 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook may face new antitrust charges. Smart glasses refuse to die. And what is going on over at YouTube? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 19th, 2020, from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Robert Straffalino. On working vacation, I'm Austin River Diaz. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Before the show, we were just talking about different things that you can have for food, depending on where you are in the world, and SUVs versus sedans. What's not to like the wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet. And you can do that by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Rich, let's start off with a few tech things you should know. Yes, indeed, Instagram updated its Threads messaging app, adding the ability to post content to Instagram stories, as well as revamping the navigation tab and adding a dedicated status section. This comes as Instagram has looked to broaden the use of Threads, which previously focused on messaging your close friends group. Last month, the app started rolling out the ability to message all Instagram users in Threads, which Instagram has now confirmed is available globally. Google announced it had completed its global rollout of rich communication services, also known as RCS, for all Android phones. So users with carriers still using only SMS can download the Google Messages app in the Play Store, enabling features like typing indicators, read receipts, higher resolution photos and videos, and larger group conversations. Google also said it's testing end-to-end encryption in the latest beta of Google Messages on one-to-one conversations. Fitbit began rolling out Fitbit OS 5.1 to sense in Versa3 smartwatches, which brings Google Assistant support, as well as the ability to view blood ox data without using a dedicated watch face. Fitbit already offered Amazon voice services support on devices, and the update now adds support for audible responses from AVS through the watch's speaker, rather than just getting the response with on-screen text. I'm annoyed as a Versa2 owner. I'm annoyed, but cool for you Versa3 people and US and people as well. Apple reached a settlement with 34 US state attorneys, generals over lawsuits about the company's practice of throttling iPhone performance as batteries degraded. The settlement has yet to be approved, but if it does, a judge could be worth, by a judge, it could be worth up to $113 million. Apple settled a class action lawsuit on the practice earlier this year for up to $500 million. And Google announced the public testing of a dedicated progressive web app for Stadia is set to start within several weeks on iOS. The current dedicated iOS app is a hub for your game library, the Stadia store, and your wider friends list, but doesn't actually allow Stadia gameplay. Google says it will test performance and add more features. User feedback will help improve the Stadia experience for everyone. Oh, very interesting trend we've got going on here. Justin, tell us a little bit more about who else is doing this. Good, Holly, Sarah, wouldn't I love to. Nvidia launched a WebRTC-based beta version of its GeForce Now cloud gaming service on mobile Safari, making the service available on iOS. DualShock 4 and Xbox One controllers will work with games as well as touch controls, although they will not natively be supported on certain games, and there is no support for playing with a mouse and keyboard. The company also says that it plans to expand to desktop Chrome-based version of GeForce Now to work beyond just Chromebooks, but iOS now has some of these subscription platforms for which has been a major issue at least to get an app into the iOS app store. You know, progressive web apps, listen, it's perfectly within a company's right to do this. Rich, do you see backlash from Apple on something like this? Because Apple really has to tread lightly because there have been enough core cases recently and people scrutinizing the app store in general, and Apple even bringing down the price of what it takes from developers who don't get a certain amount of downloads all year. What does this mean? Well, I mean, I'm sure they would like to in some way. I mean, they set up these, you know, the way the app store is set up, they change the rules to allow for streaming services so that services like GeForce Now have to kind of vet each game individually as an app and then have like a central streaming catalog app. So I mean, this is definitely thumbing the nose at those rules. It also does add Fortnite. That was kind of one of the sub-headline on every announcement of this that we saw in the news. GeForce Now doesn't include Fortnite, so you can get that again on iOS, admittedly through a Kluge kind of, you know, not very much not as streamlined as it used to be through the iOS app store. I don't know what Apple can strictly do for this other than break a web browser, which I don't think is in anyone's best interest. And Nvidia doesn't really have that much of a developer presence on the app store that they could even like tighten the review screws on them or anything like that. Not that I even think Apple would do something that transparent for this. I mean, right now, Apple basically said, if you want to do this, go through Safari. And it seems like a lot of people are taking them up. Whether customers will actually be interested in doing that, I will honestly be interested to see how much adoption we're gonna get. You just hit on it, Rich. This is way more of an interesting thing on paper than it will be in practice. This is not going to be the