 Coming up on DTNS, why Sony is ditching E3 again, a machine to keep livers safe for transplant up to a week. And Patrick tries to convince us, and maybe himself, the Quibi can succeed. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 14th, 2020, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the cold, cold forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Patrick, we realized during Good Day Internet, it's been more than a month since we talked to you. We missed you. OK, I don't even know what tech is anymore. It's been so long. What do we do on this show again? Don't try to convince me of that. LaWanda Vutek has been going strong. It's been getting like accolades on Twitter, I saw. So, folks, if you want to hear us talking about that and Japan, we talked about Patrick's upcoming trip to Japan and some of the tech there. Good Day Internet, got to get it. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A small percentage of Instagram's global users will now be able to access their direct messages, or DMs, from Instagram's website. The company calls this a test and says that more details on a potential wide-scale rollout will come in the future. Why don't they like the web? Epic's Game Store reports it now has 108 million users putting it on-bar with Valve's Steam Store, which had 90 million users as of January of last year. Epic says that beyond Fortnite, $251 million represents sales of third-party games, excluding coupons and excluding promotional funding Epic has given to developers. At a press conference Monday, US Attorney General William Barr repeated a request that we mentioned during our CES coverage last week for Apple to help the FBI unlock two iPhones belonging to a man who killed three people at Naval Air Station, Pensacola. Barr said, quote, Apple has not given us any substantive assistance. Apple rejected that characterization and said the Attorney General's saying they have responded to all FBI requests promptly with all the information it had, which it said is many gigabytes of information. So whether it stays a war of words or not, we'll have to keep an eye on it. After years of quarterly declines, the PC market grew between 2.3% and 4.8% in Q4 2019. According to research firms, Gartner and IDC, a boost between 0.6% and 2.7% over 2018. IDC also says 2019 was the first full year of PC growth since the market grew 1.7% in 2011. Verizon Media launched a privacy focused search engine called OneSearch that promises no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data storing and no data sharing with advertisers. Verizon says as part of its search optimization process, it will store a user's IP address, search query and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and their search. All right, let's talk a little more about Sony and its relationship to E3, Patrick. Indeed, complicated relationship. A representative from Sony Interactive Entertainment told GamesIndustry.biz that it will not participate in E3 this year, adding, quote, we do not feel the vision of E3 2020 is the right venue for what we are focused on, end quote. Sony says instead it plans to participate in hundreds of consumer events worldwide. And Gadget notes that E3 attendance declined from 69,000 in 2018 to 66,000 in 2019. By comparison, Gamescom has drawn approximately 370,000 people for the past two years. The ESA, which puts on E3, opened the conference to the public in 2017 and appears to be moving the conference to appeal more to fans and influencers. Yeah, I think what confuses me a little about Sony is on the one hand they seem to be wanting to say we wanna go directly to the fans and the ESA is like, well, we're trying to bring the fans into E3. And Sony is like, well, that's not really in line with what we want. I mean, so first of all, Gamescom indeed attracts a lot of people, but E3 has been opening up to the fans a little bit. It's never been a fan event per se. Also Gamescom is ginormous. It's impossible to compare the two, but E3 has been losing relevance for a good while now and PlayStation Sony was not there last year either. What's surprising here is that we all expect, well, they will announce the PlayStation 5 this year. All the details, they've already talked about it a little bit. And some people, me, expected them to do it at E3 because for all its woes and issues, E3 is still a place where you can reach the maximum number of press, not just specialized press, but the general public press. And it seems Sony is thinking, you know what? We really don't need any of that. Now they might announce stuff around E3. A lot of companies do that without actually being on the grounds at E3, which I'm sure is very annoying to the ESA which gets revenue from E3, but they might also just continue doing what they've been doing, which is do their state of play direct to consumer videos and announce everything there. I think E3's relevance was in question anyway and this year might have been the last big year for E3 if Sony went in order to reach the consumer media. Now that they're not going this year even, the questions about E3 are even more pressing. And Microsoft will be at E3 and Phil Spencer tweeted today that they're excited to present at E3. So we will get Xbox Series X details at E3 from Microsoft. But this reminds me, Sony pulling out reminds me of when Microsoft pulled its booth from CES. It was earth-shattering