 Coming up on DTNS has Stadia saved cyberpunk 2077 Facebook wants to read your mind, summarize news and stop Apple with full page ads. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 16th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane saw Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm Roger Chang. The show's producer and we were just having a deep conversation about the effect of the internet and the passage of time on music styles and and how the 80s and the 50s and now are different. If you want that wider conversation, get our expanded show. Good day, internet. Become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Native apps for Apple's M one based Macs continue to roll out. Microsoft has released Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and one note as Universal apps. Mozilla released Firefox 84 for M one based Macs, though it will still require Rosetta for streaming content from DRM video services. Amazon's Luna game streaming service is now available through the Chrome browser on some phones running Android 9 or newer flagship phones from Google. One plus and Samsung are supported with more phones expected to get supported as time goes on. You'll also still need a Luna invitation before you can start an account if you don't already have one. Samsung's president of mobile T.M. Ro said that Samsung plans to bring the S Pen support to more phones and make foldable phones accessible to more buyers, which a lot of people read as meaning more affordable and unnamed Samsung official also told news agency Yonhap that Samsung is preparing to release the Galaxy Note series next year. And that quote rose message does not mean that the Galaxy Note series will be discontinued. That was a rumor previously. Samsung will hold its next announcements in January. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved a bill to let Huawei's presence continue in Germany, though it still requires parliamentary approval. The US administration has lobbied its European allies to reject Huawei's technology, claiming China can use it to spy on and steal sensitive information. Huawei denies the allegations. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Twitter that the state will file a multi state lawsuit against Google alleging anti competitive conduct, exclusionary practices and deceptive misrepresentations. Paxton referred to Google controlling pricing and engaging in market collusion. Texas is already part of a suit against Google regarding an abuse of monopoly power in search and search related ads. And breaking news just coming across the wire. Roku and Warner Media have reached an agreement for distribution of HBO Max. It'll show up on Roku tomorrow. In our time. All right, let's talk a little more about these full page ads. Facebook took out ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal saying, quote, we're standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere. This is all because of a change to Apple's third party ad policy that's coming early next year. The policy centers around something called the IDFA, the ID for advertisers. This is a number that can be linked to your device and Facebook and others use this number and data like it to target ads based on what they know about the user behind that number. This allows them to personalize the ads. Now, Apple's going to continue to let developers use that number. They can use it for analytics just like they are now. But if a developer wants to combine it with other data to track a user, the user must grant permission so they can they can actually use it to track the user within their own apps. It's just if they want to bring in another company. And that's important for understanding things later. An example of the notification that Apple will provide is like this. Facebook would like to permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies. And then you'll have an option to allow it or don't allow it. Companies are prohibited by Apple from using incentives to get people to agree or reducing functionality if they don't agree. So this just has to be a clean and fair agreement. Very similar to how the GDPR writes the law. If a developer is found to be using data without permission, they can be removed from the app stores or Apple intends to enforce it. Now, everyone agrees this is going to reduce the number of users whose data can be used for personalized ads. Personalized ads use data known about you to show you relevant ads. That means the ads are more effective and therefore can be sold for a higher rate. So if you have fewer personalized ads, the advertising platforms like Facebook make less money. But it also means small businesses can actually spend less money counterintuitively because they can target people. They have a better chance of turning into customers instead of a massive radio campaign where it's going to hit a bunch of people that aren't going to turn into customers, they can say, oh, we have a good chance that everybody sees this ad might buy something from us. Facebook says in a test last summer, it saw more than a 50 percent drop in publisher revenue through its audience network when personalization was removed. There's no doubt that this is going to affect