 Coming up on DTNS Patrick Norton talks about moving tech into a new house during a pandemic why many U.S. health agencies will not use exposure notification apps and this time Google really truly means it when they say they want a coherent messaging strategy. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday April wait no I'm just kidding May 8th 2020 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt. Who even knows what day it is or month I know where I am though Studio Redwood I'm Sir Lane. I'm drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland Ohio I'm Len Pearl. I'm from somewhere outside of St. Louis I'm Patrick sorry see I finally remembered at that time it's stopped on Roger. He's Patrick Norton he's Roger Chang he produces the show we just spent a half hour reminiscing about MTV on Good Day Internet you can get that at patreon.com slash DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know. Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association confirmed that the Tokyo Game Show scheduled to start September 24th has been canceled. The show will transition into a virtual event with more information expected later in May. Tom Moran at The Verge reports that according to sources Microsoft will integrate cursor support into Office for iPad with plans to roll out the update by fall 2020 support is expected for the unified Office for iOS app as well as two separate word excel and PowerPoint apps. Apple says it will reopen stores in Dusseldorf Frankfurt and Russenstrasse Germany and one store in Boise Idaho in the U.S. on Monday May 11th three other stores in Alabama Alaska and South Carolina will open in the week customers and employees will have their temperature checked before it entering the store and must wear masks as well. Samsung will launch a Samsung pay debit card this summer backed by a cash management account from SoFi Google is reportedly working on its own branded payment card as well and of course we all know Apple has its own credit card too. Clearview AI software performs facial recognition by comparing images to a database of photos that are scraped from the public Internet. Google, YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter have sent cease and desist letters to Clearview and response to a lawsuit in Illinois. Clearview AI now says it will voluntarily cancel quote the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal state or local government department office or agency. I don't know if that'll make them drop the suit but we'll see. Europe has commissioned a study of tech companies preferences for their own services. They're looking into things like Amazon operating their own retail and a marketplace businesses that they compete with third parties. Apple's app development but also having an app store that has apps that compete with Apple's own apps. Study is going to look at what would happen if rules were changed like prohibiting companies from treating their own products differently on their platforms or even separating the businesses entirely. The study will also look at requiring data to be shared with smaller rivals and data lock-in that makes it difficult for customers to switch to a competitor. A final report is due to the European Commission in five months. Alright let's talk a little more about this Facebook redesign. Oh there is one Tom. Facebook announced its redesign at F8 last year and then it was been rolled out in some waves. The company added an option to try out the new version in March at least for some accounts. I was actually one of those accounts so I've been hanging out with it for a couple months now. The redesign is official for everybody and the option to update manually if you haven't received it is there as well. The new look promises faster load times easier nav and a dark mode for the desktop which is something that a lot of people enjoy. The company is also seeking user feedback on the new look whether you like it or don't like it. I rarely go to Facebook but I did maybe a month ago I don't remember anymore and I got the new look and my reaction was like huh simpler. It's you know got a lot of white space looks nice but I haven't really been using it. Patrick have you been using it? I actually go on Facebook even less than you do so it's more like you know that moment where you're like is everything oh that's the one I want and then I respond to somebody's message and I immediately shut down Facebook and restart my machine. You know when I got I got I have you know a Facebook burner account which is a dramatic way to say that I've got more than one Facebook account but in March I got that for whatever reason that that account was got pushed out to me right away and so I had kind of my Sarah Lane account which is my real Facebook account and then this other one that I kind of used for just testing purposes and I was like huh okay well let's go back and forth and see what's like dramatically different there really isn't much different it looks different it's cleaner it's nicer a lot of more white space or I suppose when you're using dark mode a lot more dark space but right but um it doesn't I mean it's it's it takes 15 minutes to be like okay everything's everything's still where it's supposed to be the buttons are the same yeah it sounds like they they've streamlined some processes for for things uh and and and then streamlined the design but functionally it sounds like pretty much works the same so yeah it looks nicer though I'll have no fear uh adopt the new look on the desktop it was interesting they were talking about the fact that they sort of let the desktop design langer because they were so focused on mobile for so many years and they're finally get around getting around to just just cleaning it up that's probably why it's not so fundamentally different functionally because this isn't a functional change this is just kind of bringing the design into the modern era yeah and it's probably why I was like oh this just looks better like a mobile app but it's the same you know that that's exactly what they were going for India's federal government allowed for the resumption of smartphone production last month but state governments had the final say over when conditions were safe to resume and that is now finally happening at states in India Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo