 Coming up on DTNS, PUBG returns to India, a voting app wants violations of terms of service to also be violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Microsoft fights leaks with official info on the Xbox Series S. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 8th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Snowy Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse and from Los Angeles. I'm Lamar Wilson around the shows producer Roger Chang. Sarah Lane not with us today, taking an extra day of vacation. She's safe, her house is good. There are a lot of fires around her, a lot to deal with, but she will be back tomorrow. We were just talking about the rumor wars between Jon Prosser and Mark Gurman. We were talking about how Taco Bell has disappointed Lamar. We were talking about this crazy weather we've all been having. If you want to have that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The final version of Android 11 has arrived and is ready to roll out to consumer devices. It includes the expected messaging bubbles, group notifications, as well as a surprise feature built in screen recording. The Google Pixel, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo and Realme phones are getting it now, while other phones will roll it out over the coming months. I'm still waiting on my 4A to get it. Yeah, I might call my 4 too. Google's official phone app for Android, available on Pixel in Android One phones, is coming to select phones from Samsung and LG. The app also now includes a verified calls feature that shows a company's name, branding, a verified badge and the reason for the call. The feature works by having the business ping a Google server for verification when making that call. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched an investigation into competition between Google Play and Apple's App Store. The commission will look at how transparent and effective the overall mobile app market is in Australia and how stores compete for app sales with other providers. The commission is surveying users, developers and app suppliers for input. Our final report will be delivered in March 2021 when I leave my house. He'll be tomorrow will be delivering the report. Xiaomi announced the 6.67 inch 1080p Poco X3 NFC, which yes, includes NFC. The first device to ship with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 732G has a 120 Hertz refresh rate and that 5,160 mAh battery. Support for 33 watts fast charging, launching in Europe. Now, starting at 199 euros, that's a promotional price. It's not going to last. The regular MSRP still be pretty affordable at 229 euros. Uber announced Tuesday that it aims to make 100 percent of the rides offered on its service happen in electric vehicles in Europe, Canada and the US by 2030. They got 10 years. Uber will offer riders the chance to request a hybrid or electric vehicle for a dollar extra. Drivers with a hybrid will get an extra 50 cents and those with full electric vehicles and extra dollar 50. Uber also plans to spend eight hundred million dollars and partner with automakers to help drivers make the switch. All right. Peloton has announced a new bike called the bike plus, which includes a rotating 23.8 inch touchscreen, improved speakers and Apple gym kit integration for twenty four and ninety five. Now, the original Peloton bike remains 1895. There's also a new treadmill that has a cheaper belt and a slightly smaller. This new tread calls twenty four and ninety five. While the existing treadmill is renamed the tread plus and is only forty two ninety five. So please get them right now. Not forty two dollars and ninety five, four thousand. Right. Yeah. Two minutes. A couple of significant moves in the epic Apple Google battle. Epic filed a motion Friday formally asking for a temporary injunction to have fortnight restored to the Apple App Store. We were expecting this. This is legally different than the restraining order that was rejected last month. So it's a second try. Epic sites a 63 percent drop in players on iOS as part of its list of damages. Speaking of damages, Apple has filed a request for monetary damages to be awarded if it wins its lawsuit with Epic based on the fact that it spent money to help market fortnight on iOS. That is now making neither of them money. That goes. Meanwhile, Google has told judges it does not believe its case with Epic should be merged with the case with Apple. They think they're separate. Google also says it has not been officially served with its complaint yet while Apple has. Oof. Podcast originator Adam Curry and developer Dave Jones have launched an open podcast directory called the podcast index. An LLC will manage the index and promises to make it available for free for any use. It also plans to offer, quote, enhanced API services of value to developers and organizations. Developers can find out more over at API.podcastindex.org. Windows central sources say Microsoft is developing a mid-range surface laptop with a 12.5 inch display and 10 gen Core i5 Intel processor and the five hundred and six hundred dollar range. Microsoft is expected to have its fall announcement sometime in October. And it's been a while since we updated you on vaccine progress because not much has been changing. There are right now nine potential vaccines in the midst of phase three trials, phase three being the last stage of testing before approval for use. The first of the nine is from Moderna and the U.S. National Institute of Health. There's another one from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, one from Germany's biotech, U.S. based Pfizer and China's Fosun Pharma, two from China's Suna Farm, one of which is in partnership with the Wuhan Institute for Biological Products, one from Australia's Murdoch Children's Research Institute, and three more that are in