advertising. When Apple implemented anti-trafficking in Safari, for example, ad prices fell by around 60 percent, according to the information. Now, that has since recovered because they figured out other ways to do advertising on the web. The other thing that's getting Facebook all upset is Apple doesn't apply this rule to its own apps. Apple does personalize its own ads in the App Store and on Apple News based on what you do in Apple's own apps. Apple notes that it is not stopping developers from doing the same thing using IDFA within their own apps. The new policy only applies to moving user data between companies and combining it with other data sets. And Apple doesn't do either one of those things. And I also pretty sure they ask your permission for this at setup. Facebook is leading the charge because Facebook is one of the largest advertising networks in the world. And if users opt out of tracking, it stands to make less money on targeted ads. It argues that it provides tools on Facebook.com for people to control how their data from Facebook is used. So Apple doesn't need to do this. But of course, that only applies to Facebook. Whereas the in-app controls on Apple apply to whatever service the developer uses, whether it's from Facebook or not. Now, advertisers are always are already working on a lot of workarounds. One called contextual targeting would use the environment you're in to determine what ad to show. For instance, players of a particular game tend to like dating apps so they could get dating apps to advertise and it should work pretty well. Other avenues would be targets based on freely available data like battery level or strength of network connection. Again, to identify the type of user rather than the user themselves. Like, oh, if this person is often with 50% battery life, they're this kind of person. You can make machine learning to identify that kind of stuff. So I kind of phrased this in an earlier discussion today as effects and practicality, which is what the advertising industry is concerned about versus principle, which is what privacy advocates in Apple are concerned about. Interesting. Yeah, the whole Facebook taking, you know, full pages out is sure. They get a lot of attention that way. We're going after Apple because we're the voice of the small business owner. And I mean, I just have to laugh about that. You know, Facebook taking Facebook's other issues that we talk about on the show all the time, just completely putting them aside. This seems so disingenuous to me. And it's not really because I think, oh, Apple's, you know, totally on the right. I mean, they're a big company that they're concerned about making money above all else the way that Facebook is as well. But for two different reasons, Apple has drawn a line in the sand and said, we are going to make privacy a thing that will make people come to our platform because we're taking it seriously and here are the ways that we're going to do this. Company like Facebook says, well, hold on a second, this is going to suck for us. You're going to really screw up a lot of things for us. And Apple's like, well, but we're not saying that you can't still have this data. We're just saying Sarah Lane as a person who may be signing up for the first time. Do you want to do this or do you not want to do this? And in the past, I just didn't have a choice. Now I might say no, I don't want to. And then Facebook and a company of any size who wants to sell ads based on location or past history or any of the data points that are used up until this point, they need to get on with the times because things are changing. My very fast take at the end of this is maybe controversial, but part of me thinks this is going to get rebuttal from Tom, but I'm going to say it. Part of me thinks that Facebook knows because of data they have, just how callable people who like Facebook might be when you feed them a message spun in this direction and therefore they're confident and that their little spin on this is that people will believe them that it's bad for them somehow and bad for small business owners. And I think they're wrong. They're certainly wrong from my view, but I think they're wrong on the whole. I think this comes off as really flat and weird and disingenuous to say the least. You know what? I'm not going to rebut the idea that Facebook looked at their own data to construct this message. It would be stupid of them not to. And it's if there is a message that gets Facebook, the company that no one wants to give a break on privacy, a chance of being heard, it's it's not about us. It's about small businesses will be fine. We can weather this storm. But the the mom and pops think of the child, not children, small businesses. I mean, it's that kind of appeal. Yeah, we'll see if it works. You know, well, I'm next. Look at this, guys, Google Stadia in the news video games. It has arrived on iOS as a mobile web beta after being announced last month and over a year after Stadia's initial launch. So it's been a long time coming. Any existing Stadia user on the free tier or paid Stadia Pro subscription can now access their library of Stadia games. Remember the service you have to buy the games within the service to use them on iPhones