like soccer, Apple and Major League Soccer or MLS announced a 10 year broadcasting deal that makes the Apple TV app the home of all MLS matches. MLS commissioner, Don Garber said Tuesday that the league has the youngest, the most diverse, the most digitally native fans anywhere in the world. Some matches will be freely available to anybody with the Apple TV app, while the rest, including the MLS and leagues cup will be part of Apple TV plus, which is $4.99 per month. Yeah, there's some interesting things about this. It's a global deal. So they're getting the rights worldwide, which is different than how sports leagues typically sell broadcast or streaming rights. They usually go country by country, region by region. MLS will also be allowed. And in fact, Apple isn't being encouraged according to Eddie Q. Apple's encouraged this. MLS will strike deals to simulcast matches on linear TV. My guess is they'll probably do this in local markets to say, oh, your local regional sports network, or maybe your local broadcast channel will be able to show a match even if it is on Apple TV. So there won't be blackouts on this. Again, first select matches. Apple's Eddie Q also said the deal is a huge opportunity for both of us because it's a partnership. It's not a rights deal. I don't know. It sounds like a rights deal to me. It sounds exactly like a rights deal. Exactly, right? I'm like, what's the definition of a rights deal? This is interesting. When I read this, the first thing I thought about was that that whole thing that Saudi Arabia was doing with some of the professional golfers here in the United States that had to leave the PGA to play in that live tournament. I don't know if it's live or LIV or those are Roman numerals. But it kind of reminded me of that and the idea that these major sports organizations are kind of up to the highest bidder, basically at this point. And I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but it just, I don't know, it just made me question a little bit the motivations from the MLS. I know why Apple would want this to happen, but it's like now people won't be able to see some of the matches, and it kind of ruins that experience for those folks. Well, but why won't they be able to see the matches? Well, the ones that get behind the Apple TV Plus. Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah. Yeah, like they'll be limited in some way. There will be a lot of free ones, but not all of them will be free. Some of them will be $5 a month. Unlike how sports viewing has gone up until this day. I was gonna say, I don't think that's that much. I don't know that that's that much different than what we get now, where you have to pay a cable subscription that sometimes is a lot more in order to get just a limited number. This is, you're paying $5 a month for Apple TV Plus, which gives you all of Apple TV Plus and gives you access to the MLS stuff. And they're not blacking out local broadcasts, so it's possible you might get some local broadcasts available without even having to have Apple TV. I mean, I get what you're saying, Stephanie, but I feel like compared to where we are now, it's still probably an improvement. Maybe I wonder about how this plays out everywhere else around the world where soccer is way more popular. And what type of access do Europeans and everybody else have to the games in general and will they be impacted? I don't know. It's $5 a month wherever you live in the world. If you can get Apple TV, you can get it. No, I mean, what's their status now? Like how much access do they have to the games now? This is our league, the US league. They probably have to pay a lot. They probably have to pay some specialty providers. So I think this would bring it down if they're even interested because they have better soccer over there anyway. Yeah, a friend of mine who is much more into soccer than me, I asked him about this this morning and he was like, this is amazing. But this is also something that he doesn't have to discover because he already has an Apple TV. He's familiar with Apple TV plus. If you care about a sport enough to figure it out, you're gonna figure it out. You're gonna figure it out, yeah. But it's kind of similar to what the NFL did with Prime. Yeah, where they did the Thursday night games on Amazon Prime Video. And now that's the only way you can get them is Amazon Prime Video. Yeah, I think one of the objections I'll expect to hear people say is like, well, I don't have an Apple device. And it's worth pointing out, if you don't already know this, that the Apple TV app is available on the web. It's on Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio, Panasonic, Hisense, PlayStation, Xbox. It's even available on cable boxes from Xfinity and Sky and Free and BTV. So it's available if you wanna install it and you've got one of those devices. All right, US Food and Drug Administration has cleared a company called Rune Labs to offer software called Strive PD. This tracks the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So it uses Apple's Movement Disorder API and an Apple Watch with the Apple Watch sensors to track things like tremors, which is one of the main symptoms of Parkinson's. And it also lets patients add symptom reports and medication usage on their own. Strive PD is meant to let