 Coming up on DTNS Spotify makes Joe Rogan exclusive and Cloud super computers and embedded AI are among the announcements at Microsoft build plus we talk with the creator of podcast addict about why it got pulled down from the play store. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday May 19th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and from the land of the almost eternal son. I'm Patrick beta. And I'm Roger change the shows. As I mentioned, in a few couple of minutes here, we're going to be talking to Xavier Guillaume and a creator of podcast addict. Thank you for being with us, Xavier. Hi Tom. Thanks for the invitation. If you want a little more of our conversation with Xavier, then of course you got to get good day internet. We were just talking to him a little bit about what's been going on. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Disney's chairman of its direct to consumer and international division Kevin Mayer is leaving Disney to become CEO of tiktok and also chief operating officer of bite dance, which is tiktok's parent company. Mayor oversaw the division that includes Disney plus. One plus has removed the photo Chrome filter for Chinese versions of its phones camera app. It will push an update to the rest of the world to remove functionality of the filter that had the unintended effect of letting it see through plastic or thin clothing. Photo Chrome seemed to use infrared light to apply an effect meant for pictures of plants. But people were not using it just for. Samsung has unveiled the ISO cell GN one a one and 1.3 inch 50 megapixel sensor with 1.2 micron pixels to help cameras perform better in low light. Also has dual pixel autofocus, which Samsung says gives it DSLR level autofocus speeds. We'll see about that. The ISO cell GN one also uses Samsung's tetracell that merges four pixels into one little pixel binning going on their production is set to start on the ISO cell GN one later this month. Facebook announced the launch of shops that lets businesses set up free storefronts on Facebook and also Instagram. Third party services like Shopify, big commerce and woo will power the shops and Facebook will make its money offering advertising and payment and other services to the shops shops will appear on Facebook pages Instagram profiles and in stories or ads shops is available now on Facebook in the US and coming to US Instagram this summer. Very smart. Google today launched Chrome 83 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Chrome 83 adds redesigned safety and privacy settings and blocks third party cookies in incognito mode, among other updates. A new puzzle icon in the toolbar lets you control what data your extensions can access. A safety check can now tell you if the passwords you use appear in public compromised password lists and Chrome 83 will also use DNS over HTTPS if your ISP supports it. EasyJet informed the UK's information commissioners office that a highly sophisticated cyber attack affected approximately 9 million of its customers, including email addresses and travel details. A sadly common sort of story until you get to the fact that attackers accessed credit card details of 2,208 customers. EasyJet says it became aware of the attack in January, but for some reason was only able to start notifying customers who credit card details were stolen in early April, which they say was because of the sophistication of the attack. It implies maybe they didn't realize it. EasyJet says it will notify everyone affected by May 26. Go X is launching 100 self-driving scooters in Peachtree Corners Georgia Technology Park on Wednesday. The scooters use two unpowered training wheels to stay upright when self-driving a motor on the handlebars seems to turn the front wheel for self navigation. Users can then summon the scooters to come to them and then send them back for recharging and sanitation. Bloomberg sources say Apple is talking to studios about licensing older TV content for Apple TV Plus. Apple only offers original shows through the service right now. And IFA 2020 will take place in Berlin in person as scheduled September 3 through the 5th. It will be limited. You have to be invited. There will only be four separate events, each event limited to a thousand people per day. That keeps it well under Germany's limit of 5,000 people for these events. Qualcomm's president will deliver a keynote along with a few other events and retail and meeting lounges will be available to let retailers and suppliers meet and strike their deal. But this will be a much smaller IFA than usual. IFA will also offer virtual attendance, though, if you want to watch these events from a safe distance. Alright, let's talk a little more about Podcast Addict. Yesterday we mentioned that it had been removed from the Google Play Store for falling afoul of the prohibition against COVID-19 apps that don't come from healthcare agencies or governments. Of course, Podcast Addict is a podcast aggregator that aggregates podcasts, which might reference COVID-19, but is not masquerading as a health app. So it didn't seem to be a legitimate application of that rule. Monday