 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook wants some of you to help predict things. The Oculus Go is now the Oculus Gone, but there may be a new way to get apps on the quest, and why Apple switching to ARM won't kill Intel. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the bright forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And now the show's producer and used car buyer, Roger Chin. We were just talking all about Flip Cup, and what we thought of the Apple announcement presentation. I'm going to talk about that a little more later. If you want to get that wider conversation, join our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Adobe published a new support page on its website that Flash Player support is ending on December 31st, 2020. Put it on your calendar, but it does plan to release security updates until then. Users should uninstall Flash Player software on their devices before the end of the year, and the company plans to give users lots of notifications about support ending as well. So it shouldn't be a surprise to you anyway. Also, most browsers already limit Flash Player functionality and plan to remove support for Flash late this year or early 2021. To Flash. Cheers. Cheers. Hold that, because Fast Company reports that Segway will retire the Segway PT and stop production July 15th. 21 employees will be laid off, 12 will stay on temporarily to handle warranties and repairs on the Segway, and that have already been sold. Apologies. Five employees working on Segway Discovery scooters will remain at the company. The first two-wheeled Segway was released in December 2001 for $5,000 American dollars. To the Segway. Cheers. U.S. dollars. Acer refreshed its Predator Helios Triton and Nitro gaming laptops. The Predator Helios gets Intel 10th Gen H-Series processors in NVIDIA 2070 and 2080 Super Max Q graphics, so does the Triton. The Helios 700 is the top of the line, starting at $2,400, coming to the U.S. in October. Still has that slide-out keyboard and trackpad that reveals the cooling apparatus, looks really nice. Acer also announced the Predator X25 Gaming 1080p monitor, but with a 360 Hz refresh rate and native support for NVIDIA G-Sync and a sensor to adjust brightness, no price on the monitor yet. China's GPS rival network, known as Beidou, launched its final navigation satellite to complete its own global navigation system Tuesday. Beidou has been in development for over 20 years. The launch was broadcast on state media channel CGTN and declared a success at 10.15 AM Beijing time. More than 600 AI scientists called for Springer Nature not to publish a conference paper titled A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing. The letter debunked the scientific basis for the paper and also called for publishers to commit not to publish papers based on similar debunked methodology in the future. Springer said the paper was submitted to a conference but was rejected after a peer review and will not be published. Twitter has placed one of the president of the United States tweets behind a warning label for what Twitter calls the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group. Users must click on the warning to view the tweet and may not like, reply, or retweet without comment. Twitter has previously hidden one tweet from the president and flagged two of his tweets as making false claims. The European Commission's latest evaluation of the 2016 Code of Conduct for countering hate speech online found 90% of flagged content was assessed within 24 hours, which is up 81% in 2018. On measures of transparency and feedback to users, Facebook was found to respond systematically while all other platforms had room for improvement. Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynolds welcomed the good results. Additional rules on this are expected to be part of the new Digital Services Act, which is coming later this year and the Commission is looking into binding transparency measures as well. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about not hate the app this time, but Apple's App Store Guidelines. Patrick, what do they got? Indeed, Apple announced a new appeal process for developers found to violate App Store Guidelines. Developers may appeal their own violations and the guideline itself. Apple also says it will no longer delay updates intended to fix bugs or other core functions even if the app is under dispute for guideline violations. So hay making a stink did have an effect. I think you can draw a straight line to Basecamp complaining about the problems with the hay app being rejected for a bug update. Remember, Apple didn't reject the hay app initially. They put it in the store. Then on a bug fix decided, oh, this should really have the in app payments. It doesn't do anything if you don't have that and rejected the bug fix. So this makes sense. Apple saying, you know what? That was dumb. If an app's in the store and all you're doing is bug fixes, we shouldn't let a buggy app be in the store. That's not making anything better for anyone, so that's good. Developers having an appeal, that's big. That's something developers are really complained about is, I don't feel like I have any recourse if I think there is a mistake that has been made. Which is really frustrating and even anxiety inducing for a developer, because when you're faced with a big company where you don't have someone to call or get a hold of to even understand what exactly the problem is, it's a very difficult situation. Here it seems like they're taking steps to at least try to address this. It remains to be seen, however, what happens when you appeal and your appeal is rejected. Is it automated? Do you get someone to talk to? It could be an improvement. It could remain the same. Well because even if you could get someone to tell you why your app was rejected, you