 Coming up on DTNS, Apple draws the line at streaming video game services, science changes gene names because of Microsoft Excel, and the president of the United States issues executive orders targeting TikTok and WeChat. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 7th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Annie Gauss, tech reporter at The Street is back. Hey, how's it going? Good. Good to have you back. We were just talking with everyone about lobster rolls quite a bit on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that expanded show, you got to become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter told The Verge accidentally pushed incorrect release notes to an update of its iOS app on Thursday, which said the ability to control replies to tweets was being added. It isn't, though. It's just being tested. So if you have the ability to limit who replies to a tweet, if you're in the test, you don't have it and don't expect to get it after all. Yeah, you got it. You got it. If you don't, you don't. Security researcher Troy Hunt announced he plans to open source the code base for the Have I Been Pwned hacked credentials repository. Hunt says he's consulting with open source experts and plans to open source the code gradually. Doesn't have a timeline for completion. Data from security breaches will not be included in the transition due to legal concerns. In June 2019, Hunt announced he planned to sell Have I Been Pwned, but after negotiations with an exclusive party broke down, he announced in March that he will plan to keep the repository independent. Google announced a partnership with the Indian state of Maharashtra to provide 23 million students and teachers with access to Google Education Services at No Church. This will include G Suite for Education, Google Classrooms, and Google Meet Video Conferencing. Google also added support for the Marathi language used in the state to its teach from Anywhere Educator Hub. Education officials in Maharashtra hope to roll out remote education solutions to roughly 190,000 schools. Two years ago, Microsoft divided the Windows team with the core development group going to Cloud and AI, aka the Azure team, and the front end in a team called the Experience Team under what is now Panos Panai's department. Microsoft is now moving the fundamentals and developer experience team back under Panai. The Windows Core Engineering team will stay with Azure. Panai says his team will focus on growing the surface business among other things. And as we've been doing, we've been keeping you up to date on vaccine progress. No big vaccine updates in the last few days. But just to keep you up to date, there are still five vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 in phase three trials. That's the last trial stage before approval. One from AstraZeneca and Oxford University is on track. It all goes well to gain approval in October. And vaccines both from Moderna and BioNTech, Pfizer and Shanghai Fosin. That's one group of three companies working on one vaccine. Both of those vaccines could see approval as early as November, if everything goes well. All right, let's talk a little more about streaming video games on Apple. Yeah, because we talked about it yesterday, but there are some developments. Thursday, we talked about how Apple's App Store rules prevent apps from accessing software running on remote machines in order to prevent bad actors from circumventing App Store rules. OK. Unfortunately, as we explained, that meant streaming game services like Microsoft's Project XCloud, Google's Stadia, can't get App Store approval because they technically access software remotely. Tom suggested Apple maybe needed to carve out an exemption for legitimate streaming video game services. Apple has responded, telling Business Insider that such services either need to submit each game in its library for review or just use the web. So in other words, sorry, no, you get no exemption. In related news, Facebook launched its gaming app on iOS without playable mini-games from Facebook's Instant Games platform. You might ask, why? Well, Apple rejected the app when it included the games because it said it violated a different rule that doesn't allow apps to distribute HTML5 games as its main purpose. This stops apps from maliciously slipping in code that can't be reviewed as part of the app review process. So there is some good going on there, but Facebook argued that watching videos of people playing games was the gaming app's main purpose. Apple disagreed. Facebook removed the games from the iOS version of the app, and now it's approved. So, Annie, my opinion on this has changed completely in 24 hours because I was like, oh, Apple just needs to do what it did with video for Apple TV and say, you can do an app purchase if you're a premium video. You could say like, oh, well, it's to find a legitimate video game streaming services an exception. And it looks like Apple's like, no, we're not. If you have a streaming video game service, you can't have that on iOS. Yeah, I mean, how much of this do you think it has to do with, if at all, Apple's own Apple Arcade service? And it's maybe, I mean, that's certainly a legitimate question, but that's a different service. That's a service where Apple says you download the apps locally, but at the same point, it's a competing service because if I'm paying a subscription price to play games, I could be paying it to Apple or I might choose to pay it to Stadia. Obviously, the games on Apple Arcade, not as sophisticated as the games you could play through Stadia and Project XCloud, but