 Coming up on DTNS, it's a virtual mobile world Congress with new mobile gear from Sony, Realme and Huawei. But can Huawei's awesome design stand without Google Play access? Plus, the Xbox Series X is better than your graphics card and why Apple might ditch Intel. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 24th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. I could not be happier to be with you, folks. Today, we were just having a great time on Good Day Internet, reminiscing about technologies of yesteryear and movie theaters and the like. You got to get that show, folks. Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. On Saturday, Samsung confirmed an employee had contracted the COVID-19 coronavirus. Samsung's factory in Gumi, Korea was shut down until Monday morning. And the floor where the infected person worked will remain shut down until the morning of February 25th. Co-workers who came into contact with the infected employee will be self quarantined and tested for infection. The Gumi factory makes a small number of high end Samsung phones for the Korean market. Google published a support article saying that any Huawei devices released after May 16th, 2019 lack play protect certification. That means any side loaded Google apps will not work reliably. Devices released before May 16th by Huawei will continue to receive support and security updates as long as that is permitted. The Wall Street Journal sources say that NBC Universal is in talks to buy Voodoo from Walmart. If acquired, Voodoo may reportedly be merged with Fandango now in a move to help bolster NBC use digital video presence ahead of the launch of its Peacock streaming service. The information reported back in October that Walmart was looking to sell Voodoo. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what's going on with Google in Europe. Let's do it. Search Engine Land reports that Google rolled out an updated search engine result page in the EU that highlights alternative directory sources for a search query. So these show up as a directory box in search results labeled find results on dot, dot, dot, depending on what you're searching for with links to services like Yelp or Yale or Sylex. These aren't labels ad units and they appear to be algorithmically selected by Google. Search Engine Land says that the system was being tested in Germany, but now appears to be live in at least the UK, in Belgium, in Spain, in Greece and in France does not appear too different from Google's rival links remedy, which was proposed back in 2013. You might recall it was criticized at the time as ineffective by Yelp and rejected by the European Commission. Yeah, the only big difference that I can tell is that that 2013 proposal just had the name of the service and a link and a little box around it and this new thing that's rolling out will have an example result. It'll have a little line that says, you know, this kind of thing to kind of get you to click. So I don't know, maybe Google found that's all you needed to make people click, but this is not mandated. This is not Google agreeing to something and putting it in place. This is Google just launching something potentially with the idea of getting ahead of any complaints that may or may not be filed. There are definitely complaints that are going to be filed about alternative directories and this may be a chance to try to subvert that, try to take the wind out of its sails before the complaint gets filed. Yeah, you know, Yelp has historically had such an issue with Google search results, although there are many times I've just gotten so good at my search, my search queries that I kind of know how to make Yelp be the top, the search result when I'm when I'm looking for something where I'm like, I actually kind of want to read some Yelp reviews. Why don't you just go to Yelp? Well, I don't know, Tom, because I'm just conditioned in a certain way. But sure, but I do. But I do kind of I can see where Google being like, listen, let's kind of add some some some boxes in here related to popular places that people are looking for anyway. They're not ads and we're and we're playing fair, well, you know, or attempting to and I don't know as somebody who's who's looking for stuff all the time, I think this is good. I guess, I mean, I don't think this is going to satisfy anybody because it was basically rejected. I'm not sure adding a little bit of extra text is going to change anybody's mind about it. Yeah. And it doesn't seem that helpful to me. Like you say, Yelp results show up in the search results already. Like I don't need another link to tell me that. I don't know. Maybe if you're in the UK and you're like, oh, no, I never see Sylex results. So this will be helpful to remind me that Sylex exists. But I don't know. I don't know that this really helps me as a user. You know, there's also and this is a whole other conversation, but it's sort of like like you mentioned, like Sylex results. Like if you don't need them, do you need them to be pushed on you? I'm not, you know, it gets into a whole other conversation about, you know, what