 Coming up on DTNS, Gorilla Glass is tougher than ever. TikTok wants to pay creators to keep them, and who will by arm without getting in hot water? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 23rd, 2020, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. And from Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Before the show on GDI, we were talking about the future of sports. Birds and animals in general. And it was a lot of fun. If you want to hear that conversation, you can get the wider one on our expanded show, Good Day, Internet, by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. And let's get it started with Facebook. They expanded tests on a redesign to pages on mobile, which offers a cleaner design and easier management to owners. The redesign removes the like button, instead giving users only the option to follow and displaying a follower count. Pages themselves will focus on key information, like a page's bio and posts. On the management side, the redesign makes it easier to edit access and assign roles to page managers, and more easily show insight analytics directly on the page and for individual posts. On AT&T's earnings call, CEO John Stanky told analysts that HBO and HBO Max had a combined 36.6 million subscribers by the end of June. Of this, HBO Max had roughly three million retail customers with another one million activations coming through bundles and other AT&T platforms. Stanky said that getting HBO subscribers that use linear cable services signed up to HBO Max has been slow and that HBO Max users spend 70% more time in the app than HBO now users. Cornyn announced that Gorilla Glass Victus, the strong one, which claims twice the scratch resistance and a 25% higher drop rating of Gorilla Glass 6 up to two meters. Cornyn also says that Victus should survive an average of 21 meter drops up from 15 on its predecessor, so if you really want to beat it up, it might be the right glass to have. Samsung will be the first to ship with the new glass with the device coming in the next few months. The FCC has begun Auction 105, a nationwide auction of 22,631 priority access licenses of Prime Spectrum in the 3.55 and 3.65 gigahertz range, letting carriers bid on seven mid-band slices per county to help their 5G rollout. The auction has been postponed from earlier this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You may have heard of it. The FCC requires 3.5 gigahertz licensees to share Spectrum, providing immediate access to top priority government users, then to priority licensees, then allowing unlicensed CBRS users to access that same Spectrum. AT&T announced on its QT earnings call that its low-band 5G network is now available to 205 million people, which now meets the FCC's definition of a nationwide network. T-Mobile has had nationwide 5G networks since last December and covers over 225 million people. Verizon plans to launch its own nationwide low-band 5G network later this year. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, you may have heard of him as well, along with 17 other plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against Google on Wednesday over a YouTube scam that allegedly used Wozniak's name and likeness to get viewers to send cryptocurrency for a Bitcoin giveaway event. Wow, the Bitcoin scams are really hot this week. Wozniak says that the scam, which also included Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, using their likenesses as well, was ignored by Google despite repeated requests to take down the scam video. And Twitter announced that during the coordinated social engineering attack that hit the service last week, you may have heard of it, attackers were able to access the direct messages of up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts. Twitter said this included the DMs of one elected official in the Netherlands, but that the attackers did not access the DMs of other high-profile politicians that had their accounts taken over. So, yeah, the plot thickens with the Google attack, but Justin, there is more to Google stories this week. Yeah, they buried a little news on top of the hack information. Probably a smart idea. In its Q2 earnings, Twitter said it saw a moderate recovery, quote-unquote, in its ad business since March, with ad revenue down 23% year over year for the quarter, but slowing down 15% in the last three weeks of June. The company reported revenue of $683 million, missing analyst expectations of $707 million, due in part to a $1.1 billion loss on a deferred tax asset. The company reported it lost $1.39 per share. Twitter saw monetizable daily active users increase 34% on the year to 186 million users, which beat analyst predictions and is the largest increase since Twitter adopted that metric. On an investor call on Thursday, however, CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for the company's recent security breach, saying it fell behind on security obligations. Dorsey also said that the company is actively exploring additional ways to make money from its users, including a potential subscription model. Earlier this month, the company posted a job