also the games through Apple Arcade are just mobile games. They're not like Apple's iOS is not the main way people would be playing these games from these services anyway. Yeah, I mean, and my other question is, you know, I haven't played either, I haven't played Stadia myself or XCloud, but, you know, how much of a demand is there to actually play those types of games on your mobile device? I mean, how important is that to people? I think it's just a perk, right? Yeah. Like it's probably not gonna stop too many people, right? From going and doing that, but on the other hand, it's something where, like on an iPad, right? And Apple's trying to get people to use their devices for gaming. They have a gaming controller. If I can't use my iPad or an Apple TV even more so, right? Then I might be, I don't know, I don't want to overstate the importance of these streaming services because there's a lot of skepticism about them too, but if I'm really into Stadia, if I'm really into XCloud, I might not buy an iPad. I might not buy an Apple TV because I can't play these games on it. It's interesting in light of all the attention on the App Store now, you know, with all the antitrust stuff going on. It's just, we'll probably continue to get a lot of attention. Well, yeah, and I think one of the interesting things about this is that what's happening with Apple is that they're just sticking to their rules. And I know the rules are there for a good reason. I get that. They were meant to stop someone from circumventing safety protections by doing an emulation and doing malicious things. But there's gotta be a way to undo that, right? There's gotta be a way to come up with an exception. Absolutely. I mean, especially if presumably is gonna be an important category. I mean, people who are kind of bullish on this whole cloud gaming thing think this could be an important category for gaming in the years to come. So it kind of seems like they have to. All right, let's talk about genes. Each gene in the human genome is given a name an alphanumeric code called a symbol used to coordinate research. That way when two scientists are talking about the membrane associated ring CH type finger one gene they can both just put down MARCH1 in their spreadsheets. And then they both know what gene they're talking about. It's a lot easier to handle or can they? You see Microsoft Excel helpfully changes MRCH1 which is entered all as one symbol MARCH1 or MARCH1 to the date one MARCH because Excel is helpful that way. Like, oh, you wrote MARCH1, you obviously mean the first of MARCH. Now, that's handy when you need to make a date but it's not so handy when you mean to identify a gene. You have to change the data type of a column or a cell to avoid the problem. And not everybody remembers to do that or remembers to save their CSV with formatting. That's another problem. In fact, a 2016 study found that about 20% of published papers were affected by this mistake. 20% of published papers had a gene name that had been changed into a date. This week, the HGNC, which handles these naming conventions so that everybody agrees what they are, published new guidelines for gene naming, altering the names of 27 genes to avoid Excel auto formatting. So now, membrane associated ring CH type finger one is MARCHF1. Well, thank goodness. Yeah, one of those things. I, this is not, you know, human genome stuff is not something that I'm totally on top of every day but I'm in Excel spreadsheet every day. So there you go, science and tech working together. I think it's crazy that, I mean, it would be nice if Microsoft added a thing to Excel that said, hey, always turn off auto formatting. Maybe that wouldn't get rid of all the mistakes. Maybe people would just not remember to always turn off auto formatting and you'd still have this problem. So maybe it is the right decision. You know, I just talked myself out of it. Maybe it is the right decision to just, just make the name so that they won't potentially cause a problem. Tom, what do you want to do? You want to talk about mighty buildings? Yes, please. You want to talk about paramounts? All right, let's go with mighty buildings. ZD nuts, Greg Nichols has a report on a startup called Mighty Buildings that wants to automate up to 80% of the building process using 3D printing. It claims it can produce a structure with 95% fewer labor hours and twice as fast as conventional construction. Not the first to use 3D printing in construction, but Mighty Buildings uses a proprietary composite that lets it build more elements like overhangs, roof structures, things like that. And 3D printing allows for design variation, not usually in traditional automated assembly like those used for cars. Use robotics to add interior and exterior finishes. Mighty Buildings has built its first two accessory dwelling units. One in San Ramon, that's in Northern California, not far from where I am now, and one in San Diego, California with more to come. Annie, what do you think? 