we're supposed to be, you know, the whole idea of, you know, antitrust and fair, you know, and making sure that that certain companies aren't aren't buried when you're when you're a company like Google. But, you know, it's kind of what what works for you. Listen, I don't want I just don't want the cure to be worse than the disease. Don't don't make the results less useful for me by trying to fix them. You're right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Microsoft announced the GPU in the upcoming Xbox Series X will be capable of 12 teraflops, double the performance of the Xbox One X and more than eight times the original Xbox One. Microsoft previously said the console would use a custom AMD Zen 2 APU, but now we know it will also use the Radeon RDNA2 architecture, which includes hardware ray tracing functionality. Microsoft also confirmed more details about the support for variable ray shading, which lets a game shade an area of pixels at a different rate than the typical one to one. So that things makes things a little more efficient and a quick resume feature that lets you resume multiple games so you can suspend multiple games. You don't have to go one by one like you do now and the idea being instead of reloading the game, you can just pick up right where you left off in multiple games. Microsoft confirmed the console will also support HDMI 2.1. That includes variable refresh rates, auto low latency modes as part of the spec. And Microsoft says they have their own spin on them to make them better. But basically, Microsoft really getting a lot of attention with the quick resume feature, which a lot of people say they wanted and now they're going to get. And the fact that this GPU performance is better than a lot of mid-range GPUs out there right now. Yeah, I mean, besides me kind of picking out their naming convention, which is starting to get a little bit silly, although Microsoft is not the only company to do that. We'll talk about that a little later in the show. You mean the Xbox One, the Xbox One X and the Xbox Series X are perfectly clear to you? No, they're really not. They're not. I'm sure they're perfectly clear to somebody at Microsoft. But you know, besides that, that aside, what is most exciting about this? Like, are you are you going to buy? Are you going to buy this console and why? I mean, the quicker zoom is getting a lot of attention because it's a feature everybody wants. But the but the reason you buy one of these is because you want that performance right there on your television or in your game studio, you know, in your little game den and and and so 12 teraflops. That's decent performance and games will be able to take advantage of that. There's a lot of backwards compatibility. If you want a game console, this is the one to get whether this actually persuades someone who is thinking they might want to get along without a game console. I don't think those people were that worried about performance anywhere. You wouldn't be considering something else. So so this is this is good for the the folks who want a game console for sure. Let's move on to a YouTube type. I don't know a series of channels that I just learned about today. The chilled cow YouTube channel was mistakenly terminated for violating terms of service over the weekend, which ended the channel's lo-fi hip hop live stream. What this did was result in a video over 13,000 hours long with other with over 218 million views. The channel was reinstated less than a day later and YouTube support Twitter account tweeted that it shared feedback with our review team to prevent similar errors from happening in the future. So this was just kind of a mistake. Now, if you're not familiar with chilled cow, chilled cow and other music streaming channels don't own the rights to the music being played, but they can get permission from artists and labels to play them. So you often hear a little bit more underground artists kind of stuff. Doesn't stop a party submitting a content ID claim on the channel. However, yeah, the point being they were doing it legally. They were licensing stuff. They weren't just grabbing stuff and playing it without permission. And they still ran into content ID. Now, granted, it took 13,000 hours for them to run into that, which is pretty impressive. And the reason you get that 13,000 hour long video is they've been going long live that long. And then when the live thing stops, it automatically archives that. Of course, that video was not playable. And now it's just kind of sitting there as a testament to how long it ran. Not anything that you'd use, but the channel's back. And and this it's just on the one hand, it's another example of YouTube's content ID situation is just broken. It may not be broken most of the time for most people, but it is definitely broken. This shouldn't happen. These are people playing by the rules, doing something right. And the algorithm just goes out and takes them down because it doesn't know any different. And this happens all the time where somebody submits a claim for something they don't own, but there's no barrier