 Coming up on DTNS, gaming sales sort of kind of went haywire last month. Wi-Fi 6 is finally upon us. And is Jeff Bezos running Amazon again? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 23rd, 2020 from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. From the shores of Lake Erie, I'm Rich Drafalino. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Tom Merritt is off today. Don't worry, he's alive and well. And we'll be back on the show tomorrow. But we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. In fact, speaking of talking, on GDI Rep, before the show started, we were talking about great lakes, how to rank them. And if lakes are kind of like oceans or something else entirely. If you're interested in that and all the stuff we talk about, good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. According to a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and European Commission for Internal Markets Theory, Breton, the first phase of Apple and Google's cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers using it on behalf of public health agencies starting on April 28th. Breton shared a photo of him having a video conversation with Cook and told Las Echoes that Cook confirmed the April 28th date has been moved up from the original mid-May release. Phase two, which would be a system update to build in opt-in contact tracing at the OS level for both Android and iOS, is expected later this year. Apple and Samsung announced that an Apple Music app is now available on Samsung's most recent TV models for its 2018, 2019, and 2020 lineups, which already support the Apple TV app. The app has access to Apple Music content, including playlists, videos, and radio stations. Apple and Samsung have an interesting relationship. Social network Nextdoor and Walmart, speaking of relationships, are co-launching a neighbors helping neighbors program to help the elderly or high-risk or otherwise vulnerable Nextdoor members get help from neighbors who are already planning a trip to go to Walmart. Nextdoor users can post to groups associated with their Walmart store to request assistance within the app. The shopping details can either be worked out in the group thread or through direct messages. Got to tell somebody your address or something like that. Nextdoor says since Group exited Beta a few weeks ago, it's seen a 7x increase in people joining groups to help each other out. And Instagram spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company is accelerating plans for an account memorialization feature, which would add the banner remembering under the username of a deceased person. Instagram currently allows family members to submit forms to memorialize accounts already, which preserves the account, prevents logins from using any password, even the one, the correct one for that account, and removes it from the Explorer page. Instagram did not announce when the new banner would launch. CEO Eric Yon announced on Wednesday that more than 300 million people joined Zoom meetings on Tuesday, April 21st, up 50% from the beginning of the month. In response to security concerns about its platform, Zoom said in a blog post that it's rolling out a software update this week that will include letting users report Zoom bombers giving users more security settings and will no longer send analytics data to Facebook without alerting users. Amazon Web Services launched Amazon AppFlow, which aims to help developers streamline data transfers between AWS and system as a service apps like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake, and Zendesk. Although Dataflow can be bidirectional, AWS's announcement plays up how AppFlow can move data from those applications to other AWS services for further analysis and then transform the data as it moves through the service. AWS defines each flow as a call to source application to transfer data to a destination, and each flow costs $0.001 per run with data processing start at starting at $0.02 per gigabyte. All right, let's talk a little bit more about people buying video games. Yeah, that's right. Nielsen's super data report that digital video game spending hit a record high in March with revenue topping $10 billion. The highest ever total for a single month and 11% year over year increase. In the number one spot, I think unsurprising to everyone is Nintendo's Animal Crossing New Horizons, which launched just on March 20th and sold 5 million digital copies at the end of the month, beating a record set in 2018 by Call of Duty Black Ops for kind of crazy. Call of Duty Warzone, meanwhile, which launched on March 10th, increased monthly active users by more than 150%, peaking at nearly 63 million active members. Bethesda and id Software's Doom Eternal sold 3 million digital copies last month. All these things are so dramatic I have to punch them up. More than three times what the 2016's Doom sold. Overall console spending was up 64% month to month from $883 million to $1.5 billion, and PC game spending was up 56% to $567 million. In mobile, meanwhile, revenue jumped 15% year over year, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize it's $5.7 billion for March, with Timmy and Tencent's Honor of Kings in the number one spot. So yeah, kind of just, I mean, we talked about this on DTNS before, kind of on the competition side of this, but yeah, kind of the numbers bearing out that for a lot of reasons, people are isolating at home. A lot of people are out of jobs right now and spending that time either playing mobile games or buying Animal Crossing, it seems like. Yeah, I mean, Animal Crossing, not a huge, I mean, it's a huge smash hit in 10 days previous record from Call of Duty for the entire month. These numbers, if they were sort of like incremental bumps, you might say, looks like the trend, I mean, maybe games are getting better or the consumer spending is on the rise in general. I mean, this has a lot to do with, people got time on their hands, people are home, people are looking for an escape, all of the above. I still kind of have to be like, okay, how much more time do you have exactly? I mean, certainly if you're out of work, you. Sarah, that's the answer. For 22 million Americans, it's all the time because that's the amount that we now know have filed for unemployment at the very least. There's likely far more that haven't and it appears that they have now found a new pursuit under the tutelage of Tom Nook. Google announced that it will start requiring advertisers to verify their identity in an effort to prevent misrepresentation and allow users to see who is running ads. Google previously collected basic information about an advertiser but didn't require documentation such as government IDs from individuals representing the organizations to verify. The change will roll out in the U.S. first and Google expects it to take several years to implement the change globally. Advertisers will have 30 days once notified of the requirement by Google with accounts suspended from running ads if not verified in that window. Consumers will start seeing identity info in the why this ad button in search starting this summer. Google began requiring political advertisers to verify identities in 2018 so they could run election ads. Man, every time I see a why this ad link now, I'm like, it's because I'm looking at an ad for a bunch of sweatshirts because I was looking at sweatshirts over the last week because all I do is live in pajamas in my home. But yeah, I mean, kidding aside, there are times where I'm kind of like, well, it's not about, you know, and I've been trained to largely ignore ads because they're ads. But yeah, the more people who have more information like this and to hold, you know, folks feet to the fire who are representing these organizations who have kind of been able to slide through in the past Google saying, yeah, we asked them for information, but none of it is really verifiable. It's nobody really on the hook was saying, yes, I am the person who's running this company. Here's who I am. Here's my full name and where I live and that kind of thing. I don't know. I mean, it's a step in the right direction as far as information being public knowledge. It shows that Google thinks this is a real, real, real problem because they don't want to do anything to mess with the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ad words is that goose and the golden eggs are what make everything else at alphabet go. None of the other stuff that they are able to try that they are able to pour resources and money into happens unless they are able to make the gigantic industry shaping amount of money that they get through AdWords. So for them to do anything that would require action and if you do not provide that data, you will now be suspended from giving Google money. That is a major issue. And to me, it is a sign that they are either girding for something that will be coming down the road in terms of government interaction with them or they are just trying to head off a PR problem before it happens and they know that maybe some people are running ads that they don't want them. Yeah, I think two things stand out to me from this story. The first is that beginning to verify identity for political ads in 2018. I think at the time, that was seen as like, we're in this very contentious political environment in the US and this is a way to add some transparency to that. Really though, also a field test for the impact that this potentially would have in terms of verifying information for something that is by percentage a very small amount of the ads that they actually run. And then the other thing is that this will take several years. So this isn't Google flipping the switch and potentially seeing a significant impact on ad revenue overnight. Yes, this will be a long-term project. I mean, they're telling us years to roll this out because it is such an important part of their business they're not rushing into this anytime soon. They're going to get a little bit of a PR bump for doing this even if we don't see this worldwide into the mid-2020s or something like that. Bloomberg sources tell Mark Gurman that Apple will ship at least one Mac using an ARM processor in 2021 next