3D printing houses getting more and more efficient, more cheaper? These are apparently 45% cheaper. Would you live in a 3D printed house? Probably, yeah, sure, why not? I mean, I'm incredibly impressed by the development of 3D printing over the past few years. I'm old enough to remember when the most you could do with a 3D printer was like print a block or something like that. Remember there was like a 3D printed pizza thing that happened a few years ago and that was like a big deal. So yeah, I mean, this seems like something incredibly useful. I mean, especially in a place like California where we have such a severe shortage of houses that there's a more efficient way to do it, like great. Yeah, I think this is, we're making progress and there are others involved in doing things like this, but I think the trend in general is interesting as it will bring down the price of building. Now, that said, we're in an era where probably fewer office buildings will need to be built for a while as companies are tending to work from home more. And with homeowner property values, it often tends to be the property itself that drives up the price, not the structure on it. So I'm not sure how much alleviation this would give in certain markets, at least markets like San Francisco and I will say that it does offer a tremendous possibility for people who want to remodel because especially with homes that may not be built off a plan, like when they did my roof, the guy literally just had to eyeball how my roof was shaped as he cut the various bits of material to make it fit. If you can just measure and just have it printed out, you literally save that and all my windows screens from being torn. Yeah, and these ones that you mentioned, Sarah, are accessory dwelling units which go by various names, in-law units, studio, et cetera. But if you want to move a relative in but not move them into your house, you could print out a new residence for them. Or give yourself a home office if you got the space in the backyard. I mean, there are quite a few use cases for this. All right, folks, an era has ended since the Paramount Consent Decree of 1948, the big five movie studios of 1948 haven't been allowed to own theaters and have been limited in something called block booking which lets a studio force a theater to take a smaller movie in order to get a more desirable blockbuster. But Friday, the U.S. District Judge Annalise Satorres found, quote, that termination of the decrees is in the public interest. Not all studios were subject to this decree, interestingly, Lionsgate and Disney, for example, not part of the big five, neither was Netflix. But now, any studio is free to buy a theater, not that they will want to, since theaters are a horrible buy right now. However, they are more likely to take advantage of the end of the restriction against block booking which will end after a two-year sunset period. That's where you can say, it was a limit on five under the Consent Decree. Now you can say like, well, if you want Jurassic World, you've got to take all 15 of our romantic comedies this year or something like that. Yeah, I mean, it's very true. You think like, who wants to buy a movie theater right now and nobody's there. But if a company were to do so and reimagine it in the times that we're in, what would it look like? I mean, I've seen some kind of funny mock-ups on the internet about like, oh, you have sort of these pods where people are in a group but far away enough from whatever other group is there. And I look at it and I'm like, still looks problematic to me. I don't know who wants to buy a movie theater. Yeah, I don't think that's something that's gonna be a result of this at all. But I do think it's gonna be more pressure on the existing theaters to take the movies that folks want. You combine this with Universal's deal with AMC theaters to do a 17-day window. And you can imagine a lot of these mid-range, mid-budget movies are going to go to on-demand faster but be forced to stay in theaters because now they can do some blocking, booking, put some pressure. At a time when theaters needed more leverage, they're losing leverage. It's not really good for them. Hey, folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. President of the United States signed two executive orders Thursday under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and a couple other justifications, forbidding transactions with TikTok owner ByteDance and any transactions with Tencent related to their super app WeChat. Each of these orders takes effect September 20th. You might recall Microsoft has until September 15th to reach a deal to buy some or all of TikTok from ByteDance. So there's a little bit of a gap there between when Microsoft's deadline is and when this executive order takes place. So that's the first thing to remember is they didn't ban the apps. They banned transactions with the companies which could cause apps to disappear and it doesn't happen until September 20th. So there's 45 days to figure out how this is gonna work. Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, will identify which transactions will be considered prohibited under the order. So that's gonna change. A lot of people are looking at the Tencent order and saying, well, wait, could this ban transactions with other Tencent industries? And so that will be important for the definition from Wilbur Ross to decide, well, is it really just WeChat? The use of the Emergency Act is generally applied to terrorism or sometimes international trade and will likely be challenged in court. In fact, TikTok has pretty much said it's going to do that. The order claims the app's access to user data, including location, browsing, messaging, payments and search histories, quote, threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to America's personal and proprietary information, potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage. This is considered in both cases a threat to national security, foreign policy and the economy of the United States. So there's the justification they're gonna have to fight out in court. While the order against WeChat is likely to be narrow, if it's not, it could affect Tencent's non-WeChat businesses. In fact, some companies may just