 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, and DeGrasia A. Daniels. Coming up on DTNS, why can't our phones be actually waterproof, YouTube's new tools to fight comment spam, and channel imitators and third-party payments come to the Apple Store in Korea? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 30th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chin. I am ready to figure out why I can't throw my phone in a bathtub full of water. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. ARM announced its latest CPU core designs, the high-performance Cortex-X3 and medium-core Cortex-A715. ARM's proposed design for socks would have one Cortex-X3 core, three A715 cores, and four efficiency Cortex-A510 cores. ARM says the X3 will offer 25% better performance than the outgoing X2, with the A715 offering performance like the Cortex-X1 core from 2020, with 20% more energy efficiency and 5% better performance than the outgoing A710. The A715 drops 32-bit support, meaning flagship systems on ships based on ARM's reference design would be 64-bit only. The NFT marketplace OpenC warned users that a staffer at the email vendor customer.io misused employee access to download and share email addresses of its users to an unauthorized third party. OpenC said that if you ever shared an email with it in the past, quote, you should assume that you've been impacted. Customer.io said it did not believe any other client data has been compromised. Samsung began mass-producing chips using its 3-nanometer process, reaching production ahead of rival TSMC. Samsung said the process reduces power usage by 45% and improves performance by 23% compared to its 5-nanometer process, no word on which customer will receive these initial chips. Samsung says they were for a high-performance, low-power computing application. Google is updating the Chrome password manager so that it syncs with Android password manager. There will now be a single page to manage both at passwords.google. And Google's switch to Android app for iOS now works for all Android 12 phones, not just the Pixel. Researchers at Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs detailed a highly-sophisticated custom-built malware called ZUO-RAT, infecting small office and home routers from Cisco, Netgear, Asus, and Dreitech. Once infected, ZUO-RAT finds all connected devices with the threat actor using DNS and HTTP hijacking to install other malware on, with custom malware able to target Windows, Linux, and macOS. Researchers say ZUO-RAT's structure appears intentionally complex, combined with being highly targeted against U.S. and Western European organizations. It indicates the capabilities of a state-sponsored actor. So, as always, make sure you're up-to-date on your patches. And if you're infected, reboot your machine. If you reboot the router, that'll get rid of the malware, though a full-factory reset is recommended for full recovery. Alright, Justin, tell us what is up with Apple. Oh, that rascally company, Apple. Well, they have another policy proposal for allowing third-party payments on iOS apps. So to catch you up, Apple is facing various pressures to allow third-party payments for apps in its iOS app store. In the U.S., a court ruled that Apple had to allow, quote, buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchase mechanisms. The wording on that is vague, and the final word on it is yet to come, as Apple appealed that part of the case and was now granted a stay on implementing it back on December 8th. Apple has been in a back-and-forth with Dutch regulators about allowing dating apps to use the third-party payments system. Apple gives those developers a 3% discount on app store fees, so they still have to pay Apple's 27% or 12% depending on where they fall in the policy. But the biggest effort comes to us from South Korea, which passed a law last August aimed at Google, but requires all mobile app stores of a certain size to allow third-party payment systems, which pretty much brings us up to now, right, Tom? Yeah, Apple announced Thursday its latest proposed policy that allows Korean app store apps to implement third-party payment. A developer who wants to take advantage of that must fill out a form, and the payment processors must meet certain criteria for reliability. Apple recommends that you use one of the following, like, white-listed companies, KCP, InSys, TOS, and NICE as pre-approved payment processors that will pass inspection. If you implement a third-party system, you cannot also offer Apple's in-app systems. You have to choose. There's also some language that must show up in the app advising users they are not using Apple's system, so some features like family sharing aren't going to work if you use a third-party payment processor. And developers have to agree that they will handle all requests for refunds and subscription management. A new binary must be submitted for distribution in the Korean store, which is similar to what they did for the Dutch dating apps as well. And developers get a little more discount in Korea than they do in the Netherlands. 