 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Hector Bones, Tim Ashman, and Johnny Hernandez. Coming up on DTNS, are Twitch streamers in for a world of hurt? Apple says self-repair is okay, sort of. And when games shut down, what's next for the gamers? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 27th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Deep in Dogtown, St. Louis, I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are going to talk about all of the things in tech today, but let's start with a few tech things you should know about. In its key one earnings report, Alphabet earned $25.62 per share on revenue of 23% on the year to $68.01 billion. However, both missed analysts' expectations. Overall revenue growth in Europe slowed to 19% in Q1, compared to 33% last year. YouTube ad revenue came in under analysts' estimates with $6.87 billion. Google Cloud grew revenue 44% on the year to $5.82 billion. That beat analysts' estimates. Other bets revenue, that includes Waymoa, among others, increased revenue 122% to $440 million, while the units lost remained flat on the year at $1.15 billion. DJI will temporarily suspend business in Russia and Ukraine to ensure its products are not used in combat, calling it a statement about our principles. This makes DJI the first major Chinese firm to cite the ongoing conflict for halting sales in Russia. The Google Play Store began rolling out its privacy-related nutrition labels to apps, which will appear in the new Google Play Data Safety section. These sections will show which data is collected if it's shared with a third party and security practices for data. Developers must submit data safety section details by July 20th. Spotify reported its Q1 revenue rose 24% year over year to 2.66 billion euros, including 282 million euros from ads up to 31% year over year, with paying subscribers rising 15% year over year to 182 million. However, the company lost 1.5 million in Russia after pulling its service from the country and warns it will lose another 600,000 subscribers in the current period. Spotify's paid subscriber forecast for the current quarter fell just short of analyst estimates. Google began testing display ads in YouTube short content. The company says initial test ads will likely be for app installs and other promotions. YouTube reported average daily views of shorts increased over four times on the year in its Q1 to 30 billion. All right, Patrick, let's talk a little bit about being a streamer and how it sucks. Wow. How it could potentially suck depending on who you are and what you're looking for. Where your revenue is coming from. Okay, so Bloomberg sources say Twitch began considering proposals to revamp its payment structure. One proposal could cut top streamer subscription revenue share from 70% down to 50%. In other words, potentially create multiple tiers with different requirements that would incentivize broadcasters to run more ads for unsubscribed viewers. Twitch could potentially drop exclusivity terms for members of its partner programming letting them stream on other services, i.e., we're gonna cut your revenue but you can stream it elsewhere at the same time and we won't cut you off. On the surface, you might say, isn't this bad for streamers? I guess it really depends on the streamer. Twitch changes might offer more freedom and with a less lucrative pay structure Twitch could drop, I mean, if they, oh boy, this seems like a big messy balancing act. I'm losing money from Twitch but I can pick up money over here but do I have any people who will watch me over here or can I get traction over here? It really all depends on what happens with the partner program and streaming on rival services I guess on Facebook, gaming or YouTube. Twitch is not commenting on the report but the rumored proposals are coming after Twitch implemented multiple efforts to boost long-term profits and satisfy its parent company, Amazon. Twitch recently launched a program meant to get prolific streamers to run more ads, i.e., we need more money, give us more money, we need more money, how about more money, give us more money. I keep thinking, did Amazon buy Twitch because they thought it was gonna be the next big thing or did they buy Twitch because Google wanted it and therefore they were gonna try to deny it from Google and boy. Yeah, I mean, probably both. I mean, Twitch is a big thing. Twitch is, it's certainly something that I would think parent company, Amazon is happy to have under its umbrella. That said, when I first read this news this morning I was like, oh man, I mean, I know we stream our show on Twitch and we're not unfamiliar with revenue streams from being on Twitch but the idea that you as a streamer and somebody who's, this is maybe not full-time or maybe it is full-time or maybe more like 20 hours a day, I don't know. Like however crazy you wanna be about live streaming if this is your bread and butter, anything that a company says is like, well, okay, your share is gonna drop. However, you have more freedom to go other places. That doesn't sound great. What tremendous opportunities we have for you. It just doesn't sound great. And maybe you are a streamer who's felt like, I wish I didn't have exclusivity. I wish I could try things out with several platforms, kind of see where my audience is or see where the audience differs. That is very legit, but not everybody feels that way. So if you're a person who has said, no, I've really invested a lot of time, energy and my own money in some cases to be on this particular platform, changes like this gets scary. And certainly I don't think, I don't think you're ever gonna run to anybody, whether they're a streamer or a YouTuber or an Instagram or whatever label you wanna slap on them. Nobody wants to hear the phrase, we're gonna reduce your revenue ever or we're gonna reduce your share. Nobody wants to hear that. And I think it's even more problematic is how many people really make money off of Facebook whose names don't end with Zuckerberg? You know what I mean? Like the content on Facebook has never turned out to be, I will rephrase this. I think there are very rare examples of people making money off of generating content or streaming content on Facebook. Perhaps this has changed and I'm simply unaware of it. Feel free to let me know, tweet at Patrick Norton. But for the most part, I think this has gotta be frustrating for Twitch streamers and it's gonna be interesting to see how they react if this story even turns out to be true. Cause part of this is one of those things like, oh, you know, Amazon's trying to figure out if everyone wanna leave Twitch, if they reduce their revenue, let's see the story and see what kind of response we get. