 Coming up on DTNS, it's TSMC versus Huawei as the China-U.S. trade war heats up in the tech sector, which Apple AR headset is most credible and Facebook buys Giffy? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 15, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Perrault. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. We were talking about old cars and old commercials on Good Day Internet today. If you want to get that conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Netflix is starting to lift European coronavirus-related streaming quality limits in Denmark, Norway and Germany. This was first reported by FlatPanel's HD. Previously, Netflix, Apple, TV+, and Amazon Prime Video all compiled with European Commission requests back in March to reduce bandwidth and help networks manage their loads. Apple restored 4K streaming late last month. Munich, Germany announced it will use open source software for administration needs. The city government also committed to making source code of all city software public as long as no confidential or personal data is involved. Netflix began moving away from proprietary software back in 2006, but in 2017 moved toward proprietary software again. The new swing back to open source will happen slowly as contracts come up for renewal. Foxconn reported its net income declined 89 percent in Q1 to $70 million overall revenue for the company declined 12 percent on the year to $31.02 billion. Foxconn thinks it stabilized everything in Q2 though. They were in China with the pandemic hitting in Q1 unlike most of the rest of the world, which really didn't get hit till March. So they're projecting double digit percentage growth for Q2 over Q1, although likely still down on the year. Next quarter, enterprise is expected to grow 10 percent, computing units 15 percent, and consumer electronics, which has phones in it falling by 15 percent. Foxconn did note that all its main factories in China have now resumed normal operations. Microsoft published threat intelligence data related to COVID-19 themed attacks on GitHub. This data comes from trillions of signals each day seen across identities and point cloud applications and email by Microsoft and has already rolled out into Microsoft solutions like Microsoft Threat Protection and Azure Sentinel. Microsoft also provided attack indicators to raise awareness of attackers shift on techniques, how to spot them and how to enable customized detection. NVIDIA launched Clara Guardian, an edge AI system designed for hospitals. Using sensors, the system can check people for elevated temperatures, use computer vision analysis to monitor for social distancing, and do contactless patient monitoring. The system will use NVIDIA's EGX edge AI chips available in late 2020 and is currently in test development in 50 hospitals across China, France, Italy, and Israel covering 10,000 hospital rooms. And Facebook announced its Messenger Rooms group chat feature now available to all users across mobile and desktop. Messenger Rooms lets up to 50 participants chat with no time limit. Rooms can be used under the people tab in the Messenger app or from the top of the main Facebook news feed and users can specify who can join, even letting non-Facebook users join the calls. All right, let's talk a little more about something else Facebook did, Sarah. Oh, let's. Facebook has acquired GIF making and sharing site Giffy. You might call it Giffy and that's fine, but that's what it acquired and put it under the Instagram organization. Giffy is already integrated into Instagram Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as several third party services that you might use. Facebook says 50% of Giffy's traffic comes from Facebook properties, though. Instagram's VP of product Vishal Saw says that Giffy's API partners will continue to have the same access to Giffy's APIs and the community can still create GIFs there. So I don't know. I mean, unless GIFs are getting pulled away from something that you really use it for, is this really a big deal? Because man, it's being called as a really big acquisition. Yeah, the need your reaction in any acquisition is, oh, they're going to ruin my favorite thing, right? And with Facebook these days, people just immediately assume evil intentions, whether it's called for or not. Facebook's saying all the right things, though, right? They're saying we're going to continue to leave it operating as it is. It already is integrated in all their products. They're going to try to find new and cooler ways to integrate it. But other than maybe being critical of Facebook getting bigger and owning another piece of the internet, I don't know that they've said anything that warrants criticism right away. As long as I get to keep my rock slow capping while hard chewing gum, Giff, I'm okay with it. I actually really thought where do I use this? It's almost exclusively on Facebook, on Instagram time. You mentioned earlier that you use it on Twitter. Yeah, yeah. But it's true. I do use it mostly with Facebook properties. So as long as they are not going to snatch stuff away, I think that people are going to be upset right now. But after time, they won't care because they still use it like they've always used it. I mean, a lot of this people going like, Giffy, isn't it like sort of fun animated Gifs? Yeah, in many ways it is. And then I've also seen, especially from particular news outlets today, like, well, Facebook's taken over your keyboard now. What are you going to do about that? And it's sort of like, like, is this really the acquisition that would make us say this? Yeah, I don't consider Giffy as an integral part of my keyboard. I guess there are plenty of situations where you've got Giff integration, if you've got the Giffy app in iOS or Android integrated. But how many Facebook things are also integrated with the keyboard somehow? Like, there's legitimate criticisms of Facebook and a legitimate criticism to be made that Facebook maybe is holding too much power over certain activities on the internet. And maybe Giffy deserves some antitrust investigation, which sounds hilarious in retrospect. But I don't think that Facebook owning Giffy means they now control, I don't know, there's a line there. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah. So analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple plans to launch a 10.8 inch iPad in the first half of 2020 and an eight and a half to nine inch iPad mini in the second half of 2020. Kuo also says tablets will have a low price point with up-to-date chips. Kuo also said that Apple's upcoming AR glasses will launch in 2022 at the earliest. However, YouTuber John Prosser claims that they will launch in March to June timeframe of 2021. They actually both could be right as the information says Apple is working on an AR headset for 2022 and an AR glasses set for 2023. All right, let's talk about augmented reality. First of all, I like the idea that we might be getting close to finally seeing what they've been working on. They've hired enough people, they just required next VR this week. Yeah, so you know they're working on something, and I'm very interested to see what it is. But I'm also kind of interested in industry veteran, longtime proven credible analyst whose predictions generally are spot on. Ming-Chi Kuo going up against the young up-and-comer YouTuber John Prosser over the date of the AR glasses, we will check back in March to June 2021 to see who will win this epic fight. Well, the thing is that, so Kuo is very, very, like he understands the supply chain and what might be on par, delayed, maybe brought to the forefront kind of thing like no other. However, John Prosser also says, I've seen these AR glasses. I've tried out at least a prototype and I like them. They're both going to be right. I'm assuming they're both going to be right. Something's going to come out shortly. Something's going to come out shortly after that. And they're both going to be able to say, see, I was right. So I am kind of excited to see what they're doing with AR. But also at the beginning, the story was the inexpensive iPads. I'm excited to see those because we were talking about this a little earlier. I believe that school is going to be different in the fall than it's ever been. So there's going to be a lot of remote learning. And these are devices that you probably can relatively easily get into the hands of school children to allow them to do their online learning. Because I think even if they aren't going to class, it's just going to be a level of disruption that we haven't seen where they're going to be doing a lot of work at home, maybe going every other day or something like that. And one day work from home, one day work in the classroom. So I think that these inexpensive iPads are going to go a long way to enabling those kind of efforts. Yeah. Quo saying that they will take the same approach as the iPhone SE makes sense. Upgrade the chips, but maybe keep the form factors simpler. These will be larger versions of affordable iPads. I think the 10.1 inch at $329 is maybe the cheapest one. I know $329 is the cheapest one they have. So will we see a $299 iPad between 8.5 to 9 inches there? It would be the largest iPad mini at 8.5 to 9 inches, I think, that they have done. So yeah, I think you're right. It may not be as splashy and flashy as an AR rumor, but it is the more impactful if you've got affordable iPads out there when more and more kids need access to that and in schools, too. In a post on the Chromium blog, Google announced it plans to block ads that use up to too many system resources. Google said this would impact 0.3% of ads that use 27% of network data taken by ads and 28% of CPU usage. Chrome would set a limit of four megabits of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period going forward or 60 seconds of total CPU usage and ads over that limit would show an error message advising that the user was seeing that because that is not showing because it was taken up too much space. The Chrome team will experiment with these features in the next few months with a plan to launch it in the stable Chrome channel in August. Man, yeah, I don't imagine anybody who isn't trying to do crypto mining in an ad is going to complain about this. I mean, 0.3% of ads using 27% of network data. That's crazy. 28% of CPU usage. I mean, how many times have you had your browser run and it just starts, you know, the fan starts blowing and you're like, what is that? And you turn off scripts and suddenly it goes away. Like ads on their own, even legitimate ads build up those processes. And if you've got something that's just taking over way more resources, either through incompetence because it's just programmed badly or maliciousness, I don't think there's anybody who's going to say, I don't want that to go away, right? Yeah, Google knows that bad ads keep people from clicking on good ads that they're generally not bothered by. So if you've got an ad that's going to crash your system, the next ad that actually may have been something that was beneficial to you that you may have clicked on, you're just going to have an aversion to doing it. So this makes sense business sense for them to get that look out of their system so that they can continue to make money for every click on the ones that meet their criteria. Yeah, for sure. And also, Sarah, as you were saying, having a big, big blank space in the middle that had some Laura Mipson kind of text in the example they showed on venture.com that I saw, but just saying like, Hey, this ad was eating up your system resources. Can you imagine as a user being like, bummer, I really wanted it. But it's good to sort of know, I suppose. But when people are trying to bypass ads left and right for the most part, it seems like this is a call to whoever's making ads, bring down that data, or you're going to get you're going to bounce out of here. All right, some people may stay working from home. We talked earlier this week about Twitter saying that their folk can just stay