couldn't argue it with them. There was nowhere to go with that. And that's what happened to Basecamp is they said, look, we rejected this bug fix because you shouldn't be in the app store anyway. Basecamp being big enough, they were able to get some people to respond, but general developers kind of chimed in and said, yeah, we didn't want to complain in public because we don't want to ruin our relationship, but we have the same problem of even if we get a person to explain why we've been rejected, we don't get to say, I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's right. Or I don't think my app is actually violating these guidelines. So at least providing some kind of process for that is important. Well, especially because if Apple, you know, if Apple was just sort of like, no, we've rejected you and there's nothing you can do about it, then there wouldn't be a dispute. If there's a dispute, it means either side might win this dispute. And that's why you go through the process of it. So being able to push through bug fixes because the app developer may indeed be the winner of this dispute is the right call. Yeah. And like you say, Patrick, it'll be interesting to see how it's handled. You know, once you've had your appeal heard, you know, there's no second appeal, my guess is Apple is the final judge on that. Well, we mentioned yesterday that Microsoft is closing its mixer service on July 22nd and immediately beginning to move partner streamers over to Facebook Gaming. Top streamers, Ninja, who was signed to Mixer in August and Shroud, who signed in October, have both received full payouts. Facebook apparently tried to sign both, but the two streamers declined and are free to move where they wish. They both tweeted somewhat big things about not knowing what they're doing, but that they care about their community. Mixer streamers using monetization will be eligible for Facebook's level up program. Mixer viewers with outstanding ember balances, channel subscriptions or mixer pro subscriptions will receive Xbox gift card credit. On July 22nd, all mixer sites and apps will redirect to Facebook Gaming and Microsoft will also work to let Facebook Game viewers click to begin laying games on the X Cloud Game streaming service. As for the low latency streaming technology from Mixer, Microsoft will hold on to that and use it in Microsoft Teams. Well, that's cool. At least the beam technology, which is is what Microsoft bought to create Mixer won't be lost. They'll still be used and it'll be used in an enterprise situation. I think that's a little bit of what we're seeing here is Microsoft saying productivity and enterprise is what we're good at. We also make a really good game machine and we're not going to stop that. But gaming content, not our thing. It's Facebook's thing. Let's let's just, you know, cut our losses while we can. Does that seem like what's going on to you, Patrick? There's definitely a let's cut our losses while we can. I think everyone was expecting Mixer to at some point. Be cut by Microsoft. I don't think anyone expected it to happen this quickly. And it might actually be a shrewd move by Microsoft to say, you know what? It's not working. Everyone else has been growing like crazy during the pandemic and the lockdown. We grew like half a percent. It's just not working. Let's close it down now because we don't intend on investing whatever, 15 billion dollars to grow it over the next five years. So let's close it now and not just let it die slowly over the next couple of years and close it in two years anyway. The live streaming ecosystem is still pretty vibrant. I think Facebook gaming is not regarded as a cool platform by the core gaming community, but I've heard various reports that it's actually performing pretty well for the people who are there. And there's also YouTube, which is to an extent pushing its live component and gaming subsection, which has the power of regular YouTube, of course. I suspect Shroud will go back to Twitch and Ninja will go to YouTube because relationships with Twitch are not great for him. Yeah, apparently Facebook, you know, by all the reports, dangled a lot of cash in front of Shroud and Ninja to keep them. If people don't know, those are two top streamers that were lured away to Mixer with exclusive contracts that Microsoft had to buy out when they shut down Mixer. They didn't have to go to Facebook because of that contract being bought out. Facebook tried to convince them, but apparently the amount of money was not the issue and the relationships, it sounds like from what you're saying, Patrick, probably outweighed it. For Ninja, I think the relationship with Twitch is what means he was he's not going to go back to Twitch. For Facebook, it seems like the numbers we're hearing is for Ninja. The contract was a multi-year deal that netted him $30 million and Shroud was 10 million. They were supposed to stay a few years. They ended up staying one year in the case of Ninja and a few months in the case of Shroud. I think at that point, if you have 10 million dollars in your pocket, 10 more millions is probably not going to make you quote unquote sell out and go to a community that you feel isn't right for you. So yeah, that's probably going to work out like that. So when people criticize them for moving to Mixer, I mean, they actually ended up doing pretty well. I mean, they made a lot of money and a lot of money. Facebook is discontinuing sales of the Oculus Go. We're saying goodbye to a third thing in this show. Goodbye, Oculus Go. The Oculus product mine, I didn't realize you. We could have a little Oculus Go appreciation, Oculus Go farewell. The Oculus Store is going to stop accepting apps or updates after December 4th and stop adding those apps December 18th. So if you get your app into the Oculus Store by December 4th, you have to publish it