optimum way that you are going to want to play any of these games up to an including Fortnite. If anything, all it does is hammer home why the Apple app store is valuable because they do vet for experience. They do vet for certain quality metrics and this will be outside of it. No one's gonna want to do this unless you are an absolute hardcore person for whom to, that you need to prove that you can. Beyond that, I don't think that these are necessarily going to take off. I'd be shocked if they could. The one thing I'll say is this does give GeForce now that continuous client presence that they've been lacking. If you're an iOS owner, this won't be the primary way you'll do it, but maybe if you want to kill five minutes, you can fire up GeForce now on your phone now and at least that's an option as opposed to not having that at all. Again, I think that's a quarter case. Well, moving on, YouTube ruffled some feathers, especially if you upload videos to YouTube and honor partner because YouTube updated its terms of service to now state that creators not in its partner program may see some ads on their videos. YouTube's partner program shares a portion of ad revenue with creators. That's why people wanna be in the partner program and requires an account to have 1000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months. So you have to show that you're consistently, have an audience. Non-partner channels though will not receive any revenue for these new displayed ads. YouTube's gonna do it. Those creators don't get a dime. The Verge confirmed that ads will not run on non-partner channels that focus on sensitive topics. So it's not across the board, but oh boy, are there some angry creators out there. Well, one way to look at this is that the bill came due. Congratulations, back in the day when you wanted to upload a bunch of video to the web, it took a lot of money and it was annoying and you had to watch for exactly how much you were using and you had to remove things. YouTube and Google after it was acquired made that a totally moot point. Now upload everything that you've ever wanted for any reason to YouTube. Now they are going to take a little bit about that back and run some ads on it. The reality of why this is happening is that there is a global ad crunch. The COVID-19 slowdown has very much affected the ad market. It's affected the ad market in every sector from display ads and print ads and television ads and even the once thought to be ascended and never ending money train that is online advertisement. That's why Google bought YouTube in the first place from search listings to these video ads, which again, there's a reason why everybody pivoted to video about two years ago was because video ads were going to be more expensive. They are now going away and Google is looking for any and every way that they can continue to maintain revenue projections that they have set for themselves. Part of that is eroding norms, like running ads on non-partnered videos. It's just the way of the world and if we continue to see an ad slowdown, you're going to continue to see more and more moves like this from Google. My question is in terms of the backlash, I mean obviously anytime anything changes on a service there's going to be a subset of users who don't like change and adding in ads when there were no ads is like not the best user experience I would imagine for like a viewer perspective. From a creator perspective is this just a I did not intend for any ads to run against this and now I have a Squarespace ad that runs against this and that's annoying to me or is this I'm losing out on potential revenue because if you don't qualify to make that, you know, we hear YouTube creators say we don't make any money that are part of that program or we barely make enough money to cover costs when we're part of that program. I can't imagine that even if Google did some lesser ad revenue share that it would, I mean maybe it would amount to something that would be meaningful to some creators. I'm not here to judge, but I don't think that would be in terms of not sharing, not having a revenue share. I'm doubting from a user perspective that there's much revenue to share or I could be wrong for single creators. Obviously for Google there's a lot of revenue share because there's tens of thousands, not millions of creators that don't qualify. Yeah, I think as a viewer, you don't care. I mean, we all know how to skip ads, you know, you check the little X or you say, you know, three, two, one, you know, you skip the pre-roll ad type thing, you know, or you can't, whatever. That is, that's just the YouTube experience depending on what you're watching. For a creator though, for someone to be like, okay, I'm really trying to, you know, boost my, you know, personal brand. Dan Benjamin was like, oh, horrible term on our show yesterday. But, you know, but you know what I mean? And, you know, and I'm not there yet. So I can't, yeah, I get, I can't get money from YouTube yet to then be like, oh no, there's ads that I get zero pennies for. It's just insulting. I mean, but also you cannot upload for free. Like again, this is a bill coming due that we might have just forgotten about, that there was a world in which it was very expensive to move video hither and non and YouTube eliminated that cost. So I can understand from their perspective, they're like, yeah, this is just, you know, congratulations. You now every once in a while might see a Sprite ad on your baby's first steps. So Justin, in terms of, you know, your theory about the bill coming due just real quick, do we think that at some point we'll see like, hey, no one has watched