4% off of payments. But that means if they would normally give Apple 30% of their cut, if they use the third-party payment system, they give Apple 26%. And we should know that this policy must be approved by the Korean Communication Commission, the KCC, which previously expressed criticism at Apple for still keeping such a large portion of payments. Yeah, so I mean, this is just kind of an update for everybody if you're wondering like, okay, so where are we with Apple allowing third-party payments? How's it going to work? You know, now that we've seen the Netherlands system, which is limited to just the dating apps because there's some quirks in the way they're applying regulatory frameworks there. But we're also seeing the Korean one and it's going to be somewhere around 26% to 27%. You still have to pay Apple in order to be listed in the store. And then this white listing of payment processors I think is probably a smart way to go about that to say like, we want to make sure we're regulating these to be reliable ways of paying because people are going to complain to Apple no matter what. So here are some ones we know meet our criteria. Not only meet our criteria, but I believe we are seeing the future of where this problem is going to go for them. Sure, you can use a third-party payment system, but we're going to discourage you against rolling your own so you can keep an even larger share of the profits. And we are going to recommend that you use these trusted vendors. At that point, I would not be shocked considering Apple is making sure that you know that there are certain ancillary features that you will not get access to if you don't use Apple's own proprietary system. Wouldn't be shocked if going forward that maybe these trusted vendors make another deal with Apple so you can include more of these kinds of features when you use them, if you want to use them. I think this is Apple shoring up their ability that they still would be able to wet their beaks, so to speak. Yeah, and I think to a certain extent it's justified for Apple to say, we are operating the App Store. We don't charge a listing fee for that. Yeah, so this is the way we have chosen to recover the cost because we let people list for free. We're going to take a chunk. You can argue whether it should be 30%, 15%, 26%. Those numbers, that's up for argument. But yeah, this is the route they've chosen to fund development of the App Store. And of course, there's no way that they are going to make any move on this until they absolutely legally have to because they know exactly what the law is country by country, and they are going to work their best magic around that law. And it just makes sense for them to do so. Man, wouldn't it be something though if Apple just said, you know what? We're tired. We're tired of fighting. Like, they would wait for all the legal processes to play out. But if they were just like, we're just going to make a new policy for everybody. Here you go. Sorry, everybody. Yeah, but every second they wait, that sweet 30% cut just keeps on coming in, keeps on coming. What if they start to realize though, they're like, oh wait, if we let Netflix do this and we give them 20%, then we get the Netflix money, which we're not getting any of right now. Well, that I think is probably continuing to be figured out. Yeah. Well, YouTube announced some new policies to try to fight comments spam and channel imitators. Comments spam is going to get combated by letting creators select increase strictness. This isn't even a new option. It's a checkmark under the existing option. Hold all potentially inappropriate comments for review. So right now you can either just let everything go up, which, you know, if your channel of a certain size is a recipe for disaster, you can say let the AI determine what might be a problem based on some things that it knows and to hold those for me to review, but let the stuff that's okay go up. Although that will allow some inappropriate stuff through. Now you can do the increased strictness, which is like, you know, I want to review even more, get a little stricter on what you let up. Or you can just stop comments from going up altogether and hold them all for review, turn them off altogether. What do you think of this part before we get to the channel stuff? I actually think that it's, I mean, it's an interesting way for them to solve that. Obviously YouTube is a user base that is wide and varied. And so they need to keep their solutions as simple as possible. But man, I actually, in reading this was thinking I would love to see more control in granularity of how you control your comments. I think it would be, it would behoove the YouTube community. If on your channel you could do a video that says, Hey, from here on out, we're only going to do, or maybe video by video. I'm only going to do five word comments on this because if people want to say something that is a bumper sticker length, then that's, that is what it is. But if you want to say something more, we're going to encourage you to go to our discord, for example. I think that there's a real opportunity here to help you mold your community in those comments. Yeah, there's some fine tuning that they could offer. I think what YouTube's trying to do though is keep it really, really simple. Yes, you know, just, just, just keep it so that you don't have to think about it a lot, which is why this is comically a check mark of like, I don't know, hold some stuff, maybe hold more stuff, because some stuff's coming through. So I like that they're keeping it simple. But honestly, this is the old Apple versus Microsoft approach argument, right? Microsoft says, we'll let it be simple if you want, but we'll give you the tools to make it complicated underneath, because Apple just has, you know, historically walled you off and said, we're just going to make it simple and you don't need to make it complicated. Unless you want to go into the, you know, terminal and start doing things there. But you want to know what I would almost say in the world of community of digital community, then this is, you know, a Twitter versus Reddit or something like that. Reddit offers a lot of moderation tools. You can communicate both that are policed by mods and that are done automatically. And I think YouTube, look, they are of a certain size and