year. The company is reportedly working on three processors based off the A14 design that will be used in the next iPhone model. TSMC will reportedly make the chips on a five-nanometer process featuring eight high-performance cores codenamed Firestorm with at least four energy-efficient cores called iStorm. Sources, Google doesn't say, but sources do say that Apple is exploring Macs with more than 12 ARM cores for future models. Yeah, so seeing this... Yeah, this stuff is... I mean, it's been in the works. We've heard rumors. Mingxi Quo noted Apple analyst who's always got the good stuff said that, some of the stuff could be happening as soon as this year. There may be supply chain issues that have drawn that into question or it might have just been pushed back by the company. But, Rich, you had some theories about why we've seen some of the products as of late that we have. Yeah, I think this has a lot... Seeing this really made the recent iPad Pro refresh make a lot of sense to me because when that first came out, it kind of seemed not like a... If you're in the market for an iPad Pro, they up the storage. There was a marginal increase in graphical power. But if you look at the benchmarks for that device, it really is... They literally just took the exact same CPU. They added a little extra graphics score. They doubled the memory. And that was about the extent of the refresh. They put a new camera in the back as well. But seeing now that they're going to be moving to that A14 for that first generation, whatever that MacBook is going to be, I'm assuming it's going to be a laptop device, with that A14, that means there's going to be a two-generation bump. And whatever processor they do, at least if they'd go from the iPad model, that's a very souped up processor compared to what's going to be available on that iPhone. So then you're going to be looking... The next comparable thing that everyone's going to be looking for from that device is going to be those iPad Pro numbers that's going to be the only comparable thing in the ARM ecosystem. And there's just going to be this huge increase between those two chips. And I think it really is designed so that there are going to be a lot of bumps along the road. I feel like it's... I mean, it's Apple. They're going to try and make it as smooth the transition to ARM for macOS as possible. But having that huge performance bump that they can boast, you know, this is 4x or whatever, you can render 8k video in three seconds or something like that, I think is a reason they held off instead of using an A13-based chip for the iPad Pro this year that they are holding off on that, virtually because they have no competition in that high-end tablet space anyway. They can afford to do it. It's still a high-performing chip. And then to have that Mac with that A14-based and really put out some stellar numbers for some very specific applications. I'm sure they're going to have their Mac apps optimized for that. And they'll really be singing on that A14-based chip. So it really made that iPad Pro, that approach to that make a lot more sense if these rumors do pan out. I mean, I will say this is something that everyone's kind of been predicting for the past, what, seven, eight years. There's still questions remaining. What are they going to do with their existing... I mean, they just released the new Mac Pro with the cheese grater look design case. Are they going to keep two lines? Are they going to keep the standard everyone uses an arm? If you're a pro, then we still have our Intel line, which is compatible with your existing suite of software that you don't need to go to either buy a new license for or upgrade. I mean, this is very exciting. And part of it is that Intel really hasn't kept its eye on the ball and respects. This is just kind of a story of Intel just letting, getting a little too comfortable where they were at in terms of competition. I think AMD really lit a fire under their butts. And I'm wondering if this will really just crank it up to 11 for Intel and really kind of get them back to the drawing board of trying to innovate once again, because Apple has been a pretty big partner for the company for the past 15 years. Yeah, I mean, they're a top three OEM for PCs worldwide. So theoretically losing that over the course of two, three years could have obviously major impacts on Intel and they're kind of getting hit, yeah, right now, buy on all sides for sure. Oh, that's me. So we have a little bit of an explainer here. There was the US FCC voted to open up the 1,200 megahertz of the spectrum in the six gigahertz band for unlicensed use. Now that's a lot of spectrum talk, but what that means is that this band can be used for broadcasting Wi-Fi and marks the biggest spectrum addition for Wi-Fi since the FCC voted to really open up the initial spectrum in 1989. And that currently uses only about 400 megahertz of spectrum across both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz band. So, you know, that 1,200 addition, just on that face alone is quite an addition. So what is that all gonna mean, I guess, the six