 Coming up on DTNS, why social networks may not be tech stories anymore. Can the US clean its networks and YouTube's disappointing security response? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 7th, 2020. That would be Thursday, August 6th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, also on August 6th, I'm Sarah Lane. And from an unfixed point in time in Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. It is indeed August 6th and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. We were just talking about the strange world of dog owners, a little bit about Uber earnings, and more in good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Are you ready for beta times? And by beta, I mean beta. Of course you are. macOS Big Sur is out in public beta, meaning if you're willing to risk or back up your data, you can experience the new diagnosis of macOS before its official release in the autumn. Google launched the final beta of Android 11, which already has reached stability, but now has a few more fixes and optimizations. Google has discontinued the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL less than a year after unveiling them. The company told the Verge it sold their inventory and completed sales of the Pixel 4 and 4 XL, though both are still available from some partners while supplies last. The Pixel 4 will get software and security updates for at least three years from when the device first became available, which was October 2019. All you Android completionists, go, go! It's a rare and special flower, my Pixel 4. Sony announced the WH-1000XM4 headphones, the successor to the XM3s. Two mics on each ear cup and an improved chip and algorithm deliver improved noise cancellation. The reviewers love these headphones. They love the XM3s. They love the XM4s. Also has a feature developed with Sony Music Studios Tokyo to rebuild audio lost to compression to try to improve your sound. XM4 also supports 360 audio, Google Assistant, Amazon Voice. Adaptive sound has some fast pairing that works with Google and more. Sony says you should get 30 hours on a charge and the XM4 headphones are available for pre-order for $350. Oh, that sounds good to me. I am a Sony loyalist when it comes to my headphones. Hey, did you hear the good word? Nintendo reported a pretty good quarter with 428% surge in profits. Nintendo reported operating profit of 144.7 billion yen. That's about 1.4 billion US dollars in the April to June quarter. Well above analyst expectations. Net sales came in at 358.1 billion yen, up 108% from the 172.1 billion yen that Nintendo reported in the same period last year. Sales of the Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite grew about 167% to 568 million units in the quarter and Nintendo has sold 22.4 million copies of a small game you perhaps have never heard of called Animal Crossing New Horizons. They're billionaires. Microsoft previously said that it wants to buy TikTok's United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand operations but the financial time sources say that Microsoft is exploring adding TikTok's India and Europe operations to the deal or possibly all of TikTok's operations. TikTok does not operate in China so a deal would not include the Chinese operation of ByteDance's DoiUan app. Reuters says that Microsoft has not raised the more expanded acquisition to TikTok owner ByteDance yet and Business Insider's source says that the financial time is completely false so who knows? Keep an eye on it. And Twitter's iOS app is rolling out that ability to choose who can reply to your tweet. The options, if you remember, began testing in May and let you choose either everyone, only people you follow or only people you mention in the tweet. Alright, let's talk a little more about what's going on with iOS and XCloud. Speaking of Microsoft, while they're not trying to do a hairpin acquisition of TikTok, they have ended their XCloud game streaming test for iOS devices after announcing that the service would only be officially launching on Android after the preview ends on September 11th. Microsoft had to limit its XCloud iOS test app to one game, Halo, the master chief collection, and 100, sorry, 10,000 testers to comply with App Store policies. Microsoft says it wants to make the service available on all devices but Apple limits remote desktop clients to be generic mirrors of a device like accessing a full Windows PC. If it's less than that, it must only connect to devices owned by the user on their local network. The developer rules state, thin clients for cloud-based apps are not appropriate for the App Store. Now you may, and maybe rightly, jump to the conclusion that Apple's trying to keep other game purveyors off the platform. That could be part of the motivation, not saying it's not. But the reason for this rule is to prevent apps from getting around other App Store rules by emulating software and then having the app only access the emulation, right? So you could get around the App Store restriction on payments. You could do malicious things by doing this that wouldn't be caught. So this is partly a security, partly an App Store policy situation. It would be in Apple's best interest during the current antitrust climate to carve out a new exception for game streaming because Google Stadia can't do this. Valve took a year to get its game streaming app in here, and that was one that was streaming games off your local devices on your local network. So Apple needs adjust their policies here. That's all. And I think that would be consistent with Apple becoming