 Coming up on D T N S Intel wants to make chips for Apple and anybody else. Slack wants to be your messaging client of choice at least to work and Qualcomm wants to make a Nintendo Switch competitor. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 24th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane in the sunny Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang. I'm glad to hear it's sunny in Salt Lake City because my to vol of meals often ship from there. And last week they were late because it was definitely not sunny. Those roads. It's you never know yesterday was not sunny and windy and rainy. So today very grateful for sun. We were just talking a lot about plumbing and water heaters on good day internet as well as snakes become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S and find out what all of that is about. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mozilla released Firefox 87, which now includes smart block, which uses stand in scripts for embedded third party trackers so that pages still load an intended page rendering sequence without sending data. The browser also includes improved refer trimming, which removes query data usually sent back to site operators when requesting content. At a meeting of the improving web advertising business group, this sounds like it comes from 1912. Google engineer Michael Kleber said the company currently is not testing its third party cookie replacement federated learning of cohorts or flock in the European Union because they worry it might violate GDPR and the privacy directive as it is implemented. The issue is that publishers will not be providing users with clear notice of being part of a flock. And you don't have any choice about how your data will be used to create cohorts. Incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees that the company hired Tableau CEO Adam Salipsky to replace Jassy, a CEO of AWS. Salipsky worked at Amazon from 2005 to 2016, most recently serving as vice president for AWS sales, marketing and support. So he probably knows the business pretty well. The Verizon Media Group plans to rebrand most of its media franchises as Yahoo Services with plans to offer subscription versions of those services under the name Yahoo Plus because everything's Plus. Although don't worry, niche brands like TechCrunch, AutoBlog and Gadget will not become Yahoo Crunch, Auto Yahoo or Yahoo Gadget. They're gonna keep their names as is. Verizon currently has 3 million subscribers to Yahoo Services. That includes Yahoo Fantasy, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail. Tesla now allows consumers or potential customers really to buy vehicles with Bitcoin in the US and coming to other countries later this year. Bitcoin used to purchase a vehicle must come from a single wallet. It could take up to six hours to process but still pretty snappy. And if you return the car, Tesla says you can choose to get your refund and US dollars or Bitcoin. Oh, no, no, no. If you return the car, Tesla can choose to refund you. You don't get a choice. Tesla decides whatever one is a very good distinction for them. You know, and when I read the story earlier, I was like, Well, that's nice of them. Uh huh. Yeah, by the way, you could you could buy a Tesla with one Bitcoin right now, a full $50,000. So yeah. Yeah, it's Bitcoin. Yeah, I want to get my Bitcoin QR code on a coin, walk into a Tesla dealership and just flip it and be like, give me give me a car. Just flip a coin at them. That's amazing. Whether or not you want one, just do it. Just do that and see how they react. Alright, let's talk about this Intel thing. Intel will not go the route of AMD and spin out manufacturing separate from design. AMD did that a few years ago. Intel will not do that yet. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced it will elevate the small foundry business. It started back in 2013 to become a standalone business within Intel called Intel Foundry Services. That will be led by Rondir Thakur. And unlike previous efforts, IFS will offer systems on a chips not only with x86, but also arm and risk v cores. It will also use industry standard design tools this time, making it easier to work for third parties. That was one of the problems with the previous version is Intel had all these proprietary services and sometimes third parties were like, we don't know how to make our stuff work on your equipment. So that's going away to help with capacity of chip making in the world because that's a problem everybody's having right now. Intel also announced it will invest $20 billion to add two new chip fabs to existing facilities it has in Chandler, Arizona. Those are set to go online in 2024. So they're not going to ease the current chip shortage anytime soon, but they will be there. Arizona has actually become a booming hotbed for manufacturing. TSMC is planning to build something in the Phoenix area. Samsung is considering building in Arizona, also considering Austin, so it may go one way or the other. And Intel wants to go head to head with them on building chips. TSMC and Samsung get a lot of business from Apple and Qualcomm and others. And Gelsinger said in his announcement, he would love to build chips for Apple, he would love to build the M1 chip for Apple. Yes, the same Apple that Intel is running ad slamming. Gelsinger said this is clearly a co-op petition story. And keep in mind Intel Foundry Services is a standalone company. Samsung does this all the time where the electronic side is slamming somebody that they actually build parts for in the other part of Samsung that makes chips. So Intel could just be like that. While Intel wants to build for others, it will also continue to take advantage of letting others build its chips where that makes sense. Everybody thought that's the route they were going to go, that they were going to become fabulous. TSMC gets more than $7 billion of business from Intel a year. And that will continue with especially high performance chips like the