clinicians track a patient's progress and monitor changes. So this is through your doctor. This is not like an app you download and pay a subscription for. It provides a better look than patient recall and can be used to fine tune medications. It will also help enroll patients in clinical trials to develop new treatments and bring those to the market more quickly. Rune Labs is not the only company working on this sort of thing with the Apple Watch. The Verge notes a company called Cerebellia is also developing an app related to Parkinson's as well. But what parked my ears about this is it's a service going to the doctors that treat this to help them rather than a service trying to get you to pay $5 a month to maybe come up with useful data that then they'll leak out on the internet anyway. So they're not doing that last thing is what I'm pointing out. I think this is good. I think this is significant. That's interesting. Now this is super cool. I was just thinking that I hope there is a way or someone could figure out a way to get Apple Watches into the hands of folks in low income communities that have Parkinson's. Cause I mean, this is wonderful. And there's already an app. I believe there's already an app that does this for on the smartphone. But if there was some way to do some sort of partnership to get more Apple Watches into more hands so that they could take advantage of the software, that'd be great. Especially as these kinds of devices get used for more of these kinds of things and not even just the Apple Watch. You can work for Fitbits and other devices from Samsung and others too, to be able to say, hey, this is going to be able to help health in general. Let's make it available. Let's figure out how to get it into people's hands like you're saying, I think that's great. Yeah, sometimes it kind of becomes a conversation of like, well, yeah, everybody with Parkinson's disease would love to have an Apple Watch, but how many actually have them? So yeah, I have another friend story, friend of mine's mother has Parkinson's and I sent her this article this morning and I said, did you want to know about this? And she goes, oh yeah, yeah, she's on the list. So I think this is somewhat slow going because the Food and Drug Administration saying, okay, we're good with Strive, but Strive has to then say, okay, we're good with you patient because you have all the symptoms that are necessary for this to work. There's some moving parts here. Yeah, that's a really good point. The news here is the FDA approval. That doesn't mean magically it appears on everybody, yeah. Right, yeah. Well, folks, if you're feeling social, get in touch with us. The DTNS audience is available or we are available to the DTNS audience, I should say, on DTNS Show on Twitter and DTNSpix, P-I-X on Instagram. Well, Meta is introducing some new features for its VR products. VR enthusiasts, listen up. VR safety tools announced in March are now rolling out to the Oculus app. At Dashboard, let's parents and guardians see a teens list of friends, list of apps, blocked apps on the account. Parents can also see headset time and get alerts when apps are purchased. So more or less just making sure that they know what the teens are doing on VR. Teens can also request permission to buy age-restricted apps. So before we get to the other aspect here, which is that Horizon Worlds thing I teased at the top of the show, this feels unremarkable. Is there anything of no tier? Stephanie, I know you follow this space pretty closely. It just feels like kind of minimum expected stuff for parental controls. It is the bare minimum, unfortunately. But when you hadn't done the bare minimum, stepping up to that, I guess feels like progress to folks. It's better than nothing. It's funny, the part about the parental controls have to be initiated through the teens account, I think is still lagging behind what most of the other platforms do with the exception of Instagram. They were mentioned in this article as well. They just flipped it so that the parents can actually send a teen a request and say, hey, you have to, you know, you got to let me get access to your phone to get these parental controls in place. So we'll see if they do something similar to that for the Oculus. But yeah, I don't know why Meta wants to take these baby steps as it relates to how parents can parent their kids and their devices. All right, let's talk about the other, oh, go ahead, Sarah, sorry. Well, I was just gonna say, it's probably because Oculus has become so popular, especially with young people, that the company was like, huh, we didn't really think about that. We never did. We should probably make sure that teens are a little bit safer than they have been in the past. They never do. All right, Meta's Horizon Worlds VR chat app is launching in the UK, adding that to Canada and the US, and getting new options for voice chat. Right now, voice chat is on by default. That's not changing. You might be like, oh yeah, they need to turn that off. No, it's still on by default when you enter Horizon Worlds, but you're getting a new setting called voice mode over the next few weeks that will let you disable that so you can say, I don't wanna hear anybody talking to me, unless they're my friend that I've approved, I don't wanna hear them. Or