gigahertz band gonna mean for your home Wi-Fi? To kind of break it down, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be faster. This is still gonna be going over the Wi-Fi 6 protocol. So there's still a theoretical max of around 9.6 gigabits per second that that's gonna top out at, of course, never going to see that speed regardless of what spectrum you're going to be using, but that six gigahertz spectrum can provide for up to 7,160 megahertz maximum capacity channels at once without signals overlapping, like we often have currently whether, you know, you have routers, you have multiple devices kind of communicating all in one space, not very uncommon for a lot of situations. And what that's going to allow routers to do is broadcast at their maximum allowable channel size. And we have Kevin Robertson at the Wi-Fi Alliance estimating that realistically, because the speeds of up from one to two gigabits per second are provided your connection is fast enough on the back end there. The Wi-Fi Alliance has already approved the Wi-Fi 6E designation in place for devices that support six gigahertz. And we'll begin certifying devices in early 2021 so we can expect to see those coming in about a year. Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Linksys, Netgear, and Apple have all signaled that they have chips and devices that will support Wi-Fi 6E or that six gigahertz band and IDC estimates 316 million devices will ship with Wi-Fi 6E support in 2021, mostly smartphones, and then moving into smart TVs maybe in 2022 according to their estimates. But, you know, we've seen a lot of attempt set coming up with like a faster or provide more spectrum. You know, we have things like Y gig and stuff in the past. Haven't really seen any industry adoption. It seems like all of the major partners that need to be on board from chip makers to device makers, router makers, that kind of stuff are all kind of lining up for 6E. The FCC has been on board kind of for a while and this vote was mostly a formality. And it looks like we're going to be living in a six gigahertz future before too long. So when do you think that we'd see consumer products that adopt this? There's smart, yeah, smartphones in 2021 and it may, I don't 100% know this. It's all going to come down to when Broadcom, whenever Broadcom puts out that first six gigahertz chip. But we've seen announcements from on the enterprise side of a lot of companies like Aruba and stuff like that already kind of having six gigahertz access points and stuff like that on their roadmap and that, you know, consumer devices can't be too far behind that. Yeah, I mean, I sort of was like, all right, how do we poke holes in what the FCC might be thinking here? And it's like, nah, it sounds like this is really a win for, again, if everything works as advertised and the manufacturers and companies who make these products that we would end up using follow through, they all seem pretty excited about this too. Like, yay, okay, we don't have any fights before we give you some new products that you have to spend money on. This seems like a win for all. And, you know, the FCC historically, sometimes these things take a while. So unanimous vote here is moving in the right direction. Yeah, the one thing to watch out for is, like anything as devices proliferate that use the six gigahertz spectrum inevitably, it will become crowded. I mean, I don't think we're coming to a situation where we're going to have less devices with IoT smart home stuff. But it's still, it's a huge expansion of the available spectrum. I mean, you know, four times increase support was in total available up till this point. So it'll be a wild buy thing before we hit that saturation point. The New York Times reports that Jeff Bezos is back in the day to day saddle of his company, Amazon. After years of focusing on long-term projects and pushing day-to-day management to his executive team. People familiar with the company's working tell the Times that due to the coronavirus pandemics, extreme pressure on how Amazon does business, Bezos is holding daily calls to make sure decisions about inventory and testing are correct and how Amazon responds to public criticism. He's reportedly talked to government officials in an April made a publicized visit to one of Amazon's warehouses for the first time in years. Due to skyrocketing customer demand for product delivery, Amazon shares are up and the world's richest man is also $25 billion richer on paper since early March. However, coronavirus cases continue to appear among workers at Amazon warehouses and Amazon has had to rethink logistics operations such as stopping accepting low priority items into warehouses and to delaying customer shipments of other items that Amazon considers low demand which I now realize is also my case of Topo Chico mineral water the next week. Oh Bezos. You know, it's Jeff Bezos having stepped away from day-to-day operations company of Amazon size not the least bit surprising. You know, Amazon's also doing sort of long-term projects. Blue Origin, for example, Bezos apparently very interested in that before