 Coming up on DTNS, why Activision Blizzard threw GeForce Now under the level 100 mount? Why you shouldn't buy that gift card your boss asked you to? And a portable speaker with a TV remote built in. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 12, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And in a remote location in San Francisco, I'm Sarah Lane. In an undisclosed space in Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. I'm in my bedroom and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, Scott, Sarah really is in a different location. You're trying to like pretend you're not in Salt Lake City. What does she get to have the cool bunker? Yeah, I want to have some sneaky, spy-like sound in cool place that I am. Not really. I'm just in my same place. We were just having a good conversation about oat milk, PR 40s and horror shows on Good Day Internet. You never know what you're going to get, but it's always fun and it's always good. So get the show, become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Well, we thought it might happen and it did. Mobile World Congress has been canceled for the first time in its 33 years of running. Spanish health officials said that there was no reason to cancel, but GSMA CEO John Hoffman told Bloomberg, the CSMA has canceled Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern, and other circumstances make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event. On another coronavirus note, Reuters sources say that Foxconn expects to have 50% of its Chinese production back by the end of the month and get back to 80% Chinese production by March. Let's hope so. Reuters saw a document indicating EU antitrust regulators plan to investigate emerging markets in tech and consider preventative measures to help smaller rivals to big companies. European competitor commissioner or competition commissioner rather, Margaret Vestiger. Marguerite Vestiger. Yeah, there you go. We'll present the paper in March. Meanwhile, Facebook postponed Thursday's launch of its dating service in the European Union due to concerns from Ireland's data protection commissioner, US federal trade commission voted five to nothing to ask for public comments on whether the rules for influencer endorsements should be tougher. Right now, they're just guidelines, but FTC chair Rohit Chopra wants to make current disclosure guidelines binding and possibly include civil penalties, which might include fines. WhatsApp has a lot of users. The company announced it now has 2 billion of them, up from 1.5 billion users two years ago. That makes it second only to the Facebook app itself, which has 2.5 billion users. And I'm shedding one single tear, no more or no less, for Andy Rubin's essential phone company announcing it will shut down, citing an inability to find a clear path to deliver its project gem smartphone to customers. I liked the essential phone the first round. I was skeptical about project gem and apparently there was reason to be. Essentials phone will continue to work, but it will not receive updates and Newton mail, which essential acquired will shut down on April 30th. Doesn't mean your Newton will work ever again. It's inessential. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about that, that remote control speaker that I was talking about at the beginning of the show, Scott. The big question is, is it a speaker with a remote or remote with a speaker? You decide Sony announced a remote control that is also a portable speaker, or is it a portable speaker with a remote control built in? Again, the question just keeps banging at our head. The SRS, excuse me, LSR 200 has a pair of two watt speakers and a center unit tuned to human voices. Speaker sits in a charging base attached to the television. It connects to the base using 2.4 gigahertz wireless and can play audio simultaneously with the TV speakers, so you can take your audio with you. The remote on top, excuse me, the remote on top includes the usual number of up and down buttons that comes to Japan in February 22nd for 20,000 yen, which is about 180 US. We were talking earlier, like the big use case would be, I'm watching the game. I don't want to pause and get behind. I got to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go do that. I'm going to take this with me. And while I'm gone, I can hear the play by play and hear what's going on and still go take care of my business. Oh, you people with your cavernous houses where you move, you know, many rooms away to go do something. Yeah, but, but you're right, Scott. This is it. The perfect example is something like, you know, a good show or yes, an important sports event or something where, you know, pausing pausing is more available than ever for a lot of people who watch TV now. But then if it matters that you're five or 10 seconds behind and you're on Twitter or, you know, something like that, then this does come in handy. I like the idea. Like a lot of times I'll head into the kitchen to put the dishes away because we're watching TV while we're eating dinner or I'll run in to get some more water or something. And I can just barely hear the audio coming from the living room, which is right next to it. That'd be nice to have a speaker in there that I could take with