to doing that in a lot of cases. So something like this happens, granted, chilled cow has enough profile that they were able to get it fixed right away. But somebody like Scott Johnson, who doesn't have as big of a profile with YouTube is chilled cow, took him weeks to get a mistake like this resolved. So there's that side of it. The other side of it is I'm delighted that, Sarah, you finally discovered the wonders of the chilled cow. It's pretty great. Oh, my gosh, this morning I read the story. I knew we were going to talk about it. And I asked a friend because I'm a hip hop fan. I'm like, what's lo-fi hip hop? And he was like, Sarah, that's, you know, the hip hop that you listen, you listen to while you're like working. That's like background music. I was like, oh, OK, that's a genre I'm not familiar with. Got it. And then, you know, the whole idea behind chilled cow, this particular YouTube account, there's quite a few accounts associated with this person or this, you know, these folks is kind of like a loop of a kind of animated girl writing down. You know, it's kind of doing homework. She's got a cat looking out the window, snowing outside. That was a joke when it went down. They're like, oh, I guess she finished her homework. She finished her homework. Yeah. But I kind of, I'm watching it and I'm like, this is weird. And then I'm like, there are 45,000 other people listening to the stream with me right now, you know, at 8 a.m. Pacific time kind of thing. And it's fascinating. And there are many others. Oh, no, I have used them. There's there's a couple that are specifically child directed and they're just lullabies. They call them like 12 hours of lullabies or seven hours of lullabies where you just play it. And hopefully your child sleeps to it. Right. But there's also ones for meditation. There's ones that are just, you know, nothing but synthwave and stuff. So I mean, people run these around the clock and it's they get a lot of views, like in the hundreds of millions. So yeah, it's it's it's probably just the soothing music where you can work to it and it doesn't get in your way, right? Because it's very background. But also the the ability to just look up every once in a while and see another person working, you know, and there's the working on our home. You almost like it's like a yule log. Right. Yeah. We're like every once in a while, something different happens. So you feel like it's real. Mm hmm. But it's but it's not distracting. Right. You know, you just kind of, you know, you're in an office environment. How about an Apple rumor? How about it? Well, normally I'd say no. But Ming-Chi Kuo brought this one. And Ming-Chi Kuo has a very good record of these things being right. New note from Apple analyst. Ming-Chi Kuo predicts Apple will release an arm based Mac in the next 12 to 18 months. So he's not the first to predict an arm based Mac. As a matter of fact, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, also who has a very good track record reported on an early stage Apple initiative to transition Macs to arm back in 2018. That is reportedly codenamed Kalamata. Ming-Chi Kuo says we're going to get our first device with one of these in 12 to 18 months. The chip will reportedly be built on a five nanometer process and is expected to be used in the upcoming 2020 flagship iPhone as well. So it's going to go into the iPhone. And Ming-Chi Kuo is saying it'll also go into a laptop. The switch to arm would give Apple more flexibility with hardware updates because the same way they they own the chip with iPhone, they would now own it on the laptop. Right now, they're dependent on Intel's development pipeline. I don't think they abandon Intel altogether right away. I think you still need the more powerful chips than arm can deliver in your MacBook Pro. But that means you'd have to have a system where Apple apps are useful across two architectures, not just across operating systems like iOS, iPadOS and Mac OS, but across Intel and ARM. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll just wholly switch over to the arm the way they switched when they went from went to Intel in the first place. My guess is we'll have to hear something about this at WWDC in June because Steve Trout and Smith pointed out on on Twitter that if this is true within 12 to 18 months, then developers need to start preparing for it now. And we would expect to see some kind of transitional arrangement, whether it's an SDK or an emulator or something like that at WWDC to make this workable. Yeah, I if we indeed get some kind of explanation of what Apple's going for here, I wonder what the developer community, you know, what what the what the mood's going to be. Does that mean more work for developers? Is this something that is, you know, they're excited to have and long coming or somewhere in between? I mean, it's definitely more work. And that's why Steve Trout and Smith is saying, you better tell us something at WWDC because we want to know how much more work it's going to be. It could be easy work. It could be hard work. It could be somewhere in between. And I