supercomputer oriented 7nm Ponte Vecchio. They will continue where it makes sense to be like, yeah, we'll outsource some stuff, but we're also going to beef up our fabrication capacity. Gelsinger is new to Intel, sort of. He led the architecting of the 486 chip back in the day and was CTO when he left Intel in 2009 after 30 years there. He went on to become COO at EMC and CEO of VMware in the intervening years and he returned to Intel as CEO February 15th this year and seems to have generated a lot of enthusiasm within the company. Also, in case you're wondering, they did announce something about 7nm, 7nm consumer chip production, that's Meteor Lake is on schedule to start in volume in 2023. But the big news here is Intel making a turn away from like maybe becoming a fabulous company to saying, no, no, no, the money is in making chips for everybody else. Instead of trying to compete with Apple and hire Justin Long and try to sell more Intel chips, let's make the M1 chip. That way we could sell Intel chips to Windows PC makers and get some money out of making chips for Apple, Qualcomm, whoever else wants it. Well, and also doesn't it just sort of signal the not the change with the the general shift towards ARM as the viable architecture of the future. It already was for mobile and everything else. But maybe, maybe desktops and maybe instead of trying to fight the rise of ARM, start building ARM chips. Yeah. And also the thing just a tiny note, the thing about when a company advertises and kind of pokes at their competition like they're doing right now against Apple and the M1 because they pulled their chips out. That's that comes and you know, and also still doing work for Apple on this side in other ways, just like Samsung. I hate that because we're the suckers. It's not the company's problem. It's our problem. We buy into that and we're affected by it and that's lame. So next time you see a commercial like that, take it for the grain of salt that it is because chances are they are holding hands in lots of ways. You just don't know about it. And that's all I wanted to make sure to insert about that. I will say this is an incredibly shrewd move on Gelsinger's part because he understands the landscape of chip fabbing right now. All the world, only Samsung and TSMC can actually are doing the bleeding edge process stuff. All the other fabs, even the Global Foundries are stuck on the larger 14 nanometer or larger size process because no one can get it down to the necessary 7, 5 nanometer that everyone's looking for. And Intel understands that there's a choke point. There's only these two companies. One's in Taiwan, the other ones in South Korea. A lot of people are very worried about relying just on those two companies to have everything made. So if Intel can work it out and they are, they pivoted away from trying to do their in-house dye string process and they're moving to extreme ultraviolet light, which is what Samsung and TSMC did, to get their process down to seven nanometers, they could be sitting on the gold mine. Plus, I mean, there's the whole political aspect of it. Bringing jobs to the US is, you know, just jobs, but chip security, right? The chip's made in the US to ensure a steady supply of weapons. So they could possibly beg federal government for money. Oh yeah, they're going to get some government contracts out of this for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to jail. Also, side note, ASML, very excited about this because they make the equipment that people buy to build their fabs. So now they have a brand new customer. It's going to buy a bunch of their equipment. That's the future. Yep, sounds like they're also excited because it's like the band getting back together with a 46 guy coming back to kind of take things over. Yeah, there definitely is. He's a really cool guy. I like him. I hope he does well. Well, let's talk about Facebook for a second. Written testimony from Facebook and Google and Twitter CEOs has been submitted ahead of a US House hearing on Thursday. That's tomorrow regarding misinformation online. A big issue these many past years. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg included suggestions for reforming Section 230, a hot topic here on the show. Quite often the US safe harbor law that prevents platforms from being liable for most things posted by its users. Zuckerberg suggests a platform should have to demonstrate an adequate system for identifying unlawful content and removing it in order to qualify for Section 230. If illegal content evaded the system, Section 230 protection would kick in. He suggested the system would be proportional to platform size. Your blog's comments would not need to meet the standards of all of Facebook. That's easy for Facebook to say, isn't it? Because they're huge and have already done this and it's already in place and they're sort of talking about one size fits all. Arguably, arguably an adequate system. But yeah, I mean, it's sort of what Zuckerberg is saying to me sounds like, well, the platform should have to prove that it's it's trying hard not to have this kind of content on the on the platform. But if stuff comes through, don't don't come running to us. We did our best. I mean, Facebook is a great example of the company that perhaps has the most issues with this specific thing and saying, well, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Finish finish your thought. No, please. I think the key to remember is Section 230 isn't about Facebook should get rid of all the bad stuff. Section 230 is about they shouldn't be liable for what you posted that was bad. I think those issues get confused sometimes. That's all. No, I mean, I think we're all aware of that. What I'm saying is that Facebook has had perhaps, I mean, I don't know, maybe Twitter, but the most experience with this kind of issue of like, hmm, when does the platform need to step in here? And when is it something that is just out of the control of the platform? Because there are simply too many