 Coming up on DTNS Apple's new privacy labels for iOS apps, the benchmarks are in on the AMD Ryzen 5000 series chips and Netflix launches the Netflix channel. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 6th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta. And producing the show with the fresh dusting of snow. I'm Amos. Also joining us, good to have the host of the SMR podcast, one of the hosts of the SMR podcast, Chris Ashley back in the house. How's it going, Chris? Let it do my people. Glad to be back hanging out. Good to have you back. And the double whammy, the double. That's right. That's right. We're bringing you back on Monday. Yeah, twice the Chris. That's right. All you folks that miss me and were messaging me furiously like, where you been at? I'm here twice. You're like, Michael Jordan's back to back. He's just kind of it'll be like a like a weekend sandwich. That's right. You know, that's right. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you get good day internet, then you know, we were just talking about white elephant gifts and secret Santa and all kinds of good stuff like that. Get that wider show. Become a patron at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple is taking pre-orders for the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max through its online store and the Apple Store app with in more than 30 countries and regions around the world. The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro went on sale in October. Apple also announced pricing for its MagSafe Duo charger as well as a leather sleeve with MagSafe for the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro both cost 129 bucks or with the option of $10 and 75 cents a month for 12 months. Apple's site lists both as coming soon, so it doesn't have a specific release date, but now you know the price. Sony announced that at launch, the PS5 will not support expanding SSD storage. The console doesn't include a user accessible M.2 SSD slot, but Sony says that this will be available in a future update. The company also said it needs to do compatibility testing on SSDs to ensure that they will work with the PS5. Expansion drives need to handle 5.5 gigabits per second of bandwidth over a PCIe Gen 4 connection and work with the PS5's I.O. controller. The PS5 does support expanding storage over USB. New York Times reports that Facebook may slow down users' ability to share posts in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation and theories about the election. Facebook did not offer exactly what would change about its sharing features, but reportedly it could be adding an additional click or two. That's kind of what Twitter did when it forced you to do a quote tweet. Facebook previously relied on its voting information center and labels within its app, but these notices are easily dismissed and don't prevent users from sharing any kind of post. Xiaomi announced the Mi Box 4S Pro, which can stream video at 8K. Not clear at this point what if any services will stream in 8K rather, but it's there. You know, it is possible when they do arrive. The Mi Box 4S Pro sells for 399.1, which is about $60 US, available now in China. Xiaomi has no plans for a worldwide release. Well, yeah, someday we'll have 8K services and then I'll worry about that, I guess. But there you go. First 8K streamer. All right, let's talk a little bit more about this Netflix channel. Let's do it. Netflix is testing a Netflix channel. This is in France, so, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a test that will show movies and TV series from Netflix and an ongoing stream like a cable TV channel. The channel called Direct will only be available in a web browser. So, you know, using Apple TV or Roku or whatever. Can't do it that way. The channel launched for some November 5th and will broadly be available to French Netflix subscribers in early December. What do we think? Chris, what do you think? So me being a big cord cutter guy, I like it. I like anything that any of these services provide that continue to draw people into the platform and put more pressure on these cable companies to change the way they do business. I love it all. So anything they come up with, I don't know why the limited access. You would think that something like this, if they launched it and they wanted it to be successful, just blow it out. You know, put it on the Apple TV or put it as a subset of the app. You know, put it everywhere and then allow, allow for folks to really get a hold of it like a regular channel. Because it's not like Netflix puts out bad shows. I love most of the shows that I've watched, at least that they put out. So, you know, anything they do to move forward, I'm all for it. Yeah, I think the reason they're they're limiting it is it's a test. They they want to make sure that it streams well. So that limits the number of people who access it at once so they can sort of scale it up and make sure it doesn't fail. They just kind of want to see who uses it. You can get more analytics sometimes by doing a web situation. But it's it's tentative that they're like, we're not sure we want to do this for everybody. So let's just try a very limited version of it. And Meryl Barr texted me earlier today and suggested it might also have to do with French content