 Coming up on DTNS, Patrick Beja has some early impressions of Apple Arcade. Amazon targets the sophisticated music listener and space elevators on the moon. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 17th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the Finnish countryside, I'm Patrick Beja. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. On Good Day Internet, the wider conversation, our expanded show. We were just talking about the locally sourced photons I'm using on today's show to power my camera. We were looking at Sarah Lane's Fitbit Versa, the new Livewithit product that she's testing out. If you want to get that show, you've got to become a member. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a view of tech things you should know. Snaps Spectacles 3 have a 3D feature that show immersive filter effects through the lenses. And now the Snapchat app itself, at least the one for iOS, is getting a 3D camera mode so users can create and share images with those depth effects that move when you tilt your phone. The feature works on the iPhone X and above once you update the Snapchat app and found in the cameras mode right hand drop down menu if you're looking around for it. The pictures can be viewed although not created on Android and also older iPhone models. Apple has awarded 250 million US dollars to Corning as part of Apple's advanced manufacturing fund which aims to encourage technology manufacturing in the US. Corning received 200 million dollars from the fund in 2017 as well. Corning makes the Gorilla Glass used in many smartphones including the iPhone. Investors have filed a lawsuit against AT&T alleging falsified numbers for Direct TV Now were given ahead of the merger with Time Warner. Those investors were saying I don't know if we would have believed the stock price. If we'd had the right numbers, the suit alleges that employees were pressured to secretly add Direct TV Now to existing customer accounts. And that seems to have happened and that user growth was emphasized at a time when executives knew that users were about to leave because promotional prices were ending. SEC obligations would require risks like that associated with a business like Direct TV Now to be disclosed. AT&T calls the claims baseless. Google's data saver feature is launching on Android TV. Features like saving a YouTube video for offline viewing and data alerts are coming to those using mobile data for Android TV. Been on Android since 2016 I believe. The data saving features will roll out in India in the next few weeks with a global rollout to come. Separately, XDA developers reports a slide that was presented by Google at a conference indicating that Android 10 will get custom phrases for its assistance. Also an in-menu ads test and Play Store redesign all this year. The slide also indicated that Google's Stadia integration and an Android TV Hero device with smart home features also coming in 2020. All right, let's talk a little bit more about a new feature from Uber. Indeed, Uber has released RideCheck for all drivers and riders in the US with plans to bring it to other countries as well. RideCheck uses GPS accelerometer and gyroscope in a driver's phone to detect unusual behavior like a long stoppage or crash. If it detects such things, Uber sends a proactive notification to the driver and rider with quick access to the emergency button and Uber's safety line. Yeah, so the idea here is there's a little machine learning to tell the difference between a driver just dropping his phone and one where she had a crash and like an actual crash. And if they think they detected a crash, then they'll send an alert to her phone asking if everything is okay. But also to the rider. If there's a rider in that driver's car, the rider will get that notification as well. The reason the driver is focused on is because the driver is likely to have his phone on all the time, whereas the rider might not. The rider might be on Twitter. In other words, the Uber app will be on for sure in the driver. But again, the point here is to try to detect if something's wrong and proactively help both the rider and the driver notify someone about it. And just to be clear, because this confused me a little bit at first, this will not proactively be like crash up ahead. Everybody panic. This is something already happened. It's been indicated within the app and the app kind of goes like, Hey, you need help. Yeah, we think we detected a crash. Are you okay? And it's not, my understanding is it's not calling emergency services by itself. It's just asking the driver. I guess at some point, if they have enough data, maybe they could say in some cases, we noticed that people did not respond in these scenarios. So maybe in these cases, we can call emergency services, but for now it doesn't. Yeah. For now it does not. NBC announced its streaming service will launch in April 2020 under the name Peacock. With about 15,000 hours of movies and back catalog of TV show, there'll be some connection with NBC's Olympics coverage as well. The back catalog will include episodes of The Office and coming in the autumn, it'll get Parks and Rec back from Hulu. Peacock will launch originals in the autumn, including a Battlestar Galactica series run by Sam Esmail. That's right. A new Battlestar Galactica series with the guy who did Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail. A comedy series from Ed Helms and Mike Shore, both who worked on The Office. Their comedy is called Rutherford Falls and a limited series called Dr. Death, starring Jamie Dorn and Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater, among others. There's some other originals in here. There's Saved by the Bell return original series as well in the offing. Wait, wait. A follow up to Saved by the Bell? I don't know if it's a reboot or a follow up. That I didn't get the. Oh my God. All of a sudden, you have my interest. Really? That was the