 Coming up on DTNS, monitor patients in the dark with radio waves, a battery that can last 28,000 years on a charge, and the real reasons why a judge ruled in favor of Epic and Campbell. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 25th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, Jason, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Whitewold room of my temporary dwelling in Helsinki, I'm Patrick Beja. And on the show's producer, Roger Che. Hey, Patrick, it's good to have you back. We were just talking to Patrick about his vacation. We were talking about his thoughts on Epic and Apple. It got a good day, internet. If you want to hear that, go become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple confirmed a report from Protocol that it acquired Spaces, a location-based VR startup that started as a DreamWorks animation project and then pivoted to video conferencing earlier this year. In fact, last week, Spaces announced that it was shutting down its existing services and heading in a new direction after being forced to shut down VR centers at the beginning of the pandemic. Mozilla launched Firefox 79, also known as Firefox Daylight for Android Tuesday. Firefox Daylight has enhanced tracking protection on by default so that ad trackers are auto-blocked in the standard mode. Daylight also includes a new user interface and Mozilla's mobile browser engine GeckoView. GeckoView. GeckoView. How do you say it? Let us know. The tech news show at gmail.com. That's not the email address. That's not the email. Sorry. Feedback at the tech news show.com. Is that it? No. That's it. Yes. Firefox holds less than 1% of the mobile market share according to net applications. Welcome back, Patrick. Amazon is rolling out a new augmented reality shopping tool, Room Decorator. So you try out how furniture and other decor might look in your own virtual space of your own space. Room Decorator is different than AR View. Amazon launched that for iOS back in 2017. That allows multiple or this new one allows multiple products in a room together, not just a single item and works with furniture products from not just Amazon but third-party sellers, too. Samsung's Find My Mobile app is now rolling out an update for offline devices. So offline finding, that's a new feature, will let you find your phone using someone else's Galaxy device or let other users use your phone to scan for their lost Galaxy devices or watches or earbuds that might be nearby. The update appears to be only available in the US and South Korea for now, available on the Samsung Galaxy Store or APK Mirror. Sounds familiar. The Facebook announced it's changing the name of its AR and VR division that encompasses Oculus Spark and portal brands to Facebook Reality Labs. The company's AR VR Research Division renamed itself from Oculus Research to Facebook Reality Labs back in 2018. The division will now be known as FRL Research. Facebook's annual VR Developer Conference Oculus Connect will also be renamed Facebook Connect and kicks off virtually on September 16. I think that Oculus Tim's on his way out. Amazon has opened its largest office building in the world in Hyderabad, India. Hyderabad is already a technology base in India for Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Amazon's 1.8 million square foot office is Amazon's first fully owned office outside the United States, although the company does manage 40 other offices, 67 shipping centers, 1400 delivery stations and of course a workforce of more than 60,000 plus 155,000 contractors in India. Gartner reports that worldwide smartphone sales dropped 20.4% for the second quarter due mostly to continued disruptions from COVID-19. Samsung was hit the hardest, dropping 27.1% here over year. Huawei sales declined 6.8% overall, but the company still saw an increase in the overall market share for the quarter, plus a rise in sales of 27.4% between Q1 and Q2. Apple dipped 0.4%. China's overall market dropped 7% for the quarter, but India was down 46%. That is a drop. Along with a lawsuit that TikTok filed challenging the US executive order banning transactions with the company, TikTok also released monthly active user details for the first time. And as you can imagine, they're pretty good. In the US, monthly active users are up 800% in 2018, from 11 million to more than 100 million today. That's in the US alone with more than 50 million daily active users. Globally, TikTok says it now has 2 billion global downloads and reported close to 700 million monthly active users in July. All right, let's talk about Facebook. There's the thinking out there that maybe Facebook is behind the scenes pushing for TikTok to get banned in the US, but maybe not. Following a legal request from Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, Facebook has blocked access to a group of 1 million members in Thailand. That group criticized the king of Thailand, and Thailand has strict laws against criticizing the monarchy. They're currently protesting against the military-led government in Thailand and calls for reform of the monarchy. So this was part of that, just kind of bleeding over onto Facebook. Facebook had resisted blocking that group. It was given 15 days on August 10th to block it or face charges and fines under the Computer Crime Act in Thailand. So Facebook took it to the last day before they did the blocking. Facebook says it plans to challenge the government's order. A spokesperson said, requests like this are severe, contravene international human rights law and have a chilling effect on people's ability to express themselves. Now, the verges Casey Newton notes that this is an example of why Facebook might not be happy about a US ban on TikTok because