users and you can't possibly know what someone's going to post before they post it. And I think that Zuckerberg saying a platform should be better at demonstrating how they're going to stop this sort of thing from happening before it starts is great. Sounds admirable. I would be interested to see how that works. Yeah. Right now, Section 230 says you don't even have to have a system in place, right? So what he's saying is let's make it so that you have a system in place. If you have a system in place, then you get the Section 230. But if you don't have a system at all, you don't get it. And that goes back to what Scott was saying is that's great for Facebook who has a system and they're probably going to define an adequate system as the one we have. It does add a burden to anyone starting up. Facebook didn't have that burden starting up. They didn't have to have any kind of system when they were a small company because Section 230 doesn't require you right now to have a system. So it's easy for Facebook to say that and any other startup would now under this, if this proposed rule became law, would now have the burden of like, well, I guess we have to prove we have an adequate system, even if it's proportionate to the platform size. Tencent founder PonyMah is the latest tech executive to get called in to discuss antitrust compliance with Chinese officials. Tencent operates WeChat, a small app you've probably never heard of. I'm just kidding, it's the most popular messaging super app in China. Big one. It also operates a lot of other technology businesses from gaming to popular streaming TV, for example, the romance of Tiger and Rose. Reuters sources say that the state administration of market regulation is looking into whether WeChat engages in unfair competition squeezing out smaller rivals. Tencent and PonyMah are much less controversial than Alibaba and Jack Ma. No relation. Alibaba was forced to cancel an IPO of its ant group earlier this year. Fintech business, rather, earlier this year or last year, in fact, late last year by the government. So yes, it looks like the eyes are now on Tencent. Yeah, if you remember when we talked about Alibaba, that had come after Jack Ma had given sort of a salty talk about regulation in China. And then he was called on the Corp carpet and had to pull the Ant Group IPO. Jack Ma is that kind of tech executive. And so it's not really surprising to see him called on the carpet. PonyMah, on the other hand, of course, is the other huge company. Alibaba and Tencent are the two biggest companies in the Chinese tech landscape. And PonyMah, he plays by the rules. He attends the party conferences. Like he's the, I don't know if you could say the Tim Cook, but he's the one who doesn't court controversy. He's not out there spouting things off like Jack Ma. So to see him called in and, of course, Tencent saying, like, oh, no, no, we asked to be called in. And this was all very, you know, day we're goer. It's still China's like saying, you know what, we're going to crack down on antitrust. We're going to crack down on what kinds of acquisitions you guys are. Even you guys may be getting too big. Yeah, and this is all, by the way, in light of some pretty massive earnings for them today that we found out like a lot of money. Nine point something billion. We don't have to get into the details of it, but just needless to say when you are succeeding that wildly in that market, even when you are the one considered the rule player, the one that comes to the table and is fully transparent with their rules, you're still going to have a spotlight on you. And sometimes that spotlight burns. So enjoy the burn. Enjoy the burn, Tencent. Enjoy the burn. Folks, we promise that we will do our best to keep you from burning in our discord. There's a good conversations going on in there. Join on in by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. Slack rolled out connected DMs, direct messages that lets anyone with a paid Slack plan, direct message anyone else with a slack plan of any kind, even if they're outside an organization. Just a few short hours ago, the story was that descend messages users needed to send an email invitation. Once accepted, the DMs appear in the Slack sidebar. The thing about the email invitation is it included a message Slack now says in response to concerns that that part of the feature could be used to send abusive messages or harassment. It's disabling the option to include a message in the invite. So now when you invite someone to a connected DM, it'll just say, this person is asking you if you want a DM on Slack, no message included. That way, if somebody knows your email address, they can't spam your Slack inbox with messages from Slack. That was like, well, if they don't know your email address, they can already spam you. Yes, but you can filter their email address. You might not want to filter everything coming from Slack. So that has been fixed. Organizations also retain control of their users' messages in these conversations. So if you're working for Big Tech Co on their Slack, that organization will have the ownership of your side of all those conversations. You'll need super admin privileges in order to read someone else's messages, but the messages stay on company servers and can be deleted by company admins at any time. Also, an organization can choose not to turn this feature on. Everything is opt-in in this entire situation. And if they do turn it on, they can limit it to only work with verified organizations as a way to cut down on any kind of other spammy behavior there. Were you surprised at how fast this exploded in their face? I mean, I'm not surprised that they reacted as quickly as they did to the explosion itself, but I guess I was a little surprised about how quickly people called foul. I don't know if that's just Slack not understanding, you know, they're looking at this from a business perspective. It's like, oh, none of these people are, they're just trying to do work, you know, no one's