opening focused on building a subscription platform codenamed Griffin. Yeah, so, yeah, and we talked about this when that job posting came up. Dorsey's saying, you know, on the call, listen, very, very early testing stages, but yes, this is something that we are actively exploring. You know, we are trying to figure out monetization options. You know, the ad revenue dip, it's, yeah, it's recovered a little bit, you know, in the last couple of weeks of June, but everybody, everybody across the board is feeling this. And the monetizable daily active users increasing leads me to believe, yeah, if you can make subscribers of some of those people, then, you know, it may be Twitter's real only viable option to make money this year. Yeah, and what's interesting to me is, I mean, Twitter is not the only social network. This is like the perennial social network problem of, hey, we have a ton of users. Also, we need to make money somehow. Twitter to date has done a reasonable job of doing that. I mean, they're in a good position to see that 34% increase. We were having conversations not too long ago where that number was looking flat. They have gone to this monetizable daily active user metric, so that doesn't give us a total scope of that. I do wonder if that includes some sort of intelligence within that number of, hey, if we were gonna do a subscription service, you know, how many of those we could turn around in there as well as a signal to, you know, to maybe alleviate some investor pressure as well. I think that a subscription from Twitter is smart. If it is an add-on to Twitter that maximizes the natural strengths of the platform, what I have thought forever is that they should be the seller of an over-the-top network like PlayStation View or Sling. It is what naturally people want to do on Twitter is watching, communicate, and see what other people are thinking about the stuff that they are watching right now. Very often, the trending topics on Twitter, when you are not the main character on Twitter, and folks, you remember, lesson, you never wanna be the main character. It is usually about television programs, about sporting events, about big events. Yeah, live stuff. Yeah, live stuff. If they have the ability to click through that, and now I can see exactly what everybody's talking about, and I can get more context to it, figure out a smart way to put in relevant tweets that are coming into the programming that you're watching, I think that that to me is the slam dunk and the way that I would immediately give money to Twitter. Beyond that, if they're looking at an enhanced version of the product, I don't know what Twitter could do to make me want to interact with a site that I think is probably harmful to mine and everybody's mental health. Oh, that's a really good point because I think a lot of people go like, what, I subscribe, and then, you know, I'm behind some sort of a paywall on Twitter, and only some people can see my stuff. There are a variety of different ways that a subscription option could work for somebody, especially, yeah, if you want to make sure that your tweets are, you know, I don't know, they rise to the top a little bit more rather than the ad model that Twitter's been using thus far. All right, well, speaking of social networks, TikTok, perhaps you've heard of that one, announced a new $200 million Creator's Fund to support US creators, at least for now, just the US, who are, as the company says, seeking opportunities to foster a livelihood on the app, that's what a TikTok spokesperson told the Verge. This is the first time that TikTok will pay creators directly for their content. They've been letting users monetize live streams beforehand, but this is the company saying, we want to pay you to stay. The company didn't say how many creators could receive funding. They also didn't say how often payments would be made or how much creators can earn, but that they would. To apply, you must be 18 years of age or older, which that's going to actually be a detriment to some TikTok creators, quite a few of them actually. You also have to consistently post original videos that adhere to the community guidelines of TikTok. And you also have to have a certain follower account. That's what TikTok says, although the company didn't say how many followers that meant. You know, it's kind of like YouTube saying you got to have a thousand subscribers in order to be able to monetize certain stuff. Creators in the United States can apply for funding starting in August. And the company says it plans to offer global access at some point. Most definitely not by coincidence, though. Earlier this week, several of TikTok's biggest stars announced deals outside the platform, because, you know, TikTok doesn't give creators much incentive to make money on the platform. Charlie Demilio, Dixie Demilio all announced a makeup line in partnership with Morph. Addison Ray, which is TikTok's second most followed creator after Charlie, announced a podcast exclusive to Spotify. So, yeah, it sounds like TikTok is like, hmm, well, first of all, people are a little bit worried about the platform in