one I left out of here and I just ad-libbed it because I'm like, I don't know. Maybe somebody cares about Saved by the Bell and I was right. I think Saved by the Bell already had a spin off show, although you could reboot it as many times as you like. It is called a reboot according to the press release. A reboot is less interesting to me than a where are they now type of show similar to what Cobra Kai is doing with Karate Kid, which is a great show. But Mario Lopez and Elizabeth Berkeley are involved. Yeah, but if they're like principals in the school and the focus is on the kids, I'm not sure I would be interested. But regardless, the news is about a new streaming service. First of all, Peacock, not sure about the name. We get used to everything though. It seems like the most obvious name for anything with the logo. For those who don't know, network is associated with the Peacock. We'll get over the challenge. Everybody laughed about the word I've had for a while too. That was the end of that. I know a lot of people are saying yet another one. Oh my God, I don't want to subscribe to a million streaming services. And this will just usher privacy back in. And I think that's not wrong that it's starting to be a lot of services. But first of all, all of them have to do it. We'll see what happens a few years from now. And if there's some consolidation, second of all, in Europe, I'm sure we're not going to get the NBC service. So we'll get all of those on Netflix probably. Or somewhere. Yeah, Amazon. Amazon or HBO, Nordic or something like that. And thirdly, yes, it will lead to privacy. But I think most people, or in large part, the people who will end up pirating some of these shows are people who probably wouldn't pay for all of the services anyway. So I don't know how much it impacts. The only increase in piracy we've seen are in countries that don't have the streaming services. So I have not yet bought the idea that, man, with all these streaming services, it's causing piracy. It's causing piracy in places where they couldn't get the streaming service. So to me, it's people who are thinking they have to have everything. It's completionists who are like, I can't afford to have all the services. And the fact is, no, you can't also afford to buy all the books, but you don't want to read all the books. You can't read all the books. So you're going to have to make choices. You're not going to be able to just have what you've been used to, which is all you can eat, everything in one bill that you complain about because on average, it's $120 a month. Well, you can't listen to all the music either, but Amazon would like you to try with Amazon Music HD, which offers lossless audio files for streaming or downloading. Amazon said it's catalog of 50 million high def songs applied to songs with CD quality bit depth of 16 bits and a 44 one kilohertz sample rate. Also says it has millions, which is probably under 10 million, or it would say tens of millions of songs that it's calling ultra HD. That's the really good one 24 bit with sample rates from either 44 one kilohertz up to about 100 92 kilohertz. Amazon Music HD uses the lossless FLAC file format, not the MQA format that title uses. It's also cheaper than title out of the gate. Music HD will be accessible in the Amazon Music app for Android, iOS, the web and Fire and Echo devices, of course, launching today in Japan, Germany, the UK and the US at $12.99 cents per month for prime members and $14.99 for everybody else. Yeah. And like I said, titles what? $19.99, I think? Yes, you're safe. I mean, it's not as if title has a huge user base anyway, compared to the other streaming music services, but it's claimed to fame was always, but our quality is better. So if you can't claim that and Amazon is undercutting you, I don't know what you do, besides lower your prices. The fact that this is available on devices that I own, the fact that it is at a reasonable price point, started to make me excited that maybe I would get it. And then I remembered that I have a tin ear and I can't tell the difference between high quality music and MP3s, much to people who cans chagrin. So I am not the target market for this. I doubt that Amazon expects to have a huge number of subscribers, but if they can capture that niche, that's another one to add to their gamut of services that they provide that you capture enough niches and you've got yourself a big audience. Do you think or do you know if that level of quality is what audio files would consider proper? I don't want to say optimal, but at least proper. I seem to remember, maybe I'm wrong, but I seem to remember Patrick Norton saying that the high quality Spotify version is okay. But if you're using this one, let's say the Amazon Music HD on a phone with decent headphones, with good headphones, will that be actually improving your listening experience or do you need to run it through the whatever, Firefly, Dongle and on a computer or I don't know, the everyday use cases actually going to be improved by this. Roger? So real quick, yes and no. Well, part of it is that if you have a crappy sound system or something that doesn't really necessarily give you a flat audio signal and you don't have headphones or earbuds, that can... No, but let's assume the setup that most people who would like to try it will have, which is phone, a decent phone and good-ish headphones. I would say this. If you commute on the train, you commute on the bus, it's going to be lost on you because it's going to be enough ambient noise and you're going to be moving around enough and you're going to be hearing yourself that... Well, what if you had noise canceling headphones? I think answer the first question, which is the most important one, is this encoding the right encoding? Yes, Flack. That's all I will buy. 24 bit with sample rates from 44 kHz, Flack. So this is good. Then let's get to like, so what equipment do you need to be able to