by the 18th. Oculus also announced it will introduce a way to distribute Quest apps outside of the Oculus Store. So the Oculus Quest, the one you have, Sarah, is now the future of this class of VR headset. And it's got much better specs. It's more expensive, but it's got much better specs than the Go. And now you can you can they're going to introduce a way to have a Quest app available without having it go through the Oculus Store, but isn't side loading. That's going to happen in 2021. So I'm very curious what that means in a related story. Facebook has acquired ready at Don Studios, the developer behind the Lone Echo VR games for the Oculus. The studio has been a publishing partner with Facebook and Oculus. Lone Echo 2 had its launch date repeatedly delayed after initially announcing a 2019 launch, but as expected sometime this year. So, you know, Oculus definitely bulking up its its in-house games, but but trying to figure out a way to encourage development with this not side loading, but not in the store way is intriguing to me. Yeah, the whole Oculus Go going away. And I have I've never I've never tried Oculus Go, but I do have a Quest and understanding what I do about the Quest and thinking, well, the Go be useful for it would be really hard to go the other way. I know there are a lot of Go folks who are like, well, this sucks. You know, it was only around for a couple of years. And, you know, now it's sort of dead in the water. But yeah, for the Quest, going through the store, which is, you know, the games are fairly expensive. Some of them are free, but most of them, you know, are upwards of 30 bucks. So to me, I'm like, the store is full of stuff that I can't afford to buy anyway. So it's not exactly a ghost town, but of all the developers who are, you know, kind of trying to get stuff in the pipeline, not necessarily looking to go through just the sort of waiting period and the acceptance period of going through the Oculus store and just getting, you know, more variety of games and all sorts of stuff that you can do with the Quest. Sounds like a great idea to me. Yeah, the the goal for those who don't know the big drawback is that it doesn't have a movement tracking. You can only do rotations. And that basically kills a VR thing because it also includes the controller. But Facebook is definitely not giving up on on VR if some people get that impression from the issue with the go. And ready at dawn is a great developer. They're really pushing VR still. So they might make it happen. Yeah, that stand up tracking is often referred to as six degrees of freedom. The goal only had three degrees of freedom. And so that's the other thing here is this is the end of three degrees of freedom. You got to have six degrees of freedom to be a product. Facebook also launched forecast a project from its research and development team to build a community around predictions. So, for example, users could create a question that another user could vote on like, would the MLB have a season this year? Sounds like something Tom might ask. Questions will be reviewed and edited for clarity. Users have a certain number of in-app points they can use to decide which questions to vote on. And then voters can then discuss why they predicted what they did. People in Canada and the U.S. can request and invite into the forecast beta if it sounds interesting to you. And the initial users will be selected from health, research and academic communities. Anybody can see the predictions and related discussions at forecast app.net and polls can be shared outside of the app as well. Forecast app is now live on iOS. Yeah, I went to forecast app.net. That's where I pulled that MLB question. So, yes, that was of interest to me. And right now it's 77% chance, yes, out of 35 forecasters. But one of the intriguing things about this system was the promise of like, I could see those forecasters, the people who voted, justify their prediction about why they were picking yes or no, especially the no people, I'd like to see that. But there doesn't seem to be a way to access that yet at forecast app.net. The other thing that I find interesting about this, Patrick, is if Facebook had launched this 10 years ago, it would have been everybody can make a question and everybody can vote on it and the wisdom of the crowds will prevail and we'll get a better result of what these predictions might be. And in 2020, it's a very limited number of vetted experts will be allowed to submit questions and make predictions and everybody will get to see them. But we're not going with the wisdom of the crowds. We're going with the wisdom of a curated number of experts. Yeah, it seems like the way things are now for most of the social network activity. It's probably a good thing, although looking at the list of questions, I'm seeing some that are relatively trivial, but it seems a majority of them have essentially less than five percent of one answer and over 95 percent of the other answer. Some of them are a little bit more nuanced, but it kind of makes me I guess two thirds of them are very slanted. Kind of makes me wonder if this app, you know, even the wisdom of the crowd for the answers is that going to be useful at all? And it also makes me think Facebook seems to be trying a lot of things and very few of them are working out their big properties. Actually, the only properties that matter are things that they purchased and good on them for trying new things. But I don't think in the past five years, anything has worked out. So it's just, you know, maybe they were just lucky and not that. Incredibly, I don't know. It's just something that came through. Yeah, no, they haven't had a lot of independent successes from from internal launches. You're right, other than there may be some features on Facebook, but but none of these projects, my big concern with forecast here is that they are they they're not even with a curated number of experts. I don't think they're going to have accuracy because you either get large numbers to get that wisdom of the crowds effect or you get people who really know what they're talking about. And that's not what they're going for here either. Like anybody can do any question and answer any question, whether it's within their expertise or not. So it's to me, almost the worst of both worlds. And it seems like there's only two choices for answers. So it's some of them have three, but most of them are right. It's a yes or no. So, yeah. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, we're going to talk a little bit more about arm and Apple's big announcement yesterday of moving their Macs and their desktops, their Mac, both laptop and desktop to arm and what effect that will have now that we've had a little time to process it. But first, Patrick, I want to get your reactions now that we've had a day to think about it to WWDC. I really like the format. I think that's almost the biggest takeaway. It was incredible production value. And I think the same way that Apple has set the standard for stage presentations in the past 20 years, I suppose, I think this is going to be the standard for those who want to have an efficient, snappy, attractive, enjoyable, pre-recorded presentation. It was really great. And the contents were great as well, really interesting stuff. But the format was unexpectedly enjoyable. Yeah, it really moved. And of course, the demos all worked. You know, it's always fun shouting for it to make fun of a failed demo. But it's actually better when you see how the product is supposed to work. Granted, it's not a live demo then. But what do you think is anything stick out, particularly on what they announced? I mean, all the big things, but I'm going to get maybe a smaller one just for the sake of fun. The hand washing tracker on the Apple Watch the Apple Watch was surprising and kind of delightful. And we all think of it in the context of the COVID pandemic, of course. But it could help with the seasonal flu. It could help with a lot of things if it actually works in the way it's supposed to. And the cleverness of how it's designed. You know, the tracking, the movement tracking tracks for movement that it thinks might be hand washing. And then it turns on the mic to listen for water and soap noises to confirm that it is probably that. I felt that was, again, delightfully clever. Apple's moved to using its own chip designs based on ARM for its laptop and desktop certainly is a big change. Apple had 6.9 percent of the worldwide PC market in Q1. That's according to Gartner and Max make up about five percent of Intel's revenue. So it's big. It alone is not going to shift the market. But if the experiment succeeds, the real impact could be if other PC vendors follow. If they look at what Apple's doing and say, yeah, it's working pretty well. I bet we could benefit from that, too. High performance with better battery life is one of the big promises of this approach. That will take time, though. We won't see the first Apple Silicon based devices until the end of this year. And that transition is going to take two years. So we won't really know the answer of whether this had a big impact on the wider PC vendors until 2022 at the earliest. Keep in mind, too, that Chrome OS and Windows already support ARM and there are devices like the Surface Pro X available. So it may or may not shift PCs to ARM, but it will have an impact. And Intel is already fighting with AMD in the consumer space, though Intel holds its own in the enterprise. Intel saw a 14 percent year over year rise in its client computing group. So they're still getting companies to buy the machines that have Intel inside. But on the consumer space, that's where Apple is strong. That's where Chromebooks are strong. Chromebooks getting stronger in educational marketplaces as well. So maybe making some moves into the enterprise. But Intel is pretty strong in client services. Intel has also been making a lot of its money off data center sales. And while there is an ARM presence in data centers, Intel's April earnings report showed a 43 percent year over year rise in sales in that sector. So Intel doing very well there. Where does that leave us? The consumer space is going to be a brawl with ARM based laptops from Apple, Windows and Chrome fighting it out with AMD and Intel on the x86 instruction set that may spill over into enterprise. If Apple succeeds, you might see in a couple of years more enterprises deciding to go Apple on ARM because of the battery life benefits. You might see the Surface Pro X start to deploy and maybe spawn more Windows machines. You might see Chrome making inroads there. Intel is still strongest, however, in the data center. ARM's power savings are becoming more interesting there. And the fact that the world's top supercomputer runs on ARM chips will help improve that perception. But Intel has a nice big lead there. Where Intel's advantage is, is to keep shifting towards what it calls data centric businesses. That includes Internet of Things. Intel's strategy is to embrace growing sectors like that, where high costs of R&D are a barrier to smaller companies. And Intel has enough cash that they can just outspend and get an advantage. So far, that IoT advantage has not materialized, but they've got some time and space to do that. So, yes, it's a big deal that Apple is switching to ARM, but the effect in the marketplace in general and certainly the effect on Intel at this point is still fairly limited, I think. Limited for sure. It's not going to change overnight. And that's what we're that's the trend that might be concerning for Intel. You mentioned AMD. You mentioned data centers starting to use ARM a little bit more. There's also the Surface