 Coming up on DTNS, Apple may do subscription bundles, big tech and big government team up to manage big elections and an epic fight with Apple. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 13, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from my house, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I like that one from your house. It's easy. It's simple. You can remember it. We're just talking a lot about a little bit more about the impact of that Foxconn announcement about China being no longer the factory of the world. We were talking a little bit more extended about the epic Apple fight. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter launched its API V2 version two today after delaying the launch after that phishing attack on the platform that affected multiple high profile accounts last month. The API V2 is the first complete rebuild of Twitter's API since 2012 and offers third party developers access to features like conversation threading, poll results, pinned tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language. A free level launches today and then an upcoming elevated level won't have those API call limits, but will cost users although Twitter isn't saying how much. That crunch sources say bite dance and India's reliance industries limited have been in talk since late July to secure a reliance investment in TikTok and a move to help bring the app back to the country. India was TikTok's largest market outside of China, but it has been banned in the country since June 29th. TikTok's business in India is reportedly valued at over $3 billion. Break up TikTok. They're like the Yankees. Lyft said President John Zimmer said Lyft will suspend operations in California if it is forced to reclassify drivers as employees. Uber said Wednesday it would temporarily suspend operations if forced to reclassify. Lyft kind of left it more open-ended. California is suing both companies over the classification based on a new California law passed on January 1st. Another page texts John Prosser sources say that Apple will announce a new watch in iPad by press release the week of September 7th and then hold an iPhone 12 event the week of October 12th with basic iPhone 12s shipping the next week and pro models in November. Cannellus estimates iPhone sales rose 10% in Q2 in the U.S. while total smartphone shipments in the country fell 5%. Apple and Samsung accounted for 7 out of every 10 devices sold in the U.S. for Q2. LG had 11% for the market followed by Lenovo and its Motorola brand NTCL. A merger has begun of G Suite's Gmail and Google Meet video conferencing as well as Google Chat, which in G Suite means a Slack-like product. Organizations that have the Chat preferred option checked will see the merger roll out on web and Android. Non-G Suite users are going to see a little bit of a change. You might have seen it already. The HabBar shows up in your mobile version of Gmail with labels for mail and meet so you can more easily access the video conferencing feature there. The next web reports that China may have half the world's electric vehicle charging stations but the fastest growing nation is the Netherlands. The Dutch have increased charging infrastructure by 162.4% between 2017 and 2020, just nudging past China's 158.1% growth. France is in third place, followed by the U.K. and then Norway. The next web also notes that there are one million charging stations worldwide. All right. Let's talk about it. That epic Apple fight. Oh, baby! Rarely do things in tech yet this petty, this loud, this fast. Epic Games announced a permanent 20% price cut for Fortnite's in-app currency V-Bucks. This is how it all begins. If you buy it on console or PC versions of the game, Epic also introduced a new direct payment option on both iOS and Android that sends users to a payment screen to input a credit card or PayPal for payment, which also gets them the new cheaper V-Bucks. However, you don't get the discount if you use Apple or Google in-app payment options. No surprise Apple removed Fortnite from the store. Surprise Apple then does the fairly unlikely move for them and releases a statement about the Fortnite removal. No surprise the statement says Epic just needs to follow the rules that all developers have to follow if they want Fortnite in the store. Fortnite then shows a short film called 1980 Fortnite, which is a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of the famous 1983 Apple Super Bowl ad mocking the ubiquitous of the App Store and Fortnite's ability to crush it. Even more surprising, Epic then files a civil anti-trust suit claiming that Apple is acting in an anti-competitive fashion in its app distribution and in app payment markets. Epic says it is filing that it does not want money or special treatment but is seeking injunctive relief to allow fair competition for all developers. Tom, will Apple have to take the L as Epic does their dance in front of them in federal court? Oh, this is going to be interesting. Earlier today, all we knew was that Fortnite had added a non-Apple and non-Google payment system. I'm like, well, that's not going to last. Apple's certainly going to pull them. I wonder if Google will. We're still wondering as we record this, whether Google will or not, because Google has slightly looser rules but it's still in their developer rules says that you have to use their in-app payment system. So I'm curious how Google's going to approach this. Apple didn't surprise me at all when they're like, well, if you do that, we pull you from the store. In fact, I'm curious how they got this into Fortnite without Apple knowing it. They must have pushed it through one of the in-app updates that they can do without going through the store. But yeah, so what this means right now in case you're wondering is you can continue to play your existing Fortnite app on iOS, you won't be able to update it, which means when the new season of Fortnite rolls around, you won't get that new season and that will cause problems and you