Amazon launched its cash shear list go stores. The project that seems successful enough that it is expanding Bezos very hands-on with that sort of thing. So it's not as if he's just sort of like and the figurehead, I don't care but you've got executives that you put into place to make sure that the whole operation runs smoothly. In a normal world anyway we're not there anymore. So, you know, someone being at the helm who needs to better understand how are we changing course all over the place. And yeah, it's like you're in, Amazon's not in a bad position in the sense that orders are up. They've got to figure out how to make a bunch more people happy that want to give Amazon their money. So it's not, you know, Amazon is at least enjoying a surge in a sense of, you know, a lot of money is coming into the company's hands but it's a mess right now. There's definitely a PR mess that has been brewing and may get a lot worse before it gets better. So I don't think business really has a choice. Amazon is a logistics company. It started as a logistics company. They were not the first website that wanted to sell books. They were the first website that realized that if they put warehouses next to other book reseller and publisher warehouses they were able to ship out books faster and cheaper. This is a moment for Jeff Bezos to step back into the spotlight because I do believe this is an inflection point for Amazon and whether or not this is a PR article that they want to make sure that everybody knows that Jeff Bezos is out there or this is a sea change in terms of a major company. There is no doubt that Amazon effectively right now is the most viable, effective and efficient part of our federal government. They are providing so much and there is no doubt that we're going to look at the history of this company and say there was what Amazon was before coronavirus and there's what Amazon was after. They are rapidly shifting their logistics enterprises so they can optimize for a virus world and a post-virus world. This is going to be a big, big, big moment of inflection for them. Justin, I think it's a really great point but I think it's there a logistics company again. I think one of the underreported things is the importance of AWS is kind of having its moment of everybody using SaaS work from home apps or people using Netflix, people using Zoom or Zoom-like services that basically all of those services depend on AWS on the back and what we see reports of outages of Microsoft Teams or something like that. We haven't seen any like, oh my God, the services down for days and days and days and I do think that's where their profit center is, essentially at this point, is things like AWS. They're definitely inflicting back wisely, obviously due to the insane demand that they've been seeing justifiably because of the COVID-19 crisis but I also think that that is something that, not that necessarily this article was talking about that but that is an equally important role that Amazon is also playing at this moment right now. In other Amazon news, the Wall Street Journal reports that more than 20 former Amazon employees said that they accessed data from third-party sellers to help structure Amazon's own private labels. The data reportedly allowed the company to single out which products had the best earning potential, how to price its own private label products, what product features Amazon might want to copy. Amazon is an ongoing antitrust probes from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the European Union's Competition Commissioner. In fact, in a July 2019 congressional hearing an Amazon executive said, the company didn't use seller data to help favor its own products. That is definitely not in line with what employees are telling the journal. In response to the journal's story, Amazon tells Business Insider it's going to launch an internal investigation. So it didn't say, this is crazy, we're not doing this, never have. We should look into this because it's two very different stories now I'm not going to pretend to know exactly again talking about Amazon here, there's a lot going on behind the scenes, so I don't know. But I find it very, very hard to believe that Amazon would willfully not look at data that's extremely helpful to the company in launching its own branded products, private label products of which it has put a lot of R&D into over the last few years and only wants more of. Well, but here's the big thing. Number one, did they look at things that are proprietary to them that only they could look at because they control the back end or do they look at public data? Obviously, if you're going to launch something, if you're going to launch a phone, you're going to know what other phones are sold for and you can go ahead and look on Amazon the same way that anybody else can. Secondarily, if you can't look at their sales data, that doesn't mean that you can't look at other things that show, you know, basically what that sales data could be based on the larger trends that are looked at through your back end. I think what Amazon is going to prove or attempt