 Coming up on DTNS, the word on the street about Google Stadia. The reviews are out. Bite Dance set to take on Spotify and Apple music. And my, you might want to track your sleep. This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, November 18th, 2019 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty soon. Very happy to have Rob DeMillo, CTO at Skidmore Owings and Merrill LLP back with us. How's it going, Rob? Very good. Thank you very much for inviting me. I can't wait to talk sleep with you. There's so many jokes there, but I'm going to let them all go. I know, I was, I really, that was, that was rude because I just threw that up there knowing that you would have the discretion not to, yeah, to run with it. You should not know that. I know, I know, I shouldn't tempt you. We had a great time just now talking on Good Day Internet about Pergolas and Redwood and all kinds of good stuff. If you want to find out that and more, of course, sign up for Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. ZDNet reports that some Disney Plus accounts have already been stolen or being offered for free or for sale on various forums. Some users have had their passwords changed. Others didn't. ZDNet suspects that the users either reused passwords from other sites or had been infected with malware previously. Forums have been filled with account credentials for Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and others for years. However, the speed at which accounts have been stolen is unusually fast. Disney Plus showing how valuable it is by how fast. Kind of, yeah. The messaging app Line and Yahoo Japan have jointly announced a basic agreement on a merger aiming to finalize the agreement in December. The owners of the two companies, Softbank and Naver will form a joint holding company with a mutual 50% investment. Yahoo Japan and Line will become subsidiaries and investing 340 billion yen to take Line private. As part of the merger, the two companies plan to integrate their business by October 2020 after which it's expected to be Japan's largest internet company by revenue. Zazu Africa Limited announced a partnership with MasterCard to issue prepaid cards linked to the Zazu payments app. Zazu lets users in Zambia rather send, receive and pay and save money without needing a bank account. This is a trend. We've been seeing a lot of this. Zazu users will be able to get a contactless physical card as well as a virtual card in the Zazu app. All right. Let's talk a little more about the fate of John Legere. Oh, let's. T-Mobile announced that the current COO Mike Sievert will succeed John Legere as CEO as of May 1st 2020. Legere had been expected to step down after the completion of the Sprint T-Mobile merger. Legere was also named CEO back in 2012. He's been there for a while. The Wall Street Journal and CNBC reported that WeWork, which is also a soft bank investment like Sprint, had talked to Legere about taking over as CEO at that company according to sources, but Legere said on a conference called Monday, quote, I was never having discussions with to run WeWork. Legere hasn't given an indication of what he plans to do after stepping down as CEO. Meanwhile, Boost Mobile founder Peter Hatterton, I know it just keeps coming, told Reuters that he's willing to pay up to $2 billion to build the prepay wireless brand back from Sprint to buy it rather. T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to sell Sprint's prepaid mobile networks, including Boost, to Dish Network for $1.4 billion as a condition of that merger. Don't forget the whole Sprint T-Mobile merger is still facing a lawsuit from US Attorneys General. So the whole thing is rather influx as the mobile companies turn. Yeah, seriously. So it's probably so it sounds like Sprint and T-Mobile feel confident about the fact that they will be able to get past the Attorneys General lawsuit and that they will then close their merger next year to the point that they just said, you know what, John's going to pick a date May 1st. He'll be done as of May 1st. That also implies to me, Rob, and you tell me if I'm over-reading the tea leaves that he does have something set up that he's going to go to. We just don't know what it is, right? There ain't no coincidences in this universe at all. Yeah, the rumors of him like going to WeWork coincident with him leaving T-Mobile and his background being a turnaround artist just sounds like that's what's going to happen. Well, it all made too much sense until he said I was never having discussions to run WeWork. So that made me think, well, maybe we just maybe just have it wrong. This is like Gary you're talking about. And it's true. He'll say stuff like that. I was never having discussions to run WeWork. I was having discussions about being CEO of WeWork. Or I just decided and I didn't discuss it with them. Yes, now I am. Now I am. Meanwhile, because of the Attorneys General, they haven't closed as fast as possible, so they missed a November 1st deadline. So technically the merger is in renegotiation either even though both parties are still totally fine with it. But because it's in renegotiate, Peter Adderdon can then step up and go like, hey, I got $2 billion. I think I want Boost Mobile back after all, which is not an easy transaction because Dish agreed to get Boost and Virgin and some Spectrum. So even if Sprint were to say, okay, we'll give Boost back to Adderdon because he's giving us more money, it could sink the rest of that deal with Dish because Dish may say, well, it's not worth it. If we don't get Boost. I forgot all about Dish. Do you know anything about Seaford? Not much. No, I don't know a thing about him. I mean, COO been there for a while. But yeah, largely kind of behind the scenes character. So I bet he doesn't curse in his tweets. That's all I would be sad. I know