general. The US is, you know, threatening to shut it down completely. And we've got creators who are like, oh, we can make a lot of money doing stuff outside of the platform. Let's do that. And maybe we won't come back. And I think it's interesting that this is becoming a differentiator for any of these viral social media platforms for lack of a better term on that. In that, you know, there's no end of complaints for something like YouTube for how they curate content, how they surface content, how they handle creators. But the pull of that monetization keeps a lot of talent on that platform. And, you know, we've seen Instagram, you know, kind of famously has left monetization kind of, you know, hey, you can do your affiliate stuff and you can do your sponsored posts, but not kind of being as aggressive on that front. Interesting to see TikTok going there. And if you need to ask how many followers you need to apply for this, you don't have enough. Certainly so. As you mentioned, Sarah, TikTok is currently fighting a two-front war, A, an existential fight for their very existence on insistence that they are Chinese spyware, but really just as any other social media network that's fledgling, they're trying to hold on to signature talent at a moment where other companies are going to offer them cash. The only thing that TikTok really, really has going for them is the fact that they are kind of unlike anything assigned from maybe Instagram. And Instagram obviously utilized stories and, you know, to kind of take over the Snapchat element they put in video when Vine got big. But at the same time, TikTok is unique. The only thing that they don't have is a lot of ad real estate. And that's something where, you know, YouTube, you understand that there's a pre-roll if you want to go see somebody's video. You don't have that experience with TikTok. TikTok is something that is a lot more of a waterfall. You're just content, content, content, in terms of the user experience. So the idea that they are pouring money into it is smart. At the same time, it does come back to that existential crisis of like, oh, okay, so I'm very excited that my, you know, I'm going to be partnering with the Chinese government to. Well, and, you know, and, you know, again, TikTok may spin off into its own, you know, wholly owned US subsidiary. That's the idea anyway, so. Sure. And I'm not saying because Tom would, I can hear Tom yelling at me to say that, like, let's be clear on the news program that TikTok is not owned by the Chinese government. But certainly these are the worries and especially we're talking about younger creators. Yeah. Well, let's talk about some Facebook news. Facebook's CrowdTangle reports on popular links on Facebook. Kevin Ruse at the New York Times used it to rank the most popular stories on Facebook. He's been tweeting his findings, which show that conservative sources like Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Breitbart, as well as the president, tend to be the most popular. CrowdTangle measures likes, comments, and shares on a publisher's page, not on personal news feeds. They're just kind of separating those two out. Meanwhile, Facebook's John Hedgeman posted an analysis that showed that if you look at Reach, where, which is news that people actually see in their feed, whether they interact with it or not, you see more liberal or nonpartisan sources like MSNBC, the LA Times, People, and Ranker.com. Hedgeman argues that Reach is a reflection of what the Facebook algorithm is putting in front of people, while the engagement data used by Ruse reflects user behavior. So, you know, Justin, I want to throw this to you. This kind of cycles around a lot of things you're passionate about here. News, potential portals to hell. Reach versus, I guess, engagement and news. I'm curious on your take on this. Since the beginning of time, Rich, there have been some real kind of like medium is the message lines drawn when it comes to political content. For whatever reason, certain political content flourishes on certain platforms. Television, census, inception has been something that was very dominated by liberal sources. AM Radio, on the other hand, is something that has been dominated by conservative sources. For whatever reason, Facebook specifically is something that is very conservative. Conservative people are on Facebook. Conservative people are liking. They are sharing. They are gathering on the Facebook platform. I'm sure there's a lot of other reasons that go into why these particular sources are attractive to Facebook, but at the same time, Facebook does not want to be the concert. They don't want to be AM Radio. They don't want to be thought of as something that is only of one political ideology. And so it does not shock me that some of these other sources, liberal or nonpartisan, which is an interesting way of phrasing, because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that would say putting nonpartisan in MSNBC or the LA Times in the same sentence is not something that they would consider accurate. But still, these are our sources that the algorithm is putting out there. And I would not be shocked if part of that is from Facebook's perspective saying, we don't want people that loathe Breitbart or Ben Shapiro to come on and see their entire newsfeed dominated by Breitbart and Ben Shapiro, even if that is the real power player when it comes to like shares and community interaction. Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, the platform wanting everyone to have the best time ever is when you look at stats like this, it's like, okay, and again, I'm not giving Facebook a pass at all, but saying there's some fancy footwork going on behind the scenes to figure out how this stuff does work with the algorithm that is in place. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was exploring selling some or all of its stake in the chip designer ARM. Now, Bloomberg reports that, according to sources, Nvidia approached SoftBank about potentially acquiring the company. Sources says that other bidders for ARM could still emerge and SoftBank could opt out and instead take ARM Public, which according to a New Street research analysis, could set their value at $44 billion. ARM previously announced plans to spin off its IoT businesses to SoftBank, a move that might make them slightly easier to acquire. Sources say SoftBank approached Apple about acquiring ARM, but that Apple will not pursue a bid. Oh, a shocker that Apple wouldn't buy ARM. Rich, we were kicking this around before the show. ARM is so big at this point, and so many companies used ARM technology, but who can buy ARM without it becoming a serious anti-competitive issue? Yeah, it really does become that question, and Apple, I think, wisely, whether they wanted to own ARM's asset or not. One, they have the money to license ARM designs for as long as they want to before they eventually spin out and could theoretically just go wholly their own designs, 10 years in the future or something like that. But when you're looking at other competitors, whether it's Qualcomm, Google itself, any of those companies that have the assets to make a large acquisition like this, and again, we're talking the tens of billions of dollars for this potential acquisition, it's going to cause all sorts of regulatory concerns because they're also either makers or they profit off of the making of those chips. Nvidia comes in at a very interesting position on this because they do make some ARM-based chips with their Tegra baseline, but they don't have nearly the market penetration to shift a market like a Qualcomm or even a Google would have with that kind of deep integration. The thing that I think is really interesting about this is, to me, if Nvidia makes this move, and again, this sounds like it's still very early talks, to me, this is about the cloud. Nvidia has actually made a ton of acquisitions recently, basically in their company history, they make an acquisition once every three, four years. In the last year, they made four acquisitions, one of them very big, they acquired Mellanox for just under $7 billion. Most people should not know who Mellanox is, but they make super high-speed, low-latency interconnects for things like data centers, public cloud providers. I think that there is a market for, and a lot of other acquisitions play into cloud providers as well. I think there's an argument here that when we're looking at where the large cloud providers are going, we're talking Google, Azure, and Amazon, oh yeah, Amazon, the biggest one. When you're talking about those public cloud providers, all of them recently are coming out with more refined ARM-based instances. That means they're going to be getting, they're going to be selling tons and tons on those licenses, and I think NVIDIA sees that where they're already seeing deployment of their GPUs and a lot of their more AI-focused chips in those cloud data centers, I think they could see ARM maybe as the next frontier, given that X86 seems like it's kind of hit its performance and efficiency plateau, at least on the Intel side, for the time being. So I think this is, if they do make this move, it's a cloud play. $44 billion cloud play though. Yeah, I mean, it's like an order of magnitude above anything else that they have done in terms of acquisition. I don't know if this is going to be a weird reverse merger or something like that. I mean, SoftBank has already started cutting up ARM to kind of divest some of their stuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if maybe they trim that down as much as possible to make it possible for NVIDIA. Well, moving back to some Facebook news, the company announced its really announced support for Messenger Room's calls to broadcast a live stream using Facebook Live. Sounds familiar? Working from home, anybody? Users that create the Messenger Room can broadcast the call to their profile, or a Facebook page, or a Facebook group with controls for who can view the broadcast and join the call. Messenger Room live streams can have up to 50 participants. Now, you know, I always sort of joke on the show, like there's never a time that I need 50 participants, but there are a lot of companies that do, and a lot of