probably won't be able to play it anymore. If you don't have it installed and you did download it in the past, you can go into the App Store, into your purchased section of your profile, find it and download it. I tried that. It worked just fine. But you can't download it new. If you've never downloaded Fortnite before, you can't get it right now. And I imagine that now that a lawsuit has been filed, Apple's just going to stick to their guns. They're not going to put Fortnite back unless a court forces them to. How a court will view this will be very interesting. But what Epic has essentially done is said, we're not waiting around for the government to finally file some kind of lawsuit against Apple and the United States or not. We're going to force the issue. Yeah. I mean, I have to believe that Apple, unless for some reason Apple was like, we're never going to win in court, which that's very un-Apple of them, Fortnite must just not think it needs iOS that badly. Because if Apple pulls away with this and some, you know, a judge rules and says, yeah, these are the rules. It's always been this way. It's the same way across the board. You know, it's somewhat controversial whether or not Apple really treats developers all the same way. But that's what the company says it does. If Fortnite can do its own thing, then I guess the company prefers it that way. Well, Epic likes to make points, right? They polled their Android app for a year because they were trying to get Google to give in on the 30 percent cut they take from in-app payments and they ended up caving on that. And they ended up putting Fortnite back in the Android app store. They've got money to burn. They're willing to bet that most of their players will continue to pay for Fortnite stuff on other platforms. And more specifically, they know which way the wind is blowing politically. They watch that five-hour house situation with all these CEOs. They watch Tim Cook have to go and answer all these questions. They know that Apple Antitrust is something at the forefront of their mind as is Apple's new commitment to services and the money they make via that, more on that in a second. But they want to make this as loud and as uncomfortable as possible. And if that means running a parody of an ad that was released possibly 20 years before some of their users were born, then they want to make the biggest noise possible so everybody knows that this is a major issue and they are on the other side of it. Before we move on, just the mechanics of this. So the suit has been filed in the district court of the Northern District of California. There will be a trial. There will probably be attempts to dismiss. It will not be solved soon because this will drag on for a while. Once this is done, then there will be appeals. And if this is actually going to end up determining that Apple is violating antitrust law, it's going to have to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. So expect this to be a story for quite a while. Oh, boy. Well, on the subject of those services that Justin mentioned, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg sources say that Apple plans to launch a set of subscription service bundles in October internally calling Apple One. The base bundle would include Apple Music and Apple TV Plus. A mid-tier plan would add Apple Arcade. The next tier app, Apple News Plus, and then a top tier would include extra iCloud storage. Apple is also supposedly developing a fitness subscription offering virtual classes and workouts that would go in one of those higher-end bundles. And there are also maybe new hardware tie-ins like a free year of Apple Arcade with a new Apple TV, say all the bundles would support family sharing type thing. This isn't too surprising, though. Code found in iOS 13.5.5 did refer to a bundle offer. In a bundle subscription, we just have a little bit more information on what those look like now. I love the passing of the torch that these stories today have. John Prosser, the one saying that the Apple iPhone announcement will happen in October. Mark Gurman saying, you know, that's great, kid. Good job on that. Let me tell you one more thing that's coming in October, these subscriptions. I love watching that. I hope they're both right because this all makes sense. And I think it's super smart for Apple to do this. The only thing missing here is Tim Cook has sort of alluded that there might be a bundle that included payments for devices as well, because if you use your Apple card, you don't have to pay interest on payments over a certain amount of time. So nothing in Gurman's story about that. He says that that his sources didn't say that that was included. But I think it's obviously smart for Apple to make these bundles because the whole point of subscriptions is to tie people in, get them in the tent and keep them there. Apple is a services company now. That is what they want to grow. That is what they want to have it be bigger and bigger. It gets them. It gives them another landing pad, another stool or leg on the stool. As Steve Jobs was always a fond of saying, and this is a way to get further into that. I do think that this is part of the reason why they want to go make the big money offered to Martin Scorsese. This is the idea of getting into the fitness market. I think is very smart for them. However, they do have a hit or miss track record with content. They've they've been very good lately because they've been able to buy movies that may or may not be Oscar contenders like Tom Hanks's movie. They were able to use their big pocketbook to to to acquisition. But in terms of creating their own stuff, it has been hit or miss. So we'll see going forward because it it is content that will drive these kinds of subscription services. I know it's just sources now telling us what the tiers are going to look like. But the extra iCloud storage should be way more farther down. That's actually what I need. I'll go mid tier for something like that, which should be