 Coming up on DTNS, Apple and Google face more App Store antitrust claims, Samsung wants your old Galaxy devices to have more purpose, and is the netbook dead or alive? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 22, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lovely Cleveland, I'm Rich Trafalino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm from Mexico City. This is Datten Campos. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. So good to have Dan Campos on the show with us today, the host and producer of Noticius Day Technolohia Express. Dan, I hope I did the accent some sort of service just then. But yes, Dan has been working with us for some time now. We're so delighted to have him on DTNS. So thanks for being with us, Dan. It's a real pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. I'm sorry, Roger, for overstepping in there. It's okay. Hey, it's all, you know, it's okay. One love. One team. Before the show, Dan and Justin, who know a lot more about Lucha Libre than you might even ever imagine, were giving us a little bit of schooling, complete with masks. That's what you get for watching the video version of GDI. If you'd like that wider conversation and all the fun in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, do so by becoming a member, becoming a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Dish plans to launch. A 5G network in Las Vegas in Q3 with the deal to run its entire network on AWS servers. Dish would be the first telco to run an entire network from a public cloud. Twitter users using iOS and Android can now tweet and view images in 4K. That's up from 2048 by 2048 resolution. Users will need to enable high quality images and high quality image uploads in settings to take advantage of the new resolution. Sony confirmed it's testing the PlayStation Plus video pass in Poland, a limited streaming service for existing PlayStation Plus subscribers. Users currently have access to 15 movies and 6 TV series and Sony says it's committed to rotating content every three months, although they cautioned that they were only committed to testing the service in Poland for a year. Windows 10 Insider preview build 21364 features the first preview of GUI support for the Windows subsystem for Linux. A feature first announced at Microsoft's build 2020 conference. This will include support for audio and 3D acceleration and full integration with the start menu, task bar, and shortcuts like Alt-Tab. And the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Federal Trade Commission does not have the power to demand monetary restitution from companies engaged in deceptive practices, ruling section 13B of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to grant injunctive, not monetary relief. In the decision, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the FTC retains its other mechanisms for consumer restitution and suggested the FTC ask Congress for further remedial authority if it believes its current authority is inadequate. All right, Justin. What happened at this subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, which is spilling over news into today? Well, I'm happy to ask Sarah. On Wednesday, a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing called Antitrust Applied Examining Competition in App Stores focused on Apple and Google's control over their app stores and several companies weighed in. Bluetooth tracker maker Tile said Apple copied its products with AirTags. Tile also claimed that even though Apple opened up its Find My app to third parties earlier this month, it acts as a hostage program. As if a third party builds Find My support into a product, customers can't use the third party app to control the feature. Spotify repeated its complaint that Apple won't let Spotify tell its customers that they could pay less for Spotify outside the iOS app, from which Apple takes a 30% commission of sales, by the way. And Match Group testified that app store fees are the company's single largest expense, now paying nearly $500 million a year to Apple and Google. Meanwhile, representatives from Apple and Google defended their company's practices at the hearing, claiming they don't copy competitors and that the commissions that they take help fund the security of their app stores. But it's something that they're probably going to be hearing a lot more about because the federal and state lawmakers are holding hearings considering legislation to weaken Apple and Google's app store controls and the Justice Department is also investigating the issue. Don't forget, next month, Apple versus Epic Games trial begins with Epic accusing Apple of violating the law by forcing it to use Apple's payment system in the iPhone app. Oh boy. So, wow, where do I start? I feel like Tile has a pretty good argument here. Probably of Apple copying its product with AirTags. Now it's not as if a company has never created a clone of another product, whether it be software or hardware, a combination of both that works well. But it does seem somewhat antitrusty of Apple to say, yeah, we're going to create something that you do, Tile, but we're going to make it a lot easier for a customer who decides to use Tile rather than an AirTag to use Tile. Well, I think the biggest thing here and what we're going to see become a continuing point of contention is what happens when you run the store and you sell the products. Like, this is what Amazon, I think, is going to ultimately get dinged for with anti-competitive practices and for Apple and Google who both make hardware and both make apps that are meant to compete with other solutions that are offered within the app store, there is a fine line. I don't think that they are ever going to give up on those commissions, which is ultimately what I think a lot of people bristle at. It's not the fact that they don't like the fact that the app store is there. They depend on those app stores being there. It's not the fact that they don't like the fact that it is a secure place to deliver your app. They love that. Their businesses