evening, Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer tweeted an apology saying the app should not have been removed. Podcast Addict is now back in the Play Store, and Xavier Guillemine is here. Xavier, first of all, as the creator of Podcast Addict, so sorry to hear about this undeserved trouble. Do you know exactly why the app was mistakenly removed? No, not really. I can guess what caused the issue. I guess some algorithm tested the application and found out there is a search field. If I enter, I don't know, COVID-19 or something, I will have some results. So maybe that was what triggered the algorithm to flag the application. So Hiroshi Lockheimer tweeted an apology, but you haven't heard from him directly. No. All I got is like one hour before his email, before his tweet. All I received an email from my appeal telling me that the appeal was accepted. And now I just had to fix the issue, which issue I'm not really still sure about it, and resubmit the application. So I went to the store, the submit button was grayed out. So I just added an extra space to one field, a description field, to get it to work. And then I pressed submit, and a few hours later, the application was back on the store. So you haven't had anything but automated communications from Google then? No, it seems funny, but at the time it was not really funny. It was like on Saturday afternoon. Because I got the email on Saturday and during the weekend it's difficult to get some attention. So I tweeted about it. I got some feedback from users. People retweeted my message. And then I got like maybe Saturday afternoon or maybe Sunday, I don't know. I got a tweet from the Google Play Store developer account telling me to send the appeal number by DM on Twitter. So I was like, oh, nice. It's going somewhere. Maybe I will just see the end of it. So I went, I sent a DM. And I got like a chatbot answering me, telling me, do you? And I posted the whole thing. It's like, so answering me, do you want to talk to someone? Yes, I'm just sending you this information because you asked me to send you a DM. And then it answered, sorry, we are not able to delete your account because you have an application there and users. Did I answer your question? So it was back and forth like this. Yes, no. So even this was fully handled by some algorithm and not really good. Patrick and I were talking in Good Day Internet about the scale at which Google operates obviously means that they have to do some automation to handle this and to stop bad actors. But there also should be a way to resolve this for a situation like yours that is a very obvious misapplication of a rule. And then even when you get someone saying, hey, please DM me, you run into a chatbot, what would you recommend Google do to make it easier to resolve these kinds of mistakes? And how do you get them in completely? So maybe the first thing like to run to have an algorithm running, it's a good thing. It's like they want to make the Play Store a safe place. But then if the algorithm flag an application, they should at least take a look at how long this application be on the Play Store. How many downloads does it have? In my case, it has been there for nine years. It's like, I don't know, 50,000 downloads shy of 10 millions. So they should at least take this into account and maybe have someone look at this flag, check manually what the issue is. And if there is really an issue, maybe send an email and give me like, I don't know, 24 hours to fix the issue or maybe until the end of the weekend so I can take a look at it. But the worst thing is like, even if they are not doing this, so they banned the application, the only thing I can do is just press a button to appeal it and just like, I don't know, I have 500 characters to explain why I don't think it's fair. But I don't have a way to talk to someone or to chat with someone. I don't know anybody is there. So it feels kind of weird when you have like, at least like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand downloads, a million downloads, 10 million downloads, but you don't have someone you can talk to at Google to report this issue. I talked about it like yesterday, like the day after I had an issue with a rental, a movie rental on the Google Play Store. I went into the application. I pressed chat with support and one minute later I had someone and they refund, it has been refund and the Play Store as a user, they have like maybe a billion of users. I don't know, like so many users. I don't think they have that many developers. So I think they can easily improve this. On the other side of this, will you do things differently in the future or do you have any advice to app developers to avoid this or are you left still wondering just why your app fell afoul of the algorithm when other podcast apps didn't? I really don't know. Like it happens, it already happened once like a few years ago and that was solved within a few hours. It was really quick and since then like it was also related to a, in that case, someone told me from Google send me a screenshot showing exactly what the issue was, which podcast was the issue. So I was able to block this content. In