Neo and more to the point. Windows 10X, which is being developed for the Neo, but will also potentially be usable on, well, they've announced it's going to be usable on other devices, which could be a better version of Windows on ARM devices, even if the current version also runs to an extent. Overall, it is a confluence of things that might spell uncertainty for Intel on the, I don't know, I guess, five year term. Intel is aware, though. They have mentioned a year ago, a few months ago, a year ago. They have made a big mere culpa. They've said they didn't focus on the right things and that they are writing the ship. So they still have time to make it right. As you said, it doesn't mean Intel is over now, but it is another indication that they need to take things a little bit more seriously than they have in the past 10 years, I'd say. Yeah, I look at it and say, Intel's got time. They need to not blow that time that they have. And because they've had time, they knew this was coming and they've gone through a series of CEOs that have each said, this is where we're going to point our resources and look for the win. And that win hasn't come. They were going to compete on mobile. Remember the Atom processor? And that didn't work for them. Right now, they're trying an IoT. It's not catching on. They need a new win because, eventually, ARM is going to come for the data center. I think that that is clear. And they may not capture the data center from Intel, but it's going to be a problem for them. And they need another space to move into. By the way, an episode of Know a Little More about what ARM actually is, it's an instruction set and an architecture, but it's not a company that makes things. If you're like, wait a minute, that's confusing. How does that even compete with Intel? Check that out coming this Thursday in the Know a Little More feed. Or if you're a patron of DTNS, you've got that episode of Know a Little More in your Patreon RSS feed right now. Excellent. That's good to be a patron. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, ARM stories, Intel stories and lots of other stories show up there every day. You can submit your own and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Sean wrote in and said, not sure if I missed it in coverage anywhere, but how will native ARM macOS apps be handled? Still user downloadable or forced into the app store with universal two Intel apps also still installable. If user installed, how does this build for Apple not allowing side loaded apps in iOS if iOS native works on macOS and all of the new app store issues with Apple requiring app store and the 30 percent cut, et cetera. Seems like companies like Epic with wanting to side load Fortnite would have a lot more to use against Apple in courts. Yeah. My answer is Apple hasn't said, but I don't know that you need to jump to the conclusion that they're going to change things. What Apple has said is you can compile an app to run on Intel or ARM as universal to you can run your Intel apps, whether they be for Intel or in a browser or just in time on ARM using Rosetta to they're even making Linux and Docker virtualization for their ARM laptops and iOS and iPadOS run natively. They didn't change any procedures, although they didn't have the app store when they switched to Intel previously. I would imagine we would be hearing about it very loudly from developers if there was a new restriction that said you had to be on the Mac app store if you want to run on ARM. They have not said anything that indicates that. So I get it, Sean, if you're paranoid, you may say, ah, but they haven't said they won't. But usually you don't say you won't do everything because you won't do it and you want to spend your time talking about what you do want to do. And that's Apple hasn't said they're going to do anything that would cause that to be the case. So at this point, without any further clarification, I would not expect Apple to change the policy that says if you go through the Mac OS app store, then of course you'll be able to run easily, but there are permissions that will allow you to take apps off the general web as well. But we'll keep an eye and find out if there's any difference. Thanks for the email, Sean, and also thanks to, and a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Ali and Lisa Shunjabi, John Atwood, and Chris Benito. Also thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today, tonight in your world. What's been going on since we saw you last? Oh, so many things, I guess I would recommend. Sorry, I just saw Sarah trying to turn on her light. It's motion sensor lights in here. I'm like clearly I'm not animated up on the show. Nobody on the audio podcast saw it, so we'll have to explain it now. So a lot of things have been going on. I would recommend you go check out Work in Sanity, which is a podcast I do with Juan Tom Merritt, who, and where we talk about having to work from home and how to keep your sanity doing that. I also would recommend The Phileas Club, which is a show where I talk about news from around the world. And in the past month, in the past few weeks, we've talked to a number of black people who've told us how they live their lives in both the US and in France. You can get that too at francspin.com. Excellent, yeah, both those shows were really edifying, I would say, really good at exposing you to another perspective that you may not have. Check those out. You can always support our show at any level at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon and go get a mask in our store at dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You got something on your mind? Well, we'd love to read it. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, which is 20 30 UTC and you can find out more, tell a friend, dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.