companies that use Facebook pages and Facebook groups, and the Facebook ecosystem in general to collaborate. So it's a move on Facebook's part to be like, all right, come on over to our side if you haven't already. What I think is the interesting play with this is that a lot of the strength of what drove Zoom to be very popular in the pandemic was the fact that only one person that was going to set up that call needed to have any kind of login, right? Or you could even do it. I'm pretty sure you could even do it with no login on Zoom, or at least you could do so now. And Skype and other services kind of adopted that. And the advantage of there, it's frictionless, right? You just click on the link you're in the meeting. Yeah, there's Zoom bombing privacy concerns. Facebook is taking the opposite approach, but also kind of to the same purpose, right? Everyone has a Facebook account. Everyone's probably already logged in on their browser. So that also becomes, in terms of a group call in rooms, becomes frictionless and then throwing in that Facebook Live where for a lot of businesses, for a lot of groups, that they may not have a website. This is targeted at those people and organizations that Facebook is the internet for them. And that is a lot of people. And so I feel like they are seeing that as an opportunity to kind of have that same kind of impact that Zoom has while taking advantage of the fact that, hey, you're already here. This is your online presence. Let's do some webinars or something like that. And the song gets played. It's always what Facebook does. Facebook makes the knockoff product. They will get X amount of success because if you offered a Facebook punch in the face, enough people would hit the button that would allow the Facebook like fist to rock your jaw. But it's ultimately a fish with feathers. Like either you are going to do rooms in a way that enhances the experience of the people, how people use Facebook or you're going to do Facebook Live and have a coherent strategy around that which has already seen so many stops and starts in terms of what they want to define Facebook Live video content is. Is it showing whatever you're seeing right now in a very mobile friendly way? Is it high end content? Is it video games? Facebook just kind of wants to throw everything out there and see what sticks and ultimately it means that very little does. So I think this is yet another Facebook product that will get X amount of adoption and then sometime down the road we're going to have a little quick hit saying Facebook is retiring messenger to live integration. We'll have that wonderful chuckle of that's still a thing. Remember that? Something else I always remember is Plex. They announced the addition of 80 ad supported live TV channels to its streaming service available to subscribers and free users. Users can access the channels through a new section called Live TV on Plex which shows a traditional grid guide of what's playing and what's coming up next on each channel like you'd find I don't know on your cable or your streamer. Users can customize the channel listings but cannot record the channels to a Plex media server. Plex eventually plans to integrate the channels with its existing product for recording from live TV with an antenna. Sarah, I know you're a Plex user. One does this sound appealing to you and two is this kind of Plex maybe going after Pluto TV or something like that? Definitely is. Pluto TV would be the most direct competitor that would come to mind to me. I do. I run a Plex media server. That is how a lot of my content is organized. I've done it for years and Plex has made some really good inroads in making that experience better. This is very different than that. This is Plex saying, all right, you don't have to pass a dollar. You can just watch free stuff. It's ad supported but you can watch free stuff. The way that you do with some of the other cable alternatives, as I like to say, which they are. Some of the stuff that Plex has on offer Reuters TV, Yahoo Finance, something called Cooking Panda, Drink TV, Tastemade, these are networks that you tend to see on free offerings across the web. It's cool. The Bob Ross channel, by the way, just want to shout out Bob Ross. You want to watch Bob Ross all day? You got it on Plex now. But this is very different than what Plex is bread and butter is. The idea that Plex is like, okay, we've offered a live offering. If you've got an OTA antenna and there's some recording options that we're not going to offer on this. But just to get people into the Plex ecosystem, being like, oh, I could just watch free stuff and it's laid out real nice and I can play it on my Roku, my Apple TV, or the web or mobile kind of thing, it's smart on Plex's part. To me, this reminds me a lot of Sling, in terms of taking a hardware brand and making a service kind of play to it. Whereas Sling was, I'm willing to pay a leading-edge price to have hardware that can give me stuff where I wouldn't normally get it in sort of like circumvent rules so I can have flexibility on my content. Plex is more, I want to maximize my content. I want to make