lower. Yeah. Yeah. Apple Arcade. Come on. I mean, I'm going to guess there'll be three tiers. Whether iCloud is in the middle tier or the top tier, I don't know. But music music and TV as the bottom tier makes sense. Those are the those that makes a lot of sense. And listen, in the in the day and age we live in where everybody's trying to buy second hand, I don't know, barbells off Craigslist subscriptions, probably going to do pretty well. Good idea. Peloton stock took a little bit of a hit on this rumor. Intel chip fans. Listen up, Intel announced details on its Tiger Lake laptop processors. It's architecture day at Intel. These 11th gen core processors will use four compute cores based on the 10 nanometer Willow Cove architecture and be the first Intel processors to use integrated ZLP graphics. Z graphics on Tiger Lake will use 96 execution units, 50 percent more than outgoing gen 11 Intel graphics, running up to 50 percent faster frequencies with support for AV one codec decoding up to four four K displays and able to play back video at up to eight K at 60 frames per second. Tiger Lake is also going to support Thunderbolt for USB for PCIe 4.0 LPD DDR5 and will launch officially on September 2nd. We'll get model numbers and all the details then. Tiger Lake uses a 10 nanometer Super Fin design. No more plus signs. They were getting a little out of control. So Intel is using the designation Super Fin. The design offers better frequency speeds at less power consumption. So same voltage level as Ice Lake would give you a big performance boost Intel claims it's a 20 percent boost in performance. We'll see Intel also previewed its discrete gaming graphics processor, the ZHPG, that's XE HPG coming in 2021. It'll have hardware accelerated ray tracing support for GDDR6 memory and it joins the ZLP low power GPU for laptops. We just mentioned ZHP for data center and the Exascale ZHPC, which you may also hear referred to as Ponte Vecchio Intel says it will have the computer efficiency of the HPG. It will have the computer efficiency of its Exascale GPU, the scalability of the data center model, graphics efficiency of the laptop version and Intel is going to even ship a discrete version of the ZLP GPU as the DG1 later this year. Not because you want an integrated graphics card as a discrete card, but just I think to show that they can do it. Finally, Intel preview the 2021 launch of 10 nanometer Golden Cove cores as part of the upcoming Alder Lake series of chips. Generally, this is being seen as a good response to Ryzen 4000 Intel showing that even though it's it's having problems moving into the lower nanometer processes, that it's still got some impressive specs and impressive performance boosts because of the way it can design things. They're claiming that they're even keeping up with Moore's law at the 10 nanometer scale. So all in all, a good announcement for Intel. Checkpoint research. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just saying this is where Intel needed to be last year. So they're playing catch up, but this is a good catch up. Checkpoint research discovered a vulnerability in the Amazon. Alex will just go ahead and say mobile app that could be leveraged to gain access to some user data. The attack would have needed the target to click on a link that would let the attacker then copy Amazon cookies. Those cookies could then use the first vulnerability and misconfigured cores policy in the Alex app to send an age track request to the Amazon Skill Store, which would then return a list of skills. The second vulnerability allowed code injection. So a cross site scripting attack could be launched on track.amazon.com and skillstore.amazon.com to acquire a CSRF token letting the attacker perform actions as if they were the target. The attacker could then replace the legitimate skill that they found on the list with a malicious skill that had the same trigger word. The malicious skill could then harvest voice history records, getting info like phone numbers, home addresses, user names, banking data history, stuff you would not want them to have. The attack wouldn't last long as Amazon routinely reviews live skills for this kind of malicious behavior and then deactivates those skills. Amazon patched the vulnerabilities after disclosure back in June. Yeah, this is a good news story. I've seen a lot of scare headlines because that's what you do to get clicks. But honestly, this is checkpoint finding a somewhat hard to exploit vulnerability. A lot of things have to go right for this to work and getting Amazon to patch it. So good job. This is a good news story. There's one of those things where whenever you have a bug infestation, what you want to see is the big bugs and not the little bugs because the little bugs mean that the big bugs are somewhere you can't say it. I like these stories where it's a very hard exploit and we're seeing it. That to me means we're seeing where that is. That is the equivalent of the big bug that cool. We're getting these as they wander in and not any kind of larger, malicious kind of underlying issues. Yes, this means there aren't a thousand more in the walls, possibly. Yes, exactly. That's what I hopefully. In Chrome 86, Google will test showing only domain names in Chrome's address bar rather than the full URLs. The move is an effort to protect users against scams and phishing attacks using misleading URLs similar to what Safari does. Google will test the idea that if you get used to only seeing the domain name, you might look be more likely to notice a phishing scam that looks like the legitimate site, but has a different domain. The test will be rolled out to a random subset of users of the canary and developers build of Chrome, or users can enable the setting in Chrome's Flags page. Apple Safari browser only shows domain names by default. Yeah, I actually like the way Safari does this, which is like, you know, it will just do it. We don't say any downside. You can turn it off if you want, if you want to see full URLs. But why