phase three, but also approved by their governments for limited use. Those are from China's Kansai Nobio, Russia's Gamalaya Research Institute and China's Sinovac. The vaccine from Oxford and AstraZeneca is expected to be the first for actual approval in mid Q3, followed in Q4 by the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. All right, let's talk a little more about that big old Apple announcement, Shannon. All right. Apple announced finally that it will hold an event September 15th at 1 p.m. Eastern. That's 10 a.m. Pacific. The invite had the words Time Flies and a stylized blue Apple logo that looked finger drawn with several different loops. And the logo also triggered an augmented reality function on the iPhone that turned the logo into the 9 15 date September 15. Four new iPhones are likely, though Apple has said on its earnings call that they won't ship new iPhones in September. Nikkei's sources say 5G iPhone production will begin in mid September. Rumors are also suggesting a Series 6 Apple Watch and a new more affordable Apple Watch as well as an iPad Air. And somebody and I'm blanking on who now I apologize. Somebody dug up the meta tags on the YouTube stream that Apple has put up for this event on September 15th and found that Series 6 is in the metadata. So I think it's pretty safe to say we're getting a Series 6 Watch. One rumor you heard Lamar was that we might not get the iPhone announcement because we know they're not ship until at the earliest October. They might hold off and only announce the watch in the iPad. Yeah, there was a Bloomberg report that was suggesting that it will be a separate, you know, this thing happening next week would just be iPhone, excuse me, iPad and Apple Watch. They would do a separate event in October, which is not unprecedented. They've done two separate events in the fall before where they would just have an iPhone event then. I feel like if they were going to do that, they should probably let people. I mean, no one's traveling to the event. So, you know, but, you know, just for expectation purposes, probably be good to let people know that not to expect an iPhone announcement next week, if that's the case. But you're saying they're probably going to announce everything. My my gut tells me they're going to announce the iPhones, even if they're not shipping until October. Yeah, because a watch and iPad announced but doesn't seem like enough on its own. Yeah, well, the OS, the OS now a drop will happen, right? They usually have. And that's the other part is I can't imagine they would they would announce the launch of iOS 14 and not announce the new iPhones to go with it either. I'm sorry, I'm at the Mac OS, the Mac OS drop. Well, and yeah, there would also be Mac OS, watch OS, TV OS on top of that. So but that's just dates. They already did the details back at WWDC. I don't know. Could be wrong. They might they might announce that they're going to announce iPhones. Who knows? I guess we'll find out on give us a teaser. Yeah. Yeah. So India and China have a border dispute. In the Himalayas dispute that has seen more than one shot fired. So as a result, India has been ordering Chinese apps to be blocked from app stores in India. Last week, India added the game PUBG to the list. Now, PUBG itself is Korean, but it is distributed by Chinese company Tencent. So PUBG has announced that it will take over distribution of its own game in India in order to avoid the block. India has been PUBG's biggest market with Central Tower estimating one hundred and seventy five million installs to date. That's about 24 percent of global downloads, just not one country. Tencent said its relationship with PUBG and other markets would remain the same. I was shocked at this. I didn't realize that that I mean, I know it's a popular game. I don't play myself, but first of all, that the mobile game was that popular. The mobile version of it. And then 24 percent of the world just in India, like they really love to fall from from from planes and and and drop down to, you know, what people do at PUBG, not yeah, in the real world, because no one gets on a plane anymore. Yeah, I I I think this tells us a few things. One is if Tencent very easily said like, yeah, when either one of us are making money off this and we're not for a while, it means they think this block is going to last. This is not a temporary thing. Otherwise, Tencent would probably be encouraging PUBG to just, you know, hold on, this will pass. So it seems like this is going to stick, and it certainly doesn't seem like India and China are going to resolve their dispute anytime soon. So I guess it makes sense for Tencent to say, if you keep us on board everywhere else where you can, we'll, you know, we'll change the terms of our agreement to let you go. And PUBG obviously wants to do this in India because of one hundred and seventy five million installs, right? Yeah, it's a it's a huge market for them. And I know that from a little bit of research into it and from my own playing perspective as somebody who has played PUBG, it's it's much more available to people since it is available on mobile and you can play this on budget phones. So it makes sense that so many people in India are playing this game on, you know, Android and iOS phones, or at least they were. So given the fact that we already heard about all of these apps being banned in India, there were one hundred and seventeen, I believe it was expected from the perspective as somebody who knows about the popularity of PUBG that they were going to reply in some way. But it did come as kind of a surprise that they decided to cut those ties with Tencent and just decide, OK, well, we're going to deal with the entire publication and everything ourselves, which is an interesting way to go about it. But it totally makes sense. I have to say the the the seriousness of this is you shine a light on it right there. And I I do think I do want Indian users in the audience to clarify this. As far as I understand, it's not banned in the sense if you have it on your phone, you can't use it. I think you can still use it. It's just blocked. So you can't go update it or actually download it fresh if you don't have it already. Gotcha. Well, we have a little bit more news coming out of that area of the world. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced that China was launching the global initiative on data security. And yes, you did hear me giggle a little bit. This initiative calls on countries to respect other countries. Data sovereignty calls and handle data security in a comprehensive, objective and evidence based manner while maintaining an open, secure and stable supply chain for information and communications, technology and services. The initiative also calls on members to oppose mass surveillance on other other countries and ask tech companies not to install backdoors on products and services to illegally obtain user information. Well, China. China is asking to not they're asking, yes, people not to have backdoors. You heard correctly because the United States is making noises about doing a lot of these things, particularly with the Clean Network Act specifically saying China Telecom should not be allowed to operate in the United States. Huawei should not be allowed to be used in the United States. You know, they want companies to sign on board to these pledges. Huawei is banned from certain things, but you can still use Huawei and they're trying to like force that hand. So China is saying some very reasonable things, right? Like let's let's let's not spy on each other. Let's handle data security in a comprehensive, objective and evidence based matter. I'm all behind all of this until I notice that China says respect our data sovereignty, though. What we do inside our borders doesn't have to meet any of these principles that we're asking the world to operate by. This is just how we want countries to treat each other. We can mass surveillance our populace. We can block things internally. You know, we don't have to allow Facebook and Google to operate if they don't operate by our laws. This is China saying we want countries to play by nice, fair rules, but we don't want to be held to other country's standards in how we treat our own people. This is directly a response to all of these other countries banning applications and banning any kind of partnerships with Chinese tech companies. Like they even specifically say that something along the lines of cleanliness of networks as one of the things that Chinese the Chinese minister, yeah, it was a total sub tweet. So we know that it is a response to all of this happening. But I'm so glad that you mentioned that, Tom, where you said, you know, on a high level, it sounds really nice. You know, this is what all countries should be doing. We should be protecting our tech companies and ensuring that they're not putting in backdoors and everything. But then you look at basically the research into the documentation and what they are actually saying here. It's they want other countries to respect their them basically. Yeah, I don't know. Make a few amendments to this and you could get me on board. You know, it has to do with applying this to people, not not just countries. Exactly. All right. Let's talk about online company voting company votes. V-O-A-T-Z. You might have heard of them. They operate mobile voting. They did absentee voting, especially for military in West Virginia. They've often been touted as like the people who could allow online voting to really happen for once. Well, online company votes filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing that violating the terms of service for a product should be considered when evaluating violations of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or CFAA. That could mean if you violated the terms of service, you could go to jail in some interpretations. The case that they're filing the brief as part of involves a Georgia police officer taking a bribe to look up confidential info on a police database. We're not talking about the bribe. That's probably illegal, but that's not an issue here. What prosecutors are arguing is that the officer exceeded authorized access. That's one of the things you can go in violation of the CFAA with is if you exceed your authorized access. You download too much, even though you're allowed to download some. The defense argues that the officer was authorized to access the database and didn't exceed his authority in doing so. The problem was when he took the bribe and gave the information to the wrong person. That's not part of the CFAA is what the defense is arguing. Now, previous cases have ruled differently on what does and does not exceed authorized use and whether terms of service play a part in determining that. Hence the Supreme Court taking up this case to make the final call. That brings us back to votes. Security researchers worry that a broad reading of the CFAA would make some kinds of security research, especially research that companies don't want to happen against the law because you just make it against your terms of service. Companies might have terms that ban scraping public info or doing reverse engineering as a way to quiet their critics. Now, an EFF brief in this case describes votes reporting a Michigan student to the FBI for researching the votes mobile voting app. Now, votes says it was only reporting suspicious activity to its customer, the state of West Virginia, and that the state notified the FBI. In the votes amicus brief, there's a little mirror image here. Votes cites the case of an MIT researcher who published a paper in February about security flaws in the votes