even, I think more interesting, you'll have an option called garble voices from strangers. Garble voices lets you know a person is talking by playing what Meta describes as unintelligible friendly sounds. We can all do our version of that later. And then if you wanna hear what that person is saying, you can raise a hand to your avatar's ear to temporarily hear them without having to add them as a friend and then decide if you wanna have a conversation I get. When garble mode is on, an icon will appear above your avatar of an ear crossed out to indicate that you're unable to hear people. I assume that happens if you've disabled it altogether as well. But I don't know, garble, garble, garble, garble, garble, garble, garble, garble. Well, here's what, and Stephanie, I don't know how much VR you're doing on a daily basis, I play a lot of VR exercise games. I'm not in Horizon Worlds, but I know what it is. And I know it's a way for people to meet friends all over the world, just like any other place on the internet, right? It's just a VR version of that. The unintelligible friendly sounds from somebody who might not actually be friendly towards me, it's kind of, it's an interesting choice. It is, it is. I'm like, what is that even? Like I just, you know, the idea of it, and even the idea that you would raise your hand to speak, I feel like, you know, the realist in me, Tom, I'm already thinking through ways to abuse this feature because, you know, you could have two people sort of tag-teaming someone, you know, you raise the hand to listen to one, thinking that they're gonna say something, you know, normal when this other person now, you know, starts shouting and yelling and screaming at you. That was the thing. I was like, you know, you should be able to do that individually. If you're gonna be able to do it at all, you should be able to do it individually with the people that you're not friends with. Like it seems like if you have the garble on, everybody you're not friends with is garbled. So I think you should be able to kind of toggle that on without having to raise the hand, just because there may be someone you wanna speak to, but there may be somebody you don't wanna speak to in the same room at the same time and you're gonna, you know, I could just see that going left very, very quickly. Yeah, I agree with you. There should be an unmute setting for individuals in a particular chat room that you're like, I don't wanna go so far as to put them on my friends list permanently and every time I run into them, but I've raised my hand. I found out that, you know, they're not crazy and they're saying interesting things, but I don't have to keep my hand up to listen to them either. So yeah, it would be nice if there was a middle ground. It's an interesting way to solve a problem of, because I assume if you turn it off entirely, it's like you just don't know they're talking, right? You wouldn't have any indication. So this is a way to let you know, like, hey, people are saying something to you. You can decide if you wanna take the risk of listening or not. And that seems like it would be distracting too. Go ahead. You're just hearing garbled. But it's friendly. Garbled, garbled, garbled, there you go. I mean, a lot of this when I, you know, at first I was like, what are they doing? And then I was like, you know, this isn't unlike what social networks have been trying to solve for many, many years now. Is, okay, you know, is somebody my friend? Great. You know, we talk back and forth. Maybe I don't wanna add them as a friend, but they can DM me. Maybe they can't do either of those things. And that is just the VR world we're in now. Yeah. I'm imagining it like simlish. Some kind of, you know, these pavers pretty much have a little bit of something. Yeah. But very friendly. I'm gonna have to try this out. But friendly. Friendly garbling. Yeah. You're gonna make me put my VR headset on later on. I know. Just to hear some friendly garbling. I know. Same. Same. Now I have to see. I have to see how it works. Everybody send me friendly. We're gonna start unfriending each other just so we can hear garbling. Unintelligible stuff. Send it to me. Well, something that you also might be interested in is a company called Modos based out of Boston developing something called the paper laptop, which has a black and white electronic paper display. You might say, what is that? Well, it's like E-Ink. It's like a Kindle. The team says that great battery life, less eye fatigue and better visibility in bright sunlight is its goal because the majority of laptop users really are using their devices for things like emails, spreadsheets, word processing and other text focused tasks, not really rich stuff where an e-paper obviously excels and the battery life is really good too. Web browsing will obviously be different without a full color screen, but Modos has done work on an e-paper monitor that can achieve 60 frames per second refresh rates, making scrolling web pages and full speed video playback very smooth. Yeah, this is still in the development phase, but that video they showed of the prototype was pretty impressive to me. If you're like, they played video. They're like, well, we're working on dithering and grayscale right now, so it doesn't look great, but it worked. The refresh rate