not? I'm not sure why Chrome's being so careful here. But that said, I'm also not sure how effective this is. And it'll be interesting to see what their test tells us. Because, you know, the idea is that people just start to see a big, long URL in their address bar and they just ignore it, no matter what it says. Whereas if you just have the domain name, they're more likely to pay attention to it and notice when you're like, hey, that doesn't say Wellsfargo.com. That's something else. Yeah, it's that is I'm not sure. I don't know. It's it's different. I'm so used to seeing the full string and it sometimes is helpful, depending on what I'm looking at. You know, if I'm looking for a particular page within a domain. But yeah, most of the time, it probably looks like gobbledygook to folks. So if it's helpful at all to to let kind of weird things stand out, that is good. Then folks like you and I could turn it off, right? Yeah, the point here isn't that it's the magic bullet. The point that it could be one thing that you see that catches your eye that might lead you to safer internet behavior. I agree. I think that this is probably something that Google should just or Chrome should just pull the trigger on like Safari did. And you know what? I had thought about it till just now when you were saying that it's probably good for you to help teach other people, right? Right now you're like, oh, look through that gobbledygook for this. If you have people who are just seeing the domain name, it's easier to explain to them what to look for. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Thursdays, we have Mr. Justin Robert Young, host of Politics, Politics, Politics on the podcast. And this week, the social networks of the world obliged us with lots of news about how they're preparing for the upcoming U.S. elections in November on Thursday. Thank you, social networks. Justin, let me run down the stories and then give us your perspective on them, if you would, sir. Yeah. Facebook launched its Voting Information Center for the U.S. It will appear in the menus for Facebook and Instagram. It will help users check their voting options and rules, list any related deadlines. Facebook will attach labels that lead to this voting information to all voting related posts, not just posts made by famous users or political leaders. Google is going to direct searches to verified voting information, showing candidate information panels when searching for federal candidates on YouTube, even, and adding more information on paid political ads to its transparency reports. Twitter plans to expand rules against content that, quote, undermine civic integrity, like voting misinformation. More tools are going to be added to help find voting info on Twitter. And Snapchat is putting a voter registration mini tool that, depending on the state, will allow you to register to vote from within Snapchat, as well as their own voting guide with official vetted voting information. Before we get to the big meeting, what do you think of all those announcements? Well, some, I think, are a little bit more meat and potatoes than others. If you can connect people in an easier way to vote a registration, if you can highlight voting deadlines, then I think that's smart and good. I would have a little, maybe a second thought about, OK, well, giving more data of exactly where I am and whether or not I am an active political participant is yet more data that these companies have about you that is relevant in several ways to their core business. However, at least it's useful. You're getting something out of it. You will be notified on places that you spend a lot of time that the time to either register or vote is drawing near. Where we can again start to wave our jazz hands to worry about an upcoming storm is undermining civic integrity on Twitter, which sounds a little hashtag heliportal, hashtag portal to hell to me, mostly because there is a line between. Election day has been moved to November 13th instead of November 3rd. OK, you can label that as but not a real thing versus the kind of political conversation that surrounds elections that very often bipartisan sources can be read as voter misinformation, whether or not it is in the letter of Twitter's law. We will have to find out. Right. If I go on Twitter and say none of you should vote, is that a yes, that on the line over the line? Exactly. Yeah, you just start calling more than balls and strikes at that point. And that's where I think we get into we get into trouble. Let's calm things down, though, and talk about the largest tech companies in the world meeting with the government. That won't get anyone upset. Members of the following big tech companies Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, aka Yahoo, in this case, Pinterest, LinkedIn separate from Microsoft sent their own representative and Wikimedia. All of those had representatives that met with members of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, the Department of Justice's National Security Division and the officer of the Director of National Intelligence. They were discussing scenario planning, handling, election misinformation and the group intends to meet regularly into November. Some of the scenarios mentioned as being discussed, including leaks of stolen materials, manipulated videos, stuff like that. Scenarios were supposedly candidate agnostic. Oh, baby, this is an interesting one, mostly because beyond whatever we saw in 2016, the idea of surreptitiously leaked materials is a part of politics and has been for a very, very, very long time. The idea that this could come from foreign actors is something that we are paying a lot of attention to, although considering the forces that have leaked stuff like this in the past, I don't know if state actors are ever going to be our largest problem considering how easy it is to leak kinds of materials. And so if somebody who is a partisan finds material that is damaging to one of our presidential candidates or a major Senate