more and more of a web services company. Like they make their money on that percentage of people being in the App Store, and if there is a popular thing that consumers are demanding, I believe they will. Let's talk about wired versus wireless charging. Everybody's excited about wireless charging, but what are the pitfalls? Well, one zero writer Eric Ravenscraft collaborated with iFixit to calculate the efficiency of wireless charging compared to wired. All charging loses some power to waste heat. So to measure the difference between the methods, Ravenscraft used a high precision power meter while charging a Pixel 4. The wired chargers he used, he took the phone from dead to 100% using 14.26 watt hours of energy, watt hours, which is about 47% more. He also found that positioning the wireless charger affected the efficiency as well. The Pixel stand used an average of 19.8 watt hours because it helped prevent misalignment less than the UTEC circular flat charger. Both wireless chargers drew around 0.25 watts when not connected to any kind of phone at all. When wired chargers drew no measurable power when unconnected. Yeah, so if you missed that folks, when it was wired, it drew 14.26 watt hours of energy. When it was wireless, it drew 21.01 watt hours of energy. So there was 47% more power being used to charge the same phone when you were using wireless, which probably isn't going to drive your power bill up a lot, but people don't want to waste power if they don't have to. And if you've got multiples of these, it does start to build up a little bit. Yeah, this isn't a gigantic revelation obviously, but it is something that we should consider because especially when we look at the iPhone and obviously there are like design elements that are going industry wide about removing physical ways to charge your phone, then this is something that we should think a little bit more about. Yeah, go ahead, Tom. No, I was just going to say, he made some other points in the article about how many more power plants would be needed if everybody was using wireless charging. I wasn't sure about his math, it gets a little fuzzy there, but I think it's interesting for people to realize, if they didn't realize already, that these induction chargers do waste quite a bit more energy than the powered ones. You may not mind, it may not be that much for you to be concerned, but it's interesting to know. Yeah, my initial reaction was one of the same lines of, okay, well in my home, I mean, listen, I want wireless all the time everywhere, and I'll take a little bit of a hit on power consumption if I get the added benefit of not having wires. But yeah, what kind of situations are needed in order for the wireless revolution to really ramp up? And if so, is power consumption in data centers outside of wherever I am, what does that look like? Because that can be problematic as well. I think the other interesting thing is what you mentioned about alignment. A lot of people don't like wireless chargers because you do have to get it correct for it to charge, and you may not notice, and then your phone doesn't charge. This is saying not only do you have to get it correct to charge, but you have to get it perfect for it to charge efficiently, or you're wasting even more energy. All right, John Prosser is not the next Mark Gurman yet, but he's getting there. He's got some really good Apple leaks that end up being true, but we're not here to talk about that right now because today, John Prosser's YouTube channel FrontPage Tech is not available. It was hijacked Wednesday and began broadcasting a Bitcoin scam, which was being recommended by YouTube's algorithm because the algorithm doesn't know. It's like, oh, FrontPage Tech has a thing. We'll promote it. After a few hours, the videos on the channel were eventually deleted, and a few hours after that, the channel disappeared entirely. Prosser is unsure if the attackers deleted it, or YouTube removed it to stop the scam, or what? Team YouTube apparently, according to Prosser, direct messaged him on Twitter asking him to fill out a form about the attack, but advised him it might take weeks to hear back about next steps, and this is part of his livelihood. Prosser did have two-factor authentication activated and believes the attackers must have used a SIM swap. If you don't understand about SIM swapping, it's a way to trick a phone company into giving you access to somebody's phone account, and the way that works in a situation like this is if two-factor authentication has text messaging as the second factor, you do a SIM swap attack to get access to the phone number, and then you trigger two-factor authentication to send the second factor. You either brute force or some other way get the password, you now have the second factor through the SIM swap, and boom, you're into a protected account. This is why we recommend that you not use text messaging as your second factor if you have the option. Still better than not having a second factor, because SIM swapping isn't easy, but if you're going after a high-profile target like John Prosser, you know, it may be in the attacker's best efforts to go through all that, which sounds what they did. Several other channels also reporting similar attacks out there, and I'm more mentioned one in particular that said, yeah, it's got taken down July 29th, and we haven't heard anything from YouTube. I think the YouTube anger is often exaggerated. A lot of times, it's just YouTube being YouTube that people get mad at, and it's like, well, you were on YouTube. You've got to expect they're