are built on top of that. It's that 30%, 15%, those figures add up and they only add up more when you get more successful. And I think that is going to feed the Sturm and Drong from these companies because, quite frankly, they've got nothing else to lose. I think what's interesting about this is that we see, you know, a lot of these conversations, I think it's very specifically like Tile has a very unique case. And it's interesting that they were at the table literally just as AirTags was coming out, right, to just kind of prove this kind of writ large with the whole kind of find my network that's also launching, putting them in what I think is a fairly unique position of Apple seemingly engineering a feature. Yes, they're building out an SDK that people can build into, but also having a solution that's out there that's well-known in the marketplace, maybe certainly not successful in the way that most or a lot of Apple products are with that kind of market share. It seems unique as opposed to something like a software service where, yes, like Spotify has an argument that, yes, Apple doesn't pay the same commission to themselves. They're not subject to that kind of stuff themselves. I think Tile has a very specific case here that is fairly unique to them. But just into your point of the commission's kind of being the whole ball game, I think that is it's interesting that they're at the table to kind of maybe open that door to have, you know, these are very substantive conversations, right? This isn't the typical thing that we see for these kind of hearings where it's mostly about hitting your talking points. We're getting some pretty substantial stuff here. So I wonder if this will open the door for actual regulation. Dan, do you have any do you have any thoughts on whether or not Apple and Google are going to get a little slap on the wrist or if there's something bigger brewing here? Actually, well, the most important thing in here is that it will set a huge precedent for future cases in this occasion. And as you mentioned, Amazon has this kind of practices, too. And for you, if you are working in that store, in this case, in a digital store, well, you want to get to more people and obviously get more of the money going for you. So let's let's wait to see what comes from this. All right. Well, over the weekend, the Verges Nilei Patel published a look back at the netbook trend that dominated the laptop market from 2007 through 2011. Pretty interesting read. This was kicked off by the launch of the original ASUS EPC. I'm not sure if you remember that, but it ran a custom Linux distro and used a single core Intel Celeron processor with a seven inch screen that had some beefy bezels. This was then quickly iterated on by with a standard package from Intel and Microsoft with an Intel atom processor running Windows 7 starter edition. It was all kind of an integrated platform required a small mechanical hard drive and ASUS alone introduced at least 20 different EPC models in 2008 alone, kind of exploded on the various different skews from there until the peak kind of ended. The category did peak in 2009, accounting for 20 percent of laptop ship. Patel points out that though, while no one network had the right combination of price, portability and power, it seemed the idea of netbooks has won, despite the twenty eight tens, windtel platform kind of falling from favor. The iPad came out in 2010, the Chromebooks hit the market in 2011 and with that same kind of low cost portability appeal, while things like the MacBook Air and Intel's ultrabook specification showed the appeal of that small, thin and light form factor that basically every laptop maker is kind of doing now. So I guess, Sarah, I'll start with you. If netbooks themselves aren't a thing anymore, isn't everything also kind of a netbook? Well, sure. Now it's just a feature, not a standalone device. It's a netbook, but it's also lots of other things. I'm for anybody who's watching the video version. I've got an old, an old Dell netbook. I know. And that fun is even green. Pretty cool. This was something that I was a product review when I worked at, I guess it was G4, you know, many years ago. And it was like a kind of a big deal because it was so small and, you know, the full keyboard. And we would call this somewhat heavy by today's standards. But at the time it was like, oh, my gosh, this is extremely portable. And sure, it wasn't the most robust computer laptop that I could buy, not even close. But it was one of these things where it's like, oh, if you have internet, then there's a lot of stuff you can do without it becoming this big, complicated setup. And that was the promise of netbooks, right? It was like, oh, for a lot of people day to day, even if you have to do something that requires more processing power once in a while, a lot of people just want something like this at the ready. So sure, you would not call them an iPad, a netbook. You wouldn't, you wouldn't call, you wouldn't call an ultra book a netbook because netbook is sort of this, it's sort of a silly term at this point, right? We all just assume that everything is internet connected. Well, also netbooks were cheap, right? And so it filled a need that people wanted, where they didn't want to buy a full laptop. They, the phones really were not there. Pre-app store, we were still on the edge network. It wasn't even 4G. So the idea of your phone being something that was robust enough even to connect to the internet was something that hadn't happened. But I think you're right. You can't call an iPad a netbook, but you can call an iPad a netbook killer because I do think that that's what happened when you were looking at taking that space, that sub-laptop price point, but making it functional enough for you to interact with email and a few social networks, a post-app store tablet experience, be it on an iPad or any of the other tablets that came out just kind of dominated where the netbooks initially had their day in the sun. I do think it's really interesting that that first EPC, it ran Linux, had