it emboldens governments to threaten bans against social networks elsewhere in the world for any purpose. They could say, look, the US is banning TikTok. We're going to ban you if you don't do this as well. Newton writes, quote, enforcement like this is now the price of admission for companies on a rapidly splintering internet. If there's one obvious lesson to be learned from TikTok's fade in America, it's that Facebook and its peers have to manage their relationship with regulators too. I'm certain that's the case. I can still see Facebook trying to say, look at this TikTok, it's not, you know, it might pose a problem. I don't think anyone would have expected an outright full ban, but certainly that logic makes a lot of sense. Casey Newton has a very good point. It's definitely not in the interest of Facebook of making banning of social networks by governments a habitual thing. So that's something to think about for sure. Yeah. And Newton, he speculates that maybe Facebook was out there saying, look, you don't want to clamp down too much on antitrust with us because look at TikTok, you know, and it's Chinese and not saying it should be banned, but sort of casting shade on them for its own purposes and it worked a little too well. Exactly. Yeah. I think so. It's certainly, you know, the other side of this is Facebook trying to resist as much as possible. In this case, you know, there might be other cases where it's different, trying to resist a lawful order, but we fall back again on that issue of they can't resist the lawful order when it's lawful in that country. Without facing the penalty, yeah. Of course. And maybe they could, you know, take that stand and decide that they're going to face the penalty there, but then you get into the argument, well, you're resisted here. Why don't you resist it there? And you fall into that very difficult pit of you decide what law you're going to obey, which is, you know, not the place I think Facebook wants to be in. All right. Sources from both Bloomberg and Taiwan's economic daily news say Nintendo is working on the new Switch console for release in 2021 that would likely include a more powerful chip and 4K graphics. A stronger lineup of game releases would accompany the refreshed hardware, including previously announced Metroid Prime 4 and the sequel to the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Currently, Switch hardware is based around NVIDIA's Tegra X1 system on a chip, which was first announced more than five years ago, so ripe for an upgrade. I don't know. What do you think, Patrick? I mean, it would be the opposite of the Switch Lite. With the Switch Lite, they put out a less powerful version or a less feature-filled version of the Switch. In order to get more people on board, this would be upgrading the hardware to be a little more powerful, maybe play a few more games that you, well, I mean, they wouldn't want it to not be able to play on the other versions of the Switch. No, I think that's a difficult question. The Switch Lite is, for those who don't know, the Switch can be connected to your TV or taken on the go. It has a screen integrated. I think most people know that the Switch Lite cannot be plugged onto the TV. So it's not really less powerful it is, but the main feature is that it doesn't play on the TV. And you can separate the controller. Right. But this would be an entirely new class of hardware because it would be capable of doing games that could potentially not run on the previous version. I don't think that's the route they would go, but certainly if only for the 4K graphics in a time when people are getting more and more 4K TVs, it could make sense that they could render the same thing in 4K. Even just that could be interesting. If they have more graphical power, maybe can have a more stable frame rate, even without going into big graphical upgrades that wouldn't benefit or be possible on the previous version. And then the games, you know, the Nintendo Switch has been selling very, very well. And Nintendo has a history of getting their core fans to upgrade to a new version of the same hardware or upgraded version of the same hardware. So already, if you give them a 4K version, they're going to think, maybe I should get it. And if you give them a lot of games, you get out of the way of 2020 for the new generation of PlayStation and Xboxes, and then you bring out the new version of the console and, you know, three of those calibers of games, you have sold millions and millions of consoles. So as a strategy, it makes a lot of sense, no matter how powerful the system is. Yeah, if Nintendo's sales are going to slow down after the big pandemic boom driven by Animal Crossing, one way to get more people interested is to refresh the hardware. So yeah, it makes sense. Well, speaking of hardware, Fitbit introduced its follow up to the Fitbit Ionic called the Fitbit Sense, an advanced health smartwatch, as the company calls it, that includes an electrodermal activity or EDA sensor, an electrocardiogram or ECG measurements, plus Google Assistant support. The EDA sensor looks for electrical changes in your skin that might indicate things like stress. Are you really stressed out? Might be able to tell you that. You might know that already, but it might be something that you'd like to keep, you know, keep reports of. You place your palm over the senses display, you breathe while it takes a measurement, and then the sense will also alert you to changes in your body temperature or high or low heart rates that might indicate spikes of some kind. Fitbit also updated its versus smartwatch and Inspire fitness tracker lines. All of this works better if you pay for Fitbit premium to keep track of all