 Charles Anderson has supported independent tech news directly starting today. You want to be like Charles? Become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is The Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 11th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the jungles of E3 covered from Finland, I am the extremely fatigued Patrick Bejo. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All right, folks, we got a lot to cover because Patrick has thrown himself on his sword. He has sacrificed his well-being to boil down all of the E3 announcements for us a little later in the show. Thank you, Patrick, for your service. Well, don't thank me until the thing actually happens. It might suck. All right, let's start, however, with a few tech things you should know. U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed photos of travelers and some vehicles traveling in and out of the U.S. were stolen in a data breach. The data was transferred to a subcontractors network that wasn't following proper security protocols where a malicious cyber attack took place, a CBP spokesperson told TechCrunch, but also says that its own networks weren't compromised. The agency first learned of the breach on May 31st and says it affected fewer than 100,000 people at a single land border. Opera launched a custom version of its browser dedicated to online gamers and streamers called Opera GX. The browser lets users limit access to CPU and RAM and RAM resources to ensure smoother gameplay. Opera GX also comes with Twitch integration so users can log into their Twitch accounts from the browser's own sidebar. Opera GX is currently in early access and available for download for Windows users. The Atari VCS Retro Console is available for general pre-order from Atari's site and GameStop in Walmart with orders from the retailers expected to ship in March 2020, though crowdfunding backers can get theirs as early as December. The base VCS 400 has an AMD processor and embedded Vega graphics and 4GB of RAM for 249 bucks. A VCS 800 has 8GB of RAM and costs $279. The classic joystick will sell for 49 bucks and the modern gamepad for 59 bucks. And if you buy an all-inclusive 800 model with both controllers, you'll pay a grand total of 389 bucks. So go play out your nostalgia for a mere 389 bucks. Or not. Or not. All right, let's talk a little bit about some nonny three-stuff first. Patrick, tell us what's going on with Foxconn. Well, Foxconn Semiconductor's division chief Yang Liu told an investor briefing that the company has enough capacity outside of China to make all iPhones bound for the US. I guess if you're in Europe, you're out of luck. Liu said 25% of Foxconn's production capacity is outside China in places like Mexico, Brazil, Europe, and India. Liu said investments are being made in India in particular. iPhones made in China are not yet subject to tariffs or other US restrictions, and Apple has given no instructions to change production lines. Yeah, so this is in the event that the US slaps a restriction on iPhones coming from China, or China does it as a retaliatory move. Foxconn thinks it can handle making all the iPhones it needs to, assembling all the iPhones it needs to, in its other manufacturing centers, likely in India, where they've been actually tuning up their factories for Indian production of the iPhones, because India wants those iPhones to be made there. And Patrick, you don't have to worry about that, because your iPhones can be made in China and go to Europe. They could even be made in Europe and go to Europe, looks like. I didn't even think about that, unless China says no iPhones for anyone ever. Yeah, and then we'd all be in trouble. Yeah, right. I mean, if they want to hurt the American economy and psyche, that could be, it seems extreme. But it seems extreme, but you're right. These are times where things that seemed extreme sometimes happen. It's interesting because when Foxconn says 25% of production capacity is already outside of China, you think, okay, well, 75% is still within China, you have a long way to go. But what percentage of that is US-bound? Right. And what percentage of that is iPhone? They have other clients besides Apple. So I think what they're trying to say is we've got a lot of capacity. Maybe people thought we were only in China, but we're not. Last week, someone stole a mini-disc archive of unreleased songs from Radiohead singer Tom York. The thief asked for $150,000 or he'd release the songs online. The songs because as you might have guessed, being on mini-disc dated back to 1997. And so Radiohead said, all right, instead of complaining, this is the quote, instead of complaining much or ignoring it, we're releasing all 18 hours on band camp in aid of extinction rebellion. Never intended for public consumption, some clips did reach the cassette in the okay computer reissue. It's only tangentially interesting. Of course, if you're a big Radiohead fan, tangentially interesting is really interesting. So the recordings will be on sale for 18 days at the price of 18 pounds. That's about 23 bucks US. And if you're like, wait, in aid of extinction rebellion, that's an environmental movement trying to raise awareness about climate change. So they're saying, you okay, instead of paying you 150,000 to stop release, we're going to release them and raise money for this cherry. Well, it's nice that they clearly had backups that were beyond mini-disc for this purpose. I also thought the thief, because Radiohead, you may or may not like the band, but people who are die hard Radiohead fans would easily pay 23 dollars for this. I would easily pay 23 dollars for 18 hours of Radiohead music that I