a super low power processor, flash storage, looks a lot like like a real early Chromebook just didn't, you know, the software wasn't there. I mean, you could argue that the first Chromebooks are basically just re-skinned netbooks. But I think it's, yeah, an interesting idea. Like, again, like the end result is we want cheap. We want things to connect to the internet. Just the netbook package, I guess, wasn't there. Well, Samsung's Galaxy upcycling program's been around for a few years. You might have heard it. You might have participated in it. The company recently announced two new programs under that same umbrella. So for consumers, there's a Galaxy upcycling at home beta, which uses the lab feature of the SmartThings app to turn an old device you might have laying around, not using it into a light or a sound sensor, letting you get notifications and record when a sound is heard or perhaps talk with the lights on and off in a room could be pretty handy. The feature also optimizes the battery for low power usage. Earlier this month, the company also announced the program will use old smartphones as eye care devices in underserved communities. The phones will be attached to a handheld fundus camera, handheld fundus cameras called the I Like to take images of the rear of an eye and use on-device AI to make a diagnosis. Very cool. Yeah, it kind of takes something that I think all of us, I don't know of all of us, but I think a lot of us have, electronics, old iPads or old phones sitting around. And I know I've used mine to play white noise for my kids, like when they're falling asleep or use it as kind of a makeshift kitchen PC. And I like that Samsung isn't, I mean, it's great that they had this program already as kind of basically a, you know, a nice way to call a recycling program, but to actually like give people more functionality in their homes, very basic usage, what they're rolling out right now. What I would, what I would kind of like to see is, you know, no one talks about upcycling like a raspberry pie, because you can kind of do anything with it. And I realize that's like a, you know, that's a enthusiast device, but it would be nice, especially on older devices where there's not a lot of value there, maybe open up that, like provide a path to open up that hardware to really explore. Those are still incredibly powerful devices that just happen to not run Android great anymore. And one of the interesting things in here, I believe. Well, when you can repurpose an old phone, for example, or all the screen and old camera, it sounds great, but also we have to take into account the updating cycle that Samsung has, because internationally is not really good. So you can still have like at least six months to one year until you get an update to actually use some of these functions. But I love the fact that you can use, in this case, the cameras from old phones and perhaps do some medical revisions with that. That sounds great. That's, yeah, that is a great way to use old tech. Well, Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit more about a show they might want to listen to? Exactly what Dan said. In fact, I'll even say it again in English. Give us five minutes and we'll give you the most important news in the world of technology, or you get your money back. Listen to Technology Express News, which is available in Espanol. All right, the laptop, ODM and Apple supplier, Quanta, confirmed its servers were breached by operators of the Revol ransomware, saying the attack had no material impact on the company's business operations and refusing to pay a $50 million ransom. The operators, I guess not being discouraged, are now targeting Apple for the ransom, as Apple has recently announced iMacs and MacBook Airs, as well as images of an unreleased MacBook obtained in the breach and promising to publish new leaks daily until paid. Apple has not publicly commented. According to the schematic seen by Mac rumors, the current generation or the next generation MacBook includes an HDMI port, Thunderbolt port and SD card reader on the right side with two additional Thunderbolt ports and a MagSafe charging slot on the left, or what appears to be one. This largely corroborates previous reports from Analyst Ming-Chi Quo and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources. We kind of had this discussion before during GDI and kind of in the prep for this of, you know, this ransomware is out there. They can't possibly think that Apple is going to pony up for this, right? I mean, you hear all the advice of the advice is, don't pay the ransomware, right? I guess it seems like an odd move. I guess leakers really like this because we get some pictures a little early, despite the nefarious activity. But, you know, what's, I guess, what's the thought? Not this version of Apple. Maybe another version of Apple when secrecy and mystique was very much core to their brand would something be worked out. But who knows? I mean, I think the larger story here is a turns out Ming-Chi Quo and Mark Gurman. Congratulations. You are the part of the stars. But beyond that, it's the fact that we continue to see ransomware make its way into all facets of our society. This is a massive problem and it doesn't seem to matter what sector it infects. There is viable ransomware plays everywhere, including this. And we've seen that with the DOJ just this week announcing a specific task force to kind of coordinate better on this, link up nation state actors with kind of ransomware operators and just kind of provide better intelligence sharing just within different federal agencies, kind of identifying this as a major threat. And keep in mind, like an organization like Reval, they're a ransomware as a service provider. This is a service you can go on certain websites and you can pay for access. They have front ends and they will operate the whole thing for you and they actually take less than Apple. It seems like they take 20% to 30% in terms of ransomware. Ransom's taken. So this is a business for them. And according to them, they took in