no one's harassing anybody. And maybe they're just in that mindset, but man, that blew up in their face fast. Yeah, I mean, I I'm kind of with you, Scott. I was like, how many people are inviting somebody into a Slack DM conversation and then in that original email saying something horrific that's going to be very abusive and and and affect the end user that, you know, the person on the other line. Well, I don't know, hopefully not that many, but certainly it's been proven to be something that you could do. And that's unwanted, because again, that Slack email that the message is coming from is something that you're not you haven't filtered out yet. So yeah, if you're the recipient of something bad, that's a that's a bad look. It seems like Slack said, oh, yeah, you know what? Very good point. Let's fix this real quick, because this whole thing is less than 24 hours old. But just as far as DMs in general, I, you know, I saw a lot of people this morning and kind of go, oh, look at Slack. It's almost like the old days of AIM, you know, or or trillion or, you know, messengers. And I'm like, I mean, you still have to be part of some sort of an organization. And yes, Slack, I mean, we're an organization on DTNS. I have organizations of, you know, two friends of mine and I, and we're not even really working together kind of thing. It can be a messaging app, but it's generally used as a work productivity app. So most of the people that you would be conversing with that aren't maybe in your organization are going to be in another organization. It seems like this will be pretty well. Well, I don't know if it's going to be well policed, but it seems like it should be pretty well policed. Yeah, I think there's some overreaction to the significance of this on the messaging landscape. I don't think people are going to be abandoning signal and WhatsApp to use Slack suddenly because there are so many limitations. And to start a conversation, I do have to email you. Like I you have to check an email from me and go, oh, Sarah wants to invite me to talk with her on Slack. Great. OK, I'll do that. And that works best in a business situation where I'm on a Zoom meeting with you. And I say, you know what? If we're going to keep working on this project together, us two people at two different companies, let's connect on Slack. I'll send you an invite and then you're expecting it, right? So this isn't a messaging platform. This is just a very interesting and flexible way to do work with other people, which is I think the mindset Slack was in when they didn't have anybody on their project team, apparently, who'd ever been harassed and didn't see like, oh, that messaging part of that in the email is not a good idea. Yeah, definitely the part that jumped out at me. All right, let's move on to some Android business. Android police sources say Qualcomm is developing a 5G capable Android 12 powered mobile game console. They say similar to a Nintendo Switch of all kinds of issues of that statement, but we'll get to it. The device would have a detachable side controller set and SD card slot and could connect to a TV and come with a 6000 milliamp battery. That all sounds actually kind of nice. The screen might be around six to seven inches or so with a 1080p resolution. Current launch target is reportedly quarter one of 2022 with a price of somewhere around $300 is what they expect. XDA developers have similar information from sources through editor-in-chief Mazeal Rashman about the risk who says his source called it a reference design, not a consumer device. So that makes it sort of interesting. But basically they're talking about making it an Android, a handheld Android game machine, a machine that's a little more adept to adding analog controls, buttons and so on to Android gaming sort of experience, which is a little rough and tumble Roger and I were talking before the show about how touch screens, you know, they don't there's not always great parity between those that support controllers and those that support touch and never the twain shall meet. Some do. Apple Arcade requires it. They make you ever those developers have all three control systems, mouse and keyboard, phone and touchscreen. And then, of course, controller, but this isn't a closed system like that. We're talking about a big open platform that would presumably play all sorts of Android games. And also this isn't Nintendo and there aren't Nintendo games on it, which is the big huge part of this would make us product like to succeed. So without first party software design and without all that, I don't know how this thing does, but I'm kind of curious to see it. I I think editor-in-chief Michelle Robbins going to end up being right. This sounds like a reference design that Qualcomm would say like, Hey, company, you want to make this by our parts and you can make this. Look at look at this thing. I I don't think this is Qualcomm trying to compete with Nintendo. That wouldn't make any sense at all. Maybe I'm wrong. Well, we'll we'll see. But I really do think this is Hey, Samsung, Huawei ZTE one plus anybody out there. Maybe you want to create a gaming community. I don't know. Maybe Microsoft and Sony, you know, want to play around with this. I think this is just Qualcomm saying like, here's the thing you can do with 5G, our chips and a few other parts. Let's give you a reference design and let your imagination run wild. Yeah, and I'm like say totally cool with the idea of pushing that stuff as best you can. It's such a weird golden egg that no one seems to be able to grasp in trying to marry mobile and true sort of Nintendo level portable gaming. Maybe they'll figure out a way and others will build around it. But I don't know. I feel like this stuff has got a real weird road to go down before I can. Well, the UK's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex is now also chief impact officer at BetterUp. If you haven't heard of it, it's a San Francisco based startup focused on coaching and mental health. BetterUp