and iPads. Google is using mobile Safari to circumvent Apple's restrictions on cloud gaming apps in the app store like Microsoft to be doing this soon as well. You can access Stadia through its mobile site or by creating a home screen icon that becomes a progressive web app. According to the Verges, Nick Statt, Statt, even Cyberpunk 2077 works on the iOS version of Stadia. Stadia offers a two or sorry, offers two free to play games right now. Those being Destiny 2 and Super Bomberman are. I wanted to throw out real early on this, the reason that Stadia is getting such great marks for how well it's running Cyberpunk 77 or 2077 is because it's being compared to all the bugs they've been having on platforms that aren't streaming platforms, particularly the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. It runs very poorly on those platforms and there's controversy surrounding it. You guys have talked about it on the show before and everybody's sort of talking about it right now. The new gen consoles seem to run it fine, but they're not technically next gen versions, but the PC versions, least amount of bugs. Also, the highest percentage of sales so far have been on PC. They're known to be a proficient PC developer and have for years. So it doesn't surprise me that people are not only having better luck there, but with high end video cards, right tracing, that sort of stuff, they're getting really great results there. The reason I say all of that is Stadia and other things like Nvidia's GeForce now and services like that are playing Cyberpunk really well because they are in effect connecting you to a remote high end PC where things are kind of running the best. So as long as the service is working well and your ISP is handling it, you might as well be getting the best PC version of the game you can, but you're playing it on your TV with your with your Stadia or a browser in this case. So that's good for them. That's good for Stadia. They needed a win, but it's funny that they're kind of getting a win on the loss of CD Projekt Red's somewhat failure at launch. So save your conspiracy theories about CD Projekt Red making Cyberpunk 2077 buggy on purpose to help Stadia. I don't think that probably washes, but yeah, it is it is unusual. Yeah. And the fact that that's I cannot state enough, like just to just to pull the camera out a bit again on streaming tech and where it has gotten to even today and where it's headed. It's nothing short of amazing that a game with that level of fidelity and complexity of visuals, a truly a next gen experience on the right hardware is coming to somebody's phone in a way that's playable, usable, sinkable to a controller. Like we are so far from where we were, say, 10 years ago on even dreaming about this sort of thing. So it's a huge, huge deal. I still say there's big questions for consumers about whether Stadia is the way to go. You're basically renting and or using a free tier of a platform that you still have to buy games for. Whereas Luna and GeForce and other stuff, they're they're taking different approaches where you can get lots of games included with your smaller note prescriptions. So I'm still on the fence on all that. But from the macro view, this is all super cool every time I hear about it. Yeah. And and this is the big event of progressive web apps. We heard about Luna coming to Android as a progressive web app. It's also already on iOS as a progressive web app. You mentioned Microsoft's going to be. I mean, I know we use the word circumvent, but that sort of implies that that you're getting around Apple, whereas Apple encourages this. They're like, yeah, we don't want to allow you to do this in the App Store. But if you want to make a progressive web app, we'll we'll help, you know, we'll pitch in and make this possible. And it's me to me. It's no different than saying, hey, these cool services work on a browser on your desktop. We're just talking about a handheld computing form and nobody complains about browser access there. I don't think they should hear. I think it's just it's easy to see the juxtaposition of the Android method versus this method. And so people want to get all tied up in that. But I think it's cool that it's just a browser. And I kind of prefer it there. I don't want more apps. I want to work really well. That's the thing about PWAs that people don't realize is they are. Getting to be indistinguishable from apps in a lot of ways. Yeah. Well, speaking of companies working together like cats and dogs, Apple's Apple TV app will arrive on Google platforms like Android TV and Google TV, you know, cats and dogs can get along just fine. Starting with the Chromecast early next year, it will be available to stream in 4K HDR with Dolby Vision at Atmos and you'll be able to see Apple TV content in voice search results as well with Google Assistant. Google also added support for Apple Music on Google Assistant smart speakers earlier this month. So we're, we're on a trend and people are playing nice. And boy, it makes me want to buy a Google piece of hardware that much more because I love Google Assistant. And this is what Apple is aiming for, is to get their app available in every place that Netflix did this in the earliest days