laws. There might be something there because there's some new laws coming in the European Union about streaming services and the amount of local content that they have to have and the amount they invest in local production companies. So there may be some reasons to do a stream in France, particularly because of local content laws that help them comply with that because they can point to a stream instead of just on demand. That could be part of it, too. I mean, there's a lot of this that, you know, it seems sort of like, oh, isn't that the old way of doing things? Like, who wants to just like put on a channel? Well, you know, now everything's all a cart, right? You choose what you want to watch. I mean, I am still of the mind when I get in my car, I want to listen to trust real radio. I just want someone to kind of like tell me what I'm going to hear. You know, whether it's talk or it's music or that sort of thing. I think that in this case, especially for a company like Netflix that has so many options and most of that stuff is content that people aren't going to directly access. It's like, oh, it's nice that it's there. Sure, you have a big library, but I'm not necessarily going to watch any of this. But if you give it to me on a channel, then I might. There might be some discoveries, some nostalgia. I really like I like the idea of this. Yeah, I think you nailed one of the best use cases for this, which is there's a ton of shows on Netflix that I may not get to just because I don't know about them. So if there's a singular channel that's just streaming, you know, an episode from each show, I may pick up on them like, oh, you know what? I am going to check this out. So I think that was probably one of the best use cases for having a channel. I think one of the things that Netflix has talked a lot in their earnings calls and other interviews about is trying to help people decide what to watch. There is definitely a thing out there of people saying, I turn on Netflix, then I'm confronted by this wall of icons, and I can't figure out what to watch. And I think they want to test if this helps with that. If you can say like, well, just go to direct, and then you can just watch something if you can't decide on anything else. And like you say, maybe that will get you interested in a show and you go dive in and choose to watch it on demand. I know a lot of other services do this. Peacock has a whole grid of stuff to just let you watch. Shutter, a guy named Horror Matt on Twitter pointed out, Shutter's been doing this for a long time. Showtime, I know it's a linear channel anyway, but they give their linear channel in the Showtime app, even if you're just subscribing directly through the app. So it's not unheard of to do this. And I just love the idea of seeing what they program on a Netflix channel. I can't tell if this is going to be customized to the user or not, but I imagine it won't. It'd be easier for them to just say like, no, this is kind of the top level, our hottest shows and movies to showcase. Yeah, I love it. I think it's pretty cool because even me being a seasoned court cutter and having, you know, all the different services, it people are, you know, I understand what people go through when they open up Netflix and like, wham, here's all this content. Now you pick what you want to watch it. Even for me, it's like, what do I want to jump through? And sometimes I end up like, I'll just go watch some of the Hulu or I'll just go watch something on the Amazon because I'm like, I don't know what I want to watch at the moment. Now I've gone back and started rewatching the blacklist. It's awesome. But there are many times where I just like, no, I don't feel like watching it. I don't know what this is and this, that and the other. So I agree. Yeah, the burden of choice. Well, Apple announced that developers will be required to provide new privacy details to users on the app store starting December 8th. A lot of people call these things nutrition labels because they're kind of like the labels you have on food. It will require developers to identify all possible data collection and uses either by themselves or a third party with a few very specific exemptions. Like you have to meet like four different criteria not to disclose it. And it's pretty restricted to like, well, this is just you signing up for something or whatever. Collect data is defined as transmitting data off the device in a way that lets developers or third party partners access it for a period longer than what is necessary to give you the transmitted request in real time. So in other words, if I'm just saying, hey, I want to download that thing from the cloud, that's not privacy. But if it's I'm going to download that thing from the cloud and they're going to log me, my account number, the request, the file type, and they're going to share that with a third party. Well, then that counts. They have to tell me they're going to do that. This includes data only used in limited situations and labels have to be updated as an app changes its practices. The app page when you look at it as a customer looking at the app store is going to tell you what data is used to track a user like the, for instance, if they collect location, that would be there. What data is linked to a user like your contact info is