hadn't heard before. I also wonder why the thief picked 150,000, not that the thief was in the right in any way. That is interesting. I could have kind of bumped it up a little bit. The first fee that came to mind. Yeah, in this day and age, maybe half a mil. There has to be a pun with haze to the thief, which is the radiohead album. But I can't find it. I've been thinking about it for, and I can't find it. Sorry. Radiohead, this is interesting. If you recall, did an experiment where they gave away an album telling you you could pay whatever you want, including zero dollars. So it's interesting to see this reaction of like, oh, you're going to give away our music for free? Well, we've done that before. So this time, we'll give it away for money, but the money won't go to us. This is such a perfect answer. And not only are they turning this problematic thing that happened to them into a good thing, but it's also gaining, I think, a lot of positive mindshare towards Radiohead themselves. It's a great PR move. I'm sure they didn't do it for that reason, but it makes them look really cool. Where they use the energy of the thief against the thief. Exactly. It's also not, who knows really, we have to take Radiohead's word for it, but this is not like the upcoming album that everyone has been eagerly awaiting for the last two years. It's stuff that didn't get on albums in the past. So the band might have said, do we really care? I mean, no, we'll have charged people small fee, but it's not the end of the world if it gets out. Eric Allison, head of Uber's aviation division, which is called Elevate, said he expects the Uber Air flying taxi service to be cheaper than driving a car in the long term. Uber plans to launch Uber Air in 2023 in Dallas and Los Angeles, where it will at least be cheaper than a helicopter. If enough people use it though, it'll become comparable to UberX and UberPool. After that, the cost of manufacturing flying taxis needs to come down to make it cheaper than actually owning your own car. Uber's working with Boeing, Embraer, Bell, and just announced today, John Air Mobility on the flying taxis. It'll begin test next year. It's actually starting in Melbourne, Australia. Of course, to make a fleet of autonomous vertical takeoff and landing taxis a success, Uber's going to need places to take off and land. It will also need to keep and retain customer trust and of course, regulatory approval. Yeah. I'll be honest, there's so much to talk about here, including the fact that they need customer trusted regulatory approval for that curve to work out the way they want, which isn't impossible, but it's not a given. But also, this chart proves that owning your own car is still cheaper than taking Uber. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's debatable depending on how often you drive. Sometimes I'm like, why do I own a car? But yeah. Go ahead, Patrick. No, I was going to say that's the thing. When you talk about averages like this, it's cheaper for some people. It's more expensive for some people depending on how much you use your car, how much you use Uber, how much. So it's so broad as strokes go that it's difficult to generalize out of it. But I like the hopefulness of it. You may throw your slings and arrows at it and say, they'll never achieve it. They need to go over too many hurdles to make it happen. But it does seem that Uber is positive about this and willing to pursue it. And it is crazy to imagine a world not that far away. Four years from now, we're here in Los Angeles, people might be paying just a little more than UberX to be able to take a flying autonomous helicopter. That said though, point A to point B in an UberX, if I needed to, I don't know, go wherever I needed to go. If I needed to go to our fun meet up tomorrow, I'll get dropped off right out front. Is the Uber flying taxi going to be able to do that for me? That's where that real estate thing you mentioned becomes a big issue. Where can they take off and land? How convenient is that? How much extra do you have to add to your trip? It's like, okay, it's really fast to get from this landing pad to that landing pad, but then I have to take a car to get where I'm going because the landing pad isn't close enough. All of that sort of thing. All right. We love Mary Meekers yearly state of the Internet report. We usually love to make a major topic out of it. She usually doesn't give it during E3. So here's what we're going to do. I will do my best to summarize what Mary Meekers said in her annual Internet Trends report at the Code Conference on Tuesday, and you folks email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Let us know which parts of this you'd like to have us continue to talk about, and we'll pay attention to that. Meekers been doing the report since 1995. This year it touches on slow e-commerce growth, rising Internet ad spending, freemium subscription business models, telemedicine, the dominance of image sharing as a communication method, interactive gaming, becoming the new social network. Fortnite is the place where people talk more than Facebook maybe. And here's some of the details. She noted that as the Internet is now passing 50% of global penetration, new growth is harder to find. Asia Pacific holds the most potential for growth right now. China has the most Internet users in the world, followed by India and then the United States. And she also notes that time spent on mobile has now passed time spent watching television and digital video makes up about 28% of total video viewing as opposed to TV. The following things, podcast listening, Amazon Echo using, wearable users, on-demand consumers, that's like Uber, Airbnb, that