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as somebody who works with, I mean, not only do I produce my own podcast, but people who work on podcasts and I get this question a lot of, okay, where do we live? You know, what's our platform? What do we choose? What's the best place? And I always kind of go, it's really up to you. It, you know, you have to build an audience and you can build an audience in multiple places. That requires more work, just plain and simple. It's going to require more work. You might end up benefiting more by doing that, but let's not, you know, mince words here. It's going to be more work for you. So, you know, that's, it's one of those things where I, you know, I kind of go, okay, Amazon, I see you. I get it. Opportunity rhymes with exposure. Indeed. Well, Mac rumors is reporting that Apple launched its much anticipated self-service repair program today for the iPhone 12, the iPhone 13 and the third gen iPhone SE in the United States. The company plans a European launch of the program later this year. The program in its detail will provide access to genuine repair manuals and over 200 Apple parts and tools through the self-repair, self-service repair store. To initiate a self-repair as a customer, you need to review the appropriate product repair manual, specific repair process on the website. Then they'll, as somebody who wants to repair something, you'll be allowed to purchase those required parts. You kind of go, yeah, yeah, I've seen it. I know what I'm doing. Please give it to me. In a blog post today, I fix its Elizabeth Chamberlain commented on Apple's self-service repair program, saying it was a great step for self-repair, but had one major issue. Users repairing their iPhones must have a valid IMEI or their phone serial number. Then that part must be paired with the phone. Mac rumors reports that the pairing process, known as system configuration, will require customers to contact the self-service repair store support team over chat or by a phone call and adds that the store is run by a third-party company, Spot, S-B-O-T, not Apple itself. The rest of the blog details, I fix its optimism about the program and the direction that the company is taking to let customers repair their own devices. Patrick, I don't know. I mean, is the idea that Apple isn't really running this program themselves concerned to you? No. That part doesn't concern me so much. I mean, it's more... Okay, first of all, let me say this flat-out. Apple making parts and repair manuals public is awesome. I feel like this is what the entire crew at iFixit, Kyle Wiens' inspiration for starting iFixit was simply the fact that he just wanted to repair his stupid MacBook. My words, not his. I was also digging into the manuals that Apple had posted and, you know, seeing the heated display removal tool that Apple techs use is fascinating for me. It's like this big stainless steel thing and the phone goes into it and there's slots to adapt different devices into it. But the catch really isn't, you know, big proprietary tools, right? You know, that Elizabeth said it over at iFixit. You have to supply a serial number to include the part to a phone. So the campaign director for right to repair at the public interest research group, Nathan Proctor, one of the things he pointed out is this allows Apple to maintain a lot of control over the repair process. And it also means Apple can decide to stop supporting repairs, right? If these parts will only work, if there's a phone call involved, all they have to do is stop answering the phone or change the rules, right? You know, iFixit founder, Kyle Wiens, his note was like, what if you want to pull the camera from another phone? Nope, you're not allowed. What if you want to buy an Apple Market Park? Nope, you're not allowed. It's a very specific set of rules that you will jump through if you want to do the official Apple self-repair system. You know, obviously, these are right to repair activists. I can probably label myself as that. They want repair to be as open and accessible as possible. And Apple is Apple. Apple likes control. It's part of what Apple does. We could argue about security. You could argue about making sure you have the right part. But essentially, this is the terms that Apple laid down for getting parts directly from Apple. Just going back to what you just mentioned about security, is there, do you think there is a legitimate claim that Apple wants to maintain the homogeneity of their product repair process because they want to ensure that they're, you know, they're custom crafted, you know, many developer long process for ensuring that the thing is tight as a drum, but from a security standpoint, isn't somehow blemish during this repair process if you're putting a non-authorized part in? I feel, I can understand why Apple would want to block non-authorized parts, but then again, there are lots of, you know, ways around that, dot, dot, dot. That said, does Apple not supply, trust their own supply chain? I feel like it's more, if you wanted to argue why Apple wants you to