to think of that LVCC without Microsoft right there next to Intel in that corner. Well, in these days, Intel isn't even in there. It was Huawei and Samsung's Neon and Hisense. And CES is doing just fine. So I think what Sony is playing with is what a lot of other companies have been playing with which is our consumer focused announcements do better when we just make them directly to consumers. And the internet allows that. So we get more bang for a buck out of that than paying for a booth. Whereas Nintendo says both. Yes, we wanna make our announcements direct to consumers over the internet, but we also will have a booth at E3 where people can play our games. So different combinations work for different companies, I suppose. Patrick, what do you think the reason that Gamescom is drawing so many attendees and E3 is on the decline? Because Germans are crazy. Oh. It's, I mean, Gamescom has a tradition of being a wide reaching consumer show. And it's been that for years. It's worked up to that. And it is, honestly, people who go to E3, it's like a couple of holes. Gamescom is eight holes. Everyone in there is there, and everyone wants people to try their games which E3 traditionally has not really been a place for people to try the games. If you're not pressed, now things have been changing. But it was more of a media event. Gamescom has been a consumer event from the beginning. Also the time of the year, Gamescom is towards the end of summer and companies don't have as much to announce. They've already announced stuff at E3. So people go there to actually play the games. And Europe, Cologne is more probably at the center of more easier access for people in Europe, stuff like that. But yeah, the bottom line is Germans are insane. Thank you for everything. Living on to Google, Google announced Chrome Test Tuesday to start implementing its Privacy Sandbox proposals from last year. Among the proposals are a privacy budget that places an upper limit on the data a website can collect and a trust token. So sites can tell you, you're not an untrustworthy actor like a bot or a spammer without needing to track you. Bigger than these, Google plans to phase out support for third party cookies within two years and Chrome will stop updating the user agent string that gives data on things like browser version, non-OS and OSs. The string is used as a part of fingerprinting which can track a browser without using cookies. An alternative called client hints is in development as well to let you know what developers can run which features. Yeah, so client hints is supposed to help developers who really use the user agent string to tell if their feature's gonna work and then serve it or not. And we'll see how well that works. But Chrome freezing the user agent string is a big deal, especially if they're gonna get rid of it. That's gonna help with fingerprinting. Google planning to phase out support for third party cookies, that's huge. And that hits Google's own bottom line as an advertising supported company. I can only imagine Google has a way they think they can convince advertisers it's worth spending their money still, even if third party cookies still are not served for tracking across multiple sites. It seems like an earthquake for the ad business. Third party cookies, if you don't have those, then the entire ad business changes significantly. So I wonder, yeah, the really interesting thing is gonna be what alternatives do they think they can make work? Maybe they will be more privacy protecting alternatives. It seems difficult to believe when you're talking about ads and targeting, but yeah, those are, I mean, this might turn out to be one of the biggest changes in that business this year, for sure. Yeah, I mean, they're gonna phase it out over the next two years and we'll be looking for what they do as an alternative. That'll be very telling. Microsoft issued patches for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 and 2019, fixing an exploit ranked by Microsoft as one. That's the second most severe ranking in the Microsoft ranking system. The flaw was discovered by the US NSA. Now, the NSA flagged the bug, it did not say when it discovered it, it would also not give details in advance of the patch, but security researcher, Brian Krebs, wrote that his sources were telling him the bug was encrypt32.dll, which controls certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in Microsoft's crypto API. That flaw could be used to spoof the digital signature of a piece of software, therefore making malware look legitimate. So that's a huge security risk. And it could also compromise Windows authentication and the way it handles sensitive browser data from Edge and IE. So this is something you'll want to put on your Windows machine as soon as it's launched and be as careful as you always are about what software you put on in the meantime. But this is a big deal. How long has the NSA had it? That's the question. Were they making use of this for a while and then decided to responsibly disclose later? We don't know. It is unusual for the NSA to hand over a bug like this. And it doesn't seem like it's an ancient bug. It is in Windows 10 and in Windows Server 2019. But one can imagine the NSA might have figured out the best use of this bug before they disclosed it. Who knows? They may have thought the risk to themselves was bigger than the