kind of thing. Next door neighborhoods have all doubled in the past two to four years. Non-US based innovation remains robust, especially in data driven and direct financial services. So if you want to look for that kind of robust innovation, you look outside the US right now, but it's still there. She also said data is the new application. And here I'm going to quote, data is now fundamental to how people work. And the most successful companies have intelligently integrated it into everyone's data workflow. People are still majorly willing to share data for personalized experiences. There's a lot of privacy concerns and she touches on that. But if you say, I'll personalize this 70 to 90% of people depending on the situation will say, yeah, that's fine, I will share my data for that. The pace of innovation is now outrunning our ability to adapt even as our ability to adapt increases. So tools that help us to adapt are important. Social media usage is decelerating, as she says. 87% of web traffic is now encrypted versus 53% in Q1 2016. That's a huge victory, something that if you had asked me in 2016, I would not have predicted. People prefer negative news, no matter what they say. And the problem is that the internet amplifies it. And here's a point Meeker makes that I don't hear often. Traditional media then amplifies social media's trending topics. So that just keeps that cycle going even worse. She says freedom is both increasing and falling on the web. So there's there's fewer totally free internet experiences, but there are also fewer totally non free internet experiences. And we sort of are increasing a partly free middle of the road web. Cyber attacks are increasing. Sadly, two factor authentication is stagnant, limiting the effectiveness of it. It was 54% of websites in 2014. It's 52% in 2018. Online education is offering more growth, more users, more choice and lower cost than offline learning, even if it's not necessarily giving you a degree all the time. And super apps are dominating in places like China. She cites grab, rapy and even uber as incorporating the elements of super app features worldwide where you pack in more than just one service into an app. So there you go. We don't have time to dig into all of that, obviously, but I hope that gives you a snapshot. It's worth reading if you want to get the whole 3338 pages. Patrick, Sarah, any first impressions? And yes, it's a long read, lots of data here. So we'll have more to say in the next 24 hours, I'm sure. But I will say of what Meeker has laid out as trends and here's what's changing and here's what's different, nothing is really standing out to me as surprising. Even news outlets amplifying social media stuff. I've been doing that for years. Yeah, nothing is shocking. I think that's the thing about Meeker's report. Because she's usually so accurate on identifying these trends, you shouldn't be surprised, but you may not have thought about it. Yeah, that's true. And it's important. I mean, AI got mentioned once. I sort of like, oh, this is a thing that makes personalization and stuff work better. And it's got a small passage, but not a huge trend. Cryptocurrency, not a mention. I mean, it's as important for the things that aren't in it as the things that are. Podcast listening doubled or the last two to four years. That's interesting to us. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Well, a lot of investment being made in podcast networks and podcast networks and podcast themselves, crop it up all over the place. I guess time spent on mobile surpassing time spent watching television is interesting, especially because in my house, it's usually a two screen situation. I'm almost never watching TV without can also being on my phone or my computer at the same time. But are you using your, your, your phone when you're not watching TV? Yeah, no, I mean, I, but I also think that I'm, I, I veer towards it more unhealthy mobile user because I think that's also typical. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I don't know if I'm, I'm representing the median, but yeah, this is, it's, it was bound to happen. All right, let's talk Nintendo. Let's do it. Nintendo held its E3 Nintendo direct live stream at Tuesday morning. A full sequel to Zelda, Breath of the Wild is coming and a teaser showed Lincoln Zelda exploring a dungeon together. Luigi's Mansion 3 will include a couch co-op and online mode. Animal Crossing New Horizon for the Switch has been delayed to March 20th, 2020. Two new Smash characters, a Banjo-Kazooie and Dragon Quest's hero. A spinoff game from Netflix's Dark Crystal will come out later this year as well. That's about, I don't know about that, called the Dark Crystal Age of Resistance Tactics. Our resident Nintendo expert, Patrick Beja. What did you think of this year's Nintendo direct from E3? It's always so cute and wholesome that it's difficult to not love. They also had this lovely introduction of the new president of Nintendo of America who's called Doug Bowser. Bowser being the main villain in the Mario series forever. And so they introduced Bowser. Of course, it was the villain from the video game and then Doug came in. It's his actual name, which is mind-blowing. And of course, the announcement of the next Zelda was a crowd pleaser, including for me. Excellent. Alright, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. You thought we talked about all the Microsoft news, but Microsoft also will stop adding games to its Xbox Backward Compatibility catalog for the Xbox One in order to focus on its next generation Project Scarlet console. Microsoft is committing to get every Xbox One game to run on Scarlet, plus games