over 100 million in the past year. So clearly, even if Apple doesn't pay, pretty successful. That's a weird thing for a criminal conspiracy to be reporting their yearly, their annual earnings. A grain of salt should be taken. If you had just hired us, we wouldn't have done this to you, Apple and Quanta. It's totally ridiculous that Apple would be expected to pay any ransom companies not going to do that. Apple hasn't publicly commented. Probably won't, you know, unless it's some flippant thing. Like, no, we're not doing that. I think Apple, as you mentioned, Justin, Apple has gotten used to the, you know, people aren't going to wait overnight in line for the new iPhone anymore. We're past that stage. You know, the no one knows what Apple's one more thing is going to be at their latest event. We're not doing that anymore. And so it's not as if the company wants these sorts of schematics to get out. I mean, this was definitely something that was stolen not was given away. But I don't, I don't think it really changes. You know, it's all supply chain stuff for the company, you know, they're going to announce something when they're ready to ship it and they think people are going to buy it. It's, it's, I don't think Reville is as powerful as, as they would like to think. But it does make a great advertisement when every tech site in the world is going to carry this near the top of their headline. I'm just saying that. Indeed. Yeah. Aspiring near-dwells, you know where to go. The most striking thing about this, this piece of news for me is that, okay. So next models are going to have ports for me. That was like really important because for portable devices from Mac, they usually have been reducing the ports and maybe this will take the hacking touch building to a next level. Yeah. You were fewer dongles. I have so many though. I've already, I've already come up with weird third party solutions. Apple's just going to give me everything. It sucks. By the way, before we move on the sources, they do keep coming. Mark German sources also say looking forward upcoming features for iOS 15 and iPad OS 15 include letting users set notification preferences based on their status like driving or working or sleeping and adding auto message reply options when in do not disturb or sleep mode with iPad OS getting more home screen widget support. Apple may also be working on expanding iMessage with more social integrations. Although these features are reportedly still in early stages. And that's something that Facebook should be biting their nails about. What about, what about a watch Justin? We got a watch. I'll tell you what as, as the time ticks down on this show, we can hope that our watch or our risks are adorned by the new garments that they just announced fitness focus venue to and the smaller venue to S smart watches with both models offering sleep scores based on monitoring REM sleep, ambient light, blood, blood oxidization and breathing as well as new activity profiles for high intensity training and a health snapshot mode to log, record and share health stats. Battery life is rated at 11 days with GPS on the venue to and 10 days, seven hours on the two S both are shipping now in Europe for 400 euros. Well, listen, I, I'm a GPS fan because I like to have that data recorded. I, I'm using a Fitbit not, not a Garmin product, but the exercise stuff is something I really do go back and look at those stats later. And without GPS, I'm not going to get a nice handy map, but boy 11 days, if you're not using GPS and just kind of using the smartwatch features is a really long time. That is great battery life. It's still really good battery life, even if you had everything turned on and you know you're, you're playing music and doing all that stuff. But sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say the sleep stats. You know, it was just yesterday, I think was Scott Johnson that we were talking about because Scott and I are both Fitbit people talking about, oh yeah, sleep data. It's so great. You learn so much about yourself. And I read this and I'm like, are we getting too much data on sleep? What is all this ambient light stuff? And, and, but you know, it all just depends on the, you know, operating system you're using. I'm so glad that you brought that up because that to me is where we're watching the smart watch market kind of splinter. And specifically in terms of like, you know, the Apple Watch is something that has led the market for a long time, but it's not for people who really rely on sleep tracking because you got to charge the thing pretty much once a day. And a lot of these competitors that have multi-day battery life, you sacrifice some of the bells and whistles of what it's going to look like and how it's going to alert you to stuff, but you get what you want, which is the quantifiable self and trust me, nothing will motivate people more than sleep data because sleep is the bedrock of our entire existence. And if you can get sleep really easily, that is a great thing for you. For me, I can do without it, but I know my friends who cannot get to sleep very easily. They relish every little shred of data because it can hopefully get them to sleep better going forward. Dan, are you a smart or a fitness tracker user? And if so, what are you using? I am using a very old MyBand from Xiaomi. It is actually the Model 4. And I was looking actually to get something new. The Garmin is an excellent option. And I love the way that they have been expanding the battery capabilities, but if we look last week, the OnePlus Watch was released and it has battery for a couple of weeks. So they are having better battery time. And it is not just something that you have to charge every night. So I love that. Very cool. Well, something that Polaroid hopes you like is a new camera that they have. In fact, a new camera system. It is 2.4 inches tall, 3.3 inches wide and 4.1 inches long. It might not seem that small in the world of smartphones, but an instant photography positively minute. It is called the Polaroid Go. And it produces images