working from home indefinitely unless they have a job that requires them to be on location. A Gartner survey back in April found that 74% of company CFOs expect at least some of their employees to remain permanent remote workers even after there's a vaccine for COVID-19. Wired reports some anecdotes box saying that they found their engineers push releases quicker working from home in their case and that reaching customers has been easier because you don't have to fly to meet them. You just call them up on a video conference. A startup called cul-de-sac has already given up its $25,000 a month San Francisco office space because they thought their workers became happier and more productive working from home. Not all companies are going to be able to take advantage of this. Apple is a very big example of having some security policies that mean they can't get a lot of things done and keep the security policy, especially when it comes to building hardware. So they are already planning to bring people back into the office later this month. If you do have to go back in the office too it's going to be different. According to a survey from commercial real estate company CBRE expect social distancing easily. 80% of the people they surveyed are going to do that. There will probably be some kind of face covering policy whether it's you have to have it on all the time or certain situations. Certainly there will be restrictions on visitors. Visitors may be banned entirely or just limited. Possibly employee health screenings. Some places will be doing fever checks and maybe some testing. TechCrunch reports that some country companies will even look at overhauling their air filtering and circulation. Implementing sensors that determine how many people are in a room to make sure that it's not over the new capacity. And putting markings on the floor to control movement around the office. Cameras might be up that monitor compliance. Some are even considering putting in robots to patrol the buildings and do cleaning like we've seen some robots doing with ultraviolet in hospitals. So I mean this is going to sound real obvious to say but no matter what even when we all come out of the lockdown as countries and cities are reopening around the world the office is going to be different. Very different. It's going to be very very different and I think that a lot of folks are not going to go back. But you know as this article is saying there's going to be some people who just the nature of their job requires them to be in an office so you're going to see a lot of differences in the way you used to work probably middle of March going back and how you will work let's say June going forward. It's just going to be a different beast of how you interact in an office. Well I think a lot of you know these the details about okay how will the office environment work okay to make everyone safe when we come back to it. In some cases okay well we're going to have to you know make sure you pull out some some deaths so that nobody's too close to each other. Maybe there's you know yeah staggered hours. All of that makes sense but there are also certain physical places where the company is going to be like you know what this is a wash. This is this let's close it down. Let's figure out where to open it up in the future. Not everybody's going to work from home. I mean in some cases maybe everybody will but most of the time let's reimagine this because you're not just going to like pull out an HVAC and be like well let's make everybody safer like in in many ways I think that open office office atmosphere is kind of maybe you know should have died a long time ago. I do imagine that especially for you folks out in California that outdoor meetings are going to be an all-time high in the second half of this year. Unless it's too hot right that would be that would be the only reason yeah that's that's a really good really good point. Companies are going to have to adapt in lots of different ways and and I think you're both right. It's going to be an evaluation case by case. Obviously Twitter is not going to have their data center employees working from home if they're meant to be swapping out RAM and stuff like that you need maintenance people on site so that's that's going to continue but where companies have the opportunity they probably will do a lot like cul-de-sac and say look it's twenty five thousand dollars a month for an eight person office in San Francisco that we now have to spend extra money to pandemic proof. We can't put as many people in that same amount of space as we used to. We can't we can't have you know the the same kind of situation as far as amenities that we used to. We have to safeguard food and all of the costs to adapt to that even you know just smaller costs like bringing in masks and everything maybe enough for company to stay. We'd rather spend that money helping people build up their their home work offices and you see that slack just increased their allotment from five hundred dollars to to an extra thousand so fifteen hundred dollars to help people build out their workspace at home. Twitter is giving people a thousand dollars as we mentioned earlier this week a lot of companies have that kind of stipend to say look the money we're saving on not running the office we're going to use some of that to help you build out your home office and then once you've done that I mean there aren't a whole lot of ongoing maintenance issues there. Maybe you give people a break on their cell phone or internet on an ongoing basis but a lot of companies are going to be doing a lot of cost analysis on that. I know Sarah you were talking about a friend of yours that that their workspace was essentially the size of a conference room and that's just not workable. Yeah exactly the idea of like well it was a conference room but a bunch of us were in there because that's where you know you could put the cubicles and it was is in in our previous world like I don't know it was you know close quarters now can't do