tell the difference? Will a phone in the right conditions be okay? Or do you need better equipment than a phone to play it? The thing is, if you have an iPhone or if you have one of the higher end androids, yeah, it'll be good. If you have one of the cheaper ones, then it's kind of an iffy proposition because a lot of those are more based on price point of meeting the phone to like... I assume if you're the kind of person that's going to subscribe to this that you have good headphones. Yeah, like, so this is the thing. If you have a phone and you want to listen to a high quality audio, you're going to buy a separate dongle that's basically a sound card that plugs into the bottom of your phone. You plug in your $300,000, $400,000 headphones into that to get the quality. $400,000 headphones. That's amazing. That's how you can tell it's good. There are people that buy tube amps just for their headphones and they make them specific. I don't think you have to have $400,000 headphones to take advantage of. I meant like $400,000 to $1,000 headphones, not $4,000 headphones. You'd be able to hear it, but those are a very select group of people and I think if you listen to most of your music on a commute, the quality will be lost on you because I used to do this. I used to commute. What about noise canceling though? No? Still not? When you use noise canceling, it's actively sending out waves that cancel out the ambient noise which interferes with the audio that goes into your ear. Got it. Okay, that makes sense. All right. Let's get to the space elevators. Zephyr Penroyer from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Emily Sanford at Columbia University in New York have written a paper describing a feasible space elevator. Space elevators based on earth have been considered unachievable because the material needed just isn't strong enough. You have to have them keeping pace with the rotation of the earth and that puts a lot of stress. People have been like, well, we need to find the stronger material. But Penroyer and Sanford have proposed basing the elevator on the moon, not earth. The slower rotation of the moon once a month compared to once a day for the earth reduces the centrifugal force. It also would then pass through the Grange point, an area where lunar and terrestrial gravity cancel out. They make a big deal about how at that point there's zero, there literally is zero gravity. You hear zero gravity talked about in low earth orbit, but it's not actually zero gravity. The Grange point is actually zero gravity and that would make a great base halfway up the elevator to create some construction. And then carbon polymers like Xylon would be strong enough to handle the forces if it stretched from the moon's surface to just at geosynchronous orbit of the earth because the moon keeps pace with the earth. So that reduces the stress. A proof of concept line about the thickness of a pencil lead would cost a few billion dollars. So it's not cheap, but when you're talking about billionaires or governments, it's relatively inexpensive compared to other projects underway. You'd still need fuel to reach the end of the cable in orbit, but after that solar power would take the cargo the rest of the way to the moon, cutting the fuel needed to a third of what you would need to get to the moon right now. So this is mostly moving heavy space cargo back and forth? I mean, it could move people too. My guess is it probably wouldn't immediately be used for passengers. It would be used for research and industry and stuff like that. Yeah. So you would need to send stuff. You still need to leave earth's orbit to reach that thing. Yes. You have to send a rocket up to the beginning of the elevator, but then the elevator takes the rest away to the moon. And like they said, you need a third of the fuel to do that as you would to take it on a rocket all the way to the moon. So that's if you really want to go to the moon very often. Because I think the interesting aspect of the earth space elevator is that it reduces the cost of sending stuff in orbit. In that case. That has been one of the things people were hoping, but what these writers are saying is we're talking about heading to the moon. We have more countries, space agencies sending things to the moon. This would reduce the cost and make us able to go to the moon more frequently to do mining and research and all kinds of stuff. Right. It's just that when you think space elevator, you think, oh, then we don't need rockets anymore. And that's not what this is for. You would still need rockets, but it's the rockets that we're launching regularly, right? We've figured out the rocket thing. We're launching from Baikonur and SpaceX and Blue Origin. That doesn't seem to be an issue right now. That's taking off, if you will. Well, this might take off as well. LinkedIn has launched a feature called Skill Assessment that gives users short multiple choice tests in English to verify knowledge in 75 skills, such as computer languages or software packages and the like. The tests were created by subject area experts who already worked with LinkedIn and other areas like writing content for LinkedIn learning. Users who fail a test can try again in three months, just kind of study up a little bit in the meantime. Tests need to be retaken every year to keep verification that you already have. More skills and languages are planned. LinkedIn is trying to stay ahead of competitors and it's important to note it's not the only company doing this. TechCrunch noted that Triple Byte focusing on engineering jobs does offer online skills tests to match applications with potential jobs as well. Yeah, this is interesting because LinkedIn, as a place to get hired, has become a thing. We all thought it was going to be a job board and LinkedIn became the place where more people are looking for jobs because of the social networking aspect. It's also one of the more successful social