this video in five years. We're starting to take this down. Does that ever happen for you too? I don't know if they're gonna get into that kind of cash crunch. This is again, just about real estate on places they can run ads. Google as a company is an ad sales company, full stop. That's how they fund everything. So they're just looking to unlock real estate. All right. And next up here, I hope you like smart glasses because Amazon launched the Echo Frame smart glasses last year as part of its invitation only day one products. We talked about it on the show, I believe along with a bevy of products that they were announced. Back, based on feedback, Amazon announced that it will actually launch an updated Echo Frames device on December 10th for $249.99 to the general public, not by invitation, not a beta, just as a product. These updated frames will include a 40% better battery life with an auto off feature from our energy savings. So I don't know if it's a bigger battery or they're just using it better, a VIP filter to prioritize notifications for apps and contacts, and an auto volume feature that will adjust volume based on ambient sound. The new Echo Frames come in modern tortoise, modern horizon blue and classic black, and invited first generation customers will be able to upgrade to a new pair for $70. Now, at all Amazon day one products though were so lucky, the company announced that it's Echo Loop. You may remember that as the smart ring would be sunsetted, although Amazon will continue to support existing beta devices. RIP Echo Loop, but let's talk about these. Out of the loop. Yeah, out of the loop indeed. Echo Frames, you mentioned Justin and our pre-show, you were like, they don't look too horrible. I mean, the whole thing with smart glasses is, I am, I always have to check myself because my first instinct is to be like, these never work. You had Google Glass, you have Snap Spectacles, but arguably some people say they work fine, but not super, has not been adopted by the general public. Something like this though, and that AR experience, especially when you're Amazon, I don't know, they might be up to something, but 250 bucks, not chump change. Yeah, I mean, that kind of goes against, that kind of goes against Amazon's brand for me with everything Echo, right? Everything Echo is, we're gonna make it either the, maybe not the cheapest thing that you can find on Amazon, but it's going to be, it's gonna be a little cheaper than maybe, certainly cheaper than anything from Apple, maybe on par, maybe even a little cheaper than something with from Google. It's commodity hardware, and this is definitely not in this space for what is essentially just adding that Amazon voice assistant into your ear and providing some interesting feedback. You can have it on the move. That is certainly a novel use case and certainly not something that you can necessarily get. You know, they have some in-car stuff so you can kind of take it on the go that way. It's already baked into your phone. It's baked into a lot of earbuds as well. And because of the, you know, these use, these are using bone conduction, right? To go into your ear. Sound quality is not gonna be great. So I still see people, if you care about audio at all, are still gonna want to use earbuds. So like, I mean, maybe, obviously they got enough feedback that they said, we can sell enough of these that we'll cut, we'll make one cent and per the Amazon model, therefore it's worth doing. So I just don't see that much of a market at that price. Considering you're also, if you wear glasses, do you need prescription lenses in there as well? I actually disagree with you, Rich, in terms of their brand being below market value, both with Kindle and with the Echo. They pioneered hardware verticals for which they have kind of set the price. I think they want to do that here. The biggest advantage that they have, and to Sarah's point about where other glasses have failed, number one, Google Glass, the most famous failure in this has kind of defined the genre, maybe even unfairly, but it looked awful. It looked like a board going through a mid-life crisis. You've had other glasses designers that have tried to get into this, but have never really been able to get the hardware, right? What Amazon has is Echo. They have best-in-class voice recognition. And if that creates a passive experience where between the heads-up display, which has gotten better and your interactivity, which you can now get in certain products like the AirPods Pro, if this is a way that you can, you're not necessarily looking for high-quality sound issues. You're just looking for it to be able to recognize your voice and have very simple prompts repeated back to you. This is an assistant that lives in your head and can show you visual things without whispering in your ear. The concept, I think, is interesting. And if they're moving forward with it, especially at a price point, which they have at that high, so they can come down, so they can continue to market this. I think that they have faith in it, whether or not it will be a hit with consumers, we will see. Yeah, as somebody who has recently had to wear readers pretty much anytime I'm near a monitor or anything where there's text near my face, the idea that I could have smart versions of these glasses that I now have littered around my apartment and in my car, not that it has to be anything that's prescription-based to have a smart set of glasses, but something that where I'm like, I gotta wear them anyway. I know I do. And I really like the Amazon ecosystem. My whole house is using Amazon's assistant anyway. Got an echo show. And if that could be something that I could be a little bit more mobile with and still reap the rewards of the things that I've gotten really used to at home, that we are onto something. Like we're close to this. I think Justin, as you mentioned, the glasses don't look so horrible. That has a lot to do with it because this is something that you are wearing. But I don't know, I don't wanna say I'm rooting for Amazon, but I'm rooting for a smart glasses feature to actually work. Yeah, the look is a big win, admittedly. Yeah. Well, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. Sometimes you submit stories about smart, all sorts of things. Sometimes you vote on others. You can do both. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, moving on. The Washington Post sources say that state and federal investigators are preparing to bring antitrust charges against Facebook. You might say, haven't they? Which is, this is a familiar trope, isn't it? Well, now the newest is alleging that the acquisition of rivals Instagram and WhatsApp led to a social media market with few quality alternatives. Basically saying, you're pushing out the other guys. The investigation has reportedly looked at WhatsApp and Instagram specifically and how they change since being acquired by Facebook and if they've left users with worse services and fewer privacy protections. This includes looking at Facebook's pledge to regulators back in 2014, six years ago, that would keep WhatsApp independent. Strong privacy protections. Facebook said, don't worry at the time. The state and federal lawsuits have not been finalized but are expected to be filed by early December with nearly 40 states reportedly interested in signing on. Justin, sometimes this seems like Groundhog Day, but what legs do we think these newest allegations have? And once this is filed, which we will presume that it will be, we are only halfway through the four horses of the Silicon Valley ecosystem as I presume we will get similar cases against Apple and Amazon. And Amazon really might be the biggest one of the bunch. As far as this, it's what we've heard in the past that these acquisitions have fundamentally altered the market, that promises made to regulators have not been kept by Facebook and that all of these services have been materially changed in ways that violate those promises. Now, what's interesting is that these are very much cases that were being brought by the Trump Justice Department. They have bipartisan support. In fact, many of these talking points, eagle-eared listeners to this program might remember, sound familiar with Elizabeth Warren's tech position when she was still a primary candidate in this race. That being said, if we look at the emerging leadership that will likely exist in a Biden administration, I do not expect this will be a, I don't expect that this is going to be a priority for them. There is a lot of Silicon Valley DNA in what we will see in the Biden administration. So I would expect this to be soft-pedaled from past the transition. Justin, my question is, I guess, what are we looking at in terms of potential outcomes? I mean, if on the date that these lawsuits are filed, these anti-trust lawsuits are filed, if the situation were to remain the same, like if the administrative landscape were to stay the same, like what would be the desired outcome, I guess, at the time of filing versus what do you think will actually happen? We'll just be looking at some fines, some SEC comes in and says we have to disclose, like what? Yeah, the big question here, Rich, is exactly when you're looking at the possibilities of what could happen. And let's say the most draconian that you are breaking up big Facebook. And now there is, you know, much as there was mob bell to the baby bells, we are now unwinding these very specific acquisitions. And we are re-independentizing a word I just invented, WhatsApp and Instagram. And maybe we're allowing some level of interaction with Facebook as an ad sales platform, and there's some allowed degree of this, but otherwise they are now separate companies to really the most mild, which is that Facebook says indeed, we were bad, bad boys to say that this was something that would remain independent. And indeed we have wound our integration far tighter than we would have otherwise. And you can cite Instagram having the messenger unification, whether or not we see anything like that with WhatsApp going forward, and that they will either online that specifically, or they pay a fine and say, well, we can show you based on our monopoly law in America that this isn't really all that effective, although we did say that we wouldn't wind it tight. So here's some money. Let's go ahead about our business. And I would suspect that we will likely see something on the pay the parking fine and move on down the road variety. In the event that there is a breakup of potentially some part of that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp triumvirate, can we call those Zucker babies? Is that the baby girl? Only if we can create a theme song based on the Muppet babies version. Yeah, now everyone's gonna have this in their head. You're a very cruel man, Rick. They'll make your dreams come true, much like our fantastic discussion here. And of course, it wouldn't be a dealer tech news show with that little kicker here. Hey, passwords, how do they work? Did you even know? I wish. Well, we have new research from Noripass, a password management company. They know a thing or two. And they say that people don't always really know how to do the old password thing well. The firm found that passwords like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, the