 Coming up on DTNS, Apple TV comes to Amazon. What Stadia can do that nobody else can, and China alarms reach TikTok. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 24th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Our venerable co-host Sarah Lane is in the midst of the logistics of moving right now, so she will not be with us today or tomorrow, but she'll be back from a brand new studio on Monday. We were just talking about a little smidge of politics, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of music, all kinds of good stuff on good day internet. You can hear that by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitch star Michael Grzeg, aka Shroud, announced in a tweet that he's leaving Twitch for Microsoft's Mixer streaming platform. His first stream will be on Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern. The move comes after another Twitch star Tyler Ninja Blevins left Twitch for Mixer in August. Blevins commented that Grzeg's move saying massive move for the platform and the streaming industry, which is all words you would expect him to say. Samsung announced that the Exynos 990 chipset built on a seven nanometer process. The chipset features the male G7s, yeah, Mali G77 GPU and eight core CPU, both of which are 20% faster than the outgoing Exynos 980. The 990 supports displays with up to 120 Hertz refresh rate and up to six cameras with a maximum resolution of 108 megapixels. The chipset does not feature a built in 5G modem, and Samsung also announced that the 5G Exynos modem 5123 also built on a seven nanometer with support for sub six gigahertz and millimeter wave. Mass production on both is expected to begin this. All right, let's talk a little bit about the piece in our time continuing. Apple has launched its Apple TV app on the Fire TV Stick 4K, the Fire TV Stick 2nd Gen, and the Fire TV Basic Edition. So no, not all the Fire TV models have it yet, but there are more to come. The Apple TV app on FireOS lets you view your Apple TV and movie purchases, including your subscribe channels as well as Apple TV plus content, at least when that content launches on November 1st. You cannot make purchases through the FireOS version of the Apple TV app. You can through the Apple TV on Roku app make purchases. I just verified that myself moments ago. So that's quite a difference. And it's probably Amazon saying, well, if you're going to take 30% of anything we sell through the Prime Video app on Apple TV, meaning we don't let you make purchases through the Prime Video app on Apple TV, we're going to do something that makes you not want to offer those purchases on Fire TV OS, but at least the app is there. Now this is all part of Apple's strategy of becoming more of a services company. That's why you're seeing them putting their software out on other platforms. Morgan Stanley analyst Katie Huberty released a note Wednesday projecting that Apple service revenues should grow about 20% next year. What with the growth of Apple music and the storming of the gates of Apple TV plus, as well as Apple Arcade and a few other things, iCloud, etc. Huberty believes that Apple TV plus particularly will end up being a $9 billion business by 2025. This is the legacy of Tim Cook services. Internet services in general under Steve Jobs were never a bright spot for Apple. It wasn't something that they did a lot of and when they did it, it often did not go well at all. This is a pivot since there are less iPhones being sold. There's less Macs being sold. They can't count on their hardware in the way they once did. And if that's the case and you are now selling a product that people need to subscribe to, then that means you've got to put it everywhere that people are. You can't rely on the Apple install base. While that is a great head start, you can offer a discounted or free version of some of these products. If you have the hardware, it's got to be everywhere. Note to the pedants in the audience, when Justin says they're selling less iPhones, he means the growth rate is slowing. He knows that. You don't need to send that correction. What's happening is they're making less money off devices and they are making more money off services and that's the place to put their money. And yeah, this is the kind of thing you have to see for Apple to expand. Now the one I'm waiting for is when I can get that Apple TV app on my Android phone. I can get Apple music on my Android phone, so I'm not discounting the possibility that that's coming. But once that happens, suddenly, well, why wouldn't I buy things through Apple TV? Now granted, not being able to make purchases might be kind of key here. Not being able to make purchases on the Fire TV OS is not great. But the fact that you can through Roku means Apple says, well, if the deal's right, we'll definitely let you make purchases. We want to take your money. So I'd be curious if that happens on Android as well. Prediction, we are going to see a price breakthrough or a percentage breakthrough with Amazon and Apple. Yeah, this is the kind of thing that'll put pressure on those kinds of deals. Yeah, it just got to make it easier going forward. Google announced that its Game Studio for Stadia will be located in Montreal in an interview with GamesIndustry.Viz. Studio head Jade Raymond said the studio will focus on making games that do things that dedicated platforms cannot. For instance, Raymond said a fully physics simulated game is possible with reference to the failed attempt at 1998 Jurassic Park trespasser. MMOs