call, okay, maybe they want to make sure it's the right part for your phone and an easy way to do that is to tie it into the hardware serial number or the IMEI, you know, maybe they want to gather information, maybe they want to prevent it from being used in certain ways, who knows? It's not like Apple's going to suddenly, you know, put out a giant press release going, this is the reason why we set up the system this way and our justification or lack of justification, you know what I mean? Like this is not the Apple way, you know what I mean? This is the company that told me, no, no, no, we don't have a design issue with an Artena, you have an issue with the way you hold your phone, right? I mean, literally that was, you know, our antenna isn't broken, you're holding the phone wrong. What, you know what I mean? Apple's an interesting company. Also, you know, I thought it was also interesting, right? I mentioned the heated display removal tool, I think at some point in here. The heat gun? So, yeah, no, no, no, it's actually a big fixture, a big device, like an appliance, like something that would go next to your coffee maker and blend right in. So, you can purchase that for $256 and it's like 108 bucks for the different display pockets that plug into that. Or you can rent something like, for example, I have an iPhone 12, you get an iPhone 12 toolkit, you rent it for seven days for $49, there's a toolkit for each model, they support and it's packed with all the tools you need, you know, that they mentioned basically in the manual. I like the part that was to avoid the non-return fee, drop it off at a UPS store by day seven. There's no mention of what the non-return fee is, but I think it's essentially the sum total of everything that's in the Pelican case. You know, and it's interesting to look at, right? Because it looks much more convenient than my long-suffering iFixit iOpener and a stack of guitar picks or, you know, I call them guitar picks, they're essentially the blue picks that come in the box with iFixit products. I mean, that's essentially a sock filled with media, you heat it in the microwave, you put it down on the screen, you get the pick under there, you get it open, you move it down, you heat it up again. So having a big thing where you put it in place and it's officially Apple sanctioned and Apple gives you the instructions, I think that'll be attractive for a lot of people. So I think there's a balance here. I think this may open up self-repair to a lot of people who wouldn't consider it before because Apple products are expensive, just like everything else in life. I think also it will, you know, make everybody working for right to repair that much more intense about taking it to the next level and making it that much easier. I mean, as somebody who, you know, full disclosure, dropped her iPhone in the toilet this morning, briefly, but I did, it's a thing that happened, hasn't happened in years, really thought I was better than this. But yeah, and now I'm having iPhone issues. This, you know, the repair program from Apple isn't necessarily gonna fix anything that's going on with my phone. I might just have to, you know, throw in a bunch of rice and call it a day for a few days, but I don't know, we'll see. It's just a couple of hours ago, but anything that gives me a little bit more of my own power to just try to make sense of this and to save a little money and learn a little bit in the process. I mean, not everybody wants to open up stuff and learn a little bit about what's going on under the hood, but for those that do, this is really big. Or if you just have looked at the costs of having somebody else do it for you or having it done by Apple, you know, you can look at that because, you know, I had a friend of mine who's like, Adam, like I'm gonna get a new phone. And he's like, wait, there's nothing I want on the new phone. It's gonna cost me $1,200 to get the cool one. And, you know, it's interesting to watch how people sort of work their way through is repair bad, is repair good, do I need repair? You know, if you have children with phones suddenly repair becomes much more attractive, also armoring phones and screens, you know, I'll be very curious to see where this evolves and if it lasts and holds forward. I mean, I'm glad that they're doing it. I think it's a good step. Yeah, it's a good step. It's a good step. Well, if you feel like this is a good step or you don't, or you wanna hear us talk about something completely different on the show, one way to let us know is in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them. Really helps us make our rundown every day. So thank you in advance. DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. Ubisoft published a list of 91 games that have had online services and multiplayer features shut off since 2021, including Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell, and Just Dance. PC versions of these games lose access to previously unlocked content, although console players keep these as long as they have old game saves. Ubisoft announced plans to shut down services for many of these titles last year. Patrick, what's happening here? Things are aging. Companies are going out of business. Servers cost money. I thought this was an interesting follow-up. Lottery Kotaki wrote, well, it was more of a screen show. 12 games killed in 2021 that proved preservation is vital. And that came out right at the tail end of last year. And not to state the obvious, but it suddenly occurred to me that finding old ROMs or keeping a vintage console running or what my friend Sebastian over at PC Per does, he has vintage DOS hardware to play as vintage DOS games because emulation is just not acceptable. This all sounds incredibly manageable or easy if you wanna be able to play the games you grew up with. And maybe you don't, maybe this is silly, but it's something I've sort of noticed all