linked like, oh, we, we link all of your activity to your, your contact info, for instance. And then what data is collected and not linked to you. That would be like anonymous usage data where they're like, we're not trying to collect data on you. We're just trying to collect data about how the app is used and stuff like that. This will apply to all new app submissions and updates. Again, starting December 8th. Uh, can't say I hate this. I mean, you know, it's the more data that we have about the kind of data that companies are, are, are pulling from us, the better. So it's hard to, to, you know, say anything bad about Apple and making an effort to better be stewards of users data, but unfortunately, I just see this as being a hundred percent useless and not, you know, for the fact that I'm trying, but the reality is the majority of people who are using apps are going to click past the new warnings, just like they click past the current warnings. And they have no idea what these people are collecting. They have no idea why it makes a difference, how they can put these, you know, different pieces of data together to then formulate who they are and what, what they're doing. And so while I applaud Apple for forcing companies to, you know, take more care about announcing what they're collecting, the reality is just, that's not the problem. The problem is on the other side, which is, A, we have no restrictions on what they can, we have very little restrictions on what they can do with the data outside of something like a GDPR. But more importantly, we're not educating our users as to why they need to look at this, why they need to pay attention to the data that's being collected and to understand whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that these companies collect this data. So I like it, but I just, it just further points out the, you know, the problem that we have and that's going to continue to escalate. Yeah, it turns, it, in many cases, I, I know exactly what you mean. It turns into companies being like, we told you, we did every single thing that we could do to tell you what was happening. You just didn't know where you didn't care. Yeah. And what I'm going to say is going to sound like it's contradicting you, but it's not because there's so many different kinds of people. There will also be people who will now freak out about apps that aren't doing anything bad. They're just doing the norm because they're going to see that big label and go like, they're collecting my contact info. It's like, well, yeah, it's an address book. That's what it does. You're going to get both. You're going to get the people who won't even pay attention to this and it's not going to help. And you're going to get the people who now suddenly are going to see all this information front and center and think it's new and, and not really understand to your point what the difference is between collecting for a proper purpose and, and collecting for an improper purpose. Right. And, you know, just even understanding how, you know, one plus one does equal to and then all of a sudden, you know, word, you know, two apps that are collecting different pieces of data, but can put it together to get a profile about you. You know what I mean? So I would, I like the fact that they're making an effort. So I hope nobody doesn't get me wrong on that, but I would much rather see an effort to educate end users as to the importance of what the data is that's being collected, what it all means and more importantly, maybe some more restrictions on not saying what they have to warn the users about the data they're collecting, but what they can actually do with the data they are collecting, right? So like you're on our platform, you're collecting this information, you can only use it for XYZ and you can only hold it for XYZ amount of time. You know what I mean? That type of stuff they could probably do and that I would see as a better option or a more effective option to help protect the users from these data because once the data is gone and then you have these data breaches and, you know, again, a lot of this is randomized and so you're not necessarily collecting, linking back, but, you know, Facebook showed us that, you know, there is an ability for third parties to collect data and really generate some pretty specific profiles about the people they're collecting data of. Well, going back to cord cutting for a minute, Roku had a nice third quarter. The company earned 9 cents per share in Q3. Analysts had expected it to lose 40 cents per share, so that was that was good for the company. Active Roku accounts rose 43% to 43 million while streaming numbers rose 54% to 14.8 million. Sales of Roku hardware increased 57 percent on the year, but Roku is in the midst of moving from being hardware focused to ad sales focused. Company is in a, you know, bit of a transition itself. To that end, the company announced that its Roku channel now has 54 million viewers while monetized video ad impressions were up 90% on the year. Roku CFO Steve Loudon said, quote, we're not going back to the way it was. COVID triggered a lasting, durable change in how marketers are thinking about their TV ad spends. This may help you understand why Roku had disputes with Peacock and HBO Max. Its future is setting precedents