mobile app and votes claimed the researcher demanded user contact in forward. They go public with more about the research. Well, the MIT researchers say they'd never communicated with votes. They only ever reported their findings to the Department of Homeland Securities, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CESA. And any contact with votes would have come from CESA, not from them. Votes amicus brief argues that terms of service should define authorized access and they point to their own bug bounty program as a mitigation factor to say, look, we allow responsible independent security research to be conducted within our terms. The MIT team, however, says they tried votes bug bounty program, but the test server seemed to be off when they did. And the bug bounty program operator, Hacker One, terminated its relationship with votes in March after evaluating votes as patterns of interactions with the research community. So a lot to unpack here, Shannon, but in short, it sounds like research, security researchers in general, not too impressed with votes. Exactly. And I'm so glad that we're discussing this because it's the CFAA has been a really major argument with security researchers for a very long time because it should be very clearly defined what is wrapped up within CFAA because you run into these kind of cases where votes are saying, like, hey, I have this problem and the example of the MIT researcher and the bug bounty program, whenever a company brings these up and says, like, hey, we are welcoming to security researchers, their problem is they are putting in limitations for security researchers. And if you work within those limitations, that's great. But the problem is, if you have a malicious actor who is attempting to hack into your systems, they don't care about your bug bounty limitations. They don't care about what your terms of service say. All they want to do is get access to data, especially if it's like for a financial gain. So if you put in these limitations for security researchers, you're you're inhibiting you're you're creating a problem for your own self and that you may run into potential vulnerabilities in the future that you could have you could have prevented if you were more welcoming to these researchers who are doing this for you, they're doing this for companies. Yeah, you're punishing the white hats without doing anything to stop the black hats. Exactly. And it's a huge problem. And and the the votes, the entire case just follows up with the issue that we continue to have with CFAA, where they want it to be very vague. They want it to include all of this information. And it really needs to be clearly defined, and it still is not that. Yeah, we'll follow up once the Supreme Court has ruled, whenever that is. In the meantime, if you want to keep up on the tech headlines each day, but you only have about five minutes, go subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. After multiple leaks, Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the Xbox Series S. It made Lamar stay up late, covering all of these official announcements. Here's what's official. It's the smallest Xbox ever. The Series S, by the way, S, the letter S, smallest Xbox ever appears to be about a third the size of the Series X, which is the letter X, X and S. I mean, that's not going to cause any confusion. The S is a slim white box with a controller, big circular grate. That's a vent, no disc slot. This is online only two hundred ninety nine dollars with more details coming soon. Then somebody leaked a promo video with more info and Xbox put it up on their YouTube channel. They're like, fine, we're just going to put that promo video up to that says that the Series S has 1440p at one hundred twenty frames per second, upscaling to 4k can do 4k media playback, ray tracing, variable rate shading, variable refresh rate, ultra low latency support, a five hundred twelve gigabyte NVMe solid state drive and coming November 10th. Now, that implies that the Series X will also come November 10th, although they didn't specifically announce that there also is unconfirmed. The idea that the Series S would be part of an Xbox All Access plan, where you could just pay twenty five dollars a month over a set period of time and get it without having to shell out the two ninety nine all at once. And that would get you access into the Xbox Game Streaming program. And the Series X would have a similar plan at thirty five dollars a month and cost four ninety nine. It doesn't leave much unconfirmed though, Lamar. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, the quick story on this is I was sleep. I woke up to use the bathroom, you know, and I looked at I went back to bed, looked at my phone and I was like, oh, crap. Because I saw I saw the leak, but then I saw Xbox dropped official thing. You know, they did a little funny meme right before that. It's like, oh, you know, we, you know, they pretty much admitted that it was true. They dropped it. So I had to do the coverage, right? Because it was real. Yeah, it was. Yeah, I wasn't going to do it on the leak. But once it was official, yeah, it was one o'clock in the morning. It's like it just got my butt up. And I have been up ever since I put two videos out about it. Yeah. First of all, this was almost this was rumored to be like a cube type box. So I was really surprised at the design of the grill is weird. People already call it a stove, you know, that you know, you put a pan on it and yes, it looks like that. But I'm really I'm really the specs look great. I mean, this is definitely better than the Xbox one X that's out now. That 120 frames per second is not 4K, but it's 1440p. And that's that's going to be amazing. I don't run that currently because I'm playing on my TV most of the time. And that price, that price, Tom, Shannon, that's yeah, 99 shocked me. Oh, yeah, I was expecting. I was expecting 399 minimum for it for this. So, you know, that definitely puts some pressure on Sony, which is rumored to be dropping an announcement tomorrow. Oh, we may have more details. Talk about tomorrow then. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm sleeping. My only negative about this, I would say is, you know, they are going to have a pet peeve. The 512 gigabyte on a digital only device when the games are next gen. And, you know, I know they said they're going to be they're going to optimize them to be a little bit smaller, but they're going to be big games. I mean, if you want to download Call of Duty, now it's 100 gigabyte. Did we get any confirmation that you can add an external drive? I mean, I assume you'll be able to. Otherwise, this would be ridiculous. It is stated in this in this thing. But but everything has alluded to that from the Xbox Series X that you will be able to put, you know, external on it. You would have to. It just it wouldn't make sense not to. So so yeah, but just, you know, I guess I was looking for a terabyte for it. But how could they do? I guess how could they do that? Russia and at a at a terabyte at 299 is probably not at 299. Yeah, that's why, right? Yeah, as long as they as long as they have some kind of like external port where I can put in my own SSD or even better if they had a way to open it up so I could put another NVME in there. That would be amazing. Yeah, they're not doing that. Yeah, I don't think they'll do that. But if they put a port on the back that's like, you know, fast enough for a nice external SSD, I would be OK with that. Yeah, it's a little bit annoying to have to do that. But but it would be better than nothing. And for 299, how much are you going to complain? It's or 25 bucks a month, right? Yeah, I just thought about this is the price of a of a switch. To know what they're close. I believe so. Yeah, I just thought about that now. And the switch also does upscaling pretty similarly to what they're saying this one will do. So I love the fact that. Yeah, I love the fact that you can do upscaling. At least that's what the promo video said to 4K on the new Xbox Series S. That's really not native. Yeah, so. Exactly. It's not native. Which I wouldn't expect it to be native. No, not at that price. No. Yeah. And of course, that's the top end switch, which light is cheaper. Switch light doesn't give you all the power either. Man, can we just call it the Xbox hot plate? Try to go. It's the series S. No, I said S, not X. But but but now we know why they called it this stupid name. And I've told them because I know the guys there. And I was like, yeah, stupid name, you know, but the series X. But now we know because they want it. They have different series. But it still would have just been nice to have a nicer, nicer name on it, but all the letters, the series B, then I can't confuse it. Yeah, absolutely. But hey, thanks to everybody. Yeah, I'm exhausted, but I'm very happy. Yeah, yeah, it's a good announcement, I think. And I'll be curious what they have left to announce on the series X. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. Check it in the mailbag real quick. I wanted to give a shout out to all the folks contributing a few spare PC cycles to the folding at home project. That's a project that has studied protein folding for a long time, but recently is using your spare PC cycles to create a distributed supercomputer that investigates potential drugs to treat COVID-19. Amos, our producer, created Team Good Day Internet to coordinate the folks here. And we are now the 283rd ranked team of 254,783 teams. So thanks to you all for jumping in and donating some spare cycles. You can get more info on the folding channel in our Discord. Just go to the folding if you have access to our Patreon Discord. Or you can head to DailyTechNewShow.com slash folding as well. Thanks to everybody for keeping that going. And, you know, we don't know if it's going to work, but we won't know until we try. So thanks for doing that. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Dan Colbeck, Philip Less, and John Atwood. Thank you both for being here. Shannon Morse, what do you got going on these days? Lots. I've been filming tons and tons of videos. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse, just like my name. I recently did kind of a hot take on how to find a VPN for TikTok since TikTok will most likely get banned. So if you want to see a pretty divisive video about my personal opinions on that whole ban, check it out over on my channel. And thank you so much to everybody subscribing and getting me closer to 30K subscribers. And of course, you got all kinds of things going on, including most recently some videos about the Xbox Series S. LaVar, where can folks find all that stuff? Oh, yes. Yeah. You go to YouTube.com slash LaVar. We'll send you better because I've been up since 1 a.m. Getting and I was going back to bed and then the specs dropped. So I got right back in the seat and did another video. And I got another one coming out in an hour about the Avenger. So, yeah, if you like game related stuff, follow me on YouTube.com slash Lamar Wilson. Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. And thank you for supporting the show. You get all kinds of good perks like that Discord, for instance, if you connect Discord to your Patreon account, you just automatically get the DTNS Discord and you can hang out. Lots of good conversations happening in there these days. Go join our patron and become one of the people talking, patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Mind to find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back with Sarah Lane and Scott Johnson tomorrow. Talk to you then. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.