me, but I guess I'd have to pick it up and then take it with me. I guess it's more if you're cooking. That way you can hear what's going on on the game. I'm attracted to this idea, but I doubt I would use it a lot in practice. So I'm not sure it's worth, you know, close to 200 bucks. I would have used this in the 80s and 90s when everything was, there was no on demand. Everything was just live when you caught it and that was the only way you were going to get it. And I would, I can think of a million use cases when that would happen in this particular case. I think it's neat also that this sounds kind of cool, but I don't know that I would use it so much in our on-demand world we live in now. Just too much. It's really only compelling for live stuff where you're like, I don't want to pause because I don't want to fall behind in the game. Right. And the fact that it's the same device that you would pause with and you're taking the remote with you, if you're with other people, are they irritated? You can just do it with any speaker to be honest. You don't need the special remote on top. That just gives you the opportunity to like turn it up or change the channel. But why would, I don't know. I also like how Sony just put no thought into what we'd call this handy contraption and just called it the SRS LSR 200. Yeah. This obviously came out from the same people who named televisions. Moving on now. Agari's quarterly fraud and identity deception trends report found that gift card phishing schemes. Maybe you've heard of them. Maybe you hadn't. Accounted for 62% of all business email compromise attacks. So an attacker could get control of a business email account and then use it to pretend that they were someone's boss and ask a subordinate to purchase gift cards, especially during the holidays. Multiple employees are usually messaged at one time. Then the amount collected in a tax can be anywhere from $250 to $10,000. Make a lot of money this way. Gift cards can be cashed out immediately and are also difficult to trace. So it requires some kind of phishing or something else to get into the account to begin with, but then that's how they cash out. If they're like, yeah, we don't get a lot out of trade secrets. We can't convince anyone to do wire transfers because that's where you get the big money. If you can do that, that requires a little more sophistication. This one's easy. You just comb through the boss's email till you figure out who his employees are. And then you say like, hey, we really want to reward Tracy for all their hard work. Buy, buy me a hundred dollar gift card from Amazon and send me the code, right? And then you do that to like 20 different people and suddenly you got 2000 bucks. Yeah, it'll add up pretty quick. I always wonder why gift cards, most of them have expiration dates on it. Is it because they don't want to get, I don't know, fraudulent toward the back end, like three years later or something? That is part of it. There's also an accounting reason because that money isn't income until it's spent. I see. Depending on how you account for it. And so the expiration date will help you say like, okay, at this point, we're going to say that that money was spent and we can count it on our balance sheet. Okay. I feel like I learned a little something new today and that's fantastic. But anyway, I'm all about having less of this sort of stuff happen. My mom got, got dinged again this week for something that's not related to this, but it had to do with some credit card stuff. And she almost got a major fraud thing happen. And I'm to be honest, super tired of it. I also hear the lot of, you know, there's a lot of campaigns going on, campaign stuff going on right now. A lot of those aren't actually real. I just, I hope people are careful this time of year and don't get hurt. Yeah. That's when I hear people talking about like, oh, you can get those discount gift cards online. They're like, I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate versions of that, but it's, it's rife with fraud out there. So be careful. Yeah. I'm trying to, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in the audience who are like, Oh no, this is actually a common practice. I cannot think of any time where someone may have emailed me and been like, Hey, do you know this? Let's get this gift card going for Tom. I've got it. I've got a good job. I think I'd be like, that sounds doesn't sound like you. Jackie Hearn, Jackie Hearn, who does the book keeping for, or the, the booking for cord killers. We, we, some of Brian and I were emailing each other and like, Hey, wouldn't it be cool to get Jackie a thing? Yes. Let's get the thing was I bought it and I sent the code to her and send the code to anyone else. So yeah. It's all right. Malware bites put out its state of malware report. And for the first time, uh, detected 11 threats per endpoint for max in 2019 compared to 5.8 threats per endpoint for windows. That's an increase for the first time of max over windows. Uh, they attribute this in part to just a general increase in max market share. There's just more people using max out there. So there's more end points, which means they become a richer target. You know, the, these numbers are per capita essentially, but, but once