creators of built communities that deserve those tools. No, that's a good allegory. Thank you for bringing the allegory into the 21st century. Yeah, there we go. It's only 20 years old as opposed to... All right, let's talk about the channel thing. As of July 29th, channels will not be allowed to hide their subscriber counts. Now, YouTube acknowledged in the post about this that some smaller channels hide their subscriber counts so they don't look unpopular because if people don't know, then they may be more likely to subscribe. But scammers and imitators use that to their advantage too. So they try to trick viewers into thinking they're a larger channel. Often what they'll do is use similar characters. And so YouTube is reducing the character set you can use as well. So they, you know, if they wanted to pretend to be YouTube itself, they might use the yen character because it looks like a wine. If somebody's not paying attention, they click on it. And then they create a channel that looks like the channel they're trying to imitate. But you wouldn't be able to tell it's not. Now, with subscriber counts front and center, you'll see, wait a minute, the channel, the beast channel I was, Mr. Beast Channel I was trying to go to, I know has millions of subscribers. This one only has six. Maybe I'm at the wrong place. I think it's a smart idea. Yeah. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Associate Professor Reich Cho of the CQ University in Australia has an article in the conversation called, it's 2022. Why do we still not have waterproof phones? It's definitely worth a read. Smartphones have varying levels of water resistance, and some of them are quite impressive, but they aren't waterproof. Waterproof means water can't get in. You've likely heard phones described as being IP69, water and dust resistant or some such thing. But Tom, what are those numbers mean? Yeah. So the IP in this case does not stand for intellectual property. It stands for ingress protection rating. It's overseen by the International Electrotechnical Commission, the IEC. That is a standards commission. It's been around since 1908. So like IEEE or ISO, if you're familiar with those, it's made up of companies, governments, users, unions, a bunch of other people, simply to make things easy for everybody to be on the same page. Each IP rating has two numbers, like you heard IP68, for example. The first is rating of protection against solids. So if you see IP68, the six is for dust. The second number is the rating against water. Solid rating goes from one to six. Rating goes from one to nine. So IP68 would mean it's dust tight and almost water tight. The example that Justin gave is the max you could do. IP69 means it's dust tight and water tight. The eight rating for water means it can withstand continuous immersion, but maybe not high pressure jets of water. Nine is protected against, you know, hitting it with a power cleanser. But Samsung phones are certified IP68. They got fined in Australia last week for over promising water resistance. What was that about? Yeah, so there's some caveats around the eight. In Samsung's case, it was IP68 up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes at a time. An iPhone is also IP68, good at the eight rating for up to six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. So if you drop them in water briefly, which is 99% of these encounters, you're still probably fine. Yeah. If you drop an IP68 phone in the toilet and grab it right away, you should be okay. But there are other considerations. So if you drop it in a pool, chlorine. If you drop it in the ocean, salt. That can corrode the exterior. It can cause damage to the phone, especially the charging port. If you drop it in the ocean, you really need to dry it out and clean it before you try to charge it. And waterproofing materials degrade over time, too. So the older a phone gets, the less waterproof it's going to be. Those seals and things just start to degrade. Also, if you dropped it and broke it, if you've cracked the screen or if you cracked the case, obviously that adds another way for water and dust to get in. All right. I think I get the rating system now, but let's go back to our original question. Why can't we just make these things waterproof, Tom? Yeah, yeah. So the weak points on our phone are the buttons and the ports. Your headphone jack, your charging port, your up and down volume buttons. The camera also, the camera casing, has to be watertight and dust tight. Depending on what you're sealing, you might use glue, adhesive strips, tape, silicone, rubber seals. And then a lot of companies are starting to do a polymer coating added to the circuit board. So if a little water does get in it, it keeps it off of the circuit board. It repels it from there. A company is developing a process for that that injects an insulator into smaller devices like the Apple Watch and the Fitbit. They don't quite have that process for the bigger stuff. But all of that adds cost. Adding all those seals adds cost to the production. In fact, Xiaomi co-founder Lee Jun once estimated, like back in 2016, that making a Xiaomi phone waterproof added 20% to 30% to the cost. So Professor Chu notes that there are some new methods that might make it easier to waterproof the phone. A coating similar to the one applied to circuit boards might be added to the outside of the phone. This would have to be more durable since it was the subject to the wear and tear of you touching it in the way that circuit boards are not. And circuit boards could be made on waterproof silicone, therefore obviously making them more waterproof. Yeah, PZ Milesi in the chat points out that Samsung mostly got the attention