that case, it was the artwork used by a podcast, which was inappropriate. And so I added a way for users to report inappropriate content. So I can kind of moderate, but most of the time it's just used to report political podcast stuff like that. And you still don't know why, why you like there are plenty of podcast apps out there that have podcasts that are talking about COVID-19. What, you know, it seems inexplicable why your particular app was the one snagged this time. It just seems random. Yeah, it feels it seems random, but it has been random quite a few times recently because I got similar things going on with my Google and mobile account, which is the application is monetized with Google ads. And over, yeah, for the past six to nine months, three times already they broke the ads because of an issue. I appeal asking for more details. And then it was like, Oh, sorry. No, not even sorry. Just okay. Now it's fixed. Without giving you an explanation. In all of these cases, you didn't get enough details to even understand what had happened and what you had done wrong. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm very glad the podcast addict is back in the Android store. So everybody go take a look, check it out, see what you think. Xavier was going to hang around with us for one more story here because it is a podcasting related story. Right, Sarah? Yeah, it really is the Joe Rogan experience. Perhaps you've heard of it. Little known podcast. Only 190 million listeners. Yeah, just a few listeners will arrive globally on Spotify starting September 1st and become exclusive to Spotify sometime after that, thanks to a multi-year agreement that Rogan made with the company. Rogan's YouTube channel will remain live, but we'll stop hosting full episodes. So this is full on Howard Stern, will it not work type situation that we're looking at here? Yeah, and Rogan gets a lot of views on his YouTube channel. So one expects that Spotify wants to get those views to video on Spotify, not just the audio. And this is disappointing to me because one of the things I didn't mind about Spotify getting into podcasting and buying Gimlet and such, is that they would maybe help these podcasts do better and sure they could have some special features that are exclusive to Spotify for some of the Gimlet shows, but the shows themselves are still available across platform. And so I'm disappointed to see them take a very large show like this and bring it behind a paywall. Granted, I guess it's not a paywall. You can get a free version of Spotify and you can still listen to the Joe Rogan experience, but you're going to have to get Spotify to listen to it. And Xavier, that impacts you directly, right? Because after September 1st sometime, folks will not be able to listen to the Joe Rogan experience on podcast addict. Yeah, and I just learned about this because some users started already to complain and to ask me on Twitter if they will be able to get the show after that. So yeah, it's the most popular show on the application. It's not with a number of subscribers, but the time span listening to the show. Interesting. Yeah, sure. I mean, it really does. I don't know. I mean, you mentioned Gimlet and when Spotify bought Gimlet and Gimlet is a very well known podcast network has a lot of shows, many of them that I listened to as well. And I thought, oh, what, you know, how is this going to change this great experience that I have hasn't changed at all. They didn't touch it. But I think something like this is, okay, Spotify dipping its toe into, okay, can we start doing exclusives with popular people? Joe Rogan is one of the most popular broadcasters out there. So this isn't sort of like, let's try it out with a relatively obscure person. They want to see what kind of impact this has. Patrick, how do you feel about this as somebody who is as invested in the podcasting as the rest of us here? I don't honestly, I don't mind it so much at this stage. We'll see how much it affects the world of independent podcasters. I will care a lot more the moment they come knocking at my door and offer me a big bucket to the money to become exclusive to Spotify. I will certainly consider it. So let it be known my price is multiple, multiple millions of dollars. Many zeros in many years. To put a button on this, I think it'll be interesting to see when we don't know how many years this is. It's a multi-year deal. At the end, will Joe Rogan have not grown as much as he wanted to because he's limited as an exclusive and leaves Spotify and good for him. He cashed a check, I'm sure, and he'll be fine. Or will this turn out to be a sea change? And will more people follow him and he'll be happy, like you mentioned, Sarah, like Howard Stern there. Yeah, hard to say. I mean, I don't, I don't want to say Joe Rogan has reached the number of people who would ever want to, you know, be, you know, be part of his world. But it might have been a situation where he's kind of like, okay, I did what I could. I got really successful. Here comes a podcast network. Does it really matter to me that I now get shut off for, for some folks, but still have a huge reach for