you've got more people using them, more bad guys want to go after it. Uh, malware bites also says Mac OS has not cracked down on borderline malware like adware as hard as it has on other serious types. So maybe that's why you're seeing not so much the really damaging malware on the max, but you're seeing a lot of adware and pups and stuff like that. Uh, and also, uh, this is based on malware bite software users and there are more of those on the Mac platform than there used to be. So that's, that's going to give them a bigger data set to draw from as well. Uh, but I think it probably has to do with the fact that there's a lot of adware. Uh, in fact, adware called new tab was the top detected Mac OS threat. Uh, and all but one of the Mac OS threats detected required a user to be tricked into downloading and opening something. Uh, the only one that didn't was a zero day vulnerability in Firefox that has since been patched. So these are adware. Uh, they're not super serious malware. Uh, they're not great, but they're, they're adware or they're, they're pop ups. Uh, but, uh, interesting to know that if you are using a Mac, you still have to think about your security. It's, it's, you know, it's not security through obscurity by a long stretch anymore. So for, for the uninitiated out there, can you tell them what end point specifically means when they just means, uh, your laptop. All right. So like the only the end point, like you, you on your notebook, check in your mail. You're the end point. Okay. That makes sense. Uh, I'm, uh, yeah, be careful. Like ads and stuff is bad. It's much better than or adware rather. It's much better than having your system files all messed up or something from something way more malicious. But, uh, you know, nobody wants 11 threats compared to 5.8. Let's get it together. People come on Mac. Come on safari. I guess who's to blame. I don't know. I think the one that really pay attention to is this all required you to download and open something. And then, you know, for decades now, I've been saying, don't open attachments. Don't click on links. You don't know where they come from. Uh, and, and that's the best way to protect yourself. It's not wrong to run something like malware bites as a backup. If you want to just make sure, uh, but best, best practices will help you avoid most of this stuff. Well, US national security advisor, Robert O'Brien noted, uh, he's not really from Ireland. I made that up. Told the Wall Street Journal. We have evidence that Huawei has the capacity secretly to access sensitive and personal information and systems it maintains and sells around the world. The evidence is being shared with allies, including the UK and Germany has not been made public just yet. The journal says the US has been aware of the back door since 2009 when it was observed in 4G equipment, but did not say if it had observed Huawei using the access. That's an important part, I guess. Network equipment from all companies must have a way for authorities to access the network for lawful purposes, but without the manufacturer having access as well. This US, sorry, the US says Huawei built equipment that secretly preserves its access to this function without carriers knowledge. Huawei denies the accusations. Yeah, it's important to know what's going on here. There are ways for the carrier to access its own equipment, and there are built-in ways for the carrier to be able to allow law enforcement to access that equipment. The way it's supposed to happen is those ways are secured, just like you logging into your laptop, you can log in, but other people can't. The equipment is supposed to be secured so that only the carrier can authorize law enforcement to access it, and the manufacturer couldn't go use that. What the US is attempting to say here is, okay, but what if they didn't? We think we have evidence that they didn't, and they've said they've had evidence but haven't shown it to anybody. Now they're saying we're showing it to allies, but they're not showing the public, so it doesn't help any of us understand what that vulnerability actually might be. Well, that's interesting. I mean, they're always in the news with issues like this, and I'm, I mean, I don't like the idea that any company may secretly have a backdoor that they're not telling us they still have access to, but if they deny it, isn't it easy? Isn't this like the easiest thing in the world to say, well, here it is right here? Like, can we just, like, if they're denying it and it's a bigger deal or grows past this. There are good reasons not to make something like this public. There might be security and confidentiality agreements, but if you're really pushing for people to not use this equipment because of a danger, it's to all of our benefit in the modern security world to make that vulnerability public. And yes, I am suspicious of something like this that hasn't been made public, but I'm not, I should say skeptical maybe, better than suspicious. I would like to see more evidence because it's easy for anyone to say one thing and when you look at it go, well, wait a minute, that's not really a backdoor. That might just be incompetence. That might be a vulnerability that's there that should be patched, which we definitely know those exist on