 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener right there listening in your ears right now, maybe your Ken Hayes or Phillip Shane or Paul Boyer or Chad Johnson, but whoever you are, we are incredibly thankful for you. On this episode of DTNS, what the heck is Netflix up to with its iOS game controller app? YouTube blanks out its home page and China cracks down on kids tech time. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 9th, 2023, except no substitutes in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio USS Hancock. I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Now see, I wish I was in Studio USS Kenneth Bailey. Is USS Hancock a relation? I mean, what was the relation of yours serving? Am I related to an aircraft carrier, Tom? Are you by family? Yes. Yes, I am. My father served on the USS Hancock during Vietnam. And here I am to tell the tale today. My father served on the USS Kenneth Bailey in the Korean during the Korean War. Look at that. My father was old. Hey, you said the quiet part out loud. All right, let's start this show with the quick hits because it's supposed to be that technology. In its latest earnings report, Sony saw a 31% drop in operating income due to its financial services and movie businesses. But Sony increased revenue forecast 6% thanks to strong PlayStation sales, despite signs that profitability for the console may decline. Sony sold 3.3 million PS5s last quarter. That was up 38% on the year. But the company's imaging sensor business is expected to weaken as smartphone sales have slowed. Sony said it didn't expect demand for smartphones to improve until 2024 at the earliest. My old bet used to be to call Sony an image sensor company because it was the most profitable part. So I guess I have to switch that to game consoles now. There you go. Slack, which you may have forgotten is owned by Salesforce, has a redesign in the works. It's meant to make the interface less cluttered. A new home section will show channels, DMs and apps as usual, but a sidebar has a bunch of cool features. DMs from all your conversations in various channels all together on the left with the active DM on the right. A new activity window can unify your messages, mentions and reactions across all your workspaces. A dedicated later menu is meant for saving any stuff you might want to revisit later. The huddle video chat has been moved to the top right corner and a big plus button in the sidebar starts a new canvas or call like that. The U.S. Federal Reserve announced a new program for overseeing banks' crypto activity, also clarifying that lenders under its authority must get approval before engaging in digital assets activities. Crypto banking more or less remains the same, but puts crypto dealings under the new novel activities supervision program. That's where the feds, specialized experts in digital assets will work alongside the regulators regular supervisors. If you are a sysadmin, data center operator, you definitely want to want to pay attention to this one if you haven't heard it already, hopefully you have. Intel and Google senior researcher Daniel Moghimi shared a security vulnerability in Intel processors called downfall. Let's an attacker use memory optimization features to get access to internal hardware registers, which then in turn lets untrusted software access data from other programs, including things like encryption keys, which you do not want them to access. The vulnerability effects Intel processors made between 2015 and 2019 from 6th gen Skylake through 11th gen Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake, 12th and 13th gen chips are not affected. Intel is using microcode. They issued some microcode to mitigate the vulnerability. So you want to make sure you get your firmware updated, though you can opt out if you can't take the performance hit because like a lot of this microcode chip stuff, it does slow down the chip to mitigate the vulnerability. In the ongoing case of Apple versus Epic, oh yes, it is ongoing. The US Supreme Court declined to change a lower court order that said that Apple can keep its app store payment rules in place while it appeals a decision that would make it change those rules. Epic Games requested to let developers immediately start directing iPhone users to other purchasing options. Justice Elena Kagan denied Epic's request, but didn't issue an explanation for that reason. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that Apple violated California's unfair competition law by limiting the ability of developers to communicate about alternative payment systems that includes purchases through the Epic Games Store. Apple's appealing that part of the decision to the Supreme Court, not very surprising, but it means the case is ongoing. Yeah, we'll see if the Supreme Court even hears the case because if they don't, then everything just stands as it is and Apple has to let people tell people facts about where they can pay. I kind of want to see them go to the Supreme Court. I want to see Apple and Epic in front. I don't know why. Is that wrong of me? No, I don't know. I mean, I want to see this at this point. Come on, let's do it. For my own personal energy. I mean, if you're nothing else, then to get this thing settled. I want to see the two Tims out there having to testify and have a real circus on this thing. I'm in. Let's go. Timmy two tones. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Moving on to YouTube, which announced on Tuesday that users who disable their watch history will no longer see recommendations on the homepage. Now this might not be something that you as a YouTube user use a lot, but a lot of people do. Discovery is pretty big that way. So with watch history turned off, you'll see search. You'll see your left hand menu. You'll see shortcut to subscriptions, YouTube shorts, and also your library. That's it. The changes are rolling out to all users over the next several months. So this might affect you later than sooner. But just just know if things look different. This is likely why. Now, Scott, you're a content creator and you've been kind of you know, doubling down on YouTube as of late. So does this change affect you and and if it does, how? Well, in theory, it does because you're going to lose eyeballs that otherwise would be not forced to see your content, but otherwise prompted to see your content in these ways. And by giving users this ability, you are limiting there. Well, they're they're self-limiting what they see. So as a creator, it makes you a little nervous. Just a little bit like, oh, I'm just trying to get my head around this now and now this changes things. What does this do to the algorithms? Does it really affect me or not? So while we're all wrestling with that, the other half of my brain is actually really excited as a user of YouTube that they're doing this. Not because I need to turn mine off because I won't be. I like my history, but I like when services and platforms give users more control and more tools over their experience. So what I'm going to like to think moving forward is that when you make your users happier, they're going to be around more and the net result is they're going to see your stuff more often anyway. And it's still on me to make good content and to find eyeballs, you know, the good old fashioned way. So to be honest, I think that wins out and I would rather be I would rather be given tools as a user than, you know, be restricted. So I say thumbs up overall. Yeah, I do too. You know, I mean, that's certainly an optimistic way to look at it, but you're right. If, you know, if you're doing the good stuff and you're putting your effort into that, then this shouldn't really cut you off from a lot of people in theory. I don't, I don't watch a lot of just straight up, you know, YouTube.com content. So my watch history doesn't really come into play that much. Tom, I don't know if you do or not. I don't feel like this is, you know, changes my life one way or another. I like the option. I think everybody should have that. So this post went up yesterday right around showtime and we were kind of kicking it around on good day internet why we thought they were doing this. Sarah, you suggested it. Maybe it was a compliance thing. We thought it could also possibly be just a good faith gesture that they know that not that many people will take advantage of. So, so maybe they build some good will without really undermining the number of views that much. I am now on the side of it's a probably some kind of compliance thing that they want to hedge off some aspect of some court case somewhere because there's so many of them it's hard to keep track. Yeah, because in August we, you know, we already gave users the option to not have their watch history be part of the experience. Why turn off watch history to do this? Why not just let me turn off recommendations. What if I want history? I want history and I don't want it to be shared but I want to see what I've watched so I can go and find that thing I watched again later because I do watch a lot of YouTube but I don't want recommendations. Why, why both? Why tie them together and that makes me think it's some kind of compliance thing and therefore if you turn off watch history of course that takes away the ability to do proper recommendations so they just got, got rid of it. That makes sense. But, but having the watch history, you know, I said I don't use YouTube, I use YouTube TV for my cable alternative but, but there are other platforms where watch history does come into play when I'm watching videos like Plex for example. I'm constantly going into like, what did I watch like a couple of days ago? I forget the name of that thing. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Like that, that is good data. So to turn off watch history in order to not get recommendations is like, yeah, you're right. I feel like you could, you could have one without having both. And then Bad Fink wonders if it's going to impact his viewing of the YouTube channel, the history of watches, you know, by accident. Yeah, Tom makes a good point though. I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't, I might, yeah, why not both? Give me both. Now I feel like I have less control. Why not both? Why not Zoidberg? Why not? Netflix is doubling down on its gaming offering. You want both gaming and TV shows? Well, great. Netflix is going to do it for you. They launched an app on Tuesday called Netflix Game Controller. It just appeared in the iOS app store. It's very mysterious. When you launch it, it says to begin, choose a game on your TV and follow the directions to connect. Except there aren't any games on any of Netflix's TV apps or at least none of the ones. I looked at WebOS. I looked at Roku. I looked at Apple TV. I looked at the video shield, none of them. The only place I can find Netflix's games in a tab is on Android and then it's in a row on iOS. But neither one of those would you need to use your phone as a controller for because you're already using your phone. Anyway, a little history here in October 2022, Netflix VP of gaming, Mike Verdu, said the company was, quote, exploring a cloud game offering. He also said Netflix was opening a new gaming studio in Southern California to be overseen by Chaco Sunny, the former EP of Overwatch at Blizzard. There's a lot of game development going on. Netflix has like five different studios, couple in Helsinki, couple in California. Scott, since we don't know what this controller on the phone does, we have permission to wildly speculate until they make it clear. What do you think? Yeah, they've left that wide open, haven't they? We all get to decide what this does until we get told what it does, but my gut reaction to this was this is possibly a