out of an abundance of caution decide to back off of Tencent's non-WeChat businesses just in case. And Tencent owns Riot Games, which makes League of Legends. They wholly own it, it's theirs. Tencent is also an investor in Spotify, Snap, Reddit, Tesla, Warner Music, Universal Music and Fortnite Maker Epic Games. Annie, I know you've been following this story both on the TikTok side and otherwise. What do you make of these executive orders from Thursday? God, where do you even make it? Well, what struck me first about them is that they're so vague. I mean, it was a lot like a social media order where immediately everyone's like, how can they even legally do this? And it's not even clear in the order itself what they're defining as a transaction. And I guess, presumably we'll hear more from Will Ross about what that entail it. It just seems like there's no way they can possibly do this. I mean, TikTok is very, you know, a file lawsuit. And the subbutt is that there could be a civil liberties law, which because, you know, especially with WeChat, it's one of the biggest communication apps in the world and it's used for virtually everything, you know. In China, it's also used by people to communicate, people with family or friends in China and it's just like the implications are unbelievable. So I just don't see how this is possible or legal and I'm not a lawyer, but we will soon see once these lawsuits happen. Yeah, let's assume the order only affects WeChat just to make the conversation a little simpler. That's still a lot of effect. WeChat has one and a half million US users, but an order like this that prevents, let's say it says, look, you can't have a transaction with WeChat, which means you can't have WeChat in the Apple app store. You can't have it in the Google Play Store. That could prevent WeChat from being on the app store in China. It may apply to say, Apple, you can't have WeChat in any of your app stores, which would stop iPhone sales? WeChat, like you mentioned, it's a super app. People use it for everything in China and they're not going to buy an iPhone in China if it doesn't have WeChat any more than people outside of China are wanting to buy Huawei phones that don't have Google services on them. It could impact adoption by businesses for use by Chinese tourists. So if a company's like, well, I would take WeChat as a payment for Chinese tourists, but I'm worried that it's not going to be supported, et cetera, et cetera, by my point of sale service. It would curtail the ability for relatives and businesses to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues in China. I remember there's a lot of companies that are multinational and have offices in China and WeChat is the way people talk to each other. It's the way they rent cars. It's the way they pay for groceries. It's the way they find restaurant reviews. It's 17 different apps in one. And it would affect US companies' business in China if they can no longer operate and collect payments through WeChat because most people pay for things with WeChat. So the NBA, musicians trying to sell their music, vending and television shows, movie theaters, et cetera, putting things available on demand. There's a lot of implications and it's unclear what those would be. Yeah, I mean, the Apple and iPhone sales angle is an interesting one because history shows that Apple and Tim Cook kind of have an ability to persuade the Trump administration to do things their way. And I wonder if that was coming into effect in this or if it will come into effect in this because that's that alone. I mean, iPhone sales in China are like 15% of their sales. So that's a massive blow for them. Don't be too surprised if Secretary Ross comes forward 45 days from now, or 44 at this point, and says, oh, this doesn't apply to app stores outside the United States. Because really underneath all of this, it's not about necessarily stopping WeChat. It's about sending a message. This is a political act because technologically on the WeChat side, it's, I guess it's simple technologically to take a WeChat app out of an app store, but it has business implications like crazy, right? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it's like Brexit. It's like of that scale almost, you know, in a way. It's like, it would be just the ripple effects would be massive. I mean, the story is unfolding at a rapid pace, but my first reaction yesterday was last evening after our show, and I was like, this is not enforceable. And a friend of mine who's also fallen in the story was like, sir, it's executive order. I mean, yes it is. And I'm like, eh, legal implications, something. There's more to the story. But, you know, taking that away, if it were to come to pass, there are friends of mine who were like, WeChat is the only way I can talk to my entire family in China. And, you know, I think, especially in the U.S., some parts of the world, but particularly here, we don't understand the implication of something like that. Facebook might be the closest one where it's like, oh, you take that away, then you like lose your entire family or communicating with them. Yes, you can find alternative methods to do so, but that is a tough ask, especially, you know, you've got elderly folks or just a large number of people in general. Yeah, this is going to take a while to come into focus. It depends on the judge. I can see a judge ruling on this executive order and saying, look at all this telemetry. You know, the normal telemetry that Facebook or Google collect also, but in front of a judge saying, look at all this stuff that is going to the Communist Party. Now, there's