Huawei equipment. Sure. All right. This next story may blow your mind. Get ready, everyone. A new feature of Google's Gboard keyboard called Emoji Kitchen, lets you combine emojis into one and then use them. The combined emoji is a sticker in your messaging app, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat and Messenger. Google designed the combos by hand. Well, somebody worked hard on it. You can tap on an emoji in the keyboard and it will suggest pre-designed combinations that you can use. The feature starts rolling out to Android users today and I am jealous. I, as soon as I found out these were pre-designed, I got a little less excited because I just wanted to go through and like make some unholy combinations of things. Right. But you know. A witch holding a flag or something. But maybe that's why they don't have to do that. Like, come on. You got all this machine learning. Google, you couldn't just do some machine learning emoji combos going on? What the heck? It's funny. Emoji story. Emojis, I'm fully on board. I'm not that big of an emoji user, but at one point I was like, this is dumb and I've totally come around. It is not. It's in the right context. I find it very funny and you can get very clever with emojis. So this is just taking it one more level. I don't know how much I would ever use it. I don't use most of the emojis that are available anyway, but but I like the evolution. To me, this is like the me emoji thing or anytime you add more features into texting apps and that sort of thing. And you push them out. They're usually this sort of thing, right? Like more, more emoji functions, more stickers, more animated stuff. And, you know, in Apple's case, they love having you look like an animal or you're talking or whatever. That stuff's fine. I just has never interested me that much. I love the idea of what an emoji is, but I'm so old school about it. I still just sort of, you know, semi-colon close parentheses. Just know I'm grinning at them and then I'm not actually searching around for quote unquote the perfect emoji to express how I'm feeling. So I'm probably not the target here, but at least this is interesting. I do wish like Tom it was more, I don't know, mix anything with anything and just give you the power to do it. The fact that these are curated is a little bit of a bummer. Yeah, Google, use it. Use one of your data centers. You can make every combination of emojis possible, darn it. Use the cloud, Sarah. The cloud is probably better pre-designed. I'm just mad because it hasn't shown up on my phone yet. Although I just accidentally sent a smiley face to my wife trying to see if it was there. So it might have made her day. Yeah, exactly. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, go to techheadlines.com. Bunch of gaming news today, and we happen to have the host of the instance, one of the premier Blizzard podcasts on the show today. So let's talk about Activision Blizzard removing its games from NVIDIA GeForce Now. That means Overwatch and Wow, because Blizzard, but also Call of Duty, because Activision. GeForce Now, you may recall if you've been listening to the show just officially launched its game streaming service last week. It had been in beta for two years just fine for the two years, but a week after launch, gone. NVIDIA, of course, says it hopes it can work out a deal to bring the games back, but it doesn't sound like that is going to happen. Scott, what's up with this? So there's been a lot of hymning and hawing, which is a popular sport in the world of Blizzard fandom. People like to just sort of pile on Blizzard. I've tried to sort of pull away from that a little bit and look at a broader perspective here. I think it's a bummer, especially because it was around during beta, which would normally indicate, hey, if you're playing things on battle net, then good chance when this thing goes live and you want to be a founder member and pay the 499 a month that you'll be able to continue to do it. And that just isn't the case at least a weekend of the launch. The reason Call of Duty is not included. This is just an important piece to clarify is it is also part of the battle net launcher. It's part of their partners tab, which is really just Activision games. Normally if that thing was on Steam you could run it just fine because this thing will run steam games, epic games, you play games and lots of stuff in between, including standalone games that don't need any sort of gaming service or store. The fact that they pulled that probably has more to do with what you're going to tell us about next, which is their deal and their connection with Google and made possibly a long running partnership. Yeah. So there's there's a lot of speculation that this might be because Activision Blizzard wants to move all of their games to Stadia. Google does have a multi-year partnership to bring Activision Blizzard eSports, both Overwatch League and Call of Duty League to YouTube, and Google Cloud handles Activision Blizzard's game hosting and streaming. So there are existing relationships between the two companies. But of course, you know, these companies are big. So just because they have a relationship with one division doesn't mean they automatically have a relationship with another, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that during one of these deals you should talk to our Stadia folks and they get a conversation going. We don't know anything about that happening. What do you think the chances are of that being behind this? Well, I mean part of me thinks that that is the reason because it just everything sort of points this idea either that or they're just sort of holding onto their cards until they kind of know what's up. They really don't lose anything if they went ahead and just stuck with the now service or any other service like GeForce Now. I think the disadvantage to them is they're not communicating anything and it's not their product. So they don't necessarily have to, but given that their game was working during the beta, I think it would behoove them to be a little more transparent and talk about it. Just maybe even a post in the forums. Like, yeah, we know a lot of we were used to this. It's in a bit of a holding pattern right now. We promise to let you know as soon as we can, whatever the message is, I wish they would do that. But as far as this being the way, I have one other concern and that would be if they're going to use Stadia as the back end for how people will stream their games, that's going to require people being able to log into their, into a virtual machine or an actual machine on a rack into their battle net credentials and launch those games from there. And because that's how it works with everything, you know, this now service, that's how it does it with the other services. You got to log into Steam to use it and that sort of thing. So they're going to have to allow for that. As far as I know, at least the current rollout implementation, Stadia does not have that. So will they, when they do their bigger rollout at the end of this year, probably something like it? You know, will Blizzard be a part of that? I don't know. But none of those things have been made public or have been talked about at all. So my main concern is that, that they're actually nowhere near a deal that means you'll be playing these anytime soon on the cloud. And that's the bummer is people are going to have to wait to find out what's going on here and in typical Blizzard fashion that could be 2021 before anything really happens. So there's also the fact that the Blizzard turns of service kind of confusingly forbid you from using a cloud service to play the game. That's really meant to prevent bot nets, right? That's, I mean, Blizzard games have been on GeForce now legally for a couple of years in the beta. So it doesn't have to do with the terms of service, does it? No, because the, well, I mean they may have to adjust those terms of service to be a little less broad about what cloud gaming is. But in this particular case, like when I was using the service earlier today, I needed to log into Uplay in order to play a game. And I did that. It's like it's a machine just not here, but I'm still interfacing with it. It's like my monitor has a really long cord to a machine in a room somewhere. And I put in my credentials and I say everything's good and I hit OK and I put in my code and boom it's as if I'm playing on that machine. It really shouldn't be any different and hasn't been during the beta period for the Blizzard games. They just are not allowing it. And my thinking is either one of two things. Either they really are, you know, making camp with with Google on this and that's the plan moving forward or they don't know what they're going to do yet and they're holding to see what their best option is because one of their options could be battle net supports this natively. It could be that you install battle net anywhere and battle net acts as a cloud platform for their games. That wouldn't shock me. And nobody is really talking about that, but that's entirely possible and it keeps it all under their own umbrella still. Nobody else is getting residual money. They could charge for it to say hey for another four bucks on top. Wow or whatever you may be able to access your Blizzard games from no matter where you're at and mobile and desktops and windows and Mac and everything else. That's entirely possible. But again, we know so little that any one of those three options could be happening. Well, that reminds me of one of Google's stated aims with Stadia was to say we also want to provide the service for game companies to white label and roll out their own versions of and that's where Blizzard having a deal with Google Cloud starts to make a lot of sense with Google Cloud's like hey, would you like a white label version of Stadia to provide to Blizzard you know, to Blizzard folks who already own the game would just add that on to your package that they could be the first to do that. I'm not saying it will be but that theoretically is possible and would explain all this. I just don't understand why this happened the next week you would think at launch they would be like well we're losing the Blizzard games but it's out unless Nvidia talked about like can you just wait a week so it doesn't happen the same day as the launch. I mean it's entirely possible they did who knows because nobody's saying but this is also another problem right now people have with Blizzard. Blizzard's not being very communicative