others? Because it's Spotify after all, you know, maybe he doesn't care that much. He's going to drive a bunch of people to install Spotify. That's true. Well, Xavier Guimine, before we let you go, any, any last thoughts on this? No, I think like it is like on Joe Rogan topic is going to lose some audience. For sure. Some people won't. Some people will never install Spotify. There are some people that will see that this like, I don't know. Not a conspiracy, but him changing the way he sought until then, like going to the big corporation. I don't know, but it's going to work out very good for him. Yeah, probably. He'll be, like I said, he'll be fine. Xavier, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. I know it's been a crazy few days for you. I really appreciate you sharing your experience with us. Thank you. Thanks. And if people want to find podcast addict, where should they go? On the play, a Google Play Store. It's the only place where it's available. And, and it's really available this time. Very good. Very good. Thank you again, Xavier. Thanks a lot. Bye. Tell us about Amazon Game Studios. Continue indeed with Amazon Game Studios releasing its first big budgets game title crucible. Tomorrow, Wednesday, 20th, it will be available. It is a free to play shooter with multiple modes. It shows you in an over the shoulder third person view within a large open objective based map. You have multiple modes. Yep, multiple modes. Harvester command is an eight versus eight struggle or resource. Heart of the Hive is a four on four mode with giant monsters that spawn periodically on the map. And Alpha Hunters is a 16 player mode with two person teams. But if your teammate dies, you can form a temporary alliance with any other solo player, which will last until the game is down to three people. And at that point, it's all for one, or I guess all for oneself. The Verge's Nick Stats says it is designed with a rather bland aesthetic, but it ends on being surprisingly unique when you're actually playing it. And in gadgets, Nick Summers says crucible shows promise, but its gameplay foundation might not be enough to survive in 2020. And you were saying people aren't like super enthused about this, even though it's getting a lot of press. It is getting some press in the specialized press. It's getting mentions, but it is Amazon's first real big release. And it should be getting more. It is significant milestone for Amazon's ambitions, or at least that's what we think and understand. And I can't help but think of Google when I see this, and big tech companies trying to get into the gaming market. And I don't know how much they're stumbling here, Amazon, but certainly I would expect that big a company to have a bigger impact on the gaming communities. And yeah, as I was saying to you earlier, Tom, honestly, in the gaming communities, no one really cares about this or really is aware that it's coming out. We kind of tangentially know that it is because it's Amazon, but it's not. We don't know anything about it. We don't. It's very, very mild as buzz goes. Well, the verge, I don't know. It gave it some faint praise, calling it bland, but also said it's better than you think, given how bland it is. So it'll be it'll be interesting to see what kind of uptake it does get. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, folks, virtual Microsoft build happening today. We're going to run through a bunch of the announcements here. Microsoft announced Microsoft industry clouds combining existing tools like Azure IoT and teams with a partner ecosystem tailored to a specific industry. The first one will be healthcare, very timely cloud for healthcare includes Microsoft's healthcare bot services to answer common questions, telemedicine through the Microsoft Teams booking app with HIPAA support and high trust certification and health monitoring through IoT and integration between teams and power apps. Let's organizations create apps and workflows with limited coding, not quite no code, but limited code and Microsoft cloud for healthcare is in public preview as a six month free trial. Very enterprisey here, but any thoughts on this? Well, good on them for timing, I suppose. The six month free trial is also a good idea. This all sounds great. Again, timing couldn't be better, really. But yeah, if Microsoft can become a household name in the healthcare services sector, that's a really good thing for industry clouds. Microsoft talked more about embedding Microsoft Azure AI capabilities than Sony's IMX500 sensor, that's the one that doesn't need a separate AI chip. We talked about it last Thursday. Sony and Microsoft also announced a smart camera managed app that lets manufacturers develop industry specific AI models for their products that provide computer vision and video analytics. For instance, a single type of camera running on this managed app could be used in retail, one of them to count visitors by the door, one on the tech stock levels, one on the ceiling to create a heat map of where people go in the store, for instance. So essentially this is smart camera sensors that are kind of specialized mini computers integrated into the