and therefore eventually the fine. Because IP68 is accurate, that's okay. And they had the information about this many minutes, this amount of water. But they were showing people swimming and surfing in their advertising. And like I mentioned, ocean water can corrode that port and they were properly disclosing that. So there's a lot that goes into this. It really is something where if you're going to have a way to get into the phone with a jack or a port, it makes it more expensive and harder to waterproof it, which is another reason why I know Apple is kind of pursuing that portless future, right? No buttons, no ports. It makes it easy to make it waterproof. You know, it did make me reflect at how far we have come in the waterproofing or water resistance that we do have now. There was certainly a time where at any moment that I might have fallen into a pool with my phone, it would have immediately gone in the bag of rice, however apocryphal that solution is. But now I, you know, if I go out paddle boarding on Lady Bird Lake, I'll often just keep my phone in my pocket, where I know I might fall in, but I'm not really worried about it. Yeah. I remember sitting in a pool a few years ago and realizing my phone was in my pocket and just giving up, like not even bothering taking it out and throwing in the rice. Like, no, it's done. And that was back before water proofing. Things were a little water resistant, but maybe we're talking, you know, five, not even eight. These days, it does feel like, yeah, you can splash it. You can drop it in water. If you grab it real quick, it's going to be fine. I think we've made a lot of progress, but I think a lot of people are like, yeah, but don't we have the ability to just seal this stuff off? And we do. It just would make your phone really expensive. And so, you know, companies are trying to balance that out. Not to mention, like it makes it harder to repair to go through all that stuff. I don't think the companies care so much about that, but that's another part of this too. Yeah. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. One day we're going to have robot umpires. That would be umpires that are actually robots. That day is not coming soon, but a lot of people use the term robot umpires to refer to using algorithms to aid in calling balls and strikes. We talked about this on May 31st on the show. We'll have a link to that show in the show notes if you want to get the full discussion about how that all works. But we have an update. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN this week that he wants the automated ball strike system, as they call it, implemented in 2024. So he's got to get the players on board. He's got to get the fans on board. He's got two years to do it. A fully automated system would, if you didn't listen to that May 31st show, send the call to the umpire over an iPhone. And then he would say it out loud. They're trying that in the minor leagues right now. They might do it that way in Major League Baseball, but the Verge pointed out the other option they have would be to make it an appealable thing. So the humans would keep calling balls and strikes, but you would have a certain number of challenges every game to say, I think that was outside. And then the algorithm would weigh in and have the final word. And that's effectively what they do in tennis, right? That is called by a line judge. And then you can appeal that. And then they will show the motion graphic of exactly where the computer said it hit, which I think is good. But boy, Tom, you're a fan of baseball. This league, man, they love doing things about five, six years after it would have made sense to really do it when people were paying attention. Yeah. I mean, never, I am not a big fan of the, why didn't you do this before criticism? Because it usually comes when they've done something. Yes. You know, and it's like, well, they're doing it now. Okay. They didn't do it before. The past is the past. I go, I'll mark McGuire on it, but, but I do like this. I do like this because balls and strikes shouldn't be subjective. I know some people argue like, oh, it's the beauty of the game. You get used to the empire and everybody's on the same page. Hey, how about this? How about if everybody's on the same page all the time at every game? Like I, I, I'm not going to rule out the fact that different stadiums, even if it's just psychological, not real, might be perceived as having different strike zones. It goes guarantee you that's going to happen. Well, that strike zone at the Coors field is a little wider, but it would be great if you didn't have to guess every time. Like who's behind the plate? You know, I do think it would regulate the umpire strike zone into something a little bit more normal if they knew they were going to be embarrassed by a challenge call. It's actually an interesting strategy thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. At our mail bag, a big Jim, the trade nerd wrote some excellent additional insight in our discord related to the story on shipping from Bloomberg that we talked about on Wednesday. Jim writes regarding security risks. Some of the top ocean lines in your company or some of the top ocean line in your company are working to try to secure their internal networks, including shipboard operations. However, the majority of those ocean providers that we have now are using least vessels and those least charter operations that do not necessarily follow the direct guidelines as an owner vessel by the carrier. There's also a question of which standards are they supposed to follow outside the country's waters when it comes to specific lockdown of data. The WTO statement and their guidelines are