I'll miss that. I can't wait to read those new WeWork tweets. You know, it's sort of like Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. You know, you can't act like the guy that everybody knew and loved, right? Yeah, I guess. Perhaps didn't love. Yeah, that's fair. You know, it's got to do your own thing. It's going to be a new era. Yeah, you act like the cranky old uncle then. Is that the deal? Maybe, maybe. We'll see. We'll see what Roll Seaford wants to fill. Meanwhile, Roger just slacked me that Apple has announced a press event for December 2nd at 4 p.m. Eastern because they hate us and want to have a press event in the middle of our broadcast day at 4 p.m. Eastern December 2nd in New York City focused on honoring our favorite apps and games of 2019. So may not be like a product announcement thing. May not even be all that much, but interesting. And nonetheless, right? I'll be in New York on December 2nd. So we can go tell them to just hold off for 30 minutes. Well, maybe they can honor you. Have you do you have an app or a game? No, no, the reviews for Google Stadia are out one day before it launches for founders on Tuesday, November 19th. And the consensus is works better than expected, but still not quite good enough. There's some noticeable lag, which is not a problem in slow paced games, but may or may not cause issues on shooters, just depending on how sensitive you are to it. Ars Technicus Kyle Orlin said it worked fine on ethernet for him, but was inconsistent to the point of aggravation on wife on his Wi-Fi anyway. Most said it kind of feels like a beta. The Verges Sean Hollister said it felt more reliable than similar services. He's tested, but does not compare to a high-end console or PC and in gadgets. Jessica Condit said I wouldn't play any of these titles competitively on Stadia, but the service is fine enough for a relaxing evening. If you don't remember, Google Stadia has now upped it. They added some games, so they're going to have 22 games at launch for $130 plus $10 a month plus $20 to $60 per game. It's interesting the whole sort of like, okay, it's not snappy enough for competitive gaming, but it's totally fun for a fun, relaxing evening. Who are the people who want one and not the other? Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, mobile gamers, I guess. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I would probably be one of those people who's like, I don't care about the snappiness necessarily. If I've got like three games that I like and I want to play a lot, but just I wonder what, you know, who's going to be diverted from getting Google Stadia and knowing, oh, well, it's a little bit sluggish. Even if it doesn't actually apply to them. It's kind of interesting because it will, first of all, me, like I actually do game and then that millisecond response time is important. But yeah, I don't know if you remember, but I was on when Stadia was announced and we had talked about it at one point and I'm like Joe streaming guy, right? So I've been doing streaming for years and I was amazed. I was for the beta was amazing because there was just a few people on it, but I was amazed by the sort of overall, uh, let's just go out there and do it attitude of Stadia. It's like, it's hard. Like that stuff is hard and user managing user complaints when users really don't understand like how streaming is affected by all the various pieces between the server and your game controller. They were, they're taking a huge gamble in this and so is Microsoft by like coming forward. So it's, it's going to be kind of interesting. I mean, this is the same crowd that was like complaining about that the scenes in Game of Thrones being too dark. It's like, well, sure. I, I, I think to answer your question, Sarah, anybody who games on an older Xbox or PlayStation, especially if it's a PlayStation three or Xbox 360, which there still are some people will be fine with this. That's, I got a peek at it this weekend and my feeling was for me, it's fine. Like I'm not a competitive gamer. I'm not really attuned to the lag. So those of you who are competitive or think, you know, you're competitive are going to notice it, but I imagine most people aren't. What's a bigger problem is what ours Technicus Kyle Orlin pointed out. And that's to your point, Rob, which is there's something in his Wi-Fi that caused issues that he didn't see an Ethernet and a lot of people are going to say, Hey, this doesn't work. It's your fault, even though it may be their router setting or their equipment or something else on their own network slowing it down because there are so many variables there. Yeah. Yeah. It's I think eventually they're going to work this out. I mean, this is the same problem Netflix had very, very early on. Yeah, that's true. And they work on stuttering and stuff. So getting those CDNs in place and you know, they've got the they've got the buck to do it. So moving on Microsoft confirmed that Abe will remove the Cortana app from the iOS and Android app stores on January 31st in the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India. A Microsoft spokesperson told the bridge that currently the app is still supported in the US. However, Microsoft said it plans to further integrate Cortana into Office 365. We talked about that in the past. The company did not reveal how devices that use the Cortana app for configuration and firmware updates like the surface headphones would work in those selected markets. It should be easy enough to just build Cortana into the surface headphone system. It's going to stay on Windows first of all. So Microsoft has done a whole push into the fact that they're like, this is just going to be a Windows. Yeah, Microsoft has said they just want it to be their voice assistant in software like Office 365. So it doesn't shock me that that