and several other ODMs have received state approval for production Xiaomi will resume some production with Foxconn in the state of Andhra Pradesh sources speaking to TechCrunch report Wistron will resume limited production for Apple in Bangalore Vivo says it's going to resume 30% production capacity while Oppo and Samsung will resume production at the Greater Noida facility with around 3,000 employees working in rotation while this is happening Nikkei Asian Review also reporting that Apple is moving about 30% of its AirPods production out of China where production has been resumed for a while into Vietnam so Apple wanting to diversify its supply chain having Wistron come back online in India helps with that moving production into Vietnam helps with that as well you know this is clearly when you you know this story is like okay we are slowly but surely getting back to some sense of normalcy however when I go okay 30% production capacity that's significantly less of what you know these companies have been used to in the past and how much is this going to be you know a lasting effect on you know quarterly earnings and people getting phones yeah we're not saying that everything's back now right it's everything is starting to come back and I think it's interesting about that Apple moving to Vietnam is that it's not going to come back the same companies have been burned a little by having their supply chains affected either because of just-in-time inventory or most parts coming from one region and when that region got shut down everything got shut down Patrick do you have any thoughts on this before we move on it seems like something if they were probably well into the process of starting before COVID hit and now they're the it's you know if I would it smells like something if they had already been working on kind of diversifying the locations and possibly in response to tariffs and other things you know I think to you know Sarah I think that what's what I'm really curious about is is where demand is you know we have so many people out of work at this point in the United States and I'm kind of curious you know what employment looks like in India and China and other places I think there's going to be a massive knock-on effect because revenues are down so far and I think it's going to take time for both demanding right I think for some things there's a huge demand like as soon as the restaurants are open it's going to be the greatest day in tips and ever hopefully if you go to a restaurant after COVID do me a favor tip heavily and tip often but or a bar or anything else but I think there's going to be a I think it's going to take time I think it's going to be a really long gradual sort of u-shaped recovery after this one these that's what smarter people tell me well speaking of recovery or here's hoping anyway google announced it would bring its collective communication products under the oversight of VP and GM of G suite Javier Soltero this now includes messages duo the phone app on android google meet google chat already part of G suite speaking to the verge soltero said there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of google's messaging apps and that the company believes people chose google's messaging apps for specific purposes okay listen okay yeah carry on soltero if you're not familiar with him joined google back in october he was previously the co-founder of a complete and vp for microsoft's office group so I mean knows what he's doing I actually am a huge fan of a complete but but but yeah I mean this is quite an undertaking isn't it how many I mean how many names do we have for things that do lots of the same things I want to start by saying that soltero did a great job with a complete maybe he's finally the guy for the job I don't want to let that point be missed I don't want to damn Javier soltero before he's had a chance to get started but man this is not the first time google has tried they almost had it right they had it all unified under hangouts and then they just got bored and were like oh you know what like maybe we'll just bust hangouts out it's not even the first time that google has unified messaging under one person nick fox who's still at google was given this job his response was to launch google alo and actually add another product to the thing that's gone now too uh so I don't know I mean google's messaging strategy has been a mess for a long time it's not the first time they've tried to solve it I don't know Patrick maybe maybe soltero can do it right maybe he can't but it's I the best line of like the part I started like trying not to laugh out loud is there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of google's especially because there is no plan and even if they have a plan just as soon as your business gets it fully integrated or it becomes a part of your life they end it with little notice and no reason um not well part of that is probably it being like okay soltero's gonna come and fix everything but let's not you know make people afraid that we're killing off products just yet you're not gonna make any changes to our products we're just hiring somebody who's really smart um and then you know we're gonna hear about it you know several months on the road yeah if they said they're gonna change things people would be up in arms about google killing products so I do like that Hiroshi Lockheimer who's the head of he's the svp of chrome and android and soltero's boss soltero report to him uh said that we're looking forward now in a way that has a much more coherent vision I would say maybe has a vision would be a place to start uh I don't maybe that's too harsh any vision where was the bottom yeah uh go Javier soltero I'm cheering for you wired has a headline up that says quote health officials say no thanks to contact tracing tech now that may sound odd if you've been hearing stories here on dts and elsewhere about all of the different countries adopting either a centralized app they make themselves or a decentralized app possibly based on the apple google approach all of those countries we've been talking about are not in the united states we talked about india's app that they made themselves we talked about germany going decentralized we talked about uk kind of playing it both ways right now they're making a