exploit. Who knows? For sure. And it might have also been that they used it for a little bit then realized others had found it and decided now's the time to disclose it. Let's talk about the human body. Who's ready? Okay. Okay. Livers for transplant can only be stored on ice for 24 hours before transplant. Okay. A team from the University of Zurich has developed a machine that can keep human livers alive for seven days outside of the body. The machine recreates the pressure found inside the body, pumps oxygen, blood and nutrients, removes waste products, algorithms adjust the mix of nutrients as well. And the machine was tested on 10 human livers deemed to damage for transplant. Six survived and even seemed healthier after with lower levels of compounds linked to injury. The researchers now need to show the machine works on transplantable livers and that livers stored within the machine are safe when transplanted into patients. Yeah. So the four of the livers that were tested on the machine that didn't survive might have been just too damaged. That that's what they need to figure out next. And then they need to figure out if they keep a liver going for seven days, are there any unexpected consequences of transplanting that preserved liver into a human body? But if everything goes well, overcoming those two questions, suddenly a lot more people are gonna be alive because a liver was able to be kept for them for seven days and certainly for 24 hours. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this is a huge breakthrough and the repercussions are, you know, it's good news. Liver transplants historically very difficult. Time is of the essence. Seven days versus 24 hours, that's a big deal. Also not to diminish anything about that if there's one that was in better shape afterwards, could I put mine into the machine and then get it back? I mean, I don't drink that much, but maybe for some people it would be useful. There's, I mean, that is an intriguing part of this study is there a secondary usage of this besides just preservation for transplant? Could you rehabilitate a liver somehow by using whatever effect is causing the liver to get cleaned up? Could you clean up people's livers? You're right, Patrick, that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. I went to the liver cleaning company this weekend. I mean, I suspect that it's still a long ways off until the procedure to get your liver out, cleaned up and back in is something that people can consider. I mean, I'm just saying, if your liver is in bad shape, maybe. Patrick, you mentioned drinking. I mean, are there other reasons that livers would go afoul? Oh, sure. Yeah, there's all kinds of diseases that can attack a liver. Surosis doesn't happen just because of drinking. That's just one of the most common. Yeah, it's not just, I mean, not a doctor, but the liver is essentially the cleaning facility for the body and the blood, right? So anything that gets too toxic gets cleaned by the liver and I don't know what I'm talking about. Let's move on down to the liver. Science, clean my liver. Also, your kidneys do that too. Google's AI department posted to its blog that it has used machine learning to make fast, accurate weather forecasts. Now, the paper has yet to be peer reviewed, but the researchers believe that their system can generate accurate rainfall predictions up to six hours in advance at one kilometer resolution with just minutes of calculation. And that's the big advance. There's a little bit of a limited situation here, but the minutes of calculation is what's important. Existing calculations can take hours to generate forecasts, though they can do so more than six hours in advance and with more complex data. So this isn't gonna be a replacement for everything, but as an example, U.S. federal agencies process up to 100 terabytes and take around six hours to complete the process before they can come up with a forecast. That means you can only do three to four runs per day and every forecast you end up with is six hours old. So conditions may have changed by the time you get the forecast data. The Google algorithm, however, taking minutes can keep you up to date, even though it's only six hours in advance. So it's an important milestone. The Google algorithm was trained on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radar data from 2017 to 2019. And instead of trying to model the weather, which is what usually we do, it just makes predictions about radar data based on the machine learning that it's done. The Google algorithm was only outperformed by existing methods when attempting to make forecasts more than six hours ahead of time, hence the six-hour limit there. Google's not alone in researching this sort of stuff. IBM, Monsanto, they're all researching the use of AI in weather forecasts. But it's a good thing to know about where we are because everyone expects machine learning to really help with weather forecasts. And this tells you how much it's helping at the current moment. This is where we are with that technology. Well, and when it comes to things like smartwatches, the thing I hear most from people who have fitness trackers or smartwatches is, yeah, I have the weather on my watch. Well, having the weather that's a little bit more up-to-date and is actually more accurate is only more helpful. Yeah, six hours isn't a lot of time, but certainly in fast-moving events, extreme weather events, things like severe thunderstorms, that can be helpful. Tornadoes, so we used to get tornado warnings within like an hour of them happening. That sort of thing could be useful. So this will find a place, but again, it needs to be peer-reviewed and actually published. But it's looking positive. It looks like it's a positive development. And like I said, it's a milestone so that you know, like, okay, this is the limit right now of what machine learning can do. It won't always be the limit, but right now machine learning is better than existing conditions at radar, rainfall forecast within six hours. So we got a ways to go. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Last week during our CES coverage, you'll be forgiven if you missed it. We talked about Quibi's announcement of more details regarding its upcoming mobile short video service. And we talked a little bit about the turn-style feature. That's the one that lets you watch content in portrait or landscape mode with no black bars. So they shoot it so that it's safe in either orientation. In fact, sometimes they shoot special content so that you get different content depending on the orientation of your phone. It's easy to criticize Quibi. I hear you doing it right now, listener. It's easy to pull the concept apart and talk about why it won't work. I hear myself having done that in previous episodes. But Patrick, you were starting to think that maybe Quibi makes sense. Maybe is a key part of my argument. Humor us and play the part of someone who's gonna help us understand why Quibi will work. Listen, Tom, you don't understand anything. TV is dead. The new screen is the phone. No, okay. I do think that there is a tendency of thinking of Quibi as another streaming service and a competitor for Netflix and Disney Plus and Hulu and all the others. That was my reaction at first as well. But I think all of the arguments that Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, thank you, are putting forward do make sense. It is not the same thing. And everything that has been tried to capture that idle time that people spend on their phone with TV-like services has been either made for TV, which is an incredibly different setup, or as many people have pointed out when they say, oh, short form mobile focused content doesn't work, made by companies whose job wasn't to make content for video content. It was companies that were social networks and that kind of thing. And it wasn't what they were focused on. It was the video content was a way to increase time spent on the app and use a job of the app. So kind of blind leading the blind, right? Facebook, which doesn't know anything about video production, asking video producers to make video for mobile when those video producers only made television. Exactly. And I mean, I think the focus of those, they weren't all in, I don't think. I think there were a few tries, and even when you're on Facebook, you're not gonna go and look at the video like it's one of the things you see in your feed and it's probably interrupting your watching your feed as if it's more than a minute, you're not gonna watch it necessarily or rarely. So it's kind of a situation where, for many, a different number of reasons, the situation wasn't ideal. And what Quibi is doing makes a lot of sense. I think it's easy as you mentioned to make fun of the turnstile feature, which honestly, I think is a gadget, but the features that change things when you rotate the phone is a gadget. The fact that you can watch your content, regular content without special features, you seeing something different or just you decide you wanna watch it in either orientation, that's very useful. The fact that they are focusing on different kinds of content, scripted, news, how do they call them? The little bits, the tidbits, the small bits. Quick bites, there you go. Hence the name Quibi. Exactly. That's what I was trying to get you to say by being sneaky. And so all of those things, I think there is space on mobile for video and no one has cracked it yet. And the fact that no one has cracked it doesn't mean it's not crackable. No one's cracked it yet. No one's cracked it until someone has. And it's been the same for all of services innovations and hardware innovations. It seems on the cusp of being something until it finally is. And then everyone realizes that it could be something. And in this case, I think they have a lot going for them. I agree with you on the turnstile thing. Not having to think about what position my phone is in is a positive. What I hope they realize soon is giving me two different views, depending on my orientation, is disruptive to my viewing. I don't want to have to think about what orientation I'm in. I don't want to have to move my phone to see different parts. But that's a detail. I mean, they're talking about views. And hopefully they'll realize that and just lean into like, hey, just shoot it safe for portrait or landscape. And then it might become a positive. What I will argue with you with that. What I will argue with you on is that no one's cracked video on mobile, YouTube and Instagram have absolutely cracked video on mobile. I disagree. I think- Cracked video, but it's still the Wild West. You know, the idea that Quibi is like, okay, we're not competing with Netflix. We are a mobile driven, you