could benefit from the fact that all players Sun Stadia are essentially playing in one big LAN party end quote. He also described games with believable interactions with NPCs drawing on tech like Google's duplex. One test of this kind will be orcs must die three set for spring 2020 on Stadia where armies of up to 500 enemy monsters cluster in one tight space. Yeah, I mean, this is part of the Stadia hype machine leading up to the launch on November 19th. But there are some very interesting possibilities if you have a well functioning centralized streaming platform like Stadia working where you could do some MMO stuff that when everybody has to be running a piece of the game locally, as they do with most MMOs these days, it wears things out real fast. I mean, everybody knows that if you get too many people in a raid, it just slows things down. And that's why they have to limit stuff. Whereas if it's all happening on one big, big, powerful data center computer, you can do all kinds of stuff that you can't do otherwise. You know, Stadia seems really cool in 2023. There's a lot of talk about all the cool things they're going to be able to do the cool things they're building to make amazing games. We're going to leverage all this technology. I swear to God, it's definitely going to happen in anywhere between two to three years. I'm not a video game expert, so I'm not going to put any kind of money or predictions on how Stadia will do. I am just very interested to see because you know they have to be around the corner in the next week or so. The like, I've been playing Stadia for the past month. Here are my thoughts, early reviews. Yeah, it's funny that in the game industry biz article interview with Raymond, they asked her about, you know, when are we going to see this stuff? And she said, well, it won't take four years. We'll have new stuff rolling out from our studio right from the get go, which is kind of avoiding the question of like, yeah, but when does the really cool stuff happen? Well, not four years. So there you go. It's 2023 or before. Not four years. Not four years. Google Watch several new apps from its digital well being experiments project. Like all app stores, I'm not picking on Google particularly here, but you can't find them easily. So make sure to not only search for the name, but also the word digital well being and then they'll show up. For example, unlock clock is a live wallpaper that will display the number of times you've unlocked your phone that day. If you're trying to keep that down. Postbox is one I've installed. It lets you choose one to four times a day when your notifications are delivered all at once. You can still go in and see your notifications on demand at any time. But the, you know, notification aspect that like grabbing your attention aspect is limited. So you're not constantly being pinged by your phone. Morph is an ass kind of a launcher that shows you different apps on your screen based on the time of day or location. It's got all your work apps at one time or all of your entertainment apps, you know, in your off hours or on the weekend or when you're traveling, vacation and apps, stuff like that. A group game called we flip counts the amount of time elapsed since anyone in the group has unlocked their phone kind of a way to, you know, win the game of not using your phone. And the desert island lets you pick up to seven apps and starts a 24 hour challenge to see if you can stick to only using those apps. All of this, of course, people trying to trick themselves into not using their phone so much. What a, what a fun, strange trend that we are in the world. We live in, right? Well, we live in a society. Well, I mean, the information you put into your body and the attention you give to things bears a lot of resemblance to food, right? It's like, ah, I can't stop myself, but I know it's bad for me. Sure. And it just, it demonstrates how few players comparably there are in this ecosystem when the food manufacturers are running diet programs, right? This is, I mean, I'm excited for anybody who gets value at it, but man, just as a large scale thing, the fact that this is the big push of our technology manufacturers is trying to remind you of how harmful their products are is just interesting. Listen, we know you're addicted to our product, but we don't want you to be harmed by it or you'll stop buying it. So, yeah. One thing I will say, a lot of these sound great in theory, but when you try to set them up, you realize just how much thinking you have to go into. I was setting up Morph and I realized, ah, crap, I forgot to put email into my work screen, you know, like you have to do some, some, some thinking. And I think that might be too much of a barrier for a lot of people. Yeah, because really you just want, I want less time on my phone. Let's, let's build a suite together or some of these things and just say just less. I want, I want to drive down my screen time in all the world of machine learning and the tools that you can build into the OS. How can we make that happen? That's why I like postbox. Postbox is a good one because you can choose one to four times. You can get the notifications when you need them. If you're like, wait, did I get a note about that yet? But it also stops your phone from pinging all the time. Better thing is just turn off notifications for everything except the stuff you sure you absolutely need. I feel like people having notifications on is one of the worst things for your attention. And man, Android really like wants you to leave notifications on. It tricks you into leaving notifications on. So it's not good. Twitter announced that it earned five cents per share in Q3 on revenue of 824 million up 9% on the year. Analyst had expected revenue of 874 million of earnings of 20 cents on the share. Twitter cited problems with its ad tech and a slow summer as causes of the revenue miss. Monetizable daily active users, however, rose 17% to 154 million, beating expectations of 14%. Ad revenue increased 8% on the year to 702 million. Twitter also said that machine learning flags have removed a removed 50% of abusive posts before they are even reported by users. Look, we're solving the problem before people can complain. 