embedded hardware slash software. Yeah, without needing a separate AI chip, and Microsoft is providing that software that manages it to be able to do all these cool things with it. Yeah, it seems like it has a lot of applications. Yeah, absolutely. And an interesting continuance of a Sony Microsoft Azure combination. There was some talk I saw that implied that maybe this extended out of the talks that led to Azure providing the back end to Sony's online gaming services. Yeah, Microsoft launched lists for Microsoft 365. Some people are calling it an air table type thing. It's kind of like Trello. It can track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory, stuff like that. It has customizable views, rules and alerts, integrates with teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft products. You can customize the views, but it has some default views like grid. That's more of the air table kind of look. Calendar, which is pretty obvious. And then gallery, which is a very visual look at the information. List will launch on the web this summer with mobile apps to follow. I actually had a few friends who were super excited about this. Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah. Wait, wait. When I think about something like Trello, which by the way is a great product. I'm just like, ah, it's just, then I just keep like missing deadlines. It's horrible. I just like write it all down like, you know, like numbers something one through 10. And those are my tasks. But so I'm probably not the person who's going to make the most of this. But yeah, I think that that kind of collab task based software program more and more is something that teams rely on. Microsoft built a 285,000 processor supercomputer for open AI that runs massively distributed AI models conducting self supervised learning for speech and image recognition. Microsoft invested a billion dollars in open AI last year and part of that deal was they would provide this kind of service. Microsoft estimates that when it's all said and done, this will rank as the fifth top supercomputer in the world based on that 285,000 processors, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity to those GPUs. So supercomputers as a service. We've seen this from Amazon and Google as well is definitely a new trend. But can it run the remake of crisis though? That's always the test. Yeah. You have to find out. Microsoft teams will soon offer a way to schedule, manage and conduct virtual appointments through its bookings app. We've also added a few features to the shifts app. Shifts can now have auto approvals in case there's some shift requests that don't need a manager to sign off. New templates are coming to help new users get started. Scenarios include things like bringing in a new bandmate or new employee at a hospital, event management, crisis response, etc. Power virtual agent chatbots are coming to the teams app store. That'll make them easier to manage. And for the real enterprise-y folks out there, Power by users will soon be able to quickly share reports to teams with one click and NDI coming to teams for easier public and private broadcasts using teams. NDI is the thing we're using right now on Skype to switch between the people talking. You know, Microsoft has always done a lot of things, but since the beginnings of Satya Mania, that they have announced they want to be the backbone, the fabric, the infrastructure of the Internet, I don't think I realized how many different things it would be until I think maybe even now. Looking at this list, it's incredible how many different types of businesses they're in and how many solutions they're offering and proposing to different industries. It's very impressive. They do so many different things now. And it's interesting to see Azure is the word that comes up, not Windows. That was part of Satya's move as well. But browsers are still important to Microsoft and they announced new features coming to the Chromium version of Edge. That's the one that launched in January. It's not quite yet part of Windows Update, so you don't have to be using it, but it's out there. Collections for Pinterest will serve up suggestions and let you export those collections to your Pinterest board. A sidebar search lets you highlight words on a page, right-click and choose search and sidebar. That way you can do a search without having to leave the page you're on. Extension installations will now sync in Edge. Administrators can now manage client-syncing. Automatic profile switching will tell when a link needs your work credentials and then when you click on it, automatically switch to your work profile in Edge to log you in. And Windows Information Protection will separate personal and corporate data and protect that content from leaking out when you're using a webpage. Who's ready to switch to Edge? Scott Johnson already did, didn't he? No, I actually like Edge. It's fast. It's good. Yeah, it is. I am a Chrome user. I have not fully jumped off of Chrome, even though I complain about it a lot. But yeah, no, I like Edge. And it's making Chrome better. Microsoft's Edge team made over 3,000 commits to the Chromium Open