that are 1.8 inches square. It is a lot smaller. The standard Polaroid is like 3.2 inches square. It is also about 20 percent smaller, just for some context, from something like the Instax Mini. It is basically as wide and just a square instead of a rectangle. It comes with a rechargeable 750 milliamp hour battery, selfie mirror, timer and supports double exposures. All the bells and whistles you could hope for an instant camera. Available April 27th for $99.99. Sarah, you are picking up a go and starting to snap. Well, I don't know. I have got an old Polaroid around where I'm a big nostalgic fan of all things Polaroid. The selfie mirror is pretty clever. You still just got the one camera, but at least you can see what you kind of look like before you pull the trigger. And it's not too expensive. Fun party trick, right? Rich, I know you're a Polaroid fan, so is this something that... I was just using my SX-70, yes. But here's the thing. They're going after Instax. Polaroid, this will be a money maker. Instax makes an insane amount of money for Fuji. Like, compared to their digital cameras, it's like five times the revenue. I was just looking at their revenue figures. Comes from Instax specifically, whether it's film or the cameras or the printers that they have for it. I think Polaroid definitely wants to get in on that market and it proves they've had some manufacturing issues and literally figuring out the chemistry since the company came back from the dead. So it seems like they're confident enough that they can do this at scale in any kind of goodness there. All right, Rich, let's check out the mailbag. Yeah, all right. Well, another Dan weighed in on the new Apple TV remote design. I'm assuming it's not Dan on the show. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dan. This Dan says, I'm afraid the new design may only fix part of the problem with Apple TV, speaking of the remote. I hate the user experience. Home screen or menu screen. I can never figure out which is which or where I want to be. I also get frustrated that we can't see what we're playing. For example, if I'm watching a bunch of the morning show episodes and I want to see which one is currently playing, if I see an actor and want to know their name, I can't figure out a way. Or if there is a way to see if that info or if they see that info is out there about what's currently playing. And if there's no way, then I'm shocked that Apple left out something so simple. You know, Dan, I wonder if you are doing the swipe down off of the screen because that will give you a lot of information about what's currently playing. It's not as seamless as it should be. I would like it to, you know, you pause, right? And then you see a bunch of, you know, like a nice overlay of, yes, what episode of a particular series you're watching, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Really all you get at this point is how many minutes are left for, you know, if you're in the middle of a show or a movie. Yeah, that is so anti-Apple though, to pause the thing and have it have a bunch of other texts come down as opposed to just one gorgeous still image. Like that minimalist approach will always define it. And I do agree with you, Sarah. I think that there should be an easier, more intuitive way to do it. And I think Apple really leaned into gestures and stuff like that with the old remote in a way that frustrated those who could not master it. Yeah. But Dan, you may say, no, the swipe down from the top isn't what I'm looking for. And that is valid. But if for any reason you're not doing that, pause, do a little swipe down, and then you get all sorts of stuff. I occasionally have to drop down my resolution of something just, I've got some sort of a weird file, you know, on Plex or whatever. So I'm in those menus all the time. So maybe I'm just used to it, but it is kind of clunky. So that would be where you set your closed captioning and stuff like that as well. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Kind of just, it's just sort of the settings when you're in the middle of something. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today they include Tim Deputy, Linnell Lane, who may or may not be related to me, but I think you know the answer to that, and Dr. X-17. Also thanks to our brand new boss, Nicholas Spiker. Just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Nicholas. You are our new boss. And of course, thank you to Justin Robert Young. He's in the fantastic new studio. Justin, where could people find more of your great stuff? Well, you can get my political podcast, Politics, Politics, Politics, and I think DTNS listeners are going to love our episode that will come out on Friday where we discuss the politics of space. Yes, SpaceX, Blue Origin, the United Launch Alliance, the incoming NASA chief, former Senator Bill Nelson, all dissected and explained for you on Politics, Politics, Politics, wherever you find your podcast. And also a big thank you to Dan Campos for being on the show for the first time. Dan, I've been... Oh, Dan's been on the show before. Oh, has he? Okay, never mind. The first time with me, Sarah, I left the ellipses in there. Sorry, you're right. Thank you for correcting that. But Dan, where could people... What are you working on and where can people check you out? The easiest way is to look for Noticias, the Technology Express, that you can find. It's a weekly podcast in Spanish where you can not only learn about the most important events, the most important news in the tech world, but also learn Spanish. And from time to time, I actually come here to the show with this kind of video extracts that you can get where you learn the world of the day. So they will keep coming. Excellent. Thanks, Dan. And thanks, Justin, for being here. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. If you could join us live, please do so dailytechnewshow.com. You can find out more information. And we'll be back here doing it all again with Patrick Boden and Glenn Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.