50% of the time. 50% of the time, Tom, it works every time. Yeah, this would be a really great earnings report for Twitter, right? The big thing with Twitter has been, are you increasing users? And granted, they changed how they report the users to only the users they sell ads to. But I think that makes sense. I think that's justifiable. Yes, up 17% on the users that you make money on, that's great news for Twitter. Granted, it's only 145 million, which is smaller than Snapchat's audience. But okay, you got to start somewhere, I guess, in your recovery. But your ad tech being the thing that brought you down, because otherwise they made more money, they made the revenue. They just didn't get to charge for all the ads because they had three different problems with three different aspects of their ad tech selling. That's not a good sign. Yeah, who's heads on a pike for that, right? I kind of feel like when that's the reason why you've missed your revenue projections, then you have to like march three people out in front of Wall Street and execution might be a little grisly. So maybe you just delete their accounts. Termination would be the grisly word that would apply because it just means they lose their job. What could say termination and then sell an ad for Terminator Dark Fate and try to make up for that money that they lost over the summer? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to get too much in the weeds on the actual ad tech that went bad, but it was like their mobile application promotion product had a bug. They had ad tech personalization wasn't operating as expected, which gave bad numbers. So they had to do give backs or they had to make goods? Yeah, yeah. That's brutal. I mean, this is the stuff that they should have nailed down after the many years of doing this. So that's unfortunate because otherwise they flipped the script and said, hey, we're growing our users. And yes, largely because they change the way they report those users, but if these are the users that make the money, those are the users you want to grow. So it's good to see them growing them. Twitter, you know, you fascinate me with your small yet plucky way of making money. Well, the good news is, is that at least of those monetizable users, they still have every reporter in America fraud. The BBC has published a version of its international news website accessible on the tour network in an effort to help readers avoid government censorship and surveillance. The site is the international version as seen from outside the UK. There are foreign language services like BBC Arabic, BBC Persian, BBC Russian available as part of that. But UK only content, you know, like BBC iPlayer will be unavailable. That's the licensing restricts them to only offering that within the UK. The site can be found at BBC news v to v J T P S U Y dot onion. This is a lot of people call it a dark web website, but it's a site that means you can access the BBC without having to leave an end node. When you go out and grab something from the rest of the internet from a tour browser, you have to go out through an end node and which end node you pick is very important because that's where someone can potentially track down who you are. If you don't have to leave the end node because it's end to end encrypted, you're much better protected. So this is this is a safer way for someone to read the BBC if they're in a situation where just reading being seen as reading the BBC would be dangerous to them. And there are plenty of those places because the internet becomes more and more of a viable everyday part of the global experience. You find out that there are many governments and non-governmental organizations that are very protective about what goes in talking about information being food, right? There are certainly some very restrictive diets around the world. Yeah. Roger pointed out that BBC on the shortwave was was for large parts of history a great way for people to find out what was going on in the rest of the world when they lived in a regime that clamped down on the news. And this is the BBC carrying on that tradition by trying to find a safe way that people can read their coverage. So good on them. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton sent a letter to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire requesting an investigation into possible national security threats from TikTok. Yeah, with the music and the memes and all of that. Senator Marco Rubio wrote to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin earlier this month asking the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to investigate TikTok for national security threats and censorship. TikTok told the Verge it does not have details on the request, but TikTok is committed to being a trusted and responsible corporate citizen in the U.S., which includes working with Congress and all relevant regulatory agencies. That's the thing they have to say. They said the thing they had to say. TikTok guidelines told moderators to censor any content that refers to Tiananmen Square, Tibetan Independence, Falun Gong. This was discovered in September by The Guardian and Bite Dance, which owns TikTok, said those are old guidelines. We retired those a long time ago in May of this year. We were totally retired those guidelines. And now TikTok takes a localized approach. They have different guidelines for each market based on what the norms are in that market. Now, if you're wondering about TikTok being a Chinese company, it's not quite that simple. Bite Dance launched an app called Douyin, D-O-U-Y-I-N. In China, September 2016, it hit 100 million Chinese users within a year. And it's still there under that name. In September 2017, Bite Dance decided to go international. And the international version of Douyin was TikTok. That was not terribly popular until November 9th, 2017, when Bite Dance bought Musically. Musically was a Shanghai product that was also based in Santa Monica. So it was a more worldwide product. And in August of 2018, Musically and TikTok merged. And so all of the Musically people flooded into TikTok and instantly made it hugely popular, in addition to the TikTok audience, which had been building over that time as well. Now, as I mentioned, Douyin is a separate app for China. Up until the merger of Musically and TikTok, TikTok was mostly a Chinese operation. Bite Dance had had some international popularity in Southeast Asia. And so I find it totally believable, Justin, that Bite Dance would have had one manual created for Douyin and just copied it over for TikTok because, well, we're not that big internationally yet anyway. Let's not waste the time on that. And in May of this year, started to realize, crap, since August, we have blown up when we merged Musically. The Musically folks have different moderation guidelines. We need to clean up this documentation. But of course, the Guardian gets ahold of it and says, hey, look at all this stuff that would make perfect sense for Douyin because it's in China, but it seems like it was applying to other people. Now, you have to connect the dots there to say, oh, that was a cover up. They wanted those moderations to apply. And then further say, even though they say they got rid of it in May, they're still pushing it. And I'm not sure there's evidence that that is happening. So how much of this announcement by Schumer and Cotton is, do you think, based just on the headlines and how much might be based on something that they know that we don't? All right, here's, there's one more vector for those of you who are aware of TikTok, the product. And that is that the primary way that they want you to experience TikTok is not how we experience other social networks where you find people that you like and you follow them. Like on Twitter, when you start an account, they give you a bunch of accounts that other people like and you can maybe pick different interests and then they'll surface other accounts that you follow. TikTok wants you to algorithmically serve you videos. As soon as you open that app, it just starts playing videos before you even have an account. It doesn't ask you to sign up for an account. It just starts playing videos. And then the more you watch it, the more it recognizes by machine learning, this is their pitch, which ones you like and which ones you don't. So it makes it even harder to say, wow, geez, my mashup of Falun Gong history with Zach Fox's I Got Depression is certainly not making the for you section that's being serviced. That being said, there is an old saying in Washington, DC that the most dangerous place in the district is between Chuck Schumer and a camera. This is like being between me and a slice of pie. I get it. Exactly. You have no idea what kind of ferocity will will come between you between those two those two items. And this is because Chuck Schumer has not been shy about attaching himself to any and all different issues that you know, what will get pressed. You know, when I was in my 20s living in New York City, it was the Fung Wah buses, the Chinatown to Chinatown buses that were largely unregulated. Then guess who stepped in to offer guidance or threatened legislation? Indeed, it was Chuck Schumer because that was a popular thing at the time. There is a bipartisan effort in a very unbi-partisan time right now to look into China. Obviously economically we're seeing it from the White House, but also culturally we are seeing an uncomfortable recognition of what happens when American companies, let's say for the most popular example, Blizzard and the NBA, how they interact with China and whether or not they are censoring or affecting their product for the money that China can bring in. This is an even closer tied situation, but I do think that this is more of a let's review what they're censoring situation in the same way that we would look at Blizzard or the NBA and less of a Huawei ZTE. I think that this is, you know, a part of the Chinese government to build a backdoor into American society. Which is why it's weird that it's a letter to the director of national intelligence to me. When Rubio wrote to Mnuchin, I'm like, oh, well, this is this is very clearly the United States waging a little bit of soft economic war with China. And you could argue that TikTok deciding to