over the place, right? Proprietary servers or something that's particularly painful for me, smart hardware that requires apps to run doesn't necessarily age well because operating system change, apps need to be updated, servers cost money. And if it's a big, massive server system that's only maintained by the company, there's probably no alternative once they shut that server down. So feel free to tweet me to say that 12 years of Little Big Planet was more than enough, but it's, and maybe it was or maybe your heart broken that the servers are gone, but it's not just games, right? Services and servers tied to hardware, especially to IT and smart phones has been really problematic in the last few years because they require money to run. And when a company goes bankrupt, there's no money for the servers, right? There's a, I think you were watching the video, you can see the Hackaday article. Insteon abruptly shuts down users left smart homeless. And this is, I think it was, Revolve went down in 2016, Spectrum went down in 2020, Samsung smart things went down in 2021. Hackaday's done a bunch of stuff around this and Gigastacy on Twitter, she covers the internet of things or the home automation stuff in great detail. She's actually quoted in the Hackaday article. This is, it's not just smart homes. One of the things they talk about in Hackaday is like things like prosthetic eyes or other hardware. It's kind of wild when you start thinking, the more and more we make this stuff connected or the more and more it requires, you know, apps to run, it gets complicated. So. Oh, sorry. I know you're listening, Roger. Oh no, I was thinking, there were this, I honestly believe a lot of this has to do with the fact that not everything is standardized. I had, I was just, I was using a router that I bought back in 98. And at some point it just stopped functioning very well as a router. So I used it as a wireless access point, but because it is IP based, it routes IPs because that's a standardized technology that everyone adheres to and worked fine. Granted, it sucked as a router because something happened to have the logic board on it. But it worked for that purpose. I was still able to squeeze some benefit. But when you orphan a product because something is so, so, so siloed away from a broader, you know, a tech, a broader technology grouping, it kind of, it kind of stinks because you invest a lot of money, a lot of time into these things. And when you don't have your smart home system, then you're like, well, nuts. And I was thinking about this as I don't know, comparing to some old classic movie, right? It's like, I don't know. I mean, pick any movie. Doesn't matter. Night of the living dead. Or some most times at midnight, unavailable on any platform, on any, basically it wasn't even available on VHS for years. What are the great lost hot messes of movie done? Yeah, so this does happen, but much less of an issue, right? In cinema it's like, eh, you can find it somewhere. Maybe you gotta do a little digging. Maybe you gotta sign up for a particular service. But we don't have these sort of ongoing issues that I feel like have been prevalent in the gaming world, especially lately, of like, where does it all go? What happens when the company just won't support it anymore? Like it just shuts down. Could there be some way for there to be like a plex of gaming? Or you just, you just find the game and it's fine. I mean, there is in a way. I mean, there have been, unfortunately, just a handful. Not a lot, but a lot of companies that do this are developers, because once the company splits up, everyone goes to the four wins. There was a game back in the late 90s called, what was it called? It was called FreeSpace. Let me see, pull up the title. FreeSpace, the sequel FreeSpace to developed by a French company about Volaton. When that game came to an end, they open-sourced the entire source code so anyone could develop for it. And what was fascinating is they not just open-sourced the game itself, they open-sourced the software to run your own server. So players who are heavily invested in the game would be able to not only make mods for the games and keep it alive, but they could also maintain servers independently of whatever company that would chose to run it. I'm wondering if it's one of those things where companies should sort of have an end-of-life roadmap of how they want to do things. Instead of just turning off the lights, it's like, okay, this source code for this game is two generations old, really no point in keeping it. Let's open-source it. We'll give the community all the assets. They can handle it. If they want to develop their own homebrew servers to do co-op gaming, great, we're just gonna give it out to the community and then move forward with other stuff. That would be ideal. It's interesting, right? Because I was thinking about slim devices was bought by Logitech and then five or six years later, Logitech ended their support or basically stop manufacturing the hardware. And much like they've done with the remote control systems more recently, they maintain some of the server availability. And of course, they've figured out open-source ways of feeding these MP3 streamers, right? This isn't exactly new. Home Assistant is one option. Actually, it's one of the things that's interesting. If you happen to be an Insteon user and you've been freaking out, StaceyonIoT.com at Stacey Higginbotham's website, there's a great article up there on some of your alternatives. How do you keep your Insteon stuff running? What's your path forward? I have several friends, for example, who have had home automation systems or household stuff go down and then moved on to Home Assistant because it was an open-source tool that allowed them to continue moving things forward. There's much stuff going on at a larger level with some other platforms. But I'd laugh, right? But my wife