decentralized one maybe they're also got one they're testing on the alawight the us however has no national app strategy and wired says that new york california massachusetts as well as the cities of baltimore and san francisco have all decided not to use apps for contact tracing instead they're just hiring people to do it now all of these these app efforts are also supplemented or in some ways they are supplementing manual contact tracing but these parts of the us are just doing manual massachusetts plans on hiring a thousand contact tracers new york 17 000 california 20 000 uh there's even a national plan scott got leave and added andy slavitt proposed a 12 billion dollar national plan that would need 180 000 contact tracers and we've talked about the fact that manual tracing is better uh than than apps but that apps could sort of help fill in the gaps tech is being used for these manual contact tracing uh things like health record access uh automatically texting people who are in actual quarantine we kind of use quarantine loosely but there's the people who are like no you really can't go around other people texting them information making sure they're okay tablets for the manual tracers to conduct data analysis while they're interviewing people uh getting location data from a user's phone with consent so they can see where they've been directly and start figuring out who they might need to interview and who they might need to contact new york is putting together three apps one to match test results with correct patients one to give patients an easy way to share relevant phone numbers to contact tracers so they don't make a mistake when they're writing it down uh and utah's healthy together app connects infected users with contact tracers and uses location data to rebuild timelines again saying like hey can we get the location data off your phone that might help us figure out where you've been and who you might have been in contact with uh i i i don't know uh what the conclusion here is uh because manual tracing is the better way to do it and but it seems like some of these health agencies are saying getting in on one of these apps from apple and google just isn't worth our time uh there there's better uses for technology that can help manual tracing oof pat i don't know how you feel about this um it's starting to we we got a lot of a lot of conflicting arguments about what is the best way to figure out who's sick and how the rest of us don't get sick that's why i think we should probably just put a permanent quarantine underneath all of humanity for the next decade well barring that no it's i think it's messy i think part of the problem is is certainly um most tech companies facebook uh uh other tech companies have done such a have such a horrible reputation for doing a decent job of handling you know privacy and and it's just it's a mess uh mostly i'm just kind of blown away with with the size of these offices or the size of these groups that like matt you know mass shoots a thousand okay but like 17 000 20 000 um people this is just i'm delighted with the idea of actually using people for this i just i think it's developing a mobile app is a nightmare for a well-funded organized company with world-class developers trying to put something out so i can totally see why actually having physical people and databases probably is a smarter thing it's just it's it's never as simple as anybody thinks ah you just build an app it'll be great you know and it does this and it'll access that and then we'll do this you know anonymized data thing that'll track everybody and and invariably somebody sells it to somebody and everybody gets pissed off um i may be a little ranty about this um yeah i i am very complimentary of the privacy protection to the apple google platform i think i think they're really solid i think they've done a great job on your correct but you shouldn't we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that all the health agencies agree they're we can say oh there seems to be disagreement there really is only disagreement about whether to implement an app or not there's agreement that manual tracing is the best way uh there's no disagreement about that and maybe that hasn't got through in all of these stories but manual tracing means i've talked to an individual i helped jog their memory i got solid ideas of where they spent the most time yeah they're not going to remember every single person they passed by in a grocery store but i'll know they went to the grocery store and who they talked with there like oh i remember seeing my friend jean there and manual tracing has fewer places where things can go wrong than apple google's bluetooth because bluetooth you know doesn't really know distance very well and it can it can it can be interfered with and it might not work and it might crash and so i can see where some health agencies say look it could be helpful let's let's do it uh because more data is better and i could see other health agencies saying yeah but why why waste our resources doing that when we're going to get almost all the way there with manual tracing anyway and then we want to worry about dealing with the margin of error on these apps and any privacy problems are gone now because we're just dealing with manual tracing yeah i i yeah yeah all right kind of yeah it sort of trickles off uh you know i don't know if you can hear patrick just putting up his hands but yeah i give up uh on wednesday spotify ceo daniel ek told bloomberg that apple has a long way to go before it is an open and fair platform spotify is pursuing antitrust action against apple in europe for limiting how third party music apps work on ios particularly spotify complained about the 30 revenue share on any purchase made on ios sonos co-founder john mcfarland said open twitter uh on twitter rather quote solid irony here having worked closely with both apple and spotify i would say it's more significantly significantly more difficult to work with in spotify's closed ecosystem than apples respect and appreciate both companies but open spotify is not patrick you can hear the walls and daniel the glass walls and daniel x house shattering in the middle of that like i was reading an interview and i'm like are you kidding me spotify like there's there's third party platforms that are desperate to