going to act this way and that way, and I'm part of that with stuff getting demonetized or whatever. I'm like, well, but I knew I was a scorpion on the back of the turtle, et cetera. This is different, though. This is security. This is YouTube saying, hey, we know your account got totally subverted and taken over by a Bitcoin scam, but we'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. Sorry about that. I'm not acceptable. And on a Twitter DM, okay, you've got YouTube issues, but you've got an email account associated with those issues. It's odd messaging from YouTube. Well, it's bad messaging mostly because they have a bad relationship with a lot of their creators. And beyond some of the decisions that do come top down, there is a chronic problem of not being able to get to somebody that works at the company, even if you are a high value, I make my living on this platform level creator. You wind up the people that have contacts at YouTube, meet them at parties and stuff like that. And that to me is really, really, really bad. I think that that is a bad, just organizational level thing. Also, Tom, scorpion and the frog, a turtle would have solved the core issue of that hero. A turtle when they got stuck because he has a shell. Yeah, he would have just said LOL. Right. So having SMS as your second factor when you have a choice is being a frog. Using an authenticator app is being a turtle. The turtle. Yeah. And if YouTube says it loves creators, well, that one, their love is like bad messaging. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Almost. Us. Pony Thursday. Social media and politics. That'll drive the pun right out of you and it's just going to get more intertwined as we approach the US general election. Here are four examples served for your consumption today. Twitter says it will exclude tweets from state-run media such as Russia's RT or China's Xinhua news from its recommendation system, meaning though it will be less likely to appear in search results or recur in your timeline. Publicly funded outlets deemed by Twitter to have editorial independence like the BBC or NPR will not be labeled. Twitter also said it will begin labeling government linked media accounts and key government officials. So if you're a government official, it'll say, hey, this is a government official. If you're from China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. Number two, YouTube says it banned 2,596 accounts from China between April and June for, quote, coordinated influence operations on political issues. The so-called spam dragons try to hide posts among a bunch of spammy posts about scenery basketball models, TikTok videos they lift and stuff so that you can't tell the channel has them, but they'll show up in the algorithm. Three, Twitter briefly suspended President Trump's campaign account, not his personal account, not the official POTUS account, his campaign account, until it removed a video that claimed in part that children are immune to COVID-19. Children are not immune to COVID-19. Facebook and YouTube removed the same video from the campaign pages there. And number four, Tech Transparency Project found that Instagram was returning 6.7 million search results for hashtag Donald Trump while only returning 390,000 results for hashtag Joe Biden. Instagram says it was due to a technical error. So, I think we've figured out what these four stories tell us today, right, Justin? Yes, congratulations, social media. You are now culture. There is a line that was crossed, and it was probably, you know, for many people, something that came before 2016. But in terms of the broader cultural impact, 2016 was a moment in which we put a lot of focus, and your mileage may vary on exactly how relevant it was, on things like misinformation purchased by state actors on Facebook, right? Or even just misinformation for fun and laughs and profit by Macedonian teens on Facebook, so they could direct people to pages with ads on it. At the end of the day, the larger issue that came out of this was, how do we morally police our platforms beyond just abuse and harassment, which is something that has been a longstanding element of internet culture? And this is what we get from it, the idea of, okay, well, what should we label news that we don't, that we think is not quite news? Should we label state-run media organizations, whether or not they are particularly onerous all the time? And by the way, this is not just a thing that is happening online. The New York Times wound up deleting off their website stories that had been bought placement on their website from state-run media sites in China. This is a media-wide thing, specifically when it comes to Russia for the last four years and China more specifically over the last few months. Yeah, the internet has gone through this multiple times, right? I remember back at TechTV, and I think I mentioned this recently, so apologies if I'm repeating myself, when we decided that a company having a website wasn't a tech story anymore, right? There was that point when it's like, companies having websites was big news in the late 90s, until a certain point when it's like, just having a website isn't enough, you have to do more. Social media is making that transition where something happening on social media doesn't make it a tech story, it just makes it part of the world these days. Yeah, that's a really good point. It truly is, and there are times where, especially when we're trying to figure out what stories we're going to talk about on this show, we have kind of debates of like, is this just pop