know, platform, but this is supposed to be, you know, not stuff that is just sort of surfacing because you're, you know, you're trying to, you know, kill five minutes here and there, which by and large is kind of why TikTok has been super successful. That's what Quibi's doing and Snapchat as well. Yeah. But that's what Quibi says they're doing is we want to be while you're waiting in line, the high quality content you use to kill time. High quality. High quality, yeah, exactly. High quality. It's not memes. It's not something you put in the background as you're doing something else as YouTube is. Right. It's, it could be something that you- It's programming. That's, the company wants to be like actual hybro programming. Is there crying need out there for people like, man, I really want to kill some time, but this quality of video is so low. No, it's the opposite. People are like, yeah, eat it up. Yes, no, absolutely there is. Absolutely there is. There is, no one- I think you'd like that to be true. I don't know if it's true. Well, I mean, the need doesn't, you know, it's the forward quote of show me what you want. And so if, if I did what people wanted, they would ask for faster horses, that kind of thing. It doesn't really exist yet. No one has put real money, real creative power into making video content designed- Not at level. You're right about that. At this level. This is the whole other level, yeah. Yeah, I think there's really something there. And again, the fact that no one's managed yet doesn't necessarily mean it can't be done. I mean, a lot of people spend a lot of time playing idle games that never played before those people on their phones. I think they could be convinced to watch a fun five minutes of comedy or a summary of news on the topic they're interested in. They could be convinced to pay for it though. Well, I guess that's another question. Yeah, that is a whole other question. Yes. I'm not arguing about the business model. I'm arguing about the core concept. And to be honest, I'm not certain it will succeed. I just think it might. This has been a great conversation about this. If you want a longer breakdown of just what Quibi is doing, why they're doing it, what parts make sense, what parts will be more difficult for them. I did that as an editor's desk. It's a 17 minute long look just at Quibi. You can get that at patreon.com slash dtns. QuibiTalk and others always, always, always appreciated on our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let us know what makes sense to you. Also join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. We have got such good stuff in the mail bag these days. We got an example of that, don't we, Sarah? In fact, we do. Professor Metcalf, Prof Metcalf in our chat wanted to chime in on our conversation yesterday about Twitter troll scores or the possibility that we would have them. Professor says, there was a question about whether the ramifications would be of a high troll score. In my mind, I see a slider in the user's Twitter settings that allows a user to decide just how much trolling they are OK with. If a troll has a higher score than you're willing to accept, you wouldn't see their content. Rather, you might see a three-dot type thing, indicating something is below your acceptable score. This should make it easy enough to provide the functionality that we want, meaning the users are in control of what they want to see. You could even let somebody quickly access their preferences by clicking the ellipses. Certainly no suggestion is going to be a silver bullet, but I really like this one because it puts me in control. And it says, the troll score isn't a deciding factor of whether you're viewed or not. The troll score is evaluated by you as a user to be like, OK, I've said it at seven and I seem to like what I see. I think that's good. That's an interesting way of looking at it. Thank you, Prof Metcalf. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Mark Gibson, Dr. Carmine M. Bailey and Mike McLaughlin. And thanks to Patrick Beja. Patrick, we missed you. Happy 2020. Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? I guess I'll talk about the Laurent Des Voutek today. It's my French tech news show. It's weekly. And if you speak French or if you want to learn French, what better way than to listen to a topic you're already familiar with? We had a great episode about CES and talked about a few things that maybe you haven't heard as much about from CES. We recorded it today. So Laurent Des Voutek is the thing you want and go to Frenchspin.fr if you want to know more. La plus intelligence, right? Something like that. Yeah, yeah. Close, getting closer every day. Listen a bit more maybe. All right, I'll keep working on it. Hey, we have new Patreon reward merchandise to celebrate six years of DTNS. Len Peralta created a six-year anniversary DTNS logo. If you back certain levels at patreon.com slash DTNS for three months, you can get either a sticker, a poster, a mug, or a t-shirt. Get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS slash merch. We're loving your feedback. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We are also live Monday through Friday for 30 PM Eastern 2130 UTC. Join us if you can and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. You won't want to miss good day internet. Tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.