Source project, things like accessibility, inking, scrolling, localization, et cetera. All right, a bunch of other stuff. Microsoft announced Project Reunion, which will try to reduce fragmentation between Win32 and Universal Windows apps, the UWP APIs. Microsoft says it can modernize existing apps in C++.net or React Native. Canary versions of Edge and Windows Insider preview builds will include the ability to treat progressive web apps like native apps. So if you've installed a PWA in Edge, you'll be able to uninstall it, manage settings the way you would any native app in Windows. Microsoft also announced Windows Terminal 1.0. That lets you run Linux and Azure executables from the command line. That's available for Enterprise. Windows will support GPU compute workflows for Linux tools and Linux GUI apps. In other words, you can run a Linux GUI app on your Windows machine without needing an X server. And soon you'll be able to install Linux apps on Windows using the wsl.exe command. HoloLens 2 coming to more markets and will add 5G capability with a dongle. Microsoft Azure Quantum, that was what they announced back at Ignite 2019, is now in limited preview. And Microsoft released a new PowerToys run launcher, adding quick search, plugins like Calculator and the ability to find running apps as well as keyboard manager PowerToys for redefining and remapping your keys. That's Microsoft build. I was thinking this morning, gosh, they really had an event lined up, didn't they? Yeah, they did. The fact that it had to be virtual, I mean, for our purposes, it doesn't really matter because no one was necessarily going to beat anywhere physical anyway, but it was a big day for Microsoft. A lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. Microsoft stories are there as well as many others, and you can submit stories of your own, stuff that you think we should care about, and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We always try to make Patrick feel at home, so let's read a mailbag mail from Scandinavia. Let's do it. This one comes from Thor, who says, Greetings from sunny but cold Kongsberg, Norway. I'm currently listening to TNS 3784, that was yesterday's show, and wanted to comment on the sunny five fake windows. Those are the ones that were going to give us some vitamin D without us having to go outside. Thor says, I've been addicted to home automation for about six months, and I love a good morning automation, me too, Thor. And I've also wanted to add some DIY fake windows by using the filters and old LCD screens to have a more convincing morning during the dark month of winter, dark months of winter here in Norway. I love getting up early, mainly to get off work early, starting early, but it's hard when it feels like midnight until well into my work day. So the sunny five windows probably are going to end up with some items to get for my ever-expanding home automation setup. Thanks for keeping me updated on the tech world. Don't know what I would do without you. I'd probably be less informed. Oh, thank you, Thor. Thanks, Thor. Yeah. So, Finland, are you in with some lights? Oh, my God. You mentioned it at the end of the segment, but I was screaming into my phone when you were talking about this. I was like, yes, all of these things, interstellar travel, of course, sure. But here, right now, I want it. I need it. Well, not this second, but in winter, I absolutely would purchase them the moment they come out. So, yes. Well, very cool. Keep us in the loop, Thor, if you end up getting them, and what you think, and if anybody else does as well. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Michael Aikens, Chris Allen, and Jonathan Price. And thanks to Patrick Beja, even though it's, you know, eternal summer where you are, you still make some time for us once week, and we appreciate it. What's been going on with you? I guess I would tell people to go check out Pixels, because it's a show about gaming, and it's the season of gaming. We're getting so many announcements, so many pieces of news, and the new consoles are getting a lot of details and more coming soon as well. So, go check out Pixels if you want to stay informed, and if you want to get a look at my eternal sunlight in Finland, you can go check out Instagram. I'm not Patrick over there as well. Thanks to everybody who has been reviewing us on iTunes. We've been getting a lot of great reviews, and we really, really, really appreciate it. Keep it coming, especially like the folks who are very obviously not Apple podcast users going in and leaving a review saying, hey, you can also get it over on Podcast Addict and Downcast and other apps like that. But all of that work that you're doing helps other people discover our show, so we really do appreciate it. And of course, you can support the show directly and get all of our great bonus content at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. We also have an email address where you can send us your feedback, because we love to hear it, and that is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Send them early and often. We are also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.