and it really helped where anything you bought had Netflix on it and it helped them build out their audience. Apple wants to do that. They're like, even if you don't have Apple stuff, it's easy for us to get the people who buy Apple stuff to pay for Apple TV Plus. Let's get anybody who has a Chromecast to do this too. And Google was touting like this makes Android TV and its derivatives one of the only places where you can get everything now that we have Apple TV. And then of course we heard at the beginning of the show HBO Max coming to Roku tomorrow. So that now Roku pretty much has everything as well. Fire TV and Peacock just need to work it out. And then everybody will pretty much have all the majors. Anyway, one tiny note to add. I was concerned about how this would go because I haven't been in the Xbox ecosystem for a while, but picking up an Xbox Series X and messing with the media apps on it. Um, day one, there was an Apple TV app on there and I that surprised me. I was like, whoa, wait a minute, really? This is happening today and doing this to an Xbox. I mean, what kind of world am I living in? And it's great. It works great. All my subscriptions were there. My synced spaces like where I was watching a show or whatever. That was all there and started where I had left off. Like all the things I expected out of the app had this been a native Apple, you know, device like Apple TV. Where they aren't functioning. And that was a huge surprise. And it's been really, that thing's been great in terms of bringing me everything I subscribed to and then some that I don't need. Um, so yeah, Series X, Series S might, might also be the, the place to get all this stuff and make sure you have it all. If you're trying to make sense of all of the apps and services and devices and platforms out there, uh, you might want to chat with some other folks who are figuring it out as well in our Discord. You can join that by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash D T N S. Well, SolarWinds still dealing with the fallout from the malware that was injected in its Orion network management platform, uh, which caused intrusions at multiple government and corporate networks worldwide, but it has not yet revealed how the attackers injected the malware into its updates. You may have seen a headline that implies that maybe you figured it out, but you have it. Here's why. Security researcher, Vinith Kumar told Reuters that he alerted SolarWinds last year. Okay. 2019. Remember the malware was injected into Orion in March of this year. So well before the injection, and that's important. Uh, Kumar alerted SolarWinds that their updates server was protected by the password SolarWinds one, two, three. Oh, yeah. Now they changed it. So this is not Kumar says the most likely source of the malware intrusion because it looks like the malware didn't show up until much later, but it does imply that maybe SolarWinds wasn't quite as on the ball with security as it should have been. And there might be other examples of them falling down on the job that did cause the malware injection. Uh, for example, three weeks ago, SolarWinds posted a job ad seeking a new vice president for security and that position is still listed as open. So, uh, more to come on that. We don't know anything else, but this, this is just sort of us keeping up to date on what's happening with the SolarWinds story. And if you see this password thing, don't jump to the conclusion like, oh, well, that's how they got in. It doesn't seem to be, but it also seems to be that maybe there was something else just as bad. Yeah. I mean, when you see something like that and you go, how was that really a password that a security researcher found and then said, Hey, company probably want to change this, which they did, but like, we're like, were there other things that maybe had been overlooked that seem obvious to somebody who knows what they're doing? Yeah, that's, I saw that. Tom talked about on the morning show segment this morning and a little bit anyway. And I just thought, this is like my mom's level of password or worse actually, because my mom at least puts capitalizations and some characters in there. She'd have an exclamation point in it, right? Yeah, which you also, by the way, cleared up this morning was a terrible choice because I guess everybody does that. It uses a lot of exclamation points. Don't use an exclamation point as your special character. It's the most common special character and a lot of brute force attacks will include it because they know that it's likely to be there. Yeah. So get a password manager. It's funny that this is a, you know, this is a broad, huge story that affects major institutions and all of that. But one of the takeaways is, yeah, give do good passwords. Like it says, did someone place a post it with it on their monitor? That would have been more secure. Honestly, I'm just having that as their password. That's right. That camera can't see that. Post a note. Anyway, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, you might be familiar with him and other company executives told employees at an end of year company-wide meeting on Tuesday that the company is developing an AI assistant tool called TLDR, which can