work with spotify spotify refuses they want total control over the it's it's the fact that he said this is like half the music industry that deals with software is just pointing and laughing at him um not just you know sonos has a pretty good operating uh you know relationship with them but other companies that have tried to work with them are like yeah they have no interest they don't care please stop back as against integrate spotify because we can't um because spotify won't let us and it's uh uh yeah well and i love spotify i would normally defend spotify like look it's their platform they can decide what they want to let on i mean as a podcaster i'm glad our podcast is on spotify but when it wasn't i didn't hold it against spotify because it's like well they get to decide who they let in and who they don't but where it does break down is spotify is pointing at apple saying but they shouldn't be allowed the same thing and granted these are different situations uh what spotify is saying is the ios is a much wider platform and they shouldn't force us not to be able to charge in the way we want and that is the big issue is apple says 30 no matter what and you can't work around it in any possible way you have to either charge 30 percent or you can't charge through your app on ios at all and that's one of the big things spotify and others are upset about which is a little different than not integrating with sonos easily uh so so i get where there's a difference but there is also some overlap there yeah it's also i mean the other thing that doesn't help is that apple has developed special relationships with certain companies that have where they are not charging 30 percent so that certainly muddies up the water so that is only for video and only for very narrowly defined very large companies couldn't even keep a straight face on that one but yeah hey folks if you want to get all the reseller products if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com all right folks as we mentioned at the top of the show patrick norton uh moving into a new house at a very interesting time to be moving into a new house uh no i mean normally we would want you to talk about uh just all the things you're running into as you try to set up technology in a new house because that's helpful as people are always moving uh but i imagine it's it's even more interesting right now it's certainly uh you know the uh goodness i i have to fly back to where all of our household furnishings are stored so i can get them and bring them back so part of me has been like stealing myself to not go into a complete panic and hyperventilating uh on an airplane as i fly to where i am picking up you know i was laughing it's not the right word but i'll say i was laughing about that it's also interesting because you know especially millennials um are moving more often and uh or more frequently i think than uh anybody in their age bracket has in the last couple four five decades and especially in urban areas it's actually kind of shocking how fast people in the that that age bracket are moving these days um it's uh it's funny the first thing i thought about this is i was like writing down notes was like google search internet options and then the name of the town you're moving to for isp options because a lot of people don't actually know even real estate agents or landlords don't actually know what options are available uh and schedule an appointment early uh you know it's basically get the electric turned on and then make sure the internet shows up right after that and as ridiculous as that sounds in some places uh or some services they actually have a fairly hefty lag time uh and when i say fairly hefty i mean it could be a week uh after you take possession of the place which doesn't sound like forever until you're in a house for a week without internet um when you're transitioning to your house it's not a bad time to upgrade routers but do yourself a favor keep your old reliable router nearby until you verify that the new router actually works that may sound silly until you've actually had to walk over to a neighbor's house and borrow a cup of router um a lot of people don't know they exist but two gallon ziploc bags are possibly my favorite thing ever for organizing uh parts and electronics uh because they are huge they fit almost anything you can actually fit a lot of laptops inside of them with their power supplies um and you know if the more time you spend packing your stuff the less likely you are to be running around trying to figure out where the particular power supply for your router is um i actually you know like to have a box which has sort of the house network inside of it so that everything i need like okay they've connected the internet and i have my box and then my router and all of the things i need to get kind of basically everything up and running uh this all may sound obvious to people who are highly organized uh or who don't move off often but there's nothing worse than knowing like okay the router's in one of those 15 boxes kids and you can watch you know Phineas and Ferb once you found the router it's so easy to be packing and go like oh well well these cables are in the same box i'm sure it'll be easy to find them and it's like no man just put them in that ziploc bag and label that bag tape it to the router like do a couple extra things that makes your life so much easier on the other end i moved nine times before i was 12 i literally when i when i pack a box i write up what's in the box on three sides of it so that if it goes into a storage unit i can always have a side facing out with the name of what's inside of it man uh hctvs you actually should transport them vertically if you're moving yourself you know that you know the magic you know lcd juice is not going to drip out of the monitor if it's stored flat but the the panel is actually supported vertically and when you put it horizontally and then bounce it it's much more likely for you to create a stress fracture in the center of the screen which is really heartbreaking um you know keep something soft and dirt free between the screen and any furniture blankets and if you're renting furniture blankets assume that somebody is stomped on uh you know a giant pile of sand on them so get something you know fleece blankets are pretty good fresh