your data. So you get some data, and if you want to upgrade a Fitbit premium, then it's all in one place. Pre-orders are now open for the Fitbit Sense that goes for 330 US dollars, the Fitbit Versa 3 for 230 dollars, and the Fitbit Inspire 2 for 100 dollars, all shipping in late September. Well, well, so as somebody, I've got a Fitbit Versa 2. Yeah, exactly. I'm not wearing it right now because I left my charger at home. I haven't been home for a week now. But anyway, in a perfect world, I actually do pay for Fitbit's premium service because if you really want to get all in on any ecosystem, and I'm not saying it's only Fitbit because there are others, it is a data nerd's dream. And something that could give me that much more data beyond how many steps I take, what my heart rate is, and how many stairs I climbed, or the equivalent of that, hiking around during the day, that sort of thing. Stress stuff, especially along with the new trend of smartwatches giving you a lot more sleep data, and whether or not they're completely accurate, I think it's somewhat hit or miss, at least in my experience at this point. But it definitely gives you a better snapshot of, do I feel well? Do I not feel well? Maybe some of these parameters are why? And this is stuff that a lot of people just weren't able to track day-to-day beforehand. It's pretty cool. Yeah, the electrocardigram is a little bit of catch-up for Fitbit here because other watches have that. But the electro-dermal activity is interesting. I think that's a cool feature to try out. Who knows? Maybe it won't be that useful, but it's interesting. Scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, or CSAIL, have developed a system to analyze wireless radio signals to detect a person's movement called RF Diary. A deep learning algorithm is trained to recognize activities like sleeping, reading, cooking, and watching TV based on how the propagation of radio waves and the room change, how they bounce off of stuff. It can also recognize some objects like laptops. The system is given a floor map of the space that it's going to monitor, so it takes a little bit of setup. It then looks at a small amount of video of the person and pairs that with existing data sets. So the person has to move around and then it goes, okay, I think the person's doing that. I've got a data set that makes me think this. That's how you train the algorithm for that individual. So it's not a plug-and-play thing. It takes a little training. RF Diary will then, once it's trained, generate text descriptions of activities and interactions with objects. So you're not recording video of someone. You're not spying on every move. You're just writing down like, oh, they're watching TV. They're going to the kitchen and cooking something. It can classify more than 30 activities accurately, more than 90% of the time, and perform as well or better than video systems. So it's a good replacement for them. Plus, it works in the dark. You don't have to have a light on or use infrared or something like that. The team has tested the system in hospitals and assisted living facilities. Again, this is not for spying on you at your home. It's for monitoring people with Parkinson's, dementia, and COVID-19. You say it's not for spying on me at my home, but that was my first thought. That's not what they want it to be used for. Of course, but of course, you think there are going to be like intelligence and military uses for these kinds of things, and that's where my mind went immediately. It's pretty cool tech. I also thought, how is add tech going to find a way to use this? Obviously, because that's, but the actual real world use for it is definitely very interesting, especially assisted living facilities. Or if it works, if it's miniaturized enough, maybe you can have that as a security system for a parent or someone that's a little bit older that doesn't necessarily need to be in an assisted living facility, but that you can keep an eye on without having a camera in their home. There are definitely very cool users for all of this. Yeah, less invasive than video. I would like to know if while watching TV, it can tell that I've also fallen asleep, because that happens often. Yeah, it might be able to do that. That's a good question. Yeah. California Battery Developer, NDB. This is cool as well. Claims that it's nano diamond batteries can last 28,000 years on a single charge. You just have to be comfortable with the fact that they're made from repurposed nuclear waste. Not everybody will. NDB purifies radioactive graphite to create radioactive carbon 14 diamonds. It then coats those with a layer of carbon 12 diamonds to contain the radioactive material. The structures are then layered themselves to create electric cells in any size, including double A, triple A, and so on. The levels of radiation are lower than the average human body gives off, so they're low. NDB just passed two proof of concept tests that saw the batteries manage a 40% charge. It also signed up its first two beta test clients. One is a leader in nuclear fuel cell products and services, and the other is a leading global aerospace defense and security manufacturing company. Yeah. So you put this on the list of, hey, if they can ever make it commercially viable, this could be great. Whether you'll see people picking up a double A battery at the convenience store that's made from radioactive waste, that's going to take a feat of marketing, I think. So is it less radioactive than the human body when it's all coated? And then if you step on it, all of a sudden, it becomes a nuclear power plant under your shoe. Presumably, because it's coated with diamonds. Maybe you don't do a tap dance on the batteries. It