summarize news articles and bullet points so that a user would be able to, or be able to see it at a glance and not have to read the full piece. So think longer form content and they're, you know, shortening it. Really hate this idea. Anyway, Facebook also told its employees that it's developing a neural sensor to turn thoughts into actions. Facebook acquired neural interface startup control labs at CTRL labs like your key on your keyboard in 2019. And at the meeting, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schofler demonstrated a sensor that takes neural signals coming from the brain to the wrist and then translates them into action. That's pretty rad. Schofler said this could be helpful for virtual typing, holding a virtual object or controlling a character in a video game. Oh, so yeah, going back to the let's let's us Facebook give you just the the cliff notes of the news. So you don't have to read the entire article. Now it's easy to say like, ah, Facebook, you know, now you're going to, you know, put a bunch of news organizations out of business. And that may be true. I see where Facebook's going. There are definitely certain, I mean, there's newsreaders, there's tech meme. There are just hovering over certain article links, depending on, you know, what platform I'm in, where I get the gist of an article and I kind of go like, OK, I understand what this news article is about, but for details, you know, and to get, you know, a wider conversation, then I'll go into the article itself. So that on its, you know, on the surface is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. But again, Facebook is in a battle in many big global entities right now about the idea of not being able, you know, sort of stealing clicks from news organizations and people who are doing really, really good work and being circumvented in that way. So I don't know. I don't. I, Scott, you said you hate this idea. I hate this idea too, even though I'd like to see it in practice in order to sort of understand that maybe it's not as evil as it sounds. Yeah, Facebook is in everybody's minds. Facebook is guilty until proven innocent. That's the reaction to this story. If this isn't Facebook, this is a great tool. If someone says, hey, we've come up with an RSS reader and instead of that kind of useless snippet you get there, we're going to use some machine learning so you get the bullet points and see what the story is about before you click through. Everybody loves this. It's only that it's coming from Facebook and everybody's jumping to conclusions about how it's going to be used, how it's going to undermine publishers. If Facebook took this and said, hey, guess what? When we when we come to an agreement about snippets, we'll give you this tool that will be an assistant for you to create the summaries for your stories that will drive people into your sites. That'd be great. Now I already hear everybody scoffing out there like Facebook will never do that. They'll make this the worst, but this is good technology. This is great technology and it doesn't need to be used. In fact, it's most likely not to be used for evil. It's just that it's coming out of Facebook, so nobody's going to trust it. Yeah, I have all I would add to that is the reason I don't like it is and you pretty much laid it out, but I just don't like this idea that Facebook is already a place where someone sees a fat meme headline in the Impact font and decides their entire social political or otherwise belief system based on that that flash of information. And so I'm sure that their data suggests that people are cool with shorter stuff and they jump to conclusions from that. But you already have shorter stuff, right? Right. And you know what? I like it. Everybody I don't want Facebook summarizing the story for me also looks at headlines and decides what the story is about. This is going to be an improvement on that because it's likely to give you a better sense of what's in the story than just a headline and a useless snippet, which is what you get now. I mean, I don't I don't disagree with that. I guess what I would say is I'm bummed that I'm bummed that people don't want to get the full story regardless. And none of this would matter if we did. It's not Facebook. I know this is likely to make you want to get the full story more than what we have now. Maybe. But but I guess what I'm saying is they're having to do workarounds for our poor behavior and that bums me out just a little bit. I don't know. I there are definitely bullet point CNBC and Axios come to mind, you know, where it's sort of like, you know, what what's what's the heart of the story? Let's give it to you. Want more? Keep reading. Great. If that was what Facebook was rolling out, great, won't care. Yeah. And like you said, Tom, to put it in the algorithmic minds of Facebook, freaks people out and there are a lot of more new sources that you might say, well, I wouldn't have trust that news source anyway, whether or not it was condensed or the full article. So kind of a larger conversation. This isn't don't read the story. This is, hey, here's a better way to understand what's in the story so you can decide whether you want to read the whole thing or not. That's the way