make the moderation and being based in China could be pushing its own point of view. It's funny to be that what we want is our tech companies to moderate more. And TikTok's like, yeah, no, we totally do that with machine learning. And it's like, yeah, but you're Chinese, we don't like that. But I get that what I don't get is the security risk. I'm not quite sure what's going on in TikTok. That's a security risk, although there have been some rumblings that there's, you know, some terrorist propaganda being pushed out on TikTok. But like you say, it's hard to find that kind of thing because you can't just go and let, you know, ISIS can't just go and push it out to all their followers, right? Well, you can search by user, but it is a fundamentally different experience than let's say YouTube surfacing. Guess who made a new video? No, that might show up algorithmically in your main feed, or you might go search that person every day. But it's, it's a fundamentally different experience on TikTok, which does make it more insidious because you could, again, have a whole thing about Tibetan independence. And you don't know for a fact whether or not it got the kind of run that it would have otherwise. Yeah. And if that can't make it, I'm guessing Daesh videos don't make it either. But, you know, it's interesting because I think there are some legitimate concerns about, obviously, what gets allowed on social media, whether it's Facebook, TikTok, or what else, but there's also a little China fever going on that sort of clouds the view of it. And it's getting harder and harder to see through that fog, especially when you're standing between Chuck Schumer and a camera. And that's, and that's the other thing is that culturally right now, there is a global, or not a global, a national question of what our relationship is and should be with China in terms of entertainment. It's, it's global. I mean, it's got us one in our chat room says there was a school where students influenced a contract with the union to get teachers better pay and videos blew up on TikTok. So yes, TikTok can have effects on things. I don't think we're debating that. Oh God. Yeah. I mean, and TikTok, you know, that my favorite meme in TikTok is these teenagers with their first job, right? At pizza huts and Panera breads, shooting TikToks of how they're doing their jobs and getting fired because the corporate overlords don't like, like the corporate overlords at Panera don't like the fact that a fort, I guess a 16 year old is showing that they microwave their, their, their macaroni and cheese. Indeed. Indeed. Thank you to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech new show. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Chance wrote in and said, I absolutely love Firefox due to their privacy priority, but I'm a web developer too. We had a web developer write in about this yesterday. And I want to tell you animations just don't work in Firefox. I love animating webpages above all things. It's freaking great, but they don't work in Firefox. It's horrible. If you don't believe me, go to a sample blog page I made at chancethehacker.com, great name, and click the fun tab and compare between Chrome and Firefox. It's no contest. Anyway, hope you like the cat pics I sent. And yes, chance. We absolutely did. Also, I did. I went to the, the page he was talking about in both Chrome and Firefox. It works in Firefox, but it doesn't work well. It's kind of like slow, chunky animation, whereas on Chrome, it's like super fast and super smooth. My question to the audience is, okay, if you're a developer and you want to make something cool, looks like, yeah, Chrome definitely has a lot more tools for you. But if all of us are choosing based on other problems, other concerns, is it bad for us to go choose Firefox? And if we do, does that help you put the pressure on Firefox to make better tools to do this sort of thing? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I don't think a general user should not pick Firefox because a developer might not make a cool animation for it. I guess that's where I'm headed. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the overall user experience. And if it's harder for developers to work on it, then it will eventually erode user experience. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Andy Beach, Martin James and Bjorn Andra. Thanks to you, Justin, Robert Young for being here. Tom, always a pleasure. It is the highlight of my Thursday. And I'll tell you what, hopefully, after you're done listening to this, you can head on over to the Politics, Politics, Politics podcast because my guest talking all about Brexit is Tom Merritt. I think we had, I've gotten a lot of great praise for us being able to break down what is a very complicated process as best we can and make it at least digestible. So if you've kind of you're aware of Brexit, but you keep finding it confusing, and there's too many people that you don't know, and then amendments to laws that have amendments that then go to another country to decide whether or not they could be law amendments, then listen to the Politics, Politics, Politics show. Yeah. If you like this and it goes well, and Brexit happens, look forward in a couple years to my appearances on Politics, Politics, Politics, talking about the Treaty of 1707 and Scottish Independence. I can't wait to dig into that as well. It is adorable that you would assume that Brexit will ever end. 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