lately. They've had a lot of problems in the last year and a half they don't really get out in front of it that's what's going on. So this just feels like one more of those. I don't think that's exactly fair because this isn't necessarily a Blizzard thing this is more of an Nvidia thing and they're dealing with Blizzard not the other way around. So I think people should back off from that just a little bit but yeah I wish they'd get out in front of it talk about it and say what their plans are and if they do a standalone client that does this and it's part of Battle.net which is already on other platforms great that sounds great like just tell us what you're doing or at least give us an indication of what we can expect. A couple other things before we wrap this up. Microsoft launching a beta for Project XCloud it's game streaming service through Apple's test flight. So if you're an XCloud beta tester you can try the service on your iPhone or iPad it's the first game streaming service to show up for an iOS device since on live because Apple has a lot of restrictions on what you can do with your device. Those restrictions apparently lead to the fact that Halo the master chief collection will be the only game available to the 10,000 preview testers. The app is limited to XCloud so it does not include Xbox game streaming feature just XCloud playing Halo the master chief collection. Small the only thing I would say about that is it makes sense to me that they would keep a very narrow test. People shouldn't read too much into the fact that it's only one game I think they just want to have the most basic test they can do on the game that is going to be the biggest thing on the platform start there and then build it out. And finally in a sign of the true of E3 Jeff Kealy is not going to be there for the first time in 25 years so that's it right yeah that's it that's the end of everybody no it'll be fun Jeff's got his own stuff going on now he's a very busy dude this doesn't shock me he's been there for a long time it's time for him to move on do something else thanks to everybody who participates in our sub Reddit lots of gaming news there as well as tech news that you care about submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show reddit.com you can also join in the conversation in our discord which is a lot of fun to meet some of your dts peers you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns let's check out the mail bag I think that's a great idea Tom Marcus in frigid Minnesota sorry to hear that Marcus hope you're staying warm says friend of the show Paul thought had an interesting premium article on his site claiming that windows 10x is much more ambitious than Microsoft is publicly suggesting his views that windows 10x is essentially a new windows NT making meaning a different platform that retains app compatibility and will eventually replace windows 10 this would mean that all the benefits of windows 10x won't be limited to dual screen devices emphasizing dual screen devices is a way to make a splash while at the same time exposing the new OS to a smaller group of users prior to windows for replacing windows for everybody at a later time the article is a fascinating look at how the new OS works and the goals of the platform in the long term that has historical precedent throughout the smart guys been following this for a long time makes perfect sense to me that after all of the trials and tribulations of windows 8 and the Metro tiles and the universal apps that Microsoft would say you know what let's just use dual screens as a way to make an entirely different operating system we won't replace windows 10 we'll just let people start to decide for themselves if they like this one better because it's got these cool features because they've been wanting to make a simplified version of windows that's more universal with apps for a long time this could be the way to do it makes perfect sense to me thanks for the email Marcus thanks to everybody who contributes to our mailbag and also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Martin James Bjorn Andre and Tim Ashman also thanks to the one the only Scott Johnson Scott what has been going on in your world yes you can go over to frogpants.com and find it all in particular I put up a new comic in my series called Fred and can it's just Monday if you want to learn more about a guy and his expired can of cream corn and why they have conversations with each other the only place to do it is fredcancomic.com and are also linked on frogpants.com and as always if you want to poke me in the public find me on twitter at Scott Johnson I love that comic so much folks we have new patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of DTNS Len Peralta created some special six-year anniversary art you can get it on a sticker a poster a mug or a T-shirt get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com I mentioned that we like your emails keep them coming we're also live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC is when we do this show join us if you can and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young talk to you then this show is part of the frogpants network get more frogpants.com club hopes you have enjoyed this brover