word password. And I love you all one word, lowercase, top of the database of 275.6 million passwords. New to the top 10 this year, however, picture one, cheeky, and senha, which means password in Portuguese. Consider this a PSA for your family, your friends, anyone that you actually shouldn't probably be getting together with over the holidays. Don't use dictionary words, predictable number combinations, strings of an edge, you know, don't use QWERTY. That's kind of coming from Noripass and also from my own personal recommendation. Also, big thing, don't reuse passwords. Reusing passwords opens up a whole another. You can have the best password in the world that's impossible to understand. As soon as that gets inevitably hacked in some breach, they're going to use, attackers can use it for what's called a credential stuffing attack, which is where they just take all your passwords that they have from that breach and try it on every single other account with your email address. Turns out if you reuse it, it's a problem. And actually a recent study came out, I was trying to find where the study was coming up, but actually that millennials reuse passwords on a higher rates, about 40% versus baby boomers, only doing it about 15% when it came to work accounts. So millennials, I'm looking at you, my tribe. Wow, yeah, you got Gen Z too. I mean, I really do think, especially because, listen, we're coming up on, pardon me, the holiday season in the U.S. and many around the world, you will, if you're like me, you're the person in the family who, you know, Aunt Susie, every so often is like, I need some help, something terrible happened to my computer. I need your help, Sarah, you know? If you're kind of nodding and saying, yeah, yeah, it happens to me every holiday season as well, just a good PSA, make sure that your loved ones are using passwords that won't get them in trouble later. I actually have an idea. Everybody's listening to this right now, go on the social media for which you know your family is watching, that's likely Facebook, and just say, hey, these are the most hacked passwords. If you have this password and you are my family and you are reading this, privately message me and you don't need, I won't reveal identities, but I will help you have your life continue as opposed to what's happening now. And then you don't have to get Christmas presents because that was the present. I just saved you from getting your identity stolen. Aunt Susie, I love you Aunt Susie. Oh, Aunt Susie, I'm gonna have to text her now. Rich, what's going on in the mail bag today? Well, I'm glad you asked, Sarah, because Nick wrote in and he had this, he says, I can't help the people with Macs that are waking in the middle of the night, but on Windows, I can explain what's going on. We were discussing this on DTNS. I wasn't, but the DTNS collectively, I guess, there we go, words are hard. So he says, you know how people are always complaining about Windows downloading and installing updates at the worst possible moment? Well, Windows shouldn't actually do that. What is supposed to happen is Windows should wake up the computer outside of what's called active hours and download updates then. This normally is in the middle of the night, presumably, because you're sleeping. Also, some apps like Steam will do something similar where the wake up on the computer is in the middle of the night to update games. Since most PCs don't have super low power, a super low power mode, like the way a phone or tablet does, this results in the PC fully waking up. This is normal behavior. If you ever want to know what the reason is for your PC waking up most recently, go to start, type CMD, open up that command line and run administrator. From there, you can type in the command power config, oh, hold on, I've just scrolled over here, power CFG, and that will be able to show you, oh, I'm sorry, power CFG slash last wake, this will show you what process, last woke up your PC. I did not know that, Nick, thank you for sharing. Yeah, thanks, Nick. Yeah, we've been talking all week and thanks to everybody who's written in and been like, I also have a ghost Mac computer, you know, or MacBook or MacBook Air, whatever, or MacBook or iMac Pro or whatever. But good to hear from the window side, Nick saying, this does happen, this sometimes is supposed to happen and if you're confused about why it happens and you want to change it, here's what you do. So thank you, Nick. Also thanks to everybody who sends us feedback every day. We love reading your questions, your comments, your tips for your fellow DTNS viewers, all of that good stuff. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to keep sending them. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Hi Tech Oki, Johnny Hernandez, and Tim Ashman. Also thanks to Justin Rubber Young for being with us today. Justin, I know you're on the move, but you're busy as ever. Where can people keep up with your work? Well, of course you can find my podcast, Politics, Politics, Politics at politicspoliticspolitics.com. There is a link there for every podcast platform that you might want. And you can also submit the feedback there, but we're all geared up for the big defining runoffs in the Peach State of Georgia. I'm flying down there at the beginning of 2021 so we can be there in person for the July 5th runoffs between Warnock versus Leffler and Purdue versus Ossoff with the fate of the Senate hanging in the balance. Come and hear everything unfold at politicspoliticspolitics.com. Excellent, thanks for being with us and definitely check out PX3. 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