I'm looking at it. It might be crappy at it too. It might be really bad and not work that way. That's the other thing we don't know. Well, moving on, Amazon unveiled the designs for antennas that consumer could use to access Project Kuiper. That's a planned satellite constellation to deliver broadband Internet. Yeah, everybody likes that, right? The phased array antenna underwent development and testing this fall. It has a 12 inch diameter that can deliver maximum throughput of 400 megabits per second. It's capable of streaming 4K video from geostationary satellites up to 22,000 miles above Earth. The project Kuiper satellites will be much lower than that. Amazon hasn't announced prices yet for the project. But they're small, tiny little antennas, 12 inch diameter. I mean, that might sound big to you, but yeah, you get 4K video. You know, this is this is a good stuff. Probably not next year, but within five years, we're going to have a bunch of these because SpaceX is doing one. There's a bunch of other companies doing it. And there's going to be a lot of rural coverage of broadband Internet. There'll probably be some people even not in rural areas wanting to take advantage of this. This is an interesting thing to watch. Indeed, it is. All right, shall we check out the mailbag? I think we shall. Adam from he says soon to be buried in snow Boston. Yes, we heard you guys are going to have a nor Easter. As they say on the news, he wanted to share a company that we mentioned briefly. The other day when we were talking about the company Gorillas, and this is a company called Gopuff that is working in the Northeast where he lives. He lives in Boston. He says they offer a bunch of convenience food and small grocery items. The only ship from their central locations. They have a number of them though through the out the city in the region. They don't promise 10 minute shiptimes in my experience, but they've all been within an hour. They don't allow people to go shopping directly on their stores or warehouses. So they're the dark stores that we talked about before. Adam says when clicking a job link, one of the benefits they tell you if you were interested in working there is using their specific location and not having to go store for store or run all around town to pick up things or use your personal money like a go for some other gig shoppers would have to do. Now Gorillas employs their drivers. I did sounds like from what Adams writing here that go puff doesn't but it's not nice to get a boots on the ground report on this. Thank you for that, Adam. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Adam. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. Who will they be? Spin the wheel. They include Paul Reese, Ragnar Barmodal and Jeff Wilkes. Also thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, I know you've been drawn up a storm among other things. What's new? Well, a couple things your your Friday or sorry, your Thursday guest, Justin Robert Young had me on his PX3 podcast yesterday. I suggest people go check that out if you want to know how I felt about the last four years in real raw detail. But also check out my comic. It's called Fred and can at Fred and can dot com. Great Christmas episode this week for those hoping we'd get some of that before the end of the year. So it's there. So go enjoy this thing that I make because it makes me feel better in the weirdest year we've ever had. That's at bread and can dot com. I'm going to double down on this. I listened to your interview with with Justin yesterday. And I know a lot of people out there probably think they know what that interview sounds like based on you saying that. And they do not know it was a really enlightening and deep and philosophical discussion that is going to surprise you. And Scott, thank you for doing that. You know, a little bit there and I definitely went places and credit to Justin. He has a way of bringing that out of me. But I think I feel pretty good about it, even though it was, you know, like I said, it's a little bit of a raw look at the more emotional side of things. And and I think I think people get a kick out of it. So check it out. And then once you've gone to politics, politics, politics.com and listen to that, go get a friend cam.com chaser. It'll make you feel better about the world. Yeah, there you go. Hey, folks, we love patrons that stick with us. That's why we're happy to offer Patreon loyalty rewards. Anybody can get them if you're like, man, I've been meaning to become a patron. Now is the time you can get a unique sticker, mug, t-shirt or hoodie, depending on what level you back at every three months, as long as you stay a patron. Each one has unique art from Len Peralta. The first one you get would be the DTNS seven year anniversary logo. Then there's one with Roger in it, one with Sarah in it, one with me in it. Every three months, get the details at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hey, have you heard the good word? We're live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. And you can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We will be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. 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.