networks, but it is vulnerable to specialty job application sites like Triple Byte because Triple Byte can super serve just that niche. This is an example of LinkedIn saying, all right, but we're going to still try to serve that area for everybody. I wonder if you can take the test for someone. Oh, you could. You absolutely could. And I don't think LinkedIn expects this or even Triple Byte expects this to be a perfect system, although Triple Byte has some actual coding example questions and essays and such, whereas it's all multiple choice on LinkedIn. It's a weed out factor. You're still as a hiring manager going to have to interview someone and make sure that you get them to prove that they do know the things they said they know. But by and large, people won't do that because they will be worried they'll be caught. Yeah, there's not a huge incentive if you get hired and then can't do the job. But then maybe you can send the person to you. No. Okay, if you talk about one can one person game the system? Yes. As a hiring manager, will this become a useless tool? No. Then yeah, they get hired and you send the person who took the test to do the job and no, that breaks down. Okay. Yeah. And then they then you have to give them your paycheck. Yeah. But no, it's seriously like this. This is a good indicator to say like, Oh, well, this person at least seems to have passed the test that helps you narrow down the pool. And that's an improvement over right now where you have nothing but their own self reporting. People can also say they have a skill that they don't have right now. So it is an improvement on that. I'm a person who would want to take these tests just to see if I could pass them. They might not be very fun, but I would like to be able to say, yes, I have passed my computer language skill and I will be updating it yearly. And last point, I can't wait for Tinder to implement the same system to make sure that you are indeed an excellent guitar player. Was that really you at Machu Picchu? Thank you. Folks to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to our sister show, DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right. The Apple Arcade, as we mentioned yesterday, has become available for some savvy folks a little earlier than its September 19th launch. And one of the savvy folks we know was Patrick Beja. Patrick, you were able to get in. First, tell us how you were able to get into the Apple Arcade. Well, as you said, I am quite savvy. So what I did was that I turned on my iPad with iOS 13.1 and I tapped the App Store icon and it asked me if I wanted to subscribe. So I did because you had the iOS 13 beta. Yes. So apparently a number of people who have the iOS 13 beta have been invited. I'm guessing this is load management and maybe early testing on Apple's part. Was it on an iPad or an iPhone? It's on my iPad. I don't have iOS 13. So it's iPad OS. You are correct. Okay. Good. Yeah. So a few early impressions. First of all, I was kind of, I guess for every service like this, you're always wondering how it's going to go, the process is going to go. This is incredibly simple. You just open the App Store app, go to the Arcade page. It says, do you want to subscribe first month? It's free. Click yes and boom, you're done. And then you have a list of games. You tap to download and they download to your iPad. And that's it. And then when you want to... The list is there's not a separate app for Apple Arcade. It's a list of games in the App Store. It is a tab in the App Store. The second game tab, by the way, there's the regular game tab and the Apple Arcade game tab. And you have some pretty lovely presentations for the apps and you just so select them just like you would any other app. And then you have a button to install. Once you install the game, you launch it and it has an Apple Arcade splash screen and then the game runs. It's as simple as you could imagine it to be. And then playing the game is just playing the game. So if my contention has been, if you're someone who likes playing games on an iPad or an iPhone, then this sounds like a great deal. Does that feel right now? So this is the really tricky part of the equation. No one is really sure who Apple Arcade is for. A lot of people are thinking, well, it's fun games, that they look like good games, but they're not what the traditional phone games or mobile games have become because those are very much based on the free-to-play model. So it's a different type of game design. These games don't have any in-game microtransactions, so you just get what you pay for. In this case, the subscription. It should be noted the games are often available on other platforms. They might be exclusive to iOS on mobile, but many of them are also available on PC or consoles. And so they're quote-unquote traditional gamers games, but traditional gamers already have traditional game devices. So some people are arguing, well, they don't really need them on this. Families might be interested because you don't have the temptation or the possibility of paying more and children. They're more wholesome health, safe games in that sense. I think, ultimately, it's kind of a little bit for everyone. It's not a service that any group is going to say, I absolutely need it, but between the price, the offering and the advantages, I think a lot of people are going to say, why not? And then give it a try at least. So I think there's a narrow, not narrow, but a shallow niche there that is actually spread a little bit wide. Gamers who don't absolutely need it might be interested because it's finally games that don't hammer you with microtransactions. Families, casual gamers will experience a different type of game or casual mobile gamers. So it does enough to be interesting to almost any gamer group. Now you can play this on the Apple TV too, right? Can you play it anywhere else? Is it also on the Mac? You can play it on the Mac, on the Apple TV, on the