not necessarily evidence that it is going to the Communist Party, but a judge may say, the fact that it might means that this is a threat to the United States and I'm going to support the order. That's quite possible that a judge would rule that way. I absolutely can see judges ruling the opposite and saying, well, you don't really have any evidence. This isn't an exact existential threat, like a terrorist act, like an actual act of war, which is what this powers act is meant to do. Remember, this powers act that the president is citing was created in 1977 after Watergate to limit the power. So there is some supervision on the issuance of this order that wasn't there, say when Roosevelt issued executive orders back during the Depression that stayed until 1977 when they got rid of all of them. So this is far from being clear what it means. My guess is this is going to have an effect on the Microsoft negotiations to buy TikTok. Something's going to happen there in the next 45 days and that executive order might become moot. I don't know what the end game is with the WeChat order. I don't know what defines blinking on the Chinese side that would cause the US to withdraw this order. I feel like this is meant to provoke a response but I don't know what it is or it could be that the administration says, we really don't care if this hurts businesses and users in small amounts because it's not big enough for us to care. I just don't know. Well, the conversation continues and you can join our conversation in our Discord and you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, we got a good one from Mike A and this was actually in response to know a little more. Mike A had some thoughts. He said, with a rapid increase of cloud gaming and related cloud virtual environments plus the fact that we all live in video conferencing now, perhaps an explainer on latency versus bandwidth. In my world of stock exchanges, latency is everything. Nobody really focuses on bandwidth. For trading, I care that my trade instructions get into the central order book within X nanoseconds of when I issued. Typically, these packets are very small. Thus, my bandwidth to the exchange, not the issue. I can't care about the end-to-end latency though, which is the summation of all the cues and processing times of all the firewalls and routers that I need to pass through. So we see this in cloud gaming as well. My bandwidth is the first node in the networks might be 10 gigabytes per second, gigabits per second rather, but if the latency for each controller joystick movement to get to the gaming server located in the US is 100 milliseconds versus somebody in the US having a latency of 80 milliseconds, then I'll always lose. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about this. Thank you, Mike. The idea of latency being so important in trading makes perfect sense to me. And yeah, know a little more at knowa little more.com available free to patrons, but as a separate feed for people who aren't patrons, covers these types of in-depth topics. So I will add this to the list, Mike. Let's talk about latency on know a little more. Yeah, cool. And thanks for all the suggestions. We keep them coming. We always appreciate them. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Degracia Daniels, Dustin Campbell and Andrew Bradley. Let's check in with Len Peralta who has been illustrating the show. What have you got, Len? Leave it to me to try to simplify a very complicated issue. I know there's more to this than just TikTok, but of course I have to draw a TikTok and I have to draw a Trump here who is doing his TikTok dance. It's TikTok. Which is what people do on TikTok. They dance. Exactly. It's TikTok for TikTok. This is what this is called. And it was just kind of a fun little exercise to draw the president and him doing his little dance saying he has the best dances like my dance. Time's a tick and I love it. Lots of nuances here, Len. Well done. Where's my Spotify, that kind of stuff. In the fine tradition of editorial cartoons, this is great. Exactly. And if you are interested, if you want this picture of Donald Trump on your wall, this, you can get this right now if you're a patron of mine, patreon.com forward slash Len or of course at my online store, lennperaltastore.com. Also thanks to AnyGauss. It's been too long, Annie, since you've been with us but so nice to have you today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can find me on twitter.com slash AnyGauss or you can also read my work at thestreet.com. And if you look up my name in thestreet.com you'll find my author page where you can read all my articles about tech and corporate finance. That's AnyGauss. A-N-N-I-E-G-A-U-S folks, go read it. It's good stuff. Thank you for supporting us. We've been getting so many good reviews in the Apple Podcast Store and other stores all week long because we've been asking you to do that. It's really great to see that. There've been some funny ones too. Some folks just doing the thing which is like write whatever they feel in there because it doesn't really matter as long as that review gets in there. So keep it up, folks. Leave us some reviews in the Apple Podcast Store. It helps visibility and helps more people discover us. We appreciate it very much. And of course you can get all kinds of extra perks, extra episodes, extra information, like know a little more. If you become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 23 to UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back on Monday with Rob D'Amillo as our guest. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.