fleece blanket you know banded around there and then store it vertically in between a couple of mattresses or the inner and outer liner of your mattress is a great way i could tell you you want to take patrick's advice on this because uh the only way that i felt safe having my dlp tv moved uh in circa you know 2005 2006 was with patrick's help he really knows what he's talking about here i've moved too many times i remember that tv um you know and on my obsession with routers and having your internet because apparently that's the most important thing in my life after my family uh and dog uh wi-fi analyzers are incredibly useful if you're on android uh you can actually get a wi-fi analyzer app on android which is a fantastically useful tool for figuring out if you've figured out the optimal placement for a router inside of your house if you have multiple mesh networks uh devices it's probably not as critical um they they don't really exist on ios which case you'll be using your laptop but wi-fi analyzer uh by abdelram and msid is an excellent inexpensive tool and you will be able to stand in corners of your house and it will tell you sort of which channel you should be using um because there's nothing more charming than discovering you can gain a healthy bump in your wi-fi speed by changing the channel of your router because everybody around you and all the other houses are all running the same channel yeah yeah no that's a good one i mean the channel won't matter so much for what i'm about to say but but the placement it's so much easier to figure that out before you've unpacked everything right because you have so many more options of where you can put that router and then you can unpack things around it so it's a good thing to do fully on you know as long as you're routed it can be problematic if you have a basement you have to cover but generally speaking for most people as high as you can get as close to the center of the house and uh if you don't have if you can keep it out of a closet you know if you can find sort of a piece of furniture to stash it on top of it can be amazing how much a little bit of elevation can do for your wi-fi performance so and uh real quickly uh when you're talking about finding internet options uh i i haven't moved in a couple of years now it's it's been a while uh but broadbandnow.com was really helpful at finding all the options uh yeah and and i think they still are good did you use them uh i literally went to six different websites uh highspeedinternet.com broadband now is actually generally the first results are going to get on google on that um you know there are some that are just terrible linkbaity sites that are trying to pick up right you gotta watch out for those for redirecting you um but uh yeah i mean it was it was i common.net is the provider i was using in alameda and they're a a startup company that that they're they're we were in their sort of test zone and i remember uh being really heartbroken because i thought we were moving and i would never be able to find an awesome internet provider again and to a certain point i was right uh because there's fiber from AT&T available on my block and i hate to complain about that but i've had such a complicated relationship with AT&T um but uh it's good to scan around because you might be shocked like common was almost half the price of what i was paying for cable but it was four times as fast and it was uncapped so it was you know search around and even if you know you're just in your house now every you know every once a year every six months search to find out if there's new provider in your area because if there is you might get a shocking improvement in your speed or a shocking reduction in your bill or as i did with common.net who is not paying me i just love them that much um it was a shocking increase in speed it was symmetrical upload and download it was a significantly less amount of money than we were paying Comcast and i got to leave Comcast so it was like a win a win a win and a win for me amazing. Hey everybody join in the conversation in our discord whether you're moving or not everybody could probably benefit from going through a few of those old boxes you just haven't opened in a few years you can join the conversation by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh let's do it we got a real nice one from GadgetSmart who wrote happy to be joining your associate producer crew after listening for free with ads for far too long. Tom, Sarah, Roger, Patrick, Scott, Justin, all of your guests had given us a wonderful show keep them coming. Oh thank you GadgetSmart. Yes super nice. That's really nice. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Sonia Vainian, Ruchan Brantley and Pollo Jacob. Len Peralta has been illustrating the episode for us. What have you drawn today Burke Brethren of DTNS? Well you know Patrick had some great advice obviously for moving but I think the biggest pitfall of moving tech into your new home is having your smart home lock you out and here is an image of some guy trying to get into his house I don't know if it's Patrick or not but it could be and he's asking Siri, Alexa, Cortana, anyone I'm trying to move in and you've locked me out of the house so the house may be smarter than you so that's the first thing the first thing is being able to get into the house to get the tech into your house and I think that's the biggest pitfall of them all. I like that skylight though once you do get in I'm like what does it look like inside it's kind of cool. I know it's a very cool looking house. I know yeah exactly. So this is available right now at my Patreon, Patreon.com forward slash Len or of course on my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com so there you go. Thank you Len also thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us this fine Friday Patrick you are a busy man these days definitely on the move but you are still giving stuff giving people what they want and where can they find out more about that? abxl.com is a place to go I'll have some other announcements to made after the floors are finished and the house is filled and the internet is on which hopefully won't happen in that order I will be launching some other stuff a little later this spring. Very cool. 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