that let it make ad money off the biggest players on its platform. Yeah, because it's making a lot of money, not just off that Roku channel where they sell the ads, but also by either selling ads or getting a cut of the ads sold on the apps on its platform like Peacock and HBO Max. You know, I don't know. It's kind of odd. So good for Roku. First off, that's the only thing I have never played with or don't own. But my other two hosts, they do use it and they love they love Roku. So, but I still find it amazing that ads is such a revenue generating source for all of these companies or Google, Microsoft, Roku, Apple. I just find it astounding that telling people what to buy is is just huge revenue source for folks. It amazes me because I don't find myself looking at an ad and saying, I got to go get that or that ad convinced me. I need this, you know, I just normally I just need something and I just go out and find what I want. But I know I'm I'm not the norm in this regard. But everybody thinks that because good advertising doesn't stick out. So the advertising that's working on you, you don't realize it raised your awareness. It made you remember something. It got you to think about something. The ads you you remember are the ones that don't work because you're like that was dumb. Although sometimes maybe those are working too. I'm trying to I'm trying. And now you got me thinking like what's the last thing I bought because I saw an ad for it. Because it's not like everybody thinks like why see an ad and then I don't buy the thing. That's not the way advertising really works. The way advertising really works is you see an ad over and over. You remember it and then you're in the store and you're like, Oh, I know what that is. Because you're less likely to buy something you're unfamiliar with. Yeah. Well, the whole the whole thing on the Internet these days is like was sold out now back in stock. Yeah, yeah, there's that too. Right. Oh my gosh. So many of those. Yeah. So many where you're like, Oh, I should get this like really highly. Better hurry up. Yeah, the equivalent of the going out for business. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, everyone's talking about this jacket. There was this furniture store in San Francisco that was going out of business for like three years. Yes, yes, so much money. Yes, I love those. Hey folks, if you want to join in the conversation on our discord, you know, let us know if you're going out of business and if you got a jacket that must go, you can chat with all kinds of folks in there. Link it to your Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T and S. The Verge has a good roundup of the benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and overall looks like Ryzen beats Intel in performance. Tom's hardware has the Ryzen 9 5950X beating the Intel Core i9 10900K an average of eight games at 1080p and 1440p not every game, but an average of eight games and Antec had the 5950X beating the i9 10900K in the majority of its gaming tests at a variety of resolutions again, not every single one, but the majority hot hardware has the 5950X on top of almost all of its gaming benchmarks. Digital Foundry found some games better on the Intel i9 10900K. So they were against the trend a little bit, but it was close enough that with the price difference, Digital Foundry said, you know what, we still recommend the 5000 series as your default choice because it's close enough and it's cheaper. For example, an Antec found that the $299 Ryzen 9 5600X comes close to or outperforms the i9 10900K in a variety of games. So you're getting more for your buck. Now AMD is quick to point out that this isn't even the best performance you can get out of its CPUs because when you pair a 5000 series CPU with the forthcoming Ryzen RX 6000 graphics cards that are coming out mid-November, early December, you should see a boost in performance because of a feature called AMD Smart Access that provides Ryzen 5000 processors direct access to 6000 series GPU memory. If you're curious about content creation, you're like, yeah, gaming, I get that. That tells me performance, but I need to do some video editing. I need to do some heavy-duty image editing. The 5950X topped a variety of rendering and encoding tests by both the Nantec and Tom's hardware. Now Intel is still a solid choice, but it's clear that Ryzen has the current edge in this category. Intel's 11th gen Rocket Lake desktop processors are going to arrive sometime early next year, though, and they're finally going to include PCI-E 4.0, so that balance is probably going to shift again. But we have definitely entered a realm of a horse race with changing leads in processor performance instead of what we have had for the last few years, which is AMD sort of nipping at the heels. I love this. I love this. I always love when you have this type of competition that continues to push the technology and the boundaries afford. I've always been an AMD fan since I started building PCs. Why? Because they were always cheaper. Because they were great. But the fact is, at least from my perspective, as they were cheaper, but they always worked just as well as any Intel CPU that I had that I was, you know, potentially going to purchase. So the fact that these guys have a once a day just come out