from all four Xbox generations. And Xbox players can now choose a gamer tag that's already in use, but it will include a hashtag and some random numbers next to their display name. Original gamer tags like Master Chief or Major Nelson will appear with no numbers next to them, solidifying them as the original owner of that tag. If an Xbox Live member changes their gamer tag, their original will still be up for grabs. So once you let one go, it can go out there without the added stuff. That's just some stuff that broke today about Microsoft. Let's back up, though. Let's get in our helicopter, our ubercopter, and look down above what's been happening at E3 over the past weekend. Patrick, where do we start? So I think what's going to be really interesting for most people listening to this show is the overarching industry trends that we've seen. And of course, that means new hardware. And when I say hardware, I include servers because Stadia detailed its essentially business model. And it seemed really muddy when they first talked about it a little bit before E3, but let's say it's technically E3. I think I was really disappointed because they introduced something that is essentially just a console, except you don't have to buy the console. There's no Netflix of games subscription or anything like that. And my expectation was that Google was going to disrupt the industry in some way like they have disrupted other industries. You know, when Gmail came out, it was crazy because you had this everlasting thing that was, I mean, anyway, we don't need to detail how Google has disrupted things before. Here it didn't have that same oomph. However, what we've learned now is that Ubisoft is going to have a subscription service with Uplay Plus that gives access to all of their games. And that is games that you can install on your PC. However, for streaming, they will be available on Stadia as well. Once Stadia actually launches for everyone for quote unquote free in a few months, I mean in early 2020, they will be able, it means that Ubisoft is accessing everyone's computers through streaming through Google Stadia. So I think the reason we're not seeing a Netflix of games from Google is that it might have been confusing if every other developer that doesn't have the capacity to create a streaming infrastructure for themselves is using Stadia for that. And I'm wondering if that wasn't Google's goal from the beginning, from analyzing the way the industry is moving. Yeah, I mean, it does sound like they're going to put out their own games at Google, but otherwise they don't want to be in competition with other streaming services. They really want to be the provider of that streaming services is what that makes it sound like to me. It does. And I wouldn't be surprised if other big publishers and developers might think, you know what, maybe that's a way we could bypass the other platforms by essentially making Stadia a white box. I mean, it's not really Stadia as its own platform, but everyone can use it to deliver their experiences to customers directly, of course, giving a cut of the action to Google in the process. So of course, you also have the ability to buy stuff on Stadia directly. But I'm wondering, I'm not certain, but I'm wondering if the bigger vision there is to provide that service for others. We had a lot of people discussing who this was for. And Josh in Japan said, it's for me. I have a gaming PC in one room and a Mac mini attached to my large screen TV in another. I use streaming through Steam, but there's often controller issues, etc. I want to completely switch to Mac, but gaming has always made me keep a PC. Stadia is good. I could still play games on my Mac. Just hope they have accessibility features like button remapping, because I'm disabled. Anyway, there has been a lot of who is this for talk? Well, people who want to use Mac and game. That's me. And Ken from Chicago on Twitter pointed out that another advantage of Stadia is buy a game, play it in five minutes. You don't have to wait for the download. That is very true. But I think one thing we might be losing sight of is everyone's going to have that service. Microsoft is launching Project X Cloud. Sony is very likely to upgrade their PlayStation Now service to work in a similar way. So when we ask what is Stadia for as gamers who know this industry, it's not necessarily streaming. It's just Stadia, which is streaming only without the option to also have a gaming box, because again, streaming is going to be offered by Google, Microsoft, and very likely Sony. Let's talk about Microsoft. We covered their announcements, but now that you've had a little chance to put them in perspective, what do you think? So the reveal of the Project Scarlet was a little bit disappointing to everyone, I think, because we didn't get any more than we got for the PlayStation 5. Essentially, it's the same thing. So that wasn't their big push. Their big push, I think, was Game Pass, which again, we're getting back to subscription services, which is really the big trend in the coming year or two. Game Pass is gaining in popularity, partly because they're offering better deals and partly because it's available on PC. But if you put that together with the launch of the X Cloud, which is supposed to start in October, so before Stadia, and we don't know exactly what is going to be available, it was a little bit vague, maybe it's only using your console for in-house server X Cloud type things in the beginning, but then certainly it's going to be internet servers. So you have the Game Pass and the X Cloud. It's again a quote-unquote Netflix of streaming for everyone. You don't even need to wait for the