should strip off the protective layer. I mean, the initial idea is definitely radioactive material. I don't want that, but 28,000 years on one charge, essentially, it's the battery that you literally never have to replace. Maybe you make it less radioactive material, and it only lasts for 20 years. That would still be pretty good. The advantages energy-wise and ecologically are so huge that you may have to consider this at least for some uses. And I think that is probably what they're going for. It's not going to be the battery in your phone, but for some specific uses, it might be really make a lot of sense to consider this if it works as they are claiming it could. And don't forget it repurposes nuclear waste that would otherwise be sitting in a disposal facility. I mean, people are probably going to be more comfortable with the disposal facility than in their radio. That was my first question was I was like, okay, 28,000 years, that's silly. I mean, in 100 years, if that actually comes to fruition, I won't be around anyway. But would there be a device that could take advantage of at least a fraction of those thousands of years that wouldn't need to be upgraded anyway, or the battery would have to be taken out and swapped in and that sort of thing. Cars, cars, okay, sure. Or if you could, you could build it into a large enough battery to supply a home and an emergency would be great because then you could still run everything and not have to worry about having power from a grid. Totally. Well, I don't know. I think, you know, when you think of, we're talking, you know, the quintupled digits of years, you know, I'm like, yeah, what kind of car is would anybody even be driving in like 5,000 years? Right, because if this were to get commercial viability, which it's not there yet, it's not clear that they can make this work commercially, they're only getting 40% at this point. But let's say they got it there and they got past the marketing resistance to the idea of this being made from nuclear waste, which again, I have to stress would be a great thing for taking nuclear waste and making sure that it wasn't polluting our environment. If we get past all that, then it doesn't matter how long it lasts. It just means you never have to replace a battery again. Right. And even if it's at 40%, does it mean it only lasts for, you know, 11,000 years? At 40%, it lasts a little bit less. Maybe that's already enough. I don't know. It's lots of questions. Yeah, yeah. Like with battery tech, you know, don't expect this to be on your shelf anytime soon, but it's got a lot of promise. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, folks, we've got a decision, but it's not the decision in Epic versus Apple. Settle back. I'm going to try to explain this as best as I can to avoid you falling victim to the misleading headlines that may be out there. US District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Monday that Apple does not have to reverse its decision to remove Fortnite from its app store. They can keep Fortnite out of the app store, but must hold off terminating Epic's developer accounts which are used to support Unreal Engine. Devil's in the details. This is a ruling on a request by Epic for a temporary restraining order. It's not a preliminary injunction. You'll see lots of stories refer to that. It's roughly the same, but it's not a preliminary injunction. We still have that yet to come, and it's not the court case itself. This is not the final word. But as Judge Gonzalez Rogers says herself in the decision, a temporary restraining order is, quote, not a preliminary adjudication on the merits, but rather a device for preserving the status quo and preventing the irreparable loss of rights before judgment. It's basically saying, which conditions should we let sit while the court determines who's right? There are four factors under which a temporary restraining order can be issued. The first is likelihood of success on the merits. And the judge found that Epic certainly raises serious questions, but it's not clear that it would prevail. So that one didn't play into this. Irreparable harm, this is the question of status quo. If normal conditions aren't maintained, would one of the parties suffer irreparable harm that would be unfair if they won the case? Judge Gonzalez Rogers noted that, quote, self-inflicted wounds are not irreparable injury. And therefore, regarding Fortnite, she said the current predicament appears of its own making. Judge Gonzalez Rogers also said Epic, quote, strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple. So that's one of the reasons that she's like, you can keep Fortnite blocked because Epic can change this anytime at once. Now, regarding Apple terminating Epic's developer account, which they said they were going to do on August 28th, the judge wrote, Epic International appears to have separate developer program license agreements with Apple, and those agreements have not been breached. She's like, there's multiple agreements here. And you're saying they broke their developer agreement, but they didn't break that one. Continuing with what she wrote, moreover, Apple is hard pressed to dispute that even if Epic Games succeeded on the merits, it could be too late to save all the projects by third-party developers relying on the engine that were shelved while support was unavailable. So she's saying harm could come to Epic during the court case that would be irreparable. And even if they won the case, they could suffer harm, and that's not fair. So that's why she's saying you can't get rid of the developer account. For one, they have an agreement that doesn't seem to have been violated because there are multiple agreements, and they