wonder also if, if indeed, like you said, Intel processors aren't going to be just like completely abandoned and it's going to be some sort of a combination of the two across a lot of Apple products. What does that look like? How does that get? How does that get explained to the consumer or does it? Well, how many care in the Mac App Store? It's easy to manage. You just tell people like, OK, you're when you submit your your app to the Mac App Store, you have to submit an arm and a Intel version and we'll put it out in the in the right place. And if you don't, you'll only show up in the App Store for the proper versions, right? But for people who like me, like to go out and download things independently, it means a lot of rogue amoeba, all these independent software developers are going to think harder about going into the Mac App Store or they may have to offer multiple versions like they did for a while when there were still people with older Macs on non-intel hardware. Hmm. Well, we'll find out soon enough. Well, maybe we won't. Hopefully we will. Maybe. Maybe Mingxi goes wrong this time. It's rarely pretty good track record. Last Friday, security expert Bruce Schneider, Bruce Schneier, rather, announced that he joined Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt Company as chief of security architecture. And that was last summer in stealth mode, so we didn't hear about it until now. Schneier previously worked with Inrupt CEO John Bruce at Counterpane and Resilient. Inrupt is the company that's trying to bring the solid technology of distributed data ownership to market. Solid is an open source project to create a container of your personal information that gives you control over what companies can access which parts of your digital information. Schneier calls Inrupt the red hat to solids Linux. Yeah, so this is significant. First of all, it's significant that they got somebody of Bruce Schneier's caliber on the security side. This isn't a security company. It's a company that needs very good security, though. So that's really good that they could convince Bruce Schneier to join in on this. It also is significant that Bruce Schneier finally said, look, I joined last summer, but it's time for me to tell you, because that implies they are getting funding, which they are, and they're going to start making things more public and maybe have some usable versions of this. If you haven't heard us talk about solid before, the idea is that you have a container with all your information and then you decide whether to give a company access to that container. And if so, how much and you can revoke it at any time so that your data isn't stored on their servers. They just have access to your data like anything, of course, anything's copyable and there would have to be some auditing to make sure that they aren't copying and keeping data that they shouldn't. So it's not like foolproof, but it's way better than right now where you have no choice but to store your personal information on a server and just hope that they treat it well and very often they don't. Solid obviously is going to need third party companies to host it the way we have email hosts, web hosts and that sort of thing. And Inrupt is one of those companies that would provide that service. It also needs companies to adopt it. Tim Berners-Lee has said, look, we don't expect Facebook to adopt this out of the gate, but we hope we can get enough companies to adopt it that it starts to gain momentum to the point that the big companies feel pressure to adopt it. Well, and the sort of like announcement of like, hey, guess what? I did last summer, you know, really points to we're getting close to something that we're proud of. Yeah, yeah, and ready to talk about and we'll need to talk about the security of it and to talk about the security of it. We'll need our chief security architecture to be publicly acknowledging it. So yeah, can't wait to find out more. Hey, folks, if you get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, that means you're subscribed to DailyTechHeadlines.com. If you don't, you can fix that error right now. Go subscribe at DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, time for our Mobile World Congress announcements, not from Mobile World Congress, because of course that got canceled. But Sony announced a phone, the Xperia One Mark Two. It's the Xperia One with a Roman numeral two. That's how they like to say it, the One Mark Two smartphone. It's a 6.5 inch 4K HDR OLED, 21 9 aspect ratio, Snapdragon 865, 8 gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage, has a micro SD card slot, a 4,000 milliamp hour battery, IP68 water resistance, wireless charging and a headphone jack. Oh, boy. Y'all are always complaining. Then you want a headphone jack. Well, this one's got it. Put your money where your mouth is and it's going to be a lot of money. I'll get to that in a minute. It has 5G. It does not support millimeter wave. That's really interesting because the 865 can support it. They just chose not to. For all of you who hate notches and don't mind bezels, this is