of nowhere where everybody's like Intel this until that and they're like, we're dropping the hammer on you fools right now. Coming out with the hotness and they're back on the the tongues of everybody talking about PC builds and computers. I love this. There's nothing that you can't love about this. Yeah, good, good stuff. And good to see competition because that's good for us as consumers because when Intel comes out with something better, there's some price pressure and maybe it's not going to be so expensive anymore. You'll have more choices when you're building your machines, when you're when you're picking your specs. So yeah, I love to see this too. Well, Eric Johnson, you may not know him, but he's a security researcher and student at Miami University posted a series of tweets in September critical of Proctorio, a software that's used to monitor students taking exams remotely. Lots of students taking exams remotely these days. Proctorio source code is easily downloadable and also not copyright protected. He criticizes how the code detected potential cheating like switching networks, abnormal clicking or eye movements. Three of his tweets included links to Pastebin postings of snippets of code used to illustrate his criticisms. Proctorio issued takedown notices to Twitter and Pastebin as well, which responded by move removing the post and the tweets. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF, helped Johnson submit a counter claim arguing that the snippets of code were a fair use because they were used for commentary and criticism and didn't undermine the marketplace for Proctorio's software. The EFF compared it to quoting a passage of a book in a book review. Twitter has since restored Johnson's tweets. We haven't seen the Pastebin be restored, although that may be restored by the time you see this. I don't know. But barring that, I would say this is a story of the law working the way it's supposed to. You may not like the way it's supposed to work, but the way it's supposed to work is if a seemingly legitimate takedown claim is sent, you take it down. Unless it's clearly like you take on the liability if you don't take it down. So the burden of proof is to be the burden is well, we're probably going to take it down if it seems legitimate. And in this case, you would say like, oh, he did post code that is your copyrighted work. So we're not going to try to adjudicate this. You say it's a violation. That's on you. We'll take it down. That keeps the burden of proof on Proctorio. And then Johnson gets to say this again, this is just the way the law works. No, no, no. That was fair use. I was just using it for commentary. I think I have a defense until Twitter. You got to put it up and Twitter says great. He says it's fair use. You guys work this out in court. I'm a neutral party in this. And that's the way it works, but it sucks because, you know, if this was time sensitive, it would have been down and it's a way to squelch speech. It's not particularly time sensitive and certainly getting more and more attention on it than it would have otherwise, but you are you are definitely seeing the process at work. I think we could have a different way of processing it and the problem will now be for Proctorio. If the EFF wants to help Johnson pursue this to to prove that they didn't know that it was fair use that they were, you know, if they were, if they if they can convince a judge that Proctorio should have known this was fair use, which to my mind it was pretty obviously fair use. Then Proctorio could be on the hook for for paying some fines for abusing the DMCA takedown process. So this touches on you know, a bunch of different topics really when you think about it. The main one being the ability to report issues that you have with different platforms and then the response that you get because the way you laid it out is one of the biggest problems. Right. If a company doesn't want you know content out there for a period of time because they want to monopolize that particular content then they can do a report. And you get taken down. So case in point, one of my favorite pod not podcasters, but well, he does do a podcast and but his shows he has an internet show and he was trying to cover a live event to networks big networks reported him as using copyright infringement even though he was getting the feed from the public access network. They reported him for copyright. So they immediately cut his feed and then you know, days later when the event is no longer alive. They like, oh yeah, you're you're okay and you're good to go. So you know, so I agree with you. You know, this is you know, showing how the process is supposed to work. But you know, we have to make sure that we continue to put pressure on these companies to be fair about it. You know, and you know, and have some people that can answer these responses and answer quickly, not just well, we'll wait, you know, till the event's over. You lost money and then all of a sudden you know, oh yeah, yeah, you're right. You're you're actually okay. You know, that's the type of thing that I worry about because I've you know, I've actually heard people complain about that very thing that happened. Yeah, and and this is that's a really good example because you can get in big trouble if you just issue a takedown notice that has no no basis, right? You can get burned by that. But in the case that you're talking about with the live stream, the networks could claim like, oh, we didn't realize he was using the public feed. We really thought he was using mine and a judge may go like, well, there's no way to prove that one way or the other. So you'd know consequences there. Right. Consequences need to be built into the law. But the damage is done and nonetheless. So yeah, so good that he did it. Good that they got it back up. But you know, we need to keep it on these type of situations and you know, and can continue to put the pressure on. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. This one comes from John, a Patreon supporter. Thank you, John, who says you talked about Waymo earlier this week and I thought I'd give you some views from inside the center of a Waymo neighborhood because John lives in South Tempe, Arizona, where there are tests being done all the time. John says it is hard to drive more than a mile without seeing at least one and maybe two or three Waymo vehicles. The app still indicates we're gradually resuming service and we'll let you know as soon as you're able to book a ride. I probably see seven to ten a day, but I've never seen a vehicle with passengers or without safety drivers in the past few months. We had mentioned that our T-10S accountant who's who's workplaces in the area, you know, she might you know, give us a test and let us know how it's going. John says your accountant may have a difficult time booking a driverless ride anytime soon, but I will try and I will put it if I am successful. Thanks. Now we got twice the possibility, John. Thank you for volunteering. Yeah, our accountant is in for it. She's like, yeah, I'll try to do this by the end of November. So we'll see it is a beta and you have to be accepted in even though it's public public wide not everybody gets the opportunity but hopefully she will maybe maybe we'll lock out in both of them. Well, we'll get two perspectives on this. Absolutely. Everybody who wants to give us feedback. We really appreciate it. Keep it coming. Feedback at daily tech news show dot com as we're to send those emails. We'd like to shout out our patrons master and grand master level patrons including Chris Meyer Philip less and Dan Colbeck. I'm sorry, Craig. It's Craig Meyer. Didn't want Craig. Yeah, Craig. Sorry. You're not Chris. You're Craig. You were always Craig, but you're the best Craig Meyer that we know. You are. Yeah. Now you've really been called out. Let's check in with Len Peralta, who's been drawing something to go along with today's show. What have you illustrated for us today, Len? Well, I wanted to do something about the Netflix channel, which I think is really cool, but I ultimately decided to go with with the app. A nutrition information story, which I thought was really kind of funny. This is a little. I took a little bit of liberty with here. I created a fake app called funny face and on the side it has the privacy facts, much like you would have the nutrition facts and some of the things that you can expect from funny faces that are 100% tracking all your movements. You have facial recognition, totally will use your personal information and data mine and use your info nefariously. So you can check this out. If you are one of my Patreon supporters, patreon.com forward slash line or at my online store at Len Peralta store.com. Just want to remind you also that it's almost time to be doing custom drawn holiday cards. And those are on the front front page over at Len Peralta store.com as well. So check them out. Excellent. Thank you, Len. Also, thanks to Chris Ashley. It has been a minute since you've been on the show. SMR podcast, of course, is one of our favorite podcasts. What else you been up to? So definitely first off, me and the boys have been had a great summer because none of us are traveling. So we're just recording like every almost every week with all of us on there at the same time. So that's been a lot of fun because we haven't done that in years. So yeah, so you can always catch me out there and then yeah, just still smoking food and chilling and you know, getting ready for Thanksgiving like I was talking about earlier. Definitely probably going to smoke two turkeys this year instead of just doing one. It's got to figure out the size if I stick with the traditional do I switch it up? So, you know, just all those things and definitely been getting into a little bit of woodworking. That's been a lot of fun and kind of surprising for me. So that's been some cool stuff for your boy. Very cool. Tom, it looks like you're Yeah, you've you've adorned yourself. Would you like a DTNS hat or toque or a hoodie or a mask or a mouse pad? We have all that and more at the DTNS store daily tech news show.com slash store and you can even get some special merchandise by supporting us on our Patreon at daily tech news show.com slash Patreon. We are live everybody Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern that's 21 30 U.T.C. We'd love to have you if you can join us you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash Monday with none other than Chris Ashley. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com Well, I hope you have enjoyed this brover.