culture or is this a tech story? And the lines are blurred more than ever. I mean, in this case, I think it is absolutely a tech story. But as you mentioned, Tom, as we march toward November, this stuff is going to get weirder and weirder. And it's stuff we have to cover and try to figure out, you know, get into the weeds a little bit, like, okay, where's the tech angle here? Because you can go sideways pretty quickly. Yeah. And more specifically, when it comes to the campaigns, because those are issues where your TOS is going to be enforced or not enforced, and it's just going to be louder either way that you go. Yeah, these stories are becoming policy stories, they're becoming legal stories, they're becoming campaign stories, and less and less about the technology that underpins them, because everybody's using the platform for things that have nothing to do with understanding, you know, the underlying technology and that they're not affecting us in new ways. Well, something that may affect us in new ways. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a five-pronged plan to curb national security risks from China called the Clean Network. The plan would seek to encourage the following five initiatives. Number one, remove untrusted Chinese apps like WeChat or TikTok from US app stores. Number two, limit the ability of Chinese cloud providers to collect store and process data for US companies and citizens. Number three, prevent untrusted handset makers such as Huawei from making trusted apps available on their handsets, either pre-installed or in app stores. Number four, stop Chinese mobile carriers like China Mobile from connecting to US telecom networks, which would mean if you're a Chinese visitor, you can't roam here. And number five, prevent the Chinese government from tapping overseas cables that connect to the US. Now, this has been detailed in some way. However, no legal or technical methods for achieving these aims were detailed in full. Let me make my best guess about how achievable these are. From bottom up, preventing the government from tapping undersea cables, you could basically get the companies like Google and Facebook and the backbone providers to just not connect their undersea cables to China. And they are not doing that. That is happening more often. So that one seems like it's got a chance. Mobile carriers not roaming. I mean, most of us are just getting used to the idea that roaming wouldn't be ridiculously expensive anyway. So I don't know. You might be able to put some conditions on these deals to say like, oh, you can't do roaming. I'd call that 47% possible. I mean, untrusted handset makers from pre-installing US apps, you could kind of do anything to Huawei these days since they put the entity list. So I imagine they could do that, whether they do it to Oppo or Vivo, that gets stickier. Cloud providers not collecting and storing process data for US companies and citizens. That would require legislation. I think it would be constitutional, but you'd have to pass it. And then removing apps from the app store, I think, good luck. You could cajole. You could try to persuade like, hey, guys, don't let these apps in, but I don't think there's anything you can do to make them not have those apps. No. And here's what's happened. Past the coronavirus, there have been latent anti-Chinese Communist Party feelings. I don't even want to say the country of China, but CCP feelings that have been a part of American, the American political zeitgeist for a long time. Post coronavirus, that has gone bipartisan. If you look at the polling, Democrats and Republicans have less and less trust for the government of China. If that's the case, and now all of a sudden there is a wide world for politicians from both sides to agree on something, and currently both of our presidential candidates have looked to blame the other one for being soft or complicit with the Chinese government, then that means a lot of people that have long buried diaries from five to 10 years ago can now unearth them and say, look at all these cool ideas I've had forever. And that's happening throughout the government. This is the tech prong of it. Beyond, I mean, it was not long ago that we were talking about on this show the idea of the Trump administration looking to nationalize the 5G network. And part of that was to keep Huawei off, to take even the possibility of Huawei building parts of our- Any of the Huawei equipment being used in the building. Exactly, yeah. That was kind of crazy technically then, but that gives you a sense of where the ideas have long been bubbling in certain parts of Washington DC in terms of being terrified of Chinese technology becoming something that is an irreversible problem for America. Now, whether or not these are achievable, my goal only here is to explain the political motivation for why we get a list of how to build a quote unquote clean system from the Secretary of State. Yeah, I think in the end, given the difficulties in achieving these combined with the motivations that Justin is talking about, I think you can come to the conclusion very reasonably that this is a lot of talk, and it will be interesting to see if it leads to any action. I'm not saying it won't, but I'm saying the point of this is to make the statement. There are a lot of people helping to make the statement they want to follow through, but maybe not all of them. Is there a way that something like this could be laid out as you're kind of showing your cards a little bit just to see if what you consider a possible adversary in the sense would