also your phone. You want a headphone jack and you hate a notch? This is the phone for you. Symmetrical bezels on the top and bottom. How's the camera and the speakers? Cameras are pretty nice. Sony makes really good cameras and they put one in their own phone here. Three rear 12 megapixel cameras, time of flight sensor, including a 24 millimeter lens on the main camera, 16 millimeter ultra wide, 70 millimeter telephoto. Sony says the camera can hit 20 frames per second, supports eye tracking, autofocus on humans and animals and calculates exposure and focus 60 times a second. All you need to do is be in Europe in the late spring and plunk down a thousand one hundred ninety nine euros. And it's yours. Well, luckily, since Sony, you know, is the best selling smartphone maker worldwide. This sounds like another hit. I'm being I'm being I'm being I'm being unkind. I think you think you made a mistake in your last sentence. We regret the error. I'm being unkind. The thing is, this is this is I'm a Sony fan. I'm kind of a Sony stan as as millennials would say, yeah, I am. I always have been. That said, Sony has a very, very small share of the smartphone market. This is not a phone. I mean, it's it's the specs are great, not not super cheap. I don't know how this makes inroads to compete with, you know, the big guys. Yeah, I mean, it's a great camera, but there are also other great cameras. Right. I describe it as Sony refuses to stop making phones. Here's their latest. Just going to keep doing that. OK, Huawei, however, does sell quite a few phones. In fact, the most in the world from certain points of view or second to Samsung, depending on how you look at it, Huawei announced the Mate XS foldable and the Mate Pro 5G tablet in Barcelona, just at a private event. The Mate XS features the same eight inch display when unfolded as the original Mate X, but Huawei claims it's 80 percent stronger and it has an enhanced falcon wing folding mechanism when it's closed. If you remember, the device features a six point six inch front display and a six point three eight inch rear display, so it doesn't fold the screen in. It folds the screen out inside. The tablet is a Kirin nine ninety five G chipset, eight gigs ram, five hundred twelve gigabytes of storage, forty five hundred milliamp hour battery. And it starts at twenty four ninety nine. That's two thousand four hundred ninety nine euros coming in late 2020. The Mate Pad Pro 5G is not foldable, but it is an Android tablet with ten point eight inch AMOLED display, that nine ninety five G chipset, six or eight gigs ram, two hundred fifty six storage, seven thousand two hundred fifty milliamp hour battery, which can also act as a seven point five watt wireless charger, tablets for wireless chargers start to make sense. As a dual rear camera system launching in April with a Wi-Fi model starting at five hundred forty nine euros, not bad. And five G models starting at seven hundred forty nine euros. Both devices run the EM UI 10 interface. That's Huawei's own interface. A top Android 10, the open source project featuring the Huawei app gallery. There is no play services here. An optional M pencil is ninety nine euros and a detachable keyboard. Also optional is one hundred twenty nine euros. And finally, Huawei also updated the MateBook X Pro with a green color option and Intel 10th gen processors and the MateBook D budget lineup. Also got 10th gen processors. The MateBook X Pro comes in April starting at fourteen ninety nine euros. No Google Play, though. Yeah, and that's really important here. You know, the Mate XS, you know, the I have been priced out. However, that aside, I'm like, this looks really good. Yeah, but you know, but Huawei has to there's there's a Google situation going on here. They say they've got a thousand plus apps in their app gallery, but that's not a lot and they won't talk about which apps they have, which implies they are missing some pretty popular apps. Yeah, I don't I don't I don't know what I mean. This does feel like a stop gap kind of thing to you. I, you know, is Huawei sort of hoping that eventually we're we're, you know, get a get a little firmware update and we'll be back in the Google Play Store eventually type thing because it doesn't. It feels like they have no idea. And they're like, well, this is what we've got for now when we have really good hardware. So let's make the most of it. Right. They are going to look nice. They are going ahead with their flagship phone announcement on March 26th in Paris. That's not because of Mobile World Congress. They always do a March announcement. We'll see if anything changes by then. But yeah, right now it's not it's not great. And it'll be this is where the rubber meets the road to see if Huawei can still sell these phones in Europe without having the Google Play services on board. Real real quickly before we wrap up the virtual MWC coverage, Realme, a subsidiary of BBK. Those are the folks that also make OPPO and vivo phones. Realme announced the Realme X50 Pro. This is similar to the Realme X50. The not pro version of the phone was announced last