it would take away the app, but they will have to migrate a few things like settings to two other situations that should easily be done. This honestly doesn't surprise me. It just shows that, you know, Microsoft is saying we are seeding that front end of the market, but we will still continue to use our voice recognition services as an enterprise service, which is where they make their money these days. Yeah, that's reasonable. I'm actually a little disappointed that I didn't use Cortana a little bit more on iOS before it got yanked just because, you know, I like to sort of know how the assistants work. I still think that Google's assistant is way better than Siri and, you know, Amazon's assistant is a whole other thing. But Cortana, I don't have a lot of experience with. Go ahead. No, no, no. Go ahead. Yeah, and I wonder what the motivation really is today. Like, is there a partnership somewhere in the works with Google and Microsoft or Amazon or Microsoft? And that's why there's Well, there is a partnership with Amazon already and they'd like a partnership with Google. So yeah, for the voice assistant. For the yeah. Yeah. Cortana is integrated with. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. So that might actually be part of the I'm sure that's part of the calculation. Yeah, yeah. But in the end, hey, Cortana, we'll miss you. Logitech announced the adaptive gaming kit designed to work with the Xbox adaptive controller to make gaming more accessible to those with disabilities. The kit includes three small buttons, three large buttons for light touch buttons and two variable trigger controls that connect to the adaptive controller over three and a half millimeter jacks and USB and can be mapped to different functions for Xbox PC games. It also includes both rigid and foldable game mats with Velcro ties for laying out the buttons. The adaptive gaming kit was developed in partnership with the Abel gamers charity, the Abilities Research Center at Mount Sinai and special effect and costs $99.99. A big advancement for this and Microsoft been doing a lot in the accessibility space. So it's good to see them continue especially in gaming to make these available. Yeah. I don't know Rob. What do you think of the what do you think of the price point? That's about right. I mean, it's $99. I'm a new controller is what 60 bucks or something like a like a not like a non adaptive controller. So $60 or $30 for the accessibility option. I mean, it's a unfortunate. Go ahead. Oh, no, I was going to say compared to the old adaptive or like controllers that they used to create that were very special and specialized and very console specific. I mean, a hundred bucks super cheap. It is used to be like $300 back in the back of the Xbox 360 days and before. Well, this is just the gaming kit. Keep that in mind. You know, it's it works with the Xbox adaptive controller, but you'll still need that controller separately to the hundred dollars. Yeah, it's it's still kind of okay. I mean, it's a it's a it's a target market that's very small. Right. And so you make up for that by you have to ratchet up the price unfortunately. So all things considered, it's actually not bad. Well, especially because because the target market is small, a lot of times people who have accessibility needs just don't have an option. Just don't have a product. So it's it's good to at least see that. The Financial Times reports that Byte Dance, perhaps you've heard of it, is in talks with Warner Music, Universal Music and Sony Music to secure move music streaming rights and plans to launch a music streaming service as early as next month. This is according to sources. Listeners would be able to search through a library of short vertical video clips designed for mobile phones and then sync these songs as they listen. The service would reportedly cost less than ten dollars per month and initially launch in Brazil, Indonesia and India. Yeah, we were round and round in our pre show about this like because that vertical video clip thing seems like they're trying to take some of their TikTok product and force it in. It's filtered through sources. So my experience is a lot of time. These things end up being a lot less weird when they actually become public than they sound when some source is kind of talking through the side of their mouth about it. But I think what is significant is that Byte Dance, which has a huge and growing market with TikTok worldwide, can get those people to move over to a fairly affordable service in areas of the world where they could be competitive like Brazil, Indonesia and India. Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, when we're talking through this earlier, you know, I was like, this is going to be like TikTok video stuff. And you were like, no, no, that's not what this is. But that's, you know, immediately where my mind went to. And the fact that it would reportedly be less than $10 per month leads me to believe it would be a more restricted library because otherwise, why wouldn't you just, you know, have it at a competitive level because look at the markets that are launching in our markets where less than $10 per month is kind of an average price for services. Yeah. And Brazil, Indonesia and India is also very, it's, that's, you know, they're not doing that on accident. It's definitely. That's where you see the really cheap Netflix, you know, the mobile only version of Netflix is in India. That's one of the test markets it launched in places like that. I do see if this starts taking off in places where they can maybe get a ground swell, Byte Dance could become a player on the scene with Apple and Spotify. Yeah, I think it's easy for, I don't know, some like me who's seen on Apple music, many people are Spotify or there are other options, obviously, but those are the two biggest players to be like, we've, we've got enough. We have enough of these. But if somebody comes in at a lower price point and is just as good, who's going to, you know, who's going to move over or who's going to sign up for Byte Dance's service who didn't with the others. Yeah, but my first reaction to this is that one's like, Oh, thank God, another streaming service, few. That's great. But, but, but then I woke up this morning and one of my VC channels that I subscribed to is chattering away with. They think this is directly putting Spotify in the crosshairs. Like it's a deliberate attempt to try and bring Spotify as market share down. Yeah, but I could see that, especially because Spotify is stronger in, in areas of the world that Apple music hasn't really caught on in. So, yeah. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Sleep trackers, a lot of them exist. They exist in a lot of different ways. There's standalone devices, standalone devices that do particular things, obviously part of your general wearable watch or fitness tracker. And they generally measure things like sleep duration, sleep quality, the phases of your sleep, environmental factors like light and temperature, even lifestyle items like when you last ate or how much caffeine you've been drinking. Alan Schwartz, MD, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, pointed out that none of them actually measure sleep directly. That would require brainwave monitoring, but infer sleep tracking from other data. But he says they can still give you data to reflect on as long as you realize the limits of what they can tell you and they can still tell you a lot. Rob, I know you've been using sleep as an android and an oximeter to track your sleep. What got you interested in this form of self-measurement? What have you found out? Self-centered interest, actually. So I snore quite a bit. And I started to notice the older that I got, I would start to wake up as tired as when I went to bed, which was just not cool, by the way, just in general. So the point of sleep is that you wake up less tired. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So I was trying to figure out what I was doing right. And so I started screwing out with all this stuff back in the Fitbit days, early Fitbit days. And so I'd use their silly little you've rolled over or you haven't rolled over thing. And I could see that I wasn't restless. So that kind of led to more and more things. And I got on the trail of sleep as android, which I don't think, Sarah and Tommy, you tell me this. It doesn't exist on iOS, does it? No. Okay. As far as I know. And aside from having the world's most awkward name for an app, it became more and more complex as to what they could do with it. Yeah. It's at the point now where it's like you can, you can if your bed partner also has sleep as android, they'll talk to each other. And when they're looking for snoring and things like that, though, they can figure out which one of you is doing it like right now. I feel like you'd be like, it's you because you're keeping me up. Part of my problem. I think my dog is actually triggering my thing. But I gave up for the dog too. Yeah, exactly. So as as the app has increased in power and phones have increased in sensors, it's doing more and more interesting things. So it's not just detecting snoring anymore. It's it's also looking for light level changes, pressure changes, vibrations, that sort of thing. And it it was showing a clear pattern for me that that there was problems the way I was sleeping. And I've got to the point now where I'll sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night jarred awake because I think I have gone into sort of this weird oxygen deprivation situation because of the snoring. So then that started getting me interested in oximeters and and so there's one there's several on the market and sleep is android allows integration with some of these things and and so the one that I picked and with this is really ugly. So so this there's a company called and I'm not making this up happy electronics that makes this this pulse oximeter and it comes with a dongle that you plug in at the end here and this little blue thing that you put on your wrist doesn't really do anything at all. So it goes it goes around your wrist. Yeah, the goes on that's how it's identifying what you're doing. No, no, no. It goes around the wrist to hold the battery and the and whatever else is in there. This is actually the sensor. There's no sensors on the blue itself. So why does it have to be around your wrist at all? I think because the other option is what you have something dangling off the bed or you do anything. Sure. On your person seems slightly more invasive, but OK. And to your point, there are some problems with this. If you know if because this is on my finger, you put this on your finger and then this goes on your wrist like that. And if if I put my hand under the pillow or whatever, you know, that happens. Sure. And when that happens, it cuts the connection to the application and the application is not robust enough to understand that that that's what has just occurred. And so it wipes out your data for the night for this thing. But when it does record, the results are kind of interesting. You've got a does a measure of oxygen intake that is rated between zero and 100 and you're supposed to be in 90 to 100. You know, that that percentile and when you're when you're sleeping and I clearly dip below. So one of things this does do, even if you're not on sleep as Android is it will beep or vibrate to wake you up if you drop below 90 so that you can get back to the point. And and it's had some effect. I have to say like it's kind of the digital version of nudging someone when they stop breathing. Yeah, that's exactly. That's exactly. And I've seen some very go