cloud solution for controlling games. And it would have to be if you're going to be across all devices. If you want this to work over a Roku, a smart TV, an Apple TV and a Google device, you're going to want to have something that's universally going to work and not have to rely on AirPlay over here and some other technology over here or local Wi-Fi only. I mean, I guess it could be Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, something like that. It could be those. Those tend to have real serious latency issues. Yeah, and not that cloud-based controls don't, but if there's one thing Stadia approved while it was briefly with us was that you can really do a good job with that. Those controllers, and they were hardware controllers, mind you, but those controllers working wirelessly with cloud based games were excellent. Their latency was next to nothing and incredibly impressive compared to much of the competition, including Microsoft's own xCloud beta. I think that that's the more likely scenario that we're going to have different ways, including hardware ways of controlling games, Netflix games in particular via any kind of TV set or set-top box via a cloud solution. Yeah, because everything else feels too janky to me and to, you know, not, I don't know. They have to do third party physical controllers or this is going to be really weird. If this controller app feels like a way to get people who don't have controllers to try their games to be like, hey, you don't have to go buy a controller if you don't have one. Use this to get involved, kind of bring people into it, but it doesn't seem like the optimal way to control games on any kind of set-top box. No, and there's a whole other question about what do you do marketing-wise? Are you going to tell people to go to Walmart and buy this Netflix controller with Netflix branding on it? Is it going to be a third party thing that they just like just use a PlayStation or Xbox? Yeah, exactly. That's entirely possible too. And that would be that's the way Apple does it. That's the way others do it. They say, hey, we recommend this. You can go buy a Series X controller on Apple.com so that you can run your Apple TV games. So I don't think that's out of the question either. But if they really want to make a solid play for gaming, if they really are digging their heels in on whatever the future of cloud is and they're making hires that indicate they want to make more than casual games, they're going to have to tell us soon because right now all it is... No, they don't. Why? Why do they have to? I guess they don't. They print money in it. They want the company to do that. That is true. That is absolutely true. This reminds me of when they launched streaming. When they launched streaming, it was first like who would want to do that? I can only do it in my browser. There's only 2,000 titles. But you know, what is this? Eventually, that became the business of Netflix. So this feels like it's in the same stage. For anybody who's interested in Netflix game controller, the app store description, this is iOS, says, coming soon to Netflix, play games on your TV with the Netflix game controller. The game controller app pairs with your TV and allows you to play games on Netflix using your phone or mobile device. So if you see that, or if you've seen that already and go, okay, upcoming, all good. It's just that the company has been very mom about okay, when's this all launching? How is it launching? With what games is it launching on? Is there hardware involved? Just kind of, you're gonna get a lot of confused, but hopeful people using this strategy. I don't know if this is on purpose or if Netflix just thought- It's on purpose. They put coming soon in the description. This isn't an accidental- It's on purpose that they did that, but I don't know that they're trying to confuse people on purpose. And start getting all hyped up to be like, ooh, what's it gonna be? I think they totally did that on purpose. I think that also helps steer the ship. They'll make decisions based on this chatter. I don't mean just the show, but just people, how they react to it. And if people say, well, I don't want a digital D-pad and some crappy touchscreen buttons to play my games. This is ridiculous. Well, that will help steer their decision-making on what hardware solutions they aim for or whatever. So I kind of agree with that. I think that they can afford to do this. So this is how they'll do it. They'll just take their time. Well, we are gonna take some time next. This week to try out stuff. It's the third annual DTNS experiment week, swapping out our normal DTNS shows during the August doldrums to try out some new ideas. So if you like the barbecue and tech show or the tech John that have been going strong for a couple of years, those both started on experiment week. This year we're gonna have a show from Nicole Lee about online life. Roger interviewing people from tech TV about the origination of that network. I've got an experiment in the works as well, a little morning news sort of thing. That all starts right here. You don't have to do anything. It's right here on the feed or YouTube channel or Twitch channel that you're watching right now, Monday, August 14th. Actually it won't be on the Twitch channel because we won't be doing it live but it will be on all the DTNS feeds starting Monday, August 14th. I heard Joe yelling at me so I stopped. Well, we are gonna talk about this today and that is the Chinese government ramping up restrictions and regulations on how children are online and how they use apps. So the goal is to limit children's access to age appropriate content on their phones or smartwatches or speakers or anything else where the internet is available. Last week, China's cyberspace administrator rather released the guidelines for the establishment of miners modes for the mobile internet. This is a