month with 5G and 120 Hertz display. The pro version has the Snapdragon 865 chipset, so it has the wider 5G compatibility, Wi-Fi 6, LPDDR5 RAM, 65 watt fast charging, better in display fingerprint reader, some improved camera and audio. But notably, it's a smaller screen. The pro is 6.44 inches and 90 Hertz refresh rate AMOLED, whereas the non pro is 6.57 inches with that 120 Hertz display. Realme X50 Pro launches in Spain in April, starting at 599 euros, maxing out at 749 euros with more markets to come. Realme is doing very well in India. Market share of their group 400 percent on the year in Q3. So it's making some progress. But they're launching this one to start in Spain because they want to build out that European audience. It's kind of fascinating the fact that MWC was canceled, but all the stuff that was going to get announced still getting announced. Turns out the world still spends. Dribs and drabs. You don't have to be there to announce it. And even in Huawei's case, you can still be in Barcelona and announce it. That's right. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. Sort of your own kind of announcements when you want us to know about a story that you care about. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord. It is a fun time. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, in our thing of the day, Nate Langson is back with us and he poses a question. Would you quit over barcodes? Because one UK man did find out what other fun stuff is coming up on the next text message podcast. There's a store in the UK that's been in business since the 1700s, but its manager resigned this week after the parent company said they wanted to introduce barcodes to the products themselves. Yes, barcodes. Plus, our telecoms regulator is also looking into why some people in the UK are being charged the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to keep hold of an email account provided by their ISP. So it's a good time to check out my show text message at UKtechshow.com and hear what's going on this side of the Atlantic. That's UKtechshow.com. I was in agreement with Nate on the barcode story. I was not in agreement with either one of them on the ISP email story, but you'll have to listen in to find out what those sides are UKtechshow.com. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. VJ was surprised in our conversation last week that Tom made the argument that a politician using deep fakes to reach a certain linguistic demographic. You might recall this was happening in India. Could be thought of as a natural extension of accessibility. He felt like it was important to understand the nuances of regional languages in a diverse country like India and how closely tied it is to cultural biases. VJ writes, Indian politics has always rooted in populism for gullible masses and pandering to the unique differences of each community. So it's an unfair advantage for a politician to use technology to trick their electorate into thinking he is one of them and can speak their language more so because there are a lot of emotional. There's a lot of emotional rhetoric used, which becomes very potent and effective when delivered as a deep fake. Even more problematic is that the delivery method is WhatsApp groups. The recipient has no way of verifying the deep fake and will instantly believe what they see in their very own echo chamber. VJ finishes up by saying, Roger rightfully made the case for this not being a natural extension of accessibility with subtitles and dubbing being more appropriate ways to do this. Yes, I often will take a side of an argument to provoke thoughts and responses and VJ rose to the occasion, not only backing up what Roger was saying, but adding some, I think, useful insight about the fact that, you know, in India, the English is a language across the continent, but there are so many subgroups that that live and breathe within their own languages. And this means something different in that kind of context and adding the WhatsApp point on top of that, I think it's really good. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, VJ. Also, shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Include Dean, Paul Boyer, Dustin Campbell and Andrew Bradley. Folks, if you are a patron, then, you know, you get more out of the show. You get good day internet. You get the editor's desk, where I talk about behind the scenes of how the show is done, give you a little more depth. You get live with it. We're Sarah and Roger now. And I think Scott Johnson is going to do one live with products and talk about them. They don't just do a quick review. There's plenty of people who do that, but they talk about what it's like to actually use this in everyday life. If you want to get more of that great content, become a patron, please. Patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you have feedback for us, our email address is a great way to let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 21 30 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Beja. 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 program.