pull back? If you don't have a plan, then this sort of thing just sounds like a bunch of numbers. So there's a couple of things at work here. Number one, there's the old Klingon proverb, only Nixon can go to China, and there is a school of thought that you don't deal with the Chinese by saying, we're going to vote about this, and we're going to decide whether or not we want this or that. You deal with China by saying in the language that China understands, which is we're banning this. You know how you guys ban stuff? We're going to ban this thing. We're going to ban this stuff. To be totally honest, part of what I've been surprised about with this TikTok thing is whether or not the federal government has any tools that they could ban an app like TikTok saying they were going to ban the app sure made bite dance sell a lot faster than I thought and not fight as much as I thought they would. And certainly an American company would fight. Let's say that was funded by China might fight a lot harder because they were more plugged into exactly what the populace might do and be more plugged into the trade winds of exactly what the American political system is. So whether or not it's feasible, the fact that a government, these things are going to be translated into Chinese and party officials are going to read them. And whatever connections are there with all these or any issues that's I think the message to Beijing is almost the larger issue beyond whether or not it's feasible. Yeah. And that's why I'm not spending a lot of time today talking about what this would do to the US internet because I'm going to worry about that when it looks closer to these sorts of things being implemented because I think Justin's right. Right now it's a diplomatic statement. Yes. Diplomats are not. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. We love y'all. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Jason wanted to let us know that he uses his stylus all the time. This is in response to our show yesterday when we were talking about the new Samsung phones and, you know, who uses styluses? Not that you don't, but who does? Jason says, yeah, I originally bought my Note 9 last year because I wanted a high-end phone that still had a headphone jack. Originally, I didn't think I would use a stylus very much, but I've ended up using it every day. I work as a plumber. I often need to make material lists for items that I need to pick up. The ability to take out the S Pen and write on a note on the screen without having to turn it on or unlock the phone, extremely useful because I often need to quickly write down fractions, which would take much longer on a phone's keyboard. Also, not having to take off my gloves in the winter, very convenient. I also use the remote shutter to take group photos on a regular basis. Oh, very good. Thank you, Jason. And we had a few other people write in some saying they don't use the stylus, some not. Thank you for those. Brian in Pittsburgh also wrote in to point out there's a key detail to the Mulan on Disney Plus story that we did mention yesterday, but Brian, I think, is right in that a lot of people often forget about that part of the story. Once you pay your $30 to Disney Plus to get Mulan, you have access to Mulan as long as your Disney Plus account remains active. Contrast this with something like Troll's World Tour, where your rental fee only got you 48 hours. This is probably how Disney justifies requiring a Disney Plus account, says Brian. As a subscriber, your $30 basically gets you unlimited early access to the film before it eventually hits the service for everyone. Trust me, Brian, when Mulan becomes available on Disney Plus to everyone, all those people who paid the $30 to get early access are going to start complaining that why do they spend their money? Aren't they ever? Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Philip Less, Rick Huebner and Martin James. Also, thanks to the one, the only, Justin Robert Young. Justin, I know politics have been kind of quiet these days, but what have you been up to? Well, you know, obviously I have the Politics Politics Politics podcast, but I'd like to take this time to explain a parable of the internet and the complaining user, because the complaining user said, I will definitely not complain if you give me this $30 Mulan thing. And I certainly will not complain if I have access to it for as long as I will. And it's more than the 48 hours that I would normally get. And so the internet took the complaining internet user across the, across the river and only then did the internet user start complaining when indeed beyond the 48 hours they would normally get for Mulan, they got months. And when the internet said, but why you promised the internet complainer said, because it is my nature, politics, politics, politics.com. Folks, please transcribe that parable and leave it as a review. It is just as helpful as your actual opinion on the Apple podcast store. Every one of your ratings and reviews helps raise the profile of the show in our category list. Even if you don't use any Apple products, it helps us or leave a review wherever you get your podcast. And we thank those folks who have been doing that. Really appreciate it. Our email address is feedback at daily technewshow.com. And boy, do we like your feedback. So keep it coming. We're also live Monday through Friday. Join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with any gals as our guest and Len Peralta will be here drawing as well. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants.com.