very basic at best. The World Shipping Council has advised stringent requirements that go beyond the WTO requirements. And I would expect that those are going to be more likely followed as it is a US and European group. Now, couple this with the current labor negotiations going on on the West Coast, round negotiations breaking down across the United States, a backlog of cargo that needs to move inland so much so that certain container ports have an excess of 5,000 to 10,000 containers that cannot move inland because of shortages of various types mixing in a hint of hacker and you've got a wonderful recipe for disaster. But hey, who knows, just my two cents. That was a good, that was a good imitation of big gyms. That's just my two cents there at the end. Thank you, Jim. He wrote all that and more in the general channel of the DTS Discord if you want to go and read that and ask him some questions about it too. I'm sure he'd be happy to answer. Also, Bodie, who has his own kilowatt podcast about electric vehicles, loved the discussion on the cost of electric vehicles. We had a Monday show. Wrote earlier this month, Ford's president and CEO Jim Farley was interviewed at the Bernstein 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. Farley thinks that we're going to see a price war in the EV space at the $25,000 price point with a vehicle build around $18,000. Ford and other automakers will compete on the initial price on the vehicle but use a form of shared vehicle ownership and software upgrades and or services to sweeten their profits. If you don't know what that means, shared vehicle doesn't mean you like you and five people own it. It's kind of like what Tesla does with their full self driving, where you pay $12,000 to access the feature enhanced autopilot just came back for $6,000. Bodie says I was pleased to hear Sarah Rich and Roger talk about the Chevy Bolt as an alternative to more expensive EVs. The Bolt is a good offering and with the 2023 Chevy Bolt having an estimated range of 259 miles and an MSRP of $25,600, this would be a pretty sweet option for someone wanting to get into an EV without paying a ton of money. Having said all that, if the Bolt doesn't light your fire, Bodie's got two other EVs in the $25,000 to $30,000 price range for you to consider the 2002 or the 2022, not 2002, 2022 Nissan Leaf S range of 149 miles, MSRP of $27,800, and the 2023 Mini Cooper will have a very modest range of 110 miles, but if you just need to get around town, that's plenty and cost you $30,750 according to car and driver. Thank you, Bodie, for that. Appreciate the extra info. Thanks, Boats. Yeah, and I really needed to get below $20,000 myself. I thought about buying a used Leaf because I could get it for below $20,000, but then I read that some of those older Leafs that you buy used, you know, had battery issues and when you're buying them used, the battery's already old, so if they're going to have battery issues, it's more likely. And so I'm waiting for a car that's below $20,000 new. Well, actually, these days, I'll just buy it new because used cars are right now more expensive than new cars. But yeah, if we ever go back to a world where used cars are cheaper, then I'd buy the cheaper one. Maybe one day, Tom. Maybe one day. Well, Justin, I would normally let you talk about something you've got going on, but do you mind if I say something I've got going on first? You go, sir. This was partially named by you. It was a brainstorming session with you that where we came up with the name A Word with Tom Merritt. I'm going to do a talk show. It's me and a guest using a single word to launch a conversation about how we think about the world. Not what we think. This isn't a deep dive explanation. This is a conversation about how do we deal with all the information out there? My first guest will be tomorrow Andrew Heaton talking about the word tribalism. And you can go subscribe to it in all of your favorite podcast apps or go directly to a wordpodcast.com. That is a wordpodcast.com. Go check it out. Let me know what you think. Two of my favorite erudite tall bearded co-hosts. You and Andrew Heaton. Yes. I promise that the guests will get progressively less like me as the show continues. Andrew Heaton was speaking of Andrew Heaton. He is also on a show that I do. He is a permanent co-host on We're Not Wrong featuring myself and Jen Briney in the episode that just came out today. We talk about the idea of the illegitimate Supreme Court, the testimony in the January 6th hearings and the summer of pain at the airport and whether or not we are going to see airline CEOs in front of Congress before the end of the summer. Something that you might want to listen to when you're delayed at an airport during July 4th weekend, which is coming up. We are not wrong available anywhere you get podcasts. Bring the pain on indeed. Hey, big thanks to our brand new boss, Rick, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Rick. Aw, geez, Rick. Aw, geez, Rick. Maybe Morty will be tomorrow. But for now, we're very happy to have Rick. Thank you, Rick. If you're Morty or someone else, go back as patreon.com slash DTNS and you could be featured on tomorrow's show as well as get all the perks and cool things that come with getting the patron, including like a direct feed. I had an editor's desk today for the folks at the associate producer level and up talking about my new mixer and all that sort of stuff. You also get good day internet, a longer version of the show available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We are live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta illustrating. Good to have him back. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.