it yeah cannot legally do it and that and I I know that a lot of people are sort of nodding to the fact that there were a lot of configurations that were bad in their first place bad for people you know bad for comforts bad for being able to you know stretch out and and feel comfortable so you know I hate to say like this is a good thing but imagining the physical workspace probably you know was what was a long time coming. I can tell you what I personally will not miss that that open workspace where everybody just was kind of sitting right on top of each other. There was no barriers you know I hated that you know I don't want to say it was a millennial thing because I think they hated it too but somebody thought it looked cute it looked good but uh but yeah that I won't be sad to see those go away it was supposed to be like we're all collaborating together there's no you know wells between us type thing that actually sucks people need privacy even at work yeah you can't force them into collaboration yeah that's for sure well I don't know maybe maybe uh if enough of these companies move people to work from home reduce their office space usage the price of offices go down and then the companies that do need to bring people into the office uh well we'll be able to save some money on that and and possibly provide better benefits better pay uh for people as well hey if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com tech crunches Danny Crichton puts it this way China wants to build and grow while America wants to design and buy that's why the two have to work with each other but there is a dispute going on to try to get the upper hand in that relationship that these two countries find themselves in and over the past 24 to 48 hours we've had several developments impacting that the first the U.S. has extended a temporary license that lets some U.S. companies usually rural ISPs continue to do business with Huawei to support equipment that they had already bought that is now extended through August 13th but the Department of Commerce has said this is the last extension you need to figure your stuff out so that you don't need to work with Huawei after August 13th the U.S. Department of Commerce also has increased restrictions of what can be traded with Huawei in its words and this is not mincing any words this is from the Department of Commerce announcement to strategically target Huawei's acquisition of semiconductors they're calling acquiring semiconductors from non-us companies a loophole so the new rules require any company foreign company that uses us chip making equipment to obtain a U.S. license before supplying certain chips to Huawei or its affiliates while we will need to obtain a license to receive certain semiconductors and use certain designs if you're wondering how they can get away with that well most chip manufacturers worldwide rely on equipment produced by U.S. companies the foundries may be in Taiwan or Vietnam or China but the companies like applied materials lamb research and KLA that make the equipment used in those foundries are in the United States China of course not happy with this is now once again saying they're considering putting U.S. companies on its unreliable entity list China has said this previously before there was a simmering down of this relationship there was an agreement that is still in place that was supposed to kind of calm all this China now says it could launch investigations into Apple Cisco and Qualcomm and might suspend purchase of Boeing airplanes again they're saying this they haven't done it yet they didn't do it last time we'll see what happens this time one of the companies caught up and this is TSMC TSMC is a Taiwanese company they have a lot of factories in China and they get a lot of equipment and design from the United States so they would be one of the companies that would have to stop supplying Huawei if they couldn't get a license interestingly Taiwan's TSMC just announced a deal with the U.S. government to build a factory in Arizona to make five nanometer chips thanks to what it calls forward-looking investment policies from state and U.S. governments in the past TSMC has said they'd need subsidies they're not coming out and saying they're getting subsidies but they're certainly getting some kind of assistance from the state of Arizona and the U.S. federal government now TSMC you may be forgiven for not realizing already operates a foundry in the U.S. state of Washington in the town of commas and has design centers in Austin and San Jose so they're TSMC is not new to the United States but building a five nanometer chip plant in the United States is a big deal that that is probably the most significant of their developments in the country the Arizona plant will not start production of chips until 2024 so this is not something that's going to start bringing chips to U.S. to U.S. assemblers right away but there's a lot of moves by the U.S. in this trade dispute specifically in the tech sector to try to strangle Huawei and whether this is being done to force China's hand in the broader trade conversation whether it's just punitive to try to drive Huawei out of business because the United States government has made it very clear that they do not trust Huawei. It's you know it's up to you to kind of decide what you believe but the fact of the matter is they are putting the pressure not only on Huawei at the supply source with semiconductors but also putting the pressure on the entire Chinese system by going after some of its biggest contributors in TSMC. Well I know a lot of folks who have listened to our coverage of this as of late depending on the company is like okay well Apple's moving some chip production into Vietnam from China or you know there's some U.S. production that seems to be lined up even if it's in 2024 at least we're going in the right direction right like is that is that the is that the call is that the call right now to if the U.S. and China are are involved in a trade war for the foreseeable future