candidate or a gubernatorial candidate and leaks it, but they are an American citizen and they just are here to affect the outcome of the election, is that fine? But if it crosses a server in Moscow, it's not. That is interesting. Manipulative. It's why I think it's interesting Wikimedia is on this foundation because Wikimedia is the one that can handle that question very well in ways that the other companies I don't think can. No, I mean, they can know where it was uploaded from. But then again, but they're very, they're very experienced in handling people saying, no, this is important. Yes, it is. No, it's not that sort of that sort of moderation. They have a perspective on there where Twitter and Facebook, they're all worried about their, you know, the how it's going to affect the relationships with lobbying and stuff. And Wikimedia lives and breathes that kind of controversy every day, whether this should be included or not. They are more well-versed on it. But I don't know if this is something that will ever be something that everybody can agree on. Oh, no, I wasn't trying to apply that. Oh, OK, I think it's interesting that they're on there because that's a voice that needs to be part of that. I totally agree. It's just, you know, what is the line between a bartender recording Mitt Romney saying that 47 percent of Americans are never going to vote for a Republican versus a Russian hacker finding. Right, let's back off that real quick, because I think we're giving short shrift to the positive that this meeting can give, which is you do want these companies thinking about very obvious things that we don't want to happen ahead of time rather than getting caught with their parents down like they did in 2016. Yes, although I would say temper your expectations because I don't know if there are answers. Again, again, I'm not saying that they will be perfect. In fact, they probably won't. But it's better to have them thinking about it than not. Yeah. And if anybody wants to know, like, why would you ever allow leaked materials out anyway? Go watch the movie, The Post. Thank you. Some of these stories end up on our subreddit. You could submit stories that you think are worthy of the show and your peers. You can also vote on other ones that you see at Daily Tech News Show dot reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. We got some good stuff. Daniel and Cincinnati said, I'm going to I'm going to read his PS first. He said, I like Microsoft. OK, then he says, why does Microsoft think that after paying tens of billions of dollars for TikTok, that history wouldn't repeat itself like when Zynga bought draw something seems to me that with all of the concessions that Microsoft will have to make to keep Taka in the States, people being finicky, governmental rules prone to change, a competitor could just come in and make an enticing clone where people just lose interest because the big lame Microsoft now runs it. Daniel, you're not wrong. And I like that you included a smiley face. But this is I mean, TikTok's bigger than draw something. I'm not sure that's the right parallel here. You know, draw something didn't have quite the presence. And I think that's the key. Microsoft doesn't really care if they buy TikTok and it fails. What they care is having it long enough to show that Azure can run a service like that and handle a challenge like that. I really do think that's their main point here. Yeah, I would just like to add here that social networks have proven to be a lot more durable than I think we think they are as we remember watching my space fade into the distance and friends are fading to the distance. But look, a Snapchat has survived and has remained a place that is is a very, very valuable piece of real estate. There's no reason to think that TikTok won as well. And there's no reason to think Microsoft wouldn't spin off management to somebody else and just want to run the back end on Azure. That's a possibility too. Samuel has a perspective different than Lamar's on Instagram Reels. He says while the dancers of TikTok are well served by the features of Reels, the fact that they don't have any sounds other than music and the missing features of not being able to duet someone means that my use of TikTok as someone that makes original content in cosplay with friends, sometimes not even in the same country as I am, is completely missing from it thus far. It feels like Instagram thinks that TikTok is still musically instead of what it has evolved into a place where many creators make original content together and couldn't care less about dancing. Just another perspective and keep up the awesome work. Thank you, Samuel. That was a good perspective on that. It could also be Instagram saying, let's not put too much development into Reels just yet. Let's put a toe in, see if people like it, and then we make the TikTok clone. I'm sure Instagram understands that it's missing some features like the duet, for example. For sure. For sure. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Daniel Dorado, Jeff Wilkes and Scott Hepburn. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young, the politics man himself. What's been going on this week? We have a lot going on this week, Sarah, and I thank you for asking. First, we have our back to school special tomorrow. That is a bunch of interviews. Experts, parents. We've had parents and teachers be writing in for the last week, and we're going to have a lot of different perspectives on the real challenges that are facing the country right now, as parents wonder whether or not they are going to send their kids back to school and what that exactly looks like. And next week, we begin two full weeks of convention coverage. Twitch.tv slash Justin are young is where you're going to have to go to get it eight to 10 each night, Monday through Thursday is when I will be on next week and the week after first for the Democrats, then for the Republicans and friends. 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