sure that everything's up here. It's a little bit more DIY and so free content, maximizes content, all that much more. In fact, now it's bringing you content. I think it's smart and whatever they can make on running these channels, then good for them. Hey, everybody, if you want to get the Tech Headlines each day in about five minutes, often hosted by Rich Strafolino, subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit as well. Shout out to y'all, Submit Stories, and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. All right, Rich, let's check out the mailbag. All right, Anthony says, Hello from Cleveland, home of Len Peralta. Thanks, Anthony. Yesterday's conversation about the MLB piping and crowd noise made me think of professional wrestling. Back in March when fans were banned from attending events, one of the top companies, AEW, All Elite Wrestling, started using about a dozen wrestlers from the rosters who weren't performing and put them in the audience, quote unquote, around the ring to cheer and boo. For a couple of weeks after the audience banned, but before the crowd was added, matches were performed in an eerie silence that really impacted the viewing experience. The other big name in wrestling waited over a month longer before adding in a faux crowd, and the difference in the shows was evident. It's certainly a lower tech approach to the problem, but might be a cheaper option for other athletic events. And at least in the case of AEW, this is myself, Rich talking now, certainly gave Billy Gunn something to do with his time, which I think was appreciated. Certainly so. Oh man, I have a lot I want to say. Don't think I should say it here. Not only is this, you know, the AEW example, I think is probably the most colorful version because they allowed their performers to kind of actually just be characters in the crowd and kind of gave them a little character business, at least early on, to differentiate like, oh no, these aren't just bodies. These are these larger than life figures that are interacting in interesting ways, watching the in-ring product. What I think WWE has done is a little bit more just generic bodies, just people to cheer and people to boo and people to just kind of be excited around there. But the advantage that those guys have is they've made their own little mini bubbles and, you know, how secure is kind of, you can do more research on companies, but that's their idea. Whereas, you know, for MLB, they're traveling from stadium to stadium, but yet the product needs to remain consistent. So I can understand the idea of trying out other sounds and I think that there are probably things, there are developments that we've yet to really see, including, you know, I know that there's been a few teams that have had their fans chant into their phone and now you're actually making, you're sewing together a demand, which is I think cool and even, you know, live streaming, that would almost be even cooler, in my opinion. Well, speaking of cool, we want to shout out our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Dustin Campbell, Andrew Bradley, and Paolo Jacob. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young. Thanks for bringing in Dr. Bird in the pre-show. Everybody should become a patron if they want that cool bird action. But well, this is going on with you. Well, you know, Politics, Politics, Politics is the podcast and I'll tell you what, Friday we had an interview, on Friday's episode, we had an interview about ranked-choice voting. I know that a lot of DTS listeners are people that are, you know, makers and engineers and tinkerers and oftentimes when we talk about voting, we think about the ways that we can do it better, ranked-choice voting often comes up, and I had a great interview with somebody who's done some research on it, not only outside of America, but also how it's worked inside of America and came up with a few unintended consequences that I think a lot of people who talk about ranked-choice voting might not have thought about. So go ahead and check it out. It's the Friday episode of Politics, Politics, Politics. Excellent. Also, Rich, you've got a new video series. Yeah, I'm doing a video series for Gestalt IT called Check Some. It's kind of a video essay series. And I recently did the, actually the first episode of it was looking at why NVIDIA acquired Mellanox and kind of their transformation from a graphics card company into an AI and data center giant. So if you're interested kind of in more of that, you can head on over to youtube.com slash Gestalt IT video and we have a link in the show notes to that specific video. Excellent. Special thanks to all of our patrons. You make our show what it is. You can always support our show at any level, dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon to know more. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern time, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom Merritt's back tomorrow. We've also got Patrick Norton and Lynn Peralta. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this. At frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.