to prove is that they're, yes, there's a lot of data out there, but they didn't look at anything proprietary when they launched it. However, this has and always will be a sticky subject for them because they are a seller inside the mall that they own. They're always a scant. Yeah, and there, you know, Amazon has a number, I mean, obviously as the owner of the platform has a number of other lovers that I think are kind of wrapped all in this, whether it's the FTC or the European Commission looking at them, in terms of the label of that Amazon choice. Obviously, they have knowledge, they know exactly how the algorithm works, so it would not take much of that inside, much of that proprietary or insider information that other competitors wouldn't have access to for them to get a very distinct business advantage. One thing that the article did kind of point out is that Amazon's private labels, I think they said accounts for about 1% of their overall sales, so it's like not this huge thing, but the issue is how many other competitors could they theoretically use that to kind of edge out of the market long-term, and they said the trend is that that is increasing and looking like it's going to be a little bit more of a significant percentage in terms of sales and revenue going forward, and it's definitely in their plan, certainly. Hey, y'all, if you want to get the tech headlines each day in around five minutes, you should subscribe if you haven't already to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, and thanks to all those participating in our subreddit, remember you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Hey, Rich. Yes, Sarah. I'd like to know what's in the mailbag, please. Well, I would love to tell you because there is an amazing message in there from Amos, our producer Amos. Hi, Amos. As of this writing, I am excited to say that the GDI folding team has 41 contributors. We're running 1,568 simulations and contributed over 17 million points to the project. This has us in just two weeks, placed just outside the top 4,000 teams worldwide. This is truly a resounding effort from everyone. Thank you for making the project a success. Let's continue to make the world a little better. I agree, Amos. Anyone that wants to join can reach out to Amos on Twitter at Ethan Kane or just join the team with the ID 261-830. Awesome. In fact, a couple folks have been like, this sounds really great. What's your team ID? 261-830. Join us if you can. And thanks to everybody who's participating. Very cool. Yeah, it's really awesome. And a special shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Chris Bettenau, Ragnahild, Vermidel, and Reed Fishler. Thank you so much. And of course, last but not least, thank you, Justin, Robert, Young. Where can people find more of your great stuff if they want to check it out? Well, if you go to the podcast store of your choice, you can search for Politics, Politics, Politics. We are obviously covering all the things that are happening in real time in our crazy plague world that we are all trying to survive. Yeah. Well, there's that. You know what we've been doing at the end of each show is shouting out a creator. Somebody who's who's doing some cool stuff you might not know about. Maybe you want to check out. Maybe go a little extra time on your hands. And I'd like to give a shout out to Comey who wrote in and said, hey, Sarah, I bet you I bet you've watched a few 360 degree VR videos on the YouTube VR app on Quest by now. He's referring to the fact that I have an Oculus Quest, which I'm in the review period for for the next Live With It segment. Comey, you are correct. Comey says, I have the Insta360 ONE X 360 camera. I'd like to share with you some videos from Norway, Vietnam and Iceland. These are all YouTube videos and we've added the link in our show notes. Comey is a VR AR enthusiast. He says he has a Quest and a Rift also into into photography and imaging technologies in general. I have a Lightro first gen and Illum Lightco's L16 various stereoscopic cameras. Wow, really do have a lot and Ricoh Theta series cameras. But the Insta360 ONE X is the one I use most often besides my main Sony. If you want to shoot your own 360 degree photos and videos and view them on Oculus Quest, the ONE X is the model I recommend. Thank you so much, Comey. You know, it's, I've been, I am a, well, I don't know if it's really passive experience at this point. It's not really very passive, but I am a consumer of the VR experience. I hadn't really thought about being a creator of the VR experience, but that gives me a lot of really cool ideas. So everybody go and check out Comey's stuff and thanks for letting us know. Please, please support our show. If you can, I know times are weird. Times are tough right now for all, but we've, we've banded together and we appreciate your support. So, so, so much. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Shannon Morris and Len Peralta will join Tom Meredith back on the show. I'll talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Time and Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.