iPad, on the iPhone. And so all the games are available on all the platforms. And very important, you can now also connect any Xbox One or PlayStation 4 controller, and that might seem a little bit unnecessary for people who are used to mobile control schemes, but for people who are used to traditional consoles, this is kind of a deal breaker if you can do that. And now you can very easily. So we've figured out what you can do with it, who it might be for. Are there enough of them? Like, is this thing going to catch on? What does it need to do to succeed anyway? That's the thing. I think the bar it needs to clear is relatively low. And I mean, no, maybe that's not the right way to put it. I think the bar needs to clear for people to be convinced to get it is relatively low. So a lot of people might get it just for the sake of it. Now, beyond the first, let's say, six months to a year, I don't think anyone could answer that question. We really don't know. It's a new type of gaming experience on mobile, and that has a lot of unknown that comes with it. And we don't need everyone to subscribe to it for Apple to keep it. Just enough people that they can pay the developers to keep good games coming into it. Well, thanks for giving us the first impressions. Of course, folks, if you're not lucky enough to get in through the beta, it will be launching in a couple of days, like we said, for $5 a month. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, maybe some gaming stories, maybe some arcade stories will show up there soon. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and join our Facebook group. If you haven't already, lots of good folks in there chatting about all sorts of stuff, facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. What's in the mailbag, Sarah? Yaro in Malaysia had some thoughts on our story yesterday about free trial surfing service and the whole idea that you could get around ever having to pay for a subscription that you never were going to pay for and just do the free trial. Yaro says, for hard car pirates, it's just easier to access unlicensed streaming sites or even just Torrent. Torrents now allow you to stream video to directly from P2P. Trust me, it's not as difficult or as much of a hassle as it seems. So they're not going to bother with this. That's not the worry, Yaro says. He says, I'm hoping that tools like this will help change the industry practice and make more trials opt-in. Opt-in seems to be fair. After all, the ideal situation is that the customer finds that they like something and once they do, they will want to continue to subscribe. Yes, it's better if the tool is not needed, but in this world we live in, it's such a counterbalance option that is needed. Now that's a great point. If this would put pressure on companies to change how free trials work to give us a little more control over whether we want to continue or not, I think that would be good. But it's not exactly opt-in or opt-out. I mean, you opt-in to the free trial. The question is, do they automatically assume you want to continue once the free part is over or do you get to make a choice at that point? And that has to be either on or off. The free trial service we talked about yesterday makes it off, makes it, you know, that you have to go do something to turn it on. You have to change something to turn it on. I think that's too high of a bar. I think if the free trial surfing service made it so that you were changed it to opt-in, we won't change anything if you say no, but we'll make it easy to change your information to keep the service if you want it. That was my point. I think it's a little too far in making it so that you're just stealing. It's not helping you to opt-in, I don't think. I will mention, though, that Yaru says the ideal situation is that the customer finds something they like, basically that it's his version of opt-in. That's the ideal situation for the customer, for the company. That's not the ideal situation, which I think means don't get your hopes up. But at the same time, and I know we'll move on in a second, but as a company, I understand that the opt-in thing is like, well, we're just not going to get enough people that we can charge for automatically who we're kind of going to forget, or it's going to fall under the radar. But I also sometimes will be like, I don't want to sign up for this free trial that I'm actually really interested in because I'm going to forget and it's going to be a hassle later. I'm going to lose money. That happens more than the alternative. Yeah. If there was a way to say, we will make it very easy for you to end the free trial without being charged, but also give you a chance to continue it, like we'll do that, then that would be the ideal for both, for both the company and the consumer. It's just really tricky to make that happen because you have to have a default option for what happens if nobody does anything. Well, thanks, Yaro, for spraying this interesting conversation. It was a good one. People have opinions about this stuff. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us today. Patrick, what's new in your world? The Phileas Club. If you don't know what this is, I'm just going to say the latest episode basically goes over what China in Africa is doing. It's my show, but honestly, I thought it was really interesting. If you've heard about China in Africa and kind of wonder, I'm not really sure what that's about and what they're actually doing and what people in Africa think about it, go check it out at Frenchspin.com, the Phileas Club. It's the latest episode. I honestly think you will enjoy it. I think you will, too. I'm a big fan of the show, so go check it out. Had some good guests for that one, too. Hey, folks, we're changing our Patreon rewards starting October 1st. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback about the new rewards. 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