do you get just get things out of China? Yeah that's a good question certainly it's a part of it a larger part of it right now is the the supply chain disruption that happened because of COVID-19 when China shut down its factories in February and companies realized that they had a lot more of their supply coming from one location so I think that is the the near-term instigator but but certainly that background of a trade dispute was part of this I don't know the TSMC thing seems to be more of a carrot in that situation of like hey here's another reason we might want to look elsewhere maybe we can get the U.S. to give us a break on taxes like TSMC got the Huawei thing is very specific to Huawei though I don't I don't know that that really has any effect on why what companies Apple would pick that that would be the more the wider trade war and the trade restrictions that that involve things beyond just Huawei because there's there's sort of two aspects of that going on. Yeah I think that you know you kind of hit it on the you know the nail on the head there that it's just kind of two things happening at the same time TSMC was probably doing this regardless of whether or not the pandemic happened but also the pandemic is showing that we might want to do a little bit more of this because we are so dependent you know on getting stuff from elsewhere so you know one of the things is that you know you can't just throw a foundry up in a couple of months these things take years not not just to build the building and get the you know get the hardware and get the processing correct but you've got to train the workforce that's actually going to do it so these are decisions that have been thought long and hard about but I would not be shocked if we see you know another company or two or three or more this I am if we can get a tax break let's see if we can't build something in the States might be beneficial to us joining the conversation in our discord if you've got thoughts on this or anything else you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns all right let's check out the mailbag oh let's do it Mike from what does even matter because I'm inside right says you're talking about tech firms potentially looking at hiring or incentivizing people outside of the Bay Area had me thinking I'm surprised they haven't done this yet Mike says the federal workforce is spread out all over the world and 100k doesn't go as far as everywhere depending on where you live that's why they include locality pay on top of base pay depending on where you live that said I would not encourage tech firms to use the federal model the cost of living is calculated on housing groceries utilities fuel etc this seems logical but in Washington a one bedroom condo is what a couple might do expect to live in versus Omaha where it might be a two bedroom home parking in large cities very expensive sometimes rare making suburban living a different commute all together groceries are a nice basis but if you're a senior professional the expense of small luxuries like going out to a restaurant should also be considered yeah this is interesting so I like Mike saying hey what we do works which is there's a base pay for a role but there's locality pay if you live in an especially expensive area and that seems to make sense but Mike also is saying but don't calculate that the way we do because it doesn't always fit the location and that's that's a good piece of information there as well thank you Mike and thanks to our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Philip less Frederick Frederick Huebner and James P. Coleson I'm sorry for laughing but I took a peek at Len Peralta's art already and I'm already laughing so let's check it with yes Len what have you drawn for us well you know um I I had the same sort of reaction that Sarah had when I saw the Facebook buying a giffy story um and I thought I'd put it into uh an image here um if you guys are familiar with that one meme of the little girl making the weird face um that's the that's the reaction I had when I heard about it I was like me just in case you were concerned no it's probably my favorite give of all time I just use that constantly uh and if you don't know what I'm talking about go out and check it out at my online store at Len for all store dot com or you can get it right now at patreon.com forward slash Len thank you Len uh thank you for the laughs also I was gonna make you laugh you really did I'm a little I'm a little flummoxed uh also thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today Rob always so good to have you and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work sure I am uh at Rob Dunwood on pretty much everything so Instagram Twitter um and you can definitely uh get ahold of me over at the smr podcast that's where me and a couple other uh guys do a weekly podcast about tech and other stuff yeah folks uh I I discovered the smr podcast a couple years back and I'm so glad I did so uh go join Rob Chris and Rod over there have a good time here and another perspective on technology and the person that tip me off to that show is one Allison Sheridan and we want to take a moment here uh to congratulate Allison on 15 years of no silicast podcasts as of this weekend uh so go take a listen and if you listen live on sunday give her a hearty congratulations on our behalf as well uh Allison of course on the show from time to time uh huge friend of ours uh so congratulations Allison uh go check it out pod feet dot com and of course you could support our show at any level at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon 15 years we should all be so lucky congratulations allison and team our email address at dtns is feedback at daily tech news show dot com we're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m eastern 2030 utc and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back on monday with ant prude as our guest talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com the club hopes you have enjoyed this