was founded back in 2013. It has about 270 employees, not that little anymore. Harry will also be a commissioner for the Aspen Institute's new Commission on Information Disorder co-chaired by journalist Katie Kirk former CISA director Chris Krebs and color of change president Rashad Robinson. It is my impulse and I'm sure a lot of others to poke fun at, you know, a royal becoming chief impact officer at a startup. But this sounds like good stuff that he's doing, you know. And if you're somebody like the Duke who is born into this situation, you can do worse things with your time. Yeah, also, I mean, you know, you got a huge name and that's kind of your currency. And I don't know. I don't I guess I'm not surprised by a situation like this. And they seem like they're an OK company and they seem like they'll benefit from having his name on there. And maybe he just wants to every day put in a nice day of work for someone who's actually a Duke, which is kind of rare. So I don't know. Let's see how he does. Yeah, I listen. It's it's could be a terrible match. Could be a great one. Well, well, we will see. I did chuckle a tiny bit at Chief Impact Officer, where I was like, OK, in another company, what would that be called? What's that? What is that job? Evangelist, right? Yeah. Operator. I don't know what marketing director looking. Yeah, what are you looking at? But yes, listen, they, you know, Prince Harry and his wife have been in the news recently. Most most of us are kind of up to speed on on that whole story. So this kind of tracks. But at the same time, it can be. It seems like both of these these well in the case of Better Up and also the Aspen Institute doing good work. And that is that is a good thing. I mean, you can't deny that he has a name that gets attention, right? So it's a matter of what he does with that power, with great power comes great responsibility. There you go. Prince Harry, Spider-Man. All right. Surprise. Let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Rick. And this is off of our conversation yesterday about the rumor that discord might sell itself to Microsoft. But will it? It might just want to go public. Who knows? Rick says, just want to chip on chip in on potential buyers for discord thought recently that Valve would make sense as a fit to number one, embrace the gaming background of the service. Number two, expand their community efforts. And number three, potentially expand further beyond their current niche. That being said, I have no clue if Valve has the kind of money that would be required. Yeah, I have a thought about this. That's where my head was with this email. Rick was like, yeah, man, it makes sense for Val. I don't know if they could afford it or not. Yeah, they might have the money. They do have a lot of money and they kind of print their own money and they're not beholden to shareholders and things like that. They've got kind of their own thing going. But the problem I would see is their bread and butter is steam and everything else sort of takes a backseat to that. So this would need to enhance steam in some way. And steam already has its own complete system of forums and messaging and friending and groups and scheduling events and all that stuff is all in steam already. It's all part of the client. To have that outside of the client seems redundant to me. And people are gonna already keep using Discord for what they use it for. They'll keep using Steam with what they use it for and those two things aren't gonna meet in the middle very often. So I don't think it would benefit them as much. And in a way, if they can't afford it especially, they already benefit from Discord's benefits. They already get that benefit. People are using Discord to play their games. So I don't know what they would actually gain in buying it other than they could say, well, we now own Discord. It's still not gonna be a thing that it could make a ton of money from. It needs to remain free. Like I just don't see this being the kind of fit. It has more of a gamer fit. I'll give you that, like versus Microsoft, generally speaking, even with my Xbox. So I get that part of it, but I just, I think it's redundant and there's not really a reason they would do it. Well, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on the show or anything that we might talk about on a future show, you can send that feedback to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks in advance. Always good to hear from you. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Jeffrey Zilx, Steve Aya Darola, and Michelle Surju. Also, we have brand new bosses, Scott Napier, Buoso Jerome, and Carl Dawson, all just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, bosses. Also thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what is new with you? Well, I just taking a page out of Tom's book, not one of his literal books. His books are fine. I don't need to take pages out of them, but his concept of how to run a great newsletter led me to finally do one. And with a little advice from him and Jerry and a few other people in our community, I went ahead and launched it. So it is the Frogpants official newsletter. You can find it at frogpants.club. Yeah, that's right. I got a club domain. So frogpants.club will take you straight there. You can look at archives that are already there. It's just simply, hey, here's my email. Start sending me your newsletter. It's free and there's a ton in there already. I've already put up two major posts and I hope people like it. So go check it out. Again, that's frogpants.club. And for everything else you're looking for, you can find it at frogpants.com. Oh, yeah. There is a page missing in here. Oh, see, I took a page out of your book. I didn't mind. That's right. Hey, we love patrons. And we love it when patrons stick with us. Some of you have been with us since the very beginning back in 2014. That's why we're excited to offer Patreon loyalty rewards. 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