just bought a mosquito repeller for us to use this summer and she had to track down the old version that isn't smart, that doesn't use an app to run. I mean, I turn it on, I turn it off. What exactly do I need an app? Am I going to track the number of mosquitoes repelled? Is it going to give me some... Is there going to be notifications on my phone? And the overall problem was, I think, Roger, you kind of got into is, this stuff costs money. Is there a way forward? I mean, how many times have you had an old piece of Windows hardware or something silly that required a driver and there was no driver for Windows 10 or there was no 1000 years ago, no Windows 95 driver for it? You mentioned your Wi-Fi router. I mean, how many Wi-Fi routers must have left? They must have left the factory with flawless firmware that was unhackable because they never got a single update. Sure, that's a possibility. I feel like this is all part of a larger problem that's not going away, I mean, mentally. And it's one of those things I honestly think if product developers could have had an open standard to adhere to, it would help eliminate all of that. I mean, I had an old IP security camera that after 2000, 2016, you could no longer open its interface on a Mac because Safari wasn't supported and there were a bunch of hooks that didn't work in Chrome. And so to use it, you had to be on a PC even though before when they sold it, it was sold as a Mac PC thing. Well, we assume many of you are raising your hand saying, I have thoughts, I have thoughts. And if you do, do send them our way, feedback at dailytechdewshow.com. This is probably not the last time we'll be talking about this issue, but... Matter. What about matter? I know, right? Yeah, matter. Where is it? Moving into the travel space, if you've built up a lot of travel points, I know I'm one of those people and I haven't used them in quite some time and I don't know when I will, Chris Christensen has a handy way and an alternative way to spend those points. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. If you haven't traveled here for a couple of years and you've built up a lot of points and you're trying to figure out a way to use them, but you're not quite ready to travel yet, there are other ways that you can use your points, your travel points, and one way is Amazon. If you Google Amazon Shop with Points, you can see that there are many different point systems that will let you cash that into Amazon dollars. And so American Express membership rewards, for instance, Capital One, Discover, City Cards, Chase Ultimate Rewards, Hilton Honors or HSBC can all be transferred points from their systems into Amazon where you can get cool techie stuff. Just thought you should know, I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. I love it, love it. I mean, if you wanna spend your points with Amazon, certainly a good way to do it. I have a lot of points. What am I gonna do? Am I gonna get on a plane? Probably just gonna buy some stuff from Amazon. Real quick, Bill from, can it finally be spring North Dakota? I guess it's not spring there yet, Bill. Bill wrote in and said, I just listened to your episode where you talked about True Bill and I wanted to give my one and a half cent experience. Sometime during the pandemic, I tried out True Bill and I saw that it would negotiate with my cell phone provider, which is Verizon, and help lower my bill. Thought that was cool, gave it a shot. The result was Verizon saying, if I wanted to lower my cell phone bill, I could lower my data plan. So cue my sarcastic surprise face. Not exactly effective negotiation. I guess with my experience, True Bill has some good promise, but maybe not always effective. Patrick, I don't know if you're familiar with True Bill. We talked about this on yesterday's show or maybe it was Monday show, the whole idea of having a subscription service to help you manage your subscription services. And this is one of those things I read about and went, I'll let somebody else try that. And thankfully Bill tried it. Technically, they did negotiate him a lower rate or give him options that he could have figured out himself without paying a fee. Yeah. Yeah, it depends. I mean, the whole idea is that if you were signed up for, I don't know, some streaming service and you weren't using it, True Bill would kind of go like, huh, we're noticing that you're not using this. Would you like to cancel or pause the subscription, save yourself some money? So it's supposed to work well, but as Bill points out, not necessarily for everything that you pay for him. I don't know, maybe how organized you are about your subscriptions or how hard you cut your subscriptions off. But yeah, I, okay. Well, subscriptions aside, Patrick Norton, what have you been up to lately and where can people keep up with your work? Oh goodness, find out what's going on with me. The latest is usually posted up on Twitter at Patrick Norton. And of course I'm still doing AVXL, a weekly podcast about home theater and audio with Robert Herron. We talk about home theater, we talk about televisions, we talk about screens, we talk about headphones. Head on over to AVXL or search for AVXL on your favorite pod catcher. Well, it was good to have you on the show. Thank you for being with us. Also want to extend a special thanks to Travis Falstad, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Travis. We see you. We feel you. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It rolls on right after we wrap up this show. It's also available at patreon.com.slashdtns. Do join us if you can. And just a reminder, we are live. If you can join us live, it's Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2800 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com.slashlive. And we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Len Peralta and Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.