next generation to get people on board. And once they're on board and they're sort of investing in your ecosystem with your subscription service, does it matter that they want a box for the next generation if your streaming service and subscription kind of upgrade to that automatically? So I think that's why Microsoft is actually pushing Game Pass so hard right now and thinking, you know, the next generation thing, it will be important, but we don't need to push it now and tell people it's going to be great, but you have to wait a year and a half for this. They can tell Game Pass and X Cloud is going to be here soon. All right, so that brings us through sort of the big looming announcements. What else stuck in your brain as cool and interesting at E3? So if you want to talk about cool, just cool, I think we have to mention the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, which in itself is not gameplay and that's always a little bit disappointing because you don't see the actual game, but the arrival of Keanu Reeves in that trailer was a jaw dropping moment. And especially when he came out on stage, I don't think I've ever seen a more excited crowd anywhere. So that was really, really cool. I guess the Avengers game at the Square Enix conference was exciting because it's Marvel and the Avengers and it's so hot right now. The game itself, we didn't see enough to judge definitively in any way. So that in itself was a little bit disappointing for me because I wanted to see more, but I guess we still have time. It's coming out in May of next year. Yeah, Gary on Twitter was thrown by the fact that they didn't get the original actors to do the voices and he's like, they're so associated with these characters now. It's just, it just feels weird. And they're also done with the characters and so expensive that they got some really great voice actors for video games, though it said basically who's who of the great names in that industry. So we don't know if he's there yet, but perhaps one day Keanu Reeves would like to join our subreddit. He could spit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. He could also be part of our Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show. It really would be breathtaking if you did. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Is there is our email from Keanu Reeves? No, it's from Tim unless that's Keanu being clever. No, I think Tim is a different person. Tim has an app tip. It's based on our conversation we had last Friday about dual commands to Amazon's assistant such as turn off the hall light and turn on the entry light. So you can kind of string stuff together. Tim says, one of the many things I love about any list, it's an app, is that when I tell Amazon's assistant to add something to our grocery list in any list, if it's already there, it tells me I already have it on the list, ask me if I want to add it again and listens without me needing to say the wake word again to my answer. Additionally, it supports entry on the web, pictures, recipes, multiple lists, customer custom orders for the aisles in stores and a bunch of other awesome features. In fact, without having a default list, I can just say Amazon's assistant add potatoes to the list and it knows to default to my main grocery list without me having to say which one. I've heard some good things about any list. Tim continues to make the case. Still though, Tim, I want to know when you ask any list if something is on your list, do you have to say tell any list is something on my list because that's the thing that annoys me about our groceries. Thanks for the feedback, Tim. Keep those app tips going. We love to hear about them. What's working for people and what isn't. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja, triumphantly returning to DTNS. We've missed you. What have you been up to besides E3, of course? Well, nothing. It's E3 all day every day. But if you want to have a complete summary of everything that happened at E3, just go subscribe to Pixels. You will get a two hours discussion between Scott Johnson and myself that we just finished recording an hour and a half ago or an hour ago. And it was great because you get all of it. If you want a slightly longer discussion than what we had here today but shorter than those two hours, just wait for MVGB, the monthly video game briefing, which we are recording tomorrow with Scott, where we'll dive into the really important things from that show. That will be, of course, available to patrons very soon and on its own feed as well. Excellent. That's frogpansons.com slash MVGB. Our goal each month is to get one more patron than last month. And you get so much when you do that. Thursday, you get a column from Roger. Friday or Saturday, you get an editor's desk audio from me. Sarah's in the middle of testing products. She did some Jabra headphones. That's in the archives. She's working on some smart bulbs right now. It's all available at patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you're in the Los Angeles area, come out tomorrow, Wednesday, June 12th from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Farmers Market by the Grove. That's 6333 West 3rd Street in Los Angeles. We're going to have a meetup, hang out, talk, watch the hockey game. At least that's me. I'll be talking up until the hockey game and then I will either be in tears or happy. So come find out. Will I be in tears? 4 to 6 p.m. at the Farmers Market on Wednesday, June 12th if you're in the LA area. At the 326 bar specifically. Yes. Farmers Market is kind of big. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Bye. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.