was enough that it actually worked. And the other thing I thought was fancy about it is it could just scroll and do forms and pretty much all the things I use my Chromebook for, it could do and it's gonna have like a month long battery life because it's an e-ink screen. I signed up for the survey. I was like, all right, I wanna find out more about this. I think I'm into it. I'd be curious what the specs of the laptop are gonna be. Did they say that anywhere in there? No, because they're still just developing the display technologies, yeah. That's gonna make a difference. And it's like, you know, is this different than a reader with a keyboard detection? Like, could you just, could you fashion this out of a Kindle currently? No, because the refresh rate is abysmal on a Kindle. That's their secret sauce, right? Okay, well, it could be a thing. I was pleased to hear them talk about the idea of this being a way to distract you because grayscale in your phone is largely agreed as a way to not use your phone so much. So I like that they put that in there because I think that's probably gonna be an actual significant selling feature for this thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't need to play video games, you know, this could be the thing. Well, I think a lot of us, myself included, you know, when I first read the story this morning, I was like, what? No, well, my laptop doesn't have color. But how many things do I really need that for? Sure, rich video, definitely so. Even though video is working on the Moto's laptop, the paper laptop, but most things, most of my day-to-day things are task-oriented work stuff. And I think that, yeah, especially if you're, well, I don't know who's doing a lot of traveling in these days, but as the world sort of comes back to life, I think that this starts to be really attractive to folks who are on the go, and yeah, the battery life in particular is a big selling point. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Josh. Josh says, thought it was interesting. He's talking about yesterday's show that Rich mentioned that authors could put notation on each word so that an audiobook AI could read the words and then place emphasis where the author desired. Reminded me of any kid who's had to learn to chant from the Torah and the notations on each word that teach you the appropriate musical notes. It's called trope, a 4,000-year-old solution to a modern problem. Hey, sometimes the old ways are best, right, Josh? Yeah, yeah. There is nothing new under the sun. That's great. And then Bodie, host of the Kilowatt podcast, wrote in and said, hey, if you're interested in an affordable electric vehicle with solar panels, because we were talking about the big expensive one yesterday that's coming from, who was it? Oh man, I'm blanket on the name suddenly, but yeah, we were talking about the big expensive one that's coming, that's like 200,000 euros. Bodie says, how about the Aptara, A-P-T-E-R-A? It's a two-seater, three-wheeled vehicle with solar panels. It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. In some states, it's classified as a motorcycle. The light year, thank you, Bodie, the light year zero has got a big price difference. The base model of the Aptara starts at $25,900 for 250 miles. The maxed out Aptara claims a range of 1,000 miles. And with all the options, it would cost you $50,700, which is still a quarter of the price of the light year zero. Production of the Aptara should begin soon if it hasn't already. Is there a top speed on that thing? Cause that thing looks pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, it's a two-seater, right? So this is not high capacity, but yeah, it looks like the, you know, it's least can get zero to 60 miles per hour in three and a half seconds. So that's decent. Well, thank you to Bodie. Thank you to Josh and thank you to everybody who writes in with questions, comments, feedback, all the things. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to direct your email our way. Thank you in advance. We love your feedback. Also, thanks to Stephanie Humphrey for being with us today. Stephanie, where can people keep up with what you've been up to? They can follow me all around the web at TechLifeSteph. You can check out my website at todethyoutweet.com and of course, please listen and download The Tech John at thetechjohnjawn.com. Yeah. For no other reason to get Rob Dunwood's secret basketball name. That's right. He has a secret basketball name? Oh yeah, yeah. He does, he does. Oh gosh, now I'm clearly behind on my episodes. No, The Tech John's awesome. And so are you Stephanie. Thank you for being with us. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, whose name is Jason. Jason just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jason. Jason, you're the best. You could be the next Jason. Just back us at patreon.com slash dtns. Fanfare is yours tomorrow if you want it. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We roll right into it as we wrap up dtns available at patreon.com slash dtns. Just a reminder, we do the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us live if you can. We'd love to have you. And we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow. It's Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Hehehehe.