would suffer irreparable harm. There's a couple other notes here, one called Balance of Equities. That's the third of the four things you have to look at in a temporary restraining order. This is, would a decision leave one side in an inequitable situation? Well, no, they're both huge companies. They're going to be fine. Apple won't be harmed by letting Unreal Engine continue. And regarding Fortnite, Apple would be just as harmed by letting Fortnite in with 0% revenue share as Epic will be by keeping it out. And Gonzalez Rogers wrote, while the court anticipates experts will opine that Apple's 30% take is anti-competitive, the court doubts that an expert would suggest a 0% alternative, not even Epic games, gives away its products for free entirely. All right. The fourth thing they look at is public interest, and this played into the decision as well. In this case, this means would it unduly hurt Fortnite players or Unreal Engine developers that aren't part of the case? The judge actually acknowledged that Fortnite is really important right now. She wrote, the court further recognizes that during these coronavirus pandemic times, virtual escapes may assist in connecting people and providing a space that is otherwise unavailable. But she didn't find that that interest outweighed the other public interest of, quote, requiring private parties to adhere to contractual agreements. She's like, sorry, that's not an excuse. On the other hand, stopping developer access for the development of Unreal Engine would definitely harm third parties. She wrote, the record shows potential significant damage to both the Unreal Engine platform itself and to the gaming industry generally, including on both third party developers and games. Epic games and Apple are at liberty to litigate against each other, but their dispute should not create havoc to bystanders. And the judge notes her previous determination that it isn't obvious that Epic violated terms regarding Unreal Engine with Epic International. She's like, there's another agreement here that they didn't even violate. So in summary, because Epic could easily fix the Fortnite situation and there isn't enough harm to Epic or players by keeping it out, the Fortnite ban is allowed to stand. But because there are separate agreements regarding Unreal Engine, and it would definitely harm third party developers, Apple may not suspend Epic's whole developer account affecting Unreal Engine. Now, like I said, this is not the end. There will now be a full hearing on the preliminary injunction on September 28th. It's essentially a less urgent version of the same thing again. The temporary restraining order only lasts to get them to that preliminary injunction where they will determine what the status quo should be during the case. So they're going to go over all this again. The actual court case over this won't be scheduled until after that preliminary injunction is decided, and that's unlikely to happen this year, hence the importance placed on these injunctions because they're deciding what the status quo will be for the next year or more. I don't know if you read the unofficial minutes of the hearing by, I think it was Sarah Jiang, really fascinating stuff, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Roger has got everything right in my opinion. She understood the intricacies of everything, including the video games aspect. She was like as a tech connoisseur, I thought she was an expert in everything she said understood and decided. It was impressive. Yeah, no, it seems like she, I mean, this is what I said probably would happen yesterday, and so yeah, it did. We didn't get any shockers here. Listen, she agrees with Tom, so obviously he's doing something right. So she's very smart. Whether you agree with Tom or not, you can participate in our subreddit by submitting stories and voting on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Who agrees with me in the mailbag? Oh, it's Dan. Dan lives in Bristol and says it's wet and windy. No, it's sunny. No, it's rainy. What the hell is going on? Dan, I hear that. He emailed us about yesterday's discussion that we had about Slack and email and civility and how workplaces are dealing with that. Dan has a top tip for those of you using Outlook. Dan says, I have a rule set up on my Outlook account that I call, did you really want to say that? It states, after I send this message, deferred delivery by two minutes unless flagged as high priority. This then gives me the opportunity to briefly reflect about ranting in an email or at a spot, an annoying typo or both. Then I have two minutes to dive into the outbox, retrieve my message and amend it. I've lost count of the number of times this has saved me from sending something I might have been thinking, but shouldn't have committed to something that can't be audited. We also use teams for real-time chat, but my colleagues and I have a private WhatsApp group running in parallel, so we can say what we're really thinking or even making. Yeah, the fact that your email might be audited by your company is a big motivation to be like, let me make sure I want that in the record. That's a cool tip. Thank you, Dan. Yeah, absolutely. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Reed Fischler, Merck Gibson, and Phillip Lass. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja making his triumphant return. Patrick, we missed you very much. We know you had a lovely time off, but we're glad to have you back and let folks know where they can keep up with what you're doing now. Listen, it's very easy. You know I'm called Patrick. You know that my social media handles are usually not Patrick. 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