over. I've seen some very complicated versions of these things where there's one. I just came across at the other night. And I apologize. I don't have the the name of the company, but essentially there's a vibratory strip that you put in your pillow. And then there is a box there to your point that you put on the side of the bed and the cable runs from the pillow to the thing on the side of the bed and it vibrates the pillow to do that nudge thing to to to wake you up with it. It's funny, Rob. You mentioned, you know, Fitbit at the beginning of the segment and I'm wearing a Versa to I wear it at nights. I mean, this thing is on me unless I'm in the shower. It's on me all the time. And in the morning I'm always sort of like, how did I sleep? The thing is though is like and there are a lot again. There are a lot of metrics going into what what it decides, you know, how I slept, you know, this was your rem this was your deep this was, you know, sort of your rest restless period, but it is not accurate. No, there will there will be a night where I'm like I slept like garbage, you know, I was like, you know, tossing and turning or Otis was snoring or the cat was around, you know, like whole thing and Fitbit would be like, you got seven hours of sleep and I'm like, uh-uh, no, I didn't. So you don't know that I was up. So I feel like it is we're getting to the point where this information is is helpful, especially when you're like, I'm trying to pinpoint a problem. But it's not really accurate as far as because like, how do they know? You know, like if I'm laying awake like silently, they think I'm sleeping. I wasn't sleeping. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're not moving, it shows that way too. I mean, that's why I stopped using Fitbit because the inference patterns on on Fitbit are immature. I think compared to something like sleep is Android sleep, it's Android has because it's got an open API. It plugs into a lot of things. So it does plug into my Google fit. It plugs into some exercise apps that I use and a bunch of other things and they share information back and forth and the inference that it makes it feels a little better to me. So it'll give me a it won't give me a sleep rating score. It'll say your deep sleep was 85% of your evening and restless sleep was 15% in that kind of thing. And then it feeds into an overall sleep lag monitor. So it shows you based off your age and your weight and your exercise levels how much sleep you should be getting on a nightly basis and how much you are and what's your deficit or how much are you over and all that. So so the information is there. But to Sarah's point not sure it's any better. You know to find a resolution does not mean that the data is better. But yeah, it's data that you look at and you go like, All right, there's a problem. What's my solution? We're kind of we're kind of still working to get to that point. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. If you have sleep solutions, please submit them. Submit all stories that you care about that you'd like us to see and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also join in on our conversation on discord. It's a lively one. Lots of good friends to meet there. You can join by linking to a patron account at patreon.com slash D T N S. All right, Chris Christensen, the amateur traveler has a website that you can use to avoid places that charge resort for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in a travel minute. I don't know if you've had this happen where you check into a hotel that you have prepaid for a hotel room and they say, Oh yes, by the way, there's a resort fee. If you want to use the fitness center, the pool or even the Wi-Fi, we're going to charge you $40 a day. It has happened to me as it has happened to many people. There's a bill being proposed in the US Congress that would outlaw it in the US. But in the meantime, Expedia, one of the largest online travel agents in the world has said that all things being equal, they're going to rank lower hotels that have hidden fees. Way to go, Expedia. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. I apologize for interrupting you, Chris, but that's good information. It definitely is. Shout out to our patrons at our master and our grand master levels, including James P. Callison, Wandy Hernandez and Jonathan Price. Also extra special thanks to Rob DeMille for being with us today. Rob, it's been too long. Nice to have you on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. You keep up with me. I mean, if you look at my about me page about me, Rob DeMille, you'll see all my stuff where to get my Twitter and my Instagram and where I'm working now and what happened to my previous job and all that good stuff. Well, thank you, Rob. And thank you, everyone for interest in our upcoming listener co-host episode that will be recording for the holiday break. We got so many good submissions. As always, more good submissions than we will be able to fit in the show. So if you hear from us, that means you're on the show. If you don't hear from us, it means you're not. But if we didn't get reach out to you, it's not because your submission wasn't great. We just had too many to pick from. So please, if you don't get on this year's show, send us an email about it again next year. And of course, don't forget, we have holiday cards coming out with Len Peralta Art. You got to sign up for our Patreon or stay on our Patreon by November 28th. And if you want to make sure you get a holiday card, you have to give us your mailing address. We can't guess what it is. So go to patreon.com slash pledges to make sure that Daily Tech News Show has access to your correct address. If you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That is 2130 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.