cross-platform cross-device government-led parental control system asking app developers, app store providers and makers of smartphones and other smart devices to develop a miners mode, kind of a cross-the-board type thing. Even though this is targeted toward Chinese companies, companies with a presence in China, maybe Apple or Samsung, also will be asked to cooperate with the system. We've spoken in the past depending on what market you're in, phones for miners, you know, kids under 18, being restricted in schools, for example. And the idea that too much time online does not help a child in any significant way besides keeping them from maybe learning more important things. So I guess when you say Chinese government, there might be some connotation that doesn't apply to other places in the world, but Scott, what are your thoughts on this? Well, I can tell you as somebody who tried to be as wise as you can be as a parent with their kids and their time with screens and digital life and gaming and whatever it may have been, you are always trying to do right by the balance of it. Like how much is enough? Is two hours a day okay? Is two hours a week okay? You really do wrestle with a range, but I think culturally it's just because that's where it's put on me. It's my job to do that, not the government's. And so when this sort of stuff happens, I bulk at it because I'm like, well, wait a minute, that's not how I wouldn't, I don't want the government telling me how to raise my kid. It's hard for me to pull away from that and look at this from a further perspective and go, all right, let's try to forget that that's how I was raised or that's how we generally do things around here and instead look at it from that perspective. I think it's actually admirable for any nation to want to see their kids, their children succeed because success in the lives of these kids as they grow, whatever that may be defined as, whatever success is, whether it be financial or other, but those things will lead to a stronger nation. That's the idea, right? I just really struggle with they have to tell my kids what to do instead of me telling my kids what to do. The risk of that, of not doing that, is that kids will just be on screens all day and never get anything else done and they'll be poorly prepared for any kind of further education or any kind of job or any kind of anything else. And I think those are real concerns, like those are actual concerns. So I don't know what the very happiest of middle grounds are here. I just think that on the whole, historically speaking, eventually that stops working. People don't like to be told what to do and this feels like a bit of that. So I guess my overall is, I'm in a very poor position to say because I just feel like this to me feels so intrusive, but I know I'm coming at it from a very specific angle. You also don't live on the mainland of China. Right. So, you know, it does, that differs somewhat. You know, and there's some more details about exactly what's going on here. You know, anybody who's followed this probably remembers that a couple of years ago, China introduced three hours per week limits on children playing video games. That was video games specifically, not just being online, although sometimes they're one and the same depending on what anybody's doing, regardless of their age. But yeah, I don't know. Tom, you know, does this feel like an overreach or is this just what perhaps, I don't know, a lot of parents, guardians, older people in China have noticed with younger people that has just sort of spilled into politics? Yeah. To me, discussing this as an overreach is a very American point of view. It's a very American centric point of view. Even a European centric point of view versus in China, I know there is a very different attitude and I don't pretend to speak for Chinese people, but from what I gather from, you know, listening to the Economist podcast that comes out of China from a Chinese correspondent there, people have a much more accepting way of saying, well, that's what the government's going to do. The government's going to do it. What I find interesting is that they, as you said, Sarah, put in that three-hour-per-week limit on children for video games and within a year, 70% of children had reduced time spent gaming. 29% reported more than three hours that were allowed. So most children had reduced the time and few of them were even going over the three hours. And if you're like, well, maybe they just reported that, maybe that's not true, 10 cent noted a 96% decrease in gaming hours. So that's the company saying, no, it definitely had an effect. And now China is saying, we want the developers, we want the app stores, and we want the device makers to all stop the kids from gaming. This is a great way to kill a vibrant part of your economy in a country that just announced deflation. Feels like maybe the cure is worse than the disease. And hadn't really thought of it from that perspective because the gaming across the world is a growing concern and I don't mean concerned in the pejorative. I mean, like it is a fast growing thing. Like a growing business. Yeah, it's like going crazy. And for you to purposely put yourself on the far outside of that financially means you don't want a piece of it. And the biggest piece of it right now is Asia, is China. Like that is the potential. That's the gold pot everybody wants. And to curb that so hard is probably not great for them long term, especially if it's working, right? Like if it's actually working, it sounds like it is and they're reporting it's working. Then that may not be what they intend. If their ultimate goal is economic strength and all of that, I think maybe they're barking at the wrong tree. We'll see. I feel like they'll just say like, yes, but we'll order people to take the time they were doing that and make more chips because that's our priority or grow more rice because we're trying to bring rice production back domestically which is another one of their big efforts. That's the way a planned economy kind of thinks. That's true. It'd be great if they suddenly said, we want everyone to spend an entire week playing video games to catch. You get, but you only get one week. You only get one. Yeah. Everybody play video games all week. That's it. But that's it. Then the rest of the year. Build chips. Forget it. Well, if you're the kind of person who plays video games, but when you're not playing video games, you might, I don't know, peruse your local target to see what's in there. Target has introduced a new perk for a drive up orders. That means you drive up. You don't go in the store. You order online or ahead of time somehow and then, you know, you kind of stand your vehicle or I guess you could be on a horse or something. And then you get your target items without going into the store new part of it. Starbucks orders. Now, not every single target has a Starbucks inside, but 1700 of, I believe 2000 target locations do so and will be able to offer this option starting in October. So as a customer, you don't enter the store. You might get, I don't know, whatever you would get a target, but then maybe also a Puppa Chino. I shouldn't say that too loud because I have a dog behind me. And you don't actually have to take off your seatbelt and go inside very drive through ask. A lot of stores do this. But yeah, this is a target and Starbucks taking it a step further. Who's in? What stuck out to me is that the pickup business, you know, it's not people haven't started going back inside altogether. So the curbside business is going strong enough to work on the app to integrate Starbucks ordering into it. Cause you have to know when people are coming in order to make sure that the drink is ready and hot at the right time. So you have to get people to hop in. There's a lot of work to make the app do that and apparently is worth it. Enough people are picking up their wild fable workout clothes to, you know, want to add Starbucks to it. Well, I think it was in a GDI recently, you know, Roger and I were talking about their grocery store experience. I'm like, put me inside a grocery store for an hour. I will just be the happiest person ever silently moving through the aisles. That's how I feel a target as well. Just let me inside a target. But hey, everyone's different. You might have a family. You might just not have an hour to kill inside a target. There's all sorts of reasons by the, you know, the pickup option is alive and well and thriving. Certainly the target near me, which is a large target as far as targets go. I think they call it a super target has a huge line of people waiting for their stuff to be just put into their trunk instead of going inside the store. So yeah, add Starbucks on top of that icing on the cake, so to speak. Well, if you are picking up your new Jean CD and a Starbucks latte on your horse at Target, please send a picture of yourself doing it to feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Speaking of which, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So Joe had some thoughts about our conversation. We had a Monday about AI in Dungeons and Dragons and the fact that a lot of people do not think it has a place there. Joe says, I spend time in the online D&D community and the discovery of AI content comes on the tail of a dustup last January, where the Wizards of the Coast announced they were retroactively revoking their open game license, which was essentially creative common style licensing for the core mechanics in D&D. This caused an uproar because all the creative work and even business people had built using that license, which was potentially impacted the way the revision was worded. It would have affected both future and past works done with the open game license, allowing Wizards of the Coast to collect fees for many creators. Ah, now they canceled that revision according to Joe. So that makes sense that they then are worried about other copyright things since they cancel. That's a missing piece to that puzzle that Joe sent us. That's very cool. Thank you, Joe. Yeah, indeed. If you have any thoughts or, you know, inside information about this ongoing story, do let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. In the meantime, we're going to thank you, Scott Johnson, because you're just a great dude. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Thanks for being a great dude. Well, let me tell you, sorry, you talk about D&D here and that's funny because we're in the middle of one of the biggest and most successful video game launches in years for Baldur's Gate 3 and it is all based on the D&D, fifth edition rules. So speaking of D&D, we're going to talk about that game at length among all the other cool stories happening in the video game world. And you can find that on our little show called Core. You can find it anywhere you get your podcast, but if you'd like to go right to the site, it's frogpants.com slash core tune in and check it out. Patrons, you are the best. Thank you for supporting the show. You get an extended show, Good Day Internet. So stick around, we're going to talk about that lady in Canada who can't stop shoes from being delivered by Amazon. Like more than 50 shoes have been delivered to this woman and she has a sign on her door. There's a lot of them even. That's right. So I guess a hundred shoes, right? Cause it's 50 pair. Good point. Hundreds of shoes and she can't stop them from coming. We're going to talk about it. Stick around. But just a reminder, we do the show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back with Shannon Morris talking about black hat news tomorrow. Don't miss it. Talk to you that. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. The timing club hopes you have enjoyed this program.